🎁The LTO "Gift" Guide🎁

It's all books 📖

Ben Kettle

Dec 6, 2022

Happy holidays! I hope you all get some rest and reflection this holiday season.

-Ben

PS - Maybe subscribe (if you haven’t already) and catch up on some Lying to Ourselves posts?

🎁The LTO "Gift" Guide🎁

I’ve never published a book review or a gift guide, but it’s the holidays, and I hope two things are true for you:

You buy yourself, or others, books as gifts and
You have a little extra time to read this time of year

As such, I thought I’d suggest three books I read this year and give you a reason to read them.

Thinking 101

A mentor recommended this book to me, and I’m glad they did. Woo-kyoung Ahn’s Thinking 101 is a great introduction to the cognitive biases that shape our lives, perceptions, and world. Ahn’s class is one of the most popular at Yale for a reason - not only is she a gifted teacher, but she’s a terrific and relatable storyteller as well.

Read this if: you want the best and most practical introduction you can get to meta-cognition.

Sample passage:

There are at least three key concepts that all of us need to better understand if we are to avoid making blatantly irrational judgments in everyday life. They are: the law of large numbers; regression toward the mean; and Bayes’ theorem.

The End of Bias: A Beginning

I avoided this book because it’s so dense, so helpful, and so practical that every time I picked it up, I was worried it’d take an hour to get through each page. I’d take notes, google the research, etc. – that’s how jam-packed and well-researched Jessica Nordell’s book is.

Read this if: You want a thoroughly researched, honest examination of how bias gets in our way. Also, lots of detailed case studies.

Sample passage - (Nordell is writing about the Supreme Court’s decision that Wal-Mart discriminated against female employees):

In his majority opinion, he [Justice Scalia] maintained that it would be impossible for a company to reach the kind of disparities seen at Walmart without a coordinated master plan of prejudice. "It is quite unbelievable," he wrote, that managers would all discriminate in the same way unless they'd been instructed to do so. "Most managers in any corporation—and surely most managers in a corporation that forbids sex discrimination would select sex-neutral, performance-based criteria for hiring and promotion that produce no actionable disparity at all he wrote. (The emphasis is mine. Reading this opinion, one comes away with the distinct impression that Scalia had never had a job.)

Read this piece if you want Nordell’s scientifically justified take on the issue of gender-based employment discrimination.

How the Word is Passed

There is a large percentage of the US population that has a hard time acknowledging slavery ever existed. They should read Clint Smith’s book How the Work is Passed.

Smith’s greatest gift is empathy. He asks simple questions of his readers that lead to some very uncomfortable answers.

Read this if you’d like to learn more about our country’s history of slavery and it’s consequences.

There are a ton of great passages in this article. I suggest you read them all.

As always, thanks for reading! What are some of the books that changed how you think this year?