Non-Fiction Books

Judgement Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases

Edited by Daniel Kahneman, Paul Slovic, Amos Tversky
Cambridge University Press, New York (1982)
This collection of papers discusses the various systematic ways in which people fail to make correct judgements. There are a surprising number of ways in which people make judgement errors, many of which are consisten and reproducible. Some of the most common are the Gambler's Fallacy, the Law of Small Numbers, and the effectiveness of negative reinforcement. Surprisingly, these errors are about as common among trained scientist who are familiar with statistics as among people who have no familiarity with statistics. For discussion of these and other errors, read this book... you may be surprised.

The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age

Allucquère Rosanne Stone
The MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass (1995)
I've just started reading this book, but it's an interesting book about the role of identity and how it is perceived, particularly over the Internet, where communication often occurs without any actual face-to-face interaction. More as I get further into it.

[an error occurred while processing this directive]