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Key points
- Here are a number of lectures and audio books that together would equate to a year of first-rate education.
- The list is in three parts: Human nature and culture, social psychology and behavioral economics, and history and prehistory.
Yesterday, I discussed my astounding year of "distance education" taking courses from some of the world's greatest professors, and all for $150. Here is the first installment of the reading (or listening) list.
The lectures listed below are all mind-expanding (and there is actually enough material on this first list to fill a full year of top-end education). I intend to revisit each of these audio lectures and books, and, like a good student, take some additional notes on the next round.
Human Nature and Culture
Robert Sapolsky, Biology and Human Behavior: The neurological origins of individuality. Sapolsky, a comparative neurobiologist at Stanford, takes the aspiring student of biology and behavior on the full journey from genes through hormones through components of the nervous system, as well as ethology, and evolution. His style is funny and self-consciously intellectual, jumping back and forth between details, qualifications, and the big picture.
In his closely related book, Behave: The biology of humans at our best and worst, Sapolsky begins with what’s happening in various brain regions a second before we make a decision, to what happens seconds to minutes before (sensory and nonconscious processing), to hours and days before (hormones involved in our emotional decisions), and then back through evolutionary and comparative processes, with a fast forward to modern society.
William von Hippel, The Social Leap: The new evolutionary science of who we are, where we come from, and what makes us happy. Von Hippel is a social and evolutionary psychologist at the University of Queensland, in Brisbane. The book won last year’s award for the best new book in social psychology, and von Hippel covers human evolution and its connections to social psychology in broad and thought-provoking strokes. One main argument is that learning to throw rocks was a major contributor to the eventual development of human intelligence and culture.
John McWhorter, The Story of Human Language, McWhorter is a linguistics professor at Columbia, and he tells a fascinating tale about how languages develop and change. He makes topics such as dialects, bilingualism, pidgins, creoles both entertaining and informative.
Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Gene: An intimate history. Mukherjee is also a professor at Columbia University, who won a Pulitzer Prize for an earlier book on cancer. This book connects his own family’s history of mental disorder to his quest to understand all the amazing developments in understanding genes over the last two centuries. I reviewed this book a few months back in a post on "bibliomania and the meaning of life."
Social Psychology and Behavioral Economics
Mark Leary, Understanding the Mysteries of Human Behavior. Leary is a highly respected social and personality psychologist at Duke University, who shares his lectures on topics ranging from personality traits and genes to happiness, self-control, self-esteem.
Robert Cialdini Influence, New and Expanded: The psychology of persuasion. Cialdini is a professor emeritus of psychology and marketing at Arizona State. Hot off the presses, and narrated by Cialdini himself, this is an updated edition of a book that has sold over 5 million copies, which I’ve described in earlier posts. In this latest edition, Cialdini quotes his Sicilian grandfather saying: “If you want things to stay the same, things will have to change.” The fascinating story of how our simple decision-heuristics are scammed by influence professionals indeed keeps evolving, and in this edition, Cialdini has added a seventh universal influence principle, which he calls “unity.” Though I’ve heard him lecture dozens of times, I was amazed at how much I learned and loved that he read the book himself.
Richard Thaler Misbehaving: The making of behavioral economics. Thaler is a Nobel-Prize-winning economist at the University of Chicago and seems to also be a fan of Cialdini's social influence work (which connects closely with his earlier book Nudge). Misbehaving tells an amazing academic tale about Thaler's battles to get economists to take psychological biases seriously, with lots of excellent details about where his insightful research ideas have come from.
History and Prehistory
Francis Fukuyama, The Origins of Political Order. Fukuyama is a political scientist at Stanford. This book tells a grand story about how the most important features of modern governments emerge, and how many critical steps were necessary to move from Viking society to modern Denmark. Kinda scary lens to view modern American politics through, though, but well worth it.
Robert Garland, The Other Side of History: Daily life in the ancient world. Garland is a classics professor at Colgate University. In these lectures, he talks not about the great “historical figures” such as Caesar and Socrates, but the often brutish and nasty lives of everyday people living in Mesopotamia, Greece, Rome, and other societies.
Daniel N. Robinson, Great Ideas of Philosophy, Robinson was a professor at Georgetown who became a fellow at Oxford in his later years. In this lecture series, he covers everything from Pythagoras and Socrates through Francis Bacon, Descartes, Hobbes, Hume, Kant, Nietzsche, Darwin, Marx, William James, Wittgenstein, and Turing, to modern research on the trolley problem and theory of mind.
Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A brief history of humankind. Harari is a historian at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who is a very engaging writer. As with all the books and lectures I recommended above, I didn’t agree with everything said (no good student should fail to think critically) but I was awed at the amazing scope of the story Harari lays out.
In my next post, I’ll add some other “classes” in more recent history, including a couple of profs who have won Nobel and Pulitzer Prizes, and been highly influential outside academia.
