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2020 was a productive year in terms of book reading. I set a goal of 25 and I ended up at 54. I track my book reading at Goodreads, and here’s the 2020 page. Saving you the work, here’s the books with links and comments.

Read this just to get some background on Coronavirus back when this was interesting and not overdone.

Highly entertaining and always relevant book on communism/socialism. Every time they try this, it fails, and there is the eventual game on whether it was ‘real socialism’ (hint: they always disown it when it is proven to suck balls).

I heard good things about Sowell’s books, but this is not that interesting. It could have been 20 pages and you get the idea quickly.

It’s a book on how to convince people of stuff, mostly based on the author’s extensive experience in negotiating with terrorists, robbers, kidnappers and other interesting characters.

Human biodiversity books

This dissertation is surely among the most interesting stuff I read in 2020. A lot of ideas to think about as datasets of ancients become more common.

This was a lot less about medicine than expected, and more of a typical summary of evolutionary biology and disease in humans. It was kinda dull in parts.

Russell Warne’s anticipated debunking/introduction book. Honestly, this book is a pretty good first step to learning about intelligence research. I think it is overly simplified in some parts, but it’s not written for me.

Jonathan Anomaly’s biotech eugenics advocacy book. Naturally, I agree with this stuff!

It’s hard to find a conservative in criminology, but there are a few. This is one of their books. I will be reading of this stuff. I already finished Anthony Walsh’s Race and Crime in 2021.

This is a summary of Michael Woodley et al’s last 10 years of work on various matters related to decadence, decline of Western Civilization, dysgenics etc.

I’ve been diving into this big history kind of books that involve some genetics. The Salter book is very good, much better than expected. I will have more to say on the Joe Henrich books, but I am finishing a few more books on this topic before doing a review. Right now I am reading Kevin MacDonald’s Individualism book, which purports to explain the same stuff as Henrich’s 2020 book, but from Indo-European and Hunter Gatherer admixture instead of church bans on incest.

Richard Lynn’s memoirs. This book is hilarious and a must read.

We set up a memorial site for Hans Eysenck. Helmuth Nyborg always tells me stories of Eysenck, so I have been reading some of his work. The book on Genius is awesome. I reviewed it at length. The other is less interesting but it’s a quick read.

More of a random book choice.

Charles Murray’s anticipated book. Most people in my circles found it a useful review and introduction, but it doesn’t go far enough on many issues. I wrote a formal review in Mankind Quarterly.

This is part of my reading on military psychology. There is a lot of good stuff because the military is about quantitative improvements and large samples.

I keep doing some work in social psychology, mostly related to stereotypes and real life. I saw some references to this old book and it’s worth the read, at least some of the chapters, see the review.

I was reading this for consulting work, but it’s good enough that it’s worth posting here as well. It reviews fundamental findings in learning research, so it’s the usual stuff on spaced repetition, interleaved learning and so on.

A defense of polymathy or generalist knowledge in 2020. This is OK.

This is a book length treatment of a large survey of academics and students from 1999 or so. It contains a lot of interesting material, but most of the analyses are very bare-bones. I wonder if the data are free somewhere…

Programming or statistics

How does one make a programming skill or knowledge test? Well, it is not that easy! Fortunately, there are some interesting dissertations and theses on this.

Related to the above, but more standard books on test construction.

A debunking book on software engineering. It’s easy because most claims in this area aren’t based on much evidence at all. This field is largely in early stages of a science and not making much progress due to terrible methodological standards.

This book is probably the best software engineering book. It is somewhat haphazard but one cannot say it is not evidence based. This book is open source and based on a massive undertaking by the author to collect and free datasets in software engineering. Head over to the author’s page.

I usually read a few introductions to some aspect of R every year. There’s a lot of new stuff coming out, major package updates or new packages. Mostly tidyverse stuff.

This is half-way a psychology book, but it has a lot of very interesting stuff, see the review.

These are highly regarded apparently, but I think they are just a bunch of just-so recommendations. Boring and do not recommend.

Books related to HR consulting work

This stuff is mostly quite boring.