Books of the month — October 2022
Five books, briefly reviewed: Henry Marsh's Do No Harm, Kiko Llaneras on thinking clearly, Isabelle Stengers, Joseph Henrich, and the flaws of science.
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Do No Harm. Henry Marsh. A superb book, full of anecdotes that turn the daily work of a neurosurgeon into an enormously rich example of imperfect, precarious decisions made out of intuition and craft.
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Piensa claro. Kiko Llaneras. A good introduction to the world of data without falling into the reductionism of worshipping it. He conveys his craft well, offering advice on how to handle the blurry domain of causality, uncertainty and chance.
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Another Science Is Possible: A Manifesto for Slow Science. Isabelle Stengers. A very short book, pamphlet-shaped, which barely gripped me. I suspect the translation does not help. To my mind it lacks clarity, although the topics it touches —the formation of modern science and its pace— are interesting.
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The Weirdest People in the World. Joseph Henrich. I loved it. It starts from a simple finding —our human disciplines look for universal patterns using homogeneous samples— and from there pulls out both historical and evolutionary consequences to draw a portrait of who we are: very strange people who rarely stop to think about our own strangeness.
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Los males de la ciencia. Juan Ignacio Pérez, Joaquín Sevilla. A good compilation of science's B-side. Useful for mapping the main challenges and for stirring the curiosity to go deeper into them.