Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

This book completely changed how I think about my own thinking (meta-cognition), and
how I perceive the human condition. Kahneman is a Nobel prize winning psychologist
who did ground breaking work showing how we, humans, are riddled with irrational
tendencies. This book really kick-started me on a journey of exploring, understanding,
and accepting the contents of my own thoughts which has been, perhaps, the single most
life-changing journey I have been on.

Weapons of Math Destruction : How Big Data Increases Inequality and

Threatens Democracy by Cathy O’Neil

I’m a huge fan of mathematics. Towards the beginning of college, I was even convinced
that math is the solution to everything and that perhaps I can find and solve an equation
for life, love, friendship etc.

So needless to say, this book was a sobering read for me. It examines how while, yes,
mathematics is very powerful, in practice it is really easy to overlook subtleties and abuse
it. For example, she tells the story of a school district hat decided to use test scores to
evaluate teacher performance and fire the worst performers. This was catastrophic
because there is so much more to being a good teacher than having students score highly
on standardized tests!!! There is no mathematical model we know of that can really be
used for something like evaluating teacher performance, therefore we should NOT use
one!