#AcademicRunPlaylist - 4/13/25

PSA: tortilla chips are Kosher for Passover! While driving to and from seder over the weekend and saying a temporary goodbye to bread products I also listened to some books for my #AcademicRunPlaylist!

First was "Adaptive Markets" by Andrew Lo. The chapters of this book that deal with financial markets and how they operate are exceptional and insightful, detailing different aspects of how they work and contrasting this reality with past idealized versions of "efficient markets." Lo also offers an illuminating explanation of different recent financial crises and possible ways to mitigate them in the future. There are unfortunately a number of extraneous chapters on partially discredited/dated psychology and neuroscience phenomena. These add little to the rest of the book and are what you would find in an intro textbook in these topics ~25 years ago. If you skip these chapters the book is a must read. Highly recommend https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691191362/adaptive-markets

Last was "Bernoulli's Fallacy" by Aubrey Clayton. Clayton delivers an incredible book for the ages, reviewing the methodology, math, and history of different statistical and probabilistic approaches to illustrate how twisted current scientific publishing has become. This is a masterful combination of the mathematical and historical to a degree I don't think I've ever seen, and while some probability background is definitely helpful I think it'll probably be accessible to novices as well. Clayton also doesn't shy away from the racist origins of most bedrock statistical methods, critiquing modern naming conventions as well. How many books on statistics quote bell hooks?!?! Finally, the book gets into the importance of taking Bayesian approaches to hypothesis testing, making the inherently subjective enterprise of science more explicit and the tests we run more understandable and valid. Highly recommend https://aubreyclayton.com/bernoulli