Simon N Wood's "lockdown reading list"

Simon Wood, a leading statistician in UK being famous for the text book of the GAMs introduced the lockdown reading list in his homepage. It looks interesting, so I’ll share it here. (most of them are Blackwell’s, books)

• Collapse (Jared Diamond) on how societies are destroyed, not by external forces, but by their failure to adapt their cultural norms to those forces.
• Thinking Fast and Slow (Daniel Kahneman) on the pitfalls of our intuitive reasoning, especially about risk and uncertainty.
• Mistakes were made, but not by me (Carol Tarvis and Elliot Aronson) on the psychology of sticking with bad decisions.
• The Parable of the Old Man and the Young by Wilfred Owen, on consequences of the above.
• Economics The User’s Guide (Ha-Joon Chang) on what you really need to know about economics, and how it isn’t just a scaled up version of household accounting.
• The Great Crash 1929 (Galbraith) a delightful disection of economic hubris (and the need for stabilizing controls that we long since did away with).
• The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William Shirer) detailing exactly how things went wrong in Germany after the Great Depression.
• Witch hunting in Scotland (Brian Levack) on the Scottish experience of the great European witchcraft panic (James I/VI wrote a treatise on Witchcraft).
• Wood and Thomas paper on the problems of prediction with disease models in the absense of direct validation data (the least impressive item here).