stuff I like/reference a lot

After reading "The Selfish Gene" in high school, I realized that some models can feel better than others, and that I could go 'shopping' for better models in books for which to better organize and navigate the world -- mental interior design, if you will. These are some of the best places to raid, imo.

books from my evolutionary/developmental biology heyday:

• The Selfish Gene (Dawkins)
• Mutants: On Genetic Variety and the Human Body (Leroi)
• Freaks of Nature: What Anomalies Tell Us About Development and Evolution (Blumberg)

books in epistemological/cognitive biases/information processing realm:

• The Righteous Mind (Haidt)
• Thinking, Fast and Slow (Kahneman)
• Predictably Irrational (Ariely)
• Phantoms in the Brain (Ramachandran)
• Probability Theory: The Logic of Science (Jaynes)
• The Book of Why (Pearl)
• Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithms (McKay)
• Causation, Prediction, and Search (Sprites, Glymour, and Scheines)

books for thinking about complex systems:

• Antifragile (Taleb)
• Sync: How Order Emerges from Chaos in the Universe (Strogatz)
• Godel, Escher, Bach (Hofstadter)
• The Origin of Order (Kauffman)
• Metamagical Themas (Hofstadter)
• The Evolution of Individuality (Buss)
• Anticipatory Systems (Rosen)
• Creation (Grand)
• Incomplete Nature (Deacon)

memorable fiction:

• Ender's Game (Card)
• children's series: Gregor the Overlander (Collins)
• Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (Adams)

more generally, my goodreads profile

misc articles:

• You and Your Research (Hamming)
• slatestarcodex

niche texts that I liked so much that I learned to cut pdfs so my friends/family would be more likely to read them:

• Cells and Senescence" (Rosen)
• "Parquet Deformations: A Subtle, Intricate Art Form", Metamagical Themas (Hofstadter)
• The Seeming Paradox of Mechanizing Creativity", Metamagical Themas (Hofstadter)
• Analogies and Roles in Humann and Machine Thinking", Metamagical Themas (Hofstadter)