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Solaris by Stanislaw Lem

Permutation City by Greg Egan

Ubik by Philip K. Dick

Judea Pearl's The Book of Why.

Basically Pearl argues that classical statistics completely ignored the concept of causality so far and introduces a complete framework to bring causal inference into statistical/data analysis. The framework is based on graphs and asks for causal hypotheses (like econometricians would do with instrumental variables) and allows to compute/quantify causal effects.

Anyone working with data should probably read this book. The fact that Pearl brought in a professional math/science writer as co-author is a huge boost to the main ideas accessibility and make for a nice albeit deep summer read.

Yes, I was thinking about the law of small numbers too ! Pretty sure the college with the smallest rate of startup founders is also a small college.

In a closed system, hence not the Earth.

I'm surprised to find no mention of Solaris by Stanislaw Lem among the fiction references. In this novel, a whole planet is somehow a living organism, truly alien to human conception of life.

My take from this book is that:

- scientific knowledge is embedded in some intellectual ether made of underlying hypotheses often not explicitly stated called paradigms

- paradigms follow a Darwinian evolutionary process, i.e. better paradigms evolve out of not-so-good previous paradigms

- paradigm replacements start with an epistemological crisis , i.e. facts that the current paradigms don't explain well enough.

Hope it helps !

Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond offers an interesting and academically quite solid perspective.

On that topic Harari's Homo Deus is a pretty interesting read. He argues that Humanism is the de facto "new" (2-3 centuries old) religion. Soon to be replace by the celebration of something even more global -- data.

When you sign a legal contract, you are also likely to spend a non-negligible fraction of the contract to lawyers so that they review it thoroughly. Think of the legal costs of fund raising or the time spent negotiating and reviewing a contract for a large deal.

Some things that are at stake on the lawyers side are their competence (can they actually make sure the contract is "secure" ?), their reputation (track record of competence established over time) and some insurance mechanism (if things go wrong can you get something back from their insurance).

All of the above seem to be missing in the case of "smart-contracts".