Comment by rayalez | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rayalez | Hacker News Reader

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Here are the best books I've read over the last few months:

- Lost and Founder - the founder of Moz shares his advice and experience from building a 40M/year company. I found the things he says about building a startup extremely insightful and practically useful. Reading it feels like having a dinner with a friend who shares with you the things he has learned in a very honest, down to earth way. Highly recommend it.

- Rationality from AI to Zombies - probably the most influential book I've read in my life, profoundly changed the way I think. It's a collection of LessWrong essays on science and rationality. (recently they've released an an audio version by the way).

- "A Short History of Nearly Everything" and "Our Mathematical Universe" - two general popular science books I'm enjoying a lot. Haven't finished reading them yet, but so far they're brilliant(and very easy to understand, authors do an amazing job explaining complicated things in a simple, accessible way).

- Hacking Growth - an AMAZING book on "growth hacking". It provides a framework for marketing a startup, gives a ton of practical advice and specific tactics. It breaks down step by step how startups and big tech companies grow their products. Most of the books I've read on the subject were bullshit, but this one is absolutely fantastic, can't recommend it enough.

Other great books I should mention: This Idea is Brilliant, Actionable Gamification, The Design of Everyday Things, The Master Algorithm (great overview of machine learning techniqes), Springfield Confidential (fun behind the scenes from one of the writers on Simpsons), Homo Deus(from the author of Sapiens).

I recommend ”A short history of nearly everything” to everyone, regardless of background. It covers a range of scientific fields and their history. My favorite part is his description of biological taxonomy. I also rememver enjoying his chapter on the history of plate tectonics.

”Our mathematical universe” is a fun and interesting book, but probably more of interest to someone with an explicit interest in physics. I enjoyed the first few chapters the most, but still feel a bit skeptical about his level 4 multiverse.

> I recommend ”A short history of nearly everything” to everyone, regardless of background

Yes, not forgetting to mention that Bill Bryson is such a fantastic writer who can not only make the complex simple but who is also fun to read. Love his travel memoirs as well.

The beginning of "Our Mathematical Universe" was a great high-level description of a lot of popular modern physics concepts for a layperson to understand.

Then it goes really downhill IMO. It (pretty much) only gets worse from level 4.

"Rationality from AI to Zombies" - I loved that book! It took me quite a bit to read it all, even though it is written in a colloquial style (might be due to length or me just wanting to digest what I've just read). Changed my perspective on quite a lot too, mainly how to approach information that causes cognitive dissonance. I wanted to read some of it again for some time, so I thank you for pointing out that there is an audio version now!

"A Short History of Nearly Everything" is an amazing book. Bill Bryson is one of my favorite authors, and even though the book can get a little slow at times (for me, at least) in some of the later chapters, his wit and writing style still make it entertaining.

If you haven't read A Walk in the Woods, or In a Sunburned Country by him, I highly recommend those as well.

I followed your advice and read chapter 9 of Rationaly from Ai to Zombies. This chapter title is "Expecting Short Inferential Distances", my summary is that if you are using a scientific language and your audience is not used to it then you should explain basic terminology. So from this piece I should estimate content with low density of information.

"I took a speed-reading course and read War and Peace in twenty minutes. It involves Russia." -- Woody Allen

I mean, yes, Yudkowsky is pretty verbose, but that's not what I'd call a super-accurate summary and there's definitely more in that chapter than your one-sentence summary.

(It's about understanding as well as knowledge, and in so far as it's about knowledge it's not only about terminology or only about science. There's some evo-psych-y speculation on why it's so easy to forget that inferential distances are there, which may or may not be correct but (1) is interesting in its own right and (2) helps to fit the notion of "inferential distance" into the reader's overall model of the world, rather than just giving specific instructions like "explain basic terminology". There's the concrete and I think useful suggestion that when you encounter a failure of communication you probably need to back off further than you are initially inclined to. There's a concrete example (appeals to "simplicity") of the sort of thing that once you've been immersed in, say, scientific thinking for a while becomes second nature to you and that you may not think to explain -- and, please note, it's not primarily a matter of terminology. There's an important warning of a failure mode you may encounter when trying to take inferential distances into account -- which seems like it should be obvious, but I've seen people fall into it often enough.)

[Note: Those things are on the Less Wrong page from which the chapter is derived. I haven't read the ebook, and it's possible that some stuff was trimmed out.]

There's also a bit of irony in complaining "this could have been explained much more briefly" about a chapter whose whole point is to warn about how communication can fail unexpectedly when you don't take the time to explain things slowly and apparently redundantly.

I think that there more interesting examples to ilustrate the fact that communication require to explain the basic to those that don't work in the field. Any good teacher knows that you have to motivate students and explain things adapting your classes to the knowledge of your students. Also, those who sell services or products know very well how to communicate the value of products. Perhaps some empathy is necessary for communication, but chapter 9 sound voiceless to me.

Yudkowsky is a polarizing writer. Some people love his writing; I do not. There's the occasional nugget of wisdom but I find his style so irritating and pretentious that it's not worth suffering through.

Scott Alexander (Slatestarcodex) is related and more readable if verbose, but less focused on that groundwork material of (so-called) rationality.

Thanks, I just read in his blog the post "beware the man of one study". Discussing if rising minimum wage hurts the economy give rise to 270 comments. I agree with the conclusion: Even if someone give you overwhelming evidence in favor of a certain point of view just wait and see if the opposite side has equally overwhelming evidence. My example: This coin came 7000 times heads so almost always gives head. Just wait and count how many times it came tails.

Thanks for pointing towards Slatestarcodex. Loved it.

Do you not read fiction or is it just that you haven't read any good fiction lately?

I rarely read fiction. I'd love to read something great, but I have harder time finding it and getting into it.

Harry Potter and The Methods of Rationality is the best fiction I've ever read, and am actually rereading now, so that's one.

I absolutely love everything written by Alexander Wales, The Martian by Andy Weir, and a lot of stuff from /r/rational. Also I think that Atlas Shrugged and everything written by Ayn Rand is brilliant.

I've read Ready Player One by Ernest Cline, and Mistborn by Brandon Sanderson not so long ago, they were pretty fun, but I wasn't blown away or anything.

Aside from that, I don't know many great ones, so I mostly read non-fiction.

Hacking growth by Sean Ellis and Morgan Browne?

Just want to check I'm buying the right book!

Yep.

Oh, and if you're interested in the subject, I can also recommend "Traction" by Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares, it's a really neat outline of traction channels.

I also really enjoyed Traction. It provides a good framework on testing to identify the channel that provides the results needed at the stage your business is at. It also goes drives home the concept that the channel that gets you to one stage of growth might not be the one that gets you to the next stage.

book recommendations on topics with lots of noise competition are really helpful, thanks

I read Traction and Hacking Growth. Traction is a great book, HG is uninspiring - too repetitive and generally is about setting up growth hacking team in your company with emphasis on "developers are important they should contribute to the growth hacking"

Traction is a really interesting overview of all sorts of channels

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