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Comment by timeattack | Hacker News Reader

Kind of obvious one, but I wish more people knew that — critical thinking.

On the one side it helps to avoid bad/stupid things in life: quackery medicine, scammers, bad investments, etc.

On the other side it allows to peep deeper into things and see more choices even in ordinary life. After some practice you gain nearly magical ability to peel couple of additional layers from reality and to see non-obvious things everywhere.

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Any Book recommendations ?

I doubt there are books that could teach you critical thinking. It requires to spend lots of time observing and learning stuff, trying out possible solutions and getting meaningful feedback.

Also from my experience it helps when you stop judging people and stuff, labeling things as good or bad, black or white. Just try to understand different points of view and outcomes as they are.

"Thinking, Fast and Slow" might be good here.

Carl Sagan's excellent The Demon-Haunted World includes a "Baloney detection kit":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Demon-Haunted_World

Checkout Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast & Slow - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking,_Fast_and_Slow

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqXVAo7dVRU

https://paulminors.com/blog/thinking-fast-slow-book-summary-...

You might want to skip chapter 4: https://replicationindex.com/2017/02/02/reconstruction-of-a-...

And take the rest with a bit of salt given that this was Kahneman's comments on the research in that chapter: "Disbelief is not an option. The results are not made up nor are they statistical flukes. You have no choice but to accept that the major conclusions of these studies are true."

"The Count of Monte Cristo" by Alexandre Dumas. There is a lovely passage exactly on this (hint: in jail).

The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe: How To Know What's Really Real in a World Increasingly Full of Fake by Steven Novella. There is an audiobook version, or any episode of their podcast, now over 750 episodes to choose from.

Rationality: from AI to Zombies is largely based on Daniel Kahneman’s work, with a bit more influence from Judea Pearl’s causality work. The rationalist subculture has a writing style and trends that might be a bit polarizing, but I found it enjoyable. A good bit of it is about how to quantify uncertainty in real problems, and that this uncertainty only exists in the observer, not the universe. It also considers controversial examples like cryonics, race and politics.

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