Ask HN: Mind bending books to read and never be the same as before?
I'm looking for mind games, plot twists, brain expanding books, and literally anything that transforms me into a smarter, wiser person.
Explores the consequences of consciousness being just a pattern. Would it continue if the pattern is paused? Seems yes, since we survive being unconscious. So we move in space and time, but still consciousness feels continuous.
What if you pause it, destroy it, recreate it somewhere else. Would it not continue then as well (the classic teleporter question). But it doesn't stop here.
What if you destroy it, but it just happens to continue somewhere else? Then it should continue there as well. So if you think that teleportation would not mean death, then you kind of have to accept that if anywhere in the universe at any time the same pattern exists when you die, then you can't really die because you'll just continue on from there instead.
Not sure I accept it, but it's certainly mind-bending to think about!
Also take a trip to his website [1] if you haven't yet.
For mind games: The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi.
Plus for a related rabbit hole: the idea that a random pattern can just pop into existence and have consciousness is basically the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain concept.
I can plausibly see life extension technology arising that gives me hundreds, or even thousands of extra years of life. It doesn't seem entirely impossible to extend that premise to millions of years, but at billions it doesn't really seem fathomable, and trillions seems to be well beyond what we know about the likely fate of the universe. And once I accepted that inevitability, it suddenly seemed a lot more plausible that my time left was probably closer to decades than even centuries, let alone anything beyond that. There were definitely a fair few existential crises in the weeks and months after finishing that book.
The emergence of a Boltmann brain is on the scale of "all iron stars collapse via quantum tunnelling into black holes"
The next milestone is all matter decaying, and the universe being empty..
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/32446949-the-punch-escro...
EEG traces of the brain show this. When you are awake, drowsy, asleep, or under anesthesia, the patterns of your brain waves are very different [0,1]. But, the brain is not 'paused', it's just firing differently than when you are awake or drowsy.
So, the 'pattern' is not just 3-D, it's 4-D. You need time as well. You'd need to transport the 'trace' over vast distances, scales, and times.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_oscillation
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3288763/ Figure 1, in particular
I know brain measurements show that our brains operates differently during sleep, but we may still be concious, at least internally.
Have you ever had the same "sleep stage 1" experience I have?
If I start to fall asleep in the living room around people, their voices seem to become louder, I am aware of what they are saying, their sentences make sense. Yet, if I am suddenly awaken to full alertness, I will have no memory of what they were specifically talking about, although I do remember that I heard them talking. It's as though the ability to form memories went away before full conciousness went away. I believe this is a common experience, and I was fascinated when this pattern was first pointed out to me.
Like this?
This one is actually a little different. There is much much less activity under anesthetic vs sleeping. There are even theories that going under general anesthetic actually causes some small degree of brain damage due to the shutdown.
He also never thinks small. I thought I knew "the point" of Diaspora about 6 or 7 times, but then he just "zoomed out" and made the last point look small and trivial by comparison. The opening chapter of that book is so abstract and yet describes the birth of a consciousness in a way that feels understandable, believable, and internally consistent.
If you love finding interesting puzzles to reason about, then I strongly recommend Egan's books!
I haven't read Permutation City, though. I'm bumping this one to the top of the queue :)
It just comes down to my preferences for what kind of itch I liked scratched the most. Egan stretches my brain and makes me wonder at the complexity of complexity. But Banks makes me yearn for the future. Demonstrates what wonders could be possible if we fast forward technological development forward 10k years.
The magnificent intellects of the artificial minds that govern the society hits me in my soul. What a wonderful idea.
It presents a well-chosen sci-fi story that explores an extreme modification to one of the parameters of consciousness, followed by an essay analyzing the consequences of that thought experiment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_return
"Eternal return (also known as eternal recurrence) is a theory that the universe and all existence and energy has been recurring, and will continue to recur, in a self-similar form an infinite number of times across infinite time or space.
The theory is found in Indian philosophy and in ancient Egypt as well as Judaic wisdom literature (Ecclesiastes) and was subsequently taken up by the Pythagoreans and Stoics [and] Nietzsche..."
Scott's MO through all of his books is to write about free will, specifically the idea that we don't possess it and that our brain makes decisions by itself and that consciousness is an illusion.
• "The Unconscious as Infinite Sets" by Ignacio Matte Blanco. Reformulates Freud in logico-mathematical terms and establishes a formal system (bi-logic) to describe unconsciousness phenomena: in case you ever wanted to apply category theory to study yourself.
• "The Protracted Game" by Scott Boorman. Interprets Maoist's revolutionary strategies during 1927 - 1949 period as a game of Go. Interesting both from historical, military, and game-theoretical perspective; raised an appreciation of Eastern wisdom and 'board games as a tool of thought' [2] for me.
• "The Unwritten Laws of Engineering" by W. J. King. Written in 1944, but the advice is still relevant, more so to the software engineering field. Should be at least skimmed at any part of your career.
• "The Myth of Sisyphus" by Alber Camus. Unequivocally answers the most important question there is — does life have meaning, and if not, should you kill yourself over it? I read it in my teens while wrestling with existential dread, and lived a somewhat happy and interesting life ever after.
[1]: http://homepages.math.uic.edu/~kauffman/Form.html
[2]: There's also "Laws of the Game" by Eigen & Winkler that describes natural phenomena as glass-bead games with various rules.
This is the only case in my life where I wanted to adopt author's philosophy and learn to see the world the way they do. The content is very interdisciplinary and heavily borrows from various fields (psychoanalysis, dynamic systems theory, biology, linguistics &c) and will surely appeal to a technically minded person.
Books like that, I think there is a lot of value in just diving in and seeing what happens. I would highly recommend it.
i see now that wikipedia states that spencer-brown claimed applications of his approach to big conjectures that never panned out, so now i am extra dubious. it makes sense now why people would go off and try that out.
There are some papers/presentations about applications of ideas based on these laws: circuit optimizations, query engines, various "iconic" algebras [2, 3]; I, like you, have a hard time buying all that (ditto author's claims about Reimann hypothesis), but still, it sounds pretty damn interesting and innovative, e.g. examples of multiplication/addition in 1st vol. of "Iconic Math" were eye-opening and intuitive for me, as a person with kinaesthetic learning style, in a sense that I deeper understood what "number" and "to calculate" mean; it also promotes the invention of various ad-hoc calculi and notations, of which I am a big fan of.
For me, the greatest thing about LoF is cross-fertilization: esoterical mumbo-jumbo benefits from formalization and mathematical approach, while technical disciplines find their root in the spiritual ground; that and the thought experiment of building the world from nothing. It bridges "above" and "below", and kinda reminds me of [4].
[1]: http://www.westdenhaag.nl/information/publications/Alphabetu...
[3]: https://lof50.com/
I've read both "Stories of Your Life and Others" and "Exhalation" in the last month and I turned to my wife and said "that story just blew my mind" for probably 75% of the stories.
You can find a few online. Here is a very short but brain-tickling example: https://www.nature.com/articles/35014679
All of his stories are good though.
I’d recommend True Names by Vernor Vinge and After Life by Simon Funk if you like Ted Chiang: https://sifter.org/~simon/AfterLife/
Made it hard for me to get emotionally invested in his stories, and I found them a bit of a slog to get through.
Not sure if I'll give his other books a read, but I might.
He has a background in Computer Science, by the way, for those that might be interested.
Erich Fromm's The Sane Society - on how society impacts people's mental health, and how to build towards a sane society
Fromm's The Art Of Loving - an analysis of different kinds of loves, trying to dispel pop culture's lies about love, and love is actually hard work
Ernest Becker's The Denial of Death - on how not our fear, but our complete denial of death existing leads to the weirdest outcomes in our society
Then there's political stuff -
Orwell's Essays, any large-ish collection. I find Orwell to be a much, much better non-fiction writer than fiction writer. Extremely insightful into political processes.
Robert Caro's books, perhaps the first The Years Of Lyndon B Johnson. Can't get better insights into how power works on a local and not-so-local level.
Popper's Open Society and its enemies, hard to summarise - a defense of Western society in light of the then-ongoing WW2. You probably saw the paradox of tolerance a few times pop up, that's from that book, among a ton of other stuff.
HN is very insular in its interests as you can see with many posts here repeating. Midwives' recommended books probably have a higher chance of truly bending your mind into novel directions.
Biology: https://www.reddit.com/r/biology/comments/6jfscw/what_are_so...
Law enforcement: https://www.reddit.com/r/ProtectAndServe/comments/gc13w5/mus...
Midwives: https://www.reddit.com/r/Midwives/comments/32fw16/book_recom...
Any of the Ask* subreddits usually have practitioners answer: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskAnthropology/comments/bl759q/ant...
Explains why we choose brands over cheaper alternatives, why we're willing to pay a lot more to lock in a deal, why we hate registering before buying the thing (but are more than happy to do so right after), why Sony removed the record button from the first Walkman, and much more.
This book forever changed the way I think about brands, and improved my design and problem-solving skills.
A couple of Rory's rules:
• The opposite of a good idea can also be a good idea.
• Test counterintuitive things only because no one else will.
A couple of "mind games" from the book:
• Merely adding a geographical or topographical adjective to food – whether on a menu in a restaurant or on packaging in a supermarket – allows you to charge more for it and means you will sell more.
• "There's your problem," I said. "It doesn't matter what something tastes like in blind tastings, if you put 'low in fat' or any other health indicators on the packaging, you'll make the contents taste worse."
https://bookshop.org/books/alchemy-the-dark-art-and-curious-...
Abbeys about more, of course. He had that rare ability to turn his book into something that felt like a direct conversation with me, the reader. I read him in my 20s and his viewpoint definitely connects with someone wanting to examine and express his/herself first before society’s overwhelming influence. He discusses trying to free himself from the conceptual confines of the human individual and societal experience while isolated in a national park. Quinn uses a hypothetical conversation between a gorilla and a person to highlight the fundamental us versus them approach humans take with the rest of earth. Then Franz de Waal really drives home that animals are likely to be much more mentally capable than we give them credit. They’re good books if you want to know something more about the universe than what your human experience is.
Edit-corrected book title.
This book makes every bit of life advice you receive afterwards feel shallow. It feels like a reference to western thought.
It's also very well translated and reads very easily, and is very short. I read about a chapter every morning when I feel motivated, and certain passages really stick in my head.
It also helps to read whenever you feel overcome with emotion because of something.
"Psycho-cybernetics" by Maxwell Maltz. A plastic surgeon shares his techniques for achieving your goals in life. 95% if not more of self-help books today borrow (consciously or not) ideas discussed in this book, and often discuss them with much less depth.
For instance, what is the point of empathy/friendship/love in a technologically advanced society? These were very useful things for our ancestors to help each other battle the harsh environment, but we have mastered our environment, so why waste brain power on empathy now?
The Wikipedia summarizes the books discussion of conciousness very well:
"The novel raises questions about the essential character of consciousness. Is the interior experience of consciousness necessary, or is externally observed behavior the sole determining characteristic of conscious experience? Is an interior emotional experience necessary for empathy, or is empathic behavior sufficient to possess empathy?
It looks like Blindsight is also still available for free on the author's website [1].
> To Mock a Mockingbird and Other Logic Puzzles: Including an Amazing Adventure in Combinatory Logic (1985, ISBN 0-19-280142-2) is a book by the mathematician and logician Raymond Smullyan. It contains many nontrivial recreational puzzles of the sort for which Smullyan is well known. It is also a gentle and humorous introduction to combinatory logic and the associated metamathematics, built on an elaborate ornithological metaphor.
Here's an example puzzle from the first half (the second half deals with combinatory logic):
> Suppose I offer to give you one of three prizes-Prize A, Prize B, or Prize C. Prize A is the best of the three, Prize B is middling, and Prize C is the booby prize. You are to make a statement; if the statement is true, then I promise to award you either Prize A or Prize B, but if your statement is false, then you get Prize C-the booby prize.
> Of course it is easy for you to be sure to win either Prize A or Prize B; all you need say is: "Two plus two is four." But suppose you have your heart set on Prize A-what statement could you make which would force me to give you Prize A?
Fun book.
Good enough. All this sort of thing becomes a Genie problem if you think about it too much. We all get what the solution means.
@Carapace I find joy in discussing the validity of answers like this and such discussion is not possible without posting the answer first. I do feel sorry if I spoiled someone the joy of puzzling themselves though.
Okay, so what does one will receive mean, if it doesn't reference the future???
Here's an example (SPOILER ALERT: with solution) of what I mean. The English version is just a verbose translation of a simple Boolean table.
==================================
Black-Hat Chuck
==================================
:date: 2014-02-01 10:56
:summary: A solution to the Three Hats puzzle.
I recently ran across a `cool puzzle site`_. Here is one of the puzzles
and a solution:
There are 3 black hats and 2 white hats in a box. Three men (we will
call them A, B, & C) each reach into the box and place one of the
hats on his own head. They cannot see what color hat they have
chosen. The men are situated in a way that A can see the hats on B &
C's heads, B can only see the hat on C's head and C cannot see any
hats. When A is asked if he knows the color of the hat he is wearing,
he says no. When B is asked if he knows the color of the hat he is
wearing he says no. When C is asked if he knows the color of the hat
he is wearing he says yes and he is correct. What color hat and how
can this be?
.. class:: attribution caption
~ `Three Hats`_
Solution
------------
I'm going to call the three men Alan, Bob, and Chuck.
First, let's imagine what Alan might be able to see. There are four
possibilities.
=========== =============
Bob's Hat Chuck's Hat
=========== =============
White White
Black White
White Black
Black Black
=========== =============
Since there are only two white hats, if Alan sees that both Bob's and
Chuck's hats are white his own hat would have to be black. In other
words, by admitting that he can't tell which hat he is wearing Alan is
saying that either or both of Bob's and Chuck's hats are black. If we
eliminate the case of both hats being white we are left with three
possibilities.
=========== =============
Bob's Hat Chuck's Hat
=========== =============
Black White
White Black
Black Black
=========== =============
From this it should be easy to see that if Bob sees that Chuck's hat is
white his own hat would have to be black. Bob would be uncertain of the
color of his own hat only if Chuck's hat is black. So Chuck, being no
dummy, can conclude that his own hat is black.
It's an elegant puzzle with a very simple and satisfying solution.
.. _cool puzzle site: http://wuriddles.com/
.. _Three Hats: http://wuriddles.com/easy.shtml#3hatsI don't see how "evaluation of the future" is relevant. The person hosting the game has laid out the conditions for his actions. If you say "you will not give me prize B in response to this statement":
1) If the host were to give you prize B, that would be a contradiction, as that would make your statement false, so you should have received C.
2) If the host were to give you prize C, that would be a contradiction, as that would make your statement true; per the rules, you should not have received prize C (or logically equivalent: you should have received one of A or B).
3) If the host were to give you prize A, there is no contradiction.
The only action the host can make, while honoring the rules they laid out, is to give you prize A. The host, assuming they're decent at logic (which is a premise of such problems), would consider the above and realize that they must give you prize A. There's no need for reading the future; they must merely know what actions they are permitted to make given the rules of the game, and given only one valid course of action, they must take take that action.
The answer is false and evaluation is true until the prize is actually given. Then the answer becomes true and the evaluation false.
I wonder if the question could be reworded somehow to say that the prize being awarded and the statement being evaluated true/false will happen at the same instant without taking the fun out of it.
For fiction, “Blood Meridian” by Cormac McCarthy, “100 Years of Solitude” by Marquez, and “Song of Solomon” by Toni Morrison (or really anything by Toni Morrison, it’s all amazing).
Also, Thich Nhat Hanh’s translation of the Heart Sutra, “The Other Shore”, gave me a much deeper understanding of my meditative practice and the way I understand consciousness.
I read Decartes in high school during the teenage existential crises we all go through and it blew my mind. Opened me up to the power of thinking from first principles and a love of philosophy and questioning everything. Cogito, ergo sum!
"Atlas Shrugged" gets a lot of hate, but it's a phenomenally important book. It was one of those that completely consumed me during the read. I could not put it down – stayed up late, work up early, and rushed home from work to get back to it.
"Rework", "Getting Real", the other books by the old 37signals crew, and of course "The Lean Startup" really changed the way I thought about software development and business. I credit them for much of my startup/programming success.
Taleb's Incerto series changed how I thought about investing, risk, and life in general. "Fooled by Randomness" and "Antifragile" are especially good.
A powerful excerpt from the book: 'So the thing to do when working on a motorcycle, as in any other task, is to cultivate the peace of mind which does not separate one’s self from one’s surroundings. When that is done successfully then everything else follows naturally. Peace of mind produces the right values, the right values produce the right thoughts. Right thoughts produce right actions and right actions produce work which will be a material reflection for others to see of the serenity at the center of it all.'
In general life, as an odd monkey wandering around a built environment, that's Zen. The categories being challenged include such fundamental ones as "Self/Other"
In coding, identifying categories and choosing to perceive them or ignore them is fundamental to debugging. "The variable claims it's $foo; but I see back there it was set to $bar...." Strip away a layer of assumptions, and look underneath at what is _really_ there.
Iterated, this is what leads you to understanding performance all the way down to the silicon.
Both of these books had a big influence on Phil Jackson — the Bulls basketball coach. His interpretation was to not “force” things — to let them unfold.
So, for coding it could be applied by not forcing solutions and instead really calmly contemplating a system until you get to a point where the next right decision reveals itself. The idea being that the solution is there, and you just have to be open to it — rather than seeing yourself as some separate entity that’s going to impose a solution on it.
I think I am not getting it because that just sounds like thinking about things and designing stuff.
I mean, sometimes, I focus on getting the right primitives so that the rest of the decisions just naturally fall out from that, but I'm not sure that's what you meant.
So, I think we’ve all been there with coding where in either a rush, or driven by ego to solve the problem in some impressive way, we kind of get ourselves tied up. But when we calm our mind, it’s easier to see, “oh, I can just leverage this little change”.
> Prince Wang's programmer was coding software. His fingers danced upon the keyboard. The program compiled without an error message, and the program ran like a gentle wind.
"Excellent!" the Prince exclaimed. "Your technique is faultless!"
"Technique?" said the programmer, turning from his terminal. "What I follow is Tao -- beyond all techniques! When I first began to program, I would see before me the whole problem in one mass. After three years, I no longer saw this mass. Instead, I used subroutines. But now I see nothing. My whole being exists in a formless void. My senses are idle. My spirit, free to work without a plan, follows its own instinct. In short, my program writes itself. True, sometimes there are difficult problems. I see them coming, I slow down, I watch silently. Then I change a single line of code and the difficulties vanish like puffs of idle smoke. I then compile the program. I sit still and let the joy of the work fill my being. I close my eyes for a moment and then log off."
Prince Wang said, "Would that all of my programmers were as wise!"
Sometimes you know that Door A is by far the "right" choice, but maybe it's the harder one. Taking a minute to drop your ego may make the choice easier. "Yeah, A is hard now, but B will bring much more pain later."
It may help to frame you decisions based on the hypothetical "1000x programmer". You acknowledge that this programmer is the absolute best. Every choice they make is literary a life or death decision, so they always make the right choice. What would they do in this situation? They would write that unit test!
Other times you don't know which one is the "right" choice. In those cases it actually doesn't matter, does it? Worrying about what may happen if you choose "wrong" will not change what's on either side of the doors.
Choose one and get on to the next set of doors. If you weren't happy with the outcome don't beat yourself up over it, instead use what you learned to better inform your future decisions.
There were a few insightful passages, but most of the book was pretentious rambling. It was difficult to understand what the author was even trying to say, with his head so far up his butt. It has a promising beginning, but becomes increasingly dense and confusing.
Quality is the ability of a thing to do its job. Chasing the definition of that word doesn't warrant a spiral into insanity.
Reading secondary literature gave me some context about Pirsig's own mental illness and his struggles overcoming his son's death, but in the end I was still disappointed.
Edit: Also, it's not about motorcycles at all. If you are interested in motorcycle travel, read Ted Simon's Jupiter's Travels instead.
Better books on motorcycling are "Long Way Round" by McGregor and Boorman or anything by Peter Egan.
Pirsig's ZatAoMM is my all-time favorite book, though I didn't finish it at first reading. The trick before reading it is not to put the book into a cubbyhole of personal preexisting expectations. It's not a travel book. It's a personal journey of discovery that just happens to be on a motorcycle. Essentially, Pirsig's bike trip is a metaphor to revisit his fragmented past and forgotten identity through the lens of a curious mind. It's a personal quest to know who he is (and was) and what in life has value that lasts.
For me, the book was transcendent.
I feel this way about Catcher in the Rye. My English teacher recommended it to me obviously on the basis that I was an angsty teenager that would identify with Holden Caulfield. But what a pile of crap it is. I still want back the hours I wasted on reading that stupid boring book.
I can't possibly so how the teacher thought suggesting that book to an angsty teen to be a good idea. That's the time kids need to have their world opened, not their angst re-affirmed. Very strange.
I didn't enjoy it either when I was reading it, but later appreciated that it depicted a certain kind of angst— that of someone leaving childhood for adulthood, feeling anxious and threatened by this shift, and wishing to just remain as the most adult-like child (the "catcher in the rye" that gives the book its title) instead of having to go through that awkward period of being the most childlike adult.
Under that reading, it's much less irritating, because Holden isn't supposed to be valorized, just understood.
Tried to read it again in my early 30s and stopped about 20 pages in, just thought it was terrible.
He was an English teacher trying to judge the quality of rhetoric though, which doesn’t have a job other than to be quality.
You have to balance the idea and quantity of a piece to describe it's properties. Then you can rank it into a hierarchy. The UK runs on this principle of reception and qualitative judgement.
Turning the brain off with "peace of mind" is necessary, can't be thinking up new ideas and directing thoughts when you are in a state of reception, nor can you be excessively self-aware of your own being.
I haven't read Zen, it seems boring to be in that state of reception all the time, to me.
For me the takeaways were: 1. Getting into a state of 'flow' is the ideal way to work. 2. Being dependent on technology one doesn't understand (& hence on people who do understand it) is an unpleasant fact of modern life. 3. Our culture still hasn't shaken the tendency to denigrate pleasure, and the subjective in general.
Still the best random buy I ever did.
One of the things I really miss of my Italian youth is having tons of quality bookshops at every corner. England outside London is sorely lacking in that respect.
I prefer a book like Siddartha by HH. The lessons are there, but the interpretation is open and the narrative is not compromised. You start reading it and you don't want to stop reading it because you're now part of Siddharta's journey. You’re no expecting the punch line that has the lesson, you simply live the story and therefore live the lesson.
Infinite Jest is also great, if you haven't read it. It gets a lot of bad press mostly due to being fetishized by a particular type of insufferable person. The book has its flaws, but is a great piece of writing and (depending how old you are, where you are in life, etc) may offer a different lens. Also, the writing is excellent.
>depending how old you are, where you are in life, etc may offer a different lens.
Could you elaborate more on this? I am curious. Maybe I could be right now in that situation. So in that case it would be optimal to start reading it now instead of in a year or two.
The dialogues made it feel like experiencing isolation and disconnection from other people; the characters talk to each other, but don't listen or care for anyone but themselves or the ones/things they deify.
The thing is, I think that was kind of the point of the book (at least as far as I read). But I couldn't handle it. That, on top of the many paragraphs of needlessly esoteric language he peppers in, made me feel like I was reading a book written for someone else.
Should I go back and finish the book? What makes it compelling to others?
Tried again about 5 years later and loved it. I suppose you just have to be in the right mindset when you approach it.
If it helps anyone decide whether to give it a go, two recent books I read and loved were 2666 by Roberto Bolaño, and Underworld by Don DeLillo, and Infinite Jest is satisfying me in the hard-earned way they both did.
House of Leaves has a very uninteresting plot, and raises more questions than it answers. It's physically painful to read, because most pages, you have to rotate the entire book every which way since the words go in spirals.
Infinite Jest is good, but way too long. A good 70% of the book could have been cut out or condensed. The writing is also intentionally bad, which makes it harder to read. There are definitely good lines, but it's kind of like DFW used a random sentence generator and some of the lines just happened to be amazing, but 90% of it is garbage.
[1] "So Good They Can’t Ignore You" by Cal Newport. It changed the way I look at my career and how I view my personal development.
[2] ADP 6-22 Army Leadership and the Profession by the US Army. Looking past the militaristic stuff, it made me change the way I see leader/subordinate relationships and how to start becoming a person others can depend on and look up to.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Good-They-Cant-Ignore-You/dp/14555091...
[2] https://www.amazon.com/Army-Doctrine-Publication-Leadership-...
Also, FYI, all of these publications are free online. Here is the Army one you linked to: https://armypubs.army.mil/epubs/DR_pubs/DR_a/pdf/web/ARN2003...
If you have difficulty interacting with people
1. How to win friends and influence people (Easy read) 2. Seven habits of highly effective people (Harder read)
To learn how to write well: On writing well
To understand how large products are made: Show Stopper!: The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT
I mean "how to win friends" is similar, it can be summarized with just the 12 chapters, and it's padded out with anecdotes putting it in practice.
I'm sure Seven Habits is the same, I have it on my bookshelf (mandatory reading from my previous employer) and I think I started reading it but I lost interest.
1. Seven habits - I can't get past Covey's personal 'experiences'. They are just seemingly so contrived and fake that they just ruin the entire thought process for me. It seems like he had to make up things that related to the covenants. Is that just me?
2. For writing - I would also suggest 'On Writing' by Stephen King for this as a different take. It's probably the best 'how to write' book ever made. It's King's personal take on the theory of writing, with lessons sprinkled throughout. So good.
Seriously, read the On Writing book. It really set his theory up for me to understand exactly why he's inconsistent. You can read his books and tell when he's thinking and processing, versus when he's writing to pay for a car or house or whatever.
Lots of self-help and pop-business books do this and above other factors like all the padding (so very much of it), it's ruined the genre for me. Hate that crap. Makes me think their advice is bullshit.
I made it a ways into Never Split the Difference and got a little useful material out of it, but bounced off when I reached a can't-possibly-be-real story about the author buying a car and getting a great price by (he claims) just repeatedly asking "how can I do that?" (or similar) when presented with a price above what he'd offered. Give me a break. "Well, you're in luck, our rates on 5-year loans are great right now, let me introduce you to our finance guy", the salesman, implausibly, never says, instead just acting confused and stupid the whole time and eventually giving in. Dafuq? Either the author actually got had and didn't realize it, or that story was at best a half-truth.
Disclaimer: I only read a small, initial part of the book, and I'll explain the reasons behind this.
For one, I liked the initial parts of it; for example, remembering first names is a nice and very attentive thing to do, and in general people appreciate it when I can remember their first name after meeting them a second and third time.
On the other side, I found it to be of a very manipulative nature (shouldn't be a surprise; the title contains an "influence people" part), which rubbed me the wrong way; the book presents some techniques that help you get "what you want," but are quite superficial and hollow, i.e., you only pretend to be interested. That's why I decided to stop reading the book.
The conflicting part in all this is the fact that I see this book recommended all the time (and it's one of the best-selling books of all-time), but I just cannot ignore its manipulative nature.
It might be that I'm simply not part of its target audience or that I'm misinterpreting the messages in the book.
Nonetheless, I'd be interested to read your (and other fellow HNers) comments on this book.
However, it is very very easy to read and follow. And if you are not a social person, the book is a good first read.
I didn't come away with the impression that the techniques are intended to be used in a hollow, phony way, so much as to show the reader a set of steps to get started toward genuinely showing interest in other people.
Not everyone can jump right in to Siddhartha or Zen and the Art or some of these heavier books that might take people out of their default self-absorption towards greater awareness of other people and their needs, but Carnegie wrote something that is easy to access and get people started down a path.
For me, I’ve often been teased for missing certain “obvious” gestures my whole life. But I’m not bad with people.
Since I’m naturally an optimist and compassionate, I read it as the former category. It was helpful for me to help identify what behaviors I already do that I should reinforce to help strengthen my relationships with other people.
I find a lot of self-help books are (sort of) “common sense” already, but that by reinforcing certain “nodes” in my brain’s “knowledge graph” I’m better able to reason about the knowledge later.
Put another way, if I’m interested enough to read a book about making friends, by reviewing information about “successful patterns” to makes friends I’m better able to reason about _how I can make friends_. It isn’t manipulative to start a conversation in a coffee shop with somebody! (Unless I’m “manipulating” somebody by asking for their contact info..?)
No. The book requires you to take a "genuine interest in people" and must repeat that seven dozen times. It also dismisses flattery and smoke-blowing and favors legitimate praise. I think sincerity is one of the key takeaways (and also the hardest parts to master) of that great book.
In China, the book is very popular and is sold under the title "The Weaknesses of Human Nature."
I found both books full of obvious things, but also found that reading and reflecting on obvious things can still go a long way for self-improvement. Personally, I didn't like "7 Habits" though because Covey is always saying his methods/truths are "self-evident" and he uses the "this is true because it would be dumb to think otherwise" line of reasoning at the points in the book when I thought his argument was weakest.
I respect Kahneman for walking back some of his claims since but he needs to publish a revision.
I'd also want him to publish a revision, I've enjoyed listening to Kahneman on podcasts and have nothing against him as an author
I agree 100%. The hardest general books are probably in the area of philosophy. My recent fav: The Logic of Scientific Discovery by Karl Popper.
When I read the Wiki for Stoner years ago I saw this line, "Bryan Appleyard's review quotes critic D.G. Myers saying that the novel was a good book for beginners in the world of "serious literature"". I looked up D.G. Myers and to see if he had a list of serious literature or a twitter where I could ask about such a list only to find he passed away in 2014.
Does anyone know of such a list? Googling provides results but nothing... conclusive.
Anyway, Bloom's list: http://sonic.net/~rteeter/grtbloom.html
Adler's: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Books_of_the_Western_Wor...
Stoner isn't on either one of them lists, FWIIW. Neither are other favorites of mine, such as The Bjorndal Saga.
I also usually search HN for threads like these when I'm looking for things to read. I'm fairly certain that's how I came across Seveneves.
I did a little searching this morning and did find D.G. Myers old blog where he posts a few of his favorite novels, including Stoner. Link here: https://dgmyers.blogspot.com/2012/12/my-favorite-martians.ht...
I'll just add that the sweet spot for learning is rarely as far out as your younger self found it to be (much to the credit of your youthful determination). Too easy, and one's engaging in little more than practice. Too hard, and one lacks the conceptual framework onto which extend one's understanding.
However, I do definitely agree with your advice not to fear the uncomfortable feeling of being at the hard end of the spectrum. With time and determination, we're often capable of longer grasps than we realize.
I guess if I had any advice to offer to someone wanting to achieve that (if it's an achievement) it'd be to try older popular literature (try King Solomon's Mines, it's amazing, then work your way to even older stuff) to get used to older English (nb not Old English, which is another thing entirely and you're not likely to encounter much of it in anything but an extremely deep reading of English lit) and to read short, relatively easy "literary" works that are more recent. Vonnegut's way at the easy end. Maybe try Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby or his short stories? Salinger's Nine Stories? I'm not sure—at this point I have trouble judging what's approachable. I'd make a terrible teacher of literature.
Lots of things kinda work this way. Jazz and "classical" music usually take some work on the listener's part, to personally learn and develop, before they yield their greatest fruits. Most folks have trouble enjoying silent films, but there are some damn good ones out there. Just takes effort and time.
Strong advice but I feel it's much harder nowadays to go down that route when there are distractions like YouTube videos that are easy to watch and make you feel you're learning when really it's scratching a superficial curiosity itch with no depth.
That said, to answer OP's question, I got Mortimer's book called "Great Treasury of Western Thought" that has compiled quotes from Western classics into key themes (the human condition, love, religions, etc), and it provided the missing link between getting meaty samples of key concepts, versus actually reading ALL the classics (the book started as the the index or 'syntopicon' of the 'Great Books of the Western World', a full compilation of Western works)
Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five. Seriously. Read it. The horrors of war leaked into your brain through a sci-fi novel. If you enjoy that, try Player Piano, a moral discourse on technology and its social effects. Even though it is old, the social complications are familiar.
To keep your brain busy, anything by Umberto Eco, but this would be my order: Name of the Rose, Foucault's Pendulum, The Island of the Day Before.
Why and how to find focus in this age of distraction. Will give you a real appreciation for woodworking, etc.
Understanding how something like powered flight works—the combination of science, engineering, process, self-control, intuition, on and on—is highly transferable to nearly any other acquirable skill.
The Elements of Style, by William Strunk and E. B. White. I liked writing since I learned how to. I didn't find this book until I was 17, and it unlocked me to write in a way that better helped others.
The Language Instinct, by Steven Pinker. I guess I like writing and language. Like C. S. Lewis, Steven Pinker has a way of writing about hard things that makes them easy to understand, even enjoyable. The subject matter is also news to most people, I think, who don't appreciate just how much that language is built in to the human mind from conception.
So Lewis's rhetoric depends on "lunatic" connoting "raving lunatic" and there are actually four branches to his tri-lemma: liar, God, raving lunatic, some-one with serious psychiatric issues who generally holds it together and seems normal much of the time.
Geoff Pullum, a revered linguist, calls it "the Nasty Book". He explained, in an essay that is easy to find online, how its chief effect is to make people insecure about their writing. The book's message is, "Here are the rules. You will have to break them to write well. But you aren't good enough to know when." In fact the rules are not rules anywhere but in the imagination of White and his acolytes. No admired writer of English knows them, never mind obeys them.
When White put out the second edition after Strunk died, he made up a bunch more rules, the went back and doctored Strunk's original text to follow his new rules.
But he didn't check his own text. Typically he breaks his own rules on the same page where he is promoting them.
The book presents a profoundly ignorant picture ofthe English language. You cannot become a good writer shackled to Strunk and White.
No, the books message is that there is a progression from undisciplined to rule-following to transcendent writing and you may be anywhere on that spectrum (though, if you are looking for a book on how to write, it's probably not deeply into the latter range), and that having the set of rules that the book presents available helps you move from the first to the second and prepare you to move to the third.
In general, I think it's accurate enough. The rules it presents aren't the only set of rules that can do that, and there certainly is room for debate about their merits among competing alternatives.
That's the opposite of its effect on me.
> The book's message is, "Here are the rules. You will have to break them to write well. But you aren't good enough to know when."
I discerned no such put-down.
> In fact the rules are not rules anywhere but in the imagination of White and his acolytes. No admired writer of English knows them, never mind obeys them.
The gist of the book is the same as other books, such as The King's English, On Writing Well, and A Sense of Style. Stephen King praises the book in his own book, On Writing. I've also read a few articles on writing that say the same basic thing.
The gist of these books is to write in service of the reader (as opposed to your ego) and to work hard at it (as opposed to being lazy and just "letting it all hang out" from the first draft), as it is a craft, like carpentry. Specifically, try to avoid wasting words, try to use the best word at each point, and try to order your words (and sentences and paragraphs) in the best way for the reader's understanding.
There are some minor rules and preferences that perhaps Geoff Pullum is pouncing on, something like, "A clever horse is a good-natured one, not an ingenious one." I can see clearly that that is an archaism and take it for what it's worth. After all, the book is about 100 years old. But any writer should know that when you get down to that level of resolution, the detail shifts a bit in the quantum foam. Things on that level vary a bit from one decade to another, from one region to another. And language is like a craft, in that there are some rules that can be followed 90% of time, but it is not mathematics. You cannot distill a formula. I see Geoff Pullum taking it as black and white, but English does not submit to such simplification.
Perhaps Strunk was more black and white, but White seems a bit looser, and I think their combination balances each other out nicely. It reminds me that no rule is absolute. However, for the vast majority of writers, they would benefit from at least trying to follow a lot of them!
> The book presents a profoundly ignorant picture ofthe English language. You cannot become a good writer shackled to Strunk and White.
For 80% of the writing I read in books, magazines, articles, etc., they suffer from the kinds of problems addressed in the Elements of Style. There may be other kinds of problems in a minority of writing, but far and away most writing suffers heavily from wordiness, vagueness, clumsy construction. I won't fault someone for incorrectly calling a horse "clever," but now I see why most writing tires me out so much --- and I can rewrite it in my head to be clearer.
If you need a book to tell you to use the best word, or to put your words in order, it means you need far more help than you can get from a book.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Perennial_Phi...
For sheer scale and sensawunda - A Fire Upon the Deep and Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/167844.Across_Realtime
For mind games, I submit "Kiln People" by David Brin. What if you could fork your consciousness into another body and rejoin periodically? "Kiln People" explores this idea in some remarkable ways.
I was able to get about a third of the way through the book because my friends kept saying it gets better... but it’s a thick book and I just didn’t get it as I kept chugging
If I’m reading fiction it’s OK to put a book down. I ask you, dear internet stranger, what do you enjoy about these books?
Also, focus has got to be one of the most terrifying concepts anyone has put into a SF book.
- Imaginatively exploring grand futures.
- Evocative hints you have to fill in yourself.
- Intelligent characters.
- Computer security as an often central concern.
- Tightness. There's a reason he barely manages a novel a decade.
- The prose style just breathes sense-of-wonder to me.
A Fire Upon the Deep has a much bigger scope and includes a menagerie of truly weird aliens.
The book is written to convince the reader that evolution is valid.
But to me, the shocking thing was to really understand the religious argument for the first time, and understand why evolution challenges that world view.
In a nutshell, there is a web of related arguments which support the belief that God exists. One of them is that the eye is so complicated, that it must have been designed from the beginning by an intelligent being. Therefore God exists.
But Darwin showed that many small random changes plus natural selection are sufficient to explain the eye's complexity.
Why was this shocking at the time?
Just imagine you are walking around with a vague gut feeling that God must exist every time you see a beautiful bird or a flower. You figure that something intelligent must have designed that beatiful, complex living thing. You see another complex wonder of nature, and feeling gets stronger. Perhaps it becomes the main reason that you believe that God must exist.
Then one day, wham! Darwin releases his book, and it becomes clear that there is a valid scientific explanation for the complexity of that flower which does not require a supernatural designer.
Instantly your whole world view collapses. There's nothing in the science that says that God does not exist. Science only says that other explanations are sufficient. And yet, just that is enough to collapse that entire line of thinking. There are still other arguments for the existence of God. But the one you felt most strongly is gone.
Reading the book gave me a detailed understanding of that religious line of reasoning, and what it might feel like to lose it. It gives me some understanding of why people, even today, have a desire to reject the scientific idea of evolution.
One of the most staggering intellectual achievements of mankind. Philosophers since Ancient Greek times had been speculating on the causes of being (some even came close to guessing something like evolution) but they were just that, guesses. Then finally we get Darwin, and bam, no guesses, here is the answer (I acknowlege several others got just pipped to the post on it). That such a simple idea lurked just out of our understanding all this time, but took such staggering genius to unlock...
Wow!
Years later religious arguments against Darwin popped up.
Dawkins' book addresses these religious arguments head on.
It's discussed in this interview here:
Essentially the number of possible configurations of the sequence of a piece of genetic code required to produce the instructions for producing a usable protein are something like 10^77 to 1. The state space is filled with an astronomical amount of unusable junk.
The next part of the argument hinges on the Cambrian explosion. They claim that mathematically there isn't enough time for life produce enough trials to give rise to the amount of species seen during that period given the duration of the period and the sheer number of combinations life has to try in order to find viable ones.
They sort of say that Darwin was like Newton. A good enough explanation of a large portion of observable phenomenon, but it breaks down at the edges and a new theory is needed.
They seem to want to fill it with Intelligent Design. I'm an atheist myself, so I don't feel compelled to fill it with the god of the gaps, so to speak. But I'm finding it hard to accept Darwin as the whole answer.
Does Dawkins book address this? Is there any book that addresses this?
In the one Dawkins book I read, the mathematical part definitely gets addressed. It may change your mind about the mathematical part.
I once read elsewhere that almost all the specific details Darwin came up with have been overturned by other scientists. But the new scientific results prove evolution and natural selection even harder.
My own personal speculation is that there may be many simple proteins that have some type of use or another. I would be interested in reading about how they came up with that 10^77 number. Sounds high to me.
On the other hand, I've read scientists make comments similar to your comments. Not in papers, but in casual interviews. Some agree with you and say that even given the current theories, there just wasn't quite enough time on earth to create life from non-life.
It's not an accepted scientific theory at all. More like a crackpot idea that will probably never be proved or disproved. But take a look at the panspermia theory. Small seeds of some kind move from planet to planet. Maybe one landed on earth long ago? It's a crazy idea. But it does address the issues you brought up.
https://www.patheos.com/blogs/crossexamined/2019/08/a-respon...
Well that at least leaves me in a different position than I started. Thanks.
Any change in belief that will influence their way of life will raise psychological shields. People will very readily change their logic to maintain a belief if that meant preserving other other aspects of their lives that they have put time and effort into.
This book is written for people who already understand the true nature of science and religion. I highly doubt it can convert people, I have yet to find a technique or even a book that has the ability to do so. It's just the way people are...
Whenever you see someone convert from religion to science most of the time the underlying foundations of it had nothing to do with logical realization and more to do with some form of minor or major trauma.
If you experienced a conversion to science from religion and you yourself describe the experience as a "logical realization" I would argue that you probably weren't that invested in the religion in the first place OR that there was some associated trauma that coincided with the "logical realization."
But then...
What is the purpose of the book? Is it just to give scientifically oriented people a playbook of arguments to use against anti-evolutionary bible thumpers when debating school curriculum? I'll accept that.
Hui-Neng's "Your Minds Move"
The wind was flapping a temple flag, and two monks started an argument. One said the flag moved, the other said the wind moved; they argued back and forth but could not reach a conclusion.
The Sixth Patriarch Hui-Neng said, "It is not the wind that moves, it is not the flag that moves; it is your minds that move."
Joshu sees the Hermits
Joshu went to a hermit's cottage and asked, "Is the master in? Is the master in?"
The hermit raised his fist.
Joshu said, "The water is too shallow to anchor here," and he went away.
Coming to another hermit's cottage, he asked again, "Is the master in? Is the master in?"
This hermit, too, raised his fist.
Joshu said, "Free to give, free to take, free to kill, free to save," and he made a deep bow.
No of course not. Its some metaphysical plug about relationships or something. One of those 'one hand clapping' things. I guess the point is to get you to stop overanalyzing. Which I'm doing.
But no, I didn't get my mind blown by monks in semantic circles. I guess I'm not ready to be enlightened.
Uh, no. Lots of them definitely rely on knowing who the monks are, their reputations, and their relationships to one another. And other facts about the world in which they occur ("Three pounds of flax!"). One is not even going to get at the interesting parts of them without that. Lots will come off as gibberish or as confusing in ways that they are not intended to be without that context.
> Sure you can 'explain them' but everybody hears them where their mind is at now.
It's not about explaining them, it's about the coming-to-terms phase of reading from How to Read a Book. Even smart folks would probably have a bad time approaching a graduate-level math text book without a little context so they get where it's even starting from and understand the references and vocabulary that the book was written assuming the reader would already have.
I hope I didn't do any harm here. I was hoping to share some of what I thought was pretty mind bending.
The physical universe is as a reflected image on the surface of a lake, illusory.
However, the "level" at which that is true is above/below/beyond the "level" at which there "really" is wind and flag.
Interesting to see what they'll do in the upcoming movie / series, whichever it was though. It's great in terms of worldbuilding, and it's influenced a lot of other stuff (like Warhammer 50K).
Reading past that is, truly, not worth it. Story's over, stop reading.
It's difficult not to see modern politics in that light afterwards, with its cult around personalities rather than ideas.
And then there is Whipping Star, which is best skimmed through so that you can get to The Dosadi Experiment.
In fairness, Whipping Star is a fabulous take on what it would be like to attempt to communicate with an alien species that does not share our basic assumptions.
Dosadi Experiment is filled with fascinating ideas. Little gems like: “Does a population have informed consent when that population is not taught the inner workings of its monetary system, and then is drawn, all unknowing, into economic adventures?”
One of the tenets of getting your mind bent is reading things that are antithetical to your own world view. For this reason I read and had my mind bent by Supernatural: Meetings with the Ancient Teachers of Mankind - Graham Hancock.
Finally, I offer The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food by Dan Barber. I have read a lot about food, nature, etc. but Barber nails the heart of the problem with our current (really recent past, in light of the pandemic) food culture. From farms and restaurants to the consumers (we are not just eaters) he shows how there could be another way that is more sustainable, as well as being more delicious.
Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre (Keith Johnstone)
The Master and His Emissary (Iain McGilchrist et al.)
Emissary’s guide to worlding (Ian Cheng)
I want to go off-topic and recommend a non-book, Learning to Fly by Missing the Ground[0] (Venkatesh Rao).
And further off the topic, the discussions in The Midnight Gospel were the closest to qualifying as mind-bending experience recently.
[0] https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2014/11/20/learning-to-fly-by-mis...
I'm a huge fan of Adventure Time so I was really excited when I heard about it, but the trailer is just full of gross imagery and I expected it to be just another stupid gross-for-gross-sake cartoon that I'd probably stop watching after a few episodes. So wrong.
second this. I stumbled over it few months ago and keep thinking that I must re-read it soon. love it
It's basically a method that helps you find what exactly get you on, what you get energy from, and how to reach it. Of course it requires a lot of introspection but the book helps you there.
It sounds cheesy I know, but that book had enough impact that it really changed the way I worked, and make sense of why I was so frustrated at times. Couple months after reading the book, the company I work with offered me a tailored job because I was finally able to clearly communicate what it is that was driving me.
It helped me a lot though. And I'm very surprised to see the amount of people around me that don't know why they are doing what they're doing. That often leads to a lot of frustration. :)
Good job!
Many people think of themselves as rational and have mastered the basics (understand the scientific method, know how to systematically solve difficult problems, etc) but are still constantly fooled by their human, imperfect brains into irrational thoughts and actions - both in day-to-day life and when pondering larger questions (science, engineering, policy, philosophy). Many aren't aware (just as I wasn't) that there are many more levels of rational thinking to unlock, that mistakes and biases can be identified and reduced. The book is adapted from a series of blog posts so lacks a bit in coherence (can be hard to get into), but stick with it for a bit, and I guarantee the ideas presented will be well-worth it.
There’s a nice clarity to it and it’s probably the most impactful book I can think of for improving your thinking long term.
For an example of the writing style: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7X2j8HAkWdmMoS8PE/disputing-...
"The Psychology of Everyday Things" by Don Norman, will change your mind about user interfaces.
"Manufacturing Consent" by Noam Chomsky to change the way you see the world.
That book impacted my life more than any other. It really opened my mind to an entire world of dissenting, radical thought that could be both studied, praised or rebuked. A true “The Giver” moment.
I have since moved to San Francisco - once a hot bed for the type of thought I accidentally came across all those years ago. About 6 months ago, while looking through my home library, I once again stumbled upon that book. I was curious, for the first time, who the publisher of this book was. What institution was so radical to give Chomsky a voice even still? And I discovered it was City Lights Publications, the publishing arm of the famous City Lights Bookstore here in San Francisco. Weird how the world works sometimes.
To all reading, if you ever find yourself in San Francisco, you must go to City Lights!
I can't say I've read it cover-to-cover, but it really is an excellent, approachable electronics resource for enthusiasts and professionals alike.
I would summarize core ideas as "To live is to suffer, but you have to carry on no matter what. This is what everybody does." and "an ode to humanity", but it really is so hard to put the experience into words. You have to live it yourself.
Link on VNDB: https://vndb.org/v92 There are also various streamers who streamed the whole story on Twitch after its popularity blew up, e.g. https://www.twitch.tv/videos/390581022
https://www.marketplace.org/2020/02/27/justintime-manufactur...
it’s elucidating but foucault is wildly convoluted in his writing unfortunately.
Not mind bending. No Twists. No roller coasters. Just a calm conversation with the author and yourself.
And yet, it had a profound impact on me.
One poem I revisit every once in a while: https://www.lieder.net/lieder/get_text.html?TextId=119749
If you understand German, I do believe it needs to be read in its original tongue. The translations I found thus far were not entirely convincing.
I would add, in my opinion, start with Steppenwolf and then read Siddhartha. It blows my absolute mind that these books were written a hundred years ago.
They're still so relevant to life. It's really, genuinely astounding.
The more you read history, and the actual written words or written speeches of intellectuals and politicians, you'll continue to be amazed. Much of their language is poetic, and their prose seems more coherent than today's, but that's probably because they wrote a lot more letters to one another.
Why are so many old houses built so well? It's not just because craftsmanship was better. It's because the ones not built so well didn't get old. (I owned a house built in 1884 for a few years. Most of it was excellent craftsmanship. Some ... not so much. Previous owners had been lucky the dining room floor had never been stressed too much.)
IMO Narcissus and Goldmund and Steppenwolf are his best.
Instead it seemed like a was harrowingly long weird sci fi fanfic over some vaguely defined but stupidly complex future society imagined in the lamest and most naive almost pubescent mind. Simple in the sense that everyone from the politician to the ascetic guru seemed like complete one dimensional stereotypes.
Also you don't stop reading because of esoteric complexity you might "get" later when you know more of the western cosmology like in fellow complex works like Ulysses (funfact both books are among the top 10 most abandoned), - you stop because it's boring imagined political history. There really doesn't seem to be a whole lot under the surface, and the schisms between "academic life" or a "life of devotion" versus "a mercantile city life", or "life of politics" was incredibly naive with no mythological, historical or even poetic context mirroring our world.
I guess i must have missed something?
Another book I'd recommend (in a very different category) is Godel, Escher, and Bach, by Douglas Hofstadter.
Maybe I've completely misunderstood the book, but my key take away is that : true enlightenment (and by enlightenment you can say, true knowledge), only comes from life experience.
And that takes quite some human understanding, specially when we've grown to value information and theory, to the point where we build a perceived complete understanding of matters, only to later realize it's an illusion.
Things like talking about the concept of Love, Grief, Hate and any other complex emotions, end up falling short no matter how you read about them, either from a technical point of view, or simply from a character from a short story. You can't truly empathize until you've lived it.
Like it's not your knowledge to own unless you've experienced it, no matter what shape or form, and maybe that deserves some sort of respect.
Maybe that reflects on our lack of appreciation for a lot of things we take for granted.
Is it wrong that he wrote it through the lens of a intellectualized male character that didn't give enough focus on women? I don't know. It's his narrative after all.
Here's a quote from the New Yorker:
"Many young men, in particular, see a glamorous reflection of themselves in the typical Hesse hero—a sensitive, brooding man who cannot find a place for himself in ordinary society. This figure might live in India in the age of the Buddha, like Siddhartha, or in Germany in the Jazz Age, like Harry Haller, or in the Middle Ages, like Goldmund in “Narcissus and Goldmund.” Whatever the setting, his path will generally feature the same landmarks. He will be plucked out of his childhood surroundings and sent to an élite school, where he will suffer deeply. He will rebel against conventional ideas of success and refuse to pursue any kind of career, combining downward mobility with spiritual striving."
Siddhartha, while an enjoyable read, confuses/"borrows" eastern religious concepts to turn it into "follow the beat of your own drum, man!".
This has real world consequences: Hesse justified his taking the "middle ground" between Nazism vs its opponents by his "politics of detachment".. you know, because he is above society, quoting from JewisPress.com:
"Hesse’s failure to publicly condemn the Nazi Party and the fascist regime was due, in large part, to his “politics of detachment” – his policy of viewing the war fever infecting Germany from a distance and his general aloofness to the deadly struggle during the 1930s and 40s as he publicly sought to occupy the “middle ground” between the Nazis and exiled German writers.
Early in the war, Hesse published an essay in which he clearly applied his “middle ground” standard, expressing and anticipating German victory but also insisting that humane values be protected. Even this bland caveat earned him everlasting hostility from the German public."
I am not claiming Hesse was a Nazi, and privately he was more anti-Nazi than anything else. His wife was Jewish.
Hesse's heroes are more Ubermensch that view regular society as cattle, than harmless Hippies.
I also tend to think the US Hippie movement of the 60s as a philosophy of selfishness..(yes, I'm aware of anti-war origins etc.) so perhaps there's more to our disagreement. My politics lean left fwiw.. social democrat.
Why are you even trying?
Prose poems, short 1-2 page descriptions of fictional cities. It’s a good gift to give and I like to pick it up at random, open to a random one, and sit with the imagery it conjures.
If I had a ‘you could bring one thing to a deserted island’ then that would be it.
- The Righteous Mind, Jonathan Haidt. Really deepened my understanding of how Western and other cultures think about moral and ethical issues.
- The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan. It's a feminist book that is very non-ideological, and helped me, as someone born in the 80's, appreciate some very real and practical issues that feminism has helped us address.
Zen and Lila by Pirsig
Beginning of Infinity by Deutsch.
Three quick tips to gain an instant charisma boost:
1. Lower the intonation of your voice at the end of your sentences.
2. Reduce how quickly and how often you nod.
3. Pause for two full seconds before you speak.
From this summary: https://github.com/benigeri/books/blob/master/The%20Charisma...
Those tips are in the introduction of the book so you can see if it works for you and decide if you want to continue reading the rest.
Personally, when I started doing only those 3 things, weird things happened that completely changed the behavior of other people towards me and then how I felt about other people. Worth a try.
Given that humans are wired to be social and we pretty much all live in society, a lot of the things that afflict us have to do with the way we relate to others, which is exactly what the book is about :)
I don’t think I really ever grasped the concept of relativity fully until reading that book — at least the aspects of time. [edit: well, not “fully”, I’m sure — but at least a lot more than I have in the past.]
At the same time I read the Dalai Lama’s, “Universe in a Single Atom”, which focuses on his love of science / physics, and was a very good pair to Rovelli’s book. It made me really think about the role of subjectivity in terms of Relativity. It also made me think about life, and consciousness, broadly.
That led to the Dalai Lama’s other book, “A Profound Mind”, which helped me really understand the Buddhist concept of “Emptiness” for the first time.
Thinking Fast and Slow
The Organized Mind
The Vital Question by Nick Lane.
The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch
From what I've heard his other books are similar.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundation_series
why is this series so much better than Taleb's books?
It is a nice reading and you may very well just read the first trilogy to grasp it.
that is exactly what Antifagile, the book he wrote after does
AlphaZero teaches Stockfish a lesson in the French Defense https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ebzevCLGbQ
Mississauga: Density Without Urbanism https://granolashotgun.com/2014/01/15/77/
Masked 1: Rise to the Rubedo Stage https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OWNPN6PtuUc
From the blurb:
"...includes landmark discoveries spanning 2500 years and representing the work of mathematicians such as Euclid, Georg Cantor, Kurt Godel, Augustin Cauchy, Bernard Riemann and Alan Turing. Each chapter begins with a biography of the featured mathematician, clearly explaining the significance of the result, followed by the full proof of the work, reproduced from the original publication, many in new translations."
My absolute favorite is Descartes Geometrie. Reading the original humanizes him. He is at once humble and yet confident that he'd discovered something important. Today, we take Descartes ideas completely for granted, and even find them trivial, and yet to realize the immense shift in thinking it represented in his time, makes it all the more impressive. I would even argue that Descartes' ideas were more important than any save Euclid in forming the foundation of modern math and physics - he was the one that divorced the notion of "quantity" from "length of a line segment"! It's just so great to read the original.
Interestingly, Riemann got almost all of his papers included in this book, the most pages by far of any author. Clearly Hawking loved Riemann - and no wonder. Riemann was the one who truly generalized geometry, and its interesting that his work in that area was mostly ignored until 50 years after it was published, when Einstein used it for General Relativity. He made enormous contributions to lots of other fields, too.
Oh, and it was really cool reading Boole's words, and recognizing that he was explicitly talking in terms of creating a calculus of thought!
So, yeah, I love this book because we often talk about "the shoulders of giants" but we rarely actually read them directly. And it's amazing, inspiring, and wonderful to relate to them!
Completely changed my world view. As someone who loves science, this book shows that Buddhism is not about belief but a way to look at the world. And that view might be closer to reality than the current one.
https://www.amazon.com/Heart-Buddhas-Teaching-Transforming-L...
Both dramatically formed by world view.
"Philosophy and the Matrix". Part of a pop culture series that takes popular art and has different philosopher break down it into different philosophies. A good way to realize that the same work of art can mean vastly different things depending on the frame of reference.
"Tribe" by Sebastian Junger. The seemingly disconnect that people felt happier when they were experiencing a traumatic event, like war, mainly because they were relying on each other and counted on each other.
"The Social Leap" by William von Hippel. How we went from just another mid-sized ape on the plains of Africa to the most successful large mammal on the planet earth in a few million years. His theory is focused on the social adaptations of early hominids and how that affects us to this day.
The general population is rarely important in this process, and of course (if you are among those accreting power) you want keep them in the dark. The illusion of participation is very important to the institutionalization of power for yourself in any kind of system, especially ones that think they are democracies.
As might be expected, to the degree they are good at it, the less the governing class needs to concern themselves with good governance or policy. And again, in the "real" Gov 101 its rule #1 that the populace doesn't understand that.
Mind bending? I think so, but I appreciate even more as a mental/citizen level up.
These are the principles they should teach kids in government class in elementary school. History without understanding this is just a database of facts.
The free sample is enough to get the core message: the Konmari method can also apply to obligations, not just objects. It's not a fascinating book, just an interesting concept. Most of the book covers the exceptions and caveats of its own technique, a rare approach in this genre. Its premise is similar to Mark Manson's "The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck", but without the aggressive self-help bro tone.
"No More Mr. Nice Guy"
This book is for nice guys who never get what they want. The answer isn't "be a selfish asshole for once", but "if you want something, ask for it" and "don't expect unsolicited generosity to be rewarded in specific ways". This book is a healthy fix to an unhealthy behaviour.
"Influence: Science and Practice"
The gang of four made a book about programming design patterns. Cialdini made a book about influence design patterns. It's easy to read, and full of examples.
Cialdini, Robert (2006) Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion
Guinn, Jeff (2017) Road to Jonestown: Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple
Ekman, Paul (2007) Emotions Revealed: Recognizing Faces and Feelings to Improve Communication and Emotional Life
Kahneman, Daniel (2011) Thinking, Fast and Slow
Mitnick, Kevin and William Simon (2002) Art of Deception
Navarro and Karlins (2008) What Every Body is Saying: Ex-FBI Agent's Guide to Speed-Reading People
Nietzsche, Friedrich (1887) On the Genealogy of Morals
Rhodes, Richard (1986) Making of the Atomic Bomb
Sun Tzu (c. 400 BCE) Art of War
Taleb, Nassim Nicholas (2005) Fooled by Randomness
Wright, Lawrence (2013) Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood and the Prison of Belief
The origins and history of consciousness - mircea eliade
Cosmic symbolism in genesis - mattheiu pageau
If you want to get deep into opinions on making art, symbolism is a great rabbit hole.
https://archive.org/stream/TheGardenOfForkingPathsJorgeLuisB...
An economic history of the species, more academic than "Guns, Germs, and Steel", without the flashy zebra bites. Not as meta as "Sapiens".
Radicalizing, even if one believes one already knows.
However, there are some "popular" examples. Jane Austen, Sylvia Plath, Kate Chopin (literature), Rachel Carson, Ayn Rand, Annie Dillard, Joan Didion (nonfiction). They aren't as fashionable today as they were in earlier generations, but that's fashion.
For me, Svetlana Alexievich (born 1948, in modern Ukraine) has been a revelation. I haven't read all of her works yet, but they're on my lists. I can give a strong firsthand recommendation for The Unwomanly Face of War (which recently got a P&V translation: https://www.amazon.com/Unwomanly-Face-War-History-Women/dp/0...).
Her work incidentally illuminates how we systematically lack certain accounts of history. The implication is that we miss pretty much everything "important", when we read history through the traditional lenses of the armed conflict and politics. The literary motif of giving voice to the politically voiceless is an everpresent theme in Russian literature (going back through Turgenev's treatment of serfs), and in the late 20th century it was brought to nonfiction, through Solzhenitsyn and Alexievich.
Statistically-speaking, most people do not spend their lives in the politburo, or in the general staff of the army, but those statistically-significant people do not usually write the history we read. It seems obvious in retrospect, but it's a revelation, and it tends to change one's perspective on the relative costs and utilities of war. As a culture, we're obsessed with the "individual", and we're typically obsessed with the "wrong" the individuals (i.e. the ones whose lives are exceedingly uncommon).
I think her work should be required reading for those seeking to become public servants, whose personal lives are often significantly detached from the consequences of the decisions they make in their professional lives. I don't know if I would call it life-changing, but it's up there.
It's similar in that it offers a somewhat unconventional lens to history, this time applied to the Cold War. As Americans, we often think of the East-West German divide in terms of Soviet and American interests, politicians, and international intrigue.
Yet, for "normal" Germans living in otherwise "normal" towns, the arbitrary partitioning of their country along hastily-drawn lines was an event that had to be integrated into their daily lives. We often think of history in top-down ways (i.e. FDR and Stalin decided that X would happen, and so it did). This book really subverts that narrative, and instead presents a brilliantly-researched and significantly chaotic reality. You come away thinking that the iron curtain was not an inevitable thing, but rather the result of frequent misunderstandings and breakdowns in effective communication, and the inability of distanced leaders to assume good intent.
For me, it changed my default perspective on how borders and bureaucratic systems work, and what role law and top-down decision making (good, bad, influential and negligible) has in everyday life, especially in moments of big change.
It's tangentially relevant to the coronavirus, where big bureaucracies are trying to flex into everyday life. It gives you some intuition of where we should expect these efforts to succeed, and where we can expect it to fail.
Gotta put both these on my list.
Religion is socially constructed, but its differences still matter to people. Someone could legitimately ask why there were no Catholic US presidents prior to JFK.
That 'identical demographics' part is perhaps a tautology? They're mostly male, because they're mostly male?
Of course we understand there are 1000 reasons for the disparity, discussed elsewhere.
Male tech startup people -> Male HN users -> Male-dominated interest areas -> Male author recommendations
A common thread with these books seems to be exploring consciousness and definitions of self.
As a bonus it does stuff I find more from women authors, like quietly question gender roles without making a scene about it, question slavery, ownership, etc.
Similar a bit to the Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells but on a whole other level.
Its a wonderful trilogy of three books. Strongly recommend it.
I can also recommend N.K. Jemisin, not really mind bending, but very odd
Generally I dislike it when authors patronise me, banging my head against their genius, and I find women authors tend to do that less (Disclaimer to sensitive people : this is my personal opinion)
Ursula K. Le Guin also appears down below; The Left Hand of Darkness was a profound read.
Not mind bending for someone who spent some time trying to imagine a anarchist society (but still quite enriching), but maybe for others.
- "Immersion" by Abbie Gascho Landis
- "Welcome to the Goddamn Ice Cube" by Blair Braverman
- "Sleeping Naked is Green" by Vanessa Farquharson
- "There's No Such Thing as Bad Weather" by Linda Akeson McGurk
https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1993/morrison/l...
Wilding - Isabella Tree. Changed how I think about what nature needs, away from the simplistic “more forests! Less agriculture!” viewpoint.
The Female Man - Joanna Russ. Forget all the ‘makeup is empowering!’ Twitter feminism. Russ has a different idea. “For years I have been saying Let me in, Love me, Approve me, Define me, Regulate me, Validate me, Support me. Now I say Move over. If we are all Mankind, it follows to my interested and righteous and right now very bright and beady little eyes, that I too am a Man and not at all a Woman... I think I am a Man; I think you had better call me a Man; I think you will write about me as a Man from now on and speak of me as a Man and employ me as a Man and recognize child-rearing as a Man's business; you will think of me as a Man and treat me as a Man”
Stone Butch Blues - Leslie Feinberg (if we count Feinberg as, at least, a female-at-birth author). A complex exploration of what gender and transgenderism and sexuality mean to people depending on their class, subculture, etc. What should we call Jess? Trans, a man, a lesbian, non-binary, something else?
I also want to say Flannery O’Connor’s short stories, but I can’t easily explain why.
There's an interview with the author on NPR https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2018/09/04/6444982...
We are looking for ideas to bend our mind. I'm happy to keep the authors gender, race, religion, or nationality out of that. The same applies for HN comments.
Going through all 278 comments to find a female name is more notable to me.
In this world he’s woken up to, Jason’s life is not the one he knows. His wife is not his wife. His son was never born. And Jason is not an ordinary college physics professor, but a celebrated genius who has achieved something remarkable. Something impossible.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1101904224/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_HY...
Another good one from the same author - Recursion: A Novel https://www.amazon.com/dp/1524759783/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_G0...
In keeping with the preposterous title, it uses sci-fi tropes to illuminate the ways in which the modern scientific community is heading in a preposterous direction.
It is sort of like the Princess Bride of sci-fi.
Permutation City is also great, as mentioned by others.
Framework for a happy life in any context.
For that matter I'd like to add another author - Michel de Montaigne and his Essays. It offers a very humane look inside his thoughts about the world and makes you think about your own life and how you look at it, too.
Phantoms in the Brain by V S Ramachandran - a book about how the brain organises itself in bizarre edge cases. The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist's Quest for What Makes us Human. The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist's Quest for What Makes us Human by the same author is also worth reading.
Admissions by Henry Marsh - An experienced neurosurgeon's account of how his job has changed over the decades. Really interesting discussion of what's important and how people react in a real crisis.
The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat by Oliver Sacks. More of a collection of interesting curiousities but does an amazing job of humanising the discussion of brain.
https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL848F2368C90DDC3D
And of course cites Sack, and a lot of amazing research/studies/results.
The caveat is that some results are not that solid, and he mentions priming, which we know does not replicate.
Here's a thing TIL from the wikipedia entry:
> At one point, Dick claimed to be in a state of enthousiasmos with VALIS, where he was informed his infant son was in danger of perishing from an unnamed malady. Routine checkups on the child had shown no trouble or illness; however, Dick insisted that thorough tests be run to ensure his son's health. The doctor eventually complied, despite the fact that there were no apparent symptoms. During the examination doctors discovered an inguinal hernia, which would have killed the child if an operation was not quickly performed. His son survived thanks to the operation, which Dick attributed to the "intervention" of VALIS.
I would also say that Dispossessed is more about love, Left Hand is about friendship.
I'll be the first to tell you I started watching their "crash course" expecting it to be BS but it is very compelling and explored ideas that I knew about intellectually but had never thought all the way through. I HIGHLY recommend people check this out and if you think they are wrong or going to far please feel free to respond or email me (email in profile), I am 100% willing to be proven wrong. Anyways I've shared this with a couple of close friends and we have all agreed that we can't continue living the way we were before having watched/read it (crash course/book).
[0] https://www.peakprosperity.com/freebook
[1] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLRgTUN1zz_oeQpnJxpeaE...
[2] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLRgTUN1zz_ofJoMx1rB6Z...
I got that feeling from reading Montaigne's Essays.
Anatomy of Melancholy by Burton and Samuel Johnson's essays also are effective in a similar vein.
Plutarch's Parallel Live's is the essential book on politics, after reading it, when you read the newspapers you get a feeling that there is nothing new under the Sun, in politics.
It was the first history/sociology book I read that I really enjoyed. I came away with a clarity that there is an essential character to American politics and discourse that has been constant throughout its history.
Decades later it is still one of the most clearly written books I've read. It reminds me of reading an elegant proof.
Or anything Vonnegut or Philip K Dick
A personal "brain expanding" book for me was The Miracle Planet but timing is everything, as an 8 year old who had only been reading children's books it taught me that you can read through anything with persistence
The Bible has a lot of mind games & plot twists. I read it as an atheist seeking better perspective on a couple thousand years ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_People_Believe_Weird_Thing...
I must admit that I do have a weird curiosity about reading one of her books.....
They're good books for trying to find out _why_ you agree or disagree.
This also amuses me as Trump is pretty far from the Greenspan/Rand economic perspective too.
Science Fiction:
Ursula le Guin - The Found and the Lost - this one will be higher impact if you're North American, but it works anywhere. Pretty much any of her books are mind bending and perspective opening. Not that they'd help become a better computer developer say - but you'd probably be a wiser person for the exposure.
C.J.Cherryh - Cyteen - on individual, on programming personality and more.
C.J.Cherryh - Voyager in Night. (on a perspective on alien thinking)
(author has a lot of excellent books as writes for an intelligent and well educated audience. I will note neither are easy reads and the second might be harder to get through)
Nonfiction:
T.E.Lawrence - 7 pillars of wisdom. (watching "Lawrence of Arabia" doesn't hurt either, they sync reasonably well). He was a deeply cynical atheist in a whole series of very violent episodes that shape life in the modern world more than you'd think. This one more for a perspective on history than changing one's own view of the world.
(edited for presentation only)
What it helped me see is that we aren't necessarily born with world class abilities but that we can achieve them by working hard. I know there have been criticisms about the methods Gladwell outlines towards achieving mastery but the basic message about working hard towards mastery is valid.
It completely changed my view on why people become Masters in their field.
1. The Vital Question - An explanation of the genesis of complex life through bioenergetics. Explains why complex life is likely very rare in the universe.
2. Power, Sex, Suicide - Why mitochondria are awesome, and also responsible for the emergence of sex, cancer, and mortality.
I'll second the suggestion for "The City & The City", another real mind-bender.
The Three-Body Problem & The Dark Forest.
Sapiens, by Yuval Noah Harari
Children of Time, by Adrian Tchaikovsky
The Road, by Cormac McCarthy (Blood Meridian is better, stylistically, but changed me less as a person)
The Alchemist and The Fifth Mountain, by Paulo Coelho
The Little Prince, by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Tribe, by Sebastian Junger
The best teachers (that could be books) will find you when you're ready. Other people's milestones are theirs, not yours. The best way to use this list is to pick a book by gut feeling. That said, I'll leave my candidate: "The Presence Process" by Michael Brown.
> Written pseudonymously by "A Square", the book used the fictional two-dimensional world of Flatland to comment on the hierarchy of Victorian culture, but the novella's more enduring contribution is its examination of dimensions.
Outsold only by the bible in 1880s/1890s [1]
Especially if you live in SV, as it's the perfect demonstration of rich landlords and deep poverty, as "society" gets richer.
My contribution: If you're not familiar with Quantum Physics, do check out 'Through Two doors at once'. There were numerous instances while reading the book that I had to just put it down and think deeply - mostly philosophical thoughts around what we are and how magical nature is. The subject matter is very very approachable - even to someone like me who hasn't read a physics book in like a decade.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/38527619-through-two-doo...
How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan (https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/529343/how-to-chang...)
Fellowship of the River by Joe Tafur, MD (https://www.drjoetafur.com/the-fellowship-of-the-river)
A life changing book!!! about sailing, freedom and Life.
https://www.amazon.com/Tamata-Alliance-Bernard-Moitessier/dp...
It gives you an alternative perspective on art, school, charity, politics (including office politics), religion, and, well, yourself. This book will likely make you revise at least some of your beliefs.
You say "anything that transforms me into a smarter, wiser person" so I'll add Eliezer Yudkowsky's fanfic _Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality_ (http://www.hpmor.com/) The whole HP universe is re-imagined, except Harry is smart, a scientist, and empowered with rationality. It is both entertaining and an introduction to the art of rationality.
If people are interestead in reading it, I would highly recommend the audio book/podcast, it's extremely well produced and features an insane amount of good voice acting [1]. Though I would definitely recommend _not_ listening to it in podcast player, and instead use one of the stitched together mp3s.
Stranger In A Strange Land
Solaris
The Fall
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Seveneves (a bit silly but definitely fun and will set you to thinking)
My recommendations are Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Ubik, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, and A Scanner Darkly. And then reading a bit about Dick's life -- in particular, his experience with the "pink light", and his belief in the real life instantiation of VALIS. After that, the book Valis will make a lot more sense, but also be even more mind bending.
Dick likely suffered from some sort of undiagnosed mental illness. But having the discussion end there sort of discounts the core themes of his books -- mainly, the recognition of the paper-thin nature of reality, and the impossible task of ever knowing with a certainty the true state of things.
Thinking about it, yeah, Valis is probably best saved for much later. That’s the same order I read Dick, and knowing a bit of his background and having seen his recurring tropes in fictional form, it added a whole new dimension to see them crop up in... pseudo-autobiographical form? I’m not even sure what to call it!
For sure! Trying to describe what Valis actually is, is about as difficult as pinning down what reality in a PKD novel is.
The fact that PKD's real life experience basically turned into one of his own novels is something I find endlessly fascinating. And also kind of sad, since whatever mental health issues he was dealing with seemed to cause him quite a bit of pain. I have a copy of "The Exegesis of Philip K Dick", and while it's too tedious to just read cover to cover, I'll often just pop it open and read a few pages here and there. Really interesting stuff.
This book has more profundity than anything I've ever read. The type of sentences which cause you to stop and think, woah, what did I just read. The type of sentences where it is obvious the author has understood something you don't, but not obvious exactly what. The type of sentence that is short and simple in what it says, but with great depth in its meaning.
I'm about done with this book and I already want to re-read it. I've decided I'll read it once every few years. To remind myself of the important parts of living. The parts that are easy to figure about going about living day to day.
Something upbeat I came across recently was Naval Ravikant's ideas on philosophy happiness and how to get rich. Not a book but you can see him on Rogan 1309 and google the get rich tweets / podcasts.
"Aczel's compact and fascinating work of mathematical popularization uses the life and work of the German mathematician Georg Cantor (1845-1918) to describe the history of infinity--of human thought about boundlessly large numbers, sequences and sets." (https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-1-56858-105-7)
This popularization makes an effort to explain truly mind bending ideas of infinity.
Ingram is one of the most advanced meditation practitioners in the west, and this book is a painstaking mapping of the development of attention. I’ve read nothing like it.
I also really love the breadth in his analysis of awakening models. I would love to see this paradigm more often: here are the models of thought in this subject, and the pros and cons of each.
... and the "Fira Kasina" chapter was an absolute trip.
Here is a decent overview of the book that goes into more detail: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/09/18/book-review-mastering-...
It's one of those books that's full of anecdotes and padding out though, so if you want a summary the author's also made blog posts and a TED talk that summarize the subject well enough.
If you just need a book to boost your courage read “The alchemist” from Paulo Coelho.
Anything by John Twelve Hawks, but especially The Traveler: his works got me thinking about the role technology plays in the world and especially the balance among surveillance and privacy.
Pure by Linda Kay Klein: perhaps only interesting if you were raised in the Church's purity culture, but this also talks about the role religion plays in society as a whole.
14 Lessons in Yogi Philosophy: really opened my mind to Eastern ideas about living a spiritual life.
They permanently changed how I think about cognition, consciousness and how fragile and small a thing conscious life is and that we have to protect it.
Other notable authors, titles, and subjects, some that others have already mentioned: Aldous Huxley, Hermann Hesse, Rainer Maria Rilke, Khalil Gibran, sufism, The Philokalia, etc.
I would add "The City And The City" by China Miéville. A delightful read and it changed the way I look at the world a little bit.
The Demon Haunted World (Carl Sagan) — although I was already a skeptical thinker, this book opened me up to how critical thinking can enhance your spiritual side as well as your intellectual side.
Godel, Escher, Bach (Douglas Hofstadter) — this book added color to a lot my intuitions about the deeper connections of patterns we see throughout reality.
Truth & Power (Michel Foucault) — I'm not a fan of most so-called continental philosophy, but Foucault's ideas about cultural structures has always stuck with me.
The Allegory of the Cave (Plato; section in The Republic) — classic; some might say the basic idea underpinning all philosophical and scientific inquiry.
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (Ludwig Wittgenstein) — I'll admit I never quite understood this book from reading it, but it definitely changed how I thought about philosophy, consciousness and spirituality.
Charles Sanders Peirce essays — it's been a long time, so I don't remember the specific texts, but he did fascinating work in semiotics. One essay in particular was critical in how I think about communication and consciousness.
Fact, Fiction, Forecast (Nelson Goodman) — Goodman is brilliant and is great at relaying philosophical problems as puzzles. He's a great writer and turns the problem of induction on its head in this one.
Foucault's Pendulum (Umberto Eco) — I don't read a lot of fiction, but this book is amazing. There's a lot of history, so you may need to keep an encyclopedia nearby, but this one will really get you thinking about how the autonomy of memes. Probably quite relevant at the moment.
Any number of books and essays by great analytic philosophers: Saul Kripke, W.V.O. Quine, Bertrand Russell, Karl Popper, Carl Hempel, John Campbell, David Chalmers, Thomas Nagel, Hilary Putnam, Jerry Fodor, Dan Dennett, David Lewis, etc.
- All You Zombies is a short story that makes use of one of the most ingenious and mind-bending time travel conundrums to reflect on the nature of personal identity.
- The Door Into Summer is about the effects of suspended animation on personal relationships.
- Anything written by Philip K. Dick.
https://www.notion.so/moderndesert/List-from-Hacker-new-chan...
Both these books drastically changed my perception of technology. The role we think it has and the effects and consequences it does have.
The main take away is that a technology contains an implicit bias that is absorbed by the user. More plainly put "to someone with a hammer, everything is a nail" applies to all technology.
The first half of the manifesto is a fairly piercing critique of industrial society. Most of the ideas are not really original. Interesting questions are raised, the call to violence is nonsense.
McLuhan's Understanding Media posits something similar about forms of communication.
Actually, any well researched history book. View on the world gets changed drastically, and usually for better.
The rest is a really wild ride through history. Fascinating read.
This is a seriously mind bending book. You will never again see the world the same way. Not an easy book to read though. You will need to follow the references (and they are many), as otherwise you will refuse to believe what you are reading. Also, it is not a "pleasant" book to read. The author is not a great writer, only a great scholar.
A guide to the good life, the ancient art of stoic joy
Framed as a conversation between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan, the book is a series of vignettes describing fantastical cities Polo has visited in his travels.
https://www.fullmoon.nu/Resurrection/PrimarySpecies.html
It’s a play made for radio about a scientist who brings his father back to life (digitally) as the first test of “resurrection” technology.
The book goes through the second person point of view of a young boy born into a village outside of a major Asian city. Each chapter is a time jump to a different point of their life. I believe I heard of this from an interview with Marc Andreessen.
Maybe not mindbending, but a must read for us engineers prone to burning the midnight oil.
https://sleepdiplomat.wordpress.com/2019/12/19/why-we-sleep-...
I’m a heavy duty skeptic but these books pushed me over the edge away from scientific materialism towards a broader view of reality where consciousness survives death.
Excellent Well executed research.
Entertaining style, and amazing at conveying very complex ideas. I had understood recursion for years prior, but this really showed me what it was to truly "think" in recursion, and to understand the Y Combinator and its significance.
life changing, I reread it every now and then
The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie How to Stop Worrying and Start Living by Dale Carnegie 10% happier by Dan Harris Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl
Will forever change how you look at humanity, society, and technology. Lot's of eye openers and in general it causes you to shift your frame of reference entirely.
The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity
Parkinson's Law, and Other Studies in Administration + The Peter Principle
Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
The Wisdom of Insecurity by Alan Watts
The Passion of the Western Mind by Richard Tarnas
The Nature of Consciousness: Essays on the Unity of Mind and Matter by Rupert Spira
Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology by David Abram
Read the reviews on Amazon to see what it’s all about
I read it a few years ago and I’ve read quite a few books that changed how I view the world but none as much as this book
"DMT: The Spirit Molecule", by Dr. Rick Strassman
"The Cosmic Serpent: DNA and the Origins of Knowledge", by Jeremy Narby
"The Law", by Frederic Bastiat
I'm kind of shocked that it wasn't cited already.
I know public sentiment for Napoleon Hill is not positive overall, but I definitely recommend this one.
Douglas Hofstadter's Godel, Escher, Bach for its captivating presentation of some very complicated ideas (at least to the 17 year old kid who read this for the first time). This book was published around the time that I was growing from hobby programming to writing software as a career, and it exposed me to non-trivial proofs, LISP, and recursion in general.
Vernor Vinge's The Peace War. It's a bit stupid, but . . . I want to make the tech in this book become reality :-) Bobbles are sheer fantasy, of course, but the Tinker tech stack would be a lot of fun.
...The Necronomicon!
Sam is a neuroscientist and meditation devotee who offers a cunning and life-altering exposé on the mysteries around consciousness and the investigations and learnings therein. One mind-bender from the book: some people have undergone a procedure to separate the left and right sides of the brain as treatment for rare disease. Following this procedure, the left and right sides can independently answer questions (sometimes simultaneously) posed by researchers, frequently offering conflicting answers. Interestingly, the right brain alone cannot speak but can answer questions by drawing or choosing letters/cards. Thus, it would appear that following the procedure, each side of the brain is conscious, yet unaware of the consciousness inside the other side.
to simply be smarter (but maybe not wiser), the art of learning by josh waitzkin. if you are interested in optimizing anything, why not learn how to optimize optimization?
It's also a great aggregator book. It introduced me to the works of Kahneman, Tetlock, Poincare and Mandelbrot.
I'd argue that defining "impact" is also problematic because we conflate things that are surprising with things that are impactful all the time. We don't count all the trains and planes that run on time as "impactful" exactly because they're not surprising, but they do have a large impact on the progression of the future. So part of Taleb's argument just seems like a semantic debate over what counts as "impactful".
Mediocristan and Extremistan are Talebs analogies for domains with different underlying mechanics (for lack of a better word).
I'm going cut some corners here, but to keep it short, the phenomena in Mediocristan can be modeled by using gaussian probability distributions (weight, height etc.), while the phenomena in Extremistan are better modeled using power law distributions, that have so called fat-tails. (wealth, land ownership)
One of the central arguments of the book is that people have been using tools from Mediocristan in Extremistan and that's what leads to these Black Swan phenomen, which in turn might have potentially ruinous effects.
One example he uses is a now defunct hedge fund called Long Term Capital Management (LTCM) [1]. My (poor) understanding of what led to LCTMs ruin (and required the Federal Reserve to intervene) is that they used some fundamentally Gaussian techniques to model derivatives.
The models predicted certain events to have a lot lower probability to occur than what was actually the case (fat-tails). Underestimating these outliers combined with the fact that the firm was highly leveraged, was ultimately what went wrong and had potentially disastrous effects on the financial markets.
[0]: https://people.wou.edu/~shawd/mediocristan--extremistan.html
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-Term_Capital_Management
Anyhow, a "Black swan event" is NOT an "event with small probability but massive impact", that's a common misconception.
A BSE is an event that, before it occurs no one credits it ("There are no black swans." because no one (in Europe) had ever seen one until they went to Australia (IIRC)), and after it occurs everyone post-rationalizes it.
There are lost of events "with small probability but massive impact": people win the lottery every day.
It's the ones we ignore, both before and after, that count as Black Swan Events.
[0]: By original I mean there aren't other books like his. If anyone else tried to write like Taleb it would be absurd, but he makes it work.
It's a guide to meditation, without the religious parts.
"The Opposable Mind", by Roger Martin
"Antifragile" by Nassim Taleb
"The Conscious Universe" by Dean Radin
Can never really look at the stars or think of space the same again.
- The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F * ck
- Everything Is F * cked
They have absolutely changed my life. I can't recommend them enough.
1) Jacques Ellul "The Technological Society (La Technique)": https://archive.org/details/JacquesEllulTheTechnologicalSoci...
2) Jacques Ellul "Propaganda" https://archive.org/details/Propaganda_201512
3) Robert Cialdini "Influence" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Cialdini#Theory_of_infl... <- could probably be described as a modern / dark adversarial take in "how to make friends and influence people" and should be read with Kahneman & Tversky's books/papers.
4) James C. Scott "The Art of Not being Governed" https://libcom.org/files/Art.pdf
5) Dickens "Hard Times" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_Times_(novel) <- for it's description of the effects on peasant communities during industrialization, which is also a theme in "La Technique" above
6) George Orwell "Down and Out in London and Paris" https://archive.org/details/DownAndOutInParisAndLondonGeorge...
7) M. Scott Peck "The Road Less Traveled" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M._Scott_Peck#The_Road_Less_Tr...
8) Introducing Psychology of Relationships - A Practical Guide by John Karter https://www.amazon.com/Introducing-Psychology-Relationships-...
9) Lion Feuchtwanger "Goya" https://www.amazon.com/Goya-Lion-Feuchtwanger/dp/8476408838
10) Thomas Ligotti "The Conspiracy against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror" https://www.amazon.com/Conspiracy-against-Human-Race-Contriv...
11) Plato "The Republic": https://archive.org/details/PlatoRepublic/mode/2up
12) Lewis Mumford "The Story of Utopias": https://archive.org/details/storyutopias00mumfgoog/page/n9/m...
13) the major works of: Kant, Schopenhauer, Hegel, Nietzsche, Marx, Foucault, Chomsky, Zizek
Short:
- Peter Wessel Zapffe "The Last Messiah": https://philosophynow.org/issues/45/The_Last_Messiah
- Lion Feuchtwanger "Power": https://archive.org/details/powerbookbylionf00zieliala/page/...
- Samuel Becket "Waiting for Godot": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waiting_for_Godot
- Fyodor Dostoevsky "The Dream of a Ridiculous Man": https://www.amazon.com/Dream-Ridiculous-Man-Fyodor-Dostoyevs...
Dune (all 6)
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert M. Pirsig
Manufacturing Consent
The Demon-Haunted World, Carl Sagan
If This Is a Man, Primo Levi
Light, M. John Harrison
I highly recommend reading at least the first four books.
;)
Did I get everything out of it that Hofstadter intended to put in? Almost certainly not, but I still got quite a bit of out it, IMO. And I can always go back and re-read it.
But in hindsight, its value to me was not in the content of the book, as much as in communicating the kind of delight and curiosity around programming that has kept me interested in the subject since 1972 or so.
Other books have done the same thing for me, most notably everything by Martin Gardner, Raymond Smullyan's books about logic puzzles that sneak an education past you, and William Poundstone's books about Game Theory and Computability.
In a way, I'm delighted that this book is not sitting as the number one thread so far. Not because it's terrible, but because new generations ahve written great books, and they deserve mention too.
To me, the most interesting thing about programming is what it teaches us about our own minds. It's a little like being an archeologist and finding collections of pottery, houses, &c. but no people. You make deductions about how they lived from their tools.
In our case, we have only a limited ability to directly examine the workings of our brains, but a wealth of ways to study the things we do with our brains, including the making of tools for our brains to use.
Programming is one of those tools, and its study is indirectly the study of us.
At the end of the day, it's all just 1s and 0s, but when we argue about whether the Visitor Pattern addresses the Expression problem, and so forth, we're indirectly exploring the (metaphorical) shape of our brains.
I have just said in several paragraphs what Michael Fellows said in one sentence: "Computer science is not about machines, in the same way that astronomy is not about telescopes."
They may have been thinking about mathematics, but I am thinking about people.
Another amazing book of his that I don't see mentioned a lot (perhaps because it is more technical that maybe any of his other books) is 'Fluid Concepts And Creative Analogies'.
I'm reading that one now. I recommend it, along with Perception as Analogy by Melanie Mitchell, and the aforementioned Godel, Escher, Bach to anyone interested in AI / cognitive science. I've only read a small part of Metamagical Themas to date, but I've read enough to recommend that as well. Just the stuff on self-referential sentences makes it worth reading.
Jocko Willink's "Extreme Ownership"
Collective activity, ie the bedrock of humans human-omg, has not looked the same since
Non-fiction: The Brain That Changes Itself
Fiction: The Way of The Peaceful Warrior
A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge: explore the far future in a space opera dreamed up by a computer science professor turned sci-fi author. This book literally inspired the first IoT sensor "motes" created, and we haven't come close to achieving the vision he explores just as texture in this rich book with fascinating characters. Not my favorite wordsmith, but one of my favorite idea-smiths.
Godel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter: create a new mathematics from the axioms up, while strolling along with a wise tortoise and a hare who share fascinating ideas and connections from art and music to number theory, incompleteness, and consciousness.
Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand. Love her or hate her, she makes you think.
The Hard Thing About Hard Things - This is a great book about building businesses, and business in general.
Capital in the 21st Century - One of the greatest books about economics and capital written ever - let alone in the last decade.
The Intelligent Investor - This is Buffet's favourite book, and regardless of how many times I read it, I still learn more. One can never digest it in full.
Predictably Irrational - This excellent tome makes behavioural economics digestible outside of economics. It's enlightening, though provoking, and turns several accepted truths on its head, purely by being written at all.
Nexus (Ramez Naam) - This science fiction book explores transhumanism and would it could mean in the near future. It's both light and pulpy, but at the same time makes you think about the outcomes of technological progression.
Systemantics
A farewell to entropy
The nature of technology - what it is and how it evolves
On being wrong
- Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari
Basically a unified theory of consciousness. 100% must read.
* (Theory) The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes
A bit long winded but it really changes the way you think about the voice in your head, about consciousness in general. Pairs well with Surfing Uncertainty
* (Self Help) Nonviolent Communication by Marshall Rosenberg Really wakes you up to the domination language that rules our interactions and provides an alternative framework. Its even great if you don't plan on implementing NVC, just to understand what non nonviolent langue is. Pairs well with Julian Jaynes The Origin of Consciousness for understanding how language formed our minds and our societies.
* (Theory) The Force of Nonviolence Judith Butler Wakes you up to the highly dominant and persistent narrative of violence. Provides frameworks for something else. If this doesnt blow your mind im not sure what will.
* (Theory)Staying with the Trouble by Donna J. Haraway The name says it all. Ways to stop trying to wipe the slate clean, to start from scratch, but instead to "stay with the trouble" and make new things WITH. Wakes your mind up to disrupting in whole new ways.
* (Theory) The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism by Naomi Klein Another book that helps you see the world through different eyes, or even if I dare, to see the world more clearly. Pairs nicely with the unnecessarily long winded "Fall" by Neal Stephenson for understand a post truth world, specifically the idea of "Edit Streams"
* (Scifi )The Reality Dysfunction by Peter F. Hamilton This one game me a framework for science and spirituality to coincide
* (Scifi ) Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie Questions everything, blows your mind on multiple levels.
* (Self Help) She Comes First by Ian Kerner Wakes you up to the massive comfort imbalance in sex between genders and provides simple ways to help fix it (for heterosexual)
And coming to think of it, there are couple of books that changed my life similarly (reading them for interview); though by themselves they may not merit to be in my permanent collection.
The first book really tears apart several of the "foundations" of economics. For instance, the creation of money as portrayed by Adam Smith? It's a myth, and no single place like he described ever existed.
Bullshit jobs is about the myriad bullshit managerial jobs we have and how we really shouldn't have them. It's capitalism, it's supposed to be efficient and yet, when he published a piece about bullshit jobs in an obscure anarchist magazine in 2013, it made so much impact The Economist wrote a response!
Science can be repressive. Dawkins is a classic example of the iron fist in a velvet glove, imho. He justifies monstrosity with a technical crutch, and whether it is 'true' or not, at the end of this book I just felt like dirt.
/just_like_my_opinion_man
It's not about genes for selfishness.
What makes it true?
The more the human mind finds answers, the more questions it reveals - such is the nature of an infinite universe and our struggle to perceive it. If "God" doesn't exist we humans sure do spend a lot of time attempting to become one. "God" may not be a "he" sitting "on a cloud", but may indeed just be the New Question beyond every Old Answer. This fact seems to be rabidly overlooked by the Dawkins cult, which prefers to define God in its own, limited terms, in order to find fault in their chosen pariah cultures.
The jury is still out. On a scale of 1 to 7, 0.1 is just enough uncertainty to allow for yet more unanswered questions .. Dawkins, himself, has at least a little of the humility required to admit that.
Excuse my frankness. That's not a fact. That's unfalsifiable woo-woo.
Without the woo and whimsy and make-believe, what have we got left in our cultures? If we kill religion we may as well kill theatre and literature and all the other things which require this unmeasurable substance in order to be viable ..
Let me use a specific example. I often say that capitalism is terrible for workers. Yet I work for a capitalist company that is--in my opinion--quite good to its workers.
Being a "realist" has told me that when looking for a job, I should be careful to avoid toxic cultures, exploitative management, and being underpaid relative to whatever I consider the fair market value of my labour.
But being a realist has also told me that toxicity, exploitation, and stinginess are unevenly distributed, and therefore it is a wise thing to shop around and negotiate for what I want.
I would NEVER say, "Toxicity is just how all businesses work. Demeaning and bullying people is just how company cultures are. Exploiting workers is what businesses do. If you can manipulate someone into working such long hours their health suffers, good for you. And negotiating is impossible, all companies push their workers around."
Being a realist means acknowledging what is in the universe, but it also means acknowledging that the universe contains variety and that almost everything is unevenly distributed.
Science is observational. It doesn't give us rules we must follow, it describes the behaviour of things in the universe.
So if someone* says, "People do selfish things, that's science," true!
But if they also say, "Therefore, it's ok to kill your neighbour and take their house, see all of recorded history, colonialism, &c." I stop them. Science teaches us that people kill each other and take their land.
But science also teaches us that people coöperate and build rockets to Mars. Science is not prescriptive, and with respect to morality and ethics, science teaches us that there are many different strategies that people use to accomplish their goals, some of which may result in the replication of the information encoded in their genes.
Selfishness "Just is?" Yes.
Therefore "______ is ok and we must accept it?" No.
---
* I am not putting these words in your mouth or arguing with you, just picking up where your statement left off.
"Humans are the greatest species of Life on Earth, according to all of the metrics that humans have chosen to measure greatness."
Science also tells me that insects are better than people, if I pick a different metric. I suspect we agree on this.
No but the fact that we have morality (and the possibility that other animals do not) can be explained via evolution. In reality probably many genes contribute in a complicated way to making us social animals.
Maybe you could articulate your objection based on science rather than feelings?
An authoritarian hell bent on altering culture to suit his own will is never going to convince me otherwise.
And that is why I find his crusade against religions he despises so dangerous. Culture devolves unless it is replenished with enlightenment - Dawkins takes no responsibility for that, since the typical means of its occurring (religious faith) is abhorrent to him.
People too easily forget that organised atheism is responsible for the massacre of millions of people, too.
1) Not orthodox science in any sense of the word, nor really philosophy of science (though it is a popularization of the work of people like William Hamilton)
2) Philosophically bonkers; it's essentially medieval demonology repackaged where the demons are called "genes."
3) Not written by an actual scientist.
It's also a hilarious takedown, as are most of David Stove's essays and books. I liked Dawkin's fairytale when I first read it, for the same reason I liked death metal music and fedora tier atheism arguments on usenet. But it's horse shit. FWIIW another nail in its coffin; Dawkin's ideology originates in part from a guy named George Price: have a look at part 3 of the Adam Curtis documentary "all watched over by machines of loving grace" for more on what became of him.
Dawkins isn't a social darwinist (and nor was Darwin for that matter). He doesn't believe that nature red in tooth and claw is the right way for people to behave. He's argued in many places that, as self-aware thinkers, we have the capacity and moral duty to rise above it.
If you want a target for your arguments, you should pick on an actual social darwinist like Nietzsche.
> “If there is a human moral to be drawn, it is that we must teach our children altruism, for we cannot expect it to be part of their biological nature. ”
Let me quote another favourite author of mine on the same topic:
> "There’s Nature, and she’s going to come out the way She is.", Feynman.
“You must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.” - Richard P. Feynman
Susan Blackmore. “Dangerous Memes; or, What the Pandorans Let Loose” (Cosmos & Culture, p.297) [2]
Blackmore is writing about 'memes' and reacts to some of Dawkins' critics. I can't say to what degree Blackmore faithfully discusses the contents of 'Selfish Gene' (1976), because I've not read it.
This can be found in the March release of NASA's e-book collection [1]. And specifically in this book: Cosmos & Culture: Cultural Evolution in a Cosmic Context Edited by Steven J. Dick and Mark L. Lupisella (2009?) [2]
Enjoy! Let the debate continue...
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22718489
[2]: https://www.nasa.gov/connect/ebooks/hist_culture_cosmos_deta....
www.nasa.gov /connect /ebooks /hist_culture_cosmos_detail.html
Systems Thinking: A Primer by Donella Meadows is also an incredibly thought-provoking non-fiction book, that really makes you think about the world and the systems we create differently.
It changed the way I think about how society today is structured and showed me that something different is possible.
Twains Pudd'head Wilson and "The Corruption of Hadleyburg"
Ayn Rand et al "Capitalism, The Unknown Ideal"
Peter Kropotkin "Mutual Aid: A Factor in Evolution"
Tannehill, Morse "The Market for Liberty"
Albert J. Nock "Our Enemy the State"
Stephan Wolfram "A New Kind of Science"
Another recommendation is "Quantum Genesis: Speculations in Modern Physics and the Truth in Scripture" by Stuart Allen. QG is a relatively deep pop sci look at physics, computation, and several related fields where the author points out that the original translation of the creation myth in Genesis 1 matches up extremely well with a modern understanding of quantum physics and simulation theory. (disclosure: a family member is the author).
Thinking Fast and Slow. (Recommended in other responses but I’d have to second this one. Incredible for reasoning about your own reasoning).
What the Buddha Taught: (Walpola Rahula): a short intro to Buddhism. There are some really powerful ideas from this age old religion, that can definitely help you think about your own happiness and what material possessions actually give you.
The Innovators Dilemma: a must read for startup founders, I think it’s the best model for thinking about technology and why startups and adoption often fails.
Atlas shrugged (Ayn Rand): completely transformative book for looking at our world, America particularly. Th perspective it gives you may not be in the best, or most human way, but I’ve found no other book that forces you to empathize with capitalism like this one.
Surely expanded my brain. But then again I was 16 and stuck on a train for 3 days and it was my only entertainment.
"The Bible" (New International Version)
“Capitalism and Freedom” by Milton Friedman
“Imperial Ambitions” by Noam Chomsky
“Evolution and Religion: A Dialogue Book" by Michael Ruse
“The Value of Free Thought” an essay by Bertrand Russel
“The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism” by Daniel Bell
“Stalking the billion-footed beast” an essay by Tom Wolfe
“Propaganda” by Edward Bernays
“Bonfire of the Vanities” by Tom Wolfe
“Walden” by Henry David Thoreau
“30 Satires” by Lewis H. Lapham
“Cat’s Cradle” by Kurt Vonnegut
Above, in chronological order, are the books that changed my life. It is weird looking at that list, as each book is tied to such a fundamental shift in my life. They each taught me about something fundamentally new and different. Faith, spirituality, economics, thought, power, society, nature, technology. It should appear obvious by looking at the list, there are plenty of opposite pairs, dipole books if you will, present. Bending one’s mind has multiple phases, first when one goes from knowing nothing to knowing something. Depending on what was learned, this can definitely be mind bending. But not everyone rides the second phase, going from knowing something to learning that it wasn’t the whole thing, or wasn’t the only way to interpret such a thing, or wasn’t entirely correct, or perhaps, in our largely subjective world, is not true at all.
Certain books can only speak to certain people at certain times of their life. It’s just the beauty of the whole thing. And to the core of this thread, one actually has to believe something, truly and passionately, in order for them to then have their world view bent and turned on its head. This is the hardest lesson that many won’t really ever opt to face. The core of truth, learning, and wisdom comes when you finally read (and thus think) something that takes a belief you previously held as passionately true, unalterably true, core-to-identity true, and made you wrestle with the reality that it may, perhaps, not be. That’s the biggest mind f* of them all.
One’s entire worldview is constructed of things they believe. But those things you believe come, for some more than others, from what one read, purposefully or not. Seek books that challenge what you believe and enjoy the ride.
Read anything written by Ancient Greeks; Aristotle, the Iliad, Herodotus, Plato. There's a reason people still read these dead white guys, and there is a reason that peak times of excellence in Western Civilization have been peak Ancient Greeks. It will make your thinking three dimensional, and give you perspective as to the world you live in today as a software engineer.
It's hard to tell whether you want a mystery/thriller book or a book on logic or a self help book. If you want to be more intelligent or aware of culture, then read the bible. You'll be surprised how almost everything you read, watch or listen to is tied to the bible. Almost every book listed in this thread will have references to the bible. You really can't be culturally intelligent without having read the bible - at least in the US or Europe. If you want a mystery, can't go wrong The Name of the Rose. Also, a book isn't going to transform you into a smarter, wiser person. The countless shelves of self-help books should be evidence enough.
Also, I love this quote from einstein:
"Reading after a certain age diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking, just as the man who spends too much time in the theater is tempted to be content with living vicariously instead of living his own life."
Then we can throw over what we like and see what sticks!
Intellectually very challenging.
Even though it is a religious book for many people, it can be read as just a normal story.
It teaches one about how to live life, not by set of defined rules, but by providing a proper explanation and through understanding.
It's a book which is usually dated to 5000 years or 7000 years.
It`s a very well-balanced story, one can ignore parts which are not relevant to present society.
(The resolution between these forms was given in South Park of all places: God appears on Earth and mentions in passing that He is Buddhist.)
- - - -
Uh, heh, Hinduism is also different from the "People of the Book", and from Buddhism. The Gita is, of course, Hindu, not Buddhist. (I'm not sure how I got confused in the previous portion of this comment, sorry. No offense intended!)
But in nowhere in Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism, ... Or any other religions from Indian origin claim their's is the only truth.
All of them are completely fine with different view points.
For example Hinduism is too broad, it literally accepts everything.
For Ex: There is only one God, there are many gods, there is no God. One can be an atheist and be a good Hindu. You need to pray to god, you shouldn't pray to god.
But there is an unification among all Indian religions. For ex: All religions go in search of God/Truth.
Any how, Bhagavadgita, should rather be looked up-on like a more of philosophical text rather than religious book. It is the essence of MahaBharata, yet another religious text book.
I recommend this order:
The Murder of Rodger Ackroyd
And Then There Were None (also titled Ten Little Indians)
Murder on the Orient Express
If you are a teenager it will definitely make you think and likely leave an impact on you. It's not a typical novel, more like philosophical ideas presented in the form of a novel. Ideal characters placed in real life. You will also understand why the world is divided into Ayn Rand lovers and haters.
It questions how the world works, how it should work, how people live their lives, and how they should live their lives, etc, etc.
Warning you, it's not filled with plots twists.
The 1940s emphasis on tall verticality in its art style is on full display. The strict adherence to command in speech seems foreign to me, not having been through the fighting forties.
Yeah its good. Cant say it will have any surprises left for you.
Rand has a very distinct philosophy and is quite black-and-white, but even if you don't agree with everything hopefully you can appreciate the writing and storytelling in The Fountainhead (and others). It seems that a lot of the discussion about Rand is focused on her philosophy and if it's right or wrong. This is probably justified but also obscures the fact that she was a master at writing.
I read this book in my early 20s and loved it. Even though I've become much more liberal on many issues (proponent of universal healthcare, tax-payer paid higher ed, etc.) I can still appreciate the themes in her work.
Also just finished Anthem last night- I recommend checking it out. Super short but really gripping read.
* Read any book you want
* Don't read books that you don't want to
* Get on with your life
For me, the books which had the most impact on my life were those which were exploring systematically something I had a confuse idea of and seemed rather unorthodox. When you get that feeling that "oh great, if I'm insane, I'm not alone", it immediately organizes your thought process and allows you to go further.
Of course, there is always the risk of an "echo chamber" effect, but on the other hand, there are some ideas that you can't get if you're not in a given predisposition, so better maximize the usefulness of your reading time (and explore introduction to alien ideas through lighter sources, like small articles).