Not told your exciting stories about thinking (like those fancy NYT bestsellers), but actually pushed your own thinking skill forward.
"The Almanack of Naval Ravikant" -- I learned about leverage, the importance of peace over joy, and how to build long-term relationships. I come back to this book every few months and look through my notes even more frequently.
what books would you recommend for people in their younger years though?
Also Statistical Models: Theory and Practice by Freedman. I refer you to Taleb's review: https://www.amazon.com/Statistical-Models-Practice-David-Fre...
"[...] This book is outstanding in the following two aspects: 1) It is of immense clarity, embedding everything in real situations, 2) It uses the real-life situation to critique the statistical model and show you the limit of statistic."
Both cover most of what you need to know to think rigorously using logic and its extension to account for uncertainty, probability.
The first one in particular looks very interesting.
How would you compare Statistical Models by Freedman with Statistical Models by Davison ?
I think it's much more advanced. It's like a third course in statistics, whereas Freedman can be used in first year.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Smullyan
[1] https://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/godTa...
Much of impact is dependent on context, and where you're in your life. I have often tried popular recommendations but more often than not, they haven't worked for me. The transformative books have happened to be the weird ones that often don't get talked about. My advice would to read wide variety of interesting stuff. And don't think too much about how to change your thinking. It will happen naturally without effort.
Despite its age and a number of inaccuracies in specific domains (e.g., mathematics, biology, sociology), the book has lost no momentum in the past years. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summa_Technologiae
Try Crime and Punishment, or Moby Dick.
I would say try some simpler writers that are easier to understand, write clearly, and have more action. Hemingway is always a good choice
When finishing the book, the story that stays with you isn't Ishamel's, it's Ahab's. Ishmael is just a part of Ahab's quest to kill the white whale, and we are in his shoes. You are put in the shoes of someone following orders towards an insane goal, in unconventional circumstences.
I like to think of Moby Dick kind of like the Bible. Every chapter has something to say about the human condition, and was written earnestly by someone who cared to translate their experience.
And english is my second language as well - looking at your username I assume you are french speaking? I would go look at André Malraux's La Condition Humaine, which has similarities to Moby Dick in some of the ways I mentionned higher.
That's intresting take, I will give Moby Dick another chance, and try to look at it from Your point of view.
>> looking at your username I assume you are french speaking?
Not even close :) I'm Polish, and nick is just an homage to favourite author from my childhood (Around the World in Eighty Days was one of first books that I read and still remember from that time).
Thinking is a hugely important function, but it should not be considered as the only one, nor the most important in every case.
The quality of this relationship is informed by various signals in your body/mind system (emotions, impressions, other thoughts and even skin reactions, in the case of persistent patterns).
It is crucial to be aware of this relationship, as your actions – and therefore what happens as a result of them – are strongly informed by it.
Any kind of preference is based on emotion. All decisions stem from having a preference for one outcome over another.
The thought processes claim to make the decisions, and to be “rational, but they always serve preferences.
The ability to expand one’s awareness beyond thinking gives access to a universe of phenomenae in a space larger and containing the thinking activity.
If you're scientifically inclined, joining any Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) Program near you will be a good start.
The Zhuangzi, probably at least two translations.
The Elements (that is, Euclid's).
Process and Reality has had the most impact on my thinking but it's one of the most unapproachable things I've ever read. Get there eventually.
Read the books, and then look into reviews and explanations of them, or even better - talk about it with someone that you like. Just try to word the things you've been exposed to and experienced and understood.
How to Write, Speak and Think More Effectively by Rudolf Flesch.
Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, Immanuel Kant. Supposedly more accessible version of Critique of Pure Reason but still very hard and mind-bending for me at least. Not just philosophy was easier after wrestling with this content.
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Tomas Kuhn. Made me self-aware about what scientific thinking actually is.
I gave up on it 20 years ago. Maybe I need to try again.
For this forum, I'm assuming you are looking for math / science books (otherwise I'd recommend the Talmud, Bible or Quran), I'd recommend Real Analysis by Charles Chapman Pugh or Surely you're joking Mr Feynman (+ Feynman Lectures on Physics)
Getting to Yes. Still one of the best books on negotiating. Again, the simple concept of seeing the world from the other side of the negotiating table, IE: thinking like the competition.
The Little Blue Book. A must read for people working in progressive politics. Will help you to think like the other side so you can formulate messaging they will understand.
A computer science degree (and thus any materials on CS), if done well, can be an exercise in thinking / problem solving skill that can serve well beyond traditional STEM careers.
A History of the Civil War, 1861–1865 is a book by James Ford Rhodes written in 1918. It is one of finest examples of plain English writing I have read. How to get your point across unpretentiously.
They didn’t teach me logic, but taught me how other people think. Or, at least how they act after you communicate to them.
I'm highly interested in what I call maximal 'unifiers', ideas or concepts which co-occur across as many disciplines and phenomena as possible. E.g. fractals, Bejan's constructal law, or structural complexity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structural_complexity_(applied...
In hindsight, reading the book and fiddling with the examples in my head really has restructured the way I think: improved on how I critically analyze the information I take in and increased my capability for extended logical deduction.
(Really amazing book, teaches a different way of thinking though the mode of drawing)
I also like Drawing on the Right Side... but note:
"a meta-review of the laterality of creative processes conducted by Dietrich and Kanso (2010) found no evidence that the right and left brain hemispheres contribute differently to creativity. Furthermore, the idea that drawing upside-down objects, including faces, leads to more accurate depictions has not been supported scientifically."
https://www.psychologytoday.com/za/blog/illusions-delusions-...
Rapid Viz (Hanks and Belliston) and Experiences in Visual Thinking (McKim) are also interesting (and out of print, but cheap used!)
1. "Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire" by Luke Burgis
2. "Four Thousand Weeks: Time and How to Use It" by Oliver Burkeman
and one bonus which definitely made me think: "When Breath Becomes Air" by Paul Kalanithi
Masterful pieces of work. Especially the 2 books in the Incerto book set: The Black Swan and Antifragile.
* Principles by Ray Dalio - honesty
* Good to Great by Jim Collins - integrity
—-
Theoretical
* Nicomachean Ethics by Aristotle - Happiness via Utility
* On Liberty by John Stuart Mills - Equity
A Mathematician's Lament by Paul Lockhart.
Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil
The takeaway that stayed most with me: all laws of physics are proven to be wrong at some point in time, and get step by step replaced by less wrong versions.
Sapiens, no introduction needed
Also "Why Most Published Research Findings Are False" by Ioannidis, which just made me more skeptical of people citing studies
I will say, that for my part Earle Stanley Gardner taught me best; to use what I'd term my "systematic imagination" and leave no possibility unconsidered. Useful for invention, but also for coding and algorithm design, of course. He did a pretty good job of cataloging the limits of most human (associative) thinking.
And it's not just me! Crime fiction had a significant influence on academic philosophy last century through such as Wittgenstein; but many others as well. There's a good article detailing that history but I can't find a URL for it just now.
If you aren't sure what "first principles" thinking is, Gardner offers a post-graduate course with interesting examples. I prefer the term "systematic imagination" to "first principles thinking" because some people tend to flip the meaning of the latter phrase on it's head and narrow their thinking to straightforward derivations from a few axioms; as if they were medieval theologians. That's not at all what Elon Musk has in mind when he talks about "first principles thinking." He means, discarding everything except the most basic principles of physics, and not neglecting any possibility that those laws allow. In other words "systematic (exhaustive) imagination."
In the same way, reading Elon's precepts (or mine) doesn't really reform your brain; but going through a lot of examples of how 'twas done right, and done wrong is really helpful. The scientific history of medicine offers plenty of (mostly horrifying) examples.
Histories of technology and technological and engineering blunders can perform the same function nicely, too. Watt saw the blunder that Newcomen had made by repeatedly heating and cooling the same chamber. Crazy inefficient. However Watt later assumed that his small-scale tests of high-pressure steam engines showed that the concept couldn't work. Unconsciously, he seems to have assumed that physics scaled (linearly) even though Galileo had shown it doesn't. Blunder. Since he held the key patent, Watt tragically blocked all development of high-pressure steam engines until his patent expired.
My own thinking has also been much improved through reading many excellent military histories that focused on decisions: because you know (nearly) everyone is really trying to do their best thinking in a war, they aren't usually being merely slovenly; yet amazing blunders happen. Such as the Germans putting their bridging equipment at the back of their columns during the Bastogne offensive in WWII. That works in a desert, but it's the wrong way to get through a forest (Ardennes) with rivers. Once trapped at the back of a narrow forest road, the German portable bridges were useless. They didn't think that one through (didn't deploy their imagination, sufficiently.)
Which studies?
I don't.
"Reading is merely a surrogate for thinking for yourself; it means letting someone else direct your thoughts. Many books, moreover, serve merely to show how many ways there are of being wrong, and how far astray you yourself would go if you followed their guidance. You should read only when your own thoughts dry up, which will of course happen frequently enough even to the best heads; but to banish your own thoughts so as to take up a book is a sin against the holy ghost; it is like deserting untrammeled nature to look at a herbarium or engravings of landscapes." ~Arthur Schopenhauer