Ask HN: What Books helped you sharpen your brains? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What Books helped you sharpen your brains?

49 pointsdaemon_900930 comments

Except Math books, which books made you smart or see the world through a different angle?

This is asked pretty often. I think I’d say the act of reading books consistently and reflecting on the ideas as a habit is what makes you smarter, not just a single book. Fiction and nonfiction alike.

But to be less pedantic and answer your question. Deep work and why we sleep are both amazing books. They contribute to making you smarter by improving aspects of your life

This. Id add reading more nuanced thoughts. Sometimes it's a research, a book, a blog, Wikipedia article, ..

The Design of Everyday Things by Donald A. Norman. Now I know _why_ my kitchen appliances irritate me.

Mountaineering: The Freedom of the Hills. How to navigate the landscape. And who has right-of-way on the trail.

Any textbook on Statics and Dynamics. Physics.

How to Win Friends and Influence People. This is the book that people trying to manipulate you have read.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases These serve as lenses through which you can view a situation to get new perspective. Like looking through a piece of red plastic to filter out red ink and see a hidden message in yellow ink, if you remember that as a child. Not in some authoritative sense, but different perspectives you can hold in your mind.

The DoET by Norman featured, to my memory, a very memorable praise for the at-the-time car design, where the driver could interact with buttons and knobs while not having to take his eyes off the road, simply by the proxy of being able to feel roughly the layout of the controls.

Then the automotive industry went and changed it all with touch screens. Yes the cars have become safer with so many innovations for passanger safety, but I wonder if we went too far with all the screens.

A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles, was a great piece of fiction that shows that you can be true to your word, and experience a good life despite whatever is thrown your way. Beautiful prose too.

Sand Talk by Tyson Yunkaporta, a primer on how Aboriginal Australian cultures view time, chaos and interactions. Good reminder that there are multiple ways of creating a narrative about the world that may or may not be more sophisticated then your own culture.

Tools of Conviviality by Ivan Illich, reaffirmed my belief that technology shapes our culture, and some technologies create artificial monopolies that push out more humane options.

Evolution in Four Dimensions: Genetic, Epigenetic, Behavioral, and Symbolic Variation in the History of Life by Eva Jablonka and Marion J. Lamb is a wonderfully instructive book on the multiple way in which biology evolves and can pass on information beyond just genetics alone.

The Listening Society by Hanzi Freinacht, a good introduction on the progression of culture, and where do we go after post modernism, and why it is difficult to do so.

...so many more good reads, but I'll leave it at this.

In a strange way, book that really influenced me is "Evolution of physics", I read as a student by Einstein and Leopold Infeld. I am not sure how better it is to normal physics book, but it was way more readable and interesting than my textbook. Another book that really influenced me a lot is "Calculus wars" and "Infinite powers".

They just made subjects that I did not care about into things that were human and part of a great story of human discovery. Made me appreciate and learn that I cannot take anything for granted.

I don't think math books make you smart or see the world through a different angle (note : I studied maths a university so I might be completely biased ).

I'd say books about fields you don't necessarily know much about (if you're a web developer, it can mean both books about linux kernel programming and cooking books) including the ones that you think are about boring topics. They will help you understand that you don't know much about anything, and that there's usually several ways to look at something (say your preconceptions vs what you learn from the book) I think this drastically improves your critical thinking.

Yes that's true but not entirely. Personally doing math helped me be systematic so I can figure out and set few rules of engagement when thinking and then continue evaluating thoughts through it with ease mostly due to practice I had in math.

Conquest by Hugh Thomas, probably the best book on Cortes' conquest of the Mexica people (Aztecs) and my gold standard for non-fiction - it's got almost 200 pages of notes and sources, for example, and most of them are available via Project Gutenberg.

This book really drove home the effects of European imperialism without all the "woke" rhetoric found in contemporary discourse. The Mexica performed human sacrifices at a horrifying scale but they were otherwise as close to a utopian society as I've ever read about, built on completely different cultural mores including a religion that almost deified the emperor far beyond Europe's "divine right of kings." Since their entire war machine was built around capturing prisoners for these sacrifices with obsidian weapons meant to wound rather than kill, they were completely unprepared for the armor and horses.

It's hard not to see Montezuma as a tragic figure whose indecisiveness led to the conquest of all of Central America. Cortes' expedition was an unmitigated disaster from day one but once the New Spain beachhead was established, the writing was on the wall, even though some tribes like the Mayans held out for a few hundred more years. I often wonder how different the world would look today if Cortes and his conquistadors were slaughtered by the Mexica before they even reached Tlaxcala. Instead Cortes walked right in the front door and decapitated an entire civilization.

How to read a book by Mortimer Adler. It sounds meta, but it did change the way I approached reading and knowledge in general.

Spot on. I felt like my IQ shot up by a couple of points after reading this book

Not a book, but just being conscious and curious about your daily activities. We learn and put things on auto pilot. Once you start asking "why" about certain things, you might start finding new ways to do things.

I agree, thinking about things help, But Brain needs stuff to think about just like body needs food. Giving it good stuff to process helps.

Reality Begins with Consciousness by Ed Close and Vernon Neppe

God talks with arjuna: the bhagavad gita by Paramahansa Yogananda

Bhagavad Gita a great book.

"A Meditator’s Practice Guide to The Mind Illuminated" book helped in improving mind clarity like switching from SD to FHD. even though the author is caught in scandals, the content is solid.

- Sapiens by Yuval Harari

- Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

- Godel, Escher, Bach by Hofstadter

- Fundamentals of Physics by Halliday, Resnick, Walker

- Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson (changed my outlook, attitude)

- Quantum Computation and Quantum Information by Nielsen, Chuang

- Meditation by Aurelius

- (some other deep, high quality novels)

- Books by Steven Strogatz

- Classical Indian Philosophy by Ganeri

- Not a book, but Andrew Ng's old ML MOOC, also LeCun's MOOC.

- nand2tetris, SICP

__________

Meditation and mindfulness have fundamentally changed my level of effectiveness. They have made me smarter, and fixed some serious problems I had. Regular practice is essential. These books were great:

- The Mind Illuminated by Culadasa

- Mindfulness in Plain English by Bhante Gunaratna

- The Wisdom of No Escape by Pema Chodron

- Why Buddhism is True by Robert Wright

- What the Buddha Taught by Walpola Rahula

__________

There are many books from many fields that has made me less dumb. I cannot list all of them.

You too, should pursue directions of your interest and genuinely enjoy what you do. Enlightenment is choice-of-books invariant.

Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow (excluding all the priming stuff)

Cialdini's Influence

Lewis Caroll Epstein is a very talented writer

“A good book gets better at the second reading. A great book at the third. Any book not worth rereading isn't worth reading.”

Personally I’ve read each book in Taleb’s Incerto numerous times - and each time I come away with something new. His meditations on the limits or knowledge, the power laws that govern much of our modern world form and so much else have come to form the underpinnings of my world view.

Being smart and see the world through a different angle are two totally different things.

I am reading The Structures of Everyday Life: Civilization and Capitalism Vol. 1 by Fernand Braudel right now and I'd say it is doing this. It sounds boring but it is incredibly fascinating - pages and pages on what people ate, drank, lived in, slept in, how they spent their days etc in the transition from feudal to industrial society and how subtle patterns of weather, technology, etc caused large events in history. It's well written, too.

Also: 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei by Eliot Weinberger

A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander

Impro by Keith Johnstone (you don't need to care about theatre or improv to enjoy this book)

Ways of Seeing by John Berger (or just watch the TV show)

The strange order of things, by Antonio Damasio. It's about the development of emotions and feelings, culture and ideology, technology and whatever else makes as human through the lenses of evolutionary biology, namely through the development of the neurological systems. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/32335976-the-strange-ord... Others: The Wealth of Nations by Smith and the first books of The Capital by Marx.

Here are a few books that can help you improve your cognitive skills and keep your brain sharp:

1. "Moonwalking with Einstein" by Joshua Foer - This book is about the science of memory and how to improve your memory through techniques like memory palaces and mnemonic devices.

2. "The Organized Mind" by Daniel Levitin - This book is about how to manage information overload and stay organized in the digital age. It covers topics like time management, decision making, and multitasking.

3. "Thinking, Fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahneman - This book is about the psychology of decision making and how our minds can sometimes lead us astray. It covers topics like cognitive biases, heuristics, and the role of emotions in decision making.

4. "The Power of Habit" by Charles Duhigg - This book is about the science of habits and how they can be changed to improve our lives. It covers topics like how habits are formed, why they are hard to break, and how to create new habits.

5. "Solve for Happy" by Mo Gawdat - This book is about how to find lasting happiness and fulfillment in life. It covers topics like the science of happiness, the role of the mind in happiness, and how to overcome negative thoughts and emotions.

I think it's worth pointing out that this is an answer generated by ChatGPT. It seems a bit dishonest to hide that fact since OP asked what helped _you_.

https://i.imgur.com/FpZ167W.png

Interesting, what do you use to generate this?

I wrote a userscript (with help from ChatGPT) that identifies if comments on HN are written by AI or a human. I based it on https://huggingface.co/openai-detector. Its still a little shabby and only works on HN, but I imagine this is going to be required for general non-specific Internet browsing going forward. It could even be expanded to hide AI generated comments. Looks like this: https://i.imgur.com/BTt1DTh.png

Hmm, the HuggingFace detector seems to identify notes from my personal notebook as being about 80% fake. Passages from Wikipedia, between 72% and 96% fake. I think this is actually detecting "grammatically correct well-punctuated prose" rather than "from GPT-2".

Yes. The point is that it is intended to detect comments obviously written completely by GPT, not detecting that a human a wrote it. You have to discern between the two, as the scale is not really utilized here. What I've found over the last few days of playing with this is that most AI generated text will be 99.97% accurately identified, while human text ranges somewhere between 70-98. So I could move the threshold for my script quite a lot. I just wanted to see how it works with these thresholds for a while.

The answers seemed generic but I didn't even notice. This is just going to get worse over time, isn't it?

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