Comment by mjb | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mjb | Hacker News Reader

There are relatively few things I've read that I can definitively point to as having almost instantly changed my mind on something. This is one of them. Reading often offers a broader understanding or different perspective, but seldom a sudden flash on insight.

Others short reads that have changed my mind in that way include:

- "The Inner Ring" by CS Lewis (https://www.lewissociety.org/innerring/)

- "On Photography" by Susan Sontag (https://www.amazon.com/Photography-Susan-Sontag/dp/031242009...)

- "Black Souls in White Skins?" by Steve Biko (as far as I can see only widely available as part of the Collection "I write what I like")

- "The Two Cultures" by CP Snow (https://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/students/envs_5110/snow_1...) (This one is a lot like Freeman's in that many summaries seem to completely misunderstand the argument it is making, and many people assume it says something it doesn't).

- "Ironies of Automation" by Lisanne Bainbridge (https://ckrybus.com/static/papers/Bainbridge_1983_Automatica...)

- "Risk Management in a Dynamic Society" by Jens Rasmussen (http://sunnyday.mit.edu/16.863/rasmussen-safetyscience.pdf). If you read nothing else, check out Figure 3.

> - "The Inner Ring" by CS Lewis (https://www.lewissociety.org/innerring/)

CS Lewis predicted the impact of social media 50 years prior to its existence:

> And if in your spare time you consort simply with the people you like, you will again find that you have come unawares to a real inside: that you are indeed snug and safe at the centre of something which, seen from without, would look exactly like an Inner Ring.

Wisdom truly does transcend time and generations.

If anyone likes to check the clarity of his view, I suggest "The abolition of man" -- chapter 3 in particular. I find it so prescient of modern times in so many ways. Astonishing.

As a child, there seemed to be some "excitement"[1] around The lion, the witch, the wardrobe. I really didn't get the allure and ultimately the whole cs lewisian fiction arena was something I stayed away from. I figured that lewis was just not for me.

Then as a young adult, I happened across abolition of man by accident (honestly, it might even have been HN where I first came across the link). This is one of the most fantastic things that I've read. And this was the start of my discovery of cs lewis' serious writings.

It's been a while since I read them, but I would put forward: the abolition of man, screwtape letters, the great divorce, and the problem of pain.

As a christian, I don't really buy all of lewis' arguments. And he even goes on record in one of his essays about how you shouldn't read too deeply into what his actual beliefs are based off his essays (which feels kind of like a cop out, but whatever). However, he was able to take a line of reasoning and then build a compelling body of text around it. The experience is impressive.

Even if you have very little sympathy towards christianity, I would suggest at least giving abolition of man and screwtape letters a shot. Abolition is all about the possibility of society becoming a machine to destroy humanity, and screwtape letters spends a lot of time trying to convince you that a non-human intelligence is going to be non-human.

[1] - I think the idea was that this was christian fiction that children should be happy to read. No necessarily that anyone was excited per se. But more like, youngish christian families wanted to build up a wholesome peer environment for their children and this was a christiany media that they didn't have to worry about.

LF Celine's Journey. He writes about WW1 and gives a first person experience of the propaganda

It's something I think about often: what does it take to convince millions of people to walk into a graveyard? It just completely flies in the face of self preservation, kind of like the Aztec sacrifices

It's hard to think about this and not turn into a cynic

The one that really changed how I think about the world was "A Muscular Empathy" by Ta-Nehisi Coates

https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/12/a-muscu...

I appreciate the thought experiment of considering whether we would truly act differently in difficult circumstances, as most never engage in that level of self-reflection. However, this article seems to beg the question.

Specifically, it starts by assuming that in the face of challenges like being born in poverty, the average person would not overcome them through will or effort alone. As a result, it cultivates empathy for those who fail to transcend their circumstances. It then implies that the solution is changing the environment, not the individual.

But this is circular reasoning. It assumes that it's all the environment, and concludes with it being all the environment.

Looking at the fall of social mobility in the US, I conclude that the average person indeed does not overcome poverty.

It is not circular reasoning. It is just something you do not agree with.

That article is decidedly not about considering whether you would act differently.

What the authors is doing is pointing out is that assuming you would act different is unhelpful. It is far more helpful and interesting to look at a situation, and examine what are all the things that would cause you to to end up in those circumstances despite your best effort. What this does is forces you to overcome the human minds tendencies towards lazy evaluation, to really break down all the forces acting upon the situation these individuals encounter.

This is actually very similar to a technique useful for startups. Assume you have failed some number of years from now. What are some of the reasons you might have failed?

> Specifically, it starts by assuming that in the face of challenges like being born in poverty, the average person would not overcome them through will or effort alone.

I would concur. Three ways out of poverty would be sports, art/music and crime (bad idea). Knowledge, luck and the right mindset and are important too. There is the book Rich Dad Poor Dad about the mindset part.

I would add “Meditations on Moloch” from Slate Star Codex.

That was really good. https://www.slatestarcodexabridged.com/Meditations-On-Moloch

Better link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/

The Slate Star Codex that really spoke to me is "The Categories were made for man, not man for the categories"

https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-ma...

I really like this post. Thanks for sharing it.

Also "I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup": https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anythin...

Since we're reposting links to about half of Scott's Top Posts page here, this is the full page: https://slatestarcodex.com/top-posts/ :)

The further back into his catalog you go, the more profound it gets - unfortunately, as he's lost more and more anonymity, he's made his earlier (and more controversial) stuff less accessible.

Thanks so much for this list! I'm always on the prowl for things to read that changed how people see the world, but explicit attempts to solicit examples have proved surprisingly unsuccessful. And here you just volunteered it :)

If you're looking for more, i have some recommendations for longer stuff around personal growth and insights:

- Erich Fromm, The Art Of Loving. It's about how love (romantic, interpersonal) is not rosy but hard, hard work. All of Fromm's writing is amazing, but this one (for me) had the most personal impact. Another great one is Fromm's The Sane Society.

- Kishimi/Koga's The Courage To Be Disliked. It's classified as self-help, but it's more a pop-psychology summary of Adlerian Psychotherapy. We can choose not to be the product of trauma, or our surroundings. We may get pushed into negative corners by our upbringing, but then we get too comfortable in those negative corners to push ourselves out. The title alludes to a person who has no friends and has a negative image of himself, maybe he's that lonely because he is afraid of being rejected/disliked. He is lonely and miserable, but he is comfortable in the loneliness. It takes courage and hard work on yourself to move out of those holes.

- Hillman/Ventura's We've had a Hundred Years Of Psychotherapy And The World's Getting Worse. In a nutshell, the problem is not always with the individual, often it's just the environment; mindfulness will only get you so far if the house is on fire.

- Becker's The Denial Of Death. We know we die but we don't realise that. How do we generate meaning in the presence of death? There are 'good' (a life project, pushing societies' boundaries) and 'bad' ways (hedonism, drugs etc.). What are the necessary illusions we should create for ourselves to keep pushing?

This kind of thing is exactly my jam. I read Becker about a year ago and it set off a landslide that has still not settled. Much appreciate the others, I have made note of them.

Great to hear!! I'm also always on the hunt for books similar to this - a weird mix of psychoanalysis, sociology, deep thought - so happy to hear your recommendations as well!!

Well my friend:

Everything (really) by Erving Goffman. A beautiful synthesis is [1] which I might recommend over the original material (sacrilege!) if you were only going to read one thing.

We (as Western Civilization, maybe) have still (imo) not come to terms with the bounty that is William James. I had negligible interest in religion, but if you're into the weird mix of psychoanalysis, sociology, and deep thought, I cannot recommend [2] enough. I read it over the course of a year, annotated the margins like the faithful annotate their holy texts (do they do that?) and many evenings still open a page, read randomly, and ponder.

I had never really considered what an institution really was, or how it came to be, or what was implicit / assumed in interacting with it. This classic prompted much fruitful imagining [3] although it's the most difficult reading of them all.

Given your tastes, you may have slogged through a bunch of philosophy and hated it. The good news (or maybe the bad news) is that this is super fun and easy to read and gives you most of the same nutrients [4] as certain schools, and has obvious contemporary relevance besides.

This scratches a proximate itch [5].

I'm a little sheepish bc all of these (except for maybe [5]) are deep classics and are, in a sense, obvious for that reason. And yet I have a PhD in a related field and never actually _read_ any of them, so maybe they won't be obvious to you either :)

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Goffman-Reader-Charles-Lemert/dp/1557...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Varieties_of_Religious_Exp...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Social_Construction_of_Rea...

[4] https://www.amazon.com/Supersizing-Mind-Embodiment-Cognitive...

[5] https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/alien-phenome...

Thank you so much!!!!! I had The Varieties of Religious Experiences on my to-read-list forever but never got to it; I had never even heard of those other authors. Thank you so much!

Another rec: Mark Fisher's Capitalist Realism, on how we can't imagine alternatives to capitalism any more.

Byung-Chul Han's Psychopolitics, on how modern neoliberalism turned us into self-exploiters. There's no 'upper class' suppressing the 'lower classes' anymore, we've moved to self-exploit, to push ourselves as our own horrible boss, without a structure to rebel against, with no chance of escape.

You're very welcome. I'm jealous of you, having James to look forward to!

found https://www.sahistory.org.za/archive/black-souls-white-skins

I concur and thanks for the list. Mine would be the Gervais Principle.

https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...

I like Peter Singer's 1971 essay 'Famine, Affluence and Morality', when taken with a little Jung.

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