Surprisingly undervalued books | Hacker News Reader

Surprisingly undervalued books

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285 pointsnqureshi95 comments

Undervaluing Wittgenstein isn't really consistent with what I've read in American philosophy at least. If you go by objective metrics (which would be the Moneyball approach), he consistently tops the citation counts, and beyond that, is considered central to many areas. Probably only Heidegger gives him a run for most broadly influential 20th-century philosopher (though it's hard to compare directly, because they've been influential on quite different groups).

He's been particularly influential on analytic philosophy via Saul Kripke, among other interpreters. In popularity contests, he routinely gets voted #1 most influential philosopher in polls of academic philosophers as well, e.g. in a 1999 poll of mostly UK/US academic philosophers (http://commonsenseatheism.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/Lac...) and in a Brian Leiter straw poll (http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2009/03/so-who-is-the-...). The former one concludes that Philosophical Investigations is "the one crossover masterpiece in twentieth-century philosophy, appealing across diverse specializations and philosophical orientations".

An interesting question might be who is undervalued on those lists: is there someone halfway down, or not on the list at all, who should be near the top?

he routinely gets voted #1 most influential philosopher in polls of academic philosophers as well

The joke is, Wittgenstein is the two most influential philosophers of the twentieth century - first for the logical positivist movement inspired by Tractatus Logico Philisophicus, and secondly for the natural language analysis inspired by Philosphical Investigations.

Relative position within philosophy education is another matter. It's hard for any "new" philosopher to compete with two millennia of classics when those classics are still relevant to the state of the art - i.e. it's hard to displace Plato given that the pertinent aspects of the human condition haven't changed since he wrote about them.

Agreed. I wondered who on earth he's been talking to. At my alma mater, a little liberal arts school with a continentally-inclined philosophy department, somewhere amid all the Heidegger and Derrida I still was taught that Wittgenstein was a BFD.

Heidegger and Wittgenstein may have more in common than the year of birth.

According to the OP's metric, Wittgenstein could be very influential and yet still be undervalued.

I kind of agree with OP here. Most people know of Wittgenstein as this impenetrable weirdo who stressed the importance of language to defining philosophical concepts, and then they move on from that. But if people really got what Wittgenstein was saying, it would bring a lot of philosophical debates to a screeching halt.

Sometimes I think of Wittgenstein as the guy who beat philosophy's final bosses.

Wittgenstein is the guy who got fired as a schoolteacher for violence against his students, and threatened a philosopher with violence when he was losing an argument.

To be thought of merely as an eccentric is lucky for him, given his history. He was a thug.

Oh, I would not want Wittgenstein teaching any child of mine. He is one of the people who deserves to be called an Asperger's sufferer. He could be roused to fury if something wasn't up to his exacting intellectual standards. When he was an architect he once had workmen raise a ceiling by 30 mm (a little more than an inch) so the dimensions of the room could be perfect. There's something about his life, which I think many on this board could identify with -- he was at once extremely proud of his mind, but also aware that he was a victim of his own relentless obsessions.

This is why it's almost heroic how, through rigorous, dedicated adherence to philosophizing, he was able to show that philosophizing was not everything.

"A philosopher is a man who has to cure many intellectual diseases in himself before he can arrive at the notions of common sense." (LW, 1944)

This. Exactly this. I couldn't have said it better.

I'd be interested to see a list of the best philosophy books for non-philosophers. I'm not a philosopher or close to the field, but I always thought Thomas Nagel's Mortal Questions was a big hitter. Not so much for an individual essay but the combination of essays - What Is it Like to be a Bat? and The Absurd are both classics in my mind. Basically every essay in that short book is great, completely understandable to the lay-person, has the potential to be deeply influential to one's everyday beliefs, and is philosophically rigorous.

Philosophical Investigations is beyond my ability to follow as is Heidegger (I think it's a common complain against continental philosophy in general). Kripke's Naming and Necessity is something I can understand, but I don't really feel the 'oomph' to the insight that there can be a posteriori necessary truths and apriori contingent truths. Obviously it's a deeply important fact, and an astonishing breakthrough. But it doesn't hit me in the same way as Nagel's Absurd, which attempts to break down and dismiss existential dread. I don't think he succeeds, exactly, but it feels important and deeply insightful.

If you enjoyed Nagel, pick up 'The Mind's I', an anthology edited by Douglas Hofstadter, which includes a few of Nagel's essays and many others of value. If you're interested in things like crime and punishment, Leo Katz has written several highly accessible books on moral philosophy and law, though his arguments sometimes trike me as glib. Reading Plato, especially the dialogs of Socrates, can be a little indigestible at first, because he takes a long time to get to the point. but there's a reason that Whitehead said most philosophy consists of 'footnotes to Plato'; once you get used to the style you'll find the weighty matters leavened with a surprising amount of dry humor.

Since you mention Hofstadter, I simply have to bring up Godel, Escher, Bach. Especially for anyone who's interested in computers and artificial intelligence, this is a must read. It is brimming over with philosophical issues, and is very accessible even to someone without any previous exposure to philosophy.

I'd also recommend "The Cyberiad" by Stanislaw Lem. It's an anthology of hilarious science fiction stories, many of which deal with deep philosophical themes. Also, along those lines is Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy trilogy, which is also hilarious and very philosophical.

These aren't exactly the first books most people think of when asked for intro to philosophy books, but I think books like these are quite perfect as very easy, gentle, funny and fun intros to many philosophical themes. Their humor and wit also put the vast majority of "real" philosophy books to shame.

A colleague of mine with a background in semiotics recently read Godel, Escher, Bach, and said it was, among other things, to his surprise a good introduction to something very similar to semiotics, but independently derived by Hofstadter from first principles.

If you enjoyed Nagel, pick up 'The Mind's I', an anthology edited by Douglas Hofstadter

Edited by Douglas Hofstadter & Daniel Dennett you mean ;-)

Daniel Dennett's philosophical writings on consciousness/AI and religion are also very approachable. His "Intentional Stance" is a classic IMHO. I've not read all of his later stuff - but Consciousness Explained is also very good.

(His four Fs definition of life always cracks me up - fight, flee, feed, and... mating...),

I actually enjoyed the "... for Beginners" series of philosophy intros that come in the format of comics. I think they're a great way to get introduced to some of the basic concepts.

They're really easy to digest, really quick, easy, fun reads. Highly recommended.

Another good way to ease in to the subject are the "Philosophy of Watchmen", "Philosophy of Batman", "Philosophy through Science Fiction" types of books. If you have an interest in any comic or fiction genre, there's probably a "Philosophy of ..." book written about it. See if you can find it, as having that connection will help you to relate and understand the underlying philosophical ideas (which can often seem way too abstract when presented on their own).

As for primary sources, I'd recommend reading Nietzsche and Plato. Nietzsche especially is probably the greatest writer philosophy has ever produced, by far. So reading his work is not the chore that the work of most other philosophers is. He also deals with very visceral, real issues that tend to really speak to people (unlike, say, most of the analytics who tend to love building abstract little logic or language puzzles to play with, which tend to leave most people cold).

Plato isn't as good a writer as Nietzsche, but his work does make for a pretty easy read, and the issues he deals with are also quite relevant and understandable for people just starting to dip their toes in to the wide sea of philosophy.

I recommend Nigel Warburton's "Philosophy: Basic Readings". It's a collection of short selections and essays (5-30 pages each) from different philosophers, writers, political activists, and more. Every essay contains some interesting core idea, which you can use as a springboard to explore the subject or writer in more detail. There is very little philosophical lingo (at least relative to a typical full philosophy text).

I thought "The Story of Philosophy" was a readable roundup (rigorous doesn't really come to mind) ... written in 1926 so the ancients through 19th century, no Wittgenstein ... but the fact that it's still in print tells you something.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Story-Philosophy-Opinions-Philosop...

The article's description is way off. "Ironically for a book ignored by most philosophers, it contains the answers to a lot of their questions, and the method for answering all of them." As you say, he is among the most influential 20th century philosophers. Besides that, his praise of Wittgenstein's method is hyperbolic.

I'll pipe up for Impro. One of my favorite books. Well, the first half is – it's a meditation on life and the universe as much as it is about theater, and it changed my mind in some cool ways. It's useful for anyone doing creative work, especially collaborative creative work, definitely including programmers. It's also very funny. The second half is about mask work and trance, which I was expecting to be fascinating, but it fell short of the sparkling magic of the first half. The material isn't as generally accessible and probably depends more on knowing how they use masks in production. Johnstone says that the masks have their own personalities, which actors take on when they wear them, and that's probably why he relies on them so much. His tastes in theater run away from personal expression toward simple universals. He's always telling actors to be more boring, and that the worst thing you can do is try to be interesting or clever.

Johnstone lives in my town in Western Canada. I ran into him in Safeway once. He's very tall and his eyes go in two different directions so he looks down at you rather quizzically from two different angles with his head tilted like a bird. I told him I loved his book, and he grunted "Good" and turned around and walked away. A few paces later he yelled "I'm glad it's useful!" and then went out of sight.

He's probably a genius. He was known in the London theatre scene of the 1950s, but felt stifled because he couldn't try whatever ideas he wanted without worrying what somebody famous would think. Then he went to teach at some remote place on Vancouver Island and discovered that he could think and do whatever he wanted. He liked that so much that he got a position in my town and stayed there permanently, presumably because there was nobody there who mattered!

This is awesome. Although such a shame he's in Canada, because now I can't meet him. He sounds brilliant.

You can meet people in Canada :)

I don't know if he's still doing it but a few years ago my wife took a workshop with him called "Ten Days with Keith". She loved it, and him. But it took a few days. He is an odd duck whose brilliance is not immediately apparent. Pretty amazing to be around someone who can tell stories about Beckett and Pinter though.

I think of Johnstone as in the spirit of Lao Tzu. He is all about the unplanned and unthought. And about creating conditions favorable to its arising.

A lot of great books, but it's unclear to me that most of these are actually "undervalued." Check out the blurb on the back cover of Philosophical Investigations, for example:

Immediately upon its posthumous publication in 1953, Ludwig Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations was hailed as a masterpiece, and the ensuing years have confirmed this initial assessment. Today it is widely acknowledged to be the single most important philosophical work of the twentieth century.

Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain has had a huge impact. From Amazon: "Translated into more than seventeen languages, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain is the world's most widely used drawing instruction book."

Same with The Inner Game of Tennis -- it was groundbreaking when it came out in 1972 and had a huge impact not just on tennis, or even sports generally, but on musicians, artists, performers, or anything with a critical mental game. Back when I was working on my music degree it was required reading.

Is it possible that the author thinks these books are undervalued simply because many of them were released a while ago (when he was young or not yet born) and thus they aren't currently being hyped and/or in the limelight? That, or perhaps they're simply not that popular within the author's social circle?

If it weren't for Hacker News, I would not have heard of Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, which I'm currently reading. I had also never heard of The Inner Game of Tennis despite playing tennis for four years in high school.

To your point, some of the books were hugely successful when released, but don't receive much attention today due to the newer books in the spotlight. We all live in different worlds so some books will be wildly popular to some groups and foreign to others.

Inner Game of Tennis is still ranked ranked among the top 1000 books on Amazon, and it's #1 in 3 categories. Impro is not much behind on the sales rank, so I'm guessing still quite a few people buy it. If you ever take an improv class, your teacher will most likely recommend it.

+1 for Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. It's superb.

I'd add A Pattern Language to the list. It's actually been very appropriately valued by the programming community, but massively undervalued by its intended audience of architects and urban planners. Should've been the architecture and planning book of the 20th century; instead most design professionals have never heard of it. Their loss!

A Pattern Language is often a required text for at least one studio course in US architectural schools. There are, however, practical issues with Alexander's approach at a professional level. Some are perhaps subtle to a layperson - most architectural projects are typically driven by the client's commercial concerns, e.g. a firehouse apparatus bay is designed for trucks not human habitation and a restaurant is designed to turn over customers not cause them to linger for six hours. On the other hand, some are obvious - planners do not have the ability to limit existing communities to a few thousand people.

This isn't to say that Alexander cannot inform a design. In fact, many architects look at his work during the process. But the kind of project which will look like the images in his book is rare simply because many of these patterns are best implemented "at run-time" by the user, rather than at "compile time" by the architect or planner.

Finally, I would say that what the programming community got from A Pattern Language is not Christopher Alexander, but Richard P. Gabriel. [http://www.dreamsongs.com/]

I've had this conversation with architects and city planners and they all say this. Only a narrow band of the patterns are in the architect's area of practice; as an obvious example, the architect does not organize the whole world at once a la Pattern 1. Most of an architect's income depends on perpetuating the poor design of modern communities with each individual building. There is just no money in refusing to build anything but a useful space except when being commissioned by an eccentric or some other rare project. That leaves only the arrangement of the interiors which is hampered by code and depends on the taste of the building's occupier in respect to the uses of rooms and selection of furniture. Alexander's patterns must be adopted by the occupiers of buildings so they can work their way backwards to the architects and city planners that don't or won't consider them.

"I've had this conversation with architects and city planners and they all say this."

Now you are having a conversation with one who isn't.

The analogy between architectural patterns and software patterns is more akin to the way in which software patterns are not relevant to an application programmer in regards to the structure of black boxes such as third party libraries or the OS kernel. Architectural design depends on OPM (other people's money) to execute.

Urban planning not writing a web app. It's maintaining legacy spaghetti code in within an institution with entrenched interests. Brasilias only come along every hundred years or so, and your average joe doesn't get appointed. But just about every one of the major urban planning patterns is standard consideration in most contemporary municipal planning departments [in the US]. Politics and money of course tend to have an influence over outcomes, of course.

On the architectural side, a lot of A Pattern Language is not directly applicable to most architectural commissions because it is focused on domestic architecture rather than commercial. Banks don't offer a place to apply, "The couple's realm."

Incidentally, complaining about the impact of building codes has probably been going on for nearly FOUR millennia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_of_Hammurabi

Yes, I agree with you. I actually didn't have software in mind when I wrote my post, but the differences you note are important.

Planning is indeed a mess. However, there are 'breaks' between 100-year plans and building-scale architecture such as neighborhood development, block-level revitalization projects, etc., which don't offer a greenfield opportunity but do allow a planner to make some important choices. Ideally, well-designed rooms would create an opportunity for homes, clusters of homes, streets, clusters of streets and business districts, and up and up. Obviously it is unlikely.

The reason it's unlikely is the patterns are so opposed to how things are done. You mention the bank. Commercial is actually addressed, but there is no place in Alexander for an isolated, cold, commercial bank branch that requires a commute for its employees. Alexander's vision for our work is too radical to happen right now.

I haven't read Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, but someone has uploaded a two hour long instructional video with Betty Edwards with the same title on YouTube, which might be of some interest. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ctkRwRDdajo

It's a good list for cherry-picking a couple reading ideas, but the amateur comments about philosophy weren't well-received by this individual.

> I find that it’s thoroughly undervalued by philosophers

Doing okay so far...

>though, who see it as an arcane and eccentric work of little value

Not so sure about that...the timing for Wittgenstein's work might've been unfortunate, given that people were starting to become infatuated with existentialism around the same time. That was as more of a pop-culture phenomenon than an academic fad though.

>it’s a difficult thing to read

Okay again...

>Ironically for a book ignored by most philosophers, it contains the answers to a lot of their questions, and the method for answering all of them.

Hrm, no. A lot of the questions concerning philosophy and the method for answering all of them?

I sincerely doubt any work that could described in such terms would be as obscure as he proposes. This borders on the illogic of conspiracy theorists believing they've found some secret truth.

A bizarre flash of irrationality in an otherwise great post.

Thanks.

You question whether it's really seen as that eccentric: I've actually corresponded with a bunch of UK philosophers about Wittgenstein, all of whom regard his earlier work as vaguely interesting if subsequently outmoded (a more or less accurate assessment) and his later work as eccentric and mostly irrelevant to serious philosophy (a totally wrong-headed assessment). I'm happy to send you email extracts if you still doubt that.

I should note that I studied philosophy here in the UK (at Oxford), so perhaps I'm biased towards the UK. But I think this applies to the US too: Wittgenstein sort-of influenced the American tradition via Rorty and Kripke, but he's still not central to modern American academic philosophy. Kripke got him totally wrong anyway, and Wittgenstein's only a piece of Rorty's outlook.

As to your last comment - what you seem to be saying is that this is highly improbable based on 'well if it's that good why doesn't everyone believe that' considerations. To which I'd respond: (a) it's not a totally obscure work. In fact, it's regarded as the main late Wittgenstein work. But (b) late Wittgenstein is totally undervalued by the mainstream of academic philosophy, mostly because (I think) he renders it irrelevant; and (c) you're better off actually reading the thing and deciding for yourself. Otherwise you become a sort of 'efficient market theorist' w.r.t. academia/books. Not a position I'd want to hold, personally.

>As far as I know, Wittgenstein sort-of influenced the American tradition via Rorty, but he's still not central to modern American academic philosophy.

Ahhh, you're coming from the perspective of an analytic philosopher. The part about the UK I can't really incorporate except to take your word for it. I've assumed they were independent of the "continental" zeitgeist.

I don't come from the analytic family of philosophy. I could never really get past Frege. OTOH, I don't care for the hippies on the other side of the fence either.

I'd be happy to peruse material/readings if you have any. I'll add my email address to my profile now.

Thank you for replying!

Ah interesting - are you a philosopher? What family of philosophy do you tend to focus on?

I let philosophy consume my life for a few years to the detriment of everything else.

I'm a values/ethics/aesthetic/desert/metaphysics nihilist with a keen interest in epistemology. Most recent relevant read I've enjoyed of late has been Popper and his work on falsifiability.

I've been trying to work through Marx recently too, but I find reading him to be a lot like reading Ayn Rand.

Insufferable and they expect you to swallow the bitter pill of their ridiculous foundations they use to prop up the philosophy they work backwards from their personal preferences to justify. I'm going to continue for the sake of trying to extract some sense of analysis with respect to Capitalism, but it's slow-going.

"I let philosophy consume my life for a few years to the detriment of everything else." - sounds like you'd love Wittgenstein. Haha.

Marx is WAY more interesting than Ayn Rand. Although you're probably better off reading Chomsky today. Popper is awesome.

> I've been trying to work through Marx recently too, but I find reading him to be a lot like reading Ayn Rand. > Insufferable and they expect you to swallow the bitter pill of their ridiculous foundations they use to prop up the philosophy they work backwards from their personal preferences to justify. I'm going to continue for the sake of trying to extract some sense of analysis with respect to Capitalism, but it's slow-going.

I'm sorry, but what on earth are you reading? Ayn Rand was a rambling novelist, while Marx' Capital is a brilliant work of economic analysis. Parts of it are completely outdated, and some predictions proved drastically false, but it's nonetheless got some brilliant insights at its core. If you happen to be reading The Communist Manifesto, it's a political pamphlet for agitation and not a work of philosophy.

I'm reading Das Kapital, not a pamphlet. Try to lend other people a little more intellectual credit than that.

With regards to Ayn Rand, in a similar spirit, I'm not talking about her crappy fiction work (which is similar in purpose to the Communist Manifesto), but rather her more deliberate and directly philosophical tracts.

Interestingly, as a result, I can only assume you committed the mistake you thought I did, judging the philosopher on the basis of their secondary output rather than the core subject matter.

I don't adhere to objectivism and I think they're fucking cultists, but I do know their philosophy well and the basis for it bears a lot of resemblance to how Marxism is grounded and justified philosophically speaking. Marxism is somewhat more empirical but not by much.

My perspective on the similarity of the bases of each may be colored by the fact that I come from a strongly skeptical and deconstructionist background.

In general, I'm willing to entertain a priori suggestions for the sake of exploring an interesting thought. An example would be that I'm willing to suspend disbelief long enough to discuss the subject of "desert" with a philosopher who isn't a nihilist if it leads to interesting conversation.

What I am not willing to do is suspend disbelief long enough to swallow an overarching socio-political theory on how the whole world should be run regardless of social context (Marxism and Objectivism) based on some ridiculous presumptions about truth and human nature.

Operators and Things, a (supposed) first-person account of a schizophrenic who recovered from the condition and wrote about her experience. The second half of the book is where it really shines, since the author attempts to analyze her experience as a window into the inner workings of her cognition: how it broke down, what she experienced when it did, how it recovered itself, and what led to it. Since the author is anonymous, and talking about one's mind is very introspective, it's hard to take away real science from the book but I found it fascinating nonetheless. While I really dislike pseudoscientific explanations of brain functioning, after reading this I took up the idea that the conscious mind is more of a time-slice scheduler and message-passer than where the actual computation is done. So concentration is about controlling your unconscious indirectly, like training a puppy how to play fetch: you give it suggestions of what to do, and ignore it when it doesn't do that :).

I'm linking to the Amazon page, but IIRC the book is old enough to be in the public domain and there is a free text version somewhere.

http://www.amazon.com/Operators-Things-Inner-Life-Schizophre...

For me, the most undervalued book is The Art of Worldly Wisdom by Baltasar Gracian y Morales.

It's a small book of very condensed and timeless wisdom in the form of maxims, written very poetically. It's not a self-help book, the kind you might picture. (any book is self-help in some way).

Perusing 5-10 maxims a day about 5 years ago heavily influenced the way I live my life, and still defines my character today.

Incredible book, I've reread it at least twice.

http://archive.org/details/artofworldlywisd00gracuoft

I had a very similar thought one year ago - for me one of the undervalued books back then was "How to win friends and influence people" by Dale Carnegie. The title was so smarmy and offputting for me (yeah, it's 70 years old...) that I skipped this gem for way too long, when it's basically everything you will ever need to deal with and manage people in a few hundred pages...

The interesting thing about Money Ball was that Billy Beane pioneered an analytic model for evaluating the true value vs subjectively perceived value of players.

This list was purely an opinion piece. It was the result of a subjective appraisal of both books, and the public opinion of them.

I'm quite disappointed.

I'm really curious how you would suggest to measure the "true value" of books.

I think there may be no such thing. Base ball is a clearly defined game with conditions for winning and losing, which gives you objective information on these true values.

But aesthetics (here book appreciation) simply isn't objective to begin with.

You can analyze the "true value" of books relative to whatever particular aims you have in mind. Just because there's nothing intrinsic to the books that specifies what those aims should be does not mean the effect of the books isn't in-principle measurable, and couldn't be judged for effectiveness once you have specified your goals.

You write "true value" and "whatever particular aims" in the same sentence. That seems like a contradiction to me.

I agree that you can define things to measure objectively about books. However, I submit that in the end judgment of quality will always remain a subjective matter.

It's not a contradiction at all. Remember that the original context was "Moneyball" - sussing out the "true value" of baseball players using statistics as opposed to basing decisions on less accurate gut (or social) assessments of value.

This use of "true" merely means "accurate" - corresponding with reality. The aims, in the case of baseball, are implicit, of course - the aim of any manager is to win games. In the case of books, people's aims will differ more. This means there's no single "true value" but for any given aim there will be some amount that book will contribute to it. This is usually hard to determine, but that doesn't make it subjective; it makes it that much more interesting if you are able to get at it.

> I'm really curious how you would suggest to measure the "true value" of books. ... Aesthetics (here book appreciation) simply isn't objective to begin with.

And this would be the crux of the problem. We have sales numbers (objective) and reviews (subjective). It is compounded that undervalued books will have fewer reviews to work with.

But the hardest part is that people are not good judges of these things. Or maybe they are, but they have different tastes than you do. So, to action!

1) You rate the top 100 books in amazon as high valued or not.

2) A scraper + statistics finds people who agree with you.

3) Looking at the bottom half of books, find those which your subset of people like.

4) Farm it out to netflix, since that is what they do anyway.

Value is always subjective. Beane's analytic model doesn't calculate value it defines a model for winning games and analyzes players based on the model.

6. ‘Principles‘ (pdf) by Ray Dalio.

Tried reading it. His life storey reads like an entrepreneur who started by trying to fit in (held several corporate jobs), failed (fired for insubordination) then started his own company.

The rest reads like a self-help book written by an amateur. Some gushing about physics and natural history (which a HBS graduate probably finds unfathomable and mysterious). Then some deep discussion of his own inner psyche; why do successful people assume its their own uniquness that made them succeed and not, for instance, market conditions or good advice?

Then I gave up. Is very wordy, very very wordy, and not many of the words worth slogging through. At least the part I saw.

Some gushing about physics and natural history (which a HBS graduate probably finds unfathomable and mysterious).

Yeah, cause all those HBS grads are just idiots, right? They could never fathom something as complex as physics or natural history. That's probably just black magic to them, even though a big chunk of them got their undergrad degrees in science or engineering.

EDIT: Some examples of those idiot HBS grads: http://www.hbs.edu/news/releases/kaplanfellows2010.html

Sorry; painted all business school grads from my experiences. You have some good examples there; I've never met those guys.

I'll repaint it: this guy (who wrote the book) was a high-school failure and not in your list. Just read his stuff if you can, to see his level of physics understanding.

A high school failure? It looks like he got a BA and then went to the best management school in the world and then became a billionaire. I'd like to be that kind of failure.

Maybe his understanding of physics is wrong. But maybe your understanding of the importance of that is wrong?

So, you judge a book about management principles by the CEO of a company not by how well he articulates those management principles or how true you think they are but by his level of physics and biological understanding.

No, because it reads like a self-help book written like an amateur.

You might want to skip the biographical part, if you don't find it relevant, and then come back and re-read it. Dalio's book describes the right attitude for handling criticism and describes a business environment built around questioning ideas.

None of that "trust your gut" and "we're a team, let's behave as a team" that many other business books preach - in Dalio's line of work mistakes are costly, and if he ran his company in the same manner some other companies are run (CEO provides the vision, everybody else just executes on it), he'd be out of business.

Agree! Just read up to page 38 and realized there wasn't a single insightful thing he'd said. It seems to be all about him and yes, it is very, very, very wordy and poorly formatted!

His use of "I" seemed to me he was trying hard not to declare some principle as unilaterally true but to say it is what he found to be true, in his experience.

"it is very, very, very wordy and poorly formatted!"

I guess that's why its undervalued.

There are some good bits. If you're a good problem solver you'll get what he's trying to say: "Have clear goals.

Identify and don’t tolerate the problems that stand in the way of achieving your goals. Accurately diagnose these problems.

Accurately diagnose these problems.

Design plans that explicitly lay out tasks that will get you around your problems and on to your goals.

Implement these plans—i.e., do these tasks."

You probably want to read the book if you want to manage people in a company like his; He later gives lots of tips on how to do it; The tips make a lot more sense if you understand his "principles", because its how they are derived.

I agree it was wordy, but it was only an hour or so read to read part 1 & 2 and beginning of 3, which he said was what you want to read if you didn't want to read all of it.

There was also some stuff about when to hire and fire people, and how to cultivate the people in your organisation.

"Ironically for a book ignored by most philosophers, it contains the answers to a lot of their questions, and the method for answering all of them."

I find this illuminating - philosopher's aren't concerned with answers. They are concerned with the questions. An interesting contrast between the scientific/engineering mindset and the philosophical mindset.

Very true, once you start understanding how to approach the right questions, the problem moves to the scientific domain, e.g. natural philosophy--> physics, philosophy of mind (partly) -->psychology/neuroscience/cognitive science, etc

It doesn't really contain answers so much as that it argues the questions or problems are really just puzzles resulting from confusions due to language.

Also see:

"Ask Slashdot: Most Underappreciated Sci-Fi Writer?"

http://www.ask.slashdot.org/story/12/08/08/2135246/ask-slash...

Slashdot has many problems, but this was actually a pretty interesting and informative thread.

Not sure where that "Slashdot has many problems" statement came from, but I enjoy Slashdot every bit as much as HN. Actually, I like /. more because there's a lot less shilling and gaming votes there.

There is? What about all those lengthy "first posts" published in the same minute as the story, which are curiously always advocating the same companies against others?

Though, I'm still not sure if it's shilling or subtle trolling.

Slashdot and HN are different flavors, I like them both but I find the harshness of Slashdot can be offputting sometimes. However often I see technical insights there that floor me.

Happily read your blog post but the assertions about Wittgenstein rang alarm bells. It may be that his works are ignored in the UK right now, but paraphrasing Brian Magee: "Philosophy is subject to fashion". So it may just be a question of trend in philosophy.

> it contains the answers to a lot of their questions, and the method for answering all of them.

For me that sounds like "Node.js contains the method to solving all programming problems.".

"I would say that this has been, unfortunately for philosophy, the central fact of philosophy. Most philosophical debates are not merely afflicted by but driven by confusions over words. Do we have free will? Depends what you mean by "free." Do abstract ideas exist? Depends what you mean by "exist."

Wittgenstein is popularly credited with the idea that most philosophical controversies are due to confusions over language. I'm not sure how much credit to give him. I suspect a lot of people realized this, but reacted simply by not studying philosophy, rather than becoming philosophy professors.

How did things get this way? Can something people have spent thousands of years studying really be a waste of time? Those are interesting questions. In fact, some of the most interesting questions you can ask about philosophy. The most valuable way to approach the current philosophical tradition may be neither to get lost in pointless speculations like Berkeley, nor to shut them down like Wittgenstein, but to study it as an example of reason gone wrong." - PG

Not an appeal to authority, mind you, just a way of saving myself time.

There's an interesting book called After Virtue by Alasdair MacIntyre that does a good job of going through how these confusions over language arise. I haven't read it for years, but I liked how it explained how and why the language of philosophy has changed over the centuries.

That's a very good and relevant quote, thank you!

It's a bit of a mistake to classify Wittgenstein as a philosophy professor.

He studied aeronautics originally - bleeding edge in 1908 just after the Wright brothers flight - to the point of starting a Phd as well as holding a patent, and only then became interested mathematics and logic. It was as a soldier in the Austro-Hungarian army that he wrote Tractatus not cloistered in Cambridge. He then worked as a rural elementary school teacher and architect (he was friends with Adolf Loos, and his family had been patrons of the Secessionist movement).

He only began teaching at Cambridge when he was 40, and was not a professor until he was 50.

+1 for Stephen Booth. I was fortunate enough to take his 17th century English poetry class at Cal. He's the only lecturer who could make poetry resonate with my geek brain.

It's funny how some classes stay with you over the years.

Wow, you took his class - that's incredible!

Do you have any class notes / resources you could share? I love the guy.

What was he like as a teacher / in person?

He was very smart, and his lectures were a lot of fun. What made him a great poetry teacher was that he didn't care about what poems "mean"; what mattered was the effect they had on the reader.

I can't tell you how liberating this was. For years I had felt that I just didn't understand poetry, but Prof. Booth told us that poems are just candy for the mind. All the rest is just pretense. And he meant it too.

The final paper was a eight-page analysis of the last four lines of Paradise Lost. So you'd take the phrase, "The world was all before them," and you'd see that this line suggests several meaning to the reader. E.g., the world (God's creation) was complete before Adam and Eve; or that the world (the entirety of human history) was in front of Adam and Eve; etc.

More than anything, he taught poetry as a kind of game. It was so much fun.

The last class was truly great--he did a close reading of the children's book Go, Dog. Go!. So entertaining. Sadly I don't have my notes anymore, but you should search for other people's write-ups of the Go, Dog. Go! lecture online. It's honestly one of the top five lectures I've ever seen.

This post made me happily spend ~$100.

Quick tip for anyone trying to get older editions of some of these books: use Abebooks

For example, some of the drawing on the right reviews mention that the 1989 edition is better. I find this happens with many new editions of older books.

You can find near good as new editions of older books on Abebooks, at very reasonable prices. I used it to get a great copy of SICP, and just now ordered a version of How To Win Friends And Influence People published during Dale Carnegie's life, as Paul Graham recommended.

I'm glad - hope you enjoy them!

I've read Impro and it's a great book.

There is another book that I want to recommend to other Hacker News readers and that is 'Language in Thought and Action' by S.I. Hiyakawa[0]. Honestly, reading that changed my life.

[0] http://www.amazon.com/Language-Thought-Action-Fifth-Edition/...

The Inner Game of Tennis is very widely read among classical musicians. Probably other types of performers as well.

I don't think a typical sampling of the HN crowd would be familiar with the work of J.D Salinger outside of Catcher and the Rye, but as someone who's loved these stories intensely since my mid-teens, I can't recommend them enough. In fact the mere mention of Seymour: An Introduction in the article sent shivers down my spine, reminding me of the amazing originality and artistry of this writer that I haven't experienced for several years now (I very rarely read fiction now). I won't bother summarizing the stories here, but if you have even a passing interest in zen, religion, literature or (at the risk of sounding pretentious) life itself then this is required reading in my book.

Yeah, this is exactly how I feel about the book. It's a shame you've stopped reading fiction - why is that?

The book "Mastery" by George Leonard is a distilled version of "The Inner Game of Tennis." Highly recommended, and it can be had for a few bucks shipped on Amazon.

I have read Impro and found it quite good yet can't remember anything related to newtonian mechanics... but I wanted to read it again anyway :)

I think he was saying that there are certain things that once you learn them, they change how you view the world. For him, Newtonian Mechanics and Calculus both did this as well as the knowledge he gained from Impro. Not that Impro had anything to do with Newtonian Mechanics.

oh, that makes sense :)

Baseball is largely zero sum. Reading isn't. Finding good books regardless of reputation is the way to go. But knowing what is good is hard, so you should trust persona recommendations first and ten reputation.

why is baseball zero sum? it's like rounders isn't it? so how does one side getting round (or whatever it's called in baseball) mean that the other team cannot? does the sum of the scores of the two sides always sum to the same value? i imagine not. so what an odd thing to assert. why?

For a team the score for a single game in meaningless it's simply win/loss.

Think of it like this. If simply increasing the score was of value teams could simply walk the first 3 batters each inning. I mean it's within the rules and just think how much more exciting the game would be if each inning started with bases loaded.

oh, ok, sure (sorry).

In a baseball league the only way for one team to do better is for other teams to do worse. This means that as a baseball manager trying to buy players (in what's pretty much an auction), knowing who the best players are is actually quite unimportant, because top players generally command top prices. What you look for are the players who are undervalued by the other teams, so that you can get them cheaper than they're worth.

This really isn't the case for books, because they're generally sold at a fixed price and if there's high demand they'll just print more of them. So it's a lot more reasonable to just look for the best books and read them.

2 thoughts - "under appreciated" is a better way of thinking of it. And, there's no accounting for taste.

'The Olduvai imperative'. Especially the introduction and the first couple of chapters.

I will add:

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values by Robert M. Pirsig

This book is pretty well known. However the sequel to it "Lila" is IMHO better and really undervalued.

+1 for Wittgenstein

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