Comment by TriinT | Hacker News Reader

Comment by TriinT | Hacker News Reader

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IMHO, this list contains only BS books. Tim Ferriss? Seth Godin? Malcolm Gladwell? Please. This is a list for those who need self-help and "motivation" books. Only exception is Livingston's F@W. The rest is pretty much junk.

Please allow me to write down my personal list for those who love to learn:

- The Art of Computer Programming

- Algorithms (by Dasgupta, Papadimitriou, and Vazirani)

- Algorithm Design (by Kleinberg and Tardos)

- Feynman Lectures on Physics

- Landau & Lifschitz's series

- Vladimir Arnold's books on ODEs and Classical Mechanics

- Winning Ways for your Mathematical Plays (by Berlekamp et al.)

- Elements of Information Theory (by Cover & Thomas)

- Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithms (by MacKay)

- Network Optimization (by Bertsekas)

- Convex Optimization (by Boyd & Vandenberghe)

- Nonlinear Control Systems (by Isidori)

- Visual Complex Analysis (by Needham)

- Lasers (by Siegman)

- Game Theory (by Fudenberg & Tirole)

- Trading and Exchanges (by Harris)

Plus a bunch of books on Classical Mechanics, Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Differential Geometry, Real Analysis, Algebra, Theoretical CS, Chemistry, Biochemistry, Cellular Biology, Evolution, Game Theory, Mechanism Design, Auction Theory, Economics, Finance, etc. That would be a reading list worth considering! It would also take a lifetime to read all the books...

With all due respect, what are 99 percent of people gaining from a book on, say, convex optimization? Yes, these are great choices if you're looking to become an expert on, say, physics. But not everyone is a physicist, nor does everyone need to be.

The point of the books on that list is that they are applicable to _many_ situations. You're not going to get oodles of "hard knowledge" from them, and I think people who go into them with that expectation are setting themselves up for disappointment.

Rather, they present some anecdotes -- some interesting, and some not -- and say "Okay, now think about these, and see if any of them can affect the way you do things." If you read a business book and don't bother to do the thinking/applying afterwards, you are, indeed, wasting your time.

The books on your list are ones that you go through, finish (though honestly, if you're just reading those books cover to cover and enjoying yourself, you're a better person than me... I'd use them as a reference at best) and can say "okay, I've learned something." The books on the original article's list are ones where once you've finished the book, you've only started learning.

"With all due respect, what are 99 percent of people gaining from a book on, say, convex optimization?"

The headline doesn't say "reading list for 99% of people." It says "Highly recommended reading list for those who love to learn." If you love to learn, then (I haven't read the book, so grain of salt) you're getting a well-written introduction to an interesting field of study.

Most of those books are from the Jibber Jabber industry with a couple exceptions, perhaps "Don't Make Me Think." I agree with another commenter that the title is about books for those who love learning not books that would be applicable to many situations if you what you need are vacuous anecdotes. Vacuous anecdotes don't build bridges, solve concurrency problems, enrich anyone's philosophical depth or anything like that.

You have some good points, but many of those books on that list help people learn to truly think deeply, not just read and briefly consider anecdotes. It is that deep, rigorous, logical thought that is valuable to virtually everyone (and certainly everyone who claims to love to learn) that is more important than the contents of those books.

Also, some of them (game theory in particular) are broadly applicable to and by most people who put the time and effort in to properly learning them.

"With all due respect, what are 99 percent of people gaining from a book on, say, convex optimization? Yes, these are great choices if you're looking to become an expert on, say, physics. But not everyone is a physicist, nor does everyone need to be."

Convex Optimization for physicists??? Whaaaat? OK, consider Game Theory, Machine Learning, Operations Research. All have practical value and all require optimization. In fact, Machine Learning is mostly applied optimization theory. The Simplex algorithm is used all the time, in the most various industries. Yet once again, the need to know a bit of optimization theory is made evident.

Physicists don't really require the kind of optimization on Boyd's book. Unless one is an experimental physicist and needs to analyze data sets. Theoretical physicists usually work with infinite-dimensional optimization, i.e., variational analysis. I entirely agree that not everyone is a physicist, nor does everyone need to be... but picking Convex Optimization as an example was a poor choice.

The list is my personal list. It's a personal thing, and as such, it is non-transmissible. I am not trying to preach. I couldn't care less if the masses read junk...

Convex optimization is a standard tool for theoretical physicists doing quantum information and quantum computing. And B & V is the standard reference.

(Don't want to engage in the main debate, but I think this is an interesting tidbit of information. It's an example where a part of mathematics has recently become useful in an unexpected way.)

This is why I love Hacker News. Where else could I expect tp see this sort of debate in the course of casual browsing?

(well, maybe Metafilter, but I'd have to pony up $5 to leave a comment)

Sometimes I wonder the case is when we meet any new problem, we first try to fit it into any existing framework in order to understand it, until the framework is broken.

This doesn't debase the beauty of math. But I just feel maybe we just need an excuse to fund mathematicians.

Wow! I didn't know that! Thanks for the info. I know nothing on QIT / QC, but it's interesting and intriguing to see finite-dimensional optimization being used by physics people.

In Derek's defense, several of the books he listed do have specific, harder knowledge, such as "Predictably Irrational" (written for the lay person, but cites many high quality studies), "Stumbling on Happiness" (same, covers much good research), "The Innovator's Solution", which contains a lot of high quality thought about how industries change, Bernstein's "The Four Pillars of Investing" (again, backed by good financial theory), and "Fooled by Randomness" (less original than it proclaims, but its fundamental perspective of the outcome of chaotic processes is useful for people not familiar with stats).

Yes, there are fluff books in there (Gladwell, Godin, etc) but you seem to be dismissing a lot of quality work just because you feel everyone should be reading hard theoretical material.

However, I do agree that it's easy to read only books such as those on Sivers' list and ignore those on your list, which is a mistake. A mix is healthy.

"Innovator's Solution" is okay, but Christensen's first one "The Innovator's Dilemma" was better. Also Surowiecki's "Wisdom of Crowds" provides a better survey of the field than any of the more technical books I've read.

Thanks for the pointer -- I hadn't read Dilemma yet, thinking it contained much the same as the later Solution, but you've given me reason to read it.

I enjoyed Surowiecki as well.

This seems to be a trend in our society. Hard knowledge is too often considered secondary to "metaknowledge": motivation, time management, self-help (like Billy Connolly said, it's not self-help if someone else wrote the book to help you, it's just help).

Or maybe this was just a ploy by OP to squeeze some money out of that Amazon Associates Program ;)

I don't think the OP is in need of money, at least the few coins you get from Amazon programs:

http://www.hypebot.com/hypebot/2008/10/derek-sivers-go.html

While I agree with your opinion of the submitted list, I feel your list is a bit unbalanced. Why only math, science and economics?

A few random suggestions:

Meditations by Marcus Aurelius

http://classics.mit.edu/Antoninus/meditations.html

How to Read a Book by Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren

http://www.amazon.com/How-Read-Book-Touchstone-book/dp/06712...

Building a Bridge to the 18th Century by Neil Postman

http://www.amazon.com/Building-Bridge-18th-Century-Improve/d...

It's interesting that he read all the books on his list (he has notes about each one) and was still a success. Most of the people I know who have reading lists like this are a personal and professional mess.

On the other hand, I've never met any rich person with a reading list like yours, but quite a few of my professors had bookshelves like that. Whether or not they actually read any of those books I'll never know. I know I've never gotten through more than about 50 pages of The Art of Computer Programming.

My first boss (who was pretty good in forth hacking) told me not to spend too much time to read Knuth's books. He said those books are great, but people who read them tends to not able to write great programs. He advised me to try to finish some stuffs that works and learn from it.

I thought he was joking. but later I know any one can learn a lot when doing a significant project of his/her own! In reality. Knuth had to learn to program computers by himself then because few was programming computers then, he can only rely on his own mind, logic and experiment to write better programs and later he tried to summarize what he had learned in "textbook" and deliver them to us, and we know most of time, it takes more text to say it clear than do it.

Of course Knuth is not ignorant of fundamental stuffs. But probably the only way to gain knowledge in any unknown territory is to explore them directly. It maybe dangerous but it is the only way.

I like to think of them as a reference book collection. Reading them cover to cover is probably not a good investment of time.

Most of the people I know who have reading lists like this are a personal and professional mess.

Yes, but they read those books, because they are a mess. They aren't a mess because of reading those books... I hope.

I am intensely curious about your point. Is it that you think reading is a not-terribly-productive use of effort, or do you take issue with the specific books? If it's the latter, which books do you recommend?

I agree with you about several of those books, but The Paradox of Choice - Why More is Less - by Barry Schwartz, was excellent. His work at Swarthmore was far from "junk".

Here's a link to his TED talk on the subject: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/barry_schwartz_on_the_par...

MacKay's side by side table comparing his book with Harry Potter made me laugh out loud just now:

http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/mackay/itila/Potter.html

He makes a pretty good case that his is the better textbook.

For an academic, MacKay seems to have a great sense of humor :)

A great list for the hardcore scientist or mathematician, but I'm not sure about the value of (say) Convex Optimization for a wider audience :)

I find the Economist book reviews (or if you're pressed for time, their end-of-year roundup) a great balance of accessibility and intellectual depth.

I agree. It is my personal list, and I make no claims that the list is suitable to other people, let alone to a wider audience.

However, I believe that not all of these books are for the hardcore mathematician / scientist. For example, I think everyone would benefit from reading Fudenberg & Tirole's book on Game Theory, which allows one to understand strategic interactions (which are abundant in Economics and Public and Foreign Policy, for instance). Moreover, the Simplex algorithm is used by many people who don't know how the algorithm works or why. A couple of chapters of Convex Optimization would be educational.

Both the OPs list and your list, and everyone else’s list for that matter seem, for lack of a better term, white collar.

What about books not for the academic but for the eminently practical? Books on gardening, needlecraft, cooking or auto mechanics, for example? Do people who work with their hands not like to learn? Or do they just not hang out at HN?

For each, his own. I like working with my hands. Personally, I am into carpentry. It's relaxing and I like to see stuff being build. It just happens that carpentry is learned by doing (especially from someone who knows more), not by reading. Science and Math is fun. Building stuff is also fun. I see no contradiction...

Certainly there are carpenters out there who like to read (I'm a librarian and connect people with materials on their hobbies often), but perhaps gardening is a better example. Much more suited to study about planting, pest control, etc. I am certainly a gardener who reads extensively on the subject.

My observation is more directed at the fact that, as a group, "learning" seems to involve math, science and, to a lesser extent, philosophy, economics or psychology. It does not involve "trades" or "crafts". But perhaps it is as you say and those topics just are not interesting to read about.

My reading list is biased towards the "why". Funny that I left out the "how" and only noticed it now. I have read a bit on carpentry, but like I said before arts & crafts can be learned from someone who knows more, in a sort of master and apprentice relationship. This is fun because learning carpentry can then be a social experience as well. It provides a good balance to, say, Math or Theoretical Physics, which require endless hours of reading and solitude.

I'd add

Conjectures and Refutations (Karl Popper)

The Fabric of Reality (David Deutsch)

Also Feynman has some shorter/easier but serious physics books that some might prefer: QED and The Character of Physical Law. And his computation lectures book is good.

Don't read Popper without also reading 'The Structure of Scientific Revolutions' by Thomas Kuhn and 'Against Method' by Paul Feyerabend. Those critiques of Popper put his philosophy in a much clearer light. Both contain extremely pertinent historical facts about the Galilean, Newtonian and Einsteinian revolutions.

You can find a criticism of _The Structure of Scientific Revolutions_ in _The Fabric of Reality_. I think that book is (significantly but not entirely) mistaken. One reason is the book can be seen as offering historical laws like Marx, which certainly aren't laws of physics, and don't follow from the laws of physics, and aren't scientific, and have no good reason that they must always be the case in all cultures. BTW Popper criticizes historical laws in _The Poverty of Historicism_ as well as more briefly in other books including C&R.

This is something of a side note in any case. tSoSR says people are prejudiced and emphasized new generations of people as important to progress. Popper mostly talks about how knowledge is created, not who creates it. So, his focus is different, and less psychological. If only the younger people are creating knowledge, that's perfectly compatible with most of what Popper says about how (anyone) can create knowledge (via fallible, tentative guesses, and criticism and subjecting ideas to severe tests).

I just finished The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and I have to agree, it's excellent on its own and it gives context to Popper. I haven't read Against Method yet, but it looks fascinating.

Kuhn scored a hit because he provided the first major challenge to positivism/empiricism/logical empiricism that people in the US noticed. However the question has to be asked, what was really new, true and what actually represented a criticism of Popper?

I don't know enough about the field to know how much of Kuhn's research was truly new, but the book is meritorious solely because it gained such widespread recognition both in and out of the scientific community. The previous challenges to Popper's falsifiability (if there were any) failed to launch.

A previous challenge to Popper's falsifiability was justificationism (of which induction is a major variety). This did not fail to launch, it was hugely influential since around Aristotle and remains influential today. (Popper says we should prefer theories that can be better tested and possibly falsified. Justificationism says we should prefer theories that are better justified, e.g. by inductive support.)

Could you give more detail about how you see Kuhn challenging falsifiability?

Justificationism doesn't even have its own Wikipedia page, what more do I need to say :) I know, inductive reasoning does. My point is just that regardless of what other challenges to Popper are out there, Kuhns' is possibly the most well known.

As far as details on how Kuhn challenges Popper, I'd recommend you read The Structure of Scientific Revolutions to find out--specifically chapter 8 where he addresses falsification and chapter 12 where he mentions Popper by name. Popper is also mentioned in the postscript.

In chapter 12 Kuhn mistakenly says that Popper is seeking falsifications that necessitate the rejection of a theory. He then points out that falsifications are imperfect, so that is problematic. That criticism would be correct, but Popper is not seeking to necessitate the rejection of any theory. Popper is a fallibilist who does not seek perfect or final falsifications, nor does he seek to justify or prove falsifications. So in short, Kuhn says there are certain difficulties, which he is correct about, and he says Popper's theory faces them, which he has wrong on account of misunderstanding Popper's theory. BTW Popper was aware of the same difficulties Kuhn brings up, and sometimes uses them in his arguments (they are not problematic for Popper's conjectural knowledge approach, but they are problematic for many other approaches).

In the postscript section 5, Kuhn says communication is always partial, so in a debate we can never prove the other guy is wrong in a way he must accept. This is the same sort of thing as before, and it is basically correct, but Popper is aware of it and his theories are compatible with it. One way Popper and Kuhn do contradict in this arena is about how valuable partial communication is. Kuhn is pessimistic about partial communication across paradigms, but Popper is more optimistic and says by an effort we can learn from each other even across paradigms/cultures/frameworks (see Popper's _The Myth of the Framework_, title essay).

I looked through ch8 also, but didn't spot any criticism of Popper's falsificationism. If you are still convinced it is there, please explain it in your own words or site specific paragraphs.

PS regarding justificationism, the prevailing idea of knowledge is that it is justified true belief. This can be found in the dictionary or any intro philosophy textbook.

PPS It is unfortunate that PG's nested thread rate limiting is hiding the reply link on this comment. I think this is a perfectly good, respectful thread. So it's collateral damage? :(

Deutsch's The Fabric of Reality is cool. I prefer Greene's The Elegant Universe, though.

Aside from Founders at Work, how many of the others that you're calling BS and junk have you read?

Actually, I have read a bunch of them. They're good airport reads. I can't read Feynman during a flight with the babies crying and the roar of the engines, but I can read Godin, Taleb, etc for entertainment. Those books teach nothing deep, but I never said they didn't have entertaining value. Fluffy, non-nutritious, yet entertaining...

I would also add "Don't Make Me Think" to the non-junk list. Great book about web usability.

That's interesting, because I liked a bunch on the original list but I'd probably consider most of the books you listed to be junk. To me this looks like the kind of list you'd put together if you wanted to look intelligent, but weren't actually intellectually curious. The only common thread among the books you've listed is that they're all hard to understand, but the questions most of them answer are rather banal.

My good sir, if you do think Feynman, Knuth, Cover, Isidori, etc are junk, then you are a monster. What you have just said is equivalent to saying that van Gogh's works are just boring blobs of paint, or that Lord Byron didn't know how to write.

These books are the finest examples of condensed knowledge mankind has ever been able to produce. Sure, they are VERY hard to read, but 1000s and 1000s of years of accumulated scientific and intellectual progress should not be easy to absorb. These books are enough for a lifetime of reading.

My list of books will still be relevant in 1000 years, while the OP's reading list will be worthless in less than a 100 years. Deep knowledge does not get stale. Don't you see the common thread among the books I have listed? Here it is: they are all "bibles" in their respective fields.

"My list of books will still be relevant in 1000 years, while the OP's reading list will be worthless in less than a 100 years. Deep knowledge does not get stale. Don't you see the common thread among the books I have listed? Here it is: they are all "bibles" in their respective fields."

I guess to me the worth-readingness of a book comes from the quality of the questions it asks rather than from the finishedness of the answers. If you actually spent a lifetime reading those books I don't think you'd really get any closer to understanding the core of the human experience.

Book from the Sivers list's question: "How to create maximum profit with minimal effort" (Mark Joyner, the Great Formula)

Book from TriinT's list's question: "What is the nature of reality, and how does it work?" (Feynman lectures of physics)

Surely, we can all agree the second question is more interesting.

"If you actually spent a lifetime reading those books I don't think you'd really get any closer to understanding the core of the human experience."

True. But I might understand Nature herself. I would like to have a solid grasp of the basics of Physics, Chemistry and Math before I get to 40.

Human experience is better understood through literature and art. It's not "deep knowledge" because it's too personal (as opposed to universal), but that does not mean it does not lead to deep thinking.

Ah, blow me (and I say that in the friendliest way possible :). I'm of the personal (key word) opinion that Vonnegut NEEDS to be on anybody's learning list. The point, however, is that people who love to learn need nothing more than a heightened sense of curiosity, not some bullshit reading list that attempts to validate how smart they are.

I read Vonnegut, too. I don't think I have learned anything "deep" from his books, but I love them nonetheless. Art is art. Science is science. Both are needed.

Vonnegut is light reading that leads to deep thinking.

Doesn't teach anything deep, but can put your mental gears in motion quite well.

>Only exception is Livingston's F@W

So you've read (even a review of) every single one of these books?

Couldn't agree more.

Thermodynamics by Enrico Fermi is a little jewel.

I didn't know Fermi's book. Thanks for the suggestion :)

IMHO

You're not being humble, you're being arrogant. Did you not notice that the list was overwhelmingly about business and marketing? Did it not occur to you that it was targeted at people other than you? Was it really humble of you to dismiss all but one of them as "junk" and "BS" without considering that context?

Business and marketing are learned by doing. I have never heard of Jobs reading marketing books. Godin, Gladwell, etc are for the sheep. I remember reading that Jurvetson read poetry and philosophy books instead of business books. Draw your own conclusions.

My list is personal. I don't claim it's for everyone. It's what interests me, period. It's the stuff worth learning. There are other great books I could include there, from Byron to Vonnegut, but literature is not deep knowledge, it's art.

How does any of that justify branding a whole stack of books that someone else finds interesting as "junk" and "BS", for "those who need self-help", and now "for the sheep"?

I'm not talking about the quality of your selections here, or the submitter's, I'm talking about the exceptionally obtuse way you have chosen to express your opinion.

The list was supposed to be for "those who love to learn". Well, if it's learning one cares about, then anything that is not deep knowledge is suspicious. Truth be told, the OP did not sell his reading list as one for "those who love to learn".

A book that can be read during a flight cannot be deep. OK, I agree that my choice of words was not the most fortunate, and that "BS" and "junk" were distasteful... but on the other hand, compared to the monumental works of Feynman and Vladimir Arnold (the kind of books that take years and years to grasp), I can't help thinking that the OP's list pales by comparison. There are books of this time, and there are books of all time. Just like Homer and Marcus Aurelius or Euclid, some great thinkers' words shall be cherished for centuries and centuries to come.

As for me, I am a mere mortal. I am not of the caliber required to write such great books, but I would be very happy if I could live long enough to read all the great books I want to read. Life's too short to read bad books.

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