Comment by Evgeny | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Evgeny | Hacker News Reader

It's hard to choose a single book, as I've read (or listened to) a number of books this year.

I'll choose Daniel Kahneman - Thinking, Fast and Slow (http://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Fast-Slow-Daniel-Kahneman-ebo...).

The way it changed my life was to make me actually think more about the way my mind operates, the decisions I make and the way these decisions affect my life. As a consequence, there were a few books I read later that were loosely related to this one in the way that they all refer to the way people think.

Barry Schwartz - The Paradox of Choice

Steven Pinker - How the Mind Works

Nassim Taleb - The Black Swan; and Fooled by Randomness

Leonard Mlodinov - The Drunkard's Walk (quite similar to Fooled by Randomness)

Carol Dweck - Mindset: The New Psychology of Success

Neil Postman / Andrew Postman - Amusing Ourselves to Death

Rolf Dobelli - The Art of Thinking Clearly (just started)

On my reading list now:

Quiet by Susan Cain - mentioned already

The Better Angels of Our Nature - Steven Pinker

Jared Diamond - Guns, Germs and Steel

Neal Stephenson - Snow Crash

Jared Diamond - The World Until Yesterday

Also, did not quite change my life, but very recommended:

Neal Stephenson - Anathem.

You may have to struggle through the beginning, but as soon as I understood the way the world he devised operates, I was thrilled completely.

+1 Snow Crash

The interesting part about Snow Crash is that I feel that the dialogue between Hiro (the protagonist in the story) and the Librarian (an artificial intelligence in the metaverse but more advanced than either Siri or Google Now) amount to what may be the future of Google/Wikipedia/Research in the form of Q&A search queries. His questions are usually ones which attempt to draw new insight from historical documents, but are asked in a way in which the Librarian can answer them as though a computer can, but does not immediately draw conclusions. I can easily see that in 10-20 years, research/Q&A/Google could perform many of those same functions without biasing the user with any particular conclusions (because it can't).

I was thinking about reading 'Thinking, Fast and Slow', but I couldn't tell if it would really be useful or if it would just be another glorified self-help book. But if people here like it, I will probably give it a shot.

Also, Drunkard's Walk was excellent.

Thinking is not a self help book. It's a memoir of sorts about a nobel prize winning economist and the way he and his mentor changed the field of decision theory through the combination of economics, psychology and statistical mathematics. It truly is eye opening and life changing.

Technically, Daniel Kahneman is a psychologist who just happens to have a Nobel Prize in Economics because his work in the field has been amazingly usefil to economists.

Well "just happens to" is strange attempt to diminish his accomplishments. We're talking about the life work of a brilliant polymath.

I would also characterize Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality as "applied Thinking: Fast and Slow". I would strongly recommend it.

Reading 'How Mind Works'. Do you think his proposal matches the recent discoveries in neuroscience? Till now(120 pages in) he seems to be an evangelical of Computational theory of mind

+1 to Kahneman - the book is brilliant.

While reading the book, sometimes you feel like it's reading your own mind. Very chilling.

Guns, Germs & Steel was a real revelation about the rise of Western civilization. Ain't because we're so smart or genetically superior, sorry. Just a matter of being in the right place at the right time a few thousand years ago.

+1 Thinking, Fast and Slow. I was going to post that as the most influential book of the year.

(I started reading Nate Silver's The Signal and the Noise when I got to a reference to Thinking, Fast and Slow. Switched and haven't gone back yet.)

If you liked "Guns Germs and Steel" you'll also enjoy Diamond's latest book "The World until Yesterday". Everything I've learned about organizational dynamics can be gleaned from this book.

Barry Schwartz on TED, same title as the book you mention:

http://www.ted.com/talks/barry_schwartz_on_the_paradox_of_ch...

+1, I was just going to reccomend this!

Great list

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