Ask HN: What books changed the way you think about almost everything?
402 anderspitman 3 hrs 359
news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19087418
I was reflecting today about how often I think about Freakonomics. I don't study it religiously. I read it one time more than 10 years ago. I can only remember maybe a single specific anecdote from the book. And yet the simple idea that basically every action humans take can be traced back to an incentive has fundamentally changed the way I view the world. Can anyone recommend books that have had a similar impact on them?
nikivi 2 hrs
One book that changed me was reading Master and Margarita in Russian for the first time.
It was the first book I started reading I could not put down until the end. Gained a lot of appreciation for literature at that time.
The other book that I enjoyed and changed me was ‘The Wisdom of Insecurity’ by Alan Watts. I was a fan of Alan Watts works through his lectures already and it was wonderful to hear his ideas in writing for the first time.
The book is available to read for free online (https://antilogicalism.files.wordpress.com/2017/07/wisdom-of...).
I wish everyone read or watched Alan Watts lectures and books. The world would be a much nicer place if that was the case.
My favorite quote is by him:
‘We thought of life by analogy with a journey, a pilgrimage, which had a serious purpose at the end, and the thing was to get to that end, success or whatever it is, maybe heaven after you’re dead. But we missed the point the whole way along. It was a musical thing and you were supposed to sing or to dance while the music was being played.’
Liquix 1 hr
Great quote, Watts is truly inspirational. What a happy surprise when Ctrl+F takes you right to the first comment ;)
If anyone doesn't have the time or attention span to commit to a full-blown book, The Joyous Cosmology [0] and Become What You Are [1] present some of Watt's ideas in a more condensed format. The former is a ~30 page essay freely available online. The latter is a collection of ~15 very short essays (1-12pg each) - a perfect replacement for smartphone scrolling when confronted with 5-10 minutes of free time.
https://holybooks-lichtenbergpress.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content...
https://www.amazon.com/Become-What-You-Alan-Watts/dp/1570629...
hangonhn 1 hr
I LOVE the Master and Margarita but I've only read it in English. When you say you read it in Russian for the first time, did you mean you've read it in English before? If so, were there huge differences?
nikivi 59 mins
Russian is my native language so I read it in Russian for first and second time. Never read it in English so can't say. But I think this is one of those books that will lose some of its 'magic' in translation.
plants 26 mins
This is disappointing to hear, but to anyone who is deterred by this comment from reading it in English, don't be. Even in English, the book was undoubtedly one of the best books I have ever read. There's something about it that makes you go "What happens next?!" for all 400 odd pages of it, and before you know it, you're at the end. It's truly a masterpiece - Bulgakov spent 10 years writing the final version of the novel after burning his initial manuscript twelve years prior in 1928, but as you will come to learn, manuscripts don't burn ;)
brational 5 mins
Can you share which translation you read? I imagine there's multiple that people will still find enjoyable but there's a lot of options for russian lit.
sixstringninja 1 hr
When you mentioned Alan Watts and his quote, I thought I'd share a small animated clip that presented that quote well. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGoTmNU_5A0
saberience 46 mins
Thanks for mentioning an amazing book of literature. The Master and Margarita is my favorite fiction book! I've read it in two translations and I prefer the Burgin & O'Connor to the Glenny, but both are great.
Everytime I read it I gain more insights. I absolutely recommend reading this book alongside a readers guide which gives more background and depth, there are many biblical, historical, and author-related references that won't be understood otherwise. The author's own life is massively relevent to the events of the novel. I recommend this guide:
https://www.amazon.com/Master-Margarita-Critical-Companion-A...
devindotcom 2 mins
Any particular reason for preferring that translation? I'm always curious to hear others' thoughts before picking one to read.
pretendscholar 1 hr
I wish everyone read or watched Alan Watts lectures and books. The world would be a much nicer place if that was the case.
Parties would become a lot more insufferable.
ChristianBundy 1 hr
Shhh. Let people enjoy things.
nik_0_0 52 mins
Really appreciate your phrasing - I feel the same way about Anthony Bourdain's material (while on a very different matter) - has convinced me to check out some more Alan Watts.
odiroot 1 hr
Thanks for mentioning Bulhakow. This is my all time most favourite book.
I mean, come on, the devil himself vs the communist party of Russia, sprinkled with loads of humour. What else do you need?
beat 11 mins
Most recent: Factfulness, by Hans Rosling. For the past year or so, I've been trying hard to understand why people act the way they do, when those actions and beliefs are often irrational. This book brought so much of that together.
Very first: The Song of Wandering Aengus, by William Butler Yeats. I read this when I was six or so. I found it as an illustrated children's book in children's section of the public library of the very small rural town. Someone decided this very adult poem, about an old man who wasted his life chasing an unattainable magic dream, was a good children's story. It introduced me to the idea that poems and stories could express sadness and failure and other negative feelings, not just the happy silly stuff of the other age-appropriate things I read.
beat 10 mins
Now I am old with wandering Through hollow lands and hilly lands But I will find out where she's gone Kiss her lips, and take her hands And wander through the dappled grass Pluck 'til time and times are done The silver apples of the Moon Golden apples of the Sun
anderspitman 7 mins
Hans Rosling is one of my greatest heroes.
scrumper 1 hr
Animal Farm was a really important book for me. I picked it up aged about 10 or 11 and I remember being really struck by how easily the pigs were able to exploit the other animals' grievances with humans to secure their own power. It felt like a grown-up story with some quite powerful, disturbing meanings under the covers. So I told my English teacher about it and all she told me in response was to go look up the Russian Revolution. I didn't understand why, but did it, and then the book had a second, much bigger impact on me. And of course what a way to learn about allegory!
It was the first time I realized books could be dangerous, subversive, and truly educational as well as simply informative or entertaining.
scarecrowbob 47 mins
One of the strangest things about that text is that very few of the folks I've talked to about it seem to feel that the issue with the pigs at the end is that there is a farmer.
That is to say, I very rarely find anyone who will agree that the book is anti-capitalist at teh same time that it's opposed to Stalinism.
I see the book continually taken happily anti-communist text. But the text is certainly not just about the Soviet system under Stalin.
Over the years, the big impact of Orwell to me has been how readily people can look at systems that they consider to be Other than their own and critique them while eagerly ignoring the implications for their own situation. That is, everyone here thinks the sheep are dumb, but at least they went through a period of time where they tried to replace the farmer with a different pig... where I live in Texas, all the sheep just think they are the farmer.
maxxxxx 2 mins
To me it’s a warning that when you rightfully overthrow an authoritarian you have to be careful not to trade that authoritarian against another one. This seems to happen all the time. Cuba, Iran, Nicaragua, Russia and probably many more.
scrumper 30 mins
I agree with you I think.
I took it as more an anti-authoritarian story than purely anti-capitalist or anti-communist. The anti-capitalist parts are fairly self-evident, at least to me: that's the rather brutal system the farmer has imposed on the animals at the start.
Booting the farmer out and starting again with the animal-owned collective sets the story up for the real message, which is that power corrupts and it is very easy for anyone attracted to power to co-opt legitimate grievance for their own ends. The return of the farmer brings a nice circularity to the story as well as giving the idea that the imposition of will on others is usually to their detriment. Capitalism or communism are basically indistinguishable to everyone existing without power or influence.
news_hacker 25 mins
Does anyone have any recommendations for reading up on the Russian Revolution? Books, videos, or otherwise.
yesenadam 15 mins
To The Finland Station
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_the_Finland_Station
thefringthing 12 mins
Sci-fi author China Mieville recently wrote "October: The Story of the Russian Revolution".
scrumper 19 mins
A famous contemporary account is Ten Days that Shook the World. it was written by an American who, it's safe to say, was fairly pro-communist.
But really it's such a pivotal moment in modern history that you're not going to starve for material. It sounds glib, but in this instance you could do worse than start on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Revolution
subjectHarold 1 hr
...are you serious? The book was an allegory (I had to look it up)????
I just thought it was a cautionary tale meant to discourage animals from going into farm management. These capitalists, with their underhand tricks...F YOU GORDEN ORSNELL!!!11""! My childhood is ruined.
quibono 1 hr
I'm not sure why you're being sarcastic, I can easily see the book having a big impact on a young person. No need to be mean or patronising.
subjectHarold 54 mins
I'm not sure why you think I was being sarcastic. Irony isn't the same thing as sarcasm. I made no comment, implied or otherwise, about the person I was replying to. The comment was about the book, the fact that many people haven't studied Russian history, and the humour that results from the many possible interpretations...which works well when you have to explain it.
Btw, you don't need to interrogate everything for hidden meaning. Jokes about misinterpretation and misunderstandings are common, they aren't some kind of Mao-era public struggle session. The reason they are funny is because they happen to everyone and because interpretation is so personal. There is no one interpretation of Animal Farm that is correct...but some are more humorous than others (intentional).
scrumper 1 hr
I was ten years old, Harold.
bit1 1 hr
Definitely "The Machine That Changed the World" by Womack, Jones, and Roos [0]. This is "the first book to reveal Toyota's lean production system." Before reading it, I had never imagined just-in-time production or value chain mapping, or vehicle assembly lines that can profitably produce quantity one of a product before being reconfigured to produce a different model (SMED: single minute exchange of die).
Now I see muda everywhere and cringe when I overhear people talking about applying kaizen and how they think they're practicing "continuous improvement" while repeating the same rote, industrial, mindless processes that they have been for the last 40 years. We can do so much better. Toyota tried very hard to teach GM how at their NUMMI[1] plant, but it wasn't the right location relative to their suppliers for JIT to fully work and "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." -Upton Sinclair
[0] https://www.lean.org/Bookstore/ProductDetails.cfm?SelectedPr... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NUMMI
SkyMarshal 4 mins
Why did GM's people's salaries depend on not understanding NUMMI/TPS? I would have thought it would have been clear to them they either adapt or die, and thus their salary depended on understanding it.
drieddust 13 mins
In software people use agile as an execuse to not think through the core architecture.
I believe agile was invented to incrementally improve an already well thought production process. Once the assembly line was setup, agile was used to eliminate the unproductive activities. I am not sure agile will be helpful to build the assembly line itself?
In most scena6 that's what people try to do with agile.
jeffreyrogers 20 mins
Kaizen seems to be manufacturing's equivalent of agile. Everyone says they do it, but almost no one actually does it because that would mean totally re-configuring their business.
miltondts 1 min
Science and human behavior - BF Skinner PDF available for free from the Skinner foundation: http://www.bfskinner.org/newtestsite/wp-content/uploads/2014...
Skinner's views on human behavior evolved a bit after this book was publish until he died but this book was my first contact with his ideas.
This book changed the way I view humans (myself included). It made me more empathic. It allowed me to unified many concepts of human/animal behavior and AI.
cosminscaunasu 0 mins
Daniel Dennet's books - explains how complex designs like our mind can appear out of very simple rules without the need of a designer or what consciousness basically is - a high level view i.e. how can we understand it in simple terms - or what is the purpose of humor. Some examples: "Darwin's dangerous idea", "From Bacteria to Bach and Back".
aphextron 27 mins
Ulysses, by James Joyce.
It will change your whole conception of what language is and how it can be used. It’s not about the characters or plots; they are recycled from antiquity. It’s about the absolute mastery of interrelation between words and imagery. It is something that has a meaning entirely emergent of its’ own self referential structure, rather than what is being described, in a sense that is almost mathematical. Realizing that was possible with writing really blew my mind.
andrewbinstock 4 mins
I've never heard it described that way. Now, you've given me the incentive to read it.
lars512 0 mins
"The Diamond Age" by Neal Stephenson
It inspired me to think about the role technology can play in improving someone's life, enhancing their development, helping them thrive.
catwell 0 mins
- NKS (Wolfram), among other things for the idea that sometimes reasoning backwards from what you observe cannot work.
- I read Brave New World (Huxley) when I was young, and it didn't have such a strong impression on me at the time, but it has strongly influenced some of my political takes over my whole life.
jpollock 2 hrs
Dale Carnegie's "How to Win Friends and Influence People" - it changed how I approach teamwork and conversations. It made me aware of how my behaviour was limiting outcomes. :)
Frankly, it made me aware that I was being an asshole and that I should change.
However, it wasn't necessarily the book, but the course that I found really useful.
6ak74rfy 1 hr
I'd concur that the book was a huge eye-opener for me. Earlier, I used to think that I only needed to be right (for e.g., while making technical design decisions) and just say it out when I disagreed. This book taught me that the way you put forward your thoughts also matters. You can be right without being a dick and without screwing up your relationships with others.
I followed up this book with Stephen Covey's 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. That was another fantastic book for me.
For me, these two books fit right into the category of those that literally changed my life.
matwood 49 mins
Agreed. Relationships are how we get things done in life. Reaching consensus, asking for help, motivation - all based around relationships with others.
Since How to Win Friends is already mentioned, I'll add Musashi here. There are so many lessons it's hard to pick them all out, plus I don't want to spoil it for anyone.
wnissen 49 mins
7 Habits made me think about certain things differently, but I had many people tell me that it really changed their life. Didn't do that for me, but "change your life" is a really high bar. Definitely How to Win Friends did.
Kalium 1 hr
I read that book. It definitely changed how I look at people.
It also made me a lot more cynical. I realized around halfway through that the author was (very skillfully) deploying his techniques in the direction of the reader. Further, the author is long-dead. We cannot possibly have a genuine emotional connection.
This helped me understand that genuine empathy is irrelevant. All that matters to convincing people is that they feel empathized with. How you actually feel isn't important, though for many it's likely to be by far the easiest and most reliable way to get there.
Dale Carnegie provided me with a very useful set of tools that I can use to achieve the outcomes I want. For that I'm appreciative.
amerine 1 hr
It’s been my experience that people can tell genuine empathy from fake.
Kalium 59 mins
I agree! It's been my experience that people genuinely believe they can reliably tell real empathy from fake.
It may be possible that the detection heuristics a given individual relies upon might, upon occasion, be a bit less reliable than could be hoped for. I've witnessed both false positives and false negatives.
Again, you're right. People do earnestly and honestly believe in their ability to detect genuineness.
beat 40 mins
The book emphasizes this fact. If you don't actually care about the person you're trying to influence, if you aren't acting in what you believe is their best interest, they can tell (usually). We have marvelous words in English for this, like "smarmy" and "skeezy".
beat 45 mins
What makes an emotional connection genuine? I firmly believe that Dale Carnegie actually cared about his readers, and was telling them these things in order to make them happier, and make the world a better place. And I am grateful for his efforts. Isn't that a valid emotional connection, even though we never met in person?
Or think about it another way... when you listen to music by Bach, do you feel an emotional connection? Do you see it as crass or alienated, or are you feeling something that a long-dead composer wanted you to feel, and grateful for the experience?
Kalium 42 mins
I agree! I also firmly believe that Dale Carnegie cared deeply about the reader he modeled in his head.
In the context of Dale Carnegie, I think that a genuine connection requires the active involvement of two people interacting with one another. For all that the emotions involved are unquestionably valid, I do not consider the genuine emotion one person feels for an imaginary other person to be a genuine emotional connection with another human being.
Bach, to my knowledge, did not like to rattle on about the importance of synchronous emotional engagement.
kansface 16 mins
This helped me understand that genuine empathy is irrelevant. All that matters to convincing people is that they feel empathized with.
You have proposed an Emotional Turing Test! The price for failure looks high!
Kalium 5 mins
It gets even more interesting when you figure you that we're already all playing it! We're all judges, and both false positives and false negatives are already common.
Balgair 1 hr
A LOT of people are put off by the name of the book. I would highly suggest you not judge Carnegie's book by it's cover. It is filled with brass-tacks advice and concrete examples of how to improve your own life and the lives of others around you. Though the title may seem 'manipulative', the book is anything but that. Consider the title as a marketing gimmick from 1933 and read the book nonetheless.
StevePerkins 1 hr
Indeed. The central point of the book is really the importance of human empathy. If you want to influence people, you have to consider their needs and wants rather that just being self-absorbed and entitled all the time.
ta1234567890 1 hr
+1 for the book. In my case, I couldn't really follow or properly understand the advice in that book until I stumbled upon The Charisma Myth and followed the exercises there. Only then I had enough social skills to apply Dale Carnegie's tips.
3minus1 42 mins
* The Selfish Gene - our bodies are vessels for DNA as they travel through time. Also colony insects and birds are fascinating.
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Thinking Fast and Slow - study after study shows that we exhibit so, so many cognitive biases, as our minds take shortcuts. there are some things you can do to recognize and mitigate these biases.
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Imagined Communities - the notion of a "nation" is only 300 years old and has no objective basis, only the fact that a group of people agree that it is a thing.
superpermutat0r 1 hr
Antifragile: How to live in a world we don't understand by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
I realized that my bad relationships are mostly the result of my lack of skin in the game. That indifference is not an advantage but that it is paralyzing.
That I have to feel to be able to risk and do something.
In addition to applying the concept of antifragility to many external things.
It has motivated me to start a business and to connect more with my loved ones, changed my perspective on research, what's important and the power of the passing of time. It definitely impacted my life.
david927 41 mins
Nassim Taleb, not Massimo
superpermutat0r 11 mins
Yeah, autocorrect.
rassibassi 34 mins
changed my perspective on research
could you elaborate on that? pro research or against?
SkyMarshal 0 mins
Probably that science via statistics is problematic and not as reliable as believed.
borski 2 hrs
“The Design of Everyday Things” changed the way I see literally everything. You’ll never look at doors the same way again, and prepare to forever be frustrated by poorly designed objects, and delighted by incredibly well designed ones.
There is no better book on the philosophy of UX, imho.
toomanyrichies 2 hrs
+1 for this gem. At least once a day I catch myself thinking some everyday object (or app) I’ve encountered could be more usable if it had certain signifiers to better illustrate its affordances, or lacked certain signifiers to obfuscate unintended affordances. Should be required reading for anyone who aspires to put products out into the world.
mirceal 1 hr
not only UX. programmers can actually learn a lot about building software if they see the meta in the book (replace door w/ interface. think about the mental model your library user is going to build for your library. make things easy to use when the correct pattern is employed and impossible if improperly done. minimize cognitive load) the book is brilliant
jeffreyrogers 19 mins
Great book, and you're right, everyone I know who's read it (including me) says the same thing about doors afterwards.
jimmychangas 1 hr
This book made me feel normal again. I am constantly being embarrassed by doors. Now I know I am not alone.
ismail 1 hr
+1 reflecting back I think this is one of the books that has been key to changing my thinking. Was one of the first design book I read, but the lessons have been with me for the last decade+.
js2 2 hrs
Indeed, I think of that book (which I read over a decade ago) every time I push or pull a door the wrong way. Reading it is like being able to see the matrix - but it’s simultaneously enlightening and frustrating when you realize how poorly so many things are designed.
erd0s 2 hrs
Oh yeah I’d second that, this book is spectacular
LyndsySimon 2 hrs
Meditations, by Marcus Aurelius.
Bottom line: judge your success in life by how well you make your decisions, not by your outcome. You have full control of your decisions, and often no control at all over their results.
pmoriarty 1 hr
If you enjoyed Marcus Aurelius, you'd probably enjoy reading Seneca.
"On The Shortness of Life"[1] is my favorite work of his, though there are many other gems among his letters.
[1] - https://tripinsurancestore.com/4/on-the-shortness-of-life.pd...
FabHK 15 mins
I found William Irving's A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy a very legible contemporary (if somewhat idiosyncratic) introduction to Stoic thought, and maybe more accessible/applicable than the classic sources.
taberiand 1 hr
Meditations is what immediately came to my mind also. It's a humbling and reassuring look into the mind of a great leader and stoic; to know that there was this man, the most powerful in his time, who strived - and struggled - to be the best he could, is inspiring.
robin_reala 1 hr
The George Long translation is available as a proofed and libre ebook at SE if anyone wants to read it: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/marcus-aurelius/meditation...
Balgair 2 hrs
A similar line of thinking is Annie Duke's Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don’t Have All the Facts. A good discussion on the book can be found here: https://www.artofmanliness.com/articles/how-to-make-better-d...
Amazon link: https://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/0735216355/ref=tmm_h...
krzysztof 1 hr
I also liked this book. Also because it shows how similar problems people had then. For more stoicism I would recommend "Daily Stoic". It's one meditation per day.
https://www.amazon.com/Daily-Stoic-Meditations-Wisdom-Persev...
tejinderss 1 hr
If you are interested in stoicism, 'stoicism and the art of happiness' is a good book
sriram_malhar 2 hrs
"Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much" - by Sendhil Mullainathan, Eldar Shafir.
Access to scarce resources induces a particular scarcity mindset, which the authors -- both behavioural economists at Harvard and MIT respectively -- show with a large variety of well-chosen examples.
The kicker is that time is one of those resources. In other words, I may be economically well-off, but if I'm short of time, I adopt the same scarce mindset that poor people (poor in money terms). I fritter away my time, I don't save it and so on. This book really showed me to deal with my time as carefully as I deal with my money. Great read, of the Freakonomics kind.
aswanson 1 hr
Read that one a few months ago. Definitely recommended.
TheAceOfHearts 16 mins
I'm surprised nobody has mentioned this one yet: "The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion", by Jonathan Haidt [0]. This book fundamentally changed how I think about religion and politics. It helped me understand a lot of behaviors which I'd previous considered absolutely incomprehensible.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Righteous-Mind-Divided-Politics-Relig...
air7 2 hrs
"Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind" by Yuval Noah Harari.
Hands down the book that most influenced me. The book had (for me) not one but several simple-yet-profound ideas that were forever inserted into the foreground of how I make sense of the world. For example, the existence of shared myths that allow humans to cooperate on a large scale. Or how I too, am religious, though I was sure I wasn't.
Can't recommend it enough.
mfoy_ 2 hrs
Check out his sequel: https://www.ynharari.com/book/homo-deus/
koverda 33 mins
Absolutely loved this book. Very thought provoking.
freedomben 1 hr
"Basic Economics" by Thomas Sowell. Not an easy read, but it deeply changed the way I think about incentive structures and the law of unintended consequences. It's a tough pill to swallow for people (like myself) who cling to utopian ideas, but the older I get the more I realize we must live in the world as it exists, with human nature as it really is. Dreaming of a better world is counter-productive if one does not engage with reality. We can build a better world, but only by being honest about the current state of things.
jshowa3 1 min
Funny thing is, reality is based a lot in perception. For example, it was "reality" that the higgs boson didn't exist before 2012. It was simply part of a model.
crowdpleaser 56 mins
+1. Reading Sowell really challenged my utopian impulses, it's amazing how deep his thoughts are but how simply they're expressed, apparently he advised people in the bay area to stop protecting so much open space in the 1970s with the warning that this would increase housing prices dramatically eventually. In hindsight this seems so intuitive and obvious but he gets credit for not needing hind sight and anticipating the most salient consequences.
porsager 1 hr
Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt is amazing too - https://mises.org/system/tdf/Henry%20Hazlitt%20Economics%20i...
freedomben 20 mins
Downloaded :-)
I also went looking for an audiobook version. Looks like Downpour has it DRM free: https://www.downpour.com/economics-in-one-lesson
tvladeck 54 mins
The Quest for Cosmic Justice is another great book by Sowell that challenges the utopian mindset that underlies many modern policy discussions. It contrasts utopian "cosmic" justice with the much more prosaic (but achievable) "human" justice
freedomben 24 mins
Fascinating! Just ordered it, thanks :-)
jason_slack 43 mins
+1. Thanks. My local library has a copy on hold for me now :-)
hn_throwaway_99 38 mins
OK, it might be a bit embarrassing to post this, but I'm going to say Marie Kondo's "The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up."
Not so much for the tidying part (though I did find that extremely helpful), but the whole idea of only keeping things in your life that "spark joy" (not an exact translation by the way - "spark excitement" or "spark meaning" are other ways I like to think about it) has had a profound impact on me.
I realized there were lots of things in my life (much more than just physical objects) that I had just sort of accumulated without thinking about what I really like or if something was good for me. I found the benefit of "practicing" this concept without mundane household objects allowed me to have a stronger sense of what I really enjoy in the more important aspects of my life.
dmux 2 hrs
"Metaphors We Live By" by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson changed how I thought about language and how I use it to orient myself in the world.
"Thinking in Systems: A Primer" by Donella Meadows changed how I approached designing/troubleshooting software systems as well as changed how I think about political policy decisions and their results.
"Object Thinking" by David West dramatically altered how I approach designing OO systems. I especially liked the chapter(s) where he used different real-world metaphors for designing systems. For example, asynchronous communication (email) is often more appropriate than synchronous communication (calling someone on the phone). Delegation of tasks without "micromanaging" (i.e tell don't ask).
"Ever Wonder Why?" by Thomas Sowell gave me an insight into some of the underpinnings of Conservative thought. I'd never had the opportunity to hear any of the arguments he brings up in college or in my own liberal social groups.
MikeCapone 1 hr
So many, and I wish I could write a long paragraph on each, but I'm unfortunately short on time. I'm posting any in case just one person who hasn't heard of those checks them out and gets value:
-Godel, Escher, Bach (Douglas Hosfstadter)
-The Mindbody Prescription (John E. Sarno, completely cured my long-term crippling RSI that kept me from using computers and was ruining my life)
-Feeling Good (Dr. Burns, cognitive therapy mostly centered on depression, but I want to learn about this before I have depression so that I can avoid it and do 'maintenance' on myself)
-The 5 Love Languages (Gary Chapman, made me understand a lot more about how people express and receive love, and the problems that arise from mismatched languages in relationships)
-Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman (you guys probably already know this)
-The Blank Slate (Steven Pinker)
-The Snowball (Warren Buffett biography)
-Influence (Robert B. Cialdini)
-Your Money or Your Life (Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin)
-When Heaven and Earth Changed Places: A Vietnamese Woman's Journey from War to Peace (Le Ly Hayslip)
-The Halo Effect (Phil Rosenzweig)
-The LessWrong.com sequences on rationality
epberry 17 mins
I can't believe this is the only post with Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman! Such a fun, creative book. Parts that stuck with me: lock picking, finding safety hazards at Oak Ridge, playing drums, working intensely.
sudosteph 1 hr
1) "The Beginning of Infinity" by David Deutsch - This book allowed me to embrace a sort of rational optimism in my world view. Also I was convinced by this book that the true test of a good government is not about whether you can pick the right leaders every time, but about being able to remove the bad ones relatively quickly.
2.) Candide by Voltaire - contributed to my personal sense of humor and belief that we live in neither the best nor worst of all possible worlds, but simply the most absurd of them.
3) The Art of War by Sun Tzu - Helped me understand the power of small effeciencies in large systems and the importance of metagaming.
gglitch 2 hrs
I imagine I’ll take heat for this, but the first answer that comes to mind is A Thousand Plateaus by Deleuze & Guattari. It has been justifiably criticized by many people on many grounds, but as with OP and Freakonomics, certain of the concepts in that book frequently appear in my thoughts 20 years after I worked through some of it. I don’t associate it with truth; but some of the mental models have really stuck with me.
Edit: also Finite and Infinite Games by James Carse. It’s slim and user friendly to a fault, and would be easy to underestimate at first glance, but imho contains great wisdom and beauty.
richardjdare 1 hr
I've wanted to read A Thousand Plateaus for a few years. The first time I tried it, all that stuff about wolves and geology just lost me. I will have to try again. Honestly, I found it harder than Heidegger's Being and Time, which I worked through while listening to Hubert Dreyfus's lectures on iTunes U a few years ago.
Whenever I read about Deleuze and Guattari I get this feeling they are on to something - I just don't know what!
jyriand 49 mins
One thing with Thousand Plateaus is that you don't have to read the book in sequence. You can start with random chapter. That's the only thing I remember from the book.
gglitch 54 mins
I know what you mean. It’s hard to avoid feeling like what appears to be glossolalic nonsense would all be revealed as a majestic tour de force, perfectly comprehensible and life-changing, if you were familiar enough with Marx, Freud, Leibniz, Spinoza, Bergson, Kant, Sartre, and god knows whom else, to put it all together. I’m not, so I can’t prove or disprove the case, which makes it a weird answer to OP’s question; but per above, it remains the case for me that images and terms from that book have never stopped working in my ideation processes since I picked it up.
andrewem 1 hr
What's an example of a concept from A Thousand Plateaus that has stuck with you?
gglitch 1 hr
Rhizomatic values and actions vs arborescent ones, de- and reterritorialization, the drawing of lines of flight, and nomadic war machines, more than anything else. I’m not sufficiently grounded in Marx or Freud to follow their narratives confidently, so my interpretations are probably overly simplistic; but I think they’d have approved of my taking the words and making them my own.
More than any of those individual terms though, I took from the book a sort of gestalt of expansive, additive, richly intellectual ideation, one based not on truth values, but in thinking new thoughts. In my edition, the translator’s introduction portrays D&G’s notion of a concept as a brick that should not be used to build a courthouse, but to be thrown through a window. This whole way of being in the world was enormously refreshing to me when I read it.
ndiscussion 2 hrs
The Selfish Gene by Dawkins. The gene is the unit of replication, and this affects every process in this universe.
scottlocklin 1 hr
Yeah, that was a biggie for me, until I read "Darwinian Fairytales" by David Stove. Everyone who has read Dawkins needs to have a look at this.
A philosopher has a look at what Dawkins actually says and realizes it is basically medieval demonology dressed up in pseudoscientific verbiage.
obelos 1 hr
Dawkins is amazingly lucid when he sticks to topics he knows very well. “The Selfish Gene” and “The Extended Phenotype” were world altering for me. Like integral calculus, I rarely have cause to apply the concept in the domain in which it was described, but the understanding that his conveyance of the material shaped in me is something I feel in my thinking every day, more than two decades later.
“The Mating Mind” by Geoffrey Miller (another biologist who would do the world a favor by sticking to his domain of expertise) came to me more recently but has left a similar impression. It impeccably elaborates upon the power of sexual selection and how it intertwines with natural selection.
pesfandiar 2 hrs
I enjoyed that and some of his other books, but it was The God Delusion that did it for me. Having been born in a religious society makes it hard to break out of needing to assume there is a god, but that book could give people enough explanation to drop that assumption.
nicoburns 2 hrs
I always think it's really interesting how our upbringings shape us. I'd never even heard of god until I was 4, when I must have heard the word mentioned, asked my dad what it mean, and it was explained to me as a thing up in the sky that some people believe in.
onychomys 1 hr
Note, of course, that he was wrong about the gene being the unit of selection. Selection happens at an organismal level. As we've come to understand the interconnectedness of the genome, this has become even more clear. Dawkins' ideas generated a lot of debate among evolutionary biologists in the 1980s, but have largely fallen out of favor. They're just too simplistic to reflect reality.
gagagababa 1 hr
Glad that somebody pointed that out. IMO, if somebody wants to get a quick overview of genetics, their time would be much better spent watching lectures 4-7 from Sapolsky's Human Behavioural Biology lectures [1]. In those 4 lectures Sapolsky's explores contradicting theories about (among other things) the unit of selection and gradualism. Highly recommend the whole series.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_dRXA1_e30o&list=PL150326949...
nabnob 1 hr
I thought the modern view of natural selection is that it occurs at multiple levels - gene, individual organism, group selection, etc.
onychomys 1 hr
There's evidence that selection happens at the organismal level (duh) and at the species level, but nothing else. There's some weak evidence that it can happen at levels above species (genus, family, etc), but it's not super well supported.
The question of population-level selection (what you've called group selection) is more contentious, although it shouldn't be. The grandpa of our field, E.O. Wilson, whom we all adore and wish we could constantly hug, loves the idea. Sadly, evidence doesn't love it. Like, there's basically none. There's no real theoretical underpinnings that would make it possible, either, because there's just too much gene flow between demes (...partially isolated breeding populations) to allow selection to happen.
gagagababa 1 hr
Indeed, it is.
3chelon 43 mins
This is news to me. I didn't realise Dawkins' theory had been so thoroughly refuted. What's the evidence for this?
stallmanifold 1 hr
I also recommend Dawkins' follow-up book, "The Extended Phenotype." Dawkins' most popular writing may be on atheism and the critique of religion, but I think his greatest contributions were really found in this book plus The Selfish Gene. Though as a caveat, "The Extended Phenotype" requires some more technical sophistication in evolutionary biology than Selfish Gene.
3chelon 44 mins
Seconded. I actually read "The Blind Watchmaker" first and that had just as big an impact on me. As someone else said, no going back after reading it. It also gave me the confidence to realise I was actually an atheist, not an apologetic agnostic!
fingerlocks 2 hrs
Seconded. This is the only book I’ve read that truly “changed” the way I think (excluding school textbooks) in a fundamental way. It was like discovering a new spacial dimension orthogonal to the existing 3. Like, how did I even live before this book?
robterrell 2 hrs
That book also gave us the term "meme" which, in its original form, is way more interesting than "animated GIFs spread on social media."
3chelon 45 mins
It's such a weird twist of irony that someone like Dawkins invented a term that has been so abused and deformed beyond all recognition. As expected, he hates what it's become; but it has truly evolved, beyond his control, so there's a wonderful truth there!
phowon 1 hr
It really is underappreciated how much 4chan has shaped Internet, and now mainstream, culture.
fermienrico 1 hr
This book has had a monumental, life altering perspective shift in everyone I know that have read it.
Warning: If you go over the fence, there is no returning back. Your thought process will change forever (for the good in my view).
pmoriarty 2 hrs
The Illuminatus Trilogy by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson
https://www.amazon.com/Illuminatus-Trilogy-Pyramid-Golden-Le...
jamesakirk 2 hrs
RAW's Cosmic Trigger and Prometheus Rising for me: I read both when I was 13 and was a recently-converted Southern Baptist. I quickly shifted my entire understanding of epistemology and the nature of reality.
corbet 1 hr
Fnord!
xxxanony 2 hrs
Hail Eris!
Saturdays 2 hrs
The Design of Everyday Things makes me rethink every user interaction or problem I face, and not just at work. Every time I open a door, I begin to think about that experience.
Recently, Educated by Tara Westover, and in the past The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls, both have taught me to approach individuals with the true ignorance of their lives that I have. You don't know where people come from and what life led them to where they are when you meet them. Try not to make assumptions. Additionally, I have to remind myself that I grew up loved, cared for, and privileged compared to so many other people.. the fact that I could read their story and post here is a testament to that, helps me try to stay down to Earth and that I had some advantages growing up that others did not.
Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker... I used to be a chronic advocate for sleeping less until I read this and did my own scrappy post-research. I'm much more conscious of my health and my sleep now.
I could go on and on..
Nebbit123 1 hr
Please do go on, you seem to have similar taste to mine (Why We Sleep and Design of Everyday Things) so I'd love to know which other books make it into your top 10 or whatever.
robotron 2 hrs
Zen & The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
This helped me understand the duality of the logical/mechanical and the creative/artistic. Then merging the two.
pmdulaney 1 hr
I read it 45 years ago and liked it. But the only thing that sticks in my memory -- and it is enough, I suppose -- is the author helping his friend fix his motorcycle with a piece of shim made on the spot from a Coke can.
Townley 1 hr
My go-to vote as well. Some of my favorite passages pertain to the awareness of-and management of- one's internal motivation and thought process when attempting to do good work.
"So the thing to do when working on a motorcycle, as in any other task, is to cultivate the peace of mind which does not separate one’s self from one's surroundings. When that is done successfully then everything else follows naturally. Peace of mind produces right values, right values produce right thoughts. Right thoughts produce right actions and right actions produce work which will be a material reflection for others to see of the serenity at the center of it all."
gorb314 2 hrs
This book changed my worldview too. For me more the idea that the world is how you perceive it, that events and objects have more than one aspect, property or interpretation.
taysom 1 hr
Great book for learning how to debug systems.
erd0s 2 hrs
Thinking fast and slow had the biggest impact in changing how I think about a lot of things, epic study of how you’re predisposed to think and make decisions in a particular way. Coincidentally I read it at about the same time as freakonomics!
petters 2 hrs
Would really like a second edition for that book. The replication crisis has, unfortunately not been kind to some of the things in the book.
omot 2 hrs
Seconding fast and slow. I'm working my way through it right now. It's pretty mind blowing.
afandian 2 hrs
"Difficult Conversations: How to discuss what matters most". I bought this on the strength of an HN suggestion.
It's like Design Patterns for human conversations: the result of studying how people interact, common patterns that work, and how things break down. Really crystallised a lot of insights I'd perceived but never thought about systematically. I highly recommend it.
Word of warning - there are a few books with this title. Look for the one by Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton, Sheila Heen.
Also Thinking Fast and Slow, recommended elsewhere in this thread.
godelmachine 2 hrs
What is Difficult Conversations about?
afandian 2 hrs
On the surface, it's about how to have conversations about difficult topics. Often these are conflict resolution type conversations. These range all the way from "you never take the bins out" to marriage breakups to large international political conflicts. These conversations can often go off the rails and conflicts are made worse, not solved. Whatever the scale, these kinds of conversations tend to follow familiar routes.
If you dispair at the way that conversations tend to devolve into personal attacks in national politics, office politics or your day-to-day interactions, this book is a very insightful handbook.
The book is the result of a big study at Harvard Business School of a large number of case studies. It spots the patterns that humans tend toward. In each case it identifies the pattern, why it happens, what the result can be (usually negative) and how to spot it coming and mitigate it. It also has snippets of conversation as case studies.
It's been a while, so I can't remember each item. But one example is that people tend to connect their identity to the point they are trying to argue. You challenge the point but to your conversation partner it feels like a direct personal attack. If you can find a way to acknowledge that connection, gently separate it from the identity, you have a much better chance of resolving the conflict.
I find a particularly strong parallel in the Gang of Four Design Patterns book. These are the broad problems that people try to solve with software, the structures that tend to emerge as people solve problems.
And, like design patterns, some things are deeply insightful and some things are obvious. E.g. of course 'iterators' are a thing. But development is so much better for having vocabulary to talk about them.
godelmachine 1 hr
I am looking for a book that will help me talk about abstract topics. Have you any suggestions?
afandian 1 hr
This is not that book. That's a great question though, I'd love an answer too.
shadykiller 2 hrs
Mine would be "Why we get fat and what to do about it" by Gary Taubes. Not only it changed my life (overweight to my healthiest ever), it also led me to challenge everything about our dietary dogmas. I further read "Art and Science of Low Carbohydrate Living", watched a lot of lectures and saw studies which question our current notions. Overall I am more skeptical of studies which have links to those benefiting from it commercially.
StacyC 1 hr
This is the book that switched on the light for me. It’s no exaggeration to say that it put me on a path to the best levels of health and fitness I have ever known. I am 56 and feel like I’m in the prime of life.
tvladeck 48 mins
The Selfish Gene & The Blind Watchmaker by Dawkins
Evolution is the reason we exist! Understanding how it happens and why it can lead to counterintuitive outcomes is very important. He also narrates his own audiobooks and is excellent at it.
The Blank Slate & The Better Angels of our Nature by Pinker
Both books counter much accepted wisdom. The second book, in particular, will make you think of humanity in a fundamentally different light.
The Black Swan & Fooled by Randomness by Taleb
The role of chance in everyday life! It plays a big role!
FabHK 35 mins
I was going to suggest a some of those.
Dawkins: A lot of really interesting things in life are really weird and puzzling, such as sex. Literature and religion try to elucidate it, but fail to get to the bottom of it. The insights popularised by Dawkins really make a lot of sense of it.
Pinker: Absolutely. There is this notion that things were much better in the past. These books shred it to pieces. It's also worth looking at Pinker's Enlightenement Now, and Julian Simon's The State of the World, though that has a lot of libertarian propaganda in it. However, the statistics are sound.
Taleb: Not a huge fan of Taleb. The point about the role of chance is much better made, in my view, by Robert H. Frank in his Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy.
lpolovets 1 hr
Most of the books that changed how I think were effective because of the subject matter and not the specific book or writing style. I suspect other books on the same subject would've been equally perspective-changing. Here are some examples:
1) "A Guide of the Good Life." This is an approachable intro to stoicism and helped me become more conscious of which things are within my control and which things are outside of my control. I now spend a lot more time focusing on the former and a lot less time being anxious about the latter.
2) Books like "Traction" (by Gabriel Weinberg) and "Cracking Creativity" that take a fuzzy subject like marketing or being creative and show that you can get very far by following recipes/algorithms/heuristics. Skill like creativity are not purely innate; they can be learned.
3) "Economics in One Lesson." (Spoiler: the one lesson is: "economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups.") After this book, I now think much more carefully about proposed policies/rules/business strategies/etc. "Subsidized child care" or "charge businesses per seat" can sound great on the surface, but specific proposals often have so many unintended or negative consequences that are not discussed, and it's important to weigh those consequences against the benefits.
4) A statistics textbook. I don't remember the specific book that was my first stats textbook, but learning about statistics made me a lot more skeptical and inquisitive about data. Now when I see a graph or number reported in the news, I think "are there ways that this might be misleading?" instead of "omg cool this is a graph in a popular magazine so it must be true."
codegrappler 2 hrs
Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom (https://www.amazon.com/Closing-American-Mind-Education-Impov...) was a book I had to read multiple times. It gave me a new understanding of how deep culture and environment really do influence your opinions of the world. I spend a lot more time reflecting on my own opinions about the world and I'm much more mindful of the opinions I declare publicly because of this book.
jcranberry 2 hrs
The Brothers Karamazov by Feodor Dostoevsky. At the time I didn't realize that it changed me, but looking back on it, the perspectives I learned from it fundamentally how I viewed and understood other people.
robin_reala 1 hr
It’s so good. I just finished reading the Constance Garnett translation and it’s just gripping all the way through. Well, I guess apart from Zossima’s life story in the middle, but that definitely has its place.
The Gutenberg HTML of it is definitely a labour of love and extremely high quality: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/28054/28054-h/28054-h.html . I converted it to a nicely formatted epub for Standard Ebooks and it’s in review now, so hopefully will be available this week.
FabHK 30 mins
Thanks for contributing to Standard Ebooks. It's a great resource. Since you modestly didn't plug it, let me:
An excellent source of carefully formatted and corrected free ebooks (mostly classics).
https://standardebooks.org
robin_reala 19 mins
Ah, well if we’re plugging I also did the SE production of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, with bonus incredible cover by Edvard Munch: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/fyodor-dostoevsky/crime-an...
jcranberry 49 mins
I was surprised no one else mentioned at least one book by Dostoevsky, actually. At least, at the time of commenting.
motohagiography 1 hr
"The Dictator's Handbook" by DeMesquita and Smith is a popular take on their academic work that describes a metamodel for reasoning about power and politics that bypasses how things "may" or "should" work and talks about how they "must" work.
https://www.amazon.ca/Dictators-Handbook-Behavior-Almost-Pol...
And a general +1 for GEB. If you read that as a teenager, you are different for it.
reubenswartz 1 hr
This is a great book. Unfortunately, I feel like a lot of people who live in a nominal democracy see the title and think, "this doesn't apply to me." Even more unfortunately, it very much does apply to you, in, for example, the United States.
pokler 51 mins
Two come to mind for me.
The first is Understanding Power by Noam Chomsky. This was the first political book I had ever read and it completely rocked my world. I knew the US was involved in some nefarious stuff, but never to that extent. Completely changed the way I read news / history & how I react to current events.
The other book is Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon.
felipelemos 2 hrs
The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, by Carl Sagan.
It changed the way I see the world, how to have a sceptical mind and not only how but why one should question.
And also, it shows to me that, if you don't have a answer for something, doesn't mean that it can not be true. It's just that you don't know. And for a lot of things, this is the correct and only answer that we can have now.
DubiousPusher 48 mins
I read this book at a time when I had lost my religion which had been very dear to me and the foundation all of my thinking. I was reading lots of different religious texts. This was the first thing I read that said that how we know what we know is more important than what we know. It was the first philosophy I had encountered that would challenge even evidence in favor of itself on the grounds that that evidence didn't meet a certain bar of quality. That was huge and this book helped me understand that concept. Which really made scientific skepticism stand out from other belief systems.
xutopia 1 hr
I came from a deeply religious family and read this book after reading Contact (a friend lent me). It too had a lasting impact on my worldview. I cultivate a skeptical worldview nowadays thanks to this book.
bharrison 1 hr
Came here to say this more or less verbatim.
rcsalvador 1 hr
It's the best!
dlbucci 42 mins
Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. The lesson on the surface is that you need to practice/work to become good at anything, but the deeper message for me was that everything is basically preordained. People are acting based on what's logical to them, which is the sum of their experiences. Since we can't control what happens to us, we aren't really in control of what we do either. I mean, the future is still wide open, but looking back, everything happens for a reason, and those reasons are pretty much out of our control. I'm not entirely certain that was the message Gladwell was trying to portray, but that's how I've viewed life ever since I read that book.
kvee 2 hrs
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality by Eliezer Yudkowsky - introduced me to the rationalist movement
The First Immortal by James Halperin - introduced me as a sixth grader to things like cryonics, nanotech, etc. Got me thinking about a realistic ambitious nearer term future for humanity, rather than a more fantasy-like one in the other sci-fi I'd read at that point, like Asimov and Heinlein
As a Man Thinketh by James Allen - gave me much greater agency in life. Made me realize “You are today where your thoughts have brought you; you will be tomorrow where your thoughts take you.”
abhiyerra 18 mins
Science, Strategy, and War: The Strategic Theory of John Boyd,History of Sexuality by Foucault, Methophors to Live By by Lakoff
All of these portray the world as a series of systems. First deals with interconnected systems like war, business, conflict, the second the notion that culture itself is a series of systems of power and sexuality has been used as a system of power, and third that most of our thought can be made from simpler set of blocks i.e metaphors from which we construct almost all of existence.
intellectronica 10 mins
Finite and Infinite Games by James Carse
Beautiful book, full of wisdom. It's short but I had to read it multiple times (and I'll probably read it many times more, each time discovering something new and deeper and relevant to my current state of play).
mattdeboard 17 mins
"I Don't Want to Talk About It: Overcoming the Legacy of Male Depression" by Terrence Real, a relational therapist.
The ideas in this 20-year-old book are just starting to catch traction, but basically it's that depression manifests differently in men than in women. This is because, the book's thesis goes, of the differences in social conditioning between men and women.
I recommend this book all the time.
3minus1 43 mins
* The Selfish Gene - our bodies are vessels for DNA as they travel through time. Also colony insects and birds are fascinating. * Thinking Fast and Slow - study after study shows that we exhibit so, so many cognitive biases, as our minds take shortcuts. there are some things you can do to recognize and mitigate these biases. Imagined Communities - the notion of a "nation" is only 300 years old and has no objective basis, only the fact that a group of people agree that it is a thing.
fpoling 1 hr
“Fooled by Randomness” by Nassim Taleb. It is hard to compress it into a short summary, but it can be something like “be very aware about unknown unknowns”.
flazzarino 47 mins
It is highly compressed! but not in a dense way, distilled might be a better term.
He writes my favorite books.
p0d 58 mins
I read through the bible every year and each time it shapes my thinking. For example, I was reading Exodus this morning about how we should care for the foreigner. I imagine several thousand years ago this was pretty radical. It also seems very relevant today.
city41 11 mins
So You Want To Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo.
It really opened my eyes to many issues about race I was not aware of and did a great job explaining the real problem is systemic racism. It had a pretty profound impact.
fancyfish 1 hr
I second the recommendation of Finite and Infinite Games by James P. Carse. He takes this simple concept and expands and applies it to modern tech, politics, the workplace, education, etc:
"There are at least two kinds of games. One could be called finite, the other infinite. A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play."
The player in a finite game actually wants it to end, where the play itself is just a means to this end. He is "playing against play." The player in an infinite game wants it to continue, and revels in the game itself.
"Although it may be obvious, it is worth stressing that “play,” as it is used here does not mean merely “playing around.” Play, in this discussion, is a metaphor for any number of complex human engagements whenever they take on a competitive, or cooperative, character. Corporations, for example, not only compete with each other but are in themselves populations of strivers, each trying to supplant another, each struggling for higher incomes and titles. The same applies to schools and colleges where attaining superior grade averages, degrees, and honors absorb the lives of students. Sexuality and marriage are often finite battle grounds with winners and losers. In fact, the features of play–finite and infinite–are essentially the same whether we are children playing jacks or soldiers caught up in a war between nations."
To me it is a concise and broadly applicable way to see the world.
https://jamescarse.com/wp/?page_id=61
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/189989.Finite_and_Infini...
rubidium 24 mins
Society and Money: Debt the first 5000 years by David Graeber
Society and structure: Leisure: The Basis of Culture by Josef Pieper
Business: Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey Moore
Life: The Gospel of Matthew
elpakal 2 hrs
Guns, Germs and Steel by Diamond. Also Foundation Trilogy by Asimov because of the incredible creativity needed to tell that story
wooly_bully 2 hrs
Strongly disagree. The geographic determinism theory of GG&S is frustrating and ignores significant factors in the rise of the West.
This review is something I generally send out to people after they've read GG&S, and strongly recommend Eric Wolf as an author. He puts many of the points I would make significantly more eloquently:
https://www.livinganthropologically.com/eric-wolf-europe-peo...
LyndsySimon 2 hrs
I would argue that “changing the way you think” doesn’t require the book to be factually accurate. The idea that external factors like geographical starting conditions can have a huge impact and shape things as complex as human culture is a powerful one, regardless of the conclusions drawn in the book.
If anything, the way it has been challenged and shown to be flawed is a lesson on and of itself - that complex systems have emergent properties, and that those starting conditions are not as deterministic as it might appear at first blush.
wooly_bully 2 hrs
Good point.
If GG&S changed the way you think, I'd highly recommend following it up with either the book from that review (Eric Wolf's "Europe and the People without History") or Ian Morris's "Why The West Rules, For Now".
elpakal 29 mins
Yes, not meant to be accurate. Just changed my perception and continues to linger.
fouc 33 mins
recent HN thread discussed how flawed guns, Germs and Steel is: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19034468
btkramer9 2 hrs
I can second Guns, Germs and Steel. I'm continually evaluating how much things are a result of my own work vs just a byproduct of the environment I'm in.
anderspitman 2 hrs
I've had a copy of this from a book sale sitting on my shelf for over a year. I'll have to get to it.
chx 46 mins
Diamond is bunk science, however. We discussed this not a week ago. Some https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19045376 here , more on r/askhistorians
harshulpandav 23 mins
"The Compound Effect" by Darren Hardy
One of the most practical books I have read which you can easily implement in your real life to see positive outcome.
https://www.amazon.com/Compound-Effect-Darren-Hardy/dp/15931...
_hardwaregeek 1 hr
Between the World And Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates. Reading about the abject fear and death in which he grew up really helped me get a tiny insight into institutional racism's effects. I can't fully comprehend the entirety of the black American experience, but that book helped me gain a small glimpse.
anderspitman 27 mins
Thanks for all the suggestions so far. Since this got a bit of traction I'll go ahead and throw in several more favorites that have changed the way I think over the years, in no particular order:
-
The Righteous Mind - Jonathan Haidt
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7 Habits of Highly Effective People - Stephen Covey
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The Emperor of all Maladies - Siddhartha Mukherjee
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The Alchemist - Paulo Coelho
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Getting Things Done - David Allen
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The Worthing Saga - Orson Scott Card
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The 4-Hour Work Week - Timothy Ferriss
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The 5 Love Languages - Gary Chapman
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The Total Money Makeover - Dave Ramsey
donatj 2 hrs
Honestly, Anthem.
While I think it's a pinch silly oversimplification of things, it makes good arguments against central planning and for individuality and liberty.
It really struck a chord in an impressionable 16 year old.
compiler-guy 1 hr
Ayn Rand is reasonably good at diagnosing certain problems, but for her solutions, its hard to tell the poison from the cure.
Also, she has no sense of "Standing on the shoulders of giants", and how an eco systems make some things easier and harder.
doctorcroc 1 hr
Ishmael (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ishmael_(novel)) - it changed how I view the planet from a species-centric perspective to one focused on maximizing the potential for sustainable life for all creatures
nickbauman 42 mins
This one did it for me, too. I was utterly, utterly changed by it. It's a new story for humankind. A story with a much bigger potential, a much more hopeful arc, with a future of unlimited potential because it goes beyond humankind toward a community of life that has its own larger reason to exist.
nickbauman 40 mins
I went on to read more than a half dozen books by this author, all of them were equally amazing and thought-provoking. I wish I could like this entry times a thousand.
jesusofsuburbia 1 hr
War and peace by Tolstoi.
It made me aware that someone as successful and powerful as Napoleon himself was by a large extent only a product of the people and the mood at the time. What I mean is that it wasn't him who inspired the people; it rather was just the Zeitgeist he was the perfect person for. I'm not a native speaker and can't really put it into words, but it completely changed my view of the amount of influence we really can have in this world, and how much we are a product of our time.
Narziß und Goldmund by Hesse.
Again a lack of words from my side. Whoever is looking for meaning in life should read this book. The last sentence of this book is (at least in German) the literary most perfect and awakening phrase I've ever read. I couldn't sleep for days afterwards.
sramsay 1 hr
War and Peace came immediately to mind for me as well, but mostly because I do not think I have ever read a more magnificent novel.
I'm a literature professor, and in academic literary study, we don't spend a lot of time talking about which books are "better" than others. But personally? I'll just never get over that one.
I suppose I'd have to add Aeschylus' The Oresteia (the oldest of the ancient Greek tragedies we possess, and the only complete trilogy). I was a truly terrible high school student, who I think just barely got into college. Reading The Oresteia as a freshman made me decide that one way or another, I would have to figure out how to read and study literature for the rest of my life.
tomxor 1 hr
Two tiny books by Stephen Wolfram (Actually transcribed lectures):
- "Computation and the Future of the Human Condition"
- "On the Quest for Computable Knowledge"
And by extension his proper book - "A new kind of science". The two above books might require you have at least played with (and enjoy) cellular automata to latch on to the concepts he is talking about with enthusiasm.
These tiny books in combination with some other similar books and ideas transformed the way I think about the world, physically, biologically, technologically - all from the perspective of computation - in terms of computational reducibility, kolmogorov complexity, emergence and entropy (RE maxwells demon - the meaning of life? more like the universal property resulting in the emergence of life like patterns and fluctuations in energy and matter)... sorry all a bit vauge, but difficult to articulate succinctly, read the (very short) books and maybe you will latch on to the same train of thought, it was mentally transformative for me.
NikolaNovak 36 mins
Of all the books I read - fiction and non fiction, wonderful ideas in SF and Carl Sagan - I'd have to single out Selfish Gene, as it single-handedly changed my perspective and mental/internal framework of the universe. I struggled philosophically with questions of consciousness and our place & meaning in the universe.
Note that I cannot always wholeheartedly, universally recommend all his later philosophical / atheism books to a wider audience, Selfish Gene is a no-brainer to me. --- Close second is Bad Science by Ben Goldacre.
wotwot42 32 mins
"Pragmatics of Human Communication" by Paul Watzlawick, Janet Beavin Bavelas, and Donald D. Jackson followed by "How Real is Real?" by the same author.
syndacks 18 mins
The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
It was the first/only book that put into words feelings I've had for my entire teenage-->adult life around the complexities of a dysfunctional middle class family.
martinraag 7 mins
Free Will by Sam Harris had a great affect on how I view the people and by proxy the world around me.
He argues that anyones decisions are a direct result of the physical structure of their respective brain, which in turn is moulded by their genes and experience so far, rather than a by an unexplainable free will.
The book made me reconsider how people treat each other because of their beliefs and actions - from harbouring negative feelings towards somebody due to their opinions to locking up people for committing crimes.
At the very least it has helped me in personal relationships and encouraged me to try to understand where another persons opposing viewpoint is coming from rather than feel negativity or superiority towards them because I feel they are wrong.
ChicagoBoy11 14 mins
On the Evolution of Cooperation. Unbelievably simple and yet conveyed one of the most powerful ideas I've ever come across.
crowdpleaser 1 hr
The right to earn a living: https://www.amazon.com/Right-Earn-Living-Economic-Freedom/dp...
and the concept of the political: https://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/C/bo54...
I used to think of laws and society as just arbitrary things. However, I now see that they reflect thousands of years of wisdom / improvement and are critical to creating the conditions for people to flourish. The right to earn a living helped me understand the common law system and why we should care about unenumerated rights and how to create a more just society.
The concept of the political helped me see how nihilistic egalitarianism and feckless bureaucracy isn't a bug but a feature of liberal democracy and how it doesn't have to be that way.
yotamoron 6 mins
"Deschooling society" by Ivan Illich.
gcheong 45 mins
Better Never to Have Been: The Harm Of Coming Into Existence by David Benatar . The best argument I've read as to what it means for a human being to be brought into existence, why it does that person more harm than good, and why we should consider the question. While people generally find the idea distasteful, especially if being or becoming a parent is a primary focus of their life, I have yet to see any well-reasoned refutation to his argument that isn't addressed in the book. The only problem is it can leave you with a somewhat constant feeling of "well, what now?".
sksareen1 49 mins
For what changed my outlook on life? Xenocide - Orson Scott Card. The 3rd book in the Ender's Game saga, it spend a lot of time exploring how people with fundamentally different perceptions and interpretations of the world around them led them to conduct themselves in ways that conflicted with each other, but were virtuous and the right thing to do according to them.
Was a big help in helping me understand how empathy can help to resolve issues and how fundamentally different we all can think - be it medieval humans or alien beings.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenocide
sinkpoint 1 hr
"Debt: The first 5000 years" completely changed the way I view money, society, and relationships.
"The selfish gene" changed the way I define life, opened my eyes to virtual life, and morality of selfishness vs. altruism.
"Into the Cool: Energy Flow, Thermodynamics, and Life" changed the way I view the life and material existence. Whereas before I viewed them as two separate domains, after I see them as a spectrum.
Chinese classic taoism treaties: "Dao De Jing", and "Zhuan Zi", offers a via-negativa way of thinking and view of existence, the values are beyond words.
Eric_WVGG 1 hr
My pick is "Tao of Pooh," which is kind of a westerner's ELI5 of Taoism. I can't overemphasize how useful Taoism has been for me as a lens through which to understand and participate in the world. (And there really isn't much mysticism to it)
darkhorn 2 mins
The Price by Niccolò Machiavelli. It is a 500 years old book about politics, power and war. There are no ideas, he supports his findings by giving examples from the history, thus it is a realistic book. The book is still valid for today's society and people in power. I guess it is in same line with Animal Farm.
porpoisely 2 hrs
I read Freakonomics and Guns, Germs and Steel in college and was initially 'amazed' by it. Now, I see it as mass market rubbish used to influence a particular demographic.
But that goes for pretty much everything really. Catcher in the Rye in high school. Carnegie's "How to Win Friends and Influence People".
I think books can "change the way you think about almost everything" when you are younger, naive and idealistic. As you grow older, wiser and understand the world more, you leave those childish things behind.
Also, as einstein said : "Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking."
I'm sure I'm not the only one that used reading as a crutch and a form of escapism and to waste time.
But if you want a book that left an impression on me, K&R's C Programming Language is one. It showed me that a technical book can be concise, well written and enjoyable to read.
sotojuan 1 hr
Most of the advice in "How to Win Friends and Influence People" is fairly relevant and can be learned at any age - the book and Carnegie's courses were originally for older businessmen. The problem with the book is that its title and chapter titles have not aged well - they sound manipulative. The actual advice is very good and focuses on empathy and kindness; timeless concepts.
I've definitely seem people change their behavior after reading it well into their 30s and 40s.
xamuel 36 mins
mass market rubbish
Yep, that describes so much of what's popular.
One book I find goes in the opposite direction--I didn't get much from it when younger, but when I revisited it as a grown man, I suddenly saw a lot more value in it: The Bible. Which is about as far from "mass market rubbish" as you can get, considering quite a lot of it was written by people who were persecuted, tortured, and killed for writing it!
stormbeard 1 hr
I think what you gain by reading is exposure to someone else's way of thinking. You won't get that by sitting in a vacuum. If you're impressionable, you just assimilate the author's way of thinking without any criticism. That shouldn't be the goal here.
The key part of that quote (whether it's real or not) is the "and uses his own brain too little" part. It's not as helpful to read a book mindlessly like you're watching television and I think you're missing out on so much by just reading technical manuals. You need to form your own opinion about what you're reading by drawing on your own experience and things you've learned.
I'm pretty sure you didn't develop your way of thinking by yourself. You were influenced by mentors and other people's thoughts and opinions. So why would you intentionally stop evolving? How do you know you've reached some "optimal mental state"?
As an aside, if you're into well-written technical books that are enjoyable to read, check out Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces: http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/OSTEP/
juvoni 2 hrs
The primary form of escape reading provided for me was an escape from poverty. Books were my ladder, and my hope. Having few mentors to tell me of a 'world' outside of the one I was living, books were able to transport me to foreign lands, they helped me understand myself, others around me and the world a little better.
Through good books, I could have access to mentors who would would never know me, but I knew them through their writing, and I acquired the tools to add value to the world.
Yes there are many mass marketed B.S books, that's why I tend to read older books that are battle tested and still relevant today(Lindy effect).
Yes, some books have more impact or less depending on what period in our lives we read them, our personal motivations or what prior knowledge and the context that makes the book relevant to us.
Of the hundreds of millions of books in the world, we may only get to read maybe a thousand or so if we try. Someone could invest years of their life into something that takes 8 hours or so to read. I think there's a high chance that their experience reveals to us something which we wouldn't have imagined and amazes us about the world we share.
ismail 46 mins
I believe you are doing your self a disservice.
As you grow older and “wiser” you realise that your time is precious. So you understand the opportunity cost of reading a book. You should then choose books that are foundational that are often the sources used by other books. You see more deeply into the meta meanings in the books, drawing many more links to other concepts hence you understand them better. This also means you could probably read much more deep/technical or difficult books.
fsloth 1 hr
Bullshit. Reading pays off. Always. Just read good books.
You have only one life. But by reading you can assimilate cumulative wisdom from thousands of lives.
Sure, don't just read, personal striving is also needed for a wholesome life.
I agree that if a book claims to be amazing and life changing, it likely is not. I find books can offer singular insights, and intuition about how people and organizations operate, what psychological and historical principles are general, and so on.
carlosyasu91 2 hrs
I've found that most of the Einstein quotes I've seen online don't have a valid source, where did you find that one? Just as a heads up, since Walter Isaacson never mentioned anything similar to that on his biography of him.
pavelrub 37 mins
Ludwig Wittgenstein - mainly Philosophical Investigations, Blue and Brown Books, and On Certainty. It gradually changed how I view the entire world around me, and dissolved my interest in philosophy, as well as in many other "sciency" things that - I realized - I was only interested in because of implicit metaphysical interpretations that ultimately stemmed out of conceptual confusion.
goqu 59 mins
There is one book that finally made me to do some work and it's called "The Midas Method". Some of it describes a set of rules (methods) we should live by to make the luck leaning towards us.
Simple things as "Watch your language! Never say “I can’t do that”" or "Never blame anything or anybody else for your misfortune" And my favorite is "Grab every opportunity which is going" You'll keep yourself busy and open for the world.
https://hundredfoot.com/bookstore/the-midas-method
It's a little dated but the stupid thing is the basic principles if you can be bothered to understand them really do work.
hypertexthero 19 mins
The First and Last Freedom by Jiddu Krishnamurti.
It changed how I think about identity by showing me the danger of labels, and made me appreciate the beauty of life.
rocky1138 59 mins
The Chalkbox Kid, because I read it when I was 10 and it was the first real book I read from cover to cover which wasn't a small children's book. It's a good story, too.
More recently, the short novel The Machine Stops blew me away with its prescience.
beefman 18 mins
A Farewell to Alms by Gregory Clark
Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman and the sequel, What Do You Care What Other People Think
Mindstorms by Seymour Papert
cjauvin 2 hrs
Recently: Enlightenment Now, by Steven Pinker, and The Elephant in the Brain (by Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson), two books which share the quality of being bold and courageous in their claims, which go against huge parts of the "common discourse".
gzell 37 mins
Hold my beer ... "The Bible (KJV)"
dalbasal 1 hr
1984, and the book-within-a-book in it.
Sapiens, recently. It had a profound effect on how I think about people, history and progress... Particularly, the points about group size and all th cultural clockwork required for and limiting our ability to function as large groups.
Paul Graham's essays, which are kind of a web book.
Practical Ethics, by Peter Singer influenced me a lot (made me study philosophy) but I was a lot less expensive impressed by my decades-later re-read.
sputknick 1 hr
Paul Graham's essays aren't just "kind of" a book, they are a book. (A very good one BTW)
https://www.amazon.com/Hackers-Painters-Big-Ideas-Computer/d...
keshav92 36 mins
Mindset, by Carol Dweck. Highly Recommended. The fact that any skill can be learnt provided you work hard for it really impacted me. Also, it was one of the first books I read, which normalized the importance of hard-work - forever different after reading that book.
gigapotential 1 hr
Factfulness by Hans Rosling - it tells you about our world with actual numbers.
grecy 1 hr
I can't believe how far down the page I had to scroll to find this.
Absolutely opened my eyes to the realities of the world we live in.
aerovistae 21 mins
Rich Dad, Poor Dad. I had never really thought about investments before, or the difference between assets and liabilities.
citilife 1 hr
I always viewed reading a book as collecting a soul. If you fully grok a book, you grok the authors thoughts. Being able to put yourself in another persons mindset is crucial.
Speaking of "groking", Stranger in a Strange Land, Time Enough for Love and The Fountain Head have probably had the most impact on my mindset.
Each book is rather different, but in general the idea of all three is
You have to be in life for yourself, and only you can define who you are / want to be.
That doesn't necessarily mean you need to be mean, but the idea that "greed is good", or that it's okay to be selfish, provided you think long term. It's about coming to terms and accepting you are greedy. But with that insight you can do introspection and learn about what drives you and make decisions yourself.
It's almost as if another layer of consciousness, learning about ones self.
dbingham 1 hr
Welp. And this is why I think Ann Rand was deeply evil and The Fountain Head was a horrible work of propaganda.
It's not okay to be greedy, nor is it okay to be selfish. And these ideas are responsible for much of the harm in the world.
It is okay to know what you need and advocate for your needs, to take care of yourself. But that is not being greedy or selfish. And to do it effectively means you have to be able to recognize the difference between a "need" and a "want". You also have to be capable of balancing your own needs against the needs of others.
A mindset of "greed is good" and "it's okay to be self" does not even try to understand the difference between "need" and "want" and provides ample justification for screwing over everyone else in pursuit of greedy (unneeded) wants.
6cd6beb 51 mins
"It's ok to be greedy/selfish" is a clickbait title for the statement that you look out for yourself first and foremost whether you admit it or not, and you want things innately.
In a well regulated capitalist environment, those drives are yoked in a way that the paths through which you become rich and powerful and sexy are the same paths through which you improve the lives of others around you.
In a poorly regulated one you get dupont and enron, but show me a silver-bullet government theory and I'll show you an unrealistic fantasy.
A mindset of "greed is good" and "it's okay to be self" does not even try to understand the difference between "need" and "want"
You're assigning that. Honestly I don't think most of Ayn Rand's critics have read her books.
dbingham 35 mins
The "well regulated capitalist environment" of which you speak is the fantasy. It has never existed.
What could exist is a world based on economic democracy, where no one becomes rich or powerful and everyone has to work together because society is structured to prevent anyone from taking power for themselves.
An economy where the stock corporation is replaced by the worker cooperative -- still an independent business operating in a free market of goods and services, but governed democratically by its workers -- would be much closer to that reality. No one would be able to amass much personal power. And any power amassed would always be held in check by the democratic structures that granted it. A world like that would do a much better job of preventing the accumulation of personal wealth way beyond need.
abtinf 42 mins
What word would you use to denote the concept "to know what you need and advocate for your needs, to take care of yourself"?
What is the difference between "need" and "want" and why is that difference important?
hammock 34 mins
Stephen Covey 7 Habits. Not so much the habits themselves, but rather the ideas presented. Specifically: principle-centered life, character ethic vs. personality ethic, circle of concern and circle of influence, etc.
onemoresoop 1 hr
Arthur Clarke's Childhood's end. I know it's fiction but it left me speechless. And aside from the descriptions of technology foreseen at that it was written, I think it's timeless.
“No utopia can ever give satisfaction to everyone, all the time. As their material conditions improve, men raise their sights and become discontented with power and possessions that once would have seemed beyond their wildest dreams. And even when the external world has granted all it can, there still remain the searchings of the mind and the longings of the heart.”
nicodjimenez 1 hr
The Goal (by Eliyahu) - changed the way I thought about business operations and about how efficiency can be detrimental to throughput
fsloth 1 hr
I am skeptical a single book can change how a person thinks about the world - at least on a practical level.
Actually transformative concepts are usually not simple, and they need to mature in the thinkers mind.
Most important subjects are ao large it would be impossible to cram them into a single book.
Books can be insightfull and amazing, and there are several that are so vivid I find chapters from them popping into my head. A few recent books I feel have been very enligthening to me:
Notes on the synthesis of form by Alexander. Skunk works by Ben Richie. Influence by Cialdini. Skin in the game by Taleb. Isaacson's biographies.
davnicwil 2 hrs
The Rational Optimist by Matt Ridley.
Presents a compelling case for being optimistic that economic growth really will keep making the world continually better on average, and in particular explores the reasons why the contrary position is often so prevalent in the media, popular opinion etc.
Regardless of whether you agree with the thesis of the book per se it's a fascinating read which will definitely give you a lot of new perspective on debates on big topics - things that come up often on HN such as AI, climate change, international relations etc. I thoroughly recommend it.
otras 59 mins
A Mind for Numbers by Barbara Oakley (and her corresponding Learning How To Learn course) absolutely changed my approach to learning and studying.
Applying the lessons made my studying many times more productive. After getting Bs and Cs in many of my undergrad classes, I recently finished a five course post-bacc CS program with all As. While Dr. Oakley isn't the only reason, it absolutely helped!
tdhz77 1 hr
Of Mice and Men. Clear and concise sentences are the best sentences. Pain and suffering is worse than death. Quality of life matters.
plants 1 hr
Plus, you can read this one in about a day or two. Picked it up for the second time about a year ago. Cried again at the end.
onemoresoop 1 hr
Seneca - Letters from a stoic; Herman Hesse - Steppenwolf , Siddhartha and The glass bead game (Magister Ludi)
hackernews2 2 hrs
Reading Ender's Game as a child instilled a sense of agency at a young age.
ohaideredevs 22 mins
Martin Eden by Jack London. Really stressed why education actually matters.
Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson. Same.
sksareen1 51 mins
Flow fundamentally changed how I look at self improvement, optimization and how you can work on yourself
https://positivepsychologyprogram.com/mihaly-csikszentmihaly...
james_s_tayler 1 hr
Why Nations Fail really helped give me deep intuitions around politics. It taught me that political stability is immensely hard to achieve and very rare. I've since come to see every situation as a political situation. This helps me reason about my environment much more clearly.
king07828 56 mins
Emotional Intelligence 2.0 by Travis Bradberry. Two people had to recommend it to me independently before I finally read it. Reading and deeply contemplating this book dramatically increased my ability to understand and predict emotionally driven behaviors. Drama in movies and in life started to make sense.
rdl 2 hrs
Hans-Hermann Hoppe: Democracy, The God That Failed. I believed democracy was the "ideal" (basically the secular religion of the USA), and just flawed in implementation. This book does an excellent job of presenting the argument for ownership of the state, limiting the scope of those who could possibly own, and the short term vs. long term interests of different kinds of government.
thaw13579 1 hr
One book not already mentioned is Alfred Korzybski's Science and Sanity. It makes fairly broad and sweeping analysis, so there is plenty to disagree with. That said, this book opened my eyes to important concerns about language and cognition that, only in retrospect, seem glaringly obvious.
stefanv 54 mins
The latest one for me was "On intelligence". It made me understand that intelligence is not that hard to understand on a conceptual level. The book is about machine intelligence, but the most impressive thing for me was the simplicity of how Jeff Hawkins defines intelligence
karlello 39 mins
A Pattern Language, Christopher Alexander. This is the original "pattern" book. About architecture and living spaces and exactly what makes a good place to be in so good.
manicdee 47 mins
Bruce Pascoe, "Dark Emu"
This book really highlighted for me how we literally rewrite history to suit our own prejudices, and finally taught me what "history is written by the victor" actually means (including claiming victory).
cutler 2 hrs
"Das Kapital" by Karl Marx is still the most accurate analysis of the causes of economic crises. His labour theory of value gets to the root of what's going on behind the smokescreen of market forces presented as fact in western Economics courses.
"On The Road" by Jack Kerouac was a liberating, mind-expanding experience with no drugs involved. Kerouac's free-form style and open-ended approach to life made a great impression.
"Cosmic Loom" by Dennis Elwell debunked the narrow-minded, reductionist attitudes of scientists towards astrology and opened up my mind to the value of symbolism.
TravelTechGuy 1 hr
1984 changed the way I perceive language and culture permanently. The notion that if certain words no longer exist in the language, then the associated idea will disappear from the culture was Earth-shaking to me.
Another idea that book drove home was the power for the media and the utter control of your life a government can exert when it completely controls it.
checkyoursudo 1 hr
My worldview-changing book was probably Stranger in a Strange Land, when I was maybe 15. I also ready Brave New World around then.
I was raised in a super religious house; for whatever reason, that one or two books started my down a path of materialism/skepticism and away from religiosity/dualism/spiritualism. It was just the start, mind you. I was probably already primed and heading that way anyway, and that just happened to be the spark. I don't mean that there were any huge insights or great revelations for me there.
hcoyote 59 mins
Mine was The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, read around the same age (took me awhile to get through SiaSL).
The ideas around TANSTAAFL were what really drove me to believe in the value of hard work and being wary of the easy path to "success".
sharadov 1 hr
Too many but I can list authors Michael Pollan - all his books
Jiddu Krishnamurti - a freethinker, who said we need a revolution in the psyche of the individual
Paul Theroux - prolific travel writing
Oliver Sacks - his insights into brain disorders
Salman Rushdie - his early works, when he was in his prime, a giant in literature.
