"Permutation City" by Greg Egan is mind-bending in a way similar to The Matrix, except taken up a few notches.
Explores the consequences of consciousness being just a pattern. Would it continue if the pattern is paused? Seems yes, since we survive being unconscious. So we move in space and time, but still consciousness feels continuous.
What if you pause it, destroy it, recreate it somewhere else. Would it not continue then as well (the classic teleporter question). But it doesn't stop here.
What if you destroy it, but it just happens to continue somewhere else? Then it should continue there as well. So if you think that teleportation would not mean death, then you kind of have to accept that if anywhere in the universe at any time the same pattern exists when you die, then you can't really die because you'll just continue on from there instead.
Not sure I accept it, but it's certainly mind-bending to think about!
For higher dimensional mind bending his Diaspora book is a must read!
For mind games: The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi.
Plus for a related rabbit hole: the idea that a random pattern can just pop into existence and have consciousness is basically the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain concept.
Diaspora was going to be my answer as well, the ending in particular. It kinda forced me to accept as inevitable that at some point my consciousness will cease, in one way or another.
I can plausibly see life extension technology arising that gives me hundreds, or even thousands of extra years of life. It doesn't seem entirely impossible to extend that premise to millions of years, but at billions it doesn't really seem fathomable, and trillions seems to be well beyond what we know about the likely fate of the universe. And once I accepted that inevitability, it suddenly seemed a lot more plausible that my time left was probably closer to decades than even centuries, let alone anything beyond that. There were definitely a fair few existential crises in the weeks and months after finishing that book.
Uuuuuhmmmm, yes, agreed. That whole story still gives me the existential shivers sometimes. The juxtaposition of the big and small. Brilliant, raw, too elegant, too calculatingly cold, too far out - and all because of its hardness (as in I don't even know if you have to suspend disbelief, it seems so perfectly real/possible), truly a masterpiece of science-fiction.
'Very far off to left field' side note: The human brain is still active during unconsciousness.
EEG traces of the brain show this. When you are awake, drowsy, asleep, or under anesthesia, the patterns of your brain waves are very different [0,1]. But, the brain is not 'paused', it's just firing differently than when you are awake or drowsy.
So, the 'pattern' is not just 3-D, it's 4-D. You need time as well. You'd need to transport the 'trace' over vast distances, scales, and times.
Sometimes I wonder if I ever actually stop thinking at night; maybe I just don't remember it in the morning? Maybe every night is just laying concious for 8 hours, thinking weird dreamlike thoughts, but being unable to form memories.
I know brain measurements show that our brains operates differently during sleep, but we may still be concious, at least internally.
Have you ever had the same "sleep stage 1" experience I have?
If I start to fall asleep in the living room around people, their voices seem to become louder, I am aware of what they are saying, their sentences make sense. Yet, if I am suddenly awaken to full alertness, I will have no memory of what they were specifically talking about, although I do remember that I heard them talking. It's as though the ability to form memories went away before full conciousness went away. I believe this is a common experience, and I was fascinated when this pattern was first pointed out to me.
This one is actually a little different. There is much much less activity under anesthetic vs sleeping. There are even theories that going under general anesthetic actually causes some small degree of brain damage due to the shutdown.
It's either this or another Greg Egan book that has simulated people reprogramming their own consciousness. Changing their thought processes, personal motivations, and memories. I think he goes into some depth on how they can do that safely and what the implications are. One character programs himself to be obsessed with carpentry and spends lifetimes of subjective simulated time trying to craft the perfect table, but has a timer to turn off that motivation after some period of time. It's a fascinating idea that has stayed with me, and I think of it every time I see another depiction of a "brain in a computer". I'm disappointed that nobody else has tackled that idea, I think people are still getting used to the concept and it will be a few years before we see something like that in some more pop-culture sci-fi.
Diaspora includes a few examples of this as well. Mathematical discoveries can only be made in the "mines", and people install these mods to make them better at mining, after working through some of the beginner steps unaltered to see if they'd like it. There's also a mod that explicitly prevents you from ever uninstalling it; I don't remember what else it even did, it seemed to spread like a slow virus through the artistic communities in the simulation.
That idea also comes back in Diaspora. That book contains some nice things, like mind-grafts, procreation/creation in a non-biological society etc. Loved that book. I also like Ted Chiangs books. I.e. the idea from story of your life (a language that treats time flow differently), also "Understand" [0] is nice: What happens we we actually increase our thinking capacity. I mean that is hard to comprehend without a nice story, for a puny brain like mine.
Also I shouldn't have said "nobody else has tackled that idea", I am sure it has come up somewhere else. I am just thinking of recent examples like Black Mirror or the new Upload show on Amazon, that IMO miss opportunities to fully explore the implications of simulated minds. Stuff like that would be very difficult to film though...
Greg Egan's an impressively good author even though he's writing about the kinds of sci-fi setups that usually come hand-in-hand with bad dialogue and poor characters. I actually think Quarantine is my favorite of his that I've read so far, though the sci-fi parts are less strong than Permutation City, some of it's philosophical aspects about identity feel like they're more immediately relevant.
Also take a trip to his website [1] if you haven't yet.
Right, he came highly recommended, but he is just boring. His stories exist to present a sci-fi concept, not be a good story. Same as Neal Stephenson's later work, which is a tragedy.
Egan is a close second for my all-time favorite sci-fi author. Some of his books read like mathematical dialogues or transcriptions of lectures (lots of the Orthogonal Series is conversations between professors and their grad students reasoning about physics of a world that we don't live in), but he also delves deep into mathematics and fringe ideas and presents them in a vista where you can enjoy the absolute splendor of the abstractions.
He also never thinks small. I thought I knew "the point" of Diaspora about 6 or 7 times, but then he just "zoomed out" and made the last point look small and trivial by comparison. The opening chapter of that book is so abstract and yet describes the birth of a consciousness in a way that feels understandable, believable, and internally consistent.
If you love finding interesting puzzles to reason about, then I strongly recommend Egan's books!
I haven't read Permutation City, though. I'm bumping this one to the top of the queue :)
Ian M Banks. The Culture series is the most splendid collection of books I’ve ever read. Some are better than others but collectively they build an insight into a galaxy spanning civilization.
It just comes down to my preferences for what kind of itch I liked scratched the most. Egan stretches my brain and makes me wonder at the complexity of complexity. But Banks makes me yearn for the future. Demonstrates what wonders could be possible if we fast forward technological development forward 10k years.
The magnificent intellects of the artificial minds that govern the society hits me in my soul. What a wonderful idea.
I think I remember reading another sci-fi book or short story that posited the classic "teleporter problem" but the device functioned by making a copy of the individual and then destroying the original, similar to The Prestige I suppose. Part of the plot centered around the original escaping that fate and then fighting for their continued existence. I think it poses a very strong argument against a copy of consciousness being a continuation since it makes no sense that there is continuity between copy and original only if the original is immediately destroyed, it just means that the copy is the only remaining instance.
Long time ago I read some idea (probably on reddit) from some guy, that was quite similar to this. The idea being is that essentially you can't die. There is no death. If universe is infinitely large and also it keeps restarting itself with big bang and some universe death all over. Then at some point. Right after you die, something exactly as you will be reborn somewhere else. Even if it takes unimaginable amount of time for that to happen. To you, that's irrelevant, you will just be immediately reborn and start again after death. Your copy might not be alive anywhere else at this moment, but it will be at some point. And well if it's exactly like you, then it's you. I found this pretty intriguing, even though I am not into any non-rational stuff. I wonder if this idea has any holes.
"Eternal return (also known as eternal recurrence) is a theory that the universe and all existence and energy has been recurring, and will continue to recur, in a self-similar form an infinite number of times across infinite time or space.
The theory is found in Indian philosophy and in ancient Egypt as well as Judaic wisdom literature (Ecclesiastes) and was subsequently taken up by the Pythagoreans and Stoics [and] Nietzsche..."
Ah jeez, I was just about to head to sleep. It’s like the library of Babel, but with universes. In infinite time with infinite random arrangements of matter, the matter will undoubtedly arrange itself exactly as it is right now. Thanks for the brain melt.
I could not think of a better answer. I've read this book 2 years ago and vowed to write a review or an interpretation of some sort when I got less excited. I didn't sleep for two days. And never wrote the review.
I find Greg Egan is also very good in small doses. I highly recommend his short story collection Axiomatic, where each story explores a different idea in brief. It's still hard sci-fi but it's chunked smaller so if you're less of a hard sci-fi fan you can still find it interesting.
After recommending it for years on every HN book thread I could find I'm happy to see it's not forgotten yet, really, Egan could have written at least 3 separate books with the content of Permutation City.
I bought this on Kindle after seeing it in another HN thread but I haven't gotten around to reading it yet. After reading your comment I think I'll bump it up higher on my priority list.
I loved the concept in permutation city of simulating your own mind out of order, but I think it would only be possible if we can show that consciousness is a pure function. If consciousness isn't pure and therefore depends on some internal state, then simulating out of order isn't possible because you need to go through all the intermediate states to get the right output.
Scott's MO through all of his books is to write about free will, specifically the idea that we don't possess it and that our brain makes decisions by itself and that consciousness is an illusion.
In this theme, "The Mind's I" by Hofstadter and Dennett is an interesting combination of short-form sci-fi and philosophy of consciousness.
It presents a well-chosen sci-fi story that explores an extreme modification to one of the parameters of consciousness, followed by an essay analyzing the consequences of that thought experiment.
• "Laws of Form" by George Spencer-Brown, a little book that describes how to bootstrap the Universe from nothing. Louis Kauffman [1] has a lot of papers/writeups on it, from knot theory to quantum physics. If you ever wanted to make a pancake truly from scratch, this is a place to start.
• "The Unconscious as Infinite Sets" by Ignacio Matte Blanco. Reformulates Freud in logico-mathematical terms and establishes a formal system (bi-logic) to describe unconsciousness phenomena: in case you ever wanted to apply category theory to study yourself.
• "The Protracted Game" by Scott Boorman. Interprets Maoist's revolutionary strategies during 1927 - 1949 period as a game of Go. Interesting both from historical, military, and game-theoretical perspective; raised an appreciation of Eastern wisdom and 'board games as a tool of thought' [2] for me.
• "The Unwritten Laws of Engineering" by W. J. King. Written in 1944, but the advice is still relevant, more so to the software engineering field. Should be at least skimmed at any part of your career.
• "The Myth of Sisyphus" by Alber Camus. Unequivocally answers the most important question there is — does life have meaning, and if not, should you kill yourself over it? I read it in my teens while wrestling with existential dread, and lived a somewhat happy and interesting life ever after.
You would definitely appreciate Intelligence and Spirit, which employs game theory, linear logic, and Hegel towards a theory of artificial general intelligence.
Retroactively, I would also add "A Thousand Plateaus" by Deleuze & Guattari to this list, except that I haven't yet read the actual thing, but only dipped my toes into related studies, like e.g. "The Allure of Machinic Life" by John Johnston that traces the history of cybernetics, A-Life and AI fields and adds a Deleuzian spin on top.
This is the only case in my life where I wanted to adopt author's philosophy and learn to see the world the way they do. The content is very interdisciplinary and heavily borrows from various fields (psychoanalysis, dynamic systems theory, biology, linguistics &c) and will surely appeal to a technically minded person.
these all sound interesting but the first result of laws of form on amazon shows an edition that claims the first ever proof of the riemann hypothesis, so now i am suspicious because that is obviously a falsehood. it's possible that someone has posthumously edited the original, but either way it shows that the book attracts cranks. any thoughts on this?
i see now that wikipedia states that spencer-brown claimed applications of his approach to big conjectures that never panned out, so now i am extra dubious. it makes sense now why people would go off and try that out.
It does attract eccentric people and spiritual seekers of all sorts ([1] gives a good historical overview), but also open-minded academics, like aforementioned Kauffman; Spencer-Brown's ideas were very popular in cybernetics at the time of Macy conferences, e.g. Varela's autopoiesis was heavily influenced by LoF. I also recall reading something about how Luhmann applied it to sociology.
There are some papers/presentations about applications of ideas based on these laws: circuit optimizations, query engines, various "iconic" algebras [2, 3]; I, like you, have a hard time buying all that (ditto author's claims about Reimann hypothesis), but still, it sounds pretty damn interesting and innovative, e.g. examples of multiplication/addition in 1st vol. of "Iconic Math" were eye-opening and intuitive for me, as a person with kinaesthetic learning style, in a sense that I deeper understood what "number" and "to calculate" mean; it also promotes the invention of various ad-hoc calculi and notations, of which I am a big fan of.
For me, the greatest thing about LoF is cross-fertilization: esoterical mumbo-jumbo benefits from formalization and mathematical approach, while technical disciplines find their root in the spiritual ground; that and the thought experiment of building the world from nothing. It bridges "above" and "below", and kinda reminds me of [4].
Minor correction: not at the time of Macy conferences, but rather at the dawn of the 60s and rise of second-order cybernetics; Macy conferences ended in 1960, while LoF was published in 1969.
If you want smaller, quicker payoffs (but in no way cheaper!), consider the anthologies of short stories by Ted Chiang. Most of them are 15-45 minutes to read, with a couple longer (1-2 hours).
I've read both "Stories of Your Life and Others" and "Exhalation" in the last month and I turned to my wife and said "that story just blew my mind" for probably 75% of the stories.
I read Stories of Your Life and Others, and felt he had some interesting ideas, but not very interesting characters, and pretty much all of his characters sounded like they had the same voice (Which, as a writer myself, I admit it can be difficult. I struggle with giving my characters distinct voices as well).
Made it hard for me to get emotionally invested in his stories, and I found them a bit of a slog to get through.
Not sure if I'll give his other books a read, but I might.
He has a background in Computer Science, by the way, for those that might be interested.
Give some of his newer stuff in "Exhalation" a try. He's improved with time. I seem to recall 'The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling' having some distinct characters, and also a really neat setting.
Social philosophy/psychology, or cultural anthropology, is mind-bending to me.
Erich Fromm's The Sane Society - on how society impacts people's mental health, and how to build towards a sane society
Fromm's The Art Of Loving - an analysis of different kinds of loves, trying to dispel pop culture's lies about love, and love is actually hard work
Ernest Becker's The Denial of Death - on how not our fear, but our complete denial of death existing leads to the weirdest outcomes in our society
Then there's political stuff -
Orwell's Essays, any large-ish collection. I find Orwell to be a much, much better non-fiction writer than fiction writer. Extremely insightful into political processes.
Robert Caro's books, perhaps the first The Years Of Lyndon B Johnson. Can't get better insights into how power works on a local and not-so-local level.
Popper's Open Society and its enemies, hard to summarise - a defense of Western society in light of the then-ongoing WW2. You probably saw the paradox of tolerance a few times pop up, that's from that book, among a ton of other stuff.
Oh if you can, try looking for similar recommendation threads from communities completely alien to you - law enforcement forums, midwife communities, car mechanics, biologists.
HN is very insular in its interests as you can see with many posts here repeating. Midwives' recommended books probably have a higher chance of truly bending your mind into novel directions.
"Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life" by Rory Sutherland
Explains why we choose brands over cheaper alternatives, why we're willing to pay a lot more to lock in a deal, why we hate registering before buying the thing (but are more than happy to do so right after), why Sony removed the record button from the first Walkman, and much more.
This book forever changed the way I think about brands, and improved my design and problem-solving skills.
A couple of Rory's rules:
• The opposite of a good idea can also be a good idea.
• Test counterintuitive things only because no one else will.
A couple of "mind games" from the book:
• Merely adding a geographical or topographical adjective to food – whether on a menu in a restaurant or on packaging in a supermarket – allows you to charge more for it and means you will sell more.
• "There's your problem," I said. "It doesn't matter what something tastes like in blind tastings, if you put 'low in fat' or any other health indicators on the packaging, you'll make the contents taste worse."
“Desert Solitaire” by Ed Abbey and “Ishmael” by Daniel Quinn. Both are wildly different but explore the question of how different the other forms of life on this planet are from ours. “Are we smart enough to know how smart animals are?” By Franz de Waal et al explores this from a scientific perspective.
Abbeys about more, of course. He had that rare ability to turn his book into something that felt like a direct conversation with me, the reader. I read him in my 20s and his viewpoint definitely connects with someone wanting to examine and express his/herself first before society’s overwhelming influence. He discusses trying to free himself from the conceptual confines of the human individual and societal experience while isolated in a national park. Quinn uses a hypothetical conversation between a gorilla and a person to highlight the fundamental us versus them approach humans take with the rest of earth. Then Franz de Waal really drives home that animals are likely to be much more mentally capable than we give them credit. They’re good books if you want to know something more about the universe than what your human experience is.
If you liked Ishmael, I recommend reading The Story of B. Its subject is very similar to Ishmael but I feel that it does a better job of portraying how the us vs them is woven into the very fabric of civilization. It's also a very entertaining read.
I read Story of B as well. But I don’t have quite a clear enough memory of it to even try to summarize it as anything past a sequel. I’ll go back to revisit them some day.
This book makes every bit of life advice you receive afterwards feel shallow. It feels like a reference to western thought.
It's also very well translated and reads very easily, and is very short. I read about a chapter every morning when I feel motivated, and certain passages really stick in my head.
It also helps to read whenever you feel overcome with emotion because of something.
"Basic Economics: A Citizen's Guide to the Economy" by Thomas Sowell. I read this as a teenager with only limited exposure to economics and it cleared up many misconceptions I held.
"Psycho-cybernetics" by Maxwell Maltz. A plastic surgeon shares his techniques for achieving your goals in life. 95% if not more of self-help books today borrow (consciously or not) ideas discussed in this book, and often discuss them with much less depth.
I enjoyed Blindsight by Peter Watts. It explores several different interesting ideas.
For instance, what is the point of empathy/friendship/love in a technologically advanced society? These were very useful things for our ancestors to help each other battle the harsh environment, but we have mastered our environment, so why waste brain power on empathy now?
The Wikipedia summarizes the books discussion of conciousness very well:
"The novel raises questions about the essential character of consciousness. Is the interior experience of consciousness necessary, or is externally observed behavior the sole determining characteristic of conscious experience? Is an interior emotional experience necessary for empathy, or is empathic behavior sufficient to possess empathy?
With respect, if your takeaway from reading Watts is that we've "mastered" the environment, I implore you to read the Rifters series and/or his blog. That's about as far from his view as it's possible to get.
It's not so much "we the humans have mastered the environment" as, well, a generic sort of we. But yes, the notable thing about Watts is definitely not his sunny optimism.
"To Mock a Mockingbird" by Raymond Smullyan. From Wikipedia:
> To Mock a Mockingbird and Other Logic Puzzles: Including an Amazing Adventure in Combinatory Logic (1985, ISBN 0-19-280142-2) is a book by the mathematician and logician Raymond Smullyan. It contains many nontrivial recreational puzzles of the sort for which Smullyan is well known. It is also a gentle and humorous introduction to combinatory logic and the associated metamathematics, built on an elaborate ornithological metaphor.
Here's an example puzzle from the first half (the second half deals with combinatory logic):
> Suppose I offer to give you one of three prizes-Prize A, Prize B, or Prize C. Prize A is the best of the three, Prize B is middling, and Prize C is the booby prize. You are to make a statement; if the statement is true, then I promise to award you either Prize A or Prize B, but if your statement is false, then you get Prize C-the booby prize.
> Of course it is easy for you to be sure to win either Prize A or Prize B; all you need say is: "Two plus two is four." But suppose you have your heart set on Prize A-what statement could you make which would force me to give you Prize A?
Apart from playing twice, I can't think of a statement that could exclude you from choosing arbitrarily between A and B, since within the conceit of the problem there is no way to exclude B with a mere statement.
So, "I don't have B"? But the system is mutable, and we can easily see that the proposition is true, and then (possibly) false. Then you have to say "I will never have B". But that's not necessarily true! You would need either an oracle, some sort of iterative evaluation, or a perspective from which the entire interaction is a single static object, something like a tree of outcomes, which you allow to be used in the evaluation (e.g. one possible implementation of an oracle). I find all of this highly unsatisfying.
"False, there is the possibility of me awarding you prize B. So here's prize C"
The answer is false and evaluation is true until the prize is actually given. Then the answer becomes true and the evaluation false.
I wonder if the question could be reworded somehow to say that the prize being awarded and the statement being evaluated true/false will happen at the same instant without taking the fun out of it.
You're not supposed to spoil it. The whole point of these puzzles is the joy and knowledge you gets from solving them on your own. Publishing the answers is selfish.
Well, I for one don't consider this a satisfying solution (you could argue it does not count as a solution at all). How is the host supposed to evaluate the future? As I said in another comment, for that the host either needs iteration or an oracle, and both of those are missing from the premise of the question. It's like asking riddle where the solution is "Use a time-machine" when no time-machine is mentioned in the riddle: it's indicative of a riddle so weak it's almost an insult.
> How is the host supposed to evaluate the future?
I don't see how "evaluation of the future" is relevant. The person hosting the game has laid out the conditions for his actions. If you say "you will not give me prize B in response to this statement":
1) If the host were to give you prize B, that would be a contradiction, as that would make your statement false, so you should have received C.
2) If the host were to give you prize C, that would be a contradiction, as that would make your statement true; per the rules, you should not have received prize C (or logically equivalent: you should have received one of A or B).
3) If the host were to give you prize A, there is no contradiction.
The only action the host can make, while honoring the rules they laid out, is to give you prize A. The host, assuming they're decent at logic (which is a premise of such problems), would consider the above and realize that they must give you prize A. There's no need for reading the future; they must merely know what actions they are permitted to make given the rules of the game, and given only one valid course of action, they must take take that action.
I don't consider it a statement about the future but rather about the inevitable consequence whenever this game is played. Maybe it should be rephrased as: For this statement one will receive prize A or C.
@Carapace I find joy in discussing the validity of answers like this and such discussion is not possible without posting the answer first. I do feel sorry if I spoiled someone the joy of puzzling themselves though.
Yeah, I haven't quite got the hang of it myself. The encoding of formal logic in English sentences is fraught with ambiguity until you grok the specific style used.
Here's an example (SPOILER ALERT: with solution) of what I mean. The English version is just a verbose translation of a simple Boolean table.
==================================
Black-Hat Chuck
==================================
:date: 2014-02-01 10:56
:summary: A solution to the Three Hats puzzle.
I recently ran across a `cool puzzle site`_. Here is one of the puzzles
and a solution:
There are 3 black hats and 2 white hats in a box. Three men (we will
call them A, B, & C) each reach into the box and place one of the
hats on his own head. They cannot see what color hat they have
chosen. The men are situated in a way that A can see the hats on B &
C's heads, B can only see the hat on C's head and C cannot see any
hats. When A is asked if he knows the color of the hat he is wearing,
he says no. When B is asked if he knows the color of the hat he is
wearing he says no. When C is asked if he knows the color of the hat
he is wearing he says yes and he is correct. What color hat and how
can this be?
.. class:: attribution caption
~ `Three Hats`_
Solution
------------
I'm going to call the three men Alan, Bob, and Chuck.
First, let's imagine what Alan might be able to see. There are four
possibilities.
=========== =============
Bob's Hat Chuck's Hat
=========== =============
White White
Black White
White Black
Black Black
=========== =============
Since there are only two white hats, if Alan sees that both Bob's and
Chuck's hats are white his own hat would have to be black. In other
words, by admitting that he can't tell which hat he is wearing Alan is
saying that either or both of Bob's and Chuck's hats are black. If we
eliminate the case of both hats being white we are left with three
possibilities.
=========== =============
Bob's Hat Chuck's Hat
=========== =============
Black White
White Black
Black Black
=========== =============
From this it should be easy to see that if Bob sees that Chuck's hat is
white his own hat would have to be black. Bob would be uncertain of the
color of his own hat only if Chuck's hat is black. So Chuck, being no
dummy, can conclude that his own hat is black.
It's an elegant puzzle with a very simple and satisfying solution.
.. _cool puzzle site: http://wuriddles.com/
.. _Three Hats: http://wuriddles.com/easy.shtml#3hats
“The Autobiography of Malcolm X” was maybe the most important book I read as a teenager, and I still go back and reread it every so often. It should be required reading.
For fiction, “Blood Meridian” by Cormac McCarthy, “100 Years of Solitude” by Marquez, and “Song of Solomon” by Toni Morrison (or really anything by Toni Morrison, it’s all amazing).
Also, Thich Nhat Hanh’s translation of the Heart Sutra, “The Other Shore”, gave me a much deeper understanding of my meditative practice and the way I understand consciousness.
Anathem by Neal Stephenson features a bifurcated world where a scholar-monk-class of mathematicians lives in walled-off areas that mingle with the rest of the world only on fixed dates. Some every year, some every ten years, and others only every 100 years. There is a lot more to it, but I don't want to give anything away.
Anathem is definitely my favorite Stephenson book. I've read all of his books except for his newest book, and I have yet to finish Seveneves - I didn't want it to end, so I put it down.
Snow Crash by the same author changed my thinking. The idea of an ideology as a conceptual virus really transformed my thinking towards religion. I was already an atheist, but it really made me see it in a new light-- the way religion can consume people's minds and seems to spread from one to another like a sickness.
I read Decartes in high school during the teenage existential crises we all go through and it blew my mind. Opened me up to the power of thinking from first principles and a love of philosophy and questioning everything. Cogito, ergo sum!
"Atlas Shrugged" gets a lot of hate, but it's a phenomenally important book. It was one of those that completely consumed me during the read. I could not put it down – stayed up late, work up early, and rushed home from work to get back to it.
"Rework", "Getting Real", the other books by the old 37signals crew, and of course "The Lean Startup" really changed the way I thought about software development and business. I credit them for much of my startup/programming success.
Taleb's Incerto series changed how I thought about investing, risk, and life in general. "Fooled by Randomness" and "Antifragile" are especially good.
"Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" by Robert Pirsig takes you deep into the philosophy on what is 'quality'. Once you see it you can't unsee it.
A powerful excerpt from the book:
'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 the right values, the right values produce the 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.'
Despite all the praise it got, I really struggled with that book. I hated it so much that I had to check if I didn't pick the wrong book by accident. I found that it's a very polarising book. It's life-changing for some, and garbage for others.
There were a few insightful passages, but most of the book was pretentious rambling. It was difficult to understand what the author was even trying to say, with his head so far up his butt. It has a promising beginning, but becomes increasingly dense and confusing.
Quality is the ability of a thing to do its job. Chasing the definition of that word doesn't warrant a spiral into insanity.
> It's life-changing for some, and garbage for others.
I feel this way about Catcher in the Rye. My English teacher recommended it to me obviously on the basis that I was an angsty teenager that would identify with Holden Caulfield. But what a pile of crap it is. I still want back the hours I wasted on reading that stupid boring book.
It's a loathsome book for some people, even angsty teenagers, because not all of them are angsty for the same reasons.
I didn't enjoy it either when I was reading it, but later appreciated that it depicted a certain kind of angst— that of someone leaving childhood for adulthood, feeling anxious and threatened by this shift, and wishing to just remain as the most adult-like child (the "catcher in the rye" that gives the book its title) instead of having to go through that awkward period of being the most childlike adult.
Under that reading, it's much less irritating, because Holden isn't supposed to be valorized, just understood.
I loved Salinger's books when I was a teenager in the 80s. I just don't think his work is relevant today. The major themes are about how everyone else is a conformist and a phony. Both ideas have been turned inside out since Salinger wrote his books. What does being a "phony" mean if you're a YouTube star or say the President of the United States?
That's a weird recommendation. I think you might have viewed it differently as a bit of a retrospective or perspective piece.
I can't possibly so how the teacher thought suggesting that book to an angsty teen to be a good idea. That's the time kids need to have their world opened, not their angst re-affirmed. Very strange.
Thing is I was already reading some pretty bleak stuff at the time, e.g. Brave New World and 1984, and as you can probably imagine the trials of a mopey teenager didn't really impress much when put up against poor Winston and Room 101 etc.
I found it to be an "atmospheric" (for the lack of a better word) book -- you understand by feeling as much as by, well, direct understanding. Kind of like Master and Margarita (which some people also find pedestrian).
Reading secondary literature gave me some context about Pirsig's own mental illness and his struggles overcoming his son's death, but in the end I was still disappointed.
Edit: Also, it's not about motorcycles at all. If you are interested in motorcycle travel, read Ted Simon's Jupiter's Travels instead.
I really wanted to like JT. But Simon is a poor writer who wanders as much on the page as he did on his bike. An an author he's no comparison with Pirsig who had much more to say than merely, "I went somewhere and saw something."
Better books on motorcycling are "Long Way Round" by McGregor and Boorman or anything by Peter Egan.
Pirsig's ZatAoMM is my all-time favorite book, though I didn't finish it at first reading. The trick before reading it is not to put the book into a cubbyhole of personal preexisting expectations. It's not a travel book. It's a personal journey of discovery that just happens to be on a motorcycle. Essentially, Pirsig's bike trip is a metaphor to revisit his fragmented past and forgotten identity through the lens of a curious mind. It's a personal quest to know who he is (and was) and what in life has value that lasts.
I read Jupiter's Travels right after. It's indeed a much better book about motorcycle travel. It's a very accurate depiction of what it's like to travel on a motorcycle. It still blows my mind that someone achieved this before ATMs, hotel booking sites and fuel injection.
I had read it when I was younger and thought much of the same thing. Years later someone taught me about mindfulness in a completely different context and after applying that thinking to other aspects of my life I picked that book up again. I was able to appreciate it much more the second time.
The first time I tried to read it, I got frustrated with his style and quit -- I had been skimming over the story parts to get to the philosophy, and it was exhausting. I liked it better the second time when I wasn't as rushed.
For me the takeaways were:
1. Getting into a state of 'flow' is the ideal way to work.
2. Being dependent on technology one doesn't understand (& hence on people who do understand it) is an unpleasant fact of modern life.
3. Our culture still hasn't shaken the tendency to denigrate pleasure, and the subjective in general.
Quality is ranking things or people by their properties. Things that suck at their job can still be ranked.
You have to balance the idea and quantity of a piece to describe it's properties. Then you can rank it into a hierarchy. The UK runs on this principle of reception and qualitative judgement.
Turning the brain off with "peace of mind" is necessary, can't be thinking up new ideas and directing thoughts when you are in a state of reception, nor can you be excessively self-aware of your own being.
I haven't read Zen, it seems boring to be in that state of reception all the time, to me.
I'm glad I'm not the only one who feels this way. I have similar sentiments about Cohelo's Alchemist and even Ayn Rands fountainhead (didn't read the second book).
I tried this book and wanted to like it. I couldn't. There's something about that "lessons in disguise" type of style that doesn't click with me. I feel it tries too hard when those lessons and the analogies are things that could be explicitly said without so much ceremony. I also found the story itself rather boring.
I prefer a book like Siddartha by HH. The lessons are there, but the interpretation is open and the narrative is not compromised. You start reading it and you don't want to stop reading it because you're now part of Siddharta's journey. You’re no expecting the punch line that has the lesson, you simply live the story and therefore live the lesson.
Once I moved to a new city and business wouldn't start until a few days later. Some time to spare, I walked into the first bookstore I saw on the street. There in the corner this book caught my attention, well, because I like motorcycles and thought the cover looks appealing.
There is so much joy in picking up an unknown book from an unknown author in an actual bookshop, then reading it and discovering that it’s So Good, that Amazon just cannot match.
One of the things I really miss of my Italian youth is having tons of quality bookshops at every corner. England outside London is sorely lacking in that respect.
There’s another great book on Zen called “Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind”. I think what Persig is getting at is “non-judgmental observation”. The ability to look at things with no ego involved, like an absolute beginner — so that you’re mind is open to the solutions that naturally present themselves.
Both of these books had a big influence on Phil Jackson — the Bulls basketball coach. His interpretation was to not “force” things — to let them unfold.
So, for coding it could be applied by not forcing solutions and instead really calmly contemplating a system until you get to a point where the next right decision reveals itself. The idea being that the solution is there, and you just have to be open to it — rather than seeing yourself as some separate entity that’s going to impose a solution on it.
> Prince Wang's programmer was coding software. His fingers danced upon the keyboard. The program compiled without an error message, and the program ran like a gentle wind.
"Excellent!" the Prince exclaimed. "Your technique is faultless!"
"Technique?" said the programmer, turning from his terminal. "What I follow is Tao -- beyond all techniques! When I first began to program, I would see before me the whole problem in one mass. After three years, I no longer saw this mass. Instead, I used subroutines. But now I see nothing. My whole being exists in a formless void. My senses are idle. My spirit, free to work without a plan, follows its own instinct. In short, my program writes itself. True, sometimes there are difficult problems. I see them coming, I slow down, I watch silently. Then I change a single line of code and the difficulties vanish like puffs of idle smoke. I then compile the program. I sit still and let the joy of the work fill my being. I close my eyes for a moment and then log off."
Prince Wang said, "Would that all of my programmers were as wise!"
> calmly contemplating a system until you get to a point where the next right decision reveals itself.
I think I am not getting it because that just sounds like thinking about things and designing stuff.
I mean, sometimes, I focus on getting the right primitives so that the rest of the decisions just naturally fall out from that, but I'm not sure that's what you meant.
In the book he uses the example of trying to get a stripped screw out of something. It’s a classic example of where a lot of people will kind of mindlessly make the problem worse. But when you approach it calmly, maybe it leads you to realize it just needs some oil applied to it, etc.
So, I think we’ve all been there with coding where in either a rush, or driven by ego to solve the problem in some impressive way, we kind of get ourselves tied up. But when we calm our mind, it’s easier to see, “oh, I can just leverage this little change”.
... The idea is that, simultaneously, categories are an extremely powerful intellectual tool, and also imprison your thoughts.
In general life, as an odd monkey wandering around a built environment, that's Zen. The categories being challenged include such fundamental ones as "Self/Other"
In coding, identifying categories and choosing to perceive them or ignore them is fundamental to debugging. "The variable claims it's $foo; but I see back there it was set to $bar...." Strip away a layer of assumptions, and look underneath at what is _really_ there.
Iterated, this is what leads you to understanding performance all the way down to the silicon.
A lot of decisions are based on choosing one of two actions. You can think of them as doors. "Do I pick Door A or Door B?"
Sometimes you know that Door A is by far the "right" choice, but maybe it's the harder one. Taking a minute to drop your ego may make the choice easier. "Yeah, A is hard now, but B will bring much more pain later."
It may help to frame you decisions based on the hypothetical "1000x programmer". You acknowledge that this programmer is the absolute best. Every choice they make is literary a life or death decision, so they always make the right choice. What would they do in this situation? They would write that unit test!
Other times you don't know which one is the "right" choice. In those cases it actually doesn't matter, does it? Worrying about what may happen if you choose "wrong" will not change what's on either side of the doors.
Choose one and get on to the next set of doors. If you weren't happy with the outcome don't beat yourself up over it, instead use what you learned to better inform your future decisions.
House of Leaves is a great novel. Will feel like a completely fresh take on narrative form.
Infinite Jest is also great, if you haven't read it. It gets a lot of bad press mostly due to being fetishized by a particular type of insufferable person. The book has its flaws, but is a great piece of writing and (depending how old you are, where you are in life, etc) may offer a different lens. Also, the writing is excellent.
I didn't finish Infinite Jest. I found it kind of insufferable. I really don't want to detract from anyone who found it enjoyable; it's surely a monumental work. But personally it felt incredibly depressing and that made it hard to read.
The dialogues made it feel like experiencing isolation and disconnection from other people; the characters talk to each other, but don't listen or care for anyone but themselves or the ones/things they deify.
The thing is, I think that was kind of the point of the book (at least as far as I read). But I couldn't handle it. That, on top of the many paragraphs of needlessly esoteric language he peppers in, made me feel like I was reading a book written for someone else.
Should I go back and finish the book? What makes it compelling to others?
My favorite aspect of the book is the way in which it depicts “addiction” in its many forms such as being addicted to drugs, playing sports, consumer products or work. It makes you think hard about the elusive nature of happiness and fulfillment.
That was my primary takeaway as well. Some people I've talked to about it didn't quite get that theme from it, but I think it helps frame its point in a less scattershot way. It is still a concept I constantly think about, though it doesn't help me avoid the pitfalls much, which I think is also kind of the point.
I've just started it - I'm about 10% of the way in and I'm really engaged - enjoying it but with a kind of mental equivalent of full-body exhaustion way after a big day at the beach - it's fun but also hard and sometimes just plain difficult. I think DFW was swimming in so many ideas & feelings that Infinite Jest was a way of letting it all come out in a Kerouacian-stream without much thought for concision.
If it helps anyone decide whether to give it a go, two recent books I read and loved were 2666 by Roberto Bolaño, and Underworld by Don DeLillo, and Infinite Jest is satisfying me in the hard-earned way they both did.
I've read both of these, and don't recommend them.
House of Leaves has a very uninteresting plot, and raises more questions than it answers. It's physically painful to read, because most pages, you have to rotate the entire book every which way since the words go in spirals.
Infinite Jest is good, but way too long. A good 70% of the book could have been cut out or condensed. The writing is also intentionally bad, which makes it harder to read. There are definitely good lines, but it's kind of like DFW used a random sentence generator and some of the lines just happened to be amazing, but 90% of it is garbage.
Re House of Leaves, I don't recall it being most pages. There was a flurry of those at the end, but I found it was an effective machination that heightened the drama rather than distracted.
House of Leaves blew me away when I read it after it came out. I agree that is a fresh take on narrative form, and I personally found the process of reading it quite fun.
Infinite Jest has been for a long time in my must read list, but never got to reading it. Heard not much, but only good things about it.
>depending how old you are, where you are in life, etc may offer a different lens.
Could you elaborate more on this? I am curious. Maybe I could be right now in that situation. So in that case it would be optimal to start reading it now instead of in a year or two.
Frankly I don't know what the parent is really referring to, I think you can enjoy it at any age. I think quarantine is a great time to read it because it is a looooong read and it should provide some much-needed laughter.
So many good suggestions here! I'll try adding two more
[1] "So Good They Can’t Ignore You" by Cal Newport. It changed the way I look at my career and how I view my personal development.
[2] ADP 6-22 Army Leadership and the Profession by the US Army. Looking past the militaristic stuff, it made me change the way I see leader/subordinate relationships and how to start becoming a person others can depend on and look up to.
I just want to comment that the Army publication you listed is really good. While you can only learn so much about leadership from books, the military is one of the best organizations at explaining what leadership is. There is another pub from the Marines that is similar and equally high quality. I think it is called "Leading Marines" or something like that.
I have a conflicting relationship with "How to Win Friends and Influence People," and maybe some of you may relate to this.
Disclaimer: I only read a small, initial part of the book, and I'll explain the reasons behind this.
For one, I liked the initial parts of it; for example, remembering first names is a nice and very attentive thing to do, and in general people appreciate it when I can remember their first name after meeting them a second and third time.
On the other side, I found it to be of a very manipulative nature (shouldn't be a surprise; the title contains an "influence people" part), which rubbed me the wrong way; the book presents some techniques that help you get "what you want," but are quite superficial and hollow, i.e., you only pretend to be interested. That's why I decided to stop reading the book.
The conflicting part in all this is the fact that I see this book recommended all the time (and it's one of the best-selling books of all-time), but I just cannot ignore its manipulative nature.
It might be that I'm simply not part of its target audience or that I'm misinterpreting the messages in the book.
Nonetheless, I'd be interested to read your (and other fellow HNers) comments on this book.
It's probably been 32 years since I read How to Win Friends, but my take on it was that it is like many things we learn throughout life - first we model, they we practice, finally we make it part of our nature, and eventually we achieve mastery.
I didn't come away with the impression that the techniques are intended to be used in a hollow, phony way, so much as to show the reader a set of steps to get started toward genuinely showing interest in other people.
Not everyone can jump right in to Siddhartha or Zen and the Art or some of these heavier books that might take people out of their default self-absorption towards greater awareness of other people and their needs, but Carnegie wrote something that is easy to access and get people started down a path.
No. The book requires you to take a "genuine interest in people" and must repeat that seven dozen times. It also dismisses flattery and smoke-blowing and favors legitimate praise. I think sincerity is one of the key takeaways (and also the hardest parts to master) of that great book.
I think the book is very polarizing. You either read it as “compassionate” or as “manipulative”.
For me, I’ve often been teased for missing certain “obvious” gestures my whole life. But I’m not bad with people.
Since I’m naturally an optimist and compassionate, I read it as the former category. It was helpful for me to help identify what behaviors I already do that I should reinforce to help strengthen my relationships with other people.
I find a lot of self-help books are (sort of) “common sense” already, but that by reinforcing certain “nodes” in my brain’s “knowledge graph” I’m better able to reason about the knowledge later.
Put another way, if I’m interested enough to read a book about making friends, by reviewing information about “successful patterns” to makes friends I’m better able to reason about _how I can make friends_. It isn’t manipulative to start a conversation in a coffee shop with somebody! (Unless I’m “manipulating” somebody by asking for their contact info..?)
I agree with what you said. The book encourages all kinds of shortcuts (not explicitly though), and later on I found other books to be much better on the same topics.
However, it is very very easy to read and follow. And if you are not a social person, the book is a good first read.
1. Seven habits - I can't get past Covey's personal 'experiences'. They are just seemingly so contrived and fake that they just ruin the entire thought process for me. It seems like he had to make up things that related to the covenants. Is that just me?
2. For writing - I would also suggest 'On Writing' by Stephen King for this as a different take. It's probably the best 'how to write' book ever made. It's King's personal take on the theory of writing, with lessons sprinkled throughout. So good.
> 1. Seven habits - I can't get past Covey's personal 'experiences'. They are just seemingly so contrived and fake that they just ruin the entire thought process for me. It seems like he had to make up things that related to the covenants. Is that just me?
Lots of self-help and pop-business books do this and above other factors like all the padding (so very much of it), it's ruined the genre for me. Hate that crap. Makes me think their advice is bullshit.
I made it a ways into Never Split the Difference and got a little useful material out of it, but bounced off when I reached a can't-possibly-be-real story about the author buying a car and getting a great price by (he claims) just repeatedly asking "how can I do that?" (or similar) when presented with a price above what he'd offered. Give me a break. "Well, you're in luck, our rates on 5-year loans are great right now, let me introduce you to our finance guy", the salesman, implausibly, never says, instead just acting confused and stupid the whole time and eventually giving in. Dafuq? Either the author actually got had and didn't realize it, or that story was at best a half-truth.
My issue with King is that to me at least, he’s a terrible writer. Prolific doesn’t mean quality. I’m suspect what someone can get out of a book about writing from someone who writes poorly.
Read the book. I was in the same camp as you. Most of his writing is just hack nonsense. But, some is well written (The Stand, Misery, Shawshank, The Green Mile, Cujo, for example). He's just inconsistent.
Seriously, read the On Writing book. It really set his theory up for me to understand exactly why he's inconsistent. You can read his books and tell when he's thinking and processing, versus when he's writing to pay for a car or house or whatever.
"Thinking, Fast and Slow" was pretty underwhelming to me given the hype. There's much better stuff out there if you're interested in cognitive biases, behavior, etc.
Sure. Stuff like Taleb's "Fooled by Randomness" or Caldini's "Influence: the Psychology of Persuasion" stand out as much better off the top of my head. There's more, but I'd have to go back to my notes.
Amusingly, the introduction to "Seven Habits" starts off arguing against a hollow "personality ethic" approach pushed by other self-help books. I could be misinterpreting, but I believe that this is Covey insulting "How to Win Friends."
I found both books full of obvious things, but also found that reading and reflecting on obvious things can still go a long way for self-improvement. Personally, I didn't like "7 Habits" though because Covey is always saying his methods/truths are "self-evident" and he uses the "this is true because it would be dumb to think otherwise" line of reasoning at the points in the book when I thought his argument was weakest.
Agreed. I ate that book up for the first half, and when I came across the concept of "priming" I was obsessed. I looked it up only to find it had been largely debunked. Immediately lost interest. There are some great concepts in there, but it's not worth my time to tease out what is and is not legitimate.
I'd also want him to publish a revision, I've enjoyed listening to Kahneman on podcasts and have nothing against him as an author
"Thinking, Fast and Slow" is a book I buy for every person for their first birthday after I met them. It is the book that has had the most profound impact on me thus far.
Is there some mind bending revelation in the second half? I read the first half and have not mustered the will to read the rest of it. It just seems so... "obvious" for lack of a better word. Maybe I've had too much psychology lectures or something, but nothing in the first half was remotely new to me.
I read part of it as well, and it came across as one of those books that is basically a fairly simple premise that can be summarized in one paragraph, padded out to fill a book.
I mean "how to win friends" is similar, it can be summarized with just the 12 chapters, and it's padded out with anecdotes putting it in practice.
I'm sure Seven Habits is the same, I have it on my bookshelf (mandatory reading from my previous employer) and I think I started reading it but I lost interest.
I'm with you. I tried to get into that book - but felt it was a lot of verbiage and new phrases to describe things that already had terms. I gave up about a 1/3 the way through.
Most likely no one is going to like this post. My father was a physicist and he had a large library of books. Growing up all of these books were over my head but I tried reading all of them. The more difficult the book the more determined I became to read and understand the content. I found this to be mind expanding. I began a life long quest to read the most difficult books and texts I could find. It sometimes takes several passes. Some things didn't make sense until years later. I recommend reading outside your comfort zone and above your comprehension. The book doesn't expand your mind it's the reading process and thinking about the reading that forces the mind to expand. I have done this for 50 years and I still do it every day It's not one book but the sum total of books that expand your mind. Read with curiosity and an unquenchable thirst for knowledge. A man who reads one book lives once life while a man who reads a thousand books life experiences thousands of lives. I hope these word aren't wasted. I thought my fathers library was the library of Alexandria and it was until I got a library card.
This is precisely what Mortimer Adler suggests in his book "How to Read a Book", to read above your current levels this is only how you grow your mind.
Strong advice but I feel it's much harder nowadays to go down that route when there are distractions like YouTube videos that are easy to watch and make you feel you're learning when really it's scratching a superficial curiosity itch with no depth.
That said, to answer OP's question, I got Mortimer's book called "Great Treasury of Western Thought" that has compiled quotes from Western classics into key themes (the human condition, love, religions, etc), and it provided the missing link between getting meaty samples of key concepts, versus actually reading ALL the classics (the book started as the the index or 'syntopicon' of the 'Great Books of the Western World', a full compilation of Western works)
Aside: The Syntopicon by Adler et. al. is an amazing resource. It is nearly incomprehensible and is keyed to specific editions of The Great Works of the Western World. But, my lord, if you get the ducks lined up in a row, the Syntopicon is an amazing piece of work.
This is a very specific question but... Stoner by John Williams is one of my favorite books. It was also more difficult for me to read than other books I typically pick up which are primarily sci-fi and NYT bestseller fiction books.
When I read the Wiki for Stoner years ago I saw this line, "Bryan Appleyard's review quotes critic D.G. Myers saying that the novel was a good book for beginners in the world of "serious literature"". I looked up D.G. Myers and to see if he had a list of serious literature or a twitter where I could ask about such a list only to find he passed away in 2014.
Does anyone know of such a list? Googling provides results but nothing... conclusive.
I was recommended Stoner by someone I respect.
"Lists" of serious literature are usually crap; either apple polishing bullshit, or political oriented nonsense. I've tried this sort of thing; even Adler related "Great Books" groups are hot garbage at this point. You need to find well read people worthy of respect.
I take well known lists (e.g. Gates') with a grain of salt, but cross referencing with personal recommendations has worked well. I ended up getting a copy of Stoner after it came up a few times in as many weeks, so it was handy last time I went on vacation.
I also usually search HN for threads like these when I'm looking for things to read. I'm fairly certain that's how I came across Seveneves.
I struggle with this since I also want to read something I enjoy and not make it a chore. I tried reading Moby Dick recently and was so disappointed. I wanted to read the original but the old English threw me off and I found it boring.
Reading literature's pretty different from reading easy fiction. It takes a different approach and mindset to appreciate it but it's incredibly rewarding when one does. Think "acquired taste", or maybe the difference between reading a pop-math book and a math textbook. Ditto reading non-contemporary fiction, so that's two hurdles to overcome in this case. I don't have any sage advice on how to gain the ability to read and enjoy literature, aside from that for most people it takes practice and persistence before it's comfortable, like getting used to the temperature of a pool. Starting small helps and is probably how most people work up to the point of being genuinely excited and gripped by something like Moby Dick.
I guess if I had any advice to offer to someone wanting to achieve that (if it's an achievement) it'd be to try older popular literature (try King Solomon's Mines, it's amazing, then work your way to even older stuff) to get used to older English (nb not Old English, which is another thing entirely and you're not likely to encounter much of it in anything but an extremely deep reading of English lit) and to read short, relatively easy "literary" works that are more recent. Vonnegut's way at the easy end. Maybe try Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby or his short stories? Salinger's Nine Stories? I'm not sure—at this point I have trouble judging what's approachable. I'd make a terrible teacher of literature.
Lots of things kinda work this way. Jazz and "classical" music usually take some work on the listener's part, to personally learn and develop, before they yield their greatest fruits. Most folks have trouble enjoying silent films, but there are some damn good ones out there. Just takes effort and time.
Moby Dick and Blood Meridian both have a certain biblical feel to them which really hits hard. Can't say they were mind bending but both were nice trips.
I'll just add that the sweet spot for learning is rarely as far out as your younger self found it to be (much to the credit of your youthful determination). Too easy, and one's engaging in little more than practice. Too hard, and one lacks the conceptual framework onto which extend one's understanding.
However, I do definitely agree with your advice not to fear the uncomfortable feeling of being at the hard end of the spectrum. With time and determination, we're often capable of longer grasps than we realize.
Any advice on how to balance learning/knowing theory vs practical stuff? As a kid, I read tons of books. While I don't regret it, I kinda wish I had spent some time outside doing socializing and physical activities. I'm in awe of people who seem perfectly happy with a book by themselves but also get along nicely with other people as needed.
The best way I know to balance is by scheduling your time. Maybe keeping a log. When I read I usually read two or three books at a time with one book being very difficult and one being normal. I will switch books every 10 minutes to build my recall. I am extremely introverted so I don't talk to people unless I have to. I prefer to write.
I actually am planning to buy a handful of books that are way outside my education / intelligence level in hope to gain a better understanding of some concepts and tech that I'm interested in. Well see how this goes.
I had a similar experience! My grandfather was a Phd in bio from Harvard so I had his library to peruse. My favorite difficult book was Biology and Knowledge by Jean Piaget.
I reread Moby Dick as an adult within the last couple years. Found it far more interesting than I did when I was young. The book plays on narration in far more complex ways than I remembered.
Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five. Seriously. Read it. The horrors of war leaked into your brain through a sci-fi novel. If you enjoy that, try Player Piano, a moral discourse on technology and its social effects. Even though it is old, the social complications are familiar.
To keep your brain busy, anything by Umberto Eco, but this would be my order: Name of the Rose, Foucault's Pendulum, The Island of the Day Before.
Asimov’s Foundation and Robots series. Images and stories from those still pop into my head randomly decades later, and bits and pieces appear throughout pop culture. From the original trilogy up to Foundation’s Edge would be a good portion size.
Understanding how something like powered flight works—the combination of science, engineering, process, self-control, intuition, on and on—is highly transferable to nearly any other acquirable skill.
Mere Christianity, by C. S. Lewis. Any of his nonfiction works have a style of writing that I seldom find. He has a dedication to reason and a step-by-step approach.
The Elements of Style, by William Strunk and E. B. White. I liked writing since I learned how to. I didn't find this book until I was 17, and it unlocked me to write in a way that better helped others.
The Language Instinct, by Steven Pinker. I guess I like writing and language. Like C. S. Lewis, Steven Pinker has a way of writing about hard things that makes them easy to understand, even enjoyable. The subject matter is also news to most people, I think, who don't appreciate just how much that language is built in to the human mind from conception.
I tried "Mere Christianity" at the urging of my mother. It was a series of logical fallacies one after the other. Although I will give him props, though, he tried to put a twist on most of them. Instead of a "false dilemma" it was a "false trilemma" and so on. It was still pretty silly.
Whenever I find a copy of Elements of Style, I chuck it in the trash.
Geoff Pullum, a revered linguist, calls it "the Nasty Book". He explained, in an essay that is easy to find online, how its chief effect is to make people insecure about their writing. The book's message is, "Here are the rules. You will have to break them to write well. But you aren't good enough to know when." In fact the rules are not rules anywhere but in the imagination of White and his acolytes. No admired writer of English knows them, never mind obeys them.
When White put out the second edition after Strunk died, he made up a bunch more rules, the went back and doctored Strunk's original text to follow his new rules.
But he didn't check his own text. Typically he breaks his own rules on the same page where he is promoting them.
The book presents a profoundly ignorant picture ofthe English language. You cannot become a good writer shackled to Strunk and White.
> The book's message is, "Here are the rules. You will have to break them to write well. But you aren't good enough to know when."
No, the books message is that there is a progression from undisciplined to rule-following to transcendent writing and you may be anywhere on that spectrum (though, if you are looking for a book on how to write, it's probably not deeply into the latter range), and that having the set of rules that the book presents available helps you move from the first to the second and prepare you to move to the third.
In general, I think it's accurate enough. The rules it presents aren't the only set of rules that can do that, and there certainly is room for debate about their merits among competing alternatives.
> its chief effect is to make people insecure about their writing
That's the opposite of its effect on me.
> The book's message is, "Here are the rules. You will have to break them to write well. But you aren't good enough to know when."
I discerned no such put-down.
> In fact the rules are not rules anywhere but in the imagination of White and his acolytes. No admired writer of English knows them, never mind obeys them.
The gist of the book is the same as other books, such as The King's English, On Writing Well, and A Sense of Style. Stephen King praises the book in his own book, On Writing. I've also read a few articles on writing that say the same basic thing.
The gist of these books is to write in service of the reader (as opposed to your ego) and to work hard at it (as opposed to being lazy and just "letting it all hang out" from the first draft), as it is a craft, like carpentry. Specifically, try to avoid wasting words, try to use the best word at each point, and try to order your words (and sentences and paragraphs) in the best way for the reader's understanding.
There are some minor rules and preferences that perhaps Geoff Pullum is pouncing on, something like, "A clever horse is a good-natured one, not an ingenious one." I can see clearly that that is an archaism and take it for what it's worth. After all, the book is about 100 years old. But any writer should know that when you get down to that level of resolution, the detail shifts a bit in the quantum foam. Things on that level vary a bit from one decade to another, from one region to another. And language is like a craft, in that there are some rules that can be followed 90% of time, but it is not mathematics. You cannot distill a formula. I see Geoff Pullum taking it as black and white, but English does not submit to such simplification.
Perhaps Strunk was more black and white, but White seems a bit looser, and I think their combination balances each other out nicely. It reminds me that no rule is absolute. However, for the vast majority of writers, they would benefit from at least trying to follow a lot of them!
> The book presents a profoundly ignorant picture ofthe English language. You cannot become a good writer shackled to Strunk and White.
For 80% of the writing I read in books, magazines, articles, etc., they suffer from the kinds of problems addressed in the Elements of Style. There may be other kinds of problems in a minority of writing, but far and away most writing suffers heavily from wordiness, vagueness, clumsy construction. I won't fault someone for incorrectly calling a horse "clever," but now I see why most writing tires me out so much --- and I can rewrite it in my head to be clearer.
There are plenty of absolute rules in English. White didn't know them, and you don't know them, but neither of you ever breaks them, or is even tempted to.
If you need a book to tell you to use the best word, or to put your words in order, it means you need far more help than you can get from a book.
Mere Christianity by C. S. Lewis is truly worth reading. Lewis's non-fiction is much better than his fiction, and his fiction is world-renowned. Mere Christianity is just so pure and clear.
I liked Mere Christianity and I like C.S. Lewis's writing in general, but certain parts of Mere Christianity annoyed me because it felt manipulative. The most egregious example is Lewis's trilemma which seems constructed to win arguments, although I've never seen it win a single argument, not by a good faith argument but by putting someone on the spot and demanding that they to choose between three answers; Two of which will make them sound exceedingly rude and harm their standing in society.
The most interesting response that I've seen to Lewis's trilemma came from a psychiatric nurse. His experience of working in an psychiatric hospital was that people with delusions, such as thinking they are Napoleon, didn't seem particularly off. They were pleasant, and easy to care for. Over the course of weeks, one would get to know them. It would gradually become apparent that the delusional thinking went very deep. They really did need residential care.
So Lewis's rhetoric depends on "lunatic" connoting "raving lunatic" and there are actually four branches to his tri-lemma: liar, God, raving lunatic, some-one with serious psychiatric issues who generally holds it together and seems normal much of the time.
Claiming to be the Messiah is a long way from claiming to be God. There is good evidence Jesus claimed the former and not the latter (which wouldn’t even make sense to a first-century Jew).
I would recommend "the perennial philosophy", by Huxley [1]. Schrödinger recommends it in his "what is life" (another amazing piece).. you'll not be disappointed if you thrive for mind expanding literature! :)
I found Candide by Voltaire to be eye opening. I read a lot of philosophy and self help, which is a category you could put this book in to. Since it's fiction though, the message comes through more in the story than it does in the author banging you over the head with "you should".
I concur on the Vinge picks. The Vinge story that really blew my mind was "Marooned in Realtime", which I contend is best read in the context of the other works in "Across Realtime":
For mind games, I submit "Kiln People" by David Brin. What if you could fork your consciousness into another body and rejoin periodically? "Kiln People" explores this idea in some remarkable ways.
I found Deepness in The Sky an incredibly frustrating read. I _really_ didn’t enjoy the switching between perspective of human and alien. (Especially the personification)
I was able to get about a third of the way through the book because my friends kept saying it gets better... but it’s a thick book and I just didn’t get it as I kept chugging
If I’m reading fiction it’s OK to put a book down. I ask you, dear internet stranger, what do you enjoy about these books?
I can't think of any way of commenting on what you said that isn't a spoiler - perhaps worth noting that the personification you object to turns out to be a pretty important thing in its own right.
Also, focus has got to be one of the most terrifying concepts anyone has put into a SF book.
I loved A Fire Upon the Deep, but I thought Deepness was a little disappointing because the aliens aren't alien enough. They seem like regular people who happen to look like bugs and who sometimes need to hibernate because of how their sun works. Ironically, it seems like the all-human Emergency is Vinge's vehicle to explore an alien way of thinking.
A Fire Upon the Deep has a much bigger scope and includes a menagerie of truly weird aliens.
I miss Ian M. Banks deeply. What a fantastic mind. Even after watching interviews with him, I find it so surprising that he built such a fantastic universe. Excession is definitely my favorite. What a wonderful wonderful journey of exploration.
The book is written to convince the reader that evolution is valid.
But to me, the shocking thing was to really understand the religious argument for the first time, and understand why evolution challenges that world view.
In a nutshell, there is a web of related arguments which support the belief that God exists. One of them is that the eye is so complicated, that it must have been designed from the beginning by an intelligent being. Therefore God exists.
But Darwin showed that many small random changes plus natural selection are sufficient to explain the eye's complexity.
Why was this shocking at the time?
Just imagine you are walking around with a vague gut feeling that God must exist every time you see a beautiful bird or a flower. You figure that something intelligent must have designed that beatiful, complex living thing. You see another complex wonder of nature, and feeling gets stronger. Perhaps it becomes the main reason that you believe that God must exist.
Then one day, wham! Darwin releases his book, and it becomes clear that there is a valid scientific explanation for the complexity of that flower which does not require a supernatural designer.
Instantly your whole world view collapses. There's nothing in the science that says that God does not exist. Science only says that other explanations are sufficient. And yet, just that is enough to collapse that entire line of thinking. There are still other arguments for the existence of God. But the one you felt most strongly is gone.
Reading the book gave me a detailed understanding of that religious line of reasoning, and what it might feel like to lose it.
It gives me some understanding of why people, even today, have a desire to reject the scientific idea of evolution.
I suppose your praise is more due to Darwin's original book, although it is much less accessible nowadays - Dawkins does indeed explain it well.
The thing that struck me was how Darwin's ideas achieved such quick adoption, even in that most pious of times, where to avow yourself an athiest was unthinkable. It's an idea, once you are exposed to it, is so immensely powerful and perhaps even to say in hindsight obvious - that the truth of it almost bowls you over. The eldritch horror it must have inspired in the religious mind at the time can only be imagined. And yet it could not be seriously challenged - because it was so clearly TRUE.
One of the most staggering intellectual achievements of mankind. Philosophers since Ancient Greek times had been speculating on the causes of being (some even came close to guessing something like evolution) but they were just that, guesses. Then finally we get Darwin, and bam, no guesses, here is the answer (I acknowlege several others got just pipped to the post on it). That such a simple idea lurked just out of our understanding all this time, but took such staggering genius to unlock...
I haven't read that particular book of Dawkins, but I have encountered a mathematical argument I find somewhat troubling, though I don't have the background to really examine it in depth.
Essentially the number of possible configurations of the sequence of a piece of genetic code required to produce the instructions for producing a usable protein are something like 10^77 to 1. The state space is filled with an astronomical amount of unusable junk.
The next part of the argument hinges on the Cambrian explosion. They claim that mathematically there isn't enough time for life produce enough trials to give rise to the amount of species seen during that period given the duration of the period and the sheer number of combinations life has to try in order to find viable ones.
They sort of say that Darwin was like Newton. A good enough explanation of a large portion of observable phenomenon, but it breaks down at the edges and a new theory is needed.
They seem to want to fill it with Intelligent Design. I'm an atheist myself, so I don't feel compelled to fill it with the god of the gaps, so to speak. But I'm finding it hard to accept Darwin as the whole answer.
Does Dawkins book address this? Is there any book that addresses this?
In the one Dawkins book I read, the mathematical part definitely gets addressed. It may change your mind about the mathematical part.
I once read elsewhere that almost all the specific details Darwin came up with have been overturned by other scientists. But the new scientific results prove evolution and natural selection even harder.
My own personal speculation is that there may be many simple proteins that have some type of use or another. I would be interested in reading about how they came up with that 10^77 number. Sounds high to me.
On the other hand, I've read scientists make comments similar to your comments. Not in papers, but in casual interviews. Some agree with you and say that even given the current theories, there just wasn't quite enough time on earth to create life from non-life.
It's not an accepted scientific theory at all. More like a crackpot idea that will probably never be proved or disproved. But take a look at the panspermia theory. Small seeds of some kind move from planet to planet. Maybe one landed on earth long ago? It's a crazy idea. But it does address the issues you brought up.
The foundations of peoples' beliefs are not tied to logic or truth, it is tied to time, effort, character and way of life.
Any change in belief that will influence their way of life will raise psychological shields. People will very readily change their logic to maintain a belief if that meant preserving other other aspects of their lives that they have put time and effort into.
This book is written for people who already understand the true nature of science and religion. I highly doubt it can convert people, I have yet to find a technique or even a book that has the ability to do so. It's just the way people are...
Whenever you see someone convert from religion to science most of the time the underlying foundations of it had nothing to do with logical realization and more to do with some form of minor or major trauma.
If you experienced a conversion to science from religion and you yourself describe the experience as a "logical realization" I would argue that you probably weren't that invested in the religion in the first place OR that there was some associated trauma that coincided with the "logical realization."
Haha. You are much better at psychology than I am. You are so right that logical arguments just make people cling to their old beliefs harder.
But then...
What is the purpose of the book?
Is it just to give scientifically oriented people a playbook of arguments to use against anti-evolutionary bible thumpers when debating school curriculum?
I'll accept that.
Try Julian Jaynes book "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind". Whether his conjectures are right or wrong, their scope is mind-blowing. Don't be put off by the title - it became a surprise hit as a popular science book.
Likewise Dennett's "Consciousness Explained." I don't agree with a lot of what he lays out, and it doesn't quite accomplish the title, but it challenges a lot of common intuitions about consciousness in a way I found productive.
The wind was flapping a temple flag, and two monks started an argument. One said the flag moved, the other said the wind moved; they argued back and forth but could not reach a conclusion.
The Sixth Patriarch Hui-Neng said, "It is not the wind that moves, it is not the flag that moves; it is your minds that move."
Joshu sees the Hermits
Joshu went to a hermit's cottage and asked, "Is the master in? Is the master in?"
The hermit raised his fist.
Joshu said, "The water is too shallow to anchor here," and he went away.
Coming to another hermit's cottage, he asked again, "Is the master in? Is the master in?"
This hermit, too, raised his fist.
Joshu said, "Free to give, free to take, free to kill, free to save," and he made a deep bow.
Ok, cute, but does it mean anything? Of course the wind moved the flag. Are they all ignorant of physics?
No of course not. Its some metaphysical plug about relationships or something. One of those 'one hand clapping' things. I guess the point is to get you to stop overanalyzing. Which I'm doing.
But no, I didn't get my mind blown by monks in semantic circles. I guess I'm not ready to be enlightened.
Lots of those stories come off as more wanky and esoteric than they're supposed to. That one... maybe not, but most are supposed to be approached with a lot more context than a Westerner with little exposure to Buddhism (and especially the history of and other stories about the monks involved in the stories) is likely to have, going in cold. They're not supposed to be nearly as confusing as they can seem (or, at least, should be differently-confusing) when one reads without some guiding commentary to fill in the gaps in knowledge one is expected to have before approaching them.
That sounds a lot like a post-facto apologist slant. Sure you can 'explain them' but everybody hears them where their mind is at now. And for most folks, especially junior monks just starting out, they might sound wanky too.
> That sounds a lot like a post-facto apologist slant.
Uh, no. Lots of them definitely rely on knowing who the monks are, their reputations, and their relationships to one another. And other facts about the world in which they occur ("Three pounds of flax!"). One is not even going to get at the interesting parts of them without that. Lots will come off as gibberish or as confusing in ways that they are not intended to be without that context.
> Sure you can 'explain them' but everybody hears them where their mind is at now.
It's not about explaining them, it's about the coming-to-terms phase of reading from How to Read a Book. Even smart folks would probably have a bad time approaching a graduate-level math text book without a little context so they get where it's even starting from and understand the references and vocabulary that the book was written assuming the reader would already have.
I think they are supposed to be 'esoteric and wanky' for the beginner, like 'mu' and 'one hand clapping' - even for the eastern audience. The idea, if I understand it correctly, is to get your mind hung up on a solution until you either get frustrated, or find your way out of the conundrum.
I hope I didn't do any harm here. I was hoping to share some of what I thought was pretty mind bending.
Even for the first story in Gateless Gate it's probably intended that the reader know what "mu" means and the orthodox Zen Buddhist position on who/what does or does not have Buddha-nature—and WTF "buddha-nature" is—before tackling it. Those parts aren't supposed to be mysterious.
There is no wind
there is no flag
there are no monks
only your mind.
Its really not just semantics. Skip the Buddhism and go read Andy Clark's Surfing Uncertainty. Its humorously written, its current science and it'll blow your mind ;)
A koan is a tool intended to be wielded by a teacher. I've never found it helpful to read them, anyway - it seems to miss the point. Language only obscures the fundamental truth.
For science fiction, Dune is a must, and Children of Time is probably the most mind-bending sci-fi I've read since. Both create imaginary worlds that are so detailed and plausible that they make you see our world in a new light.
But take Dune with a grain of salt; I read them, but the books after the first get a bit, I dunno, wishy-washy? Vague? Philosophical? I wanted to like it because the universe it describes is compelling, but the stories themselves lose a lot of luster.
Interesting to see what they'll do in the upcoming movie / series, whichever it was though. It's great in terms of worldbuilding, and it's influenced a lot of other stuff (like Warhammer 50K).
I liked some of the ones after the second more than the second. But I honestly wish I'd stopped at the first. It is such an amazing story that gives life to an incredibly interesting and well built universe. Then, having built that wonderful universe, the follow-on books got bored with it and decided to focus on ... fancy sounding bullshit, for lack of any better description. Going back to the first book, I see that the flaws were there already, but they were in service of building the world, while that relationship flipped afterward.
I agree that books 3-4 are pretty slow and uninteresting, but one of the major aspects of Dune is the rise and fall of tyrants, and our obsession for saviours, which only really shines in the Heretics/Chapterhouse books, where the empire really falls.
It's difficult not to see modern politics in that light afterwards, with its cult around personalities rather than ideas.
Messiah and Children are sometimes published in one volume since Messiah's so short, so you may as well read both if you're going past the first book. And if you've done that you may as well finish the arc with God Emperor.
Reading past that is, truly, not worth it. Story's over, stop reading.
It is best just to read the first book. It is complete in itself.
And then there is Whipping Star, which is best skimmed through so that you can get to The Dosadi Experiment.
In fairness, Whipping Star is a fabulous take on what it would be like to attempt to communicate with an alien species that does not share our basic assumptions.
Dosadi Experiment is filled with fascinating ideas. Little gems like: “Does a population have informed consent when that population is not taught the inner workings of its monetary system, and then is drawn, all unknowing, into economic adventures?”
There is Dune and then there are the books that came after Dune. I tried reading the follow-ups and they were merely average. But Dune ranks as one of the best novels ever written.
I picked up a copy of Dune at the Harvard Coop as a teenager and I was amazed. I learned to develop an inner dialog of reasoning. It also started me thinking in terms of systems and the importance of efficiency. Loved it.
A piece of fiction that has never failed to make me think every time I read it, is: The Futurological Congress: From the Memoirs of Ijon Tichy by Stanislaw Lem.
One of the tenets of getting your mind bent is reading things that are antithetical to your own world view. For this reason I read and had my mind bent by Supernatural: Meetings with the Ancient Teachers of Mankind - Graham Hancock.
Finally, I offer The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food by Dan Barber. I have read a lot about food, nature, etc. but Barber nails the heart of the problem with our current (really recent past, in light of the pandemic) food culture. From farms and restaurants to the consumers (we are not just eaters) he shows how there could be another way that is more sustainable, as well as being more delicious.
The Midnight Gospel is insanely good. It's the best thing I've watched in a long time.
I'm a huge fan of Adventure Time so I was really excited when I heard about it, but the trailer is just full of gross imagery and I expected it to be just another stupid gross-for-gross-sake cartoon that I'd probably stop watching after a few episodes. So wrong.
It's basically a method that helps you find what exactly get you on, what you get energy from, and how to reach it.
Of course it requires a lot of introspection but the book helps you there.
It sounds cheesy I know, but that book had enough impact that it really changed the way I worked, and make sense of why I was so frustrated at times. Couple months after reading the book, the company I work with offered me a tailored job because I was finally able to clearly communicate what it is that was driving me.
A bit of err, self-actualization? Goes a long way. I've been in a similar point, eventually I was offered to go to a career coach. It's basically someone that challenges you about what you want to do, what you want to achieve. And in my case, identify that I'm a people-pleaser, I'd rather defer to others to tell me what to do rather than take my own initiative, because comfort zone, risk, etc.
Yes, pretty much really. Nothing you couldn't have done by yourself. The book is just helping you along the way to make you realize those things yourself. It sounds like you had a similar experience :)
It helped me a lot though. And I'm very surprised to see the amount of people around me that don't know why they are doing what they're doing. That often leads to a lot of frustration. :)
Rationality: From AI to Zombies by Eliezer Yudkowsky
Many people think of themselves as rational and have mastered the basics (understand the scientific method, know how to systematically solve difficult problems, etc) but are still constantly fooled by their human, imperfect brains into irrational thoughts and actions - both in day-to-day life and when pondering larger questions (science, engineering, policy, philosophy). Many aren't aware (just as I wasn't) that there are many more levels of rational thinking to unlock, that mistakes and biases can be identified and reduced.
The book is adapted from a series of blog posts so lacks a bit in coherence (can be hard to get into), but stick with it for a bit, and I guarantee the ideas presented will be well-worth it.
I stumbled across Chomsky’s “Imperial Ambitions: Conversations on the Post 9/11 World” at my local library on the east coast while I was a senior in high school. When checking out the librarian seemed confused, “interesting,” she said “this book doesn’t appear to be in our system. It’s your lucky day. You just got yourself a free book!”
That book impacted my life more than any other. It really opened my mind to an entire world of dissenting, radical thought that could be both studied, praised or rebuked. A true “The Giver” moment.
I have since moved to San Francisco - once a hot bed for the type of thought I accidentally came across all those years ago. About 6 months ago, while looking through my home library, I once again stumbled upon that book. I was curious, for the first time, who the publisher of this book was. What institution was so radical to give Chomsky a voice even still? And I discovered it was City Lights Publications, the publishing arm of the famous City Lights Bookstore here in San Francisco. Weird how the world works sometimes.
To all reading, if you ever find yourself in San Francisco, you must go to City Lights!
A relatively unconventional choice but the highest-rated visual novel of all time, Muv-Luv Alternative, is insane. It is without any exaggeration the only piece of actually "life-changing" media that I've consumed. I felt myself to be mentally much more mature and tougher afterwards, and able to face challenges head-on instead of procrastinating or shirking away. It really is something that shakes you from your soul and leaves an everlasting emotional impact, which is very different from the non-fiction books (which are also indispensable of course).
I would summarize core ideas as "To live is to suffer, but you have to carry on no matter what. This is what everybody does." and "an ode to humanity", but it really is so hard to put the experience into words. You have to live it yourself.
After reading "The Machine that Changed the World," by Womack, Jones, and Roos, all product management paradigms besides Just-In-Time seem irredeemably sub-optimal, almost provably so. The book is about the Toyota Production System, and how Toyota's product management paradigm of JIT alone caused Toyota to become the largest car manufacturer in the world over Ford, GM and all the entrenched American mass producers.
I agree. However, this pandemic has proven that JIT leads to outages when part of the supply chain is suddenly disrupted by external forces. On the other hand, what production system wouldn't have been hit (as hard?) by the corona virus? Interesting!
Ecclesiastes. Short book of wisdom so jam-packed with truth I challenge anyone to read it and disagree with the message it shares. Always relevant but especially so in these challenging times.
Discipline and Punish by Michel Foucault fundamentally changed the way I look at things like school and work. Essentially, they're systems of discipline and control masquerading as something very different. Skip all the Malcom Gladwell crap and read some real philosophy. It's hard but rewarding.
Great book. The current situation certainly brings his ideas to mind. While it may well be justified, the speed and ease with which many open, democratic societies have gone into strictly enforced Italy/Spain-style lockdowns (essentially crisis-driven totalitarianism), shows us how thin the veneer of freedom really is, and how seamlessly our institutions can be made to serve the "carceral state".
I would recommend Madness and Civilization from the same author, in a similar vein. Similar to prisons, society needs hospitals to house the sick, so that the "sane" ones have somewhere they can point to and say, "Those are the sick ones, over there". It's a good argument on distancing one's self from the other, in order to maintain a feeling of superiority.
absolutely. control is endemic and insidious and why we build systems in the first place. they’re also necessary for societies to reach greater achievements.
it’s elucidating but foucault is wildly convoluted in his writing unfortunately.
I "saved up" for The Glass Bead Game - reading about 7 Hesse books before going for his magnum opus. I was severely let down by it. It's all over the place, sloppy. I thought perhaps it was because of the loss in German-->English, but a few German friends (including a few on HN) have suggested the original isn't much better.
IMO Narcissus and Goldmund and Steppenwolf are his best.
I agree. I loved Steppenwolf, and it had several absolutely sublime passages - very much like in the rest of his bibliography - but The Glass Bead Game was completely devoid of any of the magic or imaginal that Hesse can conjure up, no timeless cultural analysis mirroring our times and no razor sharp Kierkegaardian character portrayal.
Instead it seemed like a was harrowingly long weird sci fi fanfic over some vaguely defined but stupidly complex future society imagined in the lamest and most naive almost pubescent mind. Simple in the sense that everyone from the politician to the ascetic guru seemed like complete one dimensional stereotypes.
Also you don't stop reading because of esoteric complexity you might "get" later when you know more of the western cosmology like in fellow complex works like Ulysses (funfact both books are among the top 10 most abandoned), - you stop because it's boring imagined political history. There really doesn't seem to be a whole lot under the surface, and the schisms between "academic life" or a "life of devotion" versus "a mercantile city life", or "life of politics" was incredibly naive with no mythological, historical or even poetic context mirroring our world.
Absolutely +1 to this. Although my German is terrible enough that I did have to read the English translations.
I would add, in my opinion, start with Steppenwolf and then read Siddhartha. It blows my absolute mind that these books were written a hundred years ago.
They're still so relevant to life. It's really, genuinely astounding.
> It blows my absolute mind that these books were written a hundred years ago.
The more you read history, and the actual written words or written speeches of intellectuals and politicians, you'll continue to be amazed. Much of their language is poetic, and their prose seems more coherent than today's, but that's probably because they wrote a lot more letters to one another.
Also anything not memorable has been lost. There's a selection bias.
Why are so many old houses built so well? It's not just because craftsmanship was better. It's because the ones not built so well didn't get old. (I owned a house built in 1884 for a few years. Most of it was excellent craftsmanship. Some ... not so much. Previous owners had been lucky the dining room floor had never been stressed too much.)
I used to like Herman Hesse, and gradually realized the straight line from Hesse to Nazism. His distinct lack of human understanding is what bothers me at core. His female characters barely exist except as mirages in the eyes of men, and his male characters are little more than intellectualized brains. It's the type of book one likes as a teenager / young adult and realizes is BS later.
I had a contrasting experience with Hesse. Narcissus and Goldmund was really influential on me. It made me realize that life doesn't have to be about buying stuff and fucking the same woman for the rest of my life. It drove me to travel and experience many things. Through that process I gained perspective you just can't get by being stuck in an office working so you can buy shit you don't need, most of the time advancing the subliminal competition your wife is in with her girlfriends.
I've only read Siddhartha, and it didn't paint the author like you've done it.
Maybe I've completely misunderstood the book, but my key take away is that : true enlightenment (and by enlightenment you can say, true knowledge), only comes from life experience.
And that takes quite some human understanding, specially when we've grown to value information and theory, to the point where we build a perceived complete understanding of matters, only to later realize it's an illusion.
Things like talking about the concept of Love, Grief, Hate and any other complex emotions, end up falling short no matter how you read about them, either from a technical point of view, or simply from a character from a short story. You can't truly empathize until you've lived it.
Like it's not your knowledge to own unless you've experienced it, no matter what shape or form, and maybe that deserves some sort of respect.
Maybe that reflects on our lack of appreciation for a lot of things we take for granted.
Is it wrong that he wrote it through the lens of a intellectualized male character that didn't give enough focus on women? I don't know. It's his narrative after all.
I respect your view. I enjoyed reading Hesse when I did; read 3 of his books; SteppenWolf, Glass Bead Game, Siddhartha. There are many nice ideas in them. I simply don't adore his writings the way many do, however. My views changed as I changed.
Here's a quote from the New Yorker:
"Many young men, in particular, see a glamorous reflection of themselves in the typical Hesse hero—a sensitive, brooding man who cannot find a place for himself in ordinary society. This figure might live in India in the age of the Buddha, like Siddhartha, or in Germany in the Jazz Age, like Harry Haller, or in the Middle Ages, like Goldmund in “Narcissus and Goldmund.” Whatever the setting, his path will generally feature the same landmarks. He will be plucked out of his childhood surroundings and sent to an élite school, where he will suffer deeply. He will rebel against conventional ideas of success and refuse to pursue any kind of career, combining downward mobility with spiritual striving."
Siddhartha, while an enjoyable read, confuses/"borrows" eastern religious concepts to turn it into "follow the beat of your own drum, man!".
This has real world consequences: Hesse justified his taking the "middle ground" between Nazism vs its opponents by his "politics of detachment".. you know, because he is above society, quoting from JewisPress.com:
"Hesse’s failure to publicly condemn the Nazi Party and the fascist regime was due, in large part, to his “politics of detachment” – his policy of viewing the war fever infecting Germany from a distance and his general aloofness to the deadly struggle during the 1930s and 40s as he publicly sought to occupy the “middle ground” between the Nazis and exiled German writers.
Early in the war, Hesse published an essay in which he clearly applied his “middle ground” standard, expressing and anticipating German victory but also insisting that humane values be protected. Even this bland caveat earned him everlasting hostility from the German public."
I am not claiming Hesse was a Nazi, and privately he was more anti-Nazi than anything else. His wife was Jewish.
Hesse's heroes are more Ubermensch that view regular society as cattle, than harmless Hippies.
I also tend to think the US Hippie movement of the 60s as a philosophy of selfishness..(yes, I'm aware of anti-war origins etc.) so perhaps there's more to our disagreement. My politics lean left fwiw.. social democrat.
Prose poems, short 1-2 page descriptions of fictional cities. It’s a good gift to give and I like to pick it up at random, open to a random one, and sit with the imagery it conjures.
If I had a ‘you could bring one thing to a deserted island’ then that would be it.
- The Righteous Mind, Jonathan Haidt. Really deepened my understanding of how Western and other cultures think about moral and ethical issues.
- The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan. It's a feminist book that is very non-ideological, and helped me, as someone born in the 80's, appreciate some very real and practical issues that feminism has helped us address.
Life changing more than mind bending: The Charisma Myth. Only reading it won't change anything, but start practicing the exercises and your whole life will change, and quickly. If you just want to get a taste, see below.
Three quick tips to gain an instant charisma boost:
1. Lower the intonation of your voice at the end of your sentences.
Those tips are in the introduction of the book so you can see if it works for you and decide if you want to continue reading the rest.
Personally, when I started doing only those 3 things, weird things happened that completely changed the behavior of other people towards me and then how I felt about other people. Worth a try.
Ha! I saw that book at a book store, skimmed it, and laughed because the author (perhaps unknowingly) has actually written a manual of basic spirituality!
You are totally right. There are many different meditation exercises, ways to control anxiety and calm down, as well as mindfulness tips and tricks. In some ways it does point towards discovering your own path to happiness, by trying different things and seeing what works for you.
Given that humans are wired to be social and we pretty much all live in society, a lot of the things that afflict us have to do with the way we relate to others, which is exactly what the book is about :)
Someone already mentioned “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”, so I’ll go with something I read last year, Carlo Rovelli’s, “Reality is Not What it Seems.”
I don’t think I really ever grasped the concept of relativity fully until reading that book — at least the aspects of time. [edit: well, not “fully”, I’m sure — but at least a lot more than I have in the past.]
At the same time I read the Dalai Lama’s, “Universe in a Single Atom”, which focuses on his love of science / physics, and was a very good pair to Rovelli’s book. It made me really think about the role of subjectivity in terms of Relativity. It also made me think about life, and consciousness, broadly.
That led to the Dalai Lama’s other book, “A Profound Mind”, which helped me really understand the Buddhist concept of “Emptiness” for the first time.
I'm surprised Sapiens isn't all over this page. I read it last year and I wish I'd read it twenty years ago. It really changed how I think of humanity, religion, ideology, law, civilization, corporations...
It changed my whole world by changing how I think of the world.
I thought Black Swan was fairly meaningless. It started to raise some interesting ideas about the effect of "black swan" events but then failed to give any insight into dealing with or preparing for those effects beyond vague generalities. I did learn how Taleb likes lifting weights and refuses to run for a bus though.
"It started to raise some interesting ideas about the effect of "black swan" events but then failed to give any insight into dealing with or preparing for those effects beyond vague generalities"
that is exactly what Antifagile, the book he wrote after does
I like Taleb but I feel most of the ideas from his books can be written in 10 pages. Although to be fair that's true for most modern non-fiction books.
"...includes landmark discoveries spanning 2500 years and representing the work of mathematicians such as Euclid, Georg Cantor, Kurt Godel, Augustin Cauchy, Bernard Riemann and Alan Turing. Each chapter begins with a biography of the featured mathematician, clearly explaining the significance of the result, followed by the full proof of the work, reproduced from the original publication, many in new translations."
My absolute favorite is Descartes Geometrie. Reading the original humanizes him. He is at once humble and yet confident that he'd discovered something important. Today, we take Descartes ideas completely for granted, and even find them trivial, and yet to realize the immense shift in thinking it represented in his time, makes it all the more impressive. I would even argue that Descartes' ideas were more important than any save Euclid in forming the foundation of modern math and physics - he was the one that divorced the notion of "quantity" from "length of a line segment"! It's just so great to read the original.
Interestingly, Riemann got almost all of his papers included in this book, the most pages by far of any author. Clearly Hawking loved Riemann - and no wonder. Riemann was the one who truly generalized geometry, and its interesting that his work in that area was mostly ignored until 50 years after it was published, when Einstein used it for General Relativity. He made enormous contributions to lots of other fields, too.
Oh, and it was really cool reading Boole's words, and recognizing that he was explicitly talking in terms of creating a calculus of thought!
So, yeah, I love this book because we often talk about "the shoulders of giants" but we rarely actually read them directly. And it's amazing, inspiring, and wonderful to relate to them!
The Codex Seraphinianus. It's basically knowledge structure without content, because it is, by design, incomprehensible. Makes you think about hypothesis-making, information design, and simple intellectual humility.
The Mulla Nasrudin books by Idries Shah. These tales, some of them very old, represent patterns that repeat again and again, in different guises in life. As you absorb them you start to recognize your own behavior patterns in response to analogous situations, which gives you the option of changing your response over time.
I haven't read that one, but I read Mason & Dixon when I was in college. I knew just enough history and scientific trivia to know that Pynchon was playing a lot of highly intelligent games and to realize that a lot was flying over my head, but not enough to really appreciate the book. Would be interesting to revisit it again.
"The Heart of the Buddha's Teaching" by Thich Nhat Hanh
Completely changed my world view. As someone who loves science, this book shows that Buddhism is not about belief but a way to look at the world. And that view might be closer to reality than the current one.
"The First Principle" by Osho. About eastern meditation and the difficulty of achieving nirvana. A lot about the paradox of trying to achieve inner peace, but only actually being able to experience it when you don't try to obtain it.
"Philosophy and the Matrix". Part of a pop culture series that takes popular art and has different philosopher break down it into different philosophies. A good way to realize that the same work of art can mean vastly different things depending on the frame of reference.
"Tribe" by Sebastian Junger. The seemingly disconnect that people felt happier when they were experiencing a traumatic event, like war, mainly because they were relying on each other and counted on each other.
"The Social Leap" by William von Hippel. How we went from just another mid-sized ape on the plains of Africa to the most successful large mammal on the planet earth in a few million years. His theory is focused on the social adaptations of early hominids and how that affects us to this day.
"The Dictator's Handbook" by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith reveals the simple principles used by everyone from CEO's, politicians, and autocrats to gather and consolidate power, depending on as few people as possible.
The general population is rarely important in this process, and of course (if you are among those accreting power) you want keep them in the dark. The illusion of participation is very important to the institutionalization of power for yourself in any kind of system, especially ones that think they are democracies.
As might be expected, to the degree they are good at it, the less the governing class needs to concern themselves with good governance or policy. And again, in the "real" Gov 101 its rule #1 that the populace doesn't understand that.
Mind bending? I think so, but I appreciate even more as a mental/citizen level up.
These are the principles they should teach kids in government class in elementary school. History without understanding this is just a database of facts.
"Snow Crash" by Neal Stephenson. What an incredible book. Starts off following this pizza delivery driver then warps into this cyberpunk adventure with VR, ancient languages and wild characters.
The free sample is enough to get the core message: the Konmari method can also apply to obligations, not just objects. It's not a fascinating book, just an interesting concept. Most of the book covers the exceptions and caveats of its own technique, a rare approach in this genre. Its premise is similar to Mark Manson's "The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck", but without the aggressive self-help bro tone.
"No More Mr. Nice Guy"
This book is for nice guys who never get what they want. The answer isn't "be a selfish asshole for once", but "if you want something, ask for it" and "don't expect unsolicited generosity to be rewarded in specific ways". This book is a healthy fix to an unhealthy behaviour.
"Influence: Science and Practice"
The gang of four made a book about programming design patterns. Cialdini made a book about influence design patterns. It's easy to read, and full of examples.
In addition to the classics of cognitive psychology (Kahneman, Taleb, et al.), I would also recommend books on psychological manipulation, religious cults, and con men. The following books offer a multi-disciplinary perspective on psychological techniques to improve awareness and exploit other people, both of which are essential to enhance your perception and protect yourself against fraud and manipulation.
Cialdini, Robert (2006) Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion
Guinn, Jeff (2017) Road to Jonestown: Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple
Ekman, Paul (2007) Emotions Revealed: Recognizing Faces and Feelings to Improve Communication and Emotional Life
Kahneman, Daniel (2011) Thinking, Fast and Slow
Mitnick, Kevin and William Simon (2002) Art of Deception
Navarro and Karlins (2008) What Every Body is Saying: Ex-FBI Agent's Guide to Speed-Reading People
Nietzsche, Friedrich (1887) On the Genealogy of Morals
Rhodes, Richard (1986) Making of the Atomic Bomb
Sun Tzu (c. 400 BCE) Art of War
Taleb, Nassim Nicholas (2005) Fooled by Randomness
Wright, Lawrence (2013) Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood and the Prison of Belief
For anyone looking for an intro to Borges I would recommend "The Garden of Forking Paths." It's a tight, exciting narrative that also explores his great themes.
Super serious question. Of the 278 comments that have been posted to this thread in the last 8 hours, has anyone suggested a single female author? I looked for a while and saw exactly zero. Isn’t that kind of notable?
Don’t Shoot the Dog by Karen Pryor. While a lot of people treat it as a dog training book, her work in behavioral psychology and training has much broader applications. It can really change the way you approach interpersonal relationships.
Heard a famous ADHD researcher recommend both this and Steven Pinker's Blank Slate for helping parents digest the science on why they can't engineer outcomes for their kids.
I suggested Toni Morrison and held without a doubt that she was the greatest living writer until her passing last year. She'll likely always hold that top spot in my mind, no one can compare. Go read "Sula" or "Song of Solomon" or "Beloved" or "The Bluest Eye". Her work will make you a better human.
I don't have an answer, other than the observation that women, as a class, were generally excluded from authorship in most cultures, with rare exceptions, until relatively recently.
However, there are some "popular" examples. Jane Austen, Sylvia Plath, Kate Chopin (literature), Rachel Carson, Ayn Rand, Annie Dillard, Joan Didion (nonfiction). They aren't as fashionable today as they were in earlier generations, but that's fashion.
For me, Svetlana Alexievich (born 1948, in modern Ukraine) has been a revelation. I haven't read all of her works yet, but they're on my lists. I can give a strong firsthand recommendation for The Unwomanly Face of War (which recently got a P&V translation: https://www.amazon.com/Unwomanly-Face-War-History-Women/dp/0...).
Her work incidentally illuminates how we systematically lack certain accounts of history. The implication is that we miss pretty much everything "important", when we read history through the traditional lenses of the armed conflict and politics. The literary motif of giving voice to the politically voiceless is an everpresent theme in Russian literature (going back through Turgenev's treatment of serfs), and in the late 20th century it was brought to nonfiction, through Solzhenitsyn and Alexievich.
Statistically-speaking, most people do not spend their lives in the politburo, or in the general staff of the army, but those statistically-significant people do not usually write the history we read. It seems obvious in retrospect, but it's a revelation, and it tends to change one's perspective on the relative costs and utilities of war. As a culture, we're obsessed with the "individual", and we're typically obsessed with the "wrong" the individuals (i.e. the ones whose lives are exceedingly uncommon).
I think her work should be required reading for those seeking to become public servants, whose personal lives are often significantly detached from the consequences of the decisions they make in their professional lives. I don't know if I would call it life-changing, but it's up there.
"The Handmaid's Tale" has an interesting epilogue that touches on this. It's in the style of a later academic lamenting how the narrator didn't say anything about the political power structures of Gilead when, of course, the whole narration had been about the personal power structures.
It's similar in that it offers a somewhat unconventional lens to history, this time applied to the Cold War. As Americans, we often think of the East-West German divide in terms of Soviet and American interests, politicians, and international intrigue.
Yet, for "normal" Germans living in otherwise "normal" towns, the arbitrary partitioning of their country along hastily-drawn lines was an event that had to be integrated into their daily lives. We often think of history in top-down ways (i.e. FDR and Stalin decided that X would happen, and so it did). This book really subverts that narrative, and instead presents a brilliantly-researched and significantly chaotic reality. You come away thinking that the iron curtain was not an inevitable thing, but rather the result of frequent misunderstandings and breakdowns in effective communication, and the inability of distanced leaders to assume good intent.
For me, it changed my default perspective on how borders and bureaucratic systems work, and what role law and top-down decision making (good, bad, influential and negligible) has in everyday life, especially in moments of big change.
It's tangentially relevant to the coronavirus, where big bureaucracies are trying to flex into everyday life. It gives you some intuition of where we should expect these efforts to succeed, and where we can expect it to fail.
Oh man, Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie is AMAZING on so many levels.
A common thread with these books seems to be exploring consciousness and definitions of self.
As a bonus it does stuff I find more from women authors, like quietly question gender roles without making a scene about it, question slavery, ownership, etc.
Similar a bit to the Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells but on a whole other level.
Its a wonderful trilogy of three books. Strongly recommend it.
I can also recommend N.K. Jemisin, not really mind bending, but very odd
Generally I dislike it when authors patronise me, banging my head against their genius, and I find women authors tend to do that less (Disclaimer to sensitive people : this is my personal opinion)
I concur with Ancillary Justice. I love the way that you have to work out what is happening through successive detail. Plenty of surprises. A genderless society is very hard to get one's mind around.
Can second both Ann Leckie (her new book "The Raven Tower" is also a great page-turner) and N.K. Jemisin (who did totally blow my mind with her Broken Earth Trilogy).
Ursula K. Le Guin also appears down below; The Left Hand of Darkness was a profound read.
Someone suggested Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking, which is by Susan Cain. Your point stands, though. HN's userbase is massively male-a survey a few years ago put it at 94% [0]. This is presumably because the high-tech startup crowd has identical demographics. These books are mostly related to tech or business, so while the skew is notable, it's an artifact of the broader issue.
I don't think it's a tautology to say HN's users are mostly male because the group it draws from is mostly male. There's room for competing theories like some quality unique to the website. To put my thought in bad ASCII flowchart form:
Male tech startup people -> Male HN users -> Male-dominated interest areas -> Male author recommendations
It's a matter of priority. Do you want your mind blown, period, or do you want it blown with [some set of constraints on how and by whom]? I'd say the first condition is hard enough. FWIW "A Room of One's Own" (Virginia Wolf) has stuck with me forever, as has "The Lathe of Heaven" (Ursula K. LeGuin)
I guess I’ll add to the female authors being suggested under this comment.
Wilding - Isabella Tree. Changed how I think about what nature needs, away from the simplistic “more forests! Less agriculture!” viewpoint.
The Female Man - Joanna Russ. Forget all the ‘makeup is empowering!’ Twitter feminism. Russ has a different idea. “For years I have been saying Let me in, Love me, Approve me, Define me, Regulate me, Validate me, Support me. Now I say Move over. If we are all Mankind, it follows to my interested and righteous and right now very bright and beady little eyes, that I too am a Man and not at all a Woman... I think I am a Man; I think you had better call me a Man; I think you will write about me as a Man from now on and speak of me as a Man and employ me as a Man and recognize child-rearing as a Man's business; you will think of me as a Man and treat me as a Man”
Stone Butch Blues - Leslie Feinberg (if we count Feinberg as, at least, a female-at-birth author). A complex exploration of what gender and transgenderism and sexuality mean to people depending on their class, subculture, etc. What should we call Jess? Trans, a man, a lesbian, non-binary, something else?
I also want to say Flannery O’Connor’s short stories, but I can’t easily explain why.
Perhaps not "mind bending" but I Should Have Honor: A Memoir of Hope and Pride in Pakistan by Khalida Brohi definitely opened my eyes to a world I didn't realize existed.
Its hard. After decades of reading indiscriminately, I found I was reading almost purely male authors. Of course; there are so many in comparison. So I have a female-author reading list now.
Same thing here. Only 16% of the books I've read 2015-now were written by women. Needless to say, as soon as I've realized that, I've picked up a book written by a woman and prioritized a few of them in my to-read list. So far this year I'm 3/7, aiming for >50% this year.
While it may not completely change your life, a book that definitely opens your eyes (probably more so if you're white and male) when it comes to mondern-day racism and just how biased our thinking really is is "Biased" by Jennifer L. Eberhardt. You ask how many of the authors listed here a women but one could just as easily ask how many of the authors listed here are black and I think the answer would be just as shocking.
Looks like Ayn Rand was listed almost an hour ago (relative to your post). There may be others, that was the first that I searched for, figuring it would show up, and yep...
And as a more useful follow-up, I'll jump in and suggest Annie Duke's "Thinking In Bets" (subtitle: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts)
Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood, and the rest of the Maddaddam Trilogy. I read it a few years ago, but still think about it all the time. The writing is vivid and visceral, and the characters have an emotional and spiritual depth that you almost never find in dystopian scifi. There are also some spooky parallels to what's happening now.
I really enjoyed the Masters of Roman series by Colleen McCullough, she brings color and life to the famous characters of Sulla, Gaius Marius and Caesar.
We are looking for ideas to bend our mind. I'm happy to keep the authors gender, race, religion, or nationality out of that. The same applies for HN comments.
Going through all 278 comments to find a female name is more notable to me.
In the throes of your rant at someone making a perfectly accurate observation you seemed to have made a false dichotomy.
The options aren't just that everyone on HN is sexist nor that women aren't interested in writing books on mind bending concepts, but another reason, as has been mentioned above, is that women for most of human history weren't allowed to write. From there it becomes rather obvious why there are less woman authors at all!
Also, check out some of Ursula Le Guin's work if you are into sci-fi.
Okay, let me just say then that your tone is very, very confusing. What with the "Obviously, everyone here is a sexist. Wake up people!" It sounds like you were being sarcastic? Were you being sincere?
I'm totally sincere. But don't let that influence you. Be rational.
When something seems ambiguous you need to shed your biases and follow the logic and evidence. Read what I wrote in my response and both dispute and reason about the logic and evidence behind it. If you find the logic to be correct then we're good, if you find it to be incorrect then both of our premises are logically flawed.
Social constructs are real, but somewhat arbitrary. There's no genetic difference between Catholics and Protestants. If you were Catholic as a child, you could become Protestant as an adult.
Religion is socially constructed, but its differences still matter to people. Someone could legitimately ask why there were no Catholic US presidents prior to JFK.
I really enjoyed this SciFi book - Dark Matter: A Novel
In this world he’s woken up to, Jason’s life is not the one he knows. His wife is not his wife. His son was never born. And Jason is not an ordinary college physics professor, but a celebrated genius who has achieved something remarkable. Something impossible.
My Adorable Apotheosis: Don't Look Back, Pussycat. Kill! Kill! by Kirsten Hacker.
In keeping with the preposterous title, it uses sci-fi tropes to illuminate the ways in which the modern scientific community is heading in a preposterous direction.
Homo Deus, by Yuval Noah Harari. This is the second book in the very famous series Sapiens. The book explains how technology will effect our lives in the future in a way that is interesting, entertaining and above all, mind-boggling.
I was looking for someone to mention stoic literature!
For that matter I'd like to add another author - Michel de Montaigne and his Essays. It offers a very humane look inside his thoughts about the world and makes you think about your own life and how you look at it, too.
I really enjoy books on neuroscience that change the way I think about perception.
Phantoms in the Brain by V S Ramachandran - a book about how the brain organises itself in bizarre edge cases. The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist's Quest for What Makes us Human. The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist's Quest for What Makes us Human by the same author is also worth reading.
Admissions by Henry Marsh - An experienced neurosurgeon's account of how his job has changed over the decades. Really interesting discussion of what's important and how people react in a real crisis.
The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat by Oliver Sacks. More of a collection of interesting curiousities but does an amazing job of humanising the discussion of brain.
Seconding this recommendation. The way the story was told became very surreal. It's an experience unlike any other that I've had while reading fiction.
FWIW, Dick claimed it was a record of communication with some cosmic intelligence named VALIS: Vast Active Living Intelligence System
Here's a thing TIL from the wikipedia entry:
> At one point, Dick claimed to be in a state of enthousiasmos with VALIS, where he was informed his infant son was in danger of perishing from an unnamed malady. Routine checkups on the child had shown no trouble or illness; however, Dick insisted that thorough tests be run to ensure his son's health. The doctor eventually complied, despite the fact that there were no apparent symptoms. During the examination doctors discovered an inguinal hernia, which would have killed the child if an operation was not quickly performed. His son survived thanks to the operation, which Dick attributed to the "intervention" of VALIS.
Erich Fromm's "Escape from freedom". It is very well written and the subject matter is truly mind-bending: how can an educated people decide to throw their freedom away and give power to a dictator?
E. Fromm was German psychologist, and jewish. He fled to America in the 1930s. He writes with a composite point of view, at the intersection of psychology, sociology, and philosophy, without getting stuck in a narrow analysis, and I think this is what makes this books and others by him so good.
Peak Prosperity's "Prosper!" [0]. I learned about PP through their daily COVID-19 updates [1] and then watched their crash course (from 2014) [2]. They are currently giving the book away for free because of how much it relates to the current situation.
I'll be the first to tell you I started watching their "crash course" expecting it to be BS but it is very compelling and explored ideas that I knew about intellectually but had never thought all the way through. I HIGHLY recommend people check this out and if you think they are wrong or going to far please feel free to respond or email me (email in profile), I am 100% willing to be proven wrong. Anyways I've shared this with a couple of close friends and we have all agreed that we can't continue living the way we were before having watched/read it (crash course/book).
The Sefish Gene by Richard Dawkins. Lot of what I thought was question of morality and good vs evil turned out to be simply the question of rational strategies in given environment.
"Why Nations Fail" offers a pretty compelling framework for why some countries are stronger than others. Changed my thinking on the role of government.
Some authours and books offer deep introspection of human lives, that you learn and realise things about yourself from reading them:
I got that feeling from reading Montaigne's Essays.
Anatomy of Melancholy by Burton and Samuel Johnson's essays also are effective in a similar vein.
Plutarch's Parallel Live's is the essential book on politics, after reading it, when you read the newspapers you get a feeling that there is nothing new under the Sun, in politics.
I agree wholeheartedly. This is a great book that is truly terrifying because Dick is constantly subverting the characters’ (and reader’s) perceptions of reality. He does this to an even greater degree in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch.
Alexis de Tocqueville's, "Democracy in America" (1835,1840).
It was the first history/sociology book I read that I really enjoyed. I came away with a clarity that there is an essential character to American politics and discourse that has been constant throughout its history.
Decades later it is still one of the most clearly written books I've read. It reminds me of reading an elegant proof.
A personal "brain expanding" book for me was The Miracle Planet but timing is everything, as an 8 year old who had only been reading children's books it taught me that you can read through anything with persistence
The Bible has a lot of mind games & plot twists. I read it as an atheist seeking better perspective on a couple thousand years ago
I can't take anyone reading Ayn Rand seriously anymore; it's what all the selfish right-wingers read and take as gospel, those that take a massive shit on everyone but themselves - Trump to name but one. And it's ironic because Rand herself was fervently atheist and hated conservatives as they turned to religion and nationalism in the 50's.
I found the stories in Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged to be compelling enough that I could both empathize with (some of) the characters while at the same time disagree wholeheartedly with their choices.
They're good books for trying to find out _why_ you agree or disagree.
I don't want to moralize too much, but I think it's a mistake to generalize this much about a person based solely on your knowledge of a book they've enjoyed.
The major theme in the fountainhead is integrity to ones personal convictions and artistic craft and has almost no direct reference to conservative politics.
This also amuses me as Trump is pretty far from the Greenspan/Rand economic perspective too.
(in case of curiousity, all of these books are intended for mature adults)
Science Fiction:
Ursula le Guin - The Found and the Lost - this one will be higher impact if you're North American, but it works anywhere. Pretty much any of her books are mind bending and perspective opening. Not that they'd help become a better computer developer say - but you'd probably be a wiser person for the exposure.
C.J.Cherryh - Cyteen - on individual, on programming personality and more.
C.J.Cherryh - Voyager in Night. (on a perspective on alien thinking)
(author has a lot of excellent books as writes for an intelligent and well educated audience. I will note neither are easy reads and the second might be harder to get through)
Nonfiction:
T.E.Lawrence - 7 pillars of wisdom. (watching "Lawrence of Arabia" doesn't hurt either, they sync reasonably well). He was a deeply cynical atheist in a whole series of very violent episodes that shape life in the modern world more than you'd think. This one more for a perspective on history than changing one's own view of the world.
What it helped me see is that we aren't necessarily born with world class abilities but that we can achieve them by working hard. I know there have been criticisms about the methods Gladwell outlines towards achieving mastery but the basic message about working hard towards mastery is valid.
It completely changed my view on why people become Masters in their field.
If you're into biology, Nick Lane's books will blow your mind. Two in particular I'd recommend:
1. The Vital Question - An explanation of the genesis of complex life through bioenergetics. Explains why complex life is likely very rare in the universe.
2. Power, Sex, Suicide - Why mitochondria are awesome, and also responsible for the emergence of sex, cancer, and mortality.
Lots of great suggestions here!
I'll add "If On A Winter's Night A Traveler" by Italo Calvino. It's the only book I've ever read in the second person, an amazing and successful experiment in form. I've never found anything else like it.
I'll second the suggestion for "The City & The City", another real mind-bender.
The best teachers (that could be books) will find you when you're ready. Other people's milestones are theirs, not yours. The best way to use this list is to pick a book by gut feeling. That said, I'll leave my candidate: "The Presence Process" by Michael Brown.
Slaughterhouse 5 by Kurt Vonnegut was probably the most recent one for me. I guess the book in its entirety is probably fairly mild by modern sci-fi comparisons, but without wanting to spoil anything there is a certain species in the book whose outlook on life immediately changed my perspective of reality.
I read Slaughterhouse 5 first, so that might be why I prefer it, even though I really enjoyed Cat's Cradle. But beyond that, I felt that Slaughterhouse 5 tied into reality more for me. It just felt more relevant, if that makes sense, but it could totally just have been due to my mindset at the time.
"Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions" by Edwin A. Abbott.
> Written pseudonymously by "A Square", the book used the fictional two-dimensional world of Flatland to comment on the hierarchy of Victorian culture, but the novella's more enduring contribution is its examination of dimensions.
Thank you for starting such an interesting thread.
Going through all the comments a few days after the question was asked is very rewarding ! So many books marked as 'to read' :)
My contribution:
If you're not familiar with Quantum Physics, do check out 'Through Two doors at once'. There were numerous instances while reading the book that I had to just put it down and think deeply - mostly philosophical thoughts around what we are and how magical nature is. The subject matter is very very approachable - even to someone like me who hasn't read a physics book in like a decade.
For me, The Origin of Consciousness by Julian Jaynes. It has really caused me to look at the world through a new lens. While the book is Jaynes' idea, the evidence he provides is fascinating as are some of the competing views that have originated from this book.
"Gödel, Escher, Bach" by Douglas Hofstadter
It's presented in a very non conventional way, but teaches you to think about many problems in a more "first principles" way, and connects real world problems with more abstract idea. I have read it well into my CS career and it was still worth it.
When I was in high school, I read Goedel Escher Bach, and it made math come alive for me -- to see it as something beyond making physics work, even though I was also interested in physics. It's probably what caused me to choose math as my college major.
"The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life"
It gives you an alternative perspective on art, school, charity, politics (including office politics), religion, and, well, yourself. This book will likely make you revise at least some of your beliefs.
Check out _The Eden Express_ by Mark Vonnegut (son of Kurt Vonnegut). It is a memoir documenting the author's own psychotic breakdown. Reading this gave me insight into the human mind and what it's like when it goes off the rails.
You say "anything that transforms me into a smarter, wiser person" so I'll add Eliezer Yudkowsky's fanfic _Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality_ (http://www.hpmor.com/) The whole HP universe is re-imagined, except Harry is smart, a scientist, and empowered with rationality. It is both entertaining and an introduction to the art of rationality.
Just finished HPMOR and loved every second of it. Truly an amazing piece of work, would definitely recommend. I do hope that i remember some of the methods of rationality mentioned in the book, but even beyond that it was just a plain good story.
If people are interestead in reading it, I would highly recommend the audio book/podcast, it's extremely well produced and features an insane amount of good voice acting [1]. Though I would definitely recommend _not_ listening to it in podcast player, and instead use one of the stitched together mp3s.
I love Valis and it's probably his most mind bending, but I wouldn't recommend starting there. That book works best when you've already been exposed to his bizarre mind-bending style, and also understand a bit of the context of Dick himself (since Valis is semi-autobiographical).
My recommendations are Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Ubik, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, and A Scanner Darkly. And then reading a bit about Dick's life -- in particular, his experience with the "pink light", and his belief in the real life instantiation of VALIS. After that, the book Valis will make a lot more sense, but also be even more mind bending.
Dick likely suffered from some sort of undiagnosed mental illness. But having the discussion end there sort of discounts the core themes of his books -- mainly, the recognition of the paper-thin nature of reality, and the impossible task of ever knowing with a certainty the true state of things.
All good picks! I was thinking of mentioning Ubik myself. I’d add A Maze of Death also.
Thinking about it, yeah, Valis is probably best saved for much later. That’s the same order I read Dick, and knowing a bit of his background and having seen his recurring tropes in fictional form, it added a whole new dimension to see them crop up in... pseudo-autobiographical form? I’m not even sure what to call it!
> pseudo-autobiographical form? I’m not even sure what to call it!
For sure! Trying to describe what Valis actually is, is about as difficult as pinning down what reality in a PKD novel is.
The fact that PKD's real life experience basically turned into one of his own novels is something I find endlessly fascinating. And also kind of sad, since whatever mental health issues he was dealing with seemed to cause him quite a bit of pain. I have a copy of "The Exegesis of Philip K Dick", and while it's too tedious to just read cover to cover, I'll often just pop it open and read a few pages here and there. Really interesting stuff.
This book has more profundity than anything I've ever read. The type of sentences which cause you to stop and think, woah, what did I just read. The type of sentences where it is obvious the author has understood something you don't, but not obvious exactly what. The type of sentence that is short and simple in what it says, but with great depth in its meaning.
I'm about done with this book and I already want to re-read it. I've decided I'll read it once every few years. To remind myself of the important parts of living. The parts that are easy to figure about going about living day to day.
The Moral Animal I found kind of mind bending though perhaps a bit downbeat. The basic thesis is that we evolved to deceive ourselves in evolutionary helpful ways as if you say 'I'm great, I should be the leader' and are lying people will see through it but if you say that and really believe it, even if it's factually incorrect, then it has a better chance of working. See many political leaders for examples.
Something upbeat I came across recently was Naval Ravikant's ideas on philosophy happiness and how to get rich. Not a book but you can see him on Rogan 1309 and google the get rich tweets / podcasts.
Aczel, Amir. The Mystery of the Aleph: Mathematics, the Kabbalah, and the Human Mind. New York, NY: Basic Books, (2000)
"Aczel's compact and fascinating work of mathematical popularization uses the life and work of the German mathematician Georg Cantor (1845-1918) to describe the history of infinity--of human thought about boundlessly large numbers, sequences and sets." (https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-1-56858-105-7)
This popularization makes an effort to explain truly mind bending ideas of infinity.
"Hidden Order" by John Holland. I think of it as a programmers view of complex adaptive systems. There are many books about Emergent systems, CAS, etc. but this one changed how I think and how I see the world.
Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha by Daniel Ingram.
Ingram is one of the most advanced meditation practitioners in the west, and this book is a painstaking mapping of the development of attention. I’ve read nothing like it.
This book was really interesting, and ultimately made me decide meditation wasn't worth it for me. (I'm not saying it isn't worth it for others, just that the outcome of meditation that he describes doesn't seem like something I want).
Yeah... I find him refreshingly honest in contrast to the predominate western notion of meditation as a panacea. Few of his peers really elucidate the breadth of challenges of the dukkha nanas (the "dark night"), and none of the "apps" do (Calm, Dan Harris, Headspace).
I also really love the breadth in his analysis of awakening models. I would love to see this paradigm more often: here are the models of thought in this subject, and the pros and cons of each.
... and the "Fira Kasina" chapter was an absolute trip.
Basically he describes the process as one of continually looping through various mental stages as one progresses in their meditative practice. Many of these mental stages look like psychotic episodes to me and I worry that getting into the practice would preclude me from accomplishing other things that are more important to me.
"Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking"; it helped me and my girlfriend understand ourselves more and make me feel less out of place in the world, accepted, less anxious and insecure if you will. It tells you that you shouldn't be ashamed of stepping out of a party earlier for example, or find quiet spaces at events, etc.
It's one of those books that's full of anecdotes and padding out though, so if you want a summary the author's also made blog posts and a TED talk that summarize the subject well enough.
The World Book Encyclopedia, complete with a two volume dictionary and an annual supplemental volume. I spent much of my childhood and adolescence buried in the many thousands of glossy, fine print pages. And the most awaited day of my summer was when the supplement finally appeared in the mail. I suppose the internet is now my adult substitute and have never really changed...
If you really want to self-modify your programming I can recommend hypnosis. The books I recommend are: "TRANCE-formations" by Bandler and Grinder, and "Monsters and Magical Sticks: There's No Such Thing as Hypnosis?" by Heller.
A few that affected me and haven't already been mentioned (in no particular order)
Anything by John Twelve Hawks, but especially The Traveler: his works got me thinking about the role technology plays in the world and especially the balance among surveillance and privacy.
Pure by Linda Kay Klein: perhaps only interesting if you were raised in the Church's purity culture, but this also talks about the role religion plays in society as a whole.
14 Lessons in Yogi Philosophy: really opened my mind to Eastern ideas about living a spiritual life.
Art of Computer Programming. Just as a book(s), it is a great book. I'm always a bit puzzled by the degree to which it's intended audience seems to avoid reading it.
I love the little quips that Knuth adds to his writings. There are little subtle things that have to be there to be funny and just below the surface meaning of the text, because taken literally they would be absurd. I remember seeing a couple in there and a couple in his book Concrete Mathematics.
The math scares people. I like how Knuth casually throws in references to prior art in the form of a book that was published in 1734. Including the page number.
They permanently changed how I think about cognition, consciousness and how fragile and small a thing conscious life is and that we have to protect it.
Other notable authors, titles, and subjects, some that others have already mentioned: Aldous Huxley, Hermann Hesse, Rainer Maria Rilke, Khalil Gibran, sufism, The Philokalia, etc.
I don't think any book has had an immediately noticeable effect, but looking back to books I read years ago I can to some degree tell which ones are still resonating.
The Demon Haunted World (Carl Sagan) — although I was already a skeptical thinker, this book opened me up to how critical thinking can enhance your spiritual side as well as your intellectual side.
Godel, Escher, Bach (Douglas Hofstadter) — this book added color to a lot my intuitions about the deeper connections of patterns we see throughout reality.
Truth & Power (Michel Foucault) — I'm not a fan of most so-called continental philosophy, but Foucault's ideas about cultural structures has always stuck with me.
The Allegory of the Cave (Plato; section in The Republic) — classic; some might say the basic idea underpinning all philosophical and scientific inquiry.
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (Ludwig Wittgenstein) — I'll admit I never quite understood this book from reading it, but it definitely changed how I thought about philosophy, consciousness and spirituality.
Charles Sanders Peirce essays — it's been a long time, so I don't remember the specific texts, but he did fascinating work in semiotics. One essay in particular was critical in how I think about communication and consciousness.
Fact, Fiction, Forecast (Nelson Goodman) — Goodman is brilliant and is great at relaying philosophical problems as puzzles. He's a great writer and turns the problem of induction on its head in this one.
Foucault's Pendulum (Umberto Eco) — I don't read a lot of fiction, but this book is amazing. There's a lot of history, so you may need to keep an encyclopedia nearby, but this one will really get you thinking about how the autonomy of memes. Probably quite relevant at the moment.
Any number of books and essays by great analytic philosophers: Saul Kripke, W.V.O. Quine, Bertrand Russell, Karl Popper, Carl Hempel, John Campbell, David Chalmers, Thomas Nagel, Hilary Putnam, Jerry Fodor, Dan Dennett, David Lewis, etc.
- The Men Who Folded Himself is a book about a time traveler that falls in love and has sex with himself in several distinct time periods.
- All You Zombies is a short story that makes use of one of the most ingenious and mind-bending time travel conundrums to reflect on the nature of personal identity.
- The Door Into Summer is about the effects of suspended animation on personal relationships.
Parsed as much as I could to make a slightly more formatted list. Stars are the ones I was drawn to most. Sorry if I accidentally missed a rec or cut stuff out.
Technopoly by Neil Postman
Industrial society and it's future by Theodore Kaczynski
Both these books drastically changed my perception of technology. The role we think it has and the effects and consequences it does have.
The main take away is that a technology contains an implicit bias that is absorbed by the user. More plainly put "to someone with a hammer, everything is a nail" applies to all technology.
> The main take away is that a technology contains an implicit bias that is absorbed by the user. More plainly put "to someone with a hammer, everything is a nail" applies to all technology.
McLuhan's Understanding Media posits something similar about forms of communication.
For those who don't know, Theodore Kaczynski is the Unabomber. He killed 3 people and injured 23 others with a mail-bombing campaign. Ideas are ideas, but maybe take with a grain of salt anything said by a guy who advocates for his beliefs using physical violence.
Always take information with a grain of salt. Kaczynski was not all there and is a murderer.
The first half of the manifesto is a fairly piercing critique of industrial society. Most of the ideas are not really original. Interesting questions are raised, the call to violence is nonsense.
Hans-Hermann Hoppe - Democracy: The God That Failed
This is a seriously mind bending book. You will never again see the world the same way. Not an easy book to read though. You will need to follow the references (and they are many), as otherwise you will refuse to believe what you are reading. Also, it is not a "pleasant" book to read. The author is not a great writer, only a great scholar.
I confess 'mind games' and 'plot twists' don't correlate to my personal notions of wisdom. Googling 'books wisdom' turns up a lot. My one sentence bit of wisdom is currently from Charlie Munger: "I never allow myself to have an opinion on anything that I don't know the other side's argument better than they do."
In these anxious, depressing times it helps to have a cognitive toolkit of techniques that can be applied to irrational thinking that influences feelings.
"Feeling Good", by David Burns, can help you create such a toolkit. This book is a self-therapy guide presented in a very user-friendly style. Wisdom will follow.
To venture into the more poetic/artistic realm, I really recommend Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino. It’s quite short, but so layered that I actually have a hard time describing it.
Framed as a conversation between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan, the book is a series of vignettes describing fantastical cities Polo has visited in his travels.
I recommend Plutarch's Lives, I own the Oxford World's Classics translations of 'Roman Lives' and 'Greek lives' and the stories told between the two alone allow to you build a mental model of the nature of mankind, the rise and fall of empires, and the "vicissitudes of fortune".
"How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia" by Mohsin Hamid.
The book goes through the second person point of view of a young boy born into a village outside of a major Asian city. Each chapter is a time jump to a different point of their life. I believe I heard of this from an interview with Marc Andreessen.
Charles Perrow, "Normal Accidents". Nominally about safety in large-scale complex engineered systems, and it's very good on that topic, and/but in doing so, touches on how scale and social factors interact with engineering details, which affects a lot more than safety.
There's a lot of books like this. I think the one that affected me most was Overthrow, America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq. It really made me start looking at foreign policy more seriously.
“20 Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation” or “ Where Reincarnation and Biology Intersect“ both By Ian Stevenson.
I’m a heavy duty skeptic but these books pushed me over the edge away from scientific materialism towards a broader view of reality where consciousness survives death.
Entertaining style, and amazing at conveying very complex ideas. I had understood recursion for years prior, but this really showed me what it was to truly "think" in recursion, and to understand the Y Combinator and its significance.
The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg
How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie
How to Stop Worrying and Start Living by Dale Carnegie
10% happier by Dan Harris
Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl
I highly recommend Information - A Very Short Introduction by Dr. Luciano Floridi. Dr. Florida’s book is a tremendously important guide to the strange new world opening up in front of us. I’m sure it will become a classic.
Design of Everyday Things. All about how we design the things we interact with, and how the design of something can influence your ability to understand it or use it, down to the most basic things like doors and handles.
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Harari
Will forever change how you look at humanity, society, and technology. Lot's of eye openers and in general it causes you to shift your frame of reference entirely.
For a more modern and youthful perspective, I'd recommend "Trick Mirror" by Jia Tolentino. It really dives into how chaotic world of internet and media has influenced younger generations.
Infoquake by David Louis Edelman and the trilogy it belongs to would be right up HN's alley IMO. It's fun techie sci-fi. Some of the ideas can really make you think about reality.
Really anything by Robert Fulghum. Granted, this books are not mind mending but when I read them I was relatively young and their authenticity left a lasting impression on me.
Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and Holy the Firm. Dillard has a way with words that is both eloquent and a little violent, and she influenced how I write just as much as Strunk and White's Elements of Style.
Douglas Hofstadter's Godel, Escher, Bach for its captivating presentation of some very complicated ideas (at least to the 17 year old kid who read this for the first time). This book was published around the time that I was growing from hobby programming to writing software as a career, and it exposed me to non-trivial proofs, LISP, and recursion in general.
Vernor Vinge's The Peace War. It's a bit stupid, but . . . I want to make the tech in this book become reality :-) Bobbles are sheer fantasy, of course, but the Tinker tech stack would be a lot of fun.
The Beginning of Infinity, by David Deutsch. It talks about the kinds of ideas that lead to progress vs stagnation at the level of individuals and societies.
Sam is a neuroscientist and meditation devotee who offers a cunning and life-altering exposé on the mysteries around consciousness and the investigations and learnings therein. One mind-bender from the book: some people have undergone a procedure to separate the left and right sides of the brain as treatment for rare disease. Following this procedure, the left and right sides can independently answer questions (sometimes simultaneously) posed by researchers, frequently offering conflicting answers. Interestingly, the right brain alone cannot speak but can answer questions by drawing or choosing letters/cards. Thus, it would appear that following the procedure, each side of the brain is conscious, yet unaware of the consciousness inside the other side.
Maybe try something/anything by Douglas Hofstadter. 'Godel, Escher, Bach' gets most of the attention, but I also found 'The Mind's I: Fantasies And Reflections On Self & Soul' (with Daniel Dennett), and 'Metamagical Themas' fascinating.
perhaps blasé, but the Tao. it is as simple as it is unknowable, from the highest levels of philosophy down to action-items in your everyday life. the Tao that can be described is not the true Tao, so you must search yourself :)
to simply be smarter (but maybe not wiser), the art of learning by josh waitzkin. if you are interested in optimizing anything, why not learn how to optimize optimization?
I wonder if the Tao is so profound as it is interpreted in the West, because the understanding of the text, much lies on the nature of the Chinese language, which is much more about concepts, than about words. For example, the 'the Tao that can be described' part in Chinese consists of only three characters, which when transliterated would read 'way can speak', where for both 'way' and 'speak' the character for tao is used. The remaining part of the sentence also only uses three characters, if I am not mistaken 'not constant(timeless, eternal) way'. See for example: https://www.tao-te-king.org/
The first time I read Talebs Black Swan was pretty mind bending. It's a intriguing mix of philosophy, history and the application of probabilistic thinking.
It's also a great aggregator book. It introduced me to the works of Kahneman, Tetlock, Poincare and Mandelbrot.
Read "fooled by randomness" if you haven't already. I much preferred it to his later work, and it introduced me to Popper (who was someone that 3 years of philosophy at university somehow managed to skip) who you might also enjoy.
I tried to read this but just could not get over his writing style. It just felt so self-indulgent and took forever to get to the point. I have no idea why it's recommended so highly.
Yup. While I appreciated the points he made in "Antifragile", the writing itself wasn't as enjoyable as it was in "Fooled by Randomness" or "The Black Swan". I haven't read "Skin in the Game" yet tho.
I don't understand the excitement about Black Swan but I genuinely would like to. If a "Black swan event" is an "event with small probability but massive impact", why would it be surprising that they exist or that they have disproportionate impact?
I'd argue that defining "impact" is also problematic because we conflate things that are surprising with things that are impactful all the time. We don't count all the trains and planes that run on time as "impactful" exactly because they're not surprising, but they do have a large impact on the progression of the future. So part of Taleb's argument just seems like a semantic debate over what counts as "impactful".
IDK if you've read the book or not, but in case you haven't I'd recommend this summary of Mediocristan and Extremistan [0].
Mediocristan and Extremistan are Talebs analogies for domains with different underlying mechanics (for lack of a better word).
I'm going cut some corners here, but to keep it short, the phenomena in Mediocristan can be modeled by using gaussian probability distributions (weight, height etc.), while the phenomena in Extremistan are better modeled using power law distributions, that have so called fat-tails. (wealth, land ownership)
One of the central arguments of the book is that people have been using tools from Mediocristan in Extremistan and that's what leads to these Black Swan phenomen, which in turn might have potentially ruinous effects.
One example he uses is a now defunct hedge fund called Long Term Capital Management (LTCM) [1]. My (poor) understanding of what led to LCTMs ruin (and required the Federal Reserve to intervene) is that they used some fundamentally Gaussian techniques to model derivatives.
The models predicted certain events to have a lot lower probability to occur than what was actually the case (fat-tails). Underestimating these outliers combined with the fact that the firm was highly leveraged, was ultimately what went wrong and had potentially disastrous effects on the financial markets.
Taleb is a good talker but not as smart as he thinks he is. (About halfway through "Black Swan" he starts taking potshots at scientists about the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.)
Anyhow, a "Black swan event" is NOT an "event with small probability but massive impact", that's a common misconception.
A BSE is an event that, before it occurs no one credits it ("There are no black swans." because no one (in Europe) had ever seen one until they went to Australia (IIRC)), and after it occurs everyone post-rationalizes it.
There are lost of events "with small probability but massive impact": people win the lottery every day.
It's the ones we ignore, both before and after, that count as Black Swan Events.
Taleb can be extremely pompous and annoying, but his books are truly original[0], and I think likely to alter how you think about the world. Many people hear words like "anti-fragile" or "black-swan" and know sort-of what they represent, so decide there's no reason to read his books, but those concepts are just the tip of the iceberg of Taleb's larger way of thinking.
[0]: By original I mean there aren't other books like his. If anyone else tried to write like Taleb it would be absurd, but he makes it work.
I first read The Art of Dreaming. Then I started with The Teachings of Don Juan and read all of the 10+ books in the series. I also read the book that was written by the women from his party. Really enjoyed all of it.
3) Robert Cialdini "Influence" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Cialdini#Theory_of_infl... <- could probably be described as a modern / dark adversarial take in "how to make friends and influence people" and should be read with Kahneman & Tversky's books/papers.
5) Dickens "Hard Times" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_Times_(novel) <- for it's description of the effects on peasant communities during industrialization, which is also a theme in "La Technique" above
Personally, I love the first four books, although the be warned they take a different tone than from the first book. The last two are good, but Heinlein passed away after writing the sixth book. I believe his son tried to continue the series, but I haven't read past that.
I highly recommend reading at least the first four books.
I love them all for different reasons. The implications of the Scattering in the latter books is pretty mind bending to me, few sci-fi books went that far.
I am of the generation that fixated upon GEB as some sort of deep wisdom, and I have a nostalgic fondness for it. I certainly credit it for sparking a lot of my curiosity about Lisp.
But in hindsight, its value to me was not in the content of the book, as much as in communicating the kind of delight and curiosity around programming that has kept me interested in the subject since 1972 or so.
Other books have done the same thing for me, most notably everything by Martin Gardner, Raymond Smullyan's books about logic puzzles that sneak an education past you, and William Poundstone's books about Game Theory and Computability.
In a way, I'm delighted that this book is not sitting as the number one thread so far. Not because it's terrible, but because new generations ahve written great books, and they deserve mention too.
I was aware of this many years ago. To this day, I don't actually consider myself that interested in computing for its own sake. Or mathematics, for that matter.
To me, the most interesting thing about programming is what it teaches us about our own minds. It's a little like being an archeologist and finding collections of pottery, houses, &c. but no people. You make deductions about how they lived from their tools.
In our case, we have only a limited ability to directly examine the workings of our brains, but a wealth of ways to study the things we do with our brains, including the making of tools for our brains to use.
Programming is one of those tools, and its study is indirectly the study of us.
At the end of the day, it's all just 1s and 0s, but when we argue about whether the Visitor Pattern addresses the Expression problem, and so forth, we're indirectly exploring the (metaphorical) shape of our brains.
I have just said in several paragraphs what Michael Fellows said in one sentence: "Computer science is not about machines, in the same way that astronomy is not about telescopes."
They may have been thinking about mathematics, but I am thinking about people.
This is one of the few books I've read that I would actually call 'mind bending' (though stretching might be a better word).
Another amazing book of his that I don't see mentioned a lot (perhaps because it is more technical that maybe any of his other books) is 'Fluid Concepts And Creative Analogies'.
Another amazing book of his that I don't see mentioned a lot (perhaps because it is more technical that maybe any of his other books) is 'Fluid Concepts And Creative Analogies'.
I'm reading that one now. I recommend it, along with Perception as Analogy by Melanie Mitchell, and the aforementioned Godel, Escher, Bach to anyone interested in AI / cognitive science. I've only read a small part of Metamagical Themas to date, but I've read enough to recommend that as well. Just the stuff on self-referential sentences makes it worth reading.
What helped me get through it was consciously reminding myself "It's OK if I don't grok every single thing in this book this time through. I can always read it again. And again, etc." In other words, I didn't try to read it like a traditional textbook (which it really isn't) where everything is strictly factual, and laid out in a nice, linear, straightforward order. I found that I just had to accept that GEB is non-linear, byzantine, self-referential, and frankly confusing at times. Instead of being blocked when I felt confused, I just kept reading.
Did I get everything out of it that Hofstadter intended to put in? Almost certainly not, but I still got quite a bit of out it, IMO. And I can always go back and re-read it.
Accelerando by Charles Stross: Be there to receive a phone call from a sentient hive lobster consciousness that escaped from the lab, and watch the singularity happen in a hilarious and mind bending fast take off.
A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge: explore the far future in a space opera dreamed up by a computer science professor turned sci-fi author. This book literally inspired the first IoT sensor "motes" created, and we haven't come close to achieving the vision he explores just as texture in this rich book with fascinating characters. Not my favorite wordsmith, but one of my favorite idea-smiths.
Godel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter: create a new mathematics from the axioms up, while strolling along with a wise tortoise and a hare who share fascinating ideas and connections from art and music to number theory, incompleteness, and consciousness.
Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand. Love her or hate her, she makes you think.
The Hard Thing About Hard Things - This is a great book about building businesses, and business in general.
Capital in the 21st Century - One of the greatest books about economics and capital written ever - let alone in the last decade.
The Intelligent Investor - This is Buffet's favourite book, and regardless of how many times I read it, I still learn more. One can never digest it in full.
Predictably Irrational - This excellent tome makes behavioural economics digestible outside of economics. It's enlightening, though provoking, and turns several accepted truths on its head, purely by being written at all.
Nexus (Ramez Naam) - This science fiction book explores transhumanism and would it could mean in the near future. It's both light and pulpy, but at the same time makes you think about the outcomes of technological progression.
I read _Atlas Shrugged_ without any preconceptions (I didn't know who Ayn Rand was, and Libertarianism wasn't nearly as trendy back then). I was taken in by the story of how everything fell apart, but was completely turned off by her solution—creating a "utopia" is quite easy when you only allow in a select few and have unlimited free energy. It struck me as the Libertarian equivalent of _The Jungle_: tell a compelling narrative of how society is (or can be) broken, and then destroy the credibility you've built by presenting your ideological vision while completely ignoring potential pitfalls.
This is exactly what I love about that book. To many it's a bible of libertarianism. To many it's everything that's bad about it. Either way I find it definitely encourages debate and thinking - much more than her other works.
Basically a unified theory of consciousness. 100% must read.
* (Theory) The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes
A bit long winded but it really changes the way you think about the voice in your head, about consciousness in general. Pairs well with Surfing Uncertainty
* (Self Help) Nonviolent Communication by Marshall Rosenberg
Really wakes you up to the domination language that rules our interactions and provides an alternative framework. Its even great if you don't plan on implementing NVC, just to understand what non nonviolent langue is. Pairs well with Julian Jaynes The Origin of Consciousness for understanding how language formed our minds and our societies.
* (Theory) The Force of Nonviolence Judith Butler
Wakes you up to the highly dominant and persistent narrative of violence. Provides frameworks for something else.
If this doesnt blow your mind im not sure what will.
* (Theory)Staying with the Trouble by Donna J. Haraway
The name says it all. Ways to stop trying to wipe the slate clean, to start from scratch, but instead to "stay with the trouble" and make new things WITH. Wakes your mind up to disrupting in whole new ways.
* (Theory) The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism by Naomi Klein
Another book that helps you see the world through different eyes, or even if I dare, to see the world more clearly.
Pairs nicely with the unnecessarily long winded "Fall" by Neal Stephenson for understand a post truth world, specifically the idea of "Edit Streams"
* (Scifi )The Reality Dysfunction by Peter F. Hamilton
This one game me a framework for science and spirituality to coincide
* (Scifi ) Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie
Questions everything, blows your mind on multiple levels.
* (Self Help) She Comes First by Ian Kerner
Wakes you up to the massive comfort imbalance in sex between genders and provides simple ways to help fix it (for heterosexual)
And coming to think of it, there are couple of books that changed my life similarly (reading them for interview); though by themselves they may not merit to be in my permanent collection.
"Debt" and "bullshit jobs", both by David Graeber.
The first book really tears apart several of the "foundations" of economics. For instance, the creation of money as portrayed by Adam Smith? It's a myth, and no single place like he described ever existed.
Bullshit jobs is about the myriad bullshit managerial jobs we have and how we really shouldn't have them. It's capitalism, it's supposed to be efficient and yet, when he published a piece about bullshit jobs in an obscure anarchist magazine in 2013, it made so much impact The Economist wrote a response!
The Selfish Gene, by Richard Dawkins. It describes what science believes life to be, and it can be very upsetting. Understanding it, however, made me a more confident and happier person than I was before.
I found this book completely degrading, even to the point of nauseating .. it discounts tens of thousands of years of human experience with describing itself, producing a taxonomic monster that is of very little actual use to the common man beyond providing a convenient excuse for ones failings and for the nature of humankinds more banal spirit.
Science can be repressive. Dawkins is a classic example of the iron fist in a velvet glove, imho. He justifies monstrosity with a technical crutch, and whether it is 'true' or not, at the end of this book I just felt like dirt.
I appreciate your opinion. I think the book gives a very convincing explanation on how evolution works and how it shaped what we call "life". I do not remember Dawkins degrading human achievements in that book, so you might be referring to talks and lectures after the book was written. On the contrary, consider the following quote from the book:
> “If there is a human moral to be drawn, it is that we must teach our children altruism, for we cannot expect it to be part of their biological nature. ”
Let me quote another favourite author of mine on the same topic:
> "There’s Nature, and she’s going to come out the way She is.", Feynman.
I agree that it has an unnecessarily downbeat take on the whole business. You can believe in science and evolution and have an "isn't it wonderful" attitude like say Feynman rather than the "We are survival machines – robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes" attitude of that book.
Surprised no one has (at least so far) in this long thread mentioned Feynman's books. Those were the real mind-benders for me. Absolutely made me think differently about myself and my place in the world.
I didn't get that impression at all. What I walked away from was a feeling of dire unease at the popularity of Dawkins' opinion that human beings are machines that can be broken and manipulated by their environment, and that social scientists can exploit this fact to their own ends, in industry, culture and war. It may be 'true' inasmuch as the fact that applying his theories give predictable results, but even the most heinous oppressors of humankind were capable of such truth. When you remove the human spirit as a factor, eventually all you get is a pile of dirt. That, to me, was ultimately degrading in the end. I don't think modern science is as close to a solution of what makes life, life, as it thinks it is - but probably that's just my genetics, which has predisposed me for an interest in the metaphysical beyond test tubes and beakers ..
Read the philosopher of science David Stove's "Darwinian fairytales." You'll realize that Dawkins book is
1) Not orthodox science in any sense of the word, nor really philosophy of science (though it is a popularization of the work of people like William Hamilton)
2) Philosophically bonkers; it's essentially medieval demonology repackaged where the demons are called "genes."
3) Not written by an actual scientist.
It's also a hilarious takedown, as are most of David Stove's essays and books. I liked Dawkin's fairytale when I first read it, for the same reason I liked death metal music and fedora tier atheism arguments on usenet. But it's horse shit. FWIIW another nail in its coffin; Dawkin's ideology originates in part from a guy named George Price: have a look at part 3 of the Adam Curtis documentary "all watched over by machines of loving grace" for more on what became of him.
I don't know this author, and I feel this discussion may turn to a flame, so sorry to put oil on the fire, but I'm quite perplexed by your argument. For all I know, maybe you're right, but it sounds a lot like you're rejecting a scientific argument because you don't like the result, which is what science has always had to fight against from the beginning.
Maybe you could articulate your objection based on science rather than feelings?
Just because someone writes a long analysis of camera work, color correction and sound recording in Shawshank Redemption, doesn't mean that they don't believe that there are emotional and philosophical aspects to the movie also. Just that the object of that work was a particular kind of analysis.
In this case, it is dangerous since a lot of the moral fibre that prevents Dawkins from calling for an all-out eradication of any human being that has the "belief in God" gene, simply won't be there for future generations' benefit.
And that is why I find his crusade against religions he despises so dangerous. Culture devolves unless it is replenished with enlightenment - Dawkins takes no responsibility for that, since the typical means of its occurring (religious faith) is abhorrent to him.
People too easily forget that organised atheism is responsible for the massacre of millions of people, too.
I'd say organised atheists are responsible, rather than organised atheism. Minor difference, maybe, but the latter implies some inextricable link where there isn't one.
I really genuinely think you have misunderstood the book, and Dawkins' philosophy in general.
Dawkins isn't a social darwinist (and nor was Darwin for that matter). He doesn't believe that nature red in tooth and claw is the right way for people to behave. He's argued in many places that, as self-aware thinkers, we have the capacity and moral duty to rise above it.
If you want a target for your arguments, you should pick on an actual social darwinist like Nietzsche.
Of course it's degrading, but it's true and it's the world we live in. It's okay if you want to put your hands over your ears and keep your eyes closed, but don't expect others to do the same, and don't be surprised when they have a better grip of reality.
Science is observational. It doesn't give us rules we must follow, it describes the behaviour of things in the universe.
So if someone* says, "People do selfish things, that's science," true!
But if they also say, "Therefore, it's ok to kill your neighbour and take their house, see all of recorded history, colonialism, &c." I stop them. Science teaches us that people kill each other and take their land.
But science also teaches us that people coöperate and build rockets to Mars. Science is not prescriptive, and with respect to morality and ethics, science teaches us that there are many different strategies that people use to accomplish their goals, some of which may result in the replication of the information encoded in their genes.
Selfishness "Just is?" Yes.
Therefore "______ is ok and we must accept it?" No.
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* I am not putting these words in your mouth or arguing with you, just picking up where your statement left off.
Science has concluded that some human genotypes are, by scientific standards "lesser" than others. This can be - and has been - used by atheists and religionists alike to justify crimes against those people. Without a moral sense there is little holding back inhumanity from consuming itself. Science hasn't found a gene for morality, and doesn't seem to be on the hunt for it. So we therefore need our cultures to help us prevent calamity - which would require, by necessity, ignoring the scientists clamouring to explain from their pulpit that some humans are simply lesser than others, and "they have the science to prove it".
All I have to say about concluding that some genotypes are lesser by "scientific standards" can be summed up in the following HaHaOnlySerious joke that I have been telling my children from the time they could understand English:
"Humans are the greatest species of Life on Earth, according to all of the metrics that humans have chosen to measure greatness."
Science also tells me that insects are better than people, if I pick a different metric. I suspect we agree on this.
No but the fact that we have morality (and the possibility that other animals do not) can be explained via evolution. In reality probably many genes contribute in a complicated way to making us social animals.
I think the fact that Dawkins has become the very thing he so violently resists - a violent, intolerant fundamentalist who brooks no further questioning of his own authoritarian narrative - is evidence enough that there is still much, much to be discovered about the way life works. His is a cultural view, and we know for a fact that all culture is a lie which must be re-told in order to persist.
The more the human mind finds answers, the more questions it reveals - such is the nature of an infinite universe and our struggle to perceive it. If "God" doesn't exist we humans sure do spend a lot of time attempting to become one. "God" may not be a "he" sitting "on a cloud", but may indeed just be the New Question beyond every Old Answer. This fact seems to be rabidly overlooked by the Dawkins cult, which prefers to define God in its own, limited terms, in order to find fault in their chosen pariah cultures.
The jury is still out. On a scale of 1 to 7, 0.1 is just enough uncertainty to allow for yet more unanswered questions .. Dawkins, himself, has at least a little of the humility required to admit that.
Yeah, well maybe God is the sum total of everything, including your much-despised woo woo .. which, in my opinion, is the opposite of the kinds of totalitarian schools of thought that threaten our cultures, time and again.
Without the woo and whimsy and make-believe, what have we got left in our cultures? If we kill religion we may as well kill theatre and literature and all the other things which require this unmeasurable substance in order to be viable ..
I can't speak for what your parent poster is trying to say, but I can tell you what I mean when I say the same thing.
Let me use a specific example. I often say that capitalism is terrible for workers. Yet I work for a capitalist company that is--in my opinion--quite good to its workers.
Being a "realist" has told me that when looking for a job, I should be careful to avoid toxic cultures, exploitative management, and being underpaid relative to whatever I consider the fair market value of my labour.
But being a realist has also told me that toxicity, exploitation, and stinginess are unevenly distributed, and therefore it is a wise thing to shop around and negotiate for what I want.
I would NEVER say, "Toxicity is just how all businesses work. Demeaning and bullying people is just how company cultures are. Exploiting workers is what businesses do. If you can manipulate someone into working such long hours their health suffers, good for you. And negotiating is impossible, all companies push their workers around."
Being a realist means acknowledging what is in the universe, but it also means acknowledging that the universe contains variety and that almost everything is unevenly distributed.
Wow. I'm stoked to share this essay I recently discovered in the context of _mind bending_, and because some comments here are critical of Dawkins' views.
Susan Blackmore. “Dangerous Memes; or, What the Pandorans Let Loose” (Cosmos & Culture, p.297) [2]
Blackmore is writing about 'memes' and reacts to some of Dawkins' critics. I can't say to what degree Blackmore faithfully discusses the contents of 'Selfish Gene' (1976), because I've not read it.
This can be found in the March release of NASA's e-book collection [1]. And specifically in this book: Cosmos & Culture: Cultural Evolution in a Cosmic Context Edited by Steven J. Dick and Mark L. Lupisella (2009?) [2]
I haven't seen it mentioned yet: Metamagical Themas by Douglas Hofstadter - this book was a game changer for me - I read it in college over a partiularly rainy spring break and its content has changed the way I think about just about everything.
Systems Thinking: A Primer by Donella Meadows is also an incredibly thought-provoking non-fiction book, that really makes you think about the world and the systems we create differently.
"The Dispossessed" by Ursula K Le Guin is a classic science fiction novel written in 1974 about political philosophy and its relation to individuals' personal lives. The book's genius is in describing capitalism through the eyes of a protagonist for whom it is unfamiliar and literally alien.
It changed the way I think about how society today is structured and showed me that something different is possible.
"I Am a Strange Loop" by Douglas Hofstadter. It explores an idea of consciousness as being a side effect over neurological loops becoming recursive. It also gets into the idea that your conscious mind can partially blend into another's. He does this by talking about his feelings of day to day life after his wife passed away. There's a dense math chapter, but the rest is pleasantly written
"Maps of Meaning" by Jordan Peterson (yeah, that JP): a extremely interesting textbook-length treatment on cultural meaning and narrative. I found it a little hard to get through the learning curve on the jargon in the print form, but I could tell it had some really interesting ideas so I got the audio version and fully enjoyed it. It was a thoroughly mind-bending look at the meaning and power of shared cultural myths and human myths which transcend culture. It ended up with a fascinating analysis of (even to the point of being a partial rehabilitation of) Jungian psychoanalytic frameworks and pre-scientifc Alchemy. Maps of Meaning was a book that I immediately wanted to re-read as soon as I finished it, because I could tell there was a lot that I missed the first time.
Another recommendation is "Quantum Genesis: Speculations in Modern Physics and the Truth in Scripture" by Stuart Allen. QG is a relatively deep pop sci look at physics, computation, and several related fields where the author points out that the original translation of the creation myth in Genesis 1 matches up extremely well with a modern understanding of quantum physics and simulation theory. (disclosure: a family member is the author).
Never split the difference (Chris Voss): incredible book about dealing with people, after reading you end up seeing most interactions with other humans as negotiations with “black swans” hidden in your conversations.
Thinking Fast and Slow. (Recommended in other responses but I’d have to second this one. Incredible for reasoning about your own reasoning).
What the Buddha Taught: (Walpola Rahula): a short intro to Buddhism. There are some really powerful ideas from this age old religion, that can definitely help you think about your own happiness and what material possessions actually give you.
The Innovators Dilemma: a must read for startup founders, I think it’s the best model for thinking about technology and why startups and adoption often fails.
Atlas shrugged (Ayn Rand): completely transformative book for looking at our world, America particularly. Th perspective it gives you may not be in the best, or most human way, but I’ve found no other book that forces you to empathize with capitalism like this one.
Never Split the Difference is an amazing book. I use what I learned from that everyday, and I've coached people (successfully) to get out of bad situations with management using those techniques. It is literally one of the most helpful books I ever read.
- "Godel, Escher, Bach" by Douglas Hofstadter
- "Foucalt's pendulum" by Umberto Eco.
- "A Perfect Vacuum" by Stanislaw Lem.
- "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" by Douglas Adams.
Labyrinths of Reason, William Poundstone
The Ghost in the Atom, P.C.W Davies
The View from the Center of The Universe, Abrams and Primack
Godel Escher Bach, Douglas Hofstadter
The Four Agreements, Don Miguel Ruiz
Hmmm. Great question. What was the most "mind bending" moment in cinema? The ending to The Sixth Sense or the trial and conviction of Harvey Weinstein? When I think of mind bending I think of the thoughts and ideas that break one out of a previous believed framework of thinking. Things that have a lasting impact on how they see and view the world.
"The Bible" (New International Version)
“Capitalism and Freedom” by Milton Friedman
“Imperial Ambitions” by Noam Chomsky
“Evolution and Religion: A Dialogue Book" by Michael Ruse
“The Value of Free Thought” an essay by Bertrand Russel
“The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism” by Daniel Bell
“Stalking the billion-footed beast” an essay by Tom Wolfe
“Propaganda” by Edward Bernays
“Bonfire of the Vanities” by Tom Wolfe
“Walden” by Henry David Thoreau
“30 Satires” by Lewis H. Lapham
“Cat’s Cradle” by Kurt Vonnegut
Above, in chronological order, are the books that changed my life. It is weird looking at that list, as each book is tied to such a fundamental shift in my life. They each taught me about something fundamentally new and different. Faith, spirituality, economics, thought, power, society, nature, technology. It should appear obvious by looking at the list, there are plenty of opposite pairs, dipole books if you will, present. Bending one’s mind has multiple phases, first when one goes from knowing nothing to knowing something. Depending on what was learned, this can definitely be mind bending. But not everyone rides the second phase, going from knowing something to learning that it wasn’t the whole thing, or wasn’t the only way to interpret such a thing, or wasn’t entirely correct, or perhaps, in our largely subjective world, is not true at all.
Certain books can only speak to certain people at certain times of their life. It’s just the beauty of the whole thing. And to the core of this thread, one actually has to believe something, truly and passionately, in order for them to then have their world view bent and turned on its head. This is the hardest lesson that many won’t really ever opt to face. The core of truth, learning, and wisdom comes when you finally read (and thus think) something that takes a belief you previously held as passionately true, unalterably true, core-to-identity true, and made you wrestle with the reality that it may, perhaps, not be. That’s the biggest mind f* of them all.
One’s entire worldview is constructed of things they believe. But those things you believe come, for some more than others, from what one read, purposefully or not. Seek books that challenge what you believe and enjoy the ride.
Skip all the pop science bullshit suggested below. That's almost entirely sugar water, and beyond that; most of it is actually actively wrong.
Read anything written by Ancient Greeks; Aristotle, the Iliad, Herodotus, Plato. There's a reason people still read these dead white guys, and there is a reason that peak times of excellence in Western Civilization have been peak Ancient Greeks. It will make your thinking three dimensional, and give you perspective as to the world you live in today as a software engineer.
> I'm looking for mind games, plot twists, brain expanding books, and literally anything that transforms me into a smarter, wiser person.
It's hard to tell whether you want a mystery/thriller book or a book on logic or a self help book. If you want to be more intelligent or aware of culture, then read the bible. You'll be surprised how almost everything you read, watch or listen to is tied to the bible. Almost every book listed in this thread will have references to the bible. You really can't be culturally intelligent without having read the bible - at least in the US or Europe. If you want a mystery, can't go wrong The Name of the Rose. Also, a book isn't going to transform you into a smarter, wiser person. The countless shelves of self-help books should be evidence enough.
Also, I love this quote from einstein:
"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, just as the man who spends too much time in the theater is tempted to be content with living vicariously instead of living his own life."
FWIW Buddhism is different from the "People of the Book" (Jews, Christians, Muslims all worship literally the same God.) Buddhism is not monotheistic.
(The resolution between these forms was given in South Park of all places: God appears on Earth and mentions in passing that He is Buddhist.)
- - - -
Uh, heh, Hinduism is also different from the "People of the Book", and from Buddhism. The Gita is, of course, Hindu, not Buddhist. (I'm not sure how I got confused in the previous portion of this comment, sorry. No offense intended!)
If one is reading Holy Bible or Koran, one needs to adhere that they are the only god.
But in nowhere in Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism, ...
Or any other religions from Indian origin claim their's is the only truth.
All of them are completely fine with different view points.
For example Hinduism is too broad, it literally accepts everything.
For Ex:
There is only one God, there are many gods, there is no God.
One can be an atheist and be a good Hindu.
You need to pray to god, you shouldn't pray to god.
But there is an unification among all Indian religions. For ex: All religions go in search of God/Truth.
Any how, Bhagavadgita, should rather be looked up-on like a more of philosophical text rather than religious book.
It is the essence of MahaBharata, yet another religious text book.
I will take the bullet and suggest Ayn Rand's Fountainhead.
If you are a teenager it will definitely make you think and likely leave an impact on you. It's not a typical novel, more like philosophical ideas presented in the form of a novel. Ideal characters placed in real life. You will also understand why the world is divided into Ayn Rand lovers and haters.
It questions how the world works, how it should work, how people live their lives, and how they should live their lives, etc, etc.
Great suggestion. This is one of my favorite books, and I enjoyed it more than Atlas Shrugged because I found it a bit more subtle.
Rand has a very distinct philosophy and is quite black-and-white, but even if you don't agree with everything hopefully you can appreciate the writing and storytelling in The Fountainhead (and others). It seems that a lot of the discussion about Rand is focused on her philosophy and if it's right or wrong. This is probably justified but also obscures the fact that she was a master at writing.
I read this book in my early 20s and loved it. Even though I've become much more liberal on many issues (proponent of universal healthcare, tax-payer paid higher ed, etc.) I can still appreciate the themes in her work.
Also just finished Anthem last night- I recommend checking it out. Super short but really gripping read.
It's similar to your description of the book, ideal characters doing ideal things. Some scenes feel like they could be trimmed down and convey the same information.
The web of characters gets more rewarding to watch past the halfway line as the conflicts start to blossom. The film builds over time and comes to a powerful and satisfying end.
The 1940s emphasis on tall verticality in its art style is on full display. The strict adherence to command in speech seems foreign to me, not having been through the fighting forties.
Yeah its good. Cant say it will have any surprises left for you.
The biggest problem with Ayn Rand's thinking is that skilled, intelligent, and talented people are always moral people in her universe. This is not always the case.
Thinking Fast and Slow. I recommend this to absolutely everyone. It’s a huge study on how everyone thinks, even when they think they’re above thinking like that. Truly amazing!
Is the whole book actually worth reading? I mean the concept is very simple (although extremely important) and can be explained concisely in a couple of minutes - why a 500-pages book?
A lot of the book is going through various types of specific bias (e.g. anchoring, sunk-cost), and going over the way in which it was studied and shown to exist. I see this as valuable as because, as you say, accounting for irrationality is important, and having an indepth account of exactly how bias arises is key to internalizing the reality that we are all prone to succumbing to these errors.
The concept of almost all books can be explained in very few pages. The benefit of going through the book is it deepens your understanding, and you will be able to remember it much longer than what you will by reading summaries.
Ok this is actually more along the lines of “Mind bending books to write and never be the same as before”, as in I wrote it and has certainly had that kind of impact. I wrote a collection of essays documenting various interests like machine learning and entrepreneurship. An ongoing project, currently on book four. It’s a lot of fun! “From the Diaries of John Henry”, available online at https://www.turingsquared.com
For me, the books which had the most impact on my life were those which were exploring systematically something I had a confuse idea of and seemed rather unorthodox. When you get that feeling that "oh great, if I'm insane, I'm not alone", it immediately organizes your thought process and allows you to go further.
Of course, there is always the risk of an "echo chamber" effect, but on the other hand, there are some ideas that you can't get if you're not in a given predisposition, so better maximize the usefulness of your reading time (and explore introduction to alien ideas through lighter sources, like small articles).
Explores the consequences of consciousness being just a pattern. Would it continue if the pattern is paused? Seems yes, since we survive being unconscious. So we move in space and time, but still consciousness feels continuous.
What if you pause it, destroy it, recreate it somewhere else. Would it not continue then as well (the classic teleporter question). But it doesn't stop here.
What if you destroy it, but it just happens to continue somewhere else? Then it should continue there as well. So if you think that teleportation would not mean death, then you kind of have to accept that if anywhere in the universe at any time the same pattern exists when you die, then you can't really die because you'll just continue on from there instead.
Not sure I accept it, but it's certainly mind-bending to think about!