The Trial -- Kafka
Ask HN: Mind bending books to read and never be the same as before?
11–20 of 747 posts
Re: Ask HN: Mind bending books to read and never be the same as before?
#12I would recommend Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter if you haven't already read it.
Re: Ask HN: Mind bending books to read and never be the same as before?
#13Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker.
Maybe not mindbending, but a must read for us engineers prone to burning the midnight oil.
Re: Ask HN: Mind bending books to read and never be the same as before?
#14The 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.
Re: Ask HN: Mind bending books to read and never be the same as before?
#15The 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.
/just_like_my_opinion_man
Re: Ask HN: Mind bending books to read and never be the same as before?
#16I would recommend Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter if you haven't already read it.
TBH I have attempted to read it many times but escapes my feeble mind. GEB is one of those books ...
Re: Ask HN: Mind bending books to read and never be the same as before?
#17The 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…
I think you may have missed the point?
It's not about genes for selfishness.
Re: Ask HN: Mind bending books to read and never be the same as before?
#18Any books by Fritjof Schuon, René Guénon, Ananda Coomaraswamy, or Titus Burckhardt.
Re: Ask HN: Mind bending books to read and never be the same as before?
#19Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker. Maybe not mindbending, but a must read for us engineers prone to burning the midnight oil.
Careful with this one, the content is controversial and considered unscientific: https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/
Re: Ask HN: Mind bending books to read and never be the same as before?
#20Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker. Maybe not mindbending, but a must read for us engineers prone to burning the midnight oil.
Unfortunately full of errors: https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/