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Ask HN: Best books read in 2022?

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Re: Ask HN: Best books read in 2022?

#121

Post by wraptile »

"How to Be Perfect: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question" by Michael Schur is my favorite read of the year.

It's an introduction to the philosophy of ethics through real-life examples and anecdotes by the creator of The Good Place TV show (the audio book even features the shows actors). Unlike most of philosphy stuff you can actually finish it in couple of days and feel like you learned a whole lot!

In particular it helped me with my ethics choice anxiety and introduced me to Aristotel's "be the best version of yourself" philosophy which is such a liberating way of thinking.

Re: Ask HN: Best books read in 2022?

#122

Post by chadk »

sien wrote: post #96

How the World Really Works by Vaclac Smil is one of the best book I've read this year. It gives such a great perspective on how much energy and material we use. It's one of the most readable books by Smil and has gems like this : “Moreover, within a lifetime of people born just after the Second World War the rate had more than tripled, from about 10 to 34 GJ/capita between 1950 and 2020. Translating the last rate int…

+1 to How Asia Works!

Re: Ask HN: Best books read in 2022?

#123

Post by abdullahkhalids »

unmole wrote: post #40
hypersoar wrote: post #34

Debt: The First 5000 Years by David Graeber of Bullshit Jobs , and, more importantly, this book. Graeber was an anthropologist, and he goes through the history of debt and how it became intertwined with our culture and morality with many, many examples. The book is chock full of ideas. Also The Dawn of Everything , which Graeber cowrote with archaeologist David Wengrow. The broader point of the book is that there is…

> Debt: The First 5000 Years by David Graeber Graeber misinterprets the history and ideas of mainstream economics, calls the safest securities on the planet a debt that will never be paid and spins bizarre conspiracy theories about the Iraq invasion. You might learn about the quaint cultural practices of remote tribes but a lot of the ideas presented are complete nonsense. You might say it has good and original parts…

The purpose of the book is to make the general-audience reader realize the problems with the conceptual-historical framework of neoliberal economics and politics. David Graeber rightfully argues that Neoliberalism sells itself to the masses by constructing this "quaint" tale of uncivilized barter-practicing foraging tribes turning into coin/money using farmers into debt based industrial-financial empires.

I am sure there are many factual inaccuracies in the book (I am not an expert so I wouldn't know either way). But what he successfully manages to do is show the reader that there are many many different economic systems practiced throughout history, and many of them very highly sophisticated (and not quaint as you suggest). And once the reader realizes this, there is only a short step to the question, "is neoliberalism really the best we can do or one of the other systems better for us?"

Re: Ask HN: Best books read in 2022?

#124

Post by yamrzou »

Anxiety by Fritz Riemann (1902-1979)

Fritz Riemann is a german psychoanalyst, and this is the translation of his best-known work, originally published under the title Grundformen der Angst (Basic forms of fear).

The book discusses how various types of fear (fear of commitment, fear of self-becoming, fear of change, fear of necessity) give rise to various personalities (schizoid personalities, depressive personalities, compulsive personalities, hysterical personalities), and discusses their relationship to love, aggression and their biographical backgrounds.

Re: Ask HN: Best books read in 2022?

#125

Post by chadk »

The two best books I read this year, and have been recommending widely are:

"The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity" by Graeber and Wengrow since it really shows how narrow our political imagination has been for the last 250 years, and makes me excited by people looking for new ways to organize.

"The Ministry for the Future" by KSR, which has further radicalized me and challenged me to spend more of my time fighting the climate crisis.

[edited for formatting]

Re: Ask HN: Best books read in 2022?

#127

Post by uxcolumbo »

chadk wrote: post #125

The two best books I read this year, and have been recommending widely are: "The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity" by Graeber and Wengrow since it really shows how narrow our political imagination has been for the last 250 years, and makes me excited by people looking for new ways to organize. "The Ministry for the Future" by KSR, which has further radicalized me and challenged me to spend more of my tim…

Fighting climate change… what do you have in mind… what can folks in (soft) tech do?

I’m equally interested but lacking in imagination currently how software can have a bigger impact.

All the big impactful things are in hard tech, ie changing industrial processes, new / improved material design, renewable energy production, reducing energy waste or waste in general etc and planting tons and tons of trees at scale - best carbon capture and ecosystem restoration tech we have I think.

But for all that we need to have the political will, which is not sufficiently present at the moment. Too many counter forces preventing systems change. So how do you address that?

A book on my to read list is Reinventing Fire.

Re: Ask HN: Best books read in 2022?

#128

Post by stillworks »

bugfix-66 wrote: post #39

I seriously doubt this appeals to the modern Hacker News crowd, but it might appeal to a couple of you: Published in October 2022, The Art of Computer Programming: Volume 4B is dazzling. It's like a guide to expressing (in non-obvious ways) all kinds of problems as some variation on Exact Cover (or Boolean Satisfiability) and using wicked tight little general-purpose backtracking solvers to solve them. If you want a…

Did you mean Volume 4 Fascile 5 ? 4b is Combinatorial Algorithms.

Re: Ask HN: Best books read in 2022?

#129

Post by uxcolumbo »

cf141q5325 wrote: post #56

Joost Meerloo's "Rape of the mind". Its an incredible older book looking at the mechanisms exploited by totalitarian systems to subdue their victims. Namely nazi Germany, soviet Russia and revolutionary China. The author was part of the dutch resistance against the nazi occupation and headed the psychological department of the dutch army in exile after he had to flee mainland Europe. He later also acted as a witness…

How do you fight a totalitarian from the inside, eg China, Russia, Iran, where surveillance is high and any opposition will be ‘disappeared’.

Does this book go into detail how the Dutch resistance did it?

Re: Ask HN: Best books read in 2022?

#130

Post by shinryuu »

uxcolumbo wrote: post #127
chadk wrote: post #125

The two best books I read this year, and have been recommending widely are: "The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity" by Graeber and Wengrow since it really shows how narrow our political imagination has been for the last 250 years, and makes me excited by people looking for new ways to organize. "The Ministry for the Future" by KSR, which has further radicalized me and challenged me to spend more of my tim…

Fighting climate change… what do you have in mind… what can folks in (soft) tech do? I’m equally interested but lacking in imagination currently how software can have a bigger impact. All the big impactful things are in hard tech, ie changing industrial processes, new / improved material design, renewable energy production, reducing energy waste or waste in general etc and planting tons and tons of trees at scale - b…

Even solar power needs interfaces. One of those interfaces will likely be through the Web. There will be work to be done that requires normal Web dev in that area.
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