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
Ask HN: Mind bending books to read and never be the same as before?
171–180 of 747 posts
Re: Ask HN: Mind bending books to read and never be the same as before?
#172The Iceman Cometh by Eugene O'Neill.
Re: Ask HN: Mind bending books to read and never be the same as before?
#173Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
Re: Ask HN: Mind bending books to read and never be the same as before?
#174The Magus, John Fowles
Dune (all 6)
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert M. Pirsig
Manufacturing Consent
The Demon-Haunted World, Carl Sagan
If This Is a Man, Primo Levi
Light, M. John Harrison
Re: Ask HN: Mind bending books to read and never be the same as before?
#175Skip 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 thre…
Can't agree more. Though, Romans >> Greeks.
Re: Ask HN: Mind bending books to read and never be the same as before?
#176“Lies My Teacher Told Me” by James Loewan will fundamentally change your understanding of American history.
Re: Ask HN: Mind bending books to read and never be the same as before?
#177Anything by Hermann Hesse. Not mind bending. No Twists. No roller coasters. Just a calm conversation with the author and yourself. And yet, it had a profound impact on me. One poem I revisit every once in a while: https://www.lieder.net/lieder/get_text.html?TextId=119749 If you understand German, I do believe it needs to be read in its original tongue. The translations I found thus far were not entirely convincing.
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.
Re: Ask HN: Mind bending books to read and never be the same as before?
#178I would recommend Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter if you haven't already read it.
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'.
Re: Ask HN: Mind bending books to read and never be the same as before?
#179The 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.
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".
Re: Ask HN: Mind bending books to read and never be the same as before?
#180Hans-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.