21–30 of 254 posts
The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion
Lies my teacher told me : everything your American history textbook got wrong
Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion
Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life
Thinking, Fast and Slow
Sapiens - How the world works
Biographies of Steve Jobs and Einstein - Taught me that even geniuses dont work in a vaccum
Lean Startup and essays from PG - taught me how to start a business
Agree or disagree with his findings, but it was the first book I read as a teenager that tried to connect seemingly disparate things into a single narrative - culture, technology, luck.
Jared Diamond had a similar, but more simple premise.
I still think of certain passages of Landes' book to this day. The impact of clockworking, the start of the modern tech industry. The impact of protocol and bureaucracy, especially the Spanish one.
In no particular order ... I Am a Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter - strongly influenced my beliefs about how consciousness works Godel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter - made me think more deeply about so many topics Animal Liberation by Peter Singer - made me both an animal advocacy activist and strongly influenced me towards a consequentialist moral Neuropath by R. Scott Bakker - more on how consciousness wor…
The Tao of Physics, by Fritjof Capra
Dancing Wu Li Masters, by Gary Zukav
The Naked Ape, by Desmond Morris
The Road to Serfdom, by Friedrich Hayek
The Worldly Philosophers, by Robert Heilbroner
The Story of Philosophy, by Will Durant
Grammatical Man, by Jeremy Campbell
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, by Robert M. Pirsig
Flow, by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
It is a highly opinionated work, with full of questionable arguments and logic. And, I am not sure whether it resulted in good or bad, but certainly, it has made an influence.
The Autobiography of Malcolm X makes a brilliant case for angry speech, making the mainstream portrayal of figures like Gandhi and MLK Jr. seem like straight-up whitewashed propaganda.
Delusions of Gender is a fierce analysis of the nature/nurture discussion that rears its head over and over, explaining various mistakes people when interpreting results, both at the research level and at the journalistic level.
Marx's Inferno reinvents Marx in a super clever way.