Ask HN: What books changed the way you think about almost everything?

Those are the two most published books in history and have changed more people's thinking than any two other books.

Reading "The True Believer" by Eric Hoffer and "Private Truths, Public Lies" by Timur Kuran prepared the ground for it!

It's not okay to be greedy, nor is it okay to be selfish. And these ideas are responsible for much of the harm in the world.

It is okay to know what you need and advocate for your needs, to take care of yourself. But that is not being greedy or selfish. And to do it effectively means you have to be able to recognize the difference between a "need" and a "want". You also have to be capable of balancing your own needs against the needs of others.

A mindset of "greed is good" and "it's okay to be self" does not even try to understand the difference between "need" and "want" and provides ample justification for screwing over everyone else in pursuit of greedy (unneeded) wants.

1) "A Guide of the Good Life." This is an approachable intro to stoicism and helped me become more conscious of which things are within my control and which things are outside of my control. I now spend a lot more time focusing on the former and a lot less time being anxious about the latter.

2) Books like "Traction" (by Gabriel Weinberg) and "Cracking Creativity" that take a fuzzy subject like marketing or being creative and show that you can get very far by following recipes/algorithms/heuristics. Skill like creativity are not purely innate; they can be learned.

3) "Economics in One Lesson." (Spoiler: the one lesson is: "economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups.") After this book, I now think much more carefully about proposed policies/rules/business strategies/etc. "Subsidized child care" or "charge businesses per seat" can sound great on the surface, but specific proposals often have so many unintended or negative consequences that are not discussed, and it's important to weigh those consequences against the benefits.

4) A statistics textbook. I don't remember the specific book that was my first stats textbook, but learning about statistics made me a lot more skeptical and inquisitive about data. Now when I see a graph or number reported in the news, I think "are there ways that this might be misleading?" instead of "omg cool this is a graph in a popular magazine so it must be true."