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

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

#261

Post by crowdpleaser »

freedomben wrote: post #152

"Basic Economics" by Thomas Sowell. Not an easy read, but it deeply changed the way I think about incentive structures and the law of unintended consequences. It's a tough pill to swallow for people (like myself) who cling to utopian ideas, but the older I get the more I realize we must live in the world as it exists, with human nature as it really is. Dreaming of a better world is counter-productive if one does not…

+1. Reading Sowell really challenged my utopian impulses, it's amazing how deep his thoughts are but how simply they're expressed, apparently he advised people in the bay area to stop protecting so much open space in the 1970s with the warning that this would increase housing prices dramatically eventually. In hindsight this seems so intuitive and obvious but he gets credit for not needing hind sight and anticipating the most salient consequences.

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

#262

Post by king07828 »

Emotional Intelligence 2.0 by Travis Bradberry. Two people had to recommend it to me independently before I finally read it. Reading and deeply contemplating this book dramatically increased my ability to understand and predict emotionally driven behaviors. Drama in movies and in life started to make sense.

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

#263

Post by ilamont »

"Why We Sleep" is the most important book I have read in many years. Helped me understand how my brain works and the nature of memory.

When I was younger, On The Road and As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning opened my mind to travel and wandering.

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

#264

Post by tvladeck »

freedomben wrote: post #152

"Basic Economics" by Thomas Sowell. Not an easy read, but it deeply changed the way I think about incentive structures and the law of unintended consequences. It's a tough pill to swallow for people (like myself) who cling to utopian ideas, but the older I get the more I realize we must live in the world as it exists, with human nature as it really is. Dreaming of a better world is counter-productive if one does not…

The Quest for Cosmic Justice is another great book by Sowell that challenges the utopian mindset that underlies many modern policy discussions. It contrasts utopian "cosmic" justice with the much more prosaic (but achievable) "human" justice

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

#265

Post by stefanv »

The latest one for me was "On intelligence". It made me understand that intelligence is not that hard to understand on a conceptual level. The book is about machine intelligence, but the most impressive thing for me was the simplicity of how Jeff Hawkins defines intelligence

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

#266

Post by gglitch »

richardjdare wrote: post #168
gglitch wrote: post #9

I imagine I’ll take heat for this, but the first answer that comes to mind is A Thousand Plateaus by Deleuze & Guattari. It has been justifiably criticized by many people on many grounds, but as with OP and Freakonomics, certain of the concepts in that book frequently appear in my thoughts 20 years after I worked through some of it. I don’t associate it with truth; but some of the mental models have really stuck with…

I've wanted to read A Thousand Plateaus for a few years. The first time I tried it, all that stuff about wolves and geology just lost me. I will have to try again. Honestly, I found it harder than Heidegger's Being and Time, which I worked through while listening to Hubert Dreyfus's lectures on iTunes U a few years ago. Whenever I read about Deleuze and Guattari I get this feeling they are on to something - I just do…

I know what you mean. It’s hard to avoid feeling like what appears to be glossolalic nonsense would all be revealed as a majestic tour de force, perfectly comprehensible and life-changing, if you were familiar enough with Marx, Freud, Leibniz, Spinoza, Bergson, Kant, Sartre, and god knows whom else, to put it all together. I’m not, so I can’t prove or disprove the case, which makes it a weird answer to OP’s question; but per above, it remains the case for me that images and terms from that book have never stopped working in my ideation processes since I picked it up.

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

#267

Post by blueprint_for »

I'm about 6% in to The Age of Surveillance Capitalism and I am certain that it has already changed my life. It presents the friction between the corporate optimization function (increase dividends and share value) and the basic human right to privacy and freedom that is continually being tipped in favor of the corporation. Our data has been spun to be this inconsequential means to make our life easier when in reality it is exploitable resource able to be crunched into manipulation for a profit. It has changed my life because it has realigned my career aspirations as a software engineer.

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

#268

Post by nik_0_0 »

nikivi wrote: post #7

One book that changed me was reading Master and Margarita in Russian for the first time. It was the first book I started reading I could not put down until the end. Gained a lot of appreciation for literature at that time. The other book that I enjoyed and changed me was ‘The Wisdom of Insecurity’ by Alan Watts. I was a fan of Alan Watts works through his lectures already and it was wonderful to hear his ideas in wri…

Really appreciate your phrasing - I feel the same way about Anthony Bourdain's material (while on a very different matter) - has convinced me to check out some more Alan Watts.
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