261–270 of 747 posts
“Lies My Teacher Told Me” by James Loewan will fundamentally change your understanding of American history.
The Fountainhead Or anything Vonnegut or Philip K Dick A personal "brain expanding" book for me was The Miracle Planet but timing is everything, as an 8 year old who had only been reading children's books it taught me that you can read through anything with persistence The Bible has a lot of mind games & plot twists. I read it as an atheist seeking better perspective on a couple thousand years ago
At random Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand. Love her or hate her, she makes you think. The Hard Thing About Hard Things - This is a great book about building businesses, and business in general. Capital in the 21st Century - One of the greatest books about economics and capital written ever - let alone in the last decade. The Intelligent Investor - This is Buffet's favourite book, and regardless of how many times I read it,…
The archetypes and collective unconsious - carl jung The origins and history of consciousness - mircea eliade Cosmic symbolism in genesis - mattheiu pageau If you want to get deep into opinions on making art, symbolism is a great rabbit hole.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Thinking, Fast and Slow" is a book I buy for every person for their first birthday after I met them. It is the book that has had the most profound impact on me thus far.
Is there some mind bending revelation in the second half? I read the first half and have not mustered the will to read the rest of it. It just seems so... "obvious" for lack of a better word. Maybe I've had too much psychology lectures or something, but nothing in the first half was remotely new to me.
I mean "how to win friends" is similar, it can be summarized with just the 12 chapters, and it's padded out with anecdotes putting it in practice.
I'm sure Seven Habits is the same, I have it on my bookshelf (mandatory reading from my previous employer) and I think I started reading it but I lost interest.
Anathem by Neal Stephenson features a bifurcated world where a scholar-monk-class of mathematicians lives in walled-off areas that mingle with the rest of the world only on fixed dates. Some every year, some every ten years, and others only every 100 years. There is a lot more to it, but I don't want to give anything away.
Explains why we choose brands over cheaper alternatives, why we're willing to pay a lot more to lock in a deal, why we hate registering before buying the thing (but are more than happy to do so right after), why Sony removed the record button from the first Walkman, and much more.
This book forever changed the way I think about brands, and improved my design and problem-solving skills.
A couple of Rory's rules:
• The opposite of a good idea can also be a good idea.
• Test counterintuitive things only because no one else will.
A couple of "mind games" from the book:
• Merely adding a geographical or topographical adjective to food – whether on a menu in a restaurant or on packaging in a supermarket – allows you to charge more for it and means you will sell more.
• "There's your problem," I said. "It doesn't matter what something tastes like in blind tastings, if you put 'low in fat' or any other health indicators on the packaging, you'll make the contents taste worse."
https://bookshop.org/books/alchemy-the-dark-art-and-curious-...
"Omnivore's Dilemma", Michael Pollan book changed the way I think about food. "The Psychology of Everyday Things" by Don Norman, will change your mind about user interfaces. "Manufacturing Consent" by Noam Chomsky to change the way you see the world.
That book impacted my life more than any other. It really opened my mind to an entire world of dissenting, radical thought that could be both studied, praised or rebuked. A true “The Giver” moment.
I have since moved to San Francisco - once a hot bed for the type of thought I accidentally came across all those years ago. About 6 months ago, while looking through my home library, I once again stumbled upon that book. I was curious, for the first time, who the publisher of this book was. What institution was so radical to give Chomsky a voice even still? And I discovered it was City Lights Publications, the publishing arm of the famous City Lights Bookstore here in San Francisco. Weird how the world works sometimes.
To all reading, if you ever find yourself in San Francisco, you must go to City Lights!
• "Laws of Form" by George Spencer-Brown, a little book that describes how to bootstrap the Universe from nothing. Louis Kauffman [1] has a lot of papers/writeups on it, from knot theory to quantum physics. If you ever wanted to make a pancake truly from scratch, this is a place to start. • "The Unconscious as Infinite Sets" by Ignacio Matte Blanco. Reformulates Freud in logico-mathematical terms and establishes a fo…
You would definitely appreciate Intelligence and Spirit, which employs game theory, linear logic, and Hegel towards a theory of artificial general intelligence.