331–340 of 341 posts
Moneyball. Will affect the way you (strive to) make decisions. Worthwhile even if you've seen the movie and/or don't like baseball. The End of Faith. Definitely don't agree with all of this, but if you're at all on the fence about religion this book has the potential to be very influential.
Who moved my cheese. Its not my favorite book but its influenced me the most and I read it atleast once a year. It is a powerful parable about making things happen for yourself and focusing on things you can control and not blaming a bad hand or rough circumstances.
You might be interested in Peaks and Valleys, by the same author. This one focuses more on how to plan for good and bad times that will come.
The Better Angels of our Nature by Steven Pinker. It's a history of macro trends in violence - wars, homicide, rape, etc. The burden of violence in the modern world is much, much lower than it was historically, even fairly recently. The book catches a lot of flak from people who reject the claim that the future will automatically be more peaceful than the past. I think this is poor criticism because that's not what t…
Fascinating to say the least.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder if The Timeless Way of Building by Christopher Alexander would be similarly interesting. It's not trying to be a novel, but explores similar concepts.
I've never read that... I'll have to check it out.
I've got a tie between two books: 1) Design of Everyday Things by Dan Norman This book ruined my life. I highly recommend it. Every engineer, manager and designer should read this. Maybe every human. I think of this book every time I try to pull a push door, every time I reach the bottom floor of a stairwell and notice the design that might save my life one day, and every time I try to struggle to operate a televisio…
Both are great books. Influence helps me a lot to deal with my 3 year old. Should be on the parenting section on bookstores. I also like The Soul of a New Machine, The Prince, The Art of War and On Human Nature.
Me too. Fascinating read. I still remember the part where one of them compares their work to the pinball game - where the reward for winning is that you get to play again.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which Taleb's book should I read first?
Fooled by Randomness, IMHO. Black Swan is an expansion of Fooled. Aphorisms is a vanity project. Haven't read Anti Frangile. Fooled by Randomness has lots of good analysis of survivorship bias, trend following and other mistaken pattern matching strategies that are hard wired into us, and blind us to the true nature of events.