"A Confession" and "The Kingdom of God is Within You" by Leo Tolstoy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Confession
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kingdom_of_God_Is_Within_Y...
Ask HN: Which books have made you introspect?
361–370 of 389 posts
Re: Ask HN: Which books have made you introspect?
#362Earlier quoted context omitted.
This book was not worth the hype for me; I read the whole thing, but regret purchasing it. - It sorely needed an editor. Echoing other's sentiments, it could have been - It used a gratuitous amount of Bible quotes, which 1. weren't necessary to make his point, 2. were often referenced as if they were data, and how people actually behave, rather than anecdotes/fiction I got suckered into to buying the book because the…
Peterson is very good at speaking and lecturing (practice makes perfect!) and I enjoy his work. That said, his tack is largely an updated stoic philosophy. A good idea, don't get me wrong. Still, if you liked his book, I'd go back and read more about stoicism. Here are some suggestion, but if anyone else has others, please chime in: https://www.amazon.com/Meditations-Thrift-Editions-Marcus-Au... https://www.amazon.co…
The way he talks about religion, I think he's way into Jungian archetypes and psychoanalysis and shit.
I originally thought his critique of postmodernism/continental philosophy and stuff was interesting, reminiscent of chomsky
His thesis on alcoholism is interesting, clearly he's atleast a decent psychologist. Reminds me of my aunt, psychologist at U. of Missouri, really interested in carl jung and religion.
IQ testing and personality tests always seemed broken to me. What is IQ measuring? Personality tests seem like arbitary categories. All of this is based on frequentist statistics (factor analysis), wonder if there's a bayesian perspective but I have no idea what i'm talking about honestly, especially compared to Peterson.
I can't stand his economic views, they're similar to Joe Rogan's "classical liberal"/market fundamentalist views. I like Kevin Carson's word: vulgar libertarianism:
"Vulgar libertarian apologists for capitalism use the term 'free market' in an equivocal sense: they seem to have trouble remembering, from one moment to the next, whether they’re defending actually existing capitalism or free market principles. So we get [a] standard boilerplate article… arguing that the rich can’t get rich at the expense of the poor, because 'that’s not how the free market works'— implicitly assuming that this is a free market. When prodded, they’ll grudgingly admit that the present system is not a free market, and that it includes a lot of state intervention on behalf of the rich. But as soon as they think they can get away with it, they go right back to defending the wealth of existing corporations on the basis of 'free market principles.'"
Re: Ask HN: Which books have made you introspect?
#3631. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind Mostly the bits about how our society is mostly built on collective fictions. 2. Siddhartha, by Herman Hesse I remember being very moved reading this, but I can't quite remember why. Looks like it's time to re-read it.
> I remember being very moved reading this, but I can't quite remember why. I think it's the unfolding of someone who sought knowledge and enlightenment throughout his life and the feeling of impotence he felt when sharing knowledge that can only be transmitted/obtained through life experiences. You have to live life in order to be enlighted. He always "knew it" in reality, but he didn't have the life experience to r…
The final, moving message of the book comes down to "live in the present." Something we hear 50 times a day from friends, commercials, videos, etc. But I think Siddhartha communicates and brings the reader on a journey that results in this realization the most effectively out of every piece of media I've ever consumed
Re: Ask HN: Which books have made you introspect?
#364[dead]
Re: Ask HN: Which books have made you introspect?
#365Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Bible is data. It's a collection of texts with its own [secular] field of study. Peterson's thesis is something like the following: that the early biblical stories constitute a kind of dominant eigenvector of human cognition and experience, what you get when you iteratively retell a story over a hundred generations. To dismiss this as anecdotes or fiction is very much to miss the point of what Peterson is trying…
It's hard for me to see why this logic points to the Bible and not the Odyssey or the Iliad, about which we could say much the same things (especially the Iliad, which shows clear marks of some parts of the story being much older than others). Or frankly any very old text with pre-literary roots. I am certainly pro-Bible, but in the terms you're putting it here it doesn't seem especially compelling.
It doesn't uniquely pick out the Bible, except to the extent that Western civilization was shaped far more thoroughly by the Bible than by Homer.
Re: Ask HN: Which books have made you introspect?
#366Earlier quoted context omitted.
Peterson is very good at speaking and lecturing (practice makes perfect!) and I enjoy his work. That said, his tack is largely an updated stoic philosophy. A good idea, don't get me wrong. Still, if you liked his book, I'd go back and read more about stoicism. Here are some suggestion, but if anyone else has others, please chime in: https://www.amazon.com/Meditations-Thrift-Editions-Marcus-Au... https://www.amazon.co…
The way he talks about religion, I think he's way into Jungian archetypes and psychoanalysis and shit. I originally thought his critique of postmodernism/continental philosophy and stuff was interesting, reminiscent of chomsky His thesis on alcoholism is interesting, clearly he's atleast a decent psychologist. Reminds me of my aunt, psychologist at U. of Missouri, really interested in carl jung and religion. IQ testi…
Peterson is openly "way into" Jungian archetypes and psychoanalysis and shit.
Re: Ask HN: Which books have made you introspect?
#367Earlier quoted context omitted.
How did it change your worldview? I tried to start it and couldn't get into it, despite knowing it's important to 40% of the world and is referenced in other sources very commonly.
Try Genesis Illustrated by R. Crumb. He's the artist behind Mr. Natural, but this is a non-satiric work. Once you get past the first few pages of creation myth, Genesis is a riveting story. The illustrations are beautiful and help make sense of unfamiliar customs.
If you want a good visual version, The Brick Testament is a fun starting point: http://www.thebricktestament.com/
Re: Ask HN: Which books have made you introspect?
#368Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can watch anytime at least the first 20 minutes. I just wanted to give a counter example to the first paragraph of the article which describe him like an opaque person who doesn't listen. I particularly like this debate because it shows he can have a decent conversation with a well known atheist and he actually listens to him. That's why I find the first paragraph really off which makes me having some doubts abou…
He did not came particularly well off in that debate.
I think both had their good points at times. Anyway, the debate shows a man different than the one described in the article. That's why I posted it
Re: Ask HN: Which books have made you introspect?
#369No question,hands down: Proust. He wrote his novels over a hundred years ago, in a vastly different world that we line in now, but over-and-over again, he totally nails and dissects human experience.
The first 30 or so pages of Swan's Way is about a child waking up in his room. He shows that something so benign and ordinary is anything but, it includes countless memories, senses, instincts, and emotions. Technologists should take note.
Re: Ask HN: Which books have made you introspect?
#370"Economics in One Lesson: The Shortest and Surest Way to Understand Basic Economics" by Henry Stuart Hazlitt. The title doesn't do it justice because it sounds so cliche, but once you read it, you'll actually agree that this DOES cover everything you need to know about economics (although heavily biased towards austrian economics than keynesian) Also an important side effect: You'll realize how economics is not just…
I could've written this exact comment after I read this book, but I actually wouldn't recommend this. I read it right before I did my economics degree, and it really warped my view of the "right way" to think about econ. It does give you a starting point, but the Austrian view isn't in the mainstream for a reason. It introduces just a bit too much bias into novice readers for my taste.
I think this cuts both ways.
In my case I came from the opposite direction. The first time I learned economics was through conventional lens of what's considered as the "norm" in modern economics, where Austrian economics is largely dismissed for the reason you point out. All economics books do cover Austrian economics but they are still biased against them so if you're a newbie, you come away thinking "OK these classical and Austrian economics theories are interesting in theory but I guess practically they don't work and it's outdated and nowadays it's all about Keynesian".
So coming from this point of view, reading this book did open my eyes, even though I knew exactly what the book talks about even before reading the book. I guess the general tone of the book was very effective in giving me a balanced point of view, since I at the time had a biased view towards Keynesian.
My current point of view is that there is no right or wrong answer, but there is only difference in context. In certain contexts Austrian way of thinking makes more sense, in certain contexts Keynesian makes more sense.
But it's looking more and more likely that it's time for Austrian economics to shine in the next decade, because of trends like globalization, increasing chaos in the world, and cryptocurrency.