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Ask HN: What books have made the biggest impact on your mental models?

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Re: Ask HN: What books have made the biggest impact on your mental models?

#41

Post by KirinDave »

Predictably Irrational is essentially required reading for anyone who is making decisions for a product.

The Information by James Gleick. Remember, Africa has had long range, distributed, fault tolerant wireless communication networks since before Europe had reliable clocks.

Euclid's Window by Mlodonow. The entire arc of history in a sweeping curve towards, ultimately, machine learning.

Reading Doc Smith's lensmen series (particularly the chronologically first 2) helped me recognize how very much pop science culture shapes perception. A futurist in the 20s thinking about interstellar travel has delightfuly different ideas. Wrong ideas, but hey.

Peter Hamilton's sci-fi, particularly the 6 Commonwealth Books: they're so different and so surprising and very happy to present a glowing and balelful view of capitalism in an expansionist universe.

Everyone in the west should.be required to read Ways of Seeing by Berger.

Re: Ask HN: What books have made the biggest impact on your mental models?

#42

Post by dwaltrip »

"Godel Escher Bach" and "I am a strange loop".

I only made it half way through GEB, however the latter is a bit easier to get through.

For me, these books marked the beginning of a lifelong journey of "self" contemplation and intellectual/philosophical exploration.

Re: Ask HN: What books have made the biggest impact on your mental models?

#46

Post by michaelmcmillan »

On Having No Head by Douglas Harding had a profound effect on my introspection. It simply points out who you really are from your subjective.

It bypasses the religious mumbo jumbo that so often gets bundled in guides to spirituality by using scientific experiements. Highly recommended!

Re: Ask HN: What books have made the biggest impact on your mental models?

#47

Post by brudgers »

Critique of Pure Reason

Philosophical Investigations

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress

Foucault's Pendulum

Snopes == The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion.

A River Runs Through It

Programming Erlang: Software for a Concurrent World

A Pattern Language

The Analects

Bhagavad Gita

Apology

The Republic

Touch the Earth

The Pity of War: Explaining World War I

The Civil War: A Narrative

Re: Ask HN: What books have made the biggest impact on your mental models?

#48

Post by maxprogram »

Poor Charlie's Almanac -- can't beat Charlie Munger when it comes to explaining how the world works.

Fooled by Randomness, Black Swan, Antifragile -- Nassim Taleb reviles lots of new ways to think, first in finance, then everything in later books.

The Origin of Wealth -- Similar to Antifragile with a lot of mental models packed in on many different subjects: economics, business, biology, ...

The Design of Everyday Things -- the bible of design. Read it to know why everyday frustrations with tech are probably not your fault. His book Emotional Design is a good compliment.

The Essential Drucker -- "essential" reading for anyone in management or scaling a startup.

History, and why the world is the way it is today:

Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari

Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond

The Birth of Plenty, William Bernstein

They Made America, Harold Evans -- fantastic history book with each chapter telling the detailed story of a businessperson or inventor in U.S. history

Re: Ask HN: What books have made the biggest impact on your mental models?

#49

Post by CGamesPlay »

spookyuser wrote: post #43

What is a Mental Model? I've heard this word tossed around so much recently and I still don't feel like I understand what it means.

It refers to a person's perception of the outside world and how well the person is able to predict the future and understand the causes of events. Sort of like how a machine learning "model" is the mechanism by which a program understands it's inputs.
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