The Black Swan. By far.
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?
#92Early on I got into a box of my dad's old NLP books (not Natural Language Processing, the other NLP.)
"Structure of Magic" vols I and II, "Frogs into Princes", "Trance-formations", and a couple of others.
NLP grew out of the application of Chomsky's Transformational Grammar to recordings of very effective psychological therapists. (Virginia Satir, Fritz Perls, and Milton Erickson.) By the way, this is the same Transformational Grammar that leads to the Chomsky Hierarchy of languages. Neat, eh?
Anyhow, the NLP people rapidly developed a powerful model of subjective reality and replicable results in theraputic settings (e.g. the "Five-minute Phobia Cure" algorithm, among many others.) The capability to reprogram belief structures engenders a change of self-definition even if you don't use it.
"Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid"
"System design from provably correct constructs : the beginnings of true software engineering" about Dr. M. Hamilton's Higher Order Software.
Everything by Robert Anton Wilson. (That's not a title, I mean everything he wrote.)
Re: Ask HN: What books have made the biggest impact on your mental models?
#93The Origins of Order by Stuart Kauffman - Reality is autocatalytic of life.
Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand - civilization as a struggle of producers vs. looters; selfishness > altruism; the love of money is the root of mostly good.
A New Kind of Science by Stephen Wolfram - Simple rules can yield arbitrarily complex behavior. Therefore reality is inherently computational from the lowest levels.
Re: Ask HN: What books have made the biggest impact on your mental models?
#94A few weeks back I read "The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion". It was very insightful. I enjoyed it so much that I ended up immediately recommending it to many of my friends. The author does a good job at getting the main points through. He ends each chapter with a summary of the discussed points, and at the end of the book he sums em all up again. Not a book, but I've been consum…
If you liked the righteous mind you'd similarly enjoy "The Dictators Handbook" by Bruce Burna De Mesquita - he explores how rulers looking to maintain power are all driven by similar incentives, and similarly provided a clear framework for analyzing political or business strategy.
Thank you for the suggestion, the premise sounds really interesting. I've just added it to my queue.
Re: Ask HN: What books have made the biggest impact on your mental models?
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interesting, I see it most often in anarcho-capitalist circles
That's very strange for me to hear, considering the position of the author himself and some of the views espoused in the book. Though I shouldn't be saying that books ought to be restricted to certain ideological followers. As a Communist myself I have my own favourites but I doubt they'd be so useful to anyone here.
I'm definitely pro-capitalism personally, but I think a collection of books that offer a convincing argument towards another perspective would be well received in the HN community. You should consider posting some.
Re: Ask HN: What books have made the biggest impact on your mental models?
#96Paul's Letter to the Galatians
Re: Ask HN: What books have made the biggest impact on your mental models?
#97_The Innovator's Dilemma_ made me start thinking critically about the kinds of projects large organizations attempt, and why they often fail. It's kind of a depressing book, actually . . .
Re: Ask HN: What books have made the biggest impact on your mental models?
#98Fantastic question. The selfish gene - for understanding human behavior Meditations of Marcus Aurelius - for understanding how to be content Debt, the first 5,000 years - for understanding money and finance from the ground up Wright Brothers - for understanding how technological breakthroughs happen Snowball (Warren Buffet), Andrew Carnegie and Rockefeller biographies - for understanding the mental mindset to win in…
I am... shocked as this 80% is is my list for the very same reasons. Surely you've enjoyed Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter as much as I have, if not (yet), this is my thank you to you.
Re: Ask HN: What books have made the biggest impact on your mental models?
#99Fantastic question. The selfish gene - for understanding human behavior Meditations of Marcus Aurelius - for understanding how to be content Debt, the first 5,000 years - for understanding money and finance from the ground up Wright Brothers - for understanding how technological breakthroughs happen Snowball (Warren Buffet), Andrew Carnegie and Rockefeller biographies - for understanding the mental mindset to win in…
For Andrew Carnegie and Rockefeller, which biographies do you recommend?
Re: Ask HN: What books have made the biggest impact on your mental models?
#100Most books by Robert Anton Wilson