"Anatomy of the State" by Murray Rothbard.
We live in a world of thieves masqueraded as leaders.
Ask HN: Books you wish you had read earlier?
81–90 of 280 posts
Re: Ask HN: Books you wish you had read earlier?
#82"Atlas Shrugged" by Ayn Rand.
Re: Ask HN: Books you wish you had read earlier?
#83A non-tech, non-business recommendation: "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" by Milan Kundera. A beautiful story, told with equal parts philosophy, psychology, and humor, and honestly heartbreakingly beautiful.
Re: Ask HN: Books you wish you had read earlier?
#84Rationality: from AI to Zombies really changed my way of thinking in many ways. It's very hard to describe it or sell it in a few sentences. Partly because it covers so many different things. And partly because I read it so long ago and have already absorbed many of the good ideas in it. They no longer seem exciting and new, and just feel obvious. But they certainly weren't when I first read it.
I constantly see places where an idea from the book is relevant and I want to make people read a chapter of it. Examples include insights into evolution, artificial intelligence, morality, and philosophy. There's a short section on how people tend to argue about the definitions of words and how unproductive this is, that I always find relevant. There's a lot of discussion on various human biases and how they affect our thinking. My favorite is hindsight bias, where people overestimate how obvious events were after they know the outcome. Or the planning fallacy, which explains why so many big projects fail or go over budget.
The author's writing style is somewhat polarizing. Some people love it and some people hate it, with fewer in between. He definitely has a lot of controversial ideas. Although in the 10 years since he started writing, a lot of his controversial opinions on AI have gone mainstream and become a lot more accepted than they were back then.
Re: Ask HN: Books you wish you had read earlier?
#85Metamagical Themas by Douglas Hofstadter. This book has taught me more about thinking differently than any other.
Isn't that mostly a book of math problems? I've read some of his other books (GEB, The Mind's I, I'm a Strange Loop) - how does it compare to those?
It's a collection of columns that Hofstadter wrote for Scientific American. It explores a lot of topics, but personally the one I found most interesting was "superrationality:" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superrationality
Re: Ask HN: Books you wish you had read earlier?
#864 Hour Work Week, it gave me some perspective on the 9-5 job I wish I had given more thought to earlier in my life when I had more time. 80/20 principle, while mentioned in the 4 hour work week, it really has a lot more to offer in the book. How you should go about leveraging your time. There was a real gem in there about how books are really the best way to acquire knowledge and a great way to approach reading in th…
I was going to mention this book. Glad you did it :)
Totally changes your perspective towards success.
Re: Ask HN: Books you wish you had read earlier?
#87Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari. It gave me a good understanding of where we, as a species, came from. What did we do, why did we spread across the planet, how did we replace other hominids? What I really appreciated was his ability to explain some of the underpinnings of society like religion, nation states and currency with a relatively simple idea. Afterwards I felt like "damn that's so simple, I should have thought…
One doesn't have to be Indian to read the magnificent book by Guha.
Yuval Harari's new "Homo Deus" is excellent. I had a blast reading it. It has a number of things from Homo Sapiens but talks about possible future and fundamental things that drive humans to create technology. Absolute one of my top 5 favorite books.
Re: Ask HN: Books you wish you had read earlier?
#88Evicted. Showed me how racism is still alive today, how bad it actually is to live in poverty even in a wealthy country in the USA. Tore down a lot of assumptions I had made.
Re: Ask HN: Books you wish you had read earlier?
#89Metamagical Themas by Douglas Hofstadter. This book has taught me more about thinking differently than any other.
Isn't that mostly a book of math problems? I've read some of his other books (GEB, The Mind's I, I'm a Strange Loop) - how does it compare to those?
it's absolutely the book of his I but copies of to give away. GEB was impressive in it's own way, but a bit too self-indulgent to be fully engaging, and 'le ton beau de marot' is spectacular but pretty narrowly focused. metamagical themas is just plain great in every respect.
Re: Ask HN: Books you wish you had read earlier?
#90The bible
Why?
Personally, because a thorough understanding of the Bible shows that its teaching is quite different to what is often portrayed in media and in the assumptions of people like myself who had not previously read it.
You can take many individual parts of the Bible out of context and make it sound like madness but reading the whole in its entirety has a narrative that many miss.
For those raised on the internet and faster gratification (like me), try The Jesus Storybook Bible which I personally think is a great effort at paraphrasing the original.
EDIT: clarity