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Ask HN: Books you wish you had read earlier?
131–140 of 280 posts
Re: Ask HN: Books you wish you had read earlier?
#132The Happiness Hypothesis by Jonathan Haidt. You hear 'ancient wisdom' on how to lead the good life all the time. These ancient aphorisms came from a time before the scientific method and the idea of testing your hypotheses. Tradition has acted a sort of pre-conscious filter on the advice we get, so we can expect it to hold some value. But now, we can do better. Haidt is a psychologist who read a large collection of t…
This book is my favorite non-fiction book. It is hard to reduce it back to what it is about, but it is filled with very useful insight into how the mind works. The metaphor of the rider and the elephant finally let me explain differences between what I consciously decided and what I actually did.
Re: Ask HN: Books you wish you had read earlier?
#133Rationality: 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 plac…
Rationality is good, but I found Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality to be a much more pleasant read about the same topics by the same author.
Both books suffer from the same problem, the lack of an editor. They could be half the size and it would make them a much more convincing and entertaining read.
Re: Ask HN: Books you wish you had read earlier?
#134Man's Search for Meaning (published under a different title in 1959: From Death-Camp to Existentialism) by Viktor Frankl who survived the concentration camps to go on to develop logotherapy and existential analysis (considered the third Viennese School of Psychotherapy). "lack of meaning is the paramount existential stress. To him, existential neurosis is synonymous with a crisis of meaninglessness", an interesting read, it does not focus on the horrors of the event, instead recognising the human capacity to overcome and rise above.
Re: Ask HN: Books you wish you had read earlier?
#135Mini Habits - It gave me a new perspective of how to go about making changes in my life, that aren't so burdensome.
I have developed several habits:
a. Writing a Gratitude Journal
b. Going to Gym in the morning
c. Programming in the morning
d. Reading in the morning
I copied some of my highlights here:
http://www.chestergrant.com/26-highlights-from-mini-habits-b...
Re: Ask HN: Books you wish you had read earlier?
#136The left hand of darkness, by Ursula Le Guin.
I found it by working my way through the list of joint nebula and hugo award winners (which is a really fun project, because all of them are amazing books). It is my favorite sci-fi book. It changes the way you look at gender, especially if you haven't questioned the concept much before.
Re: Ask HN: Books you wish you had read earlier?
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
"How to Win Friends and Influence People" by Dale Carnegie, because it changed my understanding of people for the better. Absolutely everyone should read this book. I wish it had a better title. "Understanding People" would be an excellent one.
I've seen this book recommended many times. I read a few chapters and don't feel like it was useful. Some of the stuff is obvious common sense like smile don't criticize others, be a good listener etc. Then it tells you to be genuinely interested in someone. How can you force yourself to be interested in someone? Does the book go into anything actually useful later on?
> Then it tells you to be genuinely interested in someone. How can you force yourself to be interested in someone?
I truly believe you can. I feel the issue is most of the time that we don't want to care. That we value our own ideas and issues higher than those of others. For me the practice of deep listening [1] really helped me to better relate with people with whom I didn't really relate beforehand. Yes, it's exhausting and yes, I fail still often enough but it shows me that we have a choice.
Re: Ask HN: Books you wish you had read earlier?
#138_The Art of Electronics_. As a software guy who sometimes is involved in embedded systems, having a good understanding of what's going on at the resistor/capacitor/transistor level would have helped a lot. I did a bunch of hobby electronics as a teenager, but never had circuit theory. I knew a lot about digital design, but not the analog stuff that the whole world ultimately rests on.
So now, when I hear a switching power supply whine in protest, I will think of it as the squeals of pain of the engineers whose life I turned into a living hell because of my lack of appreciation for P = IV. I’m truly sorry. I wasn’t thinking. (And this is just the first chapter of that book).
Re: Ask HN: Books you wish you had read earlier?
#139Re: Ask HN: Books you wish you had read earlier?
#140The bible, cover to cover: if reading western literature or philosophy produced in whatever year A.D., the bible is required reading for comprehending many the references and various rhetorical modes. I'm irreligious from a muslim background myself but I'm reading it now. Same goes for the qoran, my family is not a practicing muslim family and thus I never read it, but it's a part of the canon, must be read. I'm not sure if I would like to have read these earlier tho, as now I have the consciousness to not be fooled by the stuff in these books.
Karen Armstrong's A Short History of Myth is a very nice guide into mythology and what that and religion are. It's like a vaccine for any sort of fundamentalism or bigotry, if read with some accompanying knowledge of mythological traditions.