51–60 of 101 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You read Dark Forrest or Deaths End (other books in the 3BP trilogy)?
Nope, is it worth continuing?
SPOILER FOR THE FIRST NOVEL . . . . . .
The whole paradigm of Earth defense changes so dramatically, as people realize sophons can see everything people do. I highly recommend continuing, as you see society changes in the series.
I found the book accessible and compelling.
“This is water” has to be one of my favorite short essays/speeches of all time. If you haven’t read it/seen it before so yourself a favor and go through it, it doesn’t take very long. Seriously wish I could get these ideas into everyone’s head.
I've read this three times now, yet I still don't see the profundity. It seems like a lot of obvious "how" -- of course your framing changes your outlook -- but no "why". I can imagine everyone in traffic, or in the grocery store has a perfectly legitimate reason for why they're acting whatever bothersome way they're acting. But how does that help me accomplish my goal any more efficiently?
The idea is not that there's a profound insight hidden in there. In fact, the essay repeats several times that there's no trite lesson or platitude to walk away with, and that the basic idea is already obvious - the world doesn't revolve around any given person. What's not obvious is exerting the mental effort to consider that fact when you feel like you're the only person who has any self-awareness in a crowded grocery store.
On a more practical level, if you're looking for a lesson then this is close to it - you get in your own way, intellectually speaking, by defaulting to the easy path of discounting the myriad reasons for other peoples' behavior while rationalizing your own. We tend not to think about the things that are so obvious they're dreadfully mundane, but because of that we close ourselves off to insights that could be very helpful but for the fact that we're locked into our first-person perspective.
More succinctly: if you find yourself thinking that you're surrounded by people who lack self-awareness, you might be lacking some of it yourself.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Throughout the book, the author cites a scientific study and article on nearly every page, so you know that these are real hard facts. This is almost discouraging to me. If spending too much time on HN has taught me anything, it's that citing a study (especially medical, nutrition, and psychology papers, among other fields I'm probably missing), is not nearly enough of a guarantee that some assertion should be call…
If the topic of the book isn't something you know well, how well do you think you can judge the coherence of the argument? Is coherence measured in some presented mechanistic model? Is it measured against your prior conception of how the body works (gained from school or other historical reading)? What if we were wrong before? I guess I'm asking this because I'd believe that this attitude is not good when heeded by t…
Hopefully by the time you have read the book, you have picked up a set of ideas from the field under the discussion and have an understanding of how they relate to one another. So I'm referring to coherence within that set of ideas and relations (which I'll refer to as a 'framework'). To be more specific I'd define 'coherence' as mutual support and lack of contradiction ('mutual support' is like... one point gains strength because of the content of other points.
The probability that the framework is strongly coherent while also in reality being false decreases with the size of the framework. In other words, if the author has made a large number of claims, which are all coherent with one another, the probability that they are true (in the sense of corresponding to something in objective reality) is relatively high. The alternative is that the author went through enormous efforts to create a large, coherent framework which doesn't correspond to something in objective reality. It's just not easy to do that (requires lots of imagination and lots of attention to detail), and it's fairly easy to detect. So either the framework matches something in reality, or the author is a very imaginative and meticulous con artist.
I think the main risk is that the authors trick themselves too, not that it's a fully intentional scam. So it seems like a decent heuristic.
I saw someone mention it in a HN comment before, but I'd like to restate it here since it is definitely one of those perspective-altering books: "Why We Sleep" by Matthew Walker. The author is a professor and prolific researcher of the effects of sleep on the human body, and goes into nearly every nook and cranny of what sleep does for the human body. He has scared me off of my usual practice of sleeping 6 hours or l…
1. Convincing you to accept the import of a problem.
2. Convincing you that the author has the solution to the problem.
3. Outlining the steps to implement this solution.
4. Listing IRL examples to convince you again of the effectiveness of the author's solution.
I read about 25% of Why We Sleep and skimmed the rest, it's all just the first step. I think sleeping is a lot like exercising: Most people agree that they need to do more of it. The problem is that we don't actually do it. So, the most important book on sleeping should be about teaching you how to sleep better and longer, which tend to include:
1. Make sure your bedroom is only for sleeping (and related), not "watching TV room" or "internet browsing before sleeping room".
2. Make your bedroom as dark as possible. Not even one single LED light.
3. If you actually wonder whether you need a short afternoon nap, yes you do.
4. Track your sleep with a device. Remember, the point is to sleep better, not just longer. You can sleep for 8 hours but the tracking will show that you may turn a lot while sleeping resulting in very short REM sleeps.
5. Collect and analyze the tracking data. Everyone is different. Thanks to tracking, I know that I always sleep better if I do some light walking or running prior in the evening.
Happy to see some great books recommended there. Specifically, let me call out: The Three Body problem. The Lathe of Heaven. And while I haven't read Parable of the Sower yet, everything I've read of Octavia Butler has ranged from really good to some of my favorite books ever, so I'm sure it's a good one. One anti-recommendation (kind of): I recently read Finite and Infinite Games, after many (many) recommendations f…
Happy to see some great books recommended there. Specifically, let me call out: The Three Body problem. The Lathe of Heaven. And while I haven't read Parable of the Sower yet, everything I've read of Octavia Butler has ranged from really good to some of my favorite books ever, so I'm sure it's a good one. One anti-recommendation (kind of): I recently read Finite and Infinite Games, after many (many) recommendations f…
Happy to see some great books recommended there. Specifically, let me call out: The Three Body problem. The Lathe of Heaven. And while I haven't read Parable of the Sower yet, everything I've read of Octavia Butler has ranged from really good to some of my favorite books ever, so I'm sure it's a good one. One anti-recommendation (kind of): I recently read Finite and Infinite Games, after many (many) recommendations f…
I'm going to go against the grain here regarding The Three Body Problem, not because it's a bad book, but because it fails to live up to its billing in a subtle but disappointing way. The book is often touted as a "hard sci fi" masterpiece, and to me (and wikipedia and most definitions I've seen), "hard" means remaining faithful to the boundaries of plausible physics. T3BP almost entirely respects these limits, even…