Amusing Ourselves to Death - Neil Postman
Ask HN: What books changed the way you think about almost everything?
161–170 of 1001 posts
Re: Ask HN: What books changed the way you think about almost everything?
#162Animal Farm was a really important book for me. I picked it up aged about 10 or 11 and I remember being really struck by how easily the pigs were able to exploit the other animals' grievances with humans to secure their own power. It felt like a grown-up story with some quite powerful, disturbing meanings under the covers. So I told my English teacher about it and all she told me in response was to go look up the Russian Revolution. I didn't understand why, but did it, and then the book had a second, much bigger impact on me. And of course what a way to learn about allegory!
It was the first time I realized books could be dangerous, subversive, and truly educational as well as simply informative or entertaining.
Re: Ask HN: What books changed the way you think about almost everything?
#163Zen & The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance This helped me understand the duality of the logical/mechanical and the creative/artistic. Then merging the two.
My go-to vote as well. Some of my favorite passages pertain to the awareness of-and management of- one's internal motivation and thought process when attempting to do good work.
"So the thing to do when working on a motorcycle, as in any other task, is to cultivate the peace of mind which does not separate one’s self from one's surroundings. When that is done successfully then everything else follows naturally. Peace of mind produces right values, right values produce right thoughts. Right thoughts produce right actions and right actions produce work which will be a material reflection for others to see of the serenity at the center of it all."
Re: Ask HN: What books changed the way you think about almost everything?
#1641984, and the book-within-a-book in it.
Sapiens, recently. It had a profound effect on how I think about people, history and progress... Particularly, the points about group size and all th cultural clockwork required for and limiting our ability to function as large groups.
Paul Graham's essays, which are kind of a web book.
Practical Ethics, by Peter Singer influenced me a lot (made me study philosophy) but I was a lot less expensive impressed by my decades-later re-read.
Re: Ask HN: What books changed the way you think about almost everything?
#165The Selfish Gene by Dawkins. The gene is the unit of replication, and this affects every process in this universe.
I also recommend Dawkins' follow-up book, "The Extended Phenotype." Dawkins' most popular writing may be on atheism and the critique of religion, but I think his greatest contributions were really found in this book plus The Selfish Gene. Though as a caveat, "The Extended Phenotype" requires some more technical sophistication in evolutionary biology than Selfish Gene.
Re: Ask HN: What books changed the way you think about almost everything?
#166I imagine I’ll take heat for this, but the first answer that comes to mind is A Thousand Plateaus by Deleuze & Guattari. It has been justifiably criticized by many people on many grounds, but as with OP and Freakonomics, certain of the concepts in that book frequently appear in my thoughts 20 years after I worked through some of it. I don’t associate it with truth; but some of the mental models have really stuck with…
What's an example of a concept from A Thousand Plateaus that has stuck with you?
Re: Ask HN: What books changed the way you think about almost everything?
#167Factfulness by Hans Rosling - it tells you about our world with actual numbers.
Re: Ask HN: What books changed the way you think about almost everything?
#168I imagine I’ll take heat for this, but the first answer that comes to mind is A Thousand Plateaus by Deleuze & Guattari. It has been justifiably criticized by many people on many grounds, but as with OP and Freakonomics, certain of the concepts in that book frequently appear in my thoughts 20 years after I worked through some of it. I don’t associate it with truth; but some of the mental models have really stuck with…
I've wanted to read A Thousand Plateaus for a few years. The first time I tried it, all that stuff about wolves and geology just lost me. I will have to try again. Honestly, I found it harder than Heidegger's Being and Time, which I worked through while listening to Hubert Dreyfus's lectures on iTunes U a few years ago.
Whenever I read about Deleuze and Guattari I get this feeling they are on to something - I just don't know what!
Re: Ask HN: What books changed the way you think about almost everything?
#169One book that changed me was reading Master and Margarita in Russian for the first time. It was the first book I started reading I could not put down until the end. Gained a lot of appreciation for literature at that time. The other book that I enjoyed and changed me was ‘The Wisdom of Insecurity’ by Alan Watts. I was a fan of Alan Watts works through his lectures already and it was wonderful to hear his ideas in wri…
>I wish everyone read or watched Alan Watts lectures and books. The world would be a much nicer place if that was the case.
Parties would become a lot more insufferable.
Re: Ask HN: What books changed the way you think about almost everything?
#170For a New Liberty[1], and
Ethics of Liberty[2] by Murray Rothbard
[1] https://mises-media.s3.amazonaws.com/For%20a%20New%20Liberty... [2] https://mises-media.s3.amazonaws.com/The%20Ethics%20of%20Lib...