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Ask HN: What are the best unknown books you have read?

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Re: Ask HN: What are the best unknown books you have read?

#21

Post by Rerarom »

Fiction:

Mordecai Roshwald, Level 7

Alexander Dewdney, The Planiverse

Joseph Heller, God Knows

Alan Lightman, Einstein's Dreams

Non-fiction:

Jane Goodall, In the Shadow of Man

Gian-Carlo Rota, Indiscrete Thoughts

C. S. Lewis, The Discarded Image

Michael E. Brown, How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming

Robert Kegan, In Over Our Heads

Michael Harris, The Atomic Times

I may add guilty pleasures like the Legacy of the Force series, but I don't think this is what people here are looking for.

Re: Ask HN: What are the best unknown books you have read?

#22

Post by AndrewKemendo »

I will always promote Jose Hernandez-Orallo's The Measure of All Minds [1]

It attempts to codify how we should go about measuring and evaluating the somewhat fuzzy concept of "intelligence." He proposes an extension of his "Anytime Intelligence Test" which could be used to test animal and machine intelligence on a level playing field.

Measurement of task capability against a baseline is the most overlooked problem in AI and as far as I am aware Hernandez-Orallo is the only one focusing on it.

Notice that all of the major "breakthrough" moments in AI over the last half century had a human baseline that an AI was competing against. Those baselines were ones that had been already developed over years (sometimes a century) and were part of competitive games already. Go, Chess, DOTA etc... had leaderboards or international rankings.

For fuzzier things like driving, translation, strategy, trading etc... there is no generally accepted and measurable baseline test for what is considered human level, only proxies and unit specific tests. So we continue to not know when an AI system is measurably at or exceeding human level. Without this we can't definitively know how much progress we're making on Human Level Intelligence.

[1]https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/measure-of-all-minds/DC...

Re: Ask HN: What are the best unknown books you have read?

#23

Post by ska »

sah2ed wrote: post #20

Two books first published in the 60s: “The Science of The Artificial” by Herbert Simon, a multi-disciplinary treatise on the goals of design by practitioners in the physical sciences (physics, bio. etc), non-physical sciences (math, comp. sci, etc) and humanities (econs., psych., etc). “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” by Thomas Kuhn, coined the concept of paradigm shift and used it to revisit the history of…

Fwiw, I don't think the Kuhn qualifies as 'unknown'.

Re: Ask HN: What are the best unknown books you have read?

#24

Post by Rerarom »

fao_ wrote: post #2

I Am A Strange Loop by Hofstadter. The book he wrote many years before, GEB, is well-known. However, he was frustrated that so many people didn't get what he was trying to convey, so he took the central point and distilled it into another book. It's a really, really good read.

His other non-GEB books are cool. I especially enjoyed Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies.

Re: Ask HN: What are the best unknown books you have read?

#25

Post by cannam »

mellosouls wrote: post #12
mellosouls wrote: post #8

Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban is not unknown but not hugely popular. Post apocalyptic novel written in a made up language (think Clockwork Orange). Poetic and deeply moving account of a boy's journey through a world where scientific knowledge has devolved to primitive ritual and incantation; and his dawning realisation that we lost everything . I've never read anything else like it. https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/R…

Here's how it starts off, be warned: On my naming day when I come 12 I gone front spear and kilt a wyld boar he parbly ben the las wyld pig on the Bundel Downs any how there hadnt ben none for a long time befor him nor I aint looking to see none agen. He dint make the groun shake nor nothing like that when he come on to my spear he wernt all that big plus he lookit poorly. He done the reqwyrt he ternt and stood and c…

That's an amazing opening. I'd like to read that now. (I have heard of this book before, but only in outline.)

Edit: Oh my word! He wrote the text of the children's book "Bread and Jam for Frances" (and, I now learn, a whole series of others with the same character). That's a lovely bit of writing. I had no idea.

Re: Ask HN: What are the best unknown books you have read?

#27

Post by mellosouls »

cannam wrote: post #25
mellosouls wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's how it starts off, be warned: On my naming day when I come 12 I gone front spear and kilt a wyld boar he parbly ben the las wyld pig on the Bundel Downs any how there hadnt ben none for a long time befor him nor I aint looking to see none agen. He dint make the groun shake nor nothing like that when he come on to my spear he wernt all that big plus he lookit poorly. He done the reqwyrt he ternt and stood and c…

That's an amazing opening. I'd like to read that now. (I have heard of this book before, but only in outline.) Edit: Oh my word! He wrote the text of the children's book "Bread and Jam for Frances" (and, I now learn, a whole series of others with the same character). That's a lovely bit of writing. I had no idea.

Yeah, it's like that all the way through, and some of it is inspired

Re: Ask HN: What are the best unknown books you have read?

#28

Post by number6 »

ska wrote: post #23
sah2ed wrote: post #20

Two books first published in the 60s: “The Science of The Artificial” by Herbert Simon, a multi-disciplinary treatise on the goals of design by practitioners in the physical sciences (physics, bio. etc), non-physical sciences (math, comp. sci, etc) and humanities (econs., psych., etc). “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” by Thomas Kuhn, coined the concept of paradigm shift and used it to revisit the history of…

Fwiw, I don't think the Kuhn qualifies as 'unknown'.

Who is Kuhn?

Re: Ask HN: What are the best unknown books you have read?

#30

Post by idlewords »

"Light and Color in the Outdoors" by Marcel Minnaert. The book goes into the physics of a lot of outdoor phenomena; you will be amazed at the things you never noticed or thought about before reading it.

"The History and Social Influence of the Potato" is a pretty good time.

"Politics of Qat: The Role of a Drug in Ruling Yemen" may sound way too niche, but it's fascinating as a study of transportation in a drug economy. Qat is a perishable leaf (like salad) and the politics of the entire region depend on who can more reliably deliver it to gunmen.

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