Charles Perrow, "Normal Accidents". Nominally about safety in large-scale complex engineered systems, and it's very good on that topic, and/but in doing so, touches on how scale and social factors interact with engineering details, which affects a lot more than safety.
Ask HN: Mind bending books to read and never be the same as before?
151–160 of 747 posts
Re: Ask HN: Mind bending books to read and never be the same as before?
#152Anything by Hermann Hesse. Not mind bending. No Twists. No roller coasters. Just a calm conversation with the author and yourself. And yet, it had a profound impact on me. One poem I revisit every once in a while: https://www.lieder.net/lieder/get_text.html?TextId=119749 If you understand German, I do believe it needs to be read in its original tongue. The translations I found thus far were not entirely convincing.
Absolutely +1 to this. Although my German is terrible enough that I did have to read the English translations.
I would add, in my opinion, start with Steppenwolf and then read Siddhartha. It blows my absolute mind that these books were written a hundred years ago.
They're still so relevant to life. It's really, genuinely astounding.
Re: Ask HN: Mind bending books to read and never be the same as before?
#153Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha by Daniel Ingram.
Ingram is one of the most advanced meditation practitioners in the west, and this book is a painstaking mapping of the development of attention. I’ve read nothing like it.
Re: Ask HN: Mind bending books to read and never be the same as before?
#154Rationality: From AI to Zombies by Eliezer Yudkowsky
Many people think of themselves as rational and have mastered the basics (understand the scientific method, know how to systematically solve difficult problems, etc) but are still constantly fooled by their human, imperfect brains into irrational thoughts and actions - both in day-to-day life and when pondering larger questions (science, engineering, policy, philosophy). Many aren't aware (just as I wasn't) that there are many more levels of rational thinking to unlock, that mistakes and biases can be identified and reduced. The book is adapted from a series of blog posts so lacks a bit in coherence (can be hard to get into), but stick with it for a bit, and I guarantee the ideas presented will be well-worth it.
Re: Ask HN: Mind bending books to read and never be the same as before?
#155"Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" by Robert Pirsig takes you deep into the philosophy on what is 'quality'. Once you see it you can't unsee it. A powerful excerpt from the book: '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 natura…
How would that work in a programming environment, to not separate one self from the surroundings?
Re: Ask HN: Mind bending books to read and never be the same as before?
#156Some authours and books offer deep introspection of human lives, that you learn and realise things about yourself from reading them:
I got that feeling from reading Montaigne's Essays.
Anatomy of Melancholy by Burton and Samuel Johnson's essays also are effective in a similar vein.
Plutarch's Parallel Live's is the essential book on politics, after reading it, when you read the newspapers you get a feeling that there is nothing new under the Sun, in politics.
Re: Ask HN: Mind bending books to read and never be the same as before?
#157Skip all the pop science bullshit suggested below. That's almost entirely sugar water, and beyond that; most of it is actually actively wrong.
Read anything written by Ancient Greeks; Aristotle, the Iliad, Herodotus, Plato. There's a reason people still read these dead white guys, and there is a reason that peak times of excellence in Western Civilization have been peak Ancient Greeks. It will make your thinking three dimensional, and give you perspective as to the world you live in today as a software engineer.
Re: Ask HN: Mind bending books to read and never be the same as before?
#158Labyrinths of Reason, William Poundstone
The Ghost in the Atom, P.C.W Davies
The View from the Center of The Universe, Abrams and Primack
Godel Escher Bach, Douglas Hofstadter
The Four Agreements, Don Miguel Ruiz
Re: Ask HN: Mind bending books to read and never be the same as before?
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am of the generation that fixated upon GEB as some sort of deep wisdom, and I have a nostalgic fondness for it. I certainly credit it for sparking a lot of my curiosity about Lisp. But in hindsight, its value to me was not in the content of the book, as much as in communicating the kind of delight and curiosity around programming that has kept me interested in the subject since 1972 or so. Other books have done the…
It's interesting that despite Hofstadter having negative interest in computing himself, he inspired so many people in the field.
I was aware of this many years ago. To this day, I don't actually consider myself that interested in computing for its own sake. Or mathematics, for that matter.
To me, the most interesting thing about programming is what it teaches us about our own minds. It's a little like being an archeologist and finding collections of pottery, houses, &c. but no people. You make deductions about how they lived from their tools.
In our case, we have only a limited ability to directly examine the workings of our brains, but a wealth of ways to study the things we do with our brains, including the making of tools for our brains to use.
Programming is one of those tools, and its study is indirectly the study of us.
At the end of the day, it's all just 1s and 0s, but when we argue about whether the Visitor Pattern addresses the Expression problem, and so forth, we're indirectly exploring the (metaphorical) shape of our brains.
I have just said in several paragraphs what Michael Fellows said in one sentence: "Computer science is not about machines, in the same way that astronomy is not about telescopes."
They may have been thinking about mathematics, but I am thinking about people.
Re: Ask HN: Mind bending books to read and never be the same as before?
#160Anything by Hermann Hesse. Not mind bending. No Twists. No roller coasters. Just a calm conversation with the author and yourself. And yet, it had a profound impact on me. One poem I revisit every once in a while: https://www.lieder.net/lieder/get_text.html?TextId=119749 If you understand German, I do believe it needs to be read in its original tongue. The translations I found thus far were not entirely convincing.
Absolutely +1 to this. Although my German is terrible enough that I did have to read the English translations. I would add, in my opinion, start with Steppenwolf and then read Siddhartha. It blows my absolute mind that these books were written a hundred years ago. They're still so relevant to life. It's really, genuinely astounding.
> It blows my absolute mind that these books were written a hundred years ago.
The more you read history, and the actual written words or written speeches of intellectuals and politicians, you'll continue to be amazed. Much of their language is poetic, and their prose seems more coherent than today's, but that's probably because they wrote a lot more letters to one another.