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Ask HN: Mind bending books to read and never be the same as before?

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Re: Ask HN: Mind bending books to read and never be the same as before?

#271

Post by kossTKR »

syndacks wrote: post #177
gherkinnn wrote: post #143

Anything 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.

I "saved up" for The Glass Bead Game - reading about 7 Hesse books before going for his magnum opus. I was severely let down by it. It's all over the place, sloppy. I thought perhaps it was because of the loss in German-->English, but a few German friends (including a few on HN) have suggested the original isn't much better. IMO Narcissus and Goldmund and Steppenwolf are his best.

I agree. I loved Steppenwolf, and it had several absolutely sublime passages - very much like in the rest of his bibliography - but The Glass Bead Game was completely devoid of any of the magic or imaginal that Hesse can conjure up, no timeless cultural analysis mirroring our times and no razor sharp Kierkegaardian character portrayal.

Instead it seemed like a was harrowingly long weird sci fi fanfic over some vaguely defined but stupidly complex future society imagined in the lamest and most naive almost pubescent mind. Simple in the sense that everyone from the politician to the ascetic guru seemed like complete one dimensional stereotypes.

Also you don't stop reading because of esoteric complexity you might "get" later when you know more of the western cosmology like in fellow complex works like Ulysses (funfact both books are among the top 10 most abandoned), - you stop because it's boring imagined political history. There really doesn't seem to be a whole lot under the surface, and the schisms between "academic life" or a "life of devotion" versus "a mercantile city life", or "life of politics" was incredibly naive with no mythological, historical or even poetic context mirroring our world.

I guess i must have missed something?

Re: Ask HN: Mind bending books to read and never be the same as before?

#272

Post by Cthulhu_ »

jgwil2 wrote: post #162

For science fiction, Dune is a must, and Children of Time is probably the most mind-bending sci-fi I've read since. Both create imaginary worlds that are so detailed and plausible that they make you see our world in a new light.

But take Dune with a grain of salt; I read them, but the books after the first get a bit, I dunno, wishy-washy? Vague? Philosophical? I wanted to like it because the universe it describes is compelling, but the stories themselves lose a lot of luster.

Interesting to see what they'll do in the upcoming movie / series, whichever it was though. It's great in terms of worldbuilding, and it's influenced a lot of other stuff (like Warhammer 50K).

Re: Ask HN: Mind bending books to read and never be the same as before?

#274

Post by Cthulhu_ »

jlengrand wrote: post #61

Ok, without wanting to sound like a crazy guy, this book has really had a large impact on me : https://www.amazon.fr/Finding-Your-Own-North-Star-ebook/dp/B... It's basically a method that helps you find what exactly get you on, what you get energy from, and how to reach it. Of course it requires a lot of introspection but the book helps you there. It sounds cheesy I know, but that book had enough impact that it reall…

A bit of err, self-actualization? Goes a long way. I've been in a similar point, eventually I was offered to go to a career coach. It's basically someone that challenges you about what you want to do, what you want to achieve. And in my case, identify that I'm a people-pleaser, I'd rather defer to others to tell me what to do rather than take my own initiative, because comfort zone, risk, etc.

Re: Ask HN: Mind bending books to read and never be the same as before?

#275

Post by geuis »

Loughla wrote: post #147
enitihas wrote: post #88

Highly recommended for everyone: "Thinking, Fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahenman. If you have difficulty interacting with people 1. How to win friends and influence people (Easy read) 2. Seven habits of highly effective people (Harder read) To learn how to write well: On writing well To understand how large products are made: Show Stopper!: The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT

Two things - 1. Seven habits - I can't get past Covey's personal 'experiences'. They are just seemingly so contrived and fake that they just ruin the entire thought process for me. It seems like he had to make up things that related to the covenants. Is that just me? 2. For writing - I would also suggest 'On Writing' by Stephen King for this as a different take. It's probably the best 'how to write' book ever made. I…

My issue with King is that to me at least, he’s a terrible writer. Prolific doesn’t mean quality. I’m suspect what someone can get out of a book about writing from someone who writes poorly.

Re: Ask HN: Mind bending books to read and never be the same as before?

#276

Post by nourishingvoid »

henron wrote: post #243

No book has made me question the reality of my surroundings like Ubik by Philip K Dick.

I agree wholeheartedly. This is a great book that is truly terrifying because Dick is constantly subverting the characters’ (and reader’s) perceptions of reality. He does this to an even greater degree in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch.

Re: Ask HN: Mind bending books to read and never be the same as before?

#277

Post by Cthulhu_ »

"Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking"; it helped me and my girlfriend understand ourselves more and make me feel less out of place in the world, accepted, less anxious and insecure if you will. It tells you that you shouldn't be ashamed of stepping out of a party earlier for example, or find quiet spaces at events, etc.

It's one of those books that's full of anecdotes and padding out though, so if you want a summary the author's also made blog posts and a TED talk that summarize the subject well enough.

Re: Ask HN: Mind bending books to read and never be the same as before?

#278

Post by Pandabob »

choxi wrote: post #179
Pandabob wrote: post #14

The first time I read Talebs Black Swan was pretty mind bending. It's a intriguing mix of philosophy, history and the application of probabilistic thinking. It's also a great aggregator book. It introduced me to the works of Kahneman, Tetlock, Poincare and Mandelbrot.

I don't understand the excitement about Black Swan but I genuinely would like to. If a "Black swan event" is an "event with small probability but massive impact", why would it be surprising that they exist or that they have disproportionate impact? I'd argue that defining "impact" is also problematic because we conflate things that are surprising with things that are impactful all the time. We don't count all the tra…

IDK if you've read the book or not, but in case you haven't I'd recommend this summary of Mediocristan and Extremistan [0].

Mediocristan and Extremistan are Talebs analogies for domains with different underlying mechanics (for lack of a better word).

I'm going cut some corners here, but to keep it short, the phenomena in Mediocristan can be modeled by using gaussian probability distributions (weight, height etc.), while the phenomena in Extremistan are better modeled using power law distributions, that have so called fat-tails. (wealth, land ownership)

One of the central arguments of the book is that people have been using tools from Mediocristan in Extremistan and that's what leads to these Black Swan phenomen, which in turn might have potentially ruinous effects.

One example he uses is a now defunct hedge fund called Long Term Capital Management (LTCM) [1]. My (poor) understanding of what led to LCTMs ruin (and required the Federal Reserve to intervene) is that they used some fundamentally Gaussian techniques to model derivatives.

The models predicted certain events to have a lot lower probability to occur than what was actually the case (fat-tails). Underestimating these outliers combined with the fact that the firm was highly leveraged, was ultimately what went wrong and had potentially disastrous effects on the financial markets.

[0]: https://people.wou.edu/~shawd/mediocristan--extremistan.html

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-Term_Capital_Management

Re: Ask HN: Mind bending books to read and never be the same as before?

#280

Post by jgwil2 »

poormystic wrote: post #4

For serious thought: anything by Krishnamurti :) Jorge Luis Borges is the man for fiction.

For anyone looking for an intro to Borges I would recommend "The Garden of Forking Paths." It's a tight, exciting narrative that also explores his great themes.

https://archive.org/stream/TheGardenOfForkingPathsJorgeLuisB...

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