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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?

#511

Post by mindcrime »

bobosha wrote: post #16
lgas wrote: post #12

I would recommend Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter if you haven't already read it.

TBH I have attempted to read it many times but escapes my feeble mind. GEB is one of those books ...

What helped me get through it was consciously reminding myself "It's OK if I don't grok every single thing in this book this time through. I can always read it again. And again, etc." In other words, I didn't try to read it like a traditional textbook (which it really isn't) where everything is strictly factual, and laid out in a nice, linear, straightforward order. I found that I just had to accept that GEB is non-linear, byzantine, self-referential, and frankly confusing at times. Instead of being blocked when I felt confused, I just kept reading.

Did I get everything out of it that Hofstadter intended to put in? Almost certainly not, but I still got quite a bit of out it, IMO. And I can always go back and re-read it.

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

#512

Post by sdfin »

bluejay2 wrote: post #237

"Basic Economics: A Citizen's Guide to the Economy" by Thomas Sowell. I read this as a teenager with only limited exposure to economics and it cleared up many misconceptions I held. "Psycho-cybernetics" by Maxwell Maltz. A plastic surgeon shares his techniques for achieving your goals in life. 95% if not more of self-help books today borrow (consciously or not) ideas discussed in this book, and often discuss them wit…

"Basic Economics" was also very effective for clearing misconceptions I held.

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

#513

Post by wunderlust »

I don't think any book has had an immediately noticeable effect, but looking back to books I read years ago I can to some degree tell which ones are still resonating.

The Demon Haunted World (Carl Sagan) — although I was already a skeptical thinker, this book opened me up to how critical thinking can enhance your spiritual side as well as your intellectual side.

Godel, Escher, Bach (Douglas Hofstadter) — this book added color to a lot my intuitions about the deeper connections of patterns we see throughout reality.

Truth & Power (Michel Foucault) — I'm not a fan of most so-called continental philosophy, but Foucault's ideas about cultural structures has always stuck with me.

The Allegory of the Cave (Plato; section in The Republic) — classic; some might say the basic idea underpinning all philosophical and scientific inquiry.

Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (Ludwig Wittgenstein) — I'll admit I never quite understood this book from reading it, but it definitely changed how I thought about philosophy, consciousness and spirituality.

Charles Sanders Peirce essays — it's been a long time, so I don't remember the specific texts, but he did fascinating work in semiotics. One essay in particular was critical in how I think about communication and consciousness.

Fact, Fiction, Forecast (Nelson Goodman) — Goodman is brilliant and is great at relaying philosophical problems as puzzles. He's a great writer and turns the problem of induction on its head in this one.

Foucault's Pendulum (Umberto Eco) — I don't read a lot of fiction, but this book is amazing. There's a lot of history, so you may need to keep an encyclopedia nearby, but this one will really get you thinking about how the autonomy of memes. Probably quite relevant at the moment.

Any number of books and essays by great analytic philosophers: Saul Kripke, W.V.O. Quine, Bertrand Russell, Karl Popper, Carl Hempel, John Campbell, David Chalmers, Thomas Nagel, Hilary Putnam, Jerry Fodor, Dan Dennett, David Lewis, etc.

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

#514

Post by gen220 »

gen220 wrote: post #317
binaryorganic wrote: post #299

Super serious question. Of the 278 comments that have been posted to this thread in the last 8 hours, has anyone suggested a single female author? I looked for a while and saw exactly zero. Isn’t that kind of notable?

I don't have an answer, other than the observation that women, as a class, were generally excluded from authorship in most cultures, with rare exceptions, until relatively recently. However, there are some "popular" examples. Jane Austen, Sylvia Plath, Kate Chopin (literature), Rachel Carson, Ayn Rand, Annie Dillard, Joan Didion (nonfiction). They aren't as fashionable today as they were in earlier generations, but t…

Another unsolicited recommendation in a similar vein: Edith Sheffer's "Burned Bridge" (https://www.amazon.com/Burned-Bridge-East-Germans-Curtain/dp...).

It's similar in that it offers a somewhat unconventional lens to history, this time applied to the Cold War. As Americans, we often think of the East-West German divide in terms of Soviet and American interests, politicians, and international intrigue.

Yet, for "normal" Germans living in otherwise "normal" towns, the arbitrary partitioning of their country along hastily-drawn lines was an event that had to be integrated into their daily lives. We often think of history in top-down ways (i.e. FDR and Stalin decided that X would happen, and so it did). This book really subverts that narrative, and instead presents a brilliantly-researched and significantly chaotic reality. You come away thinking that the iron curtain was not an inevitable thing, but rather the result of frequent misunderstandings and breakdowns in effective communication, and the inability of distanced leaders to assume good intent.

For me, it changed my default perspective on how borders and bureaucratic systems work, and what role law and top-down decision making (good, bad, influential and negligible) has in everyday life, especially in moments of big change.

It's tangentially relevant to the coronavirus, where big bureaucracies are trying to flex into everyday life. It gives you some intuition of where we should expect these efforts to succeed, and where we can expect it to fail.

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

#515

Post by jhedwards »

Bandrsnatch wrote: post #394

Most likely no one is going to like this post. My father was a physicist and he had a large library of books. Growing up all of these books were over my head but I tried reading all of them. The more difficult the book the more determined I became to read and understand the content. I found this to be mind expanding. I began a life long quest to read the most difficult books and texts I could find. It sometimes takes…

I had a similar experience! My grandfather was a Phd in bio from Harvard so I had his library to peruse. My favorite difficult book was Biology and Knowledge by Jean Piaget.

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

#516

Post by toyg »

jesuschroist wrote: post #307
mjberg01 wrote: post #127

"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…

Once I moved to a new city and business wouldn't start until a few days later. Some time to spare, I walked into the first bookstore I saw on the street. There in the corner this book caught my attention, well, because I like motorcycles and thought the cover looks appealing. Still the best random buy I ever did.

There is so much joy in picking up an unknown book from an unknown author in an actual bookshop, then reading it and discovering that it’s So Good, that Amazon just cannot match.

One of the things I really miss of my Italian youth is having tons of quality bookshops at every corner. England outside London is sorely lacking in that respect.

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

#517

Post by andrewflnr »

gitrog wrote: post #438
crimsonalucard wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>is that women for most of human history weren't allowed to write. Isn't this sexism? Read my argument again. I literally said that the reason why there are more men then women authors on mind bending concepts is because of Sexism. We are in total agreement. I know of Ursula K. Le guin. If you read her biography you'll read about all the hardships she had to go through to get her work published. As a woman her books…

Okay, let me just say then that your tone is very, very confusing. What with the "Obviously, everyone here is a sexist. Wake up people!" It sounds like you were being sarcastic? Were you being sincere?

Pure trolling. Disregard.

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

#518

Post by bcassedy »

ianai wrote: post #482

“Desert Solitaire” by Ed Abbey and “Ishmael” by Daniel Quinn. Both are wildly different but explore the question of how different the other forms of life on this planet are from ours. “Are we smart enough to know how smart animals are?” By Franz de Waal et al explores this from a scientific perspective. Abbeys about more, of course. He had that rare ability to turn his book into something that felt like a direct conv…

If you liked Ishmael, I recommend reading The Story of B. Its subject is very similar to Ishmael but I feel that it does a better job of portraying how the us vs them is woven into the very fabric of civilization. It's also a very entertaining read.

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

#519

Post by mgbmtl »

pjc50 wrote: post #286
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 stu…

Don't bother with the books past the first and maybe the second. Dune itself should be treated as a standalone masterpiece of worldbuilding.

I agree that books 3-4 are pretty slow and uninteresting, but one of the major aspects of Dune is the rise and fall of tyrants, and our obsession for saviours, which only really shines in the Heretics/Chapterhouse books, where the empire really falls.

It's difficult not to see modern politics in that light afterwards, with its cult around personalities rather than ideas.

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

#520

Post by carapace »

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…

Taleb is a good talker but not as smart as he thinks he is. (About halfway through "Black Swan" he starts taking potshots at scientists about the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.)

Anyhow, a "Black swan event" is NOT an "event with small probability but massive impact", that's a common misconception.

A BSE is an event that, before it occurs no one credits it ("There are no black swans." because no one (in Europe) had ever seen one until they went to Australia (IIRC)), and after it occurs everyone post-rationalizes it.

There are lost of events "with small probability but massive impact": people win the lottery every day.

It's the ones we ignore, both before and after, that count as Black Swan Events.

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