151–160 of 211 posts
This book originally was for therapists, but later it got very popular and simplified for the common reader. I think it helps better than anything if you want to grow your soft skills. Because it does not have some generic advice on common life scenarios. It dives deep into the root cause of many issues any conscious living being will have. I find the mirror it holds to your face very healing for a lot of issues.
It's probably different for fiction, but I've just recently started to get into that.
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Of the Ender series books, I've read the whole quintet - Ender's Game, Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, Children of the Mind, Ender in Exile. I've enjoyed all five of them, although the quality drops which each of the instance. Speaker for the Dead is worth the time for sure, the other three I'm not entirely convinced. Speaker won a Hugo award in 1987. Of Card's novels, the Shadow Saga, is a pretty good read thou. I'v…
For me Ender's game was completely ruined when I learned about the controversy around the author, because to me, homophobia goes completely against the message of the books. So it no longer works for me.
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The Bible, directly and indirectly, is one of the major contributor to Western Civilization. While most of them has been secularized, large amount of ideas that we take for granted or consider common in the Western Civilization, such as equality of all man and inherent dignity of human, could be traced back to The Bible. A good understanding of The Bible would give you an understanding on the process of how Western C…
I don't think that this is really correct. For around 1500 years, most philosophical, political and religious thought in Europe had to be justified by referring back to the Bible. Therefore the arguments that equality, liberalism, democracy, and so on have their roots in the Bible are well rehearsed but they are not falsifiable nor, for the most part, true. The political philosophy underpinning the stories in Genesis…
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Can you draw some broader pictures here for the relatively uninformed how you would get a broadly humanistic view from, e.g., The Republic? If that's too broad an ask, could you draw a line from Plato (and others) to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights?
I don't really read books, but I've really enjoyed reading a lot of Sherlock Holmes lately. The stories themselves aren't that interesting but the way Holmes collects, processes and works with data assisted by his methodical and almost pedantic approach to draw relevant conclusions from said data using his extensive knowledge of previous cases is extremely engaging. Now that the 21st century is entirely data driven,…
The stories have actually much to teach one. It was the first place where the power of reasoning starting from a set of data-points was laid out in such a intelligent way. It taught you the importance of thinking in a logical manner. Arthur Conan Doyle was inspired by his professor Joseph Bell from Edinburgh Medical University who used to deduce people's occupations just from observing key physical characteristics. The main idea is to identify the key data-points from the mass of irrelevant data and then draw inferences using logical chain reasoning. If people actually practiced this mode of thinking then the World would be a far better place i.e. understand inferential statistical thinking, less scams etc.
As a followup you should also read Edgar Allan Poe's four short stories; three of them featuring Auguste Dupin (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C._Auguste_Dupin) and another named "The Gold Bug". They were an inspiration to Arthur Conan Doyle's creation of Sherlock Holmes and he mentions this in "A Study in Scarlet".
The Overstory by Richard Powers: this book changed the way I look at trees. I'll be driving some days and out of nowhere notice a tree and appreciate it. This book inspired me to consider that there is an objective meaning to life. The Incerto Series by Nassim Nicholas Taleb: where to start...I started reading this series over a decade ago and I still think about it weekly. It can be very dense to get through as I to…
> Thought experiment: if you could take your dream vacation at no expense but would have no memories or photos/videos of the trip would you do it? No. The photos and videos are not interesting, but .. no memories? Further, I am unlikely to take it if I also have to be alone. Experiences are, for me, to be shared because shared experiences are the coin that connect us to others.
- Practical Vim - Seven Languages in Seven Weeks Career changing for me.
How did they change you career? Was the change in terms of how you think or quality of code you wrote?
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You're not meant to read it like a regular book, front to back, like it's a romance or text book. Is something you're meant to read through out your life, not in one sitting. >then what what what?
> Is something you're meant to read through out your life, not in one sitting. Meant by whom? The original authors of the Torah? The various prophets and Kings? The original authors of the New Testament? The Jewish scholars who compiled the Tanakh? The Christian scholars who combined the Septuagint and the New Testament into a single work? Pope Innocent I who ratified the choice of Gospels?
It's not a question of who decided that, but because it's a complex book. And that is also true to pretty much every other religious book in the world, where believers reach to their respective holy texts on a regular basis to study them and have a deeper understanding of their faith.
I'll go against the question since I believe this is about elevating one's thinking and not merely about books. Just like learning the math theorem is practically worthless without doing the exercises (at least to me), I'll advise to just do something in the domain you want to be elevated in. Of course this doesn't apply to things you can't hope to do: for example History's lessons; Invading another country all alone…