On a completely different topic: After watching my first marriage degenerate and my wife asked me to move out, I was fairly well mystified about what was going on. We'd read lots of books about marriage and communication, planned for it to be tough, intended to see it through... so what happened? "The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work" by John Gottman was a book that I read after we'd separated that first sta…
His book presents very reasonable advice but his statistics are made-up. Doesn't mean it's not a valuable book but can be a bit annoying for people who care about being accurate. https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/02/27/book-review-the-seven-...
"Made up" is too strong. "Misapplied in a way that makes some people suspect willfulness rather than error", perhaps.
"Basic Economics" by Thomas Sowell. Helped me gain a more intuitive understanding of economics. On a side note, the man is a machine. He's been writing close to a book a year since the age of 80 (he's 92 now).
I recommend reading everything by Thomas Sowell. A true original thinker.
I had a very poor model of what people meant when they spoke of divinity, god, and religion until reading the Tao Te Ching. Whenever I heard god, I just thought of sky daddy. The key is to understand that religion is a map, not the territory. All religions are essentially different paths to the same destination, mixed with varying levels of human interpretation.
One thing to be aware of is that different translations affect the understanding of this book to a certain degree. I do not have a recommendation for English translations, as I read it in a different language, but it is good to compare a few translations in a bookstore before buying.
There are some translations that are more worried about changing the meanings, which makes it harder to read, and others that focus on comprehensibility but arguably could be more distant to the original.
I had been using CFEngine 2 for configuration management of UNIX/Linux systems for a few years already when CFEngine 3 came out. I'd read the documentation carefully but struggled with the concepts. When I went to a CFEngine class taught by Mark Burgess (author of CFEngine) at USENIX LISA conference, I kept asking questions about anything I didn't understand in the tutorial and about halfway through the class, something just clicked for me and all the ideas that had been swirling around in a confused mess in my head just straightened out and aligned and formed this elegant conceptual tower, everything just fell into place. It was a remarkable experience, mentally. A real aha! moment.
I had a very poor model of what people meant when they spoke of divinity, god, and religion until reading the Tao Te Ching. Whenever I heard god, I just thought of sky daddy. The key is to understand that religion is a map, not the territory. All religions are essentially different paths to the same destination, mixed with varying levels of human interpretation.
DDJ was honestly very very confusing book to me. And the different translations vary SO wildly that I don’t really know what to take from it.
Actually there were different veraions of DDJ throughout history. The oldest one was discovered not too long ago and is very different from the popular one.
Being somewhat skeptic myself in my younger years and coming closer to God through my relationship with my girlfriend (who isn't even a believer herself)... I just recently came up with a hypothesis why so many Math and CS people were famously Atheist. I grew closer to God through just observing the natural world, and my natural relationship (affection, friendship, etc.). My hypothesis is that so many of these (incre…
Which God ? As someone who grew up with the choice of believe or not believe, one of the reason that I stayed atheist was because there was no religion that looks more right than any of the other dozen ones (and thousands when we count branches)
I choose atheism when 16 and rediscovered religion at 35. How? whats the difference between a religion and believing in atheism, psychology, social science? in this sense i overcame atheism and started looking at the interesting concepts of religions, introduced geografically and sequentially in time. naturally i decided to dig deeper in my cultures religion at hand instead of idealising the grass is greener far away. my conclusion is that sciences and religions is just a approach to understand and model the world. it would be stupid to ignore the knowledge embeeded in both and there are wrong conclusions embedded that are not easy to identify in both. maybe it seems easier to identify them with! science but still social "science" nowadays seems to me not much more like a new cult trying new approaches challenging thousand year old cults and knowledge embedded in their religion. Like a kid who challenges the parents. In the end it's a natural selection process that will decide what knowledge / models survive through time. Isn't it a beautiful creation process. No need to condemn either approach. The Bible teaches, you shouldnt use gods name in vain. Exodus 20:7. Isnt it true for science, too?
As a companion to this, I grew up somewhat militantly Atheist (and consumed Dawkins like skittles), and had a very hard time accepting faith in a reasonably way until I read Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief by Jordan Peterson. I know he's unfortunately become quite the provocateur, but that first book is worth a read, and crystallized to me what it could mean to have a world view with a supernatural force.
I was in the same position until I came across his series "The psychological significance of Biblical stories". It made me realize that viewing the world through a narrative structure was far more interesting than the materialist portrayal of the New atheists.
the point is that both perspectives are important and helpfull. you shouldnt ignore either side. however destructive behavior can evolve from both.