Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s Eight Books Everyone Should Read
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Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s Eight Books Everyone Should Read
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Re: Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s Eight Books Everyone Should Read
#2[deleted]
Re: Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s Eight Books Everyone Should Read
#3It's good to see the bible on that list. I should get around to reading it.
Re: Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s Eight Books Everyone Should Read
#4I'll go ahead and claim that most of these books are pretty dry these days. Historically significant, yes, and everyone should definitely know of them and what they're about. But reading them probably won't make much of a difference to your life. The same information can be found in other places these days, in forms that are more comfortable for the brain to digest.
Re: Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s Eight Books Everyone Should Read
#5I'll go ahead and claim that most of these books are pretty dry these days. Historically significant, yes, and everyone should definitely know of them and what they're about. But reading them probably won't make much of a difference to your life. The same information can be found in other places these days, in forms that are more comfortable for the brain to digest.
Reading large works like these may stimulate your thinking much more than getting the same information in a shorter format.
Re: Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s Eight Books Everyone Should Read
#6What a ponderous, pretentious load. This strikes me very much as a list of "Books I want everyone to know that I think everyone should read" which is very different from the stated title. Is Origin Of Species really a better choice than almost anything on the topic by Dawkins or Gould for the general purpose of "[learning] of our kinship with all other life on Earth"?
Re: Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s Eight Books Everyone Should Read
#7"The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith (eBook) – “to learn that capitalism is an economy of greed, a force of nature unto itself.”" : Someone must have had problems understanding Capitalism, it seems.
Re: Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s Eight Books Everyone Should Read
#8I'll go ahead and claim that most of these books are pretty dry these days. Historically significant, yes, and everyone should definitely know of them and what they're about. But reading them probably won't make much of a difference to your life. The same information can be found in other places these days, in forms that are more comfortable for the brain to digest.
For some of them, I think it's better to first read works from knowledgeable dissidents. Then when reading those books, it's easier to spot the ideologies contained in them which you otherwise might have missed. (Since we have been trained since childhood to accept these ideologies without even noticing them.)
Take Wealth Of Nations' insidious creation myth of markets, downplaying government policy in favor of barter myths. To someone like Neal Degrasse Tyson, raised in that mythology, it seems plausible that such a human social arrangement is in fact a force of nature. But if you read Graeber's Debt: the First 5000 Years, or maybe even Chomsky's Understanding Power, the myths get deflated. (http://www.zcommunications.org/debt-slavery-and-our-idea-of-...)
(Though I suppose with capitalism's negative externalities which threaten to turn the Earth into another Venus, maybe there is no significant distinction between it and a force of nature...)
Re: Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s Eight Books Everyone Should Read
#9What is really awesome is that all those books are offered for free! Anyone has a better format to read "Newton's Principia : the mathematical principles of natural philosophy" ?
Re: Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s Eight Books Everyone Should Read
#10I'll go ahead and claim that most of these books are pretty dry these days. Historically significant, yes, and everyone should definitely know of them and what they're about. But reading them probably won't make much of a difference to your life. The same information can be found in other places these days, in forms that are more comfortable for the brain to digest.
Reading large works like these may stimulate your thinking much more than getting the same information in a shorter format.
I think msvan may have been referring to books too. For instance: Origin of the Species spends a great deal of time presenting evidence for why evolution should be believed. At the time this was of course necessary to convince all of the skeptics. Now, it can be sort of dry. Dry as in "not stimulating". It's much more interesting to follow a book that deals with things that are controversial today. Reading Dawkins for instance is likely to push some buttons even in those who accept evolution. It's also arguable that this sort of thing isn't science, it's just philosophy (the idea of the Meme, for instance) and if it is philosophy, how can we separate the philosophical import of evolution from the science of evolution.
Yes, saying this is likely to rile up some Dawkins defenders, but then I've proven my point, the issues it discusses are not dry the way that pages and pages of evidence presented for an argument you already accept the conclusion of is.
But I shouldn't really speak, I barely read these days.