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Ask HN: What is the most mind blowing book you've ever read?

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Re: Ask HN: What is the most mind blowing book you've ever read?

#81
Chomsky's oeuvre on politics, in general. There isn't one single book that states a thesis, it's about a perspective. So perhaps start with The Chomsky Reader. An easier-to-digest intro is the documentary Manufacturing Consent. The twist is that a lot of the things you think of as "bugs" in the political and economic systems of the Western democracies are "features" from the perspective of powerful elites. But the meta-lesson is that big questions can be answered. If you get past the mythology in your culture, and read primary sources, you can really figure this stuff out. Chomsky can go off the deep end at times (and his fanclub does so a lot), but his documentation is meticulous. Well worth reading.

For very different perspectives on programming, check out Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programming (read it a decade ago and I use techniques from there every day.)

The Gift by Lewis Hyde. Although directed at artists, it is highly relevant to creative programmers and the phenomenon of open source. He is able to articulate things which are very hard to talk about, like the intersection of economics and artistry, and how the gifting ethos is necessary for any culture to thrive. If you think ESR had the last word on how open source works, you need to read this.

Another book of interest by Hyde is Trickster Makes This World, wherein you learn the hacker archetype - the giver of technology; the player of tricks - has been around since prehistory. It's not a coincidence that those two aspects are always seen together.

Re: Ask HN: What is the most mind blowing book you've ever read?

#82

Mind-blowing for those who've read 'The Selfish Gene' and thought it explained everything about evolution: 'The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist Programme', SJ Gould and RC Lewontin 'The Origins of Genome Architecture', M Lynch 'Mutation-Driven Evolution', M Nei

Regarding 'the selfish gene', I still think that the concept that the gene is the unit of evolution and the resulting organism is just its proxy, is one of the greatest insights since Darwin.

Re: Ask HN: What is the most mind blowing book you've ever read?

#83
post #45

Gödel, Escher, Bach[1] has shaped the way I think in many ways and really warped my perspective on allot of things. There's also the Imperial Radch series which is a very, very good sci fi series which is unlike any other sf I've ever read[0]. [0]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17333324-ancillary-justi... >Winner of the Hugo, Nebula, British Science Fiction, Locus and Arthur C. Clarke Awards. [1]: https://en.wi…

Ann Leckie was being touted as Iain M Bank's successor with her Imperial Radch series. But due to that expectation being set up I was underwhelmed. It was enjoyable on its own but doesn't compare in quality to Banks's works, e.g. Excession, in my opinion.

Re: Ask HN: What is the most mind blowing book you've ever read?

#84

The Selfish Gene - Richard Dawkings. ( http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Selfish_Gene ) The idea that organisms evolved to be survival vehicles for our genes totally inverted and simplified my view of life. It gave me a plausible explanation for how we came to be, and put the final nail in religion's coffin (for me).

Ditto for me, although not with quite the same effects. It ties into so many things in the real world; for us, e.g. "Worse is Better" (https://www.dreamsongs.com/WorseIsBetter.html) because it has survival value.

Re: Ask HN: What is the most mind blowing book you've ever read?

#87

The alchemist - Paulo Coelho I've read it several times and each time I found something interesting that I didn't notice.

It's a nice, romantic take on a narrative called "The Tale of Two Dreamers" which influenced many others writers (such as Borges) and can be traced back to "The Thousand and One Nights":

https://books.google.com/books?id=Y0i8aZ94CJUC&lpg=PA514&ots...

Re: Ask HN: What is the most mind blowing book you've ever read?

#90
post #42

Gödel, Escher, Bach - An Eternal Golden Braid, by Douglas Hofstadter. Both a work of literary and technical genius. Le ton beau de Marot, also by Douglas Hofstadter. Was blown by his description of how making the typographical choice of starting the first word of each chapter with letters decreasing in height to the normal page font size, caused him to rethink a whole chapter (he couldn't use descenders, which limits…

Re: Eliezer Yudkowsky, also "Three Worlds Collide": http://robinhanson.typepad.com/files/three-worlds-collide.pd...
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