Ask HN: 2018 Summer Reading List?

[1] We Are Legion We Are Bob (Bobiverse 1-3) - Just finished this trilogy and really enjoyed it! It's well paced, has a very likable protagonist and has a nice sprinkling of programming/CS humor.

[2] Guns, Germs and Steel - Can't believe I waited so long to check this off my list. Very thorough and well written argument about how geography and environment shaped the modern world.

[3] Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion - Scientific and philosophical reasoning for why the self is an illusion. Covers a lot of ground without getting too heavy: Buddhism, mediation, neuroscience, religion, and more.

If you have the budget, book a flight to Cairo, Morocco and Tunis. They are dirt cheap, relatively safe and you can get by with little English. You'll see that despite they are 3 North Africa Arabic countries, they are wildly different.

If you like the beaches, they offer lots of options (for Egypt go to Sharm ElSheikh. I have yet to do a better scuba diving).

Also I don't read books about countries. I visit them. People and especially authors are biased and also perceptions are very relative. A shitty country for someone is a home for another one.

"I took a speed-reading course and read War and Peace in twenty minutes. It involves Russia." -- Woody Allen

I mean, yes, Yudkowsky is pretty verbose, but that's not what I'd call a super-accurate summary and there's definitely more in that chapter than your one-sentence summary.

(It's about understanding as well as knowledge, and in so far as it's about knowledge it's not only about terminology or only about science. There's some evo-psych-y speculation on why it's so easy to forget that inferential distances are there, which may or may not be correct but (1) is interesting in its own right and (2) helps to fit the notion of "inferential distance" into the reader's overall model of the world, rather than just giving specific instructions like "explain basic terminology". There's the concrete and I think useful suggestion that when you encounter a failure of communication you probably need to back off further than you are initially inclined to. There's a concrete example (appeals to "simplicity") of the sort of thing that once you've been immersed in, say, scientific thinking for a while becomes second nature to you and that you may not think to explain -- and, please note, it's not primarily a matter of terminology. There's an important warning of a failure mode you may encounter when trying to take inferential distances into account -- which seems like it should be obvious, but I've seen people fall into it often enough.)

[Note: Those things are on the Less Wrong page from which the chapter is derived. I haven't read the ebook, and it's possible that some stuff was trimmed out.]

There's also a bit of irony in complaining "this could have been explained much more briefly" about a chapter whose whole point is to warn about how communication can fail unexpectedly when you don't take the time to explain things slowly and apparently redundantly.

Check out the Unfolding of Language if you're interest in the Language Instinct. Also Elephant in the Room made me think of the Master and his Emissary, very interesting book, check that one out too.

Favourite book I've read this month so far is Flight to Arras, by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.

Its a beautifully written book about life, war, death, refugees, politics, adventure, community religion & humanism (set during WW2 when France was in a seemingly dire position). Saint-Ex is better known for The Little Prince and Wind, Sand and Stars, but I think this is my favourite I've read of him.

Teaser: “For love is greater than any wind of words. And man, leaning at his window under the stars, is once again responsible for the bread of the day to come, for the slumber of the wife who lies by his side, all fragile and delicate and contingent. Love is not thinking, but being. As I sat facing Alias I longed for night, when my thoughts would be of civilization, of the destiny of man, of the savor of friendship in my native land. For night, so that I might yearn to serve some overwhelming purpose which at this moment I cannot define. For night, so that I might perhaps advance a step towards fixing my unmanageable language. I longed for the night as the poet might do, the true poet who feels himself inhabited by a thing obscure but powerful, and who strives to erect images like ramparts round that thing in order to capture it. To capture it in a snare of images.”