Goat Walking by Jim Corbett. Interesting musings on wild places, man's place in them and finally his memories of the beginnings of the sanctuary movement in the 80s. Very relevant to today.
Ask HN: What are the best unknown books you have read?
231–240 of 399 posts
Re: Ask HN: What are the best unknown books you have read?
#232Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s a good recipe for making a lot of estimation errors. Worse, it will leave you feeling more confident than you should be. Then, when you least expect it, it’ll blow up in your face.
It also sounds a bit like real life parody to me. How to find out employee morale? Well, you need to hire some statistical experts, who model everything and than give you an estimate and if they got the callibration right, the result might be even close to reality. Definitely easier than the other solution. Like talk to your employees once in a while and have a culture where they are not afraid to speak up if somethi…
True somewhat. That is what bothered me with this book. While the importance of Statistical Models is undeniable, i am not sure whether they are applicable everywhere. Nature has endowed us with certain heuristic decision making models (see the works of Gary Klein on RPDM) and many a time one can decide based on "gut feelings" (see the works of Gerd Gigerenzer).
Re: Ask HN: What are the best unknown books you have read?
#233The hidden persuaders by Vance Packard I read this book as a kid, it changed how I view the world and I've never forgotten it's lessons. It shows how the ad world is working hard to persuade you. It convinced me to always question what are represented as facts by ads or the media. A healthy skepticism has served me very well. Most people never deeply question and Packard is correct that there's an entire industry try…
Fascinating.
I wonder about suits... weddings, funerals, in court... or employees in thankless jobs (car sales and fry's electronics)
Re: Ask HN: What are the best unknown books you have read?
#234'The Extended Organism' by J Scott Turner I've posted this repeatedly to these lists, but no one else is as enthused by it. From the GoodReads page: "Can the structures that animals build--from the humble burrows of earthworms to towering termite mounds to the Great Barrier Reef--be said to live? However counterintuitive the idea might first seem, physiological ecologist Scott Turner demonstrates in this book that ma…
I can see how this idea may seem novel to people who never thought about it on their own or seen it in many other places, but the isomorphism between carbon based life and its higher level ecosystem is not new. It also blurs the line between life and systems that aren't alive... but you have to realize that "life" is just a loaded word that mostly describes carbon based nano-machines. The vagueness of the word "life" produces an illusion of the concept being "interesting" when it is actually we ourselves who made up the word. I can make up any arbitrary word and give it a vague definition but that only makes the word itself interesting not the concepts it describes. Yes there is a blurriness and conceptual interest between "life" and the "ecosystems" that surrounds it, but this is only a property of the word "life" not of the systems themselves which is basically just little nano machines increasingly interacting with each other to form larger macro structures.
The highest level stuff I've seen about this topic is the Gaia hypothesis. The creators of this theory managed to make it align with actual scientific theories but I think the very creation of this theory was caused by the same psychological trip up I described above. Yes life and ecosystem share an interesting isomorphism but again I repeat that the interesting part is really just a "linguistic" phenomenon.
Re: Ask HN: What are the best unknown books you have read?
#235Gog by Giovanni Papini. I read it in Spanish, and apparently it's not the easiest book to find in English, but if you do, it's definitely different. https://neglectedbooks.com/?p=2493
That site alone deserves its own mention in this context?
At least for me it was worthy of bookmarking.
Re: Ask HN: What are the best unknown books you have read?
#236Travels in Tartary, Thibet, and China, by Evariste Regis Huc He's an early 1800s French Catholic monk and is possibly the greatest travel writer of all time. Not only is the trip amazing, but the way he writes about it? Incredible. In the sequel, the Chinese empire summons him to stand trial for being a Christian, since it was mostly illegal to be so in the empire at the time. It, too, is amazing. https://www.gutenbe…
You will love this book: The Story of the Mongols Whom We Call the Tartars by Friar Giovanni Carpini.
The cover itself is worth the price of the book - https://www.amazon.com/Story-Mongols-Whom-Call-Tartars/dp/08...
Re: Ask HN: What are the best unknown books you have read?
#237It's made the rounds but The Courage to Be Disliked has been my go-to recommendation for the last year.
It fundamentally changed the way I look at the world and helped me to get unstuck from some serious mental and emotional shortcomings.
Re: Ask HN: What are the best unknown books you have read?
#238Systems of Survival by Jane Jacobs.
She comes up with an elegant social theory behind the nature of corruption.
We know on a certain level why people can be seduced by corruption, but she introduces a higher level concept that describes why entire civilizations can be corrupt.
The book is really short as her theory is quite elegantly explained in a short dialogue between intellectuals.
Re: Ask HN: What are the best unknown books you have read?
#239"The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life" — Erving Goffman (1959). Timeless. https://www.amazon.com/Presentation-Self-Everyday-Life/dp/03...
Re: Ask HN: What are the best unknown books you have read?
#240"Mating" by Norman Rush. Fiction. I think the Amazon review has it right: "Had Jane Austen been in the Peace Corps in Africa in the 1980s, Mating is the book she might have written."
Superb: beautifully written and unputdownable.