My father Marconi.
Ask HN: What are the best unknown books you have read?
281–290 of 399 posts
Re: Ask HN: What are the best unknown books you have read?
#282Spinoza's "Ethics". It was one of the first efforts to apply mathematical logic to philosophy (Wittgenstein borrowed a lot from it), and to provide an axiomatic model of emotion. Very roughly, it took a two pronged approach to illustrate there is no objective logical foundation for differentiating between "me" and "not me": firstly, by showing that, given determinism, everyone/thing is part of a single unalterable pr…
Assume non-determinism - this is just pure pragmatism because if the universe is conpletely deterministic, what is the point of even this conversation? It would be immoral for god to create us without free will. If we have free will, we must be able to act immorally, else it's not really free will. So god is in a bind - he has to imbue us with the power to go against his wishes, morally speaking. Immorality in humans…
What Spinoza shows is that, given a set of noncontroversial axioms, free will is essentially undefined. E.g., if you take an action, it is either caused by you, someone/something else, or chance, reasonable assumption? For free will, we would say the action is caused by you. Okay, then why did you take that action? Because of the person you are at that time. Why are you that person? Something at time t-1 made you that person. Either that thing was you, something else, or chance. For the original action at time t to be caused by you, who you are at time t also has to be caused by you, meaning the action at time t-1 that made you who you are also has to be caused by you.
If we follow this recursion far backwards enough, we eventually get to the point where you were a baby, incapable of making your own decisions. This shows that any causal chain can ultimately be traced backwards to something outside "your" control. In which case, how can one sensibly assign responsibility to yourself?
Perhaps another abstract way to put it: Spinoza shows that God creating some kind of free will that made actions unpredictable to him is equivalent to the idea of God creating a rock so heavy that he himself cannot lift; it's incompatible with the idea of omnipotence. Undefined in the sense that the set of all sets that are not members of themselves is undefined.
Re: Ask HN: What are the best unknown books you have read?
#283The Network Revolution – confessions of a computer scientist (1982)¹ is the title which immediately springs to mind. I never see anyone else mention this book, but I liked it. One of the many interesting things it contains is an anonymized telling of what happened with Doug Engelbart and why, even after giving the dazzling “ The Mother of All Demos ”², the SRI company did not succeed in its grand plan for the future…
...mostly known for being a ufologist I remember a book he wrote, something about "Magonia". Not sure he considered UFOs "real" but more of a collective psyche phenomenon. Actually he collected a lot of ancient stories from previous centuries: fairy tales, Mother Mary visions, strange happenings of 1800s and befor 1950... it was very entertaining.
I happen to have almost all of his ufology books including "Passport to Magonia" and you're right that he covers those subjects, but he doesn't claim it's a collective psyche phenomenon. Instead he argues that it has elements of this but guided by an external control system, which is itself part of some, for lack of a better word coming to my mind right now, extradimensional intelligence (he never makes this specific word use) that manipulates human beliefs by manifesting entities in a way that corresponds with the more general belief tendencies of any era. Thus, in ancient times, what we now call UFOs manifested as "fairy folk" and such while today the tendency is more towards temporarily physical apparitions that are made up to be "aliens", presumably because it fits better with the psychological tendencies of our current technological, space-exploring civilization. His core point though is that in both cases, we're really seeing the same extremely ancient phenomenon recur in different guises. Many nuts and bolts UFOlogists really dug into Vallee's ideas because of this, but to me at least, it actually makes a lot more sense than UFO's being aliens in the classical Hollywood, scifi sense of the word. Their behavior makes no discernible sense in that context.
Re: Ask HN: What are the best unknown books you have read?
#284Patterns in Network Architecture: A Return to Fundamentals by John Day. There's not a lot of criticism of technology at this level.
Re: Ask HN: What are the best unknown books you have read?
#285Earlier 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…
I worked at a clueless large company, but even they knew morale was bad, thus me being placed on the morale comititee. Our one meeting we decided it was difficult to improve morale, but after some discussion we did end up with an ice cream social..
Re: Ask HN: What are the best unknown books you have read?
#286White by Kenya Hara [1]
A brain reboot. If you're into design or a minimal lifestyle or want to be inspired before creating a new thing. Easy to read.
Re: Ask HN: What are the best unknown books you have read?
#287Spinoza's "Ethics". It was one of the first efforts to apply mathematical logic to philosophy (Wittgenstein borrowed a lot from it), and to provide an axiomatic model of emotion. Very roughly, it took a two pronged approach to illustrate there is no objective logical foundation for differentiating between "me" and "not me": firstly, by showing that, given determinism, everyone/thing is part of a single unalterable pr…
> there is no objective logical foundation for differentiating between "me" and "not me": firstly, by showing that, given determinism, everyone/thing is part of a single unalterable process, and secondly, by showing that there is no single objective standard for drawing the line between a thing and the things around it. I don’t see it. Does he address the fact that dozens of other philosophers over the years have arg…
>I don’t see it. Does he address the fact that dozens of other philosophers over the years have argued the opposite?
He creates an axiomatic foundation out of definitions that most philosophers of the time would have found reasonable (nowadays they're also reasonable, just takes a bit of work to get past the language choices he made, as mathematical logic didn't exist then so it's phrased in terms of geometric and theological language). He then uses this foundation to show that there's no objective measure for dividing individualness (what is me, what is not me) and responsibility (what was caused by me, what was not caused by me), essentially a proof that given the axioms no such measure can exist. Similar to how one might give a proof that e.g. there is no way to assign a Lebesgue measure to every subset of the real number line. Note this is just a very rough summary; his actual proof is long and dense.
>Isn’t this just free will?
Spinoza essentially shows that if free will is defined as "being 100% the cause of some action", then free will does not exist. Because any action we take, is determined by who we are at that moment, and who we are at that moment depends on actions we took in the past, and this causal chain can be traced backwards to who we were as a baby, when we could not make decisions.
Another way to look at it. If the universe was deterministic, and I had unlimited computing power and storage for simulation, then I could exactly predict someone's actions in life (assuming consistent laws of physics). If it was nondeterministic, then there are some things I couldn't predict, but these things would all be the product of chance, so how could they increase the degree to which any particularly individual is the cause of some action? They would just increase the degree to which randomness was the cause of some actions.
Re: Ask HN: What are the best unknown books you have read?
#288Andy Kessler's How We Got Here. Only a few hundred people have rated it on GoodReads, but if you wanted to trace a march of technological progress from swords to the Internet, it does a good job. There are definitely other stories you could tell about this accelerating sweep of technological change, but this one was a solid rapid overview and really stuck some ideas with me about how changes compound (or completely s…
FWIW I read most of How We Got Here book last year after having it in my reading list for something like 15 years :-/ Somehow it popped up after all that time. I thought it was a great concept for a book, and the author has a unique viewpoint and knows his stuff, but it wasn't very well written. There seemed to be a lot of detail without defining terms, but it was also "breezy" and fast. Just my opinion.
Yeah, it's admittedly more along the lines of an insightful blog post or a really good bar conversation than some kind of Rise and Fall, expectations management is probably due here.
But it kind came on this crest of technological advancement nonfiction, like Brilliant or Salt, and gets some of the key implications across in a fast and digestible way.
Re: Ask HN: What are the best unknown books you have read?
#289Not exactly a book, Assessing and Strengthening the Manufacturing and Defense Industrial Base and Supply Chain Resiliency of the United States . (1) It raises some concerns that folks in this forum are probably interested in and could do something about. Things like forcing US companies doing business in China to transfer dual-use technologies, the lack of US suppliers for certain goods, like high tenacity polyester…
It reflects badly on HN that the #1 response to an intellectual question views the world through an obsolete lens of nationalism.
The problem is when you let your shields down and unfriendly nations that DO believe in nationalism decide to take advantage of you. Similar to the whole "no one wants to be the second to last guy to get rid of all their nuclear weapons" thing.
Re: Ask HN: What are the best unknown books you have read?
#290Earlier quoted context omitted.
...mostly known for being a ufologist I remember a book he wrote, something about "Magonia". Not sure he considered UFOs "real" but more of a collective psyche phenomenon. Actually he collected a lot of ancient stories from previous centuries: fairy tales, Mother Mary visions, strange happenings of 1800s and befor 1950... it was very entertaining.
I happen to have almost all of his ufology books including "Passport to Magonia" and you're right that he covers those subjects, but he doesn't claim it's a collective psyche phenomenon. Instead he argues that it has elements of this but guided by an external control system, which is itself part of some, for lack of a better word coming to my mind right now, extradimensional intelligence (he never makes this specific…
I still think it's very interesting how he found the tales of UFO sightings stereotypical and tried to explain the patterns in an original fashion.
I mean it's a nice way to look at things that makes me curious of the other book.