841–850 of 1001 posts
I think any atheist rational person should read this, to get a more realistic view on himself/herself and the world around you.
Our society is too individual and self-centered, which is actually a wrong view on how the world works. I recommend this to anyone, especially when you lose someone or something big in your life.
For a long time I had wanted to start a business but after reading that book I truly believed I could. It was a long journey but I now run my own software business and I honestly would not have started on this path had my friend not recommended it to me.
To be honest, I'm almost embarrassed to admit it. It is not high-brow literature, and I don't even think it's considered to be a good book on being an entrepreneur, but it was a very important part of my story.
One book that changed me was reading Master and Margarita in Russian for the first time. It was the first book I started reading I could not put down until the end. Gained a lot of appreciation for literature at that time. The other book that I enjoyed and changed me was ‘The Wisdom of Insecurity’ by Alan Watts. I was a fan of Alan Watts works through his lectures already and it was wonderful to hear his ideas in wri…
Great quote, Watts is truly inspirational. What a happy surprise when Ctrl+F takes you right to the first comment ;) If anyone doesn't have the time or attention span to commit to a full-blown book, The Joyous Cosmology [0] and Become What You Are [1] present some of Watt's ideas in a more condensed format. The former is a ~30 page essay freely available online. The latter is a collection of ~15 very short essays (1-…
misc. Forrest Mims notebooks, the Python Tutorial, Practical C Programming
first chapter of Sound and the Fury, snippets of Naked Lunch, wide swaths of Ulysses
The Universe in a Nutshell, French's Special Relativity
The Gamma Function, a graph theory text whose name i don't remember, baby Rudin
Brain Structure and Its Origins, The Form Within
"Basic Economics" by Thomas Sowell. Not an easy read, but it deeply changed the way I think about incentive structures and the law of unintended consequences. It's a tough pill to swallow for people (like myself) who cling to utopian ideas, but the older I get the more I realize we must live in the world as it exists, with human nature as it really is. Dreaming of a better world is counter-productive if one does not…
Sowell's weak point it is that (and this is is not unique to Sowell, it's common to both nominal supporters of free markets and their opponents) there's too often an implicit conflation of the economic system that actually exists with a free market. The way he taught me to look at policy in terms of incentives more than makes up for any of that though.
* Sapians - great for a global view of our history, and an understanding of how important myths and religions have been for us being successful (as protocols for getting on)
* Thinking in Systems - toolchest of mental models for dealing with complex systems
About 10 years ago I read a book called "Rich Dad, Poor Dad". In summary, it describes a different way of thinking about money and wealth and the mindset of a successful person versus one who struggles with money. For a long time I had wanted to start a business but after reading that book I truly believed I could. It was a long journey but I now run my own software business and I honestly would not have started on t…