I was reflecting today about how often I think about Freakonomics. I don't study it religiously. I read it one time more than 10 years ago. I can only remember maybe a single specific anecdote from the book. And yet the simple idea that basically every action humans take can be traced back to an incentive has fundamentally changed the way I view the world. Can anyone recommend books that have had a similar impact on them?
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 writing for the first time.
I wish everyone read or watched Alan Watts lectures and books. The world would be a much nicer place if that was the case.
My favorite quote is by him:
‘We thought of life by analogy with a journey, a pilgrimage, which had a serious purpose at the end, and the thing was to get to that end, success or whatever it is, maybe heaven after you’re dead. But we missed the point the whole way along. It was a musical thing and you were supposed to sing or to dance while the music was being played.’
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 (1-12pg each) - a perfect replacement for smartphone scrolling when confronted with 5-10 minutes of free time.
There is a game available on most gaming platforms, PC and console, called Everything which is home to an experience crafted using Watts' lectures. It is quite an interesting experience. Not quite a game but more of an interactive philosophical exercise, but quite good, and a very interesting introduction to Watts' work.
Is there a recommended order of Watts’ books, a fundamental one to start with? I’ve ended up buying a few of his books, but haven’t started on them yet.
Thanks for mentioning an amazing book of literature. The Master and Margarita is my favorite fiction book! I've read it in two translations and I prefer the Burgin & O'Connor to the Glenny, but both are great.
Everytime I read it I gain more insights. I absolutely recommend reading this book alongside a readers guide which gives more background and depth, there are many biblical, historical, and author-related references that won't be understood otherwise. The author's own life is massively relevent to the events of the novel. I recommend this guide:
My experience with secondary literature about MaM is negative. I went to the University Library and checked out a massive commentary on it and a book about its interpretation.
The latter argued that, contrary to a common notion, Woland is emphatically not the Devil. I did not get far in trying to understand it, but this and the similarly non-understandable commentary really took away some fun out of reading the book, because I constantly felt I was too stupid to get it.
Reading commentary is good, but maybe on a way lower level than literature professors trying to make a name.
I can sympathize with this, however, if you read my recommended guide, it absolutely isn't "that kind" of criticism. It's very readable and made a lot of sense to me. :)
Was amazed when I saw the recommendation on the top comment. My fiancé recommended me this book and I just finished it on my commute this morning (this specific translation). Still thinking about it! Wonderful book, super engaging and just absolutely beautifully written. I couldn't put it down. Highly recommended!
About depth of the book: we've studied it in literature class in Russia for a month, because it's a kaleidoscope of interpretations, one would definitely miss too much without a guide (especially in 17 y.o. as myself). The only piece with more class time is War and Peace for obvious reasons.
I did a meta review of translations before trying that particular translation. I found it extremely readable, and the humor comes through nicely, while also maintaining some of the long sentences Bulgakov liked and remaining faithful in general to his style.
I LOVE the Master and Margarita but I've only read it in English. When you say you read it in Russian for the first time, did you mean you've read it in English before? If so, were there huge differences?
Russian is my native language so I read it in Russian for first and second time. Never read it in English so can't say. But I think this is one of those books that will lose some of its 'magic' in translation.
This is disappointing to hear, but to anyone who is deterred by this comment from reading it in English, don't be. Even in English, the book was undoubtedly one of the best books I have ever read. There's something about it that makes you go "What happens next?!" for all 400 odd pages of it, and before you know it, you're at the end. It's truly a masterpiece - Bulgakov spent 10 years writing the final version of the novel after burning his initial manuscript twelve years prior in 1928, but as you will come to learn, manuscripts don't burn ;)
I've read it first in Russian (I'm a native speaker) and then in English (Ginsburg translation) when I was learning the language. I don't think it lost too much in translation, but it might because I'm very familiar with the original text. You don't need to know anything about Russia or Soviet Union to enjoy it.
Another book similar in spirit and quality to M&M is "Danilov, the violist" by Vladimir Orlov.
I speak both Russian and English and read it both languages. Yes, some of the magic is lost, but not too much. Mostly it's word interplay and phrases that are just hard to translate.
But you can recover a lot of understanding even without speaking the language with a bit of work. By say trying to get a feel for what Moscow might be like in the 1920. Political persecution and censorship are major themes. Even things like psychiatric hospitals are important because they were often used as an alternative torture and imprisonment system. Writers are poets were also important. That was before TV, radio was just getting started so writers were sort of like the Youtube celebrities of the day. And controlling what they say, do, and act was critical. In other words things that might seems kind of "meh" or odd carry significance and knowing about it might make it for a richer interpretation and a more interesting read.
Can you share which translation you read? I imagine there's multiple that people will still find enjoyable but there's a lot of options for russian lit.
I read the Mirra Ginsburg translation, which I have heard is a sin because it is based on the censored text. If I could do it over (which I probably will in a couple years) I would probably read the Burgin/Tiernan O'Connor translation that another commenter has mentioned. There is more information on all of the English translations here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Master_and_Margarita#Engli...
> Cowardice was undoubtedly one of the most terrible vices - thus spoke Yeshua Ha-Nozri. 'No, philosopher, I disagree with you: it is the most terrible vice!'
(This is Pontius Pilate's response to Yeshua.) To me this is about staying silent when you see evil being committed. But it doesn't even have to be 'Evil with a big E', it's just about speaking up when you see something that doesn't sit right with your morality.
The other big takeaway for me was about how Margarita threw away all the rules of society to save the Master (her beloved). But she did it for more than just his sake, I think; she certainly took her liberation from society's expectations of women.
Thanks for pointing out. Even though I don't share your take on this, I find it interesting.
I think the first example is just some innocent banter of a couple characters from long ago, who had a very naive understanding of the world because they couldn't begin to comprehend its true complexity.
I think the second example is something any cool person would have done, because witches are awesome.
Absence of cowardice (also known as self-preservation) will severely limit what people allow to do to them.
This includes limiting all the things that you listed as worse than cowardice.
On the other hand, lack of fear will empower ideologies that employ suicide bombers.
Also it will make nuclear wars much less unthinkable.
As a more technical companion to Freakonomics, I would recommend "The undercover economist" and its sequel by Tim Harford. It's a great introduction to the way economy shapes our lives and choices. You will never drink coffee or sit in a queue the same way after reading it.
Another book that changed allot about how I look at the world is "The long tail" by Chris Anderson. Maybe too thin of a concept for a whole book, but definitely interesting.
Thank you for this! I love Alan Watts too. Recently I've started listening to "chillstep" mixes of his talks on youtube (while doing yoga/meditating). They're really fantastic. Eg. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLu1wP9HhYM
I've registered here to write this.
It is interesting that two most voted books here, Master and Margarita and Animal Farm are both about Stalin.
In MoM the all 3 main characters have real prototypes. Master is Author (Bulgakov), Margarita is Author's wife Elena, Woland is Stalin.
Bulgakov was under assault of Soviet regime, he wanted to emigrate, but Stalin kept him in country. He was in constant fear of being detained for anti-soviet propaganda. Her wife which he loved a lot was forced to became secret informer, she reported periodically to officials against him. Bulgakov knew that, and this theme also in book. This moment is so tragic and central, because her wife was editor of the book. MoM is about exceptional courage of Bulgakov, his personal response to Staling, his sole main reader. At that time, just comparing Stalin to Statan was enough to be executed.
There's a rather modern and new German translation which has been turned into an audio play by Bayerischer Rundfunk. I adore that! They have cast an Austrian as Fagott, with a wonderful Viennese dialect.
No idea whether Fagott has some linguistic extravagance in the original, but it works really well on this Master of Ceremonies.
Really appreciate your phrasing - I feel the same way about Anthony Bourdain's material (while on a very different matter) - has convinced me to check out some more Alan Watts.
Animal Farm was a really important book for me. I picked it up aged about 10 or 11 and I remember being really struck by how easily the pigs were able to exploit the other animals' grievances with humans to secure their own power. It felt like a grown-up story with some quite powerful, disturbing meanings under the covers. So I told my English teacher about it and all she told me in response was to go look up the Russian Revolution. I didn't understand why, but did it, and then the book had a second, much bigger impact on me. And of course what a way to learn about allegory!
It was the first time I realized books could be dangerous, subversive, and truly educational as well as simply informative or entertaining.
Totally, I agree! Even though George Orwell is more known for 1984 but his work truly shines with the Animal Farm. It is a children's book fwiw but every aspect of it is meant for the grown-ups. Outstanding!
Luckily if you're in Australia, you can read this book for free because it is public domain there.
>>I told my English teacher about it and all she told me in response was to go look up the Russian Revolution.
You have to only look at the management hierarchy in your company. Pigs in the Animal Farm novel eat apples.
We pigs are brainworkers. The whole management and organisation of this farm depend on us. Day and night we are watching over your welfare. It is for YOUR sake that we drink that milk and eat those apples.
Why do you think your bosses get business travel, no limit credit cards, RSU, big bonuses and neat double digit monthly pay check.
It is for YOUR sake that we drink that milk and eat those apples.
>Why do you think your bosses get business travel, no limit credit cards, RSU, big bonuses and neat double digit monthly pay check.
Sorry, but i dont believe this is an accurate analogy. The reason is that otherwise they might leave for another opportunity. No-one is telling workers what the pigs are saying in AF.
One of the strangest things about that text is that very few of the folks I've talked to about it seem to feel that the issue with the pigs at the end is that there is a farmer.
That is to say, I very rarely find anyone who will agree that the book is anti-capitalist at teh same time that it's opposed to Stalinism.
I see the book continually taken happily anti-communist text. But the text is certainly not _just_ about the Soviet system under Stalin.
Over the years, the big impact of Orwell to me has been how readily people can look at systems that they consider to be Other than their own and critique them while eagerly ignoring the implications for their own situation. That is, everyone here thinks the sheep are dumb, but at least they went through a period of time where they tried to replace the farmer with a different pig... where I live in Texas, all the sheep just think they are the farmer.
To me it’s a warning that when you rightfully overthrow an authoritarian you have to be careful not to trade that authoritarian against another one. This seems to happen all the time. Cuba, Iran, Nicaragua, Russia and probably many more.
The word "revolution" is probably the most deeply ironic one in the whole of the English language. You fight and die to overthrow the oppressor only to end up back where you started.
The only exceptions are revolutions guided by good ideas and solid values.
Just "overthrow the current leaders and then (??? magic happens here ???) and then we get a better society" doesn't work. You end up where you started or worse because usually the ideas haven't changed.
Intellectual revolutions must precede political ones.
This is why I'm kind of a dull boring centrist politically. I dont support any major attempt to rock the boat because there has been no intellectual improvements that might guide such a thing.
Most revolutionary thinkers don't think replacing the existing leaders will "magically" lead to a better society.
They have grievances with the existing systems, reason to believe those in power won't address those grievances, and reason to believe replacing those in power with people more sympathetic to their grievances will address them.
Also, there has been a boatload of revolutionary thought about how to make a better society over the last century or so. There are clear ways that our system is imperfect and clear ideas of how it could be improved. I'm not sure why you claim there are no "intellectual improvements" over the status quo.
> They have grievances with the existing systems, reason to believe those in power won't address those grievances, and reason to believe replacing those in power with people more sympathetic to their grievances will address them.
So they are doing exactly the same as those in power, which is taking care of themselves.
> The only exceptions are revolutions guided by good ideas and solid values.
Those are mostly not exceptions; successfully uprooting an existing power structure takes more than good ideas and solid values, and replacing it with something that will stably sustain itself both during the revolutionary emergency and afterwards without either falling apart or enabling a power hungry would be despot to exploit it to create an authoritarian regime takes far more than that.
The US “Revolution” was a regional separatist movement led by the local elites and local governments that did not upend the basic local social, economic, or political power structure save for severing the latter from a remote central government (and the resulting new central system was replaced with something more closely approximating, and deliberately modeled on, the old one very shortly after the Revolution in the face of widespread perception of imminent failure otherwise.)
In other words, it mostly wasn't revolutionary and in the one way that it was it mostly failed.
It was a liberal revolution, but not a social one. It definitely shifted the power and I think calling it a revolution is justified. A bit of a side note, but I wholeheartedly recommend https://www.revolutionspodcast.com it starts with the English revolution, then moves to the US, then back to Europe for the French Revolution. There are a lot of episodes on the revolutionary XIX century in Europe and how the “question” slowly changed from the political one to the social one.
Russians are probably the least luckiest people in the world.
* they bore the brunt of Mongol invasion which utterly wiped the aristocracy at the time and set back the countries development by generations and depopulating the land. Luckily, the Mongols stopped there and didn't move further west, saving the populace of Western Europe
* Without warmwater ports, Russia lacked the capacity to participate in maritime trade that bolstered the economy of Western Europe
* Brutal and absolute monarchical rule suppressed any kind of representative government; Serfdom (essentially, slavery) was abolished only in the late 19th century
* Once it got its act together and started Industrializing in good stead... now comes the Crimean War, depleting morale, resources and will of the people
* Oh... was that not bad enough? World War 1, which strains the country so bad, that Germans successfully foment unrest and ultimately Revolution. The Revolution itself ends up being the best strategic decision by the Germans, and the Communist Government signs a treaty essentially ceding large parts of the country to the Central Powers
* But wait! That didn't mean the end of troubles for Russians, and they endure a prolonged Civil War fought not just on the Western theater, but also on their Eastern provinces. Red and White Russians fight each other constantly, appropriate resources from the peasants by force.
* The Country has barely recovered from all of this, Stalin comes to power. The madman purges experienced officers and intelligentsia leading to a very ineffective State and Military; he signs a pact leading to (temporary) peace as they know they can't fight the Germans
* Whoops, nope, the Germans invade anyways, reach as far as Moscow. Millions of Russians perish. St. Petersburg is besieged in one of the most destructive sieges ever, period
* At the end of the war, Russia has lost millions of its population, resulting in a demographic catastrophe that will affect it forever
* Once again, Stalin foolishly throws away a chance for friendship, and instead of working in good faith, we end up in the Cold War. The Soviet Union makes tremendous progress, but is no match for the economic and military might that comes with the vast (and now booming) population of the West. The Soviet Union was _offered_ aid as part of the Marshall Plan, and could have possibly used it for kickstarting their economy and supercharging economic growth but no
* Despite having a highly educated workforce, Soviets fail to capitalize on it, instead becoming the same repressive state they replaced. They fail to take advantage of the technological improvements and ultimately fall far behind
* the final kick: right after the fall of Soviet Union, when the people finally hope to be free and pursue and obtain the benefits of modernity, they're hit by an economic and social collapse. Again, the result is depopulation; crimes are high, lives are wasted by alcohol and tobacco.
And this is just the highlights. So... I do feel bad for the Russian people.
The Eastory channel on YouTube has done short (10 minute) animated videos of the eastern front of WWII - Germany vs Russia - tracking all army unit movements and the movement of the frontline, and summarising what each side was trying to achieve at each stage. (It's more interesting and watchable than my description sounds).
"here, 40k prisoners of war. 300,000 soldiers here. 500,000 POWs. Here, 1.2 million soldiers. Another 120k POWs." on and on and on. The scale of it is just unthinkable.
But TBF, we're doing rather alright compared to Africa, India and some of South America. Because of heavy emphasis on engineering disciplines in the USSR and because oil now, I guess.
Though as years go by, I hate this snow mush more and more. With a passion.
> they bore the brunt of Mongol invasion which utterly wiped the aristocracy at the time and set back the countries development by generations and depopulating the land. Luckily, the Mongols stopped there and didn't move further west, saving the populace of Western Europe
It's actual Russia (now called Rus` or Kievan Rus` in modern history), then Little Russia, now Ukraine.
> Without warmwater ports, Russia lacked the capacity to participate in maritime trade that bolstered the economy of Western Europe
It's bunch of various nations, then Great Russia, when part of them was captured by Russia, then Grand Duchy of Moscow, then Russian Empire (since 1860), now Russian Federation.
Time span | Historical name | Modern name | Language then and now
?? - V | Russia (Русся) | «Old Russa» town | Old Norwegian, not exists
VII-XII | Russia (Русь) | Kievan Rus`, Ukraine | Slavonic, Ukrainian
XVII- pt | Russia (Россия) | Russian Empire, Russian Federation | Many, Russian (modernized Church Slavonic)
There was also the reign of Lenin. It started with the execution of the Tsar and his family, and culminated in the Red Terror. A quote from Martin Latsis when he was deputy chief of the Ukrainian Cheka sums it up:
>Do not look in materials you have gathered for evidence that a suspect acted or spoke against the Soviet authorities. The first question you should ask him is what class he belongs to, what is his origin, education, profession. These questions should determine his fate. This is the essence of the Red Terror.
People always forget one of the craziest blows to Russians: sometime around 1648 tsar Alexei, under the influence of the Orthodox church, banned all secular music. I guess “music is of the devil” was named as the motive, but the actual cause likely were skomorokhs, or folk jokester-singers ― satire was always the strong suite in folk entertainment. So, in the 18th century Russian music had to start again, beginning with the ‘classical’ genre this time. I also suppose this is why folk singing is much better known than really old folk music (though a lot of songs too are late inventions by individual composers). Meanwhile, the church itself didn't have a tradition of music afaik, again preferring singing (rather monotonous, at that).
I myself have seen only brief mentions of this, and thus far couldn't find a definite source detailing this mess.
That's how it goes 9 times out of 10. I learned that from reading Why Nations Fail. It busted the whole myth of "progress" and replaced it with "change".
Not an assumption. Look at the world. Read history. Most times power structures are challenged the challenge isn't successful or it is overthrown and the same or worse power structures replace it.
10% is still optimistic. The Russian, French and Haitian revolutions all worked out pretty horribly and the American Revolution killed a ton of people and destroyed an enormous amount of property to avoid the terrors of Canada.
Washington was quite the exception. So many at the time predicted he would be a dictator, but he gave up power 3 times voluntarily, and set an amazing example.
Your last sentence diminished the value of first sentence. The countries your mentioned are just different not authoritarian and probably are so because of too-much-fingering by imperialist countries.
I took it as more an anti-authoritarian story than purely anti-capitalist or anti-communist. The anti-capitalist parts are fairly self-evident, at least to me: that's the rather brutal system the farmer has imposed on the animals at the start.
Booting the farmer out and starting again with the animal-owned collective sets the story up for the real message, which is that power corrupts and it is very easy for anyone attracted to power to co-opt legitimate grievance for their own ends. The return of the farmer brings a nice circularity to the story as well as giving the idea that the imposition of will on others is usually to their detriment. Capitalism or communism are basically indistinguishable to everyone existing without power or influence.
It is an allegory of the Russian Revolution of 1917. The farmer represents the Tsarist autocracy. In a Tsarist autocracy all power and wealth is controlled by the Tsar (Farmer Jones). This is actually a long way from capitalism. In the end the pigs form what is referred to as an oligarchy.
So many people seem to want to name-check Orwell for anti-communist purposes without recognizing that the man himself fought for a revolutionary socialist militia in the Spanish Civil War. In other words, he put his actual life on the line for communism (in the non-Stalinist form he interpreted it as), and actually ultimately probably died from complications related to injuries he sustained in that conflict.
His writing changed after Spain. He saw the deliberate press distortions, and the Soviets installing listening equipment in the telephone exchanges. If anything, this gives him greater credibility. This is a review he wrote of /We/, which I dug up while thinking about your comment. http://orwell.ru/library/reviews/zamyatin/english/e_zamy
Nothing there in that review is inconsistent with the anti-Stalinist but revolutionary socialist views of the POUM militia he fought with in Spain.
Now, arguably "Emmanuel Goldstein" in 1984 is meant to be a kind of Trotsky figure (and his book within 1984), and the fact that Goldstein and his book are ultimately shown to be fake and created by the Party may be a kind of critique or renunciation of Trotskyism and similar currents. Hard to say.
For me one of the weirdest use of this book was a vegan (and animal rights supporter) friend who copy/pasted on Facebook the speech of Old Major, the eldest pig who incite the Revolution, who was explaining to the animals how bad the farmer was treating them. For her it was perfectly expressing her feeling that farming animals was a monstrosity and she was completely ignoring that the speech was designed by the pig to manipulate the listeners (the other animals) and that it was a metaphor of communism. So for her, the issue was indeed the farmer, not as symbol of capitalism, but simply as a farmer exploiting living beings. All symbolism was evacuated and all that remained was a rousing speech for animal rights.
I suppose all book interpretation eventually shows the ideology of the reader. It doesn't even have to respect the presumed intention of Orwell who, from what I know, never expressed any support for veganism or actual animal rights.
>Over the years, the big impact of Orwell to me has been how readily people can look at systems that they consider to be Other than their own and critique them while eagerly ignoring the implications for their own situation.
"Capitalism is terrible" is a pretty constant meme on the left in US politics right now, perpetuated by many people who have read that book.
>where I live in Texas, all the sheep just think they are the farmer.
Ah the classic "people that don't vote to tax the rich for entitlements think they are rich". If your model of how people vote depends on people being completely stupid, it's wrong.
It is incredibly relevant to politics today. Galvanising people's anger to get them to support something completely unrelated that's not good for them at all, is something we see constantly. In Brexit, in Trump, but also in many other cases. People are easy to manipulate. And instead of a warning, people are treating Orwell's books as an instruction manual.
Btw, I enjoyed watching the score on the above comment jump up and down. Apparently a bunch of people get irritated when their ideological hero gets called a dirty commie using the man's own words.
It doesn't exist yet, but when Mike Duncan's Revolutions podcast* wraps up the Mexican Revolution, the Russian Revolution is the next stop. I'm really looking forward to it. Duncan does an incredible job of tying together the precursors, politics, social situation, and military campaigns into a coherent serial narrative.
Darkness at Noon, by Arthur Koestler, is another allegorical book about the Russian Revolution, more specifically the Moscow trials that followed. The book had a strong impact on me.
It’s a great book but I would recommend it to readers who are already somewhat familiar with the Russian Revolution and how Stalin seized power (defeating both the left and right-wing oppositions within the Bolshevik party) after the death of Lenin.
I'm not an historian or anything of that kind but I'm really interested about the Russian Revolution and I spent quite a few hours on finding the best books about it. My knowledge about those books mainly comes from r/askhistorians (highly recommended!) and academic journals such as the American Historical Review and the Slavic Review. I saw a few other people recommending Miéville's October and even Reed's Ten Days. Now, I'm not claiming those books are bad in any way (I own Reed's) but if you're interested in an historical analysis those are probably not your best shot. Miéville is a sci-fi author who describes himself as a socialist, so he is not trained as an historian and, at the same time, he's definitely simpathetic to the Revolution. Reed's book was written during the Revolution and is a great book if you look at it as a primary source, but it's definitely a partial one. If you're interested in a book of history, then I would recommend you either Fitzpatrick's "The Russian Revolution", which is a short (about 200 pages) book from one of the great pioneers of the revisionist school in soviet historiography. For a more recent (and longer) book I would take a look at S.A. Smith's "Russia in Revolution: An Empire in Crisis, 1890 to 1928". I want to make it clear: Miéville's and Reed's books are great, but one should approach them knowing the context. It's similar to another great book (highly recommended!) by Orwell: Homage to Catalonia. It's similar to Reed's Ten Days, but I would not recommend it as an history book. Hopefully, those recommendations should be enough, but if you have other questions feel free to ask. For a quick look about Soviet historiography, here is a _great_ article by Sheila Fitzpatrick (the author of one of the books I recommended above) reviewing 5 books that came out in 2017: https://www.lrb.co.uk/v39/n07/sheila-fitzpatrick/whats-left
Once you know the context, you can appreciate more books like Reed's and Mièville too.
Thank you! Appreciate the recommendations and explanations. I've been wanting to approach the Gulag Archipelago but was looking to enhance my understanding of the historical context and political climate of the times first.
Yes approaching it with context is extremely important, as its the heavily influenced by the cold war. Consider that Gulag Arcipelago estimates about 60 million dead in the gulags, which is simply not accepted in today's historiography. 60 million would be equal to over one third of the Soviet Union's population, even before the Second World War.
I just finished reading this and loved it! As someone without much preexisting knowledge about the course of the revolution or anyone involved other than the Tsar and the main Bolsheviks, I found it to be very accessible and engaging. You really get a sense of the personalities of the main actors, especially Lenin.
I found Sheila Fitzpatrick’s The Russian Revolution 1917-1932 to be a well-written and fairly balanced account of the period. In her first chapter she goes as far back as the emancipation of the serfs to describe the societal context that led to the 1905 and 1917 revolutions. The book is easy to read, not too long but is well referenced if you want to further explore.
Trotsky's book on the revolution is a literary masterpiece on par with Thucydides, though it's obviously not the best choice for an objective or broadly-based historical picture.
A People's Tragedy, while important as it has been widely read, is nowadays criticized quite heavily in the historiography of the Russian Revolution. Consider reading a few other books (like S.A. Smith's for a very recent one) if you want a different perspective.
Interesting, I did not know that. I see by your other comment that you've done more research into this than I have - I'll take a look at r/askhistorians. Thanks for the heads up and the suggestions.
I picked up A People's Tragedy after reading Figes's book on the Crimean War - do you happen to know if that book is similarly criticized? In other words, should I put a mental asterisk just next to A People's Tragedy, or next to everything by Figes?
Unfortunately, I'm not familiar with Figes' books in general, but with a few searches I came up with a few reviews. The first, on the LRB, is quite positive, but the author, Geoffrey Wheatcroft does not seem to have, based on his wikipedia page, much expertise on the topic. The other, published in Victorian Studies, is more academic, and is quite negative. The author, Andrew Lambert, cites numerous errors. His most important critique is that this book narrates what he calls the "old-crimean war", and that it largely ignores what are now considered some very important aspects of the war. If you want some alternative books, consider taking a look at this thread (https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5v7ggr/what_...), where u/kieslowskifan, a user who I absolutely admire for his knowledge, recommends a few crimean war books to a fellow redditor. Happy reading!
For a feeling of what the early Soviet Union was like, I highly recommend We the Living by Ayn Rand. If you don't like her politics, I still recommend it to understand exactly what it was that she is reacting against.
That book is not exactly autobiographical. But she does draw very heavily on her own personal experiences to draw that time and place as accurately as she could. For example the purge that ended Kira's university education was not made up, and indeed would have ended Ayn Rand's career if she had been one year younger.
You're being down-voted for no good reason. If you want to understand what drove Ayn Rand to the extremes then "We the Living" is probably the best explanation there is.
A famous contemporary account is Ten Days that Shook the World. it was written by an American who, it's safe to say, was fairly pro-communist.
But really it's such a pivotal moment in modern history that you're not going to starve for material. It sounds glib, but in this instance you could do worse than start on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Revolution
I highly recommend Homage to Catalonia if you liked Animal Farm. It really explains how Orwell became disillusioned with communism (while fighting for it).
Simplistic yes, but also true. He became throughly disillusioned with socialism because he felt that someone like Stalin would always take control of it.
My interpretation was that he was always anti-authority, but his experiences led him to believe that an authoritian figure will always try to grab power and it doesn't matter what `side` they say they are for, power is their aim.
True he liked the spirit of his socialist militia but by the end I think he felt its spirit had been crushed and abused by others.
That was clearly sarcasm. A directed one and thus patronising. Irony happens when there is a contrast between intent and effect, like "the man had to bring his car to the repair shop after driving over a pothole. He is ironically responsible for maintaining the roads"
Truly, most of those who struggle to speak it and write it do not deserve the English language, any more than their great teacher Alanis Morrisette. The situation you describe is not irony. Irony is a property of communication, not of coincidence.
An event can still be situationally, or cosmically ironic even if it's not in fiction. if you really want it to be a property of communication, then think of the communication as being between the universe, or God and the subject.
More importantly, English is defined by common usage, and the usage of irony in describing an unexpected combination of real events has been common for hundreds of years. I believe this probably comes from people's common belief in fate, or that their lives are part of some broader story. Under this mindset, it makes perfect sense to use terms from literature to describe phenomena of life. And your insistence that irony is a property of communication is satisfied.
Words have multiple senses, and the ones from common usage are just as valid as the ones from academic usage, though they may be harder to pin down.
This is why it is important for words to have specific meanings. This muddling of "irony" is at least partially responsible for the narrative fallacy that you describe. The universe does not care about our subjective experience. "Unlikely" events occur in everyone's life, but not because the Fates are taking poetic license with that life. If the roads should be better maintained or if they are maintained much better than they should be, we won't know from repairs to the local road superintendent's car.
I love new usages that make English more capable or more entertaining. I detest those that impoverish our discourse and thus our thinking.
* Factfulness and Thinking Fast And Slow. The latter helped me internalise that my thinking, like most humans, is biased. Even being aware of those biases doesn’t always help. We need to go above and beyond to overcome our biases. Factfulness goes into detail about what those biases are and how they lead to a distorted world view. Rather than taking the easy way out by blaming journalists/politicians/rich people, he turns the focus onto us and our biases and speaks about how to look at the world in an objective fact based manner.
* The Dictator’s Handbook. One simple axiom - leaders do what is necessary to stay in power. Using that idea they explain the basis of all political systems, whether autocracy or democracy or somewhere in between. I didn’t really understand politics before I read this. CGPGrey has a video where he summarises the book. [1]
* (Only for Indians) India After Gandhi. You can’t really understand your country if you don’t know it’s history. History stopped in 1947 according to our history books, and most people are blissfully unaware of what came after. They don’t know how close India came to losing democracy or how easily it could happen again. They don’t understand the dangers of promoting one language at the expense of others because they don’t know that it’s been tried before. Every Indian needs to know so we don’t repeat the mistakes of the past over and over.
While his admission concerns mostly the theory of priming, the problem is not specific but a methodological error. In my view all his research should be looked at with suspicion and with a view to have his experiments replicated independently sooner rather than later. This has been a problem throughout social psychology and other branches of science, so nothing specific to Kahneman, he's just the best known. Which brings up the next thought, which is I always look at information from the epistemic point of view: where does this knowledge come from: rational thought, experiment, experience, faith? I just notice, without judgement, how eager some of the posters here are to accept a theory or a philosophy even when it has already been debunked, or the evidence is flimsy, or maybe it's formulated in ways that are not even "debunkable". And there is a pragmatic view that if it feels right and it helps, why not.
India After Gandhi is truly a powerful book, and you're right in saying that it is our duty as an Indian to educate ourselves about post-1947 happenings. My only issue with the book, though only slightly, was the fast that Guha was a bit too soft on Nehru. There were many flaws/bad decisions (and good decisions too indeed) taken by Nehru which, I think, the book downplayed.
Nevertheless, Guha is truly an amazing historian and all of his books deserve to be read!
I read the first five or so chapters of Factfulness based on this recommendation, and do not recommend that book. Here is my review (also posted to Goodreads at https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2713701220):
The book was recommended to me as being mainly about bias, with the state of the world as examples, but this was wrong – the book is mainly about the state of the world, and it gives a few basic biases I already knew about as examples. The state of humanity all over the globe is not something I care about as much – I can’t personally affect it and it won’t affect my personal life – and the book never explicitly justified its assumption that it is important for people to know.
I did appreciate one thing: the book’s description of exactly what system is supposed to replace the “developing”/“developed” dichotomy. I was told as a child that it was obsolete, but never what was supposed to replace it. The book proposes categorizing countries within a distribution of four income levels in which most countries fall in level three. The author never justified his choice of four levels, nor his choice of boundaries between the levels, but I am willing to believe based on the graphs that at least this model is more useful than the older two-level dichotomy.
However, the rest of the book was pretty boring. I didn’t fall in the category of “people who think the world is getting worse” that the introduction assumed I fell into, so the next few chapters that kept insisting that the world was getting better were redundant and boring for me. The other chapters all seem the same and I don’t think I’ll learn anything useful from them.
I can guess that Bill Gates recommended this book because it is written for people like him – rich philanthropists who are wondering how best to use their power to make a difference in the world. Most people do not fall in this category.
>>They don’t know how close India came to losing democracy or how easily it could happen again.
Would it have been a bad thing? Well, China is doing swimmingly well. And please don't give the oh-India-is-very-diverse argument. Those who claim China is not diverse, doesn't know China.
Democracy was not something that originated out of India. It got shoved upon and lapped up by the very white-washed freedom-fighting leadership back in the day. No other alternative has/was ever been considered ["A political system with Indian characteristics"]. Also, for a country with a very high illiteracy rate, I never figured out how democracy actually works.
>>They don’t understand the dangers of promoting one language at the expense of others because they don’t know that it’s been tried before.
So let's just promote English and ensure there will always be animosity and division amongst the intellectuals (since by definition, they'd already know English) and the rest who only speak a "regional vernacular".
The thing that has shocked me most on my interactions with the Indian English-speaking (elite) is on how unoriginal they are. I could have well been speaking with a Brooklyn hipster and wouldn't have been able to tell the difference (other than the appearance and context).
Well with none of their "regional vernaculars" being developed and growing up on just a diet of American and British books and (liberal) ideas, can't quite blame them.
ps: I do a lot of business travel to India. Let's just put it that I have a love-hate affair with the country.
I was just thinking about our government in India earlier today and how the illiterate population play a role in sustaining a bad functioning government. My concern was mostly with the environment and how those in power seem to be doing nothing to fix what needs to be done urgently. I do not know how to explain the craze that the common people have for politics, but it is very active here. They get riled up very easily and this has let people who have the ability to trigger the thoughts of the masses into power. Very often, those who get into power do not join politics to bring change but only because they see how easy it is to be corrupt.
On the flip side, I think most of the modern generation has a better understanding of what needs to be done and where our priorities should be but it's gonna be a long time before those in power go away for good. But it might be too late by then, and I'm afraid we'll be stuck in this cycle.
I've only read a couple of history books about India, one by William Dalrymple and the other by Ramachandra Guha. I'd highly recommend both of them. In case you want to know about the last decades of the freedom struggle, Gandhi After India is probably what you're looking for.
OK, it might be a bit embarrassing to post this, but I'm going to say Marie Kondo's "The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up."
Not so much for the tidying part (though I did find that extremely helpful), but the whole idea of only keeping things in your life that "spark joy" (not an exact translation by the way - "spark excitement" or "spark meaning" are other ways I like to think about it) has had a profound impact on me.
I realized there were lots of things in my life (much more than just physical objects) that I had just sort of accumulated without thinking about what I really like or if something was good for me. I found the benefit of "practicing" this concept without mundane household objects allowed me to have a stronger sense of what I really enjoy in the more important aspects of my life.
My experience is kind of opposite. I decide one day to discard everything I own and live out of a suitcase for a while (had plenty of savings so was not living poor).
I had bookshelves full of books I never read, architecture books, art books, children's books, clothing I never wore, toys and figures I didn't play with, stuffed animals, framed posters, and entire household of stuff.
5 years later I miss some of that stuff. For lack of a better word I think it was part of my identity. Of course not all of it but lots of little things, even if I didn't use them they served as anchors for memories. Even if the only anchor was when I bought them that would remind me of other things that happened around the time I acquired the item etc..
I'm still mixed on if it was the right thing to do.
I think you went too far. The mindset is never about minimalism -- or what you can do without. It's about ensuring that what you have is good. You should have stuff. Books, toys that are memorable, clothes of different kinds. What you have needs to be important though!
That's not the Marie Kondo thingy. Ms. Kondo's recipe is that you go through your stuff category at a time (books, shirts etc) and per each item figure out if that thing "brings you joy" or not.
My wife was into it. We went through our stuff and ended discarding lots of crap. So, it's rather "go through all of your stuff once in a while and throw all crap away" than "ultra minimalism at all cost".
Thanks for posting this. I am the kind of person to whom many forms of minimalism are seductive, and yet, the books, tchotchkies, and ephemera pile up.
This book helped me too. I used to hoard all kinds of stuff and find clever ways to store it because it might be useful some day, if I could ever find it at the right time. Eventually I started intentionally buying duplicates of things I needed so there would always be one on hand. I'd especially be reluctant to get rid of stuff that didn't take up a lot of space. I didn't realize how much it added up. Sometimes getting rid of even very small things can make storage much smaller and more manageable. I know where everything is now, and it saves a lot of time! I moved to a tiny apartment and got rid of most of my things and now I'm just nice and cozy with the stuff I actually want.
I don't think this is embarrassing at all. After the initial purge, I couldn't believe how much it changed my purchasing habits. I now have a very simple rubric that prevents me from buying things I don't need. Tidying Up reads as a sort of mild self-help manual but it conceals a powerful anti-consumerist undertow (speaking as an American, anyway)
I really like the phrase "anti-consumerist undertow!" but I also visualized it in the opposite way - consumerism as the undertow, and "Tidying Up" as the "swim parallel to shore until you're out" advice.
It's a really great idea, and the way people are taking to it is really nice to see. I even see people understanding after a few eye rolls the importance of her more Shinto inspired things (such as being thankful to items).
From her I learned that all items have a home. I had heard such an idea before, but her explanation made it stick. Now I don't lose keys or gloves or ear muffs, they all have a home in my house. It's not ideal placement, I often end up backtracking a bit, but I think the idea isn't to wring efficiency out of every decision, but to just know and accept, and that feels ok when you're around joyful things.
This has a very different impact on me, since I enjoy experiencing taking apart and putting back and restoring and playing etc... vintage musical instruments in my spare time.
It never gets old. There is no real reason to sell one because each instrument is almost childlike in some incorporeal manner.
I ended up purchasing more things, but just being more tidy.
"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 engage with reality. We can build a better world, but only by being honest about the current state of things.
+1. Reading Sowell really challenged my utopian impulses, it's amazing how deep his thoughts are but how simply they're expressed, apparently he advised people in the bay area to stop protecting so much open space in the 1970s with the warning that this would increase housing prices dramatically eventually. In hindsight this seems so intuitive and obvious but he gets credit for not needing hind sight and anticipating the most salient consequences.
Interesting fact: Economics in One Lesson is an extended meditation on Frédéric Bastiat's classic essay "That Which is Seen, and That Which is Not Seen." Part of Hazlitt's goal was to make Bastiat's ideas more modern and accessible. However, enough time has passed that some of his examples are a bit dated. I actually prefer the original. Bastiat is a splendid writer.
Just a heads up - the theory explained in that book (Austrian school) is 100% fringe economics. It's very popular with libertarians, but not really considered to produce very useful outcomes by pretty much any other school of economics.
You either haven't read the book or you you misunderstand how much of the book is Austrian economics. Yes, modern Austrian economics is considered fringe. However, historically the foundational results of early Austrian economics has been fully integrated into mainstream economics. From Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austrian_School):
> Among the theoretical contributions of the early years of the Austrian School are the subjective theory of value, marginalism in price theory and the formulation of the economic calculation problem, each of which has become an accepted part of mainstream economics.
> The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups.
Probably the biggest reason the Austrian School is "fringe" (a fairer descriptor is "heterodox") is that there's no money in it.
Economics is a value free science, at least how Austrians practice it, but happens to show that government intervention is usually harmful. For example, Keynesians believe that the business cycle is an inherent failure of markets with no known cause and that government must intervene heavily to correct such errors. By contrast, the Austrian Theory of the Business Cycle takes nearly the opposite position -- that intervention, mainly in form of credit expansion causes booms. A bust is a correction of errors made during the boom and should not itself be corrected with more easy money, starting the cycle all over again.
Now, the vast majority of working professional economists derive all or much of their income from the government in one way or another. Many work for the federal government or the Federal Reserve Bank or consult with them. Or they work in government funded universities doing research with money from government grants.
Early last century, Hoover then FDR discovered and embraced John Maynard Keynes who offered a general theory that supported heavy government intervention. The Keynesian prescription just happened to provide an intellectual basis for policies that would require government to grow much larger and more powerful. Before long government began to fund more and more professional economist jobs. And no surprise, those jobs went to Keynesians.
A few decades later Milton Friedman (not an Austrian) said, "We are all Keynesians now" -- not as an admission that the theories were correct but a concession that in practical terms it's nearly impossible to work in the field and not be a Keynesian.
Do you have an opinion as to what you think is wrong with it, or just bandwagon fallacy?
What for example, do you think of Subjective Theory of Value or the Theory of Marginal Utility, which were developed by the father of the Austrian School, Carl Menger, in the latter part of the 19th century? Or the Austrian Theory of the Business Cycle, for which Friedrich Hayek won the Nobel Prize in 1974?
Yes. It’s all very plausible sounding, neat, and internally consistent, but you can’t derive a useful macroeconomic model from it that matches real-world, empirical observations. (Of course, the same could be said for a lot of mainstream stuff).
Part of it is probably just the historical context - monetary systems in the modern economy are very different than the gold-standard, fixed exchange rate kind of environment the book was written in, for example, which changes a lot of how things operate. But even then I think it still would have suffered from the fallacy of composition, where you can’t start from a description of interaction between two people and just scale it up - the emergent behaviour is almost always surprisingly different.
Could you provide a concrete example where it breaks down?
With regards to Austrian economics, as far as I remember, the school is not even mentioned in Hazlitt's book, but you are right that he was heavily influenced by it. But the book and its propositions stand on their own, I think.
Although Sowell writes very convincingly and brings logical arguments at first sight, most of his statements on the free market are based on intuition rather than data. He consistently uses a handful of examples (minimum wage, housing market) and extrapolates those to other areas in the economy without substantiation. Always assuming a fully efficient market (which it is not, see different bubbles in past few decades), rational actors (i.e. ignoring human emotion and/or marketing effects that effect consumer spending) and full price elasticity of all goods/services/labor.
It's an interesting read, but be (very) skeptical. The world and economics is a bit more complex than the picture he portrays.
> assuming a fully efficient market (which it is not, see different bubbles in past few decades)
Well, I think it's part of the book to speak in favor of free markets as opposed to centrally planned "markets" (such as prices for money, e.g., interest rate).
If you're criticizing an underlying assumption, then of course I can also go ahead and criticize parts of mathematics for some of their axioms. Yet, that doesn't make mathematics wrong, only more limited in scope.
The Quest for Cosmic Justice is another great book by Sowell that challenges the utopian mindset that underlies many modern policy discussions. It contrasts utopian "cosmic" justice with the much more prosaic (but achievable) "human" justice
In similar veins, his 'A Conflict of Visions' and 'The Vision of the Anointed' are two stunning incisive books that show pretty directly why we are where we are now, as divided as we are now. Likely corresponds strongly with Haidt's 'The Righteous Mind', referred to elsewhere in this topic.
Nearly two decades ago Sowell sent me a signed copy after I emailed him challenging him on something he wrote in one of his columns!
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.
Funny thing is, reality is based a lot in perception. For example, it was "reality" that the higgs boson didn't exist before 2012. It was simply part of a model.
The problem with just accepting how the world really is, is that it pushes many people into a state of stagnation, never really pushing the status quo. If you refuse to accept the society you live in today, then you have more incentive to change it tomorrow.
Nonsense. Acceptance of a realistic understanding does not preclude using that understanding to achieve your goals. It is certainly better then designing your policies based off a rejection of reality.
Definitely "The Machine That Changed the World" by Womack, Jones, and Roos [0]. This is "the first book to reveal Toyota's lean production system." Before reading it, I had never imagined just-in-time production or value chain mapping, or vehicle assembly lines that can profitably produce quantity one of a product before being reconfigured to produce a different model (SMED: single minute exchange of die).
Now I see muda everywhere and cringe when I overhear people talking about applying kaizen and how they think they're practicing "continuous improvement" while repeating the same rote, industrial, mindless processes that they have been for the last 40 years. We can do so much better. Toyota tried very hard to teach GM how at their NUMMI[1] plant, but it wasn't the right location relative to their suppliers for JIT to fully work and "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." -Upton Sinclair
In software people use agile as an excuse to not think through the core architecture.
I believe agile was invented to incrementally improve an already well thought production process. Once the assembly line was setup, agile was used to eliminate the unproductive activities. I am not sure agile will be helpful to build the assembly line itself?
In most scenarios that's what people try to do with agile.
Setting up a mechanical assembly line is very different from setting up a software pipeline, although, as you can tell already, they use some of the same words and metaphors.
It isn't possible to build a mechanical factory in weeks with readily available tools [0]. We just don't have that kind of concentration of knowledge, we don't have the skills, the know-how etc. to accomplish that. Whereas with software: you have OSS, you have the Cloud, and all kinds of numerous tooling that helps you get started immediately, and iterate on that until you get to the final product. That kind of iteration, debugging etc. is just not possible with manufacturing. Which is why in manufacturing you need great designs and processes: bad decisions are very costly. They are costly in software too, but... your MVP will still churn out value, even if its not efficient. Once you prove that your product satisfies a need, you then make it better, you make it more efficient, scale it out, yadda yadda. But getting started is absurdly easy. And thats why lean works.
The designers of lean realized that all that worry about scaling, about automation, planning, QA... while its important, it doesn't provide the most value for everyone. For a smaller company, its more important to get out a product that solves a problem even if its janky. Once you prove its usefulness, you attract more money, more people etc.
So lean solves two problems:
* gets you started quickly and fails bad ideas fast
* lets you justify bad design if it provides more value
One could argue that the technical debt built up by this kind of process has to be paid down someday. If your product survives for long enough, you will have enough resources to do that. And then you have a core product that brings in revenue, and you repeat the same lean method for other products. Rinse and repeat, ad infinitum.
[0]: where this assumption fails, you see a lot more manufacturing. e.g. in China, the fruits of this kind of aggregation in manufacturing skill is visible, and that's why Chinese manufacturers are so adept at responding to changing market conditions.
I agree with your points above.Having said that knowledge and experience is a critical factor and I am fine with using agile for MVPs and startup scenarios.
My issue is with the way agile is evangelized and implemented in the Enterprise. These Enterprise people simply rationalize that if Toyota can do it then why we can't without realizing where it fit and where it does not.
Personally I think it does not fit with the culture of thousand approvals and beating the dead horse i.e. endlessly cross examining any design or implementation failures.
This happens because Enterprise people love the buzzwords. Agile and cloud are the latest buzz in Enterprise so they watch a ppt or two somewhere starts pushing agile into a culture where it does not fit at all. This results in sufferings and frustration.
Kaizen seems to be manufacturing's equivalent of agile. Everyone says they do it, but almost no one actually does it because that would mean totally re-configuring their business.
I hadn't recognized the equivalency of [lean] and agile before. That's interesting and helps give me a better appreciation for why we only end up paying lip service to the idea. Thanks for the thought.
A good approach to this is to start small. Apply kaizen on small things, get the "kaizen culture" ingrained in your team/company culture, and slowly move on to bigger things.
For me it was a sequence of books that did it. The Phoenix Project first, then David Anderson's Kanban book. Some tine after that was The Goal and Deming's Out Of The Crisis, and a book of Taichi Ohno musings.
You're right, what has been seen cannot be unseen.
It's interesting for a number of reasons, not least because it explains that a lot of the ideas driving how Toyota worked post-war came from the fact that they knew they wouldn't be able to let people go in an economic downturn.
Why did GM's people's salaries depend on not understanding NUMMI/TPS? I would have thought it would have been clear to them they either adapt or die, and thus their salary depended on understanding it.
Simply accepting you're in the wrong location means moving, and you can't move a factory and all it's workers cheaply. Similarly, no one wants to automate their own job away, as that would result in them not having a job.
Granted, long-term that thinking kills companies, but short term it keeps the bills paid, the kids fed, and the beer cold.
From what I was able to gather it was less about being in the wrong location and that the internal politics of GM set NUMMI up for failure.
America was able to be a powerhouse of manufacturing during WW2, I remember reading that a lot of the DNA for JIT/Kaizen/Lean came from the Marshall Plan[1].
The Chicken Tax. Because of it, US auto manufactures promoted and sold the one market segment where they had 0 to no competition. Even today, the big American automakers suck balls at making Sedans and focus exclusively on Trucks and SUVs.
The tools don't really mean anything, it's mostly adopting the principles enforced. And everyone has to adopt it for it to work. The ones that do it best, have a strong company culture. You define the why before the how and what.
Bottom line: judge your success in life by how well you make your decisions, not by your outcome. You have full control of your decisions, and often no control at all over their results.
I found William Irving's A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy a very legible contemporary (if somewhat idiosyncratic) introduction to Stoic thought, and maybe more accessible/applicable than the classic sources.
Exactly! This book is my recommendation as well to everyone who seeks to learn more about stoics. It is easy to understand, you can relate to the things said, and it is practical! It makes you think and challenges your beliefs as you go on and on. It makes sense!
The idea of "Making Smarter Decisions When You Don’t Have All the Facts" reminds me of this TED Talk:
"If you ever struggle to make decisions, here's a talk for you. Cognitive scientist Tom Griffiths shows how we can apply the logic of computers to untangle tricky human problems, sharing three practical strategies for making better decisions -- on everything from finding a home to choosing which restaurant to go to tonight."
Meditations is what immediately came to my mind also. It's a humbling and reassuring look into the mind of a great leader and stoic; to know that there was this man, the most powerful in his time, who strived - and struggled - to be the best he could, is inspiring.
Are we really going that low to take beliefs from WER (white, educated, rich) people? I mean wasn't Seneca the rich man during that time? And also Marcus Aurelius book doesn't seem appealing to read because it was never meant to be published.
About the 'white' part: the Roman empire apparently did not categorize people based on something as superficial as their skin color: "physiognomy did not function as a criterion of social status in the Roman system of stratification". [1]
I also liked this book. Also because it shows how similar problems people had then.
For more stoicism I would recommend "Daily Stoic". It's one meditation per day.
Is an outcome not the other side of the decision-making coin? I understand that the outcome should not carry all the weight, but it surely often carries a lot of the weight of a particular decision. That is, how does one get good at making decisions? By seeing positive results flow from them.
> Is an outcome not the other side of the decision-making coin?
No, and that's the key. You cannot truly control outcomes, so judging your life and self-worth on them is leaving your happiness and fulfillment to chance.
> That is, how does one get good at making decisions? By seeing positive results flow from them.
Nope. You get better at decision-making by being reflective about your past decisions. Outcomes can be a factor in that, but only insofar as they can point you to the realization that you missed information that was available to you.
There are many decisions in life where there is no "good" outcome. There are some where the "good" outcome is catastrophic for you personally, and that catastrophe is avoidable if you compromise your ethics. If you see a child drowning in a river and know that there's a good chance that you will die if you attempt to rescue them, rational self-interest alone tells you to walk on by. Stoicism puts a layer on top of that - can you live with yourself without regret if you do that? Are you willing to accept the risks to live up to your own standards?
Nonviolent Communication by Marshall B. Rosenberg is an amazing eye-opener. It's a book about how how to interact with your fellow humans in a way that enriches the lives of everyone around you. It's full of things that should be obvious, but in practice are not. You can think of it as a more advanced version of Dale Carnegie's "How to make friends and influence people", with more focus on conflicts, and a specific communication methodology.
I use non-violent-communication (NVC) constantly, at work and at home. It basically is a method that forces you to listen and to speak without judgment. But “People Skills” by Robert Bolton is a much more scientific and nuanced approach that I’ve found greater success with. They key is to so ingrain these methods that you are no longer using a method. In the end, you simply really care about what people have to say, you delay judgment as long as possible, and you practice empathy while remaining clear about your own needs and boundaries. Also, being direct.
Just last week I sat through a meeting where no one was listening to one another, elephants were being buried underground, and we were becoming more divided. Taking a cue from ‘Radical Candor’, I invited the room’s abstract complaints and negativity to focus on me, specifically. Luckily, someone was so pissed at me and my team that they launched into a list of things we’d done wrong. That gave me a chance to listen, to show I cared, and to connect the dots with his previous discussion at the meeting. Basic stuff. But it opened the floodgates to honest conversation for the rest of the night.
I always say that computers are easy, humans are hard. Would love to see more recommendations about this topic.
Humans are "Hard" because they are individuals with their own motivations, drives, capricious emotions and in a word, are not always "rational". I feel most of the books on management/organizations/communications, approach Human Communications from a utopian viewpoint. They assume a path of least resistance and then impose a structured process (fad of the month) to arrive at a positive end goal. I have come to the conclusion that this is all unworkable BS (note books like "Leadership BS", "Bullshit Jobs" etc.) and we need to change our approach completely based on actual realities rather than wishful thinking. To that end i found the following books useful;
The Art of Worldly Wisdom (aka The Pocket Oracle and Art of Prudence) by Balthasar Gracian - A set of aphorisms with penetrating insight into Human Nature.
Why we do what we do: Understanding Self-Motivation by Edward Deci - A short book from a psychologist.
The Empowered Manager: Positive Political Skills at Work by Peter Block
Management: A Political Activity by Ted Stephenson
> I always say that computers are easy, humans are hard. Would love to see more recommendations about this topic.
I wouldn't go so far :). They're both hard; and need talented individuals to function together and come up with great ideas and processes on how to build, maintain and scale them.
And as nerdy engineers, we often discount the humans, which we ought not to do.
All this "if you answered c, e and f, we are not of the same opinion" feels passive-aggressive to me.
The whole thing feels manipulative to me. It makes me think that people try an insincere way of talking to me, in order to manipulate my feelings and reaction.
I've had huge discussions with friends who try to live the book, and neither of us could make the other see their point.
One of their examples was "My boyfriend likes to go DJing, but sometimes I'd love for him to stay home and cuddle with me. So I clearly tell him that him leaving makes me feel alone and that I would like some warmth. But I don't tell him what to do, to stay at home, for example. I only talk about my own perception and feelings."
–
"Yes, that's great, but in communication there is the level of pragmatics above pure logical semantics. And you telling your boyfriend that him leaving makes you feel very alone is just another way of saying 'please don't go'".
This book was extremely influential to me and changed my outlook. If you’re reading the book and sense insincerity, I’m not sure how to address that beyond encouraging you to read it with a lens that it is completely sincere.
Since reading it, I have been amazed at how unclear many people communicate. They say things to express some basic emotions - anger, frustration, etc - but so many people do not express in clear terms the root of this feeling.
In your example, the woman does indeed want the boyfriend to stay at home. But saying you want someone to do something, at a minimum, doesn’t explain why you want that. It also doesn’t give them much recourse to either object, or come up with alternative solutions.
I can't agree with an idea that encourages you to not say what you want, for me, this is the opposite of good communication. If you want your boyfriend to stay at home, you should say so and then explain why. Not actually saying it is likely to make the situation more confused and lead to conflict.
It encourages you to first understand and say what you need, then talk about what you want as one possible solution.
We're very "good" at solutionising what we think we want rather than what we need. One of the things I took away is a way to clearly consider and express the root cause of something. In the DJ example not wanting their partner to go may be due to any number of reasons that aren't clear to the DJ, they could be lonely, feel insecure, feel mistrustful of fidelity, feel ashamed at their own lack of passion for an activity etc. Any number of these things can come to the surface when you start saying why something bothers you rather than the first solution your brain offers up, plus it's a much nicer conversation when both parties are involved in building the solution.
What's also nice is I've had better "shower conversations" with myself to figure out what I really want from situations.
Importantly, saying it without coming down with harsh judgment on the other person is also key. You truly don’t know what’s going on in their mind, or what motivations they may have had in doing something. NVC encourages realizing this and avoiding assigning feelings or intent to the other person, since you don’t know if that’s accurate.
“I feel lonely much more than I want to when you’re gone DJing Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. I don’t like feeling lonely. Can we figure out something to help me feel lonely less often?”
And yes, you could say “I wish you’d stay at home,” but is that really the desire? The desire is to feel lonely or ignored less of the time in this scenario I think; maybe I’m wrong!
Maybe the DJ said she couldn’t come with thinking she would be bored. Maybe she’d love to come, but thinks he doesn’t want her there.
Saying clearly the why, without judgment on the other person, certainly seems to be pretty NVC to me.
It seems natural if asked:
"Can we figure out something to help me feel lonely less often?”
To respond:
"Ok well, what do you want?"
If you're not willing to give actual things you want, then the other person has to "mind read." And from my experience in relationships, when people are trying to mind read what the other actually wants, this always ends up in issues/problems.
Mind reading is not the goal of this conversation.
The response you said might happen - "OK well, what do you want?" - would indeed be a desired response. The reason is that the response leads to a conversation, where they can both talk about possible solutions. And the solution doesn't have to be "don't go DJ tonight," although that could be one.
Imagine if the conversation instead was this:
Girlfriend: "I don't want you to DJ at the club tonight."
DJ thinks: "What? She knows this is really important to me, but she just wants me to stop going. What the heck. She doesn't want to support me in this now, after I've done it for so long?"
DJ says: "This is really I important to me. Stop trying to control me, I don't try to control you!"
Girlfriend: "I'm not trying to control you, I just want you to stay home tonight!"
DJ: "Sounds like control to me!" huffs out of the room
Giving the DJ some amount of context can help avoid anyone feeling accused, and can help someone misinterpret why someone wants something.
Hah, but sometimes the non-verbalized component of this communication method is a bit silly if they actually want you to consider ‘not go’ to be the only option.
“Oh, when you said you would feel alone you were actually (more or less) forbidding me from going out tonight.”
It sounds like your friend may have missed some of the more critical points of the approach. Let me try:
* My boyfriend went DJing three times last week,
* but when he leaves, I feel lonely (n.b. this is different from "him leaving makes me feel alone")
* because I need some companionship in my relationship.
* I'd like to ask him to stay in with me at least x nights a week.
I talk to my boyfriend about my 1) observations, 2) feelings, 3) needs, and 4) requests (this is verbatim the four-step process outlined in the book). To all this, I might add:
On the other hand, I also wonder if DJing is his way of meeting his own needs for independence/action/excitement, and how he would feel about staying in x nights a week. Perhaps there's another way that we can make sure both of our needs are met, such as inviting close friends over to stay the night when he's gone, or inviting our friends over for a house party so he can socialize and I can still have him around.
---
Communication works when it's a good-faith effort on both sides to understand where the other is coming from and meet each other's needs mutually. The goal shouldn't be to manipulate the other's feelings and reactions, but to focus on the parts that no one could possibly disagree on (observation, feelings, needs—e.g., "I feel lonely") rather than blaming ("that makes me lonely") or subjective judgments ("3 nights a week is excessive").
If "we are not of the same opinion" strikes you as hokey, consider the intention of phrasing it that way: If you get in the habit of telling people when and why they're wrong, you're going to erode the spirit of cooperation required to arrive at a happy solution.
Re: the wording: I would be perfectly fine with "if you answered b we disagree". But that extremely gratuitous and overly complicated way of saying it really feels manipulative. Who talks that way, ever?
I haven't read the book. Does it really go so far as to say that the girlfriend should say all that but shouldn't say "I would like it if you would do that"?
'Cause there's a big difference between "I don't tell him what to do" and "I don't express my preferences/desires".
No, it is totally fine to make requests! NVC just advises you to give some context about your feelings and needs before you make the request, instead of jumping straight to it. The prescribed sequence is:
1. Observations: things that are objectively observable
2. Feelings: your feelings about them
3. Needs: the needs you want met
4. Requests: a proposal as to how you want your needs met
It's not always practical or necessary to go through the whole sequence. Sometimes all you need to say is "I'd like you to stay." But if things get tricky or contentious, it can help a lot to separate observations from feelings, and start with objective facts first.
For example, if someone is really upset that their partner isn't staying home with them, they might be tempted to say "Obviously you don't care about this relationship because you never spend time with me!"
That's not going to work nearly as well as "When you leave me at home alone a lot, I feel lonely and ignored. I need time and connection to feel good about our relationship. Could you stay home tonight?"
Explaining your feelings serves (at least) two purposes: (a) it helps the other person have empathy for you; and (b) it provides information about the true purpose of the request. The extra information helps ensure the right need is addressed (in this case, it reveals that what's wanted isn't just presence at home; it's quality time and connection), and helps the other person find alternative solutions if they can't accept the proposal (maybe their partner has an appointment to visit a friend at the hospital and really can't stay; but they are still many ways to address the underlying need, e.g. "It's important that I see my friend at the hospital, but I do want to spend time with you; can we make a plan to spend tomorrow night together?")
If the only information provided is the request, then the receiver can only say yes or no; they aren't equipped with enough information to find a solution that might work better for both parties.
(I guess I should add that this is my interpretation; it seems like people have different interpretations of NVC. I think of it as a tool to use when things get difficult, and for me its purpose is to convey information more clearly, not to obscure my true preferences.)
I found the opposite, that by verbally giving context to feelings it can be a more honest and effective communication. And no, the book does not say you should "only talk about my own perception and feelings" and discourage making direct requests of others in order to ask to cuddle—it merely allows you a helpful framework to communicate feelings around it if communication is difficult. See zestyping's sub-response to a sibling thread.
I think that is why I value Non-Violent Communication so much, for its desire to be compassionate and empathetic to both your self and others while realizing that you don't just deserve to get what you want from others just because you want to feel a certain way or feel you need a certain outcome due to circumstances.
The Dale Carnegie comparison threw up a red flag for me because that book is all manipulation. I have an ex-friend who read it and swears by it, but she's just become completely insufferable and fake. It's like she's constantly in a job interview.
I think that says more about your friend than it does the book. When I read the book back in high school I felt it was less, how can I manipulate people, and more, how can I become someone people enjoy being around.
Just because someone's an asshole doesn't mean they're autistic.
I've read the book and had a visceral reaction to it personally. It is called "How to win friends and influence people" after all. Seems to be a love it or hate it type of thing.
I can see that kind of reaction. When I read it, the book seemed to be a lot about giving people what they want by changing things about yourself and your mindset. For some people that's a good idea (if you're a selfish jerk), and for some people that's a terrible idea (if you already give in too much to other people).
As someone who moved to the US at a young age, reading How to Make Friends and Influence People explained a lot of the apparent insincerity/fakeness that bothered me in both business and personal interactions, and that had been very much a mystery to me.
How did that go again?
Dear $FIRSTNAME $LASTNAME,
I am writing you to emphasise how much your business personally means to me and how $EMOTIONAL_STATE I feel about it...
Also remember that he was a huckster, for example changing his name so people would associate him with the steel Carnegies (no relation).
I know some people get turned off by his delivery and how some people poorly execute what he teaches, but I have found this to be a life changing book. I've read it easily a dozen times and listened to the 8 hour audio version almost as many times.
The main take away that I use all the time is that most of us jump to solution oriented problem solving when in conflict or explaining our side, and that's usually not what people are looking for. When someone is upset, they are usually looking for empathy. They want to be understood. When they are understood, they are able to problem solve or hear the other side.
The problems are that:
1) Marshall is teaching a new language. So, he's speaking slowly, repeating himself, and talking at a very basic level. That's why it sounds unnatural.
2) People generally suck at giving empathy, even more so when they are personally invested in the situation. So, they have a bias against it.
But, like learning any new language, when you get to native speaking level, it sounds very different.
I do couple's coaching on the side, and this is one of my main tools. It is amazing to watch. A couple who comes in and sit on opposite sides of the room, not looking each other will be cuddling on the couch crying in each other's arms 20 minutes later, right after I translate their actions into the feelings that drive those actions and simple requests. They see each other at a deep level, and that's what people typically want.
“The Design of Everyday Things” changed the way I see literally everything. You’ll never look at doors the same way again, and prepare to forever be frustrated by poorly designed objects, and delighted by incredibly well designed ones.
There is no better book on the philosophy of UX, imho.
not only UX. programmers can actually learn a lot about building software if they see the meta in the book (replace door w/ interface. think about the mental model your library user is going to build for your library. make things easy to use when the correct pattern is employed and impossible if improperly done. minimize cognitive load) the book is brilliant
+1 for this gem. At least once a day I catch myself thinking some everyday object (or app) I’ve encountered could be more usable if it had certain signifiers to better illustrate its affordances, or lacked certain signifiers to obfuscate unintended affordances. Should be required reading for anyone who aspires to put products out into the world.
The first time I tried to read this book after Luke Kanies the founder of Puppet recommended it I barely made it 15% in, but after 6 months of noticing poor design everywhere I went back and gave it another go. I'm not in UX but I think about this book almost daily.
Indeed, I think of that book (which I read over a decade ago) every time I push or pull a door the wrong way. Reading it is like being able to see the matrix - but it’s simultaneously enlightening and frustrating when you realize how poorly so many things are designed.
+1 reflecting back I think this is one of the books that has been key to changing my thinking. Was one of the first design book I read, but the lessons have been with me for the last decade+.
Maybe trite, but the Bible. For a mind-blowing experience, read Matthew chapters 5–7, and have in mind that the topic is: “what it means for a person to be righteous, or good.” The analysis of the role of moral rules, the place of worry and anxiety in driving us to short-sighted compromise, the tension between “secret” good-doing versus good-doing for public recognition, are all potent, helpful, and life-changing.
The Book of Mormon as well, for those of us raised in a certain cult. Also D&C 132[0] where Joseph Smith has a "Revelation" about taking multiple wives and basically threatens his wife with hell if she doesn't go along with it (she wasn't a huge fan of polygamy).
> And I command mine handmaid, Emma Smith, to abide and cleave unto my servant Joseph, and to none else. But if she will not abide this commandment she shall be destroyed, saith the Lord; for I am the Lord thy God, and will destroy her if she abide not in my law.
You have to keep in mind that this was written by multiple authors 2000 years ago in a different culture using different ways of putting things. It is also a good exercise to entertain a mental position that is not yours; read a hindu verses assuming hindu gods exist, read the bible assuming God exists. That way you are not in danger of loosing out on valuable concepts just because the supernatural is alien to you.
For a book used by millions of people as the only source of wisdom for over a dozen centuries, I can hardly disagree more about the 'overlooked' part.
I am not commenting about its actual merits, as it has some merits and some beautiful verses. But it is just a book among many. It should stop being the only book many people read.
They may not have meant this, but I took it to mean "overlooked by some groups". Especially nonreligious types, I feel, could learn from a lot of the secular wisdom in the Bible (and I say this as an agnostic). And I know there are many contradictory, sexist, barbaric, and other awful things in there, and I'm not trying to apologize for those bits. Just that there's more good things in there than many nonreligious types often know.
As an example, my agnostic, very nerdy brother read the whole thing and said he learned a lot from it. I figure there's a lot of potential people out there just like him.
You dont even have to take it literally. I learned from Asop's fables and I acknoledge animals can't talk. What I got from Noah's ark wasnt that God is a genocidal maniac or he loves us all very much, but that if you know what needs to be done, do it and don't care what others think.
Yeah, even if the whole base of the story is lunatic.
Sorry, but the Noahs story does not makes sense logically (all the different animals on one ship) nor morally. Killing everyone and only spare some lunatic.
But if you can take from it "do what needs to be done" well, good for you. But I would argue a common trivial dantasy book contains as meaningful wisdom if you neglect 90% like with the bible.
I do not call the flood lunatic. I rather meant the idea that the all-loving god send it to wipe out his own creation but then decides to spare some and instruct him zo build a boat so humans and animals can survive....
Btw. that the scenario is allmost word for word the same as in the Gilgamesh epos, is another funfact.
My experience is, that the Bible shows you what the reality is really is. If you truly reflect on it for yourself you will uncover how right it is. But this assumes you really want to think and see the truth. And yes it will hurt (in a good way).
Every other statement, "I have my own beliefs" is short sighted.
And Bible is not equal to the institution you call "Church"!
* The Selfish Gene - our bodies are vessels for DNA as they travel through time. Also colony insects and birds are fascinating.
* Thinking Fast and Slow - study after study shows that we exhibit so, so many cognitive biases, as our minds take shortcuts. there are some things you can do to recognize and mitigate these biases.
* Imagined Communities - the notion of a "nation" is only 300 years old and has no objective basis, only the fact that a group of people agree that it is a thing.
>* Imagined Communities - the notion of a "nation" is only 300 years old and has no objective basis, only the fact that a group of people agree that it is a thing.
The Penguin History of Europe series is great for this, especially The Pursuit Of Glory, which details the time when states switched from being based on their king, to states being based on a 'unified set of people', i.e., an imagined community.
There's also the amazing Vanished Kingdoms: The History of Half-Forgotten Europe, which is a bunch of essays, one on a forgotten European kingdom that ceased to exist, and no-one claims it as their heritage. It shows you how easily your identity of a citizen of a state can get lost and forgotten - your great-grandparents may have seen themselves as Etrurians, but that state is gone and now you think of yourself as an Italian, but nothing much changed about your family
> Imagined Communities - the notion of a "nation" is only 300 years old and has no objective basis, only the fact that a group of people agree that it is a thing.
The Lombards, Saxons, Franks, Magyars, Mongols and many, many others would disagree. And the Khmer, Mon, Viet and Tai.
> Overall it is worth reading Imagined Communities because of its purported cultural significance. But much of it is so garbled and unclear I’m not sure what people are taking from it, aside from the proposition that the modern nation-state was invented in the last few centuries due to modernity. In the end the book is kind of a long tautology.
"The Selfish Gene" was a revelation to me. I read it during college, as a break from my math, CS and physics classes. It felt like having an evolutionary biology course on the side.
I was going to put down "The Selfish Gene" myself. I remember picking it up in high school and hating the first few pages. I read the first chapter in college, and I didn't get what all the fuss was about. After college, I picked up the book, and was blown away! In retrospect, my younger self wasn't ready for it
For younger readers, or those who prefer a lighter reader, Dawkins "The Greatest Show On Earth" covers similar material in a more accessible (if less rigorous) manner. I forgot to mention it in my own recommendations, but it is one of the books I recommend at every opportunity.
I came here to recommend Thinking Fast and Slow. I'm not surprised that it was mentioned a few times already. I am about to head into my third read of it. If I had to pick one concept from this book that had the most impact on my decisions and the way I look at other people's decisions, it would have to be loss aversion / prospect theory.
Love your list, but wanted second Imagined Communities. I don't see it as much as the other's (frequent HN recommendations). Drags a bit, but is short and impactful. I especially thought its exploration of how _language_ influenced nation's was particularly enlightening. If you find the Selfish Gene to have powerful explanatory effect, I bet you will feel similarly about Imagined Communities.
> Basically, Gat is refuting a modernist view, which has arguably gone from being revisionist to normative, that the concept and execution of a nation is a historically contingent construction of early modern Europe, and more precisely Revolutionary France of the 1790s.
"The Selfish Gene" was also a great discovery for me. I guess that coming from a CS background it was a big revelation to understand the biology in such a different perspective. Really worth reading.
I'm surprised nobody has mentioned this one yet: "The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion", by Jonathan Haidt [0]. This book fundamentally changed how I think about religion and politics. It helped me understand a lot of behaviors which I'd previous considered absolutely incomprehensible.
I just finished reading this and it is definitely incredible. It put in to words the many jumbled and foggy thoughts I've been having on the subject for a long time. I feel as if I can perceive people's motivations so much more clearly now, and so many people's apparently contradictory behaviors are suddenly explained and obvious. Fantastic and very important book.
The Coddling of the American Mind which he co-wrote with Greg Lukianoff is an important book about problems faced by the current college-age generation and the effects that social media, helicopter parenting, and certain ideologies have had on them. The Atlantic article it started as is also good, but the book expands and improves on the argument.
It’s less of a classic as the Righteous Mind because it’s more focused on a topical issue. I think it pairs well with Laura Kipnis’s Unwanted Advances.
"Deep Work" by Cal Newport. It completely changed how I view my work, and how I spend my time, more than any other generic self-help book I've come across. It isn't the usual "delete Facebook, and everything will be fine" blog post. The main take-away for me is making a well-defined separation between "busy"/"shallow" work and "deep" work. This takes the form of spending long, uninterrupted periods engaged in deep work (e.g. academic research), with shorter periods allocated for shallow work (e.g. checking and responding to emails). I have managed to allocate one day per week for myself where I completely turn off WiFi, allowing me to focus on whatever task I choose. This means not accepting the temptation to respond to interruptions from instant messaging apps, email, news websites, etc., and it has worked wonders for my productivity! For me, it serves as a weekly reminder of the insane amount of content I consume while online, along with the (highly expensive) constant context-switching I must perform to do this.
I'm actually reading through his "How To Become a Straight-A Student" right now. Nothing particularly profound, but the task tracking method is definitely helping me stay on-top of college work while having a full-time job at the same time.
Dale Carnegie's "How to Win Friends and Influence People" - it changed how I approach teamwork and conversations. It made me aware of how my behaviour was limiting outcomes. :)
Frankly, it made me aware that I was being an asshole and that I should change.
However, it wasn't necessarily the book, but the course that I found really useful.
A LOT of people are put off by the name of the book. I would highly suggest you not judge Carnegie's book by it's cover. It is filled with brass-tacks advice and concrete examples of how to improve your own life and the lives of others around you. Though the title may seem 'manipulative', the book is anything but that. Consider the title as a marketing gimmick from 1933 and read the book nonetheless.
Indeed. The central point of the book is really the importance of human empathy. If you want to influence people, you have to consider their needs and wants rather that just being self-absorbed and entitled all the time.
True, but it's hard to force oneself to care about other people, to be honest. Many are naturally self-centered, and it's not easy to trick/convert one's mind into not being self-centered. There are some tips like finding a common interest, but not enough. The book has gaps in that aspect.
incidentally, Dale Carnegie didn't write that title. The main title and all the chapter titles were written by an advertising copywriter named Vic Schwab. Arguably the titles made it the publishing phenomenon it is. Schwab also wrote a book that probably changed the lives of many marketers. It's title is "How to write a good advertisement"
I found the content manipulative and I honestly can't understand why this book is so revered. Maybe my expectations were set too high but reading it left me feeling underwhelmed.
I agree. The content was in sync with the title. There were some decent advises and observations for example regarding how to be more tactful, but in general the book seemed to be about faking and manipulating your way to victory. It's very sad if people feel they have to cut corners this way by programming themselves to react certain ways, instead of trying to find genuine happiness that delivers the genuine smile and interest towards people etc.
I read that book. It definitely changed how I look at people.
It also made me a lot more cynical. I realized around halfway through that the author was (very skillfully) deploying his techniques in the direction of the reader. Further, the author is long-dead. We cannot possibly have a genuine emotional connection.
This helped me understand that genuine empathy is irrelevant. All that matters to convincing people is that they feel empathized with. How you actually feel isn't important, though for many it's likely to be by far the easiest and most reliable way to get there.
Dale Carnegie provided me with a very useful set of tools that I can use to achieve the outcomes I want. For that I'm appreciative.
In another book titled "Never split the difference" the author distincts empathy and sympathy. You can be empathic aka. understand how and why the other person feel. This helps you understand the other person and ask the right questions. You don't necessarily have to agree with it (sympathy).
Both have an important role in your connections with other people but its useful if you learn to separate them.
What makes an emotional connection genuine? I firmly believe that Dale Carnegie actually cared about his readers, and was telling them these things in order to make them happier, and make the world a better place. And I am grateful for his efforts. Isn't that a valid emotional connection, even though we never met in person?
Or think about it another way... when you listen to music by Bach, do you feel an emotional connection? Do you see it as crass or alienated, or are you feeling something that a long-dead composer wanted you to feel, and grateful for the experience?
I agree! I also firmly believe that Dale Carnegie cared deeply about the reader he modeled in his head.
In the context of Dale Carnegie, I think that a genuine connection requires the active involvement of two people interacting with one another. For all that the emotions involved are unquestionably valid, I do not consider the genuine emotion one person feels for an imaginary other person to be a genuine emotional connection with another human being.
Bach, to my knowledge, did not like to rattle on about the importance of synchronous emotional engagement.
Bach, above all, wanted his listeners to experience a connection with God. Not necessarily the dogma-bound God as defined by a specific religion - he did after all compose for both Catholic and protestant masters - but certainly some all-pervading sense of the divine which, if allowed to act as mediator between us and Bach and all of creation, does appear to act as some sort of emotional engagement - indirect, yes, but also transcending the barrier of time and certainly high up on the composer's list of priorities.
I agree! It's been my experience that people genuinely believe they can reliably tell real empathy from fake.
It may be possible that the detection heuristics a given individual relies upon might, upon occasion, be a bit less reliable than could be hoped for. I've witnessed both false positives and false negatives.
Again, you're right. People do earnestly and honestly believe in their ability to detect genuineness.
The book emphasizes this fact. If you don't actually care about the person you're trying to influence, if you aren't acting in what you believe is their best interest, they can tell (usually). We have marvelous words in English for this, like "smarmy" and "skeezy".
It gets even more interesting when you figure you that we're already all playing it! We're all judges, and both false positives and false negatives are already common.
I'd concur that the book was a huge eye-opener for me. Earlier, I used to think that I only needed to be right (for e.g., while making technical design decisions) and just say it out when I disagreed. This book taught me that the way you put forward your thoughts also matters. You can be right without being a dick and without screwing up your relationships with others.
I followed up this book with Stephen Covey's 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. That was another fantastic book for me.
For me, these two books fit right into the category of those that literally changed my life.
Agreed. Relationships are how we get things done in life. Reaching consensus, asking for help, motivation - all based around relationships with others.
Since How to Win Friends is already mentioned, I'll add Musashi here. There are so many lessons it's hard to pick them all out, plus I don't want to spoil it for anyone.
7 Habits made me think about certain things differently, but I had many people tell me that it really changed their life. Didn't do that for me, but "change your life" is a really high bar. Definitely How to Win Friends did.
It took me way to long to listen to my dad's advice and read that book. It has a very bad title and will probably cause immediate social ban if caught reading it at school as a teenager (also kids/teen dynamics are sometimes 100% opposite than adult dynamics, being nice and non critic as a teenager can be super risky in some social settings, it's all about not caring and being sarcastic, thank god this period ends at some point, to most of us), but nevertheless, it's the must-have book to transition from the annoying, hot tempered, emotional, entitled, short fused, sarcastic and boasting teenager I was into an adult.
+1 for the book. In my case, I couldn't really follow or properly understand the advice in that book until I stumbled upon The Charisma Myth and followed the exercises there. Only then I had enough social skills to apply Dale Carnegie's tips.
"Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind" by Yuval Noah Harari.
Hands down the book that most influenced me. The book had (for me) not one but several simple-yet-profound ideas that were forever inserted into the foreground of how I make sense of the world. For example, the existence of shared myths that allow humans to cooperate on a large scale. Or how I too, am religious, though I was sure I wasn't.
If you enjoyed this then I highly recommend Ideas: A History by Peter Watson, a far superior book in my opinion.
I found Sapiens to be shallow and full of useless waffle after reading Ideas. It really highlights the fact that Harari presents one particular version of history and there are many great thinkers that have an opinion on the things he discusses. E.g. Harari speculates on how and why money came to be used where as Watson presents a plethora of ideas on the origin of money and discusses the merits of different views.
Ha. My gut reaction to reading your and your parent post was "What?! How can they criticize the book. It's pure truth!" Guess I really took a liking to that book. :)
But seriously, can you elaborate on where you thought it was biased?
It’s not so much that it was biased, more that it presented a particular view on history as if it was the truth. Harari view would have been a data point in “Ideas”, which is more a (very detailed) survey of the ideas about history. Gun, Germs and Steel is actually discussed as are Jared Diomonds other works in relation to his ideas of the grand narratives of human evolution and thought.
Harari often speculates about what people in the past were thinking when we have actual written accounts from the time. The point of “Ideas” is that imposing modern ideas on the past doesn’t really work or is at least difficult because the ideas of the time were so different. An example would be the modern conception of an “artist” being a concept created during the romantic period. Before that people doing painting or music considered themselves craftspeople. So trying to read intent into what they were doing based on the modern conception of an artist is a fools errand. Harari seemed to do this kind of thing all the time.
There were some interesting facts in Sapiens but there was so much fluff as well. Maybe this is just me but do we really need a page of speculation about what society would have been like if we used seashells as currency?
Maybe it’s the editors fault but I though Sapiens could have been a cut down to a third of its length by removing (to me) useless, unreferenced speculation about what people may have thought. A don’t get me started on the poor referencing.
Anyway this has turned into a bit of a rant so I’m going to stop here.
Highly recommend Ideas: A History. It’s denser, a little drier but definitely far superior to Sapiens.
I just finished this recently and would definitely recommend as well. It really made me question a lot of assumptions I had about humanity and history. For example it's really not obvious that the agricultural revolution should have ever taken place considering the challenges associated with changing from a proven system for survival.
Fantastic and I completely agree. The book helped me to get perspective on current events and helped provide relevant historical precedent for almost everything in the world around us.
For example, I never thought about how ideas that are touted by organizations or religions are frequently argued to be "natural" or "divine" or somehow sewn into the fabric of the universe. The book helped me to become a little more skeptical by portraying how versatile and diverse human societies can be, and how there is truly very little that is "natural", "eternal", and meant to be.
Similarly, the book helped me to realize how unprecedented the current rates of economic and technological growth are. Its an exciting time to be alive, filled with almost infinite possibilities, and that fact is especially inspiring when you understand how much more restrictive previous generations and cultures were.
I'm finding it a bit hit and miss. I agree, the "shared myths" notion is very appealing. And I enjoy learning the facts that form the skeleton on which he pins his thinking. However, I can't help feeling that a professional thinker -- philosopher, whoever -- would debate his proposals. It seems to me that a collaboration with a second author would have leant robustness to his philosophy. As it stands, it comes across as an historian stepping outside of his expertise unchallenged. All well and good, but a bit flimsy.
I look forward to reading further books published in response by others.
It was a funny book in that he introduced very few facts about the world that I didn't already know, but that he tied all of it together so well. I find that I'm a much more empathetic and rational person whenever I try to frame my opinion of something/someone the way Harari would.
The Design of Everyday Things makes me rethink every user interaction or problem I face, and not just at work. Every time I open a door, I begin to think about that experience.
Recently, Educated by Tara Westover, and in the past The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls, both have taught me to approach individuals with the true ignorance of their lives that I have. You don't know where people come from and what life led them to where they are when you meet them. Try not to make assumptions. Additionally, I have to remind myself that I grew up loved, cared for, and privileged compared to so many other people.. the fact that I could read their story and post here is a testament to that, helps me try to stay down to Earth and that I had some advantages growing up that others did not.
Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker... I used to be a chronic advocate for sleeping less until I read this and did my own scrappy post-research. I'm much more conscious of my health and my sleep now.
Please do go on, you seem to have similar taste to mine (Why We Sleep and Design of Everyday Things) so I'd love to know which other books make it into your top 10 or whatever.
Antifragile: How to live in a world we don't understand by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
I realized that my bad relationships are mostly the result of my lack of skin in the game. That indifference is not an advantage but that it is paralyzing.
That I have to feel to be able to risk and do something.
In addition to applying the concept of antifragility to many external things.
It has motivated me to start a business and to connect more with my loved ones, changed my perspective on research, what's important and the power of the passing of time. It definitely impacted my life.
Nassim is really a great thinker. His latest book "Skin in the game" probably is underestimated by the public. It's relevant to quite a lot of current events happening that have a huge impact on modern society.
Most recent: Factfulness, by Hans Rosling. For the past year or so, I've been trying hard to understand why people act the way they do, when those actions and beliefs are often irrational. This book brought so much of that together.
Very first: The Song of Wandering Aengus, by William Butler Yeats. I read this when I was six or so. I found it as an illustrated children's book in children's section of the public library of the very small rural town. Someone decided this very adult poem, about an old man who wasted his life chasing an unattainable magic dream, was a good children's story. It introduced me to the idea that poems and stories could express sadness and failure and other negative feelings, not just the happy silly stuff of the other age-appropriate things I read.
Now I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands
But I will find out where she's gone
Kiss her lips, and take her hands
And wander through the dappled grass
Pluck 'til time and times are done
The silver apples of the Moon
Golden apples of the Sun
"Metaphors We Live By" by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson changed how I thought about language and how I use it to orient myself in the world.
"Thinking in Systems: A Primer" by Donella Meadows changed how I approached designing/troubleshooting software systems as well as changed how I think about political policy decisions and their results.
"Object Thinking" by David West dramatically altered how I approach designing OO systems. I especially liked the chapter(s) where he used different real-world metaphors for designing systems. For example, asynchronous communication (email) is often more appropriate than synchronous communication (calling someone on the phone). Delegation of tasks without "micromanaging" (i.e tell don't ask).
"Ever Wonder Why?" by Thomas Sowell gave me an insight into some of the underpinnings of Conservative thought. I'd never had the opportunity to hear any of the arguments he brings up in college or in my own liberal social groups.
Why is that you never hear about Sowell and his work? I consider myself fairly well read, but I've only discovered him the past few years. I wish I had found him earlier!
The only book I've ever bought judging by the cover (well, the title) only was George Lakoff's Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things. It wasn't what I expected (what did I expect??), but it was insightful and thought provoking. One of the first books I've come across that shows you that the world is much, much more complicated than the simple (and "obvious") stuff we are taught in school.
So many, and I wish I could write a long paragraph on each, but I'm unfortunately short on time. I'm posting any in case just one person who hasn't heard of those checks them out and gets value:
-Godel, Escher, Bach (Douglas Hosfstadter)
-The Mindbody Prescription (John E. Sarno, completely cured my long-term crippling RSI that kept me from using computers and was ruining my life)
-Feeling Good (Dr. Burns, cognitive therapy mostly centered on depression, but I want to learn about this before I have depression so that I can avoid it and do 'maintenance' on myself)
-The 5 Love Languages (Gary Chapman, made me understand a lot more about how people express and receive love, and the problems that arise from mismatched languages in relationships)
I can't believe this is the only post with Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman! Such a fun, creative book. Parts that stuck with me: lock picking, finding safety hazards at Oak Ridge, playing drums, working intensely.
I developed bad RSI starting about 5 months ago. It's manageable now (mostly from stretches and nerve glides my physical therapist taught me, and using an ergo keyboard and foot pedals) but was scary there for a bit. I've read about a third of the way through The Mindbody Presciption (after seeing it mentioned on HN) but I feel like he just keeps repeating himself and hasn't actually told me anything useful yet. I know I need to finish it but I'm curious what your experience was.
The problem with so many of these books is that there's been a lot of criticism and praise for all of them, tear downs, rebuttals, critiques, etc; not to mention various kinds of "evidence" both in support and against the various theories involved. The history of the ideas is long and convoluted, and is almost impossible to sort out today without a long and concerted effort on the part of the reader.
I prefer to take the information as more a "tour de force" - information to inspire my thinking, and where it seems to be relevant (or has supporting evidence of efficacy), application of it to problems at hand.
Yes, I second "The 5 Love Languages". Very good lessons for how to strenghten important relationships in my life. Before, I didn't realize how much more I prefered one kind of love language over some others.
The 5 Love Languages is not supported by any scientific research, basically, it's a load of bollocks. It's just the latest self help book to be in vogue.
Lots of things that work aren't supported by scientific research (yet?). It's your choice not to use it, but to claim that something is bollocks probably means that you will never follow what most people tell you about lots of things (where are all the double-blind peer-reviewed studies about how to bake a good cake or write a good novel?).
Yes, but claims about a "good cake" are not making generalized claims about human behavior. The only downside of a "bad cake" recipe is someone trying it and it's not a great cake.
There are massive consequences for releasing a book claiming to be a factual model for how human brains work and how people should behave towards each other based on this model. If the book becomes popular, this sort of model can become the defacto truth to most people and live on in public consciousness for years as pop psychology.
As an example, look at things like Meiers Briggs (ISTP, ENFJ etc), "Type A vs Type B personalities", DISC personality testing, etc. ALl of these are based on old, flawed, and straight up bad research. Yet companies across America (and the world) are still giving people training and hiring people based on these studies. Note, DISC, for example was based on William Moulton Marston's work, a guy who DIED in 1947. The "research" which became DISC is from 1928! Businesses are still dressing up this old and flawed research and selling it to businesses for huge profits.
"Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much" - by Sendhil Mullainathan, Eldar Shafir.
Access to scarce resources induces a particular scarcity mindset, which the authors -- both behavioural economists at Harvard and MIT respectively -- show with a large variety of
well-chosen examples.
The kicker is that time is one of those resources. In other words, I may be economically well-off, but if I'm short of time, I adopt the same scarce mindset that poor people (poor in money terms). I fritter away my time, I don't save it and so on. This book really showed me to deal with my time as carefully as I deal with my money. Great read, of the Freakonomics kind.
I imagine I’ll take heat for this, but the first answer that comes to mind is A Thousand Plateaus by Deleuze & Guattari. It has been justifiably criticized by many people on many grounds, but as with OP and Freakonomics, certain of the concepts in that book frequently appear in my thoughts 20 years after I worked through some of it. I don’t associate it with truth; but some of the mental models have really stuck with me.
Edit: also Finite and Infinite Games by James Carse. It’s slim and user friendly to a fault, and would be easy to underestimate at first glance, but imho contains great wisdom and beauty.
I've wanted to read A Thousand Plateaus for a few years. The first time I tried it, all that stuff about wolves and geology just lost me. I will have to try again. Honestly, I found it harder than Heidegger's Being and Time, which I worked through while listening to Hubert Dreyfus's lectures on iTunes U a few years ago.
Whenever I read about Deleuze and Guattari I get this feeling they are on to something - I just don't know what!
Perhaps try reading Freud's account of his treatment of the "wolf man" first - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergei_Pankejeff#Der_Wolfsmann... - then read the chapter "One Or Many Wolves", bearing in mind that it's dripping in sarcasm. That chapter had me laughing out loud.
I know what you mean. It’s hard to avoid feeling like what appears to be glossolalic nonsense would all be revealed as a majestic tour de force, perfectly comprehensible and life-changing, if you were familiar enough with Marx, Freud, Leibniz, Spinoza, Bergson, Kant, Sartre, and god knows whom else, to put it all together. I’m not, so I can’t prove or disprove the case, which makes it a weird answer to OP’s question; but per above, it remains the case for me that images and terms from that book have never stopped working in my ideation processes since I picked it up.
One thing with Thousand Plateaus is that you don't have to read the book in sequence. You can start with random chapter. That's the only thing I remember from the book.
Rhizomatic values and actions vs arborescent ones, de- and reterritorialization, the drawing of lines of flight, and nomadic war machines, more than anything else. I’m not sufficiently grounded in Marx or Freud to follow their narratives confidently, so my interpretations are probably overly simplistic; but I think they’d have approved of my taking the words and making them my own.
More than any of those individual terms though, I took from the book a sort of gestalt of expansive, additive, richly intellectual ideation, one based not on truth values, but in thinking new thoughts. In my edition, the translator’s introduction portrays D&G’s notion of a concept as a brick that should not be used to build a courthouse, but to be thrown through a window. This whole way of being in the world was enormously refreshing to me when I read it.
Roots vs trees? If these ideas have any merit, surely it should be possible to express them clearly, and without (gratuitous?) invocation of pseudo-scientific terms.
What is pseudoscientific about those words? Read the book to see how they are used, and why the selected language is actually sensible in its given context.
Your criticism is like telling a pharmacist not to use the terminology that distinguishes some kinds of drugs from others. It may be true that the blue pill makes your dick hard and the red pill cures your headache, but if you actually want to go into it and address why and how they do these things you need a more focused vocabulary that is clearly defined in its context of use (which G&D do).
A rhizome isn't just a root, it's an offshoot of a plant with the ability to create an entirely new plant.
You have a point with arborescent, but it is translated from French, and from what I know of French morphology, arborescent could probably sounds to a French person like "treeish" or "tree ADJ", and therefore not quite so formal/illegible.
The joke I tell about A Thousand Plateaus is that on one of the plateaus is good writing. Didn't make it into the book though
After I read it, I felt like I could see the world for what it really is: just a bunch of fallible humans all pretending they knew The Way Things Should Be. Popes, CEOs, tech gurus, presidents, the lot of them all desperately clinging to their beliefs lest their followers abandon them.
That book made me realize that all the truths everyone "just knows" and takes for granted aren't necessarily truths. They're beliefs, or myths. Even so, there isn't anything necessarily wrong with that: a culture or civilization needs beliefs or myths to function, but what those beliefs are can determine the ultimate fate of that civilization and whether it's sustainable.
What I really took away from it is that I no longer really believe anything. Or perhaps more accurately, I recognize when something I hold true is actually a belief and not truth, and am willing to question it or understand that I continue to hold it despite any supporting evidence. I learned that beliefs are choices people make, for reasons their own.
I was always an atheist, but I realized religions are just more beliefs like any other belief people hold as true.
I learned that some beliefs can be beneficial ("If I'm good to others, others will be good to me") and others destructive ("Humans are the pinnacle of evolution"). Ideas don't need to be true to be helpful (which is why the relentless drive in tech communities, often, for the objective truth or a logical ordering and categorization for everything rubs me the wrong way).
Note, of course, that he was wrong about the gene being the unit of selection. Selection happens at an organismal level. As we've come to understand the interconnectedness of the genome, this has become even more clear. Dawkins' ideas generated a lot of debate among evolutionary biologists in the 1980s, but have largely fallen out of favor. They're just too simplistic to reflect reality.
Glad that somebody pointed that out. IMO, if somebody wants to get a quick overview of genetics, their time would be much better spent watching lectures 4-7 from Sapolsky's Human Behavioural Biology lectures [1]. In those 4 lectures Sapolsky's explores contradicting theories about (among other things) the unit of selection and gradualism. Highly recommend the whole series.
I think the claim that Dawkins views are "just too simplistic to reflect reality" is probably too simplistic itself. For a start, you can check the Wikipedia article on The Selfish Gene and its section on units of selection: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Selfish_Gene#Units_of_sele...
There's evidence that selection happens at the organismal level (duh) and at the species level, but nothing else. There's some weak evidence that it can happen at levels above species (genus, family, etc), but it's not super well supported.
The question of population-level selection (what you've called group selection) is more contentious, although it shouldn't be. The grandpa of our field, E.O. Wilson, whom we all adore and wish we could constantly hug, loves the idea. Sadly, evidence doesn't love it. Like, there's basically none. There's no real theoretical underpinnings that would make it possible, either, because there's just too much gene flow between demes (...partially isolated breeding populations) to allow selection to happen.
> I didn't realise Dawkins' theory had been so thoroughly refuted.
It has not. The "battle lines" between the "Dawkins school" and the "Gould school" were established in the 1970s and 1980s, and they are pretty much the same still. Each school probably thinks they refuted the other one decades ago already.
Also the majority of biologists don't give these much thought either way.
>
What I encountered were quite a few references to Stephen Jay Gould, hardly any to other evolutionary theorists. Now it is not very hard to find out, if you spend a little while reading in evolution, that Gould is the John Kenneth Galbraith of his subject. That is, he is a wonderful writer who is bevolved by literary intellectuals and lionized by the media because he does not use algebra or difficult jargon. Unfortunately, it appears that he avoids these sins not because he has transcended his colleagues but because he does does not seem to understand what they have to say; and his own descriptions of what the field is about - not just the answers, but even the questions - are consistently misleading. His impressive literary and historical erudition makes his work seem profound to most readers, but informed readers eventually conclude that there's no there there.
> If you've read anything Stephen J. Gould has ever said about evolutionary biology, I have some bad news for you. In the field of evolutionary biology at large, Gould's reputation is mud. Not because he was wrong. Many honest scientists have made honest mistakes. What Gould did was much worse, involving deliberate misrepresentation of science.
neither of those quotes, written by people who are not biologists, actually demonstrate how Gould is supposedly wrong. I find it ironic that they are the ones accusing Gould of politicizing evolutionary biology, but they are the ones doing the politicizing.
What Prominent Biologists Think of Stephen Jay Gould
Many nonspecialists believe that Stephen Jay Gould was the preeminent evolutionary theorist of the 20th century. His The Mismeasure of Man might be the most widely read book on biology/evolution among scholars in the humanities. But people specializing in the fields in which Gould pontificated generally had a poor opinion of his scholarship.
Bernard D. Davis (1983)
It is…not surprising that Gould’s history of the efforts to measure human intelligence, The Mismeasure of Man, received many glowing reviews in the popular and literary press, and even a National Book Critics Circle award. Yet the reviews that have appeared in scientific journals, focusing on content rather than on style or on political appeal, have been highly critical of both the book’s version of history and its scientific arguments. The paradox is striking. If a scholar wrote a tendentious history of medicine that began with phlebotomy and purges, moved on to the Tuskegee experiment on syphilitic Negroes, and ended with the thalidomide disaster, he would convince few people that medicine is all bad, and he would ruin his reputation. So we must ask: Why did Gould write a book that fits this model all too closely? Why were most reviewers so uncritical? And how can non-scientific journals improve their reviews of books on scientific aspects of controversial political issues?
John Maynard Smith (1995)
Gould occupies a rather curious position, particularly on his side of the Atlantic. Because of the excellence of his essays, he has come to be seen by non-biologists as the preeminent evolutionary theorist. In contrast, the evolutionary biologists with whom I have discussed his work tend to see him as a man whose ideas are so confused as to be hardly worth bothering with, but as one who should not be publically criticised because he is at least on our side against the creationists. All this would not matter, were it not that he is giving non-biologists a largely false picture of the state of evolutionary biology.
Ernst Mayr (2000)
Skeptic: You developed your theory of allopatric speciation in the 1940s and 1950s. In the 1970s Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould applied that to the fossil record and called it punctuated equilibrium. Was this just a spin-off from what you had already done? What was new in punctuated equilibrium?
Mayr: I published that theory in a 1954 paper (“Change of Genetic Environment and Evolution,” in Huxley, J., A.C. Hardy, and E.B. Ford, Eds., Evolution as a Process, London: Allen and Unwin), and I clearly related it to paleontology. Darwin argued that the fossil record is very incomplete because some species fossilize better than others. But what I derived from my research in the South Sea Islands is that in these isolated little populations it is much easier to make a genetic restructuring because when the numbers are small it takes rather few steps to become a new species. A small local population that changes very rapidly. I noted that you are never going to find evidence of a small local population that changed very rapidly in the fossil record. My essential point was that gradual populational shifts in founder populations appear in the fossil record as gaps.
Skeptic: Isn’t that what Eldredge and Gould argued in their 1972 paper, citing your 1963 book Animal Species and Evolution several times?
Mayr: Gould was my course assistant at Harvard where I presented this theory again and again for three years. So he knew it thoroughly. So did Eldredge. In fact, in his 1971 paper Eldredge credited me with it. But that was lost over time.
E. O. Wilson (2011)
I believe Gould was a charlatan….I believe that he was…seeking reputation and credibility as a scientist and writer, and he did it consistently by distorting what other scientists were saying and devising arguments based upon that distortion.
Richard Lewontin (2015)
Steve and I taught evolution together for years and in a sense we struggled in class constantly because Steve, in my view, was preoccupied with the desire to be considered a very original and great evolutionary theorist. So he would exaggerate and even caricature certain features, which are true but not the way you want to present them. For example, punctuated equilibrium, one of his favorites. He would go to the blackboard and show a trait rising gradually and then becoming completely flat for a while with no change at all, and then rising quickly and then completely flat, etc. which is a kind of caricature of the fact that there is variability in the evolution of traits, sometimes faster and sometimes slower, but which he made into punctuated equilibrium literally. Then I would have to get up in class and say “Don’t take this caricature too seriously. It really looks like this…” and I would make some more gradual variable rates. Steve and I had that kind of struggle constantly. He would fasten on a particular interesting aspect of the evolutionary process and then make it into a kind of rigid, almost vacuous rule, because—now I have to say that this is my view—I have no demonstration of it—that Steve was really preoccupied by becoming a famous evolutionist.
Robert Trivers (2015)
Many of us theoretical biologists who knew Stephen personally thought he was something of an intellectual fraud precisely because he had a talent for coining terms that promised more than they could deliver, while claiming exactly the opposite. One example was the notion of “punctuated equilibria”—which simply asserted that rates of (morphological) evolution were not constant, but varied over time, often with periods of long stasis interspersed with periods of rapid change. All of this was well known from the time of Darwin. The classic example were bats. They apparently evolved very quickly from small non-flying mammals (in perhaps less than 20 million years) but then stayed relatively unchanged once they reached the bat phenotype we are all familiar with today (about 50 million years ago). Nothing very surprising here, intermediate forms were apt to be neither very good classic mammals, nor good flying ones either, so natural selection pushed them rapidly through the relevant evolutionary space.
But Steve wanted to turn this into something grander, a justification for replacing natural selection (favoring individual reproductive success) with something called species selection. Since one could easily imagine that there was rapid turnover of species during periods of intense selection and morphological change, one might expect species selection to be more intense, while during the rest of the equilibrium stabilizing selection would rule throughout. But rate of species turnover has nothing to do with the traits within species—only with the relative frequency of species showing these traits. As would prove usual, Steve missed the larger interesting science by embracing a self-serving fantasy. Species selection today is a small but interesting topic in evolutionary theory, not some grand principle emerging from paleontological patterns….
Hard to imagine—but at the end the organism appears to be in full self-deception mode—a blow-hard fraudulently imputing fraud, with righteous indignation, coupled with magnanimous forgiveness for the frailties of self-deception in others….
Much less so, it was said was Stephen Gould, who was into self-promotion, self-inflation and self-deception full time. Not only was his science hopeless but so was much of his behavior in other contexts as well.
Again, I find it really funny that these guys are politicizing the guy who they claim to be politicizing science. All of this critique is criticism of character and of rhetorical style.
As an aside, I also think it's funny that you could easily* substitute the name Gould for Feynman in each of these criticisms, but somehow Feynman is considered a demi-god among physicists for having the same 'character flaws' and rhetorical flair.
Your first criticism was that Krugman and Yudkowsky weren’t biologists, so I found multiple examples of biologists saying Gould was untrustworthy. Now you’re claiming that the critics of Gould are politicising science. This is a bit rich seeing as Gould always put his politics above science.
Comparing Feynman to Gould is distasteful. They may both have been blowhards, self publicists and excellent writers but only one of them launched campaigns of harassment against other researchers. You could not easily substitute Feynman for Gould in these criticisms. Feynman never wrote anything as dishonest as Mismeasure of Man.
> Opposition to sociobiology and evolutionary psychology
Gould also had a long-running public feud with E. O. Wilson and other evolutionary biologists concerning the disciplines of human sociobiology and evolutionary psychology, both of which Gould and Lewontin opposed, but which Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Steven Pinker advocated.[93] These debates reached their climax in the 1970s, and included strong opposition from groups such as the Sociobiology Study Group and Science for the People.[94] Pinker accuses Gould, Lewontin, and other opponents of evolutionary psychology of being "radical scientists", whose stance on human nature is influenced by politics rather than science.
If you would like to back up your claim that the same criticisms could be made of Feynman as of Gould here are the summaries. I’m sure the parallel statements will be easy to find if you’re right about Feynman.
Krugman: Gould was a good writer but vastly more respected outside his field than in it because he was a good writer more than a good scientist.
Yudkowsky: Gould wrote multiple books in which he acted as if other peoples’ life’s work was unknown to him, pawning off their intellectual work as his own, pretending that the field was in a state of confusion and that he, the towering genius, had brought closure and clarity.
Davis: Gould wrote a book of breathtaking intellectual dishonesty that was looked upon with favour in the popular press and panned by experts writing for other experts.
Smith: His ideas are so confused as to be unworthy of discussion but outsiders think he’s a genius of the field because he can write well.
Mayr: One of Gould’s only actual claims to originality was a trivial extension of work dating back either to the founder of the field or to a course taught to undergraduates in which he was a teaching assistant.
Wilson: Gould was a charlatan who dishonestly and repeatedly mischaracterised the work of other scientists.
Lewontin: Gould would take reasonable ideas and caricature them to the point they were plainly wrong.
> Your first criticism was that Krugman and Yudkowsky weren’t biologists, so I found multiple examples of biologists saying Gould was untrustworthy. Now you’re claiming that the critics of Gould are politicising science. This is a bit rich seeing as Gould always put his politics above science.
And they are guilty of the exact same non-arguments. Doesn't matter if they are scientists or non-scientists, the criticisms are exactly the same.
>> Opposition to sociobiology and evolutionary psychology Gould also had a long-running public feud with E. O. Wilson and other evolutionary biologists concerning the disciplines of human sociobiology and evolutionary psychology, both of which Gould and Lewontin opposed, but which Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Steven Pinker advocated.[93] These debates reached their climax in the 1970s, and included strong opposition from groups such as the Sociobiology Study Group and Science for the People.[94] Pinker accuses Gould, Lewontin, and other opponents of evolutionary psychology of being "radical scientists", whose stance on human nature is influenced by politics rather than science.
Again, where's the real critique of opposition to sociobiology? There are actually numerous flaws with sociobiology and evo-psych, which you seem to just dismiss out of hand as made up lies. The interdisciplinary fields of Science and Technology Studies and Sociology of Scientific Knowledge, which Gould was drawing from (though not necessarily in an optimal manner) provide sober critiques of the authority of science and of the political nature of knowledge and knowledge production. These fields look at how scientific practice is actually done and draw out mechanisms through which knowledge is produced through the interactions between people, prior knowledge and beliefs, objects of experimentation or evaluation, goals, pragmatic circumstances, 'grey' and information infrastructures, and community norms and expectations. Take a look at Epistemic Cultures (https://www.worldcat.org/title/epistemic-cultures-how-the-sc...) for a great example of such work, which compares scientific practice among high-energy physicists and molecular biologists, who follow very different trajectories in the formulation of new ideas, according to their circumstances and needs.
Gould's work is along similar lines.
One major critique of the Mismeasure of Man is that Gould dredges up long-dead hypotheses about race. However, these claims are in fact not dead, and have real impact on the world today. As an archaeologist, I can relate. Laypeople still think that archaeology does and believes things that have been debunked and shifted away from decades ago, things that 'prove' the inferiority of some races or that fuel nationalist and racist agendas. The thing is, people who are devising racist and nationalist policy are generally not intellectually honest, and don't care to actually read up on why or how these claims are wrong. They find an article from 1934 that supports their views and they go with it, and dismiss any criticism as coming from ""radical scientists", whose stance on human nature is influenced by politics rather than science.". Mismeasure of Man is clearly a popular non-fiction book geared towards educating laypeople about the flaws of race science, with the hope that people will recognize when policy is being enacted based on shitty science and oppose it when they do.
I’m glad we’ve come to an agreement that Gould was on at least one occasion a tendentious writer and that you’ve withdrawn your claim that Feynman was anything like him. I’m going to bow out here. Good luck with your archaeological work.
I am not asserting that he is tendentious. I'm writing that his public outreach work is a necessary part of being a scientist, as it helps improve public understanding of valid and invalid knowledge, and helps hold its improper use to account. You're trying to split the difference regarding your original claims, but you're just plain wrong.
I never took back a word of my original claims though I did respond to your further claims in response, always backing them up with quotes and citations.
Below you or any other future readers may find a guide to the many faults in The Mismeasure of Man, all of which misunderstandings, distortions and deliberate omissions tended certain ways which supported Gould’s politics, though not the truth.
Stephen Jay Gould’s Analysis of the Army Beta Test in The Mismeasure of Man: Distortions and Misconceptions Regarding a Pioneering Mental Test
> 5.1 Gould’s Judgments of the Army Beta
Among the many topics of negative analysis in Stephen Jay Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man [1] is the Army Beta test. Although not the most prominent section of Gould’s text, his 23-page passage on the Army Beta is typical of his style in the book. Throughout the book, Gould criticized early scientists who studied individual and group differences of being misled by preconceived notions based on their social beliefs—instead of the data. Yet, Gould himself was motivated to write The Mismeasure of Man by his strong political and social beliefs, which guided him to present his text describing the early intelligence scientists as blinded by their prejudices [4,7,12,50]. Given Gould’s pervasively incorrect statements in The Mismeasure of Man about the Army Beta, factor analysis [3], the place of intelligence testing in the immigration debates of the 1920s [5,9,10], the biological basis for intelligence [4,8,9], and the questions regarding Gould’s analysis of Morton’s work [11–14], we wonder whether there is any section of The Mismeasure of Man that is factually accurate.
Like other sections of The Mismeasure of Man, when Gould wrote about the Army Beta, he omitted relevant information that contradicted his preconceived beliefs and misinterpreted data in order to portray the study of individual human differences as ideological pseudoscience. Contrary to Gould’s claims, the Army Beta’s content, instructions, and time limits were all appropriate for a group-administered intelligence test a hundred years ago. We believe we have also demonstrated that the Army Beta very likely measured intelligence, given the results of multiple confirmatory factor analyses and the positive correlations with external criteria (both during World War I and in modern times).
I never claimed you took back any of your own claims. But you did misrepresent mine. Your quotes and citations do not support your argument in any way, and are therefore irrelevant.
I did not read the entire article you just posted, but it is worth noting that it misrepresents Mismeasure of Man as clinical research itself, rather than a historical and theoretical critique which it is, and holds improper standards against it (which is very funny because that's exactly what they claim Gould is guilty of!). Historical research is certainly biased, and that's okay. Historical research depends on omission as a crucial feature, otherwise how would you write a book about a focused topic? The two kinds of work have different kinds of data and follow different argumentation strategies, yet the authors of this paper expect otherwise. This is unreasonable and demonstrates a clear lack of understanding regarding what history is, and I have a hard time taking them seriously as a result.
Dawkins is amazingly lucid when he sticks to topics he knows very well. “The Selfish Gene” and “The Extended Phenotype” were world altering for me. Like integral calculus, I rarely have cause to apply the concept in the domain in which it was described, but the understanding that his conveyance of the material shaped in me is something I feel in my thinking every day, more than two decades later.
“The Mating Mind” by Geoffrey Miller (another biologist who would do the world a favor by sticking to his domain of expertise) came to me more recently but has left a similar impression. It impeccably elaborates upon the power of sexual selection and how it intertwines with natural selection.
Hmm, I'll check that Darwinian Fairytales out. However, I must say, I've read Alas, Poor Darwin: Arguments against Evolutionary Psychology, to see what critics of Dawkins and evolutionary psychology had to say, and found it rather poor.
So, for now, my considered view is that Dawkins has many interesting insightful things to say, while his critics are often attacking straw men.
The search engine coughed up a PDF. I randomly opened it (p. 173) and read up to this author-provided "TL;DR" on p.176:
The main reason, however, for thinking that sociobiology is false, is the simple
one I gave at the beginning: that it is obvious that human beings are the most
intelligent and capable things on earth. But genes are not human. Therefore (etc.).
Well, it might make more sense in context. You can't litterally read a random sentence on a random page of a book and expect to have a reasonable opinion on its quality.
It's such a weird twist of irony that someone like Dawkins invented a term that has been so abused and deformed beyond all recognition. As expected, he hates what it's become; but it has truly evolved, beyond his control, so there's a wonderful truth there!
I also recommend Dawkins' follow-up book, "The Extended Phenotype." Dawkins' most popular writing may be on atheism and the critique of religion, but I think his greatest contributions were really found in this book plus The Selfish Gene. Though as a caveat, "The Extended Phenotype" requires some more technical sophistication in evolutionary biology than Selfish Gene.
I enjoyed that and some of his other books, but it was The God Delusion that did it for me. Having been born in a religious society makes it hard to break out of needing to assume there is a god, but that book could give people enough explanation to drop that assumption.
I always think it's really interesting how our upbringings shape us. I'd never even heard of god until I was 4, when I must have heard the word mentioned, asked my dad what it mean, and it was explained to me as a thing up in the sky that some people believe in.
Seconded. This is the only book I’ve read that truly “changed” the way I think (excluding school textbooks) in a fundamental way. It was like discovering a new spacial dimension orthogonal to the existing 3. Like, how did I even live before this book?
Seconded. I actually read "The Blind Watchmaker" first and that had just as big an impact on me. As someone else said, no going back after reading it. It also gave me the confidence to realise I was actually an atheist, not an apologetic agnostic!
I read through the bible every year and each time it shapes my thinking. For example, I was reading Exodus this morning about how we should care for the foreigner. I imagine several thousand years ago this was pretty radical. It also seems very relevant today.
Not only that, but the 4th commandment (of the 10) was changed to include their experience in Egypt related to "foreigners" and the sabbath.
Exodus 10:11,12 (NASB)
"...but the seventh day is a sabbath of the LORD your God; [in it] you shall not do any work, you or your son or your daughter, your male or your female servant or your cattle or your sojourner who stays with you. For in six days the LORD made the heavens and the earth, the sea and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day; therefore the LORD blessed the sabbath day and made it holy."
Then notice the change in Deuteronomy, it's specifically to address the experience of being a "foreigner" and being mistreated in Egypt.
Deut 4:14,15
"...but the seventh day is a sabbath of the LORD your God; [in it] you shall not do any work, you or your son or your daughter or your male servant or your female servant or your ox or your donkey or any of your cattle or your sojourner who stays with you, so that your male servant and your female servant may rest as well as you. You shall remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the LORD your God brought you out of there by a mighty hand and by an outstretched arm; therefore the LORD your God commanded you to observe the sabbath day."
It's really sad when people who claim to be "Christian" do not understand that the most foundational teachings of God in the bible include caring for foreigners in a very personal and special way.
I've been listening to the Bible when I drive somewhere almost every day since the beginning of last year. I use Prof. Horner's plan, which divides it into ten lists, and provides a consecutive chapter to read or listen to for each lists. So, ten chapters a day at 1.25x (it sounds like a New York cadence) takes about 25-35 minutes. The YouVersion Bible app makes it automatic for me. The idea is that you get an intense survey of all the books. Here's a brief description of the plan: https://www.bible.com/reading-plans/19-professor-horners-bib...
It has gradually shaped my thinking in ways that is hard to describe. I've really began to understand just how much the Old and New Testaments tie together; many ideas and concepts are repeated several times in different books.
does the YouVersion app continue all 10 lists for the full length of the plan? Each list has a different number of chapters and I haven't done the math, but it looks like they aren't going to evenly line back up after 1 or two cycles. Looks like an interesting plan to me, but based on my YouVersion experience it seems like they are probably non-ideal. Obviously you like it, so I'm curious how it works.
Yes, that is the beauty of the plan. The shortest list is just the book of Acts (28 chapters), and the next shortest in the book of Proverbs (31 chapters). When a list ends, it starts over again. So over the course of the year, you'll go over those books ~12 times. The longest two lists are the Pentateuch books (200+ chapters) and the prophetic books (250 chapters). So on any given day, you are listening to various books that keep changing, and you get a mix that helps you form connections between the books.
I have just two minor quibbles with the YouVersion plan:
1. As the chapters are being read, each chapter is announced with just the number, not the book. So you have to guess the book from the context. This was confusing the first couple months, until I became familiar enough with them to be able to guess the book from the content and the context of the chapter.
2. The plan is meant to continue indefinitely, but the YouVersion plan must be restarted after the first cycle (250 days). It irks the perfectionist in me, but in practice it's no big deal.
I second that. For a book that's the foundation of our entire Western Civilization it's amazing that so few read it these days. No wonder our civilization is breaking down. Not to mention how mythologies in so many cultures have embedded remnants of its first book, Genesis. Also the inspiration of countless masterpieces of literature like the novel by Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita (1989), mentioned at the top of this list.
> For a book that's the foundation of our entire Western Civilization
That might be putting it a bit strongly. "western civilization" derives from ancient greek society, which wasn't christian, but contained many concepts that are considered foundational to our society (such as democracy).
It may be putting it a bit strongly, but biblical references and allusions permeate the Western canon and Western culture pretty thoroughly. For the last 500 years it was the only book that nearly everyone had read. Before that it was for over a thousand years the only book everyone knew at least some of.
Few books have ever had such penetration of a culture. The Koran, the Analects, the Pali Canon are perhaps the only meaningful comparisons.
The 500 years figure I chose was not a coincidence. The printing press and the Reformation are connected. If a person in Europe or the New World could read, they would have read some or all of it.
Before that familiarity came from weekly readings at Mass, which is why I talked about partial familiarity for the thousand years prior.
I'm an atheist, but there's a difference between dismissing the book's contents and dismissing the impact and influence of the book's contents.
Actually learned persons in the west have considered democracy a terrible form of government that inevitably gives rise to tyranny for millenia. It's hardly foundational, rather it's a known anti-pattern. Republics were an attempt to harness the benefits of democracy without the drawbacks.
I set out to read through the bible once, but I don't believe I can get much from the prose style of KJV or similar. I decided on some website that would send me a free "modern", more readable, version. Unfortunately, they never sent it and I moved on.
Is there a version you might recommend? Or just advice on reading the archaic prose?
For reading, I like the English Standard Version ['ESV']. Kind of splits the difference between erudition and enjoyability.
KJV is cool for the Cormac McCarthy-esque prose [strike that, reverse it], sounds great when declaimed, but it is kind of a chore to machete through as a reader.
There are so many variants these days, it's not unlike choosing a Linux distro
Yeah, ESV and NIV (new international version) are pretty solid. Also the NKJV (new king james version) is a good one.
http://bible.com has ~60 english versions and a way to show 2 in parallel if you want to compare a few. http://biblegateway.com lets you look at 5 at a time... I thought I remembered one that let you do arbitrary number, but I can't find that one.
My go-to vote as well. Some of my favorite passages pertain to the awareness of-and management of- one's internal motivation and thought process when attempting to do good work.
"So the thing to do when working on a motorcycle, as in any other task, is to cultivate the peace of mind which does not separate one’s self from one's surroundings. When that is done successfully then everything else follows naturally. Peace of mind produces right values, right values produce right thoughts. Right thoughts produce right actions and right actions produce work which will be a material reflection for others to see of the serenity at the center of it all."
I read it 45 years ago and liked it. But the only thing that sticks in my memory -- and it is enough, I suppose -- is the author helping his friend fix his motorcycle with a piece of shim made on the spot from a Coke can.
The sequel, Lila, is also really great. He's worked out the structure of Quality, in detail, and it makes a lot of sense. p.s. If you love Pirsig, read Thoreau's A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849) - the form is identical.
My inspiration when it came to me learning/building/programming computers and most everything else I undertook in my 20's. It made me strive to be a know-er of things, not just a user.
This book changed my worldview too. For me more the idea that the world is how you perceive it, that events and objects have more than one aspect, property or interpretation.
Yes! This book also got me to read Walden by Henry David Thoreau, which was also life changing.
I never fully understood what Pirsig meant by Quality though. I could not understand what it really was, but I didn’t need to. I got so much good out of the book. But if someone could explain better I’d love to hear.
My personal understanding is that much of the point of the book is less to give you a direct understanding of Quality itself, which he says is not directly understandable, but to surround the concept, give you the parameters, where it is where it isn't, being able to identify it when you see it.
+1 For Zen & The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. This book lead me to accept a lot of parts of myself and seek to integrate all those parts together. I credit it with starting the journey that changed my life.
im sorry i love these threads and all the people contributing but this book is overrated. Please explain to me what is so great and life changing about this book.
It will change your whole conception of what language is and how it can be used. It’s not about the characters or plots; they are recycled from antiquity. It’s about the absolute mastery of interrelation between words and imagery. It is something that has a meaning entirely emergent of its’ own self referential structure, rather than what is being described, in a sense that is almost mathematical. Realizing that was possible with writing really blew my mind.
Reader beware, this book can eat smart people. I've known multiple PhDs who, after reading Ulysses, could never get through a party without talking about it.
'Joke' from my mother (an English Lit. professor):
If someone tells you they enjoyed Ulysses, they're either pretentious or mad.
If someone tells you they enjoyed Finnegan's Wake, they're a liar -- because no-one has made it through that book.
A good number (I won't say plenty) of people have read Finnegans Wake and enjoyed it. At the risk of being branded a liar I can say that I've read the whole thing (out loud) and found it a very worthwhile experience. Some of the language play is very enjoyable.
n.b. reading _Finnegans Wake_ out loud is fundamental to the purpose of the book and it's enjoyment as a reader. I find myself laughing regularly and not knowing exactly why; maybe just because of the surrealist nature of the language.
The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, by Carl Sagan.
It changed the way I see the world, how to have a sceptical mind and not only how but why one should question.
And also, it shows to me that, if you don't have a answer for something, doesn't mean that it can not be true. It's just that you don't know. And for a lot of things, this is the correct and only answer that we can have now.
I read this book at a time when I had lost my religion which had been very dear to me and the foundation all of my thinking. I was reading lots of different religious texts. This was the first thing I read that said that how we know what we know is more important than what we know. It was the first philosophy I had encountered that would challenge even evidence in favor of itself on the grounds that that evidence didn't meet a certain bar of quality. That was huge and this book helped me understand that concept. Which really made scientific skepticism stand out from other belief systems.
I came from a deeply religious family and read this book after reading Contact (a friend lent me). It too had a lasting impact on my worldview. I cultivate a skeptical worldview nowadays thanks to this book.
He took me out of the pit of my sunken thoughts, I wake up, I take off the blindfold, it was the first book to open my mind and I will always be grateful
I second the recommendation of Finite and Infinite Games by James P. Carse. He takes this simple concept and expands and applies it to modern tech, politics, the workplace, education, etc:
"There are at least two kinds of games. One could be called finite, the other infinite. A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play."
The player in a finite game actually wants it to end, where the play itself is just a means to this end. He is "playing against play." The player in an infinite game wants it to continue, and revels in the game itself.
"Although it may be obvious, it is worth stressing that “play,” as it is used here does not mean merely “playing around.” Play, in this discussion, is a metaphor for any number of complex human engagements whenever they take on a competitive, or cooperative, character. Corporations, for example, not only compete with each other but are in themselves populations of strivers, each trying to supplant another, each struggling for higher incomes and titles. The same applies to schools and colleges where attaining superior grade averages, degrees, and honors absorb the lives of students. Sexuality and marriage are often finite battle grounds with winners and losers. In fact, the features of play–finite and infinite–are essentially the same whether we are children playing jacks or soldiers caught up in a war between nations."
To me it is a concise and broadly applicable way to see the world.
Jordan Peterson describes something like this, but as if one is embedded within the other, as the game itself which can be wonr or lost, and the meta-game of all future games which means you get to continue playing; and uses it to discuss why cheating in games is so bad, especially when teaching children about cooperation.
Cheating might win you the game, but it means nobody will trust you and nobody will want to play with you in future and you're out of the meta-game, you lost the more important thing. It's important to lose fairly at a game, so you get to play again long term.
Something that comes up in HPMOR where a dark lord can't submit and be humble to learn a lesson, instead fighting and killing everyone but losing the larger goal, and something which surely comes up every time someone is "technically right" on a mailing list or forum argument but in such a way that nobody wants to engage with them in future.
1) "The Beginning of Infinity" by David Deutsch - This book allowed me to embrace a sort of rational optimism in my world view. Also I was convinced by this book that the true test of a good government is not about whether you can pick the right leaders every time, but about being able to remove the bad ones relatively quickly.
2.) Candide by Voltaire - contributed to my personal sense of humor and belief that we live in neither the best nor worst of all possible worlds, but simply the most absurd of them.
3) The Art of War by Sun Tzu - Helped me understand the power of small effeciencies in large systems and the importance of metagaming.
RAW's Cosmic Trigger and Prometheus Rising for me: I read both when I was 13 and was a recently-converted Southern Baptist. I quickly shifted my entire understanding of epistemology and the nature of reality.
Wilson's "Everything is Under Control" was another important one for me after the Illuminatus! Trilogy. That's what sent me down the path into Thomas Pynchon, Hakim Bey, Noam Chomsky, etc. Can't really turn back after that.
I can't belive nobody has mentioned "Walden" by Henry David Thoreau.
To be fair, I'm not a big recreational reader. But this one will always stick out to me. When I read it in college, it had such a profound effect on me, I belive it literally helped shape who I am as a person even to this day
Maybe it was right place, right time. It is certainly an impressionable age, but I have read it again as an older man, & it was just as powerful.
I've read "Guns, germs & steel", "How to win friends & influence people", "Freakonomics" & some of the other stuff that pop up in the comments, they are all fine. But none of them influenced me like "Walden" did.
When I initially read this thread I had precisely the same reaction.
Emerson and Thoreau weren’t just naturalists preaching justice. Their Nature is the same Nature Marcus Aurelius refers to in Meditations. Once you put their work in the context of the Trinitarian/Unitarian debate of the early 19th century, you see how deeply they thought about not just civilization, but science and philosophy together.
I’d add to Walden, Emerson’s Nature, and especially his essay Man, the Reformer. In today’s ultra-specialized and mostly-capitalist society, this piece has the power to simultaneously shatter and solidify your identity and sense of worth.
The Transcendentalist practically gave young America its voice following independence. They’re certainly worth revisiting if you only remember Walden as a reclusive pond.
"Difficult Conversations: How to discuss what matters most". I bought this on the strength of an HN suggestion.
It's like Design Patterns for human conversations: the result of studying how people interact, common patterns that work, and how things break down. Really crystallised a lot of insights I'd perceived but never thought about systematically. I highly recommend it.
Word of warning - there are a few books with this title. Look for the one by Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton, Sheila Heen.
Also Thinking Fast and Slow, recommended elsewhere in this thread.
On the surface, it's about how to have conversations about difficult topics. Often these are conflict resolution type conversations. These range all the way from "you never take the bins out" to marriage breakups to large international political conflicts. These conversations can often go off the rails and conflicts are made worse, not solved. Whatever the scale, these kinds of conversations tend to follow familiar routes.
If you dispair at the way that conversations tend to devolve into personal attacks in national politics, office politics or your day-to-day interactions, this book is a very insightful handbook.
The book is the result of a big study at Harvard Business School of a large number of case studies. It spots the patterns that humans tend toward. In each case it identifies the pattern, why it happens, what the result can be (usually negative) and how to spot it coming and mitigate it. It also has snippets of conversation as case studies.
It's been a while, so I can't remember each item. But one example is that people tend to connect their identity to the point they are trying to argue. You challenge the point but to your conversation partner it feels like a direct personal attack. If you can find a way to acknowledge that connection, gently separate it from the identity, you have a much better chance of resolving the conflict.
I find a particularly strong parallel in the Gang of Four Design Patterns book. These are the broad problems that people try to solve with software, the structures that tend to emerge as people solve problems.
And, like design patterns, some things are deeply insightful and some things are obvious. E.g. of course 'iterators' are a thing. But development is so much better for having vocabulary to talk about them.
I can give one tiny little bit of advice from several years about tutoring and teaching mathematics and physics...
Always start with examples.
If I am trying to teach the fundamental ideas of complex analysis, I want to show folks how to take derivatives of complex functions with several worked examples and then show them how to do line-integrals on the complex plane -- I want them to have a big repertoire of things that they have worked out. I want them to have done for themselves several "closed loop" integrals that have come out to zero, and some that have come out to one, before I ever imagine putting the residue theorem underneath their noses. When I explain that analytic functions are these conformal maps which preserve angles, I want them to understand that how we defined analytic functions requires them to locally look like scaled rotations, and to understand that neither scaling nor rotation can change an angle.
Same thing in computing. I wouldn't dream about explaining what a monad is until I've explained what a functor is, and I wouldn't dream about explaining what a functor is without thinking through how lists and maybes and functions and eithers and pairs are all "outputtish" in a certain hard-to-describe way, maybe even discussing how a `forall z. (a -> z) -> z` is actually outputtish in `a` too, before I could finally define some bad definitions ("can get an output out of it" -- well no, I can't do that with the function!) and then alight on "okay so here's a good definition of outputtish as mappable, you can take a function and map it over the output" and then the fact that this has a specific jargon name at that point is no longer of any consequence, "we call this a functor" -- great, some name to memorize, but the concept is "not hard."
In other words, abstractions are patterns in concrete topics. The Dewey Decimal System organizes a library. It is incredibly difficult to convince someone to use the Dewey Decimal System to organize a pile of five books: "What's the point in having this big abstract unifying theory about book contents? I only have five of them!". But what you do if you want to teach someone the Dewey Decimal System is to make sure that first they have a whole library that is in some mess of a state, they can't find what they need to find and they can't see where to file new "books" (examples, pieces of information) and then you come over the hill with this Dewey Decimal System and you look like a righteous force for justice, "aha! everything can be well-organized!"
I have tried so many times to lead with the "Here's how you want to think about this sort of problem!" theory for all of my tutees, and it always leaves them looking at me with that "what abyss of hell did this crazy tutor crawl out of?" face. By contrast if I am just encouraging about "okay, what do you know about this system?" and am very careful to snip the premature theory of "Uh, F = m a?" that they have been exposed to, we can often work through a problem in words and then work through it in numbers and then I can suggest that here is a different way to think about it in terms of, say, momentum conservation.
"Debt: The first 5000 years" completely changed the way I view money, society, and relationships.
"The selfish gene" changed the way I define life, opened my eyes to virtual life, and morality of selfishness vs. altruism.
"Into the Cool: Energy Flow, Thermodynamics, and Life" changed the way I view the life and material existence. Whereas before I viewed them as two separate domains, after I see them as a spectrum.
Chinese classic taoism treaties: "Dao De Jing", and "Zhuan Zi", offers a via-negativa way of thinking and view of existence, the values are beyond words.
My pick is "Tao of Pooh," which is kind of a westerner's ELI5 of Taoism. I can't overemphasize how useful Taoism has been for me as a lens through which to understand and participate in the world. (And there really isn't much mysticism to it)
I second Tao of Pooh. It’s genuinely insightful and I plan to read it again. However no one I recommend it to seems to take it seriously. They think it’s a parody of some sort because it seems unlikely that a “serious” text would involve Winnie the Pooh.
> That made me prick up my ears, and say that that was not so. The example I gave was Graeber's claim that the:
>> Federal Reserve… is technically not part of the government at all, but a peculiar sort of public-private hybrid, a consortium of privately owned banks whose chairman is appointed by the United States president, with Congressional approval, but which otherwise operates without public oversight…
> That is the kind of glaring error that Graeber claims he does not make.
> Of the twelve votes on the Federal Open Market Committee, seven are cast either by the Governors of the Federal Reserve--who are officers of the United States government, nominated by the President, and confirmed by the Senate--and five are cast by Federal Reserve regional bank Presidents, who take office only when approved by a majority of the Governors.
> Not one, but all twelve.
..,
> And let me give the last word to a commenter on the last:
> I don't want to get involved with him because he's so damned crazy, but I just noticed that note 19 to chapter 12, p. 451. Egads. He has no idea what he's talking about. Not understanding the Treasury bond market in a book that purports to be a major treatise on debt???... Someone should tell him that deposits are liabilities for banks
>> But then he starts talking about how democratic methods of structuring organizations are often more efficient than rigid hierarchies, and so will often arise spontaneously when people really need to be get things done. And he uses Apple Computers as an example:
> Apple Computers is a famous example: it was founded by (mostly Republican) computer engineers who broke from IBM in Silicon Valley in the 1980s, forming little democratic circles of twenty to forty people with their laptops in each other's garages.
> In other words, I am now angry at myself for paraphrasing the book, and trying to put theses into Graeber's mouth, because this is such a rambling, confused, scattershot book that I am doing you a disservice by making it seem more coherent than it really is.
> But Graeber is basing part of his argument on the attitude of ancient Sumerians towards prostitution (vs later attitudes), and this is his evidence for the attitude he says they had. And so the question for me is, did he not actually look at the list of mes? There are plenty of Sumerian texts that are mentioned or summarized in books but hard to find in translation, but this one, as I mention above, is easily available. So if he didn’t read the actual list of mes, he did sloppy research and I’m bound to wonder where else he skipped research he ought to have done.
> Or did he know what was on the list, and that things like destruction of cities and troubled heart and fear and terror were there (they are) but went ahead anyway because darnit he was sure he was right and how many of his readers would question it, or had ever actually seen that list? Cause it’s pretty obscure.
> Either way I can’t really trust him anymore–if he’s ignoring or eliding things in areas I know something about, surely it’s happening elsewhere in the book and I just don’t see it because how could I?
DeLong has been on a strange Graeber-witch hunt over the years and it appears there is a lot of bad faith in his criticism of Debt. Here is a response to DeLong from Graeber and it specifically addresses most of the points you quoted here:
Mine would be "Why we get fat and what to do about it" by Gary Taubes. Not only it changed my life (overweight to my healthiest ever), it also led me to challenge everything about our dietary dogmas. I further read "Art and Science of Low Carbohydrate Living", watched a lot of lectures and saw studies which question our current notions. Overall I am more skeptical of studies which have links to those benefiting from it commercially.
This is the book that switched on the light for me. It’s no exaggeration to say that it put me on a path to the best levels of health and fitness I have ever known. I am 56 and feel like I’m in the prime of life.
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 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.
There are also at the very least rumors about the Author being somewhat fraudulent. At the very least the story is not genuine. Doesn't mean it doesn't have valid points to teach.
Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss
- As someone who doesn't want to "negotiate" and be a hard bargainer across the table, this book taught me how to bring empathy to every negotiation, and to use that get both parties what they really want most. It's also a fascinating read that details a number of his negotiations as chief hostage negotiator for the FBI.
"The Dictator's Handbook" by DeMesquita and Smith is a popular take on their academic work that describes a metamodel for reasoning about power and politics that bypasses how things "may" or "should" work and talks about how they "must" work.
This is a great book. Unfortunately, I feel like a lot of people who live in a nominal democracy see the title and think, "this doesn't apply to me." Even more unfortunately, it very much does apply to you, in, for example, the United States.
The Brothers Karamazov by Feodor Dostoevsky. At the time I didn't realize that it changed me, but looking back on it, the perspectives I learned from it fundamentally how I viewed and understood other people.
It’s so good. I just finished reading the Constance Garnett translation and it’s just gripping all the way through. Well, I guess apart from Zossima’s life story in the middle, but that definitely has its place.
The Gutenberg HTML of it is definitely a labour of love and extremely high quality: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/28054/28054-h/28054-h.html . I converted it to a nicely formatted epub for Standard Ebooks and it’s in review now, so hopefully will be available this week.
Too many things. It implanted the idea that people, all people can be understood explicitly, through empathy (and that all people can be empathized with). It showed me a way of thinking that was based off of human emotions and understanding but also analytical. Father Zosima's conversation with the woman with the dead child also helped me resolve the question of how much of a part one's thoughts and intentions play in whether you're a good person, and in general what it means to be a good person and how that can change. There are other things, but on first reading those are the ways that it directly influenced my viewpoint (that I can remember now).
Thinking fast and slow had the biggest impact in changing how I think about a lot of things, epic study of how you’re predisposed to think and make decisions in a particular way. Coincidentally I read it at about the same time as freakonomics!
It made me aware that someone as successful and powerful as Napoleon himself was by a large extent only a product of the people and the mood at the time. What I mean is that it wasn't him who inspired the people; it rather was just the Zeitgeist he was the perfect person for.
I'm not a native speaker and can't really put it into words, but it completely changed my view of the amount of influence we really can have in this world, and how much we are a product of our time.
Narziß und Goldmund by Hesse.
Again a lack of words from my side.
Whoever is looking for meaning in life should read this book.
The last sentence of this book is (at least in German) the literary most perfect and awakening phrase I've ever read. I couldn't sleep for days afterwards.
War and Peace came immediately to mind for me as well, but mostly because I do not think I have ever read a more magnificent novel.
I'm a literature professor, and in academic literary study, we don't spend a lot of time talking about which books are "better" than others. But personally? I'll just never get over that one.
I suppose I'd have to add Aeschylus' The Oresteia (the oldest of the ancient Greek tragedies we possess, and the only complete trilogy). I was a truly terrible high school student, who I think just barely got into college. Reading The Oresteia as a freshman made me decide that one way or another, I would have to figure out how to read and study literature for the rest of my life.
I'm about halfway through "War and Peace" right now, and am amazed at how much life Tolstoy packs into the book. So many amazing scenes, and pithy characters. What's striking me now is both the characters' greatness mixed with their weakness. There's something to me inexplicable about my admiration of Pierre, Natasha, Count Rostov etc., but interesting how as the book continues their faults are revealed. Also, the timeless conflicts/themes/impetus of money, politics/social hierarchies or groups, marriage, etc.
I'd love to know some of the things you find interesting or meaningful about the Oresteia - I read it as a freshman in college and was never particularly impressed, but these days I'm becoming more and more interested in revisiting ancient literature. What about it left such a mark on you?
I read it in English as "Narcissus and Goldmund". The subject at the core of this book is very dear to me and it really moved me and like you, I was affected for a long time. I give away all the good books to friends saying "You must read this, it's excellent!" and thus I no longer have my copy. I must read it again.
By the way, if by some chance, there is a big overlap in our tastes, I recommend the fictional work called "Loving Vincent". It's a "moving painting" rather than a "movie".
'The Power Broker' by Robert Caro is ostensibly a biography, but it's actually about how power works. The protagonist starts out employing idealistic methods, but falls flat on his face, and comes to delight in any means of achievement. I found that once I understood the protagonist's raw goal-seeking, and the dynamics that emerge from it, I started to recognize similar dynamics at many levels of society and government.
Barack Obama read it at 22 and said it was mesmerizing and that it shaped how he thinks about politics.
I always viewed reading a book as collecting a soul. If you fully grok a book, you grok the authors thoughts. Being able to put yourself in another persons mindset is crucial.
Speaking of "groking", Stranger in a Strange Land, Time Enough for Love and The Fountain Head have probably had the most impact on my mindset.
Each book is rather different, but in general the idea of all three is
> You have to be in life for yourself, and only you can define who you are / want to be.
That doesn't necessarily mean you need to be mean, but the idea that "greed is good", or that it's okay to be selfish, provided you think long term. It's about coming to terms and accepting you are greedy. But with that insight you can do introspection and learn about what drives you and make decisions yourself.
It's almost as if another layer of consciousness, learning about ones self.
Welp. And this is why I think Ann Rand was deeply evil and The Fountain Head was a horrible work of propaganda.
It's not okay to be greedy, nor is it okay to be selfish. And these ideas are responsible for much of the harm in the world.
It is okay to know what you need and advocate for your needs, to take care of yourself. But that is not being greedy or selfish. And to do it effectively means you have to be able to recognize the difference between a "need" and a "want". You also have to be capable of balancing your own needs against the needs of others.
A mindset of "greed is good" and "it's okay to be self" does not even try to understand the difference between "need" and "want" and provides ample justification for screwing over everyone else in pursuit of greedy (unneeded) wants.
There are many people, like a younger version of myself, who think it wrong to advocate for your own needs and wants. And who are smart enough to realize that every "need" truly is a want when you take a large enough perspective. And that holds them back from expressing themselves. The Fountainhead is essential reading for anyone who thinks in that way.
On the other hand, for well-adjusted folks, taking the book literally, is a recipe for overcompensating.
"It's ok to be greedy/selfish" is a clickbait title for the statement that you look out for yourself first and foremost whether you admit it or not, and you want things innately.
In a well regulated capitalist environment, those drives are yoked in a way that the paths through which you become rich and powerful and sexy are the same paths through which you improve the lives of others around you.
In a poorly regulated one you get dupont and enron, but show me a silver-bullet government theory and I'll show you an unrealistic fantasy.
>A mindset of "greed is good" and "it's okay to be self" does not even try to understand the difference between "need" and "want"
You're assigning that. Honestly I don't think most of Ayn Rand's critics have read her books.
The "well regulated capitalist environment" of which you speak is the fantasy. It has never existed.
What could exist is a world based on economic democracy, where no one becomes rich or powerful and everyone has to work together because society is structured to prevent anyone from taking power for themselves.
An economy where the stock corporation is replaced by the worker cooperative -- still an independent business operating in a free market of goods and services, but governed democratically by its workers -- would be much closer to that reality. No one would be able to amass much personal power. And any power amassed would always be held in check by the democratic structures that granted it. A world like that would do a much better job of preventing the accumulation of personal wealth way beyond need.
You don't need "get tons of power" as an incentive. Most people are plenty motivated by the "make enough to live a good life" and "have meaningful work". Plus, in a democratic socialist economy, the average worker would have much more incentive to get creative than they do in the current economy. Because they own the business and directly reap the benefits of their innovations. In the current economy, the average worker has very little incentive, by comparison, to innovate new efficiencies. They won't benefit. At best they'll get a promotion or a bonus, and not even that is guaranteed.
You're just using different words to describe socialism, which I frankly don't think needs any further arguments against it besides pointing at it's attempted implementations.
No, that's not socialism. Socialism is "a theory or system of social organization that advocates the vesting of the ownership and control of the means of production and distribution, of capital, land, etc., in the community as a whole" (from dictionary.com). dbingham is proposing something different - vesting the ownership and control of enterprises in the workers at those enterprises, not in society as a whole.
I think the closest to this, in current practice, is the German model, where workers have at least a say in the direction of their enterprises (not sure about ownership). It seems to be working out really well for them.
I can't give you a specific example. The kind of thing I was talking about is called a "work council" (or, let's see if I can get German in here without mangling it, "Betriebsräte").
It is, technically, a form of Democratic Socialism - you could also call it Free Market Socialism, but it hasn't been tried anywhere. Only state socialism has been tried.
Ayn Rand was a deeply flawed person who would have been aided by having more empathy for others. But she does make a few fantastic points that unfortunately tend to get lost in her ancap fervor.
Namely, that people tend not to think for themselves and slavishly follow social convention for no reason. Not for things like, "should I take all this money?" But rather for things like, Does doing this thing actually bring meaning and joy into my life? Or, Do I actually find deep value and beauty in consuming this media? Or noticing how often we adopt opinions of others for our own, without reflecting on whether or not we actually agree, and whether or not we actually care about what this other person thinks.
And then apply these thoughts to your own creative potential. How often have we not created something because others would not have appreciated it or preferred it another way? When was the last time we did something without consensus or approval, on our own, because we wanted to? How many things are we hanging on to because that's what everyone else does and we don't want to be cast out?
I find that those points are good and necessary ones, but can be had outside the wrapper and nudge in the direction of being blindly selfish and to ignore the suffering your pursuit of desires wrecks upon others.
Much of Bhuddist thought addresses the same concepts, but the goal is reduction of suffering.
Consider Ayn Rand as someone who had everything taken from her and her family in the name of absolute collectivism/communism, and that the articulation as a reaction to that.
So it's like a reactionary book ... it's existence might makes sense in historical context.
The book "1776" changed the way I thought about many many things. It's about the military presence and the early years of the US Colonies and the British presence as well. Everything was so different back then. Getting all those details shows how life was different in almost every way imaginable: people only had 1 or 2 outfits, income taxes of 2% were considered unimaginably high, military only had 9 bullets per soldier, stage plays were the main means of entertainment, bitter cold affected everyone, no communication meant lots of confusion, etc. Lots of great details in that book.
Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy by David D. Burns helped me get out of a hole of anxiety, depression, and panic attacks. Not to say I'm all the way there, but I'm far better than I used to be, and perfectly functional. His list of 10 cognitive distortions was tremendously enlightening, like I felt a huge weight was lifted off my shoulders when I realized how I could combat my bad thoughts with rationality.
The first is Understanding Power by Noam Chomsky. This was the first political book I had ever read and it completely rocked my world. I knew the US was involved in some nefarious stuff, but never to that extent. Completely changed the way I read news / history & how I react to current events.
The other book is Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon.
Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom (https://www.amazon.com/Closing-American-Mind-Education-Impov...) was a book I had to read multiple times. It gave me a new understanding of how deep culture and environment really do influence your opinions of the world. I spend a lot more time reflecting on my own opinions about the world and I'm much more mindful of the opinions I declare publicly because of this book.
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality by Eliezer Yudkowsky - introduced me to the rationalist movement
The First Immortal by James Halperin - introduced me as a sixth grader to things like cryonics, nanotech, etc. Got me thinking about a realistic ambitious nearer term future for humanity, rather than a more fantasy-like one in the other sci-fi I'd read at that point, like Asimov and Heinlein
As a Man Thinketh by James Allen - gave me much greater agency in life. Made me realize “You are today where your thoughts have brought you;
you will be tomorrow where your thoughts take you.”
I'll be in the minority then, but to me these are my best books.
The Power of Vulnerability by Brenè Brown and
Quiet by Susan Cain.
The first is not a real book since it's audio only, there is no written counterpart but it changed the way I see, connect, live in the world entirely. I _never_ found something along those lines.
While the second book, Quiet, although a little boring in some sides, made me accept my introversion (although I don't appear like an introvert).
If I had to pick only one then it would be the power of vulnerability, such a shame it hasn't a paper counterpart (you could read all brene brown books probably and get the same message, but that audio book is so great).
I had to think deeply about this and particularly about a book changing the way I think about things and how often I think back to things in the book. For me it has to be Drawing On the Right Side of the Brain. It made me realize that I am more creatively skilled than I thought I was — a realization which has enhanced my life greatly. To some lesser degree The Artist's Way has influenced me as well.
Perhaps the most nuts-and-bolts useful of books for me has been John Saxon's Algebra 1 and Algebra 1 1/2 textbooks. After coasting through high-school algebra without gaining any real mastery, in my early 20s I sat down with these two masterworks of clarity and re-taught myself algebra in the space of a couple full weekends. I use this (re-)learning every day of my life.
A related book, and the basis for much of whats in Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain is The Natural Way to Draw, by Kimon Nicolaïdes. It is a text book and has structured lessons in it, so if you need formal structure its helpful. Following the lessons is not required to gain a lot from this book.
Antifragile by N N Taleb. Additionally also the black swan by the same author.
All said and done I feel like it's made me look at and evaluate a lot more possibilities at all important junctions in my life (if not all junctions). It's helped me channelise my mind better to understand signals I care about in an otherwise extremely noisy world. It's also made me a stronger individual being able to do more for people and look at things sometimes as just a series of outcomes, and making everyday life and outcomes more tolerable for me emotionally as well.
Antifragile has changed the way I've thought about many things. A couple key concepts in the book are like lenses that gave me entirely new ways of viewing the world.
The Lindy effect: The strongest systems are usually the ones that have been around the longest. Accordingly, there should be a healthy distrust for any recent invention or practice.
The world is too complex to understand: Complex systems are mostly not designed, but exist and thrive by virtue of natural selection. This includes human societies. Even leaders and managers of these systems do not understand why they work. In particular you can't predict the outcome of tampering with complex systems, and you should avoid doing it in a wholesale centralized way.
Stress makes antifragile systems stronger: In particular a certain amount of stress, challenge, and variation is necessary for a person to remain strong.
Extreme tails: Fragile and antifragile systems often have payouts where a single event dominates the outcome. As an individual, there are two takeaways. There are only a couple of opportunities in life that count. They will only count if you maintain the optionality to take advantage of them. A single tragedy can ruin you. You have to look out for it constantly, even if everything has been pretty rosy up until now.
“The Kingdom of God is within you,” by Leo Tolstoy. It changed the lives of Ghandi and MLK as the essential primer and exposition of Christian anarchism and its consequent pacifism. It led to my discharge from the military as a conscientious objector just as the war with Iraq (pt. 2) heated up.
Second, Wendell Berry’s many essays and short-stories. His skepticism about technology can be taken to Luddite extremes, but his questioning of the full human impact of technology has profoundly affected how I think: that technology not only enables new human possibilities, but more importantly, shapes the very meaning of what it means to be human.
Finally, Paul Graham’s essays, especially his one on wealth. It’s the clearest explanation of “Make what people want” that I have read, and has a liberating affect on a mind that has been conditioned by society to be just another employee. I wouldn’t have jumped head-first into the startup world were it not for PG’s influence.
For what changed my outlook on life? Xenocide - Orson Scott Card. The 3rd book in the Ender's Game saga, it spend a lot of time exploring how people with fundamentally different perceptions and interpretations of the world around them led them to conduct themselves in ways that conflicted with each other, but were virtuous and the right thing to do according to them.
Was a big help in helping me understand how empathy can help to resolve issues and how fundamentally different we all can think - be it medieval humans or alien beings.
Maybe it didn't change my mind about "everything," but it did change my mind about everything related to negotiating.
The premise is that "no," is not an answer to be feared and avoided - it's an answer to be sought out. Getting a "no" is a key part of understanding the other side's position.
Many of the techniques he teaches can be used in non-negotiation settings.
For example, consider the seemingly simple problem of asking good questions. The author advocates interrogative-led questions over leading questions:
- interrogative led: begins with "who," "where," "what," "when," and "why."
- leading: binary answer, and usually begins with "do" or "does"
Consider the difference between the answers you're likely to get by asking "Did you like the movie?" vs. "What did you think of the movie?"
When you ask someone an interrogative-led question, you acknowledge their agency and challenge them to think. When you ask a leading question, more often than not, you're trying to manipulate the other person. Worse, you will get much less helpful answers.
Works great for job interviews, and many other professional settings.
One oddity: I've seen interviews/presentations with author, but he's a surprisingly bad speaker. As a how-to writer he's one of the best I've read.
I know it may sound silly, but The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy meant a lot to me. It taught me not to take life too seriously and to just embrace its weirdness.
As a book lover, and a very frustrated one at that (for I never seem to have time to read all the books I would love to have already read), I've found Pierre Bayard's How To Talk About Books You Haven’t Read both inspiring and liberating.
The title sounds it's appealing to some kind of self-help shenanigans on how to fake your knowledge on books, but in truth is a very coherent metaliterary theory that delves into memory, psychoanalysis, honesty, and creativity.
Because of this, and since it correctly argues that the line separating what you have read from what you haven't isn't as clear or obvious as it appears, it's inspiring because it shows you a way through the seemingly endless human library; and liberating because it allows you to reconcile yourself with your limited knowledge of any particular set of books.
Since it's impossible to know even a fraction of all that has been published, and because your memory is fallible, whenever you are talking about books, whatever book it may be, in some sense you are always talking about a book you haven't read.
That being so, it's far better to own it as it is and to take advantage of that fact, talking confidently about any book. And this is where this book can really come handy.
Ever since I first read it some years ago, I felt I had a weight lifted from my shoulders. I'm not as bold as Pierre Bayard is, and I still find myself awkward for not having read so many important books. But now I'm more at ease, knowing that others, whoever they are, are also in a somewhat similar situation. Instead of feeling an ignorant sod, I now know I'm surrounded by an endless throng of likewise ignoramuses.
To me, it’s “in search of the lost time” by marcel Proust. In this hustle and bustle world where people build startups for high evaluation, money and reputation, reading this book is an oasis in the desert experience to me. It inspires me to rethink of my simple day, to pay more attention to details, to figure out why little thing become what it is, to cherish small achievements and to appreciate people. And more importantly it inspires me to be alone and use the mind to think about the world and rebuild it.
Again, I'm glad you reminded me about this book. About to introduce it to some friends through our book club. I'll be re-reading it soon, so maybe I'll put on that movement while I read the end :)
Healing Back Pain: The Mind-Body Connection by Dr Sarno litreally gave me my life back. Suffered back pain which I thought was from sitting and coding for 11 years. I had no idea emotions can have an impact on physical pain. real excruciating pain that went away almost 3/4th of the way through the book. this sounds so sales pitchy but mind body connection is real I think how now we wonder how doctors in 1950s said smoking tobacco isn't bad for you, we will wonder in future on how doctors denied the mind body connection.
Ishmael (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ishmael_(novel)) - it changed how I view the planet from a species-centric perspective to one focused on maximizing the potential for sustainable life for all creatures
I went on to read more than a half dozen books by this author, all of them were equally amazing and thought-provoking. I wish I could like this entry times a thousand.
This one did it for me, too. I was utterly, utterly changed by it. It's a new story for humankind. A story with a much bigger potential, a much more hopeful arc, with a future of unlimited potential because it goes beyond humankind toward a community of life that has its own larger reason to exist.
I used to think of laws and society as just arbitrary things. However, I now see that they reflect thousands of years of wisdom / improvement and are critical to creating the conditions for people to flourish. The right to earn a living helped me understand the common law system and why we should care about unenumerated rights and how to create a more just society.
The concept of the political helped me see how nihilistic egalitarianism and feckless bureaucracy isn't a bug but a feature of liberal democracy and how it doesn't have to be that way.
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (I don't know which translation I read).
Imagine the plot of three or four excellent movies woven together. It struck me how little human nature changes over time and across cultures. It also features some fascinating Russian history as a backdrop. As a person who almost exclusively reads non-fiction, it changed my view of how powerful fiction can be. I can't fathom what must've been in Tolstoy's mind to have the ability to create something like this.
Honorable mention to The Brothers Karamozov by Fyodor Dostoevsky.
I'd like to learn more about Russian literature - I don't know if it's these authors and books that grabbed me, or if it's something larger.
19th c Russian literature is awesome. It might be personal, but Russian literature has a very special place in my heart. I recommend reading other works of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. I also strongly recommend Gogol and Chekhov.
Most of the books that changed how I think were effective because of the subject matter and not the specific book or writing style. I suspect other books on the same subject would've been equally perspective-changing. Here are some examples:
1) "A Guide of the Good Life." This is an approachable intro to stoicism and helped me become more conscious of which things are within my control and which things are outside of my control. I now spend a lot more time focusing on the former and a lot less time being anxious about the latter.
2) Books like "Traction" (by Gabriel Weinberg) and "Cracking Creativity" that take a fuzzy subject like marketing or being creative and show that you can get very far by following recipes/algorithms/heuristics. Skill like creativity are not purely innate; they can be learned.
3) "Economics in One Lesson." (Spoiler: the one lesson is: "economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups.") After this book, I now think much more carefully about proposed policies/rules/business strategies/etc. "Subsidized child care" or "charge businesses per seat" can sound great on the surface, but specific proposals often have so many unintended or negative consequences that are not discussed, and it's important to weigh those consequences against the benefits.
4) A statistics textbook. I don't remember the specific book that was my first stats textbook, but learning about statistics made me a lot more skeptical and inquisitive about data. Now when I see a graph or number reported in the news, I think "are there ways that this might be misleading?" instead of "omg cool this is a graph in a popular magazine so it must be true."
"Frodo: I wish the Ring had never come to me. I wish none of this had happened.
Gandalf: So do all who live to see such times, but that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us."
I'm only a quarter of the way through but it's already giving me vast amounts of insight into the roots of western civilization. It's also equipping me with mental models to analyze modernity and determine where we are in the history of civilization. It looks like we're in the decadent period.
My Struggle series by Karl Ove Knasgaard
An auto-biographical novel that's over 3600 pages for the entire series. It's really just the most accurate literary experience of modern man. I'm finding it quite useful to analyze my own conscious experience through life.
Seems most of the books recommended are for non-fiction, so I'll add some fiction to the mix.
The Hyperion Cantos series by Dan Simmons. It is deeply philosophical and caused me to think about life in a way no other science fiction has before or since. I found myself really sympathizing with the characters in these books, and found the overall plot incredibly fascinating.
Another good one is the Commonwealth Saga series (and others set in the same universe) by Peter F. Hamilton. It's a very _big_ space opera with lots of engaging characters, interesting technology, exciting descriptions of interstellar war, and a good reminder of just how unlike humanity an alien species could be. It really opened my mind to possibilities of humanity in the future in terms of how we might progress, both in terms of progressing out into the galaxy and how we could progress as a species.
Presents a compelling case for being optimistic that economic growth really will keep making the world continually better on average, and in particular explores the reasons why the contrary position is often so prevalent in the media, popular opinion etc.
Regardless of whether you agree with the thesis of the book per se it's a fascinating read which will definitely give you a lot of new perspective on debates on big topics - things that come up often on HN such as AI, climate change, international relations etc. I thoroughly recommend it.
I discovered the dire situation of men, with health and social conditions that top women’s problems by a factor 50, but we’ve never heard about. Funny thing is the guy is still a feminist in his approach (give men what used to be only given to women), but finally seeing men in a society where we really carr a lot when women face a problem... it changed my vision of life and humanity.
Mostly all about life, not technology, but all the books below have science behind them and many references and studies. I have read every one of these books, some multiple times. These are the books I would make required reading if I gave a class on life, they cover sleep, nutrition, exercise, brain health (depression/happiness), memorization and learning.
* Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain
* Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise
* Eat to Live: The Amazing Nutrient-Rich Program for Fast and Sustained Weight Loss (evidence based, ~1,000 references)
* The Promise of Sleep: A Pioneer in Sleep Medicine Explores the Vital Connection Between Health, Happiness, and a Good Night's Sleep (sleep debt)
* Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life
* Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything
I have my eye on Why We Sleep and want to read it soon. I did ask Matthew Walker once about the fact that he says you cannot pay of Sleep Debt whereas William Dement (Promise of Sleep) says you can pay off up to 1-2 weeks but no more. In my experience, I can pay off some sleep debt in a week but it levels out after that.
I haven't heard back on that, probably should message him outside of Twitter, but was hoping for a public dialogue.
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 writing for the first time.
The book is available to read for free online (https://antilogicalism.files.wordpress.com/2017/07/wisdom-of...).
I wish everyone read or watched Alan Watts lectures and books. The world would be a much nicer place if that was the case.
My favorite quote is by him:
‘We thought of life by analogy with a journey, a pilgrimage, which had a serious purpose at the end, and the thing was to get to that end, success or whatever it is, maybe heaven after you’re dead. But we missed the point the whole way along. It was a musical thing and you were supposed to sing or to dance while the music was being played.’