Asimov’s Foundation and Robots series. Images and stories from those still pop into my head randomly decades later, and bits and pieces appear throughout pop culture. From the original trilogy up to Foundation’s Edge would be a good portion size.
Understanding how something like powered flight works—the combination of science, engineering, process, self-control, intuition, on and on—is highly transferable to nearly any other acquirable skill.
Thinking Fast and Slow. I recommend this to absolutely everyone. It’s a huge study on how everyone thinks, even when they think they’re above thinking like that. Truly amazing!
Is the whole book actually worth reading? I mean the concept is very simple (although extremely important) and can be explained concisely in a couple of minutes - why a 500-pages book?
The concept of almost all books can be explained in very few pages. The benefit of going through the book is it deepens your understanding, and you will be able to remember it much longer than what you will by reading summaries.
A lot of the book is going through various types of specific bias (e.g. anchoring, sunk-cost), and going over the way in which it was studied and shown to exist. I see this as valuable as because, as you say, accounting for irrationality is important, and having an indepth account of exactly how bias arises is key to internalizing the reality that we are all prone to succumbing to these errors.
For anyone looking for an intro to Borges I would recommend "The Garden of Forking Paths." It's a tight, exciting narrative that also explores his great themes.
The Codex Seraphinianus. It's basically knowledge structure without content, because it is, by design, incomprehensible. Makes you think about hypothesis-making, information design, and simple intellectual humility.
I confess 'mind games' and 'plot twists' don't correlate to my personal notions of wisdom. Googling 'books wisdom' turns up a lot. My one sentence bit of wisdom is currently from Charlie Munger: "I never allow myself to have an opinion on anything that I don't know the other side's argument better than they do."
The Selfish Gene, by Richard Dawkins. It describes what science believes life to be, and it can be very upsetting. Understanding it, however, made me a more confident and happier person than I was before.
I found this book completely degrading, even to the point of nauseating .. it discounts tens of thousands of years of human experience with describing itself, producing a taxonomic monster that is of very little actual use to the common man beyond providing a convenient excuse for ones failings and for the nature of humankinds more banal spirit.
Science can be repressive. Dawkins is a classic example of the iron fist in a velvet glove, imho. He justifies monstrosity with a technical crutch, and whether it is 'true' or not, at the end of this book I just felt like dirt.
I didn't get that impression at all. What I walked away from was a feeling of dire unease at the popularity of Dawkins' opinion that human beings are machines that can be broken and manipulated by their environment, and that social scientists can exploit this fact to their own ends, in industry, culture and war. It may be 'true' inasmuch as the fact that applying his theories give predictable results, but even the most heinous oppressors of humankind were capable of such truth. When you remove the human spirit as a factor, eventually all you get is a pile of dirt. That, to me, was ultimately degrading in the end. I don't think modern science is as close to a solution of what makes life, life, as it thinks it is - but probably that's just my genetics, which has predisposed me for an interest in the metaphysical beyond test tubes and beakers ..
Of course it's degrading, but it's true and it's the world we live in. It's okay if you want to put your hands over your ears and keep your eyes closed, but don't expect others to do the same, and don't be surprised when they have a better grip of reality.
I think the fact that Dawkins has become the very thing he so violently resists - a violent, intolerant fundamentalist who brooks no further questioning of his own authoritarian narrative - is evidence enough that there is still much, much to be discovered about the way life works. His is a cultural view, and we know for a fact that all culture is a lie which must be re-told in order to persist.
The more the human mind finds answers, the more questions it reveals - such is the nature of an infinite universe and our struggle to perceive it. If "God" doesn't exist we humans sure do spend a lot of time attempting to become one. "God" may not be a "he" sitting "on a cloud", but may indeed just be the New Question beyond every Old Answer. This fact seems to be rabidly overlooked by the Dawkins cult, which prefers to define God in its own, limited terms, in order to find fault in their chosen pariah cultures.
The jury is still out. On a scale of 1 to 7, 0.1 is just enough uncertainty to allow for yet more unanswered questions .. Dawkins, himself, has at least a little of the humility required to admit that.
Yeah, well maybe God is the sum total of everything, including your much-despised woo woo .. which, in my opinion, is the opposite of the kinds of totalitarian schools of thought that threaten our cultures, time and again.
Without the woo and whimsy and make-believe, what have we got left in our cultures? If we kill religion we may as well kill theatre and literature and all the other things which require this unmeasurable substance in order to be viable ..
I can't speak for what your parent poster is trying to say, but I can tell you what I mean when I say the same thing.
Let me use a specific example. I often say that capitalism is terrible for workers. Yet I work for a capitalist company that is--in my opinion--quite good to its workers.
Being a "realist" has told me that when looking for a job, I should be careful to avoid toxic cultures, exploitative management, and being underpaid relative to whatever I consider the fair market value of my labour.
But being a realist has also told me that toxicity, exploitation, and stinginess are unevenly distributed, and therefore it is a wise thing to shop around and negotiate for what I want.
I would NEVER say, "Toxicity is just how all businesses work. Demeaning and bullying people is just how company cultures are. Exploiting workers is what businesses do. If you can manipulate someone into working such long hours their health suffers, good for you. And negotiating is impossible, all companies push their workers around."
Being a realist means acknowledging what is in the universe, but it also means acknowledging that the universe contains variety and that almost everything is unevenly distributed.
Science is observational. It doesn't give us rules we must follow, it describes the behaviour of things in the universe.
So if someone* says, "People do selfish things, that's science," true!
But if they also say, "Therefore, it's ok to kill your neighbour and take their house, see all of recorded history, colonialism, &c." I stop them. Science teaches us that people kill each other and take their land.
But science also teaches us that people coöperate and build rockets to Mars. Science is not prescriptive, and with respect to morality and ethics, science teaches us that there are many different strategies that people use to accomplish their goals, some of which may result in the replication of the information encoded in their genes.
Selfishness "Just is?" Yes.
Therefore "______ is ok and we must accept it?" No.
---
* I am not putting these words in your mouth or arguing with you, just picking up where your statement left off.
Science has concluded that some human genotypes are, by scientific standards "lesser" than others. This can be - and has been - used by atheists and religionists alike to justify crimes against those people. Without a moral sense there is little holding back inhumanity from consuming itself. Science hasn't found a gene for morality, and doesn't seem to be on the hunt for it. So we therefore need our cultures to help us prevent calamity - which would require, by necessity, ignoring the scientists clamouring to explain from their pulpit that some humans are simply lesser than others, and "they have the science to prove it".
All I have to say about concluding that some genotypes are lesser by "scientific standards" can be summed up in the following HaHaOnlySerious joke that I have been telling my children from the time they could understand English:
"Humans are the greatest species of Life on Earth, according to all of the metrics that humans have chosen to measure greatness."
Science also tells me that insects are better than people, if I pick a different metric. I suspect we agree on this.
No but the fact that we have morality (and the possibility that other animals do not) can be explained via evolution. In reality probably many genes contribute in a complicated way to making us social animals.
I don't know this author, and I feel this discussion may turn to a flame, so sorry to put oil on the fire, but I'm quite perplexed by your argument. For all I know, maybe you're right, but it sounds a lot like you're rejecting a scientific argument because you don't like the result, which is what science has always had to fight against from the beginning.
Maybe you could articulate your objection based on science rather than feelings?
Just because someone writes a long analysis of camera work, color correction and sound recording in Shawshank Redemption, doesn't mean that they don't believe that there are emotional and philosophical aspects to the movie also. Just that the object of that work was a particular kind of analysis.
In this case, it is dangerous since a lot of the moral fibre that prevents Dawkins from calling for an all-out eradication of any human being that has the "belief in God" gene, simply won't be there for future generations' benefit.
And that is why I find his crusade against religions he despises so dangerous. Culture devolves unless it is replenished with enlightenment - Dawkins takes no responsibility for that, since the typical means of its occurring (religious faith) is abhorrent to him.
People too easily forget that organised atheism is responsible for the massacre of millions of people, too.
I'd say organised atheists are responsible, rather than organised atheism. Minor difference, maybe, but the latter implies some inextricable link where there isn't one.
Read the philosopher of science David Stove's "Darwinian fairytales." You'll realize that Dawkins book is
1) Not orthodox science in any sense of the word, nor really philosophy of science (though it is a popularization of the work of people like William Hamilton)
2) Philosophically bonkers; it's essentially medieval demonology repackaged where the demons are called "genes."
3) Not written by an actual scientist.
It's also a hilarious takedown, as are most of David Stove's essays and books. I liked Dawkin's fairytale when I first read it, for the same reason I liked death metal music and fedora tier atheism arguments on usenet. But it's horse shit. FWIIW another nail in its coffin; Dawkin's ideology originates in part from a guy named George Price: have a look at part 3 of the Adam Curtis documentary "all watched over by machines of loving grace" for more on what became of him.
I really genuinely think you have misunderstood the book, and Dawkins' philosophy in general.
Dawkins isn't a social darwinist (and nor was Darwin for that matter). He doesn't believe that nature red in tooth and claw is the right way for people to behave. He's argued in many places that, as self-aware thinkers, we have the capacity and moral duty to rise above it.
If you want a target for your arguments, you should pick on an actual social darwinist like Nietzsche.
I appreciate your opinion. I think the book gives a very convincing explanation on how evolution works and how it shaped what we call "life". I do not remember Dawkins degrading human achievements in that book, so you might be referring to talks and lectures after the book was written. On the contrary, consider the following quote from the book:
> “If there is a human moral to be drawn, it is that we must teach our children altruism, for we cannot expect it to be part of their biological nature. ”
Let me quote another favourite author of mine on the same topic:
> "There’s Nature, and she’s going to come out the way She is.", Feynman.
I agree that it has an unnecessarily downbeat take on the whole business. You can believe in science and evolution and have an "isn't it wonderful" attitude like say Feynman rather than the "We are survival machines – robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes" attitude of that book.
Surprised no one has (at least so far) in this long thread mentioned Feynman's books. Those were the real mind-benders for me. Absolutely made me think differently about myself and my place in the world.
Wow. I'm stoked to share this essay I recently discovered in the context of _mind bending_, and because some comments here are critical of Dawkins' views.
Susan Blackmore. “Dangerous Memes; or, What the Pandorans Let Loose” (Cosmos & Culture, p.297) [2]
Blackmore is writing about 'memes' and reacts to some of Dawkins' critics. I can't say to what degree Blackmore faithfully discusses the contents of 'Selfish Gene' (1976), because I've not read it.
This can be found in the March release of NASA's e-book collection [1]. And specifically in this book: Cosmos & Culture: Cultural Evolution in a Cosmic Context Edited by Steven J. Dick and Mark L. Lupisella (2009?) [2]
GEB always struck me as masturbatory, self-aggrandizing ramblings about simple ideas like self-similarity, with strewn-in, stream-of-consciousness anecdotes about Greek mythology, art and biology.
What helped me get through it was consciously reminding myself "It's OK if I don't grok every single thing in this book this time through. I can always read it again. And again, etc." In other words, I didn't try to read it like a traditional textbook (which it really isn't) where everything is strictly factual, and laid out in a nice, linear, straightforward order. I found that I just had to accept that GEB is non-linear, byzantine, self-referential, and frankly confusing at times. Instead of being blocked when I felt confused, I just kept reading.
Did I get everything out of it that Hofstadter intended to put in? Almost certainly not, but I still got quite a bit of out it, IMO. And I can always go back and re-read it.
I am of the generation that fixated upon GEB as some sort of deep wisdom, and I have a nostalgic fondness for it. I certainly credit it for sparking a lot of my curiosity about Lisp.
But in hindsight, its value to me was not in the content of the book, as much as in communicating the kind of delight and curiosity around programming that has kept me interested in the subject since 1972 or so.
Other books have done the same thing for me, most notably everything by Martin Gardner, Raymond Smullyan's books about logic puzzles that sneak an education past you, and William Poundstone's books about Game Theory and Computability.
In a way, I'm delighted that this book is not sitting as the number one thread so far. Not because it's terrible, but because new generations ahve written great books, and they deserve mention too.
I was aware of this many years ago. To this day, I don't actually consider myself that interested in computing for its own sake. Or mathematics, for that matter.
To me, the most interesting thing about programming is what it teaches us about our own minds. It's a little like being an archeologist and finding collections of pottery, houses, &c. but no people. You make deductions about how they lived from their tools.
In our case, we have only a limited ability to directly examine the workings of our brains, but a wealth of ways to study the things we do with our brains, including the making of tools for our brains to use.
Programming is one of those tools, and its study is indirectly the study of us.
At the end of the day, it's all just 1s and 0s, but when we argue about whether the Visitor Pattern addresses the Expression problem, and so forth, we're indirectly exploring the (metaphorical) shape of our brains.
I have just said in several paragraphs what Michael Fellows said in one sentence: "Computer science is not about machines, in the same way that astronomy is not about telescopes."
They may have been thinking about mathematics, but I am thinking about people.
This is one of the few books I've read that I would actually call 'mind bending' (though stretching might be a better word).
Another amazing book of his that I don't see mentioned a lot (perhaps because it is more technical that maybe any of his other books) is 'Fluid Concepts And Creative Analogies'.
Another amazing book of his that I don't see mentioned a lot (perhaps because it is more technical that maybe any of his other books) is 'Fluid Concepts And Creative Analogies'.
I'm reading that one now. I recommend it, along with Perception as Analogy by Melanie Mitchell, and the aforementioned Godel, Escher, Bach to anyone interested in AI / cognitive science. I've only read a small part of Metamagical Themas to date, but I've read enough to recommend that as well. Just the stuff on self-referential sentences makes it worth reading.
The first time I read Talebs Black Swan was pretty mind bending. It's a intriguing mix of philosophy, history and the application of probabilistic thinking.
It's also a great aggregator book. It introduced me to the works of Kahneman, Tetlock, Poincare and Mandelbrot.
Read "fooled by randomness" if you haven't already. I much preferred it to his later work, and it introduced me to Popper (who was someone that 3 years of philosophy at university somehow managed to skip) who you might also enjoy.
Yup. While I appreciated the points he made in "Antifragile", the writing itself wasn't as enjoyable as it was in "Fooled by Randomness" or "The Black Swan". I haven't read "Skin in the Game" yet tho.
I tried to read this but just could not get over his writing style. It just felt so self-indulgent and took forever to get to the point. I have no idea why it's recommended so highly.
I don't understand the excitement about Black Swan but I genuinely would like to. If a "Black swan event" is an "event with small probability but massive impact", why would it be surprising that they exist or that they have disproportionate impact?
I'd argue that defining "impact" is also problematic because we conflate things that are surprising with things that are impactful all the time. We don't count all the trains and planes that run on time as "impactful" exactly because they're not surprising, but they do have a large impact on the progression of the future. So part of Taleb's argument just seems like a semantic debate over what counts as "impactful".
IDK if you've read the book or not, but in case you haven't I'd recommend this summary of Mediocristan and Extremistan [0].
Mediocristan and Extremistan are Talebs analogies for domains with different underlying mechanics (for lack of a better word).
I'm going cut some corners here, but to keep it short, the phenomena in Mediocristan can be modeled by using gaussian probability distributions (weight, height etc.), while the phenomena in Extremistan are better modeled using power law distributions, that have so called fat-tails. (wealth, land ownership)
One of the central arguments of the book is that people have been using tools from Mediocristan in Extremistan and that's what leads to these Black Swan phenomen, which in turn might have potentially ruinous effects.
One example he uses is a now defunct hedge fund called Long Term Capital Management (LTCM) [1]. My (poor) understanding of what led to LCTMs ruin (and required the Federal Reserve to intervene) is that they used some fundamentally Gaussian techniques to model derivatives.
The models predicted certain events to have a lot lower probability to occur than what was actually the case (fat-tails). Underestimating these outliers combined with the fact that the firm was highly leveraged, was ultimately what went wrong and had potentially disastrous effects on the financial markets.
Taleb is a good talker but not as smart as he thinks he is. (About halfway through "Black Swan" he starts taking potshots at scientists about the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.)
Anyhow, a "Black swan event" is NOT an "event with small probability but massive impact", that's a common misconception.
A BSE is an event that, before it occurs no one credits it ("There are no black swans." because no one (in Europe) had ever seen one until they went to Australia (IIRC)), and after it occurs everyone post-rationalizes it.
There are lost of events "with small probability but massive impact": people win the lottery every day.
It's the ones we ignore, both before and after, that count as Black Swan Events.
Taleb can be extremely pompous and annoying, but his books are truly original[0], and I think likely to alter how you think about the world. Many people hear words like "anti-fragile" or "black-swan" and know sort-of what they represent, so decide there's no reason to read his books, but those concepts are just the tip of the iceberg of Taleb's larger way of thinking.
[0]: By original I mean there aren't other books like his. If anyone else tried to write like Taleb it would be absurd, but he makes it work.
Erich Fromm's "Escape from freedom". It is very well written and the subject matter is truly mind-bending: how can an educated people decide to throw their freedom away and give power to a dictator?
E. Fromm was German psychologist, and jewish. He fled to America in the 1930s. He writes with a composite point of view, at the intersection of psychology, sociology, and philosophy, without getting stuck in a narrow analysis, and I think this is what makes this books and others by him so good.
If you're into biology, Nick Lane's books will blow your mind. Two in particular I'd recommend:
1. The Vital Question - An explanation of the genesis of complex life through bioenergetics. Explains why complex life is likely very rare in the universe.
2. Power, Sex, Suicide - Why mitochondria are awesome, and also responsible for the emergence of sex, cancer, and mortality.
I was looking for someone to mention stoic literature!
For that matter I'd like to add another author - Michel de Montaigne and his Essays. It offers a very humane look inside his thoughts about the world and makes you think about your own life and how you look at it, too.
I really enjoy books on neuroscience that change the way I think about perception.
Phantoms in the Brain by V S Ramachandran - a book about how the brain organises itself in bizarre edge cases. The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist's Quest for What Makes us Human. The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist's Quest for What Makes us Human by the same author is also worth reading.
Admissions by Henry Marsh - An experienced neurosurgeon's account of how his job has changed over the decades. Really interesting discussion of what's important and how people react in a real crisis.
The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat by Oliver Sacks. More of a collection of interesting curiousities but does an amazing job of humanising the discussion of brain.
And coming to think of it, there are couple of books that changed my life similarly (reading them for interview); though by themselves they may not merit to be in my permanent collection.
746 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 292 ms ] threadWhy and how to find focus in this age of distraction. Will give you a real appreciation for woodworking, etc.
Understanding how something like powered flight works—the combination of science, engineering, process, self-control, intuition, on and on—is highly transferable to nearly any other acquirable skill.
https://archive.org/stream/TheGardenOfForkingPathsJorgeLuisB...
Science can be repressive. Dawkins is a classic example of the iron fist in a velvet glove, imho. He justifies monstrosity with a technical crutch, and whether it is 'true' or not, at the end of this book I just felt like dirt.
/just_like_my_opinion_man
It's not about genes for selfishness.
What makes it true?
The more the human mind finds answers, the more questions it reveals - such is the nature of an infinite universe and our struggle to perceive it. If "God" doesn't exist we humans sure do spend a lot of time attempting to become one. "God" may not be a "he" sitting "on a cloud", but may indeed just be the New Question beyond every Old Answer. This fact seems to be rabidly overlooked by the Dawkins cult, which prefers to define God in its own, limited terms, in order to find fault in their chosen pariah cultures.
The jury is still out. On a scale of 1 to 7, 0.1 is just enough uncertainty to allow for yet more unanswered questions .. Dawkins, himself, has at least a little of the humility required to admit that.
Excuse my frankness. That's not a fact. That's unfalsifiable woo-woo.
Without the woo and whimsy and make-believe, what have we got left in our cultures? If we kill religion we may as well kill theatre and literature and all the other things which require this unmeasurable substance in order to be viable ..
Let me use a specific example. I often say that capitalism is terrible for workers. Yet I work for a capitalist company that is--in my opinion--quite good to its workers.
Being a "realist" has told me that when looking for a job, I should be careful to avoid toxic cultures, exploitative management, and being underpaid relative to whatever I consider the fair market value of my labour.
But being a realist has also told me that toxicity, exploitation, and stinginess are unevenly distributed, and therefore it is a wise thing to shop around and negotiate for what I want.
I would NEVER say, "Toxicity is just how all businesses work. Demeaning and bullying people is just how company cultures are. Exploiting workers is what businesses do. If you can manipulate someone into working such long hours their health suffers, good for you. And negotiating is impossible, all companies push their workers around."
Being a realist means acknowledging what is in the universe, but it also means acknowledging that the universe contains variety and that almost everything is unevenly distributed.
Science is observational. It doesn't give us rules we must follow, it describes the behaviour of things in the universe.
So if someone* says, "People do selfish things, that's science," true!
But if they also say, "Therefore, it's ok to kill your neighbour and take their house, see all of recorded history, colonialism, &c." I stop them. Science teaches us that people kill each other and take their land.
But science also teaches us that people coöperate and build rockets to Mars. Science is not prescriptive, and with respect to morality and ethics, science teaches us that there are many different strategies that people use to accomplish their goals, some of which may result in the replication of the information encoded in their genes.
Selfishness "Just is?" Yes.
Therefore "______ is ok and we must accept it?" No.
---
* I am not putting these words in your mouth or arguing with you, just picking up where your statement left off.
"Humans are the greatest species of Life on Earth, according to all of the metrics that humans have chosen to measure greatness."
Science also tells me that insects are better than people, if I pick a different metric. I suspect we agree on this.
No but the fact that we have morality (and the possibility that other animals do not) can be explained via evolution. In reality probably many genes contribute in a complicated way to making us social animals.
Maybe you could articulate your objection based on science rather than feelings?
An authoritarian hell bent on altering culture to suit his own will is never going to convince me otherwise.
And that is why I find his crusade against religions he despises so dangerous. Culture devolves unless it is replenished with enlightenment - Dawkins takes no responsibility for that, since the typical means of its occurring (religious faith) is abhorrent to him.
People too easily forget that organised atheism is responsible for the massacre of millions of people, too.
1) Not orthodox science in any sense of the word, nor really philosophy of science (though it is a popularization of the work of people like William Hamilton)
2) Philosophically bonkers; it's essentially medieval demonology repackaged where the demons are called "genes."
3) Not written by an actual scientist.
It's also a hilarious takedown, as are most of David Stove's essays and books. I liked Dawkin's fairytale when I first read it, for the same reason I liked death metal music and fedora tier atheism arguments on usenet. But it's horse shit. FWIIW another nail in its coffin; Dawkin's ideology originates in part from a guy named George Price: have a look at part 3 of the Adam Curtis documentary "all watched over by machines of loving grace" for more on what became of him.
Dawkins isn't a social darwinist (and nor was Darwin for that matter). He doesn't believe that nature red in tooth and claw is the right way for people to behave. He's argued in many places that, as self-aware thinkers, we have the capacity and moral duty to rise above it.
If you want a target for your arguments, you should pick on an actual social darwinist like Nietzsche.
> “If there is a human moral to be drawn, it is that we must teach our children altruism, for we cannot expect it to be part of their biological nature. ”
Let me quote another favourite author of mine on the same topic:
> "There’s Nature, and she’s going to come out the way She is.", Feynman.
“You must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.” - Richard P. Feynman
Susan Blackmore. “Dangerous Memes; or, What the Pandorans Let Loose” (Cosmos & Culture, p.297) [2]
Blackmore is writing about 'memes' and reacts to some of Dawkins' critics. I can't say to what degree Blackmore faithfully discusses the contents of 'Selfish Gene' (1976), because I've not read it.
This can be found in the March release of NASA's e-book collection [1]. And specifically in this book: Cosmos & Culture: Cultural Evolution in a Cosmic Context Edited by Steven J. Dick and Mark L. Lupisella (2009?) [2]
Enjoy! Let the debate continue...
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22718489
[2]: https://www.nasa.gov/connect/ebooks/hist_culture_cosmos_deta....
www.nasa.gov /connect /ebooks /hist_culture_cosmos_detail.html
Actually, any well researched history book. View on the world gets changed drastically, and usually for better.
The rest is a really wild ride through history. Fascinating read.
;)
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mind%27s_I
Did I get everything out of it that Hofstadter intended to put in? Almost certainly not, but I still got quite a bit of out it, IMO. And I can always go back and re-read it.
But in hindsight, its value to me was not in the content of the book, as much as in communicating the kind of delight and curiosity around programming that has kept me interested in the subject since 1972 or so.
Other books have done the same thing for me, most notably everything by Martin Gardner, Raymond Smullyan's books about logic puzzles that sneak an education past you, and William Poundstone's books about Game Theory and Computability.
In a way, I'm delighted that this book is not sitting as the number one thread so far. Not because it's terrible, but because new generations ahve written great books, and they deserve mention too.
To me, the most interesting thing about programming is what it teaches us about our own minds. It's a little like being an archeologist and finding collections of pottery, houses, &c. but no people. You make deductions about how they lived from their tools.
In our case, we have only a limited ability to directly examine the workings of our brains, but a wealth of ways to study the things we do with our brains, including the making of tools for our brains to use.
Programming is one of those tools, and its study is indirectly the study of us.
At the end of the day, it's all just 1s and 0s, but when we argue about whether the Visitor Pattern addresses the Expression problem, and so forth, we're indirectly exploring the (metaphorical) shape of our brains.
I have just said in several paragraphs what Michael Fellows said in one sentence: "Computer science is not about machines, in the same way that astronomy is not about telescopes."
They may have been thinking about mathematics, but I am thinking about people.
Another amazing book of his that I don't see mentioned a lot (perhaps because it is more technical that maybe any of his other books) is 'Fluid Concepts And Creative Analogies'.
I'm reading that one now. I recommend it, along with Perception as Analogy by Melanie Mitchell, and the aforementioned Godel, Escher, Bach to anyone interested in AI / cognitive science. I've only read a small part of Metamagical Themas to date, but I've read enough to recommend that as well. Just the stuff on self-referential sentences makes it worth reading.
Maybe not mindbending, but a must read for us engineers prone to burning the midnight oil.
https://sleepdiplomat.wordpress.com/2019/12/19/why-we-sleep-...
It's also a great aggregator book. It introduced me to the works of Kahneman, Tetlock, Poincare and Mandelbrot.
I'd argue that defining "impact" is also problematic because we conflate things that are surprising with things that are impactful all the time. We don't count all the trains and planes that run on time as "impactful" exactly because they're not surprising, but they do have a large impact on the progression of the future. So part of Taleb's argument just seems like a semantic debate over what counts as "impactful".
Mediocristan and Extremistan are Talebs analogies for domains with different underlying mechanics (for lack of a better word).
I'm going cut some corners here, but to keep it short, the phenomena in Mediocristan can be modeled by using gaussian probability distributions (weight, height etc.), while the phenomena in Extremistan are better modeled using power law distributions, that have so called fat-tails. (wealth, land ownership)
One of the central arguments of the book is that people have been using tools from Mediocristan in Extremistan and that's what leads to these Black Swan phenomen, which in turn might have potentially ruinous effects.
One example he uses is a now defunct hedge fund called Long Term Capital Management (LTCM) [1]. My (poor) understanding of what led to LCTMs ruin (and required the Federal Reserve to intervene) is that they used some fundamentally Gaussian techniques to model derivatives.
The models predicted certain events to have a lot lower probability to occur than what was actually the case (fat-tails). Underestimating these outliers combined with the fact that the firm was highly leveraged, was ultimately what went wrong and had potentially disastrous effects on the financial markets.
[0]: https://people.wou.edu/~shawd/mediocristan--extremistan.html
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-Term_Capital_Management
Anyhow, a "Black swan event" is NOT an "event with small probability but massive impact", that's a common misconception.
A BSE is an event that, before it occurs no one credits it ("There are no black swans." because no one (in Europe) had ever seen one until they went to Australia (IIRC)), and after it occurs everyone post-rationalizes it.
There are lost of events "with small probability but massive impact": people win the lottery every day.
It's the ones we ignore, both before and after, that count as Black Swan Events.
[0]: By original I mean there aren't other books like his. If anyone else tried to write like Taleb it would be absurd, but he makes it work.
1. The Vital Question - An explanation of the genesis of complex life through bioenergetics. Explains why complex life is likely very rare in the universe.
2. Power, Sex, Suicide - Why mitochondria are awesome, and also responsible for the emergence of sex, cancer, and mortality.
The origins and history of consciousness - mircea eliade
Cosmic symbolism in genesis - mattheiu pageau
If you want to get deep into opinions on making art, symbolism is a great rabbit hole.
Framework for a happy life in any context.
For that matter I'd like to add another author - Michel de Montaigne and his Essays. It offers a very humane look inside his thoughts about the world and makes you think about your own life and how you look at it, too.
Phantoms in the Brain by V S Ramachandran - a book about how the brain organises itself in bizarre edge cases. The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist's Quest for What Makes us Human. The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist's Quest for What Makes us Human by the same author is also worth reading.
Admissions by Henry Marsh - An experienced neurosurgeon's account of how his job has changed over the decades. Really interesting discussion of what's important and how people react in a real crisis.
The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat by Oliver Sacks. More of a collection of interesting curiousities but does an amazing job of humanising the discussion of brain.
https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL848F2368C90DDC3D
And of course cites Sack, and a lot of amazing research/studies/results.
The caveat is that some results are not that solid, and he mentions priming, which we know does not replicate.
And coming to think of it, there are couple of books that changed my life similarly (reading them for interview); though by themselves they may not merit to be in my permanent collection.