Ask HN: Books that teach you to think

"Geography of Nowhere" by Kunstler and "Inside the Aquarium: The Making of a Top Soviet Spy" by Suvorov.

"Ishmael" by Daniel Quinn.

"How to Know Every" - Elke Wiss. I read this recently and it was pretty good.

"Nobody Wants to Read Your Shit" -- I learned that I wasn't a bad writer. I just wasn't hooking people in the first sentence. You need to hook someone in the first sentence, get them to the second, and repeat until the end. This goes for every type of content creation and even other things like first impressions in work and dating.

"The Almanack of Naval Ravikant" -- I learned about leverage, the importance of peace over joy, and how to build long-term relationships. I come back to this book every few months and look through my notes even more frequently.

I read a book called “Thinker Toys” when I was younger. It had some unorthodox methods but I found them useful for “thinking outside the box”. Often times the solution would pop out doing something wild lol.

1. The Black Swan 2. Thinking Fast and Slow

Just as important are books that can teach you how to relate to thoughts, AKA proprioception of thought.

Thinking is a hugely important function, but it should not be considered as the only one, nor the most important in every case.

I studied logic and philosophy at University, but I don't recommend any texts in that area because empirical studies don't. Studies have shown that taking logic or philosophy courses didn't help students think through situations nearly as well as taking, say, medicine. It turned out that encountering real world examples of good vs bad thinking helped more than being able to name or categorize particular kinds of fallacies after the fact.

I will say, that for my part Earle Stanley Gardner taught me best; to use what I'd term my "systematic imagination" and leave no possibility unconsidered. Useful for invention, but also for coding and algorithm design, of course. He did a pretty good job of cataloging the limits of most human (associative) thinking.

And it's not just me! Crime fiction had a significant influence on academic philosophy last century through such as Wittgenstein; but many others as well. There's a good article detailing that history but I can't find a URL for it just now.

If you aren't sure what "first principles" thinking is, Gardner offers a post-graduate course with interesting examples. I prefer the term "systematic imagination" to "first principles thinking" because some people tend to flip the meaning of the latter phrase on it's head and narrow their thinking to straightforward derivations from a few axioms; as if they were medieval theologians. That's not at all what Elon Musk has in mind when he talks about "first principles thinking." He means, discarding everything except the most basic principles of physics, and not neglecting any possibility that those laws allow. In other words "systematic (exhaustive) imagination."

In the same way, reading Elon's precepts (or mine) doesn't really reform your brain; but going through a lot of examples of how 'twas done right, and done wrong is really helpful. The scientific history of medicine offers plenty of (mostly horrifying) examples.

Histories of technology and technological and engineering blunders can perform the same function nicely, too. Watt saw the blunder that Newcomen had made by repeatedly heating and cooling the same chamber. Crazy inefficient. However Watt later assumed that his small-scale tests of high-pressure steam engines showed that the concept couldn't work. Unconsciously, he seems to have assumed that physics scaled (linearly) even though Galileo had shown it doesn't. Blunder. Since he held the key patent, Watt tragically blocked all development of high-pressure steam engines until his patent expired.

My own thinking has also been much improved through reading many excellent military histories that focused on decisions: because you know (nearly) everyone is really trying to do their best thinking in a war, they aren't usually being merely slovenly; yet amazing blunders happen. Such as the Germans putting their bridging equipment at the back of their columns during the Bastogne offensive in WWII. That works in a desert, but it's the wrong way to get through a forest (Ardennes) with rivers. Once trapped at the back of a narrow forest road, the German portable bridges were useless. They didn't think that one through (didn't deploy their imagination, sufficiently.)

The Philosopher's Toolkit: A Compendium of Philosophical Concepts and Methods by Baggini and Fosl. Mathematical logic, fallacies, etc. written by two famous philosophers. It's a great textbook for undergrads.

Also Statistical Models: Theory and Practice by Freedman. I refer you to Taleb's review: https://www.amazon.com/Statistical-Models-Practice-David-Fre...

"[...] This book is outstanding in the following two aspects: 1) It is of immense clarity, embedding everything in real situations, 2) It uses the real-life situation to critique the statistical model and show you the limit of statistic."

Both cover most of what you need to know to think rigorously using logic and its extension to account for uncertainty, probability.

I can recommend the puzzle books by Raymond Smullyan [0], for example "Satan, Cantor and Infinity". Among others, this contains puzzles about infinities and apparent paradoxes associated with them. Reading is mostly a form of consumption and therefore not really suitable to train your working memory. For this you have to solve mental tasks on your own instead of following the thoughts of others (without implying that this can not be valuable as well). Smullyan's books contain humorous puzzles of increasing difficulty, that are mentally challenging but still fun to read. I learned of them after finding here on HN Smullyan's article "Is God a Taoist?" [1] and wanted to read more from him.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Smullyan

[1] https://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/godTa...

Among the most important books for me was Summa technologiae by Stanislaw Lem, oldie but (still) a goldie:

Despite its age and a number of inaccuracies in specific domains (e.g., mathematics, biology, sociology), the book has lost no momentum in the past years. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summa_Technologiae

“Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”

"The 5 Elements of Effective Thinking" by Edward B. Burger and Michael Starbird

This is a hard. Books that made me a better thinker have to be the hard ones / ones that made me change. Top two would be

Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, Immanuel Kant. Supposedly more accessible version of Critique of Pure Reason but still very hard and mind-bending for me at least. Not just philosophy was easier after wrestling with this content.

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Tomas Kuhn. Made me self-aware about what scientific thinking actually is.

How To Solve It by G. Polya [1,2]

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Solve_It

2. https://archive.org/details/howtosolveitnewa00pl

If you prefer older books that stood the test of time:

How to Write, Speak and Think More Effectively by Rudolf Flesch.

Serge Lang, Undergraduate Analysis.

(Someone already posted How to Solve It which would be my first recommendation on this forum.)

The Zhuangzi, probably at least two translations.

The Elements (that is, Euclid's).

Process and Reality has had the most impact on my thinking but it's one of the most unapproachable things I've ever read. Get there eventually.

Bhagavad Gita

Drawing on the right side of the brain

(Really amazing book, teaches a different way of thinking though the mode of drawing)

The highest leverage is not which books, but who to meet. Find people you can discuss these topics with and that will push you're thinking the most.

For this forum, I'm assuming you are looking for math / science books (otherwise I'd recommend the Talmud, Bible or Quran), I'd recommend Real Analysis by Charles Chapman Pugh or Surely you're joking Mr Feynman (+ Feynman Lectures on Physics)

Lateral Thinking by Edward de Bono

Probably Hume's Enquiry, specifically how he discusses causality. Tl;dr anything we have to say about one event causing another event relies on the assumption that the future will be like the past. Also the is-ought problem

Also "Why Most Published Research Findings Are False" by Ioannidis, which just made me more skeptical of people citing studies

Metapatterns by Tyler Volk - If anyone knows any similar ones that are as (or more) transdisciplinary and unifying please share!

I'm highly interested in what I call maximal 'unifiers', ideas or concepts which co-occur across as many disciplines and phenomena as possible. E.g. fractals, Bejan's constructal law, or structural complexity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structural_complexity_(applied...

You do not need books to learn how to think. Explore your own thoughts by challenging them. Those that make sense in your own reality go futher and research about them. Expand your awareness by observing the details of the context in question. Talk to people instead of reading. A Book is just a bunch of somebody's ideas trying to sell you what they even don't know if it is true or works. Instead of reading, start writing about your own experience about the world.