It's ok to "forget" what you read (https://medium.com/the-polymath-project/its-okay-to-forget-what-you-read-f4ef1c34cc01) as books update our mental models or how we perceive the world. What books have made the biggest impact on your mental models?
Readit News
The selfish gene - for understanding human behavior
Meditations of Marcus Aurelius - for understanding how to be content
Debt, the first 5,000 years - for understanding money and finance from the ground up
Wright Brothers - for understanding how technological breakthroughs happen
Snowball (Warren Buffet), Andrew Carnegie and Rockefeller biographies - for understanding the mental mindset to win in business (it's not what you think)
Hackers and painters - for understanding startups and how/why they work
Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance - for understanding beauty in the routine
Essentialism, the disciplined pursuit of less and Walden - for understanding how "stuff" gets in the way of happiness
Les Miserables - for understanding love
Having picked this a few weeks ago, I am finding it hard to finish because of the ponderous writing. I admit that first few chapters were a revelation, but the cultural verbosity regarding everything becomes wearing quickly. "The Ascent of Money" is much better primer on the evolution of financial system.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b05447pc
> Snowball (Warren Buffet), Andrew Carnegie and Rockefeller biographies - for understanding the mental mindset to win in business (it's not what you think)
> Hackers and painters - for understanding startups and how/why they work
> Essentialism, the disciplined pursuit of less and Walden - for understanding how "stuff" gets in the way of happiness
It's often cited on HN, but I've found it very dense and difficult to read.
My favorite part was the author's knack for writing a paragraph that caused me to think of several critical questions or potential holes, then immediately follow it up with a few paragraphs addressing most or all of those questions and plugging the holes.
There is also this book : The Tycoons: How Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Jay Gould, and J. P. Morgan Invented the American Supereconomy Reprint Edition, Kindle Edition by Charles R. Morris
Links: https://www.amazon.com/Titan-Life-John-Rockefeller-Sr-ebook/...
https://www.amazon.com/Andrew-Carnegie-David-Nasaw-ebook/dp/...
https://www.amazon.com/Tycoons-Carnegie-Rockefeller-Invented...
For me it's nice to see this is being recommended even outside social anarchist/Communist circles.
21 Things they don't tell you about Capitalism, Bad Samaritans (Ha Joon Chang) - Learned that free trade is generally bad for developing countries, countries need to build out high productivity industries to grow their economy in the long term and avoid a balance of payments deficit (unless blessed with oil or something), manufacturing is vital to a country's economy and its service sector, "free markets" are a constantly evolving political definition with numerous inherent double standards, the only reason most of us in first world countries are paid well has nothing to do with our own superior ability (eg. bus driver in India vs. Norway), but due to immigration control and the institutions we inherit.
Also looking for more book recommendations, so feel free to send some my way!
The consensus among experts on the matter is that protectionism has a negative effect on economic growth and welfare, while free trade has a positive effect.
There are challenges to be sure, but free trade is most definitely a net positive for developing countries. Countries whose governments prevent their citizens from engaging in international trade tend to be much worse off.
There isn't a single first world country that developed under free trade. The US and the UK were highly protectionist with steep tariffs, and it was only after they gained world dominance that they started opening their borders and demanding free trade from everyone else.
The economic "miracles" of Japan, Korea, and Taiwan were all highly protectionist, and their now world-renowned industries were heavily subsidized by the government over decades. Toyota took 30 years to make a profit and 60 years to become a dominant player in the auto industry. Had these countries adopted free trade policies, these industries never would have developed due to being unable to compete with foreign competitors, and Korea and Japan would still be third world countries exporting textiles and refined sugar.
The developing countries that did adopt free trade policies (at the behest of the IMF/World Bank/WTO) all grew slower than they did before those policies were in place. Latin America's growth rate since the 80s has been a third of what it was prior, in Africa's case I believe it went from like 1-2% to .2% (don't remember the exact numbers).
The analogy in Chapter 3 titled "My six-year-old son should get a job" is brilliant. If a child is told to get a job and fend for himself, then he'll likely end up working low-productivity dead-end minimum wage jobs for the rest of his life. However if he's able to focus on his studies, get parental support, go to university, maybe do research for a professor on the side - then this insulation from the free market via parental subsidies will pay off in the long run as the child will end up doing much greater higher productivity work. Similarly, developing countries need to invest in high productivity industries to develop.
Highly recommend the book, it's a quick read. I took the same Econ 101 classes where I was taught that free trade is unequivocally good. This book changed my mind, while also helping me realize that much of economics is completely divorced from reality. Even if you ideologically can't let go of the theory that free trade is good, history and the data clearly say otherwise.
There is actually a musical about the way that the US federal government and financial system were founded in order to be able to provide capital for warfighting.
Fooled By Randomness - a) Survivorship bias. b) If you look at revealed preferences, people choose regular small gains with a rare huge loss over regular small losses and a rare huge gain even though that choice is -ev. c) Much more!
Hackers and Painters - One of the most insightful, subversive, and surprising texts out there.
C Interfaces and Implementations - Great examples of good API design and how to build clean modular code.
The Paleo Manifesto - Explains how the origin of religion was probably as a set of models for coping with the transition from hunting/gathering to civilized agriculture. The part of the book where he points out that the story of the fall of man in the Bible is probably the story of this transition is super interesting.
The Game - Made me realize that the narrative told by boomer and gen-x parents about how to attract a woman is probably doing young men (and women) more harm than good. I would not try to treat this as a how-to manual, though. A fun yarn.
Starting Strength - After years of fumbling around in the gym this cut through a lot of bad ideas about fitness, exercise, strength, and health. It lead to the first real (and lasting) progress I've ever made physically.
Understanding Comics - Understanding art and visual communication.
Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! - Up there with Hackers & Painters in its rate of insight & surprise per page.
Fail Safe Investing - Thought provoking ideas about why we invest and how best to go about doing that. (The ideas stand up, IMO, but some of the concrete advice on how to implement those ideas is very dated.)
Good Calories, Bad Calories - It turns out that even scientists can be dishonest and corrupted by politics.
I Am a Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter - strongly influenced my beliefs about how consciousness works
Godel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter - made me think more deeply about so many topics
Animal Liberation by Peter Singer - made me both an animal advocacy activist and strongly influenced me towards a consequentialist moral
Neuropath by R. Scott Bakker - more on how consciousness works, this time through a work of fiction
The Dispossessed by Ursula K. LeGuin - strongly influenced my beliefs about political systems
The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins - changed how I thought about animal behavior and what living things do
Republic, Lost by Lawrence Lessig - strongly influenced my beliefs about US government
Manufacturing Consent by Herman & Chomsky - made me rethink my view of the media and news
Guns, Germs, and Steel -- how circumstance drove civilizations. Fun storytelling even if it's a bit too "just-so". definitely trains you to look at any situation and seek it's origins with less initial judgement.
The Visual Display of Quantitive Information -- gets at the essence of communication and medium. more than it seems!
The Alchemy of Finance -- "reflexivity", but if you're also interested in Soros or some finance storytelling it's worth it.
The Selfish Gene -- as everyone else has said.
The Prize -- the history of oil. huh? yeah. Likely to change how you look at the history of technology, government, power, the saudis, and geopolitics.
Korzybski, Alfred. Science and Sanity. Institute of GS, 1958. [1]
The Institute of General Semantics has a current website [2], is on Facebook, and has several articles on Wikipedia.org [3].
One of the mind-bending premises (Wikipedia.org):
"Non-Aristotelianism: While Aristotle wrote a true definition gives the essence of the thing defined ..., general semantics denies the existence of such an 'essence'. [...] In general semantics, it is always possible to give a description of empirical facts, but such descriptions remain just that—descriptions—which necessarily leave out many aspects of the objective, microscopic, and submicroscopic events they describe. According to general semantics, language, natural or otherwise ... can be used to describe the taste of an orange, but one cannot give the taste of the orange using language alone."
[1]: https://books.google.com/books/about/Science_and_Sanity.html? [2]: http://www.generalsemantics.org/ [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institute_of_General_Semantics
Fooled by Randomness, Black Swan, Antifragile -- Nassim Taleb reviles lots of new ways to think, first in finance, then everything in later books.
The Origin of Wealth -- Similar to Antifragile with a lot of mental models packed in on many different subjects: economics, business, biology, ...
The Design of Everyday Things -- the bible of design. Read it to know why everyday frustrations with tech are probably not your fault. His book Emotional Design is a good compliment.
The Essential Drucker -- "essential" reading for anyone in management or scaling a startup.
History, and why the world is the way it is today:
Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari
Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond
The Birth of Plenty, William Bernstein
They Made America, Harold Evans -- fantastic history book with each chapter telling the detailed story of a businessperson or inventor in U.S. history
I would also add:
- Influence: the Psychology of persuasion
- Selfish Gene
- Emotional Design
- Antifragile
- How To Fail At Everything And Still Win Big
Clock of the Long Now, by Stewart Brand - for the concepts of deep time and the long now; appreciating a sense of how we experience time and our place in history [See also: Time and the Art of Living]
Flatland, by Edwin A. Abbott - creative parable that's very helpful for conceptualizing abstract concepts of topology and higher dimensions
Thinking in Systems, A Primer, by Donella Meadows - great introduction to systems thinking, which is a useful lens for appreciating the complexity of all sorts of complex phenomena
A Pattern Language, by Christopher Alexander - great work of urban design, useful framework for looking at design systems and how pieces fit together on different scales [See also: Death and Life of Great American Cities]
Oulipo - A Primer of Potential Literature - nice introduction to the Oulipo and ideas of constraint as creative / poetic device [See also: Exercises in Style; Eunoia]
Impro, by Keith Johnstone - great primer on improvisation, really made me appreciate its impacts beyond just the theater, for example the importance of status in social relations
The Power Broker, by Robert Caro - unbeatably rich and compelling look at how power and politics actually work, for better (power gets things done) and for worse (power blinds and corrupts)
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, by Annie Dillard - beautiful, meticulously observed study of the natural world close at hand; made me appreciate the power of looking deeply and persistently
Le Ton beau de Marot, by Douglas Hofstadter - remarkable exploration of language and translation, in all its magic and complexity…both deeply personal and deeply researched, a must-read for lovers of language
The Library at Night, by Alberto Manguel - turned me on to the various lenses through which we can conceive of and appreciate libraries; their vast power and potential
Moby Dick, by Herman Melville - for really hammering home the grand, powerful potential of great literature and well-wrought language [ See also: Don Quixote; Infinite Jest]