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Comment by timoth3y | Hacker News Reader

The seminal work on this tendency we humans have to classify and rank each other is Stephen Jay Gould's The Mismeasure of Man

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mismeasure_of_Man

If you have a chance, it's worth a read. It's on my list of the top ten most important books I've ever read and it permanently altered the way I think about the way we think about ourselves.

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https://www.nature.com/articles/474419a

Also, you can measure skulls of different population groups with MRIs and other modern tech, and they vary.

As a fan of Gould, I was very disappointed to see that it's likely he committed scientific fraud in service of his political convictions.

Ironically, Gould's thesis was that the practice of science is politically biased.

That sounds interesting, I'll add that to my order list. What came to mind for me around this topic, was Edward Said's 'Orientalism'. Is an amazing critique.

Checked one of the praise review: https://www.pep-web.org/document.php?id=PAQ.053.0286A

Sounds good. My bookmark folder grows.

Tangential: I am curious to know the other 9 books. Can you, please?

There might not be an actual list, it's a common idiom. A way to say "I won't spend the effort to classify it precisely, but it definitely wouldn't be below 10th place."

I confess I don't have a literal list of ten books, but there is a small handful of books that shifted my way of thinking. A simple list of these books would require a great deal of explanation. None of them are generally considered "great works" and almost never make such lists.

Some, like "Zigler on Selling" just came to me when I really needed it, and it ended up changing the trajectory of my life.

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