Mine was Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs or SICP.
There are a lot of stories of people who hate their jobs and make a switch.
One was a lawyer who became a truck driver. A doctor who became a programmer (iirc ... I do remember she was in tears because she didn't want to disappoint their family not sure if she wanted to be a programmer or not).
This book gave me the courage to leave engineering field and become a firefighter paramedic. 1st best career decision I made at the time
Are you neutral good or chaotic good? And can you achieve a third class when you level up?
Sorry, couldn't resist.
Something about the combo helped me disconnect from the religion I had been raised in, and helped me see that there are many ways to view the world and life.
It's a little dense and a bit meandering at times, but the core idea behind it: we have a strong bias in believing that civilization comes in stages. We believe we go 'hunter/gatherer/primitive' -> agriculture -> 'real' civilization. Basically, this is totally false.
Not only is it totally false, but one of the reasons we might have this bias is because, while the native Americans were being eradicated, Western thinkers and theologians had to justify why Western civilization was 'better', despite native Americans basically giving Westerners the seeds for individual liberties and social blueprints for the Western Enlightenment...
It really uprooted my deepest beliefs about human history, civilization, and (most importantly for me) what I believe "the future" should look like. Mind-expanding for sure.
The thing that I think about from them is the 'Reverse Fermi Paradox'. We've been humans for ~200k years now. Just in the last 10k or so have we had 'civilization'. What were we doing for the other 19/20ths of our time here? Ice ages don't account for all that time and there were warm periods in them. What was going with us all that time?
I think about it a lot also in context of their reviews of different cultural models. It seems we spent a lot of time experimenting and trying out a bazillion different ways to organize and have families and be in a tribe. Since we've no record of it, I'm fascinated by how our deep ancestors lived as a culture and how different it was.
Can't resist this apocryphal Gandhi quote:
Reporter: What do you think of civilization?
Gandhi: I think it is a good idea.
https://amturing.acm.org/award_winners/simon_1031467.cfm
Herbert Simon later went on to win the Nobel Prize in Economics for his contributions on "Bounded Rationality" in decision making.
https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/1978/sim...
The economics anti textbook (hill and myatt).
Though this was 12 years ago, public discussion of economics has progressed a little bit since, so it may not have quite the same paradigm busting feeling it did for me back then, but it's still pretty good.
Other mind expanding non fiction...
Feynman lectures (all 3 volumes)
Design patterns (don't hate me lol. Obviously less revelatory if you've already absorbed the knowledge by other means. And for flip's sake don't overdo them! )
Thomas byrom's "The Heart of Awareness" is a popular translation for a quick read.
If you want something denser with commentaries and explanations, Swami Nityaswarupananda's translation is great. Another good translation keeping western audiences in mind is Duet of One by Ramesh Balsekar.
It is about Advaita (Vedanta). Another good introduction to it is the Mandukya Upanishad: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandukya_Upanishad
which, in just 12 verses, shows that we are neither body or mind but the witness of both.
Not necessarily, at all. Advaita is supposed to be very rational and logical, and not require faith. Faith belongs to the path of Bhakti Yoga (faith/devotion to God), while Advaita is about the path of Jnana Yoga, the path of knowledge.
Also, the Wikipedia article about Advaita Vedanta seems to me to be somewhat poor, and factually wrong in parts, IMO, though I am not an expert on this. I may think this way because my family has some background knowledge about Advaita, Adi Shankara, Sanskrit and related subjects related to Hinduism, going back some generations, so I may have picked up some stuff by osmosis, apart from what I have read and studied and practiced myself.
BTW, there is another music-related "EGB" that Hoffy missed!
The keys G, B and Eb (separated from each other by a major third) used in John Coltrane's "Giant Steps". Major-third-spaced tonality changes, particularly masked by ii-V-I cadences, became known as Coltrane Changes.
This was a long time ago, but the book was beautiful right off the shelf and it made so much immediate, intuitive sense. It also came at just the right time in my life when I needed to focus on broad outlays of information, but didn't yet realize it, or how to do it.
Later on I developed my own method but I still go back and browse the book from time to time. A few years after my first reading, I used mind mapping to help me with a very stressful job and was able to get weeks ahead of my work there, using the extra time to learn about interesting new tech.
But beyond the principles/methods themselves, the book opened my mind to the idea that one could find ways to work with additional inspiration and productivity in the ideas & concepts space, which I built on as a foundation later as a professional trainer and coach.
The author's lecturing presence and style was also pretty unique. He was a broad thinker by nature, and was able to impart the beauty of such as quite uniquely different from the deeper sort of thinking.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEokHNWf-Qg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Buzan
Interesting post idea, thanks.
a book by science history writer James Gleick. The guy who wrote « chaos ».
It’s not about « computer », but rather the inevitable march toward our now ( with computers )
Each chapter break down a particular advance, or area of science that was changed by information theory ( before information theory was a thing )
Some titbits :
until the telegraph, the second faster way to carry meaning was putting a bunch of guys on horses.
The fastest was using drums over a river. — Talking about telegraph, the French had something innovative going on just a few years before it’s invention. Based on tower relay and a elaborate flag code.
It's like debugging a server log of your mind.
Note that I quickly deviated from any expected norms of "dear diary, today _____ happened and it made me feel ______", and instead simply decided to write, whatever cames to my mind, every day, no matter how nonsensical. Most of it is pointless and cringe, but there's some brilliant opinions, descriptions of values, and even poetry in there.
A diary is, after all, literally an expansion of your mind into the physical realm.
A Life's Work by Rachel Cusk [2]
The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin [3]
We Real Cool by bell hooks [4]
[1] >The moment of queer pride is a refusal to be shamed by witnessing the other as being ashamed of you.
[2] >Birth is not merely that which divides women from men: it also divides women from themselves, so that a woman's understanding of what it is to exist is profoundly changed. Another person has existed in her, and after their birth the live within the jurisdiction of her consciousness. When she is with them she is not herself; when she is without them she is not herself; and so it is as difficult to leave your children as it is to stay with them. To discover this is to feel that your life has become irretrievably mired in conflict, or caught in some mythic snare in which you will perpetually, vainly struggle.
[3] >The terrible thing, old buddy, is that you must accept them. And I mean that very seriously. You must accept them and accept them with love. For these innocent people have no other hope. They are, in effect, still trapped in a history which they do not understand; and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it. They have had to believe for many years, and for innumerable reasons, that black men are inferior to white men. Many of them, indeed, know better, but, as you will discover, people find it very difficult to act on what they know.
[4] >Showing aggression is the simplest way to assert patriarchal manhood. Men of all classes know this. As a consequence, all men living in a culture of violence must demonstrate at some point in their lives that they are capable of being violent.
Great read whether it sticks around as a belief for you or not, akin to any other religious text in my opinion.
Can be read for free at lawofone.info
Definitely read the intro before jumping into the meat of it for the great context provided by the L/L Research team for what comes after.
Even if you are a die-hard pessimist it will open some cracks and plant seeds on your mind. Disguised as a physics book - not an easy read - this is a treaty on optimism.
I think that after that book i had the question: how 100 years ago he was able to write about those places?. Then i never stopped to read. After that i started to develop the addiction i have about knowledge.
EDIT: oh, and the final plot twist.., was amazing.
I've been a very prideful person nearly my entire life. This book really opened my eyes and also led me to Christian faith. I highly recommend it, even to children like my older son that also struggle with humility.
Also, of course, I'd recommend reading the New Testament, as it is the source for much of the material in Humility.
The Requiem for Homo Sapiens tetralogy by David Zindell.
I should mention that for many, his late work is completely insane, and he has indeed suffered psychosis at his latest years.
I should also mention, anecdotally speaking, you can experience dissociation and suffer peculiar dreams just by reading through this.
Non-zero: the Logic of Human Destiny was anothrr very good materialistic philosophy read for my impressionable young mind. Talking about human cooperation & emergence of civil order. Not nearly as in depth but I think of it as also quite related to the History of Everything, mentioned in other comments here.
by Tim Harford
This book very much changed my understanding of home international finance worked and why.
His other stuff can be of interest too, like Prometheus Rising and Cosmic Triggers. It’s not that what he writes about is necessarily scientific or rigorous, but he offers a bunch of worldview building blocks that one can try and find very useful.
All you need to know about the universe. And mankind.
Really an astounding re-framing of biology, and one of the best books of science literature I’ve read in my life.
Reading this started my deep dive into the rabbit hole of high strangeness phenomena.
Can't say one way or another if it's all just bunk or not, but at least it's entertaining.
Unfortunately what it all comes down to is experiential testimony, and I still believe that without physical evidence or extraordinary film footage of some kind (which apparently exist but haven't been released due to "reasons"), all attempts to rationalize the existence/non-existence of this phenomenon will remain speculative (I'm aware it's not exactly easy to prove non-existence).
I actually find this whole topic a wonderful epistemic exercise; initially everything is trivially dismissible so you Bayes weight to impossible and crazy, but as you dive into all the accounts throughout history you really can't be so sure of your initial assessment anymore.
What will move the needle to improbable is if we "solve" physics (QM vs gravity, theory of everything etc) and definitively rule out all mechanisms in support of high strangeness phenomena (i.e., there really is only 4 fundamental forces, no extra physical dimensions, etc).
Until then my head cannon for all this might just be we're being toyed with by unthinkingly scientifically advanced entities.
Or.. spirits and the supernatural is real and is entirely non physical, the phenomenon is itself intelligent, and thus cannot be studied by conventional scientific methods (but even then I'd think the scientific process should work).
Ah well, see how fun it is to speculate :). Hopefully with the recent shift in government attitude towards UAP we'll see some hard data released soon and make more accurate assessments.
TL;DR - the book explains how humans are predictably irrational and how seeming cognitive ease in decisioning is simply laziness in action since the brain will substitute a tough decision for a similar but easy one! It has made me reflect upon why I think the way I do, helped me to remove most bias from my actions, and also has a great suggestion that you should ask others to check you if you sound stupid, which is not great for your ego but is necessary nonetheless.
In terms of soft skills: "Outliers"
Also Stephen Covey's 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Be proactive; Begin with the end in mind; Put first things first; Think win–win; Seek first to understand, then to be understood; Synergize; Sharpen the Saw (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_7_Habits_of_Highly_Effecti...).
Leaves of Grass
Persuasion
Foundation
The Diary of Lady Murasaki
The Remains of the Day
Travels in Siberia
Anabasis
A Brief History of Time
The Rebel
Why: skeptical/scientific thinking