10 ms·

Surprisingly undervalued books

285 points by nqureshi 14y ago

codewright 14y ago
It's a good list for cherry-picking a couple reading ideas, but the amateur comments about philosophy weren't well-received by this individual. > I find that it’s thoroughly undervalued by philosophers Doing okay so far... >though, who see it as an arcane and eccentric work of little value Not so sure about that...the timing for Wittgenstein's work might've been unfortunate, given that people were starting to become infatuated with existentialism around the same time. That was as more of a pop-culture phenomenon than an academic fad though. >it’s a difficult thing to read Okay again... >Ironically for a book ignored by most philosophers, it contains the answers to a lot of their questions, and the method for answering all of them. Hrm, no. A lot of the questions concerning philosophy and the method for answering all of them? I sincerely doubt any work that could described in such terms would be as obscure as he proposes. This borders on the illogic of conspiracy theorists believing they've found some secret truth. A bizarre flash of irrationality in an otherwise great post.
- nqureshi 14y ago
  Thanks. You question whether it's really seen as that eccentric: I've actually corresponded with a bunch of UK philosophers about Wittgenstein, all of whom regard his earlier work as vaguely interesting if subsequently outmoded (a more or less accurate assessment) and his later work as eccentric and mostly irrelevant to serious philosophy (a totally wrong-headed assessment). I'm happy to send you email extracts if you still doubt that. I should note that I studied philosophy here in the UK (at Oxford), so perhaps I'm biased towards the UK. But I think this applies to the US too: Wittgenstein sort-of influenced the American tradition via Rorty and Kripke, but he's still not central to modern American academic philosophy. Kripke got him totally wrong anyway, and Wittgenstein's only a piece of Rorty's outlook. As to your last comment - what you seem to be saying is that this is highly improbable based on 'well if it's that good why doesn't everyone believe that' considerations. To which I'd respond: (a) it's not a totally obscure work. In fact, it's regarded as the main late Wittgenstein work. But (b) late Wittgenstein is totally undervalued by the mainstream of academic philosophy, mostly because (I think) he renders it irrelevant; and (c) you're better off actually reading the thing and deciding for yourself. Otherwise you become a sort of 'efficient market theorist' w.r.t. academia/books. Not a position I'd want to hold, personally.
  - codewright 14y ago
    >As far as I know, Wittgenstein sort-of influenced the American tradition via Rorty, but he's still not central to modern American academic philosophy. Ahhh, you're coming from the perspective of an analytic philosopher. The part about the UK I can't really incorporate except to take your word for it. I've assumed they were independent of the "continental" zeitgeist. I don't come from the analytic family of philosophy. I could never really get past Frege. OTOH, I don't care for the hippies on the other side of the fence either. I'd be happy to peruse material/readings if you have any. I'll add my email address to my profile now. Thank you for replying!
    - nqureshi 14y ago
      Ah interesting - are you a philosopher? What family of philosophy do you tend to focus on?
      - codewright 14y ago
        I let philosophy consume my life for a few years to the detriment of everything else. I'm a values/ethics/aesthetic/desert/metaphysics nihilist with a keen interest in epistemology. Most recent relevant read I've enjoyed of late has been Popper and his work on falsifiability. I've been trying to work through Marx recently too, but I find reading him to be a lot like reading Ayn Rand. Insufferable and they expect you to swallow the bitter pill of their ridiculous foundations they use to prop up the philosophy they work backwards from their personal preferences to justify. I'm going to continue for the sake of trying to extract some sense of analysis with respect to Capitalism, but it's slow-going.
        nqureshi 14y ago
        "I let philosophy consume my life for a few years to the detriment of everything else." - sounds like you'd love Wittgenstein. Haha. Marx is WAY more interesting than Ayn Rand. Although you're probably better off reading Chomsky today. Popper is awesome.
        14y ago
andreyon 14y ago
I have read Impro and found it quite good yet can't remember anything related to newtonian mechanics... but I wanted to read it again anyway :)
- Simucal 14y ago
  I think he was saying that there are certain things that once you learn them, they change how you view the world. For him, Newtonian Mechanics and Calculus both did this as well as the knowledge he gained from Impro. Not that Impro had anything to do with Newtonian Mechanics.
  - andreyon 14y ago
    oh, that makes sense :)
cvursache 14y ago
Happily read your blog post but the assertions about Wittgenstein rang alarm bells. It may be that his works are ignored in the UK right now, but paraphrasing Brian Magee: "Philosophy is subject to fashion". So it may just be a question of trend in philosophy. > it contains the answers to a lot of their questions, and the method for answering all of them. For me that sounds like "Node.js contains the method to solving all programming problems.".
- nqureshi 14y ago
  "I would say that this has been, unfortunately for philosophy, the central fact of philosophy. Most philosophical debates are not merely afflicted by but driven by confusions over words. Do we have free will? Depends what you mean by "free." Do abstract ideas exist? Depends what you mean by "exist." Wittgenstein is popularly credited with the idea that most philosophical controversies are due to confusions over language. I'm not sure how much credit to give him. I suspect a lot of people realized this, but reacted simply by not studying philosophy, rather than becoming philosophy professors. How did things get this way? Can something people have spent thousands of years studying really be a waste of time? Those are interesting questions. In fact, some of the most interesting questions you can ask about philosophy. The most valuable way to approach the current philosophical tradition may be neither to get lost in pointless speculations like Berkeley, nor to shut them down like Wittgenstein, but to study it as an example of reason gone wrong." - PG Not an appeal to authority, mind you, just a way of saving myself time.
  - 4clicknet 14y ago
    There's an interesting book called After Virtue by Alasdair MacIntyre that does a good job of going through how these confusions over language arise. I haven't read it for years, but I liked how it explained how and why the language of philosophy has changed over the centuries.
  - cvursache 14y ago
    That's a very good and relevant quote, thank you!
  - 14y ago
windu 14y ago
+1 for Wittgenstein
mjn 14y ago
Undervaluing Wittgenstein isn't really consistent with what I've read in American philosophy at least. If you go by objective metrics (which would be the Moneyball approach), he consistently tops the citation counts, and beyond that, is considered central to many areas. Probably only Heidegger gives him a run for most broadly influential 20th-century philosopher (though it's hard to compare directly, because they've been influential on quite different groups). He's been particularly influential on analytic philosophy via Saul Kripke, among other interpreters. In popularity contests, he routinely gets voted #1 most influential philosopher in polls of academic philosophers as well, e.g. in a 1999 poll of mostly UK/US academic philosophers (http://commonsenseatheism.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/Lackey-What-are-the-modern-classics.pdf http://commonsenseatheism.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/Lac...) and in a Brian Leiter straw poll (http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2009/03/so-who-is-the-most-important-philosopher-of-the-past-200-years.html http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2009/03/so-who-is-the-...). The former one concludes that Philosophical Investigations is "the one crossover masterpiece in twentieth-century philosophy, appealing across diverse specializations and philosophical orientations". An interesting question might be who is undervalued on those lists: is there someone halfway down, or not on the list at all, who should be near the top?
- brudgers 14y ago
  he routinely gets voted #1 most influential philosopher in polls of academic philosophers as well The joke is, Wittgenstein is the two most influential philosophers of the twentieth century - first for the logical positivist movement inspired by Tractatus Logico Philisophicus, and secondly for the natural language analysis inspired by Philosphical Investigations. Relative position within philosophy education is another matter. It's hard for any "new" philosopher to compete with two millennia of classics when those classics are still relevant to the state of the art - i.e. it's hard to displace Plato given that the pertinent aspects of the human condition haven't changed since he wrote about them.
- zachalexander 14y ago
  Agreed. I wondered who on earth he's been talking to. At my alma mater, a little liberal arts school with a continentally-inclined philosophy department, somewhere amid all the Heidegger and Derrida I still was taught that Wittgenstein was a BFD.
endymi0n 14y ago
I had a very similar thought one year ago - for me one of the undervalued books back then was "How to win friends and influence people" by Dale Carnegie. The title was so smarmy and offputting for me (yeah, it's 70 years old...) that I skipped this gem for way too long, when it's basically everything you will ever need to deal with and manage people in a few hundred pages...
- moron 14y ago
  From what I remember, the main knock against the book is that it teaches you to be phony to others in order to get what you want. But for me, it was invaluable as well. I was such a dick in my professional life before I read that book.
gnosis 14y ago
Also see: "Ask Slashdot: Most Underappreciated Sci-Fi Writer?" http://www.ask.slashdot.org/story/12/08/08/2135246/ask-slashdot-most-underappreciated-sci-fi-writer http://www.ask.slashdot.org/story/12/08/08/2135246/ask-slash... Slashdot has many problems, but this was actually a pretty interesting and informative thread.
- bravoyankee 14y ago
  Not sure where that "Slashdot has many problems" statement came from, but I enjoy Slashdot every bit as much as HN. Actually, I like /. more because there's a lot less shilling and gaming votes there.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
  - icebraining 14y ago
    There is? What about all those lengthy "first posts" published in the same minute as the story, which are curiously always advocating the same companies against others? Though, I'm still not sure if it's shilling or subtle trolling.
  - precisioncoder 14y ago
    Slashdot and HN are different flavors, I like them both but I find the harshness of Slashdot can be offputting sometimes. However often I see technical insights there that floor me.
acmiller 14y ago
+1 for Stephen Booth. I was fortunate enough to take his 17th century English poetry class at Cal. He's the only lecturer who could make poetry resonate with my geek brain. It's funny how some classes stay with you over the years.
- nqureshi 14y ago
  Wow, you took his class - that's incredible! Do you have any class notes / resources you could share? I love the guy. What was he like as a teacher / in person?
  - acmiller 14y ago
    He was very smart, and his lectures were a lot of fun. What made him a great poetry teacher was that he didn't care about what poems "mean"; what mattered was the effect they had on the reader. I can't tell you how liberating this was. For years I had felt that I just didn't understand poetry, but Prof. Booth told us that poems are just candy for the mind. All the rest is just pretense. And he meant it too. The final paper was a eight-page analysis of the last four lines of Paradise Lost. So you'd take the phrase, "The world was all before them," and you'd see that this line suggests several meaning to the reader. E.g., the world (God's creation) was complete before Adam and Eve; or that the world (the entirety of human history) was in front of Adam and Eve; etc. More than anything, he taught poetry as a kind of game. It was so much fun. The last class was truly great--he did a close reading of the children's book Go, Dog. Go!. So entertaining. Sadly I don't have my notes anymore, but you should search for other people's write-ups of the Go, Dog. Go! lecture online. It's honestly one of the top five lectures I've ever seen.
sophiabatka464 14y ago
nice movie http://freemoviesite24.com/2012/10/people-like-us-2012-download-movie-for-free http://freemoviesite24.com/2012/10/people-like-us-2012-downl...
nkoren 14y ago
+1 for Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. It's superb. I'd add A Pattern Language to the list. It's actually been very appropriately valued by the programming community, but massively undervalued by its intended audience of architects and urban planners. Should've been the architecture and planning book of the 20th century; instead most design professionals have never heard of it. Their loss!
- brudgers 14y ago
  A Pattern Language is often a required text for at least one studio course in US architectural schools. There are, however, practical issues with Alexander's approach at a professional level. Some are perhaps subtle to a layperson - most architectural projects are typically driven by the client's commercial concerns, e.g. a firehouse apparatus bay is designed for trucks not human habitation and a restaurant is designed to turn over customers not cause them to linger for six hours. On the other hand, some are obvious - planners do not have the ability to limit existing communities to a few thousand people. This isn't to say that Alexander cannot inform a design. In fact, many architects look at his work during the process. But the kind of project which will look like the images in his book is rare simply because many of these patterns are best implemented "at run-time" by the user, rather than at "compile time" by the architect or planner. Finally, I would say that what the programming community got from A Pattern Language is not Christopher Alexander, but Richard P. Gabriel. [http://www.dreamsongs.com/ http://www.dreamsongs.com/]
  - 1123581321 14y ago
    I've had this conversation with architects and city planners and they all say this. Only a narrow band of the patterns are in the architect's area of practice; as an obvious example, the architect does not organize the whole world at once a la Pattern 1. Most of an architect's income depends on perpetuating the poor design of modern communities with each individual building. There is just no money in refusing to build anything but a useful space except when being commissioned by an eccentric or some other rare project. That leaves only the arrangement of the interiors which is hampered by code and depends on the taste of the building's occupier in respect to the uses of rooms and selection of furniture. Alexander's patterns must be adopted by the occupiers of buildings so they can work their way backwards to the architects and city planners that don't or won't consider them.
blindhippo 14y ago
"Ironically for a book ignored by most philosophers, it contains the answers to a lot of their questions, and the method for answering all of them." I find this illuminating - philosopher's aren't concerned with answers. They are concerned with the questions. An interesting contrast between the scientific/engineering mindset and the philosophical mindset.
- pav3l 14y ago
  Very true, once you start understanding how to approach the right questions, the problem moves to the scientific domain, e.g. natural philosophy--> physics, philosophy of mind (partly) -->psychology/neuroscience/cognitive science, etc
- andreasvc 14y ago
  It doesn't really contain answers so much as that it argues the questions or problems are really just puzzles resulting from confusions due to language.
lr--rw-rwx 14y ago
I will add: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values by Robert M. Pirsig
- rimantas 14y ago
  This book is pretty well known. However the sequel to it "Lila" is IMHO better and really undervalued.
JoeAltmaier 14y ago
6. ‘Principles‘ (pdf) by Ray Dalio. Tried reading it. His life storey reads like an entrepreneur who started by trying to fit in (held several corporate jobs), failed (fired for insubordination) then started his own company. The rest reads like a self-help book written by an amateur. Some gushing about physics and natural history (which a HBS graduate probably finds unfathomable and mysterious). Then some deep discussion of his own inner psyche; why do successful people assume its their own uniquness that made them succeed and not, for instance, market conditions or good advice? Then I gave up. Is very wordy, very very wordy, and not many of the words worth slogging through. At least the part I saw.
- ryanwaggoner 14y ago
  Some gushing about physics and natural history (which a HBS graduate probably finds unfathomable and mysterious). Yeah, cause all those HBS grads are just idiots, right? They could never fathom something as complex as physics or natural history. That's probably just black magic to them, even though a big chunk of them got their undergrad degrees in science or engineering. EDIT: Some examples of those idiot HBS grads: http://www.hbs.edu/news/releases/kaplanfellows2010.html http://www.hbs.edu/news/releases/kaplanfellows2010.html
  - JoeAltmaier 14y ago
    Sorry; painted all business school grads from my experiences. You have some good examples there; I've never met those guys. I'll repaint it: this guy (who wrote the book) was a high-school failure and not in your list. Just read his stuff if you can, to see his level of physics understanding.
    - ryanwaggoner 14y ago
      A high school failure? It looks like he got a BA and then went to the best management school in the world and then became a billionaire. I'd like to be that kind of failure. Maybe his understanding of physics is wrong. But maybe your understanding of the importance of that is wrong?
    - 14y ago
aMoniker 14y ago
Interesting. I was just today thinking about this problem in passing. I'm certain that many books are 'about' subjects that they would never be categorized by in a library or by a bookseller. I wonder if it's possible to successfully relate outwardly disparate books by some system using full-text analysis and comparison.
ubershmekel 14y ago
The interesting thing about Money Ball was that Billy Beane pioneered an analytic model for evaluating the true value vs subjectively perceived value of players. This list was purely an opinion piece. It was the result of a subjective appraisal of both books, and the public opinion of them. I'm quite disappointed.
- andreasvc 14y ago
  I'm really curious how you would suggest to measure the "true value" of books. I think there may be no such thing. Base ball is a clearly defined game with conditions for winning and losing, which gives you objective information on these true values. But aesthetics (here book appreciation) simply isn't objective to begin with.
  - dllthomas 14y ago
    You can analyze the "true value" of books relative to whatever particular aims you have in mind. Just because there's nothing intrinsic to the books that specifies what those aims should be does not mean the effect of the books isn't in-principle measurable, and couldn't be judged for effectiveness once you have specified your goals.
    - andreasvc 14y ago
      You write "true value" and "whatever particular aims" in the same sentence. That seems like a contradiction to me. I agree that you can define things to measure objectively about books. However, I submit that in the end judgment of quality will always remain a subjective matter.
      - dllthomas 14y ago
        It's not a contradiction at all. Remember that the original context was "Moneyball" - sussing out the "true value" of baseball players using statistics as opposed to basing decisions on less accurate gut (or social) assessments of value. This use of "true" merely means "accurate" - corresponding with reality. The aims, in the case of baseball, are implicit, of course - the aim of any manager is to win games. In the case of books, people's aims will differ more. This means there's no single "true value" but for any given aim there will be some amount that book will contribute to it. This is usually hard to determine, but that doesn't make it subjective; it makes it that much more interesting if you are able to get at it.
jberryman 14y ago
The Inner Game of Tennis is very widely read among classical musicians. Probably other types of performers as well.
ivankirigin 14y ago
Baseball is largely zero sum. Reading isn't. Finding good books regardless of reputation is the way to go. But knowing what is good is hard, so you should trust persona recommendations first and ten reputation.
- andrewcooke 14y ago
  why is baseball zero sum? it's like rounders isn't it? so how does one side getting round (or whatever it's called in baseball) mean that the other team cannot? does the sum of the scores of the two sides always sum to the same value? i imagine not. so what an odd thing to assert. why?
  - Retric 14y ago
    For a team the score for a single game in meaningless it's simply win/loss. Think of it like this. If simply increasing the score was of value teams could simply walk the first 3 batters each inning. I mean it's within the rules and just think how much more exciting the game would be if each inning started with bases loaded.
    - andrewcooke 14y ago
      oh, ok, sure (sorry).
  - lmm 14y ago
    In a baseball league the only way for one team to do better is for other teams to do worse. This means that as a baseball manager trying to buy players (in what's pretty much an auction), knowing who the best players are is actually quite unimportant, because top players generally command top prices. What you look for are the players who are undervalued by the other teams, so that you can get them cheaper than they're worth. This really isn't the case for books, because they're generally sold at a fixed price and if there's high demand they'll just print more of them. So it's a lot more reasonable to just look for the best books and read them.
msluyter 14y ago
A lot of great books, but it's unclear to me that most of these are actually "undervalued." Check out the blurb on the back cover of Philosophical Investigations, for example: Immediately upon its posthumous publication in 1953, Ludwig Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations was hailed as a masterpiece, and the ensuing years have confirmed this initial assessment. Today it is widely acknowledged to be the single most important philosophical work of the twentieth century. Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain has had a huge impact. From Amazon: "Translated into more than seventeen languages, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain is the world's most widely used drawing instruction book." Same with The Inner Game of Tennis -- it was groundbreaking when it came out in 1972 and had a huge impact not just on tennis, or even sports generally, but on musicians, artists, performers, or anything with a critical mental game. Back when I was working on my music degree it was required reading. Is it possible that the author thinks these books are undervalued simply because many of them were released a while ago (when he was young or not yet born) and thus they aren't currently being hyped and/or in the limelight? That, or perhaps they're simply not that popular within the author's social circle?
- bennesvig 14y ago
  If it weren't for Hacker News, I would not have heard of Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, which I'm currently reading. I had also never heard of The Inner Game of Tennis despite playing tennis for four years in high school. To your point, some of the books were hugely successful when released, but don't receive much attention today due to the newer books in the spotlight. We all live in different worlds so some books will be wildly popular to some groups and foreign to others.
- zszugyi 14y ago
  Inner Game of Tennis is still ranked ranked among the top 1000 books on Amazon, and it's #1 in 3 categories. Impro is not much behind on the sales rank, so I'm guessing still quite a few people buy it. If you ever take an improv class, your teacher will most likely recommend it.
Codhisattva 14y ago
2 thoughts - "under appreciated" is a better way of thinking of it. And, there's no accounting for taste.
gruseom 14y ago
I'll pipe up for Impro. One of my favorite books. Well, the first half is – it's a meditation on life and the universe as much as it is about theater, and it changed my mind in some cool ways. It's useful for anyone doing creative work, especially collaborative creative work, definitely including programmers. It's also very funny. The second half is about mask work and trance, which I was expecting to be fascinating, but it fell short of the sparkling magic of the first half. The material isn't as generally accessible and probably depends more on knowing how they use masks in production. Johnstone says that the masks have their own personalities, which actors take on when they wear them, and that's probably why he relies on them so much. His tastes in theater run away from personal expression toward simple universals. He's always telling actors to be more boring, and that the worst thing you can do is try to be interesting or clever. Johnstone lives in my town in Western Canada. I ran into him in Safeway once. He's very tall and his eyes go in two different directions so he looks down at you rather quizzically from two different angles with his head tilted like a bird. I told him I loved his book, and he grunted "Good" and turned around and walked away. A few paces later he yelled "I'm glad it's useful!" and then went out of sight. He's probably a genius. He was known in the London theatre scene of the 1950s, but felt stifled because he couldn't try whatever ideas he wanted without worrying what somebody famous would think. Then he went to teach at some remote place on Vancouver Island and discovered that he could think and do whatever he wanted. He liked that so much that he got a position in my town and stayed there permanently, presumably because there was nobody there who mattered!
- nqureshi 14y ago
  This is awesome. Although such a shame he's in Canada, because now I can't meet him. He sounds brilliant.
  - gruseom 14y ago
    You can meet people in Canada :) I don't know if he's still doing it but a few years ago my wife took a workshop with him called "Ten Days with Keith". She loved it, and him. But it took a few days. He is an odd duck whose brilliance is not immediately apparent. Pretty amazing to be around someone who can tell stories about Beckett and Pinter though. I think of Johnstone as in the spirit of Lao Tzu. He is all about the unplanned and unthought. And about creating conditions favorable to its arising.
_feda_ 14y ago
I don't think a typical sampling of the HN crowd would be familiar with the work of J.D Salinger outside of Catcher and the Rye, but as someone who's loved these stories intensely since my mid-teens, I can't recommend them enough. In fact the mere mention of Seymour: An Introduction in the article sent shivers down my spine, reminding me of the amazing originality and artistry of this writer that I haven't experienced for several years now (I very rarely read fiction now). I won't bother summarizing the stories here, but if you have even a passing interest in zen, religion, literature or (at the risk of sounding pretentious) life itself then this is required reading in my book.
- nqureshi 14y ago
  Yeah, this is exactly how I feel about the book. It's a shame you've stopped reading fiction - why is that?
drcube 14y ago
I was a huge J. D. Salinger fan in high school. I read all his books (there aren't that many) over and over. But Seymour, and Introduction was always my least favorite. It seemed kind of unfocused. A spiritual/philosophical, new agey, masturbatory navel gazing. Not that it wasn't interesting, in its own way, but it was the kind of thing only hard core Salinger fans would want to read. But this mention of it makes me want to go back and reevaluate it. Maybe my high school brain just couldn't appreciate it. And, aside from reading one or two of the Nine Stories every couple of years, it's probably been ten years since I read Salinger, so now I want to go back and read them all. Thanks.
mck- 14y ago
For me, the most undervalued book is The Art of Worldly Wisdom by Baltasar Gracian y Morales. It's a small book of very condensed and timeless wisdom in the form of maxims, written very poetically. It's not a self-help book, the kind you might picture. (any book is self-help in some way). Perusing 5-10 maxims a day about 5 years ago heavily influenced the way I live my life, and still defines my character today.
- graeme 14y ago
  Incredible book, I've reread it at least twice.
- kqr2 14y ago
  http://archive.org/details/artofworldlywisd00gracuoft http://archive.org/details/artofworldlywisd00gracuoft
graeme 14y ago
This post made me happily spend ~$100. Quick tip for anyone trying to get older editions of some of these books: use Abebooks For example, some of the drawing on the right reviews mention that the 1989 edition is better. I find this happens with many new editions of older books. You can find near good as new editions of older books on Abebooks, at very reasonable prices. I used it to get a great copy of SICP, and just now ordered a version of How To Win Friends And Influence People published during Dale Carnegie's life, as Paul Graham recommended.
- nqureshi 14y ago
  I'm glad - hope you enjoy them!
wickedchicken 14y ago
Operators and Things, a (supposed) first-person account of a schizophrenic who recovered from the condition and wrote about her experience. The second half of the book is where it really shines, since the author attempts to analyze her experience as a window into the inner workings of her cognition: how it broke down, what she experienced when it did, how it recovered itself, and what led to it. Since the author is anonymous, and talking about one's mind is very introspective, it's hard to take away real science from the book but I found it fascinating nonetheless. While I really dislike pseudoscientific explanations of brain functioning, after reading this I took up the idea that the conscious mind is more of a time-slice scheduler and message-passer than where the actual computation is done. So concentration is about controlling your unconscious indirectly, like training a puppy how to play fetch: you give it suggestions of what to do, and ignore it when it doesn't do that :). I'm linking to the Amazon page, but IIRC the book is old enough to be in the public domain and there is a free text version somewhere. http://www.amazon.com/Operators-Things-Inner-Life-Schizophrenic/dp/0615509282/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1350244808&sr=8-1&keywords=operators+and+things http://www.amazon.com/Operators-Things-Inner-Life-Schizophre...
lhnz 14y ago
I've read Impro and it's a great book. There is another book that I want to recommend to other Hacker News readers and that is 'Language in Thought and Action' by S.I. Hiyakawa[0]. Honestly, reading that changed my life. [0] http://www.amazon.com/Language-Thought-Action-Fifth-Edition/dp/0156482401 http://www.amazon.com/Language-Thought-Action-Fifth-Edition/...
dlevine 14y ago
The book "Mastery" by George Leonard is a distilled version of "The Inner Game of Tennis." Highly recommended, and it can be had for a few bucks shipped on Amazon.
atas 14y ago
'The Olduvai imperative'. Especially the introduction and the first couple of chapters.

285 points by nqureshi 14y ago

It's a good list for cherry-picking a couple reading ideas, but the amateur comments about philosophy weren't well-received by this individual. > I find that it’s thoroughly undervalued by philosophers Doing okay so far... >though, who see it as an arcane and eccentric work of little value Not so sure about that...the timing for Wittgenstein's work might've been unfortunate, given that people were starting to become infatuated with existentialism around the same time. That was as more of a pop-culture phenomenon than an academic fad though. >it’s a difficult thing to read Okay again... >Ironically for a book ignored by most philosophers, it contains the answers to a lot of their questions, and the method for answering all of them. Hrm, no. A lot of the questions concerning philosophy and the method for answering all of them? I sincerely doubt any work that could described in such terms would be as obscure as he proposes. This borders on the illogic of conspiracy theorists believing they've found some secret truth. A bizarre flash of irrationality in an otherwise great post.

nqureshi 14y ago
Thanks. You question whether it's really seen as that eccentric: I've actually corresponded with a bunch of UK philosophers about Wittgenstein, all of whom regard his earlier work as vaguely interesting if subsequently outmoded (a more or less accurate assessment) and his later work as eccentric and mostly irrelevant to serious philosophy (a totally wrong-headed assessment). I'm happy to send you email extracts if you still doubt that. I should note that I studied philosophy here in the UK (at Oxford), so perhaps I'm biased towards the UK. But I think this applies to the US too: Wittgenstein sort-of influenced the American tradition via Rorty and Kripke, but he's still not central to modern American academic philosophy. Kripke got him totally wrong anyway, and Wittgenstein's only a piece of Rorty's outlook. As to your last comment - what you seem to be saying is that this is highly improbable based on 'well if it's that good why doesn't everyone believe that' considerations. To which I'd respond: (a) it's not a totally obscure work. In fact, it's regarded as the main late Wittgenstein work. But (b) late Wittgenstein is totally undervalued by the mainstream of academic philosophy, mostly because (I think) he renders it irrelevant; and (c) you're better off actually reading the thing and deciding for yourself. Otherwise you become a sort of 'efficient market theorist' w.r.t. academia/books. Not a position I'd want to hold, personally.
- codewright 14y ago
  >As far as I know, Wittgenstein sort-of influenced the American tradition via Rorty, but he's still not central to modern American academic philosophy. Ahhh, you're coming from the perspective of an analytic philosopher. The part about the UK I can't really incorporate except to take your word for it. I've assumed they were independent of the "continental" zeitgeist. I don't come from the analytic family of philosophy. I could never really get past Frege. OTOH, I don't care for the hippies on the other side of the fence either. I'd be happy to peruse material/readings if you have any. I'll add my email address to my profile now. Thank you for replying!
  - nqureshi 14y ago
    Ah interesting - are you a philosopher? What family of philosophy do you tend to focus on?
    - codewright 14y ago
      I let philosophy consume my life for a few years to the detriment of everything else. I'm a values/ethics/aesthetic/desert/metaphysics nihilist with a keen interest in epistemology. Most recent relevant read I've enjoyed of late has been Popper and his work on falsifiability. I've been trying to work through Marx recently too, but I find reading him to be a lot like reading Ayn Rand. Insufferable and they expect you to swallow the bitter pill of their ridiculous foundations they use to prop up the philosophy they work backwards from their personal preferences to justify. I'm going to continue for the sake of trying to extract some sense of analysis with respect to Capitalism, but it's slow-going.
      - nqureshi 14y ago
        "I let philosophy consume my life for a few years to the detriment of everything else." - sounds like you'd love Wittgenstein. Haha. Marx is WAY more interesting than Ayn Rand. Although you're probably better off reading Chomsky today. Popper is awesome.
      - 14y ago

andreyon 14y ago

I have read Impro and found it quite good yet can't remember anything related to newtonian mechanics... but I wanted to read it again anyway :)

Simucal 14y ago
I think he was saying that there are certain things that once you learn them, they change how you view the world. For him, Newtonian Mechanics and Calculus both did this as well as the knowledge he gained from Impro. Not that Impro had anything to do with Newtonian Mechanics.
- andreyon 14y ago
  oh, that makes sense :)

cvursache 14y ago

Happily read your blog post but the assertions about Wittgenstein rang alarm bells. It may be that his works are ignored in the UK right now, but paraphrasing Brian Magee: "Philosophy is subject to fashion". So it may just be a question of trend in philosophy. > it contains the answers to a lot of their questions, and the method for answering all of them. For me that sounds like "Node.js contains the method to solving all programming problems.".

nqureshi 14y ago
"I would say that this has been, unfortunately for philosophy, the central fact of philosophy. Most philosophical debates are not merely afflicted by but driven by confusions over words. Do we have free will? Depends what you mean by "free." Do abstract ideas exist? Depends what you mean by "exist." Wittgenstein is popularly credited with the idea that most philosophical controversies are due to confusions over language. I'm not sure how much credit to give him. I suspect a lot of people realized this, but reacted simply by not studying philosophy, rather than becoming philosophy professors. How did things get this way? Can something people have spent thousands of years studying really be a waste of time? Those are interesting questions. In fact, some of the most interesting questions you can ask about philosophy. The most valuable way to approach the current philosophical tradition may be neither to get lost in pointless speculations like Berkeley, nor to shut them down like Wittgenstein, but to study it as an example of reason gone wrong." - PG Not an appeal to authority, mind you, just a way of saving myself time.
- 4clicknet 14y ago
  There's an interesting book called After Virtue by Alasdair MacIntyre that does a good job of going through how these confusions over language arise. I haven't read it for years, but I liked how it explained how and why the language of philosophy has changed over the centuries.
- cvursache 14y ago
  That's a very good and relevant quote, thank you!
- 14y ago

windu 14y ago

+1 for Wittgenstein

mjn 14y ago

Undervaluing Wittgenstein isn't really consistent with what I've read in American philosophy at least. If you go by objective metrics (which would be the Moneyball approach), he consistently tops the citation counts, and beyond that, is considered central to many areas. Probably only Heidegger gives him a run for most broadly influential 20th-century philosopher (though it's hard to compare directly, because they've been influential on quite different groups). He's been particularly influential on analytic philosophy via Saul Kripke, among other interpreters. In popularity contests, he routinely gets voted #1 most influential philosopher in polls of academic philosophers as well, e.g. in a 1999 poll of mostly UK/US academic philosophers (http://commonsenseatheism.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/Lackey-What-are-the-modern-classics.pdf http://commonsenseatheism.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/Lac...) and in a Brian Leiter straw poll (http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2009/03/so-who-is-the-most-important-philosopher-of-the-past-200-years.html http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2009/03/so-who-is-the-...). The former one concludes that Philosophical Investigations is "the one crossover masterpiece in twentieth-century philosophy, appealing across diverse specializations and philosophical orientations". An interesting question might be who is undervalued on those lists: is there someone halfway down, or not on the list at all, who should be near the top?

brudgers 14y ago
he routinely gets voted #1 most influential philosopher in polls of academic philosophers as well The joke is, Wittgenstein is the two most influential philosophers of the twentieth century - first for the logical positivist movement inspired by Tractatus Logico Philisophicus, and secondly for the natural language analysis inspired by Philosphical Investigations. Relative position within philosophy education is another matter. It's hard for any "new" philosopher to compete with two millennia of classics when those classics are still relevant to the state of the art - i.e. it's hard to displace Plato given that the pertinent aspects of the human condition haven't changed since he wrote about them.
zachalexander 14y ago
Agreed. I wondered who on earth he's been talking to. At my alma mater, a little liberal arts school with a continentally-inclined philosophy department, somewhere amid all the Heidegger and Derrida I still was taught that Wittgenstein was a BFD.

endymi0n 14y ago

I had a very similar thought one year ago - for me one of the undervalued books back then was "How to win friends and influence people" by Dale Carnegie. The title was so smarmy and offputting for me (yeah, it's 70 years old...) that I skipped this gem for way too long, when it's basically everything you will ever need to deal with and manage people in a few hundred pages...

moron 14y ago
From what I remember, the main knock against the book is that it teaches you to be phony to others in order to get what you want. But for me, it was invaluable as well. I was such a dick in my professional life before I read that book.

gnosis 14y ago

Also see: "Ask Slashdot: Most Underappreciated Sci-Fi Writer?" http://www.ask.slashdot.org/story/12/08/08/2135246/ask-slashdot-most-underappreciated-sci-fi-writer http://www.ask.slashdot.org/story/12/08/08/2135246/ask-slash... Slashdot has many problems, but this was actually a pretty interesting and informative thread.

bravoyankee 14y ago
Not sure where that "Slashdot has many problems" statement came from, but I enjoy Slashdot every bit as much as HN. Actually, I like /. more because there's a lot less shilling and gaming votes there.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- icebraining 14y ago
  There is? What about all those lengthy "first posts" published in the same minute as the story, which are curiously always advocating the same companies against others? Though, I'm still not sure if it's shilling or subtle trolling.
- precisioncoder 14y ago
  Slashdot and HN are different flavors, I like them both but I find the harshness of Slashdot can be offputting sometimes. However often I see technical insights there that floor me.

acmiller 14y ago

+1 for Stephen Booth. I was fortunate enough to take his 17th century English poetry class at Cal. He's the only lecturer who could make poetry resonate with my geek brain. It's funny how some classes stay with you over the years.

nqureshi 14y ago
Wow, you took his class - that's incredible! Do you have any class notes / resources you could share? I love the guy. What was he like as a teacher / in person?
- acmiller 14y ago
  He was very smart, and his lectures were a lot of fun. What made him a great poetry teacher was that he didn't care about what poems "mean"; what mattered was the effect they had on the reader. I can't tell you how liberating this was. For years I had felt that I just didn't understand poetry, but Prof. Booth told us that poems are just candy for the mind. All the rest is just pretense. And he meant it too. The final paper was a eight-page analysis of the last four lines of Paradise Lost. So you'd take the phrase, "The world was all before them," and you'd see that this line suggests several meaning to the reader. E.g., the world (God's creation) was complete before Adam and Eve; or that the world (the entirety of human history) was in front of Adam and Eve; etc. More than anything, he taught poetry as a kind of game. It was so much fun. The last class was truly great--he did a close reading of the children's book Go, Dog. Go!. So entertaining. Sadly I don't have my notes anymore, but you should search for other people's write-ups of the Go, Dog. Go! lecture online. It's honestly one of the top five lectures I've ever seen.

sophiabatka464 14y ago

nice movie http://freemoviesite24.com/2012/10/people-like-us-2012-download-movie-for-free http://freemoviesite24.com/2012/10/people-like-us-2012-downl...

nkoren 14y ago

+1 for Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. It's superb. I'd add A Pattern Language to the list. It's actually been very appropriately valued by the programming community, but massively undervalued by its intended audience of architects and urban planners. Should've been the architecture and planning book of the 20th century; instead most design professionals have never heard of it. Their loss!

brudgers 14y ago
A Pattern Language is often a required text for at least one studio course in US architectural schools. There are, however, practical issues with Alexander's approach at a professional level. Some are perhaps subtle to a layperson - most architectural projects are typically driven by the client's commercial concerns, e.g. a firehouse apparatus bay is designed for trucks not human habitation and a restaurant is designed to turn over customers not cause them to linger for six hours. On the other hand, some are obvious - planners do not have the ability to limit existing communities to a few thousand people. This isn't to say that Alexander cannot inform a design. In fact, many architects look at his work during the process. But the kind of project which will look like the images in his book is rare simply because many of these patterns are best implemented "at run-time" by the user, rather than at "compile time" by the architect or planner. Finally, I would say that what the programming community got from A Pattern Language is not Christopher Alexander, but Richard P. Gabriel. [http://www.dreamsongs.com/ http://www.dreamsongs.com/]
- 1123581321 14y ago
  I've had this conversation with architects and city planners and they all say this. Only a narrow band of the patterns are in the architect's area of practice; as an obvious example, the architect does not organize the whole world at once a la Pattern 1. Most of an architect's income depends on perpetuating the poor design of modern communities with each individual building. There is just no money in refusing to build anything but a useful space except when being commissioned by an eccentric or some other rare project. That leaves only the arrangement of the interiors which is hampered by code and depends on the taste of the building's occupier in respect to the uses of rooms and selection of furniture. Alexander's patterns must be adopted by the occupiers of buildings so they can work their way backwards to the architects and city planners that don't or won't consider them.

blindhippo 14y ago

"Ironically for a book ignored by most philosophers, it contains the answers to a lot of their questions, and the method for answering all of them." I find this illuminating - philosopher's aren't concerned with answers. They are concerned with the questions. An interesting contrast between the scientific/engineering mindset and the philosophical mindset.

pav3l 14y ago
Very true, once you start understanding how to approach the right questions, the problem moves to the scientific domain, e.g. natural philosophy--> physics, philosophy of mind (partly) -->psychology/neuroscience/cognitive science, etc
andreasvc 14y ago
It doesn't really contain answers so much as that it argues the questions or problems are really just puzzles resulting from confusions due to language.

lr--rw-rwx 14y ago

I will add: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values by Robert M. Pirsig

rimantas 14y ago
This book is pretty well known. However the sequel to it "Lila" is IMHO better and really undervalued.

JoeAltmaier 14y ago

6. ‘Principles‘ (pdf) by Ray Dalio. Tried reading it. His life storey reads like an entrepreneur who started by trying to fit in (held several corporate jobs), failed (fired for insubordination) then started his own company. The rest reads like a self-help book written by an amateur. Some gushing about physics and natural history (which a HBS graduate probably finds unfathomable and mysterious). Then some deep discussion of his own inner psyche; why do successful people assume its their own uniquness that made them succeed and not, for instance, market conditions or good advice? Then I gave up. Is very wordy, very very wordy, and not many of the words worth slogging through. At least the part I saw.

ryanwaggoner 14y ago
Some gushing about physics and natural history (which a HBS graduate probably finds unfathomable and mysterious). Yeah, cause all those HBS grads are just idiots, right? They could never fathom something as complex as physics or natural history. That's probably just black magic to them, even though a big chunk of them got their undergrad degrees in science or engineering. EDIT: Some examples of those idiot HBS grads: http://www.hbs.edu/news/releases/kaplanfellows2010.html http://www.hbs.edu/news/releases/kaplanfellows2010.html
- JoeAltmaier 14y ago
  Sorry; painted all business school grads from my experiences. You have some good examples there; I've never met those guys. I'll repaint it: this guy (who wrote the book) was a high-school failure and not in your list. Just read his stuff if you can, to see his level of physics understanding.
  - ryanwaggoner 14y ago
    A high school failure? It looks like he got a BA and then went to the best management school in the world and then became a billionaire. I'd like to be that kind of failure. Maybe his understanding of physics is wrong. But maybe your understanding of the importance of that is wrong?
  - 14y ago

aMoniker 14y ago

Interesting. I was just today thinking about this problem in passing. I'm certain that many books are 'about' subjects that they would never be categorized by in a library or by a bookseller. I wonder if it's possible to successfully relate outwardly disparate books by some system using full-text analysis and comparison.

ubershmekel 14y ago

The interesting thing about Money Ball was that Billy Beane pioneered an analytic model for evaluating the true value vs subjectively perceived value of players. This list was purely an opinion piece. It was the result of a subjective appraisal of both books, and the public opinion of them. I'm quite disappointed.

andreasvc 14y ago
I'm really curious how you would suggest to measure the "true value" of books. I think there may be no such thing. Base ball is a clearly defined game with conditions for winning and losing, which gives you objective information on these true values. But aesthetics (here book appreciation) simply isn't objective to begin with.
- dllthomas 14y ago
  You can analyze the "true value" of books relative to whatever particular aims you have in mind. Just because there's nothing intrinsic to the books that specifies what those aims should be does not mean the effect of the books isn't in-principle measurable, and couldn't be judged for effectiveness once you have specified your goals.
  - andreasvc 14y ago
    You write "true value" and "whatever particular aims" in the same sentence. That seems like a contradiction to me. I agree that you can define things to measure objectively about books. However, I submit that in the end judgment of quality will always remain a subjective matter.
    - dllthomas 14y ago
      It's not a contradiction at all. Remember that the original context was "Moneyball" - sussing out the "true value" of baseball players using statistics as opposed to basing decisions on less accurate gut (or social) assessments of value. This use of "true" merely means "accurate" - corresponding with reality. The aims, in the case of baseball, are implicit, of course - the aim of any manager is to win games. In the case of books, people's aims will differ more. This means there's no single "true value" but for any given aim there will be some amount that book will contribute to it. This is usually hard to determine, but that doesn't make it subjective; it makes it that much more interesting if you are able to get at it.

jberryman 14y ago

The Inner Game of Tennis is very widely read among classical musicians. Probably other types of performers as well.

ivankirigin 14y ago

Baseball is largely zero sum. Reading isn't. Finding good books regardless of reputation is the way to go. But knowing what is good is hard, so you should trust persona recommendations first and ten reputation.

andrewcooke 14y ago
why is baseball zero sum? it's like rounders isn't it? so how does one side getting round (or whatever it's called in baseball) mean that the other team cannot? does the sum of the scores of the two sides always sum to the same value? i imagine not. so what an odd thing to assert. why?
- Retric 14y ago
  For a team the score for a single game in meaningless it's simply win/loss. Think of it like this. If simply increasing the score was of value teams could simply walk the first 3 batters each inning. I mean it's within the rules and just think how much more exciting the game would be if each inning started with bases loaded.
  - andrewcooke 14y ago
    oh, ok, sure (sorry).
- lmm 14y ago
  In a baseball league the only way for one team to do better is for other teams to do worse. This means that as a baseball manager trying to buy players (in what's pretty much an auction), knowing who the best players are is actually quite unimportant, because top players generally command top prices. What you look for are the players who are undervalued by the other teams, so that you can get them cheaper than they're worth. This really isn't the case for books, because they're generally sold at a fixed price and if there's high demand they'll just print more of them. So it's a lot more reasonable to just look for the best books and read them.

msluyter 14y ago

A lot of great books, but it's unclear to me that most of these are actually "undervalued." Check out the blurb on the back cover of Philosophical Investigations, for example: Immediately upon its posthumous publication in 1953, Ludwig Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations was hailed as a masterpiece, and the ensuing years have confirmed this initial assessment. Today it is widely acknowledged to be the single most important philosophical work of the twentieth century. Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain has had a huge impact. From Amazon: "Translated into more than seventeen languages, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain is the world's most widely used drawing instruction book." Same with The Inner Game of Tennis -- it was groundbreaking when it came out in 1972 and had a huge impact not just on tennis, or even sports generally, but on musicians, artists, performers, or anything with a critical mental game. Back when I was working on my music degree it was required reading. Is it possible that the author thinks these books are undervalued simply because many of them were released a while ago (when he was young or not yet born) and thus they aren't currently being hyped and/or in the limelight? That, or perhaps they're simply not that popular within the author's social circle?

bennesvig 14y ago
If it weren't for Hacker News, I would not have heard of Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, which I'm currently reading. I had also never heard of The Inner Game of Tennis despite playing tennis for four years in high school. To your point, some of the books were hugely successful when released, but don't receive much attention today due to the newer books in the spotlight. We all live in different worlds so some books will be wildly popular to some groups and foreign to others.
zszugyi 14y ago
Inner Game of Tennis is still ranked ranked among the top 1000 books on Amazon, and it's #1 in 3 categories. Impro is not much behind on the sales rank, so I'm guessing still quite a few people buy it. If you ever take an improv class, your teacher will most likely recommend it.

Codhisattva 14y ago

2 thoughts - "under appreciated" is a better way of thinking of it. And, there's no accounting for taste.

gruseom 14y ago

I'll pipe up for Impro. One of my favorite books. Well, the first half is – it's a meditation on life and the universe as much as it is about theater, and it changed my mind in some cool ways. It's useful for anyone doing creative work, especially collaborative creative work, definitely including programmers. It's also very funny. The second half is about mask work and trance, which I was expecting to be fascinating, but it fell short of the sparkling magic of the first half. The material isn't as generally accessible and probably depends more on knowing how they use masks in production. Johnstone says that the masks have their own personalities, which actors take on when they wear them, and that's probably why he relies on them so much. His tastes in theater run away from personal expression toward simple universals. He's always telling actors to be more boring, and that the worst thing you can do is try to be interesting or clever. Johnstone lives in my town in Western Canada. I ran into him in Safeway once. He's very tall and his eyes go in two different directions so he looks down at you rather quizzically from two different angles with his head tilted like a bird. I told him I loved his book, and he grunted "Good" and turned around and walked away. A few paces later he yelled "I'm glad it's useful!" and then went out of sight. He's probably a genius. He was known in the London theatre scene of the 1950s, but felt stifled because he couldn't try whatever ideas he wanted without worrying what somebody famous would think. Then he went to teach at some remote place on Vancouver Island and discovered that he could think and do whatever he wanted. He liked that so much that he got a position in my town and stayed there permanently, presumably because there was nobody there who mattered!

nqureshi 14y ago
This is awesome. Although such a shame he's in Canada, because now I can't meet him. He sounds brilliant.
- gruseom 14y ago
  You can meet people in Canada :) I don't know if he's still doing it but a few years ago my wife took a workshop with him called "Ten Days with Keith". She loved it, and him. But it took a few days. He is an odd duck whose brilliance is not immediately apparent. Pretty amazing to be around someone who can tell stories about Beckett and Pinter though. I think of Johnstone as in the spirit of Lao Tzu. He is all about the unplanned and unthought. And about creating conditions favorable to its arising.

_feda_ 14y ago

I don't think a typical sampling of the HN crowd would be familiar with the work of J.D Salinger outside of Catcher and the Rye, but as someone who's loved these stories intensely since my mid-teens, I can't recommend them enough. In fact the mere mention of Seymour: An Introduction in the article sent shivers down my spine, reminding me of the amazing originality and artistry of this writer that I haven't experienced for several years now (I very rarely read fiction now). I won't bother summarizing the stories here, but if you have even a passing interest in zen, religion, literature or (at the risk of sounding pretentious) life itself then this is required reading in my book.

nqureshi 14y ago
Yeah, this is exactly how I feel about the book. It's a shame you've stopped reading fiction - why is that?

drcube 14y ago

I was a huge J. D. Salinger fan in high school. I read all his books (there aren't that many) over and over. But Seymour, and Introduction was always my least favorite. It seemed kind of unfocused. A spiritual/philosophical, new agey, masturbatory navel gazing. Not that it wasn't interesting, in its own way, but it was the kind of thing only hard core Salinger fans would want to read. But this mention of it makes me want to go back and reevaluate it. Maybe my high school brain just couldn't appreciate it. And, aside from reading one or two of the Nine Stories every couple of years, it's probably been ten years since I read Salinger, so now I want to go back and read them all. Thanks.

mck- 14y ago

For me, the most undervalued book is The Art of Worldly Wisdom by Baltasar Gracian y Morales. It's a small book of very condensed and timeless wisdom in the form of maxims, written very poetically. It's not a self-help book, the kind you might picture. (any book is self-help in some way). Perusing 5-10 maxims a day about 5 years ago heavily influenced the way I live my life, and still defines my character today.

graeme 14y ago
Incredible book, I've reread it at least twice.
kqr2 14y ago
http://archive.org/details/artofworldlywisd00gracuoft http://archive.org/details/artofworldlywisd00gracuoft

graeme 14y ago

This post made me happily spend ~$100. Quick tip for anyone trying to get older editions of some of these books: use Abebooks For example, some of the drawing on the right reviews mention that the 1989 edition is better. I find this happens with many new editions of older books. You can find near good as new editions of older books on Abebooks, at very reasonable prices. I used it to get a great copy of SICP, and just now ordered a version of How To Win Friends And Influence People published during Dale Carnegie's life, as Paul Graham recommended.

nqureshi 14y ago
I'm glad - hope you enjoy them!

wickedchicken 14y ago

Operators and Things, a (supposed) first-person account of a schizophrenic who recovered from the condition and wrote about her experience. The second half of the book is where it really shines, since the author attempts to analyze her experience as a window into the inner workings of her cognition: how it broke down, what she experienced when it did, how it recovered itself, and what led to it. Since the author is anonymous, and talking about one's mind is very introspective, it's hard to take away real science from the book but I found it fascinating nonetheless. While I really dislike pseudoscientific explanations of brain functioning, after reading this I took up the idea that the conscious mind is more of a time-slice scheduler and message-passer than where the actual computation is done. So concentration is about controlling your unconscious indirectly, like training a puppy how to play fetch: you give it suggestions of what to do, and ignore it when it doesn't do that :). I'm linking to the Amazon page, but IIRC the book is old enough to be in the public domain and there is a free text version somewhere. http://www.amazon.com/Operators-Things-Inner-Life-Schizophrenic/dp/0615509282/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1350244808&sr=8-1&keywords=operators+and+things http://www.amazon.com/Operators-Things-Inner-Life-Schizophre...

lhnz 14y ago

I've read Impro and it's a great book. There is another book that I want to recommend to other Hacker News readers and that is 'Language in Thought and Action' by S.I. Hiyakawa[0]. Honestly, reading that changed my life. [0] http://www.amazon.com/Language-Thought-Action-Fifth-Edition/dp/0156482401 http://www.amazon.com/Language-Thought-Action-Fifth-Edition/...

dlevine 14y ago

The book "Mastery" by George Leonard is a distilled version of "The Inner Game of Tennis." Highly recommended, and it can be had for a few bucks shipped on Amazon.

atas 14y ago

'The Olduvai imperative'. Especially the introduction and the first couple of chapters.