[HN Gopher] Ask HN: Books that teach you to think
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Ask HN: Books that teach you to think
Which top 2 books you you always remember when someone asks you
about books that taught you to think. Not told your exciting
stories about thinking (like those fancy NYT bestsellers), but
actually pushed your own thinking skill forward.
Author : aristofun
Score : 42 points
Date : 2022-10-16 16:32 UTC (6 hours ago)
| iamjasonlevin wrote:
| "Nobody Wants to Read Your Shit" -- I learned that I wasn't a bad
| writer. I just wasn't hooking people in the first sentence. You
| need to hook someone in the first sentence, get them to the
| second, and repeat until the end. This goes for every type of
| content creation and even other things like first impressions in
| work and dating.
|
| "The Almanack of Naval Ravikant" -- I learned about leverage, the
| importance of peace over joy, and how to build long-term
| relationships. I come back to this book every few months and look
| through my notes even more frequently.
| P5fRxh5kUvp2th wrote:
| As an avid reader for the last 40 years, this does not apply to
| me.
| mradek wrote:
| I read a book called "Thinker Toys" when I was younger. It had
| some unorthodox methods but I found them useful for "thinking
| outside the box". Often times the solution would pop out doing
| something wild lol.
| rasm wrote:
| "The 5 Elements of Effective Thinking" by Edward B. Burger and
| Michael Starbird
| Shatnerz wrote:
| "How to Know Every" - Elke Wiss. I read this recently and it was
| pretty good.
| ninethirty wrote:
| "Geography of Nowhere" by Kunstler and "Inside the Aquarium: The
| Making of a Top Soviet Spy" by Suvorov.
| la64710 wrote:
| Bhagavad Gita
| fraaancis wrote:
| "Ishmael" by Daniel Quinn.
| nuancebydefault wrote:
| Carlo Rovelli -- reality is not what it seems
|
| The takeaway that stayed most with me: all laws of physics are
| proven to be wrong at some point in time, and get step by step
| replaced by less wrong versions.
|
| Sapiens, no introduction needed
| nnlsoccer wrote:
| Drawing on the right side of the brain
|
| (Really amazing book, teaches a different way of thinking though
| the mode of drawing)
| psteitz wrote:
| This is a hard. Books that made me a better thinker have to be
| the hard ones / ones that made me change. Top two would be
|
| _Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics_ , Immanuel Kant.
| Supposedly more accessible version of _Critique of Pure Reason_
| but still very hard and mind-bending for me at least. Not just
| philosophy was easier after wrestling with this content.
|
| _The Structure of Scientific Revolutions_ , Tomas Kuhn. Made me
| self-aware about what scientific thinking actually is.
| andi999 wrote:
| Serge Lang, Undergraduate Analysis.
| uptownfunk wrote:
| How does it stack up to Rudin?
| holtkam2 wrote:
| 1. The Black Swan 2. Thinking Fast and Slow
| fluffet wrote:
| +1 on The Black Swan. I found all of Taleb's books really
| interesting, but this one I enjoyed the most.
| kherud wrote:
| I can recommend the puzzle books by Raymond Smullyan [0], for
| example "Satan, Cantor and Infinity". Among others, this contains
| puzzles about infinities and apparent paradoxes associated with
| them. Reading is mostly a form of consumption and therefore not
| really suitable to train your working memory. For this you have
| to solve mental tasks on your own instead of following the
| thoughts of others (without implying that this can not be
| valuable as well). Smullyan's books contain humorous puzzles of
| increasing difficulty, that are mentally challenging but still
| fun to read. I learned of them after finding here on HN
| Smullyan's article "Is God a Taoist?" [1] and wanted to read more
| from him.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Smullyan
|
| [1]
| https://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/godTa...
| marc_io wrote:
| Just as important are books that can teach you _how to relate_ to
| thoughts, AKA proprioception of thought.
|
| Thinking is a hugely important function, but it should not be
| considered as the only one, nor the most important in every case.
| greymalik wrote:
| Examples?
| Nomentatus wrote:
| Meditation for example (vipassana in particular) helps you tune
| into information coming at you through feelings in various
| parts of your body. An ancient text said that good monks
| "always keep their attention on their bodies," for this reason.
| Antonio Domasio is the leading researcher on how taking the
| body out of the equation hamstrings humans in making decisions,
| whether about poker hands or what house to buy. His former
| students are doing some great work, too.
| joflicu wrote:
| Can you say more? What do you mean by "how to relate to
| thoughts?" Seems similar to mindfulness, but I am not sure.
| jcynix wrote:
| Among the most important books for me was _Summa technologiae_ by
| Stanislaw Lem, oldie but (still) a goldie:
|
| _Despite its age and a number of inaccuracies in specific
| domains (e.g., mathematics, biology, sociology), the book has
| lost no momentum in the past years._ Source:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summa_Technologiae
| jonjacky wrote:
| _How To Solve It_ by G. Polya [1,2]
|
| 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Solve_It
|
| 2. https://archive.org/details/howtosolveitnewa00pl
| morelisp wrote:
| (Someone already posted _How to Solve It_ which would be my first
| recommendation on this forum.)
|
| The _Zhuangzi_ , probably at least two translations.
|
| _The Elements_ (that is, Euclid 's).
|
| _Process and Reality_ has had the most impact on my thinking but
| it 's one of the most unapproachable things I've ever read. Get
| there eventually.
| Nomentatus wrote:
| I studied logic and philosophy at University, but I don't
| recommend any texts in that area because empirical studies don't.
| Studies have shown that taking logic or philosophy courses didn't
| help students think through situations nearly as well as taking,
| say, medicine. It turned out that encountering real world
| examples of good vs bad thinking helped more than being able to
| name or categorize particular kinds of fallacies after the fact.
|
| I will say, that for my part Earle Stanley Gardner taught me
| best; to use what I'd term my "systematic imagination" and leave
| no possibility unconsidered. Useful for invention, but also for
| coding and algorithm design, of course. He did a pretty good job
| of cataloging the limits of most human (associative) thinking.
|
| And it's not just me! Crime fiction had a significant influence
| on academic philosophy last century through such as Wittgenstein;
| but many others as well. There's a good article detailing that
| history but I can't find a URL for it just now.
|
| If you aren't sure what "first principles" thinking is, Gardner
| offers a post-graduate course with interesting examples. I prefer
| the term "systematic imagination" to "first principles thinking"
| because some people tend to flip the meaning of the latter phrase
| on it's head and narrow their thinking to straightforward
| derivations from a few axioms; as if they were medieval
| theologians. That's not at all what Elon Musk has in mind when he
| talks about "first principles thinking." He means, discarding
| everything _except_ the most basic principles of physics, and not
| neglecting _any possibility_ that those laws allow. In other
| words "systematic (exhaustive) imagination."
|
| In the same way, reading Elon's precepts (or mine) doesn't really
| reform your brain; but going through a lot of examples of how
| 'twas done right, and done wrong is really helpful. The
| scientific history of medicine offers plenty of (mostly
| horrifying) examples.
|
| Histories of technology and technological and engineering
| blunders can perform the same function nicely, too. Watt saw the
| blunder that Newcomen had made by repeatedly heating and cooling
| the same chamber. Crazy inefficient. However Watt later assumed
| that his small-scale tests of high-pressure steam engines showed
| that the concept couldn't work. Unconsciously, he seems to have
| assumed that physics scaled (linearly) even though Galileo had
| shown it doesn't. Blunder. Since he held the key patent, Watt
| tragically blocked all development of high-pressure steam engines
| until his patent expired.
|
| My own thinking has also been much improved through reading many
| excellent military histories that focused on decisions: because
| you know (nearly) everyone is really trying to do their best
| thinking in a war, they aren't usually being merely slovenly; yet
| amazing blunders happen. Such as the Germans putting their
| bridging equipment at the back of their columns during the
| Bastogne offensive in WWII. That works in a desert, but it's the
| wrong way to get through a forest (Ardennes) with rivers. Once
| trapped at the back of a narrow forest road, the German portable
| bridges were useless. They didn't think that one through (didn't
| deploy their imagination, sufficiently.)
| leobg wrote:
| If you prefer older books that stood the test of time:
|
| How to Write, Speak and Think More Effectively by Rudolf Flesch.
| graymatters wrote:
| "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance"
| nextos wrote:
| _The Philosopher 's Toolkit: A Compendium of Philosophical
| Concepts and Methods_ by Baggini and Fosl. Mathematical logic,
| fallacies, etc. written by two famous philosophers. It's a great
| textbook for undergrads.
|
| Also _Statistical Models: Theory and Practice_ by Freedman. I
| refer you to Taleb 's review: https://www.amazon.com/Statistical-
| Models-Practice-David-Fre...
|
| _" [...] This book is outstanding in the following two aspects:
| 1) It is of immense clarity, embedding everything in real
| situations, 2) It uses the real-life situation to critique the
| statistical model and show you the limit of statistic."_
|
| Both cover most of what you need to know to think rigorously
| using logic and its extension to account for uncertainty,
| probability.
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