Books that dramatically changed the way you think

[PyramidHead]

Great thread, a lot of interesting avenues to explore here.

A few more books that had lasting impacts on what I think and value:

The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan, the first book I read that opened my eyes to what goes into the production and distribution of food. Even if I no longer agree with Pollan's recommended approach to eating, I still appreciate his doing the legwork on the topic.

Time Travel in Einstein's Universe by J. Richard Gott, my introduction to popular cosmology and scientific literacy in general, which I picked up during the time when I was obsessed with the film Donnie Darko. Gott is also the originator of the Doomsday Argument, which everyone should digest and mull over at least once in their lives. It's one of the classics of statistical inference from self-observation, and I'm surprised it isn't more well known.

The Tao is Silent by Raymond Smullyan (remember Smullyan-esque from the old forum?). I was an actual Taoist for some time in high school and college, and since it's such a simple religion that can be interpreted in so many ways, maybe I still am to some extent.

 

[Tinker Grey]

The tragic thing is that when C.S. Lewis was challenged on the sloppy logic, and to be frank, idiocies of it, he squirmed in his chair and said it wasn't meant to be an academic work, that it was more a work of poetry or fiction. Which is pretty pathetic for a man of his status. Especially considering the type of work it is. He was hit pretty hard in the face with the stupid bat after it's release. So he clearly regretted publishing it. But the cat was out of the bag, so he rolled with it. But he spectacularly failed to spot his own idiocies. Which is remarkable.

This is interesting. Can you point me to where I can read about this?

I cannot. I wrote this post quite a bit ago. I had recently read something before making that post. But I think that was the case. Don't forget that he worked in Oxford and shared a table with Tolkien. These guys read each others work and tried tearing it apart. I don't think he intended it as the serious book it was taken to be. So it didn't pass through the customary Oxford quality control. I think he said that is what he regretted. It was something like that.

OK. Thanks for the reply. I had never heard CSL regretted it.

 

[DrZoidberg]

I cannot. I wrote this post quite a bit ago. I had recently read something before making that post. But I think that was the case. Don't forget that he worked in Oxford and shared a table with Tolkien. These guys read each others work and tried tearing it apart. I don't think he intended it as the serious book it was taken to be. So it didn't pass through the customary Oxford quality control. I think he said that is what he regretted. It was something like that.

OK. Thanks for the reply. I had never heard CSL regretted it.

I recall him regretting not being clear on that it wasn't an academic work. Because it was scrutinised as if it was, when it wasn't. I think this hurt him. Because the logic of it is incredibly sloppy. He wasn't an idiot. He must have realised this himself. His closest friends were among the worlds foremost experts in how to rip an academic work apart in the seems. So the broken logic of it cannot have escaped him.

 

[Angry Floof]

Lots! But two off the top of the list:

The Ego Tunnel by Thomas Metzinger
Changed how I understood myself and humans in general. Kind of blew a lot of ingrained assumptions about human nature out of the water.

The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan
Changed how I see life itself and the interplay of all living things with each other and with the environment. All of nature is ten kinds of brilliant and miraculous, with no magical mastermind with specific intentions required to create or power it. The human species is as likely to be cultivated by another species and any. We just have these primitive personal narratives lying to us and dumbing down for us what's happening at any given time. (See The Ego Tunnel, above )

The more you learn about those strange and wonderful stories of interplay, the more you are open to accepting a higher power. It's just not a supernatural one.

 

[PyramidHead]

Lots! But two off the top of the list:

The Ego Tunnel by Thomas Metzinger
Changed how I understood myself and humans in general. Kind of blew a lot of ingrained assumptions about human nature out of the water.

The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan
Changed how I see life itself and the interplay of all living things with each other and with the environment. All of nature is ten kinds of brilliant and miraculous, with no magical mastermind with specific intentions required to create or power it. The human species is as likely to be cultivated by another species and any. We just have these primitive personal narratives lying to us and dumbing down for us what's happening at any given time. (See The Ego Tunnel, above )

The more you learn about those strange and wonderful stories of interplay, the more you are open to accepting a higher power. It's just not a supernatural one.

Thomas Metzinger is an interesting mind for sure, I've read some of his essays and ideas but not a book yet. I should check that one out.

 

[rousseau]

Lots! But two off the top of the list:

The Ego Tunnel by Thomas Metzinger

TL;DR version?

 

[Angry Floof]

Lots! But two off the top of the list:

The Ego Tunnel by Thomas Metzinger

TL;DR version?

The tl;dr version is that there is no such thing as a self, at least not as a thing or entity, but rather as a complex process, an ever-changing, illusory nebula of physiology, neurology, and environment.

He describes two basic models of the self: the functional self, which is required if you want to eat or poo or love your mom, and the phenomenal self, which is the identity, sense of personhood, and is conceptual in nature, i.e., the narrative about the sense of self, and what most people think they are.

 

[Angry Floof]

Lots! But two off the top of the list:

The Ego Tunnel by Thomas Metzinger
Changed how I understood myself and humans in general. Kind of blew a lot of ingrained assumptions about human nature out of the water.

The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan
Changed how I see life itself and the interplay of all living things with each other and with the environment. All of nature is ten kinds of brilliant and miraculous, with no magical mastermind with specific intentions required to create or power it. The human species is as likely to be cultivated by another species and any. We just have these primitive personal narratives lying to us and dumbing down for us what's happening at any given time. (See The Ego Tunnel, above )

The more you learn about those strange and wonderful stories of interplay, the more you are open to accepting a higher power. It's just not a supernatural one.

Thomas Metzinger is an interesting mind for sure, I've read some of his essays and ideas but not a book yet. I should check that one out.

You can also find quite a few talks and interviews on youtube.

 

[ruby sparks]

Lots! But two off the top of the list:

The Ego Tunnel by Thomas Metzinger
Changed how I understood myself and humans in general. Kind of blew a lot of ingrained assumptions about human nature out of the water.

The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan
Changed how I see life itself and the interplay of all living things with each other and with the environment. All of nature is ten kinds of brilliant and miraculous, with no magical mastermind with specific intentions required to create or power it. The human species is as likely to be cultivated by another species and any. We just have these primitive personal narratives lying to us and dumbing down for us what's happening at any given time. (See The Ego Tunnel, above )

The more you learn about those strange and wonderful stories of interplay, the more you are open to accepting a higher power. It's just not a supernatural one.

Having googled, both look good.

 

[Politesse]

I cannot. I wrote this post quite a bit ago. I had recently read something before making that post. But I think that was the case. Don't forget that he worked in Oxford and shared a table with Tolkien. These guys read each others work and tried tearing it apart. I don't think he intended it as the serious book it was taken to be. So it didn't pass through the customary Oxford quality control. I think he said that is what he regretted. It was something like that.

OK. Thanks for the reply. I had never heard CSL regretted it.

I recall him regretting not being clear on that it wasn't an academic work. Because it was scrutinised as if it was, when it wasn't. I think this hurt him. Because the logic of it is incredibly sloppy. He wasn't an idiot. He must have realised this himself. His closest friends were among the worlds foremost experts in how to rip an academic work apart in the seems. So the broken logic of it cannot have escaped him.

C.S. Lewis was depressive, and often disdained of the works he had completed. But I don't recall, and I read his biography recently, that he had any special animus for Mere Christianity.

 

[DrZoidberg]

I recall him regretting not being clear on that it wasn't an academic work. Because it was scrutinised as if it was, when it wasn't. I think this hurt him. Because the logic of it is incredibly sloppy. He wasn't an idiot. He must have realised this himself. His closest friends were among the worlds foremost experts in how to rip an academic work apart in the seems. So the broken logic of it cannot have escaped him.

C.S. Lewis was depressive, and often disdained of the works he had completed. But I don't recall, and I read his biography recently, that he had any special animus for Mere Christianity.

But that just means he was an idiot, which he wasn't.

 

[The Colourful Jester]

The Salmon of Doubt by Douglas Adams.

Released posthumously, it's a selection of his writings gathered from his hard drive. In it he recommends The Selish Gene and has a chapter on his atheism. Also the beginning of a new book that was never completed.

 

[Testy Calibrate]

+1 for this. Provides essential context for understanding why some civilisations have had more success than others..

If you enjoyed Guns Germs and Steel, check out "Collapse" by the same author. Gives a history of Easter Island and how the people destroyed themselves there, which is a great parallel to today and climate change denial.

Which, interestingly, turned out to be wrong on many counts. So too with Greenland. But it was still an excellent book for its premise.

For me, catch-22 and one flew over the cuckoo's nest were really powerful early influences. Then Vonnegut's cat's cradle. In the vein of spiritual consciousness I actually got a lot out of the celestine prophesy despite it being poorly written. Then, of course, zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance.
In terms of sciency stuff, Poincare's the value of science stands head and shoulders above everything else. Also, gleick's chaos and steven Johnson's Emergence probably influenced my professional life more than anything else.

 

[Underseer]

Not a book, but a class: physics.

Well, make that plural: physics classes. If you fall in love, you can't take just one.

Anyway, the most important thing is that physics taught me how to apply math to the real world. I know all those interminable word problems in elementary school through high school tried really hard how to apply math to things in the real world, but I didn't really get it until physics. Once you learn how to use math to solve problems in physics, you become better at applying math to other problems in other areas.

On a related note, physics taught me to think of math as a language instead of just an arbitrary series of steps and procedures to memorize. If math is a language, math is a language that can only describe the relationships between ideas. While that may sound restrictive, I think it makes math one of the most powerful intellectual tools at our disposal.

Physics also taught me a way of figuring out which information is important when solving a problem. You need to examine each piece of information and figure out if it is actually relevant to the particular question you're trying to answer in that particular moment. If not, toss it aside and concentrate on the pieces of info that are relevant. People joke about physicists' tendency to reduce problems to oversimplified abstractions and approximations, but if you know when to do it, you can deal with more complex problems without getting bogged down in unnecessary details.

Physics taught me to be much better at taking a macroscopic view of a problem. It taught me when to take a big picture view of things and when to drill down to detailed info and which pieces of detailed info to drill down to. Too many people will take a single example or a single piece of information, and use that as a template for looking at all the other pieces of information because they honestly can't handle the big picture view and think of all the parts of a system interacting with each other.

Nothing that I've done has so profoundly altered the way I think than physics classes.

 

[Underseer]

Number two is an event from my childhood.

While my family was living at  Yokota Air Base in Japan, I was in elementary school. A boy close to me in age committed suicide so that his siblings "could eat more."

This event shocked me to my core.

People had told me all my life that because I was an officer's child, things were different for me. People treated me better and my life was better off. I didn't really understand what any of that meant until I read that article in the base newspaper. That was when I started to grasp what my own privilege was and the moment I started to understand how profoundly different things were for the children of NCOs/enlisted men/women.

Nowadays of course, the military is much better at identifying families that might be in trouble and getting them to apply for food stamps. This still pisses me off of course. Anyone serving in the military full time should not need food stamps to feed their children. Everyone with a full time job should get a living wage, but especially people in the military and first responders for fuck's sake. If you expect someone to risk their lives for others, then the least you can do is pay them enough to support a fucking family. And no, I don't care how badly you want those $800 hammers instead. Fuck the $800 hammers, and fuck the contractors charging that much for fucking hammers.

Anyway, that event is still the prism through which I view any and all sociopolitical matters. For any given issue, I will ask myself "Would this make it more or less likely that that little boy kill himself?" The answer to that question strongly affects my position on a given issue.

 

[steve_bank]

No specific books as a kid. Scifi in general, especially Robert Heinlein. As a baby boomer WWII books.

 

[arnoldo]

DUNE

 

[OLDMAN]

Number two is an event from my childhood.

While my family was living at  Yokota Air Base in Japan, I was in elementary school. A boy close to me in age committed suicide so that his siblings "could eat more."

This event shocked me to my core.

People had told me all my life that because I was an officer's child, things were different for me. People treated me better and my life was better off. I didn't really understand what any of that meant until I read that article in the base newspaper. That was when I started to grasp what my own privilege was and the moment I started to understand how profoundly different things were for the children of NCOs/enlisted men/women.

Nowadays of course, the military is much better at identifying families that might be in trouble and getting them to apply for food stamps. This still pisses me off of course. Anyone serving in the military full time should not need food stamps to feed their children. Everyone with a full time job should get a living wage, but especially people in the military and first responders for fuck's sake. If you expect someone to risk their lives for others, then the least you can do is pay them enough to support a fucking family. And no, I don't care how badly you want those $800 hammers instead. Fuck the $800 hammers, and fuck the contractors charging that much for fucking hammers.

Anyway, that event is still the prism through which I view any and all sociopolitical matters. For any given issue, I will ask myself "Would this make it more or less likely that that little boy kill himself?" The answer to that question strongly affects my position on a given issue.

Working Poor should be an oxymoron. especially in the rich nations of the world. Somehow in the USA, people are proud of being working poor.

 

[Underseer]

DUNE

That series is a most epic deconstruction of the phenomenon of cult of personality. Even when you have a leader with every possible attribute one could want in a leader, things still go horribly wrong in the end because at the end of the day, human beings are still human beings no matter how incredible their skillset.

 

[Underseer]

Number two is an event from my childhood.

While my family was living at  Yokota Air Base in Japan, I was in elementary school. A boy close to me in age committed suicide so that his siblings "could eat more."

This event shocked me to my core.

People had told me all my life that because I was an officer's child, things were different for me. People treated me better and my life was better off. I didn't really understand what any of that meant until I read that article in the base newspaper. That was when I started to grasp what my own privilege was and the moment I started to understand how profoundly different things were for the children of NCOs/enlisted men/women.

Nowadays of course, the military is much better at identifying families that might be in trouble and getting them to apply for food stamps. This still pisses me off of course. Anyone serving in the military full time should not need food stamps to feed their children. Everyone with a full time job should get a living wage, but especially people in the military and first responders for fuck's sake. If you expect someone to risk their lives for others, then the least you can do is pay them enough to support a fucking family. And no, I don't care how badly you want those $800 hammers instead. Fuck the $800 hammers, and fuck the contractors charging that much for fucking hammers.

Anyway, that event is still the prism through which I view any and all sociopolitical matters. For any given issue, I will ask myself "Would this make it more or less likely that that little boy kill himself?" The answer to that question strongly affects my position on a given issue.

Working Poor should be an oxymoron. especially in the rich nations of the world. Somehow in the USA, people are proud of being working poor.

The event I'm speaking of happened in the 1970s. Before decades of Reagan-inspired trickle-on economic policies from both parties brought us to where we are now, when more and more families with fully employed parents need food stamps to not have a child end up like the little boy mentioned above.

The wealthy have become more and more wealthy during the intervening half century, but now not only do we have more working families on food stamps, but we now have a growing phenomenon of homeless people with full time jobs.

But hey, as long as Paris Hilton gets a nice tax cut so that she can buy even more fabulous jewelry for her pet chihuahua, who gives a shit how those dirty commoners who draw a pay check get by, or even if they can get by? If they didn't want to be homeless people with full time jobs, they should have decided to be wealthy like Paris Hilton.