Ask HN: Which book has had the most meaningful contribution in your life? Your life is yours. There are many sectors to it. So you decide what meaningful actually means and which sector it belongs to. |
Ask HN: Which book has had the most meaningful contribution in your life? Your life is yours. There are many sectors to it. So you decide what meaningful actually means and which sector it belongs to. |
Despite being fiction, it sets the standard for elegance and charm.
Suffering from recency bias though, as I read it recently.
Few books by Ken Wilber, gave me a framework, a meta-frame of sorts when I was young.
Introduction to NLP (esp. chapter V on Meta Model, took me two years to process it)
Structure of Magic, vol. II - communication, incongruity
Mind and Nature by Gregory Bateson
And I could go on and on... but the winner is...
"Embracing Our Selves" by Sidra & Hal Stone.
This book and perspective changed my life completely. It was like a grenade bursting inside my mind and I've seen many people reacting to it this way (incl. people closest to my heart). It's a perspective shift, an insight. You've been warned. :)
I come back to these books from time to time. All three give me some kind of inner peace or more mental strength.
This book gave me a proper example and details on how horrible things begin, continue and end.
A good reminder that practical inteligence is way more important than the qualification you get in an intelligence test.
It’s like speaking with … the absolute? beyond human. Cuts through time and space and brings me to it, instantly, always.
"Low effort social grift", sorry I thought we were in a place of normal conversions with like minded nerds, I didn't realise this was actually twitter.
The "CIS" is redundant - meaning of the phrase would be the same without it.
It taught me a light hearted nihilism that I found useful to buoy up against the storms in my adolescent life.
Helped me shape the way I look at relationships in my life.
It is a treatise on selfishness. A stench of arrogance leaks out from every paragraph. It showed me the worst of the worst. What not to be. I like to think reading it made me a more empathetic, social, caring person. It also awakened my antenna to the vileness in people that may lie just below the skin.
That is was excruciatingly badly written was a bonus. It showed me that dangerous ideologies are persistent enough to survive laughably poor communication.
I thought it was well written though. She just has a weird style; I kinda dug it. I would call it writing Brutalism, and it was very clear and to the point.
I used Fountainhead to introduce my kids to Ayn Rand and as a warm up to Atlas Shrugged.
It wouldn't be fair to only pander to transgender community, would it?
> "Low effort social grift", sorry I thought we were in a place of normal conversions with like minded nerds, I didn't realise this was actually twitter.
It is a part of normal conversation to call out empty virtue signalling when observed. Ironically, deflecting discussion by labeling it as "X-like" (where, in this case, X=Twitter) instead of providing real arguments is exactly what a typical Twitter shitposter would do.
Mate, you need to check yourself. Read the context of my original post, maybe even click the link and have a look at some of the studies. If that passes you by then maybe this isn't the place for you.
I don't think I do.
If you're unwilling (or incapable) of defending your point with logical arguments, this place definitely isn't for you. I know that acting all high and mighty is a good manipulation technique that works on emotionally driven people who crave approval, but I don't really care about your opinion of me as a person, I only care about logical connections you can make to provide me with understanding I previously didn't have.
And currently, you're providing none, so this conversation doesn't interest me.
Don't let the door hit you.
Ask HN: What is the most mind expanding book(s) you have read till date? 85 comments, 6 months ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34193766
Ask HN: Which book would you pick to re-read for the rest of your life? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31968169
Ask HN: What book have you re-read 3x or more? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32712496
Ask HN: What book(s) had a profound impact on your life and why? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34314364
Ask HN: Best books read in 2022? 249 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33849267
Ask HN: What is the best thing you read in 2022? 259 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34055123
Ask HN: Name 3-5 books that had the most impact on your career and knowledge? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32896299
That set, in turn, ensnared me. It was the closest thing in the 1970s to today's internet. I could look up almost any topic that came to mind. I could research any topic we were learning in grade school. When I was bored, I could flip through any volume and learn about whatever subject happened to present itself. I still remember the acetate sheets separating the human body into skeletal, muscular, nervous, and digestive layers. I remember the beautiful drawings of sea creatures. I even remember article typefaces.
Maybe I'd have figured this out anyway, but those encyclopedia gave me the lifelong habit of assuming that answers were out there, if you had the ability and desire to go find them. They also sparked a love of reading for fun.
I think the World Book editors encouraged some kind of writing that was more engaging to grade school/teenage me. The set is still in my parents' house, but I'm scared that the spell might break if I open it again now.
I'm coming to appreciate the bible and its evolution. My latest appeciation? The KJV's translation biases (I don't want to say 'errors') makes me want to look at the Torah, which also has it's own evolution (or lack there of).
Any interest in apocrypha?
As for the translation biases, that's kind of a separate topic, and comparing translations is very interesting for me personally, I enjoy using that AndBible software.
Apocrypha too has interesting stories which influenced art, literature, etc. etc. etc. Definitely worth reading.
A side note, since you mention the biases, I think you might enjoy the book development of the New Testament canon, I don't remember the author or the exact book title, sorry about that. I find it fascinating that the only books of the Bible whose author is confirmed are seven pauline epistles (perhaps three more, I think yes, but I'm a layman). I could go on, but I have to stop somewhere.
It might be called a little biased by mostly ignoring "market failures" yet basic physics also mostly ignore friction.
Also regarding "meaningful": I had tried to get an understanding of how society works for some time and had even tried reading Capital by Marx but in the end I found most I wanted in Basic Economics.
Sowell is persuasive only if you haven’t read many other books on economics and society. Always be on your toes when an author is very popular among laypeople (of a certain political persuasion) but held in low esteem by professionals in his field.
I've read a microeconomics textbook afterwards and the book still doesn't seem too bad.
What would be your suggestion of a book for introducing laypeople to economic thinking?
this is untrue. It seems clear from other comments you aren't familiar with Sowell's work and are making a straw man argument. Disappointed to see poor intellectual effort on HN.
A very meaningful book I read was "A Short History of Nearly Everything" just because it showed me how much to the world there was to discover. It made me very optimistic.
I haven't finished "The Brothers Karamazov" and I don't think I would call it a "meaningful contribution" to my life _but_ I do think so far it is one of the only books that has made me say "wow." Every sentence seems to be crafted to perfection and connect with you on a deeper level. I can't personally relate to it too well but I would say everyone should get to experience a bit of it.
Besides those, I read a few auto/biographies which where interesting, I could relate to and gave me motivation and discipline.
1. Caesar by Adrian Goldsworthy.
This is a biography of Julius Ceasar. There’s a story in here about a teenage Ceasar, with no institutional authority and effectively a student at this point, raising a navy to go capture pirates who had previously kidnapped him. I spent many years thinking about influence without any authority after reading this story and it’s probably had a significant shift in how I see the world and my role in it.
2. The WEIRDest people in the world by Joseph Henrich
I grew up in India. This book helped me understand so much of the cultural differences between American culture and what I grew up with that it is easily one of the most valuable books for any immigrant or anyone from America who has to work across cultures.
3. Debt - The first 5,000 years by David Greber.
The single most valuable thing I took away from this book came pretty early in the book - Buying stocks in a company is effectively loaning money to the company. This book shifted my perspective significantly- I use to see the world as a network of power relationships. Now I see the world as a network of debt relationships. I can not recommend it enough.
It really is not though. Unless you muddle the definitions of debt, equity and ownership to the point of uselessness. Then again, this is the same book that blithely conflates credit with benevolence.
Unless you are buying enough of a company to get access to a board seat, you effectively have zero control over a company. Buying 1 share of Google gets you such an insignificant fraction of a company.
Yes, buying shares is theoretically equivalent to buying an ownership into a fraction of the company.
But that’s not actually a useful model. Asking “do I want to give money to this company that they may choose to never return?” helped me understand a lot of what investing really was much much better.
It gave me a toolkit to survive getting sick and dealing with a life changing event.
I had almost failed 4th grade, and it was strongly suggested (I don't know the details, but it happened quickly) that I should be set loose in the school library, and allowed to pick out any book and read it. This very book got me into electronics, and later when the personal computing revolution arrived, I was all set to join in.
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Diary of an Early American Boy: Noah Blake 1805.[2]
It was the love story wound into this quite fascinating look into the lives of young men in that time period, that inspired my decision to propose to my Wife.
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[1] https://worldradiohistory.com/BOOKSHELF-ARH/Technology/The-B...
Can you elaborate why strongly suggested?
I really like your examples.
The Sherlock Holmes canonical stories - The importance of logical reasoning and brain over brawn. Instrumental in teaching me to think.
Physics for Entertainment (and other books) by Ya. Perelman - Beauty and understanding of Science. Instrumental in giving me a lifelong interest in Science/Technology.
Structured Computer Organization by Andrew Tanenbaum - Instrumental in teaching me the layering of abstractions by which something complex can arise from more simpler and detailed components.
Raja Yoga by Swami Vivekananda and The Science of Yoga by Swami Sivananda - Instrumental in introducing me to Hindu philosophy.
Bruce lee's fighting method (3 vols) - Instrumental in introducing me to Martial Arts and physical culture.
The above books were the ones which sparked my interest in their respective domains decades ago (late 1980s/early 1990s in India) when books were hard to come by and money wasn't available either. When i look around today, books are so easily available and yet people have stopped reading and even seem to lack curiosity.
Otherwise I would really recommend Moby Dick. Its a rollicking adventure, a wonderful technical description of bygone whaling and ultimately a starting point for introspection on some questions you may be asking yourself.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_in_August#:~:text=Light%....
On a business level, Critical Chain (Goldratt) and the Phoenix Project (Kim, Spafford, Behr) were necessary eye-openers once I got into top management.
I guess you never really know what's going to speak to you at a given point in your life, so read widely!
If I could sum up, I would say that so much of health and fitness is just trying to figure out the right thing to do - this book applies an appropriate level of skepticism to say what we know and what we don't on this subject, and teaches you how to assess for yourself what you need to do to improve your odds of a long healthy life. Finding it is like finally finding the a great text book on subject that you haven't been able to wrap your head around.
Some examples: healthy joints by examining and addressing movement patterns and muscle imbalance; maintaining muscle mass through weight training and prioritization of protein consumption (including red meat); the importance of V02 max as demonstrated by 3-6x decreases in mortality; the implications of all this on reduction of cancer, Alzheimers risks, etc.
The difference between this book and all others I've seen is that, as a trained scientist with a mathematical background, Attia has a rare combination of MD training, a mathematical/scientific way of thinking, and a history of working as a consultant in risk assessment. All this provides a much needed framework to assess what is known in the space and use it to make practical recommendations for how to live - and how to asses new evidence as it comes in.
Much of it my not be new to you (in particular), but the book may provide important reasons why you would want to do these things. Motivation is a huge part of it.
"Self-Reliance and Nature The Complete First and Second Series of Emerson's Essays"
I'll share one from when I was in my 30s, Killer Of Men by Christian Cameron; the entire series is fantastic and came around just at the right time I needed it. It is the story of an older man telling the story of his life and looking back through those eyes (I really like that perspective and it helped me see some things). The entire series takes place in Ancient Greece and the Greco-Persian wars.
Bless
I have zero interest in having control over any company I'm invested in. Which I assume is the case with the overwhelming majority of retail shareholders.
> But that’s not actually a useful model. Asking “do I want to give money to this company that they may choose to never return?” helped me understand a lot of what investing really was much much better.
I am having a hard time understanding why this is a useful way of thinking about equity investment. In the most common case i.e. in secondary markets, you aren't giving the company any money by buying stock. And in the most common case you don't want the company to return the money.
I don’t know how well this translates to different people with different approaches to life and investing styles, but here’s my thoughts on it.
If you want to start with first principles and understand how to invest, you need a foundational model to start building theory on.
Modeling investing as a loan made to a company where the company can choose to not return money at all comes with all sorts of nice properties. The first question you ask is “if I give them money, will they eventually be able to return it?” which will make you look into their business and figure out how much money they need to make to pay you back and when they can pay you back and who else they need to pay back and ultimately how much paying everyone back will cost them. Share buybacks then look a lot like companies paying back some investors and dividends look a lot like interest payments. This is fits very cleanly into all sorts of other models we have today.
Take a look at a plot of number of outstanding apple shares over the past 15 years. It’s abundantly clear that they’ve been “paying back” consistently over time. If that were a person looking to borrow money, you would happily lend money to them!
Take a look at American Airlines. They have a monumental amount of corporate debt and then they need to pay $10B back to all share holders. They were “paying back” their share holders at a steady clip until around covid and then they had to “borrow” more from investors and doesn’t look like they’re ready to go back to “paying” back just yet.
Obviously these are very unsophisticated models. But as a simple approximation, they work really well (for me).
If I were to go to a VC and “borrow” money from them, it’s very helpful to think about how much I can pay them back - it’s super easy to model that like borrowing any other amount of money.
And ultimately, it really does function as a loan from the investor’s perspective. You give away money to an entity expecting to get back that amount and then more. If that entity goes broke, you will not get your money back. If that entity does really really well, they can pay you back a lot more money and so on.
Debt and equity are both modes of investment. We have different words for them because they mean different things. You are not Modeling investing as a loan, you are describing investing in equity.
Sowell is unserious because he misrepresents the other side. He basically argues that when you leave everything for the market to figure out it will automatically turn out alright, and if it doesn’t then clearly it means you need to deregulate more. You can look up what the arguments against complete free market solutions in healthcare, housing, education, and manufacturing are and you’ll see that the “obvious common sense market based” solutions don’t produce good outcomes for society.
“Economic decisions made through the marketplace are not always better than decisions that governments can make. Much depends on whether those market transactions accurately reflect both the costs and the benefits which result. Under some conditions, they do not.
When someone buys a table or a tractor, the question as to whether it is worth what it cost is answered by the actions of the purchaser who made the decision to buy it. However, when an electric utility company buys coal to burn to generate electricity, a significant part of the cost of the electricity-generating process is paid by people who breathe the smoke that results from the burning of the coal and whose homes and cars are dirtied by the soot. Cleaning, repainting and medical costs paid by these people are not taken into account in the marketplace, because these people do not participate in the transactions between the coal producer and the utility company.
Such costs are called “external costs” by economists because such costs fall outside the parties to the transaction which creates these costs. External costs are therefore not taken into “account in the marketplace, even when these are very substantial costs, which can extend beyond monetary losses to include bad health and premature death. While there are many decisions that can be made more efficiently through the marketplace than by government, this is one of those decisions that can be made more efficiently by government than by the marketplace. Clean air laws can reduce harmful emissions by legislation and regulations. Clean water laws and laws against disposing of toxic wastes where they will harm people can likewise force decisions to be made in ways that take into account the external costs that would otherwise be ignored by those transacting in the marketplace.”
He goes on to spend the rest of the chapter talking about limitations of the market. Maybe you should try reading the book before you criticize it.
With regard to health insurance, he argues "Whenever I hear about how many Americans do not have health insurance, my usual response is to wish that I were one of them…I would rather pay doctors and pharmacies directly, without sending the money through bureaucratic channels in the government and the insurance companies".
He (intentionally) misunderstands that the entire reason to have a health insurance mandate is to force healthy people to pay into the system. If only sickly people had health insurance the fees would be impossibly high. You can't have a system where people only start paying for health insurance after they get sick. And if you have a system without insurance people won't be able to afford expensive treatments so they'll just die. Sowell's policy suggestions aren't serious, and he's not taken seriously because of it.
- Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew
- Mysore State, India, Visveswaraya
You study the biographies/auto biographies of ministers of these states, you see the practical challenges with getting free markets. Especially in the initial years (50-100 years of development), until you have factories, industry-oriented education system, discipline, solid work-habits, inclusion of women in the economy, etc, free-market doesn't work. And it doesn't happen on its own, as well. Early days, consistent commitment and encouragement by powerful forces within society is key.
One could say that free markets is a stage of evolution; one cannot recommend free markets as a blanket recommendation. The contextual reality of a place is more important in what's going to work in reality.