Unweaving the Rainbow by Richard Dawkins
The Demon-Haunted World by Carl Sagan and Ann Driyan
Read them when I was in my early 20s. Changed the way I see the world.
this post was submitted on 18 Sep 2023
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I was gonna read the selfish gene by Dawkins, but since it's probably gonna be such a tough read, do you think your suggestion is a bit easier to digest?
Definitely. As a total layman in this kind of stuff, I believe I've read The Selfish Gene first, but at the time I was so eager to consume as much knowledge as possible in this subject, that I could maybe be misremembering all the effort and research it took for me to understand it. It's a fascinating book, but more specific.
Imo, Unweaving the Rainbow has a much broader appeal and is much easier reading. They're both very different books.
Not sure if they all fit entirely but:
- The Story Of Stuff (Annie Leonard)
- How The World Works (Noam Chomsky)
- Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions (Dan Ariely)
- The Hidden Brain (Shankar Vedantam) / Idiot Brain (Dean Burnett)
- The Myth Of Choice (Kent Greenfield) / The Paradox Of Choice (Barry Schwartz)
- The Free Will Delusion: How We Settled For The Illusion Of Morality (James B. Miles)
- Getting Free: Creating An Association Of Democratic Autonomous Neighborhoods (James Herod)
- The Best That Money Can't Buy (Jacque Fresco)
- No Contest: The Case Against Competition (Alfie Kohn)
I've been meaning to start reading some Chomsky & Alfie Kohn! Both very revolutionary writers from the reviews I've been checking out
Predictably Irrational is really good.
I feel like I read Chomsky's books at a key point in my life where I didn't really get all of it but it primed me for later learning. Good list overall 👍🏼
The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow.
Completely upended the way I look at how humans have organized ourselves and adjusted them periodically based on changes and advances in our environment and society. Shows that we are capable of taking the advancements we make that are beneficial and ridding ourselves of the negatives that emerge alongside them. Regardless of how big and difficult those shifts may seem
It was my 3rd Graeber book after Bullshit Jobs and Debt. Each worth a read!
Carl Sagan - A Demon-Haunted World. Explains the key difference between a scientific vs religious mindset.
Against the Grain
Internal Combustion
Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia
These all caused me to examine aspects of modern society that we usually just accept blindly
The Sun Does Shine - I was a supporter of the death penalty until I read this book. It totally rocked my world and I realized how totally wrong I was. There are evil people in this world, but I am not God and I don't get to decide who lives and dies. Also, if there is even a small chance that someone was wrongly convicted, we can not kill them - we make ourselves murderers.
Really this book made me rethink my entire view on systematic racism, the prison system, and the death penalty.
Gotta be “Confessions of an Economic Hitman”
"The History of the Protestant Reformation in England and Ireland" by William Cobbett.
On Writing - If you want to write and and are able to ignore advice that doesn’t fit your style, I’ve always found this a nice inspiring comfort read (the audiobook is great!)
I've read Taking the War Out of Our Words and found it really enlightening. It wasn't a paradigm shift, but it really shows how the way we speak is naturally adversarial and how we can overcome that. It's especially useful when talking with people you disagree with.
A Short History of Nearly Everything, by Bill Bryson.
I loved Bryson's travel books when I was a teenager, so when this history of science popped up I devoured it just based on author recognition alone.
Amazing book. No regrets. He's just as hilarious as always.
I'd read it on my lunch break at my call centre job, and I remember reading about all these amazing scientific breakthroughs that happened mostly by accident, just because someone basically took an interest in the world around them. And what was I doing? Working in a call centre hassling people to do surveys?
Long story short the book helped steer me down a different path, one where I've learned interesting things and met fantastic people and, yes, generally taken an interest in the world around me.
It just made me realise what humanity can be, as cheesy as that sounds.
Of course, being a science book from 2003 I'm sure it's now incredibly out of date. But I'd recommend it anyway, the author's awe for the subject is timeless.
When I was about 12, my father brought from the airbase thrift shop two books of the "Tell me why" series. It blew my mind knowing how stuff, iI never paid attention to, worked.
From then on I knew that there was an explanation for almost everything, it just required looking for the right book :-)
This has been my entire life only with Google. People always ask me why I know so much about so many things, but it's really all just surface level knowledge. There's an answer for just about every question you can have, so why not find it?
The Tao of Pooh, the Te of Piglet, and the Tao Te Ching.
Daniel Goleman's Emotional Intelligence helped me get better at every relationship in my life.
Can you elaborate a bit? Amazon reviews make it sound more academic and less actionable.
Yes, it's definitely more academic than practical, but that's really what I needed. I had read plenty of books that told me what I should do, but not why I'm doing it. By learning the theory I could be more improvisational in my interactions with confidence.
The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle. Every time there was an experiential experiment in the book, I put it down and tried it for myself. I possibly changed more over the course of reading that book than at any other period in my life.
A People's History of The United States, Howard Zinn
The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus
A Short History of Decay, E. M. Cioran
The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are, Alan Watts
Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault
The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins
How Emotions Are Made, Lisa Feldman Barrett
The Conspiracy Against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror (2010) by Thomas Ligotti was referenced heavily in writing Rust Cohle's character in True Detective season one. After falling in love with the series, I picked up the book and... wow. If you're into some misanthropic nihilism written by a succinct fiction author and not an unnecessarily verbose philosopher, it's a good read.
Currently also reading Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right (2017) by Angela Nagle. I just started last night but it's changed a lot about how I see the current alt-right, where they came from, and how to effectively counter their arguments (and why conventional counterarguments don't work).
Immune by Philipp Dettmer. Made me appreciate my body and immune system
Scale by Geoffrey West is an insanely interesting read if you're a bit into superficial science!
Hyperspace by Michio Kaku
Thank You For Arguing.
Learning about rhetoric and how the truth isn't necessarily persuasive has been really valuable in the post-truth era.
The divide: a brief guide to global inequality and its solutions by Jason Hickel
When McKinsey Comes to Town: The Hidden Influence of the World's Most Powerful Consulting Firm by Michael Forsyth and Walt Bogdanich. A cutting expose into the forces that are shaping our society that most don't see.
The Man Who Broke Capitalism: How Jack Welch Gutted the Heartland and Crushed the Soul of Corporate America—and How to Undo His Legacy by David Gelles. Gives you a better understanding of the philosophies that shaped corporate offshoring, outsourcing and sell offs from the 70s to today.
Currowan: A Story of Fire and Community During Australia's Worst Summer by Bronwyn Adcock. A revealing firsthand account of what it's like to live through the catastrophic real life effects of climate change.
A Good Place on the Banks of the Euphrates: Stories from the War Against ISIS by Warren Stoddard II. A frightening and inspiring collection of short stories and diary entries from the perspective of an internationalist fighter on the ground.
The Consolations of Philosophy by Alain de Botton. A digestible collection of reassuring practical tactics to understanding personal attitudes and behaviours as framed by some of history's most influential philosophers.
Guns Germs and Steel. I remember feeling, after I read it, that I saw things differently. But now the ideas presented in it seem the most natural things in the world, and I can't imagine I ever thought otherwise. Or maybe I had the same views before but not historical foundations for them.. I can hardly remember now.
It’s a book that historians scoff at. It’s all narrative and no science apart from few cherry picked examples.
“Our Fake History” has an episode on it, and as a topic it’s spot on for that show.
The Art of War- expressed better than any other piece I've read the rationale of war. War is conflict and understanding both the enemy and yourself is the only way to effective success.
Atomic Habits- the best way to improve your life is to improve the minutia of it by just 1%. Applies rationale to how we operate while on auto pilot and gives effective solutions to combat the negative habits we fall into.
The Way of Monkey Book- an amazing, modern lens to stoicism and individually written in the style of eastern texts. While the author is deplorable to say the least, the message and morals of the work brilliantly reflect the ebb and flow of nature and the distortion of such through the actions of the average man.
Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter
Reading this (or trying to) is like being on drugs. You go from “What in god’s name is the author smoking?” to some kind of nirvana.
The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind
I read Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain at some point during the First World War centenary. I'm also roughly 100 years younger than Vera Brittain, so I was very close to her age during WW1. I knew the facts of WW1 before, but it hit me really hard to think about a whole generation of young people (of the countries involved) having their youth drowned in a war. And the pointlessness of it all. It made me really grateful for the circumstances I was lucky enough to grow up in.
The Five Love Languages - explains the inner workings of love, and how to sustain long term relationships, especially marriage
Man's search for meaning -- Viktor Frankl
The Zhuangzi.
I tried a few times to describe why but I’m having a hard time of it. I guess it made me accept that I can’t control everything and that there’s a natural ebb and flow in most things. Not in a defeatist kind of way. But more like you ride out the bad and find joy where you can. You never know if the alternative could have been worse.
Basically it made me appreciate the weird and little things in life and not overthink the big.
There’s a lot more to it, but it’s one of the lasting benefits it gave me.
I have the feeling a Sapiens might be a worthy member of such a list. I haven't read it yet though. I'd love to hear someone's opinion who has.
The Ego and Its Own, by Max Stirner.
Made me see individualism, society and ideology completely differently.
The World is Flat - Tom Friedman
It was a paradigm shift for me because of the time that I read it and the decisions I needed to make at the time. A case of good timing. Your results may vary
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