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hegemonicon comments on Book Recommendations - Less Wrong
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My picks, some of which have already been mentioned. I would classify these all as "viewquake" books for someone who hasn't encountered the concepts in them before.
Godel, Escher, Bach - gets a huge credit for sending me down the rabbit hole of "what your brain is actually doing", though like others I'm not sure if I would like it as much on a second reading.
Meditations by Marcus Aurelius - Stoicism at its best, I count this as the most motivational book I've ever read.
The Sciences of the Artificial by Herbert Simon - retreads topics that are probably already somewhat familiar to LW readers, but still has one of the highest insights/page ratios I've ever seen.
48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene - instrumental rationality in the social arena.
And one dis-recommendation:
I've only read bits and pieces of Godel, Escher, Bach but I certainly mean to read more. I'd borrow it from my parents, but my father (who showed me the Crab Canon when I was ten) is reading it to my fourteen year old little brother, and I'm certainly not about to interrupt! Maybe once I get around to paying back my library fees, yeah?
Your father is awesome.
Wikipedia lists seven popular english translations. Is there a particular one you can recommend?
Definitely Gregory Hays.
Greene appears to assume worst-possible social equilibrium to justify the book, unnecessarily IMO. Clearly there are societies where people are more altruistic and trustworthy than others, but in a fairly decent society they are still useful for defense at the very least. On the other hand he's more honest than Cialdini, who pretended all of his methods are defensive, while greatly benefiting from booksales to manipulators.
I grabbed "A Pattern Language" from the library and enjoyed skimming it. I also considered it overrated; I've been avoiding "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" largely because it's recommended by the same people.
I second avoiding "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance." It's definitely overrated: the arguments are unclear and not very well justified.
I like the idea of design patterns, just not the hubristic treatment they get in that volume.
On the other hand, I strongly recommend his "Notes on a Synthesis of Form", which discusses cognitive and cultural constraints on the design process. It's short, sweet, and full of insights as to why design generally sucks.
Zen and the Art I liked when I read in my pre-LW days, but on reflection it's an almost perfect example of huge, self-consistent networks of beliefs that don't correspond to reality.
The powerful characteristic of Chris. Alexander's 'A Pattern Language' is not immediately obvious - the patterns themselves are not rigourously researched (the authors admit this, and use a rating system to make it clear their own level of confidence in their proposals), and many do not stand the test of time. There are a few which seem to me to be worth paying deep attention to, but I won't go into that here.
The real invention is the idea of a pattern language. What it is. The work of an architect involves dealing at a wide variety of scales, and along the whole gamut from subjectivity to objectivity. It involves crossing and re-crossing between a number of only loosely related sets of systems; all with the aim of producing something acceptable in terms of function, aesthetics, economy and constructional/structural viability. In short, it is a complex task in an irreducibly (this side of any putative singularity) complex environment.
Humans are not good at dealing with complexity - there is well established research on the limits of the human brain in handling more than a few ideas at once. This is why reductionist practices have served us so well. However, reductionist practices are all but useless in complex environments, unless you are happy to ignore aspects of that environment which you can't handle- the error of the logical positivists.
Pattern languages offer a tool for managing our understanding of a complex environment, without self-defeating reduction (the error of Notes on the Synthesis of Form: in order to arrive at his tree-like diagrams of problems, Alexander had to develop an algorithm that decided which of the relationships between parts of the problem which had been identified should be ignored. The approach of 'Notes' involves deliberately ignoring parts of the analysis of the problem).
Each pattern allows for reductive thinking at an appropriate level of perspective, while the explicit links maintained between patterns at larger and smaller scales in a non tree-like 'semi-lattice' help maintain in consciousness and in the design process all the connections which make the situation complex in the first place.
I will admit to being an architect.