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Torello comments on Open Thread, September 23-29, 2013 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Robin Hanson defines “viewquakes” as "insights which dramatically change my world view."
Are there any particular books that have caused you personally to experience a viewquake?
Or to put the question differently, if you wanted someone to experience a viewquake, can you name any books that you believe have a high probability of provoking a viewquake?
Against Intellectual Monopoly converted me from being strongly in favor of modern copyright to strongly against it.
The Feynman Lectures on Computation did this for me by grounding computability theory in physics.
The Sequences.
A microecon textbook given to a reflective person.
I'm not sure if it is possible or has a high chance of success to give someone a book in the hope of provoking a viewquake. Most people would detect being influenced. Compare with trying to give people the bible to convert them doesn't work either even though it also could provoke a viewquake - after all the bible is also much different from other common literature. To actually provoke a viewquake it must be a missing piece either connecting pieces or buildig on them and thus causing an aha moment. And the trouble is: This depends critically on your prior knowledge thus not every book will work on everyone.
Compare with http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_of_proximal_development
If someone will actually get through the density of the text, moldbug has been known to provoke a few viewquakes.
Reading Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations prompted the biggest viewquake I've ever experienced, substantially changing my conception of what a properly naturalistic worldview looks like, especially the role of normativity therein. I'm not sure I'd assign it a high probability of provoking a viewquake in others, though, given his aphoristic and often frustratingly opaque style. I think it worked for me because I already had vague misgivings about my prior worldview that I was having trouble nailing down, and the book helped bring these apprehensions into focus.
A more concrete scientific viewquake: reading Jaynes, especially his work on statistical mechanics, completely altered my approach to my Ph.D. dissertation (and also, incidentally, led me to LW).
I know of a few former-theists whose atheist tipping point was reading Susan Blackmore's The Meme Machine. I recall being fairly heavily influenced by this myself when I first read it (about twelve years ago, when it was one of only a small handful of popular books on memetics), but suspect I might find it a bit tiresome and erroneous if I were to re-read it.
I tried to read it a few years after reading a bunch of dawkins and found it hard to get through
The Anti-Christ would be my #1 pick, for both versions of the question. Stumbling on Happiness is a good second choice though.
"1493" and "The Better Angels of Our Nature"
What was the viewquake for you in 1943?
Primarily how much biology and ecosystems could have largescale impacts on society and culture in ways which stayed around even after the underlying issue was no longer around. One of the examples there is how the prevalence of diseases (yellow fever, malaria especially) had long-term impacts on differences in North American culture in both the South and the North.
The biggest world-shattering book for me was the classic, Engines of Creation by K. Eric Drexler. I was just 21 and the book had a large impact on me. Nowadays though, the ideas in the book are pretty mainstream, so I don't think it would have the same effect for a millenial.
While it's overoptimistic and generally a bit all over the place, Kurzweil's The Singularity is Near might still be the most bang for the book single introduction to the "humans are made of atoms" mindset you can throw at someone who is reasonably popular science literate but hasn't had any exposure to serious transhumanism.
It's kinda like how The God Delusion might not be the most deep book on the social psychology of religion, but it's still a really good book to give to the smart teenager who was raised by fundamentalists and wants to be deprogrammed.
After reading Engines of Creation, The Singularity is Near didn't have nearly as much effect on me. I just thought, "Well, duh" while reading it. I can imagine how it would affect someone with little exposure to transhumanist ideas though. I agree with you that it's a good choice.
Understanding Power by Noam Chomsky.