Hacker News Books

I would suggest "Man and His Symbols", which is an introduction to Jungian psychology. Jung took a unique view on the psyche, which I believe is helpful in forming an objective opinion about humankind 'in itself', a necessary vantage point if you desire anything "eye-opening".

Just started reading "Man and His Symbols" by Carl Jung (would recommend), and as other people posted, Jungarian beleive that dreams are more active than random passive thoughts. New ideas can come through the sub-conscious.

I was just reading "Man and His Symbols" by Carl Jung who argued for somewhat of the same attitude in his book.

What you are calling the "gut" he called the unconscious and his argument was that the unconscious was composed of primitive brain structures that evolved over millions of years for good reason and that provide valuable intuition.

It's remarkable how much the "rationalist" side of HN responding to you coincides with critics he described in his book who fail to understand the value of intuition.

Well, actually that's true. From Man and His Symbols by Carl Jung (the guy who came up with the terms introvert and extravert):

"But if one is an introvert and the other is an extravert, their different and contradictory standpoints may clash right away... The extravert, for instance, will choose the majority view; the introvert will reject it simply because it's fashionable."

That doesn't sound like shyness at all to me. So yes, the original definition of introversion all along hasn't been shyness.

(Edited multiple times to add more thoughts)

In Jung’s Man and his Symbols, he says that the unconsciousness is a new phenomenon...and man had relied heavily on his unconsciousness..that is now repressed. It reveals itself in dreams. And so it lingers...like a secretary taking notes and organizing them. Sometimes it comes back garbled as our dreams and not always decipherable.

Writing dream journals is a good habit.

I also want to write down not just dreams but also moods during eclipses and lunar cycles and match it to astrological transit charts.

What if there is a pattern..on an individual level and for the general collective and the for the larger society. If there are 300 or 500k such journals...would it be possible to figure out patterns and trends.

Can we do this by matching Facebook status updates or twitter or fit bit data etc? We already have so much data. How difficult would it be to match birth dates/horoscopes to available data.

A social media app for tracking moods, life events and zodiac should be interesting.

I hesitated to use social media to describe it but did it anyways for lack of a better term. I don’t mean to suggest that this can be a ‘product’ for generating revenue. Somethings should be beyond exploitation for money.

What if we can have a window of insight into our own unconsciousness? And if there is no true free will, then we are still processing information that we are exposed to and making life decisions based on what we perceive subconsciously.

On the other hand, an acceptance of astrology and code of behaviour can steer a society into predictable patterns of behaviour leading to less conflict.

Think of it like a language. If in a country everyone speaks the same language, the changes for miscommunication would be much lower than in a country where there are multiple languages of communication.

This language can be linguistic or mathematical or anything else. Why can’t it be astronomical or astrological?