Hacker News Books

That said, you might skip the digression on silver (ugh).

* Tribe - Sebastian Junger (taught me how important it is to be part of a close community, decided to Airbnb all of next year after reading this book)

By David Deutsch

In the book he details his theory of everything. Quite ambitious and very thought provoking.

Thinking Fast and Slow

The Organized Mind

The Vital Question by Nick Lane.

The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch

Yes.

the Beginning of Infinity you cite is also fiction with little to no scientific support

WTF? BoI is not fiction.

Deutsch here isn't trying to modify quantum mechanics, he's trying to "interpret" it. He wouldn't use the term "interpret" of course, for excellent and fascinating reasons that I can't quickly cram into an HN post, but you can find them in his book The Beginning of Infinity (I was convinced about this area of what he says in the book, not about everything else he says there -- there's a LOT of stuff in there!).

By the way, I don't know whether or not you meant to imply that Deutsch is not a physicist, but he is -- and well known for his work on the fundamentals of quantum physics.

While waiting for that new book, I recommend reading his previous book The Fabric of Reality.

The Wide Lens - Ron Adner (a more complete view for developing projects, foreseeing the inevitable problems beyond your immediate reach)

Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World - Haruki Murakami (just awesome)

Snow Crash - Neal Stephenson (tomorrow's world, written the day before yesterday)

And here's all the 40-something book I've read this year: https://www.goodreads.com/user_challenges/562634

> most non-physicists consider it self-evident that when you hold your arm out horizontally you can feel the force of gravity pulling it downwards. But you cannot. The existence of a force of gravity is, astonishingly, denied by Einstein's general theory of relativity. This says that the only force on your arm in that situation is that which you yourself are exerting, upwards, to keep it constantly accelerating away from the straightest possible path in a curved region of spacetime.

I won't pretend to understand all of this (perhaps someone would like to explain it?) but it's interesting nonetheless.

Read Rework by Basecamp. Read The Beginning of Infinity by Deutch. Read the Art of Doing Science and Engineering by Hamming. Watch some Bret Victor talks. Ignore the negative memes about tech. They're all wrong, the rules get re-written every 10 years, and that is going to decrease in duration, not increase. You might be the person needed to re-write them.

Release your code. Teach. Share.

If you can, bootstrap. Give more than you take. Don't hire or work with assholes. Grow slowly. Don't over-lever yourself. Make something people not just want, but love. Know thyself. Don't outsource your thinking, build the thing only you can build.

If you are not working on the most important problem in your field, why not?

Most importantly, know that the future is bright and that our best days are not only ahead of us, but always will be.

[1] https://alexdanco.com/2020/02/07/debt-is-coming/

"The Beginning of Infinity" by David Deutsch. It's difficult to pinpoint this book as being about a thing or a set of things, but my best attempt is to say it's about attaining knowledge and the non-existent limits to human knowledge. I've never felt more inspired than when I finished reading this book and reflected on the infinite lengths humankind has to go on technological progress. Overall, it's an incredible argument for optimism about what is possible.

Yes, this is the tricky part. Per the article, such knowledge is passed on culturally, i.e. by people imitating their betters. But that's not the whole story. My guess is that occasionally, in unusual circumstances, some wise person would step in and say, 'No, don't do that!' (without necessarily being able to explain why).

An important clarification is that, contra the article, people can't literally imitate other people. Rather, they guess the meaning of other people's behaviour. Again, without necessarily being able to explain it or even state it in words. See Chapters 15,16 of The Beginning of Infinity, by David Deutsch.

Yes, one can only engage with a problem that has personal relevance. Mostly people aren't engaged. They are notionally working on 'important problem X', but their real problem is how to please an authority figure or how to further a career. Which aren't interesting.

A study of history shows that objective progress is possible, so it follows that it must come about by lots of Feynman-like people working on their own apparently unimportant problems.

This can be explained by the way reality and our knowledge of it are structured. Solutions to problems typically have 'reach'. Thus in order to solve parochial problems people typically create fundamental theories which automatically apply to all sorts of other problems, including important ones.

The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch is a fascinating read which has a lot to say about this sort of thing.

On a different note, I am just finishing up Snowflower and the Secret Fan (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_Flower_and_the_Secret_Fan). Not only a well written story about the life story of two Chinese women around the turn of the century but also taught me some interesting customs about women's lives in pre-Revolution China, e.g. being lao tongs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laotong).

David Deutsch's The Beginning of Infinity. If you know him, it's probably because Deutsch did some pioneering work in Quantum computing back in the day, but this book covers everything from physics to biology to computing to art with a grand sort of theory of everything. There are few popular science books more densely packed with original ideas.

Borges' collected fictions. There probably isn't much that needs to be said about this that hasn't already been said. Borges was a visionary.

Proust.

Stanislaw Lem's Solaris. Completely changed the way I think about sci-fi.

Nick Bostrom's Superintelligence. I think this is still the gold standard of speculative AI books.

Sapiens. Like everyone else I loved this one.

"The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World" by David Deutsch

https://www.amazon.com/Beginning-Infinity-Explanations-Trans...?

2.) Candide by Voltaire - contributed to my personal sense of humor and belief that we live in neither the best nor worst of all possible worlds, but simply the most absurd of them.

3) The Art of War by Sun Tzu - Helped me understand the power of small effeciencies in large systems and the importance of metagaming.

As David Deutsch argues in The Beginning of Infinity, this is true not just for computers, but for everything.

I suspect that many of the replies to this comment who cynically cite variations of "the principle of mediocrity" would also do well to read it.

He makes the point that the single coldest place in the known universe is not anywhere in the depths of space (which is gets down to about 3 kelvin), it's in a lab designed by humans and used for quantum mechanics research (200 nano kelvin).

Our capacity for information gathering and creativity has allowed us to create physical realities that cannot otherwise exist outside the influence of intelligent beings. Incredible to think about.

They must have been members of what David Deutsch calls a "static society". These are societies which actively try to keep things the same, and stamp out any innovation or differences. Things change there so slowly that the change is not noticeable within a single generation. In a 2011 interview with Ken Rose (https://groups.google.com/d/msg/beginning-of-infinity/dr64n4...), Deutsch said that "progress, from the point of view of the human species as a whole, is very recent and very rare. Through most of human history, people would live their entire lives without ever encountering an innovation, whereas now, we take it for granted that iPhone updates come more often than is comfortable."

For more, see his superb book The Beginning of Infinity (2010).

Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom. Few thinkers have thought about this issue as deeply as Bostrom, and it was fascinating to hear his thoughts on AI.

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. Pretty traumatic read but essential if you really want to understand a dark and overlooked chapter of American history

While nodding towards quite real problems involving, let's say for example vaccines, I don't think any of that troubles the principle of free speech in the slightest. Practically applying it is difficult and as error-prone as is anything else, but the principle is enlightening in that task.

There does exist a principle of free speech that is not the same thing as the various legal principles, constitutional rules, laws, or rules of thumb that say government suppression of speech is worse than other kinds. Crucially important though those have been, it's still true that suppression of speech itself is uniquely bad: Fundamentally, knowledge is not infallible, all problems are caused by lack of knowledge, and speech is the means of correcting all other mistakes. Practically, we find it all too easy to socially suppress good ideas. It's hard to see the true extent of that because it's impossible to see the upside that hasn't happened as a result of that suppression.

I hardly need to refer explicitly to some of the specific ideas of the not-distant past about social control that we have since learned, though they were certainly obviously good, were not good.

Practically, it's hard to escape the idea that taking seriously the millennia-long stream of historical failures of ideas -- and their replacement with better ones -- does entail treating ideas that are obviously wrong with considerably more flexibility and humility than is tempting.

I recommend David Deutsch's book The Beginning of Infinity to shake up anybody's ideas about this, no matter where you start from.

Extrapolating a bit from that lesson, and with ~40 more years of hindsight, I'd highly recommend that a bright 14 year old read some books that give a broad overview of science & philosophy, and establish a thorough understanding of the scientific method. One that I happen to be reading right now that I feel is remarkable is David Deutsch's The Beginning of Infinity. Deutsch is a theoretical physicist at Oxford working on Quantum Computation. The Beginning of Infinity (despite the new-agey sounding name) is an incredible work.

Another book I highly recommend is Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene, not just for how it explains Neo-Darwinish, but because of the chapter on Memes. Deutsch also has a great treatment of Memes.

1. The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World by David Deutsch. It makes a bold claim that we will always be at the beginning of the infinite progress that lies ahead. History has proven again and again that whenever people said all progress has been made, so much more progress unfolds. I liked this book so much that we gifted this book at my startup to the entire team of 170 people!

2. The Innovator's Solution by Clayton M. Christensen and Michael E. Raynor. This is a sequel to the popular Innovator's Dilemma book. I like the sequel much better because it tries to give solutions to the dilemma. The book packs tons of counter intuitive insights. Highly recommended.

3. The Big Picture by Sean Carrol. The best cosmology book I have read in a long while

4. First break all the rules. If you are a first time manager, I highly recommend reading this book.

5. Deep Work by Cal Newport. This book changed my working habits and life. I was constantly distracted before, and now I am able to focus a ton.

6. Feeling Good. This classic is again a must read. Even if you are not depressed, it will help build your mental immunity against future depression.

7. Our Mathematical Universe by Max Tegmark. A very interesting book that makes the claim that our universe is actually just mathematics. No physical reality exists because physics and mathematics are interchangeable.

There were many other interesting books I read (I read a total of 60 books in 2016!) For those who are interested, here's my entire list of books that I read in 2016: http://shelfjoy.com/paraschopra/books-ive-read-in-2016

- Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari

- Our Mathematical Universe by Max Tegmark

- Statistical Rethinking by Richard McElreath

I liken it to David Deutsch’s comments on good systems of government in his book The Beginning of Infinity where he advised that the trait you should use to evaluate a system of government is not whether it produces good policies, but rather how easy it is to remove bad policies.

Languages don’t cause people to invent better designs for mapping between the real world and software abstractions. They can provide tools to help, but they don’t cause the design.

But statically typed languages do create boilerplate and sunk cost fallacies leading to living with bad designs and accepting limitations that have to be coded around.

Dynamic typing compares favorably in this regard: it is very easy to rip things out or treat a function as if it implicitly handles multiple dispatch (because you can specialize on runtime types with no overhead and no enforcement on type signatures or type bounds), and quickly get feedback on whether a design will be a good idea, or what things would look like ripping out some bad design.

I think exactly what you describe is the hyped up promise that static typing, especially in functional languages, fails to actually deliver in practice. You can still write production code that way, just incurring costs of maintenance of more code & boilerplate without the supposed offsetting benefits of catching more bugs, reducing runtime errors, or communicating design more smoothly in the type system, except in isolated, small parochial cases.

That's an interesting way of phrasing things, and in this context, it reveals a sort of innate natural paradox that I find really fascinating. The author here uses "motion" both to describe natural, universal entropy ("wasted motion"), and the more productive or meaningful sort motion that is the result of deliberate, intentional human action. The thing which I find so interesting here, is that the "useful motion" which goes into building the clever hacks that the author talks about - that motion can only be judged as effective by the evaluating the degree to which it reduces the wasteful motion/ natural entropy that was present previously. Ie, meaningful and "useful" motion can only exist in opposition to the more common natural, wasted motion.

It reminds me of one the logions from an early gnostic text[1], that I had always found a bit confusing due to it's apparent insistence that "motion and rest" is key to what makes human beings special. I had mentally wrote off that saying, thinking it was either a relic of old school dualistic / karmic morality or that it was a simple "obey the sabbath" type of thing - but I'm now seeing the connection between human intellect and this sort of paradoxical type of "motion-which-reduces-motion" the author describes - and in that context "rest" could mean the the time spent introspecting, evaluating, and pivoting based on results.

To give another example that I picked up from reading "The Beginning of Infinity" by David Deutsch, our human intellect is surprisingly unique and powerful exactly because it allows us to force the universe into states that would not otherwise arise on their own, even to the extent that we can build states which are otherwise impossible to arise in environments controlled by unchecked natural entropy. One example he gave to support this is the fact that absolute coldest place that we know of in the universe, is not in some far off galaxy - it's in a university lab that was designed and built specifically to maintain incredibly low temperatures for quantum computing research purposes.

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[1] Gospel of Thomas, 50: http://gnosis.org/naghamm/gosthom.html

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"Universes, histories, particles and their instances are not referred to by quantum theory at all – any more than are planets, and human beings and their lives and loves. Those are all approximate, emergent phenomena in the multiverse."

Indeed, time itself is an emergent phenomenon:

"[T]ime is an entanglement phenomenon, which places all equal clock readings (of correctly prepared clocks – or of any objects usable as clocks) into the same history."

Here is Weinberg's fundamental problem:

"[T]he vista of all these parallel histories is deeply unsettling, and like many other physicists I would prefer a single history."

Well, I'm sorry Steven, but you can't have it. That's just not how the world is, and wishing it were so sounds as naive and petulant as an undergrad wishing Galilean relativity were true, or Einstein wishing that particles really do have definite positions and velocities at all times. Yes, it would be nice if all these things were true. But they aren't.

They make vocal calls and signals but they haven't evolved a general-purpose language. Presumably they could have. But they haven't.

Whereas humans did. Language is a huge meme transmission booster and we evolved other boosters such as large sclera so you tell roughly where someone is looking.

I don't know why elephants haven't gone that way. Perhaps because their adaptive niche and lifestyle isn't so dependent on memes to start with. Whereas our ancestors were relatively helpless, physically speaking, and thus utterly dependent on their memes both for survival as well as for social position. Which placed strong survival and sexual selection pressures for improved meme transmission and storage.

People who behaved or even dressed differently were looked down upon by their tribes or social groups and thus were less likely or simply unable to access food and mates. So, you're right, there is a connection between social hierarchy and intelligence. But fundamentally it's to do with memes (see David Deutsch's The Beginning of Infinity, Chapters 15-16).

You could imagine similar things for face recognition. An Alzheimer's patient who has a large digital photo library of family members and events, and would like some information retrieval tool to help search for a specific memory, family member, etc. Or someone who takes stock photographs and wants to photoshop bystanders out of the photos so that nobody's image rights are infringed when submitting the stock photo for publication-- might want face detection to aid in the person-removal task.

I agree completely with scrutinizing motives and refusing to work on tech when the goal is unethical. But I don't agree this allows us to point at a generic, amoral technology in and of itself and say it's conceptually unethical for existing. Maybe there would be some extreme or contrived cases when I would agree to that, but even this face recognition stuff is very far from it.

Deutsch argues that human progress is essentially due to the power of "good explanations", and the circumstances that allow good explanations to be generated, improved, error-corrected, and discarded in favour of better explanations.

Deutsch is critical of the idea that we should merely focus on predicting things rather than creating explanations for them.

There has been a lot of recent progress and excitement about the application of statistical/predictive ideas to business and industry - machine learning, "big data". However there there has been little (or no) progress in understanding how to generate explanations.

Deutsch argues that human creativity is a key component of the scientific method, that is often downplayed. We currently have no good explanation for how human creativity works, because if we did, he argues, we could go and program it tomorrow, and then we would have genuine AI.

(n.b. this is all hugely paraphrased and possibly misrepresents Deutsch's arguments. But another of Deutsch's arguments is that creativity on behalf of the human recipient allows ideas to survive transmission through awfully lossy mediums, such as this one)

It talks about the kinds of ideas that lead to progress in human societies and those that lead to stagnation. I believe Deutsch is, in this book, the first philosopher to actually explain why science works as well as it does. I wish I could do justice to this book in a short review, but instead I can only urge everyone reading this to give it a shot. Read the first chapter, and you'll know you have to read the rest.

Intellectual humility is not the same quality as personal meekness and geniuses have always had difficult personalities. Philosophers doubly so. How could it be otherwise? How can one create new stuff if one is too agreeable and too susceptible to groupthink?

Btw, the reason falsifiability doesn't have to be falsifiable (by experiment) is that it isn't a scientific idea; it's a philosophical one. It is potentially 'falsifiable' by criticism, however.

The best modern Popper proponent is David Deutsch. See his books The Fabric of Reality and The Beginning of Infinity. They're both packed with interesting ideas and arguments. He says that Popper did indeed solve the problem of induction. And here's a recent paper of his on the logic of experimental testing: https://arxiv.org/abs/1508.02048

As David Deutsch points out in The Beginning of Infinity, Winston Churchill was an optimistic leader and a fan of science and progress who nonetheless suffered from depression (the 'black dog') [1].

Whereas Thomas Malthus (mistakenly) predicted mass starvation due to population growth [2] and was therefore a pessimist who nonetheless was of a sunny disposition and the life and soul of dinner parties in London.

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10483171-the-beginning-o...

[2] An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798)
http://www.esp.org/books/malthus/population/malthus.pdf

The Beginning of Infinity - David Deutsch

Dear Friend, From My Life I Write To You in Your Life - Yiyun Li

Hillbilly Elegy - JD Vance

Inadequate Equilibria - Eliezer Yudkowsky

The Neapolitan Novels - Elena Ferrante

Mating In Captivity - Esther Perel

Our Mathematical Universe - Max Tegmark

Radical Candor - Kim Scott

Scale - Geoffrey West

The Seventh Day - Yu Hua

Somebody with a Little Hammer - Mary Gaitskill

Stubborn Attachments - Tyler Cowen (ebook)

What Do You Care What Other People Think? - Richard Feynman

David Deutsch had an anecdote in his book The Beginning of Infinity about explaining Arrow’s theorem to a US congressman and eventually getting him to the point of understanding how it applies to the electoral college in principle and there is no simple legislative change that could mollify it (I think the discussion was about how preferential voting would improve upon FPTP voting).

The congressman replied something like “this is lamentable” and Deutsch wrote a big passage about whether it makes sense that anyone should ever find a mathematical fact to be “lamentable.”

I do think there will be pragmatic varieties of this sort of impossibility theorem for machine learning fairness and that society in a broad sense will have a hard time processing it, and the possible legislative reactions might be totally unreasonable, even unintentionally harmful.

[0]: < https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow's_impossibility_theore... >

When it comes to consciousness the problem is not that we haven't built a big enough simulation with enough neurons, but rather that we lack an explanation for consciousness and its associated complex phenomena, like qualia. When we can explain consciousness, he suspects it will be easy to program. Conversely, if you can't program it, you don't understand it.

While "Shutup and calculate" is useful for invention and technology it's detrimental to our understanding of the world which, arguably, is why science was so useful to start with.

For an interesting discussion on the power of explanations check out David Duetsch's work in the book the Beginning of Infinity. He claims that explanations are fundamental to progress.

Lila by Pirsig (If you've read ZMM and left Lila unread you've left a lot on the table)

The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutch

Antifragile by Taleb

Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality by Yudkowski. Particularly Chapter 39.

The two Political Order and Political Decay books by Fukuyama

Life's Ratchet - Hoffman

0. https://www.thebeginningofinfinity.com/

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beginning_of_Infinity

2. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10483171-the-beginning-o...

3. https://brettroberthall.podbean.com/