HackerNews Readings
40,000 HackerNews book recommendations identified using NLP and deep learning

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Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

Matthew Walker, Steve West, et al.

4.7 on Amazon

19 HN comments

Thinking, Fast and Slow

Daniel Kahneman, Patrick Egan, et al.

4.6 on Amazon

16 HN comments

The Design of Everyday Things: Revised and Expanded Edition

Don Norman

4.6 on Amazon

15 HN comments

The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma

Bessel van der Kolk M.D.

4.8 on Amazon

9 HN comments

The Black Swan: Second Edition: The Impact of the Highly Improbable: With a new section: "On Robustness and Fragility" (Incerto)

Nassim Nicholas Nicholas Taleb

4.5 on Amazon

8 HN comments

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion

Jonathan Haidt and Gildan Media, LLC

4.6 on Amazon

8 HN comments

The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles

Steven Pressfield and Shawn Coyne

4.6 on Amazon

5 HN comments

How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence

Michael Pollan and Penguin Audio

4.7 on Amazon

4 HN comments

The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science

Norman Doidge

4.7 on Amazon

4 HN comments

The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

Malcolm Gladwell and Hachette Audio

4.4 on Amazon

4 HN comments

Maps of Meaning

Jordan B. Peterson and Random House Audio

4.8 on Amazon

3 HN comments

Man's Search for Meaning

Viktor E. Frankl , William J. Winslade, et al.

4.7 on Amazon

3 HN comments

How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain

Lisa Feldman Barrett, Cassandra Campbell, et al.

4.6 on Amazon

3 HN comments

Humankind: A Hopeful History

Rutger Bregman , Erica Moore, et al.

4.7 on Amazon

3 HN comments

Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

Siddhartha Mukherjee

4.8 on Amazon

3 HN comments

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strkenonJune 3, 2021

I haven't read Humankind yet, but a recent review I have read[0] gives a mix of positives and negatives to it. A lot of the cited studies are controversial in their own right: S.L.A. Marshall's claim that only 15% of soldiers in WW2 fired their weapons is based on subjective evidence, omits mention of whether they had any opportunity to fire, and has many other flaws that have since been picked apart, for example.

This is not to say that our negativity is justified! Only that Bregman seems to have as persistent a bias to positivity as other writers have to negativity.

[0] https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-human...

stakkuronJune 3, 2021

This story is examined nicely in Rutger Bregman's book Humankind: A Hopeful History.

TL:DR; It turns out that in the real world, nothing like the Lord of the Flies happened; in fact the opposite happened.

Highly recommend Bregman's book, by the way, which shoots down many of the faulty foundations of what we take for granted as fact today about human nature. I believe this article is an excerpt from the book.

andrei_says_onJune 3, 2021

> So a great story but I don't know how much can be extrapolated from it about human behaviour in general.

Given that this really happened, a lot.

Lord of the Flies came out of the fantasy of an English superintendent. Yet, it has permeated our culture as a cautionary tale about human behavior. It is 100% fiction.

I’d like to recommend Humankind by Rutger Bregman - a wonderful book dismantling the toxic narratives we have about ourselves.

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