Top Hacker News Book Recommendations in Politics & Social Sciences (all time)

All Time Past 6 Months

Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II

Douglas A. Blackmon

4.8 on Amazon

3 HN comments

The Practicing Stoic: A Philosophical User's Manual

Ward Farnsworth

4.8 on Amazon

3 HN comments

The Library Book

Susan Orlean

4.3 on Amazon

3 HN comments

Face: One Square Foot of Skin

Justine Bateman

4.2 on Amazon

3 HN comments

The Tyranny of Merit: What's Become of the Common Good?

Michael J. Sandel

4.5 on Amazon

3 HN comments

Caste: A Brief History of Racism, Sexism, Classism, Ageism, Homophobia, Religious Intolerance, Xenophobia, and Reasons for Hope

University Press

3.7 on Amazon

3 HN comments

Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland

Patrick Radden Keefe, Matthew Blaney, et al.

4.6 on Amazon

3 HN comments

Bringing Up Bébé: One American Mother Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting (now with Bébé Day by Day: 100 Keys to French Parenting)

Pamela Druckerman

4.7 on Amazon

3 HN comments

Breaking the News: Exposing the Establishment Media's Hidden Deals and Secret Corruption

Alex Marlow

4.9 on Amazon

3 HN comments

Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity―and Why This Harms Everybody

Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay

4.8 on Amazon

2 HN comments

Chaos Under Heaven: Trump, Xi, and the Battle for the Twenty-First Century

Josh Rogin, Robert Petkoff, et al.

4.5 on Amazon

2 HN comments

Speechless: Controlling Words, Controlling Minds

Michael Knowles

? on Amazon

2 HN comments

Coraline

Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean

4.8 on Amazon

2 HN comments

The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire

William Dalrymple

4.5 on Amazon

2 HN comments

What We Owe to Each Other

T. M. Scanlon

4.7 on Amazon

2 HN comments

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elliekellyonMar 14, 2020

You might find T.M. Scanlon's What We Owe to Each Other interesting.[1]

[1] https://www.scribd.com/document/127602229/Scanlon-1998-What-...

tunesmithonAug 12, 2019

I don't know if it's true for Chomsky, but I have noticed that a lot of academic sentences use a lot of inner clauses. I think it's a bad habit. When reading those sentences as a programmer, I wish for a lot of parentheses so I can determine order of operations. Without them we're left to infer that order, which is extra work when we're also just trying to figure out what the sentence itself is about.

Here's an example from T.M. Scanlon's "What We Owe to Each Other", a philosophical book on morality I was reading yesterday:

"When I ask myself what reason the fact that an action would be wrong provides me with not to do it, my answer is that such an action would be one that I could not justify to others on grounds I could expect them to accept."

This sentence is actually key to what the entire book is about, but.... "what reason the fact that an action"? I mean even as programmers we are taught to break apart long boolean expressions.

It's kind of like garden path sentences but a more general syntactic ambiguity that smart people are more guilty of due to their need to explain complex subjects. Hard for a writer to recognize, because they know what they mean.

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