[lew89]

For me, the biggest boost lately was Nassim Nicholas Taleb: Black Swan, Antifragile. He's a real philosopher in a sense that he addresses real world problems instead on messing with theory. He's an insightful practitioner who builds proper terms to describe phenomena he observes and follow consequences. For me, his books were not only very inspiring because of its messsage (not popular, but seems very true, using terms he proposes contributed much to my understanding of the world), but set a good example of forming a good base for finding out stuff. He's inspiring, because he has similar interests to me, especially cognitive biases and he shows with his success that you can refuse to do bull*t people do nowadays and be successful. Plus, he's much into Probability Theory, so he's a good choice for an engineer who prefer mathematics over more social stuff.

I would also recommend The Structure of Science Revolutions (Thomas Kuhn), very important book to understand how science works, what are its limitations, how should we treat scientific facts. It also show very nature of learning about world (it's not lineary incremental like most people think). It also emphasize that there is always quite a lot of dogma in science (you need some assumptions that can't be really proved right, only wrong if you dwell on it and eventually fail). If you are interested in modern science belief system and what are stuff it can't explain (according to Kuhn, any science paradigm has smaller or bigger blind spot), it's quite well explained in The Science Delusion by Rupert Sheldrake.

If you are interested in nature of non-linearity of learning, what were steps in forming human's worldview, I think Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West make a good point. I can't say for sure, because I have only started (it's very long, 1500 pages), but I definitely like the guy. :)

[climber_mac]

I'm not sure why this comment is getting downvoted. I have read a lot of Nassim Taleb and completely agree with your comment.

He is a modern philosopher with really valuable insights about how to navigate the world given all of our biases and inability to accept the role of uncertainty in just about everything we do.