Undervaluing Wittgenstein isn't really consistent with what I've read in American philosophy at least. If you go by objective metrics (which would be the Moneyball approach), he consistently tops the citation counts, and beyond that, is considered central to many areas. Probably only Heidegger gives him a run for most broadly influential 20th-century philosopher (though it's hard to compare directly, because they've been influential on quite different groups).
He's been particularly influential on analytic philosophy via Saul Kripke, among other interpreters. In popularity contests, he routinely gets voted #1 most influential philosopher in polls of academic philosophers as well, e.g. in a 1999 poll of mostly UK/US academic philosophers (http://commonsenseatheism.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/Lac...) and in a Brian Leiter straw poll (http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2009/03/so-who-is-the-...). The former one concludes that Philosophical Investigations is "the one crossover masterpiece in twentieth-century philosophy, appealing across diverse specializations and philosophical orientations".
An interesting question might be who is undervalued on those lists: is there someone halfway down, or not on the list at all, who should be near the top?
he routinely gets voted #1 most influential philosopher in polls of academic philosophers as well
The joke is, Wittgenstein is the two most influential philosophers of the twentieth century - first for the logical positivist movement inspired by Tractatus Logico Philisophicus, and secondly for the natural language analysis inspired by Philosphical Investigations.
Relative position within philosophy education is another matter. It's hard for any "new" philosopher to compete with two millennia of classics when those classics are still relevant to the state of the art - i.e. it's hard to displace Plato given that the pertinent aspects of the human condition haven't changed since he wrote about them.
I'd be interested to see a list of the best philosophy books for non-philosophers. I'm not a philosopher or close to the field, but I always thought Thomas Nagel's Mortal Questions was a big hitter. Not so much for an individual essay but the combination of essays - What Is it Like to be a Bat? and The Absurd are both classics in my mind. Basically every essay in that short book is great, completely understandable to the lay-person, has the potential to be deeply influential to one's everyday beliefs, and is philosophically rigorous.
Philosophical Investigations is beyond my ability to follow as is Heidegger (I think it's a common complain against continental philosophy in general). Kripke's Naming and Necessity is something I can understand, but I don't really feel the 'oomph' to the insight that there can be a posteriori necessary truths and apriori contingent truths. Obviously it's a deeply important fact, and an astonishing breakthrough. But it doesn't hit me in the same way as Nagel's Absurd, which attempts to break down and dismiss existential dread. I don't think he succeeds, exactly, but it feels important and deeply insightful.
The article's description is way off. "Ironically for a book ignored by most philosophers, it contains the answers to a lot of their questions, and the method for answering all of them." As you say, he is among the most influential 20th century philosophers. Besides that, his praise of Wittgenstein's method is hyperbolic.
According to the OP's metric, Wittgenstein could be very influential and yet still be undervalued.
I kind of agree with OP here. Most people know of Wittgenstein as this impenetrable weirdo who stressed the importance of language to defining philosophical concepts, and then they move on from that. But if people really got what Wittgenstein was saying, it would bring a lot of philosophical debates to a screeching halt.
Sometimes I think of Wittgenstein as the guy who beat philosophy's final bosses.
Agreed. I wondered who on earth he's been talking to. At my alma mater, a little liberal arts school with a continentally-inclined philosophy department, somewhere amid all the Heidegger and Derrida I still was taught that Wittgenstein was a BFD.
I'll pipe up for Impro. One of my favorite books. Well, the first half is – it's a meditation on life and the universe as much as it is about theater, and it changed my mind in some cool ways. It's useful for anyone doing creative work, especially collaborative creative work, definitely including programmers. It's also very funny. The second half is about mask work and trance, which I was expecting to be fascinating, but it fell short of the sparkling magic of the first half. The material isn't as generally accessible and probably depends more on knowing how they use masks in production. Johnstone says that the masks have their own personalities, which actors take on when they wear them, and that's probably why he relies on them so much. His tastes in theater run away from personal expression toward simple universals. He's always telling actors to be more boring, and that the worst thing you can do is try to be interesting or clever.
Johnstone lives in my town in Western Canada. I ran into him in Safeway once. He's very tall and his eyes go in two different directions so he looks down at you rather quizzically from two different angles with his head tilted like a bird. I told him I loved his book, and he grunted "Good" and turned around and walked away. A few paces later he yelled "I'm glad it's useful!" and then went out of sight.
He's probably a genius. He was known in the London theatre scene of the 1950s, but felt stifled because he couldn't try whatever ideas he wanted without worrying what somebody famous would think. Then he went to teach at some remote place on Vancouver Island and discovered that he could think and do whatever he wanted. He liked that so much that he got a position in my town and stayed there permanently, presumably because there was nobody there who mattered!
A lot of great books, but it's unclear to me that most of these are actually "undervalued." Check out the blurb on the back cover of Philosophical Investigations, for example:
Immediately upon its posthumous publication in 1953, Ludwig Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations was hailed as a masterpiece, and the ensuing years have confirmed this initial assessment. Today it is widely acknowledged to be the single most important philosophical work of the twentieth century.
Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain has had a huge impact. From Amazon: "Translated into more than seventeen languages, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain is the world's most widely used drawing instruction book."
Same with The Inner Game of Tennis -- it was groundbreaking when it came out in 1972 and had a huge impact not just on tennis, or even sports generally, but on musicians, artists, performers, or anything with a critical mental game. Back when I was working on my music degree it was required reading.
Is it possible that the author thinks these books are undervalued simply because many of them were released a while ago (when he was young or not yet born) and thus they aren't currently being hyped and/or in the limelight? That, or perhaps they're simply not that popular within the author's social circle?
If it weren't for Hacker News, I would not have heard of Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, which I'm currently reading. I had also never heard of The Inner Game of Tennis despite playing tennis for four years in high school.
To your point, some of the books were hugely successful when released, but don't receive much attention today due to the newer books in the spotlight. We all live in different worlds so some books will be wildly popular to some groups and foreign to others.
Inner Game of Tennis is still ranked ranked among the top 1000 books on Amazon, and it's #1 in 3 categories.
Impro is not much behind on the sales rank, so I'm guessing still quite a few people buy it.
If you ever take an improv class, your teacher will most likely recommend it.
+1 for Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. It's superb.
I'd add A Pattern Language to the list. It's actually been very appropriately valued by the programming community, but massively undervalued by its intended audience of architects and urban planners. Should've been the architecture and planning book of the 20th century; instead most design professionals have never heard of it. Their loss!
A Pattern Language is often a required text for at least one studio course in US architectural schools. There are, however, practical issues with Alexander's approach at a professional level. Some are perhaps subtle to a layperson - most architectural projects are typically driven by the client's commercial concerns, e.g. a firehouse apparatus bay is designed for trucks not human habitation and a restaurant is designed to turn over customers not cause them to linger for six hours. On the other hand, some are obvious - planners do not have the ability to limit existing communities to a few thousand people.
This isn't to say that Alexander cannot inform a design. In fact, many architects look at his work during the process. But the kind of project which will look like the images in his book is rare simply because many of these patterns are best implemented "at run-time" by the user, rather than at "compile time" by the architect or planner.
Finally, I would say that what the programming community got from A Pattern Language is not Christopher Alexander, but Richard P. Gabriel. [http://www.dreamsongs.com/]
I haven't read Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, but someone has uploaded a two hour long instructional video with Betty Edwards with the same title on YouTube, which might be of some interest. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ctkRwRDdajo
It's a good list for cherry-picking a couple reading ideas, but the amateur comments about philosophy weren't well-received by this individual.
> I find that it’s thoroughly undervalued by philosophers
Doing okay so far...
>though, who see it as an arcane and eccentric work of little value
Not so sure about that...the timing for Wittgenstein's work might've been unfortunate, given that people were starting to become infatuated with existentialism around the same time. That was as more of a pop-culture phenomenon than an academic fad though.
>it’s a difficult thing to read
Okay again...
>Ironically for a book ignored by most philosophers, it contains the answers to a lot of their questions, and the method for answering all of them.
Hrm, no. A lot of the questions concerning philosophy and the method for answering all of them?
I sincerely doubt any work that could described in such terms would be as obscure as he proposes. This borders on the illogic of conspiracy theorists believing they've found some secret truth.
A bizarre flash of irrationality in an otherwise great post.
You question whether it's really seen as that eccentric: I've actually corresponded with a bunch of UK philosophers about Wittgenstein, all of whom regard his earlier work as vaguely interesting if subsequently outmoded (a more or less accurate assessment) and his later work as eccentric and mostly irrelevant to serious philosophy (a totally wrong-headed assessment). I'm happy to send you email extracts if you still doubt that.
I should note that I studied philosophy here in the UK (at Oxford), so perhaps I'm biased towards the UK. But I think this applies to the US too: Wittgenstein sort-of influenced the American tradition via Rorty and Kripke, but he's still not central to modern American academic philosophy. Kripke got him totally wrong anyway, and Wittgenstein's only a piece of Rorty's outlook.
As to your last comment - what you seem to be saying is that this is highly improbable based on 'well if it's that good why doesn't everyone believe that' considerations. To which I'd respond: (a) it's not a totally obscure work. In fact, it's regarded as the main late Wittgenstein work. But (b) late Wittgenstein is totally undervalued by the mainstream of academic philosophy, mostly because (I think) he renders it irrelevant; and (c) you're better off actually reading the thing and deciding for yourself. Otherwise you become a sort of 'efficient market theorist' w.r.t. academia/books. Not a position I'd want to hold, personally.
Operators and Things, a (supposed) first-person account of a schizophrenic who recovered from the condition and wrote about her experience. The second half of the book is where it really shines, since the author attempts to analyze her experience as a window into the inner workings of her cognition: how it broke down, what she experienced when it did, how it recovered itself, and what led to it. Since the author is anonymous, and talking about one's mind is very introspective, it's hard to take away real science from the book but I found it fascinating nonetheless. While I really dislike pseudoscientific explanations of brain functioning, after reading this I took up the idea that the conscious mind is more of a time-slice scheduler and message-passer than where the actual computation is done. So concentration is about controlling your unconscious indirectly, like training a puppy how to play fetch: you give it suggestions of what to do, and ignore it when it doesn't do that :).
I'm linking to the Amazon page, but IIRC the book is old enough to be in the public domain and there is a free text version somewhere.
For me, the most undervalued book is The Art of Worldly Wisdom by Baltasar Gracian y Morales.
It's a small book of very condensed and timeless wisdom in the form of maxims, written very poetically. It's not a self-help book, the kind you might picture. (any book is self-help in some way).
Perusing 5-10 maxims a day about 5 years ago heavily influenced the way I live my life, and still defines my character today.
I had a very similar thought one year ago - for me one of the undervalued books back then was "How to win friends and influence people" by Dale Carnegie. The title was so smarmy and offputting for me (yeah, it's 70 years old...) that I skipped this gem for way too long, when it's basically everything you will ever need to deal with and manage people in a few hundred pages...
The interesting thing about Money Ball was that Billy Beane pioneered an analytic model for evaluating the true value vs subjectively perceived value of players.
This list was purely an opinion piece. It was the result of a subjective appraisal of both books, and the public opinion of them.
I'm really curious how you would suggest to measure the "true value" of books.
I think there may be no such thing. Base ball is a clearly defined game with conditions for winning and losing, which gives you objective information on these true values.
But aesthetics (here book appreciation) simply isn't objective to begin with.
Value is always subjective. Beane's analytic model doesn't calculate value it defines a model for winning games and analyzes players based on the model.
Tried reading it. His life storey reads like an entrepreneur who started by trying to fit in (held several corporate jobs), failed (fired for insubordination) then started his own company.
The rest reads like a self-help book written by an amateur. Some gushing about physics and natural history (which a HBS graduate probably finds unfathomable and mysterious). Then some deep discussion of his own inner psyche; why do successful people assume its their own uniquness that made them succeed and not, for instance, market conditions or good advice?
Then I gave up. Is very wordy, very very wordy, and not many of the words worth slogging through. At least the part I saw.
Some gushing about physics and natural history (which a HBS graduate probably finds unfathomable and mysterious).
Yeah, cause all those HBS grads are just idiots, right? They could never fathom something as complex as physics or natural history. That's probably just black magic to them, even though a big chunk of them got their undergrad degrees in science or engineering.
You might want to skip the biographical part, if you don't find it relevant, and then come back and re-read it. Dalio's book describes the right attitude for handling criticism and describes a business environment built around questioning ideas.
None of that "trust your gut" and "we're a team, let's behave as a team" that many other business books preach - in Dalio's line of work mistakes are costly, and if he ran his company in the same manner some other companies are run (CEO provides the vision, everybody else just executes on it), he'd be out of business.
There are some good bits. If you're a good problem solver you'll get what he's trying to say:
"Have clear goals.
Identify and don’t tolerate the problems that stand in the way of achieving your goals. Accurately diagnose these problems.
Accurately diagnose these problems.
Design plans that explicitly lay out tasks that will get you around your problems and on to your goals.
Implement these plans—i.e., do these tasks."
You probably want to read the book if you want to manage people in a company like his; He later gives lots of tips on how to do it; The tips make a lot more sense if you understand his "principles", because its how they are derived.
I agree it was wordy, but it was only an hour or so read to read part 1 & 2 and beginning of 3, which he said was what you want to read if you didn't want to read all of it.
There was also some stuff about when to hire and fire people, and how to cultivate the people in your organisation.
Agree! Just read up to page 38 and realized there wasn't a single insightful thing he'd said. It seems to be all about him and yes, it is very, very, very wordy and poorly formatted!
"Ironically for a book ignored by most philosophers, it contains the answers to a lot of their questions, and the method for answering all of them."
I find this illuminating - philosopher's aren't concerned with answers. They are concerned with the questions. An interesting contrast between the scientific/engineering mindset and the philosophical mindset.
Very true, once you start understanding how to approach the right questions, the problem moves to the scientific domain, e.g. natural philosophy--> physics, philosophy of mind (partly) -->psychology/neuroscience/cognitive science, etc
It doesn't really contain answers so much as that it argues the questions or problems are really just puzzles resulting from confusions due to language.
Not sure where that "Slashdot has many problems" statement came from, but I enjoy Slashdot every bit as much as HN. Actually, I like /. more because there's a lot less shilling and gaming votes there.
Happily read your blog post but the assertions about Wittgenstein rang alarm bells. It may be that his works are ignored in the UK right now, but paraphrasing Brian Magee: "Philosophy is subject to fashion". So it may just be a question of trend in philosophy.
> it contains the answers to a lot of their questions, and the method for answering all of them.
For me that sounds like "Node.js contains the method to solving all programming problems.".
"I would say that this has been, unfortunately for philosophy, the central fact of philosophy. Most philosophical debates are not merely afflicted by but driven by confusions over words. Do we have free will? Depends what you mean by "free." Do abstract ideas exist? Depends what you mean by "exist."
Wittgenstein is popularly credited with the idea that most philosophical controversies are due to confusions over language. I'm not sure how much credit to give him. I suspect a lot of people realized this, but reacted simply by not studying philosophy, rather than becoming philosophy professors.
How did things get this way? Can something people have spent thousands of years studying really be a waste of time? Those are interesting questions. In fact, some of the most interesting questions you can ask about philosophy. The most valuable way to approach the current philosophical tradition may be neither to get lost in pointless speculations like Berkeley, nor to shut them down like Wittgenstein, but to study it as an example of reason gone wrong." - PG
Not an appeal to authority, mind you, just a way of saving myself time.
+1 for Stephen Booth. I was fortunate enough to take his 17th century English poetry class at Cal. He's the only lecturer who could make poetry resonate with my geek brain.
It's funny how some classes stay with you over the years.
Quick tip for anyone trying to get older editions of some of these books: use Abebooks
For example, some of the drawing on the right reviews mention that the 1989 edition is better. I find this happens with many new editions of older books.
You can find near good as new editions of older books on Abebooks, at very reasonable prices. I used it to get a great copy of SICP, and just now ordered a version of How To Win Friends And Influence People published during Dale Carnegie's life, as Paul Graham recommended.
There is another book that I want to recommend to other Hacker News readers and that is 'Language in Thought and Action' by S.I. Hiyakawa[0]. Honestly, reading that changed my life.
I don't think a typical sampling of the HN crowd would be familiar with the work of J.D Salinger outside of Catcher and the Rye, but as someone who's loved these stories intensely since my mid-teens, I can't recommend them enough. In fact the mere mention of Seymour: An Introduction in the article sent shivers down my spine, reminding me of the amazing originality and artistry of this writer that I haven't experienced for several years now (I very rarely read fiction now). I won't bother summarizing the stories here, but if you have even a passing interest in zen, religion, literature or (at the risk of sounding pretentious) life itself then this is required reading in my book.
The book "Mastery" by George Leonard is a distilled version of "The Inner Game of Tennis." Highly recommended, and it can be had for a few bucks shipped on Amazon.
I think he was saying that there are certain things that once you learn them, they change how you view the world. For him, Newtonian Mechanics and Calculus both did this as well as the knowledge he gained from Impro. Not that Impro had anything to do with Newtonian Mechanics.
[+] [-] mjn|13 years ago|reply
He's been particularly influential on analytic philosophy via Saul Kripke, among other interpreters. In popularity contests, he routinely gets voted #1 most influential philosopher in polls of academic philosophers as well, e.g. in a 1999 poll of mostly UK/US academic philosophers (http://commonsenseatheism.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/Lac...) and in a Brian Leiter straw poll (http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2009/03/so-who-is-the-...). The former one concludes that Philosophical Investigations is "the one crossover masterpiece in twentieth-century philosophy, appealing across diverse specializations and philosophical orientations".
An interesting question might be who is undervalued on those lists: is there someone halfway down, or not on the list at all, who should be near the top?
[+] [-] brudgers|13 years ago|reply
The joke is, Wittgenstein is the two most influential philosophers of the twentieth century - first for the logical positivist movement inspired by Tractatus Logico Philisophicus, and secondly for the natural language analysis inspired by Philosphical Investigations.
Relative position within philosophy education is another matter. It's hard for any "new" philosopher to compete with two millennia of classics when those classics are still relevant to the state of the art - i.e. it's hard to displace Plato given that the pertinent aspects of the human condition haven't changed since he wrote about them.
[+] [-] dulse|13 years ago|reply
Philosophical Investigations is beyond my ability to follow as is Heidegger (I think it's a common complain against continental philosophy in general). Kripke's Naming and Necessity is something I can understand, but I don't really feel the 'oomph' to the insight that there can be a posteriori necessary truths and apriori contingent truths. Obviously it's a deeply important fact, and an astonishing breakthrough. But it doesn't hit me in the same way as Nagel's Absurd, which attempts to break down and dismiss existential dread. I don't think he succeeds, exactly, but it feels important and deeply insightful.
[+] [-] nemo|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] neilk|13 years ago|reply
I kind of agree with OP here. Most people know of Wittgenstein as this impenetrable weirdo who stressed the importance of language to defining philosophical concepts, and then they move on from that. But if people really got what Wittgenstein was saying, it would bring a lot of philosophical debates to a screeching halt.
Sometimes I think of Wittgenstein as the guy who beat philosophy's final bosses.
[+] [-] zachalexander|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gruseom|13 years ago|reply
Johnstone lives in my town in Western Canada. I ran into him in Safeway once. He's very tall and his eyes go in two different directions so he looks down at you rather quizzically from two different angles with his head tilted like a bird. I told him I loved his book, and he grunted "Good" and turned around and walked away. A few paces later he yelled "I'm glad it's useful!" and then went out of sight.
He's probably a genius. He was known in the London theatre scene of the 1950s, but felt stifled because he couldn't try whatever ideas he wanted without worrying what somebody famous would think. Then he went to teach at some remote place on Vancouver Island and discovered that he could think and do whatever he wanted. He liked that so much that he got a position in my town and stayed there permanently, presumably because there was nobody there who mattered!
[+] [-] nqureshi|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] msluyter|13 years ago|reply
Immediately upon its posthumous publication in 1953, Ludwig Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations was hailed as a masterpiece, and the ensuing years have confirmed this initial assessment. Today it is widely acknowledged to be the single most important philosophical work of the twentieth century.
Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain has had a huge impact. From Amazon: "Translated into more than seventeen languages, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain is the world's most widely used drawing instruction book."
Same with The Inner Game of Tennis -- it was groundbreaking when it came out in 1972 and had a huge impact not just on tennis, or even sports generally, but on musicians, artists, performers, or anything with a critical mental game. Back when I was working on my music degree it was required reading.
Is it possible that the author thinks these books are undervalued simply because many of them were released a while ago (when he was young or not yet born) and thus they aren't currently being hyped and/or in the limelight? That, or perhaps they're simply not that popular within the author's social circle?
[+] [-] bennesvig|13 years ago|reply
To your point, some of the books were hugely successful when released, but don't receive much attention today due to the newer books in the spotlight. We all live in different worlds so some books will be wildly popular to some groups and foreign to others.
[+] [-] zszugyi|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nkoren|13 years ago|reply
I'd add A Pattern Language to the list. It's actually been very appropriately valued by the programming community, but massively undervalued by its intended audience of architects and urban planners. Should've been the architecture and planning book of the 20th century; instead most design professionals have never heard of it. Their loss!
[+] [-] brudgers|13 years ago|reply
This isn't to say that Alexander cannot inform a design. In fact, many architects look at his work during the process. But the kind of project which will look like the images in his book is rare simply because many of these patterns are best implemented "at run-time" by the user, rather than at "compile time" by the architect or planner.
Finally, I would say that what the programming community got from A Pattern Language is not Christopher Alexander, but Richard P. Gabriel. [http://www.dreamsongs.com/]
[+] [-] dalys|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] codewright|13 years ago|reply
> I find that it’s thoroughly undervalued by philosophers
Doing okay so far...
>though, who see it as an arcane and eccentric work of little value
Not so sure about that...the timing for Wittgenstein's work might've been unfortunate, given that people were starting to become infatuated with existentialism around the same time. That was as more of a pop-culture phenomenon than an academic fad though.
>it’s a difficult thing to read
Okay again...
>Ironically for a book ignored by most philosophers, it contains the answers to a lot of their questions, and the method for answering all of them.
Hrm, no. A lot of the questions concerning philosophy and the method for answering all of them?
I sincerely doubt any work that could described in such terms would be as obscure as he proposes. This borders on the illogic of conspiracy theorists believing they've found some secret truth.
A bizarre flash of irrationality in an otherwise great post.
[+] [-] nqureshi|13 years ago|reply
You question whether it's really seen as that eccentric: I've actually corresponded with a bunch of UK philosophers about Wittgenstein, all of whom regard his earlier work as vaguely interesting if subsequently outmoded (a more or less accurate assessment) and his later work as eccentric and mostly irrelevant to serious philosophy (a totally wrong-headed assessment). I'm happy to send you email extracts if you still doubt that.
I should note that I studied philosophy here in the UK (at Oxford), so perhaps I'm biased towards the UK. But I think this applies to the US too: Wittgenstein sort-of influenced the American tradition via Rorty and Kripke, but he's still not central to modern American academic philosophy. Kripke got him totally wrong anyway, and Wittgenstein's only a piece of Rorty's outlook.
As to your last comment - what you seem to be saying is that this is highly improbable based on 'well if it's that good why doesn't everyone believe that' considerations. To which I'd respond: (a) it's not a totally obscure work. In fact, it's regarded as the main late Wittgenstein work. But (b) late Wittgenstein is totally undervalued by the mainstream of academic philosophy, mostly because (I think) he renders it irrelevant; and (c) you're better off actually reading the thing and deciding for yourself. Otherwise you become a sort of 'efficient market theorist' w.r.t. academia/books. Not a position I'd want to hold, personally.
[+] [-] wickedchicken|13 years ago|reply
I'm linking to the Amazon page, but IIRC the book is old enough to be in the public domain and there is a free text version somewhere.
http://www.amazon.com/Operators-Things-Inner-Life-Schizophre...
[+] [-] mck-|13 years ago|reply
It's a small book of very condensed and timeless wisdom in the form of maxims, written very poetically. It's not a self-help book, the kind you might picture. (any book is self-help in some way).
Perusing 5-10 maxims a day about 5 years ago heavily influenced the way I live my life, and still defines my character today.
[+] [-] kqr2|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] graeme|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] endymi0n|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] moron|13 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] ubershmekel|13 years ago|reply
This list was purely an opinion piece. It was the result of a subjective appraisal of both books, and the public opinion of them.
I'm quite disappointed.
[+] [-] andreasvc|13 years ago|reply
I think there may be no such thing. Base ball is a clearly defined game with conditions for winning and losing, which gives you objective information on these true values.
But aesthetics (here book appreciation) simply isn't objective to begin with.
[+] [-] Codhisattva|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JoeAltmaier|13 years ago|reply
Tried reading it. His life storey reads like an entrepreneur who started by trying to fit in (held several corporate jobs), failed (fired for insubordination) then started his own company.
The rest reads like a self-help book written by an amateur. Some gushing about physics and natural history (which a HBS graduate probably finds unfathomable and mysterious). Then some deep discussion of his own inner psyche; why do successful people assume its their own uniquness that made them succeed and not, for instance, market conditions or good advice?
Then I gave up. Is very wordy, very very wordy, and not many of the words worth slogging through. At least the part I saw.
[+] [-] ryanwaggoner|13 years ago|reply
Yeah, cause all those HBS grads are just idiots, right? They could never fathom something as complex as physics or natural history. That's probably just black magic to them, even though a big chunk of them got their undergrad degrees in science or engineering.
EDIT: Some examples of those idiot HBS grads: http://www.hbs.edu/news/releases/kaplanfellows2010.html
[+] [-] prostoalex|13 years ago|reply
None of that "trust your gut" and "we're a team, let's behave as a team" that many other business books preach - in Dalio's line of work mistakes are costly, and if he ran his company in the same manner some other companies are run (CEO provides the vision, everybody else just executes on it), he'd be out of business.
[+] [-] meric|13 years ago|reply
Identify and don’t tolerate the problems that stand in the way of achieving your goals. Accurately diagnose these problems.
Accurately diagnose these problems.
Design plans that explicitly lay out tasks that will get you around your problems and on to your goals.
Implement these plans—i.e., do these tasks."
You probably want to read the book if you want to manage people in a company like his; He later gives lots of tips on how to do it; The tips make a lot more sense if you understand his "principles", because its how they are derived.
I agree it was wordy, but it was only an hour or so read to read part 1 & 2 and beginning of 3, which he said was what you want to read if you didn't want to read all of it.
There was also some stuff about when to hire and fire people, and how to cultivate the people in your organisation.
[+] [-] curiouslurker|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blindhippo|13 years ago|reply
I find this illuminating - philosopher's aren't concerned with answers. They are concerned with the questions. An interesting contrast between the scientific/engineering mindset and the philosophical mindset.
[+] [-] pav3l|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andreasvc|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gnosis|13 years ago|reply
"Ask Slashdot: Most Underappreciated Sci-Fi Writer?"
http://www.ask.slashdot.org/story/12/08/08/2135246/ask-slash...
Slashdot has many problems, but this was actually a pretty interesting and informative thread.
[+] [-] bravoyankee|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cvursache|13 years ago|reply
> it contains the answers to a lot of their questions, and the method for answering all of them.
For me that sounds like "Node.js contains the method to solving all programming problems.".
[+] [-] nqureshi|13 years ago|reply
Wittgenstein is popularly credited with the idea that most philosophical controversies are due to confusions over language. I'm not sure how much credit to give him. I suspect a lot of people realized this, but reacted simply by not studying philosophy, rather than becoming philosophy professors.
How did things get this way? Can something people have spent thousands of years studying really be a waste of time? Those are interesting questions. In fact, some of the most interesting questions you can ask about philosophy. The most valuable way to approach the current philosophical tradition may be neither to get lost in pointless speculations like Berkeley, nor to shut them down like Wittgenstein, but to study it as an example of reason gone wrong." - PG
Not an appeal to authority, mind you, just a way of saving myself time.
[+] [-] acmiller|13 years ago|reply
It's funny how some classes stay with you over the years.
[+] [-] nqureshi|13 years ago|reply
Do you have any class notes / resources you could share? I love the guy.
What was he like as a teacher / in person?
[+] [-] graeme|13 years ago|reply
Quick tip for anyone trying to get older editions of some of these books: use Abebooks
For example, some of the drawing on the right reviews mention that the 1989 edition is better. I find this happens with many new editions of older books.
You can find near good as new editions of older books on Abebooks, at very reasonable prices. I used it to get a great copy of SICP, and just now ordered a version of How To Win Friends And Influence People published during Dale Carnegie's life, as Paul Graham recommended.
[+] [-] nqureshi|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lhnz|13 years ago|reply
There is another book that I want to recommend to other Hacker News readers and that is 'Language in Thought and Action' by S.I. Hiyakawa[0]. Honestly, reading that changed my life.
[0] http://www.amazon.com/Language-Thought-Action-Fifth-Edition/...
[+] [-] jberryman|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _feda_|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nqureshi|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dlevine|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andreyon|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Simucal|13 years ago|reply