The basic gist of the book goes something like this: in the real world (especially in a business setting) there are many things which are hard to measure directly, but which we may care about. Take, for example, "employee morale" which matters because it may affect, say, retention, or product quality. Hubbard suggests that we can measure (many|most|all|??) of these things by using a combination of "calibrated probability assessments"[2], awareness of nth order effects, and Monte Carlo simulation.

Basically, "if something matters, it's because it affects something that can be measured". So you identify the causal chain from "thing" to "measurable thing", have people who are trained in "calibrated probability assessment" estimate the weights of the effects in the causal chain, then build a mathematical model, and use a Monte Carlo simulation to work out how inputs to the system affect the outputs.

Of course it's not perfect, since estimation is always touchy, even using the calibration stuff. And you could still commit an error like leaving an important variable out of the model completely, or sampling from the wrong distribution when doing your simulation. But generally speaking, done with care, this is a way to measure the "unmeasurable" with a level of rigor that's better than just flat out guessing, or ignoring the issue altogether.

[1]: https://www.amazon.com/How-Measure-Anything-Intangibles-Busi...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calibrated_probability_assessm...

That said:

"All models are wrong, but some are useful"

Well, you need to hire some statistical experts, who model everything and than give you an estimate and if they got the callibration right, the result might be even close to reality.

Definitely easier than the other solution. Like talk to your employees once in a while and have a culture where they are not afraid to speak up if something is bothering them.

Ah no, too complicated. Back to math. That works better when dealing with those irrational emotional humans.

The writing style makes it hard to read (almost like an academic research paper) it's tough to keep urself interested. However the learnings are substantial too.

It raises some concerns that folks in this forum are probably interested in and could do something about. Things like forcing US companies doing business in China to transfer dual-use technologies, the lack of US suppliers for certain goods, like high tenacity polyester fiber, domestic production of PCBs, specialized glass for NVG systems, a shortage of software engineers, but also shortages in skilled trades, like welders.

The dominance of the Chinese in certain critical industries is also problematic. For example one manufacturer produces 70% of small drones, which then creates secondary attack surfaces, like lack of security on the drone’s link. Another is the Chinese takeover of solar panel manufacturing, which creates a potential energy security risk.

For those skeptical of any report from the current administration, I would refer you to Ash Carter’s Inside the Five-Sided Box (2) which raises many of the same issues.

(1) https://media.defense.gov/2018/Oct/05/2002048904/-1/-1/1/ASS...

(2) https://www.amazon.com/Inside-Five-Sided-Box-Lifetime-Leader...

I do hope we return to being #1, though that becomes less likely every day.

It also talks a lot about very early Internet history, and gives the history of many things which I have not seen others reference, like Lee Felsenstein and Community Memory.

I suspect the book might not be well-known because it author, Jacques Vallée, it mostly known for being a ufologist. I did not know this until after I read the book, though, and the book itself does not contain any references to UFOs. I can wholeheartedly recommend the book, and it’s free to read online!¹

Later books in the same vein like Hackers and Dealers of Lightning are more well-known and seem to be appreciated by many, but this book seems to have been overlooked by most people.

1. https://books.google.com/books?id=6f8VqnZaPQwC&pg=PS1

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos

Post apocalyptic novel written in a made up language (think Clockwork Orange).

Poetic and deeply moving account of a boy's journey through a world where scientific knowledge has devolved to primitive ritual and incantation; and his dawning realisation that we lost everything.

I've never read anything else like it.

https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riddley_Walker

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/776573.Riddley_Walker

  Woak up. Got dresd. Had brekfast. Spoke wif Ergates
  thi ant who sed itz juss been wurk wurk wurk 4 u
  lately master Bascule, Y dont u ½ a holiday?

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Feersum-Endjinn-Novel-Iain-Banks/dp/0...

Phonetically styled narrative from characters pops up in several Banks novels. I’d argue the The Barbarian’s Scottish dialect in The Bridge was a precursor to Bascule.

There are also smattering’s of fun phonetic speech in the first few Culture novels. Most memorably from Fwi-song the prophet of the Eaters cult.

I had the feeling with Feersum Endjinn Banks decided to go ‘all in’ on the fun phonetics.

In the early 90s I went to a Banks reading (possibly Crow Road or The State of The Art) in Sheffield and during the Q&A he talked with great animation and detail about his new as yet untitled novel, which a few years later turned out to be Feersum Endjinn.

Sorely miss him.

I'd certainly agree with you there. He's variously introduced his readers to Scots, the Doric and the vernacular in his books over many years. Feersum Endjinn was a fun read, especially for me as a Scot who has an interest in the Scots language.

> Sorely miss him.

I do too. I'd met him at various times over the length of his career. Always a bloody nice guy and always self deprecating in a way you knew was very genuine. I always relished him taking the mickey out of his famous neighbour in North Queensferry, Gordon Brown, every now and again.

On my naming day when I come 12 I gone front spear and kilt a wyld boar he parbly ben the las wyld pig on the Bundel Downs any how there hadnt ben none for a long time befor him nor I aint looking to see none agen.

He dint make the groun shake nor nothing like that when he come on to my spear he wernt all that big plus he lookit poorly.

He done the reqwyrt he ternt and stood and clattert his teef and made his rush and there we wer then.

Him on 1 end of the spear kicking his life out and me on the other end watching him dy. I said, "Your tern now my tern later."

Edit: Oh my word! He wrote the text of the children's book "Bread and Jam for Frances" (and, I now learn, a whole series of others with the same character). That's a lovely bit of writing. I had no idea.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2005/feb/05/featuresreview...

I've read it twice and I'd read it again. Many years ago there was a dramatisation of it at the Edinburgh Festival, very powerful.

One bit that sticks in my memory is when Riddley stumbles on the overgrown ruins of what must be the M25 motorway that encircled London. And he cries: "O what we ben wonce! And what we come to now!"

I read this book as a kid, it changed how I view the world and I've never forgotten it's lessons. It shows how the ad world is working hard to persuade you. It convinced me to always question what are represented as facts by ads or the media. A healthy skepticism has served me very well.

Most people never deeply question and Packard is correct that there's an entire industry trying to persuade you. Not just what product to buy but which college to attend or which company to work for and yes even which political candidate to vote. Those very same hidden persuaders, some of the brightest minds in the world, are working on the web still trying to persuade you to click.

The closest way to bring it to HN world is PG's famous essay The Submarine that talks about recurring themes in the media such as 'suits are coming back'. The public relation professionals planting those stories are also hidden persuaders.

http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

[1]: https://www.amazon.com/Electrons-Valence-Development-Theory-...

1. Super Thinking - Lauren McCann and Gabriel Weinberg (DuckDuckGo)

2. Thinking Strategically - Avinash Dixit

https://www.amazon.com/Cloudspotters-Guide-Science-History-C...

I found this book in the Best Books of the Year 2006 round-up by The Economist: https://www.economist.com/books-and-arts/2006/12/07/fighting...

Book review: https://www.economist.com/books-and-arts/2006/05/25/radiantl...

Website: https://cloudappreciationsociety.org/

From the Preface:

Many of the scientific treatises of today are formulated in a half-mystical language, as though to impress the reader with the uncomfortable feeling that he is in the permanent presence of a superman. The present book is conceived in a humble spirit and is written for humble people.

From Chapter 8:

Put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground. -- EXODUS III, 5

We have done considerable mountain climbing. Now we are in the rarefied atmosphere of theories of excessive beauty and we are nearing a high plateau on which geometry, optics, mechanics, and wave mechanics meet on common ground. Only concentrated thinking, and a considerable amount of recreation, will reveal the full beauty of our subject in which the last word has not yet been spoken.

This book was also on Gerald Jay Sussman's must-read list of books [1]. Another great book of his is "Linear Differential Operators" -- if you've ever wanted an intuitive explanation for why d/dx is not Hermitian but d^2/dx^2 is, this is the book you need to read. A quote from the book that resonated with me when I first read it:

Since the days of antiquity it has been the privilege of the mathematician to engrave his conclusions, expressed in a rarefied and esoteric language, upon the rocks of eternity. While this method is excellent for the codification of mathematical results, it is not so acceptable to the many addicts of mathematics, for whom the science of mathematics is not a logical game, but the language in which the physical universe speaks to us, and whose mastery is inevitable for the comprehension of natural phenomena.

[1]: http://aurellem.org/thoughts/html/sussman-reading-list.html

> “I wish HN had some other way of stylizing quotes.”

Me too, also simple ordered lists and ```inline code```.

He's an early 1800s French Catholic monk and is possibly the greatest travel writer of all time. Not only is the trip amazing, but the way he writes about it? Incredible.

In the sequel, the Chinese empire summons him to stand trial for being a Christian, since it was mostly illegal to be so in the empire at the time. It, too, is amazing.

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/32747/32747-h/32747-h.htm

Excerpt, brief review, and link to PDF of the full book here on Derek Lowe's excellent blog In the Pipeline:

https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2010/05/27/ma...

Trollope isn't as well known as Dickens or Austen. I think the emotional intelligence of this book makes up for the fact that nothing much happens.

There's a vicar who is old friends with the Bishop. He's made Warden of an Almshouse for old men in the community. The amount of money he's going to get to do basically nothing is embarrassingly large.

It's an extremely gentle book about controversy, conspiracy, and people taking a moral stand.

It got me hooked on Trollope. His other books are far more intricate, worldly, and entertaining. But I like this short novel very much.

"The History and Social Influence of the Potato" is a pretty good time.

"Politics of Qat: The Role of a Drug in Ruling Yemen" may sound way too niche, but it's fascinating as a study of transportation in a drug economy. Qat is a perishable leaf (like salad) and the politics of the entire region depend on who can more reliably deliver it to gunmen.

In general Pollan references a lot of great work in all of his books. If anyone wants to find some stuff to read his books are a good first stop.

A book I am very fond of that I don't think is widely known (though it's not in the same league as your suggestion) is "Resisting the Virtual Life", a 1995 collection of essays on the theme of cyber-wariness published by Lawrence Ferlinghetti's City Lights imprint - more often associated with poetry.

Also very obscure for a long time, though easily bought now: Mervyn Peake's self-illustrated children's book "Captain Slaughterboard Drops Anchor". From the author of Gormenghast, but frankly much better. Highly recommended.

The book is a thorough explanation of western harmony in its very basic aspects, from first principles. It also includes criticism of other, more famous music theory books, which is very interesting. One thing I love about it is how every theoretical concept comes first from what is perceived (hence "phenomenological"). A brief example of that is how some chords, which look like dominant chords if you look only on their notes, are sometime subdominant chords, because of the context in which they are played.

Some quotes:

On the approach of the book: "The conventional analytic approach as taught in academies is based primarily upon the depiction of the WRITTEN content of a composition by means of symbols and concepts inherent to the accepted analytic code. This analysis however, which describes mainly what is SEEN, does not always succeed in describing what is HEARD - the perceptual musical essence"

His definition of tonality which I loved so much that I had to memorise it: "Tonality constitutes the organisation of a given number of tones in a manner which creates among them differences of kinetic potential."

[1]: http://arielrubinstein.tau.ac.il/articles/FRANKFURTER_ALLGEM...

[2]: http://arielrubinstein.tau.ac.il/books.html

Everyone knows about Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (ZMM). Lila is not as well known, but it's fun to read if you really enjoyed ZMM. https://www.amazon.com/Lila-Inquiry-Robert-M-Pirsig/dp/05532...

https://www.amazon.com/Semiology-Graphics-Diagrams-Networks-...

https://medium.com/@karlsluis/before-tufte-there-was-bertin-...

Interestingly another relatively unknown book I like (and bought/read 20 years ago) is also about harmony:

https://www.amazon.com/Harmonic-Experience-Harmony-Natural-E...

I would say there's two kinds of harmony: harmony in equal temperament, and "alternative" harmonies based on physics, and this is about the latter. I can't tell from the link what the other harmony book is about. What's good about it?

As far as computer books, I've read a lot of recommendations here over the years like "thinking forth", "Computer Lib" by Ted Nelson, etc. They are well known to some audiences but not others.

----

I also enjoy reading what people though the computing future would be like. I have "Superdistribution" by Brad Cox:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21833331

And "Mirror Worlds" by Gelertner:

https://www.amazon.com/Mirror-Worlds-Software-Universe-Shoeb...

I'm pretty sure Gelertner claims that the Facebook feed is identical to his "life streams". I guess taken literally it's hard not to see the current Internet as a "mirror world" that's becoming the real world.

Unfortunately GGIP is expensive so I would try to find it at your local library. (French copies are online).

As for a Sadai's book: it is an extremely thorough book about western harmony from first principles. It treats what is perceived - what we hear - as the anchor, and not what we see when we analyse the notes on paper. A good example of that is how we decide to give names to chords. We tend to name chords based on the notes in them, but this can sometime lead to misunderstandings because the context and how those notes are spread through the chord are also very important. Basics like which note is in the bass is taken into consideration, but otherwise these factors are often ignored. Sadai shows many examples for that throughout the book - as well as such "Mistakes" in other famous books. A quote from the book about the approach taken: "The conventional analytic approach as taught in academies is based primarily upon the depiction of the WRITTEN content of a composition by means of symbols and concepts inherent to the accepted analytic code. This analysis however, which describes mainly what is SEEN, does not always succeed in describing what is HEARD - the perceptual musical essence".

This prompts me to propose (although it's not obscure) "Artificial Intelligence: The Very Idea" by John Haugeland. It's an AI textbook that is extremely readable and inviting - the best I've seen as a purely readable text, though probably far too basic for most readers here - but that is entirely drawn from the realm of "good old-fashioned AI", i.e. things like logic systems that have very little in common with what is understood as practical AI nowadays. Combine the readability of the book with the apparent hopelessness of its premise, and you have a perfectly nostalgic experience.

Jacques Ellul, Propaganda https://archive.org/details/Propaganda_201512

Thomas Ligotti The Conspiracy Against The Human Race https://archive.org/details/TheConspiracyAgainstTheHumanRace

and anything written by Peter Wessel Zapffe (an introduction to his work https://philosophynow.org/issues/45/The_Last_Messiah)

An even more obscure writer would be Christopher Evans and especially his novella "Chimeras". This is set in a medieval world in which some people have the Talent, an ability to create dazzling works of art out of thin air - just pure thought-stuff. An act of mental creation which appeals to the computer programmer in me.

Psycho-Cybernetics, A New Way to Get More Living Out of Life (1960) by Dr Maxwell Maltz, MD.

A foundational work in the field of self-image and more generally self-growth. Sort of the missing link between Hill-Carnegie and Covey, it's the first of its kind to shatter the body/mind duality and show facts in hand the power of the whole. A positively enriching read, containing a few invaluable ideas.

If you're a Zen or Stoic like me, you'll find the traces of these roots in there, the lineage of ideas.

This is the article that introduced it to me; I don't know it counts as "unknown" if it has a Guardian story written about it.. https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2011/aug/05/writ...

This is a textbook for behavior change course, but it is 100% practical (project to pass subject is to change some kind of behavior)

Only tested information Science-based. This book can change your life but you wont find it mentioned anywhere

> LOGIC, n. The art of thinking and reasoning in strict accordance with the limitations and incapacities of the human misunderstanding.

> SELF-EVIDENT, adj. Evident to one's self and to nobody else.

[1] http://thedevilsdictionary.com/

I found it completely by accident, picking it up at random off the shelf in my university's library while procrastinating.

The "Aquarium" of the title is the nickname given to GRU headquarters in Moscow by those who work there. "What sort of fish are there swimming there?" asks Suvorov of his boss when he learns about it. "There's only one kind there—piranhas." ─ Wikipedia.

Book: https://archive.org/details/ViktorSuvorovAquariumTheCareerAn...

My "best unknown" in the espionage topic would be Gordon Winter's Inside BOSS[1] which tells of the author's stint in the employ of South African intelligence during the apartheid era.

Sample passage:

> I asked [Intel chief] H. J. van den Bergh how on earth British intelligence could obtain all the names of people who voted Communist in British elections. Surely the vote was secret. H J laughed and said any voter attending a polling station automatically had his name checked on the voters’ roll, which naturally gave his residential address. And when he voted he was given a numbered counterfoil. His voters’ roll number was written on the counterfoil stub which bore the same number.

> ‘It is therefore possible for the voting slip to be related to the counterfoil stub, which then gives the man’s number on the voters’ roll,’ explained Van Den Bergh.

> ‘But all the voting slips are locked in big black metal boxes and locked away after the elections, so how do British intelligence get to them?’

> H. J. van den Bergh shook his head sadly as if he was sorry I was such a simpleton.

> ‘That’s the answer the British authorities will always give if anyone claims that ballot papers are secretly scrutinized. But let me ask you some very simple questions. First, you agree that the voting slips are placed in boxes and then filed away in some official building somewhere?’

> ‘Yes,’ I answered.

> ‘And presumably those boxes are placed in a room?’

> ‘Yes.’

> ‘Does that room have a door?’

> ‘Yes, I suppose so.’

> ‘Does the door have a lock?’

> ‘I should imagine so.’

> ‘Is there a key to that lock?’

> ‘Yes, there must be.’

> ‘Then,’ said H. J. van den Bergh triumphantly, ‘somebody must look after the key.’

> Only then did I realize what he was getting at.

1: https://archive.org/details/INSIDEBOSS/page/n5

It's an NLP book unlike any other. It presents 12 (if I recall correctly) patterns of speech that are highly effective at changing people's perception of something. It's just super practical and really helped me out when I read it close to a decade ago. Never heard anyone else bring mention it.

I read all his other books (those that were translated) after it.

> After the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, Yoshimura's nonfiction chronicle of three previous tsunamis on the coast of Sanriku, Sanriku Kaigan Otsunami received an influx of orders, requiring a reprint of 150,000 copies. Yoshimura's wife and author in her own right, Setsuko Tsumura donated the royalties from the book to the village of Tanohata, which was heavily impacted by the tsunami. Tanohata was a favorite place of Yoshimura's to visit and inspired him to begin research on the historical tsunamis of the area.

Thank you for the recommendation.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akira_Yoshimura

And unusual combination of start up story and Holocaust survivor story.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0805241280/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_8V...

Only a few hundred people have rated it on GoodReads, but if you wanted to trace a march of technological progress from swords to the Internet, it does a good job. There are definitely other stories you could tell about this accelerating sweep of technological change, but this one was a solid rapid overview and really stuck some ideas with me about how changes compound (or completely swerve to a new goal) over time.

The original tweet is more about how domain experts would rely on books nobody outside that domain has heard of, so maybe I should be thinking more about textbooks that stuck with me. Sources of Chinese Tradition, the Tractatus, and A Mathematical Theory of Computation all left pretty lasting influences in one way or another.

Sources of Japanese Tradition discusses the origins of Tendai Zen Buddhism, with some bits on Dogen, who once wrote something like, "If you want to achieve a certain thing, you must first become a certain person. After becoming a certain person, you no longer want that certain thing."

That's a pretty good tie in to Kessler's view of the last several hundred years of human progress. We were repeatedly solving some other problem, which once we had the tools to solve that, it became nearly irrelevant compared to what else we could do now.

I thought it was a great concept for a book, and the author has a unique viewpoint and knows his stuff, but it wasn't very well written. There seemed to be a lot of detail without defining terms, but it was also "breezy" and fast. Just my opinion.

It attempts to codify how we should go about measuring and evaluating the somewhat fuzzy concept of "intelligence." He proposes an extension of his "Anytime Intelligence Test" which could be used to test animal and machine intelligence on a level playing field.

Measurement of task capability against a baseline is the most overlooked problem in AI and as far as I am aware Hernandez-Orallo is the only one focusing on it.

Notice that all of the major "breakthrough" moments in AI over the last half century had a human baseline that an AI was competing against. Those baselines were ones that had been already developed over years (sometimes a century) and were part of competitive games already. Go, Chess, DOTA etc... had leaderboards or international rankings.

For fuzzier things like driving, translation, strategy, trading etc... there is no generally accepted and measurable baseline test for what is considered human level, only proxies and unit specific tests. So we continue to not know when an AI system is measurably at or exceeding human level. Without this we can't definitively know how much progress we're making on Human Level Intelligence.

[1]https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/measure-of-all-minds/DC...

Propaganda and Information Warfare in the Twenty-First Century by Scot MacDonald, it's purely academic but also a fantastic read. Also academic is Technoscientific Imaginaries: Conversations, Profiles, and Memoirs by George Marcus, also obscure but at least easier to find.

The 60s-80s books from City Lights are nice when you come across them. Pretty rare though.

A psychoactive book, science-based (YMMV).

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/897536.Neurospeak

- - - -

Gurdjieff's "Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson"

Impossible to categorize, incredibly challenging. Gurdjieff was a genius on the level of Leonardo da Vinci, but where Leonardo studied the outer world, Gurdjieff studied the inner world. This three-volume tome is his effort to encode and transmit his particular school of thought.

Gurdjieff has had a deep and obscure influence on Western culture. For example, in the Monty Python's Flying Circus movie "The Meaning of Life" an abridged description of his philosophy is given in the boardroom scene about the meaning of life, right before Terry Jones asks, "What was that about hats?"

I agree he is brilliant but at the same level as the founder of the Scientology or other cult leaders who became awfully rich

Talking about a good book to read on cults / religion :

https://infidels.org/library/historical/unknown/three_impost...

But now I'm reading "the fourth way" by Peter Ouspensky, the most famous (if we don't count Joseph Stalin) of his students and find it awesome. Very rational, explaining everything in an exciting, easy to grok way. It feels like a book I would recommend to everyone.

An off-kilter, hilarious, inventive, and cutting apocalyptic sci fi novel about pop music. Writing style is like Douglas Adams meets Tom Robbins, through the lens of Top 40 radio and tabloids.

https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781733712569

Deathworld by Harry Harrison. I've been waiting for some screenplay writer to stumble across this one, and if I had to guess James Cameron probably did, but just didn't tell anyone.

SLAN by A. E. van Vogt.

The Witches of Karres by James H. Schmitz.

Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen, and Paratime by H. Beam Piper.

However the best of all, is maybe only slightly less know, since the author is certainly extremely well known: Tuf Voyaging by George R. R. Martin. An absolutely fantastic collection of stories about an ecological engineer.

I found it to be a very interesting and deep take on the philosophical and historical origins of many contemporary political currents.

The Road to Serfdom, by F. Hayek, a liberal economist.

I found it very well written, amusing and even hilarious in how even in the 1940's supporters of communism and progressives where making the same kind of arguments that are made today. Hayek needless to say, deals brilliantly with these. As relevant today as when written. I find its ideas resonate a lot when thinking about how systems of all kind come to be and function.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/27208.The_Third_Policema...

Might be targeted at a teen audience, but I enjoyed it very much, as relaxing, clean, light fiction that makes the reader want to be a better person while they enjoy themselves. Very thoughtful and enjoyable, hard to put down. Shows a hard situation be resolved, from the perspective of the youths involved, and I thought it shows a lot of kind thoughtfulness over many years, by the author. (Some years ago I knew the author's husband.)

Make sure you get one of the older editions with mind drills in it.

A small cult is growing around a woman who claims that the world will end at a specific date and that some will be saved in a specific way. When the date comes and there's neither end of the world nor saving, how will the group react?

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Sweating-Bullets-Notes-Inventing-Powe...

“Reminisces of a Stock Operator” by Edwin Lefevre. Thinly veiled autobiography of Jesse Livermore, a 1920/30’s trader and his experiences, including foreseeing the crash of 1929.

It's a first person narration of some Pleistocene hominid, somewhat educational but mostly just hilarious, in the sense of a Douglas Adams or Terry Pratchett book.

I know 3 or 4 People who read it, they all loved it, but it's virtually unknown.

Book: https://web.archive.org/web/20151123024834/http://www.geenst...

The Snow Geese by William Fiennes....just for the sheer perfection of the prose.

I've posted this repeatedly to these lists, but no one else is as enthused by it.

From the GoodReads page:

"Can the structures that animals build--from the humble burrows of earthworms to towering termite mounds to the Great Barrier Reef--be said to live? However counterintuitive the idea might first seem, physiological ecologist Scott Turner demonstrates in this book that many animals construct and use structures to harness and control the flow of energy from their environment to their own advantage."

Available online: http://www.opalonline.org/

Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opal_Whiteley

[1] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00K4I391A

If you think it’s “obvious” that progressive taxes are better/worse than flat taxes this is an excellent look at the evidence which may make you less confident.

That probably says something interesting about the relationship of flat rate tax systems (as usually proposed) and progressive rate tax systems, although I'm not sure what.

[1] What I mean by "applied serially" is you take you income, and apply the first tax. Your income minus the tax amount becomes the income for the second tax, and so on.

[2] I say "flat rate" rather than simply "flat" because almost no one ever actually proposes a flat tax, which would be the same tax amount regardless of income.

[3] ...which makes it not really a flat rate, but rather a progressive tax with two brackets. I think that every serious "flat" tax proposal I've seen has been this way, so that's what I'm using.

https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691000466/th...

Most people here may have scraped work on decision theory. But Hubbard turns the field into a coherent skillset. Otherwise you're just sitting around talking about decision models instead of using and practicing with them, for everyday living. This is what Hubbard gives you.

"Smart Choices" is a book which may be better known but complements FoDA nicely as an entry-level supplement.

Sounds interesting, but I couldn't find this in a quick preliminary search. Do you have a link handy? The only book titled "Foundations of Decision Analysis" I came across was by Howard and Abbas.

Also, not sure if this is related to the Hubbard you refer to or not, but there's a gentleman named Douglas Hubbard who has written some really excellent material in this area. I consider his book How To Measure Anything to be one of the best / most important books I've read, and it's one I recommend to pretty much everybody.

“The Science of The Artificial” by Herbert Simon, a multi-disciplinary treatise on the goals of design by practitioners in the physical sciences (physics, bio. etc), non-physical sciences (math, comp. sci, etc) and humanities (econs., psych., etc).

“The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” by Thomas Kuhn, coined the concept of paradigm shift and used it to revisit the history of science that was previously thought to be cumulative and linear.

I must have mentally parsed the “unknown” used by OP as “not widely known” (to the HN crowd), and if you look at a lot of the contributions, many of the authors are not exactly “unknown” either.

Mordecai Roshwald, Level 7

Alexander Dewdney, The Planiverse

Joseph Heller, God Knows

Alan Lightman, Einstein's Dreams

Non-fiction:

Jane Goodall, In the Shadow of Man

Gian-Carlo Rota, Indiscrete Thoughts

C. S. Lewis, The Discarded Image

Michael E. Brown, How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming

Robert Kegan, In Over Our Heads

Michael Harris, The Atomic Times

I may add guilty pleasures like the Legacy of the Force series, but I don't think this is what people here are looking for.

https://www.turingsquared.com

Did Monetary Forces Cause the Great Depression? - Peter Termin, 1975

Termin is still going strong at MIT. His 1975 book was foundational for challenging Friedman on the cause of the Great Depression. Given what was to come in the 1980s this book quickly became overshadowed and destined for obscurity. However, it still provides an appropriate, timely lens to analyze monetary theory without the abstraction that has engrossed economics as of late.

The Supreme Court in the American System of Government - Robert Jackson, 1955

A series of lectures created for a Harvard lecture series in 1954-55 by Justice Jackson. He suddenly died before being able to deliver them, but they were compiled in a book now out of print. Justice Jackson is widely regarded - across the aisle - as one of the most brilliant legal writers of our time (or perhaps of any time). While this book doesn't set out his entire judicial philosophy, or even do what the title says due to his untimely death, it does lay a valuable conception of the proper role of the SCOTUS within the Republic. Also recommended, to see both his pen and intellect in action, are his opinions in Korematsu v. United States and West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette.

The Opium of the Intellectuals - Aron, 1955

Amazon does a better job of summarizing than I could off the top of my head, so here you go: "Raymond Aron's 1955 masterpiece The Opium of the Intellectuals, is one of the great works of twentieth- century political reflection. Aron shows how noble ideas can slide into the tyranny of "secular religion" and emphasizes how political thought has the profound responsibility of telling the truth about social and political reality-in all its mundane imperfections and tragic complexities."

An incredibly difficult read that is worth trying to get through. Brimming with ideas and not without its own pitfalls. Tells the story of 20th Century intellectual history and thought as well as any could, although in a rather indirect way.

The Protestant Establishment: Aristocracy and Caste in America (Aristocracy & Caste in America) - Baltzell, 1987

I'll let Amazon summarize again: "This classic account of the traditional upper class in America traces its origins, lifestyles, and political and social attitudes from the time of Theodore Roosevelt to that of John F. Kennedy. Sociologist E. Digby Baltzell describes the problems of exclusion and prejudice within the community of white Anglo-Saxon Protestants (or WASPs, an acronym he coined) and predicts with amazing accuracy what will happen when this inbred group is forced to share privilege and power with talented members of minority groups."

My summary would be: what will happen (hypothetically, remember the date of publication) when an ephemeral class (WASPs) suddenly disappear from their previous pedestal of influence? Prescient, widely applicable to other countries with their own quasi-classes, and deeply interesting for those less familiar with the subject.

Accomplished its eponymous goal in a brief 110 pages, many of which are beautiful lithographic sketches.

The book is BS. (I've read it.) There, I said it. It's always "this book is hugely thought provoking" (pointing at you Daniel Gross), and never ever and expansion on why or what insights it actually contains that's interesting. It has mildly interesting sentences that feels deep (mostly because they're confusing). The book has developed into some BS signalling device like Infinite Jest used to be. Everyone has read it, no one understands it. Everyone goes "oh yes, that's such a deep book, nothing has changed my mind like it since sapiens", and then we're all supposed to go silent to independently ponder it's many layered-ness, but in reality that's just what we do because we wouldn't come up anything remotely insightful if pushed into a corner. Frankly, the fact that this book is pushed so much makes me totally reconsider oft-repeated meme that "tech is low virtue signalling" (or low corruption). Clearly not.

(There, rant over. I'm overplaying how mad I actually am, I just feel like we need a few more rants against this book strewn about whenever this book is mentioned. Please, anyone, prove me wrong and a horrific narrow-minded dimwit by writing something more in-depth about what you think it contains and how it's insightful, I would love you infinitely.)

I suppose there are many ways to learn that, but, for me, it was this book. The lesson helped me a lot.

And it’s really short book so I don’t feel so guilty recommending it. Brothers Karamazov is amazing, but recommending it is like giving someone a job.

Does it changes abruptly after the second half? I'll probably never know.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Flash-Grand-Voyage-Ldp-Litterature/...

From '89, somewhat dated now, but still interesting.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/819654.Comfort_Woman

https://www.amazon.com/Maze-Bummer-Parody-Runner-ebook/dp/B0...

that's the kind of work i have in mind. simple and refreshing.

Mikhail Bulgakov

The results were unexpected!

> As soon as I began to study my perception, to look at my own experience, I found that there were different ways of perceiving and that the different ways provided me with different facts. There was a narrow focus which meant seeing life as if from blinkers and with the centre of awareness in my head; and there was a wide focus which meant knowing with the whole of my body, a way of looking which quite altered my perception of whatever I saw. And I found that the narrow focus way was the way of reason. If one was in the habit of arguing about life it was very difficult not to approach sensation with the same concentrated attention and so shut out its width and depth and height. But it was the wide focus way that made me happy.

The book is full of arresting and innovative insights on awareness and perception. For example, the spotlight analogy for "covert attention" is often attributed to Francis Crick writing in 1984[2], but fifty years earlier Milner writes:

> At any moment there exist in the fringes of my thought faint patternings which can be brought to distinction when I look at them. Like a policeman with a flash-light I can throw the bright circle of my awareness where I choose; if any shadow or movement in the dim outer circle of its rays arouses my suspicion, I can make it come into the circle of brightness and show itself for what it is. But the beam of my attention is not of fixed width, I can widen or narrow it as I choose.[3]

On the topic of first person recountings of mental journeys, but from the other side of the analyst's couch, it's also worth mentioning Operators and Things: The inner life of a schizophrenic[4] a powerful first person account of schizophrenic hallucination and ideation which comes across a little more like a novel than an objective account but is fascinating nonetheless.

1: https://www.brainpickings.org/2017/10/11/a-life-of-ones-own-...

2: e.g. "(The analogy was first suggested by Francis Crick, the geneticist.)" - https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/06/how-cons...

3: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=ntg6OE7haSgC&pg=PA77

4: Online at https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/13476 it seems - I read it in paperback in the 80s and only turned that site up with google just now, so ... but the PDF seems to work.

1. Grammatical Man, by Jeremy Campbell (1982)

https://www.worldcat.org/title/grammatical-man-information-e...

My introduction to information theory and its diverse set of interrelated applications and phenomena.

2. Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity, by William Ophuls (1977)

https://www.worldcat.org/title/ecology-and-the-politics-of-s...

Distills the Limits to Growth issue to its essence, and looks at the political implications, with a set of estimates of political developments which have played out closely.

3. An Inquiry to the Nature and Wealth of Nations, by Adam Smith (1776)

https://www.worldcat.org/title/inquiry-into-the-nature-and-c...

The best-known, but least-read, and most mis-read book on this list. Smith isn't perfect and has flaws. But his message is extraordinarily misunderstood and misrepresented. Even where he is wrong, he is instructive.

4. Commercialism and Journalism, by Hamilton Holt (1909)

https://www.worldcat.org/title/commercialism-and-journalism/...

A short but extraordinarily illuminating read on the influence of money and advertising on the press, coming near the beginning of the era of mass media.

5. Unix Power Tools, by Mike Loukides et al (1997)

https://www.worldcat.org/title/unix-power-tools/oclc/2584502...

The book that really got me "over the hump" in understanding the Unix environment and tools. Now somewhat dated, though still highly useful.

6. A Short History of Progress, by Ronald Wright (2004)

https://www.worldcat.org/title/short-history-of-progress/ocl...

An exploration of the story, question, and future, of progress.

7. Entropy and the Economic Process, by Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen (1971)

https://www.worldcat.org/title/entropy-law-and-the-economic-...

A re-thinking of economics taking thermodynamics into account. Famously difficult to read, but well worth the effort.

8. On the Damned Human Race, by Mark Twain (1962)

https://www.worldcat.org/title/mark-twain-on-the-damned-huma...

A darker, angrier, more bitter side of Twain, cracking open the sanitised version those familiar with Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn will know, and giving an insight to the darker side of late 19th and early 20th century America.

9. Energy and Civilization, by Vaclav Smil (2017)

https://www.worldcat.org/title/energy-and-civilization-a-his...

A re-casting of history, not according to spiritual or cultural progress, Great Men, or social dynamics, but the access to and utilisation of energy sources.

10. Resistances to the Adoption of Technological Innovations, by Bernhard J. Stern (1937)

https://archive.org/details/technologicaltre1937unitrich/pag...

A fascinating exploration of the organised opposition to numerous significant technological innovations through the ages, contrary to the conventional story told by mainstream economic and innovation models and stories. Stern's research assistant at the time he was working on this topic went on to become known as a science fiction author, and based one of his first works on this notion: Isaac Asimov.

On the question of compiling such lists: I've recently started keeping a research journal in which I'm trying to capture works of significance that I've read, vaguely inspired by both index-card methods (such as Zettelkasten or POIC) and bullet journals.

The organisation is "BOTI" -- best of the interval.

I will start a two-page spread, dated, of a specific class of entries -- works, videos, authors, ideas, etc. -- and when that closes, start another. Periodically (about every month, for now) I'll select the best of those works for a BOTM list, and at the end of a year, a BOTY list.

Or at least that's the idea.

This may address the question of keeping track of the most significant works (or authors, concepts, ideas, etc.) over time, which otherwise tend to become a bit of a jumble.

The BOTI list and periodic aggregations themselves resemble round-robin databases, or ring or circular buffers or files, though without actually rewriting each specific list. The initial capture levels remain accessible (in the journal) for revisiting, should something prove to have been more significant on subsequent reflection than initially appeared.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stoner_(novel)

My contribution:

Richard Dawkins called Julian Jaynes's 1976 book, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, “either complete rubbish or a work of consummate genius”

It's a science based look at human behaviour. It's not light reading but it's not a textbook either, it's in-between.

This book will remain unknown just by the virtue of it's weight - this is not 'how to feel better by meditating 10 minutes a day' pop psychology pamphlet, this will take some work to get through :)

Lecture I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNnIGh9g6fA

It explains the Ether (EPOLA, Electron-Positron Lattice) and states the many proofs for that, as well as explains many hitherto unexplained physics phenomena such as Mass Inertia, the speed of light c, Gravity and the Pauli Exclusion Principle.

You'd think the concept of "Ether" is debunked but after reading the book you'll be convinced it is real.