I’m gonna make a list and hit the library

  • tungah@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Unweaving the Rainbow by Richard Dawkins

    The Demon-Haunted World by Carl Sagan and Ann Driyan

    Read them when I was in my early 20s. Changed the way I see the world.

    • i_am_a_cardboard_box@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I was gonna read the selfish gene by Dawkins, but since it’s probably gonna be such a tough read, do you think your suggestion is a bit easier to digest?

      • tungah@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Definitely. As a total layman in this kind of stuff, I believe I’ve read The Selfish Gene first, but at the time I was so eager to consume as much knowledge as possible in this subject, that I could maybe be misremembering all the effort and research it took for me to understand it. It’s a fascinating book, but more specific.

        Imo, Unweaving the Rainbow has a much broader appeal and is much easier reading. They’re both very different books.

  • 001Guy001@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    Not sure if they all fit entirely but:

    • The Story Of Stuff (Annie Leonard)
    • How The World Works (Noam Chomsky)
    • Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions (Dan Ariely)
    • The Hidden Brain (Shankar Vedantam) / Idiot Brain (Dean Burnett)
    • The Myth Of Choice (Kent Greenfield) / The Paradox Of Choice (Barry Schwartz)
    • The Free Will Delusion: How We Settled For The Illusion Of Morality (James B. Miles)
    • Getting Free: Creating An Association Of Democratic Autonomous Neighborhoods (James Herod)
    • The Best That Money Can’t Buy (Jacque Fresco)
    • No Contest: The Case Against Competition (Alfie Kohn)
    • SighBapanada@lemmy.caOP
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      1 year ago

      I’ve been meaning to start reading some Chomsky & Alfie Kohn! Both very revolutionary writers from the reviews I’ve been checking out

    • MaungaHikoi@lemmy.nz
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      1 year ago

      Predictably Irrational is really good.

      I feel like I read Chomsky’s books at a key point in my life where I didn’t really get all of it but it primed me for later learning. Good list overall 👍🏼

  • cmbabul@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow.

    Completely upended the way I look at how humans have organized ourselves and adjusted them periodically based on changes and advances in our environment and society. Shows that we are capable of taking the advancements we make that are beneficial and ridding ourselves of the negatives that emerge alongside them. Regardless of how big and difficult those shifts may seem

    • lugal@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      It was my 3rd Graeber book after Bullshit Jobs and Debt. Each worth a read!

  • AfricanExpansionist@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    Against the Grain

    Internal Combustion

    Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia

    These all caused me to examine aspects of modern society that we usually just accept blindly

  • TeaHands@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    A Short History of Nearly Everything, by Bill Bryson.

    I loved Bryson’s travel books when I was a teenager, so when this history of science popped up I devoured it just based on author recognition alone.

    Amazing book. No regrets. He’s just as hilarious as always.

    I’d read it on my lunch break at my call centre job, and I remember reading about all these amazing scientific breakthroughs that happened mostly by accident, just because someone basically took an interest in the world around them. And what was I doing? Working in a call centre hassling people to do surveys?

    Long story short the book helped steer me down a different path, one where I’ve learned interesting things and met fantastic people and, yes, generally taken an interest in the world around me.

    It just made me realise what humanity can be, as cheesy as that sounds.

    Of course, being a science book from 2003 I’m sure it’s now incredibly out of date. But I’d recommend it anyway, the author’s awe for the subject is timeless.

  • devnull406@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    The Sun Does Shine - I was a supporter of the death penalty until I read this book. It totally rocked my world and I realized how totally wrong I was. There are evil people in this world, but I am not God and I don’t get to decide who lives and dies. Also, if there is even a small chance that someone was wrongly convicted, we can not kill them - we make ourselves murderers.

    Really this book made me rethink my entire view on systematic racism, the prison system, and the death penalty.

  • PeepinGoodArgs@reddthat.com
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    1 year ago

    Thank You For Arguing.

    Learning about rhetoric and how the truth isn’t necessarily persuasive has been really valuable in the post-truth era.

    • PeepinGoodArgs@reddthat.com
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      1 year ago

      I’ve read Taking the War Out of Our Words and found it really enlightening. It wasn’t a paradigm shift, but it really shows how the way we speak is naturally adversarial and how we can overcome that. It’s especially useful when talking with people you disagree with.

  • phaedrux_pharo@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    A People’s History of The United States, Howard Zinn

    The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus

    A Short History of Decay, E. M. Cioran

    The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are, Alan Watts

    Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault

    The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins

    How Emotions Are Made, Lisa Feldman Barrett

  • hawgietonight@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    When I was about 12, my father brought from the airbase thrift shop two books of the “Tell me why” series. It blew my mind knowing how stuff, iI never paid attention to, worked.

    From then on I knew that there was an explanation for almost everything, it just required looking for the right book :⁠-⁠)

    • JusticeForPorygon@lemmy.sdf.org
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      1 year ago

      This has been my entire life only with Google. People always ask me why I know so much about so many things, but it’s really all just surface level knowledge. There’s an answer for just about every question you can have, so why not find it?

  • Zeram@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter

    • Ocelot@lemmies.world
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      1 year ago

      Reading this (or trying to) is like being on drugs. You go from “What in god’s name is the author smoking?” to some kind of nirvana.