Intellectual superpower books

What books do you feel gave you some sort of intellectual superpower by reading?

e.g. they had some lasting extremely useful effect on how you think about the world.

— David R. MacIver (@DRMacIver) September 9, 2022

Maybe because I am a bookworm, but this is a tweet storm that I decided to make a blog post to better organize my thoughts.

Investigation of truth

The Pleasure of Finding Things Out: The Best Short Works of Richard P. Feynman. Jeffrey Robbins (Editor). This provided confirmation bias on my love of tinkering on things. And messing with people. (As a young adult, I would put pennies in random, difficult to reach places and make people think the old building was haunted.) Really anything by Feynman is good, but this was the first and imo best. The Meaning of It All: Thoughts of a Citizen-Scientist, Six Not-So-Easy Pieces: Einstein’s Relativity, Symmetry, and Space-Time.

How We Believe: Science, Skepticism, and the Search for God. Shermer, Michael.

Work

The Cluetrain Manifesto. Rick Levine, Doc Searls, David Weinberger. This reflects how I see communication with our customers. Tell the truth because they have personal relationships with insiders who will and will talk amongst themselves. This latter is even more important in the time of social media as those conversations will essentially happen in public.

The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. Taleb, Nassim Nicholas. We get blindsided by the unexpected. We need to expect and learn from these rare events.

A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future. Pink, Daniel H. I needed to get beyond the product and working to making the product understandable to laypeople.

Confirming bad behavior

Everything Bad is Good for You. Johnson, Steven. Connected my vices to skills that made me successful in my career.

The Edison Gene: ADHD and the Gift of the Hunter Child. Hartmann, Thom. It felt good to see my behavior as a gift instead of a curse.

The Speed of Dark. Moon, Elizabeth. More behavior validation, but this time regarding autism.

Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking. Cain, Susan.

Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School. Medina, John.

Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions. Ariely, Dan.

Parenting

Little Cub. Dunrea, Olivier. I am definitely Old Bear and my kid Little Cub. Every time I read it, I return to that feeling of being a new parent and how amazing it is.