Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed

* Three Body Problem. I've heard of it many times, but never read it. Picked it up a month or two ago, read the whole thing in a few sessions, one of my favourite sci-fi books ever. Will read the next book in the series. * Immune: A Journey into the Mysterious System that Keeps You Alive. Best pop-sci book I've read in a while. Strikes the right balance between including pertinent information without being overwhelming, explaining things in a digestible way without dumbing down, etc. Inspired me to read a proper immunology primer (How the Immune System Works), which was also very good. * How Rights Went Wrong. An excellent, level-headed take on the U.S. conception of rights, and how it leads to zero-sum thinking in supreme court cases. The author is so relentlessly reasonable that it's hard not to buy into his argument. Even though this book is about the U.S., it has lots of case studies where it contrasts with various other countries, which helped me understand my country's (Canada's) court system and system of rights better. Let-downs:…

Read an intro book on biology at university level. I think I read this one, but feel free to grab a newer one: https://www.amazon.com/Zoology-Robert-Dorit/dp/0030305047/re... (https://www.amazon.com/Zoology-Robert-Dorit/dp/0030305047/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=zoology+Dorit+walker&qid=1562059433&s=books&sr=1-1) I used to read books on physics, but I think I learned an order of magnitude more about the world we live in from the above book, and it didn't require more than a high school level understanding of chemistry and biology. I read three more books on various topics in biology afterwards. Otherwise, if you are the sort of person who can stomach a theoretical book, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed is really the kind of book that takes a while to get through, but you start seeing things differently afterwards. It discusses how large organizations can mean well and do evil.

Here are the ones I'd be willing to recommend, in reverse chronological order of when I read them. I read 59 total. Listen to books on tape while working out has maybe doubled my reading rate. Genghis Khan: His Conquests, His Empire, His Legacy - Great book on how the Mongol Empire came to be, who Genghis was, and it put the whole thing in perspective for me in a useful way. The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World from Scratch - What it says on the tin. Actually a good overview how some important technologies interrelate. Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction - How to be wrong less often. Based on the Good Judgement Project results. The Three-Body Problem - Decent enough science fiction but extra interesting because it's science fiction from a different culture. Ignition!: An informal history of liquid rocket propellants - A history of things that go boom. Engaging writing and I learned things about chemistry. The Traitor Baru Cormorant - I'm nominating this for a Hugo. It tells you it's going to stab you in the gut but when it does you don't see it coming. Plus high quality scheming and speculation on economics, society, and empire.…

* Influence by Cialdini - great overview of the psychology of human motivation and influence. You'll get the inside dirt on a lot of sales and marketing tricks. * Seeing like a State by James Scott - a good political history with lots of insight into many conventions in our modern society, such as even last names, were created to make society manageable by a central government. * Europe and the Europeans by Barzini - the closest thing I have found to being a time traveler, skipping between different places and times in Europe from 1920 to the 1970's.

From Ruby Rogues 184 RR "JESSICA: Alright. So, I am going to echo one of Greg’s picks because it was on my list but for a different reason. ‘Seeing like a State’ is an amazing book. And I think it’s drastically changed the way I look at software, not for the same reason as Greg talked about but because it shows why what we do is hard. ‘Seeing like a State’ talks about all the subtleties of human systems and human interactions at the local context level. It talks about all the improvisation that everyone does on a day-to-day basis and how in real human communities, we’re constantly changing the system to adjust to a slightly different reality, to corner cases we hadn’t seen before but now we have. It’s shifting and it’s not well-defined. And suddenly it makes complete sense that the hardest part of software is figuring out what we want to do. That’s it. It’s a great book." http://www.amazon.com/Seeing-like-State-Certain-Condition/dp... (http://www.amazon.com/Seeing-like-State-Certain-Condition/dp/0300078153)