Ask HN: Best books written on “How to think”?
I feel like talking about how to think is going to be a bigger topic of discussion going forward now that we have AI, and dependence on software is really going to the next level — so since I've always gotten such amazing recommendations on HN, I had to ask this here
I have read many these kind of books, and I have found none of them to be helpful. They are just mangling delicious-sounding sentences.
I have found that the most effective way to think is to write your own book, your own expedition of the matter at hand. When you write a sentence/paragraph, you notice how poor/ugly/erroneous your writing is, and then you rewrite it. I love being noticing how wrong I am, because at that point I have learned something. This way, you have iterated and learned the matter, and learnings are not just in your brain with you all the time, but you also have externalized it in writing, and the passing of time shows if it is timeless bulletproof understanding/thinking/learning/whatever.
Thinking is writing and writing is thinking, and thus also we've been pretty intense about the topic for a long time:
https://hn.algolia.com/?q=how+to+write
Just two cents.
from previous thread, a lot of good suggestions.
A succinct book which is a good primer for thinking through things is "Rulebook for Arguments" by Anthony Weston. Quick to get through and understandable.
I really like The Philosopher's Toolkit: A Compendium of Philosophical Concepts and Methods by Baggini & Fosl.
Learning to Learn the coursera course is always recommended
Philosophical Investigations
LLM’s are mechanisms simulating playing language games.