Books that teach you to think

"Nobody Wants to Read Your Shit" -- I learned that I wasn't a bad writer. I just wasn't hooking people in the first sentence. You need to hook someone in the first sentence, get them to the second, and repeat until the end. This goes for every type of content creation and even other things like first impressions in work and dating.

"The Almanack of Naval Ravikant" -- I learned about leverage, the importance of peace over joy, and how to build long-term relationships. I come back to this book every few months and look through my notes even more frequently.

The Philosopher's Toolkit: A Compendium of Philosophical Concepts and Methods by Baggini and Fosl. Mathematical logic, fallacies, etc. written by two famous philosophers. It's a great textbook for undergrads.

Also Statistical Models: Theory and Practice by Freedman. I refer you to Taleb's review: https://www.amazon.com/Statistical-Models-Practice-David-Fre...

"[...] This book is outstanding in the following two aspects: 1) It is of immense clarity, embedding everything in real situations, 2) It uses the real-life situation to critique the statistical model and show you the limit of statistic."

Both cover most of what you need to know to think rigorously using logic and its extension to account for uncertainty, probability.

I can recommend the puzzle books by Raymond Smullyan [0], for example "Satan, Cantor and Infinity". Among others, this contains puzzles about infinities and apparent paradoxes associated with them. Reading is mostly a form of consumption and therefore not really suitable to train your working memory. For this you have to solve mental tasks on your own instead of following the thoughts of others (without implying that this can not be valuable as well). Smullyan's books contain humorous puzzles of increasing difficulty, that are mentally challenging but still fun to read. I learned of them after finding here on HN Smullyan's article "Is God a Taoist?" [1] and wanted to read more from him.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Smullyan

[1] https://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/godTa...

How To Solve It by G. Polya [1,2]

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Solve_It

2. https://archive.org/details/howtosolveitnewa00pl

In my experience, the harder you search for things that can transform you, your thinking, the rarer it is to find them. I might find something impactful, but it's possible no else can relate to that feeling. Sometimes the most unexpected things can change your life. I recently re-watched the movie _Groundhog Day_. I found it pretty amazing the first-time, too. But second time, I thought that there couldn't be a better metaphor for life. I do realize that the writer didn't intend it that way, but it doesn't hurt to draw your own lessons. I found a new value in being kind and trying to seize the day.

Much of impact is dependent on context, and where you're in your life. I have often tried popular recommendations but more often than not, they haven't worked for me. The transformative books have happened to be the weird ones that often don't get talked about. My advice would to read wide variety of interesting stuff. And don't think too much about how to change your thinking. It will happen naturally without effort.

Among the most important books for me was Summa technologiae by Stanislaw Lem, oldie but (still) a goldie:

Despite its age and a number of inaccuracies in specific domains (e.g., mathematics, biology, sociology), the book has lost no momentum in the past years. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summa_Technologiae

I would suggest reading as much great literature as possible. One can learn how to think in many different ways, it doesn't need to be from a manual. Good books invite one to question, to put oneself in the shoes of the protagonists, to imagine what we would do in their situation, and to empathise.

Try Crime and Punishment, or Moby Dick.

Just as important are books that can teach you how to relate to thoughts, AKA proprioception of thought.

Thinking is a hugely important function, but it should not be considered as the only one, nor the most important in every case.

(Someone already posted How to Solve It which would be my first recommendation on this forum.)

The Zhuangzi, probably at least two translations.

The Elements (that is, Euclid's).

Process and Reality has had the most impact on my thinking but it's one of the most unapproachable things I've ever read. Get there eventually.

The awakening of intelligence, J. Krishnamurti The human condition, Andre Malraux On The Road, Jack Kerouack 1984, George Orwell

Read the books, and then look into reviews and explanations of them, or even better - talk about it with someone that you like. Just try to word the things you've been exposed to and experienced and understood.

Thinking in Systems: A Primer by Donella Meadows

If you prefer older books that stood the test of time:

How to Write, Speak and Think More Effectively by Rudolf Flesch.

This is a hard. Books that made me a better thinker have to be the hard ones / ones that made me change. Top two would be

Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, Immanuel Kant. Supposedly more accessible version of Critique of Pure Reason but still very hard and mind-bending for me at least. Not just philosophy was easier after wrestling with this content.

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Tomas Kuhn. Made me self-aware about what scientific thinking actually is.

“Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”

1. The Black Swan 2. Thinking Fast and Slow

The highest leverage is not which books, but who to meet. Find people you can discuss these topics with and that will push you're thinking the most.

For this forum, I'm assuming you are looking for math / science books (otherwise I'd recommend the Talmud, Bible or Quran), I'd recommend Real Analysis by Charles Chapman Pugh or Surely you're joking Mr Feynman (+ Feynman Lectures on Physics)

Six Thinking Hats, by Edward DeBono. The concept is very simple, but this idea of looking at something from different defined perspectives is a useful tool that many seem to lack.

Getting to Yes. Still one of the best books on negotiating. Again, the simple concept of seeing the world from the other side of the negotiating table, IE: thinking like the competition.

The Little Blue Book. A must read for people working in progressive politics. Will help you to think like the other side so you can formulate messaging they will understand.

A computer science degree (and thus any materials on CS), if done well, can be an exercise in thinking / problem solving skill that can serve well beyond traditional STEM careers.

Socratic Logic by Peter Kreeft.

A History of the Civil War, 1861–1865 is a book by James Ford Rhodes written in 1918. It is one of finest examples of plain English writing I have read. How to get your point across unpretentiously.

Textbooks on rhetoric. Aristotle’s book is okay. I also had a book from the 1950s.

They didn’t teach me logic, but taught me how other people think. Or, at least how they act after you communicate to them.

Metapatterns by Tyler Volk - If anyone knows any similar ones that are as (or more) transdisciplinary and unifying please share!

I'm highly interested in what I call maximal 'unifiers', ideas or concepts which co-occur across as many disciplines and phenomena as possible. E.g. fractals, Bejan's constructal law, or structural complexity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structural_complexity_(applied...

While I can't produce the second recommendation at a moment's notice and would have to think, the first one would unquestionably be "Attacking Faulty Reasoning: A Practical Guide to Fallacy-Free Arguments" by T. Edward Damer.

In hindsight, reading the book and fiddling with the examples in my head really has restructured the way I think: improved on how I critically analyze the information I take in and increased my capability for extended logical deduction.

Bhagavad Gita

"Geography of Nowhere" by Kunstler and "Inside the Aquarium: The Making of a Top Soviet Spy" by Suvorov.

Borges short story collections — The Library of Babel can launch you in any number of directions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Library_of_Babel?wprov=sft...

Drawing on the right side of the brain

(Really amazing book, teaches a different way of thinking though the mode of drawing)

"The 5 Elements of Effective Thinking" by Edward B. Burger and Michael Starbird

Try https://fs.blog

Two that I recently completed:

1. "Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire" by Luke Burgis

2. "Four Thousand Weeks: Time and How to Use It" by Oliver Burkeman

and one bonus which definitely made me think: "When Breath Becomes Air" by Paul Kalanithi

"How to Know Every" - Elke Wiss. I read this recently and it was pretty good.

The only 2 (set of) books I ALWAYS recommend: Incerto by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, and Zero to One by Peter Thiel.

Masterful pieces of work. Especially the 2 books in the Incerto book set: The Black Swan and Antifragile.

I read a book called “Thinker Toys” when I was younger. It had some unorthodox methods but I found them useful for “thinking outside the box”. Often times the solution would pop out doing something wild lol.

The Matter with Things, by Iain McGilchrist. To be precise it taught me how to un-think. There are several podcasts with him available on YouTube, to get a first taste.

Maybe not crazy about thinking, but the book 'mindset' from a known stanford prof. helped me massively

IMHO the books with the transcription of the Krishnamurti conferences encourages the practice of thinking in novel ways.

pdfcoffee.com_lend-me-your-ears-pdf-free wonderful work for universal knowledge, learning to hear and learn to speak ...

Practical

* Principles by Ray Dalio - honesty

* Good to Great by Jim Collins - integrity

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Theoretical

* Nicomachean Ethics by Aristotle - Happiness via Utility

* On Liberty by John Stuart Mills - Equity

Beginning of Infinity - David Deutsch Personal Knowledge - Michael Polanyi

Thinking Fast and Slow by Kahneman

Serge Lang, Undergraduate Analysis.

Hackers & Painters by Paul Graham

A Mathematician's Lament by Paul Lockhart.

Confucius and such kind of Old Books.

Any book on logic (and/or logic puzzles) and/or Lisp.

Eric Ries “Lean Startup” has genuine life advice value I think

The real way to help your thinking is writing.

Plato's Republic

Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil

"Ishmael" by Daniel Quinn.

Lateral Thinking by Edward de Bono

Probably Hume's Enquiry, specifically how he discusses causality. Tl;dr anything we have to say about one event causing another event relies on the assumption that the future will be like the past. Also the is-ought problem

Also "Why Most Published Research Findings Are False" by Ioannidis, which just made me more skeptical of people citing studies

I studied logic and philosophy at University, but I don't recommend any texts in that area because empirical studies don't. Studies have shown that taking logic or philosophy courses didn't help students think through situations nearly as well as taking, say, medicine. It turned out that encountering real world examples of good vs bad thinking helped more than being able to name or categorize particular kinds of fallacies after the fact.

I will say, that for my part Earle Stanley Gardner taught me best; to use what I'd term my "systematic imagination" and leave no possibility unconsidered. Useful for invention, but also for coding and algorithm design, of course. He did a pretty good job of cataloging the limits of most human (associative) thinking.

And it's not just me! Crime fiction had a significant influence on academic philosophy last century through such as Wittgenstein; but many others as well. There's a good article detailing that history but I can't find a URL for it just now.

If you aren't sure what "first principles" thinking is, Gardner offers a post-graduate course with interesting examples. I prefer the term "systematic imagination" to "first principles thinking" because some people tend to flip the meaning of the latter phrase on it's head and narrow their thinking to straightforward derivations from a few axioms; as if they were medieval theologians. That's not at all what Elon Musk has in mind when he talks about "first principles thinking." He means, discarding everything except the most basic principles of physics, and not neglecting any possibility that those laws allow. In other words "systematic (exhaustive) imagination."

In the same way, reading Elon's precepts (or mine) doesn't really reform your brain; but going through a lot of examples of how 'twas done right, and done wrong is really helpful. The scientific history of medicine offers plenty of (mostly horrifying) examples.

Histories of technology and technological and engineering blunders can perform the same function nicely, too. Watt saw the blunder that Newcomen had made by repeatedly heating and cooling the same chamber. Crazy inefficient. However Watt later assumed that his small-scale tests of high-pressure steam engines showed that the concept couldn't work. Unconsciously, he seems to have assumed that physics scaled (linearly) even though Galileo had shown it doesn't. Blunder. Since he held the key patent, Watt tragically blocked all development of high-pressure steam engines until his patent expired.

My own thinking has also been much improved through reading many excellent military histories that focused on decisions: because you know (nearly) everyone is really trying to do their best thinking in a war, they aren't usually being merely slovenly; yet amazing blunders happen. Such as the Germans putting their bridging equipment at the back of their columns during the Bastogne offensive in WWII. That works in a desert, but it's the wrong way to get through a forest (Ardennes) with rivers. Once trapped at the back of a narrow forest road, the German portable bridges were useless. They didn't think that one through (didn't deploy their imagination, sufficiently.)

You do not need books to learn how to think. Explore your own thoughts by challenging them. Those that make sense in your own reality go futher and research about them. Expand your awareness by observing the details of the context in question. Talk to people instead of reading. A Book is just a bunch of somebody's ideas trying to sell you what they even don't know if it is true or works. Instead of reading, start writing about your own experience about the world.