(Part 3) Top products from r/TrueAskReddit

I love well written science fiction books that have way more to them in terms of political views, predictions about the future, "what would happen if" situations. I generally gravitate towards the genre and all these books are science fiction, but I found them enjoyable and definitely thought provoking to me. I tried to write some descriptions about them but I'm not that great at writing, and also thinking clearly in the morning while lacking sleep.

• Ender's Game Series - Mainly Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, and Children of the Mind. It's just a young adult science fiction series but Orson Scott Card talks about some interesting stuff and the society that he made is detailed and interesting.
  
  
• A Canticle For Leibowitz - I loved the ideas in this book. It probably doesn't have the same impact as it did during the cold war and the threat of nuclear war but it's still interesting. It's written in eras and the main subject the book deals with is the three stages of a civilization. The first one being a period of darkness where people will gravitate towards faith in something that promises good things. The second one being a period where everything is under control and people are focusing on society as a whole, mainly improving it and generally being selfless. The third period is where the growth stops and people are comfortable enough to start worrying about their own issues and happiness which eventually leads back to the dark ages and the cycle repeats. Pretty interesting.
  
  
• Animal Farm - Great book, not much to say since everyone here probably knows at least what it's about. If you haven't read it it's a small book and will take a couple of hours if not less to read.
  
  
• Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep - Great apocalyptic/wasteland -future book about a bounty hunter questioning his motives. A lot of small things in it and a book that makes you think (at least it was for me).
  
  
• Science Fiction: Stories and Contexts - This is a great collection of short science fiction stories, had to get it for a sci-fi college class and I'm slowly reading what we didn't read. It has nice and long sections for stories about Alien Encounters, Artificial Life, Time, Utopias and Dystopias, Disasters and Apocalypses, and Evolutions.
  
  
• 1984 - Great book, a bit boring but terrifying to read and think about what it would actually be like in that society.
  
  Why I added Science Fiction: Stories and Contexts (Amazon reviewer)
  >Masri's collection is a monumental anthology of science fiction stories and novel excerpts that are paired with theory, criticism, and analysis relevant to a given theme found in the stories. There are no other anthologies with the breadth or scope of what Masri accomplishes here, which makes this a very unique and useful addition to any teacher's arsenal.
  
  >Instead of focusing on one of the many historical approaches to science fiction, Masri selects 9-10 stories around particular themes (e.g., Alien Encounters, Artificial Life, Time, Utopias and Dystopias, Disaster and Apocalypses, Evolution) and pairs the stories with three contextual essays by critical theorists, scientists, and scholars (e.g., for the Evolution stories she includes essays by Steven Jay Gould, Marvin Minsky, and Steven Johnson). Additionally, Masri is careful to select stories that are representative of the whole gamut of science fiction and its writers. The collection's author diversity crosses sex, race, and nationality lines.
  
  It really is a great collection, I haven't found any stories I haven't enjoyed at least somewhat yet.
  
  edit: added some details and fixed some grammar

>If we cut public funding to education and other services, we are taking the rug out from underneath future inventors and innovators.

I think you believe that you are presenting facts, but you are not. This is not a 'fact', this is an emotional appeal. You make your decisions based on political rhetoric, not on your understanding of how policies actually affect people in the real world.

If you want to learn how to logically and rationally understand politics, read some economics.

>It is beyond irrational to believe in such a utopian ideal

I'm glad that there are 'rational' people like yourselves who know better than idiot-libertarians like me.

Doesn't it seem strange to you that there are a higher percentage of economists that support freed markets than regular punters? The question is: how are you so sure that you're on the right side? Could this possibly be a function of the Dunning-Kruger Effect?

> Is that because voters are already polarised

Yes. I think a lot of people have this ideal of like, voters carefully evaluating each candidate in every election which is in practice totally insane. The two parties in the US are pretty distinct and party affiliation is a very strong predictor of voting behavior. Unless you have a very particular and unusual set of issues you care about it (only stuff where there's major divisions inside both parties) ticket splitting is totally irrational. Most voters know this, which is why the number of true "independents" is so low (most self described "independents" are reliable partisans who just don't self-identify with the parties for various reasons). Winning elections is mostly about turning out your base and demoralizing the opponent's base and TV ads aren't actually any good at this, since they're targetted towards extremely uninformed voters who probably won't turn out no matter what.

Honestly - through rigor. I would suggest studying logic, some philosophy (this is about the structure of arguments, and deduction in a general sense) and then something applied, like policy analysis or program evaluation. <- those last two are just related to my field so I know about them, plenty of others around.

Some suggested books that could be interesting for you:

Intro to Logic by Tarski

The Practice of Philosophy by Rosenberg

Thank you for Arguing by Heinrichs

Policy Analysis is instructive in that you have to define a problem, define its characteristics, identify the situation it exists in, plot possible solutions (alternatives), and create criteria for selecting the alternative you like most.

Program Evaluation is really just tons of fun and will teach a bunch about how to appraise things. Eval can get pretty muddy into social research but honestly you can skip a lot of that and just learn the principles.

The key to this is that you're either very smart and can learn this stuff through your own brains and force of will, or, more likely, you'll need people to help beat it into you WELCOME TO GRADSCHOOL.

Absolutely. You're probably just concerned about scale. You may think earning 3% is small when investing $1,000 ($30 ROI), but scale that up to say $25,000 and you get an ROI of $750. Still not a great deal of money, but way more than the smaller investment.

The problem becomes getting your foot in the door to earn those higher returns. You could take out a loan and make your bet on the market to build your bankroll (Buying on Margin), but if your first bet goes bust, you could easily be in trouble/debt for a very long time. This is Risk and how much you're willing to take on.


A great book you should read is Reminiscences of a Stock Operator by Edwin Lefevre. It doesn't outline any trading strategies (that are useful today), but gives you a good idea on the philosophy of trading. Good luck to you if you decide to start trading.

1. I think the actions of politicians are determined almost entirely by their desire to get re-elected (or else they would be outcompeted by politicians whose behavior was so determined). Thus I expect that having politicians, especially ones who have already been elected, read anything is unlikely to change their behavior.
   
   
2. What is meant by "literature"? Some economics textbooks are classics in their domain (like Exchange and Production, formerly called University Economics, by Armen Alchian). Or, for one more closely related to politics, I might pick Mancur Olson's The Logic of Collective Action. Perhaps by reading it, politicians could become less susceptible to pressure groups. But that would be merely a hope.
   
   
3. If we're going define "literature" more strictly, then I would recommend The Brothers Karamazov, because that's what I would recommend to everyone. Read it slowly, preferably with a friend or two so you can discuss it. Then read it again. Beautiful stuff.

The most complete explanation of his ideas is probably Das Kapital, but it has a well-deserved reputation for being particularly difficult to get into. A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy also has some good insights into his thoughts while the later Critique of the Gotha Progra has more detail concerning what a communist society might actually look like. If you're looking for a secondary source, Karl Marx's Theory of History is excellent.

/u/KaleHavoc mentions the Piraha, which I'll expand on a little. They're not religious in the sense that they believe in god or the devil or have ritual. They don't have a creation myth, they don't have churches, and they have no worship. They do, however, have superstitions, so to speak, and believe that spirits walk among them.

The curious thing about the spirits though is that it appears to be a group delusion that everyone knows about, but maybe pretends isn't real.

Dan Everett has a very interesting book about them called "Don't Sleep, There are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle." In one story he relates how the village hears a "spirit" calling from the woods over the course of several days. He identifies the source as one of the villagers, but when asked, the villager flat out denies that it was him.

In another story, a large group of villagers claims to see a spirit on the opposite side of the river from where Everett and the villagers are. Everett can't see the spirit, but everyone agrees that it's visible.

The Piraha are also known (or at least, Everett believes) as having one of the world's completely unique languages. The language is missing tenses in the way we think of them, and has no memory generally beyond the lifetime of those currently alive.

I'd really recommend the book. It's quite interesting.

There's a few fictional treatments of this you may be interested in, that explore hypothetical libertarian societies and how they work.

• Welcome to Free America
  
• The Probability Broach
  
• Freehold
  
• Escape from Terra (graphic novel)
  
• The Moon is a Harsh Mistress

If you enjoy reading and history, check out Imbibe. It's basically a history of cocktails in the US along with recipes, etc. even if you have no intention of making the drinks, the history and evolution is really neat.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0399532870?pc_redir=1408718170&robot_redir=1

Read this book, WarDay by Whitley Strieber & James Kunetka. Pretty much an exploration of what you're talking about.

This might be a much smaller scale, but in Gladwell's Tipping Point he explores people he calls "mavens" and "connectors". These are relatively small numbers of people who disproportionately influence the masses even without being assigned powers. Your question reminds me of that book.

I suggest reading this

At some point, I was reading a book about this. Here it is, on Amazon

A book that covers this topic:

The Experts Speak : The Definitive Compendium of Authoritative Misinformation

Juan Pujol Garcia. I can't recommend reading this enough.

I have not confused anything. If you wish to understand why I believe this, I highly suggest reading Paul Farmer's Pathologies of Power. Actually, I suggest you read it regardless, as it is one of the best works of applied anthropology that our discipline has ever produced, and is interesting even to a layperson.

In short, Farmer argues that if we are to discuss human rights and freedoms, we must consider freedom FROM things as well as freedom TO things. Lack of access to food, water, and healthcare, and other barriers to a healthy, productive life are referred to as "unfreedoms", and must be addressed to build a truly free and just society.

Farmer has a brilliant analysis and critique of "human rights" based on his work as a medical anthropologist around the world. An interesting and informative read.

I believe healthcare is a fundamental human right.

>Pathologies of Power uses harrowing stories of life--and death--in extreme situations to interrogate our understanding of human rights. Paul Farmer, a physician and anthropologist with twenty years of experience working in Haiti, Peru, and Russia, argues that promoting the social and economic rights of the world's poor is the most important human rights struggle of our times. With passionate eyewitness accounts from the prisons of Russia and the beleaguered villages of Haiti and Chiapas, this book links the lived experiences of individual victims to a broader analysis of structural violence. Farmer challenges conventional thinking within human rights circles and exposes the relationships between political and economic injustice, on one hand, and the suffering and illness of the powerless, on the other.
>Farmer shows that the same social forces that give rise to epidemic diseases such as HIV and tuberculosis also sculpt risk for human rights violations. He illustrates the ways that racism and gender inequality in the United States are embodied as disease and death. Yet this book is far from a hopeless inventory of abuse. Farmer's disturbing examples are linked to a guarded optimism that new medical and social technologies will develop in tandem with a more informed sense of social justice. Otherwise, he concludes, we will be guilty of managing social inequality rather than addressing structural violence. Farmer's urgent plea to think about human rights in the context of global public health and to consider critical issues of quality and access for the world's poor should be of fundamental concern to a world characterized by the bizarre proximity of surfeit and suffering.

-Amazon.com