What clicked and made you have a different mindset? How long did it take to start changing and how long was the transformation? Did it last or is it an ongoing back and forth between your old self? I want to know your transformation and success.
Any kind of change, big or small. Anything from weight loss, world view, personality shift, major life change, single change like stopped smoking or drinking soda to starting exercising or going back to school. I want to hear how people’s life were a bit or a lot better through reading and your progress.
TIA 🙏
Two Vonnegut novels—God Bless you Mr. Rosewater and Player Piano—fundamentally shifted the way I view the world.
The novels primarily discuss the economy, automation, and human wellfare. When I was young I defaulted to a laissez-faire economic mindset, and basically assumed automation and technology would always make our quality of lives improve. I was very much in the Ayn Rand club on economic and moral issues. These books were ultimately what made me reflect and consider the other “spiritual” (in the sense Vonnegut uses the term) aspects of human wellfare. Vonnegut was my introduction to humanist thought, and I owe the vast majority of my personal moral development to the influence of these two books.
I hated every particle of Playor Piano when I read it and still do today. Granted my field is automation and I am an engineer.
I am making the world a better place. Freeing humans from degrading filthy boring work. You know what really irked me the most about that novel? The population lived in a freaken utopia and couldn’t say one good thing about it.
I would love to have the lives of those “workers”. Think of what you could do with a life where your job required nothing out of you. Go have 8 kids, learn conversational French, become the world champion at the knife game. They start life on near the top of Maslow’s hierarchy and the author had the gall to heavily handed compare them to chattle slaves. Yeah I am sure people getting sold for sex or getting whipped to harvest cotton all day are really comparable in lifestyle to people who are bored at work.
I spent several years working on manufacturing and logistics automation, and I urge you to reconsider your interpretation of it.
Just from your comment, you totally missed the point of the book. It’s not anti-automation. Your analysis is the exact false binary Vonnegut is interrogating. The book is actually a response to the exact attitude expressed in on your comment.
I’m happy to go into it, but Vonnegut is the master; no one will say it like he does, but you have to be open to it. If you react defensively, you’ll come away thinking he’s just anti technology, and that he must be wrong because technology is good. If you reread it with an open mind, or even reflect upon it again, you might find particularly important insights for the likes of you and me.
Yeah this sounds like religion to me. Believe it is true and you will believe it is true. Also, you didnt address what I wrote, only the argument you think I was making
Discworld - Hogfather. In particular the speech of death about the little and big lies and how justice and mercy are simple human constructs and that in return we are basically responsible for our own happiness/misery. Since they made a movie, here exactly what I meant: Deaths speech
Designing freedom, by Stafford Beer
I’d been a software engineer for 15 years. In that time, in all the jobs I’ve had, I’d never once worked on anything that actually made people’s lives better, nor did I ever hear anyone else in tech ever really dive into any sort of meaningful philosophical interrogation of what digital technology is for and how we should use it. I made a few cool websites or whatever, but surely there’s more we can do with code. Digital technology is so obviously useful, yet we use it mostly to surveil everyone to better serve them ads.
Then i found cybernetics, though the work of Beer and others. It’s that ontological grounding that tech is missing. It’s the path we didn’t take, choosing instead to follow the California ideology of startups and venture capital and so on that’s now hegemonic and indistinguishable from the digital technology itself.
Even beers harshest critic is surely forced to admit that he had a hell of a vision, whereas most modern tech is completely rudderless
Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World was the first dystopia that I ever read. I’d gotten so enamored with all of the various utopias in sci-fi, especially Star Trek, that the idea that the opposite might exist hadn’t previously occurred to me. While it didn’t change me in a day-to-day kind of way, it helped me make sense of the world around me. I have always loved Star Trek, but it never seemed like humanity was truly headed in that direction.
BNW, 1984, and others helped me understand the world around me, which I think made me a better person in the end. Am I going to be a party to the creation of these kinds of worlds, or am I going to try to help move humanity in the other direction?
Not a complete list, but maybe an amusing one —
- A Wrinkle in Time
- Emergence
- Revolt in 2100
- Aristoi
- Stranger in a Strange Land
- Illuminatus!
- The Left Hand of Darkness
- The Book of the Law
- The Journal Entries of Kennet R’yal Shardik
- Gödel, Escher, Bach
- That Which Is Seen, and That Which Is Not Seen
- Le Ton beau de Marot
- Slavery’s Constitution
- Negative Math
- Programming in Haskell
- Good and Real
Cultboy got hella laid, but ended up a junkie though. As an aging dude I’d rather have Bob H’s end times than Al C’s.
Illuminatus is the most potent and interesting paradigm-shifting book I’ve ever read. It’s like an epistemological shotgun blast, guerilla ontology indeed. Anything by R. A. Wilson is advisable, but this one really shakes you loose of your preconceptions and opens the door to new perspectives.
Illuminatus! is the political weirdness of the post-JFK-assassination period; extrapolated into a psychedelic occult fantasy; as interpreted by two white male porno writers; who were on some combination of weed, acid, plastic nude martinis, and coke for most of it.
It is very much a product of a specific time period and social situation.
I’ve probably re-read it more than any other book.
Wilson went on to write some good stuff, and some utter bullshit, and he’s very clear on the fact that he’s not telling you which part is the good stuff and which part is the utter bullshit.
I’ve probably re-read it more than any other book.
I definitely have.
Honestly I don’t think he wrote any utter bullshit, as such. Anything that could be described as such, was basically intended as such, with the explicit purpose of making you a specific kind of confused. In that sense, the bullshit itself was deeply profound, in a sense.
Everything is true, and false, and meaningless. I think really grokking that, which requires the intermingling of nonsensical-sounding profundity with profound-sounding nonsense, underlies an elusive sort of dynamic enlightenment.
But what the fuck do I know?
Meanwhile, it’s the only book I actively hate. I feel like it stole a fantastic name with a story that was too “I’m 14 and I am smart”.
I probably would have loved it when I was 14.
Maybe I read it at age 17 and didn’t much care for it.
I thought the martians were genocidal self-righteous assholes who I hoped the earth would nuke. The whole idea of thinking right meant doing things right and magically didn’t sit with me for a second. You can just look around, all these really dumb animals and plants managing just fine. You don’t need to know hydrodynamics to be a fish. And if magical thinking worked no way evolution wouldn’t have exploited the hell out of it.
Still it was kinda cool to see a novel that merged sci-fi, the Gnostic Gospel of Judas, and Joseph Smith in one setting.
If anyone here liked that book go read the Gospel of Judas and have your mind blown.
How did you like godel Escher Bach? Have it on my bookshelf, intending to read it eventually after my current stack.
