Oh, the list is pretty good, I've read/recognized a lot of the pieces in it and they're mostly all extremely useful reads. I'm just annoyed by the exceptionally poor job done by the organizer(s), nominators, and judges in encouraging people to use their list.
It strikes me as something that was never intended for outsiders to see / use, in which case what's the point of its existence? Stroking their own egos because they can make a list, and feel important that they've read some / all of them?
Wow - nice list. Many/ most I do not know. If I were in school today I would look for a cognitive science program. It seems like a rich field.
- and your question:
>Do you have any better recommendations? I'm interested in cognitive science, possibly a PhD.
I know you are specifically asking about recommendations of books - and I might be tempted to add works by Teodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch to get some of the more 'Hegelian' approaches to history and consciousness.
Adorno's "Aesthetics" and "the Dialectic of the Enlightenment"
Walter Benjamin's general essays and the "Arcades Project" (a genesis of the idea of the hyperlink)
Bloch's "The Spirit of Utopia"
But is also makes me think about a built-in danger - the implicit warning in this post:
would apply to a field like CogSci to some extent.
Looking back on my college and gradschool years I grazed in different areas: Biology, Comparative Lit, Political Theory and played around with the Apple computers in the little used Rutgers computer lab... But I didnt have the 'wherewithall' to knit these different interests into a curriculum. I had a friend who finished majors in BioChem, English Lit and Art (Sculpting).
In my case I followed my interests in a hermetic way - cognitive science would have been a good platform to do it differently.
The problem with a cross-disciplinary program can be that you come out as a dilettante - able to have good conversation s in a few areas but no depth. I made it through graduate level classes based on difficult and interesting works of literature, philosophy, literary/political theory and math. But in my 40s I realize I know little of depth. And I don't mean this in the Socratic 'i know that I know nothing' way. I am really not an expert in anything at a time in my career where I should be. I am a generalist. A mid-level Linux SysAdmin. Which is by no means the end of the world. But there is a lot unexpressed, a lot undone and if you do not develop the tools to do this when you are young - it is only harder later.
There is a Nietzsche quote that has always haunted me. The opening lines of "On the Use/Misuse of History"
"We do need history, but quite differently from the jaded idlers in the garden of knowledge, however grandly they may look down on our rude and unpicturesque requirements...we need it for life and action, not a convenient way to avoid life and action, or to excuse a selfish life and a cowardly or base activity. We should serve history only so far as it serves life."
Alot of stuff from Nietzsche feels like it was written 'Just For You' but that is how it has been for me. A jaded idler in the garden of knowledge. Eternal student - still catching up on novels bought a decade ago.
Even in computer science - I can really enjoy reading the classics - Kernighan and Ritchie, Knuth, Stevenson, Eric Raymond, etc. But I am not sure if I have ever applied stuff that I have learned to work.
As Nietsche says - "...we need it for life and action, not a convenient way to avoid life and action".
What is the point of reading a book on Lisp if I am likely to never use it? I don't know. I am continually drawn to topics like this but it is all mental activity and no action.
A dilettante.
Which is not to say that many prosper in these programs. People get PhDs in comp lit or anthropology and work in advertising firms.
What drew me to Hacker News is the figure of Paul Graham - his essays and the synthesis of Ars and Techne are teh way it should be...
But the falloff is steep. Be relevant. Or content in a life of 'jaded idling'.
