I know you said no religious books… but I feel like I have to mention the Gutenberg Bible. Not for the religious aspects itself, but for the impact it had on the world via creating the means and purpose for an average person to gain literacy, and because it then caused the Protestant reformation.
Gotta be the medical journal that had the paper “Hey doc before you slice open that guy over there and wiggle your fingers around inside them, wash your fucking hands!” Or the medical journal that published the paper “Doc eats pens every meal until their piss kills the tiny little demons conspirering against the USA. Calls it penicillin.”
In a similar vein, the scientific journal that described the Haber Process, a chemical process that could be used to synthesize ammonia, which could then be used as a fertilizer to provide nitrogen to crops.
The cheap availability of nitrogen fertilizers was probably the biggest contributer to the “Green Revolution” in the mid 20th century, which massively increased agricultural yeilds. And those massive increases in agricultural yeilds are why, worldwide, hunger has dropped to historically low levels in the last century.
“Hey doc before you slice open that guy over there and wiggle your fingers around inside them, wash your fucking hands!”
It was quite a controversial idea at the time.
The Origin of the Species, of course.
Lord of the Rings
1984
The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx…
Which was supposed to be progressive and utopian…
Then a bunch of Authoritarians came up with a fucked up interpretations of it and gave rise to Stalinism and Maoism and the CCP…
So that lead to the Cold War and the world nearly ended… but humanity is still here thanks to the heroes like Vasily Arkhipov and Stannislav Petrov amonst various others who prevented global nuclear war.
And then the CCP made the One Child Policy and I almost got forcibly aborted by the CCP because of that policy…
I wasn’t supposed to exist. I’m supposed to be an aborted fetus… 💀
Marx is just rolling in his grave
That’s a great example.
Glad you made it.
The Very Hungry Caterpillar
Isaac Newton - Principia Mathematica. For example, so much of our modern world would not be possible without calculus.
Newton himself might disagree, given that he said that he was only able to produce his work because he was “[stood] on the shoulders of giants”.
That could put Euclid’s Elements above Pricipia Mathematica.
Every day we stand on the shoulders of those before us
Euclid’s Elements (13 books)
Evelyn woods speed reading book
I don’t think it helped me in particular because I have always known how to read fast and keep comprehension but it lays out all the variables that go into it, you get out of it what you put into practice basically. Speed reading is the equivalent of 2x speed videos but works much more often in real life.
Here is a quick test to prove to yourself how fast you can go
Dang that exercise is tiring. My vision actually tunneled in just to be able to keep up. Unfortunately i forgot where I stopped lol so I guess retaining what I spped read needs more practice. But yeah quieting the mind to read faster and faster to keep up with that exercise and not scanning the whole word takes more practice for me.
holy shit that’s cool! wowowow I was always blown away by how fast some people can read but I think I get it now, I’m shocked that I think I actually absorbed most of that last bit at 900wpm
Yeah speed reading and visualization, two massively useful underrated skills to improve that can save you loads of time if you do the right things.
For visualization there is what are called memory palaces where you basically create a symbological image or story (series of images) that are so absurd that you just simply remember them in great detail, and you can use each detail to trace back to something else more important, that’s how you get people reciting hundred of didigrs of pi or whatever else, they have just created a system that encrypts digits of pi into a more rapidly accessible format that makes it feel like you are finding information rather than it bubbling up from the depth fo your mind.
The trick there is that it feels slow and tedious and hard at first but the more practice and experience you have with encoding things, the more quickly you can just remember the most insane amount of shiz with little to no effort.
ahhh that’s cool to put a name to it. I know that’s the method they use in Mandarin Blueprint, a system for learning Chinese characters.
neat that it’s an abstract concept that can be applied to other things, do you use it yourself?
Thats actually a perspective thst hadn’t clicked for me until just now, that even learning basic words in kindergarten classes and they have funny images of anthropomorphized letters or whatever else spanning across the room, that’s subtle but powerful memory techniques being ingrained in us.
I think I understand the mechanics and intuition of how it works enough that I could apply the techniques easily enough if I wanted to but I otherwise don’t just go around spending time memorizing random mildly useful things for fun because I have other things I can do with my limited thinky power, I don’t really know how I got decent at this stuff in the first place but it just be how it be I guess, I don’t think I compare skill-wise to anyone that has actually practiced it more seriously but i can defenitely be very flexible with this stuff if I need to be.
Assuming you’re counting their impact throughout history, and not just the contemporary world:
Xenophon’s Cyropaedia
Ptolemy’s Almagest
Al-Khwarizmi’s Al-Jabr
Newton’s PrincipiaWhile unlikely to be #1, I bet there’s at least one computer programming book in the top 100.
The C Programming Language
Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie
Victor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. It’s philosophy developed in a concentration camp, and it’s still as relevant today. "He who has a why to live can bare almost any how.
Strong argument for Hobbes’s Leviathan
I want to say Mein Kampf but I wonder how many people actually read it before Hitler came to power.
On that note, I’ve always wanted to get my hands on a copy just because I want to see what kind of insane ramblings it contains but there’s basically no way to do that without looking like a neo-Nazi. I wonder if there’s scans of it online.
There was a joke in Germany during the war that Mein Kampf was like the Bible. Everyone had a copy but none had read it.
I tried to read it once and couldn’t. If you’re not super into Hitler’s racial grievances and Weimar politics, it’s hard to understand.
So what you’re saying is bro should have used a ghostwriter like with The Art of the Deal.
no ones read that either
