since everybody's doing it

I may as well jump off a cliff too. I don't say that every book or author here is great reading or should be regarded as great thinkers, but they are things I've read and feel some influence from.

1) Allegory of the Cave/Apologia - Plato. This got me started on philosophy. I would not say that I find Plato very enlightening now, relative to even some of his contemporaries, but one has to start somewhere. Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics or the Confucian Doctrine of the Mean is probably far more influential on my thinking now.

2) On Liberty - Mill. This shows up everywhere in my thinking, from utilitarian morals to my absolutism over free speech and the free exchange of ideas.

3) The Art of War - Sun Tzu. Obviously. I gleaned a lot of IR thinking here. His understanding of the dangers of war as well as its importance to the safety and existence of the state is incredibly forward looking (consider Plato's explanation of soldiering as a contemporary vision).

4) The Prince - Machiavelli. I read this before Sun Tzu. It is a broader investigation of internal politics and the methods used, sometimes still, by political figures to manipulate each other and the public. If nothing else, starting from the assumption that someone is trying to manipulate you is probably safer than trusting that they have good judgments and share your own starting worldview. Between this and hip-hop (and teenage/young adult encounters with police on trivial things like traffic stops as well as false accusations made on less trivial things made from hurried and inappropriate assumptions of my character), it's very hard for me to trust what an authority figure says is necessary without a proper explanation, and even then I'm liable to find a flaw or a loophole. More importantly it gives me pause when trusting their version of events as though it must be the facts of the case.

5) Essays - Montaigne. I'm still trying to hold these meditations up as an ideal for how I should engage in fields like education or intellectual debates. I find it difficult at times.

6) Road to Serfdom/Capitalism and Freedom - This was my first real economic kick. I've since read more powerful things from Hayek, but nothing with the same sort of simple and elegant reasoning in it (local knowledge over centralisation).

7) On the Theory of Moral Sentiments/The Wealth of Nations - Adam Smith. If I could have a better role model for the twin interests in ethics and economics, I'm not sure who it is.

8) Critique of Pure Reason - Kant. Somebody has to keep me on my toes.

9) Freakonomics - Levitt/Dubner. This was an eye-opening way to look at the world, but in many cases, it was a study on some of the meditations I'd already done in far more depth. Outliers and Tipping Point (Gladwell) would be other modern examples of this sort of experience, looking for what the incentives or hidden (unspoken anyway) explanations of complex phenomenon are.

10) Prospects of an Industrial Civilization - Russell. This isn't his best work (Principia Mathematica if I could follow along with rigorous mathematical logic without becoming bored.). But I found more in common with his complaints over the lifestyle demanded by a capitalistic society (for example the hours worked relative to leisure hours or the number of competitive things that are, effectively, the same products with a different label on them, such as cars or fast food hamburgers) or in particular the nature of how things are administered from a top-down perspective here than with say, raw Marxism. I think the complaint over too many same competitive products is yet another top-down type criticism itself now, but it's one I make myself in my moments of elitism. Proposed Roads to Freedom is a good summary of some of the views in this treatise, but it I think contains fewer practical observations that have since been borne out in reality in the form of the nature of European politics or the use, or rather abuse, of public education.

11) Civil Disobedience - Thoreau. I haven't had cause to practice this in full, as I'm not an oppressed person really and we didn't manage to lock people up for opposing the Iraq War as in Thoreau's case with Mexico, but as with Mill's absolutism over free speech, this is always potent stuff in my mind. The tricky part is getting people to follow through with the idea that the only place for an honest man in a dishonest society is in prison. Voltaire has much the same point. I gather it is difficult to muster the same level of conviction in one's ideas on a cause of "rightness", but people do manage to do it.


12) I have to throw some fiction on here. Hamlet - Shakespeare. Iliad - Homer. Red Badge of Courage - Crane. Brothers Karamazov - Dosteyevsky. And obviously Heart of Darkness - Conrad. The Iliad and Crane are almost diametric opposites, but basically I think they're telling the same story about the quest for immortality of some sort and the lengths, sometimes ridiculous, that we go forward in pursuit of it, often attaining it only through death. I have no idea why Hamlet isn't always read in high school. Conrad's work is like a subtler (much) version of Poe's short stories, using always my favorite type of person and moral story: grey. Animal Farm or 1984 from Orwell/Blair should also make an appearance here.

I'm also not sure what book or series of them influenced my statistical sports analyst mode, but I'm sure that came from somewhere. I embraced OBP, OPS, and WHIP, and then things like VORP and WARP. But I also recall playing baseball as a child and getting a lot of walks anyway. I was a very boring child it seems. At least apart from the fascination with Calvin and Hobbes and Far Side cartoons.