I’ve had a few people ask me to recommend good, intellectual books to read and videos to watch. So I’m making an ongoing list:
Books
- A People’s History of the United States
- Lies my Teacher Told Me,
- Anything by Noam Chomsky (Start with The Essential Noam Chomsky)
- How to Argue and Win Every Time
- How to Win Friends and Influence People
- Letter to a Christian Nation
- Misquoting Jesus
- The Giver
- Siddartha
- Stranger in a Strange Land
- Contact (The book, not the movie.)
- Starship Troopers (The book, not the movie.)
- Night Watch
- The Working Poor
- Confessions of an Economic Hit Man
- The War Prayer
- The Logic of Evil
- A Russian Diary
- The Jungle
- Why
- Anything that teaches you how to speed read
- Anything that helps you understand your personality type
- The Tipping Point
- The Intelligent Investor
- How to Become a Billionaire
- The Millionaire Next Door
Documentaries
Movies
- Fair Game
- Network
- Trade
- Traffic
- Lord of War
- Blood Diamond
- The Men Who Stare at Goats
- Bullworth
- Hotel Rwanda
- The Hunting Party
- Bill Hicks: Revelations
TV Series
Pseudo Intellectual Junk
These will not make you smarter. They will make you feel smarter without nourishing your intellect. Avoid them or approach them with brutal skepticism.)
- Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
- The Celestine Prophecy
- Waking Life
- What the Bleep do we Know?
- The Secret (or any other book/movie promoting the “Law” of Attraction)
- Tuesdays With Morrie
- Anything by Deepak Chopra or Eckhart Tolle
Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Books?
These books are demonized in the Western World (some of them for good reason). As a result, they’re useful to challenge your conventional upbringing by looking at the world from the point of view of your culture’s enemies. Seeing the world from extreme perspectives will help you center your perspective and will help you understand how other people think. If nothing else, if you’re going to make enemies out of people who think differently than you then you may as well at least be informed about what it is they think.
If you enjoyed this post, you’ll also like these:
Knowledge and Learning
- The value of knowledge
- Every grain of knowledge is valuable. Every grain of ignorance is destructive.
- Why you should have high intellectual standards
- We’ve never raised an entire generation of adults ever
- They’re giving away free superpowers on the internet
- The Alphabits analogy (Why it’s bad to be stupid)
- It’s not cool to be stupid
- How to become an expert at anything
- How to read for truth
- 10 ways people get dumber as they get older
How to Think Like a Genius
- 8 steps to becoming a genius
- My quest to find enlightenment
- Your ability to think obligates you to
- Enlightenment through logic
- The map of everything
- My approach to thinking/problem solving
- 10 steps to winning an argument
- How to solve a problem with a team
- Creativity is logic, not magic.
- My two rules about rules
- What is wisdom?
- Wisdom I learned working in IT: Nothing is magical
- Wisdom I learned working in IT: Answers come from questions
- The relationship between sanity, reality, truth, religion, and science
- 11 ways mainstream academic philosophy has come to resemble religion
- And Old Man From Jersey Explains Philosophy (Comic)
- And Old Man From Jersey Explains How To Think (Comic)
My Tweets About Philosophy
The Importance of Public Education
- Education is the silver bullet to the world’s problems
- The value of knowledge
- Every grain of knowledge is valuable. Every grain of ignorance is destructive
- We’ve never raised an entire generation of adults ever
- They’re giving away free superpowers on the internet
- The Alphabits analogy (Why it’s bad to be stupid)
- It’s not cool to be stupid
- Why you should have high intellectual standards
- We have never raised an entire generation of adults, ever
- The rising tide of vagrant intellectuals
Flaws in the Public Education System
- 6 ways universities make people dumber
- The glass ceiling of higher education
- It’s time to stop oppressing the academically disinclined
- We need to do more to help people get the job they’re suited for
- A modest proposal on the moral imperative of teacher accountability
- The quality of our leaders reflects the quality of our higher education system
Improving Public Education
- The entry I submitted to Google’s 10×100 contest
- 1 way to improve college education
- School and work should be fun, and they can be
The Wise Sloth 
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