| Yes. Someone ran some ML algorithm on HN book threads once https://hacker-recommended-books.vercel.app/category/0/all-t... Putting aside books like the Pragmatic Programmer and Lean Startup, big authors in order were Richard Dawkins, Ayn Rand, Yuval Harari, David Foster Wallace, Malcolm Gladwell, Jonathan Haidt, Henry Hazlitt etc. Kind of the typical middle-brow stuff you'd expect some white college educated FAANG L5 to be reading on the weekend at his house in Sunnyvale. Steven Pinker wasn't high up on the list but someone like him would be typical. He has studied the brain and linguistics and visuo-spatial thinking and writes about that (actually I think he's wrong about adaptationism, but anyhow...) Then he writes some Hegelian type books about how human history is a series of progressive steps to our current state, the best of all possible worlds. He's in the same boat as his typical readers - he has some specific technical knowledge, and that plus the weltenschauung of a 67 year old son of a lawyer who got a doctorate at Harvard results in his books. It's living in a bubble. It's good someone like Pinker rejects some irrational views, the problem is when he can't see his own prejudices and irrational views. |