Ask HN: What are some essays that profoundly changed the way you think

Thank God For the Atom Bomb:

https://www.uio.no/studier/emner/hf/iakh/HIS1300MET/v12/unde...

George Gilder: When Bandwidth Is Free -- Lead to my idea of the BitGrid

https://web.archive.org/web/20000620164302/https://www.wired...

Alaskan Alpine Club -- Offbeat, but interesting. (I can't find the reference, CURSE YOU GOOGLE! but somewhere in this rabbit hole, I found a profound essay that talked about human conversation as an error correcting mechanism, and it changed how I talk with others forever)

https://billstclair.com/doug/alaskanalpineclub.com/index.htm...

Travels with Samantha by Philip Greenspun - showed me storytelling on the web in a way I had never seen it before

https://philip.greenspun.com/samantha/

Keep Your Identity Small (1)

This essay has saved me from wasting away so much time in general.

(1) https://paulgraham.com/identity.html

The Neuroscience of Despair: The trouble with seeing depression solely as a brain malfunction

https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-neuroscience...

Profit and Loss by Mises made me realize that the reason the free market works is akin to natural selection. It's not even the main point of the essay. Anyway it's great and a short read, also free

https://mises.org/library/book/profit-and-loss

“There are three musts that hold us back: I must do well. You must treat me well. And the world must be easy.” —Albert Ellis

In praise of idleness [0] - Bertrand Russell

[0] - http://www.eoos.dds.nl/texts/russel_inpraiseofidleness.pdf

You and Your Research by Richard Hamming

https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html

All of DFW’s are life changing, but you have to remember that it’s just one perspective despite it seeming so right. Big Red Son and Shipping Out are some of the more humorous: https://www.openculture.com/2012/02/23_free_essays_stories_b...

Two Views of the Mississippi by Mark Twain. In a career defined by the pursuit of knowledge it’s good to mull on how knowledge dissolves beauty.

Fiasco: The Anglo-Franco-Soviet Alliance That Never Was and the Unpublished British White Paper, 1939–1940

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/07075332.2018.1...

Not changed my mind (on what? "The holocaust is bad"?) but Night (and its sequel Day; I haven't read Dawn, which comes in the middle, yet) by Elie Wiesel. Horrifying, but important. Note that it's semi-fictionalized.

On truly changing the way I thought of something, I'd say some of Cory Doctorow's writing on Pluralistic, namely on if enshittification was a necessary consequence of the SEO spammers or a conscious choice by Google to increase.

Finally, Lies My Teacher Told Me. It's about how textbooks (in the US at least) misrepresent history, and how many of them still teach things effectively from the 50s. It's great. If you struggle with context and/or comprehending it (it's written fairly academically), he has a young readers edition (actually I'd recommend it anyway; it's good and young readers editions often provide more context than the 'adult' versions)

The Last Man by Francis Fukuyama. The end of history started as an essay and became a book, but the last man is a couple chapters at the end of that book. It talks about how people (I think mostly men) find purpose in an era where every frontier has been explored and closed

The Great Myths 7: “Hitler’s Pope”?

https://historyforatheists.com/2019/05/the-great-myths-7-hit...