1. The Blind Watchmaker - Dawkin's - permanently fixed in my mind how life on earth works.
2. How the Mind Works - Steven Pinker - still among the best, easiest to read and most comprehensive view of cognitive science.
3. Thinking, Fast and Slow - Daniel Kahneman - though a life of clever experiments he discovered many bugs in human cognitive process - so you know what mistakes to look out for in your own mind.
4. I am a Strange Loop - Douglas Hofstadter - deal with the sadness of nothingness after death.
5. Daring Greatly - Brene Brown - how and why to live authentically and not let fear/embarrassment/shame/guilt/etc. get in your way.
6. Getting Things Done - how to get organized so you can make progress toward your goals.

7. Profit!

Apps and games - obviously. Question is what is the interface medium - motion and voice? A mutli-touch remote?

Yes, thank you! The reality is that government is too big AND corporations are too big. Sadly, we need big government - primarily because it's the only gorilla potentially strong enough to stand up to the behemoths of industry - although many would argue that they've essentially merged. The point is If you want small government you need small corporations - it would have to be a process of deescalation - which is incredibly unlikely. Fortunately, the mosters tend to die under their own weight - as do all things that become sufficiently complex.

This is exactly why we need a new third party - of, by and for the thinking people. The moment is somewhat ripe because the majority of the population have never been more disgusted with both sides. A third party would have the benefit of being a new, young, healthy entity to take on the old, sick dying entities. The regular creation of new political entities (like the creation of new companies) would do wonders for the health of our political process.

The single biggest blockade against new political entities is the voting system. The single vote system requires that people play the game of "not throwing away their vote" on "outsider" candidates - which keeps power squarely in the hands of the powerful. The only way out of this mess is to enact ranked choice voting - which enables people to vote their conscience and cover their bases at the same time.

Has anyone else here read and fully understood that book? It's point was that a properly polled and diverse crowd will give more precise answers than any individual expert. The whole point of the exercise is that no individual can know the best course of action - or for example exactly what the positive or negative ramifications of legalization would be. By definition the collective answer may not make sense to the individuals - and that is frequently the nature of wisdom - one who lacks it frequently ignores the one who has it. Just because the voice of the crowd in this instance happens to be a bunch of stoners that doesn't mean we should dismiss it offhand - who's to say what the right answer looks like - maybe legalization is exactly the kind of wallet lubricant our economy needs to get moving again.

Marijuana aside - the debate should not be whether or not to legalize, but how good or bad is this particular mechanism at culling the true wisdom of the crowd. On first blush it seems bad - two criteria from the book are not met: Diversity - you need to have a diverse enough crowd to get all the pieces of the puzzle - whereas this system is undoubtedly limited to the technologically savvy segment of the population; and Incentive - each individual needs to have a real incentive forcing them to make their best possible guess - whereas voting in this system has no consequence.

The book was focused mostly on markets as good predictors - specifically the author was looking at political outcome markets like the Iowa Electoral Market and showing why they tend to predict outcomes better than pundits or exit polls. So what if we rephrased the question in terms of economic or opinion results so that the performance of an idea could be measured in terms of economic growth or some other index like quality of life? Then each idea would be assigned stock - so rather than simply voting you have to invest real dollars in an idea that you think will be successful - and successful ideas in turn yield actual returns.

Any thoughts from the crowd on how to best implement a Good Idea Market?

I thought the idea behind Canonical was to a become a "foundation" for Linux development - take your billion dollars, invest it, use the dividends to fund linux developers and thus better the world. That would obviously require a market that didn't suck, but over a long enough period of time you'd think it would work out (end of the world theories aside). Aren't there lots of non-profit foundations that work that way?