Please help me with these omnivore dilemma questions?
if you actually read the book all the answers are in there. I mean you really don't know the answer why he refers to us as Children of corn? If you had read the book or even read an abstract you would know the answer to this as, it is a main theme through the book (and modern industrial agriculture itself). You should be able to easily read the book in 4 days and than do your own work and won't have to resort to this lazy sort of cheating that in the end only cheats you out of learning.
Which top 5 to 10 books have had the biggest influence on your mental models of the world?
Here are TEN of the books that have most shaped my view of the world:The Nature of Technology (W. Brian Arthur) -- Helped me see how technology evolves, and how it has a fractal structure.Breakdown of Will:(George Ainslie) -- Ainslie's model helps me understand why my will is strong when it is, and why it is weak when it is.Guns, Germs and Steel (Jared Diamond) -- gave me a framework for our history back to about 12,000 years ago.Wise Choices, Apt Feelings (Alan Gibbard) -- helped me see how we can and should still engage in our common ethical practices, even if we abandon the notion of objectivity in ethics.Meaning and Relevance (Sperber and Wilson) -- helped me see how much our brains have to do to interpret even the most straightforward-seeming bits of conversation. The Selfish Gene (Richard Dawkins) -- This book is a little dated at this point, and more recent arguments have convinced me that there is some room for group selection and punctuated equilibrium in our evolutionary explanations, but I have to give Dawkins credit for introducing me to the gene's eye view of the world.A People's History of the United States (Howard Zinn) -- This book reinforced for me how much history tends to be written by the victors, and how it almost always pays to understand events from multiple points of view.Thinking Fast and Slow (Daniel Kahneman) -- By the time I read this book, it didn't really change my mental models much, but it stands in for all the books and articles I had read up to that point on the topic. This is a great one-stop-shop for an overview of the cognitive and motivational bias literature.The Difference (Scott Page) -- This book helped me realize the power of diversity for problem solving. Page creates some extremely elegant mental models for thinking about these issues.Philosophical Investigations (Ludwig Wittgenstein) -- Wittgenstein helped me realize that word meaning is determined by USE and not (with the exception of some special cases) by REFERENCE to something with an objective external existence. This has had a profound impact on how I approach difficult philosophical questions, and how I deal with ambiguity and vagueness in conversations.Honorable mentions: Surfaces and Essences (Douglas Hofstadter), The Omnivore's Dilemma (Michael Pollan)