 "Dumbing yourself down" around your peers?
radu_floricica: Been there. But I find I haven't felt that particular need for quite a while. I guess what helped is that in the last year I started to read a lot. I made a "never look at the price" policy when it comes to books, and used amazon to the max. I still have a backlog of 2-3 books, and usually one in the mail (also in a not very developed country, mail takes about a month).I can only guess why it works, or why simply reading HN or articles isn't enough. Reading a book is usually harder, more immersive and, if the author is good, usually feels like a dialog.What books exactly probably depends on yourself. I started with The Black Swan, by Nicholas Nassim Taleb, and it really opened my taste to good books. Richard Dawkins's older books, Marvin Minsky, Hernando de Soto, Jared Diamond, they all deserve to be read in full.I also caught up with some professional books I somehow missed, like The Mythical Man-month or Peopleware, and I found a fascination for cognitive psychology with The Wisdom of Crowds and Predictably Irrational.Yup. Thinking back I no longer wonder why. Each book was a very long conversation with a person smarter then myself. Exactly what I needed.