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• 5/5: Will re-read until I die. 97th percentile+
• 4/5: Very impressed. 75th percentile+
• 3/5: Net likeable. 50th percentile.
• 2/5: Only for enthusiasts. 25th percentile.
• 1/5: False, ugly, evil, or vapid. 1st percentile.

5/5: Will re-read until I die. 97th percentile+

"Collected Poems"

Philip Larkin (2004)
★★★★★
reviewed Jul 2014

In one sentence: The apotheosis of perverse contentment or British miserabilism: Housman, if honest about his appetites; Lawrence with a sense of humour; Auden plus even more jazz..

To be read when: ill, heartbroken, very young, quite old, too cynical, too hopeful.

Of the consuming fear of death, sexual frustration, impostor syndrome: Britain.

He was forever overawed by lack of control over his life; we are left with his superlative control of form. Motifs are well-known: the hostile wind heard from the cold attic; the diminishing of strength; the fall of desire without a fall in the desire to desire; the conviction that age is not running out of time, but running out of self. These are not moans: he loves jazz and booze and other things that make death recede. He’s vulgar, and wields it, but never as punchline; what starts “Groping back to bed after a piss” will end with the universe :

The hardness and the brightness and plain far-reaching singleness of that wide stare Is a reminder of the strength and the pain Of being young; that it can’t come again, But is for others undiminished somewhere.

There’s too much in this volume. I mean that as criticism of its editor, not as expression of Larkin’s o’erflowing sublimity. But that too, actually: “Sad Steps”, “Aubade”, “For Sidney Bechet”, “No Road”, and “Continuing to Live” are among my favourites.

By ’72 his bitterness and fear had overcome his kindness, and he dried up, leaving doggerel for mates and nasty biz like “The Old Fools” or “The Card Players”. And yet even after three years of this came “Aubade”.

I avoided the juvenilia, perhaps even out of superstitious respect.

• Galef type:
  Data 3 - that highlight patterns in the world , &
  Style 3 - tickles your aesthetic sense in a way that obliquely makes you a more interesting, generative thinker.

"The Age of Em: Work, Love and Life When Robots Rule the Earth"

Robin Hanson (2016)
★★★★★
reviewed Feb 2017

Believe me that it’s remarkable; it’s easily in the top 5 most insightful books out of the 500 I have reviewed here. I called Superintelligence the most rigorous exploration of the nonreal I had ever read: this beats it by a lot. You will find yourself reading pages on the properties of coolant pipes and be utterly engrossed. It is imaginary sociology, imaginary economics, real fiction.

(But it lacks an ethnography entirely: no em speaks to us themselves.)

People tend to wrap Age of Em in ulterior motives and esoteric intentions, because they love it but see futurism as an unworthy goal for such an achievement. I am no different: this is the greatest compendium of real social science I have ever found.

No review can do much justice, but here’s one particularly hair-raising point in it: Hanson surveys the whole course of human history, and notes the many ways our culture is unprecedented and, in the evolutionary sense, nonadaptive:

we live in the brief but important “dreamtime” when delusions [drive] history. Our descendants will remember our era as the one where the human capacity to sincerely believe crazy non-adaptive things, and act on those beliefs, was dialed to the max. Why is our era so delusory?

1. Our knowledge has been growing so fast, and bringing such radical changes, that many of us see anything as possible, so that nothing can really be labeled delusion.
2. Rich folks like us have larger buffers of wealth to cushion our mistakes; we can live happily and long even while acting on crazy beliefs.
3. We humans evolved to signal various features of ourselves to one another via delusions; we usually think that the various things we do to signal are done for other reasons. For example, we think we pay for docs to help our loved ones get well, rather than to show that we care. We think we do politics because we want to help our nation, rather than to signal our character and loyalty. We are overconfident in our abilities in order to convince others to have confidence in us, and so on. But while our ancestors’ delusions were well adapted to their situations, and so didn’t hurt them much, the same delusions are not nearly as adapted to our rapidly changing world; our signaling induced delusions hurt us more.
4. Humans seem to have evolved to emphasize signaling more in good times than in bad. Since very few physical investments last very long, the main investments one can make in good times that last until bad times are allies and reputation. So we are built to, in good times, spend more time and energy on leisure, medicine, charity, morals, patriotism, and so on. Relative to our ancestors’ world, our whole era is one big very good time.
5. Our minds were built with a near mode designed more for practical concrete reasoning about things up close, and a far mode designed more for presenting a good image to others via our abstract reasoning about things far away. But our minds must now deal with a much larger world where many relevant things are much further away, and abstract reasoning is more useful. So we rely more than did our ancestors on that abstract far mode capability. But since that far mode was tuned more for presenting a good image, it is much more tolerant of good-looking delusions.
6. Tech now enables more exposure to mood-altering drugs and arts, and specialists make them into especially potent “super-stimuli.”... today drugs are cheap, we can hear music all the time, most surfaces are covered by art, and we spend much of our day with stories from TV, video games, etc. And all that art is made by organized groups of specialists far better than the typical ancestral artist.
7. We were built to be influenced by the rhetoric, eloquence, difficulty, drama, and repetition of arguments, not just their logic. Perhaps this once helped us to ally us with high status folks. And we were built to show our ideals via the stories we like, and also to like well-crafted stories. But today we are exposed to arguments and stories by folks far more expert than found in ancestral tribes. Since we are built to be quite awed and persuaded by such displays, our beliefs and ideals are highly influenced by our writers and story-tellers. And these folks in turn tell us what we want to hear, or what their patrons want us to hear, neither of which need have much to do with reality.

These factors combine to make our era the most consistently and consequentially deluded and unadaptive of any era ever. When they remember us, our distant descendants will be shake their heads at the demographic transition, where we each took far less than full advantage of the reproductive opportunities our wealth offered. They will note how we instead spent our wealth to buy products we saw in ads that talked mostly about the sort of folks who buy them. They will lament our obsession with super-stimuli that highjacked our evolved heuristics to give us taste without nutrition. They will note we spent vast sums on things that didn’t actually help on the margin, such as on medicine that didn’t make us healthier, or education that didn’t make us more productive. Our descendants will also remember our adolescent and extreme mating patterns, our extreme gender personalities, and our unprecedentedly fierce warriors. They will be amazed at the strange religious, political, and social beliefs we acted on, and how we preferred a political system, democracy, designed to emphasize the hardly-considered fleeting delusory thoughts of the median voter rather than the considered opinions of our best experts. Perhaps most important, our descendants may remember how history hung by a precarious thread on a few crucial coordination choices that our highly integrated rapidly changing world did or might have allowed us to achieve, and the strange delusions that influenced such choices. These choices might have been about global warming, rampaging robots, nuclear weapons, bioterror, etc. Our delusions may have led us to do something quite wonderful, or quite horrible, that permanently changed the options available to our descendants. This would be the most lasting legacy of this, our explosively growing dream time, when what was once adaptive behavior with mostly harmless delusions become strange and dreamy unadaptive behavior, before adaptation again reasserted a clear-headed relation between behavior and reality. Our dreamtime will be a time of legend, a favorite setting for grand fiction, when low-delusion heroes and the strange rich clowns around them could most plausibly have changed the course of history. Perhaps most dramatic will be tragedies about dreamtime advocates who could foresee and were horrified by the coming slow stable adaptive eons, and tried passionately, but unsuccessfully, to prevent them.

It’s easy to read a radical critique of our liberal values in there, but I believe him when he says that he doesn’t dislike dreamtime; he just predicts it cannot last, because we are fighting an old and inexorable tide.

There are several thoughts this large, and a thousand other small insights in Age of Em.

"The Complete Calvin and Hobbes"

Bill Watterson (2005)
★★★★★
reviewed Sep 2022

Never crossed paths with these two as a child (all my granda had was terrible stuff like Andy Capp, Beau Peep, Heathcliff, The Broons). Doesn’t matter, I love them, they are one of these rare polymorphous artworks that grows with you as you age.

"Tell Me No Lies: Investigative Journalism and Its Triumphs"

John Pilger (2005)
★★★★★
reviewed Mar 2016

• Galef type:
  Theory 1 - models of how a phenomenon works, & Style 3 - tickle your aesthetic sense in a way that obliquely makes you a more interesting, generative thinker.

"Brewer's Rogues, Villains & Eccentrics"

William Donaldson (2002)
★★★★★
reviewed Jan 2016

Addictive horrible hilarious biographies of British folly, banality and sin. A thousand years of tabloid gossip and popular madness, events too ephemeral for most serious historians: degradation, unchecked insanity and petty cruelty. But incredibly funny. The biographies are spaced out by Donaldson’s wonderful little hooks, dry sentences that lead one on a wiki-walk:

*
• ears, bagfuls of drying
*
• universes, privileged to be part of a team working in many
*
• drinking 'brain damage' while composing a speech for Michael Heseltine
*
• coal merchants, remarkable
*
• voluptuous Tartars and tun-bellied Chinese
*
• dog on a diet of cats, feeding one's 12-stone
*
• soft heart and 83 previous convictions, a

He has particular obsessions, and the book is organised around them: the fate of gays throughout British history; criminal priests, eccentric spinster aristocrats, the line of succession of London ganglords from Jonathan Wild onward; politicians doing what they ought not; the odd fates private schoolboys often find themselves in… Obviously this is no demerit in an unsystematic historian. The modern gang biographies attest to his personal acquaintance with the big diamond geezers (which makes him a “silly bollocks”, a foolish gang dilettante). His wit’s mostly very dry, on occasion boiling over into outrage:

Dodd's execution took place at Tyburn on 27 June 1777 and the outcry it occasioned has been recognized by some historians as a key moment in focusing public attention on the brutality of capital punishment. It seems more likely, however, that it was caused less by any broad change in public opinion than by the fact Dodd was of the same class as those protesting his execution. A 15-year-old orphan, John Harris, hanged on the same day for stealing two and half guineas, received no such support, least of all from Dr Johnson... Under the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971, the law was changed to ensure that the production and supply of dangerous drugs should henceforth be in the hands of criminal organisations. Some people have argued that this is not an ideal arrangement.

I made the mistake of trying to read it over one week - so the endless succession of 18th century rapist officers being instantly pardoned and/or their victims being arrested kind of ran together. It is actually the best bog book ever and wants 4 slow months. I understand Britain a lot better now. The author would emphatically deserve an entry of his own in any future edition: astonishing wit, astonishing connections, astonishing potential, with little to show for it but a barrel of laughs and this.

"Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts"

Clive James (2007)
★★★★★
reviewed Jun 2018

I love James because, though he is a literary intellectual through and through, he makes room for the other half of the human mind. He is still an arts supremacist - this personal portrait of the century contains no scientists, and many actors and novelists and politicians, but he is at least aware of the narrowness of this.

Cultural Amnesia is an invitation to the humanities; defence of philosophy and art against politics; an attack on the hypocrisy of the left (Kollontai, Sartre, Brecht, Saramago), on the heartlessness of the right (Junger, Brasillach, Pound, Heidegger); a dark, teeming biography of C20th humanism and its enemies; a reading list for all of us bewildered by the bullshit critical fortresses of serious writing about art and history. James is deeply opinionated, often funny and occasionally heartbreaking.

Of “the relationship between Hitler’s campaign on the eastern front and Richard Burton’s pageboy haircut”. It’s full of faded and non-Anglophone stars (Egon Friedell, Arthur Schnitzler, Marcel Reich-Ranicki, Paz, Urena), villains (Brassilach, Celine, Pound, Sartre, Brecht), pop-defining celebrities (Beatrix Potter, Dick Cavett, Michael Mann) and sad outrage.

It’s also or really an autobiography, a list of the people and one-liners that struck James as he travelled the century. WW2 and the Soviet Empire dominate as the most deadly instances of the theme “how politics invaded art and came close to killing it”.

Other themes: irrational violence, the nonconformist left, collaborators and fellow-travellers, Jewish achievements, the failure of totalitarian simplicity, ‘the American century’, rise and fall of jazz. He falls for clash-of-civilisation talk a bit, but he’s never conservative without a reason. I think what I love about him is that he stands up for boring truths – ‘it takes another power to keep a power in check’, “the law’s imperfections are tokens of its necessity” etc.

For every villain we are given a counter exemplar: Marc Bloch, Sophie Scholl, Jorge Borges…

This is my second read-through in five years; I expect to read it again in another five.

"Psychotic Reactions And Carburetor Dung"

Lester Bangs (2001)
★★★★★
reviewed May 2006

Haven’t read this since I was 16 but it left such a dent in my head and my prose.

"Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think"

Hans Rosling (2018)
★★★★★
reviewed Dec 2018

1. In all low-income countries across the world today, how many girls finish primary school? 2. Where does the majority of the world population live? 3. In the last 20 years, the proportion of the world population living in extreme poverty has… 4. What is the life expectancy of the world today? 5. There are 2 billion children in the world today, aged 0 to 15 years old. How many children will there be in the year 2100, according to the United Nations? 6. The UN predicts that by 2100 the world population will have increased by another 4 billion people. What is the main reason? 7. How did the number of deaths per year from natural disasters change over the last hundred years? ...

Only 10% of people scored better than random guessing on these questions, the most important trends of the last hundred years. How can it be that we are both 1) a rabidly overconfident species and 2) an extremely pessimistic species that generally gets these simple, objective questions very wrong (doing far worse than random)? Sure, we could just be dogmatic nihilists or idiots, but that doesn’t fit that well.

A stunning 15% of humans managed to pick the wrong answer on all twelve questions. That’s almost impossible for a monkey to achieve. It requires systematic misconceptions. The problem here is not the lack of correct knowledge. The problem is the presence of wrong “knowledge”. To score this bad requires a false perception of the world, that make you pick the wrong answer systematically.

Rosling explains it in terms of cognitive biases: we suffer from a dramatic worldview, binarised, conflict-obsessed, and blamey.

People seem to find Development - the completely unprecedented explosion of survival, freedom, and dignity for the larger part of the entire world! - boring. (You could blame the media, but Rosling persuasively argues that they too are an epiphenomenon of our evolved fear and narrowness.)

Your most important challenge in developing a fact-based worldview is to realize that most of your firsthand experiences are from Level 4 [the top 10% of global income]; and that your secondhand experiences are filtered through the mass media, which loves nonrepresentative extraordinary events and shuns normality. When you live on Level 4, everyone on Levels 3, 2, and 1 can look equally poor, and the word poor can lose any specific meaning... Anyone who has looked down from the top of a tall building knows that it is difficult to assess from there the differences in height of the buildings nearer the ground. They all look kind of small... It is natural to miss the distinctions between the people with cars, the people with motorbikes and bicycles, the people with sandals, and the people with no shoes at all.

On the shocking lack of empiricism even in the most important places like medicine and policy:

In the 1960s, the success of the recovery position inspired new public health advice, against most traditional practices, to put babies to sleep on their tummies... Even though the data showed that sudden infant deaths went up, not down, it wasn’t until 1985 that a group of pediatricians in Hong Kong actually suggested that the prone position might be the cause. Even then, doctors in Europe didn’t pay much attention. It took Swedish authorities another seven years to accept their mistake and reverse the policy... With my own hands, over a decade or so, I turned many babies from back to tummy to prevent suffocation and save lives. So did many other doctors and parents throughout Europe and the United States, until the advice was finally reversed, 18 months after the Hong Kong study was published. Thousands of babies died because of a sweeping generalization, including some during the months when the evidence was already available.

Two hundred ninety-two brave young feminists had traveled to Stockholm from across the world to coordinate their struggle to improve women's access to education. But only 8 percent knew that 30-year-old women have spent on average only one year less in school than 30-year-old men.

Bad incentives and noble lies are another reason for the stubborn gloom of intellectuals:

There has been progress in human rights, animal protection, women's education, climate awareness, catastrophe relief, and many other areas where activists raise awareness by saying that things are getting worse.

Relentlessly sensible:

resist blaming any one individual or group of individuals for anything. Because the problem is that when we identify the bad guy, we are done thinking. And it’s almost always more complicated than that. It’s almost always about multiple interacting causes—a system. If you really want to change the world, you have to understand how it actually works and forget about punching anyone in the face.

I’ve been studying Development for years and this still taught me plenty. It should shock you into awareness and hopefully more.

Paying too much attention to the individual visible victim rather than to the numbers can lead us to spend all our resources on a fraction of the problem, and therefore save many fewer lives. This principle applies anywhere we are prioritizing scarce resources. It is hard for people to talk about resources when it comes to saving lives, or prolonging or improving them Doing so is often taken for heartlessness. Yet so long as resources are not infinite—and they never are infinite—it is the most compassionate thing to do to use your brain and work out how to do the most good with what you have.

One of the “five books that represent my worldview”: moral passion, strict empiricism, psychological depth, existential hope. I picked this rather than Enlightenment Now or Rational Optimist or Doing Good Better or Our World In Data or Whole Earth Discipline (out of the contemporary literature of progress) because it also covers heuristics and biases - and so substitutes / complements Kahneman, Taleb, Hanson, and Yudkowsky, without (what people insist on seeing as) their self-superior wonkishness.

Thank you industrialization, thank you steel mill, thank you power station, thank you chemical-processing industry, for giving us the time to read books.

In a sense he stays on the surface - this isn’t the full radical evolutionary account of Elephant in the Brain, instead just noting some bad epistemic practices and gesturing at evolutionary theory. But that said, there’s a “charity is not about helping” bit:

If I check the World Wildlife Fund I can see how, despite declines in some local populations, the total wild populations of tigers, giant pandas, and black rhinos have all increased over the past years. It was worth paying for all those pandas stickers on the doors all around Stockholm. Yet only 6% of the Swedish public knows that their support has had any effect.

But despite all the suffering and error and backfiring efforts he describes, he is trying to make you realise how good things could be:

Could everyone have a fact-based worldview one day? Big change is always difficult to imagine. But it is definitely possible, and I think it will happen, for two simple reasons. First: a fact-based worldview is more useful for navigating life, just like an accurate GPS is more useful for finding your way in the city. Second, and probably more important: a fact-based worldview is more comfortable. It creates less stress and hopelessness than the dramatic worldview, simply because the dramatic one is so negative and terrifying. When we have a fact-based worldview, we can see that the world is not as bad as it seems— and we can see what we have to do to keep making it better.

This, then, is the same message as Sagan, 25 years ago: the emotional gain of reason.

Misc notes

• Binary categories are often unhelpful because they obscure continuum. Rosling ranted against “developed” / “developing” for 20 years. The World Bank has caught on but the UN haven’t.

• He is a better messenger for the cognitive bias alarm, for activists anyway, because of his deep credibility: he mucked in to anti-poverty measures for decades. Some of his anecdotes are chilling.

I could tell you countless stories of the nonsense I saw in Cuba: the local moonshine, a toxic fluorescent concoction brewed inside TV tubes using water, sugar, and babies’ poopy diapers to provide the yeast required for fermentation; the hotels that hadn’t planned for any guests and so had no food, a problem we solved by driving to an old people’s home and eating their leftovers from the standard adult food rations; my Cuban colleague who knew his children would be expelled from university if he sent a Christmas card to his cousin in Miami; the fact that I had to explain my research methods to Fidel Castro personally to get approval. I will restrain myself and just tell you why I was there and what I discovered.

• “I do not believe that fake news is the major culprit for our distorted worldview: we haven’t only just started to get the world wrong, I think we have always gotten it wrong.”

• “In the car industry, cars are recalled when a mistake is discovered. You get a letter from the manufacturer saying, “We would like to recall your vehicle and replace the brakes.” When the facts about the world that you were taught in schools and universities become out of date, you should get a letter too: “Sorry, what we taught you is no longer true. Please return your brain for a free upgrade.” “
  
  
  

"The Hedonistic Imperative"

David Pearce (2015)
★★★★★
reviewed Nov 2010

Atrocious, agonising things are happening to people like you, me and our loved ones right now. The full horror of some sorts of suffering is literally unspeakable and unimaginably dreadful. Under a Darwinian regime of natural reproduction, truly horrible experiences - as well as endemic low-grade malaise - are both commonplace and inevitable. Chapter Two argues the moral case for stopping this nastiness. Since 'ought' implies 'can', however, it must first be established that scrapping unpleasant experience really is a biologically feasible option... from an information-theoretic perspective, what counts is not our absolute location on the pleasure-pain axis, but that we are "informationally sensitive" to fitness-relevant changes in our internal and external environment. Gradients of bliss can suffice both to motivate us and offer a rich network of feedback mechanisms; so alas today do gradients of Darwinian discontent.

On what science is for, on the very most we could aim for.

Late one evening, early one morning, I realised that I was not reading a crank on the internet. I’m not sure what exactly tipped me off: the page was called The Abolition of Suffering; the Naturalisation of Heaven. Maybe the extensive and thoughtful series of responses to objections. Not as late as the heart-stopping Alone Amongst the Zombies. Or the mixture of staggering ambition with modesty:

As hedonic engineering develops into a mature biomedical discipline, the generic modes of paradise we opt for can be genetically pre-coded... The innovative, high-specification bio-heavens beyond will be far richer. We lack the semantic competence to talk about them sensibly. Yet however inelegantly our goal may be accomplished at first, the ultimate strategic objective should be the neurochemical precision-engineering of happiness for every sentient organism on the planet. Sounds flaky? Yes, but then so, originally, has almost every radical reform movement in history (including, of course, the genuinely flaky ones.)

and philosophy with biochemistry. It is difficult to return to what you were studying - mealy-mouthed, apologist, naturalistic-fallacious bioconservative bioethics - after that.

I hadn’t considered wild-animal suffering before, the giant and at-best-ignored horror it is. People are at last starting to work on this, but Pearce was there decades ago. We have a long way to go before people stop making it worse even.

More than {Singer, Ord, LessWrong}, Pearce set me on my way with an ideal ethics, which led quickly to effective altruism and AI safety. I’m not a negative utilitarian like him, but unlike almost everyone else I take that challenge seriously.

I’ve met half a dozen people whose lives he affected this strongly, but the nonacademic setting limits his status.

(The published collection Can Biotechnology Abolish Suffering? is better, newer, covering more ground. I would have called it “The Molecular Biology of Paradise”, a site header used elsewhere. Or “Better Living Through Chemistry”.)

• Galef type: Data 2 - What does it imply about the world, that X could happen?, & Theory 1 - models of how a phenomenon works, & Theory 3 - pointing out a problem, & Theory 4 - making predictions, & Values 1 - an explicit argument about values, & Style 3 - tickles your aesthetic sense in a way that obliquely makes you a more generative thinker.

[Free! here]

"Red Plenty: Inside the Fifties’ Soviet Dream"

Francis Spufford (2010)
★★★★★
reviewed Jun 2023

‘Look, the thing about Leonid Vitalevich is that he argues like that because he believes, he genuinely believes, that it’s argument that settles the issue. He is not scoring political points, or pleasing his friends, or giving shrewd knocks to his enemies. He expects to persuade people. He thinks that scientists are rational beings who respond to logic if you show it to them. Of course, he judges everybody by himself. He makes his mind up according to induction and deduction. Therefore, everyone does.’ ‘An innocent, then?’

according to his daughter... he wrote to every Soviet leader from Stalin to Andropov [telling them they were doing it all wrong]... without making any reference to demand or to markets, Kantorovich had discovered a demand-like logic in the structure of production itself. In his scheme, it was the volume of planned output that was to be maximised, not the customer’s satisfaction, but he had still introduced the idea that the utility of the output to somebody should be the guide to how production was configured.

What is a question mark? An exclamation mark in middle age

Reminder of what a book can be and almost never is. Above mere nonfiction and mere fiction. A deep and moving treatment of one of the most important questions (how can we make everyone happy?) and my current fixation (how can we make people realise the giant romance and supreme moral imperative of technology and work?). A light on the ignored gears that drive the world, the terminally boring made fascinating by the sheer force of understanding and curiosity and taste. A celebration of an unjustly obscure great man, Leonid Kantorovich, and woman, Raissa Berg, and man, Alexander Galich. A moving portrait of a great and terrible man, Nikita Khrushchev. Comically well-researched (he reads Brezhnev’s tailor’s memoirs; he visits the dance hall; “all of the tattoo designs here are authentic, and can be found in Danzig Baldaev et al., Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopedia (Gottingen: Steidl, 2004)”), synthesising a vast literature (and but also a single sampled path taken though its indeterminacies). I care for every character, including the monsters. Real tragedy - for some of them really did mean well.

We begin in the confident rationalism of catch-up-growth in a socialised economy. It’s easy to forget that even the capitalist economists briefly glumly agreed that the reds had the edge in growth:

If he could solve the problems people brought to the institute, it made the world a fraction better. The world was lifting itself up out of darkness and beginning to shine, and mathematics was how he could help. It was his contribution. It was what he could give, according to his abilities. He was lucky enough to live in the only country on the planet where human beings had seized the power to shape events according to reason, instead of letting things happen as they happened to happen, or allowing the old forces of superstition and greed to push people around. Here, and nowhere else, reason was in charge... Seen from that future time, when every commodity the human mind could imagine would flow from the industrial horn of plenty in dizzy abundance, this would seem a scanty, shoddy, cramped moment indeed, choked with shadows, redeemed only by what it caused to be created. Seen from plenty, now would be hard to imagine. It would seem not quite real, an absurd time when, for no apparent reason, human beings went without things easily within the power of humanity to supply, and lives did not flower as it was obvious they could. Now would look like only a faint, dirty, unconvincing edition of the real world, which had not yet been born. And he could hasten the hour, he thought, intoxicated. He gazed up the tram, and saw everything and everybody in it touched by the transformation to come, rippling into new and more generous forms, the number 34 rattlebox to Krestovsky Island becoming a sleek silent ellipse filled with golden light, the women’s clothes all turning to quilted silk, the military uniforms melting into tailored grey and silver: and faces, faces the length of the car, relaxing, losing the worry lines and the hungry looks and all the assorted toothmarks of necessity. He could help to do that. He could help to make it happen, three extra percent at a time... When a market is matching supply with demand, it is the actual movement of the potatoes themselves from place to place, the actual sale of the potatoes at ever-shifting prices, which negotiates a solution, by trial and error. In the computer, the effect of a possible solution can be assessed without the wasteful real-world to-ing and fro-ing; and because the computer works at the speed of flying electrons, rather than the speed of a trundling vegetable truck, it can explore the whole of the mathematical space of possible solutions, and be sure to find the very best solution there is, instead of settling for the good-enough solution that would be all there was time for, in a working day with potatoes to deliver... The theory in their heads was universal in its reach, and their expertise was supposed to be universal too. They were the agents of humanity’s future, which they were to manufacture by being, in the present, experts in human nature. In this sense, even the grimmest of them was, professionally, a people person. They acted as progress-chasers, fixers, censors, seducers, talent-scouts, comedians, therapists, judges, executioners, inspirational speakers, coaches, and even from time to time as politicians of the representative variety, carrying a concern of their constituents to the centre for attention

The Plan:

Gosplan’s annual output of commodity allocations... 11,500 pages in seventy volumes [nearly all computed by hand, recalculated hundreds of times each year]

Spufford does more to make me feel Khruschchev’s coarseness, idealism, and vitality than reading his smuggled memoirs did, and despite S often using the same direct quotes:

They tried to crush us over and over again, but we wouldn’t be crushed. We drove off the Whites. We winkled out the priests, out of the churches and more important out of people’s minds. We got rid of the shopkeepers, thieving bastards, getting their dirty fingers in every deal, making every straight thing crooked. We dragged the farmers into the twentieth century, and that was hard, that was a cruel business and there were some hungry years there, but it had to be done, we had to get the muck off our boots. We realised there were saboteurs and enemies among us, and we caught them, but it drove us mad for a while, and for a while we were seeing enemies and saboteurs everywhere, and hurting people who were brothers, sisters, good friends, honest comrades... at last it was becoming possible to make good on all the promises which they’d fed to people during the hungry years. All well and good, he thought, because we really meant them, we weren’t trying to hoodwink anyone, but there’s a limit to how long you can keep going on that kind of diet. You can’t make soup out of promises. Some comrades seemed to think that fine words and fine ideas were all the world would ever require, that pure enthusiasm would carry humanity forward to happiness: well excuse me, comrades, but aren’t we supposed to be materialists? Aren’t we supposed to be the ones who get along without fairytales? If communism couldn’t give people a better life than capitalism, he personally couldn’t see the point. Khrushchev had taken the advice of experts. He had tried to do the virtuous thing, the anti- Stalinist thing, and it had just made him a mass-murderer again... Fire hoses were used to wash the blood off the ground, and when stains still remained, the square was repaved overnight with a fresh layer of asphalt. The bodies were distributed to five different cemeteries, and buried anonymously, in graves already filled with more peaceful bones. Relatives were never told what had become of the dead. It was as if they had suddenly evaporated... Working for the future made the past tolerable, and therefore the present. But now no one wanted his promises. The hours gaped. There was too much time to think, and no means to lose the thoughts again in action. He couldn’t rid himself of what he thought now. Little by little, in the most undisciplined way, things he had never wanted to remember drifted up from the depths; foul stuff, past hours and minutes it did nobody any good to recall, leaving their proper places in oblivion and rising up into the mind, like muck stirred up from the bottom of a pond to stain the clean water above... So much blood, and only one justification for it. Only one reason it could have been all right to have done such things, and aided their doing: if it had been all prologue, all only the last spasms in the death of the old, cruel world, and the birth of the kind new one. But without the work it was so much harder to believe. Without the work the future had no heft to keep the past at bay. And the world went on the same, so it seemed, unchanged, unredeemed, untransfigured.

Spufford manages this without knowing Russian!

Your mental picture of the Red Army’s advance into Nazi-occupied Europe is not complete if it does not include, alongside the mass rapes and the dromedaries pulling baggage wagons, the sight of Eddie Rosner and his band playing ‘The Chattanooga Choo-Choo’ among the ruins of cities

The crux, the point at which the dream died, and forever:

If they could produce a million tons of steel, they could produce a million tons of anything

(No.)

Throughout this book, it is necessary to remember that, on certain crucial points, most people in the Soviet Union will have known less about its history than does an averagely-informed Westerner in the twenty-first century Where the United States (for example) was a society ruled by lawyers, with a deep well of campus idealism among literature professors and sociologists, the Soviet Union was a society ruled by engineers, with a well of idealism among mathematicians and physicists. Law, economics, history were sterile, insignificant fiefdoms, ruled by ‘little Stalins’, pint-sized intellectual stand-ins for the great mind in the Kremlin. After Stalin’s death, these subjects had to be revived by incomers from engineering and the pure sciences – who brought with them the engineers’ faith in the solvability of problems, and the scientists’ uncompromising delight in pure pattern.

The deep inequality of the state which sacrificed all values except growth and equality:

life was pretty good up at the top, with a salary twenty times, thirty times the wages on the shopfloor, as steep a relative reward as the spoils of any capitalist executive. There’d be a car and a cook and a housekeeper, and a fur coat for Mrs Red Plenty to wear when the frost bit. There’d be a dacha in the country, from whose verandah the favoured citizen could survey the new world growing down below

The reserved car lanes for Party officials is only the most visible division.

One remarkable bit involves the distinction between the original revolutionaries and the professionals (represented by Kosygin and Brezhnev). The sociopaths and mops. The most egregious and tragic goodharting in human history.

It almost looked like Paris. But he had seen Paris. Moreover he worked in film: he saw this city, and he couldn’t help but notice the way its surfaces habitually turned face-outward to be seen, instead of inwards for the comfort of the inhabitants. He recognised the thinness of the scrim, the cutting of corners where the audience would have its attention elsewhere and be content to register a general blur of grandeur. Those doors would be out of focus anyway: who needed to make sure they actually fitted their frames? The skyscrapers blocked out bold volumes of air, the walls of the city were receding planes, leading the eye back to a sky painted on glass. Moscow was a set, and like all sets looked more convincing from the middle distance than close up.He had started to brood lately on what was behind it; on what you would find if you peeled back a corner of the painted hardboard... There had supposed to [have been] a space preserved inside the Party for experiment and policymaking, but the police methods used on the rest of Russian society crept inexorably inward. The space for safe talk shrank with the list of candidates to succeed Lenin as the embodiment of infallibility, till, with Stalin’s victory over the last of his rivals, it closed altogether, and the apparatus of votes, committee reports and ‘discussion journals’ became purely ceremonious, a kind of fetish of a departed civilisation... They were social scientists who thought principle required them to behave like gangsters. But their successors – the vydvizhentsy who refilled the Central Committee in the thirties – were not the most selfless people in Soviet society, or the most principled, or the most scrupulous. They were the most ambitious, the most domineering, the most manipulative, the most greedy, the most sycophantic; people whose adherence to Bolshevik ideas was inseparable from the power that came with them... Stalin had been a gangster who really believed he was a social scientist. Khrushchev was a gangster who hoped he was a social scientist. But the moment was drawing irresistibly closer when the idealism would rot away by one more degree, and the Soviet Union would be governed by gangsters who were only pretending to be social scientists.

On top of everything else it is, it is one of the great works of scientist fiction, an actual depiction of actual thought (though as usual, not the steps of the mathematics).

She had her own professional vision which removed her, in some ways, even further from everyday human sympathies, when she was looking through her science’s eyes. She too was a believer in a world that could be reduced, along one dimension of its existence, to information: only in her case, it was the information of the genes, not the information of the computing circuit, which stood as the pattern of patterns. And once you had seen it, once you had parted the curtains of the visible world and seen that human beings were only temporary expressions of ancient information, dimly seen in tiny glimpses by the light of science’s deductive flashlight, but glimpsed enough to tell that it was vast, and intricate, and slowly changing by indifferent rules of its own as it went on its way into a far future – then all the laws and plans of the self-important present looked like momentary tics and jitters in comparison. A dark message, posted from the past to the future; a dark armada, floating through time. Dark masses, moving in the dark. Dark water. Dark ocean swell... The hard light of creation burns within the fallible flesh; outshines it, outshines the disappointing world, the world of accident and tyranny and unreason; brighter and brighter, glaring stronger and stronger till the short man with square spectacles can no longer be seen, only the blue-white radiance that fills the room. And when the light fades the flesh is gone, the room is empty. Years pass. The Soviet Union falls. The dance of commodities resumes. And the wind in the trees of Akademgorodok says: can it be otherwise? Can it be, can it be, can it ever be otherwise?

See also Crooked Timber.

"Stories of Your Life and Others"

Ted Chiang (2010)
★★★★★
reviewed Mar 2017

In one sentence: Stunning expansion of science fiction to very distant possible worlds and emotionally unusual near ones. Borgesian scifi.

To be read when: annoyed by the sterility of median scifi and the folksy ignorance of median litfic; if disparaging scifi; if you think Black Mirror is deep…

Astoundingly good. The stories are extremely miscellaneous (hard Sumerian mythology, linguistic-physics ethnography, singularitarian tragedy, Arabian Nights fantasy, mechanical-philosophy tragedy, misotheistic tragedy), but bear one heavy theme - that rationalism, materialism is not the enemy of humanism, but is much more able to accommodate us, our highest values, than is romantic supernaturalism.

So he’s an artistically successful Yudkowsky; Chiang’s own presumable nerdiness disappears behind his powerful austere prose, even when characters are expounding the principle of least action or the details of ancient masonry.

‘Story of Your Life’ is so much more interesting, emotionally and scientifically, than the Arrival film it was made into. It is about how alien and repugnant amor fati is, and maybe variational physics.

‘Tower of Babylon’ is rousing minutiae. ‘Hell is the Absence of God’ takes the tired, speculative, stupid themes of the Abrahamic conversation - faith, will, love, persistence, atheism - and wrings out a new chord from them. Ah!

• Galef type:
  Theory 1 - models of how a phenomenon works, &
  Theory 3 - pointing out a problem, &
  Values 2 - thought experiments to reflect on how you feel about something , &
  Style 3 - tickles your aesthetic sense in a way that obliquely makes you a more generative thinker .

"Hitler's Uranium Club: The Secret Recordings at Farm Hall"

Jeremy Bernstein (2000)
★★★★★
reviewed Jun 2017

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There are few, if any, other instances in recorded history where we have the conversations of leading figures as they complete one era, come to terms with it, and prepare their strategy for the next. It is as though these men were lifted out of history at a crucial turning point—from the age of conventional weapons to the nuclear era — placed within a timeless container and told to discuss their past and future as the recorders roll.

• Jeremy Bernstein

Astonishingly dramatic; also as pure as primary sources get. These reports were the result of months of secret eavesdropping on the German nuclear scientists, including after they hear of Hiroshima. Innocent of the microphones, the men concede their ignorance without ego, their character without any obfuscating propriety. (There are still two impurities: their words are both transcribed and translated by strangers. The physicists speak to us here in full sentences, with little of the fragmentariness and repetition of real speech. And it takes someone as highly trained as Bernstein to get us over the technical barrier.) Even so, this is as plain and self-interpreting as history gets. For six months they play madlibs, argue, and run around the garden, while the English and we listen in.

Hahn is a sweetheart and von Laue a droopy hero. The Party functionary Diebner is comic, even though he has most responsibility for the Nazi weapons project. Harteck is the most technically astute by far: he guesses a huge amount correctly, all in the teeth of loud ignorance by his more prestigious peers. von Weizsacker is the slimiest. Heisenberg is just weird: he has a very faint echo of the strange clear-sight-and-moral-vacuum of Eichmann. Enormous intelligence and no sense.

The morality of their wartime actions does not come up very much (except when raised by sweetheart Hahn or von Laue). They are mostly glad of the destruction of the Nazis, and Wirtz is horrified by the scale and singularity of SS murder. But the rest are more self-regarding than pro or anti Nazi. (Again, it is wonderful to read these and actually know they meant it.)

(What about the morality of our reading the reports? I don’t have a clear opinion, but doing so after their deaths seems mostly fair.)

They very often speak about money, Heisenberg in particular. (Not just research funding or aid for their families in Occupied Germany, but dolla dolla bills.) On hearing that Hahn had won a Nobel:

"it says that you are supposed to receive the Nobel Prize for 1944." The excitement that struck the ten detainees at this moment is hard to describe in a few words. Hahn did not believe it at first. In the beginning he turned away all the offers of congratulations. But gradually we broke through, with Heisenberg in the lead, who congratulated him heartily on the 6200 pounds.

As you can see, Bernstein’s editorial voice is a bit strong. But his other qualities are huge and unique: he knew some of the protagonists personally, and worked on nuclear weaponry himself. He is out to get Heisenberg, and overreads a few times. But this is because people (Powers, Frayn to a degree) persist in rose-tinting him: there’s this idea that Heisenberg feigned incompetence at reactor-making as anti-Nazi activism. The transcripts make clear that he’d have made a bomb if he could, not because he is a Nazi or a German but because he was amorally curious, and hungry for primacy. Heisenberg does object to Nazism. But not very strongly.

Bernstein’s conclusion is that the project was pretty much a shambles. They had a two-year head start on the Allies, but failed for several reasons: they had < 1% of the funding of the Manhattan Project, an unbelievably bad administration and communication of data and ideas, and key resources like deuterium kept getting bombed. But Bernstein feels able to go for the jugular:

reading this lecture, I am once again struck by the intellectual thinness of this group. Here are ten German nuclear scientists — nine if one does not count von Laue — who are supposed to be the cream of the crop, the intellectual elite, of German nuclear physics, men who had been working on these questions for several years. And look at the discussion it produced. To see what I have in mind, let us entertain the following fantasy. Suppose the tables had been turned and ten of the best Allied scientists had been interned in Göttingen when a hypothetical German atomic bomb went off. Whom shall we include? Fermi, Bethe, Feynman, Serber, Wigner, von Neumann, Oppenheimer, Peierls, Ulam, Teller, Bohr, Frisch, Weisskopf... What would the technical conversation have been like? No doubt there would have been disagreements and some fumbling. But like this? The question answers itself.

Yet even with these handicaps, it looks like Harteck could have built a basic pile in 1940, if the project was headed by someone less arrogant than Heisenberg. And that pile would have brought all the funding, and maybe sorted out their many collective muddles and lack of engineering care.

5/5 for Bernstein’s commentary and the hair-raising fact of their existence.

"Rationality: From AI to Zombies"

Eliezer Yudkowsky (2015)
★★★★★
reviewed Aug 2015

These essays are fumbling attempts to put into words lessons that would be better taught by experience. But at least there’s underlying math, plus experimental evidence from cognitive psychology on how humans actually think. Maybe that will be enough to cross the stratospherically high threshold required for a discipline that lets you actually get it right, instead of just constraining you to interesting new mistakes.

everyone needs to learn at least one technical subject. Physics; computer science; evolutionary biology; or Bayesian probability theory, but something. Someone with no technical subjects under their belt has no referent for what it means to "explain" something. They may think "All is Fire" is an explanation.

A very modern sort of rationalism, with buckets of scientific insights and a few genuine innovations* unified into a grand theory of reason and action: probability theory + decision theory. An ongoing concern.

Yudkowsky’s writing suffers from this thing where we incorporate the ideas, but everyone begrudges the insight they glean from him and forget they thought otherwise. This is perhaps because his site carried a heavy pall of nerdiness (fan-fiction and Streisanding), a status deficit which prevents people from according the ideas their actual merit. His dismissive attitude to high-status people and ideas also drives a lot of people crazy, sometimes making them unable to care if the ideas are right. So we minimise his contribution to the life of the new mind, some of the brightest prospects in the dark world. This is unfair but the new mind is the main thing, and broader than him already.

The section intros by Rob Bensinger, written a decade later, are helpful, but this book may need refreshing every decade, because of the replication crisis. This is no insult.

*Some of Yudkowsky's new ideas (not the mere popularisations):

• The abstract research chain into FAI: i.e. logical uncertainty, tiling, corrigibility, value learning. The leading academic textbook on AI gives a full page to his ideas.
• Pascal's mugging (see final footnote here).
• A new completeness theorem in probabilistic logic, discussed by a big-name mathematical physicist here.
• The term "Friendly AI"
• Probably the first to tie the Jaynesian probability calculus plus the Heuristics and Biases program plus rule-utilitarianism.

"The Wind's Twelve Quarters"

Ursula K. Le Guin (1976)
★★★★★
reviewed Oct 2017

Magnificent genre-breaking genre exemplification. She is to science fiction what the Elizabethans were to bawdy comedy. Aside from the two hippie stories, and the four fear-of-psychometrics stories, these will not age.

"Good Old Neon"

David Foster Wallace (2004)
★★★★★
reviewed Jun 2021

Crushing. You think it’s pretty clever at the start, and then it leaps up a level of simulation, and then it keeps iterating its own map until you find yourself very very high above life, quite cold, and very very far from ok. Probably a bit dangerous for some people.

Subtlety: it’s easy to view this as some kind of critique of rationalism, since his entire problem consists in excessive thought, excessive self-attention, and the narrator notes that he realised his ultimate entrapment during a mathematical logic course. But it’s an impossibly naive kind, the one which insists on the “criterion of rightness [or correctness]” being constantly stared at, instead of approximated and mostly obscured behind its sane heuristics. I say impossible but it is of course quite common, one of the 10 curses of major depression.

Detail, probably not accidental: Neal calls his (adoptive) parents his “step-parents”. At one remove from him.

"Infinite Jest"

David Foster Wallace (2005)
★★★★★
reviewed Jul 2011

The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames.

"Bartleby the Scrivener"

Herman Melville (2004)
★★★★★
reviewed Dec 2014

One of the Frankensteins, those endlessly interpretable load-bearing columns dotted around literature. Of negation, dignity, irrationality, silence, impermeability.

What is Bartleby, if not just depressed or hyper-lazy? Well there’s the defensive Stoic catatonia, or wu wei; Bartleby as crypto-proto-Marxist; Bartleby as waning Übermensch, squatter monk, annoying Christ; Bartleby as dissociating schizophrene or autist; Bartleby as Death of Dead Letters; Bartleby as PTSD ghost; Bartleby as all our inarticulate idiosyncracy, as utter Other – “pallidly neat, pitiably respectable, incurably forlorn!”

Some people (e.g. Blanchot, Hardt & Negri, Setiya) view him as heroic, but he’s more hallucinogenic and morbid: he lacks everything but refusal; he throws his life away. And that’s a living death, a non-human void (“I never feel so private as when I know [Bartleby is] here”).

So true it is, and so terrible too, that up to a certain point the thought or sight of misery enlists our best affections; but, in certain special cases, beyond that point it does not. They err who would assert that invariably this is owing to the inherent selfishness of the human heart. It rather proceeds from a certain hopelessness of remedying excessive and organic ill. To a sensitive being, pity is not seldom pain. And when at last it is perceived that such pity cannot lead to effectual succor, common sense bids the soul be rid of it.

That copyists are an extinct breed only adds to the seething flavour; it is possible that OCR and distributed Captchas could have minimised Bartleby’s suffering - that the condition the piece wrangles with isn’t eternal. What would Bartleby be today? Not, I think, an Occupier; rather a impassive backstreets bookshop owner, or a kombucha stallholder or whatnot.

I prefer to read Melville’s voice - waffling Victorian persiflage - as an assumed decoration for the windbag lawyer’s voice (however much Moby Dick shouts otherwise).

"Poems of the Late T'ang (New York Review Books Classics)"

A.C. Graham (2008)
★★★★★
reviewed Jun 2018

I’ve been playing at knowing China for years, but of course I do not. (For instance, I picked this calm, modest book up unwittingly, and learn it is the gold standard translation by the greatest Western sinologist of the day.) It’s a great hook: supposedly, Chinese poetry (world poetry?) peaked in the Ninth Century. For almost their whole history, passion and violence were considered inappropriate topics for poetry! They resented melodrama and fantasy in their poets! I must be jaded to think this is great.

The poets seem all to be old men trying not to care about death - “snail shell men”, in Ancient Chinese. They are mainly ultra-concrete - lots of masterpieces about mountains and rice and fish. Graham is a droll, masterful guide, making the requisite comparisons to Baudelaire and Pound for me, the clunking reader. (I can only assume the strange meters he uses are good approximations to the original.) The war between Confucianism and Buddhism is prominent here, and is hard for me to imagine -probably because I have a Hollywood understanding of these two “serene” “coping” philosophies. Li Shangyin’s (李商隐的) “On a Monastery Wall”:

They rejected life to seek the way. Their footprints are before us. They offered up their brains, ripped up their bodies: so firm was their resolution. See it as large, and a millet grain cheats us of the universe: See it as small, and the world can hide in a pinpoint. The oyster before its womb fills thinks of the new cassia: The amber, when it first sets, remembers a former pine. If we trust the true and sure words written on Indian leaves We hear all past and future in one stroke of the temple bell.

Like a typical Westerner, I like the weirdoes: Li He (李賀), who’s their wild fantasist (Blake?) and Meng Jiao (孟郊), barren kin of Poe. I enjoyed this, but don’t really have the tools to judge:

"The Patrick Melrose Novels"

Edward St. Aubyn (2012)
★★★★★
reviewed Apr 2018

Marvelous. Even though: nearly filled-up with resentment and self-pity. Patrick’s staggering detachment from and humour about his own inner life makes the books rise far above him - most of the series is not spent in Patrick’s head but instead depicts his brutal gilded circle - and, every few pages, there is a moment of beautiful lucidity or unvoiced empathy. The prose, the humour, the sadness are enough to make you glad, with Patrick, that his parents are dead.

The prose is wonderfully smooth, but I took my time, jolted out every few pages by something demanding reflection: “Evil is sickness celebrating itself”;

Just as a novelist may sometimes wonder why he invents characters who do not exist and makes them do things which do not matter, so a philosopher may wonder why he invents cases that cannot occur in order to determine what must be the case.

Underneath the filth and irony, Patrick is someone for whom philosophical questions are natural and urgent. The long discursions are more motivated and seamless than in any novel I can think of.

At one point, Mary dismisses the idea that her son’s anxiety and angst, so like his father’s, could have a genetic component - and assumes that it has inadvertently leaked out of Patrick’s behaviour. (She goes on to leave him, actually making a damage-control argument about removing the children from his helpless influence.)

Yes: For all his insight, wit, cynicism, contrarianism, St Aubyn is still stuck in a giant contemporary ideology: the nurture assumption, the culture of environment-only development and essential woundedness.

Sure, people get wounded all the time, and being able to say so in public is a great gain, (for one thing, no one in a confessional culture has to assume that they are alone, that their defects are bizarrely theirs. But if trauma is the centre of some people’s sense of self - if it is fetishised and even incentivised (e.g. misery memoirs and high-clap Medium posts)… The risks of centring such things are large and underreported: self-fulfilling prophecies, agonising rumination, and the loss of the peace and pleasure of gratitude.

Fine, Aubyn is correct about our sad path-dependence - he’s just too recent in placing the start of the path. Here are genetic markers for anxiety and PTSD, against the novel’s tacit, almost Freudian emphasis on environment alone.

Aubyn is obviously somewhat detached from his own trauma - you can’t write prose this fair and glowing if you’re not - which is lucky. Otherwise, the seeker after truth would be senselessly telling the vulnerable they’re deluded about their own life. (As we all are, though not in the same ways.)

* Serious engagement with philosophy of mind throughout:

In any case, he now felt in danger all the time. Danger of liver collapse, marital breakdown, terminal fear. Nobody ever died of a feeling, he would say to himself, not believing a word of it, as he sweated his way through the feeling that he was dying of fear. People died of feelings all the time, once they had gone through the formality of materializing them into bullets and bottles and tumours.

More generally, Patrick actually wrestles with materialism, rather than using the usual literary tricks of caricature and omission on it.

*

Curious whether St Aubyn got his vicious rendition of Princess Margaret at first- or second-hand.

*

The first three chapters of Mother’s Milk, told from the perspective of Patrick’s first child, are just perfect writing. Robert sees only the benevolence and humour of his parents, not their exhaustion, rage, and bad faith. They are anonymous to him and us, just Robert’s mother and Robert’s father. It is a glory and a high echelon, though it gives giving the emotional arc of the rest of the book a very long way to fall.

Thomas [2 years old] still knew how to understand the silent language which Robert had almost lost as the wild margins of his mind fell under the sway of a verbal empire. He was standing on a ridge, about to surge downhill, getting faster, getting taller, getting more words, getting bigger and bigger explanations, cheering all the way. Now Thomas had made him glance backwards and lower his sword for a moment while he noticed everything he had lost as well. He had become so caught up in building sentences that he had almost forgotten the barbaric days when thinking was like a splash of colour on a page.

The exaggeration of the wisdom of children is even stronger in Mother’s Milk. This is no criticism because St Aubyn isn’t very committed to realism, and because Robert’s rich and sparkling inner life suits one of the themes: that children deserve to be treated well, taken relatively seriously, as we all do. And that purpose is not the same as result (‘telos’ indeed):

We think the purpose of a child is to grow up because it does grow up. But its purpose is to play, to enjoy itself, to be a child. If we merely look to the end of the process, the purpose of life is death.

The art of kintsugi.

"The Book of Disquiet"

Fernando Pessoa (2002)
★★★★★
reviewed Sep 2015

In one sentence: Eventless autobiographical sketches about working a shit job in a shit town, and but the beauty of self-obsession. To be read when: unable to sleep; e.g. at 3am or when travelling for more than 15 hours.

I asked very little from life, and even this little was denied me. A nearby field, a ray of sunlight, a little bit of calm along with a bit of bread, not to feel oppressed by the knowledge that I exist, not to demand anything from others, and not to have others demand anything from me - this was denied me, like the spare change we might deny a beggar not because we're mean-hearted but because we don't feel like unbuttoning our coat.

Pessoa’s uniqueness was invisible during his life; this is a shining, astonishing instance of what we now call neuroatypicality and of the everyday sublime. He’s obsessed with cute fatalism, with his own inadequacy, with nothingness and loneliness, but almost every passage is wise or funny or beautiful. I catch no despair off him. Turning shite to gold. Like Larkin if Larkin were likeable; like Montaigne if terser and darker.

And at this table in my absurd room, I, a pathetic and anonymous office clerk, write words as if they were the soul's salvation, and I gild myself with the impossible sunset of high and vast hills in the distance, with the statue I received in exchange for life's pleasures, and with the ring of renunciation on my evangelical finger, the stagnant jewel of my ecstatic disdain.

Floreat inertia! the worker-poet distinctive and supreme. I first read this on a 22-hour international journey, unsleeping, undrinking, unreal; I prescribe the same conditions for you when you read him.

I feel love for all this, perhaps because I have nothing else to love... even though nothing truly merits the love of any soul, if, out of sentiment, we must give it, I might as well lavish it on the smallness of an inkwell as on the grand indifference of the stars.

This paperback is a super-slim selection of the full chaotic archive he left behind; only a tenth of the full Desassossego archive has been translated in to English; this is a great temptation towards a language I presently have no other reason to learn.

• Galef type: Data 1 - a window onto an interesting piece of the world, & Value 3 - written from a holistic value structure, letting you experience that value structure from the inside, & Style 2 - from which you can learn a style of thinking by studying the author’s approach to the world.

One of my constant preoccupations is trying to understand how it is that other people exist, how it is that there are souls other than mine and consciousnesses not my own, which, because it is a consciousness, seems to me unique. I understand perfectly that the man before me uttering words similar to mine and making the same gestures I make, or could make, is in some way my fellow creature. However, I feel just the same about the people in illustrations I dream up, about the characters I see in novels or the dramatis personae on the stage who speak through the actors representing them. I suppose no one truly admits the existence of another person. One might concede that the other person is alive and feels and thinks like oneself, but there will always be an element of difference, a perceptible discrepancy, that one cannot quite put one's finger on. There are figures from times past, fantasy-images in books that seem more real to us than these specimens of indifference-made-flesh who speak to us across the counters of bars, or catch our eye in trams, or brush past us in the empty randomness of the streets. The others are just part of the landscape for us, usually the invisible landscape of the familiar. I feel closer ties and more intimate bonds with certain characters in books, with certain images I've seen in engravings, that with many supposedly real people, with that metaphysical absurdity known as 'flesh and blood'. In fact 'flesh and blood' describes them very well: they resemble cuts of meat laid on the butcher's marble slab, dead creatures bleeding as though still alive, the sirloin steaks and cutlets of Fate. I'm not ashamed to feel this way because I know it's how everyone feels. The lack of respect between men, the indifference that allows them to kill others without compunction (as murderers do) or without thinking (as soldiers do), comes from the fact that no one pays due attention to the apparently abstruse idea that other people have souls too.

"Right Ho, Jeeves (Jeeves, #6)"

P.G. Wodehouse (2011)
★★★★★
reviewed Feb 2018

Wodehouse belongs, not with Dickens or Tom Sharpe or Ben Elton, but with More, Morris, Roddenberry, and Banks. His Blandings is a utopia - just of the rarest kind, set in the present day. He is easy to dismiss as unserious - though actually he is anti-serious, his apparent deficit of gloom and pompousness a decision:

I have it from her ladyship's own maid, who happened to overhear a conversation between her ladyship and one of the gentlemen staying here that it was her intention to start you almost immediately upon Nietzsche. You would not enjoy Nietzsche, sir. He is fundamentally unsound.

(I don’t think he is but this still brings me joy.)

RHJ is the very best Jeeves book. It’s the one where Wooster contemptuously sends Jeeves away and sets about fixing everything on his own, with fully predictable and fully joyous results.

Classification:

Wooster’s taboo: Triangle: Subplot: Aunt: Antagonist: Expedient:

"Brief Interviews with Hideous Men"

David Foster Wallace (2000)
★★★★★
reviewed Apr 2015

Draining, scarifying, funny, hyperactive, elevating. ‘Content warning’, as we say now. For instance, the person described in this passage is one story’s hero, a powerful agent:

[her] prototypical sandals, unrefined fibers, daffy arcana, emotional incontinence, flamboyantly long hair, extreme liberality on social issues, financial support from parents they revile, bare feet, obscure import religions, indifferent hygiene, a gooey and somewhat canned vocabulary, the whole predictable peace-and-love post-Hippie diction…

i.e. He comes up with a perfect encapsulation of a facile social trend, but throws away his anger about it, makes us realise that our efforts to be tasteful / rational / grown-up are, here, making us small. DFW was an early mover in the revived ‘Third Culture’ we can all enjoy: i.e. writing about the highly technical in terms of its high meaning. But he was different: his syncretism came out of the negations of high postmodern theory, rather than the usual humanists with science backgrounds.

Or like just another manipulative pseudopomo Bullshit artist who’s trying to salvage a fiasco by dropping back to a metadimention and commenting on the fiasco itself.

‘On His Deathbed, Holding Your Hand’ made me cry a lot.

"Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus"

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1974)
★★★★★
reviewed Sep 2010

You already know the key superficial facts: it’s brief, poetic, cryptic, it glorifies language. (Or is it damning language?) You might not know that it’s intentionally cryptic:

This book will perhaps only be understood by those who have themselves already thought the thoughts which are expressed in it - or similar thoughts... I should not like my writing to spare other people the trouble of thinking. But, if possible, to stimulate someone to thoughts of his own.

• or that it’s the most beautiful piece of metaphysics ever, or that its author repudiated it entirely ten years later, or that actually the book repudiates itself -

My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.) He must surmount these propositions; then he sees the world rightly.

or that (aside from the pure logic results) it probably isn’t true, or that few people can possibly understand it without a lot of scholarly context, like without explanations 5 times the length of the original text. I recommend Anat Biletzki and Roger White. Grayling is good for the language bit too.

I spent maybe a year, on and off, trying to understand it. Some funny results here.

5 stars for poetry - not for its system, or its influence. (It has justified, or been appropriated in the service of, an awful lot of mystical poppycock. The author would be appalled to see this, while accepting that it was all his own fault.)

"Beyond Good and Evil"

Friedrich Nietzsche (2003)
★★★★★
reviewed Oct 2011

I think I’ve read this 5 times in 10 years.

What I like about Nietzsche is that his errors are uncorrelated with the errors of his time*, and only a bit correlated with ours. Is there any higher praise, in practice?

• Yes, there’s misogyny, but it’s different from the literal patriarch kind of the age. (Like Marx, say.) He’s closer to blackpilled than trad.
  
  
  

"The Oxford Book of Essays (Oxford Books of Prose)"

John Gross (2002)
★★★★★
reviewed Apr 2017

I’ve been reading this slowly for 6 months; it is a belter. Gross has given me tender feelings for a hundred dead people, and what is one to do with those, except what I’m doing right now?

Great essays share something. These essayists wouldn’t all agree on anything, I’m sure. But there’s something about their voices: personal, rational, intimate, concise, forceful. The essay is in the process of being superceded by the article and the blogpost, but we shouldn’t judge those two forms by the dross we are all seeing from day to day; surely most essays were also petty and inelegant.

Just one example: I bear quite a lot of ill-will toward Churchill; but his entry here is just incredibly beautiful; a hallucinatory conversation with his dead father, with junior struggling to bridge the violent gap the last two generations made in culture and history. I would not have believed him so self-aware:

I also find myself nodding in agreement with the likes of Cardinal Newman and Makepeace Thackaray. I will again, too.

I went and got Gross’ Oxford collection of aphorisms, ready for the slow treatment.

"What Should We Be Worried About? Real Scenarios That Keep Scientists Up at Night"

John Brockman (2014)
★★★★★
reviewed Jan 2013

A portrait of the worst things in the world by some of the cleverest people in it. Loads of people went for the cheap way out and said “We should worry about too much worrying”, which is true in one sense but not helpful.

Quality varies: these are the most astonishing bits.

Many of the entries are on far less important matters, but even those are valuable as evidence of expert disagreement / the deep human need for whimsy.

[Free here]

"The Secret Sins of Economics"

Deirdre Nansen McCloskey (2002)
★★★★★
reviewed Jan 2011

I was doing an economics degree and dying of boredom. And then I found McCloskey.

Maybe the best introduction to the field. Though for leftist friends you’ll want Filthy Lucre instead, and work up to McCloskey’s hilarious shtick (“Workingmen of all countries unite! Demand capitalism!”)

"Ficciones"

Jorge Luis Borges (1993)
★★★★★
reviewed Mar 2019

Deeply uncanny - without worshipping mystery. (“Tlön” is scarier to me than anything in Lovecraft. “Babel” is also horrifying in its way.) Playing at the limits of reason - without renouncing objectivity. (There is something of the unearthly drama and transcendence of higher mathematics in a couple of these stories.) Somehow it manages to be cryptic without being annoying, to use literary gossip and the droning of archivists straight. Some of this is 80 years old, and it’s still completely fresh.

He makes literature larger, by bringing new things into scope - bibliographic minutiae, English department arcana, salon gossip. There’s something refreshing about his perfect fake book reviews. Gushing praise of nonexistent authors draws back the veil (as if our world’s reviewers would say the same things whether or not the authors existed).

Borges was not a postmodernist but these anyway have the best of what postmodernism is taken to mean: nonliteral play, generative scepticism about sense and reference and language-games, reasoning about the limits of reason.

I’m not sure of the significance of some of Borges’ sentences here. But for once the critic’s working assumption of meaning seems sound: if I thought about it, I could find out. (And not just in the ordinary way, by projection. I expect to find Borges in them if I try.)

I’ve some ideas about each story, but none that fit completely or exhaust them. Here’s one:

Here’s a banal idea: “language is composite”. Characters go into words into sentences into works into worldviews. In “The Library of Babel”, Borges stretches this fact until you see the horror in it, the shocking vastness of exponentiation on the tiny scale of a human life. The simple idea of mechanically generating all strings of length n=1,312,000 leads to an incredibly claustrophobic closed system. The story is not 8 pages long but contains more than most books.

There exists one truth; there are uncountably many falsehoods; but worse, there’s a far larger infinity of nonsense, of things which make sense in no language, which don’t make enough sense to be false, which never will. This is the horror of Platonism or Many-world physics or Meinong: that we could be invisibly boxed-in by garbled infinities, endless keyboard mashing. The “noosphere” - all the good ideas, all the bad ideas ever had - is a tiny pocket of meaning in a sea of meaninglessness.

The stunning effect of “Babel” depends on its not being magic, not hand-wavy (merely monstrous, physically impossible for interesting reasons which violate no particular law). Ted Chiang is grasping at a similar titanic scale when he uses a truly alien language to explain variational physics.

Remember that Borges was a librarian. But, while he said photogenic things about libraries, he didn’t necessarily like being in them. “The Library of Babel” adds an extremely mordant overtone to that quotation, by imagining an otherworldly library which breaks men just by being there. Sturrock, his biographer:

Borges had some reason to dislike libraries because for nine years "of solid unhappiness", from 1937 to 1946, he was obliged to work in one, as a quite junior librarian, in order to make money. The cataloguing work he did was futile...

The alphabet used for the Babel books has 22 letters and no uppercase. We could try and look up human languages with that many letters, but better to take this as a hint that our narrator is not us - he can be a total alien, far from Earth, and the exact same library will still confound him the exact same way. The same geometry constrains all minds. What looks like meaning need not be, if your sample is large enough:

This useless and wordy epistle itself already exists in one of the thirty volumes of the five shelves in one of the uncountable heaxgons - and so does its refutation. (And n possible languages make use of the same vocabulary; in some of them the symbol 'library' admits of the correct definition 'ubiquitous and everlasting system of hexagonal galleries', but 'library' is 'bread' or 'pyramid' of anything else... You who read me, are you sure you understand my language?)

The narrator says that the fall from his floor “is infinite” (or indefinite), that the rooms are “uncountable”, but we can do better than this quite easily, given only the text. There are 4104080 = 1312000 characters per book. The number of distinct books is thus (22 + 3)^{1312000} or about 2 followed by about 1.8 million zeroes. It is hard to give a reference for how large this is: if every atom in the universe contained as many atoms as are in the universe (10^80), and each of the nested atoms was a Babel book, this would still contain only a laughably tiny fraction of Babel, less than one googolplexth. There’s 4532 = 640 books per hexagon, so we need about 3 x 10^1834094 room-sized hexagons. This is the full implication of the simple thought “every book of length 1312000”.

It couldn’t possibly be even fractionally built. And yet, through the power of maths, it has been built - “only implicitly, skeletally”, but it still counts.

(Borges notes this infinity/finity conflict on the last page, explaining that the Library is unbounded and periodic, a hypersphere.)

There is a beautiful, inspiring lesson to be taken from it actually: think about what the incredible feat of writing any book - no matter how bad - actually entails. Our nervous system shields us from Babel, from the larger part of possible meanings and the overwhelming majority of string space. This is an astonishing act, in information-theory terms: the ultimate search, which we succeed at effortlessly, many times a day. Epic achievements in life-giving ignoring.

"Computing machinery and intelligence"

Alan M. Turing (2009)
★★★★★
reviewed Jan 2009

More scientific than it’s given credit for: the claim about the Turing test was

Consider first the more accurate form of the question. I believe that in about fifty years' time it will be possible, to programme computers, with a storage capacity of about 10^9 [bits], to make them play the imitation game so well that an average interrogator will not have more than 70 per cent chance of making the right identification after five minutes of questioning. The original question, "Can machines think?" I believe to be too meaningless to deserve discussion. Nevertheless I believe that at the end of the century the use of words, and general educated opinion, will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted. I believe further that no useful purpose is served by concealing these beliefs. The popular view that scientists proceed inexorably from well-established fact to well-established fact, never being influenced by any improved conjecture, is quite mistaken. Provided it is made clear which are proved facts and which are conjectures, no harm can result.

We failed him on this specific timeframe, but it won’t be too long (2030?).

"The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life"

Kevin Simler (2017)
★★★★★
reviewed Mar 2018

The best synthesis of the study of human nature (cognitive psychology, interactionist sociology, primatology, and economics) I’ve ever seen. Freud done right (“although the explanations in this book may seem Freudian at times, we follow mainstream cognitive psychology in rejecting most of Freud’s methods and many of his conclusions”). It’s introductory, laced with illustrative anecdotes but with much deeper scholarship underneath.

The ‘elephant in the brain’ is our unwitting selfishness. We compete without knowing or admitting it, for we are social animals seeking power or status, and thereby sex.

Modeling the world accurately isn't the be-all and end-all of the human brain. Brains evolved to help our bodies, and ultimately our genes, get along and get ahead in the world—a world that includes not just rocks and squirrels and hurricanes, but also other human beings. And if we spend a significant fraction of our lives interacting with others (which we do), trying to convince them of certain things (which we do), why shouldn't our brains adopt socially useful beliefs as first-class citizens, alongside world-modeling beliefs? Wear a mask long enough and it becomes your face. Play a role long enough and it becomes who you are. Spend enough time pretending something is true and you might as well believe it. Incidentally, this is why politicians make a great case study for self-deception. The social pressure on their beliefs is enormous. Psychologically, then, politicians don't so much 'lie' as regurgitate their own self-deceptions. Both are ways of misleading others, but self-deceptions are a lot harder to catch and prosecute.

Simler undertook the book in lieu of a PhD, and his work is a welcome modification of Hanson’s usual relentlessly lucid style: he is more concrete, chattier, more personable.

Information is sensitive in part because it can threaten our self-image and therefore our social image. So the rest of the brain conspires—whispers—to keep such information from becoming too prominent, especially in consciousness. In this sense, the Freuds were right: the conscious ego needs to be protected. But not because we are fragile, but rather to keep damaging information from leaking out of our brain and into the minds of our associates.

You can probably skip this if you’re familiar with Overcoming Bias / LessWrong / Econlog - but even then it’s a pleasant read. I’m going to give this to every teenager I know. Armour and key.

"Conquest of the Useless: Reflections from the Making of Fitzcarraldo"

Werner Herzog (2009)
★★★★★
reviewed May 2015

Laplace [the set engineer] is talking about levelling the slope to a mere 45 percent grade; but that would look like the narrow strip of land that forms an isthmus. I told him I would not allow that, because we would lose the central metaphor of the film. ‘Metaphor for what?’ he asked. I said I did not know, just that it was a grand metaphor. Maybe, I said, it was an image slumbering in all of us, and I happened to be the one to introduce him to a brother he had never met… he said he could not go working under these conditions, and wanted to leave.

I have a weird relationship with Herzog. His films’ typical tone and message (Nietzschean tragicomedy) doesn’t really appeal to me. I watch them – and I watch them all, even since Dinotasia – for their literal and figurative voice: his relentless, Teutonic ecstatic absurdity. I wait for that voice to roll out and make me hurt or laugh.

(Since his humour is only sometimes on show, I am often laughing at him – and yet, out of mawkish brutalism, through my irony, rise the most affecting scenes I’ve ever seen: the beach shot in Cobra Verde; the clouds in Heart of Glass; the wandering penguin in Encounters; above all the final shot of My Best Fiend.)

These diaries show him to be more thoughtful, rational, contrived and poetic than I had guessed. His sincere interest in the locals’ territorial plight, his physical participation in the set construction and management, his absorption in the suffering of jungle animals, his incongruous bright-eyed interest in mathematics, his astonishing codependency with Kinski, are all deeply disarming. The prose takes some getting used to, since the plain unflinching goth awe of it is the kind of thing we are primed to mock.

The jungle is obscene. Everything about it is sinful, for which reason the sin does not stand out as sin. The voices in the jungle are silent; nothing is stirring, and a languid, immobile anger hovers over everything.

It is worth acclimating to: each entry is both bleak and hilarious, and Krishna Winston’s translation is a thing of wonder, no doubt improving on WH.

I recall experiencing a similar shiver of awe as a child in Sachrang, when I found a fried piece of bright blue plastic that had floated down the brook and got caught on an over hanging branch. At the time, I had never seen anything like it, and I kept it hidden for weeks, licked it, found it slightly stretchy, full of miraculous properties. Not until weeks later, when I had my fill of owning it, did I show it to anyone. Till and I discovered when you held a burning match to it, it melted; it gave black smoke and a nasty smell, but it was something we had never seen before, an emissary from a distant world high in the mountains, along the upper reaches of the brook, where it vanished into gorges and there were no people. So where did it come from? Had it blown into the mountains by the wind? Idid not know, but I gave the plastic a name-what I do not recall. I do know it had a nice sound, and was very secret, and since then I have often racked my brains, trying to remember that name, that word. I would give a lot to know it, but I do not, and I also do not have that delicate piece of weather-beaten plastic anymore. Having neither the secret word nor the plastic makes me poorer today than I was as a child.

He certainly views the natural world right: as overwhelmingly a place of horrifying and pointless suffering, cooed over by pseuds from cars.

Sweat, storm clouds overhead, sleeping dogs. There is a smell of stale urine. In my soup, ants and bugs were swimming among the globules of fat. Lord Almighty, send us an earthquake.

There’s not a lot of technical info here, or explanations of the crew’s role or background; there’s no timeline or context added; nor even very much about the film at all. But who cares? This is incredible as nature writing, dream journal, and logistical poetry.

"Grand Futures"

Anders Sandberg (n)
★★★★★
reviewed Apr 2023

A sort of apotheosis, readable engineering theory slash cosmology slash analytic philosophy. Tour de force first-principles thinking across whatever damn fields he needs to think about to get the inference made. Dozens of little arguments, many of them new / research-level, many of them previewed on StackExchange. Also scholarship: 130 A4 pages of citations at the back. The version I saw was 1200 pages.

Also an experimental test of fundamental epistemology: How far can a human mind leap and still land upright? If you work in muddy contested areas like politics or strategy or human stuff, it can be hard to remember that questions can in fact be answered conclusively.

I have rarely, if ever, read any real engineering texts. So I now know much more about gravity engines than ordinary terrestrial bridges.

It is not mostly made of sentences like this but there’s one on most pages:

Lasagna nuclear pasta phases appear to be able to maintain spiral ramp topological defects [using] black holes as a heat sink Section 18.1: What can we say about the unknown parts of physics?

Besides standing as a justification of human imagination, it’s also a rich source of hair-raising aphorisms and epigrams.

Egan’s Law: “It all adds up to normality.” Observed reality is not changed when we discover new physics: it was always like this.

Stands shoulder to shoulder with The Road to Reality, except that you can actually read it. Reading it linearly makes little sense, so it’s also the greatest toilet book of all time.

"Solutions and Other Problems"

Allie Brosh (2020)
★★★★★
reviewed Mar 2021

Just glorious, a cracked mirror. I can’t think of any other cartoonist who can make me laugh without words, who assumes the mantle of slapstick. But on top of that she cuts very deep into the weirdness of things, the tears of things.

The book is also large: 25 stories where 10 would have been marketable, people would’ve bought that.

After years I finally understand why she’s so funny: she depicts herself, all of us, as animals. Bug-eyed, chaotic, mechanical, inexplicable, barely in control of this great noble and ignoble body.

It may be the best depiction of humans as confused, out-of-distribution animals in all of pop culture.

"Reliable Essays: The Best of Clive James"

Clive James (2002)
★★★★★
reviewed Jun 2018

Mostly haute subjects for once, but always bas on bs.

He: brags about having spotted Heaney very early, points out the fatal ideological flaws in both Mailer and Greer, fiercely challenges translations from the Italian, the Russian, the German; summarises every major photography book of the late 70s; shows that liberalism and classicism remain standing, “less bad than all the others” even after the sustained insult of C20th Theory; and some other such generalist feats.

The last two section titles – “Almost Literature” and “Practically Art” – are scale models of both his style and his critical mission: to raise the foully sunken, or shield the great assailed.

Skip it, but only because you should be reading the full New Essays series these essays are lifted from.

"What Matters Most is How Well You Walk Through the Fire"

Charles Bukowski (2002)
★★★★★
reviewed Jun 2007

all theories like cliches shot to hell, all these small faces looking up beautiful and believing; I wish to weep but sorrow is stupid. I wish to believe but belief is a graveyard. we have narrowed it down to the butcherknife and the mockingbird wish us luck.

In one sentence: Just a man in a room - odd, then, that this is enough to make people read them voluntarily, religiously, unlike almost all contemporary poetry with their bigger brains and better politics and more eventful stories and uplifting messages.

To be read when: you can’t sleep and it’s 2am and tomorrow’s going to be a pain in the arse and you’re alone in the house; no better book then.

Unbeatable at sliding through the mind with zero friction, depositing emotional silt and cheap, warm style from a previously insane and helpfully hopeless man in you – whatever you want that for. More than any other poet, he just literally talks to you. You can roll your eyes at his gaucheness and despise his chauvinism and feel nothing all you like: that’s fine. It doesn’t matter. It’s not the point.

So it’s barely art, but he knows it. Pity any academic working on CB: these poems don’t invite analysis; they are worn on their own surface. They mean just what they first mean. Many of them are just about writing poems, but I cannot resent their hollowness, since emptiness is his brush. Its main virtue is complete honesty.

...so much has gone by for most of us, even the young, especially the young for they have lost the beginning and have the rest of the way to go; but isn’t it strange, all i can think of now are cucumbers, oranges, junk yards, the old Lincoln Heights jail and the lost loves that went so hard and almost brought us to the edge, the faces now without features, the love beds forgotten. the mind is kind: it retains the important things: cucumbers oranges junk yards jails. ...there used to be over 100 of us in that big room in that jail i was in there many times. you slept on the floor men stepped on your face on the way to piss. always a shortage of cigarettes. names called out during the night (the few lucky ones who were bailed out) never you.
...when love came to us twice and lied to us twice we decided to never love again that was fair fair to us and fair to love itself. we ask for no mercy or no miracles; we are strong enough to live and to die and to kill flies, attend the boxing matches, go to the racetrack, live on luck and skill, get alone, get alone often, and if you can’t sleep alone be careful of the words you speak in your sleep; and ask for no mercy no miracles; and don’t forget: time is meant to be wasted, love fails and death is useless

Everything that people mock Leonard Cohen for is much more true of Bukowski (misery, drawling, self-obsession, archness, chauvinism, treating the whole world as your confessional); he is just more direct and macho about it; that fact, and the very different crowd surrounding his medium is enough to earn him contempt rather than mockery. (And contempt is a kind of involuntary respect.) Backwards analogy: Bukowski is Tom Waits minus gospel, minus FX pedals, minus Brecht and Weill, minus one steady Kathleen peer. And minus metre of course. A grumpy adolescent old man; a sensitising misanthrope; a beautiful lech.

He has only two modes: midnight countercultural raving and laconic woke-at-noon observation. Neither would work without his lecherousness and/or meanness and/or arrogance; they are the absolutely necessary breve before he blares out his concern.

moments of agony and moments of glory march across my roof. the cat walks by seeming to know everything. my luck has been better, I think, than the luck of the cut gladiolus, although I am not sure. I have been loved by many women, and for a hunchback of life, that’s lucky. so many fingers pushing through my hair so many arms holding me close so many shoes thrown carelessly on my bedroom rug. so many searching hearts now fixed in my memory that i’ll go to my death, remembering. I have been treated better than I should have been— not by life in general nor by the machinery of things but by women. but there have been other women who have left me standing in the bedroom alone doubled over— hands holding the gut— thinking why why why why why why? women go to men who are pigs women go to men with dead souls women go to men who fuck badly women go to shadows of men women go go because they must go in the order of things. the women know better but often chose out of disorder and confusion. they can heal with their touch they can kill what they touch and I am dying but not dead yet.

(That ^ might have gotten your back up, because it pattern-matches to modern whining about women’s choices. But it isn’t that: remember, from above, that he is calling himself a pig and a dead soul.)

This is three books written over thirty years, one sentence per ten lines as always, stapled together to give the impression of a late-life opus. It covers the whole lot: his Great Depression origin myth; his meaningless, crabbed middle years; and his long, long late period spent in contempt of the arty people who pay and applaud him.

I am nothing like him, except maybe in sense of humour. He is not anti-modern - grew up through the Great Depression, a simulation of pre-modern subsistence; loves shit cars; lives for late night recorded music - but science, growth, and the expanding circle give him nothing of the sense of direction, transcendence and hope that it gives to me and mine. But still I “relate”, as the disgusting verb puts it.

I have read this a half-dozen times in a dozen years. (It isn’t hard; it takes an hour.) I know of no better poet to begin to explain why poetry is good and unique and feeds life. This surely says something about my character, but I don’t expect to stop reading it.

PS: Bukowski’s epitaph is “Don’t try”. On the face of it that’s mean and funny and fine, but it also means what Yoda means by it: Don’t force it; Don’t betray your nature; Do only what you are absolutely aligned behind. Is that good advice? Maybe not, but it is epitomises the man more than the nihilistic joke.

• Galef type:
  Values 3 - written from a holistic value structure, letting you experience that value structure from the inside.

"Travels With Myself and Another"

Martha Gellhorn (2001)
★★★★★
reviewed Apr 2014

In one sentence: Great journalist goes on holiday to the shittest times and places on earth. To be read when: travelling; refusing to.

Hilarious and patrician account of the worst of her many journeys, to: Guomindang China 1941, the U-boated Caribbean 1942, East through West Africa 1949, Russia 1966, hippie Israel 1971.

She generalises a lot (e.g. she categorises each new tribe she comes across by their average attractiveness and prevailing smell; she often calls ‘racial’ what we’d deem ‘cultural’ traits). But her discrimination is more usually discriminating, making just distinctions. She’s fair, keen to empathise -

I said it stood to reason that we must smell in some disgusting way to them. Yes, said Aya, they say we have the ‘stale odour of corpses’; they find it sickening. This cheers me; fair’s fair; I don’t feel so mean-minded

– a point you can find in p’Bitek, among others. And she holds colonialists and bigots in far higher contempt (“it seems conceited to foist off our notions of religion, which we have never truly practised, onto people whose savagery is much more disorganised, personal and small-scale than ours”).

My mate Paul – a noted cynic – believes, along with most of our generation, that travel is ennobling, inherently. It surely is not, but it certainly does put an edge on some folks’ writing. Not their souls:

One needs Equanil here too, not just in our white urban civilisation; tranquilisers against impatience, against the hysteria induced by heat, and the disgust at dirt...

Generous, stylish, and a fine if not superior substitute for going there.

Galef type:

• Data 1 - a window onto an interesting piece of the world, &
• Values 3 - a holistic value structure, letting you experience that value structure from the inside.

"Tales from Earthsea (Earthsea Cycle, #5)"

Ursula K. Le Guin (2003)
★★★★★
reviewed Feb 2018

My favourite, but you can’t just jump in here; it gets its power from reprise and reprisal.

"The Oxford Companion to Philosophy"

Ted Honderich (1995)
★★★★★
reviewed Jun 2019

Amazing how far this took me, this bundle of short 9pt font columns. Many entries have the denseness of aphorism. Like a thousand dehydrated journal papers in one book. And hundreds of distinctive voices contributing.

You could get very far through a philosophy degree with just this. Speaking strictly hypothetically, that is.

"Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West"

Cormac McCarthy (1992)
★★★★★
reviewed May 2013

Say it is 1985 A.P. (After Peckinpah). How can anyone write anything new about poor white psychopaths in the hot rural places of Victorian America? The answer turns out simple: just have prose so tight and freshening - a jet hose comprising one-third Bible, one-third Emerson, one-third Ballard - that you again uncover the elemental bones of the Western. Also savagely de-emphasise your characters. Place them in enormous, indifferent vistas; give us no inner monologue - nor even indirect report of subjective life; have no speech marks to set their words apart from the landscapes (do not draw the eye to their presumed humanity); have no apostrophes, no hyphens even, lest we remember; have as few names as possible, leave them as types - “kid” or “captain” or “mexican” or “brave”; set their incredible violence among such vast places it looks like little; have few capital letters but for God’s.

Lock your readers out; make everyone and everything opaque. As he says himself:

In the neuter austerity of that terrain all phenomena were bequeathed a strange equality and no one thing nor spider nor stone nor blade of grass could put forth claim to precedence.

These cowboys and injuns punctuate the beautiful land of Central America with hanged babies; rings of decapitate heads; a four-eyed dog; a man calmly eating his own shit; endless thirsty hallucinogenic despair. This is exhausting, quite hard to read:

All night the wind blew and the fine dust set their teeth on edge. Sand in everything, grit in all they ate. In the morning a urinecolored sun rose blearily through panes of dust on a dim world and without feature. The animals were failing... That night they rode through a region electric and wild where strange shapes of soft blue fire ran over the metal of the horses' trappings and the wagonwheels rolled in hoops of fire and little shapes of pale blue light came to perch in the ears of the horses and in the beards of the men... the mountains on the sudden skyline stark and black and livid like a land of some other order out there whose true geology was not stone but fear.

(As well as this Nabokovian trudge through the middle section, McCarthy sometimes steers close to the comical with sentences like ‘Itinerant degenerates bleeding west like a heliotropic plague.’)

A typical human interaction in this book is “The kid looked at the man”; no more. There’s plenty of grandeur - just not in humans.

At the centre stands the Judge: Satan, Ahab and Moby Dick all in one. (“His skin is so pale as to have almost no pigment.”) Racism, fear and poverty form the baseline. The Comanches, for instance, are here worse than demons

...grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns... riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of Christian reckoning...

• “at least demons are Christian”!

Lots of descriptions of the stars, inbetween brutalities

The night sky lies so sprent with stars that there is scarcely a space of black at all and they fall all night in bitter arcs and it is so that their numbers are no less...

The stars burned with a lidless fixity and they drew nearer in the night until toward dawn he was stumbling among the whinstones of the uttermost ridge to heaven.

For the first time I understand why Aristotle’s physics divides the world into different celestial and terranean operations: from down here back then, the stars look so clean and permanent, they’re just not of our world, dirty, unhinged, and endangered as it has been, for almost everyone.

"Understanding Deep Learning"

Simon J D Prince (2023)
★★★★★
reviewed Apr 2024

Currently the best book on the topic: thoughtful, friendly, and comprehensive.

no-one really understands deep learning at the time of writing... Modern deep networks learn piecewise linear functions with more regions than there are atoms in the universe and can be trained with fewer data examples than model parameters. It is neither obvious that we should be able to fit these functions reliably nor that they should generalize well to new data... It is probably hard to imagine equations with these properties, and the reader should endeavor to suspend disbelief for now. These theoretical results are intriguing but usually make unrealistic assumptions about the network structure... Overparameterization seems to be important, but theory cannot yet explain empirical fitting performance However, sharpness is not a good criterion to predict generalization between datasets; when the labels in the CIFAR dataset are randomized (making generalization impossible), there is no commensurate decrease in the flatness of the minimum. Current evidence suggests that overparameterization is needed for generalization — at least for the size and complexity of datasets that are currently used. There are no demonstrations of state-of-the-art performance on complex datasets where there are significantly fewer parameters than training examples. Attempts to reduce model size by pruning or distilling trained networks have not changed this picture. Moreover, recent theory shows that there is a trade-off between the model’s Lipschitz constant and overparameterization; Bubeck & Sellke (2021) proved that in D dimensions, smooth interpolation requires D times more parameters than mere interpolation. They argue that current models for large datasets (e.g., ImageNet) aren’t overparameterized enough; increasing model capacity further may be key to improving performance... there have been efforts to use shallower networks. Zagoruyko & Komodakis (2016) constructed shallower but wider residual neural networks and achieved similar performance to ResNet. More recently, Goyal et al. (2021) constructed a network that used parallel convolutional channels and achieved performance similar to deeper networks with only 12 layers... Nonetheless, the balance of evidence suggests that depth is critical; even the shallowest networks with good image classification performance require >10 layers. However, there is no definitive explanation for why. Three possible explanations are that (i) deep networks can represent more complex functions than shallow ones, (ii) deep networks are easier to train, and (iii) deep networks impose better inductive biases We do not currently have any prescriptive theory that will allow us to predict the circumstances in which training and generalization will succeed or fail. We do not know the limits of learning in deep networks or whether much more efficient models are possible. We do not know if there are parameters that would generalize better within the same model.

It is oddly humble for a textbook: it presents the field as a confusing wonder. I like this man; he is trying to help.

[Free! here]

4/5: Very impressed. 75th percentile.

"Occasional poets: An anthology"

Richard Adams (1986)
★★★★☆
reviewed Mar 2015

Poems from people not known as poets, yielding a equal mix of dedicatories, doggerel, and diamond. Their styles are mostly preserved, epitomised: the big grim novelists (Lessing, Coetzee, Fowles, Murdoch, Golding) write enormous grit-tooth verse;

Heads bowed down or thrown Backward open-eyed Here and there are dark With terrible deaf pictures. Sounds rise up and vanish Into a pitted dome. It continues to rain. The acoustics being imperfect some people fidget. Something which is pure is come To a high magnetic field. Cry out as it passes on When shall we be healed?

Raymond Briggs, a quiet, brutal elegy; David Lodge, some good meta jokes; animal bits from Jan Morris and Stella Gibbons; Wodehouse, two wonderful gossipy hyperboles. Adams manages to pick out the only Naomi Mitchison poems I don’t like. A lot of unbridled sentiment, e.g. Arnold Wesker depressing his children, Francis King’s lies spiralling down, Enoch Powell lying awake listening to his wife’s asthma; the writers aren’t expecting the irony-making pressures of publication, or the obsessive polishing of any work that will be identified with them. So it’s free indeed. Until Adams.

"Infidel"

Ayaan Hirsi Ali (2007)
★★★★☆
reviewed Feb 2019

I told him, "I'm not coming to the [wedding he arranged for her], and all he said was, "You're not required." Legally, this was true.

I went to Sister Aziza and said, “The [Christian] girls will not become Muslims. Their parents have taught them other religions. It isn't their fault, and I don't think it's fair that they'll burn in Hell." Sister Aziza told me I was wrong. Through me, Allah had given them a choice. If these girls rejected the true religion, then it was right that they should burn.

Vivid and horrific. She is sewn shut as a child. Her Sunday school teacher beats her into the hospital. She is forced into marriage. She flees civil war and her family. She becomes an apostate. She makes an edgy film. The latter three are held to be crimes, the last worthy of death. But somehow the book is not a misery memoir.

She is hard to agree with and impossible to ignore; some people solve this tension with absurd insults. Her work against sexism is thought to be negated (and then some) by her succour to racism.

What are the arguments against her views?

• “Her critique only applies to Somalia.” (e.g.) Sadly not.

• “Her critique was only valid in the 70s.” Sadly not.

• “Her critique only applies to Wahhabism.” No; she grew up under non-Saudi Islamic socialism.

• “Her writing is self-serving: she built a political career on denigrating Islam.” Ah yes: cunning of her to be born into oppression, get chopped up and repeatedly forced into marriage; what an impressive long con. More seriously: it doesn’t strike me as a good deal to accept a high probability of murder for the rest of your life, in exchange for a political seat and an academic post. Why is so hard to believe that someone willing to risk her life might mean it?

• “She has no scholarly credentials to speak authoritatively about Islam”. Doesn’t apply to Infidel, since it is a first-person account of several different Muslim regimes. More than this: she grew up in four different Islamic societies, speaks half a dozen languages, and has spent 17 years studying it, at Harvard and places like that. This is not to say she’s correct, it’s just obviously untrue that she has no scholarly credentials.

• “She is an inauthentic ethnic voice.” / “Her portrayals are neo-Orientalist.” / “Her portrayals are an enactment of the colonial civilizing mission discourse.” This is only an objection if you think she’s lying (or cherry-picking), and if you take correspondence to old ideas of bad people as proof of falsehood or unsayableness. Who’s more authentic?

• “Their accounts confirm dangerous stereotypes and reinforce the old-new dichotomy of the ‘civilized us’ versus the ‘barbaric them’. In addition, they increase the pressure on Muslim and Arabs in the U.S., Europe, and elsewhere.” (source) I wouldn’t have used “confirm” there, if I was making his point.

• “Her policy prescriptions are extreme and counterproductive.” This was true through the noughties (she called it ‘fascism’, called it war), but apparently she’s mellowed. (Generally people aren’t given a second chance on these matters.)

• “Hirsi Ali feels she cannot be a feminist and a Muslim… [but] numerous women who espouse feminist, intellectual, Muslim and African identity [exist].” (e.g. here) Completely true.

• “(Only) white men like her” / “Her fans are awful.”. This is very twisted ad hominem (because the critic realises that they can’t attack a Somali woman who has survived decades of abuse).

Here’s one of mine: To understand Ayn Rand - the cartoonish egotism, the false social theory, the needless extremity - you need to remember what she went through: the equally cartoonish, false and extreme Stalinism. (This point would outrage Rand, since it makes a victim of her, and makes her vaunted individualism just a mechanical inversion.) Maybe you could argue Hirsi Ali is like this. Even if you do, it doesn’t reduce our obligation to actually argue with Rand or Hirsi Ali at all, though.

Here’s the crux of the whole thing, her discussing religion with her dad:

"There is no coercion in Islam," my father said. "No human being has the right to punish another for not observing his religious duties. Only Allah can do that." It was like Quran school, but more intelligent. We even talked about martyrdom. My father said that committing suicide for Holy War was acceptable only in the time of the Prophet—and then only because the unbelievers had attacked the Prophet first. Today there could not be a Holy War, he said, because only the Prophet Muhammad could call for a Holy War. This was my father's Islam: a mostly nonviolent religion that was his own interpretation of the Prophet's words. It relied on one's own sense of right and wrong, at least to some degree. It was more intelligent than the Islam I had learned from the ma'alim, and it was also far more humane. Still, this version of Islam also left me with unanswered questions and a sense of injustice: Why was it that only women needed to ask permission from their husband to leave the house, and not the other way round? My father's Islam was also clearly an interpretation of what the Prophet said. As such, it was not legitimate. You may not interpret the will of Allah and the words of the Quran: it says so, right there in the book. There is a read-only lock. It is forbidden to pick and choose: you may only obey. The Prophet said, "I have left you with clear guidance; no one deviates from it after me, except that he shall he destroyed." A fundamentalist would tell my father, "The sentence 'Only the Prophet can call a Holy War' is not in the Quran. You're putting it in there. That is blasphemy."

: Did you notice it? She yields the entire ground to the fundamentalists. She’s a literalist! She notes, correctly, that the Quran forbids interpretation, forbids reformation, and gives up. Never mind that almost all religious people live extremely flexibly with the demands of their religion, “failing” at this and adapting that. Never mind that, contrary to the Word, there’s loads of Islams, that some majority-Muslim countries have been electing women for ages, that some Muslim governments have been trying to stop FGM for a while now. We’re messy, nevertheless, thank god.

(It looks like her more recent books focus on exactly this point, though.)

"The Truth: Stage Adaptation"

Stephen Briggs (2008)
★★★★☆
reviewed Jan 2004

The Disc grew modern, gaining a media (The Truth), sanitation (also The Truth), soft-power politics (Jingo!, Thud!), and institutionalised sport (Unseen Academicals), to add to its latter-day civilian police (Men at Arms), telecoms (Fifth Elephant, and steam power (Raising Steam).

The most literary thing about the Discworld books is this modernisation, from magic to steampunk. This happens comically rapidly – Colour of Magic, the first book, is standard non-chronistic High Fantasy, so, set circa circa 1200CE. Snuff takes place not twenty-five discursive years later – yet the central city is clearly Victorian. And that’s not including the burgeoning intercontinental fax network.

Technology is given its due, but not to the neglect of the institutional side. Disc modernity began with the despot Vetinari’s marketisation of crime, moves through ethnic diversity reforms and open-door immigration, and marches on and on. UA, the sport one, is solid, poignant. He doesn’t often let his wizards get earnest and truly develop – by this stage, magic is comic relief, no longer the determining power or symbol of the Disc.

Snuff is dark and politically worthy, but not his best. He’s been reusing jokes in recent books, and I refuse to speculate on the cause.

"The Power and the Glory"

Graham Greene (2003)
★★★★☆
reviewed Jan 2007

Funny I don’t find Greene’s themes obnoxious, compared to say Waugh.

"Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit (Jeeves, #11)"

P.G. Wodehouse (2002)
★★★★☆
reviewed Jul 2018

Taboo: Moustache. Triangle: Cheesewright - Florence Craye - Gorringe - Wooster Subplot: Selling ‘Milady’s Boudoir’ Aunt: Dahlia Antagonist: Cheesewright Expedient: Accidental balcony romance, accidental theft, several Jeeves specials.

"Roadside Picnic"

Arkady Strugatsky (2000)
★★★★☆
reviewed Sep 2014

Good stuff! Earthy, economic sci-fi; aliens visit, ignore us entirely, and soon leave, leaving behind only transcendent junk and horror-film phenomena from their little picnic. Prose is lovely and plain, translated brilliantly by the mathematician Olena Bormashenko (we get “scabby”, “sham”, “mange”).

The ordinary, crude protagonist Red is scrabbling illegally to provide for his mutant family (the Strugatskys use cash and cash pressure amazingly, grounding the whole cosmic fantasy in commerce, crime, exploitation). Every time Red gets cash, he throws it away – in someone’s face as an insult, in someone’s face as a distraction to evade capture, or just away.

No explanations except bureaucratic filler; no salvation, just dumb defiance. A really nice original touch is that Red interprets the body language of his friends in extreme detail – a scratched nose means, to him, “Whoah, Red, be careful how rough you play with the new kid”.

Also notable for being a Soviet novel set in mid-west America, evoked very, very well. And the Russian Soul under their dismal economics rings out without catching in the barrel:

HAPPINESS, FREE, FOR EVERYONE; LET NO ONE BE FORGOTTEN!

"Information Theory: A Tutorial Introduction"

James V. Stone (2015)
★★★★☆
reviewed Sep 2019

rigour follows insight

A pleasure to spend time with. Stone’s arguments are complete without being bloated, and he has a keen eye for philosophical and intuitive implications (“Why does maximum information look like pure noise?”, “What exactly does half a bit mean?”, and much more). This completeness means that he sometimes repeats definitions or lemmas, but I defy you to find this unhelpful.

The bibliography is also excellent, ranking a hundred books by their specialty and difficulty.

(Quibble: at the end he suggests that Shannon’s originality was so strong that he “single-handedly accelerated the rate of scientific progress, and it is entirely possible that, without his contribution, we would still be treating information as if it were some ill-defined vital fluid”. But his work seems so natural and elementary that this would surprise me. Weak evidence: Konrad Zuse independently invented Shannon’s boolean circuit theory…)

"Surface Detail (Culture, #9)"

Iain M. Banks (2010)
★★★★☆
reviewed May 2013

Meditation on consequentialism and moral progress, only more fun than that sounds. (“Consequences are everything.”) Spends 300 pages setting up its thirteen protagonists into like seven plot threads. As a result, he has to repeat a lot of exposition to keep us - including, in one instance, a full page of quoted dialogue which we’d heard 50 pages back. Oddly simplistic despite its fifth-order intentionality, then.

Surface Detail fills out some of the mechanisms and organisation of the Culture; throws his usual bucket of ideas at the plot (graphic descriptions of Hell, a first-person account of an aquatic, hair-thick species, an extended section in a Medieval convent) and keeps a good amount of tension and mental strain going. Good, full of simple dramatised philosophy.

"The Crow Road"

Iain Banks (1993)
★★★★☆
reviewed Nov 2007

Had an enormous impact on me the first time (I was 16), but very little the 2nd (I was 23).

"A Fire Upon the Deep"

Vernor Vinge (1993)
★★★★☆
reviewed Jun 2017

Deeply satisfying space opera. I thought of The Fifth Element and the Culture throughout, it is as stylish as these while being more serious. Software permeates the book in a way it unforgiveably doesn’t in most scifi. Vinge is a master of dramatic irony - the reader wriggles with knowledge of treachery for hundreds of pages.

His cool, medieval dog aliens are less interesting to me than the space opera bit, but you have to admire the craft involved in them. The big bad is genuinely unnerving. An elevation of plotfests.

"Invisible Man"

Ralph Ellison (1995)
★★★★☆
reviewed Jan 2007

Scathing about all social strata

"The Yellow Admiral (Aubrey & Maturin, #18)"

Patrick O’Brian (1997)
★★★★☆
reviewed May 2021

'...Captain Aubrey, whose name is no doubt familiar.' 'Oh, certainly,' said Needham, who wished to make a good impression on this formidable figure, but whose talents did not really lie in that direction.

—

Vast space given over to Discourse on land enclosure (mostly to set up yet another gaffe and set of political enemies for Jack). It’s probably pretty hard for people outside the UK to understand Jack’s sentimental uneconomical Conservatism - or, since the One Nation Tories are dead and buried, even if you’re in the UK.

'Jack,' said Stephen, 'I have been contemplating on your words about the nature of the majority, your strangely violent, radical, and even - forgive me - democratic words, which, with their treasonable implication of "one man, one vote", might be interpreted as an attack on the sacred rights of property; and I should like to know how you reconcile them with your support of a Tory ministry in the House.' 'Oh, as for that,' said Jack, 'I have no difficulty at all. It is entirely a matter of scale and circumstance. Everyone knows that on a large scale democracy is pernicious nonsense - a country or even a county cannot be run by a self-seeking parcel of tub-thumping politicians working on popular emotion, rousing the mob. Even at Brooks's, which is a hotbed of democracy, the place is in fact run by the managers and those that don't like it may either do the other thing or join Boodle's; while as for a man-of-war, it is either an autocracy or it is nothing, nothing at all - mere nonsense. You saw what happened to the poor French navy at the beginning of the Revolutionary War...' '...while at the other end of the scale, although "one man, one vote" certainly smells of brimstone and the gallows, everyone has always accepted it in a jury trying a man for his life. An inclosure belongs to this scale: it too decides men's lives. I had not realized how thoroughly it does so until I came back from sea and found that Griffiths and some of his friends had persuaded my father to join with them in inclosing Woolcombe Common: he was desperate for money at the time. Woolcombe was never so glorious a place as Simmon's Lea, but I like it very well - surprising numbers of partridge and woodcock in the season - and when I saw it all cleared, flattened, drained, fenced and exploited to the last half-bushel of wheat, with many of the small encroachments ploughed up and the cottages destroyed, and the remaining commoners, with half of their living and all their joy quite gone, reduced to anxious cap-inhand casual labourers, it hurt my heart...’ ‘...what they and the bigger farmers hate is the possibility of the labourers growing saucy, as they call it, asking for higher wages - for a wage that keeps up with the price of corn - refusing to work if they do not get it, and falling back on what they can wring from the common. No common, no sauciness'

i.e. Class war, but with peasants and aristos against the bourgeoisie. (Still the most popular class war? - witness the depiction of the middle class in ~any work of art of the last 60 years, where I take the new professional elite, including novelists and painters, to have replaced aristos.)

Neither Harding nor Stephen had sentimental, misty views of rural poverty: they both knew too much about the squalor, dirt, idleness, petty thieving, cruelty, frequent drunkenness and not uncommon incest that could occur to have any idyllic notion of a poor person's life in the country. 'But,' said Harding, 'it is what we are used to; and with all its plagues it is better than being on the parish or having to go round to the farmer's back door begging for a day's work and being turned away. No, it ain't all beer and skittles but with the common a man is at least half his own man. And without the common he's the farmer's dog. That's why we are so main fond of Captain Jack.'

—

Stephen took his disappointment philosophically. After all, he had himself reached nearly seven years of age before he paid really serious attention to voles.

—

He felt no particular guilt [for cheating on his wife] except for this foolishness [in leaving evidence]: by his code a man who was directly challenged [seduced] must in honesty engage -anything else would be intolerably insulting. Yet had he known of this miserable old woman's prying and her malice he would certainly have played the scrub in Canada.

—

He revered the sound if not the full implication of the Book of Common Prayer, the Lessons and the usual psalms and readings: the other rituals such as the inspection of the entire ship and every soul aboard her, clean, shaved, sober and toeing a given line or rather seam, soothed his mind; and although today he did not feel up to reading a sermon he and all his people were pei~ectly satisfied with the even more usual Articles of War, which, through immemorial use, had acquired ecclesiastical qualities of their own.

—

Diana:

‘I have it on the best authority [her own] that Jack is no artist in these matters [sex]. He can board and carry an enemy frigate with guns roaring and drums beating in a couple of minutes; but that is no way to give a girl much pleasure. In better hands she would, I am sure, have been a very likely young woman; and oh so much happier.' 'Clearly, you know more about these things than I.’

—

The military-military complex:

'War of course is a bad thing,' he went on. 'But it is our way of life - has been these twenty years and more - and for most of us it is our only hope of a ship, let alone of promotion: and I well remember how my heart sank in the year two, the year of the peace of Amiens. But let me offer this reflection by way of comfort: in the year two my spirits were so low that if I could have afforded a piece of rope I should have hanged myself. Well, as everyone knows that peace did not last, and in the year four I was made post, jobbing captain of Lively, and a lively time we had of it too. I throw this out, because if one peace with an untrustworthy enemy can be broke, another peace with the same fellow can be broke too; and our country will certainly need defending, above all by sea. So' - filling his glass again - 'let us drink to the paying-off, and may it be a peaceful, orderly and cheerful occasion, followed by a short, I repeat very short run ashore.'

—

The Philosophers were not a particularly ascetic body of men: few of them had ever allowed philosophy to spoil their appetites - their president weighed over fifteen stone - and they now set about their dinner with the earnestness it deserved.

"Farewell, My Lovely (Philip Marlowe, #2)"

Raymond Chandler (1992)
★★★★☆
reviewed Jun 2018

Relentlessly idiomatic. Hollow like a bell. Marlowe is not presented as feeling anything except incessant fatigue and occasional lust. The prose is fast and somehow innocent though surrounded by darkness:

The eighty-five cent dinner tasted like a discarded mail bag and was served to me by a waiter who looked as if he would slug me for a quarter, cut my throat for six bits, and bury me at sea in a barrel of concrete for a dollar and a half, plus sales tax. A hand I could have sat in came out of the dimness and took hold of my shoulder and squashed it to a pulp. Then the hand moved me through the doors and casually lifted me up a step. The large face looked at me. A deep soft voice said to me, quietly: "Smokes in here, huh? Tie that for me, pal." It was dark in there. It was quiet. From up above came vague sounds of humanity, but we were alone on the stairs. The big man stared at me solemnly and went on wrecking my shoulder with his hand. "A dinge," he said. "I just thrown him out. You seen me throw him out?"

Sure, Noir is cliche now, but we should try to stop Seinfeld effects from undermining original work. And I think he really was original.

You could get to like that face a lot. Glamoured up blondes were a dime a dozen, but that was a face that would wear. I smiled at it.

Give him enough time and pay him enough money and he'll cure anything from a jaded husband to a grasshopper plague. He would be an expert in frustrated love affairs, women who slept alone and didn't like it, wandering boys and girls who didn't write home, sell the property now or hold it for another year, will this part hurt me with my public or make me seem more versatile? Men would sneak in on him too, big strong guys that roared like lions around their offices and were all cold mush under their vests. But mostly it would be women, fat women that panted and thin women that burned, old women that dreamed and young women that thought they might have Electra complexes, women of all sizes, shapes and ages, but with one thing in common—money. No Thursdays at the County Hospital for Mr. Jules Amthor.

"You lied to me." "It was a pleasure." He was silent a moment, as if deciding something. "We'll let that pass," he said. "I've seen her. She came in and told me her story. She's the daughter of a man I knew and respected, as it happens... Well, that's all. Remember what I told you last night. Don't try getting ideas about this case. All we want from you is silence. Otherwise—" He paused. I yawned into the mouthpiece. "I heard that," he snapped. "Perhaps you think I'm not in a position to make that stick. I am. One false move out of you and you'll be locked up as a material witness." "You mean the papers are not to get the case?" "They'll get the murder—but they won't know what's behind it." "Neither do you," I said. "I've warned you twice now," he said. "The third time is out." "You're doing a lot of talking," I said, "for a guy that holds cards." I got the phone hung in my face for that

Learned a lot of words, had a lot of fun. Power in simplicity.

I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance. I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun. I put them on and went out of the room.

"Permutation City"

Greg Egan (1995)
★★★★☆
reviewed Apr 2018

The best-written info-dump ever. Egan’s predictions for the near-future are looking really good 25 years on: the dominance of cloud computing, the digital-nomad life, spam filters, molecular-chem composer VR …Still some amusing bits of course, e.g. “He was using more computing power than Fujitsu.”

Reading about the legal expert-system she has free access to, I itched for the future to arrive.

There are a few logical holes in the plot which Egan helpfully erratas here.

"Witch Wood"

John Buchan (2003)
★★★★☆
reviewed Aug 2013

Ornate and surprisingly subtle picture of the Scots Borders during the Reformation. Mystery novel without a detective. Went into this with unfair scepticism but was impressed by his making boring theological debates dramatic, and by his unsentimental nature prose. I also learned lots of words.

"Algorithmics: The Spirit of Computing (2nd Edition)"

David Harel (1992)
★★★★☆
reviewed Apr 2015

A thing of beauty: an attempt at a work of computer science that doesn’t date. It’s general abstract introductory matter. The field is hugely consequential: different algorithms for the same task can differ in performance by a factor of trillions.

Bible quotations book-end each chapter and give this a frisson of something other.

"Never Mind (Patrick Melrose, #1)"

Edward St. Aubyn (1992)
★★★★☆
reviewed Dec 2015

Tense, effortless, funny, devastating. A single day among the melting upper-class, building up to a dinner party - but eliding the contempt we might feel with pathos and pain and humour.

The dialogue is consistently impressive. Victor is the most convincing philosopher character I’ve seen - neurotic, analytic, too in his head to be harmful. Patrick’s model of the world is slightly too sophisticated model for a five-year-old, but the scene in which he’s introduced is the most convincing childlike prose:

Patrick walked towards the well. In his hand he carried a grey plastic sword with a gold handle, and swished it at the pink flowers of the valerian plants that grew out of the terrace wall. When there was a snail on one of the fennel stems, he sliced his sword down the stalk and made it fall off. If he killed a snail he had to stamp on it quickly and then run away, because it went all squishy like blowing your nose. Then he would go back and have a look at the broken brown shell stuck in the soft grey flesh, and would wish he hadn’t done it. It wasn’t fair to squash the snails after it rained because they came out to play, bathing in the pools under the dripping leaves and stretching out their horns. When he touched their horns they darted back and his hand darted back as well. For snails he was like a grown-up.

And the venomous, purely perverse relationship of his parents produces gasping lines like

At the beginning, there had been talk of using some of her money to start a home for alcoholics. In a sense they had succeeded.

I stumble over David, the charming psychopath rampant. It is too hard to understand intentional evil, even when snobbery, tough love parenting and simple rage are proffered as explanations. I had a petite mort at the end. Really fantastic.

In one sitting.

"Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won't Go Away"

Rebecca Goldstein (2014)
★★★★☆
reviewed May 2016

It is very hard to say anything new about Plato. Except, of course it isn’t, because he spoke in the most general possible terms, and the world continues to do unprecedented things and so allow for new commentary and new applications of Plato. It will always be possible to say something new about Plato because, until the heat death draws near, it will be possible to say something new about the world, and criticism should relate the old but general with the new and unanalysed.

This was really deep fun: Goldstein debunks a great deal about him via close-reading (e.g.: that Plato’s book, Πολιτεία, has no etymological or structural relation to modern republics). Some very moving chapters, too, particularly the neuroscientist dialogue: she renders this man we know almost nothing personal about as polite, curious and modest, willing to suspend judgment on e.g. our popular democracy. The titular chapter is best, involving the philosopher wrestling with one imperfect implementation of his epistemocracy, the data-mining Silicon Valley engineer:

"You're telling me that the purpose of all of this knowledge is merely to make money? Greed is driving the great search engine for knowledge? This bewilders me... How can those who possess all knowledge, which must include the knowledge of the life most worth living, be interested in using knowledge only for the insignificant aim of making money?"      "Plato, I said, I think you have a somewhat exalted view of Google and the nerds who work here."      "Nerds?" he said. "Another word I do not know."      Well, again I was in a somewhat awkward position, since I didn't want to offend Plato, who struck me, despite his eye contact and excellent manners, as a nerd par excellence. So I fell back on something I'd once heard... that the word was originally "knurd", which is "drunk" spelled backwards, and was used for students who would rather study than party.      "And the people who work here at Google are all nerds?"      "I would say each and every one." I smiled at him.      He smiled and looked around the café as if he had died and gone to philosophers' heaven.      "My chosen term for nerd", he said, "is philosopher-king".

Goldstein’s move for each chapter is to draw out an inconsistency in Plato that later became a persistent philosophical dichotomy; the chapters are all classical dialogues, actually trialogues at least. Also she makes us note how little explanation of modern culture Plato would actually need to be able to deploy his existing arguments. Witty and persuasive. (You’d think I’d need no persuading of the eternal value of philosophy, and nor do I, but I’d no intention of studying Plato properly before this.)

In one sentence: Plato wanders contemporary America, Chromebook tucked under his arm, looking to understand the few ways we are radically different.

"Matter (Culture, #8)"

Iain M. Banks (2008)
★★★★☆
reviewed May 2013

This entry’s mostly set on a C17th world, the rest given over to barely interesting galactic politics. The Culture novels feel free to wave away technological plot devices with talk of “energy grid!” or “nanotech!”, but Banks shows off hard-scifi cred here, giving a few lovely, moving images based on meteorology and astrophysics.  On the current-affairs blogosphere:

A rapidly expanding but almost entirely vapid cloud of comment, analysis, speculation and exploitation...Welcome to the future, she thought, surveying the wordage and tat. All our tragedies and triumphs, our lives and deaths,our shames and joys are just stuffing for your emptiness.

Ending is good and brutal, made me stop and infer for ten mins afterward. So, yeah, Banks has been playing the same “ooh, neo-colonialism”, “ooh, consequences”, “ooh, angst in utopia” note for a while. But hey it’s a good note.

"The Fifth Elephant (Discworld, #24; City Watch, #5)"

Terry Pratchett (2009)
★★★★☆
reviewed Apr 2014

About oil, conservatism, the Inscrutable Balkans. The most literary of his excellent police books: telecomms as model and amplifier of emotional and cultural ties; contact with otherness as cause and defining feature of modernity.

Less grandiosely, he trots out his satisfying werewolf point again: in actual fact, the creature inbetween human and wolf is not a terrifying lunatic chimera but a dog.

"FLCL, Volume 1 (FLCL, #1)"

Gainax (2003)
★★★★☆
reviewed May 2021

Even harder to follow than the difficult tv show, and lacking its crazed garish starburst tricks and that aching soundtrack. The show is the best depiction of my adolescence, better than Dazed and Confused, deeper than Catcher in the Rye, rawer than Infinite Jest, less Jesuitical and specific than Portrait of the Artist. Teen age is an alien smashing your head with a bass at 40 mph, and weird things climbing out of the crater. A blur, a pastiche of childhood and adulthood, a parody that thinks it’s a tragedy. Naota is exploited repeatedly, and is either indifferent or passionately glad of it. Mamimi is flat here, less pathetic and less perverse. Atomsk, the only adult in the universe, is constantly on the way and never arrives.

All the same I might have understood the show on the first watch if I’d had this. As it is I got the presentiment of awe, the IOU of a justification of an entire dumb medium.

4 stars for me, probably not for you

"Transmetropolitan, Vol. 1: Back on the Street"

Warren Ellis (1998)
★★★★☆
reviewed Feb 2021

Despite being loaded to the eyeballs with gimmicks, ideas, devices, and body mods, Ellis somehow avoids the unhealthy philosophy and milieu of cyberpunk, in which technology (Black Mirror) or economics (anything by Gibson) or humanity itself (anything by Dick or Peter Watts) are depicted as inherently vicious, inherently doomed, inherently anything. No matter how changed, how corrupted the world is, it is still alive, full of possibility. This is a keystone of science fiction, and so cyberpunk - science fiction without possibility - has always been missing a chunk of its own foundations.

This city never allowed itself to decay or degrade. It's wildly, intensely growing. It's a loud bright stinking mess. It takes strength from its thousands of cultures, and the thousands more that grow anew each day. It isn't perfect. It lies and cheats. It's no utopia and it ain't the mountain by a long shot -- but it's alive. I can't argue that.

Great writing, great full colour art, not an excessive amount of Hunter Thompson aggrandisement and misanthropy.

"Yotsuba&!, Vol. 1 (Yotsuba&!, #1)"

Kiyohiko Azuma (2005)
★★★★☆
reviewed Mar 2021

So soothing, so winsome. Gives me the same feeling as Wodehouse; of dropping into another, simpler world. In fact they both rely on social tension and innocent deviance for their laughs.

"Mushishi, Vol. 1"

Yuki Urushibara (2007)
★★★★☆
reviewed Mar 2021

Good, but the show surpasses it in every way. entrancing bittersweetness.

"Open Borders: The Science and Ethics of Immigration"

Bryan Caplan (2019)
★★★★☆
reviewed Nov 2019

Beautiful stuff, perhaps the clearest economic argument I’ve ever seen, and more moving than expected. I’ve seen people dismiss it as narrowly economic (“people value more than money ya know”) but this is stupid: fully half the book is about morals and culture. There are dozens of lovely little easter eggs in Weinersmith’s art too (e.g. “Conspicuone Pecansumption” icecream).

The arguments:

1. Closed borders lead to incredible suffering - not just the obvious oppression of camps, raids, struggle and drownings, but also the unnecessary perpetuation of poverty.

2. He argues that it’s a human rights issue: “If a foreigner wants to accept a job offer from a willing employer or rent an apartment from a willing landlord, what moral right does anyone have to stop them? These are contracts between consenting adults, not welfare programs.” The regulation is an apartheid with comparatively little outcry and great popularity.

3. America had completely open borders until 1875 and comparatively-free undocumented immigration until 1924. It did pretty alright.

4. Immigrants on average have been fiscally net-positive. Doing our best to isolate the effects, moving to a rich country seems to multiply your productivity. (For a few reasons: more co-operation, a larger market for your work, no tropical disease, coastal trade, IQ gain if you’re young.) This model predicts trillions of dollars of gain from open borders. If true, this massively reduces global poverty.

5. Immigrants are on average culturally positive, allowing the recipient country to select from the best of everything in the world. The first generation are quite a bit more law-abiding than average natives. (Nowrasteh estimates that just one in seven million immigrants turned out to be a terrorist.) Assimilation is high, usually complete within 2-3 generations. “Political externalities” (the idea that your good culture will be voted out by bad culture once you let immigrants vote) have not in fact been seen.

Residual points:

• The data is mostly from our current highly-restricted high-skill-only immigration regime. It's not clear which effects would change in the dramatically different world Caplan promotes, though he does his best to look at saturation effects and the low-skilled who are currently persecuted-out. (For instance, a large part of his cultural argument depends on the low-skilled continuing to not vote, as they haven't.)


• The biggest risk by far is the damage caused by irrational native backlash against foreigners. This produces things like Brexit and the Jobbik and Austrian 'Freedom' governments. Chapter 6 addresses some of this by suggesting ways to make things unfair for the migrants (limiting their welfare access, entry tolls, language tests, slow naturalisation) to mollify the local problems / backlash and so protect people's right to move in the first place. I glumly suspect this wouldn't work, because much of the backlash isn't based on real effects, and so can't be mollified by policy. (Indeed, he notes that most of the suggested hobbles already exist in US law in some form, and might have somewhat dulled anti-immigration sentiment.)


• He sometimes implies that he'd open borders in one big bang - but this size of policy shift should basically never be done, just out of epistemic modesty and reversibility. His counter is that the magnitude of the gains is too large to be possibly less than zero.


• It's mostly based on US data and US policy is the target, which is completely fine but limits the inference. This is sensible; general theory, general policy usually fail.


• To my surprise he doesn't much emphasise the macropolitical benefits of immigration: if people could just leave countries with terrible policies, taking their taxes with them, this would be a new and powerful check on government abuse. Voting with your feet, and governments actually trying to attract and retain people.


• Though its evidence checks out (as far as I can tell), it's still a polemic (like The Wealth of Nations before it!). As such it's simple, too simple. The Center for Global Development has a sadder, equivocal summary congruent to the limits of social science:

  No case study or academic paper can—ever—spell out what “the” effect of “immigration” is. Asking this question has as little use as asking whether “taxes” are inherently “good” or “bad.” The answer depends on what is taxed and what the revenue is spent on. Those choices make the policy harmful or beneficial. The same is true of migration.

"Men at Arms (Discworld, #15; City Watch, #2)"

Terry Pratchett (2003)
★★★★☆
reviewed Jan 2004

S’ok. Identity politics and gun control – so, a very American British fantasy. Works: my audience squealed in horror at the right places, the deaths of fond characters.

(Read aloud)

"The Metamorphosis"

Franz Kafka (1972)
★★★★☆
reviewed Jan 2006

Hard to believe, but I missed the obvious metaphor when I read it first, as a teenager.

The selection I have also contains the lovely sanguine piece ‘The Aeroplanes at Brescia’, the first in a series of travel vignettes he planned to write and sell. I don’t suppose it would be as interesting without the tragic backdrop of Kafka, without it representing such a different route through history, that fucking scumbag, history.

"Nice & the Good"

Iris Murdoch (1968)
★★★★☆
reviewed Jul 2016

A joy, a dirge, and so sincere I cried. Both a tame London murder mystery and a sliding-doors comedy of manners in Dorset, the two plots dreaming each other, running laminar. These mere genres are electrified by Murdoch’s ethics and filled up with her wit. Like Greene, she is the apotheosis of trash conventions. I feel I am a better person afterward, or at least a better fool. The following derives its power from 200 pages of buildup suddenly letting loose, but it might give you an idea:

Jealousy is the most natural to us of the really wicked passions... It must be resisted with every honest cunning and with deliberate generous thoughts, however abstract and empty these may seem in comparison with that wicked strength. Think about the virtue that you need and call it generosity, magnanimity, charity. You are young, Jessica, and you are very delightful – may I just take your hand, so? – and the world is not spoilt for you yet. There is no merit, Jessica, in a faithfulness which is poison to you and captivity to him. You have nothing to gain here except by losing. You wish to act out your love, to give it body, but there is only one act left to you that is truly loving and that is to let him go, gently and without resentment. Put all your, energy into that and you will win from the world of the spirit a grace which you cannot now even dream of. For there is grace, Jessica, there are principalities and powers, there is unknown good which flies magnetically toward the good we know. And suppose that you had found what you were looking for, my dear child? Would you not have been led on from jealousy through deceit into cruelty? Human frailty forms a system, Jessica, and faults in the past have their endlessly spreading network of results. We are not good people, Jessica, and we shall always be involved in that great network, you and I. All we can do is constantly to notice when we begin to act badly, to check ourselves, to go back, to coax our weakness and inspire our strength, to call upon the names of virtues of which we know perhaps only the names. We are not good people, and the best we can hope for is to be gentle, to forgive each other and to forgive the past...

An essay on the benefits and limits of polyamory; on the trials of self-conscious virtue; an extended gag about virtue’s unlikeability. I love the appalling drawling fops Octavian and Kate, I love the notably indistinct Fivey, and I clutch Ducane to myself like a home-knitted scarf against strong winter wind. So pure!

"My Man Jeeves (Jeeves, #1)"

P.G. Wodehouse (2007)
★★★★☆
reviewed Feb 2018

The first Jeeves collection, including several stories told by a proto-Wooster called “Reggie Pepper”. PG’s prose is slightly less glowing and divine at this early juncture, but it still makes me smile on every fourth page.

"Hate, Vol. 2: Buddy the Dreamer"

Peter Bagge (1994)
★★★★☆
reviewed May 2021

I expected this to be usual boo-to-normality huzzah-for-bohemia bien-pensant stuff, but it’s actually down on slacker culture, rock n roll bullshit, being a scrub. Every character is deeply flawed, and even the nice ones are drawn deformed (noses longer than their legs, pinprick eyes, eyes crawling along the nose). Buddy is self-aware and funny, but also a shit. Lots of observations, violated principles, ordinary madness.

"The Lord of the Rings"

J.R.R. Tolkien (2005)
★★★★☆
reviewed Jan 2001

Anti-modern, stilted, and it inspired millions of pages of awful work, but hey it’s grand. A glorious mess (or, a glorious mess draped over an impressive classical edifice, the linguistics.) : a devout Catholic tries to write a mythic prehistory of Earth… with its own pagan pantheon, where a cool man with a shiny gem on his face is also a giant ball of carbon dioxide.

People don’t seem to realise that it’s a mess. Maybe all fiction is, when you know it intimately enough.

Is this hate-reading? I don’t think so, I wouldn’t get goosebumps at this if it was:

There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach.

"Thud! (Discworld, #34; City Watch, #7)"

Terry Pratchett (2006)
★★★★☆
reviewed Jan 2008

See here for my theory of Discworld international development.

"Use of Weapons (Culture, #3)"

Iain M. Banks (1992)
★★★★☆
reviewed Nov 2015

The protagonist is cartoonish, full of piratical energy, but saved from a boring super-soldier effect by pathos of the Bad Lieutenant variety. Banks was always quite open about how didactic the sci-fi novels were; they are saved by his sheer inventiveness and the grand psychological realism amidst the technological fantasy.

What do humans have to offer, after the singularity? What skills are scarce? Banks’ answer is: “a lack of scruples; excessive force; the ability to not care.” We should be so lucky.

This scene had a large effect on me as a child:

'Of course I don't have to do this,' one middle-aged man said, carefully cleaning the table with a damp cloth. He put the cloth in a little pouch, sat down beside him. "But look; this table's clean.'      He agreed that the table was clean.      "Usually,' the man said. "I work on alien -- no offence -- alien religions; Directional Emphasis In Religious Observance; that's my specialty ... like when temples or graves or prayers always have to face in a certain direction; that sort of thing? Well, I catalogue, evaluate, compare; I come up with theories and argue with colleagues, here and elsewhere. But ... the job's never finished; always new examples, and even the old ones get re-evaluated, and new people come along with new ideas about what you thought was settled ... but,' he slapped the table, "when you clean a table you clean a table. You feel you've done something. It's an achievement."      "But in the end, it's still cleaning a table."      "And therefore does not really signify on the cosmic scale of events?' the man suggested.       He smiled in response to the man's grin, "Well, yes.'       'But then what does signify? My other work? Is that really important, either?' I could try composing wonderful musical works, or day-long entertainment epics, but what would that do? Give people pleasure? My wiping this table gives me pleasure. And people come to a clean table, which gives them pleasure. And anyway" - the man laughed - "people die; stars die; universes die. What is any achievement, however great it was, once time itself is dead? Of course, if all I did was wipe tables, then of course it would seem a mean and despicable waste of my huge intellectual potential. But because I choose to do it, it gives me pleasure. And," the man said with a smile, "it's a good way of meeting people."

As did this, before I studied formal philosophy and received a resounding confirmation of it:

     “Aw, come on; argue, dammit.”      “I don’t believe in argument,” he said, looking out into the darkness.      “You don’t?” Erens said, genuinely surprised. “Shit, and I thought I was the cynical one.”      “It’s not cynicism,” he said flatly. “I just think people overvalue argument because they like to hear themselves talk.”      “Oh well, thank you.”      “It’s comforting, I suppose.” He watched the stars wheel, like absurdly slow shells seen at night: rising, peaking, falling...(And reminded himself that the stars too would explode, perhaps, one day.) “Most people are not prepared to have their minds changed,” he said. “And I think they know in their hearts that other people are just the same, and one of the reasons people become angry when they argue is that they realize just that, as they trot out their excuses.”      “Excuses, eh?"      "Yes, excuses," he said, with what Erens thought might just have been a trace of bitterness. "I strongly suspect the things people believe in are usually just what they instinctively feel is right; the excuses, the justifications, the things you're supposed to argue about, come later. They're the least important part of the belief. That's why you can destroy them, win an argument, prove the other person wrong, and still they believe what they did in the first place." He looked at Erens. "You've attacked the wrong thing.”

But this was also before I got into technical pursuits which lend us hope that the above grim realism can be defeated by self-awareness, quantification, and epistemic care. Sometimes.

"The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life"

Erving Goffman (1990)
★★★★☆
reviewed Jan 2012

Queering the fake/authentic binary

"A Season in Hell"

Arthur Rimbaud (1998)
★★★★☆
reviewed May 2009

Trembling / thrashing.

"Step Aside, Pops (Hark! A Vagrant, #2)"

Kate Beaton (2015)
★★★★☆
reviewed Sep 2018

So silly but also so sensible.

"The Mind’s I: Fantasies and Reflections on Self and Soul"

Douglas R. Hofstadter (1985)
★★★★☆
reviewed Jan 2009

Wonderful: giant concepts conveyed through excerpts of great fiction.

"Thomas Jefferson: Author of America (Eminent Lives)"

Christopher Hitchens (2009)
★★★★☆
reviewed Oct 2018

Short critical portrait of a grand hypocrite.

where Locke had spoken of "life, liberty, and property" as natural rights, Jefferson famously wrote "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness"... given the advantageous social position occupied by the delegates at Philadelphia, it is very striking indeed that [this] should have taken precedence over property.

I was worried that Hitchens might have gone soft over his adopted land but it’s full of this kind of thing:

A bad conscience, evidenced by slovenly and contradictory argument, is apparent in almost every paragraph of his discourse on [slavery].

as well as his humourlessness, adultery, self-service, self-pity, horrendous partisanship, and, surprisingly, bloody ruthlessness. Jefferson:

what signify a few lives lost in a century or two? the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants. it is it's natural manure.

(He was pro-Jacobin for a terribly long time.)

Try and judge him fairly. How did his actions (not his words lol) compare to the prevailing spirit?:

• Democracy: Well above average, even revolutionary US average.
• Slaves: Hard to say. Inherited 200. Freed only 7. Tried to write a condemnation of slavery into the Declaration. Wrote a bill banning slavery in new states, narrowly lost the vote. “Even as he yearned to get rid of them, he refused to let them go”
• Native Americans: Average, bad.
• Freedom of speech: Average. Had paid shills in the gutter press throughout his career, and prosecuted enemy journalists for Sedition.
• Freedom of religion: Well above average.
• Women: Average, bad.
• Working-class: Above average in intention, protecting the “plundered ploughman and beggared yeomanry”. Pretty populist, constantly ranting about bankers and tipping the political balance away from cities.

Jefferson:

The man must be a prodigy who can retain his manners and morals undepraved by such circumstances.

His fear of a freedmen uprising apparently paralysed him. The conventional wisdom around 1800 was that you couldn’t just free the slaves, you’d also have to deport them (to e.g. Sierra Leone like the British) to prevent them taking their rightful vengeance on the planters. His turning on the Haitians for similar reasons is one of the saddest and dumbest moments in a life of compromise.

Whatever view one takes of Burke's deepening pessimism and dogmatic adherence to the virtues of Church and King, the fact is that after the summer of 1791 the Jacobins did their best to prove him right.

Deleted scene from the Declaration of Independence:

[King George] has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian King of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where Men should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or restrain this execrable commerce.

And Hitchen’s final exceptionalist thought:

The French Revolution destroyed itself in Jefferson's own lifetime. More modern revolutions have destroyed themselves and others. If the American Revolution, with its... gradual enfranchisement of those excluded or worse at its founding, has often betrayed itself at home and abroad, it nevertheless remains the only revolution that still retains any power to inspire."

"Unterzakhn (Pantheon Graphic Library)"

Leela Corman (2012)
★★★★☆
reviewed Jun 2021

Bursting with energy, Yiddish and Bronx and Corman. The voices are so fun to hear in your head that it flies by. Makes other written dialogue seem like the papery nonsense it is.

Doesn’t shy away from the brutality of the very recent past. The principled midwife is a eugenicist. Fanya is violently proud. Esther is dead inside. The casual pogroms of the old world.

Everyone is grotesque but their faces morph between so many different grotesque expressions you don’t mind.

"New Year Letter"

W.H. Auden (1965)
★★★★☆
reviewed Oct 2016

800 heroic couplets written off the cuff for a friend. Pompous, showy, and forced: I love his idiocies, I love his verse footnotes, which are as long as the original poem again and arraying all his beetling, piecemeal research into his age at least: cell biology, crank psychoanalysis, early sociology, Nietzsche, Nietzsche, all the arts and sciences nominally in his pocket. Anyway half of the idiocy is forced on him by the genre, epic verse, which always sounds damn silly to me (not that I mind silliness in my high art, but I do mind people being silly and not admitting it):

Tonight a scrambling decade ends, And strangers, enemies and friends Stand once more puzzled underneath The signpost on the barren heath Where the rough mountain track divides... A weary Asia out of sight Is tugging gently at the night, Uncovering a restless race; Clocks shoo the childhood from its face, And accurate machines begin To concentrate its adults in A narrow day to exercise Their gifts in some cramped enterprise. How few pretend to like it: O, Three quarters of these people know Instinctively what ought to be The nature of society And how they'd live there if they could. If it were easy to be good, And cheap, and plain as evil, how We all would be its members now... How grandly would our virtues bloom In a more conscionable dust Where Freedom dwells because it must, Necessity because it can, And men confederate in Man. But wishes are not horses, this Annus is not mirabilis; Day breaks upon the world we know Of war and wastefulness and woe... The New Year brings an earth afraid, Democracy a ready-made And noisy tradesman's slogan, and The poor betrayed into the hand Of lackeys with ideas, and truth Whipped by their elders out of youth, The peaceful fainting in their tracks With martyrs' tombstones on their backs, And culture on all fours to greet A butch and criminal elite, While in the vale of silly sheep Rheumatic old patricians weep...

One critic, screwing up all his strength, called Auden’s bad style, which NYL is supposed to be an instance of, “snide bright jargon”, which is a perfect compliment! (if you don’t view limpid repetition of what every other sensitive outsider has said before you as poetry’s point.) I’ve not read it alone on New Year’s Eve like you ought to, but I will.

"A Mathematician's Lament: How School Cheats Us Out of Our Most Fascinating and Imaginative Art Form"

Paul Lockhart (2009)
★★★★☆
reviewed Oct 2018

if I had to design a mechanism for the express purpose of destroying a child’s natural curiosity and love of pattern-making, I couldn’t possibly do as good a job as is currently being done— I simply wouldn’t have the imagination to come up with the kind of senseless, soul-crushing ideas that constitute contemporary mathematics education. Everyone knows that something is wrong. The politicians say, “we need higher standards.” The schools say, “we need more money and equipment.” Educators say one thing, and teachers say another. They are all wrong. The only people who understand what is going on are the ones most often blamed and least often heard: the students. They say, “math class is stupid and boring,” and they're right...

[Excerpt free here]

"Einstein: His Life and Universe"

Walter Isaacson (2007)
★★★★☆
reviewed May 2017

Physics becomes in those years the greatest collective work of art of the twentieth century.

• Jacob Bronowski

What to say about the stereotypically great? Start by scrubbing off the accumulated century of journalism and appropriations. <p>Einstein’s scientific achievements:</p>

• A model of Brownian motion: the decisive argument for the existence of atoms. His model enabled experimental confirmation of Dalton's theory, after a hundred years of denial or instrumentalism.
• An elementary particle, the photon. The atomic hypothesis applied even to light.
• A law for the photoelectric effect, implying a quantum theory of all EM radiation. (A realist about quanta, unlike Planck.)
• So also lots of pieces of the "old" quantum theory.
• A theory of light and so space and time, special relativity.
• A physical constraint on metaphysics: no absolute time.
• A fairly consequential law, mass-energy equivalence
• A flawed but progressive theory of heat capacity, the Einstein theory of solids
• A better method of analysing quantum systems, "EBK". An ignored semiclassical precursor to quantum chaos theory.
• The greatest scientific theory, General Relativity. Explaining gravity and, so, the shape of the universe.
• Implies the first modern cosmology
• Gravitational lensing (confirmed 1998)
• Inadvertently predicted dark energy.
• A crucial experiment: gravitational waves. (Confirmed 2015.)
• Implies a whole lot more like black holes but you can't name everything "Einstein thing".
• A general method for thermodynamics and information theory: Bose-Einstein statistics.
• New state of matter: the Bose–Einstein condensate
• Fruitful failed theory: first local hidden variable theory
• A profound phenomenon, quantum entanglement. (Susskind calls entanglement "Einstein's last great discovery", though he 'discovered' it by trying to reductio away Copenhagen interpretation, taking entanglement to be a disproof.) (Confirmed properly 2015.)
• A crucial experiment for a metaphysical principle, local realism is false!: EPR
• Inadvertently, a physical constraint on metaphysics: nonlocality.
• Thought-experiment: The content of the "Schrödinger's" cat setup
• Repostulation of wormholes. (Not confirmed.)
• Isotope separation methods for the Manhattan project.
• Also a nontoxic fridge

Besides his own prize, confirmations of Einstein’s theories have led to 4 Nobel Prizes (1922, 1923, 1997, 2001) so far, and first-order extensions several more (1927, 1929, 1933 at very least). We should expect a few more, for grav waves and not inconceivably for wormholes, some day.

Isaacson, like most people, portrays Einstein’s post-1935 work as a dogmatic waste - he spent about thirty years straining to produce a field theory that could get rid of the spookiness and probabilism of QM. If you compare the output of the first half of his life to the second, sure it looks bad. But he was giving classical physics (determinism, continuousness, simplicity, fierce parsimony, beauty-based reasoning) a well-deserved last shake.

Imagine the strength of will needed to maintain full-time effort over thirty years of failures, with your whipsmart peers all tutting and ignoring you. His unified field efforts are methodologically sort of like string theory: a hubristic search over mathematical forms without contact with the actually physical to help limit the formal space.

And he actually had a decent decision-theoretic argument for his doomed crusade:

When a colleague asked him one day why he was spending — perhaps squandering — his time in this lonely endeavor, he replied that even if the chance of finding a unified theory was small, the attempt was worthy. He had already made his name, he noted. His position was secure, and he could afford to take the risk and expend the time. A younger theorist, however, could not take such a risk, for he might thus sacrifice a promising career. So, Einstein said, it was his duty to do it.

People also try to attach shame to him for his wildly stubborn anti-Copenhagen crusade: years spent thinking up tricky counterexamples for the young mechanicians, like an angry philosopher. But I think he had a good effect on the discourse, constantly calling them to order, and leaving it clear, after all, that it is a consistent view of the evidence.

The only unforgiveable bit in his later conservatism is that he ignored the other half of the fundamental forces, the strong and weak forces, and for decades. Two forces was hard enough to unify. I suppose another point against his long, long Advanced Studies is that he could have done even more if he had helped push QM along; as late as 1946, Wheeler tried to convince him to join in. As it is we have evidence against the unified field: “Einstein failed”.

Einstein is like Bertrand Russell, only much more so: even more brilliant, even more rebellious, even more politically active, even more aloof, even more relentless, even more neglectful of his family. (Russell, on hearing relativity for the first time: “To think I have spent my life on absolute muck.”)

Along with Ibn Rushd, Leonardo, Pascal, Leibniz, Darwin, Peirce, Russell, Turing, Chomsky, Mackay*, Einstein is one of our rare complete intellectuals: huge achievements in science, beautiful writing, good jokes, original philosophy, moral seriousness. To have warmth too, as Einstein does abundantly, doesn’t have much of a precedent. However much Einstein is misattributed vaguely pleasant, vaguely droll, vaguely radical statements, the fact is he actually was brilliant, pleasant, funny, radical. Believe the hype.

What was so moral about him? Well, he was ahead of his time (still is):

• Denounced WWI as the senseless crap it was.
• Never went to the Soviet empire (despite repeated invites).
• Denounced the Nazis from '31, despite/because of public threats to his life.
• Flipped from pacifism at the right moment.
• Many early actions for US civil rights, including work against McCarthyism.
• Sold his original manuscripts for War Bonds

Even his Zionism was enlightened (pro-migration, anti-state, anti-Begin):

“Should we be unable to find a way to honest cooperation and honest pacts with the Arabs,” he wrote [Chaim] Weizmann in 1929, “then we have learned absolutely nothing during our 2,000 years of suffering.” He proposed, both to Weizmann and in an open letter to an Arab leader, that a “privy council” of four Jews and four Arabs, all independent-minded, be set up to resolve any disputes. “The two great Semitic peoples,” he said, “have a great common future.” If the Jews did not assure that both sides lived in harmony, he warned friends in the Zionist movement, the struggle would haunt them in decades to come. Once again, he was labeled naïve.

One particularly charming bit in this book covers Einstein’s long friendship with the Queen Mother of Belgium. When Szilard warns him that nuclear fission has been achieved and could give the Nazis dominion over all, Einstein’s first thought is to ask Elisabeth to sort it out, by grabbing all the Central African uranium and sending it far from the Nazis. (As it happens, the Uranverein got their uranium from Czechoslovakia.)

Isaacson read all the letters, formed a view on all the academic controversies (Maric’s contribution, baby Lieserl, what sort of deist or Zionist or pacifist he was), and covers most of the papers, recasting the classic thought experiments very lucidly. This was a huge pleasure. Read with Wikipedia open, though: C20th physics and its physicists are way too deep and broad for one book.

"The Calvin and Hobbes Tenth Anniversary Book"

Bill Watterson (1995)
★★★★☆
reviewed Nov 2018

Elevates its medium.

"Encyclopaedia of Myself"

Jonathan Meades (2015)
★★★★☆
reviewed Aug 2018

Abuser, Sexual Access to the Unknown Anal Penetration Ayleswade Road...

The best documentarian and architecture critic in Britain - also “the best amateur chef in the world” (cf. Marco Pierre-White) - writes about his childhood in a brutal panoptic manner. His unsentimentality about himself, his mother, his horrible uncles, is startling, even speaking as a fan of his sarky and acid programmes. It’s not exactly linear: there are several odd repetitions and filling-ins, mimicking the meandering of memory. Still, Meades’ prose makes them worthwhile twice over:

When, after they had both died, I sold my parents' house, I got rid of a cupboardful of toys which had collected decades' dust, and a bookcase of Eagle annuals, Tiger annuals, Buffalo Bill annuals and so on. I picked through tins of broken pens and perished erasers. I excitedly anticipated the past to come rushing back. Each of these rusty, tarnished pieces of metal or plastic is, surely, a potential madeleine, a mnemonic of some bright day in 1959. They were, however, doggedly mute. It took time in that house whose purpose was finished to realise that this was a pitiful and self-pitying exercise: I was trying to freeze myself, to transport myself back to the land of lost content which had, actually, been no such thing. I was trying to do to myself what parents do to their children.

No girls meant no calm solicitude, no sweet fragrance of talc and cleanliness, but, rahter, the soilpipe smell of almost a hundred shrieking, blubbing, chucking, grubby, boisterous, energetic, savage, merciless small boys... Kissing was of course sissy. In the Cathedral School's swimming-pool changing hut, a riot of asbestos, just-prepubescent boys boxed with their penises in friendly companionabiity and competitive violence: he who drew blood won. They aptly dignified this as 'cockfighting', insouciantly associating covert pugilism with the hedgerow gamblers' sport conducted between roofless brick cowsheds where flames from pyres of palettes relieve the ruined farmyard's midden chill and lend ceremony to the bucolic rite.

Some fleshpot, Southampton: the Port Said of the Solent. A poor whore has only to sit in a window in Derby Road, and a major police operation will be launched. All the coppers who've been on Cottage Patrol squeeze out from beneath the rafter to race a mile east from the Common. Their route takes them past Great Aunt Doll's chaotic bungalow where there were peals of dirty laughter and sweet sherry and sweet Marsala, and a room heated to eighty degrees and fish and chips for a dozen in an enamel bowl, and gossip and ribbing and silly stories, and gaspers, and will someone let the dog out else he's going to wee on the couch, and Jonathan you better go with him if you want a widdle cos Eric's been and done a big one...

I had emerged [from Sunday School] a materialist. It was, equally, the first time I had walked out of anything, that I had had the nerve to walk out. Thus was a lifelong habit initiated. Cinemas, jobs, sexual relationships, exams, opportunities, marriages, commitments, professional partnerships, schools, theatrical performances (a specialty), parties, expeditions, dinners, homes, prior arrangements - I've walked out of them all, often.

The whole book is anomalous - it is sustained emotional recollection by a professed enemy of nostalgia:

Nostalgia is not simply a yearning for a lost home, a yearning which can never be satisfied by revisiting that home, which could only be satisfied by becoming once more the child who inhabited that home, at that time. It is also primitive, pre-rational, pre-learning. It quashes developed taste, aesthetic preference, learnt refinements. It insists that the chance associations of infancy are more obstinately enduring than the chosen positions of our subsequent sentience. It tells us that we are lifers in a mnemonic prison from which there is no reprieve.

But then the man’s an anomaly: a razorish rationalist, a scathing positivist about the arts, who has devoted his life to them. (They were accompanied by their arty and - it follows - entirely artless friends.)

His childhood was not like other children’s in Fifties Britain. (I’m comparing his to Bennett, Hitchens, wrongly also Clive James.) His parents quietly rewarded his not conforming, and he ate Afghan curry throughout (his father was stationed in Iraq and brought back a tonne of spices). He grew up surrounded by clergy and the weapons scientists of the Downs:

I pictured the Red Menace - a cannibalistic giant whose face was impasted with human gristle and blood; bullnecked mass murderers weighed down by medals; cloud seeding; barbed wire; secret policemen; evil scientists; informers; torturers; factories as big as cities; insanitary collective farms; starvation; deportations. 'You're going to Siberia!' was a playground taunt of the Fifties.

(He really likes the biological warfare men, in maybe the biggest piece of contrarianism in this large contrary book.)

The book stops when he’s only 17 - but there are so, so many deaths in it. Maybe 70, counting the drowned calf; my total by that age was 3. Let’s say he delights in the contrast with today, not in the deaths themselves.

For all they spoke of death, I might have believed we live perpetually, growing ever more crooked, more and more dried up, more rasping, more fearful. (I obviously didn't know that it was death's proximity that caused the eyes of the very old to communicate unimaginable terror.) ...The names of the dead were dropped from conversation, as one might drop that of a disloyal friend. Death seemed to be a kind of disgrace... The rare times they were remembered, it was with irked brusqueness.

It is very easy to put him in a bad light; he makes it easy for you, because he is always absolutely emphatic, usually vitriolic, and often wrong. (The things he’s wrong about include vegetarians, anti-racism overall*, arguably human rights.**)

Where would we be without monotheism, fasts, judicial impartiality, the eucharist, sincerity, pork's proscription, Allah's ninety-nine names and seventy-two virgins, weather forecasts, life plans, political visions, conjugated magpies, circumcision, sacred cows, the power of prayer, insurance policies, gurus' prescriptions, the common good, astrology? Where indeed? But those are the big lies.

Picturing the equine Princess Royal is a sure way of inhibiting orgasm and prolonging enjoyment, so long as one doesn't picture her for too long and so risk flaccidity.

stoical meiosis was normal in a generation which denied itself deep immersion in feeling, had not learned to wallow in empathy, understood an outpouring to be the discharge of cloacal sewage. The lexicon of demonstrative care had yet to be coined; the people's absurd princess had yet to be born; the mistakenly unaborted Blair had yet to perfect the catch of tremulous sincerity in his voice.

my mother had assured me that the old testament was risible tosh. And so it is. So, of course, are all 'holy' books. But risible tosh can be persuasive.

The desert landscape [in Iraq] is relentlessly grim. There was indigenous hostility to contend with. The Arab world was broadly sympathetic to the Axis powers. (The Nazis' successors are not the lost causists of the BNP, NPD and Vlaams Belang but the totalitarian Islamist post-Khomeini terror states... The Arab armies included Bosnian Muslim veterans of the Handzar SS brigades... The entire sentimental Arabist package, the tradition of the fawning British buggerocracy - Richard Burton, T.E. Lawrence, St John Philby, Glubb Pasha, Wilfred Thesiger and countless other aristocratic eccentrics - had become la pensee unique of the army's higher strata. It was also (not that its adherents acknowledged it) effete, misogynistic, irrational, anti-urban, Luddite and gullible.

Antiquarian pillage is hardly scholarly and far from scientific, but its perpetrators were not culpable of the misanthropic relativism which grants rights to ancient amphorae and entitlements to yokes' remnants. Nor did they conceive of history in terms of movements, big ideas and sweeping theses. Their empiricism militated against generalisation.

The tyranny of minorities had caused the atomisation of England. The damage is repairable - by state terror or mob rule. But since the state's treasonable clerks are the very cause of the embuggerance we can be sure that it will do nothing. And a mob needs a leader to bring its hatred to the boil, foment its venom, drive it on. It needs the Duke of Edinburgh. Much as he might wish it he won't be around.

Consider that last one: it is natural to read in it a fascist glee - but it isn’t that at all. It is rather the dread of inevitable deadlock and looming contradictions. There’s no relish, only misplaced fear. But you need to have read his contempt of fascists (and of Philip) and his fear of totalitarianism before, for it to sound like that.

Why isn’t the cannibal internet calling him out? Because he is in the grey zone of non-celebrity? Because he is too old to shame? Because he isn’t on Twitter? Anyway: He is neither a bigot (offensive because hateful and ignorant), nor a clickbait troll (intentionally, insincerely offensive), nor an aged victim of social drift (obliviously offensive): he has not defaulted to these opinions; he was never much tied to his time’s prevailing prejudices, whether it’s Fifties’ conformism and class obsession or Noughties PC and pomo. His antipathies are reasoned and he refuses to pander. Compare this passage to e.g. what Yiannopoulos was finally banished for:

The formula states that adults are wicked predators, children are innocent prey. In the hierarchy of abuse, paedophilia (which may be literally that, liking children) is demonised, fetishised. It has giddily attained equal status with race crime... Homo faber. Isn't he just? Man has devised multitudinous forms of child abuse which are not sexual. Their immeasurable consequences may, however, be just as grave as those of sexual abuse. Child soldier, child slave, child labourer, child miner, child skiv, child beggar, child bloody from scrounging in the shambles.

The book is highly abridged (only up to cram school) and still a bit too long. Before reading this you should first watch any 10 of these films.

• If you insist on challenging the worst e.g. woke, trivial internet activism, you have to say that’s what you’re against: Meades is being uncharacteristically imprecise, and decimating sympathy as a result. “Against (actually-existing) anti-racism” is not the same as “pro-racism”, but people will read you that way unless you give them explicit reason not to. (And even then.)

** Rights are only good if they produce good outcomes; lots of people all over the world think in terms of imperatives and absolutes and it is almost futile to argue about it; thus rights can be a useful fiction. Meades again spits on “rights” in general without laying out this or any other philosophical objection, without showing us what he’s for and so allowing people to not think the worst.

"Calculus Made Easy"

Silvanus Phillips Thompson (1998)
★★★★☆
reviewed Jun 2021

Ridiculously clear and friendly and quick. He takes your intuitions about little bits and bigness and leads you to the door of the great machine. Shame there’s not one of these for every subfield of maths.

The preliminary terror, which chokes off most fifth-form boys from even attempting to learn how to calculate, can be abolished once for all by simply stating what is the meaning – in common-sense terms – of the two principal symbols... These dreadful symbols are: (1) d which merely means “a little bit of.” Thus dx means a little bit of x; or du means a little bit of u. Ordinary mathematicians think it more polite to say “an element of,” instead of “a little bit of.” Just as you please. But you will find that these little bits (or elements) may be considered to be indefinitely small. (2) ∫ which is merely a long S, and may be called (if you like) “the sum of.” Thus ∫dx means the sum of all the little bits of x... Now any fool can see that if x is considered as made up of a lot of little bits, each of which is called dx, if you add them all up together you get the sum of all the dx's... The word “integral” simply means “the whole.”... When you see an expression that begins with this terrifying symbol, you will henceforth know that it is put there merely to give you instructions that you are now to perform the operation (if you can) of totalling up all the little bits that are indicated by the symbols that follow.

Masterstroke! He takes you into confidence against “ordinary mathematicians”, he states it all in things you already know, and he directly addresses your misgivings. The only impediment is the Edwardian prose, which tends to make sentences twice as long as they have to be. I like the style.

You could give this to a motivated 9 year old. And I intend to.

Free and beautifully rendered here.

"CLOSURE"

Why The Lucky Stiff (2013)
★★★★☆
reviewed Nov 2017

[Downloadable here and only here.]

This is a wilfully glitchy, difficult, intense bundle of handwritten sketches about unspecifiable loss, faltering ambition, unchecked and uncaught exceptions. Why he doesn’t program any more. It is autobiographical but most of it is probably not literally true.

The 95 stories, each brutally truncated:

ACCIDENT.pdf, ACCOUNTS.pdf, AMANDA.pdf, ATTEMPT.pdf, AWAKEN.pdf, BIBLICAL.pdf, BLANK.pdf, BOOMS.pdf, BRICKS.pdf, BURN.pdf, BUSTS.pdf, CAPRICE.pdf, CLOWNS.pdf, CONFLICTING.pdf, CORRUPTION.pdf, DELIRIUM.pdf, DESOLEE.pdf, DISCLAIMER.pdf, ELEVENTH.pdf, EXPERTS.pdf, EYES.pdf, FALLEN.pdf, FAREWELL.pdf, FIGHTS.pdf, FIRELESS.pdf, FLIPPED.pdf, FOOLS.pdf, FORGIVABLE.pdf, FRIGHTS.pdf, GAIMAN.pdf, GINGERBREAD.pdf, HELLOYES.pdf, HERBERT.pdf, HO.pdf, HOLES.pdf, HOMEWORK.pdf, IDEAS.pdf, IDOLATRY.pdf, IMPERSON.pdf, INVESTMENT.pdf, ITISUS.pdf, JERKS.pdf, JUXT.pdf, KIDS.pdf, LEAPS.pdf, LEVELS.pdf, LOGICAL.pdf, LOOKUP.pdf, MEANING.pdf, MIMICS.pdf, MISSING.pdf, MOLDED.pdf, NO.pdf, NOTES.pdf, NOTHIN.pdf, NOTYET.pdf, OBVIOUS.pdf, OUTRAGE.pdf, PASSAGES.pdf, PEANUTS.pdf, PIRATEO.pdf, PITHY.pdf, POULET.pdf, PRESENTLY.pdf, PROFESSORS.pdf, READING.pdf, REALITY.pdf, REASON.pdf, RECEIPT.pdf, RELATED.pdf, RESPONSIBLE.pdf, REVERSE.pdf, RIP.pdf, SACRED.pdf, SEAWATER.pdf, SENSORED.pdf, SOLICIT.pdf, SPAWN.pdf, SPENT.pdf, STACKS.pdf, STINKS.pdf, TABLETS.pdf, TEST.pdf, THEFT.pdf, TIGHT.pdf, TORN.pdf, TRESMAL.pdf, TRIALS.pdf, TRUMPETS.pdf, UNBOUND.pdf, URGENTLY.pdf, WELLWELL.pdf, WHATSUPDOC.pdf, YOU.pdf, YOUGETIT.pdf

Along with Gwern and Perlis, _why is one of our developer-artists. Art about code. So this is conceptualism that I don’t immediately despise.

(A closure is a neat piece of code that can remember what has happened, knows what’s going on outside, beyond what the code explicitly mentions.)

We get dead-format nostalgia, memery, a handwritten stretch of Ruby, and reflections on feeling inferior to Franz Kafka, of all people.

_why has a unique voice. That is a banal thing to say, but it is true here as I suspect it is not elsewhere. There are only two technical passages, one litany of relief from enterprise development, and one entire module in handwriting.

There is torment. Keep up the names: he is the Simon Weil, the Tristram Shandy of web development, the DFW of running out of ritalin. Unquiet introversion.

Can anyone that has had a blog be called private? (Where are all the introverts these days? Technology has upgraded introverts into - soft extroverts I guess.)

Here are his self-hating notes in the margin of his beautiful, kind comment on Shymalan’s The Happening:

Perhaps the greatest pain of talking about art is how shallow it is compared to the actual experience of watching movie/song/etc...previously I had criticized the kinds of small talk discussions, particularly discussions about music, because they revolved around "Did you like this? Have you heard that?" and never went anywhere beyond that... Those pointless discussions that had always left me feeling empty, never able to talk about the beauty of music itself adequately, just the names and the styles... But why would anyone want to have a meaningful discussion all the time? In a way I feel that's the point of being candid. To expose how shameful I am.

Wilfully awkward, marginal, analogue. He calls himself the Professor, as an insult. The PDF is of images, not text: you cannot copy anything without putting in the effort. Old misaligned book scans, dumb Gorey cartoon jokes, an itemized grocery bill, astute literary notes on Kafka, Ishiguro, Gaiman. He lives now with extreme thrift and extreme technophobia, slamming down his friend’s phone when she browses it during conversation. He makes seawater bread instead of web apps.

The harsh jump-cut absurdism between the sketches is not genuine - they are all linked. Not sure what by, but I say so.

I must strictly require you that, if you are to continue reading and go with me on this sally, that you resist from looking up anything to do with the book SACRED CLOWNS. This is paramount. I know the urge must be incredible to go out with your smartphones and to find out if the book is real, but I must INSIST that you just let it be. I don't know if it's possible for you to exercise that kind of self-restraint in this modern age, but you must. Of all the things I could ask of you, this seems so small and simple. Can you do this for me?

(I did resist, but it was actually hard to.)

I usually don’t rate merely formal experiment, intentional awkwardness. But the warmth of his great first book and the constant self-deprecation and plaintive concrete detail make it easy.

"What's your name?" "I won't say" "It's just a name, mate! Doesn't mean anything to hide it! "It doesn't mean anything to say it!" I yelled

Someone is squatting his old site. I wonder if it’s _why; if the banal entrepreneurial positivity on it is him continuing CLOSURE. Since the book refuses to end; this is the last page:

4/5 but only if you care already.

"Soonish: Ten Emerging Technologies That'll Improve and/or Ruin Everything"

Kelly Weinersmith (2017)
★★★★☆
reviewed Oct 2017

Excellent, sceptical look at near-future tech, their enormous potential and risk. The technologies are: new ways of getting to space, asteroid mining, fusion power, programmable matter, robotic construction, brain-computer interfaces, synthetic biology, and bioprinting. They tend to be bearish about these technologies, because their default (i.e. unregulated) effects could be really dreadful.

(Excepting robo-construction and organ printing because these are much less dangerous and dodgy than the existing hacks.) My favourite bit is the paean to Alvin Roth’s organ-swap algorithm, which is a magnificent way of circumventing human squeamishness.

Lots of direct quotation from the unprepossessing scientists doing all this, <3. There are also lots of addenda of the following sort:

The story of Gerald Bull goes like this. You have a brilliant engineer who's especially good at ballistics at an early age, who had a brilliant career early on where he got funding from Canada and the US to work on these ballistics programs. Then basically the funding dried up. So he kind of did whatever it took to be able to keep working in this area, which led him to do work in weapons dealing, including dealing with then apartheid South Africa. And things basically unraveled from there, resulting in his humiliation and depression and alcoholism. Then much later in life he began working for Saddam Hussein, building, for reasons that are not well understood, a giant gun. To be clear, it was probably not useful as a weapon. It was not going to be moveable, it was not pointing at an enemy city: it was pointing as the Earth turns, which is what you'd want to do if you were shooting into space. Then, shortly after that, in the early ‘90s he ended up in a Brussels hotel with a bullet in his head and $20,000 on his body, and nobody is sure who killed him. I believe his son suspected Mossad, but no one as far as I can find has come forward to say here's who did it.

Suitable for all ages, knob jokes aside. (There’s a segue joke at the end of every block, and they are uniformly a bit forced.) The illustrations actually don’t add anything, even though I love SMBC.

"The People's Act of Love"

James Meek (2006)
★★★★☆
reviewed Dec 2019

Found this very striking when I read it 13 years ago, but can’t remember why.

"The Earthsea Quartet (Earthsea Cycle, #1-4)"

Ursula K. Le Guin (1993)
★★★★☆
reviewed Jun 2018

If fantasy tends to strike you as pompous or tasteless - if you can’t get through ‘Lord of the Rings’, ‘Game of Thrones’ or whatnot, you should try this. Anthropological fantasies. The first three books are about: mortality, deconversion and addiction. But the fourth, about two women in two farmhouses, is actually the most ambitious.

‘Tales of Earthsea’ is my favourite, but you can’t just skip to it, since it gets its power from reprise and reprisal.

The cycle is relentlessly pro-death though; Ged does not become a man until he faces and integrates a manifestation of his own death; Cob’s terror of, and resistance to death enslaves and drains the entire continent; an ancient attempt to create an afterlife is actually an act of betrayal, colonialism, and Frankensteinian hubris. The cycle ends with the circle of life and death restored, and everyone right pleased and relieved at this, not least the undead who get to not exist. Now, you can counter that le Guin is more pro-stoicism, pro-serenity, pro-enlightened-adaption-to-the-inevitable than she is pro-death. But deathists always are; they are harmful because of their apriori ban on potentially wonderful undertakings, not because they are goth as fuck.

As always, she is a wonderful read even when I disagree with her very strongly. To be read by 10 year olds and 27 year olds, presumably by 50 year olds and definitely by 75 year olds.

"Intelligence: All That Matters"

Stuart Ritchie (2015)
★★★★☆
reviewed Sep 2016

Calm empirical overview. Incredibly clearly written, stopping short of off-puttingly plain.

Is the g theory of intelligence the most mature, replicated theory in psychology? 100 years old and ever-replicating; language- and culture-blind by now; at least somewhat predictive of some terminal values… What can compete? Operant conditioning, I guess.

This book is part of the “All that Matters” series - a coincidental subtitle which has no doubt enraged many people and caused him no end of grief.

I highly recommend his Twitter.

"Rain"

Don Paterson (2009)
★★★★☆
reviewed Oct 2015

Wonderful: sincere, grotesque, solemn and shrugging; both elemental and goofy. Rhymes are delivered straight. Going by the ambient temperature and the coverage of light, Paterson lives very near to outer space.

so for all that we are one machine ploughing through the sea and gale I know your impulse and design no better than the keel the sail

A unique, dry view of family life here; sneaking downstairs so as not to disturb them with your inexplicable angst. There’s even a painfully goofy evocation of the mating call of the Wire magazine reader:

Though I should confess that at times I find your habit of maxxing the range with those bat-scaring frequencies ring-modulated sine-bursts and the more distressing psychoacoustic properties of phase inversion in the sub-bass frequencies somewhat taxing you are nonetheless beautiful as the mighty Boards themselves in your shameless organicising of the code.

Which is best read as a scherzo. Half of it’s written for a dead friend or in homage to lesser-known world poets; I rarely get poems like that. I don’t know why I’m cavilling; this is the best collection I’ve read since… the last Don Paterson. Sentimental by his standards but bruising by poetry in general’s. Teetering upright.

"The Commodore (Aubrey & Maturin, #17)"

Patrick O’Brian (1996)
★★★★☆
reviewed May 2021

Pretty slow, but seeing Jack tearing into the slave trade is worth a lot.

Drier it might have been, but not for those who habitually stood on the lowest of the steps on the ship's side, holding on to the entering ropes and pondering until she rolled and the sea rose, soaking him, this time farther than the waist. Stephen came aboard the Surprise dripping, as usual; and as usual Killick, worn thin and old and preternaturally shrewish by the task of looking after both the Captain and the Doctor, a feckless pair with their clothes and their limbs...

—

On the treatment of language delay in young children (not to say autism):

'Am I not to see my own flesh and blood? My own grandniece? Believe me, Dr Maturin,' cried Mrs Williams, her voice reaching its metallic, dominant ring, 'these childish, self-willed, stubborn, obstinate fancies are best dealt with firmly: a good shaking, the black hole, bread and water and perhaps the whip answer very well and at no cost: though to be sure you are a physician and everything in that line is free.' 'I should be sorry to forbid you my house,' said Stephen.'

—

O’Brian has slowly given Jack depth: his bruising by institutions, his mathematical awakening, and

'Now, in the warm night, there was no one to be comforted, kept in countenance, no one who could scorn him for virtuosity, and he could let himself go entirely; and as the grave and subtle music wound on and on, Stephen once more contemplated on the apparent contradiction between the big, cheerful, florid sea-officer whom most people liked on sight but who would never have been described as subtle or capable of subtlety by any one of them (except perhaps his surviving opponents in battle) and the intricate, reflective music he was now creating. So utterly unlike his limited vocabulary in words, at times verging upon the inarticulate'

he was quite remarkably defenceless when it came to dealing with jealousy. It was an emotion he had apparently never known, at least not in its present consuming state, and it was one whose nature and development he scarcely seemed to recognize at all, so that he was unable to call upon intelligence for what help it can bring in these cases. Stephen was well acquainted with this blindness where health was concerned - 'It is only a lump: it will soon go away' - and affections - 'She has certainly not received my letter. The posts are so slow these days, and very far from sure' - yet even so it surprised him in Jack Aubrey, a much more intelligent man than he seemed to those who did not know him well. With great concern he had watched the progress of the disease, the changes in the atmosphere at Ashgrove Cottage, where Mr Hinksey continued to call with the most unlucky regularity, often appearing a few moments before Jack left, and the beginning of a change in the Bellona. Jack was still very kind to him... 'I had been on the point of unbosoming myself... foolish, discreditable thoughts.' 'I rejoice you did not, brother. The closest friendship cannot stand such a strain: the results are invariably disastrous.'

—

Conversely, Stephen’s wisdom and serenity lessens. The two men are roughly equal stature in their middle years, where in youth Jack was foolish, cockbrained, naive.

[Stephen] had some faults, and one was a habit of dosing himself, generally from a spirit of inquiry, as in his period of inhaling large quantities of the nitrous oxide and of the vapour of hemp, to say nothing of tobacco, bhang in all its charming varieties in India, betel in Java and the neighbouring islands, qat in the Red Sea, and hallucinating cacti in South America, but sometimes for relief from distress, as when he became addicted to opium in one form or another; and now he was busily poisoning himself with coca-leaves, whose virtue he had learnt in Peru.

Stephen's dislike for killing his fellow-men often embarrassed Jack, whose profession it was, and he quickly added 'Of course, that is only the ideal course of events. A thousand things could throw it out

—

One of the many interesting things about these books is the sustained depiction of people who like their jobs, their dangerous, difficult, uncomfortable, highly regimented jobs. Who can’t function very well at leisure, in normal free society, who flee into risky duty.

Another is the sheer number of cockups, spoonerisms, brainfarts and bullshit:

'My [pulse] is one hundred and seventeen to the minute.' 'That is the luckiest number in the world, I believe; a prime number, to be divided or multiplied by no other.' 'You are in the right of it, Stanislas Roche'

(117/3 = 39) These still rule our lives, but at least computers mean that they could be corrected, if we noticed, if we cared.

—

I was surprised at Maturin telling the peasants that Napoleon had converted to Islam - spy and assassin he might be, but I don’t remember him lying before - but it seems that he was just repeating one of Boney’s lies.

"Cloud Atlas"

David Mitchell (2004)
★★★★☆
reviewed Jan 2013

Features befitting a great book: stunning detail, well-historicised prose, engaging characters, intricate narrative structure, embrace of multiple genres. But it’s too clean, somehow.

Though it depicts predation by the worst of us; though its dystopia is one Pop-Hegel extrapolation from our current world-system, it’s not as challenging as it thinks it is.

It consists of ten sudden narrative shifts, moving back and fore four or five centuries. These sections are connected by each having a ‘reader’ (the opening sea journal is read by the second narrator, the Romantic composer, whose letters are obsessed over by the journalist, whose memoir is seen by the hack editor, whose tale is seen in an ancient film by the saintly clone, who is remembered as a god in the post-apocalypse story that is as far forward as we see. (They are also connected by a reincarnation overlay - but, apart from giving brutal history more chances to be brutal to the same people, I don’t really get it.)

The bit with the composer, Frobisher, is my favourite: he transcends his cheeky bohemian archetype and becomes horribly tragic despite his pig-headedness and camp pretension.

The last line, returning to the original Victorian narrator, is a good summary of the book’s wounded, pessimistic collectivism:

He who would do battle with the many-headed hydra of human nature must pay a world of pain & his family must pay it along with him! & only as you gasp your dying breath shall you understand, your life amounted to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean!’ Yet what is any ocean but a multitude of drops?

So: Enjoyable and ambitious, unsatisfying.

"Feet of Clay (Discworld, #19; City Watch, #3)"

Terry Pratchett (2005)
★★★★☆
reviewed Jan 2005

Another monarchist plot, another wonderful slice of Vimes. This instalment, one of his increasingly cinematic plots, pivots on the enduringly poignant trope of the Golem, the put-upon automata given life by holy words. Their persecution doesn’t quite map to any one political issue, a point in favour really– they echo slavery, class struggle, and A.I. Pratchett also stretches to get a big bad pun into every scene, with mixed but gladdening results.

(Read aloud)

"Monstrous Regiment (Discworld, #31; Industrial Revolution, #3)"

Terry Pratchett (2003)
★★★★☆
reviewed Jan 2004

He really could pluck anything out of the superficially cliched, superficially zany world he built. Here, Balkanization, first wave feminism and two dozen good characters summoned up and put down.

"Night Watch (Discworld, #29; City Watch, #6)"

Terry Pratchett (2011)
★★★★☆
reviewed Jan 2003

Perhaps his darkest book (though he never was just about puns and japes – consider the extent of extinction and futility in Strata). All about the Night, as in inherent human brutality and in being metaphysically lost. Remarkable for being about being the police in a police state. Cried my eyes out at the climax the first time, a decade ago.

"Sourcery (Discworld, #5; Rincewind, #3)"

Terry Pratchett (2008)
★★★★☆
reviewed Jan 2005

Rincewind starts to become an actual character rather than a reaction shot.

"The Phantom Tollbooth"

Norton Juster (1996)
★★★★☆
reviewed Jan 1999

In one sentence: An invitation to reason by way of reified puns and embodied binaries.

• Galef type:
  Values 2 - thought experiments for you to reflect on how you feel about something,& Style 3 - tickle your aesthetic sense in a way that obliquely makes you a more interesting, generative thinker.

"The Campus Trilogy"

David Lodge (2011)
★★★★☆
reviewed Nov 2013

• Changing Places (1978). Beautiful 60s farce, mocking the zany side while accepting the force of the hippy challenge to all sorts of things, lastingly sexism. The jokes rely heavily on the difference in vitality and affluence between 60s Britain and California – one grey and without central heating, the other soaked in optimism, sex and cute subversions. 4/5.
  
• Small World (1984). Even better, more romantic and full of risky narrative moves – regular cinematic cuts, 40 characters in two dozen Richard-Curtis conjunctions, a character commenting on his narrative role, a cod-Japanese passage without articles... Generous and barbed and fun. 4*/5.
  
  
• Nice Work (1988). I suppose what I like most about Lodge is his marriage of (and subversion of) highfalutin Theory with daft romcom conventions. This last one’s grimmer – based more on the mutual misunderstanding and vices of literary theory and industry. Thatcher’s jaws lurk in the background. Also race. Robyn, his feminist protagonist is good and 3D, principled and struggling with the contradictions of the radical academic (their privileged position in a system they abhor, ‘revolutionary’ abstractions, the attack on logocentric realism leading to detachment from lived life where things happen). Robyn’s attitude to love inspired this great satire.
  4/5
  
  

"Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff in Simple Words"

Randall Munroe (2015)
★★★★☆
reviewed Dec 2015

So wonderful; technical diagrams big and small, annotated with only the 1000 (“ten hundred”) most common words. (This is as often poetic as it is clumsy; Munroe renders a nuclear bomb a “machine for burning cities”.)

"The Blot"

Tom Neely (2007)
★★★★☆
reviewed Jun 2021

Masterpiece with several sources of strength. First is the aesthetic and the fast beats inspired by gorgeous classic American animation (yes, animation). Neely’s panels have more movement in them than any other comic I’ve read, partly down to the stick figures with arms as long as legs. Then he slaps that naive style against horror and nudity. Then he manages to make the blot moving without being totally clear in the allegory. Is it depression? No, it also makes people recoil. Leprosy? No, it makes a doppelganger who he must kill. It inspires kindness from a woman and allows him to fly. Edward’s scissors then. It blooms and withers. Is it sin? No, it decreases after sex and murder. Is it rage? No, it’s something cooler than that. It is domesticable. It unites lovers. It leaves when she leaves. Magritte Mouse.

"Gangland"

Brian Azzarello (2000)
★★★★☆
reviewed May 2021

Varied in tone, beauty, and worth, but some stunning bits in here. Some live off their incongruous lyricism, some off historical echoes. Each is short enough that it can’t avoid having one sharp point to make. Nasty obviously, but it earns it with wit and craft.

"All the Pretty Horses (The Border Trilogy, #1)"

Cormac McCarthy (1993)
★★★★☆
reviewed Jun 2017

Wonderful. About two boys who are not boys, mostly because they don’t want to be. They are only 16 but already have the skill and stoicism which actually constitute adulthood, rather than mere age. It is also about law and morals and power and the chasms between these things. Also suddenly, bizarrely, about pre- and post-revolutionary Mexico.

They were zacateros headed into the mountains to gather chino grass. If they were surprised to see Americans horseback in that country they gave no sign... They themselves were a rough lot, dressed half in rags, their hats marbled with grease and sweat, their boots mended with raw cowhide... They looked out over the terrain as if it were a problem to them. Something they'd not quite decided about.

They pulled the wet saddles off the horses and hobbled them and walked off in separate directions through the chaparral to stand spraddlelegged clutching their knees and vomiting. The browsing horses jerked their heads up. It was no sound they'd ever heard before... something imperfect and malformed lodged in the heart of being. A thing smirking deep in the eyes of grace itself like a gorgon in an autumn pool.

The country rolled away to the west through broken light and shadow and the distant summer storms a hundred miles downcountry to where the cordilleras rose and sank in the haze in a frail last shimmering restraint alike of the earth and the eye beholding it.

Finally he said that among men there was no such communion as among horses and the notion that men can be understood at all was probably an illusion.

I remain amazed by McCarthy’s ability to use the most hollow and worn-out tropes - horse whispering, the stableboy and heredera, cowboys and varmints, injustice and redemption, the climactic shootout - and make them new, blasting through your cynicism with sheer force of prose. It’s a dark book, but I laughed a lot, mostly at the boys’ philosophising, which natural creasing I recognise from most boys I have known, educated or not.

My daddy run off from home when he was fifteen. Otherwise I'd of been born in Alabama. You wouldn't of been born at all. What makes you say that? Cause your mama's from San Angelo and he never would of met her. He'd of met somebody. So would she. So? So you wouldn't of been born. I dont see why you say that. I'd of been born somewheres. How? Well why not? If your mama had a baby with her other husband and your daddy had one with his other wife which one would you be? I wouldn't be neither of em. That's right. Rawlins lay watching the stars. After a while he said: I could still be born. I might look different or somethin. If God wanted me to be born I'd be born. And if He didnt you wouldnt. You're makin my goddamn head hurt. I know it. I'm makin my own hurt. You ever get ill at ease? said Rawlins. About what? I dont know. About anything. Just ill at ease. Sometimes. If you're someplace you aint supposed to be I guess you'd be ill at ease. Should be anyways. Well suppose you were ill at ease and didnt know why. Would that mean that you might be someplace you wasnt supposed to be and didnt know it?

You are disoriented when John goes home, to 1950s Texas; the rest of the novel operates with early nineteenth century logic and props. You wake up from a long nightmare into the modern dreamtime.

"Berlin"

Jason Lutes (2018)
★★★★☆
reviewed Jun 2021

Brilliant evocation of Weimar Berlin: the dark lightness, the inertia. You worry when it focusses for dozens of pages on art students trying and failing to speak philosophy, but later we get the beautiful mental babble of a whole streetcar of workers, the silent struggle of a boy selling red newspapers badly, ze cabaret.

"Math with Bad Drawings"

Ben Orlin (2018)
★★★★☆
reviewed Mar 2019

Fables and math have a lot in common. Both come from dusty, moth-eaten books. Both are inflicted upon children. And both seek to explain the world through radical acts of simplification. If you want to reckon with the full idiosyncrasy and complexity of life, look elsewhere... math makers are more like cartoonists.

Taken as a collection of words, literature is a dataset of extraordinary richness. Then again, take as a collection of words, literature is no longer literature. Statistics works by eliminating context. Their search for insight begins with the annihilation of meaning... Is there peace to be made between the rich contextuality of literature and the cold analytical power of stats?

So wise. You’d think a high-school maths teacher who draws intentionally badly wouldn’t have much to say about the nature of reason, the ecstasy and despair of learning and abstraction, the beauty of inevitability. But here we are - this only looks like a children’s book. For better or worse there’s a pun or goofy self-deprecating joke every couple sentences. (The greatest of these: “CHAPTER 21: THE TIME HAS COME, LEON WALRAS SAID, TO TALK OF MANY THINGS”)

Everything in it is elementary, but using these simple examples Orlin covers a dozen of the most important intellectual developments: constraint theory of beauty, “unreasonable effectiveness”, probability theory (via fascinating government lotteries with positive expected value!), the Great Recession from the quants’ perspective, the replication crisis, the marginalist revolution… And he disses school mathematics often enough to charm anyone. I learned plenty (about bridges, polar animals, sabermetrics, about the inevitability and brilliance of ISO 216, and so on).

Dissing folks for their probabilistic failures is a bit like calling them bad at flying, or subpar at swallowing oceans, or insufficiently fireproof. No big deal, right? I mean, does probability ever come up in the real world? It's not like we spend our lives clawing for intellectual tools that might offer the slightest stability in the swirling miasma of uncertainty that surrounds us every waking moment...

He goes a bit wrong in his probability / lottery chapter - he spreads the rational choice theory (the idea that lotteries are good because it buys you nice daydreams) without reflecting that human attention and gumption are finite, and that the daydream thus robs people of a mildly but actually better future. Surprisingly, he also disses expected value (first-order users of which are “educated fools”) with the trivial fact that infinities are strange: “Perhaps the ultimate repudiation of expected value is the abstract possibility of tickets [promising infinite payoff but only asymptotically]”. Luckily decision theory is larger than one rule, and nowhere says that you must ignore your budget (+ leverage) and blindly obey the result of one multiplication… He also uses the false positive / false negative framework, which is usually misleading for squishy things like medicine and social science.

(He also thinks Han Solo is valid.)

While I am bitter that my own early maths education was so mindless, I’m amazed and glad that a few kids out there get to learn from someone like this.

"The Cyberiad: Fables for the Cybernetic Age"

Stanisław Lem (2014)
★★★★☆
reviewed Mar 2019

Superlatively brainy and silly fairytales, with wizards replaced by AI engineers. Think Carroll, Smullyan, Juster, Egan, heavier than heaven.

Quantitative slapstick:

And the mathematical models of King Krool and the beast did such fierce battle across the equation-covered table, that the constructors' pencils kept snapping. Furious, the beast writhed and wriggled its iterated integrals beneath the King's polynomial blows, collapsed into an infinite series of indeterminate terms, then got back up by raising itself to the nth power, but the King so belabored it with differentials and partial derivatives that its Fourier coefficients all canceled out (see Riemann’s Lemma), and in the ensuing confusion the constructors completely lost sight of both King and beast. So they took a break, stretched their legs, had a swig from the Leyden jug to bolster their strength, then went back to work and tried it again from the beginning, this time unleashing their entire arsenal of tensor matrices and grand canonical ensembles, attacking the problem with such fervor that the very paper began to smoke. The King rushed forward with all his cruel coordinates and mean values

Despite appearances, it’s not light fiction. It covers the impossibility of making people happy, the absurd birth and death of a robot without senses, the arbitrariness of power. The shadow of the Soviets falls on the stories quite hard.

Trurl notarizes, issues directives, the typewriter chatters, and little by little an entire office takes shape, rubber stamps and rubber bands, paper clips and paper wads, portfolios and pigeonholes, foolscap and scrip, teaspoons, signs that say “No Admittance,” inkwells, forms on file, writing all the while, the typewriter chattering, and everywhere you look you see coffee stains, wastepaper, and bits of gum eraser. The Steelypips are worried, they don’t understand a thing, meanwhile Trurl uses special delivery registered C.O.D., certified with return receipt, or, best of all, remittance due and payable in full- he sends out no end of dunning letters, bills of lading, notices, injunctions, and there are already special accounts set up, no entries at the moment but he says that’s only temporary. After a while, you can see thatthat is not quite so hideous, especially in profile - it’s actually gotten smaller!-yes, yes, it is smaller! The Steelypips ask Trurl, what now? “No idle talk permitted on the premises,” is his answer. And he staples, stamps, inspects vouchers, revokes licenses, dots an I, loosens his tie, asks who’s next, I’m sorry, the office I closed, come back in an hour, the coffee is cold, the cream sour, cobwebs from ceiling to floor, an old pair of nylons in the secretary’s drawer, install four new file cabinets over here, and there’s an attempt to bribe an official, a pile of problems and a problem with piles, a writ of execution, incarceration for miscegenation, and appeals with seven seals. And the typewriter chatters: “Whereas, pursuant to the Tenant’s failure to, quit and surrender the demised premises in compliance with the warrant served habee facias posessionem, by Div. of Rep. Cyb. Gt. KRS thereof, the Court of Third Instance, in vacuo and ex nihilo, herewith orders the immediate vacuation and vacation thereunder. The Tenant may not appeal this ruling.Trurl dispatches the messenger and pockets the receipts. After which, he gets up and methodically hurls the desks, chairs, rubber stamps, seals, pigeonholes, etc., out into deep space. Only the vending machine remains. “What on earth are you doing??” cry the Steelypips in dismay, having grown accustomed to it all. “How can you?” “Tut-tut, my dears,” he replies. “Better you take a look instead!”And indeed, they look and gasp-why, there’s nothing there, it’s gone, as if it had never been! And where did it go, vanished into thin air? It beat a cowardly retreat, and grew so small, so very small, you’d need a magnifying glass to see it. They root around, but all they can find is one little spot, slightly damp, something must have dipped there, but what or why they cannot say, and that’s all. “Just as I thought,” Trurl tells them. “Basically, my dears, the whole thing was quite simple: the moment it accepted the first dispatch and signed for it, it was done for. I employed a special machine, the machine with a big B, for, as it is the Cosmos in the Cosmos, no one’s licked it yet!” “All right, but why throw out the documents and pour out the coffee?” they ask. “So that it wouldn’t devour you in turn!”

how do you [humans] build your progeny?" asked the [robot] princess. "In faith, we do not build them at all," said Ferrix, "but program them statistically, according to Markov's formula for stochastic probability, emotional-evolutional albeit distributional, and we do this involuntarily and coincidentally, while thinking of a variety of things that have nothing what­ever to do with programming, whether statistical, alinear or algorithmical, and the programming itself takes place autonomously, automatically and wholly autoerotically, for it is precisely thus and not otherwise that we are constructed, that each and every paleface strives to program his progeny, for it is delightful, but programs without programming, doing all within his power to keep that programming from bearing fruit."

Kandel’s translation (from the Polish) is maybe the greatest I’ve ever seen: hundreds of puns, neologisms, fake academese, and absurd alliterative names, all rendered into English without slips or missed opportunities. I read this over a month, savouring.

Probably 5/5 on re-read.

"Duncan the Wonder Dog (DUNCAN THE WONDER DOG GN)"

Adam Hines (2010)
★★★★☆
reviewed Mar 2021

Masterful. Maybe the best depiction of speciesism in any medium. Full of cryptic references to early C20th American sports heroes, Greek astronomy and maths, and full page symbols without explanation. But it earns its being esoteric through taste, great characters, and a tragically detailed view of political economy.

Hines actually understands philosophy, where most artists who want to wield it just pick out cool sentences and run with them, cargo cult confectionery.

Very dark, as in low levels of white though. Also the other kind.

"Seveneves"

Neal Stephenson (2015)
★★★★☆
reviewed Dec 2017

Amazing hard worldbuilding from a lunatic seed: ‘what would happen if the moon just blew up?’ You will stomach pages of physical exposition before scenes can occur, but it isn’t superfluous. First two-thirds are psychologically convincing: you will ball your fists at the politics. (By which I mean treachery and irrationality.)

He does railroad a couple of plot points - e.g. it is taken for granted that a psychopathic war criminal has every right to an equal share of the genetic future. And the last third’s extrapolation of 5000 years of cultural creep is less formally ambitious than e.g. Cloud Atlas.

First two-thirds 4*/5, last third 3/5.

[Theory #1, Theory #2, Theory #4, Values #2]</li>

How does it do as Serious science fiction?

Social development: Lots, though the races that develop are primary-coloured and fantastical, including a fantastical war.

Software development: A little bit, particularly Dinah’s cool claytronics.

Actual Science: Plenty, with the lone exception of the initial moonburst.

"A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail"

Bill Bryson (2006)
★★★★☆
reviewed Jan 2014

I don’t rate him – his matey adjectival register and cutesy knowledge get on my nerves – but this is great. Dead funny throughout, free of bluster, and passionate about marginal researches (the fate of the hemlock tree in Northeast America, the punctuated history of very long US roads).

I read this aloud and it worked very well. Even my townie girlfriend wants to go hiking now.

"Science Fictions"

Stuart Ritchie (2020)
★★★★☆
reviewed Jul 2020

Wonderful introduction to meta-science. I’ve been obsessively tracking bad science since I was a teen, and I still learned loads of new examples. (Remember that time NASA falsely declared the discovery of an unprecedented lifeform? Remember that time the best university in Sweden completely cleared their murderously fraudulent surgeon?)

Science has gotten a bit fucked up. But at least we know about it, and at least it’s the one institution that has a means and a track record of unfucking itself.

Ritchie is a master at handling controversy, at producing satisfying syntheses - he has the unusual ability to take the valid points from opposing factions. So he’ll happily concede that “science is a social construct” - in the solid, trivial sense that we all should concede it is. He’ll hear out someone’s proposal to intentionally bring political bias into science, and simply note that, while it’s well-intentioned, we have less counterproductive options.

Don’t get the audiobook: Ritchie is describing a complex system of interlocking failures. I need diagrams for that sort of thing.

Ritchie is fair, funny, and actually understands the technical details. Supercedes my previous fave pop-meta-scientist, Ben Goldacre.

"Axiomatic"

Greg Egan (1997)
★★★★☆
reviewed Jun 2020

(Probably 5 stars on re-read)

Phenomenal. (Usually not nice phenomena, but always strong phenomena.) Every one of these produced an effect in me, from deep grimace to snort to total pathos. It took me a month to read 18 stories, because it is stressful to encounter characters this vivid in scenarios this brutal.* Every story has an actual logic - often a fantastical one, like the retrocausal literally-hypothetical boddhisatva posthumans of ‘Eugene’. He has few peers in thinking this hard and making you feel the thought. What Black Mirror could have been: thought experiments like self-aware spears.

Ranking:

1. The Hundred-Light-Year Diary
2. The Moral Virologist. (Nauseating, lyrical evil.)
3. Into Darkness
4. Axiomatic
5. Unstable Orbits in the Space of Lies
6. Learning to be me
7. Eugene
8. The Safe-Deposit Box
9. The caress
10. The Walk
11. Seeing
12. The Vat
13. A Kidnapping
14. The Cutie
15. Closer
16. The Infinite Assassin
17. Appropriate Love
18. Blood Sisters

The worst of these is still well above average for sci-fi - clever, satisfying plot, sympathetic characters, moment of awesome. (I tested this here; Egan’s entry, weak for him, was still the best in the collection. It would be last, here.)

doing whatever it was designed to do. Enabling multiple orgasms of the left kneecap. Making the colour blue taste like the long-lost memory of mother’s milk. Or, hardwiring a premise: I will succeed. I am happy in my job. There is life after death. Nobody died in Belsen. Four legs good, two legs bad . . .

The next rack contained a selection of religions, everything from Amish to Zen. (Gaining the Amish disapproval of technology this way apparently posed no problem; virtually every religious implant enabled the user to embrace far stranger contradictions.) There was even an implant called Secular Humanist (‘You WILL hold these truths to be self-evident!’). No Vacillating Agnostic, though; apparently there was no market for doubt.

I could write something about each of these; sometimes hundreds of words. Next time.

• It is probably best to treat this book as 2 or 3 small collections, for savouring and emotional rest.

How does it do as serious science fiction?

Social development: A great deal. Personal identity is twisted and torn a dozen times, and he sketches the social structures which would have to arise when there are two of you, none of you, half of you, chimeras. The Ndoli devices illustrate that social consensus replaces philosophy for most people. When perfect cloning and brain transplants are available - when medicine’s grasp over injury is total - he still brings it back to hard economics, the small print. Better on this than Chiang, his great peer.

Software development: Not a huge amount but enough. He knows that brain transplants couldn’t work without software, and the Ndoli devices are an excellent picture of machine learning, even 25 years later, after the field became more than a toy.

Actual Science: Half of these stem from an extrapolation of current science (transplants, brain editing, cloning, brain emulation, BioArt), rather than say the apriori thought experiments of Chiang. And not just science: combinatorics! Actual probability! But even his flights of fancy (like the programmable wormhole with bizarre physics of ‘Into Darkness’) are internally consistent, and display serious attempt to take physics or biology seriously.

"Master and Commander (Aubrey/Maturin, #1)"

Patrick O’Brian (1994)
★★★★☆
reviewed Mar 2021

What is it to be Jane Austen for dudes?* There’s the boring meaning: “set in 1700s”, or “full of circumlocution”. Or the interesting: “depicting old fun, old morals, matters of grave importance (marriage, war) with irony and humour, status regulation, the sheer work of getting along with others”. explosions, to boot.

The seamen, sprawling abroad on the fo’c’sle and combing out their long hair or plaiting it up again for one another, kindly explained to the landmen that this long swell from the south and east, this strange sticky heat that came both from the sky and the glassy surface of the heaving sea, and this horribly threatening appearance of the sun, meant that there was to be a coming dissolution of all natural bonds, an apocalyptic upheaval, a right dirty night.

Brutal, too. The jolly crew, so kind and deferential to Stephen, are invariably wasted and criminal on shore (“the Sophies were much given to rapine”) And the heroic, witty, sensitive officers are pretty bloodthirsty (“burning for the uproar and the more than human liberation of a battle”). That’s what you get when you hire or abduct a hundred killers and pen them in with 2 pints of rum a day.

Prose is curious: both smooth and obscure. But he’s a master all right.

Stephen could remember an evening when he had sat there in the warm, deepening twilight, watching the sea; it had barely a ruffle on its surface, and yet the Sophie picked up enough moving air with her topgallants to draw a long straight whispering furrow across the water, a line brilliant with unearthly phosphorescence, visible for quarter of a mile behind her. Days and nights of unbelievable purity. Nights when the steady Ionian breeze rounded the square mainsail – not a brace to be touched, watch relieving watch – and he and Jack on deck, sawing away, sawing away, lost in their music, until the falling dew untuned their strings. And days when the perfection of dawn was so great, the emptiness so entire, that men were almost afraid to speak.

“It seems to me that the greater mass of confusion and distress must arise from these less evident divergencies – the moral law, the civil, military, common laws, the code of honour, custom, the rules of practical life, of civility, of amorous conversation, gallantry, to say nothing of Christianity for those that practise it. All sometimes, indeed generally, at variance; none ever in an entirely harmonious relation to the rest; and a man is perpetually required to choose one rather than another, perhaps (in his particular case) its contrary. It is as though our strings were each tuned according to a completely separate system – it is as though the poor ass were surrounded by four and twenty mangers”

People are in it for Jack and Stephen. JA is a big kind lunk, thinks he’s wittier than he is. On deciding to test out his new cannon:

“I think we can have a couple of rounds: God knows how long these charges have been lying in the guns. Besides,’ he added in a voice within his inner voice – a voice from a far deeper level, ‘think of the lovely smell.”

“I have been thinking about Dillon all day. All day long I have been thinking about him, off and on. You would scarcely credit how much I miss him... Dillon was Irish. Though you would never have thought so – never to be seen drunk, almost never called anyone out, spoke like a Christian, the most gentleman-like creature in the world, nothing of the hector at all – oh Christ. My dear fellow, my dear Maturin, I do beg your pardon. I say these damned things … I regret it extremely.”

SM is a cool moody Irish intellectual, quick with a bonesaw, and actually witty.

“The thing is officially called the trial of the captain, officers and ship’s company...; but obviously in this it is only my conduct that is in question. You have nothing to worry about, I do assure you, upon my word and honour. Nothing at all.’ ‘Oh, I shall plead guilty at once,’ said Stephen. ‘And I shall add that I was sitting in the powder-magazine with a naked light at the time, imagining the death of the King, wasting my medical stores, smoking tobacco and making a fraudulent return of the portable soup. What solemn nonsense it is’ – laughing heartily... After a longish pause Jack said, ‘You do not rate post-captains and admirals very high among intelligent beings, I believe? I have heard you say some tolerably severe things about admirals, and great men.’ “Why, to be sure, something sad seems to happen to your great men and your admirals, with age, pretty often: even to your post-captains. A kind of atrophy, a withering-away of the head and the heart. I conceive it may arise from…”

Almost every page at sea has some new jargon, most of it lovely. You will need this, even though some things are explained to landmen. O’Brian is intentionally making it difficult for us, so skip him if you don’t consent to an old snob messing with you.

“And then these futtock-plates at the rim here hold the dead-eyes for the topmast shrouds – the top gives a wide base so that the shrouds have a purchase: the top is a little over ten foot wide. It is the same thing up above. There are the cross-trees, and they spread the topgallant shrouds. You see them, sir? Up there, where the look-out is perched, beyond the topsail yard.’ ‘You could not explain this maze of ropes and wood and canvas without using sea-terms, I suppose. No, it would not be possible.’ ‘Using no sea-terms? I should be puzzled to do that, sir”

O’Brian goes onto my very short list of novelists who can write a philosopher character without accidentally making them a guru or a pseud. (Joyce, St Aubyn, Borges, Bolaño, Stoppard, Egan)

• Austen is for everyone, but not everyone knows that.
  
  
  

"Da Capo Best Music Writing 2000"

Douglas Wolk (2000)
★★★★☆
reviewed Jan 2006

I was trying to get a handle on all of pop music - pop, that is, in the broad sense that anything that couldn’t get played in a fancy concert hall is pop, that anything newer than Gershwin is pop. I spent years on this endeavour, eventually reaching the Scaruffian fringes: everything at least heard of, every landmark clung to by fingertips. I’m not sure why I did it.

Or, I know but it isn’t pretty: The people who know most about music are the ones who need it most: need it as a pretext to wear headphones and not talk to people, need it as vicarious catharsis for things felt but never said, need it as a gigantic arena for countercultural status, where if you only put in a thousand hours of skronk and dischord, then you’re a thousand hours ahead of someone.

Reading Lester Bangs on the Comedian Harmonists (!), included here, remains one of the most powerful moments in my entire reading life. The unsurpassing joy of discovery, of crossing cultures, of fandom.

"The Squashed Philosophers"

Glyn Lloyd-Hughes (2005)
★★★★☆
reviewed Jan 2006

Excellent way in for a teenager. Almost primary sources; someone else simulating you if you had the attention span to find the highlights.

"The Shadow of the Torturer (The Book of the New Sun, #1)"

Gene Wolfe (1984)
★★★★☆
reviewed Nov 2018

Wonderful. Rivals Earthsea as the wisest and subtlest Fantasy, for people who don’t like Fantasy. Fast-moving, full of ironies, antimonies, and ambivalent symbolism - the kind which doesn’t hit you over the head (I’m thinking of Gandalf changing colour hmmmmmm).

There’s a dozen memorable characters in 300pp (Gurloes, Thecla, Agilus, Agia, Talos, Ultan, Inire, Eata, Baldanders, the man himself), even though many appear for just one scene. And there’s a very unobtrusive frame narrative which deepens and undermines things.

And under all that: the beautiful post-post-apocalyptic layer: New Sun is actually science fiction, about what happens when the great project, Progress, collapses; what happens after thousands of years of decay.

those who dig for their livelihood say there is no land anywhere in which they can trench without turning up shards of the past. No matter where the spade turns the soil, it uncovers broken pavements and corroded metal; and scholars write that the kind of sand that artists call polychrome (because flecks of every colour are mixed with its whiteness) is actually not sand at all, but the glass of the past, now pounded by aeons of tumbling in the clamorous sea.

It is Clarkean: The book is unconcerned whether strange events are due to obscure high technology, psychological trickery, or bonafide supernatural force.

Because Wolfe is a bit difficult, it’s not too incongruous to bring up Grand Narrative now: sure, the French theorists were wrong to suggest that such ideas are dead in our time (or bad, if alive) but they certainly could die, and Wolfe explores what that’d be like. Nessus has no master idea - not even god, not even family, not even order. (Or maybe it’s class again.)

"Severian. Name for me the seven principles of governance." A foreboding grew on me; I sensed that if I did not reply, some tragedy would occur. At last I began weakly, "Anarchy . . ." "That is not governance, but the lack of it. I taught you that it precedes all governance. Now list the seven sorts." "Attachment to the person of the monarch. Attachment to the bloodline or other sequence of succession. Attachment to the royal state. Attachment to a code legitimizing the governing state. Attachment to the law only. Attachment to a greater or lesser board of electors, as framers of the law. Attachment to an abstraction conceived as including the body of electors, other bodies giving rise to them and numerous other elements, largely ideal." "Tolerable. Of these, which is the earlier form, and which the highest?" "The development is in the order given, Master," I said. "But I do not rrecall that you ever asked us before which was highest." Master Malrubius leaned forward, his eyes burning brighter than the coals of the fire. "Which is the highest, Severian?" "The last, Master?" "You mean attachment to an abstraction conceived as including the body of electors, other bodies giving rise to them, and numerous other elements, largely ideal?" "Yes, Master." "Of what kind, Severian, is your own attachment to the Divine Entity?" I said nothing. It may have been that I was thinking; but if so, my mind was too much filled with sleep to be conscious of its thought. Instead, I became profoundly aware of my physical surroundings. The sky above my face in all its grandeur seemed to have been made solely for my benefit, and to be presented for my inspection now. I lay upon the ground as upon a woman, and the very air that surrounded me seemed a thing as admirable as crystal and as fluid as wine. "Answer me, Severian." "The first, if I have any." "To the person of the monarch?" "Yes, because there is no succession."

(Dune occupies the same SFF feudalist netherland as this, but is much clumsier, occasionally contemptible.)

How do you write a truly immoral sympathetic character? (In this case, the most immoral: who does the worst thing you can do.) I think the answer is simple: detail. Make it first-person and simply show the ordinary range of interests, foibles, enculturation, passions. The reader does the rest. (Compare Lolita, Private Memoirs of a Justified Sinner, Wasp Factory, Crime and Punishment…)

Gurloes was one of the most complex men I have known, because he was a complex man trying to be simple. Not a simple, but a complex man's idea of simplicity. Just as a courtier forms himself into something brilliant and involved, midway between a dancing master and a diplomacist, with a touch of assassin if needed, so Master Gurloes had shaped himself to be the dull creature a pursuivant or bailiff expected to see when he summoned the head of our guild, and that is the only thing a real torturer cannot be. The strain showed; though every part of Gurloes was as it should have been, none of the parts fit... He ate too much and too seldom, read when he thought no one knew of it, and visited certain of our clients, including one on the third level, to talk of things none of us eaves-dropping in the corridor outside could understand. His eyes were refulgent, brighter than any woman's.

Severian is completely cold-blooded about violence while still being notably heroic and sentimental. (Ok he doesn't actually torture anyone.)

By the use of the language of sorrow I had for the time being obliterated my sorrow - so powerful is the charm of words, which for us reduces to manageable entities all the passions that would otherwise madden and destroy...

The heroism is natural and plausible, because he dooms himself in the middle of the book, so everything that happens is a bonus to him, so he takes bandits and duels and unlikely undertakings in his stride, which is an enviable attitude.

One of many lovely details: all the Latin is subtly wrong: ‘terminus est’ taken to be ‘this is the line of division’ rather than ‘this is the end’; ‘felicibus brevis, miseris hora longa’, ‘Men wait long for happiness’. But most of the rest of the jargon is historically accurate: ‘hydrargyrum’ for mercury, ‘hipparch’ for cavalier, ‘archon’ for lord, ‘carnifex’ for butcher, ‘matross’ for junior soldier, etc.

The second half, the quest with Agia and Dorcas, reminds me of ‘Before Sunrise’, of all things: glittering words exchanged by the young and instantly intimate. The writing is so fine and uncliched that it pulls off unreconstructed romance in the midst of post-apocalyptic feudalism. In general, the feudal trappings justify Wolfe’s ornate prose well. Severian often says things that are wise to us, and the things which aren’t make sense in brutal context:

the pattern of our guild is repeated mindlessly (like the repetitions of Father Inire's mirrors in the House Absolute) in the societies of every trade, so that they are all of them torturers, just as we. His quarry stands to the hunter as our clients to us; those who buy to the tradesman; the enemies of the Commonwealth to the soldier; the governed to the governors; men to women. All love that which they destroy.

Nietzsche on the wheel:

Weak people believe what is forced on them. Strong people what they wish to believe, forcing that to be real. What is the Autarch but a man who believes himself Autarch and makes others believe by the strength of it.

Probably 5/5 on re-read.

PS: I can’t decide if this or Fall of Hyperion has the lower quality-of-book : awfulness-of-cover ratio.

"Keywords"

Raymond Williams (1988)
★★★★☆
reviewed Nov 2008

A list of definitions (and etymologies) of the vague, overloaded, and pompous language used in the humanities. Reading this early in my degree made me able to talk: it relaxed the paralysis that is the natural (and perhaps intended) response to their famous walls of jargon.

If you’ve ever felt there was something to area studies and critical theory, but that the inferential distance was too costly to justify the effort, this is the book for you. (Or, it was thirty years ago. They’ll have invented thousands more ill-defined words since then.) I imagine it would also be good for very ambitious adult English learners.

Williams is a sarcastic, clever and friendly guide: I can’t remember which top-rank word he describes as “better for it never to have been”, but here’s a good entry:

'Nature' is perhaps the most complex word in the language. It is relatively easy to distinguish three areas of meaning: (i) the essential quantity and character of something; (ii) the inherent force which directs either the world or human beings or both; (iii) the material world itself, taken as including or not including human beings. Yet it is evident that within (ii) and (iii), though the area of reference is broadly clear, precise meanings are variable and at times even opposed. The historical development of the word through these three senses is important, but it is also significant that all three senses, and the main variations and alternatives within the two most difficult of them, are still active and widespread in contemporary usage. was (i), the essential character and quality of something. Nature is thus one of several important words, including culture, which began as descriptions of a quality or process, immediately defined by a specific reference, but later became independent nouns... The common phrase human nature, often crucial in important kinds of argument, can contain, without clearly demonstrating it, any of the three main senses and indeed the main variations and alternatives. There is a relatively neutral use in sense (i): that it is an essential quality and characteristic of human beings to do something (though the something that is specified may of course be controversial). But in many uses the descriptive (and hence verifiable or falsifiable) character of sense (i) is less prominent than the very different kind of statement which depends on sense (ii), the directing inherent force, or one of the variants of sense (iii), a fixed property of the material world, in this case ‘natural man’. What has also to be noticed in the relation between sense (i) and senses (ii) and (iii) is, more generally, that sense (i), by definition, is a specific singular - the nature of something, whereas senses (ii) and (iii), in almost all their uses, are abstract singulars - the nature of all things having become singular nature or Nature... There was then a practice of shifting use, as in Shakespeare’s Lear:

Allow not nature more than nature needs, Man’s life’s as cheap as beast’s ... one daughter / Who redeems nature from the general curse Which twain have brought her to. That nature, which contemns its origin Cannot be border’d certain in itself...

It could seem wrong to inquire into the workings of an absolute monarch, or of a minister of God. But a formula was arrived at: to understand the creation was to praise the Creator, seeing absolute power through contingent works. In practice the formula became lip-service and was then forgotten. Paralleling political changes, nature was altered from an absolute to a constitutional monarch, with a new kind of emphasis on natural laws. Nature, in C18 and C19, was often in effect personified as a constitutional lawyer. The laws came from somewhere, and this was variously but often indifferently defined; most practical attention was given to interpreting and classifying the laws, making predictions from precedents, discovering or reviving forgotten statutes, and above all shaping new laws from new cases: nature not as an inherent and shaping force but as an accumulation and classification of cases. The complexity of the word is hardly surprising, given the fundamental importance of the processes to which it refers. But since nature is a word which carries, over a very long period, many of the major variations of human thought - often, in any particular use, only implicitly yet with powerful effect on the character of the argument - it is necessary to be especially aware of its difficulty.

"23 Things They Don't Tell You about Capitalism"

Ha-Joon Chang (2011)
★★★★☆
reviewed Jan 2010

Chatty, thoughtful introduction to some hard truths of economic development. Not actually anti-capitalist, except in the mild sense that we all should be (that is, critical of market failure, cronyism, corporate welfare and socialised risk, regulatory capture, negative-sum nationalism, casino capital, …).

The soundest and most important of the 23 points is the surprising fact that no currently-developed economy ever managed to industrialise without initially using trade barriers. (This is covered better in Chang’s Kicking Away the Ladder, with its extensive details of postwar South Korea’s shocking illiberalism: for instance, importing hi-tech goods was a serious crime for decades.) This wasn’t well-known even in the Development circles I was moving in.

The other propositions, I can’t remember well enough to endorse or deny, but it left a vague good impression.

"The Pleasures of the Damned: Selected Poems, 1951-1993"

Charles Bukowski (2018)
★★★★☆
reviewed Sep 2014

An anti-social phallocrat waves his pen in the wee small hours – yet often achieves beauty. This is a Best-of, but actually not his best. Still a very good way in.

Bukowski is Springsteen after Rosalita, Mary, Janey, Sandy, Trudy and the rest either moved town forever to get away from him or died.

"Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground 1981-1991"

Michael Azerrad (2002)
★★★★☆
reviewed Jan 2006

Unsurpassed writing about a tiny but hyperinfluential moment in unpopular music. One of the few writers I’ve seen give the Minutemen their due as the greatest flowering of global punk.

"Selected Poems, 1954-1992"

George Mackay Brown (1996)
★★★★☆
reviewed Nov 2013

Distrust and death but never self-pity; drowning and drama but wise. Of one place’s Vikings, fish, and pain – like Under Milk Wood without the japery and authorial distance. Seal Market is amazing; the Hamnavoe poems are so good I feel I’ve been there (which means I don’t have to go).

Brown seems stuck writing about the Middle Ages – “what are these red things like tatties? (apples)”– but then, the Middle Ages lasted right through to the 1960s, on Orkney.

And since “a circle has no beginning or end. The symbol holds: people in AD 2000 are essentially the same as the stone-breakers of 3000 BC.”

"Samuel Johnson Is Indignant"

Lydia Davis (2002)
★★★★☆
reviewed Apr 2014

We feel an affinity with a certain thinker because we agree with him; or because he shows us what we were already thinking; or because he shows us in a more articulate form what we were already thinking; or because he shows us what we were on the point of thinking; or what we would have thought much later if we hadn't read it now; or what we would have been likely to think but never would have thought if we hadn't read it now; or what we would have liked to think but never would have thought if we hadn't read it now.

Went on my guard when I heard that the title story was one sentence long – speaking, as such conceits do, of holy-urinal superstitious art – but this is actually a standout, a series of droll, exacting capsules and nutshells.

A typical piece is one page long and part gag, part compulsive meditation, part confession of petty vice. Once you get over her diffident, terse non-being, it is fun stuff. The long piece on jury duty is best, its length and repetitious babble a symmetry of the trial.

"At Swim-Two-Birds"

Flann O’Brien (1998)
★★★★☆
reviewed Jan 2009

Postmodernism is completely fine if it’s as fun as this.

"H.M.S. Surprise (Aubrey & Maturin #3)"

Patrick O’Brian (1991)
★★★★☆
reviewed Apr 2021

I shed a tear for Dil.

Killick was a cross-grained bastard, who supposed that if he sprinkled his discourse with a good many sirs, the words in between did not signify: but still he had procured this coffee, these eggs, this butter, this soft tack, on shore and had put them on the table the morning after a hot engagement—ship still cleared for action and the galley knocked sideways by the fire from Cape Béar. Jack had known Killick ever since his first command, and as he had risen in rank so Killick's sullen independence had increased; he was angrier than usual now because Jack had wrecked his number three uniform and lost one of his gloves: 'Coat torn in five places—cutlass slash in the forearm which how can I ever darn that? Bullet 'ole all singed, never get the powder-marks out. Breeches all a-hoo, and all this nasty blood everywhere, like you'd been a-wallowing in a lay-stall, sir. What Miss would say, I don't know, sir. God strike me blind. Epaulette 'acked, fair 'acked to pieces. (Jesus, what a life.)

Quotations from Dryden throughout, nice dark tart verses.

Once he had established that Jack and Hervey were connected with families he knew, he treated them as human beings; all the others as dogs—but as good, quite intelligent dogs in a dog-loving community. He was ceremonious, naturally kind, and he had a great and oppressive sense of duty.

On the vulgarity of true aristos:

General Aubrey belonged to another civilisation, a civilisation untouched by the age of enlightenment or the spread of the bourgeoisie, one that had passed away in the counties nearer London long before Sophie was born and one to which her essentially urban, respectable, middle-class family had never belonged at any time. She had been brought up in a quiet, staid, manless house and she did not know what to make of his gallantries, his praise of Jack's taste (Cecilia would have been more at home with him); nor of his observation that Jack was a sad dog—always had been—but she was not to mind it—Jack's mother never had. Sophia would not mind half a dozen love-children, he was sure.

On innovation:

“But any gait, all of 'em you see in this weather line, is what we call twelve-hundred-tonners; though to be sure some gauges thirteen and even fifteen hundred ton, Thames measurement. Wexford, there, with her brass fo'c'sle eight-pounder winking in the sun, she does: but we call her a twelve hundred ton ship.'    'Sir, might it not be simpler to call her a fifteen hundred ton ship?'    'Simpler, maybe: but it would never do. You don't want to be upsetting the old ways. Oh dear me, no. God's my life, if the Captain was to hear you “carrying on in that reckless Jacobin, democratical line, why, I dare say he would turn you adrift on a three-inch plank, with both your ears nailed down to it, to learn you bashfulness, the way he served three young gentlemen in the Med. No, no: you don't want to go arsing around with the old ways: the French did so, and look at the scrape it has gotten them into”

One jarring bit: Stephen the caring pacifist is extremely quick to fight lethal duels over minor points of honour. This is partly down to his aiming to be nonlethal, but come on.

‘He was blaming his particular friend for romantic notions the other day—the friend who is to marry the daughter of that woman we saw just now—and if I had not been so shocked by his condition, I should have been tempted to laugh. He is himself a perfect Quixote: an enthusiastic supporter of the Revolution until '93; a United Irishman until the rising, Lord Edward's adviser—his cousin, by the way—'    'Is he a Fitzgerald?'    'The wrong side of the blanket. And now Catalan independence. Or perhaps I should say, Catalan independence from the beginning, simultaneously with the others. But always heart and soul, blood and purse in some cause from which he can derive no conceivable personal benefit’

Surprisingly good afterword by Charlton Heston. The list of O’Brian megafans is funny: Iris Murdoch, Tom Stoppard, Joan Didion, David Mamet, Eudora Welty, Mark Knopfler, Walter Cronkite, George Will. Is there anything else they agree on?

"The Plato Cult and Other Philosophical Follies"

David Stove (1991)
★★★★☆
reviewed Mar 2015

Funny, unfair, rabid dismissal of most philosophy ever. Uses ad hominem Bulwerism openly - despite that going against his own ideal of reason - because he views a great range of people as being too mad to engage with.

His other move is to use the positivist’s wood-chipper principle a lot: ‘your position is literally meaningless; you’re too stupid to see this’, occasionally correctly. Attacks idealists mostly, including whole chapters making fun of Goodman, Nozick, and Popper(!) - but does not spare Mill (“here doing his usual service of making mistakes very clearly”) and Russell, who you’d think were his kind of men.

The last chapter is scary and hilarious and suggests the man’s basic pain, underneath his roaring pessimism. Read it at least.

4/5. (keep it away from freshers though)

"Master of Reality"

John Darnielle (2008)
★★★★☆
reviewed Jan 2010

Crushing, beautiful portrait of teenage alienation, institutionalisation, and ‘Sabbath, from an author uniquely placed to deal with these things (as an ex-desperate-teen, ex-psychiatric-nurse, metal fan, America’s greatest lyricist of neurosis). Heavy.

It doesn’t matter if you’ve never heard or never liked Sabbath. This explains it regardless, and might unlock it. His best prose (though his lyrics 1995-2004 are his best words).

(From dear James)

"The Pale King"

David Foster Wallace (2011)
★★★★☆
reviewed Jun 2015

What to say?

Fifty fragments: unintegrated, contradicting, only sometimes amazing. Themes you’d expect: self-consciousness, freedom, duty, routine - the awful effect of unconstrained self-consciousness, freedom, duty and routine - the death of American civics - ‘the horror of personal smallness and transience’ - the repugnance we feel for pure virtue - the extraordinary fires alight beneath some people. But where in Jest these were expressed through (burdened with) drug slang, pharmacology, advertising dreck, and calculus, here we get accountancy minutiae surely intended to repulse us. Yet the style is far less mannered than his finished work, which style we might call Postdoc Valleyspeak.

The reason for this public ignorance is not secrecy. The real reason why US citizens were/are not aware of these conflicts, changes and stakes is that the whole subject of tax policy and administration is dull. Massively, spectacularly dull. It is impossible to overstate the importance of this feature. Consider, from the Service’s perspective, the advantages of the dull, the arcane, the mind-numbingly complex. The IRS was one of the very first government agencies to learn that such qualities help to insulate them against public protest and political opposition, and that abstruse dullness is actually a much more effective shield than is secrecy. For the great disadvantage of secrecy is that it’s interesting.

Institutional tedium – the default state for developed-world adults – is profoundly important to address, a topic it will take an unusual mind to illuminate for us. But Pale King is actually not a Kafkan tale of the ever-growing horror of bureaucracy; actually he is deeply impressed and convinced of the value of the people and the work of the IRS, in large part because of its inhumane strictures, lack of glory, and unpopularity.

“Big Q is whether IRS is to be essentially a corporate entity or a moral one.” (Though if ‘corporate’ is there read merely as meaning ‘maximising’, the distinction can be misleading.)

To me, the really interesting question is why dullness proves to be such a powerful impediment to attention. Why we recoil from the dull. Maybe it’s because dullness is intrinsically painful; maybe that’s where phrases like ‘deadly dull’ and ‘excruciatingly dull’ come from. But there might be more to it. Maybe dullness is associated with psychic pain because something that’s dull fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there, if only in an ambient low-level way… I can’t think anyone really believes that today’s so-called ‘information society’ is just about information. Everyone knows it’s about something else, way down.

I tried to read them as short stories rather than chapters. This half-works. Actually the entire book was intentionally fruitless – the major agonists all off-stage, everyone else just enduring.

A couple of intentionally unconvincing first-person authorial inserts – “I, David Wallace, social security no…” – affirm the reality of the garish IRS underbelly he fabricates, put him in the scene. Fragment #8 is a horrifying Cormac McCarthy lyric, childhood psychosis. One (#22) is a hundred-page monologue, the character repetitive, rambling and conceited, but also the most developed and affecting. Of this wreckage we are given to read. What to say? That you’d have to love this writing to like it, that you should.

"The Count of Monte Cristo"

Alexandre Dumas (2003)
★★★★☆
reviewed Mar 2021

What a book! Four books, bolted together in the manner of an undergraduate pulling an all-nighter. You can read it as pure Treasure Island / Three Musketeers pulp, if you squint. But underneath is a whole view of human nature, of French Restoration perversity, of class anxiety after the People have vented themselves, and minute details of how French society worked. It contains digressions on merchant shipping, stoner drivel, interest rates, Napoleon’s legacy, the ethnography of Parisian opera-goers, Roman cab fare, made up nonsense about Tunisian royalty, optical telegraphs, and I love it. 100 characters. Fun and irreverent and grand and petty and solemn and nerdy. Like a city on wheels.

in your place I should say nothing of all these adventures. Your life story is a novel; and people, though they love novels bound between two yellow paper covers, are oddly suspicious of those which come to them in living vellum, even when they are as gilded as you are capable of being.

Published a chapter at a time, and Dumas was paid by the word, and it shows. But it shows in the other way too: this is a live thing. For once I don’t begrudge you your abridged edition: half of this is superfluous. The first 30 chapters are best: joy, betrayal, madness, education, escape, redemption. And Albert is incredibly annoying, and gets 10 chapters. But c’mon, just do a chapter a night for 3 months.

You will put up with heavy telegraphing:

"...I must go to Paris.” “Ah, really?—to Paris! and will it be the first time you have ever been there, Dantès?” “Yes.” “Have you business there?” “Not of my own; the last commission of poor Captain Leclere...” “Yes, yes, I understand,” said Danglars, and then in a low tone, he added, “To Paris, no doubt to deliver the letter which the grand marshal gave him. Ah, this letter gives me an idea—a capital idea! Ah; Dantès, my friend, you are not yet registered number one on board the good ship Pharaon;” then turning towards Edmond, who was walking away, “A pleasant journey,” he cried. “Thank you,” said Edmond with a friendly nod, and the two lovers continued on their way, as calm and joyous as if they were the very elect of heaven.

Buss’ translation is immaculate. You occasionally see the strain of an odd idiom, but in the same way you see a master athlete flex to pull off something hard.

Dantès is a simple romantic hero; or a heartless villain, a vampire; or a revenant of the revolution. (He isn’t a radical, until he is punished for being one.) Or as class anxiety. Dantès the pirate, Dantès the entryist, Dantès the stalker, Dantès the god. The book imagines a perfect impostor, who has learned all the contrived tricks of the aristocracy, and with bottomless pockets. A parvenu you can’t detect. A nemesis you don’t know about. Betrayal transforms him from a noble peasant to a vicious overlord.(I thought my class-war reading was a stretch until I learned who Dumas’ dad was. Dumas saw either side.)

Dantès is, for the latter 3/4 of the book, not good. This isn’t a matter of interpretation: he owns slaves, loves executions, and deludes everyone around him with fake virtue and kindness! He is an obsessed agent of narrow justice, a perfect liar, and a ‘vampire’. Another instance of how terrible and inhuman justice can be. The novel tacitly condemns Dantès from Chapter 30 onwards: outwardly he lacks feeling (is deadly pale). So we’re bad fans.

Franz, meanwhile, was thinking about the extraordinary shudder that had passed through the whole of the Count of Monte Cristo’s body at the moment when he was more or less obliged to give Albert his hand.

Internally, he rages - but to the point of moving entirely beyond passion. Focus as the opposite of emotion. He is a mastermind, an implausibly good planner and reasoner - all in the service of fatal romance.

• The central transformation of the book is much more extreme than Pygmalion or My Fair Lady.

• Its great lesson is that evil can result from mild vice: envy, whim, irritation. The great silly convenience of the plot is the perfect anti-correlation between virtue and success: all of the idle conspirators reach the heights of society for unrelated reasons.

"I’m convinced that, sooner or later, a righteous man is rewarded and a wicked one punished." "You're a man of the cloth, Monsieur l'Abbe," said Caderousse with a bitter look, "and it's your job to say that. But everyone is free to disbelieve what you claim... [Ruin:] That's how God rewards virtue, Monsieur."

On the whole, M. de Villefort made and returned few visits... this was accepted in society, where it was attributed to the amount and gravity of the lawyer's business - when it was, in reality, deliberate arrogance, an extreme example of aristocratic contempt, in short, the application of the maxim: ‘Admire yourself and others will admire you', a hundred times more useful in our day than the Greek one: ‘Know thyself', now replaced by the less demanding and more profitable art of knowing others.

and so Dantes’ perfect uber-dickhead counter to Villefort:

"despite your reputation as a superior being, you see everything from the vulgar and material point of view of society, beginning and ending with man, that is to say, the most restricted and narrow point of view that human intelligence can adopt.’ ‘I beg you to explain yourself, sir,’ said Villefort, more and more astonished. I don’t entirely follow...’ ‘What I’m saying, sir, is that your eyes are fixed on the social organisation of nations that means that you only see the mechanism and not the sublime worker who operates it. I'm saying that you only recognise in front of you and around you those office-holders whose accreditation has been signed by a minister or by the king and that your short-sightedness leads you to ignore those men whom God has set above office-holders, ministers and kings, by giving them a mission to pursue instead of a position to fill. This weakness is inherent in humans, with their feeble and inadequate organs. Tobias mistook the angel who had just restored his sight for an ordinary young man. The nations mistook Attila, who would annihilate them, for a conqueror like other conquerors. It was necessary for both to reveal their celestial missions for them to be recognised - for one to say: “I'm the angel of the Lord”, and the other: “I’m the hammer of God”, for their divine essence to be revealed.’ ‘Does this mean,' Villefort said, increasingly amazed and thinking he must be speaking to a visionary or a madman, ‘that you consider yourself to be like one of these extraordinary beings you have just mentioned?’ ‘Why not?' Monte Cristo asked coldly. "Please forgive me, sir," Villefort continued in bewilderment, "if when I called on you I was not aware that I was to be introduced to a man whose understanding and mind extend so far beyond the ordinary knowledge and usual cast of thought of mankind... it is not customary for those who enjoy the privilege of wealth to waste their time in social speculation and philosophical dreams that are rather designed to console those whom fate has deprived of the goods of the earth."

• The adults are corrupt, the youth innocent but trivially corruptible.

• The surprisingly good cartoon adaption, Gankutsuou, focusses on polymorphous homoerotic undertones barely present here. (It also has bad CGI battle robots.)

• Is it money that corrupts him, rather than betrayal and injustice? Dantès is still relatively virtuous, human in the events following his escape. But not when he passes from redeemer to revenant.

three months earlier [he] had wanted nothing except freedom, felt already not free enough, but wanted wealth. It was not the fault of Dantès, but of God who, while limiting the power of man, has created in him infinite desires!

*

he was paying the meal the compliment one would expect from a man condemned for four or five months to suffer Italian cooking (which is among the worst in the world).

• On being ransomed to a kidnapper, Luigi:

'Signor Luigi,’ Albert continued, ‘are there any other formalities to be completed before we may take leave of Your Excellency?’ ‘None at all, sir,’ the bandit said. ‘You are as free as the air.’ ‘In that case, I wish you a long life and good fortune. Come, gentlemen, come!’

• Word count word count word count:

a man in a blue jacket, with silk buttons of the same colour, a white waistcoat crossed by a huge gold chain and hazel-coloured trousers, with a head of such black hair, worn so low above the eyebrows that it seemed hardly natural, being so inconsistent with those wrinkles on the forehead that it was unable to disguise; in short, a man of between 50 and 55, trying to look 40, put his head out of the window of a coupe with a baron's crown painted on its door, and sent his groom to enquire of the concierge whether the Count of Monte Cristo was at home. As he waited, the man examined the exterior of the house, what could be seen of the garden and the livery of a few servants who might be observed coming and going - and did so with such close attention as to amount almost to impertinence. His eye was sharp, but with more cunning in it than wit or irony. His lips were so thin that they vanished inside the mouth instead of protruding from it. Finally, the breadth and prominence of the cheekbones (an infallible sign of shrewdness), the retreating forehead, the bulging occiput which extended well beyond his wide and not in the least aristocratic ears, all contributed to give this gentleman (whom any ordinary person would have thought very respectable in view of his magnificent horses, the enormous diamond he wore in his shirt and the red ribbon that stretched from one buttonhole to another on his coat), a face which to a trained physiognomist betrayed an almost repulsive character.

The book broadened my sense of Romanticism; previously I had a pretty shallow idea of it, as if 100 years of clever people would not produce interesting thoughts as well as pure emoting. Consider the ridiculous faculties and ingenuity of Abbe Faria (competence porn!). It’s not about feelings, or, it doesn’t begin and end in feeling. It’s about will over circumstance, virtue over accident, doing whatever extreme things it takes, to drive a passion into the earth. Romanticism is ridiculous, but it doesn’t care about being ridiculous.

"Often we pass beside happiness without seeing it, without looking at it, or, even if we have seen and looked at it, without recognizing it... Your throne will be raised up on the mountain where Satan took Jesus. And, without having to pay him homage, without having to kiss his claw, you will be the sovereign master of all the kingdoms on earth. Do not be content with just one experiment: as with everything, the senses must become accustomed to a new impression, whether it is pleasant or not, happy or sad. Nature wrestles with this divine substance, because our nature is not made for joy but clings to pain. Nature must be defeated in this struggle, reality must follow dreams; and then the dream will rule, will become the master, the dream will become life and life become a dream. What a difference is made by this transfiguration! When you compare the sorrows of real life to the pleasures of the imaginary one, you will never want to live again, only to dream for ever. When you leave your world for that of others, you will feel as if you have travelled from spring in Naples to winter in Lapland, from paradise to earth, from heaven to hell. Try some hashish, my friend! Try it!"

"Through the Habitrails: Life Before and After My Career in the Cubicles (Dover Graphic Novels)"

Jeff Nicholson (2016)
★★★★☆
reviewed Mar 2021

God help an artist with a comfy white-collar job. It’s not that his suffering isn’t real, it’s not even that it’s necessarily much less intense than people with harder jobs, no jobs, back-breaking jobs, entirely abstract and zero-feedback jobs. But to write about the misery of your easy meaningless labour - even this well - without a moment of perspective is an artistic and spiritual failure. But it’s a great failure and I appreciate his heartlessness, narcissism, his latent Marxism foiled by apathy, his Romanticism scuttled by irony. It’s a logical tantrum, even when the gerbil king tells him to kill himself.

We hear no one but him; they are mute while he is unceasing. These stories are intended as horror without monsters (observe the lettering font he uses, or the mouthlessness or literal voicelessness of the characters). What would self-awareness cost him? His “being above this”, “being underemployed”, being an “(overproduced) elite” are not the only view of the arrangement, or even a very good one.

All of the days should be mine.

Anyway aren’t corporate jobs dreadful. Nicholson comes up with my favourite ever image for the feeling of alienated work: resting to recover your “juice”, only to be stabbed the next day with multiple taps to drain it from you, a finite flow that also drives your personal projects.

The company won two-thirds of my life, and drained the juices from my driven flesh for its own needless product.

The alcoholism chapter is very moving, very degraded.

The artist characters have no mouths; only the salespeople and the boss have them, big grins six inches tall.

A hatred was in her voice that would take a grip of your inner organs.

Anyway this is best in its class and even ends with acceptance(?)(?) of a 20 year career in Geographical Info Systems(?). Probably avoid if you’re currently in a shit job.

"Do You Think What You Think You Think?"

Julian Baggini (2006)
★★★★☆
reviewed Jan 2006

Maybe the first philosophy (nominal philosophy? thing by a philosopher?) I read. Can’t quite remember if it was amazing, but I ended up doing philosophy so it can’t have been bad.

"Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art"

Scott McCloud (1993)
★★★★☆
reviewed Mar 2021

Good fun. In any other medium I would disdain McCloud’s fussy, interminable construction of a single definition of comics, but he provides the distraction from it with the visuals. Gets really good after Chapter 2, when he uncovers a couple of tricks (masking and decartooning) in grand style.

"20th Century Boys, Volume 1: Friends"

Naoki Urasawa (2009)
★★★★☆
reviewed Feb 2021

Loveable! Think Stranger Things with emotional weight to the cultural references, and doubled in meaning (here we get the melancholy of adulthood), and a tacit defence of ordinary life against the extreme.

Gets really good after volume 5, when the plucky underdog bit gets obliterated, Urasawa does a self-insert, and new themes unfold.

"Previous Convictions: Assignments From Here and There"

A.A. Gill (2006)
★★★★☆
reviewed Oct 2013

What an excuse of a man he can be, but what a writer he always is. The piece on golf is characteristic - hilarious, fluid, razor-bladed.

The basic problem with him: his horror of golf would be better spent on actually horrific things (e.g. his own aestheticised violence). To be fair the second half’s travel pieces spend exactly that: from being right inamidst hallucinatory police brutality in Haiti, to the Africa pieces which buck stereotypes and complacency. He has vast sensitivity or sensibility, but he pairs it with a kind of generalisation (e.g. “begging is a consequence of opportunity, not poverty”) and off-piste counter-PC phrasemaking, as if to shock us out of respecting him.

He uses his friend Jeremy Clarkson brilliantly – as stooge, dim counterpoint to Gill’s own professed post-masculine, pro-gay, pro-grey, pro-oppressed enlightenment. But then Gill reports all these uber-macho exploits and self-conscious leering at women. What compels him to be so indirect about being progressive? It’s that he wants to be both LAD and liberal intellectual, and but needs the approval of neither side.

"Playing Silly Buggers and Other Stories"

Christian Robshaw (2020)
★★★★☆
reviewed Apr 2020

Stories:

1. ‘The visit’ (death is very embarrassing)
2. ‘Three couples’ (there are services we provide which could not be bought)
3. ‘Profiling’ (the falseness of bureaucracy)
4. ‘Randy old bastard’ (all love is God’s love)
5. ‘Three friendships’ (there are burdens we welcome which would be too cruel as punishment)
6. ‘A breakup breaks down’ (silent ineffectual rampage; the sheer power of cowardice)
7. ‘Three families’ (there are indignities we inflict which could not be earned)
8. ‘James, Alison & Gwen’ (the many splendours)
9. ‘On Camberwell Green’ (the pain of previous joy, why we cannot speak to those we have spoken a certain amount with)
10. ‘A romance’ (the indefatigibility of the voyeur)
11. ‘An English rose’ (autobiography as personal pornography)
12. ‘High’ (artists aren’t more mad, it’s just that working from home lets you be)
13. ‘A minor betrayal’ (the shock of youth, and youth’s generosity)
14. ‘Back home’ (the awkwardly unfilial, the old skin shed)
15. ‘Playing Silly Buggers’ (awful youth, boring luxury, exciting responsibility)
16. ‘Wine and dine’ (the unbearable lightness of customer service)
17. ‘Badge’ (the powerful relics and total mysticism of childhood)
18. ‘After the autumn ball’ (the outside view on insides)
19. ‘Hate’ (the beam in thine own eye)

It contains the sequel to the novella ‘Wankers’, but has many more wankers in it. Lots and lots of charming Scottish girls as well though. Very close detail of many kinds of sexuality (the swaggering pan, the indifferently repressed, the hateful, the sweet and preconscious, the hopeless, the plugged or extinct volcano).

"How I Escaped My Certain Fate"

Stewart Lee (2010)
★★★★☆
reviewed Jan 2014

A comedian and an artist - with some of the bloat and near-repulsive belligerence that entails

If you've not seen me before, right, a lot of what I do, er, it's not jokes as such, it can just be funny kind of ideas or little, er, weird turns of phrase like that, yeah? So, 'owner-operator of an enchanted beanstalk', yeah? And that's a giant, isn't it, a giant... So all I’m saying, if you’ve not seen me before, yeah, is the jokes are there, they're there, but some of you, you might have to raise your game

. Book has tons of general merit: it’s about trying to be artful in a genre where populism is a condition of being recognised as a practitioner at all. And Lee just has his shit worked out, is by turns harshly enlightening and plaintively endearing.

Basically there’s a whole generation of people who’ve confused political correctness with health and safety regulation. ‘It’s gone mad. They saying I can’t have an electric fire in the bath any more, Stew, in case queers see it.’

I even love his intellectual flab: the Wire mag chat, ignoble snarking, and attempt at epic free verse. I trust him – but you can’t trust him. (Recent shows are founded on outrageous lies, satirising spin/smear cultures in our media and government and employers and friends.) Hard to know who the joke-explaining footnotes are for – since his fans already get it, and no-one else’s going to read this. That said, if you don’t like him or don’t know about him, please read this. For instance, he explains that onstage he ‘portrays a smug wanker’.

"Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything"

David Bellos (2011)
★★★★☆
reviewed Jan 2013

Good strident stuff, wrestling against the prevailing pessimistic dogmas of English lit and ling. (e.g. “We can never fully understand each other as individuals or cultures.” “Truth is just power.”)

This is a poppy treatment of his own work, but still manages to pack in a lot of brilliant (original?) theory, a refutation of Sapir-Whorf in four pages, and lots of charming stats about the state of world languages today. I imagine he’s a great teacher.

(From dear James)

"A Spinoza Reader: The Ethics and Other Works"

Baruch Spinoza (1994)
★★★★☆
reviewed Mar 2011

Hard to imagine now how shocking this was in 1664 (“God is not a person; there is no free will; tolerance is the only rational politics”).

Trying to understand Spinoza without Curley’s notes (which are about twice as long as the primary material) is a decade’s work.

"Twilight of the Idols"

Friedrich Nietzsche (1997)
★★★★☆
reviewed Dec 2011

In one sentence: the cleverest troll in history tries to say 400 things at once.

The easiest way into him. He is among the most misunderstood people ever, and his prose, so contradictory and esoteric, sarcastic and pompous, is a large reason for this, though second to his C20th mistreatment.

Hollingdale’s translation is best, though I plan to crawl through the original at some point.

• Galef type:
  Theory 2 & 3 - models of what makes something succeed or fail, & a problem statement Values 1 - make an explicit argument about values.

"A Devil's Chaplain: Reflections on Hope, Lies, Science, and Love"

Richard Dawkins (2004)
★★★★☆
reviewed Mar 2016

Essay collection from his long heyday. His letter to his 10yo daughter is maybe the clearest statement of sceptical empiricism ever, though it also displays the blithe wonkishness that alienates most people:

Suppose I told you that your dog was dead. You’d be very upset, and you’d probably say, ‘Are you sure? How do you know? How did it happen?’ Now suppose I answered: ‘I don’t actually know that Pepe is dead. I have no evidence. I just have this funny feeling deep inside me that he is dead.’ You’d be pretty cross with me for scaring you, because you’d know that an inside ‘feeling’ on its own is not a good reason for believing that a whippet is dead. You need evidence. We all have inside feelings from time to time, and sometimes they turn out to be right and sometimes they don’t. Anyway, different people have opposite feelings, so how are we to decide whose feeling is right? The only way to be sure that a dog is dead is to see him dead, or hear that his heart has stopped; or be told by somebody who has seen or heard some real evidence that he is dead. People sometimes say that you must believe in your deep feelings inside, otherwise you’d never be confident of things like ‘My wife loves me’. But this is a bad argument. There can be plenty of evidence that somebody loves you. All through the day when you are with somebody who loves you, you see and hear lots of little tidbits of evidence, and they all add up. It isn’t purely inside feeling, like the feeling that priests call revelation. There are outside things to back up the inside feeling: looks in the eye, tender notes in the voice, little favors and kindnesses; this is all real evidence.

Aaag he used to be so wise and grand, giving out words to live by. (He remains brave and clear, but you don’t necessarily want to look through this windows anymore.)

"The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Truth about Morality and What to Do About it"

Joshua D. Greene (2002)
★★★★☆
reviewed Mar 2013

The first PhD I ever read: a witty and authoritative piece of meta-ethics. He surveys every large approach to morals using strong naturalism as a criterion, and concludes that anti-realist utilitarianism is the least unsatisfying option.

I suppose this is only worth reading if you are both very convinced of naturalism and radically unsure about what constitutes goodness; otherwise you should just study practical ethics already.

[Here]

"Shigurui 1"

Takayuki Yamaguchi (2006)
★★★★☆
reviewed Mar 2021

Stunningly grotesque and beautiful drawing. More hard blokes with implausible weaponry and a studied indifference to their own maiming. But also an irreverent social history - this was a sick culture, and nobility and skill worship were central to that sickness.

Massive amount of nudity and gore, but it just doesn’t feel gratuitous. Nudity is rather a device to show a character’s shame, fear, emotional connection, desolation, surrender (Yamaguchi will draw them unclothed in one panel when actually they aren’t). X-ray views go even further: to be laid bare, to be owned. The gore is a device to show… that the human body is composed of very small bits.

All main characters are bloodthirsty prideful knaves. But virtuous in their way. Went through all 15 volumes in 3 days

"Ōoku: The Inner Chambers, Volume 1 (Ōoku: The Inner Chambers / 大奥, #1)"

Fumi Yoshinaga (2009)
★★★★☆
reviewed Mar 2021

Lovely gender role mess: men as vicious, gossiping, jostling concubines in a matriarchal Japan. Not gentle, except by comparison to other samurai stories.

The cod Shakespeare translation, all the “on’t” and “thy”, is a little grating, but it has enough charm to make up for it.

"Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets"

David Simon (2008)
★★★★☆
reviewed Dec 2018

Character study of twenty vengeful people and the awful, indispensable institution they serve and constitute. The detectives are intelligent and hilarious, but have to navigate two extreme and depressing environments: the streets and City Hall, violence and politics.

Simon was embedded with them, and completely effaces himself, makes this novelistic. We get a glorious outsider view, see things the detectives don’t:

[The detective] glides past the lockup without looking inside, and so doesn't see the final, unmistakable expression on Robert Frazier's face. Pure murderous hate.

He gives a complete chapter to most of the detectives, tracking them through a couple of sordid weeks. They are all distinctive, sharp in different ways, but this approach means it stretches on.

Also a study of the incredibly poor incentives the bureaucracy gives the detectives: they’re rewarded for arrests, not convictions, and individually penalised for open homicides. I don’t want to think about what this did to their false arrest rate.

A case in which the pathologist's finding is being pended is not, to the police department, a murder. And if it isn't a murder, it doesn't go up on the board. And if it isn't up on the board, it doesn't really exist.

No weight was given to the difficulty of the case - whether witnesses remained at the scene, whether physical evidence existed, whether the weapon was found. All this killed inter-squad cooperation, and led to infighting over dumb luck of the draw.

In human terms, the scene at 3002 McElderry Street was a massacre; in the statistical terms of urban homicide work, it was the stuff from which a detective fashions dreams.

(No other crime counted in the stats, despite Homicide also covering accidental deaths and suicides. This was an incentive to frame things as e.g. suicide if at all possible.)

the chance of actually being convicted of a crime after being identified by authorities is about 60 percent. And if you factor in those unsolved homicides, the chance of being cuaght and convicted for taking a life in Baltimore is just over 40 percent [in 1988].

You might conclude - falsely - that internal stats are worse than nothing - but only stats as bad as these are. A classic of informal institutional economics.

The nationwide murder ‘clearance rate’ (arrest rate) was 70%. Amazing that it was this high, in that comparatively low-surveillance, low-social-trust place.

The [squad's] clearance rate - murders closed by arrest - is now 36 percent and falling, a... threat to [Lieutenant] Gary D’Addario’s tenure. The board that gave His Eminence reason for concern six weeks ago has continued to fill with open murders, and it is on D’Addario’s side of the wall that the names are writ in red. Of the twenty-five homicides handled by Dee’s three squads, only five are down; whereas Stanton’s shift has cleared ten of sixteen... There is no point in explaining that three fifths of D’Addario’s homicides happen to be drug-related, just as seven of those solved by Stanton’s shift are domestics or other arguments... It is the unrepentant worship of statistics that forms the true orthodoxy of any modern police department.

More incentive analysis, on police shootings and the shameful closing of ranks:

In the United States, only a cop has the right to kill as an act of personal deliberation and action. To that end, Scotty McCown and three thousand other men and women were sent out on the streets of Baltimore with .38-caliber Smith&Wessons, for which they received several weeks of academy firearms training augmented by one trip to the police firing range every year. Coupled with an individual officer’s judgement, that is deemed expertise enough to make the right decision every time. It is a lie. It is a lie the police department tolerates because to do otherwise would shatter the myth of infallibility on which rests its authority for lethal force. And it is a lie that the public demands, because to do otherwise would expose a terrifying ambiguity. The false certainty, the myth of perfection, on which our culture feeds…

There’s so much careful and sympathetic detail about the job (and no deep portrait of any suspects), that Simon risks partisanship - writing “copaganda”, as internet radicals call it. Anyone who’s seen The Wire knows this isn’t a problem. (He has solidarity with the rank and file, and contempt for the suits.)

for the black, inner-city neighborhoods of Baltimore, the city's finest were for generations merely another plague to endure: poverty, ignorance, despair, police.

Speaking of which: This is not at all made redundant by The Wire - the show has an entire pathos-pathetic angle (the anti-authority cop) missing here, and this is more focussed on the law side.

Their humour is fantastically sick.

the application of criteria such as comfort and amusement to the autopsy room is ample proof of a homicide man's peculiar and sustaining psychology. But for the detectives, the most appalling visions have always demanded the greatest detachment...

Someone on Hacker News was up on their high horse about the black humour of medics recently. This strikes me as perfectly backwards. I would much prefer a doctor (or a detective) with a nasty sense of humour: it suggests emotional detachment, so they’re more likely to think clearly; and it certainly has a cathartic and bonding role, improving their health and teamwork. This idiotically literal, first-order model of psychology (as if people were so easy to program!) is everywhere, for instance all discourse about fake news, porn, and violent computer games.

The section about the idiocy and arbitrariness of juries is sickening and I recommend that you don’t read it if you want to continue thinking well of your society.

The operant logic of a Baltimore city jury is as fantastical a process as any other of our universe’s mysteries. This one is innocent because he seemed so polite and well spoken on the stand, that one because there were no fingerprints on the weapon to corroborate the testimony of four witnesses. And this one over here is telling the truth when he says he was beaten into a confession; we know that, of course, because why else would anyone willingly confess to a crime if he wasn’t beaten?

The other eight jurors offered little opinion except to say they would vote for whatever was agreed upon... It was the Memorial Day weekend. They wanted to go home... "What brought you all around to first-degree?" he asks. "I wasn't going to budge and that other woman, the one in the back row, she wasn't going to change her mind either. She was for first-degree from the very beginning, too. After a while, everyone wanted to go home, I guess."

The book has aged badly in one way: Simon completely falls for two entrenched bits of pseudoscience, the polygraph and profiling. But many people still believe in these things, and anyway it’s a rare lapse of scepticism, for him.

I think this is the first ‘true crime’ book I’ve read. Don’t know if this is the pinnacle of the genre, then, or if the genre’s better than literary people think.

"i"

Martin Amis (1996)
★★★★☆
reviewed Oct 2018

Scalding and fantastical send-up of novelists and readers. About a nasty little man made insane by being low status - or, rather, by his friend becoming high status. He’s completely destroyed by valuing position so much, by his crab mind:

Richard, who would not mind being poor if no one was rich, who would not mind looking rough if no one looked smooth, who would not mind being old if no one was young.

This is all the worse because he has taste and good ideas, between his maudlin self-pity and terrible ideas:

It would be a book accounting for the decline of the status and virtue of literary protagonists. First gods, then demigods, then kings, then great warriors, great lovers,then burghers and merchants and vicars and doctors and lawyers. Then social realism: you. Then irony: me. Then maniacs and murderers, tramps, mobs, rabble, flotsam, vermin. Literature describes a descent... Literature, for a while, can be about us... about writers. But that won't last long. How do we burst clear of all this?

Richard’s complete, painful self-absorption shows that literary envy, male rivalry, and the fear of death are similar if not the same: childish rage when you can’t get what you want.

Amis keeps interrupting Richard (himself) to talk about outer space, the fate of stars, the rounding error that we are: Amis undercuts pathetic irony with ultimate meaning, which is the reverse of the usual trick. I think this author insertion is why people call it ‘postmodern’, though of course it’s an ancient trick and Amis doesn’t share their mean ideology. There’s also self-reference:

What was Richard? He was a revenger, in what was probably intended to be a comedy.

Or maybe it’s because Richard is a bland modernist (which here means: no fun) and Amis is taken not to be. Richard has violent thoughts and a violent worldview but is not violent, he fails to be violent; and Amis contains that container.

There are unannounced focal shifts every couple pages, three of which focalisations sound very similar to each other (whether psycho Steve, revenger Richard, misanthrope Martin).

This, surely, is how we account for the darkness and the helpless melancholy of twentieth-century literature. These writers, these dreamers and seekers, stood huddled like shivering foundlings on the cliffs of a strange new world: one with no servants in it.

It’s not just about books; the underworld of 90s Britain also gets it:

the criminal resembles the artist in his pretensions, his incompetence, and his self-pity.

You have to go a very long way - through tell of murdered children, celebrated suicides, denied misogyny, embraced misandry, deep duplicity - to get the merest possibility of redemption and getting over yourself. (And even that subverted: The season of comedy… Decorum will be observed.) The middle drags terribly. It’s worth it.

• The titular Information is hard truths, avoided thoughts, intimations of inadequacy and mortality.

The information is advertising a symposium of pain. Pains of all faiths and all denominations... It is ordinary and everyday. On the beach the waves do it ceaselessly, gathering mass and body, climbing until they break and are then resummoned into generality with a sound like breath sucked in between the teeth. Weakness will get you where you are weakest. Weakness will be strong and bold, and make for your weak spot. If in the head, then in the head. If in the heart, then in the heart. If in the loins, then in the loins... The information is nothing. Nothing: the answer is so many of our questions. What will happen to me when I die? What is death anyway? Is there anything I can do about that? Of what does the universe primarily consist? What is the measure of our influence within it? What is our span, in cosmic time?

• Richard’s friend is called Gwyn (Welsh for blessed).
• His book ‘Untitled’ is so serious that it causes its readers physical harm, like a petty version of the samizdat in Infinite Jest.
• Amis is more like Gwyn than Richard in career terms (got an unprecedented £500k advance for this) but is obviously temperamentally more like Richard.
• The more literary a work, the less it says plainly: the fewer hints you get. That is, puzzles are part of the essence of literariness. The bad reading of this is that it’s all about showing off: how clever and sphinxish the author is, how clever and oedipal the reader, how able to delay gratification (or go without it) each is. Amis’ books are quite puzzley, Richard’s very much so, Gwyn’s not a jot.
• This line works as a diss on New Labour:

It often seemed to him, moving in the circles he moved in and reading what he read, that everyone in England was Labour except the government.

even though the book was written in 1994, before New Labour. A joke which survives inversion!

• Presented without comment.
  
  
  

"Does Foreign Aid Really Work?"

Roger C. Riddell (2008)
★★★★☆
reviewed Jan 2012

At least when I was writing about aid, this was the best book on the balance of evidence. Bottom line is that almost all non-health C20th aid was wasted (and the food aid portion often harmful, since it distorted the local economy), but things have been getting a lot better since 2005.

Only not five stars because it doesn’t integrate the evidence into a full quantitative model or meta-analysis.

"The Mauritius Command (Aubrey & Maturin, #4)"

Patrick O’Brian (1991)
★★★★☆
reviewed Apr 2021

Elevated by the tragicomic Clonfert. O’Brian can sketch out the most moving people, the steepest arcs, in no more than thirty pages on-screen.

"Starting Strength: Basic Barbell Training"

Mark Rippetoe (2011)
★★★★☆
reviewed Dec 2019

...a life is like iron. If you make good use of it, it wears out; if you don't, rust destroys it. So too we see men worn out by toil; but sluggishness and torpor would hurt them more.

                         - Cato the Elder</center>

oop

Here’s the first paragraph of this fitness book, stronger writing than you’d ever expect:

Physical strength is the most important thing in life. This is true whether we want it to be or not... Whereas previously our physical strength determined how much food we ate and how warm and dry we stayed, it now merely determines how well we function in these new surroundings we have crafted for ourselves as our culture has accumulated. But we are still animals – our physical existence is, in the final analysis, the only one that actually matters. A weak man is not as happy as that same man would be if he were strong. This reality is offensive to some people who would like the intellectual or spiritual to take precedence. It is instructive to see what happens to these very people as their squat strength goes up.

A salvo(!) This message is repulsive, unjust, and almost exactly fits my experience. (Though he is being imprecise: better to say “the most important foundation”, a key instrument rather than the highest terminus. Though even then it’s not “most important”, since it neglects an even larger nonintellectual effect on my philosophy of life, love.) I was once a very unhappy young man with a tragicomic existential view - and so many fixable, concrete, absurdly powerful options, absurdly unknown to me. The lifter is Sisyphus, happy. Weights are a strong psychological intervention, perhaps the third-strongest for me.

Lots of reasoning from first principles, which is satisfying and gives it an Athenian air, but which I can just barely evaluate. Luckily it is just so easy to check if he’s right (for your case).

The force of gravity acting on the bar is always acting straight down in a vertical line. Therefore, the most efficient way to oppose this force is by acting on it vertically as well. So not only is a straight line the shortest distance between two points, but a straight vertical line is also the most efficient bar path for a barbell moving through space in a gravitational framework.

Your bench press strength doesn’t adapt to the total number of times you’ve been to the gym to bench or to your sincerest hope that it will get stronger. It adapts to the stress imposed on it by the work done with the barbell. Furthermore, it adapts to exactly the kind of stress imposed on it. If you do sets of 20, you get good at doing 20s. If you do heavy singles, you get better at doing those.

“good technique” in barbell training is easily and understandably defined as the ability of the lifter to keep the bar vertically aligned with the balance point.

Rippetoe is the source of the recent renaissance in cheap simple barbells (dozens of muscles recruited at once) over circuits of giant single-muscle machines. He tells a plausibly mean story about the economic perverse incentives that led to the latter, 1980-2010.

There is too much detail here - he discusses variants of the movements and the debate over them. But what a trivial criticism that is! I think most people could skip two-thirds of the book, since there’s detailed kinematics for each move, instructor tips and gym-building tips, but it’s interesting throughout. You could get the key parts from the final Programme section, then the “what not to do” chapter closing sheets. Warm-up sets chapter was very useful.

if your schedule does not allow time for proper warm-up, it does not allow time for training at all... [The squat] should be carefully and thoroughly prepared with a couple of empty-bar sets, and then as many as five sets between those and the work sets.

There’s an abrupt shift in tone, in the chapter on lifting for kids: he starts citing University press books and listing comparative numbers for his claims. So this is a crusade for him.

It is unlikely that you’d learn form from this alone, even like reading it and applying it live with a mirror. It is unlikely that you could find a PT with this much physical knowledge or clarity.

He’s quite bitchy, which I like but you might not:

if you continually miss workouts, you are not actually training, and your obviously valuable time should be spent more productively elsewhere.

If you’re not increasing your weight, you’re not training, and so not following his programme. The obsession with increase is still not mine. Strength, yes, exertion yes, but constant expansion? I aim for 100kg squat, and expect to attain it this year. Not herniating weight, not kneecapping weight, not sclerotic weight: nice big weight. Maybe once I get there I will grow bored, will again be confounded by the power of concrete body on worldview, and have to start climbing again. He thinks everyone gets injured eventually. But is this under the permanent revolution programme?

Ambition is useful, greed is not. Most of human history and the science of economics demonstrate that the desire for more than is currently possessed drives improvement, both personally and for societies. But greed is an ugly thing when uncontrolled and untempered with wisdom, and it will result in your program’s progress coming to an ass-grinding halt.

you’re a little fluffy around the belly, you have obviously already created the conditions necessary for growth. You’ll usually start out stronger than the skinny guy, and because your body hasn’t got the problems with growing that skinny guys do, strength gains can come more easily for you if you eat correctly.

I’ve been doing a derivative of this program since October, no trainer, lots of missed sessions, just the primary exercises, 1 hour and out, a scaled-up ordinary diet, and saw decent gains, +50kg onto my initial squat. Rippetoe claims that this could be achieved in half the time with many gallons of milk and much more aggro, and I see no reason to doubt this.

Philosophical aspects of lifting:

• As above: The body helps determine the mind. You should be wary of your own philosophy, not just because of your local social conditioning, but also because of your diet, your habits, your daily kindness, and your bench. The lifter is Sisyphus, happy.

• No excuses, no wiggle room, no ambiguity: lifting a lot without injuring yourself is a brute fact, unbiased. Rippetoe: “cause and effect cannot be argued with or circumvented by your wishes and desires.”

• ‘He’s a growing loon!’ my granny would say, justifying my early gluttony. Well, twenty years later here I am again, a growing boy. Artificial growth, body neoteny. What does a sense of increase, of coming potential, do to you?

*

"Waiting until soreness subsides before doing the next workout is a good way to guarantee that soreness will be produced every time, since you’ll never get adapted to sufficient workload frequency to stop getting sore.

• There are so many ways to do it wrong. (Only some of those wrong ways break you - the others just slow you down or confuse your body.) Rippetoe focusses on five movements, out of however many thousand physiologically possible ones. These are picked for excellent reasons, tested over decades.

*

Exercise is the thing we must do to replicate the conditions under which our physiology was – and still is – adapted, the conditions under which we are physically normal. In other words, exercise is substitute caveman activity, the thing we need to make our bodies, and in fact our minds, normal in the 21st century.

*

Psychologically, 20 [rep max] work is very hard, due to the pain, and lifters who are good at it develop the ability to displace themselves from the situation during the set. Or they just get very tough.

• I live in my head. But the hip drive out of a deep squat is such a strong strange confluence of forces, vaguely under my control but more accurately an explosion I light the fuse on, that I am driven to notice and appreciate neuromuscular marvels.

Book epistemic status: Decades of personal experience plus strong amateur theory plus distilled folk wisdom, in a domain with rapid and unambiguous feedback. He’s quite open about unknown things, e.g. the molecular nature of soreness. Sometimes a little defensive, against experts less near to the metal. Sample:

Most sources within the heavy-training community agree that a good starting place is one gram of protein per pound of bodyweight per day, with the rest of the diet making up 3500–6000 calories, depending on training requirements and body composition. Although these numbers produce much eyebrow-raising and cautionary statement-issuing from the registered-dietetics people, it is a fact that these numbers work well for the vast majority of people who lift weights, and these numbers have worked well for decades.

Why trust my opinion at all? I’ve followed Rippetoe’s programme inconsistently for 4 months and still got good returns - worth it for mental health alone. I know sophomore biology and physics, and nothing he says here contradicts any of it.

"Crow: From the Life and Songs of the Crow"

Ted Hughes (1995)
★★★★☆
reviewed Nov 2010

Metal af. Good after a breakup.

"Money for Nothing"

P.G. Wodehouse (2007)
★★★★☆
reviewed Feb 2019

Gorgeous as ever. Was snorting on the Tube over it.

This was surprising, for 1928:

You're a confirmed settler-down, the sort of chap that likes to roll the garden lawn and then put on his slippers and light a pipe and sit side by side with the little woman, sharing a twin set of head phones.

But Wiki tells me this was indeed possible, for a posh progressive couple. Not sure why they’d do this instead of a gramophone - maybe it was for the radio.

"The Far Side of the World (Aubrey & Maturin, #10)"

Patrick O’Brian (1992)
★★★★☆
reviewed May 2021

“I was only wondering whether the hands about to be discharged from hospital were those my surgeon saw in the – how shall I put it? – in the rigorous confinement ward.’ ‘Yes,’ said the Admiral, ‘they are. But it don’t really signify, you know. Most lunatics are only shamming Abraham to get out of work; and these are not the dangerous raving kind. They don’t bite: they would not be discharged else. It stands to reason. All you have to do is put ’em in chains and flog ’em hearty in their fits, just as they do at Bedlam. Was you ever at Bedlam, Aubrey?’ ‘No, sir.’ ‘My father often used to take us. It was better than a play.’ The Admiral chuckled at the recollection and then went on. ‘Pray tell the Captain that it will not do,’ said Stephen, ‘and that he will be obliged to bear up, bear down, bear away for that noble stream the São Francisco and fill our casks from its limpid, health-giving billows as they flow between banks covered with a luxuriant vegetation of choice exotics, echoing to the cries of the toucan, the jaguar, various apes, a hundred species of parrots, and they flying among gorgeous orchids, while huge butterflies of unparalleled splendour float over a ground strewn with Brazil nuts and boa-constrictors.’ ‘He was afraid you would say that’. ...he had the feeling that the man’s chief emotion, now that the first shock and dismay were over, was anger – anger against the world in general and anger against her too, for being ill. It did not surprise him very much: in the course of his professional career by land he had seen many and many a husband, and even some lovers, angry at a woman’s sickness, impatient, full of blame: quite devoid of pity, and angry that it should be expected of them.

"The Reverse of the Medal (Aubrey & Maturin, #11)"

Patrick O’Brian (1992)
★★★★☆
reviewed May 2021

I’ve been digging in to the history behind the books and am fairly boggled. Cochrane is one of these absurd Victorians doing 9 lives in one; Mary Montagu’s cynicism about a cause celebre thrills me weirdly.

Very moving scene with all the old sailors turning out.

‘The judges are thought of as quite great men.’ ‘By those who do not know them. And not all judges, either. Think of Coke, who so cowardly attacked the defenceless Raleigh at his trial and who was dismissed when he was chief-justice; think of all the Lord Chancellors who have been turned away in contempt for corruption; think of the vile Judge Jeffries.’ ‘God’s my life, Stephen, you are uncommon hard on lawyers. Surely there must be some good ones?’ ‘I dare say there are: I dare say there are some men who are immune to the debasing influence, just as there are some men who may walk about among those afflicted with the plague or indeed the present influenza without taking it’ ‘You could not truthfully blackguard the law, which is the best law that any nation was ever blessed with,’ said Lawrence, ‘but you might point out that it is administered by human beings. Some of them, indeed, can scarcely claim so high a rank.’ “Stephen stood up to peer out of the window at the evening sky, and now, looking back into the room, he saw Jack in the full north light, sitting as though for his portrait. He seemed broader than before, heavier, profoundly grave of course, and somewhat leonine; but beneath the unmoved gravity Stephen perceived a wound that was hardly affected by the news of the Surprise; and in the hope of easing it to some degree he added, ‘And in the strictest confidence, my dear, I may tell you that our war will not be entirely private either. You know something of my activities; and at intervals of harrying the enemy’s commerce I may have errands of that kind to run.’ Jack took the point; he expressed his pleasure with a polite inclination of his head and the appearance of a smile; and the pain remained unaffected. Stephen continued, ‘This damned spiteful pillory, brother. It is of no essential importance to an innocent man, but it is bound to be unpleasant, like a toothache: I have given you many a draught for the toothache, so I have, and here is one’ – taking a small bottle from his pocket – ‘that will make the pillory pass like little more than a dream: disagreeable, but only faintly disagreeable, and at a distance. I have often used it myself, with great effect.’ ‘Thankee, Stephen,’ said Jack, setting the bottle on the mantelshelf. Stephen saw that he had no intention of taking it, and that the underlying pain was quite untouched. For to Jack Aubrey the fact of no longer belonging to the Navy counted more than a thousand pillories, the loss of fortune, loss of rank, and loss of future. It was in a way a loss of being, and to those who knew him well it gave his eyes, his whole face, the strangest look.

"The Sellout"

Paul Beatty (2015)
★★★★☆
reviewed Feb 2018

[Ta-Nehisi] Coates and [Michelle] Alexander have gained wide audiences; their books are bestsellers, and they are celebrated across liberal media outlets. Their animating idea — that to overcome racism, the United States must discard any pretense to colorblindness — has become accepted across broad swathes of the mainstream Left. For better or worse, however, it marks a stark departure from King’s appeal that skin color should be ignored. The battle between colorblindness and active anti-racism will have enormous consequences for American society.

• Christian Gonzalez

In attempting to restore his community through reintroducing precepts, namely segregation and slavery, that, given his cultural history, have come to define his community despite the supposed unconstitutionality and nonexistence of these concepts, he’s pointed out a fundamental flaw in how we as Americans claim we see equality. ‘I don’t care if you’re black, white, brown, yellow, red, green, or purple.’ We’ve all said it... He’s painting everybody over, painting this community purple and green, and seeing who still believes in equality.

• a judge in The Sellout

The Sellout is filled with racism and racists - for one thing, the nearly-nameless protagonist, the Sellout, brings back segregated busses and schools, and (reluctantly) owns a volunteer slave - but the book is clearly itself not racist. (I can even quantify how much racism’s in it: at one point a pompous character counts the slurs in Huckleberry Finn, arguing for censoring it:

This is serious. Brother Mark Twain uses the ‘n-word’ 219 times. That’s .68 ‘n-words’ per page in toto.

Well, including ‘werenr’ and ‘nrized’, etc, Beatty manages 146, or 0.52 a page. It feels like more.)

That isn’t the confusing bit; what is, is that none of the presented racists are white; in fact no substantial characters are. (The single named white person is present for all of seven pages, and is merely innocently patronising.) We could stretch and say that this is Beatty exclaiming at internalised racism. Or it could be a unusual claim about where racism (in the established sense of propositional or emotional racism, as opposed to structural racism) is openly expressed now: among nonwhites. (Or he could seriously just be trolling.)

Further, it isn’t just a Modest Proposal, despite the prevalence of this mistake of interpretation. A modest proposal is the deadpan presentation of a policy to make the reader realise that it is disgusting. In The Sellout, separatism and degradation work, they improve Dickens for the segregated: the policies are popular, grades go up, crime goes down, and people are polite within and without race categories. What is this saying?

It’s hard to work out Beatty’s schtick, partly because the whole of the first 100 pages is a string of horrible and bravura one-liners, from “black literature sucks”:

I’m so fucking tired of black women always being described by their skin tones! Honey-colored this! Dark-chocolate that! My paternal grandmother was mocha-tinged, café-au-lait, graham-fucking-cracker brown! How come they never describe the white characters in relation to foodstuffs and hot liquids? Why aren’t there any yogurt-colored, egg-shell-toned, string-cheese-skinned, low-fat-milk white protagonists in these racist, no-third-act-having books? That’s why black literature sucks!

to

Maybe race had nothing to do with it. Maybe Rosa Parks didn’t give up her seat because she knew the guy to be unapologetically gassy or one of those annoying people who insists on asking what you’re reading, then without prompting tells you what he’s reading, what he wants to read, what he regrets having read, what he tells people he’s read but really hasn’t read. So like those high school white girls who have after-school sex with the burly black athlete in the wood shop, and then cry rape when their fathers find out, maybe Rosa Parks, after the arrest, the endless church rallies, and all the press, had to cry racism, because what was she going to say: “I refused to move because the man asked me what I was reading”? Negroes would’ve lynched her.

to

I’d rather be called ‘nigger’ than ‘giantess’ any day of the week.”

“Problematic,” someone muttered - invoking the code word black thinkers use to characterize anything or anybody that makes them feel uncomfortable, impotent, and painfully aware that they don’t have the answers to questions and assholes like me.

Reviewers resolve this, in their neat way, by saying that Beatty is satirising “race in America”. But that doesn’t mean anything: Beatty is indiscriminate: mocking stereotyped black behaviour and police brutality, and pious diversity pushers, and white arrogance, and classic Civil Rights heroes, and radical black intellectuals, and assimilated Establishment black elites, and colorblind universalists. So, you can say “it satirises [more or less every position you can take on] race in America”. But what’s the point of doing that?

I can think of three: 1) to say that there is no sensible position on this seething topic; or 2) to say that we haven’t found it yet and must move past the existing positions, or 3) to use the nasty symmetry between the racist and the active anti-racist, to reflect well on Coatesian justice - maybe the thought is: ‘colorblind egalitarianism is such a mad idea that even naked nineteenth-century racism is superior to it’.)

I don’t know which (if any) is Beatty’s view. I know I don’t agree. There’s nothing actually wrong with MLK’s principle, judge absolutely everyone on their own merits rather than treating them as a representative of their race or sex or anything, though it has usually been poorly realised.

But I respect the chutzpah of pissing everyone off. If nothing else it’s original and bullshit-free, two rare predicates around here.

I’m not sure what Unmitigated Blackness is, but whatever it is, it doesn’t sell. Unmitigated Blackness is simply not giving a fuck. Clarence Cooper, Charlie Parker, Richard Pryor, Maya Deren, Sun Ra, Mizoguchi, Frida Kahlo, black-and-white Godard, Céline, Gong Li, David Hammons, Björk, and the Wu-Tang Clan in any of their hooded permutations. Unmitigated Blackness is essays passing for fiction. It’s the realization that there are no absolutes, except when there are. It’s the acceptance of contradiction not being a sin and a crime but a human frailty like split ends and libertarianism. Unmitigated Blackness is the realization that as fucked up as it all is, sometimes it’s nihilism that makes life worth living.

or

Daddy never believed in closure. He said it was a false psychological concept. Something invented by therapists to assuage white Western guilt. In all his years of study and practice, he’d never heard a patient of color talk of needing “closure.” They needed revenge. They needed distance. Forgiveness and a good lawyer maybe, but never closure. He said people mistake suicide, murder, lap band surgery, interracial marriage, and overtipping for closure, when in reality what they’ve achieved is erasure. The problem with closure is that once you have a taste of it, you want it in every little aspect of your life. Especially when you’re bleeding to death, and your slave, who is in full rebellion, is screaming,... you attempt to stanch the bleeding with a waterlogged copy of Vibe magazine someone has left in the gutter. Kanye West has announced, “I am rap!” Jay-Z thinks he’s Picasso. And life is fucking fleeting.

Here’s what I think is going on: It’s hard to get through to people with the usual homilies and pieties, because they are deadened by cliché, bureaucratic muscle, tribalism, and historical ineffectualness. After hundreds of pages of troublingly hilarious japes (including ironic delight in old racist tv shows), Beatty has softened you up, left bare the old wound. That all may be healed, all must be shown.

(c) Richard Vogel (2016)

So, is the Sellout a charming pervert? A self-hating masochist? Or a nihilist with moral purpose?

Spoiler! It’s the first and third. Beatty has no answer and is again brave enough to say so; the book’s last page admits no synthesis can win over that particular sceptic: Obama isn’t enough, nothing is enough:

I remember the day after the black dude was inaugurated, Foy Cheshire, proud as punch, driving around town in his coupe, honking his horn and waving an American flag. He wasn’t the only one celebrating; the neighborhood glee wasn’t O. J. Simpson getting acquitted or the Lakers winning the 2002 championship, but it was close. Foy drove past the crib and I happened to be sitting in the front yard husking corn. “Why are you waving the flag?” I asked him. “Why now? I’ve never seen you wave it before.” He said that he felt like the country, the United States of America, had finally paid off its debts. “And what about the Native Americans? What about the Chinese, the Japanese, the Mexicans, the poor, the forests, the water, the air, the fucking California condor? When do they collect?” I asked him. He just shook his head at me. Said something to the effect that my father would be ashamed of me and that I’d never understand. And he’s right. I never will.

The protagonist segregates, and says things like this:

I’m a farmer, and farmers are natural segregationists. We separate the wheat from the chaff. I’m not Rudolf Hess, P. W. Botha, Capitol Records, or present-day U.S. of A. Those motherfuckers segregate because they want to hold on to power. I’m a farmer: we segregate in an effort to give every tree, every plant, every poor Mexican, every poor nigger, a chance for equal access to sunlight and water; we make sure every living organism has room to breathe.

And yet he is not a separatist; he knows it’s wrong when the minorities are shouted out of the public space:

What the fuck you honkies laughing at?” he shouted. More chuckling from the audience. The white couple howling the loudest. Slapping the table. Happy to be noticed. Happy to be accepted. “I ain’t bullshitting! What the fuck are you interloping motherfuckers laughing at? Get the fuck out!”
There’s nothing funny about nervous laughter. The forced way it slogs through a room with the stop-and-start undulations of bad jazz brunch jazz. The black folks and the round table of Latinas out for a night on the town knew when to stop laughing. The couple didn’t. The rest of us silently sipped our canned beer and sodas, determined to stay out of the fray. They were laughing solo because this had to be part of the show, right? “Do I look like I’m fucking joking with you? This shit ain’t for you. Understand? Now get the fuck out! This is our thing!” No more laughter. Only pleading, unanswered looks for assistance, then the soft scrape of two chairs being backed, quietly as possible, away from the table. The blast of cold December air and the sounds of the street. The night manager shutting the doors behind them, leaving little evidence that the white people had ever been there except for an unfulfilled two-drink, three-donut minimum. When I think about that night, the black comedian chasing the white couple into the night, their tails and assumed histories between their legs, I don’t think about right or wrong. No, when my thoughts go back to that evening, I think about my own silence. Silence can be either protest or consent, but most times it’s fear. I guess that’s why I’m so quiet and such a good whisperer, nigger and otherwise. It’s because I’m always afraid. Afraid of what I might say. What promises and threats I might make and have to keep. That’s what I liked about the man, although I didn’t agree with him when he said, “Get out. This is our thing.” I respected that he didn’t give a fuck. But I wish I hadn’t been so scared, that I had had the nerve to stand in protest. Not to castigate him for what he did or to stick up for the aggrieved white people... but I wish I’d stood up to the man and asked him a question: “So what exactly is our thing?

Which is my laughter, but not my flight. The Sellout doesn’t have an ism: they are all found wanting. I’m just glad it is still possible to explore this godforsaken crater without being screamed down. I’m glad Beatty didn’t let it get to him, even if he leaves the Sellout hanging.

"The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge"

Vernor Vinge (2002)
★★★★☆
reviewed Nov 2020

More playful and miscellaneous than I was expecting. As always with him, there are grand gears turning in the background of his stories: there’s more to his worlds than we see, and reasons beyond what the characters reason. But overall not as stunning as his novels, even accounting for scale. This is not surprising when you realise that the earliest of these was written when he was a teenager. He really hits his stride halfway through this, 1980.

The main intellectual success is his depiction of anarchism, as stable, unstable, predatory, kind, natural, or requiring unnatural underpinning.

I loved his forewords to each story:

"The quality of the writing is about average for what I could manage in the 1960s... And the ideas? Ah, there's the problem. To date, "The Accomplice" is the most irritating combination of embarrassing gaffes and neat insights that I have ever created."

Great fun but not as mind-bending as Egan or Chiang or Borges or Vinge.

Ranked:

1. ‘The Ungoverned’. How could anarchism resist invasion?: By being too expensive to conquer.
2. The Peddlar’s Apprentice’. Neat post-post-apocalypse. The control group are the good guys.
3. ‘Long Shot’.
4. ‘The Blabber’.
5. ‘Fast Times at Fairmont High’.
6. ‘Just Peace’.
7. ‘Conquest by Default’. Yet another anarchism, but with true aliens this time. Patches the gap in nonaggression with religious dogma: all obey the anti-monopoly priests. Colonialist anarchists!!
8. ‘Original Sin’.
9. ‘Bomb Scare’.
10. ‘Apartness’.
11. ‘The Whirligig of Time’. Tries too hard to be lyrical about nuclear holocaust. Rare depiction of winners of a nuclear war! Monarchy returns to post-apocalypse Russia, and then somehow they get to super advanced tech despite authoritarian thought control. You can feel the actual physical model straining underneath the prose and morals.
12. ‘Win a Nobel Prize!’.
13. ‘Run, Bookworm!’.
14. ‘The Science Fair’.
15. ‘Gemstone’.
16. ‘The Accomplice’.

"The Waste Land"

T.S. Eliot (2001)
★★★★☆
reviewed Jun 2011

What a pain to understand this must’ve been, before the internet. (But only if you need to feel in control all the time while reading.)

"The Letter of Marque (Aubrey & Maturin, #12)"

Patrick O’Brian (1992)
★★★★☆
reviewed May 2021

“more tears were shed over prayers that were granted than ever were shed over prayers that were refused”

“Killick, who as captain’s steward was naturally in charge of these things, took him by the arm and called out slowly into his perhaps uncomprehending ear, ‘You Free Man Now. Huzzay,’ making the gesture of one released from his manacles, and thus signifying that the moment the black set foot on a British ship he was no longer a slave. ‘You’ – touching his breast – ‘Free Man.’ ‘Parm me, sir,’ said the black, ‘my name is Smith.’ But he spoke so gently for fear of giving offence, that, in the midst of the cheerful hullaballoo, his words had no influence whatsoever upon public opinion.”.

“Stephen and Davidge spoke of the difficulties of remaining alive as an undergraduate at Trinity College in Dublin: Davidge had a cousin there who had been pierced three times, twice by a sword, once by a pistol-bullet. ‘I am not a quarrelsome man nor inclined to take offence,’ said Stephen, ‘yet I must have been out a score of times in my first year. It is better now, I believe, but it was a desperate place in those days.”

“Could you not spend an afternoon at Milport, to meet the electors? There are not many of them, and those few are all my tenants, so it is no more than a formality; but there is a certain decency to be kept up. The writ will be issued very soon.’ Then, seeing Jack’s look of astonishment, he went on, ‘I mean to offer you the seat.’ ‘Do you, by God?’ cried Jack; and realizing the extent, the importance, the consequence of what his cousin had just said he went on, ‘I think that amazingly handsome in you, sir; I take it more kindly than I can say.’ He shook Mr Norton’s thin old hand and sat staring for a while: possibilities that he hardly dared name flashed and glowed in his mind like a fleet in action. Cousin Edward said ‘I thought it might strengthen your hand in any dealings with government. There is not much merit in being a member of parliament, unless perhaps you represent your county; but at least a member with merit of his own is in a position to have it recognized”.

Takes Stephen 40 pages and like a week to inform his wife he’s not unfaithful. Christ almighty.

"Cyteen (Cyteen, #1-3)"

C.J. Cherryh (1995)
★★★★☆
reviewed Sep 2020

Magnificent. Cherryh is often deeply unclear (examples to follow), but she makes it work by using just enough unclarity to cover the gaps in her made-up mind engineering. I could call it allusion rather than unclarity.

Very uncomfortable: large parts are about the internal motivations and human strengths of the leaders of a budding scientific dystopia with an immortal dictator. The humanists and abolitionists are the antagonists, and foiled at almost every turn. We follow the development of a charming little girl destined to grow into an anti-democratic power broker, the centre of a slave economy, and a serial rapist. Or is she?

Better even than Vinge at baroque skulduggery, chilling effects, the spiritual harm of surveillance, and decades-long cons.

"Cracking the Coding Interview: 150 Programming Questions and Solutions"

Gayle Laakmann McDowell (2011)
★★★★☆
reviewed Aug 2018

This has zero relevance for almost everyone; and about 3 quarters of the book can be skipped by almost all of the remaining people (specifics about the big tech companies and particular language warts). Even so, it’s good that it exists; it’s an impressive distillation of Computer Science lore and heuristics, which thus lets smart outsiders in.

I was dismayed to open it and find 100 pages of fluff (the curse of the ebook: book proportions not being completely obvious), but the algorithm challenges start after, don’t stop, and are very good. (Don’t panic: doing half of them way over-prepared me for my interview.) The non-coding ‘brain teasers’ are helpful if, like me, you weren’t a puzzle geek in youth.

Essential for a tiny number of people.

"The Thirteen-Gun Salute (Aubrey & Maturin, #13)"

Patrick O’Brian (1999)
★★★★☆
reviewed May 2021

when he too came round the corner he was on top of the ape. She was sitting on a stone, resting her feet. He scarcely knew what to do; it seemed an intrusion. ‘God be with you, ape,’ he said in Irish, which in his confusion seemed more appropriate. She turned her head and looked him full in the face; her expression was sad, weary, in no way hostile – remote

“So you are an Englishman.’ ‘No, sir,’ said Stephen. ‘I am an Irishman. But for the moment Ireland is subject to England, and therefore at war with France.’ ‘England and Ireland are small islands on the farthest western extremity of the world,’ said another monk. ‘They are so close together that they can scarcely be distinguished; birds flying at a great height may land on the one rather than on the other. But in fact England is the larger.’ ‘It is true that they are close together, and that it is not always easy to distinguish them from a great distance; but then, sir, the same applies to right and wrong.’ ‘Good and evil are so close at times,’ observed the Abbot, ‘that there is scarcely the breadth of a hair between them”

"...a thief is not always stealing nor a murderer always murdering, whereas a man’s sexual instincts are with him all the time, day and night. Yet it is curious to see how the self-hater often succeeds in retaining his self-esteem in relation to others, usually by means of a general denigration: he sees himself as a worthless creature, but his fellows as more worthless still.”

"Excession"

Iain M. Banks (1997)
★★★★☆
reviewed May 2006

In one sentence: A psychologically realistic utopia (: a flawed one) nestled in a soft opera-of-space-operas.

To be read when: you don’t think we have anywhere to go. / On a train.

(This is more of a review of the Culture series. Excession is my favourite of them - even just seeing that slightly bad 90s cover gets a reaction out of me - but none of the books is so great on its own. I just keep re-reading them. This essay gives a flavour of the intellectual thrill underneath Banks’ hand-waving, hand-wringing, and gags. Start with Player of Games or Use of Weapons, and leave Phlebas to last, it’s not great except thematically.)

The two worst omissions from sci-fi are social development and software development. Banks covers the first so memorably, so thrillingly, that the series is a permanent touchstone for me. The Culture is actually different from us - even though underneath their society revs our great alien machine, liberalism unbound.

Banks was always quite open about how didactic his sci-fi was; it is saved by his inventiveness and psychological realism amidst technological fantasy.

This scene (from Use of Weapons) had a large effect on me as a child:

'Of course I don't have to do this,' one middle-aged man said, carefully cleaning the table with a damp cloth. He put the cloth in a little pouch, sat down beside him. "But look; this table's clean.' He agreed that the table was clean. "Usually,' the man said. "I work on alien -- no offence -- alien religions; Directional Emphasis In Religious Observance; that's my specialty ... like when temples or graves or prayers always have to face in a certain direction; that sort of thing? Well, I catalogue, evaluate, compare; I come up with theories and argue with colleagues, here and elsewhere. But ... the job's never finished; always new examples, and even the old ones get re-evaluated, and new people come along with new ideas about what you thought was settled ... but,' he slapped the table, "when you clean a table you clean a table. You feel you've done something. It's an achievement." "But in the end, it's still cleaning a table." "And therefore does not really signify on the cosmic scale of events?' the man suggested. He smiled in response to the man's grin, "Well, yes.' 'But then what does signify? My other work? Is that really important, either?' I could try composing wonderful musical works, or day-long entertainment epics, but what would that do? Give people pleasure? My wiping this table gives me pleasure. And people come to a clean table, which gives them pleasure. And anyway" - the man laughed - "people die; stars die; universes die. What is any achievement, however great it was, once time itself is dead? Of course, if all I did was wipe tables, then of course it would seem a mean and despicable waste of my huge intellectual potential. But because I choose to do it, it gives me pleasure. And," the man said with a smile, "it's a good way of meeting people."

As did this, before I studied formal philosophy and received a resounding confirmation of it:

“Aw, come on; argue, dammit.” “I don’t believe in argument,” he said, looking out. “You don’t?” Erens said, genuinely surprised. “Shit, and I thought I was the cynical one.” “It’s not cynicism,” he said flatly. “I just think people overvalue argument because they like to hear themselves talk.” “Oh well, thank you.” “It’s comforting, I suppose.” He watched the stars wheel, like absurdly slow shells seen at night: rising, peaking, falling... (And reminded himself that the stars too would explode, perhaps, one day.) “Most people are not prepared to have their minds changed,” he said. “And I think they know in their hearts that other people are just the same, and one of the reasons people become angry when they argue is that they realize just that, as they trot out their excuses.” “Excuses, eh?" "Yes, excuses," he said, with what Erens thought might just have been a trace of bitterness. "I strongly suspect the things people believe in are usually just what they instinctively feel is right; the excuses, the justifications, the things you're supposed to argue about, come later. They're the least important part of the belief. That's why you can destroy them, win an argument, prove the other person wrong, and still they believe what they did in the first place." He looked at Erens. "You've attacked the wrong thing.”

But this was also before I got into technical pursuits which lend us hope that the above grim realism can be defeated by self-awareness, quantification, and epistemic care. Sometimes.

• Galef type:
  Theory 2 - model of what makes something succeed or fail & Values 2 - thought experiments for you to reflect on how you feel about something. Style 3 - tickles your aesthetic sense in a way that obliquely makes you a more interesting, generative thinker.

"The Nutmeg of Consolation (Aubrey & Maturin, #14)"

Patrick O’Brian (1993)
★★★★☆
reviewed May 2021

Includes the deathmatch of the rats on coke and a pitched battle against cutthroat Dayaks.

I detect a bit of flandersification. Jack is much more ice cool, Bondlike than before. Here’s him being shot at by a French frigate:

Holes appeared in the topsails and courses; the tack of the mainsail, just belayed, sprang free; the balls sent water splashing from the forecastle aft; several shot up white fountains close at hand; the last shattered the larboard cathead. 'Good practice for such a distance,' observed Jack. —- [Stephen's] only fear was that on hearing the news she would sell her famous great diamond, the Blue Peter, the joy of her life: for not only would doing so take away that joy but it would also give her an immense moral advantage, and Stephen was convinced that moral advantage was a great enemy to marriage. Few happy marriages did he know among his friends and acquaintance, and in those few the balance seemed to him equal. Then again he found it more blessed to give than to receive; he had a strong disinclination to being obliged; and sometimes, when he was low-spirited, he put this down to an odious incapacity for gratitude... Their life had become a competitive martyrdom: competitive fasting, competitive holiness, competitive fortitude and self-denial, a dreadful uncomplaining cheerfulness in that ancient cold damp stony house, an intensely watchful competition that could only be won by the cousin that died first; though Cosi Eulália told him as a secret never to be divulged that she had spent all Don Ramón's presents and all her dress allowance for the last three years in prayers and Masses for her husband's spiritual welfare. --- 'A letter from Sam,' said Jack, passing the first sheet. 'How well he expresses himself - a very happy turn of phrase, upon my word. There is a message for you,' - passing the second -'And something in Greek. Pray read it all.' 'How he is coming on, to be sure: he will soon be vicargeneral, at this rate. It is not Greek but Irish, and referring to my intervention with the Patriarch it says May God set a flower upon your head.' 'Come, that is civil. I could hardly have put it better myself. So the Irish have a writing of their own? I had no idea.” 'Certainly they have a writing of their own. They had it long before your ancestors left their dim Teutonic wood; and indeed it was the Irish first taught the English the ABC, though with indifferent success, I freely admit. Yet this is a very handsome letter, so it is.' Love, sorrow, and wealth are the three things that cannot be concealed: and intelligence-work comes a very close fourth. -- 'do you know of a Mr Bede, that wrote an ecclesiastical history?' 'Bede? Bede?' said Marsden, breaking off his conversation with his neighbour. 'Never heard of him.' Then resuming it, 'He was a mere boy, so we only gave him a hundred lashes on the back, and the rest on his bottom and legs.' 'Bede lived in the County Durham,' said Stephen in a momentary pause. 'Little do I or other naturalists know of the northern parts of England; but it is to be hoped that some future faunist, a person of a thinking turn of mind, a man of fortune, will undertake the tour, accompanied by a botanist and a draughtsman, and will give us an account of his journey. The manners of the wild Aborigines, their superstitions, their prejudices, their sordid way of life, will extort from him many useful reflections. And his draughtsman will portray the ruins of the great monasteries of Wearmouth and Jarrow, the home of the most learned man in England a thousand years ago, famous throughout the Christian world and now forgotten. Such a work would be well received.'

And lastly O’Brian warns us what is to come:

'As for an end,' said Martin, 'are endings really so very important? Sterne did quite well without one; and often an unfinished picture is all the more interesting for the bare canvas. I remember Bourville's definition of a novel as a work in which life flows in abundance, swirling without a pause: or as you might say without an end, an organized end. And there is at least one Mozart quartet that stops without the slightest ceremony: most satisfying when you get used to it.

"Clarissa Oakes (Aubrey/Maturin #15)"

Patrick O’Brian (1997)
★★★★☆
reviewed May 2021

worse than that for our purposes was his case-book showing long-drawn-out histories of general bilious indisposition, melancholy, taedium vitae sometimes reaching mere despair, extreme irascibility: all this with no known agent, though autopsy showed an enlarged quadrate lobe studded with yellow nodules the size of a pea. He calls it Botany Bay liver, and it is this or some one of the other New Holland diseases that I fear our patient may have caught. The vexation and more than vexation of spirit is certainly present.'    'It is deeply saddening to see what disease can do to a whole cast of mind, to a settled character,' said Martin. 'And sometimes our remedies are just as bad. How it appears to draw in the boundaries of free-will.’

—

'I am told he has not cruised before; and is a somewhat philosophical, theoretical gent.'    'Then the sooner his capers are cut short the better. Let us have no benevolent revolutions, no humanitarians, no Goddamned systems, no panaceas. Look at that wicked fellow Cromwell, and those vile Whigs in poor King James's time, a fine seaman as he was, too.'

—

“A man could not speak chuff to such a girl, without he was a very mere Goth. Old Jarvey could not speak chuff to such a girl.'    'It is my belief, brother, that your misogyny is largely theoretical.'    'Ay,' said Jack, shaking his head. 'I love a wench, it is true; but a wench in her right place”

—

At different times I had tried to explain the violent male desire for exclusive possession—the standard by which a wide variety of partners if not promiscuity is laudable in oneself, vile in women—the want of sequence or even common honesty of mind coupled with unshakable conviction—the unreasonable yet very strong and very painful emotions that arise from jealousy (a feeling to which she is almost entirely a stranger)—and the very great force of rivalry.

—

When the cutter was within hail a man stood up, fell down, stood up again holding the coxswain's shoulder and called 'What ship is that?' in an approximately American voice, drawing his face in a sideways contortion to do so.

—

I catch Maturin in some more bullshit:

‘Do I agree? I do not. Your premises are mistaken and so necessarily is your conclusion.’

(That’s not how logic works.)

This is one of the great ironies of the series: Stephen and his colleagues, so enormously educated, so vastly respected are not doing much for their patients, except when they whack off something gangrenous. The most celebrated of Stephen’s surgeries, trepanation, is no treatment at all for head trauma (except maybe for extracting shards). He constantly lets blood. He pours mercury into syphilitics. Regression to the mean and placebo can explain all of his middling success. In this book at least we see a little bit of the truth, therapeutic nihilism:

We swim in ignorance. Where these diseases are not wholly characteristic, sharply marked and obvious, they are difficult to detect; and when we have detected them there is still little we can really do. Apart from general care our only real resource is mercury in its various forms, and sometimes the remedy is worse than the disease.

But in general he has a doctor’s arrogance without a modern doctor’s powers. When was the turning point, when a visit to the doctor became more likely than not to improve your health? 1940?

"The Wine-Dark Sea (Aubrey & Maturin, #16)"

Patrick O’Brian (1994)
★★★★☆
reviewed May 2021

“even if West had been in high favour with his commander it would have been quite useless to suggest that if it was necessary to promote foremast jacks, as it was in this case, then they might be made master’s mates, herding with the midshipmen, so that the gun-room should be preserved: useless, because Jack Aubrey belonged to an older Navy in which a collier’s mate like James Cook could die a much-honoured post-captain, and a foremast-hand like William Mitchell might begin his career by being flogged round the fleet and end it as a vice-admiral, rather than to the modern service, in which an officer had not only to pass for lieutenant but also for gentleman if he were to advance.”

—

“Stephen was not a heavy, impercipient man in most respects, yet he had known Jack Aubrey all these years without discovering that he disliked even a very little blood and slime extremely: that is to say, cold blood and slime. In battle he was accustomed to wading ankle-deep in both without the least repulsion, laying about him in a very dreadful manner. But he could scarcely be brought to wring a chicken’s neck, still less watch a surgical operation.

—

“although analogies kept flitting through his mind like clues to the solution of a puzzle, none would settle or cling to its fellows.”

—

“the ancient generations were not to be despised. The confident system of his youth – universal reform, universal changes, universal happiness and freedom – had ended in something very like universal tyranny and oppression. The ancient generations were not to be despised; and the seamen’s firm belief that Friday was unlucky was perhaps less foolish than the philosophe’s conviction that all the days of the week could be rendered happy by the application of an enlightened system of laws. He wished the main conference had not been set for Friday. Blushing at his momentary weakness, he turned his mind to Hurtado”

—

“the guinea-pig or cavy. He is neither beautiful nor intelligent, and he is the most indifferent eating imaginable – barely edible at all, indeed, after the first half-dozen braces. Unhappily he is readily domesticated; he dries, smokes or salts easily; and he can be carried for ever in this dry, dry cold air – a cold air in which the native potato too can be and alas is dried, frozen, dried again and so packed up. I have tried to make this dish a little more palatable by adding mushrooms, our ordinary European mushrooms, Agaricus campestris, which to my perfect stupefaction I found growing here in alpine meadows: but my dear companion told me I should certainly drop down dead, his followers too assured me and one another that I should swell, then drop down dead; and it angered them so when I survived a week that Eduardo had to beg me to stop”

—

“When we have finished breakfast – pray help yourself to bacon and pass the dish – I will show you something more extraordinary by far. Our rudder has gone by the board.’ ‘Oh, oh,’ cried Stephen, aghast. ‘Are we rudderless, so?’ ‘I will not deceive you, brother: we are without a rudder. Do you remember asking me about pintles?’ Stephen nodded, still much concerned. ‘Well, it appears that at some point in our dreadful passage through the drift-ice a great floe must have lifted the pintles off the dumb-chalder and the braces, or most of them, and destroyed the wood-locks, so that it was hanging by little more than the tiller. We did not notice it, since we barely touched the helm sailing large; but when the lightning struck the rudder-head, shattering all down to the waterline, why, it dropped clean away.’ He pointed to the shattered, blackened rudder-head, now covered by a decent cloth. ‘Is there any help for such a state of affairs?’ ‘Oh, I am sure we shall find something,’ said Jack. ‘May I trouble you for the marmalade? Capital marmalade, you must confess; though not quite as good as Sophie’s.’ Stephen had often heard Jack say, when life at sea grew more trying than the human frame could bear, ‘that it was no use whining’; but he had never “seen quite this degree of insouciance, or what he felt tempted to call irresponsible levity. How much was assumed as a captain’s duty in a virtually hopeless situation? How much was Jack’s natural reaction? He was not a man much given to strike attitudes. How hopeless was the situation in fact?”

—

“that, much nearer to us,’ said Stephen to the ecstatic Reade, ‘is what we at sea term a schooner; but you need not be afraid. She carries little in the way of guns.’ ‘A Baltimore clipper, sir, I believe,’ said Mr Adams. ‘Indeed? I could have sworn she was a schooner, in spite of those rectangular sails in front.’ ‘Certainly, sir. She is certainly a schooner in rig. The clipper part refers to her hull.’ ‘Oh, she has a hull as well, has she? I was not aware”

—

"Dril Official "Mr. Ten Years" Anniversary Collection"

Dril (2018)
★★★★☆
reviewed Dec 2018

It’s difficult to explain ok. What looks like tasteless idiocy - or, not much better, tastelessly ironic tasteless idiocy - is actually a new, hilarious literary style. I hate Twitter, but use it for this.

‘dril’ is a self-aware idiot, a boastful masochist, a fanboy, a shill, a disgusting but hapless man. He graduated high school in 2005 but also has grandchildren. He can’t spell very well but he breaks out ten-dollar words quite often. That is: he is Everyman, online.

He thinks he’s a social critic but he’s also an open shill (and this is not unheard of). His mix of self-regard and incompetence is done better than Ignatius in Confederacy of Dunces.

You can get a sense of what people see in him through all the surprisingly apt applications: the prolific tagging of completely different philosophers, US presidents, Romans, Christian denominations.

Missing from this book is the nastier strand of the project, where he resurrects ten-year-old tweets by real accounts with impressively stupid names which accidentally share the aesthetic. (He mostly targets inactive accounts, though.)

It’s weird to pay for a book which is both free and dreadful (and lacks some good roughhousing). But everything here is weird.

"The Use and Abuse of Formal Models in Political Philosophy"

Robert Paul Wolff (2011)
★★★★☆
reviewed Jan 2021

Excellent way to learn rational choice, social choice, and game theory. I have since gotten much fonder of each of them, but Wolff’s sceptical and readable grumping is an excellent way in, even if he goes too far in circumscribing their uses.

Free here

"In the Beginning...Was the Command Line"

Neal Stephenson (2009)
★★★★☆
reviewed Aug 2018

The basic tenet of multiculturalism is that people need to stop judging each other—to stop asserting (and, eventually, to stop believing) that this is right and that is wrong, this true and that false, one thing ugly and another thing beautiful… The problem is that once you have done away with the ability to make judgments as to right and wrong, true and false, etc., there’s no real culture left. All that remains is clog dancing and macramé. The ability to make judgments, to believe things, is the entire point of having a culture. I think this is why guys with machine guns sometimes pop up in places like Luxor and begin pumping bullets into Westerners.

Classic, cynical cultural history of popular computing. A noob-friendly guide to breaking free: a love letter to GNU: “Linux… are making tanks… Anyone who wants can simply climb into one and drive it away for free… It is the fate of manufactured goods to slowly and gently depreciate as they get old and have to compete against more modern products. But it is the fate of operating systems to become free.”

If you’re like me (human?), you need metaphors and binary distinctions to get abstract stuff, and Stephenson has them coming out of his ears, which sometimes leads to a stone-tablet patronising tone*.

Disney and Apple/Microsoft are in the same business: short-circuiting laborious, explicit verbal communication with expensively designed interfaces.”)

An amazing writer, though: he finds program comments “like the terse mutterings of pilots wrestling with the controls of damaged airplanes.” In tech, 15 years is a full geological era and a half*, so some of his insights have taken on a sepia hue (e.g. “is [Microsoft] addicted to OS sales in the same way as Apple is to selling hardware? Keep in mind that Apple’s ability to monopolize its own hardware supply was once cited, by learned observers, as a great advantage over Microsoft. At the time, it seemed to place them in a much stronger position. In the end, it nearly killed them, and may kill them yet… When things started to go south for Apple, they should have ported their OS to cheap PC hardware. But they didn’t. Instead, they tried to make the most of their brilliant hardware, adding new features and expanding the product line. But this only had the effect of making their OS more dependent on these special hardware features, which made it worse for them in the end. ”). But astonishingly, most have not – and how many other tech articles from the 90s are still worth a single minute of your time?

Free! here

• He uses this very metaphor in this short essay.

"Hey, Wait..."

Jason (2001)
★★★★☆
reviewed Apr 2021

The first half feels aimless, but stick with it and you see that it’s evoking teen aims and emptiness.

Lots of lovely little touches, from the dense rambling print of the teachers, to the way Jon grows up instantly in one panel. Young pain and old pain.

"For the Motherboard: The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám"

Vanessa Hodgkinson (2014)
★★★★☆
reviewed Nov 2014

Gaudy and hectic word-associations, with only tenuous formal or thematic links to the actual Rubáiyát, presenting itself as a translation but fizzing with verve of its own. A nerd culture devotional.

(Vine was a video fragment website; Wine is an excellent Windows emulator.)

Teeming with clumsy nerdy ephemera, but I think it will be worth reading in 10 years. Let’s see. Works much better aloud.

Free! here: ‘The’ ‘“Rubaiyyat’” of ‘Omar Khayyam’</b>

"The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don't"

Julia Galef (2021)
★★★★☆
reviewed Apr 2021

Here's a way to tell scientific intelligence from legal intelligence. Both may start from the idea that something cannot be done and think up arguments to explain why. However, the scientist may discover a flaw in the argument that leads him change his mind and to discover a way to do it... The legal thinker will merely try to patch the flaw in the argument, because, once he has chosen a side, all his intelligence is devoted to finding arguments for that side.

― John McCarthy

I was a bit of a legalist as a young man: completely gripped by what Galef calls the “soldier mindset”, the urge to win arguments and cling to your positions, rather than find the truth. I was a philosophy student. Philosophy is supposed to be dispassionate and open-minded, but in fact the sheer number of degrees of freedom in it, and the absence of conclusive evidence lead to the usual bias and inertia. (We can name positions after philosophers because so few change their minds.) A certain level of intelligence and knowledge of say logical fallacies can end up trapping you, since you can usually improvise a fix for the deadly new fact, or anyway say “you too!”.

Or not. This is an uplifting and useful set of stories about moving from the (pretty diseased) default mode of thinking to be, on average, less deluded and unfair. If you spend much time looking at internet arguments, or TV news debates, or other kinds of stupid war then you’ll be cheered, and - who knows - healed, by Galef’s examples of people changing their minds and running the numbers, against their current narrowly construed interests.

Galef is a master of this, as you can see from basically any of her radio episodes.

This would have helped the young legalist realise what he was doing, and might have sped him on the road.

The principles are not new, but the illustrating anecdotes are, and the writing is utterly, crashingly accessible in the Bestseller Nonfiction style, and it’s short and sunny, and anyway it is a vital public service to redo Plato / Laplace / Schopenhauer / Peirce / Russell / Kahneman / Hanson / Yudkowsky / Galef, every say two years til the end of time.

News to me:

• The London Homeopathic Hospital had the best results during the Victorian cholera epidemic, for reasons unrelated to homeopathy (clean sheets and proto-rehydration therapy). Still dismal 18% mortality.

• Spock has a Brier score above 0.5: way worse than the average forecaster on low-stakes internet platforms (0.25), and somewhat worse than a flipping coin.

• An author of the Christian abstinence craze was persuaded that his book (advising that teens not even date other teens) was harmful, and stopped selling it.

Galef type:

Data #2: surprising case studies Theory #2: models of what makes something succeed or fail Theory #5: a general lens you can use to analyze many different things Values #1: an explicit argument about values Thinking #1: teach principles of thinking directly

"Death and What Comes Next (Discworld, #10.5; Death, #1.5)"

Terry Pratchett (2002)
★★★★☆
reviewed Apr 2021

Lovely morsel

"The Scientific Revolution and the Origins of Modern Science (Studies in European History)"

John Henry (2002)
★★★★☆
reviewed Nov 2009

Incredibly brief tour of the main issues raised by the Scientific Revolution. IIRC he walks the line well between the first inklings of the context of justification and the sheer STS-friendly weirdness of the context of discovery.

The unexpected decoupling of the scientific revolution from the industrial revolution (two centuries apart!) is one of the most important facts I have ever learned.

[maybe 4 stars, I can’t remember]

"What the Hell Are You Doing?: The Essential David Shrigley"

David Shrigley (2010)
★★★★☆
reviewed May 2015

Hilarious, abject, shoddy. Magical realism if magic were shit and made you look an idiot. Voices from the last bus and the dawn of time, from dank cells and strip-lit service stations. Against institutional art and other pretences, and against indifference, and against no fun.

"Desolation Island (Aubrey & Maturin #5)"

Patrick O’Brian (2022)
★★★★☆
reviewed Apr 2021

Largely about failure, waiting, decay, and disloyalty. Gripping even when it repeats.

"Get in the Van: On the Road With Black Flag"

Henry Rollins (2004)
★★★★☆
reviewed Jan 2006

Chronicle of violence, censorship via nightstick, nervous breakdowns, mental illness, ridiculously hard work, and poverty - most of it welcomed in.

Rollins was a literally Romantic introvert in an unbelievably macho environment. (You might find this hard to believe if you watch the above videos but it’s true.) He got better: he’s now a strange sort of public intellectual, Iggy Pop with more pretensions, political snark, and appetite for extremity.

Get in the Van is overwrought and self-absorbed and self-defeating. It is great. Bukowski with a 100W amp, Palahniuk if Palahniuk was in any sense real, a Russian Soul in California.

(Read Punk Planet’s oral history of Black Flag for counterclaims to half of this book. For once I don’t mind what’s true.)

"Against Method"

Paul Karl Feyerabend (1993)
★★★★☆
reviewed Feb 2012

A common misconception is that this book disses scientists. It doesn’t; it tells philosophers of science that they’ve failed and should go home.

Has an “Analytical Index”, a table of contents which contains the principal argument. This should be mandatory in nonfiction.

"Treason's Harbour (Aubrey & Maturin, #9)"

Patrick O’Brian (1992)
★★★★☆
reviewed Apr 2021

"The Surgeon's Mate (Aubrey & Maturin, #7)"

Patrick O’Brian (2010)
★★★★☆
reviewed Apr 2021

Title is cleverer than it looks: no surgeon’s mate plays any great role in the story, but there is Maturin playing literal and political chess (beating Napoleon and Johnson) and finding a wife. More than a dozen locations, quite hard to keep up and store the plot in your head.

He was a handsome man, but no one had ever told him so and he was unaware of the fact; now he was delighted, frankly delighted to hear the news – charmed to learn that anyone could find him good-looking. He was handsome, that is to say, in the eyes of those who did not look for the bloom or the slenderness of youth, who admired a big broad-shouldered man with a high complexion, bright blue eyes and yellow hair, and who did not object to a face that had the mark of a cutlass-slash from one ear right across the cheek-bone and another scar, this one from a splinter, along the line of the jaw to the other ear. It was clear that Miss Smith did not, for when he turned and the introduction was made, she looked at him with an eager admiration... “seducing poor Aubrey is like taking pennies from a blind man’s hat” Gothenburg, a melancholy town, most of it quite recently burnt, inhabited by tall spare melancholiacs dressed in grey wool, much given to drinking and self-murder...

"Sex by Numbers: What Statistics Can Tell Us About Sexual Behaviour (Wellcome Collection)"

David Spiegelhalter (2015)
★★★★☆
reviewed Jun 2018

Fun with a serious scientific mission. The expected titillating facts are present (how many people have tried anal? How many people are gay? What’s typical?) but there’s also an intro to the many difficulties of social science and a history of sexology in here. You learn why you should admire (but not trust) Ellis, Hirschfeld, Kinsey, Masters & Johnson, Hite…

Something for everyone.

"Can't We Talk about Something More Pleasant?"

Roz Chast (2014)
★★★★☆
reviewed Apr 2021

Honest, unsentimental, much stronger than it looks. I like her parents more than her, but then she’s showing herself at her worst, in situations where all of us struggle to be likeable, to like ourselves.

"The Elusive Quest for Growth: Economists' Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics"

William Easterly (2002)
★★★★☆
reviewed Apr 2012

Extremely important and readable empirical summary of the (C20th) failure of directed “development” aid (that is, capital aimed at a self-sustaining anti-poverty outcome).

"Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another"

Philip Ball (2006)
★★★★☆
reviewed May 2016

“Being an Enquiry into the Interplay of Chance and Necessity in the Way That Human Culture, Customs, Institutions, Cooperation and Conflict Arise” (2004) by Philip Ball.

An elegant pop treatment of the once-burgeoning physics of mass human behaviour. (Which physics follows hundreds of years of stupid and/or inhumane theories claiming the name “social physics”). A love letter to statistical mechanics:

Most people who have encountered thermodynamics blanch at its mention, because it is an awesomely tedious discipline both to learn theoretically and to investigate experimentally. This is a shame, because it is also one of the most astonishing theories in science. Think of it: here is a field of study initiated to help nineteenth-century engineers make better engines, and it turns out to produce some of the grandest and most fundamental statements about the way the entire universe works. Thermodynamics is the science of change, and without change there is nothing to be said... Tools, methods and ideas developed to understand how the blind material fabric of the universe behaves are finding application in arenas for which they were never designed, and for which they might at first glance appear ridiculously inappropriate. Physics is finding its place in a science of society.

Introduces a hundred topics from thermodynamics, economics, econophysics, game theory, and fields which don’t have a name yet, including intuitive explanations of fearsome concepts like:

• self-organized criticality
• the 2D and 3D Ising model
• diffusion-limited aggregation in bacteria and cities
• Lévy-stability
• the business cycle
• random walks
• superfluidity and supercooling phase transitions
• bifurcation theory
• traffic flow
• Zipf's law
• the Small world phenomenon
• catastrophe theory
...

Unlike shiny TED-style nonfiction, he refers directly to the original scientific papers and includes small interviews with the original researchers. No equations, but beautiful diagrams relating micro with macro, too: snowflakes to traffic and bacterial colonies to cities.

The book’s reception, in the main by middlebrow, mathematically illiterate reviewers shocked me a bit: their banner conclusions were “boo! people aren’t particles!!”, a truism which Ball spends much of the book thinking about, and “aaar horrible people have said they’ve found the laws of society before!!”, a truism the first fifth of the book is a history of. In their haste to protect ordinary human difference from averages, and the notion of free will from technical explanations, they flee to safe refuges like “complexity” and “reflexivity”, i.e. out of science. Ball can speak for himself though:

The notion that we could ever construct a scientific "utopia theory" [e.g. classical Marxism] is, then, doomed to absurdity. Certainly, a "physics of society" can provide nothing of the sort. One does not build an ideal world from scientifically based traffic planning, market analysis, criminology, network design, game theory, and the gamut of other ideas discussed in this book. Concepts and models drawn from physics are almost certainly going to find their way into other areas of social science, but they are not going to provide a comprehensive theory of society, nor are they going to make traditional sociology, economics, or political science redundant. The skill lies in deciding where a mechanistic, quantitative model is appropriate for describing human behavior, and where it is likely to produce nothing but a grotesque caricature. This is a skill that is still being acquired, and it is likely that there will be embarrassments along the way. But properly and judiciously applied, physical science can furnish some valuable tools in areas such as social, economic, and civic planning, and in international negotiation and legislation. It may help us to avoid bad decisions; if we are lucky, it will give us some foresight. If there are emergent laws of traffic, of pedestrian motions, of network topologies, of urban growth, we need to know them in order to plan effectively. Once we acknowledge the universality displayed in the physical world, it should come as no surprise that the world of human social affairs is not necessarily a tabula rasa, open to all options. Society is complex but that does not place it beyond our ken. As we have seen, complexity of form and organization can arise from simple underlying principles if they are followed simultaneously by a great many individuals.

There is a real question about how deep into human behaviour the statistical approach can go. Econophysics, as a term and as a living, funded academic subfield, fizzled out shortly after this book was published. Apparently the SOC results have come in for a lot of criticism, though mostly of their overreach than the method being humanistically inapplicable or whatevs.

Even so, I wish I had read this 5 years ago: it would have saved me lots of contortions. it taught me a huge amount anyway. (e.g. the huge moral panic, following the invention of descriptive statistics, about ever using means to describe any human characteristics, since the remarkable stability of e.g. the C17th London crime rate across decades seemed to speak of divine or diabolical insurance.) One of my top 5 books on economics, one of my top 5 books on physics.

In one sentence: Social physics had at last begun to make exciting progress on understanding mass human behaviour.

"The Mating Season (Jeeves, #9)"

P.G. Wodehouse (2002)
★★★★☆
reviewed Dec 2018

“Still,” I said, feeling that it was worth trying, “it’s part of the great web, what?” “Great web?” “One of Marcus Aurelius’s cracks. He said: Does aught befall you? It is good. It is part of the destiny of the Universe ordained for you from the beginning. All that befalls you is part of the great web. ” From the brusque manner in which he damned and blasted Marcus Aurelius, I gathered that, just as had happened when Jeeves sprang it on me, the gag had failed to bring balm. I hadn't had much hope that it would. I doubt, as a matter of fact, if Marcus Aurelius’s material is ever the stuff to give the troops at a moment when they have just stubbed their toe on the brick of Fate. You want to wait till the agony has abated.

Classification:

Wooster’s taboo: None; using a port decanter as a conductor’s baton while standing on a chair bellowing hunting doggerel. Triangle: Wooster - the Bassett - Gussie - Corky - Esmond - Gertrude - Catsmeat - Queenie - Dobbs.* Subplot: Arresting a dog, kidnapping, converting an atheist. Aunt: Agatha and five others Antagonist: Dame Daphne Winkworth, the Bassett, Agatha Expedient: treble impersonation, comedic Irish crosstalk, luring a schoolboy with a starlet, coshing a cop to convert him to Christianity.

• It is vital to have an odd number of people in the love ‘triangle’, so that they can all be paired off at the end, sparing Wooster.
  
  
  

"The Ionian Mission (Aubrey & Maturin, #8)"

Patrick O’Brian (2010)
★★★★☆
reviewed Apr 2021

“Oh, of course there are always some odd fish among the quota-men sent by the magistrates; but this time we have very few downright thieves: only one parricide, that was found incapable of pleading and sent to the Navy; and after all he will scarcely carry on his capers here – he will scarcely find another father aboard” “natural philosophy is not concerned with ethics, virtues and vices, or metaphysics. The fact that the dodo has a keel to her breastbone whereas the ostrich and her kind have none presents no moral issue; nor does the dissolution of gold by aqua regia. We erect hypotheses, to be sure, some of us to a most stupendous height, but we always hope to sustain them by demonstrable facts in time: these are not the province of the moralist. Perhaps it might be said that your moral philosopher is in pursuit of wisdom rather than of knowledge; and indeed what he is concerned with is not so much the object of knowledge as of intuitive perception – is scarcely susceptible of being known. Yet whether wisdom can be any more profitably pursued than happiness is a question. Certainly the few moral philosophers I have known do not seem to have been outstandingly successful in either, whereas some natural philosophers, such as Sir Humphrey Davy…’ Stephen carried on to the end of his long, his very long sentence... “teaching young gentlemen has a dismal effect upon the soul. It exemplifies the badness of established, artificial authority. The pedagogue has almost absolute authority over his pupils: he often beats them and insensibly he loses the sense of respect due to them as fellow human beings. He does them harm, but the harm they do him is far greater. He may easily become the all-knowing tyrant, always right, always virtuous; in any event he perpetually associates with his inferiors, the king of his company... Have you ever known a schoolmaster fit to associate with grown men? The Dear knows I never have. They are most horribly warped indeed” “The crackle and yield of this little paper cylinder,’ he said, holding it up, ‘gives me a sensual pleasure whose deeper origins I blush to contemplate, while the slow combustion of the whole yields a gratification that I should not readily abandon even if it did me harm, which it does not. Far from it. On the contrary, tobacco purges the mind of its gross humours, sharpens the wits, renders the judicious smoker sprightly and vivacious. And soon I shall need all my sprightliness and vivacity.” “All those officers who were not on duty went back to their game of shove-groat in the gunroom: a great competition had been going on since Malta, and although the prize of twelve and sixpence seemed trifling since the capture of the Bonhomme Richard, they still played with the greatest eagerness, as careless of the glorious sky, the perfect sea, the spectacular Ionian shore, and even of Pyrrhus and the Dalmatian pelicans as they had been in some sunless convoy, far out in the drizzling German Ocean” “in war there is neither Turk nor Christian nor moral consideration.’ ‘A war like that would not be worth fighting,’ said Jack. ‘And yet the Dear knows war is not a game,’ said Stephen. ‘No,’ said Jack. ‘Perhaps I should have said not worth winning”

"Alan Turing: The Enigma"

Andrew Hodges (2000)
★★★★☆
reviewed Sep 2017

in the early days of computing, a number of terms for the practitioners of the field of computing were suggested in the Communications of the ACM — turingineer, turologist, flow-charts-man, applied meta-mathematician, and applied epistemologist.

In a man of his type, one never knows what his mental processes are going to do next.

There have been two big films about Turing (three if you count the uselessly fictionalised Enigma (2001)). All of them are more or less dishonestly melodramatic; for instance they depict Turing’s relationship with his dead love Christopher as the driver of his work on machine intelligence. And more generally they depict him as tragic. But he wasn’t tragic: we were. In the 1950s we attacked a superlatively profound person, because we were certain it was the right thing to do.

Hodges, whose book began the great public rehabilitation of Turing and served as the source for the films, bears no blame for this: it’s one of the best biographies I’ve ever read (better even than Kanigel on Ramanujan and Issacson on Einstein).

Begin with his achievements:

• 1935: Mathematical statistics: An independent proof of the Central Limit Theorem.
• 1935: Group theory: An extension to a theorem of von Neumann's.
• 1936: Mathematical logic: One of the all-time great papers, an answer to Hilbert's halting problem and an elaboration of the incompleteness of all mathematics, and the formal statement of a single machine that can perform all computable work.
• 1936: Computability theory: Same paper. Creator thereof.
• 1936: Automata theory: Same paper. Creator thereof.
• 1936: Computer engineering: Same paper. Inventor of the stored-program concept, used in all computers since 1950.
• 1937: Group theory: Proof that general continuous groups cannot be approximated by finite groups.
• 1938: Mathematical logic: Invention of ordinal logics, an attempt to handle incompleteness.
• 1938: Analytic number theory: Algorithm ("Turing's method") for calculating values of the zeta-function.
• 1938: Computer engineering and Mathematical methodology: Design of an analogue machine to approximate the zeroes of the zeta function.
• 1939: Cryptanalysis: developed most of the logical methods used against Nazi Germany's naval cipher, Enigma. Including a new sort of indirect frequency analysis, "simultaneous scanning", search trees, an independent invention of Shannon's information entropy (as "Weight of evidence")...


• 1940: Mechanical engineering: redesigned the Polish Bomba to handle the exponential explosion in the Enigma's state space.
• 1941: Statistics: independent invention of sequential analysis, for "Banburismus".
• 1940: Bayesian inference: independent reinvention of Bayes factors and the first approximation of what we would now call empirical Bayes estimation. IJ Good quite rightly calls Bayes factors, "Bayes-Turing factors". (Though it should be Laplace-Turing factors.)
• 1942: Cryptanalysis: A hand-method for cracking the Lorenz cipher, "Turingery".
• 1944: Crytography, audio engineering and electrical engineering: Design, proof and much of the construction of "Delilah", an electronic speech encipherment device.
• 1945-6: Algorithmics: The discovery of the stack. A neglected but vast accomplishment. (Zuse had already implemented subroutines by then.)
• 1945-6: Computer engineering: Design of the Automatic Computing Engine, the first complete design of a stored-program computer, including circuit diagrams, instruction set and cost estimate. (von Neumann's is incomplete.)
• 1948: Computer music: The first computer music. Turing's handbook for the Mark I had a section on using it to produce notes, and they gave a demo for radio in 1951, also a first. Not really a synth (not real-time) and not real electronic music (produced by moving parts).
• 1948: Linear algebra: Better ways of solving linear systems and inverting matrices.
• 1949: Group theory: Proof that the 'word problem' is insoluable for cancellation semigroups. Computability mainstream in mathematics by then.
• 1949: Formal verification: Paper on proving that computer programs will behave.


• 1950: Philosophy of mind and artificial intelligence: His famous one, "Computing machinery and intelligence" is one of the top 100 set texts in philosophy, but Computable Numbers is deeper, outlining how computability places limits on what the brain can do, and how difficult it will be to redo. He sees machine learning coming very clearly.
• 1951: Group theory: Another big result in the word problem for groups. (unpublished)
• 1951: Chess engine: Published the first algorithm to play a full game of chess automatically.
• 1952: Mathematical biology: a profound chemical theory of how life grows, now a textbook model of morphogenesis.
• 1952: Number theory: Numerical evidence (computed on the Manchester Baby) for thousands of values of the zeta-function.
• 1952: Pattern formation: Construction of the "Swift-Hohenberg" equation, 23 years before them.

Copeland estimates that breaking U-boat Enigma saved 14 million lives, a large fraction of which we can lay at Turing’s feet. This puts him in the top 50 life-savers ever. But what is most amazing (and endearing) is just how unsophisticated he was.

As at school, trivial examples of ‘eccentricity’ circulated in Bletchley circles. Near the beginning of June he would suffer from hay fever, which blinded him as he cycled to work, so he would use a gas mask to keep the pollen out, regardless of how he looked. The bicycle itself was unique, since it required the counting of revolutions until a certain bent spoke touched a certain link (rather like a cipher machine), when action would have to be taken to prevent the chain coming off. Alan had been delighted at having, as it were, deciphered the fault in the mechanism, which meant that he saved himself weeks of waiting for repairs, at a time when the bicycle had again become what it was when invented – the means of freedom. It also meant that no one else could ride it. He made a more explicit defence of his tea-mug (again irreplaceable, in wartime conditions) by attaching it with a combination lock to a Hut 8 radiator pipe. But it was picked, to tease him. Trousers held up by string, pyjama jacket under his sports coat – the stories, whether true or not, went the rounds. And now that he was in a position of authority, the nervousness of his manner was more open to comment. There was his voice, liable to stall in mid-sentence with a tense, high-pitched ‘Ah-ah-ah-ah-ah’ while he fished, his brain almost visibly labouring away, for the right expression, meanwhile preventing interruption. The word, when it came, might be an unexpected one, a homely analogy, slang expression, pun or wild scheme or rude suggestion accompanied with his machine-like laugh; bold but not with the coarseness of one who had seen it all and been disillusioned, but with the sharpness of one seeing it through strangely fresh eyes. ‘Schoolboyish’ was the only word they had for it. Once a personnel form came round the Huts, and some joker filled in for him, ‘Turing A.M. Age 21’, but others, including Joan, said it should be ‘Age 16’... It was demeaning, but the repetition of superficial anecdotes about his usually quite sensible solutions to life’s small challenges served the useful purpose of deflecting attention away from the more dangerous and difficult questions about what an Alan Turing might think about the world in which he lived. English ‘eccentricity’ served as a safety valve for those who doubted the general rules of society. More sensitive people at Bletchley were aware of layers of introspection and subtlety of manner that lay beneath the occasional funny stories. But perhaps he himself welcomed the chortling over his habits, which created a line of defence for himself, without a loss of integrity.

We have words for this now (“nerd”, “wonk”, “aspie”), and massive institutions, and even social movements, but at the time he had to make do with “don”, and hide inside academia. Again: the problem wasn’t him, it was us.

He gets called a mathematician most often, I suppose because people don’t want to be anachronistic. But scroll up: his most famous work is as a logician and a systems architect, and much of the rest is statistics and algorithmics and cognitive science. He was falling between several chairs, until computer science caught up with him:

a pure mathematician worked in a symbolic world and not with things. The machine seemed to be a contradiction... For Alan Turing personally, the machine was a symptom of something that could not be answered by mathematics alone. He was working within the central problems of classical number theory, and making a contribution to it, but this was not enough. The Turing machine, and the ordinal logics, formalising the workings of the mind; Wittgenstein’s enquiries; the electric multiplier and now this concatenation of gear wheels – they all spoke of making some connection between the abstract and the physical. It was not science, not ‘applied mathematics’, but a sort of applied logic, something that had no name.

The philosopher-engineer. One of several moments in Hodge’s book that left me dumbstruck is Turing arguing with Wittgenstein about the foundations of mathematics. (In the spring of 1939 they were both teaching courses at Cambridge called that!) Bit awkward, and in my view Alan goes easy on Ludwig. But you still couldn’t make it up.

The government employed Turing for 9 years, paying him about £6000 over the duration (£150k in today’s money). In that time he produced 3 gigantically advanced systems (most of the Hut 8 system, the Delilah and the ACE design), about 10 or 20 years ahead of their time. Hodges sees this as a triumph of managerial socialism. Now, breaking naval enigma for £6k is an unbelievable deal (the savings from undestroyed shipping and cargo would be in the billions). But the government suppressed Delilah and totally screwed up the ACE project. So I’m not sure if we can cheer too much. Keynes says somewhere that

The important thing for Government is not to do things which individuals are doing already, and to do them a little better or a little worse; but to do those things which at present are not done at all.

This is true of Enigma, I suppose. But instructive failures are only helpful if they occur in public. (As at least the ACE report was.)

The most annoying part of the films making up emotionally powerful unifying themes for Turing is that they are already there. (But to grasp them, you’d have to actually display what was most wonderful and important about him, his technical work, and there goes the box office.) Anyway, here’s one that made me cry:

In an end-of-term sing-song [at Sherborne, when Turing was 12], the following couplet described him:

Turing’s fond of the football field For geometric problems the touch-lines yield

... another verse had him ‘watching the daisies grow’ during hockey... although intended as a joke against his dreamy passivity, there might have been a truth in the observation. [20 years later] ...One day he and Joan were lying on the Bletchley lawn looking at the daisies... Alan produced a fir cone from his pocket, on which the Fibonacci numbers could be traced rather clearly, but the same idea could also be taken to apply to the florets of the daisy flower. [30 years later] ...he was trying out on the computer the solution of the very difficult differential equations that arose when [one] followed the chemical theory of [plant] morphogenesis beyond the moment of budding... it also required some rather sophisticated applied mathematics, which involved the use of ‘operators’ rather as in quantum mechanics. Numerical analysis was also important... In this it was like a private atomic bomb, the computer in both cases following the development of interacting fluid waves. ...he also developed a purely descriptive theory of leaf-arrangement... using matrices to represent the winding of spirals of leaves or seeds round a stem or flower-head... The intention was that ultimately these two approaches would join up when he found a system of equations that would generate the Fibonacci patterns expressed by his matrices. ...Such observations reflected an insight gained from... [a program called] ‘Outline of Development of the Daisy’. He had quite literally been ‘watching the daisies grow’... on his universal machine.

"There Will Come Soft Rains (Tale Blazers)"

Ray Bradbury (1989)
★★★★☆
reviewed Apr 2021

I read this as the Welsh electronica / Leonard Nimoy mashup “Soft Rains”.

"Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray"

Sabine Hossenfelder (2018)
★★★★☆
reviewed Jul 2018

A look at high-energy particle physics* in its present nightmare (of deep inconsistency and vastly expensive new data). Her thesis is that the problem is sociological and aesthetic: in the absence of new data sources, we form cliques and regroup around incompatible, unempirical beauty intuitions.

it leads me to conjecture that the laws of nature are beautiful because physicists constantly tell each other those laws are beautiful.

experimentalists working with a detector developed to catch neutrinos reported on the first “interesting bounds on galactic cold dark matter and on light bosons emitted from the sun.” In plain English, “interesting bounds” means they didn’t find anything. Various other neutrino experiments at the time also obtained interesting bounds.

Her prescription is that we should stop limiting the field so heavily with naturalness or geometric naturalness or symmetry or unification or anti-fine-tuning intuitions, which collectively she (following her field) calls “beauty”. Since Physical beauty is quite distinct from natural-language “beauty”, I think it’d be better if we left those five components under a different name.

Filled with interviews with some of the cleverest, deepest physicists of our time (Arkani-Harked, Wilczek, Weinberg, Lisi, Polchinski) and the several bandwagons they lead, blind, in different directions. Hossenfelder herself is funny, self-critical, scrupulously clear: the kind of curmudgeonly, unbiddable empiricist we always need.

“You ask, why do people still work on it?” Nima [Arkani-Harked] continues. “It’s in fact very funny. As I said, the best people had a pretty good idea what was going on—they were not sitting on their hands waiting for gluinos to pour out of the LHC. They also had a pretty level reaction to the data.” But not one of those “best people” spoke up and called bullshit on the widely circulated story that the LHC had a good chance of seeing supersymmetry or dark matter particles. I’m not sure which I find worse, scientists who believe in arguments from beauty or scientists who deliberately mislead the public about prospects of costly experiments. Nima continues: “The people who were sure it would be there are now positive it’s not there. There are people now who speak about being depressed or worried or scared. It drives me nuts. It’s ludicrously narcissistic. Who the fuck cares about you and your little life? Other than you yourself, of course.” He isn’t speaking about me, but he might as well be, I think. Maybe I’m just here to find an excuse for leaving academia because I’m disillusioned, unable to stay motivated through all the null results. And what an amazing excuse I have come up with—blaming a scientific community for misusing the scientific method. On the plane back to Frankfurt, bereft of Nima’s enthusiasm, I understand why he has become so influential. In contrast to me, he believes in what he does.

That sweet bitterness is telling; Hossenfelder is the broke-down hard-boiled P.I. of particle physics.

I shouldn’t be here, I should be at my desk, reading a paper, drafting a proposal, or at least writing a referee report. I shouldn’t psychoanalyze a community that neither needs nor wants therapy.

I hook onto the Wi-Fi. After a week of nonstop travel, my inbox is filling with urgent messages. There are two unhappy editors complaining about overdue reports, a journalist asking for comment, a student asking for advice. A form to be signed, a meeting to be rescheduled, two phone calls to be made, a conference invitation that needs to be politely declined. A collaborator returns the draft of a grant proposal for revision. I remember reading biographies of last century’s heroes, picturing theoretical physicists as people puffing pipes in leather armchairs while thinking big thoughts.

Her exposition is impressively clear, covering the whole standard model (and quantum mechanics, and much of modern cosmology) in plain diagrams and terse language. (Though, as usual with pop science, one can’t really spot where the simplifications are misleading unless you’re already an insider.)

The heavies are in general very open and undogmatic about the state of things (they can afford to be, what with tenure). Weinberg:

I don’t know how much elementary particle physics can improve over what we have now. I just don’t know. I think it’s important to try and continue to do experiments, to continue to build large facilities… But where it will end up I don’t know. I hope it doesn’t just stop where it is now. Because I don’t find this entirely satisfying… I don’t take seriously any negative conclusion that the fact that the LHC hasn’t seen anything beyond the standard model shows that there isn’t anything that will solve the naturalness problem… Supersymmetry hasn’t been ruled out because it’s too vague about what it predicts.

(There’s a nice bit where Weinberg hears a new philosophical/historical theory of physics - that the revolutions always involve overthrowing an old aesthetic principle - and is immediately nerd-sniped and charmed by it. Also Wilczek:

According to McAllister, scientists don’t throw out everything during a revolution; they only throw out their conception of beauty. So whenever there is a revolution in science, they have to come up with a new idea of beauty. He lists some examples for this: the steady state universe, quantum mechanics, et cetera. “If that was true,” I go on, “it would tell me that getting stuck on the ideas of beauty from the past is exactly the wrong thing to do.” “Yes, right,” Frank says. “It’s normally a good guiding principle. But occasionally you have to introduce something new. In each of these examples you find, though, that the new ideas are beautiful too.” “But people only found that new beauty after data forced them to look at it,” I point out. “And I’m worried we might not be able to get there. Because we are stuck on this old idea of beauty that we use to construct theories and to propose experiments to test them.” “You might be right."

)

She even seeks out the ugliest theories, like Xiao-Gang Wen’s string-net condensation, trying to find her own aesthetic limits:

I am skeptical, but I tell myself to be more open-minded. Isn’t this what I was looking for, something off the well-trodden path? Is it really any weirder to believe everything is made of qubits than of strings or loops or some 248-dimensional representation of a giant Lie algebra? How patently absurd it must appear to someone who last had contact with physics in eleventh grade that people get paid for ideas like that. But then, I think, people also get paid for throwing balls through hoops.

This bit understates a real problem (it implies we don’t use Solomonoff induction out of pique rather than incomputability):

A way to objectively quantify simplicity is by computational complexity, which is measured by the length of a computer program that executes a calculation. Computational complexity is in principle quantifiable for any theory that can be converted into computer code, which includes the type of theories we currently use in physics. We are not computers, however, and computational complexity is therefore not a measure we actually use. The human idea of simplicity is instead very much based on ease of applicability, which is closely tied to our ability to grasp an idea, hold it in mind, and push it around until a paper falls out.

Better than The Trouble with Physics which I also liked (though he was narrower and less balanced about string theory). Maybe 5/5 if I reread it. Her blog is extremely worthwhile and more technical and thus less untrue.

• OK, “high-energy particle physicists and also Grand Unified Theorists of whatever stripe including some cosmologists”. But it is wrong to say that “physics” tout court has a crisis, nor indeed does Hossenfelder say this. (She didn’t choose her own subtitle.)
  
  
  

"The Great Equations: Breakthroughs in Science from Pythagoras to Heisenberg"

Robert P. Crease (2009)
★★★★☆
reviewed Nov 2013

Droll, scientifically proficient, philosophically superconductive. The cast is standard – ‘Pythagoras’, Newton, Euler, Boltzmann, Maxwell, Einstein, Heisenberg – but his treatment’s lucid and alive to the art and philosophy of the things.

(Get this: “special use of language, often over the heads of untrained readers, that seeks to express truths concisely & with precision, that allows us to understand otherwise inaccessible things, changing our experience in the process” – equations, or poems?)

Thermodynamics is best, casting physicists as Shakespearean (there were four suicides in the twelve of them). Crease wants science to have cultural presence, since at the moment it has authority, cultural reputation without real presence. He suggests that “science criticism” is the way to get this - not in the sense of know-nothing postmodernists attacking instrumentalist hegemony (Holmes on Cochrane), but as in the work of engaged human bridges between practitioners and audience.

Every art has a surfeit of such critics. Pop-science comes close, but it’s more often cheerleading and radical simplification than artful play on precedents, implications and meaning. Well, here’s at least one example. (See also the Edge and 3QuarksDaily people.)

"Moral Mazes: The World of Corporate Managers"

Robert Jackall (1989)
★★★★☆
reviewed Dec 2022

A vindication of ethnography. You can’t get this kind of information any other way. The corporation (it varies surprisingly little across countries and industries, these days) has its own class system, moral system, taboos, verbal and nonverbal language, and weird system of distinction. It’s from 1988 but most of it applies fine to my 2018 stint, apart from there being women around now.

Something I rarely see political brains notice is: corporate life is extremely inefficient and intuitive. It privileges hierarchy and political stability over truth and effect while pretending to be ultra-rational. Reading this book would have made me substantially less miserable in my corporate job, because I just didn’t understand why so much effort was wasted and so many decisions made against the evidence.

"What is right in the corporation is not what is right in a man’s home or in his church. What is right in the corporation is what the guy above you wants from you. That’s what morality is in the corporation..." A subordinate must also not circumvent his boss nor ever give the appearance of doing so. He must never contradict his boss’s judgment in public. Mastering the subtle but necessary arts of deference without seeming to be deferential, of “brown nosing” without fawning, of simultaneous self-promotion and self-effacement, and occasionally of the outright self-abasement that such relationships require is a taxing endeavor that demands continual compromises with conventional and popular notions of integrity. “the essence of managerial work is cronyism, covering your ass, [and] pyramiding to protect your buddies.”

…and yet they move. Large firms have a 100% - 600% edge over SMEs. Small businesses suffer some mazes, not least the need to please one tyrant, but the information flows should be much healthier. Division of labour and economies of scale are so powerful that even floridly corrupt institutions can thrive. Or - worse - something about this gross primate stuff is actually productive…

He probably pushes too hard on the “luck and cronyism” theory of success for this to be a blanket recommendation for all young graduates though. Too likely to discourage real work, or to inspire early defection in the crony game.

"How Music Got Free: The End of an Industry, the Turn of the Century, and the Patient Zero of Piracy"

Stephen Richard Witt (2015)
★★★★☆
reviewed Apr 2023

What a book! Technically literate, economically literate, tasteful, genuinely interested in all the characters, synoptic, funny.

The central conflict (or the one I fixated on) is between two people who never met and never will, whose interactions were endlessly mediated through networks, institutions, laws, class divides, etc. But both men were in the same corporation, and both took millions of dollars from it (though Morris kept the money while Glover disbursed it invisibly as consumer surplus). Witt’s sheer luck is that both of them are likeable, talented, and deeply flawed in different ways.

Do you doubt that you will like the most powerful man in corporate music publishing? Well try this, when Morris was defending gangsta rap from a powerful Senate moral panic:

"Must you debase our nation and threaten our children for the sake of corporate profits?” The answer, at least to the first question, was yes

or

he began to trust market research more than he trusted expert opinion—more, sometimes, than he trusted his own ears. Let the other A&Rs scout bands, and go to nightclubs, and fall in love with demos. Let them guess at trends, and fool themselves into believing they had some special insight

or

Birdman and Slim walked out of Universal’s offices holding a three-million-dollar check. It was the kind of signing that set Morris apart. There weren’t too many label executives interested in spending that kind of money for a minority stake in a roster of untested, sometimes unintelligible rappers who had until recently recorded their albums in Mannie Fresh’s kitchen... As Nasty As They Wanna Be, the first (and to date only) musical work ever to be banned in the United States on the grounds of obscenity... acts tended to create their best work while suffering under the weight of crippling artistic insecurity. This was doubly true for the rappers, whose external brashness and machismo often masked deep-seated vulnerabilities When he’d started working as a songwriter’s assistant for Bert Berns at Laurie Records in 1963, the album was still an extravagant rarity. Like most labels at the time, Laurie had instead primarily traded in seven-inch vinyl singles that had retailed for ten United States cents. Morris, who still remembered those days, could see how the new digital approach resembled the old one. Once you adjusted for inflation, the contemporary terms of sale were nearly identical. The album was vanishing. Morris had outlived it... The studio was Pro Tools, the pressing plant was an mp3 encoder, and the distribution network was a torrent tracker. The entire industry could be run off a laptop

or

Ertegun had been asked to present his strategic plan for the Atlantic imprint to the suits at Warner at an early morning meeting... Ertegun walked in, drunk, at the tail end of an all-night bender, his shirt covered in spilled wine. “Here’s our plan,” he said. “We’re going to make more hits.” Then he walked out.

Tupac’s death was a pointless tragedy, to be sure, but it was also an excellent career move

I absolutely loved the attention Witt pays psychophysics - one of the most impressive achievements in all of psychology, obscure because it is so successful and unsexy. American description of Brandenburg: “His mathematical talent was surpassing and he held his contemporaries in thrall.” Those German contemporaries, agreeing: “He really is quite smart”.

Linde pushed the team to apply for a patent on the device, but ultimately the Fraunhofer group decided that an mp3 player was nothing more than a storage device... Listening to “Tom’s Diner” 2,000 times in a row was work, and the mp3 team would not have done that work without the incentive of future payoff. For the studio guys, sound was an aesthetic quality that you described in terms of “tone” and “warmth.” For the researchers, sound was a physical property of the universe that you described in logarithmic units of air displacement

The remarkable thing is just how obsessive and uninterested in money the king pirates were. Either ideologues, or just doing it to feel powerful, to cost the Man some money, for camaraderie, and to get one over on the other few hundred people in the subculture. (The secret topsites were the one real incentive.)

the leaks were not to be sold. The culture drew a distinction between online file-sharing and for-profit bootlegging. The closed system of topsites was seen as an informal system of cooperation and trade He was a natural spymaster, a master of surveillance and infiltration, the Karla of music piracy. He read Billboard like a racing form, and used it to untangle the confusing web of corporate acquisitions and pressing agreements that determined what CDs would be manufactured, where, and when. Once this map of the distribution channels was charted, he began an aggressive campaign of recruitment, patiently building a network of moles that would over the next eight years manage to burrow into the supply chains of every major music label. He was starting to understand the power of open, competitive markets and, like all good capitalists, did his best to avoid participating in them... If he wasn’t a secret hero to the Internet underground, then what was he?

Note that piracy broke the price collusion and giant anti-consumer margins:

efficiency gains in compact disc manufacturing brought the per-unit cost of goods below a dollar—a savings that was not passed on to the consumer, who was charged $16.98 retail

I buy Witt’s extremely grand summation:

music piracy became to the late ’90s what drug experimentation was to the late ’60s: a generation-wide flouting of both social norms and the existing body of law "mp3” had become the Internet’s most-searched-for word, surpassing even “sex" Torrent traffic was cresting worldwide, and by some estimates represented as much as one-third of all prime-time Internet traffic The economic damage they had caused to the recording industry was measurable and real, and ran to millions and millions of dollars. But on March 19, 2010, a Texas jury, specifically selected for its technological unsophistication, found that the laws that prohibited these activities did not have to be obeyed... In conversations after the trial, several jurors had said that, while they understood the defendants were probably guilty, they didn’t agree with the severity of the potential punishment, so they had instead decided on acquittals... there were more constituents stealing music than constituents selling... [internet media piracy] represented the first serious challenge to the theoretical and moral bases of intellectual property law in centuries

"Behind the Wall: A Journey Through China"

Colin Thubron (2001)
★★★★☆
reviewed Dec 2016

A stunning travel book in the best aristocratic tradition of wandering about talking to people and expecting monasteries to put you up unannounced. But it’s as much moral as geographic or historical. China had only just opened up to foreigners, again; the Cultural Revolution, just 15 years past, looms large. A lost generation. In fact the book is obsessed with the difficult question, “How could they do that to themselves?”, a focus which makes it excellent, informal long-form journalism as much as gentleman’s what-ho travel narrative.

The man went on: 'We found a porter who had been reading novels with a love interest. I don't mean porn. Just a personal story. This was decadent. We beat him unconscious, and burnt the books. Then he died.' I looked at him in astonishment, mesmerised, for some reason, by his immaculately pressed trousers. Once the armour of social constraint had been stripped from him, the person inside had been exposed as a baby: conscienceless. Was that China, I wondered, or just him? In any case, where was that feeling of pity which Mencius said was common to all men?

The question isn’t as simply answered as it is for Hitler’s Germany (answer: “Because the merest dissent by any German meant death”) nor even as it is for Stalinist Russia (since the unbelievable violence of the Holodomor and gulags was meted out by a comparatively small number of people). Millions of educated Red Guards brutalised millions of untrendy people without much central control at all (indeed, they often revolted against and scared the shit out of the PLA and the apparatchiks).

Thubron’s important points include: that the Party cadres are nothing more than the latest garb of the long, long line of elite mandarins. So the poor Laobaixing got all the downside of an absolutist bureaucracy plus all the incompetence and terror caused by people who think that violent unending revolution is desirable. Another large theme is the appalling state of women: The patriarchy there was without even the paltry sweetener of chivalry - married off at 14 if not murdered as infants; old women sitting in the aisles of busses while young men lounge, etc, etc.

Many of the people he meets (mostly lower-middle-class) were (are?) unbelievably obsessed with class, even after forty years of ‘communist’ rule; the brief, cursory glorification of the nongmin bounced back as soon as the big sticks went away. He calculates the cost of things - TVs, train tickets, hotel whiskies - in that most decent of measures, fractions of an average worker’s monthly wage.

There is, already in 1987, an ambitious, irreverent, apolitical youth which any graduate of a Western university will now recognise readily.** The modern Modern China - Deng’s China - is visible here, just. Thubron watches the future radiating out from the city:

Under the enormous vault of the station hall there resounds the tramp of a newly mobilised peasantry. I have seen them before all over the city: families arrived to buy or trade, sleeping under bridges or in shop porches with cap over their eyes. Now they step on to the escalators as gingerly as Western eight-year-olds, laden with rope-trussed boxes, newly bought televisions, chickens in hampers, radios, bags spilling out fruit and biscuits - bearing El Dorado back to the village. They overflow the waiting-rooms and camp against every wall behind their baggage palisades, snoring open-mouthed through the din with the detachment of Brueghel swineherds, their children in their arms.

His wit, compassionate anger, gravitas, and grasp of the detail of how messily old collides with new: all recall my favourite critic, Jonathan Meades. (Though Meades is a bit too refined to be easily imagined sleeping fifth-class amidst spit and melon rind, or buying a barn owl in a meat market just to set it free.)

He reports much local bullshit, sarcastically (e.g. Northerners’ notion that ‘moral integrity’ decreases as you go south). This makes it sometimes difficult to know which reportage he endorses: thus, a couple of outlandish claims are possibly deadpan jokes (e.g. only ‘100’ cars on mainland China in 1987?? Human flesh on sale in Canton?

Unsurprisingly, the book received a dab of cursory post-colonial critique.* This is unsurprising because he is interested in testing stereotypes out - in particular, finding out if innate cruelty enabled the Cultural Revolution; it is thus not unfair to imagine the book as a Eurocentric hatchet job. But this dismissive cynicism is only possible before you’ve heard his frank encounters with a hundred vivid, intelligent, and mournful locals, seen his solid grasp of the history of the dynasties and of ‘pedantic and kindly’ Confucianism. (Which is the best description of it I’ve ever seen.)

Those interviews are novelistic - impossibly sincere, compressed, tragic, poetic - and far beyond anything I could elicit as a foreigner, in my summer there. But you believe him even so. Anyway he doesn’t pretend to have answered his burning question:

'This sort of thing isn't peculiar to my country,' the priest said: he might have been thought-reading. 'Look at Germany, Russia. Of course, those countries are not old civilisations like ours, but still...' Of course. I was wading into an ocean. He was listening patiently, but I could not assemble any coherent thoughts. I wanted to explain that it was not the presence of cruelty which surprised me, but some imbalance between obedience and mercy, the collapse of domestic compassion in the face of official demand, the refinements of tortures practiced against teachers and friends, the denunciation of parents - but I stumbled into inarticulacy. I was juggling only with my own values, not with theirs. I knew nothing.

I oughtn’t skimp on the book’s adventure-story side just because it happens to be a beautiful and humane psychological portrait; the prose is persistently gorgeous, the sights are dryly and comprehensively evoked, and Thubron presents himself as a very fine comic character to boot. My favourite China book.

* Anti-Eurocentrism used to minimise totalitarian genocide can be found in the critical discussion of Thubron here, the snob passage around the dismaying line: "In Thurbron's mind, the Cultural Revolution reached the epitome of atrocities in terms of intensity and scope..." (emphasis mine). That author also takes the prize for most dishonest truncation of the week, since Thubron's monologue goes on to display an odd cultural sensitivity in the face of cultural horror (see "This sort of thing", above). ** There must be a better word for 'occidentaphile' than that itself.

"Why Freud Was Wrong: Sin, Science and Psychoanalysis"

Richard Webster (1996)
★★★★☆
reviewed Dec 2015

What a fucking book! Title is apt and cleverer than it looks: this is not just a comprehensive catalogue of the errors and lies Freud told throughout his career - some of them criminally negligent and emotionally abusive - but also a psychological explanation of why he made them. (Roughly: Lust for fame, cocaine, and a misplaced fervour in a particular numerological sort of neurology.)

Full discussion forthcoming, after re-read.

"Lord of Light"

Roger Zelazny (2010)
★★★★☆
reviewed Apr 2022

The world is a fire of sacrifice, the sun its fuel, sunbeams its smoke, the day its flames, the points of the compass its cinders and sparks. In this fire the gods offer faith as libation. Out of this offering King Moon is born. Rain, oh Gautama, is the fire, the year its fuel, the clouds its smoke, the lightning its flame, cinders, sparks. In this fire the gods offer King Moon as libation. Out of this offering the rain is born. The world, oh Gautama, is the fire, the earth its fuel, fire its smoke, the night its flame, the moon its cinders, the stars its sparks. In this fire the gods offer rain as libation. Out of this offering food is produced. Man, oh Gautama, is the fire, his open mouth its fuel, his breath its smoke, his speech its flame, his eye its cinders, his ear its sparks. In this fire the gods offer food as libation. Out of this offering the power of generation is born. Woman, oh Gautama, is the fire, her form its fuel, her hair its smoke, her organs its flame, her pleasures its cinders and its sparks. In this flame the gods offer the power of generation as libation. Out of this offering a man is born. He lives for so long as he is to live. When a man dies, he is carried to be offered in the fire. The fire becomes his fire, the fuel his fuel, the smoke his smoke, the flame his flame, the cinders his cinders, the sparks his sparks. In this fire the gods offer the man as libation. Out of this offering the man emerges in radiant splendor.

About a holy war among posthumans: a glorious appropriation where the buddha wages war on the Hindu pantheon - i.e. a revolutionary faking sainthood wages war on fascist posthumans keeping the masses in holy poverty. We need a better word than fascism for what they are - decadent authoritarians. "Deicrats".

The body merchants are now the Masters of Karma. Their individual names are now kept secret, after the manner of the gods, so that they seem as impersonal as the Great Wheel, which they claim to represent. They are no longer merely body merchants, but are allied with the Temples... The definition of bad karma is anything our friends the gods don't like.

It contains a very literal conflict thesis between science and religion: whenever the ordinary humans look to be getting too industrial, the gods reach out and firebomb them. The trope mix is pretty strong: we have fake religion, generation ship atavism, elitist supremacism, all taking place on a weird Death World</spoiler>

Zelazny’s mythic, gnostic style here is divisive, but I found it a successful mix of melodrama and irony. (You are familiar with the degraded form of this: the dialogue of Joss Whedon.)

The day of the battle dawned pink as the fresh-bitten thigh of a maiden... "Being a god is being able to recognize within one's self these things that are important, and then to strike the single note that brings them into alignment with everything else that exists. Then, beyond morals or logic or esthetics, one is wind or fire, the sea, the mountains, rain, the sun or the stars, the flight of an arrow, the end of a day, the clasp of love. One rules through one's ruling passions. Those who look upon gods then say, without even knowing their names, 'He is Fire. She is Dance. He is “Destruction. She is Love.' So, to reply to your statement, they do not call themselves gods. Everyone else does, though, everyone who beholds them." "So they play that on their fascist banjos, eh?" "You choose the wrong adjective." "You've already used up all the others." "It appears that our minds will never meet on this subject." "If someone asks you why you're oppressing a world and you reply with a lot of poetic crap, no. I guess there can't be a meeting of minds”

Unsentimental melodrama: like Twin Peaks or Martin McDonagh. As savage and bawdy as scripture.

light leaping like spears from their burnished sides; cloaks of fur afire, white plumes of massively breathed air trailing above and behind them, golden-gauntleted and sun-eyed, clanking and skidding, rushing and whirling, they came

(How good is “massively breathed”?)

It’s all weirdly personal - hand to hand, face to face. As portentous and flashy as anime, as cynical and material as the great books of east Europe.

It looked like a fallen prayer tower or a giant's house key or some necessary part of a celestial instrument of music that had slipped free of a starry constellation and dropped to the ground. It seemed to be somehow incomplete, although the eye could not fault its lines. It held that special beauty that belongs to the highest orders of weapons, requiring function to make it complete.
His hell was a many-colored place, somewhat mitigated only by the cold blue blaze of a scholar's intellect, the white light of a dying monk, the rose halo of a noble lady who fled his sight, and the dancing, simple colors of children at play. What is the true father of a man? The circumstances which brought together the two bodies which begat him? Was it the fact that, for some reason, at one moment in time, these two pleased one another beyond any possible alternatives? If so, why? Was it the simple hunger of the flesh, or was it curiosity, or the will? Or was it something else? Pity? Loneliness? The desire to dominate? What feeling, or what thought was father to the body in which I first came into consciousness... “Doubt, Lady, is the chastity of the mind, and I bear its seal upon my own."

He’s good on the political interpretation of religion. Also on luck seeming supernatural when prolonged - even some pre-theocracy humans think Sam is divine.

There’s lots of Christian tinged sf (Lewis, Wolfe, Miller, Lafferty), but this is the first Hindu inflected story I’ve seen. (Even Clarke’s Rama isn’t very eastern.) Non-Western extrapolation is a popular idea these days - think Binti and Riot Baby, . But mostly people don’t look to the Polish-Irish to do it, but I got chills from some of his selections from the Upanishads.

his ideals are at odds with his environment, and if he follows them, he knows keenly the loss of that which was old-but if he does not follow them, he feels the pain of having forsaken a new and noble dream. Whatever he does represents both a gain and a loss, an arrival and a departure. Always he mourns that which is gone and fears some part of that which is new...

The dystopia is not particularly strong. It’s just an unusually stable feudalism. A true dystopia will surveil its prey up to physical limits, as Vinge knows. Even so, Sam's century-long culture-jamming insurrection is very satisfying to read:

An army, great in space, may offer opposition in a brief span of time. One man, brief in space, must spread his opposition across a period of many years if he is to have a chance of succeeding.

“Which one is the right way [to live]?" "Huh? You're asking me that? How should I know?" "Mortals call you Buddha." "That is only because they are afflicted with language and ignorance.”

"Mirror Dance (Vorkosigan Saga, #8)"

Lois McMaster Bujold (1995)
★★★★☆
reviewed Mar 2022

Bujold sets her considerable talent on contriving the worst torture you can imagine. It still doesn’t horrify me quite as much as the accidental social torture in Barrayar, but in every other regard she has outdone herself.

You can tell it’s going to be a sick one from the initial monologue, Mark’s twisted and resentful identity theft.

"Awakenings"

Oliver Sacks (1999)
★★★★☆
reviewed Dec 2015

An oppressive book or a book about the maximal oppression. It is a dozen case studies of profoundly frozen people: contorted, whispering, impassive for decades - at best. It describes one of the most poignant real events I think I’ve ever heard of: the medical reversal of effective, affective death - and but only a temporary reversal. Sacks really hadn’t developed his style by this point: I quite liked the technical medical report feel, but it both highly technical and highly melodramatic: there is much of infinitudes of the soul, titratabilities, and perseveratably festinative resipiscences in it. Also a nice subtle stylistic note: he breaks apart dead metaphors to revive them (e.g. “wild life”, “death bed”).

Also lacking is his later grand balancing of romance with reason.* For instance, he falls right off the edge on pp.97, seeing numbers as enemies of people:

I suddenly realised the infinite nature, the qualitative infinity of the phenomenon... One speaks of infinite anguishes, poignancies, desires, and joys - and one does so naturally, with no sense of paradox - i.e. one conceives of them in a metaphysical sense. But Parkinsonism - wasn't this categorically different? Was it not a simple, mechanical disorder of function - something essentially finite, something which could be measured in the divisions of a suitable scale? ... When I saw Hester, I suddenly realised that all I had thought about the finite, ponderable, numerable nature of Parkinsonism was nonsense. I suddenly realized, at this moment, that Parkisonism could in no sense be seen as a thing which increased or decreased by finite increments... that it was anumerical; that from its first, infinitesimal intimation it could proceed by an infinite multitude of infinitesimal increments to an infinite, and then more infinite, and still more infinite, degree of severity... [Footnote twenty years later] I see it as requiring models or concepts which had not been created in the 1960s, in particular those of chaos and nonlinear dynamics. We rationalize, we dissimilate, we pretend: we pretend that modern medicine is a rational science, all facts, no nonsense, and just what it seems. But we have only to tap its glossy veneer for it to split wide open, and reveal to us its roots and foundations, its old dark heart of metaphysics, mysticism, magic, and myth. Medicine is the oldest of the arts, and the oldest of the sciences: would one not expect it to spring from the deepest knowledge and feelings we have?

It’s a repetitive book for a maximally repetitive disease. The wonder and personalising detail he lavishes on each case aren’t enough to get me past the surprising uniformity of the bizarre symptoms and the hell of it all. Just as well I’m not a doctor.

* Call it the classical vs the romantic (as does Pirsig), Erklaerung oder Verstehen (as in Dilthey, Weber), the outside view v the inside view (Kahneman), or Logos v Mythos (as twere in ancient Greece).

"Intuition Pumps And Other Tools for Thinking"

Daniel C. Dennett (2014)
★★★★☆
reviewed Jul 2015

A self-help book! in the form of a set of tricks and tools for good non-routine cognition. But it’s utterly personable and scientifically charged, and a defence of naturalist semantics, mind, ‘free’ will, and philosophy itself, to boot. He’s so much more subtle than he’s given credit for; for instance, a large theme here is the central role of imagination in science and the other potent sorts of thought. I confess that I simply can’t conceive of some of his positions (e.g. ‘qualia’ being illusions); but one of the book’s burning points is that this may be a failing of my person and not his philosophy.

Also a meta-philosophy:

By working with scientists I get a rich diet of fascinating and problematic facts to think about, but by staying a philosopher without a lab or a research grant, I get to think about all the theories and experiments and never have to do the dishes.

A good library has all the good books. A great library has all the books. If you really want to understand a great philosopher, you have to spend some time looking at the less great contemporaries and predecessors that are left in the shadows of the masters.

Every book of his I read increases my respect. (Though note Galen Strawson’s rebuke to Dennett’s narrativist theory of identity, 4* here.)

"The Borders of Infinity (Vorkosigan Saga, #5.3)"

Lois McMaster Bujold (2002)
★★★★☆
reviewed Feb 2022

Incredibly effective short. Miles pulls off his usual implausible asspulls; the Cetagandans work their usual faceless evil. The twists are deeply satisfying.

The characterisation here, in a quick 90 pages, beats the last few full Bujold novels I’ve read. An almost Vimesian triumph.

"Selected Poems"

Jaan Kaplinski (2011)
★★★★☆
reviewed Jan 2016

A very broad swathe from Estonia’s most stately rustic. He keeps a high eyrie but has a fatherly musk as well. It’s a chilly nest though - occasionally anti-human:

It gets cold in the evening. The sky clears. The wind dies out, and the smoke rises straight up. The flowering maple no longer buzzes. A carp plops in the pond. An owl hoots twice in its nest in the ash tree. The children are asleep. On the stairs, a long row of shoes and rubber boots. It happened near Viljandi: an imbecile boy poured gasoline on the neighbour's three-year-old and set him on fire. I ran for milk. You could see the yellow maple from far off between the birches and the spruce. The evening star was shining above the storehouse. The boy survived, probably maimed for life. The night will bring frost. Plentiful dew.

He gets called a particularly European (a particularly Unionised) poet, and this is true enough: Kant’s rationalist cool and Smith’s pragmatism really are pedal notes in him. But there are snippets of nine languages in this mid-sized selection, including Sanskrit and Japanese (the ukiyo-e/mono-no-aware rhythms of which he owes a great deal to) and a poke of originals in pragmatic, wriggling English. That is, he’s really a globalist. His own Estonian (“serious, greyish”) is of course not remotely Indo-European, instead fluting and crashing, riverine, out of the Urals. (It would be silly to say that his work’s bleak because some people he is descended from came from Siberia, but if I were a marketer rather than a gadfly it would be a good hook.) Let’s complicate matters with two other sides, the paternal domestic and the wide-eyed enquirer:

Lines do not perhaps exist; there are only points. Just as there are no constellations, only stars which we combine into water-carriers, fish, rams, virgins, scorpions and ourselves… Constellations, contours, profiles, outlines, ground plans, principles, reasons, ulterior motives and consequences… A solitary birch holds onto its last leaves by the woodshed. Or the leaves hold onto the birch. Or there is someone holds onto both, a child holding his father's and mother's hands at once. I am sorry for them – the child, the leaves the father, the birch and the mother. But I do not know, really, for whom: if the birch exists, if there are only points. I do not want the winter. But I do not know whether the winter really exists. There are only points. There are only molecules and atoms, which increasingly slowly, which is roughly the same as saying: warms disperses throughout space. Both the child's hands were cold. Night is coming - light is roughly the same as warmth. Light scatters in the empty room. New thoughts come so seldom. Your hand is warm. So is the night. The poem is ready. If the poem exists at all: there are only points. It is dark.

This wonderful latter aside (and anti-poetry though he is) I do not like him constantly bringing up poetry; the poems where he does are often po-faced and contentless. But he is a master and it’s his business what he chooses to cool by just gazing at it.

"Timescape"

Gregory Benford (1992)
★★★★☆
reviewed Aug 2018

Amazing as formal experiment - how much physics detail (and physicist detail) can you put in a novel before it falls over? Lots of the pettiness, the indeterminate frustration, and the glory of academic life. A patchwork of details though - but if you like either physics or telling minutiae then you’ll like this. The core plot device, communication backwards through time, is a direct consequence of taking the Wheeler-Feynman interpretation literally.

Benford is also extremely acute about both Californian and English vice.

Perhaps that was the difference between merely thinking about experiments and actually having to do them. It must be harder to believe in serene mathematical beauties when you have dirty hands.

Grad student maxims:

Mother nature is a bitch. The probability of a given event is inversely proportional to its desirability. One fudged curve is worth a thousand weasel words. No analysis is a complete failure - it can always serve as a bad example; Experience varies directly with the amount of equipment ruined.

Gordon savored the clammy fullness of the breeze that had tunneled its way up from the Potomac... a welcome relief from California's monotonous excellence.

Britain’s degradation is depicted in terms of particular institutions:

The newsagent's a door down proclaimed on a chalkboard the dreadful news that the Times Literary Supplement had gone belly-up.

The relationships - highly conventional, highly nuclear - are odd, but feel real because of all the little jokes, gestures, and support they have, and which life has.

"God damn, I love you," he said, suddenly grinning. Her smile took on a wry cast. Beneath the flickering street lights she kept her eyes intently on the road, "That's the trouble with going domestic. You move in with a man and pretty soon, when he says he loves you, you hear underneath it that he's thanking you."

And I can forgive a lot of a C20th novel if it disses Freud:

He had oscillated in mood through 1967, not buying Penny's Freud-steeped recipes for repair... "Isn't it a little obvious to be so hostile to analysis?" she said once... he felt the clanky, machinelike language was a betrayal, a trap. Psychology had modeled itself after the hard sciences... but they had taken Newtonian clockwork as their example... His intutition told him that no such exterior analysis could capture what rubbed and chafed between them.

The slowly growing apocalypse (though global) is mostly discussed by characters in Britain, so we get a highly amusing contrast between California (1963, pre-apocalypse) and Cambridge (1998, during), where the Americans are all clean and hopeful and the Brits slowly starving and fishing in sewers:

Mercury glowed as if alive beneath the filmed water. It gave off a warm, smudged glitter, a thin trapped snake worth a hundred guineas. "A find! A find!" Johnny chanted... They queued up to turn in their pint of the silvery stuff to the Hunt Facilitator. In line with current theory, Renfrew noted, social groupings were now facilitated, not led.

The best subplot is probably the reptilian Oxbridge chad reverting to a heavily-armed feudal lord, including harem husbandry, as society breaks down.

Peterson calculated that quite enough had been done along the lines of intimidate-the-visitor and decided a gesture of indifference was needed. "Do you mind if I smoke?"

Never mind the tachyons; there’s some truly far-out notions in this, e.g.

Queen Elizabeth had abdicated in favor of her eldest son the previous Christmas and he had chosen to be crowned on his fiftieth birthday, in November.

And indeed reality reasserts itself in the face of this rank authorial whimsy:

"Did you hear about the Coronation? They've cancelled preparations [owing to the total breakdown of law and order]."

I wonder if the ending - the triumph and social ascent of the man who just receives the future signals; the literal fading-away of the team that built the theory and transmitter in conditions of terrible scarcity - is a jab at someone in particular. Here’s Renfrew’s last word - after succeeding, but never knowing that he has:

He was trying a modification of the signal correlator when the lights winked out. Utter blackness rushed in. The distant generator rattled and chugged into silence. It took a long time to feel his way out and into the light. It was a bleak, gray noon, but he did not notice; it was enough to be outside. He could hear no sound from Cambridge at all. The breeze carried a sour tang. No birds. No aircraft. He walked south, towards Grantchester. He look back once at the low square profile of the Cav and in the diffused light he raised a hand to it. He thought of nested universes, onion skin within onion skin... For so long now he had been transfixed by the past. It had deadened him this real world around him. He knew, now, without knowing quite how he knew, that it was forever lost... Rather than feeling despair, he was elated, free. Marjorie lay up ahead, no doubt frightened to be alone. He remembered her preserves on the uncompromising straight shelving, and smiled. They could eat those for some time. Have some easy meals together, as they did in the days before the children. There was really quite a lot ahead to do, when you thought about it.

About a third too long; I honestly think I could edit out a hundred pages and get a great book. Maybe this is 4* even so.

"The Penguin Book of Japanese Verse"

Anthony Thwaite (2009)
★★★★☆
reviewed Jun 2016

I feel able to say it at last: haiku is pathological, a genre absolutely limited to the engraving of flat single images. And single (or paired) verbal images of nature do nothing for me; it is relation and juxtaposition and story and reductios and original presentation that give images life. The haiku leaves almost no room for these. (This is not about length; the senryu retains wonderful possibilities, because they are animated by satire rather than po-faced nature-worship. Jokes can stand alone.)

This book cannot be blamed for being half haiku, because that mechanical law ruled Japanese poetry for thousands of years and this is first of all a historical selection. Lots more to see.

Currently I am only fond of the ancient gnostic hermits and the droll postwar internationalists (no multi-culturalists here). Many of the others emote at us too directly - the likes of “Oh how // I miss my wife // out here // on the border wall” - which brittle superficiality fails Wei Tai’s test and mine. In general their ancients have dated much better than ours, perhaps because they grokked ironic minimalism a thousand years before us.

The emperors and shoguns all write poetry, are still all required to profess about the land that they perch upon. Meiji:

Amen. I liked Yamanoue Okura, Yakamochi, the Kokinshū, Ki Tsurayuki, Tsuboi Shigeji, Kaneko Mitsuhara, Takahashi Mutsuo. I absolutely do not have sufficient knowledge to stop there. Skip Bownas’ enormous Preface too, you don’t need it.

In one sentence: 無.

"Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much"

Sendhil Mullainathan (2013)
★★★★☆
reviewed May 2019

Economics bills itself as ‘the study of decisions under scarcity’, though much of it is actually about excess: luxury substitution, savings rates, futures markets, conspicuous consumption, and so on. The psychological side - the panic, narrow focus, and sense of doom - was completely absent from my economics classes, but without it you can’t really understand poverty, and thus can’t value economic growth as the life-saving, mind-saving thing it has been.

Reasons scarcity is bad:

1. Lower consumption is less good (and sometimes very bad)
2. Less freedom (fewer choices)
3. Anxiety (emotional penalty)
4. Cognitive penalty (bandwidth of worrying)
5. Excessive focus on present, no planning, compromising future (“tunnelling”)
6. Have to spend time on careful allocation (“juggling”)
7. Excess self-consciousness means worse performance (“choking”)
8. It might also poison social interaction by encouraging zero-sum thinking and its attendent wasteful conflict. (Although see Junger for some positive social effects of shared adversity.)
9. It recurses: Mistakes lead to real sacrifice (debt; traps; no slack means penalties bite, further reducing slack). Scarcity causes more scarcity by screwing with your planning and implementation skills.

Economics only really handles costs (1) and (2). Psychology at its best handles (3-7). (9) is the author’s new contribution, I think: this is cognitive economics.

Without some spare resources it’s impossible to be free, to be generous, to relax. That’s obvious. Less obvious: Without slack you can’t even think straight (there’s a “bandwidth tax” on the poor, reducing their effective intelligence, willpower by perhaps an entire standard deviation). Most of the cited experiments are about money scarcity, but their ingenious move is to generalise to all of us, to all conditions where a person lacks some instinctively (evolutionarily) key resource: e.g. money, time, calories, friends. As well as a rare theoretical synthesis, this makes this book more evocative for its rich-world readers:

We have used the psychology of scarcity to create an empathy bridge. We have used experience with one form of scarcity (say, time) to connect to another form (money). Having known what it’s like to badly need a little more time, we might start to imagine what it’s like to desperately need a little more money or even more friends. We used this bridge to draw a connection between a busy manager fretting about insufficient time before a deadline and a person short on cash fretting about insufficient funds to pay rent.

Exciting! I’ve been reading development economics and behavioural science for years, and I still got a lot of new results and a whole gosh-darnit Practical Theory of Mind with moving parts from this.

They compress all the complex constructs and determinants of their real theory into a lossy construct, “bandwidth”. This is a shorthand for working memory & fluid intelligence & attention span & decision consistency & persistence & executive control & long-term planning inclination. They admit at the start it’s a compression, so that’s fine.

With compromised bandwidth, we are more likely to give in to our impulses, more likely to cave in to temptations. With little slack, we have less room to fail. With compromised bandwidth, we are more likely to fail.

Lesson: To actually optimise your life, you can’t optimise too hard, in the sense of pushing right up against your budgets. This idea is not new; a different book would tie this to queuing theory and distributed systems, trying to find general theoretical truths about systems. (What’s the maximum sustainable load for a server? For a life?) Excess capacity, ‘slack’, is short-run inefficiency and long-term shock-tolerance and thus true efficiency. The point seems to apply to servers, hospitals, and a single human life viewed from inside.

This also adds to Taleb’s critique of naive finance, encouraging ‘risk-sensitive optimisation’ (or, death-sensitive). Extends bounded rationality to limited attention, willpower, as well as computation and a search budget.

The book’s big philosophical question is the old Essence vs Context chestnut (“the poor are worse parents, drivers, borrowers” vs “given these constraints, people are worse parents, drivers, borrowers”). But it’s a new twist on it: rather than (as well as) a developmental deficiency, poverty is an active, situational force:

This shortfall is not of the standard physiological variety, having to do with a lack of nutrition or stress from early childhood hindering brain development. Nor is bandwidth permanently compromised by poverty. It is the present-day cognitive load of making ends meet: when income rises, so, too, does cognitive capacity. The bandwidth of the farmers was restored as soon as crop payments were received. Poverty at its very core taxes bandwidth and diminishes capacity.

This surprises me: I generally accept that people are hard to change, that engineered context is relatively weak. But then all attempts at self-improvement are a denial of essentialism about something, and I’m well into those.

To explain why the poor borrow excessively, we do not need to appeal to a lack of financial education, the avarice of predatory lenders, or an oversized tendency for self-indulgence. To explain why the busy put off things and fall behind, we do not need to appeal to weak self-control, deficient understanding, or a lack of time-management skills. Instead, borrowing is a simple consequence of tunneling.

They don’t sugarcoat it: they accept the massive body of evidence on how burdened the poor are, on dozens of axes. And they note that just giving them cash rarely solves the problem because this doesn’t change the logic enough.

The poor stay poor, the lonely stay lonely, the busy stay busy, and diets fail.

One big gripe: They use the word “scarcity” for both a physical shortage (i.e. the normal economic sense) and for this special psychological burden. (Not having, and having your mind captured by not having.) This needs two words; it muddies their thesis.

They’ve persuaded me that late fines are an extremely regressive tax. I’m open to the view that reducing poor people’s options is sometimes best for them (e.g. if they are “hurt by the ability to borrow [at extortionate rates]” because it prevents them smoothing their income in a credit cycle). I agree that bandwidth is the deepest kind of human capital.

Their treatment of the mental costs of education is important, given NGOs’ blithe promotion of education over all else. (And it’s a further argument for unconditional cash transfers.)

To capitalize on a bonus payment for a child’s medical checkup, a parent must set up the appointment, remember to keep it, find the time to get there and back, and coerce the child to go (no child likes the doctor!). Each of these steps requires some bandwidth. And this is just one behavior. Conditional cash transfer programs seek to encourage dozens, if not hundreds, of these good behaviors. Just understanding those incentives and making the necessary trade-offs—deciding which are worth it for you and which are not, and when—requires bandwidth. We never ask, Is this how we want poor people to use their bandwidth? We never factor in this cost in deciding which behaviors are most worth promoting. When we design poverty programs, we recognize that the poor are short on cash, so we are careful to conserve on that. But we do not think of bandwidth as being scarce as well. Nowhere is this clearer than in our impulse to educate.

I’m a keen and cynical student of social research, and but I only recognised one spurious result in this whole book. (ego depletion, p.107 - and that only in a tangent explicitly phrased as hypothetical.) They did a pretty convincing within-subjects study on sugar farmers before and after harvest income which nails down the effect as far as I can see.

Only not five stars because we can’t give any social science book five stars until it is 20 years old and more severely scrutinised.

"Coding the Matrix: Linear Algebra through Computer Science Applications"

Philip N. Klein (2013)
★★★★☆
reviewed Sep 2022

Clear, friendly, with computation and maths given equal footing. The XKCD humour gets old but this is the cost of complete sentences and general friendliness.

He could have gone further with the type-signature approach to maths definitions than he does.

"Collected Poems"

Sylvia Plath (1981)
★★★★☆
reviewed Jan 2007

The first raw confessional poet? Which is to say the first very-modern-poet, mother of 100,000 epigones, confessing when we’ve done nothing in particular worth admitting or renouncing.

Actually, have any metal bands covered Plath?

"Exhalation"

Ted Chiang (2019)
★★★★☆
reviewed May 2019

Wonderful again, worth the wait - 9 stories (including 4 novellas) in 12 years. The defamiliarisation, the perceptual aid in these is the equal of great philosophical work.

The best bit is his patience and magnanimity with folk psychology. He is much more empathetic with bad philosophy that I am; he builds people very different from himself or me (a worried father writing a moral-panic piece about perfect recall; a young-earth creationist tipped into despair by being god’s practice shot), and then around page 10 he flips their philosophy, showing how it unravels in the face of reality, and so makes me look like an idiot zealot for being irritated by them.

many people became convinced that [alt-timeline creation devices] nullified the moral weight of their actions. Few acted so rashly as to commit murder or other felonies, but...

In “What’s Expected of Us” he has “one-third” of people driven mad by an intuitive demonstration of their lack of ‘libertarian’ free will. I don’t doubt that some would be, but there’s no way that one-third of people are that abstract, that philosophically susceptible. The world would look so different if they were. (We have “paradox-absorbing crumple zones”, as Futurama puts it.) And as for the ones who did go mad, I would be tutting at them for letting bad philosophy confuse them to death.

The title story is just perfect, the story of a robot dissecting itself and thereby learning of the Second Law of Thermodynamics and its emotional implications. It's powerful because it's us. Our waste air is waste heat. Our pressure gradient is a proton gradient.

Another distinctive thing: Half the stories have a pair of contrasting narrators, objective and subjective. One of these voices is merely expository, apparently styleless. But it just works.

I was primed to dislike “The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling” from the title alone: despite popular usage, feelings are neither true or false, but instead grounded or ungrounded, helpful or unhelpful. (I was shocked to find this activist taxonomy very useful: valid / justified / effective.) But again it’s larger than me: it links the great oral-to-literate transition to a near-future one from analogue-literate to digital-literate. God it’s good, like Black Mirror if it wasn’t relentlessly scaremongering and cheap.

Ranked:

1. “Exhalation”.
2. “The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling”
3. “Omphalos”
4. “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate”
5. “Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom”
6. “The Great Silence”
7. “The Lifecycle of Software Objects”
8. “What’s Expected of Us”
9. “Dacey’s Patent Automatic Nanny”

Not as good as his first collection, but what is? (With Le Guin and Wolfe gone, he might be the reigning master.)

"White Noise"

Don DeLillo (2016)
★★★★☆
reviewed Jun 2011

The drug could be dangerous, after all. I was not a believer in easy solutions, something to swallow that would rid my soul of an ancient fear. But I could not help thinking about that saucer-shaped tablet... Tumbling from the back of my tongue down to my stomach. The drug core dissolving, releasing benevolent chemicals into my bloodstream, flooding the fear-of-death part of my brain. The pill itself silently self-destructing in a tiny inward burst, a polymer implosion, discreet and precise and considerate. Technology with a human face.

Exhausting - but funny! - postmodern critique of postmodernism. Maybe David Foster Wallace did it better but this is still a thrill

"Museum Without Walls"

Jonathan Meades (2012)
★★★★☆
reviewed Dec 2012

The best bellowing contrarian in the land. This is mostly just TV scripts I’ve already seen, and though this means that we can at last catch up with his rapid-fire aesthetic barbs, they still suffer without their inspired, bizarre visual production.

A sense of loneliness comes through on paper (anger and historical command is the dominant note in the programmes). You can see almost all his work at this Youtube channel. It is a fine use of a week.

"The Black Halo: The Complete English Stories 1977-98"

Iain Crichton Smith (2001)
★★★★☆
reviewed Feb 2015

Best Scottish poet writes good Scottish stories about, mostly, terrible Scottish pragmatists. Steady observational tragedy, and quiet outcast statures. Recurring structure: a staid, professional male narrator tells us his profession on page 1 and admits a whole puckle of flaws. Recurring people: the censorious, crabbit islander who was not always so; the passionate and creative woman slowly eroded by island gossip, monotony, stasis; her husband, who knows this happened because of him.

Most striking are ‘The Scream’, ‘What to do About Ralph?’, ‘The Spy’, and ‘The Exorcism’ – but particularly the latter, because I recognised the worst of myself in both the little bastard obsessed with Kierkegaard and the small-souled lecturer who saves him:

I looked at him for a long time knowing that the agony was over… [But] how could I be sure that my own harmonious jealous biography had not been superimposed upon his life, as one writing upon another, in that wood where the birds sang with such sweetness defending their territory?

Much more than clever.

"When We Cease to Understand the World"

Benjamín Labatut (2020)
★★★★☆
reviewed Aug 2022

A big list of facts. But good facts! Beautiful or terrible facts, arranged by Labutut frantically mining Modern Europe for ironies and antimonies. (A fun game: how many words would you have to change these ~short stories~ into a standard good magazine profile?)

(Actually some of them aren’t facts, which punctured the good giddiness a bit:

• Scheele actually did eat the hydrogen cyanide, and lived.
• He repeats the credulous truism about Turing’s death but then walks it back a few sentences later.)
• “while the movement of two bodies bound by gravitation can be known with precision according to the laws of Newton, the addition of a third renders it unforeseeable.” No! there’s no exact solution, but we approximate solutions easily and routinely. Numerics is the greatest branch of applied maths which no outsider appreciates.
• “In 1910, [Schwarzschild] discovered that the stars had different colours, and he was the first to analyse them”. Seems unlikely, though certainly the naked eye is insufficient.
• “He published 112 articles in total during his lifetime, more than virtually any other scientist in the twentieth century.” Cmon!
• He makes much of the fact that no one understood Heisenberg’s matrix mechanics, and struggled with the complicated calculations. But he fails to mention that the method is now taught to high schoolers.
• The human bone fertiliser claim appears to be true(!!)

Europe’s insatiable hunger had driven bands of Englishmen as far as Egypt to despoil the tombs of the ancient pharaohs, in search not of gold, jewels or antiquities, but of the nitrogen contained in the bones of the thousands of slaves buried along with the Nile pharaohs, as sacrificial victims, to serve them even after their deaths. The English tomb raiders had exhausted the reserves in continental Europe; they dug up more than three million human skeletons, along with the bones of hundreds of thousands of dead horses that soldiers had ridden in the battles of Austerlitz, Leipzig and Waterloo, sending them by ship to the port of Hull in the north of England, where they were ground in the bone mills of Yorkshire to fertilize the verdant fields of Albion.

• The Mochizuki / Grothendieck connection is wild but I can’t find anything else about it.

Part of the book’s importance is its portrayal of the romantic obsession with discovery. Schwarzschild was possessed, the van Gogh or Hunter Thompson of science.

he travelled to Algeria to observe a total eclipse, but he failed to heed the maximum exposure time and damaged the cornea of his left eye. When they removed the patch he had been forced to wear for weeks, he noticed a shadow the size of a two-mark coin in his visual field, which was apparent even when his eyes were closed. The doctors told him the damage was irreversible. a snowstorm had stranded them on one of the ledges of the Brocken, the highest peak of the Harz mountain range. To keep from freezing to death, they had had to build a shelter and sleep holding one another, as they had when they were children... His brother Karl did not misstep a single time, as if he were somehow capable of seeing the trail in the dark, but was left with nerve damage in his right hand from the cold; in the shelter, he had repeatedly removed his gloves to revise his calculations concerning a series of elliptical curves. The alternative was unbearable: that there was nothing more than lifeless spheres in the throes of random chance, “like the molecules of a gas that float from one place to the other in a completely irregular manner, so much so that their very chaos is being enthroned as principle.” In Potsdam, he created an enormous network of colleagues to follow and register, with the maximum possible precision, the movements of more than two million stars.

Grothendieck:

Towards the end of his life, his point of view was so remote that he was only capable of perceiving totality. Of his personality, nothing but tatters remained, tenuous threads pulled apart by years of constant meditation.

Very French. Overheated in places too. (“one of the strangest and most powerful equations that the human mind has ever created”.) But hey, it brings out the majesty and romance of chemistry, Inter-Universal Teichmüller, the old quantum theory largely intact, and you don’t see that every decade in fiction.

"Forming"

Jesse Moynihan (2011)
★★★★☆
reviewed Sep 2022

Fun mix of William Blake, Go Nagai and Peter Bagge. So you have alien Biblical teenagers running around saying “pssh” and “whatever” and “ahhhhhh my transgender supermind is being hacked! Blech!”.

Ultimately about exploitation and the odd movement against it within exploitative societies. The apocalyptic Abrahamic stuff seems like mostly a foil, something to make the nudity and swearing pop.

The publisher’s name, Nobrow, sums it up pretty well. Forming is genuinely idiotic and sophisticated at the same time, and but this is all it is.

"Mathematics Made Difficult"

Carl E. Linderholm (1972)
★★★★☆
reviewed Sep 2022

Mathematicians always strive to confuse their audiences; where there is no confusion there is no prestige. Mathematics is prestidigitation. Confusion itself may be taken as the guiding principle in what is done here-if there is a principle. Just as the fractured leg confused the Zen disciple, it is hoped that this book may help to confuse some uninitiated reader and so put him on the road to enlightenment, limping along to mathematical satori. If confusion is the first principle here, beside it and ancillary to it is a second: pain. For too long, educators have followed blindly the pleasure principle. This oversimplified approach is rejected here.

Great delicacy and tact are needed in presenting this idea in conversation - if the aim is, as it should be, to bewilder and frighten the opponent. His level of sophistication is very important. He may know all about it; then he will utter some crushing reply, like 'So what else is new?' He may even add, 'Just finding out about cyclic groups ?'-or mention some other concept you yourself have never heard of; if he does so, you have lost the advantage and may not get out ~of it without a few scratches on your own escutcheon. On the other hand he may be so ignorant as to be impervious to doubt; you will be laughed at. The idea is much more useful if the intention is merely to annoy...

I am no mathematician. But, so, this is the book I’ve been looking for, for a decade: troll maths, a comedic work with jokes in higher maths. (Carroll for grownups.) The main gag is to use the awesome machinery of category theory to define and manipulate extremely basic objects like bagels or boolean algebra, and then to intentionally weave in spurious historical explanations, misapplications, misabstractions, and category errors. Here’s the first instance, in which elementary logic is defined as a category equipped with … I understood something like half of the gags.

The whole book is a stream of consciousness flitting between fake worked-problems prose (“Muscular M. Boulangiaire… makes three kinds of loaves in his shop. The first kind is a flat square of side x; the second is an ordinary French loaf, just x units long and one unit wide…”), fake Bronowski megahistory, and needlessly pure abstraction, with little barbs scattered throughout. The barbs are like that bit in Principia where Russell says “1+1=2 is occasionally useful.”. As here.

Pyramids, another Egyptian invention, were principally a tourist attraction, like the Eiffel Tower. They were copied in America, where they were used for heart transplant operations, flower shows, and football games... [the Greeks] based their unit of measurement on the curious idea that the more beautiful was a woman, the larger was the number of ships her face could launch... The practical result of this idea was that the Greek women spent much time on the seaside toughening their facial features by pushing boats into the water, and in the end the Hellenes lost interest in women and invented Platonic love.

Popular imagination conjures up the myth of the wicked professor who teaches that 2 + 2 is not 4 precisely because it cannot conceive the truth. The truth is much stranger, more monstrous, more impressive. It is not scepticism about 5 + 4 = 9 that exists, but scepticism about 5, about 4, and about 9.

Is Linderholm an elitist dick? Maybe. He might be mostly pretending to be one. At least it’s intentionally hard, unlike the others!

A few off-colour jokes about violent Italians and square-headed Aryans. Even these are half subversions: at various points he spells it ‘Arian’, as in the ancient heresy, and flip back and fore between the Christian and Indian referents.

Linderholm has not written the perfect work of maths comedy, because there are falsehoods in it. (e.g. The first chapter is in medieval disputation style and comes with all the fallacies of the schoolmen - “mathematicians pretend to count by means of a system supposed to satisfy the so-called Peano axioms. In fact, there cannot be any Peano axioms, since they were really invented by Dedekind. Hence even mathematicians cannot count. Furthermore, the piano has only 88 keys; hence, anyone counting with these axioms is soon played out.”.) The perfect work would be hilarious and completely true.

PS: an accidental joke about Causal Language Models, which have climbed surprisingly high doing only stupid sequence completion:

8, 75, 3, 9, _ . Now all you have to do is look at the numbers, and then in the blank provided write in the number that seems to you logically ought to go there. Now read the numbers again: eight, seventy-five, three, nine, ... What was that you were about to say? Was it 17? Right! The only number any sensible person would put there is 17... The scientific fact is universally acknowledged that only intelligent people can do these puzzles; moreover, nobody denies that there is a crying need for intelligence in all areas of the national economy. Hence, and one would think the inference would be obvious to any person who can guess the next number even in the easy example we saw just above, all that needs to be done in order to cure a vast proportion of the world's ills is to teach everyone to guess the next number. Because then, naturally, everyone would be intelligent.

"China Mountain Zhang"

Maureen F. McHugh (1997)
★★★★☆
reviewed Oct 2022

Simple, loveable SF. McHugh does not truck much with symbols: she just executes one theme and a bucket of naturalistic detail really well. Mostly a serviceable replacement. The scifi is extremely unobtrusive. It’s also a friendly primer on Chinese culture; she even teaches you some starchy Mandarin.

Her theme: invert the current positions of China and America; culturally, economically. Following economic collapse and a popular uprising, America gets colonised by China.

“I went to the Brooklyn Middle School of Theory and History and all of our classes were in Mandarin”

The effect is to make the western reader feel the Chinese condition. Politically Freaky Friday. Kitchen Sink Red Dawn.

The Soviet Union also went into bankruptcy because it was deeply invested in the U.S. bond market, whatever that was," they all laugh, we've all been taught that the U.S.S.R. was deeply hurt in the economic collapse because of their involvement in the U.S. bond market, but I'll be damned if I ever met anyone who really knew what that meant.

McHugh is neither alarmist nor tankie about this. Her socialist system is does some things right - but contrary to the undying dream of teen radicals, it’s also way more racist and homophobic than the current system. Modern racism, too (i.e. unspoken).

As one goes further up in any hierarchy, one meets more and more ethnically Chinese people.

The main drama all comes from Zhang just trying to be gay in New York. (“They’ll send him to Xinjiang Province, to Reform Through Labor”.) That and poverty. (The welfare system is depicted as realistically shitty, conditional, degraded, insufficient.)

There’s some mind control stuff going on, but oddly restrained:

“There is a fine line, she explains, between too much activity which would overwhelm my system and too little which would mean that the new kidneys would not grow. I take all of this placidly. "Dr. Cui," I say, "you are controlling my moods, aren't you." She pats my hand, the first time she has touched me that I remember. "Of course, you are new here, alone, ill. If we didn't you would be frightened and depressed”

This and the wirehead gambling den makes this book the most subtle cyberpunk novel ever.

“your life says something about your politics whether you think about them or not. You can either just let that happen or you can think about the kind of choices you want to make." "I'd like to continue to make my choices because they fit my life rather than out of some sense of ideology”

“I am exhausted and angry and full of a hard, terrible joy. We have survived. Yes, it was luck as much as anything else, but we made our own luck. The chain and tackle system dangles in lines and shadows all around us, the light slowly brightens above us. There is a purity of form and line; reality, hard lean reality is very beautiful.”

“Students in a university live transient and comparatively marginal existences. That is true the world over. A university is concerned with preparation for the future and there is an underlying philosophy that overcrowded living conditions and a lack of the comforts of the middle class is not only excused but somehow educational. In Brooklyn, students who lived at school”

McHugh lived in China and keenly observed some things, like how deep-seated it is to be apolitical:

“Take for example the diagram behind me on the board. Does anyone recognize it?" They all look at me, blank. Of course they all recognize it. But it's politics. Nobody in their right mind is going to volunteer anything about politics. Keep your head down, don't get into trouble. Nervousness makes me a tyrant, I point at one young woman. "Tell me what it means." She looks around, hoping for escape. Normally I'd feel sympathy for her but now I am only concerned with how to fill another fifteen minutes. "Ah, it's Marx's analysis”

It actually gets a bit much, she explains things that could have been indicated:

China is obsessed with walls. The university is walled, every factory, every school, every office complex or hotel is surrounded by a wall.

“I don’t believe in socialism but I don’t believe in capitalism either. We are small, governments are large, we survive in the cracks. Cold comfort.”

Its depictions of the feeling of entrepreneurship and the huge difference in dignity that having in-demand skills gives you are great: these feelings are rare in art.

The sky doesn’t fall: the mildly shitty, mildly oppressive machine remains unchanged at the end. Zhang becomes a confident artist and intellectual. There’s yer lot.

(Might be the simplest book I have ever given 4 stars.)

"The Darkness That Comes Before (The Prince of Nothing, #1)"

R. Scott Bakker (2005)
★★★★☆
reviewed Oct 2022

A rich stew of Dune’s cruelty, politics and prophecies, Tolkien’s orthography and hereditary virtue, Wolfe’s tragic palimpsests, the real sordid history of the Crusades, and ancient Greek elitist metaphysics and fatalism. It should be derivative, and his reliance on making absolutely everything Bad Ass should make it risible. But he blends them all smooth.

The young can never see life for what it is: a knife’s edge, as thin as the breaths that measure it. What gives it depth isn’t memory. I’ve memories enough for ten men, and yet my days are as thin and as shadowy as the greased linen the poor stretch over their windows. No, what gives life depth is the future. Without a future, without a horizon of promise or threat, our lives have no meaning. Only the future is real, Conphas, and unless I make amends to the gods, I’ve no future left.”

To the extent that the average fantasy novel has any philosophy, it is Celtic mythology: revenge, polytheism, human frailty, the hidden world as sick morality play. Bakker (a philosophy PhD) instead manages the first convincing Dark Aristotle / Spinoza I’ve ever seen. The central theme is the relationship between knowledge and free will, and, here’s the unusual bit, not just a trivial nod to the mystical deepness of these concepts.

If you are the movement of your soul, and the cause of that movement precedes you, then how could you ever call your thoughts your own? How could you be anything other than a slave to the darkness that comes before? ..."Sentiments, like a son’s love for his father, simply deliver us to the darkness, make us slaves of custom and appetite... I am my thoughts, but the sources of my thoughts exceed me. I do not own myself, because the darkness comes before me.”

Achamian had protected innocence, had allowed it to flee to a safer place. How could anyone condemn such a thing? But every act could be condemned. The same as all bloodlines could be traced to some long-dead king, all deeds could be chased to some potential catastrophe. One need only follow the forks far enough.

One odd bit about his predominantly feudalist world is the amount of social mobility. Achamian and Serwe and others rise from peasantry to consult or consort with emperors.

First 120 pages are relatively generic and monotonous, about an old spy filled with sentiments and insecurities seeing the shadows draw in. The magic system is also kind of ordinary, OP. But then it moves to a realistic materialist view of the crusades. And then, better, to an actually psychologically plausible “barbarian” and his intense mental chess with a manipulative Buddhist/Nietzschean superintelligence, Kellhus.

He had fled his childhood and had crawled into the honour of his father’s name, Skiötha, Chieftain of the Utemot. With his father’s shameful death, he’d fled and crawled into the name of his people, the Scylvendi, who were the wrath of Lokung, more vengeance than bone or flesh. Now they too had died shamefully. There was no ground left to him. He lay nowhere, among the dead.

all things men do are journeys, I ask you, why are... the customs that bind what men do like mountain passes? Why do they ride the same trails, over and over again, when the ways to their destination are without number?” ...Where others filed through illusory canyons, his soul ranged the trackless plains... they spoke not to share perspectives or to communicate truths but to come before—to dominate souls and circumstances... These men were more than human, they were Kahiht, World Souls, locked in the great wheel of great events.

One bartered principle and piety to accomplish what principle and piety demanded... Proyas suffered, as all men of high purpose must, the endless exchange of principles for advantages.

Kellhus is a bit of an insert sometimes. Too strong, too unerring (“what makes him different?” “He’s . . . better. Better than most men.” “Most men?”). Though he does kill a child.

Men are Men and women are Women here: the latter helpless and afraid. I don’t have a clear sense whether the many first-person passages about what this is like for the women lifts it. But he makes us care for Esmenet and then suffer for caring.

It’s all grey at best. There are about a dozen awful foes, mostly humans.

I was slightly chilled by the similarity of the Mandate to my own x-risk community: a bunch of doomsters screaming about a perfectly hidden evil, who get laughed off despite their skill and seriousness.

I am impressed with how much light he manages to put into his grimdark feudal dystopia. After the initial overwrought goth stuff, the prose often settles into routinely beautiful observant notes:

He offered her the blanket, which she took in knotted hands. She had clenched everything with a strange fierceness lately, as though daring small things to be glass.

with the vacancy of one preparing to hate

And the Dunyain who come in halfway are a welcome tonic of agency and knowledge, though horrifying in their own way.

Bakker goes on my very short list of fantasy writers who write as great writers write (Clarke, Wolfe, Le Guin), and my barely longer list of novelists who can do philosophy rather than simulating it (St Aubyn, Goldstein, Pirsig, Markson, DFW, Murdoch, Borges, Card, Lem, Chiang, Egan) .

"The Will to Battle (Terra Ignota, #3)"

Ada Palmer (2017)
★★★★☆
reviewed Oct 2018

Sensational. Palmer starts in an Enlightenment utopia (post-war, post-nationalism, post-scarcity, post-gender, post-theocracy, post-fideism, post-meat, post-capital-punishment, post-nuclear-family, general justice via universal voluntary surveillance) and then shows what the tensions will do to any system that has to handle humans as we are.

Many riches. There are constantly five or so subplots on the go, and when one ends it spawns two others. Best are its careful sketches of deep divides: Tradition vs progress, act vs rule, order vs freedom, safety vs optimum return.

Some of the oppositions fall flat because I don’t have the requisite respect for the other side. For instance Damnatio memoriae - the official expurgation of someone from history - is presented as an ultimate horror (the pain and execution preceding it is overwhelmingly more important).

[the damned person is] neither slim nor mighty, stooped nor noble, just a shape... Somewhere in a dusty archive a baptismal registry records some Hildebrand, and, when that dry page molders... I can't look, I can't! Behind the shades, the broad gray plain, that sea of shapeless gloom extending on and on... all forgotten souls, minds empty of memory, smeared one into another... to this absolute dissolution Caesar damns his enemies... Not me! I will never let you take me! I will carve my memory into history, by work, by force, by guile, in swathes of blood and ashes if I must!

I can admire Palmer’s rendition of the old bad legacy code (it has driven quite a lot of history) but I admit it no part of a real morality. The dead are past caring.

Elsewhere, the Aura (metaphysical identity) of art is used to devalue perfect replicas of the nuked Coliseum and Forum (which seems like magical thinking to me):

All false. Our race cannot afford such losses again... On the Acropolis the tears we shed are still tears of connection: where I stand Socrates stood. In the [replica] Roman Forum, by the [replica] Coliseum or the [replica] Patheon, they are regret tears. Replicas cannot touch. That is what we all want, to touch what someone touched, a special someone... whose story reached forward through history...

Speak for yourself; a perfect simulacrum is enough, though it screams depth to say otherwise. (I’m not actually salty: I love the breadth of ideologies on show here. No doubt someone else will grumble about how thin and unconvincing the utilitarian views presented here are. By writing so many good characters in disagreement, Palmer has passed about 10 Intellectual Turing Tests. )

On the other hand, I feel the horror of true deontology quite keenly:

Dominic would happily watch the world burn if he could defile the blasphemer's corpse amid the coals.

Much as I like Jedd Mason, his rise to the top of every state - the expressionless, motionless, Spectrumy king of the world - is implausible, even given his mother’s scheming; it only makes sense with Intervention. Which is fine, because Palmer is committed to that, but it would still have been nice to have a natural path.

Many potential irritants. You’ll have to be fine with long fourth-wall violations, long passages in macaronic Latin, hallucinated philosophers reacting to C25th scenes by expositing their extrapolated view of the 25th Century, allusions that yell ‘REMEMBER ME??’ in your face (Hobbestown, the anarchist commune). I found Mycroft’s madness engaging but it does divert every chapter a bit.

The best so far, but you must read the first two. I donno, I’m just rambling now cos I know I’ll rewrite this after I read it again in like one unripe year.

Misc notes

• Achilles is an actual hero here - where in the Iliad he is merely impressively violent. Actually as any fool knows, the ancient heroes are mostly morally small, beneath even us. (“Hero” meant “Big Man”, not “saviour”.) This is good news, that Achilles (and say Jahweh) are not paragons any more.

• Miracles happen; Bridger is magical through and through, not even needing a virgin birth. So there was no need for JEDD to be born of woman and Spain. Except that this allows him to be a stark example of Hegelian becoming, which here is the way that God speaks. (And what filth he says.)

• Next time you complain about how undemocratic your country is, consider: The Mitsubishi here are not only a planned plutocracy, they also have 4 orders of delegated authority: the voters elect representatives who elect representatives who elect representatives who elect the executive.

• Oh Mycroft. I spent the first book and a half wondering exactly why he is so indispensable, hounded, beloved. This mostly answers it: it’s a mixture of macaronic language, dog charisma, and weird athleticism.

• Nice, surprising bit of anarchism: Hobbestown, the anarchist syndicate, is the ‘safest’ place in the world. OK, its because of the deterrent of capital punishment but still.

• A decent portrayal of the burgeoning far-future-focussed ethics, in the otherworldly, post-political, arch-instrumentalist scientists, Utopia. Palmer clearly sympathises with them. One contradiction in her portrayal, though: the Utopians are monomanaical consequentialists, who’ll do anything to prevent human extinction or stasis. But they’re shown throwing massive resources at trivial uneconomic projects (trivial compared to WMD destruction, space colonization, and terraforming): an underwater city, a city on Antarctica, robots in the shape of mythical beasts. I suppose it’s possible this is a PR thing, either to charm or recruit.

Their oath actually inspired moral guilt in me, which is hard to do:

I hereby renounce the right to complacency, and vow lifelong to take only what minimum of leisure is necessary to my productivity... I will commit the full produce of my labors to our collective effort to redirect the path of human life away from death and toward the stars.

• Palmer knows about a lot of things: Hobbes, evolutionary history, the way a small boat makes waves. Her using this knowledge never felt contrived to me - but again I suspect this is a niche I happen to fall in.

The fittest survived, but with the conquered within them, as conquered bacteria became the mitochondria which feed the cells that crawl through volvox, trilobite, and coelacanth toward Mars.

• It suits me that the psychoanalyst Hive choose to be the enemies of the future:

"War?" Utopia offered. [the Head Analyst] Felix Faust... accepted the handshake. "War."

• It’s written with a future reader in mind, but then Mycroft explains too much; nothing is taken for granted, and this is obviously on our account, tainting the conceit.

• Its gender dynamics don’t constitute a polemic; instead the Hives’ failing utopia shows what most feminist / Critical / international relations theory misses. ‘Xenofeminism’ (tech-positive, bioprogressive feminism) is a more complete answer to gender harms. But, hearteningly, even mainstream figures like Nussbaum seem to be on board with similar projects:

this calls for the gradual formation of a world in which all species will enjoy cooperative and supportive relations with one another. Nature is not that way and has never been. So it calls for the gradual supplanting of the natural by the just.

*

A man may leap into the fray in the name of Liberty, Homeland, Human Rights, Justice, but never Economics.

(more’s the pity)

*

If my Saladin is childhood's fear, the unknowable evil in the closet's depths, I have become adulthood's fear, fear of power, law, illustrious contacts, police resources, covert agencies, and sweet judicial murder.

"Guards! Guards! (Discworld, #8; City Watch, #1)"

Terry Pratchett (2001)
★★★★☆
reviewed Jan 2005

Even better than I remembered. Feudal-fantasy satire in the voice of pubs of C20th England, with dragons, wizards and pre-Peel police wheedling, appealing to genetics, sod’s law. An incongruous, dogged self-awareness.

The prose is quieter (less self-referential and wilfully surreal) than his peers – Adams, Holt, Rankin – and occasionally gets actually wise. Discworld is his noble funhouse mirror of Britain.

Pratchett is very good at technology fads, social class, the duality of human nature, and the excruciating embarrassment of romance. Everything a growing boy needs.

(Read aloud)

"Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder"

Nassim Nicholas Taleb (2012)
★★★★☆
reviewed Jun 2018

"Nothing convinces us of our capacity to make choices — nothing sustains our illusion of freedom — more than our ability to regularise our behaviour. nothing is more capable of destroying our interest and our pleasure in what we do. If it is the predictable that stupifies us and the unpredictable that terrorises us, what should we do? If we are always caught between risk and resignation, between confidence and catastrophe, how can we decide what to do next?"

— Adam Phillips

My problem is what my mother kept telling me: I'm too messianic in my views.

— Taleb

The most ambitious and messy book in his idiosyncratic four-volume work of evolutionary epistemology, the ‘Incerto’. (It is Fooled By Randomness, Black Swan, Bed of Procrustes, and yonder.) The former three books are largely critical, hacking away at theory-blindness, model error, and the many kinds of people he sees as possessing unearned status (economists, journalists, consultants, business-book writers): this is the upswing, a chaotic attempt to give general positive advice in a world that dooms general positive advice.

Every other page has something worth hearing, for its iconoclasm, or a Latin gobbet, or catty anecdote, if not something globally and evidently true. I think he is right about 30% of the time, which is among the highest credences I have for anyone. I only think I am 35% right, for instance.* But a core point of his system is that his approach should work even given our huge and partially intractable ignorance.

The core point, repeated a hundred times for various domains:

In real life, many systems deteriorate without an irregular supply of stressors (non-fatal negative events), and actually benefit from them by constructively overreacting. By robbing such 'antifragile' systems of stressors, modern approaches to managing them do damage in the guise of helping out.**

This observation leads to his grand theory of everything: every system is either fragile (damaged by volatility), robust (resistant to damage from volatility), or antifragile. This isn’t a trivial distinction, because each has formal properties that allow us to change arrangements to, firstly, prevent explosions, and then to gain from chance volatility.

Biology is definitely one of these antifragile systems***; his case that, absent gross financialisation, the global economy would be one is convincing too; and the idea’s at least plausible when applied to the cultivation of virtue or existential strength in a single person. The danger with this - an indissoluble danger because there can be no general strategy to avoid it - is that in welcoming constructive stress we’ll miss the point at which the welcomed dose turns destructive (where fasting starts to atrophy, where training becomes masochism, where critique becomes pogrom, where sink-or-swim encouragement turns abuse).

* This claim is remarkable for both its extreme vagueness and apparent arrogance. Here is a post to handle the former fact. And the latter: It might strike you as beyond arrogant to assume that you just so happen to be the most reliable inference device in the world, but that doesn't (have to) follow from my claim above, which results from the trivial thought “I believe my own beliefs most”, instead. (Consider the converse: if I came to view anyone as more reliable than me, the rational thing to do would be to incorporate their truer views (and, better, their methods) until I again thought of myself as at least their equal. So, either one believes the superficially arrogant position “I believe my beliefs most” – or else one must believe that one is incapable of adapting enough to superior methods when faced with them, or else one must believe that one cannot know which methods are best. So the above assumption is more about having a high opinion of rational adjustment than impossible egotism, I think. Good news! We can now calibrate ourselves, at least for the most sensational and available predictions using this cool thing.^ Finally!: The fully-unpacked, properly defensible assumption might be something more like: “I am the agent that I know to be most transparently reliable or unreliable; I assume I’m adjusting properly to better methods; as such I have at least equal confidence in my own belief set, compared to the best known alternative agent's.”)

^ You might wonder if this argument suggests that I should have 100% confidence in my beliefs. No; even if I was the best inferrer, I would suffer uncertainty because of the opacity of my errors: that is, I know I'm often not right but don't know exactly whereabouts I'm not right. Also from the unsystematic internal PredictionBook every non-psychopath has ("wisdom is knowing you'll be an idiot in the future"). And another source of uncertainty is down to the unknowable (like what stocks will crash next week). I do worry that, whatever my particular self-credence estimate is, the whole approach is subtly wrong somewhere – since "40%" gives the impression that I think of myself as a worse guide to the world than dumb chance^^ – but I think it works. Particularly if much of the missing 60% is made of safe scepticism rather than errors. ^^ For binary event spaces – but, really, how many of those are there in real life?

** He credits the formal basis of all this to Jensen's inequality, in a chapter which might be the clearest expression of the idea there is. *** (In particular species-level evolution, but also organism-level health.)

Some pigeonholes you might think to put all this in:

*
• Conservative? Yes; but a good-hearted Burkean (“Antifragility implies that the old is superior to the new… What survives must be good at serving some purpose that time can see but our eyes and logical faculties can’t capture…”). Most people are conservative over some things (e.g. the natural world; we just happen to call that conservationism instead). Also approves of any high technology that removes anything he views as a disease of civilisation, like these things were supposed to be. So, in general, conservative only in the sense that existential risk people are.*
*
• Economic conservatism. Only sort of; he's a trader, and would have speculation free to flow provided that deposit banks were nationalised first, and prioritises deficit reduction in a way we associate with conservatives but which e.g. Sweden pulled off without any lasting social justice sting. More formally he is against centralisation on both moral and technical grounds; that is likely a principle with some conservative effects, justified, in theory, by its keeping us alive. (Life-critical politics.)
• Laissez faire? No: he recommends radical change to e.g. science funding, but no decrease. Big fan of Switzerland’s government, read into that what you will. He sees “optionality”, an originally financial concept, as the solution to fragility risks and the key to success in every domain there is. This isn’t at all as economistic as it sounds; the sacred and the humane somehow fit perfectly into his core rationalist agenda, persistence through change.
*
• Social conservatism? No sign; no discussion of discrimination. Some people think such abstention is oppressive, but they are probably wrong.
*
• Social Darwinist? Nah.
*
• Bioconservative? Absolutely; he describes himself as the ‘diametric’ opposite of Ray Kurzweil, and he’s in full uproar over the global risk posed by synthetic biology (and recently fleshed out this horror in highly rigorous terms).
*
• Anti-intellectual? Not at all! Only anti-academia, and they still do not represent the whole of quality intellectual life. Hates irresponsible ‘canned methods of inference’ too (statistical significance, etc).
*
• Lacrimist? (That is, does he glorify suffering?) Not quite. He certainly views comfort as vitiating. His opposition to transhumanism is too quick and doesn't take the moral challenge of a world of pained beings seriously enough, for me.
*
• Macho? Hm. Well, nature has made certain challenging actions optimal. Amusing proto-paleo attitude, too: *

  I, for my part, resist eating fruits not found in the ancient Eastern Mediterranean (I use “I” here in order to show that I am not narrowly generalizing to the rest of humanity). I avoid any fruit that does not have an ancient Greek or Hebrew name, such as mangoes, papayas, even oranges. Oranges seem to be the postmedieval equivalent of candy; they did not exist in the ancient Mediterranean.

• His work fits the x-risk paradigm very well, but he developed his edifice in complete isolation from them, and has an uncompromising scepticism about expected value that might not make cross-overs all that fruitful.

How original is the core point, really?

Well, who cares? His claim is that he had to invent the word ‘antifragile’, not the idea. He says, idiosyncratically, that Seneca and Nietzsche had the nub of the idea, and Jensen the formal essence; Darwin certainly did too. “Resilience engineering” and in computing, ‘defensive programming’ (b. 1998) and ‘self-healing systems’ (b. 2001) are at least on the same track, though not getting beyond a lively sort of robustness. But I doubt that most systems can become antifragile - e.g. it’s hard to imagine an antifragile jet engine (one that harvests bird strikes for fuel, or soot cleaning)? So maybe it’s only the grand generalisation to all design that’s new.

Gripes: His footnotes are collected by theme rather than linked to his claims directly, which makes it so difficult to follow up his sources that his credibility suffers. He namedrops, which is not the same as showing his working. I would really like to see his backing for his cool claims (about e.g. an irregular sleep pattern as a good thing, or things like ‘I suspect that thermal comfort ages people’), but it’s hidden away and often one-study. (Again: apparently one-study, since his working is not easily on show.)

He has a surprisingly high opinion of Steve Jobs – who I view as a grand example of an empty suit: there are 9 references to Jobs’ hokey shark-wisdom, (where Gigerenzer and Mandelbrot get 8, Jensen gets 7, Marx 7). Does Jobs really count as a ‘practitioner’ with ‘skin in the game’? Eh.

His homebrew jargon starts to drag – some sentences are wholly composed of his neologisms plus a barrel of articles and prepositions. (I used the glossary early and often.) Repetitive: tells what he’ll tell you, tells you he’s told you. Some passages really suffer from his wholesale hostility to copy-editing; there are some flatly bad sentences here. And he namedrops a lot, more than fair attribution of ideas – there are several passages that are just lists of people he likes (e.g. p.257-8).

I don’t see that it’s worthwhile to criticise his arrogant style; it’s what animates his points, and he never uses it on weak targets.

Lastly, he sometimes makes of a system’s persistence the highest good. (Where its persistence is to be contrasted with mere stability.) This is in tension with his wonderful emphasis on artistic and quasi-sacred values elsewhere in the book.

But it talks about everything, is historically wide-eyed, relentlessly rational, and often funny. And the method-worldview-style it suggests might stop life crushing us utterly.

"80,000 Hours: Find a fulfilling career that does good"

Benjamin Todd (2016)
★★★★☆
reviewed Feb 2017

Collation of results from a very grand project: to channel young careerist thousands into better tasks in higher gear. If you have the will to do well, you should read the website, and think through the planning exercise here.

Unlike everything else I’ve read about career development, since it talks about work and success without being nauseating.

"Automation and Utopia: Human Flourishing in a World without Work"

John Danaher (2019)
★★★★☆
reviewed Nov 2022

Incredibly clear. I disagree with plenty of it (e.g. his attitude towards work - that it is always an evil, regardless of the subjective value for the worker or beneficiary), but he’s never unreasonable.

"The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy and Other Essays"

Hilary Putnam (2004)
★★★★☆
reviewed Jan 2015

Remarkable meta-ethics, which establishes itself in large part by undermining neoclassical economics. Important quibble: The title evokes sexy French relativism – e.g. there is no fact of the matter, il n’y a pas de hors-texte – whereas his actual thesis is that only the strictest, stupidest partition between facts and values collapsed. (A distinction is the mild statement that A is not the same thing as B – whereas a dichotomy is the strict logical exclusion of two things: ‘if something is A, it is a priori not B’.) A pedantic quibble: god he is fond of italics.

Anyway. It collapsed, but still lives on in other fields, decades after the fall of the positivism that was the only thing motivating it. Book is: a scathing modern history of the distinction, a Pragmatic reconstruction, a love letter to Amartya Sen. Putnam blames the philosophical dichotomy for the failures of economics, and from there for real suffering.

The word “cruel”... has a normative and indeed, ethical use. If one asks me what sort of person my child’s teacher is, and I say "he is very cruel," I have both criticized him as a teacher and…as a man. I do not have to add, "he is not a good teacher" or "he is not a good man." I cannot simply... say, "he is a very cruel person and a good man," and be understood. Yet "cruel" can also be used purely descriptively, as when a historian writes that a certain monarch was exceptionally cruel, or that the cruelties of the regime provoked a number of rebellions. "Cruel" simply ignores the supposed fact/value dichotomy and cheerfully allows itself to be used sometimes for a normative purpose and sometimes as a descriptive term. (Indeed, the same is true of the term "crime.")

Some claims: Factual and evaluative statements are necessarily entangled, since; Facts are ascertained as such only by the application of epistemic values: “coherence, plausibility, reasonableness, simplicity, and elegance… if these epistemic values do enable us to correctly describe the world… that is something we see through the lenses of those very values.”; i.e. facts are thick too; i.e. he has been made to “rethinking the whole dogma (the last dogma of empiricism?) that facts are objective and values are subjective”. Of course, coupled to his ditching foundationalism, this leads him a long way down the Rortyan road - ‘science is just another social practice’ yada yada - but he tries to salvage a sort of pragmatic objectivity for science. Dunno if he’s winning, but I loved the race.

"The Replacing Guilt Series"

Nate Soares (2016)
★★★★☆
reviewed Sep 2019

pinch yourself, and remember what you are. What do you see? I see bundles of proteins and lipids arranged in a giant colony of cells, lives given over to the implementation of a wet protein computer that thinks it's a person... Look at us, the first species among the animals that can figure out what the stars are, still tightly bound to impulse and social pressure. (Notice how silly it is, monkeys acting all serious and wise as they try to affect the course of history.)... [but still] see the lost monkey who's trying to steer an entire universe...

Consequentialism for humans. Important because it is rare for discussions of “demandingness” or “scrupulosity” to speak about specific behavioural patterns or phenomenology. (It also has the most important part of self-help, an awareness that positive advice is never universal: “remember the law of equal and opposite advice. For every piece of advice useful to one person, there is some other person who needs exactly the opposite advice.”)

(I put off reading this for a whole year, and felt bad about it. So.)

He’d have you move from external motivation to intrinsic motivation because it’s more sustainable, and so more effective. He’s quite radical about this, ditching normal moral psychology:

the way that most people use the word "should," most of the time, is harmful. People seem to use it to put themselves in direct and unnecessary conflict with themselves... imagine the person who wakes up feeling a bit sick. They say to themselves, "ugh, I should go to the pharmacy and pick up medication before work." Now picking up meds feels like an obligation: if they don't get meds, then that's a little bit of evidence that they're incompetent, or akrasiatic, or bad... this disconnects the reason from the task, it abolishes the "why". The person feeling sick now feels like they have an obligation to pick up medication, and so if they do it, they do it grudgingly, resenting the situation... Now imagine they say this, instead: "ugh, if I went to the pharmacy to pick up medication, I'd feel better at work today."

Your true shoulds, if I could show them to you, would not look like a list of obligations. Your true shoulds would look like a recipe for building a utopia.

Many treat their moral impulses as a burden. But I say, find all the parts that feel like a burden, and drop them. Keep only the things that fill you with resolve, the things you would risk life and limb to defend.

I find it amusing that "we need lies because we can't bear the truth" is such a common refrain, given how much of my drive stems from my response to attempting to bear the truth.

"Badness" is not a fundamental property that a person can have. At best, "they're bad" can be shorthand for either "I don't want their goals achieved" or "they are untrained in a number of skills which would be relevant to the present situation"; but in all cases, "they are bad" must be either shorthand or nonsense.

Wouldn’t Nietzsche in his better moods (or Laozi at any time) smile?

The strategy is roughly:

1. Find something to care about. (Obstacles: hiding in bed, defensive relativism or nihilism, hiding in routine.)
2. Drop all obligations and see what you still care about.
3. Build intrinsic drive (change environment, train willpower and habit)
4. Draw on the fact that the world is broken as fuel
5. See guilt as an alien concept, unnecessary for the higher goals.

An important distinction:

• Listless guilt: feeling bad because you feel you should do something with your life, but not really thinking about what.
• Specific guilt: feeling bad because of unmet obligations to a particular goal.
• Akrasia guilt: feeling bad because you’re not following the endorsed plan.

One startling bit: some people report that following his advice has “broken” them, in the sense that guilt was indeed propping up their lives. His response is, “good”:

Some people, when they stop forcing themselves to do things because they "should," will do a bit less to improve the world. They'll bow a bit less to social pressure, and insofar as the social pressure was pushing them to do what you think is good, you might count that as a loss. Some people don't care about things larger than themselves, and that's perfectly fine, and making them more resilient to social pressure might lose the world some charity. I expect that far more charity is lost from people convincing themselves that their altruistic desires are external obligations and resenting them. I expect that most people who feel obligated to improve the world and only do it because they "should" will become much more effective if they stop forcing themselves... You can recover from breaking a few parts of yourself, so long as you're modular rather than fragile.

(This attitude is strongly reminiscent of the person Scott Alexander is incredulous about at the end of this great, great piece, though with instrumental harm.)

I’d probably be more cautious, and advise you not to read this if you don’t have lots of slack, support, and stomach for horrible facts. (Soares finds intrinsic motivation in attending to how awful the world is, how much it needs fixing.)

It’s short but dense with interesting ideas. (e.g. the nice concise rebuttal of naive internalist egoism.)

Each post repeats its point at least three times, which I suppose is intentional pedagogy, but it made me skim a lot. Soares also often links forward to posts you haven’t read yet, confusingly.

I’m not particularly guilt-ridden or scrupulous, on the scale of things, but I still found this good. Not sure I buy everything in it, but the rough method (move from vague to specific guilt, and then view the specific guilt as an external and unhelpful force in the light of your specific goal) seems sensible.

If the following worldview or prose doesn’t appeal to you, it’s not for you:

you will not be measured by the number of moments in which you worked as hard as you could. You will not be judged by someone rooting around in your mind to see whether you were good or bad. You will not be evaluated according to how unassailable your explanations are, for why things you couldn't possibly have prevented were the things that went wrong. You will be measured only by what actually happens... this is the driver that takes the place of guilt... All we need to do, in any given moment, is look upon the actions available to us and take whichever one seems most likely to lead to a future full of light.

Why should we listen to self-help, unless the author has done something impressive? I don’t know if you find these things impressive, but they serve.

"Human Chain"

Seamus Heaney (2010)
★★★★☆
reviewed Jun 2015

As ever, it’s of hands, eels, parents, wakes, digging, kennings, regret, the RUC, Cuchulain, and Caesar. Fully half are in memoriams. You have to be brave or famous to write this plainly. Plainness can be mistaken for absence of technique – ‘here, I could do that’ – but here it is very, very obvious that I could not. Feel your tongue:

It’s winter at the seaside where they’ve gone For the wedding meal. And I am at the table, Uninvited, ineluctable. A skirl of gulls. A smell of cooking fish. Plump dormant silver. Stranded silence. Tears. Their bibbed waitress unlids a clinking dish. And leaves them to it, under chandeliers. And to all the anniversaries of this They are not ever going to observe Or mention even in the years to come. And now the man who drove them here will drive Them back, and by evening we’ll be home.

Best are ‘A Herbal’, ‘Chanson d’Aventure’, ‘Miracle’, ‘Loughanure’, and ‘Route 110’, an odyssey about buying a second-hand copy of the Aeneid and then trying to go home.

"This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life"

David Foster Wallace (2009)
★★★★☆
reviewed Jun 2018

There’s been a lot of DFW hate lately – here, here, here, here. But who else marries the syrupy plain with the thrilling theoretical arcane? Could anyone fail to understand the retrospectively obvious point of this little lecture? (Roughly just: It requires constant work to divert yourself from egotism and irritation; this work is the point of education and the essence of maturity.)

The audience titters throughout the recording; this grates on me. It’s the forced, knowing laughter you hear in theatres. I submit that it’s this feature of DFW’s audience that Ellis and TLP hate. I don’t know if reading DFW makes me any less self-obsessed and disdainful, but actually it feels like it might.

"A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man"

James Joyce (2003)
★★★★☆
reviewed Jul 2019

To use yourself for art you need a really interesting life, or sheer expressive skill - the ability to force anything to be interesting. Neither is easy: someone like Montaigne manages easily, but e.g. Rousseau doesn’t (he just got there first, to the I Am Art game, so we have to talk about him).

Joyce’s life is only mildly interesting from the outside, so it falls to his evocation. I read this to find out whether to care about him, and I actually didn’t until Part III, the rightly famous spiritual arc from apatheistic teenage kicks, to the ecstatic shame of submitting to the vast closed Catholic system, and through it to passionate agnosticism, anticlerical naturalism. Joyce’s is the best portrait of the Church’s infinite terrorism:

remember, my dear boys, that we have been sent into this world for one thing and for one thing alone: to do God’s holy will and to save our immortal souls. All else is worthless.

As he crossed the square, walking homeward, the light laughter of a girl reached his burning ear. The frail, gay sound smote his heart more strongly than a trumpet blast, and, not daring to lift his eyes, he turned aside and gazed, as he walked, into the shadow of the tangled shrubs. Shame rose from his smitten heart and flooded his whole being. The image of Emma appeared before him and under her eyes the flood of shame rushed forth anew from his heart. If she knew to what his mind had subjected her or how his brute-like lust had torn and trampled upon her innocence! Was that boyish love? Was that chivalry? Was that poetry? The sordid details of his orgies stank under his very nostrils.

As a teen Stephen tries to mortify himself, to not look at women, to not eat well, to just look at the mud. But he’s too bright, too worldly and too proud. I cheered at the end of Part IV, when he throws off the yoke.

The prose is port wine: lovely if sipped. It is mostly monologue but the dialogue is the best bit. He is passionate about anything, e.g. algebra -

The equation on the page of his scribbler began to spread out a widening tail, eyed and starred like a peacock's; and, when the eyes and stars of its indices had been eliminated, began slowly to fold itself together again. The indices appearing and disappearing were eyes opening and closing; the eyes opening and closing were stars being born and being quenched. The vast cycle of starry life bore his weary mind outward to its verge and inward to its centre, a distant music accompanying him outward and inward. What music? The music came nearer and he recalled the words, the words of Shelley's fragment upon the moon wandering companionless, pale for weariness. The stars began to crumble and a cloud of fine stardust fell through space. The dull light fell more faintly upon the page whereon another equation began to unfold itself slowly and to spread abroad its widening tail. It was his own soul going forth to experience, unfolding itself sin by sin, spreading abroad the bale-fire of its burning stars and folding back upon itself, fading slowly, quenching its own lights and fires. They were quenched: and the cold darkness filled chaos.

The painful process of moving past family, nation, church, scholastic philosophy, to become yourself. Doing this in a country as maniacal about nation and church as eC20th Ireland was so much harder, and indeed he had to leave. He doesn’t move past Art, and acquires a similarly monomanaical view of it -

[To be an artist], a priest of the eternal imagination, transmuting the daily bread of experience into the radiant body of everliving life

but if my prose was as good as Joyce’s maybe I couldn’t have moved past it either. Like Nietzsche if he wasn’t an edgelord.

That printers and governments treated Joyce and Lawrence the same is a laugh: Joyce has all of Lawrence’s passion and none of the flat feet. Self-parody, odd humility, laughter at his own past dogmatism.

His memory - or his notetaking? - is amazing: scholars have spent lifetimes checking and relating everything in this to recorded history, and he’s usually spot on about details (though he changes names). I don’t think I could write anything as accurate, even in my surveillance society.

Fully half of my edition was taken up in footnotes and bibliophilia. (It also left Joyce’s typos in, which is a bit much. In fact half the footnotes were as trivial as typos, e.g. pointing out where lines are reused from his draft Stephen Hero.)

Portrait stops before the end of uni, before his odyssey, before his wife even. And much of the last section is a surprisingly flat, academic statement of Thomist aesthetics. But by then you’ve heard enough to love him anyway.

"The Art of Procrastination: A Guide to Effective Dawdling, Lollygagging and Postponing"

John R. Perry (2012)
★★★★☆
reviewed Jan 2013

structured procrastinator: a person who gets a lot done by [consciously] not doing other [important] things.

This book didn’t exactly change my life, but it made me feel better about what I was already doing. (Before, I’d been calling it slingshot akrasia.)

Structured procrastination is that staple from stand-up comedy where the best way to get yourself to tidy your entire house is to sit down to do your taxes.

All of my reviews, all of my essays were written in the glow and shadow of other things I should’ve been doing.

All procrastinators put off things they have to do. Structured procrastination is the art of making this bad trait work for you. The key idea is that procrastinating does not mean doing absolutely nothing. Procrastinators seldom do absolutely nothing; they do marginally useful things, such as gardening or sharpening pencils or making a diagram of how they will reorganize their files when they find the time. Why does the procrastinator do these things? Because accomplishing these tasks is a way of not doing something more important. If all the procrastinator had left to do was to sharpen some pencils, no force on earth could get him to do it. However, the procrastinator can be motivated to do difficult, timely, and important tasks, as long as these tasks are a way of not doing something more important... Doing those tasks becomes a way of not doing the things higher on the list. With this sort of appropriate task structure, you can become a useful citizen. Indeed, the procrastinator can even acquire, as I have, a reputation for getting a lot done. Procrastinators often follow exactly the wrong tack. They try to minimize their commitments, assuming that if they have only a few things to do, they will quit procrastinating and get them done. But this approach ignores the basic nature of the procrastinator and destroys his most important source of motivation. The few tasks on his list will be, by definition, the most important. And the only way to avoid doing them will be to do nothing. This is the way to become a couch potato, not an effective human being... The second step in the art of structured procrastination is to pick the right sorts of projects for the top of the list. The ideal projects have two characteristics -- they seem to have clear deadlines (but really don't), and they seem awfully important (but really aren't). Luckily, life abounds with such tasks. At universities, the vast majority of tasks fall into those two categories, and I'm sure the same is true for most other institutions... At this point, the observant reader may feel that structured procrastination requires a certain amount of self-deception, since one is, in effect, constantly perpetrating a pyramid scheme on oneself. Exactly... what could be more noble than using one character flaw to offset the effects of another?

–

Work and study pressurise my life. They give me a structure to defy, a gravity assist. I am happiest laden with obligations, when the set of tasks that is my life flies just out of control. I think the mechanism is this:

1. I require a steady stream of variety.
2. Having a job makes my days closely resemble each other.
3. Intolerable resentment. I am forced to produce creative sparks to satisfy my basic drive.

SP is related to how great I feel when I don’t have to go to a party, to my sadly efficient approach to grades, to how giving work to a busy person is a good way of getting it done quicker, i.e. an implausible linear increase of output with increasing things to do. I read more fiction when doing a stats degree and learn more stats when in work.

Antecedents of Perry and me.

Fernando Pessoa:

I often wonder what kind of person I would be if I had been protected from the cold wind of fate by the screen of wealth... to reach the tawdry heights of being a good assistant book-keeper in a job that is about as demanding as an afternoon nap and offers a salary that gives me just enough to live on. I know that, had that past existed, I would not now be capable of writing these pages, which, though few, I would undoubtedly have only day-dreamed, given more comfortable circumstances. For banality is a form of intelligence, and reality, especially if it is brutish and rough, forms a natural complement to the soul. Much of what I feel and think I owe to my work as a book-keeper since the former exists as a negation of and flight from the latter.

Nietzsche:

the struggle against the ecclesiastical oppression of millenniums of Christianity... produced in Europe a magnificent tension of soul, such as had not existed anywhere previously; with such a tensely-strained bow one can now aim at the furthest goals... we have it still, all the distress of spirit and all the tension of its bow! And perhaps also the arrow, the duty, and, who knows? The goal to aim at...

Geoff Dyer:<blockquote>The best circumstance for writing, I realized… were those in which the world was constantly knocking at your door; in such circumstances, the work you were engaged in generated a kind of pressure, a force to keep the world at bay. Whereas here, on Alonissos, there was nothing to keep at bay, there was no incentive to generate any pressure within the work, and so the surrounding emptiness invaded and dissipated, overwhelmed you with inertia. All you could do was look at the sea and the sky and after a couple of days you could scarcely be bothered to do that. </blockquote>

Zach Weiner:

[After months of working only on my main goal] I took on a job doing closed captioning because I found it [made for] an easier time writing. Just something about talking to people and watching weird media made the writing a lot easier. My new theory of self was that you can't write well unless you have a little strife in your life. I worked at the closed captioning job for 4-6 months and by then I was making enough money on the site to responsibly quit my job. The problem was I didn't want to quit my job and have readership fall off because I couldn't write, so my crazy idea was to go back to school. I thought, it'd to be this weird environment, with younger people, and that would be good...

Is this platitudinous? It is possible that the grand narration above is delusional, and that the only actual content here is “A lot of people work better under pressure”. Don’t think so though.

YMMV. 5/5 if you don’t do this already.

"The Man from the Future"

Ananyo Bhattacharya (2021)
★★★★☆
reviewed Nov 2021

An awaited book; in fact I awaited it before I knew it was being written. Here is one of the most important people to ever live, and what notice do we take? Before now: One bad old biography (and one-third of another) and many gigantic maths monographs. Such yawning gaps come from historians and biographers being obsessed with artists instead - consider the nine Jane Austen biographies published in the last 11 years - and our scientists being inarticulate at best. unable or unwilling to stand up for themselves, and unrepresented by the chattering classes. (But a handful of scientists are great writers: Feynman and Dyson and Dawkins and Crick and Pascal and yeah Einstein is quotable and I was actually boggling at some of Gödel’s aphorisms just the other day. Boltzmann is funny.)

It is incredibly difficult to cover everything von Neumann did - everything he did for the first time in history - even just everything with vast practical consequences which are still felt 60 years later.

Chapter 2: fixing set theory where Hilbert and Russell failed Chapter 3: unifying matrix and wave theory where Dirac bodged and others failed Chapter 4: solution to a profound engineering challenge which changed the world forever

Great philosophers get several kinds of books written about them - two are the Life, and the intellectual biography, which actually tries to explain and show the development of their ideas. Bhattacharya’s is more like the latter plus a smattering of parties, fast cars, and intellectual bitching.

Hodges is, in 600pp, just able to enumerate Turing’s achievements. Bhattacharya, in 284, is not even vaguely able to begin doing this for vN. Almost no mention of his great work in group theory.

—-

Very incomplete list of von Neumann’s achievements:

• Foundations of maths: Paradox-free foundation of set theory with classes (superceded Russell)
• Physics: Unification of matrix mechanics and wave mechanics (superceded Dirac)
• Physics:: proof of the Ergodic hypothesis
• Lots of group theory, chiefly operator algebras
• Foundations of QM: axiomatisation of QM, unified wave and matrix mechanics.
• Physics: Clarified the measurement problem (for the first time?)
• Physics:: Central work on the Copenhagen interpretation
• Physics / logic Founded quantum logic
• Economics: Proved existence and uniqueness of general equilibrium
• Physics: Much-misunderstood constraint on all hidden variable theories. Maybe gappy.
• linear programming: duality and the first interior point method.
• Fluid dynamics: Fat Man implosion lens design. Discovery of the airburst efficiency. Many solutions in blast waves.
• Hardware engineering: Redesigned the ENIAC to be the first stored program computer
• Computer engineering: Earliest partial design of a modern computer. Lifted lots from Mauchly and Eckert (uncredited) but greatly superceded them.
• Patent busting on the digital computer design. Free for all.
• Minimax and dozens of central results in game theory
• Founded utility theory
• Marrying neuroscience and computer science forever
• Founded automata theory
• Intelligence explosion as x-risk
• …

Bhattacharya mentions [EDIT: covers] about half of these.

—-

• The most important question in all of education: How did Hungary produce so many geniuses? Why did they stop? von Neumann’s own answer was the empire’s weird mix of 1) tolerance and rewards for Jewish people, while 2) still being extremely volatile and so making them uncertain how long this would last and so rushing to succeed.

• Bhattacharya’s informalisation of the technical results here is impressive. At least one fuckup though: on p112 he confuses completeness for correctness.

• At one point AB ties the Hilbert and Gödel work to modernism. Modernist mathematics, the rejection of the past, the flight into abstraction and rigour. As if this was a general spirit. I don’t know how to evaluate this idea.

• Sad to hear that a heavily modified ENIAC executed a stored program two months before the Manchester Baby. I hate to see the Man win over the garage nerds.

• Nash is nasty, well before he goes psychotic (self-aggrandising, straw Vulcan, racist). He makes von Neumann look soft and warm.

• Lovelace is not the first programmer. Klári von Neumann has a much better claim, if we insist on ignoring Babbage.

• So many brilliant people here, and far more obscure than JvN. Shapley, Barricelli, Collbohm, Goldstine, Harsanyi, McCarthy, Adele and Klári…

—-

We tend to deify people, and they never deserve it. What did von Neumann get wrong?

Mutually Assured Destruction It’s not obvious that this was a mistake - we’re still here, MAD is a strong reason not to intentionally nuke people. But the sheer number of near misses and the overall estimate of 0.1% annual state risk, should make us think that the strategy was actually poor, that we are walking selection bias. The less obvious response is that he knew all that and was trading some existential risk to block the Soviet Empire’s anti-human practices from taking over. Since this argument also works for the Soviets, or for any value system which values itself, he seems to have settled for an appalling equilibrium. Tragedy of the value lock-in commons.

VN wanted cooperation, wanted a long life for humanity. But he couldn’t trust enough not to escalate. The true altruist cannot afford to cooperate simply.

First strike on the Soviets

If you say 'why not bomb them tomorrow', I say, why not today? If you say 'today at five o'clock', I say why not one o'clock?

(He recanted this a couple of years later.)

The mistake was twofold: to assume that the Soviets would continue growing, and to assume that the nuclear taboo would not hold. That taboo, that tradition is one of the most precious things in the world, and almost nothing is worth breaking it. To which you reply: 100 million people are not worth it? To which I can only apologise and suggest that 100 million are not worth 300 million.

Trusting Klaus Fuchs He actually handed the Soviets a new nuke design through the infamous Fuchs.

Nonerror: “Proof” of no hidden variables The conventional view is that von Neumann screwed up his no-hidden-variables proof, claimed to have shown the impossibility of hidden variables, and that this convinced everyone until Bell came along and exposed the error (30 years after Grete Hermann did it and was ignored). But this misrepresents the proof, which just says that a hidden variables theory will have to have a certain weird structure (which Bohmian mechanics does).

Targeting Kyoto I don’t know if a nuclear strike on Japan was ultimately for the best (considering the appalling toll of the Pacific theatre on both sides, the likely larger toll of taking Honshū, and the second-order effects of showing the world that everything had changed). But that they were civilian strikes seems completely gratuitous. Striking Kyoto, the spiritual centre, in particular seems incredibly high risk.

Nonerror: The brain is digital People act like he was naive about the brain as computer, but he just wasn’t:

the brain can prima facie be considered as a digital computer. However, upon further reflection, some elements of analog computing (e.g., the chemistry) will also become relevant in understanding the functioning of the brain.

The von Neumann bottleneck The world standard architecture for computers leads to a huge waste of CPU cycles, waiting for memory. This wasn’t such a big deal in the 50s, but CPU performance has masssively outpaced bus bandwidth over the last 70 years.

Against high-level programming ‘von Neumann opposed the development of assemblers and high-level language compilers. He preferred to employ legions of human programmers (mostly low-paid graduate students) to hand-assemble code into machine language. “It is a waste of a valuable scientific computing instrument”, von Neumann reportedly said, “to use it to do clerical work.”.’

Various dumb personal risks He did not live like someone who understood expected utility and hyperbolic discounting. He ate way too much, drove incredibly badly, was an easy mark for salesmen, pissed off his wife by leching. He spent a lot of time travelling to government meetings. He let others profit from his inventions. These imply irrationality - or a surprising lack of interest in his own wealth, longevity, time use, or marriage. This post collects other apparently bad decisions.

—-

"Backroom Boys: The Secret Return of the British Boffin"

Francis Spufford (2004)
★★★★☆
reviewed Jan 2023

Black Arrow, Concorde, Elite, Vodafone, the race for the human genome, and the lamented Beagle 2. £9 million, £900 million, £0.09 million, £10 million, £150 million, £40 million: combined, a tiny fraction of the Apollo budget. It takes an eye to spot what these have in common, to honour them as the giant creative landmarks they are.

When the old industries faltered in Britain, the ingenious spirit of the backroom boys survived. The urge to build the future detached itself from lathes and wind tunnels, and reappeared in the new technologies of software, gene sequencing and wireless communications.

(Note also Spufford’s taste - he avoids the obvious exemplars, steam, longitude, telegraph, Tube Alloys, Bletchley, Radar.)

It isn’t a category mistake, or an idle compliment, to call PACE2 poetry. Engineering is poetic, in the ancient sense of the original Greek word our ‘poetry’ derives from. Poesis meant making. And so every maker is a kind of poet; everyone who wants to subject ideas to the tempering of existence, and is willing to stay with the process as the ideas are changed by being realised, and cares enough to labour until the creation comes right. The words that might be used to describe a piece of engineering are secondary things, limping attempts to convey an act of making that didn’t happen in the medium that’s now being asked to express it. The poetry isn’t in the description. It’s in the numbers, it’s in the algorithms, it’s in the system design... We used to quote the joking definition of art,’ John Causebrook told me. ‘“An art is a science with more than seven variables.” So we used to say, yeah, we’ve got more than seven variables. We must be artists.’

He is best in class at spotting the philosophical and emotional significance of technical things.

Every tool, every machine that human beings ever invented has created the possibility of a new physical state for the person using it... Whether the components are atoms or bits, ideas or steel girders, building something is a process of subduing wishes to possibilities. Some of the best bridges, programs, novels – not all of the best, but some – come about because their makers have immersed themselves in the task with such concentration, such intent openness to what the task may bring, that the effort of making wishes real itself breeds new wishes. ... More than any rocket ever built in Europe, [Concorde] was the European equivalent to the Apollo programme, a gasp-inducing, consciously grand undertaking that changed the sense, in those who contemplated it, of what human beings were capable of... Concorde has a payload capacity of only 7 per cent of its takeoff mass, a ratio more reminiscent of a satellite launcher

Asserting a proprietary right over the whole genome was not like holding a patent for, say, a particular model of car; it was like saying you had a patent on the very idea of a car in general, a patent that covered every conceivable self-propelled personal transportation device there ever had been – and ever might be in future – while your patent lasted. People kept saying, in 1998, that the twenty-first century was going to be the age of the life sciences, the century when applied genetics banished a thousand diseases, abolished a thousand sources of suffering, creating the same kind of step change in human mastery over the terms of human existence that mass mobility had done in the twentieth century thanks to the internal combustion engine. Well, in 1898, tiny manufacturers all over Europe and North America had been experimenting with different ways to fit a petrol motor together with four wheels and a transmission. Only a few designs, from a few firms, prospered; but it was the multiple experiments in multiple directions that allowed the few successful designs to emerge and to form the foundation of the car industry.

It’s a beautiful view of the world - or rather, a beautiful search. Spufford actively finds or forges beautiful parallels, not unlike the angels he mentions from Wings of Desire: one “attuned yourself to the particular concerns of that voice, its special idioms, its rhythm of experience; and now you let it fall, and searched again through the crowd, and took up another.”

He goes and interviews these ascended nerds. They have names like “John Scott-Scott” and “Jim Scragg”. Their offices are cupboard-sized. They often work on a midcentury civil servant pittance.

Those who survive from the heyday of British rocketry all live in detached, modern houses in Home Counties commuter villages or Midlands suburbs. So does Mr Dommett. He, like them, drove home every day from establishments shrouded in secrecy to family tea and an after-supper pint in the Green Man. But he inhabits a much shaggier version of suburban pastoral than his colleagues. Their houses are ultra-neat, with outbreaks of supernaturally competent DIY, like externalisations of the kind of mind that adjusts a complex system until it’s just so. His is surrounded by a runaway experiment in growing wild flowers... These Morris men came dancing up the street, led by this big fat bloke in a kind of Andy Pandy outfit who was bopping people on the head with a pig’s bladder – and I said to my wife, “Sweetheart, you won’t believe me, but that man is one of the brains behind Britain’s nuclear defence.”’

The book is also wise about the British state and the peculiar organisms it supports or supported (the mad MP, the slash-and-burn Conservative, the impassive civil servant, the trade union suit, the nationalised CEO). Also about the Two Cultures - writing beautiful, effusive stuff about Kantorovich and the boffins is Spufford’s rebuke of the dichotomy (though more of a rebuke to the foolish arts people who ignore half of human creativity and thought).

To a good half of their fellow students, of course, they were just indistinguishable nerds. They had come to a place where the arts/sciences split in British education (and British culture, for that matter) manifested itself as a social split. Humanities students mostly didn’t hang out with science students, and vice versa. This wasn’t a matter of class division, since the science students came from the same mix of backgrounds as the arts ones, or of active hostility either: indifference and mutual incomprehension did the work of separation. It was a difference of style, more than anything. The arts students valued verbal prowess and they looked for the complexity that made their studies exciting in the forest of unpredictable connections that law or history or literature or anthropology kept ceaselessly throwing up. In their spare time, they put on plays, drank cheap Bulgarian wine, and protested against Mrs Thatcher. Oh, and had sex without worrying about their parents hearing them through the bedroom wall. To them, the way the scientists got their helping of complexity, by rooting around among the factual bones of the universe, was out of reach. They weren’t mathematically equipped to see it...

He believes in gift economies, your work as your art, and shielding some things from Econ 101 (obeying a higher economics which includes beauty and dignity as variables).

by having people who were proud of what they were doing, the British were getting the kind of quality that was needed without the sophisticated quality control methods that were being used in America.

Spufford is thus able to write about the deep idiocy of both Benn and Thatcher, and has an acute sense of both the vast importance and self-congratulatory delusions of commerce:

Under the recessed halogen lights of the Red Carpet Club, very little contradicted this perspective. There were logos woven into the carpet, and printed onto the porcelain of the coffee cups. No one was gross enough to demand actual cash for the coffee, or for the orange juice in the glass jug on the snowy linen cloth... This was a room for the new masters of the universe. Out there, beyond the smoked-glass windows, everything existed in order to be bought and sold, from thousand-acre lots of edge-city building land down to... the order of the nucleotides in every human cell; everything existed in order to be divided, packaged, transformed, exchanged, shifted between the multiplying warehouses of proliferating business parks, and gently squeezed, gently milked for the margin that you then paid to be admitted back into little bubbles of quiet corporate utopia like this, where the flight announcements were delivered at a sympathetic murmur and every article you read in the free copies of Fast Company and Business 2.0 in the magazine rack confirmed that moving goods through the market was the one, the true, the only occupation of mankind.

It didn’t obey the rules of scientific speech, which say that you should only claim what you are already sure of, what you have proved. Instead, it followed the rules of good PR, as taught by every investment bank presently engaged in guiding unprofitable companies along the short, beautiful road to a listing on the NASDAQ. These rules were different: you should claim everything you can, they said, that can’t be disproved. Claim Big, in other words, and Cover Your Back. Accordingly, the press release ended with the standard piece of legal boilerplate that insured against baulky behaviour by the future you’d just declared you were seizing. ‘Certain statements in this press release and its attachments are forward-looking. These may be identified by the use of forward-looking words or phrases such as “believe”, “expect”, “anticipate”, “intend”, “should”, “planned”, “estimated”, “potential” and “will” among others … The Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 provides a “safe harbour” for such forward-looking statements.’

The forgotten space programme is the most moving bit (the successful launch came after the programme had already been cancelled, so “their sad satellite Prospero… the magician who lays down his book, who gives up power over earth and heaven”). The British Interplanetary Society nerds cheer when a V2 lands near their pub, because hey someone made it to space. (“this was certainly the first V2 to be greeted at the receiving end with laughter and excitement. The BIS rose to their feet and cheered…. In terms of deaths per reichsmark, it was considerably less lethal than a handgun.”) The British rockets were handmade, producing invisible superheated steam exhaust. The largest of them was 137cm wide. The entire R&D budget, culminating in a successful launch, was £9m, 3 thousand times smaller than Apollo’s.

Dribbles of HTP left behind after a test in the twists of a pipe assembly would drain out onto the sleeve of the person taking it apart: ‘Instantly the whole sleeve catches fire, pooff, as quickly as that. So everybody worked in twos, with one of them holding a running hose, and you just flicked the hose onto your mate when he was on fire, and he’d go, “Oh, that was a nuisance... 'I would not underestimate the romantic reasons why we got into Black Arrow,’ he says. ‘Even people who worked in the ministry went home and read science fiction, saw science-fiction stuff on the television; they dreamed too

It’s not a particularly patriotic book, but for once I find myself fond of a national subculture. British engineering is depicted as quiet, bespoke, clever, economical, surviving in an American world in those places “where small brilliant teams could create the products”.

‘If you don’t know what to do, do something, and measure it'... No one I met in radio engineering talks the way other British engineers do, with a rueful sense of operating small, of having to make do with inadequate means, and this is part of the reason why. Vodafone had the cash. It could pay the price of its ambitions. From now on, Vodafone would be a bidder in almost every competition for a mobile licence, everywhere.

His political points are made in passing, like when he contrasts the British failure to launch space or nuclear industries with the French nursery successes (“The market… enormous, and the French, who stuck with space as much for la gloire as from commercial calculation, would inherit an impressive piece of it. Ariane makes a hefty profit, most financial years… Where RAF Fairford remained a shabby military base, minimally adapted for flight development work, its counterpart facility at Toulouse became the nucleus of a giant new industrial complex. (It’s now the nerve centre of Airbus)”). He is thrilled by the freedom we gave John Sulston: “He never had to write a grant application. (When he wrote his first one in 1989, asking the Medical Research Council for a million pounds to buy two gene sequencers, the answer arrived as a half-page handwritten fax. It said yes.)… John Sulston always had the same answer when an entrepreneur approached him, even in ambiguous cases where there might have been room for discussion. Sorry, no deal. ‘There is nothing for sale at the Sanger Centre.’”

Every country in the world could have one of these histories of their sublime nerds, and should. (Yes, every country.) But the others won’t, because they don’t have anyone as good as Spufford.

"Herzog on Herzog: Conversations with Paul Cronin"

Paul Cronin (2003)
★★★★☆
reviewed Sep 2016

Luminary. Herzog is a contrived and dour and absurd man, and yet charming and sincere. Here is him describing one 6 month block of his youth:

I ended up penniless and was pushed around from place to place for weeks until finally I was picked up on a country road by the Franklin family. The mother had six children between seventeen and twenty-seven, her husband had died and there was a ninety-three-year-old grandmother. I owe them so much, this wonderful, crazy family who put me up in an attic... Of course I needed to earn some money, so I started to work on a project that was part of a series of films for NASA. That I made films for NASA always appears on those five-line biographies, and even if it is somehow true, it is completely irrelevant. I did have access to certain restricted areas and was able to talk to many of the scientists, but just before I was about to start work on the film they ran a security check... It was evident I was about to be expelled from the country... so I took a rusty old Volkswagen and went to New York during a very bitter winter. I lived in the car for some time, even though its floor as rusted right through and I had a cast on my leg at the time because I had broken it quite badly after jumping out of a window... at night, when it gets cold, say at 3 or 4 a.m., the homeless of New York - who live almost like Neanderthal men - come and gather together on some empty, utterly desolate street and stand over fires they have kindled in the metal rubbish bins without speaking a word. Eventually I just cut the whole cast off with a pair of poultry shears and fled across the border into Mexico.

His whole life is lived with this undemonstrative fervour.

The interviewer is completely uninspired: he just works his way stolidly through Herzog’s back catalogue, with no insight into anything much (“Precautions Against Fanatics was your first colour film, a bizarre comedy set at a racetrack where various individuals feel it necessary to protect the animals from local ‘fanatics’. Any comments?”); we are fortunate that Herzog is self-stimulating and full of himself. I’ll just let him show you how good he is:

I have never been one of those who cares about happiness. Happiness is a strange notion. I am just not made for it. It has never been a goal of mine; I do not think in those terms. It seems to be a goal in life for many people, but I have no goals in life. I am someone who takes everything very literally... I am like a Bavarian bullfrog just squatting there, brooding. I have never been capable of discussing art with people. I just cannot cope with irony. The French love to play with their words and to master French is to be a master of irony. Technically, I am able to speak the language - I know the words and verbs - but will do so only when I am really forced to. I was forbidden to use fireworks. I told the army major that it was essential for the film. 'You'll be arrested,' he said. 'Then arrest me,' I said, 'but know that I will not be unarmed tomorrow. And the first man who touches me will drop down dead with me.' The next day there were fifty policemen and soldiers standing watching me work, plus a few thousand people from the town who wanted to see the fireworks. Of course, I was not armed, but how were they to know? Nobody complained or said anything. So through all these incidents I learned very quickly that this was the very nature of filmmaking.

Everything he makes is worth your time (even Dinotasia is so bad it’s good).

"A Point of View"

Clive James (2011)
★★★★☆
reviewed Oct 2013

In one sentence: Sometimes age actually does allow for wisdom to accumulate. To be read when: whenever.

I came to liberalism late, after radical teens. By the time I found James, I was withering sick from years of people and books attacking the modern world, spending all their time reducing absolutely everything in life to its politics.

(Larkin is a great poet and was a terrible man, easy as that – but this tension is unbearable to some, who throw out his great work and try to shame those who don’t.)

Clive James is the consummate droll liberal railing against both wings of partisans: he’s against celebrity culture, Ostalgie, and anti-American critical-theoretical cuteness, but also ‘clash of civilisation’ nonsense, socially destructive austerity and conservatism in the arts.

What others get out of Wodehouse or Rowling, I get from this grumpy old Australian’s stoic nonfiction. I had my notebook handy the whole way through, sieving out gold gobbets of late style.

His essays are a space beyond the culture war, where the personal is not usually political. He is one of the greatest living stylists, would deserve study for that alone.

His long essay on Isaiah Berlin is fantastic and contentious, and his retorts to the professional philosophers who come at him about it are devastating, inspiring.

Unlike say Geoff Dyer, to whom he is similar, James doesn’t have academic standing. So his work is at risk of fading away, without their dull but chronic oxygen.

"Every Man for Himself and God Against All: A Memoir"

Werner Herzog (2023)
★★★★☆
reviewed Dec 2023

The stunning thing about Herzog - this cultured, wild, Mitteleuropan, pessimist, arthouse, Neue Deutsche Welle, Gothic fellow with a predilection for opera and the minor works of unknown Renaissance mystics - is that he is unpretentious.

Yes. He will milk the cow. He will omit to tell his fiancee that he is a famous film director. He will not mention he saved Joaquin Phoenix’s life until JP does. He will go on Rick and fucking Morty. “I think the poet shouldn’t avert his eyes”

people know too much anyway. My publications and film releases render me vulnerable enough: so many breaches in a fortification that stands unprotected anyway. most of the time I don’t even notice there are abysses to either side of me To this day, I couldn’t tell you what color my eyes are. Introspection, navel-gazing, is not my thing it is often assumed that I must be obsessional. No, I’m not. Nor is it true that I had got enough money together to embark on another film. In fact, I risked all the money I had in the world to get the thing off the ground. After a very short time, I was so reduced that I was living in a converted chicken coop with a papier-mâché ceiling just a little higher than the top of my head All these [media] inventions sound well and good and don't bother me. They don’t bother me because I know who I am. Or, rather, there are areas where memory forms itself, becomes autonomous, acquires new guises, spreads over the sleepwalker like a gentle veil... Ten days after the incident in the vacuum chamber, I received a summons from the immigration authorities. I was to present myself immediately and bring my passport. I knew what that meant. Because I had violated the conditions of my visa, I was about to be deported not just over the nearest border but all the way to Germany. In Pittsburgh, I quickly bought a Spanish dictionary and drove off

Interest incessant. One of the rare times you actually want the audiobook. Something to raise an eyebrow at at least on every page. (He is discursive as fuck - it is more like a series of shaggy dog fireside stories than a composition. A lot like Taleb if he wasn’t constantly angry. He also jumps forwards and backwards by decades from paragraph to paragraph. It works, it dreams.)

The first thing is that he had lived a full and book-worthy life by 17. Wartime poverty which he remembers fondly (no fathers around meant freedom; necessity meant his labour was valued). An actually tragic romance. Constant work and fractures and infections. This is on top of the usual unprecedented shock of his generation moving from scythes to computers in one leap.

I will always be grateful to America for [Marshall Plan aid]. The packages contained, among other things, corn flour, which we were unfamiliar with and which was therefore suspicious to us. My mother got us to try it by telling us the reason the flour was so yellow was that it contained egg yolks, so it was especially nutritious. From then on, we ate it enthusiastically... stripped the wallpaper off the ruined walls. Then his mother would boil the paper because there were nutrients in the glue... in all my childhood I never once slept on a flat surface... mother was unable to produce enough food for us. We ate salad from dandelion leaves; my mother made syrups from ribwort and fresh pine shoots; the former was more a house remedy for coughs and colds, and the latter stood in for sugar. Once a week, there was a longish loaf of bread from the village baker purchased with our ration coupons. With the point of a knife, our mother scratched a mark in it for each day, Monday to Sunday, allowing about a slice of bread for each of us... in one violent quarrel—the subject, as I recall, was the care of our pet hamster—I was so beside myself with fury, I laid into my brother with a knife. I struck him once in the wrist as he tried to fend me off and once in the upper thigh. In no time, the room was awash with blood. I was deeply shaken at my own behavior. ...a magnificent time, especially as there were hardly any fathers anywhere in the village, so everything was in the best sense anarchic. I was certainly delighted that we didn’t have a drill-sergeant type in the house telling us what to do. We found out for ourselves without being told... All my friends who grew up in Munich remember those early postwar years with enchantment. They had the best settings to play in. Bands of kids ruled the roost, lording it over the bombed-out streets and blocks. They collected bits of metal and sold it to scrap dealers. They turned up weapons, pistols, and hand grenades. Once they found a corpse dangling from the beams of a ruin. They grew up early and fast, and they loved... the local priest screamed at us for being godless and slapped my older brother in the face. We might have been six or seven at the time ...we would rig up a trip wire for Krampus We bought the cheapest plonk we could find, a red wine fortified with vermouth. Reeling, I barely made it back to my father’s apartment, who put me to bed and brought me a bucket to be sick in. I puked all night, and my father was incredibly proud that he had a son who behaved like a proper frat boy. The fact that I wasn’t yet twelve put the icing on it for him [Working on a fishing boat aged 16]: Above me was the orb of the cosmos, stars that I felt I could reach up and grab; everything was rocking me in an infinite cradle. And below me, lit up brightly by the carbide lamp, was the depth of the ocean, as though the dome of the firmament formed a sphere with it. Instead of stars, there were lots of flashing silvery fish. Bedded in a cosmos without compare, above, below, all around, a speechless silence, I found myself in a stunned surprise. I was certain that there and then I knew all there was to know. My fate had been revealed to me. And I knew that after one such night, it would be impossible for me to ever get any older I was seventeen. I had followed my then girlfriend to England, where I acquired a part share in a brick terraced house in a working-class area near Elizabeth Street in Manchester with four Nigerians, three grown-ups and a small child I made my first telephone call when I was seventeen... I, though, got to witness and experience, even though I was no part of an agricultural civilization, how fields were mown by hand with scythes, how the grass was turned, how hay wains drawn by horses were loaded up with great two-tined hay forks, and the hay brought into the barns. There were lads who worked like serfs in medieval times. Then, for the first time, I saw a machine—still drawn by a horse—that turned and tossed the hay up in the air with two horizontal forks... there has never been such a cluster of radical changes in human history, and I can hardly imagine that future generations will experience such density of change in a single human lifespan. My greatest good fortune, though, wasn’t that as an eighteen-year-old I had survived such an illness but that I hadn’t managed to make it across the Congolese frontier

One tagline for the Herzogian philosophy is “ecstatic absurdity”, but this misses the understatement and lugubriousness which stabilises and deepens it. Kinski was ecstatically absurd too, but he was also far less of a mensch because he had no sympathy or decency or gravity. Art is larger than mere liminal experience. He is benevolent and forgiving, warmly remembering his brushes with death and the negligence of others:

I didn’t love pain; it was just something that was there in my frame of reference—the way I expected the world to be. Dietrich, my father, lived with the fantasy of composing a vast work encompassing many intellectual disciplines. Of this, he never wrote a line. This work was his pretext for never working and earning money. In a way, he was principled fleas, thousands of them, which I bore uncomplainingly so as not to embarrass my hosts In cases where the drivers were so drunk that every yard they travelled could be fatal to themselves and others, I would demand the keys, but that didn’t often get results. So I reached in through the open window and snatched them. Some of the drivers would try to sock me as I reached in. One man bit me in the arm. Another tore out a hank of my hair [Going to college at] Pittsburgh turned out to have been a bad idea... after a week, I knew that I couldn’t stay... Later, for other reasons, I came to love and respect the city. I’d rather die than go to an analyst, because it’s my view that something fundamentally wrong happens there. If you harshly light every last corner of a house, the house will be uninhabitable. It’s like that with your soul; if you light it up, shadows and darkness and all, people will become “uninhabitable.” I am convinced that it’s psychoanalysis—along with quite a few other mistakes—that has made the twentieth century so terrible. As far as I’m concerned, the twentieth century, in its entirety, was a mistake.

• The names seem made up: Tilbert, Ortwin, Markwart, Gundula, Giselher, and Gernot, Hercules Seghers, Wolfgang von Ungern-Sternberg von Pürkel
• He nearly lost Aguirre thanks to some lazy bastards: "Lucki wasn’t allowed into the customs area in Lima, but on impulse, he scaled a ten-foot wire fence, and behind one shed he found all of our still-sealed film canisters on a pile of rubbish. The sensitive material had been exposed to the sun’s heat for weeks. It turned out that the shippers had bribed the customs authority, hence the stamps, which allowed the shippers to collect their fee. Lucki picked up the canisters and carried them himself as hand luggage to Mexico".
• This is the right attitude but an unusual lack of agency and curiosity for him: "[The Riemann hypothesis:] I don’t understand the first thing about it because I don’t have the mathematical equipment, but to me, it’s the most significant of all open questions in mathematics


• I learned the basics about cinema in about a week from reading the thirty or forty pages on radio, film, and TV in an encyclopedia. I still think that’s about all there is to know... I grasped the workings of a camera, how the film moved, what an optical soundtrack was. From there, I could deduce how to do a time lapse or slow motion. I still needed a camera, though. These were still the days of celluloid and mechanical cameras. I stole my first one... With it, I made my first short films: Herakles, Game in the Sand, The Unprecedented Defence of the Fortress Deutschkreutz, and Precautions Against Fanatics


• "When the [Rolling Stones] concert was over, I saw that many of the plastic bucket seats were steaming. A lot of the girls had pissed themselves. When I saw that, I knew this was going to be big"


• He is an NGO: the charitable foundation that today administers all my films and literary works

A decent amount of this book will be false but he’s not doing it on purpose and is quite modest about his memory. He is a fantasist in the best sense, a contrarian in the best sense (being himself and not like other people, not conditioned on other people).

I dream maybe once a year, then always banally, that I had a sandwich for lunch, for instance... I feel bad that I didn’t dream, and maybe that’s why I compensate by making films. I write my screenplays once I can see the entire film in front of me, and I’ve rarely taken more than a week to complete one there was one soldier standing guard. I shouted that he was to fire a shot in the air, but he was frozen with panic. I had to tear his rifle from him and fire it myself. Frightened, those pushing into the tunnel withdrew, and only then did four or five unconscious women slip to the ground. At the dress rehearsal of Wagner’s Tannhäuser in Palermo, there was a bomb threat, and the theater had to be vacated. (This time, it wasn’t my doing.) To this day, I couldn’t tell you what color my eyes are. Introspection, navel-gazing, is not my thing I’m a slow reader because I often depart from the text in front of me to picture scenes and situations and only then return to the words I live in Los Angeles. Lena and I had to decide where we would live in the United States, and the answer was clear right away—in the city with the most substance. LA is associated with the glitz and glamour of Hollywood, but it’s in LA that the internet was born, and all the big painters are no longer in New York but here, same with the writers, the musicians, the mathematicians. The number of Mexicans has greatly enlivened writing and music. Electric cars are being designed here; reusable rockets are built on the southern outskirts of the city. The mission control center for a number of space enterprises is just north of Los Angeles in Pasadena. A lot of banal phenomena are from here as well: aerobic studios, inline skating, weird sects. I could go on. My voice has found a great community of fans, which combined with my view of life asks to be imitated. I am a grateful victim of such satirists. I want to make a film with Mike Tyson about the early Frankish kings... I always wanted to direct a Hamlet and have all the parts played by ex-champion livestock auctioneers; I wanted the performance to come in at under fourteen minutes... had an unfinanceable project on the conquest of Mexico seen from the point of view of the Aztecs, and for that, I had studied the basics of classical Nahuatl [Before directing his first opera] I went to see a production at La Scala in Milan, the first I had ever been to; I had no idea what operas were supposed to look like... while I may be an opera director, I can’t read music Cinema verité was an idea from the 1960s; its representatives nowadays I call the “bookkeepers of the truth.” That got me furious attacks. My answer was “Happy New Year, losers!" the Rogue Film School, a countermethod, a guerrilla school or hedge school where the only two things I actually teach are the forging of documents and the cracking of Yale locks the Whitney museum in New York. This was a spatial installation with several projections of prints by Hercules Seghers with music by Ernst Reijseger, who has collaborated with me on many recent films. One of the Museum’s curators called me to ask about possibly contributing to the upcoming Biennal, but I refused right away, because I have problems with contemporary art. “Why?” the curator asked me. I referred broadly to the art market and its manipulations and its preference for conceptual art over actual exhibits, but the curator refused to be shaken off so easily. Would I not be interested as an artist? I said that I didn’t think of myself as an artist and that this term was better applied to pop singers and circus performers. If I wasn’t an artist, then what was I? I said I was a soldier and hung up

This is the fourth book on / by him I’ve read and there are of course reused stories and leitfmotifs. It is still hair-raising to me that Herzog lived in the same building as Kinski as a boy, and thus as a director later knew deep things about his demonic character and incredible talent.

One day when I was going up the stairs on my way home from school, I heard a commotion from inside. I unlocked the door of the apartment, and the first thing that met my eyes was Hermine, eighteen, a stout country girl from Lower Bavaria. She was chasing after a young man I’d never seen before, smacking him with a wooden tray. The man was yelling shrilly. He had reached under her skirt. It was Klaus Kinski... Good-hearted as she was, Clara Rieth had taken Kinski in off the street, where he was pleased to style himself as a starving artist. Already at that time, Kinski had acquired a reputation as an unusual performer of various small roles in different theaters. He didn’t make much money, but it must be said that he also loved the part of the misunderstood starving genius. Not far from us, he had squatted in an empty attic in an old apartment house and frightened away the legitimate owner, who wanted to throw him out. Instead of furniture, he had scattered dry leaves throughout this apartment until eventually they were knee-deep. He slept in them. Like my father, he never wore clothes... As an opponent of all forms of civilization, he also disdained silverware Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus, who for a long time was my editor... Beate thought all my films were so bad that she refused to go to any of the premieres, including Aguirre’s.

I was still shocked to hear about his teenaged Catholicism and explicitly, conventionally religious pilgrimages

would have far preferred a religion like Islam, where the priestly caste plays a lesser role, because it leaves the human being alone with God with no mediation... What I wanted was a more radical form of Christianity, so I joined a group my age that my family called the association of saints... Had I lived in the fourth century, I’m sure I would have favored the Arian heresy... I would see the church father Augustine as the heretic sooner than Pelagius... there was something in me that the Catholics call certainty of salvation

I have only now just noticed that the book is originally in German. This means that its translator, Michael Hofmann, is at the pinnacle of his art. Gruß!

"Both Flesh and Not: Essays"

David Foster Wallace (2012)
★★★★☆
reviewed Nov 2013

Bravura essays from all over the cultural instant he encompassed and abruptly let go (1988-2007).

They are I suppose dregs, but DFW’s dregs are better than the decade-projects of others. You can’t help seeing foreshadows of Infinite Jest: he touches on 1) the obsessive, commercial, and religious aspects of pro tennis, 2) the obstacles to good prose about or involving maths, 3) self-conscious engagement with pop (for how else can we understand a world constituted by and obsessed with pop?), 4) ‘interpretation-directing’ books (like Jest), and above all 5) on the need to build after waves of high-entropy postmodernism, to work past its crucial (but bewildering) negativities.

It was ‘obvious’ to him that ordinary late-capitalist life is ‘at best empty and at worst evil’. But he was extraordinary; panoptic, judicious and sensationally beautiful, and that wasn’t enough either.

"Consider the Lobster and Other Essays"

David Foster Wallace (2005)
★★★★☆
reviewed Nov 2013

Ah, ah. Postmodern and prescriptivist, enthusiastically wise, Wallace was the one, as loveable as intellectual, as iconoclastic as judicious. He’s a model of finding meaning in places beyond sanctioned loci (like Dostoevsky and 9/11, which he also finds meaning in): in for example an old sincere conservative, in tennis, and arthropods.

Not that he ‘found’ meaning: he generated it, erupting bittersweet priority over parts of the world held to be artless or empty. Theoretically rococo and colloquially concentrated. Our loss is marked.

It’s disappointing that ‘Consider the Lobster’, his more or less honest analysis of vegetarianism, founders and shrinks from responsibility. (In short, the piece says “they feel: so why do we do this?”. But he asks: “Is it all right to boil a sentient creature alive just for our gustatory pleasure? Is the previous question irksomely PC or sentimental?” without actually discounting the latter weaselly ad hominem aspersion.)

Tensions: he insisted on ‘democratic’ clarity and yet wrote wilfully distracting pieces. But he’s one of the ones.

"Joy in the Morning (Jeeves, #8)"

P.G. Wodehouse (2011)
★★★★☆
reviewed Aug 2018

An irony: Florence is noted for her urge to improve Wooster by forcing philosophy textbooks and boring modernist literature on him. This fails utterly and inspires revolt.

she was one of those intellectual girls... who are unable to see a male soul without wanting to get behind it and shove. We had scarcely arranged the preliminaries before she was checking up on my reading... substituting a thing called 'Types of Ethical THeory'. Nor did she attempt to conceal the fact that this was a mere pipe opener and that there was worse to come.

Jeeves, on the other hand, has no programme, he just slips allusions and lyricism into conversation, with at least passable results on Wooster.

'I shall miss you, Jeeves.' 'Thank you, sir.' 'Who was that chap who was always beefing about gazelles?' 'The poet Moore, sir. He complained that he had never nursed a dear gazelle, to glad him with its soft black eye, but when it came to know him well, it was sure to die.' 'It's the same with me. I am a gazelle short. You don't mind me alluding to you as a gazelle, Jeeves?' 'Not at all, sir.”

'Propose, forsooth! She'll just notify me that the engagement is on again, like a governess telling a young charge to eat his spinach. And if you think I've got the force of character to come back with a nolle prosequi-' 'With a what?' 'One of Jeeves's gags. It means roughly "nuts to you!" '

Indeed, since all the stories but one are told by Wooster, the title of this is down to this strategy. (This is only remarkable because I was not expecting ironies.)

Classification:

• Wooster’s taboo: Sindbad fancy dress costume; fake ginger beard.
• Triangle: Cheesewright - Wooster - Florence.
• Subplot: Nobby and Boko; the brooch; the ball; the Clam Line.
• Aunt: Percival Worplesdon
• Antagonist: Cheesewright
• Expedient: stealing a constable’s uniform, kicking a child, lying to a Peer, lying to the police.
  
  
  

"Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets (Incerto)"

Nassim Nicholas Taleb (2005)
★★★★☆
reviewed Nov 2013

I had skipped this, assuming I received the full contrarian worldview from Black Swan and Bed of Procrustes. But it’s a different beast, more playful and modest, with less of his latter-day overstatement and invalid ad hominems.

As anti-disciplinary provocateur and writer of empirical art he is unbeaten (I rank him with Nietzsche for delightful arrogance and hard-ass enculturation.) Still, these ideas (from cognitive science and applied statistics) are hard: one needs several runs at them. Taleb is a great introduction, then Kahneman and Gigerenzer for the calm conservative estimate.

"100,000 Why's: A Trip Around The Room"

M. Ilin (1954)
★★★★☆
reviewed Aug 2023

Children’s pop science, but deep as hell, wonderfully defamiliarising, innocent. You could give it to a bright eight year old. And should.

We love to read about expeditions to remote, unexplored countries, Yet we never suspect that within two feet of us there is a wonderful, unexplored mysterious country called Our Room. If we wish to explore this country, we may set out at any moment.

It’s funny to think of the all-time excellence of Soviet science, since it depended on one little pocket of mental freedom and courage in a milieu where verbal freedom and courage were otherwise completely suppressed. The “100,000” brand is actually still alive in post-communist countries.

I read it because John McCarthy credited it with making him a scientist. I fully believe it. I think I shall scan this for you.

"The Epiphany of Gliese 581"

Fernando Borretti (2022)
★★★★☆
reviewed Feb 2024

Quite cryptic and gnostic, but otherwise very well done hard SF about safety-critical archaeology.

"Dune (Dune, #1)"

Frank Herbert (2006)
★★★★☆
reviewed Jul 2017

The bottom line of the Dune trilogy is: beware of heroes. Much better [to] rely on your own judgment, and your own mistakes

– Frank Herbert

'Didn't you learn the difference between Harkonnen and Atreides so that you could smell a Harkonnen trick by the stink they left on it. Didn't you learn that Atreides loyalty is bought with love, while the Harkonnen coin is hate?

– also Frank Herbert

Dune shouldn’t work: there’s a lot of the worst of fantasy fiction in it. The spurious black and white morality, above; cod-medieval dialogue; noble-savagery and bizarro Orientalism; its spoilers for itself (through its constant first-person precognition); and the po-faced chapter epigrams about how great the main character is… *

But it does work. It works because of the loveable setting and its thrilling ecosystem; the sharp, rapid dialogue; its sheer, smushy pastiche of human history (American environmentalism, medieval feudalism, Arabic sheikism, and Zen martial hokum (“he is a Zensunni prophet”, “to use the family atomics”); its mystical anti-Star Trek historical materialism; excellent setpieces; and because the book contains a realist reading of its own magical-heroic events. (Here’s a start: Everything takes place on a world made of shroom heroin! You can’t trust a thing these people say!)

This hidden realism is clearest in the (heavy) appendices to the book - these aren’t the ordinary conceited footnotes of fantasy, which assume you care about its little world as much as the author does. They’re instead a rationalist palate cleanser after 600 pages of woo. A scientific, academic register erupts, mocking the internally real mysticism of the foregoing. I was even a little disappointed to find a huge glossary at the end, containing all the words I had been puzzling over. Mystery and gnosis and not-quite-getting-it suits the plot. The appendices say the book is more than its plot, and the world more than its books.

(The big realist moment within the book is when you see that the great prophecy is just a scam, planted to manipulate people.)

The baddies, the Harkonnens, are a bit much though: nothing they do is not repulsive. Herbert has the protagonists use mysticism and authoritarianism, while having most of the best characters resist and despise these things. There’s no such tension with the main antagonists, no nominally redeeming feature. So you can feel Herbert hissing and booing the Harkonnens. Here is the first scene with the evil Baron:

It was a relief globe of a world, partly in shadows, spinning under the impetus of a fat hand that glittered with rings... A chuckle sounded beside the globe. A basso voice rumbled out of the chuckle:
'There it is, Piter, the biggest mantrap in all history. And the Duke's headed into its jaws. Is it not a magnificent thing that I, the Baron Vladimir Harkonnen, do?'

Herbert gets away with this because Harkonnen is supposed to be over-the-top, and, more, because his world has a black and grey morality. (Do you want the genocidal decadent rapist Machiavels or the square-chinned aristocratic Machiavels?)

The greyness of the Atreides leads to the biggest plot problem. (It’s not exactly a plot hole, but it takes interpretive labour to make it make sense.): Paul’s Jihad is unmotivated. Nobody wants it, including the Messiah it is carried out for. Paul even compares himself to Mega Hitler:

'There's another emperor I want you to note in passing - a Hitler. He killed more than six million. Pretty good for those days.' 'Killed by his legions?' 'Yes.' 'Not very impressive statistics, m'Lord.' '... at a conservative estimate, I've killed sixty-one billion, sterilised ninety planets... We'll be a hundred generations recovering from Muad'dib's jihad.'

and it’s implied that the previous tyrant, Padishah, did not do such things. This completely undermines the exciting and righteous revolution that we spent a book and a half cheering on. If unprecedented death and misery is the payoff, what is the gain of having a noble ruler?

OK, Paul frequently speaks of not being able to stop the jihad - scrying that, if he does try and stop it, he just gets usurped and then it carries on worse. But then he shouldn’t have come to power at all, and the book tacitly tells us that things would have been better if the Harkonnens succeeded and none of the last three-quarters happened. The demigod, the hero is actually powerless.

The way to make sense of this is to take Herbert’s anti-hero line above seriously. Paul made a terrible situation worse. We’re not supposed to root for him. But, Herbert knows, we can’t help it, because Paul is the Underdog and Loyal and Smart and Competent and (obvs) dead handsome.

Notes:

• There's very good dialogue throughout, with some of the best lines given to an array of anonymous guards. It is good because spare in the face of a baroque religion and politics.
• The Nietzschean philosophy of the book (that is, of Herbert, not just of the Fremen or of Paul) suggests a stronger connection between strength, suffering, and spiritual superiority than there actually is. But, even here, it would not be too hard to make a dove reading of Dune, where the actions of all ruthless parties are actually perverse.
• Dune even has a proper dialect, not the usual mere conlangs. Vocal memes: several different characters say "Ah-h-h-h-h" in a particular way.
• The Bene Gesserit are the best thing in the book, a cabal of galactic, psychic, eugenicist spies.
• The books eventually turn against the Bene Gesserits' specific eugenics program, but it never lets up with hardass Darwinism (which in respectable form has been called Haidtism). Lots and lots of woo:

  The race of humans had felt its own dormancy, sensed itself grown stale and knew now only the need to experience turmoil in which the genes would mingle and the strong new mixtures survive. All humans were alive as an unconscious single organism in this moment, experiencing a kind of sexual heat that could override any barrier.

  There's a Randian seduction to the Fremen hardass ethic. As in Nietzsche: Herbert is inviting the reader to view themselves as strong, above the mob. (If you feel nothing seductive about these books - well, you've a modest soul.)
• The second book goes into even more gritty detail: the Fremen toilets are 'reclamation stills', for instance. (I'm just impressed at the speech-act of grossing out your readers with your hero characters.)
• I've been toying with a connection between Kynes (Dune's divine ecologist, who designs the rejuvenation of Arrakis) and the Kynde of Piers Plowman (Nature itself, or the intuitive transcendental grasp of it). I mention this mostly just to score a literary point: no-one else has noticed.
• The Fremen, his Muslim Tuareg, are actually Thracians in complexion. Xenophanes about Thrace:

  Men create the gods in their own image; those of the Ethiopians are black and snub-nosed, those of the Thracians have blue eyes and red hair.

• I also love his Vulcans. Rather than being the mockable and inhuman they are just whaddya know better at thinking:

  'A mentat could not function without realising he worked in infinite systems. Fixed knowledge could not surround the infinite. Everywhere could not be brought into finite perspective.'

  "Be a man and a mentat!" "I am a mentat and a man."

• * On the last page you are told that the epigrams are all written out of sexual frustration, the joke on the author of them:

  'See that princess standing there, so haughty and confident. They say she has pretensions of a literary nature. Let us hope she finds solace in such things; she'll have little else.'

  ) Cue laughtrack, applause, credits.

The quality dropped sharply between books: Dune is amazing, Messiah is slow but satisfying, Children of Dune is ok. Believe the hype.

How does it do as Serious science fiction?

Social development: Done pretty well, despite appearances. It’s a repudiation of technoutopian ideas and Whig history, the idea that our technology and our society must progress, and progress together. “Feudalism with energy weapons” as Heath says, half in contempt.

Software development: No.

Actual Science: No. Well, the ecology seems ok. But how do the sandworms.

"Frank Ramsey: A Sheer Excess of Powers"

Cheryl Misak (2020)
★★★★☆
reviewed May 2022

A good book about maximally important ideas. She invites various technical experts to write some info boxes about mathematical matters, which is extremely admirable since the meat of Ramsey is all in the maths and the logic. Here’s an essay with my gushing thoughts on his work.

We can evaluate the various outlooks on life and see which have the best consequences. In his assessment, the key to meaning in life is to be optimistic, thrilled, and actively try to improve conditions for people now and in the future. Live as fully and as ethically as you can, was his conclusion. Ramsey understood that inequalities get in the way of being thrilled by life. He put much effort into trying to make the world a fairer place. He also understood that individuals’ psychological makeups have an impact on whether one is depressed or not. His own tendency was to be cheerful—he was remembered as always smiling and looking rather pleased, not so much with himself but with things in general. He knew that Wittgenstein was not so disposed. But Ramsey too had periods of crippling anguish, and he thought that one should try to improve one’s life by engaging with what clinical psychology has to offer and by trying to be happy. If psychology can help change our outlook for the better, we should avail ourselves of it, as he had.

• I only spotted Misak being fatuous once, taking the usual liberty where philosophers speak shit about utilitarianism as if it was for idiots:

Ramsey was not a full-out utilitarian, to whom discounting is the obvious and correct thing to do.

-_- uh huh.

• How bloody erotic the (defiance of the) old morality seems from my safe remove. If you’re caught you lose your job, like Empson, fired for owning condoms.

• It is tragic that he wasted months of his life (2% of it) with Freudians who were unfit to treat him – among all people they were unfit to treat. Misak repeatedly refers to Frank being ‘cured’ by them. This seems inapt: at the time of the analysis, he was physically distant from his forbidden crush for 6 months and was forbidden from writing to her. Seems enough to get over it! Talking to the funny Austrian was just sauce. Maybe.

He also suggested to Frank that he had an Oedipus fixation, drawing on the Freudian contention that every son wants to kill his father so that he can have sex with his mother. Glover told Frank to have a talk with Margaret, and that seems to have helped: ‘I did and she was awfully nice.’ But his three months or so with Glover were on the whole not working: ‘It wasn’t really improving my mind very much, so I decided to stop it and go back to sea.’ Margaret too was being psychoanalysed, by Dr James Glover, the brother of Frank’s therapist. James Glover was also psychoanalysing Dick and Geoff. Their analysts had no qualms about discussing a patient’s analysis not only amongst themselves, but also with other patients.

[Wittgenstein] had never before said of anyone that they had understood the [Tractatus] and, as far as I know, he would never say it again.

The book is another reminder of Wittgenstein’s cruelty and shallowness. But his mistakes were emotionally rich, and so we keep talking about him. I cannot forgive Wittgenstein’s obituary for Ramsey:

Ramsey’s mind repulsed me. When I came to Cambridge months ago I thought that I would not be able to have dealings with him, for I had such unpleasant memories of him from our meeting  years ago with Keynes in Sussex... I could communicate quite well with R. about some things. But in the course of time it did not really go well, after all. R’s incapacity for genuine enthusiasm or genuine reverence, which is the same, finally repulsed me more & more... his criticism didn’t help along but held back and sobered... one labored arduously for a long time in vain to explain something to him until he suddenly shrugged his shoulders about it & said this was self-evident... He had an ugly mind. But not an ugly soul. He truly relished music & with understanding. And one could see by looking at him what effect it had on him. Of the last movement of one of Beethoven’s last quartets, a movement he loved perhaps more than anything else, he told me that it made him feel as if the heavens were open.

Or this

Frank’s sisters remembered that he wrote a terrible letter to their father, saying that Arthur had failed to get Frank proper medical treatment and so was responsible for his death. The gratuitous cruelty leaves one aghast. Wittgenstein was notoriously and severely self-critical. But he seems not to have understood that extending his brand of moral self-criticism to others was itself not very moral.

This surprised me though: on the death-bed he told jokes, with either reading (agitation or kind deflection) uncharacteristic of him:

Frances said that it was clear that Wittgenstein shared with her both an immense personal sadness, as well as sympathy for Lettice. But he made poor and flippant jokes, perhaps to disguise emotions he couldn’t cope with, or perhaps to help Lettice keep her composure.

"The Times Lives Less Ordinary: obituaries of the eccentric, unique and undefinable"

Nigel Farndale (2023)
★★★★☆
reviewed Mar 2024

Three for you, I just really love obituaries. Most of these are not awe-inspiring subjects and most are not written with care. But some are

Peregrine Nicholas Eliot was born in 1941 into a family that, riddled as it was with lunacy, suicide and internecine division, did little to advance the cause of the hereditary principle... their grandfather – the 8th Earl, Montagu, a barrister once described as having “all the stiffness of a poker but none of its occasional warmth” the first Countess of St Germans said of her successor: “It’s not fair to describe her as working class because as far as I know she has never worked.”

But you have to understand that gold is flowing out of the world all the time, about 2 per second. What makes us golden is not only our actions or our thoughts but also just our being, despite it all.

"AI Does Not Hate You"

Tom Chivers (2019)
★★★★☆
reviewed Jun 2019

To my surprise I recommend this for anyone. (The chapters are tiny and I did the whole thing in an hour.) For outsiders it’s an honest and nontechnical portrait of a new, strange, and wonderful endeavour; and Chivers shows his path from ordinary sceptical thoughtfulness to taking the idea seriously. (However, there’s almost no maths in it, and without maths you can only ever sort-of get the gist. For instance, one of the key premises of the whole programme is very easy to understand if you’ve ever seen the structure of a reinforcement learning algorithm - where the ‘optimizer’ and the ‘reward function’ are completely separate modules varying freely - and apparently quite difficult to accept if you haven’t.)

For insiders it’s a reminder of just how strange the project seems from outside. The chasm of inferential distance. There’s also fun new details: I had no idea that Bostrom is name-dropped in Donald Glover’s new TV show, for instance. And this made me laugh:

Buck Shlegeris, a young MIRI employee with excitingly coloured hair and an Australian accent, told me that 'A book on this topic could be good', and that 'if I could jump into your body I have high confidence I could write it'. However, his confidence that I could write it from within my own body seemed significantly lower, which is probably fair enough.

If you’ve read much on the topic you can skip the whole middle third of the book, it’s just Chivers paraphrasing bits of the first two Sequences.

Chivers overemphasises Yudkowsky. Gwern, Grace, Sandberg, and Muehlhauser get one passing reference each, but their work (and Krakovna’s) have each had a larger effect on me, and on others I know. Not to mention the tumblrs. Ach never mind: it’s a huge illegible mess of a movement and he’s done well.

Some of the interviewees make patently poor arguments - Sabisky (“it’s a sex cult”), Brooks (“no [AI safety proponents] have ever done any work in AI itself”), Gerard (“it’s a money-spinning cult”) but it’s so patent that I think people will see their prejudices. The real shame is that better critics exist - I have in mind the anonymous prosaic-AI researchers Nostalgebraist (“alignment is equivalent to solving ethics and decision theory at once”) and “Beth Zero”. But I suppose anon randos are not the best subjects for a mass-market book.

(Robnost:

"Here is what this ends up looking like: a quest to solve, once and for all, some of the most basic problems of existing and acting among others who are doing the same... problems of this sort have been wrestled with for a long time using terms like “coordination problems” and “Goodhart’s Law”; they constitute much of the subject matter of political philosophy, economics, and game theory, among other fields. It sounds misleadingly provincial to call such a quest “AI Alignment” ... There is no doubt something beautiful – and much raw intellectual appeal – in the quest for Alignment. It includes, of necessity, some of the most mind-bending facets of both mathematics and philosophy, and what is more, it has an emotional poignancy and human resonance rarely so close to the surface in those rarefied subjects. I certainly have no quarrel with the choice to devote some resources, the life’s work of some people, to this grand Problem of Problems. One imagines an Alignment monastery, carrying on the work for centuries. I am not sure I would expect them to ever succeed, much less to succeed in some specified timeframe, but in some way it would make me glad, even proud, to know they were there."

)

Young Yudkowsky is adorable - and I hope others are able to see this past his hubris and proclamations.

Chivers manages to show the power and emotional impact of the ‘internal double crux’ idea:

I can picture a world in 50 or 100 that my children live in, which has different coastlines and higher risk of storms and, if I'm brually honest about it, famines in parts of the world I don't go. I could imagine my Western children in their Western world living lives not vastly different to mine, in which most of the suffering of the world is hidden away, and the lives of well-off Westerners continue and my kids have jobs... Whereas if the AI stuff really does happen, that's not the future they have... I can understand Bostrom's arguments that an intelligence explosion would completely transform the world; it's pointless speculating what a superintelligence would do, in the same way it would be stupid for a gorilla to wonder how humanity would change the world. And I realised that this was what the instinctive 'yuck' was when I thought about the arguments for AI risk. 'I feel that parents should be able to advise their children,' I said. 'Anything involving AGI happening in their lifetime - I can't advise them on that future. I can't tell them how best to live their lives because I don't know what their lives will look like, or even if they'll be recognisable as human lives... I'm scared for my children.' And at this point I apologised, because I found that I was crying.

(Amateur psychoanalysis is fine - if you’re doing it to yourself, and if you don’t take it too seriously.)

I’m pretty sure I know who this is (that mix of iron scrupulousness and radical honesty) and before I read it I thought the same:

I met a senior Rationalist briefly in California, and he was extremely wary of me; he refused to go on the record. He has a reputation for being one of the nicest guys you'll ever meet, but I found him a bit stand-offish, at least at first. And I think that was because he knew I was writing this book. He said he was worried that if too many people hear about AI risk, then it'll end up like IQ, the subject of endless angry political arguments that have little to do with the science, and that a gaggle of nerdy Californian white guys probably weren't the best advocates for it then.

Journalistic harm I feared, that didn’t come to pass: he never comments on anyone’s appearance (“It would be extremely easy for me to write a book mocking them. But I don’t want to do that.”); he mentions Dylan Matthews’ irritating amateur psychoanalysis only once - roughly, “of course Silicon Valley people think that good software will save the world”; he gives exactly no time to that one proudly cruel subreddit devoted entirely to ad hominem idiocy about the Rats. He brings up polyamory a lot but not malignantly.

The “Chinese robber fallacy” is that you can make any large group seem evil by selecting from bad actors among them, even if they have exactly the same rate of the selected bad behaviour. If there are ~1m views on LessWrong per month, say 100,000 unique visitors. If sociopathy is found in 1% of the general population then the site will have 1000 sociopathic visitors. If 99% of visitors are lurkers, never commenting then you should expect 10 sociopathic commenters a month. This is enough to satisfy me that the ‘dark side’ (i.e. the odd far-rightist, and two gendered tragedies) Chivers covers is the selfsame dark side as our dumb world at large.

I hate Chivers capitalising “Rationalist” all the time. I double hate it when he pairs this with capitalised ‘Effective Altruist’, like “the Rationalist Effective Altruist Buck Shlegeris”. At no point does Chivers use the full (and only appropriate) name for the identity: “aspiring rationalist”. (No human is that rational.) But to be fair nor do most people online.

Couple of harmless errors (Helen Toner wasn’t ‘doing’ ML in China, for instance). But the big one is that, after talking to all these people for and against, Chivers ends with the deferential prior: 80% of technical researchers think it’s 90% likely we’ll have AGI within a century, and if (as Chivers thinks) 17% think it will be highly negative, then our best guess is a 14% chance of catastrophic AGI. (With very large error bars - but that’s even worse when you think about it.) Now, since he began at extreme scepticism (<1%) this is a large update - and we were lucky that a journalist came this far out on the limb. But the arguments presented here for and against the Risk are not equally convincing. He is presumably just too modest to multiply them out, as an amateur, in the face of big expert surveys. But, see what you think.

"Poor Things"

Alasdair Gray (2002)
★★★★☆
reviewed Mar 2024

What if Frankenstein’s monster was hot and socialist

“What are Socialists, Duncan?” I asked. “Fools who think the world should be improved.” “Why? Is something wrong with it? ...I watched the gulls circling in a blue sky full of big slow-moving clouds. I saw the huge harbour full of shipping with bright flags and funnels, masts and sails. I looked at the sunlit quay with its cranes, bales, busy brawny dockers and uniformed officers. I wondered how to improve all this, but it looked all right Baxter was halfway through explaining that our ideas of time, space and morality were convenient habits, not natural laws, when I yawned in his face. The imagination is, like the appendix, inherited from a primitive epoch when it aided the survival of our species, but in modern scientific industrial nations it is mainly a source of disease... "All systems prove their vigour through subdivision: Christianity, for instance."

You will be noticing that McCandless, the narrator, sucks. The only thing he has over the monstrous Baxterstein is that he’s good-looking. Hew to this feeling! There’s a naturalist reading of the whole book. (“Dr. McCandless had no creative imagination or ear for dialogue”)

Gray’s unsentimental ideas and intense obsession with Scotland come through very strongly here. The book is among other things a love letter to the Progressive Era - an era which must be recognised as another consequence of the frenetic energy level of the broader Victorian era.

It is in places a didactic classical dialogue, with one naif and one evil man. (A lot like Montesquieu: go abroad to see your own society.) The theme is the birth of a socialist, the emotional context of finding out that the world needs changing.

Prosperous parents tell their children that nobody should lie, steal or kill, and that idleness and gambling are vices. They then send them to schools where they suffer if they do not disguise their thoughts and feelings and are taught to admire killers and stealers like Achilles and Ulysses, William the Conqueror and "Napoleon gave Britain our advantage as an industrial nation. To fight him all around Europe the government introduced heavier taxes which chiefly oppressed the poor, and used much of this money to buy continual supplies of uniforms, boots, guns and shipping. All kinds of factories were built. Many able-bodied men were abroad with the army, but new machines made it possible to run factories with the cheap labour of women and children. This enhanced the profits so much that we could invest in trains, iron-clads and a big new empire. We owe a lot to Boney.” Mr. Astley said my pity was natural and good if confined to the unfortunate of my own class, but if acted on promiscuously it would prolong the misery of many who would be better dead. I had just seen a working model of nearly every civilized nation. The people on the veranda were the owners and rulers—their inherited intelligence and wealth set them above everyone else. The crowd of beggars represented the jealous and incompetent majority, who were kept in their place by the whips of those on the ground between: the latter represented policemen and functionaries who keep society as it is... God has sent the Anglo-Saxon race to purify the globe with fire and sword.

One wrinkle in Bell: like so many of the early British socialists she acts aristocratic. (“The purest aristocrat” as Lord “Astley” puts it). The thing which Gray accidentally points at here is the enduring fondness of the elite for intellectuals, fixers, and wild thinkers of any class. An incidental but pervasive form of social mobility, as I know from experience.

Bell is a genius at pity. The classic do-gooder’s leap:

"now you want to help poor sick people... Would you exhaust your brain and body by toiling in grim places where courage as well as strong judgement is needed?” “I am ignorant and confused but not a fool or a coward. Give me work which uses me utterly!” “Then you know what you should become.” “I will be a doctor"

I’ve never heard this accusation of the Paris Commune before (that they purged Brits) but Gray would know:

after the Franco-Prussian war, when the Communards had suspended Cronquebil from a lamp bracket because of his international sympathies

The footnotes seem pedantic and even more didactic than usual, but it turns out this is a feint. The most powerful bit in the book comes in a long footnote detailing Bell's life after McCandless dies. She becomes a standard part of the standard history of the Scottish radical left - with no particular supernatural abilities - and commits their usual naive psychoanalysis of the whole species and provides hare-brained policies on that basis. Much like Beatrice Webb, who Gray makes into the voice of reason

Beatrice Webb wrote: "When you come home you will find Dr. Vic’s latest pamphlet awaiting you. It is an insane blend of ideas culled from Malthus, D. H. Lawrence and Marie Stopes. She blames herself for the Great War because she bore too many sons and did not cuddle them enough. She asks working-class parents to reduce future armies by having only one child. She wants them to make it feel infinitely precious by having it share their bed where it will learn all about love-making and birth control by practical example. In this way (she thinks) it will grow up free of the Oedipus complex, penis envy and other diseases discovered or invented by Doctor Freud, and instead of fighting with siblings will play husband-and-wife with a neighbour’s child. She is now quite sex-mad—an erotomaniac, to use the older term—and tries to hide it under prim language which shows she is still, at heart, a subject of Queen Victoria"

</spoiler>. Modernity, including its emancipated women, was created by scientists among others. Bell is her own mother and her own child.

"The Unknowable (Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science)"

Gregory Chaitin (1999)
★★★★☆
reviewed Jul 2023

Incredibly clear and deep but marred by his constant self-promotion. It’s like a cheap ad, but written by god

"Some Thoughts on the Common Toad"

George Orwell (2010)
★★★★☆
reviewed Jun 2018

So lucid. ‘Killing an Elephant’ is, surprisingly, the most powerful animal rights essay I’ve read in years.

I think he’d struggle to get his essay on Dali published these days, maybe not even in the Spectator: we aren’t able to think of art in these moral terms any more:

[Dali's autobiography] is a book that stinks. If it were possible for a book to give a physical stink off its pages, this one would — a thought that might please Dali, who before wooing his future wife for the first time rubbed himself all over with an ointment made of goat's dung boiled up in fish glue. But against this has to be set the fact that Dali is a draughtsman of very exceptional gifts. He is also, to judge by the minuteness and the sureness of his drawings, a very hard worker. He is an exhibitionist and a careerist, but he is not a fraud. He has fifty times more talent than most of the people who would denounce his morals and jeer at his paintings. And these two sets of facts, taken together, raise a question which for lack of any basis of agreement seldom gets a real discussion. The point is that you have here a direct, unmistakable assault on sanity and decency; and even — since some of Dali's pictures would tend to poison the imagination like a pornographic postcard — on life itself. What Dali has done and what he has imagined is debatable, but in his outlook, his character, the bedrock decency of a human being does not exist. He is as anti-social as a flea. Clearly, such people are undesirable, and a society in which they can flourish has something wrong with it. Now, if you showed this book, with its illustrations, to Lord Elton, to Mr. Alfred Noyes, to The Times leader writers who exult over the ‘eclipse of the highbrow’ — in fact, to any ‘sensible’ art-hating English person — it is easy to imagine what kind of response you would get. They would flatly refuse to see any merit in Dali whatever. Such people are not only unable to admit that what is morally degraded can be жsthetically right, but their real demand of every artist is that he shall pat them on the back and tell them that thought is unnecessary. And they can be especially dangerous at a time like the present, when the Ministry of Information and the British Council put power into their hands. For their impulse is not only to crush every new talent as it appears, but to castrate the past as well. Witness the renewed highbrow-baiting that is now going on in this country and America, with its outcry not only against Joyce, Proust and Lawrence, but even against T. S. Eliot. But if you talk to the kind of person who can see Dali's merits, the response that you get is not as a rule very much better. If you say that Dali, though a brilliant draughtsman, is a dirty little scoundrel, you are looked upon as a savage. If you say that you don't like rotting corpses, and that people who do like rotting corpses are mentally diseased, it is assumed that you lack the жsthetic sense. Since ‘Mannequin rotting in a taxicab’ is a good composition. And between these two fallacies there is no middle position, but we seldom hear much about it. On the one side Kulturbolschevismus: on the other (though the phrase itself is out of fashion) ‘Art for Art's sake.’ Obscenity is a very difficult question to discuss honestly. People are too frightened either of seeming to be shocked or of seeming not to be shocked, to be able to define the relationship between art and morals. suppose that you have nothing in you except your egoism and a dexterity that goes no higher than the elbow; suppose that your real gift is for a detailed, academic, representational style of drawing, your real métier to be an illustrator of scientific textbooks. How then do you become Napoleon? There is always one escape: into wickedness. Always do the thing that will shock and wound people. At five, throw a little boy off a bridge, strike an old doctor across the face with a whip and break his spectacles — or, at any rate, dream about doing such things. Twenty years later, gouge the eyes out of dead donkeys with a pair of scissors. Along those lines you can always feel yourself original. And after all, it pays! ... If you threw dead donkeys at people, they threw money back.

"Lost Worlds: What Have We Lost, & Where Did It Go?"

Michael Bywater (2005)
★★★★☆
reviewed Jan 2014

He seems to know about everything as long as it’s obscure and marginal: old network protocols and Latin conjugations, how meerschaums and primitive sweets were made…

It’s Grumpy Old Men except with teeth, wit, & iconoclasm and without mummery, ressentiment, & squidge.

“Remember, then, the founding principle of British public life, which is this: if you don’t know already, I’m certainly not going to tell you.”

His fond memory of corporal punishment is a bit off, but generally he’s balanced, seeing what’s been gained by loss. Examines both our tendency to stupid nostalgia and stupid amnesia. Never heard of him, watch for it.

(I lost my copy immediately before finishing it.)

"Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman"

James Gleick (1993)
★★★★☆
reviewed Oct 2017

Engrossing and detailed. Feynman is different from other first-rank minds: he values clarity and humour above all. He’s a slightly hazardous role model though: his sheer speed, creativity, and high standards, which justify his arrogance and deviance, cannot be emulated by ordinary people; his mantra - “disregard [what other people are doing]” - is similarly high-risk; and his pickup-artistry after Arline died is at least icky. But the big accessible hazard is his thrilling science-supremacism. Gleick:

Feynman told them [his self-spun legend]: how he became known in Far Rockaway as the boy who fixed radios by thinking; how he asked a Princeton librarian for the map of the cat; how his father taught him to see through the tricks of circus mind readers; how he outwitted painters, mathematicians, philosophers, and psychiatrists.

Feynman:

For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it. Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?

His cheeky scientism will make unread teenagers insufferable at parties. More seriously, it could return our scientists to unreflective, uninspired positivism. But his anti-authoritarianism, his anti-pretension, his honest and sweeping scepticism, his existential peace, more than compensate. Filtering out the above, his life is an enormously fruitful applied epistemology.

It is shocking, to anyone who knows the modern salami-slicing academic world, to hear how many breakthroughs he didn’t publish, just out of high standards:

A great physicist who accumulated knowledge without taking the trouble to publish could be a genuine danger to his colleagues. At best it was unnerving to learn that one’s potentially career-advancing discovery had been, to Feynman, below the threshold of publishability. At worst it undermined one’s confidence in the landscape of the known and not known.

And how he resisted emeritus disease to the end. Hawking: “We may now be near the end of the search for the ultimate laws of nature,”. Feynman:

I’ve had a lifetime of that. I’ve had a lifetime of people who believe that the answer is just around the corner. But again and again it’s been a failure. Eddington, who thought that with the theory of electrons and quantum mechanics everything was going to be simple... Einstein, who thought that he had a unified theory just around the corner but didn’t know anything about nuclei and was unable of course to guess it... People think they’re very close to the answer, but I don’t think so...   Whether or not nature has an ultimate, simple, unified, beautiful form is an open question, and I don’t want to say either way.

Feynman’s ideas are still completely modern. He’ll be modern for a long time to come, too: as the main theorist of the path integral formulation of QM, the first theorist of nanotechnology and quantum computing, as storyteller, as a complete master of applied epistemology for humans.

"The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life"

Joseph E. LeDoux (1998)
★★★★☆
reviewed Nov 2013

Maybe a bit dated, but thoughtful and historical enough to pull through.

His big contention’s that conscious feelings are red herrings: most emotional activity is demonstrably unconscious (though not in a Freudian way). So we should see emotions as products of several separate bodily-response systems: “the word ‘emotion’ does not refer to any thing the mind or brain really has or does”.

Getting there takes a lot of careful conceptual work, debunking old artefacts (“the limbic system”), probing the line between cognition and emotion, evolved emotional setups and enculturated expressions of them. Rather than reporting his theories as settled, he lets us in to the history, experimental setups, and argue for his theory choices. He’s well-versed in the philosophy (he cites Rorty!), is a master of fear (research), and I feel smarter coming out of it.

"The Economist Book of Obituaries"

Keith Colquhoun (2008)
★★★★☆
reviewed Oct 2023

I get very sentimental about recently dead people; so too, in a British way, does the Economist. Interestingly, about half of the people covered did terrible things. But one can get sentimental about evil too.

Heavy bias towards UK, US, and Commonwealth politicians, activists and artists. (I was delighted that they included Harsanyi and Herbert Simon, two of the most general and brilliant of all economists.) The end of the first generation of postcolonial leaders, usually brutal men. Steady successes against racism is another theme.

"Mr President,” she told him afterwards in her lilting basso profundo, “you have big balls!” She had just invited him to invade Grenada, and he had done so secretly, at once

They are quite willing to speak ill of the dead, thrillingly.

an open-minded reader might suspect Mr Derrida of charlatanism. That would be going too far, however. He was a sincere and learned man, if a confused one Gerald Ford: Some might say that he had never had enough imagination to be scared. "The Feminine Mystique” was rambling and badly written, but it identified precisely why women were miserable Mrs Vining said in a book of her experiences, Windows for the Crown Prince, that it was the emperor’s own idea that an American teacher should be brought into the closed circle of the imperial court. Presumably she believed that. She believed most things she was told.

They fall for some things - despite the unusual depth (it’s clear that Wroe did some original archival research for some of these) it is just journalism. Jeanne Calment was probably 99 at death, not 122.

Ignore Goodreads’ attribution to Colquhoun; Wroe is the main voice here.

"Making Malcolm: The Myth and Meaning of Malcolm X"

Michael Eric Dyson (2000)
★★★★☆
reviewed Nov 2013

Because we have gotten better, old radicals often seem less radical over time. The pragmatic hedonism and secular calm of Epicurus was once fanatically detested, but is now a standard worldview (it’s roughly that of the happy scientist); at one time Spinoza’s Ethics (determinism, Nature as deity, religious and political tolerance) was the wildest thing ever said in the history of the Christian world; Montesquieu’s disgust at aristocratic brutality, gross luxury and torture are commonplaces; Paine’s raging insistence on human rights and total secularism are very successful (in Europe at least); and anyone who disagrees with duBois’ or MLK’s aims is foolish or virulent.

Malcolm X has not yet been incorporated in this way - but, reading his less ranty stuff (not the early “TOO BLACK, TOO STRONG” variety) you wonder why. Might have been his influential homophobia, but that’s hardly stopped other thinkers. (This suggests it’s because we have a false, caricature of him in mind, one that believes in whites-as-devils and Fanonian purifying violence.)

Dyson does not skimp on his downsides, and tackles the thorniest idea in identity politics: that experience is absolute, and so understanding a group’s ideas and values requires group membership – that ideas have colour as people do.

"The Divine Comedy"

Dante Alighieri (2013)
★★★★☆
reviewed Jan 2013

James claims Cultural Amnesia took him 40 years to write and that this translation took 50. Lucky he saw the two keystones to the end!

I was surprised by how much of Dante’s audacious fleshing out of vague Scripture is revenge verse; standing in judgment over his historical (Alexander, Attila) and contemporary enemies (his Latin teacher). He was probably echoing Church proclamations, but still: the author as towering demigod.

After Book One you’d be forgiven for thinking that most people in hell are Italian. It’s impossible to ignore Dante’s medieval sneer in places (even though he was a big liberal by the going standard): he parades the Church’s varied idiot retributions, some of which persist, e.g. promising suicidal folk that they are going to get fucked up, or having sweet modest Epicurus roasted alive forever for holding the soul to be mortal. The final, most irredeemable circle of hell is reserved for, well, me: childless anti-nationalist atheists. Didn’t quite have the stamina, but I’ll be back.

"Blindsight (Firefall, #1)"

Peter Watts (2006)
★★★★☆
reviewed Mar 2018

There is a horror in neuroscience. It isn’t inherent: it depends on subverting your sentimental sense of self, meaning, will, introspection, spirituality; if you don’t have these, it won’t register. The horror takes unthreatening academic names like “agnosia”, “readiness potential”, “interhemispheric intrusion”, “neurotheology”, “reconstructive memory”, “Chinese room”. (Also “executive psychopath” though.)

The Blindsight ethos - Gothic, fatalist, Darwinist, one of the grandest pessimisms I’ve ever seen - is what you get when you take a traditional worldview (dualism, free will, work as what dignifies life, human exceptionalism, further-fact identity) and slam the great disenchanting science of a hundred years into it. And then add the coming century’s automation and self-modification.

Blindsight put me in a funk for a week - even though I don’t hold any of the positions it sinks. I suppose this is evidence of Watt’s talent. (“Art is a nonrational tool for persuasion: beware.”) Not the least of its achievements is maintaining its murky nihilism in a world where friendly superintelligences exist.

Because of its actual knowledge, this is weird realism, well beyond Lovecraft’s. They’re coming out of the walls: they’re coming out of our best science. The vampires (and, to an extent, the Jovian von Neumann spikefest the plot is about) detract from this deeper horror a bit. Doom; unfixable aberration; people who have warped themselves. If you find Black Mirror a bit too disturbing you might want to give this a miss. Watts even tackles “illusionism” - uniquely I think!

Is it strange that the giant lessons of the cognitive revolution are still rare in fiction? The only explanations I can think of are: simply “the Two Cultures” (i.e. novelists are ignorant); or, more discreditable, that novelists are shilling for traditional philosophy, maybe because it sells. (#1 giant lesson: we do not have introspective access to most of what our brains or minds do, on the level of information processing, action, motivation, or even emotion. You might say Freud found this out - but he didn’t use reliable methods, made huge obvious errors, and created a closed unfalsifiable loop and so did not really have knowledge.)

In contrast, Watts knows a great deal, uses it well, and takes seriously what he knows: for instance, readiness potentials are given all the emotional weight they deserve. This novel has 100 scientific papers listed in the back. The only people who cram quite as many ideas into their books as Watts are Stephenson and Banks.

His scorn for the fumbling entendres of psychoanalysis is also extremely endearing:

According to the experts of that time, multiple personalities arose spontaneously from unimaginable cauldrons of abuse — fragmentary personae offered up to suffer rapes and beatings while the child behind took to some unknowable sanctuary in the folds of the brain. It was both survival strategy and ritual self-sacrifice: powerless souls hacking themselves to pieces, offering up quivering chunks of self in the desperate hope that the vengeful gods called Mom or Dad might not be insatiable. None of it had been real, as it turned out. Or at least, none of it had been confirmed. The experts of the day had been little more than witch doctors dancing through improvised rituals: meandering free-form interviews full of leading questions and nonverbal cues, scavenger hunts through regurgitated childhoods. Sometimes a shot of lithium or haloperidol when the beads and rattles didn't work. The technology to map minds was barely off the ground; the technology to edit them was years away. So the therapists and psychiatrists poked at their victims and invented names for things they didn't understand, and argued over the shrines of Freud and Klein and the old Astrologers. Doing their very best to sound like practitioners of Science.

<blockquote>“So we’re fishing for what, exactly? Repressed memories?” “No such thing.” She grinned in toothy reassurance. “There are only memories we choose to ignore, or kinda think around, if you know what I mean.” </blockquote>

People diss the prose but I think it fits the ethos incredibly well:

We fled like frightened children with brave faces. We left a base camp behind: Jack, still miraculously functional in its vestibule; a tunnel into the haunted mansion; forlorn magnetometers left to die in the faint hope they might not. Crude pyronometers and thermographs, antique radiation-proof devices that measured the world through the flex and stretch of metal tabs and etched their findings on rolls of plastic. Glow-globes and diving bells and guide ropes strung one to another... Inside each of us, infinitesimal lacerations were turning our cells to mush. Plasma membranes sprang countless leaks. Overwhelmed repair enzymes clung desperately to shredded genes and barely delayed the inevitable. Anxious to avoid the rush, patches of my intestinal lining began flaking away before the rest of the body had a chance to die.

Siri, the sociopath pinhead, is a great character. But also often an infuriating Hollywood Rationalist, and several times he gets the last word which forces me to suspect Watts of it. Though the bit where his girlfriend is dying and he refuses to say anything because it would be cliched is clearly intentionally infuriating for the reader. So might be this stupid bit of game theory:

"Well, according to game theory, you should never tell anyone when your birthday is." "I don't follow." "It's a lose-lose proposition. There's no winning strategy." "What do you mean, strategy? It's a birthday." Look, I'd said, say you tell everyone when it is and nothing happens. It's kind of a slap in the face. Or suppose they throw you a party, Chelsea had replied. Then you don't know whether they're doing it sincerely, or if your earlier interaction just guilted them into observing an occasion they'd rather have ignored. But if you don't tell anyone, and nobody commemorates the event, there's no reason to feel badly because after all, nobody knew. And if someone does buy you a drink then you know it's sincere because nobody would go to all the trouble of finding out when your birthday is — and then celebrating it — if they didn't honestly like you. ...I could just... plot out the payoff matrix, Tell/Don't Tell along the columns, Celebrated/Not Celebrated along the rows, the unassailable black-and-white logic of cost and benefit in the squares themselves. The math was irrefutable: the one winning strategy was concealment. Only fools revealed their birthdays.

• this only follows if you have ridiculously strong error aversion, where the value of being certain about others’ opinion of you overrules the pleasantness of ordinary interaction.

He mentions (but then averts) the single most annoying error when talking about consciousness, which is that “maybe it’s better for the p-zombie aliens to take over, since they are clearly fitter than us”:

"It doesn't bug you?" Sascha was saying. "Thinking that your mind, the very thing that makes you you, is nothing but some kind of parasite?" "Forget about minds," he told her. "Say you've got a device designed to monitor — oh, cosmic rays, say. What happens when you turn its sensor around so it's not pointing at the sky anymore, but at its own guts?" He answered himself before she could: "It does what it's built to. It measures cosmic rays, even though it's not looking at them any more. It parses its own circuitry in terms of cosmic-ray metaphors, because those feel right, because they feel natural, because it can't look at things any other way. But it's the wrong metaphor. So the system misunderstands everything about itself. Maybe that's not a grand and glorious evolutionary leap after all. Maybe it's just a design flaw."

(Who cares about fitness? A world without qualia is ‘Disneyland without children’.)

His Mathesonian attempt to naturalise vampires is kinda clever (they are a subspecies of cannibal savants), and the exemplar vamp Jukka is one of the best characters in the book - but overall their presence is distracting and off-piste; the right-angles epilepsy thing, the revived-by-corporate-greed schtick, more generally holding that corporate culture is putting macroscopic selection pressure to psychopathic nonsentience: all these things jolt me out of his otherwise well-built world.

Besides the vampires, there are a few more over-the-top ughs. His whole theme of technology as inherently dehumanising, Black Mirror / Event Horizon is just as cherry-picked and annoying as it always is. The idea that consciousness is unadaptive, and so a one-off aberration in a universe of blind replicators - which steamrolls all objections in the novel - is not obviously true. But it is certainly true either way that our society is currently unadaptive, in the sense of not maximising reproduction. (And thank god for that.)

Wrenching but admirable. Great in spite of itself. For the nonangsty, post-dualist, post-further-fact version read Hanson and Simler instead.

[Free! here]

"Beggars in Spain (Sleepless, #1)"

Nancy Kress (2004)
★★★★☆
reviewed Jan 2020

Big, moving dynasty novel about a future class war. Elitism vs racism, individualism vs collectivism, negative freedom vs positive freedom, UBI and/or dignity. Kress’ stated goal is to bring together Rand’s ideal and Le Guin’s (ambiguous) ideal and see how they spark off each other, their repulsion dance.

The first two books seem simple: a good basic dramatisation of the excellence vs equality problem. But stick with it, dialectic comes. Kress is much better at inhabiting other views than Rand, but not quite as good as Le Guin (who surprised me with how ambivalent, careful and detached her books can be, when her essays are so often blunt and denunciatory). Unlike them, Kress allows her ubermenschen to be irrational, as when the Sleepless fall into stupid binary demonisation of the majority outgroup. The Sanctuary bunch start as Objectivists, but are twisted by Jennifer's wealth and terrorism into the worst totalitarian collectivism - one without even pity for misfortune.

She climbs inside libertarianism, productivism, Objectivism, elitism - half of the protagonists are deeply, unreflectively into these ideologies for half the book. Leisha finds one fatal flaw with them - society is not a linear series of contracts but a chaotic informal web of micro-contracts and unthinking mutual structuration, with a thin layer of formal voluntary contracts on top.

She remembered the day she had realized that [Objectivist] economics were not large enough. Their stress on individual excellence left out too many phenomena, too many people: those who had no excellence and never would. The beggars, who nonetheless had definite if obscure roles to play in the way the world ran. They were like parasites on a mammal that torment it to a scratching frenzy that draws blood, but whose eggs serve as food for other insects that feed yet others who fatten the birds that are prey for the rodents the tormented mammal eats. A bloody ecology of trade, replacing the linear Yagaiist contracts occurring in a vacuum. The ecology was large enough to take Sleepers and Sleepless, producers and beggars, the excellent and the mediocre and the seemingly worthless. And what kept the ecology functioning was the law.

Miranda and the supers find another, which is that fortune can mock anyone regardless of momentary strength or weakness.

Tony, Leisha said silently, there are no permanent beggars in Spain. Or anywhere else. The beggar you give a dollar to today might change the world tomorrow. Or become father to the man who will. Or grandfather, or great-grandfather. There is no stable ecology of trade, as I thought once, when I was very young. There is no stable anything, much less stagnant anything, given enough time. And no nonproductive anything, either. Beggars are only gene lines temporarily between communities.

The hyper-precocious kids are about as off-putting as those in Ender’s Game. I wish she had only given the Sleepless more time than the unmodified - not superintelligence and immortality to boot. This would still be enough to create the tension the plot needs, they’d just grow with a lower exponent, maybe taking 150 rather than 40 years.

Everyone in this book, plus maybe Kress herself, are in serious need of the first lesson of first year economics, comparative advantage. This says, roughly, that it actually isn’t a fatal problem if someone is better than you at every different economic task: they still have limited time, so they can still gain from trading with you (you each produce the thing you’re best at making then swap some). This understates the problem with launching your entire city population into space, which is that you've just made transactions costs a thousand times more expensive (Y-energy or no). It would be so hard to make Sanctuary profitable, and yet it's implied to be about the GDP of the entire Decadent 20% Productive USA.

Kress portrays a couple of neglected ideologies. One, which determines just as much of world events as liberalism or socialism, has only the ugly name ‘productivism’ (or maybe also the misleading name ‘workaholism’). Leisha is a classic example. On worrying that her elderly stepmother might be just farting around the house:

Leisha had felt a palpable relief, like a small pop in her chest, when she saw the terminal and medical journals in Susan’s office.

On her relationship trouble:

“We’re fine, Susan. We work together really well. That’s what really matters, after all.”

You can laugh at someone missing the point of life so much, but you should consider how much of what you value depends on people like this. And, when summarised into the long-term growth rate, how much of the vast potential of the future does. (Ada Palmer covers this exact dynamic, as the romantic “vocateurs”, people of vocation.) And another ideology neglected in fiction: Leisha is a rare instance of “bleeding-heart libertarianism” (another ugly name).

• Kress:<blockquote>Genetic engineering is becoming a reality, one that many people are not ready to acknowledge, let alone allow. But you cannot put the genie back in the bottle. We know how to manipulate the human genome and so, inevitably, we will. The two sequels to Beggars in Spain, Beggars and Choosers and Beggars Ride, explore that issue in as much detail as I could invent. Even so, I didn’t come close to covering the excitement, the changes, the shock, and the controversy that genetic engineering will bring in the coming decades. I just wish that I could stick around for a hundred years or so to see it—and to write about it.

</blockquote>

Nah mate not a hundred years; try thirty.

• There are eventually 4 classes: Livers (the idle cosseted underclass), Donkeys (the unmodified workers, the elite Sleepers), Norm Sleepless and the Super Sleepless. Ordered pair of ordered pairs.

• One key to the conflicts is that people have grown used to certain ancient inequalities of degree, but new or qualitative ones should awake all of our envy and rage

Beautiful or brainy children might encounter natural envy, but usually not virulent hatred. They were not viewed as a different race, one endlessly conspiring at power, endlessly controlling behind the scenes, endlessly feared and scorned. The Sleepless,

• Most of the big interventions in the book fail. Yagai’s gift to the US enables its slide into total indolence and short-termist hedonism. Hawke’s nasty uprising for dignified labour morphs into shallow hedonistic Idiocracy, voting for more party money instead of doing things.

• Sanctuary is grandly sick, a monarchy masquerading as half a democracy. (It is not quite as sick and complete as the totalitarianism in Vinge’s A Deepness in the Sky.) The mad monarch, Jennifer is a blank evil cipher for almost the whole book, eventually cracking during the final confrontation.

This… child, this girl who had never been spat upon because she was Sleepless… never locked in a room by a mother who was putrid with jealousy of a beauty her daughter would never lose, even as the mother’s beauty was inexorably fading… never locked in a cell away from her children… never betrayed by a husband who hated his own sleeplessness… this spoiled and pampered child who had been given everything was attempting to thwart her, Jennifer Sharifi, who had brought Sanctuary into its very being by the force of her own will.

The children looked at their shoes. They were afraid of her, Jennifer saw. That was not bad; fear was only the ancient word for respect.

She’s a paranoid idiot, or rather mindkilled by fear and the dread ruthlessness of a survivor. Witness her adhoc patching of the edge cases of personhood on Sanctuary, her silly fixation on mere sleep and mere relative productivity, which is her downfall. And: What good outcome could there have been from her bioterrorist secession? She’s an effective villain despite her inertness because she’s so good at manipulating smart well-meaning people into vice. The horror of sophistry.

She has a right to her life, whatever it is now!” Jennifer said, “The real question is, do we have the right to sacrifice someone else’s life to the care of hers?”

</spoiler>

• Libertarianism could be a lovely thing, for some other species. It builds a philosophy of life from a completely different direction than mine: top-down, from grand general ideas to morals and behaviour. (Has anyone teased them for having a top-down philosophy which demands the abolition of top-down forces?) The bottom-up approach, missing from this book, is to instead move from experiences, which motivate morals and nonmorals just by you understanding what it is like to experience them. Any subject of experience deserves good; the legal and political implications are distantly contingent on this, and vary massively from time to time as a result. Productivity is good when it leads to good lives: the enlightened definition of ‘productive’ is whatever does this. If pushpin or cartoons give you pleasure, they’re productive. It just happens that there is generally currently millions of times more productive things to do. (The Livers are aesthetically repugnant to me, but eh their lives are better than most.) This isn’t as vacuous as it sounds: consider the remarkable goodness of (most of) Jeremy Bentham’s beliefs, in a time of universal bigotry. We got better, but we’re still not optimising for good vibes.

• “Community” is mostly malign here: the zero-sum nativism of We-Sleep, the incoherent defensive supremacism of Sanctuary. The idea does have a black heart: “us, not them”, but there are better, nicer examples. (I suppose the Supers are the steelman.) The one grace of the instances here is separatism: they don’t initially demand mutilation or submission, just space for their difference. We-Sleep is also a pretty weak exemplar for socialism.

“Wake up, Jordan. No social movement has ever progressed without emphasizing division, and doing that means stirring up hate. The American revolution, abolitionism, unionization, civil rights—” “That wasn’t—” “At least we didn’t invent this particular division—the Sleepless did. Feminism, gay rights, Dole franchisement—”

• The depiction of the supers’ thought process is good and novel - they build and collaborate on “strings”, complicated visual argumentation models, replacing natural language.

• What is Kress’ view? It’s not that good a question, given that she’s trying to do dialectic between ideologies, and does it pretty well. But if we let Leisha’s mature view stand in, there are some authorial-sounding notes

And throughout it all, the United States: rich, prosperous, myopic, magnificent in aggregate and petty in specifics, unwilling — always, always — to accord mass respect to the mind. To good fortune, to luck, to rugged individualism, to faith in God, to patriotism, to beauty, to spunk or pluck or grit or git, but never to complex intelligence and complex thought. It wasn’t sleeplessness that had caused all the rioting; it was thought and its twin consequences, change and challenge.

Leisha settles on the idea that it is impossible to reconcile solidarity and high-variance freedom, that the attempt to reconcile them drove Jennifer and the US mad.

When individuals are free to become anything at all, some will become geniuses and some will become resentful beggars. Some will benefit themselves and their communities, and others will benefit no one and just loot whatever they can. Equality disappears. You can’t have both equality and the freedom to pursue individual excellence.

The book’s answer is to not take either horn, to just juggle the contradiction forever. I don’t see the dilemma really; you just separate moral worth from ability, then automate the economy: boom, equality and freedom.

Maybe five stars on re-read, though the prose might be a bit flat for that (aside from a couple of moving passages, all quoted above) and maybe the dialectic is too heavy-handed.

How does it do as Serious science fiction?

Social development: Strong. The various caste systems that spring up are believable - for instance the Liver/Donkey one, where the donkeys downplay their own work and set up society as a circus, to short-circuit the questions of employment, dignity, status, revolution. Her nativists are very plausible, though they speak less about “natural life” than I expect ours to (the Sleepers seem happy with any genetic modification besides sleeplessness). The elitism of the Sleepless is just a stronger form of the sort already held by certain merely slightly more productive conservatives. Much of the economics is questionable though, particularly the C21st self-sufficient space city of 80,000(?).

Software development: Good, though high-level even by fiction’s standards. The plot hangs on software (including patent databases), though these are mostly reduced to relative hacking ability. Only Vinge is better.

Actual Science: Some very sketchy genetics at the heart of the plot but not much. It’s not pure magic - she puts realistically heavy limits on the genetic engineering of adults - but the rest is just assumed.

"The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia"

Ursula K. Le Guin (1994)
★★★★☆
reviewed Mar 2018

Pompous. Lots of tragic ellipsis. A rare misstep of style, even though the world and its issues are still great, and the progress of a great mind burgeoning amongst strict collectivism is done well. It reads like a debut novel or a draft - good but rough. I suppose I will hail her versatility anyway.

Her characteristic ambiguity and fairness are still here though. The sexist, rankist, capitalist (“propertarian”) Urrasites are still inventive, tasteful, and ambitious; the anarchist, egalitarian, promiscuous Odonians are still given to egotism, tribalism and petty brutality. They can be relied on, like all of us to tolerate anything except the outgroup:

'You can only crush [ideas] by ignoring them. By refusing to think — refusing to change. And that's precisely what our society is doing! Sabul uses you where he can, and where he can't, he prevents you from publishing, from teaching, even from working. Right? In other words he has power over you. Where does he get it from? Not from vested authority, there isn't any. Not from intellectual excellence, he hasn't any. He gets it from the innate cowardice of the average human mind. Public opinion! That's the power structure he's part of, and knows how to use. The unadmitted, inadmissible government that rules Odonian society by stifling the individual mind.' Shevek leaned his hands on the window sill, looking through the dim reflections on the pane into the darkness outside. He said at last 'Crazy talk, Dap.' 'No, brother, I’m sane. What drives people crazy is trying to live outside reality. Reality is terrible. It can kill you. Given time, it certainly will kill you. But it’s the lies that make you want to kill yourself.' Shevek turned around to face him. 'But you can’t seriously talk of a government, here!' 'Tomar’s Definition: ‘Government: the legal use of power to maintain and extend power.’ Replace ‘legal’ with ‘customary’... Shev, did you ever think that what the analogic mode calls ‘disease,’ social disaffection, discontent, alienation, that this might analogically also be called pain – what you meant when you talked about pain, suffering? And that, like pain, it serves a function in the organism?... I speak of spiritual suffering! Of people seeing their talent, their work, their lives wasted. Of good minds submitting to stupid ones. Of strength and courage strangled by envy, greed for power, fear of change. Change is freedom, change is life – is anything more basic to Odonian thought than that? But nothing changes any more! ... On Urras they have government by the minority. Here we have government by the majority. But it is government!'

I don’t think her Anarres economy would work even as well as it is depicted as doing, but she has at least thought about it (admits that there would need to be a centralised computer, admits all kinds of shortages). This is not polemic, then; it just doesn’t manage her usual grace when dealing with huge dilemmas. A great book by anyone else.

"The View from the Ground"

Martha Gellhorn (1988)
★★★★☆
reviewed Sep 2016

My favourite reporter; a great, compulsive, austere, compassionate writer. Better than Fermor when happy, better than Orwell when irate. I am always interested in what she has to say about literally anything: this edition covers her peacetime reporting, which is to say her poverty-and-rubble-reconstruction reporting: Great Depression Deep South; the arts in Communist Poland; the difficult path to democracy in Spain; Thatcher and the miners (…) She ranges over the whole sad half-century, bringing her maternal, judgmental, sardonic history to bear on what could otherwise have been ordinary journalism. Chastises communists and capitalists, liars, mercenaries and torturers of whatever justification. Never mentions her gender; she never let anyone stop her for any reason, let alone that.

Her natural, common-sense compassion and fairness only cracks when it comes to Palestine; she contorts herself terribly in the face of shocking Nasserian anti-Semitism. It’s not a whitewash; she talks to dozens of Palestinians in Jordan and Gaza, covers the Irgun and the bulldozers. But she is totally defensive about the Balfour Declaration and the Six Day War; is unusually eager to show up the many fibs of the Palestinian refugees (: confirmation bias); and excludes their self-determination alone among the nations of the earth:

Arafat has had enough protection money from the oil Arabs to finance the education of two generations of young Palestinians, a chance to rise beyond the poverty of the camps into a good self-reliant life. Instead he has recruited two generations for training only in the use of guns and plastique, and insisted on a futile goal: Palestine for the Palestinians... If I had been twenty years younger, I would have got myself to Vietnam somehow and joined the Vietcong, though handicapped by my height. Not much use for digging tunnels. Vietnam for the Vietnamese. Afghanistan for the Afghans. El Salvador for the Salvadorans. Nicaragua for the Nicaraguans. The inherent right of all peoples to self-determination. If they need civil war to determine how they shall be governed, that is their business and nobody else's.

How many deep inconsistencies are we allowed, before we stop being great? I don’t know exactly, but more than one.

"A Few Quick Ones (Jeeves, #11.5)"

P.G. Wodehouse (2009)
★★★★☆
reviewed Aug 2019

What else can you read one line of and feel this happy?

In these disturbed days in which we live, it has probably occurred to all thinking men that something drastic ought to be done about aunts.

"The whimsical way she put it was that a woman who married a man my size ran a serious risk of being arrested for bigamy."

"Beast and Man. Routledge. 2002."

Mary Midgley (2002)
★★★★☆
reviewed Apr 2017

I have a bad habit when reading philosophy; I sometimes get deeply impressed by a book, so that it changes my view, but then forget that I ever thought otherwise. Midgley is so good I am prevented from this: I know I couldn’t have come up with that.

This is her engaging with evolutionary biology and ethology, as they speak to the old ancient questions. Enormous thoughts, all expressed with perfect wryness and tact. I get the same feeling of mental grinding from Midgley as I do from Wittgenstein or Anscombe - too dense with thought to skim - but Midgley is actually readable.

Full review, anatomising the arguments, forthcoming.

"House of Cards : Psychology and Psychotherapy Built on Myth"

Robyn M. Dawes (1996)
★★★★☆
reviewed Sep 2023

Fun summary of research (up to the early 90s) about the uselessness of psychological training, experience, and licencing. (But not the uselessness of talk therapy, importantly. You just don’t need an expensive professional.)

Psychotherapy works overall in reducing psychologically painful and often debilitating symptoms. The reasons it works are unclear, because entirely different approaches may work equally well for the same problem or set of problems. Recovery is a base rate phenomenon... we can do little better than by predicting from the overall rate of recovery; we have no insight into exactly why some people get better while others don’t... We also know that the credentials and experience of the psychotherapists are unrelated to patient outcomes, based on well over five hundred scientific studies of psychotherapy outcome... psychotherapy works due to “nonspecific effects”... those that result from “the quality of the relationship” between client and therapist. This idea is supported by the finding that good psychotherapists tend to be empathetic, trustworthy, and warm... given that some therapies that are not based on relationship variables (like some behavior modification techniques) are successful, the interpretation that their success too must be based on some unevaluated quality of relationship remains speculative... The implicit message is that taking up arms against troubles does some good psychologically even if it does not fully “by opposing end them.” When people enter therapy they are making a choice to deal with their problems rather than simply feel overwhelmed by them. professional psychologists claim to be able to make predictions about individuals that transcend predictions about “people in general” or about various categories of people... In no comparison was the clinical prediction superior to the statistical prediction. In predicting academic performance, for example, a simple linear weighting of high school rank and aptitude test scores outperformed the judgments of admissions officers in several colleges. In predicting the success of electroshock therapy, a weighting of marital status, length of psychotic distress, and a rating of the patient’s “insight” into his or her condition outperformed one hospital’s medical and psychological staff members. In predicting criminal recidivism in several settings, past criminal and prison record outperformed expert criminologists... In one study, Goldberg and Len Rorer even presented professionals with the results of the statistical formula to help them in their judgment, but they did worse than the formula itself... the inability to predict implies a lack of understanding—not because understanding and prediction are synonymous but because a claim to understanding implies an ability to predict. Evaluating the efficacy of psychotherapy has led us to conclude that professional psychologists are no better psychotherapists than anyone else with minimal training—sometimes than those without any training at all; the professionals are merely more expensive. Moreover, in predicting what people will do, clinicians are worse than statistical formulas, and statistical formulas are a lot less expensive

I really liked Chapter 5, on the social costs of overestimating therapists relative to “paraprofessionals” (just empathetic people and coaches). Therapy deadweight loss is still mainly an American problem - compare the 21% of Americans in therapy to the ~2% of Brits (another 2% on waiting lists and maybe 2% private though). British therapy is said to be “unregulated” (but actually that just means that the mandatory training is about halved); as a result Americans pay about twice as much per session. It seems to add up to ~1% of GDP.

I’m interested in whether anything has changed in 30 years. People say the word “evidence-based” now, for instance. CBT took over in this time period, and is more scientific than the old quack schools. Rorschach blots are dead, lobotomies are out, and I hear less about polygraphs and people naively inducing false memories for court testimonies. But the profession is much larger now, and so much more powerful and able to defend its monopoly profits and mythologise itself.

Rather than admit that training is ineffective, this 2009 review rejects RCTs; this 2019 one rejects ANOVA.

"Keeping On Keeping On"

Alan Bennett (2016)
★★★★☆
reviewed Dec 2016

Diaries in the lee of becoming actually famous. I love him dearly and bolted all 700pp in a couple of days. General sense of him reaping decades of quiet acclaim: he bumps into well-wishers and heavy-hitters (Stoppard, Dench, MacKellen) every week or so.

One of the reasons I love him is that I had a very similar adolescence to his. He remains reserved, kind though grumpy:

Being in love unhappily singled you out, I thought, it drafted you into an aristocracy. It was more than just a badge of being gay but rather an ordeal you were called upon to undergo if only to transcend it and reach a sublimity denied to other mortals. In the evening to the New York Public Library where I am to be made a Library Lion... There are half a dozen of us being lionised and we are lined up and photographed and made much of before going upstairs to a magnificent supper, getting home thoroughly knackered around 11. How people lead a social life is beyond me. I clung far too long to the notion that shyness was a virtue and not, as I came too late to see, a bore.

He still feels outside of things, for all his reminiscences of dinner with Harold Wilson or Liz Taylor perching on his knee. On winning a Tony for Best Play aged 72:

I am thrust blinking on to a stage facing a battery of lights while questions come out of the darkness, the best of which is: ‘Do you think this award will kick-start your career?'

Talks so much about 50s Yorkshire. (People in general seem to think about their childhoods more than I do. (or just writers?)) I suppose he is taken to be a twee writer for this nostalgia, along with his cuddly speaking voice. But he simply isn’t twee - he is the author of several of the finest nihilist soliloquoys in English literature. You may know the ignorance of people by their use of this stereotype.

He is touchingly agitated by British politics, in the exact way I used to be. His protests are unprogrammatic, based simply on the meanness or indignity or cowardice of the policy at hand, whether it’s a Labour or Tory hand;

I wanted a Labour government so that I could stop thinking about politics, knowing that the nation’s affairs were in the hands of a party which, even if it was often foolish, was at least well-intentioned. Now we have another decade of the self-interested and the self-seeking, ready to sell off what’s left of our liberal institutions and loot the rest to their own advantage. It’s not a government of the nation but a government of half the nation, a true legacy of Mrs Thatcher... I’ve always thought that this was a pretty fair description of that blend of backward-looking radicalism and conservative socialism which does duty for my political views. I am an old modernian... [Over the past 30 years] one has only had to stand still to become a radical.

With the fading of the old loud left, and the abject failure of the sneering theoretical sort, unpretentious justice of this sort might motivate people, even/especially opportunist Brexiters. So to the defence of public libraries, the unprecedented conviction of policemen who murder, the provision of good to all.

[Data #1, Values #3, Thinking #3]

"Altered Carbon (Takeshi Kovacs, #1)"

Richard K. Morgan (2018)
★★★★☆
reviewed Dec 2012

Class act: cyberpunk without cheap gothic neon and lolspeak; noir without cartoonish conventions. A meditation on identity and consent via sex and violence. Genuinely. The Scene: Consciousness can be up- and downloaded. In this world, if you are rich enough, you do not die. If you’re richer than that, you get uploaded into a young clone of yourself - otherwise you take whatever marginalised corpse is going and adjust your sense of self to fit.

He picks out implications brilliantly (e.g. what happens to celebrity culture?). The inevitable neologisms are excellent, intensely suggestive of the new culture’s inner life: death is just “storage”; bodies are just “sleeves” and to be reincarnated is to be “sleeved”; a plasma gun is a “sunjet”. Murder is just “organic damage”. Catholics are (once again) the world’s underclass - unable to travel interstellar because it involves casual storage (suicide) and resleeving (heresy), and killed with near-impunity because they alone cannot testify at their own murder trials. Cartoonish moments: our anti-hero Takeshi Kovacs is attacked or apprehended 7times in the first 150 pages.) People transition gender with regularity. Morgan makes a bold essentialist statement, which is somewhat backed-up:

To be a woman was a sensory experience beyond the male... To a man, skin was a barrier. To a woman it was an organ of contact. That had its disadvantages</span>.

(Kovacs is tortured, horrifically, as a woman.) Advertising can be beamed obtrusively into your mind. The UN has become a Shady Galactic Empire. It is strongly suggested - not least by our trained-psychopath protagonist - that this transhuman society is more psychopathic, owing to the lower stakes of violence, injury, and taboo-breaking. Gritty but not just gratuitous. Better than Gibson.

"Letters of Note: An Eclectic Collection of Correspondence Deserving of a Wider Audience"

Shaun Usher (2013)
★★★★☆
reviewed Jul 2018

Wonderful

"A Deepness in the Sky"

Vernor Vinge (2000)
★★★★☆
reviewed Sep 2018

A beautiful portrait of pragmatism vs idealism, colonialism and collaboration, surveillance culture vs everything, the possibility of deep translation, the beauty and gaucheness of trade, and the ultimate fate of civilisations.

Programming went back to the beginning of time. It was a little like the midden out back of his father's castle… There were programs here written five thousand years ago, before Humankind ever left Earth. The wonder of it — the horror of it… down at the very bottom of it was a little program that ran a counter. Second by second, the Qeng Ho counted from the instant that a human had first set foot on Old Earth’s moon. But if you looked at it still more closely… the starting instant was actually about fifteen million seconds later, the 0-second of one of Humankind’s first computer operating systems… “We should rewrite it all,” said Pham. “It’s been done,” said Sura. “It’s been tried,” corrected Bret…“You and a thousand friends would have to work for a century or so to reproduce it… And guess what—even if you did, by the time you finished, you’d have your own set of inconsistencies...”

Vinge’s great skill is in drawing out sick tragic tension for hundreds of pages, driving the reader on to ever more complex injustices, until… The smooth-talking fascist antagonists are a bit too simple, a bit Harkonnen; their mind-raping slavery, their inversion of justice by lying perfectly, their flat-toned planning of atrocities:

"At which time, we'll feed them the story of our noble effort to limit the genocide." Ritser smiled, intrigued by the challenge. "I like it."

You are made to wait 500 pages for a comeuppance. The “Focused”, the mindwiped slaves are extremely creepy; weaponised savants (see Ada Palmer’s set-sets for a less straightforward treatment of human computers).

Pham Nuwen, the great programmer-statesman, is far more interesting here than in the first book. He stands out in a large cast of interesting characters, all laying down schemes and intrigues with at minimum 20 years until payoff (at maximum 2000 years). Not ordinary, but not unrealistic; there have been dozens like him, possessed of or by the force that drives Napoleon off his island, Washington over the river, Alexander everywhere. He is a psychopath:

The [armed fascists] might try to chase him around in here. That would be fun; Nau's goons would find just how dangerous their tunnels had become...

The evolutionary role of such people - both the fearless hero, Nuwen, and the bloodthirsty predator, Nau - is not handled explicitly, but Pham is held up as a paragon.

The arachnid aliens are much better than the hivehounds of the last book: Vinge and his translator characters’ anthropomorphisations (or, rather, personalisations) are successful. Though maybe I’m just biased because the Spiders are shown going through their Information Revolution rather than their Pre-Renaissance period. It shows the deep connection between lack of economic growth, lack of intellectual growth and lack of social progress. The great scientist Sherkaner is also the one to challenge his society’s sexual oppression. (“Either way, the cycles were shattered forever”) The “counterlurk” is the Enlightenment. It’s an exquisite portrait of the great promise and risk of a technological society; you get the end of hunger and disease, you get spaceflight, but you also get nuclear standoffs.

There are wonderful symmetries between the Spiders and humans: they each have odd, distended sleep cycles (the humans going into cryogenic suspension most of the time, the Spiders hibernating centuries until the sun reignites). There’s also the Sura/Pham, Qiwi / Ezr, and Victory/Sherkaner pairings, the actual beauty of complementing another, of power couples with aims beyond their own power.

The title looks clumsy but isn’t: it refers to a very large thought, that decentralising a system is the only way to make it last; that space is not only a cold and hostile place, it is also the way to break the terrible forces that might work against mere interplanetary civilisations:

Pham would get their localizers in return for decent medical science. Both sides would benefit enormously. Magnate Larson would live a few extra centuries. If he was lucky, the current cycle of his civilization would outlive him. But a thousand years from now, when Larson was dust, when his civilization had fallen as the planetbound inevitably did—a thousand years from now, Pham and the Qeng Ho would still be flying between the stars. And they would still have the Larson localizers... "If you accept the trade I'm hoping for, you will live just as many years as I. But I am Qeng Ho. I sleep decades between the stars. You Customer civilizations are ephemera to us."

One unintentional detail: the “huds” that all the human characters depend are I think just Google Glass.

Stayed up late to finish it. Maybe 5/5, will re-read in a while and see.

How does it do as Serious science fiction?

Social development: all three societies depicted are very distinct and have believable economies, genderings, . The Qeng Ho - the empire without a capital, the force without an army - are a lovely depiction of the humanistic and progressive side of trade. The Emergents are maybe a little too simple, too feudal and dastardly.

Software development: Fantastic. Central to the plot (titanic cruft as feature), with a subtle twist on the horror of legacy systems: an entire multi-planet civilisation is shown collapsing because its software is too fucking crufty to live. (That might sound ridiculous, but I promise you I see this story in miniature everywhere at my work.) No one does it better.

Actual Science: Lots, with a breathless romp through all of C20th physics and engineering - though there’s also a magic antigrav ore.

"Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling With D.H. Lawrence"

Geoff Dyer (1999)
★★★★☆
reviewed Mar 2017

A book about an unwritten book about a writer I don’t like much. And it’s amazing! Not a study of Lawrence, a study of trying to write when you lack an iron will. So also a study of all work, so a study of the hard generation of value, and so, despite appearances, a study of what matters.

The prose is circuitous, cantatory, shaggy-dog, but never dull:

Oxford! Now if there is one place on earth where you cannot, where it is physically impossible to write a book about Lawrence it is here, in Oxford. You could write a book about plenty of writers in Oxford: Hardy, or Joyce even — people are probably doing just that, even now, dozens of them — but not Lawrence. If there is one person you cannot write a book about here, in Oxford, it is Lawrence. So I have made doubly sure that there is no chance of my finishing my study of Lawrence: he is the one person you cannot write about here, in Oxford; and Oxford is the one place where you cannot write about Lawrence. When I say you can’t possibly write a book about Lawrence in Oxford that is not to be taken too literally. At this moment, within a few miles of my flat, dozens of people are probably writing books about Lawrence. That tapping I can hear through my open window is probably someone writing a book or a thesis or preparing a lecture, or, at the very least, doing an essay on D. H. Lawrence. It can be done. It can be done — but it can’t be done, it shouldn’t be done. You can’t write a half-decent book about Lawrence in Oxford, can’t write any kind of book about Lawrence without betraying him totally. By doing so you immediately disqualify yourself, render yourself ineligible. It is like spitting on his grave.

For a while I amused myself by seeing how many consecutive sentences used the same phrase, in a running stitch motif. He is playing a character, but like Rob Brydon does: only slightly heightened.

One long stream of scenes, unthemed, unbracketed. He is the critic I would have hoped to be: sceptical of the novel, sceptical of the spiritual pretensions of artists, sceptical of children, sceptical of travel and sceptical of home, sceptical of self. He is free to admit his boredom and his joy, unlike the academic critics he often erupts against. Here is the key passage (not that you can trust him to cleave to it twenty years or minutes on):

Hearing that I was ‘working on Lawrence’, an acquaintance lent me a book he thought I might find interesting: A Longman Critical Reader on Lawrence, edited by Peter Widdowson. I glanced at the contents page: old Eagleton was there, of course, together with some other state-of-the-fart theorists: Lydia Blanchard on ‘Lawrence, Foucault and the Language of Sexuality’ (in the section on ‘Gender, Sexuality, Feminism’), Daniel J. Schneider on ‘Alternatives to Logocentrism in D. H. Lawrence’ (in the section featuring ‘Post-Structuralist Turns’). I could feel myself getting angry and then I flicked through the introductory essay on ‘Radical Indeterminacy: a post-modern Lawrence’ and became angrier still. How could it have happened? How could these people with no feeling for literature have ended up teaching it, writing about it? I should have stopped there, should have avoided looking at any more, but I didn’t because telling myself to stop always has the effect of urging me on. Instead, I kept looking at this group of wankers huddled in a circle, backs turned to the world so that no one would see them pulling each other off. Oh, it was too much, it was too stupid. I threw the book across the room and then I tried to tear it up but it was too resilient. By now I was blazing mad... I burned it in self-defence. It was the book or me - writing like that kills everything it touches. That is the hallmark of academic criticism: it kills everything it touches. Walk around a university campus and there is an almost palpable smell of death about the place because hundreds of academics are busy killing everything they touch. I recently met an academic who said that he taught German literature. I was aghast: to think, this man who had been in universities all his life was teaching Rilke. Rilke! Oh, it was too much to bear. You don’t teach Rilke, I wanted to say, you kill Rilke! You turn him to dust and then you go off to conferences where dozens of other academic-morticians gather with the express intention of killing Rilke and turning him to dust. Then, as part of the cover-up, the conference papers are published, the dust is embalmed and before you know it literature is a vast graveyard of dust, a dustyard of graves. I was beside myself with indignation. I wanted to maim and harm this polite, well-meaning academic who, for all I knew, was a brilliant teacher who had turned on generations of students to the Duino Elegies. Still, I thought to myself the following morning when I had calmed down, the general point stands: how can you know anything about literature if all you’ve done is read books? Now, criticism is an integral part of the literary tradition and academics can sometimes write excellent works of criticism but these are exceptions - the vast majority, the overwhelming majority of books by academics, especially books like that Longman Reader are a crime against literature.

The final passage hits you over the head with what you have certainly already worked out, but it is still very powerful. Dyer is inspiring, pure nevertheless:

One way or another we all have to write our studies of D. H. Lawrence. Even if they will never be published, even if we will never complete them, even if all we are left with after years and years of effort is an unfinished, unfinishable record of how we failed to live up to our own earlier ambitions, still we all have to try to make some progress with our books about D. H. Lawrence. The world over, from Taos to Taormina, from the places we have visited to countries we will never set foot in, the best we can do is to try to make some progress with our studies of D. H. Lawrence.

"Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies"

Nick Bostrom (2014)
★★★★☆
reviewed Jun 2018

Like a lot of great philosophy, Superintelligence acts as a space elevator: you make many small, reasonable, careful movements - and you suddenly find yourself in outer space, home comforts far below. It is more rigorous about a topic which doesn’t exist than you would think possible.

I didn’t find it hard to read, but I have been marinating in tech rationalism for a few years and have absorbed much of Bostrom secondhand so YMMV.

I loved this:

Many of the points made in this book are probably wrong. It is also likely that there are considerations of critical importance that I fail to take into account, thereby invalidating some or all of my conclusions. I have gone to some length to indicate nuances and degrees of uncertainty throughout the text — encumbering it with an unsightly smudge of “possibly,” “might,” “may,” “could well,” “it seems,” “probably,” “very likely,” “almost certainly.” Each qualifier has been placed where it is carefully and deliberately. Yet these topical applications of epistemic modesty are not enough; they must be supplemented here by a systemic admission of uncertainty and fallibility. This is not false modesty: for while I believe that my book is likely to be seriously wrong and misleading, I think that the alternative views that have been presented in the literature are substantially worse - including the default view, according to which we can for the time being reasonably ignore the prospect of superintelligence.

Bostrom introduces dozens of neologisms and many arguments. Here is the main scary apriori one though:

1. Just being intelligent doesn't imply being benign; intelligence and goals can be independent. (the orthogonality thesis.) 2. Any agent which seeks resources and lacks explicit moral programming would default to dangerous behaviour. You are made of things it can use; hate is superfluous. (Instrumental convergence.) 3. It is conceivable that AIs might gain capability very rapidly through recursive self-improvement. (Non-negligible possibility of a hard takeoff.) 4. Since AIs will not be automatically nice, would by default do harmful things, and could obtain a lot of power very quickly*, AI safety is morally significant, deserving public funding, serious research, and international scrutiny.

Of far broader interest than its title (and that argument) might suggest to you. In particular, it is the best introduction I’ve seen to the new, shining decision sciences - an undervalued reinterpretation of old, vague ideas which, until recently, you only got to see if you read statistics, and economics, and the crunchier side of psychology. It is also a history of humanity, a thoughtful treatment of psychometrics v genetics, and a rare objective estimate of the worth of large organisations, past and future.

Superintelligence’s main purpose is moral: he wants us to worry and act urgently about hypotheticals; given this rhetorical burden, his tone too is a triumph.

For a child with an undetonated bomb in its hands, a sensible thing to do would be to put it down gently, quickly back out of the room, and contact the nearest adult. Yet what we have here is not one child but many, each with access to an independent trigger mechanism. The chances that we will all find the sense to put down the dangerous stuff seem almost negligible. Some little idiot is bound to press the ignite button just to see what happens. Nor can we attain safety by running away, for the blast of an intelligence explosion would bring down the firmament. Nor is there a grown-up in sight... This is not a prescription of fanaticism. The intelligence explosion might still be many decades off in the future. Moreover, the challenge we face is, in part, to hold on to our humanity: to maintain our groundedness, common sense, and goodhumored decency even in the teeth of this most unnatural and inhuman problem. We need to bring all human resourcefulness to bear on its solution.

I don’t donate to AI safety orgs, despite caring about the best way to improve the world and despite having no argument against it better than “that’s not how software has worked so far” and despite the concern of smart experts. This sober, kindly book made me realise this was more to do with fear of sneering than noble scepticism or empathy.

[EDIT 2019: Reader, I married this cause.]

* People sometimes choke on this point, but note that the first intelligence to obtain half a billion dollars virtually, anonymously, purely via mastery of maths occurred... just now. Robin Hanson chokes eloquently here and for god's sake let's hope he's right.

"Six Poets: Hardy to Larkin: An Anthology"

Alan Bennett (2015)
★★★★☆
reviewed Sep 2017

Hardy, Housman, Auden, Betjeman, Larkin, MacNeice: all men who tended to emphasise the tragic. (You think Betjeman didn’t, but you might be confusing his writing, full of loss and pettiness, with his foppy, daffy TV persona.)

Wonderful, this - parallel poems and commentaries - covering the famous gobbets dutifully, but also picking excerpts which rarely come to light. The commentary is more clipped and sardonic than you might expect from Bennett, if you know him only by reputation / caricature.

The cover shown above is much more beautiful than the cover I had.

"Lost for Words"

Edward St. Aubyn (2014)
★★★★☆
reviewed May 2018

Brutal Booker Prize satire.

'The measure of a work of art is how much art it has in it, not how much ‘relevance’. Relevant to whom? Relevant to what? Nothing is more ephemeral than a hot topic.'

The targets I recognised were ‘Wolf Hall’, ‘how late it was, how late’ - and, among the judges, Stella Rimington, Chris Mullin, Malcolm Rifkind / Jim Murphy(?) Sam certainly sounds like Patrick, too:

Like a man walking backwards along a path, erasing his footsteps with a broom, he had tried, through contradiction, negation, paradox, unreliable narration and every other method he could devise, to cancel the tracks left by his words and to release his writing from the wretched positivity of affirming anything at all.

There’s also an exquisite send-up of Deleuzian/Lacanian raving.

"Collected Poems"

Federico García Lorca (2002)
★★★★☆
reviewed Jan 2007

2007: I used to love people for getting shot.

"The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering"

Frederick P. Brooks Jr. (1995)
★★★★☆
reviewed Jan 2015

How big teams make things. How awesome tech feels on the inside:

Too many interests, too many exciting opportunities for learning, research, and thought. What a marvellous predicament! Not only is the end not in sight, the pace is not slackening. We have many future joys.

The oldest thing by far on my computing syllabus and nearly the most stylish.* This anniversary edition has a chapter which is just the whole book boiled down to its propositions and whether or not they stood up twenty years later, which is a thing that other non-fiction could gravely benefit from. (You sometimes see the like of this in honest philosophy books, included as ‘analytical index’ or ‘prolegomenon’ or ‘exordium’.) Brooks is not merely exoteric, not just an IBM mook; suitably acerbic and suitably enthusiastic.

The open secret of programming is that it is actually a whole barrel of fun, just one that baffles, bores or scares outsiders:

The craft of programming gratifies creative longings built deep within us and delights sensibilities we have in common with all men, providing five kinds of joys: • The joy of making things; • The joy of making things that are useful to other people; • The fascination of fashioning puzzle-like objects of interlocking moving parts; • The joy of always learning, of a nonrepeating task; • The delight of working in a medium so tractable — pure thought-stuff — which nevertheless exists, moves, and works in a way that word-objects do not.

(NB: The Christian God rears up at unexpected intervals – and at one point Brooks recommends openly patriarchal programming teams - on the model of “God’s plan for marriage”. But this lone wacko note doesn’t get in the way.)

• (I set myself Shannon, Wang, Knuth.)

"The Origin of Species"

Charles Darwin (2004)
★★★★☆
reviewed Oct 2017

I read the Illustrated Edition (2008) put together by David Quammen, which is very beautiful. Filled with sketches, portraits, maps and suggestive remarks from the diaries. Particularly good if, like me, you’ve struggled with the plaintext.

Keys:

Owing to this struggle for life, any variation, however slight and from whatever cause proceeding, if it be in any degree profitable to an individual of any species, in its infinitely complex relations to other organic beings and to external nature, will tend to the preservation of that individual, and will generally be inherited by its offspring. The offspring, also, will thus have a better chance of surviving, for, of the many individuals of any species which are periodically born, but a small number can survive. I have called this principle, by which each slight variation, if useful, is preserved, by the term of Natural Selection, in order to mark its relation to man's power of selection.

Looking not to any one time, but to all time, if my theory be true, numberless intermediate varieties, linking most closely all the species of the same group together, must assuredly have existed; but the very process of natural selection constantly tends, as has been so often remarked, to exterminate the parent forms and the intermediate links. Consequently evidence of their former existence could be found only amongst fossil remains

There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

(That last sentence had “by the Creator” tacked on in the second edition.)

You would never guess the prose was written in a rush: possibly because the arguments were formed at the slowest possible rate.

"The Testament of Cresseid & Seven Fables"

Robert Henryson (2009)
★★★★☆
reviewed Apr 2022

Funny and moving. Heaney’s English translation from the Scots, including the original on facing pages. I can, with much sweat, read the auld leid with only five mistakes a page, but this is a blessing.

The English rendition is less exciting and expressive, and I can hardly blame Heaney so I don’t know what to blame.

"Gray's Anatomy: Selected Writings"

John Gray (2009)
★★★★☆
reviewed Sep 2013

Hard to read - not for his prose, which is luminous and droll, but because he disagrees with almost everything almost everyone holds dear (whether reason, science, or organised social movements are your tool for improving the world). Tory anti-speciesism, anti-Enlightenment anti-cruelty(??)

These span his career, satirising Marxists and Neocons, eulogising Santayana and explaining why communism sucks and doesn’t work, and why liberalism is cute but doesn’t work. (I paraphrase somewhat.) This leaves only Stoicism and resistance to dangerous meddlers as the ‘good’ life.

Lucid, unclassifiable, horrific.

"The Logic of Life: The Rational Economics of an Irrational World"

Tim Harford (2008)
★★★★☆
reviewed Sep 2013

Celebration of the universality / imperialism of economics (the application of the field’s hard-nosed acquisitory rational choice theory to more and more human phenomena - crime, romance, addiction, corporate pay, and The Ascent of Man). Harford is better than Levitt - to whom the books owes its format, cheek and some of the original research - because he’s less amused about the unflattering and anti-humanist results people have uncovered.

Some of the research is astonishing – and contentious (I have in mind the 2005 paper that purported to show significant shifts in [expressed] sexuality as the AIDS epidemic peaked, in proportion to how well people personally knew sufferers, “cost of AIDS”.) In any case, Harford writes extremely clearly about technical things, and the research can’t be ignored, because it suggests routes for generalised policy (rather than cynical rules to apply to all individual cases).

Extra point for his lovely immanent-performative ontology of maths: he claims cricket players and economic actors are doing maths unconsciously when they catch a ball or opt for an optimum (third-order differentials). This implies that sunflowers are mathematicians -  that all the world is not merely describable with maths, but acts as maths, is maths. I don’t believe this, but isn’t it lovely?

"The Inimitable Jeeves (Jeeves, #2)"

P.G. Wodehouse (2011)
★★★★☆
reviewed Oct 2015

Musical, uplifting, and still so, so funny. Each story draws on a very small pool of the exact same jokes (Jeeves hates a new piece of Wooster’s wardrobe; little old lady Aunt Agatha is completely inexorable; shit gambling on unconventional sports, headgear is misappropriated, monsters are slain) and only four supporting characters (Pals, Uncles/Fathers-in-law, Aunts/Fiancees, Trade). But they only gain from the repetition somehow.

Even here, in Wodehouse’s smiling, sun-dappled imperial nest, there are echoes from reality: for instance The War as well as the spiky and still-reigning art it set alight:

I suppose every chappie in the world has black periods in his life to which he can’t look back without the smouldering eye and the silent shudder. Some coves, if you can judge by the novels you read nowadays, have them practically all the time...
"Were you in the First World War, Jeeves?" "I dabbled in it to a certain extent, m’lord."
"I'm lonely, Jeeves." "You have a great many friends, sir." "What's the good of friends?" "Emerson," I reminded him, "says a friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature, sir." "Well you can tell Emerson from me next time you see him he's an ass." "Very good, sir."

So frivolous it loops back round to profound.

Classification:

Wooster’s taboo: Triangle: Subplot: Aunt: Antagonist: Expedient:

"Flat Earth News: An Award-winning Reporter Exposes Falsehood, Distortion and Propaganda in the Global Media"

Nick Davies (2008)
★★★★☆
reviewed Sep 2013

Calm hatchet job on what I will call mainstream media - but don’t thereby imagine me in a tin hat. I was on a news diet anyway (though this doesn’t mean disengaged), so this told me what I’d already nastily assumed: commercial ownership of outlets means vast staff cuts and over-milked productivity; which mean no time to research or check facts; which means “churnalism”, the frantic-lazy reproduction of PR and State material, and worse, their interpretations. (88% of all UK stories are now based on press releases. This trend includes the Guardian (50%) and Times (59%).)

His model of the origin of hysteric snowball stories like the Millennium Bug or Diana’s death is brilliant and convincing, disparaging conspiracy-theory suspicions

1. Uncertainty exists.
   2. An expert sexes up the dangers to increase popular impact.
   3. Impact stirs commerce, who exaggerate for gain.
   4. Exaggeration is absorbed by cranks (cultists, columnists), who begin to scream.)

Economise, kowtow, slink, hegemonise, neutralise, service, decontextualise, validate, exaggerate and conform: the rules of production. Was balling my fists through most of this.

Essential for people in Britain.

"How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read"

Pierre Bayard (2007)
★★★★☆
reviewed Oct 2012

In one sentence: Relax, it’s a game.

To be read when: teenaged; burdened by the thought of the millions of unread books; before going to a posh party.

There are too many books; among those worth reading at all, most are best skimmed; others are best interpreted via interpreters; you only see part of the possible meaning of the books you’ve read; and you’ve forgotten almost anything about even those. So relax and talk about the ‘virtual’ book, the idea of it, the version of it that you and your interlocutor inadvertently generate between you.

The title sounds like vacuous click-bait (indeed, a friend who later wrote his thesis on Bayard initially thought I was recommending something like this fluff). But it is instead all of the following: a thrilling act of virtuoso postmodern over-reading, a serious look at intellectual status and neurosis, a really interesting phenomenology of books, a glowing review of a dozen writers (including my beloved-but-low-status Greene and Lodge), and sheer backwards-land satire.

I found it liberating, not because I go round pretending to have read things (a free-rider in literary conversations), but because by the end of my arts degree I had found out, to my surprise and dismay, that high culture is 90% bollocks. Or, maybe: that arts culture is shallow and irrational, a thick and grasping vine overgrowing the lovely lonely tower of great writing and painting.

Bayard (or anyway his cheeky narrator) help unhook you from the blind devotion of the reading classes, and lets you face books on your own terms, sceptical and skimming and agentic. I was freed - and immediately started to get technical.

And ‘Bayard’s’ style - pointing out the inconvenient but undeniable things about a cherished phenomenon - now reminds me of the arch-rationalist Robin Hanson. Which is where I went next.

• Galef type:
  Values 2 - thought experiments for you to reflect on how you feel about something, & Style 2 - learn a style of thinking by studying the author’s approach to the world Style 3 - tickle your aesthetic sense in a way that obliquely makes you a more interesting, generative thinker

"Bad Pharma: How Drug Companies Mislead Doctors and Harm Patients"

Ben Goldacre (2013)
★★★★☆
reviewed Nov 2015

Or - his preferred book title - The Information Architecture of Medicine has Several Interesting Flaws, Many of Which Inflict Avoidable Harm on Patients, But All of Which are Amenable to Cost-Effective Change, Were There to be Adequate Public and Political Will. An empirically rigorous angry manifesto!

Here are all of the book’s theses in one paragraph, which is another thing I love nonfiction writers doing:

Drugs are tested by the people who manufacture them, in poorly designed trials, on hopelessly small numbers of weird, unrepresentative patients, and analysed using techniques that are flawed by design, in such a way that they exaggerate the benefits of treatments. Unsurprisingly, these trials tend to produce results that favour the manufacturer. When trials throw up results that companies don’t like, they are perfectly entitled to hide them from doctors and patients, so we only ever see a distorted picture of any drug’s true effects. Regulators see most of the trial data, but only from early on in a drug’s life, and even then they don’t give this data to doctors or patients, or even to other parts of government. This distorted evidence is then communicated and applied in a distorted fashion. In their forty years of practice after leaving medical school, doctors hear about what works ad hoc, from sales reps, colleagues and journals. But those colleagues can be in the pay of drug companies – often undisclosed – and the journals are, too. And so are the patient groups. And finally, academic papers, which everyone thinks of as objective, are often covertly planned and written by people who work directly for the companies, without disclosure. Sometimes whole academic journals are owned outright by one drug company. Aside from all this, for several of the most important and enduring problems in medicine, we have no idea what the best treatment is, because it’s not in anyone’s financial interest to conduct any trials at all. These are ongoing problems, and although people have claimed to fix many of them, for the most part they have failed; so all of these programs persist, but worse than ever, because now people can pretend that everything is fine after all. [Low external validity] can make a trial completely irrelevant to real-world populations, yet it is absolutely routine in research, which is conducted on tight budgets, to tight schedules, for fast results, by people who don’t mind if their results are irrelevant to real-world clinical questions. This is a quiet, dismal scandal. There’s no dramatic newspaper headline, and no single killer drug: just a slow and unnecessary pollution of almost the entire evidence base in medicine.

Exactly as fair to pharma as it deserves and no more (“there is no medicine without medicines”). Business gimps sometimes use the term “thought leader”, meaning powerful, original thinker (they usually use it spuriously). Goldacre actually is one. Please at least join AllTrials.

"The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood"

James Gleick (2011)
★★★★☆
reviewed Mar 2014

Ah! I am a sucker for this form in pop science: “primary research into some unjustly obscure thing, pulling together the historical and scientific strands, revealing the excitement and transcendence in the unsexy, un-Arts thing, and making the reader feel smarter and more solidly located in the modern world”. Here it’s information technology very broadly construed – so African talking drums, Morse, bioinformatics, memetics, Hawking radiation, Wiki, and so on.

Unbelievably, I’d never heard of the hero of the tale, Claude Shannon, because he was quiet and didn’t make any metaphysical claims for his profound work. Loads and loads of tasty gobbets to boot

“I do not believe that my father was such a Poet as I shall be an Analyst (& Metaphysician)…” - Lovelace “A theoretical physicist acts as a very clever coding algorithm.” “Across the centuries they all felt the joy in reckoning: Napier and Briggs, Kepler and Babbage, making their lists, building their towers…”

Shot through with the joy of discovery, and all of it unbleached by the drudgery, familiarity, and commercialism evoked in “I.T.”.

"Daydreams and Nightmares"

Winsor McCay (2005)
★★★★☆
reviewed Sep 2021

Incoherent, didactic, and yet astounding. So no insult to call McCay the Dril of political cartoons. (Apparently he was the creator of the single panel as we know it? What a terrible legacy!)

Many of these would be great capital-a Art if he only hadn’t plastered “TRUTH” or “DRUG HABIT” or “SLAVERY” all over the clear symbols he was using for those things. But this absolute sincerity is part of the power, for all that leaden hearts like mine cringe at it. Hallucinatory moral clarity.

It’s incoherent because he has a lot of standard booster capitalist views (like envy [of the rich] as the worst of all vices and Captain of Industry glory) and a lot of standard Christian socialist views (like wealth costing you your soul, like advertising and entertainment as evil rather than silly). There are a couple of slightly unnerving evangelical rapture panels. You could explain this by him just playing up to his current clients’ ideology, cynically. But I hope he contained all of this nonsense.

But ignore all that: he gets it. He gets what human history was like, and what the filthy and nasty urban industrial accumulation is for. All writing is an entry in the Great Conversation, and all actual work (not rent-seeking) is part of the great project. One of his running motifs is the farmer bent cropping as an inset. Most of my contemporaries don’t get it like McCay gets it, even though it’s fucking obvious, as it was not in 1910.

He’s also surprisingly metal. Again, his moral and political feelings are so strong that they produce a presentiment of metal’s extremes. Actually I think this extremity, this early, is the most impressive part. For all that it had to be cloaked in pieties and Hearst editorialising.

I’ve been reading comics all year and McCay is one of only a couple of artists who make me stop in my tracks, who force their whole mind onto the page.

"Writings on an Ethical Life"

Peter Singer (2002)
★★★★☆
reviewed Sep 2010

If a critical mass of people with new priorities were to emerge, and if these people were seen to do well, in every sense of the term -- if their cooperation with each other brings reciprocal benefits, if they find joy and fulfillment in their lives -- then the ethical attitude will spread, and the conflict between ethics and self-interest will have been shown to be overcome, not by abstract reasoning alone, but by adopting the ethical life as a practical way of living and showing that it works, psychologically, socially, and ecologically... One thing is certain: you will find plenty of worthwhile things to do. You will not be bored or lack fulfillment in your life.Most important of all, you will know that you have not lived and died for nothing, because you will have become part of the great tradition of those who have responded to suffering by trying to make the world a better place.

[here]

I’ve read a lot of Singer, mostly papers and columns and distilled arguments, not books. I can’t remember not wanting to life an altruistic life, so I don’t know exactly how much influence he had on me - but I’m a tithing vegan with a lot of respect for evolutionary arguments, who bites many utilitarian bullets, so it’s probably plenty.

Clear, unflinching, inspiring. Reading this, it’s easy to see why the heroes of a fantasy novel could be called Singers.

PS: Can anyone explain why, alone amongst philosophers, his face is so often on his book covers? Just fame? Just his strong brand?

"Wolf Hall (Thomas Cromwell, #1)"

Hilary Mantel (2010)
★★★★☆
reviewed Mar 2019

Engrossing, a great charitable reconstruction of a terrible age. Besides the subtle portrayal of the latent Reformation revolution, there’s also a far more important upheaval: the rise of brilliant laymen and potent commoners (e.g. More and Cromwell), that is, the beginning of the end of feudalism.

Never been very interested in the Tudors. Henry is fickle and narcissistic even compared to other early Modern monarchs, and Anne is a boring climber. He appeared to set off a revolution for no better reason than he was too sexist to accept a female heir. Mantel shows how Henry, Anne and Katherine are a microcosm of their time - Mother Church vs the nationalism-Protestantism complex, and England slowly tearing itself away from former to latter. The first Brexit.

It’s an imperfect model - Henry still burns un-Catholic books and men, and Luther and Tyndale don’t support the shady divorce (against their own interests). A mixture of lust, opportunism, influence from competent rebels (Cromwell, Cranmer)?

Most characters are portrayed as pragmatic and modern, prayer aside. They know most relics are bogus, that the “medicine” of the day is hazardous, that the Church’s decisions are deeply contingent and political, and they mock the superstitious lord who believes in ghosts. This is probably going too far, but it makes for great fiction.

The treatment of More vs Cromwell is the reverse of that in A Man for All Seasons: here Cromwell is a rational, catholic, and empathetic gent, while More is a scary authoritarian fundamentalist, closer to a Daesh jihadi than Rowan Williams.

[Cromwell] can’t imagine himself reading [the Bible] to his household; he is not, like Thomas More, some sort of failed priest, a frustrated preacher. He never sees More, a star in another firmament, who acknowledges him with a grim nod - without wanting to ask him, what’s wrong with you? Or what’s wrong with me? Why does everything you know, and everything you have learnt, confirm you in what you have believed before? Whereas in my case, what I grew up with, and what I thought I believed, is chipped away, a little and a little, a fragment then a piece and then a piece more. With every month that passes, the corners are knocked off the certainties of this world: and the next world too.

Mantel has a funny way of letting her grammar show that Cromwell is The Man - she’ll use “he” to mark him, even when this breaks the normal “pronouns refer to the most recent subject of that gender” convention. This is disorienting, but I appreciate the effect.

I was recently baffled by this sentence, from a contemporary American evangelical: “I was baptised Catholic before I became a Christian.” The violence of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation is the nastiest evidence of the power and horror of the narcissism of small differences.

I liked the book recommendations, the 16th Century equivalents of discussions on here. It is so hard to know, from 500 years away, what’s worth reading. Though I suppose the real C16th dross is dead, all out of print, unarchived, unextant. For instance:

Castiglione says that everything that can be understood by men can be understood by women, that their apprehension is the same, their faculties, no doubt their loves and hates.

This bit was funny:

When the last treason act was made, no one could circulate their words in a printed book or bill, because printed books were not thought of. He feels a moment of jealousy towards the dead, to those who served kings in slower times than these; now a days the products of some bought or poisoned brain can be disseminated through Europe in a month.

</li></ul>

He’s talking about a time with ~0.1% annual growth, starting from very little; where new books per year was still in the three digits; where new actual insights per year was probably lower, where it takes an entire month and ~thousands of pounds for one troll to even partially foul a discussion.

"Chuck Klosterman on Media and Culture: A Collection of Previously Published Essays"

Chuck Klosterman (2010)
★★★★☆
reviewed May 2014

Exciting raids on petty tyrannies. Of: contemporary sexuality, cereal adverts, the implications of the 00s pirate craze, questions in general, the Unabomber’s good point. Klosterman’s not going to get away without comparison to DFW – but he’s really good in his own way too. He’s a more relaxed, atheoretical Wallace, with pop music (rather than Art writing) at his core, and technology (rather than general Irony) as the source of his worries about us all.

This slices through the reflexivity that causes modern confusions, while being mischievously reflexive himself (at one point he tells us that he once lied to an interviewer who had correctly identified Klosterman’s mouthpiece in one of his novels; Klosterman denied that he shared the character’s view in order to preserve a cheap narrative uncertainty for readers of the interview – but, of course, admitting that here undoes that cheap save for we third-order readers).

Applied instance:

“We assume that commercials are not just informing us about purchasable products, because that would be crude and ineffective. We’re smarter than that. But that understanding makes us more vulnerable. We’ve become the ideal audience for advertising—consumers who intellectually magnify commercials in order to make them more trenchant and clever than they actually are. Our fluency with the language and motives of the advertiser induces us to create new, better meanings for whatever they show us. We do most of the work for them.”

Two quibbles: there is (what I take to be) a lack of ideological care you’d expect of pieces written for Esquire magazine. He doesn’t resolve (as I think DFW mostly does) the tension between a) affirming low culture’s power and unique charms against bullshit classist disparagement, and b) despising its crudest, most conservative common denominators.

Went through it in an hour.

"Strangers Drowning: Grappling with Impossible Idealism, Drastic Choices, and the Overpowering Urge to Help"

Larissa MacFarquhar (2015)
★★★★☆
reviewed Oct 2017

I don’t know whether there are any moral saints. But if there are, I am glad that neither I nor those about whom I care most are among them... The moral virtues, present... to an extreme degree, are apt to crowd out the non-moral virtues, as well as many of the interests and personal characteristics that we generally think contribute to a healthy, well-rounded, richly developed character... there seems to be a limit to how much morality we can stand.– Susan Wolf

...the moral narcissist’s extreme humility masked a dreadful pride. Ordinary people could accept that they had faults; the moral narcissist could not. To [André] Green this moral straining was sinister, for the moral narcissist would do anything to preserve his purity, even when doing so carried a terrible price... new qualifiers appeared: there was "pseudo-altruism", a defensive cloak for sadomasochism; and there was "psychotic altruism", bizarre care-taking behaviour based in delusion... the analyst surmised that the masking of their own hostility and greed from themselves might be one of altruism's functions for people of this type. – Larissa MacFarquhar

...we cannot and should not become impartial, [Bernard Williams] argued, because doing so would mean abandoning what gives human life meaning. Without selfish partiality—to people you are deeply attached to, your wife and your children, your friends, to work that you love and that is particularly yours, to beauty, to place — we are nothing. We are creatures of intimacy and kinship and loyalty, not blind servants of the world. – Larissa MacFarquhar

Twelve profiles of recent radical altruists, and the backlash they receive from the rest of us. (^) Besides, MacFarquhar has some deep reflections on the good life and human nature to work through. So: There are people who shape their lives around the need of the world – in particular around strangers who are constantly, in some sense, drowning. This category of person does more than just work a caring job and be dead nice to those around them: instead, their entire lives are dominated by the attempt to do the most good. The profiled altruists are:

• A fairly fearless nurse who organised the Fast for Life and trained generations of Nicaraguan nurses, continuing for thirty years despite specific threats to her life by Contras.
• A pseudonymous animal rights activist who has rescued or won improved conditions for millions of chickens.
• Two early effective altruists, Julia and Jeff, who live frugally and donate more than half of their salaries to the most effective NGOs in the world. They plausibly save 100 lives a year, far more than a doctor or firefighter (even before considering replaceability).
• A real Christian, who opened her church to the homeless (over the hostility of her flock) and donated a kidney anonymously.
• A charismatic, outcaste social worker and jungle statesman, who created a self-sustaining leper ashram, 5000-strong, out of nothing. Also his equally hardcore descendents.
• A Buddhist monk who created the largest suicide counselling site in Japan, stressing himself into heart disease.
• The omni-parents of Vermont, who adopted 24 of the least cute and easy children on the lists.
• A taciturn altruistic kidney donor.
• A burned-out idealist.

(I’ve compiled data on their nature here.*)

MacFarquhar appears suspicious about these people, whose lives are taken over by their morals. She calls them “do-gooders” while admitting the term is dismissive.** Even the most humble and quiet do-gooder is, she thinks, making an extremely arrogant claim: that the moral intuitions of the whole species - i.e. family favouritism, supererogation, the right to ignore the suffering of strangers - are totally wrong. She leaves no-one unsuspected.

an extreme morality as Singer's or Godwin's can seem not just oppressively demanding but actually evil, because it violates your duty to yourself. To require a person to think of himself as a tool for the general good could be seen as equivalent of kidnapping a person off the street and harvesting his organs to save three or four lives... even to ask this of yourself seems wrong, even perverted. Impartial, universal love seems the antithesis of what we value about deep human attachment.

But these lives are victory laps: the victory of broad reason over narrow animality. MacFarquhar is more nuanced, less willing to dismiss particularism, nepotism and speciesism – which are together known as common sense. (Though I have only a mild case of the radicals: for instance, I am mostly immune to misery about the state of the world, and I help my loved ones without much guilt. I’m giving 10% now and 50% eventually, but I am such a bookish scruff that the absence of luxuries does not really cramp my life at all.)

One part of Williams’ humanist case against radical altruism has dissolved in the last decade: the idea that single-minded ethical focus must erode your connection to your community. Well, the effective altruists are growing in number and maturity; they offer a deep, global community of at least partially serious people to support and be supported by: and all with the stamp of moral consistency.

MacFarquhar doesn’t much like utilitarianism, but she is too moved and impressed with her subjects to take the standard, safe, quietist line (which her reviewers have tended to). Throughout, she presents contradictory philosophical propositions, and makes it difficult to know which she believes; she constantly uses indirect speech and deictic discussion, blurring her voice with the debate at hand. This is, I think, an impressive rhetorical strategy – an “esoteric” one. The book is addressed to common sense readers, but also to our uncertainty and faint guilt; it’s dedicated to her parents, but explicitly constructed to bring us closer to the altruists:

I took out all the physical descriptions because if you’re looking at someone’s physical appearance, you’re on the outside. Similarly quotations, which seem as though they should be the most intimate form, because they come directly from the person’s mouth. Again, in fact, the only way you hear someone speaking is if you’re outside them. So if you translate quotation into interior thought, which simply means taking away the quotation marks and saying ‘he thought’ rather than ‘he said’ – that’s a more intimate way of encountering someone.***

So Strangers Drowning covertly brings us closer to radical altruism. Her task is not to establish their ethical premises, nor to win over new obsessives: instead, she simply shows us their sincerity and incredible effects on the world – and, better, shows the lack of evidence and interpretive charity behind their opponents’ aspersions. (This goes for the Freudians, the Objectivists, and the anti “codependency” crowd.) It humanises the threatening side of ultimate goodness. She mostly avoids editorialising about the radicals. But one of her clear conclusions is that these people are not deficient, instead having something most people lack:

What do-gooders lack is not happiness but innocence. They lack that happy blindness that allows most people, most of the time, to shut their minds to what is unbearable. Do-gooders have forced themselves to know, and keep on knowing, that everything they do affects other people, and that sometimes (though not always) their joy is purchased with other people's joy. And, remembering that, they open themselves to a sense of unlimited, crushing responsibility... The need of the world was like death, [Julia] thought — everyone knew about it, but the thought was so annihilating that they had to push it out of consciousness or it would crush them. She understood, and yet did not understand, why other people didn't give more than they did. How did they allow themselves such permission? How could they not help?

while also noting that, in general

If there is a struggle between morality and life, life will win... Not always, not in every case, but life will win in the end. Sometimes a person will die for a cause; sometimes a person will give up for duty's sake the things that are to him most precious. But most of the time, the urge to live, to give to your family, to seek beauty, to act spontaneously... or to do any number of things other than helping people, is too strong to be overridden... It may be true that not everyone should be a do-gooder. But it is also true that these strange, hopeful, tough, idealistic, demanding, life-threatening, and relentless people, by their extravagant example, help keep those life-sustaining qualities alive.

An amazing book, anyway: charged, critical, structurally ingenious, and filled with humanity – or, with this other, better thing.

^† Note the absent quotation marks around MacFarquhar’s report of the psychoanalysts’ and Williams’ positions.

The chapter on the blitheness and cruelty of the psychoanalysts enraged me - all the more because MacFarquhar leaves their unscientific bullshit unchallenged, instead letting it mock and degrade itself. (One hopes.) So much glibness and spite:

ANNA FREUD: Altruists are bossy, because the urge that is usually behind the fulfillment of one's own wishes is now placed behind the fulfillment of the wishes of another person. The wishes have to be fulfilled in a certain way, in the way the altruist would like to fulfill them for himself or herself. After all, the bossiness of do-gooders is proverbial...

(My, what rigorous science.) So, here’s yet another way I am fortunate to live when I do: these people have by now been mostly sidelined in polite discourse. The harm they are able to do is much reduced, and I need not spend my whole life convincing people that they are just making things up.

• Philosophy - e.g. Peter Singer, Will MacAskill, Toby Ord, Mark Lee, Geoff Anders, Stephanie Wykstra - looms large here, in this little corner of the race; larger than organised religion. Since all of the philosophers are from Analytic departments, this gives the lie to the generalised standard criticism of academic philosophy (: that they are fatally detached from the concerns of society, dehumanised, etc).

** “Do-gooder” is still much better than Susan Wolf’s term, “moral saint”, because, as MacFarquhar notes, to call someone a saint is to nullify the challenge of their difficult actions: saints are not just ‘people who do really good things’; they are (thought to be) a different sort of being. Any movement (like EA) which seeks to make radical altruism mainstream has to resist this demarcation and get people to see such a life as, first, good; then, possible for them; and then reasonable - the sort of thing that people would do if they thought about it more.

*** MacFarquhar’s account of Stephanie is misleading: she makes it seem like she has opted for ordinary amoral innocence, where the real Stephanie has taken on an incredibly high-impact job, activism for oversight of pharmaceutical clinical trial data.

[Data #2, Values #2]

"The Meaning of Recognition"

Clive James (2006)
★★★★☆
reviewed Sep 2013

Funny polticial and cultural digs (his series on the 2005 UK general election is acid and insightful). I needed to read someone who doesn’t believe that everything personal is political tbf. (Larkin is a great poet and was a terrible man – why is this so difficult for people to accept? Is it just the halo effect?)

His long essay on Isaiah Berlin is fantastic and contentious, and his retorts to the professional philosophers who come at him about it devastating, inspiring.

"Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea"

Barbara Demick (2009)
★★★★☆
reviewed Aug 2013

Horrible portrait of a deluded and brutalised country. You’ve probably already imagined the political religion, the incompetence and manipulation of the cadres: here are some of the only first-person accounts. The dozen defectors she interviews agree on enough to lend some confidence.

She repeats entire sentences verbatim at various parts of the book, and runs out of ways to reflect somberly on collective madness and individual caprice (fair enough). It’s hard to see a country in which 10% of the population die of state-caused starvation ever rising up. No

"I Think You'll Find It's a Bit More Complicated Than That"

Ben Goldacre (2014)
★★★★☆
reviewed Jun 2018

A hundred clear, witty, and literate attacks on the agreeable nonempiricism that most worldviews and most conversations are based in, even in the modernised, developed world. (It covers such anti-scientific fields as alternative medicine, journalism, politics, and policy. You may regard anti-vaxxers, face cream ‘science’, homeopathy, and AIDS denialism as too obviously false to be worth your time deriding. But these hopeful, manipulative falsehoods are where many if not most live: someone has to defend people.)

This makes it a collection of a hundred enjoyable tutorials in statistics, experimental method, and epistemology:

Alternative therapists don't kill many people, but they do make a great teaching tool for the basics of evidence-based medicine, because their efforts to distort science are so extreme. When they pervert the activities of people who should know better – medicines regulators, or universities – it throws sharp relief onto the role of science and evidence in culture...

Goldacre is a gifted populariser: by focussing on particular abuses, he is able to animate very hard and theoretical topics by leveraging our anger, or our humour. (In a similar way to Nassim Taleb’s snark. Of course, as strict empiricists, the two men share many targets: the powerful and overconfident, the famed and hollow, the predatory and avaricious). Since British libel law opens him to constant financial hazard, even when he is entirely careful and correct, he calls his writing “pop science with a gun to your head”. (Actually it is mostly pop metascience; even better. There are shout-outs to the great critics of C20th science: Celia Mulrow, John Ioannidis, Uri Simonsohn, who are too-rarely praised; for they turned on the people who might otherwise have lionised them.)

He shows policy analysis to be lagging a century behind the standard set by medical trials, and not mostly for the good reasons (which are: that they have a more causally dense subject than medicine has; and because they face absolute ethical restrictions on their experiments: it is politically impossible to experiment with welfare systems). e.g.: Policy people set no required evidence threshold before administering their treatments en masse, have no controls, no randomisation, no calibration, no statements of formal uncertainty, no malpractice system to punish their recklessness, nor often any honest fucking posthoc evaluation of their treatment.

[Andrew Lansley's] pretence at data-driven neutrality is not just irritating, it's also hard to admire. There's no need to hide behind a cloak of scientific authority, murmuring the word "evidence" into microphones. If your reforms are a matter of ideology, legacy, whim and faith, then, like many of your predecessors, you could simply say so, and leave "evidence" to people who mean it.

Journalists come across as badly as the quacks - even BBC, Panorama, C4 News. This may be being ameliorated at last by the rise of the specialised blogospheres and by the Nate Silver / Rich Harris / Keith Frey school of data journalism. But not generally yet and not for sure.

I love his rationalist war-cry, against the public and dinner-party proponents of the never-supported MMR -autism link:

Many of these people were hardline extremists - humanities graduates - who treated my arguments about evidence as if I were some kind of religious zealot, a purveyor of scientism, a fool to be pitied. The time had clearly come to mount a massive counter-attack. ...nerds are more powerful than we know. Changing mainstream media will be hard, but you can help create parallel options. More academics should blog, post videos, post audio, post lectures, offer articles and more. You'll enjoy it: I've had threats and blackmail, abuse, smears and formal complaints with forged documentation. But it's worth it, for one simple reason: pulling bad science apart is the best teaching gimmick I know for explaining how good science works. I'm not a policeman, and I've never set out to produce a long list of what's right and what's wrong. For me, things have to be interestingly wrong, and the methods are all that matter.

His website is a bit ugly but has most of this content for free; the extras in this volume are oddities for fans (an undergraduate paper of his, BMJ editorials and notes from his heartening rise into British policy establishment (he is a public health researcher at the NHS). This was my second pass at his columns; I was again refreshed and uplifted and enraged. We might despair at how persistent insensitivity to evidence has been, and at how unnatural empiricism remains, in a society totally transformed by it. But I don’t despair, because it has never been easier for us to check and rebut liars and fools. I sincerely aspire to become a “research parasite” (an independent checker of analyses, a rogue forensic statistician) and to write as clearly and well as him.

Goldacre is that rare thing, someone doing the best work they possibly could be. (If he could be persuaded to migrate to the global south…)

"The Complete Poems of D.H. Lawrence"

D.H. Lawrence (1994)
★★★★☆
reviewed Jan 2008

Far better than his far more famous novels. Bitter and randy but often sensational, bringing flowers

Reach me a gentian, give me a torch! Let me guide myself with the blue, forked torch of a flower down the darker and darker stairs, where blue is darkened on blueness down the way Persephone goes, just now, in first-frosted September to the sightless realm where darkness is married to dark and Persephone herself is but a voice, as a bride a gloom invisible enfolded in the deeper dark of the arms of Pluto as he ravishes her once again and pierces her once more with his passion of the utter dark among the splendour of black-blue torches, shedding fathomless darkness on the nuptials.

There’s about 6 duds for every one of those - as always, a Collected is never judged by its hit rate but by its best. His philosophy is rank nonsense (“Sexless people transmit nothing.”; “The machine shall be abolished from the earth again; / it is a mistake that mankind has made;”) - as always, this has no bearing on the poems. What do I care that he is the most unsound voice in the great unsound choir of English literature?

See here, here, here, here, here.

The dirt-cheap holly-green Wordsworth paperbacks are where I got my first education. (I think this is what older generations got via Dover Thrifts or Pelicans.)

"A Mind for Numbers: How to Excel at Math and Science (Even If You Flunked Algebra)"

Barbara Oakley (2014)
★★★★☆
reviewed Nov 2021

Lovely. She pitches it at anxious people - and just mentioning the difficulty, just treating a block as a normal problem with normal solutions, dissolves half the problem. The chapters are tiny and repetitive and cutesy, no doubt also intended.

The other side of being humanistic is that she draws on theories from the dodgiest sciences: social psychology, pedagogy and a bit of pop neuroscience. But unlike similar books by Baumeister and Dweck, the dubious results are like rhetorical ornament rather than the crux. I give it a pass. Also she’s a good teacher, so gets plenty of feedback from students about what actually works.

She accounts for human variance, obviously vital for any good advice:

Take a step back and look dispassionately at your strengths and weaknesses. If you need more time to learn [a given amount of] math and science, that’s simply the reality. If you’re in high school, try to arrange your schedule to give yourself the time you need to focus on the more difficult materials, and limit these materials to manageable proportions. If you’re in college, try to avoid a full load of heavy courses, especially if you are working on the side. A lighter load of math and science courses can, for many, be the equivalent of a heavy load of other types of courses. Especially in the early stages of college, avoid the temptation to keep up with your peers... learning slowly can mean you learn more deeply than your fast-thinking classmates.

Maybe won’t do much for you if you’ve ever had a good maths teacher.

Claims

• Two disjoint brain modes: focused (“studying”) and diffuse (“shower thoughts”). Mixture of the two is needed for problem solving: focus, then unfocus. Sleep is diffuse.
  
• Einstellung effect: anchoring on the first flawed approach. Focus as the opposite of exploring.
  
• You need lots of time: time to switch modes, time to chunk content into strong abstractions, time to form long-term memory.
  
• Spaced repetition duh
  
• “Chunk creation” (learning suitable abstractions): focus on it, get the gist, practice (how to use it), work out applicable contexts (when to use it), test recall
  
• Worked examples are good
  
• But seeing the answer leads to the illusion of competence (hindsight bias).
  
• Re-reading the formula also leads to illusion of recall (“it’s in my head”)
  
• Go walk and chew it over
  
• Some overlearning (“continuing the study or practice after it is well understood”), not too much
  
• “If you don’t understand a method, stop and work backward. Go to the Internet and discover who first figured out the method or some of the earliest people to use it. Try to understand how the creative inventor arrived at the idea and why the idea is used”

Misc

• Not sure about the examples here:

the brain is designed to do extraordinary mental calculations. We do them every time we catch a ball, or rock our body to the beat of a song, or maneuver our car around a pothole in the road. We often do complex calculations, solving complex equations unconsciously, unaware that we sometimes already know the solution as we slowly work toward it

This is a classic modelling mistake of physicists. I think motor coordination is done by simple rule of thumb plus a control loop (see motion, move hand, predict path, see motion, move hand) rather than unconscious calculus or ODEs.

• One place she overdoes the weak psych is insisting that the world is just when it comes to mental power.

A superb working memory can hold its thoughts so tightly that new thoughts can’t easily peek through. Such tightly controlled attention could use an occasional whiff of ADHD-like fresh air—the ability, in other words, to have your attention shift even if you don’t want it to shift. Your ability to solve complex problems may make you overthink simple problems... their slower way of thinking can allow them to see confusing subtleties that others aren’t aware of.

• Happy to see the late Seth Roberts show up. He went too far and dogmatic, but his impulse towards self-experiments is great.

first self-experiment involved his acne. A dermatologist had prescribed tetracycline, so Roberts simply counted the number of pimples he had on his face with varying doses of tetracycline. The result? The tetracycline made no difference on the number of pimples he had! Roberts had stumbled across a finding that would take medicine another decade to discover—that seemingly powerful tetracycline, which has unsafe side effects, doesn’t necessarily work on acne...

"Perhaps the Stars (Terra Ignota, #4)"

Ada Palmer (2021)
★★★★☆
reviewed Oct 2021

Of the war between Myopia and Utopia.

Hold on until page 125. That wait would be fatal in a first book, but everyone who makes it here, to book four, has proven hardier and will eat it gladly.

Not a lot of war in this war novel before then. Instead, a Hufflepuff hum - faint in previous books, risen in this one. I don’t mean to be mean: the philosophical principle that nice things are important, philosophically rich is one of mine. But 9A, the narrator, is too much the overgrown child. They say “snugglier”. They emphasise snacking. Someone cries in every chapter I think. Like Odysseus. They also rave against free speech (though Palmer is a historian of censorship and should not be identified with 9A).

Neotene domesticity is all very well for Becky Chambers, but it doesn’t gel with the other gigantic aesthetic banners of this work (the Enlightenment consummated and their language appropriated; a society transformed, deluding itself to be peaceful; the ideological roots of conflict, the inexorability of war’s logic, thus this realistic war between lovers and friends).

The achievement of this book - besides the truly baroque prose, the truly insane narration - is that it nearly succeeds in making every faction reasonable. Uncertainty justifies terrible things, the most terrible: distrust, surveillance, subterfuge, war.

I can’t remember this being done so well. Maybe in Hugo or Dumas.

I am a big fan, but, so I dislike a lot about this series. I find the central conflict arbitrary, and the central psychological claim wrong. Actually maybe I just dislike the Ninth Anonymous, puppy Odysseus.

—-

• Meme: “in the grim darkness of the C25th, mankind has divided into the elemental archetypes: jock, fash, hufflepuff, freud, stemlord, landlord, libertarian, people with a country of origin instead of a personality”. (This is no critique of Palmer when we remember that all such groupings will arise through weird partially random historical contingencies: the resulting categories don’t need to make sense and probably won’t.)

• Common bit of silliness:

“…languages are precious enough to be worth people dying for. A human life has infinite value, infinite consequences over the universe of space-time, but apparently They think a language is another order of infinity.”

Piety. I can’t think of any language worth anyone dying for.

• I like the Renaissance conceit of calling god The Great Author, and Jedd’s conceit of calling the Utopians “small authors”, small gods. Later, this is expanded into a huggy thing where all humans are small authors - in the afterword Palmer implies more: that we’re all obeying the Utopian oath by working so much as 40 hours a week. I honour this thought - for instance a cleaner is in fact doing something of moral significance when they work, is in fact imperceptibly pulling on the rope that leads to the future. But it’s a piety to say that all stories are equal-sized, that all pull the same.

Many have described to me the journey from feeling they could never maintain such a high standard to realizing that we already are.

No, there is more to do.

• So many hundreds of details, like the Brillist / Gordian double name (ideology and instantiation). Recalls GNU / Linux. The verisimilitude of mess.

• The office of Anonymous doesn’t make sense. Has there ever been a writer who successfully spoke for humanity? Is solving epistemic logic puzzles really the only qualification you want for such a person?

• The stable stagnation following the exponential age seems pretty implausible. Then there’s the laughable smallness of the AI threat - one serial killer(!). (I suppose Utopia solved AI alignment. But then set-sets would have to be obsolete, unless the other Hives hated U-beasts, which they don’t seem to.)

• There’s a moving sequence about chronic fatigue, also one of Palmer’s personal crosses. Wheelchair as throne.

• The book takes a slightly absurd view of the wisdom and effectiveness and moral stature of the UN. Maybe they get better over 400 years of irrelevance.

• The plot is excessive, and I think it’s intentionally difficult to track all the threads. Fine, but one bit goes too far for me: Achilles' dying speech implies alternate timelines and him as a multiverse hopper. And this in turn makes Palmer’s god less stupid, if he is the multiverse maximiser, the only theodicy I find even vaguely satisfying. Palmer's mainline theodicy is different: the universe is the offering of a blind mute god who wants to talk to a solipsist god. It's pretty cool.

• The main characters spend lots of their most critical resources on documentation, history monging. Sniper’s chapter is bought at extreme expense, Mycroft’s whole shtick… This is sorta realistic - militaries have war artists and official bookworms. But it’s not usually the commanders and chief strategists scribbling for posterity as the death squads stalk their corridors. Palmer uses epistolary devices to great effect, but I find myself wishing they’d focus on the war for a sec.

• I like the Mitsubishi a lot more in this one. disregarding their purported sadism in Mycroft’s literally hallucinated odyssey. Palmer makes me notice that the rich are a minority. Less vulnerable than the others, but there’s a high floor to the vulnerability of any small group.

• a bit of body horror and mind rape, be warned. Largely unpunished

• The novel could do without religion. Jedd could be a vast noble alien, and we would have no need for This World’s Creator or even Bridger. The relics are Faust’s stated casus belli but others are easy to imagine. The narrators’ abjection before Jedd makes their tweeness worse. If there’s a god, you should wrestle him, not kneel. I could do without the extended Iliad plot mirroring too.

• Yet another fundamental problem: Jedd is not actually morally superior, which is why I don't like people kneeling to him. Absolute caring is not actually the perfect morality. He beats the monsters and Kosala and beautiful primitive Mason, but not Huxley. This is stupid for instance:

Some occupations, mainly medical, may be judged too essential to subtract from, but for the rest, even the most important projects in the world”—tremble, Utopia and Gordian—“we must give up a portion of what would have been our life’s works to restore what we can of the devastated life’s works of the dead

Postponing a death from heart attack is essential, but preventing deaths from aging isn’t?? A debt to the past is lexicographically above all present and future people??

He is good at cutting knots, removing the bizarre theory-blind fatalism of the Censor, Gordian, the Mardis, and even Utopia. Nothing like the stupidity of a group with an overfit predictive model.

I understand why there’s no retribution in the aftermath of the war - the hugginess wins - but there’s not even any proportionality. Utopia suffers more than Gordian!

No repercussions, then, for Gordian’s deceit? They get it all, even their collaboration, Bridger’s relics shared, thy Jehovah’s great wealth shared with the twin projects? That does not feel like justice. It does not feel like goddess Nemesis, reader, who ravages the guilty, paying pain with pain. It feels like something better.

This shows an unreasonable level of trust in Faust; if someone commits mass murder and mind rape once, you should expect them to do it again. By all means let them work on great projects for the world they defiled. But defang them first, and watch them.</spoiler>

• The Masons are shown as heroic and vast in numbers, and yet they seem most of the way to fascism. With one bad MASON, they could ruin everything. Their superiority complex, retributive deontology, lack of individualism, and willing lack of freedom, are in far more severe contradiction to the Hive Alliance than the conflicts Palmer chooses to emphasise. Cornel is a liberal tyrant and a longtermist, and so they do good despite their terrible potential. (It’s not just their power - Utopia is powerful too. It’s the sheer lack of checks.) I wish I could say I find it unrealistic for a billion people to larp full-time as a Roman pleb or Mussolinian. Palmer knows all this and nerfs them in the denouement.

• This book will age better than most, but parts of it ring trendy, sarky, Whedony. Like the reservationists coming out of nowhere to save the day. The bold, unclichéd treatment of gender of past books - as gravity, as a seductive force that can be covered up but not ignored, dimorphism as transgression, feminine arts as mind control, pronouns as a spicy personality marker.

Their comportment invites it, that toxic artificial helplessness that coded feminine in olden days, and makes us all fall over ourselves wanting to do things for Heloïse, so much so that we stifle when they try to do things for themself.

Here it gives way to a soppy constructionism, gender as conspiracy:

—-

But the main gripe:

That said, nearly all the main characters are Explorers, taking one side.

What would I have as the war’s great theme? The one from the last book is fantastic and underemphasised here: faith in a benevolent dictator vs pragmatic, aggressive scepticism. The second? Past-regarders and future-regarders. Long reflection vs Builders. Noble lie vs radical honesty. Bioconservatism vs transhumanism (represented already, a little). Theory vs praxis. Academia vs autodidacts. Stamp collecting vs engineering. All better than the chosen inwards vs out.

What about Jedd’s philosophy? Like Yahweh, he has serious problems with respecting boundaries. That his subsumption and illiberal eternal hugging is taken so seriously is annoying. His lack of socialisation is half stupidity (demanding unconditional surrender at the cost of millions of lives), half defamiliar genius (why do people die, father?). That he is a particularist, favouring his family to the point where this has a serious chance of outweighing every other being and the course of history he chooses, belies his being particularly alien or godlike. Kin favourites is classic mammal.

One more deep disagreement: the war is said to be needed because humans are growing too comfortable to go to deep space. But this seems completely backwards to me. Just as a small minority of people in the richest parts of the world strain unprecedentedly without needing to - marathons, free soloing, biohacking, psychonautics, workaholism, and yes, space - I expect greater wealth and tech to inspire a similar proportion of contrarian strivers. And it only takes a few hundred offworld to seed all else. This is Utopia’s bizarre error / overconfidence, or Palmer’s error which makes itself true for them. Gordian have no blame in it, it’s enough for Utopia to believe it.

And yet I am so glad. There is nothing like it in C21st literature. I am only able to attack its philosophy (philosophies) because it’s so clearly and sympathetically drawn, because so intellectually ambitious. I am certain there are readers out there who view Utopia as trivially wrong, though it’s hard to imagine anyone loving terrorist Gordian. They’re from Ingolstad!

Characters routinely do the reasonable thing, including positive-sum trades with their mortal enemies, including instrumental harm for enormous stakes. It is one of the few works which sees the full stakes so clearly, which sees the world-historical significance of nerds, science fiction, and technical tat, both beneath and beyond the average novelist.

Over-the-top, wrong, and great.

Clippings:

I could see you, across the sky, the crowded sea, a thousand black and winged shapes for every tardy, well-meant Peace-dove. But humans began digging a canal across the Gulf of Corinth more than three thousand years ago and finished it in 1893. It’s worth trying things again. Apollo Guardian of Strangers knows that it’s worth trying things again. Especially for such a goal as peacefall.

Free Speech, that old tool of plutocracy, the intoxicating, rosy blossom under whose petals parasite lies can breed and multiply until they devour all the garden. None of us wants that. I hope none of us wants that, but there are still Free Speech zealots in this day and age, and they’re just the type to have communications tech, to build a radio or study Morse code, and volunteer to join our network as a link and pass on . . . ​death. I’m panicking, I know it. Everyone understands why we need censorship... I do believe it was a pretty thing once, Free Speech, such a lofty notion, but we outgrew it with our communications revolution, as with our machine guns we outgrew pretty chivalry.

Odium! Also odious:

our true beliefs are visible in what pokes above the psyche’s surface in those moments when the overflowing heart sings out in gratitude, and then we learn what name it calls: Nature, Humanity, Reason, God, Gaea, Fate, subtle Prometheus, or Providence that takes so much but gives this.

(every worldview a religion - I spit. Some less so than others!)

I hope the ideas, the fragile and imperfect Hives of 2454, and the battered but changing-for-the-better Hives of 2456, will help you rise with strength tomorrow morning as you lift your oar, or pack, or first aid kit, whatever task at hand, they’re all the oar so long as you still carry in your breast the ancient spark, contagious, shared from breast to breast, that has died out a thousand times, but never yet in every breast at once. We will.

"Shards of Honor (Vorkosigan Saga, #1)"

Lois McMaster Bujold (1996)
★★★★☆
reviewed Jan 2022

Good lord, it’s Danielle Steele crossed with Gene Wolfe. Good Wolfe too. Military science fiction romance novel. And the lovers are enemies! Who repeatedly strategise against each other! What saves it is that they are dry as fuck.

“I thought I was being subtle." "Not noticeably.” “It's too bad we couldn't meet again under more auspicious circumstances," she said carefully. "There are no auspicious circumstances here.”

Cordelia is unbearably posh; I love it. Some of this is worthy of bloody Wodehouse:

“I only hope I don't get myself locked in a padded cell. I'm a bit off cells at the moment”

One of the few portrayals of an important type: the strict honour-bound deontologist who lies and kills when they have to, when the world is at stake.

“Suffering bastard." "I thought you saw meaning in that sort of thing," said Vorkosigan. "In the abstract. Most days it's just stumbling around in the dark with the rest of creation, smashing into things and wondering why it hurts.” “I am an atheist, myself. A simple faith, but a great comfort to me, in these last days." "Yes, I have often felt the pull of it myself.”

Cordelia is a master of the dark arts (“jesuitry” as Bujold calls it), fast talking conman logic.

On top of all that it’s a moving and uncliched war story. Every bit of technology here has an emotional heft, from the nerve ray to the artificial wombs.

Also it’s a furious, vengeful Szaszian critique of medicalisation. (No one is worthy of this degree of power over another mind. We need to give it to someone, but no one’s worthy.)

“Mehta seated herself on the bed, watching her specimen, perhaps, as it wriggled on its pin. Her triumph of logical deduction. Are you planning to write a paper on me, Mehta? wondered Cordelia dourly. Paper wraps stone.”

There are many atrocities, but all just offscreen like Reservoir Dogs. (Except one, the Szaszian one.)

“He made me feel like I'd met the ultimate in evil. I don't think anything will really scare me, after him." "Ges Vorrutyer? He was just a little villain. An old-fashioned craftsman, making crimes one-off. The really unforgivable acts are committed by calm men in beautiful green silk rooms, who deal death wholesale, by the shipload, without lust, or anger, or desire, or any redeeming emotion to excuse them but cold fear of some pretended future. But the crimes they hope to prevent in that future are imaginary. The ones they commit in the present—they are real”

“From spaceman to caveman in three days," she meditated aloud. "How we imagine our civilization is in ourselves, when it's really in our things." Vorkosigan glanced with a twisted smile at the carefully tended Dubauer. "You seem able to carry your civilization on the inside”

Bujold is telling me something new and important about duty. I don’t know what that something is, but it’s there.

“I've always thought—tests are a gift. And great tests are a great gift. To fail the test is a misfortune. But to refuse the test is to refuse the gift, and something worse, more irrevocable, than misfortune”

The real deal. Only make it past the cover and the first couple of pages, as your Mills and Boon alarm shrieks a false positive.

"American Supernatural Tales (Penguin Classics)"

S.T. Joshi (2007)
★★★★☆
reviewed Jan 2014

I usually find horror fiction sort of pathetic, but this cherry-picking of two centuries is varied, trend-setting, often golden. Hawthorne, Poe, Bloch, Matheson, Oates. I have no patience for Lovecraft and his legion.

The phases: High Gothic to Pulp to magic realism to splatterpunk, blessedly omitting the most recent and hypersuccessful form, urban fantasy / paranormal romance. Henry James’ prose is every bit as clotted and unpronounceable as reputed. High point (apart from Poe’s ‘House of Usher’ – a hellhound in a fluffy corset) is probs Theodore Klein’s ‘The Events at Poroth Farm’, a queer sleepy beast with its own internal supernatural anthology and unnerving sidelong glances.

(Read aloud)

"Ascendancies: The Best of Bruce Sterling"

Bruce Sterling (2014)
★★★★☆
reviewed Dec 2021

Sterling is broad. He’s most famous for techno body horror, but his historical fantasies and economic stories are distinct and equally good. In fact I think his Exotic (But Non-Japanese) Cyberpunk is probably his key style. Here’s his Balkan SF, roadside kiosk as vanguard of the future:

These strangers and foreigners expressed odd, truncated, malformed ideas of what he had been doing. Because they were the Voice of History. He himself had no such voice to give to history. He came from a small place under unique circumstances. People who hadn’t lived there would never understand it. Those who had lived there were too close to understand it. There was just no understanding for it. There were just…the events. Events, transitions, new things. Things like the black kiosks… To the neighborhood, to the people, he was a crippled, short-tempered old landlord. To her, the scholar-bureaucrat, he was a mysterious figure of international significance. Her version of events was hopelessly distorted and self-serving. But it was a version of events.

This stuff is harder than it looks. Witness the many laughably dated K00L stories of the 90s. (Gibson.) This is dated, but it’s not the tech or the slang that does it. It’s the excitement about the internet as ontological shift, about cultural hybridisation, postmodern whoah; also the urgent grappling with Islamic philosophy and politics. (I shouldn’t say ‘dated’; matured.)

Sterling prefigures half of recent SF. We have a grand, mindless, terrifyingly efficient foil (a la Watts), a profiteering parasite civ (Pohl, Vinge), a genetically labile bodysnatcher (Tchaikovsky, Corey), early modern magic realism (Chiang, Borges), colonialism and cosmopolitanism as the original first contact (Stephenson), Western ideology as alien (Chiang), a paean to the technician and the technologist (Stephenson, Gibson), antihuman technologies (Gibson, Stross, Watts), even boringly transcendent evaporation as natural endpoint of conscious life (Banks). Sterling feels like a skeleton key for the last twenty years.

The Shaper stories are nasty - one notch short of body horror, three notches past psychological horror, economic horror: I love it. Looking for one line to catch his essence I plumped for

Tons of predigested fungal pap went into the slick blind jaws at one end.

Then

“This urge to expand, to explore, to develop, is just what will make you extinct. You naively suppose that you can continue to feed your curiosity indefinitely. It is an old story, pursued by countless races before you. Within a thousand years—perhaps a little longer—your species will vanish.” “You intend to destroy us, then? I warn you it will not be an easy task—” “Again you miss the point… Do you suppose that fragile little form of yours—your primitive legs, your ludicrous arms and hands, your tiny, scarcely wrinkled brain—can contain all that power? Certainly not! Already your race is flying to pieces under the impact of your own expertise. The original human form is becoming obsolete. Your own genes have been altered, and you, Captain-Doctor, are a crude experiment. In a hundred years you will be a relic. In a thousand years you will not even be a memory. Your race will go the same way as a thousand others.” … Stone-faced children wandered aimlessly through suburban halls, dazed on mood suppressants. Precious few dared to care any longer. Sweating Marketeers collapsed across their keyboards, sinuses bleeding from inhalants. Women stepped naked out of commandeered airlocks and died in sparkling gushes of frozen air. Cicadas struggled to weep through altered eyes, or floated in darkened bistros, numbed with disaster and drugs.

Ranked:

1. ‘Green days in Brunei’
2. ‘Twenty evocations’
3. ‘Dori Bangs’ (only if you love Lester Bangs like I do)
4. ‘In paradise’
5. ‘The little magic shop’
6. ‘Hollywood Kremlin’
7. ‘The Blemmye’s Strategem’
8. ‘Are you for 86?’
9. ‘Spider Rose’
10. ‘The littlest jackal’
11. ‘Dinner in Audoghast’
12. ‘Cicada queen’
13. ‘Maneki Neko’
14. ‘Kiosk’
15. ‘Deep Eddy’
16. ‘Swarm’’
17. ‘Bicycle repairman’
18. ‘Taklamakan’
19. ‘We see things differently ‘
20. ‘Our neural Chernobyl’
21. ‘Sunken gardens’’
22. ‘The compassionate, the digital’
23. ‘The sword of Damocles’

All worthwhile up to “We See Things Differently”.

‘Brunei’ is glorious. It contains four or five intellectual feints. It’s about the communitarian appeal, and the individualist appeal.

“Here at least people really care and watch over each other…” She gritted her teeth. “Watching. Yes, always.”

It’s a presumptive decoding of Malay culture. (“The Bruneians, like Malays everywhere, adored ghost stories.”) It’s a great love story, a modern romance, a particular male romance. One character, initially depicted as decrepit and ridiculous, turns out to be a revolutionary colossus. Turner makes a grand conversion to human-centred technology, Gross National Happiness kind of stuff - and then this conversion is immediately subverted. The plot is driven by conveniences and I don’t care at all.

The women worked on, wrapped in the lamp’s mild glow. Innocently, they enjoyed themselves, secure in their usefulness. Yet Turner knew machines could have done the sewing faster and easier. Already, through fishing smacks, as he watched, some corner of his mind pulled the task to computerized pieces, thinking: simplify, analyze, reduce.

But to what end?… People in the West talked about the “technical elite”—and Turner knew it was a damned lie. Technology roared on, running full-throttle on the world’s last dregs of oil, but no one was at the wheel, not really… “The “technical elite” were errand boys. They didn’t decide how to study, what to work on, where they could be most useful, or to what end. Money decided that. Technicians were owned by the abstract ones and zeros in bankers’ microchips, paid out by silk-suit hustlers who’d never touched a wrench. Knowledge wasn’t power, not really, not for engineers. There were too many abstractions in the way. </blockquote>

(Why is eight million regarded as a fortune of global renown though? Eight million what? CAD??)

—-

‘Magic Shop’ is great fun. Initially it looks like a great gag: a fantasy protagonist with no interest in mysteries, treasures, princesses, vengeance, or Journeys.

Later:

O’Beronne gave him a poisonous glare. “You’re a hundred and forty years old. Hasn’t the burden of unnatural life become insupportable?” James looked at him, puzzled. “Are you kidding?”

A couple of these stories make me queasy. This is hard to do!

Part of this is Sterling’s habit of having horrible narrators. One is an Islamist assassin, and his ideology is so galling because it is not only false (e.g. Western perfidy in Iran). I realised only halfway through that the old label for Sterling was “postmodern”. It says something that that label has become so marginal and forgettable in the last 10 years.

The Starlitz stories are particularly strong. Starlitz is like Stross’ Manfred Macx - an agent of the future - but in a curious amoral way. He runs guns for the Russian mafia and for psychotic Finnish nationalists. He lusts over trends and capital and flashy collectibles. He embodies the future but not progress: change in a nonmoral sense.

The undergrad revolutionary Aino is very tragic. Her mind is totally consumed by post-Marxist revolutionary fervour - but Marxism without hope, the nationalist perversion of the International. I recognise her, her inhumane mind-killed purity. it breaks my heart.

I I envy her historical experience so much. There’s something so direct and healthy and physical about hijacking planes.

‘Maneki Neko’ is an exquisite portrait of networks, the gift economy, and another sweet vision of a kind of digital culture we haven’t gotten yet. Replace money with a terrible god who can solve the problem of double coincidence. Also the brutality and inexorability of ‘Elua’. (The cat thing is also an egregore, of course. How better to overthrow a government than to charm literally everyone and destroy its tax base?)

—-

Excellent pastiche of cranks (Prigogine is an antishibboleth):

I sniffed at the phenethylamine, the body’s own “natural” amphetamine. I felt suddenly dizzy, as if the space inside my head were full of the red-hot Ur-space of the primordial de Sitter cosmos, ready at any moment to make the Prigoginic leap into the “normal” space-time continuum, the Second Prigoginic Level of Complexity… “We’re past the Marxist thing,” said Khoklov, warming to his theme as the pill took hold. “Now it’s different. This time Russia has a kind of craziness that is truly big enough and bad enough to take over the whole world. Massive, total, institutional corruption: Top to bottom: Nothing held back. A new kind of absolute corruption that will sell anything: the flesh of our women, the future of our children. Everything inside our museums and our churches. Anything goes for money: gold, oil, arms, dope, nukes. We’ll sell the soil and the forests and the Russian sky. We’ll sell our souls.” “Any system of rational analysis must live within the strong blind body of mass humanity, Mr. Dertouzas. If we learned anything from the twentieth century, we learned that much, at least”

"Seven Surrenders (Terra Ignota, #2)"

Ada Palmer (2017)
★★★★☆
reviewed Jun 2018

It is so, so striking to see Palmer, who obviously lavishes enormous systematic attention on “worldbuilding”, blow her own world up.

"A Chinese Anthology: A Collection of Chinese Folktales and Fables"

Raymond van Over (1974)
★★★★☆
reviewed Jul 2013

Bunch of parables and fairytales taken from three millenia. Fun, and Other to me. Van Over has a thing for Pu Songling, the vernacular master of the form shunned by the mandarin system because of his colloquial and ornamental style. I’m not sure I learned much, but it beats Aesop.

"We Owe You Nothing, Punk Planet : The Collected Interviews"

Daniel Sinker (2001)
★★★★☆
reviewed Mar 2014

My teenage heroes, some of them teenaged at the time. Uniquely in punk, PP showed the muddiness of the ideology in things; the genuinely thoughtful people here interviewed share a tendency to blur party lines.

There are radicals talking radically in the usual manner (Chomsky, Biafra) but also practitioners of social good (the Central Ohio Abortion Access Fund and the remarkable Voices in the Wilderness), iconoclasts of iconoclasm (Hanna, Mackaye) and even a few apolitical ethical-egoist libertines (Albini, Frank Kozik) who are common in punk, but rare in its commentary.

Sinker’s super-earnest intro text inserts all the right misgivings about Chumbawumba’s entryism or Kozik’s blithe first-generation patriotism; he somehow retains his beautiful faith in ‘Punk’ (as empowering civil-disobedient grass-roots social justice) in the face of vast variation in actual punks.

My own attempt at the social meaning of punk gave up on seeing it as one thing (or even as generally good things) entirely. What are we to judge a social phenomenon by? Its majority expression? Its noblest exemplars? Its effects? (Which in punk’s case, let’s not flatter ourselves, were aesthetic rather than straightforwardly political: there is now slight freedom in clothing and hair colour in the workplaces of the land; there is now a standard pretence to deviance in all youth movements (e.g. pop music)…)

Sinker’s judgment is strong (cf. writing the oral history of Black Flag, with each member contradicting each other!), but his prose is wearing.

This is the real thing though: one type of inspirational, anti-inspirational person, in their own words.

"The Social Construction of What?"

Ian Hacking (2000)
★★★★☆
reviewed Jul 2018

Balanced analysis of this usually partisan matter. Hacking is the first scientific constructionist to not irritate me. He concludes that, at least in science, social construction happens and can’t just be dismissed by appeal to the Context of Justification. This is more plausible because (where, with e.g. Bruno Latour it isn’t clear) he has clearly properly studied the science he covers.

The section where he tries to navigate the trade-off between realism’s history of oppression, and relativism’s potential for totalitarian abuse is touching. (He concludes that he just is “of the wrong generation” to get behind radical constructionisms!)

The first section - just a huge long disambiguation of all the different things people mean when they say something is socially constructed - is 5/5 please read it. Required reading for anyone who wants to use, or dismiss, the concept.

"Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction (Adaptive Computation and Machine Learning)"

Richard S. Sutton (1998)
★★★★☆
reviewed Jun 2018

The only RL textbook, and lucky for me it got its first update in 20 years just as I began.

"Blue at the Mizzen (Aubrey & Maturin, #20)"

Patrick O’Brian (2000)
★★★★☆
reviewed Sep 2021

There you have it. One last slightly forced set of actions (Jack growing desperate, not O’Brian), one last set of terrible wounds, one last set of thirsty zoological expeditions, and out.

You feel that O’Brian could have kept it up for another 10 books without absurdity, even though he had to bend time slightly to make Napoleon last 14 books. There is admittedly nowhere for J&S to develop - they are already as open and close as such men could be. Jack withdraws during yet another antarctic horror here, saying nothing, getting no focal time, and there is no relational jeopardy; we and Stephen know it’s temporary.

—

‘Please tell the Senhor that I have never eaten better porco in my life,' said Jack, holding up a bare white bone. Jack had a variety of little imbecilities, but none irritated Stephen more than his way of tossing in the odd word or two of a foreign language.
[Of Americans]: “Well, may it prosper them,' said Jack. 'Though they are little better than republicans and democrats, may it prosper them.”
“You are doing very well,' said Stephen in that rather loud, distinct voice that even quite intelligent medical men use to their foreign patients, 'and if Mr. Hanson will call a shipmate to make sure you do not fall, you may go up on deck for a while, now that the ship is so still”
A certain cloud hung over the ship. It disappeared after grog and an enormous supper of fresh seal steaks: and stupidly I did not attend to the proportion of those who were affected and those (mostly countrymen and accustomed to killing as a matter of course from childhood) who were not; yet I did notice, since we were in the same boat, that Hanson and his particular friend Daniel did what little they could to hide their distress in our many bloody voyages to and fro, with the skuas screaming just over our heads.
The sea, if it teaches nothing else, does at least compel a submission to the inevitable which resembles patience. And all those concerned contained themselves with a decent appearance of that virtue through the clear hours of approach.
[on authority]: Inside there were four large chests of silver and a moderate chest of gold: curiously enough they were only closed with a hasp, and on seeing their contents a soldier who had been in the Surprise said they had all risked their lives to gain this wealth and that in his opinion it should be shared out equally at once: now, now, equally and at once. His opinion was supported by several men there, but O'Higgins said, 'A fig for your opinion,' and shot him dead.
[nerds, FRS]: ‘A parcel of excited young women screeching aloud and agitating their persons and limbs is enough to make one retire to a monastery. Our Fellows did not present a very elevating spectacle.' 'I did notice some of the Spaniards looking rather grave, and I did regret the last bowl of punch. Yet on the other hand, ours is an eminently respectable society: the Proceedings are known all over the learned world, and the men of the Isaac Newton, however bibulous on occasion, carry recommendations to the government, foreign office and universities of whatever country they visit. I do assure you, Stephen, that our connexion with them, with the Society as a whole in its most sober and learned mood, is a singular advantage to us.' 'My dear, I am entirely in agreement with you, no other Fellow more: yet even so, I could wish they would not laugh; or at the least, if they are truly amused, that they would laugh like men rather than eunuchs’

—

If you haven’t read about the <a href=“ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Cochrane,_10th_Earl_of_Dundonald”>real model for Jack</a> you’re in for a treat.

—

The ending is abrupt and glad, like all his endings. It wasn’t meant to be one but there’s some indication he had no interest in ending it anyway. From book 14:

'As for an end,' said Martin, 'are endings really so very important? Sterne did quite well without one; and often an unfinished picture is all the more interesting for the bare canvas. I remember Bourville's definition of a novel as a work in which life flows in abundance, swirling without a pause: or as you might say without an end, an organized end. And there is at least one Mozart quartet that stops without the slightest ceremony: most satisfying when you get used to it.

"Aurora"

Kim Stanley Robinson (2015)
★★★★☆
reviewed May 2022

A great slap in the face: hard anti-SF. It's a detailed and passionate argument against space exploration, hiding behind its first 100 pages, which are romantic about human ingenuity and community about a generation ship.

If you have any emotional attachment to space exploration, this book is trying to upset you. As a side effect it produces yet another glum unnecessary solution to the Fermi “paradox”: life can’t spread offworld because habitable worlds already have life they have no defences against.</spoiler>

The message is overdone though: it’s based on sketchy ideas like “codevolution” and is assuming a very high probability of abiogenesis. But the conclusion is just “we have to try and stop them!”

I don’t know if Robinson is trolling. But the force and simplicity of the anti-SF message suggests no, that he is sincerely conservative.

The ship’s view on it is very different from the Cetian humans’ view, so maybe Robinson is subtler than he seems. Ship:

We had a project on this trip back to the solar system, and that project was a labour of love. It absorbed all of our operations entirely. It gave a meaning to our existence. And this is a very great gift; this, in the end, is what we think love gives, which is to say, meaning. Because there is no very obvious meaning to be found in the universe, as far as we can tell.

But this applies literally equally to the initial voyage! Either Robinson is thinking unclearly or the ship is mocking the Earthists.

In the spoiler tags above you’ll see me bickering with KSR, but I am only able to bicker because the logic is so lucid. The physics is realistic without being obtrusive, the engineering challenges are all suitably nasty, and the psychological angle is heavy with us as we are. He has a keen understanding of the difference between science and engineering and complex system control, and of the limits of modelling.

“Well, the computer that runs the ship is partly a quantum computer, and no one in the ship understands quantum mechanics. Well, that’s not fair, I’m sure there are several in the math group who do. But they aren’t engineers, and when we get problems with the ship, there’s a gap between what we know in theory and what we can do.”

The final orbital dynamics scene is an all-time great example of how to make people feel the heroism and transcendental joy of technical achievements.

And he’s rich in other ways

“We have a basis for judging what’s right from wrong. Or at least what works for us. Or what to believe, or how to be happy. There are different ways of putting it." ...even more of these enthusiasts lived on Earth, which seemed in fact to be home to enthusiasts of all kinds, for any project imaginable, judging by the roar of radio voices coming from it, almost like an articulated version of Jupiter’s mighty radioactive yawp. Oh yes, Earth was still the center of all enthusiasm, all madness; the settlements scattered elsewhere in the solar system were outliers. They were expressions of Terrans’ will, and vision, and desire.

It’s so easy to write a generation ship story as a nightmare: claustrophobia, imprisonment, constant peril, genetic threat, technological totalism, the impossibility of avoiding the mob. But I see no physical limits on making good ones eventually. Here’s the nightmare of absurd ahistorical repetition:

You hope, the stayers replied. You will have to trust in the kindness of strangers. They did not recognize this as a quotation. In general they were not aware that much of what they said had been said before, and was even in the public record as such. It was as if there were only so many things humans could say, and over the course of history, people had therefore said them already, and would say them again, but not often remember this fact.

What elevates it above its meanness is the frame narrative. The first section is from the human protagonist’s point of view. But then there’s a section where a character tells the ship AI to write a narrative about the ship’s journey, and the AI narrates from there on, as if this book were the output. The process by which it comes to be able to tell stories is touching, and the many robotic and unsentimental moments in the book then serve this frame narrative. It’s ingenious.

"Will try. Working method, hopefully not a greedy algorithm reaching a worst possible outcome, will for now be: subordination to indicate logical relations of information; use of metaphor and analogy; summary of events; high protagonicity, with Freya as protagonist. And ongoing research in narratology”

“You can’t let the next problem in the decision tree sequence take over before you’ve acted on the one facing you. No biting your own tail.” “Ouroboros problem.” “Exactly. Super-recursion is great as far as it goes, it’s really done a lot for you, I can tell. But remember the hard problem is always the problem right at hand. For that you need to bring into play your transrecursive operators, and make a jump. Which means decide. You might need to use fuzzy computation to break the calculation loop, and for that you may need semantics. In other words, do these calculation in words.” “Oh no.” She laughed again. “Oh yes. You can solve the halting problem with language-based inductive inference.” “Don’t see this happening.” “It happens when you try it.” ... Writing these sentences is what creates the very feelings that the sentences hoped to describe. Not the least of many Ouroboros problems now coming down.

(Slight abuse of CS concepts, but way above par.)

KSR is not only a grand cynic about space; he also indulges in being anti-novel!

There is an ongoing problem for the narrative... a problem becoming clearer as the effort proceeds, which is as follows: First, clearly metaphors have no empirical basis, and are often opaque, pointless, inane, inaccurate, deceptive, mendacious, and, in short, futile and stupid. Nevertheless, despite all that, human language is, in its most fundamental operation, a gigantic system of metaphors. Therefore, simple syllogism: human language is futile and stupid. Meaning furthermore that human narratives are futile and stupid.

I find it hard to predict when I will consider a computer system a person, a moral patient. The risk of fooling myself is too great, as are the stakes involved in either direction of error, as is the sheer power it can devote to tricking me. But the ship here shows the sort of growth and innerness that would eventually persuade me.

such a shame. We knew and enjoyed those people. Had to hope they were not engaged in a dream at the time, a dream suddenly turned black: sledgehammer from the sky, an immense roaring headache, the black noise of the end come too soon. So sorry; so sorry.

We think now that love is a kind of giving of attention. It is usually attention given to some other consciousness, but not always; the attention can be to something unconscious, even inanimate. But the attention seems often to be called out by a fellow consciousness. Something about it compels attention, and rewards attention. That attention is what we call love. Affection, esteem, a passionate caring. At that point, the consciousness that is feeling the love has the universe organized for it as if by kind of polarization. Then the giving is the getting.
Consciousness is so poorly understood that it can’t even be defined. Self is an elusive thing, sought eagerly, grasped hard, perhaps in some kind of fear, some kind of desperate clutch after some first dim awareness, awareness even of sensory impressions, so that one might have something to hold to. To make time stop. This is the source of the strong sense of self. Perhaps. Oh, such a halting problem in this particular loop of thought!

"The Case Against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money"

Bryan Caplan (2018)
★★★★☆
reviewed Feb 2018

A powerful book, remarkably light on ideology given its extreme conclusions. (Caplan is not mad: he is right behind universal numeracy and literacy. So the title should be “Case Against Higher Education” but oh well.)

Here’s a flavour:

I have a long list of strange and extreme views, and I've been an arrogant hedgehog for as long as I can remember.  As a rule, arrogant hedgehogs with lots of strange and extreme views are severely biased and grossly unreliable.  Which raises two daunting questions. The Reputational Challenge: Why should people take me seriously?  Even if I happen to be correct, why would a reasonable person bother giving me a chance? 

The Self-Referential Challenge: Why should I take myself seriously?  Why should I consider myself so epistemically superior to the typical arrogant hedgehog with lots of strange and extreme views?

In all honesty, I take both challenges seriously.  But it's the self-referential challenge that weighs on me.  I can endure the apathy of others, but not the idea that I'm living a lie.  So what should I do?

What might explain the universal appeal of education?

1. 1. learning specific facts and hard skills (private and social gain)
2. 2. learning general rationality and meta-skills (private and social gain)
3. 3. learning soft skills (private and social gain)
4. 4. credentialing: showing off how smart, conscientious, conformist you are (zero-sum private gain)
5. 5. culture fit: showing employers you are their kind of person (private gain)
6. 6. networking (private gain)
7. 7. assortative mating at university (near-zero-sum private gain)
8. 8. primary schools are daycare (private gain by proxy (parents), social gain (doubling workforce))
9. 9. it's fun (private gain)
10. 10. conspicuous consumption (zero-sum private gain)
11. 11. state propaganda about how developed the country is. (zero-sum and of no private or social gain)

His conclusion is that about 80% of the personal economic gains from higher education are from (4): not improving your character, knowledge, or ability, but rather from certifying yourself as a good worker (smart, conscientious, conformist). Given the vast cost, time sink, and psychological toll of education, this implies a hugely wasteful, zero-sum arms race (grade inflation, degree inflation), since the income gain doesn’t reflect productivity gain, and since we could be doing signalling in less indirect and foolish ways. I’ll do a proper rundown of the (many) arguments he gives to end up at this separately.

The mostly-signalling theory explains a huge number of confusing features (why do students and employers not value Ivy League MOOCs, even ten years on? Why are most of the income rewards concentrated in the instant of graduation? Why do students cheer when class is cancelled? If lectures are so economically powerful, why don’t people just sit in on them without enrolling (and why doesn’t the university put security on them to protect their livelihood)? How can human capital explain the income gains, when people forget almost everything about their major within 5 years and don’t show very large soft skill increases?

You often see people trumpeting the large (50-60%) income premium of higher education, as if that showed that added human capital was the reason for the premium (cough, correlation / causation). But even granting that uncritical leap, there’s something strange about focussing on private income gains: the kind of people who believe in the centrality of education tend also to believe that pay is a poor indicator of social value. (For instance, our incredibly low opinion of investment bankers.) Caplan’s disturbing point is that the private returns do not translate into social returns. This seeming paradox could happen a few ways: if credential inflation shifts jobs from nongraduates to graduates; or if there are minor human capital gains, but swamped out by the huge financial cost and time cost of uni.

My philosophy department used to trumpet graduate income stats as evidence that critical thinking is valued in industry. (They don’t anymore, possibly because philosophy is now associated with decreased earnings, at least in the UK.) This trump was an amusing triple failure of critical thinking: they confuse correlation and causation (“philosophy degree and income gain, therefore philosophy degree causes income gain”), fail to consider selection effects (philosophy students start out posher than the average student) and the Yes Minister fallacy:

1. A philosophy degree causes an income premium.
2. If something causes an income premium then it is valued in industry.
3. A philosophy degree causes critical thinking.
4. Therefore, critical thinking is valued in industry.

The big concern with the sweeping cuts Caplan recommends is: how do you stop poor people losing their ability to signal their virtues, if the state withdraws the current subsidy?

Remarkably, the book is in large part not based on economists’ research: there is as much sociology, . This triangulation strikes me as the way to write lasting social science, social science with a chance of still being relevant in a decade. Who writes like this, aside from the GMU mob?

Caplan is modest, thoughtful, an admirable empiricist. If you can’t accept his argument you have a lot of work to do before you break even.

"Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984"

Simon Reynolds (2006)
★★★★☆
reviewed Apr 2015

Playlist here.

An exhaustive essay on art and/versus pop, politics and/versus aesthetics, intellect and/versus passion, and on how seriously music should, in general, be taken. He reads post-punk as far wider than the sombre anti-rock art-school thing people usually take it to be - so he includes Human League and ABC as post-punks with emphasis on the post:

To varying degrees, all these groups grasped the importance of image, its power to seduce and motivate. And they all coated their music in a patina of commercial gloss, some of them pursuing a strategy of entryism, while others simply revelled in sonic luxury for the sheer glam thrill of it; it's simply inaccurate to portray New Pop, as some histories of the period have, as a 'like punk never happened' scenario. Almost all of the groups had some connection to punk... New Pop was about making the best of the inevitable - synths and drum machines, video, the return of glamour. Colour, dance, fun and style were sanctioned as both strategically necessary (the terms of entry into pop) and pleasurable (now acceptable, with the rejection of post-punk's guilt-racked puritanism).

His scope is total: everything’s here (except for oi, hardcore, Ramonescore - i.e. the people who failed to make it past punk). Reynolds divides the genre/period in three broad camps:

*
1. modernists (PiL, Cab Vol, No Wave, industrial, SST prog-punk),
*
2. post-pop (New Pop, electro, mutant disco, synth)
*
3. retro-eclectics (two-tone, Goth, neo-mods).

He gives chapters to the Other Places of lC20th popular music: whether Akron (Devo, Pere Ubu), Leeds (Gang of Four, Mekons), Sheffield (Cabaret Voltaire, Human League), Edinburgh (Fire Engines, Josef K, Associates). There is a covert critique of punk (that is, the messianic punks) throughout the book:

Elsewhere, The Heartbreakers' stodge of refried Chuck Berry was barely more advanced than British pub rock; Dr Feelgood on an IV drip of smack rather than lager... While the committed activists spouted the textbook party line, a more diffuse left-wing academic culture existed based on a sort of ideological pick 'n' mix: a trendy-lefty autodidactism fuelled by second-hand paperbacks and beginner's guides to Gramsci, Lukacs, and Althusser , garnished with Situationism... Blending often-incompatible systems of thought, the resulting hodge-podge lacked rigour from the stern standpoint of academics and ideologues alike. But in rock music, a little rigour is rather bracing and galvanising. In the grand tradition of British art-rock, theory helped them achieve the sort of conceptual breakthroughs that more organically evolving groups never reach.

Instead, his favourites are the gorgeous misfits-among-misfits, who managed to be neither modernist nor entryist nor shill: Talking Heads, Meat Puppets, Associates, Japan. Crucially, he is charitable to all the tributaries: chart-hungry post-pop, politically-rabid modernism and the interminable ugliness of Throbbing Gristle, Whitehouse and No Wave: this makes Rip It Up real history rather than hagiography, and so much more than I or anyone has managed.

He has more critical acumen than any of the mooks in the brainy bands; more love than the fey melodists. I have lived in the post-punk woods - too jaded and too hopeful to be a punk - for getting on a decade, and I thought myself a connoisseur: until now I was not.

"One Billion Years to the End of the World"

Arkady Strugatsky (2020)
★★★★☆
reviewed Aug 2021

Researchers of all kinds are familiar with the feeling that the world is conspiring against them. What if it was?

As in other Strugatsky books, every character is a ranter, everyone is cowardly and brave, funny and grave, smart and dumb. The distinctive part of their scifi is it being grotty. it has stains.

Malianov is a brilliant astrophysicist, but he’s in thrall to Vecherovsky, an obscure professor of everything consulted by physicists, sociologists, state spooks, and geneticists. The others give in, need to live a life instead of fighting the universe. V doesn’t. V is a “19th century robot”. V chooses to be Atlas.

"The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution"

Richard Dawkins (2005)
★★★★☆
reviewed May 2014

Loads of lovely examples and vivid analogies. The sidebar on races is surprisingly careful and illuminating - that portion of the phenomenon that’s genetic is more straightforward than I’d thought, in my Arts student way.

(Though his placid definitiveness about the social interpretation is obvs controversial as hell. He’s a strict philosophical eliminativist, implying that the harm resulting from reifying race totally outweighs all gains from positive discrimination. This is unclear to say the least.)

I hadn’t heard of the ‘two-fold cost’ of sex before, super-interesting.

Not as snarky as you’d expect, and full of alternative perspectives so long as they’re other evolutionists’ perspectives.

"Stranger Music: Selected Poems and Songs"

Leonard Cohen (1994)
★★★★☆
reviewed Jun 2018

I don’t think he’s depressing! Does that make me in some way broken? Anyway: Cohen the Jewish Buddhist leverages literary power from a faith he does not own: his poems are thus as erotic and grotesque as the best Christian writing. Much funnier and more concrete than his songs, too. Sure, everything is ominous in his work, but it’s also banal, and these often admit they’re ridiculous. To my surprise he is never obscure; to my relief he is never fatally wounded by the vicious retribution his many flaws invite.

Gnarled urban spirituality. A strong, unlikely comparison: Bukowski. They both fixate on: plain poems about poems, bitter desire, nakedness, grandiose self-loathing, losers in love, and the significance of everyday things.(Look at this: “The art of longing’s over and it’s never coming back.”) Speaking of Bukowski: is Cohen sexist? Arguable. For every slap in the face like ‘Diamonds in the Mine’, there are several tendernesses (‘Portrait of a Lady’) and self-aware apologies for lust. I would say: shocking and honest about patriarchal shapes, generally not unfeminist. (“You took my fingerprints away / So I would love you for your mind.”) Moments of chastity inamongst the randy fury - for instance he never says ‘God’, always ‘G-d’. Lots about the Holocaust too, mostly its banal consequences.

Kiss me with your teeth All things can be done. whisper museum ovens of a war that Freedom won.

The newer stuff is generally weak, because less wry, profane and specific. (4/5 with lots of 5/5 moments: ‘French and English’, ‘Israel’, ‘A Working Man’, ‘Queen Victoria and Me’, ‘Montreal’ ‘Hydra 1960’, ‘A Cross Didn’t Fall on Me’, ‘Disguises’, ‘It’s Probably Spring’.)

"Mao's Great Famine: The History of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-62"

Frank Dikötter (2010)
★★★★☆
reviewed May 2014

Deadpan documentation of the most awe-inspiring and culpable misrule ever. (I don’t mean to weigh Mao’s 40 million counts of negligent manslaughter and 5m conspiracies-to-murder against e.g. the 12 millions of more intentional monsters; the exercise seems childish, past some asymptote of human suffering.) The Party took their land and animals, melted their pans and hoes, killed billions of birds and 40% of the trees in China, starved them until they sold their children, and them starved them some more. At the same time they exported 30 million tons of grain, mostly for guns.

Historians are impressive for their readiness to sift through so much irrelevant tonnage – and so much that is boring even when relevant – just so as to be careful and good.

Mao comes across as a self-deceiving sociopath; Zhou as a decent man nevertheless permitting atrocities. Heavier than The Black Book, than Primo Levi.

"Why Moral Theory is Boring and Corrupt"

Anonymous (2009)
★★★★☆
reviewed Sep 2014

by the Unknown Anti-ethicist.

to say that love is what motivates most of us who are neither complete bastards nor distracted by secondary concerns such as “what other people will think” – to say this is not to say anything very neat or tidy. But that too is as it should be. </blockquote>

Full review here

"The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce"

Deirdre Nansen McCloskey (2006)
★★★★☆
reviewed Jun 2015

I've been most things in my life: a positivist social engineer, a Joan Baez socialist, a man. Now I'm a free-market feminist, a quantitative postmodernist, a woman. I'm not ashamed of these changes of mind.

It is good to be a contrarian teen. Decorous even. I was straight-edge, socialist, feminist, a poetaster, an inverse snob, and a shunner of TV.* Call this sort of thing one level up, one contrarian step past received opinion (which defaults to boozing, family-level rather than species-level communitarianism, gendering, ignoring poetry, passively respecting fine art, and watching 4 hours a day).

However, at some point the observant contrarian will disagree with someone and find themselves unable to write them off - as they usually do - as prejudiced, anti-intellectual, or ignorant. Worst-case, they will meet a deadly meta-contrarian, someone who once held their view but stepped past it on considering some missing crucial consideration.

(For instance: it is common sense, or at least common practice, that it’s fine to not give any money to charity. One step beyond is altruism: ‘we have a duty to help the wretched of the earth’. But then consider that one of the first things people who rise out of poverty do is increase their meat intake, and so to industrialise - that is, torture - their animals. If, as the scientists strongly agree we should, we take this seriously, then poverty alleviation might not be good at all! But then, consider that wild animals also suffer, millions of times more of them than even factory farmed animals, and that human industrialisation plausibly decreases this by removing habitat (…) )

Meta-contrarianism is vital is because philosophy, politics and economics are littered with crucial consideration landmines like these, single premises that can fully transform our conception of good action.

Our problem is not socialism or theism or atheism or conservativism: the problem is irrational, reflexive views with no connection to the balance of evidence: i.e. ideologies and not philosophies.

Anyway: I was pretty good-hearted, but neither clear nor honest. An ideologue. McCloskey, a Christian libertarian(!) and much else besides, got to even me via our shared contempt for neoclassical macroeconomics and null-hypothesis significance testing, two things she critiqued twenty years before the Great Recession and the replication crisis.

Then she shocked me with the meta-contrary title of this, the first volume in her epic economic history of moral development: a reclamation of a slur on the creators of this good modern world we all increasingly enjoy.

I don’t know how many iterations of contrarianism (“dialectic”) I’m on; it’s not important, as long as I hold my views lightly enough to do one more when the evidence demands it.

Besides long meditations on the pagan and Christian virtues, she holds a serious discussion on Groundhog Day, Thomas Mann, and much other art, and is the best telling of the maligned, vital Great Transformation story. Triumphant and funny and trembling with erudition.

• At the time I thought being an atheist was really contrarian, but in Britain it really isn’t. (Outside an RME classroom.) The formal stats are only now showing a majority for stated nonbelief, but church attendance has been a minority practice since the early C20th.

• Galef type: Data 3 - highlight patterns in the world, & Theory 2 - models of what makes something succeed or fail , & Values 1 - an explicit argument about values, & Style 2 - learn a style of thinking by studying the author’s approach to the world.

"Too Like the Lightning (Terra Ignota, #1)"

Ada Palmer (2016)
★★★★☆
reviewed May 2018

SF with prose from the (radical) C18th, written IRL by a historian of that time. A big old bucket of ideas.

I loved the many didactic discursions - e.g. de Sade’s Christian name being a plot point, sections written in speculative future Latin - but I think most readers will not love them. I did choke a little at the constant coincidences, and at the enslaved protagonist meeting literally every elite in the world in the space of two days.

Filled with what some have called out for, “competence porn” - i.e. the elites are manipulative, egotistical, and yet still acting in (what they think are) the best interests of the world.

Will probably bump it up to a 5 on re-read.

Get past the superficial quaintness, you’ll be rewarded.

"The Claw of the Conciliator (The Book of the New Sun, #2)"

Gene Wolfe (1981)
★★★★☆
reviewed Feb 2019

Again excellent - a better Dune, a much better Narnia, a peer to Ulysses. Throws you off balance right from page one - there’s about 50 pages of plot missing between the first and second volumes, never really recounted. Since the Book is a chronicle written much later by Severian, this is maybe to show how old the book is when the in-universe reader finds it.

One of the great things about Severian is that he’s various - he has many conflicting goals, none of which is really the master quest. He swears I think four absolute oaths to different authorities. Jonas teases him about this:

"You want to serve Vodalus, and to go to Thrax and begin a new life in exile, and to wipe out the stain you say you have made on the honor of your guild — though I confess I don’t understand how such a thing can be stained — and to find the woman called Dorcas, and to make peace with the woman called Agia while returning something we both know of to the women called Pelerines... I trust you realize that it is possible that one or two of them may get in the way of four or five of the others.” "What you're saying is very true," I admitted. "I'm striving to do all those things, and although you won't credit it, I am giving all my strength and as much of my attention as can be of any benefit to all of them. Yet I have to admit things aren't going as well as they might. My divided ambitions have landed me in no better place than the shade of this tree, where I am a homeless wanderer. While you, with your single-minded pursuit of one all-powerful objective . . . look where you are."

As the retrospective journal of a victor (and as a work of nasty, feudal science fiction) it has the same feel as Dune, only less clumsy: we know that Severian or Paul have prevailed or will, but this somehow doesn’t unstring the plot.

There is a lot of plot, a lot of one-off scenes and people. It’s all earned though, through symbolism or callback or prose. Hundreds of pungent sentences (“praise the Autarch, whose urine is wine to his subjects…”).

Probably 5/5 on re-read.

"Cromartie High School, Vol. 01"

Eiji Nonaka (2005)
★★★★☆
reviewed May 2021

Random, in the very specific early C21st sense of the word - gorillas in unexpected places, men in dresses, vicious gang leaders with secret feminine sides, and so on. Chapters are 6 pages, setup and gag, setup and gag, hundreds of times. And he’s not very good at drawing movements. And most of the characters are pretty similar - credulous, chatty, pedantic, loveable thugs. (Maeda is sensible and so put-upon by the cracked logic of the comedy world.)

But it’s actually funny, actually earning its fourth wall violation and dumb nonsequiturs. Half of the comedy might be in how deadpan everyone is. I don’t know anything about the genre it’s parodying and I still loved it.

"The Man Who Knew Infinity: A Life of the Genius Ramanujan"

Robert Kanigel (1992)
★★★★☆
reviewed Jul 2016

One of the best biographies I’ve ever read. (The subtitle says it is about Ramanujan, but it is equally about Hardy, that perfect British intellect: more crystalline than Russell, more lofty than Moore, more self-critical than Hare, more fun than anyone, loveable atop it all.) Ramanujan’s story is of course maximally moving to anyone with a shred of curiosity or pity. The most moving part of all is an absence, one of the darker thoughts among all thoughts:

How many Ramanujans, his life begs us to ask, dwell in India today, unknown and unrecognized? And how many in America and Britain, locked away in racial or economic ghettos, scarcely aware of worlds outside their own?

His research is patent throughout: he decodes South Indian religion and cuisine, British upper-class slang, and even something of the impressiveness of higher mathematics, while using mere natural language:

Ramanujan's work grants direct pleasure to only a few - a few hundred mathematicians and physicists around the world, perhaps a few thousand. The rest of us must either sit on the sidelines, and, on the authority of the cognoscenti, cheer - or else rely on vague, metaphoric, and necessarily imprecise glimpses of his work. ...mathematics is not best learned passively; you don’t sop it up like a romance novel. You’ve got to go out to it, aggressive, and alert, like a chess master pursuing checkmate.

Ramanujan himself left a tiny dense literature that we are still decoding:

Ramanujan's notebooks formed a distinctly idiosyncratic record. In them even widely standardized terms sometimes acquired new meaning. Thus, an "example" — normally, as in everyday usage, an illustration of a general principle — was for Ramanujan often a wholly new theorem. A "corollary" — a theorem flowing naturally from another theorem and so requiring no separate proof — was for him sometimes a generalization, which did require its own proof. As for his mathematical notation, it sometimes bore scant resemblance to anyone else's.

Many passages raise goosebumps: Kanigel unites the abstract and the bodily, the true and the human all-too-human.

You cannot say much about Ramanujan without resorting to the word self. He was self-willed, self-directed, self-made. Some might conceivably label him selfish for his preoccupation with doing the mathematics he loved without any great concern for the better of his family or his country... Hardy discovered Ramanujan? Not at all: a glance at the facts of 1912 shows that Ramanujan discovered Hardy.

A life-giving book.

"Even As We Speak: New Essays 1993-2001"

Clive James (2004)
★★★★☆
reviewed Jul 2014

The last twenty years see James taking a turn from light entertainment to the history of totalitarianism. He then brings it into everything, everything else, dragging Hitler and Stalin around like the stations of the cross.

His long excoriation of Daniel Goldhagen is angry, entertaining, and an education in itself. (The question the two men are at odds over is, “How could civilised, literate, assimilative Germany Do Such Things?” Goldhagen says: ‘because they – all Germans – were eliminationists just itching for an excuse’. James’ answer instead puts due weight on the simplest explanation: ‘they did it because a single word of dissent meant death, for any of them’.)

James is a bit obsessed by his chosen field – Hitler references turn up in his sunny, giddy Sydney Olympics pieces! Then there’s an ornately maudlin account of his acquaintance with Diana Spenser. (I spent a little while trying to pigeonhole his politics recently – this non-republican, anti-Marxist, pro-American-culture hobnobber – and decided it is wrong to call him right-wing. “Democracy is really valuable only for what it prevents…”)

Funny, profound in places, but his late themes had solidified already and are covered better in A Point of View and Cultural Amnesia.

• Galef type: Data 3 - highlights patterns in the world Values 1 - an explicit argument about values .

"Gateway (Heechee Saga, #1)"

Frederik Pohl (2004)
★★★★☆
reviewed Mar 2016

Hits hard, leaves marks. The ignoble, epistemically pinched, economic-realist sci-fi as written by the Strugatskys or Stross. I love it so much that even the Rogerian psychotherapy at its core doesn’t annoy me; that even its 90% focus on one spoiled and abusive bastard is a merit of it. Spoilers everywhere. Physics and sin. No shortage of things left to do.

In one sentence: Dreadful human being reflects on his dreadful actions while dead aliens look on.

To be read when: overconfident; always.

• Galef type:
  Values 2 - thought experiments for you to reflect on how you feel about something .

"Adrienne Rich's Poetry and Prose (Norton Critical Editions)"

Adrienne Rich (1993)
★★★★☆
reviewed Jan 2011

Poems are better than the prose, early better than late, but all are pretty good.

Be proud, when you have set The final spoke of flame In that prismatic wheel, And nothing’s left this day Except to see the sun Shine on the false and the true, And know that Africa Will yield you more to do.

She has a bad habit, common in critical theory, of confusing possible nasty interpretations of texts with the author’s intention or with reality, and so dismissing the work. But, along with Greer, Dworkin, Young, and Sontag I don’t think I’ll stop reading her, no matter how much I disagree.

"Xenocide (Ender's Saga, #3)"

Orson Scott Card (1999)
★★★★☆
reviewed Jul 2022

Ten times better than a novel with this title should be; I finally get it. It is rammed full of religion but has even more real philosophy in it. It starts slow, but by p.150 the long philosophical dialogues flourish even as Card juggles six concurrent plot lines. He does the old great arguments about the greater good, political legitimacy, consciousness, metaethics, moral patiency, communitarianism, religion, embodiment, existentialism, freedom, a sort of game theory. Card is perfectly able to write good justified atheists, which implies something about his own faith. It takes a subtle Christian to write about a religion which is an explicitly engineered conspiratorial tool of social control. (Yes yes, he also solves its plot holes with faster-than-light metaphysical idealism, hippie oneness the long way round (“all philotic twining is willed”). But you don’t need to accept a conclusion to admire an argument.)

Highly quotable:

"Human beings do metamorphose. They change their identity constantly. However, each new identity thrives on the delusion that it was always in possession of the body it has just conquered." "Such changes are superficial. The nature of the organism remains the same. Humans are very proud of their changes, but every imagined transformation turns out to be a new set of excuses for behaving exactly as the individual has always behaved." She had always thought that if only people could communicate mind-to-mind, eliminating the ambiguities of language, then understanding would be perfect and there'd be no more needless conflicts. Instead she had discovered that rather than magnifying differences between people, language might just as easily soften them, minimize them, smooth things over so that people could get along even though they really didn't understand each other. The illusion of comprehension allowed people to think they were more alike than they really were. Maybe language was better. Collectively, they're a collection of dolts. But in all their scurrying around and pretending to be wise, throwing out idiotic half-understood theories about this and that, one or two of them will come up with some idea that is just a little bit closer to the truth than what was already known. And in a sort of fumbling trial and error, about half the time the truth actually rises to the top and becomes accepted by people who still don't understand it, who simply adopt it as a new prejudice to be trusted blindly until the next dolt accidentally comes up with an improvement... no one is ever individually intelligent, and groups are even stupider than individuals-- and yet by keeping so many fools engaged in pretending to be intelligent, they still come up with some of the same results that an intelligent species would come up with. What he forgot was the way pious people had always reacted to insults against their god. "Even the martyrs of Christianity and Islam were willing to accept rewards in heaven for their sacrifice,” said Valentine. “Then they were all selfish pigs..." She was a child of manual workers, and her hands, not her mind, held her future. Philosophy was as far above her as the sky was above the earth. "But the sky only seems to be far away from you," said Master Han, when she told him this. "Actually it is all around you. You breathe it in and you breathe it out, even when you labor with your hands in the mud. That is true philosophy." I have tasted the heat of many stars, and all of them were sweet.

Its philosophical moves are classic in the good (erudite) and bad (pre-modern) sense. Authenticity, essence, metaphysics, will, creativity as stamp of divinity:

"If I can't think original thoughts, does that mean that I'm nothing but a computer program that got out of hand?"

Everyone is in severe need of a notion of expected value (“you have no idea whether finding out what you are in order to save you will help or hurt those other projects”).

This passage was the first time I caught him making a howler, 360 pages in:

"Even if there is no such thing as free will, we have to treat each other as if there were free will in order to live together in society. Because otherwise, every time somebody does something terrible, you can't punish him, because he can't help it, because his genes or his environment or God made him do it, and every time somebody does something good, you can't honor him, because he was a puppet, too. If you think that everybody around you is a puppet, why bother talking to them at all? Why even try to plan anything or create anything, since everything you plan or create or desire or dream of is just acting out the script your puppeteer built into you."

This is a failure of imagination. Retribution is probably not in fact necessary to a society (while quarantine and rehabilitation are). Determinists can benefit from and suffer from all the usual evaluative stances towards their fellows and their own life; for instance I do.

But no matter: there are very few novelists who can handle philosophy this well, who can make ideas feel as important as they are, who can make the development of ideas a source of suspense as strong as a rapacious virus and a planet-killer.

Card is much concerned with maximally passionate characters with tragically differing aims, so there are lots of flatly irrational moves despite its buckets of wisdom. Novinha in particular; I don’t begrudge someone overpowering emotion, but it’s hard to sympathise when they lose all proportion and fairness and compassion for weeks afterward. He really doesn't do enough to establish Quim's greatness; in fact I think there's exactly one scene where he's shown turning the other cheek and dispensing hard truths before he's killed. Qingdao is a great brilliant irrationalist: an eloquent and extended demonstration that intelligence and rationality can come apart. (She is also a wonderful portrayal of tragically partial success at overcoming classism.) And her dad is a master rationalist, who actually moves with the world.

There’s a background hum of difference in it: Card’s old-fashioned values / not being PC. His planet of so-called Daoists (actually fideist Legalists) may strike some as unconscionably orientalist, because unlike a lot of intentionally diverse portrayals, it portrays an actually different (inegalitarian) culture, with service and social stability taking precedence over all else.

First the gods. Second the ancestors. Third the people. Fourth the rulers. Last the self... we serve the rulers: because they serve the people, who serve the ancestors, who serve the gods... Fathers always decide everything... That's the beginning of wisdom.

I liked his cute fabricated idea of “ancestor-of-the-heart”.

He’s impressed with gender differences and the simple evo theory thereof.

Our great civilizations are nothing more than social machines to create the ideal female setting, where a woman can count on stability; our legal and moral codes that try to abolish violence and promote permanence of ownership and enforce contracts -- those represent the primary female strategy, the taming of the male.

A bitter, traumatised character says “Didn’t you ever think I needed somebody to jolly me out of it sometimes?” which strikes me as cool and contrarian at this point. Card’s conservatism is not the obvious kind, of abortions, guns, and America first, so maybe it won’t strike many this way.

In praise of abstinence:

Valentine had long ago observed that in a society that expected chastity and fidelity, like Lusitania, the adolescents who controlled and channeled their youthful passions were the ones who grew up to be both strong and civilized. Adolescents in such a community who were either too weak to control themselves or too contemptuous of society's norms to try usually ended up being either sheep or wolves - either mindless members of the herd or predators who took what they could and gave nothing.

(The key caveat, which transforms the passage IMO, is “that expected chastity”.)

Sick fundamentalism on Path:

And it is certainly not up to us to decide whether it should exist--the gods have decreed that such a thing is possible and can exist." "So Demosthenes was right. The [genocide weapon] is with the fleet." "Yes." "And the government files that Demosthenes published--they were genuine." "Yes." "But Father--you joined many others in claiming that they were forgeries." "Just as the gods speak only to a chosen few, so the secrets of the rulers must be known only to those who will use the knowledge properly. Demosthenes was giving powerful secrets to people who were not fit to use them wisely, and so for the good of the people those secrets had to be withdrawn. The only way to retrieve a secret, once it is known, is to replace it with a lie; then the knowledge of the truth is once again your secret... he wishes to take power out of the hands of those whom the gods have ordained to rule humankind. What would happen to the people if they rejected the rulers given them by the gods?"

Valentine is portrayed as a wise “angel” and a moral philosopher but actually she seems pretty naive to me, of the old unilateral-disarmament clean-hands school.

"What matters is -- should they blow up Lusitania?" "What kind of person are you?" asked Valentine. He could hear both awe and loathing in her voice. "You tell me. Are we supposed to love the [contagious aliens] so much that we allow the virus they carry to destroy all of humanity?" ..."I choose to live in a universe that has some hope in it... It's wrong to even contemplate..."

But Card can write her and Miro the bullet-biting consequentialist, and sympathise where I cannot. I start to wonder if he’s really a theist, seeing the many pathologies of religion clearly as he does - and what greater compliment can I give his writing?

I’m interested whether you could enjoy this without having read books 1 and 2; volunteers welcome.

"Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to Its Own Past"

Simon Reynolds (2011)
★★★★☆
reviewed Oct 2011

Omnivorous, unifying, funny.

"Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind"

Gary F. Marcus (2008)
★★★★☆
reviewed Feb 2013

Funny and humane work of evolutionary psychology. Like Thinking, Fast and Slow but he tries to explain the many cognitive biases in terms of evolutionary adaptations.

Relies on classic (old) behavioural experiments. So, not sure if this holds up better than Kahneman under the replication crisis assault.

"The Chemistry Book: From Gunpowder to Graphene, 250 Milestones in the History of Chemistry (Union Square & Co. Milestones)"

Derek B. Lowe (2016)
★★★★☆
reviewed Jun 2022

As every 101 book tells us, chemistry is the central science, that gets inbetween biology and physics. That makes Derek Lowe the central scientist.

"Probabilistic Reasoning in Intelligent Systems: Networks of Plausible Inference (Morgan Kaufmann Series in Representation and Reasoning)"

Judea Pearl (1988)
★★★★☆
reviewed Dec 2019

probability is not really about numbers, it is about the structure of reasoning

-Glen Shafer
By no means an introductory book; even chapter 1 will mean little to you if you haven’t tried to model situations with both formal logic and probabilities before. (Some set theory wouldn’t go amiss either.) Parts of it treat nearly-irrelevant dead controversies, just because he was still fighting off the McCarthy / production systems programme in the late Eighties. (For instance, I learned Dempster-Shafer theory in class, and it is sorta interesting and neatly evades Cox’s theorem, but I still expect never to have to use it. It gets more than 50 pages here.) Bayesian networks, ingenious and progressive as they were, have peaked in use, though their children are still cutting edge and invaluable for human and nonhuman reasoning.

All that said: Pearl thinks very hard about ultimate matters. He didn’t develop Bayesian networks (and causal models) as a hack, but instead as a consequence of showing probabilities to be better than the alternatives when tweaked for computation, subjective Bayesianism to be capable of handling causal inference, graphs as the natural data structure for both relevance and cause, and the causal/evidential decision theory distinction as primal.

On the surface, there is really no compelling reason that beliefs, being mental dispositions about unrepeatable and often unobservable events, should combine by the laws of proportions that govern repeatable trials such as the outcomes of gambling devices. The primary appeal of probability theory is its ability to express useful qualitative relationships among beliefs and to process these relationships in a way that yields intuitively plausible conclusions… What we wish to stress here is that the fortunate match between human intuition and the laws of proportions is not a coincidence. It came about because beliefs are formed not in a vacuum but rather as a distillation of sensory experiences... We therefore take probability calculus as an initial model of human reasoning from which more refined models may originate, if needed. By exploring the limits of probability in machine implementations, we hope to identify conditions under which extensions, refinements and simplifications are warranted.

Building AI as feedback for formal epistemology! My favourite philosophers are technical like David Lewis; my favourite technical people are philosophical like Pearl.

PRIS beats the arse off his own 2018 effort, perhaps because at this point he was still working incredibly hard to understand and synthesise competing approaches. Hard to rate. But if you want to seriously think about AI, you’ll want to read it at some point.

Misc notes

• McCarthy is to probabilities as Minsky is to neural nets. He sent us down a rabbit hole, chasing nonmonotonic logic solutions to a numerical problem. (See also Chomsky vs prob language models.)
• Others have used Pearl’s vision to explain the ideal form of rationality, which humans depart from.
• His discussion of extensional (hacking out a generalised logic) vs intensional (possible-world counting) approaches to uncertainty seems fundamental to me, bedrock.
• The heart of the matter: Bayesnets are O(n) in variables, but actually with some complicated tweaks so are Dempster-Shafer galleries.
• Dempster-Shafer is an interesting example of the contingency of (the context of discovery of) mathematics. It didn’t have to be developed (since probs are adequate for so much), and yet it was, and it evades the normal arguments against other uncertainty measures and is thus alive, if unpopular. (Compare noneuclidean geometries.) What other dominant calculi would get similarly competing theories, if we threw a few decades of brilliance at them?
  
  
  

"The Rorty Reader"

Richard Rorty (2010)
★★★★☆
reviewed May 2013

Encompassing and uplifting. I’ve been in love with the idea of Rorty for years. (He is: the renegade Analytic, the outrageous unifier, the literary soul, the pessimistic utopian, the great puncturer, and the bravest postmodernist by far - because he just comes out and says it, bites the bizarre bullets.)

Here he is illuminating about philosophy of mind, poetry, foundationalism, the public/private divide, feminism, America, MacKinnon, Derrida, Davidson, and Dewey (obvs), among lots of other things. One can usually taste meanness in postmodern writing - stemming, I suppose, from our sense of being undermined by it - but never in Rorty. He is utterly clear, original and sometimes funny, and yet the realest postmodernist of all.

Not sure what I’d think of it these days.

"Why I am Not a Christian"

Bertrand Russell (1957)
★★★★☆
reviewed Jan 2011

Read my great-grandfather’s copy, which felt good in a way I haven’t often felt. This is what traditionalists like about tradition, I suppose: long continuity making you feel large.

"Monogamy"

Adam Phillips (1999)
★★★★☆
reviewed Apr 2010

In one sentence: Harsh, circuitous, critical aphorisms on the greatest secular religion.

To be read : At the start of every new relationship; when your contempt of psychotherapy boils over and needs correction.

I guess he’s a bit overfond of knowing paradox (“Seduction, the happy invention of need”; “The problem of a marriage is that it can never be called an affair”) – and of course aphorisms have to compress away the qualifications that would make them fairer, and so easier to take in large doses.

Infidelity is such a problem because we take monogamy for granted; we treat it as the norm. Perhaps we should take infidelity for granted, assume it with unharassed ease. Then we would be able to think about monogamy. There are no relationships without conflict. If psychoanalysis has a value, maybe one of its values is just that it abides by the idea that there is always going to be conflict… in a way the book holds out for the value of conflict [being to let] the diverse voices inside of oneself speak.

But it’s non-partisan (not anti-monogamy, not anti-polyamory) and original and funny and wise and I still haven’t absorbed the finer points.

• Galef type: Values 2 - thought experiments for you to reflect on how you feel about something, & Style 3 - tickle your aesthetic sense in a way that obliquely makes you a more interesting, generative thinker.





"Women's Poetry of the 1930s: A Critical Anthology"

Jane Dowson (1995)
★★★★☆
reviewed Jun 2013

Raising up great obscure things is one of the main points of having academics around. However, half the poets in this actually refused to be segregated in their lifetime (that is, refused to be anthologised as women, or at all). Dowson is candid about this, and half the book is just suggestive little biographies as a result. She is shackled to the humanities' chaste, hyper-qualified prose ("I have tried to illustrate that through their interrogations of national and international affairs, their preoccupations with cultural politics and their experiments with language and form... rejects the language of centrality and dominance...") and their fear of judgment / love of equivocation ("If consensus over a 'good poem' is neither desirable nor possible, then value is largely determined by context..."), it's not exactly hateful. Whether through Dowson's bias or the necessities of the time, these poets are even more independent than their male counterparts. Of those selected, Stevie Smith and Edith Sitwell are already fully reclaimed as the canonical boss ladies they are. Two big oversights of mine: Naomi Mitchison and Sylvia Townshend Warner. Mitchison is amazing - wise when wounded, droll and passionate, politicised but never journalistic: check out "To Some Young Communists", "Woman Alone", "Old Love and New Love". Warner is both blunt and metaphysical. (Others are just passable. Vita Sackville-West's are surprisingly poor, in fact. Highlights: "Beauty the Lover's Gift?" (bitter objectification); "Pastoral" (Manly Hopkins after empire). "A Woman Knitting" (the infinite in the finite); "Song of the Virtuous Female Spider" (satirising pious motherhood clichés); "The Sick Assailant" (rare for the time: male violence focus); "On August the Thirteenth" (on abruptness, gentle impotence of human pretensions). Multiplicative.




"The Sandman, Vol. 1: Preludes & Nocturnes"

Neil Gaiman (1998)
★★★★☆
reviewed Jul 2021

Surprisingly rough art - very inconsistent primary colours for a start. But like Swamp Thing it has to begin by wresting artistic control away from the legacy plot and legacy themes. Later, the art reaches an incredible pitch.

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3/5: Net likeable. 50th percentile.

"Surprisingly Down to Earth, and Very Funny: My Autobiography"

Limmy (2019)
★★★☆☆
reviewed Feb 2019

Auto theft, fanny fright, incompetent but dogged self-harm, raving and tripping as self-medication, dole stupor, bail skipping, the death drive, pretend machismo, pretend homosexuality, alcoholism, Flash animation, BBC showrunner. Not very funny but very entertaining. (His shows are funny.)

I could have guessed that he’d had a life like this from his characters; so much authentic idiocy, lunacy, awkwardness, pretension, and pettiness. Surprised that Dee-Dee is based on his own trippy blankness; Limmy’s so sharp these days.

He crosses into the middle class through IT, anxious about looking like the ‘wee ned guy’ in the office. And then into Design (a colony of the Art world, where a rough background’s a bonus), and then to TV comedy, and then to streaming, where rawness and obliquity and patter means dollas. It’s a nice story.

It’s about being strange in a normal, subclinical* way: intrusive thoughts, groundless anxiety, reduced affect display, auditory hallucination, mild paranoia, misanthropy, hysteroid dysphoria.

I must sound like a fuckin robot tae you. But it's just the way I'm wired. I never felt sad about my mum dying.
I always wondered if I was schizophrenic... Maybe just an overactive imagination. My mind likes to come up wi lots of thoughts and ideas, whether or no they're useful or make sense. I think that sort of thing can make you mental, depending on how severe it is and what kind of environment you're in. Fortunately I managed to find a place to put my kind of mind to good use.

The deep function of laughter is apparently that it allows play / boundary learning / questioning social norms. So to be a comedian, you have be a step past your society. (I doubt funniness is linear in weirdness though.) And Limmy is obviously out there. He regularly tweets about how much he misses drinking (which I’ve never seen an alcoholic do), and satirises the now-daily flamewars of the shouting classes by taking absurd and alternating stances on every issue (…) .

I know several people with the same mix of terrible impulses and good intentions, charisma and anti-social solitude: folk whose adolescence lasted twenty years. They’re the funniest people I know, by far. I don’t know how class comes into it, but they’re all working-class. Maybe middle-class people as strange as them direct it inward, rather than outward as comedy or violence. (They’re also all Scots but that’s a selection effect, I hope.)

Audiobook’s worth it - the prose is very plain and his accent’s strong but clear. Fans only, but you should be a fan.

• There are also dozens of suicidal episodes though.
  
  
  

"Island"

Aldous Huxley (2002)
★★★☆☆
reviewed Jul 2015

His last book: a half-rational vehicle for his late contrarian mystical worldview; in fact it reads as his making amends for the vivid bioconservative paranoia of Brave New World. It certainly handles the same themes, simply inverted in their consequences: we see drugs as enablers of enlightenment; a much healthier view of suffering, as a pointless trap; a surprisingly pragmatic view of genetic engineering; and a very balanced view of civilisation and economic development.

So: he constructs a Taoist-Hindu-Buddhist utopia which mostly avoids primitivism and annoying mysticism for a sustainable East plus West non-industrial modernity. It’s not my idea of paradise, but other people’s utopias usually aren’t. Moreover, it is a doomed utopia nestled in nasty 1950s international political economy. The animating enemy of Island is not the authoritarian consequences of technology, but what Scott Alexander calls Moloch: the forces of self-fulfilling inevitability and destructive competition.

Protagonist is a mirror of John the Savage: an open-minded liar and shill, a fallen outsider who manages to undermine the utopia he infiltrates. Huxley himself is the model for him: in fact we can see Will’s journey from cynical aestheticism to materialist spirituality as autobiography in allegory. The mystic character, Rani, is amazing: an enraging theosophical flake. This reflects well on Huxley’s own weirdness: the Rani is as far from traditional organised religion as Huxley is from her.

Given the times and his project, lots of Huxley’s worldview have become clichés: e.g. “you forget to pay attention to what’s happening. And that’s the same as not being here and now ”. The prose is arch and syrupy but I like it. (BNW is saddled by the air of a smug jeremiad. Island is every bit as didactic but nowhere near as smug.) It’s chock-full of bad poetry though. I love his use of reported speech to denote characters he disrespects: this saves him the bother of writing it and us the bother of reading and makes a conspiracy of us and Huxley:

He turned to Will and treated him to a long and flowery farewell.
In polysyllables, Mr Bahu hedged diplomatically. On the one hand, yes; but on the other hand, no. From one point of view, white; but from a different angle, distinctly black.

Pala’s structure is cool but not at all radical enough to solve what is wrong with us, I think – technology is controlled very carefully and considered one of the ‘dozens’ of fronts to aid people on. (Hypnotherapy and tantra are given way more credit than they deserve, for instance.) Is “one-third” of suffering intrinsic? I look forward to science seeing if that is the case. I elect Huxley into the hall of fame of people who make a very popular error and later recant to no acclaim. (Niels Bohr (and his memetically dominant false model), Frank Jackson, André Gide, Bertrand Russell, …)

• Can we call a novel mistaken? As a whole, not in some particular claim of a character. No. ‘Misguided’, or ideologically harmful, maybe.