thejdizzler
2d ago
I wonder if the Counting Crows took that line in Mrs. Potter's Lullaby from that book title.
thejdizzler
4d ago
Barely sentient preschooler. I have no memories of the event, but I got my Star Wars toys taken away around that time because I was talking too much about Mace Windu in class.
thejdizzler
6d ago
For context my PR is in the 14:50s. I've run that pace for a half-marathon before, but have gotten fat the past few years so am slower.
I started running when I was in 7th grade and slowly built mileage throughout high school, college, and the first few years of grad school, which resulted in my peak fitness in 2021 with PRs of 14:54 in the 5k, 30:40 in the 10k and 4:17 in the mile. The key was just lots and lots of running, a substantial amount of swimming and biking, and some lifting. As well as heavy dose of natural talent.
Since not being part of an NCAA team, I've gotten slower and really since 2024 where I got COVID and then proceded to gain 20 pounds in a matter of months, my fitness has definitely taken a hit. I'm trying to get back into it though and have lost most of the weight I want to and am back to good mileage (67/week). So hoping it's just a matter of time.
Big tip from me would be to slow everything down. A lot of people end up running pretty hard on what is supposed to be their easy run, my past self included. Not only does this inhibit the system you are trying to train (your aerobic system), but it also reduces the amount of training you can handle and makes you hate running. If you really want to get better, I would suggest buying a heart rate monitor and capping all your easy runs at 60-65% of your max heart rate. This is going to feel really slow and you may have to walk all uphills, but you'll quickly see improvement. About 1-2 of your days you can go as hard as you want, but most runs should be this easy.
thejdizzler
7d ago
- Work: Working on starting to write up my thesis
- Fitness. Alumni meet was a bit of shock to the system: went out very hard and died very hard for a pretty bad 5k (16:49). Not too worried as I've been doing a lot of mileage and a lot of marathon pace stuff. Hours: 9 running, 67 miles
- Intellectual stuff: One blog post this month so far. Reading is going well. Finished the dev bio book, am still working on the other two (Lenin, Jared Diamond follow-up) as well as Brandon Sanderson in Spanish.
- Finances: Big divvy month which is nice, hoping I can save a little bit more so I can buy some more stocks. Spending so far: $2149
- Dating. Fourth date this weekend with this girl. I've stopped using Hinge and deleted my instagram, as I think this is going to go long term.
- Tarot. No session this week.
- Socializing: Was in Boston all weekend and had too many social events before.
- Screen time: 1.2 hours. Really good especially since I was on the train all day.
- Meditation: 5 minutes 3x last week. Would like to make this more of a priority.
thejdizzler
8d ago
Just finished Isles of the Emberdark by Sanderson. I'm not a big Sanderson fan, but new girl is and I'm trying to give him another shot. This one was very entertaining; I couldn't put it down, but it was also terribly written. Cringe, repetitive descriptions and dialogue, one dimensional characters, and chock full of millennial humor. I loved the plot and world building though, so think I will be diving back in for more Sanderson, probably in Spanish so I don't have to deal with how terrible of a writer he is on a sentence by sentence level.
Also reading State and Revolution by Lenin for philosophy book club. In contrast to Marx, who I found to be interesting and insightful, Lenin comes off as an idealistic and dogmatic blowhard. The closest analogy I can think of outside of leftist spaces is Saint Augustine and other early Christian writers versus the Bible (with the Bible being Marx for Lenin). Lenin's polemics against Kautsky reminded me a lot of Augustine railing on Origen: they both have very strong opinions without a lot to back them up, both in terms of logic and in terms of what their gospel truth actually says.
thejdizzler
9d ago
Thank you for this response. Think I will have to do some math once I own the house. My electricity in Baltimore has been ludicrously expensive the past few years, so it may make sense in the end.
thejdizzler
10d ago
Is rooftop solar a good investment if you're a homeowner? Thinking about an install after getting a house.
thejdizzler
13d ago
My roommate called it "the worst thing he's ever tried to read". I don't think it's that bad, but it's certainly not "good".
thejdizzler
13d ago
I'm part of UBI pilot scheme that my friend Alex runs in Baltimore. The idea is that you donate 7% of your income and then you get the average donation out. So I earn $4k a month, and contribute $280 or so for example. If the average contribution is more than 280 I get some money and if it's below I give. When the program started I was receiving small amounts of money, and now I'm giving about $50/month.
- Work: Nothing new to report.
- Fitness. Another week another 65 miles. Did a silly ultra marathon here in Baltimore this past weekend, but dropped out at 23 miles or so. Hours: 8.6 running, 1 swimming.
- Intellectual stuff: Four blog posts last month and over 30 hours of Spanish immersion! This month I want to focus on kicking my scrolling habit, so will be less strict about what language I'm reading in, but want to get the total amount of reading up. Currently working on Lenin (he is not a good thinker, I see where woke get it from), Why the West Rules and developmental biology book in Spanish.
- Finances: Below 4k (barely) for August, which was pretty bad (-7% savings rate). This month should be better, but I have a lot of extra expenses (Boston Marathon, Spanish lessons, etc.) so will need to watch my spending still despite paying ~$550 less in rent.
- Dating. Third date went really well, but need to escalate things from just kissing. Will see her again after I get back from Boston this weekend. Really want to completely quit porn and masturbation and I think this potential relationship is giving the motivation to actually do so, as I've only masturbated one time since last week.
- Tarot. No session this week.
- Socializing: Went to Philly with my roommate, social for guaranteed income club.
- Screen time: 1.4 hours. Too much scrolling.
- Meditation: 5 minutes 3x last week. Would like to make this more of a priority.
thejdizzler
14d ago
I'd maybe think about investing in the companies that make these commodities. Agriculture/mining/oil companies all seem like good bets in a stagflation world.
thejdizzler
15d ago
What I am saying is that it is not believable that other characters would step up because the circumstances described in the book are so special. The tension required to create an interesting narrative undermines the idea of psychohistory.
thejdizzler
15d ago
Sure, Asimov says that you don't, but from my memory of the events of the book, the level of wisdom/guts/foresight required to execute the specific plans that Hardin/Mallow pull off is pretty exceptional. Probably because it has to be to make the book interesting. You can say that someone else would have stepped up to the plate, but it's not believable based on what has to happen in the text.
thejdizzler
15d ago
No dude, yours is. Hardin is almost removed from power by young politicians on terminus before he manages to pull off his masterstroke. Marlow is arrested and tried but gets off because he's brilliant. Asimov might pull Hari Seldon out after each event to say "see look it was preordained", but the text suggests otherwise which is grating.
thejdizzler
15d ago
Well there's always another way out: failure.
thejdizzler
15d ago
Thanks for the last minute nomination! Just beat the bell! Was proud of this one, and seemed like it generated some good discussion!
thejdizzler
15d ago
Yes they do this, but the narrative frames each of Sheldon's successors (Salvador Hardin, Hobor Mallow) in the first book as very much going against the grain of the times. Hardin has to coup the encylopedists to gain power, and then is nearly voted out of office before he pulls his spin move on Anacreon. Mallow is put on trial and nearly sentenced to death for failing to save a missionary. Both only survive and fulfill Seldon's prophecy because of their exceptional wit and character. Asimov can try and claim that this is all according to his predictions, but it's not very believable to me, which the central crux of my problem with the story.
thejdizzler
15d ago
Not how it'a portrayed in the book dude. The various people who overcome the problems the foundation have to face are visionaries who go against the popular consensus.
thejdizzler
15d ago
Only because they found oil there in the 20th century. Without oil, the Suez Canal is still important, but the rest of the region is pretty useless.
thejdizzler
15d ago
Very cynical. This take has convinced me that this is at least plausible, so I guess Asimov's religion comes off better in this light.
thejdizzler
15d ago
The Foundation by Asimov Review: Materialist vs Great Man Theories of History
My History with this Book
Every summer my philosophy book group reads one to three novels, both to connect with themes that are more difficult to convey through rhetoric, and to give ourselves a small break while people are traveling, working additional jobs, or trying to recover from the school year. We first read Blood Meridian in June and July, which I did not enjoy but managed to get a lot out of philosophically. By popular vote, the second book, to be discussed in August, was determined to be Foundation, the first book in the American science fiction great’s imaginatively named Foundation trilogy. I was a little skeptical of this book before it was even put forward as an option. I had last read it when I was fourteen [1], and I found my friend Bella’s pitch for reading the book, which was concerned with free will versus determinism, to be rather uninteresting [2].
However, the people spoke and we did end up reading this book. Much to my surprise it ended up being the perfect thematic counterpart to Blood Meridian’s focus on the power of violence, and brought up an interesting debate about different theories of history [3], despite being of relatively poor literary quality on the level of prose, plot, or characters.
Short Plot Summary
The Galactic Empire is entering a period of decadence, which will, within a few short decades, transform into a decline, and then finally into a fall within three centuries. Of course, this being the height of the Empire’s power and influence, no one believes this is likely to happen at all, except for Peter Turchin, sorry I mean Hari Seldon, who has used advanced statistics and sociology to predict that the capitol, Trantor, will fall into anarchy within three hundred years. According to Seldon and his philosophical/scientific movement of psychohistory, there’s nothing that can be done about it at this point, but if the Empire plays its cards right and provides resources for a scientific station called the Foundation at the edge of the galaxy, the coming dark ages can be shortened significantly.
Of course, suggesting that the Empire could possibly fall or that there could be anything wrong with the current clearly corrupt and ineffective ruling structure of the galactic government is high treason. Seldon is put on trial, and his project is discredited, although the government does provision the outer rim world of Terminus for the project of constructing a galactic encyclopedia.
Seldon foresaw that the galactic government would be completely unwilling to take his project seriously, and so both his trial and the founding of a scientific colony on Terminus are exactly according to his plan. This colony, known as the Foundation, is slowly guided through a series of crises by various Hari Seldon clones [4]. These individuals use the power of religion and economics to first assert the independence of the Foundation, and then to dominate its local interstellar neighborhood by the end of the book.
Non-violence as a Sustainable Way to Establish Political Power
In contrast to Blood Meridian, and perhaps surprisingly given the premise of galactic (re)conquest, Foundation is an almost completely non-violent book. This is certainly deliberate: one of the early Hari Seldon clones (Salvador Hardin) actually states the following when asked to sanction a bloody war with the Foundation’s neighbors:
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.
All three of the major crises in this book are overcome through non-violent and rather clever means, which reeks a little bit of a revenge of the nerds fantasy, although it still makes a certain amount of sense.
Wars are generally very costly because the capital expended to run them successfully is often completely destroyed, meaning that war is usually not even a zero-sum game, but actually a negative sum game. Even if you win, the resources and lives lost by both sides cannot be recovered, meaning war is an incredibly short-sighted way of winning and maintaining political power, especially if you want to rule over the entire galaxy. Those lives and resources will be needed to help you win influence later in the process!
Blood Meridian in its own way actually supports this thesis on violence too. All the destruction caused by Glanton’s gang doesn’t actually lead them anywhere, and every single one of them ends up hanging from some kind of rope (literal or metaphorical) by the end of the book.
That said, war is sometimes inevitable, as “the last argument of kings,” and I believe in the later entries of this series, it is given its proper place as a political tool.
Structural-Demographic or Great Man Theories of History?
The most interesting part of the book for me was the academic discipline of psychohistory, which Seldon and his trainees used to make large-scale predictions about the future of galactic civilization. These methods are implied to be largely statistical: they cannot predict with certainty that certain events will or will not occur, but they can provide confidence intervals and probabilities for such occurrences. While this might seem like science fiction technology on the level of the fusion drive, it’s actually something that we can more or less do now. Human behavior becomes more, not less, predictable as the number of individuals under consideration increases, making it relatively simple to predict certain facts about the future. For instance, because of declining birth rates across the whole world, we know that there will be a reckoning with the current pension system sometime this century, just as certainly as we know that the sun will cook all life to a crisp on Earth in around a billion years. Marx, perhaps the first psychohistorian, and later scientists like Peter Turchin and Joseph Tainter have formalized this study as an academic discipline. Turchin’s work, which he dubs structural-demographic theory of history, I find to be particularly interesting.
In the book, Seldon recognizes that the Galactic Empire is almost certainly going to collapse within three centuries. The probability of this is so high in his calculations that it’s not worth it to even bother trying anything to avert it. He does however see a possibility of reducing the amount of time between the fall of this empire and the rise of the next through the creation of the eponymous Foundation. Because he is predicting so far in the future, this seemingly small action actually can have a very profound effect, as in Ray Bradbury’s A Sound of Thunder where treading on the wing of a butterfly in the Cretaceous completely changes human society [5].
The novel, probably because it is a novel and not a hypothetical research paper, has to rely on another theory of history to drive its plot forward. While Seldon is able to predict with broad strokes the various crises that the Foundation faces, the polity relies on the genius of various great men to get them out of these crises. I wrote an essay a long time ago in support of this theory of history and I still stand by a lot of what I said, but with many more caveats.
In the pre-modern world where populations and material throughput were comparatively much smaller, statistical prediction was much less effective at plotting the course of history. A single battle or a single bad harvest can make or break a nation: that’s how you see Alexander triumph over the Persians in the 4th century BC and Canada today speaking French and English rather than Norwegian.
Of course, material factors are still important. Rome underwent a similar demographic decline to us, which locked in the empire’s fate at a certain point, and the increase of salt concentrations in the soil of the Fertile Crescent due to poor irrigation practices also doomed that region to relative irrelevance in the modern era.
In modern times, great men are still important, but more as a vehicle for what Hegel calls “Die Weltseele” [6] or the world-soul in English. Large movements like the French Revolution, the various communist revolutions, and the rise of fascism were all inevitable from a statistical understanding of history. The leaders of these movements did not necessarily bring them into being, but rather channeled the underlying forces that already existed in the population.
Maybe this latter concept is what Asimov intended his characters in Foundation to portray, but it didn’t really come through that way to me. The various Hari Seldon clones seemed to be acting against the forces of common wisdom in society, which seems much more like classic Great Man Theory to me, and in turn makes the book significantly weaker by undercutting the power of psychohistory.
Bad Writing
Despite the interesting themes of the work, I didn’t find Foundation to be a very good book. Most of this was due to the piss-poor character work done by Asimov. Despite being decades, if not centuries, apart, all the principal protagonists speak and act exactly like Hari Seldon. The villains that these glorified clones have to face, both within the government of the Foundation and in local star systems, also think and act shockingly alike. These dynamics mean that the character work that is there is both repetitive and one-dimensional.
The plot, despite being easy to follow, was similarly uninteresting. Because the central premise of the series is that Seldon’s predictions do have actual value, we know, at least in this entry, that the Foundation is going to succeed. This robs the plot of any kind of dramatic tension and leaves us only with the question of how the puzzle will be solved, not its eventual outcome.
Asimov’s galactic spirit religion was also quite difficult for me to believe in. While there have always been cynical atheist types in every society and indeed in every religious hierarchy, I have a hard time believing that something this obviously top-down and fake could actually inspire people without also converting the leadership into believers eventually. While you might be able to argue that Mormon founder Joseph Smith was a cynical con-man who just wanted a justification to sleep with his neighbors’ wives, subsequent generations of Mormon leadership clearly believed (and still believe) in the Book of Mormon. I just don’t see a way for the separation between the religious leadership on Terminus and the gullible provincials to be maintained for as long as it is in this book.
- It was also a recommendation from my dad, and I enjoyed it back then. Neither of which were very good signs for a dense philosophical text that could generate a rich discussion.
- We know that determinism is true because of physics and biology, and even when we examine our subjective feelings of choice, there’s nothing that we can actually come away with that looks like “free will”.
- Which was the topic of one of my first blog posts ever.
- Not literally, it just feels that way, probably because Asimov’s character work is so poor.
- One of the inspirations for the term “Butterfly Effect”
- This is from a letter that Hegel sent to Niethammer while in Jena, where he saw Napoleon (the current world-soul) on horseback.
thejdizzler
21d ago
On a meta note I am impressed that we are continuing to do these nearly 8 months into the year!
- Work: Quantifying images this week which I find to be extremely tedious. Accepted the position to start in May, so have a firm deadline to graduate, which is nice.
- Fitness. Another week another 63 miles. Weight is dropping slight (at 166 again) which is good. Feeling prepared for the marathon. Hours: 8.1 running, 1 swimming.
- Intellectual stuff: Started reading Lenin, finished Feast and two of my Spanish books. Hoping to get one more good blog post in this month. Spanish Immersion hours last week: 6.** Blog posts this month**: 2
- Finances: No ZIM divvy, but will definitely be below 4k for this month. Beginning to house hunt in Baltimore. Monthly spending so far: 3657.
- Dating. Second date sunday, have a third date coming up with the same girl on Thursday at my house! Really want to completely quit porn and masturbation and I think this potential relationship is giving the motivation to actually do so.
- Tarot. Discussed my old roommates romantic life, and how I should wrap up my PhD.
- Socializing: Long run with my friend Jeff on saturday, potluck later that day, and helping new roommate move in last week.
- Screen time: 1.9 hours. Too much scrolling.
- Meditation: 5 minutes 3x last week. Would like to make this more of a priority.
thejdizzler
23d ago
Still reading Feast. Finished my Spanish book which was depressing (really glad I wasn't on the losing side of the civil war, which knowing my politics, especially my youthful politics, I would have been). Starting on State and Revolution by Lenin for book club.
More options
Context Copy link