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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   1364 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 5, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

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So, what are you reading?

Still on The Eternal Dissident: Rabbi Leonard I. Beerman and the Radical Imperative to Think and Act.

It seems strange that a Rabbi would proclaim himself agnostic and have his first sermon be about how Adam ought to have eaten the whole fruit of knowledge and not just part of it, but I have to agree with the introduction that there is an authenticity to it. Beerman, if he is to be believed, was inspired by the Spinozan God-as-nature idea, and argued that authentic doubt can be a religious stance.

The tropes fit perfectly into today's leftism: social justice, activism, inequality, racism, oppression, but these things must have made a different impression before Current Year. Various dubious aspects pepper the narrative, like support for the Rosenbergs. If there's one thing I've taken away from it, it is the reminder that I'm not exactly a church-goer myself, and that perhaps a renewed study of my relation to God is in order.

I, Asimov by, predictably, Isaac Asimov. Some biographies and especially auto-biographies bored me, but this one is not the case. The author clearly is writing about the subject he is deeply interested in, and is not hiding it at all (I'd even say flaunting it), and yet it remains an interesting book. Asimov being a pretty standard prosperous New York secular American Jew, with all cultural and political stances that follow from that, there are a lot of things for me to disagree with him about, but I think it's still a very illuminating and interesting book.

Also, Spice: The 16th-Century Contest that Shaped the Modern World - the topic is pretty obvious from the title. Not too much new there in general, but the details are fascinating. Those early explorers were really wild, and it's insane how dangerous and close to suicidal their exploits were.

He wrote some giant two-volume biography first, and then cut it down to that one (and added more recent material) a decade later. It's easier to avoid being boring if you have to force yourself to cut most of what you've written.

IIRC he did leave in my favorite part, the bit about becoming the most popular teacher at Boston University and having his writing career take off but being belittled for not doing enough research:

I finally felt angry enough to say, “…as a science writer, I am extraordinary. I plan to be the best science writer in the world and I will shed luster on the medical school. As a researcher, I am simply mediocre and…if there’s one thing this school does not need, it is one more merely mediocre researcher.”

Of course he got ... not fired, since he had tenure by then, but effectively "constructive dismissal" from the administration? Still he disclaimed coworkers' admiration for the incident:

I shrugged, “There’s no bravery about it. I have academic freedom and I can give it to you in two words:

“What’s that?” He said.

“Outside income,” I said.

The resulting one is pretty massive too, if it were twice as big I'd probably never even tried it because there's no way I could finish it. So far I'm about 1/3 in, and he already talked a lot about how his science career sucked, unlike his writing. Given that I had always been his fan and yet was never sure (or interested, to be honest) about what he did as a scientist, that's not a surprise.

If you go to his Google Scholar page and look at the list by citation count it's topped by fiction ("I, Robot": 2670 citations), then adds popular science writing ("Asimov's biographical encyclopedia of science and technology", 663) and other non-fiction, then eventually gets down to science textbooks ("Biochemistry and human metabolism", 54) and science research ("Acid‐phosphatase activity of normal and neoplastic human tissues", 48).

IIRC it could have been even worse. He went into biochemistry, so was relatively immune to the quantum chemistry revolution sweeping upward through the field, but I recall him describing the horror with which experienced chemists discovered that they would have to practically get a second degree in physics just to keep their own chemistry research relevant.

It's kind of a shame that he's now much better-known for his science fiction writing than his science writing, though. He jokingly had the "Clarke-Asimov treaty", acknowledging Asimov to be the second-best SF writer and Clarke the second-best science writer, but IMHO with SF Asimov was (among their contemporaries) second-best to Heinlein, whereas with pop science he really was the best around.

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