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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2235 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for November 30, 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?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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So, what are you reading?

Still on The Dawn of Everything. Picking up Tom Brown's School Days.

I went through Unconstrained, a novel about an AGI breaking out, over the weekend. The AI sections are uninspired and contrived, the characters are bland stereotypes, and the story is woke in that frequently described as "fish don't have a word for wet" way. At least the non-AI technical details were pretty accurate.

It's unfortunate that the most serious predictive engagement with the question of an AGI breakout remains a novella with the framing of a My Little Pony fanfiction. That's not as damning a praise as it sounds at first glance, but it's a strange issue given how much ink has been spilled and how omnipresent the technologies have become since 2012.

I'm still on Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead recounting a fictional WWII battle on a fictional pacific atoll, based on Mailer's own experiences in the Philippines during the war. I will say that after reading The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Robert Caro has me questioning a lot of WWII stories from prominent men, so I question whether Mailer, who was definitely a clerk and a cook at other times in the army, was really volunteering for behind-the-lines Recon patrols as is claimed.

It's a funny parallel to listening to Darryl Cooper's podcast series on Israel-Palestine, because the more I listen to Darryl Cooper the more I realize that even where I disagree with him he is My Guy, we listen to the same music and married similar women and read similar books. Where the more I read Norman Mailer the more I know he would hate me, his petty villains in the book are literally called out as alumni of my school and being from my hometown.

Overall Mailer is a great writer, I decided to try his big classic after reading The Fight about the Rumble in the Jungle, but the Naked and the Dead feels a little all over the place for me. The emphasis of the book is on the internal struggles of the men on the island, the Japs are barely around. I'm halfway through the book, and the Japs have shown up for one night attack across a river, and one has been caught out behind American lines and war-crimed. Parts of the book deal with issues of strategy from the commanding officer's perspective, others with the actual labor involved for the GIs trying to win the war on the island, the drudgery of building supply roads, men being assigned to platoons or reserves being switched between companies, lots of walking and riding around and taking watch, very little action. Which is of course a view of war, but the particular way it is shown in this book is miserable.

The vast majority of the book is about the internal lives of the men, their fears and insecurities and personal sins and petty gossip and hatreds. Nobody seems to like each other in Mailer's army, they're either playing oblique status games within the military hierarchy or they despise each other for racial reasons and they all despise themselves for various insecurities related to courage or luck or wealth or success with women. For a bunch of men on an island, they are constantly thinking about pussy, getting it or not getting it or losing it. Mailer, who was Jewish, writes in two Jewish characters who specifically are outcasts from the rest of the group for their Jewishness, and estranged from each other by their own different degrees of Jewishness, one more modern and assimilationist and one more yiddish. And forget the Japanese American translator, who is a few paragraphs of a stereotype I've seen a lot by now but was probably revolutionary then. Officers scheme as to how to degrade their subordinates and force them to submit totally, subalterns cheat and steal to escape notice from their commanders when they aren't bowing and scraping to show what good dogs they are. HQ never seems to work very hard at anything useful, much time is spent talking about stuff that seems deeply out of place in the book, building a clubhouse for the officers, obtaining liquor for the officers, who put out a cigarette in the General's tent, stealing supplies from a ship offshore, etc. It's not clear where they find time to fight a war, what with all the backbiting and infighting and struggles of will and general dicking around going on. It seems like the Japs could have won the battle with a few well placed letters telling men their wives were cheating on them back home, and informing the general his aides didn't like him.

Mailer, of course, was there, he saw the elephant. So as part of my course of war memoirs this year, I have to fit it in. How does this fit in with American Sniper and Storm of Steel and Band of Brothers, or even Sevastopol Stories or The Things They Carried? Part of me tends to call this the (1944 American) Jewish experience of the war, the outcast's experience of the war: alienated, never fitting in, always being removed from your comrades, never quite one of the guys. The Naked and the Dead paints a whole army of similar outcasts. Where someone like Chris Kyle or Ernst Junger feels himself among friends in the war Mailer never did. In Band of Brothers, the first thing Easy Company does is get rid of the Jew Sobel in favor of Dick Winters, and after that they're a happy family. Antisemitism in the US Army in WWII might really be the underlying story here. Where in Band of Brothers the hijacking of army supplies and the redirection of stuff for fun and profit is a gay romp, in The Naked and the Dead it's a psychologically fraught crime ending in misery.

Overall, still half to go so maybe it justifies itself, and it's a Great Book by a Great Author on a Great Topic so it's never a total waste, but not one I'd really recommend.

I recently read, in a slightly weird context, two long-forgotten WWII memoirs published during the war (so generally as positive as is possible to be while remaining truthful - e.g. one of them devotes a paragraph to mentioning that there were some HQ officers he deeply disliked and thought did a terrible job, gives the unflattering nickname for one, then drops the topic as far as he can), and the sense I got from them was that when you're really at the frontline, you develop intense camaraderie or you die, but the moment you go behind the lines all the petty antagonisms come out. The real grunts stuck together in small groups even when behind the lines, but for the most part the military had a lot of every-man-for-himself balanced by small favours and horse-tradings. And of course every group dislikes and envies the guys behind them without much thought for the guys in front of them. Mailer, as suited to him, makes it much more alienated and emotional than these contemporary books (the other book, written from a frontliner's perspective, was mostly "you don't have room for emotions, except when talking about women, you either make ironclad friends with your squad or you go crazy/get killed, and humour is a critical survival mechanism"), but these accounts resonate together to me. Mailer was apparently mostly doing the miserable wait-around-build-stuff-steal-what-you-can work, whereas Junger was literally in the trenches for most of his war, and under artillery fire when not, so it makes sense the human relationships involved would be very different.

Part of me tends to call this the (1944 American) Jewish experience of the war, the outcast's experience of the war: alienated, never fitting in, always being removed from your comrades, never quite one of the guys.

A gay friend once described his alienation in high school in a way that made me think (but not say) "Yeah, that sounds exactly like being an insecure fat kid." I think the internal experience of alienation is pretty source independent. Maybe Mailer was just a weird asshole that no one else liked, doing a big old Typical Mind Fallacy.

Portnoy's Complaint, a book I read in November that I loved, did this well, using the particulars of the Jewish experience to really dig into the universal experience of male puberty. Mindy Kaling's Never Have I Ever did a good job with it as well.

It's striking seeing a book about soldiers where nobody is friends and nobody likes each other and everybody is brooding and alienated, compared to stories about war where comrades come together. And something you notice is that Band of Brothers starts out by kicking the Jew out of the company and then everyone gets along, where The Naked and Dead is full of Jews stewing about how everyone hates them and southie guys from Boston complaining about all the Yids.

The Wine Dark Sea.

I'm slowing down in my reading of the Aubrey-Maturin series because I don't want it to end. I can just reminisce about it and pretend that there is a lot more to come. I can't remember the last time I caught myself doing this with a series.

Making my way through Infinite Jest, I'm curious if anyone here has thoughts on it.

Missed it by a Month

I see, thank you.

Reading Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. It's actually quite a fun fan fic. I wish Yudkowsky had stuck to writing fiction, he's quite talented in that realm!

I am very surprised by a continued stream of praise (including such words as "genius") piled on HPMOR. I read it, and it was fun, and I admit the premise is pretty clever. But both as a fantasy book and as a literature it seemed to be very mid. Tons of plot lines lead to nowhere. Main reveal is obvious very early. The main protagonist is very Mary Sue. Other characters are severely under-developed. And coming back to the premise, what actually comes out of it? I mean yes, the protagonist wins (I don't think it's much of a spoiler that the titular character in a fantasy book wins at the end, and especially if he's named Harry Potter, right?) but isn't that where the interesting part starts? I mean, by that point HP is basically a god. And he intends to make everybody else into gods (without even asking them, of course - I mean why would he, they are all NPCs anyway). Or only wizards (what happens to muggles btw?) Isn't it something we may want to address somehow? Nah, we're done here, buh-bye.

I mean it's fun, I do not deny it. But genius? Life-changing? "one-shotted a substantial percent of the world’s smartest STEM undergrads"? I mean I knew undergrads now are not what they used to be, but really?

HPMOR has many flaws, but it really does achieve what it sets out to do. It...

  1. Provides a fantasy wherein merely being actually intelligent (as opposed to being iron man or sherlock holmes intelligent) is enough to gain social status, wealth, and power.
  2. Actually manages to teach general principles by which its audience (high schoolers) can become more intelligent.
  3. Captures the essential fantasy of harry potter in general.
  4. Doesn't make any of the invisible-to-normies but backbreaking-to-autists mistakes found in most ordinary literature.

Provides a fantasy wherein merely being actually intelligent (as opposed to being iron man or sherlock holmes intelligent) is enough to gain social status, wealth, and power.

Yes, but not exactly. HPMOR's premise is that being intelligent makes you super-powerful. And it's not like Tolkien characters are not intelligent (please, no "why didn't they just order Eagle Uber to Mordor", it had been done to death) - it's just, as in the real world, intelligence is not enough. Otherwise we'd all be ruled by God Emperor Yud The First, The Only And The Eternal by now. But in HPMOR, intelligence makes you a god among mortals, pretty much literally. Unfortunately, this means all other characters (except maybe one or two) must be dumbasses for that to work out. That's disappointing.

Actually manages to teach general principles by which its audience (high schoolers) can become more intelligent.

Might be, not being a high-schooler I can't make much use of that, so here might be a part of it that I am unable to appreciate.

Captures the essential fantasy of harry potter in general.

I must disagree here. The essence of how Potter wins has nothing to do with intelligence and everything to do with feelings, especially love. The whole premise of the original HP universe is that Voldie is smarter, more powerful, more capable, more ruthless, more everything, than any other character in the universe (including Dumbledore, which is close to his level but ultimately is also done in by him). And he still loses, because he doesn't know what it means to be human, and that's, evidently, how the magic works in that universe. HPMOR universe runs on pure intelligence, the concepts above aren't even featured there. Many people - especially rationalist, autist, introverted, hyper-intelligent geeks - may feel much more at home at the latter universe than at the former, but those are very, very different universes, and claiming HPMOR captures the "essence" of the original work is very far from the truth. If anything, it captures the external trappings while hollowing out the essence and substituting another - maybe more palatable to the geeks, but completely different.

Doesn't make any of the invisible-to-normies but backbreaking-to-autists mistakes found in most ordinary literature.

I've noticed a number of literary mistakes (like, dangling plots, unmotivated actions, etc.) when reading it but of course I already forgot the specifics. But I am willing to believe HPMOR does not have a kind of mistakes that trigger the autists so much, like claiming in one part that certain staircase in Hogwarts had 12 steps, and in another chapter saying it's 11 steps. Of course, no normie reader had ever cared or will ever care about this. Avoiding such mistakes indeed may make it an easier read to certain category of readers - but that doesn't make it a work of literary genius. At least my threshold for it is much higher - and in a different place too.

I am only a few chapters in, to be fair! The beginning is very fun and engaging. Can't speak to the book as a whole.

He doesn't have any other fiction on the level of HPMoR, though, does he? "Three Worlds Collide" was interesting but not great. I really like "Kindness to Kin" but it's just one short story. I'm working my way through "planecrash" right now, and so far it's a pretty good first draft of something that could have become a good novel series after it got a ton of editing that it didn't get.

On the other hand, HPMoR is roughly four long novels put together, and I watched it get produced in real time and saw how little editing it got, and although I find that intensely annoying (I'm trying to avoid getting too spoilery, but at at least one point there's an explicit moral that the protagonist has been an idiot by neglecting to consider advice from others, and the irony just hurts), it's quite amazing for someone to make it from beginning to end of that much writing, juggling a coherent arc-plot through multiple major tonal shifts, without ever seriously dropping the ball. In "planecrash" he's at least capable of co-writing and adapting to others' ideas, so he could have handled working with an editor if he'd ever actually made a career of writing and gotten one.

You may enjoy some of his other glowfics; I really liked "but hurting people is wrong". There's also the conspiracy world, a series of stories set in an alternate Earth. And the Masculine Mongoose trilogy on Tumblr. But, yeah, he mostly does one-shots.

Oh, hell, I forgot about the Masculine Mongoose! Yeah, those were wonderful, and more accessibly so than "Kindness to Kin"; still short stories, but I shouldn't have forgotten to mention them.

The "conspiracy world" stories were interesting but not great as stories.

I hadn't read "but hurting people is wrong"; thanks for the recommendation!

He doesn't have any other fiction on the level of HPMoR, though, does he?

Not on the level of MoR, but he is very likely the author of The Waves Arisen, which is a similar take on Naruto, with less intensive plotting.

Eliezer Yudkowsky, at his best, has leaps of genius nobody else can match. Fifteen years ago, he decided that the best way to something something AI safety was to write a Harry Potter fanfiction. Many people at the time (including me) gingerly suggested that maybe this was not optimal time management for someone who was approximately the only person working full-time on humanity’s most pressing problem. He totally demolished us and proved us wronger than anyone has ever been wrong before. Hundreds of thousands of people read Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, it got lavish positive reviews in Syfy, Vice, and The Atlantic, and it basically one-shotted a substantial percent of the world’s smartest STEM undergrads. Fifteen years later, I still meet bright young MIT students who tell me they’re working on AI safety, and when I ask them why in public they say something about their advisor, and then later in private they admit it was the fanfic. Valuing the time of the average AI genius at the rate set by Sam Altman (let alone Mark Zuckerberg), HPMOR probably bought Eliezer a few billion dollars in free labor. Just a totally inconceivable level of victory.

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-if-anyone-builds-it-everyone

Progress on Cryptonomicon has been slow, and I'm now about a quarter of the way through it. In addition to being very long it's also very slow in terms of plot progression.

Ah, Cryptonomicon. The book that pretty much killed my interest in Neal Stephenson.

...which is really weird to say, cause it's not a bad book by any means. I've read bad books before. That isn't one of them. Hell, I've read through slogs before, and I wouldn't call Cryptonomicon a slog.

But after finishing, I basically paused, considered everything, put it on my shelf, and never picked up one of his books ever again.

Which is weird, come to think. Cause Snow Crash was fun as hell, and The Big U was definitely entertaining.

Eh, maybe I'll give Diamond Age another shot one day.

Why did it kill your interest in him? Assuming you can answer the question without spoiling the plot.

Hit the half way mark and it will start to feel comfortable, to the point you’ll find yourself bemoaning that you’re closer to finishing than starting. At least that’s how I felt after the slow start.

Just finished The Years of Rice and Salt as detailed by the main thread. Otherwise still working through Marx and Kant and a Spanish thriller set in Medieval Japan.

I recently read and finished Piranesi by Susanna Clarke. I loved it - probably the most memorable book I've read in years. I decided to try her other (and much better known) major work: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. Christ I've been finding it boring. I've gotten through just over 100 pages and I don't think I can manage any more. I get that it was a deliberate stylistic decision to write in the style of someone from the early 19th century but it doesn't work for me at all. That being said, I respect authors trying something radically different from whatever everyone else is doing and given all the plaudits it clearly impressed plenty of people. Interested in what anyone here who's tried to read it thinks.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell picks up in the last third. I haven't decided if it was worth reading.

Piranesi is a totally different genre than Norrell. Though the latter is also good, it is more of a tome like Neal Stephenson novels.

If you want more like Piranesi, I would strongly recommend Madeline Miller's novels based on Homeric classics.

If you want more like Piranesi, I would strongly recommend Madeline Miller's novels based on Homeric classics.

I'll definitely check those out, thanks for the suggestion!

My girlfriend has been reading Jonathan Strange for several weeks (months?). She initially found it delightful and easy to read, but then came to a chunk of it where the pacing slowed to a crawl. I believe she's now about three-quarters of the way through it and is determined to finish it before the end of the year.

Keep at it until Jonathon Strange comes in. Mr Norrell is really really boring, and it's not fun slogging through that, but the visceral experience of finding him boring helps you understand him better in the long run, as well as why the world reacts to Strange with such relief.

Finished Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. It was an interesting ride (pun intended) but the end was kinda disappointing. After all that buildup, suddenly they just cried together and that was all? I mean I get it that real life has no "endings", but that's what I expect from fiction, however old-fashioned it is. Maybe it's too much to expect. But, I think I get what Pirsig was going for, and likely will read the sequel at some point next year.

Lila is much better, IMO, if you want full description of his MoQ (Metaphysics of Quality). But ZAMM has much better metaphors (like Gumptionology, Newton's gravity, and so many others).

Abyss: Unbound Book 7 By Nicoli Gonnella.

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