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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   1158 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for May 24, 2026

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?

I'm still on Sayers' Whose Body? Also reading Abelson's The Seven Liberal Arts after rereading Sayers' essay The Lost Tools of Learning.

Almost finished with A Parade of Horribles (Dungeon Crawler Carl Book 8) by Matt Dinniman. It's definitely delivering the expected goods, and the only reason that I haven't already finished with it and moved on is because despite being somewhat ridiculous from a strictly gaming standpoint, The system of Nil series that I was reading turned out to have enough meta-level commentary that I ended up finishing that out first.

Pouncing on the next chapter of Man Eaters of Kumaon for myself and reading Rikki-Tikki-Tavi to the boy.

My favorites of the Wimsey novels are Five Red Herrings and Have His Carcase.

Nothing, but at least that means I'm not performing a close reading and textual analysis of the DSM-5, ICD-10 and ICD-11.

I genuinely would take recommendations now. Recommendations for the recommendation would be that I mostly prefer nerdy hard sf bullshit, but I could branch out.

But if someone were to recommend Heidegger, I'd say hi, and then dig two graves before embarking on a journey of revenge.

try Robert B Parker Spenser series. genre is hardboiled detective fiction. i started with Looking for Rachel Wallace. i am 7 down in the series.

hard SF: if you haven't, then Anathem and Seveneves.

I will take a look, I do have softness for noir.

I did read both! I loved Anathem, one of his best, but Seveneves sorely disappointed me. The story should have just ended 2/3rds of the way through and it would be a much better book for it.

Funny, I liked the last third best. Read the book through in the middle of a screaming once-in-a-century hurricane, really kept the mood up.

Currently reading:

  • Desolation Island Patrick O'Brian
  • The Monastery of the Damned Nicholas Tobias
  • Interwar Articles Ernst Junger
  • The City-State of Boston: The Rise and Fall of an Atlantic Power, 1630–1865 Mark Peterson
  • High Output Management Andrew S. Grove

I’m trying my hand again at A Fire Upon The Deep. I made an attempt at it some years back, but it’d always been one that remained in the back of my mind and I’ve since had a commitment to myself to eventually return to it. I think what may be key to it is to go slower than my usual reading speed.

I found the tomato surprise about the pack aliens clever, but annoying.

Wait, what’s the surprise? The echolocation thing was introduced organically, as was the genetic/value drift from avoiding inbreeding. At least, I don’t remember the plot hinging on anything else that should have been common knowledge to a bunch of stranded humans…

The very first chapter set on the planet is written from the viewpoint of one of the alien packs, so you keep encountering weird turns of phrase that make no sense and have to slowly guess what the hell is going on: "Okay, does each dude have a pack of doglike animals with them that they have a tight bond with like in Starship Troopers? No, do they control them like riggers in Shadowrun? Wait, there's no one else, does their conscience simply hop between the dog bodies? Oh, o-oh, I get it now, it's like a hivemind, but with a small number of animals, an oligomind!"

Which is, as I've said, a clever trick, but I still don't like it.

I read it not that long ago, and enjoyed it. I want to claim I finished every novel set in that particular universe, and that's probably true.

I thought it was fantastic the first time, but have never been able to re-read it and I have no idea why. But I've read A Deepness In the Sky twice and loved it both times.

The galactic Usenet feels hilariously dated nowadays.

It ranks up there with the sock puppet subplot in Ender’s Game, yeah.

I go back and forth on the viability of that in the modern era: there are certainly solo discussion influencers on social media that shape ongoing politics, if not as directly. This site has loose associations with several such folks.

But it certainly would take a Wiggin-caliber poster to make it viable, and to have that much sway. But I also don't see any of the current crop parlaying it into global political office.

I don’t know why that is either… Because I’m not a usual fiction reader, but I love stories like that. For some reason it just never clicked with me previously. One thing I will say though is audio productions of all the old classics have offered me a great deal of renewed enjoyment to re-experience. I’d recently listened to the Dorsai series a couple years ago after I’d read the books even years prior to that, and it was a great experience.

I really need to read some Junger. Never heard of him before the SSC reviews of Marble Cliffs but his work sounds so cool.

There are basically three Jungers - the man lived to be a hundred and two. The early Junger, roughly Storm of Steel to The Worker, is a warrior-poet writing on his war experiences and how the War (and particularly the emergence of technology's power over man) changed the world. He rejects the Nazis when they come to power and his techno-nationalist thought takes a mystical turn, this is where we get Marble Cliffs and some of his real hidden gems. After WWII, he's able to write more freely, and his thought becomes explicitly centered on individual inner freedom under the rule of technology, with The Forest Passage and Eumeswil his best-known works, as well as his writings on psychedelics (he was a friend of Albert Hoffmann and coined the term "psychonaut"). All his books except for his diaries and correspondences are very short, so you can start anywhere that takes your fancy.

Try reading On Pain by Junger. That’s one of my favorite short-reads of all time. Storm of Steel was the first work of his I’d ever read and I was hooked after that.

Nearly finished The Matriarch.

I recently finished reading Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut, perhaps better known as the Ice-9 book, first published in 1963. It seems like it's supposed to be a highly satirical book that probably made a lot more sense at the time it was published. For me, reading it in 2026, it seemed kind of weird and lame; a bunch of weird characters who didn't make much sense running around and doing stuff that doesn't make much sense. At least the chapters are strangely short, I did at least manage to finish it. I was more interested in the Sci-Fi Ice-9 stuff, but that was maybe like 10% of the book, mostly the last few chapters, and very little discussion of it. I expect a good Motte thread about the idea would be way more interesting. My recommendation is, if you're genuinely interested in 1960s-era social commentary, it may be worth a read. If you're interested in Sci-Fi around the Ice-9 idea, don't bother.

Thanks, saved me a read. I've never been very happy with Vonnegut. Increasingly kind of confused as to how he attained the status he has.

Vonnegut’s non-linear storytelling never appealed to me one bit, but reading Slaughterhouse 5, I could understand why people were drawn to him.

The Mottetariat seems to have swung so far against Vonnegut that now I have to reread his work to come in here with a sharpened memory and rant against the slander. I greatly enjoyed Vonnegut as a 19 year old. That might be the prime time to enjoy Vonnegut's satire.

19 year old

Actually this explains a lot.

Currently reading Descent of Man by Charles Darwin. What's striking to me is how much of a not-Darwinist Darwin is. I mean, he's a naturalist, yes, but check this out:

As the voice was used more and more, the vocal organs would have been strengthened and perfected through the principle of inherited effects of use

That sounds like Lamarckism to me. Bro be out there batting for the other team. And it's not like he wrote this when he was 12, before he had his head screwed on straight. This was toward the end of his life!

The classroom story we were told about the history of evolution, at least in my school, was very misleading. In my school, we were taught Lamarck was basically the Aristotle of evolution, saying a bunch of harebrained nonsense he made up, and Darwin was basically Newton who came along and explained how it akshually worked. But that is not at all how this played out.

No, because of "inherited effects of use" and not "inherited effects of greater reproductive fitness"

Fascinating. I love a good conspiracy theory. Something about DarwinismTM doesn’t sit right with me. I’m not a young earth creationist, but it does seem there are a lot of big outstanding questions. And it’s presented to every Westerner as a fairy tale story in school.

Why is this? Well it’s obvious. Politics.

Try bringing this up in typical PMC company and see their reaction.

This is a pretty low form of contrarianism. You can't possibly apply this level of skepticism to everything.

The supply curve offers higher quantities at less fidelity. The demand curve is populated by bored high-schoolers. Solve for the equilibrium.

Alternatively: fairy tale stories are a map, the map is not the territory, and ain’t nobody got time for a better map.

Nah, this is pretty common. Like if you read Maxwell 1865, it looks nothing like the modern presentation of Maxwell’s equations. It’s not because people are lying, it’s because the underlying idea has been substantially cleaned up from the first person to stumble upon it.

Another example: calculus didn’t even have any rigorous foundation until a century after Newton, when Cauchy finally came up with the modern epsilon-delta thing we teach everyone today.

Modern presentation is only wrong in the sense that it’s biased towards presenting the polished ideas in their final state, while attributing this to the original thinkers, when in reality, there’s usually a big story between "guy who originally thought of this" and "what we’re actually presenting to you in class today."

The Gaussian distribution is another example. The distribution itself was proposed by Gauss, yes, but the justification for why this distribution is indeed the peremptory-correct distribution was done by Laplace (who had proposed several prior attempts at his own normal distribution!) The logic of why the normal distribution is the normal distribution—what we now know as the Central Limit Theorem—is the meat of the story, and yet Laplace’s name is merely a footnote to anyone except math nerds.

Yeah, and furthermore for calculus we all still pay the price because limits are honestly only taught as a holdover from that attempt to prove to other math people calculus was legit. You don't actually need an understanding of limits at all for nearly anything you do in calculus, but the big standardized tests include it so everyone is forced to teach it anyways.

Also IIRC neither Laplace nor Gauss were the actual very first dudes to propose the Normal distribution, that was actually de Moivre as a binomial approximation (who ALSO got robbed of Poisson distribution naming rights). Though Laplace was doubly a reputational victim, since he furthermore got robbed of credit somewhat because he was the dude who did most of the work with Bayesian statistics and inference much like he did for calculus. Sir Bayes didn't even publish his stuff himself. And Laplace did most of the cleanup work for Newton's gravitational theories.

But yeah, naming in math and science is a bit of a mess.

Still on The Glass Bead Game. Haven't formed a firm opinion just yet despite being nearly 60% done, but intrigued enough to continue. I get that it's a kind of hagiography of Knecht that's not supposed to be taken at face value but I'm hoping there's more to it still.

For me, the interesting questions were not about looking past the face value of the text but about why this hagiography was undertaken. It's also fairly fun, imo, to read.

Battle Cry of Freedom, McPherson.

Haven’t decided whether it has school textbook energy or if I just associate the antebellum material with high school. Setting that confusion aside, I found the beginning extremely compelling. It opens with sheet music: one tune, two sets of lyrics. Eloquent.

There are parts I want to write up for the Motte and parts I want to quote directly. Mostly about the absurd growth of mid-1800s America and how it mapped to the economic and social movements we learned about in school. Consider the Great Awakening. The standard AP explanation is “well, excess land is a pretty good situation for splinter religious groups.” This is underselling it. A glut of natural resources corresponds to a shortage of skilled labor. That suppresses the anti-capitalist sentiments which wrack Europe around this time, and it takes the pressure off social strife, so there’s less unrest and less resistance to industrialization. Moving along that curve pushes the modal worker out of the home and into the factory, or in the case of women, into education. So the next generation is both richer and better educated, creating a much more literate, socially conscious class which is still aligned with the industrialization project rather than conservative. Each surplus reinforces the others.

And none of this is touching on the Peculiar Institution! That’s like half of the opening chapter.

I have a lot more to say about this, but I’m going to hold off until I’ve read some more.

Ah yes, the famous "frontier thesis". Interesting to me that this thesis is not actually a modern invention, it dates back to 1893, only three years after the frontier 'officially' faded into nonexistence.

But I do think it's a decent one. There aren't many places and times in history where you could legitimately say "don't like it? Pack up and leave!" and you literally could just leave to somewhere without much rule of law, but still survive. And like, two of them are intertwined with US history.

I remember reading it years ago, and found it excellent. Should probably re-read it, and one or two of his other books.

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