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PaperclipPerfector  16hr ago (text post)   579 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.

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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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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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