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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   2467 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 13, 2023

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 Herzog's Citizen Knowledge. It's a good primer for knowledge debates in recent times, and the references are great.

Paper I'm reading: Hannon's Are knowledgeable voters better voters?

Just started Frank: The Making of a Legend by James Kaplan, about Frank Sinatra. It's the first biography of a celebrity I've read with any attention. I think I hold some deep feeling that musicians' lives aren't as worthwhile to learn about as geniuses in science or philosophy or politics. But Frank Sinatra was a kind of genius, and his life is pretty interesting so far. Also, Kaplan is a good writer and sometimes I read the prose aloud to feel it on my tongue. I think it sharpens me in some way to feel how good writing conforms to the breath.

I'm also reading Lonesome Dove, by Larry McMurtry. Good Western so far -- it kind of seems like Red Dead Redemption 2 is to video games what Lonesome Dove is to novels: longform, epic Westerns which are modern but don't treat the genre's tropes with contempt. Really, come to think of it, the Western seems to be the one genre which is allowed to have some dignity against the eviscerations of postmodernism. Occasionally you'll get a flat-out anti-western like No Country for Old Men. But then you'll get really good modern takes on the genre which incorporate the spirit of the best while modernizing the trappings of the story, like Breaking Bad or that Wolverine movie Logan.

I finished The Road, by Cormac McCarthy. It was good, but I suspect it shouldn't have been my first McCarthy novel. Yes, it may well exemplify his sparse prose the best. But I feel like even though Blood Meridian is a lot longer it seems to have more in the way of action. Maybe when my docket is free I'll try it out.

I finished The Road, by Cormac McCarthy.

What a great book. Really made me think and feel. It wasn't until I watched the movie years later with my wife, though, that I actually realized what the point of the book was and what the road actually represented. I'd thought it was just an exploration of stoicism and humanity's resilience.

I ran through the newest Red Rising book, Light Bringer, in a couple of days.

Solid book, but just like after Iron Gold and Dark Age, I'm left wanting to know what happens next more than I'm left impressed by what I just read.

Has anyone else read this series, and if so, what are your thoughts on the "sequel" series?

Started reading Wizard's First Rule. Maybe it gets better but the ~100 pages I read were pretty terrible so I put it down.

Got caught up on The Game at Carousel, a horror movie litRPG. It's truly fantastic, the sort of book that makes a part of me wish I could live in the setting (despite all the terrible stuff happening there).

Just started @self_made_human's Ex Nihilo, Nihil Supernum and The Dao of Simulation. They're pretty good! The latter didn't interest me too much--it may not quite be a typical videogame setting, but I have a very hard time caring about anything where the setting is fake/virtual--but the former is quite fun and interesting so far.

Also started reading The Windup Girl. It was well-written and interesting but the rape scene was much too much for me, so guess I'm never finishing that one.

Wizard’s First Rule does not, in fact, get better. You dipped out before some of the more memorable cringy bits.

Just started @self_made_human's Ex Nihilo, Nihil Supernum and The Dao of Simulation. They're pretty good!

I'm glad you liked them!

where the setting is fake/virtual--but the former is quite fun and interesting so far.

Would it cause you pain to learn that most of the books you read were fiction?

Jokes aside, I suppose we have very different metaphysics, but in that particular story, the MC faces just as much risk of oblivion as anyone IRL. The Developers are perfectly capable of reviving him on a whim, but they choose not to, since that raises the stakes and draws in more viewership. (I'd point to a parallel to God, who can trivially reincarnate anyone the moment they die, but refrains from it. In this case, he's not even guaranteed a Heaven or Hell to go to, those cost computation and energy, and the region where the story's mainframe is placed is kinda like an Ancap dream/nightmare, where pesky things like rights for baseline humans are minimal to nonexistent, making them perfect toys or NPCs.)

Of course it's a Xianxia setting, so people far up the tree can and do revive or reincarnate, but if the MC needs to, he'll have to figure out a diegetic means of achieving that, without the narrator simply hitting the respawn key!

Yeah, it's interesting. If I learned that we lived in a simulation, that wouldn't change my attitude towards life. It would be just as valuable, "real", and meaningful as I had previously thought it was. Still, reading about it in a story totally destroys any sense of stakes for me, regardless of the other details around it such as how permanent death is.

The one quasi-exception to this is qntm's Ra which handled it pretty well. MAJOR, MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD: in the end the main character is attempting to save the world from the quadrillions of simulated humans who already control the sun's power output and want still more power. There are an arbitrary number of them, they have an arbitrary amount of time to consider their next moves, and they already have control of the sun and far more power than the rest of humanity, collectively, has access to. In the minutes between their escape and the destruction of earth, she uses what's left of physical reality's sun-computer permissions to upload the entire earth. It was a fitting solution and really the only realistic one given the situation.

But yeah, for me it has nothing to do with whether death is permanent. I'm not sure I can even articulate a true reason fictional simulations don't appeal to me. They just don't. Not a criticism of your story at all.

EDIT: could we get links to not appear in spoiler text? They show up blue against the otherwise black spoiler highlight.

I'd like the spoilers to work at all, they're always open by default and I can't toggle them @ZorbaTHut.

Did you mean Wizard's First Rule, by Terry Goodkind?

If you think the first 100 pages are terrible then I doubt you'll like the rest. From my recollections reading it as a teenager, books 1 and 2 were good, and the rest were hit and miss. I still maintain that those two books are perfectly good fantasy novels in their own right.

Ultimately Goodkind has the reputation as a knock-off Robert Jordan, and I can't say I disagree with that assessment.

Yes, that's what I meant, I'll edit it.

I liked:

  • The wall, that was pretty interesting
  • Everything involving Richard's brother, who was a fairly interesting antagonist
  • The blood flies and their purpose
  • The secret book which was burnt after it was memorized

I disliked:

  • It was all super predictable
  • Richard was much too much of a blank slate to me. He seemed to basically just be "generic good guy."
  • The world overall felt tiny. It just wasn't interesting. Maybe it opens up more later.
  • Laying out explicitly the main character's whole quest right from the start, plus the main characters, all of whom are just very trope-y

I read the Wheel of Time series about 10 years ago and have been reading plenty of epic fantasy since, so maybe it's just that I read these stories in the wrong order. Certainly the prose etc. was fine, it just felt like a story I'd read many times before.

you haven't even gotten into all the weird sex stuff yet!

It was all super predictable

Well, Wizard's First Rule was 1994 and A Game of Thrones wasn't until 1996. Goodkind was definitely exploring well-trod ground. Martin gets shit these days for not finishing his series, but AGoT deserves to recognized for the sea-change that it was.

The world overall felt tiny. It just wasn't interesting. Maybe it opens up more later.

It does, starting where you quit and further in the second book. There's the wall you need to cross, and then another, and then another. Crossing these thresholds is something of a theme in these books. Willful separation in the libertarian ethos.

Laying out explicitly the main character's whole quest right from the start, plus the main characters, all of whom are just very trope-y

You will never get away from this, unfortunately. The arc of each book is pretty clearly explained early in each book. The main characters don't change much, though new allies and enemies sometimes emerge.

I read the Wheel of Time series about 10 years ago and have been reading plenty of epic fantasy since, so maybe it's just that I read these stories in the wrong order. Certainly the prose etc. was fine, it just felt like a story I'd read many times before.

Yes, Goodkind's work has not aged well. It's been done better and in more interesting ways in the 25 years since. Still, he sold a ton of books, so he was clearly delivering what some people wanted to read. I maintain that he's the poor man's Jordan, which is a backhanded compliment, but still means he writes a decent fantasy story.

For my birthday, a friend of mine got me a golf book, The Eternal Summer by Curt Sampson. It follows the majors in 1960, a transitional period in the professional game where Ben Hogan was waning, Arnold Palmer was at his peak, and Jack Nicklaus was just starting to emerge.

I'm not really expanding my mind with this, but reading about golf is relaxing to me. One thing it's got me wondering about, is why golfers often seem to peak much sooner than their physical abilities do; and then some mental factor makes them decline. The example in this story is Ben Hogan: dominant in the early 1950s, he was still able to strike the golf ball extremely well as he aged into his 40s, but somehow lost his ability to putt. Why does this happen? One would imagine you'd lose ball-striking first and putting last. It's one of the oldest questions in golf, and I don't know if it's ever been satisfactorily answered.

You also have players like Rory McIlroy, who burst onto the scene and won four majors very young, and has not been able to win another one since 2014. He remains an overpowering driver of the ball, and somehow the finesse areas of his game have declined; this, even though he's lost absolutely none of his physical ability. Why would a player of golf, a game which seems to reward incremental improvement over time, peak at age 24?

Someone in the Motte recently observed that people in creative areas are most productive from 25 to 40, and then the rate of new production drops off steeply. I wonder if there is some related phenomenon that happens in golf. Troubling as I hurtle towards 40 myself, lol.

There are plenty of counterexamples, though. Many golfers don't peak until their late 30s or 40s. Some classic examples would include Phil Mickelson (who won his six majors between the ages of 34 and 51), Steve Stricker (who didn't peak until ~45), or right now Lucas Glover who has won the last two PGA events at age 43 and has resurrected his career after a decade and a half of being one of the randoms to win a major.

edit: forgot another great example. The only other player to have a "Tiger-esque" season in the last few decades was Vijay Singh who was 41 at the time (2004). The large majority of his wins came after he turned 40

Ben Hogan was never a great putter and it makes sense that his biggest weakness would be the first thing to go, especially since his car accident did him no favors with respect to his vision. I also think it's unfair to say that Rory McIlroy's skills have been in the decline. Golf and tennis are unusual in that we evaluate players based on their performance in a few selected events rather than over the course of an entire season, even though it's doubtful that this is an accurate representation of overall ability. Mac hasn't won a major in nearly a decade, but he was pretty damn close at this year's PGA. And he's the reigning Tour Champion, and won the Tour Championship just a few years ago. He's currently the No. 2 ranked golfer in the world. Lack of recent major wins is pretty weak evidence that his mental game has collapsed.

I don't know if this is really true among creatives either. It's most notable among musicians who operate in what can broadly be considered the "pop" field, but that's an area where youth is at a premium. It's also a area where more susceptible to fashion, and when styles change it can be hard to keep up when your strengths lie in another idiom. Within the rest of the musical world, this doesn't seem to be much of an issue. Jazz musicians and classical composers don't tend to have careers that drop off after 40, with the exception of some earlier jazz musicians who, for instance, didn't make the transition out of the big band era. For artists, authors, and directors this doesn't seem to be a thing at all.

Golf and tennis are unusual in that we evaluate players based on their performance in a few selected events rather than over the course of an entire season, even though it's doubtful that this is an accurate representation of overall ability.

One of the things about golf is, especially for the majors, anyone who gets in is basically good enough to win if they put four of their best rounds together. And in a field of around 150 players somebody generally comes close to doing that. That's why there are plenty of golfers who were career journeymen with only one or two career wins who randomly win a major.

It was a testament to Tiger Woods' insane dominance that he was winning a majority of the tournaments he played from ~2005-09, because that meant that his average four rounds was consistently better than the rest of the fields' best four rounds.

About 60 pages into Ender's Game. Enjoying it so far, the prose is unusually good compared to what little sci-fi I've read.

Ender's Game remains excellent even years after discovering it as a teenager. You'll also like Ender's Shadow, best read as a companion to the original.

I just finished Plutarch. That was a slog at times but I loved it.

I'm midway through The Dawn of Everything

For something lighter I'm picking up Nightbitch which my wife recommended.

I finished The Power Broker. I’m not sure if it was worth spending 3 months of my life reading versus reading another 3 or 4 books in the same timeframe. But it was one helluva read. I actually think Robert Moses has aged much better than the book portrays him. Because even though he did a lot of negative things, particularly when it came to displacing minorities, he actually got shit done! Freeways, housing, bridges, stadiums, parks, dams, I mean an amazing amount of public infrastructure. He takes a lot of heat in the books because he was so obsessive about building car infrastructure rather than public transport, and rightfully so, but it’s amazing the way he was able to leverage power to cut through red tape and get things done. He’s a complicated figure, no question about it, but as someone who lives in San Francisco, I think we could use a Robert Moses or two.

After spending months on the Power Broker, I ripped through In Cold Blood in less than a week. What a compelling book. It’s as good as any fiction story I’ve ever read and I highly recommend it, especially for a poolside or summer reading list.

I found Caro to be one of the greatest non fiction authors of all time, but I'm midway through The Years of Lyndon Johnson and the one thing that really frustrates me is his authorial Gell-Mann amnesia. In the middle of writing a 1600 page book on how Robert Moses/LBJ was a fraud and everything you heard about him was a lie forwarded intentionally to perpetuate a myth he'll pause to outline another character and give out some real whoppers. Al Smith working in fish markets, Sam Rayburn honest as sunshine, Coke Stevenson studying law by campfire. Watching Caro demolish LBJ one hears about Coke Stevenson accidentally getting into politics and one thinks "What a load of baloney, he made that up himself."

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