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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   4262 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 24, 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 Paradise Lost. So far God isn't coming off well and Jesus sounds harebrained. On the other hand, Satan seems to have unfortunate ideas about what to do with humanity, which feels personal.

Paper I'm reading: Magnus' Science and Rationality for One and All.

Fellow Tetrapod by Dan Bensen, an absolutely delightful speculative-biology scifi novel. The premise: there are countless parallel versions of Earth, and in many of these sapient species have arisen, each from a different branch of life. There are sapient net-casting spiders that communicate by weaving puppets of their interlocutor, sapient hagfish that move about by extruding stilt-like rods of mucus, sapient crows that ride on the shoulders of domesticated hominids, sapient squirrels whose brain is mostly animated by strains of toxoplasma, and so on.

Two of these species (rotifers that form clonal colonies ruthlessly at war with each other and intelligent robots created by a long-extinct dinosaur race), have discovered how to cross between universes, and created a UN-like organization dedicated to building peaceful trade relations between sapient species. The protagonists are the representatives of humanity in this organization, about half a dozen of people rather neglected by their bosses on our Earth and looked down on by the members of senior, more affirmed species, trying to optimize humankind's position in the multiverse. The author has really done his readings on evolutionary biology, physiology, psychology, and so on; the novel comes with a proper bibliography.

I did it! I finally finished Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell. It had been on the back burner for...gosh. Months, now. The final stretch was so atmospheric and surreal that it pulled me back in. I absolutely loved how Strange and Norrell persistently refused to resolve their differences on other peoples' terms, only to come together in pursuit of new magic. The chapter where they first parted ways was one of the best in the book for similar reasons. It's hard for me to recommend the book without caveats; even as a notorious fan of door-stoppers, I found it slow at points, and I was afraid it wouldn't deliver. With the exception of a couple plot threads, I can conclude that it did.

Next up, I'm going to start Banks's Use of Weapons. It's the Culture book I've most wanted to read for a while, and I found a used copy recently.

Though...perhaps something a little lighter? Last night, after discussing stylized prose and pacing in JS&MN, we were flipping through Patriot Games. I wanted to find a Clancyism. And wow, he did not disappoint.

Sergeant Major Noah Breckinridge was the image of the Marine non-commissioned officer. Six-three, the only fat on his two-hundred-pound frame was the hot dogs he'd had for lunch in the adjacent Dahlgren Hall.

God, it's perfect. The peak of the genre. Simultaneously a vivid image and a complete blank slate. It imports a stable of tropes while screening itself with the extra details. They don't matter; they're only there to keep the reader from noticing that he or she has conjured a phantom, fully formed, from the collective (American) unconscious. In isolation, Clancyisms are ridiculous. In context, when the reader stays under keeps suspending disbelief, they make for a vibrant, breakneck read.

If you liked Jonathan Strange I can recommend Piranesi by the same author - also good but much shorter and tighter (though on the downside, from my point of view, the homoeroticism moves from subtext to text).

I just finished Freddie DeBoer's How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement which was just...utterly disappointing. It falls into the same normie-splainer genre as Louise Perry's The Case Against the Sexual Revolution which means it's worthless to anyone that is vaguely familiar with stupidpol rhetoric and arguments.

At least his book on education had an idea worth looking at. This one? There's nothing new there. It doesn't help that Freddie is even less willing to challenge his audience on their assumptions (e.g. the injustices of policing, where he basically accepts the progressive frame of "police hunting African-Americans" but with "but #Defund mainly hurts blacks though! Maybe one day but not now, not this way!").

And, add insult to injury, Amazon is wise to my tactics so I couldn't even exchange it. I'll have to wait for another credit to read Hanania and Rufo's takes on the "why 'wokeness'?" genre. They can't be worse than this.

I just started Chip War. Not much farther than the first chapters but it's not actively patronizing me so we're off to a better start. But I am debating just how much of the historical set up I care about compared to the exploration of the post-COVID situation.

The audience for these books are like 64 year old boomer centrists who think Trump is vulgar but “the left seems to be going crazy” (literally my mother). Expecting to get much out of them if you’re very online is fruitless, in many ways they’re written explicitly for people who aren’t.

Yeah, at this point it's my fault for buying books based on liking someone's (less dense) online output and just expecting them to say something different without checking. I got Freddie's cause I liked his first and figured it'd be more of the same.

But this is arguably bad even for the John McWhorter "I'm a fellow tribe member, it's okay. You're not crazy or racist if you ignore these wokes" genre

Of course, in hindsight, part of it may just be that I am (was, I dunno) way more of a normie-leftist on education than crime. IIRC Others here without that problem also complained about some of the same behavior I'm noting here in The Cult of Smart too.

Finished Conan The Barbarian in The Phoenix On The Sword. Only 24 pages! Phew. Short stories rock.

Over to the other side of the spectrum for Brothers Karamazov at ~900 pages, and Dostoesvky doing his reverse Columbo act of "Chapter 3: I beg the reader's patience, for before I begin the introduction to the beginning, I must first include a preface to the beginning of the introduction".

What is it with old books and these interminable beginnings? It doesn't take that long to set the scene.

What is it with old books and these interminable beginnings? It doesn't take that long to set the scene.

Dostoevsky spent nearly two years writing The Brothers Karamazov, which was published as a serial in The Russian Messenger from January 1879 to November 1880.

I do not believe that these are unrelated.

Is Brothers K really 900 pages? Damn, I'm 95% through on kindle and it flew by (admittedly on commutes and flights). What a book.

Yes it goes faster than anything else by him, but I think that’s because it really is one of the funniest things ever written.

Slowly working my way through McGilchrist's The Master and his Emissary. It's about the brain hemispheres, and how current Western society is very imbalanced. We use the left hemisphere too much, which inhibits the right hemisphere.

It's a pretty long/dense book. Enlightening though.

Literally or metaphorically?

I was under the impression brain-hemisphere research wasn't in a great state. Per Scott:

I am not an expert in functional neuroanatomy, but my impression is that recent research has not been kind to any theories too reliant on hemispheric lateralization. While there are a few well-studied examples (language is almost always on the left) and a few vague tendencies (the right brain sort of seems to be more holistic, sometimes), basically all tasks require some input from both sides, there’s little sign that anybody is neurologically more “right-brained” or “left-brained” than anyone else, and most neuroscientific theories don’t care that much about the right-brain left-brain distinction. Also, Michael Gazzaniga’s groundbreaking work on split-brain patients which got everyone excited about hemispheres and is one of the cornerstones of Jaynes’ theory doesn’t replicate.

Scott should read the book. It seems to make a solid case, although I'm still in the first 20% of it, so I'm not going to start explaining how, at this point. But it already seems clear that there are more than "vague tendencies". Both hemispheres do all sorts of tasks, but how they do it and how they relate to the world is different.

No, I'm not familiar with Jaynes or with the Debt book. Intriguing thought though.

There might also be a relation to the broad society swings of culture in terms of art, thinking and literature? From the enlightenment to romanticism, etc. New technologies might promote more analytical or rationalistic thinking (the printing press, the internet). I haven't looked into this at all, it just popped up in my head now.

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