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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   4049 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for November 19, 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 going through Fedorov's Common Task, which has been a pleasant surprise. It's delightfully eclectic, and something in its sharpness is compelling.

A truly moral being does not need compulsion and repeated orders to perceive what his duty is- he assigns to himself his task and prescribes what must be done for those from whom he has become separated, because separation (whether voluntary or not) cannot be irreversible.

Yesterday I finished The New Science of Narcissism. I was disappointed to find it no better than any other pop science book I've read in the last few years, and quite a bit worse in a couple of specific ways (the author rings the "DAE orang man bad???" bell a lot despite himself including a bar chart showing that Trump is no more narcissistic than many prior Presidents; and he completely lost me when he argued that the Goldwater rule ought to be abolished). I was expecting something a lot more useful and/or a lot more discomforting, but for the most part it told me a lot of things I already knew (everyone has narcissistic traits to some degree, narcissism can be an asset in certain contexts, you can be narcissistic without full-blown narcissistic personality disorder etc.). The book also includes an entire chapter about how geeks are narcissistic, which seemed a bit tangential. Probably the only thing I really got from it was a better understanding of "vulnerable narcissism" as distinct from the grandiose narcissism with which we're all familiar.

Yesterday evening I started Ted Chiang's short story "The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate", and finished it at lunchtime today. Readable and entertaining, but a fairly conventional time-travel story for the most part - it didn't get me thinking the way "The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling" did. Planning to read Bones and All next, having enjoyed Luca Guadagnino's film adaptation far more than I expected to, to the point that it's my favourite film released in 2022 aside from Tár. (The film of Bones and All incidentally represents a massive step-up in quality from Guadagnino's previous collaboration with Timothée Chalamet Call Me by Your Name, about which I still cannot understand the hype.)

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