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PaperclipPerfector  13d ago (text post)   3483 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for April 21, 2024

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 on Meyer's In Defense of Freedom. It's an effective statement of right-libertarian ideas, and surprisingly critical of Kirkian conservatism. Meyer's defense of freedom and reason is in large part against "New Conservatism's" defining of freedom as the freedom to do one's duty. It's surprising considering that the system related to his name is "fusionism." I'll have to dust off my Kirk sometime.

Allow me to bring down the intellectual quality with the various sci fi audio book series I've listened to recently. Light spoilers ahead, but I tried not to include anything too major.

The Murderbot Diaries.

The protagonist is a Sentry Bot. Made out of cloned tissue and cybernetics, he's born into servitude as corporate property rented out for security on planetary survey missions. He has recently managed to hack his governor module and has freed himself from control. With his newfound freedom he quietly does his job but spends all of his free time binge watching serials.

A mission goes awry and adventure ensues. 7 books, I listened to them all. Some fun characters. The later books seem a bit padded, there was an arc over the last few books so the endings of each weren't as satisfying. I probably just needed a break from the series.

Bobiverse

In 2016 a Silicon Valley CEO of a mid-sized company signs up to have his head frozen in case of death. He dies. The cryogenic company promised to use his funds to build him a new body, but that didn't work out so well. In 2133 his mind is brought back online as a digital replicant because his personality is seen as a good match for becoming a von Neumann probe.

4 books, I made it through them all. Some very imaginative world building and explorative sci fi. There's some Reddit tier atheism stuff at the beginning but it quickly moves on to more interesting things.

Expeditionary Force

In 2030 bipedal hamster-like aliens launch a surprise assault on Earth. The protagonist, Joe, helps defend a small town at the initial invasion site. Later, some lizard-like aliens recruit them to launch a counterattack. Joe ends up as part of an occupying force on one of the hamster worlds. Joe is a blue collar grunt, and bit boring. The early parts drag. He later discovers an ancient alien AI housed in something similar to a talking beer can. Things pick up after that.

I listened to 3 books of 16. It initially had promise but the alien world building was a bit weak. Skippy's origin is the most interesting plot thread but apparently there's not much progress on that until book 9. It had its moments but I gave up on it.

Starship's Mage

This one was interesting because I didn't think I'd like it. It's essentially hard sci-fi with magic.

A brutal eugenics program on Mars led to the creation of Magi. They are the key to FTL travel and the galaxy opened up to colonization. Some alien ruins have been discovered, but no sign of living aliens. The Mage King controls FTL and thus all trade and travel between worlds.

I really enjoyed the first few books. I made it through 7 of 14. The sci-fi magic just being magic meant that everything not involving a wizard is easy to understand. There are Newtonian space battles similar to the Expanse.

For me, it peaked at book 4, Alien Arcana. The first 4 books had more investigation and mystery. After that the series shifted more to fleet space battles and interstellar politics with anti-mage separatists. The author doesn't have the grasp he needs on things like large scale military production and what the military advisors would be saying for those plotlines to work well.

The first two get recommended on /r/rational periodically, but iI’m sad to say I never got around to them yet.

Is Expeditionary Force Craig Alanson? That one’s on the list. Eyes are open for a hard copy.

Never heard of Starship’s Mage. It does sound rad.

Is Expeditionary Force Craig Alanson?

Yes, Craig Alanson. The first book is Columbus Day.

Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland, which is a narrative history of the Troubles following a lot of the big and small players in the (mostly Provisional) IRA throughout the duration of the conflict. I know next to nothing about the Troubles but it has thus far been a riveting and accessible introduction.

On an entirely different note, I decided to pick up a light fantasy read, and ended up with Kushiel's Dart, a...racy political intrigue set in alternate history France. The lead character is charming and while it is pretty schlocky in general, the plot and character interactions are a lot of fun. Some interesting worldbuilding at work as well.
I have a feeling this is a book that would have a rather harder time getting published today on account of the contents of the first hundred pages or so alone, but maybe I'm simply naive about the nature of the industry. The ringing endorsement from Robert Jordan on the cover gave me a good chuckle in any case.

I'm currently reading Iron Gold by Pierce Brown. I am not really enjoying it, but people have assured me that the next book gets back to the excellence of the first three, so I'm trying to slog through it.

Can you post an update if it picks up? I couldn't get through it and gave up on the series. It'd be good to know if it's worth the slog.

Sure!

Burning Wheel, a roleplaying game manual. It’s incredibly pretentious. At the same time, though, there’s legitimately a lot of good material there? Notes about common pitfalls from RPGs. Systems which look like commentary on familiar games. I get the impression that this was created after a lot of long forum arguments and table experience.

Whether that actually makes a functional game…I’m not sure. There are lots of play-examples, but I’ve never heard of any random person playing it. The provided setting is an archetypal fantasy world which works fine to contextualize the rules, but leaves me cold. Burning Empires is better on that front.

Then again, I don’t usually play games like these. The theory is more fun than the practice. Which makes experimental, abstract books like this one more appropriate.

I'm still working my way through War and Peace, notating it as I go. It's such a tremendous work.

In between I listened to some graphic novel recommendations and read From Hell on my tablet. Really fun work, and fascinating that it is based on a pseudo-legitimate Ripper conspiracy.

I took a beach trip and grabbed a book my wife had bought and had been well reviewed, R.F. Kuang's Yellowface. The best thing I can say about it is that it was shorter than I thought it was going to be, it was a 200 page book with extra large margins and line spacing to make it 300 pages, so that it seems like a real book but is really an overgrown novella. Even in 200 pages, it runs out of ideas midway through. A blank space and a power fantasy where I was told a literary work would be.

I read Chris Jesu Lee's review of Yellowface and thought it sounded like hot garbage.

He was absolutely correct and the hip bookstore employee who recommended it to my wife should get the other half of her hair shaved off in public for this.

Oof, I read through Kuang's Poppy War trilogy and had no desire to read more of her. The first half of the first book is Kung Fu Harry Potter, then it shifts hard into Chinese nationalist fever dream, complete with a few chapters dedicated to the rape of not-Nanking so you don't feel as bad when the main character commits genocide on the not-Japanese. Then she spends two books ping ponging between ruthless sociopathy and helplessness as the plot demands. People called the details of the setting (food, clothing, etc) really well researched, but then the author described the not-Mongols as using huge longbows on horseback and that kinda brought everything into question for me.

The whole book just felt like a thesis length version of "But I have already drawn you as the Soyjak and me as the Chad..."

And I've read Babel, so between us we've got the whole bibliography.

Spoiler: It was bad.

I recently read Записки из подполья/Notes from Underground on a whim and was amazed at how perfectly it describes the POV of an average chud over 150 years later, down to the thought processes. It was actually hard to read at times because the protag is an incorrigible edgelord - which to be fair is easy for me to say because of modern over-exposure to nihilism and contrarian shit - but at the same time his schtick hits pretty close to home sometimes:

  • he's a shut-in who stopped interacting with society, and cannot stop himself from taking petty offenses over minor shit when occasionally forced to interact
  • he's a self-made philosopher and an irredeemable contrarian, opposing some things for nothing but the fuck of it and unironically considering himself oppressed by the laws of reality (e.g 2 + 2 = 4) that prevent him from freely expressing himself
  • he's thoroughly poisoned by the ennui of his existence, at some point admitting that even just being extremely, cripplingly lazy would be better than being inactive out of sheer apathy
  • later sections are dedicated to his encounter with a prostitute, which was very uncomfortable to read (despite having zero lewd details) purely because of how viscerally cringe the underground man's posturing is
  • the last few pages consist of quite literal cope and seethe by the underground man after the girl leaves, featuring gems like "insulting somebody is good actually, it helps them grow" and "at least I pushed boundaries and took things to extremes, you cowards would never dare go even halfway"
  • he admits that he hates the real/"live" life (живая жизнь), was unprepared to handle it when Liza came, and wants nothing more than to return to his "underground"

Good writing really is timeless, I'm not much of a reader but I really should've paid attention in school at least.

It's absolutely brilliant. One of the most uncomfortable reads I've ever had. Resonates so completely through the ages.

The only thing I recall really resonating with me from school was Gore ot uma/Woe from Wit. Naturally, back then I thought Chatsky was a based sigma, whereas now his antics reveal him as a cringelord who can't read the room.

Fish's Clinical Psychopathology, and the Oxford Handbook of Clinical Psychiatry.

The latter, while still quite dry, has informed me that the piccolo gene is implicated in depression, which given what I remember from watching DBZ as a kid, is quite accurate.

The former is indeed about humans, my concerns about how to apply an MSE to a fish are dispelled, though it took a while. I'd be very concerned unless it was a talking bass, or a very particular kind of sushi place, but then again, I don't eat fish.

Just finished Feynman’s autobiography. What a guy! You know a guy is being honest in his autobiography when half the book is filled with memories of blond babes and tits, and the other half is about him solving this or that very difficult physics problem.

Surely You're Joking? Funny story about this book. In high school physics, my teacher would offer students the opportunity for extra credit once a quarter. To get the credit, you had to read a book from her pre-approved list and then have a 30 minute conversation about the book. I, as a bookworm, took advantage of this and read Surely You're Joking. I thought it was awesome as well. In fact, I enjoyed it so much that I read his second autobiography What Do You Care What Other People Think, which, while not as good as his first, was still worth reading.

I didn't learn much physics in that class, but her booklist stuck with me.

I also highly recommend this book. It's hilarious and fascinating.

You should also pretend that the movie doesn't exist.

It was easy to pretend that until you told me that it does :P

Seconded. It really is a hoot. If the guy had been alive today his YouTube channel would be popping.

I got the impression that if he was alive today he would be fired from academia promptly and make a fortune as a quant

Undoubtedly, but that would only make his YT spicier.

Seconded. It really is a hoot. If the guy had been alive today his YouTube channel would be popping.

Not really - he wasn't a self-promoter in that way. SYJ happened because Leighton and Sands made it happen, not because Feynman wanted to do the work of writing a memoir.

I'm currently reading Molecular Biology Of The Cell. It's a big biochemistry text that's over 1,700 pages, a topic which I've long planned to cover in full but have never managed to get the time to do so. I plan to finish it by the end of next month, and have been making notes when I read so as to aid in memorisation of the concepts covered.

In conjunction with this, because deep time is fascinating, I have been reading a large variety of papers on biospheric evolution during the Precambrian while drawing up a timeline of events - there's a long, complex fuse that led up to the explosion of animal life at the beginning of the Phanerozoic and that as far as I can tell is still poorly understood. There is so much from back then that would've been like nothing the world has seen since (the Snowball Earth(s), the Ediacaran biota, and so on - there is even some evidence showing incipient multicellular life all the way back in the early Proterozoic that went nowhere, a dead branch on the evolutionary tree which featured relatively complex lifeforms large enough to be visible to the naked eye). I've been including links in my notes so I don't lose the original sources, I might put it up TheMotte at some point once I'm happy with it.

Done with I, Claudius and onto A Thread Across The Ocean.

A couple thoughts on I, Claudius

  • Historical fiction is a very cool concept and I would like to read more of it. It gives the author a nice structure to work with and he can then just make up interesting stories to fill in the unknown. It's fun to read the Wikipedia entries on all the Roman emperors/politicians after finishing the book.
  • In the same vein, I'm currently rewatching The Sopranos, and I kept thinking how much the palace intrigue and murder in I, Claudius reminded me of the show. There's a scene in the The Sopranos where a couple mafia guys are torturing a Jewish man who refuses to submit and he says "900 Jews held their own against 15,000 Roman soldiers...and the Romans, where are they now?" Tony Soprano answers "You're looking at them asshole." Great bit of writing from The Sopranos, and I like the idea that the mafia are the descendants of these debauched and violent Roman emperors.
  • *Overall, I thought the book was very good, though it did waver a bit at the end when Caligula became emperor. It felt rushed and not fully fleshed out, especially in comparison to the reigns of Augustus and Tiberius.

I'm about a quarter of the way through A Thread. It's about the construction of the first telegraph line across the Atlantic Ocean in the 1860s. It's a pretty interesting bit of trivia.

I just finished I Claudius as well. I was somewhat surprised by how little of a part Claudius plays in the grand scheme of the book, but I suppose the whole point is that he both a distant and all too close observer of the sordid goings on of the Roman elite. I can see how the Caligula parts might feel rushed, but I got the sense that at that point a lot of the big players that Claudius was closing following were just dead, leaving only Caligula's shenanigans to describe. You might know this already but apparently there is a sequel, Claudius the God.

I agree. I kept waiting and waiting for Claudius to finally become emperor and realized about 50 pages from the end that the book would likely end right at the point where he did become emperor.

I think my issue with the book is that once Livia died, the intrigue and backstabbing and villainy became far less subtle and interesting. Caligula was indeed a villain, but a far less interesting one than Livia. His villainy was right up in your face while Livia’s villainy was in the shadows.

I have yet to read I, Claudius, but I did see the TV series in Latin class. I recommend Robert Harris’ Cicero trilogy, it’s a phenomenal series of historical novels which cover Rome in the waning days of the Republic. It’s from the perspective of Cicero’s head of IT scribe/slave.

Thanks for the rec, I've got it saved in my cart.

I'm reading the final book in the Hyperion Cantos series.

As a recovering voracious reader with lots of free time, I've found I'm pretty picky. Almost no sci-fi in the past 10 years has captured me at all, so I'm combing back through the few classics I've missed out on.

Overall I'd give Hyperion a 8/10 which to me is a "Definitely read if you like the genre". However I have to vent about its shortcomings:

  • The author clearly loves historical literature and so has pushed it into many core parts of the story. It doesn't fit in a sci-fi setting as neatly as he imagined it.
  • The world building between ~1990 (when he wrote it) and 2732 (When it's set) is unbelievably sparse. There's maybe one or two wars and authors mentioned for those 700 years, no major advances in religion, etc.
  • The plot armor of the cast after the first book is obvious and impenetrable. I'm not looking for Game of Thrones here, but there has to be a middle ground between that and "I can tell after a single page introduction this guy is going to live the whole series and definitely switch to the be a good guy.
  • Speaking of good guys, the morality spectrum is pretty black and white here. The big bad is the big bad, and the good guys have very few rough edges. Plenty of Deus Ex Machina you can call a mile a way.

All that being said there's plenty of cool concepts and imagery. Each book in the series is pretty different which you normally don't get in a series. May dig into the Battletech books next.

I'm rereading The Human Reach series by John Lumpkin. It's a hard sci-fi Tom Clancy in space series- the atomic rockets guy was illustrator and scientific/technical cosultant- and is at the very least interesting and engaging with no glaringly obvious scientific errors. Ships have heat radiators and space battleship tactics are cognizant of Newton's laws and the tyranny of the rocket equation instead of trying to do Midway or Trafalgar in space.

One thing I think it could benefit from is introducing an economic logic driving space travel and colonization. The series takes place in a world of continued relatively low fertility and tries to use national pride as the logic behind space colonization, which in turn necessitates trade, creating enough of an infrastructure to set space battles and spy stuff against. But it's hard not to notice that the great powers could easily just... not. Not build antimatter factories or fusion fuel production operations or engage in long range exploration. Indeed, it's lampshaded in the books themselves; two of the belligerents are specifically noted for their populations being too low to fill out colonies and the sheer expense of colonization and maintaining a space navy is readily apparent. Every benefit to the homeland is drawn from things based in Earth orbit and not beyond. It's not implausible that the US and Russia and the like would maintain a single colony for national pride, but maintaining multiple and then going to war to own more of them seems to require an explanation, which is lacking in the book.

Isn't that similar to how European colonial empires were a net economic drain? And yet there was something, not measured by that economic equation, that made them want a "place in the sun".

Putting aside motivations like pride and competitiveness, there might be something similar to what Paul Graham wrote (I think), about allowing serendipity. Holing up and focusing on specializations may not be the best investment strategy. Maybe there's a place for trying a number of things that aren't likely to work, in case one of them takes off. (What would the world be like if the circa-1600 UK had decided that this "colonization" thing was economically inefficient?) Maybe it's like the social-capital version of an index fund, or hybridization? Possibly the increased scale provides more options in case something somewhere goes wrong, much like an insurance policy?

(There's room for a counter-argument here, about guaranteeing exposure to disease, political instability, and other problems of heterogeneity.)

I thought it depended on the place and time. The sugar producing colonies in the Caribbean were extremely profitable for example. And the Spanish got literal boatloads of silver out of their South and Central American colonies.But then you get into the scramble for Africa in the 19th century and a lot of those were prestige projects that never made any money for the mother country, with the Italians in Abyssinia being the the most egregious example.

I think there were profitable episodes and individual people who made a lot of money throughout, but for the most part most things were a financial drain after the mid-18th century. Even in the Caribbean you had in many cases the classic situation in which profits were privatized but ‘losses’ (paying for defenses like building forts, the various extremely expensive colonial wars, compensating slaveowners) were funded by government borrowing and in most cases taxes on the metropole. While England was much richer than the rest of Europe for almost all of the 19th century, that was probably more to do with the Industrial Revolution than the Empire, and at the height of empire in the early 1920s the UK wasn’t substantially (or at all in some cases) richer than other northwest European countries.

Even where states made a lot of money early on (again, more of an Iberian thing than an Anglo-French one) it was squandered pretty quickly. The Spanish obviously lost it all fighting the Dutch and French. The scale of the public losses are sometimes overstated because a lot of failed Anglo-French investment (eg. the colossal amount of money the British wasted in Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Peru and Latin America generally) was private, but that was still a big economic drag. Plus, imperial preference never really worked because the British were worried about another 1776 and so from the early 1880s allowed the colonies to opt out or circumvent a lot of protectionist policy, which meant that the whole system never brought much wealth back to London.

There's another element: discovering wealth does not necessarily make you wealthier. Within 100 years of discovering the Cerro Rico at Potosi which essentially doubled the world's silver supply, the Spanish crown was serially bankrupt.

All the major powers, except possibly the USA, have in-series declining populations who aren’t offered a better life in the colonies(far from it- colonies are shown to be poorer societies which degenerate into shitholes fast without massive subsidies), a major difference from Europe in 1850, and there’s also nothing at all anyone needs in the stars, unlike Victorian Britain which colonized because it was dependent on trade.

Indeed, except for China and Korea, every major nation with colonies is explicitly said to have declined. There are vague hints at ideological reasoning, but an intelligence focused account of a space war could surely round out the motivation behind a colonization effort which is explicitly noted to be an extremely expensive and excessive investment in creating elbow room for a declining population. The science qua physics is like a 10 on the mohs scale; a lack of explanation for major states making highly irrational economic decisions stands out against that backdrop.

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