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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   2901 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 15, 2024

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So, what are you reading?

I’m still on The Conquest of Bread and Future Shock.

Picking up Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms, a book about the inner universe of a 16th century miller who was executed by the Inquisition. The title is a reference to his belief that the world was created from a chaos “just as cheese is made out of milk” and “worms appeared in it, and these were the angels.” The man himself sounds like a decent man, not particularly crazy, concerned with the money-making aspects of the Church and the apparent absurdity of its teachings, preferring a simplified, natural religion of doing good deeds.

Started reading And The Band Played On, about the handling of the very beginning of the AIDS epidemic in the early 80s. Seems interesting so far, and I have at least some expectation of it going against some of the things I believed.

To pre-register what I currently believe, I think it was probably handled within about a standard deviation of about as well as it could reasonably be expected to have been, considering both the highly novel nature of the disease and the behavior of the victims, including being highly reluctant both to seek medical care and to cease high-risk behaviors like sharing needles to inject drugs and highly promiscuous gay sex. I am skeptical that any reluctance of authority figures to take it seriously due to the nature of the victims was a bigger factor than either of those. Considering that even now, ~45 years later, we still don't have a great handle on medical treatment, it's hard to see doing more sooner helping much. The only thing they could have semi-realistically done differently was to crack down much harder on those high-risk behaviors, which probably would have been pretty ugly and would have further outraged the affected community. So yeah, AIDS sucks and hindsight is 20/20, but give us a realistic alternative that the people involved could actually have done if you want to really convince me that we screwed it up.

I'll caveat, as before, that some of Shilts' history is... somewhere between rumor and hearsay. If you read a particularly horrifying quote said by a dead man to an unnamed person in a private conversation, or if there's certainty about the internal state of mind about someone the author never talked with, there's reason to be more skeptical than the prose is.

To pre-register what I currently believe, I think it was probably handled within about a standard deviation of about as well as it could reasonably be expected to have been, considering both the highly novel nature of the disease and the behavior of the victims, including being highly reluctant both to seek medical care and to cease high-risk behaviors like sharing needles to inject drugs and highly promiscuous gay sex.

And The Band Played On doesn't do a lot, imo, to challenge those bounds. For all Shilts puts a lot of blame on Reagan and co, most of it's a complaint for more funding or public announcement, both of which were not very plausible to change without hindsight; most other models run around some early surveillance that the US CDC simply wasn't set up to do in that era. I think there's a steelman available, but it's not generally what people want to talk about.

Thanks, I'll check that thread out after I finish reading.

I'll caveat, as before, that some of Shilts' history is... somewhere between rumor and hearsay.

I did notice that kind of thing, both in this book and the last new non-fiction book I read, The Devil's Chessboard, which I also posted about. They're both non-fiction books that manage to be decently engaging. I think part of the price of that is the authors filling in and making up or embellishing a lot of details about what people said, thought, and were like. On the one hand, it helps draw more casual readers in, but on the other, how could anybody possibly know that for sure? What might a different observer with different opinions think about these people and their situations? You don't get that in this type of book. Maybe it qualifies for being a distinct genre? I'd like to think I'm decent at picking up that theme and not taking the impressions too seriously at least.

I'm finishing up On The Edge by Nate Silver in print. The River vs Village dichotomy is really getting sweaty now that he's talking about things like NFTs and SBF. I like Silver a lot, but this is starting to feel like a Law Review Note where a student picked a topic at the start of the semester only to realize that there really isn't much to say about it, and tried to grind it out anyway. I'm hoping maybe the last 100 pages are about cheating, which might salvage the whole project if he has a robust theory of cheating.

I'm still on Seeing Like a State on my tablet. I'm sure I have nothing to say that hasn't already been said about it.

On audiobook I just listened to Down and Out in Paradise, a quick bio of Anthony Bourdain my wife got on audible. Holy shit that book was terrible. It combined a preening retroactive wokeness (Can you BELIEVE that Tony referred to people as Puerto Ricans and Swedes?) with a deep misogyny whenever it discussed Tony's partners. The author didn't seem to have gotten more or less any original material, no one close to Bourdain spoke to him much. Another book that really felt like the author got an advance, tried to do some research, didn't find anything, but wrote the book anyway. Most of the pages are just a rehash of Kitchen Confidential with occasional emphasis from another public interview or published material. Then the author drop facts at random, but not really go into them. He points out that Anthony Bourdain was on steroids near the end of his life, but doesn't go into when or why he started doing it. Which is emblematic of my problems with the whole book! I'm probably more pro-steroid than most, but there's something obviously weird about Anthony Bourdain doing steroids, it doesn't fit his core public persona, how did he get into it, how did he justify it to himself? The lack of research makes his attempts at deflating the Bourdain myth fall completely flat. I would highly recommend against this book, read Kitchen Confidential and any post-suicide profile of Bourdain and you'll get the same substance.

Very slowly, I'm reading Phenomenology of Spirit, I've started the Half Hour Hegel series, which goes through the whole book paragraph by paragraph. I am still many many many videos from the end, it feels kind of like the year I spent reading the bible in daily bite size chunks.

If anyone knows one, I'm looking for a good history of the Kennedy family. Joe to JFK/RFK/Ted.

I'm reading Nate's blog currently, and this review of the book does not terribly surprise me. In general, I get the impression that he has a prodigious ability to silence his own biases when the data goes against them - in my experience a very unusual skill - , combined with a serious attitude to competently do the single thing he is doing. But in most other ways he is not actually very exceptional. His polling/election model, which he is focusing pretty much all his attention on, is well done and very reasonable, but it doesn't actually include anything surprising. It's just that the competition tend to blatantly ignore or diminish the biases of their favourite polls or use kind-of insane assumptions, such as current-538 (which isn't affiliated with Nate in any way, under the hood) enforcing a fundamentals-only polling approach that, among other things, led to a better election forecast when DEMs polled badly.

Symbols of Transformation by Carl Jung

If you like to read pages upon pages of "And in this culture they have..." to prove an archetype exists (I don't) then this is the book for you.

Nevertheless I have been trudging through it because interspersed throughout there are tidbits of information essentially about mommy issues (which I would say I and a significant portion of modern men have) so it feels like this weird job of like panning for gold or finding a needle in a haystack or whatever.

Worth it but it's been a slog. Can't wait to be finished.

oooh that sounds like the book for me. send it over once you're done ;)

I don't have a take. I have issues and I'm tired of them.

I'll say this. Jung tends to be misunderstood IMO in the sense that he gets lumped in with mystics, and while he is something of a mystic he's actually really big on living in the external world, and the whole inner journey thing is only a thing you do when you have no choice and it's dangerous because you can get "stuck down there", i.e. so in love with your introversion that you get separated from reality and become increasingly useless even as you become so captivated and bedazzled by "insights" and imagine yourself to be specially favored by the higher powers.

Jung seems to be a proponent of "getting over yourself" and taking the slings and arrows of living as a person among the other people. When you do find yourself on the journey, he seems to be a proponent of caution, of a skeptical attitude toward the stuff you're being "blessed" with, of staying at all times connected with anything that keeps you connected to the real world (elsewhere, I think in his autobiography, he mentions that when he had his famous "encounter with the unconscious" he used his duties to his practice and to his children to keep him grounded in the external world), and of getting the fuck out of there once you find the thing you're looking for.

"Mommy issues" is not a term he uses in this book per se, but he talks extensively about the regressive longing for the warmth and protection of the womb and how dangerous this can be for an adult, and it made me think of my own cowardice, my tendency to want to be some sort of exception, my unwillingness to face the simple facts of my own external life such as my isolation and near-friendlessness and my unwillingness to do basic common sense things about these like taking up a hobby (Jung is big on common sense solutions and like being a normal fucking functional person in society, again very misunderstood guy). It's been a surprisingly effective wake-up call for me since there are few voices these days I'm actually willing to listen to but his is one of them for some reason.

Here's a fun quotation I just read from the book:

In reality the neurosis is manufactured anew every day, with the help of a false attitude that consists in the neurotic’s thinking and feeling as he does and justifying it by his theory of neurosis.

My theory of neurosis has been bad for me nooooo 😭😭😭

I'm reading Surface Detail, the 8th culture novel. I'm pretty far in and fairly disappointed so far. I'm comparing it to Matter which I just finished. It's apparently poorly thought of, but I'm comparing the vivid imagery of the eternal, subterranean war in the latter with the simplistic, extended exposition for each new element in Surface Detail.

I'm close to finishing the series at this point, hoping that Hydrogen Sonata isn't a poor sendoff.

yeah I love the Culture series but sadly some of the later ones are pretty lackluster

I'd love to hear your opinions of Hydrogen Sonata when you're done. I didn't like Matter as much as Surface Detail, but I thought both of them were a noticeable step down from The Player of Games, Use of Weapons, Excession, or Inversions, and I never got around to reading Hydrogen Sonata at all. Of course, I might have stopped from the get-go after Consider Phlebas if I hadn't previously been assured by a friend that better sequels were to follow.

Do author's works have the same "bathtub curve" for failure probability that engineered products do? Not quite for the same reasons, but for similar ones? Their first book(s) are done without enough practice, so have issues due to lack of experience. Then they hit a personal Golden Age. Then when their stock of good original ideas starts to wear out they either dig into the mediocre original ideas or they get repetitive.

I thought Hydrogen Sonata was an okay novel (by Bank's standards). I read it after exhausting the others and I wished the Culture had a better send-off. If I had to pick favorites it would be either Player of Games or Excession. Perhaps Matter as a third.

On the other hand, if you're done with the Culture, the Algebraist is really good even if it's not set in the main universe.

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