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Notes -
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.
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