site banner
naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   3298 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for April 2, 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.

4
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

So, what are you reading?

I'm picking up Condon's The Manchurian Candidate. I had stumbled on some other work of his and was very impressed with his writing skills. The movie left little impression, but the trope of brainwashing seems to be a recurring one in the modern mentality, even if it appears in different forms over time.

Barbara Mertz' Temples, Tombs, and Hieroglyphs (2009 edition), a fantastically written history of Ancient Egypt. Last year I had also read Jan Assmann's The Mind of Egypt, a more scholarly text focusing on its self-image and its conceptions of the world, history, and power. My combined impressions were as follows:

  1. For being a Bronze Age kingdom ruled by literal god-kings, Ancient Egypt looks surprisingly nice. Sure, they had their share of dispotism, chauvinism, and imperial warfare, but I haven’t found anything like Assyrian brutality on prisoners, Roman blood sports, Greek slave economy and rampant misogyny, or Aztec mass human sacrifices. For the standards of antiquity (which are very low to us), it seems an actually pretty decent place to have lived as a commoner.
  1. The development of culture and worldview looks so strangely like a coherent arc. First there’s Ancient Kingdom pharaohs, who look so aloof and self-sufficient in their divinity. Then the kingdom collapses in rebellion and civil war, teaching the rulers of Egypt that they have responsibilities towards their people; Middle Kingdom pharaohs care a lot more about justifying their position with philosophy and theology. That era collapses too, with an invasion and occupation that teaches them that the rest of the world exists, too; and the New Kingdom is defined by imperial engagement with the great powers of Asia. Eventually the state model of the Bronze Age becomes unsustainable and Egypt fades into a province of distant empires, ruled by fatalism and detachment. This honestly sounds like the kind of satisfying storytelling that one should be most skeptical about in history; I wonder how much this understanding is due to scarcity of records, pareidolia, and my own ignorance, and in what proportion.

Finally getting around to Thucydides' The History of The Peloponnesian War, I meant to pair it with Herodotus' Histories which I read a few years back but other things distracted me.

Apt Pupil is great. Really, his whole novella collection Different Seasons is some of his best work.

The Long Walk is also good. Even better when you know King came up with the idea while an undergraduate. Once you’re done, check out The Running Man.

Following Paul Graham's recommendation, I recently finished reading Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People.

Going into it I wasn't sure what to expect, and maybe I'm being overly cynical, but wow is this book ever corny. Every other page contains an anecdote like "I spent ten years trying to land this one particular client, and was met with a door in the face every time. Then I tried this One Weird Trick, and the prospective client immediately opened an account with me, invited me to be his guest at the opera, and urged me to fuck his wife." The whole book is like this.

Maybe it's a book that should be read backwards because its insights are in the water supply. Perhaps in 1938, "start off by praising your employees before offering constructive criticism" was an innovative suggestion, but I've had six permanent office jobs in my life and I'm pretty sure every one of my employers and supervisors had taken this advice onboard years (if not decades) ago. Hence, the general tenor of work is presumably much less confrontational and gladiatorial than it was in the thirties, but everyone's relative position in their ability to effectively deal with people hasn't changed.

I also found it kind of weird how the message of the first chapter is "never criticise people" and then the last six chapters provide techniques and strategies for how to criticise effectively and diplomatically. Which one is it, Dale?

De Tocqueville (writer of Democracy in America) also wrote a less rosy book on the French Revolution, might be worth checking out.

A Night Without Stars by Peter F. Hamilton. Apparently it’s part of his Commonwealth Saga, which is some of the best hard-ish sci-fi I’ve read.

I finished the first three books of The Corean Chronicles but put the series down after that. It started off strong but by the end of the third book the MC was just destroying everything no sweat. He was so strong there was no tension left.

It’s a shame because I really loved L. E Modesitt Jr.’s Recluce Saga but this series I didn’t find nearly as good.

He basically has one thing he writes, but he does it very well...

Him and Ty Frank (of The Expanse fame) are both old school SpaceBattles serial posters who sold out/went legit and it kind of shows.

Plus one for Project Hail Mary, excellent read.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats