Radiance Carter Scholz ★★★★★ 2003 2014/02/20 (Quotes are extracted from my annotated ebook edition of Radiance; see also my list of other review & excerpts from them.)



Publisher summary:



Somewhere in California, in the 1990s, a nuclear weapons lab develops advanced technologies for its post-Cold War mission. Advanced as in not working yet. Mission as in continued funding. A scandal-plagued missile defense program presses forward, dragging physicist Philip Quine deep into the machinations of those who would use the lab for their own gain.





The Soviet Union has collapsed. But new enemies are sought, and new reasons found to continue the work that has legitimized the power of the Lab, its managers, and the politicians who fund them. Quine is thrust into the center of programs born at the intersection of paranoia, greed, and ambition, and torn by incommensurable demands. Deadlines slip and cost overruns mount. He is drawn into a maelstrom of policy meetings, classified documents, petty betrayals, interrupted conversations, missed meanings, unanswered voicemail, stolen data, and pornographic files. Amid all the noise and static of the late twentieth century made manifest in weapons and anti-weapons, human beings have set in motion a malign and inhuman reality, which now is beyond their control.





More than a critique of corrupt science and a permanent wartime economy, Radiance is a novel of lost ideals, broken aspirations, and human costs. In this vivid satire, relationships are just a question of who’s using whom. Failure is just another word for opportunity. “Spin” is a property not of atomic particles but of the news cycle. Nature is a blur beyond the windshield, where lives are spent on the road, on the phone, on the make, in fierce competition for financial, political, and intellectual resources. It is a world which language is used to evade, manipulate, and expedite. It is a world where everyone’s story is always open to revision and language is used for justifying everything from defense programs to divorce.



Years ago, I ran into a book review titled “‘Its awful and enticing radiance’: The Beauty and Terror of Carter Scholz’s Radiance” by L. Timmel Duchamp; about a 2001 novel I had never heard of by an author I had never heard of, but it sounded interesting and I read the review until towards the end, it quote a key passage in Radiance:



A murmur of rain had started again. He lay there in the abyss of his thoughts as her breathing beside him steadied and deepened. Almost a voice stirred in him. It starts before Hanford, it almost said. It starts with Röntgen, with the piece of barium glowing in the path of invisible rays, striking out the fire that God had put there. It starts with his wife’s hand on the photographic plate, its transparence there, the ashen bones visible within the milky flesh. Who could imagine that this radiance at the heart of matter could be malign? That with its light came fire? (Yet from the first the ashen bones were there to see within the flesh.) It starts with Becquerel carrying the radium in his pocket that burned his skin, and darkened the unexposed film. It starts with Marie Curie poisoning herself in that pale uncanny glow. With Rutherford guessing at this new alchemy, guessing that matter, giving up its glow, transformed itself one element into another. With the miners at Joachimsthal, deep under the Erzgebirge, inhaling the dust of uranium and dying of “mountain sickness”. With women who by the thousands in watch factories tipped their brushes with that glow, touched it to their tongues before painting the dial face, women who only much later, when the watches’ glow had faded, sickened and died from that radiance taken into their bones. It begins with Ernest Lawrence rushing across the Berkeley campus, the idea of a proton accelerator uncontainable in his mind, calling out, I’m going to be famous! With Oppenheimer at Jornada del Muerte that morning of Trinity. With the scientists who had prised open the gates to that blazing realm past heaven or hell. What were they now at the Lab in all their thousands, but the colonial bureaucrats of that realm, the followers and functionaries, the clerks and commissars? Mere gatekeepers of that power. Or in its keeping. It goes of its own momentum beyond Hanford, to Trinity, to Hiroshima, to the prisoners, the cancer patients, the retarded children, the pregnant women injected or fed this goblin matter to see would it bring health or sickness, the soldiers huddled in trenches against the flash, bones visible in their arms through closed eyes, staring up at the roiling cloudrise, the sheepherders, the farms, the homes, the gardens downwind. And in his sleep the voice long stilled spoke once more. It starts with Sforza; in case of need I will make bombards, mortars, and firethrowing engines of beautiful and practical design. It starts with Archimedes focusing the sun’s rays upon the fleet at Syracuse, it starts with the first rock hurled by the first grasping hand. It starts where we start. It is mind, it is hunger, it is greed, it is defense, it is mischief, it is the devil, it is the god; it is life.



The force of the incantation struck me and a few years later, a copy finally appeared in my local library system. I requested it and devoured it in one or two sittings; Scholz’s favored punctuation-less style, using hyphens for voice transitions, annoyed me (but did not challenge me - I’d already read Stand On Zanzibar & Dos Passos’s U.S.A.). The swirl of references drenched the work in reality - Scholz seems to know everything about everything, from philosophy of science to the L5 Society to Wagner’s Parsifal, but the themes were grand and ones ‘modern literature’ so often fails to address and cedes to science fiction: the role of science in society, the tension between future gains and present losses, what is corruption, whether we live up to our own standards, the worth of truth…





You could only call it a satire if you didn’t realize how closely it all tracks to real events: it is a roman à clef of the Star Wars program, down to the nuclear tests which intrude onto 5 pages in the final section. (Scholz seems to have drawn heavily on Gregory Benford’s autobiographical essay “Old Legends”, included in the anthology the “Radiance” novella was first published in.)





The novel begins in media res, depicting a failed exorcism of the government labs, quickly turning to its protagonist, a good-natured but despairing and baffled Quine’s attempts to understand his predicament: in charge of designing a nuclear weapon where the data simply disagrees with the theory which is supposed to be right. The story unravels into one of deception and funding pressure, and Quine triumphs, unseating the culprit in it all, and realizing he doesn’t belong at the labs - “I belong inside!” he says, even as he is forced out in the turmoil of anti-nuclear protesters.





A hallmark of Radiance is the Gibsonian sense of alien entities and organisms clashing for life, at a level above individuals: the Labs has generated its own culture, with its own imperatives and loyalties and goals, fed by government money, but in this respect, we can say little better of the continual antagonist of the labs, the protesters, as it is its own alien entity, seeking funding for its protests (funding, Réti reminds us, comes from the enemy), subverting Lab members for information, pressuring characters like Lynn to serve it. And it doesn’t end there: the Pentagon lurks in the background, represented by Reese, quietly pushing along research into ever better nuclear weapons, and hinted at twice are foreign governments like North Korea, and beyond that? Here I borrow a term from Kevin Kelly and refer to the Technium: science and technology regarded as its own entity with its own drives and selection effects, including the proliferation of all forms of technology.





Section two turns to the unseated Highet: his ouster, and the epilogue of his story as he looks over the ruins of his life and seeks out a final resting place in a think-tank. The Biblical and Wagnerian overtones are strong in this section. Thinking of Parsifal‘s Grail quest, it’s hard not to remember that only one knight finds the Holy Grail in the end: the others all go astray or have sinned in various ways.





Section three completes the work. Just like Dune Messiah thoroughly subverted and undermined the simplistic narratives presented for the reader to swallow in Dune, part three shows the reader how Quine in his own turn is fully subverted by the environment, his sense of duty, and yes, his own belief in the desirability of progress. (“He goes right to the point and carries the reader / Into the midst of things, as if known already; / And if there’s material that he despairs of presenting / So as to shine for us, he leaves it out; / And he makes his whole poem one. What’s true, what’s invented, / Beginning, middle, and end, all fit together.”) The imagery and parallelism at times is not even subtle: for both Quine and Highet, Scholz arranges for them to at some point limp (just like Edward Teller) and have inflamed reddish faces - the implication could hardly be clearer if one of the characters had been named ’Faust’ and Lynn Hamlin renamed Margaret Hamlin.





And finally, having been ‘corrupted’ (but having succeeded in securing the future of the National Ignition Facility which runs to this day), Quine is dealt the final blow: the revelation of the leak of nuclear test data. The Technium strives toward openness and proliferation. Technology may be amoral but it has imperatives of its own. The book ends in Quine in despair and granted a moment of lucidity: seeing his entire life as a mixture of success and failure, as but a pawn of vast forces beyond his comprehension, beholding the presence of the ghostly Technium, far from exorcised.



…he stabbed the radio to silence as the dash blinked JAM and he accelerated into the next lane with the needle climbing past 80 past 90 when the CD player blinked PLAY and a falsetto whined, –gonna be just dirt in the ground –Damn it! Shut up…! banging the dash as his wheels trilled on the raised lane dividers and a horn snapped his head around to the panicked face of another drive too close as he yanked the wheel and the road slid on despite his foot wedged on the brake and the yank of the wheel back against a fishtailing swerve into a chorus of horns and gaping faces traveling sideways past him until the car came up hard against a curb and stopped. He was on the shoulder turned sideways. Through the passenger window he saw traffic rush toward him and pass behind him. Ahead of him, smoke rose from fields of stubble, and a flight of bird, scattered by some disturbance, wheeled, now black, now white, against the empty burning sky.



In the heart of that light, lucid and inevitable, all that was scattered cohered. Superbright and all its progeny stood plain before him in conception and in detail and in its component part and its deepest strategies and in its awful and enticing radiance. He saw the design and the making of that device complete, and of further devices without end, and he stood apart from them as if it mattered not at all whether the deviser was himself or whether they came into being sooner or later. Trembling he stared across the burning fields and whispered, –Stop. Stop. But the traffic rushed on.



The 3 sections form closed circle: a tight ball of historical forces, corruption, science, despair, progress, failure, and personal tragedies.





The reader expecting further satire will not be pleased by this section. They’ve missed the point: this isn’t a comedy, it’s a tragedy. And what would a tragedy be without there being a great gap between what we hoped a character might accomplish and what actually happens? The higher they can fly, the sadder a crash.



Coyote, First Angry, enemy of all law, wanderer, desert mind, outlaw, spoiler, loser, clown, glutton, lecher, thief, cheat, pragmatist, survivor, bricoleur, silver-tongued Taliesin, latterday Leonardo, usurper Sforza, adulterer Lancelot, tell, wily one, by any means, of the man with two hearts, of knowledge and desire safely hidden from each other. Did not Paracelsus command us to falsify and dissimulate so that ignorant men might not look upon our mysteries? Did not the noble da Vinci hide the meaning of his thought by the manner of his script? What man has not two masters, two minds, two hearts? Tell of the man so wounded in himself that he tore his second heart from him and cast it out, naming it the world, and swore to wound it as it had wounded him.



It’s not as simple as ‘good’ and ‘evil’. It’s not even as simple as ‘corruption’ vs ‘honesty’: look around. Progress is not inevitable. Athens declined. Florence declined. Countries fall. Knowledge can be lost (look at scurvy). Science is not a formalized process, but a spirit of honesty and inquiry, which can be aped and the wordless teaching lost (how can Japanese or Chinese researchers run hundred of experiments, apparently complying with all known standards, every single one of which concludes acupuncture works, when results elsewhere show dramatically lower success rates?). After WWII , many Americans saw the ruins of Germany and Japan, and took to heart a lesson: the darkness waits. Anti-vaxxers to our left, Creationists to our right. And that’s in America, still preeminent in science, still one of the wealthiest countries in the world - based on just that science & technology. Highet is not wrong - just one-sided.





(“If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”)





Throughout the book, we know “the work goes on”. Another of Scholz’s references, this time to alchemy’s magnum opus, the philosopher’s stone, which grants moral purification, eternal life, and the transmutation of base elements into nobler ones. (Transmutation has been realized as radioactive decay, while modern medicine would astound Bacon, and it does not seem absurd that in the next few centuries mankind will cure aging.) The double aspect pops up again, of fraud and greatness: research as practical work but also as spiritual quest. Another double aspect: alchemists were notorious scam artists & mountebanks, tricking others (particularly secular lords and governments) into funding their researches based on tricks with gold - but Isaac Newton was an alchemist, Robert Boyle based modern chemistry in part on the knowledge painfully gleaned by centuries of alchemists, and the formation of modern states was due in part to gunpowder (Chinese alchemists), and Roger Bacon, who I cannot resist supplying an apt quote about:



“Once upon a time, there was a man who was convinced that he possessed a Great Idea. Indeed, as the man thought upon the Great Idea more and more, he realized that it was not just a great idea, but the most wonderful idea ever. The Great Idea would unravel the mysteries of the universe, supersede the authority of the corrupt and error-ridden Establishment, confer nigh-magical powers upon its wielders, feed the hungry, heal the sick, make the whole world a better place, etc. etc. etc.





The man was Francis Bacon, his Great Idea was the scientific method, and he was the only crackpot in all history to claim that level of benefit to humanity and turn out to be completely right.”



It starts with Bacon…





But the traffic rushes on. And the work goes on.



Stories of Your Life and Others Ted Chiang ★★★★★ 2010 2012/12/12 What’s there to say about Chiang that all the others don’t say? He is the closest thing to a modern Jorge Luis Borges in melding high concepts with literature to create something better than either; in some respects, I’d rank his best short stories as better than Gene Wolfe’s (too often tedious & unsolved puzzleboxes). His writing is deceptively excellent: I would call him a writer’s writer, because the flat evenness of his prose may strike a reader as boring unless they have tried to write as clearly themselves and failed abysmally, at which point they begin to appreciate Chiang’s infallible choice of words and lucid prose which sinks into the mind without friction.



Stories of Your Life and Others is much superior to his novella Life Cycle of Software Objects, and contains pretty much all of his greatest short stories which I have read, except for his excellent “Exhalation”. I read most of them online, so when I had the chance to read a hardcopy of the full collection, I seized it.



1. “The Tower of Babylon”; amusing, and in describing the lives of the people living on the tower, moving in some respects. The final ending feels like an appropriate conclusion. If one had to criticize it, it would be that the Tower itself is completely unrealistic even in the Biblical cosmology of the story: as I said, the best Chiang stories unite literature and good ideas. I would rank this #5 of the 8 stories.

2. “Division by Zero”; not terribly impressive - over-wrought, and I feel I have read this story before and better. #7.

3. “Understand”; a classic in the niche genre of superintelligence, and IMO better than Vinge’s “Bookworm, Run!” and at least as good as Flowers for Algernon. Chiang, like every other author, confronts the limits of his writing ability in trying to write convincingly of a superintelligence who is by definition vastly smarter than he is (the same challenge laid down by Campbell to Vinge: “you can’t write this story, and neither can anyone else”), and so the start of the story is much stronger than the later passages. But the whole is still memorable. #4. (Probably an even better read for those who haven’t read about themes of superintelligence before.)

4. “Story of Your Life”; I had actually read this one before, and dismissed it as sentimental tripe with some weak physics or linguistic layering that I didn’t really understand. In this respect, like many of the other reviewers on this page who pan it as ‘dumb seeing-the-future’ tropes, the fault was mine: “Story of Your Life” is much better than the critics give it credit for being, simply because they entirely failed to understand the concept despite quite a lot of explanation from Chiang. Fortunately, just a few weeks ago I happened to read some material on the Lagrangian interpretations of physics and combined with knowing in advance the ending, I was able to appreciate the story much better this time. Thinking about it, I realized it does something unusual in providing another angle, a psychological angle, to timeless interpretations of physics and block universes and backpropagation in neural networks and I even connected it to Zen, which makes them all a little easier to understand for me. I didn’t get it the first time, but I’m glad I eventually reread it and ‘got’ it. I would rank this #3 of the 8 stories. #3. This story is what I believe was the first adaptation of any of Chiang’s stories, despite being overrated like “Life Cycle of Software Objects”, getting a movie in 2016. Since there seems to be some confusion over what exactly Chiang is trying to say with this one, I’ve expanded out my thoughts on what is actually going on in an essay: https://www.gwern.net/Story-Of-Your-Life

The movie, however, avoids this almost entirely. When I heard there was going to be a movie, I said to myself, “I bet it’ll miss the entire point and make it about time travel or something”. It does. Avoiding the physics entirely (!) the screenwriter takes the offhand mention of Sapir-Whorf and interprets the protagonist as getting actual time-travel powers; based on his interview making no mention of why & when he decided to drastically simplify, I suspect he doesn’t even realize how badly he failed to understand it. The scriptwriter apparently took the only bits he understood, a mention of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (which is mostly a hypothesis, as decades of searching have turned up less than impressive empirical results like slightly easier perception of named colors and better geographic location knowledge when grammar encodes direction - certainly nothing like the grand expectations in the 1960s that led to such linguistic neologistic monstrosities as ‘herstory’ or ‘womyn’). With the meaning of the story excised, he has to come up with a regular plot, and does this by giving the aliens a - dare I say - more human motivation in trying to somehow save themselves by uplifting humans. This is itself a betrayal of part of Chiang’s ethos: in many of his stories, Chiang is depicting the unknown and the unknowable and human confrontation with it. The heat-death of the universe in “Exhalation”, post-human intelligence in “Understand”, post-human knowledge & science in “The Evolution of Human Science”, the nature of God and morality and the implications of divine-command theory in “Hell is the Absence of God”, what lies beyond the sky or the circular universe in “The Tower of Babylon”, and… alien cognition and ways of viewing the universe in “Story of Your Life”. What’s left is mostly a glossy action movie heavy on military hardware (presumably this is one of those Hollywood productions where the US military provides lots of equipment & personnel in exchange for a positive depiction as honest & competent & not trigger-happy) about the need for a world government, with the physics theme turned into just a Sapir-Whorf superpower though this makes no sense in-universe (if the protagonist can create stable time-loops and steal information from the future, why doesn’t she steal a cure? Or why not see an alternate future where her child doesn’t get sick, or an entirely different husband and healthy child she could also love? Or how is Heptapodese not supposed to lead to incredible chaos as people learn it and start monkeying with the future? Why do the aliens need any assistance from the humans in the first place, whether to learn their language or to save themselves?) The special-effects depiction of Heptapod is some nifty cloud effects, but the heptapods themselves are not terribly compelling aliens. As a rendering of Chiang’s vision, I would have to give it an F because it is frustratingly almost the opposite of what he meant, and as a generic Hollywood SF movie I would give it a B. I would doubtless have enjoyed it more if I had never read the story.

5. “The Evolution of Human Science”; short, dubious. Not Chiang’s best work, on either dimension. #8.

6. “Seventy-Two Letters”; simply fantastic. The setting is wonderful, the problem great, the ideas even better, and the solution & meaning better still. I can’t say it’s incredibly deep, but it’s a look at a road not taken, and a reminder of how confusing genetics was and how many strange ideas were proposed before we reached anything like the current Mendel-Fisher particulate-inheritance paradigm. #2.

7. “Hell Is the Absence of God”; as an atheist who keeps coming back to the Wisdom Books & the Book of Job particularly (KJV translation, of course), this story came as a gut punch. The writing is Chiang at his most Chiang-y, the world interesting and provocative (Chiang takes the Bible ‘literally but not seriously’, one might say), and the ending simply unspeakable. But don’t take my word for it, ‘decide for yourself’, as the fallen angels say. This story enriches reading the Book of Job for me, and I think ultimately hammers in for me the unacceptability of divine command ethics and makes me more atheistic. #1. Pairs well with Scott Alexander’s more freewheeling Unsong.

8. “Liking What You See: A Documentary”; interesting ideas, but something about the dialogues and characters seem off. It just jars me. I think somewhere Chiang also notes his dissatisfaction with the writing of this one. #6.

Worm (Parahumans, #1) Wildbow ★★★★★ 2013 2014/08/13 Worm (Table of Contents/official summary/TvTropes/Reddit/post-interview) is addictive superhero SF posing as fantasy; it is long, of consistently high quality, and features a huge amount of imaginative powers with equally imaginative applications & combos (the protagonist usage of bugs, as impressive as it is, is only one of many possible examples, although I particularly like the Regent & Shadow Stalker incident as an example of social-engineering/hacking); the setting excellently rationalizes the standard superheroes vs supervillains setup (which as often observed, makes little sense prima facie). The series opens in the smallest possible setting, the geeky introverted protagonist Taylor being bullied in school, steps logically towards a life of crime as a supervillain while trying to do the right thing (and being manipulated by multiple parties, some prescient) and slowly expands to multiversal scope with an appropriately epic & bittersweet ending. (Reminds me of Watchmen.) Or to borrow from the official summary:



An introverted teenage girl with an unconventional superpower, Taylor goes out in costume to find escape from a deeply unhappy and frustrated civilian life. Her first attempt at taking down a supervillain sees her mistaken for one, thrusting her into the midst of the local ‘cape’ scene’s politics, unwritten rules, and ambiguous morals. As she risks life and limb, Taylor faces the dilemma of having to do the wrong things for the right reasons…Readers should be cautioned that Worm is fairly dark as fiction goes, and it gets far darker as the story progresses. Morality isn’t black and white, Taylor and her acquaintances aren’t invincible, the heroes aren’t winning the war between right and wrong, and superpowers haven’t necessarily affected society for the better. Just the opposite on every count, really. Even on a more fundamental level, Taylor’s day to day life is unhappy, with her clinging to the end of her rope from the story’s outset. The denizens of the Wormverse (as readers have termed it) don’t pull punches, and I try to avoid doing so myself, as a writer. There’s graphic language, descriptions of violence and sex does happen (albeit offscreen).



I recommend reading single arcs at a time: calling the whole thing ‘Worm’ is a bit of a misnomer, it’d make much more sense to group a few arcs and call them individual novels in the ‘Worm Saga’ or something. Length-wise, it’s upwards of a million words, and according to my arbtt logs (using the rule ‘ current window $title =~ [/.* Worm - Iceweasel/] ==> tag Worm ’), took me 37 hours & 42 minutes over 5 days to read.



The work is not perfect. The opening is perhaps too slow: the first fight with Lung, which hooked me, took a while to happen as it only really starts in ch4. In the middle, I suspect there was perhaps too much material devoted to the Slaughterhouse Nine arc and not enough to later plot arcs like Taylor joining the heroes or dealing with later Endbringers. Further, there’s so many characters that a binge read is a good idea, but during a binge, the fights can blur together and become exhausting, suggesting Worm may spend too much time on that. Some good parts, like characters having reasons to be bad, are taken to an extreme where it seems like every character, no matter how mundane, must have a backstory explaining how their environment/society made them evil (even for characters like Emma where such a cause is unnecessary). But the flaws are relatively small and hopefully will be addressed in the editing process. I look forward to reading Wildbow’s Pact when it finished, and I think I’ll check out some of the fanfics like Cenotaph.



I read Worm after it was finished and I continued to see positive reviews of it, such as Eliezer Yudkowsky:



…I commend to you…the just-completed story Worm, which is roughly 1.75 million words in 30 volumes. The characters in Worm use their powers so intelligently I didn’t even notice until something like the 10th volume that the alleged geniuses were behaving like actual geniuses and that the flying bricks who would be the primary protagonists and villains of lesser tales were properly playing second fiddle to characters with cognitive, informational, or probability-based powers…Doing this so smoothly that I don’t even notice because my brain considers the resulting world to be ‘normal’ really ought to deserve some kind of epic bonus points….There are stories which are better than Worm, and stories which were written faster than Worm, but I don’t know of any epic which was ever written faster and better than Worm.



Other reviews include Joshua Blaine:



…a self consistent and expansive Super-hero universe, and with a ton of unique and powerful abilities, I’ve really been enjoying it. The story is Worm, and It’s easily one of my favorite web stories in awhile, and very dark (especially as the story progresses further).



iDante:



I’ve been reading this awesome web serial called Worm. Highly recommend if you want some action and suspense. There’s a bit of rationality business in there as well, but it’s spaced out and the story is long. I see it’s been recommended previously on here as well.



Vaniver:



Caveat: Worm is really dark. The characters are clever, the protagonist makes the most out of a superpower that seems mediocre at first glance, and there are enough twists and turns that I would look at the clock and realize that I’d been reading for six hours. (Worm is really long, so if you’re the sort of person who has to keep reading fiction be warned that it will eat a week or two.) But, despite those positives, terrible things happen to everyone always. I found it similar to Game of Thrones in that it was engaging but depressing, and unlike GoT where new characters are introduced, dance about, and then die, in Worm there’s a clear protagonist who, as far as I can tell, always wins eventually. I also found the superhero fight sequences less engaging as time went on - but they can be skimmed with little loss.



and Ritalin:



Indeed. Although, frankly, what I’ve seen of Worm so far seems to designate it as very similar to my idea of Hell; every accomplishment is either made moot or cost something irreplaceable and possibly of superior value, every victory is short-lived, every mistake is paid for dearly. Every situation is desperate, every problem urgent. By the time a conflict reaches its resolution, another is at its peak, and two more are right around the corner. Perhaps it’s even worse; hardship, instead of building character, corrupts it. For the characters, it must be like a nightmare they can’t wake up from.

Urne Burial Thomas Browne ★★★★★ 2005 2012/07/14 I first heard of Browne in Borges - as so often - in the ending of “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” where the narrator is attempting to translate it into Spanish. Borges is always interested in translation (see for example his fantastic essay on translating the 1001 Nights) and I made a note to look up this work which presented such challenges for rendering into Spanish. (The actual edition I used was James Eason’s online edition.)



Urn Burial is hugely archaic, but also amazing. I am not sure where I have last seen any literary pyrotechnics to match Browne in English. David Foster Wallace sometimes approaches him, but beyond that I draw blanks. The book defies any simple summary as many passages are cryptic tangles and Browne says many things. So I will not try, and simply present some passages that struck me:



“He that lay in a golden Urne eminently above the Earth, was not likely to finde the quiet of these bones. Many of these Urnes were broke by a vulgar discoverer in hope of inclosed treasure. The ashes of Marcellus were lost above ground, upon the like account. Where profit hath prompted, no age hath wanted such miners. For which the most barbarous Expilators found the most civill Rhetorick. Gold once out of the earth is no more due unto it; What was unreasonably committed to the ground is reasonably resumed from it: Let Monuments and rich Fabricks, not Riches adorn mens ashes. The commerce of the living is not to be transferred unto the dead: It is not injustice to take that which none complains to lose, and no man is wronged where no man is possessor.”



“If the nearnesse of our last necessity, brought a nearer conformity unto it, there were a happinesse in hoary hairs, and no calamity in half senses. But the long habit of living indisposeth us for dying; When Avarice makes us the sport of death; When even David grew politickly cruell; and Solomon could hardly be said to be the wisest of men. But many are too early old, and before the date of age. Adversity stretcheth our dayes, misery makes Alcmenas nights, and time hath no wings unto it. But the most tedious being is that which can unwish it self, content to be nothing, or never to have been, which was beyond the male-content of Job, who cursed not the day of his life, but his Nativity; Content to have so farre been, as to have a title to future being; Although he had lived here but in an hidden state of life, and as it were an abortion.”



“Nature hath furnished one part of the Earth, and man another. The treasures of time lie high, in Urnes, Coynes, and Monuments, scarce below the roots of some vegetables. Time hath endlesse rarities, and shows of all varieties; which reveals old things in heaven, makes new discoveries in earth, and even earth it self a discovery. That great Antiquity America lay buried for a thousand years; and a large part of the earth is still in the Urne unto us.”



“Some bones make best Skeletons, some bodies quick and speediest ashes: Who would expect a quick flame from Hydropicall Heraclitus? The poysoned Souldier when his Belly brake, put out two pyres in Plutarch. But in the plague of Athens, one private pyre served two or three Intruders; and the Saracens burnt in large heaps, by the King of Castile, shewed how little Fuell sufficeth. Though the Funerall pyre of Patroclus took up an hundred foot, a peece of an old boat burnt Pompey; And if the burthen of Isaac were sufficient for an holocaust, a man may carry his owne pyre.”



“The long habit of living indisposeth us for dying.”



“To be content that times to come should only know there was such a man, not caring whether they knew more of him, was a frigid ambition in Cardan: disparaging his horoscopal inclination and judgement of himself, who cares to subsist like Hippocrates Patients, or Achilles horses in Homer, under naked nominations, without deserts and noble acts, which are the balsame of our memories, the Entelecchia and soul of our subsistences. To be namelesse in worthy deeds exceeds an infamous history. The Canaanitish woman lives more happily without a name, then Herodias with one. And who had not rather have been the good theef, then Pilate?

But the iniquity of oblivion blindely scattereth her poppy, and deals with the memory of men without distinction to merit of perpetuity. Who can but pity the founder of the Pyramids? Herostratus lives that burnt the Temple of Diana, he is almost lost that built it; Time hath spared the Epitaph of Adrians horse, confounded that of himself. In vain we compute our felicities by the advantage of our good names, since bad have equall durations; and Thersites is like to live as long as Agamenon, [without the favour of the everlasting Register:] Who knows whether the best of men be known? or whether there be not more remarkable persons forgot, then any that stand remembred in the known account of time? without the favour of the everlasting Register the first man had been as unknown as the last, and Methuselahs long life had been his only Chronicle.”



“What Song the Syrens sang, or what name Achilles assumed when he hid himself among women, though puzling Questions are not beyond all conjecture. What time the persons of these Ossuaries entred the famous Nations of the dead, and slept with Princes and Counsellours, might admit a wide resolution. But who were the proprietaries of these bones, or what bodies these ashes made up, were a question above Antiquarism. Not to be resolved by man, nor easily perhaps by spirits, except we consult the Provinciall Guardians, or tutellary Observators. Had they made as good provision for their names, as they have done for their Reliques, they had not so grosly erred in the art of perpetuation. But to subsist in bones, and be but Pyramidally extant, is a fallacy in duration. Vain ashes, which in the oblivion of names, persons, times, and sexes, have found unto themselves, a fruitlesse continuation, and only arise unto late posterity, as Emblemes of mortall vanities; Antidotes against pride, vain-glory, and madding vices. Pagan vain-glories which thought the world might last for ever, had encouragement for ambition, and finding no Atropos unto the immortality of their Names, were never dampt with the necessity of oblivion. Even old ambitions had the advantage of ours, in the attempts of their vain-glories, who acting early, and before the probable Meridian of time, have by this time found great accomplishment of their designes, whereby the ancient Heroes have already out-lasted their Monuments, and Mechanicall preservations. But in this latter Scene of time we cannot expect such Mummies unto our memories, when ambition may fear the Prophecy of Elias, and Charles the fifth can never hope to live within two Methusela’s of Hector.”

The Discovery of France: A Historical Geography from the Revolution to the First World War Graham Robb ★★★★★ 2007 2013/10/24 Discovery of France charts the transition of the region covered by modern France into the unified cultural/political/geographic entity of today. This is incredibly interesting because from our perspective, we have forgotten (if we ever knew) what went into the process of taking the thousands of villages and regions differing in all sorts of ways, and crushing them into the relatively homogeneous high-tech culture of today - unifying languages, political systems, forms of transportation, religion, and so on. A theme throughout is Scott’s legibility (Seeing Like A State); Robb gives all sorts of examples demonstrating local knowledge, specialized information, and resistance to outsiders.

Often people dramatically underestimate this. It’s easy to assume that the vast nation-states like China or America just sort of came into existence naturally, but this overlooks the amount of effort Chinese/American governments/organizations have put into unification, in aspects ranging from stamping out as many languages and other cultures as possible to simplifying existing languages (particularly striking in China) to enforcing standardized units & measures (encouraging cash crops is a good way) to standardized national educational curriculum inculcating patriotism and common beliefs. You may not think that they are ‘unified’, but they are far more unified than they used to be - contrast the original 13 American colonies to how large America is now, or look at historical maps of Han China with the current boundaries, and think about all the cultural, linguistic, political, and economic differences that used to exist, and how many of, say, the languages are now extinct. (To say nothing of the peoples… Tibet and the American Indians come to mind as examples unique only for the documentation and notice taken of their particular instance.) The process of homogenization and simplification happens in many large countries, for easily-understood reasons such as the convenience of the state. Besides Robb & Scott, some views of this process can be found in Fukuyama’s The Origins of Political Order for China. (You could also get a bit of the American process out of Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States by looking at various incidents in the right way, but that’s too polemical & focused on other topics for me to really recommend.)

This may sound like a very grand theme, but Robb is able to give so many fascinating examples that one forgets the underlying demonstration and just basks in the knowledge of how the past is a very foreign country. (As I mention in my review of The Dark Side of the Enlightenment: Wizards, Alchemists, and Spiritual Seekers in the Age of Reason, a sense of distance and alienation is one of the things I prize most in historical works - while there is continuity, continuity is easy to find and it is beyond easy to portray the past as proceeding Whiggishly and comprehensibly into the present, obscuring all the ways in which we are profoundly alien from the past.)

Where do I start… The extraordinary fact that until the 20th century, French was only a plurality language in France? The stiltwalking shepherds? The horrifying bits about drunken dying babies being carted to Paris by the ‘angel-makers’? The packs of smuggler dogs who smuggled goods in and out of France for their human masters? (Or the dog-powered factories?) The forgotten persecution of the cagot caste? The Parisian who sold maggots to fisherman, which he raised in his closet on a pile of cat & dog roadkill collected from the streets? The wars between rival villages? The commuting peasants who thought nothing of a 50 mile walk? The strange twists of fate that lead regions to specialize in particular wares? The villages of cretins or families who regard a cretinous child as a gift from god? The mapping of the hidden communication networks that spread rumor at the speed of a horse? The corvée system of road-building, so inefficient at points that transporting the materials to build 1 more meter of a road could destroy more than 1 meter of that same road? All of this and much more is to be found in Robb’s dizzying tour of France, past and present, a tour I found as entertaining as educational.

The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy Adam Tooze ★★★★★ 2007 2014/05/07 A fascinating account of the economic transformation of Germany under the Nazis, the repression & distortion of the German economy, the strategic confusion & ignorance of their best options revealed by shifting armament priorities (such as the underemphasis on tanks & overemphasis on surface ships), the difficulties imposed by exchange rates, how often Germany teetered on the brink of disaster, and how Hitler’s constant focus on the danger of the American juggernaut guided his grand strategy; Nazi Germany’s militarization based on debt induced competing arms races / instability an the country quickly (and only temporarily) became the deadliest shark in the European waters, which had to desperately keep swimming forward & taking insane gambles if it was not to choke to death on its own accumulated wastes & bad decisions, in the hopes that it could eat all its enemies before they woke up & ate it, and while the shark got a reprieve in Austria and then the freak victory in France, it eventually hit a wall in Russia and died after thrashing around for a while.



Tooze’s account of WWII explains many otherwise baffling points for me, such as the focus on futuristic weapons or why Nazi Germany sought an alliance with Japan even at the cost of declaring war on the USA & striking FDR’s shackles, why it invaded the USSR with less than an ultimate effort, and the economic consequences of its conquests (predictable to anyone who’s read Tainter’s The Collapse of Complex Societies). Particularly surprising is Tooze’s description of how impoverished Germany was in comparison to rival countries (despite the gleaming technology and Blitzkrieg we associate with Nazi Germany, and the industrial conglomerates like IG Farben with Imperial Germany, most of Germany was still rural & unproductive, and the country abjectly dependent on imports to maintain its agriculture; Tooze includes a very telling anecdote: Ford Motors, when considering a plant in Germany, found that to give its blue-collar American workers their accustomed lifestyle would require expenses 4x that of normal blue-collar German workers; and horses will feature repeatedly throughout). Tooze also does a good job delineating how the Holocaust both exacerbated and helped with the severe labor & resource problems Nazi Germany began facing, and covers how it was a logical outcome of earlier policies: emigration failed because the German balance of payments did not allow for the Jews to leave with anything like their actual wealth, and unsurprisingly many Jews were not so fearful as to emigrate penniless, and starvation in camps was not far from the earlier Wehrmacht plan to make the conquest of the Ukraine pay by simply starving to death 30 million Slavs to free up food harvests. Indeed, given all the constraints and necessary imports in the 1930s and 1940s, one really has to wonder how contemporary Germany can be so wealthy and whether it really is due to labor reforms or thanks to the Euro…



One flaw is that Tooze freely goes from macro to micro, from the overall economy to very small subindustries or benchmarks, and it’s easy to get lost. And while the book covers the international finance in enough detail to understand it (and things like why Schacht was the ‘dark wizard of international finance’), I don’t think he does as good a job as Lords of Finance, which should probably be read before Wages of Destruction so one understands the international gold standard, and the French and British actions in the inter-war period.

Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World Liaquat Ahamed ★★★★★ 2009 2012/09/16 I enjoyed this tremendously for revealing a new world to me where I thought I already knew the lay of the land. Throughout were revelations to me - just how ruinous WWI was, how reparations kept echoing and damaging Germany, how exactly the hyperinflation started (it was only partly the Versailles payments but more the social programs?), how America aggravated the issue (the Coolidge quote and the American tourists certainly never appeared in my history textbooks…), how late the stock bubble was and the details of the endless succession of crises that rocked Europe. It’s also interesting to understand why Keynes had such a grip on economics until recently: he predicted repeatedly what would happen, and it’s hard not to sympathize a great deal with him.



As far as criticism goes, I can agree with some of the other reviewers: Ahamed sometimes goes overboard with the narration, and skimps on the details one might want. He provides no convenient graphical network of how factors affect each other in a gold economy, so one is left constantly being surprised by connections, and the rare graph is not very helpful - for example, he provides a time graph of the big economies’ rises and falls in growths, and remarks that their recoveries in the Great Depression… and nowhere on the graph marks for each country the year in which they left gold! Well, that graph wasn’t very informative or helpful - Tufte would not be pleased.



Applying it to modern times is a little harder, although the ironies are many (particularly the Germans being hardasses on debt now, when they seemed to understand not all debts could be paid after WWI… -_-). One thing that struck me was how the nationalist demonstrations & protests in Germany reminded me of what I hear in China these days - which has a somewhat similar per capita GDP as those nations and is in a similar period of industrial growth, and indeed, is the young turk of Germany to the old tired island-nation England of Japan, with South Korea as a nervous smaller neighbor (France?). And China is quite aggressive lately. Before WWI, it was rightly pointed out that such a war between such networked nations as France/Germany/England would lead to ruin; and right now, one could point out a similar thing with China/SK/Japan/USA. But nevertheless, before WWI, they thought they could have a short victorious war against an encircling enemy; does China think it can have a short victorious war against their encircling enemy, the USA-coordinate nations? I don’t think it does, but I do think people underestimate the risk of war in East Asia. (Of course it could never happen; just like WWI could never happen.)

Bias in Mental Testing Arthur R. Jensen ★★★★★ 1980 2015/10/22 (410k words / 840 pages; online edition; WP) One of the classics in the field, Jensen sets out to explain almost everything, it seems, in psychometrics, from the core concept of error-prone measurements and extracting factors to the various tests available, their correlates, concrete justifications for why the normal distribution is more than an assumption of convenience (a number of the points were new to me), exhaustive coverage of the core topic of various kinds of bias and evidence against them, to culture-fair tests, and finally how mental testing is best employed. (There is also some discussion of behavioral genetics and what the genetic architecture of intelligence might be, but that’s a minor topic and he gives more attention to other things like reaction-time research.)



Discussion of the topics straddles that fine line between too informal and too formal, as Jensen is careful to introduce and explain each concept as he goes and includes excellent summaries at the end of each chapter to the point where this would make a good textbook and it is so readable that I think even new students to statistics could understand almost everything in the book (at least, as long as they paid attention and occasionally checked back to the glossary to be reminded of which of the many formulas is relevant to a particular point; there is a ton of content and skimming will not work).



Overall, my impression is extremely positive. I’m especially impressed that despite now being 35+ years old (and hence based on research from before then), there’s hardly anything substantive I can object to. The statistical principles are largely the same, the black-white gap has hardly budged, the lack of bias remains accepted, etc. I saw no large mistakes or content that has been totally obsoleted, and in some areas one would have to say Jensen is being constantly vindicated by the latest research - in particular, in arguing for the genetics of people of non-retarded intelligence being largely uniform over the intelligence range and governed by a large number of additive alleles (yielding an objective normal distribution), none of it needs any correction. Afterwards I read a recent review, “Bias in mental testing since Bias in Mental Testing”, Brown et al 1999, comes to the same conclusion.

The Remains of the Day Kazuo Ishiguro ★★★★★ 2005 2012/07/21 Of Ishiguro’s novels, this is the most elegant, most restrained, and most English. The prose is so smooth that like Gene Wolfe’s, it becomes invisible, and you pass through it to the slow silent sorrow of the protagonist. Ishiguro makes the tragedy clear enough, shows us the heart of the story, but without ever being gauche.



In July 2012, I re-read it and for good measure, I watched the movie too. (The movie, IMO, was pretty good with excellent casting, if unfortunately often blunter than the novel and the ending especially so.)



What struck me this time through was the ending of the novel: the butler has come to realize that his life has been suboptimal and less joyful than it could have been because he shunned Miss Kenton and denied his emotions out of a misguided sense of professionalism. But instead of the typical Hollywood ending where he woos Miss Kenton or quits his job etc, he realizes that it really is too late: his and Miss Kenton’s day is almost over, and the important thing to do is make the most of ‘the remains of the day’, which for him is returning to his butlering job but being less rigid and more human.



It is, in other words, a beautiful tale of not honoring sunk costs or pursuing lost opportunities.

The Book of Lord Shang - A Classic of the Chinese School of Law Shang Yang ★★★★★ 2011 2008/01/01 The Book of Lord Shang was very hard for me to read: there is something sublime about it, in the old sense of “terrifying” - the policies and reasoning laid out are a systematic crushing of anything that might oppose the State and its goals. It feels inhuman, mechanical, and all the more so when you know that these sort of policies were how the Qin crushed all their opposition - including those states espousing the other Hundred Schools of Thought like Mohism & Confucianism - and that the 20th century affords further examples of how these policies proved themselves in practice (unlike the former Schools).



It’s no wonder that there are so many negative reviews on the other copies here at Goodreads: you might as well ask your normal liberal Western to drink rat poison as read The Book of Lord Shang & try to fairly evaluate it. Even if they’ve read their share of Chinese classics & philosophy, they wouldn’t want to understand it, just like modern readers don’t want to understand the Unabomber’s philosophy.



(The version I read was an ebook version of Duyvlord.)

The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution Francis Fukuyama ★★★★★ 2011 2012/01/01 It is, overall, an excellent book and one of the better ones on grand history I’ve read†… but Fukuyama does not have a very transparent prose style, and makes no concessions to those who don’t have a good grasp on global history and especially those who don’t know their Chinese history well (eg. if you can’t put the Qing, Han, Qin, and Shang dynasty in order, you aren’t going to enjoy at all the large amounts of material he rightfully devotes to Chinese politics). And it’s seriously big, no kidding. This is no fluffy Guns, Germs, and Steel walk through the park!



† for example, I found some sections very useful for structuring my thinking on the evolution of ethics and regard for ancestors.

The Histories Herodotus ★★★★★ 2003 Decided to finally read Herodotus after I read Gene Wolfe’s historical fantasy novel Solder of Arete which draws heavily on him, and then when I had to track down a quote on LessWrong.com to the exact Herodotus passage. Overall, far more interesting than I had expected. Surprisingly funny or interesting anecdotes. There is a superfusion of gods and oracles, which was curious - the oracles truly were treacherous! The Persian kings come off as remarkably capricious and destructive, even the good ones. And Herodotus has a strange capacity to skeptically reason well & sensibly and then be completely superstitious in the next passage. Having read about these ancient events many times, I found half the value was just seeing a thorough account from a single Greek’s perspective.

Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman James Gleick ★★★★★ 1993 2014/04/08 A solid biography, though I don’t have anything in particular to say about it. It throws in all the classic anecdotes and quotes you expect (which are more than worth their weight in gold - certainly, the price of admission) doesn’t try to whitewash Feynman despite the temptation to hero-worship, and includes some critical examination, does at least try to explain all the physics which earned Feynman his prestige, etc. It’s a well-regarded widely-read biography on an excellent subject which I have nothing to say against (aside from Gleick unfortunately repeating Feynman’s story about his IQ without explaining the many reasons why this doesn’t mean what people are forever taking it to mean).

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined Steven Pinker ★★★★★ 2011 This was really really good, as in, maybe the best book I’ve read that year. Time and again, I was shocked to find subjects treated of keen interest to me, or which read like Pinker had taken some of my essays but done them way better (on terrorism, on the expanding circle, etc.); even so, I was surprised to learn new things (resource problems don’t correlate well with violence?).



I initially thought I might excerpt some parts of it for an essay or article, but as the quotes kept piling up, I realized that it was hopeless. Reading reviews or discussions of it is not enough; Pinker just covers too much and rebuts too many possible criticisms. It’s very long, as a result, but absorbing.

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet David Mitchell ★★★★★ 2010 Finally got around to reading it. It was surprisingly unliterary and unpostmodern for Mitchell, but in exchange, he nailed the historical details and gave us an adventure which subverted many of the usual tropes - the raid on the nunnery was just a trap, the hero doesn’t get the girl, his chief heroism was standing there to be shot at, and the man who takes down the big baddie is someone we thought to be entirely in the baddie’s pocket. The supernatural aspects are implied to be genuine, but it’s never resolved, which I am grateful for. It would ruin the feel.

Collapse of Complex Societies Joseph A. Tainter ★★★★★ 1990 Very good: much better than Jared Diamond’s Collapse, and much more convincing than Spengler or Toynbee.

It was also deeply disturbing - the Ik amazed me in chapter 1, and the statistics in chapter 4 were extremely dismal and tie in far too well to Cowen’s The Great Stagnation and Murray’s Human Accomplishment. There are a great many datapoints suggesting that diminishing marginal returns to modern tech/science began sometime in the late 1800s/early 1900s…

Star Maker Olaf Stapledon ★★★★★ 1999 Star Maker is one of the very few SF books that I’d place up there with Blindsight and a few others in depicting truly alien aliens; and he doesn’t do it once but repeatedly throughout the book. It’s really impressive how Stapledon just casually scatters around handfuls of jewels that lesser authors might belabor singly throughout an entire book.

Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea Barbara Demick ★★★★★ 2009 Highly recommended. Probably the second best book I’ve read about North Korea, after B.R. Myer’s The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves and Why It Matters.

Schismatrix Plus Bruce Sterling ★★★★★ 1996 2010/11/13 Quite remarkable. One of the best solar system colonization universes with a baroque and cyberpunk-inflected computer/biology split.

The Cambist and Lord Iron: A Fairy Tale of Economics Daniel Abraham ★★★★★ 2007

Genetics and Analysis of Quantitative Traits Michael Lynch ★★★★★ 1998

Unforgotten Dreams: Poems by the Zen Monk Shotetsu Steven D. Carter ★★★★★ 1996 2017/10/05

The Complete Winnie the Pooh A.A. Milne ★★★★★ 1992

Latro in the Mist Gene Wolfe ★★★★★ 2003

Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death and Brain Surgery Henry Marsh ★★★★★ 2014 2015/11/02

Diaspora Greg Egan ★★★★★ 2000 2014/01/23

The Sign of the Seahorse Graeme Base ★★★★★ 1998 1999/01/01

The Rediscovery of Man: The Complete Short Science Fiction of Cordwainer Smith Cordwainer Smith ★★★★★ 1993

The Collected Songs Of Cold Mountain Hanshan ★★★★★ 1983

The Ring of the Nibelung Richard Wagner ★★★★★ 1977 2006/01/01

100 Suns Michael Light ★★★★★ 2003

Raptor Red Robert T. Bakker ★★★★★ 1996

City of Golden Shadow (Otherland, #1) Tad Williams ★★★★★ 1998

The Jewish War Flavius Josephus ★★★★★ 1981

Great Mambo Chicken And The Transhuman Condition: Science Slightly Over The Edge Ed Regis ★★★★★ 1991

Cicero’s Treatise on the Nature of the Gods Charles Duke Yonge ★★★★★ 2010

Codex Seraphinianus. Ein Orbis Pictus des Universums der Phantasie. Luigi Serafini ★★★★★ 1983

The Best of Little Nemo in Slumberland Winsor McCay ★★★★★ 1997

Code: Version 2.0 Lawrence Lessig ★★★★★ 2006

The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade Alfred W. McCoy ★★★★★ 2003

A Presocratics Reader Patricia Curd ★★★★★ 1996

The Secret History of Star Wars Michael Kaminski ★★★★★ 2008

The Golden Age (Golden Age #1) John C. Wright ★★★★★ 2003

The Napoleon of Notting Hill G.K. Chesterton ★★★★★ 2008

The Dhammapada Anonymous ★★★★★ 1995

Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings Jorge Luis Borges ★★★★★ 1964

The Protracted Game: A Wei-Ch’i Interpretation of Maoist Revolutionary Strategy Scott Boorman ★★★★★ 1971

The Westing Game Ellen Raskin ★★★★★ 2004

Matilda Roald Dahl ★★★★★ 1998

Strega Nona Tomie dePaola ★★★★★ 1975

The Velveteen Rabbit Margery Williams Bianco ★★★★★ 1990

The Very Hungry Caterpillar Eric Carle ★★★★★ 1992

The Tale of Peter Rabbit Beatrix Potter ★★★★★ 2002

The Book of Imaginary Beings Jorge Luis Borges ★★★★★ 2006

Snow Crash Neal Stephenson ★★★★★ 2000

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead Tom Stoppard ★★★★★ 1994

Zen Flesh, Zen Bones Paul Reps ★★★★★ 1971

The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering Frederick P. Brooks Jr. ★★★★★ 1995

Compact Oxford English Dictionary Oxford University Press ★★★★★ 2008

The Complete Calvin and Hobbes Bill Watterson ★★★★★ 2005

Principles of Forecasting: A Handbook for Researchers and Practitioners Jon Scott Armstrong ★★★★★ 2002

Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained John Milton ★★★★★ 1968

The Poetic Edda Unknown ★★★★★ 1990

Travelers of a Hundred Ages: The Japanese as Revealed Through 1,000 Years of Diaries Donald Keene ★★★★★ 1999

One Hundred Famous Views of Edo Hiroshige Utagawa ★★★★★ 2000

Ficciones Jorge Luis Borges ★★★★★ 1994

Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed James C. Scott ★★★★★ 1998

Is There Anything Good about Men?: How Cultures Flourish by Exploiting Men Roy F. Baumeister ★★★★★ 2010

Treasure Island Robert Louis Stevenson ★★★★★ 2001

What Is Life? with Mind and Matter and Autobiographical Sketches Erwin Schrödinger ★★★★★ 1992

Invisible Cities Italo Calvino ★★★★★ 1974

Mark Lombardi: Global Networks Mark Lombardi ★★★★★ 2003

Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength Roy F. Baumeister ★★★★★ 2011

Gormenghast (Gormenghast, #2) Mervyn Peake ★★★★★ 1998

Beowulf Unknown ★★★★★ 2001

Little, Big John Crowley ★★★★★ 2006

A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World Gregory Clark ★★★★★ 2007

The Confessions of Aleister Crowley: An Autohagiography Aleister Crowley ★★★★★ 1989

A Colder War Charles Stross ★★★★★ 2005

Against the Day Thomas Pynchon ★★★★★ 2006

Gravity’s Rainbow Thomas Pynchon ★★★★★ 2006

James and the Giant Peach Roald Dahl ★★★★★ 2002

Creative Destruction: How Globalization Is Changing the World’s Cultures Tyler Cowen ★★★★★ 2004

The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind Julian Jaynes ★★★★★ 2000

Rationality and the Reflective Mind Keith E. Stanovich ★★★★★ 2010

Number9Dream David Mitchell ★★★★★ 2003

The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom? David Brin ★★★★★ 1999

The Consolation of Philosophy Boethius ★★★★★ 1999

The Stars My Destination Alfred Bester ★★★★★ 1996

Armor John Steakley ★★★★★ 1984

The Gunslinger Stephen King ★★★★★ 2003

Watchmen Alan Moore ★★★★★ 2005

Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art Scott McCloud ★★★★★ 1993

Hell is the Absence of God Ted Chiang ★★★★★ 2009

Strategy B.H. Liddell Hart ★★★★★ 1991

The Grand Strategy of the Byzantine Empire Edward N. Luttwak ★★★★★ 2009

Alice in Wonderland Jane Carruth ★★★★★ 2004

1984 George Orwell ★★★★★ 1950

Heart of Darkness Joseph Conrad ★★★★★ 2003

Meditations Marcus Aurelius ★★★★★ 2006

Dreamtigers Jorge Luis Borges ★★★★★ 1985

Selected Non-Fictions Jorge Luis Borges ★★★★★ 2000

The Library of Babel Jorge Luis Borges ★★★★★ 2000

Collected Fictions Jorge Luis Borges ★★★★★ 1999

Accelerando Charles Stross ★★★★★ 2006

Dune Messiah (Dune Chronicles #2) Frank Herbert ★★★★★ 1987

The Leopard Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa ★★★★★ 2007

The Fall of Hyperion (Hyperion Cantos #2) Dan Simmons ★★★★★ 1995

Foucault’s Pendulum Umberto Eco ★★★★★ 2007

The Cyberiad Stanisław Lem ★★★★★ 2002

The Martian Chronicles Ray Bradbury ★★★★★ 1984

The Selfish Gene Richard Dawkins ★★★★★ 2006

Good and Real: Demystifying Paradoxes from Physics to Ethics Gary L. Drescher ★★★★★ 2006

The Player of Games (Culture, #2) Iain M. Banks ★★★★★ 1997

The Devil Is Dead R.A. Lafferty ★★★★★ 1999

Dangerous Visions Harlan Ellison ★★★★★ 2002

Fourth Mansions R.A. Lafferty ★★★★★ 1969

Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions Edwin A. Abbott ★★★★★ 1992

A Study in Emerald Neil Gaiman ★★★★★ 2007

The Absolute Sandman, Volume Two Neil Gaiman ★★★★★ 2007

The Absolute Sandman, Volume One Neil Gaiman ★★★★★ 2006

The Sandman: The Dream Hunters Neil Gaiman ★★★★★ 2000

Nightside the Long Sun (The Book of the Long Sun #1) Gene Wolfe ★★★★★ 1993

The Book of the New Sun (The Book of the New Sun #1-4) Gene Wolfe ★★★★★ 1998

Le Ton beau de Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language Douglas R. Hofstadter ★★★★★ 1998

True Names: and the Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier Vernor Vinge ★★★★★ 2001

Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs ( MIT Electrical Engineering and Computer Science) Harold Abelson ★★★★★ 1996

The Cathedral & the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary Eric S. Raymond ★★★★★ 2001

In the Beginning…Was the Command Line Neal Stephenson ★★★★★ 1999

The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier Bruce Sterling ★★★★★ 1993

Blindsight (Firefall, #1) Peter Watts ★★★★★ 2006

Toast, and Other Stories Charles Stross ★★★★★ 2005

Permutation City (Subjective Cosmology #2) Greg Egan ★★★★★ 1995

Kiln People David Brin ★★★★★ 2002

The Demolished Man Alfred Bester ★★★★★ 1999

Stand on Zanzibar John Brunner ★★★★★ 1999

The Genius Factory: The Curious History of the Nobel Prize Sperm Bank David Plotz ★★★★ 2006 2016/07/11 Millionaire Robert Graham’s Repository for Germinal Choice (1980-1999) sperm bank was founded as a form of positive eugenics in order to encourage sperm donation by gifted men (initially Nobelists) for use in the nascent field of artificial insemination. Launched to instant infamy, it turned out to have actually struck a major chord among women seeking sperm, who were generally treated extremely shabbily by the medical establishment which when doing as it pleased, casually chose donors largely at random and denied the women any kind of choice or information about the donor (Plotz notes the first recorded case of artificial insemination involved abruptly chloroforming the woman and using a random medical student). However, it encountered perennial troubles in obtaining sufficient supplies, as artificial insemination (not necessarily/usually IVF, as I assumed for most of the book until I finally realized my mistake) used up large quantities of semen before a successful pregnancy, so the lack of Nobelist participants (between the rigorous medical testing and the notoriety) immediately forced a switch to less distinguished donors; further, fees charged to women never came close to covering the operating expenses of recruiting those donors and schlepping all the semen around, even as other sperm banks adopted the Repository’s innovation of stringent health examinations & forcing Graham to sustain the Repository himself, and while he arranged for millionaire Floyd Kimble to take over funding the Repository when he died, that millionaire then soon died himself without having made any further provisions! Graham’s family was happy to see the sperm bank die, and that was that.

Around 2000, journalist David Plotz began a 13-part Slate investigative report describing the positive eugenics background, history of the sperm bank, and trying to find donors/mothers/offspring - succeeding in reaching a small fraction of them. The online series includes some of their personal reactions to their experience, beliefs about the harm, some of them being reconnected with each other, descriptions of their current circumstances etc.

The first question about this book is, is it worth reading if you’ve already read the Slate articles and are interested in learning more? Yes. The background on Graham, Shockley, and modern sperm banking is much more extensive in the book, and it goes into substantially more detail about the donors/mothers/offspring. For example, the Slate series has one 2001 post focusing on “Donor White”, who had not been found by that point; but White showed up afterwards, was interviewed extensively by Plotz (much of the book is in the first-person), and interacted a great deal with Beth/Joy over the following years, all of which is in The Genius Factory but not the Slate articles. He also corrects/updates a number of assertions (eg how exactly the Repository closed, with the online version concluding vaguely that it must have shut down because Graham somehow just didn’t bother to put anything in his will and his relatives didn’t support it, while the book version fixes this by bringing in Kimble and explaining what went wrong; apparently none of these corrections have been added to the Slate versions, checking back).

It’s interesting seeing how disparate peoples’ reactions to the sperm bank are, ranging from (the proper) indifference to considerable curiosity to almost neurotic obsession. I also appreciated the book expanding on the descriptions of the offspring and their successes even in trying circumstances, and the modern sperm banking industry, which is hard to get a read on because it’s so private (eg Plotz quotes Repository staff noting that, as long suggested, prospective mothers value highly height and health; leafing through the catalogue, everyone is a positive eugenicist), and the issue of where the unrelated fathers stand (in a very difficult one, and at least for the women who contacted Plotz, in a generally untenable one, although he notes the selection bias). So I enjoyed much of the book and read it in one or two sittings.

Much of this is relevant to anyone thinking about the current prospects for embryo selection on traits. The estrangement of fathers emphasizes how naive it is to hope that merely offering some sperm of better genetic quality would be enough to encourage en masse usage: genetic relatedness is far too important to almost everyone, and giving up relatedness for better traits is inherently insulting to the cuckolded father; egg/sperm donors are always a last resort. (This is something the iterated embryo selection & genome synthesis approaches must grapple with; who will use your optimized eggs/sperms if it means the child will be 50% or 100% unrelated to the birth-parents? On the other hand, regular embryo selection & CRISPR preserve relatedness almost entirely.) The lure of greater intelligence turns out, surprisingly, to not matter as much to the mothers as does height/athleticism/health and avoiding below-average outcomes. So mothers prize physical attributes as much or more than mental ones, and are risk-averse; suggesting the importance of doing selection on multiple traits of which intelligence is only one and perhaps not even the most important one and of emphasizing that we have excellent height polygenic scores which right now would allow height increases of <4 inches, and of framing it in terms of reducing the chance of a low outcome rather than its equivalent increasing the mean.

What’s bad in the book? Plotz comes off, as a little snide & anti-intellectual; he seems to take an attitude in slightly disliking almost everyone in the book and it bleeds through unavoidably. He lacks any kind of sympathy. This slight disdain extends from the people to the core topics. Though he can’t deny the power of genetics when even the briefest meeting or description of the sperm donors shows their resemblance to their offspring, he is an orthodox liberal in doing his best to deny it. (Which lends some passages surreal qualities; having just described how successful a bunch of kids were or how they resemble their donor or conceded that intelligence is indeed heavily genetically influenced, he’ll then invoke the shared environment or epigenetics as the explanation of everything and move on. I am reminded of the story that Bertrand Russell, seated next to a Christian at dinner, asked what he thought would happen to him when he died: “Oh, well, I suppose I shall inherit eternal bliss, but I wish we wouldn’t talk about such an unpleasant topic.”)

He also makes a number of errors or questionable claims or perpetuates things he should know better. I noted down a few while reading:



He notes that the press hyped the Repository as the “genius factory” or the “Nobel Prize bank” or calls them “superbabies” or “genius babies”, and then he goes on and routinely uses those hyperbolic phrases himself and indicts the Repository as a failure for producing no geniuses, even after having correctly noted that the ‘genius babies’ would not have been anything of the sort because they would get only half their genes from the sperm donor:



What were the kids like? Had the genius genes created genius babies? Were Repository prodigies now skipping their way through America’s best private schools, prepping for Harvard, intent on curing cancer and reinventing physics? Were there lots of little Shockleys out there, hot-wiring the latest Intel chips to work double time?…Graham thought his donors would supply a massive intelligence boost. In fact, the genetic improvement was probably minuscule. Nobel sperm would give modest odds of slightly better genes in the half share of chromosomes supplied by the father. And even then Graham would be operating on only the nature side of the equation: he had no control over nurture-schools, upbringing, parents. This was a formula for a B-plus student, not the “secular savior” Graham hoped to breed.



This is problematic because, aside from putting words in Graham’s mouth who reasonably expected “a few more creative, intelligent people”, he is judging the method fundamentally flawed when the results, as far as Plotz’s mini-census is able to uncover and Graham himself believed based on early reports (but was unable to confirm due to non-cooperation from the mothers), are consistent with what the simplest application of genetics would have predicted. At no point does Plotz figure out what the results should have been So I will do it for him. The adult heritability of IQ is ~0.8 now, increasing during childhood, because schools/upbringing/parents just don’t matter that much. The donors listed range in gifts, but an IQ of 130 seems like a reasonable guess given their general education and often scientific success (at least two donors should’ve been excluded by the Repository, but in both cases they are clearly well-above-average anyway). So they would be expected to yield a boost of +12 IQ points. The mothers themselves range from below average to perhaps 130s themselves, we’ll guesstimate 110. The offspring will be half-related to the donor and to the mothers; so their total expected adult IQ would be 300.80.5 + 100.80.5 = 16 or ~116 with the usual 15 SD; their childhood IQs would tend to be a bit lower. What would we expect from such a group? Well, we would expect them to do well in school, be healthy, athletic, a number of them at the top of their class and MENSA level - in short, we would expect what Plotz shows us, and we expect them to basically resemble a group of Ashkenazi children given mean Jewish IQs of ~110! (Incidentally, an especially high-scoring child, such as Doron Blake would be expected to regress back to 116 due to the major instability of childhood IQ; even if Doron Blake had scored at 160 or something, very early childhood IQ correlates r=0.5 or less with final adult IQ, so Blake would be expected to end up somewhere around (160-116) * 05 or 138 IQ.) A marginal +12 IQ points is no joke; that’s worth many thousands of dollars in annual income, increases the odds of graduating college, etc; and from an eugenic perspective, this is a gain that can accumulate over multiple generations. The world would look very different if each generation was 12 points smarter. (To put that in a global perspective, a mean of 12 points takes you from the UK or USA to somewhere like subsaharan Africa.)

This is problematic because, aside from putting words in Graham’s mouth who reasonably expected “a few more creative, intelligent people”, he is judging the method fundamentally flawed when the results, as far as Plotz’s mini-census is able to uncover and Graham himself believed based on early reports (but was unable to confirm due to non-cooperation from the mothers), are consistent with what the simplest application of genetics would have predicted. At no point does Plotz figure out what the results should have been So I will do it for him. The adult heritability of IQ is ~0.8 now, increasing during childhood, because schools/upbringing/parents just don’t matter that much. The donors listed range in gifts, but an IQ of 130 seems like a reasonable guess given their general education and often scientific success (at least two donors should’ve been excluded by the Repository, but in both cases they are clearly well-above-average anyway). So they would be expected to yield a boost of +12 IQ points. The mothers themselves range from below average to perhaps 130s themselves, we’ll guesstimate 110. The offspring will be half-related to the donor and to the mothers; so their total expected adult IQ would be or ~116 with the usual 15 SD; their childhood IQs would tend to be a bit lower. What would we expect from such a group? Well, we would expect them to do well in school, be healthy, athletic, a number of them at the top of their class and level - in short, we would expect what Plotz shows us, and we expect them to basically resemble a group of Ashkenazi children given mean Jewish IQs of ~110! (Incidentally, an especially high-scoring child, such as Doron Blake would be expected to regress back to 116 due to the major instability of childhood IQ; even if Doron Blake had scored at 160 or something, very early childhood IQ correlates r=0.5 or less with final adult IQ, so Blake would be expected to end up somewhere around or 138 IQ.) A marginal +12 IQ points is no joke; that’s worth many thousands of dollars in annual income, increases the odds of graduating college, etc; and from an eugenic perspective, this is a gain that can accumulate over multiple generations. The world would look very different if each generation was 12 points smarter. (To put that in a global perspective, a mean of 12 points takes you from the UK or to somewhere like subsaharan Africa.)

Plotz’s timeline is hopelessly pessimistic when he writes



The Nobel sperm bank kids, I realized, were messengers from our future. We are on the brink of the age of genetic expectations. Soon-maybe not in 5 years, but probably in 50-fertility doctors will be able to identify and manipulate genes for “intelligence” and “beauty.”



Indeed, not in 5 years from 2005, but he knew full well that PGD existed in 2005 since he covers it in the book and was being actively developed, and had probably heard about the ‘Moore’s Law for sequencing’. It didn’t take 50 years, it took 8: the publication of Rietveld et al 2013 would make the identification & manipulation of intelligence genes possible, and PGD was already waiting for it. It can be done now if anyone wants to.

Indeed, not in 5 years from 2005, but he knew full well that existed in 2005 since he covers it in the book and was being actively developed, and had probably heard about the ‘Moore’s Law for sequencing’. It didn’t take 50 years, it took 8: the publication of Rietveld et al 2013 would make the identification & manipulation of intelligence genes possible, and was already waiting for it. It can be done now if anyone wants to.

Describing Galton’s work:



Successful fathers had successful sons. This, Galton claimed, proved that God-given abilities were passed from one generation to the next. (It did not concern Galton that in Victorian England, advantages of birth, wealth, and education might have given the sons of famous men a career boost.)



Wrong. Galton was well aware of the issue and tried to figure out the effect of such environments, inventing the adoption study, and finding - exactly as subsequent studies using a variety of designs have also found - that the ‘advantages of birth, wealth, and education’ didn’t count for much. Sloppy axe-grinding.

Wrong. Galton was well aware of the issue and tried to figure out the effect of such environments, inventing the adoption study, and finding - exactly as subsequent studies using a variety of designs have also found - that the ‘advantages of birth, wealth, and education’ didn’t count for much. Sloppy axe-grinding.

On applications of eugenics:



The American eugenicists’ most important cause was sterilization. How they longed to cut! They thought practically everyone should get the knife: the “feebleminded,” alcoholics, epileptics, paupers, criminals, the insane, the weak, the deformed, the blind, the deaf, and the mute-and their extended families. Of course, most of the purportedly genetic ailments developed by eugenicists were not, in fact, genetic in origin.



Wrong. All of those are highly heritable and many genetic variants for them have been found, particularly alcoholism, insanity (presumably schizophrenia), and deafness. (Plotz’s arrogance is particularly offensive here as even in 2005, hundreds of deafness genes had been identified.)



Oddly, another trait that doctors sometimes tried to match was religion, as though it had some genetic component.



Religious attitudes are heritable.

Religious attitudes are heritable.

On speed of eugenics:



And even if they had been genetic, sterilization would have been a hopelessly bad cure for them. It would have taken literally thousands of generations of mass sterilization to significantly reduce the incidence of genetic diseases. But eugenicists didn’t stop to do the math.



Likewise wrong. I have no idea where Plotz got this claim of ‘thousands of generations’ as he doesn’t cite it, but where to start… Non-disease traits respond extremely quickly to selection, which would justify eugenics on its own quite aside from diseases; the commoner diseases could be substantially decreased within a few generations (I calculated that after 20 generations, schizophrenia could be halved, which is more effective than any other anti-schizophrenia treatment currently in use…); while it might take ‘thousands of generations’ to completely wipe out a particular disease, that will be because it had already diminished to a great extent and as it becomes ‘harder’ to wipe out that becomes ever more unimportant; eugenicists did stop to do the math because eugenicists like R.A. Fisher invented the math.

Likewise wrong. I have no idea where Plotz got this claim of ‘thousands of generations’ as he doesn’t cite it, but where to start… Non-disease traits respond extremely quickly to selection, which would justify eugenics on its own quite aside from diseases; the commoner diseases could be substantially decreased within a few generations (I calculated that after 20 generations, schizophrenia could be halved, which is more effective than any other anti-schizophrenia treatment currently in use…); while it might take ‘thousands of generations’ to completely wipe out a particular disease, that will be because it had already diminished to a great extent and as it becomes ‘harder’ to wipe out that becomes ever more unimportant; eugenicists did stop to do the math because eugenicists like R.A. Fisher invented the math.

the timeline of behavioral genetics is quite bizarre:



late 1970s. At the time, sperm collection was practically the only widely available fertility treatment that worked. Social science research was beginning to show that intelligence was at least partly heritable.



Well before then.

Well before then.

Plotz cites uncritically both empirically falsified Gardner’s “multiple intelligences” and epigenetics



many of Plotz’s criticisms make no sense or are self-contradictory; he lambasts the Repository for the idea of focusing on Nobels, and then writes “Graham wouldn’t have known what to do with an oddball like Einstein.” Um, no, I think Graham would’ve known exactly what to do with a Nobel Prize winner like Albert Einstein, since you just wrote an entire book on that topic.



a deeply disturbing anti-intellectualism trend surfaces in his descriptions of Shockley. I was particularly struck by



Shockley himself didn’t seem like much of a provocateur. He discussed incendiary topics in a bizarre manner - exactly as if he were summarizing the latest advances in semiconductor research. He was the iceman. He didn’t exude hatred for blacks - he didn’t have any. He didn’t exude sorrow - he didn’t have any of that, either. Shockley’s critics assumed that his racial anxiety stemmed from some personal experience, some deep trauma, but it probably didn’t. He had no particular feelings for blacks one way or another. He hardly knew any blacks. To him, his racial conclusions were simply the logical outcome of a train of thought. As far as he was concerned, once he started to address human quality, he would follow its logic wherever it took him. In his mind, his conclusions had nothing to do with any actual black person; he was simply making an irrefutable point.



One might think that in discussing a highly controversial and highly important topic, being dispassionate, having no personal grievances, and attempting to hew strictly to the science and logic would be laudable. Apparently not. Apparently if you care about it, you’re a racist; if you are scientific and unbiased, then you’re ‘bizarre’ and the ‘iceman’ and still a racist. This total lack of sympathy or interest in understanding Shockly’s points leads Plotz into another genetics blunder:



Shockley thought he could prove to blacks that whiteness led to intelligence. Shockley proposed to do this by measuring the percentage of “white” genes in blacks: he would show that the “whiter” the black person, the smarter he was. (Not that he had any real idea of how to test for “white” genes.) He asked NAACP leader Roger Wilkins to help him collect blood samples from members of the Congressional Black Caucus and other celebrated blacks, on the grounds that these accomplished people would surely prove to be significantly white. When Wilkins rejected him furiously, Shockley suggested that Stanford blood-test its five hundred black students. You can imagine how well that went over on campus.



Extracting racial ancestry and ‘white genes’ is hardly as difficult as Plotz makes it out to be, and Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza was busy doing just that at the time; ‘admixture studies’ have been extensively used throughout medicine to help pin down disease-causing variants which differ by race, and - just as Shockley proposed - have been used in the debate since then.

Extracting racial ancestry and ‘white genes’ is hardly as difficult as Plotz makes it out to be, and Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza was busy doing just that at the time; ‘admixture studies’ have been extensively used throughout medicine to help pin down disease-causing variants which differ by race, and - just as Shockley proposed - have been used in the debate since then.

more overvaluation of shared-environment:



The more I thought about it, the less surprising the maternal resemblance seemed. Most of these children had been raised only by their mothers. Their “social fathers” tended to be emotionally distant, and their biological donor fathers were out of the picture. So of course they were tied tightly to their moms. The mothers were women anxious for children, so motivated that they had chosen a genius sperm bank. Not surprisingly, they had become driven mothers. They spent more time with their kids than most parents did, certainly more than I did with mine or than my wonderful parents had with me. Was it any wonder their children grew up to be like them? I got the feeling that Samantha could have taken sperm from the dumbest player on the NFL’s worst team and would still have raised a brilliant boy. Her good genes would have helped, but so would the stimulating world she created around her. Any child would have fallen under that spell.



Plotz ignores that he spends much more time with the mothers than the donors in his quest to rescue shared-environment.



Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle Daniel L. Everett ★★★★ 2008 2016/03/27 (~110k words; 2.5 hours) 2008 anthropology/linguistic memoir by Daniel Everett about studying the famous Pirahã people and particularly their language. Some of the material is covered in the widely read New Yorker article or elsewhere: the Pirahã possess an astoundingly crude and simple language, the Blub of natural languages, without recursion. The 18 chapters are organized autobiographically with Everett’s research conclusions interspersed mostly chronologically (Everett making no strong topical separations, which may annoy some readers despite being more realistic - one does not live and do science in discrete blocks of time, after all, and Everett neglects neither side of his life). Everett does go into some detail about the linguistic aspects, but not very much (which is good because I’ve always found linguistics excruciating) and it’s very popularized and quick a read.



And a bit formulaic: a naive anthropologist joins a tribe, full of ideology (in Everett’s case, Christian missionary zeal), discovers the challenges of aboriginal life, nearly kills himself and his family several times, gradually comes to appreciate and understand the tribe and its ancient wisdom, and returns to tell the tale. Everett’s challenges include denying his wife & child were dying of malaria rather than typhoid fevers even as everyone he met insisted it was obviously malaria and mocked him for being a stupid foreigner who brought his family to Brazil, and discovering the fatalistic cruelty & bigotry of poverty - a riverboat captain and his crew taking 2 hours off to play a soccer game, a nurse humiliating him in front of everyone simply because he was Protestant and she was Catholic (after several weeks in an ICU, both wind up surviving), and mistaking the lack of overt coercion in the staunchly egalitarian Pirahã and barely defusing a drunken plot by the Pirahã to massacre them all - as they years later do massacre a group of Apurina they see as interlopers, or Everett’s offhanded mention of a village-wide gangrape of one woman. (I am reminded of things Graeber and Scott have written about tribal societies often being organized to suppress the existence of leaders or income inequality.) Pirahã can be ostracized, and when ostracized, may be shot at. Like many groups, they do not tolerate alcohol well at all (Everett describes fleeing the village when they get particularly large quantities of alcohol from traders, and returning to see blood all over; I would have liked some more specifics about those events).



So what does he return with? A sketch of a society which is horribly fascinating. Unlike the controversial Ik, the Pirahã have been documented as existing for centuries in apparently identical to their current form; their language’s only relation is extinct, and the Pirahã language is a language isolate, without counting or recursion or color words or comparisons or quantifiers or pluralization or disjunctions, minimal phatic elements, and so few sounds that it can be whistled, hummed, yelled, sung, or spoken, but also evidential grammar which indicates if the speaker is speaking of something from personal knowledge; all current Pirahã speak only small fragments and phrases of Portuguese or other major Brazilian languages (renaming foreigners in Pirahã in order to talk about them), and are despite 8 months of enthusiastic effort (to avoid being constantly cheated by river traders and understand money) are unable to learn to count to ten (making Everett’s ability to predict when resupply airplanes come nigh magical to the Pirahã), add any numbers, draw straight lines, or write. No Pirahã is ever mentioned as learning well another language, converting to a religion, leaving the villages for the wider world, or mating with an outsider (nor outsiders ever accepted into the Pirahã). Everett recounts that the Pirahã lusted after fine river canoes, and he arranged for a skilled canoe builder to come and teach them and even bought the necessary tools as a gift to the Pirahã, and they enthusiastically made a canoe; 5 days later, they suddenly refused to make another one, saying “Pirahãs don’t make canoes”. They seem to need relatively little sleep, mature quickly, never plan ahead or make long-term investments (such as making wicker rather than palm leave baskets) or talk about the distant future/past (and will very rarely talk about anything they learned from someone now dead: “generally only the most experienced language teachers will do this, those who have developed an ability to abstract from the subjective use of their language and who are able to comment on it from an objective perspective”), and will casually throw away tools or things they will need soon. They know how to preserve meat, but never both unless intending to trade it; food is eaten whenever it’s available, and since they fish at all hours, everyone might wake up at 3AM for fish. Growing and harvesting manioc is universal in the Amazon despite the need to process it to remove cyanide, but Everett says the Pirahã only grow & process manioc under the influence of an earlier missionary. They have no oral tradition but tell short repetitive stories of things that happened to them or someone they knew, no myths or origin stories (when asked: “Well, the Pirahãs say that these things were not made.”), no relationships closer than grandparents (about the most distant directly observable given that Everett puts their life expectancy in the 40s, leading to minimal incest taboos, forbidding only full siblings or parents or grandparents). Burials are ad hoc, and bigger men will be buried sitting because, the Pirahã say, you need to dig less. They have difficulty understanding foreigners are like them, and can understand language, in a bizarre echo of the Chinese room:



Then I noticed another bemusing fact. The Pirahãs would converse with me and then turn to one another, in my presence, to talk about me, as though I was not even there. “Say, Dan, could you give me some matches?” Xip06gi asked me one day with others present. “OK, sure.” “OK, he is giving us two matches. Now I am going to ask for cloth.” Why would they talk about me in front of my face like this, as though I could not understand them? I had just demonstrated that I could understand them by answering the question about the matches. What was I missing?



Their language, in their view, emerges from their lives as Pirahãs and from their relationships to other Pirahãs. If I could utter appropriate responses to their questions, this was no more evidence that I spoke their language than a recorded message is to me evidence that my telephone is a native speaker of English. I was like one of the bright macaws or parrots so abundant along the Maici. My “speaking” was just some cute trick to some of them. It was not really speaking.



All of this is part of Everett’s case that the Pirahã are, like Luria’s peasant, ruled by an “immediacy of experience principle” and this yields an extraordinarily conservative culture on which new ideas and concepts roll off like so much water off a duck’s back.



Their supernatural beliefs are particularly fascinating: dreams are simply interpreted literally and discussed as supernatural events that happened, and any random thing can be a ‘spirit’, with regular theatrical performances of ‘spirits’ who are obviously tribe men (but when asked, Pirahã deny that there is any connection between particular men and spirits, part of their weak grasp on personal identity (I was particularly amused by the Heraclitean tone of one anecdote: “Pirahãs occasionally talked about me, when I emerged from the river in the evenings after my bath. I heard them ask one another, ‘Is this the same one who entered the river or is it kapioxiai [a dangerous spirit]?’”), where names change regularly and are considered new people). Some of the spirit appearances are group hallucinations or consensus, and Everett opens Don’t Sleep with the anecdote of being part of a group of Pirahã staring at an empty sand bank where they see the spirit Xigagai saying he will kill anyone going into the forest that day. This example is a bit perplexing: what could possibly be the use of this and why would they either perceive it or go along with it? Similarly, it’s hard to see how the spirit outside the village talking all night about how he wanted to have sex with specific women of the village is serving any role, and the tribesman reaction when Everett walks up and asks to record his ranting is hilariously deadpan: “‘Sure, go ahead’, he answered immediately in his normal voice”. Other spirits make more sense:



Pirahãs listen carefully and often follow the exhortations of the kaoaib6gi. A spirit might say something like “Don’t want Jesus. He is not Pirahã”, or “Don’t hunt downriver tomorrow”, or things that are commonly shared values, such as “Don’t eat snakes.” Through spirits, ostracism, food-sharing regulation, and so on, Pirahã society disciplines itself.



The function and etiology of religion like this remains perplexing to me, but as a method of egalitarian coercion, it does at least explain incidents like the Pirahã ordering Everett to stop preaching about Jesus because the spirit of Jesus was causing trouble in another village and trying to rape their women with his three-foot long penis. Everett’s deconversion from Christianity is probably the funniest I’ve read, but also very strange (some illiterate tribesmen should make no impact on your religious beliefs) and well exhibits the concrete and ‘hard’ tendencies:



…something that I thought would make them understand how important God can be in our lives. So I told the Pirahãs how my stepmother committed suicide and how this led me to Jesus and how my life got better after I stopped drinking and doing drugs and accepted Jesus. I told this as a very serious story. When I concluded, the Pirahãs burst into laughter. This was unexpected, to put it mildly. I was used to reactions like “Praise God!” with my audience genuinely impressed by the great hardships I had been through and how God had pulled me out of them. “Why are you laughing?” I asked. “She killed herself? Ha ha ha. How stupid. Pirahãs don’t kill themselves” they answered. They were utterly unimpressed. It was clear to them that the fact that someone I had loved had committed suicide was no reason at all for the Pirahãs to believe in my God. Indeed, it had the opposite effect, highlighting our differences.



Overall, the picture painted is astonishing. How is this possible? How can such people and societies exist? But Everett does not find them pitiful, and is seduced by the Pirahã. Living by the plentiful river, with no native technology more advanced than a bow, the Pirahã have lowered their expectations to the point where the jungle is paradise. If there is no food, then it is an opportunity to “harden” themselves and practice self-reliance. (This is deliberate, as it’s unlikely that if it was just the random chance of hunting, they would be so uniformly 100-125 pounds & 5-5.3 feet tall). The climate means they don’t need much clothing or shelter, and if it’s raining, they can make a primitive hut. If they are hungry, they can go into the jungle and hunt. If there are foreigners, they can beg for food. They amuse themselves by talking and dancing and having sex and hunting and fishing and being self-reliant. They have no worries most of the time, have few duties