What I've Been Reading; December 2021
Palladium's elites edition, on controlling for statistical confounds, more Hume, and more Stephenson
(Coming soon is also a 2021 Reading in Review post, where I will talk about the stats I’ve collected on my reading this year. I use Storygraph to keep track of books, and it offers up some nice graphs w/ genre breakdowns etc., and I use Toggl to (manually) track how much time I spend reading, so those two together offer up some nice analysis tools.)
Post Apathy’s notes on Great Founder Theory. The notes were good, but also just made me want even more to read GFT myself. Maybe one day it will be at the top of my tbr pile.
Palladium article in favour of liberal education over pre-specialised “fast-tracks” into the cutting edge of a discipline. They make a decent case, but I’m already biased in favour of a wide education.
Another great article from Samo Burja in Palladium, this time on elites (Palladium this month had a focus on elites). I think many people nowadays have a negative view of elites (source; I asked some friends), whether that's in the sense that they think elites are incompetent, evil, or an obstruction to societal progress. Burja examines what is meant by the word elite - in its intended, more useful, and sharp definition - and how they are crucial to making change happen.
The case for Elon Musk (Substack automatically makes substack links into embeds, so click the little thing below this paragraph for link). As someone who isn’t all that caught up neither in billionare fandom nor billionaire-eating, it seems to me that the billionaires in the limelight - Musk and Gates the foremost of them - are doing, on balance, very good things for/in society. Here, O’Malley tries to consider Musk’s contributions to society and comes to that conclusion. He seems to have an even lower prior opinion of Musk than I do, so reading this made me adjust down a little bit in my opinion of billionaires in general, but the case for Musk seems fair.
Article on the ways in which controlling for statistical confounds is actually bad practice. I tweeted on this, but it bears to be restated that for years I’ve been hearing how controlling for statistical confounds is bad, or doesn’t work, and that we shouldn’t take it for a good method of showing the incremental validity of one construct over another. This article shows exactly the way in which regression-type analyses are bad at that. Specifically, the authors note (the excerpt may bear some rereading to understand fully, or you can go read the abstract of the article);
strategies for establishing incremental construct validity using multiple regression analysis exhibit extremely high Type I error rates under parameter regimes common in many psychological domains
Article from all the way back in 2015 outlining how not only are we not heading into a sixth extinction event, individual species extinction is not the biggest problem facing our ecology. The article outlines "bioabundance", the concept that, in addition to biodiversity (a large amount of species), we should work towards an abundance of members within one species, up to the limits of their local ecological constraints. The article also highlights some methods that had already been set in place for this, like "functional" species translocation, wherein a species that is thought to fulfill a similar ecological niche as another, is transplanted into an ecology where that function is missing, leading to increased bioabundance (and diversity) in that ecology.
A story from David Epstein’s Range Widely newsletter. I fairly enjoy stories of excellence, and for the longest time they were focused around early specialisation, using Tiger Woods and Mozart as their prime examples. David Epstein wrote Range last year, a book about late specialisation for expertise, and in this blog post he outlines how even Mozart and Tiger weren't pushed into their domains: both of them had an interest in their domain from an early age, and in Mozart's case, his father even kept him away from instruments for a while, preferring to tutor Wolfgang's older sister.
Max Roser from Our World in Data on steps needed to reduce global inequality. I liked this article especially because it highlighted that both redistribution *and* economic growth is needed for us to eliminate global poverty. Max’s article “The world is much better, the world is awful, the world can be better”, is probably on the top end of my favourite articles of all time, and this feels like a spin-off of that one, outlining some concrete challenges and solutions for how to make the world better.
Anathem, by Neal Stephenson. In last month’s post I gushed on and on about Snow Crash, Stephenson’s 1998 techno-futuristic language-as-brainstem-hacking novel, but Anathem crushes it in comparison. It’s longer, which enables it to spend more time with the main character, and the themes, which it uses for good effect. The book is speculative fiction, set in an alternate universe Earth analog, first-person viewpoint from the point of view of a “student” in a “monastery” working on…many different things. From there, it takes us off to adventures and pondering about consciousness, anthropics, parallell universes, first contact, and more. This is the kind of book that, if you find joy in its first couple hundred pages, which it spends on setting up characters, there is an immense amount of payoff in the next five hundred. At the same time, it also takes patience and good-will on the part of the reader to, on the occasions when the characters launch into a lecture or “Dialog” on some specific scientific or philosophic point, give the author that space to develop the book’s themes. I am used now to reading long-form fiction, so this is exactly the type of slack I'm willing to cut authors, but can see how others may not. That means though, that I am now a fully converted Stephenson fan, and his books have skyrocketed in priority on my tbr list.
I also read Blindsight by Peter Watts, and Kindness to Kin by reddit throwaway account solguard (which I had heard discussed as a sort of different “answer” posed to the concept Blindsight tries to deal with). I liked Blindsight just fine in itself, and Kindness to Kin was a great short story to read after, as “critique” of Blindsight of a sort. I can see how Blindsight might have been revoluationary at one point, but in the intervening years I think I’ve become inoculated to the specific things it poses.
Last for this edition is Octavia Butler’s The Parable of the Sower. I liked the book throughout, but it was also a bit strange because, due to the fact that I had no idea where it would go - how the scope would change - it was hard to pass judgement on what the early, and even mid-late parts of the book was about. Additionally, the beginning felt like the type of beginning that either fits into a very very long book or a series (meaning that full character growth and idea/setting realisation from this type of beginning only comes in/after more words than the length of this book. That turned out to be the case.)
The book started out religious in the way that slightly weirds me out (which I feel is a specific American portrayal of religion as something universal - it's hard to describe) where there was a religious community, and then it took a turn from that and promised more interesting things to come.
My copy had a John Green quote at the top (“…pairs well with 1984 or the The Handmaid’s Tale”), and I have to disagree with him about that. Maybe I'm just a cynic about its topics but they don't seem as universal as 1984/Handmaids Tale. Rather, it felt a lot like an adventure novel crossed with Fahrenheit 451 (which is already slightly adventure-y). It was decent speculative fiction but I've also been reading some dammed good spec fic recently (see above) and it didn't measure up. I can see why John Green liked it - he has a thing for Great American novels and child Geniuses (which this book sort of has) - but it was not my cup of tea.
As always my StoryGraph has my ratings for each of the books, if you care about that kind of thing. See you in the new year!