Well, Holt found an answer that was satisfying to him, although I remain skeptical. He starts with Derek Parfit's construct: that anything could have happened, but only one thing did, and how was that one thing selected as the winning reality? He then assumes two principles:
1) For every truth, there is an explanation of why it is true.
2) No truth explains itself.
Based on these assumptions, he rules out all but two possible operational principles. One, the principle of Simplicity, doesn't work, because the simplest reality would be the empty set, the one where nothing at all happened, and that is clearly not the reality we are experiencing. The other organizing principle could be Fullness. So, under this principle, the Universe would be both full and empty, both simple and complicated, both good and bad, etcetera-- which is exactly how we experience Reality! It's not uniformly fantastic, but it's not completely awful either. Holt goes on to look at the probabilities of a cosmos that was on an extreme versus one that sits in the middle of the spectrum, and from a logical and mathematical perspective concludes that from the organizing principle of Fullness, this reality was generated.
I think this is a whole lot of unacceptable assumption and still doesn't answer the Ultimate Question. Holt never really explains where the principle of Fullness came from, or what it had to work with to generate Reality. He himself must not be completely satisfied, because he does continue his quest and speak with John Updike, who is a theist and envisions God (unsurprisingly) as an author, who, becoming bored with nothingness, made the world "as a bit of light verse." Holt also details some personal experiences that only underscore the fact that whatever our theories about Life, the Universe, and Everything, we have to function in the material world every day as if it made sense....
So that's what happens in Dewey section 110-119. The big questions will no doubt continue through the 100's...
Saturday, December 27, 2014
Friday, December 19, 2014
The Explanatory Power of the Multiverse?
Previously: In Why Does the World Exist? Jim Holt is continuing to report on the different approaches to the question, "Why is there something instead of nothing?" He speaks to scientists, philosophers and mathematicians, and finds both compelling aspects and holes in each perspective.
Holt moves to the multiverse model to present the idea that if "anything that can happen, will happen", then it is hardly surprising that the universe happened. Turns out there are multiple conceptions of the multiverse, which I will not review here, as the multiverse is an area of my special interest, and I have a lot of other ground to cover. However, although the multiverse addresses the "fine-tuning" issue (how does our universe just happen to have the right mathematics to support life?), it still doesn't really address the fundamental question: How did we get something from nothing?
Holt turns to mathematicians for their take. As fans of Neal Stephenson's Anathem know, there is a school of mathematics that believes that "mathematical forms indeed have an existence that is independent of the mind considering them" (Rene Thom, quoted on p. 173). Other mathematicians do not agree with this perspective and see their work as either describing things that they observe (applied math) or imagining other, logically consistent but perhaps physically impossible constructs (like the square root of -1-- this is "pure" math). Either way, there is a case to be made that our reality can be described strictly in terms of mathematical relationships between forces, in which case, it could be conceived as the product of an infinite mind, contemplating possibilities.
This is the theory subscribed to by John Leslie. If you think about Plato's cave again, then, if the shadows on the wall are our reality, and we are the people chained facing the wall, and the pure mathematical forms are the objects of which we only see the shadows, this infinite mind is the sun that casts the shadows. Then, of course, we are back to the God Hypothesis, but rather than an image of God forming things out of chaos and mud, we have the more 21st century image of Him creating them out of the matrix of His own mind. Is there much substantive difference between the two conceptions?
Derek Parfit, who is primarily a moral philosopher, has recently interested himself in this problem of origins, and his contribution is to start from the how and work into the why, considering all the possible realities including our own and asking ourselves what cosmic possibilities might be true. There could be nothing at all (but obviously there's not). There could be one universe or a lot of universes, and it or they could be designed or selected to be good, bad, or indifferent; simple or messy; similar or different; and so on. Perhaps all possible worlds exist, in which case ours, with all its flaws, requires no explanation. Just as some people have to live in North Korea and some people get to live in Hawaii, so some beings have to live in this entropy-driven universe and this fallen planet, while presumably somewhere beings are enjoying a more uniformly good existence, and some poor creatures are perhaps suffering an even worse one. But again, what drove all possible worlds to exist? I feel that we continually, contrary to one of Holt's earlier sources, run up against a wall with no door marked "NO EXPLANATIONS BEYOND THIS POINT."
Holt moves to the multiverse model to present the idea that if "anything that can happen, will happen", then it is hardly surprising that the universe happened. Turns out there are multiple conceptions of the multiverse, which I will not review here, as the multiverse is an area of my special interest, and I have a lot of other ground to cover. However, although the multiverse addresses the "fine-tuning" issue (how does our universe just happen to have the right mathematics to support life?), it still doesn't really address the fundamental question: How did we get something from nothing?
Holt turns to mathematicians for their take. As fans of Neal Stephenson's Anathem know, there is a school of mathematics that believes that "mathematical forms indeed have an existence that is independent of the mind considering them" (Rene Thom, quoted on p. 173). Other mathematicians do not agree with this perspective and see their work as either describing things that they observe (applied math) or imagining other, logically consistent but perhaps physically impossible constructs (like the square root of -1-- this is "pure" math). Either way, there is a case to be made that our reality can be described strictly in terms of mathematical relationships between forces, in which case, it could be conceived as the product of an infinite mind, contemplating possibilities.
This is the theory subscribed to by John Leslie. If you think about Plato's cave again, then, if the shadows on the wall are our reality, and we are the people chained facing the wall, and the pure mathematical forms are the objects of which we only see the shadows, this infinite mind is the sun that casts the shadows. Then, of course, we are back to the God Hypothesis, but rather than an image of God forming things out of chaos and mud, we have the more 21st century image of Him creating them out of the matrix of His own mind. Is there much substantive difference between the two conceptions?
Derek Parfit, who is primarily a moral philosopher, has recently interested himself in this problem of origins, and his contribution is to start from the how and work into the why, considering all the possible realities including our own and asking ourselves what cosmic possibilities might be true. There could be nothing at all (but obviously there's not). There could be one universe or a lot of universes, and it or they could be designed or selected to be good, bad, or indifferent; simple or messy; similar or different; and so on. Perhaps all possible worlds exist, in which case ours, with all its flaws, requires no explanation. Just as some people have to live in North Korea and some people get to live in Hawaii, so some beings have to live in this entropy-driven universe and this fallen planet, while presumably somewhere beings are enjoying a more uniformly good existence, and some poor creatures are perhaps suffering an even worse one. But again, what drove all possible worlds to exist? I feel that we continually, contrary to one of Holt's earlier sources, run up against a wall with no door marked "NO EXPLANATIONS BEYOND THIS POINT."
Monday, December 15, 2014
Still Watching People Try to Figure Out Why the World Exists!
Leibniz reasoned to the existence of God by postulating that the universe might not have existed, therefore requires an explanation for its existence, and, unless you are going to argue that it's "turtles all the way down," there's ultimately going to have to be some self-explanatory cause. This line of reasoning certainly does not provide an airtight proof for God's existence... it rather seems to point us back to Swinburne's assertion that God is the simplest explanation. David Deutsch contributes a further insight: "important explanatory advances often change the meaning of explanation." For example, we might conclude that the part of reality we can see is not representative of the whole, like those prisoners in Plato's cave I mentioned before, in which case, unless we can either get out of the cave or receive and understand information from outside it, our "explanations" are hardly worthy of the name.
Jim Holt introduces another important concept, related to the self-explanatory explanation, about halfway through the book: that of the self-subsuming principle. Robert Nozick, known primarily as a political philosopher, developed this concept. A self-subsuming principle is sort of the opposite of the paradox where a man comes up to you and says, "Watch out! Everyone in this town is a liar!" What are you supposed to do with that information, when it contains its own contradiction? On the other hand, if he said, "Good news! Everyone in this town tells the truth!" you would at least be free to believe his statement without cognitive dissonance. However, while that concept means that we can imagine explanations for the existence of the universe that are coherent, it gives us no way to be sure they are true. For example, if it is true that anything that can happen, will happen, then that statement happened, and everything has happened, including both nothing and all variations on the theme of nothing. Or maybe that's not how it went.
Einstein said the universe was eternal, and infamously adjusted his equations in light of that assumption. However, with the Big Bang looking more and more likely, scientists are speculating that quantum instability might have caused the Big Bang. After all, "changeless emptiness is incompatible with quantum mechanics." (p.141) Apparently, however, for reasons I still don't understand, this model is incompatible with gravity, thus necessitating the Theory of Everything that people are always on about. Furthermore, even if the conflict between quantum mechanics and relativity could be resolved, there's the question of where those two forces came from. If the universe is an unsurprising, indeed a predictable result of these laws, are they a transcendent reality? "Since the world is logically prior to the patterns within it, those internal patterns can't be called on to explain the existence of the world."
Now do you see why Swinburne finds the God Hypothesis the simplest, the most elegant, the most self-explanatory explanation for the existence of the universe?! The mind of God would be a great place for the laws of physics, quantum and relative, to reside, and His will would be a great catalyst for them to act.
Jim Holt introduces another important concept, related to the self-explanatory explanation, about halfway through the book: that of the self-subsuming principle. Robert Nozick, known primarily as a political philosopher, developed this concept. A self-subsuming principle is sort of the opposite of the paradox where a man comes up to you and says, "Watch out! Everyone in this town is a liar!" What are you supposed to do with that information, when it contains its own contradiction? On the other hand, if he said, "Good news! Everyone in this town tells the truth!" you would at least be free to believe his statement without cognitive dissonance. However, while that concept means that we can imagine explanations for the existence of the universe that are coherent, it gives us no way to be sure they are true. For example, if it is true that anything that can happen, will happen, then that statement happened, and everything has happened, including both nothing and all variations on the theme of nothing. Or maybe that's not how it went.
Einstein said the universe was eternal, and infamously adjusted his equations in light of that assumption. However, with the Big Bang looking more and more likely, scientists are speculating that quantum instability might have caused the Big Bang. After all, "changeless emptiness is incompatible with quantum mechanics." (p.141) Apparently, however, for reasons I still don't understand, this model is incompatible with gravity, thus necessitating the Theory of Everything that people are always on about. Furthermore, even if the conflict between quantum mechanics and relativity could be resolved, there's the question of where those two forces came from. If the universe is an unsurprising, indeed a predictable result of these laws, are they a transcendent reality? "Since the world is logically prior to the patterns within it, those internal patterns can't be called on to explain the existence of the world."
Now do you see why Swinburne finds the God Hypothesis the simplest, the most elegant, the most self-explanatory explanation for the existence of the universe?! The mind of God would be a great place for the laws of physics, quantum and relative, to reside, and His will would be a great catalyst for them to act.
Monday, December 8, 2014
Is God Necessary? (More about Why Does the World Exist?)
According to the book I am currently reading, Why Does the World Exist? by Jim Holt, Adolf Grunbaum says "Why is there something instead of nothing?" is the wrong question. He says that before the Big Bang there was no time, joining many earlier philosophers such as Leibniz who argued that time is a relation between events, so that if there are no events, there is no time. How this proves that, as it were, there is no such thing as Nothingness, I'm not quite clear, except that, well, if nothing happens in the forest, and no one is there to observe the lack of events, is it still a (non)happening? Grunbaum elucidates: if the Big Bang model is physically true-- if the creation of the Universe started with what is called a "singularity," that is, a one-off event that did not operate according to the same processes and principles that obtained afterwards-- then by definition that's all there ever was; time and matter came into existence at the same time, and it's impossible to speak of a 'before.' (Grunbaum thinks this disproves the existence of God, but I can't see why, since God by most definitions is outside time and space anyway.)
Richard Swinburne , on the other hand, advocates that God is, in fact, within time, that it is meaningful to say that God did one thing before another. He envisions God as "the right stopping point in explaining the world, the one that would minimize the part of reality that was left unexplained." (p. 104) He is willing to grant the conceivability of a reality that contained a universe but no God; he finds God to be not a necessary explanation, but the simplest explanation for the existence of everything else, and that there is no explanation necessary for His existence.
This, by the way, is my own position, more or less, although I find it easiest to conceptualize God as being outside time as we know it. He may have some kind of sequential experience of metachronology, how would I know, but He very obviously is not confined to the same history that we are, and so, for me, to say that he is "within time" is not very meaningful.
What a great book!
Richard Swinburne , on the other hand, advocates that God is, in fact, within time, that it is meaningful to say that God did one thing before another. He envisions God as "the right stopping point in explaining the world, the one that would minimize the part of reality that was left unexplained." (p. 104) He is willing to grant the conceivability of a reality that contained a universe but no God; he finds God to be not a necessary explanation, but the simplest explanation for the existence of everything else, and that there is no explanation necessary for His existence.
This, by the way, is my own position, more or less, although I find it easiest to conceptualize God as being outside time as we know it. He may have some kind of sequential experience of metachronology, how would I know, but He very obviously is not confined to the same history that we are, and so, for me, to say that he is "within time" is not very meaningful.
What a great book!
Wednesday, December 3, 2014
"Why is there something instead of nothing?" (Why Does the World Exist, by Jim Holt)
That is the central question of Why Does the World Exist, by Jim Holt. After surveying many possible answers, the first one he explores in depth is the theory that our world was manufactured somehow. He admits that this idea may not be different in any meaningful way from the God hypothesis, but in the process of explaining it, he does make an interesting point. If the creator wanted to leave any kind of instructions or message for his creation, one of his best bets would be to use mathematics-- to embed messages in the constants of nature. He also talks about mathematics itself as something that is not nothing but yet is not exactly something either. I hope he'll come back to these points.
The Greeks and most other ancients considered the world to have come about the same way the Bible says: by the organization of some preexisting mess. The word "cosmos" and the word "cosmetics" come from the same root, meaning an arrangement or an adornment. So the cosmos is that which is organized, and its opposite isn't the vacuum, but that which is disorganized. Many modern(ish) scientists, including Einstein, believed the opposite: that the universe was eternal and unchanging. Discovery of its expansion -- by a priest, no less-- put paid to this "because it's there" cosmogony. But if the Universe exploded into being out of nothing, what is nothing? In math, it's a powerful placeholder, but you can't get there from here: that is, if you have only 0, you can't get to 1. (Additional fun fact: if you have all the counting numbers, you can't just add them until you get to infinity, either. You can't get something from nothing, and you can't get infinity from the finite.)
So what is nothing? Holt distinguishes between "nothing," meaning "not anything," and thus NOT semantically a noun naming a substance, and "nothingness," which is both grammatically and semantically a noun denoting a possible reality. Or is it possible? It's certainly impossible to imagine, which doesn't mean it can't exist. If it exists, if there can be a state where there are no things, it is "as Leibniz was the first to point out, the simplest of all realities." (p.59) It is beautiful in symmetry and is not subject to entropy. So, did God make the universe out of Nothingness... or is there no such thing?
The Greeks and most other ancients considered the world to have come about the same way the Bible says: by the organization of some preexisting mess. The word "cosmos" and the word "cosmetics" come from the same root, meaning an arrangement or an adornment. So the cosmos is that which is organized, and its opposite isn't the vacuum, but that which is disorganized. Many modern(ish) scientists, including Einstein, believed the opposite: that the universe was eternal and unchanging. Discovery of its expansion -- by a priest, no less-- put paid to this "because it's there" cosmogony. But if the Universe exploded into being out of nothing, what is nothing? In math, it's a powerful placeholder, but you can't get there from here: that is, if you have only 0, you can't get to 1. (Additional fun fact: if you have all the counting numbers, you can't just add them until you get to infinity, either. You can't get something from nothing, and you can't get infinity from the finite.)
So what is nothing? Holt distinguishes between "nothing," meaning "not anything," and thus NOT semantically a noun naming a substance, and "nothingness," which is both grammatically and semantically a noun denoting a possible reality. Or is it possible? It's certainly impossible to imagine, which doesn't mean it can't exist. If it exists, if there can be a state where there are no things, it is "as Leibniz was the first to point out, the simplest of all realities." (p.59) It is beautiful in symmetry and is not subject to entropy. So, did God make the universe out of Nothingness... or is there no such thing?
110-119: Special Topics in General Philosophy
Dewey calls this sequence "Metaphysics." It includes some of the big words: beauty, time, evil, truth, and the ever-popular "Why?" In my local library, I found two items that looked like they might be interesting, as well as a surprising amount of, I don't know, dianetics and what-not. I picked up On Evil by Terry Eagleton, a Marxist literary analyst/ historian/ apologist for Liberation Theology. The book postulates that evil really exists. It criticizes the "product of circumstances" defence, the "expression of pure free will" argument, and the "born evil" accusation, which he calls just another form of determinism that would release the perpetrator from blame. It looks interesting enough and has the great virtue, after The Story of Philosophy, of being short. As insurance, I also brought home Time-Life Mysteries of the Unknown: Time and Space, which has lots of pretty pictures and seems to be mainly about time travel, which is always good, and other speculative ideas. Then I went to the big library and ran into more short books with one-word titles like Truth and Beauty, but I think the winner is Why Does the World Exist, by Jim Holt, who writes for the New Yorker.
It's billed as "An Existential Detective Story" and seems to comprise an exploration of all the theories about not only the mechanics of creation but also the purpose, ranging from "there isn't one" to "God." I do feel the author made a strategic error in his introduction by blithely announcing that if you can accept a preexisting Creator you don't care about this issue. He thus disqualified a great many people, including me, from reading his book! But I don't think he's right. I think that even though I can accept a preexisting, purposeful Creator, it is interesting to consider both HOW and WHY He created. Furthermore, this book really is written in a highly readable narrative style that is a real blessing after The Story of Philosophy. But if the author is right and this book is not actually of interest to me, I can always learn about theories of time travel or the humanist perspective on evil.
It's billed as "An Existential Detective Story" and seems to comprise an exploration of all the theories about not only the mechanics of creation but also the purpose, ranging from "there isn't one" to "God." I do feel the author made a strategic error in his introduction by blithely announcing that if you can accept a preexisting Creator you don't care about this issue. He thus disqualified a great many people, including me, from reading his book! But I don't think he's right. I think that even though I can accept a preexisting, purposeful Creator, it is interesting to consider both HOW and WHY He created. Furthermore, this book really is written in a highly readable narrative style that is a real blessing after The Story of Philosophy. But if the author is right and this book is not actually of interest to me, I can always learn about theories of time travel or the humanist perspective on evil.
Friday, October 17, 2014
Plato vs Aristotle; Francis Bacon-- Didn't He Write Shakespeare?; Spinoza and Voltaire, Those Two Old Heretics
So, hooray for all of Western philosophy in 4 weeks and 400 pages! I'm reading The Story of Philosophy by Will Durant. I'm not getting any younger doing this, so I have given myself permission not to read every single word of every single page....
Plato Vs. Aristotle:
My perception is that Plato thought in airy abstractions, while completely ignoring what could be learned of human nature from his own companions, for example in their appalling treatment of their slaves. Plato proposed an ideal society that would begin by sending away every adult from a city, thus treating only with children 10 and under... and those few enlightened adults deemed fit to train them up in the utopian way they should go. On the other hand, he also came up with the well-known and profound Allegory of the Cave, and what has been said of Shakespeare could well be said of him: "He's full of quotes!" He provided one of my father-in-law's epitaphs: "How shall we find a gentle nature that also has great courage?" And that's what the goal of his Utopia was, to produce such natures. Will Durant argues that the theocracy of the Catholic church that obtained from about 400-1500 AD was modeled, in many aspects consciously, on Plato's utopia and its philosopher-kings.
Aristotle, however, was a concrete and practical thinker. I am especially happy to know that he founded modern library science by organizing the famous collection at Alexandria. He set to work demolishing Plato's Utopia, (unless you count the aforementioned Holy Roman Empire as an exemplar) and furthermore interested himself in every aspect of knowledge available to him. He studied biology, being the first to classify man with the other mammals; he studied theater, being the first to define its value in providing catharsis to the viewer-- Plato thought it was a pernicious waste of time. He also came up with the concept of every virtue as the golden mean between two vices; for example, generosity lies between stinginess and financial recklessness. This may seem blindingly obvious to us, but only because Aristotle thought of it; the Greek tradition before him is full of heroes whose virtues are excessive.
I like Aristotle better, myself. It seems like when he's wrong, it's an honest mistake that came from just getting the wrong end of the stick as he walked around and observed things, whereas when Plato is right it seems like the accident of a stopped clock. But if you read this book you can get a foundation for making your own judgement!
Francis Bacon-- Not Just for Shakespeare
Or so I gather from the whole chapter devoted to him. BTW, he's the very next dude studied after Aristotle, so there are about 1500 years that go by pretty quickly in this book. Just saying. Hard to believe nothing whatsoever happened philosophically in that time period.
Spinoza and Voltaire
Here's a fun fact: Spinoza was excommunicated from the synagogue his family attended in Holland because he taught against the resurrection of the dead. Of course it's quite usual for Jews not to believe in the afterlife, but apparently at that time such a stance was perceived as threatening the uneasy cordiality between Jews and Christians in Northern Europe, so they needed to distance themselves from him. He sounds like a nice guy personally, even though he laid the foundation for the Higher Criticism that was later taken to ridiculous extremes. Much of what he said has been said since by the most orthodox of monotheists, for example: God is at work not only in the miraculous but in the usual. George MacDonald has a lovely sermon about how making water into wine in 15 seconds at a wedding is no greater work than turning water into wine in 15 years on a hillside in France-- he may have learned that point from Spinoza.
Voltaire, another guy who would be a total blast to hang out with, would, however, have been appalled to think that any of his thought was useful to any believer. He was absolutely not a fan of organized religion, but some of the men he sent up, such as Dr. Pangloss with his health-and-wealth insistence that "all's for the best in the best of all possible worlds," were certainly made of straw. I myself was fascinated by Candide at one point in my youth, and loved the "moral," which seemed to me to be that the world is full of unanswerable questions, and so there's nothing for it but to just do whatever work we can right now.
However, if that's what philosophers really believed, they'd all be out of work... so I'm off to see what the rest of them have to say about life, the universe and everything.
Plato Vs. Aristotle:
My perception is that Plato thought in airy abstractions, while completely ignoring what could be learned of human nature from his own companions, for example in their appalling treatment of their slaves. Plato proposed an ideal society that would begin by sending away every adult from a city, thus treating only with children 10 and under... and those few enlightened adults deemed fit to train them up in the utopian way they should go. On the other hand, he also came up with the well-known and profound Allegory of the Cave, and what has been said of Shakespeare could well be said of him: "He's full of quotes!" He provided one of my father-in-law's epitaphs: "How shall we find a gentle nature that also has great courage?" And that's what the goal of his Utopia was, to produce such natures. Will Durant argues that the theocracy of the Catholic church that obtained from about 400-1500 AD was modeled, in many aspects consciously, on Plato's utopia and its philosopher-kings.
Aristotle, however, was a concrete and practical thinker. I am especially happy to know that he founded modern library science by organizing the famous collection at Alexandria. He set to work demolishing Plato's Utopia, (unless you count the aforementioned Holy Roman Empire as an exemplar) and furthermore interested himself in every aspect of knowledge available to him. He studied biology, being the first to classify man with the other mammals; he studied theater, being the first to define its value in providing catharsis to the viewer-- Plato thought it was a pernicious waste of time. He also came up with the concept of every virtue as the golden mean between two vices; for example, generosity lies between stinginess and financial recklessness. This may seem blindingly obvious to us, but only because Aristotle thought of it; the Greek tradition before him is full of heroes whose virtues are excessive.
I like Aristotle better, myself. It seems like when he's wrong, it's an honest mistake that came from just getting the wrong end of the stick as he walked around and observed things, whereas when Plato is right it seems like the accident of a stopped clock. But if you read this book you can get a foundation for making your own judgement!
Francis Bacon-- Not Just for Shakespeare
Or so I gather from the whole chapter devoted to him. BTW, he's the very next dude studied after Aristotle, so there are about 1500 years that go by pretty quickly in this book. Just saying. Hard to believe nothing whatsoever happened philosophically in that time period.
Spinoza and Voltaire
Here's a fun fact: Spinoza was excommunicated from the synagogue his family attended in Holland because he taught against the resurrection of the dead. Of course it's quite usual for Jews not to believe in the afterlife, but apparently at that time such a stance was perceived as threatening the uneasy cordiality between Jews and Christians in Northern Europe, so they needed to distance themselves from him. He sounds like a nice guy personally, even though he laid the foundation for the Higher Criticism that was later taken to ridiculous extremes. Much of what he said has been said since by the most orthodox of monotheists, for example: God is at work not only in the miraculous but in the usual. George MacDonald has a lovely sermon about how making water into wine in 15 seconds at a wedding is no greater work than turning water into wine in 15 years on a hillside in France-- he may have learned that point from Spinoza.
Voltaire, another guy who would be a total blast to hang out with, would, however, have been appalled to think that any of his thought was useful to any believer. He was absolutely not a fan of organized religion, but some of the men he sent up, such as Dr. Pangloss with his health-and-wealth insistence that "all's for the best in the best of all possible worlds," were certainly made of straw. I myself was fascinated by Candide at one point in my youth, and loved the "moral," which seemed to me to be that the world is full of unanswerable questions, and so there's nothing for it but to just do whatever work we can right now.
However, if that's what philosophers really believed, they'd all be out of work... so I'm off to see what the rest of them have to say about life, the universe and everything.
Monday, September 29, 2014
100-109: Life, the Universe and Anything: General Philosophy
Oh, joy! I finally get to dig into the actual disciplines, starting with the most ambitious, philosophy. More ambitious even than theology, because it also undertakes to study the nature of God, and without benefit of any kind of revelation or Scripture! As I mentioned before, I am reading books from our church library whenever possible, so my selection for this decade is Will Durant's classic introduction The Story of Philosophy. It is available at just about every librare on the title page, and apparently many of the newer print editions are also not very well-made. It is available at just about every library in the old-fashioned, 450-page version.
There are many introductions to philosophy available; I think this one is still attractive because Durant is opinionated and therefore less dry than his subject might suggest. Of course some of his opinions may seem dated, and his choice of whom to cover is a bit idiosyncratic. He himself apologizes for omitting all Eastern philosophers, and of course he can't cover any developments in philosophy past 1920, the date of the book. But the ones he does include, being dead, are unlikely to have changed much in the last 100 years, so I look forward to reviewing them over the next few weeks.
There are many introductions to philosophy available; I think this one is still attractive because Durant is opinionated and therefore less dry than his subject might suggest. Of course some of his opinions may seem dated, and his choice of whom to cover is a bit idiosyncratic. He himself apologizes for omitting all Eastern philosophers, and of course he can't cover any developments in philosophy past 1920, the date of the book. But the ones he does include, being dead, are unlikely to have changed much in the last 100 years, so I look forward to reviewing them over the next few weeks.
Miniature Books: An Old Tradition Still In Vogue
You can see from this picture that miniature books can be things of beauty. They were first made by those who prepared other illuminated manuscripts and were functional as well as elaborate: missals could be easily carried in a pocket or even worn at the waist or around the neck for convenience of prayer throughout the day. They also were used as practice pieces for apprentice binders-- a use they still have in art school, where students produce books that, if not strictly 'miniature,' are certainly small.
This was a really beautiful book to look at and read parts of. Every imaginable subject and style of miniature book is mentioned, from the aforementioned hand-written prayer books to those novelty items that come packages with a magnifying glass. Certain publishers are famous for their teeny yet readable versions of the classics, which collectors buy for shocking prices: http://www.lorsonbooksandprints.com/raheb.html. This book really focuses on these limited-edition collector's items, but many books, especially children's books, were originally designed to be small. Ant and Bee, Maurice Sendak's Nutshell Library, and the Beatrix Potter books come to mind. Small books are maybe not as useful as they used to be-- with the advent of e-readers, any book becomes portable-- but making something smaller will always make it somehow both cuter and classier, and one advantage of collecting miniature books is that they don't take up much space!
After reading this book, I got a little inspired and ended up spending a few hours and a few dollars at eBay, where miniature books for the casual dollhouse furnisher, the curious collector, and the serious antiquarian are all available. One could start a collection fairly reasonably, for example with items from the Little Leather Library. Of course this house is full of books already, so I suppose I don't really need to take up this hobby, but it certainly is a charming one to read about!
Tuesday, September 23, 2014
90-99: Books about Publishing Curiosities
In the 090's in a typical library for general use, turns out you can read about all kinds of oddities of publishing: rare books and the people who steal them; weird books and the mysteries surrounding them; banned books; and the two things I chose: literary hoaxes, and books bound in an unusual manner.
Literary Hoaxes is a series of brief articles about all kinds of forgeries and falsehoods, organized by time period or topic (Native Americans and Australians seem particularly to attract printed tomfoolery, for some reason). I'm not a fan of sitting down and reading straight through compendiums like this, but I may need to just read the few pages that reveal that Go Ask Alice was a work of fiction.In fact, I had better at least flip through the whole book, lest I be fooled by more too-lurid-to-be-true autobiographies!
As a former calligrapher and student of medieval books, I am more excited about Miniature Books. What a fun thing to collect! I suppose you could put them on a miniature bookshelf! If you wanted to do it cheaply, you would end up with a lot of children's books-- Beatrix Potter and Maurice Sendak have particularly popular boxed sets-- and a lot of those things they sell near the check-out line at Barnes and Noble. I suspect this book is more about collecting exotic, rare miniatures-- it does seem to be full of pretty pictures. It's also, ironically, pretty big- a coffee-table book about matchbook books!
Literary Hoaxes is a series of brief articles about all kinds of forgeries and falsehoods, organized by time period or topic (Native Americans and Australians seem particularly to attract printed tomfoolery, for some reason). I'm not a fan of sitting down and reading straight through compendiums like this, but I may need to just read the few pages that reveal that Go Ask Alice was a work of fiction.In fact, I had better at least flip through the whole book, lest I be fooled by more too-lurid-to-be-true autobiographies!
As a former calligrapher and student of medieval books, I am more excited about Miniature Books. What a fun thing to collect! I suppose you could put them on a miniature bookshelf! If you wanted to do it cheaply, you would end up with a lot of children's books-- Beatrix Potter and Maurice Sendak have particularly popular boxed sets-- and a lot of those things they sell near the check-out line at Barnes and Noble. I suspect this book is more about collecting exotic, rare miniatures-- it does seem to be full of pretty pictures. It's also, ironically, pretty big- a coffee-table book about matchbook books!
Monday, September 15, 2014
Three Books about Everything by CSLewis, David Rakoff, and Leo Tolstoy
Well, C.S. Lewis is indeed a great writer, although I can't recommend Present Concerns as a starting point. It's really mainly interesting as a window into Lewis's own particular interests, some of which do not seem very contemporary at all: the bad effect that coeducation has had on "serious argument about ideas; why an appalling boarding school is an important experience; the possibility of the elimination of English departments in universities.... Lewis is always literate, always genteel, but sometimes just so idiosyncratic or so much a product of his own times that a collection of ephemera really doesn't hold up all that well.
David Rakoff, on the other hand, is very of the moment. I didn't give him much of a chance, so please feel free to make up your own mind. In my very briefly formed opinion, Rakoff is a great example of that kind of journalism where the reporter is the story, and I'm afraid I just didn't like Rakoff enough to want to read a whole book about him and his adventures. Especially since I did read David Foster Wallace's famous long piece about cruise ships, "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again." The piece I read by Rakoff just seemed to be doing the same kind of thing only with more crudity, and I just didn't feel like it.
And poor Leo Tolstoy-- I really wanted to like his project, but in my opinion he should have stuck to original writing rather than anthologizing. I might say this collection of excerpts, quotes and original paragraphs was inchoate-- still in a state of preliminary chaos. There were lots of good parts, but they didn't cohere from day to day. The chief difficulty, though, I think is that the selections were not sacred enough to form a devotional, but not secular enough to be attractive to someone who doesn't use devotionals. So the dear old man fell between two stools and ended up with a product that, well, I guess the librarian who bought it liked it...
Spoiler alert: the main topic of the 90s is "Books with interesting bindings". I doubt my library maintains such a collection, and what would be in it, anyway, besides maybe S, that weird novel-within-a-novel that comes packed with inserts...
David Rakoff, on the other hand, is very of the moment. I didn't give him much of a chance, so please feel free to make up your own mind. In my very briefly formed opinion, Rakoff is a great example of that kind of journalism where the reporter is the story, and I'm afraid I just didn't like Rakoff enough to want to read a whole book about him and his adventures. Especially since I did read David Foster Wallace's famous long piece about cruise ships, "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again." The piece I read by Rakoff just seemed to be doing the same kind of thing only with more crudity, and I just didn't feel like it.
And poor Leo Tolstoy-- I really wanted to like his project, but in my opinion he should have stuck to original writing rather than anthologizing. I might say this collection of excerpts, quotes and original paragraphs was inchoate-- still in a state of preliminary chaos. There were lots of good parts, but they didn't cohere from day to day. The chief difficulty, though, I think is that the selections were not sacred enough to form a devotional, but not secular enough to be attractive to someone who doesn't use devotionals. So the dear old man fell between two stools and ended up with a product that, well, I guess the librarian who bought it liked it...
Spoiler alert: the main topic of the 90s is "Books with interesting bindings". I doubt my library maintains such a collection, and what would be in it, anyway, besides maybe S, that weird novel-within-a-novel that comes packed with inserts...
Wednesday, August 27, 2014
80-89: Essays, or, Books as Boxes of Chocolates
As far as I can tell, the 80s are dedicated to collections of short works on assorted subjects. The two I chose from the public library were as follows:
Fraud by David Rakoff, which I picked because I mistakenly thought for some reason that he was the author of Every Person on the Planet, which I loved but isn't by him. Also, it is supposed to be funny and has pictures drawn by the author. It's the pictures that really are reminding me of something, although, not, as it turns out, the work of Bruce Eric Kaplan. Did Rakoff ever do cartoons for the New Yorker? Did he illustrate someone else's books? This is driving me slightly nuts, and the interwebs, which usually can answer such a question so quickly, are only interested in his writing, not his drawing, so if anyone can help me, I'd appreciate it. Meanwhile, I am looking forward to enjoying Rakoff's work, which gets stellar reviews. It appears to be a collection of essays most of which were originally written for This American Life, so that's a pretty good pedigree.
A Calendar of Wisdom, which I picked because it was compiled by Leo Tolstoy, who I correctly thought was the author of Resurrection and War and Peace, both of which I had greatly enjoyed. It seems to be a sort of semi-secular devotional, a collection of quotes and short essays by the great man himself and many others about how great wisdom is and of what it consists. Not the kind of thing one reads cover to cover, but I'm looking forward to leaving it around. I'm particularly interested in it because I am trying to write a devotional right now for my own personal use, because I can't find one that is exactly what I am looking for.
Before I went to the public library, I decided that I would try, whenever possible, to read from our own church library. When I hit the 200s, this will be very easy, of course, although pickings are slim elsewhere in the Dewey numbers, and only half our holdings are even assigned a number yet. But it so happens we have one book numbered 082, a slim collection of CS Lewis's ephemera, originally published in newspapers and magazines, and covering a wide range of topics. It is ironically titled Present Concerns even though it is about things people were concerned about in 1945. But CS Lewis was such a great writer he could make shopping for groceries interesting, so I will give it a fair trial.
As always, you can click on the images below to explore these books further.
Fraud by David Rakoff, which I picked because I mistakenly thought for some reason that he was the author of Every Person on the Planet, which I loved but isn't by him. Also, it is supposed to be funny and has pictures drawn by the author. It's the pictures that really are reminding me of something, although, not, as it turns out, the work of Bruce Eric Kaplan. Did Rakoff ever do cartoons for the New Yorker? Did he illustrate someone else's books? This is driving me slightly nuts, and the interwebs, which usually can answer such a question so quickly, are only interested in his writing, not his drawing, so if anyone can help me, I'd appreciate it. Meanwhile, I am looking forward to enjoying Rakoff's work, which gets stellar reviews. It appears to be a collection of essays most of which were originally written for This American Life, so that's a pretty good pedigree.
A Calendar of Wisdom, which I picked because it was compiled by Leo Tolstoy, who I correctly thought was the author of Resurrection and War and Peace, both of which I had greatly enjoyed. It seems to be a sort of semi-secular devotional, a collection of quotes and short essays by the great man himself and many others about how great wisdom is and of what it consists. Not the kind of thing one reads cover to cover, but I'm looking forward to leaving it around. I'm particularly interested in it because I am trying to write a devotional right now for my own personal use, because I can't find one that is exactly what I am looking for.
Before I went to the public library, I decided that I would try, whenever possible, to read from our own church library. When I hit the 200s, this will be very easy, of course, although pickings are slim elsewhere in the Dewey numbers, and only half our holdings are even assigned a number yet. But it so happens we have one book numbered 082, a slim collection of CS Lewis's ephemera, originally published in newspapers and magazines, and covering a wide range of topics. It is ironically titled Present Concerns even though it is about things people were concerned about in 1945. But CS Lewis was such a great writer he could make shopping for groceries interesting, so I will give it a fair trial.
As always, you can click on the images below to explore these books further.
Sunday, August 24, 2014
What Now? Blur
I spent a long time with Blur: How to Know What's True in the Age of Information Overload. One thing that was really nice about it was that it assumed that there was such a thing as truth and that the reader might care to know what that was. Previous posts have outlined the authors' strategies for getting at the truth. The authors close by bringing up a related issue. It's good to fact-check the information that comes our way... but it's even more important to make sure we are getting the information we need.
Most of us just kind of let the news flow towards us. Whether it's our Facebook feeds, TV and radio, or even a print source, we expose ourselves to far more than we can really process, but yet are exposed to only what someone else thought was important enough to bring to our attention. So I am hearing a lot about the Ice Bucket Challenge, but nothing about-- well, I don't know, because I'm not hearing anything about it. What's in your feed is determined partly by who else has responded to the items available... you can't respond if it doesn't show up in the first place... so maybe your view of the news is skewed not by deliberate inaccuracy but just by the happenstance of what gets picked up, what gets traction as the flavor of the day.
So what to do? The authors suggest that we make a list of the ten things we are most worried about, interested in, or involved with. We can then seek out the news that pertains to those concerns, and skip what doesn't... although I would have missed a lot of interesting information that way. Maybe an even more interesting question, once I've decided the topic matters, is: what is this piece of reportage telling me? Is there really anything new here, or is it just a rehash? How reliable is the stuff that seems new to me?
Ultimately, if I really want to contribute to the public discourse, just reading The Week or watching the news the same way I read a novel or watch Jeopardy isn't good enough. I have to start asking myself more questions.
Most of us just kind of let the news flow towards us. Whether it's our Facebook feeds, TV and radio, or even a print source, we expose ourselves to far more than we can really process, but yet are exposed to only what someone else thought was important enough to bring to our attention. So I am hearing a lot about the Ice Bucket Challenge, but nothing about-- well, I don't know, because I'm not hearing anything about it. What's in your feed is determined partly by who else has responded to the items available... you can't respond if it doesn't show up in the first place... so maybe your view of the news is skewed not by deliberate inaccuracy but just by the happenstance of what gets picked up, what gets traction as the flavor of the day.
So what to do? The authors suggest that we make a list of the ten things we are most worried about, interested in, or involved with. We can then seek out the news that pertains to those concerns, and skip what doesn't... although I would have missed a lot of interesting information that way. Maybe an even more interesting question, once I've decided the topic matters, is: what is this piece of reportage telling me? Is there really anything new here, or is it just a rehash? How reliable is the stuff that seems new to me?
Ultimately, if I really want to contribute to the public discourse, just reading The Week or watching the news the same way I read a novel or watch Jeopardy isn't good enough. I have to start asking myself more questions.
Sunday, August 17, 2014
How to tell real news from fake (More from Blur by Kovach and Rosenstiel)
I'm still reading Blur by Kovach and Rosenstiel. It's great information, but definitely leaves me wondering how I would ever have time to implement all the suggestions they provide for vetting news stories.
For example, one should ask oneself, apparently, where the information comes from. Was the journalist herself a witness or credentialed expert? Were first-hand witnesses the sources for an event? If so, how recently did they see it? How many of them are there? What were their perspectives, both literally and figuratively? If experts are quoted for analysis or commentary, what are their agendas? And are they offering facts, or opinions? What about "anonymous sources? And when opinions and analysis are offered, do the same catchphrases ("death-panels;" "welfare queens;" "boots on the ground") keep cropping up? If so, you may not be hearing sources so much as parrots of official talking points. The ideal source is risking something and gaining nothing by providing information.
These questions only have meaning if you are reading what the authors call "the journalism of verification," whose writers are committed to producing only what they can prove to be true, not what they believe to be true. So all forms of evidence can be tested: what is offered? How was it vetted? Has opposing evidence also been presented? What conclusions have been drawn-- are they supported? Could other conclusions be drawn from the same evidence? Are you getting breaking news that may be incomplete, or something that should have been properly analyzed? This reminds me of the book I read about Confidential magazine, and how for years they avoided lawsuits by meticulous fact-checks of their gossip pieces!
Every communication has three levels: the denotation (what it says), the connotation (what it means), and the annotation (how it feels; the tone). So, does a news story follow the scientific method? Is it true in denotation, that is, are all the facts accurate? In connotation, that is, are the facts assembled to make a true story? Is the tone fair? I think of weather reports, which often exaggerate certain evidence and take on a hysterical tone, because otherwise, why would we tune in?
Perhaps one could also think of the scientific method, which involves forming a hypothesis and then testing it with evidence. We do this all the time in real life: did I leave my keys in the church library? Well, let me go look, knowing it's possible that I did not. Any piece of journalism that purports to be investigative should certainly address the possibility that the hypothesis was wrong.
A lot of what passes for informational programming is just talking heads with talking points and a moderator who discourages moderation. In such a situation, the interviewer or emcee often lets false statements go by, because her job is really just to facilitate her guests' expression of their own ideas. In such a case, we may be in the realm of the "journalism of affirmation," which seeks only to comfort with well-worn ideas and theories. Such "journalism" cherry-picks facts, ascribes unusually evil motives to the other 48% of Americans, and indulges in ad-hominem attacks and ultimately the creation of alternate realities. We like this kind of "news," which is both entertaining and affirming, but let's not kid ourselves that we have learned anything from it!
For example, one should ask oneself, apparently, where the information comes from. Was the journalist herself a witness or credentialed expert? Were first-hand witnesses the sources for an event? If so, how recently did they see it? How many of them are there? What were their perspectives, both literally and figuratively? If experts are quoted for analysis or commentary, what are their agendas? And are they offering facts, or opinions? What about "anonymous sources? And when opinions and analysis are offered, do the same catchphrases ("death-panels;" "welfare queens;" "boots on the ground") keep cropping up? If so, you may not be hearing sources so much as parrots of official talking points. The ideal source is risking something and gaining nothing by providing information.
These questions only have meaning if you are reading what the authors call "the journalism of verification," whose writers are committed to producing only what they can prove to be true, not what they believe to be true. So all forms of evidence can be tested: what is offered? How was it vetted? Has opposing evidence also been presented? What conclusions have been drawn-- are they supported? Could other conclusions be drawn from the same evidence? Are you getting breaking news that may be incomplete, or something that should have been properly analyzed? This reminds me of the book I read about Confidential magazine, and how for years they avoided lawsuits by meticulous fact-checks of their gossip pieces!
Every communication has three levels: the denotation (what it says), the connotation (what it means), and the annotation (how it feels; the tone). So, does a news story follow the scientific method? Is it true in denotation, that is, are all the facts accurate? In connotation, that is, are the facts assembled to make a true story? Is the tone fair? I think of weather reports, which often exaggerate certain evidence and take on a hysterical tone, because otherwise, why would we tune in?
Perhaps one could also think of the scientific method, which involves forming a hypothesis and then testing it with evidence. We do this all the time in real life: did I leave my keys in the church library? Well, let me go look, knowing it's possible that I did not. Any piece of journalism that purports to be investigative should certainly address the possibility that the hypothesis was wrong.
A lot of what passes for informational programming is just talking heads with talking points and a moderator who discourages moderation. In such a situation, the interviewer or emcee often lets false statements go by, because her job is really just to facilitate her guests' expression of their own ideas. In such a case, we may be in the realm of the "journalism of affirmation," which seeks only to comfort with well-worn ideas and theories. Such "journalism" cherry-picks facts, ascribes unusually evil motives to the other 48% of Americans, and indulges in ad-hominem attacks and ultimately the creation of alternate realities. We like this kind of "news," which is both entertaining and affirming, but let's not kid ourselves that we have learned anything from it!
Wednesday, August 6, 2014
Googling something once does not make you an expert on it: Blur by Kovach and Rosenstiel
This is a sort of book report on Blur by Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel. The problem they are trying to solve is nicely summarized in the subtitle: How to Know What's True in the Age of Information Overload. They propose six steps to evaluating news, regardless of medium of delivery:
1. Determine what kind of content you are looking at.
2. Determine whether the account is complete.
3. Assess the sources.
4. Assess the evidence.
5. Question the reporter's explanation or understanding of the evidence.
6. Explore whether the news is meeting real needs.
The writers identify four kinds of content:
-Verification, which asks whether the material is accurate and fairly contextualized. In this model, it is the reporter's job to fact-check, to know his beat, to distinguish between fact and analysis, and to know what he still doesn't know.
-Assertion, which just passes on as much raw information as possible without evaluation. In this model, there is usually no time to fact-check, analytical statements are tossed off by sources as if they were facts, and not challenged, and sheer quantity substitutes for story.
-Affirmation, which chooses content that will confirm the opinions of its audience. This is distinguished from opinion journalism, as found in, say, The National Review, which does not expect to be your source of news but of news analysis. Affirmation expects you to "hear it here first," but only if it matches what you were expecting to hear.
-Interest-group journalism, which is designed to look like news but is dedicated to serving only the purposes of the funding group. Look for shady funding sources or for repetitive themes and conclusions in every story.
These models can be combined in an aggregate, such as The Week, that collects and edits news and opinion, attempting to tell you both what happened and what people thought about it, but the very act of editing is an act of filtering that can be driven by a desire to inform, affirm, or propagandize.
We all remember the 5 Ws and an H, but here's something that is often missing from reports of all kinds: the Q-- Questions that remain unanswered or that were raised by the info in the story. If the news doesn't even give the who, what, where, when, why and how, it is certainly not complete and is not a good example of verification journalism. If it does answer those questions, it may legitimately go on to try to make sense of those answers. It may also try to authenticate things stated in previous reports. It may even be assembling information in such a way as to draw attention to new paradigm. For example, this article I just read today in the New York Times magazine: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/03/magazine/the-kids-who-beat-autism.html?_r=0 introduces facts that suggest that there may be a cure for autism available to some children. This is certainly a new idea. Do the facts presented in the story support it? That is what the authors are challenging us to discover.
Wow, see why this is the book I wanted to read? It's not exactly relaxing, but it is very clear and easy to follow and discusses a challenge that I deal with every day: the information that is coming at me. So often those who act like they know what they are talking about get the credit they expect, but really, all they did was Google something-- it's just raw, random, uncontextualized data, or it's spin, or it's sheer fabrication, and it's a big project to really tell which is which. Now I'm going to read about how to evaluate sources.
1. Determine what kind of content you are looking at.
2. Determine whether the account is complete.
3. Assess the sources.
4. Assess the evidence.
5. Question the reporter's explanation or understanding of the evidence.
6. Explore whether the news is meeting real needs.
The writers identify four kinds of content:
-Verification, which asks whether the material is accurate and fairly contextualized. In this model, it is the reporter's job to fact-check, to know his beat, to distinguish between fact and analysis, and to know what he still doesn't know.
-Assertion, which just passes on as much raw information as possible without evaluation. In this model, there is usually no time to fact-check, analytical statements are tossed off by sources as if they were facts, and not challenged, and sheer quantity substitutes for story.
-Affirmation, which chooses content that will confirm the opinions of its audience. This is distinguished from opinion journalism, as found in, say, The National Review, which does not expect to be your source of news but of news analysis. Affirmation expects you to "hear it here first," but only if it matches what you were expecting to hear.
-Interest-group journalism, which is designed to look like news but is dedicated to serving only the purposes of the funding group. Look for shady funding sources or for repetitive themes and conclusions in every story.
These models can be combined in an aggregate, such as The Week, that collects and edits news and opinion, attempting to tell you both what happened and what people thought about it, but the very act of editing is an act of filtering that can be driven by a desire to inform, affirm, or propagandize.
We all remember the 5 Ws and an H, but here's something that is often missing from reports of all kinds: the Q-- Questions that remain unanswered or that were raised by the info in the story. If the news doesn't even give the who, what, where, when, why and how, it is certainly not complete and is not a good example of verification journalism. If it does answer those questions, it may legitimately go on to try to make sense of those answers. It may also try to authenticate things stated in previous reports. It may even be assembling information in such a way as to draw attention to new paradigm. For example, this article I just read today in the New York Times magazine: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/03/magazine/the-kids-who-beat-autism.html?_r=0 introduces facts that suggest that there may be a cure for autism available to some children. This is certainly a new idea. Do the facts presented in the story support it? That is what the authors are challenging us to discover.
Wow, see why this is the book I wanted to read? It's not exactly relaxing, but it is very clear and easy to follow and discusses a challenge that I deal with every day: the information that is coming at me. So often those who act like they know what they are talking about get the credit they expect, but really, all they did was Google something-- it's just raw, random, uncontextualized data, or it's spin, or it's sheer fabrication, and it's a big project to really tell which is which. Now I'm going to read about how to evaluate sources.
Monday, August 4, 2014
70-79: Journalism, Broadly Defined
The 70's are meant to focus on newspapers. However, the bulk of the books on offer seemed to be memoirs. Maybe they were journalistic in that they had originally been blogs? Or maybe they were by or about journalists, or about people's interactions with newspapers? I wasn't sure, but I picked up MWF Seeks BFF, a "stunt biography" about a woman going on 52 "first dates" with different women in her new town, looking for a new BFF. It looked entertaining and similar to other books I have read and enjoyed, but I wasn't sure what it had to do with journalism or how it achieved my goal of forcing myself to learn about a wider variety of topics, so I also selected Blur: How to Know What's True in the Age of Information Overload, which seemed more like a "real" 070s book.
Well, less like a book I would read like a novel, anyway. I'm a little ways into it and really appreciating it, but I have been keeping the Book Darts (TM) handy, because it does require some study and attention. They are addressing the problem of over information
Well, less like a book I would read like a novel, anyway. I'm a little ways into it and really appreciating it, but I have been keeping the Book Darts (TM) handy, because it does require some study and attention. They are addressing the problem of over information
Sunday, July 20, 2014
What would Piaget have said.... (Robert's Rules of Order)
... about the 704 pages of Robert's Rules of Order, which are full of disclaimers about the precedence of one rule over another, exceptions that may or may not be codified elsewhere, and the impossibility of providing for every contingency? Piaget wrote a book (The Moral Judgement of the Child) studying the way boys played marbles and girls played hopscotch, and noted that the boys spent time amplifying the rules while the girls complicated their playing field. I always remembered that observation, because I spent a lot of time listening to my three boys debate the fine points of rules they made up for their board games. Calvinball also exemplifies this principle. So, if debate is a game, good ol' General Robert and his heirs are playing it just like Piaget's boys played marbles.
Another thing I find weirdly amusing about this book is the way it treats deliberative bodies as if they had wills and opinions, for example in this sentence: "Parliamentary procedure enables the overall membership of an organization...both to establish and empower an effective leadership as it wishes, and at the same time to retain exactly the degree of direct control over its affairs that it chooses to reserve to itself." (10th ed, p. XLVII) No wonder the Supreme Court thinks corporations are people!
Finally, I realize in reading this book that although I have been in plenty of meetings where motions were offered, seconded and voted on, and where people were recognized and had the floor, I have never in my life been in a meeting truly run by Robert's Rules. Nor, after reading just the preliminary comments to this tome, is that an aspiration of mine. Whew! So much work just to have an argument!
Another thing I find weirdly amusing about this book is the way it treats deliberative bodies as if they had wills and opinions, for example in this sentence: "Parliamentary procedure enables the overall membership of an organization...both to establish and empower an effective leadership as it wishes, and at the same time to retain exactly the degree of direct control over its affairs that it chooses to reserve to itself." (10th ed, p. XLVII) No wonder the Supreme Court thinks corporations are people!
Finally, I realize in reading this book that although I have been in plenty of meetings where motions were offered, seconded and voted on, and where people were recognized and had the floor, I have never in my life been in a meeting truly run by Robert's Rules. Nor, after reading just the preliminary comments to this tome, is that an aspiration of mine. Whew! So much work just to have an argument!
Saturday, July 19, 2014
60-69: This Meeting Will Now Come to Order
The only thing in the 60s in either of the libraries I checked was Robert's Rules of Order. Don't see why some book about the founding of the Rotarians or something couldn't have also been included, but no, I have to read Robert's Rules of Order. So far my favorite part was when they said in the introduction that you only have to read the first 5 chapters and skip anything you don't immediately understand. I do like the main goals, though:
1- to make sure you only talk about one thing at a time
2- to give each side of the question alternating time to speak
3- to put a stop to rude or irrelevant comments
4- to provide for dividing a question into smaller parts so that each can be considered on its own.
Seems like Congress could benefit from the last idea. Certainly is irritating how many bills are a big amalgamated mess of amendments.
1- to make sure you only talk about one thing at a time
2- to give each side of the question alternating time to speak
3- to put a stop to rude or irrelevant comments
4- to provide for dividing a question into smaller parts so that each can be considered on its own.
Seems like Congress could benefit from the last idea. Certainly is irritating how many bills are a big amalgamated mess of amendments.
Sunday, July 6, 2014
Extra Credit: Cheat Sheet: How to Talk about Books You Haven't Read
Apparently this book usually is found in 809, but obviously I couldn't wait that long, and I would have put in the 30's, along with the other books about reading. Or not reading. Turns out there is a case to be made, by Umberto Eco (among others who are extensively quoted here), for making the choice to not read books. Skimming them, or indeed just hearing other people talk about them, may be just as good as actually reading them, especially given the high probability that in 10 years you will have pretty much forgotten them anyway. I think of James Joyce's Ulysses. I've heard a lot about it. I've read a page of it. I read ALL of The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, pretty much to my regret. And, based on all that information, I cannot imagine the circumstance which would cause me to regret not actually having waded through all of that notorious experiment in the abuse of English! So I'm glad I now have some theoretical justification for this stance.
What's your favorite book to talk about without reading?
What's your favorite book to talk about without reading?
Still Reading Despite Slim Pickings! (Shocking True Story)
Okay, I could have chosen a more serious tome, but I didn't. The history of Confidential was an easy read and thoroughly explained the origin of the scandal sheets we still buy today, complete with their weird mix of celebrity abuse, consumer scare stories, and occasional forays into party politics (The National Enquirer will be happy to dig up dirt on presidential candidates as well as on actors and poor little rich girls). Confidential was successful as long as it employed fact-checkers to make sure every bit of mud it slung was grade-A, and that the stars so besmirched would have more to lose than to gain from a libel suit. When it got sloppy, it went down, but the book doesn't explain how or why a whole new generation of similar rags managed to take its place. I would have liked a little more historical perspective along with my boffo headlines. But now I know that magazines, if shelved, live in the 50's.
Thursday, June 26, 2014
50-59: Serial Readers
My trip to 50-59 contained a little more angst than usual; the topic is Magazines, and the pickings are slim. Technically, collected volumes of the New Yorker should count, I guess, but they live in the Periodicals room, so all I had in front of me was memoirs of magazine employees, deconstructions of the social import of assorted publications, and the history of various rags. I ended up with Shocking True Story, which is the history of the country's first celebrity gossip sheet, Confidential. I'm not hurting myself. Sure, the history of Hollywood in the 40s and 50s touches on everything from unionization to the Red Scare, but the chapters are short, and each one starts with a (surprisingly literate) excerpt from an original article. Did Rita Hayworth neglect her children? Did Desi cheat on Lucy? By now, with most of the participants safely located where what anybody says about them can no longer ruin their lives, it's pure entertainment. And the 50's definition of "shocking" is a little different from ours, so it's rather mild entertainment at that.
PS: Why are so many famous people so spectacularly miserable? I don't think anybody's ever figured it out, but an occasional reminder that the grass is not in fact greener is always welcome.
PS: Why are so many famous people so spectacularly miserable? I don't think anybody's ever figured it out, but an occasional reminder that the grass is not in fact greener is always welcome.
40-49: The Category Formerly Known As Biographies
40-49: There is no 17th floor. There is no Miss Zarves. This, according to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Dewey_Decimal_classes#Class_000_.E2.80.93_Computer_science.2C_information_.26_general_works) is where biographies used to live. Now it is waiting for someone to invent a new form of information gathering so it can represent that. There's a goal for you: be the guy who starts a trend that ends up in the 40s of the Dewey Decimal System.
Don't Know Much About....: The Know-It-All by AJ Jacobs
So AJ Jacobs set out to read the entire Encyclopedia Britannica. This did not, as it turned out, make him a complete know-it-all, because, as his somewhat disappointing experience on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire demonstrated, he kept forgetting stuff. It did, however, increase what I suspect was already his propensity to interject random facts into conversations in an effort to show off his knowledge (Personally, I prefer the vocabulary strategy). He spent a lot of time worrying about whether all his newfound knowledge was making him a better person or at least helping him solve real-life problems, and related a few incidents where it was. But Jacobs' real genius lies in his ability to make his daily life as an encyclopedia reader, editor of Esquire, husband and aspiring father hilarious and relatable. Even though this book is structured as a miscellany, it was a page-turner. Recommended.
Wednesday, June 11, 2014
30-39: Books of Lists
The 30's are dedicated to trivia and compendiums: almanacs, the Guinness Book of World Records, etc. Schott's Miscellany, but not John Hodgman's Areas of My Expertise,which is a fake almanac found in the humor section. Do not envy the life of a cataloguer who has to make those distinctions!
But all is not lost, because AJ Jacobs was here and left us The Know-It-All. I loved The Year of Living Biblically, so I'm fairly excited about this, too. It's just that I also have juicy comic science fiction by Tom Holt and A. Lee Martinez on the stack, so it's taking some commitment to settle into a book that has a chapter for each letter of the alphabet instead of multidimensional travel or bug-eyed monsters...
Friday, May 23, 2014
A Father Seen through a Screen of Books: More about The Reading Promise
I'm still thinking about The Reading Promise. As I was reading this book, I was captivated, but I also kept having to stop because Alice Ozma's story of how she experienced her father was so moving to me. Even when he was embarrassing her to death, as parents so often do, or even when she had to adapt herself to his idiosyncrasies to her own inconvenience, her love and respect for him persisted-- and persist to this day. The story takes us past their reading streak and on to Mr. Brazina's empty-nest literary life, further emphasizing Ozma's reverence for his literary gifts. It's just the most lovely response to an unconventional childhood I have ever read.
Monday, May 19, 2014
20-29: How to Read a Book: The Reading Promise
020-029 starts with uninviting shelves about how to research and boring-looking but important books about library science, which are probably what I should have chosen now that I've volunteered to help organize my church's library. Instead, I kept looking till I got to 028, which looks suspiciously like 019 (books about books) but turns out to be the slightly different topic of books about reading. There was one I didn't bring home called Reading: the Solitary Vice, that I could only hope was written ironically. A book-long joke, though-- I just don't have time for that. Tolstoy and the Purple Chair, which everyone was talking about last year, was also available, but as my mother and I say at craft fairs, "I could do that."
I was still torn, though, between an anthology of writings about reading and a memoir of a father-daughter reading streak that ended up lasting over 3,000 days. But it's the library! Everything's free and you are under no obligation to actually read everything you bring home! So they both came with me. But as soon as I opened The Reading Promise, I was completely captivated, and therefore have barely glanced at A Passion for Books, much as it might also reward my attention.
The Reading Promise bills itself as the story of "My Father and the Books We Shared," and it's not so much a book about reading as about the silliest, most awkward father you can imagine who happened to love to read to his daughter. She could have written Too Close to the Falls or The Glass Castle or even Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, but it obviously didn't even occur to her to see herself as in any way a victim of her unconventional upbringing. Rather, she presents herself as the very privileged member of a secret society that was held together by books but also by a shared love of frozen custard, a shared disdain for boys and an ongoing dispute about the proper way to pet a cat.
The book is a series of vignettes following our author from 3rd grade until she leaves for college and their nightly practice of reading aloud finally ends. Some of the anecdotes directly relate to their experience with a specific book (any father of daughters will completely respect how he handled Dicey's Song), but many of the incidents related-- the fish funeral, the bad grade, the Boy Hater's Club-- take place in the other 23 hours and 45 minutes a day. But while not every incident directly involves a book, each one does give us more insight into the man who named his daughter Alice Ozma. The picture that emerges is of a man who was eccentric, prickly, but absolutely dedicated both to his daughter and to the value of books to enrich and even explain our lives. Spoiler alert to my family: I can't imagine a better Father's Day present.
I was still torn, though, between an anthology of writings about reading and a memoir of a father-daughter reading streak that ended up lasting over 3,000 days. But it's the library! Everything's free and you are under no obligation to actually read everything you bring home! So they both came with me. But as soon as I opened The Reading Promise, I was completely captivated, and therefore have barely glanced at A Passion for Books, much as it might also reward my attention.
The Reading Promise bills itself as the story of "My Father and the Books We Shared," and it's not so much a book about reading as about the silliest, most awkward father you can imagine who happened to love to read to his daughter. She could have written Too Close to the Falls or The Glass Castle or even Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, but it obviously didn't even occur to her to see herself as in any way a victim of her unconventional upbringing. Rather, she presents herself as the very privileged member of a secret society that was held together by books but also by a shared love of frozen custard, a shared disdain for boys and an ongoing dispute about the proper way to pet a cat.
The book is a series of vignettes following our author from 3rd grade until she leaves for college and their nightly practice of reading aloud finally ends. Some of the anecdotes directly relate to their experience with a specific book (any father of daughters will completely respect how he handled Dicey's Song), but many of the incidents related-- the fish funeral, the bad grade, the Boy Hater's Club-- take place in the other 23 hours and 45 minutes a day. But while not every incident directly involves a book, each one does give us more insight into the man who named his daughter Alice Ozma. The picture that emerges is of a man who was eccentric, prickly, but absolutely dedicated both to his daughter and to the value of books to enrich and even explain our lives. Spoiler alert to my family: I can't imagine a better Father's Day present.
Wednesday, May 14, 2014
So Many Books... You Know the Rest: More from Practical Classics
So many books, so many interesting perspectives on them from Practical Classics.
Sure, we all knew Bartleby was about a guy who preferred not to do his job, but how about Farenheit 451? Everyone knows The Joy Luck Club is about family, but that's not usually how we read or remember To Kill a Mockingbird (a good dad story) or Metamorphosis (a story about how not to handle the disability of a family member).
Everyone I know has heard, or heard of, or at least quoted without knowing they were doing so ("global village," anyone?), Marshall McLuhan, but I didn't know I owed the concept of "camp" to Susan Sontag or the phrase "art in the age of mechanical reproduction" to Walter Benjamin. Smokler provides such thorough crib sheets for all three that I am now saved the trouble of reading the originals!
So now I am talked into attempting Maus, for its portrait of a difficult dad, and The Crying of Lot 49, not only because it looks interesting but because I've always wanted to read Thomas Pynchon and always not wanted to dedicate 6 months to Gravity's Rainbow. I'm even more excited about A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again now that I know that it's about how we relax or whether we even can any more. Just the summary, at least while read on a beach that it took me 8 hours and hundreds of dollars to get to, gave me something to think about, and the fact that everything else David Foster Wallace has written seems to be a thousand pages long is a bonus. I'm even intrigued, if terrified, by Bastard out of Carolina for its promise of forgiveness in the middle of horror.
Below are links to the books I'm adding to my wish list. As always, you can explore without buying.
Sure, we all knew Bartleby was about a guy who preferred not to do his job, but how about Farenheit 451? Everyone knows The Joy Luck Club is about family, but that's not usually how we read or remember To Kill a Mockingbird (a good dad story) or Metamorphosis (a story about how not to handle the disability of a family member).
Everyone I know has heard, or heard of, or at least quoted without knowing they were doing so ("global village," anyone?), Marshall McLuhan, but I didn't know I owed the concept of "camp" to Susan Sontag or the phrase "art in the age of mechanical reproduction" to Walter Benjamin. Smokler provides such thorough crib sheets for all three that I am now saved the trouble of reading the originals!
So now I am talked into attempting Maus, for its portrait of a difficult dad, and The Crying of Lot 49, not only because it looks interesting but because I've always wanted to read Thomas Pynchon and always not wanted to dedicate 6 months to Gravity's Rainbow. I'm even more excited about A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again now that I know that it's about how we relax or whether we even can any more. Just the summary, at least while read on a beach that it took me 8 hours and hundreds of dollars to get to, gave me something to think about, and the fact that everything else David Foster Wallace has written seems to be a thousand pages long is a bonus. I'm even intrigued, if terrified, by Bastard out of Carolina for its promise of forgiveness in the middle of horror.
Below are links to the books I'm adding to my wish list. As always, you can explore without buying.
Sunday, May 4, 2014
A Post about a Book about Books: Practical Classics
I decided to go with Practical Classics: 50 Reasons to Reread 50 Books You Haven't Touched Since High School
. I like the fact that each essay is a few pages long, and I like the fact that the author writes very personally about his responses. What I don't like is that the author does not, to my mind, have a thorough command of the conventions of written English; he'll use structures like "both... also," and sometimes his flow of thought is not very clear. I wish I'd had a few hours with this book and a red pen before it went to press. Aside from that, I do like the whimsicality of his choices and juxtapositions... last night I was intrigued by the description of Labyrinths, a short story collection by Jorge Luis Borges, then completely turned off as he summarized The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath. I never had to read either of these books in school, and none of the students I'm working with now have ever mentioned either one, but I certainly have heard of them both, and I'm glad to know more so I can make a decision about whether they are worth my time. Borges sounds like my kind of thing; Plath sounds like my kind of instrument of torture. I would rather read about badminton than subject myself to another narrative of madness at this point in my life, and the more effectively done, the less interested I am. But that's just me.
I'm glad he included Sherman Alexie and Phillip K. Dick, too. From Alexie he chose Reservation Blues. I think you can't go wrong with this funny, honest, insightful Native American magical realist, but the one the kids are actually required to read is The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, which is his YA novel. For Dick, he chose Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, mainly, I think, so he could compare it to Bladerunner. I was glad to read that discussion, because I personally got so frustrated with the lack of relationship between the two that I ended up turning the movie off halfway through. But apparently that's just me. By the way, I've never had a student tell me that Philip K. Dick was required-- possibly because of his scatalogical name-- but I would make every highschooler read A Scanner Darkly, concluding with some kind of ceremony in memory of the author's list of drug abuse victims and any others the students or teacher knows. I've never seen the movie, but the book left me in tears as I remembered those I have lost.
If you want to know more about any of these books, here are the links. You don't have to buy anything!
. I like the fact that each essay is a few pages long, and I like the fact that the author writes very personally about his responses. What I don't like is that the author does not, to my mind, have a thorough command of the conventions of written English; he'll use structures like "both... also," and sometimes his flow of thought is not very clear. I wish I'd had a few hours with this book and a red pen before it went to press. Aside from that, I do like the whimsicality of his choices and juxtapositions... last night I was intrigued by the description of Labyrinths, a short story collection by Jorge Luis Borges, then completely turned off as he summarized The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath. I never had to read either of these books in school, and none of the students I'm working with now have ever mentioned either one, but I certainly have heard of them both, and I'm glad to know more so I can make a decision about whether they are worth my time. Borges sounds like my kind of thing; Plath sounds like my kind of instrument of torture. I would rather read about badminton than subject myself to another narrative of madness at this point in my life, and the more effectively done, the less interested I am. But that's just me.I'm glad he included Sherman Alexie and Phillip K. Dick, too. From Alexie he chose Reservation Blues. I think you can't go wrong with this funny, honest, insightful Native American magical realist, but the one the kids are actually required to read is The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, which is his YA novel. For Dick, he chose Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, mainly, I think, so he could compare it to Bladerunner. I was glad to read that discussion, because I personally got so frustrated with the lack of relationship between the two that I ended up turning the movie off halfway through. But apparently that's just me. By the way, I've never had a student tell me that Philip K. Dick was required-- possibly because of his scatalogical name-- but I would make every highschooler read A Scanner Darkly, concluding with some kind of ceremony in memory of the author's list of drug abuse victims and any others the students or teacher knows. I've never seen the movie, but the book left me in tears as I remembered those I have lost.
If you want to know more about any of these books, here are the links. You don't have to buy anything!
Wednesday, April 23, 2014
10-19: Books about Books
Turns out 10-19 is all booklists. Uh-oh! "750 Books for Middle Readers," that sort of thing. Not at all something I can curl up with. But I did find these two:
and
They both look more like collections of short essays than lists, and they both have the additional virtue of including many books I have already read. Obviously, with my current project, unless there is a list of "Best Non-Fiction by Dewey Decimal Number," which I'm sure there is but not at my library, the last thing I need is more reading ideas! But it's always interesting to see what someone else is saying about books I have loved (Kristen Lavransdatter, filed under Strong Women in Book Smart), hated ("Holden Caufield, That Little Brat," filed under "Violence and Loss" in Practical Classics) or successfully avoided so far ("The Scarlet Letter: I Don't Like It Either," filed under "Love and Pain," also in Practical Classics). I'm looking forward to reading about this great literature, if not actually reading it!
and
They both look more like collections of short essays than lists, and they both have the additional virtue of including many books I have already read. Obviously, with my current project, unless there is a list of "Best Non-Fiction by Dewey Decimal Number," which I'm sure there is but not at my library, the last thing I need is more reading ideas! But it's always interesting to see what someone else is saying about books I have loved (Kristen Lavransdatter, filed under Strong Women in Book Smart), hated ("Holden Caufield, That Little Brat," filed under "Violence and Loss" in Practical Classics) or successfully avoided so far ("The Scarlet Letter: I Don't Like It Either," filed under "Love and Pain," also in Practical Classics). I'm looking forward to reading about this great literature, if not actually reading it!
Monday, April 21, 2014
How to Succeed in Business, Given That Nobody Knows Anything: The Black Swan
Just finished my first book!
The Black Swan
went fast, since I had it on audio and Kindle. I kept debating whether it was in the right place in the DD system, since it was trying to be a book on epistemology (do we know anything, and if so, how?) but kept ending up being a book on investment strategies. My biggest takeaway was an investment strategy (broadly defined): We don't know much. Weird things can happen. They can be bad or good. If you can make a small risk that puts you in a position to profit from a good weird thing happening, do so, but don't stake much on the risk that a bad weird thing WON'T happen, because there is no meaningful way to assess the possibilities.
Tomorrow I go back to the library; I am excited to see what's in 010-019.
went fast, since I had it on audio and Kindle. I kept debating whether it was in the right place in the DD system, since it was trying to be a book on epistemology (do we know anything, and if so, how?) but kept ending up being a book on investment strategies. My biggest takeaway was an investment strategy (broadly defined): We don't know much. Weird things can happen. They can be bad or good. If you can make a small risk that puts you in a position to profit from a good weird thing happening, do so, but don't stake much on the risk that a bad weird thing WON'T happen, because there is no meaningful way to assess the possibilities.
Tomorrow I go back to the library; I am excited to see what's in 010-019.
Sunday, April 13, 2014
0-9: What Do We Know, and How Do We Know It? (The Black Swan)
I am about halfway through The Black Swan. I keep thinking about these verses of Scripture:
"Come now, you who say, 'Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a city, and spend a year there and engage in business and make a profit.' Yet you do not know what your life will be like tomorrow. You are just a vapor that appears for a little while and then vanishes away. Instead, you ought to say, 'If the Lord wills, we will live and also do this or that.' But as it is, you boast in your arrogance; all such boasting is evil." (James 4: 13-16, NASB) Taleb's book seems like an exposition of this passage, even more so because one of his main applications is to critique those who build their business models on the confidence that they know something about the future.
If you want to know Taleb's point, you could save a lot of time by reading just the first chapter here: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/22/books/chapters/0422-1st-tale.html?pagewanted=all. If you want to know what kind of fellow the author is, he'll be happy to tell you here: http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com. If you want a sound critical overview of the book, The New York Times has provided it here: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/22/books/review/Easterbrook.t.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0, but I rather like this analysis from a Berkeley prof, here: http://www.stat.berkeley.edu/~aldous/157/Books/taleb.html.
One thing neither reviewer mentioned was that Taleb has an odd habit of including sentences that don't make any sense or that are very badly composed, and sometimes whole paragraphs that seem completely irrelevant, at various moments in the book. I don't have an example to hand, but it gives me the same feeling that I have when I'm watching a 2.5 hour movie and a scene drags. Come on, you could have saved 45 seconds right there!
One very interesting point Taleb makes in the course of stressing how we don't know anything is this: We are very bad at estimating how long something will take. Sometimes, the further you travel towards a goal, the farther away it may recede. For example, a person who is out of work is more likely to remain out of work the longer he has been looking. Taleb presents this phenomenon as a certainty, which is an example of how statistics lie, but being aware that it is a possibility is useful information. Sometimes there is an external reason for this phenomenon-- employers get nervous about hiring people who have been out of work for a long time. Sometimes it is more psychological; the longer I am out of work, the more discouraged I might get about finding work, and the more comfortable with surviving some other way. But just knowing that the longer you let a project --like finding work or painting a room or writing a novel or going to war-- go, the more likely it is that it will go even longer, is useful information.
"Come now, you who say, 'Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a city, and spend a year there and engage in business and make a profit.' Yet you do not know what your life will be like tomorrow. You are just a vapor that appears for a little while and then vanishes away. Instead, you ought to say, 'If the Lord wills, we will live and also do this or that.' But as it is, you boast in your arrogance; all such boasting is evil." (James 4: 13-16, NASB) Taleb's book seems like an exposition of this passage, even more so because one of his main applications is to critique those who build their business models on the confidence that they know something about the future.
If you want to know Taleb's point, you could save a lot of time by reading just the first chapter here: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/22/books/chapters/0422-1st-tale.html?pagewanted=all. If you want to know what kind of fellow the author is, he'll be happy to tell you here: http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com. If you want a sound critical overview of the book, The New York Times has provided it here: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/22/books/review/Easterbrook.t.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0, but I rather like this analysis from a Berkeley prof, here: http://www.stat.berkeley.edu/~aldous/157/Books/taleb.html.
One thing neither reviewer mentioned was that Taleb has an odd habit of including sentences that don't make any sense or that are very badly composed, and sometimes whole paragraphs that seem completely irrelevant, at various moments in the book. I don't have an example to hand, but it gives me the same feeling that I have when I'm watching a 2.5 hour movie and a scene drags. Come on, you could have saved 45 seconds right there!
One very interesting point Taleb makes in the course of stressing how we don't know anything is this: We are very bad at estimating how long something will take. Sometimes, the further you travel towards a goal, the farther away it may recede. For example, a person who is out of work is more likely to remain out of work the longer he has been looking. Taleb presents this phenomenon as a certainty, which is an example of how statistics lie, but being aware that it is a possibility is useful information. Sometimes there is an external reason for this phenomenon-- employers get nervous about hiring people who have been out of work for a long time. Sometimes it is more psychological; the longer I am out of work, the more discouraged I might get about finding work, and the more comfortable with surviving some other way. But just knowing that the longer you let a project --like finding work or painting a room or writing a novel or going to war-- go, the more likely it is that it will go even longer, is useful information.
Friday, April 4, 2014
Let's Read All the Books!
I started thinking about this project a few weeks ago, and I just decided to start and figure out the details later. Easier to steer a moving ship and all that. So I took the first book from the first nonfiction shelf from the Chester County Library main branch. (I go there every three weeks to get audiobooks to mitigate my annoying commute) The book was:
The title is pretty comprehensive, right? And that's what it was about: a chapter on what scientist do wrong, a chapter on how journalists make it worse, and so on. It seemed to me to fall into the category of epistemology (can we know anything, and if so, how?), and therefore be a logical fit for the very beginning of the very first decade of the first century of the Dewey system, "Generalities." It was interesting enough, and certainly has changed the way I read magazines, which are full of "Scientists discovered this week that…" articles. However, it did seem to have the same flaw from which many non-fiction books suffer: they would have made great chapters. Meanwhile, as I was forcing myself to finish it (a task from which I eventually excused myself, grateful to the author for making me more skeptical, but not feeling the need to take his journey all the way to the end), I was doing some back of the envelope calculations and realizing that I was unlikely to live long enough to read every book in the library or even one book for every number in the system. That's when I decided to go decade by decade.
This approach has a number of benefits: it gives me more control over what I try to read-- in fact, it gives me the option of bringing home a selection of volumes. It gives me the fun of "shopping" along the whole decade-- although some seem to be much more full than others, and a few are not used at all. It also gives me a bit more of a picture of the flow-- or lack thereof-- of the categories. 0-9, for example, seems to start right in with consulting and go from there through paranormal theories to bibliophilia before landing squarely in technical manuals for various computer languages, which occupy about 3/4 of the decade's shelf space. These were my selections:
I got The Black Swan in audio and text versions, so I started with that. I am finding the style by turns engaging and mildly annoying, as if I sense that the author might not be somebody I would like very much if I knew him in person, but that as long as he is safely confined to the pages of a book, he's quite entertaining. He, too, has only one big idea, which has been extensively described elsewhere, and which nicely compliments the big idea of my first selection. He too believes that we don't know nearly as much as we think we do, a thesis I am more and more prepared to accept the longer I live! He makes this point through a number of personal and historical anecdotes, which are both intrinsically rewarding and thought-provoking-- for example, would I rather risk being broke on a chance of being a millionaire, or just plod along in the certainty of earning an income between known parameters? (Well, that one's easy-- the latter. Turns out I'm financially highly risk-averse.) He also is making me wonder whether there is any action point: how to prepare for events that can't at all be predicted but yet will completely disrupt your life?
And so, we're off to the races: 0-999! Have you ever done a Dewey Decimal challenge?
(Full disclosure: I am a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com. If this arrangement actually makes any money, I'll donate it to my church's bookstore. But mainly I just wanted you to be able to click through and learn more about the books if you wanted to.)
The title is pretty comprehensive, right? And that's what it was about: a chapter on what scientist do wrong, a chapter on how journalists make it worse, and so on. It seemed to me to fall into the category of epistemology (can we know anything, and if so, how?), and therefore be a logical fit for the very beginning of the very first decade of the first century of the Dewey system, "Generalities." It was interesting enough, and certainly has changed the way I read magazines, which are full of "Scientists discovered this week that…" articles. However, it did seem to have the same flaw from which many non-fiction books suffer: they would have made great chapters. Meanwhile, as I was forcing myself to finish it (a task from which I eventually excused myself, grateful to the author for making me more skeptical, but not feeling the need to take his journey all the way to the end), I was doing some back of the envelope calculations and realizing that I was unlikely to live long enough to read every book in the library or even one book for every number in the system. That's when I decided to go decade by decade.
This approach has a number of benefits: it gives me more control over what I try to read-- in fact, it gives me the option of bringing home a selection of volumes. It gives me the fun of "shopping" along the whole decade-- although some seem to be much more full than others, and a few are not used at all. It also gives me a bit more of a picture of the flow-- or lack thereof-- of the categories. 0-9, for example, seems to start right in with consulting and go from there through paranormal theories to bibliophilia before landing squarely in technical manuals for various computer languages, which occupy about 3/4 of the decade's shelf space. These were my selections:
I got The Black Swan in audio and text versions, so I started with that. I am finding the style by turns engaging and mildly annoying, as if I sense that the author might not be somebody I would like very much if I knew him in person, but that as long as he is safely confined to the pages of a book, he's quite entertaining. He, too, has only one big idea, which has been extensively described elsewhere, and which nicely compliments the big idea of my first selection. He too believes that we don't know nearly as much as we think we do, a thesis I am more and more prepared to accept the longer I live! He makes this point through a number of personal and historical anecdotes, which are both intrinsically rewarding and thought-provoking-- for example, would I rather risk being broke on a chance of being a millionaire, or just plod along in the certainty of earning an income between known parameters? (Well, that one's easy-- the latter. Turns out I'm financially highly risk-averse.) He also is making me wonder whether there is any action point: how to prepare for events that can't at all be predicted but yet will completely disrupt your life?
And so, we're off to the races: 0-999! Have you ever done a Dewey Decimal challenge?
(Full disclosure: I am a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com. If this arrangement actually makes any money, I'll donate it to my church's bookstore. But mainly I just wanted you to be able to click through and learn more about the books if you wanted to.)
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