At times illuminating, frustrating, thought provoking, unrelatable Roland Barthes has a different understanding of what myth is than most. He feels as if no one is intentionally creating myths anymore but they are being creating all the same via social values. This book is broken into two parts the first part is a collection of essays he wrote where he analyses various events and things in the modern day and explains the modern myth that is attached to them. This branch of study is I guess called semiology, basically it looks at things in the world and looks for things that carry more meaning than their essence. For example, he breaks down different portraits styles of French politicians to explain why they were cropped just so, looked in such and such a direction, wore just such a suit etc. etc. etc. All choices deliberately made to communicate more than just happenstance random choice but instead a specific meaning. He saw myth as an organizational tool used to maintain and justify a given social order. As indicated in this quote: ...

The only surviving work of the Roman Poet Lucretius, ‘On the Nature of things’ was written about a hundred years before Christ. The goal of the book was to try and explain Epicureanism to the Romans. I was surprised to learn that Epicurus was born about 300BC. This book explains pretty much every phenomenon you can think of from sweet vs bitter tasting things to why we sleep. Of course, the caveat being that it explains everything from a perspective of a guy two thousand years ago, so he was bound to have made a lot of mistakes. That being said it was impressive some of the things that he got right. For example, he argues that at a tiny level the most abundant thing must be nothing or void. If this was not the case movement would not be allowed. This of course turns out to be true as the closer you look at something the more space you start to see. The temptation is to read something like this from an angle of superiority, but while reading this instead of thinking “how far we’ve come” it kept making me feel like we haven’t come that far. Or rather we still barely know anything. A phrase from Foucault has been in my head for the last few weeks. He basically says that there are certain words that get used in science as definitions that aren’t actually definitions. They act instead as boxes that hide things we don’t understand. This seems very applicable here as many of the things Lucretius talked about, we now have better names and smaller boxes for, but there is still a lot of boxes. Lucretius essentially gives the basis of a mechanical viewpoint of the world that was free from the influence of gods. Where particles interacted with particles and the shapes of particles largely influenced the reaction. For example, he theorized that foods that were sweet had round smooth shaped particles while bitter food must have hooked and rough shaped particles. This viewpoint of bodies effecting bodies for all interactions remained the only answer in science until newton came along 300 years ago (Epicurus to Lucretius is the Same time as Newton to us) and turned everything on its head by introducing the concept of i.e., a box for something we don’t fully understand. As foundational of a text as this is, I wouldn’t necessarily say it needs to be on your must-read list. Probably the most interesting section in this book to me was a section on the mortality of the soul. Where the definition he gives of the soul is pretty much the same one modern science gives. Here modernity has not learned a single new thing since his time. In fact, we’ve probably forgotten some things.

When I bought the Symposium, it came in a two pack with Phaedrus as its second. I was glad to find out that this book too revolved around pederasty(sarcasm). Essentially, Phaedrus runs into Socrates walking in the country after hearing a speech by Lysias on reasons why a boy should only lend his favors to a lover (older man) who is not in love with him. The text is lighthearted and has many jokes as Socrates then makes a better speech which agrees with Lysias impressing Phaedrus, but eventually reveals he believed Lysias’ speech to be pretty lame and he didn’t agree with his own. The book finishes with him giving a rebuttal speech and then he focuses on the art of rhetoric and the dangers and pitfalls that are in it. My favorite quote is in regard to (ironically) writing: ...

This book was pretty long and mostly interesting. As one might expect it is fairly dense full of charts and diagrams. On the upshot is I now have a concept of what a standard deviation is. This book makes several statements: Everyone has varied levels of intelligence and this intelligence can be measured by what psychometricians call ‘G’ for general intelligence. G is a subset of IQ, but I’ll just refer to it via IQ. IQ has a high predictive power on various social outcomes including marriage, illegitimacy, salary, criminality and more. It is easier to be successful in life with a high IQ than with a low IQ. IQ is more important than how much money your parents had in predicting outcomes. Colleges have gotten better at selecting for IQ and therefore Ivy League schools get a much higher percentage of the best and brightest than they did 100 years ago. There is the emergence of a new class in America that they dub the “Cognitive Elite” these people are separated from the larger subset of the population in ways that were not the case 100 years ago. (i.e., private schools, rich neighborhoods, white collar offices, etc.). This new cognitive elite wields an extraordinary amount of power over the shape of our culture. IQ is affected by genetic and environmental factors IQ is pretty much set by the time you are 6 years old IQ varies between ethnicities in the following order from top to bottom Asian, White, Latino, Black. (They don’t really say why other than a combination of genetic and environmental factors) All of our best efforts in education haven’t produced as large of improvements in student’s IQ as most people think. The top IQ students have been neglected by government funding, which has instead been funneled towards the lowest performing students. Affirmative action is a disaster After reading this, whether right or wrong this book has been helpful. It was so controversial that it initiated many research groups to be formed to try and ferret out the legitimacy of the claims that the authors make, which is more useful than everyone nodding their heads in agreement. Most of the criticisms of this book center around their statistical methods and their decision to look at the correlation between race and IQ. It is worth noting that (from what I’ve seen) almost none of the conclusions the authors make have been refuted. For example, there is actually an apparent gap between white and black IQs (as of 96) for reasons unknown. My professional(joking) opinion is that the correlations are very compelling and intuitively it makes sense that a “smart” person would be more successful than a “dumb” person ON AVERAGE. That is pretty much the entire book in a single sentence, and I am not sure what is so controversial about that. As for the race difference thing, it makes more sense to me to look at it with open eyes instead of pretending it doesn’t exist. So, if there is a difference, we should do more investigations on trying to figure out how to close the gap. The authors sound defeatist on this point saying that all attempts in the past have failed to produce much change, but that doesn’t seem to be a reasonable conclusion to make from the data to me. In fact, the last section of the book was centered on what they would suggest for political actions based on this data and to me it was the worst part. As they aren’t political scientists it comes as no surprise their suggestions would tend towards the naive and whatever political bent, they brought to the table initially. Overall, I enjoy reading polarizing books because they are typically right at the center of important conversations. Rating 7.5/10

This book sets out to demonstrate how violence over history is on a downward trajectory and that we currently live in the least violent time in history by almost every metric. This is very counter intuitive considering we have gotten so efficient at killing people; indeed, we have invented weapons capable of wiping out the human race, but they have yet to be used. The future is a little more optimistic than it appears at first glance. This book starts by outlining various trends he found of violence that has drastically been reduced. For example, homicide, war, torture, executions, and lynching have all been in decline for some time. In the next section he talks about 5 factors that contribute to these declines. The first factor is “The Leviathan” borrowing the term from Thomas Hobbes who argues that even though governments are somewhat arbitrary they nonetheless decrease violence on the overall. The second factor contributing to peace is the concept of commerce. As they say, “if goods don’t cross borders, soldiers will”. Thirdly he attributes the feminization of culture as a cause for the drop in violence. He draws some very interesting correlations between cultures of honor and violence that I hadn’t thought of before. Honor much like a religious ideal can be inflated to infinite proportions leading to tiny insults being cause for a duel to the death. He then draws parallels between the duels of gentlemen from the past and gang violence in the present, showing how the motivation behind the violence is similar, it is just that one had been romanticized more. The ultimate example of this “honor” oriented violence is the era of chivalry. As women stopped being property to be fought over like oil or gold, many of these types of honor-based violence have decreased. Women also tend to be less aggressive on the whole, for example women are less likely to vote for hawkish foreign policy when compared to men. So as their ability to contribute and influence society has grown so too has their more peaceful ideas. The fourth cause in the decrease of violence is cosmopolitanism. He cites the printing press as having an outsized effect on people’s perceptions of other people. Crediting novels as the medium that allowed people for the first time to see the world from a different perspective. Doing this allowed people to feel the pain of others in ways that were not possible before literacy. The final reason he cites is what he labels “The escalator of reason”. He argues that enlightenment and humanist traditions have been the most successful tool in humanity’s arsenal for decreasing violence. To put it simply, if you believe in logic when you ask someone not to hurt you, by extension you also must apply the same logic to see that they themselves don’t want to be hurt. Thusly expanding our circles of consideration and integration. This book is well written, fairly easy to digest. It is full of interesting anecdotes and statistics that Pinker marshals to back his various claims. I enjoyed it, although I feel as if the book could have been shortened by a fair bit without sacrificing on content. There is some controversy as to his way of counting war violence to come away with the results he did, but no one can argue that violence has been restrained quite a bit since the Middle Ages. Especially when you consider the spine-chilling methods of executions and tortures employed and the complete lack of consideration for the welfare of humans that don’t look like you.

Nassim Taleb investigates the improbability baked into the world and the expert’s underestimation of it. A quick synopsis of the title is that for many years it was assumed that all Swans were white. This assumption held true over thousands and thousands of observations. It remained true until Australia was discovered and lo and behold a Black Swan was found and overthrew the “scientific theory” that all swans are white. This anecdote is a reminder that we cannot verify anything, only conduct experiments that either confirm or disconfirm theories. Confirmation of a theory should not be considered verification. This problem is the main focus of the book which is: you can for sure know when you are wrong but will never know when you’re right. Taleb defines a Black Swan event as relates to the book as having the following characteristics: ...

Short review here. Not much to say about this other than it was enjoyable reading. The book contained 18 short stories by H.P. Lovecraft. They seemed to get better and better. My favorites were The Rats in the Walls The Call of Cthulhu The Color Out of Space The Outsider Author Three things of note about the author, one he was reciting poetry by two, reading by three, and writing stories by six years of age. Secondly, his adult life was incredibly unstable. He didn’t ever seem to have much money and reading how he lived, he seemed a little bit like a loser. As in living with his mom, and then with a sugar mamma, and then moved in with his aunt. Makes me realize that maybe getting “Employee of the Year” for 40 years isn’t always the definition of success. Thirdly, he was a very materialistic thinker. It was this that partially attracted him to the strange and weird as a sort of escape from a bland clockwork world. ...

This was a really interesting read. The emphasis on the active role the mind plays in constructing reality was thought provoking. Also watching the space time paradigm go out to get milk is rewarding. I think I fundamentally disagree with a few of his main conclusions, but that’s something we’ll have to discuss over tea. It’s funny the more books I read like this; the more overlapping stories/ illustrations pop up. Like Necker cubes, split brain patient stories, etc. It is as if these units of information are virulent. Good read, I love books that help you look at the world differently. ...

Lee Strobel earned a law degree from Yale and was a crime reporter back in the 80s. Long story short his wife became a Christian and so he goes on a spiritual quest to see if there is anything to Christianity. Strobel sets the book up by saying he was going to use his hardnosed skeptic journalistic approach that he used on crime to get to the bottom of the evidence, historical or otherwise that supports Christianity. He proceeds to interview a lot of the leading evangelical theologians and historians asking them hard questions and recording their answers. As such this book is a good summary of the state of the art of Christian apologetics. Broken into 3 parts it starts by compiling the best arguments for the historicity and facticity of the gospels. This section sets out to prove the following: ...

At some point during a conversation, I asked a question that was half-joking and half-serious. I asked, “If life is suffering, why is it morally okay to continue bringing more life into this world?” Little did I know, I would soon read a book that asked the same question. This book, published in 2010 by Thomas Ligotti, was an explanation of his own philosophy, which happened to be extremely dark. Ligotti starts by explaining that most people have the assumption that “being alive is alright,” and it is from this assumption that most philosophy is built. Instead, Ligotti starts with the assumption that “being alive is NOT alright,” and proceeds from there. This book could be considered an agreement and expansion of Peter Zapffe’s “The Last Messiah,” in which Zapffe argues that consciousness (mostly a sense of self) is a class A blunder by evolution. Ligotti calls this level of consciousness the “Mother of All Horrors,” as it has given us the ability to realize that we are puppets, turning us into uncanny things that no longer belong in nature. Zapffe concludes that the best course of action is for humanity to implement a two-child limit, causing the gradual extinction of the human race. Ligotti and other philosophers argue that parents have blood on their hands for bringing more uncanny, absurd creatures into this world of suffering. He also points out the similarities between this worldview and Buddhism, in that the destruction of the self is the goal of both, just with different wrapping paper. Ligotti argues that many philosophers have arrived at the same conclusion that he has, but they have made a twist at the end to allow them to tell the same story differently or come to a different conclusion, which is usually the conclusion that “being alive is alright.” There was a quote near the end of the book that has really stuck with me, which captures the isolation communicated in the book. It went something like, “Humans are the only species that, if they were to instantly go extinct, would not be missed.” As a bit of trivia, this book was a primary inspiration for Matthew McConaughey’s character in the first season of True Detective. Overall, this book was difficult to read due to how dark it was. The writing was quite good, but it was the definition of defeatist. It has given me much to think about. ...