Book

This book has been on my list for a long time, as it could be considered one of the most influential texts in shaping the western world. Written in 1651 Hobbes gives his views on political philosophy and touches on almost everything else along the way. Ghosts, validity of scripture, hell and truth. The central tenant of the book is his view on men in a “state of nature” which is synonymous with the state of “war of all against all”. He famously said that in this state “life of man, (is) solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” The book is broken into 4 parts and the first deals with this as well as an overview of Hobbes’ philosophic framework with which he is operating. Hobbes is a materialist and Christian in that way a sort of relic of his time. He discounts all events supernatural excepting a small handful which God did during biblical times. In the first part of the book, he describes man as a machine, tossing the platonic idea of soul out the window as silly. His logic is incisive and leaves little room for grey areas. In some ways it feels like you are indulging a senile old man who still believes that truth can be got at by “precise” definitions and clear statements, but on the other hand, it is hard to knock the man’s models as we live in a world partially built by him. If nothing else, he seemed to have a clear view of human nature. The crux of this book is that he believes (much like Sam Harris) that it is best to start considering political philosophy from the worst-case scenario. To him the worst-case scenario is a state of nature. This means that any government, no matter how tyrannical is preferable to the state of nature and therefore all efforts should tend towards preserving governments. To Hobbes a government at its core is always representational. A group of people agree to give up their right of ruling to a person or group of persons in order to avoid the state of nature. The person or group of persons is the embodiment of the people (book’s cover photo), otherwise known as the commonwealth. This brings about some other interesting conclusions from Hobbes’. Again, viewing the world in black and white terms, he believes you are either part of the commonwealth or not. If you are, then you agree to give up your representation to whoever your leader is. Since you’ve done this, you (and everyone in the commonwealth) could be considered to be the authors of the leader’s actions. This in turn means that the sovereign cannot do anything considered unjust as like God, justice is defined by the sovereign and the sovereign owns the agency of the subjects. To be brief Hobbes feels that the worst thing in the world is to be in a state of anarchy and the best defense against that is a strong united government, otherwise known as the leviathan. Something that everyone works to preserve to make it as difficult as possible to kill. Whatever consequences the ruler imposes the subjects should consider worthy sacrifices to avoid the state of nature. He finishes the book by trying to couch his principles in Biblical terms. He, unperturbed by the millions of scholars before him, wades into the murky depths of exegesis and comes out on the other end with his political philosophy intact. I was quite glad to finish this one as the last half was quite dry and I thought a little pointless as once a person with a brain turns 16, they stop being convinced by other people’s readings of scripture. I will say that his incisive logic did not sleep on religious matters either though as he brought up some really good problems overlooked by many. Like this thought on divine inspiration: ...

Lost in the Cosmos is a uniquely styled book. It loosely follows the theme of modern alienation. In most chapters Percy sets up a scene, asks a question, and then provides multiple choice answers leaving it to the reader to decide. I can see how the format could be a turn off for some, but I found the whole exercise very interesting although I admittedly never stopped to formulate my own answers. He also takes a detour into semiotics (the study of signifiers and signified) which never fails to get into the weeds but provides a context for many of his thought experiments. The central thesis of the book is that humans are “naming things”. We live in a world full of objects that we name and put inside boxes. This is all well and good but something uncanny happened when we became self-aware. We found that in a world full of named things we are unable to name ourselves. Everything is something to the subject, but the subject is nothing to itself. The attempt to say who you are is like trying to see the back of your head. This creates alienation in the individual that used to be salved by religion naming you as a creature, brahman, atman, something is better than nothing but now we live in an age where it is extraordinarily difficult to believe in those stories so most jettison the whole thing leaving themselves alone in the cosmos. To further illustrate this idea the book opens with a beautiful quote from Nietzsche: ...

This book tried to capture the zeitgeist of the 1950s and therefore by necessity over-simplified and added artificial narratives to the decades preceding it. This narrative laid the preamble for the book by arguing that different ages had had different defining psychological hang ups. Whether this is true or similar to a horoscope reading it is up for debate. As a psychologist coming at the problem of identity from an existential viewpoint authentic individuality was the focus of the book. Some points that stuck out to me are: ...

The author is a neuroscientist and psychologist who is also a concentration camp survivor. The first half of the book is split between an autobiographical description of his experience in the camps as well as some psychoanalysis on himself and other inmates and guards. After being released he founds a new school of psychology called “logotherapy”. The second half of the book talks more about what this school of psychology is and how it works. To boil down this guy’s philosophy is as follows: ...

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.

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. ...