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Unofficial What are you Reading Thread?

Started by Thurnez Isa, December 03, 2006, 04:11:35 PM

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The Good Reverend Roger

Quote from: Reeducation on February 02, 2012, 06:57:22 PM
Quote from: Jasper on February 02, 2012, 04:35:25 PM
Reeducation, if you'd said that the 8 circuit theory was bad based on it not making predictions, or being unfalsifiable, or made some kind of argument based on its quality as a theory like that, then maybe people would have responded better.  Instead, you gave them "8 circuits in my ass".

We all have fun making fun of RAW, but still many people here do respect him.

Yes I worded the thing badly. And don't get me wrong, I respect the dude as well, but I just see his books as a one long zen koan.
I can't really explain it better.

edit: Of course I could be wrong. I don't know. :)

This is exactly why I barge into churches and synagogues every week and screech that they're wrong about everything.  Because I personally don't believe their model is effective.

It makes me lots and lots of friends.  For a given value of "friend".
" It's just that Depeche Mode were a bunch of optimistic loveburgers."
- TGRR, shaming himself forever, 7/8/2017

"Billy, when I say that ethics is our number one priority and safety is also our number one priority, you should take that to mean exactly what I said. Also quality. That's our number one priority as well. Don't look at me that way, you're in the corporate world now and this is how it works."
- TGRR, raising the bar at work.

BadBeast

Didn't Leary use the 8 circuit model to 'cure' paedophiles?
"We need a plane for Bombing, Strafing, Assault and Battery, Interception, Ground Support, and Reconaissance,
NOT JUST A "FAIR WEATHER FIGHTER"!

"I kinda like him. It's like he sees inside my soul" ~ Nigel


Whoever puts their hand on me to govern me, is a usurper, and a tyrant, and I declare them my enemy!

"And when the clouds obscure the moon, and normal service is resumed. It wont. Mean. A. Thing"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zpkCJDYxH-4

Jasper

I've heard stories where he used small doses of LSD to cure smoking and alcohol addiction.  (That's cure without quotation marks.)

Mesozoic Mister Nigel

Quote from: The Good Reverend Roger on February 02, 2012, 07:53:00 PM
Quote from: Reeducation on February 02, 2012, 06:57:22 PM
Quote from: Jasper on February 02, 2012, 04:35:25 PM
Reeducation, if you'd said that the 8 circuit theory was bad based on it not making predictions, or being unfalsifiable, or made some kind of argument based on its quality as a theory like that, then maybe people would have responded better.  Instead, you gave them "8 circuits in my ass".

We all have fun making fun of RAW, but still many people here do respect him.

Yes I worded the thing badly. And don't get me wrong, I respect the dude as well, but I just see his books as a one long zen koan.
I can't really explain it better.

edit: Of course I could be wrong. I don't know. :)

This is exactly why I barge into churches and synagogues every week and screech that they're wrong about everything.  Because I personally don't believe their model is effective.

It makes me lots and lots of friends.  For a given value of "friend".

:lulz: And you wonder why you have so many stalkers.
"I'm guessing it was January 2007, a meeting in Bethesda, we got a bag of bees and just started smashing them on the desk," Charles Wick said. "It was very complicated."


The Good Reverend Roger

Quote from: Nigel on February 04, 2012, 05:47:47 AM
Quote from: The Good Reverend Roger on February 02, 2012, 07:53:00 PM
Quote from: Reeducation on February 02, 2012, 06:57:22 PM
Quote from: Jasper on February 02, 2012, 04:35:25 PM
Reeducation, if you'd said that the 8 circuit theory was bad based on it not making predictions, or being unfalsifiable, or made some kind of argument based on its quality as a theory like that, then maybe people would have responded better.  Instead, you gave them "8 circuits in my ass".

We all have fun making fun of RAW, but still many people here do respect him.

Yes I worded the thing badly. And don't get me wrong, I respect the dude as well, but I just see his books as a one long zen koan.
I can't really explain it better.

edit: Of course I could be wrong. I don't know. :)

This is exactly why I barge into churches and synagogues every week and screech that they're wrong about everything.  Because I personally don't believe their model is effective.

It makes me lots and lots of friends.  For a given value of "friend".

:lulz: And you wonder why you have so many stalkers.

I don't wonder at all.  It's my smashing good looks that does it.
" It's just that Depeche Mode were a bunch of optimistic loveburgers."
- TGRR, shaming himself forever, 7/8/2017

"Billy, when I say that ethics is our number one priority and safety is also our number one priority, you should take that to mean exactly what I said. Also quality. That's our number one priority as well. Don't look at me that way, you're in the corporate world now and this is how it works."
- TGRR, raising the bar at work.

Mesozoic Mister Nigel

Quote from: The Good Reverend Roger on February 04, 2012, 05:38:28 PM
Quote from: Nigel on February 04, 2012, 05:47:47 AM
Quote from: The Good Reverend Roger on February 02, 2012, 07:53:00 PM
Quote from: Reeducation on February 02, 2012, 06:57:22 PM
Quote from: Jasper on February 02, 2012, 04:35:25 PM
Reeducation, if you'd said that the 8 circuit theory was bad based on it not making predictions, or being unfalsifiable, or made some kind of argument based on its quality as a theory like that, then maybe people would have responded better.  Instead, you gave them "8 circuits in my ass".

We all have fun making fun of RAW, but still many people here do respect him.

Yes I worded the thing badly. And don't get me wrong, I respect the dude as well, but I just see his books as a one long zen koan.
I can't really explain it better.

edit: Of course I could be wrong. I don't know. :)

This is exactly why I barge into churches and synagogues every week and screech that they're wrong about everything.  Because I personally don't believe their model is effective.

It makes me lots and lots of friends.  For a given value of "friend".

:lulz: And you wonder why you have so many stalkers.

I don't wonder at all.  It's my smashing good looks that does it.

:lol::1fap:
"I'm guessing it was January 2007, a meeting in Bethesda, we got a bag of bees and just started smashing them on the desk," Charles Wick said. "It was very complicated."


Juana

American Gods (Author's Perfered Text) by Neil Gaiman
"I dispose of obsolete meat machines.  Not because I hate them (I do) and not because they deserve it (they do), but because they are in the way and those older ones don't meet emissions codes.  They emit too much.  You don't like them and I don't like them, so spare me the hysteria."

EK WAFFLR

Finished the Kerr book. Now reading a book by Norwegian author Per Petterson, I Curse the River of Time.
"At first I lifted weights.  But then I asked myself, 'why not people?'  Now everyone runs for the fjord when they see me."


Horribly Oscillating Assbasket of Deliciousness
[/b]

Lord Cataplanga

Now reading 1Q84 book three, by Haruki Murakami. I like it a lot, so far, which was surprising because I really didn't like book two.
A lot of the side characters in book two are turning up to be very interesting people in the third book, which is fortunate because the protagonists were getting more and more boring.

Rococo Modem Basilisk

Just finished Distrust That Particular Flavour. The only problem I found with it is that I had already read most of the essays in it, just because I occasionally look for things written by William Gibson and read them (and have been for several years). I strongly recommend it for anyone who isn't quite as obsessed with William Gibson as I am.

Today I also finished The Knowable Future by David Loye. It's supposed to be a psychologist's take on futurism with a political science bent. I was slightly bothered by his obsession with ESP, and I suspect that at the time he was writing it he felt alienated from his field and blamed it on creeping rationalism. Several times he suggested that psychologists pretend behaviorism never happened and return to freudianism. On the other hand, he lays out a fairly straightforward system for performing predictions, and in the last chapter he gives a pair of predictions for the year 2000 (this was written in 1977), one optimistic and one pessimistic, and both more or less accurate.

The other day, I finished War and Peace in the Global Village by Herbert Marshal McLuhan. It was pleasant and interesting as any McLuhan book should be, and it was full of PD-style clip-art juxtapositions and memebombs. There were (surprisingly relevant) Joyce quotes in the margins. On the flipside, he doesn't appear to have gotten the memo that the Iron Mountain Report is a satire and spends a whole chapter drawing conclusions from it, which is a little like finding someone you respect blogging about what the Protocols of the Elders of Zion tells us about the Ruling Elite.

Earlier this week I read Millennium People by J. G. Ballard. I recommend it if you identify as a discordian, a poetic terrorist, an activist, or anything like that, on account of being (oddly enough) a cautionary tale. I recommend it also if you want an excuse to make fun of Occupy, or if you want to call Ballard a visionary for predicting Occupy, or if you just like tight prose.

I finished Amnesia Moon by Jonathan Lethem last week, and it's an interesting treatment of reality tunnels. If the barstool defense isn't doing it for you, give that a try. Give it a try if you find the barstool defense working too well for you, too.

I'm about a quarter of the way through Lethem's release of PKD's Exegesis. It's about half Cosmic Trigger and half Time Cube. The footnotes are great, though. Erik Davis and a handful of other 'big names' contribute.

I am likewise halfway through Psychological Warfare by Paul Linebarger. This is considered the original and standard treatment of the topic, which Linebarger wrote for the US Army. I'm not sure if the Army still uses it, or if the Army is still involved with psyops programs itself. Nevertheless, it's surprisingly accessible -- much more so in my opinion than the fiction the author wrote as Cordwainer Smith. Moreover, it's actually funny in places -- which is unexpected for a nonfiction book about psyops written for distribution by the US Army.

A while ago (several weeks at least, but probably closer to a month) I read Mirage Men by Mark Pilkington, which I recommend as a follow-up to Psychological Warfare on account of being about current, recent, or on-going US military psyops campaigns on domestic groups. If you look at contactee culture as an information system being experimented upon by outsiders as Vallee does (and Keel seemed to), Mirage Men makes a good argument that at least some of the parties involved are different branches of the US government, for reasons that at one point involved creating chaffing for legitimate operations (such as spy planes).

Reading Right Where You Are Sitting Now and recently read Reality Is What You Can Get Away With. I have Cosmic Trigger II and Cosmic Trigger III coming soon. I have a sneaking suspicion that at a certain point RAW stopped saying original and interesting things and started mostly phoning it in and repeating things he said in previous books, but those are all things I was unable to pirate so it's worth a try.


I am not "full of hate" as if I were some passive container. I am a generator of hate, and my rage is a renewable resource, like sunshine.

Cain

Mirage Men sounds like it is worth a read.  I definitely find there is more meat to Vallee's understanding of the UFO/contactee phenomenon than, say, Budd Hopkins, though I'm not sure it would be necessarily a smokescreen for experimental and secret planes, given the disturbing tendency towards cult-like behaviour such contactees tend to show.  But I'm sure you can already guess my thoughts on that (Jeff Wells minus Lovecraft and occultism, which is to say psyops directed domestically for other political purposes).

Loye's book also sounds interesting, could you expand on his method any?  I'm about to read Bruce Bueno de Mesquita's The Predictioneer's Game: Using the Logic of Brazen Self-Interest to See and Shape the Future.  Mesquita uses a game theory approach, but I understand it differs slightly in how it understands rational self-interest, or so I am led to believe.  Nevertheless, that the CIA use him as a consultant suggests his work is worth examining, IMO, even if his success rate is lower than he states (90% correct sounds implausibly high to me, but then anything above 80% in the social sciences automatically invites my skepticism), because the CIA brief the President, and so their beliefs invariably shape the understanding of the man in office.

Rococo Modem Basilisk

Loye proposes something called the "Ideology Matrix". It sounds nuanced, but really he's just breaking down particular major groups by tendency and counting which side they are on (he breaks liberals from conservatives, but then he breaks radicals of any stripe from centrists of any stripe, for instance). It feels like it should be less effective than, say, delphi pools.

I did a quick search on the author and his idea, and didn't see any mention on wikipedia, so it must have faded into obscurity. His method was something like this:





xforagainst
conservatives01
liberals10
radicals10
weak01
young10
old01
=3-3

Then, he says if the absolute value of either number is high but the total is close to zero, there will be a lot of violent disagreement about it (on the extremes, riots &c). Nothing so nuanced as to use game theory.


I am not "full of hate" as if I were some passive container. I am a generator of hate, and my rage is a renewable resource, like sunshine.

Cain

A bit simple, but it does make sense.  Probably more useful at a state or local level and to do with policy arguments, but still potentially useful.  I could see several ways to tinker with it and calibrate outcome more effectively... Thanks.

Scribbly

The Hunger Games Suzanne Collins.

I really enjoyed Battle Royale. The Hunger Games has a similar basis (kids thrown together to kill each other for political reasons) in a different setting. Post-apocalyptic North America.

I started reading this on the way to work this morning, and I was absolutely struck. I almost missed my change on the train because I was so engrossed in it. The lead is absolutely compelling. I'm not sure what it is about it, but it had me alternately starting to tear up and chuckling on the tube. Now I'm sitting at work and just wish I could crack it open and finish it. I think I will probably do that tonight.

When a book makes you look like a weirdo on public transport and you can't wait to get back to it, I figure that's a pretty good endorsement.
I had an existential crisis and all I got was this stupid gender.

EK WAFFLR

"At first I lifted weights.  But then I asked myself, 'why not people?'  Now everyone runs for the fjord when they see me."


Horribly Oscillating Assbasket of Deliciousness
[/b]