Unofficial What are you Reading Thread?

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

I still have that sitting in my stacks of "to read" books. Made some headway on "An anthropologist on Mars", which is pretty good but kind of old news by now.

Finished one of the focus group books, started another one. I'll probably read Babbie's "The Practice of Social Research" next.

Now that I've decided I don't want to double major because of the time factor, I've been really torn between majoring in psych and majoring in molecular bio. I still have a while to decide, but this morning I woke up with this idea; I finish the psych degree with a bio minor and a focus on neurobiology, and then winter 2015 I apply to the bio graduate program at PSU AND the neuroscience graduate program at OHSU. I'll probably get into the bio program if I don't get into the neuropsych program, and then I can re-apply as a Bio grad.

Backup plan: Made. Maybe. I need to talk to an advisor so I can stop obsessing.

[Cain]

Finally got around to reading Machiavelli's 'The Prince' (been on my reading list for a while) Also someone stole my first copy of it off my porch one night. At the time I thought it was hilarious and ironic that it got stolen but now that I've read the thing I see it really wasn't.

I have to say that for all its reputation as an 'evil scheming' book, I don't really see it that way. It certainly lends itself to that but it seems more of a 'this is how the world really is and works, ugly though it may be, and this is what you can do to manipulate things to your benefit.'  To be sure it's full of amoral stuff but I view it more as a look at politics once preconcieved notions of morality are removed, which reveals a very familiar landscape.

I'm still mulling it over and may reread it (it's actually a pretty fast read) but I can't help thinking that there are ideas and concepts in here that can be harnessed for other purposes. After all if 'The Prince' is considered an 'instruction manual' for the machine, there should be some good information on where to put the monkey wrench. If my thoughts congeal I'll try to make a post about it.

Well, in the context of the time it was written, it was.  Most books on leadership from that period or before tended to say "if you want to be a good leader, be a good Christian.  God will sort out the rest."

Machiavellia purposefully sets himself against Christian tradition, not only in his choices (note the large amounts of references to Classical figures, ie; Pagans), but also in terms of understanding what a good ruler is, and how a good ruler may not necessarily be a good person by Christian standards of morality, and may even have to "enter into evil" to achieve the greater good.

There is also the problem that the book is full of praise for Cesare Borgia...which lends credence to the idea that is possibly a satire of some sort, making a point about the Medici, to whom the book is obstensibly dedicated.  Given Cesare's historical reputation, the Medici would hardly see that as flattering, and Machiavelli was noted even before the publication of The Prince as being a satirical playwright, with a biting and even black sense of humour.

It is definitely worth re-reading, though.  While, as you say, it is a very slim volume and thus easy to read in some ways, Machiavelli is very good at condensing complex concepts into short, easily read passages.  His historical analogies and examples are also complex, and likely chosen for that reason (Machiavelli's other writing job was as a historian of Florence).

And, of course, The Prince must be contrasted with the longer Discourses on Livy, which is his book on politics in republics.

[MMMW]

I bought "Spinfluence: The Hardcore Propaganda Manual for Controlling the Masses" because it looked flashy and I'm a big dupe. Irony. I guess when something self-proclaims to be hardcore, it's because it's not.

[Cain]

Hardocre propaganda?  With XXX-rated memes.  Hawt disinformation on generality action.  Barely legal Big Lies!

[McGrupp]

And, of course, The Prince must be contrasted with the longer Discourses on Livy, which is his book on politics in republics.

Added to my list. Still have History of the Peloponesian War on there too from way back in february. Though I'm reading much more these days. Not smoking pot is like having magical powers of reading comprehension.

[Rococo Modem Basilisk]

Finally got around to reading VALIS, by Phillip K Dick. That's the book from whence the term "Black Iron Prison" originated.

Really fantastic read. Enjoyed every word of it. It's one of those books that will make you a little bit crazy if you let it get into your head.

Between VALIS and Radio Free Albemuth, I think I might prefer Radio Free Albemuth. But, VALIS is a bit more mindfucky.

I did end up buying the Exegesis (or, at least, the most recent thousand-page subset of it). It's not as interesting as VALIS, because it's precisely what you sort of expect it to be: a thousand pages of an intelligent, creative, well-read paranoid schizophrenic on amphetamines trying to analyze and come to grips with a particularly strange hallucination. I got about half-way through it, and had to stop.


I've recently been reading Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct. It bothers me a bit that he doesn't do a good job trying to support his arguments. Mostly, it bothers me because I know a bit about the subject matter and I know that he's describing things more or less correctly (although at one point he gives a set of 'words' generated by 'neural nets', and not only is word-generation through ANNs a pretty strange thing to do, but they actually look like they've been generated by letter-tokenized markov chains instead) rather than bullshitting about things with which he is only vaguely familiar (like Kevin Kelly does in every fucking thing), but he writes in this breezy disorganized way like Kevin Kelly and doesn't use footnotes. There are good, readable science writers who do justice to their subject matter but write in such a way that you can find well-rounded and well-supported arguments upon a re-reading (such as James Gleick does in The Information), and it disappoints me that Pinker isn't doing this -- seemingly by choice. Perhaps he's gotten better; this was his first book for a general audience.

I've also been working my way through Wireless, a collection of short stories by Charles Stross. The quality varies, but the overwhelming sense of ambient dread does not. If it wasn't so science fiction it'd all be horror, instead of just the stuff that imports ideas from Lovecraft's circle. It's good for reading in line at the DMV, and it's passable as a substitute for Neptune's Brood, which came out a month ago but I still can't afford.

[Cain]

And, of course, The Prince must be contrasted with the longer Discourses on Livy, which is his book on politics in republics.

Added to my list. Still have History of the Peloponesian War on there too from way back in february. Though I'm reading much more these days. Not smoking pot is like having magical powers of reading comprehension.

Yead, reading that stoned would....not be a fun experience.  Thucydides is wonderfully precise, but if there is ever an analogue to "academic German" in any other language in the world, it might be his dry, analytical, writing style in Ancient Greek.

Hell, I don't recommend reading it on a deadline, like I originally had to.

[Random Probability]

Lately I've been reading Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson.  While thoroughly a work of fiction, Stephenson sketches in broad strokes the problems with data privacy and freedom (i.e., encryption and interception) that are more true today than when he wrote it a dozen years ago.

I'm only about half-way through it since I only bother reading during long flights as there are far to many distractions around the house.  And it's about a thousand pages, give or take.  What I've read so far is intriguing.  I'll leave it to the laymen to decide how good a job he's done toning some of the concepts down for non-technical readers, but I think he's made it reasonably accessible.  Maybe.  At the very least it's fun to read a story that uses historical figures as characters.

It should be noted that this is the first book in the Baroque Cycle.  The other two books occur in previous centuries, but this one is the one to start with.

[Cramulus]

Finally got around to reading VALIS, by Phillip K Dick. That's the book from whence the term "Black Iron Prison" originated.

Really fantastic read. Enjoyed every word of it. It's one of those books that will make you a little bit crazy if you let it get into your head.

Between VALIS and Radio Free Albemuth, I think I might prefer Radio Free Albemuth. But, VALIS is a bit more mindfucky.

what I liked about it is something that Dick does very well in his books ---

there are all these nested layers of narrative, and the narrator is on a different one than the character (even though they're the same person)

and since ultimately the book is about spreading a certain piece of information, it gradually dawns on you that your awareness of the narrative is also one of the layers


When I encountered the term "Black Iron Prison" in the book, I had totally forgotten that this was the book from whence the term originated... So it gave me a bit of a gnostic jolt, like, this book was talking to me personally. Reminding me what was really going on. Very surreal.

I've recently been reading Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct. It bothers me a bit that he doesn't do a good job trying to support his arguments. Mostly, it bothers me because I know a bit about the subject matter and I know that he's describing things more or less correctly (although at one point he gives a set of 'words' generated by 'neural nets', and not only is word-generation through ANNs a pretty strange thing to do, but they actually look like they've been generated by letter-tokenized markov chains instead) rather than bullshitting about things with which he is only vaguely familiar (like Kevin Kelly does in every fucking thing), but he writes in this breezy disorganized way like Kevin Kelly and doesn't use footnotes. There are good, readable science writers who do justice to their subject matter but write in such a way that you can find well-rounded and well-supported arguments upon a re-reading (such as James Gleick does in The Information), and it disappoints me that Pinker isn't doing this -- seemingly by choice. Perhaps he's gotten better; this was his first book for a general audience.

That's a bummer to hear! It's funny, The Language Instinct was probably the main book which made me want to study psychology, it was my first brush with how the mind is actually studied. And Pinker started the Luxuriant Hair Club for Scientists, so he always ranked high in my book.

But in the last few months I keep running into quite articulate critiques of him. (Cain recently pointed out an interesting one by IOZ but I can't find it) And I am recalling a psych student friend of mine taking a "philosophy of the mind" class in college, and was severely annoyed by Pinker's How The Mind Works. I had attempted to hack through The Blank Slate a few years back but also found it kind of .. I'm not sure how to put it - it didn't draw me in. So maybe it's time to revise my opinion.

If I recall correctly, the footnotes / biblio for The Language Instinct were pretty extensive though, no? Are you spotting a lot of places where he's talking out his ass or wrong?

[Rococo Modem Basilisk]

Cryptonomicon is lovely. I was unable to read the Baroque Cycle until I finished Cryptonomicon.

[Rococo Modem Basilisk]

Finally got around to reading VALIS, by Phillip K Dick. That's the book from whence the term "Black Iron Prison" originated.

Really fantastic read. Enjoyed every word of it. It's one of those books that will make you a little bit crazy if you let it get into your head.

Between VALIS and Radio Free Albemuth, I think I might prefer Radio Free Albemuth. But, VALIS is a bit more mindfucky.

what I liked about it is something that Dick does very well in his books ---

there are all these nested layers of narrative, and the narrator is on a different one than the character (even though they're the same person)

and since ultimately the book is about spreading a certain piece of information, it gradually dawns on you that your awareness of the narrative is also one of the layers


When I encountered the term "Black Iron Prison" in the book, I had totally forgotten that this was the book from whence the term originated... So it gave me a bit of a gnostic jolt, like, this book was talking to me personally. Reminding me what was really going on. Very surreal.

VALIS does do the thing with the characters better. It's one of the few instances where PKD characters seem like real people, probably because they were heavily based on his close friends. However, VALIS seemed very much to be a vehicle for exegesis quotes (much moreso than Radio Free Albemuth, or even the heavily theological Divine Invasion). It's a very nice vehicle, and he managed to tack on a plot after about fifty pages, but it's still not really the same as a story and it isn't Neal Stephenson length so he can't get away with putting a bunch of infodumps in everywhere and expecting not to interrupt the pacing.

I've recently been reading Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct. It bothers me a bit that he doesn't do a good job trying to support his arguments. Mostly, it bothers me because I know a bit about the subject matter and I know that he's describing things more or less correctly (although at one point he gives a set of 'words' generated by 'neural nets', and not only is word-generation through ANNs a pretty strange thing to do, but they actually look like they've been generated by letter-tokenized markov chains instead) rather than bullshitting about things with which he is only vaguely familiar (like Kevin Kelly does in every fucking thing), but he writes in this breezy disorganized way like Kevin Kelly and doesn't use footnotes. There are good, readable science writers who do justice to their subject matter but write in such a way that you can find well-rounded and well-supported arguments upon a re-reading (such as James Gleick does in The Information), and it disappoints me that Pinker isn't doing this -- seemingly by choice. Perhaps he's gotten better; this was his first book for a general audience.

That's a bummer to hear! It's funny, The Language Instinct was probably the main book which made me want to study psychology, it was my first brush with how the mind is actually studied. And Pinker started the Luxuriant Hair Club for Scientists, so he always ranked high in my book.

But in the last few months I keep running into quite articulate critiques of him. (Cain recently pointed out an interesting one by IOZ but I can't find it) And I am recalling a psych student friend of mine taking a "philosophy of the mind" class in college, and was severely annoyed by Pinker's How The Mind Works. I had attempted to hack through The Blank Slate a few years back but also found it kind of .. I'm not sure how to put it - it didn't draw me in. So maybe it's time to revise my opinion.

If I recall correctly, the footnotes / biblio for The Language Instinct were pretty extensive though, no? Are you spotting a lot of places where he's talking out his ass or wrong?

The bibliography is fine. My issue with the footnotes is that there aren't many, and when they exist they contain an aside or a joke, instead of support for the point.EDIT: I flipped through just now, and there is exactly one footnote in the first 350 pages of my copy. It's in chapter two. It's not a bad one (it points people toward the glossary), but unless I missed some it's the only one in more than half the book.

The things that are bothering me aren't where he's wrong or talking out of his ass, but instead where he is right and totally justified but is making a really shoddy argument (or makes a good argument but leaves big gaping holes in it). It bothered me as a programmer, because whenever I see a hole in an argument I see it as an exploitable surface. He's clearly going through the motions of supporting all his arguments and filling in all the holes, but then he misses some inexplicably or glosses over some very important step in reasoning.

He's at his best when he's explaining Chomsky's sentence diagramming rules. He does a damned good job of explaining markov chains, too. But, when he walks through an argument diagnostically, he walks through it from the perspective of somebody who already knows the answer, and he walks through it as though he assumes the reader also already knows the answer (and believes him). He rushes through the argument while keeping the general language of a properly supported argument, but doesn't bother to close the loopholes where alternate explanations can lay (even in passing), except in a handful of situations, where he often covers it in a later chapter without mentioning it in the earlier one.

I get the impression that he had initially written a much longer, much better book, and that the editor asked him to chop out about half of the technical stuff, then asked him to add a quarter of it back in later after he had dutifully sewed up the wounds.

[Cramulus]

adroitly said! I definitely recognize what you're referring to

[Cain]

Been blasting through Greg Bishop's Project Beta while organizing my files on my laptop.

Project Beta is the amusing, true-life story of how Air Force intelligence infiltrated the UFO community in the 1980s and drove one particular man, Paul Bennewitz, to the brink of insanity - all in the name of national security.

Essentially, the Air Force, NSA etc was worried that UFO enthusiasts would stumble upon elements of top-secret projects, and then be pumped by Soviet intelligence for the data.  So the idea was to infiltrate the UFO community and steer it down the paths of inquiry that it desired, which was away from the top secret programs.

This meant the Air Force and NSA helped, inadvertantly, spawn the "Dulce Base" conspiracy theory and associated topics.  By beaming nonsense at Bennewitz's equipment, which Bennewitz faithfully decoded according to his own mythology/psychosis, the theory grew that there was a secret base under Dulce, New Mexico, where humans were kidnapped for genetic experimentation, despite the many, obvious problems with that theory.

And of course, the UFO nuts are convinced that the Air Force was doing this to cover up the "real truth" about aliens on Earth...helpfully aided by a former AF counterintelligence officers statements.

While morally reprehensible, you have to admire the sheer ingenuity of what occured.

[Junkenstein]

Would I be right in considering the above an example of Cognitive infiltration? If so, that concept has probably got a lot to answer for regarding the outright crazy conspiracy theories.

[Cain]

Yes and no.  I mean, it's certainly not what Sunstein would recommend, since it meant actively courting and propagating crazy conspiracy theories.  But in terms of infiltrating a society or group and subverting its information flow and outlook...yeah, it's definitely a model.