beforeness asked: Enjoying the phrase "world product"
Thanks!
It really does feel like … there is a way “a world” is supposed to be, and this one came out of the factory wrong or something
beforeness asked: What was the name of that book you were blogging about a couple months ago about marine boot camps?
Making The Corps by Thomas E. Ricks. I highly recommend it.
beforeness asked: No problem, also I had a quick look at your goodreads and I wanted to ask, as a mathematician, how bad did you find Everything & More? I remember hearing that mathematically it was terrible but I wouldn't have had the background to know when reading it.
It was astonishingly bad. According to the D. T. Max biography, Wallace ran the book by a math-educated reader during the editing process, and that reader came back with many corrections, but in a lot of cases Wallace stood his ground, which is baffling to me. It’s one thing to do that with aesthetic choices, but I don’t understand doing it in math, where sometimes you can be just plain wrong.
The reviews here and here give a good sense of the book’s overall problems, and the unofficial “errata” here should give some sense of the frequency and severity of the errors, even if you don’t have the math background to understand the corrections being made.
beforeness asked: If you're still taking the praise, your blog, along with a few belonging to my friends, made me create a Tumblr account because I felt it would be handier to have them all on a dashboard rather than checking them individually in a browser.
That’s flattering, thank you!
beforeness asked: I'd also read a science of Santa article as a kid, but it lacked any obvious sign to me that it was tongue in cheek so it just made me far more certain that he was real, because well it was scientifically plausible.
Huh, I wonder how many kids this happens to when those articles are written? I guess I’d never thought about it.
beforeness asked: Ah ok, I like his writing generally, but felt that was probably the weakest thing of his ive read, his talk on Philip k dick is a lot more interesting, I think
I might check it out. I dunno, I’ve read some of his (Tom Whyman’s) blog as well and it rubs me the wrong way in the same way the “cupcake fascism” article did?
It just feels like his whole act is tossing all his impressions and prejudices and vague associations in a blender and then presenting the whole thing in a kind of bombastic pretentious way, but with a lot of humor and a sense that the bombast is all tongue-in-cheek? Which doesn’t really work for me: as comedy, it’s not especially funny, and as analysis, it’s (as I said) just a bunch of preconceived notions jumbled together.
(I guess I feel this way about a lot of what I guess could be called “experimental nonfiction” – if you want to write literature, just write literature. Irony and ambiguity and big jumbled tangles of not-well-differentiated THEMES are not necessarily virtues in nonfiction, and often you get the worst of both worlds.)
beforeness asked: what did you make of cupcake fascism, out of curiosity?
I talked about it on here a while ago – see this post (including entire reblog chain) and also this post
beforeness asked: I don't know how to phrase it, but your post about LW, even though I broadly agree with it, kind of irked me, I'm not sure how the surface signal stuff really plays into all of it, when the reason the LW community is so good has nothing to do with that, and everything to do with the quality of the people there - surely if LW doesn't have these kinds of things happen that's all that matters, since it has its own language which hypothetically would could be used by manipulative people in same way?
(Cut for the same reason the last one was cut)
beforeness asked: I find it really interesting how many comments like the one you've quoted from people with far-right politics will open by stating they were once very liberal
Yeah, it’s pretty common, especially among people who want to present it as an intellectual development: “I grew up in a good left-wing intellectual family but then I started to see cracks in the facade etc.”
People who talk like this often make me wary because — as in the case of the person I quoted — it seems like they’re responding to problems with their own side by embracing the other side, its own problems be damned. So, in that person’s case, they were infuriated by mistakes in an overreaching book by an arrogant scientist (Gould), so they picked up … another overreaching book by an arrogant scientist (Wolfram).
The right response to realizing “oh no, my people have problems” is not “ah, it must be the other side’s people who have no problems.” Everyone’s got problems.