What Did You Just Finish?

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > The Book Barn > What Did You Just Finish?

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

Just finished Lost Horizon a bit ago. A bizzare and very of-its-time combo of overly passive descriptive prose, episodes of snappy and well-executed material that doesn't insult the reader, and running through it all, a magnificent spectrum of 1930s British paternalistic racism that stretches from "oh well that's pretty open minded, for the time period" to "tugs at collar nervously" to "only members of the Nordic Race can gain the full benefit of this mysterious Oriental power, and we have created a fallout vault of enlightened Western culture to survive the coming apocalypse with our loyal servants of the other races".

# ¿ May 3, 2022 06:38

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# ¿ May 5, 2024 16:59

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

the Spain Virus posted:

Tell me, is there interest in me doing a read-through of all the Carolyn Wells mystery novels here, spoilering the endings? I might also go through all the Perry Mason novel, but I've have to dig them out.

If not, I'd take a lighter tone and do it in GBS, but I'd rather do it here,

(They are, many of them GBS worthy, I have to say)

Yes, definitely!

# ¿ Jul 23, 2022 23:45

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

Gaius Marius posted:

There's a sequel?

Bartleby 2: Re-Scrivened

# ¿ Mar 22, 2023 04:04

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

The Snow Leopard is the story of one man's profound and grueling two-month, 250-mile journey up his own rear end. Recovering from his wife's death, Peter Matthiessen leaves his grieving son with friends and goes to Nepal to engage in 300 pages of florid prose that alternates between hairshirtery, orientalism, pseudoscience, and casual racism. Matthiessen cannot resist interpreting his every mood swing for its profound significance. With those swings, he alternates between reading deep truths into the half-understood version of Buddhism he ascribes to local lamas, and referring to the residents of the steppe as either primitive or childish. In between there's plenty of time to endorse free energy theory, wax poetic with discredited racial theories about cultural commonalities and promote the existence of the yeti.

The most remarkable thing is that he manages to make the high Himalayas so much about him, and, as a result, so goddamn boring.

Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 08:01 on Oct 13, 2023

# ¿ Jun 25, 2023 00:42

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

Nice Tuckpointing! posted:

I kid you not this was one of the hardest books for me to finish. And the same year I read, based on a friend's recommendation, "The Power of Now" and it was a one-two punch of third-life crisis dudes thinking everybody cares about their celebration of ignorance, and calling it wisdom? Does that make any sense? Because the book sure didn't. By the end of "The Snow Leopard" I was wondering if I was losing my mind considering all the praise this book has received. Even Paul Theroux, the snarkiest, least hairshirtery of the dudes who made their careers ditching their families to travel, loves it.

I agree wholeheartedly, even as someone who reads a lot of nonfiction (including very bad stuff). It took me about a year and a half to get through, I think it may have permanently deteriorated my enjoyment of reading, and "celebration of ignorance" captures it perfectly, on levels I'd not considered before.

Clearly we should both read The Secret next.

Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 07:37 on Jul 30, 2023

# ¿ Jul 30, 2023 07:34

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

I've just finished Medieval Ethiopian Kingship, Craft, and Diplomacy with Latin Europe by Verena Krebs. This fantastic, well-cited and well-written text provides a detailed description the history of correspondence and emissarial missions between the Ethiopian imperial Christian kingdom and European courts, a topic I knew nothing about.

This book also resoundingly corrects longstanding false historical beliefs about the basis for these missions; historians, driven in part by racist assumptions, assumed that the Ethiopian kings were sending missions to Europe to seek superior European technology, particularly in the realm of warfare. Krebs convincingly demonstrates with extensive citation to available records that these missions were driven by domestic Ethiopian political and eschatological forces, and were principally in pursuit of religious goods, relics, and cultural materials, which the Solomonic court used to expand and cement its cultural and political hold over its territories through the construction of lavish religious sites. These missions were also a reflection of the practice of imitating perceived features of the Solomonic kingdom, and were in part ceremonial in nature. In correcting the record, Krebs describes fascinating details about how these missions were misconstrued, first by European powers, then by historians, in a discussion of claims and context that touches everything from the Pazzi conspiracy to the Nazis. I very strongly recommend this book, especially for anyone who, like me, is ignorant about the subject- It's remarkably approachable even if you don't know the subject. I barely knew there was an Ethiopian Christian kingdom!

I also want to strongly recommend the thread that directed me to this and several other books. This is Cats with Cannons: Let's Play Pentiment, an LP of the recently released adventure game released by Obsidian Entertainment. A branching murder mystery narrative taking place in early 16th-century Bavaria, Pentiment is all about the ways that historical facts can be altered, purged or be covered over, told in a highly entertaining and responsive setting. It's a glorious work of artistry, engaging design and authenticity, directed by Josh Sawyer, history major and goon who I believe has specialized education in the era. JSawyer is also participating in the thread by sharing details about some of the extensive historical research that went into the game. If you want to learn about different kinds of medieval script, see a dialogue between Saint Grobian and Socrates in a mind palace, or get a whole swathe of other wonderful book recommendations in this vein, this is the thread for you.

Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 06:46 on Oct 9, 2023

# ¿ Oct 8, 2023 19:21

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

Debbie go Home, a collection of short stories by Alan Paton, the author of Cry, the Beloved Country. Excellent, remarkably clear prose from a very interesting figure I knew little about, capturing the hosed up racial dynamics of pre-apartheid SA from the perspective of about as good a paternalistic figure as was possible for the period (dude ran a reform school for black boys for a lot of his career taking a much more progressive approach than was the norm, before helping found an antiapartheid party that ultimately got squelched by the NP). That said about half the book is very paternalistic, literally, as it's fictionalized anecdotes from his time as a schoolmaster regarding specific black students.

I read this 150 page short story collection in 2 days after taking several months juggling multiple 300 page nonfiction books, and it was the only fiction text in my current backlog. I'm giving myself whiplash!

Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 08:10 on Oct 13, 2023

# ¿ Oct 13, 2023 07:56

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

I just finished Causal Inference in Statistics: A Primer by Judea Pearl, Madelyn Glymour, and Nicholas Jewell. Before reading this book I believed that structural equation modeling and Bayesian analysis were useful, if sometimes counterintuitive, frameworks by which complex causal inferences could be derived, based on carefully examined and articulated assumptions. Thanks to this short text, which took me only a couple months to struggle through, I now understand that all statistical reasoning is worthless and that mathematics itself was a divine joke visited upon mankind. I am now going to read some other books on causal reasoning in statistics that I can hopefully use to undo the effects of reading this book.

Judea Pearl is apparently a very important innovator in statistics and computer science, but the book totally, completely, fails to effectively work as a primer on causal inferences from pretty much any direction other than, I assume, whatever specific theoretical framework he is coming out of. Rather than explaining concepts using grounded examples or articulating them in order, the book almost immediately jumps to pure, extended algebraic proofs of middle concepts (sometimes at way, way more length than necessary), frequently failing to articulate prior assumptions. While some useful concepts are explained at some points, they are surrounded by a landscape of text spent on the least useful elements of the framework. Other terms are used inconsistently, particularly ones that are explicitly the authors' inventions. Little discussion of actual causal reasoning or the underlying assumptions involved is provided, and the book instead leaps to repeated examples or applications of SEM and later counterfactual reasoning that just...handwaves these assumptions, to spend pages upon pages of text re-proving relatively trivial and useless applications of the concept of SEM. Yes, I understand that you can precisely model counterfactuals if you have a fully specified model and the values of all exogenous variables, Dr. Pearl. Do you see why I might want to do some groundwork before I make the claim that I have fully specified my model and the values of all exogenous variables?

Especially horrifying was a section of material from the end of the text where the authors effortlessly transposed their reasoning to court cases, complete with an entire raft of bizarre assertions about science, policy, and the assumed distributions of data. One standout was a hopefully hypothetical case where an individual died after using a drug for back pain and his estate sued the manufacturer, arguing that safety data from approvals experiments was not valid because the deceased "took the drug of his own volition, unlike subjects in the experimental study, who took the drug to comply with experimental protocols", and provide nonexperimental data on postmarket outcomes. The authors begin to apply their analysis by saying "we ignore sampling variability." Using data from this nonexperimental set, the authors assert that "barring sampling errors, the data provide us with 100% assurance that the drug was responsible for the death of Mr. A." I fully believe this guy knows that's not an okay thing to say, and that he's a careful and cautious researcher who understands the importance of the context of reasoning with statistical modeling. But that's absolutely at odds with the what he's presented in this text.

edit: upon reading reviews and the book webpage I now understand that a lot of my struggles to understand parts of the middle of the text were because it's also riddled with errors.

Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 08:14 on Jan 12, 2024

# ¿ Nov 26, 2023 04:35

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

Sweetness and Power by Sidney W. Mintz, which I got as a gift some time ago and am finally clearing off my backlog. This book is apparently highly influential; it should not be. I started the book with great expectations as Mintz, an athropologist, described how he spent years doing sugar cultivation fieldwork in Puerto Rico, literally working the fields alongside multiple generations of impoverished laborers. ...but this was pretty much the only mention of Puerto Rico, or fieldwork, in the book.

Nominally speaking, Sweetness and Power is a description of sugar and its relationship to humanity over time, particularly connecting the grower and consumer's respective experiences in the systems of capital. In practice, Mintz has written a terrible anthropology book that desperately wants to be a history book. Trying to be anthropological, the book is divided into chapters on the different roles of sugar: chapter 1 is "food, sociality, and sugar", chapter 2 is production, chapter 3 consumption, etc. However, because the topic is much too broad and historically focused to work with this anthropological organization, Mintz repeatedly re-tells the chronology of sugar in each chapter. The general scope of coverage is also lopsided: Mintz spends way, way more time on consumption than anything else (a full third of the book is this one chapter), and in practice almost all of the actual detailed research or sourcework goes into either early historical uses of sugar or, specifically and exclusively, changes in its use in Britain. While this is an important topic given sugar's role in the British empire's glory years, it's covered over and over again to the exclusion of other topics (like detailed information about cultivation or economics or trade or policy). A lot of the claims are reliant almost entirely on price or consumption stats, some of questionable quality. Organized entirely chronologically and without repetition, the book would probably be a third its length.

I strongly suspect the root cause here is that Mintz dictated the book to someone and then just...didn't edit it. At one point Mintz uses the word drageoir for several paragraphs, then says he knows his audience doesn't know what the word means, and only then provides a definition. This isn't to prove a point or anything, he just...does it. This would make sense in a first draft being typed straight from a dictaphone; it makes no sense in a final publication. He has a distracting and infuriating tendency (in chapters 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5) to use interrupting parentheticals (for example, in chapters 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5) to repeat explanations or list sub-elements of a concept in multiple places (e.g. the different chapters of the book, the first, second, third, fourth, and fifth) even though it adds nothing to the thing being described - a practice he sometimes repeats multiple times on a page in each chapter, that is, the first, second, third, fourth, and fifth. It's like the fucker's trying to hit a pagecount. The above example is nowhere near as bad as it is in the text, where this sort of example occurs on multiple subjects, multiple times a page. If you want your audience to understand what context factors for food consumption are, you only need to give examples once! Not twenty times! If you say sugar was integrated into the activities of daily life, then yes, that's definitely a major thesis, and it may be worth repeating that assertion in multiple places. However, you do not need to give a list of daily life activities every time you say it!

For an anthropologist playing at historian, though, Mintz is also a poo poo historian (and arguably a poo poo academic). He plays fast and loose with terminology and, most frustrating of all in a book that's got a serious bibliography, sometimes just spends a page or two making wild claims with no cited source. This gets especially infuriating in the final chapter, where the mask falls off and it becomes clear that Mintz is driven by an intense hatred of modern food and approaches to eating that don't involve people cooking their own food and eating together at set times. It gets seriously antimodern, and is all the more obnoxious because I know a decent amount about modern food science, business and policy, enough to know he's just wrong about a large number of the increasingly unsupported assertions he makes in this chapter (which makes me doubt the rest). Most of his observations about the US and modern food practices are completely worthless because he knew absolutely nothing about US ag policy and its effects on commodities.

Here's the useful takeaways:

Mintz makes a decent case that colonial plantation sugar production was in some sense the first example of human industrial practices, long before it developed in the metropolitan center.
In Europe, sugar started as an incredibly expensive and mysterious foreign product that was used as an ostentatious display of wealth. Over time it was treated as a wonder medication and as access expanded, it eventually became ubiquitous in the diet of lower classes, changing their approach to eating.
Mintz proposes the concepts of "intensification" (where an existing cultural consumption ritual, such as the use of sugar effigies as luxurious decorations at banquets, spreads and is imitated by other groups - like the lower classes using sugar frosted wedding cakes) and "extensification", where the ritual changes during its spread to lower classes (think the lower classes using sugar in tea instead). Notice this took me one sentence to explain, and I only had to do it once. Imagine having these definitions explained repeatedly, but only inconsistently and informally, over and over for a hundred pages. I can't imagine why these terms haven't caught on.
Mintz makes the argument that sugar in the British diet helped facilitate industrialization and interacted with a range of really lovely nutrition practices in the lower class, driving its substitution for foods that would not have done as well with factory work. In this way, in a very broadly Marxist sense, the underclass factory workers consuming tea with sugar (in lieu of other food with better nutrition) are connected in parallel with slaves on sugar plantations. (Mintz does not get into how this would have worked in countries other than Britain).
At the time Mintz was writing, dietary fat was still considered a source of health concern. Nowadays sugar is also used for nonsweetener food additive purposes, including in conjunction with dietary fat (although I know that this is not as much the case as it used to be).

This book dictates false beliefs around food and nutrition that would eventually blossom into broader lovely nutrition beliefs (and policies) in later years. As it stands, it's going on my shelf right next to the crap produced by Michael Pollan.

Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 08:55 on Jan 13, 2024

# ¿ Dec 25, 2023 01:43

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

I just finished Alex Reinhart's Statistics Done Wrong: the woefully complete guide, which is an excellent and very accessible text describing a whole range of the worst statistical malpractices active in the sciences. It's written for researchers or the lay public, and I think anyone reading it would gain an improved understanding of the issues involved - these are short, punchy, remarkably clear explanations of the problems, their causes, and their consequences, with crystal clear, intuitive examples and essentially no math needed. Critically, it's recent enough that it accurately describes current bad practices, and includes resources and recommendations on how to address them, either at an institutional level or individually.

Frankly, this text should probably be assigned reading for...just about everyone, including nonscientists, and especially for anyone just starting in the sciences, before they even take their first stats class. Oh, and even better: the simplified version is available online for free right here. Really, go give it a shot, and consider getting the full print version. Its only limitations are that it's relatively high level and brief (there are additional more complex or field-specific issues it doesn't address), and as someone already aware of the problems it mentions, I can't be certain it's as accessible as I believe it is. This book stands in severe contrast to the last stat methods book I read, which was written by a luminary in the field and borderline useless.

Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 08:22 on Dec 30, 2023

# ¿ Dec 30, 2023 07:48

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

Just finished Other Russias by Victoria Lomasko. Victoria, now living in exile following the second invasion of Ukraine, is an artist whose work serves as a witness of sorts to populations in Russia that are not otherwise visible, either externally, or (thanks to the state media control systems), internally.

The first half of the book is impressionistic sketches of various individuals in "invisible" groups in Russia with accounts of their experiences, including slaves, rural communities and sex workers. The second half provides similar contemporaneous illustrations and accounts of various dissident activities in the country, all from a period roughly 2012-2016. Not a particularly objective or neutral narrative, but still a very interesting read (and I was glad for the lighter burden given the almost all of my current backlog is multi-hundred page academic nonfiction).

A common element is that individuals are completely dissociated from political engagement, to the point that the most motivated and successful grassroots activists identify themselves heavily by not doing anything political, because political activity is understood to be both futile and detached from concrete goals. Political activists are conversely alienated from actual policymaking or procedures (since the ones who are capable of it wind up in prison or dead). You can really feel the effect of multiple generations of sabotaging the sense of the civic self.

Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 08:50 on Jan 13, 2024

# ¿ Jan 10, 2024 03:41

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

I've finished Shakespeare's Storytelling, by Nate Eastman. This is intended as an introductory undergraduate text that focuses on Shakespearean literary techniques to illustrate his profound influence on how stories are told in all media (with a bunch of contemporaneous book and film examples). This makes the book a significant divergence from most of the intro texts I've read, which spend way more time on historical contextualization. I'm a complete ignoramus on literary theory and Shakespeare, so the book was pretty illuminating- but was definitely written for an even more basic audience, as some relatively simple concepts are explained multiple times. It's still an excellent choice if, like me, you haven't read the bard's plays in years and never got a good contextualization of his influence other than "hey look he invented the word eyeball!" and jokes about thumb-biting and keeping the cheap seats entertained.

Also some of the examples are incredibly goony. There is a katana duel.

The author also runs an A/T thread here.

Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 03:38 on Jan 31, 2024

# ¿ Jan 23, 2024 03:03

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

Professionalism and Ethics in Complementary and Alternative Medicine by John Crellin and Fernando Ania

Kill me.

# ¿ Feb 15, 2024 03:29

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

FPyat posted:

Is that academic or bullshit making use of a faux-academic/professional title?

I�ll do more of a write up when my blood pressure normalizes, but according to the book one author is a British doctor and pharmacist with a PhD in the history and philosophy of science, and was/is a named professor at a Canadian university.

The other author has an HD (guess) and is the founder and president of the Homeopathic College of Canada, as well as founder, president and dean of the International Academy of Homeopathy.

Out of 250 pages, the entire field of bioethics gets 5 pages starting at page 128. All of those pages are wrong.

# ¿ Feb 15, 2024 05:42

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

FPyat posted:

I meant to ask whether the publisher was academic or not.

My bad- it�s pseudo-academic alt med quackery, the Haworth Integrative Press, bought and absorbed by one of the giants some time ago- I forget which. Naturopaths probably thought it was legit.

# ¿ Feb 15, 2024 05:56

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

Professionalism and Ethics in Complementary and Alternative Medicine by John Crellin and Fernando Ania, for reals.

If I had more time I'd give this more of a writeup, but doing so would require a lot of background. In brief, this book from an "integrative press" promises a "framework for understanding and evaluating professional and ethical issues" in alternative/complementary medicine. The book consists of three very uneven parts, all terrible; at root, the authors can't accurately summarize these issues, because if they could, they wouldn't be able to defend or rationalize alt-med practices!

1. "The current scene," a sort of survey of overarching context, regulation, and challenges in ethical conduct for people in alternative and complementary medicine (so this covers both the industry of people making things like herbal supplements, and "practitioners" like Reiki or homeopaths). It's notably from a Canadian perspective. In the course of this first part, numerous common falsehoods that are used to protect and justify alt-med beliefs are deployed, e.g.:

a) science is based in "reductionism" and therefore can't understand "holistic" effects, or explain associated concepts from alt-med.
b) "conventional medicine" is essentially a protectionist operation by which doctors control the boundaries of acceptable practice.
c) placebo is an independent, direct and magickal causal force, justifying the use of alt-med despite a lack of actual evidence (these cite to Kaptchuk, a researcher who basically leads efforts in promoting the abuse of placebo effects to promote and legitimize TCM bullshit).
d) changes in scientific consensus and problems in conventional medicine reflect deeper fundamental problems that need correction in the medical "paradigm."

And many more. Frequently the authors will raise a topic, list off a bunch of questions about it, engage in a several-page partial analysis (frequently developing concepts from scratch even as they demonstrate considerable research and cite multiple sources), make a bunch of unsourced "many believe" and "some say" claims, and then just sort of wander into a new topic. I could get into a lot more detail as this is a pretty dense 100 pages of material, but issues like the above occur throughout.

2. "Professionalism," a much shorter chapter, outlines the giant gaping hole at the center of the whole book: clinical and research bioethics. There's already an entire academic discipline and series of systems of regulation and practice built on how to ethically practice medicine, and the whole loving thing gets introduced more than halfway through the book, introduced as "modern bioethics," horribly misrepresented for five pages, and then largely ignored! I'm not going to try to summarize bioethics as a field here, but in brief it's a Big Deal from historical, policy and ethical standards, and it's mindboggling that the book doesn't largely focus on it, particularly its dominant form; for complex reasons, the field and all accepted practices in bioethics (both for conducting research and in the clinic) revolve around a school of thought and ethical analysis framework called "Principlism".

Principlism is a sort of political compromise solution to the original political problems of creating and enforcing the field of bioethics as much as it is an actual ethics framework. In a sentence, it identified and extrapolated "midlevel principles" of ethical conduct that are common across almost all cultures and approaches to ethical reasoning, and built out a framework so that ethical "dilemmas" could be resolved in a way that would essentially respect as many of these general ethical norms as possible, all without relying on any particular ethical viewpoint as a foundation. This is not a normal approach to addressing ethics, but when you're bootstrapping a policy solution that has to be accepted by the Catholic Church, conservatives, liberals, doctors, philosophers, nurses, industry and the public all at once, it's basically the only possible option, and it was largely a success.

Principlism was and is really impressive for what it was able to accomplish (despite the fact that it's got a ton of issues). It's the thousand ton gorilla of bioethics, the thing everyone else defaults to and responds to. Having a book about ethics in any kind of medicine that just sort of waves in the general direction of Principlism before setting it aside is bonkers, especially when the authors don't have any sort of other framework that they can use (and all the more so when they get a lot about it wrong, and are similarly wrong about fundamental concepts in ethics and epistemology when they address those issues). What made Principlism so effective was that it functioned as a sort of high level survey of ethical issues from so many angles, the very thing that this book fails at. The book mis-summarizes Principlism, and spends maybe four pages total on other actual concepts or systems from either bioethics or the fundamentals of ethics (basically we get consequentialism, deontology, and gestures toward virtue ethics and feminism, none of them very accurate).

3. The book ends with 12 "case histories/readings," which are sometimes fictional, sometimes factual, sometimes 1800s letters to frontier doctors. The five part "stepwise process" that the authors say they apply to these is incredibly vague (step 5 is "a consideration of how to negotiate decisions, alternative positions, or particular views"), and works completely differently in each case. The authors continue to correctly identify a lot of issues that would be relevant in the analysis, including things that are a genuine problem for alt-med practitioners (like the problem of promoting your own products as cures, or the use of fictional patient testimonials). At the same time, there are no clear conclusions, and very little in this section would be cleanly applied outside the most extreme examples; no boundary conditions are identified, so (to quote the authors complaining about another organization's ethics code,) "all are important issues, but as a potpourri of points, they are devoid of stated principles and context, and thereby, not easy to remember.

A large part of what makes this book so frustrating is that in spite of its very selective and routinely false framing of issues, the authors are able to identify and summarize genuine ethical problems, and at least pay lip service to the sort of issues that would genuinely inform professional conduct and the obstacles to professionalization...in the bizarro parallel world where any part of the alt-med universe was worth professionalizing. For example, the authors discuss different definitions of "professionalism", and how the divergent schools of acupuncture make the creation of professional standards (let alone self-regulatory policing) very difficult. Reading the book made me feel like I was getting gaslit by the authors' delusions and selective reasoning.

Great for the whole family 5/5

Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 06:19 on Feb 17, 2024

# ¿ Feb 17, 2024 06:12

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

The Philosophy of Science & Communication Theory, by Charles Pavitt
This book attempts and largely succeeds at something pretty remarkable: it summarizes the progression of the philosophy of science, and translates that work into applied, useful material about how that philosophy structures and dictates theory and metatheory development in actual science, all at a level accessible for the science graduate student. This is already an incredibly daunting task, all the more so when the chosen field of application is communication theory, a space with, to put it generously, significant heterogeneity in its theoretical frameworks. Pavitt is well-positioned for this task as a significant figure in some corners of communication research, and he largely succeeds.

The book is divided into a first section summarizing major movements, thinkers, and contributions in the philosophy of science (philsci), then a second section discussing how different positions in philsci have resulted in different theoretical approaches to communication research (and how the application of philsci can be used to explain conflicting theories, and sometimes declare winners). Each section is about 170 pages, and they follow the order of the title: in the first, Pavitt summarizes the major contributions and movements of epistemology from the Greeks through positivism and its downfall to contemporary realist writing, all with a consistent eye for covering the things that actually matter for a scientist reader - either directly , or indirectly because it will inform his later commentary. The first section also synthesizes these elements to propose a generally plausible set of prescriptive statements about the purpose and form of ideal scientific theory. I was frankly stunned by Pavitt's selectivity here: he obviously has to make a million cuts to cover so much ground, but even as someone very familiar with and/or committed to or against some of the figures discussed, I thought he did everyone sufficient justice and his choices of coverage made sense, especially by the end of the book.

The second section is similarly impressive, as Pavitt moves nimbly from general systems theory through behavioralism and several linguistics areas through media and group communication frameworks, illustrating strengths, weaknesses, and the respective, a priori philosophical commitments of each, with frequent, memorable examples for new concepts. Throughout, Pavitt is simultaneously a pluralist and comfortable putting his foot down when it proves a point: He's willing to say Kuhn is actually incoherent, and talk about the defects of, e.g., Skinner, to the degree that it proves his broader points about concepts such as instrumentalism vs realism or levels of explanation. There's obviously thousands of additional pages of nuance and critique left out (Chomsky is introduced for his attacks on Skinner and his syntax work is summarized but not addressed in much detail), but the point is to give the reader a vocabulary to discuss and criticize theory, not to summarize all theory. I don't agree with every decision or opinion Pavitt expresses, but he's cautious, flexible, and right so much of the time that it's hard to take real issue.

Books like this should be required reading for grad students, in the same way that simpler philsci concepts should be taught in elementary school. That said, this book was a real toil to get through. If there's a defect, it's that when Pavitt introduces a now-discredited theory or thinker, he's willing to tell us it's bad, and he'll say why, but the explanation of why it's important to learn about this obviously lovely belief may not arrive for a hundred pages. Some of this was me: it's hard to keep attention on a summary of a field you already know backwards and forwards, or a thinker that you know is already in history's dustheap. I'm also just bluntly less interested in the pretheoretical, pretestable, formalist areas of linguistic and communicative classification that have formed the core of a lot of debates in the field - c'mon you schmucks, construct some hypotheses, set some boundary conditions, articulate your definitions and limitations already!

quote:

Now there is nothing inherently wrong with being a behaviorist, but

The book is also a bit of a death march- this is functionally a series of 17 extremely dense 20-page summative essays, each building on all the previous and covering an entire school or schools of thought, with few concessions to readability like formatted emphasis or restatement (though, again, the explanations are very good). It's not the worst I've read, but it's a grind.

Bottom line: if you're a scientist or scientist-aspirant in one of the comm-adjacent fields (which is basically all of the social sciences and some of the others too) and you've not had any real philsci, this book may be worth a read, especially the first half- and if not, you should hope someone in your field has written something that similarly bridges the philosophy-to-scientific-practice gap. Knowing the underlying logics and principles of philsci are a huge benefit to your ability to cleanly develop and analyze science within and across fields. It takes real cojones for a scientist to be able to say that most theory in their field has little "content," but that's exactly how Pavitt ends the book- and at that point he's helped the reader to the same realization.

Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 03:45 on Mar 16, 2024

# ¿ Feb 29, 2024 08:20

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

Dream Town by Laura Meckler

Dream Town is a history of the Cleveland suburb of Shaker Heights, a collection of neighborhoods that has been historically famous for its relatively successful and sustained history of racial integration and equity. Using an individual experience framing, each chapter of the book moves forward in time following an individual, starting from the Van Sweringen brothers, eccentric developer weirdos (think 1800s Winklevoss twins) who created the suburb, through to current students and politicians, describing their interactions with the conflicts, policies, and struggles of the period.

I usually hate contemporary nonfiction books like these, which I have gotten used to finding as shallow, anecdote-laced musings without explanation, nuance or specific policy recommendations. That's not the case here. Meckler, a Washington Post education reporter who grew up in Shaker Heights, delivers extremely well-researched, carefully nuanced and self-monitored writing. Detailed policy issues and waves of theory spanning 70 years are explained clearly, caveats and drawbacks are identified, and throughout, high level events are interwoven with personal experiences - all without relying on shallow emotional appeals. Meckler does a compelling job of presenting each individual covered (other than the Van Sweringens, she interviewed each person or their families at length) and is willing to express her opinions about where policies succeeded or failed, and who was to blame, all while acknowledging her own bias.

From a policy standpoint, you're likely to learn something even if you're already well-immersed in integration and education policy. Meckler does an excellent job articulating the drawbacks, optics challenges, and underlying necessary infrastructure of historic practices like busing programs, real estate distribution, "detracking" (undoing the practice of separating courses into high and lower skill level classes, a historic way that segregation was reinstated in nominally integrated schools) and school redistricting. She's similarly educational on concepts like the emergence of equity-based programming and the intersecting and complicating role of economic class. One thing she doesn't tackle as directly is the parasitic role of private and charter education in reestablishing segregation, I suspect because it was less of an issue in Shaker Heights than elsewhere (though I think it's become an increasing problem over time).

The title up there is a link. I strongly recommend buying this book. It's fantastic, the sort of contemporary and historical journalism that deserves greater attention and support.

Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 23:38 on Mar 30, 2024

# ¿ Mar 1, 2024 09:04

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

White Coke posted:

What do you think is the best?

Probably the sequel, Rose 2: Any Other Name

# ¿ Mar 6, 2024 01:30

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

Talking about detective fiction by P.D. James

This enjoyable discussion of the mystery genre is perhaps lighter and less focused than I was hoping it would be, but an enjoyable read nonetheless. As an 88 year old accomplished writer of the genre whose consumption of it was compulsive and wide-ranging, James has a lot of useful comments and interesting positions. James herself is interesting for having relatively enlightened and sensitive views for someone of her generation (even as there are a handful of comments that make me feel like a layer of racism is being papered over- it's hard to tell if I'm misreading her). Her observations of how the genre was both refined and grown in response to internal development and broader social changes over the decades are highly informative and never overstated.

The greatest benefit of the book is probably the range of other sources and authors that James casually mentions, either as mystery writers themselves, or as commentators on the field. I wish the bibliography at the end of the book was comprehensive! If anyone can help me find a complete copy of Knox's article in which the describes the commandments of detective fiction, I'd be very grateful. I may need to (eventually) put together a broader detective fiction bibliography from this text for my own use.

# ¿ Mar 16, 2024 04:32

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

Neoreaction: A Basilisk by Elizabeth Sandifer

Oof, oh, ugh, ouch. This book, which is a series of variable-format impressionistic essays, was presented to me as an insightful or detailed analysis of the alt-right, and that's very clearly not what the author is going for. But a lot of it was downright frustrating and borderline offensive to read even taken on its own terms. I think Sandifer is a goon or goon-adjacent, so I'm not going to slam the book too hard, but it's pretty close to anti-informative. There's a general pattern of actions that make the book hard to read:

1. Explicit obscurantism done for its own sake, and not in a productive postmodernist sense where it informs the subject. A small, straightforward example from the relatively engaging and structured essay on Trump (the shorter essays are generally much stronger):

quote:

But then he literally built a six-hundred-and-sixty-six foot tower to which he offered up that name, sacrificing it upon its black altar such that the building became a titanic sigil of the sixteenth Major Arcana of the Tarot of the Golden Dawn, symbolizing destruction and ruin,

This is just a more complicated repeated reference to the Tower tarot card. Making me have to look it up doesn't benefit, there's no reason explicit or implicit for using the golden dawn tarot deck, and it interferes with the notion of the conceptual relationship she's trying to convey, which would otherwise be at least interesting (if not really justified). The text is littered with these metaphorical flourishes, and they rarely serve any benefit.

2. Claims and concepts, both accurate and false, tossed around without justification or explanation, not always coherently. All media is propaganda? Really? not going to flesh that out in any way, do any parsing there? Neoreaction being somehow surreptitiously a reaction to Marx? That's not explicit? Nick Land's shift to reactionary politics was a product of drug abuse? Might further biographical context help us out here? Useful ideas, like the well-traveled and obvious one that the lesswronger grey goo future AI framework looks an awful lot like religious belief and seems motivated by a pathological fear of death, are not interrogated on their own terms, and sometimes are used for the opposite purpose- the assumption that they must have a point.

3. The entire book is framed as accepting a nihilist premise that the world is doomed. This nihilism is used to both entertain aspects of the alt-right subjects and to dismiss discussion of how and why their views are formed or have appeal or explain anything rhetorically strong or weak. It's a constant assumption undermining concrete discussions, other than a couple spots where it gets lifted with oblique references to, e.g., Marxism being the solution to the inevitable doom of the world, with no further details.

4. Introducing a new subject of analysis, like a new alt-right figure or literary source, in the last few pages of an essay, then not finishing the explanation or connecting them back to the text. Sandifer's root desire seems to be to draw broad, metaphorical connections between concepts, regardless of whether they have any relevance, and then drop them. The concept of the hauntological, monsters, Basilisks in general, aren't ever actually set down and fully explained, but they reappear to paper over a lack of transitions throughout the text.

5. William fuckin' Blake. The titular essay ends with a virtual car crash: a twentyish page section that turns a discussion of the neoreactionary movement into an accounting of Blake's life and works. This is part of a larger effort to propose an alternate or rehabilitated version of some elements that Sandifer presents as driving neoreactionary thought, but why? Why would you want this? What is the benefit here? I get that Sandifer likes gnostic creative reasoning and Blake in particular (it really reads like she is reciting material from a grad thesis on him), but it's poorly attached even to the prior literary elements and concepts that she had built up over the previous 140 pages as an alternative to engaging with the subject.

6. Sandifer seems openly enamored of the rhetorics and practices of several of her (really horrible, globally harmful, bigoted) subjects. She spends a lot of time trying to find elements of their material to rehabilitate, which is fuckin' frustrating and weird when the reader is not given a sufficient understanding of the subject to even follow her down this path.

Sandifer seems to hold the belief that saying weird new and possibly wrong things is a sort of innately beneficial exercise which okay, sure, I get the inductive-creative-deductive cycle. But there's not any strong reason to use, e.g., David Icke's racism as a launchboard for the exercise. Something can just be bad. It can be useful to understand how and why it is bad. You don't gotta bargain with the white supremacist ontology just because it's also weird. We don't need to reinvent the thule society. A standout is Mary Daly, a TERF who engages in eyerollingly bad figurative linguistic reconstruction work that Sandifer is plainly enamored of. That the author feels the drive to entertain and want to rehabilitate or mimic this approach is downright concerning, especially when she could do it with all the rest of existing literature.

7. Almost none of the essays have any conclusions, or at least any conclusions relating to the content of the essays. It's pretty common to paraphrase the "oh well we're all doomed" concept coupled with a stacked set of metaphors. The overarching conclusion at the end of the book is that the entire neoreactionary movement is made up of atomic, pure, undifferentiated stupidity, which, I didn't need to read 300 pages to know they're dumb or that their belief systems make you dumber. I wanted the how and why and what to do about it, and the book seemed contemptuous of the question, and more engaged with reactionary thought than interested in its opposition.

As it stands I'm probably not going to hang on to this book, and I'm going to have to search for a different one that actually covers its subject. Divabot was apparently going to write one at one point, I need to see what he's been up to.

Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 08:33 on Mar 30, 2024

# ¿ Mar 30, 2024 08:04

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

nonathlon posted:

Interesting take. I've just finished Neoreaction and while I don't have the same objections or depth of reaction, it did leave me dissatisfied. Trying to summarize why:

* it feels overly long and very discursive, going off on tangents that don't seem to add much. Sometimes it even seemed to dodge an interesting point to head off in another direction
* This is the individual essays, but the book as a whole doesn't seem to fit together well and is just a collection of parts
* Some of the arguments do seem to just end midstream
* It does have a very nihilist / doomster tone

I can't speak to the factual basis of the book but to me it does a decent job of dismantling the various reactionaries. However, I'd recommend that people only read the core essay, not the whole book.

A good counterposition to mine; I likely had this reaction in part because I already knew the broad strokes about the book's various subjects, and because I tend to hold nonfiction to a pretty high (arguably unfair) standard, per my previous posts in this thread.

# ¿ Mar 30, 2024 23:28

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# ¿ May 5, 2024 16:59

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

Until Proven Safe: the history and future of quarantine, from the black death to the space age by Geoff Manaugh and Nicola Twilley
God, I must be going soft- a lay-facing pop sci book that I mostly liked! This married authorial team pulled together a number of years of research and writing, some for the BLDGBLOG blog on architecture, to provide a well-reported and fairly detailed accounting of the history and practice of quarantine from a wide range of directions, ranging from early medieval practices to COVID responses to more exotic stuff like the steps NASA takes to try to keep our astronauts from giving the moon STDs. The timing was auspicious, since they had the chance to interview people doing global pandemic work for years and weeks before COVID hit, and still had time to significantly talk about the COVID response as well.

The authors generally have the right opinions and some degree of nuance. The book criticizes the Trump COVID response and, throughout, highlights historical bigotries and injustices that intersected with the history of disease. The authors do correctly identify some (very broad) policy recommendations. A theme that emerges toward the end of the book is that the authors are unfortunately too credulous with their audiences, something that's made especially clear in interviews with public health officials pre-COVID, and with tech surveillance firms like Palantir post COVID. While the last part of the book is critical of big tech surveillance solutions to quarantine (citing Foucalt more than I'd like), there's still not really sufficient depth of discussion because so much is more poppy gee whiz here's how this worked reporting and controlled interviews with current officials. A better book would spend more time on the concrete elements of epidemiology and associated policy, but then the authors probably wouldn't have been able to tour Italian lazarettes. A good read (with a good bibliography), but not incredible.

The Rape of the Mind: the psychology of thought control, menticide, and brainwashing by Joost Meerloo
Goddamn it, there's gotta be one every month. This 1950s book is considered one of the original founding texts of propaganda study in the US, but there's a very good reason it's not assigned anymore; it's bullshit. Meerlo was a Dutch psychoanalyst and resistance worker who spent some time as a Nazi prisoner and played a significant role in the Nuremberg trials, making a later career around the study of interrogation and brainwashing methods used by Nazi and Soviet forces. There is almost no specific, useful information on these practices in this book, however. Writing before Popperian falsificationism really became embedded in cultural understanding of truth, Meerloo applies his understanding of freudian psychoanalysis to make broad characterizations of brainwashing and "menticide" (his term) practices, both as practiced by foreign enemies and as a threat of totalitarian control domestically, before discussing ways that individuals can be made more resistant to all brainwashing.

On substance, well, there's really nothing of value here. Meerloo does have some correct opinions, even for his time- he's opposed to the McCarthy hearings, which he identifies as a source of totalitarian influence within the US, and he's broadly supportive of more personalized education, racial equality, and civil disobedience- but he's also, uh, very much of his time and movement as well. Lots of "these spies could have been identified by their defects, such as the latent homosexual tendencies caused by their neuroses" and explanations tied to "primitive cultures" and, humorously, a horrified opposition to the use of automobiles and "pushbutton society." The dude says, repeatedly, that "conversation is a lost art" due to the existence of radio!

Meerloo does tap into some correct positions, like skepticism of standardized testing and concerns about the role of more passive media in reducing critical thought. However, the fact that some of his concerns are agreeable shouldn't distract from the fact that none of them are justified; Meerloo is basically repeating random midlevel observations from other sources as profound insights with no connection to anything else, which is why he can distribute them among broader psychoanalytic bullshit. As was an issue with so much of the time, most of the book is just...broad, abstract claims, repeated and without linkage to concrete evidence, boundary conditions, or any sort of specific definitional framework.

What makes me frustrated isn't that the book is simply wrong, but that it's written in a way that's just infuriating to parse- a combination of the worst stereotypes of period writing. If you've ever wondered about the origins of cold war rhetorical pastiches like this one from bioshock, well, the full force of this style is on display in the book- a combination of false generalizations, deliberately vague, uncited anecdotes presented as absolute proof, repetition and abstract unrelated assertions- I actually reached out to the Linguistics thread to help identify one part of the form which they identified as abuse of the "dramatic present". I hope that y'all can help me better characterize the rest of this infuriating writing style!

I've linked a pdf copy of the book above for anyone who can help me recognize what these stylistic features are called. I'm not sure what edition it is, but it's noticeably missing some material from the 2015 Martino reprint of the original 1956 edition that I have in hardcopy. Really, though, consider that a blessing.

Beautiful Swimmers by William W. Warner
Thank god, a book I can recommend wholeheartedly. Warner, a biologist, Smithsonian official, WW2 veteran and US Information Agency worker (who, reading between the lines, was probably an intelligence analyst during the exact period that the above Meerloo book was written!) spent years preparing this Pulitzer-winning discussion of the Chesapeake bay and its famous crabs- but in truth, this isn't a biology text. Warner gives equal time and grace to covering the history of the region, its broader ecology, and the lives and industry of the watermen who ply it for crabs, oysters, and other riches that continue to be the largest sources of seafood in the US. Warner is an incredible writer and a magnificent researcher, using his experience in the navy to comfortably integrate with and spend days out in the bay with numerous watermen of every stripe, simultaneously playing the role of anthropologist, ecologist, historian and economist with equal skill. Warner is sympathetic to his primary subjects- waterman and crab alike- but also spends the time and nuance to recognize and discuss the pollution that threatens to kill the Bay, as well as the economic forces that press down on the watermen, including the "upstream" systems of factory fishing and industry. It's a book from 1977 by a public official, so Warner doesn't go into the very severe racial dynamics of the region as much as I'd like (if he'd tried I don't think it would've ended well for him, alone in the bay with the caucasian, ah, rural, fishermen), but he does mention it in a couple paragraphs that make it very clear that as bad as the watermen have it, black inhabitants of the region are in a far worse state.

In terms of format Warner weaves the narrative of several individual days out with specific interviewees, together with with well-researched profiles of the history and context of just about everything he sees during those outings. The book follows the seasons on the water, interspersed with chapters covering specific locales, issues, and practices. It's incredible the whole thing is only 300 pages for how much information it contains. It feels like less - I burned through it in a couple days, even as I separately looked up information about what happened with many of the individual locations and interviewees mentioned. This is the only nonfiction book I can think of where the writing is so good I don't mind lacking an exhaustive bibliography, but Warner tends to name his sources in-text, and has a list of recommended further reading at the end, which I think I now have to pursue.

All told, this is an engaging, enjoyable, detailed, and educational read, perfect for any age. In practice, Beautiful Swimmers was one of the driving forces of the movement to clean up the Chesapeake, an ongoing and largely successful effort that more people should know about (and one which requires constant vigilance). I recommend that everyone- yes, everyone- read this book. I've linked it in openlibrary above, and now I'm going to have to add all of Warner's other writing to my list for next year.

Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 10:13 on Apr 21, 2024

# ¿ Apr 21, 2024 03:03

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > The Book Barn > What Did You Just Finish?