Links
Tracing Woodgrains documents one man’s war against the rationalists and the dark side of how Wikipedia works: Partisan, neurotic advocates have undue influence. Goes to show why Wikipedia has bee terrible for anything taboo or too political over the last decade. Fortunately, it’s still great for non-partisan topics.
Default Friend notes that TracingWoodgrains is “becoming one of the best documenters of Internet history writing today”. High praise from maybe the best internet anthropologist herself.
One of TracingWoodgrains’ strengths is he doesn’t hide the fact he comes from inside the sub culture. You trust the writing as coming from someone who gets it. Anna Gat recently praised Default Friend along similar lines.I’ve recently been listening to History 102. The YouTuber Rudyard Lynch, aka WhatIfAltHist, signed up to be part of Erik Torenberg’s impressive suite of podcasts at Turpentine.
If you know WhatIfAltHist from YouTube, you’ll know that some of his predictions are a bit crazy (and non-Deutschian) but listening to him chimp out to a abnormally laconic Erik about different historical periods is great if you like an irreverent, non-pc, slightly ADD style.
Jump in anywhere: Rome, China, the Slave Trade, or Islam. There’s quite a few out now.Recent viral montage remix of Alex Jones voiceover reminded me of my old flatmate who used to always play this sort of thing on the living room speakers, lol.
Sam Altman’s study on where he gave poor people $1k a month for three years showed essentially no benefit compared to the control group.
Novels
The Fall by Camus
This book is about signalling. It kind of surprised me.
Jean-Baptiste Clamence, a respectable judge, is recounting his life to a stranger at a bar. He has lived a good life but recently failed to prevent a woman jumping off a bridge (a literal fall) which triggered his existential crisis (a figurative fall). He realises all his past good deeds were insincere and mainly, well, signalling.
Clamence confessing to a stranger felt more like Camus confessing to the reader. Especially when Clamence, just like Camus in real life, is described as a womaniser and former soccer protege. It turns out Camus’s wife killed herself shortly before he wrote this. Like Clamence, Camus couldn’t prevent her fall.
It’s odd stumbling across this old novella by a famous continental philosopher when you’re expecting some postmodern, artsy, maybe-not-very-empirical book and it’s then it’s just about signalling. Talking about signalling is how young rationalists earn their strips.
I came of age annoying people by talking about signalling theory. Now I can still annoy people by talking about this book.
Hamlet by Shakespeare
I assume you’ve heard of this one.
We agree to read the modern translation concurrently. Free online versions of No Fear Shakespeare. Shakespeare wasn’t talking to you, anon. “Anon” means “soon”.
I watched a few of the adapations. I enjoyed the Mel Gibson 1990 movie one even though it overplays the freudian stuff. Andrew Scott modern performance is good too. It’s cool to see all the different elements from different actors’ emphasis showcasing the multitudes to Prince Hamlet. Kenneth Branagh with the theatricality. Gibson with anger. David Tenant with madness. Olivier with melancholy (supposedly).
At the book club, we talk about whether you should read a modern translation, Hamlet’s motivations, and film adaptions.
Piranesi by Susannah Clarke
Fun read. I won’t spoil this one because it has a pulpy mystery feel to it. One of us said it was CS Lewis meets Borges meets Gone Girl which is an apt description.
Great review from one of the ACX finalists which spells out the Narnia connection.
Upcoming
Hemingway and a three-part Crime and Punishment.
Books
I’ve been reading a fair bit of Will Durant. His Lessons of History is a deserved favourite around here. Recommended. It’s a distillation of the lessons he drew from working on his mammoth 11-part Story of Civilization.
The bigger series focuses more on profiling impressive thinkers than most works of history. If you’re not planning on buying the book and just going to use libgen Anna’s Archive or something, I’d recommend just bouncing around the profiles of the thinkers. They’re also on YouTube. Voltaire, Rousseau, Schopenhauer, and more. Someone should put the profiles on Spotify.
I also grabbed a couple of biographies of Spinoza. Steven Nadler’s A Life was great but I really enjoyed Rebecca Goldstein’s Betraying Spinoza which focused on the paradox of him being a representative Jewish thinker and such a famous atheist pantheist.
There’s a Deutschian nugget when Goldstein talks of her breakthrough moment when she realised what Spinoza meant by rationality: All facts require explanations. Sounds straight out of The Beginning of Infinity.
The title Betraying comes from Goldstein applying such a personal and loving focus on the thinker who above all else exalted rationality and admonished feelings.
Both biographies provide good accounts of Spinoza’s 1400s Iberian Jewish Conversos and Marranos during the Inquisition and the mass immigration to the more religiously tolerant Amsterdam where Spinoza’s family ended up.
Spinoza himself becoming an outcast for his heretical not-quite-but-almost atheistic views from his fervent community who was finally allowed to express their religion.
You know… Hayek is probably spinning in tomb if he can hear the current crop of Austrian economists, the same way Foucault can’t believe the level of nonsense miseducated or cynical Americans extracted from his thoughts. Camus was a realist. And signaling was always a way to add insult to injury when reality strikes. Always.