Sandy

I'm giving up on this after about 50%. While it's a fascinating read, it's fucking long, and the title is a lie. A better title would be “Way More About Christianity Than You Could Ever Possibly Want To Know,” but I'll grant that his is catchier.

The good points: this dude has done his research, and somehow makes things interesting that I couldn't have given fewer shits about.

The bad points: SO GODDAMN LONG. Four(?) looooong chapters on early Christians, and then two paragraphs about the origins of mathematics. The ebook has no internal structure, so you can't even skip chapters you don't care about. Watson doesn't know the difference between hyphens and dashes, which I never realized was important until this book—it caused a lot of re-parsing on my part. Desperately needs an editor.

If you're curious in the social fabric of the history of the world, you could do worse than this book. I wasn't, so I couldn't.

Instead of being about the computational philosophy of science, this book describes a data definition language and corresponding computer program for problem solving, but, as far as I can tell, neither are useful for anything. /Extremely/ contrived examples are used to showcase the power of the system, but the correlations drawn are completely arbitrary and would be indistinguishable from noise in a real application.

Too mystical, too much reliance on shaky metaphors and mythological reinterpretations of bullshit. Also, one gets the impression that Bly is absolutely in love with himself; he'll present poems written by himself as evidence for his point, which would be sketchy under the best circumstances, but when combined with terrible poetry, it becomes unforgivable. Save yourself some time and skip over this one.

This is without a doubt the worst biography I've ever read. It calls itself “the story of Gord Downie and the Tragically Hip,” but it's not really. It's goes on and on interminably with anecdotes only tangentially related to the band:

“Gord Downie died from cancer, here's sixteen pages about other, completely unrelated, musicians who also died from cancer.”

“Here's an entire chapter about the internal politics of the record labels, and how they affected other bands' records, but not how it affected the Hip's.”

“That one time I went to a Tragically Hip show.”

“Is the Tragically Hip really a /Canadian/ band? Or just a band from Canada?”

And lots of other banal shit like that. Skip The Never-Ending Present, it's clearly a cash-grab on the sensationalism after Downie's death.

This is a fantastic “how” AND “why” book (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/oPEWyxJjRo4oKHzMu/the-3-books-technique-for-learning-a-new-skilll) for learning jazz. As best I can tell, Mark Levine's The Jazz Theory Book is a good “what” book.

Thinking in Jazz is a well-structured collection of interviews with jazz musicians, focusing on commonalities in their responses. It gives a fantastic insight into where jazz skills come from, what they're made up of, and how many of the world's best practitioners got where they are. I'd strongly recommend the first five chapters to any aspiring musician.

This book has the same problems every book on music seems to have: a lot of “a dominant 7 chord looks like this” and then a big chart of how to reharmonize what with what. Which is to say it's probably really helpful if you have a specific question you want answered, but falls flat on the topic of “how do I learn this stuff?” and “what are the most important pieces here?” As such, I'd say that this book is useless to an amateur, self-taught musician.

This is without a doubt the best book I've read this year, if not ever.

Caplan delivers spectacularly on the title. Not only is it a rebuttal of the common view of economists that everyone always acts rationally, but it also strongly argues that humans are particularly bad in the political arena. The book persuasively challenges many common criticisms of democracy: that most voters are stupid and only vote in self-interest, that bureaucratic inefficiencies are a bad thing, that politicians are mostly crooked, that low-voter turnout is a bad thing, and that democracies aren't very good at giving the people what they ask for.

MY GOOD IS THIS BOOK GOOD.

If you accept Caplan's premise, and evidently I do, the consequences he points out are staggering. “Get out and vote” campaigns are actively harmful to society. If you're running for office, you should in fact not keep your campaign promises. It's a delightfully different lens for looking at the world, and one which puts a lot more into perspective than I realized beforehand.

I picked up a second hand copy of Keys to the Kingdom after greatly enjoying Ollam's talks at WWHF and DefCon. This book was disappointing, as he's a much better speaker than he is writer. The good: you can get through this book in a few hours, and it covers the same amount of material as maybe four or five of his talks. The bad: you'll be getting a significantly worse experience.

After the first few chapters, I found myself skimming. As an amateur with only a passing interest in lockpicking, most of these attacks are too sophisticated for me to care about. I'm not going to be breaking in to any high-security locations, and attacking a pin tumbler is as fancy as I'm ever going to possibly need be.

That's not to say this book is without its highlights. I learned about the impressioning attack, and that pressing a key against your forearm for 30 seconds will leave an impression for 15 minutes. That's a pretty cool way of exfiltration. I just tried it myself and it seems to work!

Let's clarify something: despite its name, this book is not written by the same guy who wrote “The Inner Game of Golf.” I'd heard great things about that book, and decided to pick up this one instead, since I care more about music than golf.

Huge mistake.

Green spends most this book paraphrasing Gallwey, but doing it in a way that comes off as sanctimonious and without adding anything of his own. As a result, TIGoM is like twice as long as TIGoG but somehow still manages to say nothing.

I'll save you some time with what this inner game stuff is all about:
1) do it for fun,
2) be aware of your performance,
3) the first step to fixing problems is to identify exactly what the problem is,
4) don't overthink it.

Good advice, but not good enough to warrant trudging through 242 pages of shit.

I'm not a smoker and never have been. But I'd heard great things about this book from lots of ex-smoker friends, all of whom said they'd read this and it had instantly turned off for them the need to smoke. INTERESTING. I've had some similar experiences in the past with addictions that just turned off one day; I was curious to see if my mental techniques for dealing with that were the same things Carr advocates here.

The psychology is fun to watch without having any stake in the game. Carr spends the whole book painting his past self as the most pitiful smoker of all time — I suppose so smokers don't feel like they're being lecture to by a non-smoker. Simultaneously, he brooks no positive feels about smoking. He calls it things like “the choking poison” and “that evil weed.” He gets people to focus on all of the terrible aspects of it, in very visceral language, and I imagine people walk away from it being disgusted with tobacco and being a smoker.

It's a pretty fascinating study, really.

I think it's a book about how wisdom can't be taught, and comes only from experience, from trying things, from getting outside of your comfort zone. But then clearly doesn't take its central premise too seriously, because the only reason to write such a book would be to try and impart wisdom. In fact, the last chapter is the main character espousing his philosophy to his friend, whom we are told finally sees the narrator as a wise, holy man.

But that's a little dour. There are things to like about this book, and among them the thing I liked the best was in fact that we shouldn't go chasing people who claim to have figured it all out. At one point, Siddhartha meets a (the?) Buddha, and flat out tells Buddha that he's disinterested in any teachings. There's something nice there about being your own person.

Another theme of the book is that you can learn from anybody, and the book parades a series of unlikable characters at us, from whom Siddhartha presumably learns things. These relationships aren't particularly fleshed out, and we are told that Siddhartha learns things, but we are never shown. It feels as though Hesse wanted the main character to learn to become a complete human, but didn't himself know what that would look like, so he sorta just waves his hands and hopefully distracts us. Among these characters are a childhood friend, a wandering ascetic, a courtesan and a BUSINESS MAN. The courtesan is presented as the love of Siddhartha's life, but as best I can tell, the two of them just have a lot of sex and like to wear fancy clothes.

Maybe it's a generational thing?

However, the last third of the book has Siddhartha living with an old ferryman, with whom he becomes great friends (and maybe lovers?) This is the only relationship in the book with any sense of verisimilitude, just two old men living and working together, having lost the people in their lives who meant the most to them.

And also they have a daily chat with the river about the meaning of life. And the river teaches them a lot of things. It's silly, but I guess you need some sort of narrative device SOMEWHERE.

The ending is disappointing. Our narrator has become holy and wise, and he talks a lot about how the world just /is/, and we should accept it as it is, without trying to change it, or without striving for anything but inner peace. I've said it before and I'll say it again — this is a fucking terrible moral. NO, the world isn't perfect, and we should strive to make it better. If you can make it a little bit better, you have made it a little bit better TIMES ALL HUMANS WHO WILL EVER COME AFTER YOU. This whole “accept the world as it is” shit is awful, and one of the most insidiously evil ideas there has ever been.

All in all, I think I would have loved this book (minus the ending) if I had read it a decade sooner, in my impressionable earlier years. There are some good insights here, but they're the sorts of things that you'll learn with age anyway — and if you accept the premise of the book, can't learn any other way.

Maybe it's the format of Very Short Introductions, but I found myself not trusting the author in the least. It ruined the book for me. Walters presents the book in an academic, disinterested tone, but spends the entirety of it making value judgments. “So-and-so's writing is clear and poignant, and despite being written 500 years ago, still resonates strongly with women today.” In fact, the whole book seems to read like a “how not to write on Wikipedia” article; it's chocked full of weasel words, and often makes references to “a recent scholar” who has “convincingly argued” something — but doesn't tell us who that scholar was, or what their convincing argument looks like! And if you wanted footnotes to do any research for yourself, well, you're out of luck! None of this is to say that one mustn't make value judgments. If Walters had put herself into the book, saying that /she/ found so-and-so's writing clear and poignant, I'd be all for it.

The first two chapters of this are fantastically inspiring. The first talks in detail about how von Neumann looked at the world, and approached problems. The second describes his unusual upbringing, and it's something I plan to reread when I'm expecting a child. Five of out five stars for this first bit.

Unfortunately, the rest of the book isn't able to keep up. Unlike Feynman, von Neumann turns out to just not have been a very interesting character. Sure, he was brilliant, but the author is quick to remind us that he (the author) isn't nearly smart enough to help you understand von Neumann. Despite this, he is clearly and unequivocally in love with von Neumann.

Often the book will meander into “von Neumann thought this. Other people said he was wrong. But they didn't actually understand what he was talking about.” Like, at least five times. But the author reminds us that he also doesn't understand what von Neumann was talking about. So, how can he be so sure that von Neumann wasn't wrong? I'd be willing to let this slide once or twice with the proper citation, but none are given and the author continually apologizes for von Neumann. Genius he might have been, but never being wrong isn't a part of genius.

Along similar lines, a big chunk of this book is the history around von Neumann—things like the Manhattan Project and the origin of electronic computers. For the most part, von Neumann doesn't play much of a part in these histories, and in each section the author tells us “this story is better told in book X.” I found myself wondering why not just read those books instead?

In all, von Neumann comes off as a Mary Sue. He can do no wrong in the author's eyes, and whenever he comes close, the author is sure to quote someone who says how lovely and brilliant Johnny was. It's boring as a historical read, and boring as a character study.

Read the first two chapters and then skip the rest.

This is the least good Dortmunder novel in the series so far. The characters are getting stale — Rollo always describes people by what they drink, Murch only talks about what routes he drives, etc — but it's fun enough. A problem with so many books with a “twist” is that they try to subtly point out to you that there will be a twist, without explicitly saying what. But there is only ever one possible twist, and so knowing there will be one is sufficient to learn what it is. Jimmy the Kid falls to this problem, which makes the third act predictable and rather boring. All in all, it's a fine read, but I wouldn't have picked it up if it were a standalone novel.