Although my brain can spool off connections to pretty much everything I've ever liked, there's this haecceity to this book that I cannot explain withoAlthough my brain can spool off connections to pretty much everything I've ever liked, there's this haecceity to this book that I cannot explain without getting too personal or TMI....more
This book is hard to summarize. It pushes a lot of buttons that make me happy as a reader. And every major character is so damn adorable and fascinatiThis book is hard to summarize. It pushes a lot of buttons that make me happy as a reader. And every major character is so damn adorable and fascinating. So much detail that I can’t slot many of them into any archetype that I’m familiar with, and yet they all manage to seem true to life - basically believable. And the writing is so damn clever. A non-high-context example:
Certain kinds of men like Ron Desormie. What a name. What a pervy name. What a perfect name for a perv like him. It could even be verbed like pasteurize. I thought: It could be? No. It will be. I thought: From now on, desormiate = perv the world, and rondesormiate will, for a while, be an acceptable, however overly formal, variant in the vein of irregardless, then become archaic, whereas sorm and desorm, the slang of tomorrow, will eventually dominate, rendering desormiate itself the over-formal variant.
The book is framed as a scripture, attributed to Gurion ben-Judah Maccabee - potential messiah, age 10 (also the protagonist); deals with just four[!] days in over a thousand pages and still be an epic in all senses of that word (Only the third quarter had some dull moments!). And all this is done unironically in complete honesty.
I know the book has too many negatives going for it: really really long (although much shorter than Worm), cutesy precocious kid narrator, even sometimes meta and pretentious. But the book is relatively easy to read, has an involving plot and fun characters and humor and does not feel at all like the dreary PoMo tome I was expecting from the marketing. Hopefully, just like Worm, I'll be able to convince a few people to read this gem of a book.
Still hard to believe this was the author's first novel!
Also don't read the awful NYT review of this book. Too much spoilers and misses the point anyway....more
Definitely one of the best non-fiction books I have read lately. So much food for thought - so much to rethink about how I look at the world. I got intDefinitely one of the best non-fiction books I have read lately. So much food for thought - so much to rethink about how I look at the world. I got interested in reading this book because of a series of tweets in response to https://ourworldindata.org/a-history-... about how both stats and stories have limits and can't help us comprehend the full complexity of the truth.
So the book starts of with a description of "scientific forestry" in 18th century Prussia wherein some smart people realized that the timber yield from a forest could be maximized if they replaced the chaotic forest ecosystem with a rectangular grid of Norway spruce. Everything seemed going spectacularly well until the next generation of spruce was planted and the impoverished ecosystem couldn't support them anymore. Yet this "forestry" was exported all across the globe especially by the colonial masters.
As the book progresses, we see this pattern repeated often. It's there in Le Corbusier's city design and Soviet collective farms. And these schemes always seem to fail. The book gives a two part answer: 1) Centralized powers are always trying to make the world "legible" since they are easier to monitor and control 2) Aesthetics and pseudo-science of "high-modernism" pretending to be actual science - instead of empiricism and looking at the data, the most rational and efficient way of doing things is assumed to be putting things in a grid. Whether it actually leads to any functional improvement is unquestioned. Instead of a thoughtful consideration of trade-offs, we are left with a singular view imposed as "best for all". Due to this hubris of naive "best for all" paternalism and the belief that one is dealing with scientific truths it leads to lack of tolerance for any dissent.
This was the book that actually helped me understand the Gandhian argument for local self sufficiency - the "metis" that people develop over time living in a local space.
Yet, Scott is very aware of how cities of yore - the organic livable cities - unlike those of Le Corbusier's, had a life-expectancy in the forties because everyone was so packed together and dying of cholera. He himself says how Green Revolution, which took ideas from scientific farming methods, helped to provide food for millions of people who otherwise would have starved. Even modern timber farms seem fairly successful. So what's the point? I think Scott is trying to raise a more subtle point - understanding that all science is model building and improving the human condition calls for coordination between the centralized state modernism and the local "metis" of all kinds. Another point is that incremental changes are much better than the revolutionary ones that claim to fix all problems.
I see similar issues in the world of software. For example, the recent back and forth about rewriting curl in a safer language. Or the trouble with metrics in ad-networks. Same thing in surface level discussions about interpretability in AI or human medicine missing the "long tail" of complexities and interactions. I think we as scientists tend to forget that humans are always solving a multi-objective problem and simple optimization schemes for a single metric are bound to fail.
I am pretty sure this is the best cyberpunk novel I have read till date. I am surprised so few people have read this book. This book deserves to be beI am pretty sure this is the best cyberpunk novel I have read till date. I am surprised so few people have read this book. This book deserves to be better known....more
Subtler than Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives. You think it's a travelogue but eventually realize that traveling is about ideas and living life itSubtler than Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives. You think it's a travelogue but eventually realize that traveling is about ideas and living life itself. Being beautifully written is a nice haunting plus. Highly recommended!...more
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