Sandy
I didn't much care for this book, but it did make me want to read more Dennett. He comes across as a delightfully clever man who isn't afraid to take his own ideas seriously and go up against the establishment. That's a vibe I could get more into, but this book failed to deliver what I was hoping. I wanted more “here's how I learned how to think” and less “let me tell you about the fun I had in Paris one summer.” Maybe it gets better, but after being bored for a few chapters (with ABSOLUTELY INCREDIBLE QUOTES SPRINKLED HERE AND THERE) I started jumping to more interesting-seeming chapters.
I never got what I was looking for, but maybe reading his books on philosophy would be more amenable.
An excellent book, which brings forth visions of futures that never were. Written in the late 70s, this book takes denotational semantics seriously, and harps on the difficulties which arise from the operational and axiomatic approaches—both of which, unfortunately, are much more popular now than their denotational counterpart.
There's a lot going on here. Some of it is delightful historical notes about computing, like early computers which drew their text backwards, to which the solution was to mirror everything, and then put a physical window in the back of the computer for the nerds to read their (now reversed) waveforms through. Or about how dynamic scoping, in all its awfulness, was brought about because it has an easy and obvious implementation when you're writing an interpreter.
But where the book really shines is in all the MATH. Oh my god. Stoy gives us structural inductive arguments (yay!) and contrasts them against induction on the runtime (which can only ever be shown to have not yet gone wrong, but never to have actually produced the right answer.) I finally got a meaningful answer to what exactly a least-fixed point is (one function is “less” than another if it is defined on fewer inputs, thus the least fixed point is the one that is bottom in as many places as possible.)
Furthermore, there's a great deal of cool representation stuff going on. Stoy points out that we have never actually seen a function, only ever representations (closed form algorithms) of them. It's obvious when it's pointed out, but I'd never thought of the lambda calculus as a REPRESENTATION OF FUNCTIONS before. The book constructs a semantics of the lambda calculus and shows why exactly it models functions, with the entire thing being built out of lattices, with theory that I suspect is where propagators also came from.
Denotational Semantics, the book, and sadly, the ideas in it, is rather dated at this point. But that's a huge amount of the charm. Our field has gone the wrong direction and it can be hard to see the context we exist in. Highly recommended.
This is a hard to review book. But the fact that I got through it, unlike any of the other ten category theory books on my shelf, I suppose is a good endorsement. I was keeping up entirely until full/faithful functors, and the remainder of the book washed over me, but I persisted on for at least a tour of the vibes.
However, the book itself is perplexing. Who is it written for? The first hundred pages give off a vibe of “math for people who have been traumatized by math” while the last hundred go hard into the paint. While I appreciated that the book doesn't use examples from math, the examples it chooses are POLITICALLY CHARGED and therefore EXTREMELY DISTRACTING. For the most part they're fine, but it does seem wildly unnecessary to add the parenthetical in excerpts like this:
> Now consider some other object x in the category. We're going to show that x “can't tell the difference” between a and b because whatever relationships x has with a, it has the same system of relationships with b. This is quite a deep idea, and is a bit like how I tell people apart, if I'm going to be honest. A lot of people look the same as each other to me in terms of physical appearance (especially white men) and I can only tell them apart via personal interaction with them.
I dunno man. There's a lot of this sort of thing and it all feels unnecessary and a bit gross. It's not enough to prevent me from recommending this book, but it's certainly not a strong recommendation.
Holy shit. I've always been a sucker for film noir, but Chandler has never done it for me. After a weird one man show in which I was reminded about LA Confidential, I picked up a copy (in book format) and it sat on my dresser for a few months, slept on.
Foolish me. What a book! Gritty noir that makes you feel dirty and have contempt for humanity. By my read, there isn't a single redeemable character in the cast of over 100—whom Ellroy somehow manages to differentiate enough that it's not too hard to remember who's who.
Ellroy's style is punchy and omits most words. LA Confidential doesn't read like anything else I've ever read—it's more evocative of imagery and feelings than it actually tells you what's going on. Sometimes it gets rather hectic and thus confusing, but as a whole it's excellent and somehow refreshing. Not a book I'd expect to use to describe a book about police brutality, political corruption, non-stop murder, prostitution, revenge, gang rapes, and aggressive amounts of drug abuse, but we can all be surprised.
It's not a very good book, but it is pretty inspiring in terms of “what could life be like if we hadn't grandfathered in all of these really awful car things.” I think of myself as a pretty radical anti-car sort, but this book gave me an appreciation for all the awful things about cars I hadn't noticed. The book itself is not worth a read, but it is certainly worth a skim.
Updated, Dec 17
So I finally finished this book. And it's fine, but it's clearly written as a serial. And like all serials, it is desperately in need of being edited. Being edited down to 350 pages—plausibly two 350 page books if you're feeling generous.
Instead it's something like 1.3 million words — nearly three times the length of War and Peace.
The problem is that there's just so many wasted words. Let's talk spoilers. There's some girl Aiko who shows up for like 500 pages, who then just dies, and it's a HUGE PLOT DEVICE. But it's hard to care because she's not a good character. And then some other girl just waltzes in and lives the dead girl's life. Like, living in her room, sleeping in her bed, hanging out with her dad, doing her chores. Why the hell is this two characters?
And then this girl doesn't have anything to do for the rest of the book. But she's still around, kinda doing her own thing. And then the main character's mom's subplot gets subtended by this girl without any closure on either side.
And then there's a big Mewtwo subplot, which is more interesting than the actual plot. But then Mewtwo escapes and that's the end of that. There are no repercussions to the story, and we never hear from him again.
THE WHOLE BOOK IS LIKE THAT. Some interesting bits that are hard to care about because almost none of it turns out to be relevant.There are glorious moments in this book, but they're nowhere near worth the price of admission.
—
Updated, November 11, 2023.
HOW AM I STILL READING THIS? I THOUGHT I ABANDONED IT.
I'm now 2500 pages in, and while it has gotten much more interesting, it's still not great. I think I just don't have enough on my kindle right now, and so it wins by default. And since it's not finished, I never remember to add more books to it until it's too late.
Vicious cycle.
Nevertheless, given that I've been reading this every day for half the year, I'm going to count it twice for my reading goal.
—
Abandoned. I made it 600 pages in, and while it was getting better, I wasn't enthralled. Maybe someone who likes pokemon more than I do would get more out of it.
I picked this up on someone's recommendation that I have now completely forgotten, with the pitch being “it gives an extremely accurate description of what it feels like to be each sex.” My partner and I started reading it with that in mind, thinking we might gain some deep understanding into one of life's deeper mysteries. My partner couldn't hack it, and put it down after a chapter or two.
Foolishly, I persevered. In retrospect, I wish I had had the wisdom that my partner did—recognizing a lost cause when I was presented with one.
Fundamentally, there are three things wrong with this book: it is chocked full of factual errors, it is based on lots of extremely suspicious psychology research, and its central thesis depends firmly on group selection. We'll go through these in order.
## Bad Facts
There are lots of (often unimportant) claims in this book that are simply wrong. For example:
> The highly successful Japanese Pokemon card series presents another example, with cards with names such as Enraged Muka Muka, Infernal Incinerator, Creeping Doom Mantra, Malice Doll of Demise, Indomitable Fighter Lei Lei, Cyber Archfiend, Terrorking Salmon, Tribe-Infecting Virus, Nightmare's Steelcage, Invitation to a Dark Sleep, Mad Sword Beast, Dark Driceratops, Gross Ghost of Fled Dreams, Pitch-Black Warwolf, and Dragon Zombie.
These don't sound like any Pokemon I've ever heard of. A little googling shows that these are in fact Yu-Gi-Oh cards. Or how about this one:
> Massively multiple online role-playing computer games, such as the hugely popular World of Warcraft, allow many players armed only with a computer to cooperate from around the world to hunt down and kill one another, team against team, in completely realistic contexts.
I think it's hard to call pretending to be an Orcish Death Knight a “completely realistic context.”
On the topic of things that should have been caught by an editor, we have this gem:
> If another female requires a better territory, more food, or assistance fighting a competitor or predator, a high-status female can lend a helping hand, or mouth or foot.
Lending a mouth doesn't seem like the sort of thing that would help someone else get more food.
> A study in the US Midwest found that bullying followed a predictable pattern. High-status boys bullied low-status boys. In turn, low-status boys bullied high-status girls.
As a low-status boy in school, who was friends with a lot of other low-status boys, there wasn't any bullying of high-status girls. In fact, we were the ones being bullied by high-status girls. My female friends say they never saw any of this bullying of high-status girls either. Of course, this doesn't prove anything, but it certainly doesn't pass the sniff test.
Then there's lots of weird claims like this one:
> If another man is trying to compete, he generally does it in public. He openly bests his competitor, then helps himself to his competitor's food—or his wife.
uhhhh.... that... doesn't seem to be... how competition works in any part of the world I've ever come across...
There is lots of crap stuff like this in the book. None of them really matter, but they do not lend credence to Benenson. If I can't trust her to spot that role-playing as an elf who must drink blood to strengthen his magic might not be realistic, or that men don't actually compete with their wives as collateral, then why should I trust anything else she has to say? Gell-mann amnesia can only take you so far, and we passed that exit a long time ago.
## Very Suspicious Science
There are lots of claims in this book that I highlighted thinking WTF. I didn't open up any of the citations, but a lot of the things referenced didn't seem to be relevant to the point at hand. I don't have any examples right now, unfortunately, and I'm too lazy to pull them up. But, in reading the titles, I also read the years, and almost all of the WTF-enough citations I cared to click on were from the 90s. I'd like to point out that the replication crisis came to our attention in the early 2010s, and it seems likely that it was precipitated by lots of bad research in the 90s.
It's hard to say here whether this is representative of all the citations in the book, or merely the most WTF ones. Nevertheless, here are some quotes from the book I took umbrage with, and my commentary on why.
> The ratio of young men (15–29 years) to older men (30+ years) in a country predicts quite accurately war-related fatalities. In their study of 88 countries from all over the world, Christian Mesquida and Neil Wiener [51] showed that as this ratio of young to older men increases, the number of fatalities during conflicts increases enormously.
I hope Benenson is misquoting the study here, because if not, she's saying “a country that has more young men has more causalities in war.” This is presented as a knock-down argument for why men are more violent and “warrior-oriented” than women. Alas, as stated it forgets to account for the fact that if you have more young men, you can send more of them into war. If you have more people at war, more people are going to get shot at, and there will be more casualties than if you had fewer people at war.
This book has lots of examples of misunderstanding data and of ignoring obvious confounders. Like the following:
> Boys raised [in an Israeli orphanage] were more likely to participate in the riskiest and most violent aspects of military service. A full 54% of them volunteered for units with fighting requirements, whereas only 16% of boys raised with their own families did so. Boys raised [in an Israeli orphanage] also displayed the most valor in battle. It is no accident that these were boys who were raised with other boys and away from their mothers.
The claim here is that the presence of women makes men less violent. Maybe. Or maybe it's just that people without families or normal upbringings have less to live for, and valor is the obvious thing to strive for if you don't have many ties to safety or much in the way of prospects back in the civilian world.
There is more like this.
> In business and science, high-status women invest less than high-status men in lower-status same-sex individuals [181, 182, 4]. Recently, my colleagues and I asked young women and men how much money they would share with a less powerful same-sex ally with whom they had worked on a joint project. Women gave much less than men did.
Notice the sleight of hand here. They asked how much people would share; they didn't actually observe people sharing. But the conclusion is that women give much less than men do. Again, I haven't read the study, and maybe it fares better than its presentation here, but given the rest of the red flags in this book, I have no reason to expect it to.
Occasionally, the book gifts us a gem like this one:
> Unsurprisingly, men are more likely to get divorced when they have been married longer, whereas the opposite is true for women.
Unless Benenson is making unrelated commentary on homosexual marriage in the midst of her point, this claim is not even wrong. Men and women are married together, for the same amount of time, and therefore they get divorced after the same amount of marriage.
## Weird Stereotypical Sexism
I'm hesitant to use the word ��boomer” immediately under a subheading of “weird stereotypes,” but I'm going to do it anyway. This book has all sorts of weird stereotypes that I've never heard anyone actually espouse, except maybe in meme format on Facebook shared by embarrassing relatives. Things like:
> Probably almost every mother who has ever lived has screamed in her home and commanded, insulted, made fun of, and otherwise acted superior to her family members at times.
My mom didn't. Either this is a knock-down refutation, or Benenson isn't actually saying anything here and has a motte and bailey where she can always retreat to “at times.”
A personal favorite of mine is Benenson's weird fixation on the fact that men are forgetful, irresponsible, and love SPORTS:
> Even where fathers take care of children, many are not certain how old their child is, what day their child was born, where to find their child's doctor, or the name of their child's teacher [14]. None of these fathers, however, has any memory problems when it comes to recalling the names, ages, and statistics of the players on their favorite sports team.
and
> A careful inspection shows that fathers can be distractible when it comes to children. While a father may dutifully push his baby's carriage, his attention is easily distracted by a pretty girl walking by, deliberations with fellow fathers about last night's baseball game, or a new business deal.
and
> Boys, regardless of whether they are educated, grow up to be men, who just don't invest as much in their families. Often, men will choose to spend their money on alcohol and tobacco or leisure activities as much as on their families.
It's comical how meme-y these ideas are.
## Bonus Taylor Swift
Presented unironically:
> Jenny wasn't really interested in a boyfriend, but she still like hanging out with the guys. Mostly she liked to play soccer and basketball with them after school. She liked to wear jeans and T-shirts instead of make-up and miniskirts.
## Group Selection
Let's get down to brass tacks. While it's fun to dunk on this book, this is where the serious structural problems in the argument rear their ugly head. Paraphrasing the synopsis of the book in a few sentences:
> Men and women survive in life via different skills. These different skills are so in-grained that they are biological in nature.
>
> Women are responsible for raising children, and thus have evolved to take good care of themselves and others. This involves WORRYING A LOT.
>
> Men, on the other hand, are all about WAR and FIGHTING ENEMIES. They can impregnate lots of women with very little work, and therefore can dedicate the rest of their energy to fending off enemies for the good of the tribe.
Ignoring the fact that the conclusions don't stem from the premise (tending children is one more thing to worry about, and thus lowers your chance of survival, and fighting is necessarily bad for your health) there is a keen misunderstanding of evolution at play here.
In particular, the argument here that men are warriors because they can get someone pregnant and then lay down their lives for the good of the group is repeatedly hammered home throughout the book:
> A young man will sacrifice his life, most immediately for the other young men in his group who are standing right next to him in battle. That is what his emotions tell him [1, 17, 18]. That is what I believe allows his genes to survive. If he survives, his genes will be more likely to be passed down to his children. If he dies but his community survives, then at least some of his genes, those residing in his closest family members, will be passed down to his nieces and nephews.
and
> If you belong to a boys' group, your allies may not remember your birthday, but they know very well if you can run fast, hit well, respect rules, and make good decisions. They may be competitors, but when things get tough, they're also the ones who will protect you and root for you, and maybe even die for you.
Different, but along the same line:
> [Fathers] know the mother of their children will almost always be there for the children. Of course, around the world, stealing another man's wife or girlfriend is probably the number one cause of murder within a community [192], even in hunter-gatherer societies [22]. But a man doesn't worry as much about this, as long as his wife can care for his children.
What a weird experience to re-read. I last looked at Xenocide when I was in my early teens, and it's cool to see just how much it shaped the person I am today. There are lots of really good ideas in this book, but it's weighed down by all that /literature/ stuff. Like, having too many characters without anything to do. Ender has six kids and a wife from the last book, but only two children have anything to do here. The others are shoehorned in, and get into some arguments for the sake of Drama, but without any payoff to the actual story.
Ender's wife gets jealous and throws a hissy fit. But it doesn't matter, and it feels like Card remembered she was around and should probably do something. Thankfully she joins a nunnery and we don't hear from her again, which is delightful because she's a tedious, unlikable character.
There's a ton of this. Plikt is set up as this MYSTERY WOMAN who idolizes Ender from afar. But Card forgets about her, and she does nothing. We get a whole chapter introducing Valentine's husband only for him to wordlessly drive the car later while the real protagonists do things. She brings five kids along, but they are never mentioned again.
And the convenience of the thing! The Enderverse is dripping with Star Wars-style creative-bankruptcy. Ender not only happens to be the guy who saves the human race, he turns out to be a brilliant author and orator and diplomat and detective. He writes and pushes through the first inter-species treaty. And he carries around the only existing egg of a extinct alien civilization. And an intergalactic AI lives inside of him.
His sister is the best op-ed writer in the universe. His brother singlehandedly united humanity and governed it until the end of his life. OK fine maybe it's a particularly bright family. Sure.
But then he travels 3000 years into the future and marries a woman whose parents genetically engineered a cure for the virus that allows for all life on the planet. She was probably pretty smart in the last book but I don't remember what she did. But her baby daddy figures out all of the only known-living alien culture. Of their children, in order of descending age:
1. discovers deep biological secrets about the aliens; is later the target of a genuine, physics-defying miracle
2. designs a vaccine to a virus that saves all of humanity in the universe; also gets rid of the false gods
3. (we are told) is a great religious hero, who dies a martyr and is subsequently beatified.
4. has metal eyes and (we are told) is the greatest father imaginable
5. commits TREASON because she is mad at her mom
6. intentionally leads a pogrom to massacre the aliens. also invents faster-than-light travel.
Like what the fuck. The city they live in has over a thousand people, and the only other inhabitants we learn about are the mayor and the bishop. Why does everyone relevant to the plot have to be in the same family?
So there's lots of stuff like that. But there's much more wrong with this book. Card's religious overtones dramatically detract here. One of the book's big themes explores worshiping false gods, and then does a smash cut—without any sense of self-awareness whatsoever—to a Catholic settlement that it plays entirely straight. Like, to the point of absurdity. The aliens don't question the christian god. The fucking sentient trees don't either. There isn't even any lampshading here as to why the christian god is OK, despite the characters knowing about the false gods.
And then there's this excellent cliffhanger ending, where Ender creates new humans out of his mind. Cool principle and a great place to end. But the book goes on for another hundred pages and sorta kinda briefly engages with these extremely flat, and so, so tired, characters. Nah dog; everyone knows you end the book when they show up.
Oh yeah and did I mention the deus ex machina where they can just wish ANYTHING THEY WANT into existence? It saves the day, but is underwhelming because nobody did anything to deserve it. And either it's going to ruin the next book, or require ridiculous lamp-shading to prevent from doing so.
idk man. Xenocide has the seeds of greatness in it, but it's got absolutely nothing on Speaker for the Dead, and doesn't inspire me to want to finish rereading this series.
Better than the Book of Three but also just awful. The WAR BAND leaves behind Eilonwy and Gurgi because they will be useless. Eilonwy and Gurgi disagree and come along on the adventure and then have no purpose for the whole book. No joke, I forgot Gurgi existed for several chapters because the narrator forgot about him too—Gurgi said nothing and did nothing for chapters at a time.
But then I suppose really this book is all about Taran. Reading this as a kid I liked Taran, but coming back through this I wish he'd just shut up and let the adults talk. He receives a magic item from a dying man that lets him do magic things but in the least literarily-interesting way imaginable, and then sells it, even though he promise the man he'd give it to the dying man's wife. After a move like that it's kinda hard to respect him as a character.
I get that like the fate of the world is at stake if he doesn't sell the magic item, but at least let him pretend to give a shit about this promise, especially when the end of the book is all about Taran and HOW HE ALWAYS KEEPS HIS PROMISES NO MATTER WHAT.
After revisiting two of these books, I don't feel the need to read the third.
It's not the worst children's book that I liked as a child and reread as an adult, but it suffers from all the usual problems. Episodic chapters, unlikable protagonists, and deus ex machina. The lore is pretty cool though; the damn pig was kidnapped and taken to hell, and then a rescue mission was executed explicitly to rescue her. For a PIG.
A fine book. The first half is awful, talking about pulleys and wedges and stuff and MECHANICAL ADVANTAGE and how to calculate it which nobody in the target audience will ever do. But then it talks about hydraulics and internal combustion engines and it's much more interesting if still makes you wonder if the book is really written for sailors.
I don't know how to review this book. It's all over the map. I liked the history of how the NES was made, and then delve into the weird limitations of the hardware. The fact that I didn't know these were limitations of the hardware really makes me appreciate the software engineering that must have gone into making games for the NES. All in all, I suspect you already know if you're going to read this book, and it's about what you'd expect it to be.
This is a really inspiring book, describing the everyday problem of power asymmetry between the people vs big organizations (governments/corporations/what have you.) Opting out of this relationship is untenable, and so what are we to do? The book's answer: obfuscation. Obfuscation is the “weapon of the weak,” allowing us to resist without needing to revolt. Short and sweet, and well worth the price of admission.
This is a pretty neat SF world with a rather dull murder mystery plot slapped on top of it. It gave me lots to think about in terms of what the world could look like if we had something to strive for — infinite life, seeing the end of time, having energy capabilities orders of magnitude of orders of magnitude more than we have today. The plot itself felt rushed and the mystery's resolution was underwhelming, but it's not really about that. I think. Maybe.
