Sandy
Revisiting Everworld was a trip.
If I recall correctly, Gateway to the Gods was the first book I ever bought with my own money. The cover looked cool and so I picked it up. Despite reading the series haphazardly as a child, in retrospect it's had some pretty profound effects on my life and the person I've become. So thanks, K. A Applegate!
For 2019 I decided to give up TV, which meant I needed something new to do before bed. My usual books are heavy and thought-provoking, and entirely /not/ the sort of thing you want filling your head in an attempt to wind down for the day. Since I didn't know of any fiction I was dying to read, I thought it might be fun to pick up some YA stuff from my past. And thus Everworld.
As a series, it's super hit-or-miss. The first few books are definitely finding their footing, the next few are quite good, followed by a couple of shit ones in a row, and then the masterpiece of #11. And then this one.
Entertain the End isn't particularly bad, but neither is it particularly good. If it were a standalone book in the series it'd be a solid 4. But it's not. It's the finale, and damn does it underwhelm on that front. I remember being frustrated by this as a child, and now I'm just as frustrated as an adult. It's a shame because this world does have a lot to offer; there's just something about the idea of a god who eats other gods that gets me excited. I like how David's been planning on getting artillery for like eight books now. Talk about foreshadowing! But the series just ends abruptly, full of promise but sorely lacking on execution.
This series could really use a good fan-fiction ending.
Anyway, now that I'm done the series, I thought it might be fun to write a little bit about how it's shaped me as a person. I was struck more than a few times over the last few books. Several of the things that I say—that nobody else says, and people look at me funny when I do—are all direct quotations from Christoper. Despite not having read the series in 15 years, I still could quote some of the passages verbatim. “Good grief, he was more David than David. And that's way too much David.”
Speaking of David, he was a huge role-model for me growing up. Something about the romance of being an unwilling hero, of needing to prove to yourself that you're capable; something about that really resonated with me. I wanted to be just like David. He doesn't drink, and so neither did I. “Personal choice.” He finds purpose in being the man the situation needs, and doing it because nobody else is stepping up. I like that. I think the world could use a lot more people like that.
I'm a little sad to be finished this trip down memory lane. The Everworld series was a fun read. It's mostly-well written and has lots of great moments. Unfortunately, the series is lacking a proper send-off, but then again, who isn't.
It's exactly what it says on the tin—a grade-school math teacher rambling about pop-psych. I picked it up hoping that umm, well I'm not entirely sure what I hoped to be honest with you. Maybe that it would give me some good insights into communicating why I like math to people. Maybe it's psych would generalize away from grade-school students to twentysomething autodidacts.
Nope.
I mean, really, it's my fault. The title can't get any clearer about what this book is about. If you don't know any psychology from the last 30 years, you'll learn some neat stuff by skimming the capstone sections at the end of each chapter “three things I'll remember.” If you do, and you don't care about the intricacies of how 13 year olds approach fractions, you'll probably be fine to give this one a miss.
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.
Senna is an interesting experience in character writing. On one hand she's super fascinating, playing Xanatos Speed-Chessmaster, and it's neat to see a protagonist with some fucking agency in this series. On the other hand, her motivations are weak. “I WANT TO TAKE OVER THE WORLD AND KILL EVERYONE IN MY PATH BECAUSE MY MOM NEVER LOVED ME.” This is hard to identify with, but maybe that's just ‘cause my mom loved me.
I was close to giving the book 4 stars because the end is fun, but realized I was bored as fuck for most of it so nah.
I picked up this book hoping it would be about the actual “search for the sound”—ie, the effort that the went into trying to write and perform songs. What I got instead was a fascinating history of the Grateful Dead. Despite having no idea what they were doing, and continually “blowing the big ones”, they somehow did alright for themselves. It's an inspiring book on that front, but damned depressing in terms of they were torn apart by bad management, the inability to focus on anything other than music, and a bunch of substance abuse.
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.
Yawn. Boring. Besides one scene in the real world, no plot actually progresses in this book. They weren't at Egypt when they started this book and they still aren't at Egypt when they finish. In the meantime they meet some people who all die, and waste some time dicking around with a “We're Americans rah rah!” speech that is clearly a plot hole in the service of needing ACTION TO HAPPEN.
You can comfortably skip this one without missing anything in the series.
This is a pretty good read! It was hard to put down—I devoured it in less than 24 hours.
Thiel has some poignant arguments in Zero to One. There's a lot of good takeaways for people who want to change the world and shape the future. But there's also chapter 10, which focuses on ways in which companies fail. This was particularly interesting to me in that it perfectly described my last company—we all knew it was fundamentally dysfunctional, but Thiel somehow managed to describe almost every single problem we faced.
I get the impression that Thiel knows what he's talking about. Combined with an inspiring message, it's worth your time.
Update 2023 — I reread this, and liked it again. It was interesting to see how much of it I'd adopted without realizing. The salient takeaways this time around are that one should be much more focused in how they spend their leisure time; it's not enough to remove digital crap; you actively need something to replace it with.
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Ever since I learned that people's score on an IQ drops by 15 points if they're regularly distracted during it (eg. by a phone), I've been pretty wary of my attention. 15 points of intelligence is a big price to pay for anything! About a year ago I got rid of my smart phone, and downgraded back to a flip phone. It's been working pretty well for me.
Digital Minimalism is Cal Newport's take on this phenomenon, and what to do about it. It gave me some vindication that maybe I'm not crazy for not wanting to sign up for instagram. Perhaps more importantly, it discusses a significantly less-haphazard-than-mine-was approach to weening yourself off these services.
The thesis of the book is “your smartphone provides much less value than you think,” but even if you already agree with that, there is value to be found in this book. Newport successfully argues that we've collectively lost the idea of active leisure and do-it-yourself-edness as a society, and suggests that these activities are a healthier substitute for mindlessly dicking around on our phones/netflix/what-have-you.
It's not Newport's best book (So Good They Can't Ignore You is), but it's worth a read.
Short review: it's garbage.
Longer review, originally posted at http://sandymaguire.me/blog/utopia-for-realists/:
Rutger Bergman's Utopia for Realists is a book whose primary thesis is that we should have a guaranteed minimum income (GMI).
I must admit, I was pretty sold on a guaranteed minimum income before reading this book. I hadn't thought too much about it, besides the fact that lots of smart people I know say it's a good idea, and that obviously we're going to need a solution to what happens to humans after we automate away all of the jobs.
After reading this book, I am significantly less on-board with the idea.
What it boils down to is that Utopia for Realists isn't very good. If these are the best arguments for a GMI, well... let's hope that they're not the best arguments for a GMI.
I can't make up my mind on whether this book is merely incompetent or actively dishonest.
For example, the book discusses the Speenhamland system, which it describes as an early form of GMI, and then discusses a contemporary report which described it as a failed experiment. But then Utopia for Realists turns around with the sentence “more recent research has revealed that the Speenhamland system was actually a success.” A description of how the original study was supposedly flawed, but no citation to back it up. No reference to which “more recent research” reveals resounding success. There are lots of other citations in the book. Why not one here?
Utopia makes some other bold claims without backing them up; here's a few that bothered me enough to mark them down:
“Ultimately, the perfect, self-regulating market proved an illusion.”
“The historian Brian Steesland... emphasizes that, had Nixon's plan gone ahead, the ramifications would have been huge... No longer would there be such a thing as the ‘deserving' or ‘undeserving poor' [no citation]”
There was another time I wanted to check a source. The book makes a case for “giving housing/money to homeless people is cheaper than dealing with the consequences of not” via a case study. I'm willing to believe this; prevention is usually a better strategy than treatment. OK, fine. What I wanted to check was the cost breakdown; Utopia describes the project as costing $217 million, and being responsible for getting 6,500 people off of the streets over nine years. This struck me as being exorbitantly expensive, and I wanted to check their methodologies and math.
The given citation for this “unmitigated success” was to a random pdf on the Utrecht municipal website which doesn't exist anymore. I didn't try any harder than this to find the document. The citation describing the experiment points to a Dutch news site (that Google annoyingly refuses to translate) that looks more like an op-ed than anything official, but more damningly, doesn't provide any links closer to the original source.
Bregman's grasp of economics is pretty tenuous. For example:
From a certain perspective, [Bastiat] says, breaking a window sounds like a fine idea. “Imagine it costs six francs to repair the damage. And imagine that this creates a commercial gain of six francs—I confess there's no arguing with this reasoning. The glazier comes along, does his work, and happily pockets six francs...” [emphasis mine]
No arguing? Except that the glazier charges a fair price to replace the window, so he is only marginally better off after replacing the window, but the world has lost one window and the owner is the worse-off for it.
He goes on:
Unlike the manufacture of a fridge or a car, history lessons and doctor's [sic] checkups can't simply be made “more efficient.”
This is absurdly stupid. We've all taken classes that were long-winded and boring. The quality of a teacher has a huge bearing on how efficiently we learn from them. Websites like Khan Academy are teaching entire university courses in a fraction of the time it would take to do through the usual channels. Doctors' checkups can and have been made more efficient; it's not an accident that doctors carry stethoscopes and have access to MRI machines.
But Bergman persists:
... the government is gobbling up a growing share of the economic pie... this phenomenon is now known as “Baumol's cost disease,” basically says that prices in labor-intensive sectors such as healthcare and education increase faster than prices in sectors where most of the work can be more extensively automated... shouldn't we be calling this a blessing, rather than a disease? After all, the more efficient our factories and our computers, the less efficient our healthcare and education need to be; that is, the more time we have left to attend to the old and infirm and to organize education on a more personal scale.
When you're obsessed with efficient and productivity, it's difficult to see the real value of education and care. Which is why so many politicians and taxpayers alike see only the costs. They don't realize that the richer a country becomes the more it should be spending on teachers and doctors.
No no no no no no. Cost disease doesn't say “we spend too much on healthcare and education.” It says “we spend too much on healthcare and education on the margin.” Which is to say that in less cost-diseased countries, spending an additional $1,000 will buy you a lot more than the same additional $1,000 in a more cost-diseased place.
Cost disease is the phenomenon that we're paying more to get less. For example, Thailand has a booming dentistry industry among Australians because you can get the same quality work done for significantly less money. This isn't “exploiting Thai workers” nor is it “taking jobs away from Australians”—it's just Australian cost disease.
A significantly smaller portion of the book describes the fifteen-hour workweek is an ideal one. Sure! Sounds good! But, Bergman says, “breaking the vicious cycle [of the 40 hour workweek] will require collective action—by companies, or better yet, by countries.”
I don't get this one. If you want to work less than 40 hours, just... work less than 40 hours? Nobody is forcing you, except your spending habits. As it happens, life is actually pretty cheap. Find a small apartment, share it with some roommates, and eat a lot of rice. You can definitely manage to do it for less than $800 a month if you're willing to shop around—and especially if you're willing to move.
The secret is to just not spend money. That means stop eating lavish meals. Don't get a pet. Don't buy a vehicle. Stop drinking and smoking and give up whatever other vices you have that cost a bunch of money. It sounds dumb, but the secret to not working very much is to not need a lot of money.
And then use your extra time to learn how to do something valuable so that you can work even less.
At the end of the day, I get the strong impression that this book was written backwards. Bergman very clearly believes in his cause, and has worked backwards trying to find arguments that support it—as evidenced by the sloppy citation work, numerous straw-men and gross-misunderstanding of the arguments against his point of view.
It's a particularly bad sign when a book is so bad that it makes people on your side agree with you less after reading it. Give this one a miss, but if you're looking for a significantly better resource championing MGI, look no further than Slate Star Codex's take on same.
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 is one of my least favorite Discworld books. Pratchett uses this literary device where he describes situations for far too long without telling you what's going on. Usually it works, but it completely fell flat for me in this book. I spent the last 30% having no idea what was going on. Maybe it's that I don't have enough knowledge of rock'n'roll imagery, but that doesn't mean it /works/.
This is a fantastic “what” book (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/oPEWyxJjRo4oKHzMu/the-3-books-technique-for-learning-a-new-skilll) for learning jazz. It walks you through what tons of things /sound/ like, and goes on and on about how to derive and play scales.
What it doesn't do very well is prepare you to actually play this stuff. For example, the book takes 245 pages before it gets to “how should you be practicing what we've been talking about so far?” If you're like me and generally just dive into books at the front, this is NOT A PARTICULARLY GOOD STRATEGY. This is part of a more general flaw in the book, which is that it's disorganized. There are 16 chapters total which are organized more by theme than usefulness or skill progression. If I were to rework it, I'd suggest reading the chapters in the following order: 1, 4, 2, 3, 5, 12, 6—that's the order I wish I had approached them.
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.
It's pretty good! I found myself not all that intrigued by Jobs after he stopped doing engineering, but my god is there a lot of good material here. It comes in terms of negotiating strategies, and in inspiration from having a single-minded artistic focus. Jobs is undeniably an asshole, but the book paints him sympathetically and it's engaging the whole way through.
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 bought this because I though it was like “how to do p-hacking” when in fact it is “what is the difference between a median and a mean” and “make sure the bottom of the graph isn't cut off.” It's a book that hasn't aged well, written in an era where presumably nobody had been exposed to statistics before. Don't waste your time or your money.
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.