Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur, August 2017
Attention
conservation notice: I have no taste. Also, I have no qualifications
to opine on studies of international political economy, cryptocurrency, or the
history and validity of European studies of the Islamic world.
- Thomas Oatley, A Political Economy of American Hegemony: Buildups, Booms, and Busts
- There is an interesting idea here, which can be briefly summarized. The US
government normally bumbles along at more or less the same level of military
spending, because different leaders have different ideas about how dangerous
the world is, and they're more or less in equilibrium. Occasionally, something
shifts (almost) everyone to thinking the world is a more dangerous place, and
the US responds by, among other things, wanting to spend more on its military.
Because another perpetual divide in US politics is about the level of
taxation, and the appropriate level of welfare spending, simply raising taxes,
or cutting spending, would be a politically difficult move. Fortunately (?),
the US government has the alternative open to it of just borrowing the
money, at low interests and in its own currency. This is because of (1) the
US's century-long record of paying its debts (and not inflating them away), (2)
the unmatched size and depth of the American capital markets, and (3) the
unique position of US financial markets in global capital flows (which Oatley
documents with
some interesting network
analyses). Of course, borrowing enough money to fund a superpower's
military will have an impact on even the biggest markets, in particular
triggering financial booms. Booms are, of course, unsustainable in the long
run, so crashes follow.
- Thus Oatley's theory. It hangs together, and is certainly plausible. I
don't find Oatley's case for it entirely convincing, however. As a modern
quantitative social scientist, Oatley runs a lot of regressions to provide
evidence in support of it, but as a time-series statistician I see very little
value to those exercises. Leaving aside all causal-identification issues, the
problem is that the regressions treat each year as an independent data
point, but of course what happened in 1969 is strongly correlated with what had
happened in 1968 and what would happen in 1970, and so on.
(Cf.) The independent units of
analysis for Oatley's theory, if such exist, aren't years, but
rather US military expansions. There have, by Oatley's own account,
been only four of these in the post-war era (Korea, Vietnam, Reagan, and
Afghanistan-Iraq). Three of these were debt financed and accompanied by
financial booms and busts. (The exception was the tax-financed Korean war.)
Three matching cases is not-unpersuasive, but it's just three. So I am left
feeling that Oatley's ideas make sense, but have yet to be
severely tested, and I don't
quite see how they could be. §
- Simon Spurrier, Conor Boyle and Giulia Brusco, Hook
Jaw
- Christa Faust, Andrea Camerini and Chris Wahl, Peepland
- Marjorie M. Liu and Sana Takeda, Monstress, vol. 1
- Comic book mind candy, respectively predator porn, a crime thriller about
porn and the other seedy underbellies of 1980s New York, and an
alternate-history fantasy. Hook Jaw may be less enthralling for
those of you who (inexplicably) fail to share my repelled fascination with
sharks. Monstress is probably the only one of enduring artistic
merit, despite (or because of) being 94-proof orientalism (in one of
the [at least] three senses which in Said used that
word). (Sequel.)
- Ann Patchett, Bel Canto
- Beautiful writing, and a story I found gripping, even though I am completely
indifferent to opera.
- Olaf Stapledon, Last and First Men (1930)
- As I may have mentioned here before, my parents kept their science fiction
novels on a very low shelf, so they were some of the first grown-up books I
read. Stapledon (in the Penguin reprint with
the striking
cover) was something I encountered when I was nine or ten, and it left a
permanent imprint.
- This is, in short, the future history of humanity, from the
end of the First World War, through the rest of the career of us First Men, to
the imminent extinction of the last human species, the Eighteenth Men, who live
on Neptune, one of whom is the narrator-historian. (The Eighteenth Men, like
the Fifth Men who were the last terrestrial species, can project their minds
back in time, to observe events through the eyes of earlier creatures.) In
between there are multiple world-spanning civilizations, relapses into
barbarism, near-extinctions both through human folly and mere bad luck, the
evolution of new human species, the engineering of new human species, alien
invasions (with humans as both invaded and invaders), relapses into animality,
and a lot of philosophizing about transience, tragedy and transcendence. It's
a very far from perfect book, but it's also one I'm very glad I read.
- Re-reading after a lapse of more than thirty years, I am struck by a number
of things.
- World histories usually deploy a roughly logarithmic compression of the
past, so that tens of thousands of years of pre-history occupy as much space as
millennia of early civilizations, centuries of Romans or Han empires, and
decades of the modern world. Stapledon's future history extends over the next
two billion years, and reverses this compression, so that longer and longer
epochs pass in the same number of pages. I am pretty sure this was deliberate.
(I haven't checked, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was pretty
exactly logarithmic.)
- The depiction of the Americanized world-civilization that the First Men
establish (Chapter 4, section 4, "The Culture of the First World State") leaves
me wondering whether Stapledon, who seems to have been Very British, understood
us at all --- or understood us only too well. (This applies particularly to
the paragraph beginning "In the days of the nations", which my memory had
mercifully suppressed.)
- A propos of that, it is striking that the creation of a world-state with
an Americanized culture is supposed to happen "some three hundred and eighty
terrestrial years after the European War", i.e., the first world war. We seem
pretty far along that path already. In general, while Stapledon, unlike many
later and lesser science fiction writers, actually has a sense of history and
of historical change, he has us First Men change very, very slowly, remarkably
so given the record of recent centuries. He imagines that atomic power is
possible, along with genetic engineering and space travel, but puts them all
very, very far away --- centuries for atomic power, and millions of years (!)
for genetics and interplanetary exploration. This is the only example I can
think of where a pioneering science fiction writer was too pessimistic
about space travel.
- Stapledon's ideas about evolution seem bizarre. I don't know enough about
educated public opinion in 1920s Britain to say if they
were peculiarly bizarre. (After all, the modern synthesis of genetics
and natural selection was
just coming into
being.) Suffice it to say that these parts have not aged well.
- A key turning point is when the civilization of the Fifth Men will become
so developed that their sheer cultivation increases the gravitational pull of
the Earth, dragging the Moon out of its orbit and causing it to eventually
crash into the Earth, forcing humanity to emigrate to Venus. (I am not making
this up.) I would really, really like to know if there was some background to
this, if only in Stapledon's personal metaphysics.
- An inter-textual note: the Fifth and the Eighteenth Men will share the
ability to project their minds back in time, experiencing past events through
the minds of earlier creatures. Both species will use this ability to "figure
out the life stories of extinct types, such as the brontosaurus, the
hippopotamus, the chimpanzee, the Englishman, the American", and generally to
try to reconstruct and preserve the history of sentient life.
(Hence this history, recounted by a Last Man.) I will be extremely
surprised if Lovecraft had not read this book very attentively before
writing "The
Shadow Out of Time".
§
- Paolo Legrenzi and Carlo Umiltà, Neuromania: On the Limits of Brain Science
- I agree whole-heartedly with the main idea of this book: in a lot of
studies where "neuro-" is a prefix to an existing discipline, it adds nothing.
Such value as they have is either from analyzing behavior or psychology, which
would proceed in exactly the same way to the same conclusions if we thought
with our kidneys rather than our brains. Seeing that certain brain regions get
detectably activated during certain kinds of thought says remarkably little, at
least at our current crude levels of measurement, and poor understanding of how
the brain works. (If we see the same brain region active when thinking about
cheese as when thinking about cocaine, does that mean that cheese is as
addictive as cocaine, or that both of them are perceived as pleasurable, or
even that both of them are being categorized as "stuff I can't possibly consume
while in this noisy, claustrophobic machine"?) So the success of such
enterprises, at least as hucksterism, owes a lot to the
Skolnick
effect, and what I can only call a superstitious attitude towards the
brain.
- That said, this book does not go much beyond just asserting these
points, repeatedly. It is, admittedly, a short book (144 small pages, with
generous margins and spacing), but I went into it expecting something a bit
more than a well-written magazine editorial. I was disappointed. §
- David Gerard, Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain: Bitcoin, Blockchain,
Ethereum and Smart Contracts
- This is the only worthwhile popular book on the subject. It provides
explanations of the essential technicalities which are both clear and correct.
It is also relentlessly negative and mocking, which is appropriate.
- Having way to share a system of files, which lets one track the history of
changes and makes it hard to alter anything without evidence, is a good idea;
the software which makes this easy enough for millions of people to use is
called "git". (Gerard is the
only writer for a popular audience I've seen to make this point explicitly.)
Everything else in Bitcoin and the blockchain is pretty much a bad idea, either
because it's inspired by bad, crank ideas about money, or because it won't
scale, or because it
completely
fails to address the actual problems of trust and verification it's supposed to
solve. (These are not mutually exclusive categories of folly.) What
people want from their record-keeping systems, whether they are tracking
financial transactions or (supposedly) guaranteeing the organic purity of their
marijuana brownies, is that all the records which people (or automated
instruments) create are valid and accurate reflections of (selected aspects of)
reality. What blockchain systems, like git, can promise is that once the
records are made, it's hard to fiddle with the records without leaving a trace.
The
entire bezzle
fits inside that gap.
(A
demonstration, which deserves to become famous.) The one partial
exception is when saying something really does make it happen --- when
the computerized representation is what we want to keep records on.
This is true for software source code and other forms of writing, which is why
version-control systems are useful, and it can even be true for banking and
money (which is why people who have their bitcoins stolen are permanently out
of luck). But for just about everything else, which isn't a pure
computer performance*,
blockchains do nothing to solve the real issue.
- As for smart contracts, I am astonished that this ever seemed like a good
idea to anyone who had programmed something more complicated than "Hello
World". There is a great deal of schadenfreude to be had from the immediate,
embarrassing and very costly failures of attempts to implement it, and Gerard,
quite properly, indulges in this.
- Unusually for a (basically) self-published book, this got noticed in
the New York Review of Books. Unfortunately,
the reviewer
was a novelist who's a bitcoin enthusiast, and so just noted Gerard's
skepticism, without describing, let alone rebutting, his arguments and
evidence. §
- (Thanks to the reader who alerted me to this book.)
- Update, 13 February
2019: This
piece by Gerard, while using current events as a hook, summarizes a lot of
the argument.
- *: I think the issue
arises even for things which are purely performative, so long as they're not
pure computer performances. E.g., not just anyone can pronounce a
couple married, or divorced, so there would be the issue of whether such a
declaration had really been issued by someone with the authority to make it.
(Cryptographic signatures only solve this problem, if you think nobody ever
loses their private keys, or gets them hacked, which of course happens all the
time when there's money or other value at
stake.) ^
- Daniel Martin Varisco, Reading Orientalism: Said and the Unsaid
- This is a respectful, but ultimately very damaging, criticism of Said's
Orientalism, informed by a comprehensive study of reviews of the
book, subsequent critiques, polemics, etc., as well as revisiting many of the
texts Said examined. It is probably incomprehensible if you haven't at least
forgotten Said's book. If you do have that knowledge, though, I strongly
recommend it. It is a great example of trying to extract the valid, rational
and salutary parts of a ambiguous, equivocal, and exaggerated work of
brilliance. §
- (I might warn, though, that Varisco is a somewhat irritating writer. I
don't know if I grew more annoyed by his over-use of the "if x is the y of z,
then a is the b of c" form; his wordiness; or his very, very bad puns, which begin with his subtitle.)
- Elliott Kay, No Medal for Secrets
- Mind candy science fiction. This is a side-story to Kay's main series, and
probably not too comprehensible without it.
Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur;
Commit a Social Science;
The Beloved Republic;
The Dismal Science;
The Continuing Crises;
Islam;
Scientifiction and Fantastica;
The Commonwealth of Letters;
Pleasures of Detection, Portraits of Crime;
Writing for Antiquity
Minds, Brains, and Neurons;
Psychoceramica
Posted at August 31, 2017 23:59 | permanent link
