Three sips of gin by Timothy Bax.

Interesting look into the Rhodesian border wars from someone who ended up in the Selous scouts. Well worth the read.

The Languages of Pao by Jack Vance

Awesome book and very relevant with one of its topics being culture clashes.

"Skunk Works". Talks about the development of the U-2, SR-71 and F-117. Cool book.

(05-09-2018 07:46 PM)Bluto Wrote:  Staying with the classics, I have finished "The Count of Monte Cristo." It is a long book, but a relatively easy read, with short chapters. The reason for the length, short chapters and easy level of difficulty is because it was a serial story in the papers originally.

To avoid spoiling too much, it is about a man who breaks out of prison, inherits a fortune, and seeks revenge from those who put him in prison. They made a movie with Jim Caviezel as the main character. While a good rendition it was heavily abridged compared to the book. You will know the general plot, but there are a lot more twists and turns in the book. Overall I liked it quite a bit, and with many classics that I end up reading, I would recommend this one as well.

I just finished The Count of Monte Cristo and I would also recommend it. Although it's not a "fantasy" story by any means, the main setup of the book describes a fantasy that I think would be appealing to many people here and I recommend it primarily for that reason. That is being able to completely reinvent yourself (in your own image) and to take total control of your past, present, and future. In the case of the book's protagonist this is helped along by having unlimited wealth. It's interesting to think about how you'd act in that situation - I'd probably skip the revenge part as I'd rather just not think about the people who have wronged me, but I can't say that for sure.

I will qualify my recommendation by saying that I think the pacing suffers in the second half of the book. I thought the first half was paced perfectly without too much time spent in the prison, but the Count (who is the most compelling character) is mostly absent for large chunks of the second half after the trip to Rome. I feel like it gets bogged down in the specifics of the Villefort and Danglars households; also the love story between Maximilien and Valentine struck me as over the top, and I expect many others here would feel the same way. Maybe that was typical for the style of the time as I'm not really familiar with a lot of French literature from that period.

Some background historical knowledge would probably help - I had to refresh my memory on what Jacobins and Girondins were as I hadn't really read about the post-Revolution/Napoleonic era since 10th grade history, but a lack of this knowledge won't really hinder your understanding of the book.

I just finished ‘Nothing is True and Everything is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia’. Really great book that explains a lot about modern Russia.

I read this book based on the post below. I've spent a fair amount of time in Holland, and have been to some of the places in Paris where the story takes place, so I really enjoyed identifying with the setting. The story is set in the 1930's, but I could still easily recognize aspects of the Dutch character and the culture in Paris.

The actual storyline is quite wrenching. The main character has his world turned upside down at the beginning of the story, and pretty much drops everything and goes on a tear.

Here's the sentence in the book that struck me the hardest:

Quote:Why should Kees have been astonished, since he had heard the confessions of Julius de Coster in the Petit Saint-Georges and had decided there and then that everything he had ever believed in did not exist?

It reminds me of taking the red pill and suddenly seeing everything in life from a different perspective. How many of us look at our behavior and decisions from before we took the red pill, and think we were fools and suckers? I do.

However, the main character goes way farther than any of us. I don't want to give away any spoilers beyond what is in the book description, but this character definitely goes wrong in the way he reacts.

I will say too that most descriptions of the book focus on his boss's bankruptcy as the tripping point that set him off, but actually sex was as big a factor, or perhaps the biggest. This plays a key factor in the ending of the story as well. Definitely a story with a lot of red pill angles.


I definitely recommend this book.

(08-27-2018 05:31 AM)ilostabet Wrote:  The man who watched the trains go by (by George Simenon)

I picked this up from a second hand book street fair because it was just 1€. I knew that Simenon was the creator of Maigret, and although I am not a big fan of detective fiction, I decided that it was cheap enough, it was one of his most famous non-Maigret books (as stated in the short description at the back) and might as well give it a try. I was expecting a book to simply pass the time, but I was in for a trip – to this moment I am still shaken by the book. This doesn’t happen to me very often.

Although the book is a cat-mouse chase of sorts, I wouldn’t classify it as detective fiction. First of all, it is in the perspective of the criminal, not the detective. It also is a lot deeper than a simple chase, focusing on the internal struggles (or lack thereof) and motivations (or lack thereof) of the protagonist. He is one of the best anti-heros in fiction in my opinion, and puts Camus’ The Stranger to shame, despite the obvious similarities. I had to google it and in fact Simenon’s book was published 4 years earlier than Camus’. It displays a much deeper existential dread and emptiness in my opinion - and it is much easier to relate to than Camus' main character.

To the outside world, the protagonist is a model citizen: father, husband, steady job, upper-middle class life. He is not especially skilled or intelligent, or special in any way, but rather an average Joe with average concerns. He seems bored, above all, but content enough. Until it all comes crumbling down. He finds out his boss is about to go bankrupt, and that he will lose his job. Upon hearing this, he leaves it all behind - without thinking too much about it. He jumps on a train and starts his slow descent into madness, perversion and the crime underbelly of central Europe (first Amsterdam, then Paris).

Perhaps the best thing about him is he seems to have no particular pleasure in doing what he does. He just seems to be doing random stuff at first, and then his purpose lies completely outside the criminality itself – as if it’s just a vehicle for something else. He’s at the same time detached about what he’s doing and why, but he constantly checks the news about himself and is annoyed about their portrayal of him. He regards himself as a normal guy, but wants at the same time to be presented as something special by the journalists. His involvement in the criminal world goes hand in hand with his growing paranoia and obsession with the police investigation of his case – to the point where it seems at times he is doing it more for the notoriety and to leave a mark on society (even if a dark one) than to derive pleasure from his criminality.

After I finished the book I had a sense of dread - the book moved me greatly on a physical level. Still now my stomach gets weird thinking about it and writing this. It doesn't happen very often for me. The meaninglessness of the modern functionary whose job is a fiction without any real world value to the worker, the ease with which a regular citizen descends into madness due to the detachment generated by the emptiness of his role in society, the dark underbelly of crime and ugliness that lives side by side (though hidden) with the normal families, the aim to do something stupid and violent just for the sake of being noticed and getting out of the artificial mould that industrial society has created. And all this darkness and purposelessness only needed a simple catalyst like unemployment.

The book is 80 years old. Reading it though, it was hard not to think about how this atomization and meaninglessness of the urban life has only gotten worse. How many of us would like to think this could never happen to us, that we would not lose our minds so quickly and so definitively, that we can keep it together. And yet the book highlights how it is all hanging by a single thread.

Great book. Could not recommend it more highly. One of the best novels I have ever read.

5/5

Fooled by Randomness, Nassim Taleb



Taleb's first book and his first identification that there are a lot of things horribly wrong with the understanding of probability generally, mainly because as human beings we are simply not built to calculate it right.

His later books are less apologetic, more eclectic, and to my mind better reads, but this one is the most theoretical of the books I've read thus far. The probability concepts at least made me feel like I was learning something new, but this if you will is the genesis of his argument, which he goes on to develop in later books. This is the second-last book of the Incerto that I've read and all that I have left now is The Black Swan, which I'll get to a little later. Some of the material covered is familiar - Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow gets a bit of airplay, but the rest of it is still original and fresh and interesting. He has a certain admiration for George Soros' conjectured lack of humanity as it applies to investments, but sums the man up in one of the best metaphors I have yet heard: 'He uses up people like napkins.'

There are, though, three main things that the book puts across which I didn't get in emphasis from any other place:

(1) Saying someone may have succeeded solely by luck is not merely sour grapes. It's mathematically supported. Skill has a big role to play, but it is entirely possible if not probable for someone to succeed solely on luck if the conditions are right - and those conditions are nowhere near as remote as you might first think. Simplest illustration can be reasoned out by mathematics:

Take 10,000 stock traders with the same skill, or no skill. Allow that in a given year, half of them will make money and get to stay on at their firm, half of them will lose money and be fired. This is a true toss of the coin, 50/50. How many people are still at the firm after 5 years? It gets down to about 313 or so: 5,000 the first year, then 2,500, 1,250, 625, 313.

That is, about 3% of the original group of 10,000. Assuming you eliminate the skewing of "skill", pure probability says that about 3 in every 100 of a group of 10,000 people under these conditions would succeed solely because of the march of probability, as the group gets smaller.

Would you hire a trader from that group who could point straight at his record saying he'd made money for 5 years in a row? Say, one who proudly proclaimed the deathmatch conditions of his office, right out of Glengarry Glen Ross? The probability illustrates, very clearly, that some impossible-to-compute fraction of his peers, if not him, got by on nothing but probability, no sour grapes, no jealousy needed, it is a matter of mathematics.

Maybe you would. It depends on the starting group. But that can be impossible to figure out as well. Taleb says he'd be more impressed if the starting group was 10 and the guy was still there after 5 years under the same conditions (this, which Taleb doesn't mention but Kahneman does, is also potentially a problem, is partially because of the Law of Large Numbers: a tiny sample group means you are more likely to get wild, inconsistent variations from the norm than with large. Also known as why you never trust a social science survey with anything less than four digits as its test group, because most social scientists and most economists don't understand probability and statistics.)

In short: probability is counterintuitive and people should understand it a lot more than they do. I am seriously thinking about looking up an introductory course on probability and statistics because of some of the implications this raises.

(2) The world is much more random than we think, and we have lost the secret of dealing with it. The ancients understood the fickle nature of life on the planet. Karl Popper was a godsend to humanity because his hard limits on science - falsifiability - are going to be the anchor that eventually consigns most social science to the dustbin. I was also surprised to learn that, prior to Bacon, science was conducting itself in a solely deductive manner. It was only after Bacon - and philosophers like Hume raged against this approach - that science began to wander down the path of inductive reasoning, that because A was observed in conjunction with B that A could be said to cause B.

And the ancients' most potent secular way of combating this randomness was stoicism. Taleb spends a lot of time on the philosopher Solon, and in particular a conversation he had with the legendarily-rich kind Croesus. Solon came to Croesus of Syria's court, and appeared utterly unimpressed and unmoved by the great king's magnificent hall and riches. When asked why, Solon simply noted that there was no point being awed by the king's wealth, as all of this could be taken away tomorrow with all the speed with which it did not first come. The legend goes that Croesus did indeed suffer a fairly dramatic turn in his fortunes, defeated in battle, and cried out to the sky on the day of his execution that Solon was right. (Cyrus the Great, the man who had defeated him, is said to have stayed the executioner's hand due to this puzzling outcry, and on hearing Croesus's story, spared Croesus's life and allowed him to live out his days as an advisor instead.)

(3) Absent someone with extremely high qualifications, reviews invariably say more about the reviewer than they do about the work under review. I think I'd already figured this out intuitively from exposure to a lot of the toxic waste of journalism, but this appears to be supported more widely. Taleb starts his crusade against journalism generally right here, and it comes down to this: journalism was never about information. It was always about entertainment.

(He also specified a really good way of cognitively/biologically distancing yourself from the daily shitstream of journalism: you can have the TV turned on and watch the tickertapes or the headlines ... but just have the sound turned off. This is liberating, it exposes the people on the screens as clownish idiots. Your brain is refused the evolutionary trigger of taking things you hear seriously. In general, Taleb's approach is to suggest by the end of the book that people think with their emotions (cf. Gerry Spence and half the books on the Scott Adams persuasion list), and that this is inevitable. The only way around it is to do the equivalent of a trick from the Orson Scott Card book Ender's Game or more classically, Odysseus at the isle of Scylla: fill your ears with wax and have yourself tied to the mast while your boat sails the fatal passage.

That, and set yourself up with options. The guy can just about convince you to go into the area off the strength of this book.

In short, avoid bullshit, avoid noise, and avoid journalism -- and I have repeated myself twice there.

I also realise, given these thoughts, that me crapping long reviews out of books is actually a bit pointless. The original way this thread started was actually a good heuristic: when you finish a book, post it up here. Don't include a review. Because I am not an expert in many of these areas, so why should I judge the book to be good or bad? The real impact is to name the book and get other people interested in reading it. Taleb holds that word of mouth is the only acceptable form of advertising out there. I benefited most from just getting the titles of books that others had read here, I shall henceforth also give that benefit to others. I have used these reviews as a way of trying to write out the kernels of what I got from these books, but this is an abuse of your time, gentlemen, so in future I plan on just on observing a twisted maxim of Wittgenstein: Whereof one cannot speak, one must remain silent.

There is an ancient grifter's trick that relies on the human mental glitch that makes us call luck skill. It involved selling a book that could predict horse races perfectly. It is a very clever trick, based on randomness, that has been used for years.

Derren Brown made a good tv show by turning the old con into a tv special. It is pretty long, but if you want to drive this point home, it is a good illustration for mentally stubborn friends:





If you don't want to watch the whole thing but still want to know the trick, this is the Wikipedia link:

Derren Brown: The System

^^^

There is another scam that relies on probability in a similar "brute force" manner, which Taleb sets out.

Write an unsolicited letter to, say, 50,000 people. To 25,000 people your letter says the stock market will go up by the first of next month; the other 25,000, that the stock market will go down.

The next month, knowing which way the stock market went, you write another letter, this time to the 25,000 whose letter "got it right". You do the same thing again: 12,500 letters say the market will go up, 12,500 say the market will go down.

The third month, you tell people based on your track record that you'll be predicting the market will go in X or Y direction and that you have an investment opportunity if they can just put up $5,000 for the privilege of being in on the investment. At this point your base of suckers is still about 6,250 strong. By this point at least some fraction of that group will be convinced that you're some kind of oracle, and will be sending you the money. Even, say, 10% of them believing you results in you receiving just over 3 million dollars. If the whole lot believe you, it's 31 million. At which point you skip town.

Polaris, Jack McDevitt.



Science fiction, by way of Indiana Jones style archaeology. Nice, inoffensive. Would recommend his earlier book, A Talent for War, which precedes this one.

"Dandelion Wine," Ray Bradbury. Semi-autobiographical coming-of-age story about a 12yo boy's magical summer of 1928. Transports one back to a simpler time.

"Target Rich Environment" by Larry Correia. A collection of short stories, mostly from various universes he has created. Lots of fun.

Daniel Pipes, “The Russian Revolution." Long, small type. Pipes is biased, but you don't see much outside a half-chapter long beef against intellectuals in politics.

The Black Swan, Nassim Nicholas Taleb.



And that's the last of the Incerto for me.

Took a trip into the science fiction realm with Dune recently. I have not read it since I was about 14 so this was a nice refresher. Recommended if you want a different take on Science Fiction from the Trekies or Star Wars fanatics.

Blood of Elves, Andrzej Sapkowski



More like a prologue than a novel. Unusual. Notes to young writers: you can get away with exposition if it's being revealed in the course of an argument. Not bad.

Great Betrayal by Ian Smith. If he had been more like Joseph Stalin in dealing with opponents Rhodesia would still be around.

"Victoria: A Novel of 4th Generation War". Is this where the 2nd Civil War is going?

The Will to Power, Friedrich Nietzsche



Bootstrap-levitationist wank.


Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell



- Long form journalism explaining the Matthew Effect and explaining that success is mostly due to the culture we are brought up in, not individual IQ or meritocracy. Argues implicitly for cultural appropriation and eugenics one step removed.

- Explains that the reason Christopher Langan didn't go anywhere academically was because he was from a shitty, poverty-stricken household and while he had scads of analytical intelligence, he had little to zero practical intelligence (read: hustle, Chutzpah, BS, Game) and therefore didn't get anywhere in the university system. Reacts like a standard uni-educated twat when Langan points out that you aren't in fact allowed to say what you think once you're tenured at university (echoing Taleb's proposition that journalistic opinion clusters around one point of view because they have an agency problem and therefore write mostly to impress each other.)

- Stupidly goes to the logical conclusion that the way to make Western underachievers get anywhere in the world is to basically work them like Chinese dogs. Imputes the cause of Chinese mathematical student superiority and/or workaholism to linear relationship between number of hours busting one's gut on a rice paddy and the rice paddy's yield, compared with European peasantry where past a certain point a patch of ground could not be pushed in fertility terms, and where indeed European peasants actually didn't work past noon even into the 19th century. Doesn't seem to wonder why these cultural differences caused Western Europe to do something with gunpowder other than make fireworks and generally set off the industrial revolution while Chinese society stagnated and eventually collapsed into Maoism.

- You get more out of Taleb's books than this shit.

THE BAD-ASS LIBRARIANS OF TIMBUKTU:And Their Race to Save the World’s Most Precious Manuscripts, Joshua Hammer.

This is a pretty good book about a humble archivist in Mali who over several years collected and archived thousands of precious pre-Islamic and Islamic texts that were scattered around the ancient city of Timbuktu, mostly in private residences. He convinced many international donors to contribute to the building of libraries in the city to house the documents. Everything was going well until ISIS showed up and started enforcing Sharia law which meant that the documents were under threat, so the archivist had to organize people in Timbuktu to evacuate them.

One interesting aspect of the book is how it highlights the difference between Sufi Islam that is practiced mainly in West Africa and the more hard line Whabbi version that is practiced by Al-Queda and ISIS. The time line of events unfolds after Ghaddafi was overthrown in Libya and the following shit storm that created, many of the ISIS fighters were foreigners from Pakistan and Algeria who came very close to overthrowing the government in Mali after seizing the city of Timbuktu. Another interesting part was how the ISIS terrorists aligned themselves with the native Tuareg (desert nomads) population who have been trying to establish their own independent territory for decades.

Highly recommended if you're interested in geopolitics, African history, Islam and terrorism.

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/01/books...ammer.html

(08-31-2018 11:36 AM)chicane Wrote:  "Skunk Works". Talks about the development of the U-2, SR-71 and F-117. Cool book.

Have that book and three other next to them to read, the other 2 books are Moonshot and Apollo 13.

What you learned reading this book?

"The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test" by Tom Wolfe.

I picked it up for $2 and figured why not, since it's acclaimed as 'the seminal book about the hippies' movement' and suchlike. Plus Wolfe had just died, and I thought I should read at least one of his books.

It's long, and I ended up skimming some of the passages which were composed of hippy-ish stream-of-conciousness blather. It was interesting to read about Neal Cassady's participation in the group, since he was the basis for the character Dean Moriarty in Kerouac's "On the Road" which I read a lot when I was younger.

Although presented as a first-hand observer's account by Wolfe, he only actually hung out with them for a couple of weeks, and the rest of the narrative was constructed from others' accounts and what he saw on the home movies they made.

Most intriguing is the central figure, Ken Kesey. He certainly comes across as a strongly charismatic person (a true Alpha?), and one gets the impression that the only reason he did not become leader of a cult of millions is because that's not what he was looking for. He was not a limp slacker hippy-type; he had been a wrestler then football player in high school and only missed a college ball scholarship due to a shoulder injury, and was a muscular, well-built guy. Most interestingly of all I found that, although we think of the hippy generation as the starting point for free-love and all that, Kesey started the movement as a married man with kids; his wife was his high-school sweetheart and they were together until he died. There is definitely the sense that the whole acid-dalliances were a crazy diversion, and his stable, (almost) normal family life kept him grounded.

The wikipedia entry on Kesey has this quote:"Without Faye (his wife), I would have been swept overboard by notoriety and weird, dope-fueled ideas and flower-child girls with beamy eyes and bulbous breasts."

Overall, interesting and changes somewhat my perception of the genesis of the hippy movement. However this is not a book I will be reading again. I will donate it at the next possible opportunity.

-edit- did not post this in "famous books you thought sucked" thread since I didn't actually hate it. Felt like I was forcing myself to finish it at times, though.

(10-14-2018 10:32 AM)ed pluribus unum Wrote:  "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test" by Tom Wolfe.
...
Most intriguing is the central figure, Ken Kesey. He certainly comes across as a strongly charismatic person (a true Alpha?), and one gets the impression that the only reason he did not become leader of a cult of millions is because that's not what he was looking for. He was not a limp slacker hippy-type; he had been a wrestler then football player in high school and only missed a college ball scholarship due to a shoulder injury, and was a muscular, well-built guy.

I assume you have read 'Onw flew over the cuckoo's nest'?

It is hailed as a hippy-book about the struggle of the individual against conformist society. That's not entirely untrue, but a far more accurate description would be, that it is about a true alpha (McMurphy) fighting against the matriarchy and trying to show his emasculated fellow inmates, that it is ok to be a man.

Very interesting what you write about Kesey's background, sounds like his own biography influenced his depiction of Murphy.

Read a couple of novels the last month or so. I started a thread on Red Pill novels and someone recommended the Flashman books by George Macdonald Fraser.

I read 'Flashman and the Tiger' and 'Flashman and the Dragon'

First one was good, second was terrific. Historical fiction, main character a British soldier and cad.

Both red pill galore, especially Flashman and the Dragon