Recommend Books on This Thread

10 posts

J. B. Usher

You guys might enjoy Anti-Education written by a young Nietzsche and recently translated last year by NYRB. It's a series of his lectures written in the style of a Socratic dialogue where a "philosopher" and some university students discuss the meaning and purpose of education. There's a lot of prescient criticisms of universities being too utilitarian and specialized as well as some entertaining rants about popular journalism. Sadly, he never gave the lectures a conclusion since he could never come up with a solid resolution to the issues raised.

Niccolo and Donkey
Jargon

Can anyone recommend Will Durant? Does he fall within or without Whig History would you say?

Macrobius
We had a copy of his encyclopediac work (Our Oriental Heritage etc.). I read my fill of it after reading 'A History of the English Speaking Peoples' (Churchill) and Clark's Civilisation , before moving on to the Cambridge Modern History and Oxford Medieval History in High School. It wasn't bad but I'm afraid I was too young (ca. age 13-14) to have a nuanced sense of the politics or historiography. I found it irritatingly rationalist and atheist. I think it was purely in the freethinker/liberal tradition but a bit iconoclastic. It would be hard to imagine it is anything but straight up Whig History, modified with a target audience of Liberal households in the 50s and 60s -- think voating for Stevenson and finding Kennedy a bit conservative. The fact that Readers Digest and similar organisations subsidised putting a full copy on the shelves of the sort of household that had the 'Harvard Classics' and the like, suggests the Intellectuals equivalent of prolefeed by MiniTruth.

I'm very grateful it was there rather than nothing, along with those Carnegie funded public libraries and their wonderful collections, admittedly designed to bust the Writer's Union, but I've grown warier of propaganda -- especially Whig propaganda -- as I've grown older. Why not read JCD Clarke instead?
Jargon

Thanks for the rec, this was exactly what I was looking for. I'll check Clarke out

Chic bot
got a link to pdf?
J. B. Usher
Sorry, only physical. Only 10 bucks on amazon if you're willing.
Thoughts

This is just a footnote on Adams.

I have never read that book, and intend to never do so. Those who *bought* it apparently were not aware of what Adams was attempting to do in his blog (i.e., to "cleverly" promote a book that intentionally consists of hot air).

The main point of my other thread about Lakoff's oversimplified attempts to "explain" the reason for Trump's popularity is to point out the formal resemblance between what he says on the one hand, and many of S. Adams's posts (especially in early 2015). They have this formal resemblance: they single out some bag of tricks (about, say, "re-framing", or "taking the high ground" -- which is a very old journalistic trick) and attempt to say that this "explains" something that is currently happening. It is an attempt to over-simplify things in an appealing way, for a certain segment of the population who will (subsequently) swallow whatever self-help formula you sell them.

In the case of S. Adams, that may be "pre-suasion" of a certain sort: in 2015, he was taking advantage of the fact that Trump has gained popularity and that this is seen as a mystery by the main pundits on TV. This puts many (by no means all) people in the mindset to accept any kind of clever-sounding explanation for Trump's success. (A simpler example of pre-suasion is: if people were first exposed to the sight of flowers, they are demonstrated to be more likely to accept romantic propositions or products.)

Adams is aware that there is a certain kind of mind (otherwise known as "ovine") that always likes over-simplified explanations of the following kind: if you seize out a single aspect or single kind of "trick" and then show how surprisingly far you can push it, then it "explains" something else incredibly complicated. (This is also the basis for the popularity of Jared Diamond and, in some circles if not others, N.N. Taleb. I don't know if Diamond is some intentional self-promoter, but it seems like Lakoff is actually dumb enough to think that he has *literally* made some discovery.)

Also: what Adams said (in his blog) about "goals vs. systems" is just hot air, and it is equivalent to something Taleb said in Antifragile (which in many places wasn't much better, all things considered).

I also thought that Hitler was quite good at "pre-suasion" in the specific sense in which that is now used: but this would take us far afield.

(Edit: Another pet theory of mine (probably wrong) is that belief in things like astrology is due, in large part, to pre-suasion that is done accidentally.)
Content Creator

I've attached a pdf of Sun and Steel by Yukio Mishima if anyone is interested. The book outlines his feelings on death, weightlifting and life with autobiographical anecdotes.

perkunos
Pre-suasion is decent juju. I (unwillingly) read his book. As business self help books go, Adams book is actually quite solid. You're not going to learn any tremendous secrets, but having a conceptual framework to hang your hat on is useful, and none of his advice is bad. Compared to books by actual giants of industry, Adams is more useful than say, Andy Grove's management book (which was also helpful, but in a very specific area). Of course I didn't pay for it; he doesn't need the money. But I've bought worse books that I was still satisfied with.

I've also read a decent chunk of the Hitler speech book "My New Order" that Trump allegedly kept by his bedside, speaking of Hitler. This is also worth a look for persuasion/business reasons. It's kind of a shame it isn't available online somewhere; the prices are outrageous. Trump actually uses many, many of the rhetorical tricks in it. Perhaps because he read the book, but maybe it's just that all good orators use these tricks. Repetition, us vs them, grievances, encouraging dreams of greatness, confirming their suspicions, etc.