Books you won't read, and antirecommendations

I had a related thread many years ago:

https://salo-forum.com/index.php?threads/the-worst-books-ever.2373/

I emphasize again that I refuse to read any books (as distinct from comics that are freely available) from Scott Adams, including the upcoming one about “persuasion”:

https://www.amazon.com/Win-Bigly-Persuasion-World-Matter/dp/0735219710/


His bag of tricks (in his blog and Twitter) is extremely simple: instead of using human reason, just retreat to making single assertions seem plausible as possible. This consists in the basic moves: reducing things, pre-emptively accusing people of things (like “cognitive dissonance”), and layers of insinuation — positive insinuation (“hey, this has NOTHING to do what what you just said. BUY MY BOOK BUY MY BOOK”), and negative (“I don’t have time to explain this to you; do your own research, buddy”).

Here’s an imaginary conversation between myself and Scott Adams:

Me: [Points to an apple.] This apple is green.

Scott Adams: That’s an absurd absolute; a tell for cognitive dissonance.

Me: Huh? Can’t you see it’s green by just looking at it?

Scott Adams: Again, *all that you are doing* is using “facts” and “logic”. Facts and logic don’t matter, JUST PERSUASION. BUY MY BOOK.

Me: I wasn’t making an “absolute” assertion, but just pointing out that an apple was green.

Scott Adams: Your response is laughable; a perfect case of cognitive dissonance. I laugh while contemplating it. By the way, you might like my book since you like apples.

Me: How is “cognitive dissonace” equivalent to making an assertion? Also, you asseriton that “all that I am doing” is something or the other is an absolute assertion, no?

Scott Adams: Again, a tell for cognitive dissonance: you don’t understand the *difference* between an *absolute* and *system*. To understand the difference, you need to read my book.

Me: Also, the notion of “goals vs systems” is an absurd absolute, since there are of course many other alternatives.

Scott Adams: Absolutely not. Systems are *way* better than goals, and I don’t have time to do your research for you. Do your own research. I along with other experts who have read up on this subject don’t have the time to explain this for you; do your own research. The best way to do that is by buying my book.

Etc. Once he ever says anything that cannot be imitated by a chatbot, then I'll change my mind.

Against my will, I read Adams "How to Fail..." book. It was excruciating, but it had a few things in it which were actually useful. Affirmations work. Systems are more useful than goals. And some of his persuasion book suggestions were actually useful (not useful enough to buy them). I will not read any more of his unless it is a cartoon book.

FWIIW, Kahneman is a friend of Talebs. I think Kahneman is completely full of shit. His book is vacuous and terrible.

M. F. M. Osborne: woker than anything Taleb said. Also talks about pinning tails to your black duck.

I also refuse to read anything by Malcolm Gladwell. Igonvalues is an unforgivable sin. Gladwell is basically the upper middle class making fart noises at each other.

I read a few pages of Peter Watts' Blindsight at the behest of a friend and it was psychologically and philosophically trash. Nerds are smart enough to keep finding new ways to enjoy vampires and "badass" autistic protagonists but not smart enough to stop wanting to. Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End was also quite arid. Baudrillard's Cool Memories I & II are quite good in parts but I got III with the intent of scanning it ( III & IV aren't online) and it was rubbish. V continued the downward trend and was quite boring.

Infinite Jest - most of what's good of it can be found in his short stories (aside from a handful of scenes which in sum are not worth the rest of it, but which might be worth excerpting). The central message of IJ amounts to St. Augustine's line here: "The good man, though a slave, is free; the wicked, though he reigns, is a slave, and not the slave of a single man, but — what is worse — the slave of as many masters as he has vices." ...so dedicate yourself to something besides pleasure - but he never makes a clear suggestion as to what that should be. There's hints of an idea in this Gerhard Schtitt character:



DFW knew something was wrong with America, untrammelled individualism, smothering parents, easy pleasure, easy life in general, because it fucked him up more severely than most people. He knew he was living in a culture which didn't give him the tools to resist all this, but he wasn't willing to go too far beyond what he knew. He was always too concerned with whether people liked him. Here he sees something which you can tell looks like a solution to him and he's too much of a pissant to wrestle with the implications - just a lot of umming-erring, oowee well it's pretty good but fascism's pretty scary, right guys? It's not that I want him goosestepping, it's just that he doesn't really seem to stand for anything besides the glorification of his own intelligence and for being liked. He seems to enjoy the spectacle of his confronting dangerous ideas more than the confrontation. All his positions are basically popular. He settles into a woolly pseudo-Buddhism which amounts to a painkiller - yet another painkiller. He values endurance and discipline, but has no higher aim towards which they're directed, no will to employ them - although it seems clear that he desperately wanted one.

To reiterate, his short stories are good for the most part. Brief Interviews with Hideous Men and Oblivion are worth reading. Good Old Neon is particularly good.

Shitposters not worth the effort: Marxist historian G.A. Cohen (ideology replaces facts now?), Jeremy Rifkin, Valentin Turchin (although Turchin doesn't rate a mention in Shalizi's notebooks, his books are mostly garbage, this was the guy who made "cybernetics" equivalent to extremely vague pseudo-philosophy , combined with commonplaces and loose analogies with politics -- although, sometimes he would say something interesting), Lev Gumilev (same thing, but with "general systems theory" instead of cybernetics, unreadable gibberish), G.S. Altshuller (the "creativity as an exact science" fad), the entire cognitive science literature on " analogy " which is really dumb, Stafford Beer (skip the Beer, and drink instead people who were less sketchy: Kantorovich, Glushkov, V.S. Mikhalevich, etc).

Also, I haven't read A.T. Fomenko's book yet on revisionist chronology but from what I've heard the data it was based on was comprehensively refuted in the Russian language literature (forget the source). If I ever get interested in this topic again I'll come back to it.

Semi-woke (a mixed bag): CSP was just a metrologist who was semi-autistic and meticulous, who tried to apply this kind of thinking to philosophy and "cognitive science". In some areas this worked well (see Vol 7 in the Collected Papers, on the logic of history and also Vol 2 on inductive logic). In some areas it was inconclusive but better than alternatives ( EP Vols 1 and 2, on epistemology and the sign theory ). By "alternatives" I mean those who are analytic philosophers but not as meticulous (e.g. Bertrand Russell), or those partly superseded (Immanuel Kant). In some areas this didn't work at all: say, in his attempts to pioneer new formalisms (which were clumsy), or his efforts to analyze inherently intractible problems of pure speculation. His opinions on the "three categories" are pretty solidly refuted by D.W. Mertz as based on nothing more than confusions and a false analogy with chemical bonding. Even if it were true, however, it's nowhere near as evident as he supposes in his correspondence (or he has not made its evidence seem evident). Still, he was erudite and recovered interesting ideas by Duns Scotus and St. Augustine (on the "sign theory" that is now developed in biosemiotics, a semi-science), and some of his work on 'abduction' still looks promising. When I was reading CSP, I suspected that (by his mode of 'analysis' that was very meticulous and semi-autistic) he would have been a very good chess player -- this was then subsequently confirmed when I read the bio of him.

Avoid: his writings on the "three categories", or anything with the word metaphysics in it, avoid the volume "Chance, Love and Logic". Only stick to the ones I mentioned above (some out of print, unfortunately).

In conclusion, Leibniz >>>>>>>> CSP > Bertrand Russell > Husserl. And even Leibniz had very bad ideas often.

I haven't read Evola myself yet, and so decline to comment until much later. However I will make some brief remarks on a seemingly similar-in-style thinker -- that I attempted to grapple with for a long time -- who inspired my thread on the "Classification of Great Men" (especially the first post and this post ), Otto Weininger. He was a pioneer in the art of poetic classifications, and although I think his book Sex and Character was silly (resting on outmoded biology and a logical equivocation between Woman as a Platonic archetype and "actual biological women"), his later book On Last Things [Über die letzten Dinge] is much better and a taste of this is in the old thread on Dogs .

Part of Weininger's insight there was there must be some esoteric, poetic meaning to everything, including the stars, all the animals, plant life, colors, and natural settings (the lake, the river). There are: the internal and the external poetry, the exoteric and esoteric poetry, the implicit poetry turning into the explicit structured classification.

His "bad" idea was that greatness/genius was either monistic or dualistic, not pluralistic (this is expressed in his first book Sex and Character ). I hold again that the only useful dualistic distinction for "greatness" is what I have formed in that thread (the foreground/background), which is a kind of riposte that I have for monists like Weininger.

Weininger did not understand the "red", which represents fire. (He said in Über die letzten Dinge : " Red is the colour of the lower life and its pleasure. (In plants, green , the colour of static pleasure, corresponds to red , the dynamic pleasure of animals; neurasthenics are anaemic, criminals polyaemic.) Blue is the colour of the joy and bliss of the highest life.") Hence, he was extremely impressed by Richard Wagner but did not understand Wagner at all (since this means to understand the domination of the fire).

The primary question for all aesthetic philosophy is the meaning of Greatness. For that purpose I disrecommend Weininger's Sex and Character , and recommend On Last Things .

Download links for the latter:
http://www.huzheng.org/geniusreligion/lastthgs.pdf
http://bookzz.org/book/866844/4e4715

Any thoughts on Flannery O'Connor? I'm skeptical, but wonder if I'm being too harsh. The one story of hers I have read was not impressive. She has a lot of admirers, but most of those I've met I wouldn't trust on books.

My suspicion is that she, like some other writers listed in this thread, is more famous for her personality and life-story than her works. I'd love to be convinced otherwise though.