Concluding thoughts on The Voyage of the Beagle

I first blogged about Charles Darwin’s pre-Origin book back in January, and as stated there was only infrequently reading it (I read two fiction books since then, though only one was scifi and thus merited blogging here). I read this first rather than his more famous later works because I thought this order of reading would help me better understand his progression from accumulating stylized facts to developing his theory. As my introduction to Darwin, I think it shows him to have been a pretty good writer even as a young man, though the extreme age of it makes some of the language (and even references to proper nouns no longer existent or common-knowledge) can make it harder to understand today. One of the things that makes it more interesting to read than a lot of contemporary scientific writing is that he has no qualms in saying which species of animals he finds ugly. I think the lack of photographs (though there are referenced figures in the text containing sketches sometimes) pushed him to use more descriptive language, including his aesthetic opinion of what he saw.

 

The Three-Body Problem

After watching the Netflix series last week, I decided to pick up the first book in the trilogy. I had previously been alternating between fiction & non-fiction books (treating the Southern Reach trilogy like one book), but I’ve just been reading The Voyage of the Beagle when away from home. It’s not like I need to finish that in time to return it to the library. I haven’t watched the Chinese version from Tencent, but I don’t know how they made 30 episodes of this book with less than 400 pages, considering that the longest adaptation of War & Peace (also the only version of that I’ve consumed) was only 20 episodes. What follows is going to be heavy on comparisons between the two, so apologies to anyone who just wanted to hear about the book.

 

Atoms vs Bits: AI imagines reality as screenwriters would prefer it

A lot of mockery has been made of Google Gemini. Zvi has a round-up here, but I’ll also quote from (thus acknowledging her existence for the first time) Grimes’ ironic appreciation: “offensive to all, comforting to none […] Art for no one, by no one”. Of course, anyone aware of earlier AIs knows that actual humans reacted against these models sucking up data and recapitulating stereotypes, thus imposing there rather heavy-handed anti-stereotype interventions on top of it. A comparison to the TV series “Bridgerton” was made, because there is actually demand for that sort of ahistorical diversity (something I’d noticed in remakes of classic stories).

This same month, Ginevra Davis reviewed Emmanuel Todd’s “Lineages of the Feminine”, in which she pronounced that feminism had achieved its goals of removing societal barriers to women but that the fundamental facts of having a female body still mean women are “still vastly underrepresented at the very, very top of capitalistic success—the economic equivalent of what [Simone] Beavoir calls “greatness.”” Prior to feminism this would have just been accepted, but now is a disappointment. She imagines a future in which reproductive technology advances enough to fully remove that burden from women and “I think that would be such a funny way for feminism to end—if someday, we get artificial wombs, and parents get to choose the body of their child, and they all choose “male,” and females can be, at long last, wiped from the face of the earth”.

Medical technology is infamously regulated because people care so much (irrationally, as so much of it is wasteful). Peter Thiel is well known for arguing that we’ve had stagnating innovation in manipulation of “atoms” generally because of regulation, while the IT revolution left few constraints on manipulation of “bits”. Since then Congress has gotten more concerned about Big Tech, with both sides of the aisle getting more negative on it (Ted Cruz being something of an exception who warns of us making Europe’s mistake). Congress, activists, and all other inhabitants of far mode may have little ability to reshape the real world as they wish, but they can at least get AI to lie to us about the world, depicting it as they have failed to make it. As people spend more and more time in front of screens, perceiving mediated rather than direct reality, this false world of pleasing fantasies will grow in importance to the real one that has failed to live up to our modern standards.

 

Reply to Imperium Press’ reply to Cofnas

In Nathan Cofnas’ most recent post he responds to Richard Hanania’s critique (as I did here), as well as some other people. One was a Substack I’d never heard of before called “Imperium Press”, and when I attempted to reply there found only paid subscribers could do so. They certainly don’t seem worth any such payment, and dubiously deserve a post, but I’d already written it up in Notepad++, so I include it below.

 

Reply to Richard Hanania’s reply to Nathan Cofnas

Last month I had a comment too long to fit into the comment box on Nathan Cofnas’ Substack post, so I made it a blog post here. Now Richard Hanania has his own critique of Cofnas (among others), and again there is too much to respond to for me to just comment there. Thus below the fold I will have many quotes from him along with my responses, which is again more difficult to read without the original post above it:

 

Were Tierra del Fuegians more primitive than Tasmanians?

I’ve been very slowly reading Charles Darwin’s “The Voyage of the Beagle”. It’s my first time reading a book on Kindle, and I just don’t feel the need to pick it up when I’m not carrying it somewhere as a hedge against bored waiting. Since I downloaded it from Gutenberg rather than checking it out from a library I also don’t have any deadline to meet. I didn’t feel like blogging about it until I got to chapter 10, on Tierra del Fuego.

 

Reply to Nathan Cofnas

Nathan Cofnas has a rather long post titled Why We Need to Talk about the Right’s Stupidity Problem, which is mostly not about low IQs on the political right (it’s partly about that), but instead his diagnosis that “wokism is simply what follows from taking the equality thesis of race and sex differences seriously”. In some ways he’s close to Richard Hanania, and like Hanania I think he’s wrongly dismissive of culture. My response was too long to fit as a comment, so I’m placing it below (although the quotations will be more of a hassle to trace back to him there).

 

Acceptance

The final novel in Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy (following Annihilation & Authority) deviates from the formula set down by those two. The first book strictly followed the POV of the biologist, while the latter followed “Control” dealing with the aftermath of the first novel, but Acceptance has four different maintained POVs, of which only Control and “Ghost Bird” follow chronologically after Authority. Even the third-person narration isn’t consistently maintained: the director/psychologist has her chapters in the very unusual second-person, while the small section containing the biologist’s writing (which should be stylistically distinct from the direct mental access of other chapters) is (understandably) in first-person, and unfortunately reads like the product of a professional writer of prose rather than an antisocial biologist.

 

Authority

Jeff VanderMeer’s sequel to Annihilation is longer, but I wound up reading it over a much smaller number of days. This is not because it’s a better book, I think it’s worse even if it was still worth reading. It’s just that the Southern Reach as an organization is less interesting than Area X, their focus of study.

 

Annihilation

As I noted when I announced my plan to read Jeff VanderMeer’s book, I had already seen the movie on its release and thus comparisons are inevitable. Because it’s the first part of a trilogy, I am going to deviate from my pattern of alternating scifi with non-fiction and continue with the rest of the Southern Reach series (as I did with the Foundation trilogy). Since they were all published together it seems particularly fitting to read them that way (also the TV Tropes page for the books lumps them all together).

 

Postwar

Tony Judt’s magnum opus on “Europe Since 1945” falls just short of 900 pages, and I didn’t take notes while reading it sporadically over these past months. That’s one reason I’m a less than ideal reviewer for it, another is that period of peace is inherently less interesting than the “interesting times” of Bloodlands. There’s not a complete absence of military conflict, and it begins in the wake of WW2, but that is still the broad contrast.

 

Serfdom as a military institution

I tweeted about this back in May, but my mind came back to it a few times as something worth preserving at the blog (whose archives are easier to search than Twitter). Andrea Matranga and Timur Natkhov wrote the paper “All Along the Watchtower: Military Landholders and Serfdom Consolidation in Early Modern Russia“. As my tweet referenced, I had previously thought of it in terms borrowed from Evsey Domar by way of Paul Krugman, analogous to American slavery in which an abundance of newly conquered land makes labor more expensive than the Malthusian usual and thus profits higher for the owner of forced labor rather than merely charging high rent to basically free peasants (who can only have somewhere else to go if there’s a surplus of land).

 

Bleeding Heart Libertarians is back… now in Substack form!

I previously blogged about BHL shutting down and some of its former members making a couple replacement blogs, but now Matt Zwolinski has revived the old name. I don’t know how many contributors his new Substack will have. I like how Substack has set the stage for something of a mini-revival of blogging after social media undermined it, but I regard the Substack platform as inferior to the standard WordPress of most blogs (Blogspot became obsolescent earlier). I’m particularly irritated at this happening to one of the best, Overcoming Bias, where it was said that comments (which I’d been making for well over a decade) from the old Disqus system would “hopefully […] will get moved soon“, but that still doesn’t appear to have happened.

 

A Canticle for Leibowitz

The other scifi novels I’ve reviewed here have been from authors known for much more than that (although Ayn Rand’s usually weren’t scifi). Walter Miller was more of a one-hit wonder, who basically stopped publishing after he combined three of his short stories into his first (and only, within his lifetime) book. A natural point of comparison to “A Canticle for Leibowitz” is Foundation, as that also depicted an attempt to preserve scientific knowledge (and civilization) after the collapse of a complex society, explicitly modeled on the dark & middle ages after the fall of the Roman empire. Miller & Asimov come at this through radically different perspectives though. Asimov was a scientist (a biochemist, specifically) who served alongside Heinlein as a civilian at the Philadelphia Navy Yard during WW2, and had optimistic Whiggish politics (hence the Foundation inevitably winning regardless of individual actions) entailing a scoffing at the realism of 1984 and fears of too much government. Miller was an engineer who served as a tail-gunner during the war and took part in the (now known to be militarily perverse) bombing of Monte Cassino abbey during the war and converted to Catholicism afterward. So when Miller has the hapless novice Brother Francis stumble upon technical documents in a fallout shelter left by the titular founder of his order, it’s not as purely a good thing as in Anthem when Rand’s protagonist discovers electrical devices underground. The permanently fallen nature of man in a moral sense means that as soon as we regain the capacity for the nuclear war that Leibowitz played a small role in, we are doomed to fall into it again.

 

Permanent post for giving away subscriptions to Substacks

For a while Substack had been giving me 3 subscriptions to Razib Khan’s Unsupervised Learning, roughly every week, and I was finding takers at Scott Alexander’s Open Threads. In the most recent one Scott said enough, so I instead will do so via comments under this post.