WBH Digest 2024-11-25: Books!
As part of the launch of John J. Reilly's The Perennial Apocalypse I am cross-promoting John's books with Hans Schantz' 2024 Black Friday/Cyber Monday Based Book Sale.
Both The Perennial Apocalypse and Spengler's Future are on sale for $0.99 in ebook. There are always a ton of great books in the Based Books Sale, so you should check it out.
The Devil's Hole Pupfish would be too unbelievable if a scifi author made them up.
I have a set of the Britannica Great Books, and I agree with this. Great Books Programs seem to produce men without chests, and so must be regarded with suspicion.
Benjamin Espen
John J. Reilly said this about the creation of a classical canon or a list of great books:
The creation of a classical canon is mostly a question of editing. It's not supposed to be comprehensive. The objection to a canon, in fact, is that it may broaden the mind while cramping the imagination.
Contemporary Western ideas about tertiary education have ossified in a strange, unproductive place. Scott Locklin has some ideas on how to regain what we have lost:
I’ve given a lot of thought on the didactics of physics (and signal processing/stats/machine learning); from when I was learning it myself it was obvious that they were giving me some baby steps bullshit to justify having another tenured position teaching the training wheels versions. My assertion is you can take a kid who knows calculus-2 (high school) and in 3 years, they’ve finished their grad school coursework. I strongly suspect, based on what age people 100 years ago got their PhDs that this was the perfectly normal trajectory of everyone daring enough to attempt physics. Not doing this is a total waste of human potential; you’re literally wasting the most productive years of your most talented students lives. No wonder science in current year is shit: the curriculum is designed for stupid people. I’m not sure what stats/ML/signal processing people get taught; I assume from observation you’re better off having studied EE than just about anything else, so maybe just jumping into Kalman and Cramer-Rao and damn the torpedoes is what is needed. I have a fantasy of implementing this in some mountain Madrassa where I make the kids chop wood, carry water and build internal combustion engines when they’re not doing math.
Benjamin Espen
John J. Reilly died before the hostage incident he mentions in this blog post got turned first into a movie starring Tom Hanks and then into a meme, but this now fifteen-year-old blog remains topical. John didn't name his blog idly.
While there are probably less offensive ways of saying it, losing weight, like other kinds of accomplishment in the modern world, usually requires a kind of obsessive focus that is off-putting to people who do not have it.
If you take two mathletes with equal talents and unequal obsessions, the guy who has a life is going to be far less productive.
Sometimes, violence is the answer.
Silence and Starsong Volume 2 Issue 1 comes out Friday! Get your copy now! See me being harsh on Asimov and enjoy some delightful stories as well. I wanted to write a review, but my 12 year old stole my contributor copy and devoured it.
I wish Bluesky the best, but Twitter/X being the world's largest text-based PVP MMORPG is actually what keeps people coming back. There is a lack of other public spaces where masculine norms about discourse can be followed.
Alastair Roberts still has one of the best explanations of what the differences between masculine and feminine norms of discourse mean.
That's it for this installment! Stay frosty.
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