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- Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters by: Steven E. Koonin
- Theory and Reality: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science by: Peter Godfrey-Smith
- The Start 1904-30 by: William L. Shirer
- The Storm on Our Shores: One Island, Two Soldiers, and the Forgotten Battle of World War II by: Obmascik, Mark
- Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman by: Robert K. Massie
- Tiamat’s Wrath by: James S. A. Corey
- What I Saw in America by: G. K. Chesterton
- Job: A New Translation by: Edward L. Greenstein
It was a little over five years ago that I started this blog. In that time I have written 240 posts, or an average of four a month, which is less than I hoped to write but still pretty impressive. Enough so that I feel like I’ve earned a break, as such other than this entry, and the end of the month newsletter, I’m not planning on posting anything else, though I have a vague idea about updating some of my past posts, so there’s some chance I’ll do that. This is not primarily about taking a vacation, it’s primarily about carving out time to get some momentum on the book I’ve been working on, which I still hope to have out this year. And which has been stalled at 30% for a while.
Beyond that there’s not much to report, except that June has been super hot, which I hate, but I’ll talk more about that in my first review:
I- Eschatological Reviews
Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters
By: Steven E. Koonin
240 Pages
Briefly, what was this book about?
The way in which the media and climate activists distort the facts and science of climate change.
Who should read this book?
If you’re really interested in steelmanning the case for not being alarmed about the climate, this is the book for you.
General Thoughts
As I just mentioned, June here in Utah has been hot. On June 15th, Salt Lake City hit 107, which tied the record for the hottest temperature ever recorded here. (In the time since I first wrote that Portland hit 115). This is bad enough, but the fact that it happened in June is even worse. July is generally hotter than June, so worse may be yet to come.
When things like this happen it’s easy to take it as proof that the globe is warming, that record breaking heat is more common, and that super hot days are the new normal. Not so fast, says Koonin. He claims, regardless of how it appears, that we haven’t had more record breaking heat, that the increase in average temperature hasn’t come because it’s getting hotter, it’s come because it no longer gets quite so cold. That the daily low temperatures are not quite so low anymore, but that the daily highs are unchanged. In making this claim he walks you through all the data, almost all of it taken from the official IPCC reports.
Note: The last paragraph was written before Lytton, Canada beat the previous Canadian high temperature record by a full 8 degrees, and then, subsequently burned to the ground. I understand this is just one data point, but viscerally it’s pretty compelling.
It’s hard to not come across as strident when you’re talking about global warming, if for no other reason than that there’s just so much background contention. Koonin is no exception to this stridency, but insofar as he has an axe to grind it doesn’t appear to have anything to do with politics. It seems to be the exact opposite. What sets him off is when people twist science for political ends. Koonin appears to have a mania for accuracy, for pointing out where things are uncertain. And when it comes to something as complicated as the climate and you’re trying to make predictions about exactly where it’s going to be in 100 years, you’ve got nothing but uncertainty.
You may find it hard to believe that he doesn’t have a partisan axe to grind, but that’s part of what drew me to the book. Koonin was 2nd Undersecretary for Science under Obama. He was also Provost of Caltech. These two together should be enough to convince you that he’s not some unhinged climate change denier, that he may in fact be exactly what he says he is, someone who’s just interested in making sure that the facts are reported objectively. In service of this goal, as I mentioned above, most of his contentions are based on data from the IPCC reports, or from studies by scientists who are part of the IPCC. And the book is full of examples of some media outlet or politician saying something, for example, hurricanes are getting worse, and Koonin showing that this claim is not supported by any of the official reports, nor by the data.
He’s got many suggestions for how to deal with this problem. The one that I found most interesting was the idea of treating climate change science like a war game. In war games you have a blue team and a red team. The blue team represents the friendlies, so if the US Army is conducting a war game the blue team represents the US. One portion of the army is assigned to the blue team, while another portion gets assigned to be the red team. They play the opponents and they’re trying to poke holes in the plan, to show where things have been missed, and where it might be vulnerable. Koonin suggests that we need a red team for climate change science. A group specifically tasked with showing where the science is weak or where the data is unclear.
It’s an interesting idea, and insofar as Koonin is acting as a one man red team he does poke many holes in things. As one example, it turns out that our computer models are actually getting less accurate. This in spite of greater computing power and all of the insights into modeling we’ve presumably accumulated. Or at least Koonin claims models are getting less accurate… And that’s the problem. I have to mostly take his word for it. Yes, he gives citations and yes, I could look those up, but that’s a rabbit hole of essentially infinite depth.
I will point out that Tyler Cowen took particular issue with Koonin’s claim that “The net economic impact of human-induced climate change will be minimal through at least the end of this century.” Saying:
That is presented as a big deal, and yes it would be. But “minimal”? The economist wishes to ask “how much.” The more concrete discussion comes on pp.178-179, which looks at twenty studies (all or most of them bad), and reports they estimate that by 2100 global gdp is three percent less due to climate change, or perhaps the damages are smaller yet. Those estimates are then graphed, and there is a bit of numerical analysis of what that means for growth rates working backwards. There is not much more than that on the question, and no attempt to provide an independent estimate of the economic costs of global warming, or to tell us which might be the best study or what it might be missing. Koonin seems more interested in discrediting the hypocritical or innumerate climate change researchers than finding out the best answer to the question of cost.
So, if I’m not going to spend my time going down the rabbit hole of verifying Koonin’s sources, what am I going to spend my time on? How about…
Eschatological Implications
Global warming is primarily viewed through an eschatological lens. Is it an existential crisis? Will it lead to vast upheaval? Does it represent the end of the modern world as we inevitably harvest the bitter fruits of progress?
Determining the answer to these questions is obviously of critical importance. Certainly when I talk to people, particularly of a more liberal bent, they answer all of these in the affirmative, and while the data I found on this subject is all over the place, anecdotally my impression is that global warming has become the default doomsday scenario, supplanting nuclear war—particularly among people of a certain age and ideology. So what sort of contribution does the book make to answering our questions?
First let’s start with a couple of things he doesn’t cover that I think he should have:
Climate refugees: When I talk to someone who’s actually informed about the issues the thing they’re the most worried about is not rising sea levels, it’s refugees fleeing areas that are no longer habitable because of severe heat and drought. More broadly they worry not that global warming will directly kill people, but that it will create discord between nations, in the form of wars over resources and refugees. And that it is these conflicts we really need to worry about.
Koonin discusses numerous potential harms, but not this one. The closest he comes is pointing out that warming is mostly occurring near the poles, rather than the equator. So while Siberia is getting much warmer (which could potentially be a good thing if you’re worried about food and refugees) the regions where most of the refugees are expected to come from are not experiencing much of an effect from warming. Perhaps Koonin assumes that people will be able to continue to live in these areas because their climate and the associated agriculture will be largely unaffected, if so that’s a pretty big assumption.
Loss of Biodiversity: Among my knowledgeable friends, this is the next big thing they worry about: a mass extinction of species caused by warming. (One of my friends calls it “The Omnicide”.) Here, I suppose Koonin might argue that warming is not the only thing causing the extinctions. Or perhaps he would argue that these extinctions will probably have little impact on us. I’m only speculating because he doesn’t make any arguments, so I have no way to judge whether he could make a persuasive argument along these lines. I suspect not. As to the former argument I’m not sure what the breakdown is between warming and things like habitat destruction, pollution, and other forms of exploitation. As to the latter, I do have some figures. From the latest issue of The Economist:
At least 9% of the 6,200 breeds of domesticated mammals that humans eat or use to produce food had become extinct by 2016, and at least 1,000 more are threatened.
If you combine those and do the math that’s 25%. Now this is just domesticated mammals, I don’t know what the associated number is for plants, but that seems like a lot.
Thus from my perspective Koonin completely ignores the two climatic impacts people are most concerned about. Even if you buy the rest of his arguments against climate alarmism, there’s plenty of potential alarmism left just in these two topics.
If we wanted to be more charitable we could just focus on Koonin’s criticism of science and reporting. And here my natural inclination is to be entirely on Koonin’s side. It seems obvious that we should do the best we can to uncover the true facts of the situation, and present them without embellishment. That if we can just nail down the science it will show us the path forward.
This was obvious and this was my natural inclination — the idealism of my youth. These days I’m a little more pessimistic. First off, worldwide coordination problems, like the one presented by global warming, are extraordinarily difficult. And if you’re thinking that you’re not even sure whether it is a problem, then you’ve just illustrated my point. Agreement is the first layer of coordination and the most difficult. And while demanding additional rigor can produce more certainty, it also embeds inaction while waiting for that rigor, and tacitly opens the option to always demanding ever increasing amounts of rigor. And in a sense that’s what Koonin is doing. Yes, I understand the idea that if we can just nail down the science, the path forward will be clear. But as I’ve pointed out in a couple of previous posts this idea of “follow the science” is far more difficult than most people realize. A subject I’ll go into more in my next review.
I liked Koonin’s book. I’m glad I read it. It was particularly good as a corrective to certain forms of apocalyptic alarmism. That said I do think he missed some of the complexities inherent in the issue—complexities which shouldn’t be overlooked.
As far as the larger issue of global warming, I’ve written about it before and I’ll probably write about it again. In particular I keep coming back to nuclear power as a solution both to this issue and to many other issues. Now I know people disagree with me on this, and there is a nuanced debate to be had over what to do with the waste, and what sort of reactors we should build, and what regulations are overkill and which are not, etc. etc. But I am becoming increasingly intolerant of anyone who is worried about climate change but who refuses to entertain the idea of making it easier to increase the supply of carbon free nuclear power.
Theory and Reality: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science
272 Pages
Briefly, what was this book about?
It’s pretty much right there in the subtitle. The book has everything from Logical Positivism, to Thomas Kuhn and Karl Popper.
Who should read this book?
Anyone who’s interested in the Philosophy of Science. Additionally I’ll say I was very impressed by how easy it was to read, unlike a lot of philosophy and a lot of textbooks.
General Thoughts
I probably hang out around rationalists too much because almost from page one I was thinking, “But what about Bayesianism? Bayesianism seems to solve this problem.” Godfrey-Smith did eventually cover Bayesianism, but when he finally got around to it, it felt like he didn’t spend as much time as I would have liked. Possibly this is just a reflection of my biases, probably because Bayesianism, particularly in 2003 when the book was written, was still a relatively new movement. Which brings me to one of the few criticisms I have of the book. I felt like Godfrey-Smith was weaker the closer he got to the present day. (The book covered the progression chronologically.) In particular when Godfrey-Smith was propounding his own philosophy, I found it less interesting and more dogmatic. Which is to say he was better at being a historian than at being a philosopher himself.
The other criticism I want to bring up is part criticism and part confusion. I had always heard that Occam’s Razor and the principle of parsimony was a critical part of science, since there are thousands of potential explanations to choose from for any given phenomenon which all fit the evidence, and the only way to choose between them is using this principle. But Godfrey-Smith spends very little time on the idea, and when he does he’s very dismissive:
Scientists often support hypotheses via an appeal to simplicity or “parsimony.” …Given two possible explanations for the data, scientists often prefer the simpler one. Despite various elaborate attempts, I do not think we have made much progress on understanding the operation of, or justification for, this preference.
I’m not sure what to make of this. I’m not sure when or where I heard that the principle of parsimony was a critical part of the philosophy of science, but whenever that was I remember thinking, “Well of course! It’d have to be. That’s obvious.” But when I finally read an actual book about the philosophy of science, the author speaks of it only in passing and dismissively. Have I stumbled into a fight I know nothing about? Is Godfrey-Smith part of some anti-parsimony faction? Is the principle just currently out of favor like some kind of fashion accessory? Or is its importance not nearly so obvious to everyone else as it was to me?
Beyond these two issues the book was enjoyable, easy to read, and a great examination of the essentials of scientific epistemology, but what about its…
Eschatological Implications
I recently went through some theories as to what might have happened in 1971. One of the minor ones I tossed into the mix was the idea that we broke science. This book confirmed that opinion. Which is not to say that it contained incontrovertible evidence of this happening, which I will now reveal to you in a dramatic flourish. No, it just further confirmed the difficulty of doing science, adding another layer of complexity. Before reading the book I was aware of how difficult it is to conduct good science. Having read the book, now I’m aware of all the difficulties involved in even defining what good science is. Which is not to say I had no awareness of these difficulties previously, but that Theory and Reality deepened that awareness.
The question that confronts us as we move forward is whether these definitional difficulties are going to get worse or better. Whether the problems of science are going to get more complex or less. Well given that nearly everything in the modern world is getting more complex, I’d be surprised if the battleground of defining science ended up being one of the rare exceptions. So if the project of defining good science is getting more difficult, what do these difficulties look like? Well they look like a lot of things, but many of the greatest difficulties seem to be the same as everywhere else. They come down to identity politics.
Godfrey-Smith devotes a whole chapter to “Feminism and Science Studies”, and interestingly in my copy of the book, which I bought used, this is the only chapter to have been marked up. Make of that what you will… Some of you reading this will wonder what feminism has to do with good science, others will probably know exactly where this is headed. Here’s the description from the book:
Feminist thinking about science makes up a diverse movement. It is unified, perhaps, by the idea that science has been part of a structure that has perpetuated inequalities between men and women. Science itself, and mainstream theorizing about science and knowledge, have helped to keep women in a “second-class” position as thinkers, knowers, and intellectual citizens.
Setting aside for the moment whether science is a tool of oppression, you can see that such claims only increase the difficulties inherent in defining what good science is. This book was written in 2003, so before critical race theory and the BLM movement, but adding race to the mix only further complicates things.
It would be one thing if the issues being raised were limited to certain minor aspects of the scientific endeavor—aspects which could be easily excised—but increasingly it appears that the entire scientific endeavor may be under attack.
Perhaps you remember the kerfuffle when the Smithsonian National Museum of African American Culture put up a graphic with various objectionable aspects of “whiteness” which included the item, “Emphasis on Scientific Method” as one of these aspects. Yes I understand it’s just one example, but it is a fairly prominent example. And even if you don’t agree that it’s evidence of an assault on the scientific endeavor it is indisputably evidence of an increasingly complicated conception of science. One that will only make it harder to agree on what separates good science from bad.
The long term impact of broken science is hard to overstate. It’s the tool that has powered all of our progress for the last 300+ years. If that tool can no longer be relied on, then we don’t have any other tools waiting to take its place. I was recently pointed at an article that sums up the situation very well, it was titled Silly people vs. serious people. The recent attacks on science risk turning us from the serious people who got us to this point into silly people who are unable to go any farther. This might be okay if everyone was becoming “silly” but they’re not. There are still plenty of serious people out there, and mostly they’re not our friends.
II- Capsule Reviews
590 Pages
Briefly, what is this book about?
William L. Shirer was a journalist best known for his book The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. This is the first book in his three volume autobiography.
Who should read this book?
Anyone who wants an insider’s account of Paris in the 20’s with appearances by Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Lindbergh, Woolf, etc.
General Thoughts
I have long intended to read The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, but I have yet to get around to it. This book was recommended to me by the voraciously well-read little old lady of my acquaintance and it was only after I started reading it that I made the connection. Once I did, I decided, for probably biased reasons, that it was smart to read Shirer’s biography first and then read his history. At some point I’ll be able to provide a report on whether that was in fact a wise decision, but it will probably be awhile.
This book reminded me of The World Until Yesterday by Stefan Zweig, which I talked about the last time I visited the interwar years. Of course Zweig’s book began before World War I, and it’s in this period that the parallels are the most apparent. Which is to say pre-World War I Vienna, kind of resembles pre-World War II America. Both had a sense of optimism. Though it could be said that they were travelling in different directions. Vienna was on it’s way down while the US was on it’s way up.
Of course Shirer himself was on the way up. And in his rise you get a sense of how small the world was for an American with a college degree, even if that person was from a small town in Iowa. Now of course as a foreign correspondent Shirer lucked into a lot of things (meeting all of the people I mentioned above). But he also grew up in the same town as the guy who painted American Gothic, and had numerous well known professors and other breaks before he even made it to France. So Shirer benefited from being an American, but he was also appalled by many aspects of America.
Similar to nearly all intellectuals of the time (I point I brought up in a previous post on the interwar years.) Shirer was deeply disturbed by the inequality of the 20s, and thought that socialism was the best solution. And indeed it’s hard to read of the way capitol treated labor during this period without having similar sympathies. But it leads to this weird contrast particularly in the life of Shirer. As part of his criticisms of these horrible conditions he criticizes the idea of there being a path from poverty to wealth. He basically doesn’t believe in the American dream. For example he calls out the Horatio Alger stories for being borderline propaganda, while never seeming to be aware of the fact that he’s basically living in one of those stories.
The Storm on Our Shores: One Island, Two Soldiers, and the Forgotten Battle of World War II
by: Obmascik, Mark
256 Pages
Briefly, what is this book about?
A Japanese doctor who was educated in America but ended up as part of the Imperial Army that occupied Attu, and the American soldier on the other side.
Who should read this book?
If you’re interested in World War II, this is a minor story in the whole scheme of things but a fascinating one. And one of the better examinations I’ve encountered of the Japanese side of things.
General Thoughts
Paul Tatsuguchi was living happily in America, having come here to study medicine, and as Obmascik tells it he might have stayed here permanently if his wealthy older brother, hadn’t sold his sister into prostitution, forcing Tatsuguchi to move home and rescue her. This is not the most interesting part of the story, but it’s close, which is why I included it. Though just now I reviewed Tatsuguchi’s wikipedia page and this element of his story is not mentioned, so take it with a grain of salt.
In any event while he was in Japan he was drafted into the Imperial Army. This posed two problems for Tatsuguchi. One he didn’t want to fight against America, he knew how hopeless it was, and two he was a devout Seventh-day Adventist and therefore a pacifist. But obviously he didn’t have a choice, and was eventually sent to Attu, the westernmost island in the Aleutian chain. When the Americans eventually decided to retake it, a horrible battle ensued, as was so often the case. Tatsuguchi recorded his experience of it in a diary.
Eventually the Japanese forces decided on a final banzai attack, and during that attack Tatsuguchi was killed by Dick Laird. Laird is the other soldier mentioned in the title, and the book spends about half the time on him. He grew up poor, working from a very young age in the coal mines before finally joining the military. He ended up recovering the journal, and when it was translated and revealed that there had been an American trained doctor on the island it caused a sensation. The translation was extensively photocopied and passed around, becoming almost holy writ for some of the men.
Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman
by: Robert K. Massie
672 Pages
Briefly, what is this book about?
A biography of Catherine the Great, absolute ruler of Russia from 1762 to 1796.
Who should read this book?
If you enjoy history at all Massie is one of the best. I wouldn’t say this was quite as interesting as Peter the Great, but it was still quite good.
General Thoughts
Catherine did a lot of amazing things, and I obviously don’t have space to cover them all, so I’d like to just focus on Catherine’s aspiration to be an enlightened monarch. These days no one questions the idea that some form of democracy is the best form of government, and that absolute autocracies are the worst. But that was far from clear back then (and I’m not sure it’s quite as clear as we think even now.) Back then many people thought that the only way for progress to occur was under the guidance of an absolute monarch who had adopted enlightenment ideals.
At the beginning of her reign this is precisely what Catherine tried to be. She corresponded with Voltaire, she bought the library of Denis Diderot, but let him keep it, while paying him to be its caretaker when he ran into financial difficulties. Diderot ended up living in St. Petersburg for five months, and he and Catherine talked nearly every day. One of her first projects as monarch was to standardize the complicated and confusing set of Russia laws left by Peter the Great. As part of this project she put together a book of instructions containing the underlying principles she wanted the legal code to reflect. This included things like equality before the law for all Russians, greater protection for serfs, and a prohibition on torture and capital punishment. In earlier drafts of her instructions Catherine even proposed entirely freeing the serfs. And keep in mind that she wrote all this stuff a decade before the Declaration of Independence.
Having put these instructions together she called together people from all walks of life, from nobles to peasants and charged them to use her instructions to come up with a new, more enlightened Russian legal code. These people met for a year and a half. The meetings were rancorous and unproductive. In the end this assembly accomplished basically nothing and after being suspended because Russia had gone to war with the Ottoman’s it was never restarted. By the time the French revolution erupted near the end of her reign Catherine had turned decisively against anything resembling democracy and many of the enlightenment ideals she had previously embraced.
The point of all this being that there was an enormous amount of progress in Russia under Catherine. But as the practical difficulties of making this progress became apparent Catherine became more and more disaffected with actual progressive methodology. As an actual monarch ruling over actual people she soon discovered that the lofty ideals of Voltaire and Diderot were horribly impractical. And when people tried to implement them you ended up with the French Revolution. I’m not sure what the lesson for the present day is, but I’m sure there is one.
544 Pages
Briefly, what is this book about?
This book mostly wraps up the Laconian plotline and sets everything up for the ninth and final book.
Who should read this book?
I will repeat, with a slight modification, what I said last time. It’s book 8 of a series, presumably by this point you should know whether or not you’re the audience for this book.
General Thoughts
I’ve quite enjoyed the Expanse series, and out of all the books, this one has to be near the top. That said I wouldn’t be me if I didn’t have some quibbles, and interestingly those quibbles relate to the last book. The bad guy in the book (more or less, I’m trying not to spoil things) is an absolute autocrat, similar to Catherine. And as absolute autocrats go, he’s pretty enlightened. Yet, the good guys are not only convinced that he’s going to have a negative impact on humanity’s chances, they’re also convinced that the whole endeavor will inexorably flame out in a couple of years. Beyond being historically illiterate this attitude is also hopelessly hypocritical, because the good guys are basically all autocrats themselves. We never read of one of the main characters being thrown out by an election. Or having to deal with a representative body, or changing course because of public opinion. They’re basically all autocrats, it’s just because they’ve been designated as the good guys that it all works out. While the other guy has been designated as the bad guy so we know it’s not going to work out for him.
Of course I understand that this is a novel, and certain things aren’t entertaining, so I’m not criticizing the writing. In fact I’m convinced that if they had included all those things I just mentioned that I would have enjoyed the series less. I just thought it was interesting to contrast the two books. The one dealing with an actual historical autocrat who was enormously successful, and the other dealing with fictional autocrats who find success entirely based on whether they have been designated as protagonists or antagonists.
by: G. K. Chesterton
159 Pages
Briefly, what is this book about?
A Tocquevillian examination of America written while Chesterton was in the country on a speaking tour.
Who should read this book?
I have a 50 book Chesterton collection on my Kindle. I haven’t decided if I’m going to read them all, but I would say that unless you’re engaged in some endeavor similar to that, you can probably skip this one.
General Thoughts
This is another book (similar to The Start) which focuses on the interwar years. And just like with Shirer, wealth inequality was very much on Chesterton’s mind, though obviously he didn’t think socialism was the solution. He mostly thought that rich people should stop applying the law unequally. He was there during prohibition, and it provides a good example of the kind of thing he was talking about. Despite the ban, rich people basically drank in the same fashion as they did before the amendment. It was the poor people who were deprived of alcohol. Prohibition wasn’t designed to stop all drinking it was designed to stop the drinking those in power disapproved of—low class drinking if you will.
He provides other examples of these sorts of disparities, some involving wealth or living conditions, and in this respect he was very similar to Shirer and others, but whereas those advocating socialism felt that the government was the solution through passing new laws and enforcing them. Chesterton seemed to be advocating that rich people just needed to be more moral, that the right thing to do was clear and they just needed to work on being more righteous. Given his impression that the chief problem was rich people were ignoring the laws already in existence, I can see why he didn’t think more laws were the answer.
III- Religious Reviews
248 Pages
Briefly, what is this book about?
This is the Book of Job from the Bible, retranslated with extensive commentary. Also it’s about how all previous translations got it wrong.
Who should read this book?
If you like reading things that were written a very long time ago, or if you like the story of Job enough to really dig into it, or if reading about the ancients grappling with theodicy is one of your “love languages” this might be the book for you.
General Thoughts
I’ve read the entire Old Testament, once. And I confess that it was more to check off a box than an attempt to deeply engage with it, so it was nice to deeply engage with at least one book.
Job reminds me a little bit of Gilgamesh, possibly just because of how old they both are. It also reminds me of Plato’s Dialogues (which I’m in the process of working through) because that’s what the book basically is, a series of dialogues.
Of course while these comparisons and observations are somewhat interesting, what you really want to know is what Greenstein thinks other translators got wrong. Well in the introduction to chapter 42 where in most translations Job acquiesces and all of his misery is undone, Greenstein claims that instead:
Job understands the deity to be exactly as he had feared: a purveyor of power who cares little for people. Parodying the divine discourse through mimicry, Job expresses disdain toward the deity and pity toward human kind (and not acquiescence, as has been generally thought;)
I’m always a little wary when someone comes along in the Year of our Lord 2019 and claims to have discovered a new interpretation of a text which was overlooked by everyone else for thousands of years. But I will give him credit for making things interesting, and he may even be correct, I just have an inbuilt bias against such efforts.
But I did enjoy learning about the fact that Job is essentially trying to bring a lawsuit against God, the exact details of how and under what customs he is doing so are not worth getting into, but in the end, as Greenstein summarizes:
…[T]he deity is able to dismiss Job’s testimony about him pro forma—Job lacks the firsthand knowledge of a witness that is required in order to make the claims in his lawsuit. God extricates himself from the lawsuit without having to explain Job’s suffering to him or to his companions.
In a sense this is the perpetual argument atheists have with theists. They feel that this life provides sufficient evidence to prove the truth of their claims, while theists claim that there is evidence outside of this life which needs to be considered. To this Mormons add yet another wrinkle by asserting that we existed before this life and may have made agreements we voluntarily choose to forget. Based on Greenstein’s summary he seems to fall into the atheist camp, and as such suffering presents an insuperable barrier to the existence of God. But I’m totally on God’s side here. Even if we were to assume God’s absence I still feel pretty comfortable assuming that humans don’t have enough knowledge to pass final judgement on reality however it’s constructed.
I keep trying to keep these book review posts short, but I keep failing. If you like them as they are or if you’d like them shorter and have suggestions on what I could cut out, or if you just want to yell at me and hope it makes you feel better please don’t hesitate. But I will mention that my love language is donations to my patreon.
Occam’s razor: The razor is often misrepresented as a preference for simplicity, when it is not. Properly represented, the razor states that when presented with two hypotheses we should prefer the one that requires us to make the fewest assumptions. It’s the scientist’s job to present enough supporting data that the balance tips in favor of the hypothesis they are promoting. In practice, more data is usually required to overcome the bias that, “you’re not looking at something new here, you’ve missed an obvious explanation for the phenomenon.”
You don’t really need to understand the razor in order to implement it effectively. Here’s how this works in practice: Your advisor gives you a signaling molecule (testosterone) and asks you to find the receptor for it. Where do you look? You start your search by reviewing your assumptions and working from there,
– intracellular signaling has to cross the cell membrane
– cell membranes are hard to get through due to hydrophobicity
– cell signaling gets around this by using a mediator at the cell surface, then a cascade of signals on the other side of the cell membrane
You should therefore look for testosterone’s partner on the cell surface
You work on the project for months, sifting through cell surface proteins, and come up empty. Eventually, you get a positive hit – something that binds to the signaling molecule really well – but with a catch: the target molecule is intracellular. You call it androgen receptor (AR) and take it to your advisor. Now you have to answer all their objections, “What if this is a coincidence? Maybe AR is related to the true signaling molecule, but the real thing you’re after is on the cell surface, or it’s a transmembrane protein, like we expect. Keep looking.” You’re frustrated, so you do keep looking where your advisor asks you to … but you also have a lead with this mysterious match, so you have a side project looking at AR, too.
Your search for new binding partners keeps coming up empty, but your side-project eventually becomes your main project as it generates more support. You do some structural analysis and figure out that testosterone is hydrophobic – meaning it’s probably able to pass through the cell membrane. That gets around the cell membrane assumption, but you know people will object that it’s not something they’ve seen before, so you have to have more that just that. You keep going, tagging the testosterone and AR proteins, and show under a microscope the two interact. Your advisor says, “maybe AR is also on the cell surface, but we always thought it was intracellular; what you’re looking at under the microscope is a cell surface interaction”, so you do it on the confocal microscope and show that AR is not on the cell surface.
Every step along the way, you have to answer objections from your peers. You have to support your hypothesis in the face of their counter-explanations. You know this, so you start making the counter-arguments in your head and doing the experiments ahead of time that make it difficult for them to maintain the status quo hypothesis. They’re creative and come up with other objections that you have to answer.
Where does the razor enter into this? Each of those objections comes with a new assumption, “maybe this protein we thought was intracellular is really on the cell surface” or “maybe the strong binding affinity for AR is a coincidence and there’s another, true target you’re missing”. You’ll likely never convince all your opponents, but eventually it will become easier to believe your hypothesis than the convoluted logical contortions your opponents have to resort to. People new to the debate will start naturally preferring your argument because it’s better at explaining the data without going to weird places. You’ll still get the odd question at a conference, “what if the association happens at lighting-fast speeds where AR jumps outside the cell real fast; have you tested whether that’s happening here?” To which you reply that no, you haven’t, but that requiring AR to rapidly pass through the cell membrane brings back to the same problem you started with except with a protein that’s not hydrophobic, and besides the testosterone is already hydrophobic so … it requires fewer assumptions to accept your hypothesis than the best alternative.
Nobody has to formally invoke Occam’s razor, but it is followed implicitly as you gather experimental data to the point where your hypothesis requires fewer assumptions to explain the observed data than any alternative.
I felt that Tiamat’s Wrath, and its predecessor, were trying to argue that despotism can’t work in the long run, not because of flawed design, but because it’s contrary to the human spirit. Someone will always want to break out of it. The authors wanted to strengthen their point by creating a steelman, which in this case required them to make their despot as magnanimous as possible. He’s immortal, so they don’t have to worry about the succession argument. He’s enlightened, taking every opportunity to NOT make the mistakes of despots of the past, so they can sidestep the argument that ‘dictators are always evil’. The question is: what if you have a perfect dictator? One who doesn’t die and doesn’t make evil dictator mistakes? And what if he is better than a messy republic? Would people still rebel and choose the mess?
Corey says yes, then makes a philosophical argument why they think that’s true. The problem is that they don’t have a good framework for making that argument. Using your Morally Upright crew to start an insurrection where a bunch of people die would only make sense if the people being governed were being slaughtered or mismanaged. But mismanagement by an immoral ruler is intentionally NOT part of the argument, so Corey has to jump through a bunch of hoops to avoid the real question: why do Holden & co. care so much about fighting this war? It feels like a great philosophical point made with bad arguments, because the authors wanted to use the tools they had (his established cast of characters), rather than the right tool for the job.
I feel like the Greeks had a more practical objection to tyranny, by which they just meant rule by a person who wasn’t a king or queen.
A tyrant had no special claim to authority. So whatever mechanism brings him to power can be used by others the moment they sense weakness of any sort to bring him down. It was doomed to either endless war and violence or endless oppression as the strong tyrant would always have to signal his power to deter usurpers.
A tyrant also really can’t answer the question of government. He may be quite enlightened today but what happens when he gets older and cynical? What if he loses his mind for decades? In the long run everyone dies so even if the tyrant is good he will leave the picture in a generation or two and then you again have a power struggle (unless it becomes a monarchy).
Democracy was nice however it would inevitably veer towards a charismatic figure using his popularity to try to remain in office and increase his power. In other words it would always devolve into tyranny even if you have a nice run for a few decades or even centuries (I think they would say jury is still out with us).
Monarchy then provides the justification for why the king/queen is in power. More importantly it provides a clear and unmistakble reason why others shouldn’t try to cease power, they have no biological claim to the throne. The monarch’s incentives are aligned with the nation since they will be passing it onto their closest blood relative. They would say you could end up with bad kings, kings with no heir, and all sorts of problems but it was the least bad of all possible systems.
Fiction though does usually create a viewpoint despotism. We side with the main lead characters because we see everything from their point of view. We don’t often see interesting questions asked like why does Han Solo get to be a general when all he did was bring a droid from point A to B? For that matter why does Lando when he worked for the enemy and then did nothing more than help bring back Solo? It takes some good world building to confine characters to the actual limits they would have in their society, even if they are leaders.
As far as government structures are concerned, I think there’s a consistent feature we see historically, where governments of all types seem to have a lifespan. The constitutional republic model hopes to overcome that limitation, but
it’s a relatively young model. I think every generation has been rightly concerned over the question of how long the US constitutional republic’s lifespan will end up being. Nobody knows, but other constitutional republics have fallen, so it’s reasonable to assume the others will as well at some point.
Agreed, though it does seem that they have him make some mistakes, though perhaps not mistakes he could easily have learned from history. For example the big mistake seems to be his Prisoner’s Dilemma strategy.
The slowdown in podcasts seems distressing, but if it advances the book it is probably a good thing. I have been curious about your ‘books finished’ series. You seem to have quite a few books finished each month. Of course, just because you finished a book in a month it doesn’t mean you started it in the same month. Nonetheless, it seems like your read quite a few pages per month. Have you ever quantified your average?
Global Warming “. And when it comes to something as complicated as the climate and you’re trying to make predictions about exactly where it’s going to be in 100 years, you’ve got nothing but uncertainty.” OK but why do you need to know *exactly* where you will be in 100 years? There’s a bit of art to decision making here. If I fall out of the plane without a parachute, an inability to quickly calculate where I’m going to hit the ground is not an argument for me not to take drastic action. And let’s face it, intellectuals can quibble about rhetoric but there’s no danger of ‘drastic action’ when it comes to climate change. There is no danger of a too high carbon tax or tradeable credit system because nothing is on the table. So while nitpicking activists for making claims that are too broad or silly (like the recent condo collapse in Miami was climate related) can sometimes be entertaining (yet we do hear from the right without fail every time there is a snow storm that this somehow disproves global warming), the reality is we’re doing almost nothing so the burden is on the deniers to really show there’s nothing to worry about. Humanity not going extinct in 100 years does not seem sufficient here. There are a lot of possible ways for humanity to not go extinct yet warming imposes massive burdens on us.
“The more concrete discussion comes on pp.178-179, which looks at twenty studies (all or most of them bad), and reports they estimate that by 2100 global gdp is three percent less due to climate change, or perhaps the damages are smaller yet.” Ahhh but did not the author tell us before that climate models are not accurate and are getting less so? So how is this author telling us about GDP costs in 2100 due to climate change after he has said there is no accurate climate model for 2100? It seems here he is doubling the sin. Pretending he has an accurate climate model and THEN pretending he has an accurate economic model. How many 1911 economic models called 2021 spot on?
For fun: World GDP is about $88T today. 3% of that would be $2.64T. That alone seems to justify the Green New Deal. World GDP growth for the last few year has been something like 2.4%. At that rate in 2100 it will be $573T and 3% will be $17.2T. So I get the argument against a strawman assertion we should all immediately revert to full Amish mode. What’s the argument for not spending about $2T per year on this issue? It’s not even really all spending. A ton of coal we don’t burn today doesn’t vanish from the earth. It can be burned in 2100 if we discover there’s nothing to global warming so it’s actually a type of saving.
Science – I have not heard of any argument against parsimony either. It seems pretty clear to me as well. If theory A explains the data, then what is added by theory A+b? Without parsimony you would need some way to tell you when to stop adding decorations to your theory that do not improve how it explains the data (why not A+2b?).
More seriously I think the problem “identity politics” has drawn out is scientism. That is people who are essentially blind to their preconceptions and biases who then deploy a cloak of scientific authority around them and are immune even when their flaws are pointed out in the terms they use. A good example of this was when Sam Harris had Ezra Klein on his show to discuss by Charles Murray. Harris could not get over his perception of himself as the ‘serious person’ who was just following science wherever it might lead, could not even focus on Klein’s quite science based criticisms.
Job – I’ve heard of the ‘lawsuit’ reading of Job before. Atheist or not it is a difficult book since even if you do not think it was divinely inspired, it was then written by people and chosen to be retold over and over while a lot of other stories were forgotten. A problem is that it doesn’t really address the question. Job was making a case that he should be the judge of God, he was asking why and God’s answer was essentially a shrug. That feels surprising and disturbing reading the book as either literature or history.
Great comments, unfortunately I don’t have time to address them all, so I’ll just address the ones that make me look good. 😉 It’s nice that you’ll miss the podcasts, as far as the books read, I track my books on GoodReads. Looks like you can see the by going here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/24180785?ref=nav_mybooks
As far pages per month last year I averaged 3100/month so 100 a day. Of course most of that wasn’t actual pages, but audio content.
Clearly you are running the risk of being an Ozymandias type character at this rate. AS a precaution, I call upon Amazon to ban you from any books about squids or genetic engineering.