The 10 Books I Finished in July
If you prefer to listen rather than read, this blog is available as a podcast here. Or if you want to listen to just this post:
Count Down: How Our Modern World Is Threatening Sperm Counts, Altering Male and Female Reproductive Development, and Imperiling the Future of the Human Race by: Shanna H. Swan
End of Everything: (Astrophysically Speaking) by: Katie Mack
Facing Reality: Two Truths About Race in America by: Charles Murray
Winning: The Unforgiving Race to Greatness by: Tim Grover
Streaking: The Simple Practice of Conscious, Consistent Actions That Create Life-Changing Results by: Jeffrey J. Downs and Jami L. Downs
Red Rising by: Pierce Brown
Coming Back Alive: The True Story of the Most Harrowing Search and Rescue Mission Ever Attempted on Alaska's High Seas by: Spike Walker
Freedom by: Sebastian Junger
Faust by: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Open and Relational Theology: An Introduction to Life-Changing Ideas by: Thomas Jay Oord
I’m back. Hopefully my absence was not too distressing...
The older I get the more I hate the heat, and as July is the hottest month of the year, lately I’ve been trying to get out of Utah, or at least up into the mountains. This July I went to the Open and Relational Theology Conference which was at a ski resort near Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Shortly after getting back from that I took a trip with my wife to a condo in the mountains. Both trips were nice, and I will talk more about the theology conference when I get to the associated review.
These two trips meant that I didn’t get as much done as I had hoped but I did quite a bit done with the time freed up by not writing two essays last month. I’m hoping some of my efforts will bear fruit, but only time will tell. As you can tell whatever else I may have been doing in July I did get quite a bit of reading done, so I’m going to try to keep things tight. Thus, without further ado:
I- Eschatological Reviews
by: Shanna H. Swan
292 Pages
Briefly, what was this book about?
That modern world is suffering from a severe chemically induced fertility crisis.
Who should read this book?
If news about decreased sperm counts fills you with curiosity or dread, this is the book for you.
General Thoughts
Growing up my experience was that kids were everywhere and they arrived fairly effortlessly. I’m the oldest of seven kids. In the house across the street was another family with seven kids and one of my best friends had 11 brothers and sisters. Now admittedly Mormons have always been at the higher end of the total fertility rate (TFR) curve, but the larger point I’m trying to get at is that when I was a child I saw no evidence of any fertility problems.
These days it seems like we’re in exactly the opposite situation. It feels harder to come up with couples who don’t have any fertility problems than those which do. If I’m trying to be objective I don’t think this is literally the case, nor do I put much stock in my childhood impressions, but I know an awful lot of couples who are having a devil of a time conceiving.
I hadn’t really given that much thought to this dichotomy until I started reading this book. Certainly I had heard that male sperm counts had been falling, but even with my focus on technologically induced crises, it only dimly registered. If someone had asked me for my opinion on the subject before reading this book, I probably would have said that the science on the phenomenon was still unclear. I would have been wrong.
Perhaps this subject was just a blind spot for me and everyone else knew it was a crisis, but my sense is that we’ve spent so much time focusing on why people might have fewer children, that the crisis of being unable to have kids has slipped under the radar. But make no mistake, it is a crisis. Here are just a handful of the statistics Swan provides in the book:
Miscarriages are increasing by 1% per year
Between 1973 and 2011 sperm concentration dropped 52% in western countries. This study involved 42,935 men.
The average twenty something woman is less fertile than her grandmother was at 35.
In China eligible sperm donors dropped from 56 percent to 18 percent. (So it’s not just the west.)
Standards for infertility have been lowered. In the 40s it was 60 million sperm/mL, now the standard is 15.
26% of men who present with some degree of erectile dysfunction are under 40.
Impaired Fecundity is actually worse among young women, relatively speaking. There was a 42% increase in impairment among women aged 14-24. While there was only a 6% increase in impairment among women aged 35-44.
About half the book is composed of statistics and a general overview of chemically induced infertility and about half is advice for what individuals can do to increase their personal fertility. I find the advice for individuals less interesting, but I was curious how efficacious it was. Swan gave lots of pointers but not much guidance on how much impact each, or even all of these changes would make. For example, with age having such an effect, which cohort has greater fertility: 20 year olds who follow none of Swan’s advice or 35 year olds who follow all of it? I suspect the former. If that’s the case, which is easier? Convincing people to have children earlier or completely eliminating harmful chemicals from every corner of the environment, and from everyone’s bodies?
We might hope that there’s some simple fix, that perhaps we can fight chemicals with chemicals. That if these chemicals mess with fertility, perhaps by throwing off the proper function of estrogen or testosterone we can just add more. Unfortunately the body is more complicated that, as one example, testosterone replacement therapy causes 90% of men to drop to a sperm count of zero!
Eschatological Implications
Shortly after finishing Count Down I came across another piece claiming that chemicals were also causing the obesity epidemic. So I intend to do a separate post looking at both claims, and the ways in which they interact. Instead I’m going to use this space to have a higher level discussion.
There are many people who wish to claim that everything is going great, and that the future is going to be awesome. In order to do this they have to explain how the dangers people currently fixate on are overblown or soluble. I am most familiar with Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now, and while he talked directly about climate change and AI risk, as well speaking about pollution generally, he did not cover chemically induced infertility. This was not a danger that was on his radar, not a problem of modernity he considered.
As I said I am not familiar with every work in this genre, and perhaps some of them have a compelling answer for why this potential catastrophe should not trouble us, but Pinker entirely ignores it. In drawing attention to this, my point is not that it’s unanswerable, my point is that it illustrates just how many potential technological catastrophes there are.
It’s not as if this problem is difficult to foresee or get a handle on. It’s easy to measure, it’s central to human flourishing, and the evidence has been available for decades. It didn’t make my list, or Pinker’s list, or really any list because there are just so many things for us to worry about. (Pinker also completely missed the corrosive effects of social media, because his book was written in 2018 rather than 2020.) There are just so many things that can go wrong. So many unintended consequences to our large-scale tampering. If we can’t even adequately deal with problems which should be obvious, how are we going to deal with the subtle problems, the ones that sneak up on us?
End of Everything: (Astrophysically Speaking)
by: Katie Mack
240 Pages
Briefly, what was this book about?
An exploration of theories on how the universe will end.
Who should read this book?
People who like astrophysics, or thinking in time horizons of trillions of years.
General Thoughts
I remember reading Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time back in the day. This book has a similar feel, though it was more irreverent and humorous than Hawking’s. (Though, to be clear, Hawking could be quite funny.) Labelling this book “A Brief History of the End of Time” would not have been misleading.
In the book Mack covers six possibilities for the end of everything: Heat Death, Big Crunch, Big Rip, Vacuum Decay or Bouncing Branes. Two of these explanations (crunch and bounce) posit a universe that cycles with the death of one universe leading to the birth of the next. The rest of the explanations posit a universe that dead ends. Cycles have always made more sense to me, otherwise you need a whole separate endeavor for explaining how universes begin. That said, dead end explanations currently seem to be favored by astrophysicists. And if that’s the way the data points, that’s the way it points. But my bet is on cycles, or some other stable state (And my personal bet is that God will reveal this to me in the hereafter. Should we run into each other in the next life I want you to remember this prediction and give me credit accordingly.)
Eschatological Implications
This book is primarily about eschatology, so obviously I had to include it in this section. Though it is an eschatology much different than what I normally write about, and much different than what most people care about. Mack largely writes about things that will happen long after we are gone, and by long I mean, for example, 10^1000 years from now. And while it’s good that some people are thinking about it, I will still contend that my eschatological focus is more useful than Mack’s.
This is not to say the book wasn’t useful or interesting. It was fascinating. I particularly liked the Vacuum Decay possibility. This holds that the Higgs Field/Potential is at a local minimum, but not a global minimum. Some incredibly energetic event could locally knock it out of its current minimum and into the global minimum, when that happened the nearby space would follow suit and a bubble of this new universe would expand out at the speed of light. Since it’s expanding as fast as information can travel we wouldn’t know about it until it hit us. One day everything’s fine and the next day the universe is unrecognizable. If you’ve ever read Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut this is similar to what happens with ice-9.
Finally, this book was also a great reminder about how little we know about things. Mack points out that of the four things that determine how the universe behaves—matter, dark matter, dark energy, and time—we really only understand matter and it’s the smallest contributor to that behavior.
II- Capsule Reviews
Facing Reality: Two Truths About Race in America
by: Charles Murray
168 Pages
Briefly, what is this book about?
The two truths that there are racial differences in cognitive ability and criminality.
Who should read this book?
Possibly no one. I think Murray’s arguments are important, but the issue is so polarized that there is no one left who does not already have a position which is unalterable.
General Thoughts
Murray is best known as the co-author, along with Richard Herrnstein, of The Bell Curve which makes the case that intelligence is important and partially heritable. As a result of this heritability they go on to say that intelligence has different means and distributions among the various racial groups. In this book Murray again makes the case for racial differences in cognitive ability, and to that he adds data making the case for racial differences in criminality. He doesn’t speculate on a root cause for these differences, but he does assert that they will be with us “indefinitely”. And indeed, according to his data the difference was shrinking until the late 80’s, but since then it's been remarkably stable.
As you might imagine we’re already in dangerous territory. The Bell Curve is still taboo, and Murray, despite being unfailingly civil, is also basically taboo. And while Murray avoids mentioning genetic racial differences in this book, it’s impossible for the mind not to go there, so perhaps you want me to offer some opinion.
This reminds me of an episode of Seinfeld where Jerry gets a couple of women to agree to a ménage à trois, but in the end decides that he can’t go through with it because he’s not an orgy guy. If he were going to do that he would have to get new clothes, new decor, new friends—he’d have to grow a mustache. Which is to say diving into racial differences in IQ is a whole lifestyle, really on both sides of the argument. And I’m not going to do it.
However I will say this, and I’ll probably end up regretting it. In the rationalist community, which I am adjacent to in a very vague sense, these sorts of ideas are generally viewed as having some truth to them. And I don’t think it’s because rationalists are just unforgivably hateful and racist, I think it’s because that’s what the data seems to say. If you’re interested in a brief overview of that data you could do worse than read Murray’s book.
Winning: The Unforgiving Race to Greatness
by: Tim Grover
240 Pages
Briefly, what is this book about?
How the true pursuit of winning requires an absolute single-minded devotion.
Who should read this book?
If you want to be inspired to try harder and to be tougher this is your book.
General Thoughts
Grover trained Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant (among others) two of the most relentless competitors who have ever walked the Earth. This is a book about how if you really want to win, there is no work/life balance, there is no pausing to rest. That all the cliches we tell ourselves are wrong. Showing up is NOT half the battle. Winning is selfish, there is an “I” in team. And you don’t need to make time for yourself or others. The only thing you should be making time for are things that take you closer to victory.
I found this book a useful wake-up call, and something of a corrective to so much of the current self-help landscape. I think I had mostly slid into a certain routine which was more focused on the perfecting of the routine than getting to a certain outcome. If it never gets me the outcome I want, what use was the routine?
However, while I think the world in general needs more focus on “Winning!” and less focus on small incremental improvements. I would argue that the absolute fixation Grover advocates for is dangerous. I do think balance is important, but more than that I’m worried that Grover doesn’t draw any lines. As an example consider Lance Armstrong. Grover didn’t coach Armstrong, but Armstrong is another example of a relentless competitor, so relentless that he didn’t give a second thought to doping (i.e. performance enhancing drugs). Grover doesn’t ever mention doping but the impression one gets is that he would be in favor of it. Particularly given that all of Armstrong’s competitors were doping. How else would Armstrong win if he didn’t do the same?
If Grover is against doping, this book gives no hint of it, and nothing in the book could be used to derive that conclusion. But of course the real question is: did Jordan or Bryant ever use performance enhancing drugs while Grover was training them?
Streaking: The Simple Practice of Conscious, Consistent Actions That Create Life-Changing Results
by: Jeffrey J. Downs and Jami L. Downs
208 Pages
Briefly, what is this book about?
Creating “streaks”, i.e. doing an activity every day in an uninterrupted fashion as a way of self improvement.
Who should read this book?
If the previous book didn’t appeal to you, maybe this one will. This is self-improvement at its easiest and most basic.
General Thoughts
This book is basically the inverse of the previous book. Rather than looking at improvement or winning as a total endeavor, this book puts forth the smallest and easiest possible methodology for improvement. The “streaks” methodology involves picking some activity that would be a part of your ideal life, and then making sure that you do that activity every day, keeping track of your “streak” of days. This activity should not be big, in fact they recommend the criteria of “laughably easy” when deciding what the activity should be. They also don’t recommend starting several streaks all at once, but rather suggest that you should go 100 days with your first streak before adding another one.
As you can see this is basically the opposite of what Grover is recommending, and I think both points of view are valuable, but my guess is that Downs’ recommendation will be more useful for more people. Still, you should never forget the need to actually win on occasion.
by: Pierce Brown
382 Pages
Briefly, what is this book about?
This is the first book of a dystopian science fiction series set ~700 years in the future where humanity has been divided into colors, each color has a specific role. Golds are on top and Reds are on the bottom.
Who should read this book?
If you’re looking for a good sci fi series, I’ve heard good things about this one, and the first book was very enjoyable.
General Thoughts
There are lots of elements that go into a good science fiction book. Plot, characters, setting, world building, etc. Pierce is pretty strong with nearly all of them. In part this is because he uses the increasingly common technique, one which I’ve kind of decided is cheating, of setting his book in a school. It’s a very strange school, and I’m not sure it makes a lot of sense, but it is a school, and with that setting comes all sorts of things you don’t have to worry about. You only have to deal with basically one location. The plot is naturally driven by the pedagogy of the school. And, If you only focus on a few characters that feels entirely natural.
However, as I said, I’m not sure it makes sense. *Incredibly mild spoiler* The school is composed entirely of Golds, the very highest caste, and they die like flies. Which is a world very different from ours, and I don’t know that his world-building is deep enough to make it believable. It’s interesting, but it doesn’t entirely cohere. But as criticism goes, that's a pretty mild one. It’d be pretty hard to find a book that doesn’t have some flaw at least as egregious.
As I write this I’m a third of the way done with the second book, and it occurs to me that the part Red Rising does poorly is what Dune does so masterfully. And there are definitely echos of Dune in the book, but that’s a very hard act to follow.
In the final analysis, Red Rising is not a classic, but it’s still quite good.
by: Spike Walker
288 Pages
Briefly, what is this book about?
Amazing Coast Guard rescues off the coast of Alaska.
Who should read this book?
People who appreciate shows like “Deadliest Catch” or general stories of man against nature.
General Thoughts
I’ve read a lot of these stories and this collection is as good as any of them, in particular the story of the most prominent rescue has a horrible twist that makes it all the more dramatic.
by: Sebastian Junger
160 Pages
Briefly, what is this book about?
A meditative book that’s half autobiographical narrative of a walking trip Junger took and half narrative of the way freedom was understood during the early history of the country.
Who should read this book?
People who enjoy long, discursive podcasts, or Junger’s other stuff.
General Thoughts
Freedom was not as good as Tribe (few books are), though it is probably more personal. After getting divorced Junger decided to start walking the rails with three companions. Walking the rails is illegal, and as such it provides the setting for numerous anecdotes on freedom. About half the anecdotes come from his trip and about half the anecdotes are historical.
I listened to the audiobook, which is only three hours long, and I think if you approach the book as just a long episode of a good podcast it’s amazing.
by: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
158 Pages
Briefly, what is this book about?
The original Faustian bargain.
Who should read this book?
It’s a classic and it’s short, so maybe everyone?
General Thoughts
Sometimes when you read an acknowledged classic you immediately recognize why it’s a classic, sometimes you kind of have to take it on faith. Faust is split into two parts and I think the first part fell into the “immediate recognition” bucket, while the second part was in the “take it on faith” bucket.
Though Faust isn’t just an acknowledged classic, it’s frequently named as the greatest work of German literature, which would appear to be a level beyond that. I definitely didn’t get that sense, even out of Part 1, but perhaps I should try reading it in the original German. I mostly know Dutch and it feels like with a moderate amount of effort I could pick up German literacy. Though it kind of feels like I’m at a point in my life when I should be cutting back on things rather than being ambitious.
As a final note I should mention that in the past I have found full cast audiobooks to be less enjoyable than those with a single great narrator. I listened to a full cast version of this book and it was quite good. So perhaps I just had a few bad experiences. I’ll keep you posted.
III- Religious Reviews
Open and Relational Theology: An Introduction to Life-Changing Ideas
by: Thomas Jay Oord
192 Pages
Briefly, what is this book about?
A new take on how God operates, very different from traditional religious ideas.
Who should read this book?
If you like plumbing the depths of theology, but find some of it far too dry, this is the book for you.
General Thoughts
As I mentioned I went to a conference on open and relational theology (ORT) last month, but this was not because I subscribe to it. My biggest reason was that I was acquainted with Oord, who organized the conference. Also, it didn't appear any more expensive than taking a vacation of similar duration, so I thought I could kill two birds with one stone.
ORT does have a lot of overlap with LDS theology, in particular they’re very big on the idea of free will and agency. Something that’s also pretty foundational for Mormons. ORT uses it to answer the questions of evil and suffering. Basically God can’t do anything which interferes with our free will. More broadly, God has only a limited ability to interfere with anything.
As I said this is not my theology and so I don’t want to get too deep into things lest I misrepresent it, but one of the interesting outgrowths of this focus on free will is that God can’t know the future. If he knows with absolute certainty what’s going to happen then we don’t really have free will. This is the “open” part of ORT, it describes the idea that the future is open, that both we and God move through time in the same way at the same rate. So God doesn’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow anymore than we do. (One assumes his predictions are better, but they are still just predictions, there is no certainty.)
As a result of this God experiences things, again much the same way we do, and he experiences our actions while we experience his. This is the “relational” part. God is not a fixed unmovable being unchanging through all the eternities, in ORT God develops in harmony with the rest of creation. His essence is unchanging, but what he has experienced is constantly being added to.
It’s a very interesting idea, and I met a lot of very cool people. As a theology I think it’s something of a statement on the ongoing developments in Christianity and religion, but I’m still not 100% sure what that statement is.
Winning for me is getting people to pay me to write. I have an ongoing “streak” where I ask for money at the end of every post. But perhaps I’ve been looking at it all wrong, and if I really want to “Win!” I need to pass the bank teller a note demanding all the money. Wouldn’t that count as getting paid for my writing? And the rate per word would be huge! Perhaps that should be my plan B. If you want to help me with plan A, consider donating.