The 9 Books I Finished in March-2022
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When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management by: Roger Lowenstein
How to Live on 24 Hours a Day by: Arnold Bennet
Burning Chrome by: William Gibson
Public Choice Theory and the Illusion of Grand Strategy: How Generals, Weapons Manufacturers, and Foreign Governments Shape American Foreign Policy by: Richard Hanania
Virtue Hoarders: The Case against the Professional Managerial Class by: Catherine Liu
Mythos: The Greek Myths Retold by: Stephen Fry
Heroes: Mortals and Monsters, Quests and Adventures by: Stephen Fry
If You Absolutely Must...: a brief guide to writing and selling short-form argumentative nonfiction from a somewhat reluctant professional writer by: Fredrik deBoer
Expeditionary Force Book 8: Armageddon by: Craig Alanson
Somehow, without really planning to, I’ve ended up traveling a lot. As I write this I’m actually in a car headed to Albuquerque (my wife is currently driving). A week ago I was in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin at Gary Con. And later this month I’m going to Vegas. I’m feeling stressed out and frivolous at the same time.
I mention the traveling to both prepare the ground for the possibility that I might once again not produce as much writing as I want to this month, and because it leads into a story, a story about masks. As I mentioned I just got back from Gary Con and as the convention approached they made it clear that they wanted a total mask mandate. They were so serious about this that they canceled the option for table-side service, which, as I understand, is a major source of revenue for them, because they didn’t want to give people the excuse that they didn’t have their mask on because they were eating. They didn’t say that you couldn’t eat or drink at the table, but they wanted you to quickly pull down your mask, take a bite or a drink and quickly put it back on.
I was not looking forward to the mandate because I think it makes it super hard to communicate in a noisy gaming hall, and, though it might be psychosomatic prolonged mask wearing always gives me a headache, plus with three shots and a verified positive for Omicron I think I’m about as safe as one can be in this day and age. So imagine my delight when I show up and not only are about half the people in the registration line unmasked, but the guy next to me in line says that the mask mandate was removed at the 11th hour, because the hotel itself doesn’t have a mandate, and indeed 90% of them aren’t wearing masks, so the point seemed kind of moot. And indeed when I get up to the window and get my badge no one mentions that I need to put a mask on. The first room I’m in eventually ends up about 50/50 masked vs. unmasked, and it does seem like it’s being left to personal preference.
But then there’s a pushback. Certain areas seem to get very draconian with the masks, arguments erupt on the facebook page. One of the guys in charge of the con posts something very extreme about the requirement for masks and it gets deleted, even as another guy posts something else reminding people of the mask requirement, but in slightly less extreme language. But it was clear that the number of people who were just sick of masks had reached a critical mass, and it didn’t matter how much people begged and cajoled a universal mask mandate just was no longer in the cards. It really felt like being on the front lines of a front that’s collapsing, with people trying to make an orderly retreat, but on the verge of a route.
As one final point, I’m always amazed that the people loudly proclaiming the need for a mask mandate because they personally can’t attend an event otherwise because of their health, never seem to be wearing an N95. My understanding is that you personally wearing an N95, while everyone else is unmasked, is better than everyone wearing a cloth or a surgical mask. So if you’re that worried, why wouldn’t you take the one step that’s completely under your control?
Anyway I’ve gone on too long about this as it is. On to the reviews!
I- Eschatological Reviews
When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management
by: Roger Lowenstein
Published: 2001
304 Pages
Briefly, what is this book about?
The story of Long Term Capital Management (LTCM), a very exclusive hedge fund full of arrogant people that blew up in spectacular fashion.
Who should read this book?
If you enjoyed The Big Short and have a general fondness for stories of financial blow-ups brought on by hubris this is a book about exactly that.
General Thoughts
I remember hearing about the spectacular blow-up of LTCM when it happened in 1998, and my recollection is that it was pretty big news, at least for a week or so. I’m sure that the appeal of the story was helped along by its obvious moral: the arrogant brought low in spectacular fashion by their hubris. Like so many before the principals of LTCM thought that they had outsmarted the market, they were wrong.
The next time I remember encountering the story was while reading Fooled by Randomness by Taleb where he described LTCM as a hedge fund set up by a couple of Nobel Prize winning economists. He scornfully described their delusional belief that they could precisely measure and therefore manage risk. He went on to say that the hedge fund had blown up after four years in what these economists had called a “ten sigma event”, which is to say an event ten standard deviations from the norm—an event which is so improbable that you’re unlikely to see even one such event in the entire history of the universe.
This “ten sigma” claim fascinated me, I was staggered that a Nobel Prize winner could be so wrong. (And yes I know the Nobel in economics is not an actual Nobel Prize.) Ever since then I’ve wanted to hear the whole story about how someone so smart could be wrong on a scale that beggars the imagination. Finally, after many years, I got around to looking into it. To start with I should probably include the section of the book Taleb referenced in making his claim:
According to these same models, the odds against the firm’s suffering a sustained run of bad luck—say, losing 40 percent of its capital in a single month—were unthinkably high. (So far, in their worst month, they had lost a mere 2.9 percent.) Indeed, the figures implied that it would take a so-called ten-sigma event—that is, a statistical freak occurring one in every ten to the twenty-fourth power times—for the firm to lose all of its capital within one year.
There it is. Of course with all such claims the truth is a little bit more complicated, though it’s also depressingly similar to other stories of financial collapse. (A point which I’ll take up in the next section.)
The fund collapsed through a combination of the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis and the 1998 Russian Currency Crisis, but I didn’t see any evidence that the LTCM principals described this combination as a “ten sigma event” after those things happened. It’s merely that before the events happened their models said that such events were spectacularly rare. If I’m going to be charitable, I don’t think the LTCM guys assumed their model was a perfect representation of reality. But I do get the impression that they thought it was directionally accurate. That it could be used for a baseline. I imagine them reasoning something like this, “At the tails of the model things are probably not completely accurate, so it might only take an seven sigma event rather than a ten sigma event, but that still should only happen once every 2 million years, which is still basically impossible.” I understand that’s still not being particularly charitable, but after reading the book it’s the best I can do. It’s clear that whatever place the models had in their decision making process that their confidence in those models was delusional to the point of insanity.
Before we entirely leave the charitable portion of this review, I need to defend the Nobel Prize winning economists, they didn’t set up the fund, nor did they have a lot of control over how it was run. They were mostly brought on to bolster its reputation. So accusing them of being arrogant and dumb is to overlook the real cocky idiots at the center of the story.
If you’re looking for the person who possessed the plurality of the fund’s hubris that would be Lawrence Hilibrand. I don’t have time to go into all the instances of Hilibrand’s arrogance. It is far easier to list the things he did that weren’t arrogant, because as near as I can tell (and one presumes that Lowenstein might have an axe to grind) there really aren’t any.
He was punished for his arrogance. All of the principals had just about the entirety of their wealth in LTCM, so when it went bust, they went bust as well. Well, not really, not bust in the way you or I would understand it, but they did go from being half-billionaires to merely multi-millionaires, who live in palatial comfort and went on to found yet another hedge fund, JWM Partners.
Unsurprisingly, their arrogance was unabated. The second fund used basically the same models and managed to last all of 10 years before it was killed by the 2007-2008 financial crisis. (Yet another ten sigma event, what are the odds!) You would think this would be the end of things, but they’re actually on their third hedge fund. Though to be fair rather than the billions invested into LTCM they were only able to get tens of millions on this third go around.
Eschatological Implications
If LTCM were an isolated story, then we wouldn’t need this section, but the hubris and collapse of LTCM appear more to be the rule of modern finance than the exception. Despite the lesson of LTCM, the 2007-2008 financial crisis was basically exactly the same story, only this time played out over the entire world rather than over a single hedge fund.
For LTCM it was the Black-Scholes model and the underlying riskless asset was government bonds. In the leadup to 2007 it was the Gaussian copula function and the underlying “riskless” asset was mortgages. We even have the same language being used to declare how improbable it is. In the middle of the crisis David Viniar, the CFO of Goldman Sachs, declared, “We were seeing things that were 25 standard deviation moves, several days in a row” I’m running out of ways to describe how idiotic this is. A 25 standard deviation move should happen once every 10135 years and he’s claiming he saw this sort of thing several days in a row!?!? Furthermore, consider that this is after LTCM, when someone like the CFO of Goldman should know that they can’t use a normal distribution when considering risk. Accordingly, what they thought was so risk free that it should never happen in the lifetime of trillions of universes, happened several days in a row. “Riskless” was anything but.
We have two examples of breathtaking financial incompetence at the highest levels within 10 years of each other. I strongly suspect that if my knowledge of financial history went even deeper that I could come up with a third example. But even if there isn't, what do you want to bet that it won’t happen a third time? In fact I strongly suspect that the third example is already in motion, and that in 10 years we’ll be able to point to another financial crisis caused by another complicated financial instrument that is already in existence.
If you disagree, then please tell me what we have done since 2008 to keep that from happening. Honestly, I’d like to know how to solve this problem. The LTCM partners went on to found not one, but two different hedge funds after their spectacular collapse, and Lord knows the mountains of bad behavior that led to 2007-2008 crisis went almost entirely unpunished. (In the US only one guy went to jail, though 25 people did end up in jail in Iceland.)
I’m not necessarily saying that the LTCM guys shouldn’t have been able to set up a new hedge fund—I am amazed that people gave them money—I’m saying that exotic financial strategies and the instruments which empower them appear to inevitably blow up in spectacular fashion. And as things increasingly centralize these financial catastrophes just get worse. On top of all this, because of this centralization only governments are in a position to do anything about the problem, and they appear woefully unequal to that task.
It’s possible that none of this will matter, that the invasion of Ukraine will lead to World War III and the last thing on our minds will be complicated financial instruments. But if we do manage to preserve the liberal order, then we’re still going to have to deal with financial crises, because they’re deeply embedded in markets which are a fundamental feature of that order. And I think people underestimate how much the 2007-2008 crisis led to the populism we’re currently seeing, and the attendant political disorder. There are an awful lot of people who remember that while they were getting kicked in the nuts, bankers were making millions of dollars off a crisis they caused. As you can imagine this might lead to them losing faith in the system that allows that, particularly if that system just keeps allowing it to happen.
II- Capsule Reviews
by: Arnold Bennet
Published: 1908
92 Pages
Briefly, what is this book about?
It’s a very short, very early self-help book.
Who should read this book?
If you’re a fan of self-help books I think you should check out this one. As I said it’s super short, and reading the earliest examples of any genre always ends up being particularly illuminating.
General Thoughts
This book put me in mind of Parkinson’s Law, by C. Northcote Parkinson. It’s one of the first, and for my money still the greatest business book. How to Live on 24 Hours is not the greatest self-help book, but it is surprising how many of the themes that are now common in self-help books existed basically from the genre’s inception. Things like prioritization, using your mornings effectively, the power of habits and ongoing effort, etc. And of course we’re still struggling with all those things, in fact, it might be getting worse. I suppose this is more evidence that some problems will always be with us, but even if that’s the case, it’s still useful to read about one of the first people to identify those problems and attempt to fix them.
by: William Gibson
Published: 1982
223 Pages
Briefly, what is this book about?
A collection of Gibson’s cyberpunk stories, something of a prequel to his famous book, Neuromancer.
Who should read this book?
If you like Gibson, or cyberpunk, or science fiction short stories as a genre, you should definitely read this book.
General Thoughts
I read this as part of Freddie deBoer’s book club. In particular he wanted to talk about the story New Rose Hotel. I’ve read quite a bit of Gibson, but I’d never read this collection, so it seemed like a great excuse to do so. New Rose Hotel, was the standout story, but possibly just because deBoer drew extra attention to it. But really all the stories were quite good. Gibson is a very literary author, and his prose is always fantastic. Cyperpunk is a close cousin to noir and as such it’s really all about the atmosphere and a certain understated panache, and Gibson, as the designated father of the genre, is the master of both.
by: Richard Hanania
Published: December, 2021
224 Pages
Briefly, what is this book about?
A comprehensive debunking of the idea that American foriegn policy is driven by a grand, overarching strategy.
Who should read this book?
I would probably just subscribe to Hanania’s substack. I think you’ll get most of the important bits, plus the book itself, as an academic publication, is horribly expensive ($160 hardback, $40 kindle).
General Thoughts
I may have mentioned that I’m part of a local Slate Star Codex meetup group. In addition to meetups we also do a book club, and this was the book we did in February. As part of that we managed to get Hanania to attend our discussion, virtually. So whatever else you might say about Hanania he’s generous with his time.
His central point essentially boils down to the idea that American foreign policy is incoherent, that it has no overarching goal. Of course people imagine we have an overarching goal, and are quick to offer up suggestions for what that goal is, but Hanania shoots all of them down. As one example many people assume we are trying to maintain our position as the global hegemon. But the only reason that position is under threat is because we gave both Russia and China the necessary help to be competitive. You have to look pretty far back in time to see the help the US gave Russia, but even while outwardly opposed to Stalin, pre-WWII, the US government still allowed US businesses to jump start their heavy industry. Our assistance to China happened more recently when we let them into the WTO and gave them most favored nation status. In other words, the only reason we’re worried about them today is because of the economic help we gave them decades ago. And it wasn’t if they suddenly became our enemy, we have always had a pretty antagonistic relationship. Obviously we did this because we hoped it would provide a long term benefit to us, but this expected benefit was always at cross-purposes with maintaining hegemony.
On the other side of things even when we’re clearly not hoping to benefit ourselves, when we’re definitely doing things for the sole reason of harming our enemies, our tactics are still incoherent. The best example of this is our habit of imposing sanctions. Hanania points out that sanctions almost never accomplish their intended goal, and generally end up being humanitarian disasters on top of that. Certainly they haven’t really affected Putin, on the contrary they seem to have made him more popular than ever inside Russia. Strengthening the perception that the West will always be implacable enemies of the Russian people and that Putin is the only one who can stand up to them.
I could go on and cover other suggestions for potential US grand strategies, like the maintenance of international laws and norms. (If that’s our strategy why do we continually break those laws?) But I’m interested in high level questions. Is true grand strategy more common in a multipolar world? As the lone hyperpower is the US trying to be all things to all people? Are monarchies and autocracies better at grand strategy because decision making power is more centralized? Or is it worse because they end up surrounded by “yes men”? Do liberal values make it harder to engage in grand strategy, because there’s an irreconcilable tension between national interests and humanitarian concerns? Is it possible that nations have always fumbled through history, sometimes doing the right thing, sometimes the wrong thing, mostly by chance, but in the age of nuclear weapons, we’re suddenly in a place where these mistakes, which have always happened, might be catastrophic?
As you can imagine the invasion of Ukraine has the possibility of answering many of these questions, and we might not like what those answers turn out to be.
Virtue Hoarders: The Case against the Professional Managerial Class
by: Catherine Liu
Published: December, 2020
90 Pages
Briefly, what is this book about?
There is a war within the left between those who want to prioritize identity (being black, or gay) and those who want to prioritize class. This is a book in favor of the latter and opposed to the former.
Who should read this book?
The book is short, which is why I picked it up, but it’s pretty dense, still if you’re interested in the conflict I just mentioned it’s probably worth reading. Certainly, as someone who’s never really been on the left, it helped me understand things better.
General Thoughts
One of my friends turned me on to Tara Henley who’s kind of the Canadian version of Bari Weiss. And Henley raved about this book, which is how I came to find out about it. Also I’ve long been fascinated by the subject of the book, what Liu calls the professional managerial class (PMC), what others call woke capital, and what still others have labeled “the cathedral”.
I have yet to decide which term is best, it’s a little like the ancient parable of the blind men and the elephant. Each term emerges from a different point of view of what is clearly a massive phenomenon. As far as the PMC, Liu ends up defining it more by its relationship to the working class than by any elements inherent to the PMC itself. The PMC is the academic who can’t imagine why the working class doesn’t just go to college, surely it must be clear to them that such attendance is the answer to all of the problems they might be experiencing. It’s the bureaucrat, who enforces laws for the working class’ “own good”, and feels all the more smug when the working class chaffs against these laws. And to take a quote directly from the book:
PMC virtue hoarding is the insult added to injury when white-collar managers, having downsized their blue-collar workforce, then disparage them for their bad taste in literature, bad diets, unstable families and deplorable child-rearing habits.
As you might have gathered this is a book about the conflict between the professional managerial class and the working class, and in a larger sense it’s a book about the conflict between those who prioritize identity and those who prioritize class. In order to understand how this conflict emerged you have to go back a few decades. This is a vast oversimplification, but Liu and people like her would probably point to a long standing unity between advocates for minority rights and advocates for economic justice. Certainly Martin Luther King Jr. still embodied both strands, and this was fairly mainstream Marxism as well, but in the years after his death these two strands started to subtly drift apart.
These advocates for broad spectrum justice had clearly seized the moral high ground, and as a consequence of this they were growing more powerful. Those already in power, who had gotten there by way of their wealth and status, needed some way to keep their power—it’s hard for people to take you seriously as an advocate for economic justice and the working class if you’re rich. So partially by design, but mostly just because of the way the incentives were structured, those in power started emphasizing the identity side of things and deemphasizing the economic side of things. It became more about minorities who were poor and less about poor people in general. In other words, identity was easier to subvert than class and so that’s what they did. Given that such subversion was second nature for those who already had power and wealth this was fairly easy to do. Basically they adopted the culture of the 60’s and used it as a proxy for virtue of the 60’s, narrowing the definition of virtue in the process, and hoarding what remained. Thus, the title of the book. Here’s how Liu puts it:
The culture war was always a proxy economic war, but the 1960’s divided the country into the allegedly enlightened and the allegedly benighted, with the PMC able to separate itself from its economic inferiors in a way that seemed morally justifiable.
…
The post -1968 PMC elite has become ideologically convinced of its own unassailable position as comprising the most advanced people the earth has ever seen. They have, in fact, made a virtue of their vanguardism. Drawing on the legacy of the counterculture and its commitment to technological and spiritual innovations, PMC elites try to tell the rest of us how to live…as the fortunes of the PMC elites rose, the class insisted on it’s ability to do ordinary things in extraordinary, fundamentally superior and more virtuous ways: as a class, it was reading books, raising children, eating food, staying healthy, and having sex as the most culturally and affectively[sic] advanced people in human history.
All of this hopefully gives you enough to understand the outlines of the conflict. You can probably simplify it into the Marxists vs. the Woke. Though that might be too simple. The borders of the conflict can seem a little bit messy when you first encounter them, and this book's primary utility is to clearly delineate those borders. In any case, I am on neither side of the conflict, and although I never thought I would say this, I clearly prefer the Marxists. In part because of things I’ve read elsewhere, but in part because of this book. Though only in this very narrow sphere, everywhere else I prefer just about anything else to Marxism.
Liu does a good job of making the case that the PMC is on the side of the Woke, and that this alignment isn’t bringing us closer to justice, it’s perverting it. Above all she makes the case that the PMC, which she admits she’s a part of (and for that matter, so am I) are mostly a bunch of sanctimonious assholes.
Stephen Fry’s Greek Myths Retold Series
By: Stephen Fry
Published: 2019
352 Pages
Published: 2020
352 Pages
Briefly, what are these books about?
Stephen Fry retells the stories of Greek Mythology.
Who should read these books?
If you like Stephen Fry or Greek Mythology you should read these books, actually you should listen to Stephen Fry narrating these books.
General Thoughts
I was a big fan of Bulfinch's Mythology when I was a kid. And it’d been a long time since I had revisited the myths, outside of reading the Iliad and the Odyssey and the Greek Dramas, which is not nothing, but it was nice to engage in a comprehensive review of all the myths.
Fry’s retelling is different from Bulfinch's (to the extent I remember it) in three respects. First off Bulfinch’s left out the more salacious details, for example I don’t remember reading that when Kronos overthrew Ouranos it involved cutting off his genitals and hurling them across Greece and out into the ocean.
The second point is closely related to the first, as part of this bowdlerization Bulfinch’s left out all of the homosexuality, Fry, for obvious reasons, not only includes it, but really leans into all the LGBT elements of the mythology. For my money a little too much. Which is not to say I think he exaggerates any of the details but rather he can’t resist using these elements as ammo in the current culture war. For example when telling the story of someone who these days would be identified as transgender he offers one of his very few footnotes. Where he not only says that this is proof of current transgender orthodoxy, but goes on to reference an academic paper in support of this point.
I’m not opposed to such arguments, but for a moment it’s an entirely different book. Rather than being a playful retelling of myths it’s modern cultural pontification. And it’s possible that this point, out of all the points he could have pontificated on, was worth the digression. But it draws unusual attention to the issue which often has the opposite of (what I presume is) the author’s intended goal. “There is no lack of people telling me how natural it is to be transgender, I was reading a book about classic mythology to get away from the grubbiness of the current culture wars. Instead I’m even more annoyed by such statements!”
I don’t want to exaggerate the issue, mostly the books are quite good. Which takes me to the third difference from Bulfinch’s. Fry frequently takes the opportunity to inject humorous asides. You kind of get the sense that these are the Greek myths as told by Douglas Adams (of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy fame) though Fry’s humor is not quite so dense.
In the end these are classic stories, told in a humorous fashion, by a great narrator. I just wish he could have done a slightly better job of keeping his politics out of things.
by: Fredrik deBoer
Published: January, 2022
50 Pages
Briefly, what is this book about?
The title pretty much sums it up.
Who should read this book?
If you are genuinely trying to make a living as a blogger, newsletter writer, or even a podcaster then I would definitely read this book.
General Thoughts
Obviously I write argumentative nonfiction, so I was hoping to get a lot of great pointers from this book. There were several, you need a niche/schtick, you need to be honest and fearless, you need to actually write, etc. Mostly stuff I’ve heard before, and it was good to be reminded of these things, but there was also nothing revelatory or earth-shattering. Where the book really excelled was in an area I’m not looking for advice, at least not yet. This was the area of actually, really and truly making a living as a writer, as in it’s your primary source of income. DeBoer gets into the nuts and bolts there, going so far as to include his actual book pitch. But of course making a living as a writer is very difficult, and thus the title, you should do it only “If You Absolutely Must”.
Expeditionary Force Book 8: Armageddon
by: Craig Alanson
456 Pages
Briefly, what is this book about?
The continued adventures of the merry band of pirates, keeping the Earth safe from the horrors of the galaxy.
Who should read this book?
I guess if you’ve already read the previous seven books you should read this one. But I think if you were on the fence about continuing I might stop at book seven or maybe even earlier. Or at least, if I were you, I would wait until some blogger you trust finishes the series and reports back to you. Because I probably will end up being just such a blogger.
General Thoughts
Increasingly this series is 80% stuff that was interesting the first time, but has been done to death by book 8 and 20% stuff I’m intensely curious and interested in and I can hardly wait to see how it turns out. As an example I was in the middle of the book, and there was a setback, and it was basically the same kind of setback that had happened in nearly all of the previous books, and I honestly just about stopped listening right there. But then just a few minutes later Alanson did some world building (technically galaxy building) and expanded on one of the big mysteries of the book and I was all the way back in, at least for a bit.
Another element that hasn’t gone quite the way I expected: When you start a series and discover it’s already been mapped out to be 15 books long, you expect that in the course of those books that the characters are going to level up in some fashion, and mostly this hasn’t happened. Though again just as I was about to reach the point of despair here as well, they did substantially level up in this book. So I will continue reading, but I wouldn’t blame anyone else for stopping.
If you were paying attention to page numbers you may have noticed a theme. There were a lot of short books this month. But short books need love just as much as massive classics. And tiny blogs need love just as much as giant newsletters. If this saying I just barely made up for completely selfish reasons resonates at all with you, consider donating.