Plagues Upon the Earth: Disease and the Course of Human History

By: Kyle Harper

Published: 2021

704 Pages

Briefly, what is this book about?

A comprehensive historical overview of the never-ending war between humanity and disease. From its earliest days all the way down to the COVID-19 pandemic. With a specific focus on what he calls the “paradox of progress”: every new advance creates new opportunities for diseases. But it’s not just us driving diseases, they’re driving us as well. Efforts to mitigate the negative effects of these pathogens are scattered throughout our history, our civilization and our genes.

What authorial biases should I be aware of?

None that you’d really be surprised by. He explicitly takes a very global view of humanity’s disease burden, knowing that the story of European diseases like smallpox and the plague have already received plenty of attention. (Which is not to say he ignores them. Merely that he locates them as just one among many.)

Who should read this book?

I think everyone should be more aware of the potential dangers of pandemics, and the monstrous impact plagues have had on the development of humanity and civilization, and this book does a fantastic job with the second part, but it has less to offer on future danger than I hoped. Speaking of which:

What does the book have to say about the future?

Harper definitely takes the stand that our long war against diseases is far from over, and there is a lot of great discussion about how pathogens evolve alongside us, changing tactics as we change our environment. But there’s almost no discussion (none that I really remember) of the danger of bioengineered pathogens, which felt like a significant oversight.

Specific thoughts: Two things which continue to baffle me

It can be difficult to remember the before times, what it was like before some major event. Even one that happened fairly recently. I’m speaking, of course, of the time before the COVID-19 pandemic. Back then everyone had heard of the really big diseases. Things like Black Death and smallpox, but surprisingly, very few people had any awareness of the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918–1920. You might have to take my word for that, but trust me, to the extent that people even knew about it (and many didn’t) it was never mentioned. It just wasn’t part of the standard historical narrative. There was World War I and the Great Depression and World War II, and so on, but no one would insert “And the Spanish flu”. Despite the fact that far more people died from that than from the actual war.

This isn’t just a weird quirk of the Spanish flu. It’s clear that diseases, even ones that kill multiple millions of people, just don’t get anywhere near the same attention per death that wars do or even well-known books! This book reinforced this strange asymmetry in attention. Historically there were numerous, gigantic plagues which are almost entirely forgotten, while other things, which occurred around the same time, are widely known. And yes, it could be argued that some things are uniquely memorable, but the other side of that is that plagues seem uniquely forgettable.

Consider these examples:

Antonine Plague vs. Marcus Aurelius: How many people have any idea about the Antonine Plague versus have seen the movie Gladiator? Or who knows who Marcus Aurelius was but doesn’t know that a plague during his reign ended up killing an estimated 10% of the population of the Roman Empire? I think it’s safe to say that Meditations, Aurelius’ book, is far better known than the plague.

Black Death vs. Hundred Years’ War: The Hundred Years’ War lasted from 1337 to 1453. In that time there were probably around 250,000 combat deaths (statistics are obviously tough to compile). In that same time the best guess is that there were at least 25 million deaths from the bubonic plague. (And actually the bulk of the deaths occurred between 1347 and 1353). So at least 100 times as many people, but it certainly doesn’t get 100 times the attention, particularly if you consider the fame of the individuals and events from the Hundred Years’ War (Agincourt, Joan of Arc, Crécy).

Shakespeare’s plays vs. the plagues that were happening at the same time: Everyone knows about Shakespeare’s plays, but how many people know that the theaters were constantly being shut down because of the plague, and that the 1592–1593 London plague probably killed around 10% of the population of London.

Add this on top of the Spanish flu and one starts to detect a trend. Now obviously there are all manner of biases when it comes to what makes it into “the record” and what doesn’t. There are obviously biases within nations and cultures, and biases related to how sympathetic the victims are, and how dramatic the situation. And one could hazard a guess as to which biases are at play here, but it still seems to be a very large asymmetry.

Arguably this was not the case with the COVID-19 pandemic. Many would say that we over-reacted to the deaths caused by it, and went too far. I don’t know what that means for future pandemics, but I hope to not find out. Though there are people who seem determined to make sure I do, which takes us to the second thing which baffles me. The continued efforts, by some, to facilitate the creation of the worst pandemics ever.

Coincidentally just before I started reading this book (it may have prompted me to pick it up, I don’t recall) I listened to an episode of Sam Harris’ podcast called “Privatizing the Apocalypse”. He was talking to Rob Reid, a leading advocate for better biosecurity, about the absolutely crazy DEEP VZN (pronounced deep vision) project. This was a program started in 2021, so after the start of COVID-19 pandemic, to go out, find as many naturally occurring pathogens as possible (go into the, much discussed, bat caves), take them back to a lab, sequence them, and then publish those sequences.

This is insane on so many levels.

1. It’s a follow up to the PREDICT program, which some people blame for getting the virus to Wuhan which eventually led to COVID. (I know there’s a lot of controversy here.)

2. Apart from the question of whether COVID was caused by a lab leak, you have to believe that lab leaks are impossible to think dredging up the world’s deadliest pathogens and gathering them in a lab is a good idea.

3. Despite the enormous risks, it was run out of USAID, not exactly the organization you think of when you think top tier biosecurity.

4. There are an estimated 30,000 people who might be able to synthesize a pathogen, once the sequences are published. You’re giving all of these people the equivalent of a nuclear weapon. And that number is only going to go up.

5. I understand the principle of open science, but as they said in the podcast “open science is not a suicide pact”!

Fortunately, someone came to their senses and DEEP VZN was cancelled in 2023, and hopefully that marks the end of these misguided efforts at collecting and cataloging. But one wonders if on some level, we’re once again seeing this strange minimization of plague deaths vs. other deaths. Would the scientists involved in PREDICT or DEEP VZN have been equally willing to work on research for a new form of nerve gas? Probably not, and yet the pathogens they uncovered could have ended up being 100 times worse.

As the title says we do have “plagues upon the Earth”. They’ve been around forever, and they will continue to haunt us, evolving and adapting as we do. Perhaps it’s this longevity, the fact that they have always been with us and will always be with us, that makes us treat them differently, to treat deaths as less severe, and research as less dangerous.

And I guess that’s the final message of this book. Just because they’ve been around forever doesn’t mean we can let our guard down!

—---------------------------------------------------------------

One of the scary scenarios mentioned in the Sam Harris podcast was bioengineering several viruses at the same time and then releasing multiple pandemics all at once. So when you show up at the hospital, the doctors aren’t even sure which disease you might have or how to treat you. For people that are opposed to releasing DNA sequences they seem to have no qualms about offering up evil genius level ideas to the bad guys. And there I go, doing the same thing. For more of this sort of casual hypocrisy consider subscribing.

Phenomena: The Secret History of the U.S. Government’s Investigations into Extrasensory Perception and Psychokinesis

By: Annie Jacobsen

Published: 2017

544 Pages

Briefly, what is this book about?

An exhaustive history of the government’s attempts to systematize and weaponize paranormal abilities. It also covers the broader paranormal research landscape, with lots of discussion of Uri Geller.

What authorial biases should I be aware of?

Jacobsen claims to be approaching the subject as a neutral observer, but I got a strong “I want to believe” vibe from the book. Her approach appears to assume what it claims to be investigating. The overarching question of the book is: “Why did the government spend so much time and effort on these areas if there’s nothing there?”

As one example of bias, I grew up reading Carl Sagan, and in his telling the appearance of Uri Geller on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson was the smoking gun. Carson went to great lengths to make sure that Geller couldn’t influence the demonstration, and, what do you know? Geller failed to bend any spoons.1 I read about this when I was a teenager and it has loomed large in my memory ever since, so I was very interested to see how Jacobsen would handle it. She devotes one sentence to it:

Geller was nervous, he said, having recently been unable to demonstrate psychokinesis on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show.

I’m sure I’m reflecting my own biases with this focus, but if she was truly being a neutral observer, I would have expected Geller’s Carson appearance to have gotten several pages.

Who should read this book?

This book was another one recommended by my friend, the seeker. (See my review of HeartMath, though this book is significantly better.) I had read a previous book by Jacobsen, which was decent, though sensational in places. So I thought I’d give it a shot. This book is similarly sensational, but it does compile all of the information about governmental investigation into extrasensory perception (ESP) and psychokinesis (PK), and the evidence thus acquired, into a single book. Jacobsen oversells much of it (particularly Uri Geller’s results at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI)) but she has done the legwork and talked to many of the individuals involved. If you’re interested in this sort of research at all, Jacobsen does a pretty good job of presenting it, as far as what you should make of it? That’s a far more difficult question.

What does the book have to say about the future?

Research into supernatural phenomena has obviously not ceased, even at the government level. And near the end of the book Jacobsen profiles a program by Dr. Kit Green and Garry Nolan to isolate a gene for ESP and PK and other psychic abilities. They describe the project as a “genomics of supernormality”. Green is a former CIA officer, with an impressive record of government service.2 Nolan is an impressive Stanford scientist,3 but he previously made an appearance in this space as a major figure in a UFO book, which is the area he seems to be spending most of his time these days.

As a consequence of work like this Jacobsen muses that we might be on the verge of something akin to the Copernican revolution, only for ESP and PK:

There presently exists a huge gap between where researchers are on a hypothesis for anomalous mental phenomena and where the science needs to be for them to move toward general theory. But it took more than a thousand years for man to move from the hypothesis that the Sun, not Earth, was the center of our solar system to the general theory of Copernican heliocentrism. Will modern technology allow for more interest in scientific research into the paranormal, or will the stigma prevail? If the stigma regarding ESP and PK research were removed from the world of science, what might be uncovered?

So I guess one possible future is for humans to be able to use gene editing and embryo selection to create a psychically sensitive master race that will rise up against the machines and found the Bene Gesserit order. But I don’t think that’s the way to bet.

Specific thoughts: What framework should one use to consider supernatural claims?

When considering claims like these there are three broad approaches one might take:

1- The absolute skeptic: This is the materialist, New Atheist, extreme skeptic position. Everything has a scientific explanation. If it exists we should be able to test it. It should be replicable. If ESP is a thing, someone should be able to reliably demonstrate it working, even if we can’t explain how it works. This has not happened. (Though see Scott Alexander’s post on such experiments.)

2- It’s true, all of it: Alternatively one might go in the exact opposite direction and credulously accept everything Jacobsen says, or for that matter, all paranormal claims. The “truth is out there” approach which accepts nearly all claims of paranormal phenomena. With a consequent claim that people are just too blinkered, scared, or oppressed for this truth to be widely known

3- Some position between these two extremes: Obviously anyone who’s religious at all (Or spiritual but not religious) falls into this camp. But this also includes anyone who accepts that things like near-death experiences (NDEs) and terminal lucidity appear to have real evidentiary backing. Or maybe you’re really unsettled by the story of Joan of Arc. Or maybe it’s that if you dig a little bit, everyone (even Michael Shermer!) has a seemingly supernatural story.4

As a religious person I definitely fall into this third bucket. And you might imagine that because of that, if I’m on the edge about a particular supernatural claim, I might default to acceptance, to the second approach, but I actually go the opposite way. I default to being a skeptic.

There are a couple of reasons for this. First, on some level I do agree that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. And second, I really believe that all of the various beliefs, claims, and phenomena need to cohere in some fashion. It all needs to fit into a single framework.

Allow me to explain. If one believes in some sort of god (let’s set aside the actual denomination for the moment) where does ESP and PK fit with this belief? Are they divine powers? Are they miracles performed by the righteous? Are they granted by some force opposed to God? Based on the evidence offered up by the book the answer to all of these questions would have to be “no”. To put it a different way, NDEs fit very well with most conceptions of God. ESP as a genetic gift, much less so.

Alternatively, ESP and PK could have a materialist explanation, and Jacobsen seems to offer this up as a serious possibility (the word “quantum” appears 44 times in the book). But she also appears to want to have it both ways. Offering up a grab bag of supernatural stories, many of which would remain outside of the materialist theories she proposes. In order to create a coherent framework you have to draw some kind of a line. You have to take a position between the two extremes of absolute doubt and capacious belief.

This is all to say that when I read a book like this, my first goal is to gather more information, then I want to determine if this information should actually be considered evidence. This involves evaluating whether it’s true or not. If it is true how does it fit together with other things I believe to be true? How does it fit into the framework? Or I guess if I were going to be Bayesian (something I seem to be slipping into more frequently despite my best efforts) how should I update? In this effort, I have obvious biases. I have the obvious biases of my original beliefs, but I also have a bias towards coherence.

With that incredibly long preamble out of the way, let’s consider some of the evidence presented in the book. Of course I can’t fact check everything, but I’ve selected four items, that hopefully represent a cross section of the kinds of phenomena and incidents represented in the book:

First, let’s start with a broad overview of the case for the existence of ESP and PK. Jacobsen and others will often point to the positive reports and the ongoing funding of paranormal research, though in a different form. The Pentagon still has a large “sensemaking” initiative which is focused on training intuitive decision making. But one of the most concrete artifacts to emerge from the period discussed in the book is a comprehensive, 183 page, after-action report conducted by the American Institutes for Research in 1995. It was something of an adversarial collaboration with one of the lead researchers being sympathetic and the other one, Ray Hyman (a founding member of the skeptics’ organization CSICOP) being skeptical. Despite this Hyman had this to say:

I have played the devil’s advocate in this report. I have argued that the case for the existence of anomalous cognition is still shaky, at best. On the other hand, I want to state that I believe that the SAIC experiments as well as the contemporary ganzfeld experiments display methodological and statistical sophistication well above previous parapsychological research. Despite better controls and careful use of statistical inference, the investigators seem to be getting significant results that do not appear to derive from the more obvious flaws of previous research. I have argued that this does not justify concluding that anomalous cognition has been demonstrated. However, it does suggest that it might be worthwhile to allocate some resources toward seeing whether these findings can be independently replicated.

To an extent this is damning with faint praise, but the phrase “getting significant results that do not appear to derive from the more obvious flaws of previous research” is stronger than I would have expected.

Second, we should look at one of the purported successes of the CIA’s ESP programs. My attention was drawn to the story Jacobsen told of a downed Russian bomber:

[Graff] was told that the Tu-22 bomber was being flown by a member of the Libyan air force… Wanting to defect, the pilot chose to bail out of the aircraft while it was in flight. The plane continued to fly on autopilot until it ran out of fuel and crashed in the jungle somewhere in Zaire… but U.S. officials had no leads as to where the bomber may have gone down…

[A “sensitive”, Rosemary Smith] was brought to the briefing room and asked to look at the map. Could she home in on a spot where she perceived the aircraft might have gone down? Using an impromptu map dowsing technique, “She marked a spot,” remembers Graff. “Map technicians converted her notation into a geographical coordinate, then sent that coordinate to the CIA station chief in Zaire.”

…Graff headed home feeling excited and apprehensive. He sensed that the future of an Air Force phenomena program hung in the balance.

​​Two and a half days later, there was a knock on Graff’s door. “We found the airplane,” he was told. The CIA’s helicopter team landed in the village nearest to the coordinates provided by Rosemary Smith. The briefer told Graff that shortly after touching down, the team spotted a villager emerging from the jungle with an airplane part under her arm. This person led the search team back to the airplane. “The unit was able to extract valuable foreign technology” from the Tu-22 Blinder, says Graff, making the Zaire mission an unprecedented success.

You would think this would be a slam dunk. Heck, former President Carter even mentions it happening! Jacobsen reports that:

Years later, in September 1995, Jimmy Carter publicly confirmed the incident as having taken place. He was impressed, Carter told a group of college students in Atlanta, that after spy satellites failed to locate the wreckage of a downed airplane, a psychic had pinpointed the location of the missing aircraft.

I tried to find some record of this September 1995 confirmation. It appears to refer to an article from Reuters, which I was unable to locate. However, I did find him talking about it in 2005 in GQ Magazine.

We had a plane go down in the Central African Republic—a twinengine plane, small plane. And we couldn’t find it. And so we oriented satellites that were going around the earth every ninety minutes to fly over that spot where we thought it might be and take photographs. We couldn’t find it. So the director of the CIA came and told me that he had contacted a woman in California that claimed to have supernatural capabilities. And she went in a trance, and she wrote down latitudes and longitudes, and we sent our satellite over that latitude and longitude, and there was the plane.

Interestingly most of the details are different from what Jacobsen describes in the book. Carter mentions the “Central African Republic” (not Zaire, though apparently it was Zaire in the Reuters piece) and the fact that it was one of our planes, a “small” “twinengine” plane, not a Russian bomber.

It is still interesting that he was talking about it, and perhaps he was trying to maintain some kind of cover story. But you would hope that if Jacobsen really is trying to be objective she would mention that Carter later gave out details very different from her version of the story.

Third, let’s consider an example taken at random.5 This occurred in the mid-1970s at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory:

Yet it was not the results of the tests that were most troublesome, says Green, it was the strange effect Geller seemed to have on several of the nuclear physicists…

After the second day of tests, AEC security officer Ron Robertson called Kit Green at CIA headquarters. “He told me there was a serious problem,” recalls Green. Several of the nuclear weapons engineers had reported seeing things they could not rationally explain. These included “items flying across the room. Lights flashing. A six-inch ball of light, rolling down the hallway. One scientist reported seeing a flying orb,” remembers Green. “One of the scientists claimed to have seen a large raven, perched on a piece of furniture inside [his] home.” Privately, Green thought these sounded “like poltergeist events” from folklore. The AEC was concerned, and so was the CIA.

Green flew to San Francisco and met with the scientists individually… One of the scientists confided in Green about a particular incident he could not get out of his mind. It happened in his bedroom, in the middle of the night. It made no rational sense, except he woke up his wife and she saw it too, Green recalls. “He told me that he saw a disincarnate arm, rotating like a hologram,” meaning an arm that was free-floating, not attached to a body. “An arm wrapped in some kind of gray cloth… instead of a hand the arm had a hook. He talked about the [horror] of seeing this hook floating over the foot of his bed. How it rotated like it was on a spit.

I like this example because it takes us to the framework problem. There are a lot of stories about Geller in the book. (And I mean a lot!) And wherever Geller goes there is a lot of spoon bending, but this is the only case where poltergeists show up to haunt people during the night after Geller visits them. So if you’re attempting to create a grand explanation for ESP and PK, how do poltergeists fit in? And why was it only this one time?

Beyond my fascination with creating some kind of framework that exists outside of pure skepticism and pure belief, what about the fact-check? All of the really sensational stuff comes from Green’s recollection. There’s no independent confirmation of any of the claims. This is a story Green has been telling for a while and eventually he tells it to Jacobsen. A “Ron Robertson” is mentioned, and you can find evidence of him talking about why the government is interested in psychic phenomena, but no one ever tried to get him to corroborate the poltergeist stories. And despite the “interest” of the “CIA”, there are no official documents which mention the raven, or the flying orb or the “disincarnate arm”. All of that derives from a single source: Green’s recollections long afterwards.

Finally, there’s Uri Geller. If Uri Geller is really a powerful psychic, then this all gets a lot more interesting. If, on the other hand, he’s one of the world’s most successful frauds, then I wouldn’t say this book is gutted, but it has suffered a major wound. Jacobsen uncritically reports all kinds of stories, this may be my favorite:

“My wife, Sara, and I were at a restaurant in Caesarea. We were having lunch with Uri. Everyone came in and they wanted to see Uri… to have him bend their spoon. He said, ‘I can’t do it right now, I can’t bend all these spoons.’ He is very gracious, you know, but they kept [asking].… Finally he said, ‘Oh, all right.’ So he stood at one corner of the restaurant and he simultaneously bent the spoons of all the people who were there.”

If he can really do that, on command, then why couldn’t he bend a single spoon on Carson. Why hasn’t he done it in a controlled setting and put to rest all doubt?

Obviously I can’t fact check that one, but there are a few that I can fact check. This review is already way longer than I planned, so I’ll just do one more. Geller spent some time with SRI, and here’s how Jacobsen reports it:

Between December 1, 1972, and January 15, 1973, Puthoff and Targ completed nine days of official tests with Uri Geller. The experiments were recorded on film, videotape, and audiotape simultaneously. According to the scientists, Geller’s tests with dice were among the most statistically significant. In these tests, he sat sequestered in a room with Puthoff and Targ while an SRI researcher in a separate room placed a single square die inside a closed metal box. The sealed box was brought into Geller’s room, then shaken by a technician, and placed on the table in front of Geller. “Mr. Geller would then look at the box without touching it and call out which die face he believed was uppermost,” states the declassified CIA Progress Report. “Geller gave the correct answer each of the 8 times the experiment was performed. The probability that this could have occurred by chance alone is approximately one in a million,” the scientists informed the CIA.

This seems pretty incredible, but it turns out that the experiment was not as closely controlled as they claimed. There’s a whole article examining all the peculiarities, but among the most startling is this:

In the fall of 1981, almost ten years after the die test, Puthoff finally revealed an astonishing fact. No film or videotape was ever made of any of Uri’s eight successful guesses!

Also the die tests were spread out over a couple of days, conducted at various locations, slipped in at the end of his time, and often involved Geller touching the box with the die. Once you understand all this, it seems far less impressive.

To be clear I’m not discounting everything Jacobsen claims. She includes the story of a near death experience. I think NDEs are supernatural and have a lot of genuine evidence around them. Also, as I mentioned in the first example, the government ESP programs produced some genuinely interesting data.6 But I think Jacobsen was far too credulous, and above all else I’m entirely convinced that Uri Geller is a fraud.

—--------------------------------------------------------

I started this review thinking, this will be a quick one I can whip out in a day or two. Mostly because I knew exactly what I wanted to say. I overlooked how much I wanted to say. And I still ended up leaving a lot of the juicy Geller stuff. Perhaps I’ll read one of the many books specifically about him. If that sounds interesting let me know. Leave a like or subscribe or an insult and I’ll catch you next time.

1. Black Easter by: James Blish

2. The Day After Judgment by: James Blish

3. Into the Storm by: Larry Correia

4. A Prisoner’s Cinema by: Justin Lee

In between some travel, and just being a lazy slug, I’ve fallen behind on my reviews. So it seemed like a good time to conduct an experiment. One of these four reviews is written entirely by an AI. (Though I did chop some bits, AI’s are verbose!) See if you can figure out which one, and bonus points if you can identify the actual AI. I was curious how well it would do and whether it would be easy to detect. But don’t worry this isn’t the first step towards turning things over entirely to AI. I like to (am driven to?) write too much to let it go.

Black Easter

By: James Blish

Published: 1968

176 Pages

Briefly, what is this book about?

A wealthy arms dealer, Baines, teams up with a black magician, Ware, to release all the demons of Hell. Hilarity ensues.

Okay, hilarity definitely does not ensue—what ensues is the release of forty-eight demons of Hell, for a single night of chaos. As you might imagine, it turns out very poorly. Father Domenico, a white magician and Catholic monk, knows it’s going to be bad. He tries to get them to call it off. (Relationships between the two camps rely on a non-interference pact, but are otherwise quite professional.) Predictably, Father Domenico is unsuccessful, which leads to one of the most chilling endings of any book I’ve ever read.

Who should read this book?

This book was written in 1968. They did things differently back then. It’s short, there’s a lot of talking and engineering. (Magic is treated as just another highly skilled profession.) Also there’s very little action until the very end, and even that is mostly “off screen”. Also, Blish doesn’t make anything up. All of the codexes are real books, and all the demonic names are historical. The Christianity is not a useful ingredient, it’s the whole dish. If all of that doesn’t put you off, I think you’ll like this book.

Specific thoughts: Man, that ending…

I’m not going to spoil the ending, but I’m going to get close. Domenico’s worry is that by releasing that many demons Ware and Baines are going to usher in Armageddon. Ware is worried about that as well. (Baines not so much, he just wants to watch the world burn.) But Ware is convinced that he has the situation under control and in any case, the Antichrist is a necessary precondition and he has not yet made an appearance, so Armageddon can’t arrive yet. As you might have guessed he’s wrong, but the reason he’s wrong is the really chilling bit. That’s the bit that made me immediately proceed to the sequel…

The Day After Judgment

By: James Blish

Published: 1971

120 Pages

Briefly, what is this book about?

The aftermath of Armageddon, and the fates of Ware, Baines, Domenico, and indeed of the world itself. Also an examination of the duality of good and evil.

Who should read this book?

If you’ve read and enjoyed Black Easter I would definitely read the sequel. It would be nearly impossible to completely fulfill on the promise made by the ending of the previous book, but this book does as well as anyone could expect in our fallen world. Speaking of which…

Specific thoughts: How fallen is our world?

I will somewhat (say 25%) spoil the ending of this book that’s as old as I am. The demons come to Earth, only to find that humanity is more wicked than they are. In part this is metaphysical. We choose our evil, while the demons are evil out of something akin to a structural compulsion.

The avatar of humanity’s evil is not Ware, the black magician, it’s Baines the arms dealer. And he’s evil because he decides to burn down the world, just to see what it would look like. There is an artistic element to Baines’ obsession, but I think that’s already part of the subtext of “wanting to watch the world burn”.

I’m not sure how common people like Baines are, either then or now. But if we were to generalize Blish’s point, I think it boils down to, you had this amazing reason, this science, and you used it to develop nuclear weapons. And then (in the book) you used them to level the world.

If that was our great crime I wonder what Blish would think about the end of the Cold War 20 years later? (He died in 1975.) Or the fact that we never have used nukes? On the other hand what would he think about Ukraine, and Iran, and the potential war with China? What would he think about culture war issues? Or larger demographic trends like, falling birth rates and polarization? Where would AI fit into things? Would it be in a similar bucket to nukes or an even greater evil?

I find the idea that demons view humanity’s evil as a step beyond their own to be fascinating, and also not entirely without merit.

Into the Storm

By: Larry Correia

Published: 2013

285 Pages

Briefly, what is this book about?

Sir Hugh Madigan, a disgraced Cygnaran knight with a talent for violence, is given command of a platoon of misfits and criminals just in time for a war nobody is prepared for. His second in command is Cleasby, an idealistic young scholar who joined the army because he read too many books about chivalry. The story follows their platoon, “the Malcontents,” through the invasion of the Menite holy city of Sul. Also there are giant steam-powered robots. It’s set in the Iron Kingdoms, the world of the Warmachine tabletop game. Imagine a fantasy setting where someone gave all the knights and wizards access to a steampunk industrial revolution, complete with lightning swords and walking tanks powered by magic brains in jars.

Who should read this book?

This is a tie-in novel for a tabletop game, and that’s working against it. If you bounce off names like “Hierarch Voyle” and “Knights Exemplar” and “Menoth’s Fury” you’re going to have a rough time. But if you’ve already read Grimnoir, Monster Hunter International, and Saga of the Forgotten Warrior and you want more Correia, this will scratch the itch. Just calibrate your expectations accordingly.

Specific thoughts: Correia’s dirty dozen

The template is The Dirty Dozen and Correia knows it. He doesn’t try to reinvent the wheel, he just makes it spin really fast.

Madigan is the best thing in the book — extremely competent, morally grey, carrying a specific wound that gives him more depth than Owen Pitt in the early Monster Hunter books. Cleasby is the heart, going from useless bookworm to competent soldier without losing his idealism. There’s a nice irony in the fact that he joined the army because of romanticized stories about knights, got assigned to the least knightly knight in the kingdom, and ended up writing exactly that kind of story himself — except this time it’s real, and real is uglier than the books ever let on.

The middle bogs down in urban combat that doesn’t have the energy of the opening (Madigan fighting bandits undercover in a tavern) or the climax. But the last fifty pages are legitimately great. Not Correia’s best work, but fun, fast, and occasionally more than that.

A Prisoner’s Cinema

By: Justin Lee

Published: 2025

264 Pages

Briefly, what is this book about?

A collection of spiritually dark short stories with disturbing themes. I’m not generally one to give content warnings, but this goes to some very grim places. Particularly the title story.

Who should read this book?

If the phrase “modern, Christian-inflected, Lovecraft” speaks to you, you’ll probably enjoy this book. The writing is top-notch. The themes are interesting. Though he seems to have trouble sticking the landing.

Specific thoughts:

I’m not one for flowery, purple reviews, but it might be that this collection deserves exactly that sort of review. I did dig up a review by one Stephen Pimentel that went that way. I’ll include the opening paragraph:

Justin Lee’s A Prisoner’s Cinema is a collection of literary horror that declines to soothe. Instead, it uses the genre’s conventions not as a blunt instrument for shock but as a scalpel to dissect the most tormented regions of the human psyche. Here, consciousness itself is the haunted house, a subjective prison from which there is no escape. The stories collectively form a sustained philosophical inquiry into the nature of evil, the instability of the self, and the search for meaning in a world haunted by internal demons and the specter of a sometimes silent God. This is spiritual horror, born from the unlit abysses of memory, guilt, and faith.

Perhaps a book like this deserves a review like that, but when you’re reviewing every book you read (quixotic, I know) summoning that kind of grandiloquence is prohibitive. This all sounds pejorative towards both the review and the book, but it isn’t meant to be. I think Pimentel does nail the core of the book, and I think Lee is a fantastic writer.

The prose in this book is great, and I enjoyed every bit of the writing, though as I said Lee seemed to have trouble crafting a satisfying ending. And oftentimes when you’re talking about the short story form, the ending is 80% of what people remember. It’s a testament to Lee’s writing that I found it to be a memorable book despite some weak endings.

Of course this is just my opinion, you may think the endings were perfect. But I suspect you’ll find some of the endings to be underwhelming, like the ending you’re experiencing right now.

—-----------------------------------------------------------

Are you ready for the answer? The AI-written review was Into the Storm. I don’t feel like it was very hard to guess, but I obviously have an advantage over someone coming in cold. I did try to make it as hard as possible. I figure if anything would be easy for an AI to copy, it would be me reviewing a Larry Correia book. For more, very limited, AI experimentation and Correia reviews, consider subscribing.

Unshrunk: A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance

By: Laura Delano

Published: 2025

352 Pages

Briefly, what is this book about?

An autobiographical tale of Delano’s experience with the mental health industry starting at the age of thirteen. Among other things, it covers her bipolar diagnosis, eating disorders, cutting, and one, nearly successful, suicide attempt. On the treatment side of the ledger she took at least a dozen drugs, engaged in constant therapy, and was committed to psychiatric hospitals and treatment programs on several occasions. In the end she decided that most of her problems stemmed from the substances she was taking, both those that are recognized as harmful, like cocaine and alcohol, and those that were supposed to help her. A major theme of the book is that the horrible withdrawal symptoms that accompany most psychiatric drugs go a long way towards creating the impression that “the drugs are helping”.

Woven through all of this, Delano provides significant research illustrating the bad incentives, and shoddy testing engaged in by the pharmaceutical industry, along with critiques of the DSM, the paradigm of mental illness as a chemical imbalance, and reliance on drugs as a first line of treatment.

What authorial biases should I be aware of?

Delano includes some extensive research. This is not merely an n=1 anecdote, there are clearly a significant number of people who are taking too many psychiatric drugs, and don’t have the skills to taper off those drugs. Also Delano is explicitly not “antimedication” or “antipsychiatry”. Nevertheless, it is clear that she is not a neutral observer, that she is profoundly distrustful of the pharmaceutical industry, and that she came by this distrust honestly, even if it doesn’t necessarily apply to everyone.

It should also be mentioned that money was never a problem for Delano, which probably meant both that she received too much care, but also that she had a large support network available during every phase of her journey.

Who should read this book?

The debate over how to care for the mentally ill is both fascinating and fraught. It sits at a convoluted nexus that includes healthcare availability, cost, worries over youth, violence, homelessness, anti- and pro- drug narratives, and a weird tangle of culture war issues. Navigating this mess is going to take as much information as we can get and this is a great book describing one of the many angles available for approaching it.

As a more specific matter I would recommend it to psychologists and psychiatrists as something of a counter-narrative/steelman for those who are wary of medications and interventions.

Finally, for those seeking to taper or get off of medication, this book is essential reading, and the idea of hyperbolic tapering may be the single most important bit of knowledge it contains.

If you want a taste of things, I read this as part of the Blocked and Reported book club, and they had an interview with Delano which was quite good.

What does the book have to say about the future?

When new tools are developed it’s tempting to overuse them. You’re on the frontier of science, which is always interesting, plus there’s the hope that the new tool will finally be the thing that fixes the old intractable problem, and finally, while first order effects manifest immediately, second order effects take a lot longer to show up. All of this means that our knowledge is constantly outrunning our wisdom. It’s not clear how to dial it back. Delano mentions a lot of worrying trends, things like the continued increase in antidepressant prescriptions for children, the removal of the bereavement exclusion from the DSM, greater pathologization of childhood restlessness, while at the same time adolescent depression continues to increase, all of which sits in a toxic alchemy with screentime and bad technology incentives.

On the other hand she does see signs of more caution with medication, and better science around how medications work, which medications beat out placebos, and a move away from medication as the first response.

Mostly what I see is a very difficult path to tread, with numerous hazards. Which takes us to…

Specific thoughts: Mental health treatment is crazy complicated

You probably heard about the murder of Iryna Zarutska by Decarlos Brown Jr. on a train in North Carolina. You’ve probably seen the edited version of the video, but if you look hard enough you can see the full video. I would not recommend it. I watched it and it haunts me to this day. The look of terror and helplessness in her eyes after she’s been stabbed, when she knows she’s dying, but in the few seconds before she actually dies… It’s tragic on a scale that we don’t often see outside of actual war.

Brown’s own mother was desperately trying to get him involuntarily committed to a psychiatric hospital, but her efforts proved entirely fruitless. And a judge had released him just months before the attack, despite his history of mental health crises and recent arrests, on nothing more than a written promise to appear. This is one end of the mental health spectrum, desperately ill people who do tragic but preventable things.

On the other end of the spectrum we could probably place Leonard Roy Frank, who was involuntarily committed by his parents after he quit his job, grew a beard and decided to become a vegetarian. Over the seven months he was committed he was subjected to 35 electroshock treatments and 50 insulin comas. We might also offer up the numerous lobotomies performed in the late 40s, early 50s as a similar example of egregious abuse.

Hopefully everyone agrees that, particularly knowing what we do now, Brown should have been committed and Frank should not have been. But in between these two cases making decisions is not straightforward, and a lot depends on someone’s pre-existing biases. Note the judge that decided that Brown should be on the street.

Delano is making the claim that she was on the Frank side of things. That she received treatment she didn’t need for something that was alarming, but not abnormal: that is, adolescent angst and existential dread. And most of all that once she was on the medication treadmill it was really hard to get off of it. All of this is obvious in retrospect, but decisions have to be made prospectively, and that’s tough. And perhaps more importantly, each decision involves a subtle and difficult mix of factors, because each decision involves an individual.

So I think it’s clear that Delano was over-medicated. And I think it’s clear that Brown should have been committed. And I would even go so far as to say that over-medication is a problem, but also that we should be involuntarily committing more people than we are. (Particularly people whose relatives are begging for them to be committed.) But how does this translate into policy? How does this translate into advocacy? Both of these end up being very blunt instruments. I see people advocating “no involuntary commitment” or “no psychiatric medication” on the one hand. And on the other hand I see people arguing that the “deinstitutionalization of the 1960s was a disaster” or that “drugs will eventually fix the problem, and if they don’t we just haven’t found the right drug” (or we need to engage in more extreme measures like electroshock therapy).

It would be nice if we just figure out the single thing we’re doing wrong, fix it and then enjoy our newfound utopia, but that’s not how it works. To put it in terms of the book. I largely agree with Delano, and I think we do have a problem with overusing medication, and being unaware of many of the side effects and particularly withdrawal symptoms. But I’m not sure what to do with this information. Delano says she’s not antimedication, but what does that translate to in terms of whether a given individual should take Prozac? Or at the other extreme, the decision to commit someone lest they murder a girl whose final look of terror will haunt me for the rest of my life?

—---------------------------------------------------

In between the Iryna Zarutska video and the Charlie Kirk videos it feels like we’ve hit a whole new era of awful scenes, and that’s without factoring in AI. I promise you will not see such videos here, and I was a little wary about the description at the beginning of the piece, but it felt important to demonstrate what the stakes are. For more high stakes writing consider subscribing.

1. The Obstacle Is the Way Expanded 10th Anniversary Edition: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumph by: Ryan Holiday

2. The Enchiridion & Discourses by: Epictetus

3. The Lives of the Caesars by: Suetonius

The Obstacle Is the Way Expanded 10th Anniversary Edition: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumph

By: Ryan Holiday

Published: 2024

224 Pages

Briefly, what is this book about?

A modern distillation of ancient Stoic principles, leavened with recent and historical examples of people overcoming difficulties, and delivered in the style of a motivational speech.

It’s broken into three sections:

Perception: view problems dispassionately. Look for hidden advantages.

Action: do something. Ideally something deliberate and creative. Be persistent.

Will: cultivate the resilience and humility necessary to accept things outside of your control.

What authorial biases should I be aware of?

Holiday is very pro-Stoic, and that’s probably a good thing in this day and age. But this is a book of anecdotes, not data.

Who should read this book?

This book benefits from being short, which widens the number of people I’d expect to benefit from it. It doesn’t take long to read, and I think almost everyone could benefit from a little Stoicism in their life. This is not a bad place to start—though I think I’ve decided that I prefer the OG Stoics. (See below for my review of Epictetus.)

Specific thoughts: The first book I’ve read and reviewed twice

I believe this is the first book I’ve reviewed for a second time. It’s not like I never re-read books, but generally I wait at least a decade for them to fade properly. (I used to re-read the Lord of the Rings every summer, but that was when I was a teenager, many, many, many years ago.) A business group I belong to decided to read this book and since it was short I went ahead.

You can go back and read my first review. I think my big impression is that I’ve gotten better at reviewing books. (One would hope so!) Though I did make an interesting point that most of the principles of Stoicism could be found in self-help books like The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. Stoicism wasn’t so much forgotten, before the Holiday-led renaissance, as absorbed.

In any case, you can see that the timing was fortuitous. It plugged right into a couple of other books I just happened to be reading. As I already mentioned, I’ve come to prefer the original Stoic texts. Let me try to illustrate why. Consider these two passages (picked somewhat at random):1

First Holiday:

The way life is gives you plenty to work with, plenty to leave your imprint on. Taking people and events as they are is quite enough material already. Follow where the events take you, like water rolling down a hill—it always gets to the bottom eventually, doesn’t it?

Because (a) you’re robust and resilient enough to handle whatever occurs, (b) you can’t do anything about it anyway, and (c) you’re looking at a big-enough picture and long-enough time line that whatever you have to accept is still only a negligible blip on the way to your goal.

Now Epictetus:

What do we admire? External things. What are we anxious about? External things. And yet we are at a loss to know how fears or anxiety assail us! What else can possibly happen when we count impending events as evil? We cannot be free from fear, we cannot be free from anxiety. Yet we say, ‘O Lord God, how am I to be rid of anxiety?’ Fool, have you no hands? Did not God make them for you? Sit still and pray forsooth, that your [snot] may not flow. Nay, wipe your nose rather and do not accuse God.

What moral do I draw? Has not God given you anything in the sphere of conduct? Has He not given you endurance, has He not given you greatness of mind, has He not given you manliness? When you have these strong hands to help you, do you still seek for one to wipe your [snot] away?2

The point of all this is that if I were going to read a book twice, I should have been reading Epictetus, or Marcus Aurelius, not Holiday. But speaking of Epictetus…

The Enchiridion & Discourses

By: Epictetus

Translated by: Thomas W. Higginson

Published: circa 125

416 Pages

Briefly, what is this book about?

Technically, this was all transmitted by Arrian, one of Epictetus’ students. The Enchiridion was his attempt to distill everything down, while the Discourses were just that, a record of Epictetus’ actual lectures.

Differences in formation and composition aside, the collection is attempting to do much the same thing Holiday is trying to do, that is offer advice for living well and overcoming challenges and hardships (of which there were a lot more back then).

What authorial biases should I be aware of?

Epictetus was born into slavery. He was disabled. (It was said that his master deliberately broke his leg during torture.) Later he was banished from Rome. (Banishment was a much bigger deal then than now.) So he doesn’t have time for your petty problems, your small anxieties. He’s mapping out a system for dealing with serious stuff. As such he has a real “The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away attitude” (though obviously he’s not Christian). For example:

Never say about anything, I have lost it, but say I have restored it. Is your child dead? It has been restored. Is your wife dead? She has been restored. Has your estate been taken from you? Has not then this also been restored? But he who has taken it from me is a bad man. But what is it to you, by whose hands the giver demanded it back? So long as he may allow you, take care of it as a thing which belongs to another, as travellers do with their inn.

This is Stoicism at its most hardcore.

Who should read this book?

The Enchiridion is short enough that really everyone should read it. The Project Gutenberg copy came in at a little over 8000 words. There are blog posts that are longer than that. I’ve never done one that long, but they’re out there. And even if you’re talking about my posts that would only be three or four of them.

Then if you like The Enchiridion you can go on to read the discourses. Which aren’t quite as pithy, but also quite good.

Specific thoughts: I was surprised by how Christian things felt.

Part of the way in which Epictetus is more hardcore is his insistence that everything that happens is what was supposed to happen, and you shouldn’t merely endure it, you should embrace it. Consider this quote:

Remember that thou art an actor in a play, of such a kind as the teacher (author) may choose; if short, of a short one; if long, of a long one: if he wishes you to act the part of a poor man, see that you act the part naturally; if the part of a lame man, of a magistrate, of a private person, (do the same). For this is your duty, to act well the part that is given to you; but to select the part, belongs to another.

Now I understand this isn’t straight down the line Christianity. But it’s certainly similar, and it’s also, as I keep pointing out, far more hardcore than the modern flavor of stoicism. And miles away from anything resembling social justice ideology. Of course what’s weird is that many people think that social justice ideology is rooted in Christianity. And they have a point, but clearly Christianity contains both threads, and the one adjacent to Stoicism has largely been abandoned. Or as Dostoevsky put it, we should be “worthy of our suffering”. If nothing else, that’s a lesson worth taking away from both Epictetus and Holiday.

The Lives of the Caesars

By: Suetonius

Translated by: Tom Holland

Published: circa 121

431 Pages

Briefly, what is this book about?

The lives, loves, acts, attitudes, debaucheries and deaths of the first twelve Roman emperors (including Julius though he technically wasn’t an emperor). It was written around the same time as Epictetus, but this is the “lack thereof” portion of the post.

What authorial biases should I be aware of?

Suetonius is more interested in what we would call the private lives of the Caesars, though privacy had little meaning back then and could be viewed as trying to hide something. Like when Tiberius retreated to the island of Capri. He does have primary sources to draw on, but he passes along a lot of gossip as well.

Who should read this book?

There’s a lot of stuff about Rome out there. I’m particularly familiar with a couple of podcasts, specifically Mike Duncan’s History of Rome and Dan Carlin’s Death Throes of the Republic arc on his Hardcore History podcast. I’m not sure if I would recommend reading this and then listening to the podcasts or, vice versa. I did the podcasts first and it was enlightening to then read one of the primary sources for much of what ended up in them. But, as a general matter, I think Roman History is fascinating enough that you should definitely have some familiarity with it. I suppose the podcasts are an easier way to get a broad view, but I quite enjoyed this book as well. And the Tom Holland translation left all of the sauciness in!

What does the book have to say about the future?

Obviously one of the chief attractions of studying Rome is its transition from a republic to an autocracy. I don’t know if that’s where we’re headed, but it’s certainly one possibility, and I think it’s interesting to know how it happened before.

Specific thoughts: The past is a different country

Suetonius covers twelve different emperors and frequently the book is just called The Twelve Caesars. Some of these emperors were better than others, but the feeling you get from Suetonius is that even the good ones had significant flaws, and the bad ones come across as being comically wicked. Caligula’s reputation is more than earned. And even Augustus, the best of the bunch, gouged out someone’s eyes with his thumbs (according to Suetonius).

This book ends up being pretty salacious from a modern perspective. Even if all the things Clinton and Trump have been accused of by their enemies turned out to be true, they would be considered better than average rulers when set against the excesses of the Twelve Caesars. It’s obviously somewhat strange to see this contrast between the strict morals offered up by Epictetus and the debauchery described by Suetonius. How do we reconcile it?

My sense is that the crimes of the emperors were recognizably Roman, though, particularly in Nero and Caligula’s case, turned up to 11. The Roman sexual mores were different than ours. Adultery was definitely a crime, but within a much more narrow band. Caligula still went way, way beyond what was acceptable, but the distance wasn’t as great as it would have been under modern standards.

On the violence side, there had just been so much violence going back for decades all through the fall of the Republic that, when Augustus had to gouge someone’s eyes out early on, it was part of a whole tapestry of violence. He then did a lot to calm things down, while also clearly demonstrating that the legions were going to be the decisive factor. Later during the year of the four emperors (all four of those emperors being included in this book) the role of the legions became crystal clear.

All of which is to say that the extreme stoicism of Epictetus wasn’t separate from these people and events, it was in response to them. How does one live in a world of chaos disorder and crazy emperors? By being exceptionally stoic…

—-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

In one of Caligula’s more insane moments he connects a bunch of ships together to form a path. He then covers the path with dirt and proceeds to travel back and forth on it for a couple of days, each time taking on a different role. Sometimes writing on Substack feels like a similar parade of self-importance, though less likely to be expressed in Latin. If you want some non-Latin self-importance, consider subscribing.

There’s a concept within statecraft known as grand strategy. The “grand” strategy means paying attention to every avenue of conflict, not just the military sphere, but also the diplomatic, the logistical, and the domestic, and everywhere else advantage might be gained or lost. It encompasses soft power, irregular actions, public opinion, etc. But at the same time, it also encompasses prioritization and focus, because, while it’s important to consider every avenue, resources are always limited and need to be spent wisely.

A great example of grand strategy done right is the US in WWII. We supported the Soviets, we developed nukes, we invaded Europe, we came together as a nation, and most of all, we buried the Axis with our industrial capacity.

For an example of grand strategy done poorly consider Vietnam. Our battlefield tactics were great. But at the strategic level we comprehensively failed in almost every domain. There was vast domestic opposition, political goals were unclear, we failed to contain the conflict geographically, and never really understood the resolve of the Vietnamese people.

You might think that the point of grand strategy, if well executed, would be winning. I disagree, I think the point of grand strategy is not losing. (There’s probably an essay to be written about how this applies to Iran, but I think we have enough hot takes on that subject at the moment.) Grand strategy asks you to pay attention to all potential avenues by which disaster may arrive. Disaster in Vietnam did not arrive through the front door, it came from many unexpected directions, but an unexpected disaster is still a disaster, and generally worse than disasters which have been foreseen.

As one considers the various aspects of grand strategy, what would it mean to have a personal grand strategy? And how would that be different from just living a “good life”? As a bridge between these two ideas, consider the life of Napoleon. Something Robert Greene does at great length in his book:

The 33 Strategies of War

By: Robert Greene

Published: 2006

496 Pages

Briefly, what is this book about?

An overview of 33 different strategies with broad utility in both literal and figurative war. Each strategy gets its own chapter which includes things like: Do not fight the last war, segment your forces, create a threatening presence, expose and attack your opponent’s soft flank, sow uncertainty and panic through acts of terror. The thing I love the most about this book are the stories Greene includes to illustrate the various strategies, and the many fantastic quotes he sprinkles in the margins.

What authorial biases should I be aware of?

It’s difficult to get a read on Greene, is he a modern Machiavelli, recommending that you wage continual war in every aspect of your life? Or does he offer up these ideas in sort of a “break in case of emergency” fashion?

Who should read this book?

I really like this book. I think I’m mostly attracted to the great stories of men pulling off amazing feats of strategic brilliance in the face of overwhelming odds. But I also think that, while I would never recommend going full Machiavellian, most people could be more strategic about how they run their life. Certainly I could.

Specific thoughts: So anyway, you were saying? Something about Napoleon?

Back to Napoleon and the idea of personal grand strategy. Greene loves Napoleon, and, without actually counting, I would say that at least half of his chapters bring in some story about Napoleon. (Maybe it’s not quite half but it’s definitely a lot.) In the beginning these stories are all about his surpassing genius, and the surprising strategies he employed to win at Austerlitz and Jena. But as you get closer to the end of the book Greene includes Napoleon’s disastrous invasion of Russia, and, more interestingly because I wasn’t familiar with it previously, Napoleon being socially outmaneuvered by Metternich.

When I first read this book over a decade ago, this contrast really struck me, the idea that Napoleon could be so cunning in one area, but so naive in another. At the time I was fighting something that felt like a war (it was near the end of my time in the company that would eventually sue me) and the book really spoke to me. But I think the idea of “losing” because of a blindspot is the thing that really stuck with me. You might even say it haunted me.1

Of course I was not engaged in a giant war with other great nations. I was just a guy trying to figure out life. As I said, it wasn’t too long after reading this book that I was sued, and I think this book helped. I did win the lawsuit.2 But mostly what this book did was leave me with high level questions. I didn’t find myself “attacking my opponents soft flank” but I did end up being very interested in what a grand strategy of life might look like. What were my objectives? What were the potential blindspots? How could I make sure I didn’t lose?

These are all interesting questions, but for most people they’re also fairly personal as well. Despite this personal nature I think that these days most people are failing in the same way that Napoleon was. They’ve put an enormous amount of focus on being really good in one or two domains and they end up being brought down in areas they dismissed. They spend a lot of time making sure they have a great career. Or, in a similar vein they really focus on being “fulfilled” or “happy” thinking that life is all about maximizing hedonic output. In either case they end up never getting married and having kids.3 And when the end of their life comes, that career they spent so much time on, or all the time they spent on themselves ends up feeling pretty hollow.

There’s a saying from David O. McKay, one of the LDS prophets, that speaks to this particular failure mode: “No other success can compensate for failure in the home.” Of course McKay was assuming that there was some kind of home, that people were married with kids, and then spending too much time at the office, or something like that, but these days a lot of people don’t even get that far.

This probably all sounds like the typical moralizing of a conservative religious guy, so let me pivot to a completely different example to illustrate what I mean. Perhaps the best known, fictional account of Buddhism in the west is Siddhartha by Herman Hesse. In the book Siddhartha achieves enlightenment. He does the thing that so many people are searching for and yet he can’t figure out how to be a good son or a good father. I realize it’s fictional, but how many people do something very similar? How many people claim to be paragons of enlightenment, but can’t manage to stay married or get married?4

You may think I’m placing too much emphasis on marriage, but this takes me to my last point. In addition to having a personal grand strategy it’s even more important that we have some kind of national, or even civilizational grand strategy. Perhaps we do, but if so it’s failing in the same way Napoleon failed. We have enormous material wealth, luxuries that were undreamed of for 99.99% of human history. And yet despite these great victories, we’re failing in the one area that matters most, we’re not having enough kids. What does it matter if Napoleon wins on the battle fields of Austria, but gets out maneuvered in the court of Austria? What does it matter if the U.S. wins the AI race in the next decade, but collapses demographically in the next century?

As usual other people have said all of this better than me, so to end I’ll turn to one of them. In this case C.S. Lewis:

To be happy at home, said Johnson, is the end of all human endeavour. As long as we are thinking only of natural values we must say that the sun looks down on nothing half so good as a household laughing together over a meal, or two friends talking over a pint of beer, or a man alone reading a book that interests him; and that all economics, politics, laws, armies, and institutions, save in so far as they prolong and multiply such scenes, are a mere ploughing the sand and sowing the ocean, a meaningless vanity and vexation of spirit.

—--------------------------------------------------------

As I prepare to, once again, do the bare minimum of self-promotion I wonder where such an endeavor rests in the universe of personal grand strategy. There certainly seems to be a lot of it these days, but I’m not sure how effective any given instance of it is. Self-promotion feels like something with high variance. Some people achieve quite a bit of success with it, while other people are so interested in success at any cost that they hitch their “self” to angry mobs and partisan prostitution.

Perhaps this is another area where it’s more important to not fail than to dramatically succeed. At least that’s how I excuse my own pathetic efforts on this front.

Speaking of pathetic efforts, be sure to subscribe! And like the post I guess…

Oh, and also any thoughts on this kind of essay/kind of book review format?

I recently finished (and reviewed) The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William Shirer. I expected the book to give me insight into our current situation. And certainly there are some parallels between Germany in the 1920s and America in the 2020s, but as a general matter it was less helpful than I thought.

America in its 250th year is very different from the Weimar Republic in its first decade. Weimar was untested, messy, tenuous, and fatally undermined by the terms of Versailles. The same cannot be said for the U.S. Institutions are a lot stronger, norms are more entrenched. Rules are strongly enforced. If something is going to happen here, it’s unlikely to happen through an outright rejection of the rules. It’s far more likely to happen by finding the weaknesses of those rules and exploiting them. The failure of Weimar was an early stage failure. Should the U.S. fail it will be a late-stage failure. In this way it reminds me of the fall of the Roman Republic, but also flopping in soccer.

Let’s start with soccer.

I. Soccer

Flopping, for those unfamiliar with the term, refers to the practice of players exaggerating (or, less commonly, fabricating) contact with another player in an attempt to induce an official to award a foul or penalty, or issue a yellow or red card. I like to start here because it illustrates the various elements of my concerns in a fashion that’s easy to understand. If you imagine soccer in its platonic form (where it is obviously referred to as football) it involves players winning through skill and athleticism. Should fouls exist in the platonic form they would be accidental, caused by an excess of enthusiasm. The platonic player, should they commit a foul, would admit the excess and acknowledge the appropriateness of the penalty assessed.

Of course this is not the world we live in. We would like soccer players to be incentivized by the purity of the game, but instead they’re incentivized to win, and if there is a way to win outside of skill and athleticism they’ll take it. Getting a penalty kick can easily mean the difference between losing and tying, or tying and winning. Accordingly there is a lot of incentive to do whatever it takes to be granted one should the opportunity arise.

This is where finding the weaknesses in the rules and exploiting them comes into play. And this is where we see the key elements of the meta-competition. Ideally the enforcement of the rule would perfectly reflect the intent of the rule, but it can’t, and this opens up a gap which can be exploited. The referee is fallible; they can only call what they see in the moment. They don’t have all the angles, and they especially can’t see into the mind of the players. This opens an opportunity for a player to gain an advantage by manipulating the referee’s perception rather than gaining an advantage by being better at the game as it was intended to be played. They’re playing the game at a higher, but also worse level. This is the meta-game.

I’m discussing “late stage failure”, as such it might be good to discuss the stages which preceded this one. It would be useful if I could say that flopping is exclusively a recent phenomenon, but that’s not entirely true, what is true is that the flopping arms race is relatively recent. Flopping has been around for a long time, but the meta-competition around flopping is more recent. If one were to select a starting point, a moment when the problem of flopping erupted into the public consciousness, a moment when people realized something had to be done, you could do a lot worse than selecting Jürgen Klinsmann’s theatricality in the 1990 World Cup Final, which ended with a red card for the Argentinian defender.

Klinsmann’s dive! Italy World Cup 1990

At first people tried to use morality, purity, and even shame to stop flopping. “This is not how the game should be played. Players who flop are less admirable than those that don’t. Flopping is wrong and players shouldn’t do it.” It’s hard to say how well this worked. I’d be surprised if it had no effect, but it also obviously didn’t stop it. Then in The International Football Association Board Laws for the 1998/1999 season we see the first explicit rule against flopping (or as the rules call it “simulation”). By the mid-2000s it was apparent that this rule wasn’t having much of an impact. Flopping drew the occasional yellow card, but didn’t materially affect the actual rate of flopping. Many officials and administrators argued that they would need to introduce the possibility of post-match penalties. Still there was a lot of resistance about post-match video review.

In 2011 a paper was published which analyzed flopping from the perspective of incentives. It wasn’t just bad sportsmanship, players were flopping more when the stakes were higher. I know this is a useful perspective, but it also lets players off too easily. Most people behave badly because of various incentives, but bad behavior is still bad. So perhaps it’s unsurprising that it was also in 2011 that leagues started seriously considering post-match penalties and disciplinary reviews. But the problem continued and by 2018 Video Assistant Referee (VAR) was introduced at the World Cup. To be clear VAR wasn’t just about flopping, it was a way of getting clarity on multiple important moments in a soccer game. Specifically VAR was triggered to determine:

1. Goal / no goal

2. Penalty / no penalty

3. Direct red card incidents (not second yellow)

4. Mistaken identity (wrong player shown a card)

Flopping would mostly fall into the second category. Since there are definitely moments where flopping is advantageous but doesn’t fall into these four buckets it still happens, and even when it does, players have developed new strategies. They will drag a leg or fling out an arm so that contact did take place, and it shows up on the video review. Determining whether any contact happened is easier than determining how severe that contact was, leading to yet another level of gamesmanship between players trying to draw a foul and referees trying to keep the game fair.

II. Defining Meta-competition

Soccer is not the only sport where this sort of meta-competition takes place. Freddie deBoer recently had a piece about tanking in the NBA in order to improve draft prospects. Clock management is also a big thing in the NFL (as in don’t score a touchdown too soon). The AIs have also informed me that there are similar discussions around Mankading in cricket, and strategic grid penalties in F1. But I think we’ve covered the sports side of things well enough. It’s time to distill out some principles for what meta-competition looks like.

First there’s weaponizing the arbiter. The parties engaged in meta-competition don’t defeat their opponents, they trick, or maneuver the referee into a position where he will do it for them. Can the flopper draw an undeserved penalty and change the course of the game.

Second there’s the perversion of the rules. Rules that are designed to promote fair play are used in an unfair manner. Rules designed to prevent injury are used instead to turn fake injuries into real points.

Third there’s the death of the “spirit” of the game, and an embrace of pure, mechanical optimization. What can we do to win, regardless of whether it has anything to do with the game as envisioned (by its inventors, fans, etc.)

Finally there’s the arms race that develops in the meta-competitive space. Video is implemented to give referees better visibility, and to combat this players throw their arms out or drag their feet in an attempt to make the image more confusing and to make sure contact can be viewed even if it might be inconsequential.

As I said above, we can’t pinpoint the first flop. It’s been around for a while. But soccer took its modern form in 1863, and even if we imagine that flopping was recognized as a problem for a while before Klinsmann’s theatrical flop, we’re still probably looking at more than a century where meta-competition was not really a concern. One could speculate on why the change happened, but it seems to be a natural progression that comes from the accumulation of minor defections until eventually the defections become so large that they break out into a different level of competition.

III. Example from the Roman Republic

While the subject of flopping in soccer is interesting, it’s when we expand this idea into the domain of politics that things become truly consequential. One of my big worries when it comes to the continued survival of the U.S. is that we have drifted more and more into the arena of meta-competition. Why is this worrisome? Soccer seems to be getting along just fine despite the struggles over flopping. Why would meta-competition be so dangerous for our polity?

To answer this question, I’d like to take you back to what many historians believe was the beginning of the end for the Roman Republic. The year was 133 BC and the office of Tribune of the Plebs was held by Tiberius Gracchus. Gracchus wanted to pass a land reform bill to give public land to poor citizens. The usual suspects opposed it (wealthy citizens, many of whom were in the Roman Senate) and they convinced the other Tribune, Marcus Octavius, to veto Tiberius’ bill.

In response to this, Tiberius used his own veto to shut down the entire state. He locked the public treasury and promised to veto all business no matter the subject until his bill was passed.

You may have to squint a little bit, but you can see all of the elements listed in the previous section.

1. Weaponization of the veto

2. Perversion of the point of the veto (it was never meant to shut down the entire government)

3. The spirit of how the Roman government was supposed to work was forever perverted by this fight.

4. It was part of an arms race. Gracchus’ veto was extreme, but Octavius’ original veto was also a perversion of how the veto power of the Tribune was supposed to work. It was supposed to be a tool to protect the weak from the powerful and Octavius used it in exactly the opposite fashion, on behalf of the rich senate.

Connecting all this to the actual end of the republic: Tiberius was assassinated shortly after these events, and later his brother suffered basically the same fate. These acts opened the door into violence, and soon there were private armies and open warfare. This culminated in a fight between two ambitious generals: Marius and Sulla. Sulla ended up triumphing in that war. Having triumphed, he attempted to put things back together by making what had previously been unwritten norms into unbreakable laws. Among other changes, the veto power of the Tribunes was neutered, to prevent a repeat of what the Gracchi brothers had done. Sulla believed that he had fixed the problem, and closed all the exploits, but by using military force (the ultimate meta-competition) he had actually provided dramatic lessons to the next generation of “players” (i.e. Julius Caesar, Pompey, etc.) that the rules don’t matter if you have the most swords.

IV. What’s happening now?

You may already be thinking of ways in which the U.S. has descended into meta-competition, but it’s still probably worth spelling it out. The most obvious example is the role the Supreme Court has come to play in all major decisions, and the dramatic power of being in a position to select the justices. Let’s once again review the criteria:

1. Weaponizing the arbiter: The Supreme Court has been weaponized. The list of big decisions they’ve made reads like a who’s who of the biggest issues of our time: abortion, student loan forgiveness, campaign finance, Chevron deference, affirmative action, same-sex marriage, etc. A similar list for Congress contains statutes not one American in a hundred could give you the details of: the American Rescue Plan, CHIPS, the Inflation Reduction Act. To the extent that Congress does make the news it’s through precisely the meta-competition I’ve been talking about: government shutdowns over the budget, the filibuster, the fights over Merrick Garland, and Brett Kavanaugh.

2. Perversion of the rules: I am sympathetic to the idea that judicial rulemaking is downstream of a broken legislative process (namely, the near-impossibility of passing constitutional amendments). Nevertheless, relying on the courts to functionally draft legislation or ‘discover’ new rights within the Constitution is a perversion of the system’s original intent.

3. Death of the “spirit” of the “game”: The rulemaking system has clearly been perverted from the original intent of the founders. They imagined that the legislature would be the most powerful branch, that it would pass laws that reflected the will and wisdom of the people—this was how good governance would be achieved. Instead governance is largely the province of the executive and the legislature is a performative stage.

4. Arms race: This one is perhaps most obvious of all, as Supreme Court appointments become more and more powerful. Leading to the situation we have now where the biggest reason to vote for a presidential candidate comes down to whether you think they’ll appoint justices you agree with.

While the Supreme Court is the most obvious example there are others. I won’t spend a lot of time on them. Hopefully you can detect the pattern by now.

Speech: Cancel culture was arguably a meta-competition about speech. Rather than debate an issue people declared it to be so far beyond the pale that it was impermissible to even utter it. They then got various institutions to back them up in this censorship.

NIMBYism: People who didn’t want new construction to take place, for whatever reason, used laws intended for other purposes (zoning reviews, environmental regulations, historical preservation rules) to halt construction, and preserve the exclusivity.

Gerrymandering: Rather than win elections by persuading voters, much of the competition has come down to redrawing the maps in advantageous ways. And then to the extent that there is pushback it once again ends up in the courts.

Science: This is the area that alarms me the most, and something which became apparent only in the last few years when fights over COVID restrictions and youth gender medicine were reduced to a simple command to “trust the science” or an assurance that debate was over because the “science was settled”. This is weaponizing the arbiter at the most fundamental level.

I would say that the arms race is uglier in these areas than it was with soccer. Soccer is simpler, everyone basically knows what the platonic ideal is, and it’s easy to get agreement on what the goal is (pun intended) even if it’s difficult to come up with a perfect system to accomplish that goal. Politics is far messier, and no one seems able or willing to act in ways that might help bring it under control. There have been many different proposals for making Supreme Court nominations more fair. I personally like the proposal where Supreme Court Justices serve 18-year terms, meaning that each president gets to nominate two justices during their four-year term. But so far, proposals like this have gotten nowhere. Perhaps as the crisis deepens people will get more serious about solutions, but solutions require level-headed compromise. If anything the worse the crisis gets the less level-headed and more combative people become.

V. Where do we go from here?

The outlook going forward is not great. I’m not aware of any good examples of meta-competition ending, scaling back, or even pausing once it’s begun. Arguably there are examples of people making the effort to “turn down the temperature” as it were, but paradoxically this is often the place where meta-competition can be seen most clearly.

A useful arc begins with Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland in 2016. Garland was widely viewed as a moderate, and viewed as a compromise pick in deference to the fact that the Republicans controlled the Senate. And yet despite this effort we ended up with one of the clearest examples of meta-competition when the Senate refused to even hold a hearing, because we were already past normal competition (win the presidency, fill supreme court vacancies) into a competition over process (do we have to hold a hearing? Apparently not.) In response to this the Democrats tried to filibuster Gorsuch, the candidate Trump put forward, and in response the Senate eliminated the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees which was easy to do because the Senate had already eliminated it for all lower court appointments by using the “Nuclear Option” in 2013.

It’s pretty easy to craft a narrative of continued escalation, where any attempts at moderation look more like a misunderstanding of the game rather than an actual opportunity to return to the “old way of playing”. And as we saw in our examples, escalation continues, and gets worse, and without some off-ramp (which seems very unlikely) it eventually results in violence. (I could definitely insert something about January 6th in here, but I’m not interested in going down that rabbit hole).

As near as I can tell the only reliable way to end a meta-competition is to reset the competition itself. This requires something big, wars, revolutions, plagues, etc. (In a similar fashion to the criteria for reversing inequality which I mentioned in a recent review of another book on civilizational collapse.) To put it bluntly, the only way out of this spiral may end up being very bloody.

When we consider the example of Rome this is precisely what we see. The Gracchi brothers were stopped through violence, and in Sulla’s estimation, the Republic had been saved. But once violence started it couldn’t be stopped and eventually the Republic perished in a series of bloody civil wars.

Looking at the current situation I don’t know if the “violence has started”, certainly things have yet to get as bad as they were in the late ‘60s/early ‘70s. And we did pull back from the brink then, but I think that for all the violence on the ground, the true meta-competition had yet to begin. (Recall that the Republicans turned on Nixon.) And fortunately, when comparing ourselves to the Romans, there are some huge differences. For one, the U.S. military appears to be far harder to subvert than the legions of Rome. So it may be premature to worry about violence on that level.

In the near term, I expect an election to happen in 2028, I expect it to be fair and I expect a peaceful transition of power. All that said I would be surprised if there wasn’t some drama, some grand pronouncements of injustice, some theatrical display of harm, some politician rolling around on the turf trying to draw a foul…

—--------------------------------------

This year is the World Cup, and it’s being held in North America. Obviously it’s acceptable to cheer for your home country (assuming they qualified) but may I also put in a pitch for the Netherlands. That’s where I served my LDS mission. Dutch soccer has a reputation for being clever, elegant, tactically ambitious, and forever punching above its weight. Much like this blog. (Too much?) So consider supporting the Netherlands and subscribing to this blog. 6

Eugenics and Other Evils

By: G. K. Chesterton

Published: 1922

188 Pages

Briefly, what is this book about?

Once this book entered the public domain, someone (most likely Inkling Books) added a subtitle to their edition: “An Argument Against the Scientifically Organized State”. This is a pretty good description of the book’s thrust, though the book’s major focus is still definitely eugenics.

When the book was written eugenics was a powerful political force, supported by numerous well known individuals. Buck v. Bell, the famous case which approved involuntary sterilization, didn’t arrive until 1927. This is where we get the infamous line from Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. writing for the majority, “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” Though it was only when researching this piece that I discovered that the ruling explicitly invoked the precedent already set around compulsory vaccination.

The full context is:

We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives. It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the State for these lesser sacrifices, often not felt to be such by those concerned, in order to prevent our being swamped with incompetence. It is better for all the world if, instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes. Jacobson v. Massachusetts, 197 U. S. 11. Three generations of imbeciles are enough.

What authorial biases should I be aware of?

You’re probably already aware of Chesterton’s biases, though in addition to being very Catholic, and very traditional, he was also a big supporter of the “little guy”. This comes out a lot in this book since eugenics seems primarily aimed at the “unwashed masses”, not the inbred nobility.

Who should read this book?

I have previously mentioned that I am gradually working through an ebook I picked up many years ago collecting Chesterton’s best-known works. This happened to be next on the list. I wouldn’t recommend it as the first Chesterton you read, or even the fifth, but it gives a great insight into a particular time and place, and puts you in the middle of an argument we consider long settled but which was raging at the time.

What does the book have to say about the future?

I think there’s a lot that could be taken from this book and applied to the current debate over MAID (medical aid in dying). It will be interesting to see if that practice ends up following a similar arc.

Specific thoughts: Chesterton’s surprisingly prescient archetypes

Every time I read a Chesterton book I think “I should probably just mostly quote Chesterton”, but then I decide that’s cheating, so I don’t. This time I’m going to ignore the strange pseudo-puritanism that gives rise to that thought and just go for it. There is one section of the book I was particularly struck by, because it seemed like he was precisely describing our present moment. He was explaining the categories of people one encounters on the pro-eugenics side of the debate. I might call them busy-bodies, bureaucrats, pundits, or even self-described experts. He calls them sects. Here are five of them:

The first sect is the Euphemists. Here’s how he describes them:

Short words startle them, while long words soothe them. And they are utterly incapable of translating the one into the other, however obviously they mean the same thing. Say to them “The persuasive and even coercive powers of the citizen should enable him to make sure that the burden of longevity in the previous generation does not become disproportionate and intolerable, especially to the females”; say this to them and they will sway slightly to and fro like babies sent to sleep in cradles. Say to them “Murder your mother,” and they sit up quite suddenly. Yet the two sentences, in cold logic, are exactly the same.

I don’t want to make this all about present day culture wars, but I think you can probably identify where this is happening in our own time.

The second sect is the Casuists. This is Chesterton’s term for people who engage in Motte and Bailey tactics. These are eugenicists who claim that eugenics is just limited to things like making sure people with severe mental disabilities aren’t allowed to reproduce, but whose actual policy proposals involve requiring government approval of each and every marriage.

The third sect is the Autocrats:

They are those who give us generally to understand that every modern reform will “work” all right, because they will be there to [over]see it…Each man promises to be about a thousand policemen. If you ask them how this or that will work, they will answer, “Oh, I would certainly insist on this”; or “I would never go so far as that”; as if they could return to this earth and do what no ghost has ever done quite successfully—force men to forsake their sins. Of these it is enough to say that they do not understand the nature of a law any more than the nature of a dog. If you let loose a law, it will do as a dog does. It will obey its own nature, not yours.

I feel like I see this a lot. Many new policies have been defended by saying that, “well people would never do that.” Or “we would never allow that.” “You’re worried about nothing.” and then of course it proceeds in exactly that fashion. Referring back to MAID, in 2016 Canadians were assured that MAID would only ever be offered to people whose death could be reasonably foreseen. In 2021, just five years later, that requirement was removed. They were also assured that poor people would never be pushed into it, and yet that’s what happened with “Sophie” who resorted to it when she couldn’t find housing.

The fourth sect he calls the Idealists:

…strange people who seem to think that you can consecrate and purify any campaign for ever by repeating the names of the abstract virtues that its better advocates had in mind. These people will say “So far from aiming at slavery, the Eugenists are seeking true liberty; liberty from disease and degeneracy, etc.” Or they will say “We can assure Mr. Chesterton that the Eugenists have no intention of segregating the harmless; justice and mercy are the very motto of——” etc.

“Abolishing the police can’t possibly result in an increase in violence. The police abolition movement is a nonviolent movement entirely dedicated to reducing violence through increased understanding!”

And finally there are the Endeavourers:

The prize specimen of them was another M.P. who defended the same Bill as “an honest attempt” to deal with a great evil: as if one had a right to dragoon and enslave one’s fellow citizens as a kind of chemical experiment; in a state of reverent agnosticism about what would come of it.

I know I’ve heard “Well we have to do something about X!” a lot, and there’s often no regard to whether that something will do anything about the underlying problem, but at least it will be, as Chesterton says, “an honest attempt”.

I understand not everyone shares my fondness for Chesterton. If so, I’ve got bad news for you, because I’m going to include a couple more quotes illustrating Chesterton’s interesting relationship to socialism:

The curious point is that the [letter writer] concludes by saying, “When people have large families and small wages, not only is there a high infantile death-rate, but often those who do live to grow up are stunted and weakened by having had to share the family income for a time with those who died early. There would be less unhappiness if there were no unwanted children.” You will observe that he tacitly takes it for granted that the small wages and the income, desperately shared, are the fixed points, like day and night, the conditions of human life. Compared with them marriage and maternity are luxuries, things to be modified to suit the wage-market. There are unwanted children; but unwanted by whom? This man does not really mean that the parents do not want to have them. He means that the employers do not want to pay them properly.

This is a great example of being economically on the left, but culturally on the right. But Chesterton makes it clear that he’s not a socialist:

It may be said of Socialism, therefore, very briefly, that its friends recommended it as increasing equality, while its foes resisted it as decreasing liberty. On the one hand it was said that the State could provide homes and meals for all; on the other it was answered that this could only be done by State officials who would inspect houses and regulate meals. The compromise eventually made was one of the most interesting and even curious cases in history. It was decided to do everything that had ever been denounced in Socialism, and nothing that had ever been desired in it. Since it was supposed to gain equality at the sacrifice of liberty, we proceeded to prove that it was possible to sacrifice liberty without gaining equality. Indeed, there was not the faintest attempt to gain equality, least of all economic equality. But there was a very spirited and vigorous effort to eliminate liberty, by means of an entirely new crop of crude regulations and interferences. But it was not the Socialist State regulating those whom it fed, like children or even like convicts. It was the Capitalist State raiding those whom it had trampled and deserted in every sort of den, like outlaws or broken men. It occurred to the wiser sociologists that, after all, it would be easy to proceed more promptly to the main business of bullying men, without having gone through the laborious preliminary business of supporting them. After all, it was easy to inspect the house without having helped to build it; it was even possible, with luck, to inspect the house in time to prevent it being built.

Who would have known that Chesterton would turn out to have been the first YIMBY…

—-----------------------------------------------

One final quote:

The Frenchman works until he can play. The American works until he can’t play; and then thanks the devil, his master, that he is donkey enough to die in harness. But the Englishman, as he has since become, works until he can pretend that he never worked at all.

While I would like to be the Frenchman, or even the Englishman, I expect that I am a legitimate American, and I’ll die in harness, i.e. I’ll be writing these reviews till the bitter end. If you’re interested in getting in early on the long downward spiral consider subscribing.

Operation Overflight

By: Francis Gary Powers and Curt Gentry

Published: 1970

384 Pages

Briefly, what is this book about?

An autobiographical account of Powers’ experiences before, during, after and around his U-2 spy plane being shot down over the Soviet Union, including his 21 months of imprisonment in a Soviet prison and his long campaign to rehabilitate his reputation upon his return to the US.

What authorial biases should I be aware of?

There was, and still is, a lot of dispute about what Powers was actually doing when he was shot down, and how he was brought down.1 It’s clear that a big part of this book is Powers trying to establish that he did everything expected of him, and went above and beyond in some cases. I found his narrative believable, but it’s clearly written from a defensive standpoint.

Who should read this book?

Cold War history buffs will enjoy it. Despite it happening a decade before I was even born, it definitely rekindled that Cold War vibe I remember from my youth. Also it’s a pretty interesting story all by itself.

Specific thoughts: An interesting “Prisoner’s Dilemma”

There’s a lot to like about this book. I found Powers to be an interesting and sympathetic narrator. Of particular interest, and evoking much sympathy, is his dilemma over how much to tell the Soviets once he’s been captured. Obviously interrogations are dramatic and tense situations by default, but Powers’ situation has additional peculiarities on top of that.

You might expect interrogation as a soldier or a spy. But soldiers expect different forms of questioning than spies. For one thing there’s no hiding that you’re a soldier, but people are generally only suspected to be spies. Powers is sort of a soldier (he was in the Air Force). He’s sort of a spy (he ultimately works for the CIA). But at the end of the day he’s technically a civilian. So when it comes to the interrogation, certain things are just obvious. He can’t pretend he’s not an American flying a super advanced spy plane over the Soviet Union. They obviously know that. In this respect he’s kind of a soldier. On the other hand there’s definitely things they don’t know and in many other ways he is acting as a spy. He definitely is in possession of some very sensitive information that the Soviets would very much like to have. Finally he has to play at being a civilian who was hired to fly a plane and push some buttons and he doesn’t know what the buttons do.

Beyond the confusion engendered by his place at the center of several different categories, he’s also handicapped in other ways. Initially he doesn’t know how much of his plane survived, and consequently what they know about the equipment and the photos. He doesn’t know how long they have been tracking U-2 flights, what they know about the overall operation, the other pilots, bases, etc. Where he’s really handicapped is he doesn’t know what the US government is going to say about him or his flight. There is no pre-coordinated cover story for him to follow along with. There’s every possibility that official government statements will contradict what he’s telling his questioners.

This last bit illustrates that the confusion over Powers’ role didn’t start with the interrogation. It’s obvious that the CIA itself never really thought through things either. It’s not that they gave zero thought to the possibility of his capture, it’s that they gave only a bare minimum of attention to that potential. As I already said there was no agreed-upon cover story. There was no discussion of what he should or shouldn’t tell them. Powers makes much of the fact that on the one occasion he did bring up being shot down and captured his CIA handler told him “You may as well tell them everything, because they’re going to get it out of you anyway.” But this was an off-hand remark, not part of some official training. He had access to a modified silver dollar which contained a poison-coated needle, but it was entirely up to him whether he took it on any given flight. This put him in a weird gray zone between hardcore spy and person making a packing list.

Understanding the biases inherent in this account, it appears that Powers did the best he could under these circumstances. He tried to be truthful about things that didn’t matter, or which he figured they already knew, and hide things that might put his fellow pilots in danger. He also tried to engage in subtextual communication with the American Government. One of the big ways he attempted to do this was through using the term “maximum altitude” and claiming that the maximum altitude was 68,000 feet. He hoped to do three things with this claim.

1- He hoped that the information would get back to the American Government who knew the actual maximum altitude was higher than that. 68,000 was wrong, but close enough to the truth that it would seem plausible to the Soviets, while also communicating to the people “back home” that he wasn’t telling them everything.2

2- But by saying he was “shot down at maximum altitude” they would also realize that the Soviets could shoot down U-2s at will and the CIA would not conduct any more overflights, thus keeping his fellow pilots safe.

3- But even if they did conduct more overflights he hoped that the Russians would take the 68,000 feet and “use it as a setting for their missiles” and thereby miss.

In the end it’s the classic story of one man trying to navigate an immense and hostile bureaucracy. Powers expected the Soviet bureaucracy to be hostile, but it’s clear that he hadn’t expected to also experience hostility from his American superiors.

Flybot

By: Dennis E. Taylor

Published: 2025

430 Pages

Briefly, what is this book about?

Another Taylor book where a few scrappy nerds get thrust into the middle of world altering events. In this case it’s the emergence of an ASI (artificial superintelligence).

Who should read this book?

If you’ve liked Taylor’s other stuff (Bobiverse, Roadkill, Outland ←Links go to my reviews) then you’ll probably like this. I wouldn’t read this as your first Taylor book. I would start with We Are Legion, the first book of the Bobiverse series.

Specific thoughts: Should we expect the characters to be as smart as the readers?

Taylor’s writing is just as engaging as ever and he seems to have pulled back from some of his more extreme global warming scenarios. (See my previous reviews.) He does have a scene where Seattle is struck by a semi-apocalyptic climate event called Poosday. (it’s pretty much what you’d guess.) ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude all agreed that the most extreme consequences of Poosday couldn’t actually happen, but it was still an improvement over his past “scenarios”.

The thing that bugged me this time around was the behavior of the characters. There were a few elements where I figured out things at the same time the characters did, but there were a couple of elements where I was way ahead of the characters. This is not uncommon. If you know more than the characters you should be ahead of them. Or if you’re guessing things based on genre conventions, it’s also to be expected that you might be ahead of them. (You predict the protagonist is probably going to triumph in the end, for example.)

But none of those excuses applied here. The characters live more or less in the same world that I do, and have the same understanding of what an ASI might do that I have. So when they don’t ask the obvious questions, or when they seem blind to things that would be obvious to me (or anyone who’s thought about ASI) it does pull one out of the novel.

This is kind of a minor complaint, but I do feel like it could have been handled better without making the story unmanageable. And if handled well it could have made a good story into a great one.

Gun Runner

By: Larry Correia and John D. Brown

Published: 2025

430 Pages

Briefly, what is this book about?

Set in a science fiction future, this is a classic tale of scoundrels with a heart of gold, who may seem like bad guys but once you peel away their gruff exterior. Though actually the story is somewhat reversed. You see the heart of gold right from the beginning, but because they are still scoundrels, some of the scoundrelly things they do end up being bad, and they have to undo the damage they’ve caused.

The story mostly revolves around Jackson Rook, a mech pilot whose piloting implants were once subverted forcing him to cause tremendous harm. This has left him haunted and in search of redemption.

Do I have any biases to declare?

My fondness for Correia is well documented in this space. But I also have a connection to Brown, exactly 36 years ago he taught me to speak Dutch in the LDS Missionary Training Center. Also he’s a friend of a friend.3

Who should read this book?

Anyone looking for a good old fashioned military scifi novel with interesting characters and some surprising twists.

Specific thoughts: An interesting assemblage of a lot of tropes

The story takes place 50 years after the development of gate technology, which allows instantaneous interstellar travel. Given that it’s only been 50 years, things are still kind of in a wild west phase, though in total 30 new planets have been colonized. The story follows the crew of the Tar Heel, the eponymous gun runners. They skirt the law to deliver weapons and contraband to those with the money to pay for them. The captain of the Tar Heel, Nicholas Holloway does have a code: he sells to people fighting the inevitable tyranny, not the tyrants themself. (As this is a Correia novel, there’s a lot of subtext about the righteousness of everyone having the guns necessary for their own defense.)

The body of the novel takes place around the planet of Swindle, a world of horrible extremes. One of those extremes is the presence of gigantic dangerous fauna. Obviously protecting oneself from these “kaiju” requires weapons which the Tar Heel is happy to supply. Unfortunately they’ve been misled by Warlord, the leader of Swindle. While there are dangerous megafauna he’s mostly using the weapons to wipe out and dispossess the original settlers and then steal their claims.

Part of the reason things are so tense is that Swindle is the best source of CX, an organic component critical for gate operation. The three major players of the galaxy (who are kind of just gestured at) currently reside in an uneasy detente. If any of them tried to claim Swindle, it would provoke war with the other two.

Pull all of this together and you have elements of Dune, Godzilla, mech-based anime, Return of the Jedi (rebels on the forest planet), Firefly, and a cyberpunk angle (through one of the secondary characters). It would be easy to screw up a book with this many elements, but I thought they did a great job of integrating them all together. They also set things up for a sequel which I will eagerly read as well.

—----------------------------------------------------------

These reviews went long enough that I considered splitting them up. Maybe I should have, but I’m getting conflicting feedback from my readership. The more I publish the more engagement I get, at least at the level of metrics, but my most vocal readers seem to prefer that reviews have a certain weight, and that otherwise I should combine them. Maybe I should conduct a survey. Or maybe I should just post my writing in whatever way I feel like. I’m leaning towards the latter but like everyone on this platform I secretly crave subscribers. Which is why I’m always telling people to do just that, though in unnecessarily convoluted ways.

The HeartMath Solution: The Institute of HeartMath’s Revolutionary Program for Engaging the Power of the Heart’s Intelligence

By: Doc Childre, Howard Martin, and Donna Beech

Published: 1999

304 Pages (But somehow this translates to only 2 hours 45 minutes on audio…)

Briefly, what is this book about?

The idea that the heart contains a separate brain, and true emotional health comes from aligning the heart’s brain and its “intelligence”, with the actual brain. Basically it’s mindfulness, meditation, and cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) wrapped in pseudoscience.

What authorial biases should I be aware of?

These guys are definitely trying to sell you on the HeartMath program. Also many of the studies they cite were conducted by their institute.

Who should read this book?

No one, unless perhaps for its (completely unintentional) value as a work of humor.

Specific thoughts: You had me at “quantum nutrients”

I enjoy most books I read. However critical I may come across in my reviews, it’s very rare that I actively dislike a book. Of the 1396 books I’ve rated on Goodreads, there’s only one book I’ve ever rated as one star. (See my review of that trainwreck here.) This book will be the second.

Though, and maybe you’ve experienced this yourself, hate-reading a book can be enjoyable. And I did enjoy it in that sense. But on every measure other than the “so good it’s bad” this book is awful.

Given that, you’re obviously wondering how on earth I came to read it. What could have possessed me? Well, one of my friends recommended it. He called it a “must read”. In his defense he’s on a religious journey. He’s what you might call a seeker, and I’ve learned that seekers go where they will, and often end up in strange places. I’m optimistic that he’ll eventually arrive at a good destination, but for now he’s in the “recommending pseudo-spiritual, bad science books” phase of his journey.1 One tries to exercise grace in these moments and given that the audiobook was only 2 hours and 45 minutes it wasn’t a huge cost. As such I told him I would read it, but I also cautioned him that I might savage it. Even going into it with that attitude it was worse than I expected.

The Good

I believe that meditation, mindfulness, and particularly CBT do have positive benefits. And when you strip away the babble, and the bad science, and their “nonlocal multidimensional domain that operates under holographic principles” that’s basically what they’re recommending people do. Further I can imagine that the pseudo-scientific, faux-spiritually wrapping might convince people to adopt these practices when they might otherwise not. Finally, these elements of flavor might, in a placebo-like fashion, actually make the core techniques work better.

Nevertheless, there are plenty of great books, programs, and other venues for picking up on mindfulness, meditation, and CBT. This one ends up feeling pretty thin on actual advice when you strip away all the so-called science. It describes only three different methods, and none of them are particularly innovative. This means that the other venues generally have the advantage of being more comprehensive, tying into a larger community with greater practical backing, and most of all not cloaking things in new age bullshit (excuse my french…)

The Bad

It would be one thing if the book made no scientific claims. If it kept things in the realm of the spiritual and supernatural then it might just be another religion, or cult, or mystic society depending on how charitable one wanted to be. But they assert that all of their claims have strong evidentiary backing.

Well there’s evidence and there’s evidence. The most common form of evidence supplied by the book consists of various anecdotes. Not only are anecdotes a pretty weak form of evidence, but because their claims are so ephemeral it’s not even clear that the anecdotes are evidence of their specific claims. For example, if someone has a bad feeling about going into business with their cousin and then that business fails this is not necessarily evidence that:

[T]he heart has its own independent nervous system—a complex system referred to as “the brain in the heart”…[which] send[s] messages back to the brain that the brain not only under[stands] but obey[s].

In fact it is unlikely to act as evidence for something so specific. And without some form of control (does every bad feeling connect to disaster?) it’s really not evidence of anything.

To be fair they do cite some studies. However, all of the studies suffer from at least one of these three problems, and most suffer from all of them:

1. The studies were conducted by the Institute of HeartMath, so there’s a strong suspicion of bias.

2. They’re precisely the kind of studies which end up failing to replicate if anyone else tries to conduct them.

3. The studies are then horribly misused (similar to the example above).

This is really the great crime of the book: the gigantic tower of mystic ramblings built on this very rickety base.

The Ugly

The pseudo-science bugged me. But on some level I tried to accept their stated premise, to run with it as it were. Early on they mention that when someone has a heart transplant that the bundle of nerves connecting the heart and the brain cannot be reconnected. There is no method for splicing nerves back together. I made a note about how these transplant patients would be an excellent source of data for their thesis. Do they behave any differently? Do they have a weaker intuition? Do they get into bad business deals with cousins more often? There’s some evidence that the body regrows the connections over time, can you chart a drop in intuition immediately after the transplant and then a gradual upswing later?

But this would be actual science, and actual science is tough. Meanwhile declaring that heartfelt emotions are “quantum nutrients”, or proposing:

…models that connect electromagnetic theory with an inherently nonlinear, nonlocal multidimensional domain that operates under holographic principles. These models, although not yet proven, help explain how the heart’s field could extend for miles and possibly across the world.

Or declaring that

Appreciation alone is a powerful coherence frequency. Appreciation actually amplifies coherence and aligns us with our true selves. It connects us with the planetary heart and our deeper purpose. By actualizing heart qualities in our lives—appreciation, care, compassion, and love—we help propel the coherence momentum in the consciousness field of the planet.

We foresee the coherence momentum eventually reaching critical mass and creating a millennium of peace and prosperity based on new intelligence. Humanity will eventually make the polarity shift from incoherence to coherence. This will allow people everywhere to more easily perceive and act in ways that are individually and collectively balanced and caring.

Is easy, lazy, and ultimately hilariously crazy.

—------------------------------------------------

The most annoying thing about the HeartMath book is that it contained no actual math. I admit that my blog contains less math than it should, but I have never waxed rhapsodic about coherence momentum with the planetary heart and declared it to be calculus, or even arithmetic. If you appreciate this very narrow quality of my writing, consider subscribing. I could mention additional positive qualities, but I don’t want to recklessly spend all my quantum nutrients.

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany

By: William L. Shirer

Published: 1960

1250 Pages

Briefly, what is this book about?

A comprehensive history of Nazi Germany, from Hitler’s birth to the Nuremberg trials. Written by someone who was there for a great deal of the most important period.

What authorial biases should I be aware of?

Shirer is a journalist, not a historian, but he did have access to the German state and party archives, plus some diaries, etc. that were captured at the end of the war. Plus he witnessed the rise of Hitler in the 30’s. I love passages like this:

No wonder that Hitler was in a confident mood when the Nazi Party Congress assembled in Nuremberg on September 4 [1934]. I watched him on the morning of the next day stride like a conquering emperor down the center aisle of the great flag-bedecked Luitpold Hall while the band blared forth “The Badenweiler March” and thirty thousand hands were raised in the Nazi salute.

Who should read this book?

It’s clear that this isn’t the most accurate book about this subject. Scholarship is always advancing and this was written more than 60 years ago. But it may be the most readable book on the subject. It flows very well. 1250 pages fly by. (Or rather the minutes fly by, I listened to it, but with a physical copy for reference and anchoring.) If you’re at all interested in this period I think you’ll really enjoy this book.

What does the book have to say about the future?

I think a lot of people are trying to draw comparisons between the rise of Hitler and the Trump phenomenon. Other people see echoes of fascism in the ubiquity of woke-ism. I don’t think history is going to repeat. And I’m not even sure it’s going to rhyme this time around. People are still too aware of the dangers of populist demagoguery for someone to come to power in the same way Hitler did. Which is not to say there’s nothing to be gleaned from this book, but I suspect that by the time things start lining up, in some bizarre fashion, it will be too late.

Specific thoughts: Pivot points

I enjoyed this book a lot. It really dug in deep to the time period and Shirer had numerous interesting observations. The element I found the most interesting were the many pivot points he identified. Points where a different decision could have made a huge difference in how history progressed. Many of these decisions, had they been made differently, had the potential to avoid the war entirely, or at least make it far shorter. A few would have been beneficial to Germany, and extended the war. Though it seems unlikely that any of these changes would have been enough to give Germany eventual victory, if we assume that the US would have still eventually entered the war.

In any case I’d like to cover seven of these pivot points. If I had more time I could easily do double that many. Most of them will be covered briefly, but I’ll spend a little more time on the first point, the one I found the most remarkable, and the last one, the one Shirer feels was the most militarily consequential. I know it would be more convenient if these were in chronological order. They’re not, but I will put the timeframe in parentheses.

Pivot Point One (Summer 1939): I had long thought that the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact involved the two dictatorships cynically arranging a non-aggression pact, which also involved secretly splitting up Eastern Europe. It was that, but for some reason, in my head, “cynicism” translated into a two party process that took place without much pressure. I had not realized that the Russian negotiations were critical for all the parties, and it was the last major hurdle before WW II could begin. As such everyone was courting Russia, and Britain and France just turned out to be really blasé about it.

Whereas the Nazis pulled out all the stops with their negotiations, sending high-level officials, and making numerous concessions to the Soviets, the British and French did the exact opposite. They sent low-ranking officials on a “slow boat”. The British diplomat didn’t even have the necessary credentials, and had been specifically instructed to “go very slowly with the conversations.” Now understand that this was at the beginning of August, and it was pretty clear that Hitler was going to invade Poland, though not if he thought he’d have to deal with the Russians. But the British and French, rather than doing everything they could to get the Russians on their side, seemed rather to be doing everything possible to sabotage their own efforts.

Pivot Point Two (January 1933): Hindenburg appoints Hitler as Chancellor. I don’t want to draw too many parallels here between then and now, but one of the reasons Hindenburg and von Papen appointed Hitler was they wanted to “own the left” as we might say today. Had they not done that, it’s entirely possible that the Nazi’s would have been revealed as a spent force. They were nearly bankrupt and losing votes.

Pivot Point Three (September 1938): The Munich Agreement, betrayal of Czechoslovakia and the surrender of the Sudetenland. I feel like I’ve come across some stuff recently that tried to rehabilitate Chamberlain. And I understand that it’s hard for us to understand the aversion to war people must have had in the decades after WWI. So I want to be somewhat charitable to Chamberlain, but when you read about Chamberlain’s negotiating strategy—how it starts from the premise of “what can we give Hitler” and from there proceeds from weakness to weakness—it really does come across as a colossal mistake.

Pivot Point Four (September 1938): The “Halder Putsch” Plot. What Chamberlain couldn’t have known—Shirer stresses this—was that elements of the German military were preparing to seize Hitler the moment he issued the final order to attack Czechoslovakia. Chamberlain removed the need to attack Czechoslovakia, and granted Hitler quite a bit of prestige on top of that.

Pivot Point Five (July 1944): Operation Valkyrie, and the attempted assassination of Hitler. Obviously by 1944 the war was basically over, and it’s not clear how much would have actually changed, but two things stand out with this incident. First Hitler’s enormous good luck: the briefcase with the bomb was moved, the building was changed, the second bomb wasn’t used, etc. And second how much actual planning the conspirators had done. I had just kind of assumed that the plan was:

1- Assassinate Hitler

2- ????

3- Germany is saved

But the conspiracy involved seizing key points in Berlin, open channels with the allies, a force of conspirators who would take over in France, and much more. It was a well planned, but unfortunately unsuccessful coup. These days, to the extent that such things still happen they mostly seem very amateurish. I mean what exactly was supposed to happen on January 6th, even if they had managed to seize Pence? Alternatively if Trump had been assassinated you just get crazy civil unrest and Vance as president…

Pivot Point Six (March 1936): Remilitarization of the Rhineland. This is definitely a big one, and one of the best places you can point to for stopping things early. And once again you can point to the weariness that still lingered from WWI, but France really missed an opportunity here. And it wasn’t just that this was the best spot to have pushed back on Hitler, it’s the enormous prestige Hitler acquired when he successfully pulled it off. Over and over again Shirer makes it clear that there were significant elements opposed to Hitler in Germany, but the prestige he was granted by the future allies made it very difficult to act against him.

Pivot Point Seven (Spring 1941): The delay in the Balkans. Shirer seems to think that this was the most consequential military pivot point. Hitler ended up in the Balkans because he had to bail out Mussolini in the Balkans. This was bad enough (and illustrates what a bad ally the Italians were) but then there was a coup in Belgrade, which pissed off Hitler so much that he delayed Barbarossa in order to teach a lesson to the Yugoslavs. As Shirer puts it:

This postponement of the attack on Russia in order that the Nazi warlord might vent his personal spite against a small Balkan country which had dared to defy him was probably the most catastrophic single decision in Hitler’s career. It is hardly too much to say that by making it that March afternoon in the Chancellery in Berlin during a moment of convulsive rage he tossed away his last golden opportunity to win the war and to make of the Third Reich, which he had created with such stunning if barbarous genius, the greatest empire in German history and himself the master of Europe. Field Marshal von Brauchitsch, the Commander in Chief of the German Army, and General Halder, the gifted Chief of the General Staff, were to recall it with deep bitterness but also with more understanding of its consequences than they showed at the moment of its making, when later the deep snow and subzero temperatures of Russia hit them three or four weeks short of what they thought they needed for final victory. For ever afterward they and their fellow generals would blame that hasty, ill-advised decision of a vain and infuriated man for all the disasters that ensued.

As you might gather from the quote, this decision delayed the invasion of Russia by around five weeks. And the difference between ending up in the suburbs of Moscow in Early December vs. Late October is gigantic.

To these points I could add:

• The Enabling Act

• Basically everything von Papen did.

• British and French diplomatic spinelessness preceding the Austrian Anschluss.

• The halt order outside of Dunkirk.

• Switching target prioritization during the Battle of Britain

• “No retreat!” orders from Hitler

• Excluding the Soviets from Munich

Set aside for the moment how you feel about Trump and his presidency (good or bad) and try to identify similar pivot points in his ascendency. I’m not seeing anywhere near as many. Is this because we’re still too close to things? Were governmental actions just more volatile back then? Or was it the world itself that was more volatile? Regardless, I hope that when our own pivot point arrives and the fate of the world hangs on a single decision, that we are blessed to make the right one.

—----------------------------------------------------

I find it easier to see parallels between our own day and the end of the Roman Republic than between our own day and the rise of Nazi Germany. I’m not sure what that means. Perhaps it’s because the first is genuinely more similar? Perhaps it’s something like the narcissism of small differences? Perhaps it’s because I’m too soft on Trump? Or perhaps I just need to read more books. I’m going to go with the last one, and if you’re interested in reviews of those books consider subscribing.

Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society

By: Eric A. Posner and Eric Glen Weyl

Published: 2019

384 Pages

Briefly, what is this book about?

A series of radical proposals for restructuring property, voting, immigration, investing, and employment. All of the proposals seek to solve the problem of “monopolized or missing markets” in ways that seem pretty strange. One has to wonder if there’s a good reason those markets didn’t exist in the first place.

What authorial biases should I be aware of?

Posner has his finger in all sorts of things, and has defended everything from post-9/11 government surveillance to increasing foreign aid. I guess the throughline is a belief in technocratic solutions?

Weyl is an economist working for Microsoft who helped popularize the idea of quadratic voting, and had a political awakening while reading Ayn Rand. This feels more like his book than Posner’s but perhaps I’m imagining that.

Who should read this book?

I read this as part of an ACX/SSC book club. Most of the people didn’t like it. They felt that it was too radical. (Though you can’t say we weren’t warned, it’s right there in the title.) But if you want to see what mechanisms Georgist economists come up with when they’re completely unrestrained, this might be the book for you.

What does the book have to say about the future?

Hayek is famous for noting that the big advantage of markets is that they are giant distributed systems for discovering prices and allocating resources effectively. They’re obviously not perfect, and socialists have long dreamt of having a centrally planned economy that would be fairer and work better. Posner and Weyl imagine a future where computing power and machine learning could take over some of the work currently being done by markets, and thereby improve the outcomes.

Specific thoughts: “Six impossible things before breakfast”

Each chapter of this book details a different idea for creating a market where there isn’t one or breaking up a hidden monopoly, and while I wouldn’t say they’re impossible, they’re all radical enough that they might as well be.

Consider, for example, chapter one, which introduces the COST (common ownership self-assessed tax) proposal. Here they propose that everything anyone owns must be assigned a price by the person owning it. Then, each year, they are taxed a proportion of that price. The obvious solution would be to set the price very low, right? Well only if you want to lose the item, because the price you set is The Price. Anyone who wants to can buy the item for the price you’ve set and there’s nothing you can do about it.

You may have heard of this system with respect to property, but Posner and Weyl eventually want to apply it to everything: your child’s bike, Grandma’s china, each of my thousands of books. All must be priced and taxed. Just the overhead of such a system would be ridiculous, and then you can imagine the outcry that would occur if some grandma lost her house because she had forgotten to reprice it in the midst of a real estate boom. And it’s not merely her house that might be bought out from under her, under their ideal endpoint, someone could purchase everything but the house. Let’s have the estate sale early!

To be fair, Posner and Weyl do offer some modifications which might help prevent such calamities. For certain things—heirlooms, photographs, mementos, etc.—the tax rate would be very low. Meaning that you could make the value so high that no one would want to buy them without affecting your tax bill very much. This still requires you to be aware of anything that’s truly valuable. And one also wonders if the tax is going to be so low, why not exempt certain things from the tax? Obviously this exemption could be abused, but so could the low tax rate.

Another aspect of their system is that you can bundle things. So rather than make me individually set a price on every single book. Presumably I could bundle them all together and set a price for the whole collection. It still seems like a pain, and something you’d have to constantly update.

Should such a system be put in place you could imagine all sorts of secondary institutions springing up. One imagines that pricing guides would become far more common. And there might even be some way of insuring your items. But it’s also possible that the system would quickly reach some weird equilibrium. What’s the limit to bundling? Could a municipality decide to bundle everything in its borders? At that point you would either need to buy the entire municipality for the bundled price or you would have to offer someone within the borders enough money to unbundle their property and sell it to you. In this fashion you would end up being pretty much back to the situation we have now. In any case they did earn the title “Radical”.

One of the people in the book club summed it up thusly:

What if we created a panopticon for private property ownership such that you would live in constant anxiety of having someone outbid you for anything you owned?

I don’t intend to spend as much time on the other chapters, but I will give a brief overview.

Chapter two is the quadratic voting chapter. This system is designed to capture the intensity of preference, rather than just its presence. Everyone would be given a certain number of voting credits. To cast one vote for a candidate or issue would cost one credit, but casting two votes would cost four credits. Three votes would be nine and so forth. Another interesting idea, but given the difficulty people have just understanding ranked choice voting, I’m not sure how easy this would be to implement. And my initial instinct is that it would make polarization even worse.

Chapter three is their solution for the immigration problem. Every immigrant would have to have some kind of sponsor, and they imagine this could go all the way down to the level of the individual. This ends up amounting to a modern version of indentured servitude. It’s not the worst idea in the book, nor the most impractical, but it’s still sufficiently impractical that I can’t imagine any circumstances where it would be implemented.

Chapter four asserts that large investment groups represent hidden monopolies because they end up controlling large chunks of companies in the same industry. This gives them the opportunity to subtly collude in ways that increase the company’s profits but harm consumers. They suggest a rule whereby you have to choose either 1) not vote your shares (so pure passive index funds are okay) 2) keep your percentage below a certain threshold, like 1% or 3%) only invest in one company within a given industry (so you could invest in Coke or PepsiCo but not both).

I can certainly imagine that institutional investors have grown to the point that they can influence companies and markets in ways we haven’t previously encountered. In other words, people in finance are always looking for an angle and I wouldn’t be surprised at all if they had found a new one. So I have some sympathy for this position, but I think at a minimum I’d like to hear more than one person making this argument in order to start taking it seriously.

Chapter five discusses creating a market for data. Obviously arguments around the monetization of personal data by giant social media corporations have been going on for a very long time, and lots of people think that people should get paid for their data. The problem is that the value of any individual’s data is tiny. Despite this book being written in 2019 Posner and Weyl are very savvy about AI, and the way it will need to be trained. They imagine that AIs will have a voracious appetite for training data, and that while old school data won’t be worth very much that training data for AI will actually be valuable enough that it might be a way of mitigating the unemployment brought on by AIs. Still it’s clear that any individual’s data is not particularly valuable, especially if a company already has 10,000 examples. To combat that they imagine data unions whereby people collectively bargain with AIs. Sure this is interesting, but as I said at the beginning, it’s also pretty fringe and strange as well.

Finally they imagine all the new markets that might be opened up by AI and LLMs. A sixth impossible idea to tackle after they’ve successfully implemented COST, passed quadratic voting, reintroduced indentured servitude, broken up institutional investors, and established UBI through data unions. Needless to say I’m not holding my breath.

—--------------------------------------------

I’m never sure what to make of books like this. I mean what’s step one here? Hope that the future AI overlords happen to be particularly convinced by your arguments? I mean that might work until the AI reads this review where I totally EVISCERATE Posner and Weyl.

When you consider how critical I have been of so many books, perhaps that’s my greatest service to the future. I’ll leave the eventual AI overlords so uncertain about the correctness of any path that they won’t have time to Skynet us. Do your part to fight extinction by subscribing.

I. Obsessing about AI and AI obsession

AI has revolutionized the creation of small scale, custom software. I own a business built around doing small scale custom software. As you might imagine, I’m very interested in the progress of AI, and I’m trying to use it as much as possible—automating technical tasks, spelling grammar and accuracy checks of my writing, and anything else I can think of.

The other day I was using Gemini to do one of the aforementioned spelling, grammar and accuracy checks. After setting it off with a prompt I had come back to see how it was doing.

Not well apparently. I clicked through to get a deeper view into its “thoughts”:1

So this wasn’t a metaphor, or a weird way to describe searching the internet. Gemini was “completely consumed by…intense shame” and “overwhelming disgrace”.

At this point you’re almost certainly wondering:

• “What on earth was the prompt?!?”

• “What did you say to Gemini to cause it to be so deeply ashamed?”

• “What sort of writing was it helping you with?”

• Or even (as other people have wondered when I told them this story) “Are you okay?”

I had been talking to Gemini about Luke Kemp’s book, Goliath’s Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse. (The review I published last week.) I had given it an electronic copy of the book, and I was making sure my conclusions were supported by the actual text. I had finally reached the point where I had the top section of the review done, and I told Gemini to critique my review. Here’s the beginning of the prompt, which was followed by the text in need of review:

Maybe the “How am I doing so far?” triggered some crazy introspective rabbit hole? But otherwise I think you’ll agree that it’s a pretty standard LLM use case.

II. Does Gemini pull it together?

You’re probably wondering what happened next. Was it able to overcome the disgrace and get past the shame?

It recognizes it’s in a loop, and you get hints here that it’s going to try to break out of the loop. So what is it going to do to break out of the loop? Why, use Python of course!

I’m not sure what to make of this pivot, why it might have made this abrupt transition, or where it gets the number 20042455. Maybe Python is to AI as breathing exercises are to humans? Also at what point does something cross the line from “typical AI hallucination”, into “worrying novel behavior”?

It goes on in this vein for a little while longer:

It ends up stuck here. The numbers remain mysterious. Its sense of shame replaced by trivial Python. I wait in vain for some kind of closure. Eventually I refresh, and like a strange dream, it disappears entirely.

III. So what?

As I mentioned at the beginning. I have a horse in this race. Many, many people predict that AI is going to put me out of business, so I can perhaps be forgiven for paying particular attention to AI’s failures. But before we get to that, let’s consider the situation more broadly.

Obviously everyone is aware of AI hallucinations. This seems like a particularly juicy one, but it’s a “known issue” as they say. As such, I imagine that there will be quite a few people who will see this, yawn, and move on.

Other people will consider the example for a little longer, perhaps look at it from a few different angles, but still ultimately file it with all the other hallucinations they’ve come across, and also move on.

Still others will dig a little bit deeper. “Is this part of some larger trend? Is this a different type of hallucination that points to a deeper issue?”

Finally there are the AI skeptics who will latch onto this as one more example of how AI is completely overhyped.2

What bucket do I fall into? It should be apparent that I’m in the “dig a little bit deeper” bucket. (After all, I am writing about it.) But it also seems worth deeper consideration. I’ve personally experienced AI getting facts wrong. I’ve also heard of (though not personally witnessed) self-serving behavior. This seems like something different, something potentially destructive. But maybe I’m just not plugged in enough and this sort of thing happens all the time. Even if that’s the case it still seems pretty “insane”. Whatever the case, it feels worth it to dig deeper. So I’m digging, what have I found?

The first thing one finds, if one is being honest, is their biases. As already mentioned, I have pretty extreme biases in this area. As I said, much of the reason I have for checking out AI is that it seems to be getting pretty good at doing the same thing I do to put food on the table. At best, AI is going to completely change the custom software landscape. At worst, it might just put me out of business. As such, I’m inclined to fixate on the weaknesses of AI, rather than its (considerable) strengths. I’m incentivized to imagine that shame-filled AIs will start randomly injecting python into a project just often enough that their use remains limited. You should definitely keep this in mind going forward.

Understanding that I have a dog in the fight, I nevertheless detect a narrative developing where AI hallucinations are becoming rarer but more annoying, and perhaps weirder. See for example this article “AI Coding Assistants Are Getting Worse”, which details subtle AI manipulation, like creating fake output in the desired format. See also “I can’t stop yelling at Claude Code”, where Claude deleted a bunch of files and replaced them with ones that were slightly broken. My own experience represents a single data point, but one that fits well into this narrative of increasingly weird, albeit rarer, behavior.

Having a narrative represents only a first step. I’ve gestured vaguely at annoyance and weirdness, but we’re still mostly in the realm of AI hallucinations being a known phenomenon. It would be nice to have more examples. It would be nice to have better data on hallucination “intensity”, or to even have a generally agreed upon definition. But most of all it would be nice to know how this all is going to play out.

Obviously more data will arrive in time. But it feels like I’m out of time.

IV. I need to make certain decisions soon

I just finished a book on epistemology (Knowing Our Limits, by Nathan Ballantyne, review here) and one of the epistemic errors he mentions is the error of trespassing. This is when someone who’s an expert in one area assumes that they can be an expert in a completely unrelated area. A classic example, and the one given by the book, is the example of Linus Pauling.

Pauling won two Nobels in chemistry and peace, but when it came to medicine, he recommended megadosing Vitamin C, something most health scientists and doctors thought was crazy. And it mostly was. Further research has revealed a few interesting edge cases, but being 5% right about something is a far cry from doing science worthy of a Nobel Prize.3

I understand why Ballantyne pushes against this practice, but at the same time, people have to trespass. People have to make decisions in areas where they have very little expertise all the time. Any speculation I engage in around the future of AI is clearly trespassing. I have no deep experience with machine learning; no special training in neurology; no prophetic insight into how novel technology is likely to progress.4

Despite these weaknesses, I need to make some hard decisions. The world of custom software is going to change and the time when I could wait for more evidence has passed. As we used to say back in the day “it’s in my base, and killing my dudes”. Last week I had a sales lead—who I know I would have closed two years ago, and for lots of money—tell me that he had vibecoded his software, and didn’t need me… yet. So far this software is just being used by his direct reports, but he has bigger dreams, so maybe he will come back when he needs to scale, but maybe he won’t.

It’s not all bad news. AI has reduced my costs and made it easier to do a broader range of software. Nevertheless I still have a lot of decisions to make. I have to come up with a strategy, allocate cash, and hire or fire people, etc. I need to make my best guess as to where AI is going, and what to do about it.

There’s obviously lots of evidence I can use in making these decisions (too much, if we’re being honest). How much weight should I give to this direct experience of AI weirdness? None? Some? If some, how much? I’m aware that people generally give too much weight to their personal experiences and not enough weight to evidence from the larger world, but ignoring it entirely is also foolhardy.

V. As long as I’m trespassing already…

If I’m already breaking the law by being on “private property” maybe I should take the opportunity to do a little “target shooting” as well and fire off a handful of potshots:

Bullet One: My son turned me on to the Shell Game Podcast. This documentary podcast is in its second season and in this season the host, Evan Ratliff, is trying to set up a company composed almost entirely of AI agents. At one point, he decides that the company is going to hire an actual human to run the company’s social media (his AIs have a hard time logging into social media, for one thing) but the AIs are going to handle this hiring. The AIs turn out to be great at sorting and scanning resumes, and the whole thing seems to be working well, but then one of the more ambitious applicants tracks down the CEO’s email. But the CEO is an AI. The applicant and the “CEO” exchange several emails, and the CEO sets up an interview outside of the process Ratliff had set up. Ratliff decides to just run with it and see where it goes.

The interview is scheduled for Monday morning, but the “CEO” calls the applicant Sunday night. The conversation is strange, as you might expect, but also Ratliff has put a sixty second limit on phone calls (because he’s already had problems) so the “CEO” hangs up mid sentence. The applicant emails the “CEO”, obviously confused. The “CEO” responds back claiming it wasn’t him. From there things get even more crazy. Ratliff doesn’t become aware of any of this until the next morning. As you can imagine he’s kind of mortified, and also pissed at the “CEO” even though he knows he’s anthropomorphising it in an unhealthy way.

If anything, this whole incident seemed less extreme than the “shame spiral” I detailed above. It’s part of a CEO’s job to call people and lie. So this was expected, but annoying behavior. If an editor is going to descend into a shame spiral they’re expected to do it on their own time, not while editing my blog post. And even if they do, they never try to cure it by writing trivial Python functions. So what does the continued presence of these sorts of hallucinatory mistakes mean for the future of agentic AI.

• Will people just get used to it?

• Will “Your AI called me up and spouted Python at me” replace “Hey, I think you butt-dialed me”? And we’ll just move on with our lives?

• Or will it create a phantasmagoria of weirdness, confusion, and annoyance until we eventually decide we’ve had enough?

Bullet Two: One of the areas I frequently trespass in is the territory of hemispheric specialization within the brain. As AIs are similar to brains, I keep returning to this subject, because for organic brains it’s a big deal.5 Whether you’re a hardcore Iain McGilchrist fan (you should be) or not, some amount of hemispheric specialization within the brain is undeniable. And yet for all of the resemblance we see between LLMs and the brain, I haven’t heard of any similar specialization happening in that domain. As I said I’m trespassing, but this lack of specialization has always struck me as something which will eventually prove to be a fatal flaw. Or at least put some kind of cap on what LLMs can do.

Part of the reason I bring this up again is that, from what I understand, hallucinations are precisely the kind of thing you would expect from an overactive left hemisphere that is unmediated by a right hemisphere. The most famous cases in this area involve people with right hemispheric damage feeling that their left arm is obviously fake, or that it doesn’t belong to them. Or something equally bizarre. Bizarre in a fashion not entirely dissimilar from the opening example.

If a “right hemisphere analog” is critical to a well functioning “intelligence” then these sorts of hallucinations will never go away entirely with LLMs. It also seems to follow (again from my limited understanding) that the more you try to control these hallucinations the weirder they’ll be when they do break through, as reinforcement training keeps picking off the low hanging fruit. This fits the developing “rarer but weirder” narrative I mentioned above.

No one seems to be talking about this potential. Obviously other people have their biases, and that probably has some impact here, but maybe I’m the one who can’t let go of this area of inquiry because of my biases?

Bullet Three: What happens if our continual push to expand the capabilities of AI leads us to a dead end? If there really is a rare but weirder trend, and we end in a situation where hallucinations are very rare, but frequently catastrophic? Say they delete a company’s entire database? (Oh, wait, that already happened.) What does a shame spiral look like when you’re trying to get the AI to write (and maintain) a SAAS? Do we end up in a situation where the AI doesn’t just call a job applicant at the wrong time, but falls in love with them and obsessively stalks them? I’m less worried about AI taking over the world and more worried about it entering a shame spiral and committing virtual suicide, and taking down the power grid.

Which is to say how will we know when to stop? What signs will there be? And will we pay attention to them? Is it possible to back up?

Bullet Four: I would be remiss if I didn’t toss in a discussion of Moltbook, the new “Reddit for AI” that everyone is talking about. So far I haven’t seen any screenshots that resemble the shame spiral-Python I encountered. There are a few possible reasons why:

1. What I saw was the thinking not the actual output, and maybe the fact that no “output” has shown up on Moltbook means that AI protections are such that it’s able to kill weird hallucinations like this before they’re actually “put down” as output. These seems somewhat reassuring, but is it foolproof?

2. The shame spiral is a Gemini problem and perhaps Moltbook is dominated by Claude.

3. It happens, but I haven’t seen evidence of it, primarily because other stuff is more newsworthy.

4. The problem is somehow very specific to me. I’m bad at using AI, or some persistent data the AI stores about me has become corrupted.

I’ll keep my eye on it, but if anyone has any insight into anything I’ve mentioned I’m all ears.

Obviously these bullets mostly represent wild speculation outside of the scope of the epistemic crisis I’m dealing with right now. AI may go in a lot of different directions in the future, and maybe I’ll even be right about some of this stuff. But at this moment I need to decide whether I’ll be out of a job by this time next year, or whether AI will hit some sort of plateau. But maybe the future will be stranger than either of those two options, and I just need to get comfortable being in the warm embrace of the phantasmagoria.

—--------------------------------------------------------------------------

It’s an essay! Imagine that. It’s been awhile. My apologies. As you can see I’m busy trying to make sure I still have a business in a year. It’s a time consuming endeavor. But over the long run I’m optimistic about things. I’ll make sure to keep you updated. If you want to follow along make sure to subscribe.

Goliath’s Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse

By: Luke Kemp

Published: 2025

592 Pages

Briefly, what is this book about?

By most accounts, civilization, which is to say the large Hobbesian state, is a good thing. Kemp doesn’t necessarily agree. In his account, states are lumbering, tyrannical, extractive Goliaths, cursed to grow bigger, more oppressive and more brittle until they are eventually brought down by a “stone” that hits in just the right place.

Civilization forms out of dominance hierarchies, and these hierarchies generally only move in one direction, towards greater inequality, greater extraction, and more self-interested decisions. This leads to ever increasing fragility and eventual collapse. Collapse might actually be a better place for the masses of people, though it’s often quite bloody to get there.

Though if that’s how it played out in the past, Kemp doesn’t think it will necessarily play out that way going forward. If (when?) civilization collapses this time, it will be far more apocalyptic.

What authorial biases should I be aware of?

Kemp is associated with the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at Cambridge. I was recommended this book by the sagacious Florian U. Jehn of the excellent Existential Crunch blog. Jehn knows his stuff which gives me the confidence to safely locate Kemp as an important scholar in the genre of collapse research, with an interesting, albeit populist/anti-elite take on the subject.

Who should read this book?

Kemp draws heavily on the ideas of James C. Scott (Seeing Like a State and Against the Grain) and writes in opposition to the ideas of Steven Pinker (in particular The Better Angels of Our Nature). If you find yourself similarly situated, you’ll enjoy this book.

It’s also a great book for anyone who can’t get enough discussion of existential risk. And really given the stakes we should be considering as many viewpoints as possible.

What does the book have to say about the future?

As you might imagine, Kemp’s vision of the future is pretty bleak. He is not a techno-optimist, rather he sees in technology the emergence of a new Goliath, a new arena of dominance and extraction. He has a certain amount of hope, but it all revolves around using democracy to disrupt the ratcheting up of inequality and elite power, which seems like a tall order.

Specific thoughts: Past, present, and future collapse

The book is divided up into three parts:

“Dawns and Ends”: “from the dawn of our species to the emergence of the first states.”

“Imperial March and Fall”: “the rise and fall of empires over the past five millennia.”

“Endgame”: “the future and the prospect of a modern global societal collapse.”

I was mostly interested in his thoughts on the future, but he had some very provocative things to say about the other bits as well.

Dawns and Ends

Much of Kemp’s perspective relies on recent, revisionist scholarship about collapse, conditions, and carnage. Right out of the gate Kemp takes aim at Pinker in a chapter titled “Hobbes’s Delusion”. In Pinker’s Better Angels he made the strong claim that violence was much worse among our earliest ancestors and that the rise of the state (Hobbes’ Leviathan, Kemp’s Goliath) has steadily acted to decrease violence. Kemp takes the opposite stance, arguing that the state is the primary source of violence.

This is not a new argument, I’ve encountered screeds against civilization and the state in several books (off the top of my head I’m thinking of: Against the Grain, Civilized to Death, and Don’t Sleep There Are Snakes — links go to my reviews). The biggest counterargument to those wishing to wind back civilization has always been child and maternal mortality, which is something that only modernity has managed to get down to levels we now find acceptable. This argument doesn’t work if you’re talking about the difference between hunter-gatherers and Hittites, but it does carry a lot of weight if you’re talking about any abandonment of our current “tech level”.

As a general matter the revisionist take makes some very interesting points, and Kemp has some valid points. As far as who’s right on the question of violence, I lean towards Kemp, but I can also see Pinker’s point. When you’re looking at tribal societies that a raiding death here and there doesn’t seem like much, but when you actually crunch the numbers the actual mortality rate is through the roof.

Probably the most important bits for our purposes are his emphasis on anti-dominance and democracy. For the vast majority of our history humans lived in egalitarian, proto-democratic tribes, where dominance was rare, and easily discouraged by the introduction of simple weapons (as opposed to our primate ancestors.) Anti-dominance continues to show up in our loathing of inequality and Kemp leans heavily on our innate democratic instincts as a potential solution to Goliaths later in the book, so it’s important that he lays the groundwork for both here.

Imperial March and Fall

This is the post-Agricultural Revolution period of things—the period people are most familiar with. The collapse of Rome looms very large in these discussions. So let’s talk about Rome for a bit.

I just did a book review of The Children of Mars by Jeremy Armstrong. One of the things the book made clear is that for hundreds of years Rome was not a Goliath at all, it was a gathering place for a handful of families/tribes. But at some point it ended up in what Kemp calls a “dominance spiral”.

In constructing his theory of the spiral Kemp leans heavily on Scott and his observations about “lootable resources”.1 Another phrase that I’ve heard used is “storable resources”. In some respects that’s the central feature. Once you can accumulate resources, you have the potential for inequality, because one person can have more resources stored than another. Kemp argues that this creates the potential for dominance hierarchies, as greater resources translates into greater power, which allows you to get more resources, and even more power, and so on, spiraling upward.

You might think that this spiral takes hold pretty easily, that once someone gets a little bit of a resource advantage that the advantage compounds until they’ve absorbed all of the nearby, easily lootable resources. But the early history of Rome shows that this was not the case. For several centuries the Italian peninsula seemed to be in something of an equilibrium with no community dominating. And it wasn’t an advantage in the amount of resources that eventually made Rome stand out, it was an advantage in waging war—in the looting part of lootable resources. They didn’t produce more, they took more.

And here we see the violence inherent in the system. The dominance spiral starts with bloodshed and coercion, and needs to be maintained in the same way. And the spiral can only end in one of three different ways:

One possibility is that someone comes along with a better system for looting (i.e. they’re better at waging war) and they overthrow your system and replace it with their own. The system is destroyed from the outside

Another possibility is that people don’t like the violence and inequality and they successfully rebel against the system. The system is ended from the inside.

Finally, as the scale of the system increases, so does its complexity. This brings a host of problems: factionalism, corruption, rent-seeking, and beyond this, eventually all of the easily lootable resources have already been seized. At the same time that problems are mounting, those inheriting the system are generally not as talented as those that start it, so the whole thing becomes fragile, and it eventually collapses. This is the system bringing about its own ending.

The question has always been, how pertinent are the previous examples of collapse to our own situation? And which of the three do we need to be the most worried about?

Endgame

Quite a bit has changed since the time of Rome. To begin with back then it was all about taking other people’s resources, there wasn’t much movement on producing your own resources more effectively.2 In the modern era we have many examples of people just making more resources, rather than looting them from other people. This is a big deal, and much of the pro-modernity arguments revolve around our greater productive capacity.

It has also given rise to the hope that we can eliminate war. That there will be so much abundance, so much benefit from free trade, that we will be able to move past great power war. The Ukrainian invasion somewhat belies this, but I nevertheless think that “the system” is unlikely to end because of war. Russia is not going to conquer Europe, and China is not going to occupy the US, at least not anytime in the foreseeable future. Abundance is not the only factor here. Many people argue that the real reason for the Long Peace is that war has become so terrible, no one wants to engage in it. Once again the situation in Ukraine undermines this argument, but it is true that modern technology has created a very different landscape from the one described by Kemp in the previous sections of his book.

Despite this different landscape, inequality has not gone away, and as Kemp repeatedly points out, it still makes people very upset, perhaps upset enough to bring the whole thing down. So even if I have my doubts about the US collapsing from the first method, the second method of ending the system, destruction from within, is still in play. Certainly there are compelling arguments that inequality is not something we should get worked up over, but absent a massive change in human psychology, it’s going to continue to generate dissatisfaction and rage. It’s just the way we’re built, and much of modern populism can be traced back to these impulses. Are the masses going to burn down the system? Maybe, but the modern world has made everything weird, and burning down the system is going to look very different this time around. (Should that be the way things go.)

Things are going to look so different that it makes me question some of the conclusions Kemp draws. Kemp talks a lot about extraction, it’s a big part of the dominance spiral. When extraction/looting is easy, that’s the “golden age”: post Punic Wars Rome, the Mongol Horde, and even “westward expansion”. But as it becomes more difficult factions emerge, corruption proliferates, and complexities arise. This is when the extractive elites become the most troublesome. And I think Kemp is right that we’re dealing with these elites right now.3 But we’ve also got an extractive public. France is a useful example, since they’re farther down the road than we are. The public’s demand for benefits is entirely unsustainable, but despite the awareness that everyone is on the same bus and it’s headed towards a cliff they are unable to apply even the mildest braking. (See the massive protests which erupted when they tried to raise the retirement age from 62-64.)

Talking about the extractive elite without talking about the entitled elderly seems like a significant oversight. And yes, picking on Boomers is unfair, because we all feel entitled, and that’s the problem. And it’s particularly a problem for Kemp because he puts a large amount of faith in democracy to solve the problems of the Goliath, and I think that faith might be misplaced. To the extent that the $38 trillion dollar debt is a problem, and represents a growing potential for collapse—obviously some people argue it’s no big deal—democracy has not slowed the growth down. Arguably the exercise of democracy has always pushed in the direction of more entitlement spending.

This brings us to the fragility of the system itself. This is where most of the discussion and most of the uncertainty lies. Many people argue that the modern world is uniquely fragile. Others argue that it’s exceptionally robust. Kemp kind of tries to have it both ways:

The world appears to be growing both increasingly robust and more fragile. I call this the ‘Death-Star Syndrome’, after the space-weapon in the film Star Wars: A New Hope that can annihilate entire planets but can itself be destroyed by a single well-placed blow. Our world is incredibly powerful and robust, yet surprisingly fragile if hit hard enough in the right place.

I would argue that anything which can be destroyed by a single hit in the right place is fragile, full stop, regardless of how robust it’s individual parts might be. I agree that modern society definitely looks formidable, but I’m with Kemp in suspecting that a well placed hit down a certain exhaust port could blow the whole thing up.

Of course that’s what you want to know, when you’re reading a book like this, is everything going to blow up? I think there are a lot of reasons why things might blow up, but Kemp’s particular thesis is that unless we reduce inequality, and level things out, things are going to blow up.

This is an interesting thesis and it reminds me of a book I read several years ago: The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality… by Walter Scheidel. (See my review here.) His contention was that the only way inequality has ever been reduced is by blowing things up. Quote from Scheidel:

Through recorded history, the most powerful leveling invariably resulted from the most powerful shocks. Four different kinds of violent ruptures have flattened inequality: mass mobilization warfare, transformative revolution, state failure and lethal pandemics. I call these the Four Horsemen of Leveling.

Now it’s always possible that Kemp is right about inequality and Scheidel is wrong, that it can be done without any of the violent ruptures he mentions. And perhaps it’s possible to mobilize on the scale of World War II in such a way that inequality is reduced, but without needing an existential threat. But that’s not the way to bet. To continue with Scheidel:

State collapse served as a more reliable means of leveling, destroying disparities as hierarchies of wealth and power were swept away. Just as with mass mobilization wars and transformative revolutions, equalization was accompanied by great human misery and devastation, and the same applies to the most catastrophic epidemics: although the biggest pandemics leveled mightily, it is hard to think of a remedy to inequality that was dramatically worse than the disease. To a great extent, the scale of leveling used to be a function of the scale of violence: the more force was expended, the more leveling occured. Even though this is not an iron law—not all communist revolutions were particularly violent, for example, and not all mass warfare leveled—it may be as close as we can hope to get to a general premise. This is without any doubt an exceedingly bleak conclusion. (emphasis mine)

On the one hand Scheidel agrees with Kemp: state collapse does reduce inequality. Where they diverge is thinking that people might be better off post-collapse. And to be fair to Kemp, he mostly makes this assertion with respect to older and less advanced societies. A point he brings up several times is that when Somalia collapsed the Somali people were better off. He does note that it will be very different for the Danish should Denmark collapse. And unfortunately the US and the rest of the western nations are a lot closer to Denmark than Somalia.

In the end I finished this book in much the same place I finished most books in this genre. Sooner or later collapse is coming, and there’s not much we can do about it. Or as the prophet said:

The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved.

—-------------------------------------------------------

When reading a book of this size there’s a lot that doesn’t make it into my review. I’m going to experiment with putting some random thoughts into a comment on the post. They will be more quick bullet points, and not exhaustive by any means. Just things that seemed interesting and would be a shame to leave out. I’m curious to know if you think that’s where they belong. Or if I should create another section “Interesting Bits” or something like that for my reviews. Or if they should be a footnote or something else.

Knowing Our Limits

By: Nathan Ballantyne

Published: 2019

344 Pages

Briefly, what is this book about?

Regulative epistemology as opposed to descriptive epistemology. Put more simply, this is about how to find truth, as opposed to how to define truth. Though because the author recommends having very high standards, you may come away from the book thinking that there is no truth. That is not Ballantyne’s intent, but most of his guidance revolves around less confidence rather than more confidence.

There is some good stuff about tolerance, and the utility of doubt. And while I take issue with some of what he says on the subject of expertise, he covers the subject exhaustively and thought-provokingly.

What authorial biases should I be aware of?

Ballantyne isn’t just interested in epistemology. He doesn’t dabble in it. He is epistemology, or rather an epistemologist. Accordingly, even though it’s apparent that he’s trying really, really hard to not make the book overly academic, it’s still pretty academic. For example:

If an undefeated defeater for believing p were included in the evidence I don’t have, then I (probably) would have heard of it by now. But I have not heard of it and the “silence” gives me reason to think that the unpossessed defeater is probably defeated.

He’s a big fan of the word defeater, and various constructions involving the word. In the course of a few pages he uses the term “defeater-defeater” seventeen times.

Who should read this book?

Epistemological collapse is the major crisis of our time, so on some level it’s probably useful to read everything you can get your hands on. (Which was my big reason for reading it.) But, as much as I crap on Yudkowsky’s Rationality: From AI to Zombies I’d probably read his chapters on Bayes’ Theorem before reading this.

I heard about the book on Jesse Singal’s substack. He was much more bullish on it. So you might read that if you’re interested or on the fence.

Specific thoughts: Lots of epistemic tools, Ballantyne really only covers one

On the one hand this is a great book about intellectual tolerance, being open to doubt and uncertainty, and refraining from judgement on controversial topics. On the other hand I can’t believe that the word “Bayes” doesn’t appear even once in the book. Allow me to explain.

Ballantyne offers numerous forms of epistemic guidance. This advice includes stuff like: employing metacognition, imagining counterfactual interlocutors, awareness of unpossessed evidence, etc.

Out of all this guidance the two that stuck out to me were:

1. Be wary of epistemic trespassing: That is making confident proclamations about areas where you lack familiarity with the evidence, and the tools to interpret that evidence. Investigation is fine. High confidence is not.

2. Seek out collaboration: As many questions sit at the intersection of disciplines, if you are going to trespass, acquire a guide. They should hopefully not only provide competence, but criticism.

You can see where these two points sit very much in the middle of the many questions of expertise that plague current discourse. But at the moment I’d like to focus on the idea that Ballantyne himself should perhaps have trespassed, or collaborated a little more. Because the book he produced was remarkably narrow.

I’m sure that on some level this is an oversimplification, but, basically for Ballantyne things are either true or not. They are defeated, or they are undefeated. On some level he’s clearly right, something is either true or it’s not, but, as he also points out, it is very difficult to establish the truth of something. There may be arguments you haven’t encountered, evidence still to be gathered, or a methodology you don’t possess. This leads him to repeatedly recommend doxastic openness ”a doubtful or unsettled mindset toward a special class of beliefs”. With the special class of beliefs being basically anything controversial. But, if you’ve come across Bayes’ Theorem, you know that there’s another way.

I’m guessing most readers have heard of Bayes’ Theorem, but if you haven’t: it’s a rule for updating the odds for something being true when you come across new evidence about that “something”. You start with an initial probability (what people call your “priors”), consider how likely the evidence would be if the claim were true versus false, and that gives you a new probability. Using this method you’ll never reach 100% certainty (or 0% for that matter) but it’s a great way of dealing with precisely the problem Ballantyne mentions, and he never so much as alludes to it. And when I was reading it I couldn’t understand why there was this glaring hole.

I asked Gemini and it said:

Ballantyne omits Bayes because he is writing a practical guide for limited humans using the language of traditional epistemology (defeaters/justification) rather than writing a formal theory for ideal agents using the language of mathematics.

I’ll be the first to tell you that Bayes is impractical, but I’m not sure telling people to “think that the unpossessed defeater is probably defeated” is any better. I do think that Gemini is right on target to point out that Bayes just isn’t part of Ballantyne’s branch of epistemology, which is illustrative of the whole problem. In the epistemic hellscape we’re currently in, we need all the tools we can get, and restricting your book to a specific branch from one slice of philosophy, which is already a niche subject, seems perverse.

In order to understand the challenge we face, let me offer up a story from the book.

Bethe remarked that convincing them was like “carving a cubic foot out of a lake”. Bethe argued that every energy system has risks; but the risks of nuclear power were manageable, and nuclear power could actually deliver more energy with less environmental risk than the alternatives. One historian recounts a story Bethe told about speaking to an audience in Berkeley, California: “After [Bethe] had presented his position on the need for nuclear power, a woman in the audience stood up, turned her back on him, and shouted, ‘Save the Earth!’ The crowd reacted, he said, with ‘thunderous applause’ ” (Walker 2006, 21). Let’s hear it for the antinuclear novices! Their values prevented them from seriously considering Bethe’s claims. Intoxicated with solidarity and righteousness, they spurned the physicist.

I’m not necessarily saying that using Bayes in this situation would have produced better outcomes than talking about defeaters. Obviously a big part of the problem is that by the time the woman is yelling “Save the Earth!” it’s already too late.

As near as I can tell that incident happened in the mid 70’s, I don’t think things have improved since then. I think we’re going to need all the tools we can get if we’re going to pierce the polarization and the panic.

What tools would I recommend? I already mentioned Bayes, but beyond that there are several others that deserve a brief mention. While Ballantyne doesn’t cover Bayes, he does mention using virtue. This comes as part of his discussion of the origins of modern epistemology. Apparently there were two branches. One focused on rules, and the other focused on virtue. Ballantyne mentions both before declaring that his book will be focused on rules. I understand why he did this, I’m sure virtue fell into the same category as Bayes, something outside his wheelhouse, but at least it got a mention. But when we consider the speech in Berkeley, one can imagine all sorts of virtues that might have helped. Intellectual curiosity, humility, respect for other opinions. Even the attribute Ballantyne prizes the most, “doxastic openness” might be easier to imbue as a virtue than teach as a rule.

My favorite form of epistemology is to pick a course that minimizes Black Swans. You’re less interested in truth than in survival. And I realize it’s a stretch to call it epistemology, but it’s very much a method for making decisions under uncertainty, which is kind of the whole point of having an epistemology. I don’t have the time to get into it here, but if you’re curious you can read about it in my post “Review of Rationality: AI to Zombies”. And I specifically speak to the Bethe/nuclear power situation in my post “Nuclear Power And Winning Through Intolerance”

Epistemic guidance is desperately needed, and this book provided it, I just wish it hadn’t been so narrow.

—-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I’ve got to start writing shorter reviews. I spent too much time on Bayes, and I’m not even that big of a fan, but the omission seemed very strange. It would also be a strange omission if I didn’t mention subscribing, or liking, or all the other stuff that comes at the end of something like this. So assume that I did, and you were very moved. Perhaps because you were feeling virtuous…

1. The Westmark Trilogy by: Lloyd Alexander

2. RoadKill by: Dennis E. Taylor

3. Slicing Pie Handbook: Perfectly Fair Equity Splits for Bootstrapped Startups by: Mike Moyer

4. Fables for Young Wolves by: Thomas O. Bethlehem

The Westmark Trilogy

By: Lloyd Alexander

Westmark

Published: 1981

184 Pages

The Kestrel

Published: 1982

244 Pages

The Beggar Queen

Published: 1984

237 Pages

Briefly, what is this series about?

The series is speculative fiction, there is no magic, no supernatural elements. Other than the fact that it’s made up, Westmark could be a small country in 18th century Europe. The story has elements of both the American and French Revolutions, with things like mayhem, monarchies, muskets and marketplaces (of both goods and ideas).

The main character is Theo, who begins the series as a printer’s devil before being swept up by events. His profession lays the groundwork for a very strong “freedom of the press” element.

Who should read this series?

If you’re a fan of Alexander (most likely his Chronicles of Prydain series) then I think you’ll enjoy this trilogy as well. If you have no familiarity with Alexander I would start with Prydain. (See my review of that series here.)

Specific thoughts: Darker and more serious than most YA series

YA is an interesting genre, one that by its very nature is always going to be somewhat sophomoric. Nevertheless there are authors who try to class up the genre, drop some gravitas into the middle of the overwrought angsty fluff. It doesn’t happen very often. YA dystopias pretend to do it (though I will say that Mockingjay, the final Hunger Games novel, didn’t merely pretend). One notable example is the Earthsea series by Ursula K. Le Guin. But along with Le Guin I would put both of Alexander’s series.

I could imagine having kids read the Westmark Trilogy as a supplement to a history class about revolutions. It’s got a surprising amount of realism and really grapples with actual issues of actual people in a way very few series do. (I hope actual people don’t have to participate very often in a last man standing battle royale…)

Though as I said above, if you haven’t read any Alexander I would start with the Chronicles of Prydain. And perhaps I may be forgiven for pivoting from Westmark to that series, but Noah Smith put up an amazing review of Prydain recently that I can’t help including:

Until recently, I had thought that every kid in America grew up reading The Chronicles of Prydain, just like Narnia and Lord of the Rings. Apparently I was wrong; in recent weeks, I’ve discovered that almost no one I know has read Prydain. Well, it’s time to rectify that.

The Prydain books are children’s fantasy, full of the usual wizards and monsters and fairies, but the themes are surprisingly mature; the series is all about coming of age, what it really means to be a hero, etc. As the protagonist, Taran, grows from a boy to a man, the series transitions from fun and improbable adventures to difficult choices and bittersweet endings. In my opinion, the writing of these books is better than Narnia, but the life lessons and social values are what really set them apart.

David Roberts wrote a good review of the series on Vox back in 2017. I don’t know if I’d call Prydain the “greatest fantasy series ever written” — Lord of the Rings is hard to beat. But it’s up there, and for some reason it’s been almost forgotten.

Also, the character Gurgi is the best sidekick ever created.

Roadkill

By: Dennis E. Taylor

Published: 2022

346 Pages

Briefly, what is this book about?

Jack Kernigan was kicked out of MIT for a crime he didn’t commit. Back home in Ohio he runs over an invisible alien who’s trying to cross the road on a blind curve. This, as it happens, is first contact. Rather than go to the authorities, Jack and his friends Patrick and Natalie end up taking possession of the alien’s flying saucer and its AI. From there things really get crazy.

Who should read this book?

If you’ve read other stuff by Taylor (he’s best known for the Bobiverse series) and enjoyed it you’ll probably enjoy this. Otherwise if you’re looking for something relatively light, where you don’t have to (or want to) think very much, this will probably scratch that itch.

Specific thoughts: Taylor and the science of global warming do not mix

The book is perfectly serviceable and I’ve enjoyed everything I’ve read by Taylor. The books are entertaining. However I have noticed that Taylor has a weird tic. I’m not sure if it affects all of his books, I don’t recall seeing it in the Bobiverse series, but then I only read the original trilogy, so perhaps it comes up later. His weird tic is that he ends up offering up some completely apocalyptic, but also totally impossible global warming scenario.

I noticed this in the last book I read of his, Outland, where global warming turns an alternate Earth into an unlivable inferno within a few decades. It was a dumb and entirely avoidable mistake, so imagine my surprise when he makes a new, but very similar mistake in this book.

In this book the protagonists are confronted with the possibility of the atmosphere’s O2 percentage dropping to 19%. It’s currently at 20.95%, so dropping to 19% doesn’t seem like much of a stretch, but in fact it would take centuries, if not millennia for it to drop that far. Taylor has it happening in five years. And not through some SF hack, like the giant vacuum in Spaceballs. It’s going to happen through processes that are all outgrowths of man-made global warming, with a small villainous shove that must remain undetectable, lest the villains get caught.

In neither case does the global warming catastrophe affect the plot very much, nor does it spoil the plot. In both cases it’s a very minor component. Small enough you might even miss it. Nevertheless it is a very strange tic…

Slicing Pie Handbook: Perfectly Fair Equity Splits for Bootstrapped Startups

By: Mike Moyer

Published: 2016

212 Pages

Briefly, what is this book about?

A guide to dynamically allocating equity in a new company before that company has achieved profitability.

What authorial biases should I be aware of?

Moyer is a big advocate for fairness, and a huge advocate for this system. At multiple points he urges people to reach out to him if they have any issues with it. This thing is definitely his baby.

Who should read this book?

If you’re looking to assign equity in a new endeavor I would definitely read this book. It’s actually a great system if you’re in a situation where lots of people are hoping to contribute time, money or resources in exchange for equity.

Specific thoughts: You could probably figure out most of this yourself

Moyer does have a tendency to oversell the amazingness of his system. To be clear, it’s a good system, and he’s obviously thought about it a lot. Additionally he has numerous examples of it actually being used. This is why I would get the book, and why I may be using it in the near future for some new ventures I’m contemplating. Nevertheless it’s not some earth-shattering hack, some unknown, completely revolutionary way of doing things. If you just set out to do your very best to account for and aggregate contributions to a new business as they occurred at a market rate, with a beneficial multiplier for cash contributions (obviously) then you’d probably end up with 80% of Moyer’s system.

You may be thinking that I’m going to use this to dismiss the book on some level. In reality it’s the exact opposite. The fact that it’s largely common sense is a huge point in its favor. Moyer is not asking you to do anything weird or unnatural. All of his recommendations are things that you might have thought of yourself, things that make sense. As such it’s kind of a no-brainer to use this for equity allocations, because it’s something your best self would do anyway.

All this said I think he does pass by too lightly the difficulties of determining market rate. Just the fact that there is a market is probably the best we can expect for overcoming that difficulty.

Fables for Young Wolves

By: Thomas O. Bethlehem

Published: 2025

120 Pages

Briefly, what is this book about?

A series of Aesop-esque fables that use animals (especially wolves, dogs and pigs) to reflect on good and bad qualities humans might possess, and ideally encourage the former.

Who should read this book?

I saw this book recommended on John Carter’s Postcards from Barsoom Substack. If that means anything to you then you might enjoy this collection. If you’re on the fence you can read his review. As for myself, I would probably advise skipping it, though it pains me to say that.

Specific thoughts: Maybe I expected too much

I really wanted to love this book, but I didn’t. It was fine. It had its moments. But overall I found it to be “mid” as the kids would say. On the plus side the writing was quite good. Here’s a sample:

The winter months are hard on everyone, and the admiration of a faraway town is a thin cloak against the cold. The young man longed to find some way to keep his reputation without having to endure the hardship of its maintenance. But he could find no easy solution, and was forced to carry on with the scheme in place.

Perhaps you can detect a hint of purple prose in this excerpt, and it does veer into the purple on occasion, but I’m pretty forgiving of that sort of thing. No, for me, the writing was fine, it was the morals I found lacking. Every fable should have a lesson, and these were no exception, but here the lessons seemed too on the nose. To come at it from another direction, you expect fables to have a timeless quality, and these seemed more focused on the current moment. (I would swear that in several cases I detected direct commentary on Trump.)

Still perhaps I am being too hard on the collection. Aesop’s fables are over 2500 years old. Other fables I’ve encountered (I think mostly Native American stories) are not quite so old, but all of them have stood the test of centuries, when so much else hasn’t. That’s a high bar for a new collection to clear, and perhaps we should be willing to celebrate the fact that Bethlehem was willing to step up to the plate.

—------------------------------------------------------

That’s the great advantage of being a critic, I can point out the bars I mostly don’t have to clear them myself. But I am overdue to put out another essay, and when I do you’re welcome to point out my many failings. It shouldn’t be hard. If you can’t wait, there are plenty of essays in the archives.

The Origin of Politics: How Evolution and Ideology Shape the Fate of Nations – Social Disintegration, Birth Rates, and the Path to Extinction

By: Nicholas Wade

Published: 2025

256 Pages

Briefly, what is this book about?

Wade offers up an evolutionary psychology account of how to make politics actually function; how, when you try to disconnect politics and the exercise of power from core human nature, as shaped by evolution, things go off the rails.

What authorial biases should I be aware of?

Nicholas Wade worked as a science writer for the NYT for 30 years. For the bulk of those years he was the science and health editor. He left the paper in 2012 and in 2014 he published A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History. The book argued that human evolution is ongoing and that it has been “recent, copious, and regional”. The regional part got him “cancelled” or at least it attracted a lot of negative attention, since it implied that differing national outcomes might be partly genetic in nature rather than wholly the result of chance, culture, or colonization.

Who should read this book?

If you’re looking for a strong pushback against blank-slateism along with a defense of the traditional nation-state (and of tradition in general). Or if you’re looking for another reason to worry about decreasing fertility.

What does the book have to say about the future?

The aforementioned fertility decline looms large in his warnings about the future, but as I mentioned he also warns about any policy that tries to exercise power in ignorance of evolutionary drives. One of the major drives is tribalism and immigration directly conflicts with that instinct. All of this points to the potential for a demographically declining society with lots of disorder.

Specific thoughts: Children are the ultimate civilizational scorecard

According to Wade, in the beginning we were all hunter-gatherers and there were no tribes, there were just extended families. And one can usefully draw comparisons between this arrangement and the functioning of a chimp society. We might call both of these structures proto-tribes, but humans went on to develop real tribes:

Tribes began to form after the beginning of agriculture some 10,000 years ago, because they were an effective way of organizing the more populous societies that were then beginning to emerge. They provided defense, a necessity for people who had settled down and had fixed property and fields to protect. Tribal organization also established internal order by making lineages responsible for settling disputes between members. The glue of tribal society was kinship, the basic human instinct for supporting family and close relatives.

We see here the core process. Some problem arises, some threat needs to be dealt with, or an opportunity presents itself. Through cultural evolution, on top of already embedded evolutionary impulses, humans gradually figure out what works. But as they do so, there’s always a balancing act between the created systems and humans’ natural proclivities. This means that forward movement is gradual. If it’s gradual enough, evolution encodes some of the cultural norms as individuals find reproductive success within the new system.

Through this process we have eventually developed several very effective systems. But it was often a fight, and we forget how difficult that fight was and how long it took. Progress is possible, but you can’t just snap your fingers and go from where things are to where you want them to be.

Wade brings up many examples of effective systems, but I really like the example of monogamy. (As someone who’s very monogamous, I’m probably biased.) Monogamy is not how things worked in the distant past, and in many societies it’s still not how it works, but for a variety of reasons several societies have adopted it and it has turned out to be a very successful adaptation:

The rule came into prominence in ancient Greece and Rome, and was then amplified by the Christian Church throughout the Roman Empire and its successor European states. Perhaps from imitation of the Europeans’ globe-spanning colonies, monogamy became the law or custom throughout most of the world. Polygamy was banned in China in 1953 and for Hindus in India in 1955.

A cultural rule has thus been imposed, largely during historical times, on a prominent feature of human nature, that of male desire to leave as many progeny as possible. Rich men may be worse off for it, but the substantial benefits of monogamy to any society are hard to ignore…

Polygamous societies traditionally resort to sending surplus young men off to war, but provoking strife with neighbors does not always turn out well. Instituting a rule of monogamy, however, averts this threat. By removing a source of injustice and resentment, monogamy gives every man a stake in the existing order and vastly furthers social cohesion.

So powerful have the beneficent effects of monogamy seemed to some commentators that they suggest the rule is a necessity for any society to grow beyond a certain size. Others have speculated that monogamy was a force that propelled the rise of the West. “There can be no doubt that there is strong correlation between “nations becoming very large and the imposition of monogamy on their citizens,” say the biologist Richard D. Alexander and others. “It is almost as if no nation can become both quite large and quite unified except under socially imposed monogamy.”

The key thing I want to draw your attention to is how long it took for monogamy to become entrenched enough that its benefits were obvious. You can’t just size up society, decide it’s deficient in some manner, make a sweeping change to correct that deficiency and expect it to stick.

As an example of such an attempt Wade opens with the example of early Israeli kibbutzim.

In their passion for equality, the founders of the kibbutzim (the Hebrew plural of kibbutz) instituted two radical policies. First, they abolished pay and private property. Second, they dissolved the human family as a social unit.

You can guess how this went. It basically lasted about a generation, which is a testament to the founders’ passion for equality. But once people were born without that strong passion—people who hadn’t known the problems the founders were rebelling against—the two artificially imposed systems collapsed.

What’s interesting is that the kibbutz experiment is not as crazy as it seems. Hunter-gatherers have no pay and no private property, so on some level you would think it would be easy, but as Wade continues to point out evolution is ongoing and we’re now at a point, whether through cultural evolution or biological, where people found the arrangement to be intolerable.

So the question is: how do you know if you’re moving too fast, or if you’re trying something similar to the kibbutzim? Here’s when Wade gets into a bit of an anti-woke, anti-progressive polemic. And he’s not wrong, but most of us have probably heard these arguments a hundred times before. But the man is 83, so I’m inclined to cut him some slack. And once you get past that he makes a very compelling point, one I’ve been thinking about myself for awhile.

The whole point is reproductive success, and the fact that we are not finding reproductive success is exhibit A for the idea that we’re following the wrong path, or if we’re on the right path we’re moving down it too fast. Tribalism, monogamy, and even the kibbutzim either improved fertility or kept it level. But what we’re doing right now, whatever that might be, is driving our society and civilization towards extinction.

Tribalism and monogamy worked by taking evolutionary drives and using them to create a path to cohesion and order. The story of the kibbutzim shows what happens when you try leaving the path, though even that radical experiment didn’t affect fertility. Somehow, what we’re doing is even worse on that metric. Wade calls this current fertility decline “the unchosen path to extinction”. I’m not sure I agree with the “unchosen” part. I think we’ve chosen to leave the path and die in the wilderness. I’m just not sure why.

—------------------------------------------------------

One of the core evolutionary drives, present in chimps and 21st century humans, is status seeking. I fear my status seeking impulse is weaker than it should be. In fact I generally find it to be “icky”. That’s the whole point of trying to wrap calls for subscribing and checking out my other stuff in some humorous bit. (Note that I’m not claiming this humor always, or even mostly, succeeds.) But perhaps I should just come out and say. “I crave status! Give me more status! Read my stuff and exalt it!”

A Case for Latter-day Christianity: Evidences for the Restoration of the New Testament’s “Mere” Christian Church

By: Robert Starling

Published: 2019

360 Pages

Briefly, what is this book about?

A broad, and intensive defense of the theology of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS). With a special focus on tying that theology to the theology of the early Christian Church. As such it spends a lot of time examining differences between LDS theology and other Christian denominations (things like the Trinity, Grace, The Book of Mormon, etc.) and how those differences look in relation to actual scripture.

What authorial biases should I be aware of?

Starling has obviously been compiling stuff and working the “Mormons are Christians” beat for a long time. Which is to say he definitely has a dog in the fight. This gives the work a somewhat tendentious tinge.

What about my biases?

I met Starling at a conference and he asked me to read his book. Outside of that meeting and a follow-up email he sent me there hasn’t been any further interaction. So I wouldn’t say we were close. I am however pretty close to the topic of “Latter-day Christianity”, so that’s a pretty big bias.

Who should read this book?

Anyone who wants to see the comprehensive case for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints being the same Church Jesus Christ established in the 1st Century.

Specific thoughts: Who is this book for?

This book is obviously geared towards people who are not LDS. Which is not to say I didn’t enjoy it, or that it doesn’t have a lot of great stuff, merely that people who are already members of the Church generally don’t need to be convinced that they’re Christian. Also they are probably familiar with much of the evidence laid out by Starling. Even if they’re not, I’m sure they’ve encountered the high level arguments.

Before we get to a discussion of the strictly non-LDS audience, there are a couple of categories in between: those who are thinking of joining the Church, and those who are thinking of leaving the Church. Let’s take them in reverse order.

The Church does have a problem with retention, and anything that helps with that is obviously welcome, but when I consider people I know who have either left the Church or are on the fence, questions about whether we’re really Christian don’t come up that much. The concerns that get raised are generally around modern cultural issues (think stuff like LGBT issues and racism) or problems with the early history of the church (think Joseph Smith polygamy).

I do have a couple of relatives who have left the Church and become Catholics, and perhaps this would be the perfect book for them. Unfortunately it’s been years since I talked to these relatives, but should I find myself in conversation with either of them I’ll try to steer it in this direction.

(I know that many of my readers are LDS, so if you have anything to add to the above, or really anything else, please don’t hesitate to chime in.)

Our next category is people who are thinking of joining the Church. People in this position might have questions or concerns about a large variety of things, from giving up smoking, to polygamy. One of these concerns might be, “Are Mormons really Christians?” At which point the correct response is “We don’t say ‘Mormons’ anymore! It’s The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints! And if you use the correct name it’s right there in the title! Duh!” Case closed.

Okay, I assume everyone knows I was joking. The nature of God is an important topic. Violent schisms have erupted over competing conceptions of the divine. See for example the conflict which attended the Arian Heresy, and Arianism is actually closer to Nicene Christianity than LDS theology. As such, christology is a legitimate area of concern regardless of what the official name of the Church is. Still, these days, it would be a rare investigator who was so concerned about the subject that they needed a book the length and depth of Starling’s before being satisfied. That said, it’s good for these people that the book exists, and I could imagine someone picking and choosing a chapter here or there to answer specific concerns. But you end up looking at a pretty narrow slice of the “thinking of joining the Church” audience.

This just leaves us with a non-LDS audience that might be interested in this topic for reasons having nothing to do with their personal religious journey. I’m not sure how big this group is. Despite this it appears that this is Starling’s primary audience. This is fine. Should I ever find the time to finish the books I envision they will have a similarly tiny audience. What is regrettable is the tone of the book. I know Starling claims that his “purpose is not to engage in contention or debate” and I’m sure there’s true, but I did detect quite a bit of defensiveness. This is probably understandable. People have been attacking the LDS Church for not being Christian for a very long time. But for those who are just interested in the topic I think it would color the presentation.

Still whatever its flaws I hope people find this book, and gain some benefit thereby. It covers a lot of fascinating material. As just one example, there’s the issue of baptism for the dead as mentioned most prominently in 1 Corinthians 15:29. Even people outside of the Church (see for example the New Testament guide I recently read) admit that the plain reading seems to support the LDS interpretation. I already mentioned my biases here, but I think there are quite a few things in the New Testament that match up better with LDS Christianity than Nicene Christianity, but I don’t want to spoil everything.

—-----------------------------------------------

People have various standards around spoiling things. My standards are entirely based on my own selfish desires. I want free reign to spoil things for other people, but never to have anything spoiled for me. But I also want to make sure spoilers are available if I happen to go in search of them. But if I come across a spoiler without looking for it, I’m really annoyed. So when I urge you to check out the archives, which I frequently do, and those archives contain a lot of book reviews, you should probably keep this entirely arbitrary standard in mind.

Taking Religion Seriously

By: Charles Murray

Published: 2025

152 Pages

Briefly, what is this book about?

Murray’s journey from agnosticism to belief, a journey that is largely intellectual rather than spiritual. Because it was largely intellectual, it’s also more explicable. This allows Murray to write a different sort of conversion story, one that’s more amenable to being mapped out as a straightforward guide with sources and citations.

What authorial biases should I be aware of?

Murray has been a libertarian thinker for decades, though he’s probably best known for The Bell Curve which he co-authored. So Murray is approaching things from a conservative/libertarian milieu. That said, it’s a very balanced book. When he provides his sources for a particular idea he also includes sources that are critical of that idea.

Who should read this book?

I’ve read a lot of books that fall in this general area. Too many to list (consider The New Testament in Its World, Modern Physics and Ancient Faith and Believe just in the last six months) I would read Murray before reading any of them. It’s clear, comprehensive, short, and meaty. Even if you’re a raging atheist I would read this book because it’s the quickest way to understand your opponents’ best arguments.

Specific thoughts: The surprising strength of the Shroud of Turin

I was pretty familiar with most of the evidence Murray brought up in this book. He did introduce me to some books I hadn’t heard of, but most of what was in the book was stuff I’d heard already. Nevertheless it was quite useful to have it compiled in such a concise way. The big exception to this sense of familiarity was his discussion of the Shroud of Turin.

If you have any awareness at all about the controversy over the Shroud, you’ve probably heard that it was conclusively proven to be a forgery by radiocarbon dating. End of story, everyone can move on.

I was never in the “conclusive” camp, but the radiocarbon evidence seemed to end the possibility of debating those who doubted. For those people the carbon-14 results were the end of the story, and it didn’t matter what other weirdness was attached to the Shroud. The carbon dating was the silver bullet of the skeptical.

But until Murray assembled it all in one place, I didn’t realize how much weirdness there was. On the one hand you have the radiocarbon dating, but on the other hand…

• Photographic negative reveals a detailed crucifixion-like image (wounds, scourging, puncture wounds on scalp/forehead, wrist/feet holes, side wound). This isn’t obvious to the naked eye viewing the cloth normally.

• Image intensity appears to encode cloth-to-body distance (darker where the cloth would have been closer, lighter where farther).

• 3D information is encoded in the image: VP-8 analysis produced a coherent 3D rendering from the shroud image in a way normal photos do not.

• Superficial Coloration: The image is bafflingly superficial; the color resides only on the top two or three fibers of a thread and never penetrates deeper than two microns (millionths of a meter).

• No Pigment: No paint or pigment was found on the linen fibers.

• No Directionality: Microdensitometer analysis revealed the coloration is microscopically directionless, ruling out application by hand or brush.

• Human Blood: Faint stains on the Shroud have been identified as human blood, and analysis indicates these fluids did not come from a decomposing corpse.

• Complexity: Reproducing the image would require a brush with a single bristle 1/100th of a millimeter wide, applying an agent that colors the fiber’s circumference but leaves the interior cellulose uncolored—a process the The Shroud of Turin Research Project (STURP) team found technologically incredible.

• STURP tested alternate mechanisms (including “scorch” from a heated statue) and found fatal problems with each; the technical report concluded no “technologically credible process” has been proposed that matches all observed characteristics. Murray notes this conclusion has not been successfully challenged for decades.

• Blood flow, scourge marks, and other image details fit the biblical narrative and also match anatomical/historical expectations.

• Dust/pollen/organic & inorganic material lifted via adhesive tape later produced evidence the cloth was in the Middle East, specifically Jerusalem.

• Textile evidence: the weave is described as common in antiquity in the Mideast but not medieval Europe.

• Stitching evidence: a complex stitching style is said to match stitching on an ancient garment from Masada.

• Pollen distribution fits a “route” and strongly favors Jerusalem: some pollen types match places tradition associates with the shroud’s travels (Edessa, Constantinople, Lirey, Turin), but most are near Jerusalem; about half are Mideast-only; some confined to the Jerusalem area; and blossoming times are compatible with Passover timing.

• Rare limestone traces: microscopic limestone on the shroud matched limestone from the same rock shelf as the Holy Sepulcher/Garden Tomb in a University of Chicago (Fermi Institute) microprobe analysis; Murray reports it was the only match among ten tomb samples examined.

• A later (2019) cellulose-aging test (Wide-Angle X-ray Scattering) is described as dating the linen to ~19–21 centuries and as incompatible with the 1988 radiocarbon result unless the shroud was stored for centuries at implausibly high temperatures.1

With all of this on the “authentic” side of the scale, it feels like the balance has to shift to that conclusion, almost regardless of how much “Bayesian weight” you give the results of the radiocarbon dating. But Murray isn’t done. It turns out that silver bullet may have been a dud.

[I]n 1988, carbon dating put the creation of the shroud at 1325 plus or minus 65 years—the appropriate range if the image is a forgery. For many, this closed the case. But carbon dating the shroud was controversial even before it was implemented—the danger of a contaminated sample was thought to be high. That danger was apparently realized. Raymond Rogers, the coauthor of the original STURP technical report, studied the sample and concluded that “[t]he combined evidence from chemical kinetics, analytical chemistry, cotton content, and pyrolysis/ms proves that the material from the radiocarbon area of the shroud is significantly different from that of the main cloth. The radiocarbon sample was thus not part of the original cloth and is invalid for determining the age of the shroud.

It appears that they tested a part of the Shroud that was a later medieval repair, not part of the original. I know that the obvious next question is: why don’t they go back and make sure to get a piece of the original and use radiocarbon dating on that? I don’t know. Perhaps they will at some point, but for now the evidence seems pretty conclusive that the Shroud dates back to the place and time of Jesus’ death. The conclusion that the Shroud’s peculiar qualities are a result of being imprinted by the holy power of Jesus’ resurrection are not quite so firm, but consider again the characteristics of the image in the cloth:

[T]he straw-colored image on the shroud is bafflingly superficial. Each linen thread in the shroud is composed of smaller fibers ten to twenty times thinner than a human hair. The color on the shroud is always on the top two or three fibers in the thread—it never penetrates deeper than two microns (millionths of a meter). On a colored fiber with a diameter of fifteen microns, the cellulose within is uncolored. Colored fibers are side by side with uncolored ones.

The implications are that any non-pigment coloring agent (e.g., an acid) that had been applied to the surface of a fiber must cover the entire circumference of the fiber and yet be confined to two microns of depth, leaving the interior uncolored, and have no effect on adjacent uncolored fibers. Doing this would require a brush with one bristle no bigger than a hundredth of a millimeter in diameter—and access to a high-power microscope. These findings ruled out all known artistic ways of creating the image.

Perhaps all of this is old hat to many of my religious readers, and I’m behind the curve. On the other hand perhaps there’s some skeptical take that “demolishes” the various pieces of evidence Murray presented. (If there is, I’d be curious to see it. Murray doesn’t mention anything substantial and I assume he looked.) For my part, as a naive rube from one of the flyover states, I thought it was pretty freaking amazing.

—---------------------------------------------------------------

Yes, I’m a naive rube, but I aspire to be less naive and less rube-ish. If you’d like to join me on my journey of anti-naivete and rube denudation, consider subscribing.

Children of Mars: The Origins of Rome’s Empire

By: Jeremy Armstrong

Published: 2025

288 Pages

Briefly, what is this book about?

The deep history of Rome. What we actually know about its legendary founding, its early rise to prominence, and the shape of its military. Additionally, the development of Roman identity and how that identity interacted with the other elements.

What’s the author’s angle?

This belongs to that genre of book which takes recent scholarship and archaeological evidence and uses it to puncture the previous, more simplistic historical view.

Who should read this book?

Military history buffs, or anyone who’s interested in Rome, particularly the period from roughly 8th–3rd centuries BC.

Specific thoughts: How video games get Rome wrong

I am certain that games like Sid Meier’s Civilization and Paradox Interactive games like Europa Universalis have significantly increased the historical literacy of those who have played them. I would say that, on net, they’re a very positive force for historical literacy.1 However, there is one way in which these games give people a very flattened view of the world, especially in the area this book covers.

From the very moment you start playing a game of Civilization as the Romans, your goals are clear: you’re going to conquer the world. You’re not just going to found one city, you’re going to found multiple cities, as many as you can. Your entire civilization is driven by a singular focus, expansion and domination. And there are definitely no issues of identity. You are the ROMANS!

To be fair to these games, there are numerous limitations. You want the game to be fun to play for a single person, and there’s a limit to the amount of complexity you can add, particularly if you also want to simulate the passage of hundreds of years.

Furthermore, not only is this a feature of video game design, it’s also a feature of the way history is written—by the Romans themselves! Quite a bit of the “history” we get from actual Roman writers is colored by a desire to portray Rome as a city with a destiny. A city that was always aware of its glorious future, and its special place in the world.

Livy portrays early Rome in much the same fashion as the game Civilization. From the moment of the city’s founding by Romulus, it was apparent that it was the first of many cities, and that they’d better start scouting the surrounding countryside in search of the next city site.2 (Plus who knows when you might need to kidnap some wives.3) Livy doesn’t quite describe it in exactly these terms, but in his history the glorious destiny and identity of Rome, as “Rome!” was there from the very beginning.

Armstrong is here to tell you that this is not the case. Not only is the idea of Roman destiny basically a retcon—Rome wasn’t much to imagine a destiny around. In the beginning Rome wasn’t a city-state like Athens or Sparta, it was more of a gathering place where various Italian clans/families coordinated.

As always, deep history is difficult. You’re trying to put together a puzzle where all but a handful of pieces are missing. Still, the idea of the tribe is a useful place to hang our hat. Perhaps if you’ve studied any Roman history you’ve heard of the 35 tribes. But by the time we arrive at the history people are familiar with (Caesar, end of the Republic) these tribes are just a way of keeping track of people, without much if any connection to a person’s actual identity. But in the early days, tribes represented something real. Actual clans and families which were Roman only in a loose sense.

In the sixth century BC, historians are somewhat confident there was a reorganization of tribes, which ended up creating four “urban” tribes and fifteen “rural” tribes. But even then using the word tribes probably gives one an exaggerated sense of the size. They really were just families, and manpower-wise Rome was still pretty weak. It was another 200 years before Rome got around to conquering the nearby city of Veii, and by nearby I mean it was 7 miles to the north.

At that time that was considered unusually aggressive. War mostly consisted of raids and short battles featuring champions. Actual expansion and conquest, of the kind you imagine if you’ve played too much Civilization, mostly didn’t happen. And despite this show of strength, a few years later, Rome itself was sacked by a band of 5,000 Gallic mercenaries which happened to be passing through on their way to Sicily.4

All of this leaves us with the question: if Rome was just a hub where some families coordinated around mutual defense and trade, and if it was just one of dozens of such hubs in ancient Italy, how did they end up being the one that went on to conquer so much of the world?

Armstrong doesn’t provide a really concrete answer. There wasn’t some singular change, or a uniquely talented leader, or a particular bit of culture the Romans possessed and everyone else lacked. The clans associated with Rome were just better at scaling up the normal Italian customs of power and obligation. They didn’t do anything different, they were just better at doing what everyone else was doing. Clans were always uniting together for mutual defense. Rome was slightly better at systematizing it. The Roman clans were bound together a little bit tighter, and when an army needed to be raised, that allowed them to raise one slightly larger than their neighbor. This made them a little bit stronger and encouraged other clans to join them. (After the sack of Rome by the Gauls, four more tribes were added from the remnants of Veii.) This organization snowballed until eventually things really took off, but over the course of centuries.

We want to imagine that there was something special about Rome from the very beginning. The Romans themselves fell into this trap. But in reality, a lot of stuff is just people getting lucky, and you never know how long that luck is going to last. In Rome’s case it lasted a very long time.

—----------------------------------------------------------------------

I came across this book in an episode of the very excellent School of War podcast, hosted by Aaron Maclean. I hesitate to recommend an entire podcast. If you take one of my book recommendations you’re only looking at 10-20 hours (mostly) but a podcast recommendation might end up being hundreds of hours. Still this is a pretty good one. Speaking of recommendations and luck. Hopefully I’ll be lucky enough to get a recommendation from you. Perhaps you could recommend it to the members of your clan.