As We May Think is one of the greatest essays ever written, and I am all for popularizing it, but one thing about the most recent mention just rubbed me the wrong way in how it presented its author, Vannevar Bush:

Bush was part of the Oppenheimer set; he was an engineer whose work was critical to the creation of the atomic bomb.

This paints the picture of an engineer working at Los Alamos under Oppenheimer to make the bomb, when in fact Bush was leading the United States' nuclear program for two whole years before Oppenheimer became involved. Oppenheimer’s predecessor? Sure. Part of his set? Misleading.

I suspect it was presented this way because of that movie; the more I keep seeing these kinds of distortions as a result, the less I think of it. This is why I will keep recommending The Making of the Atomic Bomb to everyone and anyone who was tickled by the Los Alamos scenes — the only ones worth watching.

There are books you read once and toss out ⊕ See also: anything by Malcolm Gladwell, Michael Lewis, or any other permanent airport book store resident. and those which keep on giving, and René Girard’s I See Satan Fall Like Lightning falls firmly in the latter category.

One concept I have come to appreciate more thanks to the book is that of the scandal. ⊕ As in: “the reaction of moral outrage and indignation about a real or perceived transgression of social norms”, not the TV show. Though I’m sure the show has its fans. Girard has a book — or rather, a collection of essays — with “scandal” in the name, but both he and Luke Burgis focus more on mimetic desire and how it can lead to conflict; the build-up of scandal is “just” a stepping stone, something natural and completely expected of humans. This may be related to their catholicism, but I am neither a theologian nor a philosopher, so I’ll refrain from speculating further.

What I won’t refrain from, however, is flipping my thinking from human desire causing scandal to the human desire for scandal. It a phenomenon not exactly like, but closely related to, schadenfreude — the pleasure in the misfortune of others. In fact, a search for Skandalfreude does return some relevant hits — one of them from Stefan Zweig, no less — so let’s use that word to describe the pleasure in being scandalized or, more broadly, the desire to be scandalized. And I suspect that, similar to schadenfreude, there is a Gaussian curve of people’s propensity for experiencing it in general and, flipping the axes, a Gaussian curve of the number of people with the propensity for it when it comes to a particular topic.

The first bell curve pits the “Karens”, ⊕ I am misusing the term Karen here, and contributing to it becoming a suitcase word. For this, I apologize. You could replace it with “the woke” in your mind’s eye — again, a misuse! — and get the same intended result. Funny how that works.scandalized by everything, opposite the phlegmatics, scandalized by nothing. On the ends of the second curve lie the haters — who think that a particular company, person, ideology, etc. is evil — and the fanboys, to whom that same entity can do no wrong.

Regarding the second, entity-based curve: the higher the profile, the fatter the tails. This we all know intuitively. When Apple causes an uproar for their “shot on the iPhone” Scary Fast event, it is the skandalfreude fat tail poking its head. Knowing how many people pour over every one of Apple’s actions just wanting to be scandalized — to the point of paying to be scandalized — it is a small miracle these storms in a teacup don’t happen more often.

So with those two curves in mind, Girard’s insight is this: mimetic desire makes only one of their ends “sticky”, the one that “likes” scandal. With a critical mass, it is no longer a bell-shaped curve at all, but leans towards the exponential. The entity to which this happens becomes a scapegoat and is stoned to death, in the true sense millennia ago, nowadays only metaphorically. This is why Apple and the rest of Big Tech should tread lightly: their tails are fat enough that even small missteps, or perceived missteps, cause controversy. A full-blown mistake or, worse yet, a true transgression, would hurl the skandalfreudeian mass ⊕ Or has that already happened?towards the deep end and make them into a scapegoat for all of the society’s ills.

The practice of doomscrolling could be viewed in this light: trawling thorough the timeline, waiting for the next opportunity to experience some skandalfreude, maybe even jump onto a stoning bandwagon or two, at no personal cost. Much of online behavior seems less bizzare when viewed through this mental model, and for that alone it is a good one to have.

I agree wholeheartedly with Alan Jacobs that “it is always better to light a candle than curse the darkness” but the self-help section of this LAX bookstore is so impenetrably dark that a candle just wouldn’t do. Maybe a 100,000 lumen LED torch?

Finished reading: Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino 📚and now I want to learn Italian (again!) because I can only imagine the word play that is there in the original.

The recent conversation between Peter Attia and Russ Roberts on cancer screening and longevity has left a good impression, so in case you rushed out to buy his new book, Outlive, here is some thoughtful criticism. Biennial colonoscopies and whole-body MRIs at any frequency are indeed unreasonable.

Finished reading: I See Satan Fall Like Lightning by René Girard 📚. It was one of those delightful surprises — much like G.E.B. was last year — that had me double-check my dates: it came out in 1999 but could have been written yesterday. Only, of course, with not nearly as evocative of a title.

It has been sitting on my wish list for a while, as on its surface it resembled too much Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces: hunt for similarities between disparate legends, epics, and myths; generalize. I did not much care for that. But after a glowing overview of Girard’s work in Wanting, off the list it went and onto the shelf.

That was a good decision. The comparison to Campbell was unfair: Girard is narrower in focus and more precise in style. The message is not buried under a mountain of anecdote, it’s right there in the introduction: myths are lies people told themselves, blinded by their own viciousness manifest in the process of scapegoating — i.e. mimetic contagion, i.e. the titular Satan — various stories of the Bible shone a light, the light, onto the process, and the world was never the same. Two thousand and some years later people are again eating their own tale, but I am now mixing my myths and becoming an unreliable re-teller — you should read the book for yourself, it is short but punchy.

📚 I Am a Strange Loop was quite a bit more personal than G.E.B. (about which I wrote a one-sentence blurb here; it is due for a proper review, after a re-read), and it’s easy to pile on Hofstadter since he’s made himself so vulnerable, but there are moments when he is way off base. Yes, there is a something to the analogy between the sense of selfhood and a self-referential (“strange”) loop, and yes different animals have different levels of self-perception, but no, I would not hail Mother Theresa as the pinnacle of humanity, nor Martin Luther King, Jr. for that matter: sorting people’s souls by a single metric is a slippery slope.

The second issue is with his idea of our own loops containing those of others, and people’s identity persisting in others' minds. That is true only to the extent that other people 1) know themselves, and 2) let others learn what they know about themselves, and not many would pass through both filters.

I am reluctant to recommend long podcasts, but Joe Walker’s 3+ hour interview with Richard Rhodes, the octogenarian author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb, was so engrossing that I didn’t even realize it was that long until posting this very message. Between discussing the Manhattan project, nuclear energy, AI, and a sprinkling of geopolitics past and present, the conversation just flew by.

For your (and mine, time permitting) weekend reading, listening, and/or viewing pleasure: the Tim Ferris interview with Nassim Taleb and Scott Patterson. I sure hope you are familiar with the former; the latter is a reporter for The Wall Street Journal who also wrote a book about “black swan traders”, which, yes, is probably going to the pile the antilibrary. It is a 2-hour discussion rightfully described as a feast.

Speaking of book piles, here is one from 3 years ago, shot in November, which was to be my holiday reading. Ended up reading four out of the seven, including A Pattern Language.