Finished reading: A Severe Mercy by Sheldon Vanauken 📚, a book about love, death and grief so earnest that any half-assed paragraph from me would not be fair. The title is justified.

Finished reading: Debt by David Graeber 📚, dropped about a third of the way through. For a book supposedly about the history of debt it had too much speculation and too many baseless claims. Looking back, The Dawn of Everything had similar tendencies, but his co-author David Wengrow seems to have been a moderating influence. Bullshit Jobs was also a tedious read, so as good of an essayist Graeber was, the talent didn’t translate to books.

📚 Writing with Style: The Economist Guide may not be the most important style guide to come out, but it has to be the funniest. Between the self-references and the dry wit lie many lessons: that even professional writers do some things a certain way because the alternative would “look weird”; that I use too many commas, the Oxford comma being one of them; and that if my name were ever to be mentioned in The Economist it would lose its diacritics — unless I insisted they stay. It earned its place on the shelf above the screen.

Stop the presses! Actually, don’t stop — please keep them running — there will be a new edition of Poor Charlie’s Almanack out next week. My pre-order is in. (ᔥDaring Fireball)

Rest in peace, Charlie Munger. If you are… were… are a fan of Charlie’s and haven’t heard of Poor Charlie’s Almanack, may this post correct the error.

Quote of the morning:

My view is that any theory of what is wrong with American health care is true because American health care is wrong in every possible way.

Very true! This is from Alex Tabarrok’s review of what seems to be quite a misguided book about America’s handling of covid. I’ll take Tyler’s side of that debate.

Tyler Cowen’s list of best non-fiction books of 2023 has 28 entries. Those are not all the books he read so far this year — only “the best” — and looking at the list one wonders what the criteria could possibly have been. The best at adding to the noise, perhaps?

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?