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.

Finished reading: Wanting by Luke Burgis 📚, which I wish had existed for me to read back in my early 20s, but maybe I would have thought it trite back then? Probably not: ever since The Dude’s parroting of pop culture was mistaken for profundity I knew how powerful mimesis was and how blind people were to it. The contents of Wanting would have brought into sharp focus that we are not only copying other people’s words and actions, but also — most of all, perhaps — desires.

Like The Dao of Capital it is overflowing with new-to-me mental models, ⊕ One day, I should write a list of all these models and how I use them. Alas, not today. or at least with words to describe what may have tickled me already: calculating versus meditative thought, thin desire versus thick, and — in a nod to Taleb — Celebristan versus Freshmenistan. At the very least it clarified too me why Taleb himself was a model worth emulating.

And if you think it too of-the-time, with its SEO subtitle and quoting of some questionable philosophers and contemporaneous books, well, there is a René Girard reading list provided in the appendix and I See Satan Fall Like Lightning is now on the pile.

Finished reading: The Dao of Capital by Mark Spitznagel 📚 about which I will have more to say later — the weekend can’t come soon enough — but how fitting that a book on the Austrian school of economics is written in an extremely roundabout way, and with such German syntax. But that’s OK!

Jason Snell notes that the iMac’s strongest legacy was Apple itself:

The company was close to bankruptcy when Jobs returned, and the iMac gave the company a cash infusion that allowed it to complete work on Mac OS X, rebuild the rest of the Mac product line in the iMac’s image, open Apple Stores, make the iPod, and set the tone for the next twenty five years.

I’m currently reading The Dao of Capital, which is all about the Austrian school of economics and the roundaboutness of true entrepreneurs, and this made what Apple is doing even more salient. Can you name a more roundabout tech company than Apple? ⊕ To be clear, I suspect little of this was premeditated in the long term — i.e. no, Jobs and Ive probably did not have a Vision Pro in mind as the ultimate goal when they thought of the iMac — but the ethos of seeing everything as a potential intermediary and not commoditizing it fully à la Samsung is very much the Apple way. Using the iMac as the intermediate step towards the iPod, which was itself an intermediate step towards the iPhone, which was supposedly to be an intermediate step towards the iPad but turned into something much greater, though it also did end up being an intermediate step towards Apple silicone, all the while peppering these intermediary products with technology — LiDAR, ultra-wide lenses, spatial audio — that would become the key building blogs of Vision Pro, which is itself an intermediary towards who knows what. Very Austrian.

Thinking more closely to home, I can think of a few biotech companies that may be doing something like this — maybe, if you squint — but none come close. The addiction to immediate profits that the distorted American health care market provides is much too great.(↬Daring Fireball)

I ⊕ As a side note: Paperwhite is objectively worse in turning pages than the original Kindle. Poor touchscreen and unclear areas mean that I am never quite sure what will happen when I try to turn the page. Having real clickety-click buttons — not that capacitive junk — would have greatly improved the experience. tried using my Kindle more, I really did, especially for nighttime reading for which Paperwhite’s backlight seemed tailor-made. But I couldn’t. The experience felt off, and no matter how good the book was, picking up the tablet and flipping through the pages felt like a chore.

Scrolling through micro.blog’s timeline, I think I found out why:

surveys indicate that screens and e-readers interfere with two other important aspects of navigating texts: serendipity and a sense of control. People report that they enjoy flipping to a previous section of a paper book when a sentence surfaces a memory of something they read earlier, for example, or quickly scanning ahead on a whim. People also like to have as much control over a text as possible—to highlight with chemical ink, easily write notes to themselves in the margins as well as deform the paper however they choose. The Reading Brain in the Digital Age

I don’t know about “chemical ink”, but knowing where I am in the book — especially a 700+ pager Content warning: A nazi biography. — is important for how I retain information (less important) and my sanity (slightly more so).

As for reading proper (chemical?) books at night: that problem may be solved by this one simple trick, not due to arrive until Thursday. Let’s see how it goes.

As obscure public intellectuals go, Rao is fairly well known online, but every day, somebody’s born who’s never seen The Flintstones, and the man does have a knack for packaging phenomena both permanent and ephemeral into digestible mental models which you can use again and again. Sure, you could check out his official New Reader guide — and there is some match between that and the list below — but doesn’t a bespoke list on an even more obscure personal blog make it more adventurous?

• The Gervais Principle, which should have been a book (and is much better than his only actual book). You will never look at office dynamics the same way again.
• The Cactus and the Weasel, the extension of the hedgehog and the fox dichotomy which made me fall in love with 2x2s, and also realize that I was a fox trying to fit in with a crowd of hedgehogs.
• The Premium Mediocre Life of Maya Millennial, wherein he coined the syntagm “premium mediocre” which perfectly captured the 2010s esthetics
• A Quick (Battle) Field Guide to the New Culture Wars, which made me want to spend as little time as possible on social networks in general, and one social network in particular, which is a good thing!
• The Internet of Beefs, which finally made sense of the ridiculous back-and-forths which were so common on Twitter X.
• Against Waldenponding, which earned him an invite to the best podcast out there, and which is also the reason I am writing this, having recently been reminded of Rao’s work.

Enjoy the multiple branching rabbit holes!