bjack on 20/8/2016 at 03:49
Brave New World seems to have a sort of likeable aspect to it. Many people would love to live in such a world, as long as they are alphas. Everyone on Soma. And then that silly savage has to muck it all up.
Flowers for Algernon. We read that in 5th grade and also saw the fairly cool movie. "that that is is that that is not is not is that it it is"
At 10 years old, that was a cool puzzle. Nearly ever kid in the class was choked up when he started to degrade again.
SubJeff on 20/8/2016 at 07:07
Whoa there on the Algernon spoiler Mr Spoiler!
If you read and liked 1984 and Brave New World I recommend reading We.
bjack on 20/8/2016 at 16:46
I think I downloaded "We" a few years ago from The Gutenberg Project. I only skimmed it though. I need to check it out again. As for the spoiler? It is just the unpunctuated sentence. When my 5th grade teacher introduced the book to us, she wrote t on the chalkboard and asked us all to figure it out. Maybe you were talking about the "choked up" part... Ok, I've edited that. :)
hedonicflux~~ on 26/8/2016 at 17:56
Dunno if any of you are into non-fiction of the philosophical/sociological/political theory type, but I'm currently reading
<i>Democracy Inc.: Managed Democracy and the Spectre of Inverted Totalitarianism</i> - Sheldon S. Wolin
and it's amazingly thought-provoking stuff. It's a hefty read. Lot's of application of 20th century French postmodernist thought, but in a much more concrete application, as it draws from it a theory of American empire, the roots of America's superpower ideology, the expansion of it's "power imaginaries", and the perversion of democracy in the process. The overall hypothesis is that we live in a totalitarian state that differs from classical totalitarianism by its "postmodern" form, rendering the citizenry apathetic and under the media-fed illusion of freedom, as opposed to mobilizing to become blindly and ecstatically supportive of a regime as in Nazi Germany. It does much tracing of the ideological roots which ended up brainwashing an entire class of the political elite (neoconservatives), citing such (slimy, disgusting) philosophers as Leo Strauss and their almost omnipotent influence on this elite class.
Would recommend!
R.I.P. Sheldon Wolin, 2015 :,(
Thirith on 26/8/2016 at 18:13
While the details of how the world functions may not be realistic, the sheer grimy dinginess of 1984 felt much more real to me than Brave New World's, erm, world, and I didn't particularly like Huxley's prose style. Orwell's worked much better for me - though I always skipped the passages from Goldstein's book. They're basically the political equivalent of the Tom Bombadil bits in Lord of the Rings.
Yakoob on 18/9/2016 at 01:06
Just finished Connie Willis' Doomsday Book and loved it. While it does kind of meander and go back and forth or repeat itself a lot, it got me hooked. I think it may be the stream-of-consciousness, believable writing that kept me going. Maybe it's just what my own disorganized and ADD-y mind needed these days :p
The overall plot is pretty great as well with some unexpected turns. The end is a bit depressing but expectedly and fittingly so.
I know picked up Pratchett's Mort and Press Start to Play, both sound interesting.
Vivian on 18/9/2016 at 14:45
Currently chewing my way through Thinking Fast And Slow by Daniel Kahneman. I usually don't read pop-sci books for fun (I know I should, but it feels too much like working), but I found this lying around next to the bins in front of my building. It is genuinely a very interesting book, and I think may even be having a positive influence on the way I think (or at least confirming some things I've suspected about our decision making machinery). It's about how we make judgements, pretty much, and how our subconscious (fast) and conscious (slow) systems interact in ways that often mean we make bad judgements, and find assessing the quality of information available to us difficult. Deffo worth a look.
demagogue on 18/9/2016 at 15:34
Well well, I just finished Paul Glimcher's Foundations of Neuroeconomics which is pretty much Kahneman with math & neurons. Well, no, just the opposite really, exactly because Khaneman I take it says the whole system is a house of card tricks for every kind of Pleistoscene situation you could've got yourself into. Glimcher says our decisionmaking system more structured than that, and not such a bag of gimmicks.
Eg, neurons naturally normalize quantities to things like environmental background (green still looks like the same green in indoor vs outdoor lighting, although they're literally 6 orders of magnitude apart), or your status (sugar is sweeter when your bloodsugar is low) or a choice set (picking between a short & grande cappuccino, you don't sense the absolute size but the relative size). It's not like it does that as a special gimmick just to set a baseline & make decisions faster like Khaneman says. Well it does that too, but for Glimcher it's a central structural design feature of neuron signalling that's always been there. Most of Glimcher's book is walking through a lot of the biases to show they fall out of structural feature & not so custom built. But it's not classical econ either because the biases are still real effects. It's something between Milton Friedman & Kahneman. I learned a ton from it anyway.
Not something I'd normally brag on or particularly recommend, but since you opened the door... I could recommend it to you or anyone interested in these things in the right mood. It's not pop science, but it's still pretty accessible because he's trying to bridge two groups that seriously distrust each other, well, despise each other (economists & psycologists/neurophy's, Kahneman being very much the latter bent, Glimcher in between).
Vivian on 18/9/2016 at 16:48
Yeah, I thought it would be something you'd know about. I am definitely reading something light and fluffy with spaceships after this, but when the book cycle clicks round to 'serious' again I'll check out Paul Glimcher, nice one!
faetal on 19/9/2016 at 01:54
Quote Posted by Vivian
Currently chewing my way through Thinking Fast And Slow by Daniel Kahneman. I usually don't read pop-sci books for fun (I know I should, but it feels too much like working), but I found this lying around next to the bins in front of my building. It is genuinely a very interesting book, and I think may even be having a positive influence on the way I think (or at least confirming some things I've suspected about our decision making machinery). It's about how we make judgements, pretty much, and how our subconscious (fast) and conscious (slow) systems interact in ways that often mean we make bad judgements, and find assessing the quality of information available to us difficult. Deffo worth a look.
Great book. Love DK. He did a deep analysis of investment banking performance over 20 years (Goldman Sachs data I seem to remember) and showed a pretty much zero percent correlation between individuals and investment performance. So basically a computer program would perform as well as an investment banker, no matter how good they think they are. What was the response of the IBs he addressed? Flat cognitive dissonance.
