Nonfiction

Legal Systems Very Different from Ours by David Friedman

David Friedman tells the stories of many real societies and their incredibly interesting legal systems. I stress their existence beacuse some of their systems are so different that I would sooner guess they were made up. Friedman remains objective throughout the book despite his anarcho-capitalist tendencies. All one would think reading it is “jeez, can this guy think in anything but economic terms?”. I’ll note that this isn’t just a history; Friedman acknowledges some complaints or inefficencies of the contemporary legal system in the United States and offers some suggestions based on the legal features of societies he examined. I want to stress again that this is very interesting history in its own right (he covers pirate law!), and Friedman’s analysis only makes it better

I’ll finish by saying I had never read a book by David Friedman before, so I was going in blind, but this description Scott Alexander is amazingly accurate.

And whenever I read David Friedman, it sounds like “The X’wunda ensure positive-sum intergenerational trade by a market system in which everyone pays the efficient price for continued economic relationships with their spouse’s clan; they demonstrate their honesty with a costly signal of self-mutilation that creates common knowledge of belief in a faith whose priests are able to arbitrate financial disputes.”

Seeing Like a State by James C. Scott

A classic work in the canon of modern YIMBYism, market-anarchism. Scott covers the follies of pre-21st century high modernist authoritarianism in various implementations from German forest science to central city planning in Brazil and more. The absolute detail with which Scott analyzes these events is startling. It’s long enough that it almost feels like a parody of itself towards the end, especially if you’ve already familiar with concepts like Scott’s legibility. Its raw historical precision is a sight to behold in itself.

Chan Buddhism by Peter D. Hershock

A nice, short book briefly covering Chan Buddhism, Buddhism as it developed in east Asia. This focuses in mixed parts on history, lived religion, and philosophy. I think I would have preferred a more strict history book.

Order Without Design: How Markets Shape Cities by Alain Bertaud

The libertarians and economists were right. You should use prices to guide any kind of city planning (which he concedes, albeit weakly, there should be). There are some other interesting factoids like major American cities performing well compared to their international counterparts on travel times and transportation.

Buddhism as Philosophy: An Introduction by Mark Siderits

A good summary on the various philosophies that can fall under the umbrella of Buddhism. This focuses on pretty much just the philosophy in Buddhism, referencing history only as needed for context. This is definitely a good introduction to various schools of Buddhism and what they contribute to philosophy, and a decent introduction to some philosophical areas themselves.

The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes

A tome chronicling the scientists, engineers, soldiers, bureaucrats, politicians, nations, cultures, and history that ultimately led to the Manhattan Project and US creation of nuclear weapons. I really enjoyed the people-focused biographical tale of how nuclear physics developed, starting often with their childhoods and going up to their contributions either directly to the Manhattan Project or to physics in general. Here are some interesting tidbits:

• Arthur Koestler remembers that food was scarce, especially if you tried to buy it with the regime’s ration cards and nearly worthless paper money, but for some reason the same paper would purchase an abundance of Commune-sponsored vanilla ice cream, which his family therefore consumed for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

• In 1920 the Horthy regime introduced a numerus clausus law restricting university admission which required “that the comparative numbers of the entrants correspond as nearly as possible to the relative population of the various races or nationalities.”421 The law, which would limit Jewish admissions to 5 percent, a drastic reduction, was deliberately anti-Semitic.

• Another ZIP-like rod had been tied to the balcony railing with a length of rope; one of the physicists, feeling foolish, would stand by to chop the rope with an ax if all else failed. Allison had even insisted on a suicide squad, three young physicists installed with jugs of cadmium-sulfate solution near the ceiling on the elevator they had used to lift graphite bricks; “several of us,” Wattenberg complains, “were very upset with this since an accidental breakage of the jugs near the pile could have destroyed the usefulness of the material.”

• The Air Force discovered the jet stream when they targeted the Musashi aircraft engine factory north of Tokyo:

  • “I did not anticipate the extremely high wind velocities above thirty thousand feet,” Hansell said later, “and they came as a very disagreeable surprise.”

• I knew Kurt Vonnegut served in WWII, but I did not know he was a POW in Dresden during the firebombing on February 13th, 1945.

  • Then a siren went off—it was February 13, 1945—and we went down two stories under the pavement into a big meat locker. It was cool there, with cadavers hanging all around. When we came up the city was gone. . . . The attack didn’t sound like a hell of a lot either. Whump. They went over with high explosives first to loosen things up, and then scattered incendiaries. . . . They burnt the whole damn town down. . . .

• I wasn’t very familiar with Leo Szilard, but this book made him seem like he thought himself a main character and tried to be relevant at every step.
  • And not for no reason, for in 1933, Leo Szilard, despite Ernest Rutherford calling it moonshine, believed it would be possible to get usable energy from the atom. He was so angry at Rutherford’s dismissal, he ended up thinking about the nuclear chain reaction:

    • “As the light changed to green and I crossed the street,” Szilard recalls, “it . . . suddenly occurred to me that if we could find an element which is split by neutrons and which would emit two neutrons when it absorbs one neutron, such an element, if assembled in sufficiently large mass, could sustain a nuclear chain reaction.

  • He wanted to experiment with all the contemporarily known elements to find one that would allow a chain reaction, but he couldn’t because he lacked the funds.
  • Szilard filed a patent for the neutron-induced nuclear chain reaction in June 1934!
    • He in fact thought this was so relevant and dangerous that he got the British navy to ensure its secrecy.
  • Szilard and Einstein drafted a letter to FDR in 1939 about the possibility of “extremely powerful bombs of a new type” being created through use of a nuclear chain reaction in uranium.
• Einstein was denied clearance to work on the Manhattan Project because of his pacificist (and probably his Zionist) writings.

The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation by Jon Gertner

My main takeaway was that it’s not necessarily Bell’s being a monopoly that led to some innovations (thinking of the transistor here) but that it positioned them well to discover and invent many things because they were in the right industry (communications) at the right time and had a lot of people and money to throw at problems.

Fiction

Red Rising by Pierce Brown

A fun, YA SF novel that is the first of a series. Your small-town, upstanding but otherwise average Joe suffers a painful loss and gets recruited by a rebel faction that helps him enter the ranks of a genetically modified, space-Rome-LARPing elite with the goal of disrupting a star-system-wide empire. Maybe there’s a bit of scope creep, but it’s fun nonetheless.

Neuromancer by William Gibson

This was the first fiction I had read since Red Rising. This was very much more cyberpunk, and I know it’s a more foundational work, so I’m not sure I can appreciate it fully since I’m already accustomed to the cyberpunk aesthetics and ideas. I still enjoyed it and think the main strengths of the book were creating a setting. Something I thought was relatively prescient, even without internet social media technology mentioned, was the following line:

Fads swept the youth of the Sprawl at the speed of light; entire subcultures could rise overnight, thrive for a dozen weeks, and then vanish utterly.

This captures contemporary internet meme culture almost perfectly. To a lesser degree more niche, ideological subcultures; those appear, thrive, and vanish on the timescale of a few months.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K. Dick

Another piece of classic cyberpunk. Set in near-future cyberpunk San Francisco, it follows Rick Deckard, a bounty hunter for the police who “retires” androids, or artificially-grown almost-human creatures. It is interesting noting the different technologies authors might focus on e.g. in this, Dick obviously uses artificial biological life but also seemingly glosses over wireheading with the empathy boxes as if their main utility is that of a cup of coffee in the morning and the shared religious experience with Mercer. In Neuromancer, there was cloning, life extension, suspended animation, and the internet as technological advances specifically relevant to the plot. Cheap spaceflight from Neuromancer, as the wireheading, Martian colonization, and more general cheap, rapid, individual transportation in this book are still noteworthy advances but not very relevant to the plot.

I watched Blade Runner before having read this, so I might have some bias, but I enjoyed the film more than this novel. I thought Deckard was a more competent protagonist in the film. It is interesting to note some of the differences: the film leaves out the entire religious sideplot with its kipple, empathy box-enabled shared experience, and antagonization by Buster Friendly of the novel, the empathy boxes in general are also totally absent from the film, and in general, much less background is given to explain the state of the world and how supposedly life on the off-world colonies is better than on Earth.

The philosophical questions it sparks like those of what constitutes being a person, is wireheading good, and a slightly more poltiical one in the changing roles of religion and entertainment in our lives are more numerous and explicit in the novel than in the film, and even the implication of Deckard’s own humanity or lackthereof is more explicit in the novel.

Soumission by Michel Houellebecq

If you drop a frog in a pot of boiling water, it will of course frantically try to clamber out. But if you place it gently in a pot of tepid water and turn the heat on low, it will float there quite placidly. As the water gradually heats up, the frog will sink into a tranquil stupor, exactly like one of us in a hot bath, and before long, with a smile on its face, it will unresistingly allow itself to be boiled to death.