231–240 of 256 posts
There Is No Antimemetics Division: https://qntm.org/scp
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As suggested by its title, "Debt" is an anthropology book about the history of debt. And by extension the origins of money. Not economics. Adam Smith and his contemporaries hypothesized that barter proceeded money. Modern economics textbooks and pundits continue to repeat this misbelief. Academics even admit the tale is often repeated as form of short hand narrative. Charlemagne was quaint?
Too bad that the book about debt and how it became intertwined with our culture and morality relies on a spurious conflation of basic terms. Adam Smith wrote a whole book on The Theory of Moral Sentiments but the beliefs that Graeber choses to ascribe to him are invented whole cloth. And for a book written by an anthropologist, the picture of China we get is a culture existentialist caricature. > Charlemagne was quai…
Sorry, I'm just not seeing it.
FWIW, I wouldn't expect Smith to have access to reports from the New World, or even the inclination to connect the dots (play anthropolgist). So maybe you think Graeber is too harsh there. But I certainly expect Adam's academic successors to adjust as necessary.
Also FWIW, I wouldn't care so much about barter-money genesis fables, recognizing that pop-science lags academic best avail science by decades or more, were it not for the outsized influence that economic spokesmodels have on real world policy.
With that kind of assumed power, relished and hoarded, the pundits have that much more responsibility to be intellectually honest. In my future perfect world, of course.
You don't have to explain more, beating a dead horse. But I am keen to know which explanations -- what is money? where did money come from? -- you favor.
My favorites I read this year in order: - Prayer of Owen Meany, it’s the basis of the movie Simon Birch if you have seen that. The book has so much more going on though - My Antonia, wonderful characters - Jude the Obscure, the cover tells you the ending is shocking, and the cover is right! - How the Irish Saved Civilization, really fun and interesting
The Bobiverse series by Dennis E. Taylor. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01L082SCI?plink=uiGaVWnYtvU9VuSn&... Ever dream of being a post-human computer with a free mandate to explore the galaxy as a Von Neumann probe? Then read this series. Not only is the setting interesting, his character development is really well done too. I hate recommending an Audible book (terrible business practices) but Dennis has an exclusivity…
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Did you read that book? I did, and Graeber certainly doesn’t think GGS or Diamond is racist
Yes I have read the book. I can't seem to access the rest of the parent tree (did our comments get shadow-banned?) but I think I was just trying to provide support for the abundant criticism that book has gotten However, I don't think there's anything in the book that suggests Graeber and Wengrow DON'T think Diamond is a racist. The few professional anthropologists I'm friends with hold such a view (obvy with more nu…
"Racist" is an extremely lazy label; it shuts down any interesting or well-motivated conversation.
It's especially silly in this case because the "traditional racist" explanation to Lali's question is genes, and Diamond's whole point is to provide a different answer to the question. Many people think he has gone too far in the direction of geographical determinism, but that's hardly a racist POV -- it's more like the opposite.
To be clear, what I was saying is NOT that anyone who disagrees with Diamond has an "ideological bone to pick". There are plenty of people who disagree with him honestly -- it's inevitable because it's a work of synthesis that "stomps on" many academic subfields. He makes leaps to the "big picture" that don't meet the standard of evidence for many (although I don't think there is any false advertising of rigor)
What I was saying that the "racist" label applied to Diamond is evidence of someone who wants to shut down conversation, probably because he doesn't conform to that person's ideology. If they understand what he wrote, they wouldn't make such a claim (especially not as a one line Internet comment)
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These critiques linked by a sibling are better, and show evidence of having read the book!
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/historians_views...
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It's weird that you say there's a lack of evidence that Graeber and Wengrow don't think Diamond is racist. If that's what you take away, it seems like a pretty big misunderstanding.
The problem that Graeber and Wengrow have with Diamond (and "big history" authors like Harari) is that they assume that inequality is inevitable and we have little agency as human societies to do otherwise.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/04/opinion/graeber-wengrow-d...
I actually love this point and 100% agree -- we should be consciously shaping our society to be more egalitarian, and not just let evolution and capitalism play out.
However it's also true that Dawn of Everything doesn't propose solutions. It's an amazing critique, including accurate claims of Eurocentrism and male bias, but it doesn't lay out a path forward. It gives evidence for many egalitarian societies, but falls short on how we apply those lessons to our own.
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The original post in this subthread reminds me of
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30128061
i.e. people read things and don't pick up on nuance -- all information (e.g. a book on the entirety of human history) is eventually reduced to a single bit of "racist" or "not racist"
- What Happened To You?: Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing by Bruce D. Perry
- The Star Principle: How It Can Make You Rich
- Decoding Greatness: How the Best in the World Reverse Engineer Success
- The Magic of Thinking Big by David J. Schwartz
- Hands-On Machine Learning with Scikit-Learn and TensorFlow
- The Choice: Embrace the Possible by Edith Eger
* Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture - Martin Fowler
Published in 2005 I believe, but still _very_ relevant. Good concrete architecture patterns and it's cool to see these patterns before they were no-brainers.
* SQL Performance Explained - Markus Winand
Actually how I first convinced my company to start paying for my books (and there have been 15+ since). We had a query that was running in an absurd amount of time for our largest customer and we couldn't get it down. It was a real blocker for releasing a feature, so I bought this book while visiting family and tore through it on the plane home. Got that query down from over 10 minutes to about 12 seconds. Through a light caching layer in front and we were cooking with gas. Part of that query's long runtime is definitely due to a poor initial implementation, but this book taught me a lot about indexes and how they're not being used constantly like I thought they were.
* Clean Architecture - Robert Martin
Always recommended around here. Finally gave it a read and the central message of dependency inversion is a good one. I took a "software engineering" course in Uni that taught us SOLID principles in a text book way where we didn't actually apply them, but working in the real world has taught me that they're appropriate in many cases, and why that's the case. Uncle Bob does a great job demonstrating that.
* Your Money or Your Life - Vicky Robin and Joe Dominguez
I reread this about once a year so I'm going to count it :) Fantastic book that keeps the concept of money and what is really does for us grounded. Helps me keep my expenses down by not being a nut with money. Working in software is a very fortunate career path for a lot of us, and I want to make sure I can make the most of it.
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How do you fight a totalitarian from the inside, eg USA, EU, where surveillance is high and any opposition will be ‘disappeared’?
In the West we still have democracy - yes might be on its last few legs, but it's not too late, as the 2020 election showed - we the people just need to come together and be more organized and strategic and remove the corruption. In the US or EU no political opposition was 'suicided' or disappeared in a Gulag like it happened in Russia multiple times. In Russia or China you will be arrested for holding up a white pie…
This is laughably biased. Whatever his defects, the election of Trump was if anything a much better example for democracy in action than the forced-along Biden election in which as much as possible of the mainline media and tech companies did everything possible to ensure it went that way.
Trump legitimately upset the applecart by winning (even if it was an electoral college victory, it was nonetheless part of how the system formally works) and surprised many people including a majority of the media landscape fully against his campaign. Because you detest that particular president's politics (im no fan of them either in many ways) doesn't make it an antidemocratic step backward..
The best non-fiction book I read in 2022 was Plagues Upon the Earth ( https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/57423807-plagues-upon-th... ) a history of infectious disease in humans. It really changed my views on a lot of things, especially how recently many contagious diseases crossed over from animals. The best fiction book I read in 2022 was Spinning Silver ( https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36896898-spinning-silve…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In the West we still have democracy - yes might be on its last few legs, but it's not too late, as the 2020 election showed - we the people just need to come together and be more organized and strategic and remove the corruption. In the US or EU no political opposition was 'suicided' or disappeared in a Gulag like it happened in Russia multiple times. In Russia or China you will be arrested for holding up a white pie…
>In the West we still have democracy - yes might be on its last few legs, but it's not too late, as the 2020 election showed This is laughably biased. Whatever his defects, the election of Trump was if anything a much better example for democracy in action than the forced-along Biden election in which as much as possible of the mainline media and tech companies did everything possible to ensure it went that way. Trum…
With him in power we would have eventually slid into fascism.
The reason he won back then is in a large part due to the misinformation campaigns supported partly by Russia, see Cambridge Analytica with the psychographic targeting etc.
For a functioning demographic you need well informed citizens.
Luckily us the people rejected the crazy views of trumpeteers.