Ary Shalizi

If the title is a question…

Revisado: 08-12-24

The answer is probably no.

Indeed, most of the transhumanist/posthumanist literature of the 1980s onward (Drexler, Kurzweil, Bostrom, etc) is not reality-grounded, but faith-based.

Pearce’s core arguments rest upon some entirely unfounded assumptions (Moore’s Law forever! Recursive self improvement! X is theoretically possible, therefore practically inevitable! We’ll be able to surveil and manipulate every cubic meter of the planet, but not in a creepy way!), and a cursory (at best) comprehension of the technologies involved.

As a molecular biologist, I have done my fair share of work professionally on both gene editing and drug discovery, topics central to Pearce’s thesis. Hoo boy is this book full of hokum and wishful thinking. As one of my instructors used to stress, it’s just as important to understand HOW a technique works as it is to understand WHAT a technique can do. Pearce looks at what we can do in a laboratory setting, and forgets (or assumes away, or is entirely unaware of) the constraints imposed by how we do those things.

It doesn’t help that it’s poorly written. Pearce is a Philosopher, you see, and so every sentence is a grand edifice, constructed of clauses within clauses, buttressed by erudite circumlocutions—and the occasional witty aside, but that’s another story—so that the reader mistakes obscurantism for profundity. In short: it’s shite.

I’ll grant that it’s an essay collection, and so some repetition is inevitable, but Pearce could really benefit from a proper editor. To take but one example, he often refers to “human primates.” But humans are, by definition, primates! Why use one word, where two will do, I guess? Some passages were so egregiously overwritten that I tried editing them down, and found you could say the same thing in simpler terms, with half the words.

Pearce is very selective in how he explains things. In some places, he takes care to introduce the various concepts necessary for an argument. In others, he simply throws out some jargon, as though it should be taken on faith. I’ve found that if an author does the latter it’s because they want the reader to think “damn, this dude is smart.“

If you want to learn about the realistic applications of biotechnology, I would recommend Matthew Cobb’s “As Gods” instead of this piece of garbage.

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I will give the audio narration extra credit for appropriately the pompous, overblown tone of the prose.

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Interesting, but tedious

Revisado: 07-12-24

Like Frans de Waal and Carl Safina, Michael Tomasello is interested in what makes us uniquely human, and what animals can tell us about that. His topic is cognitive development, and he contrasts that of humans with our closest great ape relatives, with a heavy dose of cross-cultural comparisons to better illuminate what we owe to our evolutionary heritage and what is culturally determined. Tomasello identifies 8 uniquely human cognitive capacities which are adumbrated, but not fully articulated in other great apes, qll of which contribute to what he calls “shared intentionality theory.” In short, humans, but not our closest primate relatives, are able to conceive of a “we” that is composed of, but independent from, “you” and “I,” and that “we” can have a joint goal. I think this is interesting as far as establishing human uniqueness goes, but man is this book a slog to get through. Intensely self-referential, Tomasello writes like a German enlightenment philosophe, lacking either de Waal’s candor or Safina’s sense of poetic lyricism. This is not an approachable book for the curious lay reader, it is treatise directed at an academic audience with a firm knowledge of ethology, philosophy, and developmental psychology. The first chapter and last two chapters are all I would recommend—they cover the core concepts at a fairly accessible level—but the majority of the book is turgid and dull.

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Not his best, but still worth reading

Revisado: 06-05-23

If you think of David Graeber’s 3 popular books of the 2010s as leading up to the magnum opus “The Dawn of Everything,” I’d say “Utopia of Rules” is the weakest one. Lacking the narrative coherence of “Debt” or “Bull**** Jobs,” it reads like a collection of thematically semi-connected essays, rather than a unified statement about rules and society.

I found the section based on the Baffler essay about flying cars particularly weak—the capitalist mode of production is responsible for a lot of problems in the world, but the unrealized promises of utopian tech like flying cars, teleportation, robot servants and faster-than-light travel isn’t one of them. That’s more likely due to the fact that the technologies ofnSciFi’s golden age are inordinately harder to realize in practice than the industrial technologies of the 19th and early 20th centuries.

That said, Graeber remains essential reading, a wide-ranging intellect who provided a consistently playful and provocative critique of society, and a message of hope for a better world. He is missed.

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Atrocious editing

Revisado: 03-05-21

The language is difficult to follow, since these are translations from vulgar latin to 19th century standard english, with all the grandiloquence one might expect. This is compounded by some comically bad sound editing. The same phrase or passage will be repeated, a quirk that occurs every few minutes. This seems to be a common issue with Museum Audiobooks, as I have noticed the same phenomenon in their “Slave narratives” collection.

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Informative, but impersonal

Revisado: 09-20-18

This social history of Judaism in the New World, from the first Portugese Jewish émigrés to New Amsterdam, through the mass migrations of Central & Eastern European jewry in the 19th and early 20th century, to the present day, while scholarly and comprehensive, is also disappointingly dry. There is a lot of fascinating material in here about the changing character of American Jewry, which was predominantly Sephardic through the founding of the republic, but became more Ashkenazic in character in parallel with the post-Napoleonic upheavals of Europe, until America became the undisputed center of Diaspora judaism after WWII. The distinct character of American as opposed to continental European or British Judaism is discussed at length. A lack of state-sanctioned religion in the United States promoted decentralization and diversification of jewish religious practices in a way that did not happen in Europe, and Jewish congregations actively borrowed practices from their protestant neighbors. What the book lacks is any real sketches of the actual individuals involved. Names of key rabbis or community luminaries are given, but you don't really get an insight into what kind of people they actually were–pugnacious? Concilliatory? Energetic? You come away with a lot of information about changing Jewish thought, and Jewish religious practices, but not much understanding of the Jewish persons doing the thinking and the practicing.

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Flawed, but worthwhile

Revisado: 12-28-17

Not a bad book, but not a great one either. Standage, an editor at The Economist, tells a story similar in outline to that of “A Splendid Exchange,” and both books fall far short of Jared Diamond’s comprehensive, scholarly “Guns, Germs and Steel.” Beginning from the observation that even a medieval farm would be incomprehensible to our hunter-gatherer ancestors, Standage discusses the domestication of the major staple grain crops (maize, wheat, rice); the transition from nomadic hunter-gatherer societies to pastoralism and sedentism before covering the role of spices in the ancient economy; the first and second green revolutions, with particular emphasis on how late 19th century developments in chemistry allowed for a vast increase in the global food supply through production of nitrogen-rich fertilizers; and how ready access to food (or lack thereof) affected combat strategies from the ancient world until the advent of mechanized warfare in the 20th century.

Some of these topics hang together better than others: the discussion of domesticated agricultural crops and farm animals as a form of biotechnology (albeit an ancient one) complements the later discussion of the interplay between technology and agriculture (sugar refining begat industrialization, which begat fertilizers, etc.) nicely. In contrast, some of the later sections on the spice trade as a spur to European global exploration, and especially the parts about food and war, seem more like a re-hash of standard historical surveys of the Age of Exploration and the Greatest Hits of European Colonialism, with some bits about food added as an afterthought. Why not talk about how coffee fueled the Enlightenment? Because the live-off-the land mobility of Alexander and Napoleon is just so much sexier. But then, why not talk about the Mongols? They pulled off conquests of much greater scope than Napoleon or Alexander; understanding how they stayed fed while conquering more technologically sophisticated cultures would be fascinating.

Finally, I think the whole narrative suffers from a Eurocentric historical perspective; part of this is understandable, since it was European expansionism that distributed new foodstuffs globally. Who can imagine Italian cooking or Irish suffering without New World crops like the tomato and the potato, respectively. But then why not tell some of those stories? Why is New World chocolate now grown in Africa, and refined in Europe? How did coffee from the shores of the Red Sea wind up growing in the highlands of South America? These would have made for more interesting case studies, that really highlight the global nature of trade in foodstuffs, than some of the material that is in the book. But overall, not a bad read.

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An excellent overview

Revisado: 12-22-17

Dry, but intriguing book about Europe’s generational cataclysm and reorganization in the first half of the 20th century by one of it's foremost historians. To Hell and Back is not really a conventional historical narrative so much as it is a series of interconnected essays that touch upon art, politics, culture, and diplomacy while chunking the 50 year period into 5 smaller epochs: the Bell Epoque prior to WWI, the great war, the interwar period, the Second World War, and the crystallization of the postwar world order by the end of the 1940s. There’s nothing really new here, but it is a solid work of synthesis of primary sources and prior scholarship. Makes a great introduction to the period for any student of modern world history.

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Bucket list and nothing else...

Revisado: 12-22-17

You know why the iconic image of Don Quixote is summed up in the expression “tilting at windmills”? That’s because most people who pick up this turgid, bombastic tome for any reason other than an academic assignment probably never make it past that part of the book.

The first book is repetitive, with the same tiresome story of lovers betraying and reconciling, losing and–shock! surprise!–finding each other in the most vexatious and unlikely of circumstances over and over and over and over again. The second book details the variety of ways a succession of people take advantage of Sancho’s credulity and Don Quixote’s mental illness for their own amusement. (Although I did enjoy the metatextual device of Sancho and Don Quixote knowing about, and referring to, the first book throughout the second one, so good on Cervantes for being postmodern before it was cool.)

The principal characters were more inconsistent than interesting. Sancho's combination of idiocy and sagacity is supposed to make him a great comic character, and Don Quixote’s juxtaposition of pragmatism and fantasy is supposed to make him a great tragicomic character; but they bounced between extremes at the whim of the plot, making their personalities seem like flip narrative contrivances rather than fundamental natural conditions, which ultimately made them both unconvincing and unbelievable.

“Sophomoric" is a fitting description, since it’s a tall tale about two wise fools. I know it’s supposed to be hilarious, but its humor is decidedly low and scatalogical. When the humor isn’t about our heroes uncontrollably vomiting or voiding their bowels, it’s laughing at their ignorance and insanity. That, in the end, is what really kept me from enjoying MacMillan’s superlative narration: I couldn’t get past the fundamental cruelty of Cervantes' humor, the expectation that I should laugh at Sancho because he’s dumb and Don Quixote because he’s divorced from reality. I was thankful to finish it and move on to something else.

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If you read one book about the brain this year...

Revisado: 12-22-17

...read this one!

As a trained neuroscientist, this is a book I’d like to hand out on the street everyone. Any time you hear a pop-culture think piece confidently declare “gene X is responsible for behavior Y,” “hormone Z is a ‘love potion,’” or “socioeconomic factor A means you will do B in situation C,” there are reams of caveats omitted, context and nuance left out in our breathless excitement that is important for understanding not just the experimental design, but the type of behavior, even the “meaning" we ascribe to the behavior itself.

Sapolsky’s book is a chance to stop and take your breath, an ambitious but accessible introduction to behavioral neuroscience that attempts to understand the headline-grabbing findings by synthesizing across a variety of temporal and biological scales. He begins with momentary and molecular and, by constantly expanding his scope, eventually encloses the cultural and generational in his arguments. His tone is conversational, like you met at a party or a coffee shop and started chatting about the topic with someone who happens to be a world expert accustomed to explaining things to novices.

With patience, an abundance of evidence, and a sophisticated understanding of the drawbacks inherent to each level of analysis, he dispels common misconceptions about behavioral science, and explains the complex interplay between different levels of inquiry–genes and environment and individual history and evolutionary history and social context and economic factors and… you get the idea. As a pair of simple examples, consider that elevating testosterone can increase cooperation, and that increasing levels of the “love hormone" oxytocin can promote aggression; in both cases, the social context is king when determining the behavioral outcome of the biological manipulation.

As a consequence of all this effort, Sapolsky comes to some truly radical conclusions about “what it all means” for topics like education and criminal justice. In particular, Sapolsky posits that as our understanding of the neural basis of behavior, and the scope of social, cultural, and economic influences thereupon, improves, our conception of justice must change. He hopes that a future “justice” will look upon our current system of crime and punishment the way we now look at epilepsy and mental illness: not as a cause for ostracism or execution due to demonic possession but as organic maladies that deserve treatment, and our sympathy.

This is that rare scientific book that is at once comprehensive and morally ambitious. I cannot recommend it enough.

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We wee beasties

Revisado: 12-22-17

This is one of the best science books I’ve read in a long time. Ed Yong writes engaging prose that conveys the excitement surrounding the current explosion of interest in the role microbes play in–well, in just about everything, from shaping individual animals to regulating nutrient flows through entire ecosystems. He makes complicated ideas and experiments easily accessible, and carefully punctures the hype surrounding some of the more exaggerated claims about the human microbiome.

The reality, while less pat than the hype might suggest, is far more bizarre and interesting. A sustained theme is the need to reframe our understanding of every animal as a community, the metazoan host and its constantly changing microbial penumbra. At least one thing I will take away from this is a new metaphor for thinking about the immune system, not as an army defending against invading pathogens, but as a ranger managing your microbial ecosystem.

The book’s organization is clever: Yong will use a recent finding as a framing device for each chapter, but whether it is engineering wolbachia to slow the spread of dengue by shortening the lifespan of mosquitos, or the way gut commensals have enabled insects (and herbivores of all stripe) to eat otherwise indigestible plant materials, he then spirals away from the specific frame story to discuss both its grand (the health of whole ecosystems) and specific (the health of single organisms or people) implications, underscoring along the way how wee beasties that we cannot see provide a foundation for all the life that we can.

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