J. Duncan Berry

Selective Use of 21st-Century Neuroscience to Prop Up 19th-Century Social Ideals

Revisado: 01-25-22

I enjoyed the artful simplification of complex scientific ideas, and will go ahead and read her book on emotion. However, I thought it less than intelligent or prudent for the author to wander off into social and political speculation. The assertion that “poverty should be solved,” for instance, makes me wonder if her grasp of the granular realities of neuroscientific research are as shallow, naive, petulant, and ill-informed as her social thinking.

The other aspect that I found troubling here is a constant shuttling between the critique of bad metaphors and the deployment of even worse metaphors! The author, like all reflexive and unreconstructed relativists, suffers from an appalling and unconscious reliance on piebald sophistry.

I appreciated her summaries if current macro-trends in neuro research, but was somewhat shocked at her complete blocking out of other developments, specifically mirror neuron research.

This book is akin to patiently attending to a bright 12yo with a nugget of solid information. The reductionism and condescension reach their climax in the second-grade lecture that is added as the Postscript.

Is it worth three hours? Yes, but realize that you are getting a massive dose of diluted and simplified science mixed in with the political sophistication of a teenaged moralist.

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Worthwhile Text; Dreadful Performance

Revisado: 12-06-21

Had purchased the paperback but never got around to reading it, so this was going to be my shortcut to getting a few of the essays under my belt while driving.

The content is as expected: a witty, trenchant critique of the dominant “Yankee” account of American history. There is some overlapping material here, but nothing you wouldn’t otherwise anticipate from a collection of essays.

However the reading, the actual performance, is absolutely dreadful. It’s worse than dreadful. The individual who did the reading breaks every line into two- to four-word phrases, each of which ends with the gravity and terminal to e that one would expect for the last sentence of a long tale. In effect every statement has equal emphasis—which means there is no emphasis on anything. Worse, there’s no regard for the phrasing and the content of the text. When you chop up a 3,000 word essay into two-word phrases, it becomes an exercise in acoustic agony.

It’s too bad, too, because given the topic it would have been great to find a knowledgeable reader with a Southern accent—or even better, someone with a Boston accent!

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Problems Ahead

Revisado: 05-27-21

Where to start? How about with a narrator who mispronounces the author's name? It is Peirce—pronounced "purse," as it is spelled. Need I go on?

How about a reader who mispronounces the single most frequently used term in the copy being read? The word "inference," the central noun in almost any discussion of logical operations, is stressed in the first syllable not the second.

From here, it only gets worse. The mangling of foreign terms and personal names is now to be expected. The name "William James" may be the only name not twisted by the narrator.

Now this is not entirely the narrator's fault because you would think that an editor, having chosen these texts from the 1870s, would be somewhat familiar with the inherent challenges of presenting them to a 21st-century audience.

So, there is plenty to blame to go around here.

The sad part of it is that this is a great time to bring out an Audible Peirce—selections from his most important, most useful, and most insightful pieces. The trick would be to get a Peirce scholar to come up with maybe eight or ten topics, stitch them together with bibliographic and thematic introductions, note the interpolations and announce when elements are being dropped, and come out with a trimmed down but useful introduction to America's most original and enduring thinker.

Brent's biography of Peirce would make for an ideal Audible book, if anyone is reading this with a mind to revisiting this figure. I have always maintained, and was convinced after reading Brent, that Peirce merits a Hollywood biopic—brilliance, character issues, drug addition, delusions of grandeur, and yet after all of it, and enduring contribution of the universe of scientific and philosophical research.

The other Peirce book worth rendering in an Audible title is Ken Ketner's "His Glassy Essence"—a combination autobiography using Peirce's own writings, a mystery novel, and a detective thriller. This is a gem.

But in all honesty, this terrific title is marred beyond use by poor narration, terrible and non-existent editing, and a fundamental ignorance of the subject, the topic, and the writer.

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Essential

Revisado: 10-11-20

If you want to understand apparent “lapses” in the conduct of the DOJ in the last few years, or the last generation for that matter, read this. Our entire understanding of the Cold War is profoundly skewed to benefit the malignant actors on the Left. This is ESSENTIAL reading.

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