Category Archives: Books

Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow

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The new book by Yuval Noah Harari (Homo Deus -A Brief History of Tomorrow (Yuval Noah Harari-PDF) sounds like just what I need.

“For the first time ever, more people die from eating too much than from eating too little; more people die from old age than from infectious diseases; and more people commit suicide than are killed by soldiers, terrorists and criminals put together. The average American is a thousand times more likely to die from binging at McDonalds than from being blown up by Al Qaeda.” Amazon

Mr. (Doctor?) Harari wrote the bestseller Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

From a brief interview (WIRED) interview with the author:

Dataism is a new ethical system that says, yes, humans were special and important because up until now they were the most sophisticated data processing system in the universe, but this is no longer the case. The tipping point is when you have an external algorithm that understands you—your feelings, emotions, choices, desires—better than you understand them yourself. That’s the point when there is the switch from amplifying humans to making them redundant.

Will tech companies become our new rulers, even gods?

When you talk about God and religion, in the end it’s all a question of authority. What is the highest source of authority that you turn to when you have a problem in your life? A thousand years ago you’d turn to the church. Today, we expect algorithms to provide us with the answer—who to date, where to live, how to deal with an economic problem. So more and more authority is shifting to these (technology) corporations.

Wikiquote

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I recently stumbled upon Wikiquote (“a free online compendium of sourced quotations from notable people and creative works”). I have a quotation jones. When I read a book I obsessively underline passages for hoarding on Google Docs. So I can get lost for hours on Wikiquote. Here’s one from Neal Stephenson’s Anathem (Erasmas theorizing why others are joining his journey):

“The work that people did had been broken down into jobs that were the same every day, in organizations where people were interchangeable parts. All of the story had been bled out of their lives. That was how it had to be, it was how you got a productive economy. But it would be easy to see a will at work behind this: not exactly an evil will, but a selfish will. The people who’d made the system thus were jealous, not of money and not of power, but of story. If their employees came home with interesting stories to tell, it meant that something had gone wrong: a blackout, a strike, a spree killing. The Powers That Be would not suffer others to be in stories of their own unless they were fake stories that had been made up to motivate them. People who couldn’t live without story…had to look somewhere outside of work for a feeling that they were part of a story, which I guessed was why Sæculars were so concerned with sports, and with religion. How else could you see yourself as part of an adventure?”

Has all the story been bled out of your life? My life?

The prophetic Mr. Adams

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First the good news. I finished reading God’s Debris (for the umpteenth time, as we mathematicians like to say), the 2004 novella by Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams. This will be the final excerpt (until next time).

I was a long time fan of Mr. Adams’ blog and the ideas he shared there but stopped reading when he — like the rest of America — became obsessed with Donald Trump. As far as I can determine, Adams was the first person (of some notoriety) to predict Trump would win the nomination and go on to win the White House. He was saying that as early as September 15, 2015 and perhaps earlier.

I seem to recall Adams insisting he wasn’t saying Trump would make a good president, just that he (like Adams) knew some Master Persuader voodoo that would take him all the way. And I don’t think Adams ever wavered in his conviction. Like I said, I stopped following because my politics toxicity was already dangerously high.

I bring it up as background for this bit from the final chapter of God’s Debris (written 13 years ago):

“The great leaders in this world are always the least rational among us. Charismatic leaders have a natural ability to bring people into their delusion. They convince people to act against self-interest and pursue the leaders’ visions of the greater good. Leaders make citizens go to war to seize land they will never live on and to kill people who have different religions.”

I hesitate to put words in Mr. Adams’ mouth but I don’t think he’s using “great leaders” in the sense of good or admirable but rather in terms of effective. Achieving an objective. Hard to argue Trump did not do that.

23 Emotions people feel, but can’t explain

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  • Sonder: The realization that each passerby has a life as vivid and complex as your own.
  • Opia: The ambiguous intensity of looking someone in the eye, which can feel simultaneously invasive and vulnerable.
  • Monachopsis: The subtle but persistent feeling of being out of place.
  • Énouement: The bittersweetness of having arrived in the future, seeing how things turn out, but not being able to tell your past self.
  • Vellichor: The strange wistfulness of used bookshops.
  • Rubatosis: The unsettling awareness of your own heartbeat.
  • Kenopsia: The eerie, forlorn atmosphere of a place that is usually bustling with people but is now abandoned and quiet.
  • Mauerbauertraurigkeit: The inexplicable urge to push people away, even close friends who you really like.
  • Jouska: A hypothetical conversation that you compulsively play out in your head.
  • Chrysalism: The amniotic tranquility of being indoors during a thunderstorm.
  • Vemödalen: The frustration of photographing something amazing when thousands of identical photos already exist.
  • Anecdoche: A conversation in which everyone is talking, but nobody is listening
  • Ellipsism: A sadness that you’ll never be able to know how history will turn out.
  • Kuebiko: A state of exhaustion inspired by acts of senseless violence.
  • Lachesism: The desire to be struck by disaster – to survive a plane crash, or to lose everything in a fire.
  • Exulansis: The tendency to give up trying to talk about an experience because people are unable to relate to it.
  • Adronitis: Frustration with how long it takes to get to know someone
  • Rückkehrunruhe: The feeling of returning home after an immersive trip only to find it fading rapidly from your awareness.
  • Nodus Tollens: The realization that the plot of your life doesn’t make sense to you anymore.
  • Onism: The frustration of being stuck in just one body, that inhabits only one place at a time.
  • Liberosis: The desire to care less about things.
  • Altschmerz: Weariness with the same old issues that you’ve always had – the same boring flaws and anxieties that you’ve been gnawing on for years.
  • Occhiolism: The awareness of the smallness of your perspective.

Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

New Harry Bosch novel in November

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“Michael Connelly will publish the next installment in the Bosch series (untitled as of now) on Nov. 7, 2017, and will introduce the world to the new Renée Ballard series kicking off with The Late Show on July 18, 2017, Little, Brown, and Company announced Tuesday.”

“The Late Show‘s Renée Ballard, Connelly’s first new protagonist in 10 years, is a young detective for the LAPD who has been stuck on the night shift in Hollywood after filing a sexual harassment complaint against her supervisor. Given the nature of the job, she can never finish a case and must hand each project to the day shift detectives when the night ends. But everything changes when she finds two cases of violence against women that she refuses to part with.”

Entertainment Weekly