Review: The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization

After reading about the Dark Ages, I wanted to go back and find out: how did the lights go out? The answer is war and economic collapse and war.

If you were there during the fall of Rome, you would feel it. Your armies are scattered by peoples without training. Your Container Stores are sitting languishing with your productive capacities sent overseas and destroyed by the hordes. The ships that brought food and oil and wine have stopped coming and those that are here sit in the harbor riding the waves like logs. Building great buildings is impossible. Your children will know your home by holes in the ground where you put wooden logs.

If you were in Roman Britain, you would have felt like you were a lunar colony and Earth had gone dark: a complete and total dearth of material production and economic complexity, such that your people are relegated to memes for weird city names and being sheep shaggers.

If you were in Roman Italy, you would have felt like a disposed Mughal elite living in the British Raj: “Wow, this empire was so splendid and neat and of course you can keep your own traditions which I respect but if you insult me I will take everything you own.”

Between Britain and Rome, the scaling goes somewhat linearly along “complete destruction” to “subjugation.”

The economy of the Roman Empire was, no doubt, a complex graph of interactions, but Ward-Perkins identifies a general shape: 1) a South agricultural basket in Africa, 2) a pre-industrial, agricultural, productive interior, and 3) a Northern/Eastern frontier manned by hundreds of thousands of soldiers that maintained breathing space for law and order.

The invasions of the Goths, Vandals and Visigoths and other Germanic tribes broke down and through the third, disturbted the second, and eventually extinguished the first. Indeed, the answer to “Why did Byzantium thrive and Rome unalive?” is that Egypt wasn’t lost to the Byzantines and that North Africa _was_ lost to the Romans.

As these regions of specialization became disconnected, the regions themselves could not generalize fast enough to maintain trade, productivity or stop the onslaught of Germanics. Iberian cities didn’t have standing armies- why would they need an army when the biggest threat was hundreds of miles to the north west? Rome didn’t need to farm enough to feed itself- why would it when it had an entire coastal range on a giant lake it controlled? America doesn’t need to build anything- why would it when it has an entire offshore workforce controlled by its only threat?

It’s a good question, and the answer is usually- it doesn’t! Specialization is fantastic and good for everyone, as long as everyone is pulling their part and not getting invaded. But how are the invasions possible?

Three answers, all of them related: The first is that the Barbarians, for the first time, were united. Most of Roman history, like most imperial histories, is picking off divided enemies one at a time until becoming a hegemon. The Germanics never united in a threatening way- until they were required to by the pressure cooker of Hunnic onslaught and Roman shield walls.

The second is the opposite side of the coin- Roman elite disunity. The Romans had gotten close to self-extinction before during the Crisis of the 3rd century, but the civil warring had been waning. Now, by the 5th century -the critical moment- it was waxing again. Who cares about the people destroying the cities of France- they can be used to destroy your Roman enemies!

The final component was the vastly unequal Roman system. Rome was a slave society, and these slaves fed the armies of its enemies and rebelled against their masters. The masters themselves were unbelievably rich and owned lands from one end of the Mediterranean to the other.

Enemy unity. Domestic division. Inequality. These led to a retreating army, an unending economic supply shock, and the end of a civilization.

Review: Ancient Civilizations of North America

 We erased the “Native Americans” in more ways than one: The United States of America, Canada, and Spanish perpetrated countless sins against the First Peoples of North America. Mass slaughter, reeducation camps and the purposeful destruction of their economies and technologies are all the ones that come to mind. Yet, both the Pro-First Peoples Whites and self-centered Expansionists erase them through diabolical compression.

There are two common cultural caricatures: the rough riding anti-cowboy who attacks the colonial village at night to scalp the innocent religious refugees. This caricature now mostly sits in the heads of the Silent Generation and Boomers. It is passing to a boring, undeveloped dispassion for the poverty of modern FPs. Its adversary is now racing through Twitter, tumblr, TikTok via easily consumed feel-bad memes: the innocent native who lived at absolute peace with the land and was aligned with feminist and trans rights- oh, and they were socialists, too.

This simplification of First Peoples is disgusting. Imagine if the Turkish _did_ admit to genocide, but instead of distinguishing between Armenians and Kurds they just said “East Anatolians”. We would roll our eyes. That’s what we do when we say “We committed genocide on the Native Americans.”

From a one time immigration event, the FPs spread across the entire Continent. Without even bringing the South American civilizations into the picture, they encompassed every conceivable niche available to humans without a readily domesticatable animal. Yet, this wide diversity of niches meant that they had a wide diversity of political, economic, and social dynamics. 

We can list of counterexamples to the Expanionist Caricature easily. The vast majority of the time First Peoples were not “rough riders” because they had no horses at all. In fact, it’s likely that the original Clovis people contributed to the extinction of the original North American horses which were only reintroduced by the Spanish. The Tunic peoples of Quizquiz were peaceful and the Chumash of South California were considered peaceful.

Yet, the Pro-FP Whites Caricature collapses on examination of peoples as well. The vast majority of First Peoples engaged in war. The Russians saw the Tlingit go to war over songs. They went to war for slaves! The Cahokia had war in their art and sport. This violence ranged from conflicts between local family units to conflicts between nations- as you can see in the expansionist policies of the Iroquois Confederacy. They were not “peaceful”.

The civilizations the Pueblo peoples and the Missippians built are comparable to the centers of civilization in the Fertile Crescent, the Indus River Valley, China, or South America. They, like many iterations of the Old World’s civilizations, fought against the environment and drained it of its resources until they collapsed. Even before sedentary life, the Folsom people were killing huge amounts of wildlife in bison jumps. 

The tendency for Pro-FP Whites to center themselves creates an infantilized story wrapped in mood affiliation. It says, “You baby; I protec baby.” It is bad allyship and commits a sort of ad hominem fallacy. It seeks to portray First People as morally good, as if an entire peoples could be good, or is required for justice to be enacted. Guess what? Even if the First Peoples were, collectively and uniformly,  war fighting anti-environmentalists a thousand years ago (*cough* the Mayans *cough*) they would still deserve justice today. 

You don’t need to caricaturize First Peoples or valorize them, but when you do want to bring up their best values and practice or stand by them, it’s important to Say Their Names: Omàmiwinini, Haudenosaunee, Puebloans, Navajo, Ute… The list is long.

Review: Inheritance of Rome

Here’s my epistemological trespassing graffiti: the Dark Ages were dark. The collapse of the Western Roman Empire was not a side quest on the road to modernism. There was no torch carried by the Byzantines and the Arab Caliphates. It was a disastrous detour. Inheritance of Rome desires the reader to not think that, and to not think in terms of grand narratives. Chris Wicham specifically doesn’t want people to attempt to tie contemporary nations to the pre-feudal regimes of post-collapse Rome. His conclusive chapter goes to great lengths to spell out what few trends existed in any real way across the entire continent. The history is jarring, however. A complete shutdown in interregional trade? The caging of the peasantry? A radical simplification of any and all intellectual institutions? The ideal Roman diet- varied and tasteful- eliminated by meat eating…? Local politics wasn’t spared: local elites went from being incentived to participate and donate to their towns and villages, to being required to ruthlessly tax and collect rent. While many of these economic and social facts were not entirely true in the Eastern Empire, it was still poor for a shockingly long time- hundreds of years! And it never achieved the same economic diversification as its united predecessor. Even calling it an Empire seems sort of suspicious after the Caliphate got through with it. The first Orthodox Kingdom led by a King-Pope? That seems more correct. One preconception fought by this book: what did the Caliphate take and from whom? When Westerners consider them now, they are treated as kind of springing up out of nowhere and taking over terra nullius. Maybe they’re taking over some infighting kingdoms? No! The Arabian empires were Roman Empires that latched themselves on and then emulated Roman institutions. Did they evolve in their own way? Absolutely, but only slowly and eventually. Institutional capture (and recapture) were the name of the Eastern Mediterranean game. Inheritance of Rome is (I would learn later) pointillist history. Every page is filled with stories and facts and anecdotes in more or less chronological/regional order. This has two effects: if you listen to it by audiobook while driving for hours at a time between DC and NYC, you get bathed in history and stories. The trends Wicham eventually mentions are subconsciously embedded in your head before he tells you what they are. It also, probably, makes for lousy physical book reading. When Empires fall, it means suffering for all.

Review: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

I picked up Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance in the fall of 2017, immediately bought a motorcycle, and then after much heartache, crying, and gnashing of teeth got rid of it. Pirsig makes the motorcycle seem like a holy object.

Yet, finishing it in 2021 makes me feel a bit unaffected. I’ve seen this all before.

If you’ve ever watched Blade Runner, you’ll feel like it’s a boring movie. Not only is it slow, but the scenes and questions and technologies seem trite. The flying car is overplayed. The replicant drama is well-trodden territory. A city always in the dark full of depressing buildings isn’t new.

When Blade Runner came out, these ideas were new. It’s just that almost forty years later, we’ve seen it all bigger, better, bolder with more CGI. The Star Wars prequels stole flying cars and giant haunted cities. Firefly carried forward the synthetic hybridization of Eastern and Western culture. Hell, I was chastised by a high school creative writing teacher for having penned an existential robot story. 

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance had the same problem: it was so vastly influential, so capturing of the zeitgeist of the counterculture revolution, that its themes have leaked into everyday reading. The themes that crop up- how to deal with the seeming conflict between nature and technology, how to truly care and why to care, how the university system is kind of a scam- these are all well-known to anybody that has used their eyeballs. 

I did something a lot like the road trip Pirsig describes in 2015. My brother and I set out (by car, unfortunately) a bit south of his route, but the plains and mountains we passed had the same bones as those where the chautauqua take place. I think if I had read it then, it would have gripped me. Instead, I read All is Quiet on the Western Front.

Venkatehs Rao tweeted while I finished that ZAMM is a “sophomore portal”, or a type of book that has a profound effect on people in their late high school or early college years. I think that is accurate. If you haven’t read a lot, I can see ZAMM being a mental bootloader, installing an (old) operating system that you can use to see the world around you correctly. 

For that reason, I can’t recommend it to my peers (if they think they have well-functioning worldviews), but I think I can recommend it to people in their younger years. It installs things that young adults need- a glorification of conscientiousness, a passing vibe (a taste really) of Zen, and is a good test of one’s ability to read complicated shit. The first is something one needs to cultivate to do good in the world, and the second is what all adults need to have any sense of spirituality that isn’t nihilistic or wrong.

The last one improves ones Quality. 

Review: CFAR: Participant Handbook

 I am intimately aware of the errors in my thoughts and the sins of my soul. I can hear the Type-A asshole screaming like a stolen mind in the Sunken Place when I am in my fifth hour of streaming a Netflix TV show I don't care about. A plethora of self-help authors' voices ring out when I spend another day not implementing any of their advice at all. 

The CFAR Participant Handbook, amazingly, does not me feel shitty for being a human being. The genre imperative, "I need to become productive achieve my dreams" is reconfigured as "Wait what are my dreams?"

Note: CFAR, the Center for Applied Rationality, is a consultant group that goes to Silicon Valley corps and organizations or otherwise accepts students, and teaches a bunch of "rationality" techniques. These are day/weeklong classes that I, being an East Coaster, have had to consume via blog posts and regurgitated efforts of graduates from the program. This actual participant handbook, released in 2020, was new to me in its _systemization_ of the random things I have been reading.

The handbook itself is a list of techniques, meant to be used by students after their classes as a reference guide. I have found it to be a useful without ever attending the classes at all. 

As a handbook, they never really lay out an explicit framework for how the different techniques work together. They're presented as a rather separate concepts that solve specific genres of problems. Goal factoring, for example, solves cases when you have an action whose end state might be achievable by other means. The Hamming Technique is used for figuring out the importance and prioritization of what you're working on. These two may seem different, but I think ultimately most of these techniques come to specialized answers to three broad questions:

1. How do I program my Pet Human to be the happiest it can be? 2. How do I really talk to and engage with what my feelings of happiness would be? 3. How do I improve my ability to think about Problems?

There is a last category of question, maybe described as "Why the fuck aren't you doing this?"

CFAR really buys into the Kahneman view of the human brain, which is the split between System 1 and System 2. The former, famously, is quick and general and cheap, while the latter is slow, thoughtful, and energy depleting. I prefer a similar but different main model: the Pet Human and the Human. The Pet Human, is like my cats, incredibly automatic and babylike. It needs to have a schedule and its hand held and it goes crazy over treats. 

One goal of CFAR's techniques is to figure out how to make the Pet Human happy. Concepts like "Trigger, Action, Planning" and "Taste & Shaping" are ways to train the Pet Human to be more aligned with its higher goals. Indeed, these techniques might be described as "meta" classical and "meta" operant conditioning, because the conditioning happens to a large degree in the mind.

However, before you can even begin programming the Pet Human, you have to know what it wants. That is where the real heart of the CFAR techniques comes. "Goal Factoring", "Aversion Factoring" and "Focusing" are all different ways of saying, "Hey, Pet Human, what is it you actually want?" It is similar to me when I'm trying to figure out why my cat is screaming from the top of the couch. I have to watch her, check her food and litter and water, and intentionally see how she is behaving.

The fact is, while we probably do intentionally observe and interrogate our cats, we do not intentionally interrogate ourselves. 

Once you know what your Pet Human wants, you then need to actually go about solving their problems. Formulating and solving them requires concepts like the "Unit of Exchange" and the "Area Under the Curve". Basically, you need techniques that fight against innate human errors that we are prone to make. You can also externalize the decision process through "Systemization" or internalize improvement through "Deliberate Performance".

The optional question, "Why the fuck aren't you doing this?" is pretty straightforward: lots of CFAR advice comes down to you're not solving things because your Pet Human is in a feedback loop of procrastination, confusion,  and guilt. Break that out by _just doing it_. Literally! just Shia LaBeouf it. "Resolve Cycles" are periods of time that you simply solve a problem without planning on it. It's how I solved a tax dispute, and, by golly, it worked despite me procrastinating on it for literally half a year. A generalized problem version is the "Eat Dirt" technique, where you just do things semi-intentionally, until you feel out what you're actually intending to do. 

The answer to these four questions, which are described in 13-35 concepts, creates a useful framework to approaching a wide range of problems. What I found interesting is that many of these techniques are not new; they're systematized versions of things that we naturally do. By applying them coherently and together, they should amplify our natural self-help tendencies. 

Review: Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures

 Fungi are weird parts of the natural world because I don't think we evolved any mental units for them. Like, we definitely know what fruits are and vegetables to a certain extent. We like bright things in trees. We have a theory of mind that we built for other humans, and we seem to be able to extend it and generalize it to other mammals and then birds and then maybe the other living things. Yet, mushrooms are these weird things that can kill you or taste really good. Yeast can make your piss hurt like a fire or make the best liquids we can engineer. 

We are not evolved enough for the fungi.

Sheldrake attempts to get us there by a circuitous route: a mix of anecdote, review of materials, and only a little bit of explanation.

Fungi are trashmen, taking out and recycling the natural worlds' shit. They're the day traders, moving nutrients from one tree to another. They're VCs, investing in the future canopies of tomorrow. They're also hippie communes, bringing in many species until they merge into one. They're also literally at hippie communes, being what may be considered the best drug of all time. They're tiny microengineers, converting sugar into fun-poison. 

If this is elucidating, great! If it isn't, yeah, that makes sense. Sheldrake constantly has to approach the fungi with metaphors of human society, and points out how the popular scientific literature uses the same metaphors. Fish fins at least look a little like legs, and humans can be said to have the heart of a lion, but a glowing green slime on a map of the United States made out of sugar? Yeah okay uhm thats like the ... the... interstate? Cool okay cool.

This alienness of a kingdom of life is kind of cool, but also problematic: it means that we haven't funded or learned enough about it. It'd be like studying the ocean and not the atmosphere. Sure, you need the first one to live, but the second one is invisible, so why look into it too hard? Sheldrake talks about how this is very interesting because it opens up a huge door for Citizen Science^TM, and because we'll likely need to know more about fungi in order to make our agricultural system not planet-burning. Of course, this knowledge also exists in indigenous spaces and by remergently contextualizing it, we can bring it to bear on world problems

Oh, and the biggest take away is that magic mushrooms are probably okay to eat. 

Review: A Short History of Nearly Everything

 Imagine going back to your last day of high school. For me, that's something like 9 years ago and eleven months. Imagine being able to remember everything that you were taught in science class in the eight years before that. You remember exactly how plate tectonics works and how the cosmic ladder works and why those animations about cells you see on the internet aren't all that accurate.

That is what reading A Short History of Nearly Everything feels like.

There are two big lessons you get from reading and relearning secondary school science. The first is very simple: this is how the universe works. 

The second is much more interesting, and much more fun to go over here than in something like Structure of Scientific Revolutions: who, how, and when are scientists doing the science? How do we know "this is how the universe works"?

Let's answer the "Who" quickly: rich, white men. The modern scientific edifice comes from rich, imperial nerds who jockeyed for status and prestige. Bryson walks us through the lifetimes of different scientists, and maybe 50% of them could be (or are) preambled with "This story is going to be really funny, but this guy was a major asshole."

The assholery is rampant and continuous. Scientists race each other to publish the same idea, they denigrate other schools of thought mercilessly, and they exile those with different theories, only to accept them a few decades later. All of these sins are amplified if you're not a man or you're not white. Modern science discourse, beset as it is by a cycle of grant chasing, tenure chasing and paper pushing, will sometimes try to harken back on this era as if it were any better. It wasn't, just bad in different ways.

A second thought: Science is born from the arts. The upper class intelligensia origins of modern scientific understanding happened because rich people had a lot of free time on their hand to go write papers about nature. The 18th and 19th century scientists weren't alone in their own bubble, separated from 18th and 19th poets and artists and political philosophers. They comingled. They drank together. They fucked. 

Science then, seems to have a same problem as the arts do: how do you deal with the work of art when the artist was a complete piece of shit? Science may have the advantage that it is true whether or not someone likes it, but Science, like Art, has to sell itself to us, and that means it has to appeal to us aesthetically. When the Artist does terrible things, like, say, triple down on trans exlcusionary radical feminism, that does make us feel a little blah about reading her boy wizard books. When the Scientist does terrible things, like, say, create a worldview that bans promulgates the idea of genetic policies, that may make us feel weird about concepts like the Standard Deviation.

But, in the latter case, it obviously shouldn't. The Standard Deviation is a pretty good measure for a bunch of things. It may have arose out of the mind that had a class, race, and national consciousness entirely alien to our own, but it stands its own ground. Art ought to be able to do the same thing. Once you cut out the Creators' own maliciousness, if the thing is still standing then it deserves its own respect.

This cutting process itself is important. Knowing about the errors made by past scientists, both ethical and social, allow us to understand how to prevent these errors from happening to/by us. Knowing about the errors of artists allows us to detect and mitigate these problems when we consume their work. Salavaging past art then, is exactly like salavaging past science: we have to learn how to filter out the bullshit. 

Fortunately, in a lot of ways, Science as an instution has improved by a lot. The competitiveness and backstabbing gave way to PBS Nova TV tropes about racing science teams. The sexism, while still a present danger, cannot stop women from discovering CRISPR and mRNA. Indeed, science can be done and is done by even the ideologically disabled. You don't need to be a rich white man. 

Most people need to read ASHONE, even 16 years after it was published, just to brush up on their science, but many also need to read it to understand how it got discovered- and how to mitigate the terribleness that can come out of those discoveries. 

Review: My Goodreads Reviews

tl;dr: I've moved my book reviews to a blog because Goodreads is a questionable place. My book reviews are intended to be public recommendations wrapped in thinking out loud. They achieve this afaik. I apologize for posting on a blog in 2021.

My book reviews are public confessionals, where I confess (without my knowledge) that I missed the point. I've written around 90 reviews, some of which are short, with a comment on some random sticking point, but others are polemics. These polemics are often long, often extremely opinionated, and have only some sort of connection to the book. In fact, I basically never directly quote a book and I instead make vague hand-wavey motions at the table of contents that I've generated in my head.

The most important aspect of the book review is that it is made to be consumed: I post them on Goodreads, and then I post them on Facebook. It turns out this effort isn't completely in vain. On Goodreads, my older reviews regularly get 10-30 likes. This isn't much in the Internet age, but (1) it is Goodreads and (2) that's a sizable return on something I usually spend a few dozen minutes on. I've also gotten personal responses on a few reviews, so if the 90:10 lurker:commenter rule holds then other people may have found my reviews useful as well. In this lonely hell world we live in, a few molecules of serotonin from being seen are worth it.

I also genuinely want people to read books like The Righteous Mind and Caste. I genuinely don't want them to read things like Willpower Doesn't Work. It would actually diminish my opinion of a person if they read WDW if they did it after I told them not to. Writing a book review is a useful tool in helping me build convincing arguments for why people should read these books, and it also serves as a vehicle to transmit the ideas even if I cannot get them to pick the books up.

Those are the profane reasons for writing the book reviews: I want attention and I want people to read the things I read it. Yet, there is possibly a more sacred level: I want to think out loud in public. The act of reading is that weird atemporal psychic phenomena we've invented where you let another human being (or advanced AI) control your inner monologue. Writing is not exactly the opposite, for while you are producing something that will control somebody else's brain, you must first control your brain. Writing is thinking.

The 'out loud in public' part is where the Goodreads and the Facebooks and the Bloggers come in. By posting something publicly, it invites criticism, positive feedback, or even new connections. Each one of these is useful and probably sufficient. Would I write reviews if it just got positive feedback? Yes. Would I write reviews if the comments were well-intended criticism? I would write more. 

I am well known for having "hot takes". My friends dread them, people unfollow me on Twitter for them, and, at work, my colleagues seem to have (hopefully) thrived on them. Yet, most of these takes are not so hot if I spent time sitting down and writing the logical sequence that it took me to get there. I simply blurt out ideas in an almost haphazard, meme-like way: "1. Here is an idea. 2. ???? 3. Profit." This is probably irresponsible.

My book reviews attempt to not be hot takes, and so people rarely disagree with them (at least, directly to me).  Yet, I'd like to think they follow a similar pattern as the hot takes, except where I distill step 2 out into some followable thoughts. That is, not only do they get somebody to read a book, but they provide valuable thoughts about the book or about the world to the reader. 

The problem is this: Goodreads is a questionable place to rely on posting my reviews on in the future, and to continue to get feedback there. As they shut down their API, it is unclear that I will be able to easily pull my information out of their database. This isn't great! The best answer I've found is to post my reviews, publically, on a blog. This has a few more benefits, like more formatting and making the links to Facebook less atrocious or being linkable from other places.

Posting on a blog feels passe. I collaborated on a poetry blog in high school and had a blog where I wrote about geopolitics and technology in college. It was literally sophomoric. Writing streams of consciousness and then pressing enter feels sophomoric! At least on Goodreads, the reviews had an air of 'fair comment section' effect but on a blog, they seem like they are from 2009! 

I apologize for this and hope that where I link to my reviews doesn't cause any readers to ignore the books that they recommend (or to read any books that I think are trash). I'm sorry!

Review: Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software by Steven Johnson

This was a fun blast from the past. Written in 2001, Johnson was writing his second book about the bubbling, boiling tech scene. He makes a few good predictions, which I prodded him about on Twitter- namely that he predicted Twitter would be a shithole.

I think that Johnson kind of confuses a few concepts here. Ants and cities certainly have emergent behavior. So does software that is designed around the same principle, namely: distributed agents following simple rules create large scale patterns that tend to equilibrium. That's good, and it reasonably predicts that changing the simple rules will change the large scale patterns and that the Internet would (has) changed a lot of those simple rules.

He also seems to mix up a lot of concepts that we would categorize today as 'machine learning' and that really have nothing to do with agents making their own decision. I guess ensemble machine learning is technically "many agents"?... but not really.

Good entertainment book if you like Johnson (and you should like him), and maybe a good book if you're doing historical research into pre-Web 2.o Web.20 concepts... otherwise it is a bit dated.