Review

** What is Love Justice? (baby don’t ask me… no more) ** For the impact that Plato has on modern western thought, I had higher hopes. Frankly if philosophy is simply footnotes to Plato then this is a series of dinner conversations I can skip. The Republic meanders through linguistics, politics, philosophy, psychology, sociology, hitting a bingo’s worth of liberal art subjects in a few long soliloquies. Plato uses a fictional Socrates to (maybe?) make his point, but the dialog style wears thin quicker than plowing through lineages from the old testament. What I thought was a method to ask thought provoking questions to inspire learning in the listener is instead related as a sequence of info-dumps or logical leaps followed by rhetorical questions, followed by one-word affirmations. ...

I love Bujold but really can’t get into this series. Main character is a prick, and about a third of the way though I’m rooting for him to suffer all the consequences. DNF

The bloody seed of the metaverse exists right here.

Che was kindof a mooch… More to come.

** History’s Finest Bureaucrat ** 冷静观察，站稳脚跟，沉着应付，韬光养晦，善于守拙，绝不当头，有所作为 Observe calmly; secure our position; cope with affairs calmly; hide our capacities and bide our time; be good at maintaining a low profile; and never claim leadership. Amazing that there isn’t more written about Deng, doubly amazing that this serves as the authoritative account both in english and in Chinese (see: Chinese Goodreads Link) minus a full retelling of June 4th 1989. More to come.

Things that I don’t like about superficial journalist books: ***Over-reliance anecdotes **, either the internship or the interview: Sure the author spent 2 months in the industry, or they’ve talked a lot with others. Doesn’t mean they understand an industry, and the worst offenders conflate neophyte experience with expertise. ***Lack of Norming: ** What is considered good in an industry, what is bad? Books that tell me about how angry I should be at every flavor of sausagemaking are not helpful. ...

First book on urban problems i’ve read that was worth reading. Theoretical frameworks that pass the sniff test, a free market version of Jane Jacobs, pairs well with seeing like a state. Recommendations are exactly how o would run a product team but author seems not to understand politics. Not sure a typical reader would enjoy it, but as real estate interests grow this is very relevant to me.

the college admissions process is not only arbitrary, it’s capricious. Like assessing future based on the brand of car kids drive. Financial aid can be downright predatory. Myth of merit, in fact each admissions department is playing moneyball to get the best students for the least money and craft their incoming class. We are going with education where china has already been for thousands of years. Maybe I lucked out by being a passenger in the process?

** Camping Trip from Hell ** Real warfare is boring. Guerrilla warfare is also boring, just more uncomfortable. The Bolivian diary describes the petty squabbles and minor victories of camping and hiking around the outskirts of civilization in what seems to have been a hopeless struggle at the end of Che’s short life. Think boy-scouts with more starvation and an occasional ambush. The Diary is not lyrical, nor does it contain much in the way of the overall mission that Che was trying to achieve. Monthly summaries contained the same lack of progress, hope for future progress, and expectation of success. Most entries included the elevation that he camped at. Even right near the end, the most pessimism Che can muster was * The peasants are not helping us with anything, and are now becoming informers. * It’s a short read, but a quick and bitter dose of reality to remember what the selective use of force entails. ...

** Barbarous Statistics ** I don’t follow baseball, but I can’t escape statistics. Whether making hiring decisions, investment calls, or building experimental design, statistics haunt every day. In Moneyball, Lewis has found an all-star protagonist and crowd-pleasing backdrop to spin a yarn worth listening to. Lewis’ lesson is not that one should use statistics over gut instinct. Instead it is that statistics are only as useful as the totality of their methodology. A mistake in any level that started by translating the real world into quantized data, then aggregated it to actionable insights, invalidates the entire process. ...