I learned about Oxford Press’ “A Very Short Introduction” series from Dr. Goldsmith during CGS500 last semester. Think of them as cliffs notes for reality; little 100-150 page volumes on a wide assortment of topics, written as an introduction to the topic by an expert. The only problem is they are rather expensive at around $9 a pop, and I’m not the only one I’ve heard look at the list and realize they want pretty much the whole set (around 200 at the moment). This is where the Internet kicks in. The Internet always brings me such great things. I’m not linking to it from here (that would be illegal…) but the usual places furnish a torrent of 85 volumes, a torrent of a partly overlapped 32 volumes, and some individual volumes that add up to about half the series. I’m still missing a few that I would like, especially “Intelligence”, “Sociology”, and a few individual philosophies/religions… hopefully the power of the interwebs will come though on that. I find this arrangement pretty ideal; to me PDFs are of comparable value to physical copies. On one hand; they don’t contribute to “stuff” (physical possessions to which I am attached), which I’m generally opposed to, and I can pack them onto the n810 and literally have a library in my pocket. On the other hand, reading extensively from screens isn’t at all good for the eyes, and isn’t quite as versatile as dead trees. This kind of thing almost makes me want one of the various “e-paper” reader appliances… its a shame they’re so damn expensive and limited (reading about them a while ago, the iRex iLiad looks like the winner of the bunch at the moment, but is even more expensive than the more common Kindle and Sony Readers). A full set of these on a connected eBook reader comes surprisingly close to the dream.
The books are incredibly, incredibly dense; I’ve been working on the Maquis de Sade one for two evenings now, and I’ve made it through about 50 pages of actual text. This is really, really unusual; for a reference point, when I gave in on the “You can’t criticize it until you give it a [serious|better|honest|another] try” argument (an argument I hate for all things) on the Harry Potter series, the whole series took me about 8 hours (for the record, my opinion of it didn’t really improve). This, however is EXCELLENT by every metric. It is thorough, well written, and intensely thought provoking; part of why it takes so long is that I’ve had to stop to evaluate my own beliefs on various topics. Some interesting things I have had to clarify to myself:
* I’m a materialist (no non-physical “self”) who believes in free will, or at least higher order effects which are indistinguishable from it. This is apparently an unusual combination.
* I don’t believe it’s reasonable to model humans as rational actors. That is the degree to which we are, mostly unconsciously, influenced by objectively irrelevant circumstance leads me to believe that, on average, for any given decision by any one individual, the decision is not made by a rational process. Dr. Pushkarskaya’s talk on biases in decision making in CGS500 provided concrete evidence for that assertion. I also prefer to imagine people are simply irrational, rather than immensely shortsighted and/or incredibly stupid.
* I tend to evaluate things based on net misery (or, conversely net happiness), which is an odd sort of Buddhist-tinged humanism. Net means net, the discussion of the conventional wisdom about removing bandages in this TED talk gets into that nuance pretty well.
* Based on the metric above, I DO believe that humanity is, on the whole, progressing, as a direct result of cultural, social, and technological development.
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Thinking about this sort of thing makes me want even more to some group reading this summer with friends, there are SO MANY things I want to get to there should be plenty of opportunities. I think I might pass around (post?) my current list and go with whatever others want to read from it.
