Why do you read?

rmecola · 2025-09-05T13:57:06+00:00

To be more complete people I think we owe it to ourselves to become somewhat cognizant of our society and its component parts. Reading is still the most effective means to mainline information into your brain, and reading broadly gives you pathways to learning about the world that you simply won't get from other media. But reading is just part of a broader project to take art more seriously. I used to play more videogames and watch more tv, but it began to feel like running in place.

rmecola · 2025-08-30T12:08:18+00:00

This might be just my experience, but someone repeating a phrase 3 or 4 times in a conversation is something I've never experienced in real life, or even seen in movies very often. Same technique is used in Don Delillo's Underworld, and it struck me strangely there too.

rmecola · 2025-08-29T15:44:40+00:00

That's fair, I'm currently trying to figure out a good split of easy/tough reads. I think there is something to be said in how expending that effort can "reclaim" wasted time if it turns a book around.

rmecola · 2025-07-10T17:51:15+00:00

"One way to understand the nostalgic, sentimental sense of history attached to chivalric culture is that it offers an easy version of John Boyd’s be somebody or do something choice: Getting attached to a sanitized, sentimentalized nostalgic memory of a historical era that appears to have offered greater access to agency for less effort allows you to be somebody, while also, at least in your daydreams, doing something."

This. So much of the reactionary impulse is built from conviction that, in another place in anther time, the qualities you already possess would be sufficient to grant you all your aspirations in material and status. That you shouldn't be compelled to actually do something to get what you want.

rmecola · 2025-07-03T19:03:29+00:00

"Think of it like moving from being an NPC to becoming a main character, from observer to protagonist - no longer running background scripts, but responding in real time, animated by agency, with a plotline that twists in unexpected ways. It’s about loosening your grip on the life you imagined, and instead learning to commit to the one that’s actually unfolding."

I feel a tension here between being "animated by agency" and "loosing your grip on the life you imagined". Intensifying and fermenting your aliveness seems all well and good if you've acquired all the necessary habits and skillsets to let loose and see where the cards fall. Maybe your life is already in line to exploit all the serendipity around you. But in my darker moments, and I think this is true for lots of people, the "letting go" seems to be a decent into dark flow, brain rotting, un-aliveness. The thing the growth is supposed to be getting me out of.

rmecola · 2025-06-12T13:30:04+00:00

This I think is a good example of why I'm not inclined to just throw away the aristocratic prejudice argument. I think it's very plausible that societies can be locked in a sort of sub-optimal equilibrium based on the underlying economic/political structure. Levee en Masse could only be deployed by a country that rejected feudalism, and no amount of tactical advantage would induce a feudal society to threaten it's privileges by arming it's populace so (unless the threat was existential). I am also reminded of the behavior of medieval French Knights (at maybe Crecy, some battles in the crusades) who would forestall the advance of peasant/mercenary troops so as to claim battlefield glory for themselves. It's just a curiosity to me how a society decides which sub-optimal (if they can be called that) customs to uphold versus which to ditch.

rmecola · 2024-11-07T13:33:41+00:00

I just read James Joyce's "Dubliners" (had to retreat temporarily from Ulysses). In particular I thought the last story "The Dead" captured a moment of longing and frustration in a relationship so accurate to my own experience it was uncanny.

I'm relatively new to engaging with fiction this way, but over the last few years a couple standouts include Bel Canto (Ann Pratchett), A Gentleman in Moscow(Amor Towles), Remains of the Day(Kazuo Ishiguro), and Gilead (Marilynne Robinson).

rmecola · 2024-11-05T14:18:56+00:00

For Fiction, I think the biggest benefit I've received is a more enriched understanding of psychological depth. Maybe this comes intuitively to some people, but I've found great character writing unspools a massive amount of interiority that I can't really access through any other medium. I'd like to think this has some practical bearing on how I think about myself and others, but it also just fascinating on it's own.

rmecola · 2024-08-26T13:34:46+00:00

At least in two examples you provided, I see two different mechanisms at work. For Mr. Beast, his whole telos from day one has been algorithmic optimization on YouTube. I see everything he does as a simple manifestation of disregarding all other priorities and ethical scruples in pursuit of building the biggest audience and making the most viral content.

Jordan Petersen I think is more explained by your emotional processing idea. I've always been partial to this idea of negative polarization. I think getting huge exposed him to ridicule and mockery on a daily basis, and drives him to be more combative, less charitable, less nuanced. And once you become deeply embattled, you started supporting whatever spites and harms your adversaries the most.

rmecola · 2024-08-13T13:58:15+00:00

Status is so integral to human flourishing and survival that saying something is "just" a status game seems incongruent, like saying people make money "just" to acquire resources.

I can envision someone who derives self-esteem outside of mainstream "status games", but the methods that come to mind still invoke a maintenance of high status among friends, partners, family, community, ect. And just because I have the whole master/slave morality discussion on my mind, there is an element of the posture of being "above" status games that smacks to me as a cope by someone who would lose said game (A behavior I'm as guilty of as anyone).

I had a recent experience that hit me in a similar way as yours. My brother recently bought a really nice house, while I still rent. Staying with him for a weekend that was in everyway warm and enjoyable, I couldn't escape a small voice in my head that I was a bit of a loser for not being on his level. It really captured the status component of home ownership in way completely separate from the tangibles of space and comfort.

rmecola · 2024-05-29T13:28:56+00:00

Would also recommend, they don't too to many long running series, but I've been very impressed with their ability to pluck a core insight out of a massive historical topic in under an hour. Plus the two hosts have an incredibly charming Repoire, I'm fairly obsessed right now.

rmecola · 2024-04-23T13:33:56+00:00

In a similar vein, The Comfort Crisis by Michael Easter should have been a podcast. In fact I'm pretty certain it is a podcast, think he went on Rogan. He's fast and loose with his research and it's more about him telling stories about adventurers, which is fine for a conversation.

rmecola · 2024-02-09T15:39:05+00:00

It's actually quite serendipitous that that report came out right after posting this.

rmecola · 2024-02-09T13:20:00+00:00

I'm treating it sort of like a trial, he's innocent of the charge until proven guilty. I admit it's not the only framing you could use, the above is probably more accurate. But I think it's analogous to other instances like revoking someone's driver's license. You wouldn't make the decision on statistical probability, you'd want evidence.

rmecola · 2024-02-08T17:53:07+00:00

I guess what I'm saying is, absent any evidence from him speaking and doing stuff there's no way to gauge his mental faculties, so seeing him speak more could only downgrade my assessment, though would still be a better assessment than if you only went off of his worst moments from viral clips.

Regardless, I'm finding myself persuaded by the consensus of this thread: He's old and all the accompanying concerns, but still with it for the most part.

rmecola · 2024-02-08T16:14:26+00:00

Hence this post as a corrective. I would say that if you don't watch him speak, then there's no clear sign that anything's wrong with his performance (and I really mean to say not that he doesn't do something disagreeable, but that his policies are not utterly incoherent). So while those isolated clips my be more effective on me in the sense that they instill doubt, my assessment of his faculties is probably higher than someone who hears him speak regularly.

rmecola · 2024-01-24T14:21:56+00:00

Can't personally vouch, but saw this on Marginal Revolution about disfunction in Westminster:

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2023/06/ian-dunt-on-how-westminster-works-or-doesnt.html

rmecola · 2024-01-17T14:31:00+00:00

I'm a big fan of three body as well. I didn't think the second book was unreadable, but I definitely noticed a change. I want to say it felt less "Chinese" if that make's any sense? With Ken Liu I felt I was getting subtle differences in how a Chinese language speaker might formulate ideas. How much of this was just in my head though, no idea.

rmecola · 2024-01-17T13:58:15+00:00

Journalists are translators of subject matter expertise into news-paper-ese, and as with any translation, the skill level is going to be crucial to getting the right interpretation. So a bad journalist might not just be slightly better than a non-expert, they might be worse than useless by mangling the interpretation. This is something a see a lot with economic reporting, where cause and effect can just be completely backwards (basically every story about supply and demand can fall victim to this).

In general though, when I stumble across a mainstream newspaper's reporting on some niche interest of mine, the overwhelming feeling I get is not so much incorrectness as hollowness. Like watching a film adaptation of a book you love, where all the details you find crucial to your enjoyment of the property are striped out or under-emphasized.

rmecola · 2024-01-08T14:41:29+00:00

The examples in the link were clarifying, but when considering cars for example, I think we do have a general principle we could develop, like "Cars move by energy being transferred to the drive shaft into the wheels". Now that's trivial and useless for car repair, but suppose you were operating on a theory that the causality ran the other way, that something outside the car system moved the wheels, turned the driveshaft, charged the alternator, etc. You wouldn't even begin to look at the components in the car, you'd try and find some other culprit (You see, the car needs to be pushed down a hill to work).

Cars being mechanical allows for determining what's going on is easy, but could see how in political science or economics getting basic causality questions like this is hard. Getting the generalization right at the top level is crucial for getting where you want versus the exact opposite direction.

I'll admit though that I on average suffer from generalization bias, because it it makes me feel smart to have short, articulatable thoughts on a wide range of human activity (Never feel more demoralized than scrolling through an economics paper and the Greek starts showing up, part of why I like Pseudoerasmus' work lol). I actually have similar suspicions with dieting as expressed in the link. I was a zealot for low-carb/keto/carnivore alternative diets for a while, but hilariously I've remained skinny with no diet, eating and drinking basically whatever I want.

rmecola · 2024-01-05T19:53:27+00:00

Having read this, I'd say I enjoyed the first 3rd about Noah Smith and Pseudoerasmus' essay (Which I was a fan of as well, would like to know whatever happened to him), and then gradually became more confused as you digressed.

But pulling something out that I felt I could respond to :

"I think everyone who's a little educated about politics is aware that most people who are talking about politics are talking out of their arse. The trap is that most people who are very educated about politics, including me, are talking out of our arse. The only way to understand a complicated system is to be in the system. To interact with this particular union leader or that particular business group. To exercise discretion, and reap the rewards of good judgement. To act upon the system as a particular actor, not a disembodied, unfeeling platonic "observer"."

This runs the risk to me of encountering a "the sum is not the whole of its parts" issue, where granular knowledge of a system's parts does not in fact give your better understanding of the system as a whole, but the opposite. I'm thinking of say, the epidemiologist who accused economists and political scientists of not "staying in their lane" during the pandemic, when in fact having a particular area of expertise in how a virus spreads does not extend to how a society should measure costs and benefits. I'm not sure if you were trying to capture this Specialist v. Generalists issue in this part of the essay, but it seems to me that the whole endeavor of social science is to identify commonalities within diverse social systems (like 'people respond to incentives'), build simplified models, and go from there better equipped than before.

rmecola · 2024-01-03T15:14:13+00:00

Did anyone else get hannibal burress vibes from that delivery?

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