Seeing as you liked "The Gene's-Eye View of Evolution", I might recommend "Evolution and the Levels of Selection", though I haven't quite finished it. It examines group selection, species selection as well as genic selection. It does so in a clear philosophical manner, e.g. helpfully distinguishing genic selection from the gene's-eye view as process vs perspective. Though it may seem obvious, the main shift in perspective I took away was that natural selection being met for an entity that meets Lewontin's conditions + the hierarchical nature of biology = selection operating at many levels nested within one another. E.g. cancer is a maladaptive feature of individual organisms explained by selection at a lower hierarchical level of cellular selection.
What are your primary book recommendation harvesting methods?
By quality, mine are friend recommendations, recommendations from online thinkers or commenters I respect (here, ACX, etc), and then the hackernews weekly scraping of commentariat-recommended books (https://hackernewsbooks.com/year/2024).
By volume, it's reversed. I wonder if anyone else has good, publicly available sources like the HN one here.
Cool to see you read Huemer and Brennan! Knowledge, Reality, and Value and the Problem of Political Authority by Huemer are essential. If you want an introduction to philosophy the former is great and if you want the best philosophical case for libertarianism then you should read the latter.
How much better (or worse), in terms of information, do you think it was to read this book ("The Gulag: A Very Short Introduction" by Alan Barenberg) compared to one or more Wikipedia articles? What about reading some statistics on Gulag imprisonment from reputable sources, the kind of questions that one might seek out before even beginning to read about the topic (e.g., total number of people sent to Gulags, annual population by year, total death toll, percentage of Soviet economy reliant on forced labor, types of prisoners, gender breakdown, age breakdown, etc.)?
Instead of the (usually bad) Very Short Introductions, I suggest the Teach Yourself books, the Graphic Guides, or even Doug West's guides. The Teach Yourself Philosophy is especially good. Also, thoughts on my list of essential books (in roughly chronological order)?
Since they're very cheap on Kindle, I suggest at least trying to peruse the Teach Yourself books. In my experience, they are usually not obviously less well up to date than the VSIs (for example, the VSI linguistics was published in 2003, the Teach Yourself in 2014, the VSI Postmodernism in 2002, the Teach Yourself in 2010, the VSI Brain in 2005 and VSI Cognitive Neuroscience in 2016, the Teach Yourself Neuropsychology in 2018).
Seeing as you liked "The Gene's-Eye View of Evolution", I might recommend "Evolution and the Levels of Selection", though I haven't quite finished it. It examines group selection, species selection as well as genic selection. It does so in a clear philosophical manner, e.g. helpfully distinguishing genic selection from the gene's-eye view as process vs perspective. Though it may seem obvious, the main shift in perspective I took away was that natural selection being met for an entity that meets Lewontin's conditions + the hierarchical nature of biology = selection operating at many levels nested within one another. E.g. cancer is a maladaptive feature of individual organisms explained by selection at a lower hierarchical level of cellular selection.
Yeah, it's on my to-read list.
What are your primary book recommendation harvesting methods?
By quality, mine are friend recommendations, recommendations from online thinkers or commenters I respect (here, ACX, etc), and then the hackernews weekly scraping of commentariat-recommended books (https://hackernewsbooks.com/year/2024).
By volume, it's reversed. I wonder if anyone else has good, publicly available sources like the HN one here.
Could you further explain the 5 star rating for populist delusion? I found it to be an unorganized rip off of The Machiavellian’s
Cool to see you read Huemer and Brennan! Knowledge, Reality, and Value and the Problem of Political Authority by Huemer are essential. If you want an introduction to philosophy the former is great and if you want the best philosophical case for libertarianism then you should read the latter.
Great review, thanks!
Or, if you are lazy but still want to get a brief introduction to the US constitution by Bodenhamer: https://youtu.be/iLaTJ8Ecj8w?si=rxa3qSl5Aq_z7AZh
Out of curiosity:
How much better (or worse), in terms of information, do you think it was to read this book ("The Gulag: A Very Short Introduction" by Alan Barenberg) compared to one or more Wikipedia articles? What about reading some statistics on Gulag imprisonment from reputable sources, the kind of questions that one might seek out before even beginning to read about the topic (e.g., total number of people sent to Gulags, annual population by year, total death toll, percentage of Soviet economy reliant on forced labor, types of prisoners, gender breakdown, age breakdown, etc.)?
Does this question miss the point?
Wikipedia has severe political bias issues for these kinds of questions, that I suspect an academic book would have less.
Good stuff.
Those short 1 hour reads are great. The years when I read the most books I find that I’ve consumed a great many of those.
Instead of the (usually bad) Very Short Introductions, I suggest the Teach Yourself books, the Graphic Guides, or even Doug West's guides. The Teach Yourself Philosophy is especially good. Also, thoughts on my list of essential books (in roughly chronological order)?
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1KOCR-qSvx0vi0XU18pglwh84NVkk2i0DANdHeM4xMmo/edit?tab=t.0
VSI series are up to date, other series usually out of date. Many fields change rapidly, so I'm not going to read some random 10+ year old textbook.
Since they're very cheap on Kindle, I suggest at least trying to peruse the Teach Yourself books. In my experience, they are usually not obviously less well up to date than the VSIs (for example, the VSI linguistics was published in 2003, the Teach Yourself in 2014, the VSI Postmodernism in 2002, the Teach Yourself in 2010, the VSI Brain in 2005 and VSI Cognitive Neuroscience in 2016, the Teach Yourself Neuropsychology in 2018).
All books are free on whatever Russian sites.
True, but I'm afraid of curses being laid by the authors.