Sarabet Chang Yuye

Book Reviews

Some of these aren’t books, admittedly.

12 items with this tag.

  • Notes: A Brief History of Intelligence (Bennett)

    A big picture book about how intelligence is implemented, synthesizing AI breakthroughs and preexisting research in neuroscience.

  • Review: The Stepford Wives (Levin)

    I think this novel fails pretty fundamentally because it chose the wrong focus, the wrong narrator. Which poses an interesting challenge – of writing the right novel.

  • The best character arc in The Stand (King)

    Stephen King novels tend to have very Manichean cosmologies and The Stand is no exception: the survivors of a society-ruining plague have dreams of both an old woman who is clearly Very Good and a man who is A Demon, and have a choice of which one to make their way towards in post-apocalyptic America ...

  • Notes: The Art of Gathering (Parker)

    The author talks more about weekend retreats, large conferences, or peace talks than about the smaller events I want to run to communitybuild. I've decided to dash this review off anyway, because designing events is so important that it's valuable to summarize major principles.

  • Review: A Kiss Before Dying (Levin)

    A very good debut novel from the guy who wrote The Stepford Wives, and one glaring flaw.

  • Review: Severance (TV show), S1 and S2

    Why set up a universe where everyone takes this bizarre-to-us premise as granted, that severed individuals are different people whom we can treat badly? The only way it makes sense to me is as a metaphor for open individualism.

  • Notes: Procrastination and Blocking (Boice)

    Full disclosure: I didn’t like this book very much, because there were 10-15 pages out of several hundred that I found relevant or interesting, and I resented marching through so much book. However, the parts I did get were useful. I also liked that the author is not someone who himself struggles much with PB: I almost hesitate to tell you that I keep my desk clean and organized, that I rarely strain to meet deadlines, that I am almost never stymied in my work.

  • Review: Dungeon Crawler Carl, books 1-7 (Dinniman)

    6/10 overall. My rating for the first book was 9, and my rating for the seventh was 3. So it goes. The series is ongoing – I think there are about 3 books left. the good Fun. Hits all the good progression fantasy buttons – character solving puzzles, hacking his game, getting stronger until he’s one of the biggest players around.

  • Notes: The Vital Question (Lane)

    Nick Lane’s bet on the location of the origin of life is underwater alkaline hydrothermal vents, where the pH difference can be dramatically different (3-5 points). Life could occur on such a chemical gradient.

  • Review: Existential Kink (Elliott)

    The operation the book tries perform on the reader, assuming the reader has preexisting masochistic tendencies they can amplify, is to getting them to reframe as pleasure the most uncomfortable moments of their lives.

  • Review: Collapse of Complex Societies (Tainter)

    Joseph Tainter’s explanation for why complex societies collapse in one sentence: the collapse of a society is a response to declining marginal returns on investment in complexity. Tainter uses ‘complexity’ pretty loosely. He’s referring to a broad set of things that include agriculture, fuel extraction, scientific research, education, and sociopolitical complexity.

  • Notes: The Bonobo and the Atheist (de Waal)

    Morality is primatological.