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I added that genre to popular science books as things on which I will no longer waste my time reading. In both cases they're just collections of cool sounding a
by jghn 1y ago
I added that genre to popular science books as things on which I will no longer waste my time reading. In both cases they're just collections of cool sounding anecdotes without much redeeming value beyond being brain pleasers.
And in the types of books you cited they are always Just So Stories that worked for that person. For instance, with "The hard thing about hard things", my takeaway was that I'll never be in exactly the same circumstances as the author with exactly the same context and thus their decisions aren't useful for me. Why bother? There was not a single nugget in there where I felt it was something I could add to my persona to make be a better person.
- Der_Einzige 1y agoThe real red pill is realizing that Jared Diamond's "guns, germs, and steel" was no more accurate or historical than the shit that Foucault was writing 30 years before
- ralfd 1y agoThe real red pill is always in the comments/blog posts: https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/review-road-belong-cargo-by-peter https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/review-road-belong-cargo-by-pet... > You may remember that Guns, Germs, and Steel is framed as a reply to a man named Yali, a “remarkable local politician” whom Diamond encountered while walking on the beach in New Guinea in July of 1972. > Yali asked a question that Diamond spends a couple of paragraphs boiling down to something like, “Why did human development proceed at such different rates on different continents?” (Which is of course what Guns, Germs, and Steel tries to answer.) But that’s not actually the way Yali put it, and his real question — indeed, his whole story, which is fascinating in its own right — suggests a whole ‘nother set of answers > [Yali is] one of the true Player Characters of history. If we lived in a better world, he would be the subject of a prestige cable drama