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Book Reviews

Finishing that Review of Sapiens For a Friend

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In a continuation of my review on Sapiens from before, I can now finish the review, since I’ve finished the book.

There was only one additional part that just stopped me completely, which was when Harari said, “Why do people worry about us running out of energy?” He was talking about the inevitable collapse of the fossil fuel industry, but no one is worried that we wouldn’t have “enough energy.” The real concern is that there will be a sharp price increase when the oil-dependent energy system we now have crosses the threshold where competition for fossil fuels rises. Less “running out of energy” and more like an “energy crisis,” the likes of which we have had before when oil has undergone price spikes. We all know that solar, wind, and nuclear power can provide the power needed, but that system doesn’t yet exist fully.

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Book Reviews

Review of End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration

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I just finished End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration by Peter Turchin. The book has a fascinating premise that I’d never heard so clearly said: social unrest arises because unhappy populations are subjected to countries with political infighting. Which, well, that’s not necessarily news. What is news is that he identifies why the political infighting occurs, which is a surplus of wannabe elites, the elite aspirants.

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Book Reviews

Review of The Morning of the Magicians by Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier

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I had mostly just thought to give The Morning of the Magicians an awful review and move on. Most of the book is profoundly stupid, and often in factual error. (For instance, Piri Reis was NOT a 19th-century admiral, but a 16th-century one thus could have presented the US with anything. Radio waves and gamma rays are both forms of light, so, yeah, you can compare them. Plus, computers are binary and human-style intelligence is analog, not the other way around.  The book’s errors are numerous and multifaceted, obvious and subtle, and even worse is the broad mischaracterizations, equally untruthful oversimplifications, and the extent to which facts are taken out of context.)

However, inside the brutal stupidity that is most of the book are two interesting parts.

First, Pauwels suggests that a being of superhuman intelligence wouldn’t need to hide. Neither would an organization of such intelligences. What they said to each other would be incomprehensible to ordinary humans, much in the same way that dogs don’t understand what humans say. It would simply be lost on us.  For a fiction writer, this is a highly interesting idea.