The Psmiths

It looks like shepherd.com is a book review site that doesn't have any reviews, just ratings. It links to Amazon. Is this really the sort of content Google should be returning? Edit: it seems I missed the link to the actual book reviews because the link text is uninformative: "Chosen by 1 person - see why." (Sometimes it goes to reviews, sometimes not.) And the word "review" never appears on the pages that have reviews. Seems like bad SEO? If you're looking for book reviews, here's a website with some pretty great reviews: https://www.thepsmiths.com/ (Content warning: the authors are conservative.)

I read these three books last year and I believe that each would be interesting to you: Undaunted Courage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Undaunted_Courage This is about doing something extremely hard with a huge amount of unknowns, and the type of person it takes to succeed. How Big Things Get Done https://www.amazon.com/How-Big-Things-Get-Done/dp/0593239512 This is about project planning and has plenty of real examples and case studies. The Education of Cyrus by Xenophon https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/review-the-education-of-cyrus-by This is the best book on leadership and teamwork that I've ever read. You can read this review instead but get a copy of the actual book, too, it's wonderful.

Shirts are topologically indistinguishable from crotchless pants; do we have a metric here? https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/review-scaling-people-by-claire-hughes goes into the differences between (in 1984 terms) inner- and outer-party expertise (aka foxes and lions? psychopaths and clueless? morlocks and eloi?). Yeah, when you've already known since ever to discount the wandering ones, what're a few more transients* to ignore? :) Lagniappe: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molniya_orbit [could a signifyin' fox pass for a lion? someday I need to track down RvRG, Ich, Claudius, Kaiser und Gott] * but if you can control transients, mode switching is an excellent way to rummage around under the noise floorboards for signal. (somewhere there's an XKCD about limitations of earth observation that was way too optimistic, and already had been for however long we'd had structured shutters)

Good read on the decline and fall of Boeing: https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/review-flying-blind-by-peter-robison

Yes! The losses were due to independence loss to Spain. In a sense the loss of sovereignty to Spain destroyed the Portuguese empire. Spain joined the Portuguese and Spanish armada and went on to fight the English (and Dutch to some extent), with catastrophic results for both Spain and Portugal fleets. When Portugal regained independence 1640 it needed to get back sovereignty of overseas territories, including from the Dutch. The Dutch controlled a big part of north Brazil when Portugal and Spain were the Iberian Union, but the Dutch and were driven back afterwards at great cost. The damage was done, and 1755 earthquake was the final nail. There were also terrible mistake in terms of state management up to the XX century where the natives, were not seen as full citizens, and naturally rebelled. As a post colonial portuguese citizen, it seems like an incredible fantasy that our society descends from such a grandiose history. Even in this thread i see the name Henry the Navigator and am incredulous people know who he was. A less known both inside and outside Portugal bad ass dude was Afonso de Albuquerque. This is from his English wikipedia page about Hormuz in the middle east: > At the same time, Albuquerque decided to conclude the effective conquest of Hormuz. He had learned that after the Portuguese retreat in 1507, a young king was reigning under the influence of a powerful Persian vizier, Reis Hamed, whom the king greatly feared. At Ormuz in March 1515, Afonso met…

> 坂になる! 𐎿𐎣𐎠 𐏐 𐎫𐎡𐎥𐎼𐎧𐎢𐎭𐎠 or 𐎿𐎣𐎠 𐏐 𐏃𐎢𐎶𐎺𐎼𐎥𐎠 ? (for the former, compare the Budenovka; for the latter, Brave New World: "a gramme is better than a damn") another hollywood-friendly helmet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kipchaks#/media/File:0925_Kipchak_style_… EDIT: re MITI see https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/review-miti-and-the-japanese-miracle (note the cocytarchy link!) although I think that's a tad more tinfoil hat than my perception: an initial idealistic new deal-ish "reconstruction" of japan quickly followed by the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_Course "Airstrip Two", complete with baroque electoral system. In personal experience, I once dealt with a japanese SWE (we had a 7 figure contract from his company) who was surprised I had 3 computers on my desk; as he put it, back home they had 3 engineers sharing a single box. So maybe there were structural as well as technical issues behind the failure of the 5th generation project? EDIT2: it appears Fyodor Dostoyevsky is part of BSD daemonology...

There is an interesting review of The Wake on the PSmiths literary substack: https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/guest-review-the-wake-by-paul-kingsnorth

Here's a fun book review: https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/review-the-variational-principles?r=otan&…

The real red pill is always in the comments/blog posts: https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/review-road-belong-cargo-by-peter > 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

About a year ago I came across the concept of ‘math circles’, here on HN. It was this longish but very interesting article: https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/review-math-from-three-to-seven-by The key element here is nurturing curiosity. Since then i and my 10yr old have been sitting through a virtual math circle led by Aylean McDonald on parallel.org.uk an organization run by Simon Singh

>How about South Africa not doing so well currently? I recently read a book review that discussed South Africa today. One of the many points it made about the dire state of things is that the air force planes that flew overhead during Mandela's inauguration were, a decade later, completely inoperable. <https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/review-south-africas-brave-new-world>.

https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/review-the-spirit-of-the-mountains ὕλημπίλιες?

Clickable: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/16/book-review-seeing-like-a-state/… https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/review-the-art-of-not-being-governed

https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/joint-review-class-by-paul-fussell/commen… What makes the firepit so heartbreaking is that it’s almost an example of attempting upward mobility the correct way, since — as you note — in the upper echelons of the American class system, taste and style and behavior are what really stratify people. The problem is that the purchaser lacks the class background to understand the shibboleths and so gets led terribly astray. It’s like some poor fool trying to seem very educated and cultured by reading The New Yorker (if you want to impress, try the New York Review of Books, or better the London Review of Books).3 This information asymmetry is what defeats so many attempts at direct social climbing. You can’t make a frontal assault on the class above you. They will see you coming. It's heartbreaking that hackers (and "technocrats", with the sole exception of the above masters of p-hacking??) have not really taken into their system that cultural mobility >>> economic mobility, given how much easier it is on paper.. (I'd say HN is a laudable attempt tho at uh CULTURAL REVOLUTION that parallels this admins' :) I think someone else said that even the "Jobs-Powell dynasty" is going to take a couple generations to get close to the Drumpfts? (How about the Vance dynasty?) Oh. I try to remember theres often an implicit downward in front of…

> Indeed, in most indigenous languages, there is no word for prison. I think it's disingenuous to argue that a certain type of misery did not exist because it doesn't map 1:1 to our label of it. It's at least sloppy. Noble savages are a fictional creation[0]: > A large, horticultural population near Lake Victoria, the Gusii lived in clans that were territorially separated from other clan territories by areas of uninhabited bush. Because these clans were exogamous, men had to seek wives from neighboring clans. Many societies have chosen marriage partners in the same way without social conflict, but Gusii clans were so hostile to one another that most had feuded in the past, and animosities continued to run high. A Gusii proverb said, “Those whom we marry are those whom we fight.” This presented the Gusii with a dilema, but instead of attempting to soothe these tensions as other societies with a similar form of marriage have done, the Gusii made matters worse. > Both before and after marriage, Gusii men were said to have been so frustrated sexually that they resorted to rape. Whether sexual frustration was the cause or not, the fact is that the Gusii committed rape almost four times as often as the average rate in the United States. In 1937, there were so many rapes that the British colonial government had to threaten military action, and in 1950 there were so many convictions for rape that there were not enough prison facilities to hold the offenders. Not surprisingly,…

疑 is a common failure mode for foxes, yes. 惑 might be interesting for me to consider in the musk-jobs case studies (roughly corresponding to where the confidence shall be reconsidered?) How about OCD? Subset of 惑? Could lead to failure-to-ship for designers.. https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/review-reentry-by-eric-berger >Part of what makes “founder mode” so effective is that startup founders have both a compensation structure and social permission that lets them treat every single issue that comes up at work as if their family is about to die (The field promotions and war stories also remind me of 1796-1797) Aha thanks. a quick de-Maistre-style counter response before I dive in social-darwinists.ch Would you say (the proddy part of) CH culture is largely pre-1939 compared to the most of the rest of teutonia (some hills of ostmark excepted..& liechtenstein) (Or even pre XVIII, leaving out AT et al if we review the antisemitism?) Edit 非常口,平常心?

To the extent that you can do some of this in your parenting, it's between net positive and neutral, but unlikely to be too harmful. "Have high expectations but be supportive" can't be a bad thing and certainly feels better than the other three quadrants, as long as your high expectations are something your child can actually achieve at their current level (psychologists also call this the "zone of proximal development"). That said, there are some giant red flags for this not being real science. Carol Dweck's Growth Mindset (linked at the bottom) famously doesn't replicate and is considered, in some cognitive psychology circles, like their version of homeopathy. A TED talk, a popular science book but no peer-reviewed paper behind it is a common sign of a particular kind of work. For someone interested in digging deeper on a similar topic, I recently read the Psmiths' review of "Math from Three to Seven" https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/review-math-from-three-to-seven-by about Alexander Zvonkin's attempt to teach children more advanced math. He got a group of children together, devised puzzles and experiments and games, and tutors and mentors a group of children for four years and it goes really well and he describes his methods and approaches in detail. It's all both demanding and supportive, and works wonderfully. Has he found THE METHOD? The one in the appendix on "How to teach this stuff" in Erdos' vision of God's book ? The punchline is that he tries it again with a…