Matthias Adler on Leadership

You can’t be a leader, let alone a good leader or an effective one, if your first instinct is to respond to any input from others by dismissing or demeaning them personally. When you make it clear to others that any suggestion, constructive criticism, complaint, or inspiration will be met with condescension, they will learn that their thoughts are not wanted or welcome, and will oblige your demonstrated wishes by keeping such to themselves – to your detriment, and the detriment of your organization as a whole.

Matthias Adler

Pavel Navarro on the Right Side of History

When you believe that you are on the ‘right side of history’, you can justify absolutely anything that you find necessary to do to those who stand in your way – or who merely disagree with you. That is in fact the primary, perhaps only reason for believing history has a ‘right’ side.

— Pavel Navarro

Hadrien Laporte on Academic Corruption

Just as public funding corrupts research universities, so too can funding from non-governmental sources when it represents a sizeable and non-anonymized portion of a given department’s funding. Funding from large businesses, wealthy individuals, or deep-pocketed foundations, if it accounts for a sufficiently large percent of the school’s or department’s activities, will procure the results these want. ‘Focused research’ will find what is paid for, and should those findings reflect the the truth that scientific and academic institutions claim to seek, it is purely accidental.

— Hadrien Laporte

Words Mean Things: “Cultist”

cultist:  n – In social media political discourse:

1) anyone who holds views different from yours with a degree of certainty equal to or greater than that with which you hold your own;
2) one who, having been informed of your disagreement with his obviously false views, stubbornly clings to them instead of immediately adopting your objectively true positions like any reasonable person would do;
3) someone who persists in obtaining information from sources you find questionable, even after you’ve made known your own disapproval of those sources;
4) a person who dares to question the authority of experts – especially those experts you know to be infallible;
5) an individual who, having considered the facts and arguments for himself, has anathematized himself by coming to independent conclusions different from the accepted consensus to which you sensibly adhere.

Cut to the Chase Already

I see things like this and wonder, wouldn’t we be better off just sending people there and figuring it out directly?

Blue Origin Wins $190M VIPER Contract

Maybe we’ll actually get some hardware out of this program. Maybe some of that hardware will even make it to the moon. But this kind of thinking makes me believe it’s more “exploration paralysis”: endless farting around with robotic projects justified as gathering important data and proving out essential technologies we need before we can even think about building colonies.

Imagine the mid-1500s British equivalent…

  • Ye novel dowsing system to detect water up to one-halfe fathom beneath the surface.
  • Ye extra-pointy shovele, developed by His Majesty’s Agricultural Implement Purveyors, to collect samples of soile.
  • Ye balance of high sensitivitye, for to measure finer minerales inside the soile, to determine if the ground can be used for croppes and husbandrye.
  • Ye Trained Royale Observer, who will (in part) evaluate clods turned by the shovele’s application.

…endlessly gathering knowledge about the east coast of North America in support of potentially maybe someday possibly thinking about determining whether colonists could eventually be sent.

We’d all be speaking Dutch today.

The thing about robotic exploration as a precursor to human colonization is that, because the former is safer/lower-risk than the latter, there will be endless justifications found for why we don’t know enough yet to send people.

Avery Easton on Reductionism

Experts are also prone to reducing complex phenomena to single-factor causes – factors which happen to align with their own expertise. But complex phenomena are rarely understood through such reductionism, just as most problems have many contributing causes, and the root cause may not be the obvious one or the one that confirms one’s personal or professional biases. Attempting to manipulate a complex phenomenon through one or two simplified variables is a recipe for unexpected if not chaotic outcomes.

— Avery Easton

“Two Years Before the Mast”

There was an element of R.H. Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast that seemed very familiar to me: the feel of an isolated, even empty world that permeates Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Endurance, and Home of the Blizzard.

Sure, it’s clear at the beginning that there is in fact a bustling, settled civilization in the background (specifically 1830s Boston), but once Dana’s ship dropped “below the hill, below the kirk, below the lighthouse top”, as it were, it’s as if the outer world no longer exists, and he is sailing on the endless seas of an empty planet.

Even after arriving in California, this sense of emptiness is barely relieved by the presence of Mexicans, Indians, and the occasional crews of other ships. There are so few people, so sparsely settled, that if anything it makes the emptiness of the world seem more rather than less acute.

It struck me that this element is actually missing from the SF I have read.

Which is strange, as you’d think it’d be a pretty obvious detail to weave into the worldbuilding of (say) the first mission to Mars, or a newly-settled planet: the characters are alone, far from civilization and from help should it be needed. They wouldn’t have it in their head that someone is watching over them, because there isn’t anyone. They wouldn’t assume that someone can be summoned to rescue them at a moment’s notice, because there is no one to call. They would know they couldn’t simply “return to civilization” should they tire of their adventures, because they are what passes for civilization.

It’s not a sense of danger or threat, though. It simply is the way the world is around them. The conditioned sense of immersion in civilization wherever one goes is simply absent, because actual civilization itself is so distant as to be wholly absent.

I think the thorough rewrite of the former project’s “The Olympian Race”  already captures some of this sense of isolation and emptiness in the climactic chapters, so this is timely.

One “character” detail that stood out for me was Dana’s personal reaction at his return to Boston. He’d dreamt for two years of finishing his contract and returning home, imagining what he would do and where he would go and who he would see. But when his ship at last reached the pier in Boston Harbor, he was instead overcome with a sense of inertia: “There is probably so much of excitement in prolonged expectation, that the quiet realizing of it produces a momentary stagnation of feeling as well as of effort. It was a good deal so with me.”

The account was fairly short, but no less powerful for that. And the book is peppered with such character observations of his crewmates and himself, fascinating little details that SF rarely seem to capture. In fairness, it’s easier to amass a collection of such observations to draw on when you spend two years immersed in the relevant environment, something rarely possible (even in analogue form) for SF writers.

I repeatedly had the same reaction I had while reading The Anabasis and Mawson’s account of his return to the hut in Home of the Blizzard: “This is such an amazing account – it would form the basis of a fantastic SF story.”

Alas, several SF versions of The Anabasis have been done. However, the story I’m currently working on, “Beneath a Silent Sky”, originated as an homage to Mawson’s account (albeit infused with paranoid mystery…).

One final item that struck me was the section written in 1860, documenting his observations from a return trip to California. In 24 years, everything that he had encountered had changed dramatically, in particular San Francisco Bay and the surrounding areas. In 1835, he described a smallish settlement around the Presidio, dwarfed by the main Mexican settlement at Monterey. When he returned, he found a city of 100,000-plus people, smaller but significant settlements scattered all around the bay, Alcatraz turned into a fortress, and a booming economy.

I always wondered if 15-20 years would be sufficient to settle Mars to the point that it could demand autonomy or sovereignty. Could enough settlers arrive and build a sufficiently large and diverse economy to support such a move? Well, here is one real-world example to draw on…

I Absolutely Loathed “Sapiens”

I finally finished the slog through Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens.

Perhaps I should say thankfully, as it was easily one of the worst books I have ever subjected myself to in fifty-odd years of being able to read.

Why is this? Let me recount some of the ways (some of which I have already touched on here and here):

  • Harari is among the smartest of Very Smart Boys – and as happens with Very Smart Boys, he has to demonstrate frequently how clever he is. Again and again, he will state something that appears to be either factually incorrect or an unwarranted extrapolation or conclusion, and then set it aside – until a paragraph or three later when he will come back to it and explain he was right on some specious technicality or very special interpretation. “Oh, you didn’t think I would akshully say something so wrong, did you?” It’s a gimmick that gets old very quickly.
  • Similarly, he goes off on tangents – almost rants, at times – on some subject, using language which in context implies that these are his actual personal opinions. These digressions are typically controversial or outré, and often presented with the passion of a true believer…before being casually attributed to someone else or passed off as mere noodling: ‘That’s what some people think, anyway’, ‘That’s a depressing line of thought, if true‘, ‘Imagine if people really believed that’, etc. The funny thing is, these digressions seem like his own opinions because they are in almost every case congruent with what you’d expect his own opinions to be, based on his reputation. Where the habit in the first bullet is apparently meant to show how clever he is, this habit can be read as a contrived edginess – a cowardly edginess dulled by plausible deniability.
  • A running theme throughout the book, and especially in the last two chapters, is that humans are nothing special, have nothing to be proud of (and a great deal to be ashamed of), and in fact live in a world of delusion about their abilities, importance, value, and the very nature of their existence. Everything we think we know is delusion, in fact, and everything we value is imaginary and arbitrary. All of which would grate on its own, but it’s especially repulsive when presented in a breezy, matter-of-fact tone – nihilism with a smile, or maybe just a puerile smirk. Which made me wonder why, when he thinks so little of humanity (or rather, “Sapiens”, since in making it clear we’re nothing special, he repeatedly makes the point that we’re not the only “humans”), that he chose to write “The” book about us?
  • The answer may lie in one of the later chapters, where he goes off on a long tangent about Buddhism, one which is unsurprisingly uncritical given his own personal experience with elements of it (Vipassana). If one accepts the premise that nothing in the human world – indeed the world as a whole – is real, or meaningful, or important, or known, indeed is just an impediment to happiness and a fuller understanding of reality, then consistent application of this premise would produce exactly this kind of nihilism. (The answer might also just be a naughty schoolboy glee in stomping on the beliefs and certainties and values of others, the way capital-A Atheists do, with no more purpose than that.)
  • The book’s structure and organization are terrible. His chapters seem to follow a corrupted “five paragraph essay” format, in this case: “Follow an oh-so-clever ‘hook’ with a thesis statement kinda related to the oh-so-clever chapter heading in some way, proceed to ramble through a bunch of anecdotes or stories or study findings somewhat related to this thesis statement without really connecting them to it or each other, and conclude with assertions about the thesis that all the rambling didn’t really set up or support”. Whatever their other flaws, the professors at JMC would never have accepted such shoddy work on a bluebook test.
  • Did I mention he’s an especially obnoxious Very Smart Boy?

I could go on, and probably will at some point in the future. But…bleh. Suffice to say it was a terrible read, and not even close to being worth the time spent on the chore.

Avery Easton on Pontificators

Those who passionately pontificate about something they don’t fully understand or haven’t put sufficient thought into will, when pressed to articulate their thoughts, bluster about the obviousness of it all and assert that there is no need for them to explain: ‘You know what I mean!’

Perhaps you do. But why should you have to fill in their blanks? Why should you have to make sense of what they are unable to articulate, or read between the lines what they are too cowardly to state explicitly?

It’s not up to you to do the work of understanding their ideas for them, let alone make those ideas workable where they can or will not.

— Avery Easton