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Determined
2/5. Nonfiction on one of my hobby horse topics of interest: how humans have way less agency over our actions than we believe we do.
I went into this prepared to get an up-to-date summary of the related research, since I haven’t done a deep dive on this in about a decade. There’s plenty of info here, but I was too distracted by developing an overpowering dislike for the author. I did have some amount of foreboding since I’ve heard his lectures, and he’s made several jokes that landed very poorly with me.
But here, the irony is thick. He notes – entirely correctly – that one problem with being a determinist is that you keep company with a lot of really unpleasant people who think really unpleasant things. He says he is not such a person, and that part of the point of the book is to make an argument in favor of – my words here – liberal values.
And then he turns around and makes all those arguments, and peppers them with the exact sort of little “jokes” that those assholes make. You know the ones. About how the child of a poor drug user is basically a write off as a human being from the second trimester in the womb. There are a lot of these. It’s been months, so I don’t remember them all, but yeah. He’s not being ironic (though there’s some of that, and my man, no, stop), he’s not being funny, he’s just being exactly the sort of awful he set out to avoid.
2/5. Nonfiction on one of my hobby horse topics of interest: how humans have way less agency over our actions than we believe we do.
I went into this prepared to get an up-to-date summary of the related research, since I haven’t done a deep dive on this in about a decade. There’s plenty of info here, but I was too distracted by developing an overpowering dislike for the author. I did have some amount of foreboding since I’ve heard his lectures, and he’s made several jokes that landed very poorly with me.
But here, the irony is thick. He notes – entirely correctly – that one problem with being a determinist is that you keep company with a lot of really unpleasant people who think really unpleasant things. He says he is not such a person, and that part of the point of the book is to make an argument in favor of – my words here – liberal values.
And then he turns around and makes all those arguments, and peppers them with the exact sort of little “jokes” that those assholes make. You know the ones. About how the child of a poor drug user is basically a write off as a human being from the second trimester in the womb. There are a lot of these. It’s been months, so I don’t remember them all, but yeah. He’s not being ironic (though there’s some of that, and my man, no, stop), he’s not being funny, he’s just being exactly the sort of awful he set out to avoid.
