Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011)

When reading non-fiction books similar to Thinking, Fast and Slow, I’m always thinking about extracting various practical life lessons from each chapter, write them down on index cards and review them later on a regular basis to let them sink in deep. Because what’s the point of reading these books, if I don’t learn from them. Okay, I’m facetious here. Also, this would never happen, since I’m far too lazy to do it. So, I just keep reading books I find sort of interesting and hope enough sticks.

I haven’t read much non-fiction over the last years and most of it concerns in-built human errors in some ways. Probably because I don’t have much trust in human decision making and my experiences have corroborated those convictions. It’s sort of confirmation bias at work, with me seeking out books that strengthen my credo that how we decide things, how we think about things, is deeply flawed.

Though, it’s not all about finding flaws, but understanding how the thinking, memory and consciousness work and all those things that help me to get at least a rough idea about what shape the map of human minds take and where all the white spots are (well, more like where they are not, because to me it seems mostly white with a few blurry patches that could mean we know, or maybe not at all). I don’t believe there’s some basic limit that makes this stuff unknowable per se, but to me it’s far more complex than people often assume.

Kahneman’s book is about two modes of thought, one that works more at the gut level and is fast and easy and another mode that is slow, deliberate and exhausting. These aren’t real brain structures, but merely two metaphors for how we react in various situations and how we come to conclusions, make decisions and other stuff where we have to use our brain.

From that initial idea, that goes way beyond simplistic notions of intuition vs rational thinking, Kahneman’s shows various experiments he did with his colleagues or experiments from other researchers working in the field and how they relate to the concept of those two modes of thought. Various aspects of decision making are explored, thought system one (with its quick and dirty heuristics) gets more space than the second.

And while the book for the most part concentrates on the errors we make because of the heuristics at work in system one, it also shows that this is not primarily the domain of the first mode of thought. All the slow and deliberate thinking doesn’t help in the least when you don’t have enough information. Or when the second mode, which is inherently lazy, trusts information provided by the first system.

But to get back to my initial concern, whether there’s anything of practical use here. This is much harder to answer, because even knowing doesn’t change our long ingrained habits. The simplest lesson probably is don’t bother too much thinking about inconsequential decisions, but if you make an important one, think long and hard. Though even knowing what is important and what not isn’t easy. But if you want easy answers, there are always self-help books.

One further bit: the later chapter on the two selves, the experiencing one and the remembering one, added to the concept of the I, of personality as a narrative that we groom over our entire lifetime into something pleasing to us (going fully self-referential at this point with its idea of an incremental self-optimizing story), which is something I’ve seen in variations elsewhere and which to me implies that most people’s concept of what personality and self means is completely at odds with reality.

What I found interesting, though, was Kahneman’s interjection that both of those selves matter, the experiencing one (the life-in-the-moment I that doesn’t need the super-arc of personality) and the remembering one (that structures memories into a live story that contains elements of looking back, forward and self-evaluation of the present). Most approaches emphasize one of those two, arguing that this is the real self, instead of admitting that there’s more to it that isn’t easily reconciled. That both aspects should be viewed as parts of the whole, even if it makes everything concerning who we are much harder to pinpoint or categorize, is a suggestion I find oddly pleasing.

Divinity Anthology: Developer’s Journal (2012)

It’s not exactly insightful to realize that something went amiss when games get published full of bugs or even missing a lot of promised content. But apart from a few glimpses that get past the marketing firewall of most companies, we rarely get a better picture of what exactly went wrong. All this considered, it’s kind of impressive just how much the Developer’s Journal (published as part of the Divinity Anthology by Larian Studios) reveals.

Sure, they try to paint themselves in a positive light, but honestly, all I can see is that they’re fucking awful at project management. Feature creep to the max, over-optimistic scheduling and no realistic goals at the outset. It still seems kind of a small wonder that Larian managed to publish three large-scale RPGs and are still in business. And from most of the blog posts of founder Swen Vincke, this hasn’t changed much with their current generation of games. Still too over-ambitious and still too much feature creep. Not that this is all that uncommon. Most larger software projects go way over budget and way over time, not just games.

This is no comment on the games themselves, of which I’ve only played the first one (actually playing right now). And I’m thankful to get that glimpse into the bigger picture, even if it’s only the partial truth, as these things always are. If there’s one thing I learned over the years, the only ones who have the best picture (and even then only a partial one) are those working on the inside. Which makes me wonder just how badly things really were, when the depiction in the Developer’s Journal already is pretty damning.

The Official Book of Ultima 2nd Edition (1992)

The Official Book of Ultima by Shay Addams is an odd curiosity, a mixture of game guide for the series up to the sixth part as well as look back at how the whole series gestated. Since Ultima is very much a Richard Garriott thing, the history part ends up being a bit of a mini-biography of him, though lacking any rigor. It’s very much a fans look at Garriott and Ultima, there’s no critical examination, no view at Ultima in a wider context apart from putting it on a pedestal. Yet, despite the hero worship going on (both Garriott and the Ultima series itself), the history also has enough details and little anecdotes about the game-making process to make it worthwhile.

While the game guides are probably good too, I would have liked to see the history part expanded to take up the rest of the book. While we get all these little details about the making of the first Ultima trilogies and Garriott’s life, it’s all a bit unevenly spread and seems cherry-picked. Sure, Ultima was Garriott’s thing, but no game gets made in a vacuum and after the first trilogy there were many more people working on them. Sure, the book is as good as it gets at the moment when you want to read something more about how Ultima came to be, but an in-depth look at the history of Origin (say 500-600 pages) that would look beyond the one series that made the company famous and beyond one man would be far more interesting.

Ludwig Erhard: A Biography (2004)

My political views are a patchwork of various thought systems, always in flux and never really complete. They reflect my personal history, my parents at first, later various friends and things that became important for me (both ideas but practical stuff as well). There’s a strong left undercurrent even to this days mixed with various liberal ideas. No so much conservative ones, though they occasionally rear their head.

So I was mildly interested in a biography of Ludwig Erhard (one written by Alfred C. Mierzejewski) when a friend gave it to me. He was an important figure for the other Germany (at least if we follow the argument of the book), though he’s today pretty much out of the public awareness, unlike Adenauer’s name, who most people can at least identify.

But let’s talk about the book itself, which is what I wanted to do after all. It’s great when it comes to the details of Erhard’s political life, his early success, his slow decline. What it misses completely is the person of Erhard himself. It completely reduces him to his political dimension and doesn’t capture an iota of the person behind the public face, the real character or at least something more personal.

Since biographies are often more fiction than reality, this approach might be more useful to the historians, but for the casual reader it becomes a deluge of details that drifts hard into tedious country. There are only so many minutes of sessions and debates and arguments before they become boring. There’s still many gems here, like how the early CDU/CSU was utterly different in outlook and viewpoint that its present incarnation, or the whole questions of the European integration. But about the person there is next to nothing, apart from vague evaluations of his character when it concerns the political.

Since there aren’t that many biographies of Erhard, it’s pretty good to have one that (mostly) defends his viewpoints and the merit of his historical value. But I wished for something deeper than just a defense of the free markets and an attack on the welfare state (a label that in itself is a subtle attack). If I want propaganda (and this biography is to some extend) I can get it elsewhere, but a honest and more comprehensive look at the man would have been far more interesting.

3000 MPH In Every Direction At Once (2003)

This collection of stories and essays has a nice rhythm to it while reading. Non-fiction and fiction alternating and the song title from the Bad Religion album of the same title always in the back of your mind, making you wondering whether reality really is stranger than fiction or Mamatas merely playing with your fucking mind. Sure, his non-fiction seems more mundane than his fiction, but even there he deploys the high-octane word-attack that makes all pieces in this collection seem kind of restless, always on the move and as if the writer can’t relax for a minute. The title of the collection is really well chosen.

As for the fiction, this is actually the first time that I’ve read some of Mamatas fiction, despite having read his blog for years and reading various essays and his biting comments on the net for years. I wasn’t sure whether I would actually like his stories, and sure enough most of them feel overdone and just a little bit the side of meta and weird for its own sake. But every time I can walk away from a collection of stories where I really liked one that it was worth reading all the rest, is a good collection.

Here I actually liked two: Impression Sunrise about aliens stealing human art, which despite Mamatas jittery and satirical style actually gave a better reason for aliens coming to Earth than most alien invasion fiction does and on the whole was fun to read. But the real winner of the collection, which makes it worth seeking out just for that, was Time of Day.

It’s about a highly connected world (headware with countless software agents and constant net access) and a main character who has to deal with a defective mind-jack that turns out to be much more. It’s really hard to describe without giving much away. Fascinating read, though whether the ending will conform to expectation from readers of hard sf is disputable, but overall I think the story shows that Mamatas can write science fiction like the best.

I always had the idea that he was more a horror writer, but most of the pieces in this collection disabused me of that notion, possessing a clear sf bent. It’s nice to see a writer with a different set of sensibilities than most sf writers I read, who still knows how to write SF well.

Starve Better (2011)

As a longtime lurker on Nick Mamatas blog I thought I give a little bit back and bought his essay collection Starve Better. While it’s a nice guide for those trying to write and then publish stuff, it’s also a hilarious read for those who aren’t interested in becoming a writer. Alongside Mamatas usual snark and bite there’s insightful stuff into the writing process, how to end a story, how to start one, helpful advice here and there. And then there’s his golden rule, that there’s actual no golden rule at all and the best you can do is get successful with finding a way that works for you.

In many ways, it’s a guide to writing and getting paid for your writing, but even if you aren’t interested in that, its still funny as hell. Mamatas could probably write about peeling apples and I would be entertained by it. I’m sure I don’t ever want to be at the receiving end of his attention and get dissected by his razor-sharp wit, but I do enjoy it when his uses his powers to demolish certain conceptions about how to become a good or even a great writer. Not because its funny, but because its funny and rings true at the same time. Best delivery of hard truths about writing I’ve seen for some time.

Starship[s] (2010)

I discovered Manchu through the French cover for Glen Cook’s The Dragon Never Sleeps. He’s the French equivalent of the likes of John Harris or John Berkey, though since he his art sports very clear lines and no expressionistic elements, the best fit is actually Chris Moore. And like the latter one, I like him stupendously when he does space art, but his more common covers or even his fantasy art leaves me mostly cold.

The Starship[s] art book from Delcourt is quite nice, but like most art books I have seen, I really can’t say I completely satisfied with some of the decisions they made. But first where they did good: a big (31,4 x 24,8 x 1,4 cm), sturdy hardcover with excellent paper quality. And often the cover art is page sized. But, sadly often you find three covers squeezed onto one page. Now, I don’t have a problem if these are minor covers, but when you title your art book Starship[s], I expect the spaceships to be featured as the premium content. There’s no logic behind which cover got it’s own page and which not, and sadly some of the small sized covers are much better than those later in the book that have their own page and often aren’t spaceships or even space art. Also, though this doesn’t happen to often, some of the bigger covers bridge the gutter. Which should be an obvious no-go in any art book, but it seems people who do art books can’t wrap their head around this.

I don’t really want to complain about the few written texts in the book, that offer gushing praise for the artist and lack any interesting critical insight into his work. But I expect those. What I really can’t stand is when you’re already halfway there quality wise and still manage to fuck some important things up. This art book could have been great, instead of merely good (and that mostly because Manchu’s space art is so fantastic). But since so many art books I’ve seen makes all the same mistakes I wonder if I should lower my expectations. Nah.

Hardware: The Definitive SF Works of Chris Foss (2011)

As far as art books go, this is the definite way how to publish the work of any artist. Hardcover binding and a near exhaustive sample of Chris Foss whole ouvre (ca. 240 pages) with excellent reproduction quality. Sure, like anything there’s a few cons: a stylish but hard to read font, picture descriptions printed horizontally instead of vertically and a few pictures that go over the gutter (deadly sin for any art book, but I’ve seen it far too often in professional publications that I have to wonder why they don’t get that this is a very bad idea). But apart from those few drawbacks, it’s really one of the best collections (if not the best) of any SF cover artist I’ve seen in recent years. It has both quality and quantity and an unbeatable price.

That said, while I do like Foss’s art, I rate a few other cover artists with similar subjects higher. Often there’s too much going on in his pictures and the design of the ships is often either too loose or too rigid to really please the eye. But due to the number of pictures in the book, there was enough I really liked. And the rest is neat too. Even if they aren’t as perfect as, say, John Harris’s covers, they are pretty close most of the time.

The Black Swan (2007)

The Black Swan feels like a sequel to Taleb’s book on randomness, which a more narrow focus on a specific subject of the broader theme. It’s about the human folly of trying to predict the future to have a better grip on it, which goes wrong when the models used fall apart when colliding with events that are without precedent and hence unforeseeable. It’s about these rare events that fall by the wayside in the Gaussian models of reality (like those used in finance to calculate risk) as negligible, but whose impact is so tremendous that they are anything but (thus showing how pointless and dangerous it is to use these models in the first place).

The book goes also in the meaty parts of why, despite this happening again and again, we still cling to models that don’t work. It’s all part of the grand theme of how faulty our minds really are and how effects like hindsight bias, domain specific mental tools and the ludic fallacy compound the acceptance of the situation. In the end, it comes down to the fact that we, as human beings, rarely want or can accept that we don’t know what will happen, and take any crutches to feel more secure. But those crutches are only making it worse.

Like his previous books it’s a fascinating read, though his style is pretty biting in places and not for those easily irked.

Quantumscapes (2006)

I’m a big fan of Stephan Martinière’s science fiction and fantasy covers, like so many others. I thought nothing could make go meh on an offering with his stuff inside. That said, I had only a lukewarm reaction to Quantumscapes, the second collection of his artwork.

First, while I love his covers like nothing else, the stuff he did for gaming, like the creature designs, hasn’t the same WOW-factor. It’s competent and very well done, but it’s not like I haven’t see similar stuff from countless other artists. Also, from the ca. 100 pages of the book, only 30 have cover art, which makes this a little too lightweight on the stuff I bought the book for.

Secondly, like everything that is enlarged too much, the cover art actually revealed flaws I hadn’t noticed before. Sometimes the positioning of objects seemed out of whack, sometimes his semi-hyperrealism makes the elements of the cover look downright ugly. It’s not that I went from loving those covers to hating them, it’s just that they didn’t look as impressive as they did before.

And lastly, as odd as it may sound, I hadn’t realized until now what an integral part the rest (everything beyond the art itself) of the cover design was, at least for me. Without the book title, quotes and all the other stuff you generally see, the art itself looked naked and just not as cool. Like movie music that fails to leave the same impression once you hear it uncoupled from the movie itself.