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not like other ideologies, ozy blog post, rationality, star wars, this is a prussian education system hateblog
The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark: Not particularly interesting as a work of skepticism, unless you happen to have an interest in space aliens particularly for some reason. Fascinating as a look into the pre-New-Atheist skepticism movement.
Sagan pays a truly baffling amount of attention to what seem to me to be relatively unimportant kinds of woo, like psychic powers and alien abductions. Of course, neither psychic powers nor alien abductions are real, and it is better to not believe in them. But from my perspective there are far more important false beliefs that actually destroy lives. Sagan mentions false memories of abuse; equally important are certain incorrect medical beliefs (such as fraudulent cancer cures and anti-vaccine sentiment) and, of course, religion.
As someone who came of age as a skeptic around New Atheists, I am struck by Sagan’s restraint as regards religion. He several times makes arguments the logical implication of which is atheism, and then backtracks that there are many liberal religious believers who of course are very rational and accept evolution and support science. I don’t agree with all of Sam Harris’s excesses, but I think it is much more intellectually honest to say that the logical implication of skepticism is atheism.
Most interesting fact: quasars were originally believed to be aliens!
The Core: Teaching Your Child The Foundations of Classical Education: This is the worst homeschooling book I have ever read.
The author literally looked at the modern education system and said to herself, “what we really need is MORE pointless memorization and meaningless execution of rote techniques.” In the standard classical-education system, memorization is most of your education from first to fourth grade. After fourth grade education concentrates on logical reasoning and clear communication. The Core eliminates that frivolous “logical reasoning” and “clear communication” part of education and replaces it with more memorization.
It’s hard to say what the worst advice in this book is, because there are so many options. The Core advises requiring your child to do literally every math problem in their textbook, even if they have mastered the material and are complaining about being bored. (I literally cannot think of a better strategy to teach children to hate math.) History consists solely of memorization: memorizing the dates of 204 world events, memorizing the US presidents, memorizing “six stories of twelve sentences each” that summarize a major era, and copying and rewriting paragraphs from histories. (You do, also, get to read historical fiction.) Writing education consists of copying out sentences and paragraphs assigned by the teacher, memorizing a bunch of rules of grammar, and learning to write five-paragraph essays.
Star Wars: Thrawn: The greatest villain in Star Wars history has returned to his proper place in the canon. With the benefit of almost thirty years of hindsight, Zahn understands exactly what the reader wants out of a Thrawn book, which is more Thrawn. It was an absolute pleasure to open to a new chapter and realize that I didn’t have to return to reading about Luke or Leia or someone boring like that.
It is difficult to write a genius character; all too often, writers rely on technobabble or unjustified leaps of logic. Not so Thrawn. Zahn plays fair with the reader; Thrawn rarely has more information than the reader does, and in theory you could often figure out what his plan is before it is revealed, even though you rarely do. Nothing is left mysterious. Star Wars: Thrawn is wonderful and I am eager about starting the sequels.
[Here are spoilers for the Dark Lord’s Answer.]
Dark Lord’s Answer: A very cool premise, poorly executed. An economist 24/7 submissive is transported into a medieval fantasy world. Because sound economic advice is often counterintuitive or even evil-sounding, in order to get anyone to take her advice she had to set up shop as a Dark Lord. Because she’s an 24/7 submissive, she sets up a puppet Dark Lord whom she submits to while also being the power behind the throne.
Inexplicably, instead of choosing to explore this incredibly interesting character and teach the reader some economics along the way, Dark Lord’s Answer chooses to leave this as a ‘mystery’ the entire time and make it a big reveal.
Thing of Things 
Because sound economic advice is often counterintuitive or even evil-sounding, in order to get anyone to take her advice she had to set up shop as a Dark Lord.
Gosh sakes (to restrict myself from the language I want to use) what a stupid decision. Did Machiavelli have to pretend to be a Dark Lord? No, he found himself in the middle of a whole job-lot of capable tough-minded leaders who were very interested in getting and keeping power, and then wrote a book of advice aimed towards their interests. What this lady should have done is find herself a king, duke or other leader who wants to overthrow his rivals and find some way of becoming an advisor – evil-sounding advice can be made palatable if it’s presented the right way and sold as “this will get you even higher up the ladder of power” – it’s not like there isn’t any precedent for pragmatic éminences grises who handle the dirty laundry of the ruler! And if she wants to submit, then that’s the icing on the cake for the actual king/duke/leader who gets to feel like they really are doing the deciding and ruling and not being manipulated (even if they are being manipulated).
“Mediaeval” covers a lot of ground, but even if we’re talking about a stretch from the 12th-15th centuries, whatever period you pitch up in will have plenty of ambitious rulers not too fussy about having educated (wizardly or otherwise) advisors who encourage them to do bad stuff in order to benefit later, it’s simply a matter of sugarcoating the bad stuff so it won’t immediately provoke rebellion and unrest.
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I think you are probably applying a little too much realism to a story about an economist 24/7 submissive getting transported into a medieval fantasy world and setting up shop as a Dark Lord’s slave-cum-power-behind-the-throne.
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So, I haven’t read the book so I could be wrong, but this sounds like somewhere your suggested changes could have helped a lot; premises that don’t actually make sense are a lot easier to accept than plot twists that don’t actually make sense.
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Is the Thrawn book set in the original EU canon or the new sequel canon? I am big fan of all Zahn’s Star Wars books, but I’m not sure I have the energy to dive deep into a new Star Wars canon.
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New sequel canon, but I haven’t been keeping up with the New EU at all and I found it very readable. I’d suggest checking it out if you liked the old Thrawn books. (It’s by Zahn!)
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Awesome; thank you! I will definitely add that to my list.
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TBH, one thing that really annoys me about EY’s writing is his obsession with the Dark Lord archetype. Especially since he tends to shoehorn it in where it makes no sense.
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1. Your description of Dark Lord’s Answer absolutely makes me want to read it, despite your “ehhh” review and the spoilers, so thanks 🙂
2. The Thrawn description also sounds like a thing that I would like (specifically: “Thrawn rarely has more information than the reader does, and in theory you could often figure out what his plan is before it is revealed, even though you rarely do. Nothing is left mysterious.”), although I don’t particularly care about Star Wars and the idea of reading Star Wars seems very strange. Do you expect I’d like and understand this despite a lack of Star Wars background beyond the movies and lack of particular Star Wars interest?
3. …did the author of The Core say why she thinks it’s so important to memorize everything? this sounds so absurd that I’m really curious about what led her to this belief.
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Thrawn stands alone pretty well if you’re into science fiction and space opera. There’s a few references to events of the movies, but nothing critical to the plot. Zahn’s Conquerers’ Trilogy may be a little easier to get into if you’re really . The Icarus Hunt is a very good standalone but having too much out-of-context knowledge might spoil its central twist, the Quadrail series is a fun romp and well-written but slightly less fair in its whodunnits. But he’s pretty universally a joy to read; the only ones I wouldn’t suggest starting with are the Cobra pieces, and that primarily because some of the intermediate works can be hard to track down.
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I think there’s a bit missing from your third sentence. Thanks for the advice!
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I’ve never read Star Wars EU anything. I’ve heard the Thrawn books are really good. Should I start with “Star Wars: Thrawn” or the original trilogy?
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Star Wars: Thrawn is probably the easiest standalone work, and is set chronologically earlier than the original trilogy. The original Thrawn trilogy is good setting, but many of its red herrings are built around excesses of the early EU, and some of its jokes (“two of you”) are more than a little dated.
Outbound Flight is chronologically earlier, but its very dependent on other pieces and spoils a lot of the results of later works.
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I’m gonna stake out a metacontrarian (but sincere) position AGAINST school but FOR memorization and rote procedure. Children aren’t ready for advanced poetry or moral philosophy, but they ARE ready to learn narratives that will help them process future events. How to get them to memorize stuff? Well, we’ve got to write good songs with the stories we want our children to access at moments of trouble when we can’t be there with them, with the right trigger words to come up at appropriate times, and not teach them a bunch of other junk. If some of them never learn the songs, or aren’t interested? Still better than most school.
Likewise lots of practical skills can be taught first in a stereotyped ritualized format. Kata and guided meditation are examples.
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Has anybody wrote about the problems of scale in homeschooling? It works for individual families with certain circumstances but not when your dealing with millions, tens of millions, and hundreds of millions of kids.
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I think the traditional way to scale it up looks like a private school.
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For someone who writes about the importance of moral hedging, you seem to be missing an application here.
Religion can to some degree impair the pursuit of pure knowledge (though looking at Newton and the fundamentalist Jews who’ve won Nobel Prizes, it’s not an absolute bar by any means). But it has an important secondary function as a defense against despair and a sense of meaninglessness. Ie. the pillars of depression in a great many cases.
(And at the incident rates we’re experiencing, existential threats to society itself…because probity in our institutions is based on a sense of moral obligation and hope that other people are doing their bit even when you can’t see it. Naked enlightened self interest doesn’t seem to be as good a defense against political corruption and sociological malaise.)
(Not to say religion is a perfect defense. But there are some aspects of its defense I have yet to see replicated in any other cultural value sets.)
Whereas atheism seems to open very specific weaknesses regarding depression: specifically resilience in weathering severe trauma.
It seems to me the logical consequence of this is for atheists to morally hedge by not deriding or otherwise implying the fundamental intellectual defectiveness of religious people and for religious folks to hedge by not trying to enforce their values on the world outside their communities (and paying close attention to whatever the godless science establishment learns)
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But is religion an effective defense against depression at all?
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Sagan pays a truly baffling amount of attention to what seem to me to be relatively unimportant kinds of woo, like psychic powers and alien abductions.
*waves old-person hand*
The reason is because those things were considered respectable subjects to believe in at the time. They were considered plausible or potentially true. Remember (actually, I shouldn’t say remember, because there is no reason why you should have ever learned this) this was the time of Uri Geller, MK ULTRA, SETI and Project Blue Book. We were sending out gold phonograph records with line drawings of naked people so that aliens would know about us. I even remember my oldest child being taught about the different types of ESP (as psychic powers were called then) in public schools.
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Sagan was one of the strongest advocates for SETI.
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Oh yes, I know. He was also one of the leaders of the put-gold-phonograph-records-on-voyager-so-aliens-can-know-about-humans project. I was/am a huge fan of Sagan. I even have an autographed copy of Contact.
Humans are human. Even great thinkers/scientists/skeptics/rationalists have their own pet areas of irrationality. ET was Sagan’s.
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Correction: It is pulsars, not quasars, that were initially suspected to be alien signals, unless there is another alien signal story that I never heard about.
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I think the public education system actually could use a little for memorization. The trend has been to strip away rote memorization, and the result has been my generation (gen zeds) frequently struggle with calculations as basic as 19 – 7. In my country, there have even been shifts in the curriculum that eliminated the /times tables/, excluding 2x and 5x.
While I don’t agree with The Core, I can see how it would be appealing to parents whose children are not being taught what 3×4 is.
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Er ? Cults ?? Raëlism ???
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Ah The Demon-Haunted World, one of the works that primarily got me into skepticism as a teenager.
Sagan’s restraint doesn’t really surprise me. As a forerunner to the New Atheists, he was producing his work at a time when atheism was significantly less common and arguing for atheism definitely was far from being one of the cool things to do. It makes perfect sense to me that as someone who had set as his main objective increasing the public appeal of science, Sagan didn’t want to alienate a sizable portion of his audience by mounting a direct attack on religious belief.
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Something that really bugged me about Dark Lord’s Answer is that she isn’t just behaving immorally by local standards, she’s behaving immorally by ours. The first time she comes on to the narrator and tries to get him to whip her — that’s not seduction, that’s sexual harassment. Telling someone “if you don’t engage in a sex act with me, we’ll harm this innocent person” is at least harassment, and arguably rape.
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I would call it sexual extortion, which seems to be considered its own category of crime in several jurisdictions. In Delaware, it seems to be considered considerably less severe than rape (class E vs class B felony), which seems rather strange.
Perhaps people tend to only be charged with sexual extortion when the sex act didn’t actually occur or was of a less serious nature??
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> Sagan pays a truly baffling amount of attention to what seem to me to be relatively
> unimportant kinds of woo
Those were the important kinds of woo at the time. There e.g. simply wasn’t any important amount of anti-vaccine sentiment back then. There are trends in conspiracy and ‘alternative’ theories. The wide spread of the mobile phone with camera killed theories about aliens, ghosts and monsters. The anti-vaxxers of now were anti-high-powerlines and anti-microwave back then.
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Anti-powerlineism is still quite common in The Netherlands. It seems to be strongly correlated with the building of new above-ground power lines.
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