Book Post for April, Not About Parenting

Tags

american politics is the best reality show, diane duane, god bothering, history side of tumblr, lingua latina, ozy blog post, rape tw, rationality, science side of tumblr, sex work, there is no justice and there is no judge

Eros and Thanatos: A pair of philosophical dialogues about love and sex, starring a family of Roman reconstructionist pagans. If this sounds like your sort of thing, it probably is. In the first, Catullus (a closeted gay man who believes that Love Conquers All) debates homosexuality with Germanicus (a Stoic who believes sex is only for procreation), Lydia (a Catholic), Sheila (a basically normal person), Ali (a postmodernist feminist) and Juvenal (the sort of edgelord who goes about saying that everything is violence and power). In the second, Juvenal, Germanicus, and Catullus debate whether murder is ever morally acceptable, along with Caligula (an atheist) and Brutus (a Buddhist).

Motel of the Mysteries: From the Body Ritual Among The Nacirema school of parody, the premise is that two thousand years from now an archaeologist finds a buried motel and concludes that this was a place of sacred mysteries. The book discusses The Great Altar (a television), the ceremonial burial cap (a shower cap), and the sacred collar (a toilet seat). Funny and pointed.

Sexual Authenticity: An Intimate Reflection on Homosexuality and Catholicism: This is a very frustrating book. I thought I would really enjoy it because I love her blog– even when I disagree she’s always insightful– but this book occasionally veered towards something I agree with and then felt like it came from Cloudcuckooland. People who have casual sex are all sex addicts! You can tell, because they deny that they’re sex addicts, and addicts always deny their addiction. Obviously. Nevertheless, Selmys’s conversion story is really interesting. She gets catechized early on by a Druid.

Sexual Authenticity: More Reflections: I find this book much less frustrating than the former book, and even agree with it in some places.

Selmys uses the Roman emperors as a framing to talk about the etiology of homosexuality. Of the first fifteen Roman emperors, only one was completely heterosexual. Even assuming that some were slandered by their detractors, at least half the emperors had some level of same-sex attraction. This seems strange from a perspective in which only three percent of the population is LGB, and startling even if you assume Roman emperors carried the gay gene, since many early Emperors were not related. She uses it as a framework to talk about different causes of homosexuality: for instance, Julius Caesar might have been an opportunistic bisexual, Tiberius a sex addict, Caligula a sexual assault victim, Nero a very feminine man forced into an ultra-masculine role in an ultra-masculine society by an overbearing mother, Hadrian a normal well-balanced person who happened to be in love with a man, Elegabalus a trans woman. Even given the many similarities between Roman emperors, there’s a lot of diversity in sexual behavior and motivation and what it means to call someone gay or bisexual.

Selmys’s observations on ex-gays seem to match up with my own observations of bihacking. Some people experience a sudden change in sexuality, but it’s not common and there’s no way to cause it; most people can, with a lot of hard work, transform themselves from Kinsey 0s and 6s to Kinsey 1s and 5s, but this does not actually offer a realistic hope of a relationship. Selmys claims that sudden orientation shifts are often caused by falling in love, which isn’t true in my experience, and I am curious what the difference is.

Selmys had a really interesting perspective on how having a lot of kids affects the experience of a parent of a disabled child. If you have one kid, all your hopes and dreams are on that kid. When your child is diagnosed with a disability, you have to grieve all the experiences you won’t have: if your child uses a wheelchair, it’s going to be a lot harder for them to play football; if your child is intellectually disabled, it’s harder to share the pleasures of science with them. But if you have more than one kid, then you can still have those experiences with your other kids, and it’s easier to recognize how good your disabled child is as themselves. I am not sure if I agree, but I think it’s interesting to think about.

Interim Errantry: Three Tales of the Young Wizards: An excellent three-novella collection. It’s nice to get a little breather and see what Kit and Nita are up to when they aren’t saving Earth. Interim Errantry is as weird as any other Young Wizards book: my attempts to explain the plots to Topher involved a lot of “Jack O’Lanterns are apparently sapient”, “and then the tree alien decides to become a Christmas tree”, and “and then through a series of misunderstandings an alien concludes that Nita and Kit are going to engage in the Impregnation Ritual on Valentine’s Day and the prelude to this involves eating one candy heart each day.”

Science fantasy is a genre close to my heart. I love urban fantasy that takes full advantage of the fact that it takes place in our reality and therefore has moons and aliens.

Also, I’m not sure if this is just me, but there were definitely more references to boners and porn than I’m used to in the Young Wizards series. The freedom of self-publishing? Changing standards in YA books?

Borderline (The Arcadia Project Book 1): The fey exist. All genius artwork comes from collaborations between humans and their fey soulmates, called “Echoes”. (The soulmate does not have to be a romantic soulmate.) The Arcadia Project, which employs solely crazy people, manages the fey/human interactions.

Our protagonist has borderline personality disorder and it’s amazing. Nothing I love more than a book about a borderline who totally has insight into the awful things she does and keeps doing them anyway. I liked how it realistically wrote her both as sympathetic and as kind of an awful person, but not as some kind of chaotic evil monster– just someone who has the same empathy and compassion as anyone else, but who sometimes does bad things on impulse. I really liked how the protagonist had recovered from suicidality but was still obviously mentally ill and had a life that sucked because, yeah, not being suicidal anymore doesn’t necessarily mean your life is great. And there was DBT in the book! The protagonist talks about her reason mind and her emotion mind, and one of the other characters is someone who literally severed her reason mind from her emotion mind with magic! I would have appreciated more use of skills, but then the protagonist is (canonically) not very cooperative with therapy. So I guess it makes sense.

 

Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes are High: Wow, it’s like the book Nonviolent Communication, but without the weird and creepy implication that if you do everything right then people will do what you want.

The key piece of advice is that you should focus on what you actually want and doing things that will achieve the goal you actually want, instead of giving into the temptation to instead achieve the goals “no one ever criticizes me” or “the person I’m talking to is punished” or “my sense of self-righteousness is justified” or similar. Do not assume that it’s impossible to get a deal both sides will be okay with: this is often possible!

Before you can succeed at a crucial conversation, you have to separate out what’s actually going on from the story you’re telling yourself is going on about how you are an innocent victim, or the other person is a horrible monster, or you are completely incapable of improving the situation. Try looking at the objective facts of the situation and separating them from your interpretations of what’s going on. Ask yourself about your role in the problem, why a reasonable and rational person would do what the other person is doing, and what you should do to move towards what you want.

The first step in a crucial conversation is to notice when people feel unsafe. When people feel unsafe, they will usually turn to silence or violence: on one hand, selectively showing your true opinions, avoiding important issues, or even withdrawing from the conversation altogether; on the other hand, forcing your views on others, labeling and stereotyping people, or insulting and threatening people. When these happen, the conversation has gone off the rails. Even noticing unsafe conversations can be a huge step towards improving conversations, but you can also work on making it safer. You do that through: apologizing when appropriate; using a contrast statement which addresses others’ concerns that you don’t respect them or have a malicious intent and then clarifies your respectfulness and intent; and finding a mutual purpose, a goal both sides share. You do that through CRIB (this book is as fond of acronyms as DBT is): committing to find a mutual purpose; recognizing why the person you’re talking to wants the things they want; inventing a mutual purpose, perhaps by agreeing that everyone wants the relationship to be strong or the business to succeed; and brainstorming new strategies that serve everyone.

Once everyone is safe, you want to find out other people’s perspectives and share your own. To share your own perspectives, use STATE: share a factual description of the situation from your perspective; tell the story you’ve told yourself about those facts; and ask for the other person’s perspective. While doing this, talk tentatively, saying things softly and in a way that implies you want other people to correct you, and encourage other people to share their own views, no matter how controversial. To encourage other people to share their perspectives, use AMPP: ask to hear people’s concerns; mirror other people’s feelings; paraphrase what you’re hearing; and if they really won’t share their opinions with you at all, prime by saying tentatively what you think the other person’s perspective might be. If it turns out you and the other person disagree, start with an area of agreement; build on what the other person is saying by suggesting that they might have overlooked something; and compare positions, suggesting that you differ and not that one of you is wrong, when you really can’t reach consensus.

When it comes time to make the decision, you should follow an appropriate decision-making procedure: for instance, the boss has the final say in a corporation, but in most marriages decisions are made by consensus. When decisions are made, you should always be clear about who is responsible, what exactly they’re supposed to do, when they’re supposed to do it by, and what the followup will be.

The Myth of the Rational Voter: Voters are systematically biased: for instance, compared to the consensus of economists, they tend to underestimate the usefulness of markets and the economic benefits of trade with foreigners. Voters are wrong even about obvious empirical issues: for instance, voters tend to vastly overestimate the percentage of the budget devoted to foreign aid. Voters care about trivia about politicians (Dan Quayle’s feud with a television character) at the expense of practical issues (who is their senator); while voters swiftly punish transgressions they hear about, these transgressions are generally things like “said a racist slur” or “cheated on his dying wife” rather than things like “caused the incarceration of millions of people for relatively small crimes” or “destroyed the entire economy”. The worst part is that voters are altruistic, so instead of voting based on their pocketbooks (which, presumably, would incentivize politicians to have a good economy for most of their voters) they vote based on what they think is good for the country (which incentivizes politicians to give voters things the voters think are a good idea, whether it is or not).  All this means that voters vote for and receive terrible policy.

Honestly, it’s kind of remarkable to me how democratic governments wind up with their current level of low-variance mediocrity. This happens every time I read something about society. Like, it’s really remarkable how well our society works given that every individual element of it is a constantly-falling-apart shitshow. I have no explanation for this state of affairs.

Weirdly, Caplan models the situation as “there are benefits to having biased opinions (less effort researching right opinions, signalling group membership, not having to admit you’re wrong), there are costs to having biased opinions (you are wrong about things and that hurts you), since any voter has an astronomically small chance of flipping the election it is rational for them to buy way more bias than they would for things affecting their personal life.” While I think that’s correct for some situations, other biases, such as the availability heuristic, clearly don’t seem to fit this model. Like, I really don’t think parents are hysterical about children playing outside because they’re obtaining a certain amount of signalling that they’re good parents at the cost of a certain amount of parenting effort, I think they’re legitimately just mistaken about the chance their children will be kidnapped. And I suspect similar arguments apply to voters as well.

Intelligence: A Very Short Introduction: I am impressed by the consistent high quality of the “very short introduction” series and wish I could subscribe to a program where they mail me a random one each month and then I get to learn about mathematics or nothingness or logic or something each month.

The most interesting thing I learned from this book is that some people, including Flynn himself, believe the Flynn effect is due to increased familiarity with standardized tests in general and intelligence tests in specific. For instance, in the 1930s, an IQ test was probably the first standardized test a person had ever taken, while I took about two standardized tests a year for twelve years while attending a school system which was widely criticized for primarily teaching me how to be good at taking tests. It’s no wonder that I’d have a higher IQ score. In this case, the Flynn effect means that changing IQ scores provide us little to no information about whether and how people’s IQ scores are changing over time.

The Rent Is Too Damn High: What To Do About It, And Why It Matters More Than You Think: This is a pretty good introduction to the YIMBY position on housing. Various regulations– including rent control and zoning– make it more difficult and less profitable to build more homes, so we have fewer homes than we need. The idea that homes are an “investment” which always increases in price also increases the price of housing for people who don’t own their own homes. As a result, people live further from work (leading to unpleasant commutes and lots of pollution) or move to cities with cheaper housing but fewer jobs. This is bad, because dense locations provide a lot of benefits to people– ranging from higher productivity to a cleaner environment to better restaurants.

With Liberty and Justice for Some: How The Law Is Used To Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful: I originally thought I was a ooey-gooey soft-on-crime liberal, and then I read this book, and discovered I was an ooey-gooey soft-on-crime liberal except for crimes committed by presidents. When Glenn Greenwald remarked that under international law torture is punished with the death penalty, I thought “yep, actually, I totally support executing George W Bush.”

Unfortunately, my tough-on-crime stance is not shared by most people. In fact, under the name of “unifying the country” and “looking forward not backward”, presidents have managed to get away with absurd violations of national and international law: from Nixon’s multiple felonies to Bush’s surveillance and torture. Of course, this is not actually how the rule of law ought to work: the most basic principle of our government is that it is a government of laws not men, which is to say that if you commit a crime you should be punished, even if you are the president. (Especially if you are the president!) Claims that “public policy takes precedence over the rule of law”. Of course, there are many incentives for any given president to pull this shit: if they punish their predecessors for felonies and war crimes, maybe they’ll be punished for their own felonies and war crimes! All this is combined with a massive expansion of incarceration, meaning a poor black person gets more time in jail for smoking pot than a president does for violating international law.

Sex Workers Unite: A History of the Movement from Stonewall to SlutWalk: The real lesson of this book is that Margo St. James, the founder of COYOTE and the St. James Infirmary, is a stone-cold badass. Margo St. James became a sex worker after she was accused of doing sex work because she was a beatnik and hosted lots of different men in her apartment, and obviously the only reason one would have men stay over is doing sex work. Her conviction meant that she couldn’t find a job other than doing sex work. She founded COYOTE, one of the first sex workers’ rights organizations, a year after J Edgar Hoover died “because we wanted to make sure he was really dead”. COYOTE’s shenanigans included awarding a giant keyhole to the Vice Cop of the Year and holding loiter-ins at the Democratic and Republican National Conventions. Their largest victory was when Judge Marie-Victoire dismissed almost forty sex workers’ cases on the grounds of sex discrimination, since the police had not arrested the clients. (The assistant district attorney for vice crimes said there was no reason to arrest men because “the customer is not involved with the commercial exploitation of sex, at least not on an ongoing basis.”) St. James also climbed Pike’s Peak to prove that sex workers aren’t diseased. Today, he St. James Infirmary commits to doing research that sex workers feel matters to them: for instance, it performed the first medical research on the foot problems caused by working all night in hooker heels.

I also appreciated the following slogans from a protest of Playboy Bunny clubs which only paid their workers in tips, without any salary: “don’t be a bunny, work for money” and “women should be obscene and not heard.”

In 34 states, doing full service sex work while being HIV positive is a felony, regardless of whether transmission occurred or what the actual risk profile of the sex act is. No HIV-positive client has ever been prosecuted.

The unsung heroes of this book are public health workers and activists, many of whom regularly break laws to help their sex worker clients: from giving out clean needles and crack kits, breaking trafficking laws to help underage sex workers find shelter and necessities, giving out birth control and post-exposure prophylaxis for HIV without prescriptions, or letting people know when the police are a few blocks away.

[content warning: rape]

Bang: The advice in this book is mostly reasonable. The author, however, is a goddamn misogynist.

As an example: Roosh says that you should do things because you want to do them, not in a desperate attempt to please a particular woman. This is great advice; I agree that if you’re buying someone a drink, it should be because you like them and want them to be happy, not because you’re desperately seeking their approval. His next sentence says that if he buys women drinks, it’s not a form of supplication, it’s to loosen them up so they’ll fuck him.

This is merely one example of a larger problem. Roosh seems to view sex not as something that people do together because it’s fun but as a competition between men and women in which men try to obtain sex and women try to deny it. He views a woman saying no to sex as an ordinary, normal part of the process of having sex with her; his writing clearly seems to imply that he expects a woman to say “no” to sex three or four times the first time he has sex with her. It is nice that he does not suggest physically forcing a woman into sex. He does, however, suggest ignoring her nos (for instance, responding to “we’re going too fast” with “yeah, I agree” but continuing to do whatever you’re doing) and responding to an outright “no” by stopping for a few minutes and then doing the thing again.

Of course, perhaps some women are saying “no” in the hopes that Roosh will override her “no”. (As I’ve always said, I think such ridiculous behavior should be punished by those women not getting to have sex until they learn better.) And of course some people say no to sex and then change their mind and say yes, although early on in a relationship you should probably check in and see if they’re sure. But a lot of the women he’d be using that strategy on are people who are scared, inexperienced, unsure, not good at setting boundaries. They might be frightened that if they don’t comply he will hurt them; he’s given them no reason to think otherwise. It is scary to be alone and naked, often in a house that isn’t your own, with a person who is larger and stronger than you. Is this the sort of thing you’re comfortable doing with a sexual partner?

Even from a purely selfish level, I can’t imagine that this is a great way to obtain sex. Like… surely you want to have sex with someone who wants to have sex with you? What benefit does having sex with a reluctant person have over masturbation? They make very good Fleshlights these days, you know. And it certainly makes the rest of Roosh’s pickup advice questionable. If he’s so good at seducing women, how come he has to pressure people who don’t want sex with him into sex? Surely they should be throwing their dripping panties at his head?

I think a lot of pickup stuff can be really useful for shy men. It can be hard to think of something to say to strangers, so knowing basically what you’re going to say can make it easier to break the ice and come off as charming and fun. A lot of pickup stuff isn’t the Magic Secret To Obtaining Sex, it’s just a basically reasonable thing to say while flirting, and that can serve as a magic feather to build confidence so you actually hit on people. And by relying on other people’s lines for a while you can develop a sense of what works and what doesn’t and eventually learn to flirt without the lines. But there has got to be a book written by a man with less awful and disgusting views about sexuality.

[content warning: rape, suicide]

The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented A Story of Martyrdom: A depressing amount of this book is based on word games about the meaning of the word “persecution”. You see, it only counts as persecution if the government intended to oppress Christians. The actual state of affairs was that Christians were widely thought of as very strange and rumored to be incestuous and cannibals, were occasionally oppressed by local governors, and sometimes were executed because the Emperor passed a law that said that everyone had to sacrifice to him or be executed, intended to figure out who his political enemies were, but that accidentally harmed Christians. I found this sort of argument-by-definition extremely pedantic. I also found the tie-ins to current culture war stuff really annoying: I can figure out for myself the connections between Christian ideals of martyrdom and Rick Santorum’s idea that Christians are persecuted today, thank you.

That said, it’s still an interesting read for the historical facts. Many so-called martyrdom stories are, in fact, fiction: there are historical inaccuracies and lurid plotlines that make the most sense if they were popular novels intended to amuse the reader. Many bear a striking similarity to Greek romance novels popular at the time. They have plots like “a Christian who has taken a vow of celibacy is forced to marry a vestal virgin, whom he converts to Christianity; they are arrested for trying to convert people, where the vestal virgin is sentenced to work at a brothel; an escaped lion does not harm her but instead kills the men attempting to rape her.” This is salacious enough that it is probably fiction and not a thing that actually happened.

Voluntary martyrdom was apparently quite common in the early church. We have several early Christian writers condemning it as heresy and the sin of suicide; this was probably political, because the Christians we would today consider non-heretical often escaped or recanted their Christianity, and there was a group of heretics, the Donatists, who had confessed to being Christian but were not executed for one reason or another. The non-Donatists have an obvious reason to condemn voluntary martyrdom. One of the stories we have about early Christians is that they went to a regional governor to try to be martyred, except the governor refused and instead told them that if they wanted to die there were cliffs to throw themselves off and ropes to hang themselves on.

The Christians were really confusing to the Romans. Roman polytheism was syncretic; it literally did not make sense to them that worshipping one god meant not being allowed to worship the emperor either. Many Christians were deliberately stubborn and difficult: for instance, one Christian responded to all questions, including his name, with “I am a Christian.” Many Christians said they respected God alone, which was both incomprehensible and probably seditious from a Roman perspective, since Roman society was based on hierarchies of respect.

 

Book Post for March

Tags

csa tw, ozy blog post, parenting, pregnancy cw

Dude, You’re Gonna Be A Dad: All I want is a book I can give to my husband that focuses on his experience of the pregnancy. Instead, I get this sexist pile of bullcrap.

A truly astonishing percentage of this book is devoted to Dealing With Women And Their Incomprehensible Woman Feelings. Of course you, a man, do not have any feelings you need to talk about! You are a manly man! You care about football! And sex! And drinking! The most striking thing about all of this is that it isn’t clear to me that this book expects men to actually get any say in their relationships whatsoever. If you don’t want to go shopping for the birth announcement or participate in a baby shower or go to the doctors’ appointments, why not just say that? Like, first of all, some men like baby showers? And, second of all, if you despise baby showers that much, why not tell your wife? It is just this horrifying vision of a world where people are constantly forced to have their most intimate relationship with someone they can’t talk to and don’t particularly like.

While I too agree that large breasts are very nice, an advice book shouldn’t go hubba hubba about how big one’s wife’s breasts are more than, say, twice. And if your wife is literally producing your child, then it seems to me that you should do your fair share of chores without having to be bribed with sex to do so. And in a pregnancy book, I think it is wildly inappropriate to talk about the process of birth and associated medical procedures as if they are so disgusting men cannot possibly be expected to deal with them. If you can’t handle knowing what an episiotomy is, maybe you shouldn’t have a partner who might get one.

The Book of New Family Traditions: How To Create Great Rituals for Holidays and Everyday: I think that it’s problematic to refer to things as being neurotypical; after all, both neurodivergent and neurotypical people are very diverse, and it’s a mistake to assume that “unlike me” is the same thing as “NT”. Still, this book is aggressively neurotypical. A lot of the things the author considers to be Fun I would consider to be incredibly overstimulating and they would make me want to hide in a corner and cry.

Nevertheless, there are a lot of really cool ideas for holidays and rituals, if you can pick through the ones that wouldn’t work for you. A few I particularly liked: A mom bonded with her son, a college student who liked World of Warcraft, by playing with him, and eventually organized a birthday party for him in WoW with his guild; celebrating A A Milne’s birthday with small children who like Winnie the Pooh; reading a poem each day with your kids during April; a dad who brings his child’s stuffed animal with him on work trips and photographs the stuffed animal doing various fun things; giving a Miss Frizzle Award each month to the family member who has learned the most things through making the most mistakes.

The Game Theorist’s Guide to Parenting: How The Science of Strategic Thinking Can Help You Deal With The Toughest Negotiators You Know– Your Kids: Less a parenting advice book, more an introduction to game theory that happens to use parenting as a hook. Still pretty interesting.

The traditional “I cut, you choose” is provably optimal if there are only two people involved. Traditional turn-taking is often suboptimal because going first is way better than going second: for instance, if you’re picking players on a team. “Balanced alternation” (Alice, Bob, Bob, Alice, Bob, Alice, Alice, Bob) is superior. If children are arguing over something, try an auction! The book recommends chore auctions, because children might have different amounts of money, but it seems to me that “you can’t buy control of the remote control if you’re saving up money for a new bike” is in fact an important economics lesson of its own. Not sure what the best way to deal with older children having larger allowances is, though. If you credibly follow through on threats, it’ll be less likely that you’ll have to follow through on threats. Majority rule works best for voting if there are only two options; if there are more options, Random Dictator (in which a single person is randomly selected to make the decision) is best over time, because families are generally small enough that everyone will be able to take a turn to be dictator.

No-Drama Discipline: The Whole-Brain Way To Calm the Chaos and Nurture Your Child’s Developing Mind: The one phrase repeated throughout this book is “connect, then redirect.” Connecting with your child first calms them, improves your relationship, and might improve your child’s brain. To connect with your child, first get below their eye level, then touch them, give them a nod, or otherwise nonverbally communicate your empathy. Acknowledge their feelings verbally, then listen to what your child says, instead of lecturing or trying to convince her not to feel what she feels. Once you’ve listened, reflect back her emotions to her (“you seem really disappointed about not getting to go to the party”). Throughout the process, try to have an attitude of curiosity about why your child is behaving as they are. And don’t catastrophize about what your child’s misbehavior means for the rest of their life.

Wait until both you and your child are calm to redirect; your child is not in a place for learning, and you aren’t in a place for teaching, when either of you is overemotional. (I think they chose “redirect” because it rhymes, because honestly what they’re calling redirection doesn’t seem like redirection to me.) Redirection is inherently flexible: the important thing is not to stick to rules, but instead to ask yourself how best to teach the child what you want them to teach. It’s important to be consistent but not rigid: if the household policy is that homework is done before fun, but the child’s grandparents came over, maybe homework can wait for after dinner.

The skills you probably want to build through discipline are insight into oneself, empathy with others, and the ability to repair harms caused. Therefore, ask the child about his feelings to build insight and about other people’s feelings to build empathy. (It’s important to ask rather than lecturing. As you can no doubt remember from your own childhood, children zone out during lectures.) To build the ability to repair harms, ask the child what they think should happen afterward. You can also ask them for ideas about how to prevent problems in the future. Try neutrally describing situations: “you said you were prepared for the test, but you got a D, what happened?” Always accept your child’s emotions, even as you limit their behavior. Emphasize what you do want your children to do (“put on your shoes”) rather than what you don’t (“stop messing around!”). Whenever possible, say a yes with conditions rather than an outright no: “we can read a story tomorrow night”, not “no more stories.” Playfulness, silliness, and humor can defuse conflicts.

Loose Parts: Inspiring Play In Young Children: The premise of this book is that to encourage freeform play with kids, you should give them toys that can be used in a lot of different ways. This book then proceeds to have pictures of literally every such toy in existence. It is literally 90% picture. I don’t object to pictures per se, and some of the pictures are very prettily shot, but I am a very verbal person who gets bored easily by the umpteenth picture of pinecones.

A random sample of things photographed in the book, to give you an idea: bouncy balls; buckets; boxes; fabric; metal washers; rocks; pipe cleaners; seeds; pots and pans; bottlecaps; colored paper; necklaces.

The Wonder Weeks: The Wonder Weeks claims that whenever your infant is really fussy it is because they are learning a new skill. I have no idea if this is technically speaking “true”, but it certainly sounds hella useful for parents to believe. It is a huge pain in the ass when infants are fussy, but parents like their infants learning new skills, and you can reframe the situation by going “oh yes! She’ll probably be able to lift her head up/talk/walk/whatever soon!” Since infants are constantly learning things, it is a bit hard to prove this framing wrong.

Suggested activities for newborns: lots snuggling.

Suggested activities for week five: lots snuggling; have ‘conversations’ with your baby; show her things she finds interesting.

Suggested activities for week eight: let baby play with her hands and feet, possibly naked, possibly securely tying a ribbon to a hand or foot; chat with baby; bathe with baby; bring baby interesting objects; if the baby can lift her head up, gently pull her up so she’s sitting supported with you. Toys: anything that dangles overhead; anything that can be swiped at or touched; a mobile that moves or is musical; cuddly toys; a music box.

Suggested activities for week twelve: let your baby feel different fabrics; gently bounce the baby; sway baby side to side like a pendulum; slide the baby down your body; lift the baby up slowly above your head then lower her down, perhaps making airplane noises; pretend to nibble the baby; put the baby on your knee and bounce her. Toys: rattles; rocking chairs; dolls with realistic faces; bells; toys that make sounds; wobbly toys that bounce back when hit.

Suggested activities for week nineteen: narrate your life to the baby; look at brightly colored pictures together; sing songs; play peek-a-boo and one-little-piggy; show the baby a mirror; say “I’m going to [dramatic pause] pinch your [body part]” and then do so. Toys: crackly paper; mirror; photographs or pictures of other babies or objects or animals she recognizes by name; CD with children’s songs; toy vehicle with wheels that really turn; screw-top container with rice in it; household items such as a measuring cup or colander in the bath; activity center; ball with gripping notches and a bell inside; plastic or inflatable rattle.

Suggested activities for week 26: peek-a-boo and variations, hiding yourself or her; hide toys under a blanket or in the bathtub; look at picture books together; whisper to her; letting her drop things from her high chair; songs where you move the child as you sing; standing the baby on her head; letting her ‘fly’ around the room; supporting her as she sits or stands; swimming (only if supervised closely); going to a children’s farm together. Toys: a cupboard full of interesting things like empty toilet paper rolls, empty boxes, a pan, keys, and plastic plates; toy pianos; toy telephones; drums; squeaky toys; cuddly toys that make noise when turned upside down; toy cars with rotating wheels and openable doors; things to fill and empty out in the bath; CD with children’s songs; picture books; photo books; wooden blocks; balls; wooden spoons; boxes; empty egg cartons; wooden spoons; cups that nest or stack.

Suggested activities for week 37: taking baby outside; allowing him to press doorbells, flip light switches, etc.; let baby watch himself as you dress or undress him; name things; ask your baby to do things for you like handing you something; patty cake; let baby imitate what you’re doing; put baby in front of a mirror; chase; hide-and-seek (make sure the baby sees you disappear). Toys: things that open and close like doors and drawers; pans with lids; alarm clocks; magazines and newspapers to tear; plastic plates, cups, silverware; cushions and duvets to crawl on and over; boxes and buckets that are larger than he is; toy cars; posters with distinct pictures; picture books; baby pools; blocks, especially if large; sand, water, pebbles, and plastic tools; swings; dolls with realistic faces; things he can move (handles, knobs); things that move by themselves (shadows, branches); containers; balls of all sizes.

Suggested activities for week 46: pattycake; itsy bitsy spider; row row row your boat; let baby ‘help’ you do housework; let baby ‘groom’ himself; let baby feed himself with a spoon; let baby cooperate in dressing himself, and name the parts as you dress him; touch and name parts of your baby’s anatomy; point to and name things; put a toy under a cup and watch him look for it; wrap a plaything in crinkly paper and watch him unwrap it. Toys: toy cars; wooden trains with stations and bridges; drum (or pots and pans!) to beat on; dolls with toy bottles; books with animal pictures; balls of all sizes; giant plastic beads; mirrors; plastic figures of people or animals; primo blocks; bicycles, cars, or trucks he can sit on and move around himself; stuffed animals, especially if it makes music if you squeeze it; sandbox with bucket and spade.

Suggested activities for week 55: give the doll a bath; let the baby help unpack groceries, do dishes, or do other housework; hide an object that’s playing a sound and let the baby find it; put a toy under one cup, switch the locations of the cups, and let him find it. Toys: dolls with strollers and beds; farmhouse with farm animals and fences; tea set (unbreakable); wooden train with tracks; cars and garage; pots, pans, and wooden spoons; telephone; Primo blocks; bicycle, car, toy horse, or engine he can sit on; push-along wagon; rocking horse; stackable containers; rod with stackable rings; colored sponges; box with differently shaped blocks and holes; mop, hand broom, dustpan and brush; large sheets of paper and markers; books with animals or cars and tractors; musical instruments; CD with simple stories.

Suggested activities for week 64: various physical antics; playing outdoors; asking the child to point to objects or body parts; movement songs like Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes or If You’re Happy and You Know It; silliness; cartoons like Sesame Street; peek-a-boo; hide-and-seek; ‘helping’ cook, vacuum, or do the dishes, or pretending ot do so. Toys: jungle gym and slide; balls; books; sandbox; tea set; puzzles; plastic bottles; cleaning utensils; toy vacuums; toys on a string; Sesame Street; cartoons.

Suggested activities for week 75: silliness; play wrestling and other physical play; drawing; trying to stand on his head or balance on one foot; drawing; blowing bubbles; jumping; balancing on a short wall; tickling; playing outside; playing with other children; ball games; ghost games; twirling around until dizzy; feeding the dog; tag; hide-and-seek; reading stories. Toys: cars and garage; clay; children’s TV; children’s books; trinkets that belong together; toy airport; drawing on paper; sand and water; push car; plastic chair; ball; bicycle; stuffed animals, dolls, teddy bears; stickers; sandbox; digging in the yard; Sesame Street; music; slide; colored pencils; blowing bubbles; trains; swings; rocking horse; puzzles.

Do Chocolate Lovers Have Sweeter Babies?: The Surprising Science of Pregnancy: This cites a lot of psychological experiments that have that sort of “gee whiz” quality that makes me think they’ll fail to replicate. Many of the cited studies are on rats, and things that apply to rat babies have a remarkable tendency to not generalize to human babies. She also cites Satoshi Kanazawa, He Who Gives All Other Evolutionary Psychologists A Bad Name. So if you’re looking for a science-based pregnancy I’d recommend Debunking the Bump or Expecting Better and skipping this one.

Anyway, the actionable advice from this book is as follows:

• Don’t eat food that makes you feel nauseous in early pregnancy.
• The expectant father may get mood swings, nausea, fatigue, food cravings or aversions, or bloat; if so, rejoice, as this is a sign of attachment and emotional responsiveness to the baby. (Also, now he gets to suffer as much as you do.)
• Eat a generally healthy diet: leafy greens, eggs, fruit, fish, nuts, beans, whole grains, soy, and a little fat and dairy, but not to excess.
• In particular: Eat fish.
• Avoid consuming an excessive amount of vitamins.
• Gain between twenty-five and thirty-five pounds.
• Have sex.
• Tell the father the baby looks like him, even if it doesn’t.
• Read books to and play music to the baby in utero; they will find those books and music comforting when they leave.
• Moderate stress and exercise are good for the fetus, but high levels of stress and exercise are bad.
• Eat a chocolate bar each day.
• Squat during childbirth if you can.
• Stimulate your breasts to induce labor.
• Spend the first hour after birth with the baby pressed against your chest.
• Don’t bathe right after childbirth.
• Get ample support during childbirth.
• Take pictures of your baby’s smiling face and then look at it as often as possible.
• Give your baby ample love and nurturing, even to the point of spoiling her.
• Breast-feed.
• While breast-feeding, try to have moderate stress in your life.

No Regrets Parenting: Turning Long Days and Short Years Into Cherished Moments With Your Kids: No Regrets Parenting consists mostly of a series of ideas about how to spend time with your children if you are a busy person, as many parents are. For instance, you can host sleepovers; if you’re working weekends, you can take your kids to the office with you and let them play at the office. To bond with a teenager, you can teach them to drive and then help them apply to college. You can have family traditions, like a taco night and family movie night. You can have family dinners together every night. Most of the suggestions are not particularly groundbreaking, but it’s nice to have them all in one place.

Playful Parenting: An Exciting New Approach To Raising Children That Will Help You Nurture Close Connections, Solve Behavioral Problems, and Encourage Confidence: Based on the author’s experience as a father and play therapist, this is an extensive guide to playing with children. I find it extraordinarily reassuring that there are how-to books for these things.

Playful Parenting argues that children’s misbehavior is often caused by disconnection, and creating a sense of connection can cause them to behave better. The best way to do this is through the language of children– play. Play also allows children to work through their feelings and conflicts in their lives. We may stigmatize certain kinds of play– disapproving of roughhousing, violent play, or play we deem sexist. But these allow kids to feel a sense of connection and work through their feelings too: for instance, wrestling can allow kids to explore themes of aggression, anger, isolation, or strength. So try to respect your children’s play and engage in it wholeheartedly. For instance, the author played Barbies reluctantly with his daughter, thinking that they were boring and stupid and sexist, before he realized that this was basically saying to his daughter “your interests are boring and stupid and sexist.” He then played with more enthusiasm. The author suggests that wrestling and other physical play are excellent ways to engage with kids, as is pretending to be stupid (for instance, putting a sock on your head, then on your hand, then on your shoulder, before you put it on your foot). Play can stop misbehavior in its tracks by turning the misbehavior into a game.

[content warning: child sexual abuse]

Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children From Sex: A must-read for any sex-positive American. Levine’s thesis is that, as a culture, Americans are hysterical about the sexuality of minors, and this causes a great deal of harm. Although her book is nearly fifteen years old, the trends she discusses have not changed as far as I can tell.

For instance, consider child on child sexual abuse. Although child on child sexual abuse is a real thing (and one of my few critiques of Levine’s book is that I think she fails to engage with the harm it can cause), social workers and scholars have concluded without evidence that sexual play and ordinary roughhousing are really sexual abuse. Sexual play might not be “just curiosity”– many children experience sexual pleasure, which they may wish to consensually explore with other children. We simply do not have enough information to know what is normal and what is abnormal sexual play, as well as whether abnormal but consensual sexual play causes any harm. In the absence of this evidence, children are being branded as sexual offenders and placed in treatment that is far more appropriate to actual abusers (for instance, it characterizes the child’s insistence that they have not done anything wrong as “denial”).

Even if it’s not branded as child-on-child sexual abuse, Levine points out that our attitude towards children’s sexuality is fucked up in a lot of different ways. For instance, she describes a parenting advice columnist who, when asked what to do when the parent catches two five-year-old boys looking at and touching each other’s penises, says to tell them there’s nothing wrong with their bodies but that their bodies are private so they shouldn’t show them to each other. Levine asks, “surely, if we want to teach our children about privacy, the correct thing to do would be to say ‘excuse me’ and close the door?” There is simply no concept that children might have privacy from parents or the ability to make decisions about their own bodies.

The situation is worse for teenagers, who pretty much always want sex more than children do. Levine’s criticisms of abstinence-only education are familiar, but she goes farther than that. Levine questions the usefulness of statutory rape law, pointing out that the line is drawn differently in different places, and yet most Americans don’t even know whether their state is a sex-under-eighteen-is-illegal state or a sex-under-sixteen-is-illegal state. She points out that many adults who had sex with adults as teenagers consider it a positive experience, and essentially no one considers actual rape to be a positive experience. And getting the courts involved can worsen an already bad situation.

Levine argues that teenagers should generally be expected to engage in outercourse, rather than intercourse. However, even comprehensive sex education (Levine calls it “abstinence-plus”) provides little to no education about what outercourse might mean, almost never mentioning such activities as phone sex, sharing porn, frottage, or use of sex toys. Many people condemn cybersex, even though it’s objectively speaking the safest form of sex a teenager might engage in: there’s no STI or pregnancy risk, and real life doesn’t come with a block function. But cybersex combines the terrifying Teen Sexuality with the terrifying Internet, so it’s doomed.

Book Post for February, Part Two: Books About Parenting

Tags

ozy blog post, parenting, this is a prussian education system hateblog

Experimenting With Babies: 50 Amazing Science Projects You Can Perform On Your Kid: Exactly what it says on the tin! If you would like to replicate a bunch of developmental psychology experiments on infants with your very own infant, this book will explain to you how! All the experiments were selected for being easily doable in the home and posing no risk to the child. Important note: buy a copy while you’re pregnant, as many of the experiments are best performed on newborns.

The Baby Book: Since there is very little evidence about most decisions parents make about babies, I feel perfectly free to make my decision based on my own preferences and values. Attachment parenting, I think, is in line with my values: it hews closely to the way people raised children in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness; it emphasizes closeness and support; it doesn’t involve letting your child cry it out, which personally I feel like would make my heart shatter in two. Whether or not Dr. Sears’s advice is right for most people, I definitely think it’s right for me.

I don’t understand why the attachment parenting blogosphere is such a cesspit. Dr. Sears emphasizes that the most important thing any baby needs is happy parents and that parents know their own baby best, so if advice goes against your own parental intuition throw out the advice. Even the much-despised advice about being a stay-at-home mother is primarily motivated by concern for the mother: raising a baby is very stressful and combining it with a full-time job can make moms miserable and unable to enjoy their babies. I think Dr. Sears both doesn’t think enough about his class privilege and doesn’t recognize that some mothers legitimately prioritize career success or would go insane only talking to people whose age is measured in months, but I think it comes from a good place.

And yet all the attachment parenting blogosphere is like “h o n e s t l y if you’re not breastfeeding your child until three and you’re not using handmade cloth diapers and you don’t cosleep until the child decides to leave your bed on their own you’re basically abusing them l b q h.” There are people feeling guilty that cosleeping isn’t the right choice for them! This is absurd. How do people take such a kind and compassionate book and transform it into an opportunity to beat up on other mothers for doing it wrong?

The Other Baby Book: A Natural Approach To Baby’s First Year: Okay, now I understand where the guilt comes from.

This was pitched to me as “amazing hatereading material” and it was, in fact, amazing. I learned all about how you can prevent the adverse consequences of vaccines by giving your child megadoses of vitamin C and homeopathic preparations. And how formula is basically POISON. And pretty much every object I’ve ever bought is also POISON, full of dangerous and unpronounceable chemicals. And that “a person—a loving, calm, skilled, experienced person who was with the laboring woman, breathing with her, talking to her, being quiet with her, supporting her” is an acceptable substitute for fetal monitoring. And the important baby bonding of elimination communication (look, it’s fine if you personally feel that elimination communication helps you bond with your baby, but my opinion is that we live in the 21st century in which there is such a thing as a disposable diaper). And that epidurals hurt your baby (no, they don’t). And in general that we should trust Nature. To be honest, Nature invented the concept of parasitoids, I think she’s a terrible fucking mother.

Apparently “woman is the birth power source.” I have no idea what this means but to be honest I sort of want to make “the birth power source” my pregnancy tag.

Brain Rules for Baby: How To Raise a Smart and Happy Child from Zero to Five: This book I like!

Prenatal stimulation is really cool and I feel sad about how much pseudoscience has given it a bad reputation. Your baby can learn things before they’re born! They can recognize Dr. Seuss books, or lullabies, or soap opera jingles, or their dad’s voice. And familiar sounds are likely to be comforting! It does not make your child a genius, but it doesn’t have to make your child a genius to be nifty.

Apparently one third to one half of new parents experience as much marital distress as couples who are currently in therapy trying to save their relationship. The biggest causes are sleep deprivation, social isolation, an uneven division of labor (usually in heterosexual couples favoring the man), and postpartum depression. To prevent this, practice empathy and ensure that you are doing your fair share of the chores (which will probably feel like you are doing an unfairly large share of the chores).

To increase children’s intelligence: breastfeed; talk to your baby a lot; encourage imaginative play, possibly using the Tools of the Mind classroom techniques which increase executive function; praise effort, not IQ. I think the last piece of advice was poorly phrased in the book: they imply that you should just switch out “you did well on that math test, you’re really smart” with “you did well on that math test, you worked really hard.” Of course, if your kid didn’t work hard at all, they’re going to be totally aware that you’re bullshitting them. So you should probably just say “good job” about the math test and instead praise their soccer performance, where they keep tripping over their own feet but also keep showing up to practice.

To increase children’s happiness: practice a demanding but responsive parenting style (support, warmth, and acceptance, combined with high standards and strictly enforced rules); be comfortable with your own emotions, including negative ones; be attuned to your children’s emotions; teach children to label their own emotions; validate and don’t judge emotions, but teach children about unacceptable behavioral responses to emotions and view crises as an opportunity to teach self-regulation skills; if your child is throwing a tantrum about not having a cookie, say something like “I bet you wish you could have another cookie. If I could, I would wave a magic wand and make all the carrots taste like cookies.” The advice here is pretty similar to How To Talk So Kids Will Listen (And Listen So Kids Will Talk).

To encourage self-control and altruism: create reasonable, clear rules; praise when the rules are followed and the absence of bad behavior; be warm and accepting when enforcing rules; when punishing, be swift and consistent, use real punishments, and remind your child that you love and accept them; whenever possible, use natural consequences or withdrawal of parental attention; provide an explanation for all rules during warnings, praise, and punishment; don’t spank.

I have two complaints about this book. First, autism is described as a single condition caused by a deficit in theory of mind, even though the evidence suggests that theory of mind deficits are not universal in autism. Second, the author explicitly claims that their advice might not apply to single parents, gay parents, or blended families because research has mostly been done on parents who are heterosexual married couples. I’m not sure why your parents being gay would mean that one should instead be harsh and unaccepting when enforcing rules, but okay.

Caring For Your Baby And Young Child: Birth To Age 5: Extremely complete, fairly mainstream, not a lot to say about it.

I must say I have a grudge against the American Academy of Pediatrics on the cosleeping thing. If you control properly for confounders, sleeping in a nursery is only a little less dangerous than safe cosleeping. And yet the AAP is all like “you should NEVER EVER EVER cosleep even if it is the ONLY WAY to get a good night’s sleep and even if you are afraid that YOU WILL KILL YOUR CHILD IN A CAR ACCIDENT DUE TO SLEEP DEPRIVATION OTHERWISE”, and their book is not only doesn’t address concerns about nurseries but also is like “here’s some advice about how to decorate your kid’s nursery.” Bleh. I can’t help but think that this is a class thing.

The guide to improving your child’s brain health includes the statement that you should avoid subjecting your child to psychological or physical traumas. Thanks, AAP. I never would have guessed.

Montessori From The Start: The Child At Home, From Birth To Age Three: What is it with parenting books and taking umbrage about totally random things? This book objects to disposable diapers and playpens. Like, honestly, lots of children use disposable diapers, and yet they all wind up toilet trained eventually anyway, so I don’t see any reason to stress about it. More seriously, Montessori from the Start also objects to pretend play, which is cognitively important for the development of small children.

I like the Montessori attitude of respecting children’s autonomy and giving them responsibility. I think that this book is exactly correct that toddlers are capable of handling a lot more than people think they are, if parents are patient and willing to teach. The book gives many practical suggestions of activities that allow one’s toddler a sense of independence and self-reliance, such as teaching the toddler to make their own snack.

The Expectant Father: The Ultimate Guide for Dads-To-Be: I was hoping for a book something along the lines of The Birth Partner, but for the entire pregnancy– a calm, patient book aimed not at the pregnant person but at the pregnant person’s support network. Unfortunately, that is not this book. This book is very definitely aimed at men. The sections about How You Might Be Feeling This Month include lots of information about what your masculinity is doing. Maybe you are feeling more masculine because you impregnated a woman! Maybe you are feeling less masculine because you’re experiencing couvade syndrome! Since my husband does not really have a masculinity in the first place, this book was less than helpful.

One thing that was actually good about this book was its extensive advice for deployed fathers feeling connected to the pregnancy. I myself am neither in the military or married to someone who is, but if you are this book might be helpful.

The Baby Owner’s Manual: An extremely cute premise– basically it’s a baby care book written as if it were an operating manual for a car or an electronics device. The advice is mostly boring standard advice you will also find in the American Academy of Pediatrics book. I had hoped it would be laugh-out-loud funny, but unfortunately the authors were insufficiently good at puns to make that happen. Not recommended.

Moebius Noodles: Adventurous Math for the Playground Crowd: A series of games which teach mathematical concepts to children from birth through school-age.  It covers symmetry, numbers, functions, and grids, and provides a variety of games that you can play with children and they can play with each other. While I know literally nothing about mathematical education, it does seem like the suggested activities are fun and would help build mathematical reasoning. Weirdly, it does not include any moebius strips.

Eating Well When You’re Expecting: A guide for nutrition for preconception, pregnant, and breastfeeding parents. This book appears to follow the USDA’s nutritional guidelines. Like all books in the What to Expect series, it is overly conservative about food safety (for instance, it forbids sushi because of the risk of parasite infection) without providing sufficient information to allow the reader to assess what they should eat based on their own risk tolerance. I suggest consulting Expecting Better or Debunking the Bump for food safety information.

Eating Well When You’re Expecting does not contain any information that you cannot find in What To Expect When You’re Expecting, except for a bit more information about various nutrients, some trouble-shooting about how you can get your nutrient needs met if you’re busy or broke or nauseous or at work, and a large number of pregnancy-safe recipes. I would suggest skipping it unless you’re having serious problems getting your vegetable/proteins/grains/whatever servings, in which case it might come in handy.

This is probably my fault for pirating the epub in the first place, but not having a search function is a huge pain in the ass if you’re trying to figure out which food groups peas count as. So if you are planning, like me, to maintain a spreadsheet where you keep track of your servings of Vitamin C foods, it might be worth obtaining an ebook with a search function.

Debunking the Bump: A Mathematician Mom Explodes Myths About Pregnancy: If you liked Expecting Better, you’d like this book, as they are in fact identical.

Debunking the Bump goes through a long list of things that pregnant people are supposed to worry about and tells you which ones are the biggest concerns, and which ones you probably shouldn’t worry about. She considers miscarriage and stillbirth to be an order of magnitude worse than congenital disability, which she considers to be an order of magnitude worse than things which cause minor impairments (very low birth weight), which she considers to be an order of magnitude worse than things which cause statistically detectable impairments (low birth weight). Given this value set (things will probably change if you have different values!), here is a listing of how risky things are in order of how risky they are.

1. Smoking more than ten cigarettes a day.
2. Delaying from age 35 to 36.
3. Smoking less than ten cigarettes a day.
4. Delaying from age 30 to age 31.
5. Delaying from age 25 to age 26.
6. Having a BMI of over 30.
7. Alcohol abuse.
8. Contracting viruses from small children.
9. Lead.
10. [Tied] Not eating oily fish; driving.

Of course, many of these are not actionable: you can’t become younger, and if you are smoking cigarettes while pregnant it is probably because you are a nicotine addict and not because you are unaware that it is very risky. Here is her list of actionable advice:

1. Wash your hands frequently when interacting with small children; avoid baby drool.
2. Cut down on discretionary car trips, wear your seatbelt, and drive cautiously.
3. Eat a daily serving of fish, particularly salmon and mackerel.
4. Eat organic vegetables to avoid organophosphate pesticide residue, particularly green beans and bell peppers.
5. Never ever ever ever ever ever ever eat any kind of meat without microwaving it or thoroughly cooking it first. This includes cold cuts!
6. At your next prenatal checkup, ask for your blood to be tested for lead. If your lead levels are high, take a calcium supplement.

The Shit No One Tells You: A Guide To Surviving Your Baby’s First Year: I really wanted to like this book! It’s a funny memoir by a disabled lesbian about the experience of parenting. I think a lot of parenting books are really, uh, optimistic, and The Shit No One Tells You provides a realistic point of view on how much labor sucks (a lot), whether you will have time to do anything except take care of a baby (no), and how much poop your life will involve (lots, and sometimes preceded by the word ‘projectile’).

But then I got to the chapter on vaccines.

Look, I feel like I’m a tolerant human being. “The research on this subject is overwhelming and confusing and I don’t know what the right thing to do is” is a common feeling. I am even sympathetic to parents who don’t want an autistic child, particularly an autistic child with high support needs. But when you say something like “there are so many anecdotes about children who got vaccines and then the light in their eyes just went out!”… guys, I’m autistic, and I’m a person. The light is still on in my eyes! I understand I am verbal, I don’t require a paid caregiver, and my violent meltdowns are extraordinarily rare, but people with more support needs than I have are still people! It is like finding a worm in the middle of an apple. The rest of the apple might taste really good, but it kind of ruined my whole experience.

Breastfeeding Made Simple: Seven Natural Laws for Nursing Mothers: This book contains medically inaccurate information about formula. In the developing world, breastfeeding is a very important public health intervention: breastfeeding reduces the risk of severe gastrointestinal infections, which can kill; parents who use formula in the developing world can wind up making their baby’s formula with unsafe water or diluting formula to save money. In the developed world, where most people can afford formula and the water is generally pretty safe, breastfeeding is less important: it leads to fewer gastrointestinal infections (which are far less dangerous in the developed world), lower rate of constipation, and probably a higher IQ. Many of the benefits this book claims simply have not been backed up by evidence.

In addition, Breastfeeding Made Simple has an anti-science attitude that upsets me. It’s true that formula was widely adopted, not because it was better, but because it seemed more scientific. And it’s true that some parents, inspired by behaviorism, ignored their babies’ cries and hunger signals. But that does not mean that we have learned that sometimes the wisdom of motherhood matters more than science; it means that science is self-correcting and sometimes makes mistakes, but that we can revise these mistakes. And it doesn’t mean that alternative medicine is an adequate substitute for real medicine.

I don’t mean to criticize this book overall. If you take the alleged benefits of breastfeeding with a grain of salt, it seems like an extraordinarily useful resource for breastfeeding parents, covering many common pitfalls. Babies do not understand the concept of clocks, and so you should generally expect to feed your children on their own schedule, not on yours; formula-fed babies take to a schedule much better, while for breastfed babies scheduling feedings can lead to underfeeding and loss of milk. You should never experience pain worse than a slight tenderness while breastfeeding: if you do, your baby probably has an improper latch-on. To ensure proper latch-on:

1. Hold your baby’s body under your breast and firmly against you; align your baby’s nose to your nipple; allow the baby’s head to tilt slightly back.
2. Lightly bring your baby to the breast (NOT breast to baby), rubbing your nipple along your baby’s face until the baby’s mouth opens.
3. Before the baby has developed head and neck control at four to six weeks, gently push the baby to get the baby to take more of your breast into their mouth.

For the first forty days after your baby is born, you should not expect to do anything except sleep and breastfeed. Clarify this state of affairs with your coparent(s); even though you may be home for parental leave and they are at work, they should still expect to handle all the cooking and cleaning. However, over time, breastfeeding becomes easier than formula feeding; you don’t have to prepare formula in the middle of the night, you can just sleepily stick the baby on your boob.

If your baby has enough stools, they are probably getting enough food. After the first week, the baby should have three to four stools the size of a quarter or more daily. It may help to track your breastfeedings and the baby’s stools on a piece of paper. Your doctor will weigh the baby; if the baby is losing weight, they are not getting enough food. If you are a neurotic wreck, or if you have some reason to believe you might not produce adequate milk, investing in a baby scale allows you to check your child’s weight at home. (This is unnecessary for most parents.)

The easiest way to wean a child is to simply continue to breastfeed until the child decides they no longer want to breastfeed. There are only positive consequences of this; in many hunter-gatherer cultures, children are breastfed until four or five. If that is not possible or desired, a gradual weaning is far superior to an all-at-once weaning; it is far less likely to be painful and to lead to health consequences like mastitis.

Several chapters at the end kindly and compassionately discuss breastfeeding difficulties. I appreciated the reminder that some breastfeeding is always better than no breastfeeding, and the most important aspect of feeding babies is that they get enough food. If you must supplement with formula for health reasons, this is not a failure.

Neurodiversity in the Classroom: Strength-Based Strategies to Help Students With Special Needs Succeed in School and Life: The opening paragraph of this book is about a teacher introducing the author to her students and saying “and these are my slow students”. The author wonders, “doesn’t she know that they can hear her?” As soon as I read that, I knew I would like this book.

It’s no secret that a lot of special education is really bad. “We’re cutting shop, which you like and are good at, so you can spend more time reading, which you hate and are bad at” bad. “This kid with ADHD forgot their homework, so we’re keeping them in from recess to make it up” bad. Neurodiversity in the Classroom argues that, instead, teachers of neurodivergent children should deliberately construct positive niches that build on the children’s skills and strengths. He provides a seven-step process for doing so:

1. Strength Awareness. Teachers and the student know what the student is good at and don’t just think of them as a pile of flaws and disabilities.
2. Positive Role Models. The student is aware of adult role models who have the same neurodivergences they do, including both celebrities and people in the community.
3. Assistive Technologies and Universal Design for Learning. Assistive tech is technology that improves access for disabled people, such as augmented and alternative communication devices, wheelchairs, and large-print and Braille reading materials. Universal design for learning is designing a learning environment that accommodates a wide array of learning differences for both neurotypical and neurodivergent children: for instance, using interactive digital books which provide speech, text, and graphics.
4. Enhanced Human Resources. The use of individuals besides the teacher to help the student, including psychologists, physical therapists, parents, tutors, and other students.
5. Strength-Based Learning Strategies. The teacher should build on the student’s abilities and interests when teaching them; for instance, an intellectually disabled student who loves music can be taught to read through song lyrics.
6. Affirmative Career Aspirations. The student should be aware of careers that they are well-suited to, given their neurodivergence and other abilities. For instance, a student with ADHD might be encouraged to look into jobs that involve novelty and movement, like being a personal trainer.
7. Environmental Modification. An environment should be created that fits the student’s needs. For instance, a teacher might muffle school bells if they have an autistic student with a sensitivity to sound.

The book is full of practical ideas about accommodating neurodivergent people in the classroom. For example, to accommodate a student with ADHD, the teacher might help the student use time-management software, frequently change activities (group work, then individual work, then lecture), provide hands-on learning activities, hold science or physical education classes outdoors, introduce movement breaks into the day, or have the student use a balance ball chair instead of a regular chair.

The Well-Trained Mind: A Guide to Classical Education At Home: A lot of the advice here seems like silly and/or counterproductive ways to educate children. Why would I waste energy teaching my children to be able to name off the English kings in order? Why would you attempt to teach spelling through workbooks instead of teaching it the way every good speller learned to spell– lots of exposure to text and having their misspellings corrected? Why would you primarily teach subjects through having children do readings and then outline their readings? (Why not spaced repetition? Oh, right, they didn’t have that in the Renaissance.) Why are you teaching children to think using formal logic, but not even addressing the skill of reading a study? Where, pray tell, is the evidence base?

Not all of the Well-Trained Mind is bad. Teaching the humanities as a single subject in its historical context seems to me to be a better approach than artificially separating art, music, literature, and history. A great books education still seems to me like a useful way to teach about the development of intellectual thought. But I expect the correct way to do it is just to work through the St. John’s College Great Books list once the kids get into high school, and not bother with all this nonsense about outlining.

Every Book Is A Social Studies Book: How To Meet Standards with Picture Books, K-6: This is pretty much exactly what it says in the title: a bunch of ways to use classic children’s books to teach about social studies topics. (“Let’s use the Sneetches and discuss prejudice!” “Let’s read about Ellis Island, then talk to people we know who are immigrants!”) If this sounds like the sort of thing you’d be interested in, you’d probably be interested in it. It is mildly annoying that one of the suggested lessons is about reducing one’s garbage output, when in reality excessive garbage production is not a particularly urgent environmental issue and it would be much better if they had talked about climate change instead.

Mind in the Making: The Seven Essential Life Skills Every Child Needs: In case you’re wondering, these skills are focus and self-control, perspective-taking, communicating, making connections, critical thinking, taking on challenges, and self-directed engaged learning.

To build focus and self-control: support your child’s interests; play games that encourage executive function, like guessing games, puzzles, sorting games with changing rules, Simon Says, and Do The Opposite Of What Simon Says; have children participate in reading books by repeating refrains or familiar words; for children over the age of two, show them age-appropriate, meaningful, educational, and nonviolent television; no background television; encourage children to play pretend; get children to make plans, follow plans, and then discuss what they accomplished; ensure your child is well-rested and has breaks; model focus, self-control, and taking breaks yourself.

To build perspective-taking: model perspective-taking; teach children collective problem-solving skills, like brainstorming possible solutions and identifying ways to meet everyone involved’s goals; be warm and kind to your children; validate your children’s feelings; talk about feelings– yours and theirs; talk about other people’s points of view in everyday life; encourage playing pretend; when a child does something that hurts others, explain how it hurts others; ask children to try to figure out the goals and motivations of people they know and fictional characters.

To build communication: model a love of language and literature; talk a lot to infants and toddlers; talk about subjects that go beyond the here and now, like what happened in the past and might happen in the future; talk about what your children find interesting; tell stories about your life and ask children to tell stories about theirs; read to children and talk about books with them; play word games; encourage children to write; use cognitively engaging talk and complex words; give children access to many forms of media, including music, art, and the performing arts.

To build the ability to make connections: tell the child about other things that are connected to their passions (e.g. a knight is like a superhero in the past); acknowledge that making mistakes is part of learning; give children open-ended toys like balls and dolls; use spatial words like “above”, “behind”, “below”, etc.; when playing with children, don’t boss them around, but instead ask questions, describe, and point out mathematical concepts; play hide-and-seek and treasure hunts; use math talk in everyday situations, such as giving out cookies; give children chores that involve math; play board games and dominoes, which involve counting; show children optical illusions; give them feedback on the strategies they chose for thinking about problems.

To build critical thinking: encourage your child’s curiosity and interests; let them play; give them accurate and valid information, even if you have to look things up; help children find other experts; teach children how to assess if things are true; talk about television shows and ads to encourage media literacy; when you and your child have a conflict, help them brainstorm ways to resolve the conflict; talk to your children about confounding variables (or someone else will).

To build the ability to take on challenges: model managing your stress, talking to others about stress, and taking time for yourself; don’t protect your child from normal bad experiences; have a warm, caring, and trusting relationship with your child; don’t freak out about your child hurting themself; help them develop coping strategies for stress; have reasonable expectations; have your child come up with a plan for following your rules and meeting your expectations, including a plan for if their first plan doesn’t work; let shy children watch new situations and gradually come to participate; promote your child’s passions; praise effort not ability; teach them that the brain is like a muscle and it gets stronger with use and hard work.

To encourage self-directed and engaged learning: be trustworthy and reliable, providing safety, security, and structure; help children set and work for goals; always include a social, emotional, and intellectual aspect to learning; when a child is recalling a past event, practice a high-elaborative style, in which you ask open-ended questions, show interest, provide feedback to the child, and repeat what the child says; have conversations that explore the past, the future, and fantasy; have children explain what they’re learning; have children strive for their personal best; give children accountability through clear expectations, acknowledging their strengths, and praising effort; create a community of learners.

How To Raise An Adult: Break Free of the Overparenting Trap and Prepare Your Kid For Success: You know that thing where people say DARE makes kids use drugs more because it normalizes drug use by telling them about all the other kids who are doing drugs? I don’t know about DARE but that is definitely true of this book for me. Normally, I think that unstructured play is the best thing for children, and my parents gave me plenty of time for it. I know there are a lot of great schools; I’ve met enough people who went to Ivies to be aware that their college experience honestly wasn’t that much different than my own. And I had a full-time mental illness as a teenager which meant that I didn’t do three hours of homework a night or go to fourteen extracurriculars.

But then I read this book and I was like “holy shit, people will judge your child for going to Barnard instead of Stanford? People hire coaches to help their children optimize their college applications? People start trying to get their children into prestigious preschools as soon as they’re born? THERE’S SUCH A THING AS A PRESTIGIOUS PRESCHOOL???????” and now I have tons of anxiety disorder fuel I didn’t before. Thanks! Very helpful.

Also, what is it with old people and the trophy thing? Yes, I got a participation trophy for soccer when I was six. No, I was not somehow deceived into thinking I was good at sports; I was perfectly fucking aware I sucked at sports. No, I don’t think it screwed me up. Can’t we wait for relentless competition until the kids are no longer reading books with pictures in them?

The Happiest Baby on the Block: When babies are born, they are not 100% finished yet. Human babies are far more dependent than nonhuman babies, because we have big heads and narrow hips and if we waited for the babies to actually be finished mothers would be way more likely to die in childbirth. Therefore, babies are likely to be very fussy and bad at self-soothing for the first few months of their life.

The solution is to create an environment that imitates the womb. This is what The Happiest Baby on the Block calls the 5 S’s:

• Swaddling– tightly wrap your baby. You can do this really tightly; most parents wrap far too loosely, for fear of causing damage.
• Side or Stomach– put the baby on their side or their stomach, not their back. (Always put the baby on their back when they sleep, to reduce risk of SIDS.)
• Shhhhhh– Make a loud shushing sound near the baby’s ear. Try to be as loud as the baby’s crying. You can also use a white noise CD.
• Swinging– Rock the baby, put them in a swing, or even stick them on the washing machine. For this one, it’s important to be gentle, because shaking a baby can cause brain damage.
• Sucking– Give the baby something to suck on, such as a pacifier, your finger, or your boob.

The Happiest Toddler on the Block: How To Eliminate Tantrums and Raise a Patient, Respectful, and Cooperative One- to Four-Year-Old: The part of toddlers’ brains that is good at language and logic is immature, and therefore the emotional and impulsive part of their brains is in the driver’s seat. It is best, therefore, to think of yourself not as your child’s boss or as your child’s friend, but as an ambassador from Adult Land to the exotic country of Toddlerlandia, with its strange customs and manners. An ambassador is unfailingly polite and respectful, and they’re willing to negotiate. But when a country is trying to get away with something that is absolutely unconscionable, an ambassador is willing to put her foot down and say “my country will not accept this.”

When a toddler is upset, always begin by echoing what she wants and feels, to make her feel understood, before taking a turn to tell her your important messages. (Of course, if your child is doing something that harms herself or others, always stop her first and then empathize. You don’t her to be hit by a car because you empathized while she was running into the street!) Use language toddlers understand: short phrases, repeated several times, with animated gestures and an expressive tone of voice.

If your child is behaving in an annoying but not dangerous way, first empathize with her, using words she understands. Then offer her a win-win compromise where you both get something you want. If she continues to behave in an annoying way, clap your hands hard and growl “no!” If she still does that, then kindly ignore her until she quiets, checking in every twenty to thirty seconds to empathize again. If your child is harming herself or others, or breaking one of your firm rules, use an appropriate consequence such as a time-out or taking away a privilege.

The best way to combat bad behavior is to prevent it. Therefore, give your child plenty of attention and praise when they’re doing well. Praise is often more likely to be believed if you say it to another person where the toddler can overhear. Offer your child age-appropriate choices (although not with more than two options, which is the most she can handle). Sometimes pretend to be incompetent at things (“do the pants go on your head?”) to make your child laugh and feel confident. Occasionally delay something your child wants for ten or twenty seconds, to give the child practice with patience and teach them that things they want will come if they wait. Help them practice breathing slowly, so they can do it when overwhelmed. Spend special time with them (as little as five minutes) several times a day, and talk to them at night about things they did well over the course of the day. If your child does not have a lovey or transitional object, help her find one. To teach appropriate behavior, tell stories about children who behave in appropriate ways, notice and praise other children who behave appropriately, and role-play troublesome situations when the child is calm.

[content warning: depressing fact about the Holocaust]

Free To Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life: It turns out this whole time Mike Blume and I have been unfairly blaming the Prussians and school was just as bad before then. The 17th century Protestants are going about memorizing little ditties about how if you tell a lie you will go to hell and be tortured for eternity. Not to be outdone, the Catholics were memorizing “What does it mean to resist authority? To resist authority is to rebel against the divine order. What happens to those who do not submit to authority? They will suffer eternal damnation.”

The basic thesis of this book is that children have a natural drive to learn, which schools successfully manage to beat out of them over the course of twelve years. This seems plausible to me. Preschoolers are, after all, known for their incessant questions. Human beings evolved to have an extended childhood because of how much we need to learn. It seems extraordinarily strange that evolution would have us pay all the costs of taking care of a child for ten or fifteen years instead of having new children, and not bother to evolve children a desire to actually learn things as opposed to being dragged into learning kicking and screaming. Other animals learn through play, and children do have a notoriously strong desire to play. We know that extrinsic motivation kills intrinsic motivation dead. And hunter gatherer tribes do not explicitly teach their children; instead, their children play games, imitating the adults, and over time acquire all the skills they need to be successful hunter gatherers. The fact that children have to be forced to learn is very strange, and primarily because for a very long time obedience and respect for authority were far more important virtues to teach children than independence and autonomy. Since, nowadays, independence matters more, it makes sense to shift back to a forager model of learning.

My one point of disagreement is that Free to Learn adheres to a Sudbury school/unschooling model in which children basically do whatever they want. I agree that that is the ideal and it works best for hunter-gatherers. However, hunter gatherers also have thousands of years of social technology, which means that the games children want to play are games which teach them skills useful in a hunter-gatherer society. We have, clearly, wasted our last couple of thousand years of cultural evolution on getting children to memorize things about eternal torture. So in the meantime I think something like Montessori is correct.

That said, time for unstructured play is also very important. Consider Little League versus a game of baseball with your neighbors. Because you have a coach at Little League, you’re probably going to be better at baseball, if for some reason you care about elementary schoolers actually being good at baseball. But if you play with friends you get the same amount of exercise, you’re free from adults, and you get practice resolving conflicts fairly and compromising with others about what you want to do. Kids who really really don’t want to play baseball don’t have to, and there’s an incentive to make playing baseball more fun for kids who suck at it– otherwise, you won’t have enough players to make up the team. And Mom doesn’t have to drive anyone anywhere. It just seems like a better system all around.

Interesting fact: The Baining are apparently the world’s most boring people, and at least one anthropologist quit studying them in disgust at how dull they are. They think that natural things are shameful and that the purpose of human life is work. Almost uniquely among human cultures, they don’t really tell stories; most of their conversation focuses on work and details of daily living. Free to Learn argues this strange behavior is linked to the Baining finding children’s play shameful and discouraging or even punishing it.

Other interesting fact: At Auschwitz, Jewish children played gas chamber.

[content warning: child sexual abuse]

Our Whole Lives: Sexuality Education For Grades K-1: You know how sex-positive feminists are always like “we need comprehensive sex education that goes beyond STIs and putting condoms on a banana. Sex education should talk about pleasure. It should give children an opportunity to think about sexual ethics and their sexual values, without assuming the only way to ethically have sex is to wait until marriage. It should be inclusive of disabled people and LGBT+ people. It should help people set boundaries and teach them to respect other people’s consent.” Well, good news, this exists and it’s called Our Whole Lives.

I particularly liked the abuse education lesson. Child sexual abuse education is very important, but I worry that if you only talk about genitals in the context of abuse, then it winds up treating genitals as bad and wrong and forbidden, which is not the message we want to send. The lesson on abuse begins by talking about healthy things we do for our bodies like exercising and eating vegetables, then talks about how loving touch is another healthy thing we do with our bodies which makes people feel good. Then masturbation is discussed briefly, along the lines of “masturbation is touching your own vulva or penis. Some children do this and other children don’t. Either way it is fine, but masturbation must be done in private.” Then they move to talking about how no one should ever touch you without your consent except in an emergency, and you don’t have to put up with touch that makes you feel angry or afraid. Only after all this context has been laid out do they talk about sexual abuse. I think this gives the message that (a) touch in general and sexuality in specific is a good thing, but (b) some bad people use touch in a way that is hurtful to others. Which I think is the right message to be sending.

Disability is included casually throughout the program: for instance, some of the children in stories are disabled, and the teacher is asked to specifically point out that disabled bodies are also wonderful.

Book Post for February, Part One: Books Not About Parenting

Tags

diets cw, harry potter, not feminism go away, ozy blog post, PRECIOUS sexual energy, there is no justice and there is no judge

Fashionable Nonsense: I have conflicted feelings about this book! It consists mainly of quotes from Continental philosophers about math or science, followed by “this doesn’t actually make any sense”, “this is confusing the scientific concept of chaos with the colloquial meaning of chaos”, “none of these words are real math words”, “they mixed up ‘velocity’ and ‘acceleration'”, and “the reason fluid mechanics are hard to solve is not that people have a misogynist objection to fluid things”. They spend a lot of time bashing Lacan, which I always approve of.

To a certain extent, I feel like it’s not entirely fair to critique postmodernism for being an elaborate series of word games? That’s the thing it is. A bunch of clever people showing off how cool their wordplay is. Now, you can ask a bunch of questions about it like “why do people act like these word games are producing knowledge?” and “why is the government funding people to sit on their asses and play incomprehensible word games with each other?” But I feel like criticizing them for being word games without connection to reality is sort of missing the point.

That said, I completely agree that a cute analogy to some mathematical or scientific concept is not the same as “an argument” or “evidence” and mostly serves to give unwarranted scientific rigor to your half-assed speculations. Indeed, I often feel like shouting this to large segments of the rationalist community.

(Not, of course, that there’s anything wrong with making half-assed speculations– I do it all the time– but it’s bad form to make people feel they are all science-y when they’re not.)

I spent a lot of the chapter on Bruno Latour grousing to myself because, yeah, sure, Latour’s approach to sociology of science neglects that people might believe things because they are true, which is kind of an important part of science. But he can also write a coherent sentence! Sometimes he’s even funny! These things are not true of literally anyone else in the book Fashionable Nonsense (I guess sometimes Irigaray is funny but not, like, intentionally), and I think we should give Latour some credit for that.

Models: Attract Women Through Honesty: Finally, a PUA book that isn’t full of shit.

The basic thesis of Models is that the most important traits for a heterosexual man attempting to attract women are vulnerability and non-neediness. Non-neediness means that you care more about your opinion of you than people’s opinion of you in general and her opinion of you in specific. Vulnerability means that you are open about your tragic backstory, weird hobbies, embarrassing tastes, and other things that people might judge you for. These go together, because if a woman is like “ew! He likes bugling!” you’re not like “how can I survive if a woman does not approve of me?????” you’re like “*shrug* her loss.”

I think this is broadly accurate in terms of dating advice, although I really want to expand it to also apply to romances aimed at women. Vulnerability is right, but I feel like there are a lot of things you can say about Edward Cullen but “not needy” is not one of them. Maybe “at least one of not-neediness or murder”? When I brought this up on Tumblr people were like “Ozy, romance novels are different from real life”, which is true. But I think the primary difference is that some things which are bad in real life, like stalking and a history of committing murder, can be romantic in stories because you know that it is not going to end with Bella feeling creeped out and uncomfortable that she’s being stalked or with Edward Cullen murdering Bella Swan. I don’t think it’s true that women are attracted to needy men but understand that in real life there are negative consequences that don’t exist in fiction. There is clearly something different going on here and I want to understand it.

My favorite story from this book is when the author goes out with one of his player buddies to try to figure out The Secret Of Women. His player buddy gets drunk and starts shouting “can I pee in your butt?” at every attractive woman who walks by. Most of them are horrified, but one of them starts talking to him about rimjobs, and they go home together. A week later, the author tries saying “can I pee in your butt?” to women. He does not get laid.

The moral of the story is that subtext matters more than text, and if your subtext is “I like saying gross shit because I think it’s funny, that is who I am, I don’t care whether you laugh or flee in horror”, that is attractive, and if your subtext is “I have unlocked the magic secret to pussy, please fuck me now”, that is not.

Models argues that when someone rejects you, they’re actually doing you a favor. For instance, a lot of men complain about women rejecting them for being short. But if she rejects you for being short, she is either not attracted to you or extremely shallow. Why do you want to date a shallow person who’s not attracted to you? You should be grateful they kicked themselves out of your dating pool so you don’t have to. This is basically abundance mindset. It is really really hard to get people who can’t get laid to have abundance mindset, and I hope Models’s framing would actually work.

Women can be divided into the categories receptive, unreceptive, and neutral. Unreceptive women have boyfriends, are moving out of the country tomorrow, have taken a vow of celibacy, are lesbians, don’t share your interests, don’t share your values, think you’re ugly, etc. If you’re not certain if a woman is unreceptive, ask her out and then you’ll know. It is best to assume that you are never ever ever ever ever going to change the mind of an unreceptive woman; even if you can, it’s not worth the effort. Shrug it off and move on.  Receptive women initiate with you or enthusiastically reciprocate your flirting. If you have a receptive woman, you escalate and move things forward.

Neutral women aren’t really sure whether they’re receptive to you or not yet; they’re a tentative yes. For most men, most women are neutral when they first meet them. A lot of men assume the right thing to do with neutral women is to avoid offending them by sticking to boring jokes and talking about the weather. This is completely wrong. The longer a woman stays neutral, the more likely it is that she will become unreceptive, because you are boring. In fact, the goal is to get neutral women to become receptive or unreceptive as quickly as possible, through expressing your non-neediness and vulnerability. That way, if she doesn’t like what you’re selling, you don’t have to waste any more time on her, and if she does, then you’re not going to have fucked it up by talking about the weather instead.

There are three important factors in getting laid. Your lifestyle, status, and looks affect what percentage of women are initially receptive to you.  Your boldness, extroversion, and willingness to actually fucking ask women out affect how many women you meet in the first place. Your charisma, flirting ability, and “game” affect what percentage of neutral women become receptive. Models argues that all men who have problems with women have problems in at least one area; most have problems with two, and a few unlucky people have problems with all three.

Lifestyle. The most important principle of lifestyle is that like attracts like. If you want to attract well-educated and successful women with strong opinions on wine, putting your cap on backwards and saying “BROOOOOOOOOOO” a lot will not help. If your heart only beats for metalheads, Sisters of Mercy and Edgar Allen Poe is probably not the right choice. This also applies on a belief level: if you believe that women don’t enjoy sex or that women are all evil, guess what kind of women you’re going to attract. That said, there are also things you can do that will improve romantic success for basically everyone, such as proper grooming, wearing clothes that signal your personality and actually fit, exercising, weight loss, adopting masculine body language and vocal tones, finding unique hobbies that you like, and developing and confidently stating your opinions. (He doesn’t say this, but I would suggest only doing this if they fit with your honest, non-needy, vulnerable self. But I think most guys are not like “my best self is a person who wears clothes that don’t fit!”, they just don’t know how to buy clothes.)

In this section, Models claims that men in general tend to care more about objective indicators of beauty such as waist-to-hip ratio, boob size, and facial symmetry than about subjective indicators like what a woman’s self-presentation is signalling. Typical mind fallacy about this issue, he proposes, is what explains the popularity of weightlifting, complaining about your height, and penis pills. Is that true? Man, other people’s brains are extremely weird.

Approach Anxiety. Lots of men are afraid of things like talking to women, flirting with women, kissing women, and having sex with women. They will generally rationalize why, actually, they shouldn’t approach women: they might say that all women are shallow and terrible (which is silly, because it is far more likely that you are screwed up than that hundreds of thousands of people are all screwed up in exactly the same way), or that they don’t really care about getting a date, or that they need to learn more before they can start. You have to identify your patterns and do the things you’re anxious about anyway; it can help to tell someone who’ll ride your ass about it. He also recommends limiting porn and masturbation so that you’re so horny you’ll ignore your anxiety. Practice accepting your anxiety, recognizing that it’s normal, reframing it as the nervous excitement of being about to do something high-stakes that you’re good at, and not even bothering to hide it from women you’re attracted to. Do exposure therapy to your fear: begin by doing things you’re a little nervous of repeatedly until you are no longer nervous, then try something a little harder. Always err on the side of boldness: boldness polarizes women and turns those “maybes” into “yes” or “no”. Finally, when you are doing something unusual like asking a strange woman you just met out on a date, always acknowledge that it is unusual: for instance, you might say “excuse me, this is kind of random, but I thought you were cute and wanted to say hi.”

Flirting. Models claims that men always communicate literally and don’t do subtext. I have talked to several men in my life [citation needed] and this is absolutely not true. However, I can definitely buy that men who suck at flirting and are buying this book Models are bad at subtext. Anyway, flirting is all about subtext. The difference between teasing and insults is whether the subtext is “I like you so much I trust that you will understand I don’t really mean this” or “I hate you.”

Lots of men are afraid of being creepy when flirting. No one ever manages to 100% avoid creeping out anyone; there are always awkward situations and miscommunications. It happens, and it is not the end of the world. Creepiness is behaving in a way that makes women feel insecure sexually. You can do this by escalating too fast or by having a subtext that isn’t matched to your text (you’re asking her about the book she’s reading and staring at her tits).

When in doubt, the best pickup line is “Hey, I thought you were cute and wanted to say hi.” Don’t bother about worrying about trying to get women not to flake on you; if a woman really wants to sleep with you, she’ll make it happen. If Brad Pitt asked her out, she wouldn’t forget. Avoid movie dates and dinner dates; instead try museums, concerts, walks in interesting places, dance classes, nightclubs or grabbing a drink somewhere, as fits your style. Find a venue close to your house. Try to do multiple things on a date; it builds a sense of getting to know the person. There’s also a lot of stuff about flirting, signals women give, etc. but this review is already a million words long so I am not going into it.

The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption: Evangelical Christians made up an entirely fictional orphan crisis and then decided it was really important that they all adopt children to help end this orphan crisis that they just made up. Naturally, basic economics continues to apply: if you have millions of dollars’ worth of demand for orphans, the supply will magically appear. Parents in many developing countries put their children in orphanages because they cannot afford to feed them but continue to visit and be involved in their children’s lives; these children are often adopted. Many parents in developing countries don’t understand the Western idea of adoption and instead round it to local concepts, such as “being sent to live with a rich relative to be educated and eventually bring money back to your family.” Occasionally children are just stolen.

Domestic adoptions are also horrifying. Many crisis pregnancy centers don’t just coerce women into not having abortions; they also coerce women into giving their children up for adoption. Some actively lie to birth mothers, claiming that their open adoption is legally enforceable when it isn’t or that they can’t take the adoption back because they already signed the paperwork when in reality they could. Others tell women that they are incompetent mothers who will hurt their babies unless they give them up for adoption, or that single parenting is always wrong.

Utah is one of the most ‘pro-adoption’ states in the country. What this means is that, by virtue of consenting to sex, an unmarried man is considered to be aware that he might conceive a child who might be put up for adoption and his silence is assumed to be consent. A birth father does not have to be notified that his child exists; he has to figure it out himself and then fight for the right to take care of his own biological child. If the woman gives birth in Utah, Utahan law applies, and some adoption agencies will move the birth mother to Utah so that the birth father doesn’t have to be notified.

Part of the problem, I think, is that there are a lot of people who want to adopt babies (both infertile people and evangelical Christians who believe in the entirely fictional orphan crisis). But there aren’t a lot of people who want to go through nine months of pregnancy and then not take care of a baby afterward; most people either want to not go through the pregnancy at all (and thus have an abortion) or raise their child. Of course, foster care

Normally, I am not viscerally moved by ineffective altruism. But every time I saw a dollar sign in this book it upset me. $65,000 per child to bring a child from the Ukraine to meet prospective adoptive families equals 19 children dead of malaria. $8,000 per child for adoption fees equals two more dead children.

[The next item talks about the Holocaust.]

Quiverfull: Inside The Christian Patriarchy Movement: Not a lot of new information for me, but then I’ve been interested in Quiverfull stuff for a couple of years and have a lot of ex-Quiverfull friends and so on.

One of the theologians who really created the idea of God not wanting you to use birth control was also a Holocaust denier. Then he read one of his Holocaust denial books explaining that the gas chambers were too small to kill as many people as the Allies reported had died. Then it occurred to him that many Jewish people were children. So he made a gas-chamber-sized space with couches and cushions, called together his children, told them to stand in the mock gas chamber, noticed that they fit, and started crying. He then spent much of the rest of his life writing books debunking Holocaust denialism.

Doug Phillips, one of the more famous Quiverfull writers, is a Jewish convert to evangelical Christianity. Between this and Milo Yiannopolous pissing off the Daily Stormer [link goes to Neo-Nazi website], I have to ask: is there literally any intellectual movement that doesn’t have a Jewish person writing for it?

[The next item contains material about dieting and weight loss.]

Nutrition: A Very Short Introduction: Wow! Nutrition makes a lot more sense than I thought it did! For instance, I previously know that abdominal fat had more negative health consequences than fat on your butt and thighs does, but apparently there is a reason! Butt and thigh fat evolved for fat storage and is metabolically inactive, while abdominal fat evolved to maintain body temperature and as such is metabolically more active, stimulating the production of glucose (whether or not it is needed) and hormones that antagonize the action of insulin. The entire book is like this: explanations for facts you previously knew about but didn’t know there was an explanation for.

In terms of actionable advice, this book recommends eating lots of vegetables and fruits, not eating a lot of processed food or restaurant meals, exercising regularly, avoiding fad diets, and avoiding excessive consumption of alcohol. Which everybody knew about already, but on the other hand if a Very Short Introduction to Nutrition book was full of facts people didn’t know about I would be concerned about the effectiveness of our public health education programs.

I wish this book would have addressed in more detail the subject of why it is so difficult for people to maintain weight loss. The author briefly mentions that an appropriate diet for weight loss maintenance is the same as a sensible diet for people who have been thin all along, but I feel like this fails to answer important questions like how come my husband and I are both eating absurd quantities of post-Valentine’s on-sale candy and yet he’s the only one with a belly.

[Here there be spoilers for Shoebox Project.]

Shoebox Project: Like all the best Marauders fic, it is stealth tragedy. Not, of course, that anything about Shoebox Project is sad: Shoebox Project is commendably fluffy, happy, light, full of witty conversations and shenanigans, and completely missing anything approaching a ‘plot’. But every so often James mentions that he wants to have tons of gross old-person sex with Lily and he probably won’t even think it’s gross because that’s how much he loves her, and then you have to put the fanfic down and sob because of your overwhelming feelings about every one of the Marauders.

(A lot of people are mistaken about this, because the movies inexplicably cast reasonably-aged people to play James and Lily, but James and Lily were only 21 when they died.)

I appreciate that the pranking is treated as being fairly morally ambiguous, and that Remus is shown as having ethical qualms about it but going along because he has a hard time standing up to his friends.

Honestly, Shoebox Project probably has my favorite Peter Pettigrew ever. He feels like he’s stupider and less charming than all his friends (and that’s kind of true), he feels like none of his friends feel very much motivation to hang around with him and just do it out of inertia (and that’s kind of true), and he feels utterly neglected now that they’ve graduated from school (and that’s absolutely true). And he doesn’t even have an explanation for why everyone is neglecting him, because he doesn’t know about the Order of the Phoenix, and he certainly doesn’t know that Remus and Sirius are banging and too busy being wrapped up in new relationship energy to talk to anyone. He becomes a Death Eater because they pay attention to him and they validate his loneliness and they offer an explanation for his problems that isn’t “I’m kind of a terrible human being.” Very relatable. Someone give Peter Pettigrew a hug.

Shoebox Project is famously unfinished, but I actually feel like the ending is a satisfying ending? I mean, you can tell they didn’t intend it to be the ending, but having Peter Pettigrew’s start of darkness as the last chapter is actually a nice resolution. Shoebox Project is about the fun, fluffy part of the Marauders’ lives, and Peter Pettigrew starting to go evil is where you can draw the line and go “yep, it’s over now.”

God, remember pre-Racefail when there was a ton of Discourse about how we need to Write Men Like They’re Men and so we got a bunch of characters being Realistically Misogynist and calling each other girls all the time? Good times, good times. Feels super-weird reading it when I’m more used to reading modern fanfiction in which Remus and Sirius are more likely to have a conversation about how asexuals need to be included in the Wizard Gay-Straight Alliance.

Epistemic Closure Challenge Thread #1

Tags

god bothering, ozy blog post

Today is the official start of the challenge!

People who are not participants are welcome to comment to give book recommendations, talk about what other people are reading, or talk about books that they’ve read recently that they disagree with.

Since it is The First One, I haven’t read any books specifically for the challenge yet, but here are my thoughts about the books I’ve read in November that I disagree with:

The Abolition of Man: In Which C S Lewis Discovers The Orthogonality Thesis.

I agree with C S Lewis that minds can be made valuing all sorts of things, and that it is important to create minds which value the sorts of things we value. Lewis’s vision, interestingly, was about genetic engineering and conditioning of a generation of humans, who would then proceed to genetically engineer and condition future generations to follow their values, rather than about Friendly AI. I am less concerned than Lewis is about the former, because I believe that human brains are not actually all that plastic; humans creating minds out of human raw material are likely to create something that is not absurdly evil.

I think Lewis undervalues humans who aren’t moral realists; he argues that without moral realism there is no reason to care more about benevolence to all humankind than about, say, chocolate. But there is a quite obvious reason why I would value benevolence to all humankind over chocolate, which is that I want to. Oddly, this contradicts something he talks about earlier in the book. He points out (quite rightly) that all the logical arguments in the world about the importance of sacrificing the few for the many won’t keep someone– even a moral realist– from fleeing the line of battle. What keeps them from fleeing is emotions: a cultivated sense of courage, loyalty to one’s friends, patriotism, and self-sacrifice. Having a different idea of metaethics does not cause someone to stop being ethical, because metaethics wasn’t the thing that was making you behave ethically in the first place.

Lewis is quite right that it is vicious to ‘debunk’ poetic language expressing the emotions associated with events. But I haven’t noticed very much of that; as I recall my school years, there was a good deal of effort put into cultivating particular virtues (e.g. benevolence, respect for diversity, patriotism), which I highly approve of. Maybe it was more of a problem in the inter-war period after World War II (thanks, Evan)?

Disagreement: I am not Christian or moral realist.

Amends: One of my new favorite books.

A novel about six people going through a reality TV rehab. The thing I love about it is that it’s funny; the entire book is wonderful crazy-person gallows humor which doesn’t shy away from the harm caused by crazy people to ourselves and others. There were shenanigans. More books about mental illness need to have shenanigans in them.

I particularly appreciated the character of Sharptooth, a NEET otherkin SJW. As a former NEET SJW, I very much appreciate this positive representation. Eve Tushnet doesn’t quite get all the shibboleths right. For instance, she has Sharptooth feel guilty about saying that someone who identified as a homoromantic demisexual is ‘really’ gay (realistic!) but has her mention the person’s nonbinary gender identity at the same time (antis do this, but SJWs usually recognize that gender and sexuality are different things). Nevertheless, Sharptooth was written with a great deal of compassion and also very relatable.

My other favorite character is J Malachi MacCool, a writer for First Things. I mean, he’s not actually a writer for First Things, but he is a writer for a magazine that is suspiciously similar to First Things. He is self-consciously traditional from the tweed jacket with the leather elbow patches on down, and described as “an Anglo-Catholic, by which he meant that he liked evensong and sherry”. He is adorably relatable.

Disagreement: I am not Christian.

Lead Me Not: A gay romance novel about a fundamentalist Christian who believes that homosexuality is a choice and decides to prove it by making a documentary about his choice to be gay. In a SHOCKING turn of events which ABSOLUTELY NO ONE COULD HAVE PREDICTED, it turns out that he’s actually gay and then he lives happily ever after with his boyfriend who is a Christian from an affirming church and we all learn that God Loves Gay People.

Super-cute inspirational romance, full of angsty gay men and tropes and Jesus. If this is the sort of thing you like, you will probably like it.

I was mildly annoyed that I have a better understanding than the protagonist of the anti-gay Biblical arguments (he mentioned Leviticus but not Romans! he doesn’t talk about the difference between moral and ceremonial law!).

Disagreement: I think that a careful study of Scripture and Tradition would lead one to approximately Eve Tushnet’s opinion on gay people. I am still not Christian.

General Notes: I think my biggest problem in the challenge is going to be finding books I disagree with that aren’t about Jesus, particularly since my husband is a former atheist blogger and thus our collective Kindle is full of, like, Plantinga and Craig. Also because I am trying to pick books that look interesting and for better or for worse I am interested in Jesus.

So what are your thoughts on starting? Having a hard time thinking of books to read? Looking forward to anything in particular?

Book Post for October

Tags

ozy blog post

Inferno: The premise of this book (modern retelling of Dante’s Inferno starring a science fiction writer who spends the first half convinced he’s been put in a theme park made by Sufficiently Advanced Aliens) is cute. Unfortunately, it doesn’t live up to its excellent premise.

Many of the sins in this book are related to Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle’s political opinions. For instance, an anti-nuclear-power protestor was placed with the violently profligate (i.e. polluters) for not letting fossil fuels be replaced with better electricity, and a teacher was placed with the fortune tellers for diagnosing a child with dyslexia and thus cursing him to not being able to learn to read. I understand that when I read a modern retelling of Dante’s Inferno, I am signing up to be preached at by the authors. However, the vast majority of human sins– as shocking as it may seem to certain people on Twitter– have absolutely no relationship to the culture war whatsoever. When keen observation of human foibles are replaced with editorials about the evil of People Who Don’t Agree With Niven and Pournelle About Things, I feel rather cheated.

I understand that they had to deal with the canonical existence of a sodomite circle of Hell somehow, but I don’t feel like making it the Circle of Depraved Bisexuals was exactly what I would go for.

Also there was a very unfair Take That to Kurt Vonnegut.

Time Will Run Back: Now this is an absolutely delightful book. Set after the USSR has taken over the world, the novel is about the son of the USSR’s leader, who decides that there simply must be a better way to go about things and ends up slowly discovering Austrian economics. I now want an entire genre of books where the conflict takes place in the form of Socratic dialogues about economics and the big suspense is whether they will manage to figure out how stock markets work in time. Caveats, of course, that Austrian economics is not technically speaking ‘true’, but in my completely unbiased opinion that is entirely made up for by the following exchange:

“Well, you know what Bolshekov is calling [our reinvention of Austrian economics] in his propaganda!”

“What is he calling it?”

“He says it’s nothing but a brazen revival of capitalism!”

Peter hit the ceiling. “The dirty son of a Trotsky!”

My one critique is that the author, with a little bit more worldbuilding, could have come up with much more clever use of language. With a few exceptions (“the dirty son of a Trotsky!” is wonderful), markets are referred to as markets, prices are referred to as prices, and so on and so forth, and this is justified with footnotes saying that it was translated from the Marxanto. I want to see what a bunch of communists who have just discovered money wind up calling a broker.

Freedom of Religion and the Secular State: A fascinating and nuanced exploration of the appropriate liberal-as-in-Locke-not-as-in-left-wing attitude towards religion. The state, Blackford argues, ought to officially take no position on otherworldly issues; its sphere is solely the secular world; it is therefore permitted neither to persecute nor to elevate particular religions. Nevertheless, the state should sometimes accommodate the deeply held beliefs of its citizens. Blackford applies these principles to a lot of different issues, from children’s rights to free speech to marriage law.

Blackford persuaded me that state religions are probably not as pernicious as I’d previously thought, as long as their influence is limited to the ceremonial (for instance, the involvement of the church in the crowning of the queen) and they have no actual governing power or public funding.

European law about religion is super-weird. Like, on one hand, there’s laicite, in which the state is engaged in wildly inappropriate persecution of a particular religion in the name of ‘secularism’; on the other hand, there’s blasphemy laws, in which the state is engaged in wildly inappropriate protection of religions justified under the grounds that criticizing people’s religion is a violation of religious freedom. All I can figure is that Americans need to do some cultural imperialism to spread to y’all across the pond the correct religious freedom norms.

Book Post for September

Tags

my fucking state, ozy blog post, parenting, rationality, sex work

Stumbling on Happiness: Daniel Gilbert’s writing style is super-fun; I recommend reading Stumbling on Happiness if you like Slate Star Codex’s characteristic snark, because there’s a lot of it here.

Neurotypical people are very strange. I spent a large portion of this book going “wait, when most people experience something really really bad, they come up with reasons why it wasn’t so bad after all? They don’t think of a bunch of reasons about why it was actually worse than they thought and means they are doomed to eternal misery? Are you sure?” This just sounds incredibly fake. #DepressiveRealism

I am not sure how accurate this book is. I noticed several citations of things (priming!) that turned out to fail to replicate, but I don’t actually know off the top of my head everything that failed to replicate. Someone should write me a program that automatically highlights citations of papers that failed to replicate so I don’t believe them.

Deep Work: I have rarely read a book that was as useful for solving my particular problems that didn’t have “for borderline personality disorder” on the cover. Even then, half the stuff in the borderline personality disorder books are for people who have violent rages or substance abuse issues, which is not a problem Deep Work particularly has. So this is likely to be a fairly useless review for people who aren’t Ozy.

Deep Work is about cultivating deep work: distraction-free concentration that pushes your cognitive capabilities to its limit. As a heuristic for separating deep work from shallow work, Deep Work suggests thinking about how long it would take to train a bright undergraduate to do the task. For instance, writing a good book is deep work because it takes years of expertise to become a good author, while scheduling a coffee date or creating a PowerPoint with the latest sales figures is shallow work. While not everyone needs to do deep work– entry-level positions are full of shallow work, and high-level executives hire other people to do deep work and are selected for their ability to make good snap decisions– Deep Work argues that our current economy has a high demand for deep work and a low supply. The current economy favors people who are superstars in their field and those who are really good at using computers, both deep-work-heavy skills; however, because of the rise of the Internet, we’re more distracted and prone to hyper-connectivity at the expense of deep thought and focus.

Deep Work emphasizes a sense of craftsmanship. Through cultivating a sense of craftmanship, you get into flow state, which is linked to overall happiness and pleasure. And through creating work that you can feel proud of– instead of frittering your life away going to meetings and answering emails– you can find a sense of meaning in your work, which allows you to be more satisfied.

Newport’s single biggest piece of advice, which he returns to hit on again and again, is that excessive use of the Internet kills deep work. If you don’t ever let yourself get bored, you’re not going to let your mind wander and have interesting new ideas for what you’re working on. (I personally have all my best ideas in the shower, probably because that’s the only place I can’t bring my laptop.) And if you’re constantly distracted and multitasking, you’re not developing the powers of focused concentration which are necessary for work. Work-related Internet use, like email, is actually even more evil than recreational Internet use, because it gives you the feeling you’re doing something productive. Newport’s advice is as follows: Don’t schedule time away from the Internet; schedule time where you are allowed to use the Internet. (I actually disagree with him about the evils of All Internet Browsing; fact-checking a blog post or researching Kuznets curves on Google Scholar are obviously different from Twitter, and I’ve found it’s nigh-impossible to do deep work without an Internet connection.) Quit social media for thirty days and only add back in services that caused a concrete improvement in your life. Pick up a hobby or form of entertainment other than reading Buzzfeed articles about the 33 Dogs That Look Most Like Presidents.

Other advice: Create a ritual to begin your deep work and transition your mind into a flow state; this might include stretching, setting up your workspace, or making a cup of tea. Write down what you’re doing for every half-hour of the day, and when you notice you’ve gotten off track revise the schedule. Alternate time spent alone and concentrating with time spent in serendipitous encounters (he gives the example of Bell Labs, in which people in a bunch of different disciplines encountered each other in the hallways and at lunch and talked about their work), which can prompt creative insight. Keep track of your daily hours spent in deep work; aim for about four. At the end of the workday (he recommends five-thirty), check your email a final time, prepare your to-do list for tomorrow, and then shut it down and don’t think about work until tomorrow morning; this gives you the idleness to recharge your energy and have insights, and since at the end of the day you’re tired enough to only do shallow work, the work you were doing probably isn’t that important anyway.

The Informed Parent: A Science-Based Resource For Your Child’s First Four Years: Amazon.com has discovered my weakness and is now solely recommending me parenting books with ‘science’ in the title.

This book makes an argument which I think is very reasonable about the alcohol/pregnancy connection: it seems plausible that alcohol has a dose-dependent effect on fetuses, so that light drinking has similarly light effects, which are outweighed by women who drink lightly in pregnancy typically being more educated and wealthier. (Of course, since the effect is quite small, there is no reason to freak out about drinks you had before you knew you were pregnant, nor even much reason to cancel that trip to Napa Valley you were looking forward to, as long as you only sip the wine and alternate it with lots of food.)

Studies about the safety of homebirth in other countries don’t necessarily generalize to the US because other countries have a lot more medical licensing. In the US, a person calling themself a midwife is not guaranteed to have any medical training whatsoever.

About 5% of women can’t breastfeed, and 10% can’t produce sufficient milk to feed their babies. If you are in this group, it is not because you are a bad mother, and there is nothing wrong with feeding your children formula, which is perfectly safe; the benefits of breastfeeding are fairly small and the costs of babies not being sufficiently fed are very high.

Effective ways to soothe a baby: white noise; skin-to-skin contact and breastfeeding; giving the baby something to suck; swaddling the baby; rocking the baby.

Shaken baby syndrome is most often caused by parents who aren’t bad or abusive but who are overwhelmed and sleep deprived because their baby won’t stop crying and who do what humans naturally do with something that won’t work– they shake it. It can help to know that colic is normal and common and will pass, and to notice when you’re getting overwhelmed and take a break before you do something you’ll regret.

Children do not understand that guns are not toys. Studies repeatedly suggest that children– even children that receive gun safety instruction– will pick up and play with handguns. If you have guns, store them locked and unloaded, with the ammunition in a separate place, until your child is a teenager.

Exposure to print and books is tightly correlated with reading ability as an older child and teenager (a result that is, of course, completely unconfounded); eating books is therefore an important pre-literacy skill that parents should encourage.

Science of Mom: Unlike The Informed Parent, which takes a somewhat encyclopedic approach, Science of Mom explores a few issues in more depth. I particularly appreciate the first chapter, which is a good and accurate explanation of which pieces of parenting advice are worth listening to (whenever Cochrane says something other than ‘more research is needed’) and which pieces are not (anything that primarily focuses on rats, which is mostly useful in the event that you happen to be parenting a rat).

Another thing I really liked about Science of Mom is its focus on tradeoffs. The decision that’s right for some people isn’t right for others. The breastfeeding chapter can be basically summed up as “breastfeeding has health benefits, but many people can’t breastfeed and that’s totally fine and they should not feel guilty about it, and the benefits of breastfeeding are not large enough to be worth making you feel miserable.” And the bedsharing chapter explains how conflicted the research is on bedsharing and SIDS/suffocation, then encourages the reader to make their own decision based on their own values and assessment of the evidence.

Anti-anti-vaxxing is too mainstream, so fortunately Science of Mom has enlightened me about the possibilities of getting pissed off at parents who don’t get the Vitamin K shot. It is not dangerous! It is literally a vitamin that all babies are deficient in! Do you want your baby to have brain bleeding? I don’t think so! Those are two words that do not belong together! (And, yeah, babies are deficient in Vitamin K. Humans are very poorly designed.)

Delayed cord clamping is surprisingly important: because breastmilk is not very rich in iron, babies often experience iron deficiency, and a few minutes of iron-rich blood from the placenta can prevent iron deficiency and anemia. (For the biodeterminists in the crowd: adequate iron as a baby reduces the risk of lead poisoning.) Iron is also important in feeding your child solids; omnivores should consider starting their child on meat, while vegetarians/vegans should begin with iron- and zinc-fortified infant cereal.

The Birth Partner: The Birth Partner is primarily aimed at birth partners (i.e. non-medical people who support the pregnant person during labor). However, it is still useful for the pregnant person to read, as the book clearly explains the process of labor and provides guidance for figuring out what you want out of labor.

The Birth Partner is a wonderfully nonjudgmental book about giving birth. It lays out the evidence for and against medical interventions, as well as the available alternatives, then encourages the mother and birth partner to consider their values about birth and come to the decision that is right for them. It’s a rare book that is equally nonjudgmental about homebirth and elective C-sections (while acknowledging the dangers of both). Another thing I liked is that it didn’t assume that birth partners are the pregnant person’s life partner or the biological father of the baby; when it had advice for one of those groups it always says “if you are the X.”

I particularly appreciated the clear explanation of various non-painkiller pain relief techniques; a lot of books tend to just have “breathing” and “meditating” as your only options, while The Birth Partner gives a lot of different strategies for reducing your pain. (I particularly appreciated the woman who chanted “epidural epidural epidural” and, when asked if she wanted one, said “if I get to chant it I don’t need it!”)

Apparently it is recommended that if you’re doing natural childbirth you use a safeword. They called it a “code word” but it’s definitely a safeword. I am so amused. My safewords are, as always, “red”, “safeword” and “I forgot the safeword.”

Gender Dysphoria Rating: 0/10. This book is sufficiently inclusive that its use of “the mother” as the term for the pregnant person actually stuck out to me, instead of being something I glance over as normal boring societal cissexism. But it’s not exactly fair to take points away from a book because it’s great on every issue except this one.

The Danish Way of Parenting: This is a weird book for me to read because my friend Ilzolende fucking hated living in Denmark, and so whenever it is like “the Danish way of parenting is so great!” I am like “if Denmark is so great how come ILZO didn’t like it???” which I admit is not the best objection.

I have been spoiled by Science of Mom and The Informed Parent and am now sulky about parenting books that don’t include proper citations. This book’s evidence was mostly “Danish people are very happy, and therefore they must be happy because of the parenting techniques they use, so if you use the parenting techniques then your children will be happy! What’s a confounding variable?” Also they don’t cite any studies that show that people in Denmark actually parent the way they are claimed to parent in this book. I mean, I don’t know anything about how Danish people parent, they very well might, but how do I know that this person wasn’t just in Danish Berkeley?

In Denmark are there books that advise everyone how to parent like an American, or is Raise Your Children As If You Are In A Foreign Country just an American book genre?

I mean, the parenting advice is probably fine. I am totally in support of being authentic with your children and playing with them and family togetherness and positive discipline and the rest. But I do not think this book has good evidence for it.

Age of Em: I had been vaguely under the impression that Emworld was bad because subsistence living, but since making ems have a really nice world is significantly cheaper than running an em in the first place, we’d actually expect ems to have very enjoyable leisure and lots of music and stuff. And anyway most ems would probably be emulations of workaholics who actually want to work twelve hours a day. So it’s a very noncentral example of a subsistence world, and in general sounds like a very nice place that I hope my descendants would manage to experience if they have more conscientiousness than I do.

The Essential Guide to Freelance Writing: Nope, the concept of pitching people still gives me a panic attack. In retrospect, it is probably not this book’s fault that it failed to fix this.

The Gated City: This book informs me that a large number of economic and environmental problems could be solved by the policies which lead me, Ozy, to have lower rent. Since I don’t like having to pay a lot of money in rent, I have obvious reasons to support this thesis. So it seemed pretty convincing to me, but take with many relevant grains of salt. (Unless you happen to live in the SF Bay Area, in which case you should agree with this book 100% and also contact your local Insert County Here Forward for a voter guide.)

[cw: sex trafficking, slavery]

The Slave Next Door: I am impressed by the existence of a book about modern slavery that spends more time talking about agriculture and domestics than it does sex work, and sad that I feel impressed.

One thing I hadn’t realized before I read this book was how fuzzy the definition of ‘slave’ is for people in the modern US. There’s a remarkably thin line between “victim of sex trafficking” and “sex worker in an abusive relationship who gives her boyfriend some of the money she earns working.” There’s a remarkably thin line between “victim of labor trafficking” and “domestic who is being mistreated by her employer but can’t leave because her visa is linked to her employer.”

The impression that I’m getting from The Slave Next Door is that immigration reform would do a lot to reduce slavery in the US. A lot of slaves are either undocumented or have their documents stolen by their employers. Decriminalizing sex work also seems to me to be important for reducing sex trafficking; sex trafficking occasionally involves U.S. citizens who speak the language, while labor trafficking is almost solely immigrants.

Domestic Minor Sex Trafficking: The title of this book is ‘Beyond Victims and Villains’, but there is clearly a villain in it! The villain is the child welfare system! False advertising!

Anyway, this is a really amazing book about minors doing sex work. Most of the time, the author argues, it’s not that minors are forced into sex work by pimps: it’s instead that– due to poverty, abuse, neglect, or homelessness– for many minors, sex work is the best way to support themselves. To many minors, street sex work seems like a better option than an often broken child welfare system. If we want to end underage sex work, the solution isn’t criminal: it’s changing the push factors that drive minors into sex work. This book does a really good job of emphasizing the agency of underage sex workers (something that is far too often ignored) while also recognizing how limited their choices are.

Disposable People: Before I read this book, I hadn’t realized how much innumeracy affects someone’s life– even more so than illiteracy. Many of the slaves in this book were kept in debt bondage (that is, they were laboring to pay off a debt to their owners). Their owners often told lies about how much the slaves owed, but the slaves, being innumerate, had no ability to check their owners’ numbers. They just thought “well, I did ask for a loan for my son’s wedding, and there was that one time my daughter got sick, and we had to pay for food that one time the crops failed… I know we’ve harvested a lot of crops for the owner, but I guess it makes sense that we’re still in debt,” because they have no way of comparing the very large number that medicine costs with the very large number that they earned from harvesting crops. If all the slaves knew they were being lied to, the institution would end: you can kidnap and beat up one person who tries to escape, but you can’t kidnap and beat up five hundred people. And also a lot of people stay because they feel honor-bound to pay off their debt, which they wouldn’t do if they knew they already had. Being able to do basic math is really important!

I hadn’t realized quite how much sex work happens in Thailand. The book points out that sex workers aimed at white people, being high-end, are usually not sex slaves; instead, sex slaves usually service middle- and working-class Thai men. While Disposable People does bash the police a little bit (they collect bribes and have no interest in actually preventing sex slavery), I think the book could have used a little more bashing of the sex-slave rescue industry, which is also pretty awful.

Mauritania really sucks as a country. I had known about the force-feeding of girls, but I hadn’t known that it is one of the few countries which still has endemic old-style hereditary slavery (as opposed to debt bondage, etc.). Of course, the Mauritanian government likes it that way, having declared all Mauritanian slaves to be ‘former slaves’ and then magically claimed to have fixed its slavery problem, because now all the people who are working for no pay but rice and a bed are doing it of their own free will! (It gets away with this because the government is totalitarian and censorship-happy.) Mauritania is also very poor, and many people go hungry, which helps preserve the slavery institution– if slaves ran away, they would starve.

Book Post for August

Tags

ada palmer, discworld, ozy blog post, parenting, PRECIOUS sexual energy, rationality, this is a prussian education system hateblog, world's worst vegan

[Thanks to Linch and Nick for buying me books. If you like my blog, you too can buy me a book by clicking on the link in the upper left-hand corner of the blog.]

Raising Steam: After I discovered Terry Pratchett had Alzheimer’s, I stopped reading Discworld, because I didn’t want to read the last Discworld book. After it was pointed out to me several times that my options are reading the last Discworld book or dying with a Discworld book unread, I picked up Raising Steam.

Raising Steam is interesting because like a lot of Pratchett’s later work it’s quite serious– this is a book about the process of a fantasy world undergoing the Industrial Revolution– but there’s a bunch of little worldbuilding details left over from earlier books that were far more silly. So the dwarves’ political intrigue is about who gets to sit on the Stone of Scone, and it’s pointed out that one dwarf really just wants control of the treacle mines, and so on. I actually like this: actually existing worlds are sometimes quite silly.

Pratchett’s dwarves are a really obvious Islam metaphor, but actually remarkably sensitively handled (especially given his racist jokes in earlier books): he emphasizes that there’s nothing undwarvish about progress or about feminism, that what ‘dwarvish’ means must and has to change, and that the opinions of extremist clerics do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the dwarf on the ground.

The Animal Activist’s Handbook: I love this book! The Animal Activist’s Handbook provides tips for vegetarians and vegans looking to create more vegetarians and vegans, including specific scripts for dealing with common questions, like “where do you get your protein?”, “don’t plants suffer too?” and “didn’t God make animals for us to dominate?”

Example advice: Share vegan food with meat-eaters, but make sure it’s food they don’t find repulsive– leave the tofu-and-carrot burgers with nutritional yeast sauce at home. Don’t try to convince people of your favorite raw-food diet. Don’t freak out about vegan purity: the effect of an occasional egg in a hamburger bun or bit of whey in a candy bar is far outweighed by omnivores thinking vegetarianism is difficult, time-consuming, and isolating. Don’t talk about health: people don’t stick to fad diets. Dress like the people you’re trying to reach out to; if you’re talking at churches, get a haircut and wear nice slacks. If someone asks about vegetarianism at the dinner table, say “I’m glad you’re interested, but I don’t want to monopolize the conversation and I’ve found that it can put people off their food. Can I have your email to talk to you about it later?”– it creates positive feelings from those who were expecting a vegetarian lecture. Always look to find common ground: get people to agree that animal cruelty is bad. Encourage people to do whatever they can: in particular, try to get them to stop eating birds and fish, which result in most of the animal suffering an omnivore causes. Practice the Socratic method: ask questions and let people draw their own conclusions. Befriend omnivores instead of isolating yourself out of vegan purity. Never get angry. Never get snarky. Never insult anyone. If someone insults you, smile and say something like “hey, you started the conversation!” Never get derailed onto another topic, like abortion or the death penalty. Know where people can get more information about vegetarianism, or ideally carry pamphlets with you.

The core of the book is that the influence you have on others is just as important as the animals you don’t eat yourself. Through nonjudgmentally encouraging others to recognize the contradiction between their opposition of animal cruelty and their support of factory farming, you can get people to reduce or even eliminate their animal consumption. Therefore, it is really important that we as vegetarians be kind, don’t lecture people, and model vegetarianism being an easy and pleasant way to live.

I appreciated the first chapter’s emphasis on altruism as something you do to make you happy and to find meaning in your life, instead of a grim duty.

In spite of coming out in 2009, this book feels extremely effective altruist to me: it talks about cause selection, emphasizes the importance of evidence when selecting tactics, and uses numbers when talking about how much good you can do. Is that just the Singer influence?

Mating in Captivity: A book about how to have a hot sex life while monogamously committed, which I purchased on the grounds that monogamous people are doing satisfactory sex lives on hard mode and can therefore be expected to have advice for easy-mode people like myself. Mating in Captivity avoids the “Ten Tips For A Hot Sex Life Tonight”-style advice, instead talking about improving one’s sex life through improving one’s relationship. A lot of the book is about how increased intimacy can destroy passion. Through developing stability and the confidence that your partner will stay there, you become bored. That’s how you get the famous “our relationship is great! they’re the love of my life! …except that we never have sex” couples. The solution is for both partners to maintain boundaries and autonomy, and be open to the existence of ‘the third’ in relationships. (Which doesn’t necessarily mean nonmonogamy– it can simply mean flirting or acknowledging your partner’s crushe son other people.) A lot of Perel’s other ideas are frankly not very insightful: did you know that BDSM can be very erotic, but some people think it’s degrading or anti-feminist? Did you know that American society is simultaneously prudish and licentious in a way that screws people up about sexuality?

Not nearly as good as Come As You Are, which I still want to give out on street corners as a sort of sex-positive missionary.

How To Win Friends and Influence People: In lieu of evidence, this book has a bunch of stories in which some person goes through Insert Absurd Levels Of Hardship Here and then comes to Absurd Levels of Success through application of Principle Discussed In This Chapter, and then it turns out that man… was Albert Einstein. (Well, actually, mostly Abraham Lincoln.) I assume this is because it was written in the 1930s and they had weird self-help book writing styles back then.

I completely approve of the advice provided in this book, which is mostly about not complaining, giving honest compliments, and looking at things from other people’s point of view. And I like the reminder that being nice is not just ethical but also more effective. But fundamentally I object to a self-help book in which half the content is anecdotes about early twentieth century celebrities. I don’t care! Get to the good part! Someone needs to write a different version of this book catering to me.

Expecting Better: A much-needed dose of sanity in the hysterical, overprotective world of pregnancy advice. Emily Oster, an economist, sensibly deals with many unreasonable and non-evidence-based beliefs with regards to pregnancy. Is coffee consumption bad? (Not if you consume less than three or four cups a day.) Is sushi really going to hurt my baby? (No.) Do I have to worry if I’m gaining five or ten pounds more than the doctor says I should? (No, and it’s much better than gaining five or ten pounds less.) Do I really have to eat that much fish? (Unfortunately, this one is a yes.) Perhaps Oster’s most controversial advice is her advice that there is nothing wrong with consuming a glass of wine with dinner while pregnant. As long as you take care not to consume more than one unit of alcohol a day– the amount the liver can easily and quickly metabolize– she argues, not only is there no evidence it harms your fetus, there’s not even any plausible mechanism for it to do so.

My favorite fact from this book is that there was a remarkably effective medication for pre-pregnancy nausea which is no longer sold for fear of lawsuits, since some women who took it and got birth defects threatened to sue. A meta-analysis found that this nausea medication led to a non-statistically-significant decrease in birth defects, and it is a combination of a B vitamin and Unisom, a Class B drug (that is, a drug which has an above-average safety profile in pregnancy). Oster recommends rolling your own.

The best thing about Expecting Better, I think, is that it allows the reader to choose their own risk tolerance, based on their own assessment of the risks and benefits. Oster is clear that the decisions individual pregnant people make are just that– individual. A professional wine taster will have a different cost-benefit analysis on consuming alcohol than a person who has no interest in drinking; someone who would welcome a child with Down Syndrome has a different cost-benefit analysis than someone who is already struggling with two intellectually disabled children. There is no right or wrong answer; it depends on your goals, your comfort with risk, and your preferences. This sort of clear-headed compassion is desperately needed in the parenting advice field.

Gender Dysphoric Person Rating: 10/10, contains absolutely nothing about your innate womanly nature. Are there PEER-REVIEWED STUDIES of your innate womanly nature? No? Then Emily Oster doesn’t care.

Taking Charge of Your Fertility: I do not recommend this book unless you happen to be in the category “people who have a uterus, like gross things, and are also complete nerds.” Like, if you are the sort of person who really deeply in your heart of hearts wants to make a chart of the functioning of your cervical mucus and also cherishes fantasies about showing up gynecologists with your expert knowledge of your own reproductive system, then this book is for you. If your thought on that is more “cervical mucus is gross” or “I don’t like graphs”, then I must say I don’t really understand your psychology, but this is probably not the book for you.

Gender Dysphoric Person Rating: 8/10. There’s a little bit of woo-woo feminist stuff about how every woman should be in tune with her body, but it’s relatively brief and then we get back into Cervical Positioning And You and How To Self-Diagnose Your Infertility Problems.

Mayo Clinic Guide to a Healthy Pregnancy: First of all, that cover.

I told Topher that he had to get the heterosexuals to stop. He said that he had no control over what other heterosexuals decided to do, because they are “97% of the population” and “not a hivemind.” I am pretty sure this is just an excuse.

Anyway, it’s a pregnancy book, with pretty much the same pros and cons as any other pregnancy book. The descriptions of what is happening week by week are interesting. The descriptions of what can go wrong are horrifying. The advice has vaguely heard of the concept of “acceptable risk” but is extremely suspicious of it.

Gender Dysphoric Person Rating: 8/10. Actually does a remarkably good job of avoiding gendered stereotypes in discussions of self-care or getting back into sex. I docked a point for all the natural pain relief being incredibly frou-frou and girly, but that might not be the Mayo Clinic Guide’s fault, and another point for the fucking cover.

The Sinner’s Guide To Natural Family Planning: Susie Bright is my favorite person. A lesbian sex-positive feminist, she was browsing the Internet one day when she stumbled across the blog of a Catholic woman who believes birth control, homosexuality, and nonmarital sex are all sinful. Naturally, Susie Bright’s reaction is to say “wow! This woman is a great writer!” and send her an email saying that she should definitely publish a book and if she ever does Susie Bright will be her editor.

Anyway, I’m not Catholic and don’t use NFP, so I am not in Fisher’s target audience twice over. However, Fisher is a genuinely witty and likeable woman with a good heart; the book explains in vivid detail what it’s like to use NFP and what people get out of it. Without shying away from the negative effects of Catholic teaching on the body, she manages to make this atheist understand why some people would adhere to it. It’s a really good book. If you’re interested in theology of the body or want to humanize a group of people you might not know very much about, I recommend it.

What To Expect Before You’re Expecting: From this book, I learned that having sex with the intent to conceive is called “baby dancing.” This is the most ridiculous and cutesy euphemism I have ever heard.

I would suggest not reading the chapters on infertility before you try to conceive, as then you will start being anxious about whether your period cramps mean you have endometriosis, at least if you are me and have an anxiety disorder. The rest of the book is pretty good, but not necessarily groundbreaking. It turns out that in order to optimally conceive, one must treat their illnesses, refrain from taking mind-altering substances, eat a balanced diet, exercise regularly, get enough sleep, and refrain from stressing. The observant reader may note that this is also the advice doctors give about how to be healthy the rest of the time too.

Gender Dysphoric Parent Rating: 3/10. Way too many cutesy jokes about what men are like and what women are like, and the section on how to keep baby-making sex exciting is just unbearable. also, WHY would you feel the need to describe sperm competition as the result of innate male competitiveness? WHY? WHYYYYYYYYYYYYYY

Too Like the Lightning: Dense, complex, fascinating worldbuilding. I was very confused until halfway through the book, and I think I’m going to reread it now that I fully understand the difference between Utopians and Humanists, whom I kind of thought were the same people for the first fifty pages. Too Like The Lightning very much trusts its reader: it fully believes that if it drops you in an alien world full of incomprehensible slang, you will be able to find your footing and follow the plot. A lot of books feel the need to hand-hold you through exactly what their far future society is like; Too Like The Lightning trusts that you are smart enough to figure it out on your own.

Too Like The Lightning also managed to pull off the “all the characters know something but the reader doesn’t” reveal and have it actually work instead of feeling like a cheap gag. (Partially because the narrator assumes his readers, being from the future, know the thing too. Did I mention it’s written in eighteenth-century pastiche? It’s written in eighteenth-century pastiche.)

There’s a system in this book that divides different people into categories. My understanding is that one of the single most important factors in the success of a science fiction or fantasy series is whether there are categories in it that people can put themselves in, so in case you are concerned: you can definitely argue about whether or not you are a Cousin or a Brillist.

(Utopians represent!)

One World Schoolhouse: The book by the founder of Khan Academy. About half the book is a somewhat dreary memoir about the founding of Khan Academy, which I suppose might be interesting for some people, but I personally don’t care a lot about how he decided to quit his job to make videos. The really interesting part of One World Schoolhouse is Khan’s explanation of what went wrong in education and how it should be fixed. He holds with the theory that modern education is a product of the Prussian system in the 19th century, designed to produce obedient and reasonably well-informed soldiers and factory workers, and that while that’s all very well in its place the modern world has rather more need of innovators than factory workers.

Khan’s vision of an ideal school was interesting. He wants classes of perhaps a hundred students, with four or five teachers. All classrooms would be age-mixed, to allow older students to mentor younger students and younger students to look up to older students. The homework would be watching filmed versions of classroom lectures and reading textbooks; there would be no lectures in class, since those are trivially easy to film. At school, students would spend about a fifth of their time using computer programs like a much more advanced version of Khan Academy’s math problems; when they got stuck, they could call over one of the circulating teachers. These programs would follow mastery learning principles: you don’t move on to the next lesson until you get 100% of the answers right. (Khan is a big fan of mastery learning. As he points out, if you get an 80% on an algebra test– sloppy arithmetic errors aside– it’s because you understand 80% of algebra. A person who understands 80% of algebra is not going to do a good job of understanding calculus. While this might make students move on slower, he argues complete grasp of algebra is better than a poor grasp of calculus.) Since the class is age-mixed, there is no reason for children to stay with their own age group; the very bright may speed through the studying, while the very slow get to stay working on some problems until they understand them. The rest of the time, students would engage in project-based learning, small-group discussions, and explorations of their own mathematical, scientific, literary, and artistic interests, guided by the teachers.

Book Post for July

Tags

all cops are bastards, cixin liu, effective altruism, ozy blog post, parenting, racism, robert heinlein, there is no justice and there is no judge

Don’t Shoot: One Man, A Street Fellowship, and the End of Violence in Inner-City America: This man can write. This is one of the few nonfiction books I’ve ever gotten invested in like it was a novel. I was on the edge of my seat: were the call-ins going to work? Would Kennedy soothe the ruffled feathers of Insert Bureaucrat Here, or would they end the program forever? Would he ever be able to convince the cops that his idea works?

Unfortunately, the writing style that makes Don’t Shoot suspenseful also makes it light on things like ‘evidence’ and ‘examination of alternate explanations.’ Don’t expect many references to peer-reviewed journal articles here.

Kennedy argues that open-air drug markets and inner-city homicides are the result of perhaps a few dozen men, and literally no one else likes it. The police want to win the drug war, but don’t know how, instead resorting to failed broken-windows policing and arresting small-time drug users; feeling like failures, they blame the black community for encouraging violence and drugs. The black community, noticing how many of its members are incarcerated or harassed by police and yet drugs and violence still run rampant, conclude that police are racist and not trying hard to get rid of the drugs (perhaps even putting the drugs in the community themselves). Even most of the gang members don’t like the violence; after all, who wants to have a life expectancy of less than twenty-five?

Kennedy’s proposal is essentially identifying gangs that kill people and going after them as hard as they can, arresting gang members for everything for public urination to violation of parole, and telling them that the harassment will stop as soon as the killing does. That way, gang members can save face, and everyone can stop shooting at the same time, without any gang having to unilaterally disarm. In addition, he proposes ending open-air drug markets (which he considers to be considerably more damaging than friend-of-a-friend drug markets, since the latter exist in white suburbs as much as black ghettos) through gathering enough information to arrest the dealers, calling a meeting, and saying “we are not going to arrest you unless you decide to deal in public again.” Kennedy’s suggestions appeal to my worldview: people respond to incentives; people are generally not stupid or evil, but instead behaving in ways that make sense to them given their circumstances. However, perhaps I should be even less likely to agree with something so intuitively appealing.

A Manual For Creating Atheists: The author of this book, Peter Boghossian, apparently makes a habit of three or four conversations per day (!), often with strangers, trying to get them to become more rational. You can be minding your own business, checking out at the grocery store, making small talk with the other people in line, and you mention you’re a naturopath and suddenly this guy is asking you to cite peer-reviewed evidence that it works. I mean, his book is full of advice that seems reasonable about how to do this thing, if you wanted to, but why on earth would you want to?

My response to this book was mostly making a mental note not to sit next to Peter Boghossian on an airplane, before I got to his obnoxiously stupid chapters on unreason in the academy and ways to make faith less acceptable in society. He characterizes academic leftism as accretions on classical liberalism– and before you say “well, maybe he doesn’t mean actual classical liberalism”, he specifically traces the academic left’s origin to John Locke. Someone should perhaps tell him that Marxists hate liberals and the Enlightenment.

Boghossian argues against the DSM saying that culturally accepted beliefs aren’t delusions, presumably because he wants religious faith to more routinely qualify as a delusion. I agree that the ‘culturally accepted belief’ heuristic isn’t exactly principled, but there is an obvious difference between the cluster of psychotics and the cluster of Pentecostals. For instance, one would not expect Pentecostals to stop being religious if they are given anti-psychotic medication. Putting Pentecostals and psychotics in the same category makes the DSM useless for psychiatrists, its actual purpose. Besides, the only obvious alternatives to an unprincipled heuristic are the DSM listing out what beliefs are and aren’t reasonable, or relying on clinical judgment. The former seems rather outside its core competency, and the latter opens up every unpopular belief for pathologization. Does Boghossian want a teenage atheist in the Deep South to be diagnosed with a delusion because he doesn’t recognize the obvious truth of God’s love?

Boghossian’s beliefs about ending oppression in the developing world seem to be of the “something must be done, this is something, therefore it must be done” variety. He ignores the wide variety of excellent feminist activism in the developing world, from the International Planned Parenthood Federation to Girls Not Brides to postcolonial and Third World feminisms. He pushes for feminist groups to spend more time on condemning Islam, without any examination of whether condemning Islam would actually improve the lives of Muslim and ex-Muslim women in any way (or, indeed, whether it would make them worse). Such feel-good, non-evidence-based activism does not belong in a book that claims to be about skepticism.

Doing Good Better: How Effective Altruism Can Help You Make A Difference: The best introduction to effective altruism I have ever read. In an engaging and readable style, MacAskill covers standard effective altruist concepts, such as replaceabilty and expected value; the last set of chapters explain clearly what actions you should and should not take, in light of effective altruism. Crucially, there is little to no normative ethics; instead of fussing around with children in ponds, MacAskill assumes that you have at least a little altruistic motivation, and instead focuses on teaching the skills of thinking like an effective altruist.

Even committed EAs can learn a lot from this book. I mostly stopped feeling vaguely guilty about things I wasn’t doing anyway. Buying fair trade has little to no effect on people in the developing world, and may even lower their wages. It doesn’t really matter whether you turn your lights off or unplug your TV; the best methods of reducing your carbon output are flying less, eating less meat, purchasing a mysterious kind of magic called ‘loft insulation’, and buying offsets. Voting, however, is surprisingly important, for much the same reason being vegetarian is (it isn’t that likely that you make the difference between a desired outcome and an undesired outcome, but when you do you get all the credit, so it works out as positive expected value).

My husband is mentioned in this book! And he is in the acknowledgements! My husband is famous.

The Drug Wars In America, 1940-1973: Essential history for libertarians and anyone who’s interested in the operation of American state power or the reasons behind America’s failed drug war. The Drug Wars in America follows how America transitioned from a tax-and-regulation-based model that focused on narcotics to the modern war on drugs. The thesis is essentially that the drug war has never been about eliminating the drug trade, because someone would notice that it wasn’t working. Instead, the drug war serves other purposes of state power: for instance, American foreign policy goals, maintaining the discretion of police even after their professionalization, increasing the profits of drug companies, and policing inner cities. Detailed and well-researched.

The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing: Why is this classified in ‘Zen Spirituality’ on Amazon? Is it because the author is Japanese? While it does have a spiritual element, the element is clearly Shinto. It’s not the “Japanese art” of anything, also! It’s Marie Kondo’s art of decluttering and organizing! She made it up.

I love this book! Essentially, it’s a reframe of decluttering. Most decluttering defaults to assuming things should be kept and then comes up with rules about what you should discard (e.g. things you don’t use for six months). Konmari, on the other hand, defaults to assuming things should be discarded, and then comes up with rules about what you should keep (e.g. things that ‘spark joy’). You don’t keep things because they’re a present, or they were expensive, or you might use them someday, or you want to be the sort of person who uses them, or because you’re too lazy to throw them out. But on the other hand if you like something and it makes you happy, you get to keep it, even if other people would think it was excessive.

Konmari has a certain animist element which I loved, but which some people might dislike. For instance, she suggests thanking the items you discard for their service to you, greeting your house each day, emptying out your bag each evening so that it gets a chance to rest, and folding your clothes in a way that will make the clothes happy; she talks about how whenever she goes to declutter a house she introduces herself to the house and asks permission first.

Many of the negative reviews seem to be from people who don’t want to declutter. That is an absolutely fine life choice which I do not judge, but I rather wonder why they’re reading a book subtitled ‘The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing’ then. I don’t read books about how to cook meat and then go “ugh, zero stars, it was constantly telling me to eat meat and I’m vegetarian.”

Nurture Shock: New Thinking About Children: I love this book! Definitely on my list of top books about parenting.

Teenagers are notoriously moody, disengaged, and impulsive; as a person goes through puberty, their sleep schedule shifts later, so that they usually want to go to bed around midnight; in spite of this, high schools begin earlier than elementary and middle schools; moodiness, disengagement, and impulsivity are symptoms of chronic sleep deprivation. And then we punish kids for sleeping in class! I think this argument is, in and of itself, enough reason for a person who is capable of doing so to homeschool their teenagers.

Children learning through imitation goes beyond the famous ‘violence in media’. In an experiment in which some children read books about why sibling rivalry is bad for several weeks and some didn’t, the former group had more sibling rivalry. The reason is that to convey the moral ‘sibling rivalry is bad,’ the books of course had to depict siblings arguing with each other– and children learn behaviors through modeling and imitation! If a preschooler sees ten pages of bickering and two of making up, there’s five times as much bickering for them to model themselves after. This suggests a truly wearying task for the parent who wishes to censor their children’s media, because it’s not like Common Sense Media screens for People Behaving In A Non-Violent Yet Annoying To Parents Fashion.

If you’d like to keep children from lying, the best strategy is to model telling the truth yourself (and remember that preschoolers think that being mistaken is the same thing as telling a lie, so apologize if you’re mistaken!), to not teach children to tell social lies, and to make sure that it’s always a better idea to tell the truth than to lie. If they might get punished if they lie, and they will definitely get punished if they tell the truth, then they will of course lie. Your kid is probably good enough at lying that you can’t tell whether they’re lying a lot. All teenagers lie to their parents; the teenagers who lie to their parents the least are the ones who argue with them the most, which the parents find stressful and upsetting. I wonder if reframing the arguments as ‘my teenager trusts me enough to tell me about things they want’ makes that better?

The Three Body Problem: I clearly have an inaccurate model of the censorship opinions of the Chinese government. I would have expected them to heavily censor information about the Cultural Revolution, but literally the first third of this book is a very stirring, evocative argument that the Cultural Revolution is bad. Apparently I am mistaken about Chinese politics! Which makes sense because I don’t know anything about it.

Anyway, this book is great, completely deserving of its Hugo for Best Novel, precisely the sort of richly imagined, well-written, well-worldbuilt, suspenseful, sense-of-wonder science fiction that is the genre at its best. The science is hard as fuck, at least from my position as a non-physicist, and the characters are well-done without distracting from the shiny neat ideas we came here for.

Don’t read the back. It spoils. Actually, avoid the reviews of it too. I don’t know why everyone decided to summarize this story using the shocking twist, but they did, and knowing it made my experience of the book a lot worse.

The Hatred of Poetry: Literary criticism is fun. Lerner argues that poetry is widely disliked because the goals it sets itself (being both a universal song that anyone can relate to and a personal expression of the poet’s soul) are impossible individually, much less together, and thus poetry is disliked because it is never capable of doing the thing it’s trying to do– even though its failures may be beautiful in their very failure. Mostly great as an excuse to read William McGonagall to Topher, who got to the fourth line of The Tay Bridge Disaster before threatening to divorce me to make it stop.

Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder For Blacks To Succeed: Please Stop Helping Us appears to be under the impression that a large amount of black violence is caused by use of the n word, gangsta rap, use of non-standard English, and sagging pants. As someone who reclaims slurs that apply to myself, listens to music that glorifies violence, occasionally speaks non-standard English, and sometimes shows people their underwear, and who has never felt the slightest desire to shoot anybody, I suspect there are other causes here.

Please Stop Helping Us claims that parts of the prison-industrial complex such as the crack/powder sentencing disparity aren’t racist because they weren’t originally created for racist reasons, and then turns around and discovers “just because your policy wasn’t intended to be racist doesn’t mean it doesn’t disproportionately negatively affect black people” as soon as they’re talking about the minimum wage. And he talks about how historically black colleges and universities have a very high dropout rate and therefore are failing their students and should be closed, and not three pages later quotes someone who mentions that historically black colleges and universities disproportionately educate poor people who probably wouldn’t have gone to college at all otherwise. Like, gee, maybe that’s relevant in the assessment of whether they’re failing their students? In short, sufficiently dishonest that I do not update my beliefs based on its conclusions.

I Will Fear No Evil: Well, now I suppose I know what transformation fetishists read before the existence of transformation fetish porn. Also, Heinlein’s dirty old man character is obnoxious– I have literally zero desire to be inside the head of one of the men who has sexually harassed me– and he isn’t much better when he’s a trans woman instead.

Book Post for May

Tags

disability, lois mcmaster bujold, ozy blog post, science side of tumblr, there is no justice and there is no judge

[Thanks to Jonathan and Cliff for giving me books!]
[you might say “Ozy, this is observably not May!” Yeah, well, I’m bad at things sometimes.]

Among the Creationists: My absolute favorite genre of books is Books About What Fundamentalist Religious People Are Getting Up To, I don’t know why this is but I have accepted this fact about myself. Anyway, this is a perfectly good book if you happen to share my interest, and gives you a real sense of why creationists believe what they believe and what it feels like to be a creationist from the inside. If you aren’t interested in creationists, however, it’s definitely skippable.

Only A Theory: tfw you’re part of the way through your nice book about What Fundamentalist Religious People Are Getting Up To and you start having the creeping suspicion that the author believes in God

[content warning for Nazis on the next review]

Pride Against Prejudice: A Personal Politics of Disability: Interesting fact I learned from this book: the Nazi euthanasia program was originally motivated as much by ‘mercy killing’ as it was by attempting to improve the race. Until 1943, Jewish children were not euthanized, because it was believed that as a lesser race they did not deserve it. I think that is a really emotionally moving argument for– even if you happen to be in favor of suicide rights– emphasizing that suicide rights are about people having the right to decide what happens to their own bodies and lives, not about some lives being objectively “worth living” or “not worth living”.

This book has a really interesting exploration of the intersection between feminism and disability rights. Many feminists have advocated for institutionalization, on the grounds that it keeps women from having to be caretakers; however, disability rights advocates tend to oppose institutionalization. I appreciated some of the snark: for instance, in response to a theorist who argues that institutionalization allows disabled women to develop ungendered roles free from family-centric ideology, she proposes that perhaps if institutionalization is so beneficial nondisabled people should do it too.

The story that made my heart ache the most was of Annie, a girl with severe cerebral palsy who was assumed to be severely cognitively disabled and placed in an institution without toys, education, or activities; even the television was for the benefit of staff. A caretaker taught her to use a letter board and it turned out that Annie was, in reality, tremendously intelligent– among other things, she had independently invented multiplication after learning about addition and subtraction from Sesame Street. Not, of course, that it’s okay to neglect people who are severely cognitively disabled, but I think that shows the importance of presuming competence and not assuming that people who can’t talk are things that don’t have subjectivity or a sense of self.

[Spoilers for the Vorkosigan Saga. Did I read half the Vorkosigan Saga in two weeks? Yes, I fucking did.]

Ethan of Athos: So the Vorkosiverse had a bunch of gay separatist telepathic religious fundamentalists. That is going to be… really interesting in a couple of centuries.

I spent a large part of this book terrified that Ethan would suddenly discover that women weren’t so bad and he was attracted to them, or worse that he was in love with Elli Quinn. Fortunately, Lois McMaster Bujold would never betray me so, and he gets to date Terence Cee the telepath instead. Also I love how Elli being hot is established by Ethan being confused by why all the other men are constantly looking at her enlarged mammary glands.

It’s really remarkable how capable Bujold is of making characters likeable. I don’t think there’s any other series where I’m as invested in the continued health and happiness of every random character in it. I started out Ethan of Athos being like “well, he is kind of a misogynist” and by the second chapter I was like “Ethan! My kind, gentle, innocent son! I will protect you from all the scary galactic women and their mammary glands!”

Borders of Infinity: Sergeant Taura, my precious angel, my one and only, my favorite character in all of the Vorkosigan Saga. Like, every character is my favorite, but Sergeant Taura is my favorite favorite, if you understand me. I was misled by Effulgence, which I read before I read the Vorkosigan Saga and includes Vorkosigan fanfic in which the role of Sergeant Taura is played by Wolverine, and I did not expect that there would be KISSING and it is my favorite story in the whole Saga.

“How free can she ever be, in that body, driven by that metabolism, that face-a freak’s life-better to die painlessly, than to have all that suffering inflicted on her-”

Miles spoke through his teeth. With emphasis. “No. It’s. Not.”

To be honest, I cheered at my book when I read that.

Brothers in Arms: Old Earth! Also, one of the few mentions of religion in the Vorkosigan Saga– there’s a bit about a galactic going on the hajj. Like, I know that Betans are all atheists or agnostics or maybe Space UUs, but what about Barrayar? They do the whole burning-things-for-the-dead thing but are they ancestor worshippers? Do they pray to a god? There should be more religious worldbuilding in the Vorkosigan Saga IMO.

Anyway, clone shenanigans are the best shenanigans.

Mirror Dance: One chapter into this book I was like “eh, Mark, I’m not sure how I feel about Mark, is this whole thing going to be from his point of view?” By the time I finished I was like “I want another dozen books and all of them are about Mark!” Lois McMaster Bujold is a master of likeable characters, let me tell you.

This is the first book in the Vorkosigan Saga where I had not read an Effulgence of it first, and this lead to considerably more suspense in the plotline! Particularly since Miles died! I was extremely concerned that Miles was going to be dead permanently and then I was going to read about Mark ending death through capitalism for the rest of the series.

Memory: “In the last book, he died,” Lois McMaster Bujold says to herself. “How could I possibly top that? What could make the reader feel more suspense than the actual death of my protagonist? I know! I’ll get him fired!” Apparently getting fired is more permanent than dying, also!

This book is so depressing and I wanted to give Miles a hug the entire time and I was seriously concerned that he would have to be retired forever.

Komarr: I was sort of leery when I started reading this book because I knew Ekaterin would be in it and I was worried I’d have to spend the whole time being grumpy that she wasn’t Sergeant Taura, my favorite, or Linyabel from Effulgence, whom I continue to be disappointed does not ‘exist’ in ‘canon’ because she is technically from ‘Twilight’. Anyway, no worries, Ekaterin is awesome and I am 100% behind Ekaterin/Miles as a pairing.

Let me be perfectly frank: fuck Tien. Tien is probably one of the most effectively horrifying abusers I’ve read in fiction. Partially, it’s because Bujold does an excellent job of evoking how trapped Ekaterin is in her relationship– quite wisely, she concentrates more on how Ekaterin feels than on the gritty details of the abuse. Partially, it’s because Tien is kind of pathetic: he feels like the sort of person who actually exists, and you can see the process of rationalization that Ekaterin goes through to make her stay in the relationship. Basically, my cheering when Tien died was about as loud as my cheering about Sergeant Taura.

A Civil Campaign: Lois McMaster Bujold, apparently: “I am just going to put a Georgette Heyer pastiche in the middle of my military SF series, this is a perfectly reasonable decision which no one will ever question.” I wonder what her editor was thinking when this book hit her desk. “Uh, Lois… you seem to have forgotten the part where they blow each other up in spaceships…”

Lord Dono is the best representation of a trans dude in fiction ever. I appreciate that the role of “transphobes”, in this book, was played by a man whose other personality traits appear to be “smug smarmy douchiness”, “committing lots of rape”, and “literally murdering a puppy.” I mean, sometimes I want a serious exploration of the nature of transphobia, and sometimes I want a Georgette Heyer pastiche in which it is clearly explained that all transphobes murder puppies. This is cathartic.

Diplomatic Immunity: BABIES BABIES BABIES BABIES LITTLE TINY QUADDIE HERM BABIES

Cryoburn: I would like to nominate Kibou-daini for the position of Creepiest Planet. Also, I feel like DIY cryonicists rebelling against the evil cryonics establishment by making sure there’s immortality for everyone is the aesthetic.

Aral died! 😦 I don’t understand why this was allowed to happen! Mark was LITERALLY JUST ABOUT TO END DEATH, you guys! AAAAAAAAAA

Winterfair Gifts: I do not buy for one single solitary second that Ekaterin and Miles are in a monogamous relationship. You’re telling me that a monogamous guy is going to invite his ex-girlfriend to be in his wedding, and give strict orders that she is to be treated like she’s a princess and given everything she wants? And then in Cryoburn he’s going to drop everything so he can be by her bedside as she dies? And his wife not only has no problem with this but makes the ex-girlfriend her maid of honor? Nah, Sergeant Taura is and has always been Miles’s secondary partner and they have a great relationship.

Shards of Honor: This is a romance novel. This is literally a romance novel. There is, technically speaking, a war, but it is all strictly secondary to the question of Aral and Cordelia: Will They Kiss. “Commander Cordelia Naismith of the Betan Astronomical Survey has never had time for love. When she meets the mysterious Barrayaran Aral Vorkosigan, she’s intrigued by his rugged masculinity… and all too aware of his reputation as the brutal Butcher of Komarr. But when her passion for the strangely honorable general conflicts with her duty to Beta Colony, Cordelia will find herself making decisions that change the course of history…”

I am endlessly, endlessly pleased by Aral’s deep confusion about these strange Betan customs like “not yentas” and “not arranged marriages” and the fact that he didn’t quite grasp that in the Betan model you’re not supposed to propose marriage a week after meeting someone.

Beta Colony is fucking creepy. Add “vivid descriptions of psychiatric abuse” to the Lois McMaster Bujold: Weirdly Good On Ableism list.

Barrayar: Does the Vorkosigan Saga seem weirdly pro-fetal-personhood to anyone else? Like, first in Shards of Honor the fetuses that were a product of Barrayaran soldiers raping people were put in replicators and sent to Barrayar, instead of being aborted. And now in Barrayar not only is killing a disabled fetus presented as unambiguously a villainous action but said disabled fetus is the MacGuffin that propels the entire climax. I guess being anti-abortion is a lot more reasonable in a universe with uterine replicators.

TINY MILES. TINY MILES IS MY FAVORITE PERSON. I WANT TO GIVE HIM INFINITE HUGS.