An intro and a bit of taste of Thomas Ligotti. While reading the review, I was thinking about Ernest Becker (The Denial of Death). Not for everyone, but for me such ideas are liberating (mostly due to confirmation bias).

Paul Bloom shares six terrific books about decision-making by non-psychologists. These books offer unique perspectives on psychology and insightful approaches to understanding decision-making processes.

Book list:

• The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don't, By Julia Galef
• The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win. By Maria Konnikova
• Transformative Experience. By Laurie Paul
• WIld Problems: A Guide to the Decisions that Define Us, By Russ Roberts
• Trying Not to Try: The Art and Science of Spontaneity. By Edward Slingerland
• Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life. By Rory Sutherland

Check out the post for the bonus 7th book.

Highlights

America’s independent bookstores may look like the tattered, provincial shops of a bygone era—holding onto their existence by the slimmest thread. And booksellers may appear genial and absent-minded, like characters out of Dickens. But in reality, they’re the marketing geniuses of our time.

In August of last year Publishers Weekly reported, “Bookstore sales finished the first half of 2023 up 6.9% over the comparable period in 2022.” In fact, independent bookstore sales outpaced most other publishing industry metrics in 2023, growing faster than overall unit sales of print books. This is unprecedented.

Booksellers have bent the rules of the free market. For the first time in history, a significant chunk of the buying public are voluntarily paying almost double—and going out of their way—to buy exactly the same product they can get cheaper and often faster somewhere else. And it’s all due to that ABA message: “non-corporate, authentic, and socially responsible.”

What no one says is that the bargain works both ways. If book buyers must behave virtuously and tithe an additional $11 a book, then booksellers must uphold the community’s doctrines. They’re locked in the moral contract, too.

But books are different. They signal something about readers’ intelligence, identity, and closely held ideas. Books confer status—especially among the highly educated. The people who sell them know this and they used it to make their case.

“Most independent bookstores have succeeded because they’ve responded to the needs of their community,” says Jan Weissmiller, co-owner of Iowa City’s Prairie Lights since 2008. “If they’re in a part of the country where people are asking for a certain kind of book, that’s what they have on the shelf. Because they’re a business.”

But what I really want is a store where all the ideas are on display—the socialist, capitalist, monogamous, polyamorous, urban, rural, popular, and reviled—that also has the homely sacrosanct quality of one of Hemingway’s coffee-and-absinthe bars. With great music, please—and no puppets, or cheap pizza.

Where are you buying books?

Genes tend to be transmitted when they make us do things that transmit genes.

Notes of the book. Seems to be a fun one ;) Have you read it?

Tsundoku is a Japanese term for buying books and magazines far faster than you can read them. Döstädning is a concept from Sweden that translates into death cleaning, advice for how to get rid of your stuff before making other people do it after you die.

Get to know some books by Vernor Vinge

At one point Dick believed that when the last of the homeoplasmates were killed off with the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans in 70 C.E., “real time ceased.” The plasmate reentered human history in 1945, when jars stuffed with ancient gnostic codices were discovered in Nag Hammadi, Egypt.

No surprise that Rome time theory is somehow mentioned in relation to PKD.

And since the film *Valis* clearly emerges from the same pulp ghetto that Dick himself wrote for throughout his mostly marginal career, he sly hints that careful readers of his own trashy paperbacks, with their lurid covers and cheesy titles, may pick up far more than they bargained for.

No shit ;)

But Dick never gave up his commitment to the “authentically human,” the “viable, elastic organism which can bounce back, absorb, and deal with the new.” He also recognized that simulacra lie deep in our souls, and that we are not so far from the spiritual paradigms of the ancient world, with their camouflage spirits, talking images, and automata gods.

The world is a prison not because of its materiality — which was the opinion of some of the ancient “Gnostics” — but because of the hidden orders of power and control it houses: the various corporate, political, and ideological archons herding us into increasingly compelling synthetic worlds.

We feel compassion for and in his characters, ordinary flawed people struggling with impossible emotional and ethical contradictions; we recognize these people and their slapstick dystopias; they are us. And yet Dick’s point of view was extremely alienated and critical; questioning authority (even the authority of the author), he shifted like an ontological nomad between subjects and truths and positions of power, constantly testing for the trap doors in the theater of the world. His was not a gnosis that knows, but one that seeks to know, or rather dissolves its own convictions into the anxious mysterium.

Good article to start Saturday.

J.G. Ballard: My Favorite Books

Metadata

• Author: The MIT Press Reader
• Category: article
• URL: https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/j-g-ballard-my-favorite-books/

Highlights

In this respect I differed completely from my children, who began to read (I suspect) only after they had left their universities. Like many parents who brought up teenagers in the 1970s, it worried me that my children were more interested in going to pop concerts than in reading “Pride and Prejudice” or “The Brothers Karamazov” — how naive I must have been. But it seemed to me then that they were missing something vital to the growth of their imaginations, that radical reordering of the world that only the great novelists can achieve.

I now see that I was completely wrong to worry, and that their sense of priorities was right — the heady, optimistic world of pop culture, which I had never experienced, was the important one for them to explore. Jane Austen and Dostoyevsky could wait until they had gained the maturity in their 20s and 30s to appreciate and understand these writers, far more meaningfully than I could have done at 16 or 17.

Books:

• “The Day of the Locust,” Nathanael West
• “Collected Short Stories,” Ernest Hemingway
• “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” Samuel Taylor Coleridge
• “The Annotated Alice,” ed. Martin Gardner
• “The World through Blunted Sight,” Patrick Trevor-Roper
• “The Naked Lunch,” William Burroughs
• “The Black Box,” ed. Malcolm MacPherson
• “Los Angeles Yellow Pages”
• “America,” Jean Baudrillard
• “The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí,” by Dalí

Some appetizers for the book on breaking Enigma.

Have enjoyed The New York Trilogy

Filosofą išgarsinusi „Nuovargio visuomenė“ (vok. Müdigkeitsgesellschaft) Vokietijoje išleista 2010 m. Šioje knygoje jis dešimtmečiu aplenkė šiandien visuotinai pripažįstamą perdegimo kultūros įsigalėjimą, ypač būdingą vadinamajai tūkstantmečio kartai (gimusiesiems 1981–1996 m.). Kasdien patiriama tokia stipri stimuliacija, ypač internete ir socialiniuose tinkluose, kad sunkiai begebama jausti ar savarankiškai mąstyti. Ironiška, kad Hano knygos populiarinamos iš lūpų į lūpas būtent per internetą.

Looking forward to reading the book someday.

cross-posted from: https://group.lt/post/1868553

The Long Seventies Podcast episode on The Illuminatus! Trilogy

Some topics touched:

Exploration of Authoritarianism, Skepticism, and Anti-authoritarian Stance: The discussed band in the book represents authoritarianism, while the author advocates for thorough skepticism and an anti-authoritarian stance.

Exploring Convictions, Rationality, and Cult Dynamics: Convictions can limit openness to new ideas and cult dynamics can restrict followers' intellectual options.

Exploring the Thought Exercise of 'The Illuminatus! Trilogy' and its Discordian Roots: The book serves as a thought exercise synthesizing eccentric ideas influenced by the Discordian movement.

Exploring E Prime and its Connection to Neuro Linguistic Programming: E Prime as a tool to alter thinking and neuro linguistic programming techniques for behavioral conditioning are discussed.

Exploring the Origins of Social Media Platforms and Conspiracy Theories: Origins of social media platforms, their names, and potential conspiracy theories are explored.

Exploring Mythological References and Time Travel in the Book: The incorporation of mythological references and time-traveling storylines blur fiction and non-fiction in the book.

Exploring Mental Habits, Deep Programming, and Brainwashing: The challenge of eliminating mental habits, deep programming, and brainwashing as a real phenomenon are discussed.

Exploring Conspiracy Theories and Alternative Views: The podcast delves into conspiracy theories like the Bavarian Illuminati theory and the conditioning effects of exposure to such theories.

Decentralized Incentives and Societal Problems: Incentives drive behavior in society, with societal issues often stemming from a decentralized web of incentives rather than intentional conspiracies.

Evolution of News Media and Pressure for Immediate Content: The evolution of news media to the 24-hour news cycle has led to a focus on publishing content quickly, sometimes sacrificing accuracy for speed.

Is V in V for Vendetta good or evil?

Review of a book

Check out the book page as well (and you can download the book for free) - https://goatgreatesteconomistofalltime.ai/en

They were published from the 20s to the 50s and written for children, so they're quite anachronistic. I find them charming! My elementary school was discarding them 30 years ago and I claimed the whole pile.

I'm reading them to my kids now to their great enjoyment, but I've never met anyone else who's even heard of them.

I will note that I've had to explain some of the social stuff that's very much of it's time. None of the problematic stuff has been mean-spirited, but I do have to break in once or twice per book to say "we don't say things like that anymore because ..." , but my kids are used to my pointing that sort of thing out already.

Hmm...

Caught my eye as I really loved Paul Bowles *The Sheltering Sky *.

Have you read any?