O.T.: Five Books that Will Drive You to Think

By Ctein

Introduction: Mike's recommendation of some philosophy books a few weeks back caught me by amused surprise. This seems to be yet another case of great minds lying in the same gutter, because while he was writing that column I was laying out this one.

I don't read anywhere as much as I'd like. I still buy a few more books each year than I find time to read. There are close to 600 unread books on my shelves, 400 of which fall into the "I really must read this" category. Consequently, I almost never go back and reread a book.

Mostly I read for entertainment, occasionally for factual education. On very, very rare occasions, a book comes along that actually makes me think. They are few and far between, and I'm recommending five to you. It happens that three were written by friends of mine. I won't tell you which ones. Don't ask. It doesn't really matter. I have hundreds of books written by friends on my shelves; I'm not recommending most of them.

If you read all of these, at least one of them will make you think very, very hard about stuff you thought you already knew. Probably, all of them will.

It's almost impossible for a thought-provoking book to be anything but controversial. We don't want to engage those controversies here. Were I to recommend a book on economics, that would not be a call to debate capitalism vs. communism. Not that Mike would allow it, but let's make his life easier and keep the conversation meta, okay? So, without further ado:

1

Beyond Fear: Thinking Sensibly About Security in an Uncertain World, by Bruce Schneier

Bruce is such a well-known security/computer security expert that XKCD makes jokes about him in its rollovers. The book's subtitle, "Thinking sensibly about security in an uncertain world," sums it up. It's a straightforward and common-sense discussion of real world matters, things that affect us every day. More important, it's a tutorial on how to think about security. That's its major value.

For example, there is threat vs. risk, concepts that people conflate. Threat is what might happen to you, risk is how likely it is to happen. Your security usually involves reducing risk to manageable levels, not necessarily eliminating threats. That's on page 20 of nearly 300. It just gets better and better.

2

God's Mechanics: How Scientists and Engineers Make Sense of Religion, by Bro. Guy Consolmagno, S.J.

Brother Guy is an MIT-trained astronomer who got the calling in midlife, became a Jesuit brother, and now works for the Vatican (his specialty is meteors and and other subplanetary bodies). He's a consummate techie who is also profoundly religious. This isn't as fringey as you might imagine; the overwhelming majority of scientists and engineers are religious. He got curious about how other techies deal with their religious beliefs, so he studied them.

The first third of the book presents historical background on science and religion. He shows how good/bad theology has lead to good/bad science and vice versa. Did you know that Kepler came up with his famous laws of planetary motion because he believed that the Godhead physically resided in the Sun and so the Sun must be at the center of the motion of all stellar bodies? Great science but lousy theology. He also elegantly explains why trying to use science to validate theology is a terrible strategy.

The second third is a field study; Guy talked to about two dozen techies, questioning them on exactly how and why they were involved with religion and wrote up their case histories for our benefit. Fascinating stuff, and the truly original part of this book.

The last third homes in on Guy's relationship, as a techie, to Christianity and the Church. Roman Catholicism has less-than-zero appeal to me (yes, I am religious; no, it's none of your business) but when I was done reading this section I had a genuine appreciation and empathy for how it does work for Guy.

3

Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity by Julia Serano

I'm not sure how to convince most of you to read this book: a collection of essays of radical feminist political theory by a trans woman. Very much my cup of tea, not most of yours. So, why do I imagine most of you would get anything out of this book? Because this book presents a brilliantly integrated and extensive model of gender and sexuality. It was recommended to me by a respected friend, Marlene Hoeber, and to steal some of her words, this is the unified field theory of sex and gender. Marlene wrote, "Serano is a scientist in her primary career and it shows in this work. Her suggested structure fits the available evidence without stretching or omitting data. It is a workable operational model that is not worried about unknown causes."

As such, it doesn't demand redefining who you are, as too much hortatory political theory does. Think of it like this: Newtonian physics works perfectly well for a lot of everyday things. But when you're stuck with puzzles and seeming paradoxes (the constancy of the speed of light, the ultraviolet catastrophe, etc.) then you bring in quantum mechanics and general relativity. An understanding of those gives you a comprehensive and practical insight into the world.

Similarly, Juliana replaces the simplistic one- and two-dimensional models of human gender with something that's much more complete and actually makes sense in light of the way humans act, instead of prescribing how they should act.

I thought I had a really good understanding of gender before I read this book. Boy, did it ever prove me wrong.

4

Dr. Tatiana's Sex Advice to All Creation: The Definitive Guide to the Evolutionary Biology of Sex, by Olivia Judson

Now we turn to the lighter side of gender, namely sex! Humorous and entertaining, yet fact-filled, this book is cast in the form of an advice column to the lovelorn, viz.:

Dear Dr. Tatiana, we're sea hares. We've been having a fabulous orgy—being both male and female we all get to play both roles at once. [...] It's such a great system, so much better than being male or female, that we're mystified why everyone hasn't followed our lead. Why aren't all living things hermaphrodites?—(signed) Group Sexists in Santa Catalina

It's fun, it's funny, it's damned educational. Judson is an evolutionary biologist, a breed that has justifiably gotten a bit of a bad reputation. Too many of them took their marching orders from the Social Darwinists, picking and choosing their data and their logic to justify the status quo. The results were as reliably laughably idiotic as they were intellectually dishonest. (My favorite example from the seventies was a claim, made in all seriousness, that women had large breasts because that body type had been selected for by men. A theory that manages to ignore the huge variation in standards of beauty across space and time, as well as the undeniable fact that there is a more-than-sufficient subset of the male population who are simply horndogs and will, as the song lyrics say, "love the one they're with.")

Olivia is not of that ilk. She manages to explode, discredit and disprove so many prevalent myths about sex and sexuality across the animal kingdom, using established scientific information. It's a real hoot.

5

The Fortunate Fall, by Raphael Carter

This one is science fiction, unfortunately out-of-print, but readily available used from Amazon. [UPDATE 6:00 p.m.: The clean and reasonably priced ones seem to be gone now, apparently due to attention from TOP (there were plenty this morning when I checked). Sorry about that. Perhaps check abebooks.com or your local library system? —Ed.]

It's vaguely on-topic (and I do mean vaguely); the protagonist is a living camera, a journalist of the future when everyone and everything is wired. And like all good journalists in novels, she stumbles upon a conspiracy and cover-up and starts to pursue the truth behind it. I don't want to tell you any more. It would spoil the fun.

For one thing, I couldn't figure out what this book was up to until I was well over 100 pages into it. I can usually divine an author's broad intentions within a chapter or so. Not the plot details of course, but the broad thematic skeleton the author will flesh out with story. In this case, I just couldn't figure out Raphael's skeleton. The book was in no way obscure; it was so rich with possibilities and directions in which it could go that I really didn't know which way she was going.

That's high praise. This books deserves it; it is one of the very best first novels I've ever read.

Let me tell you something else about this book. When I got to the end, I said to myself, "Huh." And I turned back to page one and started reading it all over again, for the pleasure of truly appreciating and understanding all the details in the book in their larger context.

I have never, ever done that with any other book, fiction or nonfiction. As I said at the beginning, I rarely read anything more than once, ever, let alone twice in a row.

The book is that good.

Ctein

Ctein's columns, one out of four of which are off-topic, appear on TOP on Wednesdays.

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Comments

[Richard Tugwell]

"the overwhelming majority of scientists and engineers are religious"

Really? Definition of religious please. Why combine engineers and scientists?

[KeithB]

Ctein and ed:
Engineers != Scientists!

Ctein, what does Brother Guy make of the Salem Hypothesis?

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Salem_Hypothesis

[Mike Johnston]

"the Salem Hypothesis"

Keith and Richard,
Could be a) most scientists are not religious. b) most engineers are religious. c) engineers greatly outnumber scientists. Therefore most (scientists + engineers) are religious.

--I'm-just-sayin' Mike

[Andrew Lamb]

Glorious. Thank you.

To add to this, The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes. Great review in the New York Review of Books. A great instance of an article enriching one's understanding of a book.

[Richard Tugwell]

" Threat is what might happen to you, risk is how likely it is to happen." Em, are you sure you got this right? From a semantic point of view, both phrases seem to involve the concept of probability.

As someone who has had some passing acquaintance with IT security, the balancing act is more crucially between the probability of an event happening, and the severity of its consequences.

[Zach Z]

Pedantic side point, but as far as threats, likelihood and risk are discussed, instead of saying the the risk is the likelihood, the three are usually represented as:

Risk = Threat (or hazard, or event) X Likelihood (or frequencly, or whatever quantifier you want to use)

[Doug Reilly]

Thanks Ctein for that list, I'll definitely be checking out that sci-fi novel.

Just want to add to Mike's note that it's not just Dawkins that disputes that: there are quite a few studies that suggest that the number [of non-religious scientists] is a lot higher than 80%. For example a study in Nature of National Academy of Science members that found only 7% believed in a personal God. Doesn't make the topic of Guy's book any less interesting, just perhaps less relevant overall.

Thanks as always for the thought-provoking column.

[Don Craig]

At the risk of veering dangerously off-off-topic, a quick google search for "percentage of scientists who are religious" produces a great variety of comments on work reported by a sociologist name of Elaine Howard Ecklund. She interprets the results of self-selected responses to a questionnaire. It is unclear, via google at least, what is meant by "are religious" and by "scientist". I for one would assert that a sociologist is not actually a scientist. (Just kidding, folks...)

[ctein]

Dear Richard,Keith and Doug,

They're combined because that's the scope of Guy's investigation.

Religious is self-defined. If you say you are, you are. If you say you ain't you ain't.

It does NOT equate to a belief in a personal God.

There have been lots of broad-based surveys of this question, over 50 years, at least. Just one of many questions that sociologists and psychologists studying techies will ask them in a personality inventory-- "Do you consider yourself religious" or some variant of that phrase. Majority answer, "Yes," consistently.

One can pick and choose some subset where it won't be true, I'm sure. That's not really important, unless you're trying to make a case for or against religious belief.

I'm not. Neither is Guy, really. He's not trying to convince you. Read the book.

My *impression* (could be wrong; I may be misremembering) is that very few techies are creationists. It wouldn't surprise me if they're concentrated among some subset of techies, but statistically they're not too important.

pax / Ctein

[ctein]

Dear Richard and Zach,

Yer both right-- it's a very shorthand sentence. Bruce spends a LOT more time on it than I did. But he had to fill out a whole book [smile].

Threat only involves probability to the extent it has to be nonzero. We're under threat of being hit by an extinction-event asteroid; we're not under threat of the sun going nova.

Risk of that asteroid hit is very small each year; risk of sun going nova is zero (unless our physics is wrong).

Mostly, it was meant to give people a reason to read the book. A distinction many people wouldn't know at all.

pax / Ctein

[John Camp]

Okay, I bought two of them, the Threat one and the SF novel, and if the SF novel turns out to be some sort of hippie marijuana-enhanced feel-gooder drivel, I'll be mightily pissed. I want rockets.

I can't for the life of me think why anybody would spend a lot of time and energy thinking about gender/sex or God. One is sort of boring to talk about, and gets so tangled up in psychological singularities that any conclusion is impossible; and the other one is trivial.

[twitter.com/kukkurovaca]

The Fortunate Fall is one of my favorite novels. If folks want some more background on it, Jo Walton has a great post at Tor.com:

http://www.tor.com/blogs/2010/01/qlocked-in-our-separate-skullsq-raphael-carters-lemgthe-fortunate-falllemg

[Al Benas]

The Fortunate Fall, by Raphael Carter, "readily available used from Amazon"

Please refer to the previous post "Buying on the "Bay" :) It better be better than "the book is that good" for $999 + $3.99 shipping. The various used sellers must have seen an advance of Ctein's column, and knowing the habits of TOP readers ... I do wonder how an ?obscure? sci fi book generates those type of prices, or has it become a worldwide classic and I've been asleep.

[ctein]

Dear JC,

Heh heh, I can't promise that you won't find it drivel, but it's certainly not a feel-good book. I don't believe marijuana plays a part, that would be sooo twentieth century… but I could be forgetting (uhhh, what was the question again?)

I'd be terribly surprised if anyone here wanted to read all five of the books I recommended. They cover such a wide range of topics. I was really trying to have a little something for everybody in there. It would be nice if everybody wanted to read at least one, but that's about it.

I may have given a misimpression of Brother Guy's book. It's more a book of amateur sociology than professional theology. Guy is obviously intensely religious, but he's even more of a geek and a techie. In his own head, the two reconcile quite nicely. But being a geeky techie, he couldn't help but wonder, “Gee, there are millions of other techies out there who are involved with religion in one way or another; I wonder how it works for THEM?” And what is the techie answer to that? Research!That was the main impetus for the book, that center section of field interviews. The first and third sections are really framing information so that there is a meaningful context for the interviews and to allow him to shorthand a bunch of stuff that otherwise he'd have to explain at length.

Unsurprisingly, it turns out that there's a remarkable variety of different ways techies think about and engage with religion. Some of them make a lot of sense to me, some I had even more trouble wrapping my head around than Roman Catholicism. Some of it is counter-intuitive; some techies engage in religion who are most definitely not religious (and would not describe themselves as such).

That's the parts of the book I like the best, not the parts that tell me about people who think like I do, but the parts that let me get inside the heads of people who don't.

And for those who do like political argument, Guy's analyses and collected information offer great ammunition against both strict fundamentalists and adamant atheists.

As for sex, I agree. Talking about it is much more boring than doing it. Assuming you're doing it right.

pax \ Ctein
[ Please excuse any word-salad. MacSpeech in training! ]
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[ctein]

Dear folks,

Okay, really sorry for that business with "The Fortunate Fall." Honestly, I keep forgetting the TOP audience will pretty much instantly snap up anything that is in limited supply. I just looked online before writing, saw lots (for some inappropriately small value of "lots") and wrote my recommendation.

My bad.

Only suggestion I have is to write Tor and tell them you'd like to see the book reissued or at least posted online for free for a limited time. You can tell Patrick I sent you; he needs the amusement [g,d,&r].

pax \ Ctein
[ Please excuse any word-salad. MacSpeech in training! ]
======================================
-- Ctein's Online Gallery http://ctein.com 
-- Digital Restorations http://photo-repair.com 
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[Chad Thompson]

This discussion come just after having watched a video of Niel DeGrasse Tyson speak about science and intelligent design. How fitting.

http://youtu.be/Ti3mtDC2fQo

[Jeff]

There are 40 copies available on www.alibris.com. For the piracy minded, I think I remember seeing this title on either alt.binaries.e-book.flood or alt.binaries.e-book last year.

[Paul De Zan]

Since you didn't plug it, Bruce Schneier has a blog:

http://www.schneier.com/

One of very few I make a point to read at least weekly.

[Jim A]

I highly recommend Bruce Schneier’s Crypto-Gram newsletter. I always find something interesting.

http://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram-back.html

[David Dyer-Bennet]

Not to put too fine a point on it, not having to think much about gender / sex is what we call "privilege" (or what Scalzi recently called "playing on the easy setting"); it is much more available to the cis-gendered heterosexual males in this society than to others.

[Bernard Scharp]

Oh my, on the exact day I order my very first Kindle (Mike, did ordering it through your amazon.com links work ok?), Ctein posts my holiday reading list. Perfect!

[Roy]

Personal taste is interesting. Whilst I flatter myself that I have very broad literary tastes (in terms of genre) not one of these books interests me very much at all: in a couple of cases the appeal is incomprehensible to me.

I'm not generally very interested in "historical novels" either, particularly those dealing with the iniquities of the uniformly foul British monarchies, however let me recommend both of Hilary Mantel's most recent examples of the genre (if this isn't an insult) "Wolf Hall" and "Bring up the bodies". Magnificent.
Roy

[bruce]

OT = Old Testament; five books that will make you think.
I can agree with that...

[Dennis Ng]

was philosophy major but ... just listen last few days to those philosophy in 90 minutes audio by Paul Strather and so far interesting. not surprise for wittengstein but even for Kant that is a big surprise! highly recommended.

[Patrick Dodds]

You know ctein, that MacSpeech sure is taking a LOT of training... :)

[Brad]

It was a strange coincidence, but I was looking for a new book. #3 seemed the most unlikely of books I would have picked up for myself - so I ordered it. Thanks.

[Louis Sinoff]

Lower priced used copies of Fortunate Fall are available from Alibris.

http://www.alibris.com/search/books/qwork/2418487/used/The%20Fortunate%20Fall

[Emmanuel Huybrechts]

I'm very curious about the #2. I wonder how the author is warping things to make them fit his own point of view. It should be entertaining although I don't believe one minute that science and religion can be reconciled, especially not the kind of religion based on books, prophets and priests.

[Ctein]

Dear Roy,

Yeah, for sure! That whole "no accounting for taste" thing. If someone ever figs out how to account for taste, they're gonna end up owning the whole effin' planet.

You may have noticed that I didn't even suggest that people would like these books, or that they were "must reads" or that they would change their lives in any way. I kept my bar low (grin).

~~~~~~~~~

Dear Emmanuel,

Feel free to email me after you've read it, with your reactions. I'll be interested (Comments will be closed by then.)

I don't think Guy has warped anything, but I'm not an expert on religion, so maybe so. But it sounds clean and intellectually honest to me (there are lots of books that make you think because they're so damn stupid.... But that's not an endorsement I'd be making).

pax / Ctein

[Maggie Osterberg]

Gender is not sex and sex is not gender.

One is interesting to think about and one, I'm told, is interesting to do.

Great list, I'm gonna touch 'em all, Kirby!