Amazon’s Rings of Power is a racist disgrace, and Africans are its victims

In IRL conversations and on social media I have been somewhat active in criticizing the new Amazon series ‘Rings of Power’ (RoP) the ‘modern adaptation’ of Tolkein’s LOTR mythos that focuses on the Second Age for its backdrop.

I have many issues with this Amazon project; the fact that it’s genuinely shit in terms of quality, the fact that it tramples over Tolkein’s lore, style, and philosophy, as well as Peter Jackson’s impeccable adaptations, but I’ll focus for a moment on the most divisive issue; the disruption of Tolkein’s universe by the means of bluntly inserting actors of world-inappropriate appearances or ethnic backgrounds into the cast. This last item is something I view as an utterly atrocious crime of cinematography, and I hate it deeply.

Primarily, there are two reasons for this hatred. The first assumes that the creators genuinely care about Tolkein’s world, and that the unloreful cast backgrounds are incidental. RoP could have told a brilliant story with an ethnically diverse cast by setting the story somewhere else; Harad, Umbar, or Rhûn. Harad is where the mûmaks (oliphaunts) come from, and there is a scene in Peter Jackson’s films where Faramir and his Ithilien Rangers kill some Haradrim, before giving a sad monologue about the senseless death of a poor young Harad man, whose people have been deceived and manipulated into supporting Sauron’s cause. A TV show in these settings could be dramatically ethnically diverse, loreful, and also tell better stories, like the tragic tale of Sauron’s domination of these nations, and perhaps also highlighting the “few good men” (so to speak) who stood up to oppose him. It could have been redemptive, tragic, beautiful, compelling.

The second reason assumes that the creators do not care about Tolkein’s world but wanted to tell a diverse story in a fantasy setting. Let’s start off by talking about diverse (in this context, meaning not ethnoculturally European) stories in such settings. Black Panther, while somewhat contrived in its plot and unnecessarily political at times, was a really great movie (final battle was shit though, who thought it was a good idea to have like a dozen actors fighting in the epic finale). I am not ashamed to say that I loved the movie overall, despite its issues. Although Black Panther was created by a white comic book artist, the film adaptation proved that there is a global audience for fantasy-type stories set in non-Western (non ethnically European or colonial) settings. And I am part of that audience.

Even more than that, what I want to see are fantasy films that aren’t based on American comic books, but actual African lore. There is an incredibly rich and elaborate mythology in West Africa that was once the bedrock of popular tribal religion, with fantastic and intricate characters that could be utilized in film and TV. One example of a great African mythological character is Anansi. Anansi is a spider god in West African (primarily Akan) folklore and myth, who is also the god of wisdom, stories, and knowledge. He is a Loki-type character, a trickster, who through intelligence and cunning wins his victories against overwhelming odds, and I recall fondly my memories of reading a story in my English class as a child about Anansi, written by a Nigerian author.

Neither Amazon Studios, nor Netflix, nor any global film/TV producer is engaging with Anansi. Nor are they engaging even slightly with the genuinely profound and rich mythological tradition of West Africa. To satisfy audiences, both black and white (some of whom want to see themselves represented, some of whom want everything to be ethnically diverse by default) they are content to cast Africans in roles that don’t make sense for the story and world they’re trying to immerse you in, while ignoring the cultural heritage of those African actors in its entirety.

This is an atrocious crime, not only creatively, but also culturally and morally. Ethnic Sub-Saharan Africans should be able to see their heritage, their cultural mythos, on high-budget TV and cinema. They should be able to watch their own version of The Northman, a cinematic masterpiece that does for Europeans what Africans have never been able to experience or enjoy. I, as an ethnic European, should in an ideal world be able to watch an epic cinematic saga based in African mythology, and I should not have to see a single white person when doing so. Black Panther was close to greatness, but it killed my immersion when a white sidekick unnecessarily became a central character. Why was that necessary? Because forced diversity goes both ways, and it hurts both sides. Whites don’t benefit from anachronistic black cast members in fantasy European settings, and blacks don’t benefit from token whites appearing without good reason in fantasy African settings.

Lastly, I think this forced diversity situation with RoP is racist to those of African descent. Yes, I really mean that. It is flagrantly racist to enforce black cast members in inapplicable settings to grab cash from black audiences, while at the same time disregarding those audiences and ignoring the stories that their cultures have to tell. It is racist that Africans cannot have their own cultural mythologies or stories represented on TV, but instead have to settle for the ‘sloppy seconds’ of European mythologies instead. It is racist to pretend that you give a shit about black people when you are treating them as second best. As an ethnic European, I find this situation disgusting, offensive, exploitative, and cruel. If I were ethnically African, I would probably find it painful, oppressive, and depressing in addition to what it already is to me right now.

“Yet hope remains” as Tolkein’s Gandalf once said. There are signs that the industry is changing. Netflix’s Squid Game was a truly remarkable event in cinematic history; it brought its viewers a story, not in a European language, not in Europe, but one that was authentic and on top of that, genuinely good. I haven’t watched it yet myself (my subscription expired two months ago) but I trust that the reviews are somewhat accurate, and I’m happy for its success.

Even before Squid Game, India started to receive similar treatment. In 2019, Netflix released the hit series “Delhi Crime” set entirely in India, with a cast entirely composed of Indian actors (for once, being faithful to the setting). This dark and visceral television series is set in the aftermath of the infamous Delhi Gang Rape and Murder of 2012, which most will recall from the horrific news reports produced by news outlets across the world as the full details of the case became known. I will not discuss the actual case here, as it is so utterly evil that to talk about it as a side topic would be inappropriate and disrespectful. The Netflix show is partially based on the actual true history of the Delhi Police’s attempt to find the perpetrators and bring justice to those responsible. Through deputy commissioner Vartika Chaturvedi (a composite character based on multiple actual police officers, some female) we see the outrage and horror of the crime, the frenzied attempt to catch the culprits, the trauma of grieving families, and the implicit guilt of the social milieu in which such a terrible act became possible. This is next on my watch list and from what I have seen, it looks incredible.

Squid Game and Delhi Crime are not fantasies, and they do not delve into the lore or cultural mythologies of their respective settings, Korea and India. But they are proof that culturally authentic shows can be great. More than that, perhaps they prove that cultural authenticity itself can take a show from good, to great. What is missing in all of this, unfortunately, is Africa, and the void that exists as a result of its absence is only widened by Amazon’s Rings of Power.

I will finish with this: it is unconscionable that black Americans be represented politically by a half-Kenyan president by the name of Barack Hussein Obama, but cannot be represented culturally by US film and TV studios, which cynically use Africans to satisfy diversity quotas while ignoring the richness of African cultural heritage.

Angela Saini thinks about race like Richard Spencer

Quillette just published this essay by Drs. Bo Winegard and Noah Carl, who joined forces to review Angela Saini’s new pop science book, Superior.

For the unfamiliar, Saini is a Desi journalist and writer from Britain considered popular within her undergraduate and professional audiences. More specifically, her popularity appears relatively confined to the center-left and middling-high (+1 SD) openness portion of that audience. Her wikipedia page (which she probably wrote herself) emphasizes her two MA degrees from high-tier British universities (Ox and Imperial) and the two books she wrote prior to Superior seem like manifestos on behalf of perceived underdogs, whose true virtue she is compelled to explain. I’m going to let a page from her book on women, entitled Inferior, speak for itself:

Just one page alone tells us so much about the kind of person who succeeds in the industry of science journalism today.

In Saini’s worldview, the “early divisions” that appear and begin to distinguish male and female humans in childhood reflect only a belief about biology, not biology itself. Reproductive and sexual behavior by consenting adults is guided by a kind of zombie notion, fed by scientific research (which is thus implied to be unreliable). If we have an interpretation of the past that contradicts this, it is only because our visions are tainted by “myths.” Men are dominant, therefore women must be, and are, submissive.

Amidst this, we (meaning Angela Saini) have “this dark, niggling feeling that never seems to go away no matter how much equality legislation is passed: the feeling that we aren’t the same, that, in fact, our biology might explain the sexual inequality that has existed… across the world.” We don’t need Freud to point out how much closer this is to a childhood diary of shameful thoughts than a book about science. Yet Saini moves decisively to nip this ‘dark feeling’ in the bud, dispelling it with one phrase: ‘thoughts like these are dangerous.’

This, in a nutshell, is Angela Saini. Her motivation is to act against the very thought that anything biological could explain anything she views as sociological. If the science seems to suggest any differences that can be related to biology, this is only because, she tells us, the science is itself flawed:

You can probably guess what her latest book Superior: The Return of Race Science had to say about its subject matter. The Quillette article did a pretty good job evaluating Saini’s arguments, so I won’t repeat their rebuttal. Instead, I want to draw attention to Saini’s fundamental mistake that we see in both Superior and Inferior: she combines strawman ideas of race and gender into a Frankenstein belief system no-one actually holds. Let’s start with her definition of race from the prologue of Superior:

“No place or people has a claim on superiority. Race is the counter-argument. Race is at its heart the belief that we are born different, deep inside our bodies, perhaps even in character and intellect, as well as in outward appearance.”

Winegard and Carl did a good job at picking up on what she actually means. In their words, Saini’s definition “inextricably binds up race with morality, making it an affront to human dignity and a threat to metaphysical equality.” To Saini, race is the idea that these features on which any two randomly selected humans from the same society will differ (appearance, character, intellect) grants a metaphysically and morally superior status. Racism, then, is a Nietzschean view in which one’s group is a master, and others are slaves.

Interestingly, Saini’s attitude here is much closer to the ‘pro-race-ists’ such as Richard Spencer than any credible scientist working in biology or related fields. As far as I’m aware, Spencer – like Saini – believes that race does indeed confer some metaphysically superior status; he only disagrees with Saini on the small matter of its existence.

	Saini	Spencer
Race is real	No	Yes
Race is socially constructed	Yes	No
Race determines metaphysical value	Yes	Yes

Ignoring her inadvertent agreement with the alt-right, I’m going to throw a curveball into our discussion by arguing that both Spencer and Saini are wrong. In common English parlance, we use the word race to legitimately describe groups defined by shared cultural characteristics, but also those defined by shared patterns of biological descent and variation, and often we see a substantial degree of overlap between the two. Yet we do not (or, at least, cannot) use race as a marker of metaphysical value or worth, and it is for this reason that both Saini and Spencer are incorrect.

Saini counters throughout her book, most notably when she interviews David Reich in chapter 7, that racial categories are mere (i.e. imaginary) social constructions. Consider the following paragraph:

There’s some truth to be found here: racial categories are indeed socially constructed. Consider the list of racial categories proposed below (from chapter 5 of Nicholas Wade’s book on the topic):

By definition, these are social constructions because they were assembled by a social community (scientists) and are subject to change and redefinition over time. But does this truly suggest, as Saini & Co. assume, that this makes them worthless and harmful? Don’t all categories of human knowledge, like fashion, physics, religion, and law operate the same way – being constructed by a social community and then applied for a specific purpose within a relevant domain? To her credit, the paragraph above does give the remarkable admission that “some categories may be useful” but discredits itself by making a full 180 to conclude that race is both useless (i.e. invalid; not fit for purpose) and pernicious, which is a synonym for wicked and malevolent.

A common-sense response might seek to look at some examples of what we often call ‘race’ in order to evaluate how harmful or inaccurate it really is. African Americans are a great place to start, because they are indeed genetically heterogeneous to a degree that makes the notion of biological homogeneity seem hard to defend. As we know, those considered racially ‘black’ in America include original AAs of West-African slave descent, recent arrivals from East African countries like Somalia and Ethiopia, or Khoisan immigrants from South Africa (who are described in Wade’s book as a separate racial category altogether). Therefore, it’s fairly unsurprising that AAs have among the highest levels of intragroup genetic diversity in the world, and are composed on average of roughly 79% African ancestry. In the case of individuals with 0% African ancestry like Sean King, it’s very clear that African/black American is a social identity or ethnic grouping, bearing little resemblance to the biological category Wade proposes.

For people like Saini, the definitional breadth of blackness in the American social context is the strongest possible case to support her argument. Yet if we concede that black is too broad to be useful, we tacitly accept that any trends, gaps, or disparities revealed by the adoption of ‘black’ are just as useless as the category itself. Prostate cancer, which remains the biggest killer of Western men today, has rates among black Americans that are “50–60 times higher than the rates in Shanghai, China.” Do we really think that pretending black and Asian Americans to be equally susceptible to prostate cancer will rid us of a “nonsense” and “wicked” category? Or would it worsen the already severe health disparities dividing America along racial lines today?

We don’t have to speculate – let’s check for common-sense by looking at a country overtly opposed to racial categories. France has a legal prohibition on collecting demographic statistics of ethnicity or race, which it has ardently enforced for many years. Yet despite this, the French government assiduously collects data on the proportion of newborns considered ‘at risk’ for sickle cell disease – a genetic disorder effectively limited to individuals of Sub-Saharan African ancestry. If France consistently avoided collecting statistics on racial demography altogether, then the life expectancy of its black population as well as the efficiency of its health service would obviously suffer as a result. How this would further the cause of justice, let alone science, is never explained by Saini – but it’s consistent with a set of policy measures her book strongly supports.

While Superior commendably admits that “understanding [medical] correlations is important” it never tells us why health disparities occupy a unique position among behavior, socioeconomic outcomes, social attitudes, or any other characteristic that will on average differ between groups; knowing one is important, but no harm will befall a society that ignores every other disparity that exists (???). When paraphrasing the section quoted above, we get: ‘no need or value to categorize people biologically, but understanding medical implications of biogeographic ancestry is important, but most categories are nonsense, but there are some physical differences, but most categories are useless, but some are useful, but race above all else is a wicked and insidious way to interpret the diversity we believe to characterize the human species in our world.’ While hyperbolic, this is no less extreme or radical than the claims and normative proposals found in Superior, particularly in its sections on cognitive ability.

You could counter that any concept of race which clumps Ethiopians, West Africans, Khosian, and Sean King in a single category is inherently silly, and should be removed or refined. This is a reasonable suggestion, but it fails to acknowledge the advantages of ‘fuzziness’ we’d trade off by enforcing a more strictly genetic interpretation on the general population. Saini is well-aware of this, rightly noting:

“…according to the rules laid out by the US government in its 1997 Office of Management and Budget standards on race and ethnicity, people who originate in Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa are automatically classified as white. Since Hefny arrived from Egypt, he is officially white.”

It’s certainly true that the ostensibly racial category of ‘white’, like ‘black’, is applied very openly in the United States – but why exactly is this a bad thing? After all, if our critique rests upon the divisiveness of race, then we should aim for racial categories that are open and inclusive to the utmost extent that doesn’t compromise the quality of information on health disparities or socioeconomic gaps in our societies. If we don’t bother with pragmatic utility and instead focus solely on the strict scientific accuracy of racial categories, we’re beginning to sound alarmingly close to actual 20th-century Nazis – something that should tell us we’re going in the wrong direction.

Stepping back into the safe territory of common sense, we might ask why on earth Saini gets it so wrong. After all, if categorizing humans into groups based on shared genetic ancestry can help people (which it can) and if these categories can be relatively inclusive (which they appear to be) then why oppose the effort? For our answer, we turn right back to Saini’s prologue, where she writes:

“We invent hierarchies, give meaning to our own racial categories…” “…once defined, these “races” rapidly became slotted into hierarchies based on the politics of the time, character being conflated with appearance, and political circumstance becoming a biological fact.”

Above all, it’s these claims where I cannot help but dig my heels in. The idea that race is made meaningful by hierarchy is as absurd as gender being intrinsically hierarchical. The notion that categorizing people based on shared ancestry invariably conflates character with appearance suggests that well-intentioned scientists like David Reich are ultimately motivated by a sinister desire to determine moral goodness based on physical aspect. While Saini seems to acknowledge that although race can be medically useful and sociologically informative, such benefits are a mere coincidence of its true purpose: to rank order the moral importance of an individual life based on racial ancestry, so that we can treat them differently.

Perhaps importantly, I’d suggest that this would be serious cause for concern, were any of it true and not dramatic fiction. The idea of moral worth or value sounds abstract or arcane to many of us today, but it was very tangible for the passengers of the sinking Titanic, where men (being of lower moral value) resigned themselves to death while women and children descended to the safety of the lifeboats. The case of the Titanic shows that when push comes to shove, ‘moral value’ ultimately means ‘who gets to live and who has to die’ so it’s definitely a subject worth raising if and when we feel there is valid cause for concern. Nevertheless, the fact that military servicemen and first responders routinely give their lives for people of racial groups Saini considers ‘lower’ on her fictitious racial hierarchy should give you a sense of how valid this concern really is.

Ultimately, Superior is very much like Inferior in that both books rest upon a fictitious idea of ‘race’ and ‘gender’ that is always assumed, never justified, and shared only among her fellow ideologues liberally quoted in every chapter as if to hammer their bad and unpersuasive ideas right into your skull. Both of her books start not with their subject matter of race, or gender, but with her – with personal stories from her background and upbringing, and the various ways in which she was ‘unjustly’ and ‘inaccurately’ categorized while growing up as a brown girl in Britain. It could be that this writing style is popular in circles I’m unfamiliar with, or it could be that Saini – like so many others who simply assume the views of their ‘opponents’ – is projecting her ghosts and demons upon an audience that sorely deserves better.

Film review: Enemy (2013)

Enemy is one of the most stunning films I’ve seen this year. Its genius is composite and gestaltic; it lies in the mind-blowing script of Gullón, the paradisal and dystopic direction of Villeneuve, and the compelling yet disturbing acting by Gyllenhaal.

While the film has received near universal acclaim, the plot and its incomprehensibility to many viewers has presented an interpretative problem that has spawned numerous analyses online. While not intending to sound solipsistic, Enemy truly spoke to me in a way few other films did, and as such my understanding is somewhat different to the majority of these reviews. Because this is an analysis as well as a review, none of it will make sense to you if you haven’t seen the film, so I strongly recommend that you go rent it now. What follows is my own analysis of Enemy, starting with our character pairs.

Adam/Mary – history professor and his girlfriend.
Anthony/Helen – actor and his wife.

Villeneuve tells us that the film is about dictatorship, and this is true. Beginning at the very start of the film we hear a lecture about dictatorships – a subject which history professor Adam (Gyllenhaal) happens to specialize in.

What dictatorships or totalitarian systems do – and hereafter I want to use the latter – is to subjugate people. But not only do totalitarian systems oppress people – they also suppress awareness of this subjugation, which can happen in a number of ways. As the film begins, Adam tells his students that in Ancient Rome, the government sponsored bread and circuses for the people in order to reduce dissent. Bread and circuses are at their core a type of entertainment. Modern governments act similarly to limit dissent in different ways, we are told – yet the focus on ‘entertainment’ will be relevant later on.

enemy_day17-0034-final — Adam and Anthony meet in a hotel

From here onwards we’ll be jumping around a bit in our analysis, but I’ll break the news to you first: Adam and Anthony are one and the same. Bear with me for a little while longer. When Adam and Anthony meet in the hotel, Anthony explains the presence of a scar on his stomach, asking Adam if he has one too. Adam recoils in fear and horror, and flees the hotel. How might we understand this scene?

There is no scar on Adam’s stomach, because that scar appeared when Adam/Anthony (hereafter ‘AA’ to refer to both) was in a car crash – something which also resulted in Mary’s death. Mary was the girlfriend of AA, or at least his mistress, while he was already with Helen. The scene where AA gets his scar, and Mary is killed in a car crash, is marked by a spiderweb on the windshield of the car. Spiders live inside webs.

Consider spiders for a moment. The spiders in this film are not some loose analogy for dictatorships or other systems of the political kind. But they do represent a totalitarian system. They are avatars of memory, and the totalitarian control that traumatic memories of the past have over people’s minds. Consider your own memories – of trauma, of bullying, of the dissolution of a romantic relationship – and how inescapable they often feel. Having crossed this point, things are slowly beginning to come clear.

At the very start of the film – and remember that it isn’t in chronological order, so this is actually the ending scene – AA is in a club [entertainment] and a beautiful attractive waitress crushes a spider. AA is crushing the pain of his own memories, by seeking entertainment. This liberates him from the totalitarian control they exert over him. What memories, you ask?

The answer is given earlier on, when Adam has a dream of walking down a hallway, passing by a woman who is at once also a spider. He wakes up, and sees a woman whose hair matches the spider pattern. This is another factual memory – it is one of the other girls that Anthony cheated on his wife with. Anthony has a serious problem with commitment and infidelity, and is repeatedly unfaithful – not just to his partner.

enemy — The spider – forever the avatar of the oppressive memories of the past – swaggers over Adam/Anthony’s hometown of Toronto

What about the giant spider walking over the entire city? This is explained by the poster for the film, which shows that same spider in the city right over Anthony (who we are able to positively identify because of his jacket) but also inside his head. This is key. The spider (the gargantuan weight of his traumatic memories) is above him, but it is also inside him; its influences on his life are pervasive and absolute like some totalitarian dictator – but these memories, like the spider, are also an integral part of his very being. His experiences are in his head to stay.

At the very end in the movie, Adam has taken the place of Anthony. He goes into the bedroom to see Helen, and is greeted by a horrifyingly giant spider. Why? Because his memories are coming back to haunt him. So what exactly does this mean?

The entire film is a story of Anthony being confronted by his past. Adam is a representative of this past, and his role as a teacher of HISTORY attests to the fact. Adam represents a past version of Anthony that was unfaithful to Helen. Now Adam was meek and quiet, even to the point that he allowed himself to be cuckolded by Anthony. How can we say that he was a representation of Anthony’s unfaithfulness?

The answer is simple; Adam is an unmanly coward, and unfaithfulness is a form of cowardice, or a lack of living up to one’s responsibilities as a man. This is attested to when Anthony is in the car with Mary who he has just tried to fuck – just before they crash, he says to her ‘You think I’m not a man?’ She DOES think he’s not a man – because she has just discovered his unfaithfulness, which precipitates their dramatic exit from the hotel. In this way, Adam’s weakness/unmanliness facilitates Anthony’s unfaithfulness – Adam does not stop Anthony from fucking his own girlfriend, because he represents Anthony’s own past weakness (and thus, his weak masculinity).

That scene where Anthony is having sex with Mary, who then freaks out when she sees the wedding ring [marks?] on his finger? This was real. Mary did not realize that Anthony was married. The freakout did indeed happen. The crash did indeed happen. And Mary died, and Anthony was injured as a result – giving us the scar from earlier.

enemy_windshield-crop-promovar-mediumlarge — The windshield after AA’s car crash forms a delicate spiderweb – all is connected

Why is Anthony an actor? Because he is acting out the horrors of the past in his head. The nightmares are all his. The gargantuan spider in the final scene looks poised to consume Adam, who by this point has assumed the role of Anthony before he enters the bedroom. It is memories of sinfulness, and the weight of his guilt, which seem ready to devour him.

Adam IS Anthony, so Adam allowing Anthony to fuck his girlfriend represents AA’s weak, sensitive, humanistic side failing to exert control over his brash, Dionysian side. This failure resulted in the death of Mary and nearly also the destruction of his marriage. This haunts him to this very day.

Simplified, it looks something like this:

AA are/is one person
The spiders are his memories and the weight of his guilt
They constitute a totalitarian system which holds him down and oppresses him, and dictates to him his actions; they force him to continuously remember the past
Adam, a history professor (the past) represents the past AA – he is weak and generally a shitty person. He allows himself to cheat on his own wife, because he is weak/unmanly/a coward.
Adam’s weakness leads to the death of Mary, his girlfriend and mistress. It gives him a scar, which stays with him.
AA suppresses this memory by entertainment, such as by attending clubs where the spider (his past) is crushed. But it keeps coming back to haunt him.
The spider is a totalitarian system above him (in terms of his control) but inside him (as it is constituted by his memories).
The film ends with AA having gone through all of the memories of this traumatic past. A gargantuan spider shows us how AA is confronted by his memories, and thus his own guilt and shame, when he goes into his wife’s bedroom.
As viewers, we are not told whether AA’s suppression of his past, his memories, and his guilt is successful or not. We do not know whether he stays with Helen, or what her transformation into his guilty conscience might entail (perhaps accusing him of another affair).
That is Enemy, and it is undoubtedly Villeneuve’s most impressive films to date.

5 out of 5 stars.
★★★★★

Book review: ‘Thinking in Systems’ by Donella Meadows

I recently borrowed this book on recommendation from a friend, knowing nothing about it or its author that the title didn’t give away. I read the whole book yesterday, and can confidently assert that I made a great decision.

Thinking in Systems is a book by the late American environmental scientist Donella Meadows whose primary goal can be summarized as the translation of the essential concepts required to understand the counterintuitive entities known as systems into a common language for a common audience. Meadows does this superbly, beginning from the most conceptually basic level of systems knowledge, but even having this knowledge already didn’t put me off those chapters because of her engaging writing style and liberal peppering of fascinating quotes and engaging case studies all throughout the book. To get a sense of scale, I think there are more than 100 of these in the book.

Reading the book also makes you feel like Meadows is holding back a lot. You get a sense exactly ‘what’ she’s holding back from time to time when she lets this slip, such as in the following section where she discusses the problem of dependency (e.g. on welfare, foreign aid, oil, alcohol) in systems:

The problem can be avoided up front by intervening in such a way as to strengthen the ability of the system to shoulder its own burdens. This option, helping the system to help itself, can be much cheaper and easier than taking over and running the system—something liberal politicians don’t seem to understand. The secret is to begin not with a heroic takeover, but with a series of questions.
* Why are the natural correction mechanisms failing?
* How can obstacles to their success be removed?
* How can mechanisms for their success be made more effective?

In short, when reading the book you very quickly get the sense that you’re dealing with someone who has a very low threshold in terms of bullshit tolerance. Political and ideological bias is entirely unfelt, as she goes back and forth to praising the counterintuitive systems-level comprehension of figures like Jimmy Carter and his proposition to levy a tax on oil imports proportional to the fraction of oil consumption that was imported, to castigating some of the paradigm assumptions that lead to system failure, in which she includes:

Money measures something real and has real meaning; therefore, people who are paid less are literally worth less. Growth is good. Nature is a stock of resources to be converted to human purposes. Evolution stopped with the emergence of Homo sapiens… Those are just a few of the paradigmatic assumptions of our current culture, all of which have utterly dumbfounded other cultures, who thought them not the least bit obvious.

Meadows’ understanding of the role that paradigms play in underlying human systems (e.g. by setting their parameters and operationalizing their utility functions) is of very high esteem to me, as I previously wrote my undergraduate dissertation on cultural paradigms and how they shift. While Meadows doesn’t go into paradigm shift in so much detail, she notes the difficulty inherent to the task, which is an astute (though perhaps not so counterintuitive) observation; in my dissertation I described a framework for this utilizing trauma, whose abnegation of paradigmatic axioms is one of the only reliable ways to secure such a shift, but I can’t blame a non-psychologist for refusing to treat the problem.

Overall, I think that this is the kind of book that everyone should have read at least once; the kind you put on the mandatory reading list in high schools. Unfortunately, as Meadows notes, our own ability to ‘transcend’ our paradigms or systems is actually quite limited, using her continued addiction to coffee despite her mechanistic understanding of this reliance to exemplify the point. This can lead us to consider that even if our ability as humans to respond to features of systems may be limited, it still may be possible to build AI systems that are able to address lack of systems comprehension. In consideration of the book’s style and intended audience I was unable to locate within it any flaw, so I’m going to have to go all the way in my evaluation.

5 out of 5 stars.
★★★★★

Book Review: ‘Win Bigly’ by Scott Adams

The facts may not matter, but shitty writing does

I recently finished with Scott Adams’ book ‘Win Bigly: Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don’t Matter’.

I made the decision to give the book my time because of my curiosity with the author borne out of his somewhat unexpected appearance on Sam Harris’ Waking Up podcast. Adams’ performance in that podcast was outstanding, and it was a great trial for Harris’ epistemological pretensions of objectivity (whatever we take that to mean). So I went ahead and got the book because of the author, knowing next to nothing about its content.

Unfortunately, this book wasn’t as good as Adams’ performance in debates. He introduces a few heuristics that could have been interesting, like ‘master persuasion’, but is ultimately unable to do anything with these heuristics because of his rapid bouncing from topic to topic between section and chapter, all of which have very little of coherence or narrative to speak of. The book is part anecdote, part self-help book, peppered throughout with justificatory factoids by way of ‘evolutionary psychology’, and by ‘inverted commas evolutionary psychology’ I mean speculative nonsense in the style of Sex at Dawn, rather than genuine work a la Dunbar or Kanazawa. There lack of substance or structure makes it a leap and bound from one ramble to another, some of which is (verbatim) copy-pasted from Scott Adams’ own blog.

Some of what Adams says is useful. His simplistic and story-like explanations for why free will is an illusion, for example, would probably be much more effective for the layperson some than arguments from Harris or genetic determinists (incidentally, I’m not sure that’s a good thing or not). He also makes some interesting statements in favor of Jamesian pragmatism, such as his assertion that the only ‘filter’ (read: schema, ideational paradigm, cognitive map etc) that works is one that makes you happy and does a good job at predicting the future. For those who occupy themselves with the ‘postmodern conundrum’ of how exactly to live with the fact of the death of God, this could be a useful insight that could be interpreted as supportive of the Christianity Adams renounces. And in case you wonder just how many people that is, Pew Research states that about half of Americans have changed religious affiliation at least once, suggesting that finding what ‘filter’ to live with is actually a challenge that quite a lot of people face.

Coming in with no expectations, I still feel a keen sense of disappointment at having wasted precious hours of my life. The book reads like an ADHD-driven series of blogposts stitched together to make sales rather than a coherent narrative from start to finish. Overall, I think the only ‘persuasion’ skill Adams has is in getting gullible people to buy his book.

2 out of 5 stars.
★★