To me this felt a bit like a left-wing Ayn Rand book: it purports to take place in the real world, but people and the world in the book work just differently enough that it's practically impossible to gain insights about it about the real world - supposedly one of the book's goals.
Oh, and the author verbed "blockchain". Ugh.
User Profile
This link opens in a pop-up window
Vincent's books
User Activity
RSS feed Back
Vincent reviewed Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson
Review of 'Ministry for the Future' on 'Goodreads'
2 stars
![Philip K. Dick: Ubik (1977, Bantam Books)](https://bookwyrm-social.sfo3.digitaloceanspaces.com/images/covers/cb635700-fb72-45ea-96f8-69215a4edd4d.jpeg)
Ubik by Philip K. Dick
Ubik, written in 1966 and published in 1969, is one of Philip K. Dick's masterpieces (The Three Stigmata of Plamer …
Vincent rated The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August: 3 stars
![Claire North: The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August (2013, Orbit)](https://bookwyrm-social.sfo3.digitaloceanspaces.com/images/covers/3c578784-682b-4a4d-aff7-c1ef310dba84.jpg)
The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North
Harry August is on his deathbed. Again. No matter what he does or the decisions he makes, when death comes, …
![Ken Grimwood: Replay (1998, Quill)](https://bookwyrm-social.sfo3.digitaloceanspaces.com/images/covers/432217-M_ZmfZmQJ.jpg)
Replay by Ken Grimwood
Jeff Winston, forty-three, didn't know he was a replayer until he died and woke up twenty-five years younger in his …
Vincent rated Open Veins of Latin America: 2 stars
![Eduardo Galeano: Open Veins of Latin America (1997, Monthly Review Press)](https://bookwyrm-social.sfo3.digitaloceanspaces.com/images/covers/f9dc87f5-cc5e-4489-a182-7411d647f206.jpg)
Open Veins of Latin America by Eduardo Galeano
Historia del saqueo de America Latina que muestra como funcionan los mecanismos actuales del despojo: los tecnocratas en jet, herederos …
Vincent rated Utopia Avenue: 3 stars
Vincent rated Utopia Avenue: 3 stars
Vincent started reading Open Veins of Latin America by Eduardo Galeano
![Eduardo Galeano: Open Veins of Latin America (1997, Monthly Review Press)](https://bookwyrm-social.sfo3.digitaloceanspaces.com/images/covers/f9dc87f5-cc5e-4489-a182-7411d647f206.jpg)
Open Veins of Latin America by Eduardo Galeano
Historia del saqueo de America Latina que muestra como funcionan los mecanismos actuales del despojo: los tecnocratas en jet, herederos …
Vincent rated Why Nations Fail: 3 stars
![Daron Acemoglu: Why Nations Fail (2012, Crown Publishers)](https://bookwyrm-social.sfo3.digitaloceanspaces.com/images/covers/40a6c896-ff9f-4077-9f72-2c3f32be6db8.jpeg)
Why Nations Fail by Daron Acemoglu
Is it culture, the weather, geography? Perhaps ignorance of what the right policies are?
Simply, no. None of these factors …
Vincent rated Never Let Me Go: 4 stars
![Kazuo Ishiguro: Never Let Me Go (2006, Vintage Books / Random House)](https://bookwyrm-social.sfo3.digitaloceanspaces.com/images/covers/ea7a5b7b-089c-4a4a-8eb8-8cb41d934700.jpeg)
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
Kazuo Ishiguro imagines the lives of a group of students growing up in a darkly skewed version of contemporary England. …
Vincent rated Algorithms to Live By: 4 stars
![Brian Christian, Tom Griffiths Brian Christian: Algorithms to Live By (2016)](https://bookwyrm-social.sfo3.digitaloceanspaces.com/images/covers/3a141872-9b12-4948-ac40-ee073f9a1f6a.jpeg)
Algorithms to Live By by Brian Christian, Tom Griffiths Brian Christian
What should we do, or leave undone, in a day or a lifetime? How much messiness should we accept? What …
Vincent reviewed At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O'Brien
Review of 'At Swim-Two-Birds' on 'Goodreads'
2 stars
I don't know how I slogged through the first half. Whether because I'm not familiar at all with Irish folklore, or because I wasn't reading it in my native language, but the whole Sweeney-thing and hopping-from-tree-to-tree and recounting of other haphazard stories did nothing for me. I somewhat liked the story of the characters interacting with their writer, but in the end the book felt to me to be about 50 pages worth of interesting storylines, most of it in the second half, and the rest filler content that I could not make heads or tails of.
Who knows, maybe I just wasn't ready for this book yet.
Vincent rated Mort: a novel of Discworld: 3 stars
![Terry Pratchett: Mort (Paperback, 2001, HarperTorch)](https://bookwyrm-social.sfo3.digitaloceanspaces.com/images/covers/Mort.png)
Mort: a novel of Discworld by Terry Pratchett (Discworld, #4)
Death comes to everyone eventually on Discworld. And now he's come to Mort with an offer the young man can't …
Vincent reviewed The Moral Landscape by Sam Harris
Review of 'The Moral Landscape' on 'Goodreads'
2 stars
I was quite excited about reading this book. It'd be incredibly interesting to read a compelling or at least clearly articulated explanation of how science can determine human values.
Unfortunately, the main argument Harris makes in this book is a lot weaker. Essentially, it comes down to the following:
1. Take as an axiom that everybody experiencing maximum well-being is morally better than everybody experiencing maximum suffering. (I was hoping this wouldn't be taken as an axiom but would instead be argued for, but OK, I can accept this axiom.)
2. People's well-being is a consequence by physical realities, such as the state of their brains.
3. Science can help us better predict what physical realities our actions will lead to.
4. Ergo, science can theoretically help us determine what constitutes more and less ethical behaviour (the moral landscape).
Which, sure, is convincing enough, but dodges all the actually interesting …
I was quite excited about reading this book. It'd be incredibly interesting to read a compelling or at least clearly articulated explanation of how science can determine human values.
Unfortunately, the main argument Harris makes in this book is a lot weaker. Essentially, it comes down to the following:
1. Take as an axiom that everybody experiencing maximum well-being is morally better than everybody experiencing maximum suffering. (I was hoping this wouldn't be taken as an axiom but would instead be argued for, but OK, I can accept this axiom.)
2. People's well-being is a consequence by physical realities, such as the state of their brains.
3. Science can help us better predict what physical realities our actions will lead to.
4. Ergo, science can theoretically help us determine what constitutes more and less ethical behaviour (the moral landscape).
Which, sure, is convincing enough, but dodges all the actually interesting topics, such as:
- Is all well-being (for example, that of animals) equally important?
- Can the well-being of different people be compared?
- Should we even act morally, and if so, why, and to what extent?
- And most importantly: how do we actually bring this into practice, given that in practice there's a whole lot that science can not (yet?) tell us?
Additionally, the argument outlined above is given in the first part of the book, and I spent the rest of the book hoping he would get to the actually interesting topics. Instead, he spent most of it railing against people who had dared disagree with him in the past, arguing against articles by people I'd never even heard of (and clearly not always painting their arguments in the most charitable light), and explaining how many counter-arguments and what he's saying were actually counter arguments against a stronger point than he was making, and was therefore not applicable.
And finally, he spent a considerable number of pages arguing against religion, which I was personally not that interested in. That one's mostly on me though: I didn't know Sam Harris but was recommended him by someone, and picked this book because it was the only one of his that didn't seem to be about religion. Of course, the fact that every other book did should have been a dead giveaway.
I might be overly harsh, as I was really excited about reading a book arguing not only that moral values were knowable, but also and especially how that was the case. All in all, though, I came away disappointed.