So I’m a huge fan and advocate of the Worm web serial and this is the much anticipated sequel. To be honest, I first started reading some months after Wildbow started writing it but bounced off after only a few chapters. I’ll go into why more later but it was so infuriating how everyone uses therapy-speak constantly and is so careful, like walking on eggshells, around each other. When I learned that he had finished it earlier this year, I decided to give it another shot and eventually powered through though it was at times quite a chore.
I had no idea this collection of short stories by Greg Egan existed until it popped up as a Kindle recommendation for me. Needless to say I immediately snapped it up though I had already read two of the eleven stories it includes elsewhere. I was also quite pleased that three of the stories, including Bit Players that I’ve read before and liked a lot, are all part of a larger story and could actually be taken together as a short novel.
I’ve had this on my reading list ever since I saw it being featured in Jo Walton’s What Makes This Book So Great but I’ve actually first known about it since I read Eliezer Yudkowsky’s fanfiction The Methods of Rationality as his version of Harry Potter consciously patterns himself after the main character in this book Miles Vorkosigan.
As promised, here is the second book of Jo Walton’s Thessaly trilogy, though it has been more than half a year since I read The Just City. I loved both the premise and the characters in that book but after a while I do have to admit that it’s a bit of an intellectual lightweight when set against its ambition and promise. Similarly this book is a fun and highly satisfying read but ultimately ducks out of any real philosophical clash.
Finally we come to the third and last book of George Alec Effinger’s Budayeen series featuring protagonist Marîd Audran. Everyone who has reviewed this talks about how the title is lifted from Shakespeare but I was delighted to discover that its opening quote is a Malay proverb even if I’ve never heard of it before. I think it’s a good sign of how widely this American writer roamed in search of inspiration.
So I finally finished the third book of Liu Cixin’s Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy and it really took some effort as it is far longer than the previous two books. This is a true epic in every sense of the word, with a prelude that takes place before the previous two novels, covers events in parallel with them, and then picks up after them until what amounts to the heat death of the universe. It’s by far my favorite of the three books and lays out some genuinely terrific ideas.
Science news always slows down in December due to the holiday season. It’ll pick up again next year.
Easily the most important article this month is this one about personality differences between men and women. Most people instinctively believe the sexes do tend to vary psychologically but the scientific consensus usually emphasizes that variances between individuals far outweigh general differences between the sexes. However more modern research now shows that there are in fact very significant differences between the sexes on narrower facets of personality and it is possible to predict whether a given person is male or female based on an overall personality profile. This suggests that the popular folk wisdom may be more justified than the previous politically correct scientific consensus.
Next is a paper that revisits the by now well known Flynn effect which describes that the average IQ of people are increasing over time. This paper however claims that this generalization masks important differences such as that over various age groups. Tellingly, it also seems that those with already high IQ saw gains over time but those with low IQ saw drops. The most important conclusion is that we need to measure larger samples from more countries before we can meaningfully talk about how IQ changes over the course of decades.
Then there’s this economics paper whose finding isn’t that all that interesting: giving medical insurance to people who previously lacked it reduces mortality. What is interesting is that the finding is based on a natural experiment that came about as a side effect of government policies. When the Obama administration wanted to penalize those who lacked health insurance, they found that their budget wasn’t enough to send letters to everyone. So instead they randomly chose people to send those letters to, inadvertently resulting in a randomized set of people in whose lives the government intervened to convince them to get insurance. This allowed the researchers to compare their outcomes with similar people who could have and did not receive the letters as a control group.
This last one probably counts as an economics paper as well. We all know about NIMBYism, here specifically referring to the phenomenon of residents of a locality systematically opposing any new construction of residence in their neighborhood. We naturally expect this attitude from homeowners but this paper shows data that renters share similar attitudes. Even though they support more construction of residences overall, they oppose new construction in the neighborhoods that they themselves stay in. This demonstrates how difficult it is to solve the problem of rising housing costs in major cities when the only real solution is to build more housing.
