Peter Gelfan (Author of Found Objects)

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Peter Gelfan rated a book really liked it The Rub of Time: Bellow, Nabokov, Hitchens, Travolta, Trump: Essays and Reportage, 1994-2017 by Martin Amis	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
Martin Amis perennially sits on my shifting list of favorite writers. He writes fiction, memoir, criticism, journalism, and I guess whatever he damn feels like or gets offered money for. He can be insightful or stubborn, vicious or tender, optimistic ...more
Apr 17, 2019 12:45PM · like · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of The Rub of Time by Martin Amis. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — The Rub of Time by Martin Amis <iframe id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
Peter Gelfan rated a book really liked it Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow by Yuval Noah Harari	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
This book follows up Harari’s earlier Sapiens by looking into the future and exploring what may become of the human race. He begins by stating that in the past few decades, we have more or less solved the three major problems that have plagued and dr ...more
Feb 27, 2019 12:50PM · like · see review
Peter Gelfan rated a book it was amazing Reality is Not What it Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity by Carlo Rovelli	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
As in his earlier books, he does a terrific job of making complex scientific concepts understandable. He lays out Einstein’s general theory of relativity in the clearest manner I have ever read. He even makes time more understandable than he did in h ...more
Dec 27, 2018 12:22PM · like · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of Reality is Not What it Seems by Carlo Rovelli. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — Reality is Not What it Seems by Carlo Rovelli <iframe id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
Peter Gelfan rated a book really liked it How History Gets Things Wrong: The Neuroscience of Our Addiction to Stories by Alex Rosenberg	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
As a novelist and editor, I need to be hip to the subtleties and not-so-subtleties of stories and storytelling as humanity’s oldest, fastest, and strongest means of communicating complex ideas and their concomitant emotions. So when I heard about a n ...more
Dec 04, 2018 12:57PM · 9 likes · like · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of How History Gets Things Wrong by Alex Rosenberg. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — How History Gets Things Wrong by Alex Rosenberg <iframe id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
Peter Gelfan rated a book really liked it The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
Rovelli is a terrific writer who can explain scientific principles in an everyday way and contagiously derive philosophical, spiritual, and poetic pleasure from them. Much of the book is a history of our attempts to understand time. He clearly presen ...more
Oct 30, 2018 12:24PM · like · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli <iframe id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
Peter Gelfan rated a book it was amazing Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
This isn’t your usual history of political-military power. It’s a history of the human race, or more like an MRI scan. It’s not about who built or conquered this or that, but where we as a species came from and are going, what drives us, what blinds ...more
Oct 09, 2018 12:54PM · 1 like · like · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari <iframe id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
Peter Gelfan has read Found Objects by Peter Gelfan (Goodreads Author) recommended to Peter Gelfan by: https://www.goodreads.com/author/conf...	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
Sep 19, 2018 09:06AM · like
Peter Gelfan rated a book really liked it Skin in the Game: The Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Goodreads Author)	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
The first back-cover quote chosen by the publisher or, more likely, by the author: “The problem with Taleb isn’t that he’s an asshole. He is an asshole. The problem with Taleb is that he is right.” The problem with this book is telling one from the o ...more
Aug 28, 2018 08:16AM · 1 like · like · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of Skin in the Game by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — Skin in the Game by Nassim Nicholas Taleb <iframe id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
Peter Gelfan rated a book really liked it This Idea Is Brilliant: Lost, Overlooked, and Underappreciated Scientific Concepts Everyone Should Know by John Brockman	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
For Edge.org’s 2018 annual collection of about 200 very short essays by top thinkers in various fields, each contributor tackles this question: What scientific term or concept ought to be more widely known? The answers fall all over the map, but as y ...more
Jul 26, 2018 05:55AM · like · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of This Idea Is Brilliant by John Brockman. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — This Idea Is Brilliant by John Brockman <iframe id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">

Peter Gelfan is now friends with Sam Grant

Peter Gelfan rated a book really liked it

The Rub of Time: Bellow, Nabokov, Hitchens, Travolta, Trump: Essays and Reportage, 1994-2017
by Martin Amis

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Martin Amis perennially sits on my shifting list of favorite writers. He writes fiction, memoir, criticism, journalism, and I guess whatever he damn feels like or gets offered money for. He can be insightful or stubborn, vicious or tender, optimistic ...more

Peter Gelfan rated a book really liked it

Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow
by Yuval Noah Harari

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This book follows up Harari’s earlier Sapiens by looking into the future and exploring what may become of the human race. He begins by stating that in the past few decades, we have more or less solved the three major problems that have plagued and dr ...more

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Reality is Not What it Seems by Carlo Rovelli

Reality is Not What it Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity
by Carlo Rovelli

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As in his earlier books, he does a terrific job of making complex scientific concepts understandable. He lays out Einstein’s general theory of relativity in the clearest manner I have ever read. He even makes time more understandable than he did in h ...more

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How History Gets Things Wrong by Alex Rosenberg

How History Gets Things Wrong: The Neuroscience of Our Addiction to Stories
by Alex Rosenberg

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As a novelist and editor, I need to be hip to the subtleties and not-so-subtleties of stories and storytelling as humanity’s oldest, fastest, and strongest means of communicating complex ideas and their concomitant emotions. So when I heard about a n As a novelist and editor, I need to be hip to the subtleties and not-so-subtleties of stories and storytelling as humanity’s oldest, fastest, and strongest means of communicating complex ideas and their concomitant emotions. So when I heard about a new book that singles out our addiction to stories as the villain of historical accounts and analysis, I had to read it.

I soon realized that Rosenberg’s point isn’t news to fiction writers (though perhaps would be to fiction readers). We already know that a story isn’t a depiction of real life nor put together the same way but is a concentrated elixir that looks, smells, and tastes like real life but makes more sense and delivers more meaning. So of course, if you convert history to stories, as is done in many books and all elementary and secondary schools, it’s all going to make satisfying Aesopic sense but bear little resemblance to what really happened or why. Similarly, many so-called experts in the human mind, from meditation masters to Freudian psychoanalysts, have learned the hard way that a neat explanation for one’s trials and difficulties is a profoundly beautiful, moving thing but quaintly irrelevant at best and generally untrue and misleading. When false explanations from narrative history are used to guide international relations, often a lot of people die.

The fallacy of narrative history soon becomes apparent. The explanation for many events hinges on the motives of the key players. The historian examines all the available information and comes to a plausible hypothesis as to why things happened. She crafts a compelling narrative based on it. We readers, suckers for a good story, lap it up and believe it. But then another historian does the same thing, except with a different hypothesis presented as fact. Ultimately, it’s impossible to know the motives of the individuals involved, even if we have clear statements from them, because none of us truly knows why we do things and all of us sometimes lie. Rosenberg is making a case for a more objective, less narrative-based study of history. I know, it sounds logical but sort of boring. After all, we often accept what’s explicitly historical fiction as probable fact. We don’t want the truth, we want something that gives us cognitive and emotional gratification.

His thesis about the fallacy of narrative history is one of those clarion ideas that we haven’t thought of before but which seem obvious almost as soon as they are stated. The problem with this book is that his point becomes lucidly inescapable in the first couple of short chapters, and then he spends the rest of the book still trying to prove it.

Rosenberg drills down to a key element in both storytelling and real life, and stays with it for most of the book. Theory of mind is our more or less innate faculty for trying to predict what other people will or won’t do. It seems to consist in varying proportions of knowledge, experience, hearsay, intuition, desires, fears, and what can seem like ESP. We rely on it constantly, almost unconsciously. And, most of us can admit, it’s often wrong. Historians reverse the process in hindsight: knowing what someone did, they try to figure out why.

Scientists and philosophers have boiled down theory of mind to a sort of flowchart. Much of book dwells on showing, in some detail and with much repetition, how theory of mind must be wrong because neural processes do not and cannot represent such abstract qualities as the knowledge and desires of others. His main point isn’t only that narrative history cannot be reliable because it “attributes causal responsibility for the historical record to factors inaccessible to the historian.” I think he takes a step too far when he goes on to say that those factors are “inaccessible because they don’t exist.” I didn’t find his argument persuasive. It’s certainly logical that larger, longer-term geographical, climatic, political, economic, and social trends are far more observable, documentable, relevant, and reliable, but that doesn’t mean that the desires and fears of individual leaders didn’t play a part even if we can’t yet know what they were. Rosenberg wants to “banish purpose” from history. But why? Surely purpose plays a role in human affairs even if on a small scale. Is such an all-or-nothing approach needed? One doesn’t want to anthropomorphize nature, but human beings arrive already anthropomorphized.

A missing element in his analysis would seem to be complexity. As a system becomes more complex, it often displays characteristics that were not, and could not have been, predicted by its earlier configuration. An exhaustive examination of hydrogen and oxygen atoms would not come up with a description of a snowflake, but that doesn’t mean snowflakes don’t exist. A brain, which at a microscopic level is made up of neurons stimulating one another, might at a higher level produce what we experience as a theory-of-mind flowchart. The author even suggests such a level, language, in which a particular sound, which does carry a representation, even of an abstraction, can be mechanistically produced, perceived, processed by the brain, and responded to. I doubt anyone ever took theory of mind, even with its flowcharts, to be a literal neurological process rather than just a model of how we second-guess our predators, prey, enemies, friends, and potential mates. A more scientific theory would have to be much more mechanistic. But just because we can’t yet see a neurological basis for abstract thought doesn’t mean we should write off the whole concept. If in fact we don’t think in abstractions, then how can we believe we do, a fact proven by this book’s existence?

When he returns, in later chapters, to addressing the perils of using theory of mind to analyze history, the book finds its stride again with vivid examples.

This often fascinating and insightful book has a vital message about the fallacies and dangers of narrative histories as, among other things, motivators and justifications for genocide, slavery, and war. It would have been even better if it had received the editorial attention it deserves, from organization and proportion right down to proofreading. Which is a shame, since this is an important book, not just for historians and writers but for anyone who reads them. ...more

Peter Gelfan rated a book really liked it

The Order of Time
by Carlo Rovelli

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Rovelli is a terrific writer who can explain scientific principles in an everyday way and contagiously derive philosophical, spiritual, and poetic pleasure from them. Much of the book is a history of our attempts to understand time. He clearly presen Rovelli is a terrific writer who can explain scientific principles in an everyday way and contagiously derive philosophical, spiritual, and poetic pleasure from them. Much of the book is a history of our attempts to understand time. He clearly presents each version of time, whether philosophical or scientific, then reveals its weaknesses and contradictions. The history itself is worth reading the book. He applies science to the philosophy, philosophy to the science, and gives the whole endeavor a sense of humanity. He may not have solved the mystery of time, but he sure has given it a thorough and enlightening examination.

In the end I was disappointed that he falls back on a traditional explanation of time as the way we perceive the implacable march of entropy and the second law of thermodynamics. Entropy is said to be a statement of the amount of disorder in a system. His explanations include saying that a primordial cloud of hydrogen has less entropy (is more ordered) than the star it coalesces into, a helium atom has more entropy (is less orderly) than the hydrogen that combines to create it, and the processes of life increase entropy (bring more disorder), as if a tree is less ordered than the dirt, water, air, and sunlight that went into making it—all of which may be technically defensible but seems paradoxical and misses much of the point of trying to understand time and its arrow. What about the self-organizing processes of the universe that seem to contradict the second law?

Most scientists get around this issue by saying that the second law pertains to a closed system, not to the world in general, which is an open system. But do any true closed systems exist—and if not, is the second law then merely an abstract principle whose applications to reality are dubious? A discussion of entropy quickly dives into complicated math, which takes it even further from practical, real-life understanding. I wonder if “entropy” is just an attempt by science to codify and sanctify into “law” the general observation that things fall apart, when in fact a more accurate statement would be that things usually fall apart but sometimes pull themselves together.

Rovelli says that energy doesn’t make the world go ’round, entropy does. But he also says that order is relative: order in relation to what? So in further describing entropy, he reverts back to a clear-cut scientific definition of entropy, which is simply heat loss. This suggests that entropy, hence time, is not a statement of disorder vs. order but just a matter of energy after all. This seems contradictory: how can heat be lost? What about the first law, the conservation of matter and energy? The usual explanation is that with entropy, the heat isn’t really lost but just becomes inaccessible. Yet to repeat Rovelli’s question, inaccessible in relation to what? Does entropy relate more to the distribution of energy than its quantity? What are we really talking about?

The entropy scenario and the second law tend to devalue or ignore what is perhaps the most interesting part of the history of the universe, the waves of organization and disorganization that characterize it. The hot but mostly undifferentiated initial post-big-bang plasma cools off and organizes itself into subatomic particles, which then become atoms, and then more types of atoms and more elements, all structured and very orderly. Chemistry then kicks in with its clockwork reactions. At some point, things cool off enough for other states of matter like liquids and solids to come into play. Then life emerges with its incredible order, becoming more and more complex. Perhaps human culture is a subsequent step of bringing order to the universe. I have discussed this with physicists, and their answers are the same and sound suspiciously circular: order may seem to increase in these situations, but because there is net heat loss, entropy increases, and hence, by definition, order decreases. And the universe continues its slow crumble to cold dust.

So my objection boils down to this. If the book explains time in terms of entropy and the second law of thermodynamics, which in turn rely on complicated math and have been subjects of intricate philosophical and scientific debates for centuries, how much closer does it bring us to understanding time? The journey is fun but in the end leaves us where—or when?

Could we just say that time is how we subjectively experience any environment in which irreversible interactions occur? And that with enough of them going on at once, we can perceive, accurately measure, and predict the sequences of these interactions relative to one another? It’s not that time marches forward, but that we live amid countless actions that have infinitesimal chances of ever being reversed. So the world constantly moves, but never backwards. Maybe that’s why when apparently irreversible things do reverse—enemies reconcile, old friends reunite, spring appears after winter’s devastation—we feel younger. ...more

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Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
by Yuval Noah Harari

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This isn’t your usual history of political-military power. It’s a history of the human race, or more like an MRI scan. It’s not about who built or conquered this or that, but where we as a species came from and are going, what drives us, what blinds ...more

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Found Objects
by Peter Gelfan (Goodreads Author)

recommended to Peter Gelfan by: https://www.goodreads.com/author/conf...

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Skin in the Game by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Skin in the Game: The Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life
by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Goodreads Author)

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The first back-cover quote chosen by the publisher or, more likely, by the author: “The problem with Taleb isn’t that he’s an asshole. He is an asshole. The problem with Taleb is that he is right.” The problem with this book is telling one from the o The first back-cover quote chosen by the publisher or, more likely, by the author: “The problem with Taleb isn’t that he’s an asshole. He is an asshole. The problem with Taleb is that he is right.” The problem with this book is telling one from the other.

When reading a novel or memoir, we know that whatever there is to learn from it will never (or should never) be put into words by a character or directly by the author. The same is true when talking to others: it’s hard to separate the useful facts from the bullshit, self-interest, vanity, insecurity, self-promotion, and self-delusion, and that becomes one’s task/game in the encounter. Though nonfiction often purports to deal in straightforward facts and propositions, it can’t help but bring these same personal dynamics into play, even if slick or painfully academic writing and clever editing can plaster them over like a real estate agent’s handyman. At least Taleb lets them all hang out. Perhaps he wants to put us through the deciphering process for our own benefit and/or his own. After all, one of his main themes is that we should give little credence to experts and pundits whether self-styled or lavishly credentialed.

You see the picture he’s painting and it’s convincing. Then you follow his own advice—when looking at something convincing, you must ask yourself what is being hidden by this picture. You cheer his anti-snobbery and then realize he’s being downright snobbish about it.

It’s refreshing, especially these days, to read a writer who does not push one way or another on the political spectrum. Doctrinarians of any stripe are likely to be offended by this book, for they deal in conviction and faith while Taleb deals in uncertainty. Things aren’t quite as simple as we would like to believe or others would like to con or lull us into believing. Uncertainty is the sea in which swim our bits of knowledge, belief, and faith, pulled this way and that by unseen tides and currents.

Skin in the Game presents interesting ideas that can spur new ways of looking at things and dealing with them. Taleb is always entertaining, even in ways he probably didn’t plan. ...more

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This Idea Is Brilliant: Lost, Overlooked, and Underappreciated Scientific Concepts Everyone Should Know
by John Brockman

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For Edge.org’s 2018 annual collection of about 200 very short essays by top thinkers in various fields, each contributor tackles this question: What scientific term or concept ought to be more widely known? The answers fall all over the map, but as y ...more

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