No Good Men Among The Living is next on my list for politics reading.
Read a couple books recently:
Incognito, by David Eagleman: This isn't a politics book, but I actually think it's relevant. It's a book about our current state of understanding of how the brain works and what the implications are. The title is because the book talks a lot about how much of the brain's activity happens outside of conscious awareness. He develops a metaphor of the conscious mind being like the CEO of a big company; notionally "in charge" but there's a lot of things going on in the company which the CEO is not aware of, and that's the way it has to be.
One of the themes of the book is the challenge of what we know about the brain to conventional notions of blame and free will. He devotes a chapter to the incompatibility between the workings of criminal law and the current state of scientific knowledge. This is the stuff that is relevant to politics imo. A lot of the posting on here is influenced by conventional notions of free will and a lot of people in this sub could do with having those ideas challenged.
This is a pretty good book, which I probably would have enjoyed more if I was less familiar with the subject. Still some good material I hadn't seen before. Decently written. I'd recommend it for people interested in how the brain works, who aren't already widely read on the subject. If you're just interested in the philosophy of free will, I'd recommend Sam Harris's short book/long essay "Free Will" as an initial primer, written from an incompatibilist perspective.
Everybody Lies, by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz: I guess this isn't really politics either, but it has more obvious relevance. The author is a data scientist and takes you on a tour of Big Data, in particular Google and Pornhub search data. The conclusions are probably shocking to people not immersed in politics and the internet, here are a couple of the major ones:
- There's a lot more explicit racism out there than people realize. Millions of Americans sometimes search for stuff like "n-word jokes". Racist searches of this kind were the best predictor for Trump overachieving in the election.
- People are not honest about sexuality. Many more people watch stuff like incest-themed porn than are willing to admit it. Hundreds of thousands of young men search almost exclusively for old women. Thirty percent of people watch exclusively porn that the majority of people would find repulsive.
None of that was news to me. There was some interesting stuff in the book, but it suffers for being basically a collection of anecdotes. I felt like it would have been just as interesting to read as a series of bullet points.
One of my favorite little bits was this, it's a comparison between the most common ways women complete the sentence "My husband is..." on social media vs on private Google searches.