/lit/ - Literature

>>12159250
I can only speak for biology as that's ostensibly my field, though once you reach post-doc or even as early as post-grad it generally all becomes biochemistry that gets done rather than micro or clinical biology.

You're right, starting with the fossils is stupid. You should start with the three central dogmas in biology:
>the cell
>the DNA-RNA-protein mechanism
>natural selection
These three theories underpin our entire understanding of biology and a holistic understanding of the subject is impossible without understand all three to a competent degree.

In much the same way you shouldn't start from a singular and ultimately myopic view of philosophy, but rather you should start from the foundational tenets. Like I said I'm a biologist not a philosopher, so I'm not an authority on what those would be, but I imagine it would be something like
>logic
>ethics
>metaphysics
>aesthetics
>epistemology
They should be understood in concert, much like the three key theories in biology, in order to understand the subject as a whole and draw connections between them.

>>12016282
John Williams

Read:
>Nothing But the Night
>Butcher's Crossing
>Stoner
>Augustus

Optional:
>none

Avoid:
>none

It's just four, read them you plebs, they're some of the most transcendent masterpieces ever put to paper.

>>11998778
Loren Eiseley: Collected Essays on Evolution, Nature and the Cosmos

Eiseley is IMO the single greatest essayist of all time. You will definitely enjoy. If it's too much of a door stop then try The Star Thrower by Eiseley for a more succinct look at his work.

Genuinely not trying to start a shitshow here, but is there anything in accelerationism that tackles the issue of race?
The general consensus of acc is that driving towards technological advancement (singularity if you want to go full force) is beneficial, both to the right acc and left acc for their various goals. However it is a pre-eminent fact that essentially all innovation and technological advancement in the history of mankind has arisen from whites and east asians. Given the current trend of third world people replacing and displacing whites in their homelands, the outbreeding of whites by non-whites resulting in a very distinct trend of lowering average global (and in some cases of white countries, a national trend eg. France where this is well documented) IQ scores and finally the abolition of meritocracy in favour of diversity quotas in academia and research, is it not possible that the best way to bring about acceleration would be to protect the most innovative groups?
In a hundred years, if trends continue, then whites are going to be a miniscule minority with essentially no impact on the global scale and will have lost the ability to be politically forceful in their own countries simply due to outbreeding. Even in fifty years there are going to be major changes as older white people who keep things running are displaced and replaced by immigrant peoples given their jobs.
Is acceleration even possible with an average global IQ of 85?

>>11155975
Watts is definitely not going to be known as a 'great' author, but Blindsight was genuinely fantastic. It falls victim to a lot of scifi tropes and Watts has trouble writing dynamic scenes with a lot of action and movement, but his world building and exploration of ideas are both really enjoyable. Of course the actual idea behind Blindsight - that consciousness can be seen as a hindrance rather than a 'higher' function of more advanced creatures - is a load of rubbish (Watts even said he had convinced himself of this by the time he finished writing and editing), but it makes for interesting reading nonetheless.

Echopraxia was a good sidequel and in my opinion while the ideas being explored were not as thought provoking as in Blindsight, the actual plot was more enjoyable (though of course the characters weren't great and overall I'd rate Echopraxia slightly lower than Blindsight).

I think the vampires are done quite well. Enough explained and enough left unexplored to provide a good base for strong characters. The whole pseudo-mind control thing in Echopraxia was getting a bit ridiculous but I can accept it given how insanely smart vampires are meant to be.

I'm really looking forward to seeing how he'll wrap up the trilogy in the final book. Things are pretty dire for humans at this point. But I think that's what Watts is going for, in that the real struggle is between vampires and Rorschach, not humans and vampires/rorschach/transhuman collectives/anything else.

Warning major spoiler: Poor Valerie :( all she wanted was to have a conversation with someone as smart as she was and then Rorschach goes and does THAT to her. What a cunt, I hope Rorschach gets what's coming to him for skewering my vampire waifu.

>>10883436
I use a lot of predominantly medical phrases/terminology to describe things, I'm hoping it gives the prose a juxtaposition between visceral and clinically detached. I think it's appropriate because throughout the story there are situations which are thematically much the same - a satellite preparing clean room being the site of a messy killing, highly detailed simulated war games that have real world consequences, a mutiny aboard a very nice, new and clean ship etc.

Some of the choice words that I like in particular:
>septated
>transmural
>occluded
>aneurysmal
>brady/tachy- (slower/faster)
>malacia
>haemorrhage (more common but still a very nice word)

>>10842457
Because the bell curves for men are much wider and flatter relative to the curves for women. What does this mean exactly and why is it so? Well it means that in any given distribution, let's say IQ for example, there will be more men with very low and very high IQs compared to women. The women will by comparison have a much larger degree of near-average IQs, with fewer on the tail ends of being very dumb or very smart. Now I would posit that to be a 'great' writer one must be a genius, something I think most people would agree with, and geniuses tend to have very high IQs in general, regardless of their specialised field. There are other traits but this is certainly one of them. So when we are dealing with billions and billions of humans, across thousands of years, we see that the ones who write the greatest novels (the geniuses) are predominantly men. This bell-curve distribution dynamic is true across any given metric, and thus results in men being the top players at the very pinnacles of all fields. Just think about it; writing, cooking, architecture, sport, art, science, mathematics - the best of the best are always overwhelmingly men.

This leaves the question of how this phenomenon arises. Well to put it simply men are expendable. It is the female of the species that is required to produce children, with men being mostly superfluous. A single man can impregnate many women. Thus there is a pressure for the genomes of women to 'play it safe'. They conserve genes that are proven to be stable, reliable and able to withstand environmental pressures, always returning to a close mean of proven outcomes. Conversely men have no such pressure forcing them to remain mostly within a stable 'no-frills' region of characteristics. Men can thus vary more wildly with the genetic components that account for the biological half of all the gene-environment interactions that govern what a person is, can do and who they are.

Imagine a 10x10 checkerboard with numbers in the squares. You are told to throw a pebble onto the grid. With 100 numbers there's a chance that you'll get a very low number and a chance you could get a very high number. This is the 'male' grid. Now imagine that fences are placed on the grid to lock off the outer rims and the remaining board is 8x8. Sure you're not going to get any very low numbers, but equally you're not going to get high numbers. One is good for consistently getting middling numbers, and one is good for getting the very highest numbers (while also getting the low numbers as a trade off). Obviously genetics is never this black and white - you do get a lot of middling and low end males, and you can get some very high end females, but generally this is a good way to think of it.

Can anyone recommend good books on writing poetry?