Ron and Sua are moving soon; last night I helped Ron to pack up the library. "You should read this," he said, showing me a book. Its title was Skepticism and ... uhm, Skepticism and .... Uhm. I forget what the rest of the title was because it was a pretty boring title. I think I kinda fell asleep partway through reading it. I said "Are you sure I want to read this? It looks really boring." You might think that's a shallow way to judge books, but it's worked pretty well for me. Books with boring titles are boring. Books with interesting titles are often boring, too, but you boost your chances by choosing a book with an interesting title.
Thus, I considered reading Universal Selection Theory and the Second Darwinian Revolution as a sort of calculated risk.
This book is trying to explain some theory of natural & unnatural selection which is different from some other theory. So it talks about selection. I got a few dozen pages in without figuring out what, exactly, the book was trying to explain. What is the new theory? I missed the part where the book explained the new theory. Probably it did explain the difference between the old theory and new but the difference as so subtle that I never realized that the book was stating its thesis. I guess that's what happened. There's no way I'm going to go re-read that thing to figure out what it was talking about. No way. It started talking about the history of the philosophy of the mind. Do I need to point out that any book which discusses the history of the philosophy of the mind is probably irrelevant? I slogged through a few more pages of the history of the philosophy of the mind. One has to make sure that an book hasn't temporarily meandered into something frivolous, eventually to reemerge into relevance. One must confirm that the book has fully set its course on folly with no sign of return. And that's what seemed to be going on, so I stopped reading.
Labels: book, snore, unfinished