This article is horseshit. I'm a professional writer, and I'll trust Oates and King over whoever this guy is.
"Read widely" isn't some religious dictum. It's more of a religious calling. (Of sorts.) If you love to read, and you love to write, you naturally read all fucking day. Your thirst is unquenchable. Your tastes are varied. So you drink from many different fountains.
You also realize there is no trade off between depth and breadth. It's a false dichotomy. It seems to be manufactured by people who find the act of reading some sort of chore. I do not. I find it the highest pleasure I have ever experienced.
Perhaps there's a difference between being naturally curious and being forced to read broadly. I dunno. I've never had to be forced. I like reading and writing the way many of us like programming. I'm truly sorry if the author does not. Writing's a hell of a shitty way to make a living; I can't imagine what it'd be like if you didn't at least enjoy the sport of it.
>You also realize there is no trade off between depth and breadth. It's a false dichotomy.
It's a tradeoff because of the finite time for reading.
One can reread Shakespeare's 4 tragedies (Hamlet, King Lear, Othello, Macbeth) again for the 10th time (about 8 hours of reading) -- or -- read E.L. James "50 Shades of Grey" for the 1st time (also about ~8 hours of reading).
Some writers may suggest that you read E.L. James because that way, you can mark the checkbox of "read some BDSM material" and hence satisfy the "read more widely" advice. (The "widely" as the blog author interprets it). The blog and his quote of Seamus Heaney disagrees with that and advises to read what one enjoys. It's also ok if one is re-reading an old favorite again instead of unfamiliar writing that's often low quality.
And yes, choosing what to read is a zero-sum game. Mathematically, how could it not be?
No, I'm not literally suggesting people have infinite time on their hands. Rather, what I'm suggesting is that time compresses when you're reading for pleasure. When you reach a certain "level," shall we say, you read so naturally and so widely and so frequently that it is truly astonishing how much you can read in a day.
Then again, I'll continue to caveat all of this by saying that my subjective experience seems increasingly abnormal every time I read someone's advice on how to read (or write). The idea of deliberately practicing a style or a voice is weird to me. I've always written by ear, and I've never thought about it. I've thought about structure, and character, and perspective, and logic, and all of the other elements that go into writing well. But when it comes to voice and style, well, shit, man. You pick it up as you go along, and you learn to trust it. It strengthens, not weakens, with exposure to breadth.
One last time: I'm going to go out on a limb and say that my experience is probably weird.
It's the same with computer science, or any other field. The best, most motivated people will naturally have breadth and depth due to their own voracious curiosity, without thinking about the distinction at all.
What kinds of material do you read? Any recommendations? I'm particularly interested in engrossing fiction, and also non-fiction work with "sticky" ideas that have changed the way you see the world.
For any individual, there must be a breadth vs. depth tradeoff.
However, across individuals, there certainly need not be (and I think that is the intuition). Saying someone "reads for breadth" or "reads for depth" doesn't seem as justified if they read 10x as much as anyone else - relative to others, they "read for both."
See, what's interesting to me is that the grandparent comment describes "50 Shades" as ~8 hours of reading. The zero-sum argument assumes that reading time is some fixed value for all people. I don't remember how long it took me to read "50 Shades," but it was significantly less than 8 hours, and couldn't have been more than an hour. (I'm not saying that to brag. It takes me a lot longer to do many other things than many other people. My only point is that the author of the article completely ignores throughput variability in his calculus.)
Perhaps the hour mark is hyperbole - I haven’t read these books and have no desire to. But different books have different levels of linguistic complexity, and with simplistic writing I find myself reading at much, much faster rates.
In addition I find that when reading “bad writing” I have a natural tendency to (automatically) skip over long, tortured sentences that seem to be going nowhere. From reputation, “50 Shades” may qualify for that category.
> You also realize there is no trade off between depth and breadth. It's a false dichotomy.
Given that we're in a forum where computer science and engineering topics are often discussed, I find it odd that anyone would suggest this.
You have a limited resource (time). Whenever you have a limited resource, there are tradeoffs in how you spend it. Unless exhaustive search is feasible, there is indeed a tradeoff between depth and breadth.
I don't necessarily disagree with your conclusion but your analysis is an oversimplification. It's possible reading broadly across domains results in deeper individual domain expertise by enabling cross-fertilization between the domains. So the relationship between depth and breadth isn't necessarily inverse or linear.
Take the recent solution to the Kadison-Singer problem. A group of relative outsiders with comparatively little mathematics expertise solved a long standing problem using techniques from their own field, computer science. The depth they achieved in math exceeded that of people who focused solely on the math. And similarly they achieved more in their own field by tackling problems from other fields.
Obviously there's a very tight conceptual relationship between those two fields even if that isn't always the case institutionally. But I think you can easily find examples where knowledge from dramatically different domains contributed to some paradigm shift, breakthrough, or other significant achievement.
Depth and breadth, in this case, are not opposite directions on a straight line. They are vectors that only appear oppositional when viewed under specific time constraints. The more prolific a reader you are, the more efficiently you read, and thus your higher throughput dramatically compresses time.
If we're to speak about very specific increments of time and units of reading material -- say, you get to read N books over 1 week -- then sure, the zero-sum argument holds. But a lifetime is so much time, offering so much opportunity to the experienced reader, that time is almost effectively lifted as a constraint.
The only zero-sum quantities in this case are time and number of books. Depth and breadth of subject matter are better described as characterizing subcategories of #_books.
>Depth and breadth, in this case, are not opposite directions on a straight line
humans have limited memory, we are not machines. How many books can you remember, and not just in a vague sense, but lines, tone, structure?
Nabokov made a similar statement as the author claimed that the only good reader is a re-reader. Nobody can genuinely remember more than a few books and be familiar with them, if you read hundreds of books at the end of the year you might as well have read nothing. But every time you reread a great work, you learn something new and free your mind up to discover even more things about it.
The very best musicians will often study their favourite pieces compulsively. They have an intimate relationship with them that others have not.
I am very sympathetic to the message of the author because we seem to be living in an age where people attempt to measure literacy on a scoreboard by counting how much books they've read. Obviously this is as doomed of an attempt as being in a hundred relationships at the same time.
A good friend of mine teaches Russian literature, and when he talks about a book like The Brothers Karamazov he can get so much more out of one book than I get out of reading 50. That is something to me that resembles genuine understanding.
Learning how to find what you will think are "great books", I think, is more important than the raw number of books. Having people that know you well and are good readers themselves can be a great resource. Also, the ability to abandon a long book after an hour of reading can be difficult for some but quite useful if you find your reading time limited.
The point of the article was in encouraging writers to hone in on an individual voice as opposed to being influenced by thousands of competing tones.
Perhaps an analogy to songwriting will make things more clear: how well received are the works of someone who writes rap-funk-metal-folk-electro-bluegrass songs?
It's not that a successful country music songwriter can't listen to and enjoy hip-hop but you'll find they tend mainly to listen to and be influenced by country music.
I think maybe the only way to be a good artist though is to explore the things that resonate with you. If rap-funk-metal-folk-electro-bluegrass speaks to your soul, and creating that music fulfills you, then who’s to say exploring those genres is a mistake? There are other measures of success than recognition.
Austin Kleon puts this especially well in “Steal Like An Artist.” He says that you can cut off some of your passions, and try to focus on one thing, but eventually you will “feel the pain of the phantom limb.”
Neither of us want me to write an essay about Wittgenstein's notion of "meaning through social interactions" and how this applies to artistic value, but I'll summarize it thus: art needs an audience.
Now, given the vast population of the world, I'm sure there are a few people out there who are into bluegrass-rap fusion, but your friends, family and neighbors are probably not going to get much out of it.
So who do you want to make art for? Who do you want making art for you? Random strangers peicing together art from fragments of digital audio they stumble across while surfing on an endless stream of information?
I think ultimately we’re going to go back and forth about an unanswerable question: what fulfills people? You can’t answer it for anyone else. One artist will need the audience as a foil; another will be perfectly happy to toil away in obscurity. To my mind the best advice is “try a lot of things and see what feels right to you; don’t be dogmatic about your approach until you have a very high level of confidence based on experience.” Beyond that I’m just not sure this is a question with a meaningful answer.
This is the solipsistic perspective of someone floating in the ocean, looking in only one direction and sure they are alone, sure they are surrounded by nothing but an endless expanse, completely unaware that they are just a few hundred feet from the shoreline that lies behind them.
The answer is not different, it is the same for EVERYONE! Turn around and swim back to land!
Recognizing that people are unique does not immediately equate to solipsism. That would be like me saying that recognizing any kind of commonality immediately implies collectivism.
I can't see why a bluegrass songwriter wouldn't benefit from learning more about rap, funk, metal; bringing a stronger context to their understanding of their own genre (which is sometimes an arbitrary delineation) and perhaps some techniques.
> It's not that a successful country music songwriter can't listen to and enjoy hip-hop but you'll find they tend mainly to listen to and be influenced by country music.
Without any examples for or to the contrary, I'm not convinced this is true.
> The point of the article was in encouraging writers to hone in on an individual voice as opposed to being influenced by thousands of competing tones.
I think both extremes are harmful. But my experience comes from dabbling in Jazz music of all sorts; 'Jazz fusion' is such a broad moniker that it extends from funk to rock to swing to rap.
While I don't disagree with the author on his points, I find them premised on faulty logic. His thesis assumes that depth and breadth are zero-sum pursuits. I suppose they are if time and energy are limiting factors, but to those who read and write for the love of the game, those limits are lifted.
When it comes time to settle down on a voice and hone your craft, sure, I would never recommend you switch up your style for the hell of it. But if you want to read widely, and if doing so refines your style, great. Go for it. It probably will.
Again, the way the author characterizes this 'problem' is jarringly foreign and antithetical to my own experience. Perhaps I lack the objectivity to see it the way the author does.
My god, this brings back some formative memories. Memories of AOHell. Memories of HappyHardcore, the self-styled hacker who claimed authorship of it. Memories of hanging out in Warez chat rooms, where everyone showed up in phished accounts to trade 'warez' and conspire to troll various AOL communities. Memories of taking apart System 7 shareware games with ResEdit and, in so doing, learning how they worked.
Hypothetical problem... Let's imagine a universe in which milk is a rare commodity, and milkshakes are worth their weight in gold. In this world, right now in 2017, 1 milkshake trades for $100 USD. You have a milkshake, and I have a milkshake. So we each hold the equivalent of $100. I drink your milkshake, effectively stealing $100 from you.
Fast forward to the year 2020. Milkshakes are now worth $1,000,000 USD. Have I deprived you of $100, or have I deprived you of $1,000,000? (Note that we can't seem to use retroactive NPV analysis in 2017, since in 2017 we had no way of accurately predicting how milkshakes would be priced in 2020.)
On the one hand, I appear to have imposed a severe opportunity cost on you. On the other hand, I haven't taken the world's only milkshake from you. So what I've literally stolen from you in 2017 is the present value of the milkshake, $100.
IANAL, and I will confess that I have no idea how a court of law would evaluate this case. But in economic terms, it certainly feels as though I've deprived you of more than $100. So what have I actually taken from you?
[EDIT: This post was meant to pose a question. It was not meant as a frank disagreement with the parent post per se. I've cleaned up the wording a bit to try to make it clearer.]
You stole $100 from me. If the value of milkshakes went down to 0 in 2020, would you say you deprived me of nothing?
This is basically like the people talking about the guy who spent thousands of bitcoins on pizza as if he lost shitloads of money by buying that pizza. Of course he didn't.
In the scenario I've presented, I think you're correct. This is because milkshakes are liquid (both literally and figuratively), and because they are replaceable.
If we add the condition that milkshakes are not replaceable, does that change the outcome? I'll stfu now if this is derailing things.
I think you're right, but I do like pishpash's solution of converting to currency value at the time of theft and then applying some sort of interest calculation. This divorces the damages of the theft from the hypothetical asset value of milkshakes over time.
Sure, but the appropriate amount, in my mind would have been $100 plus prevailing interest, not some in-kind distribution. Suppose there is only one milkshake in the world and it got destroyed, how would you ever repay the claim except by converting to currency value?
Sure, but the appropriate amount, in my mind would have been $100 plus prevailing interest
Bankruptcy laws determine that. Maybe x% a year? Creditors took them to court and at that moment the court takes over. You should have bought more bitcoins at $400 if you believed in it.
So essentially we set damages at t0 currency value of the milkshake, plus interest over N years. Seems reasonable.
If milkshakes were illiquid, and could only be bought and sold every N years, that would seem to peg damages to asset value instead of currency value. Or am I wrong?
Assumptions: milkshakes are fungible (I can buy a functionally equivalent milkshake), I have the wealth to acquire a replacement milkshake without significantly shifting the balance of my assets.
Under those assumptions, you have deprived me of the exchange value of my milkshake at the time it becomes known to me that you have misappropriated it. This is my moral judgment, not a legal opinion.
[Edit: I did not take your response as a frank disagreement, and anyway, even if it were, there's nothing wrong about disagreeing with me. I'm not an ethicist, just an opinionated rando.]
I would be highly suspicious of anything calling itself "wild" and "Atlantic" in the same breath. There is almost no wild Atlantic salmon fishery left in the United States and Canada. It's all farm raised. Occasionally you can find legitimately wild Atlantic catch in Scotland or Norway. But wild catch makes up less than 1% of all Atlantic salmon on the market.
So if you want wild salmon, start by looking for a Pacific label, a listed species, or a regional designation of some kind. That's still not a guarantee, but it narrows things down quite a bit.
For what it's worth, 90% of all salmon on the US market is farmed. So if you're at a restaurant or a BBQ and aren't sure what you're getting, you're probably getting farm-raised Atlantic salmon.
Right, but genetic diversity of the breeding population would be very low, making the population itself very fragile. And that's assuming the spawn survive their first season. (Most young salmon spawn do not survive, and those not native to the local waters face unique challenges.)
This doesn't seem to be a case where the invading species gains an immediate upper hand in its new environment. (Cf., the rampant python population in the Florida Everglades.) In this case, the invading Atlantic species faces stiff and probably superior competition from the various Pacific salmon species, which are every bit as big and fast, and which fill the same ecological niche. Hell, a Pacific Chinook will get twice as big as an Atlantic salmon. It also knows the territory, including where and what to hunt, and its wild instincts haven't been dulled in a fish farm.
If I were a betting man, I'd wager on the native Pacific populations over the scattered pockets of farm-raised exotics nearly 99 times out of 100. Barring human involvement, of course. If we hunt the Pacific species out of existence, or damage the environment beyond recognition, all bets are off.
> Hell, a Pacific Chinook will get twice as big as an Atlantic salmon.
They don't have to be bigger and faster, with precise 'local knowledge' to be dangerous to an ecosystem. They merely have to be different.
Perhaps their small size will cause them to escape the attention of normal predators, or their lack of knowledge of what to eat causes them to decimate some species that Pacific salmon don't eat.
Atlantic salmon aren't "different" enough from the various Pacific salmon species to occupy their own niche in the Pacific Northwest. If the big ones are too big for you, there are also medium-sized species and smaller species.
The Atlantic salmon is a big, predatory fish that needs to eat a lot of smaller species to stay alive. In the Pacific Northwest region, pretty much every species that could sustain the Atlantic salmon is also preyed upon by an extant, native salmon variety of some stripe. If the Atlantic salmon possessed some sort of advantage in obtaining one prey species or another, then there you go, there's a niche it can adapt to. Thus far, we haven't seen that advantage materialize, or the niche appear.
I apologize if some of the nuance of this point was lost in my "bigger, faster" figure of speech. My tl;dr here is that exotic species don't just magically, automatically win in a new environment simply because they're exotic. To thrive, their exoticism needs to confer some specific competitive advantage within the local ecosystem. I'm struggling to see what that advantage is for the Atlantic salmon in the Pacific Northwest, simply because the oceans and waterways in that region are teeming with very, very similar competitors.
The conflict of interest (companies are also advertisers) is powerful, and it appears to be exerting a significant effect on the directional reliability of aggregate reviews for any company large enough to be a major advertiser. Companies can badger Glassdoor into removing negative reviews, and Glassdoor will ask few to no questions before taking summary and unappealable action in the company's favor.
The negative reviews are pretty much the only interesting data points on the site. Take them with a grain of salt, sure. But you have to take the positives (especially large cohorts of positives over short time intervals) with the whole freaking salt shaker. The aggregate scores offer some directional guidance, but bear in mind that you are not looking at the total sample size of reviews; you are looking at the sample size after the company has culled and gamed what it can, which is often quite a lot of the original pool.
This is sort of like the directional reliability of eBay scores, now that there is a short decay on past reviews, and pretty much anyone with 10 minutes on their hands can get negative reviews expunged.
They're not good markets, and even if they were, they fall far short of the Segway's original goals as a mass consumer product. There is a reason Segway is often used as a cautionary tale in product circles, and as as "What not to do" case study in academia.
I remember that they were promoting Segway as the way of the future. That it was going to change the world. They literally said that their device was going to change the world like Ford did.[1]
Fun fact: One of the original promotional videos shows cops using it.
I'd highly recommend reading a book like "The Domestic Dog," which was recently updated with a new edition in 2017. It contains all of the latest science and anthropology around the origins of the human/dog relationship.
The tl;dr is that dogs really do identify us as family, and in all likelihood, the first ancestral wolves to become domesticated dogs took as many co-evolutionary steps towards us as we did them.
Humans and dogs have been evolving alongside each other for at least 15,000 years. The sorts of dog breeds that can't survive in the wild (bulldogs, etc.) are a fairly recent innovation in all of that time, dating back to the mid 1800s and the emergence of the modern breeding program.
Dogs like being with us as much as we like having them around. They were the first domesticated species, and they are literally the only mammals we know of who can read human facial expressions and emotions as well as the great apes can. Our relationship with them is a partnership, not an enslavement.
If you want to take issue with the way humans treat animals, there are so many better targets for outrage than our treatment of the dog. Take the cow or the chicken, for instance, most of whom lead a tortured and awful existence and would want nothing to do with us in a state of nature.
The reason I chose dogs is because it isn't an easy target.
Another example is Deer. I live in New Jersey and we have an overpopulation of Deer, to which the most common response is that we should cull them so they don't become dangerous to roads. The moral stance would be to design our transportation in a way that doesn't frequently kill other species. Another common response is that the overpopulation will lead to them dying anyway as their isn't enough food to sustain them, so the argument boils down to kill them because they're going to die anyway.
The Ainu people believe that their treatment of bears is just. I'm just pointing out that I'd rather see all of these animals free from human emotional projection.
The issue with deer is that there are too few natural predators for them in many places on the east coast. The booming population has detrimental effects on the forests. Deer consume only certain plants so they end up causing lower diversity of eastern forests. When the decision is either cull them now or let the population starve until it gets back to a comfortable capacity, it's much better to cull them. This not only helps the surrounding ecosystem but also gives some people the chance to get large quantities of meat for almost no cost. Some people in the US really do still live off the land to an extent, meat is much cheaper when you kill and clean the animal yourself.
We kill them, because we have replaced the apex predator in most ecosystems.
There are too few wolves, mountain lions, bobcats, coyotes, and bears to keep the population in check, so we do it.
>so the argument boils down to kill them because they're going to die anyway.
There's more to it than that. Overpopulation will cause damage to more than just deer. One of the biggest is the increase in the deer tick population and the subsequent increase in Lyme disease.
Instead of killing them ourselves, we could try to reintroduce predators, but why would a deer prefer being killed by a mountain lion to being killed by a human?
Coyotes never really went anywhere; in fact, they seem to thrive in the same marginal suburban and semi-wild niches that deer do. Coyotes don't generally prey on deer, however, and hence they're not a perfect substitute for the lost wolves and bears. (Coyotes are too small and slow to take adult deer, except in snowy conditions.)
We have reintroduced wolves to national parks like Yellowstone, evidently with great success. I hope we do the same in other national parks if/where needed. Wolves do not prey on humans, contrary to popular belief, and generally keep a lot of distance from wandering hikers or campers.
Nature may not be "fair," but all things considered, I'd rather we let the wolves do the job of deer population control than humans. We are not as good at it, and we also pump the ecosystem full of heavy metals while we're shooting at the critters.
There are many problems with dog breeding though. The health and wellbeing of the animals do not seem to be prime motivations in at least some breeds.
But at least it contrasts with cows and chickens, which are domesticated and selectively bred as meat producing machines that survive just long enough for slaughter (for 99.99% of individuals of those species).
While we humans are thinking creatures, and must seek to act morally, keep in mind that nature isn't and doesn't.
From the perspective of nature-red-in-tooth-and-claw, humans create a huge number of niches which dozens (hundreds?) of species have evolved to fill. (And to be fair, eliminated a vast number of niches as well.) We've created niches like "human head and body hair", which lice exploit, "provide emotional support for humans", which dogs and cats fill, "carry heavy shit for humans", which horses, donkeys and oxen have filled (and still do, in some places), and "produce huge numbers of delicious offspring, most of whom humans will eat", which pigs and chickens and cows fill.
From nature's perspective, these niches are no more strange or unnatural than the bacteria which live in guts to break down plant matter for their hosts, the birds that pick insects off of large animals, coral reefs or the ants that farm aphids. Even meat animals aren't really a significant aberration: countless species produce huge amounts of young, from dozens to millions at a time, with only one or two of those offspring surviving to reproduce themselves ("r selection").
Nature is all about the survival of the genes most fit for the existing niches. It doesn't care about what niches existed in the past or might exist in the future, and it doesn't share your biases. As far as nature is concerned, cows and dogs are more fit than buffalo and wolves, because cows and dogs are better-adapted to the existing niches.
You can choose to believe otherwise, that wolves are inherently superior to dogs and buffalo to cows, but that's your judgement, not nature's.
Well put, and I agree. I love the theory of evolution for explaining so much of the living world, including the awful stuff. I think it's a great comfort to know that it's not arbitrary.
In fact it can explain why I have empathy with other living things, and want them to have happy lives. Maybe that will be an expanding niche, who knows. I know nature doesn't care, but I do.
You/we ARE a part of nature. If 100% of people care about doing certain things (that they actually have control over) in a certain way, that's the same as nature doing it that way. When it's a smaller percentage, that's just that thing happening in different ways.
Well, that's true in the same sense that everything in the world is just quantum fields interacting. It's true that my mind is part of nature, but my thoughts are not part of an explanatory theory, a framework for predictions, certainly not one that is mostly about genetics and evolution.
Explanatory theories, frameworks and the like are always a work in progress, ergo, never complete - ref Gödel's theorems. What's standard knowledge in the future can easily be utterly incomprehensible today, thus that (being part of a theory or framework) shouldn't be taken as a necessary criteria in talking about things at a level that's more abstract than a theory (which by definition must be about the (mathematical) specifics of specific phenomena), as the parent thread does.
If, as you rightly claim, everything is just interacting fields, should it make or break the argument if the specific interaction of particular (as yet unknown) combinations of fields is as yet unknown?
It can also be questioned if an individual's thoughts are special enough in the grandest scheme of things - or if they're merely a mechanism, that seems special to the body where those thoughts are occurring. For example, moving away from humans: animals have thoughts too, yet their behavior(s) can be abstracted into proper theories (apex predator theory, food chains, etc.) backed with sufficient evidence, without much regard to the thoughts of individual creatures, or even entire species - classifying creatures as predator vs prey is sufficient to study a lot of large scale ecological phenomena.
Of course, there can be various kinds of explanations for why one feels empathy for others - evolution: humans evolved to live in groups and empathy was an asset to group-living, incentives/economic: those that show consideration for others were similarly reciprocated, etc. etc.
PS: I wrote the parent, different alias.
PPS: the dog breeding problems are very real, and I do hope a rich dog-loving American can hire veterinarians and lawyers to simply sue some of the organizations involved in setting/promoting the ludicrous breed standards (resulting in GSDs with sloping backs, pugs that can't even breed without human assistance, etc.). The difference with cows and chickens is one can find enough dog lovers to make an actual issue out of this, compared to (live) cow lovers or (live) chicken lovers.
There was a genetic survey done a bit ago that suggests that wolves and dogs are more remotely related. That domestic dogs existed as a separate wild dog species from wolves at the time of domestication.
Does that book talk about the phenomenon of baboons stealing puppies from wild dogs and raising them?
Every time we look at it we end up pushing back the date of human canine cohabitation. If it turns out that this coevolution with dogs predates hominids, I wouldn't be the least bit surprised.
Yes, hence why I use the term "ancestral wolves" and not simply "wolves," in the hopes of avoiding confusion. Many people assume dogs are simply some sort of captured/degenerated/infantilized versions of the modern-day grey wolf. This is not at all the case. The likely ancestor of the domestic dog was an ancient lineage of Middle Eastern/Eurasian wolf that is presently extinct and did not survive the last glacial maximum -- because humans hunted its megafaunal prey to extinction. Dogs used to be classified by most textbooks as subspecies of Canis lupus, the grey wolf. Increasingly, genetic analysis shows that Canis familiaris might properly be its own species.
The dog was, in all likelihood, domesticated multiple times over multiple thousands of years in various parts of the globe. The lineage that survived to present is likely to have come from the Fertile Crescent area, even though its domestication predates the agricultural revolution. (Dogs joined us when we were hunter-gatherers, and cats joined us when we settled down to store grain and thereby attracted rodents).
I am not convinced that non-human apes "domesticated" the dog the same way we did, even if modern apes seem capable of taking actions superficially analogous to domestication. Ancestral wolves specifically followed human camps around and lived among us for (presumably) thousands of years before it even occurred to us to domesticate them as such. By that time, nature had 'pre-selected' them for us -- the friendly and cooperative ones, who could survive at the margins of our hunting parties, outcompeted their more feral cousins, who kept their distance from humans and then starved when the mammoths ran out. The first ancient wolves we came into frequent, nonviolent contact with were, in all likelihood, the result of many generations of natural selection before we set about artificially selecting them.
Ironically, and counterntuitively, dogs were more naturally fit than wolves to survive in the early days of the Homo sapiens.
As barkingcat suggests, pretty much every country on the planet that has normalized diplomatic relations with China formally accepts the One China policy. This is part of China's chess strategy for forcing the world to accept its ownership of Taiwan.
I will go out on a limb for a second and suggest that the day will come soon enough when the United States formally bends the knee on this issue as well. We are headed in that direction much faster than anyone anticipated.
The 'free world' has chosen to worship the Almighty Dollar as its lord and sovereign. China is where most of your dollars come from now. Ergo, China has the mandate of market-capitalist heaven, and you work for China now.
As far as "sovereign embarrassment," there is no such thing. If you want Chinese trade and embassy relations, you put out whatever news releases, go on television, press conferences, and at the UN General Assembly you stand up and proclaim exactly what Norway has said. It's an "embarrassment" in the poster's mind, but pretty much every country has done it. Then you go behind China's back and buy Taiwanese stuff and talk to the President of Taiwan in backchannels because everyone needs cpu's, microchips, and cell phones. The level of hypocrisy is pretty high in global politics.
I do not agree with this, but it is the state of the world.
Taleb is a gifted statistician who often wanders out of his element to make broad, bold, but perfunctory claims about various subjects. You kind of have to take his work for what it is: the work of a really smart, but arrogant guy who likes to shoot first and aim later.
Personally, I prefer his academic papers to his pop-sci blogging and books. But I still can't help reading him. He isn't always right, but he's usually interesting.
I agree with you that he would benefit tremendously from a strong editor.
"Read widely" isn't some religious dictum. It's more of a religious calling. (Of sorts.) If you love to read, and you love to write, you naturally read all fucking day. Your thirst is unquenchable. Your tastes are varied. So you drink from many different fountains.
You also realize there is no trade off between depth and breadth. It's a false dichotomy. It seems to be manufactured by people who find the act of reading some sort of chore. I do not. I find it the highest pleasure I have ever experienced.
Perhaps there's a difference between being naturally curious and being forced to read broadly. I dunno. I've never had to be forced. I like reading and writing the way many of us like programming. I'm truly sorry if the author does not. Writing's a hell of a shitty way to make a living; I can't imagine what it'd be like if you didn't at least enjoy the sport of it.