Student of Trinity

The Awakened were a big deal in G1 and G2 when they first came out. In G1 they really seemed to be the Good Guys. Then in G2 they still seemed pretty reasonable, until you thought about what Tuldaric was really doing, and (if you joined them) what their big plan really involved. A lot of people still really liked them, but I always thought that G2 already showed that the Awakened were really a dead end.

That actually is a distinct ending, by the way. It's just a bit hidden. Well on in the middle of the game you can meet a lone Shaper who outlines what a true Shaper ought to do. If you do what he describes, you'll get a different ending. I think.

Doesn't sound like we read the same books. If somebody asked me what this 'Mary Sue' term means, I'd answer, "Kvothe." Well, actually, of course I wouldn't, because how do you really pronounce that name? Are you sure? But I'd try to refer to him. I don't really mean that he's as bad as actual fanfic Mary Sues, of course. I like these books and agree that their qualities well outweigh their flaws, and even their flaws aren't exactly bad things, but good things that seem to cloy a bit when they keep going on. But if you want to explain what issues are at stake, in making an extremely talented protagonist, the Kingkiller Chronicles are the best published example I know.

I wonder if another part of Kvothe's problem is this: this series has run two long books already, and the main actual bad guys have hardly even appeared. When they've appeared, so briefly, they haven't done anything that makes any sense. Now, in itself, this is surprisingly effective. The Chandrian work as Sauron plus conspiracy theory. But if we had them popping up a bit more, and doing tremendous things, then I think we'd be measuring Kvothe more against them, instead of against the ordinary extras around him, and finding him less oversized.

Kvothe is too good ... for too little reason.

I think this is an insight. Kvothe is annoying because there's no clear reason for him to be so awesome. The 'legendary hero' thing doesn't quite do the job, because it's not really an explanation, just a confirmation. If the premise were instead that he was literally a demi-god, or even just bitten by a radioactive groundhog or something, then it seems to me that he'd be a lot less annoying. And in fact I think he'd actually be more interesting, because then there'd probably be more reflection and reaction from him about how different he is from everybody else.

I really liked the beginning of Strange and Norrel, but I was somehow disappointed as it went along. Where the beginning seemed both novel and inevitable, what followed seemed to grow more familiar and yet more arbitrary.

Kvothe's character flaws are not really his issue, but rather the question of whether his talents have any limitations. For what it's worth, though, high levels of talent in real life do seem to work like midichlorians, as well as like classic Jedi training. The thing is that levels of performance range so very widely. People who are really talented at something often seem, to people who aren't so blessed in that way, to do unbelievably difficult things with no effort at all. That doesn't mean that the talented people never make any effort. They may well work very hard, but what costs them that effort are achievements whose staggering difficulty won't even be recognized by people who are not in their league. One sometimes hears that high talent is really just a capacity for practicing harder. I don't think that's all it is. It's that, plus starting from six feet above the ground.

Kvothe's individual talents seem perfectly believable to me. Extraordinary talent is quite like that, I think. It's just that he is like that for so many different things.

There are a number of things he's not very good at, or doesn't know how to do, or has difficulty learning, whatever.

It's been a while since I read these books, so I've probably just forgotten what these are, but none spring to mind.

You could try a film gris and adjust the exposure afterwards.

Kvothe is an extreme case even by the standards of fantasy. The saving grace, if it does save, is that Kvothe's incredible ability is advertised clearly as the premise. This is the autobiography of a legendary demi-god; take it or leave it. Leaving a premise like that doesn't mean you don't like fiction.

Actually preferring a book about a total screw-up, though, only makes sense as a kind of reaction. Are there any books like that that I can think of? Maybe the Flashman series, in a way, though Flashman isn't exactly an incompetent, just a coward. He's no genius but he isn't an idiot, and he does have one or two talents to a high degree.

I happened to read The Name of the Wind around the same time as I read Trudi Canavan's Magician series, and I'm pretty sure I'd fail a test about recognizing which episodes appeared in which books. Some of these broad strokes only seem broad, it seems to me, because Harry Potter made a rather narrow range of tropes seem like a roomy genre. Line the books up from the right angle, and the similarities are pretty striking.

I wouldn't call it a problem, though. I agree that the tone and style of the Kvothe books are very different from Harry Potter. Plus, of course, the sheer length of the Rowling series makes people focus on its general features. The Kingkiller Chronicles have no major plot similarities I can see with any of the individual Harry Potter volumes.

The Magic School genre seems to have sprung up rather quickly. I believe that A Wizard of Earthsea may have been the first, but I feel sure that I read a number of vaguely similar stories in my youth. Maybe this is all it is: write a fantasy story to appeal to schoolkids, and Magic School is an obvious choice. Tip your target audience a little older, and your School just gets a little more advanced.

Marxism as a methodology is not necessarily tied to Marxism as an ideology, though the latter uses the former to formulate much of its rhetoric. A Marxist historian would be interested in such topics as the bourgeois nature of the French Revolution, class structures in pre-Columbian American societies, and the making of the English working class (coincidentally a book by the aforementioned E.P. Thompson that I'm currently reading).

 

Marxism as an ideology is certainly a historical topic that I would say is worthy of investigation, but the rationale Marx initially used to develop that ideology is closely tied to history in a different way. He proposed that material relations to the means of production are the deciding factor in society, in that they are the engine of society that propels them through history. A society begins as hunter-gathers, develops a slave-based economy in the manner of Rome or Greece, formulates feudalism, and from there becomes capitalist. Marx called this historical materialism. This historical materialism is what Marxist historians generally use; they are called Marxist historians perhaps because "historical materialist historian" doesn't really communicate very well.

That's an ably conducted defense, but I'm not sure I buy it. 'Marxist' is just too heavily loaded a term, it seems to me, for anyone to wear it as innocently as that.

Academic departments have a lot of inertia, because tenure means that people stick around for thirty years or more after being hired, and even when the guard does change, professorial democracy means that the new guard gets hired by the old. So like any academic department, a history department must often be a museum, in which the high-brow views of two generations past are pristinely preserved. And fifty years ago, half the world pledged allegiance to ideological Marxism.

So calling Marxism a methodology rather than an ideology sounds to me like saying the Jolly Roger is really just a flag that ships fly when the captain feels it sets the paintwork off. Maybe, but I'm not so sure. Making Marxism out to be a rigorous, neutral-minded science was always part of Marxist ideology, after all. You might want to sniff carefully at that Kool-Aid before you sip.

Okay, congratulations: you have all gone from wuss to bad.

For me, as a doctoral student, one has three minor fields and one major field. These are topical, not methodological or ideological (e.g. early U.S., modern U.S., early European, modern Latin America, military, etc). I've certainly had exposure to things like marxist theory and (*gag*) Foucault, and also methodological topics like social history and microhistory, but my course of study was never locked in around a single ideological or methodological approach. Theoretically, one's courses fall into these chosen fields and prepare one for exams on those fields. One is tested on the major field and two of the minor fields, and then there's an oral exam; the exams are spread out over a two week period. Each minor field exam consisted two different professors each giving me a pair of essay prompts; I'd choose one of each and type up an essay on that. The major field exam was the same except that my advisor got to give me for prompts and I had to write two essays for him, plus one more for another professor. So, I'd show up in the morning, receive a departmental laptop, and receive my questions, and start typing. After the written exams, there's an oral exam where the professors all get together and ask whatever random questions they feel like. The nature of the essay questions on the written comps varied widely; all asked for some historiography (enumerate literature on the topic to show one's mastery of it), but some were all historiography, whereas others primarily asked me to provide a narrative on the topic, showing that I knew What Happened, with the literature summary being a secondary component.

That sounds pretty reasonable.

This isn't a case where each school of thought has basically similar ideas about how history should be studied and just thinks there needs to be more emphasis on their own area of interest: by and large, they each have fundamentally different ideas of what history is and what the goals of the study of history should be.

Well, fine, but: Marxism? Seriously? One dead white male's idiosyncratic rantings from the bleary dawn of industrial capitalism, as the basis of an entire academic discipline? That's almost as bad as generative linguistics. I mean, specializing in the history of industrial development, as something that Karl Marx happened also to have taken a stab at in his day, I can totally understand. And Marxism has certainly existed as a historical phenomenon, an ideology that influenced much of the world for several generations. The history of Marxism is a perfectly legitimate topic. But being a Marxist historian just strikes me as absurd, let alone having to choose Marxism first, before studying history.

Wow. Yikes. You have to first pick a particular doctrinaire squint, and lock yourself into it for good? That sounds pretty pointless, frankly.

I'd be happier to hear that you need to specialize in methodology, or know relevant languages. Ideology first seems like a helluva a way to run an academic discipline.

Yeah, just the one written preliminary. I think it lasted about six hours, though.

That's kind of the German model for the doctorate, which was the historical basis for the modern doctorate around the world. It assumes that you already know the past — that's what the previous degrees were about. The doctorate is all about research, on this model, so it really only consists of a dissertation. Adding any exams at all is a North American thing, I think. In Germany, doctoral students aren't officially students. Their official status is that of academic co-workers: qualified professional scientists or scholars, collaborating with a professor on research.

What was the history comp like? I'm really curious.

In physics, things like this vary widely. Where I studied, there was a 'preliminary' exam rather than a comprehensive. You had to pass it within the first year of your PhD studies, or get kicked out of the program. Some people thought it was terrible, because the PhD was supposed to be about research, and yet there was this hoop to jump through, about having passable knowledge of standard undergraduate stuff. I thought it was a good idea just for that. It ensured that nobody got out of the school, with a PhD in physics, while being clueless about something basic and major in the subject. Where I teach now, in Germany, there's no such exam for the doctorate, but the undergrad degrees include fairly comprehensive oral exams.

Physics is a mature natural science with a small and uncontroversial body of basic principles. Ask, What should every physicist know about physics? and you'll get very much the same answers from every physics professor in the world. So a preliminary exam like the one I wrote really makes sense in physics. I'm really curious what the analogous thing in history might be, though. Is it a test of factual knowledge, to make sure that every history PhD knows the gross outline of major world events for the past three millennia? I can see some point in that, but on the other hand I'm not sure it's so unambiguous to decide which events were 'major'. Or is it a test of basic historian skills? If so, what are those?

Dissertations should actually be fun. I don't really know zip about a history dissertation. Physics dissertations today are basically just two or three short published papers, stapled together, with intro and connecting text typed out in a last-minute rush.

For what it's worth, though, I think my advice would be to try to say something radical and dramatic. That's naive, undergraduate thinking, and most graduate school training is probably all about crushing down bold hypotheses into nice, smooth surfaces of subtle nuance. But my guess is that there's a subtle nuance about this itself: it's not that bold conclusions are all wrong, just that most of them are. So bread-and-butter work is pretty low key. It's still the few bold conclusions that really make the subject worthwhile, even when they do turn out to be wrong. So I think it's worth working extra hard, and enduring years of scorn from your advisor, to try to say something a little more "out there". The extra effort and embarrassment will be worth it, to be doing something that's actually interesting and significant, instead of something safe but who-even-cares.

Wasn't this originally a Japanese game? Until I see kanji here, you people are wusses.

The Glass Bead Game isn't exactly a plot-heavy book, either. It has one, but it feels a bit tacked on. Maybe it's just my taste, but I'm starting to think that "novel of ideas" is marketing spin for "novel of people standing around talking".

The thing I don't really get about any of these books is that they all feature academic settings, in which no-one does research. That's just weird. It has nothing to do with any actual academic setting that has existed for, oh, two hundred years or so. The idea of adding to knowledge, and not just preserving and appreciating it, has been the principal meta-idea of the modern age. Okay, you could imagine that being abandoned. But it's so clearly just a boring step backwards, it's hard to see how that can be a good idea for a book.

Actually I kind of hated Anathem. It's a huge fat book that can almost be summarized surprisingly briefly: The Glass Bead Game meets A Canticle for Leibowitz. That would be great, actually, except for the almost. The thing that summary misses is that there isn't actually much of a plot to the book, and what there is unravels into arbitrary quantum mumbo-jumbo at the end.

Stephenson should have waited with his setting and theme until he had a substantial enough idea for the plot. I was very disappointed.

In G4 you can get a heap of XP right in the first zone, if you get in the killing blow on this Battle Alpha (or something) that Greta fights. I thought this might be similar, but I guess the point is that Shanti isn't actually very tough.

Do you get a huge pile of exp for this, or is it just silliness?

If you do get exp, can you find a way to farm her?

I'm a little curious how much one can get out of a 'civilian' biography of Einstein. The scientific one was pretty much nailed years ago by Abraham Pais, who both knew Einstein personally and was a theoretical physicist himself. Pais's Subtle Is the Lord focuses mostly on Einstein's physics, to the point of including lots of equations. But this seems to have been Einstein's own idea of what his life was really about.

It's actually a rather sad story, that way, because there was this tremendous burst of creativity at age 26, and then a tremendous ten-year struggle to re-imagine gravity, ending with Einstein's greatest success. For the entire second half of his life, though — he died in 1955 at age 75 — Einstein mainly failed. He certainly failed by his own standards. And he doesn't seem to have had much of a social or family life. He lived for physics, and physics basically dried up on him. I'm curious how much of this comes through in a less technical biography.

I suppose that a random question has to be one that cannot be expressed by any algorithm shorter than the question itself as a simple statement. In this sense it is probably rather difficult to pose a truly random question in any natural language. But we can try to get as close as we can.

I know that topic drift just happens, but really, people, this is a bit extreme. We've had several posts in a row about custom titles. The thread is clearly marked as being about 'random questions'. Please show a little respect, and stop introducing arbitrary tangents of logical coherence.

Let's try getting back on track.

Où sont les neiges d'antan?

I had a custom title from before I was a mod, but I didn't like it that much. I had always wanted to be an Interloper, so I made myself one.

Some countries could observe Pi Day on 22/7.