Rich and Strange Aeons

Pulled off the library shelf at random.

Squid Empire: the rise and fall of the cephalopods, by Danna Staaf. Recommended. It's mostly a tight, short, book on cephalopod evolution, from the first Cambrian shelled swimmers, through the mighty ammonoid empire, to modern octopi etc. I found it fun and accessible, without the author pampering the reader much by talking about calamari and kraken. It didn't even talk that much about biology, beyond what was needed to explain the basics and some evolution. Staaf has her own PhD in cephalopod research, though then decided she preferred to write about science rather than do it; anyway, she's at home in the subject.

I also discovered that Firefox's spelling dictionary doesn't contain 'cephalopod' or 'kraken'. For shame.

The secret life of clams: the mysteries and magic of our favorite shellfish, by Anthony Fredericks. Meh. This one does regale you by telling you about songs about clams, and clams in movies, and lots of personal anecdotes and analogies. Somewhere in there might be actual clam biology, if I skim and skip forward enough. I won't say outright that it's _bad_, but coming straight off of the squid book it's certainly a shock and not what I was expecting. It has also run afoul of "when he talks about things I know, sometimes he's wrong", more than once in my not getting that far into the book. It very much feels like "pop science journalist trying to keep your attention with bells and whistles and human interest".

Or, like Anthony is a guy jumping up and down and waving his arms with lots of clam toys in his hands, "hey kids! fun facts!", while Danna is the shy person you asked at a party about her research and she's so glad you asked, while not actually getting too technical for the uninitiated. Granted I may not be the best judge of 'uninitiated'.

Anthony is said to be an "award winning science author" with multiple books, and also a professor of education somewhere.

I'm tempted to share cool squid facts I wrote down but maybe that should be another post.

I'm healthy enough to feel like studying or reading non-fiction again, and have started this book, on the nature of expertise, and arguing that generally breadth is better than overspecialization.

* Tiger Woods was a golf prodigy from like age 2, but Roger Pedersen came to tennis casually and late.
* Chess and golf are kind learning environments: clear rules, clear feedback, lots of repetitive situations. Tennis less so. Much of human life, even less so.
* Collaborative human-computer chess is apparently more fruitful than I knew. Humans can provide strategy and management that complements the computer's tactical genius. Even fairly inexperienced humans... whereas much of the work of becoming a grandmaster is becoming a tactical expert, something that is now entirely eclipsed by the computer.
* The more eminent a scientist, up through Nobel prize winners, the more likely they are to have artistic hobbies or other non-scientific interests.
* The Flynn effect -- the widespread rise in IQ scores -- is particularly pronounced in abstraction, like Raven's Progressive Matrices, or more abstract words in language-based IQ tests. Younger generations don't do better than older ones on concrete words.

* Luria studied peoples during the rapid modernization of the USSR and found that untouched remote villages were extremely concrete thinkers. They could learn from experience, sure, but categorically refused to answer questions outside their experience. They tended to group things oddly, compared to 'modern' people who would group items easily by color or material, or function (hunting tools vs. prey, say.)

Like a sample syllogism:
All bears in the far north are white.
Novaya is in the far north.
What color are the bears in Novaya?

Villager: "How can I know? I've never been to Novaya!"
Slightly modernized villager: "Going by your words, the bears there would be white."
Modern person: "White, duh."

Of course, syllogisms are at least 2300 years old, thanks Aristotle, so it's not literally a 'modern' thing, but something about education or social complexity.

On the flip side, the villagers were immune to some optical illusions where same-sized circles look different sizes based on what's around them.

Luria's results have been replicated since in other subsistence societies.

I finished Revolts. Farley is really good at writing thrillers. A friend's daughters get very excited watching tense movies or episodes, especially the youngest girl, even when they know the plot and outcome; youngest will get up to shake out tension, or hide from the TV, or cling to mother for comfort. I felt a lot like that reading this book, having to put down the book because eeeeeee. This despite the fact that if you describe the plot baldly, it's a ridiculous concatenation of unlikely setbacks.

Oh, and the plane did crash, but *not* because of the storm! Well played, Farley.

I'm currently reading the Black Stallion's Ghost, which I'm sure I did read, because I doubt there are two novels in the series with the Everglades, sawgrass, Seminoles, and twisted icons. I still recall nothing of the plot.

The whole Lady Trent series. I enjoyed re-read it, and some arc bits made more sense when I read them back to back.

_A Numerate Life_, John Allen Paulos. I've enjoyed his classic books (_Innumeracy_) but this grumpy memoir-skeptical memoir didn't have much IMO. It did have something though, an observation that almost no one is entirely normal.

Imagine that 90% of people are 'normal' on some dimension. Imagine that there are lots of mostly independent dimensions: height, IQ, sexual orientation, kink, family history, travel... if there are 10 such, then under 35% of people are normal on all dimensions. If 20 such, 12%. Up to you to decide how many ways you could characterize people, or how many of them to treat as normal.

_Port of Shadows_: years later, Glen Cook returns to the Black Company series, with an interquel, set after the first book. It was a gripping read, and possible inconsistencies were lampshaded within the text...

_If a Lion Could Talk_, Stephen Budiansky, 1998.

...then probably we could understand it, but it wouldn't be a lion anymore.

I saw this book mentioned a lot in grad school, when I was doing my own reading about animal cognition and ape language experiments, but I never read it before. It's much more skeptical than most of what I read then, but fairly convincing in its own right. Independent of that is a lot of animal cognition and communication stuff I didn't know.

This isn't a comprehensive review, just a sweep through of stuff that stood out to me.

**

People report anecdotes of animal intelligence, but rarely animal stupidity under similar situations. People seek to prove animals are some defective version of humans, rather than attending to the impressive things animals can do, in effect denigrating what animals are actually like.

"Smart animals" often means the ones who do what we want; a "stupid horse" learns that the right behavior will avoid being made to work.

Importance of 'peripherals': it's easy to confuse a difference in sensory ability with a difference in intelligence. Rats learn smell associations better than visual ones. Then again, animals learn things that tie into their natural behaviors: dogs can easily learn a tone means food, but not which speaker means food.

If goldfish had hands to play with, would they seem any dumber than monkeys?

At a basic non-verbal general cognition level, humans aren't much different from many animals: we can learn lists, keep 7 things in memory, subitize 4 objects. One researcher claims pretty much all vertebrates have the same general intelligence. This is too strong -- apes do seem better than monkeys who are better than dogs -- but as an order of magnitude thing, maybe kind of right.

Humans special because of our own specialized learning system, language -- which just happens to be capable of unbounded levels of abstraction and reference, creating a real discontinuity of capability, of thought about thoughts, intentions about intentions about intentions.

"Unthinking intelligence" -- it takes hard work to find animal behavior that can't be explained as associative learning. It's possible, but hard.

Lots of 'intelligent', adaptive, behavior -- stalking is brilliant for predators. But puppies stalk bugs at a few weeks of age. Instinct.

Evolution is trial and error; at a faster timescale, so is learning.

Utility of intentional stance, or mock anthropomorphism: assuming a behavior or organ has intention or purpose is often productive and predictive, but that doesn't mean a behavior actually is intentional, any more than a heart is.

Many animal calls classified as "food call" or "alarm call" may at root be attention, "here I am", calls. Or for pets, "summon human". Semantics provided by context of use, not the call itself.

Chomsky: "If you want to find out about an organism you study what it's good at. If you want to study humans you study language. If you want to study pigeons you study homing instinct."

Old approach: mentalism, trying to find human thought, even syllogisms, in animals. Later approach: behaviorism, denying anything other than stimulus-response. Even later approach, inspired by computers and cybernetics: cognitivism, looking for mental representations, whatever those might be.

'animats', very simple models that can produce impressive behavior by interacting with information in the environment. "Follow a gradient, or tumble randomly until you find a gradient" for bacteria. Model frog with 3 interacting simple loops, producing complex prey-grabbing behavior. Model cricket that emulated mate-finding behavior with 100 lines of code, plus an 'ear' responsive to the right frequencies.

Horses and chimps can learn to learn, eventually getting faster at learning new discrimination tests. Chimps can transfer 'sameness' to new match-to-sample tests; pigeons can't.

Timing tests on sequential learning tasks, like ABCD, then being asked about pairs like AC or BD. Monkeys can learn 6 items, pigeons 5 and slower; monkeys also give evidence that they've learned a list they mentally run down, pigeons had learned simpler and less complete rules: A comes first, D comes last; BC baffles it.

Counting vs. rhythmic memory: people can easily repeat "Deck the Halls" 'fa la la la la la la la' without conscious knowledge of how many 'las' there are.

Ground squirrels do make different "hawk alarm" and "mammal predator" alarms. They're not semantically random, but have different acoustic properties: the hawk alarm is a high tone hard to locate, or that is even deceptive. Call benefits both receiver (there's a hawk, run) and sender (lots of running squirrels make the caller not stand out.) The mammal call is part of "look, I see you, your ambush failed, go away."

Animal esperanto: across species, high whines convey fear or appeasement, nonthreat; deep growls convey aggression and threat. Exploitation of big things making low sounds.

Key question: not what an animal is trying to 'say' but what it is trying to accomplish. The whole point is manipulation; often that means 'honest' signals, but not always.

Bird song varied because sender and receiver -- and each male bird is both -- have different goals. Receiver wants to judge how far away someone is, and respond if they're nearby. Sender has no reason to be honest, it'd be ideal to make rivals run around responding to fake threats. Songbirds can only judge distance of a song they know, creating an arms race of multiple songs per bird -- if you use a song your neighbor doesn't know, they have to worry you're intruding. Birds in less competitive areas (more resources per territorial bird) have more stable regional dialects.

Acoustically a bark is between a whine and growl, rising and falling in pitch. Many species 'bark' in a general sense, including bird chirps. Content neutral, "I'm here, now what?" Because they mean nothing, they can mean anything. "Follow me", "stranger approaches", "feed me", "let me in", "let me out". Human vowels and consonants are kind of like whines and growls, making words different kinds of barks.

Humans children use words as names, not as requests, much more obviously than any trained animal. Likewise lots of mutual attention games, with pointing and gaze, that even ape mother-infant pairs don't show.

Bunch of undermining of mirror tests of self-awareness I don't want to summarize.

Animal social intelligence often greater than nonsocial, e.g. easily learning a dominance hierarchy but not other sequential relations, or in-group membership but not arbitrary categories.

Training of child hunting behavior by adult predators is impressive in many cases: fairly good matching to the child's abilities. But it mostly seems to be setting up a learning oppotunity for the child; actual imitation is vanishingly rare. Even the famous snow macaques learning to wash potatoes seems to have been serial re-invention; for example, it didn't spread any faster even as the number of washing monkeys grew.

Infant chimps stick twigs in holes, and follow adult chimps; those combined is enough for them to learn that fishing in some holes yields termites. "stimulus enhancement": animals are drawn to places where conspecifics are finding food, putting them in the same situation in which to learn how to get food.

"The things an animal is good at generally do not require three decades of ambiguous experiments to uncover." -- an indictment of "do apes think like humans" research.

Salt: A World History, Mark Kurlansky. Pretty engaging tome on the history of salt's use and extraction, and its legal or military entanglements. Trying to fund a government off of salt tax or monopoly has been common, and commonly hated, from Legalist China to British abuses in India. The US Civil War can partially be told as a history of fights over saltworks. The Chinese were drilling for brine and using by-product natural gas by 100 AD, and doing percussion drilling around 1100 AD, down below 3000 feet by 1835.

Eye of Cat, Roger Zelazny. Time-dilated alien-hunter Navajo, teleport booths, assassins, psi, Navajo shamanism... a weird book, I don't anticipate re-reading.

The Sharing Knife: [Beguilement and Legacy], Lois Bujold. I'd read this series in 2009, and am enjoying it again. Lakewalker powers and their fight against malices gives me RPG ideas, interacting with inspiration from Martin and Hobb and what I think of as "Wraiths and Rangers". Like much of Bujold, has many laugh-out-loud moments in an otherwise serious story.

Penric's Demon & Penric and the Shaman, Lois Bujold. Novellas set in her Five Gods universe, which I finally got paper copies of from the library. (Released as DRM ebooks, which I refuse to support.) Good, and funny, and I'd happily read more.

The Forgotten Beasts of Eld, Patricia McKillip. My first McKillip after all these years. Enjoyable, with a fairy-tale quality to the story and and writing.

_How not to be wrong: the power of mathematical thinking_, Jordan Ellenberg -- already reviewed. Also the only one of these I read on paper. The rest were ePubs on phone or laptop.

(re) means "re-read" in my private book list.
Uh, so I guess minor spoilers below.

_A Thousand Leagues of Wind, the Sky at Dawn_, Ono Fuyumi (Eugene Woodbury translator) (re) -- fan translation of the second Youko novel of the Twelve Kingdoms series. Still good overall, though the ePub I was reading had a lot of text-level errors. I used to send him corrections back when I followed his translations chapter by chapter... oh well. Still funny in several places.

_The Coin_, Muphrid (re) -- A Haruhi Suzumiya fanfic. At 100,000+ words it definitely qualifies as a novel. It captures the feel and tone of the original novels very well, even while making up a voice for Haruhi herself, who is not a POV character in the novels. So doubly impressive. And it's addressing "Haruhi learns she has powers", so triply so.

_A Study in Scarlet_, Arthur Conan Doyle -- The title is familiar, but the content was at best ambiguously so. Not sure if I never read it, or read some massively abridged version as a kid, or just forgot it that thoroughly. To my surprise, it's the first Holmes story, just over novel length (43K); I'd have thought it started as short stories. Serialization, I guess... Notes:
* Holmes wants to go listen to some woman violinist, Norman Neruda
* A ring is found and handed over to the first caller, no "can you describe it" check
* Villainous Mormons! Based on real rumors. Doyle apparently later said "oops" about that.
* Written 1887, set... estimates vary between 1881 and 1884. Putting Holmes stories on a timeline is a sanity-destroying project, apparently.
* I think it's noteworthy how Holmes and the police separately telegraph Cleveland, Ohio, in a rather casual way, to ask about their victim/suspects.

_Dragon Ship_, Lee and Miller. One of the later Liaden novels. I've now read all other than Trade Secret. As usual, a fun read; I think of these books as candy. I dimly recall, possibly erroneously, some fans griping that while the books are steeped in egalitarian romance, it was heteronormantive. No more! There was male-male in _Dragon in Exile_ or _Necessity's Child_, and female-female in this one. Probably in an earlier one I don't remember, given how Theo and Kara fall on each other. That said, I don't recall any same-sex lifemating, or marriage, vs. FWB.

Though if anyone in this series ends up with a harem, Theo seems a good candiate: Kara, Win Ton, and her ship. I guess her dad has posthumous bigamy in his future, too.

Yes, posthumous.

Hmm, I don't have an icon that's specifically bookish. Have a Hodgell instead.

***

Edit to add: f/t ratio!
Nonfiction: 0%

Fiction: a bit complicated
* female author, male translator. Fuyumi wrote the story, Eugene wrote all the words I read. Author hopefully dominates in influence, but.
* fanfic author of unhinted gender. Demographics of fanfic authors and people who hide their gender suggest female.
* Doyle is not complicated
* Neither is a married couple, really

Roughly even?

The POVs aren't:
* 3 girls
* 1 girl
* Watson
* Mostly Theo, but also Kamele and Miri (F), Bechimo, Win Ton, Clarence and Uncle (M).
f/t ~= 3/4 by book, or 5/6 by major character.

So, I finally finished the Lets Play of the Fate/stay night visual novel. That sentence probably made no sense to most of my readers, so let me expand:

Visual novel (VN): a Japanese thing I'm not that knowledgeable about. It could be as simple as a novel with graphics, simple animations, and sound (music and dialog). In practice, they usually have you make choices, so it's like a multimedia Choose Your Own Adventure (CYOA) novel. They're also thought of as a game -- and usually H (for hentai) or ero games, with some sexual content -- albeit ones with far more reading than playing. They also make use of running on a computer: as they're usually about relationships (as it were), you can accumulate relationship points with different characters, which affects branches later on, so it's a bit more complex than a CYOA book.

Fate/stay night: one particular VN by Kinoko Nasu. No one knows what the title means, if anything. The English translation has been described as 800,000 to a million words, twice as long as the Lord of the Rings. It has spawned an anime of the same name, which I'm told is not that good (though popular); a manga, about which I've heard nothing; a prequel light novel series called Fate/zero by Gen Urobuchi (basically canonized fanfic) which spawned an anime of its own; and most recently an anime Fate/Unlimited Blade Works based on the second 'route' of the VN, which I'll explain later. I've seen Fate/UBW (strong start, pacing lags later) and Fate/zero (just plain strong, though dark.)

I imagine that there might be some way to run the VN/game in a Windows environment on my Linux box, with the fan-made English translation files. But, that's a lot of work, and after playing the American-made Black Closet, I'm not sure "playing" this sort of game is really my thing. Happily, some heroic servant of the people made a walkthrough, aka a Lets Play, of the (fan-English) game, including all the bad endings and extras, but excluding the (allegedly bad) sex scenes. I started reading it over a month ago, on October 11th. Last night, I finished.

In addition to being long, the player had snarky comments about Nasu's "words word words", long (not that long) philosophical ramblings at times that didn't make tons of sense. So my ideas for snarky titles were Unlimited Verbiage (as above) or Unlimited Nasu Words, for a closer play on titles.

***

In addition to being longer than LotR, Fate/stay night could also be thought of as a trilogy, but in a different way. It's basically three different stories (also called 'routes') about the same characters and general events. Not three different perspectives on the same sequence of events (which could be interesting, and there is a bit of that in the prologue), but three different main sequences, branching based on early choices by the player. (I guess? I'm actually not sure if it branches solely on that; there seem to be aspects of three different related worlds, with differences that wouldn't depend on your choices. But, not sure, don't care enough to hunt it down.) Two of the routes also have two different good-ish endings each, and across all three routes there are 40 Dead Ends (you die) or Bad Ends (you otherwise fail). It's actually pretty channeled: you have to play the Fate route first, then the UBW route, then the Heaven's Feel route. Another reason I figured I might as well just read it.

So, was it good? It was engaging, at the very least: I didn't take a month to finish because I was slacking off in boredom. It does have flaws and confusing bits; never know what to attribute to the original author vs. the translator, I'd guess some of both. By the end of the UBW anime I was joking that the Holy Grail could punch holes in the plot, not just space.

It has more female roles than LotR, and strong ones. You play as Emiya Shirou (Japanese name order), a teenage boy, but interact heavily -- and not just sexually -- with various girls or women. Tohsaka Rin has been called the deuteragonist, as she plays a major role in all three routes, is the heroine (or love interest) of the second, and even gets to be the narrator in the prologue and one of the endings. (She's also an iconic character of tsundere, twintails, and zettai ryouki fashion... one of my early reactions to the UBW anime was "she's obviously tsundere, but I don't mind, because she's tsundere to *everything* and life in general, not just as a love interest.") And there's various other women, strong in combat, magic, and/or surviving a lot of crap. (And some of them do get a lot of crap to survive.)

It does pass the Bechdel test. I'm not sure it passes it often -- if two women are talking there's a good chance it'll be about Shirou, though "what an idiot" is more likely than "what a hunK" -- but it does.

Shirou's infamously sexist in some ways, like "girls shouldn't fight" despite the girls being able to fight on a completely different level than him, though someone on TV Tropes argues it's deeper than that: that he didn't want Saber fighting because she was *injured*, but (a) couldn't say that well (see: idiot) and (b) thought his life wasn't worth protecting. After barreling through the whole thing, I'm agnostic on the question, aka "I don't want to go back and re-read the first route to have an informed opinion."

The nature of the story allows it to plunder myth and legend at will. Sometimes brutally ("X was never like that!" people say, though I'm "eh, I can see it") but sometimes with research ("Y actually was described as a pretty boy").

It's inspirational: I imagine a lot of fanfic from it (though checking, not as much as I thought; it does rank higher in crossovers than on its own, which makes some sense), and have had some RPG inspirations of my own already. And I can see plundering some of the characters for future PCs. It definitely has memorable characters, of both sexes.

One cool thing for me is that at least three characters are basically Lawful Good (Saber is *officially* LG, she has a stat sheet in-universe!), with very different personalities, and none Lawful Stupid. (Shirou can be dumb but it's more your standard Shounen Stupid). I have an interest these days in how characters can be morally straight-and-narrow yet different people. (Nanoha is also good for that, and to a lesser degree Order of the Stick. Possibly superhero media in general, but that's less my thing.)

Basically, I had fun, and am glad I read it. Should you read it? I don't know if it's *that* good, objectively speaking. Would it be of interest if you hadn't seen related anime, as I had? I can't say.

I know I haven't described what it's *about*; there's a zillion other sources for that, though, so I was going for some underexploited angles, as well as "this was to my taste, if you like my taste you might too."

(Edit: one thing it's about is heroism and the sacrifices made for it. I'm not sure if it says anything deep or useful about it - -I've been more reading than thinking -- but that's definitely A Theme. Maybe even The Theme.)

The new icon is, of course, Rin, apparently giving one of her "now listen up, idiot" lectures.

by Amartya Kuma Sen. I read this back in 2006, just re-read it recently. It's overdue so I don't feel I have the time to do a review, I'll just drop in some points of interest.

As I think I mentioned, being able to know where various states this time around was cool. Go geography!

One of his repeated themes is that India has a long tradition of, if not democracy per se[1], then public discourse and religious tolerance. He hammers on India's religious diversity a lot: for like 1000 years India was more Buddhist than "Hindu"; Sanskrit has more atheistic and agnostic writing than any other classical language; there's doubt about Rama's divinity expressed within the Ramayana itself; Ashoka and (the Muslim) Akbar the Great both sponsored big public councils on religion, with Akbar laying out rules for civil discourse (and trying to create his own integrationist religion; didn't get far.)

Rabindranath Tagore sounds like a cool guy. Gandhi's contemporary, more secular and 'modern', big Bengali poet, picked up and dropped like a fad by Western writers of the time.

Another theme is how India has been exoticized, with Indians even coming to buy into Western exoticism of their own country. The West saw itself as scientific and rational and played up India's mysticism and religions, with many Indians doing the same; this ignores a lot of math and science that came out of India. He quotes Alberuni talking about Aryabhatha's heliocentric theory, from 499 CE. Another medieval Arab is quoted as saying India prided itself on three things: their method of reckoning, chess, and a collection of myths and fables. Voltaire later listed important things from India: numbers, backgammon, chess, "our first principles of geometry", and "the fables which have become our own."

Sen describes three approaches to India: curatorial, a la early British, closest to being objective and open-minded, but still drawn to the exotic and contrasts with Europe rather than comprehensive description; the magisterial, a la James Mill and other 19th century colonialists, condemning all of India without visiting it or reading any native languages; and the exoticist, going straight for what's "cool" and different.

There's a chapter on the Bomb, where he notes that it was a big security setback for India. Before, they had the strategically ambiguous 1970s tests to know that they could go nuclear, and 7x the conventional military of Pakistan. The BJP going openly nuclear gave Pakistan the political cover to do the same, leveling the playing field, and hampering India's ability to conventionally defend Kashmir (e.g. no more cross border raids.) And India still doesn't have a Security Council seat, perhaps because the existing permanent members don't want to create an incentive to blast your way onto the Council.

By absolute numbers, India is the third largest Muslim nation, just behind Pakistan and well ahead of Bangladesh. (Indonesia leads.)

The gender ratios of south and east India are fairly normal; it's north and west India that has the big deficit of girls and women, at birth and in general. He points out that he uses sub-Saharan Africa as his baseline, not just rich countries like Europe.

He notes the irony of Sanskrit and Vedic nativism when those came with the Aryan 'invasion', relative to the indigenous Dravidian and other populations.

One of Sen's professional themes has been how Indian famines stopped outright with democracy; OTOH, persistent hunger and other deprivations like illiteracy haven't been cured, with problems like teachers simply not showing up to low caste schools. Part of the food problem is the government buying up production above and beyond what's needed for famine buffering, to keep up food prices, which helps farmers (some of whom are poor) at the expense of all the other poor people.

Okay, that's it for me. A lot more to the book, but time presses.

[1] Though I've seen it said elsewhere that the historical Buddha was born in a republic, and a 'prince' only insofar as a republic's citizens are all 'sovereign', but this wasn't glorified enough for future hagiographers. Anyway, there's low-detail Greek attestation to various republics in India.

Democracy and Knowledge: Innovation and Learning in Classical Athens, Josiah Ober, 2008.

Classical Athens is famous for being a democracy, or 'democracy' given the status of slaves, women, and metics (resident non-citizens.) It's also been infamous throughout history for its grand mistakes, like trying Socrates, purging its generals, a disastrous attack on Syracuse, various atrocities, with these used to discredit democracy and 'mob rule' as if alternative forms of government never ever made mistakes.

Ober's book, 5th or so in a series of sort, argues that in fact Athens was supremely successful (militarily and economically) in a highly competitive environment for 200 years, a nigh superpower (my word) among city-states (polis in the singular, poleis plural), adapting to and recovering from multiple setbacks (conquest, loss of empire, imposition of oligarchy, plague killing 1/3 of the people, invading Syracuse) until finally squished by the Macedonian juggernaut that conquered Persia, Egypt, and everything up to the Indus. (And then by the Roman juggernaut that conquered that and everything else around. Point is, Athens didn't fail in particular, it was overwhelmed.)

And, he argues, it was so successful because of its democracy, not despite it. The costs were high: the putative cost of not having a central and expert command-and-control system, instead running things by groups of amateurs, and the explicit cost of running the democracy, as citizens were paid in the thousands for attending the Assembly, serving on juries, or acting as magistrates, along with the costs of public buildings and running a prototype welfare state. To be so pre-eminent despite such costs the benefits must have been even higher, particularly the benefits of marshaling public resources for the public good, generating and gathering knowledge for learning and innovation, legitimacy and incentives to align people to act in the public interest, and maintaining security and social stability.

(Addendum: one thing I forgot I think is worth adding: Athens ran a navy. Not just a militia of all the citizens showing up to be armed, but a standing navy with all the complexity that implies. The best navy around, imperial quality. As a strong democracy...)

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