[This is one of the finalists in the 2024 book review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. I’ll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you’ve read them all, I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked]

To a first approximation, there are a million books about World War II. Why should you care about How the War Was Won (hereinafter “HtWWW”) by Phillips Payson O’Brien?

• It provides a new, transformative view of the conflict by focusing on production of key goods and what affected that production instead of the ups and downs of battles at the front.

• That particular lens used can (and should) be applied outside of just World War II, and you can get a feel for how that might be done by reading HtWWW.

• I have lectured about World War II and read many, many books about it. I have never texted friends more excerpts of a book than this one.

I have some criticisms of HtWWW, but if the criticisms dissuade you from reading the book, I will have failed. These complaints are like tut-tutting Einstein’s penmanship.

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-how-the-war-was

[original post here]

Table Of Contents

I. Comments About Master And Slave Morality
II. Comments By People Named In The Post
III. Comments Making Specific Points About One Of The Thinkers In The Post
IV. Other Comments

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-nietzsche

Some commenters on the recent post accused me of misunderstanding the Nietzschean objection to altruism.

We hate altruism, they said, not because we’re “bad and cruel”, but because we instead support vitalism. Vitalism is a moral system that maximizes life, glory and strength, instead of maximizing happiness. Altruism is bad because it throws resources into helping sick (maybe even dysgenic) people, thus sapping our life, glory, and strength.

In a blog post (linked in the original post, discussed at length in the comments), Walt Bismarck compares the ultimate fate of altruism to WALL-E: a world where morbidly obese humans are kept in a hedonistic haze by robot servitors (although the more typical example I hear is tiling the universe with rats on heroin, which maximizes a certain definition of pleasure). In contrast, vitalism imagines a universe alive with dynamism, heroism, and great accomplishments.

My response: in most normal cases, altruism and vitalism suggest the same solutions.

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/altruism-and-vitalism-as-fellow-travelers