Conversation

I’d just gotten my first credit card after landing in the US six months earlier. Exciting time, a first foray into this “e-commerce” thing I’d been hearing about.
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To be clear it’s not that the selections are cringe (all good books), but the lack of imagination they reveal.
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It wasn’t till several years later that my book selections showed any sign of maturing individual interests and tastes rather than just being an echo of what was popular in my milieu of “engineering grad students who like reading.”
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This is cringe for STEM grad students in the same way Ayn Rand is cringe for generic sophomore (though in that case the books are also bad, not just what it says about your tastes). I think I’d already read all these at that point from libraries, but wanted to buy copies to own.
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Nothing cringe about covering great bases before forays into the long tail of content, whose depths one cannot explore productively without the conceptual tools developed while engaging with content of known quality and sufficient penetration for meaningful discussion.
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I find the near Pavlovian kicking of Rand's writing to be lazy. The vast majority of people I have talked with about her neither know her history nor have read anything outside of Atlas Shrugged. Much like Nietzsche, Rand's work is all too often twisted by others.