We Are Not Saved

I.
When I pivoted a month ago I stopped posting book reviews to this space, and started posting them to Notes. My idea was that I would then do one long book review every month and also link to all the reviews I had done through Notes, so that anyone who was really interested in my take on the great historical novel, Ivanhoe, or alternatively the queer, postmodern New Testament essay collection, Sex and the Single Savior could see that I had in fact opined on both and click through on whichever one actually interested them.1
That is still the plan, but on top of that I have the urge to use this space to ruminate. Whenever I ask someone to critique my writing they always say I do too much rumination, but what do they know?!? Sure, maybe they went to Yale or Notre Dame.2 But do they understand the public's deep yearning for kidney stone stories set in Edinburgh?
...
-------------------------------
After the Fall: From the End of History to the Crisis of Democracy, How Politicians Broke Our World
Author: Ian Shapiro
Year Published: 2026
320 Pages
Type: A compilation of thirty-five years of geopolitical regrets, like an old man looking back at the job he didn't take, or the girl he should have married—only the job was the Partnership for Peace and the girl was Russia.5 The old man is proud of a handful of things, like when he didn't sack Baghdad in 1991.6
-------------------------------

While everyone else is talking about AI, I'm going to engage in an exegesis of a single verse in the Old Testament, and yet somehow AI will still sneak in!

Is there some deeper meaning to the traffic cone on Sherlock's head? Or is it just silly vandalism? Most people seemed to think it was the latter, but I think it was a hidden symbol of some mystery. How could it not be?
I.
June 25 was the tenth anniversary of my blog. I understand that, traditionally, an anniversary post would come out on the actual day, or at least the same week, but I blew past the occasion without even realizing it. And then, even when I did realize it, I was too busy with other stuff to jump on it. In fact I haven't posted anything since July 3. I must have been overcome by the patriotic fervor of our nation's 250th anniversary.1
As a better person than me has said, it's self-indulgent, and even unseemly to dwell overly long on one's recent gap in writing. But this is destined to be a very self-indulgent post so I'm going to ignore her (obviously wise) advice, and explain the gap in great detail. July 3 was two days after my first experience passing a kidney stone. Then two days after that (July 5) I went on a week-long road-trip around the Pacific Northwest.

This was my entry to the 2026 ACX Book Review Contest. Given that it was, sadly, judged inadequate to the high standards of the ACX readership, I must now inflict it on you. Hopefully, with your obviously lower standards, you'll enjoy it. It is ridiculously long. These warnings aside, I would urge you to at least read parts one and two.
The Knowledge Machine: How Irrationality Created Modern Science
By: Michael Strevens
0. Why This Book?
Out of the tens of millions of books ever written over the centuries, why review this one?
Because science is the secret to the creation of the modern world and this book holds the secret to the creation of science. 
In particular, it answers the question: why didn't modern science develop any sooner? Why didn't the Chinese, the Greeks, the Romans, or the Arabs develop internal combustion engines, arrive at the germ theory of disease, or send a man to the Moon? 
The answer it gives is surprising, and right there in the title. Everyone thinks that the essence of science is open inquiry, but it's really a deliberately narrow procedural straitjacket. Modern science has many irrational qualities. It requires us to wall off our thinking. Natural philosophy was never going to succeed as long as it included philosophy. Philosophy is deep. Science only works if it's shallow. 
Strevens is not the first to delve into the workings of science. Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn trod similar ground, and they'll make an appearance, but Strevens incorporates the best of both. He keeps Popper's focus on empiricism, while better describing how actual scientists work. And he acknowledges Kuhn's assertion of paradigmatic thinking, but shows how this gets channeled into productive public argument. 
By showing how science works, Strevens also demonstrates how it might stop working. And once you understand the components of the "Knowledge Machine" it would appear to be in greater peril than most people realize. This is why I chose to review this book out of all the books ever written: science needs saving, and with it the rest of the world.
I. My Father, the Physics Teacher
.....

I.
If you don't live in Utah, you may not have heard that the Great Salt Lake is in trouble. It's been rapidly dwindling in size and depth, and while it's never going to disappear entirely (though look at the Aral Sea), there are always issues when an environment goes through a rapid transformation. The big worry is that the lake will become so salty that even brine shrimp and brine flies can no longer survive. This would eliminate a major source of food for migrating birds, while at the same time a shrinking lake also removes the wetlands they use for mid-migration habitat. There are other potential problems as well, but you get the idea.
 
I'm old enough to remember when we were having the opposite problem, when the lake was so high that it threatened I-80 (the stretch west of SLC), the SLC airport, and various communities and businesses perched around the edge of the lake. This was in the mid-80s and my father worked at one of those businesses. This particular business would take lake brine, pump it into shallow ponds, allow the water to evaporate away, and then harvest the minerals left behind. Their big cash product was potash, which is used in fertilizers. The rising lake threatened to flood their carefully managed pond system, so it was a real ongoing crisis for my father back then. 
After a couple of years of hard fighting, the lake eventually won. The outer dike was breached and lake water flooded into the pond system, completely wiping out the productive capacity of the business. It was a dark day...