https://www.amazon.com/So-Who-John-Galt-Anyway-ebook/dp/B07YCY22W8
Chapter 3 is much better than the first two. The biggest difference is it focuses on Rand’s writing. The first two chapters had a lot to say about society and Rand’s detractors. That put the author’s tribalism on full display.
Chapter 3 still has writing flaws like frequent Objectivist cliches, exaggerations, imprecision, superficial comments and disorganization. It’d really help if Tracinski used section headings within chapters – primarily to better track what’s going on in his own mind and make his writing follow an outline, and only secondarily to guide readers. The exaggerations are less frequent than in the first two chapters when he was fighting with the outgroup.
Although many comments on Rand read as repeating cliches to me – kinda like how people like to repeat the slogans of their tribe – some of the main points in the chapter are more interesting.
The first paragraph of chapter 4 is flaming the outgroup (incorrectly, IMO) instead of discussing Rand’s writing. Fortunately it switches to talking about the book after that. The second paragraph calls Galt the “main hero” of the Atlas Shrugged (a view I’ve criticized).
Overall chapter 4 is OK. It’s pretty basic (nothing particularly interesting like chapter 3 had), but when Tracinski talks about the Rand’s books he isn’t too bad. The last few pages go back to praising the ingroup and attacking the outgroup, though, so they’re awful.
Chapter 5 opens by talking about Galt, not people who disagree with Objectivism. It starts talking about basic stuff again. When I think of a guide to Atlas Shrugged, I expect it to help one interpret what AS says, as well as study or practice AS stuff, so that one can learn it in more detail. This guide, however, seems to be written for people who barely remember most of the factual content of AS. It gives a lot of reminders of the plot, with pretty basic interpretation. That actually makes some sense, though. Most fans and readers of AS probably do know the plot a lot worse than Tracinski and need this kind of basic help. Other types of basic help are missing though. There’s no textual analysis.
It’s interesting to me how much Tracinski cares about physical appearance, voice tone and mannerisms – and expects everyone else to, too. That is not how I look at the world. Understanding a character in a novel, for me, does not mean having a picture of them in my head. I think I’m the outlier here. I know most people care a great deal about appearances. They judge people a lot by their clothes, physical appearance and fashion. And I’ve been thinking recently about how much video games are art (particularly visual, but also sound effects, musics and voice acting, as well as stories) and are judged as art. It’s not just that people enjoy seeing “cool” stuff or are willing to pay real money to buy cosmetic items. What I’ve figured out is that most of them can’t really math and are awful with numbers. So how do they interpret the skills/abilities of video game heroes and enemies? By what they look like, not by understanding the numbers. This is visible sometimes when the numbers and appearance don’t match – I routinely see people believe the appearance instead of the actual numbers, and fail to notice. This is one of the reasons people are OK with easy games – they can feel accomplished for winning, even if the numbers make the game easy (e.g. the enemies have low hit points), as long as the visual art makes the enemies look challenging.
Mid chapter 5, Trancinski gets distracted by mocking some people’s interpretations of Atlas Shrugged, rather than focusing on the book. I haven’t been sharing details but I’ll give one. Going into this mode of fighting with other people is so distracting for Tracinski that he loses the ability to count. He writes:
In roughly his first two pages of dialogue, he [John Galt] never speaks a sentence longer than six words: “I have known you for many years.”
That’s seven words.
Tracinski also lost the ability to quote. The book actually says (I checked two digital versions):
“I’ve known you for many years.”
So the numeric count is wrong about the words immediately following it, and the quote is wrong, and both errors get past Tracinski. But this doesn’t actually stand out given all the other errors Tracinski makes. It’s just one more example. I thought it was notable because it happened right when he switched his focus to fighting with people, and I’ve been observing how, when he does that, what he says is significantly lower quality.
This also reminds me of DD misquotes. It seems like some of his misquotes come from using a quote, then changing it while editing – basically editing it in the same way he’d edit his own text. That’s one possible explanation of how this error happened (so the count was correct when first written and was never reconsidered after editing the quote). I don’t understand how people could edit text in quotes and think that’s OK, rather than fully leaving quoted text alone during editing passes, but I’m suspicious that they do it.
A friend suggested to me that some misquoting could be due to using tools like Grammerly. That makes sense. I wrote about it:
Some misquotes could be due to misusing software and bad software design. You could take something like a grammar checking software and click “change all” and thereby become a misquoter. In fact, DD wrote his own custom software which is likely capable of causing misquotes because it has features to do automated mass changes to a book (it also crashed after I tested it briefly) (however I’m not sure if you’re supposed to ever save changes made in Concordance, or only use it as a viewer). One could also use find/replace or even spellcheck (if the original quote has a misspelled word or a non-dictionary word, then spellcheck could cause a misquote. this is a particular issue with quotes of old books or foreign language quotes). Software features like this don’t differentiate between quotes and non-quotes, so they can result in changes to quoted text. Even if you don’t use a “change all” type automation, these kinds of tools can lead to skimming through a long book and quickly making small changes to many parts without rereading the surrounding context. Like you use a “find” or a “go to next possible grammar or spelling error” or button to quickly review dozens of things in a text, it’d be pretty easy to be looking at some words, and edit them, without reading the whole paragraph and realizing they’re within a quote. Concordance does the same thing: it encourages you to rapidly review many different small parts of a book and one of the purposes is to make detail edits. Grammarly will show you suggested changes, one by one, rapidly, without even a full sentence of context, and it has a button to accept the change, so it’d be easy to introduce misquotes (and miscounting too) by using it because it encourages changing words without rereading the whole sentence, paragraph or passage that the words are in. I’m doubtful that this kind of software usage issue is the full explanation of these sorts of misquotes, but I now fear it is a cause of misquotes for many, many authors.
Another thing I noticed about many of Tracinski’s errors is that he makes them in passing while speaking briefly about something. His focus is elsewhere. He has some philosophical point he wants to make, which he’s trying to explain at length. He uses sub-points which he talks about briefly. The sub-points are often wrong but he never tries to analyze them; he just assumes them in service of his other goal which is where his attention is.
Overall, my impression is Tracinski is worse when dealing with disagreement with people, and better when writing thoughts/analysis that makes sense to him and isn’t meant to disagree with anyone. He’s bad at dealing with dissent or clashes of ideas where he doesn’t respect the other side. If two ideas in his own head clash, and they both seem reasonable to him, maybe he handles it better? Maybe if he disagrees with someone but thinks their position is reasonable, he handles that better too? idk. I don’t recall offhand examples in the book so far where he discusses a disagreement while respecting the other side.
I’ve noticed there’s something I disagree with about how Tracinski uses quotes but I wasn’t clear on what it was. I think I just consciously figured a big piece of it. He uses quotes to illustrate his points but doesn’t analyze them. He thinks they speak for themselves.
I thought this quote was particularly revealing:
This is what I mean by Galt representing so radically new a vision of man that it can take the reader a few attempts to get a sense of who he really is.
Tracinski thinks regular characters are understood after one reading of a book, and Galt is way more complicated so don’t feel bad if you don’t understand him after one reading – 2-4 readings is normal to understand his real nature.
Tracinski thinks the world is much less complex than I think it is. He thinks much less effort is needed to understand things than I think. Even when he’s saying it’s super hard, he then suggests what I consider a low amount of effort and thinks that should work (even for a regular person, not some great thinker).
This fits with the book as a whole, which is full of detail/precision type errors because Tracinski doesn’t look at anything in adequate detail and then thinks he’s done.
I finished ch. 5.