Reviews and Comments

Was recommended this and it looks interesting.

I'm certainly liking the approach here. It also seems to suggest that rationality can be broader than, say, concepts like logical validity, and include other kinds of discursive games or dialogue goals that shape what constitutes "rational" (i.e., justified/justifiable or prescribed) speech. At the same time, it seems obvious that certain kinds of dialogue, or discursive games, are paradigmatic to us when discussing what reasoning looks like externally. The paradigmatic case still benefits from seeing how it is embedded into other speech activities. I feel like this is what would allow us to truly have the discussion, for example, about whether LLMs can reason or not.

Inadvertently I start reading new books when I'm still stewing on and note-taking other ones. It takes some time, especially with non-fiction, for some ideas to really sink in, and for me to make connections, let alone write them down or do an annotated bibliography. Well, I've undeniably started this one. That doesn't mean I'll be sure to finish it.

I really sank some time into this one compared to the other two or three books I've been reading on and off. Certainly am learning a lot. I remember getting up to musical scales last time with a different music theory book, and kind of hitting a wall of understanding. This book has helped get past that, gradually discerning what is at first ambiguity in the music vocabulary.

I found myself watching some music analysis videos on Youtube and understanding what was going on a lot more, although with a bit of mental lag. I'm almost done with this book and just need another stretch.

Finished the first chapter, covering "elementary rules of usage," which are a list of guiding tips that address common, more subtle mistakes in grammar, as well as uses of punctuation and syntactical sorting that promote clarity and precision. The next chapter seems to be on composition, which is larger-scale organization of writing.

This is a book I remember being assigned in my high school AP English courses, an early introduction given its been traditionally used in university/college classrooms. Rereading to remind myself of some key ways to clean up my writing.

Got through an overview of profit and loss, balance sheet, and cash flow statements. So far, this book uses and analyzes exemplary cases for its core financial concepts, in addition to introducing new subcategories and implicit formulas encompassed by or composed of those major concepts.

So far I find this book to be much better coverage of music theory concepts than Michael Hewitt's Music Theory for Computer Musicians. So far, gets straight to the point, with much clearer and simpler though powerful definitions of musical theory concepts than the roundabout overviews of the aforementioned book.

I just think some accounting knowledge might come in handy once in a while. Will be reading this lazily. Don't be surprised if it just stays in my list of books I'm currently reading indefinitely.

Finished reading this a few weeks ago. It was a good review of the different models of dissociation, although the book focused more on psychoanalysis / analytical psychology and did not incorporate any, or otherwise incorporated too few, neuroscientific studies of dissociation and dissociative symptoms. Its relationship to my own life could be felt in the context of my experience of incongruity in different areas in my life, that I've only become more aware of over time. My sense of self felt incoherent, vague, or fractured, and this was very much connected to my CPTSD triggers. It was insightful learning about the hypotheses of the genesis of structural dissociation at the level of personality, as it helped me trace my footsteps back to the kinds of strategies I used to handle trauma and how they relate to consequent structural dissociation or dissociative symptoms.

Had been reading this to get an overview of Podman, as I was planning to mess with and implement service containers for my VPS.

Have finally reached Unit 7 again, which covers the proof method for demonstrating argument validity. The proof method involves applying replacement rules and rules of inference on formulae to show that a conclusion does indeed follow from some set of premises with shared operands. Glad I finished taking notes on the previous Unit chapter so I can move on with reading.

Taking a break from reading books on gender, I guess, so am now reading a bit more of mesearch. Having a Dominican background, I thought it would be interesting to learn about the Taíno of Quisqueya (so-called "Hispaniola"), and some of the Spanish colonial history on the island, as an introduction to Dominican history.