48 Laws of Power sounds like quite the red flag of a book! It’s usually quite hard to know if someone begrudgingly takes on zero-sum worldviews for tactical reasons or if they’re predisposed / looking for an excuse to be cunning, but an announcement like this (in the form of just being excited about this book) seems like a clear surrender of anyone’s obligation to act cooperatively toward you.
Yes! To be clear, reading or many forms of recommending is not the red flag, the curiosity or DADA-like view of the value prop of books like that make sense to me. The specific way it comes across in the passage on the Adorian Deck saga definitely makes hiding behind “defensive cynicism” very weak and sounds almost dishonest. The broader view is more charitable toward Emerson in this particular way (see this subthread).
This was twisted to make me seem like a villain. I recommended it as a book specifically to read to be able to defend against unethical people who use those tactics offensively—Defense Against the Dark Arts.
My comment was still when I was mid reading OP. Earlier in the essay there’s an account of the Adorian Deck situation, then the excerpts from the book, which is as far as I got before I wrote this comment. Later in OP does the case for that Emerson is interested in literature like this for DADA reasons become clearer and defensible.
For commenting before I got to the end of the post, I apologize.
Thanks for updating this! This points at something that concerned me about the structure of the original post—Alice or Chloe accuse me of something, but (in the event it was actually covered in my one conversation with Ben) my response to it (or, rather, Ben’s paraphrase) might only be included 8,000 words later, and still likely missing important context I would want to add.
48 Laws of Power sounds like quite the red flag of a book! It’s usually quite hard to know if someone begrudgingly takes on zero-sum worldviews for tactical reasons or if they’re predisposed / looking for an excuse to be cunning, but an announcement like this (in the form of just being excited about this book) seems like a clear surrender of anyone’s obligation to act cooperatively toward you.
48 Laws of Power, along with Robert Greene’s other books, are fairly popular, especially around some entrepreneur / hustle culture circles.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Greene_(American_author)
Many top books deal with controversial topics. For example, The Prince, or Lolita.
I’d be hesitant to update much on someone’s reading choices like this.
Yes! To be clear, reading or many forms of recommending is not the red flag, the curiosity or DADA-like view of the value prop of books like that make sense to me. The specific way it comes across in the passage on the Adorian Deck saga definitely makes hiding behind “defensive cynicism” very weak and sounds almost dishonest. The broader view is more charitable toward Emerson in this particular way (see this subthread).
This was twisted to make me seem like a villain. I recommended it as a book specifically to read to be able to defend against unethical people who use those tactics offensively—Defense Against the Dark Arts.
My comment was still when I was mid reading OP. Earlier in the essay there’s an account of the Adorian Deck situation, then the excerpts from the book, which is as far as I got before I wrote this comment. Later in OP does the case for that Emerson is interested in literature like this for DADA reasons become clearer and defensible.
For commenting before I got to the end of the post, I apologize.
Thanks for updating this! This points at something that concerned me about the structure of the original post—Alice or Chloe accuse me of something, but (in the event it was actually covered in my one conversation with Ben) my response to it (or, rather, Ben’s paraphrase) might only be included 8,000 words later, and still likely missing important context I would want to add.
‘use those tactics offensively’ Did you intend to imply it’s sometimes okay to use these tactics defensively, and you should learn how to do so?