SneerClub

Since Adam Becker apparently has a new book out that lays into TESCREAL-ism and Silicon Valley ideology, I'm going to give an anti-recommendation regarding his prior book, What Is Real?, which is about quantum mechanics. Unlike the Sequences, it's not cult shit. Instead, the ambience is more like Becker began with the physicist's typical indifference to history and philosophy, and he somehow maintained that indifference all the way through writing a book about history and philosophy. The result fairly shimmers with errors. He bungles the description of the Einstein--Podolsky--Rosen thought experiment, one of the foundational publications on quantum entanglement and a major moment in the "what is quantum physics all about?!" conversation. He just fails to report correctly what the Einstein--Podolsky--Rosen paper actually says. He makes a big deal about how "hardly any women or people who aren't white" appear in the story he's told, but there were plenty of people he could have included and just didn't — Jun Ishiwara, Hendrika Johanna van Leeuwen... — so he somehow made physics sound even more sexist and racist than it actually is. He raises a hullaballoo about how Grete Hermann's criticism of von Neumann was unjustly ignored, while not actually explaining what Grete Hermann's view of quantum mechanics was, or that she was writing about quantum entanglement before Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen! His treatment of Hermann still pisses me off every time I think about it.