Category Archives: worklife

Entrepreneurship as Social Evil

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[cross-​​posted from non­trapre­neur]

Little-​​e entre­pre­neur­ship is the charm­ing eccen­tric­ity that dri­ves busi­ness inno­va­tion in our cul­ture and economy.

It’s a will­ing­ness to accept risks that oth­ers would shy away from, in exchange for even­tual rewards nobody else can see.

It’s the Ear­li­est Adopter’s enthu­si­asm for a fad that doesn’t yet exist.

It’s the heady taste of hubris that helps you move step past think­ing I could do that, and actu­ally give it a try.

It’s an inor­di­nate will­ing­ness to ignore risks, to forge ahead, to plot a course into the unknown. On a promise.

Big-​​E Entre­pre­neur­ship is the cul­tural fetishiza­tion of that risk-​​seeking behav­ior, mag­i­cal think­ing and obses­sion. It’s taught in busi­ness schools. It’s the sole focus of some eco­nomic devel­op­ment insti­tu­tions, it gets investors’ hearts rac­ing, it’s the stated core of our government’s hope for the national future.

This car­toon “Entre­pre­neur­ship” has become a per­va­sive eco­nomic fetish.

Why is that a prob­lem? Look:

Some young women are nat­u­rally beau­ti­ful, and also nat­u­rally thin. Our culture’s fetishiza­tion of Thin Beauty has fos­tered deadly anorexia, poor self-​​images among nor­mal women, the sex­u­al­iza­tion of chil­dren, drug abuse, and more.

A real cot­tage in the coun­try is unusual, and can also be pretty and rest­ful. Our culture’s fetishiza­tion of Sub­ur­ban Life has fos­tered an indus­try of chem­i­cal lawn treat­ments, greige devel­op­ments at the edge of every city where the win­dows never open, social iso­la­tion, mort­gage debt, finan­cial cri­sis, the neces­sity of dri­ving every­where, and more.

It’s reward­ing and healthy to play sports. Our culture’s fetishiza­tion of Pro­fes­sional Sports has built media empires and lob­by­ing com­pa­nies, offered false promise to dis­ad­van­taged youth, encour­aged drug abuse by even school-​​age ath­letes, glossed over the effects on city cen­ters, and more.

We’ve fetishized com­merce and craft into shop­ping mall sprawl. We’ve fetishized the com­plex consensus-​​bulding of pol­i­tics into talk­ing points and intran­si­gent argu­ment. We’ve fetishized com­bat and national defense into gun sports.

In the same way these other unusual but nat­ural extremes have given birth to social evils, the notion of big-​​E Entre­pre­neur­ship depends on over-​​exaggeration and over-​​generalization of nat­ural but unusual extremes: the little-​​e entrepreneur’s eccen­tric­i­ties of risk-​​seeking, and mag­i­cal think­ing and obsession.

We’re told we can be “entre­pre­neur­ial” church mem­bers, “entre­pre­neur­ial” social activists, “entre­pre­neur­ial” artists, “entre­pre­neur­ial” employees.

Think about that. What does that really mean?

You don’t need Angels or VC to change the world. They need you. They need you to rush ahead. They need lots of you in their port­fo­lios; your rare returns are their sole resource. You are their crop. You are their slot machines.

You don’t need to mon­e­tize every­thing, or promise ten-​​fold returns. Finan­cial cap­i­tal is not the only kind. A project can make you rich in social cap­i­tal, intel­lec­tual cap­i­tal, indi­vid­ual capital.

You don’t need to grow for­ever, or to burn down to bank­ruptcy. Maybe what you’ve done so far is enough. Even if you dis­ap­point busi­ness cul­ture because you’ve started a “lifestyle busi­ness”, at least you still have a life to live.

You don’t need to think of peo­ple as tools and resources. Peo­ple are peo­ple. This insti­tu­tion you’ve started must be for the peo­ple who com­prise it, more than they are expected to work for it. Never lose sight of the fact that it is an it.

You never have just one goal. Your ven­ture is not your world. Even the most obses­sive investor will admit that reduc­ing risk is as much a goal of any ven­ture as increas­ing returns. When you begin to believe some sub­set of “win­ning” is the only goal, when your investors drive you to forge ahead at all costs, when your instinct is to cut away the parts of your life that other peo­ple think are impor­tant just to make it to launch? That’s when you’ve become a dan­ger to your­self, and to society.

Big-​​E Entre­pre­neur­ship is just like Hol­ly­wood and the NBA and the Bill­board charts and the bridal mag­a­zines. You are not going to make next Google or Face­book. Your idea isn’t as orig­i­nal as you imag­ine, your skills aren’t all you need, your beau­ti­ful office in a fash­ion­able ZIP code won’t make your prod­uct any better.

And those suc­cess­ful, rich peo­ple you find egging you on, “advis­ing” you and “sup­port­ing” you and “con­nect­ing” you?

They’re just as caught up in the illu­sion as you are. Pity them. It was their luck that got them through the maze. Not their skill, not their men­tors, not their investors, not their “best peo­ple”, and cer­tainly not The Sys­tem as a whole.

The cul­ture rein­forces them at every turn. Is it any coin­ci­dence they’re sur­rounded by all the evi­dence they need to keep believ­ing that their illu­sion is uni­ver­sal and valid? They’re swim­ming in suc­cess. They see evi­dence of the Sys­tem of Accepted Busi­ness Prac­tices and Rit­u­als work­ing around them, all the time.

Because they have arranged life so they never see it fail. They’re not allowed to see any­thing else as success.

Where are the Big-​​E Entre­pre­neurs whose ven­tures didn’t grow? Didn’t hit it big? They were torn down for parts and raw mate­ri­als, skillsets and cap­i­tal, and dumped right back into hop­per to be fed into the machine.

Who are you? If you define your­self by your project, I don’t think you’ve answered the question.

What do you want? If you only men­tion your project, you’re a liar.

What are the risks? If you don’t know, I can start your list with this one: “I don’t know the risks”.

What will be enough? If you don’t have any idea, I’ll guar­an­tee that “more” isn’t the only answer.

What will you sac­ri­fice? If you didn’t say “myself”, then take a moment to con­sider the Big-​​E Entre­pre­neur­ship com­plex out there, wait­ing and ready, yearn­ing to drop you into the hopper.

You’re a pile of raw materials.

Port­fo­lio filler for investors.

Pro­mo­tional mate­r­ial for your city.

Future donat­ing alumni of your University.

The cover of unsold magazines.

Oh yeah, and you did some stuff once. What was that thing, that com­pany you did back when?

That was your vision? Huh. Who knew?

What is your academic paper for?

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No, really: Why did you write it? Why did you stay up two days before the extended dead­line, typ­ing furi­ously and graph­ing these arbitrary-​​seeming charts and wrestling with the lay­out soft­ware and the pub­lish­ers’ vanilla tem­plate so you could wait for some of your peers (read: “bet­ters”) to thumb through it desul­to­rily, look­ing for obvi­ous gram­mat­i­cal gaffes or mis­spellings, only then to rub­ber stamp it? Why did you feel the need to travel to [rel­a­tively dis­tant for­eign city] to stand in this ill-​​fitting suit and mum­ble about it in front of this not-​​quite-​​reconciled slide deck which, counter to most of our under­stand­ing of how com­put­ers work, is actu­ally out of order and miss­ing some pic­tures?

Was it to inform us? The easy targets—your the­sis advi­sor and chair­man and dean and edi­tor and even unto your spouse and parents—they already pretty much know all they need to about this stuff. Every­body out­side that social cir­cle within tele­phone reach, odds are, doesn’t care.

Was it to pro­mote your field? Past your the­sis advisor/​chairman/​dean/​editor, who actu­ally has read every word of your paper?

Not I.

Was it to travel? To sell some­thing? To demon­strate to what­ever com­mit­tee cur­rently con­trols your life that you have spent the last few months “pro­duc­tively”? To build your CV, or make a splash in the thrilling field of [your field here]? To get your next job?

If you wanted to inform us, why didn’t you just tell us? All of us. There is email. There are blogs, avail­able for free. Tell us.

Have you con­sid­ered that you are trans­form­ing the library (pos­si­bly, but rarely, libraries) where the scarce phys­i­cal copies of your work will be stored into mere County Cour­t­houses, where birth and death records are main­tained in per­pe­tu­ity for legal rea­sons and the occa­sional ama­teur genealogist?

If you wanted to build your field, or tout and expand your par­tic­u­lar spe­cialty, why not just tell the peo­ple most likely to adopt your inno­va­tions? This thing here, it smacks of spam; it says you can­not be both­ered to iden­tify col­leagues, and instead must rely on ran­dom suck­ers. By telling this to five inter­ested, salient peo­ple, I bet you could spread the word in a way that would ensure its dominance.

Or have you not both­ered to learn the other influ­en­tial and recep­tive peo­ple in your own field? Think on that a moment.

If you wanted all along to do some­thing else you’re not telling me… hey, I’m will­ing to believe and sup­port that. Your paper was a ticket, in that case, or an adver­tise­ment. And that modal­ity has a long and thriv­ing pub­lish­ing his­tory in the sci­ences and in engi­neer­ing fields around the world.

This paper then is a piece of instant ephemera, isn’t it? After you’ve trav­eled, got­ten your next job, patented that cool new wid­get: this is the ticket stub in the pub­lic scrap­book, the snap­shot they make of you and your one-​​time boyfriend at the top of the log flume in the amuse­ment park, and offer to sell you at the exit.

Could you maybe stamp that at the top? “I had to write this down so they would give me $175 so I could afford on my wages to travel to some far off place and broaden myself, and maybe have some fun, by meet­ing oth­ers just like me.” “I had to prove to some dude that I could ape his sen­si­bil­i­ties.” “I had to get the fifth entry on this scav­enger hunt of a resumé.”

Those might be good things to place in the paper itself, maybe between the abstract and the use­less key­word list, for the casual reader’s benefit.

Or did you write this with delight? Delight in your work, in your progress, in your field and its implications?

Did you write it to tell me, not in these fuck­ing gran­ite stone steps of words, worn dan­ger­ously round by years of pas­sive use by monks through the ages, but in poetry? In your choice of haiku, psalm, pentameter?

So where are you, in this?

Did you write it to efface your­self? To blend in against the throngs of nearly iden­ti­cal agents of abstraction?

Mm hmm. I think you maybe did.

Yeah. That worked.

Oth­er­wise, do this: Sit down now, hav­ing writ­ten this thing, this scrap, this bone that implies no dinosaur but rather a com­mon cow, and start again. Make me laugh. Make the god­damned hairs stand up on my arms. These are words, which do not exist in a cul­tural vac­uum but instead reach across the ages in links to Plato and Byron and David Fos­ter Wal­lace, to Tolkien and Dar­win and Jesus Christ. To nov­el­ists, poets, essay­ists, preach­ers, and all man­ner of com­mu­ni­ca­tors of delight.

Where are you, in these words? No, wait—I don’t really care. Where is the delight in these words? Make me see that, and you may follow.

You are not allowed to keep delight to your­self. Moron. This, above all the other things, is the thing the Acad­emy has lied you into mis­un­der­stand­ing, with its delayed grat­i­fi­ca­tions and post­pone­ments of your life: Delight, kept secret, always fades to nothing.

You are being trained to disappear.

But I think maybe you, this reader, because you have made it this far, you still have a gleam of curios­ity in you, some spark of delight left burn­ing and warm­ing you.

Say it. Invoke the muse we still pos­sess, out here in the world. Say it in too many words (though care­fully cho­sen), be too long (there are no page lim­its), be wordy, be florid, and above all be engag­ing.

More peo­ple will read your work, given some fla­vor or some spice or some inter­est and even one god­damned joke—per­haps even a scrap of that body-​​filling awe that drew you to this work yourself—than will ever sit squirm­ing in the chair at the con­fer­ence, or dive deeper than your pub­lished abstract.

Oth­er­wise, you and your delight are lost. Look at the mar­riage and death records in the County Cour­t­house, and tell me where you see the love, the grief, the joy and pain in them.

Your paper is headed to the cour­t­house of your scant soci­ety even now. I will not see it again.

Make us another one. Build your­self one in which you can live.

This con­ven­tion of unread­able, dis­tant, self-​​effacing, four-​​page, two-​​column, Times Roman fact is not a bow to “real­ity”, you know. Real­ity doesn’t give a damn what you say about it, or how many words or pages you use.

It is, rather, the very mech­a­nism by which your career makes you its prey. The sound of droning-​​but-​​succinct aca­d­e­mic “prose” is the sound of your soul’s bones being chewed by your Institution.

Those other words, the long-​​form prose, the writ­ing skills you should have learned in your “breadth” train­ing, when instead some­body made you start focus­ing on your spe­cialty: those are the only sword you are afforded, with which you might, pos­si­bly cut your way free.

Oth­er­wise: you’re institution-​​poop for sure, child.

Sing, or fade. Sing, or die.

Write bet­ter.

Now.

Telegraphic reviews of my overdue library books with links to Amazon in them; you figure it out

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Books over­due because I’ve been busy, but worth not­ing any­way because they’re worth noting.

  • I got one: Sin­clair Lewis Arrow­smith
     One of the best ear­li­est real­ist exam­i­na­tions of the moti­va­tions and lifestyle of Amer­i­can aca­d­e­mic engi­neers (includ­ing in that fold “doc­tors”, as they should be, now and in the 1900s), Mid­west­ern­ism (aka “Bab­bit­tism”), and the dif­fer­ences between our stated cul­tural expec­ta­tions and the implicit ones we gen­er­ate by the blind deci­sions we take in our lives.
  • To Ref­er­ence: Clay­ton M. Chris­tensen The Innovator’s Dilemma
     Corporations—and by exten­sion insti­tu­tions of other types, like “med­i­cine” and “the Academy”—obtain the well-​​deserved rep­u­ta­tion as logy, stilted piles of dead wood because of their suc­cess, not despite it. Christensen’s obser­va­tion, cun­ningly masked as com­mon sense, seems to be that large insti­tu­tions can­not pur­sue inno­va­tions because their adap­tive moves are slower and more expen­sive for them than for smaller, new insti­tu­tions. In other words: the big­ger (and more suc­cess­ful) they are, the more likely to be replaced with­out even noticing.
  • Meh: Jack E. Graver Count­ing on Frame­works: Math­e­mat­ics to Aid the Design of Rigid Struc­tures (Dol­ciani Math­e­mat­i­cal Expo­si­tions)
     One of many math­e­mat­i­cal “recre­ations” books I’ve been thumb­ing lately, as we gear up to build a genetic pro­gram­ming inno­va­tion engine that will be able to make “math­e­mat­i­cal dis­cov­er­ies”. Graver’s mono­graph focuses on flexibility/​rigidity of two– and three-​​dimensional frame­works (sta­t­ics, essen­tially) and the dis­crete math and neat lit­tle the­o­rems that con­nect (get it? a pun!) graph the­ory, lin­ear alge­bra and engi­neer­ing design prin­ci­ples. One would want it to be a bit more “pop­u­lar­ized”, but it’s of inter­est as a land­mark for the future, at least.
  • To Buy: Ross Hons­berger More Math­e­mat­i­cal Morsels (Dol­ciani Math­e­mat­i­cal Expo­si­tions)
     This is more along the lines of what I was look­ing for: a few dozen very inter­est­ing, solv­able prob­lems that cross the line from “brain teaser” to “advanced home­work”. Don’t get me wrong—I’m not sit­ting here with a graph pad and a pen­cil try­ing to do make­work and proofs; I’m using these books to research the way we spec­ify (and mis-​​specify) com­plex prob­lems. Mostly plane geom­e­try, num­ber the­ory and a bit of (sim­ple) prob­a­bil­ity the­ory, the Morsels series seems to be prob­lems culled from those Math Olympiads I was never smart enough for, and var­i­ous ama­teur math jour­nals. Will buy because there are very few proofs; math­e­mat­i­cally rig­or­ous proofs are, to shine some clar­i­fy­ing light on my long-​​standing opin­ion, over­whelm­ingly a waste of the time of both the prover and his reader, since they are merely the algo­rith­mic dis­guis­ing of ini­tial assump­tions by wrap­ping them in hack­neyed rit­u­al­ized maneu­vers that decrease one’s cru­cial abil­ity to ques­tion the orig­i­nal crap you started from.
  • To Buy: Vic­tor Klee and Stan Wagon Old and New Unsolved Prob­lems in Plane Geom­e­try and Num­ber The­ory (Dol­ciani Math­e­mat­i­cal Expo­si­tions)
     As with the pre­vi­ous, a nice pile of small, simply-​​stated prob­lems, with the added fil­lip (for me, who Cf. above is inter­ested in build­ing com­pu­ta­tional affor­dances in sup­port of project man­age­ment for abstract problem-​​solving projects) that they’re mostly unsolved. Well, OK, they were; we have Fer­mat in here, and some oth­ers that will be famil­iar to folks who fol­low this kind of stuff. But there is plenty of grist in the mill here for me and my ilk, along the lines of, “How would you spec­ify the goals and con­straints of a prob­lem like, ‘Are the dig­its of the dec­i­mal expan­sion of π devoid of any pat­tern?’” I like that. That’s what real work is about, since it begs so many other ques­tions about who’s ask­ing, what they really want to know, and why.
  • To Buy: Ross Hons­berger Math­e­mat­i­cal Chest­nuts from around the World (Dol­ciani Math­e­mat­i­cal Expo­si­tions)
     Like the other Hons­berger books (all AFAIK from the Dol­ciani Math­e­mat­i­cal Expo­si­tions series), full of inter­est­ing and use­ful levers to use when learn­ing evo­lu­tion­ary com­put­ing and meta­heuris­tics more gen­er­ally. “The prod­uct of a bil­lion pos­i­tive inte­gers is a bil­lion. What is the great­est sum these bil­lion num­bers might have?” might be some­thing you’d throw a search algo­rithm at, except then you’re answer­ing more along the lines of “…What’s the largest sum you can find?” And that’s not the ques­tion. It’s my hope that by think­ing about these prob­lems as they’re stated, tech­ni­cal souls who by brain­washed in their home­work and work­lives to think of spe­cific exam­ples as some­thing to solve in a one-​​off way might be pushed to think­ing of how one can search for meth­ods. In other words: Para­met­ric mod­els are the crutch of a weak mind.
  • To Buy: Louis L. Buc­cia­relli Engi­neer­ing Phi­los­o­phy
     Too short, too lit­tle, almost too late, but very very nice. A lovely quick mono­graph that would serve as an intro­duc­tion to sev­eral prob­lems we’ve been wrestling with lately at “work” (What’s “work”? You’ll see, soon enough…): “Design­ing, like lan­guage, is a social process”, “What engi­neers don’t know and why they believe it”, and per­haps the most inter­est­ing and best jumping-​​off point for a real mono­graph of its own: “Learn­ing Engi­neer­ing.” Don’t get me started on the actual engi­neer­ing stu­dents (and pro­fes­sors, and prac­ti­tion­ers) I know, who on the whole tend to think about their own work and what it implies very poorly. Not least because they believe they are con­cerned only with “the real world”. See? You got me started.
  • To Bor­row: Arthur T. Ben­jamin and Jen­nifer J. Quinn Proofs that Really Count: The Art of Com­bi­na­to­r­ial Proof (Dol­ciani Math­e­mat­i­cal Expo­si­tions)
     As I said before, proofs are not my cup of tea right now. But the men­tal processes that allow peo­ple to spec­ify and design proofs are. So this, being a work about the design pat­terns of com­bi­na­to­r­ial proofs that deal with “what is the most…?”, “how quickly does…?” and “how many are…?” kind of ques­tions is in fact more inter­est­ing than I first expected. The book starts, as do the other Dol­ciani books I’ve been brows­ing, with prob­lems, but does go into a num­ber of inter­est­ing work-​​them-​​through details that for me might be a shop­ping list of things to watch out for as we try to explain what evolved problem-​​solvers are actu­ally doing. For the moment I don’t want a how-​​to, I want a what-​​was-​​that? book, and this might come in use­ful some­day soon in that capacity.
  • Meh: Arthur T. Ben­jamin and Ezra Brown, eds Bis­cuits of Num­ber The­ory (Dol­ciani Math­e­mat­i­cal Expo­si­tions)
     Mostly proofs, pre­sented via a wide-​​ranging set of reprinted short papers.
  • To Buy: Ross Hons­berger Math­e­mat­i­cal Delights (Dol­ciani Math­e­mat­i­cal Expo­si­tions)
     Another Hons­berger col­lec­tion of quick plane geom­e­try, num­ber the­ory and light­weight com­bi­na­torics. One cutely meta one explores the “shared prop­er­ties of crank solu­tions to Fermat’s last theorem”.
  • To Buy: Ross Hons­berger Math­e­mat­i­cal Gems III (Dol­ciani Math­e­mat­i­cal Expo­si­tions, No.9)
     As above, with a nice sec­tion on cryp­tog­ra­phy and num­ber the­ory that would open up a lovely pile of prob­lems for genetic pro­gram­ming to be used on.
  • To Admire: Stew­art Cof­fin Geo­met­ric Puz­zle Design
     You know those lit­tle wooden poly­he­dra things, where there are a bunch of sticks that inter­lock, and your goal is to slide and twist and poof they all fall apart, then your real goal of putting them all back together starts? So this is about how to make those, and more inter­est­ingly the design pat­terns you see: slid­ing blocks, coor­di­nated motion, mis­lead­ing sim­i­lar­i­ties, ways of using and abus­ing sym­me­tries, all the empty space (or com­pli­cated mech­a­nism) hid­den away on the inside. Very cool.
  • To Buy: Ross Hons­berger Math­e­mat­i­cal Dia­monds (Dol­ciani Math­e­mat­i­cal Expo­si­tions)
     Yeah, well, you get the pic­ture by now: nice. Why are these books so hard to find? Why aren’t they in more libraries?
  • To Ref­er­ence: Michael O’Neill and Conor Ryan Gram­mat­i­cal Evo­lu­tion: Evo­lu­tion­ary Auto­matic Pro­gram­ming in an Arbi­trary Lan­guage (Genetic Pro­gram­ming)
     I know Conor from years back (Jesus, I’m old: back when he was doing this work, for exam­ple), and Gram­mat­i­cal Evo­lu­tion (GE) actu­ally fea­tures in a small way in the project I’ve been work­ing on for more than a year. So while I per­son­ally don’t need to own this, it was a worth­while read and if you’re inter­ested in a dif­fer­ent way (not stu­pid old S-​​expression GP) for evo­lu­tion­ary meth­ods to be used to evolve com­plex struc­tures like algo­rithms, proofs, clas­si­fiers, trad­ing agents, or what­ever, you should con­sider this book a good intro… if a wee bit out­dated. Because, you know, life moves on, and a lot of the stuff this par­tic­u­lar book has in it is old hat. In any case, more peo­ple ought to know about Gram­mat­i­cal Evo­lu­tion; it’d do them good to under­stand there’s more that one way to solve the problem.

    And if you’re a com­puter kind of per­son inter­ested in GE: Go have a look at Pavel Suchmann’s GERET sys­tem. I like it. Nice, clean code.

  • To Admire: Conor Ryan Auto­matic Re-​​engineering of Soft­ware Using Genetic Pro­gram­ming (GENETIC PROGRAMMING Vol­ume 2)
     I said I knew Conor since way back; he was work­ing on this the­sis when I was work­ing on mine at Penn. (Spoiler: he got his degree, unlike me.) Thank you, Conor, for both the size and util­ity of the chap­ter enti­tled “Prac­ti­cal Con­sid­er­a­tions”: a land­mark notion in GP, now and then.
  • To Buy: Anthony Brabazon and Michael O’Neill Bio­log­i­cally Inspired Algo­rithms for Finan­cial Mod­el­ling (Nat­ural Com­put­ing Series)
     Every­body who ever learned about meta­heuris­tics (even before they earned that st00pid name) said, “Hey! This would be a great way to play the stock mar­ket!” A long time ago, Bar­bara and I were at a com­pu­ta­tional finance con­fer­ence, watch­ing the aca­d­e­mics talk, and after a cou­ple of days I observed, “You only ever hear these peo­ple talk once: either their work is dumb, and we stop invit­ing them, or their work is smart, and they stop accept­ing our invi­ta­tions.” Brabazon and O’Neill have done some­thing dra­mat­i­cally unex­pected: writ­ten clearly and suc­cinctly about how to build work­ing trad­ing and finan­cial man­age­ment sys­tems. Throw all your other Springer books on Ama­zon; this one, if you’re inter­ested in this stuff, is the real deal. Also: more Gram­mat­i­cal Evo­lu­tion. Now you get the trend?
  • Meh: Dan Kalman Uncom­mon Math­e­mat­i­cal Excur­sions: Poly­no­mia and Related Realms (Dol­ciani Math­e­mat­i­cal Expo­si­tions)
     Some­how not quite the same stuff as Honsberger’s. I think my reac­tion is not because the sub­ject mat­ter is dif­fer­ent (though it is, being con­cerned mostly with roots and struc­ture of poly­no­mial equa­tions and stuff), but rather that it’s kind of ped­a­gog­i­cally heavy-​​handed. Like a grad­u­ate sem­i­nar text or some­thing. Not for begin­ners, not for ama­teurs even, in my opin­ion: more of a focused, pro­gres­sive advanced train­ing session.