Reviews Written By: A3N10W4T5GBPR2provided by Amazon.com |
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 | Outliers: The Story of Success (1st Edition) | |
 | "Eloquent exaggerations" | 2009-11-19 |
| Gladwell has taken what would be a few ordinary blog posts and added enough eloquent fluff to them to make them into a book. There is probably a good deal of truth to his conclusions, but the evidence is much weaker than he wants you to think.
For his claim that 10,000 hours of practice are needed to become an expert, he doesn't discuss the possibility that the causality often runs the opposite way: having the talent to become an expert creates a desire to practice a lot. He gives at least one example where the person seemed to lack expertise before getting the 10,000 hours of practice, but it's not hard to imagine a variety of immaturity-related reasons why that might happen without the amount of practice causing the expertise. I'm confused by his claims about how much practice he thinks the Beatles had before becoming successful. He points to somewhere between 1,200 and 1,800 hours of practice they had by late 1962 (which is about when Wikipedia indicates they became successful in the UK). Gladwell seems to say they weren't successful until they came to the US in February 1964. He implies that they had 10,000 hours of practice by then, but I don't see how he could claim they had much more than 3,000 hours of practice by then. So calling the 10,000 hour estimate a rule appears involve a good deal of exaggeration. | ||
 | The Second Brain : A Groundbreaking New Understanding of Nervous Disorders of the Stomach and Intestine | |
| "Less interesting than the title suggests" | 2009-10-21 |
| This book provides a more complete description of the digestive system than most people would want.
It describes evidence that the gut is controlled by an independent nervous system. Contrary to what the title suggests, only a small part of the book talks about that, and the implications of this independence seem minor. The book is more about biochemistry than neuroscience. | ||
 | Meltdown: A Free-Market Look at Why the Stock Market Collapsed, the Economy Tanked, and Government Bailouts Will Make Things Worse | |
| "One valuable idea, surrounded by many questionable claims" | 2009-08-28 |
| This book describes the Austrian business cycle theory (ABCT) in a more readable form than it's usually presented. Its basic idea that malinvestment creates business cycles, and that central bank manipulation of interest rates can cause malinvestment, is correct. But when Woods tries to argue that only errors by a government can cause business cycles, his ideological blinders become obvious. He's mostly right when he complains about government mistakes, and mostly wrong when he denies the existence of other problems.
He asks why businesses made a "cluster of errors" that added up to a big problem rather than independent errors which mostly canceled each other out. The only answer he can find is misleading signals sent by the Fed's manipulation of interest rates. He doesn't explain why businessmen fail to learn from the frequent and widely publicized patterns of those Fed actions. It's unclear why groupthink needs a strong cause, but one obvious possibility that Woods ignores is that most people saw a persistent trend of rising housing prices, and didn't remember large drops in housing prices over a region as large as the U.S. He shows no understanding of the problems associated with sticky wages which are a key part of the better arguments for Keynesian approaches. He wants to credit ABCT with having predicted this downturn. If you try to figure out when was the last time it didn't predict a downturn (the early 1920s?), this seems less impressive than, say, Robert Shiller's track record for predicting when bubbles burst. His somewhat selective use of historical evidence carefully avoids anything that might present a picture more complex than government being the sole villain. He describes enough U.S. economic expansions to present a clear case that credit expansion contributed to the ensuing bust, and usually points to a government activity which one can imagine caused excessive credit expansion. But he's unusually vague about the causes of the expansion that led to the panic of 1857. Could that be because he wants to overlook the role that new gold mining in California played in that inflationary cycle? He mostly denies that free market approaches have been tested for long enough to see whether we would avoid business cycles under a true free market. He points to a few downturns when he says the government followed a wise laissez faire policy, and compares the shortness of those downturns with a few longer downturns where the government made some attempts to solve the downturns. When doing this, he avoids mention of the downturns where massive government actions were followed by mild recessions. Any complete survey comparing the extent of government action with the ensuing economic conditions would provide a much murkier picture of the relative contributions of government and market error than Woods is willing to allow. The most interesting claim that I hadn't previously heard is that a large decrease in the money supply in 1839-1843 coincided with healthy GNP growth, which, if true, is hard to explain without assuming Keynesian and monetarist theories explain a relatively small fraction of business cycle problems. My attempts to check this yielded a report [...] saying GDP in 2005 dollars rose from $31.37 in 1839 to $34.84 in 1843, but GDP per capita in 2005 dollars dropped from $1884 in 1839 to $1869 in 1843. Declining GDP per capita doesn't sound very prosperous to me (although it's a mild enough decline to provide little support for Keynesians/monetarists). He tries to blame the "mistakes" of credit rating agencies on an SEC-created cartel of rating agencies. That "cartel" does have some special privileges, but he doesn't say what stops bloggers from expressing opinions on bond risks and developing reputations that lead to investors using those opinions in addition to the "cartel"'s ratings (Freerisk is a project which is planning a sophisticated alternative). I say that anyone who understands markets would expect the yield on the bonds to provide as good an estimate of risk as any alternative. Credit rating agencies must be performing some other function in order to thrive. An obvious function is to mislead bosses and/or regulators who don't understand markets into thinking that the people making investment decisions are making choices that are safer than they actually are. It appears that the agencies performed that function well, and helped many people avoid being fired for poor choices. His discussion of whether WWII spending cured the Great Depression points out that mainstream theories falsely predicted a return to depression in 1946. But it's unclear whether all versions of Keynesianism make that mistake, and it's unclear how ABCT could predict the U.S. would be much more prosperous in 1946 than at the start of the war. Here's an alternative explanation that lies in between those theories: wages were being kept too high for supply and demand to balance through 1941. Inflation and changes in government policy toward wage levels during WW2 eliminated the causes of that imbalance. Arnold Kling has a good quasi-Austrian alternative called the Great Recalculation. | ||
 | The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008 | |
 | "Mostly true, but biased toward wasteful spending" | 2009-08-26 |
| Large parts of this book accurately describe some processes which contribute to financial crises, but he fails to describe enough of what happened in crises such as in 2008 to reach sensible policy advice.
He presents a simple example of a baby-sitting co-op that experienced a recession via a Keynesian liquidity trap, and he is right to believe that is part of what causes recessions, but he doesn't have much of an argument that other causes are unimportant. His neglect of malinvestment problems contributes to his delusion that central banks reach limits to their power in crises where interest rates approach zero. The presence or absence of deflation seems to provide a fairly good estimate of whether liquidity trap type problems exist. If you recognize that malinvestments are part of the problem that caused crises such as that of 2008, the natural conclusion is that the Fed solved most of the liquidity trap type problem within a few months of noticing the severity of the downturn. There is ample reason to suspect that the economy is suffering from a misallocation of resources, such as workers who developed skills as construction workers when perfect foresight would have told them to develop skill in careers where demand is expanding (nurses?). Nobody knows how to instantly convert those workers into appropriate careers, so we shouldn't expect a quick fix to the problems associated with that malinvestment. It appears possible for he Fed to make that malinvestment have been successful investment by dropping enough dollars from helicopters to create an inflation rate that will make home buying attractive again. Krugman's suggested fiscal stimulus looks almost as poor a solution as that to anyone who sees malinvestment as the main remaining problem. His claim that central bank policy is ineffective is misleading because he pretends that controlling interest rates is all that central banks do to "stimulate" the economy. If instead you focus on changes in the money supply (which central banks can sometimes cause with little effect on interest rates), you'll see they have plenty of power to inflate. He dismisses the problem of sticky wages as if it were minor or inevitable. But if you understand the role that plays in unemployment, and analyze Singapore's policy of automatically altering payroll taxes to stabilize jobs, you should see that's more cost-effective than the fiscal stimulus Krugman wants. I'm not satisfied with his phrasing of lack of "effective demand" being caused by people "trying to accumulate cash". If we apply standard financial terminology to changes the value of a currency (e.g. saying that there's a speculative bubble driving up the value of the currency, or that there's a short squeeze - highly leveraged firms have what amounts to a big short position in dollars), then it seems more natural to use the intuitions we've developed for the stock market to fluctuations in currency values. He doesn't adequately explain why most economists don't want a global currency. He says labor mobility within the area that standardizes on a currency is important for it to work well. I'm unconvinced that much mobility is needed for a global currency to work better than the mediocre alternatives, but even if it is, I'd expect economists to advocate a combination of a global currency and reducing the barriers to mobility. How much of economists dislike for a global currency is due to real harm from regional fluctuations and how much is it due to politicians rewarding people like Krugman for biasing their arguments in ways that empower the politicians? Or do they not give it much thought because they've decided it's politically infeasible even if desirable? His description of the shadow banking system clarifies quite well how regulatory efforts to avoid crises failed. His solution of regulating like a bank anything that acts like a bank would work well if implemented by an altruistic government. But his "simple rule" is too vague for his intent to survive in a system where politicians want to bend the rules to help their friends. | ||
 | Greatness: Who Makes History and Why | |
 | "Broad and shallow" | 2009-06-23 |
| This broad and mediocre survey of psychology of people who stand out in history probably contains a fair number of good ideas, but it's hard to separate them from the many ideas that are questionable guesses. He's inconsistent about distinguishing his guesses from claims backed by good evidence. One of the clearest examples is his assertion that childhood adversity builds character. He presents evidence that eminent figures were unusually likely to have had a parent die early, and describes this as the "most impressive proof" of his claim. He ignores the possibility those people come from families with a pattern of taking sufficiently unusual risks to explain that evidence. In other places, he makes mistakes which seemed reasonable when the book was published, such as "Mendelian laws of inheritance are blind to whether an individual is first-born or later-born" (parental age has a measurable effect on mutation rates). He avoids some of the worst mistakes that a psychology of history could make, such as trying to psychoanalyze individuals without having enough information about them. He mentions some approaches to analyzing presidential addresses and corporate letters to stockholders, which have some potential to be used in predicting whether leaders have the appropriate personality for their jobs. I wonder what would happen if many voters/stockholders demanded that leaders pass tests of this nature (I'm assuming the tests can be scored objectively, but that may be shaky assumption). I'm confident that we'd get leaders with rhetoric that passes those tests. Would that simply mean the leaders change their rhetoric, or would it be hard enough to maintain a mismatch between rhetoric and thought patterns that we'd get leaders with better thought patterns? | ||
 | 101 Ways to Improve Your Communication Skills Instantly | |
| "Is this a book or a PowerPoint presentation? " | 2009-02-27 |
| This is closer to a set of PowerPoint slides than it is to a real book. Most of what it says is reasonable, but it doesn't say enough to be worth buying. One piece of advice they give is to use anecdotes and stories, but they don't come close to following that advice. It's rare for them to put more than two sentences together into something paragraph-like. I'm not sure who this book is aimed at, but their advice to "avoid questions that pry into personal matters" implies their goals have little to do with what I wanted advice about (creating close personal friendships). The one good aspect of the book is that it won't take much of your time - if you spend more than an hour reading it, you're doing something wrong. | ||
 | My Voice Will Go With You: The Teaching Tales of Milton H. Erickson, M.D. | |
| "Strange anecdotes " | 2009-01-29 |
| This is a book of short anecdotes about a therapist who seems unusually skilled. It has some entertainment value, but it's hard to learn much from them. It tells me little about whether NLP as typically practiced is valuable because it sounds hard, maybe impossible, to teach much of the skills involved. | ||
 | My Voice Will Go With You | |
| "Strange anecdotes " | 2009-01-29 |
| This is a book of short anecdotes about a therapist who seems unusually skilled. It has some entertainment value, but it's hard to learn much from them. It tells me little about whether NLP as typically practiced is valuable because it sounds hard, maybe impossible, to teach much of the skills involved. | ||
 | The Misbehavior of Markets | |
| "Limited Value " | 2008-10-06 |
| Mandelbrot describes some problems with financial models that are designed to provide approximations of things that can't be perfectly modeled. He pretends that pointing out the dangers of relying too much on imperfect approximations shows some brilliant insight. But mostly he's just translating ideas that are understood by many experts into language that can be understood by laymen who are unlikely to get much value out of studying those ideas. His list of "ten heresies" is arrogantly misnamed. Sure, there are some prestigious people whose overconfidence in financial models leads them to beliefs that are different from his "heresies", but those "heresies" are closer to orthodoxies than they are to heresies. His denial of the equity premium puzzle is fairly heretical, but his argument there is fairly cryptic, and relies on suspicious and poorly specified claims about risk. He says market timing works, but the strategy he vaguely hints at requires faster reaction times than are likely to be achieved by the kind of investor this book seems aimed at. His use of fractals doesn't have any apparent value. Mandelbrot is primarily a mathematician with limited interest in understanding how markets work. One clear example is his mention of a time when Magellan "was still a small fund, too small for any detractors to argue that its size alone gave it a competitive edge". Any informed person should know that's completely backward - larger funds have a clear disadvantage because they are limited to trading the most liquid investments. Another example of a careless mistake is when he claims the evidence suggests basketball players have hot streaks, seemingly unaware that Tversky and others have largely debunked that idea. | ||
 | Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950 | |
| "Limited value" | 2008-08-12 |
| I was reluctant to read this book but read it because a reading group I belong to selected it. I agree with most of what it says, but was underwhelmed by what it accomplished. He has compiled an impressive catalog of people who have accomplished excellent feats in arts, science, and technology. He has a long section arguing that the disproportionate number of dead white males in his list is not a result of bias. Most of this just repeats what has been said many times before. He appears do have done more than most to check authorities of other cultures to verify that their perspective doesn't conflict with his. But that's hard to do well (how many different languages does he read well enough to avoid whatever selection biases influence what's available in English?) and hard for me to verify. He doesn't ask how his choice of categories (astronomy, medicine, etc) bias his results (I suspect not much). His most surprising claim is that the rate of accomplishment is declining. He convinced me that he is measuring something that is in fact declining, but didn't convince me that what he measured is important. I can think of many other ways of trying to measure accomplishment: number of lives saved, number of people whose accomplishment was bought by a million people, number of people whose accomplishment created $100 million in revenues, the Flynn Effect, number of patents, number of peer-reviewed papers, or number of meta-innovations. All of these measures have nontrivial drawbacks, but they illustrate why I find his measure (acclaim by scholars) very incomplete. An incomplete measure may be adequate for conclusions that aren't very sensitive to the choice of measure (such as the male/female ratio of important people), but when most measures fail to support his conclusion that the rate of accomplishment is declining, his failure to try for a more inclusive measure is disappointing. His research appears careful to a casual reader, but I found one claim that was definitely not well researched. He thinks that "the practice of medicine became an unambiguous net plus for the patient" around the 1920s or 1930s. He cites no sources for this claim, and if he had found the best studies on the subject he'd see lots of uncertainty about whether it has yet become a net plus. | ||
 | Why We Lie : The Evolutionary Roots of Deception and the Unconscious Mind | |
| "Decent but not too valuable " | 2008-08-06 |
| This book is mostly correct, and might be valuable to a few people, but will provide few surprises for people who know a fair amount about cognitive science and evolutionary psychology. He uses a broader than normal definition of lying that doesn't require intent. I agree with his choice to focus on that broader concept, but I think deception would be a more descriptive word to use. A few of his bolder, unsupported claims seem wrong, such as "human society ... would collapse under the weight of too much honesty". | ||
 | Interesting Times | |
 | "Outdoes Monty Python" | 2008-07-07 |
| Of the eight Discworld novels I've read so far, this is the best. It reminds me of Monty Python, but produces Pythonesque absurdity while keeping the characters a good deal more realistic than Monty Python. | ||
| Interesting Times: Discworld #17 | |
| "Outdoes Monty Python" | 2008-07-07 |
| Of the eight Discworld novels I've read so far, this is the best. It reminds me of Monty Python, but produces Pythonesque absurdity while keeping the characters a good deal more realistic than Monty Python. | ||
 | The Cult of Statistical Significance: How the Standard Error Costs Us Jobs, Justice, and Lives (Economics, Cognition, and Society) | |
| "Good but could have been better " | 2008-05-28 |
| This book provides strong arguments that scientists often use tests of statistical significance as a ritual that substitutes for thought about how hypotheses should be tested. Some of the practices they criticize are clearly foolish, such as treating data which fall slightly short of providing statistically significant evidence for a hypothesis as reason for concluding the hypothesis is false. But for other practices they attack, it's unclear whether we can expect scientists to be reasonable enough to do better. Much of the book is a history of how this situation arose. That might be valuable if it provided insights into what rules could have prevented the problems, but it is mainly devoted to identifying heroes and villains. It seems strange that economists would pay so little attention to incentives that might be responsible. Instead of blaming the problems primarily on one influential man (R.A. Fisher), I'd suggest asking what distinguishes the areas of science where the problems are common from those where it is largely absent. It appears that the problems are worst in areas where acquiring additional data is hard and where powerful interest groups might benefit from false conclusions. Which leads me to wonder whether scientists are reacting to a risk that they'll be perceived as agents of drug companies, political parties, etc. The book sometimes mentions anti-commercial attitudes among the villains, but fails to ask whether that might be a symptom of a desire for "pure" science that is divorced from real world interests. Such a desire might cause many of the beliefs that the authors are fighting. The book does not adequately address concerns that if scientists in those fields abandon easily applied rules, scientists are sufficiently vulnerable to corruption that we'd end up with less accurate conclusions. The authors claim the problems have been getting worse, and show some measures by which that seems true. But I suspect their measures fail to capture some improvement that has been happening as the increasing pressure to follow the ritual has caused papers that would previously have been purely qualitative to use quantitative tests that reject the worst ideas. The book seems somewhat sloppy in its analysis of specific examples. When interpreting data from a study where scientists decided there was no effect because the evidence fell somewhat short of statistical significance, it claims the data show "St. John's-wort is on average twice as helpful as the placebo". But the data would provide evidence for that only if there were data showing that the remission rate with no treatment was zero. It's likely that some or all of the alleged placebo effect was due to effects that are unrelated to treatment. And their use of the word "show" suggests stronger evidence than is provided by the data. I'll close with two quotes that I liked from the book: "The goal of an empirical economist should not be to determine the truthfulness of a model but rather the domain of its usefulness" - Edward E. Leamer "The probability that an experimental design will be replicated becomes very small once such an experiment appears in print." - Thomas D. Sterling | ||
 | The Birth of Plenty : How the Prosperity of the Modern World was Created | |
| "Many good ideas, sloppy analysis" | 2008-04-08 |
| This book contains many ideas about the causes of economic growth that are approximately right, but rarely backs them up with good arguments. He starts by saying four institutions are needed to escape from a Malthusian trap: property rights (rule of law), reason (scientific methods), capital markets, and fast transportation/communication. But later when discussing why some countries were slow to develop, he adds ad hoc explanations (e.g. "excessive military expenditure" "reliably derails great nations"). The biggest shortcoming of the book is that it ignores evidence that China provides a counter-example to his main claims. He doesn't acknowledge expert claims that parts of China around 1800 had a degree of property rights and rule of law that was comparable to England at that time, nor does he discuss the recent dramatic Chinese takeoff that happened with a mediocre degree of property rights and rule of law. He gives many hints about why those four institutions are helpful, but provides little evidence that any one is essential. About the closest he comes to providing rigorous evidence is a graph indicating how much of economic growth appears to be explained by a Rule-of-Law indicator. He follows that with a similar graph of how government spending levels explain economic growth, and claims the negative effect of government spending would be invisible without the computed trend line, but the rule-of-law trend is more impressive. I see those graphs differently. The most obvious trend is that government spending over about 15 to 18% (of GDP?) reduces growth, with no obvious pattern for lower spending levels. The most obvious trend in the rule-of-law graph is that low values on the rule-of-law indicator are associated with larger variations in economic growth, which is somewhat contrary to his claim that such values reliably prevent growth. The section I found most valuable was the one describing reasons for thinking that 16th century Holland created the beginnings of the industrial revolution. There are enough misleading or false statements in the book to convince me not to trust him. For example, he refers to eclipse prediction around 1700 as a spectacular change to what was previously a mystery. He appears unaware that eclipses had been predicted more than a millennium earlier. He often digresses into anecdotes that have no apparent relevance. For example, he claims "a healthy market for government debt is, in fact, essential for funding business". After giving two implausible theoretical reasons for that claim, he says it was "vividly demonstrated in the U.S." in 1862, but then gives a description of how government bonds were sold, without mentioning anything about the effect on business. His discussion of the possible trade-offs between inflation and unemployment makes a claim that increased unemployment caused more unhappiness than "an identical rise in inflation". But inflation is measured in different units that unemployment. If we happened to measure inflation in percent per presidential election, the naive comparison would work much differently. (He is subtly misinterpreting a serious paper that is hard to fully explain to laymen). His advice to undeveloped nations includes "before a nation builds roads ... it must first train lawyers", which makes me doubt his understanding of what causes the rule of law. | ||
 | How Is Quantum Field Theory Possible? | |
| "Some good ideas, but mostly unreadable" | 2007-08-25 |
| This book contains some good ideas, but large parts of it are too hard for me to get anything out of, both due to an assumption that the reader knows a good deal about quantum mechanics and due to a style which probably requires rereading most parts multiple times in order to decipher even those parts which don't require an understanding of quantum mechanics. I was impressed by her explanation of how we should understand the uncertainty of position and momentum measurements. She says the quantum entities have genuine deterministic properties, but we shouldn't try to think of position and momentum as properties of any persistent entities. They are properties associated with specific measurements. The properties of persistent entities such as atoms are mostly stranger than what we can measure, and measurements only give us indirect evidence of those properties. Her descriptions of coordinate systems used in quantum physics seem inconsistent with the impressions I got from Smolin's Trouble with Physics. Smolin implies (but doesn't clearly state) that quantum theory retains Newtonian background dependent coordinates. Auyang's descriptions of quantum coordinate systems seem very different. It's clear that I've only scratched the surface of what's needed to understand these issues. | ||
 | Reasons and Persons | |
| "Thoughtful but not very satisfying" | 2007-07-31 |
| This book does a very good job of pointing out inconsistencies in common moral intuitions, and does a very mixed job of analyzing how to resolve them. The largest section of the book deals with personal identity, using a bit of neuroscience plus scenarios such as a Star Trek transporter to show that nonreductionsist approaches produce conclusions which are strange enough to disturb most people. I suspect this analysis was fairly original when it was written, but I've seen most of the ideas elsewhere. His analysis is more compelling than most other versions, but it's not concise enough for many to read it. The most valuable part of the book is the last section, weighing conflicts of interest between actual people and people who could potentially exist in the future. His description of the mere addition paradox convinced me that it's harder than I thought to specify plausible beliefs which don't lead to the Repugnant Conclusion (i.e. that some very large number of people with lives barely worth living can be a morally better result than some smaller number of very happy people). He ends by concluding he hasn't found a way resolve the conflicts between the principles he thinks morality ought to satisfy. It appears that if he had applied the critical analysis that makes up most of the book to the principle of impersonal ethics, he would see signs that his dilemma results from trying to satisfy incompatible intuitions. Human desire for ethical rules that are more impersonal is widespread when the changes are close to Pareto improvements, but human intuition seems to be generally incompatible with impersonal ethical rules that are as far from Pareto improvements as the Repugnant Conclusion appears to be. Thus it appears Parfit could only resolve the dilemma by finding a source of morality that transcends human intuition and logical consistency (he wisely avoids looking for non-human sources of morality, but intuition doesn't seem quite the right way to find a human source) or by resolving the conflicting intuitions people seem to have about impersonal ethics. The most disappointing part of the book is the argument that consequentialism is self-defeating. The critical part of his argument involves a scenario where a mother must choose between saving her child and saving two strangers. His conclusion depends on an assumption about the special relationship between parent and child which consequentialists have no obvious obligation to agree with. He isn't clear enough about what that assumption is for me to figure out why we disagree. I find it especially annoying that the book's index only covers names, since it's a long book whose subjects aren't simple enough for me to fully remember. | ||
 | Straightforward: How To Mobilize Heterosexual Support For Gay Rights | |
| "Mostly Sensible" | 2007-06-22 |
| This book provides mostly sensible advice about how to promote gay rights without unnecessarily provoking opponents, and sometimes (but not consistently) without requiring unusual effort on the part of gay rights supporters. Many of the ideas in the book can be applied to other causes that mainly require changing public opinion.
They occasionally go overboard and suggest fighting privileges that don't exist. For instance, they mention favorably advice that heterosexuals boycott marriage until it's available for all. It might make sense to ask heterosexuals to not have their marriages legally recognized (although I doubt the effectiveness of such a strategy). But the suggestion that wedding ceremonies be boycotted as long as gays are excluded from them is silly - wedding ceremonies are very much available to gays today. Their Fair Employment Mark, under which employers would volunteer to enable employees sue them if they discriminate, would be a great idea under a sufficiently fair legal system. But it's unclear why an employer would consider the U.S. legal system sufficiently fair to agree to this. | ||
 | Why Not How to Use Everyday Ingenuity to Solve Problems Big and Small | |
| "Entertaining" | 2007-06-20 |
| This is a very entertaining and somewhat thought-provoking book. I'm uncertain whether it had much effect on my creativity. It certainly demonstrates the authors' creativity, and gives some insights into how their creative thought processes work. But it's probably more valuable as a collection of interesting ideas than it is as a recipe for creativity. While they focus more on presenting interesting ideas than on evaluating how well they would work, the do a decent job of anticipating problems and understanding the relevant incentives. Possibly the most important idea is mandating anonymity of political campaign contributions (see also the book Voting with Dollars) as an alternative way of ensuring that it's hard for contributions to influence politicians votes, with plausible suggestions about how to ensure that it's hard for donors to evade the anonymity rule. Their examples often leave me wondering why the ideas they describe are so little known (e.g. the anonymity requirement has been tried in 10 states for judicial elections - why hasn't that been reported widely?). Another interesting idea is how tests of black boxes in cars (similar to those in planes) cause drivers to drive much more safely (20 to 66 percent declines in accident rates - "Fear of getting caught may be a more powerful motivator than fear of getting killed"). I am disappointed that it doesn't have an index. | ||
 | Made In China: How China's Leading Entrepreneurs Survive And Thrive In The World's Most Turbulent Market | |
| "Very ordinary advice on business management" | 2007-06-09 |
| I was looking for a book that describes how Chinese culture and government cause business in China to work differently from U.S. business. This book fails to provide any insights of this nature. It is merely a standard set of plausible but not very original sounding recommendations for how to run a business. It happens to use Chinese businesses to illustrate its points, but it would sound virtually the same if it used U.S. businesses as examples instead. | ||
 | The Cognitive Animal: Empirical and Theoretical Perspectives on Animal Cognition | |
| "Occasionally Interesting" | 2007-01-26 |
| This book is a large collection of short papers, somewhat comparable in style to what you would get in a peer-reviewed journal. I found many of them dull, but a few were good enough to make the book worth buying.
Slobodchikoff's paper on prairie dog speech is what attracted me to the book; it's interesting but doesn't say enough to provide a convincing answer to my questions about how sophisticated their grammar is. Several of the papers provide nice anecdotes of sophisticated behavior where I didn't expect it (e.g. apparently detailed planning by a spider), but I sometimes wonder to what extent there's a selection bias that causes complex behavior to be overemphasized in reports of this nature, since they're more interesting to read than reports of animals failing to exhibit smart behavior. | ||
 | South Bay Trails: Outdoor Adventures in & Around Santa Clara Valley : From the Diablo Range to the Pacific Ocean | |
| "Thorough" | 2007-01-20 |
| This book provides descriptions of all the parks in the area it covers, with maps that show nearly all hiking trails and advice on when is the best time of year for each. I wish the equivalent books for other parts of the bay area were this complete. | ||
 | A WHACK ON THE SIDE OF THE HEAD : How You Can Be More Creative | |
| "Did Little for me" | 2006-11-15 |
| This book is eloquently written, and I agree with most of what it says. But I haven't felt that it is helping me to be more creative. | ||
 | Social Mindscapes: An Invitation to Cognitive Sociology | |
| "Refreshing Tidbits" | 2006-11-03 |
| This book is a refreshing and concise collection of interesting tidbits about cultural aspects of human minds. He points out many cultural quirks in our thinking that I suspect many people unconsciously assume are universal beliefs. Sometimes it's easy to see once you're provoked to think about it why we should consider something to be a cultural quirk (e.g. putting jam and jelly into two distinct categories rather than one). With others, such as whether the differences between male and female genitalia justify classifying the equivalent parts differently for each sex, I'm almost suspicious enough of his report that western culture had a different answer a couple of centuries ago than it does today to tempt me to check some of his copious references. And there are a few places where his cultural norms seem odd (e.g. his claim that daylight savings time seems natural). With only 113 pages of actual text, it's a quick read that would be worth reading for the entertainment value alone, and has the added benefit of shaking up one's preconceptions. | ||
 | Rethinking Innateness: A Connectionist Perspective on Development (Neural Networks and Connectionist Modeling) | |
| "Very Technical" | 2006-11-02 |
| This book contains some thoughtful reasons for believing that many evolutionary psychologists overestimate how much information about the human mind is encoded in genes. However, it is mixed in with some highly technical developmental neurobiology that only a few specialists are likely to find interesting. For nonspecialists, David Buller's book Adapting Minds says similar things about innateness in a style that is more suited for laymen. | ||
 | Stumbling on Happiness | |
| "Colorful Analysis of Human Biases" | 2006-09-13 |
| This book is a colorful explanation of why we are less successful at finding happiness than we expect. It shows many similarities between mistakes we make in foreseeing how happy we will be and mistakes we make in perceiving the present or remembering the past. That makes it easy to see that those errors are natural results of shortcuts our minds take to minimize the amount of data that our imagination needs to process (e.g. filling in our imagination with guesses as our mind does with the blind spot in our eye). One of the most important types of biases is what he calls presentism (a term he borrows from historians and extends to deal with forecasting). When we imagine the past or future, our minds often employ mental mechanisms that were originally adapted to perceive the present, and we retain biases to give more weight to immediate perceptions than to what we imagine. That leads to mistakes such as letting our opinions of how much food we should buy be overly influenced by how hungry we are now, or Wilbur Wright's claim in 1901 that "Man will not fly for 50 years." This is more than just a book about happiness. It gives me a broad understanding of human biases that I hope to apply to other areas (e.g. it has given me some clues about how I might improve my approach to stock market speculation). But it's more likely that the book's style will make you happy than that the knowledge in it will cause you to use the best evidence available (i.e. observations of what makes others happy) when choosing actions to make yourself happy. Instead, you will probably continue to overestimate your ability to predict what will make you happy and overestimate the uniqueness that you think makes the experience of others irrelevant to your own pursuit of happiness. Some drawbacks: His analysis of memetic pressures that cause false beliefs about happiness to propagate is unconvincing. He seems to want a very simple theory, but I doubt the result is powerful enough to explain the extent of the myths. A full explanation would probably require the same kind of detailed analysis of biases that the rest of the book contains. He leaves the impression that he thinks he's explained most of the problems with achieving happiness, when he probably hasn't done that (it's unlikely any single book could). He presents lots of experimental results, but he doesn't present the kind of evidence needed to prove that presentism is a consistent problem across a wide range of domains. He fails to indicate how well he follows his own advice. For instance, does he have any evidence that writing a book like this makes the author happy? | ||
 | The Labyrinth of Time: Introducing the Universe | |
| "Well Written" | 2006-09-05 |
| This book provides a great overview of the more interesting parts of modern physics, with some emphasis on time and the philosophy of time.
It is less clearly focused on time than the cover suggests. If you want a deep and narrow focus on time, Huw Price's book Time's Arrow is more appropriate and provocative. Labyrinth of Time explains many things better than other physics books do. For instance, the standard description of the twin paradox suggests that acceleration is responsible for the differences in how each twin ages. Lockwood refutes that with a nifty diagram of a cylindrical space-time where unaccelerated twins age differently on world-lines of different lengths. The book provides good explanations of why the alleged paradoxes of time travel aren't sufficient to imply that time travel is impossible. Lockwood does a relatively good job of arguing in favor of the Everett (many world) interpretation of quantum mechanics, but that section requires enough experience with the subject that many laymen will have trouble following it. The speculations he reports about how time might mean before the Planck time are really strange. | ||
 | Kanzi : The Ape at the Brink of the Human Mind | |
| "Interesting and Partly Convincing" | 2006-07-26 |
| This book makes plausible claims that some bonobos have learned to handle language in a way that is approximately as sophisticated as that of a two year old human. But their anecdotal evidence is somewhat hard to evaluate, and they didn't quite convince me that they were careful enough to rule out the possibility that their biases caused them to overestimate the sophistication of Kanzi's understanding. The book is a bit long-winded about research that Savage-Rumbaugh did before working with Kanzi, and I was a bit disappointed that the book didn't provide more of the anecdote about Kanzi that made the book worth reading. But those anecdotes convinced me that much more is going on than some authors such as Pinker had led me to believe. I still hope for better evidence that will help clarify how much bonobos can understand. But that will be hard, and I don't know how it should be done. | ||
 | Kanzi : The Ape at the Brink of the Human Mind | |
| "Interesting and Partly Convincing" | 2006-07-26 |
| This book makes plausible claims that some bonobos have learned to handle language in a way that is approximately as sophisticated as that of a two year old human. But their anecdotal evidence is somewhat hard to evaluate, and they didn't quite convince me that they were careful enough to rule out the possibility that their biases caused them to overestimate the sophistication of Kanzi's understanding. The book is a bit long-winded about research that Savage-Rumbaugh did before working with Kanzi, and I was a bit disappointed that the book didn't provide more of the anecdote about Kanzi that made the book worth reading. But those anecdotes convinced me that much more is going on than some authors such as Pinker had led me to believe. I still hope for better evidence that will help clarify how much bonobos can understand. But that will be hard, and I don't know how it should be done. | ||
 | Last Well Person: How to Stay Well Despite the Health-care System | |
| "Frustrating mix of wisdom and dogma" | 2006-06-29 |
| There appears to be a large discrepancy between how effective most people think modern medical practices are and the evidence that experts have presented suggesting that it does very little to extend life. This book gives the impression of describing a pattern of ineffective or harmful practices that might be offsetting the benefits of the practices that are known to work. But there are enough flaws in his argument that I can't decide how much of his conclusions I should accept. He starts by saying he's a Popperian, but often acts like he's following some other, more dogmatic, philosophy. I'm particularly annoyed at his certain feelings of inevitability that we will die by about age 85: I am aware of no data to support the premise that we can alter the date of death. ... When high-functioning octogenarians decline, it is because their time is approaching. He starts by making a plausible claim that many people get cardiovascular surgery when there's no evidence that it will benefit them (and is likely to create some risks). But starting in the next chapter it becomes easy to find flaws in his arguments. He raises some plausible doubts about the evidence for statins, but then tries to imply that if the imperfect evidence that's available shows that less than 2% of people who are prescribed statins will benefit, then we should doubt that those people ought to take statins. He presents evidence that prostate cancer treatments save fewer lives than is commonly thought. It appears that sometimes the treatment merely changes the cause of death to something else. Yet he concludes that the treatment is useless, when the data he presents indicate nontrivial benefits. He hints that the evidence doesn't meet the usual standard of statistical significance, but feels comfortable concluding (without even saying how close it is to being statistically significant) that the lack of proof is strong evidence of ineffectiveness. He has a somewhat interesting proposal that the final phase of drug testing be done by the FDA rather than by drug companies. If the FDA were run by angels, that would solve a number of problems with the existing regulatory incentives, but with an FDA run by humans it would replace them with new problems. For instance, the choice of which drugs to test is something that only a few special interest voters (i.e. mainly those working for large drug companies) would understand, so their interests would be likely to influence those choices to the benefit of those companies. | ||
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