Book Review: Fantastic Voyage : Live Long Enough to Live Forever by Ray Kurzweil, Terry Grossman
This book provides a lot of interesting ideas for improving your health, but it is a bit too ambitious and I’m often left wondering whether they researched a particular idea well even that I should respect their opinion. They often seem to be more interested in showing off how many different topics they know something about than they are on focusing on the most important steps that a typical reader should be taking.
They are somewhat biased toward technological solutions, but occasionally surprise me with other approaches, such as pointing out some clear evidence that some kinds of meditation improve longevity.
I’m fairly suspicious of their advice about aluminum. It’s unclear why we should consider aluminum dangerous enough to be worth worrying about, but if it is then choosing the right baking powder and antacids are at least as important as the aluminum sources the book mentions (minor gripe: the index doesn’t have entries for aluminum or metals). Parts of the book leaves me wondering whether a close examination would reveal similar questionable aspects to their advice.
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Nick Szabo has a theory about the cause of the industrial revolution that’s well worth reading.
Book Review: Adapting Minds : Evolutionary Psychology and the Persistent Quest for Human Nature by David J. Buller
This book makes a strong case that there are problems with claims put forth by leading Evolutionary Psychologists, but the problems are somewhat less important than the book tries to imply.
This is the most serious and careful attack on Evolutionary Psychologists so far. But it is often hard to tell to what extent the theoretical claims he attacks are reflect bad theories or whether some of them are just careless misstatements by people who are too focused on attacking the tabula rasa worldview to worry about criticisms from other viewpoints. For instance, it’s hard to believe that the Evolutionary Psychologists mean the word “universal” in the phrase universal human nature as literally as Buller takes it.
He presents strong arguments that Evolutionary Psychologists have overstated the extent to which dna encodes specialized mental modules, and presents detailed arguments that their empirical results have been sloppy and at least slightly biased against the idea of a general-purpose mind. But if Evolutionary Psychologists are willing to modify their theory to refer to somewhat less specialized modules whose features are influenced by dna in less direct and more subtle ways, then the features of their theories that they seem to consider most important will survive.
His analogy with the immune system illustrates how a system that looks at first glance like it requires some fairly detailed genetic blueprints can actually be caused by a general purpose system that learns most of its specializations by reacting to the environment.
This is not in any way an attack on the idea of using evolutionary theory to understand the mind. In fact, he even points out that Evolutionary Psychologists have been overly interested in questions asked by creationists rather than those that evolutionary theory suggests are important.
Ironically for a philosophy professor, his weakest arguments are the most philosophical ones. He correctly points out the problems with using an essentialist notion of species that is based on universal phenotypic characteristics, but then proposes a definition of species based on continuity and spatiotemporal localization that seems as essentialist and as far from what people actually mean by the word as the definition he criticizes. If I understand his definition correctly, it implies that recreating a Dodo from dna would produce a new species. He should study the philosophy of concepts a bit more (e.g. Lakoff or the neural net literature) and decide that the concept of species doesn’t need either type of essence, but can instead be a more probabilistic combination of several kinds of attributes.
China’s one-child policy has created an imbalance between men and women that is producing some unrest that has potentially serious consequences. This interesting article analyzes the feasibility of one of the better ways of mitigating this problem.
In Reason Magazine, James Bovard reports on some strange discrepancies in the media stories about Rigoberto Alpizar, who was killed by air marshals in December. It seems that the passengers in the plane said that Alpizar never claimed to have a bomb. Yet the majority of media reports seem to conclude that the air marshals acted correctly.
Why do the storytellers find this controversy much less entertaining than Cheney’s shooting accident?
Cass Sunstein writes about an experiment that shows that political discussions tend to produce polarizing groupthink rather than understanding.
Arnold Kling reports that free markets are more popular in China than in the U.S.
That reminds me that I should give more thought to investing in China-related companies.
Book Review: The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century by Thomas L. Friedman
It’s subtitle is almost accurate, but it would be more accurate to say it’s a verbose history of a brief part of the 21st century.
I didn’t learn very much from this book, but people who haven’t been paying much attention to the news might. I normally expect reporters to be much more superficial than authors with more substantive specialties who write about what they know, and this book only weakens that expectation a tiny bit.
He does an eloquent job of disputing the notion that offshoring means sweatshops by reporting evidence that Asian workers are doing well enough that Americans should be worried more about being outcompeted on skill and motivation than on low wages. “[Bill] Gates is recognized everywhere he goes in China. Young people there hang from the rafters and scalp tickets just to hear him speak.”
He’s less eloquent at describing how offshoring affects the U.S. For a good, concise analysis, I recommend The Armchair Economist‘s chapter on the Iowa car crop (how farmers grow cars by sending food to Japan).
He doesn’t do much to anticipate new effects of globalization. For instance, his advice on what jobs won’t be outsourced suggests specialized lawyers, brain surgeons, robot operators, nurses, etc. Many of those only require modest advances in communications infrastructure to be offshorable, the rest would require some improvements in robotics to be offshorable. And he ignores the possibility that most offshorable jobs will be replaced by more intelligent software in a decade or two.
His descriptions of the large companies that are playing interesting roles in flattening the world tends toward acting as their PR agents. For example, he reports that Google has had an equalizing effect (e.g. Colin Powell used to rely on aides to do better research than I could afford, now he uses Google routinely for research that typical users can do just as easily), but neglects to notice the risks of having so much of the world’s access to information go through one company in one political jurisdiction.
He says “If President Bush made energy independence his moon shot, in one fell swoop he would dry up revenue for terrorism”. It’s somewhat unlikely that jihadists would otherwise get much money from oil. It’s wildly implausible that the U.S. government is as good at affordable mass production as it was at solving a prestigious problem by throwing money at it. And the amount of money that investors have poured into photovoltaics companies in the past few months leaves me wondering why we should think there are opportunities that will be overlooked if the government fails to throw money at energy problems.
But he makes up for that with occasional gems such as this quote from Bill Gates: “Someone estimated that the cost of saving a life in the U.S. is $5 or $6 million – that is how much our society is willing to spend. You can save a life outside the U.S. for less than $100.” I suspect that $100 is a bit misleading because it ignores the time needed to inform yourself about whether the money is going to be spend productively, but the double standard is quite real.
In the past few months I’ve heard from both Eric Drexler and from Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat that the Chinese government is run by engineers. This sounds important enough that I checked for confirmation on the web.
this page says “Every member of the Politburo in China is an engineer.”
An article titled Made in China: The Revenge of the Nerds reinforces the point.
This must imply some interesting things about the policies of the Chinese government. I wish I could predict whether this is the result of forces that will persist for a significant time or whether (as this page hints) it was a one-time result of Deng Xiaoping’s personality.
Book Review: The Armchair Economist: Economics And Everyday Experience by Steven Landsburg
This short and eloquent book does a mostly excellent job of explaining to non-economists how economic reasoning works in a wide variety of mostly non-financial areas. But it’s frustrating how he can get so much right but still demonstrate many annoying oversimplifications that economists’ biases make them prone to.
For example, on page 145 he claims that a trash collection company could cheaply prohibit Styrofoam peanuts in the trash by checking everyone’s trash once a year and fining violators $100,000. But anyone who thinks about the economics of such fines will be able to imagine massive costs from people disputing who is responsible for peanuts in the trash. Maybe there are cultures in which such fines would ensure negligible violations, but there are probably as many cultures in which disputes over people putting peanuts in someone else’s trash cans would produce more waste than the peanuts do.
His suggestion of applying antitrust laws to politicians is almost right, but ignores the public choice problems of ensuring that laws marketed as antitrust laws do anything to prevent monopoly. The details of antitrust laws are complex and boring enough that few people other than special interests pay attention to them, so special interests are able to twist the details to turn the laws into forces that protect monopolies.
On page 183 he says “Flood the economy with money and the nominal interest rate goes up in lockstep with inflation”. Given a sufficiently long-term perspective, this is an arguably decent approximation. But he’s disputing the common sense of a typical reporter who is more interested in a short-term perspective under which those changes clearly do not happen in lockstep (on page 216 he provides hints at a theory of why there’s a delayed reaction).
He makes some good points about the similarities between environmentalism and religion, but it seems these points blind him to non-religious motives behind environmentalism. He says on page 227 about relocating polluting industries: “To most economists, this is a self-evident opportunity to make not just Americans but everybody better off.” Maybe if he included a payoff to the U.S. workers whose jobs went overseas, this conclusion would be plausible. But it’s hard enough to figure out how such a payoff should be determined that I suspect he simply ignored that problem.