Book Reviews

Bonds That Make Us Free

Posted by Peter on November 10, 2014
Posted in: Book Reviews. Tagged: , , , .

Book review: Bonds That Make Us Free: Healing Our Relationships, Coming to Ourselves, by C. Terry Warner.

This book consists mostly of well-written anecdotes demonstrating how to recognize common kinds of self-deception and motivated cognition that cause friction in interpersonal interactions. He focuses on ordinary motives that lead to blaming others for disputes in order to avoid blaming ourselves.

He shows that a willingness to accept responsibility for negative feelings about personal relationships usually makes everyone happier, by switching from zero-sum or negative-sum competitions to cooperative relationships.

He describes many examples where my gut reaction is that person B has done something that justifies person A’s decision to get upset, and then explaining that person A should act nicer. He does this without the “don’t be judgmental” attitude that often accompanies advice to be more understanding.

Most of the book focuses on the desire to blame others when something goes wrong, but he also notes that blaming nature (or oneself) can produce similar problems and have similar solutions. That insight describes me better than the typical anecdotes do, and has been a bit of help at enabling me to stop wasting effort fighting reality.

I expect that there are a moderate number of abusive relationships where the book’s advice would be counterproductive, but that most people (even many who have apparently abusive spouses or bosses) will be better off following the book’s advice.

Value-Focused Thinking

Posted by Peter on October 21, 2014
Posted in: Book Reviews, The Human Mind. Tagged: .

Book review: Value-Focused Thinking: A Path to Creative Decisionmaking, by Ralph L. Keeney.

This book argues for focusing on values (goals/objectives) when making decisions, as opposed to the more usual alternative-focused decisionmaking.

The basic idea seems good. Alternative-focused thinking draws our attention away from our values and discourages us from creatively generating new possibilities to choose from. It tends to have us frame decisions as responses to problems, which leads us to associate decisions with undesirable emotions, when we could view decisions as opportunities.

A good deal of the book describes examples of good decisionmaking, but those rarely provide insight into how to avoid common mistakes or to do unusually well.

Occasionally the book switches to some dull math, without clear explanations of what benefit the rigor provides.

The book also includes good descriptions of how to measure the things that matter, but How to Measure Anything by Douglas Hubbard does that much better.

How the West Won

Posted by Peter on September 8, 2014
Posted in: Book Reviews, Politics. Tagged: , , .

Book review: How the West Won: The Neglected Story of the Triumph of Modernity, by Rodney Stark.

This book is a mostly entertaining defense of Christian and libertarian cultures’ contribution to Western civilization’s dominance.

He wants us to believe that the industrial revolution resulted from mostly steady progress starting with Greek city-states, interrupted only by the Roman empire.

He defends the Catholic church’s record of helping scientific progress and denies that the Reformation was needed, although he suggests the Catholic church’s reaction to the Reformation created harmful anti-capitalist sentiments.

His ideas resemble those in Fukuyama’s The Origins of Political Order, yet there’s little overlap between the content of the two books.

The early parts of the book have too many descriptions of battles and other killings whose relevance is unclear.

I was annoyed at how much space he devoted to attacking political correctness toward the end of the book.

In spite of those problems, he presents many interesting ideas. Some are fairly minor, such as changes in privacy due to the Little Ice Age triggering the invention of chimneys. Others provide potentially important insights into differences between religions, e.g. “many influential Muslim scholars have held that efforts to formulate natural laws are blasphemy because they would seem to deny Allah’s freedom to act.”

Alas, I can only give the book a half-hearted endorsement because I suspect many of his claims are poorly supported. E.g. he thinks increased visibility of child labor in the 1800s caused child labor laws via shocked sensibilities. Two alternatives that seem much more plausible to me are that the increased visibility made the laws feasible to enforce, and the increased concentration of employers into a separate class made them easier scapegoats.

The Depths

Posted by Peter on August 25, 2014
Posted in: Book Reviews, Health, The Human Mind. Tagged: .

Book review: The Depths: The Evolutionary Origins of the Depression Epidemic, by Johnathan Rottenberg.

This book presents a clear explanation of why the basic outlines of depression look like an evolutionary adaptation to problems such as famine or humiliation. But he ignores many features that still puzzle me. Evolution seems unlikely to select for suicide. Why does loss of a child cause depression rather than some higher-energy negative emotion? What influences the breadth of learned helplessness?

He claims depression has been increasing over the last generation or so, but the evidence he presents can easily be explained by increased willingness to admit to and diagnose depression. He has at least one idea why it’s increasing (increased pressure to be happy), but I can come up with ideas that have the opposite effect (e.g. increased ease of finding a group where one can fit in).

Much of the book has little to do with the origins of depression, and is dominated by descriptions of and anecdotes about how depression works.

He spends a fair amount of time talking about the frequently overlooked late stages of depression recovery, where antidepressants aren’t much use and people can easily fall back into depression.

The book includes a bit of self-help advice to use positive psychology, and to not rely on drugs for much more than an initial nudge in the right direction.

Superintelligence

Posted by Peter on July 28, 2014
Posted in: Artificial Intelligence, Book Reviews. Tagged: .

Book review: Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies, by Nick Bostrom.

This book is substantially more thoughtful than previous books on AGI risk, and substantially better organized than the previous thoughtful writings on the subject.

Bostrom’s discussion of AGI takeoff speed is disappointingly philosophical. Many sources (most recently CFAR) have told me to rely on the outside view to forecast how long something will take. We’ve got lots of weak evidence about the nature of intelligence, how it evolved, and about how various kinds of software improve, providing data for an outside view. Bostrom assigns a vague but implausibly high probability to AI going from human-equivalent to more powerful than humanity as a whole in days, with little thought of this kind of empirical check.

I’ll discuss this more in a separate post which is more about the general AI foom debate than about this book.

Bostrom’s discussion of how takeoff speed influences the chance of a winner-take-all scenario makes it clear that disagreements over takeoff speed are pretty much the only cause of my disagreement with him over the likelihood of a winner-take-all outcome. Other writers aren’t this clear about this. I suspect those who assign substantial probability to a winner-take-all outcome if takeoff is slow will wish he’d analyzed this in more detail.

I’m less optimistic than Bostrom about monitoring AGI progress. He says “it would not be too difficult to identify most capable individuals with a long-standing interest in [AGI] research”. AGI might require enough expertise for that to be true, but if AGI surprises me by only needing modest new insights, I’m concerned by the precedent of Tim Berners-Lee creating a global hypertext system while barely being noticed by the “leading” researchers in that field. Also, the large number of people who mistakenly think they’ve been making progress on AGI may obscure the competent ones.

He seems confused about the long-term trends in AI researcher beliefs about the risks: “The pioneers of artificial intelligence … mostly did not contemplate the possibility of greater-than-human AI” seems implausible; it’s much more likely they expected it but were either overconfident about it producing good results or fatalistic about preventing bad results (“If we’re lucky, they might decide to keep us as pets” – Marvin Minsky, LIFE Nov 20, 1970).

The best parts of the book clarify many issues related to ensuring that an AGI does what we want.

He catalogs more approaches to controlling AGI than I had previously considered, including tripwires, oracles, and genies, and clearly explains many limits to what they can accomplish.

He briefly mentions the risk that the operator of an oracle AI would misuse it for her personal advantage. Why should we have less concern about the designers of other types of AGI giving them goals that favor the designers?

If an oracle AI can’t produce a result that humans can analyze well enough to decide (without trusting the AI) that it’s safe, why would we expect other approaches (e.g. humans writing the equivalent seed AI directly) to be more feasible?

He covers a wide range of ways we can imagine handling AI goals, including strange ideas such as telling an AGI to use the motivations of superintelligences created by other civilizations

He does a very good job of discussing what values we should and shouldn’t install in an AGI: the best decision theory plus a “do what I mean” dynamic, but not a complete morality.

I’m somewhat concerned by his use of “final goal” without careful explanation. People who anthropomorphise goals are likely to confuse at least the first few references to “final goal” as if it worked like a human goal, i.e. something that the AI might want to modify if it conflicted with other goals.

It’s not clear how much of these chapters depend on a winner-take-all scenario. I get the impression that Bostrom doubts we can do much about the risks associated with scenarios where multiple AGIs become superhuman. This seems strange to me. I want people who write about AGI risks to devote more attention to whether we can influence whether multiple AGIs become a singleton, and how they treat lesser intelligences. Designing AGI to reflect values we want seems almost as desirable in scenarios with multiple AGIs as in the winner-take-all scenario (I’m unsure what Bostrom thinks about that). In a world with many AGIs with unfriendly values, what can humans do to bargain for a habitable niche?

He has a chapter on worlds dominated by whole brain emulations (WBE), probably inspired by Robin Hanson’s writings but with more focus on evaluating risks than on predicting the most probable outcomes. Since it looks like we should still expect an em-dominated world to be replaced at some point by AGI(s) that are designed more cleanly and able to self-improve faster, this isn’t really an alternative to the scenarios discussed in the rest of the book.

He treats starting with “familiar and human-like motivations” (in an augmentation route) as an advantage. Judging from our experience with humans who take over large countries, a human-derived intelligence that conquered the world wouldn’t be safe or friendly, although it would be closer to my goals than a smiley-face maximizer. The main advantage I see in a human-derived superintelligence would be a lower risk of it self-improving fast enough for the frontrunner advantage to be large. But that also means it’s more likely to be eclipsed by a design more amenable to self-improvement.

I’m suspicious of the implication (figure 13) that the risks of WBE will be comparable to AGI risks.

  • Is that mainly due to “neuromorphic AI” risks? Bostrom’s description of neuromorphic AI is vague, but my intuition is that human intelligence isn’t flexible enough to easily get the intelligence part of WBE without getting something moderately close to human behavior.
  • Is the risk of uploaded chimp(s) important? I have some concerns there, but Bostrom doesn’t mention it.
  • How about the risks of competitive pressures driving out human traits (discussed more fully/verbosely at Slate Star Codex)? If WBE and AGI happen close enough together in time that we can plausibly influence which comes first, I don’t expect the time between the two to be long enough for that competition to have large effects.
  • The risk that many humans won’t have enough resources to survive? That’s scary, but wouldn’t cause the astronomical waste of extinction.

Also, I don’t accept his assertion that AGI before WBE eliminates the risks of WBE. Some scenarios with multiple independently designed AGIs forming a weakly coordinated singleton (which I consider more likely than Bostrom does) appear to leave the last two risks in that list unresolved.

This books represents progress toward clear thinking about AGI risks, but much more work still needs to be done.

The Hidden Reality

Posted by Peter on June 30, 2014
Posted in: Book Reviews, Life, the Universe, and Everything. Tagged: .

Book review: The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos, by Brian Greene.

This book has a lot of overlap with Tegmark’s Our Mathematical Universe

Greene uses less provocative language than Tegmark, but makes up for that by suggesting 5 more multiverses than Tegmark (3 of which depend on string theory for credibility, and 2 that Tegmark probably wouldn’t label as multiverses).

I thought about making some snide remarks about string theory being less real than the other multiverses. Then I noticed that what Greene calls the ultimate multiverse (all possible universes) implies that string theory universes (or at least computable approximations) are real regardless of whether we live in one.

Like Tegmark, Greene convinces me that inflation which lasts for infinite time implies infinite space and infinite copies of earth, but fails to convince me that he has a strong reason for assuming infinite time.

The main text is mostly easy to read. Don’t overlook the more technical notes at the end – the one proposing an experiment that would distinguish the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics from the Copenhagen interpretation is one of the best parts of the book.

Rule of the Clan

Posted by Peter on June 16, 2014
Posted in: Book Reviews, Politics. Tagged: , .

Book review: The Rule of the Clan: What an Ancient Form of Social Organization Reveals About the Future of Individual Freedom by Mark S. Weiner.

This book does a good job of explaining how barbaric practices such as feuds and honor killings are integral parts of clan-based systems of dispute resolution, and can’t safely be suppressed without first developing something like the modern rule of law to remove the motives that perpetuate them.

He has a coherent theory of why societies with no effective courts and police need to have kin-based groups be accountable for the actions of their members, which precludes some of the individual rights that we take for granted.

He does a poor job of explaining how this is relevant to modern government. He writes as if anyone who wants governments to exert less power wants to weaken the rule of law and the ability of governments to stop violent disputes. (His comments about modern government are separate enough to not detract much from the rest of the book).

He implies that modern rule of law and rule by clans are the only stable possibilities. He convinced me that it would be hard to create good alternatives to those two options, but not that alternatives are impossible.

To better understand how modern individualism replaced clan-based society, read Fukuyama’s The Origins of Political Order together with this book.

Our Mathematical Universe

Posted by Peter on April 14, 2014
Posted in: Artificial Intelligence, Book Reviews, Life, the Universe, and Everything. Tagged: , , .

Book review: Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality, by Max Tegmark.

His most important claim is the radical Platonist view that all well-defined mathematical structures exist, therefore most physics is the study of which of those we inhabit. His arguments are more tempting than any others I’ve seen for this view, but I’m left with plenty of doubt.

He points to ways that we can imagine this hypothesis being testable, such as via the fine-tuning of fundamental constants. But he doesn’t provide a good reason to think that those tests will distinguish his hypothesis from other popular approaches, as it’s easy to imagine that we’ll never find situations where they make different predictions.

The most valuable parts of the book involve the claim that the multiverse is spatially infinite. He mostly talks as if that’s likely to be true, but his explanations caused me to lower my probability estimate for that claim.

He gets that infinity by claiming that inflation continues in places for infinite time, and then claiming there are reference frames for which that infinite time is located in a spatial rather than a time direction. I have a vague intuition why that second step might be right (but I’m fairly sure he left something important out of the explanation).

For the infinite time part, I’m stuck with relying on argument from authority, without much evidence that the relevant authorities have much confidence in the claim.

Toward the end of the book he mentions reasons to doubt infinities in physics theories – it’s easy to find examples where we model substances such as air as infinitely divisible, when we know that at some levels of detail atomic theory is more accurate. The eternal inflation theory depends on an infinitely expandable space which we can easily imagine is only an approximation. Plus, when physicists explicitly ask whether the universe will last forever, they don’t seem very confident. I’m also tempted to say that the measure problem (i.e. the absence of a way to say some events are more likely than others if they all happen an infinite number of times) is a reason to doubt infinities, but I don’t have much confidence that reality obeys my desire for it to be comprehensible.

I’m disappointed by his claim that we can get good evidence that we’re not Boltzmann brains. He wants us to test our memories, because if I am a Boltzmann brain I’ll probably have a bunch of absurd memories. But suppose I remember having done that test in the past few minutes. The Boltzmann brain hypothesis suggests it’s much more likely for me to have randomly acquired the memory of having passed the test than for me to actually be have done the test. Maybe there’s a way to turn Tegmark’s argument into something rigorous, but it isn’t obvious.

He gives a surprising argument that the differences between the Everett and Copenhagen interpretations of quantum mechanics don’t matter much, because unrelated reasons involving multiverses lead us to expect results comparable to the Everett interpretation even if the Copenhagen interpretation is correct.

It’s a bit hard to figure out what the book’s target audience is – he hides the few equations he uses in footnotes to make it look easy for laymen to follow, but he also discusses hard concepts such as universes with more than one time dimension with little attempt to prepare laymen for them.

The first few chapters are intended for readers with little knowledge of physics. One theme is a historical trend which he mostly describes as expanding our estimate of how big reality is. But the evidence he provides only tells us that the lower bounds that people give keep increasing. Looking at the upper bound (typically infinity) makes that trend look less interesting.

The book has many interesting digressions such as a description of how to build Douglas Adams’ infinite improbability drive.

The Great Degeneration

Posted by Peter on March 2, 2014
Posted in: Book Reviews, U.S. Politics.

Book review: The Great Degeneration: How Institutions Decay and Economies Die, by Niall Ferguson.

Read (or skim) Reinhart and Rogoff’s book This Time is Different instead. The Great Degeneration contains little value beyond a summary of that.

The other part which comes closest to analyzing US decay is a World Bank report about governance quality from 1996 to 2011 which shows the US in decline from 2000 to 2009. He makes some half-hearted attempts to argue for a longer trend using anecdotes that don’t really say much.

Large parts of the book are just standard ideological fluff.

Self Comes to Mind

Posted by Peter on November 20, 2013
Posted in: Book Reviews, The Human Mind. Tagged: , , .

Book review: Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain by Antonio R. Damasio.

This book describes many aspects of human minds in ways that aren’t wrong, but the parts that seem novel don’t have important implications.

He devotes a sizable part of the book to describing how memory works, but I don’t understand memory any better than I did before.

His perspective often seems slightly confusing or wrong. The clearest example I noticed was his belief (in the context of pre-historic humans) that “it is inconceivable that concern [as expressed in special treatment of the dead] or interpretation could arise in the absence of a robust self”. There may be good reasons for considering it improbable that humans developed burial rituals before developing Damasio’s notion of self, but anyone who is familiar with Julian Jaynes (as Damasio is) ought to be able to imagine that (and stranger ideas).

He pays a lot of attention to the location in the brain of various mental processes (e.g. his somewhat surprising claim that the brainstem plays an important role in consciousness), but rarely suggests how we could draw any inferences from that about how normal minds behave.