Book Reviews

Book review: How To Win Friends and Influence People, by Dale Carnegie.

This book mostly deserves its fame. It gives simple descriptions of basic techniques that should make most people who follow the advice more likable than average, without requiring prohibitive effort.

I have two modest complaints.

He focuses more than I would like on how to befriend people who like to talk at length, which leaves me wondering what to do with the potentially nicer friend who is too modest to say interesting things about himself.

The chapter called Make the Fault Seem Easy to Correct encourages misleading people into thinking something is easier than it actually is. Even if this works 75 percent of the time, I expect that the resentment caused by a few rare cases where it turns out to be more misleading than intended outweigh the benefits produced by its successes. The book Switch describes a better version of this strategy (incorporating an important part of what Carnegie advises): focus on breaking down the task into small steps.

Book review: Going Inside: A Tour Round a Single Moment of Consciousness, by John McCrone.

This book improved my understanding of how various parts of the brain interact, and of how long it takes the brain to process and react to sensory data. But there were many times when I wondered whether it was worth finishing, and I wish I had given up before the last few chapters that focused on consciousness other than neuroscience.

Too much of the book is devoted to attacking naive versions of reductionism and computational models of the brain. His claim that “chaos theory electrified science” is wrong. It electrified some reports about science, but has done little to create better models or testable predictions.

It’s misleading for him to claim the difference between human and animal consciousness “is terribly simple. Animals are locked into the present tense.” There are many hints that animals have some thoughts about the future and past, and it’s hard enough to evaluate those thoughts that we need to be cautious about denying that they think like us. He suggests that language and grammar provide unique abilities to think about the future. But I’m fairly sure I can analyze the future without using language, using mostly visual processing to plan a route I’m going to kayak through some rapids, or to imagine an opponent’s next chess move. I expect animals have some abilities along those lines. Human language must provide some improved ability to think about the future, but I find it hard to specify those abilities.

Book review: Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jetha.

This book makes a strong case that pre-agricultural humans were very far from monogamous, much like Chimps and Bonobos. It’s often convincing, but sometimes biased by ideology.

Some of the evidence comes from the difficulty that humans have being monogamous now, and the under-reported satisfaction of cultures that encourage egalitarian sharing of mates (including WWII pilots). Some stronger evidence comes from the size of our genitalia, and the promiscuous, egalitarian sex and reported absence of rape and war in our closest living relatives (Bonobos – have they really been observed well enough that we should expect to have seen rape and war?).

The book is highly critical of the Victorian version of marriage, but is somewhat approving of marriage as an institution if it’s more like some non-English cultures where occasional sex outside of the marriage is considered to be fairly harmless.

They also claim there was little violence, because food was abundant and it was normally easier to move to unoccupied land than to fight over resources. They provide decent reasons not to trust arguments that supposedly demonstrate high levels of violence in primitive cultures, but they don’t convince me they’re any more objective than the people they criticize. The most questionable part of this section is their belief that the natural growth rate of pre-agricultural humans was unusually low. They have some plausible reasons for expecting a slower population growth rate than the 25 year doubling time that Malthus expected in the absence of resource constraints, but they don’t come close to providing a good argument that Malthus was off by the factor of 10,000 that would be needed to reconcile the estimated pre-agricultural population growth rates with an absence of resource constraints. I get the impression that they imagine our direct ancestors had no competition from other hominids.

The book’s back flap claims that it contains an explanation of why homosexuality hasn’t been selected out of our genes, but the closest to that I could find in the book was a theory involving bonding which would explain bisexuality but not homosexuality.

Book review: Counterclockwise: Mindful Health and the Power of Possibility, by Ellen J. Langer.

This book presents ideas about how attitudes and beliefs can alter our health and physical abilities.

The book’s name comes from a 1979 study that the author performed that made nursing home residents act and look younger by putting them in an environment that reminded them of earlier days and by treating them as capable of doing more than most expected they could do.

One odd comment she makes is the there were no known measures of aging other than chronological age at the time of the 1979 study. She goes on to imply that little has changed since then – but it took me little effort to find info about a 1991 book Biomarkers which made a serious attempt at filling this void.

She disputes claims such as those popularized by Atul Gawande that teaching doctors to act more like machines (following checklists) will improve medical practice. She’s concerned that reducing the diversity of medical opinions will reduce our ability to benefit from getting a second opinion that could detect a mistake in the original diagnosis, and cites evidence that North Carolina residents have an unusually high tendency to seek second opinions, and also have signs of better health. But this only tells me that with little use of checklists, getting a second opinion is valuable. That doesn’t say much about whether adopting a culture of using checklists is better than adopting a culture of seeking second opinions. The North Carolina evidence doesn’t suggest a large enough health benefit to provide much competition with the evidence for checklists.

One surprising report is that cultures with positive views of aging seem to produce older people who have better memory than other cultures. It’s not clear what the causal mechanism is, but with the evidence coming from groups as different as mainland Chinese and deaf Americans, it seems likely that the beliefs cause the better memory rather than the better memory causing the beliefs.

Two interesting quotes from the book:

certainty is a cruel mindset

to tell us we’re “terminal” may be a self-fulfilling prophecy. There are no records of how often doctors have been correct or not after making this prediction.

Book review: Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century, by P. W. Singer.

This book covers a wide range of topics related to robotics and war. The author put a good deal of thought into what topics we ought to pay attention to, but provides few answers that will tell us how to avoid problems. The style is entertaining. That doesn’t necessarily interfere with the substance, but I have some suspicions that the style influenced the author to be a bit more superficial than he ought to be.

I’m disappointed by his three-paragraph treatment of EMP risks. He understands that EMPs could cause major problems, but he failed to find any of the ideas people have about mitigating the risk.

With some lesser-known risks, the attention he provides may be helpful at reducing the danger. For instance, he identifies overconfidence as an important cause of war, and points out that the hype often created by designers of futuristic devices such as robots can cause leaders to overestimate their military value. This ought to be repeated widely enough that leaders will be aware of the danger.

He expresses some interesting concerns about how unmanned vehicles blur the lines between soldiers in battle and innocent civilians. Is a civilian technician who is actively working on an autonomous vehicle that is about to engage in hostile action against an enemy an ‘illegal combatant’? Does a pilot walking to work in Nevada to pilot a drone that will drop bombs in Afghanistan a military target?

Book review: Leadership and Self-Deception: Getting out of the Box, by the Arbinger Institute.

In spite of being marketed as mainly for corporate executives, this book’s advice is important for most interactions between people. Executives have more to gain from it, but I suspect they’re somewhat less willing to believe it.

I had already learned a lot about self-deception before reading this, but this book clarifies how to recognize and correct common instances in which I’m tempted to deceive myself. More importantly, it provides a way to explain self-deception to a number of people. I had previously despaired of explaining my understanding of self-deception to people who hadn’t already sought out the ideas I’d found. Now I can point people to this book. But I still can’t summarize it in a way that would change many people’s minds.

It’s written mostly as a novel, which makes it very readable without sacrificing much substance.

Some of the books descriptions don’t sound completely right to me. They describe people as acting “inside the box” or “outside the box” with respect to another person (not the same as the standard meaning of “thinking outside the box”) as if people normally did one or the other, we I think I often act somewhere in between those two modes. Also, the term “self-betrayal”, which I’d describe as acting selfishly and rationalizing the act as selfless, should not be portrayed as if the selfishness automatically causes self-deception. If people felt a little freer to admit that they act selfishly, they’d be less tempted to deceive themselves about their motives.

The book seems a bit too rosy about the benefits of following it’s advice. For instance, the book leaves the reader to imagine that Semmelweis benefited from admitting that he had been killing patients. Other accounts of Semmelweis suggest that he suffered, and the doctors who remained in denial prospered. Maybe he would have done much better if he had understood this book and been able to adopt its style. But it’s important to remember that self-deception isn’t an accident. It happens because it has sometimes worked.

Switch

Book review: Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard, by Chip and Dan Heath.

This book uses an understanding of the limits to human rationality to explain how it’s sometimes possible to make valuable behavioral changes, mostly in large institutions, with relatively little effort.

The book presents many anecdotes about people making valuable changes, often demonstrating unusually creative thought. The theories about why the changes worked are not very original, but are presented better than in most other books.

Some of the successes are sufficiently impressive that I wonder whether they cherry-picked too much and made it look too easy. One interesting example that is a partial exception to this pattern is a comparison of two hospitals that tried to implement the same change, with one succeeding and the other failing. Even with a good understanding of the book’s ideas, few people looking at the differences between the hospitals would notice the importance of whether small teams met for afternoon rounds at patients’ bedsides or in a lounge where other doctors overheard the discussions.

They aren’t very thoughtful about whether the goals are wise. This mostly doesn’t matter, although it is strange to read on page 55 about a company that succeeded by focusing on short-term benefits to the exclusion of long-term benefits, and then on page 83 to read about a plan to get businesses to adopt a longer term focus.

Choke

Book review: Choke: What the Secrets of the Brain Reveal About Getting It Right When You Have To, by Sian Beilock.

This book provides some clues about why pressure causes some people to perform less well than they otherwise would, and gives simple (but not always easy) ways to reduce that effect. There’s a good deal of overlap between this book’s advice and other self-improvement advice. The book modestly enhances how I think about the techniques and how motivated I am to use them.

The main surprise about the causes is that people with large working memories are more likely to choke because they’re more likely to over-analyze a problem, presumably because they’re better at analyzing problems. They’re also less creative. There are also interesting comments about the role of small working memories in ADHD.

The book includes some interesting comments on how SAT tests provide misleading evidence of sexual differences in ability, and how social influences can affect sexual differences in ability (for example, having a more feminine name makes a girl less likely to learn math).

The book’s style is unusually pleasant.

Book review: Probability Theory: The Logic of Science, by E. T. Jaynes.

This book does an impressive job of replacing ad hoc rules of statistics with rigorous logic, but it is difficult enough to fully understand that most people will only use small parts of it.

He emphasizes that probability theory consists of logical reasoning about the imperfect information we have, and repeatedly rants against the belief that probabilities or randomness represent features of nature that exist independent of our knowledge. Even something seemingly simple such as a toss of an ordinary coin cannot have some objectively fixed frequency unless concepts such as “toss” are specified in unreasonable detail. What we think of as randomness is best thought of as a procedure for generating results of which we are ignorant.

He derives his methods from a few simple axioms which appear close to common sense, and don’t look much like they are specifically designed to produce statistical rules.

He is careful to advocate Bayesian methods for an idealized robot, and avoids addressing questions of whether fallible humans should sometimes do something else. In particular, his axiom that the robot should never ignore information is a goal that will probably reduce the quality of human reasoning in some cases where there’s too much information for humans to handle well.

I’m convinced that when his methods can be properly applied and produce different results than frequentist methods do, we should reject the frequentist results. But it’s not obvious how easy it is to apply his methods properly, nor is it obvious whether he has accurately represented the beliefs of frequentists (who I suspect often don’t think clearly enough about the issues he raises to be clearly pinned down).

He does a good job of clarifying the concept of “induction”, showing that we shouldn’t try to make it refer to some simple and clearly specified rule, but rather we should think of it as a large set of rules for logical reasoning, much like the concept of “science”.

Book review: Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior, by Christopher Boehm.

This book makes a good argument that a major change from strongly hierarchical societies to fairly egalitarian societies happened to the human race sometime after it diverged from Chimpanzees and Bonobos. Not due to any changes in attitudes toward status, but because language enabled low-status individuals to cooperate more effectively to restrain high-status individuals, and because of he equalizing effects of weapons. Hunter-gatherer societies seem rather consistently egalitarian, and the partial reversion to hierarchy in modern times may be due to the ability to accumulate wealth or the larger size of our societies.

He provides a plausible hypothesis that this change enabled group selection to become more powerful than in a typical species, but that doesn’t imply that group selection became as important as within-group selection, and he doesn’t have a good way of figuring out how important the effect was.

He demonstrates that humans became more altruistic, using a narrow biological definition of altruism, but it’s important to note that this only means agreeing to follow altruistic rules. He isn’t able to say much about how well people follow those rules when nobody notices what they’re doing.

Much of the middle of the book recounting anthropological evidence can be skipped without much loss – the most important parts are chapters 8 and 9.