Book review: The Execution Channel by Ken MacLeod.
The style of this book is better than that of the other books I’ve read by MacLeod, but not good enough for the style alone to be sufficient reason to read it.
I was disappointed that the substance was not very thought provoking. Unlike the typical MacLeod novel, it is set in a society too similar to ours to stretch our imaginations much, and sufficiently less pleasant to be somewhat depressing.
Much of the book is commentary on the current “war on terror”. I agree with a lot of that commentary, but only a few aspects of the commentary have much value.
The most important way in which this novel stands out is that it portrays most characters as people who expect to be the kind of leaders that conspiracy theorists imagine the world to be run by, but regularly end up as more realistic people whose battle plans don’t survive contact with the apparent enemy. And there’s a good deal of realistic “fog of war” type uncertainty over who the enemy is.
MacLeod deserves a good deal of credit for avoiding a number of biases that make typical novels popular but unrealistic, such as making the protagonists better than human. Unfortunately, the results confirm that this kind of realism interferes with the enjoyability of novels.
Book Reviews
Book review: The Robot’s Rebellion: Finding Meaning in the Age of Darwin by Keith E. Stanovich.
This book asks us to notice the conflicts between the goals our genes created us to serve and the goals that we as individuals benefit from achieving. Its viewpoint is somewhat new and unique. Little of the substance of the book seemed new, but there were a number of places where the book provides better ways of communicating ideas than I had previously seen.
The title led me to hope that the book would present a very ambitious vision of how we might completely free ourselves from genes and Darwinian evolution, but his advice focuses on modest nearer term benefits we can get from knowledge produced by studying heuristics and biases. The advice consists mainly of elaborations on the ideas of being rational and using scientific methods instead of using gut reactions when those approaches give conflicting results.
He does a good job of describing the conflicts between first order desires (e.g. eating sugar) and higher order desires (e.g. the desire not to desire unhealthy amounts of sugar), and why there’s no easy rule to decide which of those desires deserves priority.
He isn’t entirely fair to groups of people that he disagrees with. I was particularly annoyed by his claim that “economics vehemently resists the notion that first-order desires are subject to critique”. What economics resists is the idea that person X is a better authority than person Y about what Y’s desires are or ought to be. Economics mostly avoids saying anything about whether a person should want to alter his desires, and I expect those issues to be dealt with better by other disciplines.
One of the better ideas in the book was to compare the effort put into testing peoples’ intelligence to the effort devoted to testing their rationality. He mentions many tests that would provide information about how well a person has overcome biases, and points out that such information might be valuable to schools deciding which students to admit and employers deciding whom to hire. I wish he had provided a good analysis of how well those tests would work if people trained to do well on them. I’d expect some wide variations – tests for overconfidence can be made to work fairly well, but I’m concerned that people would learn to pass tests such as the Wason test without changing their behavior under conditions when they’re not alert to these problems.
Book review: Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming by Bjørn Lomborg.
This book eloquently counters many popular myths about how much harm global warming is likely to cause, but is sufficiently partisan and one-sided that it will do more to polarize the debate than to resolve disagreements. Many of his criticisms of the alarmists are correct. Reading this book in combination with writings of his opponents will give you a much better perspective than reading only one side of this debate.
Selective reporting gives the impression that global warming is causing more deaths, but Lomborg reports that warming will cause reduced deaths for the foreseeable future, mainly through reduced cold-related cardiovascular deaths. He claims warming won’t cause a net increase in deaths until at least 2200, but I expect that uncertainty about medical innovation makes predictions more than a few decades ahead not credible. Even for the next few decades, he exaggerates the evidence. What he calls “The first complete survey for the world” covers the entire world, but only tries to model the effects of the 6 types of disease for which global information is available, and its authors clearly deny knowing whether other diseases have important effects. Lomborg claims there will be 1.4 million fewer deaths in 2050 due to global warming, but he seems to get that number from the effects of only two disease types, whereas the paper he cites predicts 849252 fewer deaths from 6 disease types.
He is often too dismissive of the possibility of technological improvements. For instance, he claims that sticking to Kyoto commitments through the 21st century “would get ever harder”, yet I can imagine a variety of ways it could get easier. He mentions specific dollar costs for complying with Kyoto for a century without hinting at the large uncertainties in those guesses.
In one place he analyzes Kyoto as if it were a foreign aid program, and says that it would do 16 cents of good in developing countries for every dollar spent. I assume he considers this an argument against Kyoto. Since 16 cents might help a person in a developing country more than a dollar helps a person in a developed country, and there is some reason to suspect that few large aid programs are more than 16 percent efficient, it could easily be considered a weak argument for Kyoto.
Sometimes he’s blatantly careless, such as when he talks about “reducing [hurricane] damage by almost 500 percent”.
He appropriately criticizes the Stern report’s use of a suspiciously low discount rate (which has major implications for how much we should do now), but he doesn’t provide a clear explanation of that issue, nor does he say what his preferred model uses (a review on Salon says it uses a 6 percent discount rate, which I suspect only makes sense if we assume a higher economic growth rate than most experts expect).
Book review: What is Intelligence?: Beyond the Flynn Effect by James Flynn
This book may not be the final word on the Flynn Effect, but it makes enough progress in that direction that it is no longer reasonable to describe the Flynn Effect as a mystery. I’m surprised at how much Flynn has changed since the last essay of his I’ve read (a somewhat underwhelming chapter in The Rising Curve (edited by Ulric Neisser)).
Flynn presents evidence of very divergent trends in subsets of IQ tests, and describes a good hypothesis about how that divergence might be explained by increasing cultural pressure for abstract, scientific thought that could create increasing effort to develop certain kinds of cognitive skills that were less important in prior societies.
This helps explain the puzzle of why the Flynn Effect doesn’t imply that 19th century society consisted primarily of retarded people – there has been relatively little change in how people handle concrete problems that constituted the main challenges to average people then. He presents an interesting example of how to observe cognitive differences between modern U.S. society and societies that are very isolated, showing big differences in how they handle some abstract questions.
He also explains why we see very different results for IQ differences over time from what we see when using tests such as twin studies to observe the IQ effects of changes in environment on IQ: the twin studies test unimportant things such as different parenting styles, but don’t test major cultural changes that distinguish the 19th century from today.
None of this suggests that the concept of g is unimportant or refers to something unreal, but a strong focus on g has helped blind some people to the ideas that are needed to understand the Flynn Effect.
Flynn also reports that the rise in IQs is, at least by some measures, fairly uniform across the entire range of IQs (contrary to The Bell Curve’s report that it appeared to affect mainly the low end of the IQ spectrum). This weakens one of the obvious criticisms of David Friedman’s conjecture that modern obstetrics caused the Flynn Effect by reducing the birth related obstacles to large skulls (although if that were the main cause of the Flynn Effect, I’d expect the IQ increase to be largest at the high end of the IQ spectrum).
It also weakens the inference I drew from Fogel’s book on malnutrition. Flynn does little to directly address Fogel’s argument that the benefits of improved nutrition show up with longer delays than most people realize, but he does report some evidence that the Flynn Effect continues even when the height increases that Fogel relies on to measure the benefits of nutrition stop.
Flynn reports that the Flynn Effect has probably stopped in Scandinavia but hasn’t shown signs of stopping in the U.S. His comments on the future of IQ gains are unimpressive.
There are a few disappointing parts of the book near the end where he wanders into political issues where he has relatively little expertise, and his relatively ordinary opinions are no better than a typical academic discussion of politics. In spite of that, the book is fairly short and can be read quickly.
One interesting experiment that Flynn discusses tested whether students preferred one dollar now or two dollars next week. The results were twice as useful in predicting their grades as IQ tests. Flynn infers that this is a test of self control. I presume that is part of what it tests, but I wonder whether it also tests whether the students were able to realize that the testers’ word could be trusted (due to better ability to analyze the relevant incentives? or due to a general willingness to trust strangers because of how the ways they met people selected for trustworthy people?).
Book review: A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World by Gregory Clark
This book provides very interesting descriptions of the Malthusian era, and a surprising explanation of how parts of the world escaped Malthusian conditions starting around 1800. The process involved centuries of wealthier people outreproducing the poor, and passing on traits/culture which were better adapted to modern living. This process almost certainly made some contribution to the industrial revolution, but I can’t find a plausible way to guess the magnitude of the contribution. Clark is not the kind of author I trust to evaluate that magnitude.
His arguments against other explanations of the industrial revolution are unconvincing. His criticisms of institutional explanations imply at most that those explanations are incomplete. But combining those explanations with a normal belief that knowledge/technology matters produces a model against which his criticisms are ineffective. (See Bryan Caplan for more detailed replies about institutional explanations).
He makes interesting claims about how differently we should think about the effects in Malthusian world of phenomena that would be obviously bad today. E.g. he thinks the black plague had good long-term effects. He made me rethink those effects, but he only convinced me that the effects weren’t as bad as commonly believed. His confidence that they were good depends on some unlikely quantitative assumptions about benefits of increased income per capita, and he seems oblivious to the numerous problems with evaluating these assumptions. His comments in the last few pages of the book about how little average happiness has changed over time leads me to doubt that his beliefs are consistent on this subject.
While many parts of the book appear at first glance to be painting a very unpleasant picture of the Malthusian era, he ends up concluding it wasn’t a particularly bad era, and he describes people as being farther from starvation than Robert Fogel indicates in The Escape from Hunger and Premature Death, 1700-2100. Their ability to reach somewhat different conclusions by looking at different sets of evidence implies that there’s more uncertainty than they admit.
He does a neat job of pointing out that economists have often overstated the comparative advantage argument against concerns that labor will be replaced by machines: horses were a clear example of laborers who suffered massive unemployment a century ago when the value of their labor dropped below the cost of their food.
Book review: Beyond AI: Creating the Conscience of the Machine by J. Storrs Hall
The first two thirds of this book survey current knowledge of AI and make some guesses about when and how it will take off. This part is more eloquent than most books on similar subjects, and its somewhat different from normal perspective makes it worth reading if you are reading several books on the subject. But ease of reading is the only criterion by which this section stands out as better than competing books.
The last five chapters that are surprisingly good, and should shame most professional philosophers whose writings by comparison are a waste of time.
His chapter on consciousness, qualia, and related issues is more concise and persuasive than anything else I’ve read on these subjects. It’s unlikely to change the opinions of people who have already thought about these subjects, but it’s an excellent place for people who are unfamiliar with them to start.
His discussions of ethics using game theory and evolutionary pressures is an excellent way to frame ethical discussions.
My biggest disappointment was that he starts to recognize a possibly important risk of AI when he says “disparities among the abilities of AIs … could negate the evolutionary pressure to reciprocal altruism”, but then seems to dismiss that thoughtlessly (“The notion of one single AI taking off and obtaining hegemony over the whole world by its own efforts is ludicrous”).
He probably has semi-plausible grounds for dismissing some of the scenarios of this nature that have been proposed (e.g. the speed at which some people imagine an AI would take off is improbable). But if AIs with sufficiently general purpose intelligence enhance their intelligence at disparate rates for long enough, the results would render most of the book’s discussion of ethics irrelevant. The time it took humans to accumulate knowledge didn’t give Neanderthals much opportunity to adapt. Would the result have been different if Neanderthals had learned to trade with humans? The answer is not obvious, and probably depends on Neanderthal learning abilities in ways that I don’t know how to analyze.
Also, his arguments for optimism aren’t quite as strong as he thinks. His point that career criminals are generally of low intelligence is reassuring if the number of criminals is all that matters. But when the harm done by one relatively smart criminal can be very large (e.g. Mao), it’s hard to say that the number of criminals is all that matters.
Here’s a nice quote from Mencken which this book quotes part of:
Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong. All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them. The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant, in this field as in all others. His culture is based on ‘I am not too sure.’
Another interesting tidbit is the anecdote that H.G. Wells predicted in 1907 that flying machines would be built. In spite of knowing a lot about attempts to build them, he wasn’t aware that the Wright brothers had succeeded in 1903.
If an AI started running in 2003 that has accumulated the knowledge of a 4-year old human and has the ability to continue learning at human or faster speeds, would we have noticed? Or would the reports we see about it sound too much like the reports of failed AIs for us to pay attention?
Book review: How to Survive a Robot Uprising: Tips on Defending Yourself Against the Coming Rebellion by Daniel H. Wilson
This book combines good analyses of recent robotics research with an understanding of movie scenarios about robot intentions (“how could millions of dollars of special effects lead us astray?”) to produce advice of unknown value about how humans might deal with any malicious robots of the next decade or two.
It focuses mainly on what an ordinary individual or small groups can do to save themselves or postpone their demise, and says little about whether a major uprising can be prevented.
The book’s style is somewhat like the Daily Show’s style, mixing a good deal of accurate reporting with occasional bits of obvious satire (“Robots have no emotions. Sensing your fear could make a robot jealous”), but it doesn’t quite attain the Daily Show’s entertainment value.
Its analyses of the weaknesses of current robot sensors and intelligence should make it required reading for any science fiction author or movie producer who wants to appear realistic (I haven’t been paying enough attention to those fields recently to know whether such people still exist). But it needs a bit of common sense to be used properly. It’s all too easy to imagine a gullible movie producer following its advice to have humans build a time machine and escape to the Cretaceous without pondering whether the robots will use similar time machines to follow them.
Book review: How Is Quantum Field Theory Possible? by Sunny Y. Auyang
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.
Book review: The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It by Paul Collier
This very eloquent and mostly thoughtful book about the world’s poorest countries will offend ideologues of all stripes. Collier’s four different explanations for poverty traps (war, presence of natural resources, bad neighbors blocking trade routes, and corruption) clearly place him as a fox rather than a hedgehog without being complex enough that they can rationalize any result (although they can probably rationalize more results than an ideal set of explanations would). He blames both villains in poor countries and thoughtless voters in wealthy countries.
Collier sees that globalization has benefited most nations, but provides plausible mechanisms by which globalization can harm some (e.g. through enabling capital flight).
Collier mostly thinks like a good economist, but his prior work for the World Bank biases him to be overly optimistic about improving such institutions. He recognizes the incentives that cause bureaucrats to be too risk averse, but then makes a cryptic claim that the British government understands the problem and is spending money to fix it. He vaguely implies that this is a venture capital-like fund, but fails to say whether they replicated the key venture capital feature of providing unusually large rewards to employees who produce unusually good results. His silence on this subject leads me to suspect that he’s asking us to blindly trust institutions that have a long track record of avoiding results-oriented incentives.
He also shows misplaced faith in authority when he tries to calculate the value to the world of rescuing a failed state by using George Bush’s calculation that the benefits of installing a good government in Iraq exceeded the expected $100 billion cost. That might be a good argument if Bush had been spending his own money to help Iraq, but his willingness to spend other peoples’ money doesn’t say much.
Collier says it is “surely irresponsible” to leave Somalia with no government. Yet most evidence I’ve seen says Somalia improved by most standard criteria such as life expectancy when it had no government. I don’t know how reliable that evidence is, but Collier’s apparent assumption that we don’t need to look at the evidence makes his opinion suspect.
The book’s biggest shortcoming is the absence of anything resembling footnotes. Collier implies this is too make the book more readable, but he could have put a section of notes at the end referencing individual pages without altering the main text in any way. Instead he only gives a fairly large list of papers he’s written. But I can’t tell without tracking down and reading a large fraction of them which of them if any support his controversial claims (e.g. that giving money to the poorest countries helps them a bit but that doubling it would reach a limit beyond which further money would be wasted).
But his advice is good enough that its value doesn’t depend much on those controversial claims being right. Following his advice to condition aid on results (e.g. sending money to countries when they stop wars, cutting it off if they have a coup or resume war) would provide incentives that would make aid beneficial.
I had previously suspected that large countries have tended to escape poverty more easily in the past few decades because “aid” organizations had enough money to prop up small corrupt governments but not enough to affect a government such as India’s. Collier presents a good alternative theory: being a large country pretty much guarantees access to the sea, and by increasing the number of neighbors, increases the chance of having a neighbor which is open to trade.
Another good tidbit is this point on Fair Trade: farmers “get charity as long as they stay producing the crops that have locked them into poverty.”
Book review: Reasons and Persons by Derek Parfit.
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.