Book Review: The Blank Slate : The Denial of Human Nature and Modern Intellectual Life by Steven Pinker
Pinker makes a good case that there’s a widespread bias toward a blank-slate world-view. But when dealing with serious scientific literature, his attempts to find clearcut enemies seem mistaken.
Pinker’s claim that “The second scientific defense of the Blank Slate comes from connectionism” is pretty puzzling. This “defense” consists of modeling the mind as “a general-purpose learning device”. But the books that Pinker references (Rethinking Innateness, and Parallel Distributed Processing), are both careful to point out why their models are completely consistent with the kind of genetic influences on behavior that evolutionary psychologists are talking about. Their disagreements with Pinker seem to be at most about how those influences are implemented, and even there I can’t find anything in Pinker’s arguments that clearly rejects what the connectionists believe.
Pinker’s attacks on Gould’s quasi-defense of the blank slate mainly convinced me that Gould didn’t want to think clearly about the subject, probably because he considered that any mechanistic explanation of the mind (genetic or environmental) was demeaning.
Pinker’s arguments that it’s silly to believe in the tabula rasa and noble savage world-views are eloquent and compelling, but his response to the “it’s demeaning” attitudes will convince fewer people, because he ignores the very real benefits of holding an unrealistically high opinion of one’s self (overestimating one’s abilities seems to be an effective means of advertising one’s strengths). To those who want to portray themselves as angelic or as wiser than software of the future, an accurate model of the mind is genuinely demeaning.
Pinker seems somewhat inconsistent about how important it is to know whether the mind is a blank slate.
On pages x – xi he says “the conviction that humanity could be reshaped by massive social engineering projects led to some of the greatest atrocities in history.” But in the chapter on fear of inequality, he claims (more convincingly), while defending his views from the charge they will encourage Nazism, that the differences between Nazi beliefs in genetic superiority and the blank slate viewpoints of Stalin and the Khmer Rouge didn’t have much effect on whether those tyrannies engaged in genocide – it was the greater tendency to divide people into in-groups and out-groups that best distinguishes the worst of the genocidal tyrants.
Pinker exaggerates the importance of finding the correct answer to the nature-nurture debate in other ways as well (I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised that an author overestimates the importance of what he’s selling).
He gives examples such as forcing people to live in drab cement boxes (as if their taste for a more natural surrounding could be reversed by social engineers), or releasing psychopaths (because societal problems caused their insanity).
But a genetic component to these behaviors doesn’t prove that they can’t be altered (I have genes for brown hair – does that mean I can’t dye my hair blue?). It only gives hints as to why they might be difficult to alter.
It sure looks like careful scientific studies of whether we knew how to alter these behaviors would be a more reliable way of debunking the faulty conclusions.
Book Reviews
Book Review: The Emperor of Scent : A Story of Perfume, Obsession, and the Last Mystery of the Senses by Chandler Burr
This is an entertaining and informative story of how a failed class of theories that tried to explain smell as purely shape recognition have been challenged by a theory that involves detecting the vibrational frequencies of bonds.
Burr does a very good job of making some rather technical discussions of chemistry readable and accurate without intimidating amateurs. The story is enjoyable except when reporting the ugly side of academic and corporate politics. The extent to which he claims that researchers who have based careers on the failed approach to smell refuse to think about the vibrational theory seems rather extreme. Yet I can only find one instance in which Burr unfairly criticizes one of those researchers (on page 233, when he says it’s strange not to know what “the same vibration” means, and implies that “same” simply means an identical integer number of nanometers. Yet it would be strange if vibrations had an integer number of an arbitrary unit such as nanometers, and on page 64 Burr implies that vibrating at 2550 nanometers is the same as 2500 nanometers).
One other incidental comment the book makes about the peer review process is worth repeating. One of the reasons that big name research labs continue producing good results is that they have an advantage comparable to insider trading as a result of seeing papers at the peer review stage, while the average lab has to wait longer to get the same ideas.
Book Review: Intangibles: Management, Measurement, and Reporting by Baruch Lev
It isn’t easy to make a book about accounting interesting and uplifting, but this book comes fairly close to accomplishing that. It provides a clear understanding of why it matters how well accounting rules treat intangible assets, and gives some good guidelines on how to improve them.
Some of the proposed improvements are fairly easy to evaluate, such as breaking down R&D into subcategories for basic research, improvements to recently released products, etc., but with some of the book’s suggestions (e.g. trademarks) I’m puzzled as to whether there’s little to be gained or whether he has a good idea that he hasn’t adequately explained.
Alas, accounting standards are a public good that few people have an incentive to create. The improvements suggested by the book could generally be adopted without first being approved by a standards committee because they mostly involve adding new information to reports. But the first company to adopt them gains little until investors can compare the information with that from other companies. And accounting standards committees tend to attract people whose main concern is preventing harm rather than creating new value. And that tendency is currently being reinforced by investors who want a scapegoat for their complacency at the peak of the recent stock market bubble.
Temple Grandin’s latest book Animals in Translation has a couple of ideas that deserve some wider discussion. (The book as a whole is disappointing – see my reviews on Amazon for some of my complaints).
She reports that Con Slobodchikoff has shown that prairie dogs have a language that includes nouns, adjectives, and verbs, and they can apparently combine words to describe objects they haven’t seen before. This seems sufficiently inconsistent with what I’ve read about nonhuman languages (e.g. in Pinker’s books) that it deserves more attention than it has gotten. I can’t find enough about it on the web to decide whether to believe it, and it will take some time for me to get a paper version of Slobodchikoff’s descriptions of the research.
Grandin has an interesting idea about the coevolution of man and dogs. Domestication of animals causes their brains to become smaller, presumably because they come to rely on humans for some functions that they previously needed to handle themselves. It seems that human midbrains shrank about 10% around 10,000 years ago, about when dogs may have become domesticated. That is what we would expect if humans came to rely on dogs for many smelling tasks.
Book Review: FAB: The Coming Revolution on Your Desktop–From Personal Computers to Personal Fabrication by Neil Gershenfeld
This book brings welcome attention to the neglected field of personal, general-purpose manufacturing. He argues that the technology is at roughly the stage that computing was when minicomputers were the leading edge, is good enough to tell us something about how full-fledged assemblers as envisioned by Drexler will be used, and that the main obstacle to people using it to build what they want is ignorance of what can be accomplished.
The book presents interesting examples of people building things that most would assume were beyond their ability. But he does not do a good job of explaining what can and can’t be accomplished. Too much of the book sounds like a fund-raising appeal for a charity, describing a needy person who was helped rather than focusing on the technology or design process. He is rather thoughtless about choosing what technical details to provide, giving examples of assembly language (something widely known, and hard enough to use that most of his target users will be deterred from making designs which need it), but when he describes novel ideas such as “printing” a kit that can be assembled into a house he is too cryptic for me to guess whether that method would improve on standard methods.
I’ve tried thinking of things I might want to build, and I’m usually no closer to guessing whether it’s feasible than before I read the book. For example, it would be nice if I could make a prototype of a seastead several feet in diameter, but none of the examples the book gives appear to involve methods which could make sturdy cylinders or hemispheres that large.
The index leaves much to be desired – minicomputers are indexed under computers, and open source is indexed under software, when I expected to find them under m and o.
And despite the lip service he pays to open source software, the CAM software he wrote comes with a vague license that doesn’t meet the standard definition of open source.
I’ve put a nearly complete list of books I own on my web site, produced via Delicious Library and DeliciousExporter.
It was fairly simple (although not particularly fast) to do. My biggest complaint is that Delicious Library doesn’t have a good way of handling books that Amazon doesn’t know about (I gave up on those).
Book Review: On Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins
This book presents strong arguments that prediction is a more important part of intelligence than most experts realize. It outlines a fairly simple set of general purpose rules that may describe some important aspects of how small groups of neurons interact to produce intelligent behavior. It provides a better theory of the role of the hippocampus than I’ve seen before.
I wouldn’t call this book a major breakthrough, but I expect that it will produce some nontrivial advances in the understanding of the human brain.
The most disturbing part of this book is the section on the risks of AI. He claims that AIs will just be tools, but he shows no sign of having given thought to any of the issues involved beyond deciding that an AI is unlikely to have human motives. But that leaves a wide variety of other possible goals systems, many of which would be as dangerous. It’s possible that he sees easy ways to ensure that an AI is always obedient, but there are many approaches to AI for which I don’t think this is possible (for instance, evolutionary programming looks like it would select for something resembling a survival instinct), and this book doesn’t clarify what goals Hawkins’ approach is likely to build into his software. It is easy to imagine that he would need to build in goals other than obedience in order to get his system to do any learning. If this is any indication of the care he is taking to ensure that his “tools” are safe, I hope he fails to produce intelligent software.
For more discussion of AI risks, see sl4.org. In particular, I have a description there of how one might go about safely implementing an obedient AI. At the time I was thinking of Pei Wang’s NARS as the best approach to AI, and with that approach it seems natural for an AI to have no goals that are inconsistent with obedience. But Hawkins’ approach seems approximately as powerful as NARS, but more likely to tempt designers into building in goals other than obedience.
Book Review: Anthropic Bias: Observation Selections Effects in Science and Philosophy by Nick Bostrom
This book discusses selection effects as they affect reasoning on topics such as the Doomsday Argument, whether you will choose a lane of traffic that is slower than average, and whether we can get evidence for or against the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics. Along the way it poses some unusual thought experiments that at first glance seem to prove some absurd conclusions. It then points out the questionable assumptions about what constitute “similar observers” upon which the absurd conclusions depend, and in doing so it convinced me that the Doomsday Argument is weaker than I had previously thought.
It says some interesting things about the implications of a spatially infinite universe, and of the possibility that the number of humans will be infinite.
It is not easy to read, but there’s little reason to expect a book on this subject could be both easy to read and correct.
The author has a web site for the book.
This book provides a moderately strong argument that the production of cheap oil is peaking, although it isn’t as conclusive an argument as I’d hoped for, and is only a little bit better than the brief summaries of Hubbert’s ideas that I’d previously seen on the net.
Much of the book consists of marginally relevant stories of his career as a geologist. He occasionally slips in some valuable tidbits, such as that Texas once had an oil cartel.
He does a mediocre job of analyzing the consequences of scarcer oil. He provides a few hints of how natural gas could replace oil, but says much less about the costs of switching than I’d hoped for. His comments on how to protect yourself are misleading:
In the past, a useful way of insuring major producers and consumers against the effect of a price changes was purchasing futures contracts. However, the ordinary futures contracts extend for a year or two. The oil problem extends for 10 years or more. The oil problem extends for 10 years or more. Anyone who agrees to supply oil 10 years from now, for a price agreed on today, very likely will disappear into bankruptcy before the contract matures.
At the time the book was first published (2001), crude oil futures contracts extended about 7 years out. They weren’t liquid enough to hedge a large fraction of consumption, but if a desire to hedge had caused them to say in 2001 that crude would be at $60/barrel in 2008 rather than saying it would be in the low twenties, that would both have signaled a need to react and reduced the risks of doing so. The idea that bankruptcy would threaten such futures reflects his ignorance of the futures markets. An oil producer who sold futures as a hedge will almost certainly not sell more futures than it has oil to deliver on. Speculators might lose their shirts, but futures brokers have the experience needed to ensure that the defaults are small enough for the brokers to absorb (see, for example, what happened in the gold mania of the late 70s).
The cover describes Stratfor (the intelligence company Friedman founded) as a “Shadow CIA”. By this book’s description of the CIA, this implies it has a lot of details right but misses many important broad trends. The book tends to have weaknesses of this nature, being better as a history of Al Qaeda’s conflict with the U.S. than as a guide to the future, but it’s probably a good deal more reliable than CIA analysis.
It describes a few important trends that I wasn’t aware of. The best theory the book proposes that I hadn’t heard before is the claim that the U.S. government is much more worried about Al Qaeda getting a nuclear bomb than the public realizes (for instance, the Axis of Evil is the set of nations that are unable or unwilling to prove they won’t help Al Qaeda get the bomb).
The explanation of the U.S. motives for invading Iraq as primarily to pressure the Saudi government is unconvincing.
The book’s biases are sufficiently subtle that I have some difficulty detecting them. It often paints Bush in as favorable a light as possible, but is also filled with some harsh criticisms of his mistakes, for example:
It is an extraordinary fact that in the U.S.-jihadist war, the only senior commander or responsible civilian to have been effectively relieved was Eric Shinseki, Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army, who was retired unceremoniously (although not ahead of schedule) after he accurately stated that more than 200,000 troops would be needed in Iraq
The person selected, Tom Ridge, had no background in the field and had absolutely no idea what he was doing, but that was not a problem problem since, in fact, he would have nothing really to do. His job was simply to appear to be in control of an apparatus that did not yet exist
But it’s hard to place a lot of confidence in theories that are backed mainly by eloquent stories. It’s unfortunate that the book is unable or unwilling to document the evidence needed to confirm them.
There’s a fair amount of agreement between this book and Imperial Hubris, but I’ve revised my opinion of that book a bit due to the disagreements between the two. The claims by Imperial Hubris that we don’t need to worry about a new Caliphate seem unpersuasive now that I see there widespread disagreement with that claim and weak arguments on both sides. The two books disagree on who’s currently winning the war, but I see no sign that defeat for either side is anywhere near close enough to be predictable.