Book Reviews

Time Biases

Posted by Peter on January 10, 2019
Posted in: Book Reviews. Tagged: , .

Book review: Time Biases: A Theory of Rational Planning and Personal Persistence, by Meghan Sullivan.

I was very unsure about whether this book would be worth reading, as it could easily have been focused on complaints about behavior that experts have long known are mistaken.

I was pleasantly surprised when it quickly got to some of the really hard questions, and was thoughtful about what questions deserved attention. I disagree with enough of Sullivan’s premises that I have significant disagreements with her conclusions. Yet her reasoning is usually good enough that I’m unsure what to make of our disagreements – they’re typically due to differences of intuition that she admits are controversial.

I had hoped for some discussion of ethics (e.g. what discount rate to use in evaluating climate change), whereas the book focuses purely on prudential rationality (i.e. what’s rational for a self-interested person). Still, the discussion of prudential rationality covers most of the issues that make the ethical choices hard.

Personal identity

A key issue is the nature of personal identity – does one’s identity change over time?

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Artificial Intelligence Safety and Security

Posted by Peter on December 6, 2018
Posted in: Artificial Intelligence, Book Reviews, Politics. Tagged: , .

Book review: Artificial Intelligence Safety and Security, by Roman V. Yampolskiy.

This is a collection of papers, with highly varying topics, quality, and importance.

Many of the papers focus on risks that are specific to superintelligence, some assuming that a single AI will take over the world, and some assuming that there will be many AIs of roughly equal power. Others focus on problems that are associated with current AI programs.

I’ve tried to arrange my comments on individual papers in roughly descending order of how important the papers look for addressing the largest AI-related risks, while also sometimes putting similar topics in one group. The result feels a little more organized than the book, but I worry that the papers are too dissimilar to be usefully grouped. I’ve ignored some of the less important papers.

The book’s attempt at organizing the papers consists of dividing them into “Concerns of Luminaries” and “Responses of Scholars”. Alas, I see few signs that many of the authors are even aware of what the other authors have written, much less that the later papers are attempts at responding to the earlier papers. It looks like the papers are mainly arranged in order of when they were written. There’s a modest cluster of authors who agree enough with Bostrom to constitute a single scientific paradigm, but half the papers demonstrate about as much of a consensus on what topic they’re discussing as I would expect to get from asking medieval peasants about airplane safety.

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The Great Stagnation

Posted by Peter on October 28, 2018
Posted in: Book Reviews, Economics, Science and Technology. Tagged: , .

Book(?) review: The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All The Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better, by Tyler Cowen.

Tyler Cowen wrote what looks like a couple of blog posts, and published them in book form.

The problem: US economic growth slowed in the early 1970s, and hasn’t recovered much. Median family income would be 50% higher if the growth of 1945-1970 had continued.

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Where Is My Flying Car?

Posted by Peter on October 14, 2018
Posted in: Artificial Intelligence, Book Reviews, Economics, Freedom, Life, the Universe, and Everything, Molecular Assemblers (Advanced Nanotech), U.S. Politics. Tagged: , , , , .

Book review: Where Is My Flying Car? A Memoir of Future Past, by J. Storrs Hall (aka Josh).

If you only read the first 3 chapters, you might imagine that this is the history of just one industry (or the mysterious lack of an industry).

But this book attributes the absence of that industry to a broad set of problems that are keeping us poor. He looks at the post-1970 slowdown in innovation that Cowen describes in The Great Stagnation[1]. The two books agree on many symptoms, but describe the causes differently: where Cowen says we ate the low hanging fruit, Josh says it’s due to someone “spraying paraquat on the low-hanging fruit”.

The book is full of mostly good insights. It significantly changed my opinion of the Great Stagnation.

The book jumps back and forth between polemics about the Great Strangulation (with a bit too much outrage porn), and nerdy descriptions of engineering and piloting problems. I found those large shifts in tone to be somewhat disorienting – it’s like the author can’t decide whether he’s an autistic youth who is eagerly describing his latest obsession, or an angry old man complaining about how the world is going to hell (I’ve met the author at Foresight conferences, and got similar but milder impressions there).

Josh’s main explanation for the Great Strangulation is the rise of Green fundamentalism[2], but he also describes other cultural / political factors that seem related. But before looking at those, I’ll look in some depth at three industries that exemplify the Great Strangulation.

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Piketty

Posted by Peter on July 31, 2018
Posted in: Book Reviews, Economics, Investing, Politics. Tagged: , , .

Book review: Capital in the Twenty-First Century, by Thomas Piketty.

Capital in the Twenty-First Century is decent at history, mediocre at economics, unimpressive at forecasting, and gives policy advice that is thoughtfully adapted to his somewhat controversial goals. His goals involve a rather different set of priorities than I endorse, but the book mostly doesn’t try to persuade us to adopt his goals, so I won’t say much here about why I have different priorities.

That qualifies as a good deal less dumbed-down-for-popularity than I expected from a bestseller.

Even when he makes mistakes, he is often sufficiently thoughtful and clear to be somewhat entertaining.

Piketty provides a comprehensive view of changes in financial inequality since the start of the industrial revolution.

Piketty’s main story is that we’ve experienced moderately steady increases in inequality, as long as conditions remained somewhat normal. There was a big break in that trend associated with WW1, WW2, and to lesser extents the Great Depression and baby boom. Those equalizing forces (mainly decreases in wealth) seem unlikely to repeat. We’re back on a trend of increasing inequality, with no end in sight.

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Pearl’s Book of Why

Posted by Peter on July 6, 2018
Posted in: Artificial Intelligence, Book Reviews, Science and Technology. Tagged: .

Book review: The Book of Why, by Judea Pearl and Dana MacKenzie.

This book aims to turn the ideas from Pearl’s seminal Causality into something that’s readable by a fairly wide audience.

It is somewhat successful. Most of the book is pretty readable, but parts of it still read like they were written for mathematicians.

History of science

A fair amount of the book covers the era (most of the 20th century) when statisticians and scientists mostly rejected causality as an appropriate subject for science. They mostly observed correlations, and carefully repeated the mantra “correlation does not imply causation”.

Scientists kept wanting to at least hint at causal implications of their research, but statisticians rejected most attempts to make rigorous claims about causes.

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The Plant Paradox

Posted by Peter on June 20, 2018
Posted in: Book Reviews, Health. Tagged: .

Book review: The Plant Paradox, by Steven R. Gundry.

This book describes a good diet, which Gundry seems to have put together by combining ideas from other competent nutritionists, testing many variations on himself and his patients, and keeping the components that showed the best results.

Unfortunately, his rhetoric is designed to convince us that he’s got brilliant, revolutionary theories. That rhetoric bears little resemblance to careful reasoning. It seems more likely that he tried a bunch of arguments on his patients, and kept the ones that more effectively scared them into following his diet.

His puns are mightier than his scalpel (“No More Mr. Knife Guy”).

I first noticed Gundry via the ApoE4 website, at about the time I gave up hoping that I could eat coconut fat without raising my cholesterol. I saw that Gundry recommended no coconut fat for my genotype, but liked coconut fat for others. That led me to think: here’s a paleo-friendly nutritionist who knows more than average.

Then I switched for 5 or 6 weeks to a diet more in line with his Apoe4 advice [1], and was surprised at how much more my cholesterol levels dropped than I expected. I only have modest evidence suggesting that that dietary change was the main reason for the cholesterol drop, but it’s still a bit of evidence that Gundry knows something valuable that I would have otherwise have overlooked.
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The Life You Can Save

Posted by Peter on June 7, 2018
Posted in: Book Reviews. Tagged: , , , , .

Book review: The Life You Can Save, by Peter Singer.

This book presents some unimpressive moral claims, and some more pragmatic social advocacy that is rather impressive.

The Problem

It is all too common to talk as if all human lives had equal value, yet act as if the value of distant strangers’ lives was a few hundred dollars.

Singer is effective at arguing against standard rationalizations for this discrepancy.

He provides an adequate summary of reasons to think most of us can easily save many lives.
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Surfing Uncertainty

Posted by Peter on March 5, 2018
Posted in: Book Reviews, The Human Mind. Tagged: , , , , .

Book review: Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Mind, by Andy Clark.

Surfing Uncertainty describes minds as hierarchies of prediction engines. Most behavior involves interactions between a stream of information that uses low-level sensory data to adjust higher level predictive models of the world, and another stream of data coming from high-level models that guides low-level sensory processes to better guess the most likely interpretations of ambiguous sensory evidence.

Clark calls this a predictive processing (PP) model; others refer to is as predictive coding.

The book is full of good ideas, presented in a style that sapped my curiosity.

Jeff Hawkins has a more eloquent book about PP (On Intelligence), which focuses on how PP might be used to create artificial intelligence. The underwhelming progress of the company Hawkins started to capitalize on these ideas suggests it wasn’t the breakthrough that AI researchers were groping for. In contrast, Clark focuses on how PP helps us understand existing minds.

The PP model clearly has some value. The book was a bit more thorough than I wanted at demonstrating that. Since I didn’t find that particularly new or surprising, I’ll focus most of this review on a few loose threads that the book left dangling. So don’t treat this as a summary of the book (see Slate Star Codex if you want that, or if my review is too cryptic to understand), but rather as an exploration of the questions that the book provoked me to think about.

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The Elephant in the Brain

Posted by Peter on January 31, 2018
Posted in: Book Reviews, Health, The Human Mind. Tagged: , , , .

Book review: The Elephant in the Brain, by Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson.

This book is a well-written analysis of human self-deception.

Only small parts of this book will seem new to long-time readers of Overcoming Bias. It’s written more to bring those ideas to a wider audience.

Large parts of the book will seem obvious to cynics, but few cynics have attempted to explain the breadth of patterns that this book does. Most cynics focus on complaints about some group of people having worse motives than the rest of us. This book sends a message that’s much closer to “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”

The authors claim to be neutrally describing how the world works (“We aren’t trying to put our species down or rub people’s noses in their own shortcomings.”; “… we need this book to be a judgment-free zone”). It’s less judgmental than the average book that I read, but it’s hardly neutral. The authors are criticizing, in the sense that they’re rubbing our noses in evidence that humans are less virtuous than many people claim humans are. Darwin unavoidably put our species down in the sense of discrediting beliefs that we were made in God’s image. This book continues in a similar vein.

This suggests the authors haven’t quite resolved the conflict between their dreams of upholding the highest ideals of science (pursuit of pure knowledge for its own sake) and their desire to solve real-world problems.

The book needs to be (and mostly is) non-judgmental about our actual motives, in order to maximize our comfort with acknowledging those motives. The book is appropriately judgmental about people who pretend to have more noble motives than they actually have.

The authors do a moderately good job of admitting to their own elephants, but I get the sense that they’re still pretty hesitant about doing so.

Impact

Most people will underestimate the effects which the book describes.
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