Book review: The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently… and Why, by Richard E. Nisbett.
It is often said that travel is a good way to improve one’s understanding of other cultures.
The Geography of Thought discredits that saying, by being full of examples of cultural differences that 99.9% of travelers will overlook.
Here are a few of the insights I got from the book, but I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have gotten from visiting Asia frequently:
Continue ReadingTL;DR: loss of topsoil is a problem, but not a crisis. I’m unsure whether fixing it qualifies as a great opportunity for mitigating global warming.
This post will loosely resemble a review of the book Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations, by David R. Montgomery. If you want a real review, see Colby Moorberg’s review on Goodreads.
Depletion of topsoil has been an important cause of the collapse of large civilizations. Farmers are often tempted to maximize this year’s production, at the cost of declining crop yields. When declining yields leave an empire unable to feed everyone, farmers are unwilling to adopt techniques that restore the topsoil, because doing so will temporarily decrease production further. The Mayan civilization seems to have experienced three cycles of soil-driven boom and bust lasting around 1000 years per cycle.
Continue ReadingHere are a bunch of loosely organized ideas that didn’t have a natural place in my review of WEIRDest People.
WEIRDest People is almost as important for understanding human biases as is Thinking Fast and Slow.
Continue ReadingBook review: The Cult of Smart, by Fredrik deBoer.
The Cult of Smart is a sporadically thoughtful book about education politics, sometimes rising above tribal politics, and sometimes repeating tired old tribal rants.
Continue ReadingBook review: The End of Alzheimer’s Program, by Dale Bredesen.
This sequel to The End of Alzheimer’s is an attempt at a complete guide to a healthy lifestyle.
Alas, science is still too primitive to enable an impressive version of that. So what we end up with is this guide that would overwhelm anyone who tries to follow it thoroughly, while still lacking the kind of evidence that would convince a skeptic.
Continue ReadingLast month, I conceded defeat in my bet (with Robin Hanson) that US COVID-19 deaths would be less than 250,000.
My biggest mistake was thinking voters would care about results, and unite against a common enemy as they did in WWII. I should have been more aware of the tendency to treat natural deaths as more acceptable than deaths due to a hostile agent. Robin clearly did better at evaluating this.
Continue ReadingI said in my review of WEIRDest People that the Flynn effect seems like a natural consequence of thinking styles that became more analytical, abstract, reductionist, and numerical.
I’ll expand here on some questions which I swept under the rug, so that I could keep that review focused on the book’s most important aspects.
After reading WEIRDest People, I find that the goal of a culture-neutral IQ test looks strange (and, of course, WEIRD). At least as strange as trying to fix basketball to stop favoring tall people.
Continue ReadingBook review: The WEIRDest People in the World, by Joseph Henrich.
Wow!
Henrich previously wrote one of the best books of the last decade. Normally, I expect such an author’s future books to, at best, exhibit regression toward the mean. But Henrich’s grand overview of humanity’s first few million years was merely a modest portion of the ideas that he originally tried to fit into this magnum opus. Henrich couldn’t quite explain in one volume how humanity got all the way to industrial empires, so he split the explanation into two books.
The cartoon version of the industrial revolution: Protestant culture made the West more autistic.
However, explaining the most important event in history makes up only about 25% of this book’s focus and value.
Continue ReadingBook review: The Precipice, by Toby Ord.
No, this isn’t about elections. This is about risks of much bigger disasters. It includes the risks of pandemics, but not the kind that are as survivable as COVID-19.
The ideas in this book have mostly been covered before, e.g. in Global Catastrophic Risks (Bostrom and Cirkovic, editors). Ord packages the ideas in a more organized and readable form than prior discussions.
See the Slate Star Codex review of The Precipice for an eloquent summary of the book’s main ideas.
Continue ReadingFrom The problem with rapid Covid testing, Mayank Gupta writes:
The absolute number of false positives would rise dramatically under slightly inaccurate, broad surveillance testing. At least initially, the number of people going to the doctor to ask what to do would also rise. One can imagine if doctors truly flubbed and didn’t know how to advise patients accurately, a lot of individual patients would lose trust in the medical system (testing, doctors, or both). The consequence of this would be more resistance to health public policy measures in the future.
For a reminder of why rapid testing is valuable, see Alex Tabarrok. Note also the evidence from the NBA that people who need useful tests can be more innovative than the medical system.
This seems like the tip of an important iceberg.
Continue Reading