The Rational Optimist

Posted by Peter on June 18, 2011
Posted in: Book Reviews, Politics, Science and Technology.

Book review: The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves by Matt Ridley.

Ridley is more eloquent than Julian Simon, but like Simon he seems like a lawyer focusing all the reader’s attention on the evidence most favorable to his conclusions rather than an objective scientist.

A lot of what he says is right, but I’m bothered by the frequency with which he exaggerates. E.g. he says “justice has improved” [since the 1950s] because 234 innocent Americans were freed due to DNA evidence. That seems like such a tiny fraction of the total injustices that’s it’s nearly useless – it’s easy to imagine that declining jury quality has overwhelmed the improvements.

The book has a bit more history than I wanted, much of it devoted to the idea that free trade is an important cause of progress. He has an interesting claim that trade an important factor in pre-agricultural human success – it reportedly was virtually nonexistent in other species (even Neanderthals), and it may have started around the time that human population began to grow significantly. But the industrial revolution has been discussed often enough elsewhere that I got little out of his summary of the causes.

I’m disappointed that he presented trends of slowing population growth as reasons for optimism. There are many ways those trends could change, such as evolution or cheaper ways reproducing. And there are good arguments that more population growth would be desirable at least for this century.

Beyond Boundaries

Posted by Peter on June 5, 2011
Posted in: Book Reviews, The Human Mind. Tagged: , .

Book review: Beyond Boundaries: The New Neuroscience of Connecting Brains with Machines and How It Will Change Our Lives, by Miguel Nicolelis.

This book presents some ambitious visions of how our lives will be changed by brain-machine and brain to brain (“mind meld”) interfaces, along with some good reasons to hope that we will adapt well to them and think of machines and other people as if they are parts of our body. Many people will have trouble accepting his broad notion of personal identity, but I doubt they will find good arguments against it.

But I wish I’d skipped most of the first half, which focuses on the history of neuroscience research, with too much attention to debates over the extent to which brain functions are decentralized.

He’s disappointingly vague about the obstacles that researchers face. He hints at problems with how safe and durable an interface can be, but doesn’t tell us how serious they are, whether progress is being made on them, etc. I also wanted more specific data about how much information could be communicated each way, how precisely robotic positioning can be controlled, and how much of a trend there is toward improving those.

Too Loud, Too Bright, Too Fast, Too Tight

Posted by Peter on May 25, 2011
Posted in: Book Reviews, The Human Mind. Tagged: .

Book review: Too Loud, Too Bright, Too Fast, Too Tight: What to Do If You Are Sensory Defensive in an Overstimulating World by Sharon Heller.

This book has lots of information about sensory overload and sensory integration problems, but left me confused about the extent to which I have the problems that the book describes and whether there are good solutions.

The book mostly focuses on problems of being overwhelmed by sensory input, but also says sensory numbness can be associated with the same kind of problems. Some of the symptoms discussed describe me rather well, but a majority do not. The book seems to suggest that almost any nonstandard reaction to stimuli might mean a person is sensory defensive, which makes me wonder whether many unrelated conditions have been lumped into one category.

Many reviewers seem pleased that the book tells them they’re not alone in the problems that they’re facing. But I kept having conflicting impressions about whether the people described in the book are like me.

The book lists many possible solutions to sensory problems, which are described as making up a “sensory diet” – more suggestions than the author could plausibly understand well enough to know whether they work. Many are supported by anecdotal evidence, some by evidence that appears to be moderately good science, and for some the evidence seems inconclusive. I believe that they are better than random guesses, but I don’t expect to get much out of them without a good deal of trial and error.

Auditory integration training sounds like the kind of help I’m looking for, and the book makes that and some similar programs sound promising. But the Wikipedia entry on AIT is rather discouraging, and the Wikipedia entry on Sensory integration therapy isn’t very encouraging.

The book reports some interesting claims about the benefits of natural full-spectrum light, such as a large decrease in cavities (see “The effects of lights of different spectra on caries incidence in the golden hamster” by I. M. Sharon, R. P. Feller, S. W. Burney). But how much of this becomes unimportant when we take vitamin D supplements?

I just tried a full-spectrum light (OttLite 15ED12R 15w) recommended by the book. It provides more illumination with 15 watts than the 20 watt fluorescent bulb I normally use, and it was immediately obvious that the book I was reading looked better because it was whiter. But it has a distracting hum. Shouldn’t a book like this be able to warn me of this drawback?

There isn’t a lot out there on the subject of sensory integration, and educated guesses are better than nothing.

The Honor Code

Posted by Peter on May 1, 2011
Posted in: Book Reviews, Politics. Tagged: .

Book review: The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen by Kwame Anthony Appiah.

This book argues that moral changes such as the abolition of dueling, slavery, and foot-binding are not the result of new understanding of why they are undesirable. They result from changes in how they affect the honor (or status) of the groups that have the power to create the change.

Dueling was mostly associated with a hereditary class of gentlemen, and feeling a responsibility to duel was a symbol of that status. When the nature of the upper class changed to include a much less well defined class that included successful businessmen, and society became more egalitarian, the distinction associated with demonstrating that one was a member of the hereditary elite lost enough value that the costs of dueling outweighed the prestige.

Slave-owners increasingly portrayed the labor that slaves preformed in a way that also implied the work of British manual laborers deserved low status, and rising resentment and political power of that labor class created a movement to abolish slavery.

The inability of Chinese elites to ignore the opinions of elites in other nations whose military and technological might made it hard for China to dismiss them as inferior altered the class of people whom the Chinese elites wanted respect from.

These are plausible stories, backed by a modest amount of evidence. I don’t know of any strong explanations that compete with this. But I don’t get the impression that the author tried as hard as I would like to find evidence for competing explanations. For instance, he presents some partial evidence to the effect that Britain abolished slavery at a time when slavery was increasingly profitable. But I didn’t see any consideration of the costs of keeping slaves from running away, which I expect were increasing due to improved long-distance transportation such as railroads. He lists references which might constitute authoritative support for his position, but it looks like it would be time-consuming to verify that.

Whether this book can help spark new moral revolutions is unclear, but it should make our efforts to do so more cost-effective, if only by reducing the effort put into ineffective approaches.

War and Peace and War

Posted by Peter on April 15, 2011
Posted in: Book Reviews, Politics. Tagged: , .

Book review: War and Peace and War: The Rise and Fall of Empires, by Peter Turchin

This book describes a plausible model of how conflict between hostile cultures such as Islam versus Christianity can create the kind of large-scale cooperation (asabiya) needed to create empires, and that the absence of a nearby border with such a conflict results in the decay of that empire.

It is very hard to evaluate how accurately he analyzes the evidence for his theory without a really complete knowledge of the history of several empires.

Asabiya resembles what Fukuyama calls trust, but is stronger, and includes some willingness to risk ones life for other members of ones society. Turchin implies that this is a desirable quality (although I can’t recall anything explicitly saying that). I wonder whether the wars it contributes to outweigh the benefits. The answer might depend on the extend to which it is possible to have trust without much asabiya (Turchin’s analysis suggests a pessimistic answer).

Much of the book contains standard style histories, mostly of times and places that haven’t received much attention. I often found these parts annoying because I couldn’t figure out which parts contained evidence for Turchin’s model, and most of them didn’t seem important enough for me to remember.

He suggests that inequality within an empire reduces its stability. Most of this isn’t very original nor backed up by much evidence. One idea that I hadn’t heard before involves the upper class intentionally reducing the asabiya of lower classes, especially with extreme forms of inequality such as slavery. It seems quite likely that the upper classes sometimes attempt this. But the other parts of the book suggest that this may backfire – conflict normally increases asabiya. Turchin writes as if geographic separation between the conflicting cultures is needed for this effect, but it isn’t obvious to me why.

The book is in some ways gloomy, suggesting that it would take an alien attack to create a big increase in worldwide cooperation. But he does leave some hope that recent technological changes may have made his model obsolete.

Avoid News

Posted by Peter on March 9, 2011
Posted in: Investing, Politics. Tagged: .

Avoid News is a good rant against paying attention to the storytellers that typically get labeled as news reporters:

Information is no longer a scarce commodity. But attention is. Why give it away so easily? You are not that irresponsible with your money, your reputation or your health. Why give away your mind?

I don’t know a single truly creative mind who is a news junkie – not a writer, not a composer, mathematician, physician, scientist, musician, designer, architect or painter. On the other hand, I know a whole bunch of viciously uncreative minds who consume news like drugs.

Bryan Caplan says:

P.S. When I read this passage, the counter-example of Tyler Cowen came immediately to mind.

I don’t consider that much of a counter-example. I found Tyler Cowen’s blog to be a dangerous addiction, and I’m glad I quit. I have a strong impression that he could be much more creative than he is, but has made a deliberate choice to pursue fame at the expense of creativity.

In order to maintain the pretense that news focuses on important information, storytellers focus on events that make us unhappy (avoiding or fixing mistakes are more important than understanding what routinely goes right, which makes it hard to focus on good news). [This also applies to other sources of political information, but that means I want the most concise source, which is not likely to be a rapidly published source.]

I’m not willing to completely follow the advice to kick my news addiction, since I’m somewhat dependent on social connections with people who imagine that news media provide valuable information. But I can mostly learn enough by watching The Daily Show, which often (but hardly consistently) is careful to indicate that they focus on frivolous, entertaining stories that give low priority to educational value. I’m definitely better off with that than I was when I was addicted to serious-sounding daily news sources.

I have a system for reading financial news that minimizes the problems with news. It involves mostly reading numbers that I find via stock symbols. Most of those numbers have been checked by accountants, who have strict rules to minimize biases. I’m fairly careful to select which symbols I follow by analyzing numbers, not stories.

For more evidence that news harms you, see an experiment done by Andreassen where subjects trading stocks did worse if they saw a constant stream of news than if they saw no news once they started trading.

Also, Robin Hanson’s analysis of how the press handled one story suggests a pretty clear positive correlation between the time a source takes to convey a story and the accuracy of that story.

[I’ve been neglecting this blog recently due to an obsession with finding waterfalls; that will change any week now when rainfall tapers off.]

Ashkenazi and the Industrial Revolution

Posted by Peter on February 15, 2011
Posted in: Miscellaneous. Tagged: .

Some of the ideas in the 10,000 Year Explosion have got me wondering whether the spread of the Ashkenazi culture played an important role in starting the industrial revolution.

The Ashkenazi developed a unique culture that was isolated for many centuries from the mainstream. Then around 1800, western Europe allowed Jews to interact much more with the rest of society (The 10,000 Year Explosion suggests that it started in 1791 in France).

At about the same time, the same region experienced a sudden shift in values that increased the status of merchants, which is what you’d expect if Ashkenazi culture that had previously been shunned became partially accepted. Those values may have contributed significantly to the industrial revolution.

The 10,000 Year Explosion explains why the Ashkenazi had some unique values that were somewhat unlikely to have been duplicated elsewhere, which would help explain why the industrial revolution didn’t start somewhere other than northern Europe.

This isn’t a complete explanation of the industrial revolution – for one thing, it doesn’t explain why England developed faster than France.

A completely unrelated idea of how agricultural diversity helped British farming productivity around the same time: Agricultural biodiversity crucial to the agricultural “revolution”.

Assorted Links

Posted by Peter on February 2, 2011
Posted in: Health, The Human Mind. Tagged: .

How To Win Friends and Influence People

Posted by Peter on January 24, 2011
Posted in: Book Reviews. Tagged: .

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.