The Best American Infographics 2016 by Gareth Cook – review

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American Info=graphics 2016, Book review, Gareth Cook, Robert Krulwich

I am always fascinated by books that represent reality in a new way and The Best American Infographics 2016 edited by Gareth Cook nails it. There are many surprising graphics that expose things that you might have felt but didn’t bring to consciousness. For example, it seems obvious that an environmentalist would be wholly Democratic and an oil worker a Republican, and a union organizer would be Democratic and a business owner a Republican. But, who would expect missionaries and a Catholic priest to be Republican and rabbis and Episcopal priests to be Democratic? Academia is, of course, loaded solid with Democrats except for the  Economists who are Republican.

A graphic on page 60 that was done early in the 2016 Presidential campaign displayed the 13 candidates with a computer analysis of the complexity of their speech patterns. On the X axis were negative words versus positive ones and on the Y axis the complexity of words and sentences. Using the same computer analysis on the same chart were 72 well-known works of literature. Ted Cruz came out as the most complex political candidate, at the same level as then President Obama. And, unsurprisingly, Donald Trump used far and away the most simple words and sentences. He was on the same level as the children’s book Peter Pan. John Kasich was the most positive candidate, with Rand Paul and Bernie Sanders being the most negative.

The real shock for me on that chart was a cluster of three famous Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes books with the book Dracula by Bram Stoker right in the middle of the cluster. This graphic was created by a computer without any human intervention. Back in the early 1990s I was pursuing Conan Doyle and his hoaxes and I had proved to my own satisfaction that Doyle had cowritten Dracula. Here, almost thirty years later, is another “soft-indicator” of his involvement with that book. As with his other hoaxes he had encoded his name into the chief feature of the crime. Doctor Arthur Conan Doyle used his title of Doctor, the first two initials of his name and the meaning of his family name to form the clue. Doyle means of the eye and thus this combination forms the title of the book. Dracula = Dr A C Ula. The Ula is the key part of the word ocular. Doyle also encoded his name into Jack the Ripper and some other crimes.

I have moved on to other funny little games now.

The End of Faith by Sam Harris – book review

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Evolution of religion, Sam Harris, The End of Faith

I read The End of Faith by Sam Harris as a preparation for a discussion of this book at the Bend, Oregon, main public library this coming Sunday. The Wikipedia article on  Sam Harris gives a good post-view of much of this book he published back in 2004 and it is even more clearly focused on his argument. This first book of his makes clear the observation that there can be no peace in the world with each of the various religions demanding adherence to their particular form of faith. Monotheism is particularly contentious on this point as every individual is inherently different and they each will have a uniquely personal point of view on what the details of God and religion should mean and be. That can only result in interpersonal conflict and group conflict and ultimately religious wars on subtle points of doctrine.

It appears that the Classical Romans had the right idea about separation of state and religion when they legally forbade people from promoting religion and particularly monotheistic religions. They permitted everyone to practice their personal religion and seem to have encouraged everyone to have household idols to their personal gods. The Roman problem with the Jews and later Christians was their proselytizing and thus creating conflict within the body politic. Harris compares the thousand years of Christianity that arose after Emperor Constantine made it a state-controlled entity to modern Islam. Making monotheistic religion into a state entity with a military inevitably creates wars and that is where he finds fault with the current Muslims.

Religion and especially monotheistic religions must be abandoned or humanity which now possesses superweapons will destroy itself.

Everybody Lies by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz – book review

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Book review, Everybody Lies, Seth Stephens-Davidowitz

This book explores a new method for detecting and measuring lying. It is based on the newly available big data dumps accessible from Google and other collectors of massive online data. Everybody Lies by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz explores people’s spinning of their truth in such subjects as mental illness, human sexuality, child abuse, abortion, advertising, religion, health (p. 14). One of the points of this book is we have to follow the Big Data wherever it leads and act accordingly (p. 283).

One of the easy observations in the book to discuss was research on who can you trust to pay back the money loaned to them (p. 258). The research was based on large numbers of loan applications and payback records. The researchers found a list of ten words/phrases commonly used on loan applications, five that correlate with who repaid the loans and five with who defaulted. Stephens-Davidowitz challenges the reader to spot those words on the list suggesting who will pay and who won’t: God, lower interest rate, after-tax, promise, will pay, hospital, debt-free, graduate, minimum payment, thank you. Give it a try and give some general reason for your decisions.

The actual results based on who repaid seem to my mind to indicate those who took absolute responsibility for their past, present and future actions. Those who defaulted put the responsibility on factors external to their present self. It is a subtle point but observe if you feel the tonality of a shifting of personal responsibility in the words: God, will pay, hospital, promise, thank you. It comes down to – God will take care of it not me – the debt will be paid in the ill-defined future – the hospital will cure my problem – a promise is a heart-felt emotion and not a monetary payment – thank you is asking the reader to be nice in return.

If you like that kind of thinking this book will be helpful but I suspect that most people will find it threatening.

There are still lessons to be learned by seeing reality clearly.

Diet Cults by Matt Fitzgerald – Book review

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Diet Cults review, Matt Fitzgerald author, Suggestions for a healthy diet, What to eat and avoid

Diet Cults by Matt Fitzgerald is one of my favorites of the stack of diet books I’ve been reading as background material for the diet book I am writing. It is easy reading and covers rather critically all of the major diet fads that we have been subjected to in the last thirty years in reasonable detail. He illustrates where each of the popular diets has its failings and where the scientific studies have demonstrated their failings.

One of the themes of the book is built right into the title, the cult-like qualities of the popular diets. That personal dedication from the dieters is needed because of the difficulty in maintaining rigorous limitations on what they can and can not eat. Pick any food you can name and you can find some people who insist that it is a panacea and others who will insist that it’s poison. Well, everything except vegetables, he wavers, no one he wrote that he had met was willing to claim vegetables were evil. I haven’t known any more people than average, but Dale, one of my buddies back in Berkeley, did claim that all green foods were poison, and he never ate any of them. Unfortunately, he died about the time he turned fifty.

Diet Cults is written in a friendly style and claims not to be cultish itself, but Matt defines his study group for perfect health to be extreme athletes. Not run-of-the-mill athletes either, but world-class ones who train to appallingly high, self-imposed, rigorous standards. He claims these are perfect specimens of human health whom the other seven billion of us average humans should emulate. Most people would simply kill themselves if they did exactly as these paragons of health do as their routine exercise.

To come back to what these heroes eat, as opposed to what they physically do, is more sensible. His recommended diet even for them is simply common sense. Lots of vegetables and fruits and quite a lot of nuts, wild-fed meats, whole grains, and yogurt. He doesn’t say to totally avoid processed fatty meats, sugar, and fried food but to keep them to an absolute minimum. It’s okay to eat lots of carbs if you’re doing a marathon or are a lumberjack burning through five thousand calories per day.

Ultimately it appears that humans can eat almost anything and remain healthy if they are physically active enough. 

Stealing Fire by Steven Kotler & Jamie Wheal – book review

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How the Mighty Fall, Stealing Fire book review

For those people who are bestselling authors, Silicon Valley geniuses, top performing Navy SEALs, and top-level scientists, this book is well worth reading. If you are a regular attendee at Burning Man you will enjoy this book. However, of the seven and a half billion people on this planet, the number of people who would clearly fall into the combined group above is probably less than ten thousand. If we liberalized the definition a bit to those who aspire to those lofty ranks we might get the number up to a hundred thousand. For the rest of humanity, the odds against you being members of this elite are a million to one, and this book Stealing Fire – How Silicon Valley, the Navy SEALs, and Maverick Scientists Are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work will probably be counterproductive to your life.

I came away from this book feeling that promoting activities for people that are beyond their abilities will hurt far more people than it helps. Granted there will be people for whom psychedelic drugs will enhance their performance, and for whom taking huge risks will have an enormous payoff, and their odds may be better than a million to one that it will work, but the odds are stacked against them. I would recommend reading Jim Collins’s book, How the Mighty Fall and why some Companies Never Give In before you read Stealing Fire. Collins’s book is about the perils of overreaching. It is an analysis of big companies that failed compared to their competitors that succeeded. The lessons to be learned in that book about companies have a direct correlation to personal strategies for winning. Stealing Fire is about the glories of overreaching and the authors interview those who have succeeded with that approach; however, they don’t dwell on the vast majority that tried that super-risky path and failed.

Of course, there is some good advice in stepping up to those people who have succeeded with your good ideas and brilliant conversation, but if you don’t have great qualities in abundance even those contacts won’t work. If instead, you can spend some time and energy figuring out a way to provide for the common person’s needs in a way that will scale up with a product you can sell to the whole world you are more likely to succeed than by taking mind-altering drugs.

The harder you work on your good ideas the luckier you will become.

 

Intuition Pumps by Daniel C. Dennett – book review

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Book review, Daniel C. Dennett, Intuition Pumps

Daniel C. Dennett is probably known to every thinking person on Earth, or at the very least I would say he should be known to every intelligent person. This book has been on my shelf for a long time and is that type that is so styled that one can put it down without guilt. There are seventy-seven fairly independent essays and I’ve read most of them. Probably the ones Dennett likes the most are the ones I’ve skipped, but he did me the favor of putting them in the appendix. Near the end, chapter 74, “A Faustian Bargain,” is short and easy to review and gives the flavor of his professional problem-solving.

Which would you choose?

(A) You solve the major philosophical problem of your choice so conclusively that there is nothing left to say (thanks to you, part of the field closes down forever, and you get a footnote in history).

(B) You write a book of such tantalizing perplexity and controversy that it stays on the required reading list for centuries to come.

Think about it for a minute.

Generally speaking, scientists choose A, while philosophers and humanities types choose B. The reason is that scientists are seeking satisfying proofs that their ideas represent testable reality beyond reasonable doubt. The humanities folks are presenting their view of complex reality and offering possibilities for how a human being might respond to that conception. The philosophers are much tighter in their efforts to define and represent abstract realities and they are not likely to find a counterpart in physical reality, but their ideas do impact human abstract reality in a consistent and observable way. The philosophers would like to tie things together into clearly defined domains of truth in their terms but realize that it is impossible in fact to do it. The humanities practitioners are creators of fact and are god-like in their powers to create and don’t really care to box it. At least they don’t want to box it into a generalized truth; they want their truths to be specific to their unique creations. Perhaps a god would feel that way too.

If you like that kind of rambling you will enjoy Intuition Pumps.

A Most Improbable Journey by Walter Alvarez – book review

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A Most Improbable Journey, Understanding Big History, Walter Alvarez

Back when I lived in Berkeley there were many opportunities to hear important scientists give lectures. Some of the best lectures were by Walter Alvarez and the beauty of living in Berkeley is you occasionally get to meet famous scientists personally. I took advantage of that opportunity several times with Walter in the typical after lecture queue. We all are in awe of his discovery of the Chicxulube crater and his considerable number of proofs that that event some sixty-six million years ago led to the demise of the dinosaurs and permitted the rise of mammals and us humans. Without the event that he exposed I wouldn’t be writing this post and you wouldn’t be reading it.

A Most Improbable Journey by Walter Alvarez is a book for the general public. It covers Big History, all the way from giving us the numbers of how very big our Universe of a home really is, to us. There are roughly a hundred billion stars in our Milky Way galaxy times a hundred billion galaxies, or roughly a number one with twenty-two zeros number of stars. And, as you may have noticed from the published deep space photos taken back toward Earth from afar by space probes, Earth is a tiny place even in the Solar system. This book is about the history of the Universe and how this tiny thing we call our home came to be.

The pages on how common sand came into being were eerie because that common element silicon required a history of repeated concentrating events before it could come onto the beaches and sand dunes that seem so common to us. The book makes many obscure things clear and even obvious. When spoken by a man who knows what he is talking about, many things become easy for an ordinary person to understand.

Everyone, even experts, should read “A Most Improbable Journey” because it demonstrates how to make difficult subjects comprehensible.

The Great Questions of Tomorrow by David Rothkopf – review

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Book review, David Rothkoph, Overview of modern politics, Rapid growth chaos, The Great Questions of Tomorrow

This is a book about the great movements facing our world civilization. Reading this book is like standing on a hillside during the great 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and watching the tsunami coming ashore. It is about those events that are clearly coming and that will destroy much of what we formerly valued but will probably leave even greater things for the survivors.

The Great Questions of Tomorrow by David Rothkopf is a book for courageous people who are not afraid to look at dismal things and see opportunities rather than mourn over the destruction. It was written by the editor and CEO of Foreign Policy magazine and is as authoritative a description of modern political realities as you are likely to read. Rothkopf comes to us with his political leanings but he does write with a decades-long Washington insider’s authority.

Assuming that you are not in an actual war zone during a battle the future is still going to be very disruptive. The causes are obvious and we must face them and be willing to adapt quickly. If we can do that and avoid being crushed by a giant Monty Python-like foot, things will be wonderful. If we cling to our past and refuse to face our new realities and adapt to them, we will suffer. That’s Rothkopf’s message. However, when it comes to the specifics of how to adapt, the book offers only generalities.

Some simple questions every eighteen-year-old must ask themselves: Is it better to get a college education or stay out of debt? What is an occupation that will offer the greatest long-term benefits and security? Should I go into debt buying a home? If I can’t get into an Ivy League university should I go into debt to get a local Junior College degree? Those are the questions facing a young person today.

Using my analogy of the great Tōhoku earthquake tsunami, “which way I should run to avoid destruction?” Just saying “don’t panic but adapt quickly” doesn’t help much. I like Nassim Taleb‘s book Antifragile because it gives practical advice within his general theory of how to construct one’s life with a structure that will permit probable survival and success no matter what happens.

The Great Question of Tomorrow is … How to survive and prosper in chaos.

The Proud Tower by Barbara Tuchman – book review

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Alfred Dreyfus, Alfred Thayer Mahan, Barbara Tuchman, European history of 1890-1914, Fomenting war, History of Sea Power, The Proud Tower

The Proud Tower is a book about the personalities of the people who were influencing the Western world, 1890-1914. We come into brief contact with many famous names and the people behind those names. Usually, it’s a flurry of specific facts about them and their lifestyle and their dedication to their cause, and their cause is usually tied closely with maintaining their class. The royalty saving their hereditary land holdings, their hereditary public positions of power and their hereditary genetic inbreeding to maintain the privileges that come with land and legal ownership of everything on it, including the people. Slightly below them in privilege but much larger in numbers are the members of the aristocracy who are also fighting to maintain the status quo, with all of its privileges. Below them almost to the point of invisibility are the others, who are represented by various organizations struggling for simple human existence, and if they succeed with that, a small voice in the government to at least state their needs if not to demand them.

From our modern perspective, the whole system seems criminally unfair to the vast majority of the people. There were the rulers, the enforcers of the rule, and everyone else. With local variations it was thus, from Great Britain to the other end of Russia. There in the beginning of the book, on page 9, we read of Lord Salisbury, the Prime Minister of England, “He regarded himself not as responsible to the people but as responsible for them. They were in his care. What reverence he felt for anyone was directed not down but up—to the monarchy. He revered Queen Victoria, who was some ten years his senior, both as her subject and, with chivalry toward her womanhood, as a man. For her he softened his brusqueness even if at Balmoral he could not conceal his boredom.”

Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan, an instructor at the US Naval Academy, wrote a book, The Influence of Sea Power on History, which had an enormous impact on this period of history. It convinced the powers of the world to build capital ships with which to assert their power and to acquire coaling ports and key locations throughout the world. He who controls the seas controls the world. Fifty years later the US had become the greatest sea power in the world, and today has far more sea power than the rest of the world combined. It’s because of Mahan that the US is dominant in the world. He also played an important role in the first attempt to create the League of Nations, the precursor to our United Nations.

Captain Alfred Dreyfus was a minor French officer who became the subject of a series of questionable newspaper stories that inflamed French patriotism for revenge against a clearly innocent man. For twelve years he was imprisoned in dreadful conditions while the French public fought over whether it was better for France for one innocent man to be imprisoned or for the General staff of their wonderful army to be challenged for framing him to satisfy the press.

Behind the whole period, there was “The Steady Drummer” of war. It was inflamed by some fabulous music by great composers like Richard Wagner and the then current favorite Richard Strauss. The nobility seemed to like the anxiety of war being promoted because it kept them in power as being a rallying point for the masses. The masses themselves didn’t want to fight and die in wars fomented by the nobility, and their spokesmen tried valiantly to create organizations to prevent war.

The book ends at the beginning of World War I when, according to Wikipedia, “The total number of military and civilian casualties in World War I was more than 38 million: there were over 17 million deaths and 20 million wounded, ranking it among the deadliest conflicts in human history.”

The Proud Tower makes clear the ultimate goal of aristocracy and of their nationalism is war.

Phishing for Phools by Akerlof and Shiller – book review

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American economics, Capitalism, Embezzlement, George A. Akerlof, Phishing for Phools, Robert J. Shiller

This must be a scholarly book if we accept that 75 pages of notes for 179 pages of text is a measure of scholarship. Phishing for Phools: The economics of manipulation & deception dives into the truths, half-truths, spins, embezzlements and bezzles that are embedded in the American economic system. That word bezzle was a new word for me. Apparently, it was made up by John Kenneth Galbraith and it means that a person in charge of something of value is illegally taking a portion for themselves but before it is known to be missing. The portion taken is defined as the bezzle. A legal owner of property may feel that it is behaving properly while their factor is bezzling a tiny portion.

This book is about the bezzling that is being perpetrated against us in our daily lives in what appear to be all of our commercial transactions. It covers many examples of how that is done in various situations such as the purchase of cars, houses, credit cards, phood, pharma, tobacco, alcohol, bankruptcy and more. This widespread “phishing” challenges the standard economic model that the free market will always lead to the greater good by Adam Smith’s “invisible hand.”

The authors explain various questionable practices that take advantage of people’s informational and psychological weaknesses. They say that if a potential exists for some advantage to be taken and there is money to be made, then someone will step forward and supply that need, to create a “phishing equilibrium.” The implication is that the need is often fulfilled by the bezzle. What the capitalist system does well is to expose needs and provide a way to satisfy those needs for money. A little bezzle helps grease the gears of commerce. The authors call this conning of the public phishing for phools.

Apparently phishing for phools is the new paradigm for legitimate economic transactions?