Housecleaning

I toggled the thing to make this site visible for the first time about 45 seconds ago.

  • The site will get a bit more colorful, I picked the blandest template possible and will add a cover photo / logo / etc. later. Still under construction.
  • In addition to “normal” blog posts, I’m trying to post a book review for every non-fiction book I read this year. As of now, the only one missing is David Brooks’ The Social Animal, which was actually the first book I read in 2019.
  • I don’t usually read so much pop psychology back to back, so I’m not sure how I ended up with 4 of the first 5 books of the year in that category. The next few will likely be history / philosophy / economics.
  • Still working on post formatting and tagging conventions. Maybe they’ll get better or worse.
  • The formula for “Reading Time” that I try to remember to put at the top of each post is minutes = (0.22 * word count + 25) / 60 plus an arbitrary adjustment based on not totally trusting the formula I found online.

Happy reading!

Book Review: The Organized Mind

by Daniel J. Levitin (2014)

Reading Time: 4 minutes

From the Jacket: Levitin presents recent advances in brain science as he reveals the key to how leaders in the information age excel – and how any reader can use their practical methods to regain a sense of mastery over the way we organize our homes, workplaces, and lives.

The Organized Mind starts with a mission statement: there’s too much information and too many demands on our time.  The most accomplished people have assistants to help navigate the flurry, but how can the rest of us cope?  Next it moves in to a summary of how our thoughts and memories work, then it takes several areas of life and applies the lessons of neuroscience to each in turn.  Those areas are our homes, social worlds, time, decision-making / healthcare, and business. 

Many scholarly types bemoan the state of learning today with particular focus on how little we know and memorize compared to “the good old days”.  Levitin’s core point is the exact opposite: the strength of our current technology is instant access to nearly infinite quantities of information and we use far too much information for memorizing to be a practical solution, so we should work to encode information in our environments and develop our skills at retrieving and manipulating information rather than memorizing it. 

A classic example of encoding information in the environment is the pill box with a cubby for every day.  You fill it up at the beginning of the week and work your way through.  Sounds like extra work if anything, but there are a some good lessons in there. 

First, because taking pills every day is a very repetitious activity, our brain tends to mash all the instances into a single memory. This makes it very difficult for our brains to call up any single instance, including whether you took your pills that morning.  Similarly, you probably occasionally find yourself wondering if you locked the door when you left the house in the morning.  Same principle, except with life-saving and/or dangerous medications.

Second, there’s not any particular virtue at getting really good at remembering whether you already took your pill today. 

Third, the pill box itself is dead simple and obvious: if it’s Tuesday and the Tuesday cubby is empty, you took your pills.  You don’t have to spend precious time and mental energy on the intriguing question of “did I already take the green one today?”

This is a good book, but I think I’ve read too much that is similar lately.  It has a number of practical suggestions for streamlining our lives and some interesting reasons why we should get better at it.  That said, I have two problems with it.  The first is that it seems a bit too long.  It would probably take a very good editor to trim it down because there aren’t whole sections that are a waste of time, but I’m not sure I walked away with 383 pages worth of insights.

The second problem isn’t really a problem with the book but with neuroscience.  Here’s a helpful insight for you: neuroscience is pretty hard (Be sure to file that stunningly original idea away in your favorite externalized organizational system). The human brain is unimaginably subtle and complex, so in spite of the massive progress being made the research still seems like doing entomology by driving a truck through a cloud of insects and poking around in whatever guts are left on the windshield.  Every insight seems to be something like “this chemical does this” and then a few months or years later we figure out that “well, it actually does this sometimes but other times it does exactly the opposite.  We’ll get back to you on that”.  That kind of gets into the pace of the field, too; I’m pretty sure I spotted a couple things Levitin wrote in 2014 that, by 2019, have turned out to be not wrong but incomplete enough to pass as wrong (not that I’m necessarily qualified to make that judgment).  That’s not a critique of Levitin, it’s just a statement about a fantastically difficult, intriguing, complex field of study. 

Overall though, it was a good book on how to organize your life with interesting forays into cognitive neuroscience.  I’m a big fan of reducing stress by prioritizing intelligently, and this book certainly hits that point a number of times from a number of directions.

Recommendation: Read this book if…. You are looking for practical ways to organize, prioritize, and reduce stress.

Book Review: Algorithms to Live By

by Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths (2016)

Reading Time: 4 minutes

From the Jacket: In a dazzlingly interdisciplinary work, [Christian and Griffiths] show how the algorithms developed for computers can also untangle very human questions. They explain how to have better hunches and when to leave things to chance, how to deal with overwhelming choices and how best to connect with others.

Christian and Griffiths work at the intersection of computer science and psychology. 

Algorithms to Live by is a fast-paced, engaging review of many different areas where we can improve our performance in human endeavors by applying lessons learned in computer science.  The first response from a reader might be that a computer applies remorseless logic to computer correct answers to clearly defined problems, a scenario that has little to do with the challenges we face as humans.  The authors’ response is that the difficult problems of computer science today primarily involve finding good enough answers to fuzzy questions with incomplete information.  This scenario is more familiar, and the talent and passion of many of the most impressive thinkers of the last century have been applied to these problems.  The authors’ point, then, is that perhaps computer science does have something to offer in everyday life.

The book itself works through several styles of problem, first describing the computer science version of the problem, how that field learned to cope with it, then drawing analogies to other fields, and finally showing how we can use the lessons learned to improve our own lives.  In a number of cases, they specifically show how sometimes when people seem to be acting irrationally, adding just one of two refinements to the decision-making scheme shows that in fact they are being very rational.

For example, the first section of the book is called Optimal Stopping.  The example I’ll borrow is the famous secretary problem.  You are hiring a secretary from a pool of 100 applicants and want the best one, but have no objective criteria to know who is best; all you can do is rank them relatively.  Worse though, each time you interview an applicant, you can make them an offer or let them go forever.  Well, it turns out that the optimal strategy is to interview 37% of the applicants, then hire the first person who is better than anyone you’ve interviewed so far. 

When scientists (Rapaport and Seale) asked people to perform this task in a lab, they found that the average person only interviewed 31 people before making a choice. 

At first, this looks like a failure: irrational behavior.  The minor tweak that brings the model in tune with reality is assuming a time cost. As long as people are interviewing secretaries, they don’t have a secretary themselves and they are conducting interviews instead of getting their own work done.  This is exactly the kind of problem that computers face and computer scientists have to solve all the time: finite processing speeds and demands for virtually instantaneous solutions to problems without perfect solutions.

There are probably two things that were minor drags.  The first is that the book glosses over some of the mathematical foundations of the computer science manifestation of the area under discussion.  On the other hand, this contributes to readability and if you’re really curious there is always enough to google it and find out more.  The second is that it covers a lot of ground that a reasonably well-read person will probably have tread before: in the section on game theory, explanations of the prisoners’ dilemma and the tragedy of the commons are good examples.  However, it’s hard to imagine elaborating on game theory without working through the foundational examples, so skimming those bits is probably a solution that keeps everyone happy.

I have three tests for a really good book (right now).  The first is that I enjoy reading it, the second is that I’m continuously setting it down to note down ideas that lead to other ideas that lead to pages of notes, and the third is that I learn something new.  This book passes all three with flying colors.

Recommendation: Everyone should read

Book Review: The Hedgehog and the Fox

by Isaiah Berlin (1953)

Reading time: 3 minutes

From the Jacket: Since its first publication in 1953 Sir Isaiah’s long essay has acquired the status of a small masterpiece.  The Hedgehog and the Fox is a triumph of erudition and a superb entryway into an understanding of Tolstoy’s work.

This book has been quoted or referenced in at least a dozen books that I’ve read, but as far as I can remember they all reference the eponymous dichotomy described in the opening two and a half pages.  The origin is a fragment from Greek poet Archilochus: “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” 

Without the original work of Archilochus, we don’t know what he intended the parable to mean; Berlin describes the concept as a sometimes-useful analogy that shouldn’t be overused.  Instead, everyone from Erasmus to Nate Silver has picked a side (hedgehog and fox, respectively) and proceeded to explain why that approach to [life, knowledge, business, forecasting….] will yield better results.

Berlin spends the remainder of the essay exploring the tension of a man, Lev Tolstoy, who knows he is a fox but wishes he were a hedgehog.  Tolstoy greatest desire was a unifying theory of history to explain how everything we experience is tied together. Throughout his life his perceptions were dominated by a sense that history is made up of an infinitude of small acts by normal people; that the small acts are inevitable rather than the product of free will; that history is therefore inevitable; that some force causes the small acts and thereby history.  He saw order through his peripheral vision – but order turned to chaos whenever he turned his keen eye to the spot. 

Tolstoy’s genius for analysis and criticism was such that no theory could survive his scrutiny; the theories were always inconsistent or failed to have a concrete mechanism through which the vaguely appealed-to “forces of history” act.  Tolstoy developed a contempt for overly scientific, reductionist explanations.  As Berlin says, “[Tolstoy] has no fear of questioning anything, and believes that some simple answer must exist – if only we did not insist on tormenting ourselves with searching for it in strange and remote places, when it lies all the time at our feet.” This torment was at the heart of Tolstoy’s character.  He never found his one big idea, only the unsatisfying proxy of folk wisdom.

Berlin’s essay is essentially tragic.  It is also a great read in the classic mid-century erudite style.  It is thought-provoking, complex, and highly readable.

Recommendation: Read it if… your interests include history, literature, or epistemology

Book Review: The Origin of Ideas

by Mark Turner (2014)

Reading Time: 4 minutes

From the Jacket: What makes human beings so innovative, so adept at rapid, creative thinking?  Where do new ideas come from, and once we have them, how can we carry them mentally into new situations?  What allows our thinking to range easily over time, space, causation, and agency?

Mark Turner holds degrees in Mathematics and English from UC-Berkeley.  His first works studied literature in the light of cognitive science.  Turner is best known for his book, coauthored with Gilles Fauconnier, The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities.  The Way We Think was published in 2002, but the core concept of conceptual blending had been percolating through the pair’s work for nearly a decade.  Twelve years later, Turner wrote The Origin of Ideas, a book that I classify as popular psychology intended to bring his ideas to a wider audience.

The book is erudite, at times very engaging, and the author is enthusiastic about the subject.  However, as a reader I was not enthralled.  Blending itself seems to be a useful metaphor, but perhaps also a tautology.  In the first case, perhaps it gives a clearer way to think about the operations the mind performs in concocting complex ideas.  However, the point that more complex ideas are made up of simpler ideas seems more philosophical than scientific, and not especially mind-blowing at that. 

The book blasts through dozens of examples of blending at work, but there was no description of a physical mechanism and only one attempt at testing a concrete prediction (which was in the appendix). 

The prediction involved a grammatical construct referred to as past tense + proximal deictic (PT+PD).  The example from the book is “he now saw that….”  The original researcher (Nikiforidou 2010, 2012) used conceptual blending theory to posit that “the grammatical pattern has the ‘effect of zooming in on the events.’”  Based on that, Turner predicted that usage of PT+PD in news reports would often be accompanied by a “zoom-in” visual.  The prediction sounds very specific, but:

  • The link between the proposed mental process and the visual effect seems more serendipitous than necessary.
  • PT+PD is designed to sound portentous.  A significant narrative moment is likely to cause more dramatic grammar and more dramatic camerawork.  Stated another way, the content of the broadcast is likely confounding grammatical/visual variables.
  • As an armchair grammarian, PT+PD seems to signify a shift in tone or expectation.  I would expect any psychological effects related to conceptual blending to be overshadowed by heightened narrative tension or subverted expectations.
  • While the author found that the PT+PD was often accompanied by a zoom-in, he did not establish a base rate (how often is zoom-in used in a broadcast regardless of the grammar at the time) or express any specific statistics

The short version is that as told in the book, the only prediction marked “successful” seems tenuous at best.  Given that The Origin of Ideas was written 12 years after the landmark book and nearly 20 years after research in the field began, the concept may lack Popperian falsifiability.

The apparently more scholarly The Way We Think, which I have not read, may provide more sources and documentation.  I’m certainly not qualified to judge any published papers or studies; all I can say is that this book did not convince me of anything.  However, the author is passionate about the subject, the book is filled with erudite literary examples and careful breakdowns of thought patterns, and there is even the occasional brainteaser.  I don’t recommend it, but it wasn’t a waste of time either.

Recommendation: No recommendation

Hello World

Reading time: 5 minutes

This post is about me and my blog.  I couldn’t think of a graceful way to start.  First a summary, then a little about me, then a little about the blog.

Summary:

My name is Steve, and I’m a bookaholic.  I am enthralled by the complex, chaotic, interconnected, infinitely detailed world we live in, and figuring it all out is my passion.  Very few topics are completely outside my interests; the areas I keep coming back to are psychology, economics, anthropology, history, and philosophy.  As of today, I am working on two nonfiction books, three works of fiction, and one book of literary analysis.  My dream is to retire from my career in corporate finance so I can be a full-time scholar.

This blog has two purposes.  The first is just to start writing; I feel like I have some things that I want to say that someone out there may enjoy or even benefit from.  The second is to serve as a training ground to hone my craft of writing for an external audience before attempting to publish anything official.  Sometimes I try to think that there is some specific set of topics that will be the focus, but that is unlikely to happen.

I hope that you enjoy the time you spend here.  Please contribute through the comments with your ideas and book / website recommendations.  If you would like to contribute an article or suggest a topic, please contact me via email.

About Me:

I grew up in a small town a couple hours from the nearest major city.  My brother and I started our first business together when we were still in single digits.  I started my first “official” job when I was [legally old enough to work]; by my senior year in high school I was driving a forklift, had a side gig as a janitor, and was taking classes at the local community college. 

I went off to a major state school where I worked in a bookstore during the semesters, had several internships at various manufacturing companies, and graduated with an engineering degree in 2010.  

After graduation, I headed off to the big city to start my career.  As of this writing in early 2019, I’ve done time in IT, operations, finance, and planning at three companies which between them have given me exposure to distribution, manufacturing, food, and oil and gas.  To the surprise of my high school self, I have worked very hard for long stretches of that time. 

When I started my first job (designing software), the company I worked for had a booklist suggested by the CEO and other contributors.  De Tocqueville’s Democracy in America was on the list, and though I had always read a lot of fiction, that book got me fired up about learning.  I started keeping track of how much I read in 2013; since then, I have averaged 48 nonfiction books and 16 works of fiction each year.  Every knowledge-rock you turn over has 50 more rocks underneath and it’s knowledge-rocks all the way down.  Someone smarter would probably pick a specialty to master, but I can’t pick.

About the Blog:

I first got the hankering to start sharing what I learned and thought shortly after that experience with De Tocqueville.  Droning at hapless dinner dates didn’t sate the urge (or garner many second dates) and even though blogging was popular, I didn’t feel that I could claim to have anything to say. “But how can I possibly presume to explain things to people when I haven’t even read the Muqaddimah?” I might have said. 

Well, I still haven’t read the Muqaddimah, but it’s on my shelf.  Just as soon as I read the Quran so that I have the proper context, and when I finish the books I’ve already started (currently Frank Knight’s Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit; Lajoux and Elson’s The Art of M&A Due Diligence; a collection of the essays of William James; and Burgess’s The Age of Stonehenge), I’ll get to it. 

My “to read” list currently holds over 500 books.  Given that only about half of the 48 nonfiction books I read each year are already on my list, and that I add about 100 books to the list each year, I figured I might as well give up on being knowledgeable and start writing now.

So, a few weeks ago I registered a website.  Ultimately there are two main purposes.  The first is purely as an outlet for the things I want to talk about and hope to find / create a community for.  My most persistent interests are at the intersection of psychology and economics, economics and anthropology, philosophy and history, and everything else and everything else.  On one hand I doubt that I’ll ever contribute much that is truly novel.  On the other hand, if I can help spread the word about some cool ideas, maybe it will catalyze someone else to have an idea and follow through on it in the disciplined, effortful way required to make a real contribution. 

The second purpose is to be a proving ground for my writing skills and my ideas.  I was a good writer in high school, but (a) that was high school, and (b) high school has been a little while now.  I have two nonfiction works in progress which will at some point contribute essays (some are already written in draft form), as will a book of literary analysis (currently only a rough outline).  The three works of fiction will probably spin off some essays, but I doubt that I will ever post excerpts.