Daniel's bookshelf: read en-US Sat, 10 May 2025 23:24:03 -0700 60 Daniel's bookshelf: read 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg <![CDATA[Summary and Analysis of Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies: Based on the Book by Jared Diamond (Smart Summaries)]]> 33410334 So much to read, so little time? This brief overview of Guns, Germs, and Steel tells you what you need to know—before or after you read Jared Diamond’s book. Crafted and edited with care, Worth Books set the standard for quality and give you the tools you need to be a well-informed reader. Ěý This short summary and analysis of Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond ĚýHistorical contextChapter-by-chapter summariesDetailed timeline of key eventsImportant quotesFascinating triviaGlossary of termsSupporting material to enhance your understanding of the original workĚý About Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Ěý Professor Jared Diamond’s informative and fascinating Pulitzer Prize–winning Guns, Germs, and Steel explores a historic Why were the Eurasian peoples able to dominate those from other lands? Ěý Diamond argues that it was ecology and geography—not race—that shaped the modern world. Societies that developed in regions with fertile land for farming and that had domesticable plants and animals were able to progress more quickly, thereby creating the tools to conquer preliterate cultures. Ěý Drawing on a variety of disciplines—from linguistics, genetics, and epidemiology to biology, anthropology, and technology—Guns, Germs, and Steel offers an eloquently argued view of the development of human societies. Ěý The summary and analysis in this ebook are intended to complement your reading experience and bring you closer to a great work of nonfiction.]]> 36 Worth Books 1504043103 Daniel 4 Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (1997) by
Jared Diamond. I read the full book years ago, before I read about what is now an ongoing explosion in the science of human genetic differences. In light of the newest science, Guns, Germs, and Steel is a cautionary tale about getting ahead of the evidence to push a political agenda. Diamond's motive doesn't seem to have been a dispassionate search for truth, but rather a passionate campaign against his notion of "racism." The summary book uses that term without ever defining it clearly, but it seems to be some sort of straw-man to tar anyone who finds evidence that people differ from each other biologically, and that the differences might matter along with environmental differences that also shape individual and group outcomes.

Which is to say, Diamond seems to be an environmental determinist (or exclusionist), someone who believes that all differences in outcomes between people (or between groups of people) are solely due to differences in the environments they have experienced, with no contribution at all from biological (e.g., genetic) differences. The summary book draws this distinction explicitly, e.g.:
There’s nothing inherently special about northern Europeans, according to Diamond. They do not possess more natural ingenuity, more tenacity, or better genes than other people. Eurasians simply inherited an advantageous environment, where they could easily receive and adopt the technologies and crops that the people of other parts of Europe invented; it is geography that led to specific advances for the Europeans. In this section, theories about the influence of human genetics and climate (a cold environment vs. a tropical one) are dispelled.
That claim is utter nonsense; Diamond was in no position to rule out any role for genes. Consider, when he wrote Guns, Germs, and Steel, the had not even finished sequencing the first human genome (that would happen in 2003). And sequencing the first example of a human genome was only the first baby step - scientists are still a long way from fully inventorying human genetic diversity, and figuring out what all that genetic material does.

Even at the time, Diamond might have reasoned that the long exposure of Europeans to crowd diseases (the "Germs" in his book title) might have led to genetic adaptations. Susceptibility to diseases varies between individuals, and a good part of the reason is due to their genetic differences. This would be similar to the evolution of pesticide resistance in insects.

But genomics technology has progressed at faster than a rate: sequencing the first human genome cost billions of dollars; today it only costs a few hundred dollars, and costs continue to drop. This has vastly expanded the ability of real scientists to test Diamond's pontifications about no role for genetic differences on the basis of zero evidence.

For example, while Diamond surely understood that the process of domesticating animals and plants involves changing their genetic makeup, it never seemed to occur to him that humans might undergo a somewhat similar process of self-domestication as they adapted to the vastly different microenvironments (and therefore, selective pressures) created by their own adoption of agriculture and civilization. That is, a the hunter-gatherer lifestyle may select for different traits than the farming and urban lifestyles. It seems hard to imagine otherwise, given the drastic differences between these ways of living. Selective pressures for adapting to these novel human environments may have been intense until very recently when the spread of social welfare programs in the developed nations lowered mortality rates across the board.

Thus we might expect to find that human populations around the world will vary genetically as a function of how long they've had agriculture and civilization - and that is precisely what the newer science that wasn't available to Diamond finds. For example, one of the first such genetic differences to be identified involves the trait of lactase persistence. Quoting from , an AI LLM:
The genetic mutation for lactase persistence in humans was first identified in the early 2000s. Specifically, the key genetic variant, C/T-13910, associated with lactase persistence in European populations, was identified and reported in studies published around that time.

It's important to note that while the phenomenon of lactose intolerance had been observed and even defined much earlier, the specific genetic mutations responsible for lactase persistence (the ability to digest lactose into adulthood) required the advancements in genetic research that occurred in the late 20th and early 21st centuries to be identified.

Different genetic mutations for lactase persistence have since been identified in other populations around the world, particularly in Africa and the Middle East, highlighting the convergent evolution of this trait in response to the cultural practice of dairying.
Lactase persistence provides a massive competitive advantage to dairying cultures which have it, because dairy cattle can convert something like five times more calories from grass into milk than meat over the life of a cow. This allowed more human individuals with the ability to drink milk in adulthood to live on the same area of pasture.

This is a clear refutation of Diamond's baseless claim that European conquerers had no genetic advantages to aid their spread. Diamond had simply gotten ahead of his skis, by making a claim that science would only be able to start testing a few years later. In fact, the whole spread of Indo-Europeans may have been driven by a chance mutation for lactase persistence somewhere on the Eurasian steppe, which gave a starting family of herders the ability to start gradually overrunning their neighbors. Essentially this genetic mutation enabled more humans to live on a given area of grassland, allowing them to outcompete their neighbors who could only harvest calories as meat from their cattle.

Now, Diamond would have been in position to know about so-called "lactose intolerance" which had been observed long before anyone could understand the genetic cause. That term was made obsolete by the discovery that white European scientists were writing from their narrow perspective of being adult milk-drinkers, when they are the ones with the recent genetic mutation, and the majority of Earth's peoples who lack the mutation are in fact the "normal" ones! And if Diamond had thought carefully about the advantages of being able to drink milk, he might have reasoned that the geographic advantages that Europeans had enjoyed also changed them genetically. So Diamond's whole approach involved a false dichotomy, the belief that he could eliminate any role for genetic differences by explaining everything with geographic differences. It doesn't seem to have occurred to Diamond that the geographic differences would perhaps inevitably give rise to genetic adaptations, which would then go hand-in-hand with the Conquistadoring. So perhaps it's time for an update edition: Guns, Germs, Steel, and Genes.

Fortunately something like that update has already been published:

* The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution (2009) by Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending

Now, of course, one single genetic mutation is unlikely to make one population "superior" to another population all by itself. But this is only one of the many genetic changes that have since been identified in human populations that had agriculture and civilization for longer periods of time. Thus the real explanation for global inequality will probably turn out to be considerably more nuanced than Diamond's all-or-nothing theory. Geographic factors matter, of course; and the geographic differences will certainly have given rise to genetic differences, and some of those may matter too.

In particular, Diamond's geographic determinism only seems to explain the initial success of the Europeans at conquering other populations who at the time lacked the advanced technologies. It doesn't explain why, centuries later, some population groups have been on average so much slower than others at adopting the clearly superior technologies and social organization methods that the Europeans brought.

Diamond's theory also doesn't explain why the advanced technologies that diffused into Europe from the Middle East didn't enable the Middle Easterners to overrun and permanently subjugate Europe when Europe was still backward. The Romans kind of did that to Great Britain, of course, but the Britons caught up soon enough and went on to forge a global empire of their own. Why didn't Native Americans and Austronesians simply copy the technologies and lifeways of their conquerors? Why aren't they (as fully) doing that today, now that most of the shooting has long ended? Cultures can change quickly, far more quickly than genes can change. If a culture is taking centuries to change, you might suspect some lingering genetic differences. Further research may find additional subtle ways in which populations that have had agriculture and civilization longer have had a bigger head start in the genetic adaptations to these cultural innovations.

Also, of course, none of the newer science supports the centuries-old form of racism, the notion of "race essentialism." That's the idea that human races are sharp and disjoint categories, and that individual humans can be primarily or even wholly characterized by their group membership. In reality, every human population group has a lot of genetic diversity, and populations vary along geographic clines, merging into each other. The within-group differences are greater than the between-group differences. After all, human populations have only been diverging genetically for around 70,000 years, which isn't nearly long enough to produce different species. We're all still one species. But even slight differences in the distributions of genes and genetic variants (e.g., s) between groups can make a big difference at the population level. That's due to various social and economic feedback mechanisms, such as the economist's .

In most populations, hardly anyone is innovative. Most people go their whole lives without contributing anything to progress. Almost all progress seems to come from a tiny minority of people. Therefore, the fate of that tiny group within a given "host" population will have a huge impact on how far the population as a whole can advance. Consider that it wasn't too long ago, in evolutionary terms, when our ancestors were unbelievably static. Around the time of Homo ergaster, for example, our ancestors were making essentially the same stone tools for a million years. That's the kind of resistance to change that our species had to overcome, and almost certainly overcoming it involved genetic mutations. And these mutations - for innovation, and for accepting innovations from other people - are probably not uninformly distributed within any single population, and may have differences between populations. Thus it might make a huge difference over time if one population is even slightly more innovative and receptive to innovation than another population.
]]> 3.71 Summary and Analysis of Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies: Based on the Book by Jared Diamond (Smart Summaries)
author: Worth Books
name: Daniel
average rating: 3.71
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2025/05/10
date added: 2025/05/10
shelves: history, science, economics, read-in-2025
review:
This book is a nice summary of Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (1997) by
Jared Diamond. I read the full book years ago, before I read about what is now an ongoing explosion in the science of human genetic differences. In light of the newest science, Guns, Germs, and Steel is a cautionary tale about getting ahead of the evidence to push a political agenda. Diamond's motive doesn't seem to have been a dispassionate search for truth, but rather a passionate campaign against his notion of "racism." The summary book uses that term without ever defining it clearly, but it seems to be some sort of straw-man to tar anyone who finds evidence that people differ from each other biologically, and that the differences might matter along with environmental differences that also shape individual and group outcomes.

Which is to say, Diamond seems to be an environmental determinist (or exclusionist), someone who believes that all differences in outcomes between people (or between groups of people) are solely due to differences in the environments they have experienced, with no contribution at all from biological (e.g., genetic) differences. The summary book draws this distinction explicitly, e.g.:
There’s nothing inherently special about northern Europeans, according to Diamond. They do not possess more natural ingenuity, more tenacity, or better genes than other people. Eurasians simply inherited an advantageous environment, where they could easily receive and adopt the technologies and crops that the people of other parts of Europe invented; it is geography that led to specific advances for the Europeans. In this section, theories about the influence of human genetics and climate (a cold environment vs. a tropical one) are dispelled.
That claim is utter nonsense; Diamond was in no position to rule out any role for genes. Consider, when he wrote Guns, Germs, and Steel, the had not even finished sequencing the first human genome (that would happen in 2003). And sequencing the first example of a human genome was only the first baby step - scientists are still a long way from fully inventorying human genetic diversity, and figuring out what all that genetic material does.

Even at the time, Diamond might have reasoned that the long exposure of Europeans to crowd diseases (the "Germs" in his book title) might have led to genetic adaptations. Susceptibility to diseases varies between individuals, and a good part of the reason is due to their genetic differences. This would be similar to the evolution of pesticide resistance in insects.

But genomics technology has progressed at faster than a rate: sequencing the first human genome cost billions of dollars; today it only costs a few hundred dollars, and costs continue to drop. This has vastly expanded the ability of real scientists to test Diamond's pontifications about no role for genetic differences on the basis of zero evidence.

For example, while Diamond surely understood that the process of domesticating animals and plants involves changing their genetic makeup, it never seemed to occur to him that humans might undergo a somewhat similar process of self-domestication as they adapted to the vastly different microenvironments (and therefore, selective pressures) created by their own adoption of agriculture and civilization. That is, a the hunter-gatherer lifestyle may select for different traits than the farming and urban lifestyles. It seems hard to imagine otherwise, given the drastic differences between these ways of living. Selective pressures for adapting to these novel human environments may have been intense until very recently when the spread of social welfare programs in the developed nations lowered mortality rates across the board.

Thus we might expect to find that human populations around the world will vary genetically as a function of how long they've had agriculture and civilization - and that is precisely what the newer science that wasn't available to Diamond finds. For example, one of the first such genetic differences to be identified involves the trait of lactase persistence. Quoting from , an AI LLM:
The genetic mutation for lactase persistence in humans was first identified in the early 2000s. Specifically, the key genetic variant, C/T-13910, associated with lactase persistence in European populations, was identified and reported in studies published around that time.

It's important to note that while the phenomenon of lactose intolerance had been observed and even defined much earlier, the specific genetic mutations responsible for lactase persistence (the ability to digest lactose into adulthood) required the advancements in genetic research that occurred in the late 20th and early 21st centuries to be identified.

Different genetic mutations for lactase persistence have since been identified in other populations around the world, particularly in Africa and the Middle East, highlighting the convergent evolution of this trait in response to the cultural practice of dairying.
Lactase persistence provides a massive competitive advantage to dairying cultures which have it, because dairy cattle can convert something like five times more calories from grass into milk than meat over the life of a cow. This allowed more human individuals with the ability to drink milk in adulthood to live on the same area of pasture.

This is a clear refutation of Diamond's baseless claim that European conquerers had no genetic advantages to aid their spread. Diamond had simply gotten ahead of his skis, by making a claim that science would only be able to start testing a few years later. In fact, the whole spread of Indo-Europeans may have been driven by a chance mutation for lactase persistence somewhere on the Eurasian steppe, which gave a starting family of herders the ability to start gradually overrunning their neighbors. Essentially this genetic mutation enabled more humans to live on a given area of grassland, allowing them to outcompete their neighbors who could only harvest calories as meat from their cattle.

Now, Diamond would have been in position to know about so-called "lactose intolerance" which had been observed long before anyone could understand the genetic cause. That term was made obsolete by the discovery that white European scientists were writing from their narrow perspective of being adult milk-drinkers, when they are the ones with the recent genetic mutation, and the majority of Earth's peoples who lack the mutation are in fact the "normal" ones! And if Diamond had thought carefully about the advantages of being able to drink milk, he might have reasoned that the geographic advantages that Europeans had enjoyed also changed them genetically. So Diamond's whole approach involved a false dichotomy, the belief that he could eliminate any role for genetic differences by explaining everything with geographic differences. It doesn't seem to have occurred to Diamond that the geographic differences would perhaps inevitably give rise to genetic adaptations, which would then go hand-in-hand with the Conquistadoring. So perhaps it's time for an update edition: Guns, Germs, Steel, and Genes.

Fortunately something like that update has already been published:

* The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution (2009) by Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending

Now, of course, one single genetic mutation is unlikely to make one population "superior" to another population all by itself. But this is only one of the many genetic changes that have since been identified in human populations that had agriculture and civilization for longer periods of time. Thus the real explanation for global inequality will probably turn out to be considerably more nuanced than Diamond's all-or-nothing theory. Geographic factors matter, of course; and the geographic differences will certainly have given rise to genetic differences, and some of those may matter too.

In particular, Diamond's geographic determinism only seems to explain the initial success of the Europeans at conquering other populations who at the time lacked the advanced technologies. It doesn't explain why, centuries later, some population groups have been on average so much slower than others at adopting the clearly superior technologies and social organization methods that the Europeans brought.

Diamond's theory also doesn't explain why the advanced technologies that diffused into Europe from the Middle East didn't enable the Middle Easterners to overrun and permanently subjugate Europe when Europe was still backward. The Romans kind of did that to Great Britain, of course, but the Britons caught up soon enough and went on to forge a global empire of their own. Why didn't Native Americans and Austronesians simply copy the technologies and lifeways of their conquerors? Why aren't they (as fully) doing that today, now that most of the shooting has long ended? Cultures can change quickly, far more quickly than genes can change. If a culture is taking centuries to change, you might suspect some lingering genetic differences. Further research may find additional subtle ways in which populations that have had agriculture and civilization longer have had a bigger head start in the genetic adaptations to these cultural innovations.

Also, of course, none of the newer science supports the centuries-old form of racism, the notion of "race essentialism." That's the idea that human races are sharp and disjoint categories, and that individual humans can be primarily or even wholly characterized by their group membership. In reality, every human population group has a lot of genetic diversity, and populations vary along geographic clines, merging into each other. The within-group differences are greater than the between-group differences. After all, human populations have only been diverging genetically for around 70,000 years, which isn't nearly long enough to produce different species. We're all still one species. But even slight differences in the distributions of genes and genetic variants (e.g., s) between groups can make a big difference at the population level. That's due to various social and economic feedback mechanisms, such as the economist's .

In most populations, hardly anyone is innovative. Most people go their whole lives without contributing anything to progress. Almost all progress seems to come from a tiny minority of people. Therefore, the fate of that tiny group within a given "host" population will have a huge impact on how far the population as a whole can advance. Consider that it wasn't too long ago, in evolutionary terms, when our ancestors were unbelievably static. Around the time of Homo ergaster, for example, our ancestors were making essentially the same stone tools for a million years. That's the kind of resistance to change that our species had to overcome, and almost certainly overcoming it involved genetic mutations. And these mutations - for innovation, and for accepting innovations from other people - are probably not uninformly distributed within any single population, and may have differences between populations. Thus it might make a huge difference over time if one population is even slightly more innovative and receptive to innovation than another population.

]]> <![CDATA[Summary and Analysis of Outliers: The Story of Success: Based on the Book by Malcolm Gladwell (Smart Summaries)]]> 33401939 Ěý
Crafted and edited with care, Worth Books set the standard for quality and give you the tools you need to be a well-informed reader.
Ěý
This short summary and analysis of Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell
Ěý Ěý
About Outliers by Malcolm
Ěý
What makes high achievers, like Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, and members of the Beatles so successful? Is it pure talent? Personal drive? An off-the-charts IQ?
Ěý
In Outliers , bestselling author Malcolm Gladwell explores the subject of success and argues that there is more to the story than individual exceptionalism. In addition to inherent talent or intelligence, there are other factors that have come into play for the innovators, artists, athletes, and prodigies who have become household names.
Ěý
Many who have attained rock-star status in their fields may have education, culture, access to a specific technology or opportunity, and ten thousand hours of practice to thank for their reaching their goals.
Ěý
Through a wide range of examples and anecdotes, learn what makes outliers so extraordinary.
Ěý
The summary and analysis in this ebook are intended to complement your reading experience and bring you closer to a great work of nonfiction.]]> 60 Worth Books Daniel 0 3.64 Summary and Analysis of Outliers: The Story of Success: Based on the Book by Malcolm Gladwell (Smart Summaries)
author: Worth Books
name: Daniel
average rating: 3.64
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/05/10
shelves: skepticism, currently-reading, misc-nonfiction
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Summary and Analysis of Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right by Jane Mayer by Leopard Books (2016-03-21)]]> 165682154 0 Worth Books Daniel 5 Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right (2016) by Jane Mayer. The U.S.-centric book describes the methods used by libertarian and right-wing super-wealthy Americans to funnel money into politics. The full book and the summary end just when Trump won his first term of office, so the whole subsequent Trump catastrophe up to now (100+ days into his second disastrous term) gets no mention. (That's a problem with any book about politics - you have to stop writing and publish at some point, but politics never stops.) The book does a great job, however, of explaining how right-wing billionaires poured money into US election campaigns. But the picture has gotten murkier of late - in the 2024 election we kept reading about how the Kamala Harris campaign outspent the Trump campaign, yet still lost, although with all the different ways there are now to put money into politics, determining the exact levels of spending by candidates or on their behalf could be difficult.

The book also seems to predate the emerging threat of foreign interference in election campaigns, such as the state-sponsored spread of Russian propaganda on social media. And with the beneficiary of that interference safely in power for the next four years, we probably won't see much in the way of serious investigation into it for a while.

The summary (and presumably the full book) focuses almost entirely on the mechanics of how our own domestic billionaires moved money around. There is virtually no mention of how spending money actually changes the way (some) people vote - that is, no mention of the underlying psychology that drives the financial machinations. Consider an issue like . If you are a scientifically competent person, capable of some level of critical thinking, then you are about as confident that climate scientists are reasonably right about the Earth's climate as you are confident that their fellow Earth scientists, the , have got the shape of the Earth right. No matter how much money some billionaire pours into Flat Earth propaganda or climate change denial, your understanding of reality is unlikely to change. Similarly, if the Catholic Church tries to bring back its original doctrine of , you won't be fooled. No matter how many Koch-funded think tanks and fake experts try to fool you.

The summary doesn't mention this : just exactly how do we have millions of Americans who can be so easily fooled on basic issues of fact? That strikes me as a much more important question than the details of how some self-serving anti-government billionaires managed to exploit this vulnerability. As long as people can be fooled, it's only a matter of time before some opportunistic scumbag shows up to fool them. As P.T. Barnum famously said, "There's a sucker born every minute." Call me strange, but I'm not content to just take that as a brute fact - I want to know why.

The full book and the summary do briefly hint at the science that could illuminate that question - the science of human intelligence differences, a subfield of - but only to smear and deny the science! The summary refers to an episode that the full book mentions only once:
When the Olin Foundation spent itself out of existence, former executive director Michael Joyce jumped to the Bradley Foundation. Over the next 15 years, he gave away nearly $280 million to his favorite conservative causes, including the school choice movement and welfare reform. Joyce’s commitment to ideological warfare sometimes led him to support poor scholarship, as in the case of political scientist Charles Murray’s widely discredited book The Bell Curve, which linked race to IQ scores and argued that blacks were less likely than whites to join the “cognitive elite.�

And later in the summary book:
Charles A. Murray: Bradley Foundation–supported author of Losing Ground, a controversial book that blamed government for creating a culture of dependence among the poor. Murray also cowrote The Bell Curve, a widely discredited work which correlated race with IQ scores and suggested that blacks would never join “the cognitive elite.�

First, note the inconsistency here. Does the summary author believe that Murray blames "government" for poverty, or does he blame their low IQs? This may be somewhat forgiveable, since conservative folklore itself typically blames poverty on policy (specifcally on Democratic Party policies), when the actual message of The Bell Curve is that IQ is a strong predictor of many social and economic outcomes for the individual. In other words, people with low IQs would have a lot of struggles no matter which Party controls their government.

The politically-motivated ignorance in those two passages reminds me of climate science denial by conservatives. First, The Bell Curve was never "discredited" - it was only reviled, much as climate scientists are reviled today by fossil fuel interests and their customers. Lots of people wrote about how they didn't like the book, but nobody actually proved its claims were wrong. Nor did any critics that I have read show evidence that they even understood what a refutation would require. (Hint: anyone who doesn't know what the acronym GWAS means need not apply - and nobody could have known in the 1990s when the book came out since the first GWAS began in the 2000s.) And the book didn't "link" IQ scores to "race" - that link has persisted in the data ever since the dawn of intelligence testing in the early 1900s. (It's same kind of link that exists between a person's sex and their height, as anyone who has taken a statistics course might understand.) See for example 50 Great Myths of Popular Psychology: Shattering Widespread Misconceptions about Human Behavior (2009), "Myth #15 Intelligence (IQ) Tests Are Biased against Certain Groups of People". Differences in average test scores between various groups of people are just measurable facts, like the difference in average heights between men and women, another persistent biological difference between people. But just as there are some tall women and short men, there are individuals at every intelligence level in every large group of people - so the group averages predict nothing definitve about individuals before you know more about them than the group they happen to be in. Generalizing from an average to an entire group would be like trying to guess how wealthy people are from the average per capita wealth for their group. Just about every large group of people has its paupers and billionaires.

The group average test score gaps are just facts; the only things left to argue about are the precise causes and consequences of these observed differences, and whether we should just accept the differences or try to "correct" them. And what sort of technology "correction" might require - so far, nothing that has been tried has worked.

Another strange and stereotypical annoyance here is the laser focus on only one between-group difference in test scores, that between "whites" and "blacks" in the USA. One might never guess that other groups post different test score averages of their own. For example, Jewish Americans routinely notch the highest average test scores, around a whole standard deviation above the average for "white" Americans. And Asian Americans top "white" Americans too, but not by as much. We see the results in the disproportionate success of Jewish and Asian Americans across a whole range of cognitively demanding careers. But for some reason, only certain test score differences get people worked up.

The differences in group mean scores are not as relevant to the book's overall theme as are the in-group variations. That is, the difference in average scores between groups pales in comparison to the spread of test scores within a group. By analogy, while men are on average a few inches taller than women, the spread of individual heights within each group is much larger.

And this spread of test scores matters - it looks to me like what the whole Dark Money industry specifically targets. Trump for exmple openly boasts about his love for the "poorly educated." Anyone who has read much about the science of human intelligence differences is well aware that IQ predicts educational attainment. That's because the educational system is efficient at identifying and promoting talent. Students who perform well early get noticed by teachers and administrators and are encouraged to pursue advanced education. That's because long experience has shown what sort of student is "college material." A whole bunch of white people - actually the majority of them - will never join the "cognitive elite" either. And that has massive political consequences. For starters, it's how we got the adjudicated rapist and convicted felon Trump, not once but also this second time, when anyone with a modestly functioning brain should have known better.

What this means is, to perhaps oversimplify, we have Dark Money and demagoguery (see: Trump) and billionaires buying elections because we have a lot of people who aren't smart enough to avoid being fooled by transparently obvious lies. And now that we are in the genomics era, evidence is stacking up that most of the reason people aren't smart enough is because they were born that way. (The heritability of adult IQ ranges from around 0.6 to 0.8 depending on the study.)

For an introduction to the science missing from the summary and from the original book, and without which politics will never make sense, see:

* Blueprint: How DNA Makes Us Who We Are
* Born That Way: Genes, Behavior, Personality
* Genes: A Very Short Introduction
* Genomics: A Very Short Introduction
* In the Know: Debunking 35 Myths about Human Intelligence
* Intelligence: A Very Short Introduction (newer 2020 edition)
* Intelligence: All That Matters
* The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution
* The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature
* The Neuroscience of Intelligence
* The New Know-Nothings: The Political Foes of the Scientific Study of Human Nature

For an introduction to the technology that might eventually transform the human species into something that can operate competently, see:

* CRISPR People: The Science and Ethics of Editing Humans (2021)
* A Crack in Creation: The New Power to Control Evolution
* Creating Future People: The Ethics of Genetic Enhancement
* Enhancing Evolution: The Ethical Case for Making Better People
* Genomics: A Very Short Introduction
* Humanity Enhanced: Genetic Choice and the Challenge for Liberal Democracies
* Rewriting Nature: The Future of Genome Editing and How to Bridge the Gap Between Law and Science
* The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race
* The Unnatural Selection of Our Species: At the Frontier of Gene Editing

]]> 5.00 Summary and Analysis of Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right by Jane Mayer by Leopard Books (2016-03-21)
author: Worth Books
name: Daniel
average rating: 5.00
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2025/05/07
date added: 2025/05/07
shelves: politics, history, economics, denialism, read-in-2025
review:
This book is a nice summary of Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right (2016) by Jane Mayer. The U.S.-centric book describes the methods used by libertarian and right-wing super-wealthy Americans to funnel money into politics. The full book and the summary end just when Trump won his first term of office, so the whole subsequent Trump catastrophe up to now (100+ days into his second disastrous term) gets no mention. (That's a problem with any book about politics - you have to stop writing and publish at some point, but politics never stops.) The book does a great job, however, of explaining how right-wing billionaires poured money into US election campaigns. But the picture has gotten murkier of late - in the 2024 election we kept reading about how the Kamala Harris campaign outspent the Trump campaign, yet still lost, although with all the different ways there are now to put money into politics, determining the exact levels of spending by candidates or on their behalf could be difficult.

The book also seems to predate the emerging threat of foreign interference in election campaigns, such as the state-sponsored spread of Russian propaganda on social media. And with the beneficiary of that interference safely in power for the next four years, we probably won't see much in the way of serious investigation into it for a while.

The summary (and presumably the full book) focuses almost entirely on the mechanics of how our own domestic billionaires moved money around. There is virtually no mention of how spending money actually changes the way (some) people vote - that is, no mention of the underlying psychology that drives the financial machinations. Consider an issue like . If you are a scientifically competent person, capable of some level of critical thinking, then you are about as confident that climate scientists are reasonably right about the Earth's climate as you are confident that their fellow Earth scientists, the , have got the shape of the Earth right. No matter how much money some billionaire pours into Flat Earth propaganda or climate change denial, your understanding of reality is unlikely to change. Similarly, if the Catholic Church tries to bring back its original doctrine of , you won't be fooled. No matter how many Koch-funded think tanks and fake experts try to fool you.

The summary doesn't mention this : just exactly how do we have millions of Americans who can be so easily fooled on basic issues of fact? That strikes me as a much more important question than the details of how some self-serving anti-government billionaires managed to exploit this vulnerability. As long as people can be fooled, it's only a matter of time before some opportunistic scumbag shows up to fool them. As P.T. Barnum famously said, "There's a sucker born every minute." Call me strange, but I'm not content to just take that as a brute fact - I want to know why.

The full book and the summary do briefly hint at the science that could illuminate that question - the science of human intelligence differences, a subfield of - but only to smear and deny the science! The summary refers to an episode that the full book mentions only once:
When the Olin Foundation spent itself out of existence, former executive director Michael Joyce jumped to the Bradley Foundation. Over the next 15 years, he gave away nearly $280 million to his favorite conservative causes, including the school choice movement and welfare reform. Joyce’s commitment to ideological warfare sometimes led him to support poor scholarship, as in the case of political scientist Charles Murray’s widely discredited book The Bell Curve, which linked race to IQ scores and argued that blacks were less likely than whites to join the “cognitive elite.�

And later in the summary book:
Charles A. Murray: Bradley Foundation–supported author of Losing Ground, a controversial book that blamed government for creating a culture of dependence among the poor. Murray also cowrote The Bell Curve, a widely discredited work which correlated race with IQ scores and suggested that blacks would never join “the cognitive elite.�

First, note the inconsistency here. Does the summary author believe that Murray blames "government" for poverty, or does he blame their low IQs? This may be somewhat forgiveable, since conservative folklore itself typically blames poverty on policy (specifcally on Democratic Party policies), when the actual message of The Bell Curve is that IQ is a strong predictor of many social and economic outcomes for the individual. In other words, people with low IQs would have a lot of struggles no matter which Party controls their government.

The politically-motivated ignorance in those two passages reminds me of climate science denial by conservatives. First, The Bell Curve was never "discredited" - it was only reviled, much as climate scientists are reviled today by fossil fuel interests and their customers. Lots of people wrote about how they didn't like the book, but nobody actually proved its claims were wrong. Nor did any critics that I have read show evidence that they even understood what a refutation would require. (Hint: anyone who doesn't know what the acronym GWAS means need not apply - and nobody could have known in the 1990s when the book came out since the first GWAS began in the 2000s.) And the book didn't "link" IQ scores to "race" - that link has persisted in the data ever since the dawn of intelligence testing in the early 1900s. (It's same kind of link that exists between a person's sex and their height, as anyone who has taken a statistics course might understand.) See for example 50 Great Myths of Popular Psychology: Shattering Widespread Misconceptions about Human Behavior (2009), "Myth #15 Intelligence (IQ) Tests Are Biased against Certain Groups of People". Differences in average test scores between various groups of people are just measurable facts, like the difference in average heights between men and women, another persistent biological difference between people. But just as there are some tall women and short men, there are individuals at every intelligence level in every large group of people - so the group averages predict nothing definitve about individuals before you know more about them than the group they happen to be in. Generalizing from an average to an entire group would be like trying to guess how wealthy people are from the average per capita wealth for their group. Just about every large group of people has its paupers and billionaires.

The group average test score gaps are just facts; the only things left to argue about are the precise causes and consequences of these observed differences, and whether we should just accept the differences or try to "correct" them. And what sort of technology "correction" might require - so far, nothing that has been tried has worked.

Another strange and stereotypical annoyance here is the laser focus on only one between-group difference in test scores, that between "whites" and "blacks" in the USA. One might never guess that other groups post different test score averages of their own. For example, Jewish Americans routinely notch the highest average test scores, around a whole standard deviation above the average for "white" Americans. And Asian Americans top "white" Americans too, but not by as much. We see the results in the disproportionate success of Jewish and Asian Americans across a whole range of cognitively demanding careers. But for some reason, only certain test score differences get people worked up.

The differences in group mean scores are not as relevant to the book's overall theme as are the in-group variations. That is, the difference in average scores between groups pales in comparison to the spread of test scores within a group. By analogy, while men are on average a few inches taller than women, the spread of individual heights within each group is much larger.

And this spread of test scores matters - it looks to me like what the whole Dark Money industry specifically targets. Trump for exmple openly boasts about his love for the "poorly educated." Anyone who has read much about the science of human intelligence differences is well aware that IQ predicts educational attainment. That's because the educational system is efficient at identifying and promoting talent. Students who perform well early get noticed by teachers and administrators and are encouraged to pursue advanced education. That's because long experience has shown what sort of student is "college material." A whole bunch of white people - actually the majority of them - will never join the "cognitive elite" either. And that has massive political consequences. For starters, it's how we got the adjudicated rapist and convicted felon Trump, not once but also this second time, when anyone with a modestly functioning brain should have known better.

What this means is, to perhaps oversimplify, we have Dark Money and demagoguery (see: Trump) and billionaires buying elections because we have a lot of people who aren't smart enough to avoid being fooled by transparently obvious lies. And now that we are in the genomics era, evidence is stacking up that most of the reason people aren't smart enough is because they were born that way. (The heritability of adult IQ ranges from around 0.6 to 0.8 depending on the study.)

For an introduction to the science missing from the summary and from the original book, and without which politics will never make sense, see:

* Blueprint: How DNA Makes Us Who We Are
* Born That Way: Genes, Behavior, Personality
* Genes: A Very Short Introduction
* Genomics: A Very Short Introduction
* In the Know: Debunking 35 Myths about Human Intelligence
* Intelligence: A Very Short Introduction (newer 2020 edition)
* Intelligence: All That Matters
* The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution
* The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature
* The Neuroscience of Intelligence
* The New Know-Nothings: The Political Foes of the Scientific Study of Human Nature

For an introduction to the technology that might eventually transform the human species into something that can operate competently, see:

* CRISPR People: The Science and Ethics of Editing Humans (2021)
* A Crack in Creation: The New Power to Control Evolution
* Creating Future People: The Ethics of Genetic Enhancement
* Enhancing Evolution: The Ethical Case for Making Better People
* Genomics: A Very Short Introduction
* Humanity Enhanced: Genetic Choice and the Challenge for Liberal Democracies
* Rewriting Nature: The Future of Genome Editing and How to Bridge the Gap Between Law and Science
* The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race
* The Unnatural Selection of Our Species: At the Frontier of Gene Editing


]]> <![CDATA[Summary and Analysis of Thinking, Fast and Slow: Based on the Book by Daniel Kahneman (Smart Summaries)]]> 39948948 So much to read, so little time? This brief overview of Thinking, Fast and Slow tells you what you need to know—before or after you read Daniel Kahneman’s book. Crafted and edited with care, Worth Books set the standard for quality and give you the tools you need to be a well-informed reader. Ěý This short summary of Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman ĚýHistorical contextPart-by-part summariesDetailed timeline of key eventsImportant quotesFascinating triviaGlossary of termsSupporting material to enhance your understanding of the source workĚý About Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Ěý Nobel Prize–winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman explores the mysteries of intuition, judgment, bias, and logic in the international bestseller Thinking, Fast and Slow. His award-winning book explains the different ways people think, whether they’re deciding how to invest their money or how to make friends. Ěý Kahneman’s experiments in behavioral economics, in collaboration with cognitive psychologist Amos Tversky, led to a theory of two systems of the fast thinking used when ducking a blow, and slow thinking that’s better employed for making major life decisions. Ěý Applying these psychological concepts to different facets of our lives, Kahneman demonstrates how to better understand your own decision-making, and the choices made by others. Ěý The summary and analysis in this ebook are intended to complement your reading experience and bring you closer to great work of nonfiction.]]> 41 Worth Books Daniel 5 This book is a nice summary of Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011) by Daniel Kahneman, good for an introduction or a refresher, but unlikely to be an adequate substitute for the full book if you haven't already read about the content elsewhere. Kahneman (1934 â€� 2024) is one of the most influential psychologists, and his ideas have been widely repeated. Thinking, Fast and Slow was something of a smash hit by the comparatively feeble standards of popular science publishing - it was no Harry Potter in terms of popularity, but among the select group of readers who read substantive books, it has a wide following. Thus if you've done much reading in recent psychology you've probably seen some terms from this summary. Many if not most of them also have articles on the English Wikipedia, for example see the article.

The summary was published in 2017, which was still kind of early days for the . The summary does not mention it. For some cautionary notes on the impact of the crisis on Kahneman's book, see chapter 2 of Science Fictions: The Epidemic of Fraud, Bias, Negligence and Hype in Science (2020) by Stuart Ritchie. Ritchie also mentions Kahneman's late-life role in alerting his fellow psychologists to the emerging replication crisis and the need to bolster the standard for research and publishing in the field.

Kahneman, like most other psychologists with a wide popular following, seems to downplay or not mention the science of human intelligence differences, a subfield of . That is, he seems to use inclusive pronouns such as "we" and "our" as if to imply that human minds all function more or less alike, and that everyone is susceptible to faulty thinking. While that latter statement is true, people are differentially susceptible to faulty thinking. For example, if your thinking has thus far kept you out of prison, imagine how different your thinking would need to have been for you to be serving a sentence today. The thinking differences that result in criminality also follow a rather shocking gender line: among criminal offenders, men typically outnumber women by a wide margin, something like 10:1. This suggests that men and women on the whole think differently from each other in some rather important ways, despite having variations that overlap.

The impression that "we" are basically all the same might be subtly reinforced among academic psychologists who recruit most of their experimental subjects from the most available supply around them: college students. College students may differ on average from other population groups (such as for example, prison inmates), so findings based on them may not generalize correctly.

See my review of Summary and Analysis of Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right based on the book by Arlie Russell Hochschild for a starting list of books that should correct the idea that all people basically think alike. The fact that people differ tends to be an unpopular idea, perhaps because human differences seem to underly every social problem and political divide, so you may have to make a deliberate effort to learn about it.

Also see my review of Summary and Analysis of Predictably Irrational . Dan Ariely has had an impact similar to Kahneman's, and like Kahneman he also writes about human irrationality. But until his latest book, Ariely hadn't seemed to experience the full extent of human irrationality. See: Misbelief: What Makes Rational People Believe Irrational Things (2023). The kinds of people featured in that book seem to have a very low representation among the tiny minority of other people who can gain admittance to elite universities, and thus end up as handy subjects in psychology experiments. So while everyone is irrational to some extent, some people take the irrationality to a whole 'nother level. And in 2024 they won an important election, making them rather hard to ignore for at least the next four years.]]> 4.05 Summary and Analysis of Thinking, Fast and Slow: Based on the Book by Daniel Kahneman (Smart Summaries)
author: Worth Books
name: Daniel
average rating: 4.05
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2025/05/04
date added: 2025/05/04
shelves: economics, psychology, read-in-2025, science
review:

This book is a nice summary of Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011) by Daniel Kahneman, good for an introduction or a refresher, but unlikely to be an adequate substitute for the full book if you haven't already read about the content elsewhere. Kahneman (1934 � 2024) is one of the most influential psychologists, and his ideas have been widely repeated. Thinking, Fast and Slow was something of a smash hit by the comparatively feeble standards of popular science publishing - it was no Harry Potter in terms of popularity, but among the select group of readers who read substantive books, it has a wide following. Thus if you've done much reading in recent psychology you've probably seen some terms from this summary. Many if not most of them also have articles on the English Wikipedia, for example see the article.

The summary was published in 2017, which was still kind of early days for the . The summary does not mention it. For some cautionary notes on the impact of the crisis on Kahneman's book, see chapter 2 of Science Fictions: The Epidemic of Fraud, Bias, Negligence and Hype in Science (2020) by Stuart Ritchie. Ritchie also mentions Kahneman's late-life role in alerting his fellow psychologists to the emerging replication crisis and the need to bolster the standard for research and publishing in the field.

Kahneman, like most other psychologists with a wide popular following, seems to downplay or not mention the science of human intelligence differences, a subfield of . That is, he seems to use inclusive pronouns such as "we" and "our" as if to imply that human minds all function more or less alike, and that everyone is susceptible to faulty thinking. While that latter statement is true, people are differentially susceptible to faulty thinking. For example, if your thinking has thus far kept you out of prison, imagine how different your thinking would need to have been for you to be serving a sentence today. The thinking differences that result in criminality also follow a rather shocking gender line: among criminal offenders, men typically outnumber women by a wide margin, something like 10:1. This suggests that men and women on the whole think differently from each other in some rather important ways, despite having variations that overlap.

The impression that "we" are basically all the same might be subtly reinforced among academic psychologists who recruit most of their experimental subjects from the most available supply around them: college students. College students may differ on average from other population groups (such as for example, prison inmates), so findings based on them may not generalize correctly.

See my review of Summary and Analysis of Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right based on the book by Arlie Russell Hochschild for a starting list of books that should correct the idea that all people basically think alike. The fact that people differ tends to be an unpopular idea, perhaps because human differences seem to underly every social problem and political divide, so you may have to make a deliberate effort to learn about it.

Also see my review of Summary and Analysis of Predictably Irrational . Dan Ariely has had an impact similar to Kahneman's, and like Kahneman he also writes about human irrationality. But until his latest book, Ariely hadn't seemed to experience the full extent of human irrationality. See: Misbelief: What Makes Rational People Believe Irrational Things (2023). The kinds of people featured in that book seem to have a very low representation among the tiny minority of other people who can gain admittance to elite universities, and thus end up as handy subjects in psychology experiments. So while everyone is irrational to some extent, some people take the irrationality to a whole 'nother level. And in 2024 they won an important election, making them rather hard to ignore for at least the next four years.
]]> <![CDATA[Summary and Analysis of Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions: Based on the Book by Dan Ariely (Smart Summaries)]]> 34751429 So much to read, so little time? This brief overview of Predictably Irrational tells you what you need to know—before or after you read Dan Ariely’s book. Ěý Crafted and edited with care, Worth Books set the standard for quality and give you the tools you need to be a well-informed reader. Ěý This short summary and analysis of Predictably Irrational Historical contextChapter-by-chapter overviewsImportant quotesFascinating triviaGlossary of termsSupporting material to enhance your understanding of the original workAbout Predictably The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions by Dan ĚýPredictably Irrational, the New York Times bestseller by Duke psychology and behavioral economics professor Dan Ariely, challenges the idea that we always make perfectly rational decisions. Featuring examples from daily life alongside results of his fascinating experiments, Ariely explains how emotional, psychological, and social factors can lead to irrational behavior—which can be damaging to ourselves and others. Ěý From the coffee we drink or the medicine we take, to the companies we support and the relationships we value, we make irrational decisions every day that can cost us in the long run. Ěý Ariely reveals not only when and how we tend to act irrationally, but why, so we can learn from our mistakes and design ways to facilitate smarter decision-making. Ěý The summary and analysis in this ebook are intended to complement your reading experience and bring you closer to a great work of nonfiction. Ěý]]> 50 Worth Books 1504044886 Daniel 5 Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions (2008) by Dan Ariely. Predictably Irrational was , and sold well for a nonfiction book about psychology and . It has been highly influential and heavily cited, so if you've done much reading in the social and behavioral sciencies you've probably seen ideas from it. For example, Ariely originated or studied many of the entries that later appeared in the article on the English Wikipedia. Predictably Irrational stands alongside Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011) by Daniel Kahneman as classics in their field.

Given that this summary book is short (obviously), it introduces many concepts with a paragraph or two. If you are seeing them for the first time, this may not be enough. Again, obviously, the next step would be to read Ariely's book, or look up the Wikipedia articles that exist for most of them. For example, the summary briefly mentions the , a topic of such importance and complexity that it warrants at least a full book of its own. The definition given here is:
Tragedy of the commons: The phenomenon in which individual demand for a shared resource overwhelms the supply of that resource; greedy participants can consume more than their fair share, leading to an overall negative effect on everyone else who uses the resource.
While the description is accurate, the reader seeing this term for the first time could use a bit more. In particular, the tragedy results from each participant acting in his own rational near-term self-interest. From the standpoint of the individual, who is helpless to restrain the other participants, self-restraint would just mean he gets nothing while the other parties take everything. And this is what makes tragedies of the commons so pernicious - the only way to solve them is to either persuade or coerce all the participants to be less rationally selfish.

Tragedies of the commons therefore amount to , the bane of libertarians and free-market fundamentalists. Free marketeers typically have blind faith in Adam Smith's , whereby individuals each acting in their own rational self-interest produce a collectively wonderful result. This only works when all costs of the individual's actions are correctly priced to the individual. But in a tragedy of the commons, the market only pays the individual to take more. The market doesn't by itself penalize the individual for taking too much, since the consumer cannot see or price in the impending collapse of the commons.

The classic example is overfishing a fishery. A fishery consists of a population of fish that can reproduce at a certain rate. "Sustainable fishing" then entails catching no more fish per year than the number that the fishery can replenish indefinitely. And for many species of fish, the most critical fish are the BOFFFFs - big old fat fecund female fish, which produce a hugely disproportionate number of eggs. But big fish tend to have the most commercial value, and so may be deliberately sought by fishermen.

Tragedy can result when fishermen are free to take as many fish as they are able. Thus the individual fisherman is incentivized to invest in more boats and better gear, to catch more fish and earn a higher profit. But when every fisherman follows the same clear logic, the overall catch soon exceeds the sustainable yield. The fishery collapses and may need years or decades to recover, if it can recover at all. The fishermen who depend on the fishery then go bankrupt. This has happened multiple times, e.g. the . In fact it happens predictably when there is a valuable unregulated resource that multiple competing humans have the technology to exploit.

Tragedies of the commons are therefore instances of Collective action problems. These problems feature a conflict of interest between what is rational for the individual vs. what is rational for the group. Immanuel Kant (1724 � 1804) anticipated a moral solution to such problems with his : "Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become universal law." Applied to the tragedy of the commons it would translate as, "Extract no more than your fair share of the sustainable resource", which would be the sustainable yield divided by the number of individuals taking a share. Of course in practice, voluntary adherence to Kant's categorical imperative rarely works, as anyone who follows it becomes the chump of the next guy who flouts it, and so the leviathan of government must often step in and regulate the commons.

So that's more detail about the Tragedy of the commons than you get from this summary book, and there's a whole lot more to learn about it. But this should give some idea of the subject density of this summary book. Therefore while the summary book is valuable for an introduction or a refresher, and is far better than reading nothing at all, it by no means replaces more detailed reading.

Other items: while reading the summary, I was struck by the quaintness of Ariely's examples of irrational behavior. Many of them are more in the realm of mild quirks than catastrophic errors, although the latter are always possible. In particular, reading the summary might make you wonder if Ariely had ever gotten a taste of some seriously real irrationality. Such as the kind studied in Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right (2016) by Arlie Russell Hochschild (see my review of the summary book for that book).

Well, it turns out that Ariely's relatively sheltered life (of apparently dealing mostly with folks at elite universities, who had to pass stringent selection for cognitive capacity to get there) came to a rather jolting end. See his latest (at the time of this review) book, Misbelief: What Makes Rational People Believe Irrational Things (2023). Boy howdy, does Ariely confront some irrationality there!

If you have been following any contentious topics (politics, religion, the science of human intelligence differences, evolution, climate change, etc.) you've been dealing with irrational people for a long time. That Ariely had managed to avoid them until so relatively late in life seems remarkable to me. As I write this in 2025, Trump just finished the first 100 days of his second term, and it's pretty clear that trying to ignore disinformation doesn't make it go away. It's not enough for scientists to just "discover" science for each other. Rationality doesn't trickle down efficiently to hoi polloi on its own. Unless scientists prioritize the problem of convincing the science deniers that science is real (as real as science has to be to churn out steadily improving technologies like smartphones), we might eventually not have any science. That is, it's time for people who understand the value of science to stop denying that there's a war against science. A well-funded war that has been doing its groundwork for decades.

Another potential issue is that Predictably Irrational came out shortly before the broke. Thus it's hard to be sure how firm the various findings in the book are. We now know (or should know) that a single study may not be enough to adequately support a novel psychological finding. For a long cautionary treatment, see Science Fictions: The Epidemic of Fraud, Bias, Negligence and Hype in Science (2020) by Stuart Ritchie. Note: I'm not accusing Ariely of any misconduct, I'm just pointing out that we now know psychological studies are prone to certain kinds of errors and there are ways to guard against them, which weren't always followed in the past. So basically you should be on alert when reading any pop psychology book that pre-dates the replication crisis. Some findings in the book might not replicate. One potential red flag is where a study tested "college students." College students are said to be the most heavily psychologically tested subpopulation on the planet, due to their convenient availability to psychology researchers, most of whom are based at universities. But college students are a select group, and their behavior may not translate to other population groups.

I'll close this review with a peculiar experiment:
In another experiment, Ariely asked Joshua Bell, one of the world’s premier violinists, to pose as a street performer at a Washington, DC, metro station during morning rush hour. Only 2.5% of people dropped change in his open violin case, and, when later surveyed, a majority of passersby did not remember hearing music at all. Given their previous experience, they did not expect a world-class musician to be playing in the DC metro, and, consequently, didn’t hear one.
I question the conclusion, because what the passersby did not hear was an actual performance. The violin is mostly a monophonic instrument with a limited pitch range. It doesn't play "songs" so much as melodies. Accordingly, a premier violinist like Joshua Bell will rarely perform unaccompanied before an audience. One could argue that Joshua Bell without his orchestral backup is not the same Joshua Bell, "premier violinist".

I'd like to repeat the experiment with a "premier pianist" in place of the violinist. Because a piano is a polyphonic instrument with a wide pitch range, an unaccompanied piano performance can come closer to being a complete song as opposed to a single line in a song. My guess is that passersby would be better able to recognize when they are hearing a premier pianist as opposed to a premier violinist. If a "premier pianist" is more recognizable as such, even when out of their usual performative context, then the reaction of the passersby would be better explained by the quality and completeness of the product itself rather than by passerby expectation.
]]> 3.71 Summary and Analysis of Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions: Based on the Book by Dan Ariely (Smart Summaries)
author: Worth Books
name: Daniel
average rating: 3.71
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2025/05/03
date added: 2025/05/03
shelves: economics, psychology, read-in-2025, science
review:
This short book is a great summary of Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions (2008) by Dan Ariely. Predictably Irrational was , and sold well for a nonfiction book about psychology and . It has been highly influential and heavily cited, so if you've done much reading in the social and behavioral sciencies you've probably seen ideas from it. For example, Ariely originated or studied many of the entries that later appeared in the article on the English Wikipedia. Predictably Irrational stands alongside Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011) by Daniel Kahneman as classics in their field.

Given that this summary book is short (obviously), it introduces many concepts with a paragraph or two. If you are seeing them for the first time, this may not be enough. Again, obviously, the next step would be to read Ariely's book, or look up the Wikipedia articles that exist for most of them. For example, the summary briefly mentions the , a topic of such importance and complexity that it warrants at least a full book of its own. The definition given here is:
Tragedy of the commons: The phenomenon in which individual demand for a shared resource overwhelms the supply of that resource; greedy participants can consume more than their fair share, leading to an overall negative effect on everyone else who uses the resource.
While the description is accurate, the reader seeing this term for the first time could use a bit more. In particular, the tragedy results from each participant acting in his own rational near-term self-interest. From the standpoint of the individual, who is helpless to restrain the other participants, self-restraint would just mean he gets nothing while the other parties take everything. And this is what makes tragedies of the commons so pernicious - the only way to solve them is to either persuade or coerce all the participants to be less rationally selfish.

Tragedies of the commons therefore amount to , the bane of libertarians and free-market fundamentalists. Free marketeers typically have blind faith in Adam Smith's , whereby individuals each acting in their own rational self-interest produce a collectively wonderful result. This only works when all costs of the individual's actions are correctly priced to the individual. But in a tragedy of the commons, the market only pays the individual to take more. The market doesn't by itself penalize the individual for taking too much, since the consumer cannot see or price in the impending collapse of the commons.

The classic example is overfishing a fishery. A fishery consists of a population of fish that can reproduce at a certain rate. "Sustainable fishing" then entails catching no more fish per year than the number that the fishery can replenish indefinitely. And for many species of fish, the most critical fish are the BOFFFFs - big old fat fecund female fish, which produce a hugely disproportionate number of eggs. But big fish tend to have the most commercial value, and so may be deliberately sought by fishermen.

Tragedy can result when fishermen are free to take as many fish as they are able. Thus the individual fisherman is incentivized to invest in more boats and better gear, to catch more fish and earn a higher profit. But when every fisherman follows the same clear logic, the overall catch soon exceeds the sustainable yield. The fishery collapses and may need years or decades to recover, if it can recover at all. The fishermen who depend on the fishery then go bankrupt. This has happened multiple times, e.g. the . In fact it happens predictably when there is a valuable unregulated resource that multiple competing humans have the technology to exploit.

Tragedies of the commons are therefore instances of Collective action problems. These problems feature a conflict of interest between what is rational for the individual vs. what is rational for the group. Immanuel Kant (1724 � 1804) anticipated a moral solution to such problems with his : "Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become universal law." Applied to the tragedy of the commons it would translate as, "Extract no more than your fair share of the sustainable resource", which would be the sustainable yield divided by the number of individuals taking a share. Of course in practice, voluntary adherence to Kant's categorical imperative rarely works, as anyone who follows it becomes the chump of the next guy who flouts it, and so the leviathan of government must often step in and regulate the commons.

So that's more detail about the Tragedy of the commons than you get from this summary book, and there's a whole lot more to learn about it. But this should give some idea of the subject density of this summary book. Therefore while the summary book is valuable for an introduction or a refresher, and is far better than reading nothing at all, it by no means replaces more detailed reading.

Other items: while reading the summary, I was struck by the quaintness of Ariely's examples of irrational behavior. Many of them are more in the realm of mild quirks than catastrophic errors, although the latter are always possible. In particular, reading the summary might make you wonder if Ariely had ever gotten a taste of some seriously real irrationality. Such as the kind studied in Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right (2016) by Arlie Russell Hochschild (see my review of the summary book for that book).

Well, it turns out that Ariely's relatively sheltered life (of apparently dealing mostly with folks at elite universities, who had to pass stringent selection for cognitive capacity to get there) came to a rather jolting end. See his latest (at the time of this review) book, Misbelief: What Makes Rational People Believe Irrational Things (2023). Boy howdy, does Ariely confront some irrationality there!

If you have been following any contentious topics (politics, religion, the science of human intelligence differences, evolution, climate change, etc.) you've been dealing with irrational people for a long time. That Ariely had managed to avoid them until so relatively late in life seems remarkable to me. As I write this in 2025, Trump just finished the first 100 days of his second term, and it's pretty clear that trying to ignore disinformation doesn't make it go away. It's not enough for scientists to just "discover" science for each other. Rationality doesn't trickle down efficiently to hoi polloi on its own. Unless scientists prioritize the problem of convincing the science deniers that science is real (as real as science has to be to churn out steadily improving technologies like smartphones), we might eventually not have any science. That is, it's time for people who understand the value of science to stop denying that there's a war against science. A well-funded war that has been doing its groundwork for decades.

Another potential issue is that Predictably Irrational came out shortly before the broke. Thus it's hard to be sure how firm the various findings in the book are. We now know (or should know) that a single study may not be enough to adequately support a novel psychological finding. For a long cautionary treatment, see Science Fictions: The Epidemic of Fraud, Bias, Negligence and Hype in Science (2020) by Stuart Ritchie. Note: I'm not accusing Ariely of any misconduct, I'm just pointing out that we now know psychological studies are prone to certain kinds of errors and there are ways to guard against them, which weren't always followed in the past. So basically you should be on alert when reading any pop psychology book that pre-dates the replication crisis. Some findings in the book might not replicate. One potential red flag is where a study tested "college students." College students are said to be the most heavily psychologically tested subpopulation on the planet, due to their convenient availability to psychology researchers, most of whom are based at universities. But college students are a select group, and their behavior may not translate to other population groups.

I'll close this review with a peculiar experiment:
In another experiment, Ariely asked Joshua Bell, one of the world’s premier violinists, to pose as a street performer at a Washington, DC, metro station during morning rush hour. Only 2.5% of people dropped change in his open violin case, and, when later surveyed, a majority of passersby did not remember hearing music at all. Given their previous experience, they did not expect a world-class musician to be playing in the DC metro, and, consequently, didn’t hear one.
I question the conclusion, because what the passersby did not hear was an actual performance. The violin is mostly a monophonic instrument with a limited pitch range. It doesn't play "songs" so much as melodies. Accordingly, a premier violinist like Joshua Bell will rarely perform unaccompanied before an audience. One could argue that Joshua Bell without his orchestral backup is not the same Joshua Bell, "premier violinist".

I'd like to repeat the experiment with a "premier pianist" in place of the violinist. Because a piano is a polyphonic instrument with a wide pitch range, an unaccompanied piano performance can come closer to being a complete song as opposed to a single line in a song. My guess is that passersby would be better able to recognize when they are hearing a premier pianist as opposed to a premier violinist. If a "premier pianist" is more recognizable as such, even when out of their usual performative context, then the reaction of the passersby would be better explained by the quality and completeness of the product itself rather than by passerby expectation.

]]> <![CDATA[Payoff: The Hidden Logic That Shapes Our Motivations (TED Books)]]> 29430779
Every day we work hard to motivate ourselves, the people we live with, the people who work for and do business with us. In this way, much of what we do can be defined as being "motivators." From the boardroom to the living room, our role as motivators is complex, and the more we try to motivate partners and children, friends and coworkers, the clearer it becomes that the story of motivation is far more intricate and fascinating than we've assumed.

Payoff investigates the true nature of motivation, our partial blindness to the way it works, and how we can bridge this gap. With studies that range from Intel to a kindergarten classroom, Ariely digs deep to find the root of motivation--how it works and how we can use this knowledge to approach important choices in our own lives. Along the way, he explores intriguing questions such as: Can giving employees bonuses harm productivity? Why is trust so crucial for successful motivation? What are our misconceptions about how to value our work? How does your sense of your mortality impact your motivation?]]> 128 Dan Ariely 1501120042 Daniel 0 3.67 2016 Payoff: The Hidden Logic That Shapes Our Motivations (TED Books)
author: Dan Ariely
name: Daniel
average rating: 3.67
book published: 2016
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/05/02
shelves: to-read, economics, psychology
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Irrationally yours : On Missing Socks, Pick-up Lines and Other Existential Puzzles]]> 23315856 219 Dan Ariely 0062379992 Daniel 0 3.47 2015 Irrationally yours : On Missing Socks, Pick-up Lines and Other Existential Puzzles
author: Dan Ariely
name: Daniel
average rating: 3.47
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/05/02
shelves: to-read, economics, psychology
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Misbelief: What Makes Rational People Believe Irrational Things]]> 75302294 “In this thoughtful, moving, and well-written book, Dan Ariely narrates his personal and professional journey to understand the world of misbelievers and conspiracy theories, and offers insights and tips that will hopefully help all of us protect our fragile social fabric from being torn apart by disinformation and distrust.”—Yuval Harari, bestselling author of Sapiens

�Misbelief is an urgent examination of the human attraction to misinformation. This timely book can provide a crucial foundation for building a more empathetic and informed society.”—Daniel H. Pink, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Power of Regret

The renowned social scientist, professor, and bestselling author of Predictably Irrational delivers his most urgent and compelling book—an eye-opening exploration of the human side of the misinformation crisis—examining what drives otherwise rational people to adopt deeply irrational beliefs.

Misinformation affects all of us on a daily basis—from social media to larger political challenges, from casual conversations in supermarkets, to even our closest relationships. While we recognize the dangers that misinformation poses, the problem is complex—far beyond what policing social media alone can achieve—and too often our limited solutions are shaped by partisan politics and individual interpretations of truth.

In Misbelief, preeminent social scientist Dan Ariely argues that to understand the irrational appeal of misinformation, we must first understand the behavior of “misbelief”—the psychological and social journey that leads people to mistrust accepted truths, entertain alternative facts, and even embrace full-blown conspiracy theories. Misinformation, it turns out, appeals to something innate in all of us—on the rightĚýandĚýthe left—and it is only by understanding this psychology that we can blunt its effects. Grounded in years of study as well as Ariely’s own experience as a target of disinformation, Misbelief is an eye-opening and comprehensive analysis of the psychological drivers that cause otherwise rational people to adopt deeply irrational beliefs. Utilizing the latest research, Ariely reveals the key elements—emotional, cognitive, personality, and social—that drive people down the funnel of false information and mistrust, showing how under the right circumstances, anyone can become a misbeliever.

Yet Ariely also offers hope. Even as advanced artificial intelligence has become capable of generating convincing fake news stories at an unprecedented scale, he shows that awareness of these forces fueling misbelief make us, as individuals and as a society, more resilient to its allure. Combating misbelief requires a strategy rooted not in conflict, but in empathy. The sooner we recognize that misbelief is above all else a human problem, the sooner we can become the solution ourselves.]]> 320 Dan Ariely 0063280426 Daniel 0 3.92 2023 Misbelief: What Makes Rational People Believe Irrational Things
author: Dan Ariely
name: Daniel
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/05/02
shelves: currently-reading, denialism, psychology, politics, science, skepticism
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Summary and Analysis of Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right: Based on the Book by Arlie Russell Hochschild (Smart Summaries)]]> 35151142 So much to read, so little time? This brief overview of Strangers in Their Own Land tells you what you need to know—before or after you read Arlie Russell Hochschild’s book. Ěý Crafted and edited with care, Worth Books set the standard for quality and give you the tools you need to be a well-informed reader. Ěý This short summary and analysis of Strangers in Their Own Anger and Mourning on the American Right ĚýHistorical contextChapter-by-chapter overviewsCharacter profilesDetailed timeline of eventsImportant quotesFascinating triviaGlossary of termsSupporting material to enhance your understanding of the original workĚý About Strangers in Their Own Land by Arlie Russell Ěý Renowned sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild seeks to understand why some American conservatives continue to vote for policies that ultimately harm them. She traveled to Louisiana to complete a five-year study, talking to members of the Tea Party and attempting to breach the “empathy wallâ€� that stands between conservatives and liberals. Ěý A compassionate observer, Hochschild pursues the heart of the “deeper story,â€� blaming the narrative—not her subjects—that informs these peoplesâ€� choices. She particularly examines the long history of environmental pollution in the region and the state governmentsâ€� failure to address it—a failure that this political faction refuses to condemn. ĚýStrangers in Their Own Land is a compelling analysis of one of the most important factors in American culture today, and Hochschild’s measured and empathic approach leads her readers toward a greater understanding of their fellow citizens. Ěý The summary and analysis in this ebook are intended to complement your reading experience and bring you closer to a great work of nonfiction. Ěý]]> 59 Worth Books Daniel 5 Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right (2016) by Arlie Russell Hochschild. Given that it's 2025 now and the American Right just put the rapist back into the White House for a second term, who is now also a convicted felon and civilly adjudicated fraudster, libeller, and sexual abuser, and who is busily destroying America's post-World War II alliances along with science, democracy, and everything else that matters, a number of authors have tried to understand how this happened. This book is a summary of Hochschild's attempt to do that. Hochschild's book originally came out in 2016, before anyone could have known the full scale of the catastrophe that Hochschild's interlocutors were going to unleash - not once, but twice.

Hochschild evidently found that among her sample of Trump supporters in Louisiana, many of them are poorly educated and devout. I couldn't tell from this Summary whether Hochschild knows anything about the science of human intelligence differences. If she does, then she'd understand "poorly educated" to be a reliable proxy measure for "low IQ". And the behaviors and attitudes she describes have "low IQ" written all over them.

Unfortunately, science at the moment can do next to nothing about this. An adult's IQ is roughly as fixed as their height. Education can make a person more knowledgeable, similar to the way that physical exercise can make a person more physically fit. But very little can be done to increase a person's individual pattern of response to education or exercise. The more cognitive or athletic ability a person has, respectively, the better results they will get from the respective training, and the more they are likely to enjoy it and be rewarded for it. But most people simply lack the innate capacity to become a college professor (like Hothschild), or an Olympic athlete, no matter how hard they might train.

So while Hochschild makes a heroic effort to "empathize" with her Trump-voting Louisianans, it's hard to imagine a route to a solution therefrom. The simple fact is that millions of Americans - sufficient to win national elections - lack the critical thinking capacity to recognize Trump's constant lies, nor can they understand why a man who is such a transparently obvious liar is unfit to be in charge of anything. No amount of "empathizing" with another person's struggles - struggles which themselves result to a large degree from their own innate cognitive incapacity - can magically increase the person's cognitive capacity. By analogy, we can empathize with cancer victims, and that's a nice gesture, but it does nothing to cure cancer. To cure cancer, or low IQ, we need science to figure out exactly what the causes are, and identify points where treatments may productively intervene. Some progress has been made on the cancer front, but science has barely gotten its boots on with the low IQ problem. It's hard to say what an eventual answer might look like, but gene editing might be able to help, at least for the future people we'll create.

For an introduction to the science missing from the summary and presumably from the original book, see:

* Blueprint: How DNA Makes Us Who We Are
* Born That Way: Genes, Behavior, Personality
* Genes: A Very Short Introduction
* Genomics: A Very Short Introduction
* In the Know: Debunking 35 Myths about Human Intelligence
* Intelligence: A Very Short Introduction (newer 2020 edition)
* Intelligence: All That Matters
* The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution
* The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature
* The Neuroscience of Intelligence
* The New Know-Nothings: The Political Foes of the Scientific Study of Human Nature

For an introduction to the technology that might eventually transform the human species into something that can operate competently, see:

* CRISPR People: The Science and Ethics of Editing Humans (2021)
* A Crack in Creation: The New Power to Control Evolution
* Creating Future People: The Ethics of Genetic Enhancement
* Enhancing Evolution: The Ethical Case for Making Better People
* Genomics: A Very Short Introduction
* Humanity Enhanced: Genetic Choice and the Challenge for Liberal Democracies
* Rewriting Nature: The Future of Genome Editing and How to Bridge the Gap Between Law and Science
* The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race
* The Unnatural Selection of Our Species: At the Frontier of Gene Editing

Imagine a future world in which the average person's cognitive trajectory has them earning college degrees at age 10, . I'm guessing that when everyone becomes that smart, the markets for religion and for demagoguery will be tiny.

Until then, good luck, I guess. ]]> 4.38 Summary and Analysis of Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right: Based on the Book by Arlie Russell Hochschild (Smart Summaries)
author: Worth Books
name: Daniel
average rating: 4.38
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2025/04/29
date added: 2025/04/29
shelves: politics, history, climate-change, economics, denialism, environmentalism, psychology, religion, read-in-2025
review:
I liked this summary of the book Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right (2016) by Arlie Russell Hochschild. Given that it's 2025 now and the American Right just put the rapist back into the White House for a second term, who is now also a convicted felon and civilly adjudicated fraudster, libeller, and sexual abuser, and who is busily destroying America's post-World War II alliances along with science, democracy, and everything else that matters, a number of authors have tried to understand how this happened. This book is a summary of Hochschild's attempt to do that. Hochschild's book originally came out in 2016, before anyone could have known the full scale of the catastrophe that Hochschild's interlocutors were going to unleash - not once, but twice.

Hochschild evidently found that among her sample of Trump supporters in Louisiana, many of them are poorly educated and devout. I couldn't tell from this Summary whether Hochschild knows anything about the science of human intelligence differences. If she does, then she'd understand "poorly educated" to be a reliable proxy measure for "low IQ". And the behaviors and attitudes she describes have "low IQ" written all over them.

Unfortunately, science at the moment can do next to nothing about this. An adult's IQ is roughly as fixed as their height. Education can make a person more knowledgeable, similar to the way that physical exercise can make a person more physically fit. But very little can be done to increase a person's individual pattern of response to education or exercise. The more cognitive or athletic ability a person has, respectively, the better results they will get from the respective training, and the more they are likely to enjoy it and be rewarded for it. But most people simply lack the innate capacity to become a college professor (like Hothschild), or an Olympic athlete, no matter how hard they might train.

So while Hochschild makes a heroic effort to "empathize" with her Trump-voting Louisianans, it's hard to imagine a route to a solution therefrom. The simple fact is that millions of Americans - sufficient to win national elections - lack the critical thinking capacity to recognize Trump's constant lies, nor can they understand why a man who is such a transparently obvious liar is unfit to be in charge of anything. No amount of "empathizing" with another person's struggles - struggles which themselves result to a large degree from their own innate cognitive incapacity - can magically increase the person's cognitive capacity. By analogy, we can empathize with cancer victims, and that's a nice gesture, but it does nothing to cure cancer. To cure cancer, or low IQ, we need science to figure out exactly what the causes are, and identify points where treatments may productively intervene. Some progress has been made on the cancer front, but science has barely gotten its boots on with the low IQ problem. It's hard to say what an eventual answer might look like, but gene editing might be able to help, at least for the future people we'll create.

For an introduction to the science missing from the summary and presumably from the original book, see:

* Blueprint: How DNA Makes Us Who We Are
* Born That Way: Genes, Behavior, Personality
* Genes: A Very Short Introduction
* Genomics: A Very Short Introduction
* In the Know: Debunking 35 Myths about Human Intelligence
* Intelligence: A Very Short Introduction (newer 2020 edition)
* Intelligence: All That Matters
* The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution
* The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature
* The Neuroscience of Intelligence
* The New Know-Nothings: The Political Foes of the Scientific Study of Human Nature

For an introduction to the technology that might eventually transform the human species into something that can operate competently, see:

* CRISPR People: The Science and Ethics of Editing Humans (2021)
* A Crack in Creation: The New Power to Control Evolution
* Creating Future People: The Ethics of Genetic Enhancement
* Enhancing Evolution: The Ethical Case for Making Better People
* Genomics: A Very Short Introduction
* Humanity Enhanced: Genetic Choice and the Challenge for Liberal Democracies
* Rewriting Nature: The Future of Genome Editing and How to Bridge the Gap Between Law and Science
* The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race
* The Unnatural Selection of Our Species: At the Frontier of Gene Editing

Imagine a future world in which the average person's cognitive trajectory has them earning college degrees at age 10, . I'm guessing that when everyone becomes that smart, the markets for religion and for demagoguery will be tiny.

Until then, good luck, I guess.
]]> <![CDATA[How AI Ate the World: A Brief History of Artificial Intelligence - And Its Long Future]]> 201802907
Tech journalist Chris Stokel-Walker (TikTok Boom and YouTubers) goes into the laboratories of the Silicon Valley innovators making rapid advances in â€large language modelsâ€� of machine learning. He meets the insiders at Google and OpenAI who built Gemini and ChatGPT and reveals the extraordinary plans they have for them.

Along the way, he explores AI’s dark side by talking to workers who have lost their jobs to bots and engages with futurologists worried that a man-made super-intelligence could threaten humankind.

He answers critical questions about the AI revolution, such as what humanity might be jeopardising; the professions that will win and lose; and whether the existential threat technologists Elon Musk and Sam Altman are warning about is realistic â€� or a smokescreen to divert attention away from their growing power. How AI Ate the World is a â€start hereâ€� guide for anyone who wants to know more about the world we have just entered.]]> 320 Chris Stokel-Walker 191448732X Daniel 5 How AI Ate the World: A Brief History of Artificial Intelligence - And Its Long Future (2024) by Chris Stokel-Walker is still new as I write this, and that's perhaps the biggest thing going for this book at the moment. There are quite a few older books about AI, given that the field has a long history. But most of that history featured overselling and under-performance, leading to several so-called . That cycle of futility began to change in the 2010s, marking the start of the . The boom got its boots on properly with "", per Wikipedia:
"a 2017 landmark research paper in machine learning authored by eight scientists working at Google. The paper introduced a new deep learning architecture known as the transformer, based on the attention mechanism proposed in 2014 by Bahdanau et al. It is considered a foundational paper in modern artificial intelligence, and a main contributor to the AI boom, as the transformer approach has become the main architecture of a wide variety of AI, such as large language models."
The AI boom then blasted into public awareness on November 30, 2022 with the initial realease of . Google itself, which had largely pioneered the boom, was caught rather flatfooted, but soon released its own public-facing AI chatbot, initially called . Numerous competitors followed suit.

The current wave of chatbots had some missteps, but they are improving rapidly, and their capabilities are already jaw-dropping. The upshot is that older books about AI are largely obsolete now. They're still of historical interest, but won't be of much use to all the governments, corporations, and individuals who are scrambling to understand the impact that the new AI technology will have on seemingly everything humans do.

However, one impact that AI hasn't evidently had yet is on books like this one. Stokel-Walker had me questioning whether I had entered a parallel universe with this sentence (emphasis mine):
"The Mechanical Turk played and beat some of the finest minds of its generation, including Benjamin Franklin two years before he became US President, Napoleon Bonaparte, and the English mathematician Charles Babbage."
While Benjamin Franklin was among the most prominent of the United States' founders, he never served as US President. As an Englishman, Stokel-Walker may be forgiven for missing a detail of US history, but this is the sort of minor detail that a competent AI assistant ought to be able to detect and flag. So I suppose it's safe to say the isn't here just yet.

It will be interesting to see how the AI boom plays out in the coming years. On the one hand, we might get mass unemployment, as AI begins ratcheting up the minimum standard of human intelligence necessary to make a human worker worth hiring. But on the other hand, maybe we'll see AI removing the "stupid" from all the organizations and Web sites we have to deal with. For example, if you've engaged with the Ĺ·±¦ÓéŔÖ database to any degree, you've probably noticed it contains a lot of errors, which you may then report to the overworked staff of Ĺ·±¦ÓéŔÖ human librarians. And hope your request will be seen among the flood of other help requests. An AI-enabled Ĺ·±¦ÓéŔÖ might make the database cleaning nightmare a lot more efficient.

Similarly, if you've ever edited on Wikipedia, there are many tedious chores that AI could streamline. AI might also be able to provide a better than random guess as to whether your edits will "stick." A constant vexation on Wikipedia is where you think you've added an improvement, and some other editor deletes it. Presumably this largely unstated de facto standard of acceptability might be something an AI model could figure out by training on the entire editing history of Wikipedia.

Given that modern AI has pretty much rewritten the game rules, but reality takes time to catch up, we'll probably see any number of companies going the way of (a famous casualty of technological progress and a cautionary tale for business students).

If you happen to run or work for one of those suddenly "dead men walking" industries that doesn't realize it's dead yet, maybe reading a book like this one could give you some advance warning. At least by reading this book, you're showing more awareness than all the people who remain oblivious to the AI that is coming for them. This book doesn't go into the kind of technical detail that might tell an at-risk industry exactly what they need to do to get on the right side of history (that might be unknowable at the moment), but it's a place to start. I'd also suggest reading all the Wikipedia articles on AI that I linked from this review. I wish everyone the best of luck as we plunge headlong into our brave new AI world.

And of course you can ask your favorite AI LLM chatbot for pointers about what you should be doing to prepare for the impact of AI LLM chatbots on your job or anything else that you care about.]]> 4.38 How AI Ate the World: A Brief History of Artificial Intelligence - And Its Long Future
author: Chris Stokel-Walker
name: Daniel
average rating: 4.38
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2025/04/25
date added: 2025/04/25
shelves: computers, futurism, history, philosophy, psychology, science, transhumanism, read-in-2025
review:
How AI Ate the World: A Brief History of Artificial Intelligence - And Its Long Future (2024) by Chris Stokel-Walker is still new as I write this, and that's perhaps the biggest thing going for this book at the moment. There are quite a few older books about AI, given that the field has a long history. But most of that history featured overselling and under-performance, leading to several so-called . That cycle of futility began to change in the 2010s, marking the start of the . The boom got its boots on properly with "", per Wikipedia:
"a 2017 landmark research paper in machine learning authored by eight scientists working at Google. The paper introduced a new deep learning architecture known as the transformer, based on the attention mechanism proposed in 2014 by Bahdanau et al. It is considered a foundational paper in modern artificial intelligence, and a main contributor to the AI boom, as the transformer approach has become the main architecture of a wide variety of AI, such as large language models."
The AI boom then blasted into public awareness on November 30, 2022 with the initial realease of . Google itself, which had largely pioneered the boom, was caught rather flatfooted, but soon released its own public-facing AI chatbot, initially called . Numerous competitors followed suit.

The current wave of chatbots had some missteps, but they are improving rapidly, and their capabilities are already jaw-dropping. The upshot is that older books about AI are largely obsolete now. They're still of historical interest, but won't be of much use to all the governments, corporations, and individuals who are scrambling to understand the impact that the new AI technology will have on seemingly everything humans do.

However, one impact that AI hasn't evidently had yet is on books like this one. Stokel-Walker had me questioning whether I had entered a parallel universe with this sentence (emphasis mine):
"The Mechanical Turk played and beat some of the finest minds of its generation, including Benjamin Franklin two years before he became US President, Napoleon Bonaparte, and the English mathematician Charles Babbage."
While Benjamin Franklin was among the most prominent of the United States' founders, he never served as US President. As an Englishman, Stokel-Walker may be forgiven for missing a detail of US history, but this is the sort of minor detail that a competent AI assistant ought to be able to detect and flag. So I suppose it's safe to say the isn't here just yet.

It will be interesting to see how the AI boom plays out in the coming years. On the one hand, we might get mass unemployment, as AI begins ratcheting up the minimum standard of human intelligence necessary to make a human worker worth hiring. But on the other hand, maybe we'll see AI removing the "stupid" from all the organizations and Web sites we have to deal with. For example, if you've engaged with the Ĺ·±¦ÓéŔÖ database to any degree, you've probably noticed it contains a lot of errors, which you may then report to the overworked staff of Ĺ·±¦ÓéŔÖ human librarians. And hope your request will be seen among the flood of other help requests. An AI-enabled Ĺ·±¦ÓéŔÖ might make the database cleaning nightmare a lot more efficient.

Similarly, if you've ever edited on Wikipedia, there are many tedious chores that AI could streamline. AI might also be able to provide a better than random guess as to whether your edits will "stick." A constant vexation on Wikipedia is where you think you've added an improvement, and some other editor deletes it. Presumably this largely unstated de facto standard of acceptability might be something an AI model could figure out by training on the entire editing history of Wikipedia.

Given that modern AI has pretty much rewritten the game rules, but reality takes time to catch up, we'll probably see any number of companies going the way of (a famous casualty of technological progress and a cautionary tale for business students).

If you happen to run or work for one of those suddenly "dead men walking" industries that doesn't realize it's dead yet, maybe reading a book like this one could give you some advance warning. At least by reading this book, you're showing more awareness than all the people who remain oblivious to the AI that is coming for them. This book doesn't go into the kind of technical detail that might tell an at-risk industry exactly what they need to do to get on the right side of history (that might be unknowable at the moment), but it's a place to start. I'd also suggest reading all the Wikipedia articles on AI that I linked from this review. I wish everyone the best of luck as we plunge headlong into our brave new AI world.

And of course you can ask your favorite AI LLM chatbot for pointers about what you should be doing to prepare for the impact of AI LLM chatbots on your job or anything else that you care about.
]]> <![CDATA[Introducing Psychology: A Graphic Guide]]> 26862950 180 Nigel C. Benson 1848317565 Daniel 0 psychology, currently-reading 3.64 1994 Introducing Psychology: A Graphic Guide
author: Nigel C. Benson
name: Daniel
average rating: 3.64
book published: 1994
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/25
shelves: psychology, currently-reading
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Rise and Reign of the Mammals: A New History, from the Shadow of the Dinosaurs to Us]]> 58986604 528 Steve Brusatte 0062951513 Daniel 0 4.35 2022 The Rise and Reign of the Mammals: A New History, from the Shadow of the Dinosaurs to Us
author: Steve Brusatte
name: Daniel
average rating: 4.35
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/24
shelves: to-read, biology, climate-change, evolution, history, science
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History]]> 36475 352 Stephen Jay Gould 039330700X Daniel 0 4.14 1989 Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History
author: Stephen Jay Gould
name: Daniel
average rating: 4.14
book published: 1989
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/24
shelves: to-read, biology, evolution, history, science
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Introducing Quantum Theory: A Graphic Guide]]> 25537096
Introducing Quantum Theory takes readers on a step-by-step tour with the key figures, including Planck, Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, and Schrodinger. Each contributed at least one crucial concept to the theory. The puzzle of the wave-particle duality is here, along with descriptions of the two questions raised against Bohr's "Copenhagen Interpretation"—the famous "dead and alive cat" and the EPR paradox. Both remain unresolved.]]> 352 J.P. McEvoy Daniel 4
I suspect that the average reader of this book won't be entirely "average" compared to the general population, but will instead have at least some educational background in mathematics, physics, and science more broadly. But even so, the book skims rapidly through equations and results, while a typical reader would probably need years of study to master the details enough to personally verify the conclusions.

The book contains a lot of equations, and according to Stephen Hawking's rule each one halves the readership. Maybe the abundant illustrations soften the damage a bit. I found the illustrations somewhat inconvenient in the ebook version, since some of them contain substantial amounts of text in the form of word balloons, text which is not repeated in the body text. However, the text size in the balloons is smaller and harder to read than the body text, and harder to enlarge in the e-reader I have on my tablet. Oh well, I squinted through it well enough.

One thing I didn't like about the equations is that many of them did not include dimensions for all the terms. My personal experience with actually studying mathematical topics is that I have to work with the equations before I can "understand" them. And this book doesn't define all the mathematical terms and symbols to the degree that a reader could actually do that. In other words, for "real" understanding it's probably necessary to read some actual textbooks. And repeat some of the calculations that the inventors of the theory used to confirm it.

But as an historical overview of how quantum theory developed, the book works pretty well. If I were really serious about grasping it, I'd probably need to read the book a few more times. But at least I got the sense of just how remarkable that particular time and place in history was, to have so much explained by so few people in so short a time. Scientific greatness seems to depend not only on having enough ability, but also having the luck to be born in the right place and time when interesting things become discoverable.

It was a bit jarring to see just what a non-factor the United States was in the early development of quantum theory. World War II certainly re-drew the map for science, with many prominent scientists fleeing to the USA to escape the mayhem of Europe. We're probably less likely to have any major scientific breakthrough today with near-zero American involvement. That might change if Trump's anti-science campaign causes a reverse brain-drain.

And while it was cool that a handful of exceptionally smart people were able to develop neat theories, which led to many useful applications, I'm sad to say that science has thus far done almost nothing to make anybody smarter. More knowledgeable, yes, but nobody's "cognitive motor" gets any bigger. We're still as much at the mercy of the random genetic crap shoot today as we were in the early 1900s, when scientific progress depended utterly on the chance appearance of exceptionally talented individuals. Just because a scientific finding is "known" doesn't mean it trickles down to hoi polloi. For example, according to Wikipedia, For science to do something really impressive, it should figure out how to make everyone smart enough to understand science.

So if you have any difficulty understanding this book, it's the fault of science for failing to democratize cognition yet.]]> 3.77 1992 Introducing Quantum Theory: A Graphic Guide
author: J.P. McEvoy
name: Daniel
average rating: 3.77
book published: 1992
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/30
date added: 2025/03/30
shelves: history, science, read-in-2025
review:
Even the cognitive outliers who developed quantum theory, over a span of decades, claim that it doesn't make sense. And that's after they spent countless hours working with it, testing it experimentally, and being competent at the mathematical details. Most readers of this book will bring considerably less to the table than, say, Albert Einstein possessed. So how much of quantum theory can a brief introductory book like this impart to the average reader?

I suspect that the average reader of this book won't be entirely "average" compared to the general population, but will instead have at least some educational background in mathematics, physics, and science more broadly. But even so, the book skims rapidly through equations and results, while a typical reader would probably need years of study to master the details enough to personally verify the conclusions.

The book contains a lot of equations, and according to Stephen Hawking's rule each one halves the readership. Maybe the abundant illustrations soften the damage a bit. I found the illustrations somewhat inconvenient in the ebook version, since some of them contain substantial amounts of text in the form of word balloons, text which is not repeated in the body text. However, the text size in the balloons is smaller and harder to read than the body text, and harder to enlarge in the e-reader I have on my tablet. Oh well, I squinted through it well enough.

One thing I didn't like about the equations is that many of them did not include dimensions for all the terms. My personal experience with actually studying mathematical topics is that I have to work with the equations before I can "understand" them. And this book doesn't define all the mathematical terms and symbols to the degree that a reader could actually do that. In other words, for "real" understanding it's probably necessary to read some actual textbooks. And repeat some of the calculations that the inventors of the theory used to confirm it.

But as an historical overview of how quantum theory developed, the book works pretty well. If I were really serious about grasping it, I'd probably need to read the book a few more times. But at least I got the sense of just how remarkable that particular time and place in history was, to have so much explained by so few people in so short a time. Scientific greatness seems to depend not only on having enough ability, but also having the luck to be born in the right place and time when interesting things become discoverable.

It was a bit jarring to see just what a non-factor the United States was in the early development of quantum theory. World War II certainly re-drew the map for science, with many prominent scientists fleeing to the USA to escape the mayhem of Europe. We're probably less likely to have any major scientific breakthrough today with near-zero American involvement. That might change if Trump's anti-science campaign causes a reverse brain-drain.

And while it was cool that a handful of exceptionally smart people were able to develop neat theories, which led to many useful applications, I'm sad to say that science has thus far done almost nothing to make anybody smarter. More knowledgeable, yes, but nobody's "cognitive motor" gets any bigger. We're still as much at the mercy of the random genetic crap shoot today as we were in the early 1900s, when scientific progress depended utterly on the chance appearance of exceptionally talented individuals. Just because a scientific finding is "known" doesn't mean it trickles down to hoi polloi. For example, according to Wikipedia, For science to do something really impressive, it should figure out how to make everyone smart enough to understand science.

So if you have any difficulty understanding this book, it's the fault of science for failing to democratize cognition yet.
]]> <![CDATA[Anti-Science and the Assault on Democracy: Defending Reason in a Free Society]]> 39380402 Defending the role that science must play in democratic society--science defined not just in terms of technology but as a way of approaching problems and viewing the world.

In this collection of original essays, experts in political science, the hard sciences, philosophy, history, and other disciplines examine contemporary anti-science trends, and make a strong case that respect for science is essential for a healthy democracy.
The editors note that a contradiction lies at the heart of modern society. On the one hand, we inhabit a world increasingly dominated by science and technology. On the other, opposition to science is prevalent in many forms--from arguments against the teaching of evolution and the denial of climate change to the promotion of alternative medicine and outlandish claims about the effects of vaccinations. Adding to this grass-roots hostility toward science are academics espousing postmodern relativism, which equates the methods of science with regimes of "power-knowledge."
While these cultural trends are sometimes marketed in the name of "democratic pluralism," the contributors contend that such views are actually destructive of a broader culture appropriate for a democratic society. This is especially true when facts are degraded as "fake news" and scientists are dismissed as elitists. Rather than enhancing the capacity for rational debate and critical discourse, the authors view such anti-science stances on either the right or the left as a return to premodern forms of subservience to authority and an unwillingness to submit beliefs to rational scrutiny.
Beyond critiquing attitudes hostile to science, the essays in this collection put forward a positive vision for how we might better articulate the relation between science and democracy and the benefits that accrue from cultivating this relationship.]]> 303 Michael J. Thompson 1633884740 Daniel 0 3.69 Anti-Science and the Assault on Democracy: Defending Reason in a Free Society
author: Michael J. Thompson
name: Daniel
average rating: 3.69
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/30
shelves: to-read, climate-change, denialism, evolution, history, philosophy, politics, psychology, religion, science, skepticism
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Summary and Analysis of The Gene: An Intimate History: Based on the Book by Siddhartha Mukherjee (Smart Summaries)]]> 33397079 So much to read, so little time? This brief overview of The Gene tells you what you need to know—before or after you read Siddhartha Mukherjee’s book. Ěý Crafted and edited with care, Worth Books set the standard for quality and give you the tools you need to be a well-informed reader.Ěý Ěý This short summary and analysis of The Gene by Siddhartha Mukherjee ĚýHistorical contextChapter-by-chapter summariesDetailed timeline of key eventsImportant quotesFascinating triviaGlossary of termsSupporting material to enhance your understanding of the original workĚý About Siddhartha Mukherjee’s The Ěý From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Emperor of All Maladies, The Gene is a rigorously scientific, broadly historical, and candidly personal account of the development of the science of genetics, the dramatic ways genes can affect us, and the enormous moral questions posed by our ability to manipulate them.Ěý Ěý As Siddhartha Mukherjee maps out the fascinating biography of the gene, from research and experimentation to scientific breakthroughs, he always returns to the narrative of his own family’s tragic history of mental illness, reminding us that despite our huge leaps in knowledge, there is still much we do not understand about the incredibly complex human genome. ĚýThe Gene is an important read for anyone concerned about a future that may redefine what it means to be human. Ěý The summary and analysis in this ebook are intended to complement your reading experience and bring you closer to a great work of nonfiction.Ěý Ěý]]> 43 Worth Books 1504043383 Daniel 0 3.91 Summary and Analysis of The Gene: An Intimate History: Based on the Book by Siddhartha Mukherjee (Smart Summaries)
author: Worth Books
name: Daniel
average rating: 3.91
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/26
shelves: to-read, biology, evolution, futurism, history, medicine, psychology, science
review:

]]> The Gene: An Intimate History 27276428
The story of the gene begins in an obscure Augustinian abbey in Moravia in 1856 where a monk stumbles on the idea of a â€unit of heredityâ€�. It intersects with Darwin’s theory of evolution, and collides with the horrors of Nazi eugenics in the 1940s. The gene transforms post-war biology. It reorganizes our understanding of sexuality, temperament, choice and free will. This is a story driven by human ingenuity and obsessive minds â€� from Charles Darwin and Gregor Mendel to Francis Crick, James Watson and Rosalind Franklin, and the thousands of scientists still working to understand the code of codes.

This is an epic, moving history of a scientific idea coming to life, by the author of The Emperor of All Maladies. But woven through The Gene, like a red line, is also an intimate history � the story of Mukherjee’s own family and its recurring pattern of mental illness, reminding us that genetics is vitally relevant to everyday lives. These concerns reverberate even more urgently today as we learn to “read� and “write� the human genome � unleashing the potential to change the fates and identities of our children.

Majestic in its ambition, and unflinching in its honesty, The Gene gives us a definitive account of the fundamental unit of heredity � and a vision of both humanity’s past and future.]]> 592 Siddhartha Mukherjee Daniel 0 4.34 2016 The Gene: An Intimate History
author: Siddhartha Mukherjee
name: Daniel
average rating: 4.34
book published: 2016
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/26
shelves: to-read, biology, evolution, history, medicine, memoir, psychology, science
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Summary and Analysis of The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History: Based on the Book by Elizabeth Kolbert (Smart Summaries)]]> 34335916 So much to read, so little time? This brief overview ofĚýThe Sixth Extinction tells you what you need to know—before or after you read Elizabeth Kolbert’s book. Crafted and edited with care, Worth Books set the standard for quality and give you the tools you need to be a well-informed reader. Ěý This short summary and analysis of The Sixth An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert Historical contextChapter-by-chapter overviewsDetailed timeline of key eventsImportant quotesFascinating triviaGlossary of termsSupporting material to enhance your understanding of the original workĚý About The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Ěý Our planet has endured five events of mass extinction, from centuries of catastrophic heating and cooling to the asteroid that fell to earth and ended the Cretaceous Period. We are currently facing the sixth extinction, and this time the human species is to blame. Ěý Elizabeth Kolbert travels the world and meets with scientists who are grappling with the ecological outcomes of human activity. Her Pulitzer Prize–winning modern science classic tells the stories of thirteen different species that have already disappeared or are on the brink of extinction as a result of human activity. Ěý A captivating blend of research and historical anecdotes enlightens readers about the unintentional consequences of our behaviors, from climate change and global warming to invasive species and overexploitation. Ěý The summary and analysis in this ebook are intended to complement your reading experience and bring you closer to a great work of nonfiction.]]> 40 Worth Books 1504044177 Daniel 0 4.08 Summary and Analysis of The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History: Based on the Book by Elizabeth Kolbert (Smart Summaries)
author: Worth Books
name: Daniel
average rating: 4.08
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/25
shelves: to-read, biology, evolution, environmentalism, futurism, history, climate-change
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Summary and Analysis of Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind: Based on the Book by Yuval Noah Harari (Smart Summaries)]]> 39939651
Crafted and edited with care, Worth Books set the standard for quality and give you the tools you need to be a well-informed reader.
Ěý
This short summary and analysis of Sapiens includes: About Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari:
Ěý
Sapiens is a wide-ranging account of human history that upends the conventional wisdom about our species with novel, even startling, theories about how we developed and where we’re headed.
Ěý
The bestselling book Sapiens takes the reader from humanity’s remote origins in East Africa; through its spread to societies and empires around the world; and finally to the present, when Sapiens as we know them may be about to disappear. Throughout this journey, Homo Deus author Yuval Noah Harari offers new insights into the importance of language, imagination, and even ignorance in the development of human history.
Ěý
The summary and analysis in this ebook are intended to complement your reading experience and bring you closer to a great work of nonfiction.
Ěý]]> 39 Worth Books 150404472X Daniel 0 4.10 Summary and Analysis of Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind: Based on the Book by Yuval Noah Harari (Smart Summaries)
author: Worth Books
name: Daniel
average rating: 4.10
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/25
shelves: to-read, evolution, history, science
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Flesh and Machines: How Robots Will Change Us]]> 205403
Are we really on the brink of having robots to mop our floors, do our dishes, mow our lawns, and clean our windows? And are researchers that close to creating robots that can think, feel, repair themselves, and even reproduce?

Rodney A. Brooks believes we are. In this lucid and accessible book, Brooks vividly depicts the history of robots and explores the ever-changing relationships between humans and their technological brethren, speculating on the growing role that robots will play in our existence. Knowing the moral battle likely to ensue, he posits a clear philosophical argument as to why we should not fear that change. What results is a fascinating book that offers a deeper understanding of who we are and how we can control what we will become.]]> 272 Rodney A. Brooks 037572527X Daniel 0 3.60 2002 Flesh and Machines: How Robots Will Change Us
author: Rodney A. Brooks
name: Daniel
average rating: 3.60
book published: 2002
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/25
shelves: to-read, computers, engineering, evolution, futurism, history, philosophy, psychology, science, transhumanism
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence]]> 648195
Hans Moravec convincingly argues that we are approaching a watershed in the history of life―a time when the boundaries between biological and postbiological intelligence will begin to dissolve. Within forty years, Moravec believes, we will achieve human equivalence in our machines, not only in their capacity to reason but also in their ability to perceive, interact with, and change their complex environment. The critical factor is mobility. A computer rooted to one place is doomed to static iterations, whereas a machine on the prowl, like a mobile organism, must evolve a richer fund of knowledge about an ever-changing world upon which to base its actions.

In order to achieve anything near human equivalence, robots will need, at the least, the capacity to perform ten trillion calculations per second. Given the trillion-fold increase in computational power since the end of the nineteenth century, and the promise of exotic technologies far surpassing the now-familiar lasers and even superconductors, Moravec concludes that our hardware will have no trouble meeting this forty-year timetable.

But human equivalence is just the beginning, not an upper bound. Once the tireless thinking capacity of robots is directed to the problem of their own improvement and reproduction, even the sky will not limit their voracious exploration of the universe. In the concluding chapters Moravec challenges us to imagine with him the possibilities and pitfalls of such a scenario. Rather than warning us of takeover by robots, the author invites us, as we approach the end of this millennium, to speculate about a plausible, wonderful postbiological future and the ways in which our minds might participate in its unfolding.]]> 224 Hans Moravec 0674576187 Daniel 0 4.05 1990 Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence
author: Hans Moravec
name: Daniel
average rating: 4.05
book published: 1990
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/25
shelves: to-read, computers, evolution, futurism, philosophy, science, transhumanism
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Marvelous Learning Animal: What Makes Human Nature Unique]]> 14568718 402 Arthur W. Staats 1616145978 Daniel 0 3.60 2012 Marvelous Learning Animal: What Makes Human Nature Unique
author: Arthur W. Staats
name: Daniel
average rating: 3.60
book published: 2012
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/24
shelves: to-read, biology, evolution, philosophy, psychology, science
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism]]> 50155421 The Pulitzer Prize-winning author, professor, and historian offers an expert guide to understanding the appeal of the strongman as a leader and an explanation for why authoritarianism is back with a menacing twenty-first century twist.

Across the world today, from the Americas to Europe and beyond, liberal democracy is under siege while populism and nationalism are on the rise. In Twilight of Democracy, prize-winning historian Anne Applebaum offers an unexpected explanation: that there is a deep and inherent appeal to authoritarianism, to strongmen, and, especially, to one-party rule--that is, to political systems that benefit true believers, or loyal soldiers, or simply the friends and distant cousins of the Leader, to the exclusion of everyone else.

People, she argues, are not just ideological; they are also practical, pragmatic, opportunistic. They worry about their families, their houses, their careers. Some political systems offer them possibilities, and others don't. In particular, the modern authoritarian parties that have arisen within democracies today offer the possibility of success to people who do not thrive in the meritocratic, democratic, or free-market competition that determines access to wealth and power.

Drawing on reporting in Spain, Switzerland, Poland, Hungary, and Brazil; using historical examples including Stalinist central Europe and Nazi Germany; and investigating related phenomena: the modern conspiracy theory, nostalgia for a golden past, political polarization, and meritocracy and its discontents, Anne Applebaum brilliantly illuminates the seduction of totalitarian thinking and the eternal appeal of the one-party state.]]> 224 Anne Applebaum 0771005857 Daniel 0 3.87 2020 Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism
author: Anne Applebaum
name: Daniel
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/24
shelves: to-read, denialism, history, politics, philosophy, skepticism
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind]]> 837037
This provocative new book, the highly anticipated follow-up to his bestselling volume Mind Children , charts the trajectory of robotics in breathtaking detail. A must read for artificial intelligence, technology, and computer enthusiasts, Moravec's freewheeling but informed speculations present a future far different than we ever dared imagine.]]> 240 Hans Moravec 0195136306 Daniel 0 4.06 1998 Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind
author: Hans Moravec
name: Daniel
average rating: 4.06
book published: 1998
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/23
shelves: to-read, computers, evolution, engineering, futurism, science, philosophy, transhumanism
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Introducing Artificial Intelligence: A Graphic Guide (Graphic Guides)]]> 26797467 Artificial Intelligence is no longer the stuff of science fiction. Half a century of research has resulted in machines capable of beating the best human chess players, and humanoid robots which are able to walk and interact with us. But how similar is this 'intelligence' to our own? Can machines really think? Is the mind just a complicated computer program?Ěý Addressing major issues in the design of intelligent machines, such as consciousness and environment, and covering everything from the influential groundwork of Alan Turing to the cutting-edge robots of today, Introducing Artificial Intelligence is a uniquely accessible illustrated introduction to this fascinating area of science.Ěý]]> 404 Henry Brighton 1785780093 Daniel 4
Even the earliest digital computers were superior to humans at any job that could be broken down into individually simple steps like addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, along with symbol manipulation involving unambiguous logical rules. But humans can do many other important cognitive tasks that seem to defy this kind of reduction into simple steps. When humans can do a particular job, but they don't understand exactly how they are doing it, they can't break it down into steps that are simple enough for a computer to perform automatically. In such cases we say that the job requires "intelligence." The word "intelligence" itself defies precise explanation for the same reason - if we understood exactly what intelligence is, we would understand how we are solving problems that we don't understand how we are solving. Thus one definition of "intelligence" is functional and contingent on the current state of computing: the ability to do something that we can't explain to a computer yet. The act of imparting these kinds of abilities to a computer, to solve the same kinds of problems that humans need "intelligence" to solve, is called AI.

As I write this review in 2025, AI has been increasingly in the news. That's because we are currently living in an "" (or an AI boom). This AI boom began in the 2010s, and stands in glaring contrast to the long prior history of that marred the first 50 years of AI research and development. AI was for a long time one of the most over-hyped areas of technology, and it's finally starting to deliver on the hype.

A rough historical analogy is with the quest for powered flight. Since ancient times, humans had dreamed of flying like birds. The quest for this dream led to a long . At first, that was a long history of failures, some of them spectular, until the finally cracked it in 1903 with their first successful airplane, the . Imagine that you were living in 1910 or so, and you wanted to learn about these newfangled airplanes. Would you want to read a book that had been written in the year 1890? Such a book might be of historical interest, but it would have almost zero practical value, because nobody in the year 1890 knew exactly how to build a working airplane. The history of aviation up to 1903 was a long "aviation winter".

AI's own "Wright brothers" moment might have been on November 30, 2022 with the initial public release of . AI suddenly exploded into general human awareness. ChatGPT is a highly successful public-facing chatbot. According to Wikipedia:
By January 2023, ChatGPT had become what was then the fastest-growing consumer software application in history, gaining over 100 million users in two months. ChatGPT's release spurred the release of competing products, including Gemini, Claude, Llama, Ernie, and Grok.
The jaw-dropping capabilities of these chatbots continue to grow by the month, opening up vast new domains where computers might make human workers more productive, or perhaps redundant. AI has now emerged as a supremely disruptive technology, and most people will be disrupted in some way. Learning about AI might be one of the most important things a person can do right now. When folks are about to get blindsided, it's better to be one of the blindsiders than one of the blindsidees.

So, can the book Introducing Artificial Intelligence: A Graphic Guide help? Maybe. Even though editions of this book have publication years in the 2010s, much if not all of the content seems to be largely the same as in the original edition, which came out in 2007. Another measure of the real age of the book is in its Further Reading section, which lists several books, the most recent being from 2002. This makes the book a work of history now, specifically a snapshot of what AI was like late in its long winter. It's like a book about aviation from the year 1890. That wouldn't be a complete waste of time, because history matters, but it might be a little bit dangerous if that was the only book you read. At the very least you would be underinformed, and possibly a little misinformed.

Finding an up-to-date introductory book about AI might be difficult just now. Writing books and getting them published takes a while, and it's barely been two years since AI became drastically relevant. Even worse, the whole field is rapidly changing now, so any book about ChatGPT for example would likely be out of date within a year or less. A book about AI that came out right now would probably be about the AI that existed six months ago, which might mean it's already out of date before the ink is dry.

While I wouldn't recommend against reading this book, it should not be the only thing you read about AI. (This is a great instance of Miguel de Unamuno's adage, in paraphrase, "The more books you read, the less harm they do.") A resource that tends to stay up-to-date is Wikipedia. In addition to the other Wikipedia articles I linked above, see , and the .

The main advantage of this book is that it's easy to read (if not to understand). The text volume is minimal and broken up by lots of illustrations. The illustrations tend to be incidental rather than directly informative, and the artistic style is a bit weird for my taste, but they break up the "" tedium that afflicts many works of dry technical prose.

I can't really speak to how well this book succeeds as an "introduction" because I've been following AI as a lay observer off and on for decades, right through that long winter. Many of the people and things in the book I had some prior familiarity with. If you're seeing it all for the very first time, I'd have to say god help you, because this book likely won't. But we don't need god any more since we now have working examples of AI itself - when (not if) something in the book confuses you, just ask ChatGPT (or Gemini, Copilot, etc.) about it.

A large fraction of the book is about . That may have made sense at the time, when AI didn't have much practical value yet. But today, most people probably don't care about whether the machine that knocks them out of a job is "really" thinking or not. All that matters is that the machine is doing your job more reliably than you can, at less cost to your employer.

I give the book 4 stars anyway because it's about one of the most important topics right now, and a person needs to read everything they can about the AI that's about to replace them. Newer books about AI will almost certainly recount or at least allude to the history of the field, so this book will give you a head start.]]> 3.35 2007 Introducing Artificial Intelligence: A Graphic Guide (Graphic Guides)
author: Henry Brighton
name: Daniel
average rating: 3.35
book published: 2007
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/22
date added: 2025/03/22
shelves: computers, engineering, evolution, history, psychology, science, read-in-2025
review:
The notion of (AI) has been around almost since the dawn of automated digital computing. In the 1950s, the first digital computers were physically enormous, wildly expensive, few in number, prodigal in energy consumption, and feeble in computing capacity. A modern smartphone runs rings around a room-sized computer from back then. But even at that earliest stage of their development, digital computers could vastly outperform human "" for many kinds of repetitive computing tasks. That is, before machines automated tedious arithmetic, teams of human "computers" had the job of manually crunching the numbers.

Even the earliest digital computers were superior to humans at any job that could be broken down into individually simple steps like addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, along with symbol manipulation involving unambiguous logical rules. But humans can do many other important cognitive tasks that seem to defy this kind of reduction into simple steps. When humans can do a particular job, but they don't understand exactly how they are doing it, they can't break it down into steps that are simple enough for a computer to perform automatically. In such cases we say that the job requires "intelligence." The word "intelligence" itself defies precise explanation for the same reason - if we understood exactly what intelligence is, we would understand how we are solving problems that we don't understand how we are solving. Thus one definition of "intelligence" is functional and contingent on the current state of computing: the ability to do something that we can't explain to a computer yet. The act of imparting these kinds of abilities to a computer, to solve the same kinds of problems that humans need "intelligence" to solve, is called AI.

As I write this review in 2025, AI has been increasingly in the news. That's because we are currently living in an "" (or an AI boom). This AI boom began in the 2010s, and stands in glaring contrast to the long prior history of that marred the first 50 years of AI research and development. AI was for a long time one of the most over-hyped areas of technology, and it's finally starting to deliver on the hype.

A rough historical analogy is with the quest for powered flight. Since ancient times, humans had dreamed of flying like birds. The quest for this dream led to a long . At first, that was a long history of failures, some of them spectular, until the finally cracked it in 1903 with their first successful airplane, the . Imagine that you were living in 1910 or so, and you wanted to learn about these newfangled airplanes. Would you want to read a book that had been written in the year 1890? Such a book might be of historical interest, but it would have almost zero practical value, because nobody in the year 1890 knew exactly how to build a working airplane. The history of aviation up to 1903 was a long "aviation winter".

AI's own "Wright brothers" moment might have been on November 30, 2022 with the initial public release of . AI suddenly exploded into general human awareness. ChatGPT is a highly successful public-facing chatbot. According to Wikipedia:
By January 2023, ChatGPT had become what was then the fastest-growing consumer software application in history, gaining over 100 million users in two months. ChatGPT's release spurred the release of competing products, including Gemini, Claude, Llama, Ernie, and Grok.
The jaw-dropping capabilities of these chatbots continue to grow by the month, opening up vast new domains where computers might make human workers more productive, or perhaps redundant. AI has now emerged as a supremely disruptive technology, and most people will be disrupted in some way. Learning about AI might be one of the most important things a person can do right now. When folks are about to get blindsided, it's better to be one of the blindsiders than one of the blindsidees.

So, can the book Introducing Artificial Intelligence: A Graphic Guide help? Maybe. Even though editions of this book have publication years in the 2010s, much if not all of the content seems to be largely the same as in the original edition, which came out in 2007. Another measure of the real age of the book is in its Further Reading section, which lists several books, the most recent being from 2002. This makes the book a work of history now, specifically a snapshot of what AI was like late in its long winter. It's like a book about aviation from the year 1890. That wouldn't be a complete waste of time, because history matters, but it might be a little bit dangerous if that was the only book you read. At the very least you would be underinformed, and possibly a little misinformed.

Finding an up-to-date introductory book about AI might be difficult just now. Writing books and getting them published takes a while, and it's barely been two years since AI became drastically relevant. Even worse, the whole field is rapidly changing now, so any book about ChatGPT for example would likely be out of date within a year or less. A book about AI that came out right now would probably be about the AI that existed six months ago, which might mean it's already out of date before the ink is dry.

While I wouldn't recommend against reading this book, it should not be the only thing you read about AI. (This is a great instance of Miguel de Unamuno's adage, in paraphrase, "The more books you read, the less harm they do.") A resource that tends to stay up-to-date is Wikipedia. In addition to the other Wikipedia articles I linked above, see , and the .

The main advantage of this book is that it's easy to read (if not to understand). The text volume is minimal and broken up by lots of illustrations. The illustrations tend to be incidental rather than directly informative, and the artistic style is a bit weird for my taste, but they break up the "" tedium that afflicts many works of dry technical prose.

I can't really speak to how well this book succeeds as an "introduction" because I've been following AI as a lay observer off and on for decades, right through that long winter. Many of the people and things in the book I had some prior familiarity with. If you're seeing it all for the very first time, I'd have to say god help you, because this book likely won't. But we don't need god any more since we now have working examples of AI itself - when (not if) something in the book confuses you, just ask ChatGPT (or Gemini, Copilot, etc.) about it.

A large fraction of the book is about . That may have made sense at the time, when AI didn't have much practical value yet. But today, most people probably don't care about whether the machine that knocks them out of a job is "really" thinking or not. All that matters is that the machine is doing your job more reliably than you can, at less cost to your employer.

I give the book 4 stars anyway because it's about one of the most important topics right now, and a person needs to read everything they can about the AI that's about to replace them. Newer books about AI will almost certainly recount or at least allude to the history of the field, so this book will give you a head start.
]]> <![CDATA[The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail]]> 664534
Focusing on "disruptive technology" -- the Honda Super Cub, Intel's 8088 processor, or the hydraulic excavator, for example -- Christensen shows why most companies miss "the next great wave." Whether in electronics or retailing, a successful company with established products will get pushed aside unless managers know when to abandon traditional business practices. Using the lessons of successes and failures from leading companies, "The Innovator's Dilemma" presents a set of rules for capitalizing on the phenomenon of disruptive innovation.]]> 252 Clayton M. Christensen 0875845851 Daniel 0 4.04 1997 The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail
author: Clayton M. Christensen
name: Daniel
average rating: 4.04
book published: 1997
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/20
shelves: to-read, computers, economics, history, philosophy, skepticism
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Summary and Analysis of The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail: Based on the Book by Clayton Christensen (Smart Summaries)]]> 33583805 So much to read, so little time? Get a brief overview of The Innovator’s Dilemma—the bestselling business book about disruption and how companies adapt. Ěý Named one of the most important business books ever written by the Economist and the winner of the Global Business Book Award, The Innovator’s Dilemma uses true stories of the successes and failures of prominent companies to analyze why great firms fail when faced with critical market and technological innovation. Ěý In this summary of Clayton Christensen’s book for entrepreneurs, managers, CEOs, and business leaders, you’ll ĚýWhy sometimes “doing the right thingâ€� can be the wrong thing, especially when faced with disruptive technologyWhy most companies, even good ones, struggle to adapt their business practicesWhat executives can do to ensure both the short-term health and long-term survival of their organizationsĚý With historical context, chapter-by-chapter overviews, important quotes, definitions of key terms, and other features, this summary and analysis of The Innovator’s Dilemma is intended to complement your reading experience and bring you closer to a great work of nonfiction.]]> 40 Worth Books 1504043421 Daniel 0 4.11 Summary and Analysis of The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail: Based on the Book by Clayton Christensen (Smart Summaries)
author: Worth Books
name: Daniel
average rating: 4.11
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/20
shelves: to-read, computers, economics, history, philosophy
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Eye Wonder: Airplanes: Open Your Eyes to a World of Discovery]]> 17993829 56 D.K. Publishing 1465402519 Daniel 4 Eye Wonder: Airplanes is a picture book for children about the history of aviation. Accordingly, it steers clear of anything that might disturb the little ones. For example, the aircraft on the cover doesn't seem to be captioned in the book, but it looks like a or . The book came out in 2013, just before Russia began carving off pieces of Ukraine. Since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Russian aircraft like these have been bombing Ukrainian soldiers and civilians.

Similarly, the book says nothing about aviation's contribution to (a) climate change and (b) disease spread. Thanks to commercial passenger aviation, the COVID-19 pandemic was able to wing its way rapidly around the world and kill millions. It's remarkable how aviation seems to get a free pass for that. Meanwhile, idiot humans learned nothing, and will spread the next deadly virus with equal efficiency. ]]> 3.33 2013 Eye Wonder: Airplanes: Open Your Eyes to a World of Discovery
author: D.K. Publishing
name: Daniel
average rating: 3.33
book published: 2013
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/19
date added: 2025/03/19
shelves: engineering, history, read-in-2025
review:
Eye Wonder: Airplanes is a picture book for children about the history of aviation. Accordingly, it steers clear of anything that might disturb the little ones. For example, the aircraft on the cover doesn't seem to be captioned in the book, but it looks like a or . The book came out in 2013, just before Russia began carving off pieces of Ukraine. Since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Russian aircraft like these have been bombing Ukrainian soldiers and civilians.

Similarly, the book says nothing about aviation's contribution to (a) climate change and (b) disease spread. Thanks to commercial passenger aviation, the COVID-19 pandemic was able to wing its way rapidly around the world and kill millions. It's remarkable how aviation seems to get a free pass for that. Meanwhile, idiot humans learned nothing, and will spread the next deadly virus with equal efficiency.
]]> <![CDATA[The Science Gap: Dispelling the Myths and Understanding the Reality of Science]]> 4904489
Milton Rothman examines sixteen standard myths about the nature of science, demonstrating that much of what passes for logical argumentation consists of the repetition of cliches and current folklore.]]> 254 Milton A. Rothman 0879757108 Daniel 4
Update: March 19, 2025 - I read the book a second time. It still holds up pretty well despite being rather old by now in "science years." Parapsychology, religion, and perpetual motion machines have made zero progress, as Milton Rothman (1919-2001) predicted. His views on Artificial Intelligence reflected the state of things back in 1992, which is an eternity in "computer years." Perhaps that was during one of the many that the field had to endure. Today of course we live in the Golden Age of AI, where every few weeks the likes of ChatGPT and Google Gemini acquire some new jaw-dropping capability.

I remember this book because it was the first place where I realized that any form of cosmic communication - for example prayer, or religious revelation - would have to violate the conservation laws. Thus people who pray to their favorite god, and actually believe the god hears them, or sends messages back, must believe science is false. If someone wants to believe science is a hoax, that's their business, but I wish those people would stop hypocritically consuming the benefits of science every day. (In the form of countless technologies that wouldn't be possible if the enabling science were wrong.)

Rothman's comments on the environmental crisis are interesting to read from today's perspective. He understood the threats posed by exponential growth in human population, resource consumption, and waste generation on a finite planet. It's too bad that hardly anyone else seems to, even now. But one glaring omission was any mention of . 1992 was still early days for climate science, although James Hansen was already sounding the alarm, to mostly deaf ears. Today, of course, you can't talk about the environment without talking about the climate and how ordinary humans are working hard every day to destroy it.

Rothman's musings on the other meaning of "environment", as in the shapers of human behaviors and social outcomes apart from the individual's DNA, badly need an update. 1992 was the very dawn of the genomics era. Today scientists have catalogued thousands of genetic disorders and find new ones every week.

Rothman takes a then-fashionable shot at . Whether or to what degree Burt's much-maligned studies of heritability using pairs of monozygotic twins involved misconduct, they've since been replicated by multiple newer studies. That is, Burt's personal failings don't erase the hard truth of the high heritability of human intelligence (typically 0.6 to 0.8 for adult IQ). It's especially odd for Rothman, whose ancestry includes Ashkenazi Jews, to deny the factor that very likely enabled his scientific career. (His ancestors hail from the group having the highest average tested IQ on the planet, and who as a group enjoy disproportionate success across the whole range of cognitively demanding professions.)

Sadly, Rothman isn't around to write that update. Fortunately there are newer books such as Blueprint: How DNA Makes Us Who We Are (2019) by Robert Plomin.]]> 4.00 1992 The Science Gap: Dispelling the Myths and Understanding the Reality of Science
author: Milton A. Rothman
name: Daniel
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1992
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/19
date added: 2025/03/19
shelves: science, skepticism, read-in-2025
review:
I read this book years ago; I do not remember exactly when.

Update: March 19, 2025 - I read the book a second time. It still holds up pretty well despite being rather old by now in "science years." Parapsychology, religion, and perpetual motion machines have made zero progress, as Milton Rothman (1919-2001) predicted. His views on Artificial Intelligence reflected the state of things back in 1992, which is an eternity in "computer years." Perhaps that was during one of the many that the field had to endure. Today of course we live in the Golden Age of AI, where every few weeks the likes of ChatGPT and Google Gemini acquire some new jaw-dropping capability.

I remember this book because it was the first place where I realized that any form of cosmic communication - for example prayer, or religious revelation - would have to violate the conservation laws. Thus people who pray to their favorite god, and actually believe the god hears them, or sends messages back, must believe science is false. If someone wants to believe science is a hoax, that's their business, but I wish those people would stop hypocritically consuming the benefits of science every day. (In the form of countless technologies that wouldn't be possible if the enabling science were wrong.)

Rothman's comments on the environmental crisis are interesting to read from today's perspective. He understood the threats posed by exponential growth in human population, resource consumption, and waste generation on a finite planet. It's too bad that hardly anyone else seems to, even now. But one glaring omission was any mention of . 1992 was still early days for climate science, although James Hansen was already sounding the alarm, to mostly deaf ears. Today, of course, you can't talk about the environment without talking about the climate and how ordinary humans are working hard every day to destroy it.

Rothman's musings on the other meaning of "environment", as in the shapers of human behaviors and social outcomes apart from the individual's DNA, badly need an update. 1992 was the very dawn of the genomics era. Today scientists have catalogued thousands of genetic disorders and find new ones every week.

Rothman takes a then-fashionable shot at . Whether or to what degree Burt's much-maligned studies of heritability using pairs of monozygotic twins involved misconduct, they've since been replicated by multiple newer studies. That is, Burt's personal failings don't erase the hard truth of the high heritability of human intelligence (typically 0.6 to 0.8 for adult IQ). It's especially odd for Rothman, whose ancestry includes Ashkenazi Jews, to deny the factor that very likely enabled his scientific career. (His ancestors hail from the group having the highest average tested IQ on the planet, and who as a group enjoy disproportionate success across the whole range of cognitively demanding professions.)

Sadly, Rothman isn't around to write that update. Fortunately there are newer books such as Blueprint: How DNA Makes Us Who We Are (2019) by Robert Plomin.
]]> <![CDATA[Game Theory: A Very Short Introduction]]> 770989 evolutionary biology and economics, and is beginning to revolutionize other disciplines from psychology to political science.

About the Series: Oxford's Very Short Introductions offers concise and original introductions to a wide range of subjects--from Islam to Sociology, Politics to Classics, and Literary Theory to History. Not simply a textbook of definitions, each volume provides trenchant and provocative--yet always balanced and complete--discussions of the central issues in a given topic. Every Very Short Introduction gives a readable evolution of the subject in question, demonstrating how it has developed and influenced society. Whatever the area of study, whatever the topic that fascinates the reader, the series has a handy and affordable guide that will likely prove indispensable.]]> 208 Ken Binmore 0199218463 Daniel 4
This might be the kind of book you need to read more than once, unless you already have background in game theory.

But even if you're brain-fogging on parts of it, the chapter on evolution and game theory felt like home to me. I've read several books about evolution, and game theory has been built into popular writing about evolution for decades now. Also, the payoffs in evolution aren't contrived, the way they sometimes seem to be in human-player games, so the results in evolution make sense.

and it suggested Game Theory 101: The Complete Textbook (2011) by William Spaniel. Evidently Spaniel has a YouTube channel which should dumb things down even more than the book. Other potentially dumber books might be:

* Introducing Game Theory: A Graphic Guide (2017)
* The Complete Idiot's Guide to Game Theory: The Fascinating Math Behind Decision-Making (2005)

On the plus side, Binmore's explanation of the (in)famous is one of the best I've seen, once I decoded his initially confusing diagram. (An animated version would make it far easier to grasp. You basically have to animate the diagram in your brain to understand it.) Binmore is right, you don't have to be a genius to understand the problem, you just need to trust your game theory. (The Monty Hall problem is perhaps one of the most horrific brain twisters, only to be solved by a woman - Marilyn vos Savant, the woman with allegedly the highest-tested IQ for a human being. She was predictably savaged, even by at least one prominent mathematician, until people eventually caught up to her, and ate their tasty plate of crow.)

I first saw the Monty Hall problem in The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values (2010) by Sam Harris. So I had a head start in making sense of it again. If you're seeing it for the first time in this book, you might need some time to get over your initial gobsmack. Generally speaking, books are hard to read in proportion to their unfamiliarity. The more new concepts you have to master to get through a single page, the slower and less pleasant reading becomes. That's why reading in a particular subject gets easier as you read more books on it. It's also probably why fiction is more popular than nonfiction - fiction usually doesn't ask you to learn anything. Most fiction books are empty calories compared to this book.

As other reviewers have mentioned (or complained about), Binmore tosses in some opinions, and shade against various rivals or outside critics. These tend to be drive-bys, often just brief allusions to what are extensive debates in the literature. That's rather poor form for a science book, because it's out of compliance with . A book that presents a random jumble of verified results along with controversial opinions ought to do a better job making sure the reader can tell the difference. And I even agree with several of Binmore's opinions, such as the well-earned shade he casts at Gould and Lewontin (in the references) for their Marxist attacks on sociobiology. That shade is worth quoting:


John Alcock, The Triumph of Sociobiology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). Sociobiologists aren’t the intellectual fascists they have been painted. Aside from offering wonderful examples of real sociobiology in action, this book lays bare the dishonest campaign of vilification directed at Edward Wilson and his followers by Gould, Lewontin, and other politically motivated polemicists.


Of course Stephen Jay Gould was one of the greatest popular science writers of all time. I've loved maybe 95% of his stuff - when he wrote about evolution, and not the 5% where he basically denied that evolution has affected human beings for the past 75,000 years or more. Although Binmore doesn't mention it, Gould was as hostile to the science of human intelligence differences as he was to sociobiology, for much the same political reasons and leading to much the same incorrect result.

Another book that recounts this and similar controversies is The New Know-Nothings: The Political Foes of the Scientific Study of Human Nature (1999) by Morton Hunt.

One area where I might take some issue with Binmore is his dismissal of Kant's , as it applies to the . (Kant lived a long time before Garrett Hardin, so these concepts are a few centuries apart. Their relation is something we recognize retroactively.) Binmore correctly points out that individual participants in a Tragedy of the Commons are behaving "rationally", but I think Binmore makes (or allows the reader to make) a subtle error: supposing that "rational" has only one definition. In Tragedies of the Commons (and in many other collective action problems), there are at least two distinct meanings of "rational": what is rational for the purely selfish individual, particularly in the short term; and what is rational for the entire group, often in the longer run - which then includes every individual in the group still living. If it is "rational", full stop, to participate in a Tragedy of the Commons, then it is rational to participate in mass suicide. For some examples, see Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (2004) by Jared Diamond. Would Binmore claim that it was "rational" for the Easter Islanders to chop down all their trees, thus depriving them of wood for tools and boats, leading to violence, cannibalism, and a 90% die-back?

Here is an area where Binmore appears hampered by his ignorance of the science of human intelligence differences. While he acknowledges the high IQ of Marilyn vos Savant, he seems oblivious to the profound differences in thought process, behavior, and life outcomes that modest differences in individual IQ scores reliably predict. For starters, if you are as smart as Kant was, then you are better able to grasp how much better things would be if everyone lived according to his Categorical Imperative, compared to the less-smart individual who blindly participates in a Tragedy of the Commons without understanding how it ruins everyone. Binmore is correct that it's difficult for Kant or anyone else to derive his imperative with the tools of analytical philosophy. For a similar reason, no amount of studying one neuron can predict what might happen when you connect billions of them together. Where is a nascent Beethoven symphony lurking in a single neuron? The ability to write symphonies is an emergent phenomenon. The "rationality" of Kant's Imperative might be similarly emergent - it emerges when you have sufficiently intelligent players in the game.

Binmore did not mention the example of cancer, which is like a Tragedy of the Commons (or a Prisoner's dilemma) which plays out on the level of individual cells in a body. Cancer results from spontaneous mutations in cells, which cause those cells to stop acting for the good of the whole (the body), and instead they seek to commandeer resources and proliferate like a bunch of microscopic sociopaths. If Binmore thinks it is "rational" to participate in a Tragedy of the Commons, then he must think cancer is rational.

Now of course multicellular organisms need to have built-in defenses against cancer. And according to , larger-bodied species tend to have more cells, longer lives, and therefore many times more chances to get cancer. And so species like elephants and whales tend to have better cellular defenses against cancer than smaller-bodied species like humans and mice.

If we view the whole human species as a kind of superorganism (a very feeble one, given our poor ability to cooperate at scale), then individual humans are like cells in a body with few or no defenses against going cancerous. The main defenses against participating in a Tragedy of the Commons appear to be:

* Intelligence (i.e., having the ability to learn about, recognize, and voluntarily avoid Tragedies of the Commons)
* A moral compass (i.e., having the sense that benefiting oneself at the expense of others, and/or at the expense of one's own future self, is "wrong")

But because varation is ubiquitous in biology, individual humans vary widely in respect to these protective traits. And that is why humanity as a whole is currently locked into a gigantic Tragedy of the Commons, burning Earth's recoverable fossil fuels as fast as economic activity allows. This might be "rational" to Binmore, but I find his view to be nihilistic, sociopathic, cancerous, and odious. And Binmore himself might agree if he lives long enough to get a full dose of the resulting climate change.

If "rational" means participating in a suicide cult, I think we need a better definition.

Binmore reprises his confusion about the Tragedy of the Commons when he gets to talking about the "irrationality" of voting in a democracy (since one individual's vote never swings an election by itself). If everyone were "rational", the Enlightenment could never have happened. But we are often told that the Enlightenment was the triumph of rationality over superstition. And for someone with a background in economics, he seems strangely unaware of the .

I suspect it is not possible to construct a worthwhile society out of sociopaths, no matter how cleverly one might arrange the incentives. Sociopaths can always find a way to arrange a prison break, such as by electing America's current rapist-in-chief. Thus the wholly amoral approach of classical economics seems to be wrong. I don't think we can solve our problems which are caused by individual selfishness by appealing to individual selfishness. Instead we will have to build the "cancer resistance" right into the individual "cells" - the solution we see in elephants and whales - rather than into the "system". The inmates always end up running the asylum. Sadly, this might require genetic augmentation of humans, just as it does with real cells to make them less cancer-prone. But we don't have millions of years to wait for evolution to maybe do the job of enabling 8 billion humans to live sustainably on a single planet. We probably have to take control of our own evolution. I'm not really liking our chances, since that requires the asylum inmates to bootstrap their way into sanity.]]> 3.19 2007 Game Theory: A Very Short Introduction
author: Ken Binmore
name: Daniel
average rating: 3.19
book published: 2007
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/06
date added: 2025/03/06
shelves: economics, evolution, mathematics, philosophy, psychology, science, biology, read-in-2025
review:
This is one of the harder VSIs I've read. The writing is not terrible, but Binmore presents more of a retrospective than an introduction. In particular, Binmore shows lots of diagrams that are apparently standard among game theorists, so he doesn't give them a second thought - or in many cases a clear explanation. I (and I assume many other readers) might need to start with a dumber introduction, something that breaks down the endless diagrams with clear callouts and perhaps accompanying video animations to clearly depict the time dimension. (A game theory diagram smashes two or more players and a discrete time dimension into just two spatial dimensions, so the diagrams don't work the way you may be used to with plots of x-y functions. But I imagine that since Binmore has been looking at these things for decades, everything becomes intuitively obvious. The author of an "Introduction" should remember that the target audience includes people who lack the decades of exposure to make everything obvious.)

This might be the kind of book you need to read more than once, unless you already have background in game theory.

But even if you're brain-fogging on parts of it, the chapter on evolution and game theory felt like home to me. I've read several books about evolution, and game theory has been built into popular writing about evolution for decades now. Also, the payoffs in evolution aren't contrived, the way they sometimes seem to be in human-player games, so the results in evolution make sense.

and it suggested Game Theory 101: The Complete Textbook (2011) by William Spaniel. Evidently Spaniel has a YouTube channel which should dumb things down even more than the book. Other potentially dumber books might be:

* Introducing Game Theory: A Graphic Guide (2017)
* The Complete Idiot's Guide to Game Theory: The Fascinating Math Behind Decision-Making (2005)

On the plus side, Binmore's explanation of the (in)famous is one of the best I've seen, once I decoded his initially confusing diagram. (An animated version would make it far easier to grasp. You basically have to animate the diagram in your brain to understand it.) Binmore is right, you don't have to be a genius to understand the problem, you just need to trust your game theory. (The Monty Hall problem is perhaps one of the most horrific brain twisters, only to be solved by a woman - Marilyn vos Savant, the woman with allegedly the highest-tested IQ for a human being. She was predictably savaged, even by at least one prominent mathematician, until people eventually caught up to her, and ate their tasty plate of crow.)

I first saw the Monty Hall problem in The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values (2010) by Sam Harris. So I had a head start in making sense of it again. If you're seeing it for the first time in this book, you might need some time to get over your initial gobsmack. Generally speaking, books are hard to read in proportion to their unfamiliarity. The more new concepts you have to master to get through a single page, the slower and less pleasant reading becomes. That's why reading in a particular subject gets easier as you read more books on it. It's also probably why fiction is more popular than nonfiction - fiction usually doesn't ask you to learn anything. Most fiction books are empty calories compared to this book.

As other reviewers have mentioned (or complained about), Binmore tosses in some opinions, and shade against various rivals or outside critics. These tend to be drive-bys, often just brief allusions to what are extensive debates in the literature. That's rather poor form for a science book, because it's out of compliance with . A book that presents a random jumble of verified results along with controversial opinions ought to do a better job making sure the reader can tell the difference. And I even agree with several of Binmore's opinions, such as the well-earned shade he casts at Gould and Lewontin (in the references) for their Marxist attacks on sociobiology. That shade is worth quoting:


John Alcock, The Triumph of Sociobiology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). Sociobiologists aren’t the intellectual fascists they have been painted. Aside from offering wonderful examples of real sociobiology in action, this book lays bare the dishonest campaign of vilification directed at Edward Wilson and his followers by Gould, Lewontin, and other politically motivated polemicists.


Of course Stephen Jay Gould was one of the greatest popular science writers of all time. I've loved maybe 95% of his stuff - when he wrote about evolution, and not the 5% where he basically denied that evolution has affected human beings for the past 75,000 years or more. Although Binmore doesn't mention it, Gould was as hostile to the science of human intelligence differences as he was to sociobiology, for much the same political reasons and leading to much the same incorrect result.

Another book that recounts this and similar controversies is The New Know-Nothings: The Political Foes of the Scientific Study of Human Nature (1999) by Morton Hunt.

One area where I might take some issue with Binmore is his dismissal of Kant's , as it applies to the . (Kant lived a long time before Garrett Hardin, so these concepts are a few centuries apart. Their relation is something we recognize retroactively.) Binmore correctly points out that individual participants in a Tragedy of the Commons are behaving "rationally", but I think Binmore makes (or allows the reader to make) a subtle error: supposing that "rational" has only one definition. In Tragedies of the Commons (and in many other collective action problems), there are at least two distinct meanings of "rational": what is rational for the purely selfish individual, particularly in the short term; and what is rational for the entire group, often in the longer run - which then includes every individual in the group still living. If it is "rational", full stop, to participate in a Tragedy of the Commons, then it is rational to participate in mass suicide. For some examples, see Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (2004) by Jared Diamond. Would Binmore claim that it was "rational" for the Easter Islanders to chop down all their trees, thus depriving them of wood for tools and boats, leading to violence, cannibalism, and a 90% die-back?

Here is an area where Binmore appears hampered by his ignorance of the science of human intelligence differences. While he acknowledges the high IQ of Marilyn vos Savant, he seems oblivious to the profound differences in thought process, behavior, and life outcomes that modest differences in individual IQ scores reliably predict. For starters, if you are as smart as Kant was, then you are better able to grasp how much better things would be if everyone lived according to his Categorical Imperative, compared to the less-smart individual who blindly participates in a Tragedy of the Commons without understanding how it ruins everyone. Binmore is correct that it's difficult for Kant or anyone else to derive his imperative with the tools of analytical philosophy. For a similar reason, no amount of studying one neuron can predict what might happen when you connect billions of them together. Where is a nascent Beethoven symphony lurking in a single neuron? The ability to write symphonies is an emergent phenomenon. The "rationality" of Kant's Imperative might be similarly emergent - it emerges when you have sufficiently intelligent players in the game.

Binmore did not mention the example of cancer, which is like a Tragedy of the Commons (or a Prisoner's dilemma) which plays out on the level of individual cells in a body. Cancer results from spontaneous mutations in cells, which cause those cells to stop acting for the good of the whole (the body), and instead they seek to commandeer resources and proliferate like a bunch of microscopic sociopaths. If Binmore thinks it is "rational" to participate in a Tragedy of the Commons, then he must think cancer is rational.

Now of course multicellular organisms need to have built-in defenses against cancer. And according to , larger-bodied species tend to have more cells, longer lives, and therefore many times more chances to get cancer. And so species like elephants and whales tend to have better cellular defenses against cancer than smaller-bodied species like humans and mice.

If we view the whole human species as a kind of superorganism (a very feeble one, given our poor ability to cooperate at scale), then individual humans are like cells in a body with few or no defenses against going cancerous. The main defenses against participating in a Tragedy of the Commons appear to be:

* Intelligence (i.e., having the ability to learn about, recognize, and voluntarily avoid Tragedies of the Commons)
* A moral compass (i.e., having the sense that benefiting oneself at the expense of others, and/or at the expense of one's own future self, is "wrong")

But because varation is ubiquitous in biology, individual humans vary widely in respect to these protective traits. And that is why humanity as a whole is currently locked into a gigantic Tragedy of the Commons, burning Earth's recoverable fossil fuels as fast as economic activity allows. This might be "rational" to Binmore, but I find his view to be nihilistic, sociopathic, cancerous, and odious. And Binmore himself might agree if he lives long enough to get a full dose of the resulting climate change.

If "rational" means participating in a suicide cult, I think we need a better definition.

Binmore reprises his confusion about the Tragedy of the Commons when he gets to talking about the "irrationality" of voting in a democracy (since one individual's vote never swings an election by itself). If everyone were "rational", the Enlightenment could never have happened. But we are often told that the Enlightenment was the triumph of rationality over superstition. And for someone with a background in economics, he seems strangely unaware of the .

I suspect it is not possible to construct a worthwhile society out of sociopaths, no matter how cleverly one might arrange the incentives. Sociopaths can always find a way to arrange a prison break, such as by electing America's current rapist-in-chief. Thus the wholly amoral approach of classical economics seems to be wrong. I don't think we can solve our problems which are caused by individual selfishness by appealing to individual selfishness. Instead we will have to build the "cancer resistance" right into the individual "cells" - the solution we see in elephants and whales - rather than into the "system". The inmates always end up running the asylum. Sadly, this might require genetic augmentation of humans, just as it does with real cells to make them less cancer-prone. But we don't have millions of years to wait for evolution to maybe do the job of enabling 8 billion humans to live sustainably on a single planet. We probably have to take control of our own evolution. I'm not really liking our chances, since that requires the asylum inmates to bootstrap their way into sanity.
]]> The Triumph of Sociobiology 491029 In this straight-forward, objective approach to the sociobiology debate, noted animal behaviorist John Alcock illuminates how sociobiologists study behavior in all species. He confronts the chief scientific and ideological objections head on, with a compelling analysis of case histories that involve such topics as sexual jealousy, beauty, gender difference, parent-offspring relations, and rape. In so doing, he shows that sociobiology provides the most satisfactory evolutionary analysis of social behavior today.
"A clear, evocative, and accurate account of the history and content on the subject, inviting to the student and the general reader alike."--Edward O. Wilson, Harvard University.]]> 272 John Alcock 0195163354 Daniel 0 3.73 2001 The Triumph of Sociobiology
author: John Alcock
name: Daniel
average rating: 3.73
book published: 2001
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/05
shelves: to-read, biology, denialism, evolution, history, philosophy, psychology, politics, science, skepticism
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Evolution and the Theory of Games]]> 41862
The account is aimed an senior undergraduate and graduate students, teachers and research workers in animal behaviour, population genetics and evolutionary biology. the book will also be of interest to mathematicians and game theorists. the mathematics has been largely confined to appendices so that the main text may be easily followed by biologists.

By applying game theory to the problems of population biology, the author has succeeded in inventing new and interesting ways of looking at populations and has developed a theory leading to testable predictions.]]> 234 John Maynard Smith 0521288843 Daniel 0 3.99 1982 Evolution and the Theory of Games
author: John Maynard Smith
name: Daniel
average rating: 3.99
book published: 1982
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/27
shelves: to-read, evolution, mathematics, psychology, politics, economics, biology, science
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Introducing Philosophy: A Graphic Guide]]> 25706239 180 Dave Robinson Daniel 0 3.55 1999 Introducing Philosophy: A Graphic Guide
author: Dave Robinson
name: Daniel
average rating: 3.55
book published: 1999
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/24
shelves: currently-reading, history, philosophy
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Game Theory 101: The Complete Textbook]]> 13067597 278 William Spaniel Daniel 0 3.72 2011 Game Theory 101: The Complete Textbook
author: William Spaniel
name: Daniel
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2011
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/23
shelves: to-read, economics, evolution, history, mathematics, politics, psychology
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Introducing Game Theory: A Graphic Guide (Graphic Guides)]]> 33296368 When should you adopt an aggressive business strategy? How do we make decisions when we don't have all the information? What makes international environmental cooperation possible?Game theory is the study of how we make a decision when the outcome of our moves depends on the decisions of someone else. Economists Ivan and Tuvana Pastine explain why, in these situations, we sometimes cooperate, sometimes clash, and sometimes act in a way that seems completely random.Stylishly brought to life by award-winning cartoonist Tom Humberstone, Game Theory will help readers understand behaviour in everything from our social lives to business, global politics to evolutionary biology. It provides a thrilling new perspective on the world we live in.]]> 279 Ivan Pastine 1785780832 Daniel 0 3.93 2017 Introducing Game Theory: A Graphic Guide (Graphic Guides)
author: Ivan Pastine
name: Daniel
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/23
shelves: currently-reading, economics, evolution, environmentalism, climate-change, history, mathematics, politics, psychology, science, sustainability
review:

]]> A Beautiful Mind 13912 The Absent-Minded Professor, or Ralph Nader, said to have had his own key to the library as an undergraduate. Or the "Phantom of Fine Hall," a figure many students had seen shuffling around the corridors of the math and physics building wearing purple sneakers and writing numerology treatises on the blackboards. The Phantom was John Nash, one of the most brilliant mathematicians of his generation, who had spiraled into schizophrenia in the 1950s. His most important work had been in game theory, which by the 1980s was underpinning a large part of economics. When the Nobel Prize committee began debating a prize for game theory, Nash's name inevitably came up—only to be dismissed, since the prize clearly could not go to a madman. But in 1994 Nash, in remission from schizophrenia, shared the Nobel Prize in economics for work done some 45 years previously.

Economist and journalist Sylvia Nasar has written a biography of Nash that looks at all sides of his life. She gives an intelligent, understandable exposition of his mathematical ideas and a picture of schizophrenia that is evocative but decidedly unromantic. Her story of the machinations behind Nash's Nobel is fascinating and one of very few such accounts available in print (the CIA could learn a thing or two from the Nobel committees).]]> 461 Sylvia Nasar 0571212921 Daniel 0 4.14 1998 A Beautiful Mind
author: Sylvia Nasar
name: Daniel
average rating: 4.14
book published: 1998
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/21
shelves: to-read, economics, evolution, medicine, history, psychology, politics, science
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Complete Idiot's Guide to Game Theory: The Fascinating Math Behind Decision-Making]]> 10731083
Game Theory means rigorous strategic thinking. It is based on the idea that everyone acts competitively and in his own best interest. With the help of mathematical models, it is possible to anticipate the actions of others in nearly all life's enterprises. This book includes down-to-earth examples and solutions, as well as charts and illustrations designed to help teach the concept. In The Complete Idiot's Guide to Game Theory , Dr. Edward C. Rosenthal makes it easy to understand game theory with insights into:

� The history of the discipline made popular by John Nash, the mathematician dramatized in the film A Beautiful Mind

� The role of social behavior and psychology in this amazing discipline

� How important game theory has become in our society and why]]> 384 Edward C. Rosenthal 161564055X Daniel 0 3.36 2005 The Complete Idiot's Guide to Game Theory: The Fascinating Math Behind Decision-Making
author: Edward C. Rosenthal
name: Daniel
average rating: 3.36
book published: 2005
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/20
shelves: to-read, economics, evolution, mathematics, politics, psychology
review:

]]> <![CDATA[That Doesn't Mean What You Think It Means: The 150 Most Commonly Misused Words and Their Tangled Histories]]> 37584988 An entertaining and informative guide to the most common 150 words even smart people use incorrectly, along with pithy forays into their fascinating etymologies and tangled histories of use and misuse.

Even the most erudite among us use words like apocryphal, facetious, ironic, meteorite, moot, redundant, and unique incorrectly every day. Don't be one of them. Using examples of misuse from leading newspapers, prominent public figures and famous writers, among others, language gurus Ross Petras and Kathryn Petras explain how to avoid these perilous pitfalls in the English language. Each entry also includes short histories of how and why these mistake have happened, some of the (often surprisingly nasty) debates about which uses are (and are not) mistakes, and finally, how to use these words correctly ... or why to not use them at all. By the end of this book, every literati will be able to confidently, casually, and correctly toss in an "a priori" or a "limns" without hesitation.]]> 208 Ross Petras 0399581278 Daniel 4
Perhaps my favorite part of reading a book like this is to learn about any mistakes I'm still making this late in life. I had already fixed a bunch before I got to this book - such as and . But I didn't already know that "nauseous" refers to something that makes a person feel nauseated - so to say "I am nauseous" doesn't (or didn't until recently) mean what the speaker probably means. See . Of course, I was led astray by the increasingly common use of "nauseous" to mean "nauseated" instead of "causing nausea".

When enough people make an error, it becomes "too big to fail" and eventually becomes "correct" - much to the anguish of pedants who read books like this one.

One problem with a book like this is that after reading it you will be seeing errors everywhere, and few people respond well to correction. That is, when the correction comes from a fellow human. That triggers all sorts of atavistic fears of social rejection and loss of "face" likely dating back to the harsh lives of our Stone Age ancestors. A loss of status in one's small tribal group was often fatal in the tough premodern world. Today's world is much, much softer, at least in the developed countries, and yet we still react to criticism like we react to snakes and spiders (another pair of ancestral fears that have become less relevant in real life for many people).

In contrast to correction from a human, which tends to result in drama, taking correction from a computer has little or no social implication and typically goes down more easily. Thus there is an outside chance that Real Soon Now, people will be taking corrections from their AI personal assistants, which will "know" and apply all the lessons from books like this one. And maybe then the world will become an AI-powered pedant's paradise.]]> 3.70 That Doesn't Mean What You Think It Means: The 150 Most Commonly Misused Words and Their Tangled Histories
author: Ross Petras
name: Daniel
average rating: 3.70
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/12
date added: 2025/02/12
shelves: compendia, writing, read-in-2025
review:
This is another great book on problematic areas of English language usage, to help pedants such as myself lose even more friends. I can't wait until Artificial Intelligence finally removes the stupidity element from language. It's frankly somewhat depressing to me to see how languages evolve because people lack the cognitive capacity to learn them. But someday we should all have AI personal assistants that will monitor everything we read, write, hear, or say, and correct all the outgoing or incoming usage errors for us. While that may seem intrusive and scary (because it will be both, in spades), the alternative will be to signal to the whole world how dumb we are when all the AI-augmented humans will see our mistakes fully explained.

Perhaps my favorite part of reading a book like this is to learn about any mistakes I'm still making this late in life. I had already fixed a bunch before I got to this book - such as and . But I didn't already know that "nauseous" refers to something that makes a person feel nauseated - so to say "I am nauseous" doesn't (or didn't until recently) mean what the speaker probably means. See . Of course, I was led astray by the increasingly common use of "nauseous" to mean "nauseated" instead of "causing nausea".

When enough people make an error, it becomes "too big to fail" and eventually becomes "correct" - much to the anguish of pedants who read books like this one.

One problem with a book like this is that after reading it you will be seeing errors everywhere, and few people respond well to correction. That is, when the correction comes from a fellow human. That triggers all sorts of atavistic fears of social rejection and loss of "face" likely dating back to the harsh lives of our Stone Age ancestors. A loss of status in one's small tribal group was often fatal in the tough premodern world. Today's world is much, much softer, at least in the developed countries, and yet we still react to criticism like we react to snakes and spiders (another pair of ancestral fears that have become less relevant in real life for many people).

In contrast to correction from a human, which tends to result in drama, taking correction from a computer has little or no social implication and typically goes down more easily. Thus there is an outside chance that Real Soon Now, people will be taking corrections from their AI personal assistants, which will "know" and apply all the lessons from books like this one. And maybe then the world will become an AI-powered pedant's paradise.
]]> <![CDATA[Sacred Cows: A Lighthearted Look at Belief and Tradition Around the World]]> 25807618 212 Seth Andrews 1478749962 Daniel 5
The diversity of religion is one of the stronger arguments against religion. (To me it's pretty much a slam-dunk.) This is called "the argument from inconsistent revelations." John W. Loftus builds it into his book The Outsider Test for Faith: How to Know Which Religion Is True (2013).

Religious people, for their part, have no good answer for religious diversity, so they mostly try to ignore it, except when they try to . They typically frame a false dichotomy, by referring to "belief" vs. "unbelief," as if there is only one "belief." A quick read of this book should that framing.

When having those friendly chats with religious people, I suggest mentioning religious diversity early and often. Most religious people prefer to focus on reasons to believe their own religion (which is usually the one they first heard at age 4). But they must equally have sufficient reasons to reject the equally insubstantiated claims of all competing religions. In many cases, their real (and usually unstated) reason is "I didn't hear about those religions at age 4", which isn't a reason in the logical sense of justifying their belief, but merely an explanation for their particular psychology.]]> 3.85 2015 Sacred Cows: A Lighthearted Look at Belief and Tradition Around the World
author: Seth Andrews
name: Daniel
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2015
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/26
date added: 2025/01/26
shelves: humor, religion, history, read-in-2025
review:
Seth's second book is great to read when you're in the mood to laugh at the credulity of other people. Then you flip on the news and see that credulous Americans just elected a rapist to the most powerful position on the planet, and it's not so funny any more.

The diversity of religion is one of the stronger arguments against religion. (To me it's pretty much a slam-dunk.) This is called "the argument from inconsistent revelations." John W. Loftus builds it into his book The Outsider Test for Faith: How to Know Which Religion Is True (2013).

Religious people, for their part, have no good answer for religious diversity, so they mostly try to ignore it, except when they try to . They typically frame a false dichotomy, by referring to "belief" vs. "unbelief," as if there is only one "belief." A quick read of this book should that framing.

When having those friendly chats with religious people, I suggest mentioning religious diversity early and often. Most religious people prefer to focus on reasons to believe their own religion (which is usually the one they first heard at age 4). But they must equally have sufficient reasons to reject the equally insubstantiated claims of all competing religions. In many cases, their real (and usually unstated) reason is "I didn't hear about those religions at age 4", which isn't a reason in the logical sense of justifying their belief, but merely an explanation for their particular psychology.
]]> <![CDATA[Simply Emerging Technology: For Complete Beginners (DK Simply)]]> 200021146
Combining bold graphics with easy-to-understand text, Simply Emerging Technology is the perfect introduction to the fast-changing world of technology for those who are short on time but hungry for knowledge.

Covering a broad range of fields—from familiar topics like 3D printing and cryptocurrency to less well-known but equally important technologies like gel robotics and extended reality, and lots more besides—entries explain the likely impact of such emerging technologies and the ways in which they could transform the way we live, exploring the potential risks and rewards of each.

Explaining individual aspects of key trends within technology more clearly than ever before, the book outlines the breakthrough technologies that underpin the future of innovation, explores their most likely practical applications, and presents the numerous ethical debates that surround them and their increasing role in cultures and societies across the globe.

Whether you are studying data science or technology-related subjects in school or simply want a jargon-free overview of this important and timely subject, this essential guide is packed with everything you need to understand the basics quickly and easily.]]> 160 D.K. Publishing 0744091985 Daniel 4 3.67 Simply Emerging Technology: For Complete Beginners (DK Simply)
author: D.K. Publishing
name: Daniel
average rating: 3.67
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/19
date added: 2025/01/19
shelves: read-in-2025, chemistry, carbon-footprinting, compendia, climate-change, composting, computers, engineering, futurism, medicine, renewable-energy, science
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences (Vintage)]]> 38540 448 Edward Tenner 0679747567 Daniel 0 3.53 1996 Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences (Vintage)
author: Edward Tenner
name: Daniel
average rating: 3.53
book published: 1996
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/04
shelves: to-read, engineering, history, psychology, science
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Cosmic Queries: StarTalk's Guide to Who We Are, How We Got Here, and Where We're Going]]> 54503255 In this thought-provoking follow-up to his acclaimed StarTalk book, uber astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson tackles the world's most important philosophical questions about the universe with wit, wisdom, and cutting-edge science.

For science geeks, space and physics nerds, and all who want to understand their place in the universe, this enlightening new book from Neil deGrasse Tyson offers a unique take on the mysteries and curiosities of the cosmos, building on rich material from his beloved StarTalk podcast.

In these illuminating pages, illustrated with dazzling photos and revealing graphics, Tyson and co-author James Trefil, a renowned physicist and science popularizer, take on the big questions that humanity has been posing for millennia--How did life begin? What is our place in the universe? Are we alone?--and provide answers based on the most current data, observations, and theories.

Populated with paradigm-shifting discoveries that help explain the building blocks of astrophysics, this relatable and entertaining book will engage and inspire readers of all ages, bring sophisticated concepts within reach, and offer a window into the complexities of the cosmos.]]> 309 Neil deGrasse Tyson 1426221770 Daniel 0 4.14 2021 Cosmic Queries: StarTalk's Guide to Who We Are, How We Got Here, and Where We're Going
author: Neil deGrasse Tyson
name: Daniel
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/02
shelves: to-read, astronomy, evolution, history, science
review:

]]> The Tragedy of the Commons 58404187 7 Garrett Hardin Daniel 0 3.55 1968 The Tragedy of the Commons
author: Garrett Hardin
name: Daniel
average rating: 3.55
book published: 1968
rating: 0
read at: 2024/12/31
date added: 2024/12/31
shelves: evolution, environmentalism, philosophy, psychology, politics, skepticism, sustainability, read-in-2024
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Ostrich Factor: Our Population Myopia]]> 983068 Hardin delivers an uncompromising critique of mainstream economic thinking. Science has long understood the limits of our environment, he notes, and yet economists consistently turn a blind eye to one feature we share with all of our planet's inhabitants--the potential for irreversible environmental damage through overcrowding. And as humankind draws ever closer to its goal of conquering our final natural enemy--disease--the fallacy of sustainable unchecked population growth becomes more and more dangerous. Moreover, Hardin argues, rampant growth will soon force us to face many issues that we will find quite unpalatable--most notably, that since volunteer population control will not work, we will have to turn to "democratic coercion" or "mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon" to limit growth, a policy that directly threatens long cherished personal rights. Challenging an array of powerful taboos, Hardin takes aim at sacred cows on both sides of the political fence--affirmative
action, multiculturalism, current immigration policies, and the greed and excess of big business and "growth intoxicated industrialists."
Hardin's forceful and cogent argument for the union of ecology and economics is a must for anyone concerned with the goal of a bountiful, yet sustainable world. Sure to spark controversy, this book underscores the urgency of our situation and reveals practical steps we must take to ensure the long term survival of humankind.]]> 176 Garrett Hardin 0195122747 Daniel 0 3.46 1998 The Ostrich Factor: Our Population Myopia
author: Garrett Hardin
name: Daniel
average rating: 3.46
book published: 1998
rating: 0
read at: 2024/12/31
date added: 2024/12/31
shelves: environmentalism, futurism, economics, sustainability, science, politics, psychology, read-in-2024
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Information Generation: How Data Rule Our World]]> 1202254 256 David J. Hand 185168445X Daniel 0 to-read, mathematics, science 3.46 2006 Information Generation: How Data Rule Our World
author: David J. Hand
name: Daniel
average rating: 3.46
book published: 2006
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/25
shelves: to-read, mathematics, science
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Beyond Contempt: How Liberals Can Communicate Across the Great Divide]]> 81617517 Practical tools for finding common ground and healing a politically divided AmericaĚýĚýĚý


Liberal and progressive frustration, grief, and alarm over Trump's destructive political agenda and behavior have prompted mounting disdain for Trump supporters and other conservatives. This reaction is contributing to political polarization and unwittingly serving to strengthen Trump’s hand as he sows divisiveness and hatred.ĚýInĚýBeyond Contempt, Erica Etelson shows us how to communicate respectfully, passionately, and effectively across the political divide without soft-pedaling our beliefs. Using Powerful Non-Defensive Communication skill sets, we can express ourselves in ways that inspire open-minded consideration instead of triggering defensive reaction. Providing detailed instruction and dozens of examples of how to discuss hot button topics,Beyond ContemptĚýis a must-have guide to productive dialogue that can defuse hostility, build trust, and open hearts and minds in unexpected ways.Ěý


About the Author

Erica EtelsonĚýis a writer, community activist, and certified Powerful Non-Defensive Communication facilitator. A former human rights attorney, she has advocated in support of welfare recipients, prisoners, indigenous peoples, immigrants, and environmental activists. She has also organized for clean, community-owned energy as part of a just transition to a local, low-carbon economy. Following the 2016 election,ĚýEtelson became active in the resistance movement and in left-right dialogue initiatives. Her articles have appeared in theĚýSan Francisco Chronicle,ĚýSan Jose Mercury News,ĚýProgressive Populist,ĚýTruthoutĚýandĚýAlternet. She lives with her husband and son in Berkeley, California.

]]> 0 Erica Etelson 1771423056 Daniel 5
Fast forward to today, and now we have a world with over 8 billion people. Fossil-fueled transportation has allowed many millions of people to migrate and mix all over the planet, building huge cities and nations with far more diversity than most of our ancestors ever had to cope with. And yet our brains still instinctively try to treat everybody else as if they are wayward members of our own little tribe - when they are not. They are members of other tribes, and our feeble Stone Age brains never really learned how to deal with those.

Etelson proposes a different way to talk to other tribes, using the rather peacocky marketing-speak term "Powerful Non-Defensive Communication." (For those of us who view tooting one's own horn as bad form, that's a bit cringe-inducing. It sounds like a name Trump might come up with, except that Trump slaps his own name on everything before he bankrupts it.) Etelson's method is not all that different from the norms of communication you find among scientists and scholars (see for example Rapoport's Rules for Debate, as adapted by Daniel Dennett), whose communities have for centuries been dealing with clashing views and increasing diversity. The main difference is that scientists and scholars place a much higher emphasis on facts than Etelson does. This is understandable, since few voters care primarily about facts, and few people have the intelligence necessary to cope with the complexity of facts on most real-world issues.

I don't agree with Etelson's entire world view, and I don't think her world view completely agrees with itself. For example, she's comfortable with biodeterminism when it comes to people's political predispositions (the emerging branch of behavioral genetics called "biopolitics"). But then she reverts to anti-hereditarianism when it comes to explaining economic disparities, health disparities, and so on. While there is certainly structural racism and sexism, it can't be the only factor, when the so-called "model minorities" in the USA (namely, Asian-Americans and Jewish-Americans) have faced plenty of negative discrimination yet still found a way to out-earn white Americans on average. That's an inconvenient fact for the anti-hereditarian narrative that doesn't appear in the book - imagine that!

But it would stand to reason that if we can inherit our political leanings - to some degree - then why wouldn't we also inherit our prosperity to some degree? Surely a person's innate cognitive capacity and behavioral traits have some influence on their ability to learn marketable skills and market them. Just because the social playing field isn't level doesn't mean the genetic playing field has to be. Why would Nature be fair when Nature's people are not?

Etelson also doesn't seem to have read a single book about the science of human intelligence differences. She even claims - without evidence - that intelligence has nothing to do with a person's cognitive errors:
Cognitive errors arise innocently and are unrelated to intelligence.
Given that "intelligence" is synonymous with "cognitive capacity," one wonders how a person's capacity for something would have nothing to do with their performance on that something. Certainly, people at all intelligence levels make mistakes, but do they all make mistakes at the same rate? The point of a test in school is to make it hard enough so very few students will get a perfect score. Most students will miss at least one question, but some students will consistently miss more questions on test after test. And what is true in school is true in life, which functions like a giant unending IQ test. That's why, for example, a low IQ can shave a decade or more off a person's life - because having a low IQ hampers a person's ability to obtain and heed health-related messaging. The low-IQ person is more likely to develop unhealthful habits. There is a whole field of study about this, called cognitive epidemiology, which Etelson seems to have never heard of.

Intelligence is the ability that enabled some unusually intelligent people to discover the long list of human cogntive biases in the first place. Intelligence differences also have some effect on which humans are likely to read about their cognitive biases and work to overcome them. If you read a book like this one, you are probably in the top quartile of the IQ distribution. You'll still make some errors, because everybody does, but the odds are that you'll make fewer cognitive errors than a person in the bottom quartile, who is very unlikely to read a book like this and become aware of cognitive biases.

But people don't get to choose how smart they are any more than they can choose how tall they are. That choice was largely made for us by factors we couldn't control, such as our genes and our early childhood environments and nutrition. Scientific progress might someday give people control, but for now we're stuck with what we have.

Etelson makes some other head-scratchers, like this one:
Liberals tend to value cooperation, collectivism, diversity, equality, critical thinking, questioning authority, conflict resolution, peace, harm reduction, health and safety, compassion, freedom, and fairness. Are there contradictions embedded in this set of values? None that I can see, thanks to confirmation bias, but I’m sure a conservative could spot some.
I'm no conservative, but I thought most educated people understood the inherent contradiction between equality and freedom. The more freedom a society has, the less equality it will have, particularly in the economic arena. Given that the genetic and social playing fields are far from level, some people "are born on third base" to use the baseball metaphor. In a perfectly free society, people with advantages and privileges would be free to exploit them to gain more advantages - much like Trump's cabinet of billionaires is soon to do as I write this. Only by reducing people's economic freedom can we hope to even approximate equality. That is, if you want equality, then people cannot be free to just keep on accumulating more and more billions. Progressive taxation is a giant infringement on economic freedom, and one that most liberals endorse. If you're not for progressive taxation then what kind of liberal can you be? If you think we have too much inequality, then you must also think we have too much freedom. Unless, perhaps, you are a transhumanist who wants to level the playing field by giving everyone the same enhanced abilities. That isn't scientifically possible yet, so it's not a policy option, but it might be the only thing that could actually work.

Etelson's message is an important one: we shouldn't hurl contempt at people for things they didn't get to choose. But then again, we didn't get to choose how much contempt instinct we happen to have either. The adjudicators have no more free will than the offenders. But reading a book like this becomes just another factor in the giant causal chain that decides our future actions, and maybe a factor that can nudge us a little in the direction of sanity. So read it.]]> 5.00 Beyond Contempt: How Liberals Can Communicate Across the Great Divide
author: Erica Etelson
name: Daniel
average rating: 5.00
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2024/12/23
date added: 2024/12/23
shelves: politics, psychology, philosophy, denialism, skepticism, read-in-2024
review:
I'm giving the book five stars to bump it up to the recommender algorithm. Books like this need to be more widely read. The main takeaway is that most people have an instinct to experience (and express) contempt for people who violate the standard they hold other people to. Etelson explains how the psychology works now, but she doesn't delve into the natural history of it too much (the contempt instinct may be a genetic hangover from our Stone Age tribal past). Back then, for the first roughly 300,000 years of humanity's existence as a species, most people lived in small groups, surrounded by other small groups which were often hostile. The world was harsh, and few people could survive for long on their own. Therefore group cohesion was essential for our ancestors' survival.

Fast forward to today, and now we have a world with over 8 billion people. Fossil-fueled transportation has allowed many millions of people to migrate and mix all over the planet, building huge cities and nations with far more diversity than most of our ancestors ever had to cope with. And yet our brains still instinctively try to treat everybody else as if they are wayward members of our own little tribe - when they are not. They are members of other tribes, and our feeble Stone Age brains never really learned how to deal with those.

Etelson proposes a different way to talk to other tribes, using the rather peacocky marketing-speak term "Powerful Non-Defensive Communication." (For those of us who view tooting one's own horn as bad form, that's a bit cringe-inducing. It sounds like a name Trump might come up with, except that Trump slaps his own name on everything before he bankrupts it.) Etelson's method is not all that different from the norms of communication you find among scientists and scholars (see for example Rapoport's Rules for Debate, as adapted by Daniel Dennett), whose communities have for centuries been dealing with clashing views and increasing diversity. The main difference is that scientists and scholars place a much higher emphasis on facts than Etelson does. This is understandable, since few voters care primarily about facts, and few people have the intelligence necessary to cope with the complexity of facts on most real-world issues.

I don't agree with Etelson's entire world view, and I don't think her world view completely agrees with itself. For example, she's comfortable with biodeterminism when it comes to people's political predispositions (the emerging branch of behavioral genetics called "biopolitics"). But then she reverts to anti-hereditarianism when it comes to explaining economic disparities, health disparities, and so on. While there is certainly structural racism and sexism, it can't be the only factor, when the so-called "model minorities" in the USA (namely, Asian-Americans and Jewish-Americans) have faced plenty of negative discrimination yet still found a way to out-earn white Americans on average. That's an inconvenient fact for the anti-hereditarian narrative that doesn't appear in the book - imagine that!

But it would stand to reason that if we can inherit our political leanings - to some degree - then why wouldn't we also inherit our prosperity to some degree? Surely a person's innate cognitive capacity and behavioral traits have some influence on their ability to learn marketable skills and market them. Just because the social playing field isn't level doesn't mean the genetic playing field has to be. Why would Nature be fair when Nature's people are not?

Etelson also doesn't seem to have read a single book about the science of human intelligence differences. She even claims - without evidence - that intelligence has nothing to do with a person's cognitive errors:
Cognitive errors arise innocently and are unrelated to intelligence.
Given that "intelligence" is synonymous with "cognitive capacity," one wonders how a person's capacity for something would have nothing to do with their performance on that something. Certainly, people at all intelligence levels make mistakes, but do they all make mistakes at the same rate? The point of a test in school is to make it hard enough so very few students will get a perfect score. Most students will miss at least one question, but some students will consistently miss more questions on test after test. And what is true in school is true in life, which functions like a giant unending IQ test. That's why, for example, a low IQ can shave a decade or more off a person's life - because having a low IQ hampers a person's ability to obtain and heed health-related messaging. The low-IQ person is more likely to develop unhealthful habits. There is a whole field of study about this, called cognitive epidemiology, which Etelson seems to have never heard of.

Intelligence is the ability that enabled some unusually intelligent people to discover the long list of human cogntive biases in the first place. Intelligence differences also have some effect on which humans are likely to read about their cognitive biases and work to overcome them. If you read a book like this one, you are probably in the top quartile of the IQ distribution. You'll still make some errors, because everybody does, but the odds are that you'll make fewer cognitive errors than a person in the bottom quartile, who is very unlikely to read a book like this and become aware of cognitive biases.

But people don't get to choose how smart they are any more than they can choose how tall they are. That choice was largely made for us by factors we couldn't control, such as our genes and our early childhood environments and nutrition. Scientific progress might someday give people control, but for now we're stuck with what we have.

Etelson makes some other head-scratchers, like this one:
Liberals tend to value cooperation, collectivism, diversity, equality, critical thinking, questioning authority, conflict resolution, peace, harm reduction, health and safety, compassion, freedom, and fairness. Are there contradictions embedded in this set of values? None that I can see, thanks to confirmation bias, but I’m sure a conservative could spot some.
I'm no conservative, but I thought most educated people understood the inherent contradiction between equality and freedom. The more freedom a society has, the less equality it will have, particularly in the economic arena. Given that the genetic and social playing fields are far from level, some people "are born on third base" to use the baseball metaphor. In a perfectly free society, people with advantages and privileges would be free to exploit them to gain more advantages - much like Trump's cabinet of billionaires is soon to do as I write this. Only by reducing people's economic freedom can we hope to even approximate equality. That is, if you want equality, then people cannot be free to just keep on accumulating more and more billions. Progressive taxation is a giant infringement on economic freedom, and one that most liberals endorse. If you're not for progressive taxation then what kind of liberal can you be? If you think we have too much inequality, then you must also think we have too much freedom. Unless, perhaps, you are a transhumanist who wants to level the playing field by giving everyone the same enhanced abilities. That isn't scientifically possible yet, so it's not a policy option, but it might be the only thing that could actually work.

Etelson's message is an important one: we shouldn't hurl contempt at people for things they didn't get to choose. But then again, we didn't get to choose how much contempt instinct we happen to have either. The adjudicators have no more free will than the offenders. But reading a book like this becomes just another factor in the giant causal chain that decides our future actions, and maybe a factor that can nudge us a little in the direction of sanity. So read it.
]]> <![CDATA[The Atheists' Guide to Christmas]]> 6405093 340 Ariane Sherine 0007322615 Daniel 0 3.62 2009 The Atheists' Guide to Christmas
author: Ariane Sherine
name: Daniel
average rating: 3.62
book published: 2009
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/19
shelves: to-read, humor, religion, science
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Limousine Liberal: How an Incendiary Image United the Right and Fractured America]]> 28121719 In The Limousine Liberal, Steve Fraser argues that the metaphor of the limousine liberal has had a pernicious effect on American political culture. From Henry Ford's attacks on Jews, bankers, and Bolsheviks in the 1920s to the Tea Party's vehement hatred of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, it has served as the animus binding together right-wing populism in America.
In the vein of the late Richard Hofstadter, Fraser dives down below the surface of rational political life to identify and understand the right's most elemental fears.]]> 304 Steve Fraser 0465097669 Daniel 0 3.04 The Limousine Liberal: How an Incendiary Image United the Right and Fractured America
author: Steve Fraser
name: Daniel
average rating: 3.04
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/16
shelves: to-read, economics, history, politics
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Envy Up, Scorn Down: How Status Divides Us]]> 10275951 What motivates individuals, groups, and cultures to envy the status of some and scorn the status of others? Who experiences envy and scorn most? Envy Up, Scorn Down marshals a wealth of recent psychological studies as well as findings based on years of Fiske's own research to address such questions. She shows that both envy and scorn have distinctive biological, emotional, cognitive, and behavioral characteristics. And though we are all wired for comparison, some individuals are more vulnerable to these motives than others. Dominant personalities, for example, express envy toward high-status groups such as the wealthy and well-educated, and insecurity can lead others to scorn those perceived to have lower status, such as women, minorities, or the disabled. Fiske shows that one's race or ethnicity, gender, and education all correlate with perceived status. Regardless of whether one is accorded higher or lower status, however, all groups rank their members, and all societies rank the various groups within them. We rate each group as either friend or foe, able or unable, and accordingly assign them the traits of warmth or competence. The majority of groups in the United States are ranked either warm or competent but not both, with extreme exceptions: the homeless or the very poor are considered neither warm nor competent. Societies across the globe view older people as warm but incompetent. Conversely, the very rich are generally considered cold but highly competent. Envy Up, Scorn Down explores the nuances of status hierarchies and their consequences and shows that such prejudice in its most virulent form dehumanizes and can lead to devastating outcomes from the scornful neglect of the homeless to the envious anger historically directed at Tutsis in Rwanda or Jews in Europe.
Individuals, groups, and even cultures will always make comparisons between and among themselves. Envy Up, Scorn Down is an accessible and insightful examination of drives we all share and the prejudice that can accompany comparison. The book deftly shows that understanding envy and scorn and seeking to mitigate their effects can prove invaluable in our lives, our relationships, and our society.]]> 256 Susan T. Fiske 0871544644 Daniel 0 to-read, politics, psychology 3.74 2011 Envy Up, Scorn Down: How Status Divides Us
author: Susan T. Fiske
name: Daniel
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2011
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/12
shelves: to-read, politics, psychology
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Taking the War Out of Our Words: The Art of Powerful Non-Defensive Communication]]> 313214 304 Sharon Strand Ellison 0972002103 Daniel 0 4.20 1998 Taking the War Out of Our Words: The Art of Powerful Non-Defensive Communication
author: Sharon Strand Ellison
name: Daniel
average rating: 4.20
book published: 1998
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/08
shelves: to-read, philosophy, plain-language, politics, psychology, self-help
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Eye Wonder: Space (Eye Wonder)]]> 2229929 48 Carole Stott 0789478544 Daniel 4 science, read-in-2024 4.04 1995 Eye Wonder: Space (Eye Wonder)
author: Carole Stott
name: Daniel
average rating: 4.04
book published: 1995
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/07
date added: 2024/12/07
shelves: science, read-in-2024
review:

]]> Pirate (Eye Wonder) 1329642 48 Deborah Lock 0756611679 Daniel 4 history, read-in-2024, war DK Eye Wonder: Pirate by Deborah Lock is another great volume in DK's Eye Wonder series. Even though I'm quite a bit older than the target audience for this book, and I have a head stuffed with trivia, I still learned a number of things. For example, while I had heard the expression innumerable times (often said with a ), I never actually knew what it means. Similarly, I didn't know the etymology of familiar terms like , , and . (Although Wikipedia disagrees with the book on the etymology of "bogeyman" and furthermore doesn't mention piracy in its article on the people. False etymologies abound, so always double-check the . We can also check with our AI friends to generate another roll of the dice; . AI s such as Gemini are still a work in progress, so they can make mistakes too.)

The book focuses more on actual history than on the familiar depictions of , but the popular portrayals of pirates are probably a main reason why someone would read this book. Come for the stereotypes, maybe leave with a few facts. Or possibly false etymologies at no extra charge.

Pirates were, and are, violent criminals, often treating their victims harshly, and sometimes experiencing harsh justice themselves. And by "harsh" I mean "very harsh" (see for example ). I'm not sure how young readers might process the harshness, so parents beware I suppose.

The book does illustrate how vindictive people used to be, a point made in considerably more detail by Steven Pinker in The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (2011). Even though things always seem to be going to heck in a handbasket, it's good to maintain some historical perspective. Things used to be a lot worse, as far as how humans treated their fellow humans. At least governments have dialed it back a little, some of them anyway.]]> 3.59 2005 Pirate (Eye Wonder)
author: Deborah Lock
name: Daniel
average rating: 3.59
book published: 2005
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/07
date added: 2024/12/07
shelves: history, read-in-2024, war
review:
DK Eye Wonder: Pirate by Deborah Lock is another great volume in DK's Eye Wonder series. Even though I'm quite a bit older than the target audience for this book, and I have a head stuffed with trivia, I still learned a number of things. For example, while I had heard the expression innumerable times (often said with a ), I never actually knew what it means. Similarly, I didn't know the etymology of familiar terms like , , and . (Although Wikipedia disagrees with the book on the etymology of "bogeyman" and furthermore doesn't mention piracy in its article on the people. False etymologies abound, so always double-check the . We can also check with our AI friends to generate another roll of the dice; . AI s such as Gemini are still a work in progress, so they can make mistakes too.)

The book focuses more on actual history than on the familiar depictions of , but the popular portrayals of pirates are probably a main reason why someone would read this book. Come for the stereotypes, maybe leave with a few facts. Or possibly false etymologies at no extra charge.

Pirates were, and are, violent criminals, often treating their victims harshly, and sometimes experiencing harsh justice themselves. And by "harsh" I mean "very harsh" (see for example ). I'm not sure how young readers might process the harshness, so parents beware I suppose.

The book does illustrate how vindictive people used to be, a point made in considerably more detail by Steven Pinker in The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (2011). Even though things always seem to be going to heck in a handbasket, it's good to maintain some historical perspective. Things used to be a lot worse, as far as how humans treated their fellow humans. At least governments have dialed it back a little, some of them anyway.
]]> <![CDATA[Eye Wonder: Oceans: Open Your Eyes to a World of Discovery]]> 28259337 Visit coral reefs, kelp forests, and other extraordinary underwater worlds. Find out fascinating facts about favorite ocean animals including sharks, whales, and dolphins. Dramatic, atmospheric photography provides a wealth of visual information. Packed with facts and written in an accessible style, Eye Wonder is the perfect educational start for young children.

Learn about science, history, and the natural world through beautiful photography and lively, age-appropriate text. The Eye Wonder series organizes information in a way that's easy to search, easy to read, and easy to learn.

]]> 56 D.K. Publishing 146544162X Daniel 4 DK Eye Wonder: Oceans by D.K. Publishing is a nice book for children about the oceans. (It's also a nice book for adults who fell behind on the Ĺ·±¦ÓéŔÖ Reading Challenge and now it's December!) The book steers clear of most horrifying natural stuff such as orcas playing with helpless seals before they eat them, as well as the devastating human impact on the oceans (from localized assaults like overfishing, oil spills, and local pollution; and by global catastrophes like human-caused climate change and ocean acidification). I guess the idea is to let the kiddies grow up before they learn how the coral reefs depicted in the book are almost all in the process of disappearing, likely within their lifetimes.

I found one small error in the Glossary:
Animal: an animal is any living creature that is not a plant. For example, dolphins, fish, and starfish are animals.
That definition implies that there are only two . The English Wikipedia begs to differ:
In biology, a kingdom is the second highest taxonomic rank, just below domain. Kingdoms are divided into smaller groups called phyla (singular phylum).

Traditionally, textbooks from Canada and the United States have used a system of six kingdoms (Animalia, Plantae, Fungi, Protista, Archaea/Archaebacteria, and Bacteria or Eubacteria), while textbooks in other parts of the world, such as Bangladesh, Brazil, Greece, India, Pakistan, Spain, and the United Kingdom have used five kingdoms (Animalia, Plantae, Fungi, Protista and Monera).
Under-counting the kingdoms by three or four isn't nearly as bad as a lot of the nonsense children are brainwashed to believe, but it's kind of rude to mushrooms.]]> 4.29 2015 Eye Wonder: Oceans: Open Your Eyes to a World of Discovery
author: D.K. Publishing
name: Daniel
average rating: 4.29
book published: 2015
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/05
date added: 2024/12/05
shelves: read-in-2024, biology, evolution, science
review:
DK Eye Wonder: Oceans by D.K. Publishing is a nice book for children about the oceans. (It's also a nice book for adults who fell behind on the Ĺ·±¦ÓéŔÖ Reading Challenge and now it's December!) The book steers clear of most horrifying natural stuff such as orcas playing with helpless seals before they eat them, as well as the devastating human impact on the oceans (from localized assaults like overfishing, oil spills, and local pollution; and by global catastrophes like human-caused climate change and ocean acidification). I guess the idea is to let the kiddies grow up before they learn how the coral reefs depicted in the book are almost all in the process of disappearing, likely within their lifetimes.

I found one small error in the Glossary:
Animal: an animal is any living creature that is not a plant. For example, dolphins, fish, and starfish are animals.
That definition implies that there are only two . The English Wikipedia begs to differ:
In biology, a kingdom is the second highest taxonomic rank, just below domain. Kingdoms are divided into smaller groups called phyla (singular phylum).

Traditionally, textbooks from Canada and the United States have used a system of six kingdoms (Animalia, Plantae, Fungi, Protista, Archaea/Archaebacteria, and Bacteria or Eubacteria), while textbooks in other parts of the world, such as Bangladesh, Brazil, Greece, India, Pakistan, Spain, and the United Kingdom have used five kingdoms (Animalia, Plantae, Fungi, Protista and Monera).
Under-counting the kingdoms by three or four isn't nearly as bad as a lot of the nonsense children are brainwashed to believe, but it's kind of rude to mushrooms.
]]> Dinosaurs 985784
Eye Wonder: Dinosaurs takes young readers back in time to an age when dinosaurs ruled the earth, from gentle Jurassic giants and the terrifying Tyrannosaurus Rex, to fearsome packs of Velociraptors and herds of Hadrosaurs.

Reviews:

"Packed with engaging photographs and facts..." -Publishers Weekly

"Good resources for reports." -School Library Journal

"An eye-popping odyssey." -Newsday

"Visually stunning." -Los Angeles Times

"Excellent page design and text help make information accessible." -Boston Sunday Herald]]> 48 Sarah Walker 078947851X Daniel 4 3.77 Dinosaurs
author: Sarah Walker
name: Daniel
average rating: 3.77
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/04
date added: 2024/12/04
shelves: biology, evolution, history, read-in-2024
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Could a Good God Permit So Much Suffering?: A Debate]]> 204583136 160 James Sterba 0192848550 Daniel 4 Could a Good God Permit So Much Suffering?: A Debate (2024) by James Sterba and Richard Swinburne

In this book, Sterba and Swinburne debate the classical . This is a topic with a long and complex history that I won't summarize here (the Wikipedia article I linked gives a good introduction).

Only a very bad God could permit the suffering I endured by reading this book. Richard Swinburne, arguing for the superstition side, finds ways to insult the intelligence of this reader in nearly every paragraph. Swinburne, being a theologian, is unanchored to facts or evidence, which is to say unachored to reality. Therefore he is able to revise the properties of his imaginary God as necessary to make it somewhat compatible with all the evil in the world. James Sterba, arguing for the reason side, tries to stanch the flow of nonsense, but largely agrees, bafflingly, to grant much of Swinburne's fabulism, while trying to show how Swinburne's version of God is incompatible with the evil in the world, in particular with the "horrendous" evil. While Sterba's arguments for the most part hit home with me, I had to work harder than necessary to decode them, because Sterba's writing style is too often the opposite to what you see described in books about "plain language". Run-on sentences, subject and predicate divided by multiple subordinate clauses, etc. Many of Sterba's sentences required me to read them two or three times, and even then it was hard to be sure I had it. I was reminded of this quotation from Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! (Adventures of a Curious Character) by Richard P. Feynman, about a sociologist who encrusted simple concepts in impenetrable language. When you have to rewrite passages of a book to make sense of them, you're reading a book that a competent editor didn't. Fortunately, Artificial Intelligence might be on the verge of eliminating this instance of gratuitous suffering from the world, by translating academese into plain language for us.

I had the thought that some of Sterba's turgid prose might have been clarified with some diagrams, but I was too lazy to try drawing them. And it's not the reader's job to illustrate a book.

Both Swinburne and Sterba employ multiple acronyms I've never seen anywhere else, defined only at their first appearances. If (i.e., when) you forget an acronym when it reappears 20 pages later, there is no glossary to make lookup simple. I pity the reader of a paper copy who doesn't have an e-reader's search function. My advice: take notes as you go.

I would probably have to write another book to detail everything I didn't like about this one. But I can give a very brief taste. Here's one example, where Swinburne writes:
Since only vertebrates have brains in any way like our brains, there is no adequate reason to suppose that any creatures other than vertebrates suffer.
This is Swinburne's way to dismiss the suffering of the caterpillar being slowly eaten alive from the inside by a parasitoid wasp larva. The ichneumonidae and braconidae famously caused great problems for naive natural theologians of the 19th century. These devout men of science began with the assumption that by studying God's handiwork in Nature they would learn about the nature of God - hence, "natural" theology as opposed to "revealed" theology (i.e., "knowledge" about God deriving from "revelation"). But as natural theologians learned more about Nature, they discovered more and more horrors. (That is, things that seem horrifying to humans. Even if these things are not horrifying to the victims such as caterpillars, why would a good God have filled Nature with things to horrify us?) These horrors are hard to square with the traditional omni-benevolent God of theology, but are perfectly explained in terms of natural selection. For example, the parasitoid wasps have been shaped by natural selection to make the most efficient use of their prey. The mother wasp injects an egg into a caterpillar which then hatches, with the caterpillar providing a temporary home and food source for the growing wasp larva. The larva instinctively consumes the caterpillar's innards in a precise sequence, leaving the vital organs for last. This keeps the caterpillar alive long enough for the larva to pupate and emerge from the spent caterpillar husk as a newly-formed adult. (Fans of the Alien horror franchise will recognize these wasps as the inspiration for some of the more frightening movies that have been made.)

If we subjected an anesthetized human to the same treatment of being eaten alive, the human would not have any conscious experience of suffering. But what human observer could not see this as a tremendous evil being done to the unfeeling victim?

Now, whether or not the caterpillar has sufficient neural complexity to have subjective experiences, humans who observe the caterpillar's horrific fate certainly do. And this created difficulties for human observers who are less sociopathically detached than Swinburne apparently is. In particular, the parasitoid wasps have no other way to reproduce. This left natural theologians struggling to explain why their omni-benevolent God would have specifically designed these wasps to lay their eggs in this particularly macabre way, rather than in some other way we humans might regard as more humane. Generally speaking, we humans view it as more humane to kill quickly rather than slowly, when killing is necessary. Yet here the parasitoid wasp larva kills the host caterpillar as slowly as possible.

But in keeping with Swinburne being at least a little bit wrong about almost everything he writes, he's not even right about the sophistication of invertebrate brains. In particular, he seems unaware of the octopus. According to Wikipedia: "Octopuses have a complex nervous system and excellent sight, and are among the most intelligent and behaviourally diverse of all invertebrates."

But Swinburne points out, correctly, that it's currently impossible to know if nonhuman animals experience pain in ways like humans do. None of us can see directly into the subjective experience of any other human, let alone the experience of an animal that lacks the language to argue for its own experience. So just for fun :

Me: Do chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans experience pain and suffering like humans do? I don't refer just to behavioral indicators of pain, such as withdrawing a limb from an injury, or crying out. I refer to the subjective experience of pain, which I imagine is hard to measure objectively.

Gemini:
This is a complex question that scientists and philosophers have debated for centuries. While we cannot definitively know what another being subjectively experiences, there is strong scientific evidence suggesting that chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans do experience pain and suffering in a way similar to humans.

Here's why:

* **Physiological similarities:** These great apes share many of the same neural structures and pain receptors as humans. When they experience injury or illness, their bodies release similar chemicals (like endorphins) to alleviate pain, just like ours.
* **Behavioral responses:** They exhibit behaviors that are consistent with pain, such as wincing, limping, and avoiding painful stimuli. They also seek out pain relief, such as using leaves to soothe wounds.
* **Cognitive empathy:** These apes are highly intelligent and empathetic. They show concern for others in pain, suggesting they understand and relate to the suffering of others.

While we cannot directly measure their subjective experience of pain, the combination of physiological, behavioral, and cognitive evidence strongly suggests that they do experience pain and suffering. It's important to treat these animals with compassion and respect, recognizing their capacity to feel pain and their need for humane treatment.

The three kinds of pain experience indicators that Gemini lists seem compelling to me. For example, seeking out pain relief sounds very telling. That's a response to pain that is in a different class than something that might be explained by instinct or reflex, such as immediately withdrawing from a painful stimulus, or crying out. To seek pain relief seems to require some level of intention and abstract thinking ability.

And cognitive empathy - how could this be merely reflexive? It seems easiest to explain in terms of an animal having mirror neurons similar to a human's, along with subjective experiences for the neurons to mirror. Trying to explain this behavior in terms of unfeeling animals behaving purely by instinct begins to sound absurd.

And just to further poke at Swinburne's "vertebrate-ism", :
Me:
Do octopuses also seek pain relief?

Gemini:
Yes, there's compelling evidence suggesting that octopuses experience pain and seek relief. Studies have shown that they exhibit behaviors such as:

* **Avoiding painful stimuli:** When exposed to a harmful substance, octopuses actively avoid the area where they experienced the pain.
* **Seeking pain relief:** They have been observed using natural remedies like rubbing their arms against rocks or plants to soothe wounds.
* **Physiological responses:** Octopuses show physiological responses to pain, such as increased heart rate and changes in skin color.

These behaviors and responses strongly suggest that octopuses have a subjective experience of pain and actively seek to alleviate it. This highlights the complex cognitive abilities and sentience of these fascinating creatures.

Now, I'm not suggesting that octopuses have complex mental lives to fully rival a human's. But it may be that they experience a lot more pain than Swinburne thinks any invertebrates can.

OK, that was a lot of retort triggered by just a few lines from Swinburne. I could do much the same thing for the rest of Swinburne's share of the book, making this review a book in its own right. But I'll stop here, except to mention that both Swinburne and Sterba accept (with Sterba allowing that he prefers but he accepts libertarianism for the debate). They agree that free will is a highly contentious topic, and that to engage with it would massively enlarge the book. Fair enough, but to dismiss the case against libertarianism puts the book on the same epistemic footing as astrology and geocentrism. See for example Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will by Robert M. Sapolsky, which obliterates any scientific basis for free will. That is, there is not the slightest hint of any activity in the brain which is uncaused by prior natural processes. Such uncaused activity would seem to require violating the conservation laws, which would mean that every time I have a thought it means a miracle happened in my head, to paraphrase Steven Pinker. If my mental life is not a continuous sequence of miracles, it means that every thought I have, and therefore every choice I make, must have been caused by natural events that happened before.

The only reason to suspect we have free will is our intuitive sense that we have it. But human intuition has been shown unreliable before. For example, before Galileo, almost everyone believed their intuitive sense that they stand on a solid, unmoving Earth, and the Sun, Moon, planets, and stars wheel around us every day. Now we know that almost everything our intuition told us about cosmology is illusory and wrong. No one with understanding of science history can feel confident taking intuition as the final word on anything - except for the existence of intuition itself.

Now, a huge part of Swinburne's theodicy hinges on humans having free will, which is convenient for the victim-blaming strategy that lets God off the hook. However, as a whole category of predestinationist Christians have long understood, free will for humans cannot be compatible with an all-powerful God. Free will also cannot be compatible with prophecy, if - as Swinburne declares - God's omniscience does not extend to knowing what all our future choices will be. But if God cannot know everything that every human will ever do, how can God predict the future where humans are involved? As an atheist, I don't suspect that prophets are anything but charlatans, but legions of Christians believe in prophecy.

Consider, for example, the prophecy that a particular human will be born centuries in the future. For this to happen, a staggering number of humans must make precisely the correct choices at the correct times. All the intermediate humans had to be born with exactly the right genomes so that the future human's parents would be brought into existence and find each other and mate at exactly the right moment to bring exactly the right sperm and egg together. This micromanaging of human choices would have to have occurred all the way back through the ancestral line. And it's not just the ancestors themselves, but also everyone else who could have interfered at any point in the process.]]> 4.50 Could a Good God Permit So Much Suffering?: A Debate
author: James Sterba
name: Daniel
average rating: 4.50
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/04
date added: 2024/12/04
shelves: philosophy, religion, skepticism, read-in-2024, evolution
review:
Could a Good God Permit So Much Suffering?: A Debate (2024) by James Sterba and Richard Swinburne

In this book, Sterba and Swinburne debate the classical . This is a topic with a long and complex history that I won't summarize here (the Wikipedia article I linked gives a good introduction).

Only a very bad God could permit the suffering I endured by reading this book. Richard Swinburne, arguing for the superstition side, finds ways to insult the intelligence of this reader in nearly every paragraph. Swinburne, being a theologian, is unanchored to facts or evidence, which is to say unachored to reality. Therefore he is able to revise the properties of his imaginary God as necessary to make it somewhat compatible with all the evil in the world. James Sterba, arguing for the reason side, tries to stanch the flow of nonsense, but largely agrees, bafflingly, to grant much of Swinburne's fabulism, while trying to show how Swinburne's version of God is incompatible with the evil in the world, in particular with the "horrendous" evil. While Sterba's arguments for the most part hit home with me, I had to work harder than necessary to decode them, because Sterba's writing style is too often the opposite to what you see described in books about "plain language". Run-on sentences, subject and predicate divided by multiple subordinate clauses, etc. Many of Sterba's sentences required me to read them two or three times, and even then it was hard to be sure I had it. I was reminded of this quotation from Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! (Adventures of a Curious Character) by Richard P. Feynman, about a sociologist who encrusted simple concepts in impenetrable language. When you have to rewrite passages of a book to make sense of them, you're reading a book that a competent editor didn't. Fortunately, Artificial Intelligence might be on the verge of eliminating this instance of gratuitous suffering from the world, by translating academese into plain language for us.

I had the thought that some of Sterba's turgid prose might have been clarified with some diagrams, but I was too lazy to try drawing them. And it's not the reader's job to illustrate a book.

Both Swinburne and Sterba employ multiple acronyms I've never seen anywhere else, defined only at their first appearances. If (i.e., when) you forget an acronym when it reappears 20 pages later, there is no glossary to make lookup simple. I pity the reader of a paper copy who doesn't have an e-reader's search function. My advice: take notes as you go.

I would probably have to write another book to detail everything I didn't like about this one. But I can give a very brief taste. Here's one example, where Swinburne writes:
Since only vertebrates have brains in any way like our brains, there is no adequate reason to suppose that any creatures other than vertebrates suffer.
This is Swinburne's way to dismiss the suffering of the caterpillar being slowly eaten alive from the inside by a parasitoid wasp larva. The ichneumonidae and braconidae famously caused great problems for naive natural theologians of the 19th century. These devout men of science began with the assumption that by studying God's handiwork in Nature they would learn about the nature of God - hence, "natural" theology as opposed to "revealed" theology (i.e., "knowledge" about God deriving from "revelation"). But as natural theologians learned more about Nature, they discovered more and more horrors. (That is, things that seem horrifying to humans. Even if these things are not horrifying to the victims such as caterpillars, why would a good God have filled Nature with things to horrify us?) These horrors are hard to square with the traditional omni-benevolent God of theology, but are perfectly explained in terms of natural selection. For example, the parasitoid wasps have been shaped by natural selection to make the most efficient use of their prey. The mother wasp injects an egg into a caterpillar which then hatches, with the caterpillar providing a temporary home and food source for the growing wasp larva. The larva instinctively consumes the caterpillar's innards in a precise sequence, leaving the vital organs for last. This keeps the caterpillar alive long enough for the larva to pupate and emerge from the spent caterpillar husk as a newly-formed adult. (Fans of the Alien horror franchise will recognize these wasps as the inspiration for some of the more frightening movies that have been made.)

If we subjected an anesthetized human to the same treatment of being eaten alive, the human would not have any conscious experience of suffering. But what human observer could not see this as a tremendous evil being done to the unfeeling victim?

Now, whether or not the caterpillar has sufficient neural complexity to have subjective experiences, humans who observe the caterpillar's horrific fate certainly do. And this created difficulties for human observers who are less sociopathically detached than Swinburne apparently is. In particular, the parasitoid wasps have no other way to reproduce. This left natural theologians struggling to explain why their omni-benevolent God would have specifically designed these wasps to lay their eggs in this particularly macabre way, rather than in some other way we humans might regard as more humane. Generally speaking, we humans view it as more humane to kill quickly rather than slowly, when killing is necessary. Yet here the parasitoid wasp larva kills the host caterpillar as slowly as possible.

But in keeping with Swinburne being at least a little bit wrong about almost everything he writes, he's not even right about the sophistication of invertebrate brains. In particular, he seems unaware of the octopus. According to Wikipedia: "Octopuses have a complex nervous system and excellent sight, and are among the most intelligent and behaviourally diverse of all invertebrates."

But Swinburne points out, correctly, that it's currently impossible to know if nonhuman animals experience pain in ways like humans do. None of us can see directly into the subjective experience of any other human, let alone the experience of an animal that lacks the language to argue for its own experience. So just for fun :

Me: Do chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans experience pain and suffering like humans do? I don't refer just to behavioral indicators of pain, such as withdrawing a limb from an injury, or crying out. I refer to the subjective experience of pain, which I imagine is hard to measure objectively.

Gemini:
This is a complex question that scientists and philosophers have debated for centuries. While we cannot definitively know what another being subjectively experiences, there is strong scientific evidence suggesting that chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans do experience pain and suffering in a way similar to humans.

Here's why:

* **Physiological similarities:** These great apes share many of the same neural structures and pain receptors as humans. When they experience injury or illness, their bodies release similar chemicals (like endorphins) to alleviate pain, just like ours.
* **Behavioral responses:** They exhibit behaviors that are consistent with pain, such as wincing, limping, and avoiding painful stimuli. They also seek out pain relief, such as using leaves to soothe wounds.
* **Cognitive empathy:** These apes are highly intelligent and empathetic. They show concern for others in pain, suggesting they understand and relate to the suffering of others.

While we cannot directly measure their subjective experience of pain, the combination of physiological, behavioral, and cognitive evidence strongly suggests that they do experience pain and suffering. It's important to treat these animals with compassion and respect, recognizing their capacity to feel pain and their need for humane treatment.

The three kinds of pain experience indicators that Gemini lists seem compelling to me. For example, seeking out pain relief sounds very telling. That's a response to pain that is in a different class than something that might be explained by instinct or reflex, such as immediately withdrawing from a painful stimulus, or crying out. To seek pain relief seems to require some level of intention and abstract thinking ability.

And cognitive empathy - how could this be merely reflexive? It seems easiest to explain in terms of an animal having mirror neurons similar to a human's, along with subjective experiences for the neurons to mirror. Trying to explain this behavior in terms of unfeeling animals behaving purely by instinct begins to sound absurd.

And just to further poke at Swinburne's "vertebrate-ism", :
Me:
Do octopuses also seek pain relief?

Gemini:
Yes, there's compelling evidence suggesting that octopuses experience pain and seek relief. Studies have shown that they exhibit behaviors such as:

* **Avoiding painful stimuli:** When exposed to a harmful substance, octopuses actively avoid the area where they experienced the pain.
* **Seeking pain relief:** They have been observed using natural remedies like rubbing their arms against rocks or plants to soothe wounds.
* **Physiological responses:** Octopuses show physiological responses to pain, such as increased heart rate and changes in skin color.

These behaviors and responses strongly suggest that octopuses have a subjective experience of pain and actively seek to alleviate it. This highlights the complex cognitive abilities and sentience of these fascinating creatures.

Now, I'm not suggesting that octopuses have complex mental lives to fully rival a human's. But it may be that they experience a lot more pain than Swinburne thinks any invertebrates can.

OK, that was a lot of retort triggered by just a few lines from Swinburne. I could do much the same thing for the rest of Swinburne's share of the book, making this review a book in its own right. But I'll stop here, except to mention that both Swinburne and Sterba accept (with Sterba allowing that he prefers but he accepts libertarianism for the debate). They agree that free will is a highly contentious topic, and that to engage with it would massively enlarge the book. Fair enough, but to dismiss the case against libertarianism puts the book on the same epistemic footing as astrology and geocentrism. See for example Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will by Robert M. Sapolsky, which obliterates any scientific basis for free will. That is, there is not the slightest hint of any activity in the brain which is uncaused by prior natural processes. Such uncaused activity would seem to require violating the conservation laws, which would mean that every time I have a thought it means a miracle happened in my head, to paraphrase Steven Pinker. If my mental life is not a continuous sequence of miracles, it means that every thought I have, and therefore every choice I make, must have been caused by natural events that happened before.

The only reason to suspect we have free will is our intuitive sense that we have it. But human intuition has been shown unreliable before. For example, before Galileo, almost everyone believed their intuitive sense that they stand on a solid, unmoving Earth, and the Sun, Moon, planets, and stars wheel around us every day. Now we know that almost everything our intuition told us about cosmology is illusory and wrong. No one with understanding of science history can feel confident taking intuition as the final word on anything - except for the existence of intuition itself.

Now, a huge part of Swinburne's theodicy hinges on humans having free will, which is convenient for the victim-blaming strategy that lets God off the hook. However, as a whole category of predestinationist Christians have long understood, free will for humans cannot be compatible with an all-powerful God. Free will also cannot be compatible with prophecy, if - as Swinburne declares - God's omniscience does not extend to knowing what all our future choices will be. But if God cannot know everything that every human will ever do, how can God predict the future where humans are involved? As an atheist, I don't suspect that prophets are anything but charlatans, but legions of Christians believe in prophecy.

Consider, for example, the prophecy that a particular human will be born centuries in the future. For this to happen, a staggering number of humans must make precisely the correct choices at the correct times. All the intermediate humans had to be born with exactly the right genomes so that the future human's parents would be brought into existence and find each other and mate at exactly the right moment to bring exactly the right sperm and egg together. This micromanaging of human choices would have to have occurred all the way back through the ancestral line. And it's not just the ancestors themselves, but also everyone else who could have interfered at any point in the process.
]]> <![CDATA[The Golden Ratio: The Story of Phi, the World's Most Astonishing Number]]> 24081
The Golden Ratio is a captivating journey through art and architecture, botany and biology, physics and mathematics. It tells the human story of numerous phi-fixated individuals, including the followers of Pythagoras who believed that this proportion revealed the hand of God; astronomer Johannes Kepler, who saw phi as the greatest treasure of geometry; such Renaissance thinkers as mathematician Leonardo Fibonacci of Pisa; and such masters of the modern world as Goethe, Cezanne, Bartok, and physicist Roger Penrose. Wherever his quest for the meaning of phi takes him, Mario Livio reveals the world as a place where order, beauty, and eternal mystery will always coexist.]]> 294 Mario Livio 0767908163 Daniel 0 3.80 2002 The Golden Ratio: The Story of Phi, the World's Most Astonishing Number
author: Mario Livio
name: Daniel
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2002
rating: 0
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shelves: to-read, mathematics, biology, astronomy, science
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Brilliant Blunders: From Darwin to Einstein - Colossal Mistakes by Great Scientists That Changed Our Understanding of Life and the Universe]]> 15802325 Drawing on the lives of five renowned scientists, Mario Livio shows how even these geniuses made major mistakes and how their errors were an essential part of the process of achieving scientific breakthroughs.We all make mistakes. Nobody is perfect. And that includes five of the greatest scientists in history—Charles Darwin, William Thomson (Lord Kelvin), Linus Pauling, Fred Hoyle, and Albert Einstein. But the mistakes that these great luminaries made helped advance science. Indeed, as Mario Livio explains, science thrives on error, advancing when erroneous ideas are disproven.

As a young scientist, Einstein tried to conceive of a way to describe the evolution of the universe at large, based on General Relativity—his theory of space, time, and gravity. Unfortunately he fell victim to a misguided notion of aesthetic simplicity. Fred Hoyle was an eminent astrophysicist who ridiculed an emerging theory about the origin of the universe that he dismissively called “The Big Bang.� The name stuck, but Hoyle was dead wrong in his opposition.

They, along with Darwin (a blunder in his theory of Natural Selection), Kelvin (a blunder in his calculation of the age of the earth), and Pauling (a blunder in his model for the structure of the DNA molecule), were brilliant men and fascinating human beings. Their blunders were a necessary part of the scientific process. Collectively they helped to dramatically further our knowledge of the evolution of life, the Earth, and the universe.]]> 342 Mario Livio 1439192367 Daniel 0 3.55 2013 Brilliant Blunders: From Darwin to Einstein - Colossal Mistakes by Great Scientists That Changed Our Understanding of Life and the Universe
author: Mario Livio
name: Daniel
average rating: 3.55
book published: 2013
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]]> <![CDATA[The Equation That Couldn't Be Solved: How Mathematical Genius Discovered the Language of Symmetry]]> 233873
For thousands of years mathematicians solved progressively more difficult algebraic equations, until they encountered the quintic equation, which resisted solution for three centuries. Working independently, two great prodigies ultimately proved that the quintic cannot be solved by a simple formula. These geniuses, a Norwegian named Niels Henrik Abel and a romantic Frenchman named Évariste Galois, both died tragically young. Their incredible labor, however, produced the origins of group theory.

The first extensive, popular account of the mathematics of symmetry and order, The Equation That Couldn't Be Solved is told not through abstract formulas but in a beautifully written and dramatic account of the lives and work of some of the greatest and most intriguing mathematicians in history.]]> 368 Mario Livio 0743258215 Daniel 0 3.91 2005 The Equation That Couldn't Be Solved: How Mathematical Genius Discovered the Language of Symmetry
author: Mario Livio
name: Daniel
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2005
rating: 0
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shelves: to-read, history, mathematics, science
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]]> <![CDATA[Burned Alive: Bruno, Galileo and the Inquisition]]> 36377241
Linking Bruno’s trial to later confrontations between the Inquisition and Galileo in 1616 and 1633, Martínez shows how some of the same Inquisitors who judged Bruno challenged Galileo. In particular, one clergyman who authored the most critical reports used by the Inquisition to condemn Galileo in 1633 immediately thereafter wrote an unpublished manuscript in which he denounced Galileo and other followers of Copernicus for their beliefs about the that many worlds exist and that the Earth moves because it has a soul. Challenging the accepted history of astronomy to reveal Bruno as a true innovator whose contributions to the science predate those of Galileo, this book shows that is was cosmology, not theology, that led Bruno to his death.]]> 304 Alberto A. Martínez 1780238967 Daniel 0 3.33 Burned Alive: Bruno, Galileo and the Inquisition
author: Alberto A. MartĂ­nez
name: Daniel
average rating: 3.33
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date added: 2024/11/28
shelves: to-read, astronomy, denialism, history, philosophy, religion, science, skepticism
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]]> <![CDATA[Galileo and the Science Deniers]]> 52768066 A fresh interpretation of the life of Galileo Galilei, one of history’s greatest and most fascinating scientists, that sheds new light on his discoveries and how he was challenged by science deniers. “We really need this story now, because we’re living through the next chapter of science denial� (Bill McKibben).

Galileo’s story may be more relevant today than ever before. At present, we face enormous crises—such as the minimization of the dangers of climate change—because the science behind these threats is erroneously questioned or ignored. Galileo encountered this problem 400 years ago. His discoveries, based on careful observations and ingenious experiments, contradicted conventional wisdom and the teachings of the church at the time. Consequently, in a blatant assault on freedom of thought, his books were forbidden by church authorities.

Astrophysicist and bestselling author Mario Livio draws on his own scientific expertise to provide captivating insights into how Galileo reached his bold new conclusions about the cosmos and the laws of nature. A freethinker who followed the evidence wherever it led him, Galileo was one of the most significant figures behind the scientific revolution. He believed that every educated person should know science as well as literature, and insisted on reaching the widest audience possible, publishing his books in Italian rather than Latin.

Galileo was put on trial with his life in the balance for refusing to renounce his scientific convictions. He remains a hero and inspiration to scientists and all of those who respect science—which, as Livio reminds us in this gripping book, remains threatened even today.]]> 304 Mario Livio 1501194739 Daniel 0 3.78 Galileo and the Science Deniers
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name: Daniel
average rating: 3.78
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]]> <![CDATA[On Trial For Reason: Science, Religion, and Culture in the Galileo Affair]]> 48580565 304 Maurice A. Finocchiaro 0192518852 Daniel 0 3.80 On Trial For Reason: Science, Religion, and Culture in the Galileo Affair
author: Maurice A. Finocchiaro
name: Daniel
average rating: 3.80
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]]> <![CDATA[The Psychology of Christian Nationalism: Why People Are Drawn In and How to Talk Across the Divide]]> 58778817 190 Pamela Cooper-White 1506482112 Daniel 0 to-read, politics, religion 3.89 The Psychology of Christian Nationalism: Why People Are Drawn In and How to Talk Across the Divide
author: Pamela Cooper-White
name: Daniel
average rating: 3.89
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rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/12
shelves: to-read, politics, religion
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]]> <![CDATA[Christianity Made Me Talk Like an Idiot]]> 60393585 216 Seth Andrews 1977250785 Daniel 5 Christianity Made Me Talk Like an Idiot (2022) by Seth Andrews

Seth's fourth book is about the communication style of the Christian community he left. What formerly sounded normal and reasonable to Seth when he was immersed in his formative community tends to sound rather odd to the outsider. Seth now takes the outsider's perspective toward his former speech habits, and concludes what the book title claims.

We know from psychometry that our adult IQs are about as stable as our adult heights, provided we haven't suffered any accidents, diseases, or age-related decline that reduce our intelligence. So it's likely Seth is correct when he says his intelligence level didn't change when he deconverted from Christianity to reason. But a human brain behaves quite differently as a function of what it feeds on. In Seth's previous book Deconverted: A Journey from Religion to Reason he details his religious upbringing; and then in Confessions of a Former Fox News Christian he describes his continued indoctrination by right-wing mouthpieces such as Rush Limbaugh. This book rounds out the story by going into more depth on the content of the doctrinal payload.

The term "idiot" might be a little over the top, since originally "idiot" was a clinical term to describe a person with profound mental disability, corresponding to an IQ of 25 or less and a mental age (at physical adulthood) of 3 years or less. That is, an "idiot" is an adult who performs like the average 3 year old and requires lifetime custodial care. Clearly that doesn't describe the vast majority of adults, of any faith or no faith, given that most adults are at least able to function independently.

There might be stronger parallels between the reasoning styles of the Christian and those of the delusional schizophrenic. See for example this quotation from the book Schizophrenia: A Very Short Introduction (2003):
One of the problems for people with schizophrenia is that their perceptions and beliefs are no longer appropriately constrained by the perceptions and beliefs of other people. Patients with bizarre beliefs are not irrational â€� they can justify their beliefs. There was a 56-year-old patient in Shenley who claimed to be six weeks old. Questioned by Eve Johnstone that this surely could not be right as she could walk and talk and do things for herself, she replied â€I am very advancedâ€�. The kinds of justification given are often quite skilful. For example, Alan Baddeley and his colleagues describe a patient who believes he is a Russian chess Grand Master.
But if you don’t speak Russian, isn’t that rather odd for a Russian chess player?

Yes, well, I don’t speak Russian, but I think it’s possible that I’ve been hypnotised to forget things like the fact that I can speak Russian.
This justification is very unlikely, but not logically impossible. What makes the TV series ''The X-Files'' such a successful example of the horror genre is that Mulder’s paranoid beliefs and the convoluted explanations he develops for them always turn out to be true. This madman sees the world as it is and we, the sane, are deluded.

Because the delusions of the schizophrenic are usually idiosyncratic (not shared by others), most people can recognize the delusions for what they are. And the delusions often hamper the schizophrenic's ability to function. This makes schizophrenia quite different than Christianity - odd Christian beliefs are widely shared, and generally stay compartmented away from real life (although not always - some varieties of Christianity reject medical care, leading to pointless death and suffering). Thus Christianity is usually not as debilitating as schizophrenia, which was of course necessary for Christianity to grow to great size and amass enormous wealth in the hands of its elite leaders.

But it's instructive to see the parallels between a schizophenic's justifications and Christian apologetics. In particular note the (possibiliter ergo probabiliter) used by the schizophrenic patients in the above quotation to justify their far-fetched claims. The evidence-free arguments of the Christian tend to have the same structure: "possibly, therefore probably." This differs from scientific thinking, whereby the scientist (or a whole scientific community) proposes hypotheses to explain observations, and then designs experiments or observations to test each hypothesis against the relevant evidence. (See: the .) The schizophrenic, and the Christian, think it's enough to propose one arbitrary hypothesis and elevate it immediately to the status of fact.

(Side note: given that appeal to probability is a fallacy, and fallacious reasoning is irrational, I disagree with the authors of the Schizophrenia book where they claim that "Patients with bizarre beliefs are not irrational." Offering plausible explanations can still be irrational when the patient refuses to consider alternative explanations, some of which are much more probable.)

Given these similarities in argument style, perhaps a more precise title for the book would be Christianity Made Me Talk Like a Schizophrenic - or, alternatively, we could use the portmanteau Christophrenic, just to keep clear that we aren't bringing in all the other features of schizophrenia including the poor life functioning.

My favorite chapter in Seth's book was Chapter Thirteen: Christianese � A Religion in Bumper Stickers. See this quotation. Although Seth doesn't use the word "" in the book, much of "Christianese" looks like deepities to me, or perhaps deepity-adjacent. about this:
While Seth Andrews doesn't explicitly use the term "deepity" in his book, the concept of using vague, seemingly profound language to mask a lack of substance is certainly relevant to the examples of "Christianese" he provides.

Deepities, as coined by Daniel Dennett, are statements that appear to be profound but upon closer examination, are often trivial or meaningless. They rely on ambiguity and double meaning to create an illusion of depth. Many of the phrases Andrews highlights in his book, such as "God just laid it on my heart" or "The Bible helps us 'do life' together," can be seen as examples of deepities. They sound meaningful and insightful, but they often lack specific content or clear implications.

While the term "deepity" itself might not be directly applicable to every instance of Christianese, the underlying concept of using vague language to mask a lack of substance is certainly relevant.


***

I did notice one small error in the book; Seth refers to "Former minister Dr. John Loftus ...". While John W. Loftus holds , and so is not a "Dr." (according to Wikipedia).]]> 4.42 2022 Christianity Made Me Talk Like an Idiot
author: Seth Andrews
name: Daniel
average rating: 4.42
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2024/11/10
date added: 2024/11/11
shelves: biology, evolution, humor, religion, skepticism, read-in-2024
review:
Christianity Made Me Talk Like an Idiot (2022) by Seth Andrews

Seth's fourth book is about the communication style of the Christian community he left. What formerly sounded normal and reasonable to Seth when he was immersed in his formative community tends to sound rather odd to the outsider. Seth now takes the outsider's perspective toward his former speech habits, and concludes what the book title claims.

We know from psychometry that our adult IQs are about as stable as our adult heights, provided we haven't suffered any accidents, diseases, or age-related decline that reduce our intelligence. So it's likely Seth is correct when he says his intelligence level didn't change when he deconverted from Christianity to reason. But a human brain behaves quite differently as a function of what it feeds on. In Seth's previous book Deconverted: A Journey from Religion to Reason he details his religious upbringing; and then in Confessions of a Former Fox News Christian he describes his continued indoctrination by right-wing mouthpieces such as Rush Limbaugh. This book rounds out the story by going into more depth on the content of the doctrinal payload.

The term "idiot" might be a little over the top, since originally "idiot" was a clinical term to describe a person with profound mental disability, corresponding to an IQ of 25 or less and a mental age (at physical adulthood) of 3 years or less. That is, an "idiot" is an adult who performs like the average 3 year old and requires lifetime custodial care. Clearly that doesn't describe the vast majority of adults, of any faith or no faith, given that most adults are at least able to function independently.

There might be stronger parallels between the reasoning styles of the Christian and those of the delusional schizophrenic. See for example this quotation from the book Schizophrenia: A Very Short Introduction (2003):
One of the problems for people with schizophrenia is that their perceptions and beliefs are no longer appropriately constrained by the perceptions and beliefs of other people. Patients with bizarre beliefs are not irrational â€� they can justify their beliefs. There was a 56-year-old patient in Shenley who claimed to be six weeks old. Questioned by Eve Johnstone that this surely could not be right as she could walk and talk and do things for herself, she replied â€I am very advancedâ€�. The kinds of justification given are often quite skilful. For example, Alan Baddeley and his colleagues describe a patient who believes he is a Russian chess Grand Master.
But if you don’t speak Russian, isn’t that rather odd for a Russian chess player?

Yes, well, I don’t speak Russian, but I think it’s possible that I’ve been hypnotised to forget things like the fact that I can speak Russian.
This justification is very unlikely, but not logically impossible. What makes the TV series ''The X-Files'' such a successful example of the horror genre is that Mulder’s paranoid beliefs and the convoluted explanations he develops for them always turn out to be true. This madman sees the world as it is and we, the sane, are deluded.

Because the delusions of the schizophrenic are usually idiosyncratic (not shared by others), most people can recognize the delusions for what they are. And the delusions often hamper the schizophrenic's ability to function. This makes schizophrenia quite different than Christianity - odd Christian beliefs are widely shared, and generally stay compartmented away from real life (although not always - some varieties of Christianity reject medical care, leading to pointless death and suffering). Thus Christianity is usually not as debilitating as schizophrenia, which was of course necessary for Christianity to grow to great size and amass enormous wealth in the hands of its elite leaders.

But it's instructive to see the parallels between a schizophenic's justifications and Christian apologetics. In particular note the (possibiliter ergo probabiliter) used by the schizophrenic patients in the above quotation to justify their far-fetched claims. The evidence-free arguments of the Christian tend to have the same structure: "possibly, therefore probably." This differs from scientific thinking, whereby the scientist (or a whole scientific community) proposes hypotheses to explain observations, and then designs experiments or observations to test each hypothesis against the relevant evidence. (See: the .) The schizophrenic, and the Christian, think it's enough to propose one arbitrary hypothesis and elevate it immediately to the status of fact.

(Side note: given that appeal to probability is a fallacy, and fallacious reasoning is irrational, I disagree with the authors of the Schizophrenia book where they claim that "Patients with bizarre beliefs are not irrational." Offering plausible explanations can still be irrational when the patient refuses to consider alternative explanations, some of which are much more probable.)

Given these similarities in argument style, perhaps a more precise title for the book would be Christianity Made Me Talk Like a Schizophrenic - or, alternatively, we could use the portmanteau Christophrenic, just to keep clear that we aren't bringing in all the other features of schizophrenia including the poor life functioning.

My favorite chapter in Seth's book was Chapter Thirteen: Christianese � A Religion in Bumper Stickers. See this quotation. Although Seth doesn't use the word "" in the book, much of "Christianese" looks like deepities to me, or perhaps deepity-adjacent. about this:
While Seth Andrews doesn't explicitly use the term "deepity" in his book, the concept of using vague, seemingly profound language to mask a lack of substance is certainly relevant to the examples of "Christianese" he provides.

Deepities, as coined by Daniel Dennett, are statements that appear to be profound but upon closer examination, are often trivial or meaningless. They rely on ambiguity and double meaning to create an illusion of depth. Many of the phrases Andrews highlights in his book, such as "God just laid it on my heart" or "The Bible helps us 'do life' together," can be seen as examples of deepities. They sound meaningful and insightful, but they often lack specific content or clear implications.

While the term "deepity" itself might not be directly applicable to every instance of Christianese, the underlying concept of using vague language to mask a lack of substance is certainly relevant.


***

I did notice one small error in the book; Seth refers to "Former minister Dr. John Loftus ...". While John W. Loftus holds , and so is not a "Dr." (according to Wikipedia).
]]> <![CDATA[In Your Face: The New Science of Human Attraction (MacSci)]]> 13167826 320 David Perrett 0230340431 Daniel 0 3.80 2010 In Your Face: The New Science of Human Attraction (MacSci)
author: David Perrett
name: Daniel
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2010
rating: 0
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shelves: to-read, biology, evolution, psychology, science
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]]> <![CDATA[Blueberries: 21 (Crop Production Science in Horticulture)]]> 21238877 336 Jorge B. Retamales Daniel 0 to-read, gardening 0.0 2011 Blueberries: 21 (Crop Production Science in Horticulture)
author: Jorge B. Retamales
name: Daniel
average rating: 0.0
book published: 2011
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/09
shelves: to-read, gardening
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Confessions of a Former Fox News Christian]]> 54664237 217 Seth Andrews Daniel 5
The book came out in 2020, with its most recent citations being from April, 2020. That was around the time that then-President Trump quit denying that COVID-19 was a problem, but before most of the ~1.2 million reported (~1.9 million estimated) had occurred. Quite a bit has happened since then, including: and the resulting protests; Trump's loss in the to Joe Biden; Trump's subsequent attempts to overturn the free and fair election, culminating in the . (Trump's large-scale attack on law enforcement made a mockery of Republican Party posturing as the party of law and order - but Republicans are still campaigning on this claim to their gullible gaslit marks.) Since then, Trump and other MAGA figures, including Fox News, have been involved in a remarkable number of court cases. Fox platformed Trump's election lies and paid the largest known libel settlement ($787.5 million) to ; a potentially even larger is still pending as I write this. Trump himself became the first former President convicted of felonies, and faces three more criminal indictments. Trump also faces large civil judgements, pending appeals.

In a thus-far successful ploy to avoid a likely prison sentence, Trump declared his candidacy for the 2024 election at a record-early date. Trump then rolled through the Republican primaries, secured the Republican Party nomination, and in just a few hours I will learn whether he goes back to the White House, or instead possibly to the Big House. (Post-election update: well, we saw how that turned out.)

That little recap of recent history shows the problem with writing a book about politics. History remains a work in progress, and whatever you write about current events will soon need an update. If Trump wins the election tonight, then Seth's book might have come before even the halfway mark in Trump's testing of America. What Trump did after Seth's book, or what came to light about things Trump did earlier, was arguably worse than the outrages that Seth mentions. And if Trump wins tonight, there's a strong chance that much worse is yet to come. In other words, as Seth is a prisoner of when he wrote, he didn't make as strong a case against Fox dogma as he could now or in another four years.

Also after the book came out, Trump's Pope-controlled Supreme Court supermajority . Since then, Republicans have been something like the dog that caught the car on abortion. As Wikipedia recounts,
"Referenda conducted in the decision's wake in Kansas, Montana, California, Vermont, Michigan, Kentucky, and Ohio uniformly came out in favor of abortion rights, generally by margins that were both bipartisan and overwhelming."
It's interesting to read Seth's coverage of the abortion controversy in Chapter 11 with the benefit of this hindsight. For example, Seth pleads for understanding and empathy between the two sides, which is well and good when it's two people having a discussion about what they should choose. (Don't like abortion? Don't have one.) But only one side is pro-choice! The other side, the Fox News Christian side, wants to use police state power to take away choice from everyone.

Whenever voters have been given a choice, thus far they have come down consistently against the theocrats. Thus from a tactical standpoint, it doesn't matter much what the Fox News marks think about abortion. When voters get to decide, there usually aren't enough theocrats to exert government control over the uterus. Accordingly, the anti-choice crowd has relied on non-democratic means to override the will of the people, such as the multi-decade project of the to increase the number of conservative judges who, with their lifetime appointments, no longer need to care about what voters think.

But I could point out a peculiarity in the "Fox News Christian" argument against abortion that Seth relays to us:
Still, approximately 80 percent of U.S. citizens embrace some type of heaven, a place where the soul resides after physical death. Given that significant number and the fact that 167 million Americans claim some flavor of Christianity, it becomes easier to understand why nearly half of the population opposes abortion. Often, that opposition isn’t motivated by a desire to discriminate against or control women but is instead laser focused on the unborn child, the precious soul, the human life that has no ability to defend itself. That rallying cry stirs the righteous to battle. Defenseless children are under attack, so God’s army must mobilize. Ultimately, this is an evangelical crusade to defend a soul residing among the multiplying cells.

But does it become easier to understand? Not when I think for a few seconds about it. Seth doesn't point out the glaringly obvious flaw in the argument that he no longer accepts. Namely, that Christians believe the soul is immortal and immaterial, thus making its defense both unnecessary and impossible. This imaginary soul survives anything, even a nuclear explosion. The only thing that mortal humans can defend is the biological part, the soul's prison of cells. Defending the part we can defend carries a large risk of being harmful to the soul, because in the normal course of things the zygote is going to grow up to be a sinner in need of salvation. What if the resulting sinful human fails to believe the correct religion, out of the thousands on offer? Then the soul that didn't need saving in the first place ends up in hell for eternity, experiencing endless burning and torture from the loving God.

It's not clear what the various Christian brands believe about the status of the aborted soul - the bible certainly doesn't clarify it, which wouldn't be surprising given that the pre-scientific goat-herders who wrote the bible had no idea of how fertilization and development work. (They also did not know where the Sun goes at night, making the bible worse than useless for astronomy.) So given the bible's silence, every Christian gets to make up their own story. It seems a bit unfair to send those souls to hell when they couldn't have committed any sin yet. Thus if the imaginary God views fairness like I do, zygote heaven is probably a pretty decent place. It might even be the actual (fictional) heaven. In that case, if Christians took their Great Commission seriously and they wanted to save the maximum possible number of souls, then they would fertilize and abort as many zygotes as possible.

The incoherency of the "soul" argument against abortion illustrates the disordered thinking of the anti-choice brands of "Christian." It might be more correct to say that the reason they give is not their true reason. The true reason might be that they are illogically conflating your embryo with their baby, such that harm to the one becomes harm to the other. (The error of connecting things that are in fact unrelated is called .) This sentiment is similar to that of the dog fanciers who complained about . If you happen to be a person who keeps dogs, and loves them, then hearing about some other person shooting their dog can feel like an attack on your dog, even though it is not.

Seth also points out the inconsistency between the Fox News Christian's deep concern for the embryo, and then their subsequent loss of concern for the resulting baby. We see this most pointedly at the southern US border, where grown-up embryos from Latin America come looking for work in the USA. Pro-"life" folks tend to be less enthusiastic about "life" when it's an undocumented immigrant. And just to pile on the irony, some fraction of those immigrants exist because Republican Presidential administrations kept blocking US assistance to family planning programs in low-income countries. That is, the number of future migrants is to some degree a policy choice, and Republicans have consistantly supported natalist policies ever since Reagan. Seth doesn't point out how pro-life attitudes increase the number of future immigrants for Fox News to terrify its viewers with - that's a point I'd like to see made loudly and often.]]> 4.34 Confessions of a Former Fox News Christian
author: Seth Andrews
name: Daniel
average rating: 4.34
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2024/11/05
date added: 2024/11/07
shelves: politics, religion, skepticism, memoir, read-in-2024
review:
This was an interesting book to read in 2024 with the benefit of some hindsight. As the other reviews cover the book content well, I'll focus on some other things not already mentioned here.

The book came out in 2020, with its most recent citations being from April, 2020. That was around the time that then-President Trump quit denying that COVID-19 was a problem, but before most of the ~1.2 million reported (~1.9 million estimated) had occurred. Quite a bit has happened since then, including: and the resulting protests; Trump's loss in the to Joe Biden; Trump's subsequent attempts to overturn the free and fair election, culminating in the . (Trump's large-scale attack on law enforcement made a mockery of Republican Party posturing as the party of law and order - but Republicans are still campaigning on this claim to their gullible gaslit marks.) Since then, Trump and other MAGA figures, including Fox News, have been involved in a remarkable number of court cases. Fox platformed Trump's election lies and paid the largest known libel settlement ($787.5 million) to ; a potentially even larger is still pending as I write this. Trump himself became the first former President convicted of felonies, and faces three more criminal indictments. Trump also faces large civil judgements, pending appeals.

In a thus-far successful ploy to avoid a likely prison sentence, Trump declared his candidacy for the 2024 election at a record-early date. Trump then rolled through the Republican primaries, secured the Republican Party nomination, and in just a few hours I will learn whether he goes back to the White House, or instead possibly to the Big House. (Post-election update: well, we saw how that turned out.)

That little recap of recent history shows the problem with writing a book about politics. History remains a work in progress, and whatever you write about current events will soon need an update. If Trump wins the election tonight, then Seth's book might have come before even the halfway mark in Trump's testing of America. What Trump did after Seth's book, or what came to light about things Trump did earlier, was arguably worse than the outrages that Seth mentions. And if Trump wins tonight, there's a strong chance that much worse is yet to come. In other words, as Seth is a prisoner of when he wrote, he didn't make as strong a case against Fox dogma as he could now or in another four years.

Also after the book came out, Trump's Pope-controlled Supreme Court supermajority . Since then, Republicans have been something like the dog that caught the car on abortion. As Wikipedia recounts,
"Referenda conducted in the decision's wake in Kansas, Montana, California, Vermont, Michigan, Kentucky, and Ohio uniformly came out in favor of abortion rights, generally by margins that were both bipartisan and overwhelming."
It's interesting to read Seth's coverage of the abortion controversy in Chapter 11 with the benefit of this hindsight. For example, Seth pleads for understanding and empathy between the two sides, which is well and good when it's two people having a discussion about what they should choose. (Don't like abortion? Don't have one.) But only one side is pro-choice! The other side, the Fox News Christian side, wants to use police state power to take away choice from everyone.

Whenever voters have been given a choice, thus far they have come down consistently against the theocrats. Thus from a tactical standpoint, it doesn't matter much what the Fox News marks think about abortion. When voters get to decide, there usually aren't enough theocrats to exert government control over the uterus. Accordingly, the anti-choice crowd has relied on non-democratic means to override the will of the people, such as the multi-decade project of the to increase the number of conservative judges who, with their lifetime appointments, no longer need to care about what voters think.

But I could point out a peculiarity in the "Fox News Christian" argument against abortion that Seth relays to us:
Still, approximately 80 percent of U.S. citizens embrace some type of heaven, a place where the soul resides after physical death. Given that significant number and the fact that 167 million Americans claim some flavor of Christianity, it becomes easier to understand why nearly half of the population opposes abortion. Often, that opposition isn’t motivated by a desire to discriminate against or control women but is instead laser focused on the unborn child, the precious soul, the human life that has no ability to defend itself. That rallying cry stirs the righteous to battle. Defenseless children are under attack, so God’s army must mobilize. Ultimately, this is an evangelical crusade to defend a soul residing among the multiplying cells.

But does it become easier to understand? Not when I think for a few seconds about it. Seth doesn't point out the glaringly obvious flaw in the argument that he no longer accepts. Namely, that Christians believe the soul is immortal and immaterial, thus making its defense both unnecessary and impossible. This imaginary soul survives anything, even a nuclear explosion. The only thing that mortal humans can defend is the biological part, the soul's prison of cells. Defending the part we can defend carries a large risk of being harmful to the soul, because in the normal course of things the zygote is going to grow up to be a sinner in need of salvation. What if the resulting sinful human fails to believe the correct religion, out of the thousands on offer? Then the soul that didn't need saving in the first place ends up in hell for eternity, experiencing endless burning and torture from the loving God.

It's not clear what the various Christian brands believe about the status of the aborted soul - the bible certainly doesn't clarify it, which wouldn't be surprising given that the pre-scientific goat-herders who wrote the bible had no idea of how fertilization and development work. (They also did not know where the Sun goes at night, making the bible worse than useless for astronomy.) So given the bible's silence, every Christian gets to make up their own story. It seems a bit unfair to send those souls to hell when they couldn't have committed any sin yet. Thus if the imaginary God views fairness like I do, zygote heaven is probably a pretty decent place. It might even be the actual (fictional) heaven. In that case, if Christians took their Great Commission seriously and they wanted to save the maximum possible number of souls, then they would fertilize and abort as many zygotes as possible.

The incoherency of the "soul" argument against abortion illustrates the disordered thinking of the anti-choice brands of "Christian." It might be more correct to say that the reason they give is not their true reason. The true reason might be that they are illogically conflating your embryo with their baby, such that harm to the one becomes harm to the other. (The error of connecting things that are in fact unrelated is called .) This sentiment is similar to that of the dog fanciers who complained about . If you happen to be a person who keeps dogs, and loves them, then hearing about some other person shooting their dog can feel like an attack on your dog, even though it is not.

Seth also points out the inconsistency between the Fox News Christian's deep concern for the embryo, and then their subsequent loss of concern for the resulting baby. We see this most pointedly at the southern US border, where grown-up embryos from Latin America come looking for work in the USA. Pro-"life" folks tend to be less enthusiastic about "life" when it's an undocumented immigrant. And just to pile on the irony, some fraction of those immigrants exist because Republican Presidential administrations kept blocking US assistance to family planning programs in low-income countries. That is, the number of future migrants is to some degree a policy choice, and Republicans have consistantly supported natalist policies ever since Reagan. Seth doesn't point out how pro-life attitudes increase the number of future immigrants for Fox News to terrify its viewers with - that's a point I'd like to see made loudly and often.
]]> The Authoritarians 1971601 Atheists and The Authoritarian Specter —gives a readable analysis of the nature of authoritarianism and its current impact on American politics.

Full text available at .]]> 261 Bob Altemeyer Daniel 0 4.30 2006 The Authoritarians
author: Bob Altemeyer
name: Daniel
average rating: 4.30
book published: 2006
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/05
shelves: to-read, history, freebies, politics, psychology, law
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Authoritarian Nightmare: Trump and His Followers]]> 53952310 How did America end up with a leader who acts so crudely and despotically, and counter to our democratic principles? Why do his followers stick with him, even when he acts against their own interests?

To fully understand, John Dean, a man with a history of standing up to autocratic presidents, joined with Bob Altemeyer, a professor of psychology with a unique area of expertise: Authoritarianism.

Relying on social science findings and psychological diagnostic tools (such as the "Power Mad Scale" and the "Con Man Scale"), as well as research and analysis from the Monmouth University Polling Institute (one of America's most respected public opinion research foundations), the authors provide us with an eye-opening understanding of the Trump phenomenon � and how we may be able to stop it.]]> 368 John W. Dean 1612199062 Daniel 0 4.14 2020 Authoritarian Nightmare: Trump and His Followers
author: John W. Dean
name: Daniel
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/05
shelves: to-read, history, politics, psychology
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Your Brain's Politics: How the Science of Mind Explains the Political Divide]]> 33509732 141 George Lakoff 1845409256 Daniel 0 0.0 2016 Your Brain's Politics: How the Science of Mind Explains the Political Divide
author: George Lakoff
name: Daniel
average rating: 0.0
book published: 2016
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/01
shelves: to-read, biology, evolution, philosophy, politics, psychology, science
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Sex, Power, and Partisanship: How Evolutionary Science Makes Sense of Our Political Divide]]> 43790978 254 HĂ©ctor A. GarcĂ­a 1633885151 Daniel 0 4.18 2019 Sex, Power, and Partisanship: How Evolutionary Science Makes Sense of Our Political Divide
author: HĂ©ctor A. GarcĂ­a
name: Daniel
average rating: 4.18
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/01
shelves: to-read, biology, evolution, politics, psychology, science
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Epistemology of Fake News (Engaging Philosophy)]]> 57280872 potential therapies for fake news.]]> 384 Sven Bernecker 0198863977 Daniel 0 5.00 The Epistemology of Fake News (Engaging Philosophy)
author: Sven Bernecker
name: Daniel
average rating: 5.00
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/27
shelves: to-read, denialism, philosophy, politics, psychology, skepticism
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Reagan Revolution: A Very Short Introduction]]> 7106312
Nearly two decades after that 1989 speech, debate continues to rage over just how revolutionary those Reagan years were. The Reagan Revolution: A Very Short Introduction identifies and tackles some of the controversies and historical mysteries that continue to swirl around Reagan and his legacy, while providing an illuminating look at some of the era's defining personalities, ideas, and accomplishments. Gil Troy, a well-known historian who is a frequent commentator on contemporary politics, sheds much light on the phenomenon known as the Reagan Revolution, situating the reception of Reagan's actions within the contemporary liberal and conservative political scene. While most conservatives refuse to countenance any criticism of their hero, an articulate minority laments that he did not go far enough. And while some liberals continue to mourn just how far he went in changing America, others continue to mock him as a disengaged, do-nothing dunce. Nevertheless, as Troy shows, two and a half decades after Reagan's 1981 inauguration, his legacy continues to shape American politics, diplomacy, culture, and economics. Both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush modeled much of their presidential leadership styles on Reagan's example, while many of the debates of the '80s about the budget, tax cutting, defense-spending, and American values still rage.

Love him or hate him, Ronald Reagan remains the most influential president since Franklin D. Roosevelt, and one of the most controversial. This marvelous book places the Reagan Revolution in the broader context of postwar politics, highlighting the legacies of these years on subsequent presidents and on American life today.

About the Series: Combining authority with wit, accessibility, and style, Very Short Introductions offer an introduction to some of life's most interesting topics. Written by experts for the newcomer, they demonstrate the finest contemporary thinking about the central problems and issues in hundreds of key topics, from philosophy to Freud, quantum theory to Islam.
]]> 168 Gil Troy 0195317106 Daniel 0 to-read, history, politics 3.25 2009 The Reagan Revolution: A Very Short Introduction
author: Gil Troy
name: Daniel
average rating: 3.25
book published: 2009
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/24
shelves: to-read, history, politics
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Most Dangerous Man in America: Rush Limbaugh's Assault on Reason]]> 10848127 400 John K. Wilson 1429965444 Daniel 0 3.43 2011 The Most Dangerous Man in America: Rush Limbaugh's Assault on Reason
author: John K. Wilson
name: Daniel
average rating: 3.43
book published: 2011
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/24
shelves: to-read, history, denialism, politics, skepticism
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Nixon Effect: How Richard Nixon s Presidency Fundamentally Changed American Politics]]> 23258921
Stemming in part from this, and also from Nixon’s scorched-earth political warfare and eventually his Watergate scandal, we have also seen the evolution of politics as war, where adversaries and ideological opponents are seen as evil or unpatriotic. Finally, Nixon’s pioneering tactics—from the identification of the Silent Majority to the Southern Strategy, from “triangulating� between both parties and claiming the political center to launching the culture war with attacks on “elites� in media, academia, and the courts—have shaped political communications and strategy ever since.

Other books have argued for Nixon’s importance, but Douglas E. Schoen’s is the first to take into account the full range of this fascinating man’s influence. While not discounting Nixon’s many misdeeds, Schoen treats his presidency and its importance with the seriousness—and evenhandedness—that the subject deserves.]]> 384 Douglas E. Schoen 159403799X Daniel 0 4.03 2015 The Nixon Effect: How Richard Nixon s Presidency Fundamentally Changed American Politics
author: Douglas E. Schoen
name: Daniel
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/22
shelves: to-read, history, politics, skepticism
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Global Change and the Earth System: A Planet Under Pressure: Executive Summary]]> 219500616 41 Will Steffen 9163153807 Daniel 0 0.0 Global Change and the Earth System: A Planet Under Pressure: Executive Summary
author: Will Steffen
name: Daniel
average rating: 0.0
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/19
shelves: biology, chemistry, carbon-footprinting, climate-change, environmentalism, politics, science, sustainability, currently-reading
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Castle and Knight (DK Eye Wonder)]]> 4961507 48 Fleur Star 0756614171 Daniel 4 3.86 2005 Castle and Knight (DK Eye Wonder)
author: Fleur Star
name: Daniel
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2005
rating: 4
read at: 2024/10/18
date added: 2024/10/18
shelves: history, war, engineering, politics, read-in-2024
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Eye Wonder: Big Cats (Eye Wonder)]]> 51024 48 D.K. Publishing 0789485486 Daniel 4 biology, read-in-2024 4.44 2002 Eye Wonder: Big Cats (Eye Wonder)
author: D.K. Publishing
name: Daniel
average rating: 4.44
book published: 2002
rating: 4
read at: 2024/10/18
date added: 2024/10/18
shelves: biology, read-in-2024
review:

]]> Eye Wonder: Bugs (Eye Wonder) 8555276 48 D.K. Publishing 0789485532 Daniel 4 4.50 2002 Eye Wonder: Bugs (Eye Wonder)
author: D.K. Publishing
name: Daniel
average rating: 4.50
book published: 2002
rating: 4
read at: 2024/10/17
date added: 2024/10/17
shelves: biology, science, read-in-2024
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Donald Trump and His Assault on Truth: The President's Falsehoods, Misleading Claims and Flat-Out Lies]]> 53599180 A NATIONAL BESTSELLERIn perilous times, facts, expertise, and truth are indispensable. President Trump’s flagrant disregard for the truth and his self-aggrandizing exaggerations, specious misstatements, and bald-faced lies have been rigorously documented and debunked since the first day of his presidency by The Washington Post’s Fact Checker staff.Donald Trump and His Assault on Truth is based on the only comprehensive compilation and analysis of the more than 16,000 fallacious statements that Trump has uttered since the day of his inauguration. He has repeated many of his most outrageous claims dozens or even hundreds of times as he has sought to bend reality to his political fantasy and personal whim.Drawing on Trump’s tweets, press conferences, political rallies, and TV appearances, The Washington Post identifies his most frequently used misstatements, biggest whoppers, and most dangerous deceptions. This book unpacks his errant statements about the economy, immigration, the impeachment hearings, foreign policy, and, of critical concern now, the coronavirus crisis as it unfolded.Fascinating, startling, and even grimly funny, Donald Trump and His Assault on Truth by The Washington Post is the essential, authoritative record of Trump’s shocking disregard for facts.]]> 381 The Washington Post Daniel 5 Donald Trump and His Assault on Truth: The President's Falsehoods, Misleading Claims and Flat-Out Lies (2020) by The Washington Post Fact Checker Staff

Sadly, this book is still relevant in 2024 and might remain relevant for four more ghastly years if Trump manages to win the Electoral College again. Even though the book came out in 2020 while Trump was still mismanaging the COVID-19 pandemic, producing hundreds of thousands of excess American deaths, and before he added "convicted felon" to his list of accomplishments, Trump is still spewing many of the same or similar lies as he dupes half the nation again. For example, Trump is once again predicting ecomonic collapse if his opponent (Kamala Harris) wins. Trump has used that line in all three of his campaigns. It's only been tested once so far as I write, by Joe Biden's win. As we near the end of Biden's term, the economy looks to be in pretty good shape. Biden cleaned up the mess that Trump left. Unemployment is down, the inflation rate has cooled, the stock market is up (in contrast to Trump's own stock that cratered), etc. The USA recovered better from the COVID-19 slowdown than most other developed nations' economies. But not if you live in Trump's world of alternative facts, where everything is a disaster which only Trump can fix.

Even if you're a fairly well-informed news reader, it's still hard to keep up with Trump's firehose of falsehoods on your own. Fortunately this book details a selection of Trump's documented lies (as well as confirming the rare correct Trump claim), giving you a unique lens into the twisted workings of what passes for the mind beneath the combover.

It will be nice if and when AI progresses enough to give everyone an AI assistant capable of fact-checking everything we read, hear, speak, or write, and in real time. (Like having your own staff of human fact-checkers to set the record straight.) That might really change the game, since Trump's habit of constant lying only works because half the nation is gullible and misinformed. Of course, just because AI might become capable of fact-checking the lies of Trump (and the recorded lies of earlier figures such as Rush Limbaugh who taught Trump how to lie), that doesn't mean people will necessarily use AI that way. It might be up to people who care about truth to arm themselves with AI so they can persuade the truth-rejectors more effectively.

I noticed only one error in the book edition I read:

The Trump administration is seeking to open the entire coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil and gas exploration, picking the most aggressive development option for an area long closed to drilling.
The U.S. Geological Survey projected that anywhere from 5.7 billion to 16 billion barrels of oil could be drilled from this land. That doesn’t even make it the biggest drilling site in Alaska. Its average estimated oil reserves fall below Prudhoe Bay’s 13.6 billion barrels but are similar to the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska’s 10.6 billion barrels. The Ghawar field in Saudi Arabia, which has been producing oil since the 1950s, has 70 million barrels left in reserves.

Everything looks good until that last sentence. The Ghawar field was originally by far the world's largest oil field and still has quite a bit left. According to Wikipedia that was over 50 billion barrels around the time of the book's publication, not just 70 million. The book might have a simple typo of "million" instead of "billion."

So, here I sit in mid-October 2024 wondering how the fate of the world will be decided in just three short weeks. I can only imagine what it's like to be sitting in Ukraine wondering the same thing, only without having a vote, and knowing that a Trump win means you'll be getting served up to Putin as a Christmas gift with a knife in your back.

If Trump loses, then this book might become less immediately relevant, but it will still be vital reading. The same psychological defects that make people easy marks for Trump won't have gone away. Plenty of would-be Trumps are itching to replace him and tap the same reservoir of gullibility, fear, prejudice, and discontent. If the next Trump is actually competent, we could be in real trouble - if we aren't already.]]> 4.18 2020 Donald Trump and His Assault on Truth: The President's Falsehoods, Misleading Claims and Flat-Out Lies
author: The Washington Post
name: Daniel
average rating: 4.18
book published: 2020
rating: 5
read at: 2024/10/17
date added: 2024/10/17
shelves: history, philosophy, politics, psychology, skepticism, read-in-2024
review:
Donald Trump and His Assault on Truth: The President's Falsehoods, Misleading Claims and Flat-Out Lies (2020) by The Washington Post Fact Checker Staff

Sadly, this book is still relevant in 2024 and might remain relevant for four more ghastly years if Trump manages to win the Electoral College again. Even though the book came out in 2020 while Trump was still mismanaging the COVID-19 pandemic, producing hundreds of thousands of excess American deaths, and before he added "convicted felon" to his list of accomplishments, Trump is still spewing many of the same or similar lies as he dupes half the nation again. For example, Trump is once again predicting ecomonic collapse if his opponent (Kamala Harris) wins. Trump has used that line in all three of his campaigns. It's only been tested once so far as I write, by Joe Biden's win. As we near the end of Biden's term, the economy looks to be in pretty good shape. Biden cleaned up the mess that Trump left. Unemployment is down, the inflation rate has cooled, the stock market is up (in contrast to Trump's own stock that cratered), etc. The USA recovered better from the COVID-19 slowdown than most other developed nations' economies. But not if you live in Trump's world of alternative facts, where everything is a disaster which only Trump can fix.

Even if you're a fairly well-informed news reader, it's still hard to keep up with Trump's firehose of falsehoods on your own. Fortunately this book details a selection of Trump's documented lies (as well as confirming the rare correct Trump claim), giving you a unique lens into the twisted workings of what passes for the mind beneath the combover.

It will be nice if and when AI progresses enough to give everyone an AI assistant capable of fact-checking everything we read, hear, speak, or write, and in real time. (Like having your own staff of human fact-checkers to set the record straight.) That might really change the game, since Trump's habit of constant lying only works because half the nation is gullible and misinformed. Of course, just because AI might become capable of fact-checking the lies of Trump (and the recorded lies of earlier figures such as Rush Limbaugh who taught Trump how to lie), that doesn't mean people will necessarily use AI that way. It might be up to people who care about truth to arm themselves with AI so they can persuade the truth-rejectors more effectively.

I noticed only one error in the book edition I read:

The Trump administration is seeking to open the entire coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil and gas exploration, picking the most aggressive development option for an area long closed to drilling.
The U.S. Geological Survey projected that anywhere from 5.7 billion to 16 billion barrels of oil could be drilled from this land. That doesn’t even make it the biggest drilling site in Alaska. Its average estimated oil reserves fall below Prudhoe Bay’s 13.6 billion barrels but are similar to the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska’s 10.6 billion barrels. The Ghawar field in Saudi Arabia, which has been producing oil since the 1950s, has 70 million barrels left in reserves.

Everything looks good until that last sentence. The Ghawar field was originally by far the world's largest oil field and still has quite a bit left. According to Wikipedia that was over 50 billion barrels around the time of the book's publication, not just 70 million. The book might have a simple typo of "million" instead of "billion."

So, here I sit in mid-October 2024 wondering how the fate of the world will be decided in just three short weeks. I can only imagine what it's like to be sitting in Ukraine wondering the same thing, only without having a vote, and knowing that a Trump win means you'll be getting served up to Putin as a Christmas gift with a knife in your back.

If Trump loses, then this book might become less immediately relevant, but it will still be vital reading. The same psychological defects that make people easy marks for Trump won't have gone away. Plenty of would-be Trumps are itching to replace him and tap the same reservoir of gullibility, fear, prejudice, and discontent. If the next Trump is actually competent, we could be in real trouble - if we aren't already.
]]> <![CDATA[The Chicago Guide to Fact-Checking, Second Edition (Chicago Guides to Writing, Editing, and Publishing)]]> 62707942 Recognize what information to fact-check
Identify the quality and ranking of source materials
Learn to fact-check a variety of media newspaper; magazine; social media; public and commercial radio and television, books, films, etc.
Navigate relationships with editors, writers, and producers
Recognize plagiarism and fabrication
Discern conflicting facts, gray areas, and litigious materials
Learn record keeping best practices for tracking sources
Test your own fact-checking skills An accessible, one-stop guide to the why, what, and how of contemporary editorial fact-checking.

Over the past few years, fact-checking has been widely touted as a corrective to the spread of misinformation, disinformation, conspiracy theories, and propaganda through the media. “If journalism is a cornerstone of democracy,� says author Brooke Borel, “then fact-checking is its building inspector.�

In The Chicago Guide to Fact-Checking , Borel, an experienced fact-checker, draws on the expertise of more than 200 writers, editors, and fellow checkers representing the New Yorker , Popular Science , This American Life , Vogue , and many other outlets. She covers best practices for editorial fact-checking in a variety of media—from magazine and news articles, both print and online, to books and podcasts—and the perspectives of both in-house and freelance checkers.

In this second edition, Borel covers the evolving media landscape, with new guidance on checking audio and video sources, polling data, and sensitive subjects such as trauma and abuse. The sections on working with writers, editors, and producers have been expanded, and new material includes fresh exercises and advice on getting fact-checking gigs. Borel also addresses the challenges of fact-checking in a world where social media, artificial intelligence, and the metaverse may make it increasingly difficult for everyone—including fact-checkers—to identify false information. The answer, she says, is for everyone to approach information with skepticism—to learn to think like a fact-checker.

The Chicago Guide to Fact-Checking is the practical—and thoroughly vetted—guide that writers, editors, and publishers continue to consult to maintain their credibility and solidify their readers� trust.]]> 245 Brooke Borel 022681789X Daniel 5 The Chicago Guide to Fact-Checking by Brooke Borel

I read the Second Edition (2023), which comes seven years after the original (2016), thus book-ending the Trump Administration. Borel's primary focus is on how to do internal ante hoc fact-checking: checking the work of an author or authors before publication, where the fact-checker is employed by the publisher. That's in contrast to external post hoc fact-checking: checking someone's work after publication, generally by an independent fact-checking organization not affiliated with the publisher. For a finished example of the latter, see Donald Trump and His Assault on Truth: The President's Falsehoods, Misleading Claims and Flat-Out Lies (2020). For a short introduction to fact-checking, see .

As the book title suggests, Borel's focus is mainly on checking factual claims, as opposed to identifying, classifying, and analyzing an author's arguments (i.e., logic-checking). To learn how to do the latter, read some critical thinking textbooks, such as Critical Thinking: The Art of Argument. Borel writes very little about checking an author's arguments in support of the author's claims, but she does mention a bit about scientific argumentation, warning about . If, like the author, you're going to be fact-checking articles by scientists, I recommend reading the book Science Fictions: The Epidemic of Fraud, Bias, Negligence and Hype in Science (2020) by Stuart Ritchie. Ritchie details a number of hazards to be aware of. In particular see the which has affected the field of psychology in particular. As the name "replication crisis" suggests, it's about findings in psychology and other fields that failed to replicate - that is, findings that other scientists working independently were not able to reproduce when they tried to repeat other scientists' experiments. The strength of a scientific finding increases as more scientists replicate the original studies. Even stronger confirmation comes from practical application of a finding, since a commercial product either works or it doesn't. For example, your smartphone relies on a long list of scientific findings for its operation. If any of that science is even a little bit wrong, your smartphone won't work. Thus you should be wary of scientific findings that are very new, haven't been independently replicated, and/or haven't led to real-world applications. Borel's advice is to ask some qualified scientists for their opinions when you can't check a scientific claim yourself, and that may be the best you can do. But as Ritchie's book points out, scientific claims differ in reliability.

The Second Edition seems to have come out just before public-facing AI large-language model chatbots such as and burst into everyone's awareness. Borel does mention AI tools for fact-checking but she's not too enthusiastic about the ones that were available when she wrote. If you spend a few hours chatting with the likes of ChatGPT, you'll probably decide to add AI to your fact-checking toolkit. AI isn't ready to fully replace the human fact-checker just yet, but AI can certainly augment the human, much as "traditional" search engines already did. In particular, these LLM chatbots have an uncanny ability to at least understand what you're asking, in contrast to traditional search engines that only respond to keywords. A keyword search may bombard you with pages of irrelevant results, particularly if your search keywords include common words with multiple meanings, and if one of those meanings is much more common than the one you want. With ChatGPT or Gemini you can usually explain what you want with a few sentences, and the chatbot gets you. And if it doesn't, you can refine your request with additional prompts and usually make yourself understood. However, even when the chatbot understands your question, it may still "hallucinate" i.e. produce incorrect responses. Thus you shouldn't take the chatbot's response as being definitive, at the time of this review. The chatbots will probably grow more reliable as more people use them, and their developers continue to refine them. Perhaps someday scientific experts will get credit for helping to train AI, much as they get credit for publishing traditional scientific papers.

I found a total of four of what I take to be errors or quasi-errors in the edition of the book that I read.

1. A reference lists the year 2005 when it almost certainly should be 2015 (the year that appears in the included link):
Thompson, Juan. “Retracted: Dylann Roof’s Cousin Claims Love Interest Chose Black Man over Him.� Intercept, June 18, 2005.


2. Not necessarily an error, but a style issue: the past tense of the regular verb "sneak" should be (or was until not long ago) "sneaked":
(though I take responsibility for any mistakes that snuck into the final text)

Enough people say "snuck" that it has become an "accepted" variant form, but I think this is bad because irregular verbs make English harder to learn. Lots of people are trying to learn English at any given time. Why punish them?

3. Borel refers to the effect, seeming to downplay it as mere misperception:
Some magazines test products, too, but keep in mind that this is subjective� a positive result might be due to the placebo effect, that wily psychological trick that makes a product seem to work by sheer force of wishful thinking.

While many instances of placebo may be due to a person's changed perception of a medical condition, I believe there are some documented instances of persons registering actual physiological changes in response to placebo. For example, I saw a documentary in which elite cyclists were given a placebo and told it was a performance enhancing drug. Several of the cyclists then went on to post faster times in a time trial event. And they reported feeling subjectively faster and more capable while they were "on" the treatment. I suspect it takes more than just "wishful thinking" for an athlete's work capacity to measurably increase. It seems that the brain must somehow trigger biochemical changes in the working muscles or aerobic system.

4. Something of a technical error seems to have sneaked in via a quotation from someone else:
And beware of fakes. In some cases, an image might be of a real event, but used in the wrong context. For instance, in 2019, as wildfires ravaged the Amazon, several high- profile Twitter accounts posted photos that supposedly showed the devastation. Cristiano Ronaldo, the soccer star, tweeted that “The Amazon Rainforest produces more than 20% of the world’s oxygen and its been burning for the past 3 weeks. It’s our responsibility to help to save our planet. #prayforamazonia,� along with a photo that was actually taken in 2013, in a different part of Brazil. Ronaldo has tens of millions of Twitter followers, and as of late 2021, his post had been shared on Twitter more than 100,000 times and liked nearly 375,000 times. And French president Emmanuel Macron, who has about 7.6 million followers, tweeted an actual photo of the Amazon rain forest on fire, but it was a stock image by a photographer who had died about sixteen years earlier. That particular post gained about 52,000 retweets and about 147,000 likes.

The paragraph is about fact-checking the authenticity of a photo, but Cristiano Ronaldo's claim itself appears to be incorrect or misleading: "The Amazon Rainforest produces more than 20% of the world’s oxygen ...". Cristiano Ronaldo seems to be confusing "flow" with "stock" in a . Earth's atmosphere contains a vast stock of oxygen which is in no danger of running out soon, even if the entire Amazon rainforest were to burn (and it probably will burn as human-caused global warming continues to tick up).

While the rainforest undoubtedly contains a vast number of photosynthesizing plants, which produce oxygen, they also consume oxygen when they die and decay. Thus it is more correct to say that the Amazon rainforest accounts for a sizable fraction of Earth's oxygen cycle, and it also represents a large stock of temporarily sequestered carbon in the form of biomass. Were the entire forest to burn, the threat would not be to "the world's oxygen" which would only decrease by a small amount, but rather from the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide, which would add to the warming effect from humanity's fossil fuel burning and other sources of human-caused greenhouse gas emissions.]]> 4.57 The Chicago Guide to Fact-Checking, Second Edition (Chicago Guides to Writing, Editing, and Publishing)
author: Brooke Borel
name: Daniel
average rating: 4.57
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2024/10/17
date added: 2024/10/17
shelves: misc-nonfiction, skepticism, philosophy, writing, history, politics, read-in-2024
review:
The Chicago Guide to Fact-Checking by Brooke Borel

I read the Second Edition (2023), which comes seven years after the original (2016), thus book-ending the Trump Administration. Borel's primary focus is on how to do internal ante hoc fact-checking: checking the work of an author or authors before publication, where the fact-checker is employed by the publisher. That's in contrast to external post hoc fact-checking: checking someone's work after publication, generally by an independent fact-checking organization not affiliated with the publisher. For a finished example of the latter, see Donald Trump and His Assault on Truth: The President's Falsehoods, Misleading Claims and Flat-Out Lies (2020). For a short introduction to fact-checking, see .

As the book title suggests, Borel's focus is mainly on checking factual claims, as opposed to identifying, classifying, and analyzing an author's arguments (i.e., logic-checking). To learn how to do the latter, read some critical thinking textbooks, such as Critical Thinking: The Art of Argument. Borel writes very little about checking an author's arguments in support of the author's claims, but she does mention a bit about scientific argumentation, warning about . If, like the author, you're going to be fact-checking articles by scientists, I recommend reading the book Science Fictions: The Epidemic of Fraud, Bias, Negligence and Hype in Science (2020) by Stuart Ritchie. Ritchie details a number of hazards to be aware of. In particular see the which has affected the field of psychology in particular. As the name "replication crisis" suggests, it's about findings in psychology and other fields that failed to replicate - that is, findings that other scientists working independently were not able to reproduce when they tried to repeat other scientists' experiments. The strength of a scientific finding increases as more scientists replicate the original studies. Even stronger confirmation comes from practical application of a finding, since a commercial product either works or it doesn't. For example, your smartphone relies on a long list of scientific findings for its operation. If any of that science is even a little bit wrong, your smartphone won't work. Thus you should be wary of scientific findings that are very new, haven't been independently replicated, and/or haven't led to real-world applications. Borel's advice is to ask some qualified scientists for their opinions when you can't check a scientific claim yourself, and that may be the best you can do. But as Ritchie's book points out, scientific claims differ in reliability.

The Second Edition seems to have come out just before public-facing AI large-language model chatbots such as and burst into everyone's awareness. Borel does mention AI tools for fact-checking but she's not too enthusiastic about the ones that were available when she wrote. If you spend a few hours chatting with the likes of ChatGPT, you'll probably decide to add AI to your fact-checking toolkit. AI isn't ready to fully replace the human fact-checker just yet, but AI can certainly augment the human, much as "traditional" search engines already did. In particular, these LLM chatbots have an uncanny ability to at least understand what you're asking, in contrast to traditional search engines that only respond to keywords. A keyword search may bombard you with pages of irrelevant results, particularly if your search keywords include common words with multiple meanings, and if one of those meanings is much more common than the one you want. With ChatGPT or Gemini you can usually explain what you want with a few sentences, and the chatbot gets you. And if it doesn't, you can refine your request with additional prompts and usually make yourself understood. However, even when the chatbot understands your question, it may still "hallucinate" i.e. produce incorrect responses. Thus you shouldn't take the chatbot's response as being definitive, at the time of this review. The chatbots will probably grow more reliable as more people use them, and their developers continue to refine them. Perhaps someday scientific experts will get credit for helping to train AI, much as they get credit for publishing traditional scientific papers.

I found a total of four of what I take to be errors or quasi-errors in the edition of the book that I read.

1. A reference lists the year 2005 when it almost certainly should be 2015 (the year that appears in the included link):
Thompson, Juan. “Retracted: Dylann Roof’s Cousin Claims Love Interest Chose Black Man over Him.� Intercept, June 18, 2005.


2. Not necessarily an error, but a style issue: the past tense of the regular verb "sneak" should be (or was until not long ago) "sneaked":
(though I take responsibility for any mistakes that snuck into the final text)

Enough people say "snuck" that it has become an "accepted" variant form, but I think this is bad because irregular verbs make English harder to learn. Lots of people are trying to learn English at any given time. Why punish them?

3. Borel refers to the effect, seeming to downplay it as mere misperception:
Some magazines test products, too, but keep in mind that this is subjective� a positive result might be due to the placebo effect, that wily psychological trick that makes a product seem to work by sheer force of wishful thinking.

While many instances of placebo may be due to a person's changed perception of a medical condition, I believe there are some documented instances of persons registering actual physiological changes in response to placebo. For example, I saw a documentary in which elite cyclists were given a placebo and told it was a performance enhancing drug. Several of the cyclists then went on to post faster times in a time trial event. And they reported feeling subjectively faster and more capable while they were "on" the treatment. I suspect it takes more than just "wishful thinking" for an athlete's work capacity to measurably increase. It seems that the brain must somehow trigger biochemical changes in the working muscles or aerobic system.

4. Something of a technical error seems to have sneaked in via a quotation from someone else:
And beware of fakes. In some cases, an image might be of a real event, but used in the wrong context. For instance, in 2019, as wildfires ravaged the Amazon, several high- profile Twitter accounts posted photos that supposedly showed the devastation. Cristiano Ronaldo, the soccer star, tweeted that “The Amazon Rainforest produces more than 20% of the world’s oxygen and its been burning for the past 3 weeks. It’s our responsibility to help to save our planet. #prayforamazonia,� along with a photo that was actually taken in 2013, in a different part of Brazil. Ronaldo has tens of millions of Twitter followers, and as of late 2021, his post had been shared on Twitter more than 100,000 times and liked nearly 375,000 times. And French president Emmanuel Macron, who has about 7.6 million followers, tweeted an actual photo of the Amazon rain forest on fire, but it was a stock image by a photographer who had died about sixteen years earlier. That particular post gained about 52,000 retweets and about 147,000 likes.

The paragraph is about fact-checking the authenticity of a photo, but Cristiano Ronaldo's claim itself appears to be incorrect or misleading: "The Amazon Rainforest produces more than 20% of the world’s oxygen ...". Cristiano Ronaldo seems to be confusing "flow" with "stock" in a . Earth's atmosphere contains a vast stock of oxygen which is in no danger of running out soon, even if the entire Amazon rainforest were to burn (and it probably will burn as human-caused global warming continues to tick up).

While the rainforest undoubtedly contains a vast number of photosynthesizing plants, which produce oxygen, they also consume oxygen when they die and decay. Thus it is more correct to say that the Amazon rainforest accounts for a sizable fraction of Earth's oxygen cycle, and it also represents a large stock of temporarily sequestered carbon in the form of biomass. Were the entire forest to burn, the threat would not be to "the world's oxygen" which would only decrease by a small amount, but rather from the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide, which would add to the warming effect from humanity's fossil fuel burning and other sources of human-caused greenhouse gas emissions.
]]> <![CDATA[Trump Election Interference Case: Government’s Motion For Immunity Determinations: Released October 2nd 2024]]> 220034564 195 Jack Smith: Special Counsel Daniel 0 5.00 Trump Election Interference Case: Government’s Motion For Immunity Determinations: Released October 2nd 2024
author: Jack Smith: Special Counsel
name: Daniel
average rating: 5.00
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/07
shelves: to-read, law, politics, history
review:

]]> <![CDATA[59 Seconds: Think a Little, Change a Lot]]> 10100782 338 Richard Wiseman 0307593266 Daniel 0 3.89 2009 59 Seconds: Think a Little, Change a Lot
author: Richard Wiseman
name: Daniel
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2009
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/28
shelves: to-read, psychology, self-help, philosophy, science
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Zero Waste: Simple Life Hacks to Drastically Reduce Your Trash]]> 36263239
We have a worldwide trash epidemic. The average American disposes of 4.4 pounds of garbage per day, and our landfills hold 254 million tons of waste.

What if there were a simple—and fun—way for you to make a difference? What if you could take charge of your own waste, reduce your carbon footprint, and make an individual impact on an already fragile environment?

A zero waste lifestyle is the answer—and Shia Su is living it. Every single piece of unrecyclable garbage Shia has produced in one year fits into a mason jar—and if it seems overwhelming, it isn't! In Zero Waste, Shia demystifies and simplifies the zero waste lifestyle for the beginner, sharing practical advice, quick solutions, and tips and tricks that will make trash-free living fun and meaningful. Learn how

Build your own zero waste kit
Prepare real food—the lazy way
Make your own DIY household cleaners and toiletries
Be zero waste even in the bathroom!
And more!

Be part of the solution! Implement these small changes at your own pace, and restructure your life to one of sustainable living for your community, your health, and the earth that sustains you.]]> 196 Shia Su 1510730826 Daniel 0 3.65 2016 Zero Waste: Simple Life Hacks to Drastically Reduce Your Trash
author: Shia Su
name: Daniel
average rating: 3.65
book published: 2016
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/28
shelves: to-read, composting, environmentalism, green-living, sustainability
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Bartlett's Familiar Quotations]]> 23807947 More than 150 years after its original publication, Bartlett's Familiar Quotations has been completely revised and updated for its eighteenth edition. Bartlett's showcases a sweeping survey of world history, from the times of ancient Egyptians to present day.New authors include Warren Buffett, the Dalai Lama, Bill Gates, David Foster Wallace, Emily Post, Steve Jobs, Jimi Hendrix, Paul Krugman, Hunter S. Thompson, Jon Stewart, Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, Barack Obama, Che Guevara, Randy Pausch, Desmond Tutu, Julia Child, Fran Leibowitz, Harper Lee, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Patti Smith, William F. Buckley, and Robert F. Kennedy.In the classic Bartlett's tradition, the book offers readers and scholars alike a vast, stunning representation of those words that have influenced and molded our language and culture.]]> 907 John Bartlett 031625018X Daniel 0 4.39 1855 Bartlett's Familiar Quotations
author: John Bartlett
name: Daniel
average rating: 4.39
book published: 1855
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/27
shelves: to-read, compendia, history, humor, philosophy, politics, writing
review:

]]> The Climate War 8899044 500 Eric Pooley 1401395988 Daniel 0 4.00 2010 The Climate War
author: Eric Pooley
name: Daniel
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2010
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/26
shelves: to-read, climate-change, economics, environmentalism, politics, history, science
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Windows 11 All-in-One For Dummies]]> 60536089 Get more out of your Windows 11 computer with easy-to-follow advice

Powering 75% of the PCs on the planet, Microsoft Windows is capable of extraordinary things. And you don't need to be a computer scientist to explore the nooks and crannies of the operating system! With Windows 11 All-in-One For Dummies, anyone can discover how to dig into Microsoft's ubiquitous operating system and get the most out of the latest version. From securing and protecting your most personal information to socializing and sharing on social media platforms and making your Windows PC your own through personalization, this book offers step-by-step instructions to unlocking Windows 11's most useful secrets.

With handy info from 10 books included in the beginner-to-advanced learning path contained within, this guide walks you through how

Install, set up, and customize your Windows 11 PC in a way that makes sense just for you Use the built-in apps, or download your own, to power some of Windows 11's most useful features Navigate the Windows 11 system settings to keep your system running smoothly Perfect for anyone who's looked at their Windows PC and wondered, "I wonder what else it can do?", Windows 11 All-in-One For Dummies delivers all the tweaks, tips, and troubleshooting tricks you'll need to make your Windows 11 PC do more than you ever thought possible.]]> 855 Ciprian Adrian Rusen Daniel 0 to-read, computers 4.25 Windows 11 All-in-One For Dummies
author: Ciprian Adrian Rusen
name: Daniel
average rating: 4.25
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/25
shelves: to-read, computers
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Big Cheat: How Donald Trump Fleeced America and Enriched Himself and His Family]]> 56898282
While the world watched Donald Trump’s presidency in horror or delight, few noticed that his lifelong grifting quietly continued. Less than forty minutes after taking the oath of office, Trump began turning the White House into a money machine for himself, his family, and his courtiers.

More than $1.7 billion flowed into Donald Trump’s bank accounts during his four years as president. Foreign governments rented out whole floors of his hotel five blocks from the White House while lobbyists conducted business in the hotel’s restaurants. Payday lenders and other trade groups moved their annual conventions to Trump golf resorts. And individual favor seekers joined his private Mar-a-Lago club with its $200,000 admission fee in hopes of getting a few minutes with the President. Despite earning more than $1 million every day he was in office, Trump left the White House as he arrived—hard up for cash. More than $400 million in debt comes due by 2024, and Trump still lacks the resources to pay it back.

“Few people are as well positioned to write an exposé of the former president as Johnston� ( The Washington Post ), and The Big Cheat offers a guided tour of how money flowed in and out of Trump’s hundreds of enterprises, showing in simple terms how a corrupt president used our government for his benefit, even putting national security at risk. Johnston details the four most recent years of the corruption that has defined the Trump family since 1885 and reveals the costs of Trump’s extravagant lifestyle for American taxpayers.]]> 304 David Cay Johnston 1982178035 Daniel 0 4.09 The Big Cheat: How Donald Trump Fleeced America and Enriched Himself and His Family
author: David Cay Johnston
name: Daniel
average rating: 4.09
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/25
shelves: to-read, economics, history, politics, skepticism
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Lucky Loser: How Donald Trump Squandered His Father's Fortune and Created the Illusion of Success]]> 208930976 From the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporters behind the 2018 bombshell New York Times exposé of then-President Trump’s finances, an explosive investigation into the history of Donald Trump’s wealth, revealing how one of the country’s biggest business failures lied his way into the White House

Soon after announcing his first campaign for the U.S. presidency, Donald J. Trump told a national television audience that life “has not been easy for me. It has not been easy for me.� Building on a narrative he had been telling for decades, he spun a hardscrabble fable of how he parlayed a small loan from his father into a multi-billion-dollar business and real estate empire. This feat, he argued, made him singularly qualified to lead the country—except none of it was true. Born to a rich father who made him the beneficiary of his own highly lucrative investments, Trump received the equivalent of more than $500 million today via means that required no business expertise.

For decades he squandered his fortunes on money-losing businesses only to be saved yet again by financial serendipity. He tacked his name on every building while taking out huge loans he’d never repay. He obsessed over appearances while ignoring threats to the bottom line and mounting costly lawsuits against city officials. He tarnished the value of his name by allowing anyone with a big enough check to use it, and he cheated the television producer who not only rescued him from bankruptcy but also cast him as a business savant—the public image that carried Trump to the White House.

Drawing on more than twenty years� worth of Trump’s confidential tax information—including the tax returns Trump tried to conceal—alongside business records and interviews with Trump insiders, New York Times investigative reporters Russ Buettner and Susanne Craig track Trump's financial rise and fall—and rise and fall again.]]> 528 Russ Buettner 0593298640 Daniel 0 4.38 2024 Lucky Loser: How Donald Trump Squandered His Father's Fortune and Created the Illusion of Success
author: Russ Buettner
name: Daniel
average rating: 4.38
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/25
shelves: currently-reading, economics, history, law, politics, skepticism
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Hatchet Man: How Bill Barr Broke the Prosecutor's Code and Corrupted the Justice Department]]> 55748370
“Elie Honig has written much more than a compelling takedown of an unfit attorney general; he also offers a blueprint for how impartial and apolitical justice should be administered in America.”—Preet Bharara

“An essential analysis for anyone committed to understanding the abuses of the Trump administration so we can ensure they never happen again.”—Joyce White Vance

“Essential reading for all who cherish the rule of law in America.”—George Conway

"Written with all the color and pacing of a legal thriller."—Variety

CNN Senior Legal Analyst Elie Honig exposes William Barr as the most corrupt attorney general in modern U.S. history, with stunning new scandals bubbling to the surface even after Barr's departure from office.ĚýĚý

In Hatchet Man, former federal prosecutor Elie Honig uncovers Barr’s unprecedented abuse of power as Attorney General and the lasting structural damage done to the Justice Department. Honig uses his own experience as a prosecutor at DOJ to show how, as America’s top law enforcement official, Barr repeatedly violated the Department’s written rules, and those vital, unwritten norms and principles that comprise the “prosecutor’s code.�

Barr was corrupt from the beginning. His first act as AG was to distort the findings of Special Counsel Robert Mueller, earning a public rebuke for his dishonesty from Mueller himself and, later, from a federal judge. Then, Barr tried to manipulate the law to squash a whistleblower’s complaint about Trump’s dealings with Ukraine—the report that eventually led to Trump’s first impeachment. Barr later intervened in an unprecedented manner to undermine his own DOJ prosecutors on the cases of Michael Flynn and Roger Stone, both political allies of the President. And then Barr fired the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York under false pretenses. Finally, Barr amplified baseless theories about massive mail-in ballot fraud, pouring gasoline on the dumpster fire battle over the 2020 election results and contributing to the January 6 insurrection that led to Trump’s second impeachment.

In Hatchet Man, Honig proves that Barr trampled the two core virtues that have long defined the department and its credibility and independence � ultimately in service of his own deeply-rooted, extremist legal and personal beliefs. Honig shows how Barr corrupted the Justice Department and explains what we must do to prevent this from ever happening again.]]> 289 Elie Honig 0063092379 Daniel 0 4.45 2021 Hatchet Man: How Bill Barr Broke the Prosecutor's Code and Corrupted the Justice Department
author: Elie Honig
name: Daniel
average rating: 4.45
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/20
shelves: to-read, history, law, politics
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Autonomous Intelligent Vehicles: Theory, Algorithms, and Implementation]]> 18198852 164 Hong Cheng 144712281X Daniel 0 5.00 2011 Autonomous Intelligent Vehicles: Theory, Algorithms, and Implementation
author: Hong Cheng
name: Daniel
average rating: 5.00
book published: 2011
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/17
shelves: to-read, computers, engineering, science, textbooks
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Eye Wonder: Whales and Dolphins]]> 524414 48 Caroline Bingham 0789492695 Daniel 4 4.23 2003 Eye Wonder: Whales and Dolphins
author: Caroline Bingham
name: Daniel
average rating: 4.23
book published: 2003
rating: 4
read at: 2024/09/06
date added: 2024/09/06
shelves: biology, science, evolution, read-in-2024
review:

]]> Eye Wonder: Birds 3262371 48 Samantha Gray 0789485508 Daniel 4
DK also publishes several longer books about birds in a similar format, for higher grade level readers. Or for adults who haven't fallen behind on their Reading Challenge. ]]> 4.11 2002 Eye Wonder: Birds
author: Samantha Gray
name: Daniel
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2002
rating: 4
read at: 2024/09/05
date added: 2024/09/05
shelves: biology, read-in-2024, sustainability
review:
"Bookazine" format (hybrid of book + magazine). Beautiful photographs. Written for children (obviously) but most adults will probably learn something too, unless you're an ornithologist. Great for catching up if you fall behind on your Ĺ·±¦ÓéŔÖ Reading Challenge!

DK also publishes several longer books about birds in a similar format, for higher grade level readers. Or for adults who haven't fallen behind on their Reading Challenge.
]]> <![CDATA[Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump]]> 36430425 208 John Fea 0802876412 Daniel 0 4.12 2018 Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump
author: John Fea
name: Daniel
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/04
shelves: history, politics, religion, skepticism, currently-reading
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Eye Wonder: Earth: Open Your Eyes to a World of Discovery]]> 24878115 Eye Wonder: Earth, your guide to learning about all the fascinating things about our planet. Travel on an incredible journey through the pictures in Eye Wonder: Earth � the book takes you from powerful volcanoes to beautiful waterfalls, and to everywhere in between. Discover the power and beauty of our planet, and share that spirit of curiosity with your school-age child! We've added eight pages of activities to the new addition to make Eye Wonder: Earth even more fascinating. Visual learners and readers alike will love exploring and learning through Eye Wonder: Earth. These books are designed to teach through pictures and a visual approach, encouraging curiosity in young, school-age children. We've added games, activities, and quizzes to engage children even more � Eye Wonder: Earth activities are designed to teach kids to both remember more of what they've learned, and learn to research when they want to know more, teaching general study skills as well as Earth-specific knowledge.

Learn about science, history, and the natural world through beautiful photography and lively, age-appropriate text. The Eye Wonder series organizes information in a way that's easy to search, easy to read, and easy to learn.]]> 56 D.K. Publishing 1465415637 Daniel 4 science, read-in-2024 4.50 1994 Eye Wonder: Earth: Open Your Eyes to a World of Discovery
author: D.K. Publishing
name: Daniel
average rating: 4.50
book published: 1994
rating: 4
read at: 2024/09/04
date added: 2024/09/04
shelves: science, read-in-2024
review:

]]> <![CDATA[If You Can't Say Anything Nice, Say It in Yiddish]]> 7185199 A vecher balkon dir in kop (May a soft balcony fall on your head.). You don’t agree? Gai bareh di vantsen (Go bother the bedbugs).

Lita Epstein offers a crash course in the Yiddish gift for vivid invective. Along the way, you’ll learn a bit about the language itself (its history, pronounciation, and travels) and gain access to its lethal power. Humor is, of course, a frequent accomplice (the better to kill you with, mein kind) and the sheer range of words—for goof-offs, screw-ups, gossip-mongers and evil-doers—will demonstrate how keen observation (not to mention hair-splitting) works through the Yiddish language to better identify an intended target. The book also provides two generous glossaries of phrases—to take you from English to Yiddish and back again.

So think, dumkop. Even if you could never tell a shlemiel from a shlemazel, or a kvetcher from a yenta before, you’ll now be able to proudly shout: Migulgl zol er vern in a henglaykhter, by tag zol er hengen, un by nakht zol er brenen. (He should be transformed into a chandelier, to hang by day and to burn by night.)

]]> 198 Lita Epstein 0760786739 Daniel 0 3.73 2006 If You Can't Say Anything Nice, Say It in Yiddish
author: Lita Epstein
name: Daniel
average rating: 3.73
book published: 2006
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/03
shelves: to-read, history, humor, writing
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Dogwhistles and Figleaves: How Manipulative Language Spreads Racism and Falsehood]]> 148008016
It is widely accepted that political discourse in recent years has become more openly racist and more accepting of wildly implausible conspiracy theories. Dogwhistles and Figleaves explores ways in which such changes--both of which defied previously settled norms of political speech--have been brought about. Jennifer Saul shows that two linguistic devices, dogwhistles and figleaves, have played a crucial role. Some dogwhistles (such as "88", used by Nazis online to mean "Heil Hitler") serve to disguise messages that would otherwise be rejected as unacceptable, allowing them to be transmitted surreptitiously. Other dogwhistles (like the 1988 "Willie Horton" ad) work by influencing people in ways that they are not aware of, and which they would likely reject were they aware. Figleaves (such as "just asking questions") take messages that could easily be recognized as unacceptable, and provide just enough cover that people become more willing to accept them. Saul argues that these devices
are important for the spread of racist discourse. She also shows how they contribute to the transmission of norm-violating discourse more generally, focusing on the case of wildly implausible conspiracist speech. Together, these devices have both exploited and widened existing divisions in society, and normalized racist and conspiracist speech. This book is the first full-length exploration of dogwhistles and figleaves. It offers an illuminating and disturbing view of the workings of contemporary political discourse.]]> 240 Jennifer Saul 0192871757 Daniel 0 4.07 Dogwhistles and Figleaves: How Manipulative Language Spreads Racism and Falsehood
author: Jennifer Saul
name: Daniel
average rating: 4.07
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/03
shelves: to-read, philosophy, plain-language, politics, psychology
review:

]]> Human Body (DK Eye Wonder) 766706 48 Caroline Bingham 0789490447 Daniel 4 4.04 2002 Human Body (DK Eye Wonder)
author: Caroline Bingham
name: Daniel
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2002
rating: 4
read at: 2024/09/03
date added: 2024/09/03
shelves: biology, medicine, science, read-in-2024
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense]]> 133203 Learn how to detect the subtle "put-downs", insults and other verbal blows that almost everyone uses—parents and children, husbands and wives, teachers and students, and friends and lovers.

Most of us are under verbal attack everyday and often don't even realize it. In The Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense you'll learn the skills you need to respond to all types of verbal attack. Specific strategies fro your defense include:

* Twelve rules of clear, effective interaction
* Recognition of five verbal modes--the Placator, Blamer, Distractor, Computer, and Leveler
* Tone of voice--make yours bolder and more assertive
* Alternative scripts--better approaches to common confrontation
* Body language--how it supports what you say
* and in special chapters directed to both men and women, the author explains how women have long been the verbal victims of men and what both sexes can do to break this destructive pattern

With numerous examples of verbal confrontations and a journal to help you keep track of your progress, The Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense will give you the perception you need to deal confidently in any interaction.]]> 311 Suzette Haden Elgin 0880290307 Daniel 0 3.76 1980 The Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense
author: Suzette Haden Elgin
name: Daniel
average rating: 3.76
book published: 1980
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/02
shelves: to-read, philosophy, psychology, self-help, skepticism
review:

]]> <![CDATA[How to Disagree Without Being Disagreeable: Getting Your Point Across With the Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense]]> 312765 * Keep domestic disagreements from escalating
* Deliver criticism to coworkers, employers, or employees
* Handle aggressive, negative comments about race, politics, or religion
* Provide discipline without increasing hostility
* Use language that reduces tension and creates rapport in every situation]]> 208 Suzette Haden Elgin 0471157058 Daniel 0 4.01 1997 How to Disagree Without Being Disagreeable: Getting Your Point Across With the Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense
author: Suzette Haden Elgin
name: Daniel
average rating: 4.01
book published: 1997
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/02
shelves: to-read, philosophy, psychology, self-help, skepticism
review:

]]> <![CDATA[In Search of Schrödinger's Cat: Quantum Physics and Reality]]> 513367
John Gribbin tells the complete story of quantum mechanics, a truth far stranger than any fiction. He takes us step-by-step into an ever more bizarre and fascinating place—requiring only that we approach it with an open mind. He introduces the scientists who developed quantum theory. He investigates the atom, radiation, time travel, the birth of the universe, superconductors and life itself. And in a world full of its own delights, mysteries and surprises, he searches for Schrödinger's Cat—a search for quantum reality—as he brings every reader to a clear understanding of the most important area of scientific study today—quantum physics.]]> 320 John Gribbin 0553341030 Daniel 0 to-read, science 4.06 1984 In Search of Schrödinger's Cat: Quantum Physics and Reality
author: John Gribbin
name: Daniel
average rating: 4.06
book published: 1984
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/01
shelves: to-read, science
review:

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