Daniel's Updates en-US Tue, 29 Apr 2025 17:04:26 -0700 60 Daniel's Updates 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg ReadStatus9368091814 Tue, 29 Apr 2025 17:04:26 -0700 <![CDATA[Daniel started reading 'Summary and Analysis of Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions: Based on the Book by Dan Ariely']]> /review/show/7435803036 Summary and Analysis of Predictably Irrational by Worth Books Daniel started reading Summary and Analysis of Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions: Based on the Book by Dan Ariely by Worth Books
]]> Review7435749826 Tue, 29 Apr 2025 13:16:24 -0700 <![CDATA[Daniel added 'Summary and Analysis of Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right: Based on the Book by Arlie Russell Hochschild']]> /review/show/7435749826 Summary and Analysis of Strangers in Their Own Land by Worth Books Daniel gave 5 stars to 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) by Worth Books
bookshelves: politics, history, climate-change, economics, denialism, environmentalism, psychology, religion, read-in-2025
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. ]]> Review7431107332 Fri, 25 Apr 2025 22:22:59 -0700 <![CDATA[Daniel added 'How AI Ate the World: A Brief History of Artificial Intelligence - And Its Long Future']]> /review/show/7431107332 How AI Ate the World by Chris Stokel-Walker Daniel gave 5 stars to How AI Ate the World: A Brief History of Artificial Intelligence - And Its Long Future (Paperback) by Chris Stokel-Walker
bookshelves: computers, futurism, history, philosophy, psychology, science, transhumanism, read-in-2025
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 Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ database to any degree, you've probably noticed it contains a lot of errors, which you may then report to the overworked staff of Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ human librarians. And hope your request will be seen among the flood of other help requests. An AI-enabled Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ 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. ]]> ReadStatus9353131435 Fri, 25 Apr 2025 21:10:18 -0700 <![CDATA[Daniel started reading 'Introducing Psychology: A Graphic Guide']]> /review/show/7468823436 Introducing Psychology by Nigel C. Benson Daniel started reading Introducing Psychology: A Graphic Guide by Nigel C. Benson
]]> ReadStatus9353124003 Fri, 25 Apr 2025 21:07:06 -0700 <![CDATA[Daniel started reading 'Summary and Analysis of Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right: Based on the Book by Arlie Russell Hochschild']]> /review/show/7435749826 Summary and Analysis of Strangers in Their Own Land by Worth Books Daniel started reading Summary and Analysis of Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right: Based on the Book by Arlie Russell Hochschild by Worth Books
]]> Comment289909451 Fri, 25 Apr 2025 21:03:56 -0700 <![CDATA[Daniel commented on Daniel's review of Introducing Artificial Intelligence: A Graphic Guide]]> /review/show/7350479828 Daniel's review of Introducing Artificial Intelligence: A Graphic Guide (Graphic Guides)
by Henry Brighton

For a much more up-to-date introduction to modern AI, see:

How AI Ate the World: A Brief History of Artificial Intelligence - And Its Long Future (2024) by Chris Stokel-Walker ]]> Review7431107332 Fri, 25 Apr 2025 17:13:03 -0700 <![CDATA[Daniel added 'How AI Ate the World: A Brief History of Artificial Intelligence - And Its Long Future']]> /review/show/7431107332 How AI Ate the World by Chris Stokel-Walker Daniel gave 5 stars to How AI Ate the World: A Brief History of Artificial Intelligence - And Its Long Future (Paperback) by Chris Stokel-Walker
bookshelves: computers, futurism, history, philosophy, psychology, science, transhumanism, read-in-2025
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 Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ database to any degree, you've probably noticed it contains a lot of errors, which you may then report to the overworked staff of Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ human librarians. And hope your request will be seen among the flood of other help requests. An AI-enabled Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ 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. ]]> ReadStatus9349671101 Thu, 24 Apr 2025 22:04:46 -0700 <![CDATA[Daniel wants to read 'The Rise and Reign of the Mammals: A New History, from the Shadow of the Dinosaurs to Us']]> /review/show/7516949217 The Rise and Reign of the Mammals by Steve Brusatte Daniel wants to read The Rise and Reign of the Mammals: A New History, from the Shadow of the Dinosaurs to Us by Steve Brusatte
]]> ReadStatus9349603223 Thu, 24 Apr 2025 21:32:00 -0700 <![CDATA[Daniel wants to read 'Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History']]> /review/show/7516903257 Wonderful Life by Stephen Jay Gould Daniel wants to read Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History by Stephen Jay Gould
]]> Comment289863981 Thu, 24 Apr 2025 15:40:50 -0700 <![CDATA[Daniel commented on Nicky's review of When Life Nearly Died: The Greatest Mass Extinction of All Time]]> /review/show/888917861 Nicky's review of When Life Nearly Died: The Greatest Mass Extinction of All Time
by Michael J. Benton

Also on the virus issue, some biologists call them "biological entities" rather than "organisms" because viruses are just completely passive and inert until they get into a host organism and then hijack the metabolic machinery of a host cell. Viruses themselves do not metabolize, so they lack one of the hallmarks of life - the ability to harness an energy source to drive chemical reactions "uphill" within themselves. If organisms are analogous to computers, viruses are analogous to storage media such as thumb drives, which can't do anything until you plug them into a computer which has the internal machinery/circuitry to harness electricity to do useful information processing work. ]]>