Archive for the ‘Books’ Category

I recently read Noreena Hertz’s book “Eyes Wide Open: How to Make Smart Decisions in a Confusing World”. It’s quite a good read. In the book she puts forward some of the problems with decision making in the modern world and how can improve our own thinking.

I have picked out some of my favourite quotes and ideas.

“We need to be better decision makers, have decision making classes in schools”

This I would totally agree with. If people had a better understanding of decision making, scientific analysis and understanding statistics and information you would hope that we would at least some of the time have better decisions making, even if that doesn’t fix political bias.

However, I think some of the picture of the “modern world” being such a problem is unjustified.

“The average copy of the New York Times contains more information than you would have encountered 300 years ago.”

That I would suggest is nonsense. How do you measure information? I am sure the New York Times contains a lots of facts and figures, but if you think about the amount of information you pick up just by living your life, its a lot.

Take cooking for example. There is so much knowledge in preparing ingredients, putting it all together and cooking it, serving it, tasting it – tasting food alone has to be a huge amount of information. The human brain can store loads of information.

She probably means specific information in a context. However, it struck me as an add thing to say. She then goes on to say that this is a lot given we can only hold seven things in our memory. Though the latest research indicates this is only two or three things anyway.

“Our world is increasingly unstable and we cannot rely upon it anymore.”

Again, this to me seems like nonsense. Our world is the most stable it has ever been. On a global level, less people are being killed by war than ever before. However, it is on a personal level were we really have seen the chance.

Hundreds of years ago, if the crops failed, you were fucked. Totally fucked. There was a good chance you would die. Just ask the Irish. Today I can walk into Tesco and buy food 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It will always be there. There is no time when Tesco do not have food.

So who cares if Leman Brothers might collapse overnight. I will still be able to find food, clean water, shelter and medical care tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after that.

In short, I think she paints a much bleaker picture than we actually find the world. However, there is plenty of room for improvement. Luckily there were some buzz words to the rescue – lets go about making some empowered decision making.

Intuitive thinking

One of the first things that I liked was that She then says that intuitive thinking is often wrong, in contradiction to Gladwell. She even says something like you can’t just blink and make a good decision. Perhaps as an intention reference to the nonsense Gladwell wrote in his book entitled “Blink”, or perhaps not.

Social media

Hurtz puts forward the idea that the constant ping of emails, phone calls and other distractions utterly ruins our train of thought. “Social media is distracting.” I have not seen the research on this, but it would be interesting to know if this is also true of the younger generation who have grown up with it.

Cult of the measurable

Hurtz laments the rejection of anything that cannot be measured. SHe claims that domestic violence is ignored because it is hard to measure. This is a big claim, so I would like to see some evidence on that before I believe it. Of course it could be the case, and if it is, that is something we should address.

Measurables are important though. Maybe not with wine, the example Hurtz uses, but they are with most things. How do you measure success without measurables? How do you make an evidence-based decision if you cannot measure the evidence? It provides the justification for your decisions.

Positivity bias

Most people have a positive bias. Ironically, it is depressed people see the world most clearly. Everyone else overlooks the negative stuff. This should be taken into account when making decisions. You should re-adjust your perceptions in case bad things happen.

I discussed this idea with my friends and family. They said, in my case, I was probably adjusting far too much already lol.

Recency bias

I am not sure what the actual name of it is. However, Hurtz tells the story of an ER doctor that had seen a lot of pneumonia cases recently. A patient came in with slightly odd symptoms that did not quite fit. However, the doctor diagnosed it as pneumonia. Another doctor, who had not seen all the cases, immediately correctly the diagnosis to aspirin poisoning.

This is something I could definitely do to be more aware of at work. Often I will be trying to trace down a bug, as it is the same thing I have seen before, but the usual fixes and debugging are getting me nowhere. Usually, it will turn out to be something totally different, but because I am zoned in on a particular problem, I miss it.

Challenger in Chief

Hurtz recommends you appoint someone to pay “Challenger in Chief”. Their job is to challenge your ideas in an attempt to overcome your optimism bias. They can play Devil’s Advocate and put your ideas to the test.

Pick your historical lessons carefully

Do not get hung up on past success and failures. Richard Zanuck, one of the producers of the Sound of Music, went on to commission several more musicals after the huge success of the first. They flopped. History is not always a good indicator.

This correlates with what Duncan J Watts writes. History only happens once, so is a sample size of one. His classic example is the Minidisk. Sony, hurt from losing the VHS Betamax wars, really did learn its lessons and make an excellent product in the Minidisk. But it still flopped, because of the entirely unpredictable rise of file sharing making MP3 devices popular. Do learn from your mistakes. But do not learn too much.

Thinking time

According to Eyes Wide Open, Barack Obama advised David Cameron to allocate large parts of his day to time where he does nothing but sits and thinks.

I cannot find any evidence to support the claim made in the book, but it is good advice anyway. At work, sometimes I just sit and think. That time is an investment, allowing me to work out the pros and cons of my ideas before I implement them, thus saving time in the long run.

It is also a good idea to not implement ideas straight away. When you first come up with an idea your a) probably quite excited about it and b) have not had time to think it through. Put it at the back of your mind and mull it over for a while before doing anything.

This is something I already practice at work and home. If I decided to take on a new project or get involved with a new charity, I will wait a few weeks and see if I am still as excited about it as I was when I first thought of the idea. Only after sustained interest in an idea will I pursue it.

Similarly, at work, if we need a new feature implementing, I will generally leave it to the next day so that my mind has time to process the pros and cons of my approach.

CV writing

Studies on CVs that suggest if you write it in the third person it is taken more seriously. So the next time you are updating your CV, replace “I lead a team and I implemented x” to “Leading a time and implementing x”.

Anchoring

Anchoring is a real problem, and something Kahneman writes a lot about in Thinking, Fast and Slow. If you are not familiar with the problem it is this. If you ask someone who much a house is worth, they will probably give you a reasonable estimate. However, if you tell them the house recently sold for a huge amount, they will subconsciously anchor on this, and give you a much higher estimate.

This is not always a problem, but is a massive problem when it comes to things like sentencing a convicted criminal to x number of years in prison. It is also one of the reasons why you can get a much better pay rise by switching companies.

Once you are aware of these potential anchors and biases, you can try and eliminate them. Hurtz recommends painting a blank canvas. If you are looking round a new house for example, and the current owner has baked some fresh bread to bias your senses, take the time to try and imagine it without it without the smell.

Colours affect our judgement. This is something we saw a lot at Sky Bet. Just changing the colour of a button for example could have a significant impact on whether people clicked it or not.

Narrowcasting

Do not be so hasty to block people with different opinions on Facebook and Twitter. It is important to expose yourself to different points of view, otherwise you find yourself in a bubble where all you ever get is people reinforcing your existing opinions, regardless of their validity.

I have Facebook friends who post material from the far left, and occasionally from the right. I have religious friends and foreign friends with cultural differences, and many of their opinions I do not agree with. However, I am glad they share them with me to challenge my own point of view.

Eli Pariser also has a great TED talk about this.

Summary

While I think the introductory chapter perhaps over-emphasises the problems with modern society, this book is filled with good ideas. Of course, I would think that as I already use a lot of them, but there was plenty of useful reminders and new ideas that for me, made this book an excellent read.

How to we make snap decisions that are more accurate than well thought out evidence-based ones.

It should have been a quite short book because the answer is that we don’t. At least more often than we would like to think. Gladwell says that the biggest problem is that these conscious decisions are locked away from our conscious minds. But the problem is that they are often inaccurate.

This is something that Daniel Kahneman addresses in Thinking, Fast and Slow. You can develop excellent intuitive thinking. But only only certain circumstances, those being where you get immediate feedback. For example if an anaesthesiologist “gets a hunch” that something is wrong you should probably listen to them; if a oncologist or psychiatrist gets one, you should probably ignore then. That is because the anaesthesiologist will find out if their hunch is correct almost immediately, the others will not find out for months, maybe ever, and so never get to refine this decision-making process.

This struck me in Gladwell’s discussion of a marriage analyst who claims he can tell if a couple will divorce just based on overhearing a conversation in a restaurant. Realistically, he doesn’t know if he can actually do that. How could he? He’ll never get feedback on whether that couple did eventually break up or not.

His discussion of biases and prejudices was interesting. He discussed what he called the Warren Harding error. Harding “looked like a president” but when he got to the Whitehouse, it turned out he was rubbish at it. Conversely, the way orchestras started recruiting more women was to do blind auditions (where the musician would be behind a screen) to prevent people from judging them based on what they looked like, for example, do they have a pair of tits.

He also discussed a heart attack decision-tree adopted by Cook County Hospital. This simple decision tree was actually more accurate than doctors were at diagnosing whether people were having a heart attack. Gladwell claimed that people can be overloaded by having too much information and this actually impairs their decision making.

This is something that struck a chord with me. It is one of the things that we have found in my work in predicting sporting outcomes is that too much information can cloud your models. In fact it is pretty much what Nate Silver’s book The Signal and The Noise is about. And the answer is the same – do some logistic regression.

I expressed some of my concerns about Malcolm Gladwell’s writing in my review of The Tipping Point. This included his analysis of the 10,000 hours rule (which is almost certainly wrong) which features in this book. It was still an interesting read however.

Outliers: The Story of Success looks both at some of the most successful people, but also how we think of success. He begins by talking about the Matthew effect. This is where sports have cut off date, say 1 January, and so kids born in January are competing against kids almost a year younger than them (kids born in December). The result is that kids in January look better, thus are put in a higher ability stream, get extra coaching and thus become world-class athletes.

According to the research Gladwell points to, this has a huge effect. Almost all sports stars are born in the first three months and almost none after September. When there is ability setting in school, September births outperform August births by a big margin too.

He then goes on to talk about the 10,000 hours rule, and finally goes on to talk about success is a result of opportunity. Take Bill Gates for example. At 13 years old, his high school got access to a computer system and so by the time he got to founding Microsoft in 1975 he had done more programming than basically anyone else in the world at his age.

This is where the book makes a great point. Gladwell uses the term opportunity, which is a combination of luck and privilege. Bill Gates worked incredibly hard, but he also had an opportunity that almost nobody else in the world had in that he spent his childhood, from 1968-1975, programming.

He is an excellent storyteller. I had the same kind of epiphany that I had when reading Michael Lewis’s Boomerang. They are both such good storytellers that they a) write excellent books and b) make us less critical because of it.

In summary, Outliers is a very engaging book, but that does not make it true. Gladwell is known for over-simplifying problems and he does it equally frequently in this book. If the message you take away is that success is more a product of opportunity than being a meritocracy of hard-work though, the book has probably been of some benefit.

As a final footnote, I had the audiobook edition and one of the things I found quite annoying was what happens with quotes. Gladwell reads it himself and goes into quotes without changing his voice or indicating it. So he will read something out and then say something like “says John Smith” and then you have to try and backtrack to where the quote starts from.

Monstrous Regiment is the 31st Discworld novel and is set in Borogravia. It was brilliant. I normally find the Discworld books funny, but it is rare that I actually laugh out loud while reading. Monstrous Regiment achieved that several times.

Plus it has added Sam Vimes and William de Worde.

Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon is a 2006 book by Daniel Dennett.

In the book he argues that we need to break the spell of using scientific enquiry to consider religion. He has no problem with religion in itself, but wants it to be given the same treatment as any other discourse – that of evidence rational scientific enquiry.

He writes in his somewhat slow and lumbering style that can take a while to get going but certainly puts forward some thought-provoking ideas. It has not been my favourite recent read but did nor did I get overly bored either.

I was really enjoyed some of the little, almost throw-away sentences, that made some quite profound points. The rotting caracas of an elephant for example. It smells horrible. But it does not objectively smell horrible. It smells horrible to us as humans, but to a vulture the smell is a pleasant one.

Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch is a 1990 novel by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman. It was pretty Discworld-y, by which I mean it was a fantasy novel with lots of Pratchett in it, but that is only to be expected and certainly not a bad thing.

It is probably Gaiman-y too, but I have not read any of his other stuff.

It is starting to date a bit. I got the references to “cassettes” but I am not sure how much longer that will be the case lol. The Anti-Christ is never really going to get old though…

Malcolm Gladwell is a man who lies for money. Actually, I do not know that. In fact, if I was to guess, I would guess that he geniunely believes what he writes. I however, am far more skeptical about the claims he makes.

Take for example the 10,000 hours rule. This is based on a study done by Anders Ericsson. Ericsson however, does not agree with Gladwell. In fact in 2012 he wrote an entire paper on it entitled “The Danger of Delegating Education to Journalists”. Gladwell’s response? To claim that Ericsson has wrongly interpreted his own study.

Approaching with a sensible amount of skepticism then, I took on Gladwell’s book The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference.

The first section talks about the law of the few. This explains how a few key individuals (such as connectors who are people that know everybody, and mavens who know lots of information on say supermarket prices) are the key to many things in our society. He cites the popular idea of the six degrees of Kevin Bacon where you can connect almost all actors to each other through Kevin Bacon.

He then talks about stickiness. How sticky in the message? He cites an example of a leaflet telling students to get a tetanus shot. It turned out that it did not matter how many horrible photos and descriptive language they used in the leaflets – the percentage of students actually going and getting the shots remained at 3%. Yet when they included a map and opening times of the on-campus health centre, this rose to 28%, even though all the students must have known where the health centre was.

In the third section, he goes on to talk about the power of context. Quoting the example of the drastic crime drop in New York City, he espouses the broken window theory. This is the idea that if you leave a broken window people will think nobody cares about the area and crime will increase, whereas if you fix it right away people will see people care and stop committing crime.

There are some strong rebuttals to what Gladwell writes however.

In the case of the law of the few, Gladwell cites a Milgram experiment where he had people send on packages to try and get to someone in a different city. He found that most packages made it, and most of them went through a few key individuals. Gladwell calls these people connectors. However, when Duncan Watts, author of Everything is Obvious, replicated the study, he found that connectors were not important.

In the case of the broken windows theory, this was one of the case studies in Freakonomics, in which the books shows that while everyone in New York was patting themselves on the back for their brilliant new policing strategy that was cutting crime, what had actually happened was that two decades ago they had legalised abortion, and now all the would-be criminals were simply never being born.

Pin a fucking medal on me, I have finished War and Peace. As Mark from Peep Show would say, I am not directly comparing my struggle reading it to the French invasion of Russia and subsequent retreat, but it was very difficult. Well, not so much difficult, but long.

I really got into it at the end. To say the first 800 pages were slow going but then it picked up sounds like a joke, but it did feel a little like that. As you get to know the characters more and more you become more involved with them, and in a novel this long, that is quite a lot.

The epilogues were huge. Normally an epilogue a chapter at the end of a book. Tolstoy had two epilogues, each with a dozen chapters in.

The fact such a book managed to maintain my interest all the way through is praise worth in itself. But this is to assume that the man, in this case “I”, had a choice in continuing to the end. However, history has shown us that once something is set in motion, it is not the will of a single man that moves it. Or something…

After careful consideration, I have decided that heroin is not for me.

I had pretty much decided this already, but Irvine Welsh’s graphic depiction of life on skag in Edinburgh confirmed this view. Maybe it is amazing. Maybe you can kick the habit. But having carefully considered it, I have decided that it probably is not worth the risk of ending up lying on a floor, covered in my own sick, injecting junk into your cock because it is the only vein I can find on my body.

The content is horrible. I have read quite a few of the famous war novels, and none of them match up to this. Perhaps it is because life in the trenches is more of an abstract concept whereas having a drug habit, while not being something I have ever done, is far closer to reality.

Plus, it makes for a really good novel.

It was hard going at first as it is written in Scottish English. However it gets easier as you go along.

Why is there something rather than nothing? Why does the universe exist? That is the question that Lawrence Krauss aims to tackle in his book “A Universe From Nothing”. I first heard him speak at QED and very much enjoyed his book The Physics of Star Trek. This one promised to be almost as good.

I found it sufficiently accessible. Some of it was a bit too clever for me. Sentences such as “when you think about it, x doesn’t make any sense…” I could have thought about some of those problems for a long time and not seen the flaw. However, for the most part it is entirely readable and Krauss is a solid communicator of his ideas.

Given how fast physics is moving, some of the content in this book could soon be out of date. However, for now it is a clear and concise overview of where we are with our understanding of the origin of the universe. There are some fascinating insights. For example, we live at a time when the Big Bang is detectable and we can see we are part of a huge universe. In two trillion years, that will not be the case. All signs of it will have disappeared. Ours is the golden age of cosmology, because the universe is only 13.8 billion years old.

I did not feel it needed some much commentary on religion. There was no religion-bashing, but there was a lot of “which is why the universe must clearly be billions of years old and so scripture must be wrong”. Perhaps this is required this is more relevant for other audiences, but from my perspective, it felt like everyone who was going to read the book would know that already.

Overall I found the book accessible and enjoyable, as well as re-igniting that feeling of excitement about physics.