Archive for the ‘Books’ Category

I had seen the film a decade or so ago (probably on VHS, that is how long ago it was), but with the 100th anniversary of theGreat War arriving, I decided I would read the original novel by Erich Maria Remarque.

It turns out that the war was pretty horrible.

It was not the shocking moments of horror that you might encounter when watching Roman Polanski’s The Pianist. It was the relentless horror, sometimes sparse in the detail, but the fact that you can gloss over such issues, reflects the nightmare of trench warfare. Other times the details are not spared. Of course we all know it was horrible, but simultaneously cannot imagine what it was really like; so such attempts are probably useful.

It would be nice to think we had learned our lesson. Of course, that probably is not the case. Even aside from the two world wars, Nassim Taleb wrote in The Black Swan that after the huge war that raged across the whole of Europe, people presumed we would have realised war was a stupid idea and would never do it again – that was the Napoleonic Wars.

Anyway, back on the book. I knew the ending from the film, so the impact was not as powerful as it could have been. Nevertheless, it is still a bold one.

Michael Shermer is founder of The Skeptics Society and psychology researcher. The Believing Brain brings together much of his research over the past few decades.

Shermer’s take home message is to do with how we form beliefs. Namely, that we form our beliefs first, and then work out what evidence supports them. This is not the way we like to think we make decisions. We like to think that we gather the evidence, weigh it up, then make a decision. However, there is good evidence that we do not.

“The brain will almost always find ways to support what we want to believe, so we should be especially skeptical of things we want to believe.”

That is not actually an exact quote, but I think it is roughly it.

Evolution has given us pattern-detecting brain because false positives are far less harmful than false negatives. This leads us to see patterns that are not there.

This is true even of exaggerated patterns. For example birds will prefer to sit on eggs with even more pronounced patterns than they are supposed to have. Shermer suggests this is also true of dating. Wearing high heals extends the legs of women, so men’s brains are tricking into thinking they are more attractive. Similarly women like men with broad shoulders and who are tall, so platform heals and shoulder pads might help.

We are also predisposed to think there is an agency behind everything. These innate evolutionary traits of patternicity and agenticity explain why so many of us are susceptible to believing there is a creator, even though there is no evidence for this.

He goes on to discuss the idea of SETI as a religion. People believe in it, even though there is no evidence for it. To be fair to him, he does go on to explain in detail why SETI is different from a religion, however I still do not entirely agree with the comparison. SETI is at least consistent with a naturalist world view and is therefore a plausible theory that we are investigating, rather than believing in.

He spends a chapter making the case that conservatives are not that bad. But then he is one. However, he makes a good case of it being important. We need a system to regulate altruism and freeloaders and both conservative and liberal agendas can do this. He also points out a lot of evidence for egalitarianism and communism do not work, hence why we need such agendas.

The final few chapters of the book look at the development of the scientific method and how it can help to overcome the biases and failings of our believing brains. This includes a discussion of how the universe was created. It feels a bit out of place in what is essentially a psychology book, as it will probably become out-of-date independently of the rest of the book’s content. Most of it I knew, but it was an interesting re-cap none the less.

Overall, it is definitely worth a read, offering some powerful explanations for why people believe what they believe and its implications for how we live our lives and structure our society.

In Self-Made Man: My Year Disguised as a Man, Norah Vincent disguises herself as man to experience what it is like living as a different gender. Throughout the book she discusses her experiences, joining a bowling team, dating, having a job, going on a men’s retreat and even spending time in a monastery.

I would say that what she found was fairly predictable. However, I am aware that I probably think that because I am a man and thus have been in the male-culture she wanted to experience all my life. Of course, there is a degree of stereotype to what she finds, but there is probably a lot of truth that men are more emotionally distant from each other, and while women feel their rights and responsibilities are oppressed, men feel oppressed by the responsibilities of having those rights and responsibilities.

I struggled to fully identify with many of the characters in the book however. I do not think I have it has bad as those. If I have an emotional problem, I can talk about it with Elina, my parents or my friends. To an a limited extend perhaps, but a limit that far exceeds the emotionally-bottled-up characters that Norah’s alter ego Ned encounters during his research.

At the end of the book, Norah concludes that she is glad to be a woman. However, it is probably impossible to separate the strain of living in a man’s world from the strain of masking her own identity with that of Ned’s, so drawing much conclusion from that is difficult.

In the end, it comes down to what most sensible people know already. Both genders have problems. Both genders suffer inequality in different areas, some more than others. Working to reduce inequality across everyone will be mutually beneficial for everyone – fighting for women’s issues makes the world better for me, and fighting for men’s issues makes the world better for women. We can all win together.

A number of books on probability I have read recently talk about Nassim Taleb’s book, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable.

Sometimes I wonder if some of the citations and due to the Black Swan meme. It is a great term to use for unexpected events. Capturing the phrase makes it more citable. However, that is not to take anything away from the book. Many have called it one of the most influential books of the past 50 years. The Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman is quoted as saying

The Black Swan changed my view of how the world works

Interesting Taleb goes on a small rant about the Nobel Prize. He questions the validity of some of the winners (though this is increasingly looking correct to do so) and also quotes others who have suggested that the Nobel Prize was a PR stunt designed to put economics on the same step as the natural sciences. Of course, he has not won one yet…

Anyway, the premise of the book is that we often assume that we live in a world known as Mediocristan in which distribution is on a bell curve. Outliers can only go so far. Height for example, you can only deviate so far from the average. However, the great challenge for society is that we actually live in Extremistan, where outliers can deviate significantly. These are the unknown unknowns as Donald Rumsfeld would put it.

How we deal with them is a difficult one. They are the unpredictable, and therefore by their very nature, we cannot predict them. Rather, we need to be prepared to handle them when they inevitably do happen. Forget trying to predict the next outlier that is completely missed by our models and instead try to robust enough to cope when negative ones happen (as well as taking advantage of the positive ones).

The book also deals with human thought processes, in particular our need to turn everything into a narrative. Most skeptics will know that one of the problems with the world is that anecdotes are more easily accepted than data, which makes it so far to get the skeptical point of view across. The issue also causes a lot of bad thinking – we fit things into a narrative that simply do not belong in one.

It is however, something we can turn to our advantage when we recognise it. For example, when going over an unpleasant situation or memory, insert it into a narrative that makes it unavoidable. Also writing down your problems in a narrative can make you feel less guilty about them. Anyway, that is just a small aside.

One of the key messages that I think we should take from Taleb, is the same message that we can take from most of the books I have read recently – that our thinking is flawed, but by recognising those flaws and trying to spot the weakness we know are there, we can be a little less stupid.

Boomerang is almost a follow-up book to Michael Lewis’s The Big Short, looking at the fall out of the global recession across the rest of the world. And by the “rest of the world”, it is basically Europe.

He first looks at Iceland in which he talks to a fisherman that became an investment banker. The whole financial crises can be summed up in the following conversation.

“You spend seven years learning to be a fisherman?” “Yes.” “And after that, you spent months training at the feet of a master before you felt you were capable?” “Yes.” “So why did you think you could be an investment banker without any training?”

He then moves on to Greece and talks about how they got into their financial mess. He claims that almost nobody on Greece pays their taxes, every government official takes bribes and that public employees have completely overrun the government to the point where they now get paid two or three times what any sensible country would pay them. I do not know how true all of that is. He finishes up by discussing Ireland.

It is an interesting, and quite a concise book which made it pleasurable to read. Some of it seems rather shallow though. How much can you rely on the stereotypes of Icelandic and Greek people that are put forward in the book? Probably less than our narrative-over-statistics obsessed minds would allow by default. Especially when he begins to talk about the German’s apparent love of shit. I even read what I would interpret as a Holocaust joke. Several times.

Further, he seems to contradict his earlier writing. The final part of the book talks about how much Germany lost in the sub-prime mortgage collapse. In The Big Short he talks about how American banks created credit default swaps that they did not really understand and how one of the people who saw it coming was Greg Lippmann from Deutsche Bank. In Boomerang he proposes the exact opposite – that the American banks knew exactly what they were doing in selling worthless assets to German banks.

In fact, the more I think about it, the more I think that what Michael Lewis has written in this book is actually complete bollocks. The collective lesson I took from Silver, Watts, Kahneman and Taleb is that the financial crisis was too complicated to predict, but humans have a tendency to add a narrative after to try and explain it to themselves in simple terms. Then Lewis comes along and says the financial crisis happens because the Greeks are lazy, the Irish are stupid and the Germans have a shit-fetish.

Leonard of Quirm, Rincewind, Captain Carrot, and a chance to save the world! What more could you want from a Discworld novel? Plus a little bit of Death too. I really enjoyed The Last Hero. It did not have too much substance to it, but it was only half the length of a typical Discworld novel and the short format worked really well for it.

Ah, the problems of eighteenth century women, how plentiful they are. Luckily, though I hate to spoil it for you all, everyone ends up with a husband. So that’s nice.

Daniel Kahneman is a psychologist who won the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economics. His book “Thinking, Fast and Slow” summarises a lot of the research he has done and proves to be a fascinating reading.

As someone who isn’t a psychologist I found some of it heavy going, but very interesting. The book is arranged into sections and these are then broken down into short chapters, which made it more readable.

Some of it was shocking too. For example, when it comes to making parol decisions, one of the biggest factors is how recently the parol office has eaten! Just after a meal they are far likely to grand you parol than just before a meal.

His discussion on priming reminded me a lot of what Richard Wiseman talks about in his book Rip It Up. Behaviour can drive emotion, even though we always think of it as emotion that drives behaviour.

The question of how effective pure branding advertising is gains some support. “Familiarity is not easy to distinguish from truth”. The more you show something to people the more confident they feel about it. Other times a lack of clarity is helpful. For example, using a bad font makes exam scores go up, because people have to concentrate more than they normally would and so make less mistakes.

Much of the book discusses the differences between System 1 (that does the fast thinking) and System 2 (that does the slower, more considered thinking). Elina often reproaches me for not noticing snails on the path, suggesting that I need to notice things or one day I will be eaten by a lion (metaphorically, these days). I now maintain that my System 1 is keeping an eye on things and simply not bothering to engage my System 2 because there is no danger.

Kahneman also adds weight o Burton Malkiel’s book A Random Walk Down Wall Street, which both discuss how the stock market is almost entirely unpredictable and therefore stock market traders actually add no value to what they do. Indeed, as 60% of mutual funds do worse-than-guessing, they actually subtract value.

Ultimately, people are just really bad at making judgements. 90% of drivers rate themselves as above average. Similarly, the majority of new businesses fail, yet the people who start them almost always believe they are exempt from such rules.

The answer to many of these issues is to replace judgement with a formula. This is essentially the entire point of Michael Lewis’s book Moneyball. Even a simple formula will do, according to Kahneman multiple regression does not even make it much more accurate.

One of the most useful points I took away from the book (almost certainly not the objectively most useful) is the idea of taking small gambles. In one chapter, Kahneman describes how people are unwilling to take profitable one-off gambles, such as a 50/50 chance of winning £20 or losing £10, but would be willing to take it if they knew they could take it 100 times in a row. The larger sample size means they are very likely to come out on top. However, they fear doing it once because there is a 50% chance they will lose and that will go down in their mental accounting.

Kahneman makes the point that we are “not on our death bed” and thus we will get chance to get even with the universe over time. Extended warranties are a great example of this. You pay a premium to insure your products, so it costs you money in the long term. A better strategy is not to buy the warranty and accept that sometimes you are going to have to replace a product – but over your lifetime you will almost certainly be up.

Moneyball is a Michael Lewis book about Billy Beane revolutionised baseball by replacing the scouting staff of Oakland Athletics with one geek and his computer named Paul DePodesta. They started drafting based on statistics, rather than whether someone looked like a traditional baseball player. The result was that with one of the lowest payrolls in baseball, they became the first team ever to win 20 games in a row.

It is written in Lewis’ usual style of presenting the information in a story narrative and is essentially the same theme as many of his other books – how people have had a huge amount of success by exploiting inefficiencies in the market.

A very interesting read and makes you wonder how many areas of human affairs suffer from such inefficiencies. The answer is almost certainly, a lot.

Imagine a world in which all books are banned. Where all books are burned because they might contain conflicting ideas. Where thinking is actively discouraged in favour of accepting the simple truth presented by authority. In short, imagine the Bible Belt.

This is the setting for Ray Bradbury‘s dystopian novel, Fahrenheit 451.

I had already seen the movie, which I enjoyed, and I enjoyed the book as well. However, I would not go as far as Tom to suggest that it is better than Nineteen Eighty-Four or Brave New World. I enjoyed both of those far more whereas I cannot say I imagine myself re-reading Fahrenheit 451. Definitely worth reading though.