What else I'm reading: Winter/Spring 2022
books books books
I may have given up on writing multi-page reviews of every book I read. A couple of my posts recently have been the best review that I could write in 60-90 minutes. Here's an even more condensed version: some quick thoughts on other books I've read over the last six months or so. Nonfiction books first, and then a few works of fiction if you scroll down to the bottom:
High Output Management, by Andrew Grove
Overall I wasn't wowed by this book, but perhaps that's b/c I'm not currently managing anyone. A few of his core ideas:
1. "there are only two ways in which a manager can impact an employee’s output: motivation and training."
2. He writes a lot about "mix[ing] knowledge-power people with position-power people", something that always seemed like a challenge to me as well, having worked at a software company that had managers, software developers, and people with PhD's in science/physics.
3. "A manager’s output = The output of his organization + The output of the neighboring organizations under his influence"
Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches, by Marvin Harris
A book that explains the logical nature of, as the subtitle says, "The Riddles of Culture":
Why do Hindus not eat cows? (Among other reasons, "The Indian farmer who can’t replace his sick or deceased ox is in much the same situation as an American farmer who can neither replace nor repair his broken tractor. But there is an important difference: tractors are made by factories, but oxen are made by cows.")
Why do Jewish people not eat pork? (Pork is very tasty, but "the Middle East is the wrong place to raise pigs...adult pigs will die if exposed to direct sunlight and air temperatures over 98° F. In the Jordan Valley, air temperatures of 110° F. occur almost every summer, and there is intense sunshine throughout the year." So pigs are tabooed so people won't be tempted by their tastiness to try to raise them.)
And so on and so forth. I liked the first half of the book better than the second half, where chapters often got deep into biblical history/medieval history (in my opinion, pretty dry) in order to make the point.
Mindwise, by Nicholas Epley
Being able to think about what others are thinking is a uniquely human talent: "Arguably, your brain’s greatest skill is its ability to think about the minds of others in order to understand them better. " In some situations we're good at doing that, and in others we are systematically bad at it. We're often "overestimating the extent to which others will see, think, and feel the same way you do."
For example, we know when we're lying, so we feel like our tells are obvious—but they're not: "when people are asked to lie or to conceal strong emotions, they tend to think the truth will be detected by others significantly more often than it actually is. "
Similarly, because we know ourselves so intimately, we focus on aspects of ourselves that other people often don't notice: in one study asking participants to rate the attractiveness of others, "when we asked our volunteers to write down how the evaluator would describe their picture, they included small details and subtle features that only a detailed examination would pick up on. These included “wearing no makeup,” “mouth looks a little large (at least my lips do),” “my smile isn’t as wide as normal,” and “sexy hands.” Of course, nobody knows how wide your smile normally is, and I don’t even know what it means to have “sexy hands.” You can sense our volunteers dialing in the microscope on themselves."
One of his pieces advice for understanding others better is (drumroll, please)... to ask them! "Getting perspective was far more effective than taking perspective."
The book overall wasn't a standout for me, although recently I have been thinking a lot about how "figuring out what your opponent is thinking" is critical for being successful at sports—and maybe that started with this book.
Ingredients, by George Zaidan
I thought this was going to be a book about the weird things we put in our food. But, it mostly was a book about how science works, approached through the lens of debates over processed food, cigarettes, and sunscreen. The writing style reminded me of someone my age who spends a lot of time on the internet absorbing memes ("Maybe the road to hell—cobblestoned with Reese’s, studded with Gushers, and sprinkled with Cheeto dust—isn’t as new as it seems."). And the goofy diagrams match the writing style:
Games People Play, by Eric Berne
The "games" in the title are the kind of stereotypical human interactions that you might see in a network sitcom, and can recognize the whole conversation as a stereotype/meme (you can immediately see where it's going). Things like (to pick a few while scrolling through the ebook quickly): complaining about how bad things are nowadays, making a show of letting people see how hard you've tried, or any situation that ends with someone saying "look what you made me do!"
Psychologically healthy people should be skilled at not initiating games. When it comes to taking part in games that other people initiate, it's a little more complex: sometimes, it's not worth it to try to "dissolve" the game, and better to just play along with the peace of mind that comes from recognizing the game as a game. In other situations (especially if I have a closer relationship with the other person taking part?), I'll try to point out and dissolve the game. Along similar lines, here's his concluding paragraph:
THE sombre picture presented in Parts I and II of this book, in which human life is mainly a process of filling in time until the arrival of death, or Santa Claus, with very little choice, if any, of what kind of business one is going to transact during the long wait, is a commonplace but not the final answer. For certain fortunate people there is something which transcends all classifications of behaviour, and that is awareness; something which rises above the programming of the past, and that is spontaneity; and something that is more rewarding than games, and that is intimacy. But all three of these may be frightening and even perilous to the unprepared. Perhaps they are better off as they are, seeking their solutions in popular techniques of social action, such as ‘togetherness’. This may mean that there is no hope for the human race, but there is hope for individual members of it.
The writing style is very "1960s psychology", and because of the format and style of the book I wouldn't really recommend it. But the ideas are there, and I think a re-write in a more modern style could be a successful book nowadays.
The Paradox of Choice, by Barry Schwartz
More choices are not always better. "Without the fishbowl, there truly would be no limits. But the fish would have to spend all its time just struggling to stay alive. " The main points: 1) the more time we spend deciding, the less time we spend actually enjoying the results of our decision, and 2) the more choices we're aware of, the more time we'll spend regretting not having made the best possible decision. The best bet, he suggests, is to cultivate a mindset of looking for something that's good enough to meet your standards (this is called "satisficing"), instead of looking for a best possible choice.
Dedicating ourselves to something is psychologically satisfying, even if we're not choosing the best of all possible things that we could be dedicating ourselves to—for example, the Amish ("How much do they suffer psychologically from the constraints imposed by community membership and its attendant responsibilities? My suspicion is that they suffer rather little.").
There's some other arguments, as well — for example, that we aren't all that rational and often don't even truly know what we want, anyway.
Overall, a pretty interesting book. Although probably some of the studies won't replicate, I still more-or-less follow the philosophy laid out here (also see the book about Stoicism, reviewed below). Sometimes it makes the most sense to make one choice and then explore it deeply instead of trying to experience everything in order to only make perfect choices.
Too Soon Old, Too Late Smart, by Gordon Livingston
A book of life advice. Nothing stood out to me all that much, but I've read a lot of these books before. (I do remember a few chapters had an "Against Victimhood" bent, although I think this book was written before "being a victim" became a part of our culture). A couple lines I highlighted:
We love someone when the importance of his or her needs and desires rises to the level of our own.
Any relationship is under the control of the person who cares the least.
Keeping our expectations low protects us from disappointment.
“The good news is that life expectancy is increasing; the bad news is that the extra years are tacked on at the end.”
And this comment on perfectionism reminds me of my review of X+Y (and also reminds me a bit of what I just wrote about The Paradox of Choice, above):
In defense of perfectionism, it might be said that obsessive people make the world function for the rest of us. Who, after all, wants to be operated on by a relaxed surgeon, or fly on an airplane maintained by mechanics satisfied when their work is “good enough?” If we excel at anything, it is because we are prepared to sweat the details (wherein resides either God or the devil, depending on your orientation).
There are merits to 'good enough', and there are merits to perfectionism; it's all about finding that right balance.
Mate, by Tucker Max and Geoffrey Miller
Dating advice (mostly for men). They frame the book around evolutionary psychology — i.e., women are attracted to certain things due to evolutionary impulses. It always feels weird to talk about dating advice, since there's this spectrum from "pure-hearted advice" to "skeevy PUA tactics". Their main pieces of advice boil down to "become a better person" (in the ways women will find attractive) and "consider things from a woman's perspective". So, it's reasonable advice but sounds/feels weird at times, too. Here's a sample from the "become a better person" column:
In any domain, you have to go through the valley of genuinely low confidence before you can reach the peak of genuinely high confidence...The best thing you can do is accept that this is the process and develop a mature perspective.
Yes, this is totally fucking terrifying. I have no idea what I’m doing. I have zero confidence that I can get us home without killing us both. But that’s OK. That’s exactly what I should be feeling, since I’ve never done this shit before.
This perspective can give you a kind of metaconfidence: you’re confident that you will be able to improve your competence at any skill if you work at it and that will lead to demonstrated performance and real confidence as a result.
The real magic happens at this metaconfidence level. The more skills you learn, the more domains you master and traits you cultivate, the more experienced you’ll get at pushing through the low-confidence barrier… and the more confidence you will build.
Bird by Bird, by Anne Lamott
I read writing advice to become a better writer. At times, reading the book and just absorbing her good writing felt more important than the actual advice being dispensed:
But there are people out there in the world who almost inspire me to join the government witness protection program, just so I can be sure I will never have to talk to them again. Maybe there is someone like this in your life. Take a character whom one of your main characters feels this way about and put the two of them in the same elevator.
Or:
"You don’t love to garden?" they’d ask incredulously, and I’d shake my head and not mention that what I love are cut flowers, because this sounds so violent and decadent, like when Salvador Dalí said his favorite animal was fillet of sole.
On Writing, by Stephen King
Formula: 2nd Draft = 1st Draft - 10%. Good luck.
Another book that I read to absorb advice on how to write better. The first 1/3 of the book is a memoir (focused on how he got into writing), so if there was anything I learned it was in the sense I just mentioned above of absorbing the author's good writing. For On Writing and Bird by Bird both, some of the advice didn't apply to me too much because they both talk about writing fiction, and (at least for now) I'm really only interesting in writing non-fiction. They also write about finding an agent and other stuff like that.
Aside from the quote above, I mainly remember his number one piece of advice: read a lot, and write a lot. Working on it...
Very Important People, by Ashley Mears
A unique book on the economics of the international VIP club scene. If you wouldn't read 250 pages about that, but might read 80 pages, I can also suggest this book review submitted to the ACX book review contest. Here's my ten-minute book review:
Promoters are looking for women with "model" looks, which is NOT the same as just being very attractive (this came up again and again and again):
"Don’t bring that. No tits and ass. Just skinny and tall."
Or:
“only really sophisticated people can tell the difference between models and hot girls.”
This line seemed so overly specific that it couldn't possibly be true:
The busboys who carry trays of empty bottles and glasses are short and brown-skinned Latinos, between five feet three and five feet five tall.
Or when the author helped a club promoter invite some attractive women to a club that night:
Even better, he suggested, would be to use key words like big party or cool party, and sushi. Models love sushi. And I shouldn’t use words like organize.
The book is at the same time so ludicrous that it's funny but also a serious examination of a labor market, so to speak:
Model scouts thus exploit global economic inequalities as they reproduce a colonial structure of extracting raw commodities from economically marginalized parts of the world like Eastern Europe and Brazil to profit from them in more developed markets in metropoles like New York and Paris. Hence [one club promoter's] nightly company of a dozen Brazilian models and a Croatian girlfriend.
Or:
They exploit girls in the classic Marxist sense in that they can extract surplus value from girls’ bodies, because they have a structural advantage over girls, who are unable to broker girls or benefit as much from their own value.
It's a very interesting book that is never exactly what you would expect.
The Captured Economy, by Brink Lindsey and Steven Teles
I was already on the "we have too much regulation" bandwagon, but I read this book looking for a book-length discussion. I remember feeling a little disappointed by the book, but there were some good stats to highlight. I learned the (made-up?) word liberaltarian from this book, which roughly defines me as well—the outcomes I'm looking for are in line with the American left, but I believe that can often be achieved through less regulation and more free markets. (As they say, “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” Many laws benefit those who are already rich & powerful enough to have political influence.) For example:
Medical licensing constrains our supply of doctors:
Under state licensing laws, the American Medical Association is vested with the authority to provide accreditation for U.S. medical schools, and accreditation is limited to a particular class size. Thus the medical profession controls how many newly minted MDs are produced in the country every year. From 1980 until around 2005, the number of medical school slots was frozen at around 16,000 first-year students
And then they don't even keep us safe:
Since a career can span many decades, during which time best practices frequently change in dramatic fashion, the mere possession of a license offers little assurance that large numbers of practicing doctors are actually competent. Yes, licensing boards do have the power to suspend or revoke licenses as well as issue fines and reprimands, but the actual discipline imposed by such boards is notoriously lax. Of doctors who made at least 10 separate malpractice payments between 1990 and 2005, only one third received any kind of discipline from their state medical boards.
And of course they discuss patents:
“The justification of the patent system is that by slowing down the diffusion of technical progress it ensures that there will be more progress to diffuse.”
...it is generally acknowledged that the rise in illegal copying has depressed sales. Nevertheless, the supply of new music has soared over this period, from 40,000 new albums released in 1999 to almost 80,000 in 2011.
Similar trends hold for both movies and books...the number of print titles published by traditional publishers increased 44 percent (from 215,138 to 309,957) between 2002 and 2012, while the number of self-published print book and ebook titles exploded from 85,468 in 2008 to 458,564 in 2013...
...How can a significant decline in effective copyright protection go hand in hand with such a strong surge in creative expression? The same digital revolution that has facilitated unauthorized copying has also slashed the cost of producing creative works. So even if the payoff of hitting the commercial success jackpot has been reduced, the upfront costs of recording an album, making a movie, or publishing a book have fallen as well. Accordingly, the net effect on the financial incentives facing artists may be a wash or even favorable. Furthermore, and more fundamental, the fact is that nonpecuniary considerations predominate in motivating creative expression. The overwhelming majority of creative works don’t sell much, but the intrinsic satisfactions of artistic self-expression are so powerful that people will engage in creative pursuits regardless.
Other chapters discuss over-regulation in finance/Wall Street and zoning laws, among other issues.
Natural Born Heroes, by Christopher McDougall
“Be fit to be useful.” A book about working out...kind of. It talks about modern workout (parkour, ultrarunning, etc) and nutrition (eating ultra-low carb diets so the body burns more fat, vegetable oils, etc) movements interspersed with telling the story of the Kidnapping of Heinrich Kreipe (a WWII German general kidnapped on Crete in 1944). Although he maybe never says it explicitly, he treats these ideas like they're the lost knowledge of the ancients which we could use to create modern supermen. It's kind of inspiring but at the same time a little goofy. A quick sample:
“What if everything we thought we knew about muscles was wrong?” Tom Myers concludes. “Are there really six hundred muscles, or only one?” Bruce Lee always said his best punch came from his big toe, and now it seemed he wasn’t kidding.
In the sixth century B.C., Eumastas hoisted a stone so huge that no one has lifted its equal in 2,600 years. How did he get air under those 1,058 pounds without the aid of steroids, padded gloves, or gym equipment? Or is the question its own answer: was it because he had to rely on his own body genius and struggle with bumpy boulders, instead of smooth modern steel, that Eumastas learned more than we’ll ever know about leverage, balance, and explosive power?
A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy, by William B. Irvine
I forgot much of this book in the time between finishing it and writing this mini-review, but the highlights I'd made in the e-book allowed me to write this review: I liked the way he motivates the book by explaining the benefits of thinking about what your life means and how to best live it, in other words, having a philosophy of life:
...it is entirely possible these days for someone to have been raised in a religion and to have taken philosophy courses in college but still to be lacking a philosophy of life. ..Unfortunately, although the theoretical side of philosophy has flourished [between Ancient Greece and now], the practical side has withered away...This book is written for those seeking a philosophy of life.
My philosophy of life was already more-or-less in line with these Stoic ideas (fighting the hedonic treadmill, figuring out what you can survive without in order to make yourself more robust, understanding that bad things will happen in life and understanding that a lot of sadness and disappointment comes from reality not meeting your expectations, etc.) before I read this book, but I wanted to get the book-length version of what this Stoic thing was about.
Irvine recommends meditating on/visualizing negative things happening to you, in order to be more appreciative of the things that you do have:
Epictetus also advocates negative visualization. He counsels us, for example, when we kiss our child, to remember that she is mortal and not something we own—that she has been given to us “for the present, not inseparably nor for ever.” His advice: In the very act of kissing the child, we should silently reflect on the possibility that she will die tomorrow.
This is...a bit more Stoic than I've ever been myself. I've managed to internalize low expectations without needing to literally visualize my friends/family dying on the regular.
He suggests another idea that's very much in line with my way of thinking, but for me it originally came more from reading about Buddhism than about philosophy. (The book also frequently touches on the similarities between Buddhism and Stoicism.) He calls this "fatalism with respect to the present". In other words, accept that you can no longer change the past or present, but you can take actions to try to create the future that you want:
the Stoics, I think, advocate fatalism with respect to the present. It is clear, after all, that we cannot, through our actions, affect the present, if by the present we mean this very moment. It may be possible for me to act in a way that affects what happens in a decade, a day, a minute, or even a half-second from now; it is impossible, however, for me to act in a way that alters what is happening right now, since as soon as I act to affect what is happening right now, that moment in time will have slipped into the past and therefore cannot be affected.
In their advocacy of fatalism, then, the Stoics were advising us to be fatalistic, not with respect to the future but with respect to the past and present.
I had also, before reading this book, adopted an idea that he calls "social fatalism": "In our dealings with others, we should operate on the assumption that they are fated to behave in a certain way." In other words, not trying to control people and not trying to change people. (Although, I worry: how does this trade off against being vulnerable/truly caring deeply about others?)
And through Stoicism, he comes to a similar conclusion I've come to on competition (also very similar to The Infinite Game):
When I row competitively, it may look as though I am trying to beat the other rowers, but I am in fact engaged in a much more significant competition: the one against my other self [who wants to be lazy]...
It is curious, but my competitors in a race are simultaneously my teammates in the much more important competition against my other self.
So, overall: a book that didn't leave a huge impression on me, but mostly because I was already living in line with it due to other books/articles/etc that I'd read and been convinced by earlier in life. But perhaps a good book for you to read, to learn more about my philosophy of living life.
She Has Her Mother's Laugh, by Carl Zimmer
[I've started but not yet finished this one] I've been struggling to get through this book about the history of genetics/heredity. It's long (600 "pages" on my Kindle edition), and it's more of a history book (telling the stories of the various historical figures involved in the development of these ideas) than an 'ideas book'. The writing is good but I haven't had much reading motivation in general lately, so this book that's not in my "easy reading" groove is unsurprisingly going slowly. If my description above sounds like it might be your thing, then you should give it a try, it's just not really in my wheelhouse right now.
How We Learn, by Benedict Carey
Another book about a subject that I'm already familiar with. But I made it through pretty quickly and it didn't feel like wasted time. There was one intriguing technique that I hadn't heard of before: a learning process that he calls Perceptual Learning Modules (PLMs). Essentially, you use a program that's like a flash-card test, where you see a picture (for example) and try to quickly give it the right classification. Here's an example where study subjects tried to learn to quickly read an aircraft's instrument panel:
Each participant received a brief introduction to the instruments, and then the training began: nine sessions, twenty-four presentations on the same module, with short breaks in between. The participants saw, on the screen, an instrument panel, below which were the seven choices [“Straight & Level,” “Straight Climb,” “Descending Turn,”, etc.]. If the participant chose the wrong answer—which novices tend to do at the beginning—the screen burped and provided the right one. The correct answer elicited a chime. Then the next screen popped up: another set of dials, with the same set of seven choices.
After one hour, even the experienced pilots had improved, becoming faster and more accurate in their reading. The novices’ scores took off: After one hour, they could read the panels as well as pilots with an average of one thousand flying hours. They’d built the same reading skill, at least on ground, in 1/1,000th of the time. Kellman and Kaiser performed a similar experiment with a module designed to improve visual navigation using aviation charts—and achieved similar results.
In essence, it's a learning technique that's intentionally trying to help build your intuition. You're not taking classes learning from a textbook how these dials work, you're just looking at the dials and getting the feedback needed to build an intuition about what the readings mean.
PLMs are really appealing to me as an athlete/coach, because one of the biggest challenges is teaching people to "see the field" and react quickly to changing circumstances. Could we build a Perceptual Learning Module to teach people to have on-field intuition? This is something I hope to follow up on someday. And from what I can tell, it's certainly under-discussed in the online communities I read that I know are interested in the science of learning.
These PLMs were just one small part of the book that drew my attention, the rest of the book was focused on the more "standard" science of learning that I've read about before: using interleaving and spaced repetition, forcing yourself to try to remember something instead of just re-reading the textbook over and over, taking breaks to allow inspiration to bubble up over time, etc.
Cynical Theories, by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay
A book about the history of, what do you call it, social justice politics, or "critical theory" or woke-ism. This book is a bit more focused on the academic side than the political side though. I was a bit disappointed in the book, because it was more focused on the history of the movement, i.e. where critical theory came from, when I was looking for more of a critical examination of the ideas themselves.
Makers and Walkaway, by Cory Doctorow
I haven't been reading much fiction lately. I wanted to like these books — they came recommended by other writers I like, and the science fiction/speculative fiction is right up my usual alley. But I struggled to get through both of them. They both had interesting ideas but the plot turned out to be weird in ways that didn't vibe with me.
The Poppy War, by R.F. Kuang
I didn't like it enough to move on to the other books in the series, but I didn't dislike it, either. Some of the plot has already slipped from my mind. I think one reason I didn't feel compelled to pick up the next book in the series is that the ending left me a little disappointed, and not excited to find out where things went from here.
Termination Shock, by Neal Stephenson
Not my favorite book by Neal Stephenson, but I wouldn't say I struggled to get through it the way I did with the Cory Doctorow books. I think I was excited by the set-up of the first few chapters, and a little disappointed with the direction that things ended up going—the ride didn't end up being as fun as I expected it to be. My favorite part of the book was the first ~50 pages about a guy and a hog.
The Dispossessed, by Ursula K. Le Guin
I had never heard of this book a year ago, and since then I've had two people tell me it's their favorite book. And it didn't disappoint, it's easily my favorite of the fiction on this list. The character building / world building was very strong: you could really feel that these characters who lived in a society very different from ours also thought very differently than we do. I liked that none of the societies in the book are "perfect" — each has some pros but some cons as well.
A few more books which I still may-or-may-not finish writing full-length reviews for:
Range, by David Epstein
Radical Markets, by Eric Posner & Glen Weyl
Optionality, by Richard Meadows
Conflicted, by Ian Leslie
Ultralearning, by Scott Young
Chasing the Scream, by Johann Hari
The Coddling of the American Mind, by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt
Ironically, I feel the pull to write more about these books because they are the best books on this list, or at least are the most relevant to my interests. So these might be the books in this post that I'd recommend the most. For some of them I've started writing a longer review but haven't yet finished. I apologize that the best books in this post are the ones that don't get mini-reviews.