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f7d9395c_atings_and_reviews___Gwern_net__Review | [Title] Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea [Author] Barbara Demick [Rating] ★★★★★ [Year] 2009 [Review] | Highly recommended. Probably the second best book I’ve read about North Korea, after B.R. Myer’s The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves and Why It Matters. | [] | Ratings and reviews - Gwern.net | Review | http://www.gwern.net/Book%20reviews | 4/1438042982502.13_20150728002302-00293-ip-10-236-191-2_475259833_0.json |
f7d9395c_atings_and_reviews___Gwern_net__Review | [Title] Past, Present, and Future of Statistical Science [Author] Xihong Lin [Rating] ★★★★ [Year] 2014 [Read] 2014/07/13 [Review] | Past, Present, and Future of Statistical Science (ed. Lin et al 2014) is a large (52 chapters by ~50 contributors, 643 pages, 9.8M PDF) anthology of essays/articles/reviews/lists touching on all sorts of topics by many famous names (Efron, Rubin, Gelman, Wasserman, Tibshirani, Laird, Cook) - some of whom I know solely from methods bearing their names! The typesetting is tasteful & of high quality, with so many equations & graphs my PDF viewer visibly lags when scrolling. I read about it on Andrew Gelman’s blog & thought it would be interesting to read a broad survey of what’s going on in statistics. The anthology ranges from bureaucracy to professional autobio to reviews of subfields to speculations & challenges about future developments to advice about publishing & research. (Probably it would have been better to turn this into 2 volumes: the readers interested in careers & advice have to the technical material, while readers interested in that may not survive the sections about COPSS & autobios.) Since statisticians get involved with any topic they please, the subject areas range from deer in Canada - & trying not to fall out of the helicopter - to traveling to the moon to breast cancer to polygraphs. Given the heterogeneity, much of it was boring or over my head or both, but much was interesting & I learned about novel topics. In one chapter, a survey statistician reminiscences about how she stumbled into statistics accidentally & fighting sexism in her early career & another mentions that the methodological debates over the famous Kinsey studies of sexuality were her entree to biostatistics while a third was unfairly treated by a Coast Guard exam & learned statistics to prove the exam was bogus while yet a fourth picked math as his major because the signup line at the college was shorter & thereby wandered into the intersection of statistics & agriculture, & in another chapter, Arthur Dempster is still gamely defending the Dempster-Shafer paradigm of statistics after all these years, while in yet another chapter there is a discussion of issues in high-dimensional data I couldn’t understand etc. The introductory bits about the history of COPSS were boring, self-indulgent, & devoid of explanations why the organization functioned or what good it did or why outsiders valued it & what really went on inside it. The autobiography section features people who can remember all the way back to the 1920s or so, a time when statistics was very different than it is now. Reading them a few at a time (they’re generally easy reads), a number of interesting trends pop up. For example, people seem to get married extremely young, as grad students or undergrads, after short romances; it’s impossible to mistake the computing revolution: before the 1960s or so, computers & techniques requiring a great deal of computation never come up, but then they become increasingly common (sometimes with shocking details: one person mentions that to test a cool new idea, using a simulation method, ate their department’s entire computer budget for that month) & transformed approaches starting in the ‘80s, & Bickel mentions in his essay his “pleased surprise that some of my asymptotic theory based ideas, in particular, one-step estimates, really worked” when implemented on modern computers; a subtrend here is also that Bayesian methods seem to explode overnight then too & even frequentists begin borrowing Bayesian techniques & logic when useful (thankfully, Tukey’s quip that “The collective noun for a group of statisticians is a quarrel” may no longer be true); WWII appears as a clear break-line in the earliest autobios, & to judge by the autobios (a selected sample to be sure!) academia used to be far less competitive & one could (in the great post-WWII expansion) almost fall into a tenured position. Some bios are humorous, like Olkin’s : …Wald had a classic European lecture style. He started at the upper left corner of the blackboard and finished at the lower right. The lectures were smooth and the delivery was a uniform distribution. …The notion of an application in its current use did not exist. I don’t recall the origin of the following quotation, but it is attributed to Wald: “Consider an application. Let X1, . . . , Xn be i.i.d. random variables.” …The Master’s degree program required a thesis and mine was written with Wolfowitz. The topic was on a sequential procedure that Leon Herbach (he was ahead of me) had worked on. Wolfowitz had very brief office hours, so there usually was a queue to see him. When I did see him in his office he asked me to explain my question at the blackboard. While talking at the blackboard Wolfowitz was multi-tasking (even in 1947) by reading his mail and talking on the telephone. I often think of this as an operatic trio in which each singer is on a different wavelength. This had the desired effect in that I never went back. …Many prominent statisticians attended the meeting, and I had a chance to meet some of them and young students interested in statistics, and to attend the courses. Wolfowitz taught sequential analysis, Cochran taught sampling, and R.A. Fisher taught something. Or the history related is surprising, for example, the revelation that the Chernoff bound was actually proven by Rubin (yes, he did that too) in Chernoff’s essay “A career in statistics”, where he mentions a tragicomic incident in rocketry where a clever method for course-correction turned out to be unnecessary.While Cook’s distance in looking for problems in linear models stems from one bizarre rat (“Reflections on a statistical career and their implications”): …I redid his calculations, looked at residual plots and performed a few other checks that were standard for the time. This confirmed his results, leading to the possibilities that either there was something wrong with the experiment, which he denied, or his prior expectations were off. All in all, this was not a happy outcome for either of us. I subsequently decided to use a subset of the data for illustration in a regression course that I was teaching at the time. Astonishingly, the selected subset of the data produced results that clearly supported my colleague’s prior expectation and were opposed to those from the full data. This caused some anxiety over the possibility that I had made an error somewhere, but after considerable additional analysis I discovered that the whole issue centered on one rat. If the rat was excluded, my colleague’s prior expectations were sustained; if the rat was included his expectations were contradicted. The measurements on this discordant rat were accurate as far as anyone knew, so the ball was back in my now quite perplexed colleague’s court. The anxiety that I felt during my exploration of the rat data abated but did not disappear completely because of the possibility that similar situations had gone unnoticed in other regressions. There were no methods at the time that would have identified the impact of the one unusual rat; for example, it was not an outlier as judged by the standard techniques. I decided that I needed a systematic way of finding such influential observations if they were to occur in future regressions, and I subsequently developed a method that easily identified the irreconcilable rat. My colleagues at Minnesota encouraged me to submit my findings for publication (Cook, 1977), which quickly took on a life of their own, eventually becoming known as Cook’s Distance. And naturally, someone will choose to go meta & criticize the implicit goal of the autobios & explicit goal of the career advice section - as one would hope of statisticians, he recognizes the epistemological peril of a series of highly-selected freeform anecdotes; Terry Speed in “Never ask for or give advice, make mistakes, accept mediocrity, enthuse”: What’s wrong with advice? For a start, people giving advice lie. That they do so with the best intentions doesn’t alter this fact. This point has been summarized nicely by Radhika Nagpal (2013). I say trust the people who tell you “I have no idea what I’d do in a comparable situation. Perhaps toss a coin.” Of course people don’t say that, they tell you what they’d like to do or wish they had done in some comparable situation. You can hope for better. What do statisticians do when we have to choose between treatments A and B, where there is genuine uncertainty within the expert community about the preferred treatment? Do we look for a statistician over 40 and ask them which treatment we should choose? We don’t, we recommend running a randomized experiment, ideally a double-blind one, and we hope to achieve a high adherence to the assigned treatment from our subjects. So, if you really don’t know what to do, forget advice, just toss a coin, and do exactly what it tells you. But you are an experiment with n = 1, you protest. Precisely. What do you prefer with n = 1: an observational study or a randomized trial? (It’s a pity the experiment can’t be singly, much less doubly blinded.) You may wonder whether a randomized trial is justified in your circumstances. That’s a very important point. Is it true that there is genuine uncertainty within the expert community (i.e., you) about the preferred course of action? If not, then choosing at random between your two options is not only unethical, it’s stupid. Not all life incidents are amusing. In Gray’s “Promoting equity”, in between fighting the good fight, she proudly relates an incident I would be ashamed of, especially were I a statistician: Early in my career I received a notice from Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association (TIAA), the retirement plan used at most private and many public universities including American University, listing what I could expect in retirement benefits from my contribution and those of the university in the form of x dollars per $100,000 in my account at age 65. There were two columns, one headed “women” and a second, with amounts 15% higher, headed “men.” When I contacted the company to point out that Title VII prohibited discrimination in fringe benefits as well as in salary, I was informed that the figures represented discrimination on the basis of “longevity,” not on the basis of sex. When I asked whether the insurer could guarantee that I would live longer than my male colleagues, I was told that I just didn’t understand statistics. Learning that the US Department of Labor was suing another university that had the same pension plan, I offered to help the attorney in charge, the late Ruth Weyand, an icon in women’s rights litigation…At first we concentrated on gathering data to demonstrate that the difference in longevity men and women was in large part due to voluntary lifestyle choices, most notably smoking and drinking. In a settlement conference with the TIAA attorneys, one remarked, “Well, maybe you understand statistics, but you don’t understand the law.” A statistician asking for guarantees! & why should voluntary lifestyle changes affect whether a predictable difference be compensated for? Pensions are job compensation, not a moral code handed down from on high, & if men do not live as long as women, ’equal’ pay is never equal & defrauds them. Or, would Gray be against maternal leave, seeing as pregnancy is a “voluntary lifestyle choice”? & consider the sophistry: “in large part” - so would she have supported a differential which corresponded to the residual? If their analysis had showed up that black men drink & smoke even more than white men, would Gray be pleased to see a ‘black penalty’ applied to their pension payments? When is equal not equal? As always, one merely needs to ask: “who, whom?” The autobiographical essays are interesting, but somewhat dry. I was pleased to reach the meat of the anthology: the freeform technical papers. Some of the chapters introduced me to ideas I had missed, such as the “bet on sparsity” argument (Cook, pg103), which reminds me of one folk argument for Occam’s razor: you should assume the world is relatively simple & predictable & take actions based on that belief, because if the world is that way, then your actions will attain their ends & that is good, while if the world is inherently complex/unpredictable, then your actions will have no net effect which is neither good nor bad, so the former scenario dominates the latter. I paid close attention to Tibshirani’s paper later in the volume, “In praise of sparsity and convexity”. Similarly, Dunson’s “Nonparametric Bayes” introduced me to an area I had little inkling of prior. The biostatistics papers (eg Breslow’s “Lessons in biostatistics” or Flournoy’s “A vignette of discovery”) bring up interesting challenges & biases to keep in mind when evaluating the latest clinical research (a skill useful for anyone), & leave me heartened at the life-saving practical work that field is doing. Nan M. Laird’s “Meta-analyses: Heterogeneity can be a good thing” reminded me of the need, when doing my own meta-analyses, to not simply ignore high I2/heterogeneity but think hard about what moderators I should include to try to explain some of it. Others raised interesting questions I’ve wondered about myself, for example, Xiao-Li Meng in “A trio of inference problems” asks how big a biased sample of a population has to be before it’s of comparable quality to a random sample: Over the century, statisticians, social scientists, and others have amply demonstrated theoretically and empirically that (say) a 5% probabilistic/random sample is better than any 5% non-random samples in many measurable ways, e.g., bias, MSE, confidence coverage, predictive power, etc. However, we have not studied questions such as “Is an 80% non-random sample ‘better’ than a 5% random sample in measurable terms? 90%? 95%? 99%?” This question was raised during a fascinating presentation by Dr. Jeremy Wu…The synthetic data created for LED used more than 20 data sources in the LEHD (Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics) system. These sources vary from survey data such as a monthly survey of 60,000 households, which represent only .05% of US households, to administrative records such as unemployment insurance wage records, which cover more than 90% of the US workforce, to census data such as the quarterly census of earnings and wages, which includes about 98% of US jobs (Wu, 2012 and personal communication from Wu). The administrative records such as those in LEHD are not collected for the purpose of statistical inference, but rather because of legal requirements, business practice, political considerations, etc. They tend to cover a large percentage of the population, and therefore they must contain useful information for inference. which is what I’ve wondered while working on my census of biracial characters, since my sample is biased but capture-recapture analysis indicates I’ve compiled up to 1/3 of the population, so how much does that compensate, does it drive the error from biases down to the same size as the sampling error? Meng derives an inequality: For example, even if ns = 100, we would need over 96% of the population if ρN = .5 [level of bias]. This reconfirms the power of probabilistic sampling and reminds us of the danger in blindly trusting that “Big Data” must give us better answers. On the other hand, if ρN = .1, then we will need only 50% of the population to beat a SRS [simple random sample] with ns = 100…the same ρN = .1 also implies that a 96% subpopulation will beat a SRS as large as ns = … 2400, which is no longer a practically irrelevant sample size. Berger’s “Conditioning is the issue” is a bit lost on me but interesting is one passage’s discussion of turning notorious p-values into something more meaningful, error probabilities: The practical import of switching to conditional frequentist testing (or the equivalent objective Bayesian testing) is startling. For instance, Sellke et al. (2001) uses a nonparametric setting to develop the following very general lower bound on α(s), for a given p-value…p = .05, which many erroneously think implies strong evidence against H0, actually corresponds to a conditional frequentist error probability at least as large as .289, which is a rather large error probability. If scientists understood that a p-value of .05 corresponded to that large a potential error probability in rejection, the scientific world would be a quite different place. TABLE 23.1 Values of the lower bound α(s) in (23.4) for various values of p. p .2 .1 .05 .01 .005 .001 .0001 .00001 α(s) .465 .385 .289 .111 .067 .0184 .0025 .00031 Other papers are a bit of a misfire: I hadn’t heard of “symbolic data” before Lynne Billard’s “The past’s future is now: What will the present’s future bring?”, & the paper still leaves me wondering what it really is. Some I had already read - Gelman & Wasserman has already blogged about their entries. And still others make one wonder; in Rubin’s interesting retrospective of his greatest-hits, “Converting rejections into positive stimuli”, he encourages the reader to not be discouraged by the journal submission process as it is so random & some of his best papers were rejected - which makes me wonder, ‘so why have this whole journal rigmarole if rejection means so little…? would you use a statistical test which exhibited such poor calibration & discrimination?’ & his remark that “if you are repeatedly told by some reviewers that everyone knows what you are saying, but without specific references, and other reviewers are saying what you are writing is completely wrong but without decent reasons, you are probably on to something” is true. Overall, the anthology is interesting & worth reading (if not each and every paper). | [] | Ratings and reviews - Gwern.net | Review | http://www.gwern.net/Book%20reviews | 4/1438042982502.13_20150728002302-00293-ip-10-236-191-2_475259833_0.json |
f7d9395c_atings_and_reviews___Gwern_net__Review | [Title] The Iron Dragon’s Daughter [Author] Michael Swanwick [Rating] ★★★★ [Year] 2012 [Read] 2014/06/02 [Review] | I read it based on Anatoly Vorobey‘s review: “This is fantasy for adults: complex flawed characters, a world rich in detail, multitude of characters who live and do things for their own sake rather than to advance a plot point or help the hero. Utter disregard for conventions and cliches of the genre. A hero who is an anti-Mary Sue. Endless inventiveness of the author. To my taste, this novel is what books like The Kingkiller Chronicles promise, but then utterly fail to deliver. But if you’re a fan of Rothfuss, try Swanwick anyway, and you might get a fuller and richer taste of what you like.” I liked it a lot after I got through the initial section in the factory, which was over-the-top Dickensian enough to make me wonder if it was worthwhile. But it got better, and began unfurling into a mad Victorian/fantasy cross, heavy on the social oppression & economic exploitation, reminiscent of China Miéville’s bourgeois imperialist New Crobuzon. The plot breaks down into a few discrete chunks of the protagonist Jane’s life, which while highlighting the ruthless nature of life in a universe where the gods are real (the homecoming queen being sacrificed may be horrifying, but the consequences of not sacrificing are even more dire, as one memorable nihilist character makes clear; and our own society does not hesitate to sacrifice lives for its own ends, as with, say, coal-burning power plants) also highlight her cowardice and selfishness in betraying her friends instead of… what? We’re not too clear, as the world begins melting and things get weird in an Invisibles or Dick-style turn towards radical ontological uncertainty. (The dragon, incidentally, appears in far less of the novel than one would expect from the title.) This may sound tedious, but Swanwick really does throw all sorts of fascinating little twists in along the way that keep one reading: malls where time literally stops so you can shop to your heart’s content; factories with ’time clocks’ that age one if one doesn’t clock out; live gargoyles, with all the food requirements flying stone entails; a man who shrinks in his wife’s regard for being a coward until he’s the size of a homunculus & is trapped in a jar begging for death; markets in entertaining slaves among the eloi upper-class elves; magical engineers who are castrated to ensure they do not damage the magics they work with; academics who assault the castles of the gods in the quest for knowledge, and get burned; universities with purges that are literally decimating… Still, it’s a happy ending, I think. Swanwick puts it amusingly in a page of explanations: I gave her T as a reward for making it through to the end of the novel he’s the one worldly thing she wants - and, quite to my surprise, the Goddess threw in K as well. What happens next? Does Jane marry T and keep K as best friend? Does K steal T from her? Do they all fall into bed together? This one I really don’t know because the real reward I gave Jane for making it to the end of the book was freedom. I ran across Carol Emshwiller just after she finished writing Ledoyt and she said she was in mourning, that all these people she had lived with for years were suddenly gone and it felt as if they’d all died. “Doesn’t it feel that way to you, too, when you finish a novel?” she asked. I thought about it. “No,” I decided. “It feels like all these characters who have suffered under my persecuting hand have been set free. I imagine them running joyfully in all directions, as hard and fast as they can, so that I can never catch them and put them in another book again.” Anyway, going over some of the parts of it which amused me while I was reading… You know your fantasy is grim and imaginative when astrology is due to educational corruption: “Hello? I was sent here for remedial?” The pale man looked up. He nodded wanly. Unhastily, without emphasis, he picked up a book, opened it, paged forward a leaf, and then back one. “There are three stars in the heavens,” he said, “moving about Jupiter, erratic sidereal bodies which establish a lesser zodiacal process for that wanderer in its mighty twelve-year progression about the sun.”…“Excuse me,” she said hesitantly, “but what effect do these minor planets have on our behavior and fortunes? I mean, you know, astrological influence?” He looked at her. “None.”“None at all?” “No.” “But if the planets affect our fortunes—” She stumbled to a stop at the dispassionately scornful look on the pale man’s face, the slow way he shook his head. “Surely you’ll agree that the planets order and control our destinies?” “They do not.” “Not at all?” “No.” “Then what does? Control our destinies, I mean.” “The only external forces that have any influence on us are those we can see every day: the smile, the frown, the fist, the brick wall. What you call ‘destiny’ is merely a semantic fallacy, the attribution of purpose to blind causality. Insofar as any of us are compelled to resist the flow of random events, we are driven solely by internal drives and forces.” Jane seized on this last. “Then what you’re saying is that our fate lies within us, right?” He shook his head. “If so, it must be extremely small and impossibly distant. I would not suggest you put any reliance in such an insignificant entity.”’…She waited, but he did not elaborate. “In introductory astrology they told us that each person has a tutelary star and that each star has its own mineral, color, and musical tone, and a plant as well that is a specific for the disease that is caused by that star’s occultation.” “All untrue. The stars do not concern themselves in the least with us. Our total extinction would mean nothing to them.” “But why?” Jane cried. “If it’s not true, why would they teach it to us?”A dry fingertip tapped the page not impatiently but pedagogically. “All courses require textbooks, charts, and teaching aids. By the time the information codified as astrology was discredited and became obsolete, it had a constituency. Certain…personages benefit from the supply contracts.” Nihilist the plot may seem to be, but it’s leavened with some sharp satire; for example, bureaucracy in the factory: At last, late in the day, the inspector general arrived. A wave of dread preceded the elf-lord through the plant. Not a kobold or korrigan, not a spunky, pillywiggin, nor lowliest dunter but knew the inspector general was coming. The air shivered in anticipation of his arrival. A glimmering light went just before him, causing all heads to turn, all work to stop, the instant before he turned a corner or entered a shop. He appeared in the doorway. Tall and majestic he was in an Italian suit and tufted silk tie. He wore a white hard hat. His face was square-jawed and handsome in a more than human way, and his hair and teeth were perfect. Two high-ranking Tylwyth Teg accompanied him, clipboards in hand, and a vulture-headed cost analyst from Accounting trailed in his wake. School: After Grunt had called attendance, he cleared his throat. “The Three B’s,” he said. “The Three B’s are your guide to scholastic excellence. The Three B’s are your gold key to the doorway of the future. Now—all together—what are they?” “Be-lieve,” the class mumbled. “Be-have. Be Silent.” “What was that last?” He cupped a hand to his ear. “Be Silent!” “I caaaaaan’t heeeeear you.” “BE SILENT!” “Good.” It was only when she went to empty out her locker that Jane realized how overgrown it had become. Orchids and jungle vines filled most of the space within and a hummingbird fled into the corridor when she banged open the door. Consumerism: It was a scorcher outside, but the mall was kept so cool that Jane was sorry she hadn’t brought a sweater. The place was jammed with fugitives from the heat. They were recreational rather than serious shoppers, most of them. Their hands were empty and their eyes were clear. College roommate strife: “The dissection manual?” Monkey asked airily. “I ate it.” “You what?” “I ate it. Why else would I want it? I was hungry and I ate it.” “But I need it for class.”“Then you shouldn’t have given it to me.” Monkey’s beady eyes glittered strangely, maliciously, in her round face. “Really, Jane, you can be so dim at times.” With a sudden standing backflip she disappeared through the doorway. Jane’s hands clenched. But really it was no more than she had learned to expect. Roommates were forever eating your books, having anxiety attacks, adopting rats and carnivorous slimes which they then expected you to feed, getting drunk and throwing up on your best dress, moving into the closet and refusing to come out for months on end, threatening suicide the night before Finals, leaving piles of rotting leaves in the middle of the floor, entertaining boyfriends in your bed because it was made and theirs not, evolving into large bloodsucking insects. Monkey was actually good of her kind. Well, she could always pick up a new manual. Monkey snatched the pencil from her hand and snapped it in two. Jane closed her eyes and traced the sigil of Baphomet with her inner vision. When she was calm again, she slid open a drawer.“All right.” There was a pair of latex gloves within. “I wasn’t going to do this.” She pulled them on. “But you don’t exactly give me much choice, do you?” Credit where credit is due, Monkey didn’t back down. There was a touch of the trickster in her heritage, and the trickster gene was a dominant. She licked her lips nervously as Jane pretended to lift an invisible box from the drawer. “You don’t scare me.” “Good.” Jane swung a hinged lid back and reached within. “It works best if you don’t believe.” She removed an equally imaginary scalpel and held it up between thumb and forefinger, admiringly turning it one way and the other. “What are you going to do with that?” Jane smiled. “This!” She slammed her fist into Monkey’s stomach. Academia: “I have been going over your laboratory reports, Miss Alderberry.” Dr. Nemesis put an arm through hers, and walked her toward the front. “They are, if I may confide in you, disappointing, most disappointing in a student of your potential.” “I’ve been having trouble with the sophic—”…“You must surely realize why I am concerned for you.” “Well…” Jane didn’t really, but that double glare bored into her, waiting for an intelligent response. “I’m here on a merit scholarship, so I suppose—” “No!” Dr. Nemesis stamped her foot impatiently. As if in response the elevator door slid open. She steered Jane outside. They were on an office level now. The walls were decorated with large unframed oils of umbrellas and sides of beef. The runners on the hall floors smelled new. “I am not talking about mere money, but about your very survival! This is a Teind year, surely you must know that.” Jane nodded, meaning no. “The department heads are even now assembling the list of those 10% of the students who are… expendable. Your name, Miss Alderberry, is going to be on that list unless you straighten up and fly right.” She glared at her: weakly, sternly. …“What set me straight was one particular incident. My adviser, none other than the wizard Bongay himself mind you, had obtained grant money from the Horned Man Foundation to create a divinatory engine in the form of a brazen head. This was, you will understand, very early in the history of cybernetics. It was all done with vacuum tubes then…Then he saw how the head glowed and how the solder ran in little rivulets from the seams in its neck and with it the gold and silver of its circuitry. Then did the wizard Bongay himself scream, in such fury that I fled for fear of his wrath.” She laughed. “He lost tenure over that incident, and his life as well. That happened near the end of the fiscal year, and the University had been relying on that grant money. Everybody involved with that fiasco was executed by order of the Bursar.” “How did you survive?” “They needed somebody to write the final report.” The University library opened its doors at midnight and closed at dawn. The rationale given for such extraordinary hours was that they discouraged dilettantes and idlers from wasting the library’s facilities. Even for the School of Grammarie, which was widely held to have pushed the concept of liberal arts to an extreme, Professor Tarapple was grotesque. A burnt and crisped cinder of a creature was he, blackened and small, his limbs charred sticks, his torso rendered, reduced, and carbonized. His mouth hung open and his step was slow and painful. He seemed a catalog of the infirmities of age. He felt for the microphone. His hand closed about it with a soft boom, then retreated. The charred sockets of his eyes rose toward the ceiling. Jane realized that he was blind….Professor Tarapple groped for a laser pointer, leaving sooty handprints on the lectern top. He directed the pointer toward the slide with motions as jerky and unconvincing as a rod puppet’s. The red dot of light jiggled off to the side of the screen. “This is—” The head wobbled. “This is—is Spiral Castle itself.” Nobody so much as breathed. “No one but I myself has ever delved so deep into the Goddess’s mysteries. The Ocean above which it is suspended is Time itself, and so far as could be determined with our limited instrumentation extends to infinity in all directions. Next slide.”…Jane was having a hard time following the lecture. The harsh white image of Spiral Castle was like a magnesium flare. It swelled and dwindled in her vision, as if softly breathing. Her eyes pulsed, aching when she tried to follow the logic of its involutions. She had to look away…“Toadswivers! Curly-mounted bobtail jades! Codheaded pigfuck bastards!” With a start, Jane came to herself. Throughout the auditorium, the audience members were rousing themselves. A Teggish professor directly before Jane’s seat straightened with a lurch and a snort. A gnome to her left passed a hand over his mushroom-spotted pate. Professor Tarapple had abandoned his lecture in a rage. He was berating his audience. “Only one being—one! me!—has ever delved so far into the Goddess’s secrets and returned to talk of them. By cannon-fire, holy water, and bells, listen to me! I risked more than life and sanity to bring you these photographs. I—I—I was once young and tall and handsome. I had friends who died in this expedition and will never be reborn. We were caught and punished and punished again. I alone escaped. Look at me! See the price that I paid! So many times I have tried to tell you! Why do you never listen?” He was weeping now. “Woe!” he cried. “Alas for those who seek after Truth, for such is the Goddess’s most hoarded treasure. Ah, she is cruel and unfathomable, and bitter, bitter is her vengeance.” The lights came gently up. The applause was thunderous. One of the parts towards the end which particularly reminded me of The Invisibles: “One time, passing through the Carolinas somewhere between 2:00 and 3:00 A.M., Jerry and I picked up a white Lotus with two blonds in it. We honked and waved. They gave us the finger and put the pedal to the metal. I did the same, of course, but even with dual carbs it was no contest. We had a muscle car but they had a sex machine. They made us eat their dust….Ten-fifteen miles down the road we saw the Lotus in a Roy Rogers lot. We pulled in for some take-out burgers. There they were. We struck up a conversation. When we left, Jerry-D went with the driver of the Lotus. Her friend went with me…Anyway, there I was, a blond in pink hot pants rubbing up against me. I had my foot to the floor, her tongue in my ear, and her hand down my pants. I pushed up her halter top and squeezed her breasts. The air shimmered with the immanence of revelation. Little Richard was singing ‘Tutti-Frutti’ on the radio and it somehow seemed significant that what I was hearing had been electromagnetically encoded, transmitted as modulated radiation, reconstructed by the radio as sound, and only reinterpreted as music somewhere within the dark reaches of my head. I felt then that the world was an illusion - and a rather shabby one at that, an image projected upon the thinnest of membranes, and that were I to push at it just right, I could step out of the world entirely. I unbuttoned her shorts. She wriggled a little to help. I slid my hand under her panties. I was thinking that everything was information when I found myself clutching an erect penis. I whipped my head around. The blond was grinning wildly into my face. My hand involuntarily tightened about her cock. Her hand tightened about mine. They might have been the same hand. We might have been one person twinned. The car was up to about 100 mph. I wasn’t even looking where we were going. I didn’t care. It was in that instant that I achieved enlightenment.” And finally, the gargoyle passage. It’s too long to quote, but I’ve posted it at http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=HDrLMfQj | [] | Ratings and reviews - Gwern.net | Review | http://www.gwern.net/Book%20reviews | 4/1438042982502.13_20150728002302-00293-ip-10-236-191-2_475259833_0.json |
f7d9395c_atings_and_reviews___Gwern_net__Review | [Title] The Many Worlds of Hugh Everett III: Multiple Universes, Mutual Assured Destruction, and the Meltdown of a Nuclear Family [Author] Peter Byrne [Rating] ★★★★ [Year] 2010 [Read] 2014/11/08 [Review] | (~140k words, 4h read) Before reading, my knowledge of Hugh Everett was limited to basically the following sketch: a young American male who post-WWII suggested taking the Schrodinger wave-equation literally, yielding the infamous Many-Worlds Interpretation, and attacked over it, left academia for Wall Street where he became rich with an optimization algorithm, and in his absence, MWI very gradually gained adherents until it is now a respectable point of view (albeit still counterintuitive), and died at some point; also, some rumor that his daughter shot herself at a casino after losing, in a literal quantum suicide. This turns out to be incorrect and very incomplete: it wasn’t Wall Street but the Pentagon, he died quite young, MWI wasn’t attacked so much as ignored after being sabotaged, his daughter did commit suicide but it was at home with sleeping pills & had nothing to do with quantum suicide, and he did much more than just MWI & one optimization algorithm. Byrne starts in media res, with Everett rich and drunk and self-destructing, then jumps back to his parents to start his tale; whether because ‘past is prologue’ or because of the heritability of personality traits, we get a sense that pathology (substance abuse, emotional problems) ran in the family, and his father survived some scrapes with corruption to finish out a reasonably good life; Everett bade fair to do better as a prodigy, excelling university, and arriving at Princeton & IAS in its golden WWII moment - the war won, von Neumann still alive & at the height of its powers (inventing game theory, modern computers, and steering the Cold War), and academia rushing into its Faustian post-war bargain with the US government and embarking on decade of exponential bloating (which, unsustainable, halted in the ‘80s or so, and this cauldron of legions of mediocre researchers + government funds + publish-or-perish has contributed to the modern scientific context in which we are awash in bogus results and worthless papers). An exciting time, and a fertile environment. I was surprised to learn that Everett made contributions to game theory, which turns out to later be relevant to one of the main mysteries of MWI (where the subjective or Born probabilities come from), and only then turned to quantum mechanics. Byrne also covers his future wife, Nancy. He tries to be sympathetic, but it’s hard to like or find her interesting at all; her views are shallow and deeply conformist, she comes off as lacking real insight into herself despite all the navel-gazing, lies to herself and others, and to be a lump of flesh going nowhere fast. He wants to paint her as neglected and damaged by her relationship with Everett, and to paint Everett as a loathsome lecher who won’t take no for an answer, but it doesn’t succeed. I was left with a major question: why would Everett ever want to date her, much less marry her? (Dating her is the real question here since it’s clear why he married her: because she got pregnant and refused to abort, and given the straitlaced Pentagon world, he was put between a rock and a hard place. Byrne quotes her as denying this tactic, but that’s obvious bullshit, especially given the era.) After a jump forward to Everett’s optimization work, we go back to Princeton and the genesis of MWI: like Columbus and Einstein and some others before him, Everett asked a deceptively simple question - what if we just take it literally? As a nice Schrödinger quote points out, it’s odd to accept that the world or objects act like a wave-function up until they are observed and then they collapse into normality but to refuse to accept that ’inside’ the wave-function it will also all add up to normality: “Nearly every result [a quantum theorist] pronounces is about the probability of this or that … happening - with usually a great many alternatives. The idea that they be not alternatives but all really happen simultaneously seems lunatic to him just impossible. He thinks that if the laws of nature took this form for, let me say, a quarter of an hour, we should find our surroundings rapidly turning into a quagmire, or sort of a featureless jelly or plasma, all contours becoming blurred, we ourselves probably becoming jelly fish. It is strange that he should believe this. For I understand he grants that unobserved nature does behave this way - namely according to the wave equation. The aforesaid alternatives come into play only when we make an observation - which need, of course, not be a scientific observation. Still it would seem that, according to the quantum theorist, nature is prevented from rapid jellification only by our perceiving or observing it. And I wonder that he is not afraid, when he puts a ten-pound note into his drawer in the evening, he might find it dissolved in the morning, because he has not kept watching it.” Pursuing his idea, Everett wrote his thesis, and here we run into the major theme of Byrne’s book, one he establishes admirably well: with many quotes from letters and recordings and referee reports, we see Everett’s thesis adviser, Wheeler, turn from a courageous physicist, well-regarded for his daring speculations, into a biased coward who bullies Everett into sabotaging & watering down his thesis so as to not give offense to his mentor Niels Bohr. I’m a little familiar with Bohr’s philosophy of science & quantum mechanics from a course I once took on the topic, and I found it entirely without merit (the most unimaginatively instrumentalist ‘shut up and calculate’ viewpoint was preferable to Bohr’s ‘complementarity’, because at least one was not left with the illusion of knowledge), so to find an excellent case made that it sabotaged the initial presentation of MWI and responsible for a multi-decade drought in one of the best available interpretations… does not leave me with a good impression of Bohr, Wheeler, the power thesis advisors wield, or academic physics in general. Certainly it is understandable that Everett would leave academia and enter the military-industrial complex where his work was interesting, valuable, valued, and well-remunerated. Everett dived straight into the heart of US nuclear politics, the intersection of nuclear physics with military strategy and game theory and computing and operations research: what levels of bombs would be developed (the Super? and even more exotic weapons?), what military services would get what delivery systems, what would be the effects of nuclear war, what was the best way to run the Cold War? (In the ‘50s, none of this was set in stone yet.) It’s a fascinatingly complicated period, for an overview see: Turing’s Cathedral, Dyson (review) Radiance (review) “Old Legends” Atomic Audit The Making of the Atomic Bomb & Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb Fourth Generation Nuclear Weapons Shame: Confessionas of the Father of the Neutron Bomb, Cohen (review) Project Air Force: 1956-1996 Byrne unfortunately is too unsympathetic to cover the period fairly, taking the Dr. Strangelove route: everyone was insane and evil. This biases his coverage badly since he’s so opinionated; in discussing the Prisoner’s Dilemma, for example, he implies it shows the irrationality of rationality and hence the intellectual bankruptcy of game theory and all related exercises - but this is a confusion of what he would like to be true with what is actually true, because the Prisoner’s Dilemma shows up again and again in all sorts of guises in the real world, along with the tragedy of the commons, and you know what? People in real life often do defect unless additional mechanisms are in place (often being put in place as a reaction to all the defecting). One of his footnotes reveals this strikingly: In other words, rationality is a (sometimes) quantifiable quality. Most human beings would agree that it is not a rational act to cross the street in front of a speeding bus, or to poison the water supply in search of short term profit, or to depend on fossil fuels, etc. But people in power who do obviously irrational things are often compelled to rationalize these actions by falling back on agendized utility values and probability statements. Of course, if you start with an irrational premise, e.g. “nuclear war is a rational option,” no amount of utilitarian quantification can, believably, turn it into its opposite. Context is everything. This is a tissue of nonsense which exposes clearly that Byrne does not deal with the real world, but with a world of ideals in which there are never any hard choices or necessity to make cost-benefit tradeoffs and all that matters is what sounds good. Accordingly, he presents a one-sided picture; a discussion of the Bohm hearings omits any mention of why the US government might be so paranoid and worried about spies (the Venona decrypts come to mind, as do the many high-ranking Soviet spies such as Harry Dexter White) and might target people involved with the Manhattan Project in particular; similarly, he uncritically cites Sakharov claiming the US was responsible for the arms races (which seems like an odd reading of Stalin’s character and his fellow researchers, for that matter), and later overestimates of nuclear winter. This bias on the biographer’s part makes one wonder to what extent Everett’s results about fallout were accurate: it’s not like he would tell us if the report was found to be fallacious or since debunked. Still, while irritating and depriving the reader of some key context, the WSEG section seems comprehensive as far as it comes to Everett up until he left the Pentagon to start his own consulting business, and that’s what really matters. The business section is similar, but much less political as they consulted on more civilian topics. What he did is hard to tell: we’re held back by Byrne targeting the general audience - I would have liked to know more about the statistical techniques involved, rather than vague descriptions like “QUICK randomly sampled the vast range of probable outcomes to select the most probable results”, which could mean a lot of things; I can sort of guess what his ’Bayesian machine’ was (sounds like a Kalman filter implemented with MCMC), but I’m completely baffled by the section about ‘“attribute value” programming’ or what sort of database it was. It also sounds like Everett began drinking himself to death at this point (but why? he doesn’t come off as so deeply depressed about MWI being ignored that he’d be suicidal in the midst of all his financial success; given Byrne’s predilection for psychologizing, it’s odd that he seems to let this central mystery pass without much more comment than some speculation that Everett was just hedonistic), and the kids enter their troubled teens (but one would never grow out of it). Somewhat surprisingly, he didn’t manage his finances very well, living extravagantly, making deeply questionable investments, and failing to diversify, all in contravention to established financial advice, flaws somewhat surprising in a statistically and economically inclined man. Eventually, he dies. In the mean time, MWI was gradually being rediscovered and rehabilitated by the likes of Deutsch and novel approaches like a Bayesian justification of Born probabilities developed, leaving off at the present time in which MWI is a respectable position leading to interesting research and believed in by a good-sized minority of physicists; this is interesting, but already familiar to me. I will have to leave it to other readers to judge how good these parts of the book are. Overall, indispensable to anyone interested in the man, and a good account of a productive yet wasted life. | [] | Ratings and reviews - Gwern.net | Review | http://www.gwern.net/Book%20reviews | 4/1438042982502.13_20150728002302-00293-ip-10-236-191-2_475259833_0.json |
f7d9395c_atings_and_reviews___Gwern_net__Review | [Title] Excuse Me Sir, Would You Like to Buy a Kilo of Isopropyl Bromide? [Author] Max G. Gergel [Rating] ★★★★ [Year] 1979 [Read] 2014/11/02 [Review] | (~95k words, <3h read) Insider memoir of a relatively American wheeler-dealer in the chemical industry finished March 1977, following him from high school dabbling in chemistry through to graduation & WWII university work to founding a small chemical synthesis company until he turned it over to a successor. Gossipy, detailed, a vivid look inside the industry. Long out of print, I read the online scan (2.3M). Gergel seems to have an amazing memory for all the details of his short stature, secular Jewishness, school life, colorful incidents (such as maiming a friend with injudicious safety procedures applied to potassium), the girls he swooned over (usually blonde), and classwork; unfortunately, some of the gossip aside, his school years aren’t that interesting since I have no idea what any of the chemistry he was studying was (the politics of draft deferment, official corruption, and the mindless patriotism of the day, are a bit interesting but he mostly hints at them). Things pick up markedly by pg60 or so when Gergel begins doing syntheses for pay, eventually escalating to his own business - and here a modern reader will start blinking and wondering whether Gergel is deliberately trying to make a deeply compelling case for the necessity of government regulation, expanded budgets for the EPA & FDA & DoJ, the Precautionary Principle, and (much) higher Superfund taxes, and whether his life might not be a proof of quantum immortality and a defeat for the forces of natural selection, so reckless and poisonous and dangerous are his concoctions and business dealings. So many of his co-workers and acquaintances die young of exotic ailments that I am shocked to read in discussions of Excuse Me Sir, Would You Like to Buy a Kilo of Isopropyl Bromide? that not only is Gergel still alive as of 2012, but Derek Lowe says he’s even written a sequel memoir, The Ageless Gergel! Derek Lowe reviews it thusly: I came across the book in Duke’s chemistry library in 1984, a few years after its publication, and read it straight through with my hair gradually rising upwards. Book 2 is especially full of alarming chemical stories. I suspect that some of the anecdotes have been polished up a bit over the years, but as Samuel Johnson once said, a man is not under oath in such matters. But when Gergel says that he made methyl iodide in an un-air-conditioned building in the summertime in South Carolina, and describes in vivid detail the symptoms of being poisoned by it, I believe every word. He must have added a pound to his weight in sheer methyl groups. By modern standards, another shocking feature of the book is the treatment of chemical waste. Readers will not be surprised to learn that several former Columbia Organic sites feature prominently in the EPA’s Superfund cleanup list, but they certainly aren’t alone from that era. John Walker: Throughout Max Gergel’s long career he has been an unforgettable character for all who encountered him in the many roles he has played: student, bench chemist, instructor of aviation cadets, entrepreneur, supplier to the Manhattan Project, buyer and seller of obscure reagents to a global clientele, consultant to industry, travelling salesman peddling products ranging from exotic halocarbons to roach killer and toilet bowl cleaner, and evangelist persuading young people to pursue careers in chemistry. With family and friends (and no outside capital) he founded Columbia Organic Chemicals, a specialty chemical supplier specialising in halocarbons but, operating on a shoestring, willing to make almost anything a customer was ready to purchase (even Max drew the line, however, when the silver-tongued director of the Naval Research Laboratory tried to persuade him to make pentaborane). The narrative is as rambling and entertaining as one imagines sharing a couple (or a couple dozen) drinks with Max at an American Chemical Society meeting would have been. He jumps from family to friends to finances to business to professional colleagues to suppliers to customers to nuggets of wisdom for starting and building a business to eccentric characters he has met and worked with to his love life to the exotic and sometimes bone-chilling chemical syntheses he did in his company’s rough and ready facilities. Many of Columbia’s contracts involved production of moderate quantities (between a kilogram and several 55 gallon drums) of substances previously made only in test tube batches. This “medium scale chemistry”-situated between the laboratory bench and an industrial facility making tank car loads of the stuff-involves as much art (or, failing that, brute force and cunning) as it does science and engineering, and this leads to many of the adventures and misadventures chronicled here. For example, an exothermic reaction may be simple to manage when you’re making a few grams of something-the liberated heat is simply conducted to the walls to the test tube and dissipated: at worst you may only need to add the reagent slowly, stir well, and/or place the reaction vessel in a water bath. But when DuPont placed an order for allene in gallon quantities, this posed a problem… All of this was in the days before the EPA, OSHA, and the rest of the suffocating blanket of soft despotism descended upon entrepreneurial ventures in the United States that actually did things and made stuff. In the 1940s and ’50s, when Gergel was building his business in South Carolina, he was free to adopt the “whatever it takes” attitude which is the quintessential ingredient for success in start-ups and small business. The flexibility and ingenuity which allowed Gergel not only to compete with the titans of the chemical industry but become a valued supplier to them is precisely what is extinguished by intrusive regulation, which accounts for why sclerotic dinosaurs are so comfortable with it. On the other hand, Max’s experience with methyl iodide illustrates why some of these regulations were imposed. keenerd: Some of the topics covered: How to acquire chemicals as a poor high school student. How to get the most out of college. Starting up a company, finding your first customers and expanding your markets. Being a supplier to the Manhattan Project. What chemical engineering was like before the EPA and OSHA. What went on to create a future Superfund site. The tricks and techniques of traveling salesmen in the ’50s. I made some excerpts conveying some of the key points. | [] | Ratings and reviews - Gwern.net | Review | http://www.gwern.net/Book%20reviews | 4/1438042982502.13_20150728002302-00293-ip-10-236-191-2_475259833_0.json |
f7d9395c_atings_and_reviews___Gwern_net__Review | [Title] Chronicle of a Death Foretold [Author] Gabriel García Márquez [Rating] ★★★★ [Year] 2003 [Read] 2014/08/26 [Review] | A quasi-police description of the events leading up to, then long preceding, an honor-killing of one Santiago. The style strikes me as vastly simpler and less magically-realistic than The Autumn of the Patriarch, and much shorter. An inversion of detective mysteries: it is agreed by all who the proximate killer is, and the mystery centers on the how & whydunnit. (Borges would approve.) As the witnesses and reports pile up, it seems to become clear that it’s all a farcical assemblage of bad luck, buck-passing, murderous traditional cultures of machismo, and accident, but doubt is cast from the beginning - the murder happened on a beautiful clear day, which in the village’s memory has become a dark rainy day; witnesses crowd around the magistrate eager to tell their involvement and exaggerate their part (“…the crowd that was pouring in to testify without having been summoned, everyone eager to show off his own important role in the drama…”); and the basis for the murder itself was likely a lie. This uncertainty renders the story sinister by the end - did the village conspire to kill Santiago? Did he anger everyone in a way we are not told of, because to provide a motive would confirm their guilt, and they collectively fail to help him, explaining the repeated slurs like ‘“He thought that his money made him untouchable,” he told me. Fausta Lopez, his wife, commented: “Just like all Turks.”’? (A nice example of cunctation: the mayor stop in to check on a dominos match so and is too late to take away the murder-weapons.) How much is Angela responsible for failing to respect the charade of virginity and deliberately sabotaging her marriage? (She is ultimately punished by the deliciously cruel method of returning 20 years of love-letters, unopened.) The assembled villagers in the square shout advice at the last second, but somehow, their exhortations serve only to confuse him and maneuver him towards his killers; the killers are made to remark their knives are rather clean given they’re killing someone. And so on. The more we read, the less we feel we know and the more worried we become that we’re being fed a pack of distortions and warped memories in which the events were far more dramatic and complicated than they actually were. The magistrate warns us that “Give [someone] a prejudice and [they] will move the world”, and the narrator remarks of one post hoc explanation that “It seemed to be such an easy truth that the investigator wrote it down…”, and “fatality makes us invisible” - or is it plot necessity that makes the victim invisible? The villagers know their stories must terminate in the death of the victim, and in the stories they confabulate, he must be invisible to have performed the actions ascribed to him. (Umineko no Naku Koro ni’s vocabulary is useful here: outside the cat box, it is known that Santiago was killed by two knife-wielding twins at such a time and place; but everything else before that is part of the cat box and can be endlessly revised.) But each story, however plausible in the singular, has a hard time surviving conjunction with all the other tales being peddled (“he never thought it legitimate that life should make use of so many coincidences forbidden literature”). And their story can always be continued by imagining or forcing consequences: For years we couldn’t talk about anything else. Our daily conduct, dominated then by so many linear habits, had suddenly begun to spin around a single common anxiety. The cocks of dawn would catch us trying to give order to the chain of many chance events that had made absurdity possible, and it was obvious that we weren’t doing it from an urge to clear up mysteries but because none of us could go on living without an exact knowledge of the place and the mission assigned to us by fate….Hortensia Baute, whose only participation was having seen two bloody knives that weren’t bloody yet, felt so affected by the hallucination that she fell into a penitential crisis, and one day, unable to stand it any longer, she ran out naked into the street. Flora Miguel, Santiago Nasar’s fiancee, ran away out of spite with a lieutenant of the border patrol, who prostituted her among the rubber workers on the Vichada. Aura Villeros, the midwife who had helped bring three generations into the world, suffered a spasm of the bladder when she heard the news and to the day of her death had to use a catheter in order to urinate. Don Rogelio de la Flor, Clotilde Armenta’s good husband, who was a marvel of vitality at the age of eighty-six, got up for the last time to see how they had hewn Santiago Nasar to bits against the locked door of his own house, and he didn’t survive the shock. Plácida Linero had locked that door at the last moment, but with the passage of time she freed herself from blame. “I locked it because Divina Flor had sworn to me that she’d seen my son come in,” she told me, “and it wasn’t true.” On the other hand, she never forgave herself for having mixed up the magnificent augury of trees with the unlucky one of birds, and she succumbed to the pernicious habit of her time of chewing pepper cress seeds. I am reminded of an old story: One day, Korzybski was giving a lecture to a group of students, and he interrupted the lesson suddenly in order to retrieve a packet of biscuits, wrapped in white paper, from his briefcase. He muttered that he just had to eat something, and he asked the students on the seats in the front row, if they would also like a biscuit. A few students took a biscuit. “Nice biscuit, don’t you think,” said Korzybski, while he took a 2nd one. The students were chewing vigorously. Then he tore the white paper from the biscuits, in order to reveal the original packaging. On it was a big picture of a dog’s head and the words “Dog Cookies.” The students looked at the package, and were shocked. Two of them wanted to vomit, put their hands in front of their mouths, and ran out of the lecture hall to the toilet. “You see,” Korzybski remarked, “I have just demonstrated that people don’t just eat food, but also words, and that the taste of the former is often outdone by the taste of the latter.” People do not live in facts, they live in stories; and as long as the story continues, they are satisfied. Everything has been brought to light, it seems, but nothing has been enlightened. By the end, the death has been foretold but remains unknown. | [] | Ratings and reviews - Gwern.net | Review | http://www.gwern.net/Book%20reviews | 4/1438042982502.13_20150728002302-00293-ip-10-236-191-2_475259833_0.json |
f7d9395c_atings_and_reviews___Gwern_net__Review | [Title] Existence [Author] David Brin [Rating] ★★★★ [Year] 2012 [Read] 2012/12/01 [Review] | Existence is best-seen as a rewrite of Earth, and Earth was a sprawling futurological serious novel which was trying to both world-build by including countless perspectives and quotes and discussions and terms but also put them into context to build a overarching thesis. Similar to Tad William’s Otherland (the fantastic first book City of Golden Shadow, not the horrible sequels), Dos Passos’s USA, or particularly Brunner’s Stand On Zanzibar (to which Brin alludes, actually, in having a alien say “what an imagination I’ve got.”) The overriding theme is, of course, the Great Silence. Brin’s solution, characteristically for a guy who wants to be the ultimate moderate and more moderate than thou, is to take up every solution: the Great Silence is due to more efficient physical transportation and memetic viruses and Berserkers and Lurkers and panspermia and ecological collapse and nuclear war and… This is a little impressive to behold, and overall, I did enjoy reading the book. Brin has had a few new ideas since Earth like the smart-mob. But for the bad: This jumping makes the book something like a huge primer on the Great Silence/Fermi’s Question, yes, but also for something of a mess of a book. The book is huge, but a good deal of the bulk is fat and self-indulgent: 1. the dolphin sub-plot is rehashed Uplift material, which only very charitably has any relevance to anything else in the book (I thought that we would at least see them towards the end on spaceships as a token nod toward justifying the time spent on them, but no!) 2. More germane subplots feel incomplete; the autistic kids, “cobblies” and the “Basque Chimera” form one such oddly underjustified subplot - is this a thing, now, lauding crippled autistic kids as secret savant heroes? I don’t know which narrative is more denigrating of the human suffering involved, the standard one or this one. (Autism spectrum may be useful in some areas, but only a little is necessary and even the high-functioning often fail: I read in the New York Times the other day that that famous tech firm which uses autistic workers has a 5/6 rejection rate of applicants just from the start. One must sift a lot of sand.) 3. much material is borrowed from his previous nonfiction or fiction; allusions to The Postman are well and good, but when I could predict the resolution of the Senator Strong mystery from the instant we were told it was an addiction… This also means that I can track how many authorial mouthpieces there are in the novel, and it’s pretty much all of them. Even people you think are wrong like Hamish are just acting as conduits for Brin’s own beliefs. This leads to the severe problem, in a repeated first contact novel, that none of the aliens were remotely alien, and the humans all seemed pretty similar to each other too. It made me wish for Stanislaw Lem, or at least Watts’s Blindsight. Brin also has a very weird attitude towards what he calls extropianism but most people these days just call transhumanism. For example, the bogus anti-caloric restriction argument Hamish gives; it is bogus because (a) none of those monks or monasteries are following nutritionally balanced diets, indeed, usually for religious reasons they’re following highly unbalanced diets if they’re not like the Taoists possibly actively poisoning themselves with mercury, and (b) the records do claim countless instances of extreme longevity, which of course we don’t believe because record-keeping was terrible - which means the evidence is so worthless and biased and corrupt that we can’t use it to claim the opposite either! I’ve told Brin this like twice before, not that he cared. But by the time the story is set, the caloric restriction question will be settled: the primate studies will be finished, the human CRers will be dead, and the underlying biochemistry (or lack thereof) will have been elucidated. Suppose he’s wrong? He probably doesn’t care, he’s dead-set against it anyway! I was a little awe-struck when he has his mouthpiece badmouth cryonics, after saying it worked and there had been revivals? WTF? WTF indeed. This attitude could be called schizophrenic. Throughout the novel, Brin seems to struggle with the fundamental problem posed by Vinge: how does he keep the story human given his belief in progress and his basic acceptance of the Strong AI thesis? He never comes up with a good answers, but blatantly hand-waves them away: an emulated rat brain goes critical and escapes into the Internet? Well, uh - nothing happens because I say so (wow, ain’t it strange)! There are even more AIs pervading the world, controlling countless key functions? Well, uh - nothing happens because I insinuate something about parents and children and them being grateful! (wow, ain’t it strange - ever see a grateful river, spider, tow-truck, computer…? Humans can barely be grateful, ever.) Humanity is a few decades away from a general nanofactory assembler in his story and thousands of crystal probes come to visit? Well, uh - the crystal probes are completely inactive and don’t carry nanofactories or anything despite it being a mindbogglingly great & evolutionarily fit idea and perfectly doable for them, because I say so and it lets me write adventure arcs with primates fighting over & chucking around glowing rocks! (wow, ain’t it strange) He’ll mock the extropians in the first part for believing in cryonics or uploads or AIs even though their most-criticized belief, cryonics, has been vindicated 100% in his story even beyond their hopes, their expectations of uploads are equally justified by events towards the end - non-destructive uploading, even! We’d settle for destructive uploads at this point… and so on and so forth. Well, uh - they’re right but they’re wrong, don’t you see! (wow, ain’t it strange) | [] | Ratings and reviews - Gwern.net | Review | http://www.gwern.net/Book%20reviews | 4/1438042982502.13_20150728002302-00293-ip-10-236-191-2_475259833_0.json |
f7d9395c_atings_and_reviews___Gwern_net__Review | [Title] Singularity Rising: Surviving and Thriving in a Smarter, Richer, and More Dangerous World [Author] James D. Miller [Rating] ★★★★ [Year] 2012 [Read] 2013/04/25 [Review] | You could see Miller’s Singularity Rising as an attempt to swim against the book current of Ray Kurzweil and present some of the other visions of the Singularity: specifically, the Intelligence Explosion school as exemplified by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Robin Hanson. It then mixes in a bunch of material on intelligence & genetics, so we might identify an additional subschool: that of Steve Hsu on embryo selection for increasing human intelligence. Miller succeeds in giving a wide overview of quite a few topics, from Hanson’s ‘crack of a future dawn’ em scenario to the Great Filter to comparative advantage & the advantages of trade as it applies (and doesn’t apply) to AIs to the intelligence orthogonality thesis (that intelligence does not imply benevolence) to the logic of arms race and its particularly unpleasant applicability to AI development. And then he tosses in the mentioned intelligence & genetics material, which I was a little surprised to learn from - I had read many of his citations (and actually host a few of the online copies of the papers on my personal site, gwern.net), but he still threw in some ones that were new to me. On a purely factual basis, I have relatively little to fault Miller for. He makes a risible claim about 1700s French life expectancies not hitting the 50s (true only if you include infant mortality, otherwise hitting 50s was perfectly routine - even in the worst tabulations, generally if you made it to 20 on average you would reach the 50s; see 0, 1, 2, 3, 4) but he is far from the first to make that mistake; he brings up dual n-back more than once, but he avoids making too many or overreaching claims on behalf of dual n-back such as the increasingly questionable effect on intelligence (see my meta-analysis); he seems to criticize people for not taking seriously the method of castration for life extension but doesn’t mention the issues with the data and the likelihood that the method would not work post-puberty (ie. for everyone who is able to morally consent to such a procedure). Otherwise… Otherwise Miller’s sins are simply that the writing is merely OK and while he does a reasonable job of, as Hanson puts it in his own review of Singularity Rising, “explaining common positions and intuitions behind common arguments”, he barely defends them or clearly justifies them. While I and many others involved in the area dislike Ray Kurzweil’s theories and arguments and books as being superficial, right for the wrong reason, overly optimistic etc, they do at least do their job of convincing people (and then hopefully they can adopt more nuanced or different views); but though I agree with a large fraction of it, it’s hard to believe that anyone could read Miller’s book and come out genuinely convinced of pretty much anything in it (as opposed to reactions like “that’s interesting” or “maybe”). For example, he does a nice question-answer sequence against the kneejerk bad-philosophy reactions to cryonics, but one could easily bite all the bullets and simply question the incredibly sketchy case he makes (yes, it’s great that wood frogs do cryonics all the time, but we’re not frogs). He asks that anyone who signs up for cryonics email him about what convinced them - I immediately thought, “50% odds that no one has done so yet”. (After writing this review, I asked Miller about this and he said no one had yet.) And aside from as comprehensive a layman discussion of the issues involved in AI economics and technological unemployment as I’ve ever seen, I can’t really name any original contribution this book makes. I can’t say I’m really glad I read it, but then I can’t say I really regret reading it (I got a number of IQ-related citations, a discussion of neo-Luddism, and info on the more esoteric possibilities of embryo selection). This is because I already know almost everything in the book and have read many of the citations already, so I am not the target audience; it’s good if you want an overview of non-Kurzweilian Singularity ideas and you don’t want to read through scores of webpages and papers, and more or less unique in conveying them all in a compact single place - so in acknowledgment of this, I bump my rating up to 4 stars (though for me it was more like 3). Excerpts: - intro-ch3 - ch4-5 - ch9 - ch10-12 - ch13 - ch14-15 - ch16 | [] | Ratings and reviews - Gwern.net | Review | http://www.gwern.net/Book%20reviews | 4/1438042982502.13_20150728002302-00293-ip-10-236-191-2_475259833_0.json |
f7d9395c_atings_and_reviews___Gwern_net__Review | [Title] The Corpse Exhibition: And Other Stories of Iraq [Author] Hassan Blasim [Rating] ★★★★ [Year] 2014 [Read] 2015/01/08 [Review] | (~44k words) Short stories drawing heavily on Borges and the magical realists; Blasim writes in a deadpan vernacular in which even the most baffling, cruel or horrible events are noted calmly and passed on, in a world in which ‘confused armies clash by night’ while mere humans try to get along as they play endless roles with masks whose significance they do not understand for an audience they cannot see for an objective that does not bear examination (“The Corpse Exhibition”, “An Army Newspaper” and “The Reality and the Record” suggest obscurely that God is the artist portraying all these severities). “I know you now have some questions that are nagging you, but you will gradually discover that the world is built to have more than one level, and it’s unrealistic for everyone to reach all the levels and all the basements with ease.” Some set scenes are memorable; from “The Killers and the Compass”: Abu Hadid knocked on a rusty door that still had a few spots of green paint, shaped like frogs, on it. We were received by a man in his forties with a thick mustache that covered his teeth when he spoke. We sat down in the guest room in front of the television. I gathered that the man lived alone. He went into the kitchen and came back with a bottle of arak. He opened it and poured a glass. My brother told him to pour one for me too. We sat in silence, and the man and I watched a soccer match between two local teams, while my brother stared into a small fish tank. “Do you think the fish are happy in the tank?” my brother asked, calm and serious. “As long as they eat and drink and swim, they’re fine,” the man replied, without looking away from the television screen. “Do fish drink water?” “Sure they drink; of course.” “How can fish drink salt water?” “Sure they have a way. How could they be in water and not drink?” “If they’re in water, perhaps they don’t need to drink.” “Why don’t you ask the fish in the tank?” Before the bald man could turn to look at him, my brother had jumped on top of him like a hungry tiger. He threw him to the ground, squatted on his chest, and pinned his arms down under his knees. In a flash he took a small knife out of his pocket, put it close to the man’s eye, and started shouting hysterically in his face, “Answer, you cocksucker! How can fish drink salt water? Answer, you son of a bitch! Answer! Do fish drink water or don’t they? Answer, shit-for-brains!” Abu Hadid stuck a cucumber up the man’s ass and we left the house. I never would understand what the man had to do with my brother. Or “The Song of the Goats”: “As he drove through the wheat fields, he was barely in control of the steering wheel. The bumps were about to break my ribs, and only dust kicked up by the truck crept in through the holes in the barrel. The barrel stank like the dead cats on the neighborhood trash heap. Did my uncle pull out fingernails, gouge out people’s eyes, and singe their skin with branding irons in the vaults of the security department? Maybe it was the souls of his victims that drove him into the ravine, maybe it was my own evil soul, or maybe it was the soul that preordained everything that is ephemeral and mysterious in this transitory world. Seven barrels lay in the darkness at the bottom of the cliff like sleeping animals. The pickup had overturned after my uncle tried to take a second rocky bend in the hill. The barrels rolled down into the ravine with the truck. I spent the night unconscious inside the barrel. In the first hours of morning the rays of sunlight pierced the holes in the barrel, like lifelines extended to a drowning man. My mouth was full of blood and my hands were trembling. I was in pain and frightened. I started to observe the rays of the sun as they crisscrossed confusingly in the barrel. I wanted to escape the chaos that had played havoc with my consciousness. I felt as if I had smoked a ton of marijuana: a fish coming to its senses in a sardine tin, a dead worm in an abandoned well, a putrid fetus with crushed bones in a womb the shape of a barrel. Then my mind fixed on another image: my brother sinking to the bottom of the septic tank and me diving after him. The bleating sounded faint at first, as though a choir was practicing. One goat started and then another joined in, then all the goats together, as if they had found the right key. The rays of the sun moved and fell right in my eye. I pissed in my pants inside that barrel, appalled at the cruelty of the world to which I was returning. The goatherd called out to his flock, and one of the goats butted the barrel.” The endings are abrupt, sometimes twist endings, leaving one pondering what moral there may be, if any; often the lack of closure itself seems to be the point. Given such a enigmatic style, unsurprisingly some of the stories worked much better for me than others (in particular, when he strays into clearer political commentary, the stories seem to get weaker). Hits: “The Corpse Exhibition” (de Quincey-esque) “The Killers and the Compass” (nihilistic) “The Green Zone Rabbit” & “An Army Newspaper” (magical realistic) “Crosswords” “The Song of the Goats” “The Reality and the Record” Misses: “The Hole” “The Madman of Freedom Square” “The Iraqi Christ” “A Thousand and One Knives” “The Composer” “That Inauspicious Smile” “The Nightmares of Carlos Fuentes” | [] | Ratings and reviews - Gwern.net | Review | http://www.gwern.net/Book%20reviews | 4/1438042982502.13_20150728002302-00293-ip-10-236-191-2_475259833_0.json |
f7d9395c_atings_and_reviews___Gwern_net__Review | [Title] Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II [Author] Keith Lowe [Rating] ★★★★ [Year] 2012 [Read] 2014/12/07 [Review] | (~144k words, ~4h) Nonfiction European history by Keith Lowe. Savage Continent is a fascinating book on the bloody aftermath of WWII as the destruction wound down, the lingering consequences of anarchy worked themselves out in the sudden peace, and people tried to find a new equilibrium, punishing collaborators and finishing the ethnic cleansings. Quickly summarized on NPR: “I was used to seeing these wonderful, cozy myths about the way the war ended,” he tells Fresh Air’s Terry Gross, “and everybody celebrating and sailors grabbing hold of nurses in New York’s Times Square and kissing them and all of these sort of things. And I was aware that it hadn’t quite ended like that.” Europe, he says, was so devastated that “it’s difficult for us to quite realize how bad the destruction was.” WWII for Americans remains the good war; while one may be familiar with tarnished aspects of that (the atrocities in the Pacific, the unnecessary atomic bombings of Japan, the domestic censorship, etc), one hears less about the post-war period. Presumably after liberation, things were cleaned up quickly and calmly and a few years later our historical memory turns to the start of the Cold War. An example of the fluffiness I have in mind is an old movie I watched in August, Three Coins in the Fountain, a romantic comedy set in post-war Rome, where while there is still poverty and recovery from the war, things are basically OK. But one might have a better idea from my earlier reading, Catch-22‘s Italy scenes; or from Gravity’s Rainbow’s depiction of partitioned Germany’s fierce stew of black-marketeering, Communism, corruption, crime, destruction, and prostitution. The end of WWII left much business unfinished: Wages of Destruction covers in detail the slave labor forces drawn from conquered Europe which worked in Germany up until defeat, and the parlous food situation of Germany and Europe at large - so what happened after? With all these victorious horny occupation forces? With the slave laborers, and the Jews, and the guerrillas or partisans or thieves or black-marketeers? How were morals slowly restored after being corrupted by the exigencies of war and the struggle for survival, and what was seen as now possible after the Holocaust? The answers are rarely pretty, but Lowe gives a synoptic view. It can be hard to understand the early Cold War: what were the Americans & Europeans thinking when they set up Operation Gladio? What was with the persecution of homosexuals or the “Red Scare” & McCarthy? Or, when reading through Bryne’s The Many Worlds of Hugh Everett (review), one can see on display his incomprehension of how anyone could plan for nuclear war or be willing to go to the edge or the security mindset. But here we see it put in context: a Europe only just liberated from one despotism, half of which has been handed over to another despot even worse and who has displayed the ruthless techniques of subversion and rewriting society on a grand scale (chapter 25, “Cuckoo in the Nest: Communism in Romania”, is a surprisingly lengthy account of the sausage factory of of Communization - first, start with the internal security offices, exploit the electoral process, destroy opponents in detai, and finally with a captive government take naked control and begin the purges), in which Communist parties were not a political curiosity but popular, even a plurality sometimes. Without the benefit of hindsight, it is easy to see how one might resort to deep states, alliances with the Mafia, and so on. Throw on top of this the festering ethnic hatreds which all sides struggled to control or exploit, which had independent lives of their own… It’s hard to not see the echoes today: the Crimea appears often in Savage Europe, as it has in recent news; mentions of ’Novorossiya’ would not be out of place; the Ukraine is battered so relentlessly in WWII and afterwards that contemporary events look not like an aberration but a return to business as usual; and can Finland rest very easy about its independence from Russia when it gained its independence not that long ago and long memories are so politically profitable? An enlightening and timely book. Excerpts: Introduction-3 4,5 6-8 9-11 12-14 15-19 20-23 24-Conclusion | [] | Ratings and reviews - Gwern.net | Review | http://www.gwern.net/Book%20reviews | 4/1438042982502.13_20150728002302-00293-ip-10-236-191-2_475259833_0.json |
f7d9395c_atings_and_reviews___Gwern_net__Review | [Title] Quantum Computing since Democritus [Author] Scott Aaronson [Rating] ★★★★ [Year] 2013 [Read] 2013/06/17 [Review] | Aaronson’s book is based off his online lecture notes which I hadn’t read before though I’ve read his blog for years. I was really excited when the book was announced, since I hoped for expanded better version of his incredibly interesting paper/monograph “Why Philosophers Should Care About Computational Complexity” (abstract: “…In particular, I argue that computational complexity theory - the field that studies the resources (such as time, space, and randomness) needed to solve computational problems - leads to new perspectives on the nature of mathematical knowledge, the strong AI debate, computationalism, the problem of logical omniscience, Hume’s problem of induction, Goodman’s grue riddle, the foundations of quantum mechanics, economic rationality, closed timelike curves, and several other topics of philosophical interest. I end by discussing aspects of complexity theory itself that could benefit from philosophical analysis.”), and see also his more recent “The Ghost in the Quantum Turing Machine”. The book turns out to be excellent, but not the 5-star universally-compelling, suitable for the layman & professional alike, complete coverage of all that is interesting about computational complexity and quantum I was hoping for. I’d say probably that one could get 80% of the value from reading “Why Philosophers Should Care About Computational Complexity”, and even more if one is not particularly interested in computational complexity or quantum computing for their own sakes. Pros: - best book I’ve ever read on computational complexity - repeatedly throws out fascinating observations - learned a lot of new things even after years reading Aaronson’s blog - PAC learning, Blum’s speedup theorem, Tarski’s decision algorithm - humor better than expected Cons: - some key arguments are sketched out briefly or badly (eg. I don’t know how anyone would understand Aaronson’s version of Cantor’s diagonal proof, compared to longer better-illustrated versions like Hofstadter’s in Gödel, Escher, Bach) - the complex-probability version of quantum mechanics didn’t seem much more transparent to me than other versions; maybe if I had a physics degree? (Not that I really understood the ‘Quantish’ universe in Drescher’s equally excellent book Good and Real, either.) - overuse of complexity zoo abbreviations - no discernible connection to Democritus or the Democritus quote - some later chapters highly technical and specialized and uninteresting (eg. the size of quantum states), not always meaningfully connected - Aaronson randomly inserts bizarre and sloppy anti-Bayesian digs - like at the end of his chapter on anthropics, he seems to think it refutes the ‘religion’ of Bayesianism. Dude, WTF? No one understands or agrees on anyone in anthropics, that’s the whole point of half the field (constructing paradoxes & unpleasant implications of the most sensible principles), and you want to use anthropics as an argument against Bayesianism‽ You want to disprove the eminently successful & practical by the useless & bizarre? If ever there was a moment that the saying ‘one man’s modus tollens is another man’s modus ponens’ was appropriate… I made excerpts of the book as I read it: - Preface - chapters 1-3 - 4-5 - 9-11 - 15-16 - 22 | [] | Ratings and reviews - Gwern.net | Review | http://www.gwern.net/Book%20reviews | 4/1438042982502.13_20150728002302-00293-ip-10-236-191-2_475259833_0.json |
f7d9395c_atings_and_reviews___Gwern_net__Review | [Title] The Machiavellians, Defenders of Freedom [Author] James Burnham [Rating] ★★★★ [Year] 1988 [Read] 2012/10/05 [Review] | The best part of the book for me was that section which is already available online, “Dante: Politics as Wish” - Burnham’s convincing examination of Dante’s little-known book on divine-right-monarchical politics as intellectually dishonest & servile justification of treason. Less convincing is his idolization of Machiavelli† as a transparent writer who meant exactly what he said and had no ulterior motives or proximate politics underlurking his writings; this claim would come as quite a shock to any Straussians in the room, and also doesn’t explain why some of his advice to The Prince was terrible advice or why he didn’t ever try to spread it about (Dietz mentions these details as he makes the case in her 1986 paper “Trapping The Prince: Machiavelli and the Politics of Deception” that the Republican Machiavelli was dispensing deliberately bad and insane advice given the context) which rather makes one wonder what Burnham is going on about when he talks about Italy being told by Machiavelli to reunify to form a viable nation-state but refusing to. † which actually surprised me: I had expected from the title that Burnham would go with some sort of Noble Lie theory in which Machiavellians ‘manufacture consent’ and defend republics or democracies from the illiberal masses Similarly, his analyses of all politics or social movements as elite class warfare or expressions of the Iron Law of Oligarchy are interesting and I think to a large extent accepted these days (eg. the field of public choice), but his actual uses of the idea seem fairly inept. He is good enough to make a number of specific predictions… pretty much all of which are wrong. For example, he predicts that post-WWII that the military would expand massively and form a real faction as opposed to a little ‘puddle’ (right) and that officers would enter the governing elites and change the composition of the ruling classes (wrong; Eisenhower was elected president, but there is no visible change in composition - few presidents or candidates have benefited from service, and contenders like Colin Powell or Wesley Clark have either not run or sunk like a stone. Congress remains a province of lawyers, and no one gets wealthy in the military until they take the revolving door), and further that his loosely defined Bonapartism is inevitable although I do not recognize Clinton, Bush, or Obama as being very Bonaparte-like figures. On pg259-260, he presents a doozy of “scientific statements about social matters”: …Thus we now may know, with considerably probability, that: if the state absorbs under centralized control all major social forces, then political liberty will disappear; if, after this war, Europe is again divided into a considerable number of independent sovereign states, then a new war will begin in Europe within a comparatively short time; if the present plan of military strategy (i.e., submarine attrition warfare, and “island-hopping”) continues unchanged in the East, then Japan will not be definitely crushed for many, many years, and perhaps never; if the present Administration plans to remain in office after 1944, then it will have to curtail political liberty further; and so on. These statements were published in 1943, well after such events as the Battle of Midway (June 1942). About the best I can say is that charitably, the counterfactual precondition for one may not have been true (if we assume ‘Administration’ refers to FDR, and not his Vice President, Truman, who succeeded FDR on his premature death and then was re-elected with no visible brownshirts stuffing pollboxes). The rest are simply embarrassing. The science of politics must indeed have been young… (Or perhaps there’s some other common thread to the political criticism that opens and closes the book. Always a problem with authors discussing deception.) | [] | Ratings and reviews - Gwern.net | Review | http://www.gwern.net/Book%20reviews | 4/1438042982502.13_20150728002302-00293-ip-10-236-191-2_475259833_0.json |
f7d9395c_atings_and_reviews___Gwern_net__Review | [Title] The Black Company (The Chronicle of the Black Company, #1) [Author] Glen Cook [Rating] ★★★★ [Year] 1992 [Read] 2013/06/08 [Review] | I read the trilogy in basically one sitting after reading the interesting opening to The Black Company on Tor. I enjoyed the first book a great deal: it’s in a fairly stock medieval setting, but it handles the dark fantasy well and the plot quickly curdles into something more complex than expected as we gain entree via Croaker to the plotting of the Taken and the Lady, clever gambits & strategies, all ending in the resolution of all plots, defeat of the Dominator, and incidentally, the discrediting of the stock fantasy trope of a Joan-of-Arc-style messiah who will lead their forces to victory over the evil oppressor. It’s also interesting wondering what Croaker is concealing from us, what his sins are: he tells us, the readers of his Annals, that he has concealed a great deal and softened other parts. The downsides are few since it’s a quick read: we see entirely too much of the Company’s wizards (how many times do we need to be told that Silent is silent? or that One-Eye has just one eye? or that Goblin gets the better of One-Eye?), and it doesn’t do a good job putting any real doubt into our minds about whether the Lady is the least of evils in the North, since she countenances quite a bit and the rebels’ sins seem like the usual sort of thing which happens in war and then the wild dogs are put down during peacetime. Book 2, Shadows Linger, was in some respects even better than The Black Company. While almost all the Taken are gone and so the scope for plotting has diminished considerably, instead we get a cozy intense little drama set in Juniper, of plotting & murder & corruption with the black castle in the background rewarding & driving it all with its tempting silver as it works towards its own little doomsday (you might call it a collective action problem!). Shed’s plot thread is considerably more compelling than Croaker’s this time, as we watch him give in to weakness, folly, and bad luck time and again, each time helping the castle grow a little closer to completion and finally triggering an epic battle destroying the entire town and shattering the Black Company. (The focus on the locals also has the benefit of not over-exposing the Company wizards and letting us see them from an ‘outsider’ perspective to restore their sheen of interest.) While admittedly the black castle is more than a little contrived (the Dominator foresaw his defeat and this was the only countermeasure? the castle took 700 years to mature? he didn’t foresee the Juniper death cult before entrusting his last best hope of resurrection to it?), the plot overall still works well, and the creatures of the castle start to give an impression of why allying with the Lady might be a good idea. Book 3, The White Rose, sees it all fall apart. We’re plopped on the Plain of Fear at the heart of the renewed rebellion, which is OK enough, and we start learning what happened with Bomanz to release the Lady & the Ten which is even better. But the rebellion is a tawdry little affair, and the plot unengaging. Raven’s foolishness is difficult to credit. The White Rose’s power is almost too powerful. Parts don’t seem to hang together (how do Tracker & Toadkiller Dog arrive with Raven’s letter if they are only released by his interference?). The final alliance is too easily accomplished. The new Taken are only names. The finale is a succession of deus ex machinas - Father Tree’s offspring on top of the silver spike on top of the true effect of naming (if all it takes to destroy someone’s powers is to name them, why did this never happen before, and why were we told that true names merely allowed penetrating a magician’s spells and defenses?) On top of that, the finale is almost anti-climactic: they dismantle the defenses and neutralize the Dominator using the Rose, and bury him more thoroughly. Oh. Well, OK… The book isn’t so much bad, as disappointing since it features none of the intricacy of the previous books, is almost oddly streamlined and ‘easy’, and takes some easy way outs. I had come to expect more from Cook. | [] | Ratings and reviews - Gwern.net | Review | http://www.gwern.net/Book%20reviews | 4/1438042982502.13_20150728002302-00293-ip-10-236-191-2_475259833_0.json |
f7d9395c_atings_and_reviews___Gwern_net__Review | [Title] Life in Our Phage World [Author] Forest Rohwer [Rating] ★★★★ [Year] 2014 [Read] 2015/02/10 [Review] | (~400 pages; 4 hours) Saw a New Yorker article on phages - viruses specialized to prey on bacteria - and it mentioned the book was available; so I downloaded the biggest file and started reading. The world of phages is more than a little scary. They have been evolving for billions of years, their numbers are so vast every writer in this anthology resorts to scientific notation (and when they don’t, the numbers are so unfamiliar they look like typos: “By killing nonillions of Bacteria, they have major effects on global energy and nutrient cycles…”), and their generation time is as low as minutes, making for dizzying amounts of selection pressure and optimization - phages seem to have explored every possible way of attacking, subverting bacteria, replicating faster, compacting and making themselves more efficient, and won every arms-race bacteria started with them. If you think you’ve learned some generalization about phages, the next chapter may disabuse you by covering a phage which breaks that rule; and if it doesn’t, it may describe a back and forth sequence of arms races 4 or 5 steps deep. We learn about eerie dynamics like “kill-the-winner”, how φX174 squeezes several genes in by encoding them as overlapping with other genes (and then it gets spookier: “Even in this extremely small genome of a well-studied phage, two genes are not essential for phage replication in the lab, and thus their function has not been determined.”) or how phages proved DNA encoded genetics and their tools have been appropriated for genetic engineering and cancer research (most recently, the CRISPR proteins, a bacterial anti-phage defense system, have been stolen), or the exotic & dangerous locales phage researchers sometimes travel to in order to collect new phage samples or do clinical trials with phage therapy (India and the former USSR, mostly), or how “temperate” phages invade host bacteria but don’t burst it immediately but set up clever timing mechanisms to determine the best time & place to eat their host, or how phages “choose” whether to extend their “whiskers” / “tails” while floating around hoping to latch on to a bacteria (which is unexpectedly active a thing to do for a virus), or (reminiscent of polymorphic computer viruses) they invent mechanisms to shuffle their genes & vulnerabilities implemented in as few genes/proteins as possible. Not all the facts are intimidating - some of the temperate phages help out their host bacteria by bringing along particularly useful genes like photosynthesis, to undo the damage the phage causes; phages preying on bacteria increase bacterial production because when the phages burst bacteria, the bacteria guts are liberated for other bacteria to eat rather than the bacteria getting hoovered up by an amoeba or hydra or something and the resources being locked away and “lost from the productive surface waters, falling as marine snow to deep ocean communities.” Others are intimidating but in a good way (why do our delicious nutritious moist mucal membranes like our noses not get eaten by bacteria? because there’s an even more incredible density of phages in mucus, 40:1, than out, 10:1). The material is presented engagingly - the vocabulary is a bit specialized but explained as it goes, and one can at least follow many of the articles. Most of the articles are interesting, even, although a few enthuse about aspects of proteins or DNA I can’t follow and some are uninteresting to an outsider (who cares about taxonomy?). The illustrations are worth looking at. I have to note the genomes: phages are such genetic minimalists that a functional overview of the gene-regions of phages are presented before each one, and they are sometimes barely a page. | [] | Ratings and reviews - Gwern.net | Review | http://www.gwern.net/Book%20reviews | 4/1438042982502.13_20150728002302-00293-ip-10-236-191-2_475259833_0.json |
f7d9395c_atings_and_reviews___Gwern_net__Review | [Title] Tombstone: The Untold Story of Mao’s Great Famine [Author] Yang Jisheng [Rating] ★★★★ [Year] 2012 [Read] 2013/08/08 [Review] | The statistics and anecdotes are fairly horrifying, and the sheer profusion drills in how widespread the famine was. But for me, the most fascinating part of Tombstone was how the vast Chinese government hierarchy rippled policies and misinformation up and down it - how the local cadres tried to bow to the demands they were hearing from higher up, how the higher ups took the falsified statistics and claims often at face value, and how the highest officials in Beijing seem almost childishly helpless as they stagger between skepticism of reports given them and unthinking acceptance of positive results. Mao particularly comes to mind in his constant swerving between “left deviationism” and “right deviationism” as he tries to get communal kitchens to work and takes at face value the harvest figures and “sputniks” (even as in other incidents, he scoffs at a local official, telling him flat out that such yields were simply impossible), as he is flattered by under-officials; despite his information problems, he astonishingly repeatedly engages in tactics of announcing liberal discussion and then brutally punishing anyone who was foolish enough to do aught but flatter Mao and his policies. Indeed, as Jisheng says, officials were placed into a situation of ‘slaves to those above, tyrants to those below’ (or however his phrase went). With such perverse incentives, it’s no surprise that we run into such perfectly Hayekian examples as ‘deep plowing’ or ‘sputniks’ or ‘close planting’ or the failure of communes to realize any gains of scale (and did realize diseconomies, like the example of how communes needed lumber to fire their large ovens/stoves rather than the little bits of grass individual households could use). What is surprising is how effective the Chinese government was in maintaining control despite these severe systemic problems. How could so many millions starve to death, and no province rise up in rebellion? How could the revolts be so small scale, when the abuses were so bad and the death tolls large fractions of entire local populations? How did emigration not overwhelm any checks set up? It’s easy to agree that Sen is basically right: Mao’s famine could not have happened in any country with remotely democratic institutions like India, because the pressure would simply have overwhelmed any coercion the feeble government could orchestrate. But there’s also a flip side here: Mao remarks with surprise ‘how good’ the Chinese people were, that he could summon millions and disperse them with a wave of his hand, and another high official says similarly that it is only the goodness of the people which prevented the Army from being called in. Jisheng is at pains to show that the Communist propaganda worked and the people were not uniformly cynical about the regime like the Russians at the end of the USSR were: many officials sacrificed their careers or lives for their people, high officials are routinely shocked when they return to their home villages, and throughout we see people who are in all seriousness convinced that all the faults stem from local or midlevel officials and if only they can get word to the Emperor in Beijing all will be made well. This naive faith, which initially strikes one as pathetic & moronic & lacking any critical thinking makes me wonder if it could also be related to how China seems to have vastly outperformed India in the past decades, since it switched to sane economic policies; if the Chinese people’s faith and hard work could lead to such utter disaster when applied to futile policies, does it yield equally unusual results when finally applied correctly? | [] | Ratings and reviews - Gwern.net | Review | http://www.gwern.net/Book%20reviews | 4/1438042982502.13_20150728002302-00293-ip-10-236-191-2_475259833_0.json |
f7d9395c_atings_and_reviews___Gwern_net__Review | [Title] Pact [Author] Wildbow [Rating] ★★★★ [Year] 2014 [Read] 2015/03/16 [Review] | Pact (~950k words; 3 days; TvTropes) takes the Worm formula but this time heads to modern urban Western occult fantasy. Where Worm tried to rationalize classic superhero fiction, Pact instead aims at rationalizing the quasi-Lovecraft paradigm of vaguely-Wiccan/occult fantasy set in small New England-esque towns with angels, demons, high-fantasy Elves, folklore creatures like goblins, oaths, and warring clans of secretive practitioners submerged in a sea of ‘muggles’; the continued survival of occult knowledge is attributed to a long demonic campaign of subversion, magic is gained by ritual rather than genes, a ‘karma’ mechanism and magically-enforced honesty (essentially, narrative causality souped way up) encourages dramatic acting and minimizing genuine conflict; and the supernatural is part of a feedback loop like superpowers in Worm. Curiously, for all the complaints about Pact being unbearably grim, the world itself is much more optimisticly constructed - as one character says, humanity has been winning (in contrast to the nigh-inevitable defeat of humanity in Worm). The start of the plot itself is well-enough described officially: Blake Thorburn was driven away from home and family by a vicious fight over inheritance, returning only for a deathbed visit with the grandmother who set it in motion. Blake soon finds himself next in line to inherit the property, a trove of dark supernatural knowledge, and the many enemies his grandmother left behind her in the small town of Jacob’s Bell. It’s probably not much of a spoiler to say that the initial maneuvering will break out into open warfare and demons will be unleashed and fought. (Chekhov’s imp: if there is a devil in the attic in Act 1, it will be unleashed by Act 3.) So what’s good about Pact? Well, it has a much faster start than Worm, the world-building takes what is usually authorial fiat and regulates it a bit so the action matters, some scenes are fantastic (who could not enjoy the chapter about Blake negotiating a contract with the demon Pazu?), the darkness is leavened by humor, and it is not as exhaustingly comprehensive as Worm. And demon lawyers are intrinsically funny. The downsides are: Blake exists only to suffer, so people who found Worm too crushing to read will probably be unable to survive a reading of Pact and Blake himself winds up being mostly a cipher (and whether this was deliberate or not, it still damages the work); Wildbow repeats his ‘Slaughterhouse Nine arc’ error (this time, in the Toronto/Conquest fetch arc, which takes up a really absurd fraction of the work); a key twist is… questionably consistent with previously given rules & facts; the magic, while still much better than most fantasy, is still heavy on fiat and uncomfortably repetitive compared to the diversity and rigor of superpowers in Worm and some important elements seemed underused (for all the stress placed on threes, I have a hard time naming any meaningful examples); and the ending is shockingly abrupt, with almost all narrative threads and mysteries dropped or unresolved. Wildbow’s post-mortem covers some of these issues. Overall: good but not as great as Worm. | [] | Ratings and reviews - Gwern.net | Review | http://www.gwern.net/Book%20reviews | 4/1438042982502.13_20150728002302-00293-ip-10-236-191-2_475259833_0.json |
f7d9395c_atings_and_reviews___Gwern_net__Review | [Title] The Hall of Uselessness: Collected Essays [Author] Simon Leys [Rating] ★★★★ [Year] 2011 [Read] 2015/04/27 [Review] | (~180k words; 5 hours) Anthology of literature-focused essays, highly miscellaneous. Judged by wordcount and topic, it seems that Leys’s focus is fairly narrow - I would compare him to a lesser Borges, but Borges delighted too much in philosophical & scientific ideas and speculation for the comparison to really work, while Leys is very much the consummate man of letters. I was interested primarily in his comments on China, and was surprised the extent to which he fixates on French literature (especially for someone who wrote in English). The good parts are his essay “The Imitation of Our Lord Don Quixote”, “Portrait of Proteus: A Little ABC of André Gide” (not so much because I care about Gide, but he does sound interesting), “Cunning Like a HedgeHog”, and many of his China essays such as “The Chinese Attitude Towards the Past” (which explains a physical absence of antiquity I had felt in my gut but had never risen to consciousness), “One More Art: Chinese Calligraphy” (which finally enlightens me on the role of calligraphy in both China & Japan), “The Wake of an Empty Boat: Zhou Enlai”, “The Art of Interpreting Non-Existent Inscriptions Written in Invisible Ink on a Blank Page” (principally for the parable from which it draws its title), “Richard Henry Dana and His Two Years Before the Mast”, & “Tell Them I Said Something”. Because of the goodness, I must overlook the bad. I have little interest in French politics of the 1800s or, much the same thing, its novelists and those essays were excruciatingly dull to me. The short “An empire of ugliness”, despite having the honor of being the second piece in the collection, is a remarkably lame attempt to defend Mother Teresa from Hitchens’s criticism (apparently the most important thing to discuss about Hitchens’s book is whether the title is obscene or merely a double-entendre, and Leys thinks it is perfectly acceptable to accept money from murderous thugs and dictators because… Jesus preached to taxfarmers?; discussion of the meat of the criticisms of Mother Teresa, is noticeable for its absence - apparently Leys believes that good results must follow good intentions while in truth good intentions follow good results, and does not appreciate that a 1% growth in GDP would do India more good than a thousand Mother Teresa); similarly, it seems that the first question Leys asks about any writer of the 20th century is what position they took on Communism, and Leys will never let you forget that he was staunchly against it & deserves credit as a seer (an anti-communism which runs so deep that his own blindness about Deng Xiaoping is all the more curious; he writes hostilely of Deng as late as 2008; to read his essays, one would have to conclude that no man’s hand authored China’s economic boom which has taken it from mass famines to a middle-income and Great Power, it just kinda sorta happened on its own and certainly Leys has no interest in the topic). And “The experience of literary translation” is not so much bad as completely inferior to Borges’s own essay on translating the Thousand and One Nights that I wonder why he bothered to write it. | [] | Ratings and reviews - Gwern.net | Review | http://www.gwern.net/Book%20reviews | 4/1438042982502.13_20150728002302-00293-ip-10-236-191-2_475259833_0.json |
f7d9395c_atings_and_reviews___Gwern_net__Review | [Title] Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void [Author] Mary Roach [Rating] ★★★★ [Year] 2010 [Read] 2013/06/29 [Review] | Hilarious, eye for details, incessant curiosity, good at tracking down bogus stories and rumors. Roach comes up with all the best quotes and stories, seems to have talked to everyone and done everything. And her running commentary is also hilarious - she’s almost as funny as she thinks she is. I laughed many times reading the book. This is definitely more “mind candy” than educational as it jumps from food to sex to hygiene to acceleration issues to psychology without any overview or unifying ideas or concepts, although I did learn a fair bit anyway from the scattershot approach. (One chapter was a revelation for me in explaining why early science fiction often postulated space driving people insane). If there is any big picture to Packing for Mars, it’s that outer space is really hard for humans to survive in and everyone & everything has to be studied in microscopic detail for anyone to go there and come back alive. Reading all the checks and modifications and details, one is boggled that we made it to the Moon, much less we be musing a Mars mission. (It makes for a pretty compelling argument that humans just don’t belong in space and that if we put half as much effort/time/money into automated exploration, we would know far more about the universe than we do - apparently, the ISS has cost us $150 billion‽ Roach is aware that this is the impression she gives in her conclusion where she criticizes ‘simulations’, but honestly, I didn’t find it a very compelling defense of the enormous difficulties & costs of shooting up some monkeys to walk around Mars compared to just sending probes.) I compiled some excerpts from most of the chapters: - chapters 1-2 - 3 - 4-5 - 6-7 - 8 - 9 - 10 - 11 - 12 - 13 - 14-15 - endnotes | [] | Ratings and reviews - Gwern.net | Review | http://www.gwern.net/Book%20reviews | 4/1438042982502.13_20150728002302-00293-ip-10-236-191-2_475259833_0.json |
f7d9395c_atings_and_reviews___Gwern_net__Review | [Title] Turing’s Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe [Author] George Dyson [Rating] ★★★★ [Year] 2012 [Read] 2012/09/06 [Review] | Mixed feelings. On the one hand, Dyson digs up all sorts of quotable lines and anecdotes and biographical details, many genuinely new to me. I enjoyed those greatly. For these I give it 4 stars. On the other hand… He is obsessed with Von Neumann’s IAS/MANIAC, to the detriment of the rest of the book. The pre-WWII history is OK but signally fails to explain things like the Hilbert program, Goedel or Turing’s actual halting theorem. Someone who read this expecting to understand ‘Turing’s cathedral’ would be vastly better served reading a book like Hofstadter’s Goedel, Escher, Bach (as old as it is). Instead, countless pages are taken up with detailed technical information that is simultaneously in depth and also poorly explained. I repeatedly got the feeling that Dyson is indulging in that common temptation, allocating material based on how much effort it took to find, not what would inform the reader - he went through a lot of work documenting MANIAC and the rest of us must enjoy (suffer) the fruits of it. I felt that if I didn’t already know a great deal of this material, I would be completely lost inside the book; I wonder how much other people could get out of it. The repeated analogies to search engines and modern computing come off very poorly (search engines are analogue? Oookkaayyy….); much could have been said about how modern chip architectures and cloud computing designs are not very Von Neumannian now, so here again I wonder if it’s a forced attempt to show contemporary relevance or perhaps just influence from his Google visit. Other parts make one question how much Dyson understands: he links Goedelian/Turing incompleteness to computer viruses and concludes with grand ’90s-esque visions (pace Kevin Kelly’s old Out of Control book) of viruses spreading out through the Internet and beating on the walls of clean computers - but viruses aren’t really a problem these days, nothing like they used to be, and the situation seems apt to only improve! Like spam, the solutions are not perfect and require a great deal of manpower & cleverness, but they are working and currently seem likely to steadily improve; this wouldn’t be a surprise to him if he had really appreciated that Goedelian/Turing-incompleteness implies that there are large decidable subsets of programs and we can build our systems out of those. (Every programmer who uses a language with a decent type system is doing something a naive understanding of incompleteness says is impossible: he’s executing nontrivial predicates over his program.) For those reasons and others, this will never get 5 stars from me, and if there were a 3.5 stars, I’d go with that. | [] | Ratings and reviews - Gwern.net | Review | http://www.gwern.net/Book%20reviews | 4/1438042982502.13_20150728002302-00293-ip-10-236-191-2_475259833_0.json |
f7d9395c_atings_and_reviews___Gwern_net__Review | [Title] Echopraxia (Firefall, #2) [Author] Peter Watts [Rating] ★★★★ [Year] 2014 [Read] 2014/08/15 [Review] | We’ve been waiting for this since Blindsight came out in 2006 and blew away all its readers. It’s been a long wait and those who read Watt’s blog and are familiar with his many travails (from a fight with the US federal government to flesh-eating bacteria) will understand the long wait. Was it worthwhile? Not really. Echopraxia is a short fast read (~3-4h) which largely expands on the ideas that B introduced: the concept of new apex predators, vampires; the minimal value of consciousness and what non-conscious upgrades of the brain like the Bicamerals could do with the horsepower; hyper-advanced aliens; and subconscious manipulation. Watts adds in scientific ‘zombies’, but the idea never really goes anywhere - Watts’s side-story “The Colonel” is in some respects more interesting than the novel, and fleshes out the major character The Colonel in a way the novel never really does. (Although the novel at least does raise interesting questions about whether Siri Keeton really escaped alive in B, to recontextualize it - perhaps we’re simply reading alien propaganda!) The Bicamerals themselves are something of a disappointment compared to the invention of the Scramblers or vampires. The plot moves on rails from the biologist in the desert to the sun back to the desert, and likely B readers will see coming the major plot twists with the alien & vampire (it’s almost identical). Some potentially intriguing ideas go unexplored; for example, the spider/“eight-legged cat” suggestion is quite interesting, but the alien fungus winds up not doing anything beyond what a more normal version of intelligence would do and so it doesn’t illustrate the idea of a timesharing slow-but-powerful intelligence. The ending is opaque and knotty, but I think with some thought and review of terminology it becomes clear: the Bicamerals and emergent AIs have completed their plan in which the hijacked fungus is incubated in the protagonist to upgrade baseline humans to vampire-like entities (sans the vampire weaknesses and without consciousness), which will be able to go toe to toe with the God-like alien invader. So, not a waste of time and probably pretty impressive to people unacquainted with Watts, but below B, some of the Rifter books, and the better short stories. I suggest reading B, then “The Colonel”, then Echopraxia. | [] | Ratings and reviews - Gwern.net | Review | http://www.gwern.net/Book%20reviews | 4/1438042982502.13_20150728002302-00293-ip-10-236-191-2_475259833_0.json |
f7d9395c_atings_and_reviews___Gwern_net__Review | [Title] Ketamine: Dreams and Realities [Author] Karl L.R. Jansen [Rating] ★★★★ [Year] 2004 [Read] 2014/11/29 [Review] | (~100k words, 3 hours; read MAPS-hosted ebook.) Everything ketamine (WP, Erowid). Jansen begins with a short history of its discovery and diffusion into the psychedelic and club scenes, covers some of the more notorious cases, the neurobiology of ketamine as understood in 2004, and then a very long discussion of the similarities of near-death experiences with ketamine psychedelic trips, followed by thorough coverage of the notorious addictiveness of ketamine (which comes off a bit apologetic; ketamine strikes me as exceedingly dangerous if “In my opinion, the group who lose control over their use is unlikely to exceed 15% of those who find the experience rewarding”, even if the biological dangers are minimal), then a bunch of ideas on how to treat ketamine addiction (some dubious, others common addiction strategies), a discussion of bad trips, and the existing body of work on using ketamine to treat addictions and other problems. It seems pretty thorough, even to a fault - I can’t say I appreciated Jansen throwing in a bunch of quantum woo and half-baked speculation, but I suppose that’s probably an occupational hazard (thinking the grand visions are anything more than grand visions and abusing physics). It’s also heavily leavened with excerpts from users’ experiences, many interviews by Jansen himself apparently; these are good to have, but perhaps not as necessary as it was in 2004 now that the Erowid trip library has over 324 reports. My own interest in ketamine is curiosity about the peculiar immediate anti-depressant effects it seems to have even with non-psychedelic use, but while depression is occasionally mentioned as a risk factor for ketamine abuse or outcome of abuse, it seems all the most relevant research must have been done after this was published in 2004. Still, an interesting and excellent overview of a niche topic, and well worth reading for more in-depth coverage after reading an overview like the Wikipedia article. | [] | Ratings and reviews - Gwern.net | Review | http://www.gwern.net/Book%20reviews | 4/1438042982502.13_20150728002302-00293-ip-10-236-191-2_475259833_0.json |
f7d9395c_atings_and_reviews___Gwern_net__Review | [Title] Clear and Simple as the Truth: Writing Classic Prose [Author] Francis-Noel Thomas [Rating] ★★★★ [Year] 1996 [Read] 2014/12/16 [Review] | (~80k words book, ~56k word online guide; ~3h without doing any exercises) A style book which actually delivers real style advice! I first heard of it on Robin Hanson’s blog and followed up recently when I saw they’ve put up an online edition/guide. The “classic style” names a style I’ve always admired - smooth, calm, humanistic, and elegant - which appears in a variety of writers past and present (Gene Wolfe often writes in this style), and it’s a pleasure to see it examined and its strengths and weaknesses laid out. (As Hanson says, the classic style is a good way to lie or deceive as it encourages one to strip away details and qualifiers to maintain the smoothness of passages.) If one likes the classic style or has need of it, I could not name a better text. The authors may not be the greatest classic stylists ever, but they are the best in discussing it while often embodying it. The book is split up into 3 parts, laying out the general attitude and evolution of classic style, then providing a few dozen short examples of the classic style vs other styles with some critical examination (noting the careful choice of language to produce striking sentences or pointing out how classic style would be disastrous in some contexts), and finally a list of writing exercises to help one learn this particular style. The first part delves into some academic issues that really don’t concern anyone interested in the classic style (I suspect most readers have neither heard of nor care about ‘mimesis’), and second part, the ‘Museum’, seems to be substantially expanded in the online guide (eg Blaise Pascal’s Provincial Letters are mentioned a few time in the book, but the excerpt of the Jesuit/Jansenist debate over “proximate” only appears in the online guide as far as I can tell); the eccentric formatting of the online guide aside, since I enjoyed most reading all the examples side by side, it might be a good idea to read the online guide first which concentrates on describing classic style & providing examples. Then, when one knows the lay of the land, read the full book, where the tangents will not distract. | [] | Ratings and reviews - Gwern.net | Review | http://www.gwern.net/Book%20reviews | 4/1438042982502.13_20150728002302-00293-ip-10-236-191-2_475259833_0.json |
f7d9395c_atings_and_reviews___Gwern_net__Review | [Title] In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives [Author] Steven Levy [Rating] ★★★★ [Year] 2011 [Read] 2013/03/24 [Review] | I learned a great deal from this book about Google, which put some of my own experiences with Google products in context. Levy has information, anecdotes, quotes, and interviews which no one else does, which, like the recent Steve Jobs biography, makes his book indispensable for anyone interested in the topic regardless of the book’s other merits. To continue the Jobs analogy, I think Levy is more independent of his subject and more willing to criticize it and poke holes in their narratives - he covers the criticisms I expected, doesn’t drop any particularly glaring issues, and more than once undermines their narratives with contrasting quotes & observations. In particular, Page repeatedly comes off as a narcissistic paranoid asshole, possibly due to his father’s death, who cannot empathize with others or understand their points of views (a trait perhaps endemic of Googlers, to judge by the Buzz fiasco). But to compensate for all the great info and explanations (more than once I thought to myself, ‘ah, so that is what happened!’), there are downsides to the book. The principle one being: Levy’s writing/presentation is extremely journalistic and dumbed down. I’m not sure whether Levy simply doesn’t understand programming & computers very well despite his long career covering the tech industry, or if he deliberately treats technical topics simplistically. (A description of JavaScript prefixes it with the undefined buzzword ‘dynamic’, although dynamic runtime typing is far from the most important aspect of JS; someone writing an early web spider is described as having a break through when they realize they can make it multithreaded, while I’m sitting back and thinking “there is no way that even in ~1995, any programmer, upon noticing that their web spider was not crawling as many URLs as he needs, would not instantly reach for multiprocessing/multithreading”.) Similar simplisticness applied to the legal discussions as well (you won’t come away with a real understanding of all the legal issues at play in the Google Books contretemps), and the economic ones fared much the same (I was glad Levy covered the auction innovations at Google, but couldn’t he explain why second-price auctions are so elegant and effective?). | [] | Ratings and reviews - Gwern.net | Review | http://www.gwern.net/Book%20reviews | 4/1438042982502.13_20150728002302-00293-ip-10-236-191-2_475259833_0.json |
f7d9395c_atings_and_reviews___Gwern_net__Review | [Title] Ready Player One [Author] Ernest Cline [Rating] ★★★★ [Year] 2011 [Read] 2015/05/02 [Review] | YA SF fiction; most similar in feel to Snow Crash and Otherland but a much faster read and overall simpler plot. Much of the appeal is simply all the ‘80s references to geeky movies and video/computer games (hard not to feel a rush of nostalgia at a mention of Robotron or a narration of a game of Tempest, which makes me wonder how much people younger than me would enjoy it), so I would strongly suggest watching at the very least War Games and since the game billionaire character seems to be based on John Carmack, Masters of Doom. (I wondered reading it how deep the resemblances go: the protagonist starts off much like Carmack did.) I was not too keen to read this, because there seems to be a deep failure of creativity when it comes to VR: almost every work seems to pick one of two hackneyed plots - ’the characters are trapped in the game world!’ or ‘the characters are competing in a contest!’ (See: every American kid cartoon, every anime like .hack/Sword Art Online, etc.) RP1 takes the latter tack, but it at least executes well. It’s fundamentally a silly idea to imagine that people would voluntarily stuff the entire Internet into World of Warcraft (way too slow and inconvenient) or that his early plot device of travel fees would ever exist (imagine paying each time you loaded a new HTML page while browsing or having to pay to switch games on your computer; absurd!) but the world at least feels reasonably realistic, with blogs and forums and professional gaming leagues and streaming video channels, and I can hardly blame him for the global-warming/energy-crisis dystopia he picks. (Many near-future SF fiction fail to achieve even a contemporary feel; many authors aim for 10 years in the future, but with the lack of smartphones and video and apps, wind up achieving a feel 10 years in the past.) Eventually you get used to it and even a narrated game of Pac-man becomes gripping. (But a decent amount of the plot takes place offline, so it’s not all ’80s namedropping and narrating games.) | [] | Ratings and reviews - Gwern.net | Review | http://www.gwern.net/Book%20reviews | 4/1438042982502.13_20150728002302-00293-ip-10-236-191-2_475259833_0.json |
f7d9395c_atings_and_reviews___Gwern_net__Review | [Title] Cool Tools: A Catalog of Possibilities [Author] Kevin Kelly [Rating] ★★★★ [Year] 2013 [Read] 2014/01/01 [Review] | Big heavy book compiling the best of the Cool Tools website/email-list, which is similar to Edmund’s Scientific Catalog; curious mix of cutting-edge Silicon Valley material, hobbies (hiking and travel especially), DIY/Maker, primitivist fetishism, and New Age stuff (yes, including the obligatory Rosicrucians) - very Californian, in other words. You might think reading a giant catalogue of stuff you’ll never buy would be boring, but it’s not. While it can’t be updated and it’s hard to follow links, the book format is much nicer for browsing & reading than the website because one can instantly shift from item to item without any overhead or action (the colored backgrounds initially seem like a mess but work well for separating entries without using up any space), On the downside, the reviews often heavily edited down from the Internet versions to save space (even with all the tiny fonts and edits, it’s still huge), occasionally out of date (eg Zeo sleep monitors - I love mine to death, but since the company shuttered ~2013, I cannot in good conscience recommend it to anyone), and has a lot of typos. Offhand, things I’ve actually started using or bought thanks to CT (book or list): trackballs, LastPass, the “oblique strategies”, bidets for toilets. Oddly, I’ve benefited most from the media recommendations, particularly the nonfiction; thanks to CT, I’ve watched: Man on Wire, The Cove, Helvetica, Jiro Dreams of Sushi, March of the Penguins, Project Nim, The King of Kong, A State of Mind, & Dead Birds; and read the books: Finite and Infinite Games, Zen Flesh, Zen Bones, Fadiman’s Psychedelic Explorer’s Guide, Tufte’s Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Chased by the Light, Letters from a Stoic, A Pattern Language, How Buildings Learn, & Peopleware. Conflict of interest: I was a contributor and got a free copy because I wrote the review of the Compact OED. | [] | Ratings and reviews - Gwern.net | Review | http://www.gwern.net/Book%20reviews | 4/1438042982502.13_20150728002302-00293-ip-10-236-191-2_475259833_0.json |
f7d9395c_atings_and_reviews___Gwern_net__Review | [Title] Proving History: Bayes’s Theorem and the Quest for the Historical Jesus [Author] Richard Carrier [Rating] ★★★★ [Year] 2012 [Read] 2012/10/31 [Review] | Overall, it’s an interesting book which I regard as basically correct and a fruitful approach for future research, and Richard Carrier is a good guy whose work should be supported. On the other hand, so far it’s not quite as awesome as I was hoping it’d be when I was writing an essay on identifying the author of the Death Note movie script with Bayesian reasoning recently - I think Luke Muehlhauser was right in his LessWrong review that Carrier does his case a disservice by trying to expound Bayesian ideas in a New Testament context where, half the point of Bayesian ideas is to point out how useless the evidence is! That’s… not a good way to either demonstrate Bayes is good in history nor to convince people of his overarching claims like ‘all correct historical inference is Bayesian inference’. The way to introduce a new paradigm is to start with its successes, where Bayesian methods led to a correct prediction or retrodiction of an issue where decisive evidence surfaced while before the issue was settled, conventional methods were confused, wrong, or underconfident; and then argue that its practical success combined with your philosophical arguments about Bayesian reasoning being the only correct reasoning is a convincing synthesis, maybe then work out verdicts/predictions/retrodictions on a non-controversial area so the experts can see how they like the conclusions, and only then extend it to highly controversial and difficult (scarce or low-quality evidence) material. I understand how he would come to write it that way since that’s what he was paid to do and Biblical material has become his specialty but I can still regret that the outcome wasn’t as good as it could’ve been. | [] | Ratings and reviews - Gwern.net | Review | http://www.gwern.net/Book%20reviews | 4/1438042982502.13_20150728002302-00293-ip-10-236-191-2_475259833_0.json |
f7d9395c_atings_and_reviews___Gwern_net__Review | [Title] Wired Love: A Romance of Dots and Dashes [Author] Ella Cheever Thayer [Rating] ★★★★ [Year] 1879 [Read] 2013/08/02 [Review] | I read this on the strength of Clive Thompson’s review Wired Love: A tale of catfishing, OK Cupid, and sexting … from 1880; I downloaded & read the Google Books version. Thompson summarizes it: …Nattie is at work one day when a telegraph operator in another city, who calls himself “C”, begins chatting her up. They engage in a virtual courtship, things get funny and romantic, until suddenly things take a most puzzling and mysterious turn. It’s all quite nuttily modern. Wired Love anticipates everything we live with in today’s online, Iphoned courtship: Assessing whether someone you’ve met online is what they say they are; the misunderstandings of tone and substance that come from communicating in rapid-fire, conversational bursts of text; or even the fact that you might not really be sure of the gender/nationality/species of the person you’re flirting with. And also teens mooning over their cellphones! “…and what with that and the telephone and that dreadful phonograph that bottles up all one says and disgorges at inconvenient times, we will soon be able to do everything by electricity; who knows but some genius will invent something for the especial use of lovers? something, for instance, to carry in their pockets, so when they are far away from each other, and pine for a sound of ‘that beloved voice’, they will have only to take up this electrical apparatus, and be happy. Ah! blissful lovers of the future!” As promised, this was a very amusing Victorian novel, an easy read (perhaps a night’s worth), and the telegraphs were fascinatingly Internet-chat-like. | [] | Ratings and reviews - Gwern.net | Review | http://www.gwern.net/Book%20reviews | 4/1438042982502.13_20150728002302-00293-ip-10-236-191-2_475259833_0.json |
f7d9395c_atings_and_reviews___Gwern_net__Review | [Title] The Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field [Author] Jacques Hadamard [Rating] ★★★★ [Year] 1954 [Read] 2014/01/20 [Review] | I took a gander at this for its possible relevance to an essay of mine on mathematical error - Hadamard’s book is one of the classics in the area of mathematical discovery, mentioned along with Poincaré’s lecture. With due allowance for style and age, Hadamard ably describes and defends the basic model of ‘work, incubation, illumination, verification’, with reference to his own discoveries, his many famous acquaintances, Poincaré’s lecture, and a very interesting survey of mathematicians. In fact, it’s a little depressing that we don’t seem to have gone much beyond that in the half-century since this was published back in 1945 or so. While at least we no longer need his defense of the unconscious as a meaningful part of cognition, much of the rest is depressingly familiar - for example, his acute observations on mental imagery & people who solely think in words, and mention of Francis Galton’s survey (little-known outside of psychology), could be usefully read by many who commit the typical mind fallacy. If Hadamard comes to no hard and fast conclusions, but merely raises many interesting points and criticizes a number of theories, we can hardly hold that against him, as we can do little better and so it becomes our failing, not his. (I read the Internet Archive scan.) | [] | Ratings and reviews - Gwern.net | Review | http://www.gwern.net/Book%20reviews | 4/1438042982502.13_20150728002302-00293-ip-10-236-191-2_475259833_0.json |
f7d9395c_atings_and_reviews___Gwern_net__Review | [Title] The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America [Author] Erik Larson [Rating] ★★★★ [Year] 2003 [Read] 2013/07/25 [Review] | Two books in one: a relatively uninteresting psychopathic serial killer (I agree with Larson, anyone who’s read Cleckley will instantly see Holmes as a psychopath), and the other a very interesting portrait of a completely forgotten societal phenomenon - world fairs & expositions. They used to be so important, major matters of national prestige, key mechanisms in the spread of art (especially Japanese art, at the Paris one) and technology, and yet, they are completely forgotten; I hadn’t even heard of them until they came up in Men in Black because some leftover buildings got used in the movie. But as Larson tells the story, we learn that they were mega-events to which all celebrities attended, and a good fraction of the entire American population would attend; they were the originals of which Disney’s Epcot is the palest imitation, they were the reason we have the Eiffel Tower and the Ferris wheel and so many other things. This story is the fascinating story, and it’s almost a pity that Larson periodically interrupts the tale of the Chicago one to tell us more about Holmes, rather than giving us real photos and more stories from the fair (photos like those in Appelbaum’s The Chicago World’s Fair of 1893: A Photographic Record): after all we are told about the Court of Honor, it’s sad to be given only a tiny glimpse of it, and it’s really a pity we read only a few ‘con stories’, as it were, from the event itself. But so it goes. | [] | Ratings and reviews - Gwern.net | Review | http://www.gwern.net/Book%20reviews | 4/1438042982502.13_20150728002302-00293-ip-10-236-191-2_475259833_0.json |
f7d9395c_atings_and_reviews___Gwern_net__Review | [Title] The Mask of Sanity [Author] Hervey M. Cleckley [Rating] ★★★★ [Year] 2003 [Read] 2012/12/21 [Review] | Cleckley scatters through this book constant fascinating anecdotes and remarks, some so outrageous or remarkable that one would assume he made them up if he were writing on some other topic. Cleckley’s moralizing and occasional very old-fashioned comments are occasionally as interesting, and reading him in 2012, one feels very strongly just how distant (in a social mores sense) we are from him in the 1940s and earlier - when he writes of ‘miscegenation’ (I wonder how many teenagers now could tell you what ‘sexual miscegenation’ is), when he defends homosexuals as possibly not insane but sometimes even decent people, or when he speaks in horror of female psychopaths not guarding their virginity, or in a half-page fulminating against the hippies, or when he speculates that a healthy male adult might - after several years stranded on a desert island - enjoy masturbation (no, really?). Sadly, Cleckley is not nearly as dated as one would hope after reading something like 200 pages detailing the endless wake of destruction, fraud, violence, deception, manipulation, and criminality: his basic conclusion that there are no effective treatments for psychopathy, and all previous attempts have been expensive failures, seems to remain true. Indeed, some attempts at treatment have backfired and resulted in even more crime being committed by subjects. | [] | Ratings and reviews - Gwern.net | Review | http://www.gwern.net/Book%20reviews | 4/1438042982502.13_20150728002302-00293-ip-10-236-191-2_475259833_0.json |
f7d9395c_atings_and_reviews___Gwern_net__Review | [Title] The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail - But Some Don’t [Author] Nate Silver [Rating] ★★★★ [Year] 2012 [Read] 2012/11/19 [Review] | An excellent popular (easy to read) overview of a variety of statistical topics, with a good focus on not fooling yourself with overfitting. Some of the technical aspects are a little weak (the Hume discussion comes to mind), but what do you expect, Silver’s a busy guy. Excerpts: - Introduction - 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 - 6 - 7 - 8 - 10 - 11 - 12 - 13 | [] | Ratings and reviews - Gwern.net | Review | http://www.gwern.net/Book%20reviews | 4/1438042982502.13_20150728002302-00293-ip-10-236-191-2_475259833_0.json |
f7d9395c_atings_and_reviews___Gwern_net__Review | [Title] Hyperbole and a Half: Unfortunate Situations, Flawed Coping Mechanisms, Mayhem, and Other Things That Happened [Author] Allie Brosh [Rating] ★★★★ [Year] 2013 [Read] 2014/02/20 [Review] | tl;dr: the webcomic is great, go read it. I’ve been a devoted reader of Hyperbole and a Half for many years now, even through the long depression drought: Brosh is witty, ironic, self-aware, hilarious, and though her comics seem crudely drawn, they still perfectly convey the inner emotions of events, illustrate the prose, and (along with XKCD) give hope to us all that we may one day become world-class comic artists though we still draw like we’re in kindergarten. Summary: I like her stuff. 5 stars. I was curious how the book version would go, since I had already read all of the online ones (of course). I picked up the e-book, reader it in FBreader on my laptop, and… I’m not really impressed. These comic essays were written for scrolling web browsers, and it shows in the awkwardness of the pagination and book display form. I’m glad the book exists so she can make the money she deserves and for all the people who simply won’t read a web comic but will read a book, but at least for me, the original is best. (The extra content isn’t really enough to change my opinion.) Book: 4 stars. | [] | Ratings and reviews - Gwern.net | Review | http://www.gwern.net/Book%20reviews | 4/1438042982502.13_20150728002302-00293-ip-10-236-191-2_475259833_0.json |
f7d9395c_atings_and_reviews___Gwern_net__Review | [Title] Declare [Author] Tim Powers [Rating] ★★★★ [Year] 2002 [Read] 2013/02/14 [Review] | I enjoyed this greatly: Declare is a hybrid of a Le Carré espionage novel (The Spy Who Came In From The Cold in particular) and Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum (in the meticulous pattern-seeking and warping of historical events and literature), with a bouncing action plot which appositely quotes from Fitzgerald-Khayyam, Spenser, Shakespeare and Swinburne especially to grant it greater depth than it might seem to merit. Even when you think it’s done on Mt Ararat (and Powers has in a final flourish explained Philby dying shortly before the Berlin Wall), the plot isn’t entirely over and there are multiple more deceptions and operations to go. And to top it all off, Powers takes an afterword to “show his work” and reveal how Cold War history was “freakier than fiction” (in TvTropes terms), but it’s hard to blame him for not being really pleased with some of the genuine incidents he works in. (The exploding car with Philby wearing a fox cape and escaping with a minor injury while everyone else died? Real. I was shocked.) | [] | Ratings and reviews - Gwern.net | Review | http://www.gwern.net/Book%20reviews | 4/1438042982502.13_20150728002302-00293-ip-10-236-191-2_475259833_0.json |
f7d9395c_atings_and_reviews___Gwern_net__Review | [Title] A Shropshire Lad [Author] A.E. Housman [Rating] ★★★★ [Year] 1990 [Read] 2015/05/27 [Review] | A Shropshire Lad (8.3k words; 1.5 hours; Wikisource edition) A.E. Housman’s first collection of 63 poems. I enjoy his terse, rhyming style of very short lines, which he somehow makes look easy and almost conversational, particularly poems II, IV, XXIII, XXX, XXXIII, XLIV, XLIX, LXII, LXIII; it’s particularly impressive how completely consistent they all are with each other. This consistency meant that when I read the parodies quoted on Wikipedia, I found them very funny. It is short enough that the themes of romantic love and death do not grow too wearying before the end, although I was not particularly taken with the patriotic poems, particularly in a collection published not all that long before WWI (“State is the name of the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly it lies; and this lie slips from its mouth: ‘I, the state, am the people.’”), but on the plus side, none of the complacent Christianity still in vogue at the time. Overall, a good collection. I will continue on to Housman’s other collections. | [] | Ratings and reviews - Gwern.net | Review | http://www.gwern.net/Book%20reviews | 4/1438042982502.13_20150728002302-00293-ip-10-236-191-2_475259833_0.json |
f7d9395c_atings_and_reviews___Gwern_net__Review | [Title] Chased by the Light: A 90-Day Journey-Revisited After the Storm [Author] Jim Brandenburg [Rating] ★★★★ [Year] 2001 [Read] 2007/01/01 [Review] | I read this after reading Kevin Kelly’s review in Cool Tools, where he wrote Take one, and only one, exposure per day. No second exposure, no second chance. A single arrow per day, and a bull’s eye each time. That’s zen. For amateurs and professionals alike this requires relying on the Force. Particularly since many of his subjects are wild birds and stealthy wolves. The ninety images stand strong, each on their own, but the complete symphony is one of the most impressive acts of mindfulness I’ve seen. After finishing looking through it, I could not disagree too much. It is one of the best photo books I have seen. The subject matter is much less profound and terrifying than 100 Suns, but the general quality is higher. More than once I found myself wondering if Brandenburg was lying - these photos are too good and catch too many moments perfectly, surely he couldn’t’ve possibly really taken only 1 photograph a day and these were them, surely he sometimes took hundreds and is covering them up? But so it seems. | [] | Ratings and reviews - Gwern.net | Review | http://www.gwern.net/Book%20reviews | 4/1438042982502.13_20150728002302-00293-ip-10-236-191-2_475259833_0.json |
f7d9395c_atings_and_reviews___Gwern_net__Review | [Title] The Theory That Would Not Die: How Bayes’ Rule Cracked the Enigma Code, Hunted Down Russian Submarines, and Emerged Triumphant from Two Centuries of Controversy [Author] Sharon Bertsch McGrayne [Rating] ★★★★ [Year] 2011 [Review] | Light history of Bayesian statistics & related topics. I enjoyed the book a lot; McGrayne has a good eye for the amusing details, and she conveys at least some of the intuition (although some graphs or examples would have helped the reader - I liked the flipping coin illustrations in Dasivia 2006 Bayesian Data Analysis). It’s also remarkably synoptic: I was repeatedly surprised by names popping up in the chronology, like BUGS, Bretthorst, Fisher’s smoking papers, Diaconis, the actuarial use of Bayes etc, and I have a better impression of Laplace and Good’s many contributions. The math was very light, which undermines the value of much of it since unless one is already an expert one doesn’t know how much the author is falsifying (for the best reasons), and means that some connections are missed (like empirical Bayes being a forerunner of hierarchical modeling, which aren’t well-explained themselves). | [] | Ratings and reviews - Gwern.net | Review | http://www.gwern.net/Book%20reviews | 4/1438042982502.13_20150728002302-00293-ip-10-236-191-2_475259833_0.json |
f7d9395c_atings_and_reviews___Gwern_net__Review | [Title] The Man Who Knew Infinity: A Life of the Genius Ramanujan [Author] Robert Kanigel [Rating] ★★★★ [Year] 1992 [Read] 2013/08/12 [Review] | A long account of a short life. I knew only the bare outlines of Ramanujan’s story, but I think this does an excellent job in fleshing the famous anecdotes out; for example, I hadn’t realized how long he had twisted in the wind before his famous letter to Hardy, nor that he had spent a full year and more in India in a position before finally being brought to Cambridge. While Kanigel goes overboard in his novelistic scene-setting and psychologizing, one cannot say he does not try to set the scene for one and go beyond a bare recitations of events to the actual feel and texture of life in various places or of various persons; particularly noteworthy is his attempts to explain at least a little of the actual math which made Ramanujan worth a biography, beyond his romantic story, and here I think Kanigel does a really good job for the layman. | [] | Ratings and reviews - Gwern.net | Review | http://www.gwern.net/Book%20reviews | 4/1438042982502.13_20150728002302-00293-ip-10-236-191-2_475259833_0.json |
f7d9395c_atings_and_reviews___Gwern_net__Review | [Title] Debt: The First 5,000 Years [Author] David Graeber [Rating] ★★★★ [Year] 2011 [Read] 2011/09/24 [Review] | Mixed feelings: many interesting little tidbits and quotes, but overall I get the feel of a vast thesis made up of confirmation bias and unreliable evidence like etymologies; some parts are flabbergastingly wrong, like his brief description of Apple Computer’s founding. (He apparently routinely makes factual mistakes; Brad DeLong apparently identified 50 in chapter 12 just to make that point.) And while he’s very cynical about things he’s against, he exhibits a strange lack of cynicism about his in-groups (like the idle poor, or China - accusing the US of manipulating the rates!) Emphasizing the rather ideological bent of the book is his very thin skin as exhibited in response to online criticism like on Crooked Timber. | [] | Ratings and reviews - Gwern.net | Review | http://www.gwern.net/Book%20reviews | 4/1438042982502.13_20150728002302-00293-ip-10-236-191-2_475259833_0.json |
f7d9395c_atings_and_reviews___Gwern_net__Review | [Title] Red Plenty: Inside the Fifties’ Soviet Dream [Author] Francis Spufford [Rating] ★★★★ [Year] 2010 [Read] 2012/06/02 [Review] | Comparable to Dos Passos’s USA or Schulz’s Radiance, if that helps. Depicts how Russia fell into the middle-income trap and stagnated, and illuminates the early growth of Russia’s industrialization and why Khrushchev thought Russia could bury the US (not in dirt, but manufactured goods). Elegiac, enlightening, sympathetic. Further reading: - In Soviet Union, Optimization Problem Solves You, Cosma Shalizi (discussion) - “The Myth of Asia’s Miracle”, Paul Krugman | [] | Ratings and reviews - Gwern.net | Review | http://www.gwern.net/Book%20reviews | 4/1438042982502.13_20150728002302-00293-ip-10-236-191-2_475259833_0.json |
f7d9395c_atings_and_reviews___Gwern_net__Review | [Title] The Metropolitan Man [Author] Alexander Wales [Rating] ★★★★ [Year] 2014 [Read] 2014/08/02 [Review] | The Metropolitan Man is an 80k-word novel following Lex Luthor as he realizes and then grapples with the threat Superman poses to the human race (now that I think about it, it is like Worm in this respect). I can’t fault Luthor’s analysis of the many risks of Superman or the ethics of his powers, and the plot develops well, finishing in an ending which however unexpected and abrupt is perfectly consistent with the plotter and thinker and careful preparer for all contingencies Luthor is shown as. But to some extent it leaves me cold - difficult to pin down what, but I think the writing may simply be too precise, dry, bloodless to really let me be absorbed by the story. | [] | Ratings and reviews - Gwern.net | Review | http://www.gwern.net/Book%20reviews | 4/1438042982502.13_20150728002302-00293-ip-10-236-191-2_475259833_0.json |
f7d9395c_atings_and_reviews___Gwern_net__Review | [Title] The End of History and the Last Man [Author] Francis Fukuyama [Rating] ★★★★ [Year] 2006 [Read] 2004/01/01 [Review] | I’ve bumped this to 4 stars as, thinking back on the ~decade since I read this, Fukuyama is still right and yet no one seems to get this. People, look at the Arab Spring. Did it yield any caliphates, say? Anarchistic self-governing communes? Self-governing city-states? Hanseatic Leagues? Or look at official rhetoric in places like China. Look at the gradual and continuing expansion of capitalism and democracy as the defaults for every country. Look at the discrediting of Putin’s Russian cronyism approach, or at the Muslim world’s shift away from marginal Salafist groups like al-Qaeda. Fukuyama was right. There are no credible alternatives to the capitalist liberal democracy paradigm. | [] | Ratings and reviews - Gwern.net | Review | http://www.gwern.net/Book%20reviews | 4/1438042982502.13_20150728002302-00293-ip-10-236-191-2_475259833_0.json |
f7d9395c_atings_and_reviews___Gwern_net__Review | [Title] The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements [Author] Eric Hoffer [Rating] ★★★★ [Year] 2010 [Review] | Many of his points and observations ring true, but Hoffer is fond of using only a few isolated examples to prove his points, and of affirming paradoxes; but the problem with each is that they are not as reliable as they may seem, and the general detachment from statistics and economics and demographics undermines my confidence in any of his claims. He cites Tocqueville approvingly on the lack of coherence of the narrative of the French Revolution with the observed facts that the French had never had it better than before the Revolution - but how can I then have any confidence in any of his narratives? | [] | Ratings and reviews - Gwern.net | Review | http://www.gwern.net/Book%20reviews | 4/1438042982502.13_20150728002302-00293-ip-10-236-191-2_475259833_0.json |
f7d9395c_atings_and_reviews___Gwern_net__Review | [Title] Dreams of Steel (The Chronicle of the Black Company, #5) [Author] Glen Cook [Rating] ★★★★ [Year] 1990 [Read] 2013/06/12 [Review] | A major improvement over the previous two books and equal to the original The Black Company & Shadows Linger: we turn to the Lady’s perspective as she fights her way back from a debacle in the invasion of the Shadowlands, builds up an army, and imposes her own manipulative rule and empire-building tactics, heavily leavened by plotting by all parties. Pluses included no more Taken popping up, we saw very little of Goblin or One-eye, and soap-operatic twist at the end aside, the overall plot has built up nicely. | [] | Ratings and reviews - Gwern.net | Review | http://www.gwern.net/Book%20reviews | 4/1438042982502.13_20150728002302-00293-ip-10-236-191-2_475259833_0.json |
f7d9395c_atings_and_reviews___Gwern_net__Review | [Title] On China [Author] Henry Kissinger [Rating] ★★★★ [Year] 2011 [Read] 2012/01/31 [Review] | Kissinger may be a duplicitous murderous bastard, but he’s an excellent analyst and while his ancient history is only so-so as far as I can tell from my other reading (eg. Needham), his takes on modern Chinese history is very interesting, and I learned a number of things I did not know before (I was shocked to learn that the Soviets at one point seriously considered pre-emptively attacking China’s nuclear program and had reached out to the USA to ask whether the USA would be very upset about it?). | [] | Ratings and reviews - Gwern.net | Review | http://www.gwern.net/Book%20reviews | 4/1438042982502.13_20150728002302-00293-ip-10-236-191-2_475259833_0.json |
f7d9395c_atings_and_reviews___Gwern_net__Review | [Title] The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires [Author] Tim Wu [Rating] ★★★★ [Year] 2010 [Read] 2010/01/01 [Review] | His Cycle is a convincing paradigm. I already knew a lot of it from Lawrence Lessig and related copyright books & writings, but Tim Wu puts the history together nicely, and renders the 2000s a little clearer (not that I really needed to be told that Apple/Jobs are a clear incarnation of the empire-building trend; this was obvious even when Neal Stephenson pointed it out many years ago in “In The Beginning Was The Commandline…” ) | [] | Ratings and reviews - Gwern.net | Review | http://www.gwern.net/Book%20reviews | 4/1438042982502.13_20150728002302-00293-ip-10-236-191-2_475259833_0.json |
f7d9395c_atings_and_reviews___Gwern_net__Review | [Title] The Circus of Dr. Lao [Author] Charles G. Finney [Rating] ★★★★ [Year] 2002 [Read] 2011/10/20 [Review] | The book comes up often in Wolfe discussions of An Evil Guest, I noticed there was a copy on library.nu, so… Short, but fairly funny; ending wasn’t quite as expected, but the dramatis personae and especially the section of questions listing contradictions/mistakes/obscurities made up for my lingering dissatisfaction. Don’t think it was directly useful for interpreting Wolfe’s An Evil Guest, but the dramatis personae is a clear inspiration for Wolfe’s own character lists. | [] | Ratings and reviews - Gwern.net | Review | http://www.gwern.net/Book%20reviews | 4/1438042982502.13_20150728002302-00293-ip-10-236-191-2_475259833_0.json |
f7d9395c_atings_and_reviews___Gwern_net__Review | [Title] The Kindly Ones [Author] Jonathan Littell [Rating] ★★★★ [Year] 2009 [Review] | Very long, not a little tedious (although in places the detail reaches tour de forces, like the early discussion of German war on the Eastern front). Desensitized by the end. Not sure how to take it, but disagree with the protagonist - I don’t understand his constant depravity and murdering, and I don’t agree I would do much the same thing in his position. One or two murders, maybe, but even killing his best friend Thomas who time and again saved Aue’s ass? | [] | Ratings and reviews - Gwern.net | Review | http://www.gwern.net/Book%20reviews | 4/1438042982502.13_20150728002302-00293-ip-10-236-191-2_475259833_0.json |
f7d9395c_atings_and_reviews___Gwern_net__Review | [Title] The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution [Author] Bernard Bailyn [Rating] ★★★★ [Year] 1992 [Read] 2011/01/01 [Review] | Bailyn was more or less as Moldbug described, and the quotes from the pamphlets fairly convincing. That said, I would have liked a lot more of those quotes about conspiracies and the origins of the plans to enslave the colonies for private profit, and much less paraphrase & political theorizing. | [] | Ratings and reviews - Gwern.net | Review | http://www.gwern.net/Book%20reviews | 4/1438042982502.13_20150728002302-00293-ip-10-236-191-2_475259833_0.json |
f7d9395c_atings_and_reviews___Gwern_net__Review | [Title] Friendship is Optimal [Author] iceman [Rating] ★★★★ [Year] 2012 [Review] | It’s an excellent dystopia which makes you feel that it’s hell - but also better than our reality. But as great as the premise is, and as chilling (or thrilling?) as the results are, on reflection I’m not quite sure I can give this a rare 5-stars (as I did initially): the prose is a little too journeyman-like, the characters a little too undifferentiated. | [] | Ratings and reviews - Gwern.net | Review | http://www.gwern.net/Book%20reviews | 4/1438042982502.13_20150728002302-00293-ip-10-236-191-2_475259833_0.json |
f7d9395c_atings_and_reviews___Gwern_net__Review | [Title] Steve Jobs [Author] Walter Isaacson [Rating] ★★★★ [Year] 2011 [Read] 2011/10/24 [Review] | Long but good biography; in some respects, too cheerleading of Jobs (balanced by Isaacson not truckling too much and being willing to cover the ugly parts of Jobs’s life). But overall, a good detailed bio. I do not admire Jobs - perhaps if he were less neurotic or chewed through people less, but I respect him: he was a real mensch. | [] | Ratings and reviews - Gwern.net | Review | http://www.gwern.net/Book%20reviews | 4/1438042982502.13_20150728002302-00293-ip-10-236-191-2_475259833_0.json |
f7d9395c_atings_and_reviews___Gwern_net__Review | [Title] Shades of Grey: The Road to High Saffron (Shades of Grey, #1) [Author] Jasper Fforde [Rating] ★★★★ [Year] 2009 [Read] 2013/03/29 [Review] | Post-apocalyptic Flatland meets Hunger Games via Paranoia - that is, an insane bureaucratic totalitarian Victorian nightmare mediated by color perception whose protagonists rebel against the order of things instituted after some doomsday. I enjoyed it a lot. | [] | Ratings and reviews - Gwern.net | Review | http://www.gwern.net/Book%20reviews | 4/1438042982502.13_20150728002302-00293-ip-10-236-191-2_475259833_0.json |
f7d9395c_atings_and_reviews___Gwern_net__Review | [Title] I Know Who You Are and I Saw What You Did: Social Networks and the Death of Privacy [Author] Lori Andrews [Rating] ★★★★ [Year] 2012 [Review] | Remarkably thoroughly researched, with endless references and anecdotes, which is an achievement indeed for a topic as ephemeral and changing as social media. (I didn’t think too much of its critical analysis or conclusions, but the rest more than made up for it.) | [] | Ratings and reviews - Gwern.net | Review | http://www.gwern.net/Book%20reviews | 4/1438042982502.13_20150728002302-00293-ip-10-236-191-2_475259833_0.json |
f7d9395c_atings_and_reviews___Gwern_net__Review | [Title] World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability [Author] Amy Chua [Rating] ★★★★ [Year] 2004 [Review] | That was actually pretty good (better than one might guess from reading the discussions of her later tiger-mother book), many interesting observations. Her paradigm seems pretty generally applicable outside the First World. I took extensive notes. | [] | Ratings and reviews - Gwern.net | Review | http://www.gwern.net/Book%20reviews | 4/1438042982502.13_20150728002302-00293-ip-10-236-191-2_475259833_0.json |
f7d9395c_atings_and_reviews___Gwern_net__Review | [Title] Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives [Author] David Eagleman [Rating] ★★★★ [Year] 2009 [Review] | 40 very short stories in the tradition of Borges, Calvino, and Stanislaw Lem (in ascending order). Overall, pretty good, although naturally the quality level varies considerably and the parables that spoke to me will not speak to others. | [] | Ratings and reviews - Gwern.net | Review | http://www.gwern.net/Book%20reviews | 4/1438042982502.13_20150728002302-00293-ip-10-236-191-2_475259833_0.json |
f7d9395c_atings_and_reviews___Gwern_net__Review | [Title] The Black Cloud [Author] Fred Hoyle [Rating] ★★★★ [Year] 1998 [Read] 2010/12/01 [Review] | Good frame story, good science, good possibilities - the black cloud is still a novel proposal and interesting to think about in a panspermia context. Mind candy. (And short enough it doesn’t wear out its welcome.) | [] | Ratings and reviews - Gwern.net | Review | http://www.gwern.net/Book%20reviews | 4/1438042982502.13_20150728002302-00293-ip-10-236-191-2_475259833_0.json |
f7d9395c_atings_and_reviews___Gwern_net__Review | [Title] Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage [Author] Kathryn Edin [Rating] ★★★★ [Year] 2007 [Read] 2011/11/13 [Review] | Incredibly sobering, explains a lot about inner-city illegitimacy, and the best thing I’ve read about the topic and why women would do something which from far away seems like a completely terrible idea. | [] | Ratings and reviews - Gwern.net | Review | http://www.gwern.net/Book%20reviews | 4/1438042982502.13_20150728002302-00293-ip-10-236-191-2_475259833_0.json |
f7d9395c_atings_and_reviews___Gwern_net__Review | [Title] Intelligence: A Unifying Construct for the Social Sciences [Author] Richard Lynn [Rating] ★★★★ [Year] 2012 [Read] 2012/08/14 [Review] | Very wonky, of course, but still many interesting correlation; I excerpted parts I found interesting to a Google+ post. | [] | Ratings and reviews - Gwern.net | Review | http://www.gwern.net/Book%20reviews | 4/1438042982502.13_20150728002302-00293-ip-10-236-191-2_475259833_0.json |
f7d9395c_atings_and_reviews___Gwern_net__Review | [Title] Proofs and Refutations: The Logic of Mathematical Discovery [Author] Imre Lakatos [Rating] ★★★★ [Year] 1976 [Read] 2011/12/28 [Review] | Surprisingly interesting, like Wittgenstein if he wrote in a human fashion, and longer than one would think possible given how straightforward the problem initially appears. | [] | Ratings and reviews - Gwern.net | Review | http://www.gwern.net/Book%20reviews | 4/1438042982502.13_20150728002302-00293-ip-10-236-191-2_475259833_0.json |
f7d9395c_atings_and_reviews___Gwern_net__Review | [Title] Little Boy: The Arts of Japan’s Exploding Subculture [Author] Takashi Murakami [Rating] ★★★★ [Year] 2005 [Read] 2011/11/24 [Review] | Main use for this book: encyclopedia entries, Murakami’s long essay, the dialogue with Okada - rest is completely impenetrable, featuring fine gobbledegook. | [] | Ratings and reviews - Gwern.net | Review | http://www.gwern.net/Book%20reviews | 4/1438042982502.13_20150728002302-00293-ip-10-236-191-2_475259833_0.json |
f7d9395c_atings_and_reviews___Gwern_net__Review | [Title] Snuff (Discworld, #39; City Watch #8) [Author] Terry Pratchett [Rating] ★★★★ [Year] 2011 [Read] 2011/11/17 [Review] | Curiously, this is the least funny but probably best Discworld book I’ve read so far. Vimes has grown a great deal since we first met him. | [] | Ratings and reviews - Gwern.net | Review | http://www.gwern.net/Book%20reviews | 4/1438042982502.13_20150728002302-00293-ip-10-236-191-2_475259833_0.json |
f7d9395c_atings_and_reviews___Gwern_net__Review | [Title] Birds [Author] Aristophanes [Rating] ★★★★ [Year] 1998 [Review] | I was mildly surprised by how much funnier than expected it was. One doesn’t expect such ancient contemporary humor to translate well. | [] | Ratings and reviews - Gwern.net | Review | http://www.gwern.net/Book%20reviews | 4/1438042982502.13_20150728002302-00293-ip-10-236-191-2_475259833_0.json |
f7d9395c_atings_and_reviews___Gwern_net__Review | [Title] The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at M.I.T. [Author] Stewart Brand [Rating] ★★★ [Year] 1988 [Read] 2010/01/01 [Review] | Well-done bit of technological investigation & prognostication, now dated & historical. Enough time has passed since 1988 to enable us to judge the basic truthfulness of the predictions & expectations held by the dreamers such as Nicholas Negroponte: they were remarkably accurate! If you aren’t struck by a sense of déjà vu or pity when you read this book, compare the people at the Media Lab with contemporary works like Cliff Stoll’s Silicon Snake Oil, & you’ll see how right they were. The sad thing is noting how few future millionaires & billionaires grace the page of TML - one quickly realizes that yes, person X was 100% right about Y happening even when everyone thought it insane, but X was off by a few years & jumped the gun & so Z was the person who wound up taking all the spoils. I read it constantly thinking ‘yes, you were right, for all the good it did you’ or ‘not quite, it’d actually take another decade for that to really work out’. “If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?” The lesson I draw is: it is not enough to predict the future, one has to get the timing right to not be ruined. To borrow from my LW comments (1/2/3): A good idea will draw overly-optimistic entrepreneurs to it like moths to a flame: all get immolated but the one with the dumb luck to kiss the flame at the perfect instant. (How many payment startup were there before Paypal? How many social networks before Facebook? How many search engines before Google?) How can you catch a falling knife? Many ‘bubbles’ can be interpreted as people being 100% correct the future - but missing the timing (Thiel’s article on China & bubbles, The Economist on obscure property booms, Garber’s Famous First Bubbles). Consider the ill-fated Pets.com: was the investor right to believe that Americans would spend a ton of money online such as for buying dogfood? Absolutely, Amazon (which has rarely turned a profit & has sucked up far more investment than Pets.com ever did) is a successful online retail business that stocks thousands of dog food varieties, to say nothing of all the other pet-related goods it sells. But the value of Pets.com stock still went to ~$0. Many startups have a long list of failed predecessors who tried to do pretty much the same thing, & what made them a success was that they happened to give the pinata a whack at the exact moment where some cost curves or events hit the right point. (Facebook is the biggest archive of photographs there has ever been, with truly colossal storage requirements; could it have succeeded in the 1990s? No, & not even later, as demonstrated by Orkut & Friendster, & the lingering death of MySpace.) You can read books from the past about tech visionaries & note how many of them were spot-on in their beliefs about what would happen (The Media Lab is a great example, but far from the only one) but where a person would have been ill-advised to act on the correct forecasts. Or look at computers: imagine an early adopter of an Apple computer saying ‘everyone will use computers eventually!’ Yes, but not for another few decades, & ‘in the long run, we are all dead’. Examples of this pop up all the time. I watched impressed recently as my aunt used the iPhone application FaceTime to videophone with her daughter half a continent away, & though about how people were disappointed by the failure of videophones in the ‘90s & previous & then concluded that perhaps people didn’t really want videophones at all - but really, it looks like the videophones back then simply weren’t good enough! & I’ve noticed geeks express wonderment at the Oculus Rift looking like it’ll bring Virtual Reality to the masses, & won’t that be a real kick in the teeth for Cliff Stoll or Jaron Lanier (who gave up VR for dead ages ago & has earned his daily bread being court jester to the elites & criticizing them)? Smartphones are an even bigger example of this. How often did I read in the ’90s & early ’00s about how amazing Japanese cellphones were & how amazing a good smartphone would be, even though year after year the phones were jokes & used pretty much solely for voice? You can even see the smartphones come up again & again in TML, as the visionaries realize how transformative a mobile pocket-sized computer would be. Yet, it took until the mid-00s for the promise of smartphones to materialize overnight. I was reminded of this recently reading an interview with Eric Jackson: Q: What’s your take on how they’re [Apple] handling their expansion into China, India, & other emerging markets? A: It’s depressing how slow things are moving on that front. We can draw lines on a graph but we don’t know the constraints. Again, the issue with adoption is that the timing is so damn hard. I was expecting smartphones to take off in mid 2004 & was disappointed over & over again. & then suddenly a catalyst took hold & the adoption skyrocketed. Cook calls this “cracking the nut”. I don’t know what they can do to move faster but I suspect it has to do with placement (distribution) & with networks which both depend on (corrupt) entities. Or to look at VR; a recent The Verge article on VR took a historical look back at past efforts, & what’s striking is that VR was arguably thought of back in the 1950s or so, more than half a century before the computing power or monitors were remotely close to what was needed for truly usable VR. The idea of VR was that obvious, it was that overdetermined, & so compelling that VR pioneers resemble nothing so much as moths to the flame, garnering grants in the hopes that this time things will improve. & of course, the money was largely wasted, because researchers can spend arbitrary amounts of money on topics without anything to show for it. Scott Fisher: “I ended up doing more work in Japan than anything else because Japan in general is so tech-smitten & obsessed that they just love [VR]. The Japanese government in general was funding research, building huge research complexes just to focus on this. There were huge initiatives while there was nothing happening in the US. I ended up moving to Japan & working there for many years.” Indeed, this would have around the Japanese boondoggle the Fifth Generation Project (note that despite Japan’s prowess at robotics, it is not Japan’s robots who went into Fukushima / flying around the Middle East / revolutionizing agriculture & construction). All those ’huge initiatives’ and…? Don’t ask Fisher, he’s hardly going to say, “yes, all the money was completely wasted, we were trying to do it too soon”. Researchers in general have no incentive to say, “this is not the right time, wait another 20 years for Moore’s law to make it doable”, even if everyone in the field is perfectly aware of this - Palmer Luckey: “I spent a huge amount of time reading…I think that there were a lot of people that were giving VR too much credit, because they were working as VR researchers. You don’t want to publish a paper that says, ‘After the study, we came to the conclusion that VR is useless right now & that we should just not have a job for 20 years.’ There were a few people that basically came to that conclusion. They said, ‘Current VR gear is low field of view, high lag, too expensive, too heavy, can’t be driven properly from consumer-grade computers, or even professional-grade computers.’ It turned out that I wasn’t the first person to realize these problems. They’d been known for decades.” And Lanier implies that Japan alone spent a lot of money: Jaron Lanier: “The components have finally gotten cheap enough that we can start to talk about them as being accessible in the way that everybody’s always wanted…Moore’s law is so interesting because it’s not just the same components getting cheaper, but it really changes the way you do things. For instance, in the old days, in order to tell where your head was so that you could position virtual content to be standing still relative to you, we used to have to use some kind of external reference point, which might be magnetic, ultrasonic, or optical. These days you put some kind of camera on the head & look around in the room & it just calculates where you are - the headsets are self-sufficient instead of relying on an external reference infrastructure. That was inconceivable before because it would have been just so expensive to do that calculation. Moore’s law really just changes again & again, it re-factors your options in really subtle & interesting ways.” Kevin Kelly: “Our sense of history in this world is very dim & very short. We were talking about the past: VR wasn’t talked about for a long time, right? Thirty-five years. Most people have no idea that this is 35 years old. Thirty years later, it’s the same headlines. Was the technological power just not sufficient 30 years ago?” …On the Nintendo Power Glove, based on a VPL dataglove design JL: “Both I & a lot of other people really, really wanted to get a consumerable version of this stuff out. We managed to get a taste of the experience with something called the Power Glove…Sony actually brought out a little near-eye display called Virtual Boy; not very good, but they gave it their best shot. & there were huge projects that have never been shown to the public to try to make a consumable [VR product], very expensive ones. Counting for inflation, probably more money was spent [than] than Facebook just spent on Oculus. We just could never, never, never get it quite there.” KK: “Because?” JL: “The component cost. It’s Moore’s law. Sensors, displays… batteries! Batteries is a big one.” Michael Wolfe offers some examples of this: Facebook - the world needs yet another Myspace or Friendster except several years late. We’ll only open it up to a few thousand overworked, anti-social, Ivy Leaguers. Everyone else will then join since Harvard students are so cool. Dropbox - we are going to build a file sharing & syncing solution when the market has a dozen of them that no one uses, supported by big companies like Microsoft. It will only do one thing well, & you’ll have to move all of your content to use it. Virgin Atlantic - airlines are cool. Let’s start one. How hard could it be? We’ll differentiate with a funny safety video & by not being a**holes. …iOS - a brand new operating system that doesn’t run a single one of the millions of applications that have been developed for Mac OS, Windows, or Linux. Only Apple can build apps for it. It won’t have cut & paste. Google - we are building the world’s 20th search engine at a time when most of the others have been abandoned as being commoditized money losers. We’ll strip out all of the ad-supported news & portal features so you won’t be distracted from using the free search stuff. Tesla - instead of just building batteries & selling them to Detroit, we are going to build our own cars from scratch plus own the distribution network. During a recession and a cleantech backlash. …Firefox - we are going to build a better web browser, even though 90% of the world’s computers already have a free one built in. One guy will do most of the work. Thiel (Zero to One): “Every moment in business happens only once. The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won’t make a search engine. And the next Mark Zuckerberg won’t create a social network. If you are copying these guys, you aren’t learning from them.”; this is precisely the opposite of reality: Bill Gates was not the first & only Gates, he was the last Gates; many people made huge fortunes off OSes, both before & after Gates - you may have forgotten Wang, but hopefully you remember Steve Jobs (before, Mac) & Steve Jobs (after, NeXt). Mark Zuckerberg was not the first & only Zuckerberg, he was the last Zuckerberg; many people made fortunes before him - maybe Orkut didn’t make its Google inventor a fortune, but you can bet that Myspace’s DeWolfe & Anderson did well. & there were plenty of lucrative search engine founders (is Jerry Yang a billionaire? Yes.) Certainty is irrelevant, you still have problems making use of this knowledge. Example: in retrospect, we know everyone wanted computers, OSes, social networks - but the history of them is strewn with flaming rubble. Suppose you somehow knew in 2000 that “in 2010, the founder of the most successful social network will be worth at least $10b”; this is a falsifiable belief at odds with all conventional wisdom & about a tech that blindsided everyone. Yet, how useful would this knowledge be, really? What would you do with it? Do you have the capital to start a VC & throw multi-million-dollar investments at every social media until finally in 2010 you knew for sure that Facebook was the winning ticket & could cash out in the IPO? I doubt it. It’s difficult to invest . There is no convenient CMPTR you can buy 100 shares of & hold indefinitely to capture gains from your optimism about computers. IBM & Apple both went nearly bankrupt at points, & Microsoft’s stock has been flat since 1999 or whenever (translating to huge real losses & opportunity costs to long-term holders of it). If you knew for certain that Facebook would be as huge as it was, what stocks, exactly, could you have invested in, pre-IPO, to capture gains from its growth? Remember, you don’t know anything else about the tech landscape in the 2000s, like that Google will go way up from its IPO, you don’t know about Apple’s revival under Jobs - all you know is that a social network will exist & will grow hugely. The best I can think of would be to sell any Murdoch stock you owned when you heard they were buying MySpace, but offhand I’m not sure that Murdoch didn’t just stagnate rather than drop as MySpace increasingly turned out to be a writeoff. In the hypothetical that you didn’t know the name of the company, you might’ve bought up a bunch of Google stock hoping that Orkut would be the winner, but while that would’ve been a decent investment (yay!) it would have had nothing to do with Orkut (awww!); illustrating the problem with highly illiquid markets in some areas… And even when there are stocks available to buy, you only benefit based on the specifics - like one of the existing stocks being a winner, rather than all the stocks being eaten by some new startup. Let’s imagine a different scenario, where instead you were confident that home robotics were about to experience a huge growth spurt. Is this even nonpublic knowledge at all? The world economy grows at something like 2% a year, labor costs generally seem to go up, prices of computers & robotics usually falls… Do industry projections expect to grow their sales by <25% a year? But say that the market is wrongly pessimistic. If so, you might spend some of your hypothetical money on whatever the best approximation to a robotics index fund you can find, as the best of a bunch of bad choices. (Checking a few random entries in Wikipedia, maybe a fifth of the companies are publicly traded, so… that will be a pretty small index.) Suppose the home robotic growth were concentrated in a single private company which exploded into the billions of annual revenue & took away the market share of all the others, forcing them to go bankrupt or merge or shrink. Home robotics will have increased just as you believed - keikaku doori! - yet your ‘index fund’ gone bankrupt (reindex when one of the robotics companies collapses? Reindex into what, another doomed firm?). Then after your special knowledge has become public knowledge, the robotics company goes public, & by EMH, their shares become a normal investment. Morgan Housel: “There were 272 automobile companies in 1909. Through consolidation and failure, 3 emerged on top, 2 of which went bankrupt. Spotting a promising trend and a winning investment are two different things.” (Is this impossibly rare? It sounds like Facebook! They grew fast, roflstomped other social networks, stayed private, & post-IPO, investors have not profited.) Because of the winner-take-all dynamics, there’s no way to solve the coordination problem of holding off on an approach until the prerequisites are in place: entrepreneurs & founders will be hurling themselves at an obvious goal like social networks or VR constantly, just on the off chance that maybe the prerequisites just became adequate & they’ll be able to eat everyone’s lunch. A predictable waste of money, perhaps, but that’s how the incentives work out. The first person to try at the right time may win the lottery; Palmer Luckey (founder of Oculus, sold to Facebook for ~$2 billion): “Here’s a secret: the thing stopping people from making good VR & solving these problems was not technical. Someone could have built the Rift in mid-to-late 2007 for a few thousand dollars, & they could have built it in mid-2008 for about $500. It’s just nobody was paying attention to that.” (At the margin, compared to other competitors in the VR space, did Luckey & co really create $2b+ of new value? Or were they lucky in trying at the right time?) It’s a weird perspective to take, but we can think of other technologies which may be like this. Bitcoin is a topical example: it’s still in the early stages where it looks either like a genius stroke to invest in, or a fool’s paradise/Ponzi scheme. We see what looks like a bubble as the price inflates from ~$0 to $130 as I write this, which look like a bubble - yet, if Bitcoin were the Real Deal, we would expect large price increases as people learn of it & it directly gains value from increased use, an ecosystem slowly unlocking the fancy cryptographic features, etc. Or take niche visionary technologies: if cryonics was correct in principal, yet turned out to be worthless for everyone doing it before 2030 (because the wrong perfusion techniques or cryopreservatives were used & some critical bit of biology was not vitrified) while practical post-2030 say, it would simply be yet another technology where visionaries were ultimately right despite all nay-saying & skepticism from normals but nevertheless wrong in a practical sense because they jumped on it too early, & so they wasted their money. When a knife drops, a fraction of a second divides a brilliant save from an emergency-room visit. The ‘bleeding edge’. | [] | Ratings and reviews - Gwern.net | Review | http://www.gwern.net/Book%20reviews | 4/1438042982502.13_20150728002302-00293-ip-10-236-191-2_475259833_0.json |
f7d9395c_atings_and_reviews___Gwern_net__Review | [Title] Pioneers of Soviet Computing [Author] Boris Nikolaevich Malinovsky [Rating] ★★★ [Year] 2010 [Read] 2014/07/06 [Review] | (Review of 2010 online 2nd edition.) Malinovsky (b1921) is a Russian/Ukrainian who began working on computers as a grad student in the 1950s in the USSR. His book is a mix of personal reminiscences, short biographies, primary documents & long quotations from memoirs, a diary contrasting ‘40s/’50s to his life in the ’90s after a heart problem sent him to the hospital, and in this American edition a preface explaining the circumstances of an online release & appendix containing a few academic reviews of the English-translation manuscript. As such, it is unique. The early American development of computing has been covered well & in detail by works such as Dyson’s Turing’s Cathedral, but Russian development is shrouded in obscurity. Before reading PoSS, about the only thing I knew about Soviet computing was that there wasn’t much of it & that they had tried an interesting experiment in not binary but trinary or ternary-based computers, the Setun. Any attempt to give an overview of the history is bound to be interesting. It also vividly conveys the oppression that they worked under: blacklisting of people for trivial reasons like having an unusual Greek surname, discouragement of Jews, stringent security checks (why? given that no one in the world cared), difficulty in acquiring parts, expensive production, opaque bureaucratic decision-making about what projects to fund & the consequence reliance on military sponsorship to cut through red tape… (but also some of the benefits, like spies & industrial espionage of American projects). That said, the informativeness is limited by the chaotic organization of topics, bouncing from person to person. This book would have benefited a good deal from some graphs or timelines to help one keep things straight, especially as PoSS spends a lot of time on the many overlapping projects in the ’40s-’50s to develop varying flavors of computers. For example, I often found myself confusing Lebedev with other pioneers. (The confusing nondescriptness of many organizations’ names also didn’t help.) Malinovsky also deliberately limits the discussion to computer hardware, mentioning that “Beyond the scope of this book is the whole range of Soviet software developed during the Cold War and the distinguished scientists behind it, this including A.A. Lyapunov, M.R. Shura-Bura, A.P. Ershov, V.M. Kurochkin, E.L. Yuschenko, and others”; unfortunately, it is the software developments which would still be comprehensible & of interest to technical readers, whose eyes glaze over at the endless mentions of hardware details like one kind of semiconductor chip vs a slightly larger kind of semiconductor chip; worse, it is difficult to evaluate hardware achievements without information about the software which ran on it, since code & hardware are a continuum (anyone can design an ultra-fast computer which is a nightmare to write for; indeed, that has oft happened). Paton writes “Lebedev suggested that his students prepare and publish materials about the formation and development of computer technology in the Soviet Union. ‘In the West, they consider us to be worse than we really are. We have to change their opinion of us’, he said. Unfortunately, his idea was not properly implemented at that time and only now has been embodied in this book.” Indeed… In his attempt, Malinovsky omits perspective/context & is biased, which overall render the book more a source for future historians writing a history of Soviet computing than a history itself. Malinovsky patriotically protests …the establishment and development of computer technology in the USSR advanced in the post-war years virtually without any contact with the Western scientists. The development of computers abroad was conducted secretly because at first, digital electronic computers were designated for military purposes. At the same time, the computer technology in the USSR evolved independently as well, led by top Soviet scientists. Despite repeated quotes how they would avidly study American publications for any available details! If he cannot say a Soviet computer is faster, then it used less parts, or was more reliable, or was built quicker, or a cluster of 76 (!) was faster than an American supercomputer… In the biographies, each & every pioneer is hardworking, kind, modest, attentive, & loyal, & how each created computers in breathtakingly short times & how every computer seemed to operate perfectly & be competitive with the fastest American machines, & how many superlatives each super pioneer deserved (backed up by endless mentions of awards that they received, or occasionally, didn’t receive due to bureaucratic sabotage). As the Abbate review notes, “Occasionally the prose takes on a heroic or patriotic tone that may be jarring to American readers (though quite common in its Russian/Ukrainian context).” More importantly, through the book Malinovsky damns following the IBM 360 paradigm rather than continuing domestic lines of development; the Slava review: As a participant first-hand account, Malinovsky’s book is both valuable & problematic. Like any other personal account, it is prone to certain biases. When Malinovsky touches upon controversial topics, he often provides only one side of the story. For example, the rivalry between the two first Soviet large-size digital computer projects, the BESM & the STRELA, is narrated largely from the viewpoint of the BESM camp. A historian would have written a more balanced account. Other topics that may require a historiographic commentary include the wide introduction of automated control systems actively promoted by the director of the Institute of Cybernetics in Kiev Viktor Glushkov (many observers claimed that this campaign led to inefficiency & waste) or the controversy over the decision to build the Unified Series of Computers that supposedly “copied” IBM 360 (Malinovsky claims that this decision directly led to the “demise” of the Soviet computer industry). In both cases, Malinovsky covers one side of the story in great detail but gives little voice to Glushkov’s critics or to the supporters of the Unified Series, who claimed that Unified Series computers were no copies of IBM but were only software-compatible with IBM & had high performance characteristics. Anne Fitzpatrick’s explanatory comments are very helpful; & it would be very beneficial for the reader if she could also address controversial historiographic issues, either in the endnotes or in the Introduction. The translator should be complimented on having done an excellent job in conveying the style of the original Russian text. This style, however, may sound a bit too heavy for an American reader, for it carries some of the typical features of Soviet-era formal discourse: too many nouns, the abundance of passive voice, overblown epithets, etc. Adjusting the style for an American audience would make the book much more readable. Malinovsky never really justifies his claims, and one wonders. The IBM 360 was a landmark design, successful in the market for all sorts of purposes, and in general, the computing market has been unkind to any attempts to take alternate paths from the current leading contender (the Lisp machines being an example), as by doing so, one cuts oneself off from an entire world of innovation & Moore’s law. (Vigoda: “In practice replacing digital computers with an alternative computing paradigm is a risky proposition. Alternative computing architectures, such as parallel digital computers have not tended to be commercially viable, because Moore’s Law has consistently enabled conventional von Neumann architectures to render alternatives unnecessary. Besides Moore’s Law, digital computing also benefits from mature tools & expertise for optimizing performance at all levels of the system: process technology, fundamental circuits, layout & algorithms. Many engineers are simultaneously working to improve every aspect of digital technology, while alternative technologies like analog computing do not have the same kind of industry juggernaut pushing them forward.”) Isn’t it more likely that Soviet computing could have gone down a dead end & stagnated permanently? Indeed, there are many signs that Soviet computing could easily have disappeared up its own navel. For example, the parts dealing with Glushkov’s grandiose plans to turn the Soviet economy into a centrally-computer-planned cybernetic program by the 1970s - this sounds like complete idiocy to the modern mind, aware of the full complexity of a modern economy & how inefficient Soviet management was & how centralization inevitably fails & of the incredible computing power needed to efficiently run even a small chunk of the economy like Walmart or Amazon - & yet Malinovsky, even after the fall of the USSR & complete discrediting of centralized economies, seems to think it was a great idea killed by politicians & could have saved the USSR & Glushkov was a prophet rather than a dreamer! It’s no surprise that the politicians were not eager to spend 20 billion rubles on a plan with no guarantee of working. And even has the chutzpah to claim “And now a huge information network - the Internet - is stretching across the Commonwealth of Newly Independent States and around the world, fulfilling Viktor Mikhailovich’s dreams and predictions of forty years ago.” The Glushkov sections also exemplify Malinovsky’s willingness to claim credit for Soviet software achievements but not discuss any of the details, many of which sound like awful ideas or meaningless, leading one to wonder if he doesn’t understand what he’s talking about or just is bad at describing them eg he quotes Glushkov as writing: What was the difference between Mir & other computers? We considerably upgraded the machine language. However, back then the popular point of view was that machine language must be as simple as possible & the rest would be done by software. We were even mocked for our efforts to develop different computers. The majority of computer scientists in the world believed that it was necessary to develop computer-aided programming, that is, to create software that would help produce other programs. Yes, that was the popular view then & still is, because it’s right. RISC is still the dominant view of Western computer scientists as baroque CISC architectures are always left in the dust. Glushkov was dead-wrong, but no mention is made of this. Or, In designing the Mir machines, we had tackled a daring problem - to match the machine language as close as possible to the human language, and here I mean mathematical nonverbal language, though later we made attempts with normal human language. So, we created ‘Analytic,’ a special mathematical language, supported by an internal interpretation system. Mir computers were used in all regions of the Soviet Union. Their creation became an intermediate stage in research aimed at the development of artificial intelligence, since the intelligence realized in them was still fairly primitive. It also looked very impressive when a machine quickly solved independent and dependent integrals, while not many professors of mathematics were able to solve them. In addition, the machine found substitutions, not just the easy ones from tables, but the difficult ones as well…the Mir computer family was quickly developed and put into serial production, receiving high marks from its users. Its creation was a giant step in the development of artificial intelligence in small computers. In what sense? Solving integrals isn’t much of an accomplishment. What does it mean to “match the machine language as close as possible to the human language”? I’m not aware of any important work in AI stemming from USSR research. Or: Glushkov proposed a macro-conveyer principle based on the idea that each processor was given a separate task during every step of the computing process, which allowed it to work independently for a long time without the interference from other processors. In 1959, at the Soviet All-Union Conference on Computer Technology in Kiev, Glushkov spoke about the idea of a brain-like computer structure that could be realized when the designers were able to integrate not thousands, but billions of elements with practically limitless connections between them, into a single system. There would also be a confluence of memory and data processing, a system in which data would be processed throughout the memory with a highest possible degree of parallelism in all operations…only the development of new non-Von Neumann computer architecture…would solve the problem of creating a supercomputer with unlimited growth in productivity and progressively more sophisticated hardware. Unfortunately, further research showed that a comprehensive realization of the construction principles of recursive computers and brain-like structures was beyond the level of electronic technology at that time. Despite being a programmer interested in AI, I have no idea what any of it means. This culminates in idiotic boasting: “Unfortunately, the potential of the Mir computer line was never fully realized. During my 1979 presentation in Novosibirsk on the integration of artificial intelligence into computers, I heard the academician Andrei Ershov criticize the Institute of Cybernetics by saying: ‘If you had not stopped upgrading the Mir family, the USSR would have had the best personal computers in the world.’” No, there was 0 chance. Not in a system as pathological/impoverished/repressed as the USSR was - there were no opportunities for the economies of scale which power microchip development, & if there had, PCs would never have been allowed outside of a few restricted roles. The whole point of the PC revolution in America was that anyone, including little kids who would grow up to be great programmers & entrepreneurs, could access cheap unrestricted computing power for the most trivial of reasons & create whatever they wanted to without friction. Nor was Glushkov alone. No matter how much dead, he’ll still hold out hope that a dead end is not a dead end. “To this day, Brusentsov maintains that the trinary system is superior to binary, but only time will be able to tell whether or not he is correct” - how long should we wait, exactly? Or from the Setun article, we read that its programming language, DSSP, “was not invented. It was found. That is why DSSP has not versions, but only extensions. Forth is created by practice. DSSP is created by theory. It is not a word.” This is pathological linguistic mysticism, one of the delusions of the 20th century - the idea that language is terribly important & that a better purer language would unlock wasted powers & enable undreamed-of productivity. If we could invent a more logical & compact language, if we could strip out the illusions built into language, if we could come up with a better one, we would solve AI / create world peace / become geniuses etc. What’s the stock trope for becoming superintelligent in 20th century SF? Your own language in which you can convey concepts more efficiently & fast; we see this in Heinlein’s Speedtalk, Anderson’s Brain Wave, even Chiang in (and anything to do with that nebulous cluster of Californian stuff called ), or enthusiasm for conlangs like Loglan/Lojban… it’s why Russian fascists intently studying Ithkuil feel like such an anachronism. It is the fallacy that strong Sapir-Whorf is correct, that languages powerfully shape thoughts rather than channel trivialities like color-name choices. The truth is that specialized languages & notations are indeed powerful, but they always succeed innovation & insight, not precede it: they codify powerful insights & choices, & can only be created after having had the insight they embody. to design a language before the powerful ideas it embodies is to put the cart before the horse. To go from Leibnizian calculus notation to say ‘Lojban will make your life more awesome’ is to ignore the specialization that gave the notation power. There are no general powerful insights you can embody in a language to turn its users into geniuses, although you can take the insights of past geniuses in statistics & design a specialized statistics language which is far better than ordinary language. Learning Ithkuil won’t give you access to any ideas or heuristics you didn’t have before, because natural language is already general & flexible. (Would Newspeak actually work? Consider Gene Wolfe’s counter-example, “Loyal to the Group of Seventeen’s Story - The Just Man” or the Darmoks of Star Trek). The politics of Soviet computing are interesting. There remains a great deal of lingering guilt & doubt around the Manhattan Project - whether it was really a good thing. scientists working on the SDI missile defense program are even more prickly about whether their work was harmful in destabilizing the precarious peace. One wonders about Russian counterparts: did they regret endeavoring mightily to put atomic bombs in the hands of a psychopath like Stalin? Or assisting bomb & ICBM development to ensure that all of humanity would live under a Damoclean sword? Or how about the environmental consequences, far from limited to Chernobyl. But there is no such doubt in the people Malinovsky quotes: “In retrospect, the rush was justified: possession of such missiles gave our country weapons parity with the United States.”; ‘Once, one of Sergei Alexeevich’s daughters asked him: “Why do you make computers for the military?” He replied: “To avoid a war.”’; etc. Indeed, the worse the USSR treated its researchers, the more loyal & devoted they seemed to become. For example, Rameev saw his grandfather expropriated, his father fatally purged under Stalin & his great invention stolen from him, & Rameev’s conclusion? “a stern voice warned him: ‘Live quietly & don’t contact us ever again!’ At that moment, Rameev understood that he had to do something unusual, outstanding, & very important for his people & nation in order to give his life meaning.” Is that so? Or in the story of the researcher Akushsky who was threatened with summary execution because a plane went down, & who cleverly saves himself by proving it was the pilots’ fault; very amusing, & chilling. Malinovsky blandly remarks at one point, “Things did not go smoothly at first because some Communist leaders overseeing the project remembered that Kisunko was the son of a repressed kulak.” | [] | Ratings and reviews - Gwern.net | Review | http://www.gwern.net/Book%20reviews | 4/1438042982502.13_20150728002302-00293-ip-10-236-191-2_475259833_0.json |
f7d9395c_atings_and_reviews___Gwern_net__Review | [Title] A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History [Author] Nicholas Wade [Rating] ★★★ [Year] 2014 [Read] 2014/09/24 [Review] | Wade’s book is a short fairly breezy overview of population genetics, combined with some long overviews of a few previous works speculating on possible grand historical evolutionary changes in human groups like the Jews. Because he takes seriously all the genetics research, unsurprisingly it’s controversial. I was waiting eagerly for it to come out to see whether Wade had put together a synthesis for the layman of all the extraordinary research which has been done over the past 20 years and summarized the flood of genetics research which has been unleashed by the crashing price of genome sequencing. I was disappointed. Wade’s book will convince no one: he hits a few highlights, but omits anything like comprehensive coverage of the theoretical and empirical grounds for accepting the laws of behavioral genetics (everything is partially heritable & usually highly polygenic, the effects of shared environment like family socioeconomic status is weak, and the rest of variance is unpredictable noise). All such a short overview can do is inflame the debate, when what is needed is to end it. Wade doesn’t describe a century of consistent results from twin studies (it’s remarkable that he could write such a book without, as far as I could tell, mentioning Plomin even once!), the missing heritability’s problem resolution by GCTA as due to traits being highly polygenic & affected by rare variants, doesn’t describe the successes of GWAS (for example, to borrow one out-of-date tabulation we now have 23% of Alzheimer’s, 3% bipolar, 13% breast cancer, 25% CAD, 13% Crohn’s disease, 31% prostate cancer, 13% lupus, 14/28% type I/II diabetes; and schizophrenia seem to have recently yielded a bit), and in some cases dramatically understates the state of the art - he confidently predicts that as far as linking genes with intelligence, “that is unlikely to happen anytime soon”, because “each of which [genes] has too small an effect to be detectable with present methods”, citing a well-known paper on the failure of early hits due to small sample sizes, except that at the estimated effect sizes, with reachable sample sizes like 100k SNP samples, the hits were predicted to be detected, and indeed, before A Troublesome Inheritance was even published, the first hits came out and have been replicating well (see Rietveld et al 2013, Rietveld et al 2014, Ward et al 2014, Zhu et al 2015). Another passage I noted with a raised eyebrow argues that a change in a population’s mean of a trait is unimportant since it would be relatively small, which is wrong since that could have a profound impact on the tails of how many members of that population are extremely high or extremely low on that trait, which is something he acknowledges in a later chapter on Jewish intelligence - that their somewhat higher mean intelligence than the surrounding goyim would explain their enormous overrepresentation among geniuses and other elites. When I look through just some of my reading on related subjects over the past year, I find hardly any of it covered: “Hints of genomic dark matter: rare variants contribute to schizophrenia risk” “Genetic enhancement of cognition in a kindred with cone–rod dystrophy due to RIMS1 mutation”, Sisodiya et al 2007 “Common DNA Markers Can Account for More Than Half of the Genetic Influence on Cognitive Abilities”, Plomin et al 2013 “Genes Take Charge, and Diets Fall by the Wayside” “Not by Twins Alone: Using the Extended Family Design to Investigate Genetic Influence on Political Beliefs”, Hatemi et al 2010 (excerpts) “Chimpanzee Intelligence Is Heritable”, Hopkins et al 2014 (excerpts) “Genetic Variation Associated with Differential Educational Attainment in Adults Has Anticipated Associations with School Performance in Children”, Ward et al 2014 (Rietveld et al 2013’s 3 SNP hits for intelligence are starting to replicate; excerpts) “The genetics of investment biases”, Cronqvist & Siegal 2014 (excerpts) “Genetic Relations Among Procrastination, Impulsivity, and Goal-Management Ability: Implications for the Evolutionary Origin of Procrastination”, Gustavson et al 2014 “A Gene That Makes You Need Less Sleep?” (see “Heritability of Performance Deficit Accumulation During Acute Sleep Deprivation in Twins”, “The Transcriptional Repressor DEC2 Regulates Sleep Length in Mammals”, & “A Novel BHLHE41 Variant is Associated with Short Sleep and Resistance to Sleep Deprivation in Humans”) How harmful is smoking during pregnancy - after controlling for the sort of people who would do that? “On the genetic architecture of intelligence and other quantitative traits”, Hsu 2014 “Not by Twins Alone: Using the Extended Family Design to Investigate Genetic Influence on Political Beliefs”, Hatemi et al 2010 (excerpts) Smoking is heritable but not through shared environment “The Importance of Heritability in Psychological Research: The Case of Attitudes”, Tesser 1993 (excerpts) “Inheritance of migratory direction in a bird species: a cross-breeding experiment with SE- and SW-migrating blackcaps (Sylvia atricapilla)”, Helbig 1991 (“For blackcap warblers, the direction of migration is clearly innate, so crossbreeding a group of blackcaps who flew south for fall migration with a group that oriented westward resulted in offspring who flew in a southwesterly direction.”) “Uncovering the Hidden Risk Architecture of the Schizophrenias: Confirmation in Three Independent Genome-Wide Association Studies”, Arnedo et al 2014 (press release; excerpts) “Common genetic variants associated with cognitive performance identified using the proxy-phenotype method”, Rietveld et al 2014; supplementary information (Rietveld et al 2013 hits replicate some more; discussions: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5) “Substantial SNP-based heritability estimates for working memory performance”, Vogler et al 2014 (excerpts) a href=“https://pdf.yt/d/bEVFEdtFm8DFf9r6”>“Growth, efficiency, and yield of commercial broilers from 1957, 1978, and 2005”, Zuidhof et al 2014 “The high heritability of educational achievement reflects many genetically influenced traits, not just intelligence”, Krapohl et al 2014 “Genome-wide meta-analysis identifies six novel loci associated with habitual coffee consumption”, The Coffee and Caffeine Genetics Consortium et al 2014 “Friendship and natural selection” “Defining the role of common variation in the genomic and biological architecture of adult human height” “Predicting human height by Victorian and genomic methods” Ancestry Informative Marker Sets for Determining Continental Origin and Admixture Proportions in Common Populations in America …Well, I could continue listing fascinating recent research for a while, let’s say. I don’t think Wade does a good job conveying the ferment and output of the field as increasing sample sizes and sophistication are making headway. And it’s not like he’s omitting the cutting-edge research in favor of a detailed discussion for the layman of what genes are, what terms like “SNPs” or “haplotypes” are, what’s the distinction between your $99 23andMe purchase and the $1000 thing you might otherwise buy, the principles of population genetics like drift, fixation, IQ etc - actually, quite the opposite, he freely talks about variants and genes and only chapters later explains his terms, if at all. So what is the book about if he isn’t covering those topics? Well, for the most part it seems to be a summary of The 10,000 Year Explosion, Pinker’s Better Angels of Our Nature, Clark’s Farewell to Alms & The Son Also Rises, Fukuyama’s Origins of Political Order, Botticini & Eckstein’s The Chosen Few: How Education Shaped Jewish History, and Cochran’s Ashkenazi intelligence hypothesis. Wade is interested in the possible different selective pressures on each population as they co-evolve with their institutions and environment, sometimes tending towards domestication, sometimes not. His presentation is not terrible, but I think most readers would be better off simply reading the source books (I have read most of them and they are worth reading in their entirety). Excerpts: ch1 ch2 ch3 ch4 ch5 ch7 ch8-9 | [] | Ratings and reviews - Gwern.net | Review | http://www.gwern.net/Book%20reviews | 4/1438042982502.13_20150728002302-00293-ip-10-236-191-2_475259833_0.json |
f7d9395c_atings_and_reviews___Gwern_net__Review | [Title] New Legends [Author] Greg Bear [Rating] ★★★ [Year] 1996 [Read] 2013/12/04 [Review] | New Legends is an anthology of SF stories picked by Bear with an eye toward the psychological & personal lives of scientists/researchers. I purchased a copy of it to look at the novella “Radiance” by Carter Scholz and compare it with the full novel Radiance for the annotated ebook of Radiance I have been working on for a while. That will be its own review, so I will pass over it for now. An unexpected bonus for me was Gregory Benford’s contribution: not a story, but an autobiographical essay “Old Legends” on the real-life background to “Radiance” that he lived through, discussing his physics career, time at LLNL (where “Radiance” is set), experiences with other SF authors in the Reagan-era lobbying for SDI/Star Wars, the Cartmill incident, his admiration of Edward Teller, etc. Scholz clearly drew on Benford for his novella, and so it was unusually interesting for me. The collection overall is good, but not great. A number of the stories are too clearly the product of early ‘90s anxious liberalism and have not aged well since they were written in 1993 or earlier (~20 years ago), some are half-baked, and some are just bad. A few are very good. They are grouped into thematic sections. To go through them in order (there are many spoilers below): “Elegy”, Mary Rosenblum. Good. A scientist working on controlled use of squid neurons to repair human brains and cure trauma like Alzheimer’s struggles with guilt about her demented mother, fear her research will fail, and worries that the squid she uses as raw materials may be part of something far greater. “A Desperate Calculus”, Sterling Blake. Bad. World-trotting scientists struggle to organize a response to a devastating pandemic. Twist ending: the pandemic was engineered to render women sterile, stopping the threat of overpopulation, forcing humanity to dieback and live in harmony with the environment, and the (immune) protagonists were spreading it through their jetsetting, overlaid on a geopolitical forecast of Northern hemisphere vs Southern hemisphere balkanization & resentment. The engineered pandemic conceit is nice but has been done many times before, and the politics are incredibly grating. Even in 1994 it should have been obvious that overpopulation was not going to be an existential threat and that the worst of the environmental problems are often solved by additional economic growth (the Kuznets curve). This story is particularly dated; contemporary writers thinking about using global warming as their threat should consider how much they care about dating themselves. “Scenes from a Future Marriage”, James Stevens-Arce. Mediocre. An unlucky couple who screw up all their life decisions fail again, and review their choices while contemplating suicide. Set against a vaguely dystopian background. This one did nothing for me as it was so over the top. “Coming of Age in Karhide”, Ursula K. Le Guin. Great. In an ageless city where every life follows ancient finely-honed patterns, a fearful child grows into its sexual maturity and becomes an adult. This is very much a Le Guin traditionalist story with her trademark gender twist, and it does what it does very well. “High Abyss”, Gregory Benford. Good. An alien religious war about the physics of the universe, in a universe which is not ours, culminates in victory for the renegade mathematician who led the revolt with his heretical theory that the world is not a line, but another topology. A treacherous counterattack sends the prophet aloft on a hot-air balloon and he realizes that his heresy did not go far enough - that the world was a string embedded in a far grander, far larger, more spherical universe (ours?). He is simultaneously exalted and debased by the epochal discovery of the truth of the Universe. Benford throws you in the hard SF deep-end to figure out the universe (I’m actually reminded a little of The Clockwork Rocket here as a recent example). Does it work? It’s hard to say because the story is so short. I’m not sure what the “string” is even supposed to be - a superstring? How does that work with the given system of the world with ’lava’ bubbling up in the center of the world? I thought initially the story was being set underseas on a crustal fault, and the lava was literal lava and the cold abyssal waters doomed the people if they tried to leave the long line/ridge, but then “stars” came up and I had to abandon that theory. I’m not entirely satisfied with my interpretation and wish the story had been longer and explained its world a little more. “Recording Angel”, Paul J. McAuley. Mediocre. In a vastly distant post-human future, a Indian-like city’s ancient rhythms are disturbed by a human returning from an eons-long space trip. She leads some sort of revolution. Did nothing for me, as nothing about it seemed important, the world-building failed to explain what was going on, etc. “When Strangers Meet”, Sonia Orin Lyris. Bad. A mind-controlling alien (the One) celebrates, with its many servants, the festival at the end of its year, culminating in a grand dance to the death (by exhaustion) of its vaguely human-like slaves. Interspersed are occasional comments about interstellar communication with aliens (humans?). This one frankly made little sense to me. There’s some repeated lines about the dangers of the servants becoming “too familiar” to the One, but also a line about “strangers bring benefits”. The story feels ominous but nothing gels before it abruptly ends with the dance performance and another use of the strangers line. What does it all mean? I have no idea. I can barely figure out what the alien social system is supposed to be (I think it’s modeled after eusocial insects), much less any theme or message. This might have worked if Lyris hadn’t badly overestimated my ability to understand what she wrote. “The Day the Aliens Came”, Robert Sheckley. Very bad. Supposedly humorous. A writer nonchalantly accepts employment with an alien tourist, but then suddenly he’s shacking up with another alien, and suddenly the couple is having kids and merging into a group organism with other couples and then the story just ends. WTF‽ This badly needed to be rejected or at least, Bear should have rejected it and sent it back to Sheckley with a note saying “where’s the second half of this story?” “Gnota”, Greg Abraham. Mediocre. A mid-future soldier gets hit by an IED due to sentimentality; his heart is to be replaced by a clone of his heart grown inside a genetically-engineered pig. He bonds with the pig. “Rorvik’s War”, Geoffrey A. Landis. Good. A citizen is conscripted into a war against the Russians. He dies in an attack - or maybe he dies another way, and then another. War is hell, and wasteful since the militaries’ computers can all simulate the outcome of the battles, except can they really take into account the human factor? Rorvik dies again and again, is taken POW and sent to a Communist re-education camp, until fuzzily he realizes: he’s in the computer simulations. He grapples back to reality, and his conscription is over. He returns home with all his limbs, having apparently served his country without any repercussions. But will he psychologically truly recover? I enjoyed this one in part because it undercut my expectations: I was mentally a little bored with yet another war against Russians and thinking it was a little stupid, but then the story justified its choices quite nicely. “Radiance”, Carter Scholz. Great. See Radiance. “Old Legends”, Gregory Benford. Great. See opening summary. “The Red Blaze Is the Morning”, Robert Silverberg. Great. Silverberg turns in one of the best stories in this volume: an old archaeologist, almost out to pasture, strives in his Turkish dig site to make one last extraordinary find justifying his heterodox theory of the origins of human civilization, following the clue of a few out of place artifacts. He is lonely, his body is failing, but his passion to understand the past drives him on in his fruitless digs. Haunted by his continuing failure to find anything at all, he begins hallucinating visions from the end of time, the dying Earth, the ruins of the mightiest civilizations that humanity will one eon give birth to. The visions are sent by his counterpart, one of the last sapient beings left in the ruins after the Gotterdammerung, who makes him an offer: to swap their minds (shades of Lovecraft’s scholars), so the being can study the impossibly remote origins of humanity and the protagonist study undreamt-of eras. He refuses of course, and the dig continues to go poorly, he drinks more and more, until finally in the climax, a Turkish official arrives with the shattering truth: the artifacts were planted by a corrupt Turkish official for the express purpose of egging him on and motivating more work at the site. His dig is futile, was always futile, and even the slender evidence he had was meaningless. His theory will not be vindicated. Utterly destroyed by the revelation, he accepts the Faustian bargain and flees into madness - or the future? And awakes at the end of time, with endless ruins to investigate and ponder. This story impressed me as close kin to “Radiance” and showing the dark side of a quest for truth. “One”, George Alec Effinger. Mediocre. A husband-wife team set out in a spaceship to search for life. As predicted by the Fermi paradox, they fail to find any on thousands of worlds. The wife dies, the protagonist slowly goes insane, and converts to religion as he continues to fail to find life on any planets he surveys. Wholly unconvincing, I thought. “Scarecrow”, Poul Anderson. Mediocre. An almost Asimovian pastiche, of another husband-wife team whose ship crashes on the chaotic moon Hyperion. They struggle to reach shelter in the installation on the moon, manned by robots, only to discover the robots have, yes, gone insane - or become religious, specifically, having developed a religion focusing on darkness/chaos/bad vs light/order/good. The pair need to prove they follow the light and are not sinister agents of chaos. Based on the wife’s brief religious dialogue with the robots, the husband receives inspiration: he proves that they come from the light by teaching the robots about fractals and chaotic equations which nevertheless have a simple beautiful mathematical core. Having proven his theodicy - how a good and orderly god could have created the chaotic Saturn environment - they are accepted by the robots as fellow worshippers and admitted into the base. While I really enjoyed the last page, I level the opposite accusation at this story that I did some of the others: it is far too long, almost all of it could be trimmed out, and some of the characterization is very poor (the wife is wholly unnecessary and IMO is constantly irritating). “Wang’s Carpets”, Greg Egan. Great. I would put this with “Radiance” and “The Red Blaze Is the Morning” as the 3 best stories in this volume. Upload civilization fires off a bunch of copies to remote systems to look for life, in part as a final attempt to find a justification for remaining involved in the real world and pursuing the great scientific project of understanding the universe, rather than enjoying ever more abstracted or refined simulations. They discover an apparently dull giant simple ocean life form based on self-replicating carbohydrate sheets. Egan offers a truly inspired bit of worldbuilding when he suggests the sheets then are Wang tiles - which are Turing-complete, surprisingly enough, and so host entire computational civilizations of their own! A wonderfully alien suggestion. This was apparently expanded in Diaspora, which if it’s as good as the short story, is well worth the reading. I’ll look for a copy. | [] | Ratings and reviews - Gwern.net | Review | http://www.gwern.net/Book%20reviews | 4/1438042982502.13_20150728002302-00293-ip-10-236-191-2_475259833_0.json |
f7d9395c_atings_and_reviews___Gwern_net__Review | [Title] Perseverance island: or, The Robinson Crusoe of the nineteenth century [Author] Douglas Frazar [Rating] ★★★ [Year] 0 [Read] 2014/12/13 [Review] | (130k words; 2h) I read the Project Gutenberg HTML edition with illustrations. An obscure Robinsonade proper, I was recommended it when a reader mentioned it as a counterpoint to my complaint that in Robinson Cruse, Crusoe is furnished with almost an entire ship of supplies and an island of abundance. Indeed, the preface of PI runs In all works of the Robinson Crusoe type, the wreck is always near at hand, the powder dry and preserved, and the days for rafting the same ashore calm and pleasant. This unfortunate had no such accessories; and his story proves the limitless ingenuity and invention of man, and portrays the works and achievements of a castaway, who, thrown ashore almost literally naked upon a desert isle, is able by the use of his brains, the skill of his hands, and a practical knowledge of the common arts and sciences, to far surpass the achievements of all his predecessors, and to surround himself with implements of power and science utterly beyond the reach of his prototype, who had his wreck as a reservoir from which to draw his munitions. This sounded promising. While detailed how-tos and manuals can be crushingly boring, a good narrative can weave them in and be both educational & interesting. (Neal Stephenson manages this sometimes.) It starts off sensibly enough, with the expected disaster as part of a sequence of gradually worsening events that eventually strands him on an unknown island. Our protagonist is part of a colonization mission, but don’t worry, he doesn’t get a colony’s worth of equipment dumped on him: just his clothes, a few books, and an anchor. This seems like a good start. It’s surprising when he manufactures nails out of his shoes, but boots did use to have nails in them and it’s clever, so no foul there. He immediately secures his priorities of food and water, perhaps in a little more baroque fashion than expected (I didn’t really follow the pipe set up), and then he makes a… “lamp-tower”. No, not for signaling passing ships. Just so he doesn’t have to rekindle fire with his flint and nails. And the lamps are powered by oil. (The oil is from the livers of sharks he spears. Of course?) This is the first sign of trouble with the narrative. The second sign comes when instead of immediately exploring the island like any sane person would, days pass as he is made to refine his landing spot and create a dwelling and begin manufacturing tools and planting seeds. …OK? He explores the island and finds an absurd number of resources. Besides the sharks and turtles he’s feasted on, he finds wild goats (and why haven’t they denuded the island?) and even more: “Wild goats, quail, tortoise, tobacco, wild ducks, trout, sweet potatoes, mussels…Find coal and sulphur, seals, more turtles, gulls, etc.” I’m not sure what sort of tropical island yields all that and coal and sulphur. But wait, there’s more: there’s also saltpetre, iron, pearl oysters, gold mines, penguins, and sea serpents! And that’s not even covering all the stuff he makes; he apparently is some sort of superhuman genius master of all trades who can make anything on the first try without ever injuring himself. Mithridates over on Amazon puts it well: The book does not live up to this vaulted goal - but rather dissolves into utter ridiculous and pathetic shows of limitless (and impossible) manifestations of human ingenuity (or rather magical conjuring experiments of every necessary mineral, metal, technology). These progression of these chapter subject headings illustrates my point -Hat Making, Knife Hammer and Spear, Discovery of Coal, Discovery of Sulphur, Steel, Cement, Iron, Astrolabe, Rifles, Submarine (Goat Powered), Steam Yacht, and eventually Chess and Backgammon (With a Goat). I understand that this is a ‘realistic’ form of fantasy writing but there are extremes to the ingenuity of man and the availability of an island with all the resources of the world. So is Frazar actually exploring the ingenuity of man? Or rather what man could do in a fantasy world? Anyone can do anything in a fantasy world… But that said, I suppose the genre had been relatively sucked dry by his illustrious predecessors - Verne and Defoe - and showing the humanity of goats was Frazar’s cherished original idea. (One wonders what Frazar would have made of I am a Pencil…) If Frazar had dropped half of the elements and contented himself with just one of the peak technologies (steam boat would have made the most sense, although I think readers would still object at the idea of a desert island with both coal and iron reserves), the realism might have been preserved. But as it is? It’s ridiculous as any semblance of a realistic narrative. A castaway would have made a lighthouse on the bluffs of the island, and then been busied with maintenance of his food supplies, clothing, and shelter, lacking much practical experience in primitive methods of maintenance, resources, tools, economies of scale or the benefits of specialization. He would not accomplish 1/100th of what the protagonist supposedly does on his own in a decade or so. I must defend the honor of the goats, however: the narrator is perfectly clear the goats do not actually play chess or backgammon, and he has merely trained them to shake dice - which seems well within their capabilities. Reading through the rhetoric, what I think this is supposed to be is a veiled metaphor of mankind, and particularly 1800s England and America. For example, these passages together very much sound like a progressive manifest destiny: …portrays the works and achievements of a castaway, who, thrown ashore almost literally naked upon a desert isle, is able by the use of his brains, the skill of his hands, and a practical knowledge of the common arts and sciences, to far surpass the achievements of all his predecessors, and to surround himself with implements of power and science utterly beyond the reach of his prototype, who had his wreck as a reservoir from which to draw his munitions…I did not gather all these things about me without many bitter hours of loneliness and despair; but their constructions and the reading of my book, which I consulted almost nightly, kept me often from miserable repinings. I felt that I was gaining, and that I had not yet done making nature, ingenuity, and industry improve my condition and increase my comforts…On that terrible day in November I was cast on shore, with scarcely any food, no hat, no coat, and without water. With no aid but that given me by God, and by the use of my own hands and brain, I was to-day sitting in front of my home, erected by myself alone. In this short space of time, one year, I had wrested from Nature many things, showing the supremacy of mind over matter, and knowledge, over ignorance and sloth. I had in this year made fire without the aid of matches, distilled salt water to procure fresh, made myself implements of defence, and erected towers of perpetual lamps, made myself flint, steel, and tinder, bows and arrows, fish-hooks and lines; discovered coal, sulphur, saltpetre, and iron, and captured goats, fish, seals, birds, etc., and at the end of the year found myself sitting at my house door surrounded with my flock of goats, my garden and farm planted, my mill and smelting-house in running order, my canoe at my feet in the quiet water of the cove, and everything about me that could please or charm the eye. From absolutely nothing I had created everything; that is to say, the ground was now so laid out that in the future I saw no end to the daring attempts that I should make, and could make with every chance of success. I felt, now that the year was ending, that my hardest work was done; that I had so much now to do with, that all that I should now undertake would be comparatively easy; but then, on the other hand, my ambition was so great that I could see things in the dim future that would tax the strength and brain of any man to consummate, but which from my temperament and loneliness I knew I should be forced to attempt. The pirate passages particularly highlight this: My courage arose as I gazed upon the skeleton before me, and I moralized thus: You must have lived in an age when God had not granted to mortals the permission to discover and utilize many of the arts and sciences of my day; you did not live when steam was the motive power, when the lightnings of the heavens were made obedient to man to convey his demands and requests, when the paddle-wheels of floating steamers beat the waters of all the oceans of the earth. All of these things, and many others, were unknown to you. My case is not as bad as yours was, if you were shipwrecked. I, of this century, on this same island, have gathered about me, from nothing, strength and power. You, seemingly, have had only this rude hut over your head. I have chances of escape; I doubt if you ever had any from the first day of your arrival, for I cannot conceive of your having willingly remained upon this desert isle. And now, poor mortal, passed away so long ago, let us see if you can do anything for me, your living prototype. …I saw plainly that I should have to blow open the hull to get at what I wanted and expose it. In the meanwhile I was fascinated with the thousand and one old-fashioned shapes about the hull that struck my eye,—the peculiar long brass eighteen pounders, some of which lay beside her, covered with barnacles, but yet showing their shape and general formation; the blunt bows of what the pirate captain had termed a fast-sailing vessel; the comical anchors, and peculiar formation of the decks, that to me, as a sailor, were very interesting. She looked to me more like Noah’s ark than the vessel of a civilized nation. How rapidly and almost imperceptibly had we advanced in this science since this tub was called a vessel, fast, strong, and staunch; and how many hours would she have been able to keep in sight a modern clipper-ship, much less overtake her. In comparison to the latter she seemed like a ship’s jolly-boat. And so indeed she was, being about 300 tons, as against the 2,000 and 2,500 tons ship of my day and time. Inasmuch as the pirate captain died in 1781, not that long ago, and had been shot through the chest & left to die, these are rather self-satisfied comments on the narrator’s part and hence, Frazar’s. (The achievements of Western civilization are great indeed, but they owe little to God, much to other civilizations, started well before the 1800s, and are the result of countless men striving rather than a few.) So is it good or bad? We might say that one’s liking will depend on how well one likes a transition from realism to steampunk. Despite the wordcount, it’s not a long read because it’s written in the inflated prose style of the 1800s, and I for one didn’t pause to look up every technical term to figure out the exact details of the industrial processes. | [] | Ratings and reviews - Gwern.net | Review | http://www.gwern.net/Book%20reviews | 4/1438042982502.13_20150728002302-00293-ip-10-236-191-2_475259833_0.json |
f7d9395c_atings_and_reviews___Gwern_net__Review | [Title] A Memory of Light (Wheel of Time, #14) [Author] Robert Jordan [Rating] ★★★ [Year] 2013 [Read] 2013/01/09 [Review] | So. It has come to this. WoT finally ended. I remember how the wheel of dharma began to turn for me: my mother ran a Girl Scouts troop while I was in middle school, and sometimes they met at a local town rec center. Rather than try to participate, I would sometimes kill time in the lounge reading their old donated paperbacks. One of them was remarkably thick, but the cover looked interesting, and I was hooked by the opening passages: a Tolkien-esque chapter about a young lad heading back to the Shire and haunted by a Ring-wraith. (Not so much the Prologue, which was too mystifying.) I’d read Tolkien by this point, of course, and wondered if it’d be an awful shameful ripoff like Sword of Shannara, but I kept reading. The opening was nifty enough but not gripping, at least until I reached Moiraine’s speech to the villagers about Manetheren. I was spellbound and had not been so gripped at least since Tolkien with Gimli’s dirge for the dwarves in the Mines of Moria. And the book didn’t stop there: there was the creepy interlude at the cursed city of Shadar Logoth, the even more creepy Machin Shin of the Waygates, the unusual Templar/Children of the Light, the intriguing uncertainty about which of the kids was the Main Character (you thought it was Rand, of course, as the major viewpoint, but the dreams kept you uncertain - surely the author wouldn’t throw those in if there weren’t a good chance the obvious choice wouldn’t be picked?), the good troll character who is a scholar rather than a warrior, a Western-samurai militaristic setting a whole city of female magicians, Old Tongue on every other page culminating in no less than the Green Man at the Eye of the World (just one of many nods to real-world things). I was impressed as I read it over the weeks, meeting by meeting, and soon checked out the other 6 or so. This was a long time ago. A very long time ago. Indeed, WoT could be considered Tolkien turned up. Tolkien had a cast of hundreds? WoT would have a cast of thousands! Tolkien had a few countries going to war against a dark lord? WoT would have dozens of countries and regions! Tolkien had two or three scheming magicians? WoT would have scores of scheming magicians, and they would be split into more than a dozen groups, all scheming. Tolkien had one or two trolls? WoT would have trolls too, all over the place, and they’d be the good kind, peaceful scholar; and Tolkien had a character recording events for a history, well, that’s a perfect task for one of the scholar-trolls. Tolkien had a few Ring-wraiths and a big fight against one at the end, well, WoT would have ring-wraiths in every book and they’d be a standard foe (which makes sense given all the magical powers given to every other character: you need to power up the bad guys if you power up the good guys). The Shire would be tainted by evil due to the hero & companions coming from there and eventually have to be led to an uprising? Emond’s Field would never fall and would wage epic battle against Padan Fain et al. And so on. You couldn’t say that Wheel of Time had the restrained scholarly English sensibility of LotR, but it packed a punch. If LotR was the novel, WoT was the video game or maybe movie adaptation, with everything dialed up to 11 and an unlimited budget for explosions & exotic locations. And it did this very well in the early books. In that sense, it’s an excellent ‘Tolkien for teenagers’. (In another sense, reusing the old ‘hidden prince’ trope of being born to a destiny and with arcane powers, WoT is also good for teens: they’ve long loved that trope, perhaps because at that age they desperately love the idea of being given a defined role and the (unearned) ability to fill it. This trope is perhaps a bit too narcissistic for adults to enjoy as much, although given how popular Frozen has been and how many people, child or adult, claim to identify with Elsa, I may be wrong here.) One of the lessons I learned from WoT was learning the hard way why one should avoid in-progress series: the mental suffering and time expended is radically out of proportion to the pleasure. (I am handily applying this lesson now to that other endless vast fantasy epic, GRRM. Given my pre-2007 comments that it was entirely possible that Jordan would die before finishing, I wonder how that one will turn out.) Another lesson is that length and a big cast of characters should not be taken as a goal in its own right because you descend into repetition and cliche. In some sense, Sanderson’s AMoL for me succeeds just by existing and giving me closure. I would be happy if it is not as enraging as King’s ending to The Dark Tower, or as unremittingly awful and a disgrace to all parties involved as Brian Herbert & KJA’s work in the Dune universe. Perhaps all the people on Goodreads who are leaving laudatory 5 star reviews without even reading the book and apparently are ignorant of what a “review” is feel the same way - that as long as it’s not awful, it deserves 5 stars for giving them closure. And it’s neither enraging nor terribly awful, so I am satisfied. I share a lot of the complaints I’ve seen in other reviews. Some characters like Moiraine do nothing interesting; others have compressed endings like Luc/Isam and Padan Fain. Bela dies despite an expectation that she would continue her improbable luck. The body-swapping is unprecedented and confusing, since it apparently is not due to Rand indulging in cosmic powers but a mysterious gray-haired woman who I could not understand after two reads and googling a bit. The resolution of confrontation with the Dark One was clever as far as it went, but it relied on a feature of Callandor I am pretty sure was not mentioned before and I feel a bit deus ex machina-d, although I’m relieved that the general interpretation of Herid Fel’s basic point that because of the Wheel, you have to restore the prison to how it was before the Bore (rather than patch it again, kill the Dark One, etc) was correct. There were many great bits. Rand and Matt bragging in one of their last meetings. Lan taking down Damodred (although didn’t we see the suicidal maneuver in a previous book…). Min vs spies. Demandred and Graendal make the Forsaken look less incompetent than usual. Thom casually knifing women while composing a poem. Many bad parts. The endless grinding battle - by the time I finished the book, I felt as exhausted as if I’d been pushing pikes with Trollocs myself. The worst part was, despite the endless pages of battle, the battles still didn’t feel epic or hardfought; they lacked any urgency or real drama. Perhaps WoT just massively over-indulged in battles before, or perhaps the battles were just disconnected - it’s a bad thing when you have characters lampshading the triviality of what they’re doing and asking ‘so why does this matter when the only battle that matters is Rand vs DO?’ The battles are weirdly parochial and limited to a few locations. 4 battlefronts is impressive? For the Last Battle, a worldwide struggle against the Shadow? We didn’t get so much as one point of view in, I dunno, Seanchan which was supposed to have waged its own epic struggle against Shadowspawn during the original colonization! We don’t get Waygates popping open in hundreds of locations, the entire Randland convulsed in thousands of battles… Basically, we didn’t see a world at war. We bounced between 4 locations again and again and again until it was an incredible chore to read another page. Last minute rescues are a storytelling device that work only a few times. In a chapter. Before they lose any impact. Some of the writing seems stiff and clumsy, and I liked Matt less than in the previous book so I suppose that was just an anomaly. The ‘philosophy’ bits of the Rand vs DO encounter were seriously juvenile; so Rand overcomes the DO with the Power of Love but then he realizes that to destroy the DO, he would take away Free Will! And just as any idiot could have predicted, he has to leave the DO alone and repair the prison good as new. And of course the DO whines at him and Rand has to lecture him self-righteously… Give me a break. I’m sure that this must have been Jordon’s notes, because I remember Sanderson doing better in Mistborn. I suspect people will be identifying loose ends and missed prophecies or Min-visions for years to come. At least we did sorta find out who killed Asmodean. So now that it is finished, what should I think of WoT? Would I recommend it to a younger version of me? I think I would. In bulk, WoT’s flaws are reduced. The repetition fades away like the Homeric epithets filling out lines, and the multi-million word count becomes less intimidating. The awful middle-late books, like possibly the series nadir Winter’s Heart, lose their severe aggravation when you have all the books in a pile waiting to be read instead of an unknown multi-year wait upon an author who may (and did) die on you. Without years between reads, the plots and characters will be easier to track, and even if one fails to pick up on clues or asides, the resolution will be delivered soon and one can go ‘ah!’ as one newly appreciates a new thread of the pattern. But I would accompany it with this caution: “WoT, in small chunks, is not good. The characters and writing is repetitious, the descriptions pedestrian; few passages will move you with the beauty of strangeness or exoticism that marks the best fantasy. What WoT does is take the ‘quantity vs quality’ tradeoff, and jam it all the way to ‘quantity’, to see what happens, and does so more extremely than any other fantasy series I know of. If you want to see ‘epic fantasy’, with a cast of who knows how many thousands, spread over more countries than you can keep straight, and watch this tapestry evolve over years and millions of words, then you must read WoT. If you want to maximize your enjoyment per word, if you want the heights of what the fantasy genre can deliver in terms of quality, then put away WoT for another day and instead do something like read through chronologically the winners of the Locus & World Fantasy Awards.” There have been worse obituaries for pieces of your childhood. | [] | Ratings and reviews - Gwern.net | Review | http://www.gwern.net/Book%20reviews | 4/1438042982502.13_20150728002302-00293-ip-10-236-191-2_475259833_0.json |
f7d9395c_atings_and_reviews___Gwern_net__Review | [Title] Renaming of the Birds [Author] David Troupes [Rating] ★★★ [Year] 2013 [Read] 2014/01/01 [Review] | I’ve been a fan of the obscure webcomic Buttercup Festival since ~2005 when I discovered it and A Lesson Is Learned But The Damage Is Irreversible (probably my 2 favorites were “Another Day” and the yeti) through Dinosaur Comics, and was pleased to see it restart in 2008. It ended in 2013 with the announcement of a Kickstarter for his book Renaming of the Birds. I will be honest, I am not a big fan of Troupes’s realistic prose and poetry as compared to Buttercup Festival, An Island People Go To, or his unfinished Green Evening Stories - for the most part, they strike me as embodying the worst sins of English poetry in the 20th & 21st centuries, while his artwork at its best nears the spare beauty of some East Asian traditions. I was not pleased to hear that it was ending in favor of a short novel, but I did notice in the announcement: Among the rewards are original Series 2 BF strips and it’s first-come-first-served for choosing strips, so if there’s one you’d really like to have hanging on your wall, better get a move on. and on the Kickstarter page: Pledge £80 [$120] or more 23 backers; Limited (77 left of 100) THE MIGHTY EAGLE: Barn Owl reward plus the the original artwork for the Series 2 Buttercup Festival comic of your choice! First backers are first choosers, so let David know your top choices in order of preference. Now that was a different story. I’ve always been a little bit impressed how effectively Troupes deployed Sharpies for his comics, and this was too good an opportunity to pass up. Plus, apparently I might get some books or something as well. I immediately subscribed and submitted my preferences: http://www.buttercupfestival.com/2-120.htm http://www.buttercupfestival.com/2-101.htm http://www.buttercupfestival.com/2-14.htm http://www.buttercupfestival.com/2-5.htm http://www.buttercupfestival.com/2-114.htm http://www.buttercupfestival.com/2-125.htm Luckily, I spoke up quickly enough to get my first choice. The Kickstarter succeeded and the printing of the book went through apparently without much issue, so I received my package in early January 2014. The original of comic #120 turns out to be a sheet of stiffish paper about 29.2x20.3 centimeters, much larger than the web image. The image also doesn’t do it justice: the original is actually visibly textured with whiteout, you can see variation in the intensity of black, and between that, the stars in the stream seem to shine a little bit. So I was satisfied and just needed to find a frame for it. I scanned it to have a backup copy: https://i.imgur.com/98YSV07.jpg I also received: “Standing in the Sea” [2011] set of 6 postcards featuring David’s poetry and the fab artwork of Laurie Hastings. Hastings’s artwork was interesting but not really in my vein. David’s poetry was decent enough that I copied part of 2 of the better ones; from “Their Daughter”: “The cooling, still-warm blue of September rolls westward …Their daughter toe-steps among the twizzles of melon vine, which follow everything, seek everything, labouring now and again to fatten a soul sweet and blind.” And from “Pumpkinseeds”: “…Outside summer tumbles like a slob through the valley. We roll up our sleeves to the shoulder, we dip our children in greeny ponds. It is only for us that catbirds mock cats. It is only for us that pumpkinseeds float in weedy splendour, flecked like whittles of sun.” Not bad. I eventually wound up using the postcards for a prank. Renaming of the Birds (2013; ISBN 978-0-9927133-0-0) is a 74pg novel with ~56 black-white sketches of birds/landscapes/people as illustrations. (There is one short poem at the end, but it seems they were all split out as the companion pamphlet The Fountain along with unused illustrations.) The Kickstarter for it describes it as …an illustrated storybook about a young clerk who is assigned to rename all the birds in his town. The book is in the form of a journal kept by the clerk, and proceeds through a whole year, as he ventures farther and farther into the woods, looking for new birds to rename. He ends up sleeping outdoors, travelling all around, building a winter den and going a bit crazy. I originally thought of this as a kids’ book and kept the language within hearing of 10 to 12 year-olds, though really it’s a book for all ages, and adults will find plenty to think about. If you’re familiar with my webcomic Buttercup Festival you’ll know the sort of whimsy, humor and outdoorsiness you’ll find in Renaming of the Birds. If you’re not – I hope you’ll find out! This is not inaccurate a summary, but it overemphasizes the ‘renaming’ part: one might think it’s a sort of magical realist novel or more upbeat Kafkaesque novel or an experimental novel, but the renaming part and the new names passes quickly. Which is too bad because I thought it was a nice parody; for example, the letter with the assignment: Special Committee for the Avoidance of Bird Death Unhappiness To Whom It Will Concern: It has been determined that the recent phenomenon of Bird Death Unhappiness will best be avoided by a process of de-bird-familiarization. We are therefore undertaking to render birds less familiar, and this will be accomplished through the assignment of new bird names. The task of bird name reassignment will be passed to the appropriate local agencies, to be staffed at their discretion. Agents should rename every type of bird within their town. All necessary forms are enclosed. Agents are to begin immediately. Ever Yours, SCABDU I had to read that fifteen or twenty times before it began to sound like real words. But the gist of it, I think, is that they wanted me to rename the birds. It is Orwellian bureaucratic reasoning that would not be one bit out of place in England. Why not? So the protagonist sets about his task, renaming mockingbirds to ‘Yelling Birds’, Crows to Rattles, Gulls to Tattles, Pigeons to Ladyfriends, Mourning Doves to Vinegar Doves, Grackles to Velvet Inkdrops, and runs out. So he sets off to the woods, and of course meets a woman there. In a few more vignettes wandering the woods, he kills time and renames some more birds. He declines to rename swans, and is puzzle by sparrows. It becomes an extended camping trip: the narrator sees some more trees, watches a kestrel kill one, sleeps in trees, and winter comes. He survives the snow by making a lean-to. (No mention of where he gets food initially before learning how to scavenge roots, which was a major concern of a Maine hermit I read about recently and who I’m reminded strongly of when rereading RotB). After winter, he wanders his way back, eventually returning to his house. Wandering around some more, he re-meets the woman and together they wander out into the woods and watch birds. He still doesn’t know what to rename sparrows to. The illustrations are appropriate and well-done. The writing is fair enough. It’s not as overripe as much of Troupes’s poetry, and he generally underplays incidents and avoids too much mawkishness and invocations of God. It does indeed feel like a journal of a long camp-out, and Troupes is doubtless taking a lot of material from life. It’s pleasant, but not much beyond that. | [] | Ratings and reviews - Gwern.net | Review | http://www.gwern.net/Book%20reviews | 4/1438042982502.13_20150728002302-00293-ip-10-236-191-2_475259833_0.json |
f7d9395c_atings_and_reviews___Gwern_net__Review | [Title] Double Entry: How the Merchants of Venice Created Modern Finance [Author] Jane Gleeson-White [Rating] ★★★ [Year] 2012 [Read] 2014/10/31 [Review] | (56k words, 1-2h read) Popularizing overview of Luca Pacioli’s publication of double-entry bookkeeping, and some historical tracing of its subsequent spread through Europe and use in modern corporate-capitalism. As an active user of ledger for my personal finances, writer of the WP article on the Medici Bank, & reader of Nick Szabo, I thought I might find Double Entry interesting. The book sets up as a morality play, pointing to the many well-known corporate scandals in the 2000s, before quickly going to Ancient Sumeria & the invention of writing for business purposes (‘accounting’ might be a bit of an anachronism there), a few tantalizing Roman quotes & the possibility of Indian invention (although as with so many other things, the Indian dreamtime makes certainty difficult to reach), and settling down in the 1300s and sketching out Venice’s rise with its associated mercantile class, such as Datini, whose well-preserved business documentation is familiar to anyone interested in Renaissance commercial practices. This sets the scene for Pacioli: Venice’s trade throughout the Mediterranean and Adriatic and Black Sea and especially Constantinople, its navy, which Pacioli witnessed as a young mathematician traveling and tutoring. He learned well, returning to Venice in time for the Gutenberg revolution to make financially feasible an enormous encyclopedia laying out the use of indispensable Arabic numerals and, as it happens, double-entry accounting. Along the way, he hung out with Leonardo da Vinci, compiled a book of cool magic tricks like handling molten lead barehanded (apparently featured on Mythbusters), wrote the first book on chess, got that portrait done, and so on. Pacioli turns out to be far more interesting than I would have guessed for a monk known for popularizing something as dull as double-entry! We get a short introduction to double-entry; I’m not sure how well one would learn double-entry from that chapter if one didn’t already have a little experience. (It’s not that complex, but it can be tricky deciding what should be added/subtracted from what accounts.) The brevity of this section is a little odd since it is the major theme of the book: you expect a book on the history of accounting to discuss in detail accounting, like a book on physics or any other intellectual topics. It’s also not a very good overview of Renaissance capitalism either: the great fairs appear in one or two sentences, the tricky methods of interest (exploiting exchange rate variations between currencies and geographic variation) are discussed too briefly to clarify, and we don’t get a good idea of how banks and trading companies were organized as a series of yearly partnerships (for example, the Medici bank was structured as several affiliated partnerships which dissolved and reformed every year; and this was how the financial state was calculated, and new partners/employees brought on) though later Gleeson-White contrasts the yearly partnership form to the continuous joint-stock corporation form - apparently forgetting that she never really covered the original form. This leads into the Industrial Revolution. A few examples of the moralizing of good accounting are provided, but not that much. (There seems to be a lot of fertile material in the Netherlands which got omitted, judging from Soll’s article “The vanished grandeur of accounting”.) An interesting example of the effect of double-entry is provided by the famed Wedgwood pottery factory, which was staggering under financial problems despite enormous success until Wedgwood got his books in order and figured out where all his money was going. I wish Gleeson-White had provided a dozen examples in that vein: how was double-entry used in real life? The first railway bubble provided the impetus for British wholesale adoption, but I wonder how double-entry related to the Gilded Age in America? Since accounting is subjective in some senses, it would have been interesting to dig into the details of some of the collapses briefly mentioned to see what went into the differing appraisals - for example, I am intrigued by the final line of this quote, but the thread is dropped without any further discussion: In the 1920s the US construction business Kreuger & Toll became one of the largest conglomerates and multinationals imaginable, like Enron seventy years later. After its founder Ivar Kreuger died in 1932, millions of investors discovered the company’s financial statements had been falsified over many years. But because of the company’s extraordinary organisational complexity, the investigating accountants Price Waterhouse could not determine the exact extent of the fraud and so the investors lost their money. The Wall Street Crash of 1929 revealed the accounts of another titanic company, Insull Utility Investments, to be ‘grossly misleading’. Its CEO Samuel Insull was tried for fraud in 1932 and acquitted on all counts. A considerable part of Insull’s defence rested on the persuasiveness of the commonsense rationale behind his accounting practices (he had treated stock dividends as income, which was prohibited at the time, but the prosecution was unable to make a clear case against it)-and, by implication, ‘the financial nonsense peddled in the conventional accounting wisdom’. The prosecution was left without a case, unable to deny that the accounting rules of the day were controversial and unable to claim that there was any consensus within the accounting profession on the particular rule in question. The Insull case highlighted the contentious and arbitrary nature of corporate accounting, especially regarding valuation and depreciation, issues which are essentially unresolvable and continue to be hotly debated today. Significantly, some of Insull’s accounting practices, which then lay outside conventional accounting practice, are now accepted wisdom. I’m concerned because as useful as double-entry is, I don’t see a good case for identifying it as a major technology worthy of a book or marketing like ‘created modern finance’ (the Dutch would seem to have a better claim there); to quote the book: “But detractors argue that a close reading of the historical evidence does not support Sombart’s generalisation: in fact the few merchants’ books which survive from the 1300s to 1800 indicate the double-entry system was not then widely adopted in practice. As part of his career-long dispute with Sombart, economist Basil Yamey argues that the spirit of capitalism animated numerous prominent Italian mercantile ventures before they adopted Venetian bookkeeping: ‘Perhaps it is sufficient to note that the Italian enterprises of the Bardi, Peruzzi, Alberti and Medici cannot be said to have been run less efficiently and “capitalistically” before they had adopted the double-entry system than after they had done so.’” Indeed. The point is made even more strongly, inadvertently, by the emphasis on modern accounting scandals and Buffett’s observation that derivatives make a corporation’s true financial state nearly unknowable, combined with the observation that the world keeps on ticking and annual global growth continues: if modern financial reporting is so ambiguous and unreliable, doesn’t that imply that clear transparent books were never that important? The book gets weaker as it returns to the original theme of the corruption of capitalism and its focus on internalizing gains while externalizing costs. While it’s true that GDP may not be a perfect measure, can we say that it’s really that bad? (Is it really plausible that a Big Mac actually costs $200 when all externalities are priced in?) I recall environmentalist activists making a big deal of Bhutan adopting ‘Gross National Happiness’, but last I heard, you still want to live in China with its focus on GDP and not impoverished unfree Bhutan (ask the Bhutanese refugees how well things worked out for them). There seems to be little critical consideration of this topic, or of arguments for optimism about the environment from the Kuznets curve (although Kuznets is certainly mentioned often enough) & the cornucopians. One feels that in the attempt to turn a long good article on Pacioli into a short book, some rather weak material got included. | [] | Ratings and reviews - Gwern.net | Review | http://www.gwern.net/Book%20reviews | 4/1438042982502.13_20150728002302-00293-ip-10-236-191-2_475259833_0.json |
f7d9395c_atings_and_reviews___Gwern_net__Review | [Title] Spam Nation: The Inside Story of Organized Cybercrime — from Global Epidemic to Your Front Door [Author] Brian Krebs [Rating] ★★★ [Year] 2014 [Read] 2015/01/11 [Review] | (2h; ~73k words) Journalistic account of Brian Krebs’s (Wikipedia, blog) experience with some Russian spammers & associates. Krebs has been engaged in a little war with Russian spammers: getting onto their forums, looking for weak points like abuse-friendly ISPs or payment processors, and blowing the whistle on them; he’s been heavily aided by the feuding community leaking lots of information and vouches to him, and the book revolves around one he’s hyped up as the ‘Pharma Wars’. All the leaks means he can do an unusually thorough job of documenting it and the principals, and the involvement of the Russian government in the e-crime scene. My own interests are mainly in the Western blackmarkets like Silk Road, and in the pharmacy affiliate networks which were one of the main routes for buying modafinil up until recently, so while Krebs doesn’t go into nearly as much detail as I would like, it’s still a fairly illuminating read. Few Westerners have as much experience with the area as he does, which makes it worth reading for anyone interested in this niche, and certainly it’s easier to read the book than try to piece together everything from his blog posts. One downside is that the book comes off as a bit stream of consciousness and disorganized: there seems to be a rough chronological order, but not much of one; and a few diagrams of all the overlapping people and organizations (as well as a flowchart of the spam process) would probably be helpful. And I used the word ‘journalistic’ deliberately: Krebs’s writing is purple and sensationalistic. Something is not ‘terrifying’, it is ‘truly terrifying’; spammers are not a nuisance, but they become “potent threats”; in describing the fall of a small plurality source of spam (~20%, I believe he estimates), “consumers all over the world were enjoying a brief reprieve” from “the spam email empire”. His overheated writing aside, his own sources make the case that spam is not that important; eg towards the end: Vrublevsky and Gusev’s Pharma Wars were extremely costly for the spam industry, and their internecine war cost everyone in their business plenty. The two are now widely reviled on cybercrime forums for costing spammers tens of millions of dollars in profits, and for focusing attention from law-enforcement officials and security experts on individual spammers. “These two fuckers killed the spam business,” Vishnevsky said in a May 2012 interview. “It was never super profitable for most guys; maybe five to ten guys earned really good money with spam. But after Pavel and Gusev started their war, everyone started thinking that every spammer is a millionaire and started hunting for spam and spammers.”…Legitimate high-tech and well-paying programming jobs are increasingly available to talented coders in Moscow, and many of his longtime employees have been hired away to legitimate jobs in Moscow’s young but promising tech sector. “Many representatives of the underground can’t find good coders now, because their salaries in Moscow are much more than you can earn with spam,” Vishnevsky said. “This business went to shit when Pasha [Vrublevsky] got busted. If Pasha and Gusev [had] not start[ed] that stupid war, everyone would be much happier.” Vishnevsky’s criticism may be harsh, but it is hardly an exaggeration. The spam industry has indeed taken a huge hit in the past few years. Prior to SpamIt’s closure in October 2010, the volume of spam sent worldwide each day hovered at around 5.5 billion messages. Since SpamIt’s closure, however, the volume of global spam sent daily has been in marked decline. According to Symantec, by March 2011, spam levels had fallen to just over one billion junk messages per day, and the total has hovered at or very close to that diminished level ever since. (If spam is at 1/5 peak and even at the peak it was ‘maybe five to ten guys’…) In other spots, Krebs makes mistakes or does not exhibit as much critical thinking as one would like: the illustration of the horrors of designer drugs is the infamous ‘causeway cannibal’ (except that that wasn’t bath salts, that was marijuana - and Krebs even acknowledges his mistake in a footnote! So why on earth does the main text confidently say he “turned into a real-life zombie after ingesting prodigious amounts of “bath salts””‽); when discussing the online pharmacies, he repeats idiotic pharmacorp talking points like “8% of the bulk drugs imported into the United States are counterfeit, unapproved, or substandard” without pointing out that no one actually cares about the fraction that are “counterfeit [or] unapproved”, and mentions that Marcia Bergeron’s poisoning death is “almost always recited in some form whenever experts allied with the pharmaceutical industry talk” without asking the obvious question if the online pharmacies are so dangerous, why is only that story ‘almost always recited’?; it’s interesting that there’s no mention of Kaspersky Lab’s connections to the FSB and why Krebs was being wined and dined by Kaspersky personally; there is a bizarre lack of mention of Bitcoin except for a throwaway line about Russian forums, which is particularly bizarre given that he discusses the rise of ransomware (now often Bitcoin-using) and seems to agree with the interviewed Russian spammers at the end that going after credit-card payment processors has effectively killed the industry (which would be an unwise prediction if they can move to Bitcoin, as many of the online pharmacies have begun to). Further reading: “PharmaLeaks: Understanding the Business of Online Pharmaceutical Affiliate Programs” “Pick Your Poison: Pricing and Inventories at Unlicensed Online Pharmacies” “Structuring Disincentives for Online Criminals” “The Partnerka—What is it, and why should you care” “Click trajectories: End-to-end analysis of the spam value chain” “An analysis of underground forums” “Folex: An analysis of an herbal and counterfeit luxury goods affiliate program” “Traveling the Silk Road: A measurement analysis of a large anonymous online marketplace” Some key authors: Nicolas Christin Nektarios Leontiadis | [] | Ratings and reviews - Gwern.net | Review | http://www.gwern.net/Book%20reviews | 4/1438042982502.13_20150728002302-00293-ip-10-236-191-2_475259833_0.json |
f7d9395c_atings_and_reviews___Gwern_net__Review | [Title] Mathematical People: Profiles and Interviews [Author] Donald J. Albers [Rating] ★★★ [Year] 2008 [Read] 2014/10/08 [Review] | A collection of interviews and occasional professional autobiographies in the 1960s-1980s focusing on mathematicians who worked in the 1920s-1970s or people closely associated with the field in other capacities (Martin Gardner, while describing himself as a journalist, impacted the field majorly through his famed Scientific American columns on recreational mathematics; another interview is with a biographer of Hilbert & Neyman, Constance Reid). Some of these mathematicians one may well be familiar (Conway, Diaconis, Erdos, Gardner, Graham, Kline, Knuth, Mandelbrot, Pólya, Smullyan, Ulam), but many just made me draw a blank (Birkhoff, Blackwell, Chern, Coxeter, Halmos, Hilton, Kemeny, Lefschetz, Pollak, Rees, Reid, Robbins, Taussky-Todd, Tucker), so there’s a wide range from the famous and public intellectuals to the working mathematicians. The interest of the interviews likewise range: Smullyan’s autobiographical essay (extracted from his autobiography, apparently) is stuffed full of hilarious stories and jokes as any reader of his books might expect, Diaconis has an interesting life story in going from a traveling stage magician to a mathematician/statistician who continues to dabble in magic (like Smullyan), Knuth’s reminiscences are of interest to any programmer, while Chern’s life is an unusual look into what it’s like to bring modern mathematics to a place like early Communist China; others are just terribly dull. Another issue is that the more pure mathematicians struggle to describe to interviewers in a short approachable fashion what, exactly, they’ve accomplished and why it’s of interest, while the geometers can at least draw pictures of some sort and the ones who dabble in application and especially statistics have all sorts of immediately-interesting topics to discuss. I admit I got very little out of the pure mathematicians, aside from being a bit amused at the aesthetic prejudices on display as algebraists sniff at analysts who sniff at topologists who sniff at combinatorics and meanwhile I have hardly any idea what those specialties are much less any opinion on their respective merits. It is difficult to maintain an interest in topics you don’t know anything about and the discussants can’t explain, so a good deal of the book was wasted on me. Some topics surface repeatedly, to one’s surprise: “New Math”, a failed American program to rewrite lower mathematical pedagogy into teaching math in a much more abstract fashion, comes up repeatedly (perhaps because of the striking failure, none of the interviewees are willing to endorse it although Kline spends much time attacking it); the Hungarian Martians seem to come up in every other interview as the interviewee either taught or worked with a Hungarian, was inspired by a Hungarian, or was a Hungarian (Von Neumann, Halmos, Pólya, Erdős, Wald, and others), although none of the interviewees seemed to have any good suggestions for why the Martian cluster seems to exist (yes, Hungary was poor and so geniuses there might turn to math preferentially, but then why don’t we see similar clusters from other impoverished countries? the Hungarian per capita GDP in the early 1900s is probably equaled or exceeded by scores of countries since and present). Other tendencies in the biographies remind me of similar observations I noted in my review of Past, Present, and Future of Statistical Science - academia seems to have been infinitely less cutthroat than it is now and many of the subjects seem to almost luck into jobs and positions (Mandelbrot in particular seems to have been a beneficiary as he was able to continue his tertium quid career until fractals became a phenomenon), and in every professional life there is a clear discontinuity at WWII where it seems all of Europe’s intelligentsia packed up for America and get sucked into the military-industrial complex for application to complex Cold War topics (the Cold War was particularly good to statistics, as one can see how statistics & probability are mentioned only occasionally pre-WWII but then suddenly everyone is dabbling in it post-WWII; likely the Cold War/WWII influence would be even more obvious if interviewers & interviewees didn’t step so gingerly around the topic out of a mix of patriotism & shame, the former exemplified by a mention of the cryptographic work in WWII which the interviewee doesn’t describe but assures us has been written up in abstract form for the open literature); people married remarkably young and had children immediately which would be a bit odd in this age of prolonged PhDs & multiple postdocs & ‘the two-body problem’. Other topic don’t: computers are surprisingly rarely mentioned, with the exception of one or two discussions of the four-color computer proof, and Kemeny who turn out to have been quite prophetic about computers becoming ordinary tools of scholars & to have been one of the developers of BASIC; a mathematically-inclined layman or technologist will be surprised at the general absence of topics like P=NP or Fermat’s last theorem, but of course those problems were only formulated or solved long after most of these interviews were conducted. And I did like some of the anecdotes related. For example, I learned that the origin of Wald’s celebrated frequentist sequential analysis came from an incident which for all the world sounds like Bayesian reasoning: “These two men were puzzled because a Navy captain with whom they had discussed the problem of destructive sampling of munitions had said that he didn’t see why he had to destroy so much of the evidence—that there ought to be a way whereby, after a while, an experimenter, like a savvy captain, would know that this was a good batch or a bad one and stop sampling…Since they were unable to get anywhere with it because it required very special mathematical skills, they took it to an outstanding mathematical statistician who was associated with them—Abraham Wald, an émigré from Hitler’s He was intrigued by the problem and solved it by developing a new technique in statistics that is now one of great importance: sequential analysis.” Active mathematicians may find these old interviews of great interest, but I think most people would be better off reading just a few of them: Diaconis, Knuth, Smullyan, Pólya, the 2 Gardner articles, Conway, Chern, Kemeny, Kline, and Mandelbrot (in no particular order). | [] | Ratings and reviews - Gwern.net | Review | http://www.gwern.net/Book%20reviews | 4/1438042982502.13_20150728002302-00293-ip-10-236-191-2_475259833_0.json |
f7d9395c_atings_and_reviews___Gwern_net__Review | [Title] Japanese Love Hotels: A Cultural History [Author] Sarah Chaplin [Rating] ★★★ [Year] 2007 [Read] 2015/02/15 [Review] | (words: 110,626; ~3h) Heavily academicized discussion of contemporary Japanese love hotels, with an architectural history and history of some related locations for having sex. The prevalence of love hotels is interesting, and Chaplin backs it with a large survey she did of current love hotels. (Curiously, this survey goes almost entirely unused in the book - some photos from it, and a few statistics are mentioned like “Only one establishment in a sample of over 300 indicated room numbers and prices used Japanese numerals; the rest were all given in Arabic numerals” or how only 2 had manual rather than automatic doors, but given how huge an effort that survey must have been, it’s oddly underused.) Much of what is a pretty good book is hidden in woolly academic discussion, referring to a panoply of Western & Japanese critics and writers. For the most part, these parts are the worst, since they are either masturbatory or obscure discussions of the obvious. (Does it really require an intimate familiarity with Benjamin’s Arcades Project and its various schemas, brought up repeatedly over the book, or Arie Graafland or Hidenobu Jinnai or Barrie Shelton or André Sorensen or Donald Richie or Mitsuo Inoue in order to notice how Japanese cities have large main streets but also narrower car-free intimate back-streets with a mix of housing and small shops/businesses? Or that there are distinct neighborhoods, sometimes with physical barriers or gates demarcating them? I would think anyone with a pulse who went there, or even just consumed some jidaigeki fiction - to give a random example, the movie Fuse Teppō Musume no Torimonochō - would notice most of the neighborhood and pleasure quarters background.) It is difficult to see what discussions of how love hotels are “liminoid” rather than “liminal” really add to one’s understanding. What is good, however, is when we get down to brass tacks: what are love hotels, how do they operate on a day to day basis, how does the industry collectively respond to changing economic and social conditions, and what are the consequences of their existence? Chaplin takes a bit of an architectural focus to this, and I sometimes rolled my eyes at the attempts to divine deep meanings in various hotels’ choice of adornment or design (often, the true answer is simply that the architect liked it or was copying it from somewhere), but that focus is understandable since the bones of hotels are well documented and preserved in things like photographs while the living flesh is harder to capture. Those more-factual parts are the best parts - learning how there are 30,000 love hotels, revenue of ¥4 trillion with 1.37m couples using daily and ~2.5 couples per room per day and as high as 7 (avg ~78.8 stays per room per month) which pays for decorating costs per room as high as $150k (black-lights: $10k per, saunas $15k per) and of course bribes (easily $100k) to all the local power groups, spotting love hotel tax evasion through water utility bills, the now-familiar immigrant-based cleaning staffs (but not South/Central American, SE Asian like Filipinos), how South Korea eradicated many of the Seoul love hotels by converting them into tourist housing for the Olympics, the 1985 law quasi-banning love hotels & how they responded (as you’d predict - like squeezing air in a balloon), the automation which saves face while using a love hotel and their cutting-edge entertainment systems (as well as how they can go wrong), or how the 12-zoning system lets love hotels infiltrate regions of cities where one would not necessarily expect anything associated with the sex trade or the power dynamics of the Tokugawa shogunate fighting organized religion & redlight districts (“By the end of the Tokugawa era…temples occupied 15 per cent of urban areas”, which leads to some amusing photos of conjunctions of love hotels & temples), the grumping of old people about how before proto-love-hotels everyone had sex outside in the field and enjoyed it more and noodle shops posting signs clarifying they were real noodle restaurants, the insinuation that a number of well-known architects designed love hotels but refused to take any credit or acknowledge involvement, the occasional discursion into a related topic (the adoption of Western-style beds turns out to be unexpectedly lengthy and interesting), some of the stranger decorations (“…one popular love hotel interior, in which ‘Yamamoto Shinya [a popular porno film director] appears on the transparent wall between the bathroom and the bedroom, as if to prompt us to act out a film.’”), the rural Japanese practice of “night-courting” which reminded me of some material on early British & American pre-marriage sexual practices like “bundling”, how the Crown Prince & Disney doubled Japanese TV ownership 1958-1959, and offbeat uses of love hotels (watching the 2006 FIFA World Cup with friends on a much nicer TV, families resting during city outings & enjoying the pool). Most of this was new to me and interesting to read about, so it’s too bad that I had to slog through some deadly-dull material to get to the good parts. | [] | Ratings and reviews - Gwern.net | Review | http://www.gwern.net/Book%20reviews | 4/1438042982502.13_20150728002302-00293-ip-10-236-191-2_475259833_0.json |
f7d9395c_atings_and_reviews___Gwern_net__Review | [Title] Selected Poems [Author] Paul Celan [Rating] ★★★ [Year] 1972 [Read] 2014/06/01 [Review] | Modern verse is always difficult to read, and I expect little from it since the freedom gives people far too much rope to hang themselves (“you need an infallible ear, like D. H. Lawrence, to determine where the lines should end”); Paul Celan is no exception in that most of his poems leave me simply baffled. Part of the problem is the shadow of the Holocaust lingering over many of the poems: an event too awesome and sublime to reduce to words, seemingly reducing Celan to slapping down words and fractured lines in frustration and despair, and not a little guilt, circling around the themes again and again (reminding me of Wittgenstein’s famous introduction to Philosophical Investigations). That said, a few of the poems or parts of the poems worked for me - not just the famous “Fugue of Death” (WP) but several of the others. In poetry, a few gems is enough, because they stay with one in a way that prose rarely does, and so I forgive Celan for the poems I did not like and myself for the poems I did not get. Some excerpts: “Aspen Tree…”, pg24: “Aspen tree, your leaves glance white into the dark. / My mother’s hair was never white. / Dandelion, so green is the Ukraine. / My yellow-haired mother did not come home. / Rain cloud, above the well do you hover? / My quiet mother weeps for everyone. / Round star, you wind the golden loop. / My mother’s heart was ripped by lead. / Oaken door, who lifted you off your hinges? / My gentle mother cannot return.” “Corona”, p32: “Autumn eats its leaf out of my hand: we are friends. / From the nuts we shell time and we teach it to walk: / then time returns to the shell.” “…We stand by the window embracing, and people look / up from the street: / it is time they knew! / It is time the stone made an effort to flower, / time unrest had a beating heart. / It is time it were time. / It is time.” “Fugue of Death”, pg33: “Black milk of daybreak we drink it at nightfall / we drink it at noon in the morning we drink it at night / drink it and drink it / we are digging a grave in the sky it is ample to lie there / A man in the house he plays with the serpents he writes / he writes when the night falls to Germany your golden / hair Margarete / he writes it and walks from the house the stars glitter / he whistles his dogs up / he whistles his Jews out and orders a grave to be dug in / the earth / he commands us strike up for the dance / Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night / we drink in the mornings at noon we drink you at / nightfall / drink you and drink you / A man in the house he plays with the serpents he writes / he writes when the night falls to Germany your golden / hair Margarete / Your ashen hair Shulamith we are digging a grave in the / sky it is ample to lie there…” “Thread Suns”, pg83: “…there are / still songs to be sung on the other side / of mankind.” “I Hear that the Axe has Flowered”, pg106: “I hear that the axe has flowered, / I hear that the place can’t be named, / I hear that the bread which looks at him / heals the hanged man, / the bread baked for him by his wife, / I hear that they call life / our only refuge.” Ironically, the reason I looked up Celan in the first place was a Japanese novella (a doujin for Touhou), Iyokan & Surrounded By Enemies’s Dream and Reality, included as a running theme quotes from Celan’s From Threshold to Threshold (perhaps because Celan’s poems in Japanese bring out the repeated themes of gates/thresholds/transitions, which complements the plot of the novella & a key character). I had been particularly struck by the poem “The Guest” from Threshold: “Long before nightfall / someone who exchanged greetings with darkness / comes to spend the night with you. / Long before daylight / he wakes / and, before leaving, kindles a sleep, / a sleep echoing with footsteps: / you hear him going off, measuring distances, / and you throw your soul / after him.” And since Selected Poems was available but Threshold was not, I downloaded it to read… and “The Guest” was not in it. | [] | Ratings and reviews - Gwern.net | Review | http://www.gwern.net/Book%20reviews | 4/1438042982502.13_20150728002302-00293-ip-10-236-191-2_475259833_0.json |
f7d9395c_atings_and_reviews___Gwern_net__Review | [Title] Before the Storm (Star Wars: The Black Fleet Crisis, #1) [Author] Michael P. Kube-McDowell [Rating] ★★★ [Year] 1996 [Review] | As a kid collecting EU novels and stories, I was always puzzled by The Black Fleet Crisis trilogy. It was wildly different in tone and subject matter from most of the EU, I didn’t know whether I hated it or loved it, and it seemed to have been largely ignored by the rest of the EU (ever see the Yevetha or Black Sword Command or the White Current mentioned elsewhere?). This ignoring has happened for a number of other books like the Dark Empire comics or Crystal Star, but usually for good reasons: Dark Empire was so over-the-top and gothic that to take it seriously would undermine many other stories and so it’s usually name-checked briefly, if that, and ignored, while Crystal Star was just so terrible it can be ignored. Neither of these seem especially applicable, though, so I didn’t know what to think. Having reread the trilogy now, I think I understand it better. It’s essentially a Weber/Drake/Clancy-style military or mil-sf novel, which happens to be set in the EU and feature 2 distracting large subplots. From the great opening Fifth Fleet exercise to the equally great small subplot of discovering the Black Sword records (I’m nerdy enough to really like that, and also the various library/research issues in the Lando subplot) to the excellent finish, that’s what it really is. The problem is in large part the non-Yevethan subplots: 1. there’s a reasonably interesting first-contact story using Lando which keeps distracting from the real story and which has absolutely no relevance to the other 2 subplots and is completely unnecessary. (Another reviewer comments that it would fit nicely as a stand-alone story like the pulpy Han Solo Adventures; I agree, and actually there were multiple Lando Calrissian Adventures, so even more reason…) 2. The subplot for Luke has more justification than Lando, but is still problematic for how sheerly boring and pointless it is. The ultimate justification seems to be the White Current assistance in the final battle and revelation of how they had been working against the Yevetha all along, but this is not much of a justification. It’s probably just as well, since any real info about Luke’s mother would have been rendered moot by the prequels (and I wonder if that’s why the ending had to be so disappointing?). The positive side is that in some respects, this subplot seems to anticipate how a lot of later writers would handle Luke - so perhaps we should not criticize Luke’s hermetical ways and musings. (Some of the resemblances to the Yuuzhan Vong/New Jedi Order story-arcs are striking, although I hated them enough that I stopped reading the EU after they started coming out.) Certainly he serves as a vehicle for some interesting bits like reflecting on the death toll of the first Death Star (although the Imperial Museum in Wedge’s Gamble is still a far better scene). (One missed opportunity is Drayson; since Drayson is a key player in the major arc, and a key player in the start and end of Lando’s arc, the trilogy missed a chance to make an interesting and subtle move: have Drayson be the topic of the trilogy! It would examine his methods, choices, and beliefs as contrasted against those he manipulates and serves. Most people would not appreciate this subtlety, but that only makes it mirror the life of its subject all the more. But he plays no role in Luke’s subplot, so the interpretation fails. Too bad. The spy novel aspects were a major reason why Zahn’s trilogy was, and probably still remains, the greatest EU series.) The criticism of Leia in the trilogy is, I think, off-base. A good character is not a omni-perfect automaton who never makes mistakes; Leia needs to make mistakes, and this depicts one of them. Calling that ‘bad characterization’ is just fanboyism. I am reminded of a foreword to one of the character encyclopedias which enthused, “Check it out, Leia never misses [in A New Hope]”. I did. She does, several times. | [] | Ratings and reviews - Gwern.net | Review | http://www.gwern.net/Book%20reviews | 4/1438042982502.13_20150728002302-00293-ip-10-236-191-2_475259833_0.json |
f7d9395c_atings_and_reviews___Gwern_net__Review | [Title] Uncontrolled: The Surprising Payoff of Trial-and-Error for Business, Politics, and Society [Author] Jim Manzi [Rating] ★★★ [Year] 2012 [Read] 2013/01/25 [Review] | Speaking as a die-hard believer in the value of randomization and meta-analysis, I’m not entirely sure how much I got from this book other than some useful assertions and interesting claims. To go through it roughly in order: 1. the first few chapters are a serviceable philosophy of science primer. We get discussion of how the Scientific Revolution was a break, we get some Popper and falsificationism, and as a very important correction, some Duhem-Quine; we get some cultural and vocation material, and discussion of the value of prediction even in non-experimental sciences. Chapter 6 is a bit of a waste as Manzi makes the standard criticism of frequentism that the basic ideal - probability as the limit of some particular set of events - is extremely imprecise since it gives absolutely no guide as to which set of events, since you can choose arbitrarily complicated events, but he does so on his own terms and without any reference to competing paradigms such as the many flavors of Bayesianism. 2. then we get into genuinely important material on the development of RCTs (he uses the term “RFT”, which I find silly). Personally, I could wish for a whole book on the gradual development and refinement, and many more examples of the superiority of RCTs to other approaches; his summaries of things like the US social program experiments is short and in many ways inferior to, say, Rossi’s “metallic laws”. ch9’s example analyses read like columns folded into the chapter, but I still enjoyed them as fun examples of critical thinking and how analyses can reach any goal. 3. with ch10 we finally get into Manzi’s own career. This section is… weirdly lacking in many examples, even though it’s the section where you would expect Manzi to just lay the smack down with countless scores of anecdotes and stories and statistics about how experimentation is the ne plus ultra of epistemology and exactly how much money it made all these corporations. There’s a few, like Capital One and some Internet companies, but it is not very thematically separate from point #2. 4. he issues some policy recommendations. Hard to argue with some of them: why not let in some immigrants as part of randomized experiments? It can hardly be worse than the current system. Fairly anodyne. So overall good, and maybe great for people who aren’t familiar with the topics. But I think in general if I wanted a layman to appreciate statistics and its pitfalls and experiments, I might actually be better off giving them Nate Silver’s The Signal and the Noise (although they’re not totally comparable, of course). People seem impressed by his Hayekian libertarian arguments using genetic algorithms as arguments. I don’t think they’re as well supported as they may seem. Just to name the obvious, society has changed massively over short time-spans, corporate mortality is astonishingly high, corporations do not replicate with high fidelity (“corporate culture” is fragile) etc; evolution, as it happens, can only filter out so many mutations per generation so past a certain point, a genome just decays. This, along with other considerations, strongly suggests that corporate ‘evolution’ is nothing but a poetic metaphor. | [] | Ratings and reviews - Gwern.net | Review | http://www.gwern.net/Book%20reviews | 4/1438042982502.13_20150728002302-00293-ip-10-236-191-2_475259833_0.json |
f7d9395c_atings_and_reviews___Gwern_net__Review | [Title] Game Programming Patterns [Author] Robert Nystrom [Rating] ★★★ [Year] 2011 [Read] 2014/05/18 [Review] | (I read the online version.) This book follows the standard pattern for design pattern books: short chapters on each particular style, with definition, pros & cons, simple pedagogic example, comparisons with other design patterns, and possibly some discussion of real-world implementations & game engines. I haven’t heard of any other place where one could find this sort of game-oriented programming design advice, and in that respect, this book is unrivaled. While far from encyclopedic, the chosen design patterns all seem like reasonable choices for video game programmers: there are some architectural ones like Flyweight & Singleton which everyone needs to know, and then a good helping of high-performance or game-specific patterns (eg. Data Locality/Object Pool/Dirty Bit & Double Buffer/Game Loop/Spatial Partition, respectively), as well as a few fairly exotic patterns which often show up in games but not that many other areas (for example, Byte Code shows up in a lot of games to support modding, but you’ll otherwise spot such things only in a few extremely-extensible applications like text editors or programming languages). The actual chapters are surprisingly brief (from my non-game-programming perspective, anyway), and come across more as unusually long blog posts than meaty book chapters. Nystrom mentions several times he was trying for brevity, but I would say he’s taken simplicity to simplemindedness. I would have liked to see more of everything: more examples, more real-world applications, more benchmarks, more comparisons to other languages (especially to higher-level languages like Python/JavaScript/Haskell, which as hardware resources increase, game programmers will increasingly use; us Haskellers say that design patterns are simply flaws in the language, and I’m curious how much of Nystrom’s writing is simply due to working around C and Java issues). The web presentation is in standard 2.0-style: big font, lots of whitespace. Not too bad for reading, although the sidebar notes were annoying since a lot of them would have been better off incorporated into the text or simply axed, and their relation to the text could be very confusing if there were 2 or 3 on the same page. The web presentation also omits a major advantage of being online: comments! I started reading the site solely because I saw one of the chapters submitted to Hacker News & found it interesting. By a quick count, there’s 18 relevant discussions on Hacker News and another 37 on Reddit, yet someone reading it has no idea. There were many interesting comments and suggestions in those submissions, why not excerpt the best? Or at least link them at the end of each chapter as a “further reading” or something? | [] | Ratings and reviews - Gwern.net | Review | http://www.gwern.net/Book%20reviews | 4/1438042982502.13_20150728002302-00293-ip-10-236-191-2_475259833_0.json |
f7d9395c_atings_and_reviews___Gwern_net__Review | [Title] The Dark Side of the Enlightenment: Wizards, Alchemists, and Spiritual Seekers in the Age of Reason [Author] John V. Fleming [Rating] ★★★ [Year] 2013 [Read] 2013/08/09 [Review] | The title might lead one to believe that Fleming is trying to show an inherent duality to science and the Enlightenment in general - its reliance on irrational methods or its oppression or inherent contradictions, say, perhaps an updated (and more factual) Foucault. But while it’s a clever play on words, The Dark Side of the Enlightenment boils down to some short biographies of minor figures in Europe: the obscure English faith healer Valentine Greatrakes, the French Jansenists, the Rosicrucians, the Freemasons, Cagliostro, and Julie de Kruedener. If one looks for any sort of demonstration of a duality to the Enlightenment, one will be disappointed, as all the examples seem amply explained by simply pointing out that alchemists and religious types and fraudsters have always existed, and the case studies simply show that the Enlightenment did not sweep them away instantaneously, lock stock and barrel; one is surprised to note Fleming’s lack of emphasis on the more famous examples of the coexistence of religion & science, like Isaac Newton. Perhaps this is to ascribe a failure at goals that Fleming never aimed at, but regardless none of the sections are particularly compelling: while the Rosicrucian and Freemason sections seem like reasonable overviews of their subjects for people who don’t know anything about the topic, Greatrakes and Kruedener left me completely bored and wondering why Fleming considered them interesting enough to write a good chunk of a book on them summarizing other people’s books on them, and the Cagliostro section seems rather apologetic (although I have only seen passing references to Cagliostro before and know little about him). Fleming’s medievalist traits show in his resentment for the low modern opinion of the Dark Ages, which is a little amusing, and his predilection for using very old and obscure books as sources. But this is the cause of the best aspect of this book: Fleming’s genuine appreciation that even in the Enlightenment, a great many people thought very differently than we do today, centuries later in a completely transformed age, and his attempt to lay out the forgotten background and bring home the difference in consciousness. For example, Fleming points out the absurdity of claiming that Milton either subconsciously or consciously wrote Paradise Lost with the Devil as admirable, given the intense religious convictions of that age and Milton’s own strong beliefs, and he does a credible job of conveying how so many Europeans and Catholics could seriously and factually believe that Napoleon Bonaparte was the literal Anti-Christ foretold by John in Revelations who would usher in the end of the world and sketching the gematria-based arguments Christian occultists concocted to ‘prove’ this. Getting in the “mind” of past ages is always hard, and I appreciate any author who gives me a little insight, even if much of the rest of his book left me feeling like I was wasting my time. | [] | Ratings and reviews - Gwern.net | Review | http://www.gwern.net/Book%20reviews | 4/1438042982502.13_20150728002302-00293-ip-10-236-191-2_475259833_0.json |
f7d9395c_atings_and_reviews___Gwern_net__Review | [Title] Drift Into Failure: From Hunting Broken Components to Understanding Complex Systems [Author] Sidney Dekker [Rating] ★★★ [Year] 2011 [Read] 2015/05/08 [Review] | (101k words) Somewhat disappointing. Dekker focuses on how the occasional rare disaster is very complex, which they can be, but never gets off his high horse, instead spending a whole book talking about how everything is terribly terribly complicated. He sets up a strawman in which attempts to improve things evidences a naive and naturally wrong “Newtonian worldview” in which tragic cases of reductionism run amok guarantee disaster, and particularly mocks the swiss-cheese model of failure. The problem is, the more he rails against it and runs through the stereotypical case-studies like Challenger, the more apt that model seems, and the less Dekker seems to be trying to understand ‘Newtonian’ views or acknowledge that improvements are possible, that drift into failure is not inevitable. For example, in discussing the recommendations produced by an aircraft investigation, like making a hatch easier for mechanics to see into, he asks rhetorically how all these fatally flawed designs and procedures could possibly have gone unnoticed before the accident; the answer is, of course, that airplane accidents are vanishingly rare and so a contributing cause can be responsible for a large fraction of the current accident rate and that flaw be unnoticed before the accidents - if only 0.001% of planes crash and a too-narrow hatch is responsible for a full 10% of all crashes, then the hatch is a risk of only 0.0001%, and it’s entirely understandable that no one would notice that, and also true that fixing the hatch is worthwhile! And one might think that he would devote great attention to the steady decline in aircraft fatalities; I kept waiting for that to come up, and on pg150, it finally does in the mouth of one of his students, and his response is… global warming. I’m not making this up, that is what he says, he ignores the fatality question and starts talking about global warming. Give me a break. More generally, there never seems to be an economic perspective taken: what is the right number of disasters? Why must there be zero disasters and any disasters are a failure of ‘Newtonian’ thinking? I experienced a similar bit of shock to see how much space he devoted to the Gaussian copula; the Gaussian copula, for those who don’t recognize it, is an obscure bit of financial modeling which, after the housing bubble burst in 2007/2008, a few people blamed its assumption of independence for causing underestimates of the probability of housing prices falling, but you haven’t heard of it since because it quickly became apparent that this was a ridiculous theory which didn’t explain anything and was picking out an incidental surface feature while ignoring the real underlying drivers of the crisis. Overall, I don’t think I learned much from this. If you’re interested in disasters and complex systems, you’re probably better off reading more standard texts like Feynman’s “Appendix F - Personal observations on the reliability of the Shuttle” or even just random post-mortems like the 2001 report “The explosion of No. 5 Blast Furnace, Corus UK Ltd, Port Talbot”. | [] | Ratings and reviews - Gwern.net | Review | http://www.gwern.net/Book%20reviews | 4/1438042982502.13_20150728002302-00293-ip-10-236-191-2_475259833_0.json |
f7d9395c_atings_and_reviews___Gwern_net__Review | [Title] Theological Incorrectness: Why Religious People Believe What They Shouldn’t [Author] D. Jason Slone [Rating] ★★★ [Year] 2004 [Read] 2015/02/11 [Review] | (56k words; 1.5 hours) A short book on some of the possible psychological predispositions to religious thinking as indicated by intuitive thinking. He diagnoses overactive theories of mind; teleological thinking; intuitive ontologies of what kind of people and things there are in the world; cognitive biases related to the birthday paradox, gambler’s fallacy, and confirmation bias, as major causes of religious thinking. I was mostly disappointed by this naturalistic account; Slone spends a completely unnecessary and insulting amount of the book going over vaguely related historical background like Durkheim and the idea of ‘postmodernism’ or explaining things like ‘deductive reasoning’. You could well skip the first 3 of the 7 chapters in their entirety without losing much at all. Chapter 4 gets more interesting, as it covers the historically recent creation of modern Protestantized & philosophized Theravada Buddhism which has become popular in the West; this is going to be surprising to those not familiar with it, but you could see David Chapman‘s blogging on the topic for online coverage of the material. (It’s out of place, though, since that particular form of Buddhism is only relevant as a counterexample and he hasn’t yet presented his account of the psychological origins of superstition/luck/religious practice.) Chapter 5 does another short case-study in looking at the great religious awakenings in America in the 1800s and argues basically they resulted in more intuitive forms of theology becoming more widespread - the argument running basically ’Calvinism is unintuitive; Calvinism became a minority belief in America; that was because of the unintuitiveness; unintuitiveness is important’, pointing out that the Puritans were Calvinist but now few people are; now, I’m not an expert on American religions or demographics, but I am fairly sure there were more people in America than the Puritans, and other people may have come from other countries at some point too… Chapter 6 discusses luck and the statistical illusions that power it. Though the book is supposed to be about the psychology research, there’s little account of the research or the methods or caveats attached to the research. Instead, he writes at tremendously abstracted levels about the results: we hear repeatedly how believers are “theologically incorrect” in that they perceive gods as more limited, agent-like, and human-like than their theologies say… how they perceive them, what studies show this result, and what the results mean - well, for that, you’ll just have to look up all the citations and read the papers yourself! (The one result I remember being discussed in any meaningful detail was asking very young children about whether they thought a mouse that had been eaten would later be hungry, or have thoughts or beliefs; no to the former, but yes to the latter.) | [] | Ratings and reviews - Gwern.net | Review | http://www.gwern.net/Book%20reviews | 4/1438042982502.13_20150728002302-00293-ip-10-236-191-2_475259833_0.json |
f7d9395c_atings_and_reviews___Gwern_net__Review | [Title] On the Road [Author] Jack Kerouac [Rating] ★★★ [Year] 1976 [Read] 2004/01/01 [Review] | A curious book: an unusual stylistic effort which in some passages reach great heights of beauty, combined with the most malign content. The strange thing reading it is wondering how this could ever have inspired a generation or been received as a model rather than a warning - it is one long crime spree by the characters, particularly Neal Cassady, even if the author is too in love with him to have the slightest perspective or critical thought or to realize that there is no redeeming value or spiritual meaning to any of their experiences other than as a warning against nihilistic hedonism and how charismatic conmen exploit voids. ‘Conman’ might well be too light a word for it; consider the following excerpts from ‘The Great Sex Letter’: She (her name Patricia) got on the bus at 8 PM (Dark!) I didn’t speak until 10 PM – in the intervening 2 hours I not only of course, determined to make her, but, how to DO IT. I naturally can’t quote the conversation verbally, however, I shall attempt to give you the gist of it from 10 PM to 2 AM. Without the slightest preliminaries of objective remarks (what’s your name? where are you going? etc.) I plunged into a completely knowing, completely subjective, personal & so to speak “penetrating her core” way of speech; to be shorter (since I’m getting unable to write) by 2 AM I had her swearing eternal love, complete subjectivity to me & immediate satisfaction. I, anticipating even more pleasure, wouldn’t allow her to blow me on the bus, instead we played, as they say, with each other. Knowing her supremely perfect being was completely mine (when I’m more coherent, I’ll tell you her complete history & psychological reason for loving me) I could concieve of no obstacle to my satisfaction, well, “the best laid plans of mice & men go astray” and my nemesis was her sister, the bitch. …In complete (try & share my feeling) dejection, I sat, as the bus progressed toward Kansas City. At Columbia, Mo. a young (19) completely passive (my meat) virgin got on & shared my seat. In my dejection over losing Pat, the perfect, I decided to sit on the bus (behind the driver) in broad daylight & seduce her, from 10:30 AM to 2:30 PM I talked. When I was done, she (confused, her entire life upset, metaphysically amazed at me, passionate in her immaturity) called her folks in Kansas City, & went with me to a park (it was just getting dark) & I banged her; I screwed her as never before; all my pent up emotion finding release in this young virgin (& she was) who is, by the way, a school teacher! This quote, or for that matter the entire plot, would fit without anyone noticing any discrepancy as a case study in Cleckey’s psychopathy examples in The Mask of Sanity. | [] | Ratings and reviews - Gwern.net | Review | http://www.gwern.net/Book%20reviews | 4/1438042982502.13_20150728002302-00293-ip-10-236-191-2_475259833_0.json |
f7d9395c_atings_and_reviews___Gwern_net__Review | [Title] 空ろの箱と零のマリア 1 [Utsuro no Hako to Zero no Maria 1] [Author] Eiji Mikage [Rating] ★★★ [Year] 2009 [Read] 2014/10/23 [Review] | (55k words, ~3-4 hour read; read the Baka-Tsuki translation.) Time loop mystery. Those familiar with novel/light-novel series like Hyouka or The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya (particularly “Endless Eight”) will be at home here: yes, there’s a Japanese high school classroom, yes there will be a beautiful long-haired girl who interacts with the narrator, yes there will be a silent mousy short-haired girl who looks an awful lot like Rei Ayanami/Yuki Nagato in it who is inexplicably popular with the protagonist & readers, yes there will be a goofball sidekick. But the core of Hakomari is not tired romcom tropes, but rather a somewhat intelligent exploration of time-loops/Groundhog Days: besides the obvious like being able to acquire many skills and ‘predict the future’, how would you detect the center of such a time-loop and escape? What happens to people over many loops? Perfect time loops are too boring since by definition they cannot change, so what kinds of imperfect time loops are there? Are the ‘awake’ people really as powerful as they seem, or might the loopers be powerful in some ways themselves, as they can keep doing the same thing indefinitely and can be guaranteed to do so? The answer to each question may seem to be pretty obvious, but Mikage lets the reader infer an answer and then yanks it away several times, using reasoning that would not be out of place in Death Note or Hyouka, using the out-of-order chapters to, like Memento, maintain suspense and mimick forgetting - mysteries are often as much about figuring out why something happened in the past as what happened in the past. (In this respect, it’s a trickier exercise than “Endless Eight”, where there’s multiple bits of time-travel but they’re all straightforward to understand.) By the end, it seems all mysteries have been tidily resolved, and the answers are good. The riddle aspect works well, but the characters and setting otherwise leave me unmoved. The writing is unremarkable, setting is arbitrary, the characters are (as already indicated) stereotypes, and the ending is both a partial copout in averting a death which had been giving it pathos/depath and also a blatant gimmick for continuing to write the series if the first one sold well enough (which given there’s 6 of them now, it must’ve). The mystery part is fun, but like Primer it’s too lacking in the other departments to be more than good. | [] | Ratings and reviews - Gwern.net | Review | http://www.gwern.net/Book%20reviews | 4/1438042982502.13_20150728002302-00293-ip-10-236-191-2_475259833_0.json |
f7d9395c_atings_and_reviews___Gwern_net__Review | [Title] The Ocean at the End of the Lane [Author] Neil Gaiman [Rating] ★★★ [Year] 2013 [Read] 2014/06/28 [Review] | A Gaiman novella of ~54236 words. It uses the device of a frame story around a flashback which is the meat of the novella. The frame story is a sad divorced English artist returning to where he grew up for a funeral, and recollecting the circumstances. This aspect is dry, mannered, and reminscent of Mitchell’s Black Swan Green or Kazuo Ishiguro. The flashback is vintage Gaiman, with a plot predictable by anyone’s who’s read his young adult works (particularly Coraline): an ordinary person meets uncanny folk, gets inadvertently involved in deep matters, goes through hell, defeats the enemy, and survives more mature for it. The narrator is wry, with many acute observations (indeed, why do so many people destroy pea by overcooking them when they’re tasty on their own?), and the antagonist is exceedingly cruel & clever in seducing & turning the protagonist’s family against him. It’s a quick read of perhaps 2 hours, and is not especially complex: the work is almost entirely set at the protagonist’s home or the Hempstock farm, and shows its origins as a short story. What makes this more than Gaiman going back to the well of mythos he has drawn from so many times before (oh look, another triune of mysterious powerful women! oh look, the fairy tale motif of the one forbidden action & of course the character does it) is the frame story’s tone of sadness and loss and wasted opportunity which otherwise shows up rarely in Gaiman’s fiction - it’s comparable to the death of the Sandman. By the end, the protagonist is pitiable: it was his fault, time and again, and ultimately the sacrifice was for him, and what has he done with his life? Little enough. As the shadows warn him, “There can never be a time when you forget them, when you are not, in your heart, questing after something you cannot have, something you cannot even properly imagine, the lack of which will spoil your sleep and your day and your life, until you close your eyes for the final time, until your loved ones give you poison and sell you to anatomy, and even then you will die with a hole inside you, and you will wail and curse at a life ill-lived.” At the end, the best the trinity can say for him is that he’s growing a new heart. Not that he’ll remember even that faint progress report. It’s an interesting combo, and helps excuse some of the lamer bits. (Talk of electrons is jarringly out of place in a Gaiman work, and some aspects are too explicit about fantasy elements better left for the reader to wonder about.) | [] | Ratings and reviews - Gwern.net | Review | http://www.gwern.net/Book%20reviews | 4/1438042982502.13_20150728002302-00293-ip-10-236-191-2_475259833_0.json |
f7d9395c_atings_and_reviews___Gwern_net__Review | [Title] A Confederacy of Dunces [Author] John Kennedy Toole [Rating] ★★★ [Year] 1994 [Read] 2013/03/13 [Review] | It’s hard to know what to make of this… I’ve rarely read a book where the main protagonists inspires such disgust in me - even for a picaresque, the main character Ignatius is extreme. It is as if Toole read Cleckley’s Mask of Sanity and a psychology textbook, and said to himself, “how can I make the most offensive moronic character which mashes up the traits of both psychopaths and autists?” and then wrote a novel on it in which the protagonist’s countless evil actions, glib lies, narcissism, ignorance, sloth, leeching, and other flaws finally brought down an appropriate punishment - only to rescue him at the last moment for further adventures. In particular, I’m not bothered that Ignatius pretends to be a medievalist Catholic. I’m bothered that as far as I can tell, Toole seems to genuinely try to present Ignatius as educated and learned and with a worldview (and reading the reviews here, it seems that most people do indeed take this for granted). The problem is, Toole fails. Utterly. In the entire book, Ignatius’s learning is displayed solely as repeated surface allusions to Boethius and Hroswitha, and a few other dropped names, and never anything of substance. Someone who read Wikipedia on Boethius and Hroswitha would know more than Ignatius does, and is probably literate enough to spot Ignatius (and by extension, Toole’s) failures, like writing ‘gyro’ where they were trying to make an allusion to Yeats’s ‘gyre’ (way to mess up an allusion to only one of the most famous poems ever!). So, with the complete failure of Ignatius to offer any sort of Catholicly-grounded interesting critique or reflection on society (as a good picaresque is supposed to!), we’re left with the evocation of New Orleans (seems good enough, although I don’t know enough about New Orleans to really judge), the humorous value of each set piece (overall, low. Jeeves this is not.), and the final convergence of plot threads at the bar (a decent enough denouement but still leaves the first 150 pages a drag). Is that enough to make it a masterpiece? I should think not. Indeed, A Confederacy of Dunces overall stands in stark contrast to Gene Wolfe or R.A. Lafferty’s better novels. | [] | Ratings and reviews - Gwern.net | Review | http://www.gwern.net/Book%20reviews | 4/1438042982502.13_20150728002302-00293-ip-10-236-191-2_475259833_0.json |
f7d9395c_atings_and_reviews___Gwern_net__Review | [Title] Bitter Seeds (The Milkweed Triptych, #1) [Author] Ian Tregillis [Rating] ★★★ [Year] 2010 [Read] 2013/03/20 [Review] | I loved Stross’s “A Colder War”, and enjoyed Powers’s Declare and Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, so this was right up my alley. I enjoyed the concept and a few touches like the Thule Society, and don’t regret reading it: taking blood sacrifice seriously in a “beware while fighting monsters” makes for a gradually creeping sense of doom which is fitting, and I was impressed to see the old medieval debate over the language of infants resurrected and then taken to the max, which was a real bit of esoterica. The logical conclusion, a British program into Enochian, is a nasty enough conclusion that it convinced me to keep reading the series. Downsides: the repeated use of raven sections is blunt; Gretel’s character is even blunter, we’re told almost on sight that “she sees the future and is manipulating everyone” and this is ground in ad nauseam, while subtlety would’ve worked better (maybe 1 hint at the beginning and then a revelation at the end for the inattentive reader - but we get what must be dozens instead); Nazi Germany is a total caricature; while sometimes the descriptions of places or events are excellent (like the opening), characters can be pretty wooden and I feel like Marsh is made to punch people to move the plot along (eg. to get himself fired, and then to ignore Will and not ask the sane thing like ‘why would you suggest something so horrible as an abortion when you know how much losing our child hurt us?’). The alt history is a little crude and lacking in details: in contrast to Declare or “A Colder War”, which wove in and rewrote all sorts of historical tidbits (some extremely obscure, in Declare), Bitter Seeds only does big brushstrokes - tanks going through the Ardennes, bad winter weather in Russia, a failure of a hypothetical Operation Sea Lion - and it omits all sorts of historical backgrounds that could’ve enriched it (Nazi occultism is a bizarre subject which is surprisingly underused by Tregillis; someone should’ve given him a copy of Morning of the Magicians or something). Hopefully he’ll weave a more intricate tapestry for the Cold War books; at least, I’ll be quite disappointed if James Jesus Angleton doesn’t make some appearances. | [] | Ratings and reviews - Gwern.net | Review | http://www.gwern.net/Book%20reviews | 4/1438042982502.13_20150728002302-00293-ip-10-236-191-2_475259833_0.json |
f7d9395c_atings_and_reviews___Gwern_net__Review | [Title] Voyage of the Beagle [Author] Charles Darwin [Rating] ★★★ [Year] 1989 [Read] 2012/12/14 [Review] | Frequently exceedingly dry and of no interest except to naturalists, and probably not always them either: Darwin’s voyage was so long ago that much of his information and speculation is simply outdated (his talk of ‘miasmas’ is one instance where later information makes his material of purely historical interest). If one is reading it for background on evolution and Origin of Species, one will be disappointed: there are a handful of lines in the main part of the work which may be taken as prefiguring or groping towards evolution, and then there’s some speculation in the surprisingly short Galapagos section (I suspect he spends as much time describing the gauchos’ methods of horsemanship and dealing with cattle as he does on all of the Galapagos material!). In general, the ‘pacing’ is quite odd: reams of material on South America, some pages on the Galapagos, a dash to New Zealand & Australia, a long section on islands and ‘cacao-nuts’ (coconuts), a mini-monograph on coral atolls, and the book abruptly ends. Which is not to say he doesn’t occasionally drop in interesting or acute observations, for he does. (The shepherd-dog of South America quite took my fancy, for example.) They are just rare welcome morsels in the general desert of this door-stopper. If I had to recommend it to my past self, I would tell him to skip the bulk but to read the Tierra del Fuego sections where the events are both interesting and evocative of the long uncivilized past of man (and perhaps his future), the Galapagos section for its substantial historical interest, and maybe the brief conclusion. —- My National Geographic anniversary edition is substantially lacking in additional material; there is surprisingly little about its reception, what contributions it made, where it was prescient and where it was wrong (disturbing, since one doesn’t know what mistakes, misimpressions, outdated information, plausible yet wrong speculation, etc. one might be absorbing over the 400+ pages). As well, Darwin’s original illustrations would benefit mightily from additional material like color photographs and maps. | [] | Ratings and reviews - Gwern.net | Review | http://www.gwern.net/Book%20reviews | 4/1438042982502.13_20150728002302-00293-ip-10-236-191-2_475259833_0.json |
f7d9395c_atings_and_reviews___Gwern_net__Review | [Title] Inside WikiLeaks: My Time with Julian Assange at the World’s Most Dangerous Website [Author] Daniel Domscheit-Berg [Rating] ★★★ [Year] 2011 [Read] 2011/11/08 [Review] | I give it 3 stars solely because it is a unique primary source about WikiLeaks; if this was not from a principal player, it would not be worth reading as it is shallow incomplete garbage. Negatives: the writing is absolutely atrocious, although I don’t know if this is due to the translation from the German or whether the co-author journalist screwed it all up. And Domscheit comes off in some passages as too ignorant to even understand Assange’s beliefs (for example, I seem to recall that there was an irritating passage where Domscheit mocks Assange’s use of red light to help his sleep - even though this is standard chronobiology, that blue light influences melatonin secretion to retard the sleep cycle and keep one awake!). One is strongly reminded of Russell’s famous description of Xenophon’s writings on Socrates: “A stupid man’s report of what a clever man says is never accurate, because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something that he can understand. I would rather be reported by my bitterest enemy among philosophers than by a friend innocent of philosophy.” Which is not to say that Domscheit’s portrait of Assange as a megalomaniac asshole is wrong, because from all the other coverage of him, it’s clear there’s a lot of truth to this portrayal. Domscheit’s personal failings are only highlighted by the since-complete & unmitigated failure of his ‘OpenLeaks’ project. It’s also bizarrely lacking in technical details, which is the one part one would hope a supposed geek like Domscheit would at least make sure his book got right! (Probably also thanks to the journalist.) Still, many interesting bits. I remember thinking way back that for a group claiming so many participants & advisers, it had an oddly low flow of leaks - which Domscheit says was because it was mostly him and Assange; makes sense. I was amused to learn that the Iceland laws were based by Assange in part on Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon - again, makes sense in a curious way. | [] | Ratings and reviews - Gwern.net | Review | http://www.gwern.net/Book%20reviews | 4/1438042982502.13_20150728002302-00293-ip-10-236-191-2_475259833_0.json |
f7d9395c_atings_and_reviews___Gwern_net__Review | [Title] The City of Falling Angels [Author] John Berendt [Rating] ★★★ [Year] 2006 [Read] 2014/01/07 [Review] | An American writer with access to Venetian high society moves there and writes down all the gossip and good stories he witnesses or hears about while living there for a few years. This book has all the strengths and weaknesses that this sounds like: on the one hand, these are pretty much all stories I am completely unfamiliar with since the reflections of Venice in things I have read or seen are typically of pre-20 century Venice (think stories like The Count of Monte Cristo or film works like Aria or histories of the Mediterranean region) and so stories like theaters burning or the Save Venice feuds or the Pound scandal are news; on the other hand, they were news to me because I didn’t care about any of them before and I don’t care much about them having read Falling Angels either. As one might expect, there’s not much cohesiveness to the stories beyond the narrator himself because real life is not so cooperative as to combine all the storylines into a single satisfying conclusion. On the positive side: Berendt is a fine writer who smoothly narrates events and lets people speak for themselves more than most writers would. He is aware of the danger of relying on gossip and seems to keep an open mind as he critically examines all the versions and stories he’s told, and he seems to have spoken to everyone so he has plenty to compare. He also has a good eye for details and and interesting people and anecdotes. I don’t regret reading it, even if I don’t expect to ever re-read it nor learned any ‘big’ truths or stories. | [] | Ratings and reviews - Gwern.net | Review | http://www.gwern.net/Book%20reviews | 4/1438042982502.13_20150728002302-00293-ip-10-236-191-2_475259833_0.json |
f7d9395c_atings_and_reviews___Gwern_net__Review | [Title] The Autobiography Of Benvenuto Cellini [Author] Benvenuto Cellini [Rating] ★★★ [Year] 1999 [Read] 2012/10/05 [Review] | To read this, one wonders how Cellini survived to age 20, much less age 70! He is constantly killing and being attacked, wenching his models, contracting hideous illnesses (or noting in passing the constant unexpected death of others), and being betrayed (by this account) or insulting others. It’s an endless exhausting cycle such that even Cellini had to notice its futility and danger. One has to wonder how much he exaggerates: aside from the demonology and weather-controlling, it seems so routine for people to go around armed and attacking for minor insults and then dying of a scratch. Then there is his strange attitude to his patrons: on the one hand, he seems largely unable to criticize them or the system despite wallowing in their corruption and wealth (surely the King of France wasn’t all that, and given the sheer servility & ignobility & criminality of the popes he deals with, his tolerance of them is astounding), but on the other hand, he almost goes out of his way to mess with them. Well, it’s fun in small doses, the constant tumult of Cellini’s life suggests that the constant murder & assault & theft & large gifts we read of in picaresques or stories (like the Decameron) are much more realistic than we give them credit for, and it’s pretty cool to look at the Wikipedia article and see images of the works he labors over at such length in his autobiography. | [] | Ratings and reviews - Gwern.net | Review | http://www.gwern.net/Book%20reviews | 4/1438042982502.13_20150728002302-00293-ip-10-236-191-2_475259833_0.json |
f7d9395c_atings_and_reviews___Gwern_net__Review | [Title] Newton and the Counterfeiter: The Unknown Detective Career of the World’s Greatest Scientist [Author] Thomas Levenson [Rating] ★★★ [Year] 2009 [Read] 2014/03/21 [Review] | A quick breezy read good for an evening; Levenson touches on the highlights of Newton’s early life & throughout keeps an eye out for the telling detail or quote which might bring the past to life for us, is sympathetic towards the alchemy and tries to put it in a context, and then plunges into Newton’s war with an obscure counterfeiter. This section would make good background reading for Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle (despite Levenson’s book being published in 2009 and the cycle finished in 2004, and the latter being one of the few places a reader might have encountered Newton in the same breath as counterfeiters, entirely unmentioned), as it pretty clearly explains the monetary issues of clipping, recoining, balance of exchange with Asia, etc, in a less digressive & action-packed manner than Stephenson’s doorstoppers. It’s interesting that Newton was so involved in criminal matters, but in some respects Levenson is trying to wring blood from a stone: Newton doesn’t seem to have been any Sherlock Holmes (an apt comparison since Moriarty was an expert on Newtonian mechanics), but rather, just obsessive & hardworking and applying all the standard investigative techniques. The story is hampered also by the relatively low amount of documentation (one wonders what the boxes of documents Newton burned would have revealed). | [] | Ratings and reviews - Gwern.net | Review | http://www.gwern.net/Book%20reviews | 4/1438042982502.13_20150728002302-00293-ip-10-236-191-2_475259833_0.json |
f7d9395c_atings_and_reviews___Gwern_net__Review | [Title] Daemon (Daemon, #1) [Author] Daniel Suarez [Rating] ★★★ [Year] 2009 [Read] 2013/03/27 [Review] | An unfriendly AI designed by a dead billionaire (who for some reason reminded me a little of an evil John Carmack) takes over the world. The overall combination is good but nothing to write home about. The frequent appearance of autonomous vehicles is a nice touch and one too often absent from SF, near or far. Most of the technical details were good (I was not surprised to read the short author bio and learn Suarez is a practicing programmer, since the Ross character felt like an author self-insert). But the decentralized conspiracy was done better in Sterling’s “Maneki Neko”, the creepy persuasive AI was done better in ‘Friendship is Optimal’, the technical detail in Cryptonomicon, the futuristic developments in Otherland, and the plutocracy/government stuff in multiple William Gibson novels (Suarez’s version being more than a little bit crude - citing Confessions of an Economic Hitman, really?). And despite the lauded technical detail, the AI presented is farcical; it’s hard to see how any ‘logic tree’ could possibly handle all that the AI does even if Suarez throws in some failures to parse responses and writes up . (If I had an iPhone I’d probably snark about how Siri can understand the responses given by various characters fine, and hasn’t taken over the world.) | [] | Ratings and reviews - Gwern.net | Review | http://www.gwern.net/Book%20reviews | 4/1438042982502.13_20150728002302-00293-ip-10-236-191-2_475259833_0.json |
f7d9395c_atings_and_reviews___Gwern_net__Review | [Title] Un Lun Dun [Author] China Miéville [Rating] ★★★ [Year] 2007 [Read] 2014/12/24 [Review] | British urban fantasy; think Gaiman crossed with Pratchett’s humor, but worse than either alone. Miéville thinks he can pull off Gaiman’s bildungsroman mythic double-world shtick with Pratchett’s pun humor and put in a hefty helping of his own Marxist people power politics & environmentalism, but he can’t. The plot, after an initial subversion of the Heroine’s Journey, settles back onto track, and most of the jokes are more wince-worthy than amusing (I did like the ‘binjas’ and the ‘Black Windows’ of ‘Webminster Abbey’, and the alternative city names like ‘Not York’, but that’s about all). There’s also a weird tendency where the story seems like it’s about to deliver a brutal punch to the reader and kill off a character gruesomely to continue the subversion of tropes, but then pulls aside at the last minute - characters tend to die offscreen and not be particularly remarked, and the Smog delivers some very villainous monologues but fails to follow up onscreen with appropriately horrifying actions, to be cleaned up with a plain old deus ex machina which is unusually lazy for Miéville. So, this isn’t a particularly good book for adult fans of Miéville but maybe it’s a good book for young teens? I couldn’t say. | [] | Ratings and reviews - Gwern.net | Review | http://www.gwern.net/Book%20reviews | 4/1438042982502.13_20150728002302-00293-ip-10-236-191-2_475259833_0.json |
f7d9395c_atings_and_reviews___Gwern_net__Review | [Title] Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas [Author] Hunter S. Thompson [Rating] ★★★ [Year] 1998 [Read] 2014/08/19 [Review] | Fear and Loathing is famous through osmosis: the opening chapters, the lines about bats, ether, drug collections, etc. The first quarter or so of the novel is justly famous. The rest of it… one wonders. After Duke & his lawyer wake up to go to the race, most of the rest is fairly unmemorable (in particular, the two halves stitched together structure is fairly crude.) The story is not terribly long, and it feel like the mostly-nonfiction it is: drug fiction tends to the ‘you had to be there’ kind of humor, and we were none of us there. It also aspires to a greater import than it ever achieves, gesturing toward the ‘American dream’ and finding ‘fear and loathing’, which from this remote perspective, looks like bombast & bluff - we know the Nixonian moment would pass in an epic crash, that the USSR would fall, that the War on Drugs would not be “a boot stamping on a human face - forever”. (In particular, the famous ‘wave’ quote seems arbitrary and unsupported by its surrounding text, although I don’t doubt that Thompson felt those sentiments deeply.) So, the opening is fantastic, but the rest isn’t really worth reading now, for an average less than its repute would suggest. | [] | Ratings and reviews - Gwern.net | Review | http://www.gwern.net/Book%20reviews | 4/1438042982502.13_20150728002302-00293-ip-10-236-191-2_475259833_0.json |
f7d9395c_atings_and_reviews___Gwern_net__Review | [Title] More Poems [Author] A.E. Housman [Rating] ★★★ [Year] 1936 [Read] 2015/06/08 [Review] | (4.1k words, 49 poems; fulltext available at Wikilivres but unfortunately their version is riddled with typos) A posthumous collection of A.E. Housman’s poems. The tone is more conceptual than A Shropshire Lad, with much heavier classical & Christian influence, and not so much emphasis on the easy & flowing rhymes in short lines (the lines are often much longer); overall, I did not get as much out of the poems. Verses I liked included: II “When Israel out of Egypt came” (last 3 stanzas), XXII “Ho, everyone that thirsteth”, XXVI “Good creatures, do you love your lives”, XXVII “To stand up straight and tread the turning mill”, XLVIII “Parta Quies”; plus an honorable mention of XXXI “Because I liked you better”, which while not really great verse on its own, becomes very moving once you know the autobiographical background. There are two poems in this collection that I really love: VII “Stars, I have seen them fall”, and XLV “Smooth between sea and land”. Unfortunately, they are fairly famous and much quoted, so I had already read them - rendering reading More Poems redundant. | [] | Ratings and reviews - Gwern.net | Review | http://www.gwern.net/Book%20reviews | 4/1438042982502.13_20150728002302-00293-ip-10-236-191-2_475259833_0.json |
f7d9395c_atings_and_reviews___Gwern_net__Review | [Title] Tau Zero [Author] Poul Anderson [Rating] ★★★ [Year] 2006 [Read] 2013/08/10 [Review] | The single central conceit is outstanding and excellent hard SF, an interesting entry in what one might call ‘time dilation horror’; there’s only one central idea, however, which becomes strained with repetition over the length of the novel (as short as it is), and while I appreciate that Anderson tried to leaven the hard SF with real characters and interpersonal drama, I can’t say he succeeded. For punch, some of Larry Niven’s Known Universe short stories using ramjets may be better (“Rammer” and “The Ethics of Madness” come to mind) and I would be remiss to not mention Peter Watts’s “The Island” (suggested soundtrack: Cloud Cult’s “There’s So Much Energy In Us”), although Tau Zero is much more ambitious. | [] | Ratings and reviews - Gwern.net | Review | http://www.gwern.net/Book%20reviews | 4/1438042982502.13_20150728002302-00293-ip-10-236-191-2_475259833_0.json |
f7d9395c_atings_and_reviews___Gwern_net__Review | [Title] Matter (Culture, #8) [Author] Iain M. Banks [Rating] ★★★ [Year] 2008 [Review] | Absurdly lengthy, with one of the slowest setups ever followed by an equally abrupt and unsatisfactory resolution which kills off pretty much every character we might have even a faint interest in† thanks to something which is introduced out of nowhere maybe 4/5s of the way through. Banks is a great author, so of course there are plenty of rewarding nuggets scattered through out (the haunted ex-Culture man, the deceptive artifact, the general convincingness of ‘the stage is small but the audience great’ theme etc.), but much less than expected from a groaning tome’s worth of Banks. The shell world concept is not developed or employed well (you could replace all of the maneuverings with 2D equivalents if you wished), and the rest of the background and concepts seem pretty stock Culture. † eg. I was expecting the betrayal to be linked to alien machinations, but no, it turns out to be exactly as simplistic as it seems, the ex-SC guy’s good argument to the contrary, and a complete red herring as he dies with everyone else, the complexity of his character never ascending beyond cackling evil. | [] | Ratings and reviews - Gwern.net | Review | http://www.gwern.net/Book%20reviews | 4/1438042982502.13_20150728002302-00293-ip-10-236-191-2_475259833_0.json |
f7d9395c_atings_and_reviews___Gwern_net__Review | [Title] 50 in 50: Fifty stories for fifty years! [Author] Harry Harrison [Rating] ★★★ [Year] 2002 [Read] 2012/08/22 [Review] | I downloaded it to read ‘The Streets of Ashkelon’ (which did not disappoint, even though I read an earlier version in Borges and a much later version in Simmons’s Hyperion). It’s a fun collection of relatively light stories; in classic SF style, each story is usually short, punchy, with a single point or idea highlighted by the ‘twist’ or punchline-style ending. This means that they are rarely subtle (eg. I see complaints online that ‘Streets’ is an unfair caricature and reveals Harrison’s stock atheism, but it’s hard to lay out the world, story, maintain a decent style, and also be subtle or fair in just a few pages), but that’s a price I’m willing to pay. Also on the downside for a modern reader, Harrison shared the common SF preoccupation with the ‘population bomb’ and coming Peak Oil/great dieback; neither of which seem to have happened, thankfully, but they still irritate one to read just a little bit. Hence, I couldn’t give this a 4 or a 5, but I don’t regret reading it since some were pretty good and I did laugh while reading some. So a 3 it is. RIP, Harrison. | [] | Ratings and reviews - Gwern.net | Review | http://www.gwern.net/Book%20reviews | 4/1438042982502.13_20150728002302-00293-ip-10-236-191-2_475259833_0.json |
f7d9395c_atings_and_reviews___Gwern_net__Review | [Title] Shadow Games (The Chronicle of the Black Company, #4) [Author] Glen Cook [Rating] ★★★ [Year] 1989 [Read] 2013/06/12 [Review] | Croaker and company head south, and things go surprisingly smoothly and well in the African countries they travel through until south of the Nile, they discover an evil empire is in their path menacing an innocent Babylonian-style city. Naturally, Dances with Wolves style, they’ll help the hapless natives protect themselves. And we get not one but four of the old Taken coming back to life (Howler, Shaper, Stormbringer, and Soulcatcher) -_-. Oh and also a ‘buried evil’ a la the Dominator. Yes, another one. That’s what, the third now? Good grief. Like the previous book, my complaint here is that the plot is simple and straightforward, parts of it are very ham-handed (eg. once I got over my disgust at yes, another Taken was back, it was pretty obvious where the crows were coming from). The upside is that it’s fun watching Croaker becoming the Captain and growing still more. | [] | Ratings and reviews - Gwern.net | Review | http://www.gwern.net/Book%20reviews | 4/1438042982502.13_20150728002302-00293-ip-10-236-191-2_475259833_0.json |
f7d9395c_atings_and_reviews___Gwern_net__Review | [Title] Silicon Snake Oil: Second Thoughts on the Information Highway [Author] Clifford Stoll [Rating] ★★★ [Year] 1996 [Review] | I read this not long after publication, and re-read it a year ago weeding through my books. Between the two, I would have to give it 2-3 stars. The good part is that at the time, he was correct in puncturing or deflating a lot of the most hyperbolic claims about the benefits of computers and the Internet: online shopping did have a ways to go, kids’ education was not being improved by computers (and may still not be), etc. The bad part is, he was correct only in the short run. On many claims or predictions where he was absolutist, he is laughably wrong now, and we can expect his track record to continue to worsen as time passes. This is actually a pretty common failure mode for skeptics of technologies: I call this the Amara effect, after Roy Amara: “We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.” | [] | Ratings and reviews - Gwern.net | Review | http://www.gwern.net/Book%20reviews | 4/1438042982502.13_20150728002302-00293-ip-10-236-191-2_475259833_0.json |
f7d9395c_atings_and_reviews___Gwern_net__Review | [Title] House of Leaves [Author] Mark Z. Danielewski [Rating] ★★★ [Year] 2000 [Review] | As impressive and inventive a multimedia presentation this is, it’s hard not to think that the fictional Navidson movie described by the novel would be far more interesting or moving than the actual novel is, dragged down by a narrator who is interesting neither in voice nor message; ‘trying too hard’ is a phrase I apply to some experimental or postmodern works, and it fits here better than most. And are we to be moved by this? The labyrinth is constantly described and discussed in it, but one thing that goes unnoticed is that with the exception of Daedalus’s labyrinth, at the enter of almost all labyrinths is nothing at all, and when one reaches it, the only thing to is shrug and head back out. | [] | Ratings and reviews - Gwern.net | Review | http://www.gwern.net/Book%20reviews | 4/1438042982502.13_20150728002302-00293-ip-10-236-191-2_475259833_0.json |
f7d9395c_atings_and_reviews___Gwern_net__Review | [Title] The Judging Eye (Aspect-Emperor, #1) [Author] R. Scott Bakker [Rating] ★★★ [Year] 2009 [Review] | Bakker says he’s influenced by Frank Herbert, and it’s nowhere clearer than here - the reader of Dune Messiah will notice the uncanny echos. The final sequence is the almost inevitable theft from Tolkien of the Mines of Moria, but it’s sufficiently exciting and well-done that unlike a similar theft in The Sword of Shannara I didn’t put down the book in disgust. The Thousandfold Thought was a sheer disappointment, and I did wonder whether to continue on to The Judging Eye, but I don’t much regret it. The new characters are still pretty dubious (Mimara is just an annoyance), but the psychopathic son has real promise as a very dark inversion of Leto II. | [] | Ratings and reviews - Gwern.net | Review | http://www.gwern.net/Book%20reviews | 4/1438042982502.13_20150728002302-00293-ip-10-236-191-2_475259833_0.json |
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