Input: [Title] Pact [Author] Wildbow [Rating] ★★★★ [Year] 2014 [Read] 2015/03/16 [Review]

Output: 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.


Input: [Title] The Hall of Uselessness: Collected Essays [Author] Simon Leys [Rating] ★★★★ [Year] 2011 [Read] 2015/04/27 [Review]

Output: (~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.


Input: [Title] Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void [Author] Mary Roach [Rating] ★★★★ [Year] 2010 [Read] 2013/06/29 [Review]

Output: 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


Input: [Title] Turing’s Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe [Author] George Dyson [Rating] ★★★★ [Year] 2012 [Read] 2012/09/06 [Review]

Output: 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.


Input: [Title] Echopraxia (Firefall, #2) [Author] Peter Watts [Rating] ★★★★ [Year] 2014 [Read] 2014/08/15 [Review]

Output: 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.


Input: [Title] Ketamine: Dreams and Realities [Author] Karl L.R. Jansen [Rating] ★★★★ [Year] 2004 [Read] 2014/11/29 [Review]

Output: (~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.


Input: [Title] Clear and Simple as the Truth: Writing Classic Prose [Author] Francis-Noel Thomas [Rating] ★★★★ [Year] 1996 [Read] 2014/12/16 [Review]

Output: (~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.


Input: [Title] In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives [Author] Steven Levy [Rating] ★★★★ [Year] 2011 [Read] 2013/03/24 [Review]

Output: 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?).


Input: [Title] Ready Player One [Author] Ernest Cline [Rating] ★★★★ [Year] 2011 [Read] 2015/05/02 [Review]

Output: 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.)


Input: [Title] Cool Tools: A Catalog of Possibilities [Author] Kevin Kelly [Rating] ★★★★ [Year] 2013 [Read] 2014/01/01 [Review]

Output: 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.


Input: [Title] Proving History: Bayes’s Theorem and the Quest for the Historical Jesus [Author] Richard Carrier [Rating] ★★★★ [Year] 2012 [Read] 2012/10/31 [Review]

Output: 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.


Input: [Title] Wired Love: A Romance of Dots and Dashes [Author] Ella Cheever Thayer [Rating] ★★★★ [Year] 1879 [Read] 2013/08/02 [Review]

Output: 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.


Input: [Title] The Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field [Author] Jacques Hadamard [Rating] ★★★★ [Year] 1954 [Read] 2014/01/20 [Review]

Output: 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.)


Input: [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]

Output: 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.


Input: [Title] The Mask of Sanity [Author] Hervey M. Cleckley [Rating] ★★★★ [Year] 2003 [Read] 2012/12/21 [Review]

Output: 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.


Input: [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]

Output: 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


Input: [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]

Output: 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.


Input: [Title] Declare [Author] Tim Powers [Rating] ★★★★ [Year] 2002 [Read] 2013/02/14 [Review]

Output: 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.)


Input: [Title] A Shropshire Lad [Author] A.E. Housman [Rating] ★★★★ [Year] 1990 [Read] 2015/05/27 [Review]

Output: 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.


Input: [Title] Chased by the Light: A 90-Day Journey-Revisited After the Storm [Author] Jim Brandenburg [Rating] ★★★★ [Year] 2001 [Read] 2007/01/01 [Review]

Output: 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.


Input: [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]

Output: 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).


Input: [Title] The Man Who Knew Infinity: A Life of the Genius Ramanujan [Author] Robert Kanigel [Rating] ★★★★ [Year] 1992 [Read] 2013/08/12 [Review]

Output: 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.


Input: [Title] Debt: The First 5,000 Years [Author] David Graeber [Rating] ★★★★ [Year] 2011 [Read] 2011/09/24 [Review]

Output: 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.


Input: [Title] Red Plenty: Inside the Fifties’ Soviet Dream [Author] Francis Spufford [Rating] ★★★★ [Year] 2010 [Read] 2012/06/02 [Review]

Output: 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


Input: [Title] The Metropolitan Man [Author] Alexander Wales [Rating] ★★★★ [Year] 2014 [Read] 2014/08/02 [Review]

Output: 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.


Input: [Title] The End of History and the Last Man [Author] Francis Fukuyama [Rating] ★★★★ [Year] 2006 [Read] 2004/01/01 [Review]

Output: 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.


Input: [Title] The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements [Author] Eric Hoffer [Rating] ★★★★ [Year] 2010 [Review]

Output: 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?


Input: [Title] Dreams of Steel (The Chronicle of the Black Company, #5) [Author] Glen Cook [Rating] ★★★★ [Year] 1990 [Read] 2013/06/12 [Review]

Output: 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.


Input: [Title] On China [Author] Henry Kissinger [Rating] ★★★★ [Year] 2011 [Read] 2012/01/31 [Review]

Output: 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?).


Input: [Title] The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires [Author] Tim Wu [Rating] ★★★★ [Year] 2010 [Read] 2010/01/01 [Review]

Output: 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…” )


Input: [Title] The Circus of Dr. Lao [Author] Charles G. Finney [Rating] ★★★★ [Year] 2002 [Read] 2011/10/20 [Review]

Output: 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.


Input: [Title] The Kindly Ones [Author] Jonathan Littell [Rating] ★★★★ [Year] 2009 [Review]

Output: 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?


Input: [Title] The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution [Author] Bernard Bailyn [Rating] ★★★★ [Year] 1992 [Read] 2011/01/01 [Review]

Output: 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.


Input: [Title] Friendship is Optimal [Author] iceman [Rating] ★★★★ [Year] 2012 [Review]

Output: 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.


Input: [Title] Steve Jobs [Author] Walter Isaacson [Rating] ★★★★ [Year] 2011 [Read] 2011/10/24 [Review]

Output: 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.


Input: [Title] Shades of Grey: The Road to High Saffron (Shades of Grey, #1) [Author] Jasper Fforde [Rating] ★★★★ [Year] 2009 [Read] 2013/03/29 [Review]

Output: 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.


Input: [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]

Output: 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.)


Input: [Title] World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability [Author] Amy Chua [Rating] ★★★★ [Year] 2004 [Review]

Output: 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.


Input: [Title] Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives [Author] David Eagleman [Rating] ★★★★ [Year] 2009 [Review]

Output: 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.


Input: [Title] The Black Cloud [Author] Fred Hoyle [Rating] ★★★★ [Year] 1998 [Read] 2010/12/01 [Review]

Output: 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.)


Input: [Title] Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage [Author] Kathryn Edin [Rating] ★★★★ [Year] 2007 [Read] 2011/11/13 [Review]

Output: 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.


Input: [Title] Intelligence: A Unifying Construct for the Social Sciences [Author] Richard Lynn [Rating] ★★★★ [Year] 2012 [Read] 2012/08/14 [Review]

Output: Very wonky, of course, but still many interesting correlation; I excerpted parts I found interesting to a Google+ post.


Input: [Title] Proofs and Refutations: The Logic of Mathematical Discovery [Author] Imre Lakatos [Rating] ★★★★ [Year] 1976 [Read] 2011/12/28 [Review]

Output: 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.


Input: [Title] Little Boy: The Arts of Japan’s Exploding Subculture [Author] Takashi Murakami [Rating] ★★★★ [Year] 2005 [Read] 2011/11/24 [Review]

Output: Main use for this book: encyclopedia entries, Murakami’s long essay, the dialogue with Okada - rest is completely impenetrable, featuring fine gobbledegook.


Input: [Title] Snuff (Discworld, #39; City Watch #8) [Author] Terry Pratchett [Rating] ★★★★ [Year] 2011 [Read] 2011/11/17 [Review]

Output: 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.


Input: [Title] Birds [Author] Aristophanes [Rating] ★★★★ [Year] 1998 [Review]

Output: I was mildly surprised by how much funnier than expected it was. One doesn’t expect such ancient contemporary humor to translate well.


Input: [Title] The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at M.I.T. [Author] Stewart Brand [Rating] ★★★ [Year] 1988 [Read] 2010/01/01 [Review]

Output: 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’.


Input: [Title] Pioneers of Soviet Computing [Author] Boris Nikolaevich Malinovsky [Rating] ★★★ [Year] 2010 [Read] 2014/07/06 [Review]

Output: (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.”


Input: [Title] A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History [Author] Nicholas Wade [Rating] ★★★ [Year] 2014 [Read] 2014/09/24 [Review]

Output: 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