Book Review: "Sapiens" by Yuval Noah Harari

I've recently read the book Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari; this was highly recommended to me 7 years ago by a friend in graduate school with whom I had enthusiastic discussions about the material in the book, but I hadn't gotten a chance to read the book until now. This book is supposed to be a history of humans, going from an evolutionary perspective for the first 2 million years since the genus Homo became distinct and then getting into the developments of language, collective myths, agriculture, urbanization, and industry. Even my summary of the flow of the book contains my opinion about its progression (though I should note that the "parts" that I speak of overlap with but aren't identical to the 4 parts that formally divide the book): the beginning part of the book seems to be a serious discussion of evolution, language, and the advent of agriculture, the middle part tries to be serious but has more inconsistencies that I find problematic, and the last part seems more clearly to be more like a "pop-history" type of book with less rigorous speculation (so I read it with a lighter heart even if the author didn't intend it that way and I therefore heavily discounted it in my overall opinion of the book); furthermore, the parts about scientific development since 1500 can be understood more clearly in other books.

There were several things that I learned from the book and several ways in which the book forced me to consider a different perspective. These are as follows, in no particular order. First, I learned that the further development of language to be able to convey detailed information, gossip, abstract ideas, and fictions happened 70,000 years ago and coincided with humans becoming dominant in the food chain and in their spread across the world. Second, I had always uncritically believed in the advent of agriculture and later urbanization as a good thing, to the extent that I've recently sometimes wondered (without being particularly informed about history & sociology) whether clashes between the Mongol invaders & Hindu natives (in contrast to earlier arrivals in India of urban Muslim traders from Mesopotamia) as well as between the expectations of Western government & the reality of the House of Saud represent clashes between urbanized cultures that have developed to a great degree versus nomadic cultures that have endured much harsher conditions and only wish to plunder the cities for wealth without care for more refined aspects of urban cultures; this book forced me to consider that individuals within nomadic tribes had much more varied diets & activities within each day, that the first few millennia of the transition to agriculture may have led to a lot of suffering compared to what came immediately before, and that the domestication of wheat can be reinterpreted as a mutalistic domestication of wheat & humans. Third, I learned that empires might be defined only by the number of culturally distinct tribes under their yokes and the flexibility of their borders in expansion, not by population or area per se. Fourth, while I had some familiarity with how capitalism & European imperialism fueled each other and with the use of scientifically-inspired racism as a justification for European colonization, I didn't have a good sense for how these all tied together until I read this book, especially in the context of scientific voyages only being funded if the scientists could tag along with naval officers ordered to colonize the lands they would reach. Fifth, I appreciated the distinction between ancient & medieval empires which grew in predictable ways by absorbing naval territories versus early modern European empires which grew unpredictably across the world with long-distance seafaring. Sixth, I appreciated the explicit call to attention about how liberal humanistic political philosophies, which profess to be atheistic in themselves & multireligious in the sense of tolerance, cast freedom & political empowerment in terms of a special nature of individuals that is drawn directly from Christian notions of creation & individual souls (though the concepts of creation & individual souls aren't unique to Christianity among traditional religions); this is something that I've pondered before but have typically glossed over, so I appreciated being challenged in this way.

There were a few points that I was happy to see in the sense of agreeing with those worldviews. These include the ideas of collective myths (not only in traditional religions but in the systems of trust that underlie monetary systems & democracies), historical predictions leading to self-fulfilling or self-negating prophecies, the existence of hierarchies of some form in almost all societies larger than about 150 people (as I've wondered, for example, if a solution to the problem of inflation coming from an immediate cash payout to everyone in a universal basic income plan would be to sprinkle it randomly upon different people at different times to ensure that the economic system doesn't stray too far from its previous state and can better respond to bigger numbers of people getting such payouts later even if that creates an effective hierarchy between those who get such payouts at a given time and those who don't), and the ways that even cultures free of external pressures can develop internal contradictions that in turn can lead to continued development of the culture as a unified entity or a split of the culture into multiple descendants. On a lighter note, I also enjoyed seeing the author, in the otherwise problematic speculation about science, point out that science fiction can only rarely, if ever, attempt to describe what would truly be alien experiences to humans, and that most science fiction stories ultimately revolve around myths & social conflicts that in one form or another have been recognizable for millennia, which leads me to the conclusion that there is no reason beyond snobbery to claim that Star Trek is science fiction while Star Wars supposedly is not (because if science fiction is defined as only portraying truly alien experiences in encounters with new technology or new intelligent species that aren't just thinly-veiled allegories for known interactions among human groups, there may only be a few books, movies, and TV series that may be called "science fiction", perhaps including Black Mirror or 2001: A Space Odyssey, and those works are rare probably exactly because readers or viewers would find them less relatable).

There were a few specific stories that I liked reading. One was of the Chinese seafarer Zheng He, as it shows that Chinese seafaring technology was as advanced as European seafaring technology around 1500 but China simply didn't have the same ambition to conquer faraway lands through seafaring. The other was of how the accompaniment of Hernán Cortés by Aztec people carrying burning incense sticks near him convinced him that the "primitive" Aztecs were treating him as a deity but was actually because he had terrible body odor due to bad hygiene, as it is a funny story, it shows that the Aztecs, immediately upon encountering Europeans, figured out what other contemporary peoples of Asia & Africa had known for many centuries (leading those peoples to set up quarantine areas for European visitors at ports), namely that Europeans had bad hygiene at that time, and it shows how the self-delusion of European winners of such conflicts (in this case Cortés believing that he was being treated as a deity so the Aztecs must have been "primitive") could persist in "official" historical narratives for many centuries.

Beyond the problematic historiography (especially ignoring the way that so many consequential scientific discoveries were made in Europe individually by people who were independently wealthy while also not clearly explaining which technological discoveries were systematically funded & used by governments, though those parts could be fixed with better writing) and excessively serious-sounding speculation about science in the last few chapters & sprinkled elsewhere in the book, there were three major points of disagreement that I had with the author, in the sense that I believe that these points strike at the fundamental arguments of the book. These are as follows.

First, the author makes a big deal throughout the book about how the global unity in understanding of political, economic, and other norms that has emerged in the last 500 years is unprecedented in all prior years of human existence. My counterargument is that this argument depends too much on the specific way that previous interactions between cultures went or on the fact that certain cultures happened to not interact. It will be based primarily on [Native] American and European cultures before and around the time of their first contact in the middle of the second millennium, as the author makes a big deal about how American tribes were among the groups that were totally isolated from the continuum of groups across Africa, Asia, and Europe (with Australian tribes being among the others). As the author argues, the lack of contact before may well have been because of a combination of technological limitations along with limitations in cultural ambition. However, in a counterfactual situation where, for example, English people looking to start local democratic governments met on a truly equal footing with Iroquois people who embodied the spirit of democracy in their local confederated governments, there is no specific reason to believe that they would have been talking past each other; the author's conception of "global unity" as a phenomenon that developed in the last 500 years with no precedent seems to depend too strongly on peoples having met or being aware of each other's existence and not enough on actual similarities between each other's cultures. Additionally, the example of Hernán Cortés and the incense sticks, along with the example (not in the book) of the origin of the ethnic slur "Indian giver" from a deliberate misunderstanding of Native Americans' attempts to barter with Europeans as gifts that were then demanded to be returned, shows that the author's view of the establishment of "global unity" depended strongly on the actual course of history (in this case Europeans deliberately ignoring what Native Americans were telling them) and not on the broader cultural similarities already present. This dependence on the actual course of history makes this a hindsight-based account that the author supposedly disclaims, making the author rather hypocritical.

Second, in later parts of the book, when the author discusses the reasons for European armies so easily conquering peoples in faraway lands, the author puts a lot of stock in the idea that success was due to the European drive for exploration of the unknown, even before that commitment to exploration started bearing systematic fruit in the forms of scientific discovery or technological advancement; conversely, the author briefly mentions and otherwise glosses over the role of more effective forms of social organization & discipline in those armies. This seems to completely undermine previous chapters in the book that so clearly emphasized the ways that communication of collective myths could lead to new forms of social organization. Perhaps this seeming contradiction can be resolved by interpreting the "drive to explore the unknown" as extending to European armies systematically developing new ways, including new forms of organization of their own armies, of dealing with unknown peoples whom they wish to conquer. However, this seems like a stupid semantic difference and again seems like the author is engaging excessively in analysis from narrow hindsight, contrary to the author's own stated claims. (UPDATE: A related point is about how the author implies that the drive for European colonists to learn about unknown cultures & explore how to systematically conquer unknown peoples led them to use what they learned about these cultures to systematically deepen existing divisions or create new divisions. I could agree that Europeans were the first to do this so systematically or so tightly coupled to the seemingly more noble goal of learning things that weren't known to them. However, I cannot agree with the idea that Europeans were the first to exploit & inflame divisions or engage in proxy wars. as ancient Egyptian kingdoms were known to have done this to the Assyrian Empire. Perhaps this can be forgiven if it turns out that this book was published before we knew about how the ancient Egyptians fomented rebellions, civil wars, and proxy wars in the Assyrian Empire, but in any case, the author's seeming unwillingness to directly assert or refute the idea that European colonists' "drive to explore" specifically included exploration of how to organize themselves better & exploit other people's weaknesses more effectively to conquer those other peoples is a much bigger problem with this book.) Moreover, the author does not attempt to explain why peoples were so consistently conquered at all by Europeans from the perspective of those conquered peoples other than simply stating the claim that those peoples couldn't imagine that their knowledge could be incomplete. I think I could do a better job than the author by imagining a counterfactual situation, using the example of Hernán Cortés encountering the Aztecs: even if the Aztecs were similarly driven as the Spanish by exploration of the unknown and had expanded their empire that way before the Spanish landed in America as historically happened, the only way from the perspective of social dynamics that I can see the Aztecs successfully repelling the invasion is by using their knowledge of dealing with unknown peoples to see through Cortés's lies into his true intentions and organize accordingly, yet there is no guarantee that knowing what to do when attempting to conquer unknown peoples would lead an empire to develop knowledge of what to do at the receiving end of a conquest attempt. Finally, in the specific cases of Europeans interacting with Native Americans, the author in a few places briefly acknowledges the role of infectious disease (used by Europeans sometimes accidentally and other times, as in the case of pox blankets in the 1763 Native American siege of the British-occupied Fort Pitt, intentionally) but otherwise glosses over this in favor of explanations based on exploration of the unknown. Yet, as the examples of Cortés as well as the slur "Indian giver" point out, it is quite plausible that Europeans, seeing how easily Native Americans were wiped out by disease, used this as propaganda to better organize themselves and portray Native Americans as weak (independent of specific technology or ideals about exploring the unknown), and I think it is irresponsible for the author to ignore this obvious possibility.

Third, there is a whole chapter about the history of traditional religions, including animistic, polytheistic, monotheistic, and atheistic religions. My problem is that the author makes too broad claims about religious trends even though there are so few surviving or [relatively] recently extinguished major traditional religions; the sample sizes are so small as to make the claims unconvincing. The author acknowledges similar problems in other contexts elsewhere but not in that chapter.

Beyond these issues, I noted several more minor issues at various points in the book. Although some of these issues personally offended me, I still categorize them as minor because I think that deleting the offending passages from the book would not significantly reduce support for or otherwise qualitatively change the main arguments of the book. These are as follows, in no particular order. Even if some of these points raise questions that have no clear answer, I think the author was irresponsible in not addressing the existence of these questions and clearly stating the lack of a clear answer.

First, the author claims that when big social orders are sustained through collective myths, those collective myths require genuine belief from members of the elite too. Recent news about how Fox News executives & star hosts privately disbelieved claims that the 2020 US presidential election was rigged but knowingly pushed such claims in public just to boost TV ratings & stock prices. On the one hand, perhaps it isn't fair to pin this on the author as this news is much more recent than the publication of the book. On the other hand, I would be curious to see how the author would react to this news now; if the author reacts by claiming to be correct because the degree of true belief among the elite was "always destined to wane at some point" or for some similar reason purely in hindsight, then that tells me that the author's approach is worthless because it would be unfalsifiable.

Second, the author does such a consistently bad job with the history of India that I have to wonder if the author's research about that specific topic consisted exclusively of books written by British colonizers to portray India to their own benefit. Problems include claims that Indo-Aryans "invaded" (as that word is usually used to imply a systematic movement of an army to bring forth a violent clash, yet there is no historical evidence for such singular violent clashes between ancient Central Asian migrants and South Asian natives), the treatment of caste in the Vedas (as even people who aren't apologists for Brahmins or deniers of the history of caste will recognize a lot of subtlety in the way the Vedas used terms associated now with caste, especially as those castes didn't exist in Indian society until after Vedic times), the treatment of caste in general (conflating jati & varna to claim that the "original" 4 varnas over time split into thousands of jatis, when the reality is much more complicated & less clear), the claim that Brahmins could have "learned" from the KKK how to enforce caste divisions (as Brahmins, especially in South India, were already brutally effective in enforcing caste divisions long before the KKK existed), and the claim that India had no national consciousness before the British Empire (which undermines the author's own prior acknowledgment of the Gupta & Maurya Empires as empires by the author's own definition). Another problematic statement by the author that I am willing to forgive given when the book was published (before the political rise of right-wing Hindu nationalism in India in the last 10 years) is the rhetorical question about whether right-wing Hindu nationalists would do away with all symbols of the Mughal Empire, include those of beauty like the Taj Mahal; the author clearly implied that they wouldn't dare to do so, but that view now seems laughably quaint. Finally, a statement by the author about religion in a broader context yields problems in the context of India. In particular, the author claims that polytheistic kings didn't try to convert conquered peoples or make them destroy temples to their own deities, but historical conflicts between Saiva & Vaisnava kingdoms in South India over religion suggest otherwise; perhaps this point can also be forgiven as a rare exception to the rule.

Third, the author's definition of an empire in terms of flexibly expanding borders still leads contemporary readers to imagine borders that strictly control the flow of people across them, which I think is historically misleading given the ease with which people could pass across. Even now, people from Mexico & countries in Central America freely pass through the international border between California & Baja California as seasonal migrant workers although the US border is otherwise very strictly controlled.

Fourth, the author makes claims about the positive cultural developments by empires, but those claims seem incomplete. Additionally, the author tries to distinguish Cyrus of Persia's claim that the empire would benefit all people from the more limited ambitions of Assyrian emperors, but this distinction is not clear at all.

Fifth, the author claims that interest (in the sense of a guaranteed geometric return on an investment) requires the existence of a currency that is not useful for any other reason. I disagree in principle because livestock and crops, which have historically been used as currencies or items of barter, have the potential to multiply over time. That said, this may be a moot point if there is no evidence for societies having charged interest directly on livestock or crops as forms of currency.

Sixth, the explanations of why some peoples did not develop agriculture until much later contact by faraway urbanized peoples seems incomplete. I agree with the idea that some peoples settled in areas where plants & animals simply could not be domesticated; the capability to be domesticated by humans is rare among species. However, this does not explain why many native peoples of America and Australia never developed agriculture even though they lived on grasslands that later turned out to support agriculture very easily; in the case of Australia, the author's omission is especially troubling given that the author explains how humans who moved to Australia 45,000 years ago had no problem with destroying the forests that were already there & replacing them with grasslands.

Seventh, near the end of the book, the author distinguishes ecological destruction from resource scarcity as the more likely cause of future human suffering or extinction. This seems to undermine an earlier chapter in which the author acknowledges that problems with allocating resources to maintain a certain standard of living under certain norms, even if the resources themselves are technically abundant, are more likely to lead to conflict. I wish the author had dealt with this more carefully.

Eighth, the author writes about the seemingly inexorable trend toward globalization and the way that world war has come to seem implausible since World War II. The failure to predict both the retreat from globalization especially since 2014 as well as the Russian military invasion of Ukraine in 2022 are forgivable given when the book was published. However, I'm more troubled that the author's claims about the implausibility of world war are phrased in ways that are unfalsifiable, as the author can always claim either a different definition of "world war" or a finite time period of validity (since the last world war) that the author would not have previously clearly stated.

Overall, I think this is still an interesting book, though I wasn't incredibly impressed by it (unlike, for example, my friend from graduate school). I'd recommend it with the caveats discussed above. In any case, as this was among the first books to go on the reading list (for books unrelated to my work) that I made for myself in graduate school, I'm glad to have finally read it.

Book Review: "The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee" by David Treuer

I've recently read the book The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee by David Treuer. This book was a gift to me from a family friend who heard that I like reading about American history and other nonfiction topics, and when that person gave me this book, we further discussed the historical injustices inflicted by white Americans upon Native Americans, the deep connections that Native American religions & spirituality have with land & nature, and the way that Native Americans see themselves as truly indigenous as opposed to being traveling groups of humans like any other group passing through a given land. In that conversation, I also noted that reading this book would be professionally useful to me given that my professional interest in transportation equity would intersect with how Native Americans have been at the forefront of many recent social & environmental justice movements and how Native cultures & issues are much more visible in the Southwest than in the Northeast (due to the history of forced removal). It was with these conversations in mind that I read this book.

This book is a combination of historical accounts, contemporary interviews, and observations by the author. The author is a Native American (from the Ojibwe tribe) who grew up on a reservation, and his stated goal in writing this book was to create a more complete picture of how Native Americans have continued to live (especially but not exclusively under adverse conditions) in every part of the US since the Wounded Knee massacre in 1890, as he felt that too many people (both people sympathetic to Native Americans and those wishing to exterminate them) wrongly framed that massacre as the final death of Native American culture, life, and identity.

Coming into reading this book, I already knew a bit about how some Native people and tribes owned black slaves, the complex loyalties that Native tribes had for or against the US government at different points (especially in the Revolutionary War as well as the Civil War), Indian boarding schools, Native land management practices, the complex results of trade between Native tribes & European settlers, how Native tribal raids were often ceremonial instead of being true acts of war, and how some tribes have gotten guaranteed income from their casinos. However, I learned more about seminal battles & massacres, notable successes in Native governance in the 19th & 20th centuries, land allotments, termination of tribal governments, the way that some Native tribes became much more mobile & spread much more after the introduction of horses, the way that agriculture (especially of corn) spread throughout the Americas, the Native conception of the geography of the Americas (especially centering the Great Lakes, with river networks to the north and south leading away), how varying numbers of Native Americans remained in every part of the US even after forced removal, the Indian Rights movements of the 19th & 20th centuries, and how Native American cultures & identities were mixed & reformed many times in the crucible of shared suffering. It was also interesting to see the author directly compare the situation in Palestine to European settlement of the Americas, implicitly compare white American settlement of Native lands in the 19th & 20th centuries to rich white gentrification of urban neighborhoods which previously mostly had poor people of color, and explain that the fact that some but not all companies that helped white Americans move west in the 19th century had smallpox vaccine mandates for their [white American] employees so those companies that didn't have such mandates could be directly linked to the spread of smallpox in Native tribes (which bears striking parallels to current debates in the US regarding mandates for vaccines against this coronavirus).

Initially, I was a little put off by the meandering nature of the narrative, but I came to appreciate it more as the book progressed. Also, based on my expectations of this book, I wanted to see more of the promised discussion of Native American religions that arose from the crucible of oppression as well as from the broader 1960s American counterculture, as I figured there would be parallels with how Hinduism in North India had to reinvent itself in the crucibles of Mughal conquest and then British colonialism and later found common cause with American & British hippies. I was thus initially disappointed to not see so much discussion of those issues, but as I read further, I thought it was nice to read about what contemporary Native American individuals are actually doing in & for their communities instead of feeling beaten over the head with arcane mysticism. Similarly, I was initially disappointed by the lack of further discussion after the initial mention of how Native Americans see themselves as part of a people truly indigenous to North America, but as I read further, I thought it was nice to read about Native American individuals' & communities' actual modern subsistence practices & knowledge of the land instead of feeling beaten over the head by mysticism of a connection to the land that cannot be explained to people who aren't Native Americans.

I really appreciated that the author, in his desire to make Native Americans feel empowered to tell their own people's story in a way that doesn't necessarily end in 1890 as a tragedy, doesn't shy away from hard truths, like Native Americans owning black slaves, Native Americans helping European and later white American settles massacre other Native Americans, and more recently Native tribal officials not doing their duties by not meeting with executives of the Dakota Access Pipeline soon enough. The author of course doesn't deny the history of oppression and genocide, but he strikes a good balance between acknowledging genocide and acknowledging Native Americans' own agency in their own history as a way of showing that with empowerment comes responsibility. I also appreciated that the author didn't frame Native religions, land practices, or their lack of written records in mystical ways that ultimately fail to connect with people who aren't Native Americans. This is really an anti-cynical, forward-looking, optimistic book that I believe can be a light for all Americans in these bitterly divided & troubled times, so I recommend this book to anyone, especially in the US; I don't claim that this is the best book ever, but I do believe that reading it carefully can slowly plant seeds of cautious optimism about the US in a reader's mind. Furthermore, from my own perspective, while I don't claim that this book is a comprehensive overview of Native American history & culture, I can use it as a starting point to better frame my view of Native Americans, and I can feel a little less intimidated to read more deeply about Native American history, culture, and activism.

Book Review: "Speak Freely" by Keith E. Whittington

I've recently read the book Speak Freely by Keith E. Whittington, but it has been sitting on my bookshelf for nearly 3 years. This is not a book that I chose for myself, nor is it one that someone to whom I'm close chose for me. Instead, this book is one that the Princeton University president Christopher L. Eisgruber chose for the then-incoming undergraduate class of 2022 as well as all other students, staff, and faculty to read. This in itself was typical; examples include the book Whistling Vivaldi by Claude Steele, which I have reviewed here, and the book Our Declaration by Danielle Allen, which I have reviewed here. Less typical for this book was the fact that the president personally ordered that physical copies be sent to every student (including graduate students, which included me at that time), staff, and faculty; it was commonly understood that the president is a personal friend of the author, who is a professor of constitutional law in Princeton University, and did this as a favor. Furthermore, there was a lot of chatter about this book in the middle of 2018 when this book was mailed to all students, staff, and faculty, just because so many people read it. In such a university with students & faculty who have very progressive (in the US context) political views, a conservative defense of unpopular free speech on university campuses, as expected, was seen as controversial. Personally, a few of my friends did read it and recommended that I not read it because it would be a waste of my time. I admit that these occurrences may have prejudiced my view of this book to some degree, but I genuinely tried to read & understand this book as fairly as possible. Follow the jump to see more.

Book Review: "The Death of Expertise" by Tom Nichols

I've recently read the book The Death of Expertise by Tom Wainwright. It's a polemical discussion of why large groups of people in the US, regardless of political affiliation, seem to be not merely indifferent but actively hostile to real learning and to the notion of expertise. It discusses, by chapter, the breakdown of communication between experts and the public as well as among members of the public, issues related to the commodification of the college experience and the associated rise of "safe spaces", the rising distrust of experts as fomented by talk radio and later by cable news and questionable blogs/"news" sites, the problems facing mainstream journalism in this respect, and the problems facing experts themselves in making sure to get things right and communicate expertise clearly to the public. It's not a particularly long book, and its writing style is clear & accessible. However, there are a lot of problems I have with the book, specifically revolving around many of the arguments being thinly sourced, internally hypocritical, and mutually contradictory; additionally, the author's frequent conflation of expertise in practice versus pedagogy lessens the credibility of many of his arguments. I detail these and other issues below; as a result, this post is going to be a bit longer than is typical for a book review on this blog. Also note that what I write before the jump will be my main criticisms of this book; other thoughts about the material (less about the book itself) will come after the jump.

In the early chapters, the author defines an expert as someone who professionally uses a specialized body of knowledge, but this seems to unduly discount those who amass specialized knowledge in fields for their own sake/pleasure and ascribe value in expertise only to those who are lucky enough to make money off of it; this implicitly discounts the role of luck, in turn implying that only those who can professionally use specialized knowledge deserve to do so as experts. Later in the book, the author points out that amateurs have transient interests while professionals are paid to do their work well with dispassion/disinterest even when they're not feeling "into it". That initially seems like a fair argument in favor of professionalism as a measure of expertise, but upon closer examination, this argument makes it too easy to claim that failures of expertise are isolated events that are few in number and can be overlooked in the face of the much larger number of successes in expertise, without truly grappling with the widespread societal impact of such failures (that might have led to present or future distrust of expertise), whether those are mistakes like the FDA recommendations to avoid eggs coinciding with an explosion of obesity & diabetes (as discussed in the book) or cover-ups like big oil & tobacco companies suppressing research showing their products to be directly harmful to the environment/human health (which are not discussed in the book).
The author also characterizes expertise by talent, longevity/experience in a field, acceptance by peer experts in the field, and so on, but the emphasis of the intangible quality of "talent" seems to feed into the pernicious notion of expertise being closed off to all but a predetermined few elites, rather than making clear that while developing true expertise is difficult, as it requires a long period of very hard work, it can in principle be done by anyone. (I will return to this point later in this review.)

A recurring problem through the book is that the author seems to conflate expertise in doing something with expertise in teaching to others, and while development of communication & teaching skills often goes hand-in-hand with development of the specialized knowledge & practice itself, high-level practice often does not overlap all that much with high-level pedagogy, as pedagogy requires a specialized skill set all unto its own. As I will discuss shortly, this problem is particularly prominent in the third chapter.

While the first two chapters, about communication breakdowns between experts and laypeople and among laypeople, have reasonably solid arguments and citations, the third chapter, about the issues with college education, seems shorter on citations of studies than the other chapters, and apart from the discussions of studies showing shorter and less rigorous assignments in many classes in universities across the US, the other arguments seem to be typical of modern critiques of the commodification of the university experience in the US, supported more by pieces from surveys and op-eds that seem more like opinionated reflections potentially riven by confirmation bias/cherry-picking of supporting narratives of their own. In particular, these sources, as cited in the book, do not compellingly demonstrate that these issues in colleges are really characteristic of most US college student experiences, and subliminally insinuate a causal link between the supposed infantilization of students at universities and their long-term rejection of authority without conclusively demonstrating (or even explicitly clarifying) such a causative link. Of course, I may be demonstrating my own confirmation bias in large part because I think the concerns over "safe spaces" and similar things are overblown (and the concepts themselves could, when done right, have some positive value for cultural tolerance), but even leaving that aside, I felt like the picture was rather incomplete, especially due to the overreliance on op-eds and other such pieces compared to rigorous peer-reviewed studies, relative to the other chapters.

For that reason, I initially thought that the book might be stronger without the third chapter, but reading further, the book never really recovers from this, as the following chapters are also a bit thin on rigorous citation material. Given the goals of this book, that is really the most damning thing about the book, because if it is generally thin on rigorous research for citations, or its citations themselves cite rigorous research but the author hasn't made that clear, then the author falls into exactly the trap of either spouting opinions which he is not necessarily qualified to make (by citing random op-eds with which he agrees, which he scolds members of the public for doing in their discussions with each other) or being a patronizing expert assuming that public will trust him enough to not question his lack of clarity regarding the trustworthiness of him and his citations, making this very book an exemplar of why many people distrust experts.

Also in the third chapter, the author conflates the issues that small colleges face in trying to attract talent, often dealt with by adding programs that they cannot sustainably support in order to use the term "university", with the hypothetical notion of two people with the same major claiming equivalence to each other even if one went to a more selective & prestigious university than the other. Even if one can question (as the author does) the equivocation of the two degrees on statistical grounds, ultimately the author also claims (earlier in the book) that college credentials are an imperfect measure of expertise in isolation and that expertise should be judged on the basis of individual demonstration, so the author fails that standard and falls into the trap of creating a strawman conflict between those two hypothetical people without properly assessing them as individuals. Moreover, in that same hypothetical scenario, the author claims that the accreditation of the major in both hypothetical colleges is not enough to claim that people graduating from that same major from the two colleges are equal, yet offers no further compelling justification; furthermore, this directly contradicts the author's prior use of college accreditation boards as an example of institutional peer expert approval, which damages the credibility of this line of argument through the book.

In the context of the third chapter, as I return to the author's conflation of expertise & expert teaching, the author had mentioned the Dunning-Kruger effect as a symptom of a failure of metacognition (understanding how oneself thinks), yet it seems like this conflation of expertise & expert teaching and the consequent scolding of seemingly dense students is in itself a failure of metacognition on the part of experts like himself, in believing (in a Dunning-Kruger-esque manner) that expertise in a certain field automatically bestows upon such experts the right to believe that however they communicate their expertise to students must be correct and that students who question the quality of such teaching must necessarily be written off as dense & entitled. This is also reflected in the author's questioning of the value of student evaluation of college instructors, because while it may well be true that most such evaluations are meaningless as they are affected by factors irrelevant to the actual learning of the material, his lack of distinction between expertise & expert teaching (from the perspective of both experts & students) allows him to fully discount students' ability to assess teaching quality purely due to their lack of expertise in the specific subject matter, and then add further insult to injury by using the most egregious examples of irrelevant student evaluations of teaching to negatively stereotype such evaluations.

Another example of the author's mistaken conflation of expertise & expert teaching is when the author claims that many people overestimate their singing abilities, believing themselves to be good enough to appear on a nationally-televised competition like American Idol, yet these same people don't believe themselves to be good enough to be voice coaches. However, if the Dunning-Kruger effect says that people who are bad at something overestimate their abilities at that thing due to a failure of metacognition, then it seems certain that there are some people who are actually good at something (e.g. savants or child prodigies) due to some intuitive/instinctive understanding but who, through a failure of metacognition, cannot recognize or clearly communicate exactly why they have the skills that they do.

In the fifth chapter, the author discusses issues in traditional journalism, including saturation, competition & fragmentation in the market, the rise of talk radio (leading in turn to cable & online punditry) giving rise to deep distrust in expertise, and the fact that many journalists go right into major news organizations from university journalism majors instead of first interning at smaller organizations and thereby not understanding how journalism necessarily works on the ground. In the context of the latter point, the author admits to not having expertise in journalism (and admirably refrains from directly criticizing modern journalistic practice beyond pointing out well-known journalistic scandals), but defends his arguments by claiming expertise as a consumer of news, which seems to again contradict his argument that students of expert teaching cannot be trusted to properly assess said teaching. Also, the author seems to frame the story as if the number and scope of incidents of journalistic malpractice is clearly increasing, but the examples taken are from a variety of journalistic outlets, as opposed to a large number from one or two major outlets, so it would be more interesting (and convincing) to see whether such incidents of malpractice or mistakes have actually become more frequent within major outlets that have existed for many decades.

In the last chapter, the author investigates the failures of experts, from fraud & deception to overextension of expertise either into other fields or too far within a field into the realm of questionable broad predictions to innocent scientific disagreements, though the overextension of expertise too far into broad predictions often overlaps with the overextension of specialized expertise into other fields.
There were two issues that I had with that chapter that were relatively more minor in the broader context of the chapter & book but which I felt needed to be addressed. The first is the author's claim that science should only be about explanation and never prediction, which I contest because while the author's actual focus is on overly broad prediction of major phenomena in the world extrapolated from narrow technical expertise, the author gives the erroneous impression that science is never meant to make predictions (which is false, given that the whole point of science & engineering is to make and then test falsifiable predictions based on existing evidence, whether to explain the natural world or to design & test new technologies), which again seems like an example of the author making pronouncements outside his area of expertise. The second is the author's cautioning against overly broad oracular predictions by experts, accompanied by a quote from Nassim Nicholas Taleb railing against experts who would make predictions over time horizons of decades if they can't predict what will happen over the next year. I dispute this because the predictability of broad trends over longer time scales can be easier due to averaging over larger short-term fluctuations. An example would be how the uncertainty in short-term weather prediction does not preclude accurate prediction of long-term climate change; this is itself a broader example of how the existence of chaos in a system implying exponential growth in the difference between two initially nearby trajectories does not imply that the exponential growth continues forever, as the trajectories themselves could be bounded through stretching & folding. By contrast, the narrow view in that quote is almost like denying the existence of physiological farsightedness by claiming that anyone who cannot see something nearby cannot possibly see things far away.

The author concludes with an epilogue reviewing recent events, like the 2016 election, Brexit, and some of the deceptions practiced in promoting the Iran deal, to point out how difficult it would be to educate people who are resistant to real education & critical thinking, while still hopefully pointing out that our society can still be saved as long as experts start to reengage with the public and laypeople actually start to critically reengage with experts and with their own civic responsibilities in turn (though I would add that this goes for experts too). My biggest issue with the epilogue is that the author warns against false equivalency, like in debates over climate change, GMOs, vaccines, and so on, yet he himself partakes in this numerous times in the book, like equating the well-documented problems with Linus Pauling pushing vitamin C with unsubstantiated assertions that Noam Chomsky's political activism is somehow wrong, which seems rather hypocritical.
There are two other broad points in the conclusion with which I disagree, though that has more to do with differences in political & pedagogical ideology. I believe the author, in believing in essentially fixed talents of people and especially in quoting Andrew Sullivan several times in claiming that democracy needs elites to save itself from its worst excesses, is unduly pessimistic about the possibility of experts and laypeople reconnecting, because I believe (having read works like Whistling Vivaldi, participated in things like the MIT-K12 Project, and so on) that such reconnection should be possible if people see the value in education & critical thinking, that anyone really can develop expertise so long as they actually put enough hard work into it and can demonstrate their value to the field at hand, and that the initial onus is on experts to start reengaging with the public not by being patronizing scolds but by actively investing time & resources into developing pedagogical skills to channel that expertise in ways that are understandable to the public; this follows my aforementioned problem with the author's definition of expertise as focusing too much on the notion of "talent" as a fixed quantity. Also, I do think a lot of this pessimism is due to the sole focus of this book on current American society, which is fine given its goals, but it feels a little incomplete as issues like the Dunning-Kruger effect, fragmentation of media, and so on, seem like they could happen anywhere, so especially in the context of Brexit, I would have liked to see discussion of how these issues may or may not have played out in countries in Europe (or Canada, for that matter, which has a fairly similar culture to ours in many ways), with appropriate discussion of what other underlying political/cultural similarities & differences may explain such phenomena. I've also read elsewhere about how a lot of prior public support for STEM & education was due to the threat of the USSR in the Cold War, so when that threat dissipated, so did such support; with that in mind, it might have been nice to see him discuss the local political & sociological aspects of the Cold War in the US given his own expertise on the Cold War, yet he instead retreads more stale pedestrian arguments

Overall, I thought the book was rather disappointing, probably in large part because in the wake of the 2016 election, I read a bunch of articles & op-eds about the topics covered in the book, including anti-intellectualism, the Dunning-Kruger effect, "safe spaces" in colleges, and so on, so I may have felt a bit overexposed to the topics in the book, and I didn't feel like I came away with anything really new. This, combined with the aforementioned numerous flaws in the book (which were not helped by the author's own frequent use of personal anecdotes aggrandizing himself in a way that started off as an obvious joke but became more grating as the flaws became more obvious), also means that while this book could in principle be a nice synthesis of these ideas for people unfamiliar with them, in practice the flaws seem to undercut the value of this book beyond simply reading similar individual articles & op-eds online as I did. It's an OK book, and in the interest of critical engagement with opposing views, I'd suggest that other people read it to form their own judgment, but with arguments that are often thinly sourced, internally hypocritical, and mutually contradictory, that engagement need not be particularly deep or sustained: the author tries so hard to convince people that he's not an old curmudgeon and that he legitimately wants people to understand how experts come to judgments on matters in their expertise, but his use of thinly sourced contradictory arguments makes his scolding less credible, especially when he scolds people for doing exactly those things.
The above paragraphs are my main criticisms of the book. Follow the jump to see a few more thoughts about the broader material at hand.

FOLLOW-UP: Gibbs Entropy and Two-Level Systems

As a follow-up to this post, I'm going to briefly discuss what two statistical mechanics professors (who shall remain nameless) I talked to about this had to say. For those who don't remember or are too lazy to read through, the issue is that a new paper publicized by the MIT news office claims that by adopting a view of entropy as per Gibbs as opposed to Boltzmann, negative temperature can be removed from statistical mechanics. I pointed out many issues I had with the arguments for that, and I would thereby cast doubt on the paper and premise as their wholes. Follow the jump to see what information I was able to learn after talking to those professors. (It appears that rendering LaTeX on this blog no longer works right after the takedown, so I'm enclosing any useful LaTeX formulas in dollar signs for you to copy and paste into a LaTeX renderer, if you so choose. The rendering of LaTeX in past posts is inconsistent, just as a heads-up.)

Gibbs Entropy and Two-Level Systems

Today, I was browsing through the MIT news page when I saw this article about how two mathematicians claim to have disproved the notion of negative temperature. My heart sank, because one of the coolest things I remembered learning in 8.044 — Statistical Physics I was the notion of negative temperature existing, being hotter than hot, and being experimentally realizable. I also became confused when the article referred to Gibbs entropy, because the definition I thought was being used for Gibbs entropy was \[ S = -\sum_j p_j \ln(p_j) \] which is exactly equivalent to the Boltzmann entropy \[ S = \ln(\Omega) \] where \[ p_j = \frac{1}{\Omega} \] in the microcanonical ensemble. I figured this would mean that the Gibbs entropy would exactly reproduce negative temperature results in systems with bounded energies such as two-level systems. I wasn't able to read the most recent paper as discussed in the news article, because it is behind a paywall, but I was able to read this article by the same authors, which appears to lay the foundational ideas behind the most recent paper. It seems like on my end, the misconception appears to hinge on what one would call the Gibbs entropy. The formula \[ S = \ln(\Phi) \] appears to be the correct one for the Gibbs entropy, where $\Phi$ is the total number of states with energy not greater than $E$ and $\Omega = \frac{d\Phi}{dE}$ is the number of states with energy exactly equal to $E$ quantum mechanically (or the number of states with energy within a sufficiently small neighborhood of $E$ in the classical limit). With this in mind, follow the jump to see how this might work for a two-level system and explore the other implications of this new definition of statistical entropy. (UPDATE: Note that in all of this, $k_B = 1$.)

Featured Comments: Week of 2010 December 19

Unfortunately, there were no comments on articles from the previous week (2010 December 12), so there was no accompanying "Featured Comments" article. That can be attributed to the fact that I wrote very few posts that week. Anyway, there were a whole bunch of comments this past week, so I can only post a couple.

Review: Slackware 13.1

There were many comments about this, so I'll post a couple, as well as my responses to them.
An anonymous reader writes, "You never even talked about this distro whatsoever. You just complained about what stuff you were used to that slackware didnt have. if every distro was the same then there would be one distro. Slackware is one of the most stable distros still surviving. You want a extremely stable distro here it is. While i agree that there is no dependacy checking, if you are going to slackware you are usually semi good at the command line and usually know how to install a program anyhow. so its "your" job to do it."
Reader Hannes Worst had this to say: "I think it's an ultimately unfair review. It only states the preferences of the writer and nothing about Slackware. It's like someone allergic to fruit writes a review about apples. From the first sentence on prejudice is shown. When you aren't capable of exploring and researching Slackware, don't write a review about it."
To the anonymous reader, I ask, if complaining about what isn't in the distribution isn't saying something about the distribution itself, then what is? Also, the last point leads me into my response to Hannes Worst.
I may not have made it clear in the review itself, but relatively speaking, I am a newbie to Linux. I like using Linux a lot, but I still have neither the skills nor the patience to work with something like Slackware for a long time just to get it working. I had a feeling that my experience wouldn't turn out so well for this very reason. But I wanted to test this feeling, so I did; I then wrote about the experience. Please tell me: what exactly is wrong with that? I figured that I made it abundantly clear that my issues with Slackware were never meant to reflect poorly on Slackware; quite the opposite: they reflect poorly on me as a Linux user.
I hope all that is cleared up. Next!

Familiarity Breeds Fondness, not Contempt

Reader T_Beermonster had this to say: "Probably the big one for me is the package manager. I've just got so used to APT over the years that I find other (probably equally good) systems don't feel right. Kind of like getting into someone else's car, the biting point is wrong and the seat is the wrong hight." I feel the same way as well, but I must ask, what about when familiar front-ends are applied to different back-ends? For example, PCLinuxOS uses RPMs in the back-end, but its GUI package manager is the familiar Synaptic. How would you feel about using that there? Or am I missing the point entirely?

Bad Experiences are Forever

Reader T_Beermonster wrote a long diatribe against Apple's Macs: "I have a visceral loathing of Apple Macs - not the hardware which in recent times has been quite attractive looking (if overpriced/underspecced). It's the OS."

FOLLOW-UP: Linux and Breakfast Cereals

Commenter twitter had this to say: "Diversity and choice are good, restrictions are bad. Despite the differences between distributions, they all share the same core of free software and all of it tailored to a wide variety of hardware architectures. That means that users get the software they want on the platform they want. Skype is difficult because it is not free software and the company has to do all the hard work of packaging things themselves. If you want Skype to work as well as Mozilla, ask Skype to liberate their code and rely on an honest service model that does not demand undue power over users."

Well, that's all for this week. I hope all the confusion surrounding my motivations regarding the Slackware review are cleared up, and I sincerely apologize for not delivering adequately to those who were expecting a more substantive level appropriate for an intermediate or advanced Linux user trying Slackware. As always, if you like the content, please continue commenting and subscribing. Finally, happy holidays!

FOLLOW-UP: A Few Loose Ends - 2009 October 2

The original post was on a bunch of different things, but this follow-up will only cover Representative Alan Grayson's ruckus.
A few different news outlets are reporting that Alan Grayson is asking for the arrest and imprisonment of one of his critics.
The issue stems from the fact that while the critic in question maintains (or something like that) a website called "My Congressman is Nuts", the critic is not actually in Alan Grayson's district.
Grayson has asked Eric Holder to jail this critic just because of that (she has misrepresented her district on her personal website).
I would not condone such misrepresentation myself, but what?
He's asking the Attorney General of the US to arrest a critic for a small misrepresentation?
What's more telling (and ironic) is that this same critic calls him out (rightfully so) for acting childish as a Representative in DC.
It's a self-fulfilling prophecy! Shame on you, Grayson!
To be honest, I would be happy (even though he's a Democrat) if he was voted out of office in 2010. I would prefer it be through the Democratic primaries, but if it happens in the general election (i.e. by a Republican), so be it.