Book Review: "Thinking, Fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahneman

I started reading the book Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman in early 2024. This was initially recommended to me by a friend, and I became even more motivated to read it upon hearing positive things about it from colleagues at my previous job, as many of the subtleties described in the book are extremely relevant to the appropriate design of interviews, focus groups, and surveys of human subjects in social science research. However, because it is a long book and the middle of 2024 was made busier for me by moving back to Maryland, traveling a lot, and starting a new job (some of which I have discussed in a previous post [LINK]), I could not finish reading this book until much more recently. Because of this large gap between reading the initial 60% and remaining 40% of this book, I admit that I have since forgotten many details from the initial 60% of this book. Moreover, I started making notes to myself in this post based on that initial 60% because I assumed that I would be able to finish reading the remaining 40% soon afterwards and I would therefore remember the book as a coherent whole, but because that didn't happen, many of the notes that I have made in this post that were supposed to form the skeleton of this post now no longer make as much sense to me. For these reasons, this post may seem a bit more stilted than other book review posts in this blog and will likely seem stronger/more coherent when discussing the latter 40% of the book.

The book is a lengthy exposition of novel ideas in psychology & behavioral economics that were empirically validated by the author, most often in conjunction with his longtime academic collaborator Amos Tversky. The concluding chapter does a good job of recapitulating the main ideas of the book. Most of the book explores various facets of individual & group-based human behavior based on the idea that there are effectively 2 modes through which individuals process information, which the author refers to as Systems 1 & 2. System 1 "thinks fast", making snap judgments based on limited information, heuristics, and a bit of laziness, and is the aspect of thinking that drives most day-to-day reactions & decisionmaking, while System 2 "thinks slow", making more deliberate judgments with more of an effort to gather all relevant information but must in turn be consciously engaged and ultimately disengages from mental fatigue (in favor of System 1) if engaged for too long. The book also considers how individuals' typical behaviors when faced with outcomes that are certain competing with outcomes that have known or unknown probabilities deviate from behaviors idealized by microeconomic theories of expected utility, notably that while the commonly observed behavior choosing a certain gain with a lower value than the expected value of an uncertain gain can be explained to some degree by expected utility theory, the commonly observed behavior of choosing a gamble on losing outcomes with an expected loss of larger magnitude than a different certain loss cannot be explained by expected utility theory; this partly explains the risks that people take in business and can be explained in turn by how people in their perceptions tend to overestimate probabilities that are close to but not exactly 0 and underestimate probabilities that are close to but not exactly 1. Finally, the book partly explains notions of hedonic adaptation (the idea that one's sense of well-being is generally similar in many different good or bad medium- or long-term circumstances by adapting to those circumstances) by distinguishing how people rate pleasure or pain when experiencing those things versus in hindsight and shows how people's conceptions of their identities & well-being in the past, present, and future are intimately tied to their actual memories and their abilities to form & retain memories. These aspects of self-conception as well as perceptions of probability can also be tied to Systems 1 versus 2, as many seemingly shortsighted decisions or perceptions can be explained by System 1 making snap judgments lazily & using heuristics based on incomplete information.

Especially as I read the latter 40% of the book, I came to appreciate how many of the ideas of this book had permeated into other things that I had read & heard from others and that I had internalized into my own worldview & view of myself. Professionally, I could see how so many aspects of framing could be important when designing surveys & focus groups. Personally, I could see how especially as I have aged, I have in many cases consciously chosen to not worry too much about certain details and instead make decisions based on lazier heuristics because I didn't feel that the results of spending more mental energy making a decision based on System 2 would be worth the effort. At the same time, I have become more consciously aware of how my memories of things in my own life can be affected by the passage of time and by more recent events in my own life, and I have become more consciously aware of the deep entanglement between my perceptions of my own memories and the narratives that shape my perceptions of my own life & of the world. I thus feel more proud of maintaining detailed personal diaries where I take note (using System 2 as much as possible when considering things outside of the current moment) of how I feel about various things in the moment as well as in hindsight and carefully consider how & why my thoughts & feelings about different events in or aspects of my life have evolved over time. Moreover, I have become more aware over time of when I might be vulnerable (through System 1) to the power of suggestion or to a subconscious desire to align with groupthink, though given that it is System 1, I am not necessarily aware of these things until later (thinking about these things through System 2). Finally, especially over the last several years, I have come to see many things at a very broad conceptual/philosophical level, whether the experiences in my own life, the evolution of different aspects of human society, or the expansion of human knowledge, in terms of perdurantism [LINK from Wikipedia]; although I am not philosophically sophisticated enough to be able to think through & defend all of its implications, it intuitively makes sense to me to think about personal identities, feelings, people, and other things that can be said to exist, in terms of their existence in spacetime and not just in space at specific instants of time. Because of my philosophical inclination in this way, I was particularly pleased to see the author discuss the idea of time-integrated pleasure or pain and of looking at changing identities or overall life courses in terms of spacetime.

Although this book is not technical at the level of an academic journal article, it is fairly technical compared to most nonfiction books aimed at the general public, so I would say that it is aimed at a well-educated reader. That said, I do think that it is written with reasonable clarity for non-academic audiences. Additionally, the book covers many topics, and it is recommended to bear in mind the headings of sections that comprise groups of chapters, because otherwise, it is easy to lose track of the narrative of the book, especially because the book is long enough that I suspect that it would be impossible for most readers (even those who read books, including more technical nonfiction books, relatively quickly) to finish this book in one sitting. I would say that the concluding chapter is a nice way to reinforce the main points of the book in the reader's mind and that the details of each chapter can be treated as a reference when needed as opposed to forming a perfectly coherent narrative in the progression of chapters in the book.

It is important to remember that some aspects of this book are out of date. In some cases, that is just because this book was published in 2011 and had been written over many years before that; for example, the author gives an example of estimating the likelihood of choosing a particular major in college, but that example uses base rates that seem to be quite out-of-date. In other cases, the book is out of date because it is based on academic experimental work in psychology & behavioral economics, and other studies may find contradictory (either null or opposite) results to those presented in this book. The Wikipedia article about this book [LINK] discussed how most of the results from most of the studies discussed in one chapter (as an example) have been found to be not replicable, with the author afterwards admitting to putting too much faith in those studies and therefore falling prey to the same biases as those discussed in that chapter & elsewhere in the book. As a slightly different example, later parts of the book discuss the ideas of nudge theory and its seeming successes in public policy, but the Wikipedia article about nudge theory [LINK] has pointed out that later studies & meta-analyses have found that after correcting for publication biases in favor of positive results & against null results, nudging does not yield statistically significant (non-null) effects on human behavior; in this case, one of the primary researchers (who is named in this book as a collaborator of the author & pioneer of nudge theory) has made some counterarguments that I don't find convincing.

With these caveats in mind, I would still recommend this book to anyone interested in these ideas and with the patience to carefully consider them, though this may partly reflect my own biases in how I view issues of identity & the world. Follow the jump to see my other assorted & disjointed thoughts about this book.

Disability, History, Wilderness, Natural Parks, and Urban Spaces (Part 1)

Over the 3 years that I physically lived in California (as I worked remotely for UC Davis remotely from Maryland for 1 year before that), I became progressively more ambivalent about the reverential attitudes that many people in California and more broadly in the western half of the contiguous US (including the Northwest, Mountain West, and Southwest) have toward wilderness and natural parks and a little bitter that such reverence could directly be connected to the way that urban spaces in this part of the US feel far more neglected and bare-bones than urban spaces in the Northeast & Mid-Atlantic do; the bitterness is related to my personal need, as someone with a disability who does not drive, for spaces with good public transit, safely walkable paths, and dense mixed-use development. I had thought about these issues more especially during this year, but thus far, I had not considered writing blog posts about these thoughts. It was only after reading the essay "The Trouble with Wilderness" published in 1995 by William Cronon [LINK], recommended to me by a friend who thought that I might be sympathetic to the arguments in the essay, that I felt compelled to further flesh out & share my thoughts about these issues in this blog.

The essay explains the dichotomies & hypocrisies inherent in primarily middle-class and rich American perceptions of wilderness and how these attitudes arose. The author explains how until the 19th century in North America & Europe, and until even later in many other parts of the world, wilderness was seen by most urban cultures as dangerous, desolate, and leading people through such desolation to despair & amorality, the latter exemplified by Rudyard Kipling's popularization in the late 19th century of the savage "jungle law". Additionally, there were roots before the 19th century of the idea of spending time in wilderness as leading to religious experiences, but such experiences were clearly meant to evoke terrified awe (consistent with the little bit that I understand about Christianity regarding its emphasis on sin & guilt) as opposed to transcendent bliss, and they were associated with people exiling themselves from society for tough religious penance, whether in the cloisters of a monastery or in a forest far from the comforts of urban civilization. The author explains that the transformation of popular perceptions of wilderness from negative to positive came in the 19th century in Europe & North America, as the perceptions of religious experiences shifted to being more uniformly positive & comforting and simultaneously as local governments started building more amenities to tame wilderness into being a natural park for tourists; I suspect that this also coincided with Friedrich Nietzsche's work on the overman (the self-realized man striving for betterment in conjunction with enjoyment of the world) being interpreted as humanity having a greater degree of control over nature and with the rise of prosperity theology in the US, but I am not yet well enough read to comment intelligently on Nietzsche's work, and in any case, the author does not explicitly make such connections or arguments. The author describes how this shift in perception was reinforced at the same time specifically in the US by the promotion of frontier myths; I was previously familiar with how the frontier myth played into those reverential attitudes in the US toward wilderness, but I didn't make the connection until reading this essay of this myth to the way that the people, including Teddy Roosevelt, who pushed this myth & related reverence for natural parks were in fact rich white American men who grew up in urban comfort & benefited from industrialization and were rewriting the frontier myth in their own image, contradicting the reality that most people, including cowboys, who worked on the actual frontier were racially, sexually, or otherwise socioeconomically marginalized by the settled WASP-dominated society in the Northeast & Mid-Atlantic. The author ties this erasure of history to how the reverence for natural parks among many Americans who grow up in urban settings took root because of the combination of feeling alienated from industrial areas (which were genuinely dangerous & polluted places to live in the 19th & early 20th centuries) and being ignorant of what undeveloped land (wilderness) is really like. The author argues that such positive perceptions are counterproductive for understanding how humanity can actually live sustainably with nature as such attitudes unduly compartmentalize "nature" as being irretrievably separate from humanity, and when combined with negative attitudes about urban environments & rigid beliefs that humanity destroys everything that it touches in nature, this leads to the logical (within its own axioms) yet incredibly depressing nihilistic conclusion that humanity should cease to exist. The author emphasizes that comfortable & positive experiences in the wilderness are too often accessible only to rich people in urbanized areas (in the sense of having the time & transportation to get to natural peaks that have a lot of physical infrastructure & amenities built deliberately, irrespective of the level of luxury of a given private tour) and that this has been true since the 19th century in North America & Europe. Finally, the author argues that it would be better to appreciate & cultivate nature closer to home even in urban settings.

My friend was correct; I did indeed feel that this essay strongly resonated with me, as I have had similar thoughts about the effects of the frontier myth on popular reverence for natural parks in the US and about the myth versus reality of human infrastructure & amenities in natural parks being marketed as "true wilderness". It is worth noting too that the word "jungle" came from the Sanskrit/Hindi word "jaṅgala", which originally meant "desert" (emphasizing the aridity) and was later expanded to refer to any place hostile to human settlement, but its application to thick forests with overgrown understories was based on a misunderstanding by British colonizers in India in the 19th century (which does not surprise me); this is relevant to illustrating perceptions in other cultures of wilderness and of shifts in perception in the 19th century, as other scholars who have published similar essays or book chapters in books or collections edited by William Cronon have showed how the shift in English away from the word "jungle", which had negative connotations, to the word "rainforest" was associated with a softening of the popular image of such ecosystems (previously seen in Europe and by white North Americans as harsh & antithetical to humanity).

I have learned over the last few years of discoveries over the last few decades about the ways that indigenous societies in America (considered as a single continent), before European colonization, shaped environments that in the 20th century were assumed to be untouched wilderness. The shaping took the form of light-touch agroforestry, silviculture (forest cultivation), and polyculture (farming many plant or animal species together in ways that are sustainable due to those species' ecologically mutualistic relations, as opposed to the monoculture prevalent in industrialized farming). Examples include the Amazon rainforest [LINK] whose shaping supported large & diverse highly-developed cities [LINK], wildflowers in the deserts of California [LINK] making clear that even the term "wildflower" in that context is a misnomer that erases indigenous American work on cultivating those plants over many generations, and the temperate rainforests of British Columbia where biodiversity was much higher due to human selection near indigenous settlements than farther away [LINK]. These discoveries came after William Cronon published his essay, so I hope that he would be aware of these more recent discoveries (as he retired from his tenured faculty position only within the last few years). Learning about these things motivated me to learn a little more, from Wikipedia, about agroforestry, silviculture, and polyculture. They seem like promising ways to promote soil fertility, biodiversity, greater resilience against pests & natural disasters, ecological health, and human health. However, it is important to recognize the tradeoffs between these benefits and the need for extensive delicate & prolonged human labor, given the implications for our current population level & standard of living in the US, instead of uncritically romanticizing such practices as better in every way than current practices of monocultures & mechanized farms, especially if such romanticism is a reflexive opposition to white dominance in the various countries of America, with that opposition in turn arising from sympathy with indigenous peoples who have been & continue to be oppressed. In particular, livestock & machines currently struggle to work well with any farming method other than monocultures, so scalability would be a problem, though I am optimistic that AI tools could be paired with more carefully-designed machines to more effectively seed & harvest more complicated crop growths in forests or polycultures.

The essay by William Cronon didn't have as much about disability or the neglect of urban spaces, which are more salient to my experiences. Thus, the extent to which the essay resonated with me because of those issues was more because my mind was filling in those gaps. For this reason, I am making this post one in a multi-part series, with this part focusing more on the essay itself and more directly related issues of indigenous land cultivation (as William Cronon's treatment of indigenous issues, which is understandable given the state of popular knowledge & research in the US in 1995, is with a sad tone as if indigenous peoples in America had been completely wiped out & existed only in the past, ignoring the ways that indigenous peoples in America continue to preserve traditional land management practices & shape their lands accordingly, even if those things happen now on much smaller scales than they did before European colonization). The next post in this series will focus more on my experiences & thoughts from the standpoints of disability & urban neglect; I may have more posts afterwards only if there is a clear need to break the material into shorter posts and there is a clean way to separate the posts by topic.

Stand-Up Comedy and Emotional Resonance

I recently read an article in The New Yorker magazine [LINK] about how the stand-up comedian Hasan Minhaj significantly exaggerated or conflated stories in his recent big stand-up comedy routines. In particular, these stories were about instances of racism or Islamophobia, including being the victim of police brutality, being part of a mosque that was infiltrated by an FBI agent, and being sent a mysterious powder that led to his child's hospitalization, that either didn't happen at all or were significantly exaggerated. As someone who has liked his work in the past and who could identify to some degree with his stand-up comedy material based on experiences as the child of immigrants from India, I found these allegations quite troubling, yet I also found myself struggling to articulate exactly why I found these allegations to be so troubling. This post is my attempt, in the current zeitgeist (as this is a very new story and new details could soon arise that would make this post irrelevant or incorrect), to make sense of these things. Follow the jump to see more.

Book Review: "How Not to Be Wrong" by Jordan Ellenberg

I've recently read the book How Not to Be Wrong by Jordan Ellenberg. As the author states in the introduction, it is an exposition of simple yet profound ideas in mathematics, meant for laypeople. Topics include nonlinear phenomena (in opposition to naïve linear extrapolation), probability, Bayesian reasoning, and statistical testing of hypotheses. All chapters refer to many examples in politics, economics, and everyday life to make the concepts easier for laypeople to digest.

I found the book to be fairly easy to follow. I can't say that I learned much in terms of concepts, as these are all concepts that I've come across one way or another in school, college, graduate school, or my work now, though I did appreciate the discussion of how conspiracy theorists like to add hypotheses after the fact to make a conspiracy theory harder to fully disprove, how the fact that random fluctuations in many phenomena observed over time are time-reversal invariant implies that the phenomenon of regression toward the mean is also time-reversal invariant in a probabilistic sense, and the intuitive explanations of common causes & common effects in leading to correlations between random variables that are otherwise not causally connected. Additionally, I felt like this book did a better job than the book Algorithms to Live By by Brian Christian & Tom Griffiths (which I have reviewed on this blog before [LINK]) in having some structure in the progression from one chapter to the next and in using topics from earlier chapters in later chapters even though this book, unlike that book, didn't pretend to have a unified message. My only quibbles are the claim that the impossibility of accurately running the fundamental equations describing atmospheric & oceanic dynamics for more than 2 weeks implies impossibility in forecasting through other methods (like machine learning models looking for patterns in weather effects & progression) and the fact that the chapter connecting ideas from probability, geometry, and signal processing (particularly around error correction) took me a fair bit of effort to follow (unlike the other chapters, which tells me that laypeople will likely struggle with that chapter much more). Additionally, I think readers should be aware that the author often makes reference to sports that are mostly popular in the US and to US politics and that the author at a few points espouses more liberal or progressive political views (though I think such espousal is not gratuitous but is done in a way that fits well with broader discussions of assumptions underlying mathematical, political, and legal judgments). Overall, I think the author has done a good job of fulfilling the goal of communicating these ideas to a lay audience, so I recommend this book to anyone who might be interested in these ideas.

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: "Michael Polanyi" by Mark T. Mitchell

I've recently read the book Michael Polanyi by Mark T. Mitchell. (As an aside, it may be worth noting that some listings of this book carry the subtitle The Art of Knowing, but the usage of this subtitle within the copy of the book I got was inconsistent.) The book gives a relatively brief summary of the life and times of the physical chemist-turned-economist/philosopher Michael Polanyi in the first chapter, and then goes into a little more detail about his philosophies on economics, politics, science, morality, knowledge, religion, and other things in the second through fourth chapters, concluding in the fifth chapter with a comparison of his philosophical views to those of his contemporaries along with a little discussion about the implications of Polanyi's views for the present day.

The book is fairly short, well-written, and engaging even for a layperson like myself. The overview of Polanyi's life is quite interesting, and as I am considering the next steps for my own career (more on that in a future post), I was particularly taken by the story of Polanyi's career change so late in life. The discussion of his philosophy avoids unexplained jargon and very heavy technical arguments, instead clearly laying things out in simple terms & examples, and I was surprised (mainly as I was previously unacquainted with Polanyi's work per se, even though I have already read works about some of the people who influenced him and whom he may have influenced) to see myself having come to similar conclusions as Polanyi even before reading this book. With respect to the latter point, though, I do have a few criticisms, which are attributable in parts to Polanyi or to the author of this book. For one, the appeals to common sense & simple examples lead to the situation where the defense of Polanyi's theory of tacit knowledge against charges of subjectivism or circularity (i.e. begging the question) isn't necessarily as tightly constructed or satisfying as possible; some of this comes from Polanyi's own quotes, while the remainder comes from the author (who seems to agree with and follow Polanyi's philosophy). For another, some of Polanyi's defenses of Christianity and critiques of evolutionary theory, with respect to their implications for constructing meaning out of human existence, aren't clear as to how broadly they should be applied in his more general framework, and it isn't clear whether this very opacity is in itself the fault of Polanyi versus the author of this book. Overall, I really enjoyed reading this book, and would recommend it to anyone looking for a nontechnical clear read about a sometimes-overlooked figure in Western philosophy of the 20th century. Follow the jump to read more detailed summaries per chapter and about my thoughts regarding the book as well as Polanyi's philosophy (warning: it may be quite roughly organized).

Book Review: "The Invention of Science" by David Wootton

I've recently read the book The Invention of Science by David Wootton, after seeing it pop up on the SMBC comic reading list a few years ago. This book puts forth a comprehensive attempt to answer the question of when the modern practice of science can definitively said to be born, and comes up with the response that it was "invented" between 1572 and 1704 in Europe through a series of changes that can be viewed as a single transformation, on par (and in many contexts in tandem) with the Industrial Revolution. Far from being a quick overview, it provides a detailed history of the linguistic and philosophical developments surrounding various aspects of the scientific method, including the basic ideas of "facts", "experiments", "hypotheses", "theories", and similar terms by tracing through the experimental apparatuses early scientists constructed, the debates they and other philosophers had among their own groups and between each other, and the effects of new technologies like the printing press, steam engine, and others. Among its key aims is to comprehensively critique the strongest forms of relativism in the modern history of science (to which I will refer with phrases of the form "of relativism", because for a physicist like me the term "relativistic" means "of/pertaining to [Einstein's theory of special and general] relativity"), which posits things like science being an entirely social enterprise where theories become ascendant only through societal power structures and the power of persuasion while notions of the power of evidence are entirely misleading, and to a lesser extent to critique the strongest forms of realism, which contrarily posits that scientific theories are an exact reflection of reality. In opposition to these, the book argues that science as a whole can be said to objectively progress as new theories can both continue to properly explain evidence that old theories can while also explaining new evidence that old theories cannot adequately explain, and that scientific developments are path-dependent and do to some degree depend on cultural context.

The book is very well-written but, as I mentioned earlier, it is a significantly heavier (literally as well as philosophically) tome than a typical popular history of science. It deeply contextualizes a lot of different, seemingly disparate, aspects of the development of scientific research between 1572-1704 in Europe in view of linguistics, philosophy, religion, and interpersonal relationships. Given that I'm a layperson when it comes to philosophy, there were a lot of passages that I found difficult to follow even after multiple careful readings simply because I was unfamiliar with many of the people and texts quoted. For example, for a while when reading, I thought that the author's criticisms of Thomas Kuhn's notion of paradigm shifts (whose seminal work on the subject I've reviewed here) were in a general sense; it took me a while to realize that the criticisms were more specific to the context of the development of the scientific method as opposed to developments since then, and even after that I needed reassurance from the concluding section that this was indeed the author's intent. However, there were a lot of things that I appreciated learning from this book. Foremost among them is the idea that the notion of inevitable progress really only originated in the 16th century, and before that the dominant view of history was that it developed in cycles, so there really was no sense that anyone could discover things unknown to their predecessors and peers; this really made me better appreciate why the mentality of a glorious past that must be returned to is still so pervasive in circles outside of scientific fields. Plus, the argument that the voyage by Christopher Columbus to Hispaniola catalyzed this new notion of "discovery" in itself was new to me, and I was surprised by how compellingly it was argued. I also appreciated the explanation of the emergence of a linguistic distinction between "physics", whose practitioners are "physicists", and "physiology", whose practitioners are "physicians".

There are a few criticisms that I have from my perspective as a lay reader. The first is that the author spends a chapter discussing the emergence of a notion of "facts", and distinguishes different kinds of "facts" when discussing the building of scientific knowledge in order to argue against the claims of strong relativism that all scientific theories are ultimately equally acceptable. However, the presentation of these distinctions is quite muddled from the beginning, which not only harms the intelligibility of the arguments for settling science through "matters of fact", but gives an opening for arguments from relativism that all "facts" ultimately depend on the existence of a shared language and cultural context for interpretation. The second is that some of the arguments against even weaker forms of relativism (like Thomas Kuhn's ideas), suggesting that theories being underdetermined by the facts at hand means that any number of theories could be equally valid, seem somewhat weak. One particular example discussed is that once the terraqueous theory (that the Earth was composed of land and water in a single "sphere" as opposed to two "spheres") was established thanks to certain findings (like the European rediscovery of the American continents and consequently acknowledging the possible existence of antipodes on land), last-ditch alternative theories were already seen in their day to be problematic, which led to the swift and relatively uncontroversial abandonment of such alternatives. The problem with that example is that it conflates the inability of thinkers of that time to come up with a viable alternative with the lack of existence of a viable alternative, and the latter is a much stronger statement which isn't actually proved by that example. (As an aside: the way I see it, the construction of scientific theories is like optimizing a fit function to a set of values that are outputs for input points sampled in a very large high-dimensional space. Paradigm shifts occur when newly sampled input points produce output values that are very far from what existing fit functions predict, while new fit functions that can accurately predict values at existing points and these new points would look quite different in form. In this context, the possibility of other cultures or even sapient alien species developing entirely different scientific theories could be explained by sampling very different sets of points to begin with, due to very different experiences, and consequently coming up with very different-looking fit functions, with perhaps only a few common sample points where different theories come close to each other.) The third is that there isn't much discussion of other cultures outside of Europe, with the exception of Arabic writings on astronomy and other sciences, and the little discussion there is seems to be casually dismissive, glibly describing such societies as "hierarchical" rather than "egalitarian" without getting into the subtleties of those terms in context; initially, I gave the author the benefit of the doubt in wanting to keep the scope of the book focused, but considering how much was said about religious philosophy and linguistics, I think a fuller picture would really have benefited the book. Related to this, I would have liked to see a somewhat clearer discussion of the extent to which the emergence of the scientific method affected and was affected by shifts from church-focused hierarchical communal philosophy to individual-centered humanism; there was some of that, but there are probably other parts of the book where that relation could have been clearer. Finally, I got the sense that the writing and the message of the first few chapters as well as the last few chapters were fairly clear, but the arguments of the middle chapters were harder for me to follow in themselves and in the broader context of the book overall; perhaps each of the middle parts could have been a separate shorter book in a series, so that readers wouldn't feel compelled to read all of those parts in order, and the author could have felt more free to restructure and explain further as needed.

This was definitely an interesting read and was unlike the last several books that I've read given its deep look at the subtleties of European philosophy in the mid-2nd millennium. I wouldn't recommend it as a light jaunt through the historical development of science, but I would recommend it to those who want a deeper look at the various philosophical factors guiding its development.

Book Review: "Medici Money" by Tim Parks

I've recently read the book Medici Money by Tim Parks. It's a book that covers the rise, consolidation of money and power, and downfall of the Medici banking family in Florence in the 15th century. It focuses on the main players in the Medici family as they relate to their banking business, and how that business grew, became intertwined in politics & religion, and was able to fund the collection & creation of artworks and other cultural artifacts; the whole story is just a long power play, with jockeying between Medici family members, popes & cardinals, politicians, and competing nobility & business interests.

The book itself is a well-written, engaging, fun jaunt through that period in history; by the fact that it only has a casual section at the end containing bibliographic notes, without having a formal bibliography, footnotes, or endnotes, I can tell this was written for popular rather than technical/academic consumption, which I can appreciate. It was particularly interesting to see the tensions, contradictions, and hypocrisies of the Catholic Church's views on usury (in the old sense of lending money at any nonzero interest rate) explored fully in this book: the argument is that usury allowed ordinary people to become wealthy without needing to inherit it or work as hard, upending the social order, while the Catholic Church depended on usury to fund its own wars & extravagant lifestyles even as it condemned the practice (though even people at that time struggled to find coherent Biblical justifications for injunctions against usury), leading to weird debates about whether some commercial practices like speculation on currency exchanges were really usury in disguise. My only quibble is that the author ties the notion of usury too much to currency: the way I see it, currency simply liquefies commercial value across space (i.e. making value available across different geographic areas), while usury liquefies commercial value across time (i.e. making value available to future buyers), so while currency certainly makes usury much more feasible by combining liquidity in space and time, it is conceivable to imagine usury without currency, simply through bonds between people expecting greater future returns to be settled through consensual barter. Overall, I think this book could be an interesting and fun history for a general audience.

Book Review: "Hume" by James Harris

I've recently been able to read the book Hume: An Intellectual Biography by James Harris. This is an "intellectual biography" in the sense that rather than focusing on the particular details or daily life of the Scottish philosopher and essayist David Hume, it delves into his philosophy and writing in the context of what he read, the people with whom he corresponded, and the political history of the Great Britain in which he lived. This is extensively sourced from Hume's very brief autobiography, his more extensive works, and correspondence with and writings by other people; Hume's own will requested that his personal papers and unpublished works (apart from those he wished to see published posthumously) dating prior to the 5 years leading up to his death be destroyed, and this seems to have happened, and Hume's autobiography is far too brief and sparse to serve as the primary resource.

I am not in the humanities, so I come at this book as a layperson. This being an intellectual biography makes it a longer and weightier book than a biography that would focus on Hume's personality and daily life. Moreover, the author feels free to introduce contemporaries of Hume, often by last name only, without much more context to their own lives and thoughts. However, to the author's great credit, the prose is clear and engaging even to a layperson like myself, and the author takes care to outline the philosophies of Hume's contemporaries to the full extent that they relate to Hume's readings, correspondence, and overall philosophical development. Additionally, the author makes clear the historical and political circumstances surrounding Hume's life, so that even someone like myself without that background can reasonably follow.
The author's main goal in this work is to show how Hume approached all of his work and interests with an eye toward philosophical examination of the broad principles governing them, without trying to claim that all of Hume's work sprang from a single unified moral philosophy, nor that Hume turned away from moral philosophical treatises toward essays on politics and religion purely in pursuit of fame. The latter refutation is made clear enough by Hume's avowed disdain for histories that were written in a very superficial way purely for mass popularity. The former refutation comes out over the course of the book: the author points out, where appropriate, and respects Hume's own wishes that his essays be read as independent entities from each other and from his other work, and the author further seems (from my rudimentary perspective) to follow Hume's own moral philosophy of interpretation via human experience. It's clear that other philosophers will use their own perspectives to try to ascribe a broad unified philosophical foundation to all of Hume's work, but I think this author does a good job of making and justifying his overall goal in this biography. It is a fairly long book, but I think anyone who is interested in philosophy and is ready for a work that is a bit more densely packed with history and politics would enjoy this book. Follow the jump to see a few more musings that are not directly related to this book.

Book Review: "Cosmopolitanism" by Kwame Anthony Appiah

I've recently been able to read Cosmopolitanism by Kwame Anthony Appiah. When I first picked it up, I thought it might be an interesting take on the issues of multiculturalism and immigration that Western societies have had to deal with over the last 2 decades (considering that this book was published in 2006). It actually turned out to be a bit different than I expected, being instead a more abstract philosophical work that lays out the arguments for a certain sort of cosmopolitan worldview and manner of engaging with other people, with these arguments being based on somewhat more abstract discussions of the histories of nations, cultures, and peoples. In particular, the author discusses how cultures have diffused throughout space and time and how people are capable of engaging with different issues and other people from across the world in an intelligent and active manner, so the framing of issues like cultural imperialism/theft or charity for the poorest around the world may end up being counterproductive in the long-term; additionally, the aim of conversation and engagement with strangers should be to reach a mutual understanding and (ideally, though this depends somewhat on the topic at hand) respect for different culture-specific values, because persuasion of people to change such culture-specific values is typically [though not always] a fool's errand. I realize this brief summary doesn't really do the book justice, because it is a rather dense book (at least for a layperson like myself) with so many different issues discussed at varying lengths and levels of abstraction.

Overall, there are a lot of arguments that seem disconnected, especially the anecdotes of his family or his childhood in Ghana (though those were nice to read), and there seem to be a lot of philosophical subtleties that may well have gone over my head, but while each chapter is a nice self-contained explanation of an aspect of cosmopolitanism, the overarching message seems rather muddled (especially comparing the last chapter to everything before it). There are other issues that I have with the book that I'll detail after the jump, but more broadly, I was somewhat disappointed by the ease with which I could use the author's own terms and arguments against the book. That said, I do agree with one main theme, and that is of respectfully engaging with strangers by critically examining "thick" beliefs on their own terms and as they arise from other "thick" & "thin" beliefs (to be explained after the jump), in order to find common ground while also understanding and respecting where differences arise; this is similar to what I learned from the last student-led discussion I attended at the Day of Action on campus in March. I suppose people who are interested in this sort of thing would be drawn to this book anyway, but I wouldn't really recommend this otherwise. Follow the jump to see more of my thoughts on this book.

Book Review: "The Attention Merchants" by Tim Wu

Originally, this post was supposed to come out a week ago, as a Linux comparison test between BunsenLabs Linux and CrunchBang++ ("#!++"), two quasi-official successors to the now-defunct CrunchBang ("#!") Linux distribution. Unfortunately, neither of them booted in a live USB. For that reason, this post is now a book review of The Attention Merchants by Tim Wu. It is a relatively long and detailed book about the history of advertising and other ways that people have tried to get into our heads and sell us on either commercial goods or ideas. It has a fairly extensive discussion of the development of advertising in newspapers, city posters, and radios, as well as further developments through TV and the Internet. Additionally, it goes through the cycles of development and backlash with respect to each medium of communication, noting how the backlashes are fairly similar to one another in many respects throughout history.

The book is quite interesting, and despite its longer length, it generally reads easily enough that this length is less noticeable. There are many examples given through each period of history and with respect to each medium of communication showing how advertising techniques further developed, and each of them is quite compelling on its own. I even learned a few interesting bits of trivia that I take for granted on a daily basis: "propaganda" was originally a straightforward (not derogatory) term for "propagation of [religious] faith", "broadcast" was originally an agricultural term (for spreading seeds through a field) that later got co-opted in advertising, and drive-in movies originated from the British government displaying war propaganda films from vans on large exterior walls in WWI. The only issue that I have is that the latter parts of the book become a little tiresome to read; part of that is because I have read from other places about the issues surrounding Internet tracking and advertising, while part of it is because the author could have better connected developments in Internet advertising to prior developments in newspapers/radio, so the repetition of key points without those deeper connections being made explicit (or only being made partway) felt a bit wearisome. Overall, though, I recommend this book for anyone who'd like to learn more about the history of advertising, how people have tried to fight back, and how the cycle continues. Follow the jump to see more details, as well as further scattered thoughts and questions I have about this book.

Book Review: "Identity and Violence" by Amartya Sen

I've recently been able to read the book Identity and Violence by Amartya Sen. It's a relatively shorter book, taking me ~3 hours to finish. The author focuses broadly on how personal identity is neither singular nor static, but is multifaceted, context-dependent, and dynamically evolving over time based on the choices people make. He further argues that a lot of sectarian strife (whatever identity the sect may encompass) occurs because people can be led to make one facet of their identity encompass their entire identity and to then act in destructive ways based on that. Additionally, he provides numerous examples of how facets that tend to be associated with individual cultures (whether ethnic, religious, linguistic, or other), with such shoehorning leading to detrimental stereotyping and unsupportable cultural fatalism, have in fact emerged over many such cultures across continents at various points in time, sometimes independently, while other times due to cultural contact and diffusion. With this, he suggests that a lot of the well-meaning efforts to integrate religious minorities into Western society, as well as efforts to reconcile religious or ethnic factions that have been at war in other countries, are misguided due to their single-minded focus on the same sorts of categorization that have led to such conflicts in the first place, and that instead, such efforts should appeal to the broad variety of identities that people hold dear to them and that make them feel whole.

Overall, I generally agree with the thrust of this book (further justifying the notion that Amartya Sen seems to capture my lay ideas about economics and society in a systematic and scholarly manner), and the numerous historical examples of cultural interaction, cultural diffusion, and the development of ideas such as democratic political participation and the protection of human rights across continents and across time periods of course jibes with things that I've learned in history classes in school and elsewhere. The book is a pretty solid read (despite a couple of minor typos that can easily be overlooked), and it brings forth many interesting ideas. I'm glad that I read it recently, given that issues of privilege, identity politics, and communal violence have been in the news lately; I would perhaps like to think that the author may have articulated ideas of privilege and "intersectionality" before those terms came into vogue in the last few years for people interested in social justice, but something the book makes clear is that these ideas of intersectionality, if not the particular jargon, are probably much older than just a few decades. Despite all of that, I do feel like there may be a few things missing in the discussion, and my question about those issues come after the jump.

FOLLOW-UP: Rebutting the New York Times Review of "A Universe From Nothing"

Somehow a few months ago, my family discovered the existence of this blog, and the first post they read was this one, for which this post is a follow-up. They then bought the aforementioned book for me so that I could read it and perhaps understand the criticisms laid out in the New York Times article that I rebutted.

Well, I read the book. It was a fairly interesting read. Having taken the class 8.033 — Relativity, I would say that everything up to around the middle of the book is stuff I've seen before in the context of general relativity. After that comes some stuff that is new to me, like the ideas behind inflation, virtual particles, and how multiverses can be explained within the framework of quantum field theory. They were all new and fairly strange ideas, but I accepted them fairly easily because it was clear how they fit into the framework of quantum field theory. After finishing the book, I went back to read the book review as well as my rebuttal of it, and I have to say that in many ways, the book review looks even slightly more ridiculous than before, and I'm actually quite happy with the assessment I laid out about a year ago.

Rebutting the New York Times Review of "A Universe From Nothing"

I was talking to my family today, and they mentioned that this week, Stephen Colbert interviewed physicist/author Lawrence Krauss on The Colbert Report, where he promoted his new book "A Universe From Nothing". They also talked about how they saw a review of this book on the New York Times that seemed rather critical of it, and they suggested that I read that review.

In fairness, I have not read the book, nor have I (yet) watched the interview on that show. But reading this article made me laugh and cringe simultaneously, and I am going to lay out why. I should also say that the book, which is supposed to explain how quantum field theory lays the groundwork for the universe springing from nothing, is for a popular audience. I would say that among the scientific community, the predictions of relativistic quantum field theory have been accepted for decades. Follow the jump to see what else I think about this.

Movie Review: 2012: Doomsday

I have to confess that (1) I'm not a huge fan of apocalypse films and (2) I had some preconceived notions of the movie before watching it. The entire premise of the movie is based on the Mayan "Long Count" calendar ending on 2012 December 21, but the truth (according to the Mayans) is that when the calendar reaches its end a new era begins and the calendar will restart (i.e. the world won't end) and that the date isn't actually 2012. I felt like this would destroy the premise of the movie, leaving in its wake just another generic apocalypse movie. However, my family really wanted to watch it, so I gave in and watched as well.
2012 is 83 minutes long, and thankfully no more; it was pretty bad. For one, the dialogue was some of the cheesiest trash I've ever seen, and this especially comes out when some of the characters vocalize the conflict between their newfound faith and their aversion to faith. But then, people don't generally watch apocalypse movies for the dialogue, so I figured there would be some awesome whiz-bang special effects to make up for the utter lack of dialogue.
I was wrong on that count as well. The rain and snow effects were some of the worst I've seen. When snow was falling in central Mexico, it looked like it was falling on a screen placed in front of the rest of the characters and scenery. Furthermore, it seemed to stick to the characters' hair but not to the surrounding fauna and flora, which makes no sense considering the characters' hair is probably a lot warmer than the surrounding plant life. The rain effects looked like they came straight out of an Indian movie from the 1960s (they were that bad). KDE 4 (or even TWM in Slackware) has better rain and snow effects than that movie.
Finally, all the preaching and talk about the anointed messengers (who, except for the indigenous girl and her baby, were all white Americans) of Jesus was a bit uncomfortable. I strongly suspect that this was actually a Christian filmmaker that made this movie (evidenced by the production group "Faith Films"), which also accounts for the pathetic effects and garbage dialogue. I'm surprised that such a niche movie made it into mainstream movie theaters.
In short, don't watch this movie (unless you're into preachy Christian films, and if you are, I have nothing against you).
(UPDATE: It turns out that I watched the wrong 2012. The real 2012, based on the Wikipedia article, is nothing like this. What I watched was some poorly-done evangelical knockoff. Wow! (UPDATE: As it turns out, my family bought this from Wal-Mart, explaining the emphasis on Christianity. Also, the title of this movie is 2012: Doomsday (which would probably have avoided trademark issues with the real 2012). I've updated the title accordingly.))