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0345336895
| 9780345336897
| 0345336895
| 4.05
| 10,698
| Apr 12, 1979
| Feb 12, 1986
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May 27, 2024
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0312141041
| 9780312141042
| 0312141041
| 3.52
| 428
| 1976
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0571214975
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| 0571214975
| 3.99
| 330
| 2003
| Jan 01, 2004
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really liked it
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Black Arrow, Concorde, Elite, Vodafone, the race for the human genome, and the lamented Beagle 2. £9 million, £900 million, £0.09 million, £10 million
Black Arrow, Concorde, Elite, Vodafone, the race for the human genome, and the lamented Beagle 2. £9 million, £900 million, £0.09 million, £10 million, £150 million, £40 million: combined, a tiny fraction of the Apollo budget. It takes an eye to spot what these have in common, to honour them as the giant creative landmarks they are. When the old industries faltered in Britain, the ingenious spirit of the backroom boys survived. The urge to build the future detached itself from lathes and wind tunnels, and reappeared in the new technologies of software, gene sequencing and wireless communications. (Note also Spufford's taste - he avoids the obvious exemplars, steam, longitude, telegraph, Tube Alloys, Bletchley, Radar.) It isn’t a category mistake, or an idle compliment, to call PACE2 poetry. Engineering is poetic, in the ancient sense of the original Greek word our ‘poetry’ derives from. Poesis meant making. And so every maker is a kind of poet; everyone who wants to subject ideas to the tempering of existence, and is willing to stay with the process as the ideas are changed by being realised, and cares enough to labour until the creation comes right. The words that might be used to describe a piece of engineering are secondary things, limping attempts to convey an act of making that didn’t happen in the medium that’s now being asked to express it. The poetry isn’t in the description. It’s in the numbers, it’s in the algorithms, it’s in the system design... We used to quote the joking definition of art,’ John Causebrook told me. ‘“An art is a science with more than seven variables.” So we used to say, yeah, we’ve got more than seven variables. We must be artists.’ He is best in class at spotting the philosophical and emotional significance of technical things. Every tool, every machine that human beings ever invented has created the possibility of a new physical state for the person using it... Asserting a proprietary right over the whole genome was not like holding a patent for, say, a particular model of car; it was like saying you had a patent on the very idea of a car in general, a patent that covered every conceivable self-propelled personal transportation device there ever had been – and ever might be in future – while your patent lasted. People kept saying, in 1998, that the twenty-first century was going to be the age of the life sciences, the century when applied genetics banished a thousand diseases, abolished a thousand sources of suffering, creating the same kind of step change in human mastery over the terms of human existence that mass mobility had done in the twentieth century thanks to the internal combustion engine. Well, in 1898, tiny manufacturers all over Europe and North America had been experimenting with different ways to fit a petrol motor together with four wheels and a transmission. Only a few designs, from a few firms, prospered; but it was the multiple experiments in multiple directions that allowed the few successful designs to emerge and to form the foundation of the car industry. It's a beautiful view of the world - or rather, a beautiful search. Spufford actively finds or forges beautiful parallels, not unlike the angels he mentions from Wings of Desire: one “attuned yourself to the particular concerns of that voice, its special idioms, its rhythm of experience; and now you let it fall, and searched again through the crowd, and took up another.” He goes and interviews these ascended nerds. They have names like "John Scott-Scott" and "Jim Scragg". Their offices are cupboard-sized. They often work on a midcentury civil servant pittance. Those who survive from the heyday of British rocketry all live in detached, modern houses in Home Counties commuter villages or Midlands suburbs. So does Mr Dommett. He, like them, drove home every day from establishments shrouded in secrecy to family tea and an after-supper pint in the Green Man. But he inhabits a much shaggier version of suburban pastoral than his colleagues. Their houses are ultra-neat, with outbreaks of supernaturally competent DIY, like externalisations of the kind of mind that adjusts a complex system until it’s just so. His is surrounded by a runaway experiment in growing wild flowers... These Morris men came dancing up the street, led by this big fat bloke in a kind of Andy Pandy outfit who was bopping people on the head with a pig’s bladder – and I said to my wife, “Sweetheart, you won’t believe me, but that man is one of the brains behind Britain’s nuclear defence.”’ The book is also wise about the British state and the peculiar organisms it supports or supported (the mad MP, the slash-and-burn Conservative, the impassive civil servant, the trade union suit, the nationalised CEO). Also about the Two Cultures - writing beautiful, effusive stuff about Kantorovich and the boffins is Spufford's rebuke of the dichotomy (though more of a rebuke to the foolish arts people who ignore half of human creativity and thought). To a good half of their fellow students, of course, they were just indistinguishable nerds. They had come to a place where the arts/sciences split in British education (and British culture, for that matter) manifested itself as a social split. Humanities students mostly didn’t hang out with science students, and vice versa. This wasn’t a matter of class division, since the science students came from the same mix of backgrounds as the arts ones, or of active hostility either: indifference and mutual incomprehension did the work of separation. It was a difference of style, more than anything. The arts students valued verbal prowess and they looked for the complexity that made their studies exciting in the forest of unpredictable connections that law or history or literature or anthropology kept ceaselessly throwing up. In their spare time, they put on plays, drank cheap Bulgarian wine, and protested against Mrs Thatcher. Oh, and had sex without worrying about their parents hearing them through the bedroom wall. To them, the way the scientists got their helping of complexity, by rooting around among the factual bones of the universe, was out of reach. They weren’t mathematically equipped to see it... He believes in gift economies, your work as your art, and shielding some things from Econ 101 (obeying a higher economics which includes beauty and dignity as variables). by having people who were proud of what they were doing, the British were getting the kind of quality that was needed without the sophisticated quality control methods that were being used in America. Spufford is thus able to write about the deep idiocy of both Benn and Thatcher, and has an acute sense of both the vast importance and self-congratulatory delusions of commerce: Under the recessed halogen lights of the Red Carpet Club, very little contradicted this perspective. There were logos woven into the carpet, and printed onto the porcelain of the coffee cups. No one was gross enough to demand actual cash for the coffee, or for the orange juice in the glass jug on the snowy linen cloth... This was a room for the new masters of the universe. Out there, beyond the smoked-glass windows, everything existed in order to be bought and sold, from thousand-acre lots of edge-city building land down to... the order of the nucleotides in every human cell; everything existed in order to be divided, packaged, transformed, exchanged, shifted between the multiplying warehouses of proliferating business parks, and gently squeezed, gently milked for the margin that you then paid to be admitted back into little bubbles of quiet corporate utopia like this, where the flight announcements were delivered at a sympathetic murmur and every article you read in the free copies of Fast Company and Business 2.0 in the magazine rack confirmed that moving goods through the market was the one, the true, the only occupation of mankind. The forgotten space programme is the most moving bit (the successful launch came after the programme had already been cancelled, so "their sad satellite Prospero... the magician who lays down his book, who gives up power over earth and heaven"). The British Interplanetary Society nerds cheer when a V2 lands near their pub, because hey someone made it to space. ("this was certainly the first V2 to be greeted at the receiving end with laughter and excitement. The BIS rose to their feet and cheered.... In terms of deaths per reichsmark, it was considerably less lethal than a handgun.") The British rockets were handmade, producing invisible superheated steam exhaust. The largest of them was 137cm wide. The entire R&D budget, culminating in a successful launch, was £9m, 3 thousand times smaller than Apollo's. Dribbles of HTP left behind after a test in the twists of a pipe assembly would drain out onto the sleeve of the person taking it apart: ‘Instantly the whole sleeve catches fire, pooff, as quickly as that. So everybody worked in twos, with one of them holding a running hose, and you just flicked the hose onto your mate when he was on fire, and he’d go, “Oh, that was a nuisance... It's not a particularly patriotic book, but for once I find myself fond of a national subculture. British engineering is depicted as quiet, bespoke, clever, economical, surviving in an American world in those places "where small brilliant teams could create the products". ‘If you don’t know what to do, do something, and measure it'... His political points are made in passing, like when he contrasts the British failure to launch space or nuclear industries with the French nursery successes ("The market... enormous, and the French, who stuck with space as much for la gloire as from commercial calculation, would inherit an impressive piece of it. Ariane makes a hefty profit, most financial years... Where RAF Fairford remained a shabby military base, minimally adapted for flight development work, its counterpart facility at Toulouse became the nucleus of a giant new industrial complex. (It’s now the nerve centre of Airbus)"). He is thrilled by the freedom we gave John Sulston: "He never had to write a grant application. (When he wrote his first one in 1989, asking the Medical Research Council for a million pounds to buy two gene sequencers, the answer arrived as a half-page handwritten fax. It said yes.)... John Sulston always had the same answer when an entrepreneur approached him, even in ambiguous cases where there might have been room for discussion. Sorry, no deal. ‘There is nothing for sale at the Sanger Centre.’" Every country in the world could have one of these histories of their sublime nerds, and should. (Yes, every country.) But the others won't, because they don't have anyone as good as Spufford. ...more |
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Jan 29, 2023
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Jan 18, 2023
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4.26
| 1,046
| Jan 07, 2020
| unknown
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it was ok
| A society without mathematical affection is like a city without concerts, parks, or museums. Something went wrong, that I don't love this book. I t A society without mathematical affection is like a city without concerts, parks, or museums. Something went wrong, that I don't love this book. I think the technical is essential for real intellectual work; normal mind-numbing maths education put me off for years; I thirst for meaning; it's by a teacher at one of the best maths schools in the world (actual best, not just Fancy). But it's essentially a hippie self-help book which got into a university press. I'm surprised it doesn't open by saying namaste to me. People often think of abstraction as stripping away meaning. But in fact, abstraction does the opposite—it enriches meaning. When you see that two things have similar structures or behavior, then those similarities create a connection, a new meaning for you that wasn’t there before. Poincaré famously said that “mathematics is the art of giving the same name to different things". “make your daughter practice math. She’ll thank you later.”13 The op-ed never asked the question of how to teach math so she’ll thank you now. The list of values at the back is shockingly poorly conceptualised. But Su is a powerful analyst - just one rule for abstractions and another for humans. (All I want is humanism without sentimental overreach. It's unclear whether I can have this.) One problem: he is too nice for me. (“Let me start by thanking you, the reader, for taking the time to sit with this book and these ideas. Simone Weil said, “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity”) It's a very Christian book. Not in its metaphysics: in its intentional naivety, piety, humility, and cuddliness (though Weil and Buber and MacIntyre come up). He is credulous about the findings of educational psychology, including the absurd Pygmalion effect size. Every chapter includes a letter from a maths student in prison, the book ends with a long awkward interview with him, and Su gave some fraction of the royalties to him. One exception: chapter 9, a laudation for power. A huge number of smart people talk as if coercive power was the only sort. They are poisoned by paying too much attention to society. Years of study have still not given me the virtues Su rightly names - persistence, patience, disposition towards abstract beauty, gaman. Ain't giving up though. Maryam Mirzakhani... once said: “The beauty of mathematics only shows itself to more patient followers."I know. At my local hiking club, there’s bonding over a shared love of hiking. When it’s time to go, we split into different skill levels to do the hike at various speeds. I have no trouble admitting that I’m a slow hiker” By contrast, in mathematics the joy often requires the skill. Borcherds made me laugh: “I was over the moon when I proved the moonshine conjecture. If I get a good result I spend several days feeling really happy about it.Days! The puzzles are all nice and can be solved in your head, a good property. But read Rota, Hersch, Taleb, Lockhart, Gardner, Byers for the meat. ...more |
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Jun 27, 2022
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1782276122
| 9781782276128
| 1782276122
| 4.13
| 41,937
| 2020
| Sep 03, 2020
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really liked it
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A big list of facts. But good facts! Beautiful or terrible facts, arranged by Labutut frantically mining Modern Europe for ironies and antimonies. (A
A big list of facts. But good facts! Beautiful or terrible facts, arranged by Labutut frantically mining Modern Europe for ironies and antimonies. (A fun game: how many words would you have to change these ~short stories~ into a standard good magazine profile?) (Actually some of them aren't facts, which punctured the good giddiness a bit: * Scheele actually did eat the hydrogen cyanide, and lived. * He repeats the credulous truism about Turing's death but then walks it back a few sentences later.) * "while the movement of two bodies bound by gravitation can be known with precision according to the laws of Newton, the addition of a third renders it unforeseeable." No! there's no exact solution, but we approximate solutions easily and routinely. Numerics is the greatest branch of applied maths which no outsider appreciates. * "In 1910, [Schwarzschild] discovered that the stars had different colours, and he was the first to analyse them". Seems unlikely, though certainly the naked eye is insufficient. * "He published 112 articles in total during his lifetime, more than virtually any other scientist in the twentieth century." Cmon! * He makes much of the fact that no one understood Heisenberg's matrix mechanics, and struggled with the complicated calculations. But he fails to mention that the method is now taught to high schoolers. * The human bone fertiliser claim appears to be true(!!) Europe’s insatiable hunger had driven bands of Englishmen as far as Egypt to despoil the tombs of the ancient pharaohs, in search not of gold, jewels or antiquities, but of the nitrogen contained in the bones of the thousands of slaves buried along with the Nile pharaohs, as sacrificial victims, to serve them even after their deaths. The English tomb raiders had exhausted the reserves in continental Europe; they dug up more than three million human skeletons, along with the bones of hundreds of thousands of dead horses that soldiers had ridden in the battles of Austerlitz, Leipzig and Waterloo, sending them by ship to the port of Hull in the north of England, where they were ground in the bone mills of Yorkshire to fertilize the verdant fields of Albion. * The Mochizuki / Grothendieck connection is wild but I can't find anything else about it. Part of the book's importance is its portrayal of the romantic obsession with discovery. Schwarzschild was possessed, the van Gogh or Hunter Thompson of science. he travelled to Algeria to observe a total eclipse, but he failed to heed the maximum exposure time and damaged the cornea of his left eye. When they removed the patch he had been forced to wear for weeks, he noticed a shadow the size of a two-mark coin in his visual field, which was apparent even when his eyes were closed. The doctors told him the damage was irreversible. Grothendieck: Towards the end of his life, his point of view was so remote that he was only capable of perceiving totality. Of his personality, nothing but tatters remained, tenuous threads pulled apart by years of constant meditation. Very French. Overheated in places too. ("one of the strangest and most powerful equations that the human mind has ever created".) But hey, it brings out the majesty and romance of chemistry, Inter-Universal Teichmüller, the old quantum theory largely intact, and you don't see that every decade in fiction. ...more |
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1558604790
| 9781558604797
| 1558604790
| 4.30
| 71
| Sep 01, 1988
| Sep 15, 1988
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really liked it
| probability is not really about numbers, it is about the structure of reasoning-Glen Shafer By no means an introductory book; even chapter 1 will probability is not really about numbers, it is about the structure of reasoning-Glen Shafer By no means an introductory book; even chapter 1 will mean little to you if you haven't tried to model situations with both formal logic and probabilities before. (Some set theory wouldn't go amiss either.) Parts of it treat nearly-irrelevant dead controversies, just because he was still fighting off the McCarthy / production systems programme in the late Eighties. (For instance, I learned Dempster-Shafer theory in class, and it is sorta interesting and neatly evades Cox's theorem, but I still expect never to have to use it. It gets more than 50 pages here.) Bayesian networks, ingenious and progressive as they were, have peaked in use, though their children are still cutting edge and invaluable for human and nonhuman reasoning. All that said: Pearl thinks very hard about ultimate matters. He didn't develop Bayesian networks (and causal models) as a hack, but instead as a consequence of showing probabilities to be better than the alternatives when tweaked for computation, subjective Bayesianism to be capable of handling causal inference, graphs as the natural data structure for both relevance and cause, and the causal/evidential decision theory distinction as primal. On the surface, there is really no compelling reason that beliefs, being mental dispositions about unrepeatable and often unobservable events, should combine by the laws of proportions that govern repeatable trials such as the outcomes of gambling devices. The primary appeal of probability theory is its ability to express useful qualitative relationships among beliefs and to process these relationships in a way that yields intuitively plausible conclusions… What we wish to stress here is that the fortunate match between human intuition and the laws of proportions is not a coincidence. It came about because beliefs are formed not in a vacuum but rather as a distillation of sensory experiences... Building AI as feedback for formal epistemology! My favourite philosophers are technical like David Lewis; my favourite technical people are philosophical like Pearl. He's also very good at taking us through a derivation and underlining the big implications (e.g. P(A) = \sum P(A|B_i) P(B_i) as a model for hypothetical reasoning: belief in event A is a weighted sum over belief in all the ways A can obtain). There's plenty of maths in here but I never struggled much, probably because of this qualitative care of his. PRIS beats the arse off his own 2018 effort, perhaps because at this point he was still working incredibly hard to understand and synthesise competing approaches. Hard to rate. But if you want to seriously think about AI, you'll want to read it at some point. ---------------------------------- Misc notes * McCarthy is to probabilities as Minsky is to neural nets. He sent us down a rabbit hole, chasing nonmonotonic logic solutions to a numerical problem. (See also Chomsky vs prob language models.) * Others have used Pearl's vision to explain the ideal form of rationality, which humans depart from. * His discussion of extensional (hacking out a generalised logic) vs intensional (possible-world counting) approaches to uncertainty seems fundamental to me, bedrock. * The heart of the matter: Bayesnets are O(n) in variables, but actually with some complicated tweaks so are Dempster-Shafer galleries. * Dempster-Shafer is an interesting example of the contingency of (the context of discovery of) mathematics. It didn't have to be developed (since probs are adequate for so much), and yet it was, and it evades the normal arguments against other uncertainty measures and is thus alive, if unpopular. (Compare noneuclidean geometries.) What other dominant calculi would get similarly competing theories, if we threw a few decades of brilliance at them? ...more |
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Dec 18, 2019
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Oct 02, 2019
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0316509035
| 9780316509039
| 0316509035
| 4.22
| 1,676
| Sep 18, 2018
| Sep 18, 2018
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really liked it
| Fables and math have a lot in common. Both come from dusty, moth-eaten books. Both are inflicted upon children. And both seek to explain the world Fables and math have a lot in common. Both come from dusty, moth-eaten books. Both are inflicted upon children. And both seek to explain the world through radical acts of simplification. If you want to reckon with the full idiosyncrasy and complexity of life, look elsewhere... math makers are more like cartoonists.
So wise. You'd think a high-school maths teacher who draws intentionally badly wouldn't have much to say about the nature of reason, the ecstasy and despair of learning and abstraction, the beauty of inevitability. But here we are - this only looks like a children's book. For better or worse there's a pun or goofy self-deprecating joke every couple sentences. (The greatest of these: " CHAPTER 21: THE TIME HAS COME, LEON WALRAS SAID, TO TALK OF MANY THINGS") Everything in it is elementary, but using these simple examples Orlin covers a dozen of the most important intellectual developments: constraint theory of beauty, "unreasonable effectiveness", probability theory (via fascinating government lotteries with positive expected value!), the Great Recession from the quants' perspective, the replication crisis, the marginalist revolution... And he disses school mathematics often enough to charm anyone. I learned plenty (about bridges, polar animals, sabermetrics, about the inevitability and brilliance of ISO 216, and so on). Dissing folks for their probabilistic failures is a bit like calling them bad at flying, or subpar at swallowing oceans, or insufficiently fireproof. No big deal, right? I mean, does probability ever come up in the real world? It's not like we spend our lives clawing for intellectual tools that might offer the slightest stability in the swirling miasma of uncertainty that surrounds us every waking moment... He goes a bit wrong in his probability / lottery chapter - he spreads the rational choice theory (the idea that lotteries are good because it buys you nice daydreams) without reflecting that human attention and gumption are finite, and that the daydream thus robs people of a mildly but actually better future. Surprisingly, he also disses expected value (first-order users of which are "educated fools") with the trivial fact that infinities are strange: "Perhaps the ultimate repudiation of expected value is the abstract possibility of tickets [promising infinite payoff but only asymptotically]". Luckily decision theory is larger than one rule, and nowhere says that you must ignore your budget (+ leverage) and blindly obey the result of one multiplication... He also uses the false positive / false negative framework, which is usually misleading for squishy things like medicine and social science. (He also thinks Han Solo is valid.) While I am bitter that my own early maths education was so mindless, I'm amazed and glad that a few kids out there get to learn from someone like this. ...more |
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4.12
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0674970977
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0316491977
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| 0316491977
| 4.12
| 8,874
| 1981
| Jun 01, 2000
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019923356X
| 9780199233564
| B0073UN0RA
| 3.48
| 552
| Oct 23, 2008
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Was looking for a qualitative introduction to convey something of the excitement and philosophical importance - the art of discovering anything which
Was looking for a qualitative introduction to convey something of the excitement and philosophical importance - the art of discovering anything which isn't bleedin' obvious! nor knowable apriori! This has bits of that ("Statistics is applied philosophy of science"; "it is the technology for handling uncertainty") but is still too dry to recommend as a first exposure. He diagnoses the worst parts of university teaching: hand calculations, canned inference, and the (exhausting, interminable) bag-of-tools approach, rather than computers and The Framework. But the latter have steep learning curves. I think the biggest thing missing is simple tailoring of datasets: let them pick something they care about to study, to learn how to study on. Lots of ML methods covered, without a single mention of the phrase "machine learning". This is fair enough if you consider how much of (enterprise) ML hype is just rebranded 40 year old stats. Hand notes the origins of the field - as State-istics , i.e. as the beginning of bureaucracy and surveillance. But he doesn't feel the tension of this fact: that it helped to transform us, for good and ill, into legible people. One dodgy idea: he claims that numbers offer a more direct apprehension of reality than words, that they're realer. But this isn't why they're better: they're better because they're more sensitive - it's at least possible for them to track any size change in the world, while words are mostly stuck to medium-sized dry goods - and because they are easier to spot errors in. ...more |
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Jan 22, 2019
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Jan 22, 2019
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0345409469
| 9780345409461
| 0345409469
| 4.29
| 74,830
| 1995
| Feb 25, 1997
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038797993X
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| 038797993X
| 4.07
| 230
| Mar 16, 1995
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1848312385
| 9781848312388
| 1848312385
| 3.94
| 1,322
| 2009
| Jan 01, 2011
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liked it
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Not so much a biography: instead a study of recent Russian anti-Semitism, the viciousness of Soviet academia, and but also the wonderful alternative s
Not so much a biography: instead a study of recent Russian anti-Semitism, the viciousness of Soviet academia, and but also the wonderful alternative subculture that lived uneasily within it. This subculture hid inside the superhuman apolitical dreamland, mathematics.* It could only exist because of the sacrifices of famous and decent men, Kolmogorov and Aleksandrov. Their selective maths schools seem to have been the only nice places to be in the entire empire, for any intellectual with a taste for actual discourse, or for the truth. (Reasons it can't be so much a biography: the subject refused to talk to her, does things that are very hard to explain, and doesn't go out much.) The teacher Ryzhik's story about the evil entrance exam he sat is so, so sad: “Coffins” were questions specially designed for the Jewish applicants... rejection was administered in a peculiarly sadistic way... if [Jews] succeeded in answering correctly the two or three questions on the ticket, then, alone in the room with the examiners, they would be casually issued an extra question... a problem not merely complex but unsolvable. The examiners would then nail the cover of the coffin shut: the Jewish applicant had failed the exam... Gessen is well-placed to write this - she was a maths nerd in Soviet Russia around the same time. As far as I can tell (which isn't very far) her grasp of the maths (one chapter for the crown jewel) is fit for purpose. But Gessen is out to bust Perelman's reputation for hyper-individualism; so she focusses on the devoted teachers and functionaries that pulled strings to get an abrasive Jew into the heart of Soviet academia, and his incredible luck in starting graduate study just as Glasnost happened. She wants to highlight the poverty of his character - his antisocial withdrawal, his complete and intentional ignorance of politics, his naivete, his savantism. It doesn't work. Yes, he's rigid; maybe he is composed of a curiosity, a competitiveness, an ethics, and nothing else (no vanity, humour, romance, charisma, empathy, theory of mind, tolerance, compromise, doubt). So what? Why does everyone need to be rounded? Does she sneer at athletes, the other people with lives this seemingly contorted and simple? David Foster Wallace managed to get over himself, on this note:
Gessen is, to be frank, quite cruel: she never passes up an opportunity to mention appearances - that that athletic boy of 1970 is "now an overweight and balding computer scientist", that the house of a man caring for his wife with late-stage dementia is "a messy place, lived in awkwardly" and he himself "similarly unkempt"; that Perelman didn't change his underwear or clip his nails as a teen. This is the shallow side of the New Yorker style on show - or else the malign side of Russian honesty. Either way fuck it. (Though Perelman would probably approve.)
The great mystery, which Gessen understandably can't touch, is why after 36 years of focus he suddenly stopped doing the only thing he'd ever done. How could he? How can that much momentum be shed? What does such a man do next? Subtract a star if you don't care about maths or if you can't abide people being mean to nerds (as both the old apparatchiks and Gessen were). --- * One of the oddest things about Perelman, because it maybe explains him turning down a million quid and the highest honours the world can bestow, is that he'd disagree with that sentence: maths, the least animal and least irrational thing we have, is too political for him. There was a little bit of nasty jostling at the time of the announcement - but nothing compared to any other science, let alone any government. Maybe the bubble everyone set up for him was bad for him, because it robbed him of perspective and so made the mild case of fuckery seem like a complete invalidation of mathematical culture. But maybe a rigorous rule-based mind would always explode eventually even given a scale to measure instances of bias. ...more |
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Hardcover
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0753555204
| 9780753555200
| 0753555204
| 4.15
| 362,247
| Sep 16, 2014
| Jan 01, 2001
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liked it
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What we hate about business books is their clichés, their fawning, their Panglossian grin, their being completely invalid because they don't consider
What we hate about business books is their clichés, their fawning, their Panglossian grin, their being completely invalid because they don't consider survivorship bias, and their prose. This one avoids all these things and is radical in an unconventional way.* It's hard to know what to think of Thiel. He's easy to demonise - much easier than his loudmouth peer Musk. For instance, he's anti-college, anti-affirmative-action, anti-Clinton - and even openly anti-competition! (And a vampire!) But I've been impressed with his clarity and sense of proportion in interviews, and nowhere here did I find the Girardian anti-humanist conservatism that Gawker, Vulture, Vox, (...) made me expect. For instance, this spiel moves me every time I hear it - the billions of hours we steal from children every year: We teach every young person the same subjects in the same ways, irrespective of individual talents and preferences. Students who don’t learn best by sitting at a desk are made to feel somehow inferior, while children who excel on conventional measures like tests and assignments end up defining their identities in terms of this weirdly contrived academic parallel reality. and similarly plaintive and humane bits: Why work with a group of people who don’t even like each other? Many seem to think it’s a sacrifice necessary for making money. But taking a merely professional view of the workplace, in which free agents check in and out on a transactional basis, is worse than cold: it’s not even rational. Since time is your most valuable asset, it’s odd to spend it working with people who don’t envision any long-term future together. If you can’t count durable relationships among the fruits of your time at work, you haven’t invested your time well—even in purely financial terms. He is simply not simple. There are four positive references to Marx, four to Zuckerberg; two to Shakespeare, two to Bezos. He is a revisionist, then, intolerable to one side and oddly scathing about the other. (The chapter which translates Google's public rhetoric is not complimentary, for instance.) His niche seems to be the repugnant but true. So, like Taleb without the bluster and boasting. Which feels bizarre, like I'm in a different timeline where Taleb is actually aiming to not alienate a mass audience. He says true things about things I know about: the history of economic thought (Walras did indeed lift the formalism of general equilibrium from physics) and the deadened air of contemporary Political Philosophy. His contribution to Trump's campaign was risible and maybe a defection against the world - but notice that even this lapse speaks to his ability to find unexpected truths - FiveThirtyEight gave an 80% chance of a Clinton win at that point. So maybe his analysis and helpful checklist for startups are true too. It's a shame few critics of capitalism will read this - for he is one, in his way: Americans mythologize competition and credit it with saving us from socialist bread lines. Actually, capitalism and competition are opposites. Capitalism is premised on the accumulation of capital, but under perfect competition, all profits get competed away. The lesson for entrepreneurs is clear: If you want to create and capture lasting value, don’t build an undifferentiated commodity business. (Of actually-existing capitalism I mean.) How on earth can you argue that monopolies give more social utility than high competition? First, distinguish three kinds: 1) criminal saboteurs and antitrustees (Apple); 2) government-licenced pets (US car dealers, the East India Companies); and 3) "creative monopolies" who gain their massive market share by doing something much, much better than everyone else. Obviously only the latter is good for society. I was recently rushing to the airport, and pulled the quickest route (via underground via train via foot) from Google Maps. On the way, I noticed a sign in the Tube and realised that actually a different line was a much shorter route. So I walked 10 mins to that line, to find, of course, that it was suspended all weekend and, consequently, that Google is better at my life than I am. This is what he means. He goes further and says that the spare resources and vision of a creative monopoly is the source of innovation and so
The model is structurally the same as the old one about the Agrarian revolution: farms meant that for the first time, not everyone had to work full-time on food production, which let them specialise in other roles (war, gods, justice, lore) and eventually - slowly - invent new things. Even so, I thought of an alternative road to dynamism, given perfect competition and so no profits: competition leads to low prices, which leads to savings, which are pooled into investment funds, which give entrepreneurs the same kind of space (and potentially the long view) that profits do. Other people would not use the word "monopoly", trying to manage the connotations, trying to persuade us by smoothing things over. This is not Thiel's strategy. One chapter argues that "Success is not just luck", mostly on the back of the existence of serially successful entrepreneurs (it is plausible that once could be luck, and plausible that one success brings massive funding, deserved or not. It isn't plausible that someone could dumbly blunder into 3 billion-dollar executions, even given the easy ride for the second and third). It pains me slightly to admit the latter, because it tints my otherwise complete loathing of Steve Jobs. --- Misc notes * He notes that the term "developed nations" is a sign of our lack of ambition, of a premature, smug, quasi-willed halt. * The dot-com boom was even crazier than you thought: A South Korean firm wired us $5 million without first negotiating a deal or signing any documents. When I tried to return the money, they wouldn't tell me where to send it. * It is not yet clear whether killing Gawker was good or bad. Either way, like his Trump donation, you must acknowledge the sheer gall and direction. * One should do a Straussian (between-the-lines) reading of anyone smart, conservative and public, because there will be a lot that's unsayable. I don't care to. The few who knew what could be learned, * Actually hold on. The man's a transhumanist, an anti-school radical, a funder of one of our only large-scale experiments in urban planning or libertarianism, a rationalist. Why do we call him a conservative? --- Short, original, modest, and he credits his ghostwriter on the cover. Minus one point because it makes 200 large claims in 200 pages and has no citations for anything. * Thinking about it, it's not so much that he avoids cliche, as that the erudite context defangs them. "Zero to One" sounds like the usual kind of motivational crap, except that it's actually a good illustration of his maxim of creative monopoly ("0 -> 1 is much, much better than 1 -> n"). And the subtitle "How to build the future" is not figurative and not petty: he cites Bostrom's trajectories about the ultimate fate of the universe - and is only focussed on technology because that's what will get us past the Rise and Fall trap, the stagnation trap and the extinction trap. ...more |
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1
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not set
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Dec 21, 2018
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Dec 21, 2018
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Paperback
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1447273281
| 9781447273288
| 1447273281
| 4.30
| 135,184
| Jun 04, 2015
| Jun 04, 2015
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liked it
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Initially, this looked like a Brin rip-off, or a Vinge rip-off, or even a Pratchett rip-off. And the prose is just serviceable. Title sucks too. But i Initially, this looked like a Brin rip-off, or a Vinge rip-off, or even a Pratchett rip-off. And the prose is just serviceable. Title sucks too. But it blooms: the long evolutionary pathway it follows - from a spider jeeust 'thinking' that pack hunting might be a good idea, to a full manned space program - is excellent. The alternative technological route is the great bit - what would industry look like without fossil fuel, a mechanised society without metal? - and the protagonist spiders who find the route are easy to empathise with. Ants are used as robots, factories, laboratories, and eventually as CPUs: There are hundreds of tamed ant colonies within Great Nest, not counting those in the surrounds that undertake the day-to-day business of producing food, clearing ground or fending off incursions of wild species. Each colony has been carefully trained, by subtle manipulation of punishment, reward and chemical stimulus, to perform a specific service, giving the great minds access to a curious kind of difference engine. {over-literal bull-shit} (Tchaikovsky overstates massively the potential of ants as a processing channel, though - witness the giant leap in practicality from ~1cm mechanical relays to (even the crappiest) fully-electronic vacuum-tube. Nothing so slow and large as an ant colony could carry out much logic-gate work without taking much longer than a human-level worker and anyway accumulating huge errors.) \{/over-literal bull-shit} (Their bioengineering stuff is actually more realistic than Vinge's spiders' breakneck 50-year sprint through the C20th and C21st centuries, even if you include the Uplifting virus. This is because Vinge's telling is deterministic - they discover all the same stuff as us, in mostly the same order - and their culture a cartoon of ours.) His other successful theme is incomprehension: females not understanding male liberation, spiders not understanding how a depressed solitary human could be sentient, Kern not understanding anything. (Mostly the spider gender politics are boring, just bizarro patriarchy with a cannibal twist.) The main antagonist, the mad hubristic scientist starts off dull and strawish (why did it take 300 years for her to ask what rough genus the spiders were?) but the moment she stops that stuff and reaches across the species barrier is quite beautiful. Also, Tchaikovsky often drops out of the Spiders' worldview mid-sentence to telegraph what you, a human, should be thinking of all this (an example is the use of "curious" in the passage above). The humans are less interesting, fairly stock generation-shippers. There is this inversion, that the scholar of dead languages is Key Crew, plot-critical all the time: To study and laud those antique psychopaths during the Earth's last toxic days had seemed bad taste. Nobody liked a classicist. Anyway worthwhile, momentarily dazzling. *** How does it do as Serious science fiction? Social development: Lots. The spiders' matriarchal anarchism is shown with realistic downsides. The ark ship humans go through several revolutions and regressions. Software development: Some, but all pretty high-level. Thousands of years of uptime for some systems, with only hints at how to keep it going. Some nice linguistic archaeology. Actual Science: Mostly evo bio, little bit of computer science and crypto maybe. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Nov 27, 2018
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Nov 30, 2018
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Nov 15, 2018
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Hardcover
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0571225233
| 9780571225231
| 0571225233
| 4.08
| 4,057
| Aug 19, 2010
| Aug 19, 2010
|
it was amazing
| ‘Look, the thing about Leonid Vitalevich is that he argues like that because he believes, he genuinely believes, that it’s argument that settles th ‘Look, the thing about Leonid Vitalevich is that he argues like that because he believes, he genuinely believes, that it’s argument that settles the issue. He is not scoring political points, or pleasing his friends, or giving shrewd knocks to his enemies. He expects to persuade people. He thinks that scientists are rational beings who respond to logic if you show it to them. Of course, he judges everybody by himself. He makes his mind up according to induction and deduction. Therefore, everyone does.’ according to his daughter... he wrote to every Soviet leader from Stalin to Andropov [telling them they were doing it all wrong]... without making any reference to demand or to markets, Kantorovich had discovered a demand-like logic in the structure of production itself. In his scheme, it was the volume of planned output that was to be maximised, not the customer’s satisfaction, but he had still introduced the idea that the utility of the output to somebody should be the guide to how production was configured. What is a question mark? An exclamation mark in middle age Reminder of what a book can be and almost never is. Above mere nonfiction and mere fiction. A deep and moving treatment of one of the most important questions (how can we make everyone happy?) and my current fixation (how can we make people realise the giant romance and supreme moral imperative of technology and work?). A light on the ignored gears that drive the world, the terminally boring made fascinating by the sheer force of understanding and curiosity and taste. A celebration of an unjustly obscure great man, Leonid Kantorovich, and woman, Raissa Berg, and man, Alexander Galich. A moving portrait of a great and terrible man, Nikita Khrushchev. Comically well-researched (he reads Brezhnev's tailor's memoirs; he visits the dance hall; "all of the tattoo designs here are authentic, and can be found in Danzig Baldaev et al., Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopedia (Gottingen: Steidl, 2004)"), synthesising a vast literature (and but also a single sampled path taken though its indeterminacies). I care for every character, including the monsters. Real tragedy - for some of them really did mean well. We begin in the confident rationalism of catch-up-growth in a socialised economy. It's easy to forget that even the capitalist economists briefly glumly agreed that the reds had the edge in growth: If he could solve the problems people brought to the institute, it made the world a fraction better. The world was lifting itself up out of darkness and beginning to shine, and mathematics was how he could help. It was his contribution. It was what he could give, according to his abilities. He was lucky enough to live in the only country on the planet where human beings had seized the power to shape events according to reason, instead of letting things happen as they happened to happen, or allowing the old forces of superstition and greed to push people around. Here, and nowhere else, reason was in charge... The Plan: Gosplan’s annual output of commodity allocations... 11,500 pages in seventy volumes [nearly all computed by hand, recalculated hundreds of times each year] Spufford does more to make me feel Khruschchev's coarseness, idealism, and vitality than reading his smuggled memoirs did, and despite S often using the same direct quotes: They tried to crush us over and over again, but we wouldn’t be crushed. We drove off the Whites. We winkled out the priests, out of the churches and more important out of people’s minds. We got rid of the shopkeepers, thieving bastards, getting their dirty fingers in every deal, making every straight thing crooked. We dragged the farmers into the twentieth century, and that was hard, that was a cruel business and there were some hungry years there, but it had to be done, we had to get the muck off our boots. We realised there were saboteurs and enemies among us, and we caught them, but it drove us mad for a while, and for a while we were seeing enemies and saboteurs everywhere, and hurting people who were brothers, sisters, good friends, honest Spufford manages this without knowing Russian! Your mental picture of the Red Army’s advance into Nazi-occupied Europe is not complete if it does not include, alongside the mass rapes and the dromedaries pulling baggage wagons, the sight of Eddie Rosner and his band playing ‘The Chattanooga Choo-Choo’ among the ruins of cities The crux, the point at which the dream died, and forever: If they could produce a million tons of steel, they could produce a million tons of anything (No.) Throughout this book, it is necessary to remember that, on certain crucial points, most people in the Soviet Union will have known less about its history than does an averagely-informed Westerner in the twenty-first century The deep inequality of the state which sacrificed all values except growth and equality: life was pretty good up at the top, with a salary twenty times, thirty times the wages on the shopfloor, as steep a relative reward as the spoils of any capitalist executive. There’d be a car and a cook and a housekeeper, and a fur coat for Mrs Red Plenty to wear when the frost bit. There’d be a dacha in the country, from whose verandah the favoured citizen could survey the new world growing down below The reserved car lanes for Party officials is only the most visible division. One remarkable bit involves the distinction between the original revolutionaries and the professionals (represented by Kosygin and Brezhnev). The sociopaths and mops. The most egregious and tragic goodharting in human history. It almost looked like Paris. But he had seen Paris. Moreover he worked in film: he saw this city, and he couldn’t help but notice the way its surfaces habitually turned face-outward to be seen, instead of inwards for the comfort of the inhabitants. He recognised the thinness of the scrim, the cutting of corners where the audience would have its attention elsewhere and be content to register a general blur of grandeur. Those doors would be out of focus anyway: who needed to make sure they actually fitted their frames? The skyscrapers blocked out bold volumes of air, the walls of the city were receding planes, leading the eye back to a sky painted on glass. Moscow was a set, and like all sets looked more convincing from the middle distance than close up.He had started to brood lately on what was behind it; on what you would find if you peeled back a corner of the painted hardboard... On top of everything else it is, it is one of the great works of scientist fiction, an actual depiction of actual thought (though as usual, not the steps of the mathematics). She had her own professional vision which removed her, in some ways, even further from everyday human sympathies, when she was looking through her science’s eyes. She too was a believer in a world that could be reduced, along one dimension of its existence, to information: only in her case, it was the information of the genes, not the information of the computing circuit, which stood as the pattern of patterns. And once you had seen it, once you had parted the curtains of the visible world and seen that human beings were only temporary expressions of ancient information, dimly seen in tiny glimpses by the light of science’s deductive flashlight, but glimpsed enough to tell that it was vast, and intricate, and slowly changing by indifferent rules of its own as it went on its way into a far future – then all the laws and plans of the self-important present looked like momentary tics and jitters in comparison. A dark message, posted from the past to the future; a dark armada, floating through time. Dark masses, moving in the dark. Dark water. Dark ocean swell... See also Crooked Timber. ...more |
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1
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not set
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Jun 24, 2023
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Sep 09, 2018
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Hardcover
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0812536355
| 9780812536355
| 0812536355
| 4.32
| 33,656
| Mar 1999
| Jan 15, 2000
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really liked it
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A beautiful portrait of pragmatism vs idealism, colonialism and collaboration, surveillance culture vs everything, the possibility of deep translation
A beautiful portrait of pragmatism vs idealism, colonialism and collaboration, surveillance culture vs everything, the possibility of deep translation, the beauty and gaucheness of trade, and the ultimate fate of civilisations. Programming went back to the beginning of time. It was a little like the midden out back of his father's castle… There were programs here written five thousand years ago, before Humankind ever left Earth. The wonder of it — the horror of it… down at the very bottom of it was a little program that ran a counter. Second by second, the Qeng Ho counted from the instant that a human had first set foot on Old Earth’s moon. But if you looked at it still more closely… the starting instant was actually about fifteen million seconds later, the 0-second of one of Humankind’s first computer operating systems… Vinge's great skill is in drawing out sick tragic tension for hundreds of pages, driving the reader on to ever more complex injustices, until... The smooth-talking fascist antagonists are a bit too simple, a bit Harkonnen; their mind-raping slavery, their inversion of justice by lying perfectly, their flat-toned planning of atrocities: "At which time, we'll feed them the story of our noble effort to limit the genocide." Ritser smiled, intrigued by the challenge. "I like it." You are made to wait 500 pages for a comeuppance. The "Focused", the mindwiped slaves are extremely creepy; weaponised savants (see Ada Palmer's set-sets for a less straightforward treatment of human computers). Pham Nuwen, the great programmer-statesman, is far more interesting here than in the first book. He stands out in a large cast of interesting characters, all laying down schemes and intrigues with at minimum 20 years until payoff (at maximum 2000 years). Not ordinary, but not unrealistic; there have been dozens like him, possessed of or by the force that drives Napoleon off his island, Washington over the river, Alexander everywhere. He is a psychopath: The [armed fascists] might try to chase him around in here. That would be fun; Nau's goons would find just how dangerous their tunnels had become... The evolutionary role of such people - both the fearless hero, Nuwen, and the bloodthirsty predator, Nau - is not handled explicitly, but Pham is held up as a paragon. The arachnid aliens are much better than the hivehounds of the last book: Vinge and his translator characters' anthropomorphisations (or, rather, personalisations) are successful. Though maybe I'm just biased because the Spiders are shown going through their Information Revolution rather than their Pre-Renaissance period. It shows the deep connection between lack of economic growth, lack of intellectual growth and lack of social progress. The great scientist Sherkaner is also the one to challenge his society's sexual oppression. ("Either way, the cycles were shattered forever") The "counterlurk" is the Enlightenment. It's an exquisite portrait of the great promise and risk of a technological society; you get the end of hunger and disease, you get spaceflight, but you also get nuclear standoffs. There are wonderful symmetries between the Spiders and humans: they each have odd, distended sleep cycles (the humans going into cryogenic suspension most of the time, the Spiders hibernating centuries until the sun reignites). There's also the Sura/Pham, Qiwi / Ezr, and Victory/Sherkaner pairings, the actual beauty of complementing another, of power couples with aims beyond their own power. The title looks clumsy but isn't: it refers to a very large thought, that decentralising a system is the only way to make it last; that space is not only a cold and hostile place, it is also the way to break the terrible forces that might work against mere interplanetary civilisations: Pham would get their localizers in return for decent medical science. Both sides would benefit enormously. Magnate Larson would live a few extra centuries. If he was lucky, the current cycle of his civilization would outlive him. But a thousand years from now, when Larson was dust, when his civilization had fallen as the planetbound inevitably did—a thousand years from now, Pham and the Qeng Ho would still be flying between the stars. And they would still have the Larson localizers... One unintentional detail: the "huds" that all the human characters depend are I think just Google Glass. Stayed up late to finish it. Maybe 5/5, will re-read in a while and see. --- How does it do as Serious science fiction? Social development: all three societies depicted are very distinct and have believable economies, genderings, . The Qeng Ho - the empire without a capital, the force without an army - are a lovely depiction of the humanistic and progressive side of trade. The Emergents are maybe a little too simple, too feudal and dastardly. Software development: Fantastic. Central to the plot (titanic cruft as feature), with a subtle twist on the horror of legacy systems: an entire multi-planet civilisation is shown collapsing because its software is too fucking crufty to live. (That might sound ridiculous, but I promise you I see this story in miniature everywhere at my work.) No one does it better. Actual Science: Lots, with a breathless romp through all of C20th physics and engineering - though there's also a magic antigrav ore. ...more |
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Sep 09, 2018
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Sep 18, 2018
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Sep 09, 2018
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Mass Market Paperback
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0374530416
| 9780374530419
| 0374530416
| 3.89
| 1,419
| Jul 17, 2003
| May 16, 2006
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really liked it
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"Being an Enquiry into the Interplay of Chance and Necessity in the Way That Human Culture, Customs, Institutions, Cooperation and Conflict Arise" (20
"Being an Enquiry into the Interplay of Chance and Necessity in the Way That Human Culture, Customs, Institutions, Cooperation and Conflict Arise" (2004) by Philip Ball. An elegant pop treatment of the once-burgeoning physics of mass human behaviour. (Which physics follows hundreds of years of stupid and/or inhumane theories claiming the name "social physics"). A love letter to statistical mechanics: Most people who have encountered thermodynamics blanch at its mention, because it is an awesomely tedious discipline both to learn theoretically and to investigate experimentally. This is a shame, because it is also one of the most astonishing theories in science. Think of it: here is a field of study initiated to help nineteenth-century engineers make better engines, and it turns out to produce some of the grandest and most fundamental statements about the way the entire universe works. Thermodynamics is the science of change, and without change there is nothing to be said... Introduces a hundred topics from thermodynamics, economics, econophysics, game theory, and fields which don't have a name yet, including intuitive explanations of fearsome concepts like: self-organized criticality the 2D and 3D Ising model diffusion-limited aggregation in bacteria and cities Lévy-stability the business cycle random walks superfluidity and supercooling phase transitions bifurcation theory traffic flow Zipf's law the Small world phenomenon catastrophe theory ... Unlike shiny TED-style nonfiction, he refers directly to the original scientific papers and includes small interviews with the original researchers. No equations, but beautiful diagrams relating micro with macro, too: snowflakes to traffic and bacterial colonies to cities. The book's reception, in the main by middlebrow, mathematically illiterate reviewers shocked me a bit: their banner conclusions were "boo! people aren't particles!!", a truism which Ball spends much of the book thinking about, and "aaar horrible people have said they've found the laws of society before!!", a truism the first fifth of the book is a history of. In their haste to protect ordinary human difference from averages, and the notion of free will from technical explanations, they flee to safe refuges like "complexity" and "reflexivity", i.e. out of science. Ball can speak for himself though: The notion that we could ever construct a scientific "utopia theory" [e.g. classical Marxism] is, then, doomed to absurdity. Certainly, a "physics of society" can provide nothing of the sort. One does not build an ideal world from scientifically based traffic planning, market analysis, criminology, network design, game theory, and the gamut of other ideas discussed in this book. Concepts and models drawn from physics are almost certainly going to find their way into other areas of social science, but they are not going to provide a comprehensive theory of society, nor are they going to make traditional sociology, economics, or political science redundant. The skill lies in deciding where a mechanistic, quantitative model is appropriate for describing human behavior, and where it is likely to produce nothing but a grotesque caricature. This is a skill that is still being acquired, and it is likely that there will be embarrassments along the way. There is a real question about how deep into human behaviour the statistical approach can go. Econophysics, as a term and as a living, funded academic subfield, fizzled out shortly after this book was published. Apparently the SOC results have come in for a lot of criticism, though mostly of their overreach than the method being humanistically inapplicable or whatevs. Even so, I wish I had read this 5 years ago: it would have saved me lots of contortions. it taught me a huge amount anyway. (e.g. the huge moral panic, following the invention of descriptive statistics, about ever using means to describe any human characteristics, since the remarkable stability of e.g. the C17th London crime rate across decades seemed to speak of divine or diabolical insurance.) One of my top 5 books on economics, one of my top 5 books on physics. In one sentence: Social physics had at last begun to make exciting progress on understanding mass human behaviour. ...more |
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May 2016
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Jul 13, 2018
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Paperback
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0226556638
| 9780226556635
| 0226556638
| 3.84
| 322
| 2006
| Jul 15, 2006
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really liked it
| I've been most things in my life: a positivist social engineer, a Joan Baez socialist, a man. Now I'm a free-market feminist, a quantitative postmo I've been most things in my life: a positivist social engineer, a Joan Baez socialist, a man. Now I'm a free-market feminist, a quantitative postmodernist, a woman. I'm not ashamed of these changes of mind. In one sentence: The obscured origins of the modern world and its heart, as built by the hated bourgeoisie. To be read when: depressed about the modern world; locked into an ideology which doesn't people's lives better, esp. your own life; if you are like most middle-class people, vaguely self-hating. It is good to be a contrarian teen. Decorous even. I was straight-edge, socialist, feminist, a poetaster, an inverse snob, and a shunner of TV.* Call this sort of thing one level up, one contrarian step past received opinion (which defaults to boozing, family-level rather than species-level communitarianism, gendering, ignoring poetry, passively respecting fine art, and watching 4 hours a day). However, at some point the observant contrarian will disagree with someone and find themselves unable to write them off - as they usually do - as prejudiced, anti-intellectual, or ignorant. Worst-case, they will meet a deadly meta-contrarian, someone who once held their view but stepped past it on considering some missing crucial consideration. (For instance: it is common sense, or at least common practice, that it's fine to not give any money to charity. One step beyond is altruism: 'we have a duty to help the wretched of the earth'. But then consider that one of the first things people who rise out of poverty do is increase their meat intake, and so to industrialise - that is, torture - their animals. If, as the scientists strongly agree we should, we take this seriously, then poverty alleviation might not be good at all! But then, consider that wild animals also suffer, millions of times more of them than even factory farmed animals, and that human industrialisation plausibly decreases this by removing habitat (...) ) Meta-contrarianism is vital is because philosophy, politics and economics are littered with crucial consideration landmines like these, single premises that can fully transform our conception of good action. Our problem is not socialism or theism or atheism or conservativism: the problem is irrational, reflexive views with no connection to the balance of evidence: i.e. ideologies and not philosophies. Anyway: I was pretty good-hearted, but neither clear nor honest. An ideologue. McCloskey, a Christian libertarian(!) and much else besides, got to even me via our shared contempt for neoclassical macroeconomics and null-hypothesis significance testing, two things she critiqued twenty years before the Great Recession and the replication crisis. Then she shocked me with the meta-contrary title of this, the first volume in her epic economic history of moral development: a reclamation of a slur on the creators of this good modern world we all increasingly enjoy. I don't know how many iterations of contrarianism ("dialectic") I'm on; it's not important, as long as I hold my views lightly enough to do one more when the evidence demands it. Besides long meditations on the pagan and Christian virtues, she holds a serious discussion on Groundhog Day, Thomas Mann, and much other art, and is the best telling of the maligned, vital Great Transformation story. Triumphant and funny and trembling with erudition. * At the time I thought being an atheist was really contrarian, but in Britain it really isn't. (Outside an RME classroom.) The formal stats are only now showing a majority for stated nonbelief, but church attendance has been a minority practice since the early C20th. Galef type: Data 3 - highlight patterns in the world, & Theory 2 - models of what makes something succeed or fail , & Values 1 - an explicit argument about values, & Style 2 - learn a style of thinking by studying the author’s approach to the world. ...more |
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Jun 24, 2015
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Jun 24, 2018
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May 27, 2024
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3.99
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really liked it
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4.26
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it was ok
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4.13
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really liked it
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4.30
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really liked it
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Dec 18, 2019
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Oct 02, 2019
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4.22
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really liked it
|
Mar 26, 2019
|
Mar 26, 2019
|
||||||
4.12
|
not set
|
Feb 25, 2019
|
|||||||
3.44
|
not set
|
Feb 25, 2019
|
|||||||
4.12
|
not set
|
Feb 25, 2019
|
|||||||
3.48
|
liked it
|
Jan 22, 2019
|
Jan 22, 2019
|
||||||
4.29
|
not set
|
Jan 08, 2019
|
|||||||
4.07
|
not set
|
Jan 08, 2019
|
|||||||
3.94
|
liked it
|
Jan 08, 2019
|
Jan 08, 2019
|
||||||
4.15
|
liked it
|
Dec 21, 2018
|
Dec 21, 2018
|
||||||
4.30
|
liked it
|
Nov 30, 2018
|
Nov 15, 2018
|
||||||
4.08
|
it was amazing
|
Jun 24, 2023
|
Sep 09, 2018
|
||||||
4.32
|
really liked it
|
Sep 18, 2018
|
Sep 09, 2018
|
||||||
3.89
|
really liked it
|
May 2016
|
Jul 13, 2018
|
||||||
3.84
|
really liked it
|
Jun 24, 2015
|
Jun 24, 2018
|