Reviews

When a superior man hears of the Tao, he immediately begins to embody it. When an average man hears of the Tao, he half believes it, half doubts it. When a foolish man hears of the Tao, he laughs out loud. If he didn’t laugh it wouldn’t be the Tao. -41 Summary For my first read through (assuming there might be more) without much research I picked up Stephen Mitchell’s version. Two things of note, one Stephen Mitchell was also the one who authored my version of Gilgamesh which was fantastic. Second, he makes clear that this is an English “version” and not straight translation of the Tao Te Ching. This book came with his own commentary at the end, as well as a transcript of an interview about the process of translation. I read once all the way through, and then re-read referencing his notes. The Tao Te Ching itself is similar to the Old Testament in that its actual authors are lost to history. It appears to have been put together from various text around 250BC. The assumed author Laozi or Lao Tzu is a person we know next to nothing about, in fact he may not even exist. His name adds to this mystery by being translated as “old teacher”. That being said there are now over 250 translations of the text and its 81 short chapters. ...

Not much to say about this one. I picked it because I wanted to read something lighter. Published in 1988 by a Brazilian author this is a short story about a shepherd boy in Spain that has a dream that recurs to him about a treasure near the pyramids. This launches the boy into a quest to find it where he encounters many interesting characters and learns “life lessons”. The two main points of this book are that each person has their own “personal legend” (or dharma) and that the secret to happiness is in pursuit of your personal legend. The second point is “when you really want something to happen, the whole universe will conspire so that your wish comes true”. Overall, it was pretty good, I wanted something lighter and maybe overshot. This would probably be very interesting reading for a small little, tiny man child.

“They’ve been living this way for centuries, are you really gonna change that in a year? All you can do is try.” Summary The above words, quoted from an unlucky soldier stationed in Iraq, seem to epitomize the entire endeavor. George Packer does a brilliant job setting the stage and providing an overview of the why’s and how’s of the Iraq war. When it comes to events as significant as war, there are seldom singular reasons that confidently explain everything. WMDs were a reason the administration gave for invading; September 11th provided the provocation for public support. Beyond that, a menagerie of motivations and political realities were aligning to push America into war. According to Packer, George W. Bush was a principled man but not a leader with vision. As a result, when the catastrophe of 9/11 struck, he fell back on his gut instinct, which told him justice needed to be done, without adequately considering long-term consequences. Meanwhile, a parallel ideology known as neoconservatism, which had a particular vision of America’s role in the world, happened to be ascending. Thus, Bush’s gut feelings found theoretical support, providing the vision he lacked. ...

Summary Towards the end of Franklin’s life, he decided to write down an account of his life, ostensibly for the edification of his son. His authorship was briefly interrupted by his involvement in the Revolutionary War, and unfortunately, it appears he wasn’t able to finish it before dying in 1790. We are left with a brief account of his family history and selected anecdotes from his life, all the way up to around 10 years before the Declaration of Independence was signed. ...

This book was pretty long and mostly interesting. As one might expect it is fairly dense full of charts and diagrams. On the upshot is I now have a concept of what a standard deviation is. This book makes several statements: Everyone has varied levels of intelligence and this intelligence can be measured by what psychometricians call ‘G’ for general intelligence. G is a subset of IQ, but I’ll just refer to it via IQ. IQ has a high predictive power on various social outcomes including marriage, illegitimacy, salary, criminality and more. It is easier to be successful in life with a high IQ than with a low IQ. IQ is more important than how much money your parents had in predicting outcomes. Colleges have gotten better at selecting for IQ and therefore Ivy League schools get a much higher percentage of the best and brightest than they did 100 years ago. There is the emergence of a new class in America that they dub the “Cognitive Elite” these people are separated from the larger subset of the population in ways that were not the case 100 years ago. (i.e., private schools, rich neighborhoods, white collar offices, etc.). This new cognitive elite wields an extraordinary amount of power over the shape of our culture. IQ is affected by genetic and environmental factors IQ is pretty much set by the time you are 6 years old IQ varies between ethnicities in the following order from top to bottom Asian, White, Latino, Black. (They don’t really say why other than a combination of genetic and environmental factors) All of our best efforts in education haven’t produced as large of improvements in student’s IQ as most people think. The top IQ students have been neglected by government funding, which has instead been funneled towards the lowest performing students. Affirmative action is a disaster After reading this, whether right or wrong this book has been helpful. It was so controversial that it initiated many research groups to be formed to try and ferret out the legitimacy of the claims that the authors make, which is more useful than everyone nodding their heads in agreement. Most of the criticisms of this book center around their statistical methods and their decision to look at the correlation between race and IQ. It is worth noting that (from what I’ve seen) almost none of the conclusions the authors make have been refuted. For example, there is actually an apparent gap between white and black IQs (as of 96) for reasons unknown. My professional(joking) opinion is that the correlations are very compelling and intuitively it makes sense that a “smart” person would be more successful than a “dumb” person ON AVERAGE. That is pretty much the entire book in a single sentence, and I am not sure what is so controversial about that. As for the race difference thing, it makes more sense to me to look at it with open eyes instead of pretending it doesn’t exist. So, if there is a difference, we should do more investigations on trying to figure out how to close the gap. The authors sound defeatist on this point saying that all attempts in the past have failed to produce much change, but that doesn’t seem to be a reasonable conclusion to make from the data to me. In fact, the last section of the book was centered on what they would suggest for political actions based on this data and to me it was the worst part. As they aren’t political scientists it comes as no surprise their suggestions would tend towards the naive and whatever political bent, they brought to the table initially. Overall, I enjoy reading polarizing books because they are typically right at the center of important conversations. Rating 7.5/10

This book sets out to demonstrate how violence over history is on a downward trajectory and that we currently live in the least violent time in history by almost every metric. This is very counter intuitive considering we have gotten so efficient at killing people; indeed, we have invented weapons capable of wiping out the human race, but they have yet to be used. The future is a little more optimistic than it appears at first glance. This book starts by outlining various trends he found of violence that has drastically been reduced. For example, homicide, war, torture, executions, and lynching have all been in decline for some time. In the next section he talks about 5 factors that contribute to these declines. The first factor is “The Leviathan” borrowing the term from Thomas Hobbes who argues that even though governments are somewhat arbitrary they nonetheless decrease violence on the overall. The second factor contributing to peace is the concept of commerce. As they say, “if goods don’t cross borders, soldiers will”. Thirdly he attributes the feminization of culture as a cause for the drop in violence. He draws some very interesting correlations between cultures of honor and violence that I hadn’t thought of before. Honor much like a religious ideal can be inflated to infinite proportions leading to tiny insults being cause for a duel to the death. He then draws parallels between the duels of gentlemen from the past and gang violence in the present, showing how the motivation behind the violence is similar, it is just that one had been romanticized more. The ultimate example of this “honor” oriented violence is the era of chivalry. As women stopped being property to be fought over like oil or gold, many of these types of honor-based violence have decreased. Women also tend to be less aggressive on the whole, for example women are less likely to vote for hawkish foreign policy when compared to men. So as their ability to contribute and influence society has grown so too has their more peaceful ideas. The fourth cause in the decrease of violence is cosmopolitanism. He cites the printing press as having an outsized effect on people’s perceptions of other people. Crediting novels as the medium that allowed people for the first time to see the world from a different perspective. Doing this allowed people to feel the pain of others in ways that were not possible before literacy. The final reason he cites is what he labels “The escalator of reason”. He argues that enlightenment and humanist traditions have been the most successful tool in humanity’s arsenal for decreasing violence. To put it simply, if you believe in logic when you ask someone not to hurt you, by extension you also must apply the same logic to see that they themselves don’t want to be hurt. Thusly expanding our circles of consideration and integration. This book is well written, fairly easy to digest. It is full of interesting anecdotes and statistics that Pinker marshals to back his various claims. I enjoyed it, although I feel as if the book could have been shortened by a fair bit without sacrificing on content. There is some controversy as to his way of counting war violence to come away with the results he did, but no one can argue that violence has been restrained quite a bit since the Middle Ages. Especially when you consider the spine-chilling methods of executions and tortures employed and the complete lack of consideration for the welfare of humans that don’t look like you.

I first listened to the Bhagavad-Gita in its entirety. I found it somewhat interesting but ultimately a dud because it felt like every other word was either a Sanskrit deity that i was supposed to already know about or a Sanskrit word that represented an entire doctrine like the word “transubstantiation”. It felt like watching marvel’s avengers end game with a Spanish voice over without any context. Probably similar feeling to someone who has never read the bible reading a book like Hebrews or something. That being said there were some interesting things in there that made me want to dig a little further. I then washed down the Bhagavad-Gita with a book by Jack Hawley. He basically walks through every verse in the Gita and translates it into more modern western terms, adding a couple clarifying sentences to those pesky single word Sanskrit ideas. The idea that was most novel to me in the Gita was that Krishna and also (luckily) other Hindu philosophies break people and actions into 3 categories. Sattva, Rajas, and Tamas. Sattva being the highest representing balance, harmony and goodness. Rajas representing energy and motion and Tamas representing lethargy and darkness. The idea being that each person and action has all three of these present at all times but in differing proportions. This was an interesting choice and makes for a more dynamic categorization of actions than the dichotomies of the west. I will have to think more about this in the future. Another question this book brought up for me was wondering why the particular virtues of “Grace, gentleness, self-control, and humility” to name a few appear to be somewhat universal in religions? The Gita did overlap a lot with ideas of the New Testament. One of the biggest differences I recognized was that Krishna did not call for evangelizing his ideas. All in all, worth the read and has opened up new frontiers to think over. Also don’t let your wives become corrupted or they will ruin this whole caste system we have set up. That is all. ...

I found it somewhat interesting but ultimately a dud because it felt like every other word was either a Sanskrit deity that I was supposed to already know about or a Sanskrit word that represented an entire doctrine like the word “transubstantiation”. It felt like watching marvel’s avengers end game with a Spanish voice over without any context. Probably similar feeling to someone who has never read the bible reading a book like Hebrews or something. That being said there were some interesting things in there that made me want to dig in a little more.

Nassim Taleb investigates the improbability baked into the world and the expert’s underestimation of it. A quick synopsis of the title is that for many years it was assumed that all Swans were white. This assumption held true over thousands and thousands of observations. It remained true until Australia was discovered and lo and behold a Black Swan was found and overthrew the “scientific theory” that all swans are white. This anecdote is a reminder that we cannot verify anything, only conduct experiments that either confirm or disconfirm theories. Confirmation of a theory should not be considered verification. This problem is the main focus of the book which is: you can for sure know when you are wrong but will never know when you’re right. Taleb defines a Black Swan event as relates to the book as having the following characteristics: ...

Judea Pearl is one of the fathers of modern Bayesian Networks which are pretty much used everywhere these days. So, in my pursuit to find a book talking about AI, I stumbled across this book. This book explains Judea’s latest contribution to computer science which is a mathematical approach to modeling causality. In the book he starts by explaining where the phrase “correlation does not equal causality” comes from. His argument is that with statistics you will never be able to define causation, because statistics does not have the language or framework to make such statements. As such statistics and big data can only go so far in their abilities to provide answers for our questions. Instead of approaching problems with the esoteric methods of regression, data stratification and trying to control for various values based on intuition, he proposes that we should try to approach problems more like human beings. He breaks the idea of causality into three rungs on a ladder. He proceeded to explain a sort of calculus that quantifies the effects that different causal relations have on the outcome of a situation.