Some Books
I’ve been reading a lot lately, but slowly. My new note-taking system seems to double or even triple how long it takes me to get through a book. Part of me wants to say “screw it all!” and go back to flying through non-fiction like novels but I can already tell how much more I’m retaining now that I’m actually writing stuff down.
Books I’ve read recently, and my opinions on them:
Corruption in America by Zephyr Teachout:
This book documents not the history of corruption but the history of the idea of corruption, though of course the two overlap in places. Teachout writes: “Corruption, in the American tradition, does not just include blatant bribes and theft from the public till, but encompasses many situations where politicians and public institutions serve private interests at the public’s expense. This idea of corruption jealously guards the public morality of the interactions between representatives of government and private parties, foreign parties, or other politicians.“ (p. 3)
Over time, the founders’ expansive understanding of corruption has narrowed to a definition requiring a quid pro quo. ”According to Justice Kennedy, corruption isn’t corruption if there isn’t a quid pro quo. In Citizens United he uses the phrase quid pro quo fourteen times… in 2000 Scalia scolded others for trying to separate ‘corruption from its quid pro quo roots’… Then in 2007 the Court started referring to quid pro quo as the meaning of corruption” (p. 238). Prior to Buckley v Valeo in 1976, “quid pro quo was not part of any definition of corruption. The phrase appeared less than one hundred times in all bribery and extortion cases, anywhere, before 1976 and less than ten times before 1950.” (p. 239)
I strongly recommend this book to anyone with even a passing interest in politics, government, law or philosophy.
This book summarizes the experiments and theories that Dweck is most famous for: those on fixed vs growth mindset. Unfortunately, it’s a strange cross between a popularization and a series of experimental papers that is not particularly enjoyable to read. If you’re interested in seeing the details of her work, perhaps in order to criticize them, I’d recommend digging up the original articles. And if you just want a summary of what she found, Wikipedia will get you there a lot faster.
Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age by Duncan J Watts
I’ve been meaning to learn more about network theory and complexity, and figured a “for the masses” popularization would give me a gentle introduction and a nice overview. I wasn’t disappointed.
I was particularly charmed by the section on cascades (approximately p. 235-244). A cascade is when information - a message, an innovation, a piece of pop culture - spreads in a network of nodes. A flip of a single node could be considered a very small cascade. A global cascade occurs when information/state spreads in a self-perpetuating manner, altering the state of the entire network.
How information spreads through a network is influenced by the connections in the network as well as the vulnerability of individual nodes to “flip” or “pass on the message”. In order for a global cascade to occur, there need to exist “percolating vulnerable clusters”. Networks with few connections may be locally unstable, as nodes will be easily influenced by a single neighbor, but it’s difficult for cascades to spread across so few connections. Networks with too many connections, conversely, are too locally stable for cascades to spread.
In networks at the upper boundary of connectedness, when a percolating vulnerable cluster is activated, the state spreads to the entire network. This is referred to in physics as Discontinuous Phase Transition and, colloquially, as “crossing the chasm”. In this way, innovations, pop culture memes, etc are not spread based on intrinsic value but depend far more on the network through which they’re spreading.
I should probably stop there! In any case, cascades will likely be my jumping off point for where to go next.
Merchants of Doubt by Erik Conway and Naomi Oreskes
This is another one of those “let’s talk about people misusing and warping science!” books, and I’m actually kind of surprised I got through it - when I tried to read Ben Goldacre’s Bad Pharma it made me so angry I couldn’t even finish it. This book is no less rage-inducing. You have been warned.
The book documents how a small number of people - often the very same people - have used their political and media savvy to cast doubt on legitimate scientific consensus about tobacco usage, the strategic defense initiative, acid rain, the ozone hole, DDT, second-hand smoke, and climate change.
If you don’t think you can stomach this book, these quotes provide the main takeaway:
“The failure of the United States to act on global warming and the long delays between when the science was settled and when we acted on tobacco, acid rain, and the ozone hole are prima facie empirical evidence that doubt-mongering worked. Decision theory explains why. In their textbook, Understanding Scientific Reasoning, Ronald Giere, John Bickle, and Robert Mauldin show that the outcome of a rational decision-theory analysis is that if your knowledge is uncertain, then your best option is generally to do nothing. […] The protagonists of our story merchandised doubt because they realized - with ot without the help of academic decision theory - that doubt works. And it works in part because we have an erroneous view of science.
“We think that science provides certainty, so if we lack certainty, we think science must be faulty or incomplete. This view - that science could provide certainty - is an old one, but it was most clearly articulated by the late-nineteenth-century positivists, who held out a dream of ‘positive’ knowledge - in the familiar sense of absolutely, positively true. But if we have learned anything since then, it is that the positivist dream was exactly that: a dream. History shows us clear that science does not provide certainty. It does not provide proof. It only provides the consensus of experts, based on the organized accumulation and scrutiny of evidence.” (p. 267-268)