Author Archives: Nick

The Language Instinct – Steven Pinker

“In our social relations, the race is not to the swift but to the verbal – the spellbinding orator, the silver-tongued seducer, the persuasive child who wins the battle of wills against a brawnier parent.”

I have always assumed that we learn language. Steven Pinker thinks otherwise, and in his book he argues that though we may learn words and the superstructure of an individual language, language in general is something we instinctively do.

Though this is well out of my usual interests, the evidence seems compelling. Children will make consistent errors as they learn languages, errors they cannot have overheard an adult say: “Don’t giggle me” or “we holded the baby rabbits.” Language complexity is universal, Pinker suggests, because children reinvent it every generation. This is why children of parents who speak a language only very poorly, like deaf children whose parents speak very poor sign language, will without further input still end up using advanced and very complex signing rules, ones their parents do not use correctly. They shut out the errors of their parents and develop their own rules.

Languages have far fewer synonyms than we believe: most things we call synonyms actually have slightly different meanings. Children, Pinker points out, intuitively understand this. If you give a child a picture of pewter tongs, call it biff, and ask them to pick out another biff, they’ll pick out plastic tongs: they associate biff with tongs, because they don’t know the word. If you give them a picture of a pewter cup and repeat the process, children will pick out a pewter spoon as being biff. Since they already know the word cup, they assume biff is the material.

Why does it all matter? Pinker worries we tend to undervalue the importance of nature and overvalue the importance of environment in human development. Of course, both matter, and language neatly captures this interaction. Nature provides structure and underlying rules: environment determines which language we learn.

Language is not my area, and I flipped through several chapters that went into the structure of language in detail. That said, Pinker argues frequently for what seems like common sense in language, helping engage those of us who are not experts. He even takes on the language experts and shows that how people intuitively use the language actually makes more sense than the so-called rules, or how the rules are actually misinterpretations of the language. Everpresent, too, is Pinker’s vast knowledge and love of digressions: frustrating if you wish to write a paper, I suppose, but great fun for the casual reader. I didn’t enjoy this one as much as I liked his Better Angels, but I learned a lot and it was certainly worth the read.

Want more? You can pick up a copy of the Language Instinct here (or in the UK or Canada).

Small is Beautiful – E.F. Schumacher

“Any intelligent fool can invent further complications, but it takes a genius to retain, or recapture, simplicity.”

Schumacher wrote extensively about natural capital consumption and his worry about the exhaustion natural resources, culminating in Small is Beautiful in the 70s. As a result, most of the ideas it presents do not feel new, largely because the ideas have been discussed widely since then. It remains, however, beautifully written.

I particularly liked his discussion of education, and found other chapters less compelling: I thought I’d share a few particularly good quotes, however;

On Education

“The way in which we experience and interpret the world obviously depends very much indeed on the kind of ideas that fill our minds. If they are mainly small, weak, superficial, and incoherent, life will appear insipid, uninteresting, petty, and chaotic.”

“To do so, the task of education would be, first and foremost, the transmission of ideas of value, of what to do with our lives.”

“If the mind cannot bring to the world a set – or, shall we say, a tool-box – of powerful ideas, the world must appear to it as chaos, a mass of unrelated phenomena, of meaningless events.”

On Economics

“If we squander our fossil fuels, we threaten civilisation; but if we squander the capital represented by living nature around us, we threaten life itself.”

“We must study the economics of permanence.”

“A man is destroyed by the inner conviction of uselessness.”

“The modern world, shaped by modern technology, finds itself involved in three crises simultaneously. First, human nature revolts against inhuman technical, organisational, and political patterns, which it experiences as suffocating and debilitating; second, the living environment groans and gives sign of partial breakdown; and, third…the inroads being made into the world’s non-renewable resources, particularly those of fossil fuels, are such that serious bottlenecks and virtual exhaustion loom ahead.”

Who Killed Canadian History? – J.L. Granatstein

“[T]he achievements of the past, and even the failures of the years gone by, can be a source of strength to meet not only today’s challenges, but tomorrow’s, too.”

Yup, it’s another Canada post. In my defense, I do try to focus on the underlying themes of these books, but I grant they’re not interesting to everyone.

Granatstein disapproves of how history is taught in Canada, and I have a suspicion he feels that way about how history is taught in a lot of places. For him, history is about narrative and causality, about learning what happened in the past, and he worries that too much of history today is about exploring political themes like racism and sexism. He doesn’t disagree that those are important, of course, but argues they should be in politics classes, not history: history should include them, but not be limited to them.

In saying so, he’s not afraid to take a controversial stance. Social history, labour history, women’s history: all as equally important as political history, he says, but too often taught at the expense of political history. In practice those are the sorts of ideas that historians fight internecine wars over, and I suspect the knives were out for him when the book was released.

I don’t know what the right way to teach history is: one has only to look at textbooks in the West Bank to see how difficult it can be. Even an attempt to have each side write alternating pages of a textbook failed in that particular case, as the views of the two sides were so different as to be irreconcilable. As this blog may betray, however, I personally love history, and so definitely believe that knowing history is important in order to be a successful citizen of a democracy. Based on the polling data, it’s not clear North Americans (I haven’t seen data for anyone else) are learning any history at all, and so there is definitely room for improvement. As perhaps with all school subjects though, the challenge is finite hours and almost infinite subjects people think should be required. Assembling a common list appears to be almost as difficult as coming up with a common history.

The Origin of Wealth – Eric Beinhocker

“An African elephant is a strategy for making thermodynamic profits and reproducing in the environment of the African bush, and a Coronatae jellyfish is a strategy for making thermodynamic profits and reproducing in the environment of the deep ocean.”

Perhaps my favourite experiment discussed by Beinhocker is actually a computer simulation, run by Epstein and Axtell, named Sugarscape. In essence, they program an enormous chessboard, with piles of sugar on each square of varying heights. Agents (‘people’) are distributed across the squares with various abilities to find sugar, move around, and survival needs in terms of units of sugar. Agents are allowed to move around, eat, die, and have children, and Epstein and Axtell essentially just press go and see what happens.

What happens is a miniature economy, and one with very few assumptions embedded. Individuals move around and various patterns form: average wealth goes up, and over time average abilities increase as the more capable agents reproduce, and we see a fall in social mobility and increase in inequality as wealthy agents have children who also become wealthy. As Beinhocker rightly points out though, it is however not as simple as the skilled agents becoming wealthy; wealth levels are a function of the entire system, and no one factor appears to determine them. In other words, it’s complicated.

If the experimenters add a second type of resource, spice, then we also see trading. Trade routes develop, like virtual Silk Roads, and we see market towns, middlemen, and complex hierarchies of trade. If you want, you can even think of these as virtual investment banks and retail banks, though at some point the analogy will break down, or at least I hope so.

Beyond telling us that life is complicated, what does such a simulation give us? In broad strokes, it suggests modern economics is doing okay, at least in how it describes computer simulations: we see the development of trading as most economists would have predicted. It also gives us a lot more. It tells us what sort of fundamental conditions are necessary for an economy to appear; gives us an idea of how extremely complicated initial conditions will work themselves out; and it lets us work with entire populations where every single member is slightly different, rather than relying on simplified versions of populations as economics often does. Most of all, however, it lets us test ideas. We can introduce minor variations, and see what happens in the Sugarscape economy. Of course, our real economy is vastly different from Sugarscape, but it’s a start.

If you want to pick up The Origin of Wealth, you can get it here (or in the UK or Canada).

The Origin of Wealth – Eric Beinhocker

“This book will argue that wealth creation is the product of a simple, but profoundly powerful, three-step formula – differentiate, select, and amplify – the formula of evolution. The same process that has driven the growing order and complexity of the biosphere has driven the growing order and complexity of the ‘econosphere’.”

I can’t quite decide what I think of The Origin of Wealth. The book has considerable strengths: it contains one of the better histories of economic thought I’ve read, and its rich discussions of various economic studies and experiments are wonderful. I also found its thesis both interesting and compelling. Parts of the book, however, also feel like retreads of old ideas, with little particularly new to recommend them. I suppose what I can say is that it is excellent, but were it half as long, it would have been even better.

Focus on the good. Beinhocker is worried economics has got it wrong. When economics began, it emulated the ideas of physics, particularly equilibrium. Shortly after, however, physics abandoned the idea, and the real model for economics, Beinhocker argues, should be biology. He points to a meeting between physicists and economists in the 90s, when the physicists remarked that the economics reminded them of Cuban cars. The ingenuity of the Cubans keeping their cars running with salvaged parts was phenomenal, but they were still old cars.

The real economy, Beinhocker suggests, is determined by evolution and non-equilibrium physics. The supply of things is determined by the process of locally reducing entropy: we humans impose order on our world to create things we want. Our demand for things, in turn, is controlled by our preferences, which are determined by evolution. When you buy a shirt, it wasn’t designed: it evolved, in response to the demand of the market.

For what it’s worth, I suspect he’s probably right, and to be fair to economics it’s starting to adopt the ideas he discusses under the heading of ‘complexity economics’. The other strength of the book, however, is in some of its examples, and I liked a few of them so much I’m going to talk about them in detail later this week. So wait till then!

If you want to pick up The Origin of Wealth, you can get it here (or in the UK or Canada).

The World Until Yesterday 2 – Jared Diamond

“[T]he Sirionos’ strongest anxieties are about food, they have sex virtually whenever they want, and sex compensates for food hunger, while our strongest anxieties are about sex, we have food virtually whenever we want, and eating compensates for sexual frustration.”

Earlier this week, I gave my broad thoughts on The World Until Yesterday. Today, I’ll highlight a few of the more interesting examples Diamond gives.

Dispute Resolution

Many traditional cultures use what is Diamond refers to as “sorry money” – one cannot compensate someone for the death of a child or a parent, but one can say sorry. Parties are forced to interact until both feel satisfied and their previous relationship is restored. This contrasts sharply with the modern court system, which attempts to ensure reparations are paid or justice is served, but does not attempt to restore any previously existing relationship between the parties. To some extent, this makes sense: in a traditional society, you will almost certainly interact with the same people again, while in a modern one you will not. Still, Diamond suggests that the modern system can often leave people feeling unsatisfied or lacking closure. Justice may well be served, but it lacks the personal relationship of traditional societies.

Leisure

Children’s games in New Guinea, for example, almost never involve competition. One example would be when each child gets a banana. Each of them divides it in half, eats half, and gives the other half to another child, who then divides that half into quarters. They do this for as long as possible. How much children’s games say about a society is up for debate, but it’s a striking difference.

Risk

At one point, Diamond is about to put his tent under a dead tree, and his New Guinea companions refuse point blank to join him. At first he is surprised: the chance of a dead tree falling is miniscule, perhaps one in a thousand. On reflection, though, he points out that locals of New Guinea may sleep under trees over one hundred nights per year: even a miniscule risk, if repeated, is not worth taking. The modern world, in contrast, frequently takes such risks, whether driving cars or, dare I say it, designing financial systems.

Diet

Don’t eat so much sugar. Or salt. You should know this. I was interested though in the idea that the massive prevalence of diabetes in some developing countries (up to 30%), may not be a natural difference, but rather a result of natural selection. When sugar became popular in Europe, Diamond suggests, Europe too might have had an epidemic of diabetes deaths, and individuals who were most sensitive to it died off; western societies today have lower rates of diabetes simply because the most vulnerable have not survived.

The whole thing is great. You can get it here (or in the UK or Canada).

The World Until Yesterday 1 – Jared Diamond

“Traditional societies represent thousands of millennia-long natural experiments in organizing human lives. We can’t repeat those experiments by redesigning thousands of societies today in order to wait decades and observe the outcomes; we have to learn from the societies that already ran the experiments.”

A bit late on posting this – apologies. It’s been a busy week.

We too often mistake past cultures based on flawed information and unconscious assumptions. Jared Diamond has actually done the research, and has the breadth of knowledge to make interesting, provocative, and informative assertions on the nature of humanity and human society.

As a result, The World Until Yesterday is a great book. Jared Diamond is an absolute master of his field, as readers of his other books can attest, and his breadth of examples and insights is exhaustive. In past books though, he has tended to take a single thesis, and argue for it based on case studies. Here, Diamond examines 9 broad themes, discussing how we treat them in the modern world, and how they were treated then. In some ways, we are clearly better off: in other ways we are perhaps not. Those nine themes are dividing space, peace/dispute resolution, war, raising children, treatment of elderly, danger response, religion, language, and diet/lifestyle.

Perhaps the most fundamental takeaway is that there are many possible ways of organizing a society, and that the narrow field of possibilities we experience for ourselves is just that: narrow. Some of these alternatives are probably undesirable from the modern standpoint: among the Kaulong people, when a man died, his brothers would strangle his widow, or in their absence, one of her sons. If they failed to do so fast enough, the widow would mock and humiliate them in order to pressure them to fulfill their obligation. Others, though, have a definite appeal, as with care for children and elderly, or our diets.

Exactly what we should learn from traditional societies is up for debate, and Diamond does not attempt to reach a consensus. His point is more profound: that we should at the very least think about other possible ways of organizing our societies, and that traditional cultures provide a way to see other possibilities in action. As they shrink and disappear, we lose a cultural laboratory of untold richness.

If you’re interested in how human society works (and if you ask me, you should be), then you should read this book, no questions asked. You can get it here (or in the UK or Canada). Later this week, I’ll look at a few of the specific examples contained within.

The Righteous Mind 2 – Jonathan Haidt

“Morality binds and blinds. It binds us into ideological teams that fight each other as though the fate of the world depended on our side winning each battle. It blinds us to the fact that each team is composed of good people who have something important to say.” Jonathan Haidt

You can read part 2 of this review here.

Can liberals and conservatives understand each other? Haidt examines the priorities of each over his six bases for morality (care, fairness, loyalty, authority, sanctity, liberty). Liberals, he finds, place weight on care and liberty, with little or no interest in loyalty, authority, or sanctity. Conservatives placed weight on all the bases, with relatively more than liberals on loyalty, authority, and sanctity, and equal amounts on fairness. Incidentally, liberals are also usually more sensation-seeking and open to new experiences, while conservatives react more strongly to signs of danger.

As a result, he says, liberals find it hard to reach out to or even understand conservatives, because they place no value on the moral bases of conservatives. To test this, he studies how well each side could predict how the other would respond to questions. Conservatives and moderates did well; liberals, on the other hand, did very poorly in predicting conservative responses, particularly on care and fairness questions, because they assumed conservatives attached no weight to these bases.

The problem, Haidt says, is that when we already support something, when challenged we ask ourselves if we can agree with our previous position: we look for any reason to stick with what we support. When we intuitively disagree with something, however, we look for whether we must agree, and seize on any reason not to. Unfortunately, this makes it easy for us to ignore the views of others, and rather than acknowledging that each side is acting morally but simply from different moral bases, we assume that our opponents are evil and self-interested. Interestingly, by the way, research suggests that self-interest has no predictive power when it comes to voting: instead, the interest of groups with which we self-identify is the key variable, even when that conflicts with self interest.

How do we fix this? We must interact with other people. Our brains are “terrible at seeking evidence that challenges our beliefs, but other people do us this favor.” Forming a connection with someone and then having them disagree with you is the ideal way to make sure our beliefs are challenged. If we don’t form that connection first though, we too often debate not to convince others or learn ourselves, but to score points with our own side, who need no convincing.

“It would be nice to believe that we humans were designed to love everyone unconditionally. Nice, but rather unlikely from an evolutionary perspective. Parochial love – love within groups – amplified by similarity, a sense of shared fate, and the suppression of free riders, may be the most we can accomplish.”

You can pick up a copy of your own here (or in the UK or Canada). I’d recommend you do.

The Righteous Mind – Jonathan Haidt

“Trying to understand the persistence and passion of religion by studying beliefs about God is like trying to understand the persistence and passion of college football by studying the movements of the ball….You’ve got to look at the ways that religious beliefs work with religious practices to create a religious community.” – Jonathan Haidt

You can read part 2 of this review here.

There’s enough (and more!) to The Righteous Mind that I’m going to spend today talking about Haidt’s analysis of morality, and Wednesday talking about its implications for politics. Mix and match as you please, but the broad takeaway should be that I was enormously impressed with the book.

Haidt argues that morality does not and cannot flow out of reason and rationality. Instead, he suggests we decide whether something is moral immediately, and then use our reason to justify why we think what we do. In other words, our reason is like the rider on an elephant. When the elephant leans, the rider doesn’t know what it’s thinking and can’t control it: all he can do is post-hoc attempt to explain why it did what it did. In his words,

“We do moral reasoning not to reconstruct the actual reasons why we ourselves came to a judgment; we reason to find the best possible reasons why somebody else ought to join us in our judgment.”

What is morality though? Haidt compares it to the sense of taste. Some people may for cultural or personal reasons notice sour more than bitter, but everyone has the taste buds for all flavours. The bases of morality are;

Care – We feel and dislike the pain of others
Fairness – Justice, rights, and autonomy
Liberty – A resentment of dominance and restrictions
Loyalty – Patriotism and self-sacrifice for the group
Authority – Deference to legitimate authority and respect for traditions
Sanctity – The body is a temple which can be desecrated by immoral contaminants

He is no moral relativist, but for Haidt, understanding the morality of others means understanding that there is more than one base from which morality can be drawn. Reasonable people can disagree on the importance of each base, but that does not make them immoral.

Why, however, are we moral at all? The answer lies in a fundamental tension in how we evolved. We are partly selfish, Haidt agrees, but we are also partly groupish; willing to sacrifice for the good of the group. Morality is about suppressing and regulating self-interest in order to make cooperative societies possible. The key moment in human history was when a few individuals began to share a common understanding of how things were supposed to be done – from that flowed language, cooperation, and society. This groupishness is what we see in religion, in sports games, in Kibbutzim, in communes, and in other human institutions.

Unfortunately, though this can be good within a group, it does little for inter-group communication, as political dialogue today (I’m looking at you, American government shutdown) can testify. Fortunately, he addresses that too – see the next review! In the meantime, you can test your own morality bases and participate in his studies here.

You can pick up a copy of your own here (or in the UK or Canada). In light of the current state of politics, it’s perhaps particularly relevant, but honestly I found it one of the more profound books I’ve read in a long time.

River Notes – Wade Davis

“To walk down a gravel road just south of the border town of San Luis Rio Colorado and watch what remains of the Colorado pass through rusted culverts, bringing not fertility but toxicity to the land, is to ask what on earth become of this stream so revered in the American imagination, and yet now so despoiled that it today reaches the ocean a river only in name.”

If you’ve ever been in North America during the winter and eaten lettuce, you’ve drunk from the Colorado. The Yuma region, which gets 4 inches of rain a year, grows 95% of North America’s winter lettuce, watered almost exclusively by the Colorado. Without the river, America would be forced to largely abandon southern California and Arizona, and much of Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, and Wyoming; upwards of 25 million people forced to relocate, not to mention eat less lettuce. As it withers, the animals, plants, and natural beauty that rely on it wither too.

Wade Davis mourns its treatment. Wade Davis, for those who don’t know him, is a possessor of one of the coolest jobs I’m familiar with, being one of the seven permanent Explorers-in-Residence at National Geographic, and is the guy who explored how zombies were created in Haiti.

Framed by his own rafting journey down the Grand Canyon, he weaves together stories of the native people around the river, both the Anasazi, the Ancient Ones, whose ruins cover the area, as well as extant groups; the stories of the first Europeans to explore the river; its geological and natural history; and its exploitation through dam construction and water diversions.

Americans may find his lament particularly powerful, but beyond enjoyment of his beautiful writing, I also took away a number of broader lessons. Water is a resource we tend to squander, and we have not yet begun to bear the costs of such behaviour, at least in the Western world. We also tend to lionize dams as a solution to global warming, and as such River Notes is a useful reminder that they too have costs, like all sources of energy. Most of all, though, he ends on an optimistic call to action: to maintain the Colorado ecosystem may take as little as 1% of the total flow, and if it were not for “cows eating alfalfa in a landscape where neither really belongs,” he points out, the entire crisis could be averted. It takes, after all, over 1800 litres of water to raise a pound of beef.

Disclosure: I read River Notes as a free advance reader copy – it is released on Saturday. You can get it here (or in the UK or Canada).