Category Archives: Book Review

Essays – Michel de Montaigne

“Everyone is well or ill at ease, according as he so finds himself; not he whom the world believes, but he who believes himself to be so, is content; and in this alone belief gives itself being and reality.”

(Note the second part of this review can be found here)

Michel de Montaigne is perhaps best known not for his own works, but for his influence on other writers, including Descartes, Pascal, Rousseau, Emerson, Nietzsche, Balzac, Asimov, Shakespeare, and perhaps most recently, Taleb. He popularized the essay as a literary genre, and was one of the first authors to combine serious analysis with personal anecdotes, but as well as a writer he was a statesman, classicist, and skeptic.

Some of his works will ring oddly to modern ears, perhaps particularly his views on women and the need for obedience to authority, but in other ways he has much in common with modern viewpoints, including his dismissal of contemporary criticisms of the native peoples of North America as barbaric, arguing that cultures tend to assume everything different from themselves is barbaric without seeking to understand.

His essays vary from wide-ranging discussions on death, friendship, and education to narrow treatises on whether a commander should go to a parley in person or why we wear clothes. It is a book that relies purely on the judgment of the author, and in that respect he is actually more accessible to the modern reader than most of his contemporaries. For myself, I liked some of his essays and disliked others, but the good ones are very good, and even the poor ones are worth reading; agree or disagree, he has put considerable thought into his perspectives, and draws upon centuries of history to support them.

Next week, I’ll focus on his essays on Death and Education, but in the meantime here are some some samples of his thought:

“Man (in good earnest) is a marvellous vain, fickle, and unstable subject, and on whom it is very hard to form any certain and uniform judgment.”

“I, for my part, am very little subject to these violent passions; I am naturally of a stubborn apprehensions, which also, by reasoning, I every day harden and fortify.”

“I have lived in good company enough to know the formalities of our own nation, and am able to give lessons in it. I love to follow them, but not to be so servilely tied to their observation that my whole life should be enslaved to ceremonies, of which there are some so troublesome that, provided a man omits them out of discretion, and not for want of breeding, it will be every whit as handsome.”

You can pick up your copy of the Essays here (or in the UK or Canada). Or, if you’ve got a kindle, the essays are often cheap or free!

Antifragile 2 – Nassim Nicholas Taleb

“The best way to verify that you are alive is by checking if you like variations. Remember that food would not have a taste if it weren’t for hunger; results are meaningless without effort, joy without sadness, convictions without uncertainty, and an ethical life isn’t so when stripped of personal risks.”

Last time we explored the idea of antifragility – what, though, are its implications? Taleb has but one core lesson; we cannot escape or prevent volatility, so we must love it, and we can only do that if we are antifragile.

To do so, focus on doing, not on theory. Taleb argues that progress comes from small advances by doers, while theorists usually just post-hoc justify the progress of doers. As Yogi Berra tells us, “In theory there is no difference between theory and practice; in practice there is.” [Nick Note – I’m not sure I agree with this, and will object below, but I thought I’d pass it along anyway]

Second, focus on dispersion, not just on averages.  For a stock portfolio, for example, don’t have all your money in a fund with moderate risk/return; put 10% in an extremely risky fund with a large upside, and the other 90% somewhere very safe. We are best, he argues, when faced with alternating periods of recovery and high intensity, whether we are talking weight lifting, investments, diets, or emotions.

Third, obey nature in the absence of opposing evidence. Taleb follows Burke, arguing that the burden of proof always lies with the unnatural or new. The natural or traditional has been tried and turned antifragile through an evolutionary process, while the new has not. It’s a principle he lives by; on breaking his nose and failing to find empirical evidence of the value of ice, he dutifully refused ice. I can only respect his adherence to principle.

Fourth, value heroism. Heroes, Taleb points out, are people who sacrifice for the community; they are extremely antifragile, taking society’s risks on themselves. As a society, we should only respect people who take risks for their opinions. Roman engineers, for example, were required to stand under their bridges after they were built, while bankers in Catalonia were beheaded if their banks failed. Consultants and investment bankers today, on the other hand, bear almost no risk from their advice. This, Taleb argues, is the core problem with capitalism; the basic unit of interaction is the corporation, by means of which no individual bears any risk for their decisions.

It can sometimes feel like Taleb is taking an unjustifiably extreme position to provoke controversy – perhaps it’s effective, but it’s also somewhat annoying. He is convincing that practical knowledge is undervalued, for example, but that is hardly the same as showing that theory is always useless. More generally, his book can sometimes feel a bit one sided, as he writes to convince, rather than to inform. That aside, the book is phenomenal; Taleb is one of the foremost thinkers of our age, and if he sometimes seems overeager to support his own ideas, the rest of the time is he is truly wise. He’s also, by the way, one of the rare authors who can throw in a line like “Genoa and Venice were competing for the Eastern and Southern Mediterranean like two hookers battling for a sidewalk.”

You can get your copy here (or in the UK or Canada), and it’s definitely worth a look. Antifragility is a concept all of us could benefit from.

Antifragile – Nassim Nicholas Taleb

“Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better.”

(Part 2 available here)

What’s the opposite of fragility? Most people say robustness, resilience, or strength. Most people, says Taleb, are wrong. Fragility is to be weakened by uncertainty or volatility, while resilience is to be unaffected by volatility. What we need is something strengthened by volatility and change – something antifragile.

In antiquity, Taleb points out, he would rather be the hydra which regrew two heads when one was cut off, rather than the phoenix, which rose identical from the ashes when destroyed, or the Gordian Knot, which fell apart at the first unexpected shock (a sword, to be specific). It’s not enough to ignore volatility; we must love volatility.

That, in a nutshell, is Antifragile. Like all the best ideas, it’s a simple idea with immediate, important, and interesting consequences. In particular, Taleb argues that the modern world, in its quest for efficiency and optimization, has ignored the effects of volatility. As a result, shocks (Black Swans) have catastrophic consequences. When one hits, however, we ask the wrong question. We demand to know why we failed to predict the housing bubble or disease outbreak, instead of asking ourselves why we built a system that is tremendously vulnerable to such shocks.

Instead of eliminating centralization and vulnerability in our systems, like big corporations or big bureaucracies, however, we keep trying to predict the future, an endeavor doomed to failure. Shocks, as Taleb has argued in other books, are rare, and so attempting to predict them is impossible because they happen so rarely – we never have enough data points to draw conclusions. (For the economists reading, he believes in fat tails). Rather than trying to predict the future, we should build systems that can evolve and adapt to it.

The second major problem he points out (the first being that our world is extremely fragile), is that many areas of antifragility in our world today are only so because people have shifted risk to others. Bankers, for example, are antifragile because they can just get a bailout if something goes wrong, while taxpayers and/or deposit holders get it in the shorts.

Above all, Anti-Fragile is a work of tremendous insight, one of interest to both layman and specialists, though laymen might be well advised to take Taleb’s advice to skip certain sections. We’ll further discuss some of the implications later this week, but in the meantime you can get a copy here (or in the UK or Canada).

Zen Gaming and the Art of Electronic Sports – Lee Southard

“The true purpose of Zen is to see things as they are, to observe things as they are, and to let everything go as it goes. Zen practice is to open up our small mind.” -Shunryu Suzuki

I thought I’d stick to the theme of games this week, and add in some applied Zen; of particular interest to some more than others, perhaps.

I can’t claim to be an expert on the gaming world, but as Kelly McGonigal argues, it’s certainly an interesting trend in the world today. Southard, however, aims to apply Zen lessons to improving the skills of gamers, and to encourage electronic sports (as he refers to them) to go mainstream.

It’s a fun idea, and the book is structured to appeal to gamers, with each chapter (a level) focused on giving specific stat increases and abilities to the reader. The result is engaging for gamers, but risks being a bit less appealing to non-gamers. Still, the attempt to apply the lessons of Zen to a modern activity is interesting, and the book is a relatively light read, albeit while providing the opportunity for reflection, as any good book on Zen requires.

I found particularly interesting his chapter on Awareness, a fairly standard first step in meditation practice. Southard suggests applying the same to gaming; instead of getting sucked into the game and falling victim to instinctive fight or flight reactions, he advises gamers to keep a part of themselves back, to note when they’re falling into bad patterns of behaviour and to enact changes as necessary. Gamers may be in particular need of this advice (I’m looking at you, people who die from exhaustion while gaming), but I suspect it’s good advice for everyone, ensuring that we not just undertake an activity, but that we note our strengths and weaknesses in order to improve. Deliberate Practice, in Karl Ericsson’s phrase.

Looking to improve your own gaming, or just find Zen? Keep reading (or in the UK or Canada). Or, sign up for the Subtle Illumination email list to your right! Disclosure: I read Zen Gaming as a free reader copy.

Of Dice and Men – David M. Ewalt

“Unlike board games, which limit the player to a small set of actions, or video games, which offer a large but finite set of preprogrammed possibilities, role-playing games give the player free will…if clue was played like D&D, you could grab the lead pipe, beat a confession out of Colonel Mustard, and have sex with Miss Scarlet on the desk in the conservatory.”

Dungeons and Dragons arouses diverse emotions even apart from the social stigma it often carries, from scorn to obsession. Writing a history of the game, therefore, is a difficult endeavor at best. That said, approximately 30 million people have played the game since it started in 1974, and even today the release of an update to the rules commands the front page of the NYT Arts section. In the 1980s, tempers burned so hot it was linked to murders and satanic rituals, and it was banned by schools and churches. It’s an understudied, but important, subject.

At times, Of Dice and Men can feel a bit like hero worship – the author clearly loves the game. Its strength, however, lies with its exploration of the human need to play and tell stories. D&D is the foundation for dozens of ideas we take for granted in today’s board and video games, games of overwhelming popularity and influence. It was D&D, for example, that introduced the idea that characters get stronger over time, contributing to emotional investment and attachment on the part of players in games like World of Warcraft today.

What marks D&D as different from most games popular with teenage boys are its open-endedness and focus on cooperation. Instead of trying to beat the others, players compare D&D to communal storytelling, in which players work together to develop worlds and stories together. It appeals to the need for narrative in all of us.

Why does this open-endedness matter? In school, we teach children that there are correct approaches to solving problems, and that what they learn correlates exactly with problems they are given. In life, however, there are no limits on solution methods; originality is far more valuable in life than in school. To that extent, D&D introduces an important idea to children; the idea that they can achieve whatever they can think of.

D&D gives the players the opportunity to be heroes, in worlds they create and describe themselves. Perhaps in a similar manner, Of Dice and Men is fun, entertaining, and though likely appealing most to people already interested in games and D&D in particular, has insights to share even with those interested in neither. In the end, I suspect all of us would be better off with more opportunities to imagine and create.

Want the full history? Keep reading (or in the UK or Canada). Or, sign up for the Subtle Illumination email list to your right! Disclosure: I read Of Dice and Men as a free advance reader copy – it is released on Tuesday.

Cicero: A Turbulent Life – Anthony Everitt

“We follow the narrative of the fall of the Roman Republic through the excited, anxious eyes of a participant who twice held the reins of power – and who did not know how the story would end…In Cicero’s correspondence, noble Romans are flesh and blood, not marble.”

Cicero is one of the most influential figures of antiquity, in large part because so many of his writings survive. We have hundreds of letters, some of them written on a daily basis, several books, and large numbers of speeches from his time as an advocate and in various political roles, including as Consul during which time he suppressed an attempted coup and was awarded the title of Father of his Country by the Senate. He also coined several words which serve as the base of words we use today; moral, quality, essence, and swan song, among others.

Perhaps above all, Cicero was a great speaker, likely the greatest of his day. Even without Latin, that brilliance carries through translation; his quick wit gets him both in and out of trouble. In one case, Cicero prosecuted a former governor of Sicily for corruption, and the defending lawyer was paid with an ivory sphinx that had been stolen from Sicily. The defending lawyer at one point claimed he didn’t understand Cicero’s riddles, and Cicero whipped back “Oh, really? In spite of having a sphinx at home?”

At heart, Everitt is a Cicero apologist. Cicero’s reputation today is mixed; by his peers at the time he was seen as cowardly and indecisive (though a genius), and that perception has to some extent continued today. Everitt argues that the truth is much more positive. To be blunt, I’m not sure I buy it. Renaming indecisiveness “tactical suppleness” doesn’t make it so, and the book can sometimes feel like a hagiography, not a biography. As a result, the strength of the book is its history of the 1st century BCE, as seen through Cicero’s eyes, not biography.

To defend Cicero and focus on the good, the book unfortunately misses opportunities for insight into his full character. In the end, Cicero is perhaps best captured by Julius Caesar, who remarked that Cicero had won greater laurels than a general, because it meant more to have extended the frontiers of Roman genius than her empire. Cicero, and the first century BCE, are topics critical to antiquity: of the two, Cicero does a better job capturing the latter, and to my mind, a worse job capturing the former.

You can get the book here (or in the UK or Canada), or you can just sign up for the Subtle Illumination email list and get your wisdom that way!

Academically Adrift – Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa

“Historians remind us that higher-education institutions initially were created largely to achieve moral ends. A renewed commitment to improving undergraduate education is unlikely to occur without changes to the organizational cultures of colleges and universities that re-establish the institutional primacy of these functions – instilling in the next generation of young adults a lifelong love of learning, an ability to think critically and communicate effectively, and a willingness to embrace and assume adult responsibilities.”

For many, education is the silver bullet that can fix society’s ills, resolving inequality, safeguarding democracy, and inspiring the next generation of leaders. Given the expectations laid on it, it is hardly surprising that it is a fiery issue, subject to significant controversies on method, motivation, and goals.

For me, the most difficult aspect is that we do not have a single way to measure what education produces, or even agree what it should be producing. Some things correlate with increasing income later in life, others with increased self-confidence or improved results on standardized tests. In Academically Adrift, Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa try to summarize the quantitative literature on undergraduate education, attempting to draw lessons from what research exists.

In brief, they draw four lessons. First, that modern universities place a low premium on learning, leading to students who feel academically adrift. Faculty, administrators, policy makers, and parents, all tacitly acquiesce to a collegiate culture with a low premium on learning and an absence of moral guidance, forcing students to attempt to find meaning in other activities. Second, that the gains in student performance from attending university are disturbingly low; students do little better at the end of their education than at the beginning on various critical thinking and writing exercises. Third, that individual learning is characterized by persistent and/or growing inequality of outcomes. Finally, that while overall learning is low, there is significant variation within and between institutions, suggesting that improved results are possible.

These are useful and important lessons. Unfortunately, I found none of them particularly surprising; though I don’t have mental numbers in mind for size of most effects they cite, the direction of the effects comes as no surprise. I didn’t know hours per week spent studying had declined from 25 hours in 1961 to 13 in 2003, for example, but I had assumed the direction. For me, therefore, the book is useful as a reference work but is dry for general reading. I have Michelle Rhee’s Radical further down my list (the hugely controversial ex-chancellor of the D.C. public schools), which though I suspect will be less informative, I hope may be more interesting.

Want to keep reading? You can get Academically Adrift here (or in the UK or Canada). Or, just join the Subtle Illumination email list to your right!

The Prize – Daniel Yergin

“[W]e should be able to raise the whole power and efficiency of the Navy: better ships, better crews, high economies, more intense forms of war power – mastery itself was the prize of the venture.” –  Winston Churchill, talking of his decision to switch the British fleet to oil power in 1911

The Prize is one of the few books I’ve read I would describe as definitive. In it, Daniel Yergin tackles the history of the oil industry, and in scope, scale, and command of the subject he is unparalleled. It well deserved its Pulitzer.

Interpreting the history of the last 150 years through the importance of oil is somewhat disturbingly effective, a fact that Yergin makes the most of. World War 2, for example, he argues was won and lost due to the difference in oil supplies, forcing a German invasion of Russia and, in the Battle of the Bulge, leading to German tanks literally running out of fuel and grinding to a halt. The general lesson is perhaps that oil supplies have affected international policy for almost every nation state in the modern era, and almost no major event in the last century is left untouched by Yergin’s, as it were, oily hands.

The book is an impossible one to summarize in a few paragraphs, and I don’t propose to try. From Greek Fire, a mix of lime and petroleum used by the Ancient Greeks as an unquenchable war machine, to the first oil well, drilled in Pennsylvania in 1859 in order to make medicines and kerosene, through the breakup of Standard Oil and the world wars, to OPEC oil politics and Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait, Yergin explains history while exploiting his historian’s gift for finding interesting or amusing anecdotes in everything. I wasn’t aware, for example, that it took 1-3 kamikaze planes to destroy an aircraft carrier, or that President Carter referred to energy conservation as the moral equivalent of war (a quote from WIlliam James). Somewhat less grandly, I also wasn’t aware that the first motels were rented as often as 16 times per night (I leave to the imagination a nocturnal activity requiring 1/16th of the night), as they were valued for their convenient, by-the-highway location.

At 895 pages and seven years in the making, the book is hardly a light read. Nothing of its scope could be. It is however a fascinating read, and for anyone interested in the history of energy or global geopolitics, it is essential reading.

Up to the challege? You can get it here (or in the UK or Canada). Or, just join the Subtle Illumination email list to your right.

Decisive – Chip & Dan Heath

“[T]hat, in essence, is the core difficulty of decision making: What’s in the spotlight will rarely be everything we need to make a good decision, but we won’t always remember to shift the light. Sometimes, in fact, we’ll forget there’s a spotlight at all, dwelling so long in the tiny circle of light that we forget there’s a broader landscape behind it.”

The shoe company Zaapos offers all trainees $1000 to leave immediately and not work for them. Why? Consider the following decision-making process.

You’re faced with an important decision. You first look for your options, but narrow framing means you ignore several critical ones. What options you’ve found, you analyze, but confirmation bias means you fail to adequately look for information that disproves your thesis. Then, you make a choice, but fall victim to short term emotion and temptations. Finally, you live with your choice, but overconfidence means you’ve failed to prepare for error.

That, essentially, is the process Chip and Dan Heath describe in Decisive. Our brains are wired to act foolishly in some situations; how, they ask, can we do better? To help, they outline a series of mental tricks and approaches that allow us to better analyze, understand, and most of all improve our decisions.

What really comes through, however, is how often we don’t do what we obviously should to make a good decision. In a study of businesses, only 29% of teams considered more than one alternative option, while experts forecasting the future do less well than a simple extrapolation of base rates (though better than novices). Simple techniques can therefore be powerful; searching for options until you fall in love at least twice (better for houses than for marriages, perhaps), testing the future instead of predicting it, focusing on process, and asking yourself what you would do if none of your current options were available, can all have large payoffs.

All of which brings us back to Zappos and their $1000 offer. People who accept it, Zappos argues, are people they didn’t want anyway. It forces employees to stop, think, and decide, not just accidentally drift into a job they didn’t want. Those who remain know that they valued this opportunity so much they turned the offer down.

I’m not sure I learnt very much reading Decisive, but it was a quick and easy read, and some of the tricks for improving decision-making will certainly be useful. If you’re looking for a substantive addition to the literature, I can’t recommend it, but if you’re looking for a fun summer read it’s worth picking up.

If you do decide to pick it up, you can get it here (or in the UK or Canada). Or, join the Subtle Illumination email list to your right instead! (Doing both also permitted…)

The Art of Choosing – Sheena Iyengar

“In order to choose, we must first perceive control is possible.” – Sheena Iyengar

For those who haven’t heard of the jam experiment, researchers set up two jam-tasting stalls at a luxury grocery store. One offered 6 flavours of jam to sample from, while the other offered 24. More passersby chose to stop at the wide-choice stall, and on average, people tasted two jams at either stall. In the end, however, 30% of people who stopped at the limited choice stall bought a jam: only 3% of people facing 24 options did.

Sheena Iyengar conducted this experiment in an effort to show that though small increases in choice can be a strict improvement, large amounts of choice can actually make us worse off. In her book, The Art of Choosing, she examines the idea of choice and how it affects our lives.  Choice, and even more so believing we have choice, is integral to the human experience. Even animals in zoos apparently develop neuroses in its absence, as happened to Gus, a 700 pound polar bear in New York City Zoo who started swimming endless laps in his pool. It being New York, however, they brought in a therapist and he recovered.

Our affection for choice can lead us into trouble, however. Even when having extra choices actually makes us worse off, we still pursue them, and, as Gus demonstrates, when we don’t have enough choice we can struggle psychologically. Fortunately, how much choice we have is usually a result of narratives we construct for ourselves, both when we have too few and too many. Retirees given a plant and told to care for it themselves, as opposed to being given a plant and told the nurse would care for it, showed marked health improvements despite the fact that a plant was given to them in both cases. Similarly, Japanese students believed they had made far fewer choices in a given day than American students, since the Americans counted things like brushing their teeth or hitting the snooze button as choice while the Japanese students did not.

Though filled with interesting experiments and ideas, The Art of Choosing can sometimes feel somewhat oversimplified. It is made up largely of stories and anecdotes rather than analysis, and so will appeal largely to readers who prefer that style of book. For myself, I preferred Barry Schwartz’s The Paradox of Choice as an introduction to choice, Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations for self-constructed narratives, and Malcolm Gladwell if you’re looking to accumulate stories for cocktail parties. Still, if choice is something that interests you, the book is worth the read, and even more so is Iyengar’s original work on jam.

Want more? Keep reading here (or in the UK or Canada). Or, join the Subtle Illumination email list to your right!