Category Archives: Book Review

What Intelligence Tests Miss – Keith Stanovich

We should take care not to make the intellect our god; it has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality. – Albert Einstein

When people criticize IQ, they often argue that personality and character are equally important, as indeed they are. For Stanovich, however, even those critics give too much credence to intelligence. Not only are there many non-cognitive factors that matter, he argues, but IQ does not even capture cognitive ability: it measures intelligence, narrowly defined, but not what he calls rationality.

Intelligence, he suggests, is the ability to achieve a specific task or objective, as measured by IQ tests. Rationality, in contrast, is the ability to select goals and objectives. It is divided into instrumental rationality, which helps you achieve what you want for the minimum resources, and epistemic rationality, which ensures your beliefs actually correspond to reality.

The distinction is one any video-gaming teenager could tell you; characters in video games have both wisdom and intelligence, and absent-minded professors have only one of the two. To make the general case, Stanovich points to individuals given problem solving tasks. When given clear directions on how to solve the problem, high-IQ people do better: without directions, IQ appears to give little advantage in figuring out how to solve the problem in the first place.

Perhaps Stanovich’s most useful insight though is that of mindware. No matter how intelligent or wise you are, he points out, if you haven’t been taught probability you will struggle with some problems. “Installing” mindware like probability theory, expected utility, and others is essential. All of us benefit from focusing not just on learning knowledge, but on developing approaches and mental models that can serve us in a variety of situations. We can also benefit from reducing contaminated mindware: mindware that reduces our ability to think critically or analyze problems effectively, be those instinctive biases or taught ideologies.

There’s no denying that intelligence tests miss a phenomenal amount of what is important, and anything that contributes to our understanding is helpful. This doesn’t mean IQ tests are meaningless, of course; simply that they should be treated as one, very limited, piece of the puzzle. What Intelligence Tests Miss is by no means the final word on this subject, but it’s a good attempt on a very complicated issue.

Want to read more on intelligence? Get the book here (or in the UK or Canada). Or, join the Subtle Illumination email list to your right!

Stranger Magic – Marina Warner

“Magical thinking structures the processes of imagination, and imagining something can and sometimes must precede the fact or the act.”

In Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights, Marina Warner examines the presence of enchantment and magic in everyday culture, and the reasons for its continued persistence despite its difficult co-existence with science. To do so, she studies how the perception of magic and imagination has evolved over history in the context of the Arabian Nights, and worries magic has been made more comfortable for Western audiences through the exoticisation of Oriental material.

She begins each chapter with a chosen story from the Arabian Nights, and analyzes it in detail before moving on to its larger implications. For me, this was actually the highlight of the book: I haven’t read the Arabian Nights in years, and having someone explain the context of the stories was fascinating. She covers Shahrazad’s gradual move from stories of men wronged by women to stories portraying women as victims, eventually earning the Sultan’s forgiveness for all women and his agreement to stop executing one per day.

Arabian Nights was enormously popular in Europe when it was translated, so much so that many of the classic tales we associate with it, like Aladdin or Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, were actually additions by European translators. Warner argues that the Arabian Nights were one of the first major popularisers of flights of fancy in Western European thought. They have provoked imagination and ideas ever since, and it is imagination that is key to knowledge, key to ethics, and key to humanity. The Enlightenment may have been the Age of Reason, but it also required imagination, and it is fiction and magic that allow for imagination to grow. Unfortunately, she suggests, since then magic has become perceived as exotic and foreign, diminishing cultural exchange and cultural understanding, not just of reason and imagination, but of East and West.

The book, however, is almost impossible to take good notes on: she moves directly from Mongolian Shamanism to Obama’s Dreams from my Father, all in the context of understanding dreams. Such tangled webs make for interesting reading, though some chapters seem to lack relevance. That said, her thesis on the importance of imagination is one I am sympathetic to, and the framing of the issue in Arabian Nights is excellent. All of us might be better off if we were a little more willing, even in this rational world, to indulge in magic, both strange and everyday.

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

The Invisible Gorilla – Chabris & Simons

“It’s true that we vividly experience some aspects of our world, particularly those that are the focus of our attention. But this rich experience inevitably leads to the erroneous belief that we process all of the detailed information around us.”

In what is perhaps one of the best known psychology experiments conducted, subjects are asked to carefully count the passes of a basketball made between a team wearing white shirts and one wearing black shirts. About half the subjects fail completely to notice when a woman wearing a gorilla suit walks into the middle of the screen, pounds her chest, and walks off!

The authors of the experiment, Chabris and Simons, argue in The Invisible Gorilla that this captures a cognitive illusion, a situation in which our intuition leads us astray. In this case, almost all of us believe that were such a situation to happen to us, we would notice the gorilla. In reality, they suggest, looking does not imply seeing if our attention is directed elsewhere. The same problem occurs when we talk on cell phones while driving: we all believe we will still see what is going on in front of us, when in reality we emphatically do not.

They list several such illusions, including attention, memory, confidence, knowledge, cause, and potential. We do not see everything we look at or remember everything we have seen; we massively overestimate our abilities, particularly those of us who are worst at something; we say we could explain how a zipper works or why the sky is blue, but when asked cannot; we believe spurious causation claims with no grounding in evidence, as in the case of autism and vaccinations; and we believe there must be an easy way to unlock vast abilities in our brains.

We tend to intuitively believe in our abilities, whether multitasking or memory, yet experiments like the invisible gorilla or one in which 50% of subjects failed to notice when experimenters replaced their conversational partner with a different person while they were distracted cast significant doubt on these claims. Intuition, Chabris & Simons argue, may well be useful in the Gladwellian sense, but the only way to know whether it is accurate or illusory is to conduct randomized experiments. In this sense, they are firmly on the side of Banerjee and Duflo, though in a different context.

At heart, though, their book is one of stories; for every claim they make they tell multiple stories of experiments run and demonstrations seen, and so the book is both entertaining and educational. Our intuitions can guide us well, often for reasons unknown to our conscious selves, but a little humility would do us all good, instead of assuming our intuitions will always steer us correctly.

Looking to understand more of the psychology of illusions? Keep reading (or in the UK or Canada). Or, join the Subtle Illumination email list to your right!

Numbersense – Kaiser Fung

“Big Data has essentially nothing to say about causation. It’s a common misconception that an influx of data flushes cause-effect from its hiding place.”

You recently graduated from a law school, and are still searching for a job. You get a voicemail from your school telling you that they are conducting a survey of whether recent graduates have gotten jobs. If you do not respond, they will assume you have a job. Do you bother to call them back to tell them the disappointing news?

Odds are, you don’t. That’s why law schools use this and other techniques to game the law school metrics, disingenuously boosting their entrance GPAs and LSAT scores, reputational reviews, and post-graduation employment statistics. Too often, unfortunately, those metrics are taken at face value.

In Numbersense, Kaiser Fung argues that we are in the age of Big Data – an age of extensive, personalized information useful for purposes including marketing, economics, and sports, but also a source of confusion, doubt, and increased evidence for theories both good and bad. Numbersense is the willingness to probe behind headline figures and decide if the data is actually meaningful, whether law school statistics or the unemployment rate. We turn to data for answers, but it is too often overwhelming, misleading, or evidence only of correlation, not causation.

The last point is perhaps the most critical. Target, a large shopping chain, was so effective at predicting pregnancy from consumption patterns they accidentally informed parents before the daughter had herself let them know – a triumph for Big Data, if something of an awkward one (details can be found in Charles Duhigg’s report here). Unfortunately, this doesn’t mean buying a large purse causes pregnancy, but simply that they correlate. Regardless of the size of the data set, Fung argues, Big Data shows correlations, not causations.

Big Data has become something of a buzzword in recent years, and the explosion in available information is indeed of huge importance. It is not, however, a panacea, and Fung rightly emphasizes this. Whether giving a how-to manual for Law School Deans looking to game the system, criticizing the Groupon business model, or studying obesity, Numbersense is an entertaining read. It will likely have the most appeal, however, to non-statisticians: Fung has succeeded in creating an almost entirely non-mathematical introduction to big data, explaining the challenges of econometrics without requiring knowledge of statistics, and for that reason alone the book is a worthwhile read. Understanding the difference between headline and core inflation may not induce murder-mystery suspense, but Fung makes it both interesting and enjoyable.

Still interested? Keep reading (or in the UK or Canada). Or, sign up for the Subtle Illumination email list to your right! Disclosure: I read Numbersense as an advance reader copy – it is released tomorrow.

Present Shock – Douglas Rushkoff

“It’s not a mere speeding up, however much our lifestyles and technologies have accelerated the rate at which we attempt to do things. It’s more of a diminishment of anything that isn’t happening right now – and the onslaught of everything that supposedly is.” – Douglas Rushkoff

Early post this week: I’m in the air on Sunday, so won’t be able to post. I deny any irony in early-posting a review about bringing everything into the present.

Information can be either a storage or flow. Twitter is a flow: there is no point in going back and rewatching twitter feeds, because once it loses its present immediacy, it loses impact. We cannot catch up with it. Books, on the other hand, are storage, and can be returned to repeatedly. The problem with modernity is that we confuse the two, scanning a digital article with the same focus as we give our facebook news feed, and missing out on much of its value.

Rushkoff argues that we have begun to experience life as one long moment, always in the present, with no beginning and no end. As a result, we have stopped emphasizing narratives in our movies and tv shows; we attempt to be everywhere at once both in attention and physically; we try to make everything happen now rather than waiting; and we oversee patterns due to an overdose of data points. It is an interesting and compelling point, that we are placing less and less emphasis on things that are not happening now, and are overwhelmed by everything that supposedly is.

Beyond that (admittedly interesting) claim, however, I don’t find the rest of his thesis convincing. His argument that we no longer value narrative arcs, supposedly evidenced in flashback heavy Family Guy episodes, just doesn’t seem reasonable. Modern life is certainly accelerated, as Alvin Toffler argued in his book Future Shock, and it seems that the faster it gets, the faster we demand it goes. It seems to me though that we show just as much need for narrative arcs as ever, though perhaps less patience for long ones. Family guy still has a story – it’s just short and shallow.

Despite being on a fascinating topic, Present Shock didn’t add as much as I had hoped to the discussion, introducing few new ideas or ways of thinking about the world. Yes, multi-tasking brains do worse on almost every measure, but that’s fairly well recognized. His discussion of moon phases affecting chemical balances in the body, on the other hand, sounds a lot more like junk science, and the fact that he doesn’t provide any actual evidence for it suggests there may not be much. There is interesting information in Present Shock, but it is overwhelmed by the irrelevant and the unlikely to be causal.

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Checklist Manifesto – Atul Gawande

Are you using enough checklists? It feels like the world is getting increasingly complicated, and I’m sure we’ve all experimented with various memory aides to try to remember everything we have to do. These range from the humble checklist to the mighty online planning tool with hyperlinked entries. For most of us, though, I suspect it’s hard to know what we’re doing right.

Gawande, a surgeon himself, is firmly convinced by the virtue of the checklist, and in his hands it becomes a powerful and thought-provoking tool to confront complexity. He begins by pointing out there are two reasons we fail: ignorance, if we don’t know something, and ineptitude, if we know how to do something and do it wrong. It is the second problem that is the most serious in the modern world, he argues, and checklists can make a dramatic difference.

There are approximately 150,000 deaths following surgery in the US, about 3x as many as deaths from car accidents, and so he’s got a point. If checklists can reduce even a small percentage of errors in surgery, it could make an enormous difference. Fortunately, Gawande has a number of stories of astonishing success from checklist adoption. When Johns Hopkins introduced a checklist for central line insertions, for example, infection rates dropped from 11% to zero; when Michigan did, it probably saved over 1,500 lives in 18 months. The results are much the same in fields as diverse as aviation or skyscraper construction.

He does caution readers not to overreach, however. Checklists longer than 5 to 9 items long become cumbersome, and people start ignoring them. Good lists therefore focus on the steps that make the biggest difference, and the ones likely to be forgotten. Too long, and they stop being effective. They also need to be carefully tested: much of the book is devoted to failed attempts at introducing checklists, as people have a tendency to ignore or fail to follow the list unless it is designed well.

The book’s a quick and easy read, but the idea is extremely powerful. Gawande talks about his own initial reluctance to adopt checklists, seeing himself as above them, and his more recent reversal of opinion. When he asked surgeons about the value of a checklist, 20% said it did not improve safety. When asked if they would want it used in surgery on them, however, 93% agreed. I suspect we could all benefit from a bit more humility and a few more lists.

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Waiting for the Barbarians – J.M. Coetzee

“Time for the black flower of civilization to bloom.”

I don’t know how to review fiction, so instead I’m just going to let Coetzee speak for himself. I’ll give a bit of background, but there are so many quotes with wisdom I think I’ll just share those.

Waiting for the Barbarians is the story of the Magistrate, a man who has “not asked for more than a quiet life in quiet times.” He administers a small town on the border between Empire and the barbarian lands. As the novel progresses, Empire becomes concerned over the possibility of war with the barbarians: interrogators come and go, prisoners are taken, and the army moves in. It captures a clash of worlds, Empire and barbarians, humanity and brutality, complexity and simplicity.

As the magistrate witnesses some of the horrors of Empire, he periodically reflects on them:

“I know somewhat too much; and from this knowledge, once one has been infected, there seems to be no recovering… The knot loops in upon itself; I cannot find the end.”

On new beginnings;

“It would cost little to march them out into the desert (having put a meal in them first, perhaps, to make the march possible), to have them dig, with their last strength, a pit large enough for all of them to lie in (or even to dig it for them!), and, leaving them buried there forever and forever, to come back to the walled town full of new intentions, new resolutions. But that will not be my way. The new men of Empire are the ones who believe in fresh starts, new chapters, clean pages; I struggle on with the old story, hoping that before it is finished it will reveal to me why it was that I thought it worth the trouble.”

On time;

“What has made it impossible for us to live in time like fish in water, like birds in air, like children? It is the fault of Empire! Empire has created the time of history. Empire has located its existence not in the smooth recurrent spinning time of the seasons but in the jagged time of rise and fall, of beginning and end, of catastrophe. Empire dooms itself to live in history and plot against history.”

On certainty;

“In all of us, deep down, there seems to be something granite and unteachable. No one truly believes, despite the hysteria in the streets, that the world of tranquil certainties we were born into is about to be extinguished.”

I’m not sure a selection of quotes do him justice, but Coetzee is very much one of the wise, and there is definitely wisdom to be gleaned here.

There’s also some wisdom to be found in the Subtle Illumination email list to your right, however. Or, keep reading Coetzee (or in the UK or Canada).

Training Genius: The Genius in All of Us (David Shenk)

“The genius in all of us is our built-in ability to improve ourselves and our world.”

David Shenk thinks you misunderstand genetics. It’s not personal – he thinks pretty much everyone does. He argues in The Genius in All of Us that in trying to distinguish nature vs. nurture, we have missed the fact that who we are is determined by their interaction. Genes are turned on and off by the environment in which we live, and in the vast majority of activities for which we never reach our genetic limitations, it is practice and context that will determine just how talented we are. All of us have the potential to be a genius.

He points to Cooper and Zubek’s experiments with maze-bright and maze-dull rats, chosen as such because they descend from generations of rats who have been relatively good or poor at solving mazes. In normal conditions, the bright rats impressively outperform the dull ones. In enriched or restricted environments, however, both types of rats performed almost the same, whether as geniuses or dullards. Genetics do make a difference, but that difference can be overwhelmed by the influence of context and environment, despite what humans usually assume.

Shenk makes an important point, that we often neglect or underrate the importance of environment and its interaction with genes. Unfortunately, perhaps due to the shortness of the book (136 pages of argument, plus 200 of endnotes and citations), it can often feel like he hasn’t explored the ideas, but rather just rushed through them without examining their implications. He focuses, for example, on the idea that we can all be geniuses with a supportive environment: equally meaningful, however, is the implication that no one can be a genius without hard work and environment, and I am suspicious his choice of one perspective over the other is intended to sell books, not provide insight. He also sometimes seems to get carried away by his own arguments, so much so that he leaves his focus on interactions and seems to imply that environment is actually dominant over genetics, a suggestion he rightfully criticizes in the inverse.

The nature of heritability is always a controversial one, and the debate is often unfortunately ideologically, not factually, based. In that respect, Shenk has done a good job attempting to stick to the science, referring to many studies and explicitly citing his research. Nevertheless, a more thorough examination of the issues would likely be more compelling, and less likely to leave the reader feeling unsatisfied.

Cultivate your own genius and join the Subtle Illumination reading list to your right! Or, keep reading (or in the UK or Canada).

Alleviating Poverty – Poor Economics by Banerjee & Duflo (2)

Part 1 of Review available here.

“To progress, we have to abandon the habit of reducing the poor to cartoon characters and take the time to really understand their lives, in all their complexity and richness.”

I’d heard before that on average, tall people earn more money. What I hadn’t heard was that apparently if you control for IQ, that difference disappears – tall people are smarter and so have higher wages. A suggested explanation is malnutrition, which both reduces height and lowers IQ, and poses a significant challenge to poverty. This and other fascinating studies make up the bulk of Poor Economics, as Banerjee and Duflo follow their own advice and turn to the data to understand the challenges of development.

If you want to help the poor, say Banerjee and Duflo, you need to give up grand theories and ideas of structural change, no matter how appealing a silver bullet may be. Rejecting Why Nations Fail, they argue that poverty is not the product of grand institutional failures, but rather is an individual or local condition, making cookie-cutter remedies useless. Development must be achieved by a series of small, well-thought out and well-tested steps, gradually accumulating into big changes, not grand designs with little relevance to the lives of the poor.

To do so, they point out, it is essential to first actually understand the lives of the poor. Arguments often rage over whether the poor are in a poverty trap, the concern being that had they only a little more money for health, schooling, or business, they could invest and increase their wages, starting a positive cycle of investment and returns. B&D, however, dismiss the arguments of Sachs, Easterly, and others, and point out that the answer can only be found in the data, through randomized control trials and empirical work, not through theory or ideological debates.

They do make some broader claims. Without a stable job, for example, they suggest there is little incentive to save, invest, or plan for the future. As a result, the creation of jobs with job security may be justified even if it is an inefficient method of job creation, because of the indirect benefits. I’m not sure if I agree or not, but it’s an interesting point.

Perhaps the one criticism I have of Poor Economics is that their attempt to stick to economic rationality, though understandable, can feel forced. At several times in the book, as when they’re discussing how some households will borrow at a 24% rate of interest in order to save it at 2%, psychological or behavioural explanations seemed like a natural next step in the discussion, and I was disappointed when they neglected them. Still, the book adds a much-needed voice in the discussion of economic development, one driven by data, not ideology.

Still interested? You can read my summary of their lessons for development here, or sign up for the Subtle Illumination reading list to your right! Or, you could always head to Amazon and get the book your yourself (or in the UK or Canada).

Poor Economics by Banerjee and Duflo (1)

Part 2 of review available here.

“The ladders to get out of the poverty trap exist but are not always in the right place, and people do not seem to know how to step onto them or even want to do so.” – Banerjee and Duflo

I’ll be posting a review of Poor Economics on Sunday, but it’s looking like a long one, so in the interim I thought I’d post a summary of their five lessons for economic development, and leave discussion to Sunday.

The poor often lack information or have false beliefs, leading them to do things like ignore potentially useful dietary advice.
The poor are responsible for far more decisions than comparable households in the West, to their cost. We take sanitization of water or the removal and treatment of sewage, for example, for granted: for the poor it can be a conscious choice. Too many conscious choices can be overwhelming, and reducing the number of decisions that need to be consciously made is no more patronizing than sanitizing household water in the US.
There are often good reasons for some markets for the poor to be missing, and so we can’t assume they will always self-form or should be formed. A health insurance market for the poor, for example, though of potential benefit, has struggled to form because the insurance options that can be sustained by the market are not what the poor want.
Poor countries are not doomed to failure because they are poor. We often hear of the failures of aid programs, but in many cases those failures are avoidable through small design fixes, rather than grand institutional change of the social and political structures.
Expectations of outcomes can often become self-fulfilling prophecies. Children drop out of school because they don’t expect to be good at it; adults stay in debt because they don’t expect to be able to stay out of it. Getting a virtuous cycle started can be enormously powerful.

Number 5, I would argue, is a lesson for life, not for development, but nevermind.

As we’ll find out on Sunday, the foundation of their book, however, is that these are not general rules applicable everywhere. Instead, they argue that development cannot be conducted by universal rules and general theories. It must be adapted to suit context, culture, and location, all of which require data, not ideological theorizing.

You can read part 2 of the review here. In the meantime, keep reading (or in the UK or Canada). Or, join the Subtle Illumination email list to your right!