Category Archives: Book Review

(Honest) Truth About Dishonesty by Dan Ariely

“The gates of hell are open night and day / Smooth the descent, and easy is the way” – Virgil, The Aeneid

Are you a liar? We tend to assume some people just are: that they consistently cheat in life. An Enron theory of dishonesty, if you will. Ariely, though, argues in The (Honesty) Truth About Dishonesty that the reality is that almost everyone cheats a little given the right circumstances. The key, he says, is to still be able to tell ourselves that we’re a good person: after all, we haven’t cheated that much.

Unfortunately, this means we can’t just assume people cheat when the money is good. Instead, he points to experiments where people cheat more when they’re knowingly wearing counterfeit brand clothes, when they’re representing a cause that doesn’t benefit them, and when tokens exchangeable for cash, not cash, is the prize. What’s worse, he also shows we usually aren’t aware of the effect, with individuals unconsciously preferring art from one gallery over another if they’ve been told the funding for the experiment came from that gallery (and even showing increased activity in their brain’s pleasure centers when they see “their” logo), while remaining completely certain of their objectivity.

There is hope, however. Dishonesty diminishes when it becomes harder to self-justify an act: we might take a coke but we wouldn’t take a dollar bill from a fridge, for example. Even small reminders of morality reduce cheating, whether trying to remember the Ten Commandments (even if you only remember one or two), or signing a commitment to an honour code at the top of the page (even if the honour code is fictional). If we can stop the small acts of dishonesty, he argues, we can prevent it from gathering momentum and becoming contagious.

For me, the implication is that if we’re trying to stop a firm from committing fraud or a politician from lying, the answer isn’t to fire the bad apples or even have them declare conflicts of interest. It’s environmental and psychological factors that encourage us to cheat, and environmental and psychological factors that can help discourage us from doing so. All of us run the risk of drifting into dishonesty, a little bit at a time, while remaining convinced that we are acting morally. In a high paced, modern lifestyle, we may never get the chance to stop, reflect, and reset those patterns, but it may be ever more important that we try.

Interested? Keep reading (or in the UK or Canada). Readers might also like Ariely’s earlier books, Predictably Irrational and The Upside of Irrationality, about the irrationalities that drive us and their potential benefits. Or, join the Subtle Illumination email list to your right!

The Art of Learning by Josh Waitzkin

“My whole life I had studied techniques, principles, and theory until they were integrated into the unconscious.”  – Josh Waitzkin

Joshua Waitzkin was national chess champion in the U.S. 8 times, inspiring the movie “Searching for Bobby Fischer,” and more recently has earned two world champion titles in Pushing Hands, the martial arts version of Tai Chi. It’s fair to say that he knows something about learning.

Quite a bit of The Art of Learning is devoted to Waitzkin’s career in both chess and pushing hands, and unfortunately though enjoyable it is perhaps a bit short on wisdom. Interspersed with that, however, are discussions of how he sees the learning process and the principles he believes underlie expertise in any discipline.

Waitzkin introduces a few vague lists of principles, but in essence argues the key to excellence is the gradual mastery of fundamental principles, over time interlinked into complexity and integrated into our subconscious.  The key to such learning is to take the small things you learn and ‘chunk’ them into larger ideas in your memory, ensuring efficient storage and retrieval. As a result, an expert martial artist and a beginner actually perceive different things. A complicated strike may be made up of six parts, but an expert perceives it as one moderately fast attack. The beginner, on the other hand, sees six different moves, all blindingly fast. Mastery of the fundamentals can actually change not just how you perform an event but also how you perceive an event.

Once you’ve achieved this chunking of basic concepts into complicated ones, he argues, you start achieving the deeper mastery critical for progress, and the correct decision can even seem intuitive. Studies of chess grandmasters, for example, have shown they do not see many moves farther ahead than weaker players. Instead, they have an intuition on which moves may be best, and so though they study the same number of possible moves, they study better quality ones.

Given Waitzkin’s success, the book is certainly inspirational, and mixed in with the story of his life are a few seeds of wisdom. I think my favourite story was that apparently as an offshoot of Soviet hypnosis programs, young Soviet chess players were taught to tap a piece quickly but softly against the table, in an effort to subliminally speed up the thinking of their opponent and encourage errors. Who knew?

Want to learn more about learning? Keep reading (or in the UK or Canada). Or, sign up for the subtleilluminations email list to your right.

Sugar as Toxin – Fat Chance by Robert Lustig

“If the food comes in a wrapper, the wrapper has more health benefits than the food.”

Added sugar is everywhere. Something like 80% of all food items sold in the U.S. contain it, and Americans yearly eat about 130 pounds each. It’s a drastic change from history, when sugar was at best available only seasonally, when fruit ripened.

Lustig thinks that sugar is toxic, evil, causing the obesity epidemic, and a poison, and that’s before he really gets warmed up.  Not only have food companies started adding sugar to almost everything to encourage consumption, he says, but they also remove the fiber to improve shelf life. Yet it is fiber, Lustig points out, that helps us process sugar. This is why eating a fruit is fine, but fruit juice is not (calorie for calorie, fruit juice is worse than pop): the fiber is destroyed by the juicing process.

The answer to obesity, says Lustig, is threefold. First, we must control the environment in which we live, reducing our intake of substances like sugar that destabilize our bodily hormones and lead to overeating. Second, we need to increase our consumption of fiber. Third, we need to exercise. An overweight person who exercises may well outlive a thin person who does not, and 15 minutes of exercise a day appears to add about 3 years to a lifespan.

I can’t say I found Lustig’s analysis of public policy compelling: it’s not his area. On nutrition, on the other hand, he’s an expert. That said, I must admit this may be one of those (very) rare instances it may be easier to just read the news article or watch the video interview. Unless you want to understand the biology behind it all or really want a broader perspective on the issue, saying sugar is bad doesn’t really take a full book.

What Fat Chance has done is reinforce my impression that the chief advantage of most diets, regardless of content, is that they make you think about what you’re eating. Both vegetarians and non-vegetarians can be healthy, but vegetarians have to think about what they eat, and that matters. But if I were you I’d cut out sugar too. Maybe throw in some extra fiber.

Keep reading (and in the UK or Canada). Or if you want to stay up to date with reviews, subscribe to the subtle illumination email list! The sign-up is on the right of the screen.

Violence Declining? Better Angels of our Nature

“It is a little-known fact that most terrorist groups fail, and that all of them die” – Steven Pinker

Listening to the media today, one could be forgiven for assuming that human society is incurably and irredeemably violent. Nonsense, says Steven Pinker in The Better Angels of our Nature, and he has the statistics to back it up.

The UK, for example, had 20 times as many homicides in the 1300s as in the 1900s. Murder rates as a percentage of population were higher in many traditional hunter-gather societies, like the Inuit or the !Kung, than in even the most violent US decade. Even rates of death in war were higher in historical New Guinea than in Germany in the 20th century. In fact, you are less likely to die  from violence today than at any time in history.

Over time, Pinker argues, humans have undergone a “humanitarian revolution”, actually caring about the welfare of others. The ability to read, for example, allows us to empathize with people we’ve never met by putting us in their place, while modernity has expanded our circles of acquaintance to include those with very different backgrounds. We’ve also begun a “civilizing process”, adopting norms that forbid violence, and in so doing have created governments with a monopoly on law enforcement, helping us avoid a Hobbesian trap. Government is not enough, however. To truly reduce homicide rates to 1 or 2 per 100,000, he argues, there must be faith in the rule of law. It is places with limited belief in the ability of government to enforce justice that see increased rates of violence. In particular, some Southern U.S. states have both little faith in government enforcement and homicide rates close to that of Central and South America, and Pinker suggests this is no coincidence.

Better Angels is a comprehensive book, spanning 800 pages and psychology, history, economics, sociology, criminology, statistics, biology, and a dozen other fields. On the way, it asks whether human nature is good or bad, whether society is progressing, and whether we should be optimistic about our common future. Better yet, it’s engaging, entertaining, and intelligent. To be blunt, it’s among the most interesting books I’ve read in years, and well worth the time. The decline of violence is a macro-trend we too often fail to appreciate, and understanding it is a key step to continuing it.

Want more enlightenment? Keep reading (or in the UK or Canada).

Why Introverts are Awesome – Quiet by Susan Cain

“The secret to life is to put yourself in the right lighting. For some, it’s a Broadway spotlight; for others, a lamplit desk. Use your natural powers — of persistence, concentration, and insight — to do work you love and work that matters. Solve problems, make art, think deeply.” – Susan Cain

Action. Boldness. Charisma. Harvard Business School and modern society are unanimous on the importance of these values. Not achieving them, therefore, signals failure: that we are too introspective, too reflective, and too contemplative. Susain Cain disagrees, and in Quiet argues that society grossly undervalues introversion. Choosing not to go to the party, or indeed to hide in the bathroom when you’re at the party, is not a sign of weakness: rather, it’s simply a preference for a life with less external stimulation, a model society might do well to learn from. 

To understand introversion, she traces it back to childhood. Highly reactive children, ones who respond strongly to stimulus, are actually more likely to be introverts than low reactive children. It is people who find external stimulation overwhelming who therefore seek to limit that stimulation, and so become more inwardly focused. For Cain, it’s a biological difference, not disadvantage.

Studying fish, she points out that bold fish are more likely to rush into traps and get caught than shy fish, but once in captivity, bold fish start eating the food earlier than shy fish and have a much higher survival rate. For humans, introversion predicts academic success in university better than cognitive ability, and an introvert’s focus on reflection means that in the lab they spend longer on tasks and do better at them. A world with less decisiveness and more forethought, therefore, might well be a better world. There is, after all, “zero correlation between being the best talker and having the best ideas.”

As befits a book written for introverts, Cain has written a book inspiring both action and reflection. At times it reads as a cheerleader for self-conscious introverts, encouraging them to be proud of their status, but it also relies on theories of learning and child-development to understand possible benefits to introversion and how people develop such traits. Of course, in serving as cheerleader for introversion, her examples of extraverted individuals can sometimes feel caricatured, and her description of introverts can sometimes feel like it includes all possible virtues. A few sections can also feel a bit slow, not contributing much to the thrust of the argument. Still, for any introvert feeling self-conscious in a world of extroverts, the book is a must read.

Want to learn more about the advantages of introverts? Keep reading (or in the UK or Canada).

Using Games in Life? Reality is Broken by McGonigal

“The opposite of play isn’t work. It’s depression.” – Brian Sutton-Smith

When was the last time you leveled up? Found a power up? Got a wisdom +1? These motivate us in video games, and Jane McGonigal argues in Reality is Broken that actual reality needs more of them. Millions of people use games to escape reality – why, she asks, can’t we use games to improve reality?

McGonigal thinks games can confer an evolutionary advantage on those who play them, helping us develop our strengths, treat depression and obesity, foster collaboration, increase democratic participation, fix education, and maximize our potential as human beings. As a result, Reality is Broken is stuffed full of interesting examples and facts, and the book shines because of them.

Whether discussing poker in graveyards to remind ourselves of our own mortality; Chorewars creating quests like doing the laundry; Quest to Learn as the framework for a charter school (with among other things students teaching concepts to AI avatars as quizzes); or God games like the Sims, Black and White, and Spore fostering the long view and developing ecosystems thinking, the games she analyzes are exciting. 69% of heads of household in the US play video games, and 97% of youth; this is a resource, she argues, we need to tap.

I’m always a little nervous about these kinds of claims; they remind me of Play Pumps, the systems installed in parts of Africa in which children playing could pump water. When the children bored of the idea, women were left to turn roundabouts by hand, making their task even more laborious. That said, games also have enormous potential to change our lives for the better.

My takeaway though is optimism about humanity. Whether in games or in real life, it’s inspiring to see millions of people seek out challenges to test their limits, working together to build things larger than themselves. World of Warcraft Wikis may not be what all of us would choose to build, but it is nonetheless a common project, and in scale an awe-inspiring one.

Want more games in your own life? Keep reading (or order from the UK or Canada).

Explaining Why Nations Fail – Acemoglu and Robinson

Acemoglu and Robinson present in Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty an important idea: that it is institutions that determine whether countries are rich or poor. When institutions concentrate power in the hands of only a few, nations fail. Unfortunately, their book can also be frustrating – their focus on institutions can feel like it blinds them to other possibilities, and as a result their examples, though fascinating, can feel repetitive.

A&R argue that political and economic institutions can be extractive (designed to extract resources and centralize power in an elite who will then oppose change or progress) or inclusive (decentralizing power and allowing individuals economic autonomy). Both types of institutions, they argue, must be inclusive for long run prosperity. It’s an important division, and one that has a lot of explanatory power: anyone who’s crossed the American border with Mexico can’t deny that it is the institutions, not the fifty feet of distance, which matters.

The bulk of the book provides examples. Their studies are both well written and compelling, but they also make me wonder whether institutions are really the distal cause: apart from the simple case of countries with a colonial past, there is little discussion of what leads to good institutions. When they do raise the issue, they seem to implicitly assume that institutions are chosen rationally by elites, based on the cost and benefits of each type, an assumption that seems unconvincing.

Economists and development experts often underrate the importance of institutions, and so Why Nations Fail makes a critical contribution. It also makes a strong argument against the centralization of political power, which can be tempting in the short run but corrupts institutions and social norms in the long run. It’s engagingly written and full of interesting facts, and so is well worth the read for anyone remotely interested in these issues (and everyone should be). It just doesn’t seem to entirely meet its (admittedly ambitious) mandate: to explain why some nations fail and some succeed.

Want more enlightenment? Keep reading (or order from the UK or Canada). Why Nations Fail is certainly worth a look.