Tag Archives: Science

The Magic of Reality – Richard Dawkins

“The high-energy fuels, sugars or whatever they are, are coaxed into releasing their energy in stages, down through a cascade of chemical reactions, each one feeding into the next, like a stream tumbling down a series of small waterfalls, turning one small water wheel after another. Whatever the details, all the water wheels and cogs and drive shafts of life are ultimately powered by the sun.”

There are some amazing things in nature, things we typically take for granted: rainbows, the seasons, earthquakes, matter itself. Dawkins doesn’t take them for granted, and in his new book, he aims to explain them in as simple a manner as possible, taking joy in the wonder of nature.

That joy in nature comes through clearly, as it often does in Dawkins’ writings. Though The Magic of Reality isn’t labeled as such, it’s mostly a science primer: if you have any science background, you’ll know much of what he says already. That said, it spans enough of areas of science almost any reader will still learn some things, and it could make a great gift for a precocious child interested in science.

From why we have rainbows and earthquakes to how we evolved and why there are so many different kinds of animals, Dawkins takes on a whole range of questions. His older works glory in nature, and invite the reader to share in his passion for it: his love of science illuminates his writings. His more recent work, however, has tended towards the bitter – I would speculate that his love for the natural world calcified into a hatred for religion. The Magic of Reality is an attempt to return to his earlier method, with some success. His joy in science is back, but he still can’t resist the occasional jab at religion: the final section, considering why bad things happen, is better left to philosophers and he doesn’t have much to say. Still, it’s much better.

Not a must read, and I’d probably rather read his early books first, but still well worth it, and The Magic of Reality could also make a good Christmas gift.

The Marshmallow Test – Walter Mischel

“To resist a temptation we have to cool it, distance it from the self, and make it abstract. To take the future into account, we have to heat it, make it imminent and vivid.”

In 2013 and 2014, Sesame Street devoted itself to self-regulation. In one episode, the Cookie Monster played the ‘Waiting Game’ – he could have one cookie now, or if he waited, he could have two. During the episode, he learns strategies to help him wait. Sounds a bit familiar? It should – Walter Mischel was a consultant on the show.

Resisting temptation is a pretty useful skill. The classic example is the marshmallow test – children were told they could have one marshmallow now, or if they waited, they could have two later. In the cutest videos ever made, these children wrestle with their willpower, trying to find ways to resist the marshmallow (or chocolate, or whatever, depending on what they found most tempting) and wait for the greater reward.

What helped? Covering the treats so children couldn’t see them made it easier. Children who distracted themselves, or were told to do so beforehand, either by thinking about other things, singing to themselves, or even sleeping, could wait much longer. Focusing on non-tempting aspects of the marshmallow – imagining it as a picture, thinking of it as puffy cloud, etc. — also helped. Thinking about sad things, in contrast, reduced how long the children could wait.

Mischel (who ran the original marshmallow test) argues this captures the difference between ‘hot’ immediate stimuli and ‘cold’ distant stimuli. Hot, tempting things are what we find appealing in the short term, but if asked in the abstract whether we’d prefer one or two marshmallows, we know we’d prefer two. The key to willpower is making hot things seem cold, and/or cold things seem hot. Make punishments and costs immediate, and the benefits seem distant.

I find willpower fascinating, and so am always pleased when the giants in the field write about it. The Marshmallow Test isn’t perfect: it can feel a bit disorganized at time as it tries to cover 50 years of experimental work, and a lot of its content is already in the public eye, the danger of having NYT columns written about you. That said, for an engaging and enlightening look at the willpower field, particularly if you’re new to it, it’s hard to do better than one of its greats!

Climate Shock – Gernot Wagner and Martin L. Weitzman

“We, together with most economists, would be fine with either carbon taxes or caps, done correctly.”

What, you might frequently wonder, is geoengineering? If you’re a scifi fan, you’ll know terraforming is shaping the earth’s surface. Geoengineering refers to using similar techniques on Earth, usually particularly in reference to controlling the temperature. The release of particle such as sulfate aerosols help block sunlight from reaching the earth, similar to the effect of the eruption of volcanoes: in 1815, the eruption of Tambora encouraged Mary Shelly to spend her summer holiday indoors, writing Frankenstein. You may think this is better than sliced bread, or absolutely crazy, solving a symptom rather than the disease. Economics, though, says that what you think doesn’t really matter: since geoengineering is relatively easy, so much so it could be done by a single country, it will be hard to stop someone from doing it, whether a rogue climate engineer or Vanuatu as it gradually submerges beneath the waves.

Climate Shock looks at the insights economics can provide as we try to understand and prevent climate change. In particular, it focuses on the economics of uncertainty – how we deal with things when we are unsure of them – and externalities – how people decide to do things when the decision will affect others. Geoengineering is a classic externality (as are carbon emissions): if someone decides to release chemicals into the air because they’re too hot, everyone is affected.

The uncertainty relates to the fact that we really don’t know the potential outcomes of warming. In the Pliocene era, carbon dioxide levels were similar to today, but the seas were 20 meters higher, and Canada had camels. We don’t know how likely that is to happen again, but we probably want to avoid it (unless you’re a camel).

The book is a great survey of some economic insights for global warming, and Martin Weitzman in particular is a titan in the field. My only comment is I suspect it would struggle to convince anyone who isn’t already a believer. If you’re looking to arm yourself with facts about warming to argue with your friends, it’s a great resource: if you’re not sure what to think, less so. Some of their arguments also feel a little hasty, not really engaging with other perspectives. David Friedman, for example, argues that uncertainty cuts two ways: global warming could also end up being good for the world, as well as bad. I’m not sure I find that convincing, but I would have liked to see Climateshock rebut or acknowledge it.  Their final point, however, is a good one: even if everyone agrees that carbon emissions are immoral, and that in itself is unlikely, the immediacy of the problem means taking the economics of it seriously.

You can see more reviews and buy it on amazon here: Climate Shock.

The Perfect Swarm – Len Fisher

“Simple rules, patterns and formulae can often help us steer our way through, but in the end it is the complexity that rules. OK?”

The world is pretty complicated these days. How, you might wonder, should you best navigate in a world that seems overwhelming? Perfect Swarm argues that we can use simple rules to defeat and exploit complexity. Locusts, for example, have tremendously large swarms – the largest can be 513,000 km2 and contain 12.5 million insects – but their wings are delicate, and if they collide in midair they might die. Fortunately, no ESP is needed to guide the swarm: instead, they individually follow simple rules of avoidance, alignment, and attraction to create a seemingly chaotic mass out of order. Fish, bees, birds, and many other animals do the same.

What does this mean for humans? One fascinating implication for leadership is that if most people are just swarming, even if only a very few members of the group have a clear direction, the entire group will move that way. Charisma, dignity, etc., might all help, but in the end as long as you have a goal and other members of the group don’t, everyone will follow you there. This has even been rather charmingly demonstrated in a room of students asked to wander randomly but not get too far from other students: adding a couple students with a destination to the mix means all the students end up at that destination!

To achieve clarity, the book trades a lot of elegance and detail, and it can sometimes feel oversimplified. The later chapters of the book focus on heuristics (simple rules for decision-making), and perhaps it’s because it is my field, but for me the section felt so simplified as to be hard to extrapolate from. If you’re looking for a fairly simple introduction to chaos theory and how different disciplines have attempted to resolve the problem, though, as well as some personally applicable insights on how to move through a crowd or decide between multiple options, Perfect Swarm can certainly provide.

What If: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions – Randall Munroe

“High in the North in a land called Svithjod there is a mountain. It is a hundred miles long and a hundred miles high and once every thousand years a little bird comes to this mountain to sharpen its beak. When the mountain has thus been worn away a single day of eternity will have passed.” – Hendrik Willem van Loon

I read a lot, but it’s rare I read a book I can recommend unconditionally. This is one of them, with the extra bonus you can read a lot of it in advance online to see if you agree. It’s insightful, it’s hilarious, and best of all it can give you a glimpse into how scientists think, working through the world from first principles.

The book is exactly what the title says: it gives carefully worked out answers to absurd questions, like what would happen if you swam in a nuclear waste pond (nothing – water is great radioactive shielding. Of course, trying to swim in such a pond would get you shot by the guards), hit a baseball going at .9c (Boom!), endured a robot apocalypse (the robots would probably slip on the mountain of skulls and most can’t open doors or pass those tricky rubber thresholds on lab doors. Even most battle drones would be stuck, “helplessly bumping against hangar doors like Roombas stuck in a closet.”) or lived in a world with love at first sight (people would want to be police officers or receptionists, since they make eye contact with the most people).

Munroe was a robotics engineer at NASA, so has good science credentials. He left to run his webcomic, xkcd (which I also highly recommend). His book, however, takes columns from a series he did online, What If, and puts them in convenient book form with some additions – you should definitely read the online column first to see if it’s your thing, and I’m not sure how much new content there is, to be fair.

The book is hilarious, as you’d expect from the author of xkcd. For me, the best part is that Munroe can’t seem to avoid thinking like a physicist. Keeping in mind I started my degree in physics, I love it: it reminds me of the great way scientists have of looking at the world. Analysis like:

“First, let’s start with wild ballpark approximations… I can pick up a mole (animal) and throw it.[citation needed] Anything I can throw weighs one pound. One pound is one kilogram. The number 602,214,129,000,000,000,000,000 looks about twice as long as a trillion, which means it’s about a trillion trillion. I happen to remember that a trillion trillion kilograms is how much a planet weighs.”

There is basically nothing I don’t love in that paragraph. This is how reasoning about the world should work, for oh so many reasons!

In Defense of Food – Michael Pollan

“Eat food, mostly plants, not too much”

There’s a myriad of diets out there, and for all that science suggests that basically all of them contribute to short term weight loss (apparently, paying attention to what you’re eating is a sufficient condition for weight loss) and most of them don’t show any persistence anyway, people still struggle to pick the best one. One thesis is that the Western diet itself is simply bad for us: a group of ten Australian aborigines who resumed traditional lifestyles for seven weeks as part of an experiment saw improvements in blood pressure and their risk of heart disease among other indicators, and also lost 18 pounds. The answer to the Western diet, says Pollan, is to stop eating it.

Pollan argues eating well is simple: we’ve been doing it since we came out of the trees. Unfortunately, it isn’t in the interests of the food industry, journalism, or even nutrition science to keep it that way: after all, if they just said eat more vegetables, we’d fire the lot of them. His goal is to make it simple again.

To do so, he suggests a series of simple rules: don’t eat things your grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food; avoid foods with ingredients that are unpronounceable, unfamiliar, or more than five in number; only shop at the edges of the supermarket; have a glass of wine with dinner; only eat a table, and never alone; and a few others.

The book is not as good as some of his others, such as Omnivore’s Dilemma or Cooked. It’s well written though, and to my knowledge probably correct. Several points are enough to make you stop and think, too: I was interested to learn that isolated populations appear to have few dental problems, whether consuming all meat, such as the Masai in Tanzania, no dairy in the Hebrides, or agriculturalists who ate largely plants (though agriculturalists showed the most tooth decay of the three). Overall, In Defense of Food is not a must-read, but if you like Pollan or are interested in food generally, worth picking up.

The Why Axis – Uri Gneezy and John List

“Without understanding that life is a laboratory, and that we must all learn from our discoveries, we cannot hope to make headway in crucial areas.”

Paying students for marks gives them an incentive to study. Does it also crowd out intrinsic incentives for the same, crippling students by making them unable to study when they are not immediately paid for it? If a gay couple tries to buy a car, does the dealership discriminate against them because they are inherently hostile to gays, or because they believe they can increase their profits by doing so? Should charities allow people to opt out of receiving mailings, and if so, will that increase or decrease donations?

If you are a teachers’ union, activist, or charity, you likely have strong opinions on the answer. What you may not have is any actual knowledge. Gneezy and List, two great experimental economists, argue that fundamental questions such as the best ways to educate, fight discrimination, and run businesses lie at the heart of experimentation. Without it, we cannot understand the world we live in, forced to reason by post hoc ergo propter hoc: that because things occur at the same time, one must cause the other. With experimentation, we can establish true causality, understanding how what we do affects the world around us.

To understand education better – and with the help of a $10 million dollar donation from some hedge fund managers – they have established their own schools, one focusing on teaching will-power and delaying gratification, and the other a more standard academic curriculum of reading, writing, and arithmetic. To understand discrimination, they tried having gay couples purchase cars while signalling they planned to check other dealerships, and found that discrimination disappeared; to understand charitable giving, they experiment with several different approaches, finding that having a pretty girl ask for donations and offering a lottery prize for donating are equally effective in increasing donations, but that the lottery has long term effects while the pretty girl does not. Giving people the opportunity to opt out of mailings is most effective of all, however, increasing initial donations, leaving long-term donations unchanged, and saving money on mailings.

The Why Axis is another in a stream of books by economists popularizing their work. As with many such, it is reasonably well written, and stocked full of anecdotes, stories, and examples. It is more interesting than most, however, because experiments provide particularly interesting fodder for discussion. In addition, Gneezy and List argue passionately for a more experimental way of looking at the world. Whether we are considering a new job, a new product, or a new policy, trying it out on a small scale provides information essential to avoiding blunders. To my mind, they’re definitely correct we would be better off if we experimented with different ways of doing things a bit more; in that spirit, pick up a paper or two of theirs to see if you find them interesting, and if so, the book might well be worth it.

Around the World in 80 Days – Jules Verne

“What had he brought back from this long and weary journey? Nothing, say you? Perhaps so; nothing but a charming woman, who, strange as it may appear, made him the happiest of men! Truly, would you not for less than that make the tour around the world?”

Now, despite suggesting in my last post that I was doing steam age science fiction, it must be admitted that Around the World in 80 Days isn’t actually science fiction: the whole point was that it was a journey that was at least theoretically possible at the time. If anything, it is a study of the British Empire at the time, with memorable comments on all the colonies and areas they pass through as well as on British attitudes about each. My favourite, I think, occurs when they are about to be attacked by bandits while on the train across America, where the comment is made that ‘it may be taken for granted that, rash as the Americans usually are, when they are prudent there is a good reason for it.’

Science fiction is often portrayed as boys’ novels, targeted to those who don’t read real fiction. This, I think, is unfair. Science fiction often neglects the sort of character development found in Dickens, true. But in return it allows for a clear focus on a single aspect of society, distilled by its removal from impurities and complicating elements that pervade our own societies. As a result, it often has profound things to say about the world we live in, as well as the worlds we might aspire to see happen, whether that’s about the future of robotics and by extension lesser beings in Asimov, or the nature of globalization in Verne. They can also inspire, as 80 Days does, by evoking a passion for adventure and a desire to see new things.

The classic picture of Phineas Fogg in a balloon is, unfortunately, false: they don’t use a balloon at all in the story. Often ignored is also the fact that he finds love on the adventure: rather than being a celebration of the modern world and consumption, in the end, Fogg is left with the classic reward of all such tales: true love, and happiness ever after.

PS – Interesting fact for West Wing (and Nellie Bly) fans: Nellie Bly did the trip herself as a homage for her newspaper, meeting up with Verne in Amiens after 72 days. Michael Palin of Monty Python fame refused to use aircraft, and managed it in 79 days and 7 hours, slightly longer than Fogg.

The Organized Mind – Daniel J. Levitin

“We need to learn how our brains organize information so that we can use what we have, rather than fight against it.”

Around 80% of Americans surveyed remember where they were on September 11th when they watched horrifying images of an airplane crashing into the first tower, and then, about 20 minutes later, a second plane hitting another tower. All of these, Levitin points out, are false memories. Clips of the first plane took 24 hours to reach broadcast television, so if you have any memory of seeing it on the day, it’s a false one.

Why does it matter? Levitin argues that without understanding the structure of how our brain works, we will be unable to organize our thoughts or our lives, or even understand when we can’t rely on our own memories. Knowing that when we try to remember something, our brain puts it in a rehearsal loop that prevents new memories from being formed, for example, tells us to carry something with us to take notes, whether smartphone or index card, so that we can avoid the loop. This reflects his most fundamental lesson: that though our brains are amazing, they are also limited, and the more we can shift the burden of organization to external devices, the better off we’ll be. In 2011, Americans took in the equivalent of 175 newspapers worth of information beyond what they did in 1986 (5 times as much), so whether you start taking notes in your smartphone, carrying index cards around with idea per index card, or just installing permanent hooks for your keys next to your doorway, it’s worth some thought.

It’s a great idea for a book, and it’s stocked full of interesting facts (who knew that in the 1800s lobster was so plentiful that they were ground up and fed to prisoners, and that servants would demand to be fed it no more than twice a week? We really screwed up that fishery). Unfortunately, it’s not as strong on insight. It’s interesting to know the different filters our mind uses to decide what to pay attention to, but the bottom line is focus on what you’re doing and turn off email and Facebook, which isn’t really a shock. It can also feel a bit repetitive: after the first half, he seems to run out of clear links between biological architecture and organizational plans, and the book wanders a little. Still, if you’re looking for interesting facts and fun ideas to try to organize your mind, the book makes for an extremely entertaining, not to mention informative, read. A good choice for the summer.

Disclosure: I read The Organized Mind as an advance reader copy, courtesy of Penguin – it is available August 19th.  You can get a copy (and see more reviews) here.

Spillover – David Quammen

“Human-caused ecological pressures and disruptions are bringing animal pathogens ever more into contact with human populations, while human technology and behaviour are spreading those pathogens ever more widely and quickly.”

The elimination of smallpox is unquestionably one of humanity’s greatest achievements. Before it was eradicated, it killed upwards of three million people per year in the 20th century, far more than the world wars or any other cause. Sadly, it also remains one of only two diseases to be eradicated in human history (the other is rinderpest): polio has seen a recent resurgence, partly due to unwillingness to accept vaccines, and we aren’t even close on most other diseases. A dramatic failure on humanity’s part, and one with an end goal that we all agree on: it doesn’t bode well for global warming.

Quammen, however, has some more bad (but interesting!) news. Many diseases are zoonotic: they use animals as reservoir hosts, often causing no symptoms, and are only noticed when they mutate and jump to humans. AIDS, Ebola, bubonic plague, Spanish influenza (and all influenzas), West Nile fever, rabies, anthrax, Lyme disease; all zoonotic, and the list goes on. That means elimination isn’t really an option, unless we’re prepared to resort to xenocide against the species in question, and as humans eliminate natural habitats and spread more widely we make cross-species infection, called spillover, more and more likely. In most countries, AIDS education materials recommend practicing safe sex or not sharing needles: in Cameroon, the signs recommend not eating apes.

What makes the book work is that the existence of reservoir hosts makes the study of the disease like a detective novel: scientists have to search for the reservoir and solve the mystery, though most of them don’t wear deerstalkers. Disease is one of those things it’s easy to forget about when we’re not in the grip of a crisis, but preparation, as with anything, is critical to reducing the impact later on. For that reason alone, I’d say it’s worth reading Spillover: the fact that it has some fun stories and interesting characters in it is icing on the cake. Even better, mind you, is seeing Quammen speak in person about it, as I was lucky enough to do: he’s a good speaker, and summarizes both content and stories well. Either way, a serious issue for humanity, and one the wise should definitely be thinking about.

You can get a copy of Spillover here.