Tag Archives: Society

The Signal and the Noise – Nate Silver

“Distinguishing the signal from the noise requires both scientific knowledge and self-knowledge: the serenity to accept the things we cannot predict, the courage to predict the things we can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

The Signal and the Noise got a lot of hype when it was released, partly because Nate Silver correctly predicted 49 of the 50 states in the American presidential election, again. The book itself is wide-ranging, covering not just politics but financial crises, baseball, the weather, economics, flu, chess, poker, global warming, and a host of other issues. In all of them, Silver examines the state of the industry in terms of its use of data and its ability to predict the future. His broadest lesson, though, is that the modern world is flooded with data, almost overwhelmed with it. As he correctly points out:

“The number of meaningful relationships in the data – those that speak to causality rather than correlation and testify to how the world works – is orders of magnitude smaller. Nor is it likely to be increasing at nearly so fast a rate as the information itself; there isn’t any more truth in the world than there was before the Internet or the printing press. Most of the data is just noise, as most of the universe is filled with empty space.”

At the core, his solution is humility about what we can predict and what we can understand about the world, no matter how much data we have. More formally, he argues for Bayesian thinking – when we make a prediction, he suggests, it should never be a single value, but instead a probability weighting of various outcomes. It is not possible, he argues, to make predictions with data abstracted from context: we must understand how the data works, not just observe it, as stock market quants might argue.

Statistics is not exactly a mass-market topic, and Silver has done an admirable job making his book accessible to the general public. I flipped through the chapter on baseball, but I imagine other readers might well do the same to the chapter on economic forecasting: to each their own. Generally, however, his examples are great fun, whether on how people predict (or don’t) earthquakes, how poker players calculate opponents hands, or the development of chaos theory by Lorenz as he sought to predict the weather. He is also a dab hand at phrasing, and there are almost too many good lines to pick one to quote. Even if you don’t directly work with data, your life is affected by it in a myriad of ways, and it’s worth understanding the limitations of our knowledge.

The Origin of Wealth – Eric Beinhocker

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

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

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

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

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

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

The World Until Yesterday 2 – Jared Diamond

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

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

Dispute Resolution

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

Leisure

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

Risk

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

Diet

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

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

The World Until Yesterday 1 – Jared Diamond

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Righteous Mind 2 – Jonathan Haidt

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

You can read part 2 of this review here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Righteous Mind – Jonathan Haidt

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

You can read part 2 of this review here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

River Notes – Wade Davis

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

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

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

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

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

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

In Praise of Slow – Carl Honoré

“And yet some things cannot, should not, be sped up. They take time; they need slowness. When you accelerate things that should not be accelerated, when you forget how to slow down, there is a price to pay.”

“Does it really make sense to speed-read Proust, make love in half the time or cook every meal in the microwave?”

I’m going about this backwards, because I reviewed Honoré’s more recent book, The Slow Fix, several months ago, and am now reviewing his older one. Worse yet, I think I like his newer book more, so the need for this review is debatable, since the two are on very similar topics. Apologies to all who find that irritating.

My reasons for preferring his second book are twofold. First, this first can feel dated: it predates the financial crisis, and there are a few sections where that shows. More broadly, though, his second book simply has the better stories and anecdotes of the success of slow, and that’s what makes it such a pleasure to read.

All that said, there are definitely still pearls of wisdom to be found here. Honoré is careful to say that many things can and should be done quickly. Some things, though, must be done slowly, and in the modern world it’s not clear we remember that. How many of us, for example, wince when we read the letter from the Harvard Dean of undergraduates to new students, which suggests that “empty time is not a vacuum to be filled…It is the thing that enables the other things on your mind to be creatively rearranged, like the empty square in the 4×4 puzzle that makes it possible to move the other 15 pieces around.”

I read recently that most people don’t listen to each other; when they’re not talking, they mentally rehearse what they’re going to say next. That’s why most conversations proceed without pauses, and yet when you think about it, that’s crazy: does no one ever need to stop and think? Fitting in writing blog posts with the rest of my life, I’m the last person to claim speed isn’t useful, but I think there’s a deeper point to be made here. If we don’t remember to stop and slow down over what matters, we may reach a point where nothing feels like it matters.

No amazon links today: you can slowly navigate there yourself, and see if you see any other books that look good on the way there! Or, you could just join the Subtle Illumination email list.

Debt: The First 5,000 Years – David Graeber

“How is it that moral obligations between people come to be thought of as debts and as a result, end up justifying behavior that would otherwise seem utterly immoral?”

A friend recommended Debt: The First 5,000 Years as a veritable bible of the Occupy movement, so I thought I’d pick it up. Its concern is distinguishing between moral obligations, as occur in a human economy, and market obligations (debts) that occur in a commercial economy. Graeber is worried that our modern economy has confused the two. Financial debts are denominated in money, and so are easily enforceable and transferable: moral obligations, like owing someone a favour, are not.

The book asks great questions, questions that aren’t studied nearly enough, like the effect of being in a perpetual state of debt on humanity, whether early cultures truly used a barter system (answer: usually only with strangers, not within the village, where non-market bonds held sway), whether debts of money and debts of morality are the same, and whether alternative systems to the current one exist. Overall, though, I was disappointed. His answers often feel confused, often asserting something only to disagree a few paragraphs later, or introducing what often felt like irrelevant distinctions instead of meaningful insights.

Unfortunately, as a result I struggled to find the book compelling. He makes blanket statements that barter economies never existed or world literatures condemned lending, for example, before backtracking and noting large exceptions shortly after. He also asserts that debts in monetary units are enforced by violence while moral debts are not, yet surely social norms and codes of behaviour, including what may be seen as a debt to society, were frequently enforced by violence. If you’re willing to overlook such claims, however, there are also important insights: it’s probably true that monetary debt’s ability to be transferred between creditors makes it more impersonal, and so justifies otherwise outrageous behaviour, for example. There are also great stories in it, like the discussion of the Tiv, who worried about being tricked into turning into witches by being fed human flesh.

The book does therefore have strengths. The questions and stories are interesting, and if a psychologist happens to write a book about the effects of debt on the human psyche, I’d definitely read it. For the nature of financial markets and moral markets, however, I found Michael Sandel more compelling and more clear, and for studies of how ancient cultures felt about debt and exchange, I’d turn first to Jared Diamond. If this is a subject you’re interested in, it’s definitely worth picking up Debt, but I’d start first with Diamond or Sandel, to get a grounding in the subject.

You can get a copy of Debt here (or in the UK or Canada). Or, wait for my review of Diamond’s The World until Yesterday, which I’ll post in the next few weeks.

The Book of Chuang Tzu

“The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao” – Tao Te Ching

The Book of Chuang Tzu (also known as Zhuangzi or True Classic of Southern (Cultural) Florescence) makes up one of the three core texts of Taoism. The Tao Te Ching, its arguably more famous fellow, is short to the point of cryptic, and uses as few as words as possible to illustrate the Tao. Chuang Tzu, on the other hand, is full of stories, personalities, events, and entertainment, to the point of being cryptic.

Taoism differs from both modern philosophies and its contemporaries in emphasizing that it is a path to be walked, rather than a term to be defined. Rather than review it, therefore, for those interested I thought I’d share an anecdote from the book.

“Hui Tzu spoke to Chuang Tzu, saying, ‘I have a big tree, which people call useless. Its trunk is so knotted, no carpenter could work on it, while its branches are too twisted to use a square or compass upon. So, although it is close to the road, no carpenter would look at it. Now, Sir, your words are like this, too big and no use, therefore everyone ignores them.

Chuang Tzu said, ‘Sir, have you never seen a wild cat or a weasel? It lies there, crouching and waiting; east and west it leaps out, not afraid of going high or low; until it is caught in a trap and dies in a net. Yet again, there is the yak, vast like a cloud in heaven. It is big, but cannot use this fact to catch rats. Now you, Sir, have a large tree, and you don’t know how to use it, so why not plant it in the middle of nowhere, where you can go to wander or fall asleep under its shade? No axe under Heaven will attack it, nor shorten its days, for something which is useless will never be disturbed.”

Honestly, if you want to find out about Taoism, you’ll have to read it yourself: you can pick it up here (or in the UK or Canada). Or, just sign up for the Subtle Illumination email list!