Tag Archives: Society

Average is Over – Tyler Cowen

“The key questions will be: Are you good at working with intelligent machines or not? Are your skills a complement to the skills of the computer, or is the computer doing better without you? Worst of all, are you competing against the computer?”

If you were paired with a machine to do a task, could together you do better than the machine alone? For Cowen, the answer matters more than you might think – with intelligent machines, he believes, lies the answer to The Great Stagnation he has worried about in the past.

There are two types of people in the world, he argues; those who can increase the productivity of machines, and those who will be replaced by them. One group will earn increasingly higher wages and rewards; the other will earn relatively less and less. Average is over, and though machines won’t replace human labour entirely, as the Luddites feared, they will completely change how labour is allocated.

This is not to say that computer programmers are the only ones who will make money, of course. Rather, Cowen thinks of working with machines more broadly; using the automatic checkouts in supermarkets, for example, or adapting your smartphone to improve workflow. It is these teams of humans and machines, he argues, that can really make our productivity soar. This is true of life in general, he says, not just the workplace, whether it be relationships, hobbies, or education.

It’s a provocative idea, particularly in light of today’s concerns over inequality. The Economist this week, for example, quotes Daimler as describing their employees as “robot farming” because the workers are there to shepherd the robots as they do the work; presumably the ratio of sheep to shepherds is diminishing. To my mind, Cowen has a point; the highest payoff activities in life will always be those that cannot be done by another person or machine.

What I am less sure of is how this affects young people preparing to enter the workforce. In some ways there have always been key skills that are most lucrative in the world of work, but if Cowen is correct, the segregation of students who do not learn to work with machines may be even more extreme than the income divisions between disciplines today. Is it possible, however, to conduct a classical education while also developing those skills? Should that be the point of education? Degrees that focus on deep, reflective thinking, like philosophy, may find significant difficulties adjusting if indeed they even want to. Either way, our society may lose out, as certainly do our would-be philosophers. The rise of the machines may decide much in the world to come, but under it lies a perspective that may not be compatible with everything we do – can and should we attempt to reconcile them?

Anyway, the book is clearly fascinating: you can keep reading it here (or in the UK or Canada). Or, join the Subtle Illumination email list to your right! Disclosure: I read Average is Over as a free advance reader copy – it is released tomorrow.

The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen – Kwame Anthony Appiah

“[H]onor, especially when purged of its prejudices of caste and gender and the like, is peculiarly well suited to turn private moral sentiments into public norms…That is one reason why we still need honour: it can help us make a better world.”

Author’s note: it’s an American book, and so he spells honour with an ‘o’ – being a Canadian, I refuse to do the same. Apologies for confusion.

In the Gospels, when Paul was about to be whipped, he revealed he was a Roman citizen, and therefore exempt. Romans took it as a matter of honour that their citizens should never be beaten but rather be treated with dignity at all times, regardless of the crime. For much of history, honour was a founding principle of (usually male) behaviour, but in modern society, it has something of a bad name, linked as it is to human rights abuses, including honour killings, and violations of the rule of law. Appiah, however, believes that far from deserving a bad name, honour provides a motivating force for morality; it compels people to be honourable out of a desire to avoid shame.

There are two kinds of honour, Appiah suggests. The first, competitive honour, is about being better than others; winning a race or gaining victory in war. The second is peer honour, which governs relations among equals: being born a lord in medieval England would give you peer honour,  to be beheaded instead of hanged if you were found guilty of a crime, for example, even if you were a completely incompetent lord. The modern conception of human rights is perhaps similar to a universal extension of peer honour.

Appiah examines three case studies, dueling, footbinding, and slavery, and discusses the role honour had in ending each of them. Each activity had critics long before it actually ended, he points out, but what actually ended them was a shift in the perception of what was honourable, from the activity itself being honourable to the activity being shameful.

To my mind, there is some question of correlation versus causation in his case studies, but they are interesting nonetheless. Unfortunately, my broader impression was somewhat neutral. The book plays an important role in attempting to introduce honour into the discussion of morality, and that far I agree. Often though I was left feeling his examples were incomplete, and they lacked the depth of understanding of Steven Pinker on a similar subject, for example. I just didn’t feel he fully engaged with the complexity of honour or morality, and as a result for me the book raised more questions than it answered.

Still, it’s an interesting subject, and if you want to keep reading, you can do so here (or in the UK or Canada),

Essays – Michel de Montaigne

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Antifragile 2 – Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Antifragile – Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

(Part 2 available here)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Of Dice and Men – David M. Ewalt

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Academically Adrift – Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Art of Choosing – Sheena Iyengar

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

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

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

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

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

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

Food and The Omnivore’s Dilemma – Michael Pollan

“Imagine for a moment if we once again knew, strictly as a matter of course, these few unremarkable things: What it is we’re eating. Where it came from. How it found its way to our table. And what, in a true accounting, it really cost. We could then talk about some other things at dinner. For we would no longer need any reminding that however we choose to feed ourselves, we eat by the grace of nature, not industry, and what we’re eating is never anything more or less than the body of the world.”

Why do you eat what you do? How was it produced? If you can answer with more than the aisle of the supermarket you bought it from, well done. If you can’t, does that worry you? Is all food created equal and of equal health benefit? Is beef from a grass-lot the same as feed-lot, or vegetables grown industrially the same as organic? Do you know the answer to that? If not, does that worry you?

Michael Pollan argues it should worry us. Three principle chains of food sustain us, all of them linking one biological system, ourselves, with another, a patch of soil. Most of us, however, remain woefully ignorant of any sort of understanding of our food systems. In The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Pollan explores each of the three methods of food creation, industrial, organic, and hunter/gatherer, and examines the costs and benefits of each.

There are a lot of shocking facts in The Omnivore’s Dilemma, but to highlight one, I hadn’t realized that in industrial production of beef, cattle are dosed with antibiotics as a preventative measure, since they are so susceptible to disease from the poor conditions in which they live. Antibiotic resistance may be one of the most serious problems humanity as a whole faces in the coming years; to squander our antibiotics in a manner almost designed to create resistance is for me simply unacceptable. Shaving pennies off the price of beef just doesn’t seem worth the cost of our ability to fight disease. Health warning: readers of sensitive stomach may find they learn rather more about how broiler chickens are raised than they might have wanted.

There are of course two sides to every story, and Pollan is careful to examine the benefits from cheaper food in terms of health and living standards. He’s right, and the animal rights movement sometimes unfairly ignores these benefits. The reality though is that most of us aren’t in a position to decide either way; we remain willfully blind to the reality, ignorant of what we eat and where it comes from. Perhaps the tradeoff is worth it, but we should at least be aware of the processes our food goes through, whether that means glass walls on slaughterhouses or increased education about industrial production. In the end, what you eat is a personal choice, but it’s one that should be made out of information, not ignorance.

If you want to learn more about what you’re eating, you can get Pollan’s book here (or in the UK or Canada). Or, join the Subtle Illumination email list to your right!

The Slow Fix – Carl Honoré

“The time has come to resist the siren call of half-baked solutions and short-term palliatives and start fixing things properly. We need to find a new and better way to tackle every kind of problem. We need to learn the art of the Slow Fix.”

Imagine a prisoner trapped inside a tower, with a rope half the length needed to reach the ground. Undeterred, the prisoner cuts the rope in half, ties the halves together, and escapes. When told to imagine themselves as the prisoner, 48% of people figure out how they did it. When told to imagine the prisoner is someone else, 66% solve the problem. How we frame the problem, and how we think about it, matters (the solution is at the end).

Carl Honoré worries that this captures a larger problem: that we have fallen victim to a culture of quick fixes. Both psychologically and societally, he argues that we turn almost immediately for the obvious solution, and end up curing not the cause, but the symptoms, of a problem. Of course, some problems can and should be cured with a quick fix: but for problems like global warming, financial crises, obesity, and others, we need to spend time understanding the problem before we can solve it.

To help, he offers a series of 12 steps problem-solvers should go through, including collaboration, devolving authority, going over the details, and others. The core of his book, however, lies in his examples. The rehabilitation-oriented prisons of Norway, the exclusively student-run conflict resolution systems of the elementary schools of Finland, locally produced coffee from farms of Costa Rica and the online chore game-ification of ChoreWars all provide grist for his mill as he puts smart solutions to difficult problems under the microscope.

As befits a book focused on slow, however, and as he himself points out, he has no easy solutions to problems or simple lessons. Difficult problems take time and care, and shortcuts are not always an option. A good start, however, is ignoring 24 hour news cycles and voters who prefer instant decisions over correct decisions. The prisoner, by the way, splits the rope lengthwise – Honoré will be disappointed if you have skipped to the end to read the solution instead of slowly digesting the material in the middle.

Feel in need of a slow fix yourself? Keep reading (or in the UK or Canada). Or, join the Subtle Illumination email list to your right!