Nerding Out: A Blog About Books

Go on, be impressed by statistics

2009-01-19T10:00:00.005+08:00

It appears that if you have read one book on probability and statistics, you might as well have read them all.

One common issue that gets re-visited a lot includes the creepy coincidence known as the birthday problem, where all it takes is just 23 people in the same room to produce a 50% or greater chance of one matching birthday pair.

People are constantly amazed at how this could even happen. But once you understand the formulation of the odds behind it, it will be less amazing. To the point of being such a natural thing to happen. If it did not happen, it will be creepy instead.

But that shouldn't make you not pretend to be amazed if you did share the same birthday with the hottest girl in the room. Go on now, go break the ice.

And I think in the mind of statisticians, it is beyond a shadow of a doubt that O.J. Simpson is guiltier than sin. It was a matter of the jury that acquitted him not understanding a single damn statistic (or lie, depends on how you see it) that was thrown about in court.

And the court of public opinion is also not helping at all and confounding the matter because everyone else does not understand statistics as well!

Numerical illiteracy can be fixed

2009-01-18T22:07:00.006+08:00

Gerd Gigerenzer's Calculated Risks is a good tool to fix numerical illiteracy. He explains that people are generally not good at thinking in terms of percentages but can figure out their odds better if given a base rate figure.

One of the most important topics touched on in the book is the issue of false positives that can occur in medical test results. (Usually newspapers do not make any mention of false positives when they talk about disease-testing. My speculation is that it is not an issue most journalists are aware of or know how to present in a comprehensive fashion.)

Given that no test is ever 100% accurate, there will always be a chance that those who are disease-free will receive results that are positive.

The book describes the havoc this kind of misunderstandings can cause as people who receive a false positive result, even without the Aids virus, end up killing themselves or carrying out risky behaviour because they think they have the death sentence upon them.

Numbers can kill sometimes, I guess.

Science to kill boredom

2009-01-17T00:08:00.007+08:00

The Undercover Scientist by Peter Bentley is not all that fascinating to read. It bascially tries to explain the science of everyday occurrences, which is enlightening if you happen to be very bored. (A little bit of chemistry and a little of physics, and a little bit of everything else.)

But there is no relation to The Undercover Philosopher by Michael Philips.

The only thing that caught my attention was the mention of Singapore's ban of chewing gum in one of the chapters about what makes gum sticky. (You know our nation-state has made it when we get mentioned for such kind of things.)

What I found funny was how chewing gum giant, Wrigley, managed to have gum listed on the Singapore-America Free Trade Agreement and lobbied the country to accept gum again after the 1992 ban.

Since 2004, gum was allowed again, but only for health reasons.

Maybe memorising useless facts such as these might be impressive if you can regurgitate them during dinner conversations and impress everyone how much you know about the world.

Sounds like a plan.

Freakonomics debunked as junk research

2009-01-16T22:44:00.004+08:00

It is always good to read books with a dose of healthy skepticism. Especially books that might appear too convincing and tidy.

Which is why fans of Freakonomics might be in for a rude shock.

In Econospinning by Gene Epstein, the author devotes chapter 15 of the book, titled "Best-Selling Myth: Freakonomics", to be nothing short of an expose of the twisted logic involved in Freakonomics.

Epstein goes after one of the most controversial findings made in Freakonomics, the one that links abortion and crime rates to reveal it as the middlebrow, deceptive and shoddy research that it is.

The best part is that Epstein even got Freakonomics co-author, Steven Levitt, to concede his error.

But what is "econospinning" in the first place? It is a term used to refer to the sort of economic journalism that shapes the data around a predetermined story, rather than the story around the discoverable data.

It amounts to reverse engineering of sorts, preferring sensationalism over substance, and a lot of times, misinterpreting figures and statistics.

Besides, Steven Levitt, New York Times columnist and much-revered public figure, Paul Krugman, is also targeted because he has tried to sway public opinion with his analysis that might not be the most insightful or truthful.

Not so simple after all

2009-01-15T22:25:00.006+08:00

The author of Simplexity is Jeffrey Kluger, a senior editor and writer for Time magazine. Little wonder then that this book reads almost like an extended version of a Time magazine feature article.

This is not a bad thing. The writing is admirable because it possesses that quality of being able to fuse abstract ideas with vivid descriptions. Being a reader of such a text has its payoff because the ability to grasp the gist of the idea is what people are looking for. People like the feeling of comprehension.

However, I was still a little disappointed with the treatment of the topic of complexity, simply because too little insights are given. There is no systematic explanation of what complexity entails, but rather it deals with different scenarios and ferrets it out by pinpointing it in each instance.

Although the idea that complexity stems from simple premises or building blocks might be news to some, I have come across better explanations of it in books such as Nexus by Mark Buchanan.

What I did like about Simplexity, though, is the explanation of the "Complexity Arc". It is perhaps one of the best insights provided.

If plotted on a spectrum, complexity at its highest level is in between two states: chaotic/ unstable (a room full of gas molecules) and robust/ stable (a lump of rock). This region between disorder and order is truly complex because it is comparable to a state of balance, an organised anarchy of sorts, and an oddball of stable dynamism and fluidity that is paradoxical.

Think of the human body or a horse or a car and you see what I mean. With the countless interactions and happenings in these states that actually produces something meaningful, complexity is fearfully wonderful.

When a shove becomes a nudge

2009-01-14T23:45:00.007+08:00

Nudge by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein reminds me quite a bit of The Paradox Of Choice by Barry Schwartz. Both books are aimed at improving the decisions people make when faced with a deluge of information and misinformation. They also offer practical solutions and advice.

However, I sense that in everyday circumstances, it is hard to even come to terms with so many sources and types of information. Having to even start sieving through them can lead to self-doubt and paralysis in decision-making.

That being said, I would consider Nudge to be a book for the learned simply because there are segments of people in society who do not have the time, ability and will power to summon their wits to finish reading a book about decision-making, let alone understand what "paternalistic libertarianism" means. A lot more hidden assumptions have to be made of the reader, such as taking it for granted that literacy will lead to full comprehension of implications of making bias decisions. Practising what is preached happens, but less than what we expect.

The good news is that nudging might work, but then again, people who are encouraged to choose certain actions as a result of "choice architecture" (say, in a cafeteria, unhealthy food is obscured or put further down the line to encourage diners to pick the healthier offerings first and give the rest a miss) might learn to overcome it, or worse, come to expect "choice architecture" to be a vital part of everyday living.

It's a tough life, with all these choosing.

To learn about deciding between
hard choices and on how to satisfice, read:

City slackers of the world unite

2009-01-13T23:35:00.004+08:00

Before Steve McKevitt's Why The World Is Full Of Useless Things, there was City Slackers, which is an equally funny book.

Written with lots of humorous anecdotes, it is an indictment of the "new economy" that has created slacker jobs in public relations, marketing and the media where measurement of productiveness of an individual is virtually impossible.

Output productivity is not dependent on how much work gets done, but how successful a campaign or product is after its launch. Such results, of course, is pretty much left to the hands of chance sometimes, with some results doing better than others. A process producing a lot of misses accompanied by a few major hits.

"City slackers" is a term used to describe the workers in such fields who get away with doing minimal work and taking the most credit, and trying their utmost to further their own careers. Companies apparently bear the brunt because what they are paying for can be nothing more than hot air and employees with very nice stories to tell: The all-talk-and-no-substance phenomenon.

This new economy, by the way, incorporates the much lauded knowledge and information sector that is supposedly burgeoning into a limitless frontier.

This optimism in unlimited upper bound success reminds me of scalable careers mentioned in Nassim Nicholas Taleb's The Black Swan. The down side is that there is just so many mediocre campaigns and products out there and no systematic way of telling the good from the less good that everyone is deluded into thinking that they are producing great stuff.

Delusion, I tell you.

An inspiration to sad children

2009-01-12T01:09:00.000+08:00

This book can inspire a generation of very sad children.

In Charles Cross' narrative, Kurt Cobain's life is tragic and amusing. A talented boy who grew into a tortured soul, somehow always incorporated gloominess as part of life.

That attitude inspired some music-making and obsession with art that celebrates grotesque forms, and ultimately cultivated a fear of being seen as a phony. Go-betweens like Cobain become insecure, fearful that success through mass appeal is both fortuitous and insipid, possessing a quality of being neither here nor there.

Cross presents more than the two-dimensional junkie people have come to know. There is a bit of fluff in here as well, but that is what makes it a compelling story.

With all the talk about how dark Nirvana is, the ferocity of Cobain's music is nothing to shout about, because death metal is probably a thousand times heavier. But they are dank, wallow in pity and yet very hummable.

Besides telling a coherent story about what made Cobain, well, Cobain, Heavier Than Heaven also speculates on the final moments of his life before he blew his head off with a shot gun sending fragments of his skull splattering all over the upholstery and walls.

Reads like Neil Gaiman in fact. Inspiring.

All modern music is nothing but

a footnote to The Beatles. Please read:

If you prefer dark fiction without
the real-life characters, do read:

Great mythos begin with solid storytelling

2009-01-11T22:39:00.010+08:00

How do you know that you have read the definitive version of The Beatles mythology?

When the book and its author get mentioned in Malcolm Galdwell's Outliers, of course. (Gladwell was using The Beatles as an extraordinary example of hard work according to the 10,000-hour rule.)

I am big on biographies and mythologising , and I read Shout! by Philip Norman over the course of several weeks when I was dutifully serving my country a few years ago. (The extended narrative bent on intricacies helped pass mind-numbingly boring nights.)

This is one of those texts that fuses solid storytelling with investigative journalism-styled fact-finding. The end result is a blow-by-blow account that pieces together disparate facts from the band's past - categorised according to eras - that it appears as an insurmountable task for anyone to even begin telling such a story.

One interesting fact: There was a fifth Beatle, Stuart Sutcliffe, who allegedly died from John Lennon kicking his head in. But nothing conclusive suggests Lennon is indeed guilty even though Beatles historians had a field day with speculations.

Yes, there really is such a thing as Beatles historians. Like there are medievalists who study the Knights Templars.

If you prefer compelling narratives about
dead musicians, do refer to:

The choice of choosing wisely

2009-01-10T21:19:00.008+08:00

Having to make a choice can be agonising enough. But having to make a choice when faced with an endless array of choices is the curse of modernity.

The Paradox Of Choice by Barry Schwartz lets on about why human beings generally suck at making decisions. Schwartz also reveals why even after people have made up their minds, they still agonise over whether it was the best decision, regardless of how many hours they spent brooding about it.

Add to the fact that the human ability to process information is generally weak or extremely faulty (we rely a lot on quick and dirty rules of thumb), people more often than not do not act in their best interest. This generally explains why there is always so much regret after the fact.

Schwartz's research primarily revolves around psychology and runs through the gamut of past research, such as heuristics and biases.

I would also like to think that this book is a major flipping of the bird in the face of treatises that insist humans are rational.

We are not and we should not pretend to be.

If you think life is about having to choose the most
worthy useless thing, this book might be appealing:

Someone who probably knows more about
psychology than you is a mentalist. To find out
what's in your mind:

If you need another book that teaches you
how to live, here it is:

An amazing feat of the mind

2009-01-09T18:35:00.013+08:00

Besides Nassim Nicholas Taleb's Fooled By Randomness, this was another book I bought in India.

If I never took an introductory class in quantum physics in university, I might never read A Brief History Of Time by Stephen Hawking out of my own volition. (But then again, I might.) Although it is written with the lay person in mind, it is simply too damn hard to understand. (Even Tyler Cowen mentioned that the inner economist in him would gladly give Hawking's book a pass.)

One of the good things that came out of it, though, is knowing that there is the acknowledgement of knowledge and its limits. It is the realisation that the most powerful observation techniques developed are useless in trying to observe and know for sure what is going on at the tiniest quantum levels. Trying to pry into that world will only alter the state that its in. Spooky, but true.

The limits of knowledge and its consequences have startled physicists. Science might not be the endeavor it was made out to be because it can never truly know.

Physicists might have sighed and ripped hair out of their heads, but at least they have refuted Cartesian claims about cleanly separating mind and body. Mind and body interactions are impossible to take apart. Reductionism might be the singular most corrupted thought to have afflicted most of humanity's thinking.

Speaking of mind and body, Hawking seems to have defied the odds. You can only wonder what he is capable of achieving if he actually had his psycho motor skills functioning.

If you like physics,
you'll probably like this:

If you like science in general,
you'll probably dig this:

If you want to know more about how
physics is applied, try this:

More than meets the eye

2009-01-08T00:25:00.007+08:00

The central thesis of Outliers is about people having a mistaken conception of how success develops. Contrary to success stemming from innate ability and a consequence of individual effort, it is a result of hard work, circumstances and serendipity combined. And those who are successful stand outside the norm. They are the outliers.

I agree with Malcolm Gladwell that hard work tends to be downplayed or overlooked. He mentions the 10,000-hour rule that is mandatory to transform an apprentice to an expert. I have read somewhere that it takes about 6,000 practice kicks of a ball before anyone can even begin to claim to be good at maneuvering it by giving it the required spin, control and power. There is simply no substitute for actually kicking a ball around to be good at it eventually.

And Gladwell also mentions about the workings of culture.

I was amused to read that Singapore was ranked as one of the countries most tolerant of ambiguity. (Maybe we thrive on it.) It only reminded me of out-of-bound markers (OB markers) that are constantly shifting. And how we don't really mind that.

But Singapore is also mentioned as being ranked highly on math skills.

However, there are some issues that I cannot wrap my mind around. If Asian countries are supposedly so good at manufacturing math geeks, why aren't we as prosperous as America when it comes to producing winners? (Then again, I think I know the answer to this one.)

I think it's because even though culture might be good at making people embrace hard work, but a culture like what we have in Singapore is not very tolerant of failure (it is probably more pronounced in Japan). We might actually be claiming dubious credit for producing hard working dullards, not robust enough to try and fail, and survive the stigma of having failed.

Or we simply cannot afford too many chances to try and fail. And we can't stand looking like a twat.

Gladwell picks the genius physicist, Robert Oppenheimer, as being an outlier (smart with street smarts). Oppenheimer is described to be quite queer in character, but eventually worked on what was to be the most important project on the planet: He helped create the atomic bomb during World War II.

I shall gladly nominate another outlier who I think all of present humanity owes our existence to: Richard Feynman, the wicked genius of a physicist and colleague of Oppenheimer.

If Feynman's dad did not spark his son's intellectual curiosity, if Feynman was born a few years later then his actual birthdate and if Feynman was recruited by the Germans instead, I think there is a likelihood we could all be Nazis now, or alternatively, not even be around to wax lyrical about our circumstances.

Chilly.

Looking for a first hand account
of hard work? Try this book:

Eating like the gods

2009-01-07T00:36:00.006+08:00

From a Singaporean perspective, the parts that stand out the most in American Gods by Neil Gaiman is the enjoyable and bizarre lore about travelling and eating by the gods.

Singaporeans have no problems relating to the excursions of travelling from one point to another to just eat and gorge on food. And Singaporeans definitely have little trouble thinking of themselves as nothing less than demi-gods who demand the best service from those serving them in establishments.

Not to mention how travelling will elicit prayers, usually for journey mercy, and before eating (the act of saying of grace). Highly religious experience, no?

But of course, I am only bastardising the miracle of a novel written by one of the most fertile minds around.

Gaiman's book is dark and meandering, profane and sacrilegious, but a holy tribute to warmth and loyalty. It is that from the start to finish. I enjoyed the witticism displayed and the sleight of hand employed. (A bunch of coin tricks are indeed mentioned.)

Without a Shadow of a doubt, good stuff. It is definitely more than just eating and travelling, but these two activities perhaps symbolises sustenance and strength. Powerful themes in this tale.

This is a grand narrative and in the author's preferred text version, Gaiman wrote the preface while on his way to Singapore.

Amen.

So, you'll like another tall tale?
Get your hands on this:

How about a shorter tale?
Take a peek at this:

Hubris makes the world go round

2009-01-06T23:55:00.002+08:00

Hubris.

One word that sums up what might be wrong with humanity. Excessive pride makes us believe we are better than what we are. Worse, we think we know what we want and we actually set out to find it.

And then there are those who actually try to deliver the next big thing, which is nothing more than a new product with a 90% probability of failing and falling flat on its face.

But what we have really become is a world gone mad. The media hates normal people and the same media waxes analytical over the most mundane detail. And people actually believe it. And call it entertainment.

Globalisation doesn't make us any wiser even though we might have become more efficient.

We are nothing more than the global village idiots, the easily bored and the dullards with poor taste. Modernity is a demon and it is also a void.

As stark and dark as the modern condition is described here, Steve McKevitt's Why The World Is Full Of Useless Things is actually one very funny book. That sort of book that is short and snappy enough to be read in one afternoon. That sort that makes you giggle.

It is irreverent and it takes pot shots at life as we know it, although seen through a grouchy pair of eyes (McKevitt claims to be not grumpy, but just stating the truth).

McKevitt, by the way, is a consultant and he writes columns in newspapers. As far as I am aware, he is based in the UK.

And he is one of those with a shape-shifting occupation, of the variety that is difficult to explain and pinpoint. I know a chef cooks and an astronaut goes to space, but I never quite know what a consultant does.

But it is most probably something more than useless.

If you like funny, sarcastic
and smart writing, do try:

If you like it more wicked,
lap this up:

The other Genesis Chapter 1 Verse 1

2009-01-05T01:41:00.005+08:00

No one on this planet has a satisfying answer as to how life started on Earth or in the universe. This part is pretty much obvious.

The less obvious part is the Herculean effort put in by researchers over the years to question, reason and argue how it all came about. And a portion of that effort can be found in Paul Davies' The Origin Of Life, where he widens the argument and speculates the possibility that life might have blasted into Earth from Mars, or vice versa, through asteroid impacts. (Sounds unlikely and wildly speculative, but still remotely possible.)

If that was true, it probably only serves to further complicate a very complex and unresolvable problem: What even kick started this process of life in the first place, regardless from where it came from?

The science that is covered in the book can be considered to be not tough, unless there is already some fluency on the part of the lay reader in chemistry, biology and physics.

Otherwise, to refrain from being overwhelmed by science is to be mindful that even though science might be taking us somewhere by enhancing its ever increasing explanatory powers, it is the pleasure of finding things out that is essentially driving researchers on, and not necessarily the search for the ultimate explanation.

Good thing Davies isn't deluded enough to claim to ever be privy to all the answers.

Oh, you like science writing?
Then you will also like:

I see. So you're a hardcore skeptic?
Then you could get your hands on:

Beef up your vocabulary with Middlesex

2009-01-04T15:11:00.007+08:00

I think some authors write novels with an electronic thesaurus wedged firmly by their sides. They also make mind maps. And conduct a lot of research. And suffer severe headaches from writing intelligently crafted sentences.

Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex is one meandering weighty tome of a novel spanning three generations about a Greek hermaphrodite finding herself/ himself and eventually being true to herself/ himself.

I wonder what inspired Eugenides to this style of narrating, with all its intricacies, information overload and zipping back and forth in time. It could even qualify as a time traveller's tale.

My friend (a girl) said she could relate to the narrator of the story, Calliope Stephanides, and had always held her/ him as a hero.

I wonder what the hell she meant by that. Mmm... Maybe she (or he) is dropping a hint.

But yes, I can tell, there is indeed a lot of confusion with oneself and this big scary world. Like being Calliope the hermaphrodite in the story.

Those who enjoy a long bizarre tale,
will also be likely to enjoy:

Know more than you know

2009-01-03T03:08:00.003+08:00

More Than You Know by Michael Mauboussin was introduced to me by a friend after I told him how much I enjoyed reading Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

Some of the ideas that Taleb talks about in Fooled By Randomness and The Black Swan can also be found in Mauboussin's book. (The version I read was the second edition, which consists of 38 short essays.) Reading them helped to clear up some thoughts encountered while reading Taleb, because there is a clear focus in the treatment of topics by Mauboussin. He introduces, explains and keeps his arguments concise.

I wouldn't claim to understand every aspect discussed in the book, but it is a good starting point for anyone interested in investing and finance, because it goes beyond the usual books about, say, fundamental or technical analysis only.

I must make this qualification about Taleb and Mauboussin: They belong to the category of distilled thinkers who encourage robust and diverse thinking by incorporating knowledge from disparate fields. It is always amusing to consider that it is the people who are dealing in a field as vulgar as high finance, who are encouraging investors and non-investors alike to build up an arsenal of analytical tools and to focus on the important information signals.

Perhaps having a lot of money (and occasionally a life or two) on the line has that effect of making people more thorough and wary of misinformation. And to crack their brains a little harder.

Wealth distribution always unequal

2009-01-02T20:06:00.018+08:00

Sometime last year, I read a 2007 Reuters news report about wealth disparity in Singapore that juxtaposes the poor with the uber-rich.

I believe the report achieved its intended effect of playing to sentiments because my impression at that time was that inequality in this country looks set to approach chronic levels. The underclass in Singapore looked like they were going to the dogs when income inequality was being compared to the the likes of the Philippines and Guatemala.

But what the Reuters news report lacked, I subsequently found in Nexus by Mark Buchanan, a book about network effects and complex physical and social systems. (A relatively easy read still, given the topics that sound way out of this world.)

When understood in its proper context - and contrary to being completely shocking - wealth and income inequality is a natural consequence. It is a result of some unseen but existing law. This means that even when inequality appears severe, regardless of whichever country it originates from, it is still adhering to fundamental principles.

Way back in 1897, Vilfredo Pareto, an Italian engineer-turned-economist, discovered a pattern in the distribution of wealth. This pattern had a strange quality to it, as it acted in a similar fashion as a physical law, such as thermodynamics or chemistry. Moreover, it was also universal, applicable across cultures and continents. It is pretty much the same way the laws of gravity hold in Singapore, as it does in China.

The pattern revealed that a small fraction of people will always own a large fraction of the wealth. This is showed to occur when the doubling of the level of wealth will result in the number of people who have that much to decrease by a constant factor. Thought of in this way, it is not surprising to find giants lingering among dwarfs, only to discover mega giants lingering among giants.

But as far as mathematicians are concerned, no one really knows how to explain why this phenomenon (also known as Pareto's law among other names) even happens.

So, is there a solution to counter the resentment of those who are less well-of, irked by the conspicuous lifestyle choices of the rich? (After all, happiness, like wealth, is relative.)

One, the less well-off can be placated by instruments of the state (easily done in Singapore). Two, the absolute level of wealth across the board can be raised (Singapore has been successful over the years to a certain extent). Three, taxes on the rich can be implemented to re-distribute wealth to those hovering around the lower rung (wishful thinking).

Last but not least, appreciate the fact that Pareto's law might perhaps never be defied.

Avoid being a sucker this new year

2009-01-01T14:17:00.002+08:00

If there is one book you need to help figure out how and why those unexpected large scale events happened in 2008, try reading Nassim Nicholas Taleb's The Black Swan.

And if you insist you are smart, this book might just make you smarter. If you think that you are dumb, this book will also make good company (revealing that dumbness is actually quite democratic, just like luck).

If you loved the egotistical, idiosyncratic and angst-ridden rants against flawed contemporary thinking in Taleb's Fooled By Randomness, chances are The Black Swan might be what you are looking for. Or it could also be too much of a good thing (some can't stand his ego).

Read it to avoid becoming the fool this new year and taken for a ride by the establishment. According to Taleb, these so called "experts" have all along been residing in the media (talking heads) and in government (politicians). And they will in all likelihood be contributing to the misshapened perception of the world's unpredictability.

Here, have some dangerous ideas

2008-12-31T20:27:00.013+08:00

I am such a sucker for Richard Dawkins.

The only reason I picked up What Is Your Dangerous Idea? was because Dawkins wrote the afterword. Otherwise, I might have given this book a miss until much later.

But it turned out to be engrossing enough, although I cannot agree that the ideas presented are exceptionally thought-provoking, partly because the subject matter discussed can be exceedingly condensed and esoteric (such as the astronomy discussion that invokes the cosmological constant is puzzling at best).

Edited by John Brockman, the 108 essays contained within are diverse, with content spanning across philosophy, physics and psychology. (Besides selling ideas through books, scientists and academics who engage in erudite thinking do share their research with the public online for free, such as the Third Culture website, which is published by Brockman.)

Written by specialists with superstar credentials from disparate fields, expository writing like this is not meant to provide rigorous proofs, arguments or hypotheses to be verified or falsified. Making tough concepts and sensitive topics palatable for the lay person is a gentle nudge to the majority of non-specialist readers to take their thinking elsewhere and beyond.

Readers might even feel inclined to brush up on their knowledge after this book.

So you like a truly scary idea that
runs counter to everything you believed
about from where you came from? Try this:

Here, have some morals

2008-12-30T23:00:00.008+08:00

I never came across uber-intellectual Umberto Eco in my three years in university. The first time I ever heard of him was in The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, introduced as a demonstrative example of knowledge and anti-knowledge in the opening chapter.

Eco, you see, apparently owns a personal library containing 30,000 books.

Which is all the more odd because I should have at least heard of him mentioned in class considering his powerhouse role as a public intellectual/ philosopher/ literary critic/ popular novelist and professor of semiotics. (Maybe NUS lecturers only like to read chic French semioticians. Eco is Italian, by the way.)

But it's never too late to start. Five Moral Pieces is heavy reading even though they are short essays (111 pages in all). It is written in an academic tone, dwells into ethical considerations and make timeless arguments about war, religion and the state of the press.

Written more than a decade ago, Eco's critique on the state of the press in the world and in Italy, for example, resonates with the state of the press in Singapore. (I felt this bit on the press was the most interesting. It's not all that perfect even from where he comes from.)

His complaints? Too much sensationalism, too focused on inconsequential happenings that distort the perception of news readers and having a business model sustained by the advertising monster.

The best thing about these older works is that I never get to come across the word "globalisation" that often, even though Eco talks about globalisation without really referring to it so assuredly.

For fans of his meaty novels, this book might not be appealing. But for fans who want to catch a glimpse of this renowned academic without going through a mountain of his works (although not so renowned from where I come from), this book is a good place to start.

Humans and pigeons draw faulty conclusions

2008-12-29T14:30:00.005+08:00

Things usually get interesting when I come across one concept or example being explored in separate books. The fun comes in trying to put them together.

In Nassim Nicholas Taleb's Fooled By Randomness and Derren Brown's Tricks Of The Mind, both authors make a reference to Skinner's pigeons to serve as a cautionary reminder that humans are just as prone as birds in developing superstitions because our mental circuitry has evolved to draw causal inferences, even where none exists.

A little word about Skinner's pigeons first: In 1948, the Harvard psychologist, B.F. Skinner, conducted an experiment involving famished pigeons in a box. Food was dropped into the box for the starving birds at intervals over a period of time. It was observed that the birds started to develop elaborate rituals (such as head-twirling and beak-pecking) as if believing that their actions had some sort of connection to the appearance of food.

Of course, from the perspective of humans, their bird-brain inspired actions were independent of the food being dropped into the box by the observing researchers.

But humans should wipe that smirk off their faces.

Skinner's experiment was insightful because it illustrated the way gamblers (of the human variety) also tend to develop tics and rituals as well: The belief that by performing a ritualistic jiggle or being in possession of a "lucky" charm will help improve the outcome of winning, gamblers are acting in a similar fashion as pigeons.

Both species assume causal connections between doing one thing that is completely unrelated to another. Worse, they keep doing it with faith unshaken.

Yes, Skinner's experiment and conclusion was mind-boggling, and that was fair and good. And we were all the better for it because we learnt something insightful (about birds and ourselves).

But faulty human reasoning does not only afflict gamblers. That faultiness is democratic in such a way that it also affects academic thinking and the discipline of behaviorism itself!

And here is where The Undercover Philosopher by Michael Philips provides a cautionary reminder against a cautionary reminder, which is to avoid swallowing wholesale the central assumption of theories such as behaviorism.

According to Philips, behaviorism suffered as a discipline because it was willfully ignorant of contravening evidence from other fields (i.e. those that showed that behavioral outcomes were not solely determined by the stimuli of rewards and punishment) and was too narrowly focused on behaviour, which it had assumed beforehand to be produced by stimuli (reward and punishment).

This basic idea of humans responding solely to stimuli is easily shown to be faulty if you consider how people make up their minds.

Public opinion and consumer choice are constantly being shaped by images and association put forth by advertisers (e.g. sexually suggestive tag lines come to mind). Brain chemistry, altered by drugs and alcohol, can influence a person's judgement and perception (i.e. every girl in a smoky club with dim lights suddenly becomes attractive).

People tend to do all kinds of crazy stuff not only because they are motivated or accustomed to a process of reward or punishment. People are suggestible in other subtle and discreet ways and it is often impossible to tell what is going on inside the "black box" that is the brain.

The bottom line is: People do not make all choices in life just because they have been conditioned to see outcomes as rewards or punishments.

And the other bottom line is: Humans are not pigeons, that's for sure. But we tend to display traits that make us appear as more sophisticated pigeons.

We can be so blind to our blindness (like behaviorism is of itself) but at the same time penetrating elsewhere (finding out that birds and humans display behaviour suspiciously resembling superstition).

Ironic.

Read more about psychology
from the perspective of a mentalist:

Mentalist shares a piece of his mind

2008-12-28T02:23:00.011+08:00

I first spotted Derren Brown's freaky mind tricks on YouTube more than a year ago. He appears more charismatic than David Blaine and less enigmatic than Criss Angel, but nevertheless, a compelling mind-bender to watch mainly because he looks like a normal bloke.

A mentalist/ magician/ illusionist/ hypnotist/ entertainer, this Brit is capable of putting his subjects in a comatose state, carry out a heist or hand over personal belongings just by asking politely.

Those bemused by the inner workings of this strange craft will find Tricks Of The Mind highly informative as it deals mainly with human psychology and fundamental biases that we mortals commit without realising it (such as how we develop beliefs and aim to prove ourselves right instead of wrong).

Just do not expect to be told everything he knows and how he does it.

Brown's open admission in this book about how he steered away from his Christian roots over the years - having once been a fervent believer who took it upon himself to pray for the salvation of his friends - is a compelling read.

His skepticism blossomed over the years to the extent that he dismisses the notion of spirituality because he knows for a fact that he does not have to rely on the supernatural to perform his illusions and acts. (His personal take on Christianity is far more textured than what is summarised here. Brown can be read as primarily trying to combat close-mindedness when it comes to religion.)

Personal struggles of this sort are especially enlightening to read due to the nature of his occupation. It will be truly amazing if he can reconcile what he does with a belief in faith.

Not included in the book, though, was his recent coming out of the closet.

As Brown has always claimed to be honest about his dishonesty, his coming out sounds like a suspicious admission because one can never be sure if this could be read as a cheeky sleight-of-hand to divert attention.

It could easily be another of his ploys to mess with your mind.

Fault yourself. Find out about
your biases and fallacies here:

Teach yourself to reason.
Like a dreaded economist:

Human psychology explored
in this book about finance:

Doing is part of learning

2008-12-27T01:21:00.007+08:00

I always fancy reading about what other people think because the thrill is never really about what they think about, but how they go about doing it.

The Pleasure Of Finding Things Out by Richard Feynman is a casual disclosure of the renowned scientist's inquisitiveness and a revelation of his eccentricities. As opposed to, say, Stephen Hawking, who has no choice but to perform theoretical physics in his head, Feynman puts his entire being into the investigation of puzzles.

Feynman was the embodiment of natural curiosity. He developed hunches about everyday life (such as whether it was possbile to mentally keep a steady count while running up and down stairs) and set out trying to test those beliefs empirically.

Before winning the Noble Prize in Physics in 1965 for contributions to the theory of nuclear reactions, he was scouted while still completing his PhD thesis to develop the atomic bomb (Manhattan Project) and saw through the process that culminated in the annihilation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. (He was depressive after the deed.)

The series of short works are extended narratives given by Feynman in his personal inimitable style. The anecdotal quality allows his injection of self-deprecating humour into his storytelling as well.

Read this book as a guide to parenting if all science fails to interest you. Feynman always credited his father for developing his curiosity in life and maintaining a healthy distrust for any form of authority that tried to impinge its wisdom.

Feynman, after all, lived out that intellectual integrity by being the only open critic of NASA after the Challenger Space Shuttle explosion in 1986. He condemned the space race propoganda that led to underestimation of the probability for mishaps to happen. The report he wrote was almost supressed from the public (it ended up in the appendix) but it is reproduced in this book.

Wicked genius.

Miss Prym is all too proper

2008-12-26T01:28:00.007+08:00

The classic struggle between good and evil featuring a cast of conniving village idiots of remote Viscos trying to carry out the grotesque deed of sacrificial killing. But first, they must elect the most suitable candidate, in a process egged on by religious rationality and greed.

The Devil And Miss Prym by Paulo Coelho is fascinating because it shows humans for what we do best - the ability to explain ourselves convincingly, attributing action and inaction on our part to circumstances, but yet still able to overcome our foibles at the most crucial moments (or so we think).

Coelho has sold over 80 million copies of his books, which is evidence that people either like to read about themselves, or like to read about people who resemble them but believe that they are above those he portrays.

Either way, this tale spun around superstition and supernatural forces should be compelling enough to hold you attention for three hours - the time it took to finish all 200 pages of it.

The only gripe is the ending, where the lass Chantel Prym gets what she had been seeking, which really isn't how life works out for a lot of people, no?

Regardless of the ending, this book will still make it as a classic, if not now, then soon.

Enjoy.

Run, talk, read and write

2008-12-25T00:03:00.004+08:00

When asking around for recommendations for good fiction titles, the name-dropping exercise will inevitably includes Japanese novelist, Haruki Murakami. (For those of you who recommended him to me, you know who you are.)

His latest book, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, is not a novel but a memoir infused with philosophical musings about his twin passions: writing and running.

In other circumstances, it will be odd to compliment someone for being a highly skilled interlocutor good at engaging himself in conversation (conferring the dubious honour of a classic nut job).

But in Murakami's case, his ability to dig deep seems like an innate characteristic, and he is so self-reflexive that the reader will probably be lost in his thought processes.

Here are some facts about him that might intrigue you: He owned a jazz bar, decided to become a novelist and tried his hand (or rather, his feet) at long distance-running, where he became an avid marathoner.

Reading his memoir provides a good sense of how his novels will read. Having never encountered Murakami's earlier works before, I can guess that his fiction writing is probably filled with a similar style of introspection and genuineness.

For those of you who consider yourselves to be writers and wordsmiths, you will find resonance in his words. For those of you who cannot imagine running a marathon and surviving it, perhaps he can convince you to make your first foray into the running world.

A relatively short and easy book to ingest, it makes for a good weekend read. Do savour the parts when he mentions surrendipitious encounters that charmed his life, because we all can relate to that.

Singapore food culture explored at length by economist

2008-12-24T03:01:00.000+08:00

One of the reasons I picked this book, Discover Your Inner Economist, off the shelves was because Nassim Nicholas Taleb kept poking fun of economists in Fooled By Randomness. So the only way to find out what makes economists tick, which in turn makes Taleb tick, is to read a book by an economist.

Given that Tyler Cowen is an economist who blogs, he is perhaps a rare find given the occupation's obsession with complex mathematical equations and model-building (highly incomprehensible to mere mortals). One of the outcomes, though, is that the book also reads like an extended blog post.

And Cowen more than qualifies as one of those advice-giving economists. He gives advice about reading, teaching your children driving and dining out.

It will be of interest to Singaporeans to know that he writes at length about Singaporean food and the local dining experience, venturing into the details about what makes fish head curry fascinating and why hawker centres will always be part of the city-state (due to public policy that protects food establishments from being taken over for other purposes, say, building another shopping mall).

On hindsight, the effect of reading those portions I can relate to appears surreal (local food suddenly became familiar but yet unfamiliar) but still clicked, but to non-locals who have never set foot on this place, I can only guess it will appear to be a pointless exercise in description.

Such kinds of descriptive writing can be interesting to know, but how useful and vivid can it get if you have never eaten, smelled or seen the food before? It is the (rather insensitive) equivalent of asking a visually-impaired person to imagine "green." And then try to taste it.

A quick check in the reference pages at the end of the book reveals that Cowen got his information on food from NUS sociologist, Chua Beng Huat (a dignified-looking mustachioed professor, I must add).

But kudos to Cowen, he did set foot on this island before and even made the effort to read about it. But I don't think nicking pages off Chua's research required that much effort either.

Mmmm...

Hitchens a Devil's Advocate (literally)

2008-12-23T02:00:00.006+08:00

If you thought that God Is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens is written by a disappointingly dogmatic author after you've read it, here's the good news: It takes a dogmatic person to recognise another dogmatic person.

This very act of faulting Hitchens will only require you to perform some soul-searching of your own and identify the unquestioning beliefs you might have been harbouring about religion. (Pretty much the same way how you would question his conclusion that "religion poisons everything.")

His full-frontal assault on religion is offensive, but it seems that he still manages to come away with the upper hand in spite of all his faults because he is a proponent of Free Inquiry (capitalised for importance), which is quite impossible to say the same of religion in general.

One interesting fact about Hitchens is that besides being a British journalist and a professor of liberal studies, he is one of the very few people who has taken part in the examination of a sainthood cause.

In June 2001, on the invitation of the Roman Catholic Church, Hitchens testified at a hearing on the beatification of Agnes Bojaxhiu, also known as Mother Teresa.

Although the Roman Catholic Church had by that time abolished the office of "Devil's Advocate," they were still obliged to seek testimony from critics. In Hitchens' own words, he was "representing the devil... pro bono." This sort of credentials shouldn't be read as him constituting pure evil, but rather an assertion of his intellectual honesty.

For those of you who fancy a passionate, intellectual, rambunctious and at times humorous exposition provided by a living breathing atheist and political provocateur, this book will be a welcomed detour from the usual political commentary in the newspapers.

And for those of you who might have ingested too much Dawkins, this book will give you a glimpse of what another aetheist is saying.

Although it is hard to agree with the devil's advocate, at the same time, it can be just as hard to disagree with him.

Trust Dawkins to toss out middlebrow thinking

2008-12-22T16:58:00.007+08:00

Dawkins is one of those personalities whose reputation overshadows his ideas. Which is a pity because if only people committed some time to understanding his treatise and refrain from jumping to the conclusion that he is strictly defending the cause of atheism.

In Climbing Mount Improbable, Dawkins is writing to address an audience of non-biologists. It can be read as an attempt to be more accessible and an open invitation to his critics that are not trained in the field of biology to take his ideas head on.

If you want to go up against him, you better be able to first figure out from where he is coming from. And he lends you a hand by presenting his case clearly and coherently.

With this book, Dawkins is also doing what his hero, Charles Darwin, never managed to do, which is to provide a variety of examples illustrating the possibility of elaborate complexities of nature without the need to appeal to the idea of an intelligent creator.

Cumulative and gradual development left to some degree of randomness is sufficient to explain the wonders that abound in nature.

And here is a useful counter-argument that proponents of evolutionary theory can use: Dawkins astutely picks out one common fallacy among middlebrow thinkers, especially those who like to point out the apparent lack of transitional forms of fossils at the species level.

It basically means that the attack on evolutionary theory being incomplete is because there appears to be gaping holes in the evolutionary tree that do not reveal transitory fossilised remains.

However, this sort of criticism is more a a matter of semantics and categorisation than a weakness of the theory itself.

Consider this other analogy: Children grow into adults in a continuous process. But due to legalities and conventions, the cut-off age that is used to determine adulthood is usually pegged at 18 years of age.

If eligible voters in an election is separated into two categories - eligible voters over 18 and those that don't qualify because they are under 18 years old - this will produce two distinct but somewhat artificial categories of dividing people.

It is clear that such a categorisation will not produce intermediaries i.e. no one can be classified as either NOT a voter or NOT a non-voter.

Likewise, when creationists make "clever" arguments saying that evolutionary theory is fundamentally flawed because there is no species identified as intermediaries, they are attacking the classification system instead of the theory itself.

This is perhaps one of the classic fallacies whereby the map is mistaken for the terrain and people debate passionately (and erroneously) about the map, regardless of how different the terrain appears.

In fact, the transition from Australopithecus to Homo habilis to Homo erectus to "archaic Homo sapiens" to "modern Homo sapiens" is so smoothly gradual that fossil experts are bickering about how to classify particular fossils.

And if there are missing fossils that break up the smooth transition, there is also the possibility that remains were not in a condition that allowed them to be fossilised. This is also another classic fallacy of mistaking absence of evidence for evidence of absence.

Climbing Mount Improbable is an apt metaphor even 12 years after this book was published. This is because advancing the debate of evolution is appearing to be an insurmountable task having it constantly mired in misunderstandings.

And it does not help that arguments made against evolution are as flawed and passionate as ever.

A fool of randomness (and almost everything else in life)

2008-12-21T01:39:00.002+08:00

No book I know has granted this much gratification. Or thought-provoking wisdom.

Fooled By Randomness by Nassim Nicholas Taleb was bought off the shelf (randomly, I must add) while travelling through India during mid-2008 for about SG$10 (which is less than half the Singaporean price).

I bought it without knowing who the author was or what the subject matter dealt with. I was barely numerate (which means being illiterate when it comes to dealing with numbers) when I first started reading it, but it prompted me to take a full-semester class in probability and statistics.

Not that it required numeracy to understand its central treatise. Taleb presented the topic of probability and statistics so fascinatingly well, it was a sin not to delve into the topic further.

Otherwise, written in Taleb's well-known idiosyncratic style and laced with his hallmark sarcasm, FBR should be read (note the normative stance) by any undergraduate, particularly those majoring in a social sciences or humanities, and with a knack for buggering lecturers with hard questions.

Taleb's scathing attacks against social scientists, philosophers and economists, in particular, is an indictment of the social sciences/ humanities department and the parent knowledge enterprise, otherwise known as, the university.

His criticism? These departments rely heavily on pseudo-scientific methods of knowing, while relying too much on explaining the past and committing the narrative fallacy of retrofitting explanations, all the while forgetting that history flows forward. The ghastliest mistake is to derive evidence from the highly visible past, with a blatant disregard for the unknowable, which is far more potent in its delivery of truths.

To rephrase Taleb, universities are the same as governments. They are not necessarily interested in the Truth (emphasis mine, and capitalised for intellectual posturing). They are more interested in self-perpetuation with their own narrow interests in mind. (But like governments, universities are necessary sometimes, and in my case, it can be shown that my ability to critique the system is conditional on me having been through the system in the first place. Hence, if no university, then no me as I am now. Note the clever use of conditional probability as an example and part of the argument.)

Which rings a bell for me because after three years of meandering through sterile corridors (and sometimes, equally sterile classes), intellectual ferment is not producing the desired concentrated spirit of inquiry. Rather, it's just a matter of mass fermenting of minds (like the process of producing the beer that is drunk by the undergraduate community on a weekend out, but without the beer as the payoff. It is just rot.) And I found it in a book and out of all places, from a book store while on an aimless holiday.

On hindsight, though, it wasn't such a chance occurrence to have randomly picked up a book on randomness after all, even considering the fact I managed to, while wandering through the Indian subcontinent.

First published in 2001, FBR established Taleb as a prophet. (It sold big, but perhaps not as big as, say, Malcolm Gladwell.) In 2004, the second edition was published and the word count was bumped up. It continued to sell big, so it made sense to continue to display the book in book stores (due to the fact it is a winner).

And add to the fact that India has always been famous for its outstanding variety of cheap books, it was just my sheer ignorance of this fact then, and this particular type of literature that has always been in existence, which foiled any earlier forays into this particular subject matter.

Introduction: Thinking about thinking

2008-12-20T18:08:00.006+08:00

Whilst thinking about thinking, I couldn't help but realise that a large part of what I know and am able to articulate is actually highly unoriginal.

Yes, even this thought of being unoriginal is highly unoriginal. But since noticing that a stupefying amount of what I know has been gleaned from books I encountered (as opposed to, say, wise sages I had the fortune to meet in the flesh and bone), I shall call these sort of knowledge "borrowed wisdom."

Not that there is anything wrong with having highly unoriginal thoughts. Learning from what others before us had to toil earnestly to come to know and learn to articulate, is said to enable this generation's fool to surpass the genius wisdom of the last.

The arduous task, therefore, is to retrace the roots of borrowed wisdom, and making intelligent connections between them. This form of synthesis also allows a more cogent aggregation of ideas, a process that lends texture and context through drawing connections. Likewise, there are those (e.g. researchers and academics) that spend their entire lives working on one specific problem, while there are others who display consilience and find coherence from disparate fields.

I prefer to be identified with the latter for now because more often than not, it requires the exercise of counter intuition.

Do not be misled into thinking that this blog is all about reading or intellectual posturing. Nor should it be construed to be an external appendage or a poor excuse for an ego.

It should be read, first and foremost, as a a personal treatise (like how most good books by erudite authors should be), and then as a tribute to the writers and thinkers whom I have read, and to those lurking on shelves that I have yet to encounter and be surprised by.

This makes the challenge quite obvious: It is one thing to stake a claim to knowledge while quite another to present it eloquently and convincingly. In other words, if you can start to think about what others thought about and re-state it in your own terms (provided it is a faithful re-presentation of the original idea), only then can you have a right to own it.

So let's begin to clear the air.