Review: Do Hard Things

 Do Hard Things has the subtitle that it's about how the conventional idea of toughness is wrong. I picked it up expecting some wishy washy reference to literature like grit (which has long been debunked), and was very surprised when it turned out to actually say a ton of sensible things. (Management books, like parenting books tend not to be sensible) For instance:

Authoritarian parenting leads to lower independence, more aggressive behavior, and a higher likelihood for substance abuse and risky behaviors. In sport, the controlling, demanding style also fails. On the athletic fields, it’s linked to lower grit and an increase in emotional exhaustion, burnout, and fear of failure. (kindle loc 151)

I've read a number of parenting books about how authoritarian parenting is wrong, but none of them ever actually wrote down what the consequences were! The author, Steve Magness, turns out to have been some sort of high level running coach, and so his emphasis is on athletic performance rather than say team management.

My high level summary of the book is that building a high performance team depends on two things: selection (who you hire or recruit into the team), and how you nurture the team (how you manage the team once you've hired them). His point is that a lot of the conventional wisdom is about boot camp building toughness, but the reality is that boot camp is about weeding out people (i.e., selection), and after that the military actually works on giving its soldiers the tools to succeed before putting them through the punishing programs (i.e., there's quite a bit of nurturing and management going on). Mistaking the selection process for the management process is what causes people to think that authoritarian parenting or dictatorship style management works. From a manager's point of view, you should be tough during the selection process (i.e., your interview process should be rigorous, thorough, and tough), but once you've built the team, other parts of management become more important.

Contrary to our old-school expectations, developing toughness doesn’t involve training camps from hell or exercise as punishment. It doesn’t involve cruel, demanding bosses with little appreciation of the individual. It doesn’t involve strict, one-way-communication parenting with little feedback from your child on their needs. As my good friend Brad outlined when explaining what he’d learned in his first few years of parenting, “At any moment, your child can go from fine to a fit. After a long day, it’s easy to want to yell at them and tell them to grow up. But, especially with young kids, you have to realize that the emotions they’re feeling are real. Even if they’re inconsequential. It requires all the patience in the world, but I try to ask myself, how can I meet them at their level, explain it, and use it as a teachable moment. Yelling at them, exerting excessive control, all that does is teach them to be afraid of you. Why would I want to ingrain to only listen because they’re afraid of me?” (kindle loc kindle loc 3218)

 One of the most important pieces on this book is something that almost no other management books mention, which is the importance of eating with your team:

Gregg Popovich is the legendary coach of the San Antonio Spurs. When it comes to creating a team culture, he’s the envy of just about every coach, CEO, or leader out there. His players rave about the bonds they still hold with their teammates years later. One player recently said, “I was friends with every single teammate I ever had in my [time] with the Spurs. That might sound far-fetched, but it’s true.” One key to such cohesion? Team meals. Popovich dinner stories are almost apocryphal. Three-hour meals, with Popovich expertly choosing the wine and food. Tables arranged so that the players maximize interaction. Popovich eschews the NBA tradition of jetting out of the city straight after a game, and instead, the Spurs go straight to a meal and stay the night. No set agenda other than time together, and certainly no ropes courses or other contrived team-bonding activities...You can’t force cohesion or unity. It doesn’t come from trust falls, gimmicky bonding activities, or forced interaction. It comes from being real. From allowing people to lower their defenses and feel comfortable enough to be who they are. You can’t force it. All you can do is create the space for it to happen. The magic wasn’t in Popovich’s team dinners. It was in his creating space for genuine interaction...If you are at a company get-together or dinner and everyone is looking down at their phone, you’ve created the wrong environment. (kindle loc 3326-3363)

I've always had a low opinion of those fake bonding events, and here's one guy who understands that ropes courses, trust falls, etc aren't worth money compared to just freaking sitting down and eating with your team on a frequent basis.

The actual part of the book about management comes from asking your people to have a realistic sense of what they or cannot do, giving them control over which outcomes they want to achieve and how to achieve them, and then providing a way for the team to work together. It's really that simple, but so few managers successfully do this, out of a misguided sense that management is about yelling at people and trying to get the to do what they don't want to do.

This is a great book. If you want to learn how to manage (or parent), you owe it to yourself to read this book.

 

Review: The Gone World

 After reading There is no Anti-Memetics Division, I went to ChatGPT Pro and asked for other books like it that I might have missed over the years. It gave me a bunch of books I'd already read, as well as books I'd already bounced off of, but one book that hit was The Gone World, published in 2018 and apparently won a few awards but somehow never got my attention.

The book revolves around Shannon Moss, who is an investigator for crimes related to the navy. The background and backstory is heavy on science fiction, however, positing that the Navy had discovered a way to traverse both deep space and time. The rules of time travel are as follows:

1. You can only travel forward in time, but not backwards in time.
2. Jumping ahead in time grants you access to a universe that hasn't happened yet and might never exist. Each forward jump therefore gives you a unique universe, that may never be repeated.
3. Returning to your own time, you aged normally depending on how much time you spent in the universe you were in. You can bring back information or people (the latter is rare), but none of the evidence is admissible in court.

What's happening in Moss' experience is that there's a world extinction event in the future, which causes the death of humanity. What's disturbing is that that extinction event keeps getting closer and closer into the future. But that's not her job. Her job is to investigate crimes, and one multiple serial murder is happening, at which point she gets involved.

Given her affiliation with the navy, she gets to jump forward in time to get an idea of what happens. At this point the story flips back and forth between being a crime thriller (will she rescue the girl in time), complete with an insane serial killer villain, and a science fiction time-travel story (can we save the world). For many books and writers this would be too hard to mix together, but somehow this story works. We get recurring characters, visiting them in multiple timelines, some of whom are victims and some of whom become villains. Moss herself at one point discovers that she might have caused the death of one of her friends due to her using an identity while time traveling.

The book is impressively well plotted, though there are a few plot holes, and the ending was great (the post-ending was anti-climatic, but appropriate). This is a great book. Not as good as There is no Anti-Memetics Division, but still excellent and well worth your time.

Review: Voice of the Whirlwind

 I’m generally a fan of Walter Jon Williams. His worlds are quite well constructed, and his characters interesting, many quite nuanced. Voice of the Whirlwind is set in his Cyberpunk universe. The protagonist, Steward, is a highly trained super soldier fanatic who’s brought back to life after his Alpha (the original) died. Apparently, the brain backups weren’t made frequently, so he has a memory gap and has to figured out what his Alpha was up to when he died.

If this sounds very familiar, it’s because Richard Morgan’s much more successful Altered Carbon had a similar setup. What made Morgan’s book more successful? First, Takeshi Kovacs narrates the novel, which makes the entire voice and presence much more immediate and visceral. Secondly, Morgan’s style is much better: rather than trying to be cyberpunk, Morgan went for a Raymond Chandler cynical hardboiled attitude.

Finally, while Stewart seems devoice of passion, Kovacs is nothing if not passionate, even if cynical.

The world that Williams introduces is complex, but there’s a lot of explicit exposition that has to happen for you to “get it.” The initial setup takes too long, and while the action goes fast once Stewartd figures out what happened, because of the third person narrative, you never understand why he should have cared in the first place.

To be fair, Williams wrote this book many years before Richard Morgan wrote Altered Carbon. I think it suffered from too much cyberpunk and its datedness shows.

 

Review: How to Win A Trade War

 How To Win A Trade War is a breezily written, conversational book about trade economics. At its best, it provides cool statistics about trade that you didn't know. For instance:

When the EU dropped barriers to trade in services among its members, it became easier for, say, Polish plumbers to accept contracts in France at lower wages, costing their French competitors work. One study found that unemployment in particularly exposed areas rose and over ten years later still hadn’t fully recovered. (kindle loc 243)

There's also an acknowledgement uncommon amongst economists that increased trade leads to the current deplorable right-wing movement in politics:

 British voters in places where jobs were more vulnerable to Chinese competition were more likely to back Brexit. In the 1990s, Democratic President Bill Clinton pushed through the controversial NAFTA trade deal to warnings that liberalization would destroy American jobs. While trade wasn’t billed as a very important issue in subsequent elections, the US voters most exposed to imports from Mexico responded by shifting toward the Republican Party. Then there was America’s “China shock.” Regions more exposed to import competition from China saw TV viewers shift to Fox News and campaign contributions to moderates drop. Polarization increased (elite lefties are just as capable of being hostile toward free trade as those on the right). But only the Republicans gained vote share where it mattered. In 2016, the effect was big enough to tip the vote and bring President Trump into office. (kindle loc 1344)

It's amazing that only Republicans gain vote share whenever free trade is involved. There's a lot of support in this book about how China misbehaves by deliberately subsidizing its state owned enterprises to ignore profitability. Effectively, Chinese companies get to ignore price signals and continue overproduction of goods as a way to retain or increase jobs.

 The final grounds for suspicion related to the response of Chinese companies to normal market dynamics. Even when demand was depressed, China’s production steamed ahead. The Chinese ramped up their shipbuilding capacity as world trade volumes collapsed by more than a fifth between 2008 and 2009. And their steel exports grew by 76 percent (that’s a lot) between 2021 and 2024 to their highest level ever, all while global demand for steel fell by 5 percent. When prices fall, that is the market’s way of telling producers that they should curb supply. When the Chinese didn’t want to hear the message, the burden of adjustment fell on the rest of the world. (kindle loc 1920)

To be honest, it's not just economists that should hang their head in shame for not pointing this out loud and clear during the 2000s. It seems to me that military strategists are also behind the 8 ball. Western countries losing shipbuilding capability should have rang alarm bells all throughout NATO but apparently nobody did (or even said) anything.

Finally, the book talks about how to properly compensate people who lose their jobs from free trade:

The US experience offers one more conclusive piece of evidence on how to support workers affected by trade-related disruptions. Trade Adjustment Assistance was a program designed to help workers hurt by imports to find new jobs. It was small and doesn’t exist anymore. (The United States works hard to sustain its reputation for having a terrible social safety net.) But for older workers, it included an interesting component: wage insurance. If you lost your job and found a new one at a lower wage, the government would top up 50 percent of the difference for up to two years. In effect, the government was subsidizing workers’ adjustment to their financial shock. A study of the program found that eligible workers were much more likely than their ineligible counterparts to find a job quickly. That cut government spending on unemployment benefits and raised income tax payments so much that the scheme paid for itself. (This is what is known as a “wow” result.) Awkwardly, the scheme didn’t effectively encourage people to switch industries altogether, maybe because eligible workers were a little older and less keen to embark on a whole new career. And because it helped workers after losing their jobs, it probably wouldn’t encourage workers to switch jobs before a trade war broke out. But as a shock mitigation program, it’s worth a look. (kindle loc 2424)

If you think the book is snarky, it's true --- the authors try very hard to keep things light-hearted (a little too hard, in fact), and I think the book could have been shortened significantly if the authors weren't trying to be so cute all the time.

In any case, I enjoyed the book and found it a good use of my time. Recommended. 

Review: Our Dollar, Your Problem

 Our Dollar, Your Problem is Ken Rogoff's book about the dollar's primacy as the global currency. How did it come about? How does the US benefit from its use as the primary currency? And what are the burdens that the US bear because the rest of the world feels obliged to hold such dollar reserves. Ken Rogoff was the former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, so he's credible and knows what he's talking about.

In this book, you get inside baseball about how the decisions of the international organizations are run:

“When there is a dispute between two small nations, the UN steps in and the dispute disappears. When there is a dispute between a small nation and a large nation, the UN steps in and the small nation disappears. When there is a dispute between two large nations, the UN disappears.” (kindle loc 2319)

Rogoff makes many claims that will be surprised by. For instance, he thinks that the exchange rate control that China imposed was not responsible for the huge Chinese trade surpluses:

the exchange rate undervaluation story misses perhaps the most important device the Chinese authorities were using to keep their economy so hypercompetitive: the steady migration of millions of people each year from agrarian rural China to its cities and manufacturing centers. The real problem that Western economies were facing was a never-ending stream of impoverished rural Chinese being lifted out of desperate poverty each year through the chance to work in the productive city centers. Exchange market intervention might have contributed to the supposed undervaluation of China’s currency, but it was likely secondary. (kindle loc 3155)

 In other words, the real economy is what's driving Chinese trade surpluses and insanely competitive prices, not just exchange rate intervention. Similarly, while the US does gain some benefit from being able to borrow in its own currency, the benefit is not that big compared to the real drivers of the American economies and the wild deficit financed spending of both parties.

Interestingly enough, Rogoff spends a lot of time knocking down the idea that deficits don't matter and that interest rates would stay low forever. The thing is, he could have published this book in 2019 before the pandemic and then really made good on his predictions, instead of waiting until 2025 to do it. He never comes out and say why interest rates would rise (is it because the world is running out of savings? capital controls?). In any case he does congratulate himself for predicting the increased interest rates of the post pandemic world (partly due to high inflation), but he also notes that it was never a given that the dollar would last as long as it did as the world's currency:

Had Russia liberalized its economy in the mid-1960s, had Japan not allowed itself to be browbeaten into a destabilizing currency appreciation in the mid-1980s, had France not insisted on including Greece in the euro in 2001, or had China moved to a full-fledged floating exchange rate regime in 2010’s, the dollar would likely still be on top, but perhaps not nearly to the extent it is today. In any of these alternative realities, U.S. interest rates would probably be higher; the dollar’s exorbitant privilege less. (kindle loc 5283)

In any case, I think Americans by accelerating the decline of the dollar's dominance (by electing officials who appear hell bent on decreasing the world's dependence on the USA) are in for a shock over the next few years when the rest of the world realizes that the American market will be superceded by those in Asia.

 

Review: First Light - Switching on Stars at the Dawn of Time

 First Light is a book about how the first stars formed, and how they're quite different from our sun and the stars being formed today. I read it on a plane and it was relatively light and didn't keep me from napping when I needed to.

The earliest stars were formed when most of the universe was either Hydrogen or Helium. By definition there weren't other elements since those had yet to have been forged in the hearts of stars.What I enjoyed about this book is that it takes pains to reveal mysteries that we still don't understand:

It wasn’t until the 1930s that it was realised that this absorption line was not due to a new element at all, but was instead a different form of the already familiar element, iron. Iron usually has 26 electrons and is associated with a well-known set of absorption lines. If we take away some of those electrons (we ionise the iron), then those absorption lines change. The absorption line linked to the mythical element coronium was identical to the absorption line produced by an iron atom that has had 13 electrons removed. Removing electrons is no easy job and requires very high temperatures to create high-energy collisions capable of dislodging electrons. To remove 13 electrons requires blisteringly high temperatures, indicating that the corona is millions of degrees Kelvin compared to the comparatively chilly 5,800K photosphere. So the Sun does indeed get hotter as you venture into the corona, an entirely unintuitive situation. Perhaps the high temperatures are produced by complicated magnetic fields violently throwing charged particles up from the photosphere into the corona, or perhaps bomb-like explosions called nano-flares throw heat up into the atmosphere. The theories are being narrowed down, but the Coronal Heating Problem remains an unsolved quandary. * * * It might disappoint you that I haven’t been able to tie up the Coronal Heating Problem in a neat and satisfying way. It’s annoying not knowing the answer, isn’t it? And surprising considering the resources we command. We have built probes that have travelled all the way into interstellar space, and Hubble can see well outside the Milky Way to a multitude of other galaxies. We understand how our Universe evolved, even right back to having a solid theory for its creation, the Big Bang. Yet we still race to exploit every bit of scientific understanding we can from seven minutes of totality, just as scientists were doing in 1925, albeit now with more advanced technology. We add to our knowledge in one sense (the corona isn’t made of an unusual element – it’s just really hot!), then add to our questions in another (wait, how is it that hot?!). I will admit that the Coronal Heating Problem was fairly new to me at the time of the Great American Eclipse. As an astrophysicist studying the first stars, it hadn’t ever occurred to me to pay much attention to the nearest star – the mundane, predictable Sun. (kindle loc 406)

 The book describes how it's taken years and they've still not discovered a generation 1 star (one that has a very low percentage of non hydrogen/helium). That's because those very old stars were mostly very big and hence had a short lifespan. In addition, to look for those old stars you have to look back in time a long way,

Recommended

Review: There is no Antimemetics Division

 I bought There Is No Antimemetics Division thinking that I'd read it on a plane flight, but no such luck! As soon as I got a couple of chapters in, I just had to keep reading until I finished the novel.

The book is properly described as a Cthulhu Mythos horror, drawing from the same genre of horror about "unspeakables", "unmentionables", and other types of horror. But it's written by a software engineer, and so is rigorous and academic in ways that H. P. Lovecraft could never match.

Imagine a world in which there are creatures that are anti-memetic. A meme is an idea that wants to spread to as many people as possible. An anti-meme is something that wants to be a secret (for instance, your password is an anti-meme) These creatures would want humans to see past them, or to forget them if they ever glimpsed them, for either innocent or nefarious purposes.

Just like in Charlie Stross's laundry series, this novel is written around an organization that's been built to deal with anti-memetic creatures. How such an organization would operate, what tools and research methods it would use, are slowly revealed in the course of this novel. At first, the novel seems to be a collection of vignettes, or short stories about individual episodes in this setting. As the novel develops, however, you start to see a theme and see various holes in the organizations, along with certain mysteries. The writing is tight, fast paced (the book's only 267 pages long), and in many cases so many words are blacked out that it would be impossible for you to fill in the blanks! That's part of the book's structure.'

The book does have several holes. For instance, I cannot understand why you would have a recurrent/repeating meeting in an organization that has to deal with creatures that could erase your memory. That seems bad. For another, by the end of the novel, the author (Sam Hughes,aka qntm) has written himself into such a corner that the resolved ending feels lackluster and insufficient.

Nevertheless, the book is short, it's cheap, and the writing and plot are all well thought out and compelling. Highly recommended. Probably the best fiction I read all year!