Review: Books that Matter - The Prince

 I've heard of The Prince but never read it, but I did use one of my audible credits to pick up the great courses lecture series about The Prince. I'm glad I did. I learned the following:

• Niccolo Machiavelli was an atheist. I had no idea that it was possible to be an Atheist during that time period, but Landon explained how he came to that conclusion, and it's convincing. Along the way I got to an understanding of what Greek philosophers came to light during that time that supported Machiavelli's position.
• Machiavelli wrote the book as an attempt to get back into the good graces of the ruling family of Florence after being exiled when the Medici took back Florence after a period of Florence being a republic in which Machiavelli was a prime mover. The book didn't work to get Machiavelli back in.
• In many ways Machiavelli wasn't able to take the same advice he gave in the book. That's how he ended up in the situation where he had to write an advice book. The book itself wasn't widely read during his lifetime as it was meant to have an audience of one person.
• Italy didn't have a national identity during that period --- the country was divided into city states, each of which experimented with differing types of governments at different times.

All in all, every chapter of the book was discussed in detail, along with the background necessary in order to understand it. It was well worth my time.

Review: The Poppy War

 The Poppy War is R. F. Kuang's fantasy retelling of the Rape of Nanking. The book starts off like a typical fantasy novel set in an East Asian analog with western trappings --- there's an exam where the hero protagonist passes and qualifies to go to a military school. The class sizes are astonishingly small for being in China (the author went to a small East Coast private college), and there's one mysterious, weird teacher whose craziness is legendary.

The magic system is completely un-worked out and deliberately designed so that the author can do whatever she likes, but the writing is transparent and enjoyable, even if the whole setup is entire cliched. (It might not be so clichéd if you didn't grow up reading Jin Yong or Gu Long).

Once the novel gets to the war between the Japanese-analogue and the Chinese-analogue, the story drags, and none of the setup she put into place in the first third of the novel has a fulfilling ending. This happened because the world-building was incomplete, so the characters ended up being dragged along by the plot rather than leading to a natural conclusion that was part of the setup.

I can see why the book was popular and won awards. But I borrowed the second book of the trilogy from the library and didn't get very far before I understood that the fundamental world building flaws in the book meant that it wasn't compelling --- the need to retell the rape of Nanking simply over-rode all other considerations and it shows.

Reread: House of Suns

 I found myself re-reading House of Suns again recently, and it strikes me as the perfect Alastair Reynolds novel. I found myself once again enjoying the story of the shatterlings, the relativistic travel and how a society could organize itself, and also the various reveals in the story --- the Absence, the interaction with multiple post-human civilizations, as well as the intrigue surrounding the eponymous title. 

The main characters in the book are fairly well fleshed out, and very relatable. I could easily read more novels set in this universe, though I don't believe Reynolds has returned to this universe in recent years (though he has some short stories where the two do show up). Recommended.

Review: Two Wheels Good

 Two Wheels Good claims to be a history and mystery of the bicycle. In practice, it doesn't shed much light on the history of the bicycle, and the mysteries it claims for the bicycle aren't terribly impressive. For instance, the mystery the author claims is that the bicycle showed up so late in history --- the reality was that the bicycle chain required precision manufacturing, as did spokes, rims, and high quality bearings. There's no discussion of the invention of the bicycle's component (derailleurs, wire spoked wheels, or even the invention of the headset).

The mystery of why the book was so lackluster was revealed to me when the author visits Danny MacAskill and goes for a ride with him and crashes on a trivial mountain bike ride, indicating that the author doesn't actually ride his bike very much or very spiritedly or adventurously, despite having claimed to spend a year as a bicycle messenger in Boston.

There's a lot of trivia in this page, as though the author tries very hard to make up for his lack of first hand experience riding a bicycle by reading widely and doing his research in the library. There are many places where he makes fun of the modern suburban cargo bike:

Cargo cycles are expensive and, with their bulk, a bit ostentatious. They are status symbols, in other words, favored by the kinds of bourgeois bohemians who inhabit gracious urban neighborhoods lined with bike lanes. The history of the cargo cycle is a parable of gentrification: the manual laborer who hauled loads through the industrial city has become a knowledge worker pedaling genteel streets with a storage hold full of kids and kale. (kindle loc 3532)

Those of us who actually ride for utilitarian purposes welcome each one of these ungainly cargo bikes, since each person out of a car is one person less dangerous to our lives.

I can't say that I learned anything useful in this book, but I got a very good idea of what an east coast urban dweller thinks about bicycles. No wonder bicycle infrastructure in this country is so poor!

Review: Going Infinite

 I read Going Infinite expecting some of the trademark incisiveness and insight that Michael Lewis had brought to his other books. To my surprise, Michael Lewis, despite having unprecedented access to Sam Bankman-Fried, apparently swallows SBF at face value, hook, line and sinker.

For instance, right at the end of the book Lewis defends SBF, claiming that it's very likely that FTX was in fact solvent at the time of bankruptcy. That seems pretty unlikely --- if it had indeed been solvent, it would have been easy for FTX to cough up the money that its depositors wanted, rather than declaring bankruptcy. Molly White has an even better takedown of Michael Lewis's claims on her blog.

The entire book, in fact, therefore doesn't add up. We get a lot of claims that SBF made at face value, which isn't very satisfying, and maybe the prurient e-mails and notes between SBF and his one-time romantic partner Caroline Ellison. It's very clear that SBF has effectively told his story well --- but we've seen admissions in public that his belief in Effective Altruism (which still seems to me a crock) was basically a sympathy play --- it was his way into social acceptability for a person who's not very good at socializing with people.

Ultimately, what I'm surprised by was that his employees put up with his treatment of them for so long:

The Serum tokens Sam paid to employees like Friedberg appeared to be fetching $.33 at the time of his bankruptcy. Their true value was not as clear. The FTX employees’ Serum tokens were “locked”; the employees were forbidden from selling them until they became unlocked. The person who did the unlocking was Sam. Initially, the tokens were meant to be unlocked over the course of seven years, starting at the end of the first year. Employees could sell one-seventh of their Serum at the end of that first year, and another seventh at the end of each of the following years, until they’d sold it all. Soon after Serum’s creation, its price had skyrocketed. Sam clearly had not anticipated this. He now had all these employees who felt ridiculously rich. (At least in theory, the value of Dan Friedberg’s Serum stash peaked, in September 2021, at over $1 billion.) In Sam’s view, everyone at once became a lot less motivated to work fourteen-hour days. And so he did a very Sam thing: he changed the terms of the employees’ Serum. In the fine print of the employee Serum contract, he’d reserved for himself the right to extend Serum’s jail time, and he used it to lock up all employees’ Serum for seven years. Sam’s employees had always known that he preferred games in which the rules could change in the middle. They now understood that if he had changed the rules once, he might do it again. They became less enthusiastic about their Serum. “It was very unclear if you had it or if you didn’t have it,” said Ramnik, who had watched in irritation as Sam locked up a bunch of tokens that he’d bought with his own money on the open market before he joined FTX. “I guess you would know in seven years.” (kindle loc 3971)

This is the kind of thing that should have an employee thinking: "If he's willing to cheat me like this, what makes me think that he'll be honest with anyone else, customers, lawyers, or his donors and lenders?" It seems there were plenty of clues as to the fundamental dishonesty of Sam Bankman-Fried. It's just that Michael Lewis chose to ignore all of them, just like his employees did.

 

Review: American Born Chinese

 American Born Chinese is a graphic novel depicting the Asian American experience. It intertwines 3 narratives: the story of the monkey king (known to nearly anyone from Asia), the story of Jin Wang, and the story of Danny, whose visiting embarrasing FOB cousin embarrasses him in school. It has been made into a Disney+ TV show, and has won many awards.

I can see why the story got picked up by Disney+ --- it has the fake sort of epiphany common to many Disney stories, which is the realization that you need to be true to yourself. The story is a straightforward narrative and the art is nothing special.

The ending was reasonable, but nothing I would call ground-breaking. 

Review: Babel

 After reading Yellowface, I had checked out Babel, R. F. Kuang's near past fantasy about a magic/silver based industrial revolution centered around translators of Oxford. At the back of the book I discovered that she got her MSc in Contemporary Chinese Studies from Oxford, which explains her familiarity with the material.

The story centers around Robin Swift, a mixed race Chinese person whose father rescued him for a chorea epidemic and brings him to England, where he undergoes an extensive classical education before starting life as an undergraduate at the translator's institute at Oxford. The department seems unusually small, with only 4 students in their cohort. (As a point of reference though, I'll note that Oxford is just small --- their math department numbers approximately 200 students per cohort)

As he undergoes his education, he's recruited by his predecessor, who faked his own death and dropped out when he realized that this work was being used by the British to oppress foreign countries. The nature of magic in this version of England is tied to silver and translations --- a silver engraving with words of deferring languages and the correct pronunciation and enunciation of both words in bilingual fashion would activate the power of the language based on the subtle differences between the words in these two languages. Kuang uses this conceit to create within the Babel translation department the need for linguistic diversity, with the department accepting its first African and Chinese students in order to research new word-pairs. Kuang associates this with being Chinese raised by the Anglo society:

He had become so good at holding two truths in his head at once. That he was an Englishman and not. That Professor Lovell was his father and not. That the Chinese were a stupid, backwards people, and that he was also one of them. That he hated Babel, and wanted to live forever in its embrace. He had danced for years on the razor’s edge of these truths, had remained there as a means of survival, a way to cope, unable to accept either side fully because an unflinching examination of the truth was so frightening that the contradictions threatened to break him. (kindle loc 5627)

The plot then cleverly revolves around the new, diverse student cohort realizing the oppression of the silver industrial revolution, and the desire of the British Empire's companies to open up the Chinese market to opium:

The silver industrial revolution is one of the greatest drivers of inequality, pollution, and unemployment in this country. The fate of a poor family in Canton is in fact intricately tied to the fate of an out-of-work weaver from Yorkshire. Neither benefits from the expansion of empire. Both only get poorer as the companies get richer. So if they could only form an alliance . . .’ Anthony wove his fingers together. ‘But that’s the problem, you see. No one’s focused on how we’re all connected. We only think about how we suffer, individually. The poor and middle-class of this country don’t realize they have more in common with us than they do with Westminster.’  (kindle loc 7079)

The book's climax drags, however, with the students attempting a revolution and the ending is much less satisfying than the rest of the book. The magic system is of course, as imprecise as translations of any text to any other language would be, which I thought was clever. The story of Robin accepting his privileged state before eventually taking action against his masters is also well done:

Robin had always been willing, in theory, to give up only some things for a revolution he halfway believed in. He was fine with resistance as long as it didn’t hurt him. And the contradiction was fine, as long as he didn’t think too hard about it, or look too closely. But spelled out like this, in such bleak terms, it seemed inarguable that far from being a revolutionary, Robin, in fact, had no convictions whatsoever. (kindle loc 4643)

The book has several anachronisms. For instance, pinyin is used frequently, despite it being a much later invention (post 1950!). It's quite clear that Kuang doesn't have extensive knowledge of non-Mandarin dialects, never even attempting to use Cantonese/Hokkien/Haka words or pronunciations of Chinese words.  It probably would have been better for the book if she'd stuck to actual Chinese characters instead of trying to use pinyin, because of pinyin's inherent ambiguity.

I enjoyed the book, nevertheless, only being disappointed by the ending, where it became clear that Kuang has written herself into a corner. I still recommend the book as a fun read, however, and it might be even more fun if you weren't already familiar with Chinese.

Review: Elon Musk

 I've been watching Walter Issacson go from being a historical biographer to becoming a biographer for contemporary figures. It's an interesting transition, though not always for the better as far as the content is concerned. When you write about a historical figure, you know how the story ends, and to some extent you can provide analysis of the person in context. So I come away from his books like Leonardo Da Vinci or even Einstein feeling smarter than when I read them. With figures like Steve Jobs there's not enough distance but you can see Issacson trying to provide historical context with decreasing success. With his most recent book Elon Musk he doesn't even try.

That's not to say that the book is no good. For one thing, the process of cost-cutting at SpaceX and Tesla isn't particularly well known or well described, nor is Musks' admirable willingness to make the call and take the risk and admit mistakes when he's made a mistake:

Musk took responsibility for the over-automation. He even announced it publicly. “Excessive automation at Tesla was a mistake,” he tweeted. “To be precise, my mistake. Humans are underrated.” (Kindle loc 3740)

Contrast this with Steve Jobs telling customers that they were holding the phone wrong. 

As the book progresses, however, you realize the limitations of Water Isaacson. He's not a technical person, so I wouldn't expect him to describe the intricacies of how a rocket can be designed, or why self-driving cars are much harder than making a reliable EV cheap enough for ordinary people to afford. (Though you could argue that Musk hasn't done that yet --- even the cheapest Tesla is still what I consider BMW territory in terms of pricing)

What's missing is that Issacson's not even that good as a business analyst. So you get this one throwaway line in the book near the end:

His most valuable lieutenants at Tesla and SpaceX had learned ways to deflect his bad ideas and drip-feed him unwelcome information, but the legacy employees at Twitter didn’t know how to handle him. (kindle loc 8104)

I went through the whole book and at no point did Issacson point to a place where either Tesla or SpaceX demonstrated the ability to manage up explicitly and defused Musk. The book has been one chapter after another chapter of Musks' feats, whether it's producing copious numbers of progeny with various women, or sleeping on the factory floor in order to inspire a sense of urgency amongst workers, or firing various managers viciously Darth Vader style. You start to get the impression that Issacson's successes in the past was because there was many other writers who went before him and produced the contextual analysis that he then summarized  in his own book, which made him seem so smart when writing books about historical figures.

This is not to say that it's a bad book. It's well written, with short chapters that can be read pick-up/put-down style in this age of multi-tasking, and told me a lot about the way Musk works, and maybe provide some sympathetic view that he's not a right-wing sycophant that he comes across as on social media. Having said that, I remember that the Nazis who voted for Hitler but didn't commit war-crimes were still Nazis and still actively worked to make the world a much worse place. Probably if Musk had been able to stick to Tesla and SpaceX he would still be hailed as a hero, and if he was an asshole to many of his employees, not much worse than Steve Jobs, which many Silicon Valley managers/CEOs seek to emulate, using his behavior as an excuse to behave abominably.

What does come across is that Musk loves risk, and loves being under fire. Which leads him to seek the kind of thrill and crises that only a company in existential threat can provide him. You therefore cannot expect him to be a normal person.

What I will say is that I admire the calm, cool manager who never manages a crisis because they were so able to anticipate problems that the problems never arise in the first place. Those people exist but because they're not attention seekers and are frequently introverts, nobody thinks to write biographies about them. It's clear that Issacson wants to write about scientists/technologiests, and innovators, and it's clear that over time the ability of one individual to make massive progress is limited --- his latest books end up being about people who lead teams of people. It's a pity that he chooses subjects that embody some of the worst humanity has to offer, providing yet another generation of Silicon Valley CEOs the excuse to behave like man-children.

Finally, I would say that I think that it's very difficult for a well-meaning biographer to get close to his subject while he's still alive and still be objective. It's quite clear to me that the calibre of Issacson's biographies go down when he's working on subjects who are still alive. A combination of not wanting to be nasty to someone whom you've gotten close to over the years (and it's impossible not to do that if you want to capture all the details) and the fact that in this case you probably don't want to piss off the richest person on the planet (who can do a lot of damage to your life if he doesn't like what you wrote). That makes the entire book suspect.

“I was very worried that if Elon and I parted on bad terms, he would tweet bad things about me and call me a libtard, and then his hundred million followers, some of whom may be violent, would come after me and my family.” Roth turned plaintive as he talked about his worries. “What Elon doesn’t understand,” he said at the end of our conversation, “is that the rest of us do not have security people the way he does.” (kindle loc 7435)

Review: Outlive

 I approached Outlive with the attitude that this was another crank health and nutrition book. To my surprise I found Peter Attia to be a pretty humble guy who's willing to read papers and go back on his previous enthusiasm for say, fasting. What he noticed about fasting was that it was very easy to lose muscle, which meant that it's only suitable for people who are so over-fat that the gains from losing fat outweighs the loss of muscle mass.

The book doesn't make any extravagant promises about shortcuts or quick fixes to your diet or exercise routine if you need to lose weight. Instead, it tries to advocate that your lifestyle and exercise program needs to meet the needs of someone who wants to live a long time in good health. If you dislike exercise or want a quick fix this book is not for you --- one of the charts early on demonstrate that if you still want to do easy activities like hiking in your 70s and 80s, you pretty much have to be in the elite 5% of the population in the top 5% of VO2 max for your age. If that's not daunting to you I don't know what is. (Then again, my Garmin watch constantly tells me I have that, so maybe it's not that hard in a nation which wants to drive everywhere and considers exercise to be something worse than death)

I will note that Attia is a great advocate for exercise. He notes, for instance, that the increased risk of dying from smoking is about 50% for a smoker vs a non-smoker. But the increased risk of dying if you're in the lowest quartile of the population is 100% compared to the population that's the next quartile up. In other words, being the least fit in the population is much worse for you than even being a smoker! For upper two quartiles diminishing returns kicks in and being in the elite 5% only reduces your risk of death by 4X rather than 2X compared to the bottom most quartile.

The nutrition part of the book is also interesting, since it notes that the RDA for protein designated by the FDA is actually the minimum necessary to maintain muscle mass, which means that if you're actually trying to gain muscle you have to double or even triple it! That will offend many vegetarians and vegans as he also goes on to explain how hard it is to get sufficient protein of the right kind on those diets.

There's also a huge emphasis in the book about sleep:

Kirk Parsley observed this when he was a physician to the SEALs. Outwardly, these men appeared to be prime physical specimens, finely honed by their rigorous training. But when Parsley analyzed their blood tests, he was shocked: many of these young guys had the hormone levels and inflammatory markers of men several decades older than them—“old-man blood,” Parsley called it. Because their training exercises and missions often began at odd hours of the night and required them to stay awake for twenty-four hours or more at a stretch, they were chronically sleep deprived, their natural sleep-wake cycles utterly disrupted. (kindle loc 5926)

The book is long and sometimes repetitive, so I don't expect a lot of people to read it, and I expect even fewer people to be able to apply the findings in the book. But then again, most people aren't going to be in the elite 5% of octogenarians who can still go hiking with their grand-children.

A science-based, humble approach to longevity. I therefore recommend this book.

Review: The Way Home

 I watched The Last Unicorn with my kids (an amazing movie --- I didn't know that a good number of the animators went on to work at Studio Ghibli later on, and also worked on Nausicaa), and realized that The Way Home is the sequel to the original novel.

The point of view character in the two novellas that form the book is Sooz, whom at the start of Two Hearts (the first novella) is nine years old. The book revisits Molly, Schmendrick, and Lyr years after the events of The Last Unicorn, and features Lyr's final adventure. It's poignant, and sets up the second novella.

The second novella begins when Sooz is 17, and is told a secret about her origin and family. It turns out that she has an older sister who was stolen by the Faerie, and she sees her on her seventeenth birthday and sets out to find her and bring her home. Along the way she encounters a stone golem who becomes her friend. The writing is just as lyrical and beautiful as Two Hearts, but I didn't find the ending nearly as compelling or beautiful. None of the other characters from The Last Unicorn appear in this second novella, so properly speaking it's only a sequel because of the connection with Sooz.

Both novellas are short and easily and quickly read. Two Hearts deserves all the awards that it's won. Recommended.

Bull Run Lake Backpack Boen Edition

 We'd planned a trip for the weekend of Sep 23-24th, but a bout of bad air arrived from Northern California and Oregon, breaking up what was until then a relatively smoke free summer. Purple Air indicated relatively good air quality near bear valley, so we reprised Carson Iceberg Wilderness, a trip that we'd done in 2017 with Bowen, but now with Boen. Back then, we'd done it as a 3 day/2 night trip, but we had only one night this time.

Air Quality at the trailhead was excellent, but we promptly got lost and ended up having to do a cross country hike to get back to the trail. The one time I'd not setup a route on my GPS of course, was the one time we had routefinding problems.

It was relatively cool, but once we'd pitched the tend and walked out to the lakeside I found that I had the courage to at least attempt to swim.

I got in, swam a few strokes, and got back out --- it was pretty cold! Arturo got in long enough to persuade Boen to get in, but after that he got out pretty quick as well. We gathered some firewood and then had dinner. Smoke came in, and gave the place a hazy air, but the portable air quality monitor never gave us a reading worse than "fresh."

We had dinner early, and then started a fire for marshmallows. I didn't realize that Boen had never roasted Marshmallows or had smores before, and that this was a new experience for him! I don't make campfires when I go camping, and the places I tend to go to don't allow them most of the time anyway, but Arturo told me that this was the first trip he'd done this year where campfires were permitted!

The night was forecast to be cold, close to freezing, but it was very comfortable at 8:00pm when Boen had had enough of Marshmallows and we brushed our teeth, and we went and did a bit of stargazing. Getting into our tent, Boen didn't read for long before going to sleep in the zero degree bag and freshly purchased Nemo Tensor Ultralight pad, which was now upgraded to R4.2 for 2023.

We all slept well, and I got out of the tent and made coffee the next morning in good spirits. The air was even clearer and cleaner this morning, and surprisingly warm. Arturo noted that his thermometer read 37F instead of the anticipated 33F, but I pointed out that he had kept his backpack in the vestibule of the tent. The air was bone dry, as was the tent, which was very much welcome when it came to packing things up.

We set off in the shade and made good time --- it's much harder to get lost on the trail from this direction, and it's also a lot easier going.

Boen was a lot stronger than his brother was, and despite blisters patched up with compeed the day before made good time with next to no whining. By the time we got to mosquito lakes we were wondering how the heck we had gotten lost the day before. As we approached the car Arturo pointed it out --- there was a sign that pointed in the wrong direction!

Air Quality was reasonable all the way home. It's the kind of thing you take for granted when you have it, but when you don't you're conscious all the time that the days when humanity can go outdoors and go camping may very well be limited!

Review: The Knowledge Gap

 If you're a parent of elementary school kids, you'll have encountered the metrics of measurement in an American school system, where kids are taught reading skills, such as identifying the topic of a sentence, and summarizing a paragraph. I remember being very impressed by this, since that was something I didn't remember doing until much later in my schooling.

Natalie Wexler's thesis in The Knowledge Gap is that this isn't a sign of a high functioning educational system but is a pointer to the lack of curriculum in the United States. The United States is unique among developed countries in that there's no national curriculum of study that the entire country follows. Instead, all the standards (in Common Core or others) are based on skills. This works in Math --- there's nothing in Math where knowledge doesn't equate to skill. But Wexler claims it fails in reading, because reading comprehension is tied completely to the knowledge you have. As an example, Wexler provides a paragraph describing a cricket match which would be incomprehensible to most Americans, since most Americans don't know what cricket is.

There's apparently a curriculum based approach called Core Knowledge, which isn't widely adopted. Chapter after chapter describes how controversial which knowledge to impart to children is -- lots of proposals get shot down or mired in politics, which is how we end up with the current situation, where many Americans don't know that the civil war was fought over slavery, or that the first 10 amendments to the constitution are called the bill of rights.

There's definitely a stigma attached to learning facts --- those of us growing up in Asia remember being told to memorize pointless facts, and history being reduced to memorizing dates that could be looked up with a quick web search or wikipedia. Nevertheless, Wexler makes a good point that if you're going to test reading comprehension, you might as well define a good curriculum so that the actual comprehension is important. There's also a ton of evidence that kids love it AND they do far better in test scores driven this way.

I didn't grow up in the American education system, but I too remember being disappointed by science classes in school getting most of my science education from popular media like Carl Sagan's Cosmos instead. That's unlikely to change unless parents demand it. I wonder if parents who grew up without this background, however, would even know to demand it!

I hope Wexler's criticism works and that we get a better knowledge-based curriculum in the United States. Apparently New York is starting to change. I wouldn't hold my breath though --- as a parent, though you can help out, since it's your job to impart knowledge as well!

The book gave me much to think about. Recommended.