Re-read: Exhalation

 When Ted Chiang's Exhalation came out on sale, I bought it. Re-reading the book, I found myself really enjoying The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate, the title story, and The Truth of Fact, the story demonstrating how writing changes the way we think, and how an accurate lifelog would impact the way we think by forcing us to confront ourselves in truth, and not allowing our malleable memories to lie to ourselves about who we are.

It's a great book. If you haven't read it, you should. And if you read it a while back, you owe it to yourself to read it again.

Review: Amazon Unbound

 Amazon Unbound is Brad Stone's follow-on to The Everything Store. It starts off where the earlier book ended, with a focus on the development of Alexa/Echo, the introduction of AWS and its successful attack on the database market, and of course, Amazon Prime, and various other products. It also provides a deep look at the people who ran the logistics behind Amazon.

What I didn't realize was that Amazon spends way more than Google on R&D:

In 2017, Amazon spent $22.6 billion on R&D, compared to Alphabet ($16.6 billion), Intel ($13.1 billion), and Microsoft ($12.3 billion). The tax-savvy CEO likely understood that these significant R&D expenses for projects like the Go store and Alexa were not only helping to secure Amazon’s future but could generate tax credits or be written off, lowering Amazon’s overall tax bill (kindle loc 974)

This is astonishing, since Google prides itself on being a technology company, and has been able to attract (and retain) engineering talent, while Amazon has never been competitive, especially when you take into account its stingy benefits package and back-loaded stock compensation package.

What's more, the book revealed a major event in which Bezos decreed that managers should have no fewer than 6 direct reports. This resulted in many upper managers stealing groups from lower level managers, causing a cascading scramble down the chain and the departure of many managers who had few direct reports:

 “When most big companies go through this, they usually announce they are going to have layoffs,” he said. “You can stick around or get a severance. But Amazon to this day never announced how many people they were trying to get rid of, so it created a culture of fear, which they probably prefer.” The informal, musical chairs–style reorganization allowed Amazon to avoid the internal and external stigma of announcing layoffs. (Kindle loc 3817)

 Stone doesn't mention that by forcing people to depart voluntarily Amazon also doesn't have to pay severance packages. Even in the case where they famously raised wages to $15/hour, there was an ulterior motive:

Earnings in Amazon fulfillment centers varied by state, but some employees were making as little as $10.00 an hour, which was above the $7.25 federal minimum wage. The S-team weighed a number of proposals from operations chief Dave Clark, including incrementally raising wages to $12 or $13 an hour. Instead, Bezos opted for the most aggressive plan, raising the entry-level U.S. hourly rate across the board to $15. At the same time, he compensated for at least part of the additional expense by discarding supplemental sources of worker income, such as stock grants and collective bonuses that were awarded to employees based on the performance of their facility. The move was tactically brilliant. Amazon had surveyed its warehouse workers over the years and found a large majority were living paycheck to paycheck and would rather have the instant gratification of up-front pay than stock grants. By getting rid of the grants, Bezos not only helped to partially offset the pay increase but eliminated another incentive for unproductive or disgruntled low-level workers to stay at the company for more than a few years. (kindle loc 5164)

The book's at its best when it dives into Amazon's logistical push and stuff that while you know had to happen behind the scenes, isn't widely reported. It's at its worst when it discusses Blue Origin (which is unrelated to Amazon) or Jeff Bezos' affair and divorce (which is subject to a lot of attention). I found it enjoyable and a compelling read, with the boring stuff easily skipped one chapter at a time.

I think there are better books about Amazon (e.g., Working Backwards), but still found this one worth reading.

Review: Hades (PC)

 In 2019, some colleagues of mine were raving about Hades. Not being willing to pay full price, I waited for a sale, and when Epic Games offered it for $16.24 and stacked a $10 coupon to bring it down to $6.24, I decided to pay for it, since the Playstation version was unlikely to drop its pricing for Hades to that level for at least a few years.

Hades is touted as a rogue-like. Randomly generated dungeons, limited number of lives, and restricted saving to prevent save-scumming. You start out with one weapon type, and each time you go through the dungeon, you have the chance to grab power-ups that can be used to unlock weapon types, special abilities, and even add rooms to the dungeons that have a chance to aid you rather than hurt you. As you progress, you unlock conversations with various characters, eventually being able to stack special effects as favors from Gods, and tackling tougher and tougher levels until you manage to hit and beat the final boss.

I'm sure other people are better at the game: it took me 51 runs before I managed to beat the boss. As you play the game you learn which effects stack well with which other effects, and which choice of weapons (you're incentivized to change weapons through a mechanic that rewards you with more persistent reward bonuses) demand the selection of which abilities, and when to pick trade-offs like increased wealth vs better power-ups.

The reason this game drew me in while other rogue-likes didn't is the increasing impact of your power-ups over time. As you accumulate them, you make further progress, even if you're unskilled at controller movement and couldn't dodge an attack to save your life. This meant that I was more and more willing to do another run since I knew it wouldn't be wasted. Furthermore, the meta-game was deep enough that I started approaching it as a resource allocation problem.

The kids loved the story enough that they became more interested in Greek mythology as a result. So now they know the names of Poseidon, Hermes, Thanatos, Eurydice, Orpheus, and Demeter. Many people claim that video games have no educational value, but my guess is those people are also the same people who claimed that comic books have no value, yet I impressed my GP teacher first day at RJC by naming the president of the USA during WW2, something I learned by reading a Batman comic.

I did the game through 10 defeats of Hades, and I still found it fun enough to want to keep playing. That's rare! I hardly ever revisit games that I "finished".

The game was fun, and I hardly ever finish games, so that means I'll put a recommended tag on this.

Review: Black Ships Before Troy

 I read on some website that Black Ships Before Troy was a good retelling of The Iliad by Rosemary Sutcliff.  I checked it out of the library since the copy that was illustrated by Alan Lee was long out of print and it was listed as a children's book. My kids ignored it until they started playing Hades, whereupon they suddenly became interested in Achilles, Aphrodite, Zeus, and other members of the Greek mythology. They even started calling Black Ships Before Troy the Hades book.

The art was not up to the standard I expected from Alan Lee. The story is well written, if simplified, but the content of the Iliad was unabridged. That means it's all there, the adultery, the horrific violence, cruelty, and inexplicable behavior (some of which is attributed to the gods). I read a couple of chapters a day to the kids, sometimes wincing as I did so, but they took it all in with aplomb.

I have no patience for poetry, so am unlikely to ever read The Iliad. If you're like me, this is by far the most approachable version and it's uncensored. Enjoy!

Review: Who Gets In And Why - A Year Inside College Admissions

 Who Gets In And Why is a book about the perennial topic of interest amongst Asian parents - college admissions. It takes a pragmatic, market-oriented approach to college, and basically divides colleges into Buyers and Sellers.

Sellers are the brand name colleges that everybody knows the names of, with big endowments and no problem getting students who are accepted to enroll. What this means is that those colleges do not have to discount their tuitions, and even if you got in, the price tag might be higher than you expect from all the marketing you hear about "Need-Blind" admissions:

the euphoria of Wellesley’s acceptance was followed by the disappointment of its financial aid offer. Grace didn’t receive a dime. In my terms, Wellesley is a seller. Nearly half of the students who are accepted end up enrolling. It’s prestigious enough and desirable enough that four out of every ten undergraduates pay its $75,000 annual price tag. As a result, financial aid from its $2.1 billion endowment is based mostly on need. (kindle loc 3664)

Buyers, on the other hand, can't count on a high number of accepts attending, and don't have huge endowments:

 Compare, for example, two private universities in upstate New York. Colgate University, with a sticker price of $72,000 per year, accepts just over one-quarter of applicants and spends less than 1 percent of its financial aid on merit-based discounts. Colgate is a seller. But just up the road in Troy, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, with a nearly identical sticker price, spends one-quarter of its institutional aid budget on merit-based aid. Yet both schools attract top-tier students with average ACT scores of 32...Buyer institutions don’t “craft” an incoming class the way sellers do. Buyers “make” their class by enticing students to apply, usually through an application process that is as simple as posting to Instagram. Then they enroll students by offering hefty discounts on their sticker price using what are euphemistically called merit scholarships. One of the schools at the fair, Susquehanna University in Pennsylvania, hit their enrollment target of 640 incoming students in 2019 only by offering discounts that averaged around 70 percent. With that coupon, the typical freshman paid around $14,000 of Susquehanna’s advertised $48,000 sticker price for tuition. (kindle loc 840-849)

 Effectively, the entire college game in the USA is rigged in favor of the elite colleges. Of course, what that means is that the entire process is as opaque as possible, with some schools trying to become sellers by trying to reject more applicants. As a result, you get more students applying to more colleges, and that drives down admission rates:

Several urban universities, including New York University, Boston University, and the University of Southern California, also transformed themselves from locally focused commuter schools to international brands. This re-sorting is largely why today’s admissions process seems so intensely competitive and anxiety-ridden to parents who went to college in the 1980s. It’s not that there are so many more top-notch students applying to college; it’s that the top ones from Los Angeles and Chicago and Atlanta and Buffalo are now all applying to the same selective schools. And they’re applying to way more of them. (kindle loc 652)

 Selingo, of course, can't break out of his own American-centric and cultural blinders. For instance, he claims:

When the Pew Research Center surveyed Americans in 2019 about eight admissions criteria colleges should consider, grades and test scores topped the list, by far, well above athletic ability, race, or first-generation and legacy status. The reality is that by using only those two measures there are simply many more qualified applicants than there are spots at any selective school. Think about this: of the 26,000 domestic applicants for admission to the Class of 2019 at Harvard, 8,200 had perfect grade-point averages in high school, 3,500 had perfect SAT math scores, and 2,700 had perfect verbal scores. But Harvard had only about 1,700 spots to offer. (kindle loc 1379)

But of course, that's completely artificial: an examination of the way other countries' university system does admits, for instance, would indicate that the problem  is with the lack of nation-wide standardized testing that's rigorous. Few parents in China or India (or even Canada or Germany) would complain about their admissions process the way Americans complain about theirs. Their examination standards are high, and hardly anyone ever scores a perfect score on their exams. In fact, at the end of the book Selingo finally admits that the US system is inferior in both social equity and in the social goal of actually education all students who can contribute to society with the benefit of a college education:

In the United States, prestige in higher education is measured by how many students a university rejects. While the philosophy on Wall Street is that growth is good, within higher education the prevailing wisdom is that increased size comes at the expense of academic quality and reputation. But that philosophy isn’t shared across the globe. In Canada, for instance, the three most-prominent universities—the University of Toronto, McGill University, and the University of British Columbia—enroll nearly 150,000 undergraduates. That’s more students than the top twenty-five U.S. universities in the U.S. News & World Report rankings combined. Even as the number of full-time undergraduates at U.S. colleges and universities has grown, enrollment at the nation’s most-selective and elite institutions has barely grown at all. There have been a few, modest exceptions. Stanford enlarged its freshman class in 2016 by about a hundred students. Yale expanded the class entering in 2017 by about two hundred students, the first expansion at Yale in forty years. They should expand the size of their incoming classes even more, and so too should the rest of the Ivy League and other top universities. (Kindle Loc 3993)

 There's a lot of detail in this book, some of which has also been leaked in recent years especially about legacy admits, the Asian penalty, and why athletic admissions are much more of a sure thing than regular applications:

For athletes, getting into a selective school is a matching game played with coaches rather than a lottery played with the admissions office. Athletes and coaches must first find each other and be a good match. Once that happens, the coach becomes the applicant’s guide and advocate, assisting him through the admissions process...Georgetown allocates about 158 slots out of 1,600 in its first-year class to coaches in twenty-two sports. Bucknell holds 170 slots out of about 970 seats in the class. The University of Virginia earmarks 180 slots out of 3,700 spaces in the class...At Amherst, another 60 to 90 admissions spots go to “coded” athletes with top academic qualifications, but who the report noted are “admitted at a much higher rate than the general admission rate” for nonathletes with similar qualifications. In all, that means Amherst dedicates somewhere around 157 admissions spots to athletes a year—when the total incoming class is only about 490 students. By making room for so many athletes, Amherst makes it so much harder for everyone else to get in. It rejects nearly 9,000 students from a pool of 10,000 applications. Like most elite colleges, Amherst is trying to become more racially and socioeconomically diverse. But its athletic teams are largely white and wealthy...no hook was stronger in assisting the prospect of an applicant than athletics. The study revealed that minority and legacy applicants got a thumb on the scale, while athletes received a whole fist. If the average applicant had a 40 percent chance of admission to one of the schools based solely on test scores and other variables, that student’s probability for getting in skyrocketed to 70 percent if he was an athlete. In other words, an athlete was about 30 percentage points more likely to be admitted than a nonathlete with the same academic record. (kindle loc 2377-2447)

And for those who're eyeing this approach, Selingo notes:

 The fastest growing high school sports for boys are fencing, volleyball, and lacrosse; for girls, it’s lacrosse, fencing, and rifle. (kindle loc 2437)

 All I can say is with this amount of insanity in the process, it's astonishing that US colleges still have the reputation they do, rather than becoming denigrated as the cesspool of corruption and outright bribery that they actually are.

In any case, the book was great and if you have kids who might attend college, it provides good tips and interesting insights.

Review: The Sandman Audible Audiobook

 I was skeptical of Amazon producing The Sandman as an audio book. Graphic novels are notoriously visual mediums if well written, and eliminating the visuals would be crippling, I thought. I expected a pale shadow of the original book, with much of the story abridged.

I was never so glad to be wrong. The soundscape presented is lush, and the story is completely unabridged, matching my memory of the graphic novels, and eliminating none of the kitschy DC Superhero references and cameos. The voice actors are great, and Gaiman himself serves as the narrator. The audio production was so good that I found myself saving episodes for the early hours of the morning so I could plug both earbuds in to get the full experience, rather than trying to listen to it in the car. Given that I treat most audio productions as multi-tasking fodder, this is high praise indeed.

The first act is a great deal, covering the first 20 issues of the graphic novels (the first 3 books as originally published as paperbacks). Gaiman wrote additional description of scenes that were provided as pure visuals. What's great is that unlike a comic book, where your eyes might slide over important details in the picture on first reading, Gaiman's additional descriptive narration ensures that you cannot miss details that he considered important.

I have friends who cannot read comics either because they're visually impaired, or because the skills required to read comic books is something you can't easily pick up as an adult for many. (It astonished me when people told me that they couldn't figure out which panel came next on a page) To those people, I can recommend The Sandman audible edition as an excellent production worthy of its runtime.

Highly recommended.

Review: The Comeback

 The Comeback is a biography of Greg LeMond, the only American to win the Tour de France (all subsequent American winners having been disqualified for doping). I was familiar with parts of the story, but found the book compelling in its centering of the story around the 1989 Tour, which was won by LeMond by 8 seconds, the closest margin in tour history.

The story covers both LeMond and Fignon, but covers LeMond's childhood and rise in American cycling in much more detail, and of course his hunting accident which nearly cost him his life and ended with a few pellets of shotgun shots in his heart. It's clear that so much of unenhanced performance cycling is reliant on genetics - while LeMond was a kid winning races, his father, despite only taking up cycling because of his son, also won races as a senior, keeping up with and placing high amongst men in his 20s while he was in his 30s.

The book described with attention and detail the tenseness in LeMond's first victory in 1986, when Hinault was favored to win:

That night the Tour director, Jacques Goddet, walked up to Greg and his family at the dinner table. He congratulated Greg and said how happy he was to see an American win the Tour. Then his eyes darkened. “Be careful,” he said. “There are many who do not want you to win.” Goddet told Greg he would do all he could to protect him; but he could do only so much. “Watch your bottles,” he said. “Watch everything.” (Kindle Loc 2544)

No story of LeMond's victories would be complete without describing the rise of EPO, which made the Peloton's speed faster and faster. Daniel de Vise, the author, claims that this accounts for LeMond having won his final two victories without having won a single stage in one case. Of course, maybe his getting shot full of shotgun shells might have more to do with it --- LeMond so genetically gifted that his VO2 Max was an astounding 93, while Lance Armstrong's was 79:

Still seeking a medical explanation for his maladies, Greg consulted with one doctor after another. Finally he saw a sports doctor who was well acquainted with the peloton. “Greg, there’s nothing wrong with you,” the doctor said, according to Greg. He gave Greg the name of a prominent European colleague, a name synonymous with doping. “You need to contact him,” the doctor explained, “because if you’re not on EPO, you don’t have a chance.” (kindle loc 4475)

Doping does affect race results --- people's bodies are affected by doping differently, so the winners would be different if doping was legalized. But the story of occasional professional cyclists who died in their prime (because racers were still learning how to dope safely) probably meant that some died who wouldn't have if doping was legal and had to be done in the open, subject to safety standards. Of course, that means that the sport would no longer be the same, and people wouldn't consider sporting winners to be heroes, but I've always considered that a dumb thing to do.

Regardless, the book was compelling reading and full of great stories. Recommended.

 

Review: Eternals by Neil Gaiman and John Romita

 After watching The Eternals, I decided to read Neil Gaiman's reboot of the original Jack Kirby comics. Lots of people worship Jack Kirby, but I could never get over his rendering of human beings (or in this case, humanoids). All his characters have a blocky look, and his women all look like the same person.

It's not surprising that Gaiman's plot is a lot more sophisticated than the Disney movie. He takes the Sprite character and takes him to its logical conclusion, and drives the entire story against the backdrop of the Eternals all having lost their memories. Some of it, of course, might have been Gaiman reprising Alan Moore's run on Miracleman (Gaiman would later go on to a final run of Miracleman), but at least it doesn't insult our intelligence.

The big nit I have is that the powers exhibited by The Eternals (with the exception of Sersi) is nowhere close to being interesting or unique. But that comes from the source material, not Gaiman.

Usually, the book is more interesting than the movie, but in this case, I'd say that the movie is quite a bit better than even Gaiman's interpretation of the source material.

Review: A Natural History of the Future

 A Natural History of The Future is an ecologist's view of the world, and it's the best introduction to ecological thinking that I've read. The idea that Rob Dunn has, is to introduce the reader to laws of the natural world (that are patterned after the laws in physics) that describe certainties about the biological/ecological world that enable us to predict what will happen over time.

The introduction is great, pointing out that the first research done into organism classification and thinking happened in Sweden. Sweden was unusual in that the diversity of life was actually very low, and the very human bias made the original ecologists focus on things that they cared about, like plants and animals, when much of the biomass of the planet actually exists in the form of insects and micro-organisms. The result was that when Terry Erwin visited the rainforest and collected specimens, he found 1200 new species living in just one type of tree. This blew people's mind, basically noting that the number of unclassified species far out-number the classified species on the planet.

The rest of the book covers these laws, such as the law of escape, which is that when an organism escapes its natural predators and parasites, it will multiply and thrive. He points out that humanity in the temperate zones effectively escaped their predators such as malaria, hook worms, and other parasites, and ominously notes that our warming of the global environment is expanding the range of those parasites and their agents (mosquitoes). The liberal in me notes that in the USA the first places to suffer the re-emergence of those agents are Texas and Florida.

There's the law of evolution, with the most prominent example being antibiotic resistance amongst microbes. Here, the prognosis for humanity isn't as bad as you might imagine. It turned out that the agricultural companies producing transgenic crops have a solution: plant the transgenic crops next to sacrificial non-transgenic crops. The pests and parasites that prey on the crop would preferentially feed on the non-transgenic crops, diluting the gene pool of any transgenic-resistant crops and preventing the rise of widespread transgenic resistance. Of course, capitalistic farmers would not heed those prescriptions and within a few generations those transgenic crop pastures would turn into hotbeds of transgenic resistance. 

All in all, the book is full of great concepts, new ideas, and a very good perspective that no matter what humanity does, we might well remove ourselves and our mammalian friends from the planet, but life on the planet will not be wiped out. He points out that there are already microbes that thrive in extremely hot, acidic, and salty conditions and cannot wait to take over the planet once humanity has made the atmosphere and ecosystem more friendly to them.

Very sobering and well worth your time. Recommended.

Review: When We Cease to Understand the World

When I was an undergraduate, I attended Kathy Yelick's "Denotational Semantics" graduate student seminar. There was a section discussion when people puzzled over the Y-combinator. On that day, I explained it as follows: when you want to write a recursive function, write it as though you had recursion as a native construct, and then at the end, wrap it with a Y. That's how you use it. (The lazy evaluation would expand on it as necessary when supplied with a concrete argument) One of the graduate students, not sure he understood what it meant, raised his hands and said, "Is that understanding sufficient to get us through the final exam?" Concrete manipulation vs intuitive understanding has always been a part of science and mathematics --- once you have a tool, it doesn't matter whether you understand how it was made as long as you know how to manipulate it. But of course, many people would disagree, and claim that if you don't understand how the tool works you don't know it. That's what this book is about.

When We Cease to Understand the World is a fictional account of various scientists and mathematicians: Karl Schwarzchild Fritz Haber, Alexander Grothendieck, Werner Heisenberg, and Erwin Schrodinger. It also includes mentions of Albert Einstein. While the mathematical theories are real, the events are made up, though how much I did not do the research on.

The book covers not mostly the mathematics and the science (though there's some explication and exposition), but the idea of what it must be like making a discovery that did not make sense at that time. It's also a reflection of the scientific and mathematical enterprise:

it’s not just regular folks; even scientists no longer comprehend the world. Take quantum mechanics, the crown jewel of our species, the most accurate, far-ranging and beautiful of all our physical theories. It lies behind the supremacy of our smartphones, behind the Internet, behind the coming promise of godlike computing power. It has completely reshaped our world. We know how to use it, it works as if by some strange miracle, and yet there is not a human soul, alive or dead, who actually gets it. (pg. 187)

Of course, I vehemently disagree with the book's premise and conclusions. Being able to exploit a quantum property means you do understand it.  That's the way science and engineering works. Just because you cannot manipulate the technology without tools (i.e., have an intuition about a system) doesn't mean you don't understand it. This sort of approach to thinking, science and technology is why we continue to have science denialists, and lots of people suffering from Dunning-Krueger.

The book showed up on a lot of "best of the year" series, but I'm afraid I cannot condone it for its conclusions. Get your science from the non-fiction section of the library or bookstore please!

Review: The Science of Sci-Fi

 I came to The Science of Sci-Fi with high hopes. I'm a science geek and I enjoy science fiction, so putting them together sounds great. The first two episodes start off with a refresh on typical physics topics like relativity and gravity, so I thought it was a good start. But when the science fiction dissections happened I found them kinda obvious. You don't really need a "great courses" lecture series to go over what Erin MacDonald talked about. And she didn't cover really good science fiction.

I thought Physics of the Impossible was a much better read.

Review: This is your mind on plants

 This is your mind on plants is Michael Pollan's second book about his experiments with drugs. Two of the drugs, opium/opiates and mescaline aren't drugs I've ever used, and one of them, caffeine, is of course popular and easy to get, and even legal.

The first article about opium isn't actually very much about opium. It's about how he grew poppies, and then discovered that even the act of growing poppies is subject to legal problems. Fortunately, his publisher (Harper's) indemnified him against legal action, but most of this section of the book that I can remember is about how much trouble you can get simply by publishing an article about how to grow poppies, extract the seed pods, and then brew an opium-infused tea with it. The tea does give you a sense of satisfaction and elimination of pain, and apparently can be addictive.

The section on Caffeine is nothing you haven't heard about. Pollan makes a big deal out of quitting coffee, and then digresses into the history of caffeine, and attributing the rise of caffeinated drinks like coffee or tea as changing Western civilization. I can believe it, since the drink of choice before that was alcohol (not covered in the book), but I think he made way too much of a big deal out of it. I've quit coffee a few times and it was never a big deal. As an addictive substance it's pretty mild.

The last section is about mescaline/peyote, a cactus flower that's used in native American rituals. This drug sounds intriguing, as what it does is produce a hyper-awareness of yourself and your surroundings for up to 12 hours. I've had moments like at (during crucial interviews or other high intensity events), but I can imagine that if you don't regularly put yourself in those situations it would be a novelty.

I enjoyed the book. I found it much more readable than How to Change Your Mind, which I bounced right off of. 

Review: Self-Made Man

 I ran across Self-Made Man from an unusual answer on Quora where the author of the answer described Norah Vincent as a Lesbian who thought that men had it better, and then decided to become one for a year, and the experience taught her that men lived in such a harsh world that she had a nervous breakdown at the end of her research. With that kind of an intro I had to check the book out of the library and read it.

I really enjoyed the book because of the amount of dedication she put into it. She got professional teachers to teach her how to walk like a man, put on a disguise (like a reverse Clark Kent, when she put on her glasses, people believed that she was a man), and got a voice coach to teach her how to speak like one too. She lifted weights to the point where her shoulders were broad enough that she could pass as a man. She wrote that she was a tomboy growing up, but despite that when she visited a monastery and lived there even the monks thought her alter-ego (named Ned) was gay!

Ned went to places and met with people that I never did. S/he went to a bowling club that was made up of mostly blue-collar workers, made friends with them, and listened to their concerns and became their buddy. Despite being bad at bowling, her team put up with her and didn't get too upset when she flubbed game after game. But of course, being men, they had to give her tip after tip. At the end of her research with them she did tell them that she was a woman, and to her surprise, one of them started defending gay people after that. She attended strip clubs but found them boring, and even paid for a lap dance out of curiosity.

Her time at a monastery was interesting. The monks decided she was gay and thought she was falling in love with one of the other monks, and warned her off! I found that hilarious. When she revealed that she was a woman at the end of the stay, they were happy to forgive her, and she noted that for one of the monks, his attitude towards her didn't change at all! She wrote that he was the only person throughout her research he was the only one whose attitude didn't change with her gender.

Her last two research  projects were a sales job selling entertaining books and a men's retreat. It was very clear that at her interviews people wanted very different displays from men than from women. She stated that she was expected to exaggerate, brag about how good she was, etc. At the men's retreat, she realized how broken the men who attended such things were --- they couldn't talk about their feelings, and needed social support to be able to hug each other. After that, she had her nervous breakdown.

Overall, I thought the book was a sympathetic look at the life of men. From a young age we tell boys that they don't cry, and at some point we beat the vulnerability out of them. But what do you expect from a society that expects men to enlist in the selective service? But of course that makes men a mystery to many women, and it takes an unusual one to want to pierce that veil of gendered ignorance. I applaud Vincent and can recommend this book.

Review: The Order of Time

 I've read previous books by Carlo Rovelli, but didn't seek out The Order of Time, until I noticed that Bendict Cumberbatch, who somehow manages to get all these roles playing smart people. I enjoyed his voice in various movies I've seen him in, so I checked it out from the library.

The opening chapters of the book covers the usual stuff about time: entropy, the laws of thermodynamics (including a visit to Boltzmann's grave), as well as an introduction to relativity (which plays a very strict relationship to time). I love the metaphors and similes used throughout the book to describe physics, and Cumberbatch does such a good job enunciating and reading it, that I played the book back at 1.0 speed, rather than my preferred 1.3x. 

Right in the middle of the book he declares that time is an emergent property of increasing entropy, rather than key to the fundamental laws of physics. I'm not sure I buy that, but I lack any better ideas.

Regardless, I enjoyed the book, it's a short read, and the lyrical descriptions themselves are well worth listening to, regardless of whether you appreciate the actual material. Recommended.

Review: Evolution Gone Wrong

 Evolution Gone Wrong is the book about humanity's poorly designed bodies.  This is such a good genre of books, that I could read multiple books like this and not get tired of it. It's the perverse side of the usual self-congratulatory books about how well designed our bodies are.

The book covers diverse topics such as the shape of our jaw and why we have too many teeth for the size of our jaws (answer: the evolutionary path of teeth and jaws are different, and post-agricultural revolution jaws are smaller, since cooked food doesn't require as much chewing and jaw strengthening exercises so our jaws continued shrinking). It covers why humans choke on food (the larynx is lowered so the humans can speak to each other), and myopia:

Children who spend greater chunks of their day outside have a lesser risk of developing myopia than children who spend their days inside. It doesn’t matter how they spend their time outside. The outdoorsy kids in the studies spent as much total time on screens as the indoorsy kids. They didn’t have to be kicking a soccer ball or climbing a tree. Even if they were playing around on their phones, as long as they were doing it outside, they were less likely to become myopic. It is a shocking result given the total buy-in to the eye-strain hypothesis. (kindle loc 865)

What's interesting is the study on sleep, indicating that even Chimpanzies make the bed:

 They sampled 1,844 chimpanzee night beds (take a second to appreciate that large sample size) and discovered that chimps used the same type of tree to build a nest in 73.6% of cases. Interestingly, the preferred tree made up only 9.6% of the trees in the forest. In other words, the sleepy chimps were not grabbing branches at random and knocking out shoddy, makeshift beds. They were being selective about their mattress materials. The sleep researchers also analyzed the properties of the preferred trees. In the article they published in the journal PLOS ONE, they note that the most coveted type of tree was a species of ironwood that “was the stiffest and had the greatest bending strength” of all the options for bedding materials available to the chimps. So chimps go for mattresses with some give, but ones that are also stable and firm. (kindle loc 2380)

One interesting conclusion is that stiff beds don't actually do as well as medium beds for providing good sleep, which is counter intuitive. The author spends a half chapter pointing out that you can tell which parts of the bodies are maladapted for modern living by looking at medical schools. For instance, dentists don't go to medical school because the demand is so high that society puts dentists directly to dental school. The same goes for podiatrists.

 Any anatomical area that needs its own entire branch on the medical tree clearly troubles a great number of people, as we saw with all the problems covered in the first section of the book. (kindle loc 1714)

The final part of the book covers our reproductive dysfunction:

 Dogon women experience, on average, roughly 100 total menstrual cycles in their lifetimes (the mean in the study was 109 and the median was 94) and birth, on average, 8.6 children. Those numbers are strikingly different from what women experience who are not practicing natural fertility. Strassmann estimates, based on data from other researchers, that it is not unusual for modern American women to go through as many as 400 menstrual cycles in their lifetimes. (kindle loc 2568)

An interesting section covers why women menstruate at all. For one thing, the relationship between fetus and the woman's body isn't a completely friendly one:

 Horse and pig fetuses, for example, do not burrow very aggressively into the womb. The membranes surrounding the fetus are several layers of tissue removed from the maternal blood supply. There is still maternal–fetal conflict in those species, but not the same degree of conflict seen in species where the fetus digs in further. Dogs and cats are somewhere in the middle. Their fetal tissues start to invade the maternal tissues but are still distanced somewhat from the maternal blood vessels. In the most aggressive version of placentation, the fetus roots in, like a mole into dirt, and snuggles right up against the blood vessels of the mother. You can probably guess which type of fetuses humans ended up with. We got the uberaggressive model. And again, we see the comparative approach pay off in solving this riddle of why SD evolved. The animals that exhibit SD and menstruation are also the ones with the most invasive fetuses. Some scientists think SD evolved as a preemptive degree of protection against a hyperinvasive fetus. The logic goes that a woman gets ahead of the game and builds in some extra protection before the vampire-fetus arrives so that her unborn child does not completely suck her dry. After all, if you know a vampire is coming to your quaint, remote village, it makes sense to start beefing up the defenses of the village before the little bloodsucker gets there. Get the garlic planted, the stakes sharpened, and the mirrors shined in preparation. (kindle loc 2751)

 There's even a great section on why Asians are more prone to diabetes at the same body weight compared to European-Americans.

All in all, it's a fun book, written with humor, and keeps you engaged while reading. Recommended!

Review: How Democracies Die

 How Democracies Die was published in January 2018, two years before the January 6th, 2020 insurrection. I mention this because if you read this book, you're getting a rosy-eyed view of the prospect for American democracy, while a realistic view would note the events after January 6th, and realize that things are far worse than what this book describes.

The book has a major thesis, which is that the main guardrails of democracies isn't the constitution, the institutions, the rule of law, or the practice of elections. The main guardrails are social norms that cause political parties to respect the conventions of a democratic society to practice forbearance, not using every tool available to legally win, but respecting the spirit of elections.

Well, from 2016-2020, the USA elected a norm-breaking president. But the authors point out that even  before Trump, the Republicans have long been on a path to delegitimize the opposition, and are now at a point where any election they didn't win is declared to be fraudulent. If things continue down this path, the authors predict that there's a good chance that an authoritarian takeover of the American government is imminent. The authors point out previous instances in history (such as the events prior to the civil war) of breakdown in society, and point out that the compromises that gave Americans back a civil democracy were achieved by agreeing to deny civil rights to minorities and maintaining white supremacy as the policy for the country.

Is there any hope that American democracy can recover? The authors say yes:

A refounding of America’s major center-right party is a tall order, but there are historical precedents for such transformations—and under even more challenging circumstances. And where it has been successful, conservative party reform has catalyzed democracy’s rebirth. A particularly dramatic case is the democratization of West Germany after the Second World War. At the center of this achievement was an underappreciated development: the formation of Germany’s center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) out of the wreckage of a discredited conservative and right-wing tradition...The rebuilding of German conservatism, of course, followed a major catastrophe. The CDU had no choice but to reinvent itself. The question before Republicans today is whether such a reinvention can occur before we plunge into a deeper crisis. Can leaders muster the foresight and political courage to reorient what has become an increasingly dysfunctional political party before further damage is done, or will we need a catastrophe to inspire the change? (Kindle loc 3122-3148)

I don't know about you, but that slim hope is just grasping at straws. If it took defeat during a major war and having the country divided up by foreign powers to get the German right-wingers to become reasonable people I'm not hopeful for the future.

Well, the book's a downer, but you'd have to be blind and not paying attention if the events of the past few years haven't alarmed you. In that sense the book's well worth reading.

 

Review: Pixel 6

 A variety of circumstances (both security related) led my wife and I to both end up with Pixel 6. First, Boen locked himself out of his Pixel 3a. Due to Factory Reset Protection, the phone became worthless and useless, since even after a factory reset the phone required him to login using his previous screen pattern. This is the well known, "too much security" problem. But BestBuy had a T-mobile Pixel 6 available and was willing to take in the Pixel 3a for a $180 discount on an already $50 discounted Pixel 6, so we ended up with a Pixel 6 for a little more than $400.

My S9+ has served me faithfully for more than 30 months, but the battery had been going downhill. More than that, I was 6 months away from the end of security updates. Prior to working on security, I'd never been a target, but since I now reported into a security organization, I decided to play on the safe side. I would default to one of the latest Galaxy Phones, but in the intervening 2 years, Samsung has seen fit to remove both the headphone jack and the microsd slot on their S models.  They also got rid of MST payments, so you couldn't use the latest phones on mag card readers! The latest one that had a microsd card slot was the Galaxy S21FE, which Arturo had. But over the holidays I couldn't get Samsung to give me a reasonable trade-in value for my S9+, so when Google's store offered me $215, I jumped on it for a 256GB Pixel 6. The Pixel 6 Pro wasn't under consideration because the worst feature of the S9+ was the curved screen. Unfortunately, the experience of trading in at the on-line Google store was much worse than going to Best Buy during a pandemic: it took weeks for Google to even receive the product, and more delays while they evaluated the phone.  They did eventually grant me my $215 trade-in, despite all the horror stories about people turning in a perfect phone only to be denied their credit. Given a choice between a BestBuy trade in and a Google one, the BestBuy trade in is much faster and easier.

There are many web-sites devoted to covering various features of the Pixel 6, but I'll focus on the experience of someone upgrading from a 3 year old phone. First of all, the bluetooth connectivity for the Pixel 6 is definitely far stronger than that on the S9+. I was really surprised by this. On the S9+, I learned to keep the phone in the same side pocket as the headphone ear piece I was using, and even then I'd occasionally get a cut-out when I was cycling. On the Pixel 6, I could put the phone in any pocket I wanted. Inside the house, I could roam far away from the phone and not get it cut out.  The latency between when I inserted by Jabra Elite 65 into my ear and the phone being connected (especially when answering a phone call) is also much faster than the S9+, and makes the experience much better than before, which was a pleasant surprise. The S9+ was also very aggressive about killing apps, so much so that I learned to manually start the audio app I wanted each time I used it. This was despite my S9+ being the 6GB RAM/128GB storage model, another reason I didn't go for the S21FE. By contrast, the Pixel 6 seems very willing to use all 8GB of RAM at its disposal, and auto-resume always correctly picked the right app to resume playing audio from on bluetooth connect, android auto startup, etc.

Lots of people complain about the size of the phone. I actually like a big phone, and the voice recognition on the phone is such that for typical one-handed tasks (like dialing a number) I don't even usually touch the screen. Where that falls over is for switching between audio apps, where sometimes the system will ask me to unlock the phone in order to start an app.

Similarly, it's nice not having any duplicate apps, and having to disable bixby, etc. Size-wise, the phones were actually similarly sized:

The Pixel is actually just a little bit bigger, despite having a much bigger screen, and the OLED display was also significantly brighter. It's unfortunately also heavier and wider, and I feel it in my pocket in ways I didn't feel the S9+. What's not so nice is the fingerprint reader. It works, just takes a little longer than the physical fingerprint reader that was on the S9+. Though again, the latest Samsung phones have also switched to an in display reader!

After I copied over my SD card to the Pixel, I had about 150GB left. Since I'd deliberately not copied any of my photos over, it was clear to me that the 128GB version of the phone would have been too cramped, since just after another month of installing apps and taking photos, I've used already 2GB. Since the base model came with 108GB free and I'm already using 108GB, I'd say that if you have the habit of using an SD card with older model phones, the base model is insufficient for daily use, let alone an extended period of travel, where you might download videos and shoot a lot of photos and videos while traveling. I immediately turned off Google Photos sync installed Amazon photos and got my already-paid-for unlimited full resolution storage. Google photos have very nice features, but none of them justify paying for cloud storage. By the way, if you run your phone at 100% capacity, you're going to wear out the storage system faster, since wear leveling partly depends on having free space for the leveling to happen!

In terms of interaction, the phone behaves much faster than the S9+. In particular, there's much shorter lag time when I double-press the power button to bring the camera up. This is a big deal since a major use case for the smartphone camera is the ability to shoot while cycling, and the less time you're riding with the camera pointing at a scene/action while trying to get a picture the better. Despite all the raves about high refresh 90Hz screens, I did not actually notice any difference in day to day use. In fact, I've turned off the 90Hz screen so I get better battery life since I didn't notice it at all. (Incidentally, this is one reason I decided I could live without a zoom --- when you're looking for a camera to use while riding a bike you don't need a zoom!)

By far the best feature of the Pixel phone, however, are the features related to voice and phone calls. I spend a lot of time waiting on the phone on hold. I tried hold for me and it worked. Then the next few times I got phone calls from someone I didn't know, I tapped the "screen my call" button, and the spam caller hung up (which let me know to immediately block the number!). When calling an automated dialing system, "direct my call" popped up and I got a transcription of the phone menu. I know I'm probably the last person to actually use telephones to make phone calls, but these 3 features alone were well worth switching over to a new phone for.

OK. Everyone raves about how good Pixel photos are. But what I notice about most reviewers is that they review the photo directly on the phone's screen, instead of looking them on a big 4K monitor. Phones have great screens, because that's what sells phones. But camera manufacturers sell cameras to photographers, so they save money on the bill of materials by putting in a relatively cheap screen. So if you compare a dedicated camera and a smartphone side by side when you take photos, you're going to think, "The phone shoots so much better photos than my dedicated camera. Computational photograph for the win!" But after you get home and look at the photos on a large 4K screen, you'll discover, as I did, that the dedicated camera is quite obviously better than the smartphone, even without fancy multi-frame HDR software pinning technology. Keep in mind that a 12 megapixel image (like that from the Pixel 6) is only barely good enough for a 4K monitor. Any improvements in monitor resolution will make it very clear that "barely good enough" in 2022 will no longer be good enough in 2026. In any case, I've on occasion been impressed by a Pixel photo, but for any kind of travel, or even routine capture, I've never regretted pulling out my Ricoh GR3 or EOS M5. Most of the photographs you'll see on my travel comes from a real camera, not a smartphone.

One particularly bad feature of the Pixel 6 is the panorama mode. I usually expect panorama mode to at least produce a higher resolution file than the non-pano shots. But the panorama mode on the Pixel 6 not only produces awful results, but stores the same resolution as a single picture. The results are awful and not worth your time. Better take individual shots and stitch them with hugin or Lightroom.

The quick UI for the phone works, and works fast: double-tap on the power button to activate the camera, and then shoot using the volume down button. The counter-intuitive part is that if you hold down the volume down button, instead of shooting in burst mode like a real camera, it starts shooting video instead! There's no way to reconfigure the phone to use burst mode, so I've learned to make do. In theory you can export frames from the video, but that's a total pain --- you have to use the Google Photos app and export the frames.

Pixel phones come with a voice assistant that's supposedly leaps and bounds ahead of everyone else, especially since supposedly the Tensor processor on the phone is designed for language processing. In practice, the hardware can't live up to the software --- frequently it'd miss the wake word, or I'd have to say "stop" a couple of times before the timer stopped, for instance. Despite training the language model, it misunderstands me a lot more often than I would like, and using the voice assistant via bluetooth headset frequently annoys me with the "you have to unlock your phone before you use this feature." The entire point of a voice assistant is that the phone stays in my pocket while I talk to it. Transcription accuracy is also not much improved, though transcription speed is now quite good. The lack of sensitivity of the microphone is also highlighted in another instance: I watched Hamilton while the phone was sitting on the couch, and the "Now Playing History" feature of the phone remembered every song that was in that musical. But the next day, I saw When Marnie Was There with the phone in my pocket, and the phone had no memory of the ending theme song.

The Pixel 6 comes with guaranteed OS updates until October 2024, and security updates until October 2026. That's a good window, ensuring that you're likely to trade in the phone long before that happens. (More than likely, the phone would have been broken or stolen before then) I don't usually care about software updates --- frequently, the UI changes just so someone can get a promotion, but the security updates are welcome, and obviously there will be bugs that I'd like to see fixed, as well as possible improvements in voice recognition and other tweaks to eliminate annoyances such as the need to unlock the phone for certain activities that voice assistant should just take care of.

For the prices we paid with the excellent trade-in values we got, this was a good phone. I'm still very annoyed that Samsung got rid of headphone jacks and micro-sd cards, which is how I ended up with the Pixel 6 (the Samsung A  series phones still have those features, but they weren't offering good trade-in values so we ended up paying less for the Pixel 6 than we would have for the A52 5G, which had a much worse camera and of course Samsung bloatware). Now that the holidays are over, you're likely to see even better deals for the Pixel 6, and if you find a good deal, it's worth taking a look at it. All in all, this is the first Pixel non-A phone that struck me as being good value compared to their Samsung counterparts, so it's also the first full on Pixel non-A phone that I would tag the recommended label on.

Review: The Genetic Lottery - Why DNA matters for Social Equality

 The Genetic Lottery is a book about the social and research implications of gene studies and research. It sets out to defend gene studies primarily from a scientist and ethics point of view, mostly from the perspective of a researcher whose work has frequently been lumped in with the eugenics movement, which has long cast a shadow over genetics research. Along the way, she provides lots of information and interesting things to think about that I hadn't seen before. For instance:

As of 2019, people of European descent made up only 16 percent of the global population but accounted for nearly 80 percent of GWAS participants. This situation is not improving, despite the falling cost of genotyping. In the last five years, the share of genetics research focused on people of European ancestry has held steady, even as the overall number of genotyped people continues to explode. genetics research does not just disproportionately study White people. It also is disproportionately conducted by White people. The collection and analysis of genetic data from populations of non-European ancestry thus presents a double bind. Without conducting genetic research with the entire global population, there is a danger that genetic knowledge will only benefit people who are already advantaged.(Kindle Loc 1544-1546)

Harden presents the concept of a polygenic index very early on in the book, basically explaining it as an index of a constellation of genes that gives rise to a complex attribute such as height, IQ, and executive function EF.  The important property of these polygenic indices is that they measure composite complex attributes,  so they're difficult to manipulate. So there's a polygenic index for education, and there's one for wealth, and there's one for executive function. What's interesting is how early these genetic effects kick in:

the education polygenic index is correlated with whether children start talking before age 3 and their scores on IQ tests at age 5.12 So, consistent with what was observed in bioannotation and twin studies, polygenic index analyses suggest that, whatever genes are doing to influence educational inequalities, they are doing it early in life—with effects that are apparent before children ever begin school.... General EF is as heritable as eye color or height, more heritable than BMI or pubertal timing.14 (Kindle Loc 2479-2502)

 Harden points out several things about polygenic indices. First of all, they're not comparable between population subgroups. In other words, if you're not white, the studies that are published currently cannot be used to predict anything about you. Secondly, the genes might do something, but the environment matters. For instance, before women were allowed to go to college, the polygenic index for educational attainment was very weak for women (duh!):

For my grandmother’s birth cohort (people who were born in 1939–1940), the polygenic index was more weakly related to educational attainment among women than among men. (These women were in their thirties before my alma mater, the University of Virginia, admitted students without regard to gender, in 1972.) But this gender difference has narrowed over time: as educational opportunities for women increased, the polygenic index has become more strongly associated with women’s educational outcomes. For woman in my birth cohort (people born in 1975-1982), the polygenic index is as strongly associated with education as it is for men. Genetics, ironically, has become a sign of gender equality. (kindle loc 2761)

What this means is that it doesn't matter how heritable something is, if the gene finds itself in an environment where it cannot express itself. So for instance:

 Despite the mythology of the United States as the “land of opportunity,” it has lower social mobility than many other countries; Denmark is an example of a country with high social mobility. The heritability of educational attainment is actually lower in countries with lower social mobility, like the United States and Italy...the heritability of child cognitive ability is lowest for children raised in poverty and highest for children from rich homes—particularly in the US, where social safety nets for poor families are weaker than in other countries (kindle loc 2773-2779)

 She goes on to reveal that wealthy students in the lowest quartile of the educational attainment polygenic index still graduate college at higher rates than students in the highest quartile of polygenic index from the impoverished social classes. What this means is that there's a ton of un-realized human potential amongst the poorest students in the country, and that the genetic influence on education is still outweighed by the effects of poverty.

Harden then goes on to argue that attempting to do intervention in education, etc without the benefits of insights from genetic research is fruitless. For instance, there's an oft-cited study of how babies whose parents speak more words to them do better in school. But that sort of correlation doesn't mean anything. She claims that rolling out expensive educational policy blindly without any sort of understanding of how the genetic influences work is unsustainable and lead to failure. Most educational interventions do in fact fail.

Where Harden falls down, however, is that she states near the end of the book that we do know what works. Universal healthcare, for instance, would eliminate a lot of the immiseration and suffering and poverty that causes poor performance amongst students. Similarly, eliminating hunger amongst children through food-stamps or poverty reduction programs directly help those students. So in the very last chapter of the book she under-mined her entire thesis! It's very clear that the progressive programs that are considered "far-left-wing" in the USA (while being solidly in the center-right in most developed countries) do not need further research in genetics, cohort studies, or eugenics programs in order to be successful. We already know how to do them, we just have never had the poliltical will to do them.

But you know what, I'm going to give Harden credit for this. Very few people (scientists or otherwise), will admit that the problem they're applying for research funding for has already been solved. And her book contains many good examples of how targetted intervention for kids with say, ADHD or other disabilities shouldn't be considered any differently than giving kids with myopia glasses to see better with. So on the whole I still think her book is worth reading.

Review: Cycorldpro Multi-Pocket Hiking Shorts #9

 I've been using the Columbia Trail Splash shorts for daily wear, but for weekend mountain biking, don't use them because they're missing belt loops. I use some pretty old shorts for that purpose, but they're neither lightweight nor really comfortable, so when slickdeals pointed me at a sale on Cycorldpro's Multi-Pocket Outdoor Hiking Shorts for $16 each, I bought two pairs.

The web-site for the purchase is horrible, with the paypal receipt going to some individuals rather than a company, so you know it's run by somebody as a side-hustle. That's not necessarily a bad thing. The shorts, when they arrived, clearly adhere to the "belt-and-suspenders" approach to clothing design. Not only are there buttons and zippers in addition to the belt loops, there's also (unpictured) an internal drawstring that you can tie so even if you didn't want to use a belt, the shorts would be perfectly fitted.

As advertised, there were pockets galore, two on each side (ample enough to fit a Pixel 6), one on each thigh (one with a zipper, and one with a velcro fastener), and one zippered rear pocket. The shorts are lightweight enough, and very comfortable to mountain bike with with liners and a belt. (Incidentally, the belt is essential for the Spider Holster, which is still my favorite way of carrying a camera) After a muddy ride the shorts cleaned off quickly and easily, and dried easily.

For day to day wear on a sailboat or when I don't need to carry a camera in "quickdraw" mode, I still prefer the Trail Splash. But for weekend mountain biking or hiking trips where I'm going to want a camera at ready these are the ticket. Recommended.

Review: The Dawn of Everything

 The Dawn of Everything comes with the subtitle A New History of Humanity. It stands proudly against books such as Sapiens and their glib, linear exposition of the dawn of civilization. Set against that, is that the book seems determined to be make its points obscure and as incomprehensible and incoherent as possible, so it's going to be a tough job to summarize its main points (since the authors seem unwilling or unable to write clearly!). But I'll try anything.

The book sets the stage by writing that the initial meetings of civilizations between the Western European cultures and the North American cultures were nothing like what is depicted in popular culture. For one, Europeans who lived amongst the native Americans would frequently go native, having discovered that the native American way of living was much less oppressive than the European society of the time. This persists even into the 1900s:

For two decades, Valero lived with a series of Yanomami families, marrying twice, and eventually achieving a position of some importance in her community. Pinker briefly cites the account Valero later gave of her own life, where she describes the brutality of a Yanomami raid.26 What he neglects to mention is that in 1956 she abandoned the Yanomami to seek her natal family and live again in ‘Western civilization,’ only to find herself in a state of occasional hunger and constant dejection and loneliness. After a while, given the ability to make a fully informed decision, Helena Valero decided she preferred life among the Yanomami, and returned to live with them.27 Her story is by no means unusual. The colonial history of North and South America is full of accounts of settlers, captured or adopted by indigenous societies, being given the choice of where they wished to stay and almost invariably choosing to stay with the latter. (Kindle Loc 460)

By contrast, Amerindians incorporated into European society by adoption or marriage, including those who – unlike the unfortunate Helena Valero – enjoyed considerable wealth and schooling, almost invariably did just the opposite: either escaping at the earliest opportunity, or – having tried their best to adjust, and ultimately failed – returning to indigenous society to live out their last days.  (Kindle Loc 471)

 Some emphasized the virtues of freedom they found in Native American societies, including sexual freedom, but also freedom from the expectation of constant toil in pursuit of land and wealth.31 Others noted the ‘Indian’s’ reluctance ever to let anyone fall into a condition of poverty, hunger or destitution. It was not so much that they feared poverty themselves, but rather that they found life infinitely more pleasant in a society where no one else was in a position of abject misery (Kindle Loc 486)

The common arguments were that such societies were primitive and poor, and that the price of egalitarianism and equality and freedom was poverty. The authors take various attacks against these common arguments, with varying success. The most effective argument they had was that it was clear that these tribal societies, far from being primitive and unthinking, had actually constructed their societies with deliberation and thinking.  In one particular account, a Wendat man frequently met with various French and Jesuit settlers and was judged a brilliant thinker and speaker of eloquence:

Some Jesuits went further, remarking – not without a trace of frustration – that New World savages seemed rather cleverer overall than the people they were used to dealing with at home (e.g. ‘they nearly all show more intelligence in their business, speeches, courtesies, intercourse, tricks, and subtleties, than do the shrewdest citizens and merchants in France’).26 Jesuits, then, clearly recognized and acknowledged an intrinsic relation between refusal of arbitrary power, open and inclusive political debate and a taste for reasoned argument. (Kindle Loc 971)

Thus the puzzle the authors pose is as follows: we know from lots of research that the adoption of cereal agriculture was one of the biggest mistakes humanity as a species could have made. Hunter/foragers had way more free time than the Western Farmers who invaded North America. So how did human beings (who were as smart then as we are today) fall into the trap of making their own lives worse? The traditional argument is the economic one: cereal agriculturist couples could produce a child every 2 years, compared to the hunter forager band who would produce one every 3-5 years. But of course, nobody says, "I will suffer and make my life much worse so that 5 generations from now my descendants will win!"

The argument the authors make in this book are as follows:

1. Many impressions of primitive cultures are wrong. For instance, throughout North America, different clans would occupy the same villages, and despite long distances you would find the same totem animals in use. This strongly suggested that many native Americans could travel far and wide.
2. The basic unit was not the family. It suggested that early humans have always lived in a somewhat virtual existence, where they could always move with their feet in if they didn't want to be told what to do:

The freedom to abandon one’s community, knowing one will be welcomed in faraway lands; the freedom to shift back and forth between social structures, depending on the time of year; the freedom to disobey authorities without consequence – all appear to have been simply assumed among our distant ancestors, even if most people find them barely conceivable today. Humans may not have begun their history in a state of primordial innocence, but they do appear to have begun it with a self-conscious aversion to being told what to do. (Kindle Loc 2628)

Even within cities that were built, leader selection was deliberate as opposed to the modern charismatic politician we expect to see today:

Those who aspired to a role on the council of Tlaxcala, far from being expected to demonstrate personal charisma or the ability to outdo rivals, did so in a spirit of self-deprecation – even shame. They were required to subordinate themselves to the people of the city. To ensure that this subordination was no mere show, each was subject to trials, starting with mandatory exposure to public abuse, regarded as the proper reward of ambition, and then – with one’s ego in tatters – a long period of seclusion, in which the aspiring politician suffered ordeals of fasting, sleep deprivation, bloodletting and a strict regime of moral instruction. The initiation ended with a ‘coming out’ of the newly constituted public servant, amid feasting and celebration.63 Clearly, taking up office in this indigenous democracy required personality traits very different to those we take for granted in modern electoral politics. On this latter point, it is worth recalling that ancient Greek writers were well aware of the tendency for elections to throw up charismatic leaders with tyrannical pretensions. (Kindle Loc 6890)

The authors spend chapter upon chapter arguing that essentially, historians/sociologists and other academics have been guilty of cherry picking their evidence to suit their arguments, that entire eons of history and civilizations that didn't exhibit the modern predilection to strict control, inequality,  and brutal control of humans were simply ignored or not studied. They pointed out that even in many cultures where the "King" was considered a god, couldn't command anyone who wasn't in direct earshot, and that there's a lot of evidence that in many such cultures, most people would chose to live a conveniently far distance from the king.

what happens if we accord significance to the 5,000 years in which cereal domestication did not lead to the emergence of pampered aristocracies, standing armies or debt peonage, rather than just the 5,000 in which it did? What happens if we treat the rejection of urban life, or of slavery, in certain times and places as something just as significant as the emergence of those same phenomena in others? In the process, we often found ourselves surprised. We’d never have guessed, for instance, that slavery was most likely abolished multiple times in history in multiple places; and that very possibly the same is true of war. Obviously, such abolitions are rarely definitive. (Kindle Loc 10099)

 I'm not a historian, archaeologist, or academic, so I have no rubric to judge the evidence or understand the believability of what they're saying. What is clear though, is that the native American Indians were given far less credit for bringing the concepts of freedom, individuality, and democracy to Western civilizations than most people would give them today, and that many societies today would do well to consider that the strictures that govern them need not be taken for granted. If the book was better written, its points would be clearer, but it makes very good points. I can't say this book wasn't a slog, but the ideas in it were valuable and interesting. Recommended.