Category Archives: books and book reviews

Off-topic: Laura Lippman’s latest novel

Posted on by

It is called Sunburn. I got to it because it was praised in reviews and because its setting is a town on the way to the beach where we vacation every summer. She calls the town Belleville, but I assume it is Bridgeville, which we have occasionally driven through but more often bypassed. I am less than half way through.

I would describe the novel as a literary strip-tease. Each chapter is short, and you learn new aspects of the characters bit by bit, chapter by chapter. It turns out that the main characters are shady, wanton, violent, and deceptive.

For me, the trouble is that nothing about the characters is alluring, so that I am not captivated by the strip-tease. My guess is that I am going to bail out before the show is over.

Jeremy Bailenson on Virtual Reality

Posted on by

The book is called Experience on Demand: What Virtual Reality is, How it Works, and What it Can Do. It was a useful corrective to a lot of my naive impressions of the technology.

A few excerpts:

By January 2015, our lab’s state-of-the-art HMC, the one that cost more than some luxury cars, had been replaced by developer models of consumer HMDs like the Oculus Rift and the Vive.

HMD = head mounted display

if someone sees his avatar get lightly poked with a stick, and also physically feels his chest getting poked synchronously, the avatar is treated as the self. People “transfer’ their consciousness into it, according to dozens of studies.

People in taller avatars negotiate more aggressively, people in attractive avatars speak more socially, and people in older avatars care more about the distant future.

Virtual reality is going to become a must-have technology when you can simply talk and interact with other people in a virtual space in a way that feels utterly, unspectacularly normal.

But we are not close to that point.

One reason we might prefer avatars to video for communication is latency. . .videoconferencing at its essence is designed to send everything the camera sees over the network, regardless of how important the feature is concerning communication.

The neat thing about VR is that you don’t need to send all those pixels over the network over and over again. . .

Tracking the actions of two speakers, transmitting them online, and applying them to the respective avatars all occur seamlessly, and all the participants feel as if they are in the same virtual room

I have little doubt that virtual reality will be an excellent tool for spreading propaganda.

VR is about exploration, and storytellling is about control.

People who make movies are used to having control of where the user is focused. Good VR gives the user the freedom to focus anywhere. Contrast Hollywood movies with video games.

The educational field trip is the elusive unicorn.

Again, the conflict between exploration and control emerges.

by analyzing the body language of teachers and learners while a class was being taught, we could accurately predict the test scores of the students later on.

Very interesting result to think about.

To the extent that it is the teacher’s nonverbal communication that matters, and to the extent that students respond individually to nonverbal communication, students might learn better from avatars:

Virtual reality makes it possible for one teacher to give one-on-one instruction to many students at the same time. . .from a nonverbal standpoint

Off Topic: what I’m reading

Posted on by

Dan Hofstadter, The Love Affair as a Work of Art. I think I saw a book review he did and I liked his writing. When I got a sample of his book, I was intrigued because he starts with Benjamin Constant, although it turns out that Constant’s ideas are not discussed. Not sure I’ll finish it, even though he writes well. I don’t care so much about the people that he profiles.

The book is a chronicle of famous French love affairs of the early 1800s, in which introspection, infatuation, and letter-writing feature prominently. These French romantics approach relationships in a way that may seem foolish and self-absorbed, but gosh. . .compared with what we see now. . .how can we dare to criticize?

Shorter Jerry Muller

Posted on by

In a Q&A, he writes,

My critique is of what I call “metric fixation.” The key components of metric fixation are the belief that it is possible and desirable to replace judgment, acquired by personal experience and talent, with numerical indicators of comparative performance based upon standardized data (metrics); that the best way to motivate people within organizations is by attaching rewards and penalties to their measured performance, rewards that are either monetary or reputational (college rankings, etc.); and that making the metrics public makes for greater professional “accountability” — as if only that which can be counted in some standardized way makes for professional probity. My book is about why this so often fails to have the desired effects and leads to unintended negative outcomes, which, after decades of experience, ought to be anticipated.

Read the whole thing. His book is The Tyranny of Metrics.

Sounding rather opposed is Bryan Caplan, who writes,

If you’re teaching something existing tests can’t detect, write a better test! But if you’re teaching something no conceivable test can detect, you probably aren’t teaching anything at all.

Bryan seems to be saying that everything one can learn is measurable in some way. Can you test for curiosity? For intellectual humility? For willingness to question one’s own beliefs?

From Albion’s Seed to Colin Woodard

Posted on by

My latest essay covers David Hackett-Fischer, Walter Russell Mead, and Colin Woodard.

Fischer shows that each of these four cultures had a different concept of liberty. For the Puritans, it was “ordered freedom,” which meant the rule of law, but laws could reflect strict community standards and hence become “an instrument of savage persecution.” For the cavaliers, it was “hegemonic freedom,” which meant that individual rights were clearly articulated and strongly protected, but these rights varied by social class, so that they “permitted and even required the growth of race slavery.” For the Quakers, it was “reciprocal freedom,” which meant equality of all under the law, but theirs was “a sectarian impulse which could be sustained only by withdrawal from the world.” In the backcountry, it was “natural freedom,” which meant resistance to foreign influences (including government) but “sometimes dissolved into cultural anarchy.” The Constitution and the Bill of Rights can be viewed as a delicate compromise that attempted to incorporate these disparate notions.

Gabriel Rossman on Niall Ferguson’s latest book

Posted on by

Rossman writes,

to this sociologist’s ear, conflating social networks, civic organizations, and social movements is confusing and imprecise. Some forms of human action are shaped by the structure of personal relationships. Others are shaped by affiliation with voluntary associations from which we derive identity and meaning. Both are important alternatives to hierarchy, but they work in different ways and so should be kept distinct.

The Square and the Tower probably will turn out to be an important book for its major claim that order requires hierarchy. But I am confirmed in my belief that Ferguson’s failure to commit to a precise definition of the term “network” detracts from the work.

How does one define the term “network”?

Posted on by

I ask this question because I have started to work through a review copy of Niall Ferguson’s The Square and the Tower. So far, it is an attempt to reinterpret history as a contest between networks and hierarchies. So naturally, I want to see the two terms defined. And they are not. It is amazing how often that happens. Somebody writes a book about culture and does not bother to carefully define culture. Am I the only one who finds that deeply annoying?

Ferguson defines a hierarchy as a network with particular characteristics. A hierarchy is heavy on top-down connections and light on horizontal or bottom-up connections. I am being terse. He is more explicit. But since he never defines the term network, calling a hierarchy a particular type of network still leaves hierarchy undefined.

When I type “network” into Google, it gives me the movie with the famous line “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it any more.” Maybe Google knows how peeved I am when a book never defines the terms that are its main focus.

One challenge is that we use the term network very promiscuously. We speak of road networks, computer networks, social networks, and so on. Maybe a definition is elusive because the term means different things in these different contexts.

Anyway, let me try to give a definition of a network, and see how you like it:

A network is a set of channels (or conduits) through which resources can flow according to particular protocols between nodes (or endpoints).

With a network of roads, the resources that flow are vehicles and their contents. The protocols usually allow for bidirectional flow.

With the Internet, the resources that flow are digital messages. The protocols include the Internet Protocols.

With real-life social networks, the “resources” are knowledge about someone based on personal acquaintanceship. The “protocols” are customs about how much we know about friends, family, and co-workers in our immediate circle. Yes, I’m stretching here.

When we talk about a political or economic contest between a network and a hierarchy, what are the resources that flow? Maybe the resources are “instructions” and “information.” They flow vertically in a hierarchy, and more horizontally in a non-hierarchy.

I have one more quibble about Ferguson. That is, the metaphor of a tower (managed centrally) and a square (emergent) strikes me as similar to the metaphor of the Cathedral and the Bazaar, found in a famous essay by Eric Raymond. I looked in the index, and there is a citation of Raymond’s essay, but Ferguson never remarks on the similarity of the metaphor!

By the way, I am probably going to like Ferguson’s book very much by the time I finish it.

What I’m Reading

Posted on by

Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War, by Wilfred Trotter. Someone who attended a discussion of The Three Languages of Politics recommended it to me. Has anyone else read it? It is sociology from 100 years ago. One of Trotter’s ideas is that there is a conflict between independent rational behavior and conformity with cultural norms. It seems relevant to The Case Against Education. In fact, it pertains to Bryan Caplan on many levels. It also anticipates Garrett Jones’ Hive Mind, right down to the bee metaphor.

If your curiosity gets the better of you, be prepared for a very strange read. The past is a different country, as L.P. Hartley wrote.

The case against policy analysts

Posted on by

Robin Hanson writes,

On the other side, however, are most experts in concrete policy analysis. They spend their time studying ways that schools could help people to learn more material, hospitals could help people get healthier, charities could better assist people in need, and so on. They thus implicitly accept the usual claims people make about what they are trying to achieve via schools, hospitals, charities, etc. And so the practice of policy experts disagrees a lot with our claims that people actually care more about other ends, and that this is why most people show so little interest in reforms proposed by policy experts. (The world shows great interest in new kinds of physical devices and software, but far less interest in most proposed social reforms.)

Tyler Cowen adds,

Policy analysis, while it often incorporates behavioral considerations, when studying say health care, education, and political economy, very much neglects the fact that often both the producers and consumers in these areas have hypocritical motives. For that reason, what appears to be a social benefit is often merely a private benefit in disguise, and sometimes it is not even a private benefit.

Some comments of my own.

1. This is where George Mason has a very distinctive point of view. Bryan Caplan’s The Case Against Education will be out soon. There is Hansonian medicine. And of course The Elephant in the Brain.

2. My minor contribution is to say that whatever the policy analyst inputs to the policy process, the output is usually policies that subsidize demand and restrict supply. See my book Specialization and Trade.

3. And of course there is the whole Hayekian theme that about what policy analysts do not know about complex problems.

It is too bad that there is so much resistance to these ideas, all of which seem persuasive to me.

Moderate voters?

Posted on by

James Taranto (WSJ) writes,

Those old enough to remember the decades before the ’90s, then, may tend to see permanent majorities around the corner because they expect a return to normalcy. Mr. Fiorina, by contrast, argues that frequent shifts in political control are now the norm because of the way the parties have changed. He rejects the common view that American voters are “polarized.” Instead, he says, the parties have become polarized, in a process he calls the “sorting” of the electorate.

So we have parties captured by extremists, and voters trying to find the moderates. Possibly related: Nassim Taleb’s forthcoming book.