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Have you been reading Strong Female Protagonist? Today’s panel has a great one-liner about superpowers that highlights just how much handwaving we usually do for them, even accepting their existence. But start from the beginning! It's really good.
Maria Konnikova, Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes: An attempt to capitalize on the Holmes mythos to convey a lot of standard behavioral psych stuff. I was underwhelmed by tidbits such as “Students who are motivated perform better on something as seemingly immutable as the IQ test—on average, as much as .064 standard deviations better.” First, IQ tests aren’t immutable; that’s well-known. Second: .064 standard deviations better? I don’t even know what that means, but it looks small as well as nonsensical. Supposedly her sources are on her website, but I couldn’t find them, so I couldn’t look up the underlying study. And she promises that by following Holmes’ methods (the brain attic is involved) you can learn to be like him “for your every thought,” except that’s the opposite of Holmes, who discards irrelevant information, and even she understands that we have to discard information to survive. I found it sloppy, is what I’m saying.
Maria Konnikova, The Confidence Game: Why We Fall for It … Every Time: I liked this one better than Mastermind. Here, Konnikova uses behavioral psych (the familiarity effect, our vulnerabilty to doing a big favor once we’ve agreed to do a small one, loss aversion, etc.) interspersed with accounts of various cons, from short to long. If you’ve already read about con artists, there’s probably nothing new here, but there are some very sad stories. Embarrassment keeps many victims silent; I’m embarrassed to think of the one time I gave money to what was obviously a scammer, who preyed on parts of my personality I wish didn’t exist. The best you can do is be aware and know when to harden your heart, I suppose.
John G. Sprankling, Property Law Simulations: What it says on the tin—short explanations of various bits of property law, plus problems to work through, usually in the context of a negotiation. Interesting scenarios!
Ben Horowitz, The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Advice about how to run a successful business from a venture capitalist. Kind of interesting just to get his worldview, which includes a fair amount of advice about transitioning from small to big, and occasionally about firing the people who worked well for a smaller firm and not so well for a bigger firm. He’s a big proponent of committing to a strategy, even if it means a complete reorientation and getting rid of people who did a lot for the old version of the firm.
Dan Ephron, Killing a King: The story of the assassination of Yitzak Rabin and the political culture surrounding it. Rabin’s death took a moment of real opportunity and destroyed it, which was exactly what his assassin wanted to do. Ephron looks at the religious nonsense with which the assassin justified his actions—Rabin supposedly posed an existential threat to the Jewish people, making his killing an act of self-defense. It’s a hard book to read, because while peace was by no means guaranteed, it was closer than it has been since.
Martin Luther King Jr., Stride Toward Freedom: King’s account of the history of the Montgomery bus boycott. It’s interesting to hear him test out concepts that would become more famous later from other speeches; the book as a whole is far more accommodating to liberals than, say, Letter from Birmingham Jail, though even at this relatively early stage King was talking about economic justice and also about the fact that he might well be killed. According to King, the protestors were initially willing to accept continued segregation as long as they were treated better and not forced to give up seats if they got there first; it was the resistance to even such a mild improvement that pushed them towards demanding integration. The amount of accommodation to whites King is willing to do at this point is fascinating—for example, there are statements about the black community’s need to improve its own standards, familiar even today. By contrast, when it comes to intermarriage, King is indirect but crystal clear: since marriage is a matter of individual choice, no one but the people involved have a right to decide who should get married. King underplays the role of Rosa Parks and other women in the civil rights movement, and there’s a jarring point at the end when he says that wage equality for black and white men is really important to everyone’s family because women should stay at home: paying black men more will allow black women to stay home, and then white women won’t be able to have their kids raised by black women and will also have to stay home. Another reminder that visions of justice are, even among great heroes, often partial.
Mary Beard, SPQR: A history of Rome, exploring its founding myths and realities, to the extent they’re knowable from the evidence. History is always about the present; Beard’s Rome is notable because it made conquered subjects into Roman citizens, with Roman citizens’ rights (although such rights could be hard to exercise from far away), and because many important figures from Roman history were immigrants, or near descendants of immigrants: Rome as melting pot. There are some repeating tics, like “it was more complicated than that,” but overall I enjoyed it as a history of people (almost all men, since that’s who left the records) scheming and fighting and doing the best they could to govern.
Maria Konnikova, Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes: An attempt to capitalize on the Holmes mythos to convey a lot of standard behavioral psych stuff. I was underwhelmed by tidbits such as “Students who are motivated perform better on something as seemingly immutable as the IQ test—on average, as much as .064 standard deviations better.” First, IQ tests aren’t immutable; that’s well-known. Second: .064 standard deviations better? I don’t even know what that means, but it looks small as well as nonsensical. Supposedly her sources are on her website, but I couldn’t find them, so I couldn’t look up the underlying study. And she promises that by following Holmes’ methods (the brain attic is involved) you can learn to be like him “for your every thought,” except that’s the opposite of Holmes, who discards irrelevant information, and even she understands that we have to discard information to survive. I found it sloppy, is what I’m saying.
Maria Konnikova, The Confidence Game: Why We Fall for It … Every Time: I liked this one better than Mastermind. Here, Konnikova uses behavioral psych (the familiarity effect, our vulnerabilty to doing a big favor once we’ve agreed to do a small one, loss aversion, etc.) interspersed with accounts of various cons, from short to long. If you’ve already read about con artists, there’s probably nothing new here, but there are some very sad stories. Embarrassment keeps many victims silent; I’m embarrassed to think of the one time I gave money to what was obviously a scammer, who preyed on parts of my personality I wish didn’t exist. The best you can do is be aware and know when to harden your heart, I suppose.
John G. Sprankling, Property Law Simulations: What it says on the tin—short explanations of various bits of property law, plus problems to work through, usually in the context of a negotiation. Interesting scenarios!
Ben Horowitz, The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Advice about how to run a successful business from a venture capitalist. Kind of interesting just to get his worldview, which includes a fair amount of advice about transitioning from small to big, and occasionally about firing the people who worked well for a smaller firm and not so well for a bigger firm. He’s a big proponent of committing to a strategy, even if it means a complete reorientation and getting rid of people who did a lot for the old version of the firm.
Dan Ephron, Killing a King: The story of the assassination of Yitzak Rabin and the political culture surrounding it. Rabin’s death took a moment of real opportunity and destroyed it, which was exactly what his assassin wanted to do. Ephron looks at the religious nonsense with which the assassin justified his actions—Rabin supposedly posed an existential threat to the Jewish people, making his killing an act of self-defense. It’s a hard book to read, because while peace was by no means guaranteed, it was closer than it has been since.
Martin Luther King Jr., Stride Toward Freedom: King’s account of the history of the Montgomery bus boycott. It’s interesting to hear him test out concepts that would become more famous later from other speeches; the book as a whole is far more accommodating to liberals than, say, Letter from Birmingham Jail, though even at this relatively early stage King was talking about economic justice and also about the fact that he might well be killed. According to King, the protestors were initially willing to accept continued segregation as long as they were treated better and not forced to give up seats if they got there first; it was the resistance to even such a mild improvement that pushed them towards demanding integration. The amount of accommodation to whites King is willing to do at this point is fascinating—for example, there are statements about the black community’s need to improve its own standards, familiar even today. By contrast, when it comes to intermarriage, King is indirect but crystal clear: since marriage is a matter of individual choice, no one but the people involved have a right to decide who should get married. King underplays the role of Rosa Parks and other women in the civil rights movement, and there’s a jarring point at the end when he says that wage equality for black and white men is really important to everyone’s family because women should stay at home: paying black men more will allow black women to stay home, and then white women won’t be able to have their kids raised by black women and will also have to stay home. Another reminder that visions of justice are, even among great heroes, often partial.
Mary Beard, SPQR: A history of Rome, exploring its founding myths and realities, to the extent they’re knowable from the evidence. History is always about the present; Beard’s Rome is notable because it made conquered subjects into Roman citizens, with Roman citizens’ rights (although such rights could be hard to exercise from far away), and because many important figures from Roman history were immigrants, or near descendants of immigrants: Rome as melting pot. There are some repeating tics, like “it was more complicated than that,” but overall I enjoyed it as a history of people (almost all men, since that’s who left the records) scheming and fighting and doing the best they could to govern.
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