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Brian Christian & Tom Griffiths, Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions: Fun exploration of practical statistics/algorithms, used to explain when you should stop searching and how you should guess probabilities when you have almost no information. Discusses various programming concepts and analogizes to ordinary human situations, such as overfitting—when your algorithm will perform better on new data when it uses less than a complete set of existing data. Training without sufficient variation can cause similar problems: “In one particularly dramatic case, an officer instinctively grabbed the gun out of the hands of an assailant and then instinctively handed it right back—just as he had done time and again with his trainers in practice.” Conversational feedback, where you respond to your audience’s signals, has similarities to responses in packet sending, and I liked the idea that human interpretation can provide robustness to voice commuication; robust protocols are less necessary when people can say “hey, say that again.” Best tidbit: “Religion seems like the kind of thing a computer scientist rarely talks about; in fact, it’s literally the subject of a book called Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About” (in the context of a discussion of how shared norms/constraints can solve prisoner’s dilemmas and improve outcomes for everyone even when they look like they’re worsening the choices available to the individual).
David Herbert Donald, Lincoln: Engaging biography of a man who was plucked from obscurity—though he liked to say he never lost a direct election, his most recent political adventure had been losing a senatorial race to Stephen Douglas—and evolved into one of our most revered presidents. Donald paints a picture of a man who had a strong core that enabled him to get past some initial missteps; a determined learner who always felt a little insecure about his lack of formal education, but would do as much work as necessary to master a task; and a gentle person who nonetheless survived a political culture so toxic that it actually turned into civil war. Bonus: as pundits have always done, pundits announced that his political career was over after he lost the Senate race to Douglas. In some ways the main lesson of American political history is: never listen to anyone who tells you “X’s career is over.”
Louis Grumet with John Caher, The Curious Case of Kiryas Joel: the Rise of a Village Theocracy and the Battle to Defend the Separation of Church and State: A seasoned political operative, who ran the NY association of school boards, explains the political history behind the lawsuit against Kiryas Joel. The extremist Hasidic sect that populated the town votes in a bloc, with no Republican or Democratic precommitments, and thus exercises extreme power in New York’s political world. Though most children go to private religious schools, children with disabilities were entitled to services and initially got them from the surrounding public schools, but they were culturally and linguistically a bad fit—with their strange accents, clothes, etc. they suffered abuse from other children. To solve this problem and extract even more money from the state (unlike the Amish, the Satmar Hasidim have no problem taking public money, just obeying public laws), they got New York to create a special school district just for them, contrary to New York’s school policies in general. After the Supreme Court struck down this as an unlawful favoritism for religion, they went back to the legislature several times to get a school district created under “neutral” rules that, in practice, only applied to Kiryas Joel; eventually, and depressingly, this tactic succeeded, and now they’re back to religious segregation and denying female bus drivers the opportunity to drive school buses because they believe women shouldn’t drive. Although Grumet classes this a victory in principle, because of the Supreme Court case, it’s hard for me to see it that way—Kiryas Joel is growing fast, bolstered by “extremely low local taxes and incredible amounts of politically acquired state and federal aid.” Combined with another story about Ramapo, where the ultra-Orthodox took control of the school board and voted to strip the public schools of as much funding as possible (because they don’t send their children to public schools and didn’t want to pay), it’s another example of the I’ve-got-mine attitude that seems to infect so much of this country these days.
Daniel L. Hatcher, The Poverty Industry: The Exploitation of America’s Most Vulnerable Citizens: Written with more passion than style, this somewhat repetitive and awfully depressing book explores how private contractors and state governments wring money out of the federal government by gaming the systems the feds use to distribute money designed to improve health care and child welfare, diverting it to other purposes and leaving children often worse off. States pay themselves for taking care of children in the state foster system, rather than passing on the money or saving it on the child’s behalf, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. States impose child support requirements on incarcerated parents, don’t tell them about their obligations, then terminate custody for failure to pay child support even without an order to pay. States evade their obligations to contribute to Medicare by taxing health care providers, then returning some of that money to them as their contribution and claiming federal matching funds—done right, you can use federal funds to get federal matching funds. “Do better” is the basic prescription, but I don’t know how hopeful it’s possible to be given the even worse condition of state governments at this point.
David Herbert Donald, Lincoln: Engaging biography of a man who was plucked from obscurity—though he liked to say he never lost a direct election, his most recent political adventure had been losing a senatorial race to Stephen Douglas—and evolved into one of our most revered presidents. Donald paints a picture of a man who had a strong core that enabled him to get past some initial missteps; a determined learner who always felt a little insecure about his lack of formal education, but would do as much work as necessary to master a task; and a gentle person who nonetheless survived a political culture so toxic that it actually turned into civil war. Bonus: as pundits have always done, pundits announced that his political career was over after he lost the Senate race to Douglas. In some ways the main lesson of American political history is: never listen to anyone who tells you “X’s career is over.”
Louis Grumet with John Caher, The Curious Case of Kiryas Joel: the Rise of a Village Theocracy and the Battle to Defend the Separation of Church and State: A seasoned political operative, who ran the NY association of school boards, explains the political history behind the lawsuit against Kiryas Joel. The extremist Hasidic sect that populated the town votes in a bloc, with no Republican or Democratic precommitments, and thus exercises extreme power in New York’s political world. Though most children go to private religious schools, children with disabilities were entitled to services and initially got them from the surrounding public schools, but they were culturally and linguistically a bad fit—with their strange accents, clothes, etc. they suffered abuse from other children. To solve this problem and extract even more money from the state (unlike the Amish, the Satmar Hasidim have no problem taking public money, just obeying public laws), they got New York to create a special school district just for them, contrary to New York’s school policies in general. After the Supreme Court struck down this as an unlawful favoritism for religion, they went back to the legislature several times to get a school district created under “neutral” rules that, in practice, only applied to Kiryas Joel; eventually, and depressingly, this tactic succeeded, and now they’re back to religious segregation and denying female bus drivers the opportunity to drive school buses because they believe women shouldn’t drive. Although Grumet classes this a victory in principle, because of the Supreme Court case, it’s hard for me to see it that way—Kiryas Joel is growing fast, bolstered by “extremely low local taxes and incredible amounts of politically acquired state and federal aid.” Combined with another story about Ramapo, where the ultra-Orthodox took control of the school board and voted to strip the public schools of as much funding as possible (because they don’t send their children to public schools and didn’t want to pay), it’s another example of the I’ve-got-mine attitude that seems to infect so much of this country these days.
Daniel L. Hatcher, The Poverty Industry: The Exploitation of America’s Most Vulnerable Citizens: Written with more passion than style, this somewhat repetitive and awfully depressing book explores how private contractors and state governments wring money out of the federal government by gaming the systems the feds use to distribute money designed to improve health care and child welfare, diverting it to other purposes and leaving children often worse off. States pay themselves for taking care of children in the state foster system, rather than passing on the money or saving it on the child’s behalf, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. States impose child support requirements on incarcerated parents, don’t tell them about their obligations, then terminate custody for failure to pay child support even without an order to pay. States evade their obligations to contribute to Medicare by taxing health care providers, then returning some of that money to them as their contribution and claiming federal matching funds—done right, you can use federal funds to get federal matching funds. “Do better” is the basic prescription, but I don’t know how hopeful it’s possible to be given the even worse condition of state governments at this point.