Reading roundup: Invisible Gorilla and The Edge
Obligatory LJ layout teeth-gnashing. *sigh* I lasted a couple of hours with the new one, but then switched back. Which is highly non-intuitive! But here's a screencap that shows where to find it (with thanks for ladymercury_10 for the link to it, as it's handier than the verbal explanation on the basis of which I hunted it down myself.)
28. Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons, Invisible Gorilla: How Our Intuitions Deceive Us -- isiscolo recommended this when I was asking for non-fiction recs for the reading bingo, and it totally hit the spot! It's exactly the kind of non-fiction I like -- weird brain stuff -- written in exactly the kind of style I like (anecdotal and personal, but with references to actual studies, in footnotes -- reading this on the Kindle allowed me to see that 25% of this book was footnotes), so I swallowed it in just a couple of days.
The book talks about common illusions rooted in our intuitions, with nifty experiments which illustrate them and real-life examples of those illusions at work, and also ideas about where those illusions may have come from. I was familiar with a number of the illusions -- I'd heard about the gorilla experiment (and have seen the video, but not "cold", so I knew to look for the gorilla), and about the illusion of competence (that people who are, ~objectively, worst at something tend to overestimate themselves the most in that field), and, of course, the illusion of correlation and causation, both in general, and specifically as it relates to the debunked "vaccines cause autism" study. But there were absolutely things I learned that I'd had no idea about, and even things I'd heard about before were very neat to see backed by actual experiments/data.
Various tidbits I got from this book that I would like to retain in future:
- In the gorilla experiment, experienced basketball players tended to spot the gorilla more often, but this did not carry over to trained players of other kinds of similar sports. "Expertise helps you notice unexpected events, but only when the event happens in the context of your expertise."
- "Post-completion error" -- "This is the type of error you are making when you walk away with your stack of copies while the original document is still sitting on the glass, or when you type out an email saying 'as shown in the document I have attached' but hit send before you attach the document." Neat to know there's a name for this!
- The reason trained radiologists miss unexpected foreign objects: "Their expertise lies not in greater attention, but in more precise expectations formed by their experience and training in perceiving the important features of the images. Experience guides them to look for common problems rather than rare anomalies." And later: "the mark of true expertise is not the ability to consider more otpions, but the ability to filter out irrelevant ones."
- Hands-free headsets and driving while on the phone -- apparently, people do just as badly at "invisible gorilla" tasks -- reacting to unexpected events -- while on the phone while driving with a hands-free headset as when holding the phone -- it's carrying on the phone conversation that's detrimental/distracting, not the handset itself. Book makes the interesting point that all the legislative emphasis on hands-free headsets may actually be *detrimental*, because it strengthens the illusion that driving while talking on a hands-free headset is safe. Also interesting that having a conversation while driving with a passenger in the car does not have this negative effect, because the passenger is an extra pair of eyes who can spot the unexpected event, and also the passenger modulates the conversation when he can see the driver is occuppied/navigating a difficult stretch, which a person on the phone cannot.
- To the point that pedestrians and motorcylists get into accidents a lot because they're unexpected events that drivers of cars don't scan for and so function as invisible gorillas -- the interesting data that cities with the most motorcyles / pedestrian traffic are the ones with the least motorcycle / pedestrian accidents.
- The concept of "digital span", and that it's 7 digits for most people, which is why telephone numbers and license plates have 7 numbers in them.
- The concept of "change blindness" and all the experiments associated with that -- like that people will apparently fail to notice when one person "turns" into a different person mid-scene, on video and even in real life (so long as the gender and race don't change).
- That "failure of source memory" is a thing -- when you have a vivid memory of a story, but can't tell if it's an episode that happened to you or a story you heard from someone else, and how it relates to unintentional plagiarism.
- The concept of flashbulb memories, and especially the way accuracy of recall decays for flashbulb memories but people still think they're recalling them with high accuracy because they're mistaking the vividness and emotionally charged nature of them for accuracy (and specifically the experiment with the non-flashbulb memory control for the 9/11 memory: "For the everyday memory, people had a good sense of how accurate they were: As their memories got worse, they were less confident in them. [...] The flashbulb memories showed an entirely different pattern, though. Subjects continued to believe strongly in the accuracy of their memories even though their memories became less accurate over time.")
- The chess rankings experiment, and the way the rankings correlate to the number of points by which people feel they're underranked, so that the weakest players think they're underranked by the most, even in terms of points, not even just percentages.
- The methodology of measuring a sense of humour. ("To create their sense-of-humor test, Kruger and Dunning selected thirty jokes written by Woody Allen, Al Franken, Jack Handey, and Jeff Rovin, and e-mailed them to professional comedians, eight of whom agreed to rate how funny the jokes were. [...] The experts generally agreed about which jokes were funny and which were not. [...] Kruger and Dunning then asked undergraduate students at Cornell to rate the same jokes. [...] Next, Kruger and Dunning asked their subjects to assess their own 'ability to recognize what's funny' by writing down the percentage of other Cornell students they thought were worse than themselves in this skill.")
- "Men were more confident in their intelligence than women, with 71% judging themselves to be smarter than average. But even among women, significantly more than half -- 57% -- thought themselves to be smarter than the average person."
- On groupthink: "group processes can inspire a feeling akin to 'safety in numbers' among the more hesitant members, decreasing realism and increasing certainty." And: "one strategy consistently outperforms all others: With no prior discussion, each person should write down his or her best estimate, and then the group should simply average together all the independent estimates." (This feels so counterintuitive to me!) And apparently groups never actually arrive at this methodology independently -- they just start discussing.
- The experiment featuring a group of three people who had never met each other working on math problems together, where each member of the group identified the same person as the leader after the excersise, with the identification being made based on only this: "The answer is almost absurdly simple: They spoke first. For 94% of the problems, the group's final answer was the first answer anyone suggested."
- "Intuition tells us that groups should be more accurate and less overconfident than individuals. When two people come up with different answers to a [true/false] trivia question, one of them must be wrong. [...] The groups were no better at solving the trivia questions than were the individuals. But being part of a group did swell the heads of the subjects. Even though they were no more accurate, they were more confident [...] leading to an 11% increase in confidence despite no improvement in performance." And "confidence increased the most for pairs composed of two low-confidence people."
- The idea that, when the brain features that interpret confidence as competence evolved, humans lived in small groups, and thus had knowledge of the "baseline confidence" state of every person they were likely to interact with, and thus could adjust for person-to-person variations in baseline confidence automatically, but that now, when we routinely interact with people whose baseline confidence level we're unfamiliar with (doctors, witnesses, job applicants), we cannot calibrate these perceptions usefully, but still intuitively default to the confidence = competence delusion.
- The experiment that showed that, in a market simulation, people who got less frequent information about how their investment accounts were doing ended up making more money than those who got more frequent information, because they fiddled with their investments less.
- The experiment where "students are each given a playing card, which they proceed to hold to their forehead so that they can't see it, but everyone else can. Then each person in the class tries to get the person with the highest possible card to pair up with him or her." (which demonstrates ability to calibrate judgement with feedback)
- The idea that the reason people see Jesus in burnt toast and so on is that the human brain evolved to be really good at recognizing faces, or things that look like faces, and so we tend to jump to those conclusions even when we see vaguely face-like patterns in irrelevant objects. ("Almost immediately after you see an object that looks anything like a face, your brain treats it like a face and processes it differently than other objects.")
- The idea that people react more strongly/remember more clearly anecdotal "correlations" involving people they know or feel they know vs actual data for similar reasons, and the strength/persistence of vividly detailed and emotionally charged memories (as with flashbulb memories). And the way that those anecdotally based memories are strongest when people have to infer the connection between statements, and that being one of the reasons for the "show, don't tell" advice to writers. ("Anecdotes are inherently more persuasive than statistics. Precisely because anecdotes capitalize on the power of narrative") And why it works like that: "Our brains evolved under conditions in which the only evidence available to us was what we experienced ourselves and what we heard from trusted others."
- The experiments with the student who trained himself to have a digital span of 79 digits -- but was proven to be no better than a regular person when he got letters instead of numbers, or the way a grandmaster-level player could reproduce chess combinations corresponding to patterns that could really happen in game when they involved 25-30 pieces, but not when the same number of pieces were arranged on the board randomly.
- "We confuse how easily our minds can do something with how well they are doing it."
- The couple of cases where intuition *is* a better guide than analysis, including the jam taste test -- because taste is not objective. And especially the idea that thinking about faces in words actually actually decreases accuracy of visual recall ("verbal overshadowing"). I think this might be my favorite bit of info learned from the book, because I'm pretty bad at faces, and I've noticed that when I try to think about faces, both people I've met and my visualization of characters, in words, that just confuses me further -- it gives me a kind of annoying mental itch that just makes me want to stop thinking in that direction, and maybe this is why.
I found the memory chapter the most interesting, because, while I knew about the general fallibility of memory (e.g. witnesses giving very different stories from each other and over time, in good faith), I knew least about the specifics and experiments. The inattentive blindness chapter did get a bit repetitive, as did the confidence one, but those were also the chapters where I had the most specific prior knowledge about the illusions. The last chapter, on ituition, had bits that didn't appeal to me as much, but also some of my favorite new information, so it's hard to judge, and I felt similarly about the correlation-causation chapter -- there were bits that I thought were really reaching, but also some very neat, new-to-me stuff that made sense.
The illusion of potential chapter didn't stay with me as strongly, but I did enjoy reading up on the whole history of "Mozart makes you smarter", especially the way no studies at all involved infants. (That said, my kids watched Baby Mozart as toddlers, and, regardless of the making children smarter claim, those videos are fun, and I do think it's neat to expose kids to classical music early on. And I may have gotten three of the Baby Einstein hand puppets for my birthday one year -- the mouse, the frog, and Bard the dragon -- and have gone around duplicating Bard's *head tilt* *head tilt* *bleeeech* *tongue thing* routine, which I still find adorable.)
The only chapter that was somewhat less interesting than the others was the one on the illusion of knowledge -- maybe because the experiments felt less compelling, or maybe the conclusions more obvious? At least to me personally, because "5 Whys" is something that's commonly done in industry to probe a sufficiently deep understanding of a problem. Though I did like the point that "you mistake your feeling of familiarity for genuine knowledge." But everything else was a lot of fun!
Oh, and I enjoyed the academic snark that the authors occasionally employed, like:
"Weingarten wouldn't have won a Pulitzer had he stationed [Joshua] Bell next to a jackhammer."
"Bill Clinton later proffered commonsense excuses for his wife's memory lapse, claiming (incorrectly) that she made the comments late at night and pointing out (correctly but perhaps unhelpfully) that she was sixty years old."
"The members went around the room, each giving his or her own estimate, in descending order of seniority. Imagine the false sense of consensus and confidence that cascades through a group when one person after another confirms the boss's original guess."
"We chose reasoning as a skill to improve because it's harder to improve a person's sense of humor (especially if that person didn't laugh at the joke about the child making God cry)"
"In medicine, an expert is evidently expected to have all relevant knowledge stored in memory; consulting a reference is even worse than effectively saying 'what the hell' and charging ahead" [This totally made me think of Dr Seah, btw XD]
"When pattern recognition works well, we can find the face of our lost child in the middle of a huge crowd at the mall. When it works too well, we spot deities in pastries, trends in stock prices, and other relationships that aren't really there or don't mean wht we think they do."
"The media, loving a good fight, even among staid academics, sprang into action."
On subliminal messages in a liquor ad that featured SEX spelled out in ice cubes: "there was no control group of subjects who were asked to describe their feelings without being shown a liquor ad. It's possible that any kind of alcohol advertizing would have induced a similar response [62% of respondents reporting feeling aroused, romantic, etc.], or that these college students were just perpetually horny."
And not snark, but just a quote I liked: "Our understanding of our world is systematically biased to perceive meaning rather than randomness and to infer cause rather than coincidence."
And I swear this was an intentional pun, right after the paragraph talking about rating jam flavors: "Thinking about it only generates irrelevant information that essentially jams up our intuitive emotional reactions."
Overall this books was a very, very fun read, and if I didn't suspect my friend TK had already read it, I would be totally giving it to him as a gift.
29. Ilona Andrews, On the Edge -- so I went back and read the first book, and it was enjoyable, too, though for slightly different reasons. Spoilers! I'd liked George as the teenager milking his Cursed Prince persona in book 3, but I like him even more as a "baby necromancer", to borrow ikel89's phrase -- he is so earnest and trying to hard to be responsible and kind. Older Jack didn't do much for me in book 3, but his younger version was very charming, especially when he was trying to use the techniques Rose uses with him to talk William off the edge -- that was adorable!
Because this is the first book, there's a bit more basic worldbuilding in this one, which I actually liked more than the profusion of post-human Hand agents in book 3 -- it was neat to get a proper look at how the Edge worked, the interaction between different families, the elders and infrastructure of East Laporte, the interaction with the Weird and the Broken from the Edger point of view. And all the zany details like Cletus the zombie pirate grandpa who has to be chained up so he doesn't go eating dog brains, and the different magical gifts the Edgers have, and Elsie Moore's magical teddy bear tea party (and good taste in leading men). And I enjoyed getting the closer look at combat magic and tactics -- the different kinds of flash defensive and offensive moves, the concept of necroscouts (I'd seen George use that in book 3, but not that it was an actual army thing), flash snipers, etc. Oh, and flash-based CPR. Good stuff!
The thing that worked less well for me was the couple. Rose is Significantly Named and the de rigeur combination of kind + stubborn, and Declan is just... very generic romance novel hero, muscled and blond and devastatingly handsome and rich, and you're supposed to think he's an asshole at first but he's totally not, because he has reasons! The way the whole marriage challenge thing turns out to be a ploy of opportunity felt like a cop-out, the mistaken assumption and lack of communication bugged me, even though the last scene was very amusing, and I generally didn't see much reason Declan and Rose would want to be together, except that he's handsome and good with the boys and she is better at flashing than he is. It was just too romance novel in that way. And the pseudo-love triangle with William, if that's what that was supposed to be, was just weird -- Rose does not for a moment think of him in those terms, and he's clearly attaching to her from a totally dysfunctional place, and yet I felt like there were nods at the standard love triangle more than a subversion of it, which was annoying. Ultimately, I felt like Declan/William had more interesting chemistry than either of the guys with Rose (Declan left his military life behind to try to save William, and resents the fact that someone else managed what he cannot! William can't forgive Declan for having a loving family he doesn't spend time with! They beat the shit out of each other! -- why is there no Declan/William slash, seriously, internet?).
I did like some moments between Rose and Declan -- flirting via combat magic demonstrations, mid-battle declaration of love, Declan's desire for a make-out bunker, even the "That was not the way this was supposed to go" statement from him after they first make love, but on the whole they kind of left me cold. But one scene I did really enjoy was the homecoming one at the very end -- apparently I have a real weakness for the unsuspecting bride(/groom) meeting the crazy, boisterous family that immediately accepts them -- I really enjoyed it here, and it put me in mind of other similar scenes I've loved, in the Vorkosigan Saga (for both Ekaterin and Tej) and the first Aute book. (In fact, Declan's mother reminded me of Cordelia for some reason, even though there isn't much actual similarity there.)
And I did like some of the more mundane moments with Rose, her getting all excited about having enough food for a month that she could divide into portions and freeze, and feeling the strain of spending most of the time talking to children and thus falling into "mom" mode by default (when she's giving pain pills to Declan), and feeling like Declan's success in getting George to stop with the indiscriminant necromancy underlines her failure to do same even while she feels enormous relief, and things like that. I don't find Rose very interesting, but I do find her likeable enough. Although Grandma Eleonore's shilling for her for several pages was kind of annoying. And even Declan had a cute moment or two, like when he's overwhelmed by Walmart.
30. Ilona Andrews, Bayou Moon (The Edge, book 2) -- When I first read the blurb, I figured this was going to be my least favorite of the books, and first meeting Cerise and William in book 3, they didn't interest me at all. But it was the only one of the series the library had in eBook, so I grabbed it, and then ikel89 turned out to remember this one more than #1, so it moved up in my queue. And, wouldn't you know it, it turned out to be by far my favorite of the three. Spoilers!
It's still got some of the romance tropes that annoyed me in the other two -- angst through misunderstanding / assumptions, for example -- but much less prominently, and some of the prominent ones simply appeal to me more, like William trying very hard to conceal his longing for Cerise (and with better justification than most such scenarios). I liked Cerise best of the three leading ladies -- Rose was sweet and Audrey was fun, but Cerise feels the most organic -- I can easily see how someone like her, with a lot of power, loving but crazy extended family, living under growing responsibility and the shadow of the feud, would become this mix of playful and deadly, wistful and ruthlessly competent. But, really, this one was mostly about William for me, and William is goddamn catnip.
OK, so his tragic backstory is ridiculously overloaded -- abandoned at birth, brought up in a cell, trained with violet conditioning to become a killer and to know that he's not human, years of black ops service, court-martial and being sentenced to death, losing the girl he likes to his best friend -- I mean, yeah. But for all that, William is kinda adorable, in ways that are both poignant and funny. The way he buys action figures and plays with toys (because he never had any growing up), the way he longs for his trailer and TV shows and coffee and dry socks, the way he falls back on what he remembers Declan doing when he needs to flirt. The way he goes to have his hair cut at salons because keeping his pelt clean is important to him and that's one way to get pretty ladies to touch him. Oh, and the evidence that William apparently watches Dora the Explorer XP ("Thank you, Dora. Put the sword back into Backpack and we'll go. [...] Vamanos."). The mix of changeling oddness (which occasionally comes across almost childlike), soldierly roughness, and controlled savagery (with the occasional explosion of berserker rage) worked for me really, really well -- I loved his POV, and I wanted to give him a hug, or at least a scratch behind the ears, and give him everything he wanted, the poor puppy.
And I liked/approved of the way Cerise isn't horrified by his obvious, obvious fucked-uppedness, but rather admiring of how well he keeps it together most of the time given all that. I liked their relationship in general -- the way they met, with Cerise menacing him with a licked finger while in hobo disguise; the way he's all "play it cool, play it cool", and clueless but trying hard to understand her and do the right thing a lot of the time, even when the right thing is mysterious to him (I'm guessing changeling might be a bit of a shorthand for non-neurotypical, but in any case it worked for me); the conversation where he relates her having to suddenly lead the family to being a sergeant; even that she has to punch him in the head to stop him when her family is about to walk in on them. I guess it's, in some ways, similar aspects that appeal to me about Mark and Kareen's relationship in the Vorkosiverse -- he's unbelievably damaged but working past that, she knows just how bad it is and loves him anyway, together they fight crime, and somehow it all works out for them.
I continue to like the relationship between Declan and William -- they are such guys, and interaction with William actually manages to make Declan temporarily interesting to me. (Actually, the way Declan and William relate and give each other shit made me realize that this is probably a contribution from the husband side of the writing team, since he was in the military, IIRC* -- and I think maybe the husband-wife tagteam writing helps explain why William (and Kaldar, in book 3, though he's a different sort of character) comes across both as a believable guy, rather than some prince charming on a white charger, and without the (unrecognized) creepy undertones that seem to crop up a lot, especially in the were-whatever lover books. But I digress.)
*This would appear to be validated somewhat in this interview: "I guess as far a character go, I tend to work more on the male dialogue, while Kate and Rose really come from Ilona's head.", and the fact that William is Andrew's "easy" character.
I loved the little scenes of William interacting with Jack (giving him the chocolate bar was a very sweet callback moment), and making smalltalk with George while Jack and Gaston kick and trash-talk each other. And seeing Kaldar through William's eyes made me want to reread the scenes in book 3 where Kaldar is freaking out that William is going to kill him over the boys. Of the new characters, I liked the crazy Mar clan, en masse -- I liked Grandma Az, who sees right through William, and Emel the necromancer, who comes out to help the family by working around the spirit of the law of his sect while following the letter, and Aunt Murid with the sniper eyes (and was sorry she didn't make it through, though I knew/remembered that from book 3), and even Gustave Mar, from the couple of pages he was actually onscreen. Ironically enough, the character who I'm *least* interested in from among the Mars is Richard, who, of course, is the protagonist of book 4... which I might still read, but am in no hurry to do so. Oh, and I liked the Mire's Judge Dobe, too.
This was also the first book where I found the antagonists interesting -- book 1 had the standard mad scientist/wizard type consumed by insanity, and book 3 had the robber baron I liked as an episodic villain, but Spider's niece and her gang of agents wasn't interesting to me at all. But Spider himself was neater than I'd expected! The urbane villain is nothing new, but what I liked were the little touches in how he interacted with his agents, snapping at them and then apologizing for snapping (like the thing with the assassin filling the place with woven baskets because she has to be constantly doing something intricate and demanding lest she snaps and starts killing people), manipulating them with both fear and gentleness -- I really got the sense that he knew these people inside out and cared about them in his cold, utilitarian way. And, ultimately, you've got to respect somebody who will take down an essentially unkillable monster with an enemy's dropped bombs and a name, while paralyzed from the waist down, and then has the presence of mind to rip out and eat its potentially restorative heart. Oh, and I liked Lagar Sheerile, too, and the way he wasn't really an evil person, just trapped by the family feud, and the way Cerise understood that.
It's the funniest of the books, too, especially William's indignation about various aspects of the swamp, like the eel, or using peat for fuel.
"The creature lunged onto dry land, clawing at the mud with short stubby paws. The damn thing had legs. Fucked-up place, fucked-up fish."
Cerise: "Crazy necromancers, anal cousin, financial liability, did any of that penetrate?"
William: "That fish is everything that's wrong with this place."
"That's a Gospo Adir eel."
Cerise grimaced. "Yes, and he's very proud of killing it."
That had to be the craziest thing he'd heard. At some point they must've looked around and said, "Hey, what do we have a shitload of?"
"Mud! It's cold and wet. I know, let's burn it!"
"Well, it ain't good for nothing else."
What the hell? He supposed if fish could have legs, then mud could burn.
Other quotes I enjoyed:
"She had accomplished her goal, and inside, in the same place she wanted her mother, she felt deeply cheated because her parents failed to magically appear."
"When she was a teenager, she used to imagine meeting a stranger. He would be from the Weird or the Broken, not from the Mire. He would be lethal and tough, so tough, he wouldn't be afraid of her. [...] She'd gotten so good at imagining this mysterious man, she could almost picture his face. || William would kick his ass."
"He would bring her flowers, swords, and whatever else she liked."
"Slowly the reality of the situation sank in. He got his ass kicked, learned nothing, and got saved by a dumb dog and an old lady. If he lived long enough to make a report to Nancy back in Adrianglia, he would have to gloss over this part."
And, um, there was some plot, though the romance and character stuff are definitely primary. Erian as the family traitor was pretty clear almost as soon as they got to the Rathole, though his motivation was not. The mad genius grandfather and his journals and death-defying box were pretty cool ideas, though I do feel like having no visible consequences for William's death and resurrection is kind of a copout (possibly because something about these books keeps making me think of the Vorkosigan Saga -- not that they're actually similar, but, like, I would be unsurprised to discover that Ilona Andrews is/are fans (though I've not been able to find evidence of it so far). I had been expecting there to be more going on with Lark, because from book 3 I got the sense that she'd been a more prominent character; as it is, I liked William and her bonding (over dressing kills, naturally, and whether one should eat squirrels XP), but I'd thought there would be more... something, possibly resolution. Or maybe that comes in book 4?
Anyway, I generally don't enjoy paranormal romance, but these three books were fun, and Bayou Moon was the most pure fun I've had reading since... *scrolls back* actually, since the first Mercy Thompson book back in January, actually (though I've definitely read more interesting and more ambitious books that I enjoyed in-between).
I'd mentioned that I have an ever-increasing list of books I'm in the middle of, and I need to keep better track of it, so, going to start doing so here, in the order in which I'd started them:
- Red Seas over Red Skies -- p.288/760
- Volha #3 -- 7%
- The Fox -- 37%
- Thursday Next #1 -- 72%
- Cast in Ruin -- 7%
- Pale Demon (Hollows) -- 17%
- Codex Born (Libriomancers #2) -- p.118/324
- Raising Steam -- p.143/365
- Alex Verus #2 -- 18%
- Finder -- 5%
- Cloud Atlas -- 8%
I think Finder (thanks, qwentoozla, for the rec!) will be my next main read, and then Cloud Atlas (thanks, adraekh for reminding me about it! -- I'm enjoying the book a good deal more than the movie so far), but who knows at this point.
Oh, and in other reading news, L is almost done with Rampant (the Killer Unicorns book I loved a couple of years ago) and O is 180 pages into Scott Westerfeld's Leviathan :)
28. Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons, Invisible Gorilla: How Our Intuitions Deceive Us -- isiscolo recommended this when I was asking for non-fiction recs for the reading bingo, and it totally hit the spot! It's exactly the kind of non-fiction I like -- weird brain stuff -- written in exactly the kind of style I like (anecdotal and personal, but with references to actual studies, in footnotes -- reading this on the Kindle allowed me to see that 25% of this book was footnotes), so I swallowed it in just a couple of days.
The book talks about common illusions rooted in our intuitions, with nifty experiments which illustrate them and real-life examples of those illusions at work, and also ideas about where those illusions may have come from. I was familiar with a number of the illusions -- I'd heard about the gorilla experiment (and have seen the video, but not "cold", so I knew to look for the gorilla), and about the illusion of competence (that people who are, ~objectively, worst at something tend to overestimate themselves the most in that field), and, of course, the illusion of correlation and causation, both in general, and specifically as it relates to the debunked "vaccines cause autism" study. But there were absolutely things I learned that I'd had no idea about, and even things I'd heard about before were very neat to see backed by actual experiments/data.
Various tidbits I got from this book that I would like to retain in future:
- In the gorilla experiment, experienced basketball players tended to spot the gorilla more often, but this did not carry over to trained players of other kinds of similar sports. "Expertise helps you notice unexpected events, but only when the event happens in the context of your expertise."
- "Post-completion error" -- "This is the type of error you are making when you walk away with your stack of copies while the original document is still sitting on the glass, or when you type out an email saying 'as shown in the document I have attached' but hit send before you attach the document." Neat to know there's a name for this!
- The reason trained radiologists miss unexpected foreign objects: "Their expertise lies not in greater attention, but in more precise expectations formed by their experience and training in perceiving the important features of the images. Experience guides them to look for common problems rather than rare anomalies." And later: "the mark of true expertise is not the ability to consider more otpions, but the ability to filter out irrelevant ones."
- Hands-free headsets and driving while on the phone -- apparently, people do just as badly at "invisible gorilla" tasks -- reacting to unexpected events -- while on the phone while driving with a hands-free headset as when holding the phone -- it's carrying on the phone conversation that's detrimental/distracting, not the handset itself. Book makes the interesting point that all the legislative emphasis on hands-free headsets may actually be *detrimental*, because it strengthens the illusion that driving while talking on a hands-free headset is safe. Also interesting that having a conversation while driving with a passenger in the car does not have this negative effect, because the passenger is an extra pair of eyes who can spot the unexpected event, and also the passenger modulates the conversation when he can see the driver is occuppied/navigating a difficult stretch, which a person on the phone cannot.
- To the point that pedestrians and motorcylists get into accidents a lot because they're unexpected events that drivers of cars don't scan for and so function as invisible gorillas -- the interesting data that cities with the most motorcyles / pedestrian traffic are the ones with the least motorcycle / pedestrian accidents.
- The concept of "digital span", and that it's 7 digits for most people, which is why telephone numbers and license plates have 7 numbers in them.
- The concept of "change blindness" and all the experiments associated with that -- like that people will apparently fail to notice when one person "turns" into a different person mid-scene, on video and even in real life (so long as the gender and race don't change).
- That "failure of source memory" is a thing -- when you have a vivid memory of a story, but can't tell if it's an episode that happened to you or a story you heard from someone else, and how it relates to unintentional plagiarism.
- The concept of flashbulb memories, and especially the way accuracy of recall decays for flashbulb memories but people still think they're recalling them with high accuracy because they're mistaking the vividness and emotionally charged nature of them for accuracy (and specifically the experiment with the non-flashbulb memory control for the 9/11 memory: "For the everyday memory, people had a good sense of how accurate they were: As their memories got worse, they were less confident in them. [...] The flashbulb memories showed an entirely different pattern, though. Subjects continued to believe strongly in the accuracy of their memories even though their memories became less accurate over time.")
- The chess rankings experiment, and the way the rankings correlate to the number of points by which people feel they're underranked, so that the weakest players think they're underranked by the most, even in terms of points, not even just percentages.
- The methodology of measuring a sense of humour. ("To create their sense-of-humor test, Kruger and Dunning selected thirty jokes written by Woody Allen, Al Franken, Jack Handey, and Jeff Rovin, and e-mailed them to professional comedians, eight of whom agreed to rate how funny the jokes were. [...] The experts generally agreed about which jokes were funny and which were not. [...] Kruger and Dunning then asked undergraduate students at Cornell to rate the same jokes. [...] Next, Kruger and Dunning asked their subjects to assess their own 'ability to recognize what's funny' by writing down the percentage of other Cornell students they thought were worse than themselves in this skill.")
- "Men were more confident in their intelligence than women, with 71% judging themselves to be smarter than average. But even among women, significantly more than half -- 57% -- thought themselves to be smarter than the average person."
- On groupthink: "group processes can inspire a feeling akin to 'safety in numbers' among the more hesitant members, decreasing realism and increasing certainty." And: "one strategy consistently outperforms all others: With no prior discussion, each person should write down his or her best estimate, and then the group should simply average together all the independent estimates." (This feels so counterintuitive to me!) And apparently groups never actually arrive at this methodology independently -- they just start discussing.
- The experiment featuring a group of three people who had never met each other working on math problems together, where each member of the group identified the same person as the leader after the excersise, with the identification being made based on only this: "The answer is almost absurdly simple: They spoke first. For 94% of the problems, the group's final answer was the first answer anyone suggested."
- "Intuition tells us that groups should be more accurate and less overconfident than individuals. When two people come up with different answers to a [true/false] trivia question, one of them must be wrong. [...] The groups were no better at solving the trivia questions than were the individuals. But being part of a group did swell the heads of the subjects. Even though they were no more accurate, they were more confident [...] leading to an 11% increase in confidence despite no improvement in performance." And "confidence increased the most for pairs composed of two low-confidence people."
- The idea that, when the brain features that interpret confidence as competence evolved, humans lived in small groups, and thus had knowledge of the "baseline confidence" state of every person they were likely to interact with, and thus could adjust for person-to-person variations in baseline confidence automatically, but that now, when we routinely interact with people whose baseline confidence level we're unfamiliar with (doctors, witnesses, job applicants), we cannot calibrate these perceptions usefully, but still intuitively default to the confidence = competence delusion.
- The experiment that showed that, in a market simulation, people who got less frequent information about how their investment accounts were doing ended up making more money than those who got more frequent information, because they fiddled with their investments less.
- The experiment where "students are each given a playing card, which they proceed to hold to their forehead so that they can't see it, but everyone else can. Then each person in the class tries to get the person with the highest possible card to pair up with him or her." (which demonstrates ability to calibrate judgement with feedback)
- The idea that the reason people see Jesus in burnt toast and so on is that the human brain evolved to be really good at recognizing faces, or things that look like faces, and so we tend to jump to those conclusions even when we see vaguely face-like patterns in irrelevant objects. ("Almost immediately after you see an object that looks anything like a face, your brain treats it like a face and processes it differently than other objects.")
- The idea that people react more strongly/remember more clearly anecdotal "correlations" involving people they know or feel they know vs actual data for similar reasons, and the strength/persistence of vividly detailed and emotionally charged memories (as with flashbulb memories). And the way that those anecdotally based memories are strongest when people have to infer the connection between statements, and that being one of the reasons for the "show, don't tell" advice to writers. ("Anecdotes are inherently more persuasive than statistics. Precisely because anecdotes capitalize on the power of narrative") And why it works like that: "Our brains evolved under conditions in which the only evidence available to us was what we experienced ourselves and what we heard from trusted others."
- The experiments with the student who trained himself to have a digital span of 79 digits -- but was proven to be no better than a regular person when he got letters instead of numbers, or the way a grandmaster-level player could reproduce chess combinations corresponding to patterns that could really happen in game when they involved 25-30 pieces, but not when the same number of pieces were arranged on the board randomly.
- "We confuse how easily our minds can do something with how well they are doing it."
- The couple of cases where intuition *is* a better guide than analysis, including the jam taste test -- because taste is not objective. And especially the idea that thinking about faces in words actually actually decreases accuracy of visual recall ("verbal overshadowing"). I think this might be my favorite bit of info learned from the book, because I'm pretty bad at faces, and I've noticed that when I try to think about faces, both people I've met and my visualization of characters, in words, that just confuses me further -- it gives me a kind of annoying mental itch that just makes me want to stop thinking in that direction, and maybe this is why.
I found the memory chapter the most interesting, because, while I knew about the general fallibility of memory (e.g. witnesses giving very different stories from each other and over time, in good faith), I knew least about the specifics and experiments. The inattentive blindness chapter did get a bit repetitive, as did the confidence one, but those were also the chapters where I had the most specific prior knowledge about the illusions. The last chapter, on ituition, had bits that didn't appeal to me as much, but also some of my favorite new information, so it's hard to judge, and I felt similarly about the correlation-causation chapter -- there were bits that I thought were really reaching, but also some very neat, new-to-me stuff that made sense.
The illusion of potential chapter didn't stay with me as strongly, but I did enjoy reading up on the whole history of "Mozart makes you smarter", especially the way no studies at all involved infants. (That said, my kids watched Baby Mozart as toddlers, and, regardless of the making children smarter claim, those videos are fun, and I do think it's neat to expose kids to classical music early on. And I may have gotten three of the Baby Einstein hand puppets for my birthday one year -- the mouse, the frog, and Bard the dragon -- and have gone around duplicating Bard's *head tilt* *head tilt* *bleeeech* *tongue thing* routine, which I still find adorable.)
The only chapter that was somewhat less interesting than the others was the one on the illusion of knowledge -- maybe because the experiments felt less compelling, or maybe the conclusions more obvious? At least to me personally, because "5 Whys" is something that's commonly done in industry to probe a sufficiently deep understanding of a problem. Though I did like the point that "you mistake your feeling of familiarity for genuine knowledge." But everything else was a lot of fun!
Oh, and I enjoyed the academic snark that the authors occasionally employed, like:
"Weingarten wouldn't have won a Pulitzer had he stationed [Joshua] Bell next to a jackhammer."
"Bill Clinton later proffered commonsense excuses for his wife's memory lapse, claiming (incorrectly) that she made the comments late at night and pointing out (correctly but perhaps unhelpfully) that she was sixty years old."
"The members went around the room, each giving his or her own estimate, in descending order of seniority. Imagine the false sense of consensus and confidence that cascades through a group when one person after another confirms the boss's original guess."
"We chose reasoning as a skill to improve because it's harder to improve a person's sense of humor (especially if that person didn't laugh at the joke about the child making God cry)"
"In medicine, an expert is evidently expected to have all relevant knowledge stored in memory; consulting a reference is even worse than effectively saying 'what the hell' and charging ahead" [This totally made me think of Dr Seah, btw XD]
"When pattern recognition works well, we can find the face of our lost child in the middle of a huge crowd at the mall. When it works too well, we spot deities in pastries, trends in stock prices, and other relationships that aren't really there or don't mean wht we think they do."
"The media, loving a good fight, even among staid academics, sprang into action."
On subliminal messages in a liquor ad that featured SEX spelled out in ice cubes: "there was no control group of subjects who were asked to describe their feelings without being shown a liquor ad. It's possible that any kind of alcohol advertizing would have induced a similar response [62% of respondents reporting feeling aroused, romantic, etc.], or that these college students were just perpetually horny."
And not snark, but just a quote I liked: "Our understanding of our world is systematically biased to perceive meaning rather than randomness and to infer cause rather than coincidence."
And I swear this was an intentional pun, right after the paragraph talking about rating jam flavors: "Thinking about it only generates irrelevant information that essentially jams up our intuitive emotional reactions."
Overall this books was a very, very fun read, and if I didn't suspect my friend TK had already read it, I would be totally giving it to him as a gift.
29. Ilona Andrews, On the Edge -- so I went back and read the first book, and it was enjoyable, too, though for slightly different reasons. Spoilers! I'd liked George as the teenager milking his Cursed Prince persona in book 3, but I like him even more as a "baby necromancer", to borrow ikel89's phrase -- he is so earnest and trying to hard to be responsible and kind. Older Jack didn't do much for me in book 3, but his younger version was very charming, especially when he was trying to use the techniques Rose uses with him to talk William off the edge -- that was adorable!
Because this is the first book, there's a bit more basic worldbuilding in this one, which I actually liked more than the profusion of post-human Hand agents in book 3 -- it was neat to get a proper look at how the Edge worked, the interaction between different families, the elders and infrastructure of East Laporte, the interaction with the Weird and the Broken from the Edger point of view. And all the zany details like Cletus the zombie pirate grandpa who has to be chained up so he doesn't go eating dog brains, and the different magical gifts the Edgers have, and Elsie Moore's magical teddy bear tea party (and good taste in leading men). And I enjoyed getting the closer look at combat magic and tactics -- the different kinds of flash defensive and offensive moves, the concept of necroscouts (I'd seen George use that in book 3, but not that it was an actual army thing), flash snipers, etc. Oh, and flash-based CPR. Good stuff!
The thing that worked less well for me was the couple. Rose is Significantly Named and the de rigeur combination of kind + stubborn, and Declan is just... very generic romance novel hero, muscled and blond and devastatingly handsome and rich, and you're supposed to think he's an asshole at first but he's totally not, because he has reasons! The way the whole marriage challenge thing turns out to be a ploy of opportunity felt like a cop-out, the mistaken assumption and lack of communication bugged me, even though the last scene was very amusing, and I generally didn't see much reason Declan and Rose would want to be together, except that he's handsome and good with the boys and she is better at flashing than he is. It was just too romance novel in that way. And the pseudo-love triangle with William, if that's what that was supposed to be, was just weird -- Rose does not for a moment think of him in those terms, and he's clearly attaching to her from a totally dysfunctional place, and yet I felt like there were nods at the standard love triangle more than a subversion of it, which was annoying. Ultimately, I felt like Declan/William had more interesting chemistry than either of the guys with Rose (Declan left his military life behind to try to save William, and resents the fact that someone else managed what he cannot! William can't forgive Declan for having a loving family he doesn't spend time with! They beat the shit out of each other! -- why is there no Declan/William slash, seriously, internet?).
I did like some moments between Rose and Declan -- flirting via combat magic demonstrations, mid-battle declaration of love, Declan's desire for a make-out bunker, even the "That was not the way this was supposed to go" statement from him after they first make love, but on the whole they kind of left me cold. But one scene I did really enjoy was the homecoming one at the very end -- apparently I have a real weakness for the unsuspecting bride(/groom) meeting the crazy, boisterous family that immediately accepts them -- I really enjoyed it here, and it put me in mind of other similar scenes I've loved, in the Vorkosigan Saga (for both Ekaterin and Tej) and the first Aute book. (In fact, Declan's mother reminded me of Cordelia for some reason, even though there isn't much actual similarity there.)
And I did like some of the more mundane moments with Rose, her getting all excited about having enough food for a month that she could divide into portions and freeze, and feeling the strain of spending most of the time talking to children and thus falling into "mom" mode by default (when she's giving pain pills to Declan), and feeling like Declan's success in getting George to stop with the indiscriminant necromancy underlines her failure to do same even while she feels enormous relief, and things like that. I don't find Rose very interesting, but I do find her likeable enough. Although Grandma Eleonore's shilling for her for several pages was kind of annoying. And even Declan had a cute moment or two, like when he's overwhelmed by Walmart.
30. Ilona Andrews, Bayou Moon (The Edge, book 2) -- When I first read the blurb, I figured this was going to be my least favorite of the books, and first meeting Cerise and William in book 3, they didn't interest me at all. But it was the only one of the series the library had in eBook, so I grabbed it, and then ikel89 turned out to remember this one more than #1, so it moved up in my queue. And, wouldn't you know it, it turned out to be by far my favorite of the three. Spoilers!
It's still got some of the romance tropes that annoyed me in the other two -- angst through misunderstanding / assumptions, for example -- but much less prominently, and some of the prominent ones simply appeal to me more, like William trying very hard to conceal his longing for Cerise (and with better justification than most such scenarios). I liked Cerise best of the three leading ladies -- Rose was sweet and Audrey was fun, but Cerise feels the most organic -- I can easily see how someone like her, with a lot of power, loving but crazy extended family, living under growing responsibility and the shadow of the feud, would become this mix of playful and deadly, wistful and ruthlessly competent. But, really, this one was mostly about William for me, and William is goddamn catnip.
OK, so his tragic backstory is ridiculously overloaded -- abandoned at birth, brought up in a cell, trained with violet conditioning to become a killer and to know that he's not human, years of black ops service, court-martial and being sentenced to death, losing the girl he likes to his best friend -- I mean, yeah. But for all that, William is kinda adorable, in ways that are both poignant and funny. The way he buys action figures and plays with toys (because he never had any growing up), the way he longs for his trailer and TV shows and coffee and dry socks, the way he falls back on what he remembers Declan doing when he needs to flirt. The way he goes to have his hair cut at salons because keeping his pelt clean is important to him and that's one way to get pretty ladies to touch him. Oh, and the evidence that William apparently watches Dora the Explorer XP ("Thank you, Dora. Put the sword back into Backpack and we'll go. [...] Vamanos."). The mix of changeling oddness (which occasionally comes across almost childlike), soldierly roughness, and controlled savagery (with the occasional explosion of berserker rage) worked for me really, really well -- I loved his POV, and I wanted to give him a hug, or at least a scratch behind the ears, and give him everything he wanted, the poor puppy.
And I liked/approved of the way Cerise isn't horrified by his obvious, obvious fucked-uppedness, but rather admiring of how well he keeps it together most of the time given all that. I liked their relationship in general -- the way they met, with Cerise menacing him with a licked finger while in hobo disguise; the way he's all "play it cool, play it cool", and clueless but trying hard to understand her and do the right thing a lot of the time, even when the right thing is mysterious to him (I'm guessing changeling might be a bit of a shorthand for non-neurotypical, but in any case it worked for me); the conversation where he relates her having to suddenly lead the family to being a sergeant; even that she has to punch him in the head to stop him when her family is about to walk in on them. I guess it's, in some ways, similar aspects that appeal to me about Mark and Kareen's relationship in the Vorkosiverse -- he's unbelievably damaged but working past that, she knows just how bad it is and loves him anyway, together they fight crime, and somehow it all works out for them.
I continue to like the relationship between Declan and William -- they are such guys, and interaction with William actually manages to make Declan temporarily interesting to me. (Actually, the way Declan and William relate and give each other shit made me realize that this is probably a contribution from the husband side of the writing team, since he was in the military, IIRC* -- and I think maybe the husband-wife tagteam writing helps explain why William (and Kaldar, in book 3, though he's a different sort of character) comes across both as a believable guy, rather than some prince charming on a white charger, and without the (unrecognized) creepy undertones that seem to crop up a lot, especially in the were-whatever lover books. But I digress.)
*This would appear to be validated somewhat in this interview: "I guess as far a character go, I tend to work more on the male dialogue, while Kate and Rose really come from Ilona's head.", and the fact that William is Andrew's "easy" character.
I loved the little scenes of William interacting with Jack (giving him the chocolate bar was a very sweet callback moment), and making smalltalk with George while Jack and Gaston kick and trash-talk each other. And seeing Kaldar through William's eyes made me want to reread the scenes in book 3 where Kaldar is freaking out that William is going to kill him over the boys. Of the new characters, I liked the crazy Mar clan, en masse -- I liked Grandma Az, who sees right through William, and Emel the necromancer, who comes out to help the family by working around the spirit of the law of his sect while following the letter, and Aunt Murid with the sniper eyes (and was sorry she didn't make it through, though I knew/remembered that from book 3), and even Gustave Mar, from the couple of pages he was actually onscreen. Ironically enough, the character who I'm *least* interested in from among the Mars is Richard, who, of course, is the protagonist of book 4... which I might still read, but am in no hurry to do so. Oh, and I liked the Mire's Judge Dobe, too.
This was also the first book where I found the antagonists interesting -- book 1 had the standard mad scientist/wizard type consumed by insanity, and book 3 had the robber baron I liked as an episodic villain, but Spider's niece and her gang of agents wasn't interesting to me at all. But Spider himself was neater than I'd expected! The urbane villain is nothing new, but what I liked were the little touches in how he interacted with his agents, snapping at them and then apologizing for snapping (like the thing with the assassin filling the place with woven baskets because she has to be constantly doing something intricate and demanding lest she snaps and starts killing people), manipulating them with both fear and gentleness -- I really got the sense that he knew these people inside out and cared about them in his cold, utilitarian way. And, ultimately, you've got to respect somebody who will take down an essentially unkillable monster with an enemy's dropped bombs and a name, while paralyzed from the waist down, and then has the presence of mind to rip out and eat its potentially restorative heart. Oh, and I liked Lagar Sheerile, too, and the way he wasn't really an evil person, just trapped by the family feud, and the way Cerise understood that.
It's the funniest of the books, too, especially William's indignation about various aspects of the swamp, like the eel, or using peat for fuel.
"The creature lunged onto dry land, clawing at the mud with short stubby paws. The damn thing had legs. Fucked-up place, fucked-up fish."
Cerise: "Crazy necromancers, anal cousin, financial liability, did any of that penetrate?"
William: "That fish is everything that's wrong with this place."
"That's a Gospo Adir eel."
Cerise grimaced. "Yes, and he's very proud of killing it."
That had to be the craziest thing he'd heard. At some point they must've looked around and said, "Hey, what do we have a shitload of?"
"Mud! It's cold and wet. I know, let's burn it!"
"Well, it ain't good for nothing else."
What the hell? He supposed if fish could have legs, then mud could burn.
Other quotes I enjoyed:
"She had accomplished her goal, and inside, in the same place she wanted her mother, she felt deeply cheated because her parents failed to magically appear."
"When she was a teenager, she used to imagine meeting a stranger. He would be from the Weird or the Broken, not from the Mire. He would be lethal and tough, so tough, he wouldn't be afraid of her. [...] She'd gotten so good at imagining this mysterious man, she could almost picture his face. || William would kick his ass."
"He would bring her flowers, swords, and whatever else she liked."
"Slowly the reality of the situation sank in. He got his ass kicked, learned nothing, and got saved by a dumb dog and an old lady. If he lived long enough to make a report to Nancy back in Adrianglia, he would have to gloss over this part."
And, um, there was some plot, though the romance and character stuff are definitely primary. Erian as the family traitor was pretty clear almost as soon as they got to the Rathole, though his motivation was not. The mad genius grandfather and his journals and death-defying box were pretty cool ideas, though I do feel like having no visible consequences for William's death and resurrection is kind of a copout (possibly because something about these books keeps making me think of the Vorkosigan Saga -- not that they're actually similar, but, like, I would be unsurprised to discover that Ilona Andrews is/are fans (though I've not been able to find evidence of it so far). I had been expecting there to be more going on with Lark, because from book 3 I got the sense that she'd been a more prominent character; as it is, I liked William and her bonding (over dressing kills, naturally, and whether one should eat squirrels XP), but I'd thought there would be more... something, possibly resolution. Or maybe that comes in book 4?
Anyway, I generally don't enjoy paranormal romance, but these three books were fun, and Bayou Moon was the most pure fun I've had reading since... *scrolls back* actually, since the first Mercy Thompson book back in January, actually (though I've definitely read more interesting and more ambitious books that I enjoyed in-between).
I'd mentioned that I have an ever-increasing list of books I'm in the middle of, and I need to keep better track of it, so, going to start doing so here, in the order in which I'd started them:
- Red Seas over Red Skies -- p.288/760
- Volha #3 -- 7%
- The Fox -- 37%
- Thursday Next #1 -- 72%
- Cast in Ruin -- 7%
- Pale Demon (Hollows) -- 17%
- Codex Born (Libriomancers #2) -- p.118/324
- Raising Steam -- p.143/365
- Alex Verus #2 -- 18%
- Finder -- 5%
- Cloud Atlas -- 8%
I think Finder (thanks, qwentoozla, for the rec!) will be my next main read, and then Cloud Atlas (thanks, adraekh for reminding me about it! -- I'm enjoying the book a good deal more than the movie so far), but who knows at this point.
Oh, and in other reading news, L is almost done with Rampant (the Killer Unicorns book I loved a couple of years ago) and O is 180 pages into Scott Westerfeld's Leviathan :)