Reviews: nonfiction
DIGITAL YOUTH, INNOVATION, AND THE UNEXPECTED (Tara McPherson ed. 2008): Available free online; a sometimes dense but rich overview of the promises and perils of digital culture for progressives. Historical comparisons of the promises of computers in the home to those of pianos in the home, for example, emphasize the importance of class and cultural capital to this supposedly freeing new environment. Likewise, another essay asks why technological innovators so often resemble those well-entrenched in current power structures - they can be innovators because they’re already so close to power. Other topics include moral panics surrounding girls online, as compared to earlier worries engendered by the telegraph and the telephone. Of particular interest to me was the chapter on machinima and the complicated relationship between machinima creators and game designers. The contributors aren’t doomsayers; they just want us to remember that technologies aren’t liberating in and of themselves. I found something of value in about half the essays, but you have to be prepared for regular use of the term “affordances.”
Ian Ayres, Super Crunchers: This repetitive, not-well-organized book offers a lot of examples of the use of data crunching - using large databases to extract important insights about consumer behavior, the effects of economic incentives, the effectiveness of medical therapies, etc. It’s an important phenomenon, but I don’t know why we needed a whole book to say so, and I’m not sure Ayres knows either. If you are interested in the trend, I suggest reading the free excerpt, then stopping.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The basic argument: most significant events in the world and in individual life are unlikely, unpredictable in advance, and subject to retrospective reinterpretation in which we try to explain why the unpredictable was really predictable all along. This leads to persistent problems when we try to apply the lessons of the past to the future. Starts with a sort of incoherent rant and a personal history that explains why he doesn’t believe in prediction, as a witness to Lebanon’s civil war, but then develops lots of takes on the argument for uncertainty and the proper way of thinking about evidence. Confirmation bias, Bayesian analysis, etc. - all pretty clearly explained. The last part of the book gets boring as he settles a bunch of scores (or tries to settle them; he often fails to give enough background for me to understand or care why he hates the folks he hates). More fun than the other nonfiction I’ve been listening to, though Taleb is clearly an enormous jerk. The book was also a nice contrast to Super Crunchers in its aggravated insistence that large numbers are often not important, while single exceptions are.
Atul Gawande, Better: This collection of essays about the practice of medicine would have been more coherent if Gawande had realized that what it is really about is the industrialization of medicine - the gains and losses from scale. It’s an interesting contrast in that way to The Omnivore’s Dilemma, which is self-consciously about the industrialization of food. Gawande’s reverence for doctors leads him to dislike malpractice law, but he advocates for a no-fault compensation system because a large-scale medical system will predictably cause harm to a certain percentage of people; his reverence for doctors also leads him to reject some very interesting arguments for medical participation in executions, but that’s not necessarily about industrialization.
I was most interested in his argument for the acceptability of large numbers of C-sections: a well-trained doctor using forceps and version can do at least as well by infants and much better by mothers (C-sections being notoriously hard to recover from), but becoming well-trained at those things is much, much harder than becoming well-trained at C-sections. So the cost of large numbers of C-sections comes with some less often articulated benefits: having a baby is safer for babies even with a less experienced doctor. If everything goes well, it’s better not to have a C-section, but the point about doing anything on the industrial scale, even birthing, is that you may be better off targeting the lowest common denominator rather than tolerating both excellence and incompetence.
Ian Ayres, Super Crunchers: This repetitive, not-well-organized book offers a lot of examples of the use of data crunching - using large databases to extract important insights about consumer behavior, the effects of economic incentives, the effectiveness of medical therapies, etc. It’s an important phenomenon, but I don’t know why we needed a whole book to say so, and I’m not sure Ayres knows either. If you are interested in the trend, I suggest reading the free excerpt, then stopping.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The basic argument: most significant events in the world and in individual life are unlikely, unpredictable in advance, and subject to retrospective reinterpretation in which we try to explain why the unpredictable was really predictable all along. This leads to persistent problems when we try to apply the lessons of the past to the future. Starts with a sort of incoherent rant and a personal history that explains why he doesn’t believe in prediction, as a witness to Lebanon’s civil war, but then develops lots of takes on the argument for uncertainty and the proper way of thinking about evidence. Confirmation bias, Bayesian analysis, etc. - all pretty clearly explained. The last part of the book gets boring as he settles a bunch of scores (or tries to settle them; he often fails to give enough background for me to understand or care why he hates the folks he hates). More fun than the other nonfiction I’ve been listening to, though Taleb is clearly an enormous jerk. The book was also a nice contrast to Super Crunchers in its aggravated insistence that large numbers are often not important, while single exceptions are.
Atul Gawande, Better: This collection of essays about the practice of medicine would have been more coherent if Gawande had realized that what it is really about is the industrialization of medicine - the gains and losses from scale. It’s an interesting contrast in that way to The Omnivore’s Dilemma, which is self-consciously about the industrialization of food. Gawande’s reverence for doctors leads him to dislike malpractice law, but he advocates for a no-fault compensation system because a large-scale medical system will predictably cause harm to a certain percentage of people; his reverence for doctors also leads him to reject some very interesting arguments for medical participation in executions, but that’s not necessarily about industrialization.
I was most interested in his argument for the acceptability of large numbers of C-sections: a well-trained doctor using forceps and version can do at least as well by infants and much better by mothers (C-sections being notoriously hard to recover from), but becoming well-trained at those things is much, much harder than becoming well-trained at C-sections. So the cost of large numbers of C-sections comes with some less often articulated benefits: having a baby is safer for babies even with a less experienced doctor. If everything goes well, it’s better not to have a C-section, but the point about doing anything on the industrial scale, even birthing, is that you may be better off targeting the lowest common denominator rather than tolerating both excellence and incompetence.