Books of March 2017

In March I read:

Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby - why the lucky stiff

This is a book introducing the programming language Ruby, although honestly that is a terrible description of the book. The author, why the lucky stiff (abbreviated as _why) is a famous Ruby programmer who was much beloved until he disappeared one day without notice, taking with him a lot of repositories and projects he created over the years. He is an enigmatic and divisive figure; some people sympathetically and nostalgically remember his programming career (although he is still apparently a programmer today, just laying much lower), and some people are angry for him leaving behind very little trace of his work. _why described his book as less of a programming book and more similar to The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime, which I think is a pretty apt description.

I was introduced to _why by Kyle Burton, my manager and mentor at Riot, started it a few months ago, and only finally got around to finishing it. It is technically a guide to Ruby, I guess, but it is the furthest thing there is from the O'Reilly books adorned with animals (although there are cartoon foxes talking about chunky bacon in the book, if that counts?). 

_why is a little crazy, and his book reflects his very unique and creative way of thinking. Here is a programming snippet from his book:

starmonkey = ratchet.attach( captive_monkey, pipe.catch_a_star ) + deco_hand_frog

His writing style is also very interesting. His flow is oftentimes very abrupt, because he uses short sentences in quick succession without really chaining them together. The result is this stream of consciousness style where thoughts and ideas spill out like slices in an array.

A big benefit of his weird examples and style is that they make you think more deeply about the syntax & ideas he is trying to teach. The guide is self professed to "teach Ruby with stories" but after reading it I'm not really sure if the story serves the programming or the programming snippets serve the story. I think it's an interesting approach and I enjoyed most of his examples & stories (e.g. % as a sideways frog face holding seats for other animals on the bus), but I still think the best way to learn programming is to actually do it and the best way to learn a language is to use it.

A downside though is that the book is tough to read, because it's so weird, and he goes on strange tangents with comics that feel more like wandering through the colorful LSD infused wasteland of _why's mind instead of a straightforward programming lesson. In Chapter 6, my cloud-to-butt Chrome extension changed a bunch of instances of the word "cloud" to "butt" in one of his stories and I didn't even think it was wrong until I saw the associated comic... but I guess that is the point.

A lot of the things he covers are universal concepts, so they were already familiar. I would be really interested in what a novice to programming would think of this book, and how clearly the ideas would be transmitted & how long they would stick. This is certainly a guide to Ruby, but in a way that is rare (at least in my experience) in programming and computer science, his personality really shines through in his writing and his thinking. I am reminded of one of his quotes:

when you don't create things, you become defined by your tastes rather than ability. your tastes only narrow & exclude people. so create.

The book is free online here if you are interested in reading it.

self portrait of _why

Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East, 1776 to Present - Michael Oren

Great read. This was the second book I chose to read in my "books about the Middle East" chunk of reading, and I think this was a really good complement to Arabs. While Arabs focused primarily on a modern history of the Arab world, cycling chronologically through themes in each country, Power Faith and Fantasy focused on America's involvement in the Middle East from its conception to present day.

The book was roughly split into two halves: the first half is a summary/account of America's involvement with the Middle East from independence to somewhere in the 19th century, and the second half is more of a thematic analysis of WW1 to present day, relating it to ideas discussed in the first half. The first half of the book I found really interesting because there wasn't much about American involvement in the Middle East in Arabs, so learning about the Barbary Wars and the many religious and philanthropic missions was pretty surprising. The second half of the book I thought was excellent, especially because he shied away from giving factual summaries and rather focused on comparing how the various presidents reacted and acted in the Middle East according to the power, faith, and fantasies they had.

I liked how he included the perspectives of many people in his book, giving me a really good understanding of the changing attitude and beliefs Americans had about the Middle East through the centuries. I am particularly fond of history books that provide not so much an account/summary but rather a coherent and consistent theory/philosophy/theme through which to understand events. He really hammered the intertwining themes of power, faith, and fantasy, and it was interesting to see how they consistently wove together influencing policy and attitude of America towards the Middle East.

The Sheikh's Batmobile: In Pursuit of American Pop Culture in the Middle East
- Richard Poplak

Soooooooo stellar. I would recommend this book to anyone; it is tremendously interesting and fun to read. Richard Poplak is a journalist who travels to 17 (?) Muslim countries looking for evidence of and influences from American pop culture. He explores Lionel Ritchie's popularity in Libya, rap in Palestine, the Simpsons in Saudi Arabia, and a ton of other parts of popular culture (I won't list them all here, there are too many plus part of the fun of the book is reading each chapter and being surprised by what's popular in what country). As a pop culture enthusiast, Poplak is both interested in how American pop culture has spread beyond America and how pop culture can be more than just a generic homogenizer of culture and instead a social and cultural force for good. His on-the-grounds reporting style brings him to meet with and learn from people who have adopted and adapted American pop culture, transforming it into something to address their needs, combined with uniquely local elements.

Through these similar but different brands of pop culture, Poplak shows us how Muslim American pop culture is something much deeper than its often shallow and superficial origin, helping these adopters transform the society and world they live in. In several of the chapters, I was impressed and inspired by their bravery in carving out a niche for themselves and using pop culture as a way to bring about change.

The book is very hopeful, and even though I am far from a pop culture fanboy, it is hard to not also believe in at least the feasibility of his views and his dreams. I'm can't say that I'm quite as optimistic as him, especially w.r.t. his hopes for pop culture being the bridge between what seem like vastly different cultures. At the same time, by learning something about these countries that is more than just the crap on the news, I felt closer to these people that I know very little about, and closer to mutual understanding. If nothing else, the book is very humanizing.

The content of the book is pretty simple, but he writes with a bunch of metaphors and comparisons and flourishes that are fun to read but difficult and tiring to get through. Not sure how much I enjoyed his style, but his personality definitely shines through in his writing, and he's very colorful and fun. It isn't a big complaint, and I honestly thought it was just my problem until I read some reviews of people who felt the same.

I found this book interesting also because of my background. I was kinda fobby until the 7th grade, and I still have this massive cultural gap from being born & raised in Taiwan. A lot of the American pop culture references he makes are the first time I've heard of any of them, which means that there are a surprising number of people in Muslim countries who know more about American pop culture than me, an American. Interesting to think about...

When Breath Becomes Air - Paul Kalanithi

I was recommended this book by my good friend Alex who spent an hour thinking about it in a chair by the beach in Costa Rica after finishing the book. It seemed to me as good an endorsement as any, so I read it on my flight back to NY (it is a really short read, 2-3 hours).

This book is fantastic. The prose is beautiful, the thoughts are beautiful, the themes are beautiful, the book is beautiful. It is written by Paul K, a neurosurgeon/neuroscientist who discovers in his last year of residency that he has lung cancer. The book is interesting in that you already know the ending of the book (spoiler alert: he passes away) but is gripping and touching and tragic all the same.

I learned a lot about seeing things from a physician's point of view, and I especially liked what he said about doctors needing hope as well. I don't have a really sophisticated view of medicine, so I can't say transforming my idea and perspective on medicine is a massive achievement, but he definitely changed the way that I think about modern medicine. Instead of medicine being a way to always "cure" and "fix" problems (i.e. people), the goal of medicine is more to "cure sometimes, treat often, and comfort always." I found his views on medicine very humanizing, especially when he explained how he came to see every patient not as a problem but as a person, and therefore see every chart or data or test or result as a person. 

Underlying the book is his search for a meaningful life. Paul explains how he was drawn to neurosurgery because each patient raises the question of what constitutes a meaningful life, since operating on the brain is to operate on the existence of a person. In his own search for meaning, even when his time in life drew much shorter than expected, he wanted not a happy life but a meaningful, purposeful life. It is a tough but necessary question for everyone to consider: with the time that we have, how do we live a meaningful life? More generally, with what we have, time included, how do we live a meaningful life?

Something I thought particularly interesting was his reason for turning to medicine, when he originally studied English, biology, and philosophy. He came to grapple with questions of life, death, and meaning initially through literature and philosophy, and found instead that the best way to come to terms and understand it was through direct experience (hence medicine). This is a philosophy I share; I think it is difficult to really understand anything unless you directly experience it yourself. Near the end of his life though, Paul turned to literature again to find the words to capture his experience. This is also how I view academic theory vs direct experience; the two are complementary in that each help us understand the other better. I find this multi disciplinary approach of his really great, and I personally also believe in applying different tools to tackle similar things with different methods and philosophies (a fine argument for a common core or at least delayed specialization).

I can't really remember the last time a book made me cry. I didn't cry until the very end of the book when his wife writes, also beautifully, about their relationship. I loved many lines in the book, but the ending of the book describing Paul's integrity and honesty in the face of death was very very touching (I won't spoil it here for you).

The book is very sad, and the story is undoubtedly tragic, but somehow the book remains beautiful and very hopeful. This is my favorite line in the book: "You can't ever reach perfection, but you can believe in an asymptote toward which you are ceaselessly striving."

Stumbling on Happiness - Daniel Gilbert

Apparently this is not the most common or current cover, but this is the version I have and I really like it.

OK full disclosure: this one is kind of a cheat, and I dunno how much it should count because
1) I've read this book over 10 times over the last few years, or at least big chunks of it
2) Technically I read half of it (this time around) over winter break, and just finished the other half this month.
I still read most of it though and flipped through the pages so I'll count it. Plus, I've never reviewed it before (or whatever you call what I do here).

I like the book a lot. I think my sister gave it to me around my sophomore year or so (of high school) and I've read it at least once a year ever since. Contrary to its name, Stumbling on Happiness is not a self-help book about how to find (or stumble on?) happiness, and instead a book about psychology, and why we have such a hard time figuring out what makes us happy.

He brings up three shortcomings of our imagination: realism, presentism, and rationalization. We believe in the realism of our imagination too faithfully, we imagine futures that look suspiciously like the present, and if we have a hard time imagining the future, we have an even harder time imagining how we will feel about it. He also proposes a surprising solution to this problem (won't spoil here) and supports it with interesting evidence. I will say it definitely has changed the way I think about things, from the little psychological facts I learned to my approach to figuring out if I'll like something. 

I love how he organizes his book and it is mapped out in a way that makes the ideas really easy to understand. The subject is kinda complicated at times, but he combines funny and educational examples with A TON of psychological studies to make his points come across very strongly and clearly. This book is soooo well researched and written, and I really love his writing style. It flows super well and is full of personality, making it a really really fun and fast read (even though it's kinda long). I never felt lost and I think there's a lot to be learned and appreciated from the book.

He also opens each chapter with a Shakespeare quote, which I appreciate a lot. 

Weapons of Math Destruction - Cathy O'Neil

Cathy O'Neil is an ex Barnard math professor who left to work at a hedge fund, and after the financial crisis, became a data scientist. Her book is about the dangers of Big Data, a very hyped field in Computer Science. I was introduced to this book by an econtalk podcast I watched last month (linked here). I am sympathetic to this topic because it is one of my biggest concerns & fears about Big Data and even about CS as a whole. I actually mentioned this topic during my Palantir interview, albeit really poorly, so I was interested in what kind of examples and what kind of solutions Cathy proposes in her book. 

The eponymous Weapons of Math Destructions (WMD) is what Cathy uses to describe mathematical models that are opaque, operate at scale, unquestioned, unaccountable, and create pernicious feedback loops. Each chapter of her book explores a different WMD and at the end of the book, Cathy paints a grim picture of connected WMDs that trail us from life to death. From applying to college, to finding jobs, to getting loans, to getting insurance, to voting, WMDs seem to dominate our lives in ways that we often cannot control or understand. What I think is noteworthy is that even though a large part of the book focuses on how the poor are especially harmed by WMDs, WMDs is a problem that affect us all, hitting the poor, middle, and upper class alike (although in differing severity).

The problem with WMDs stem from their objective. Until our models learn morality, our ML models have to have their objectives & focuses planned by the programmer/developer/ data scientist, and often times the objective of WMDs is not fairness or equality. Instead, many try to optimize for efficiency or maximum profits, ignoring that there are real people behind these data points. In models that iterate on complex data, such as human beings, every person must be simplified into traits that are hopefully representative of them, and Cathy argues that these traits or proxies are often inaccurate or malicious, intentionally or otherwise.

This is, I think, a strong argument against a completely free market, and strikes me as one of those externalities that require government intervention. The free market, optimized for maximum profit, will continue to use WMDs in a pernicious feedback loop to keep the disenfranchised and affected in. Instead, just as we needed government regulation and market based policies, combined with strong unions and journalism/ awareness to fix the poor working conditions of the industrial revolution, we will need a similar type of fix for these WMDs.

Cathy highlights that many of these WMDs have the tools to be great forces for good, because the same WMD that negatively profiles and incarcerates people can be a model that identifies those who most need assistance. The problem is that many WMDs codify the past instead of inventing the future, reinforcing past stereotypes and past mistakes but hidden under the mask of unbiased unquestionable mathematics. 

I've always felt that the other half of the solution is closely related to the programming community. Just as people need to be aware and need to have access to the models that affect their lives, the developers that create these models also need to be cognizant that data is people, not just statistics and numbers. Cathy

I think this is also a strong argument for diversity in tech. Those who think the same will just continue to build the same models with the same assumptions, and with great diversity in tech these different backgrounds will help prune and weaken the initial biases built into these models. This was always a problem in the tech industry, although initially I think more related to excluding talent, but now it takes a moralistic dimension, as programmers continue to gain more and more influence into people's lives. 

Even if you are not remotely interested in data science, these WMDs probably affect you in some way or other, and Cathy writes in a wonderfully legible way, making sometimes complex topics easy to understand. She also hammers her points in with multiple examples, and repeats herself, making the ideas in the book very clear. I really recommend this book!!

The End of Fashion: How Marketing Changed the Clothing Business Forever
- Teri Agins

A few days ago I decided the "theme" for the next chunk of books I plan on reading is fashion, so I dutifully googled "good fashion books" and this was one on the top of a list, so I started with this one. I think this book ended up being a good place to start, and would be an interesting read for a range of people from fashion industry newbies like me to more serious fashion fans and aficionados. 

The book, written by a fashion journalist Teri Agins, looks at fashion in the last couple of decades, and how mass marketing and changing consumer trends have changed the fashion industry. It is a really interesting story starting from the haute couture (a term I didn't know until I read the book) French fashion houses, and along the way examining Emanuel Ungaro, Ralph Lauren & Tommy Hilfiger, Armani, department stores, DKNY, and Zoran. I only knew about half the names on this list but apparently Ungaro and Zoran are pretty famous.

This book actually completely changed my views on fashion and updated my very naive and uneducated understanding of why brands are famous and how fashion has evolved over the last few decades. Initially, fashion was dictated from these fancy old French fashion houses, like Dior, or YSL, or Chanel, and fashion trends were birthed from the runway and from fancy seasonal collections. This is the kind of runway fashion that I typically think of if someone asks me where fashion comes from; thin Europeans wearing crazy clothes designed by trendsetting designers (like Zoolander and Mugatu).

Dispensing with the conception that fashion designers are crazy geniuses isolated from commerce and marketing, Agins explains how changing consumer tastes for cheaper and more comfortable clothes and lessened importance on fashion forced designers to focus on marketing their brand. Fashion houses were no longer able to dictate the trends of fashion from the runway, and to secure profits and retain customers in a world no longer enamored by haute couture, they had to resort to strategies like bridge brands, boutiques, licensing, and marketing through movie stars. Many brands now sell the same or similar clothes to a public with increasingly homogenized tastes, differentiated only by their marketing and brand name & reputation.

Miscellaneous parts that I liked:

• Armani making a fortune by marketing to movie stars, and Oscars being referred to as Armani's night. Previously fashion houses were too snobby to market to movie stars, thinking their more deserving clientele to be royalty and aristocrats
• The evolution of department stores from actual departments (menswear, sportswear, etc.) to the collection of boutiques that we see now
• The homogenization of department stores (into the same few collection of boutiques), because the products they sell are safer
• The volatility and fragility of these companies, and how 1 bad season or 1 bad clothing line can lose millions and drive away business
• The steak vs the sizzle in fashion and the disconnect between the runway and the consumer, especially in Isaac Mizrahi's case, where he was hyped up by the fashion press but his clothes never sold well on racks
• The catfight between Ralph Lauren and Tommy Hilfiger
• Zoran and his success in the fashion industry by NOT changing his clothes too much, by changing colors rather than hemlines and shapes
• I wonder if innovation will be stifled because designers are not as free to explore, just as movie directors are not as free to explore with bigger and bigger budgets, and new designers will have a hard time breaking in because marketing is so expensive and so crucial to success

(as a side note, I kinda like the idea of "Miscellaneous parts that I liked," maybe I will do that for all the books in the future)

Instead of my original conception of fashion giants and entrenched emperors, the fashion industry seems more like one gigantic wild game of capture the flag, with all these companies running around frantically to keep their brand afloat amongst a sea of fickle consumers. It is an interesting story of a shifting balance of power, and how these fashion companies have either struggled to adapt or perished in the last few decades. 

All the Shah's Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror
- Stephen Kinzer

I originally planned on The Sheikh's Batmobile being the last book in my Middle East series, but I kept seeing the same pictures of Iranian women in Western style clothing picnicking on the lawn on Reddit, and every comment section would say "Iran used to be a democratic country before the US fucked it all up!!!" So I got interested in how it actually happened, and I picked up All the Shah's Men. 

pics like this

All the Shah's Men is a book about the CIA-backed Iranian coup dubbed Operation Ajax that happened in 1953, orchestrated by the US and the UK to overthrow Mohammad Mosaddegh. Mohammad Mosaddegh was a popular prime minister of Iran, seen by many as a champion of secular democracy, and fought vehemently with the British to reclaim Iran sovereignty over their lands and resources, especially oil. The story begins over a century ago, first with a brief explanation of Persian history and religion, and then with the weak and corrupt Qajar dynasty who gave many concessions to Russia and Great Britain. From the Qajars' concession, the Anglo-Iranian oil company extracted much of Iran's great wealth in oil and earned much but gave little to the Iranians, a classic case of colonial exploitation. It was in this political climate that Mohammad Mossadegh came to power as a man of the people, a fervent Iranian nationalist. 

The UK-Iran conflict comes into a climax when Mossadegh nationalizes the oil company. This is complicated by the US-Iran relationship, where the US supports the fledging democracy of Iran and frowns upon British colonialism, the US-UK-USSR relationship in the Cold War. Initially against military intervention in Iran, the US changed policy after Truman and under Eisenhower, when the Dulles brother's orchestrates Operation Ajax. On the few days of Operation Ajax, Kinzer gives a gripping blow by blow account of how Roosevelt's mission to overthrow Mosaddegh barely succeeds, with many unexpected obstacles and surprises. Kinzer ends the book by analyzing some of the consequences of the coup, lamenting the death of the beginnings of a mature Iranian democracy and warning against attempts of military dominance in Iran.

Stuff I found interesting:

• The US was initially very well liked by Iran, and many Iranians thought of the US as very different from the European colonizers. Instead, the US was seen as a democratizing benefactor who supported Iran. This shift to the relationship now between the "Great Satan" and part of the "Axis of Evil" is very interesting to me.
• US sentiment towards the coup changed greatly from Truman to Eisenhower, under which the coup happened. Two things I thought interesting were: Eisenhower was driven by ideology, and wanted to keep communism out of Iran at all costs. Eisenhower was also given incomplete information (but didn't want complete information) by his advisors and aides, who were the main architects of the plan. Which sounds familiar in today's political climate, and is completely horrifying.
• Mossadegh was not a saint, and made many mistakes. I appreciate how Kinzer highlighted that perspective.
• On that note, I appreciate how Kinzer didn't make 100% assertive conclusions, acknowledging that the question "what would've happened without the coup" is very difficult if not impossible.
• Eisenhower's bemused question why they couldn't "get some of the people in these downtrodden countries to like us instead of hating us." Great question still today...
• (most of) the British government were assholes, and Churchill in particular was a horrible imperialist in the book. I drew a similar conclusion from Arabs except this was a detailed account of a specific event.

While I liked the historical account and analysis, I am not persuaded by the last chapter. I'm not sure if you can draw a steady line between the coup and the Iranian Revolution 20+ years later, and the connection is especially tenuous tracing from the Iranian Revolution to the Iran in present today, ignoring several presidents and big events in between. I agree that we should be wary of the unintended consequences of US intervention, but it seems to me like Kinzer takes a few too many jumps from 1953 to the 21st century. 

Like all of the books I've read so far on the Middle East, this is a pretty depressing book, but it is a really interesting read and now I definitely have more context for the next time that photo is reposted. 

Robots versus Slime Monsters - A. Lee Martinez

love A. Lee Martinez; I was planning on reading more of his books in April so I'll talk about all of them together. I'll just say this is a wonderful book for his fans, since each story follows a side character in each of his novels after they finished. I really wish I backed this on kickstarter when it was out.

Podcasts of March 2017

In March I listened to:

534: A Not-So-Simple Majority
https://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/534/a-not-so-simple-majority
Holy crap this was a really frustrating podcast to watch. This was also my first This American Life podcast (recommended by Andy!). This podcast was about a NY district, East Ramopo, and the school system there. Because there is a large Hasidic ultra-orthodox Jewish community, many of these Jewish children don't go to public school and go to private yeshivas. However, because property tax pays for a lot of public schools, the Hasidic community was upset over having to pay taxes for schools their children would not use, and was able to vote a majority of their candidates onto the school board, even though their children would never go to a private school. As a result, they were able to vote to cut budgets, remove classes and extracurriculars, and even sell schools. The whole podcast goes from frustrating to infuriating and it is a crazy intense local political battle.

I found this not-so-simple majority especially alarming in a political climate where people in power make decisions about things that will never affect them (e.g. a bunch of white men signing bills about birth control for women).

Something else I found interesting was that I found myself automatically siding with the public school side, even though the Hasidic Jews had some good claims too, since many of them were lower middle class and paying for schools their families would never use. Perhaps this is because I can more easily identify with the regular school district kids...?

Paul Bloom on Empathy
http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2017/02/paul_bloom_on_e.html
This one suuuuucked. I liked the first part and the premise, but I didn't feel like there was much substance to this podcast. The primary idea is that empathy is sometimes harmful, and empathy is a poor tool for policy. Bloom highlights three main problems:

1. It is biased. It's much easier to be empathetic to someone like you, even if intellectually those might not be the type of people that need your help.
2. Empathy often extends mostly to individuals or small groups, so we get these interesting psychological findings where it is easier to care about 1 than about 10. This happens everyday; we watch a Facebook video and become tremendously concerned about someone in particular and yet have no trouble being indifferent to the suffering of thousands or millions.
3. Empathy can also be "weaponized," and exploited by people to get us to support stuff that makes the world worse.

3) was interesting, a good example he brings up is child beggars. Bloom suggests that donating to disabled or injured child beggars is good in the short run, but in the long run, creates demand that results in more children being maimed intentionally (to exploit our empathy). A horrifying case of unintended consequences...

The rest of the podcast I found pretty boring, and they talk about things like parenting, IQ points, and anger.  When I started watching This American Life I realized one of the things I don't like about Econtalk is sometimes Russ and the guest go on kind of unrelated tangents. I skipped most of it, maybe you will find it more interesting.

550: Three Miles
https://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/550/three-miles
Wow this was really really good!!! This was about two schools in the Bronx 3 miles away, one a public school in one of the poorest neighborhoods in the Bronx and the other an expensive private school. The producer Chana follows two students from the public school, Melanie and Jonathan, after they graduate from high school. Melanie disappears before senior year ends, and Jonathan ends up getting a scholarship to Wheaton (I will not spoil the rest of the story).

This was both really eye opening and really sad. I thought it highlighted something that people from privileged positions often do not see, that you cannot imagine poverty by just taking money away from your bank account. Poverty is often pervasive, and one of the most insidious things about it is the effect it has on your attitude. It is heartbreaking to hear about the pressure Melanie was put under and to hear Jonathan say he never felt like he deserved to achieve anything.

513: 129 Cars
https://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/513/129-cars
This was probably my favorite TAL podcast so far. If you watch any to see if you like them I would recommend this one. A bunch of producers follow a team of car salesmen trying to reach a monthly quota. If they reach their quota, 129 cars, then they get a big bonus from Chrysler, putting them in the black, otherwise they will be in red for the month (since they sell at a deficit to get to those numbers). 

My takeaways were:

• After listening to them describe a few sales I kept thinking that this was basically psychological warfare, so I was pleasantly surprised when one of the car salesmen mentioned the most important text to learn to sell cars is Sun Tzu's The Art of War. 
• I also always thought the manager and the salesmen work together to play the customer, but really the manager and the salesmen play the customer and the customer plays the dealership and the salesmen plays the manager and the dealership plays each other and the car company plays them all. Really really interesting stuff.
• The best time to buy a car from a car dealership is on the last few days of the month when they're trying to meet their quota

360: Switched at Birth
https://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/360/switched-at-birth
Pretty weird story. This woman gets the wrong daughter from the hospital, realizes it early, but only tells the two daughters 42 years later. This obviously causes a lot of tension between the two mothers and the two daughters. I found two parts of the podcast interesting:

• The first was that the women felt they belonged in the family that they were actually biologically born into, raising some interesting questions about nature vs nurture. Marti was outgoing in a serious family, and Sue was anxious and introverted in a generally extroverted family. 
• The second was with myself, I found myself much more sympathetic to Mary Miller, the woman who raised Marti even though she knew Marti was not her daughter after she explained her story. A good... reminder to not draw early conclusions?

600: Will I Know Anyone at This Party?
https://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/600/will-i-know-anyone-at-this-party
This episode is about how the Republican party has transformed over the years, especially given the recent political climate. This episode was really something else... There's a song sung by Neil Patrick Harris about Paul Ryan's private thoughts, pains, and feelings about embracing Donald Trump and feeling abandoned by his party. Here's my favorite line from the song:

Now the guy is calling me a wussy, I wish I could grab by the lapels and tell him...

The first part is also called Party in the USA. Which is great.

The episode opens up by talking about how three Reagan era Republicans, all hosts of a conservative show, feel like their party has transformed. They discuss their surprise at how the party has changed, and how values have shifted, changing what the party stands for.

A big ticket issue this election season was immigration. Party in the USA takes Zoe to St. Cloud Minnesota to understand why and how immigration became such a big deal, even the core issue, for Republican voters. 

Why is immigration such a central issue? Was it because they were directly affected in some way? Did they lose their job or been negatively impacted? Zoe found no. The concerns about immigration were rooted in fear of and discomfort with change coupled with feelings of lack of control. I found it interesting that no one interviewed thinks they are racist (I guess that is kind of obvious), and that even people who disagreed with those against immigration never used the r-word (racist). Instead, racism was more a side product of fear of change from the old ways in a very isolated town, and people pointed instead to money as the primary problem. How much are these immigrants costing us?

A big cause of this is just ignorance, "experts" citing "facts" and fear mongering. A lot of people Zoe spoke with were very concerned with immigrants being a big burden on tax payers, and imposing Sharia law in America, both of which are just not true. But the same message is being pushed over and over again, by many speakers who come in with similar information that reinforces these beliefs.

At one point, a young Somali immigrant said she understood how they felt, and she just thought that those against immigrants had learned bad information and just needed to learn good information. She said, "you can't argue with a feeling." I think that is really interesting. A lot of political discourse now begins and ends with insults, and a lot of what we believe we reinforce by selectively learning. To reach across the other aisle, to counter this stream of misinformation, we need to push a different message instead of isolating and insulting those across the political aisle.

Robert Whaples on the Economics of Pope Francis
http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2017/03/robert_whaples.html
This podcast is about the economics of Pope Francis, specifically in the encyclical that he recently wrote dealing with environmental and economic issues, such as capitalism, inequality, etc. His argument is that we have been addicted to excessive consumption for too long, which combined with environmental problems, puts us on an unsustainable path that could easily become a catastrophe.

This view is, of course, contrary to the ideas underpinning capitalism, since free markets are based on the idea that people will always want to consume more, driving competition and consumption. Robert discusses the idea that the pope has in relation to his background. Pope Francis is from Argentina, one of the countries where a capitalist system has failed, and so is skeptical of capitalism. On the contrary, his predecessor John Paul II, who spent most of his adult life in a communist society, was much more supportive of the benefits of free markets.

I found Robert and Russ's argument that in general poverty has been greatly improved in the 20th century, in part due to capitalism very interesting, and reminds me of some of the arguments made in The Better Angels of Our Nature. Taking up a pro-market perspective in contrary to Pope Francis, they argue that the problem with capitalism is not necessarily capitalism, but rather that capitalism gives us what we want. Capitalism does have its flaws and its externalities, but the way to make capitalism better is to change what we want.

Crafts, Garicano, and Zingales on the Economic Future of Europe
http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2017/03/crafts_garicano.html
They had 3 guests on this podcast, each an economist from a different part of Europe. It was fun to hear three different views with three different accents discussing and debating the economic future of Europe and how they got there. Even though they have different views and perspectives, they all paint a grim picture of Europe's future and specifically the future of the European Union.

Some interesting things I learned from the podcast: 
The EU was never really well unified, with the Northern countries dominating the Southern countries (and with France believing they belong with Northern Europe but economically more similar to Southern Europe). There is also no real leader of the EU, and Angela Merkel, despite her position of power, is ultimately elected by the Germans to serve the Germans. There is a lot of mistrust between these countries, making it difficult for policies to be implemented affected countries by people not from those countries. A big cultural challenge.

The euro was created under the assumption that there would be institutions created later to support it, but currently none of these institutions exist. Instead, at a time of crisis, countries are turning to more nationalistic agendas, making it even more difficult to create pan-Europe institutions necessary to revitalize the EU. This connects to a discussion on Brexit, specifically its short term and long term impacts. In the short term, Brexit doesn't seem to have caused that significant of an impact, which Crafts argues is because short term is macroeconomic forecasting, which economists are bad at. Long term, disintegration of trade and greater trade costs means trade goes down, which is unequivocally a negative effect. 

One of the other big things they discuss is productivity in Europe. Perhaps due to regulations, creative destruction in Europe is very difficult, making innovation costly. The job market is also relatively stagnant. Crafts draws a comparison between America and Europe in that the former tends to protect the worker, while the latter tends to protect the jobs. Another big problem for productivity is corruption. In Italy for example, the elite employs the EU to stay in power, driving down innovation and competition at the cost of growth and productivity.

All in all they describe a very pessimistic view of Europe where the EU is a burning building without a fire escape. There is a great amount of anxiety in Europe, a large populist movement anxious about the future and antagonistic towards immigration and globalism. One thing 

611: Vague and Confused
https://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/611/vague-and-confused
I am really liking This American Life! I think I prefer them to Econtalk. They are better produced and more interesting, plus sometimes Russ goes off topic which bothers me a little.

This podcast is about rules that are vague and confusing, and the aftereffects of that. The first case that they examine is immigration. The recent laws on immigration/deportation, and the uncertainty regarding the policies of our new president has caused a lot of fear and confusion amongst undocumented immigrants. Ira Glass and Lilly Sullivan go to Chicago, and meet with a family trying to navigate the situation. I found their personal account very powerful, with their concerns over whether their oldest sister would have to go back, how their financials would be if their father was deported, if they would split up their family or all move back to Mexico, etc. It was particularly sad when their youngest daughter started to cry, worried about whether her sister would be able to stay in America. It really puts a human real side to the problem, instead of demonizing "undocumented immigrants" or "aliens," and helping us see them as real people.

The second case was wildly interesting; I had no idea this island existed or even ever heard about it. Producers Sean and Adia head to the Hawaiian island of Niihau, where a rich American family, the Robinsons, purchased an island from the Haiwaiian king. When they bought the island in the 1860s, they promised the king that they would help the people living on the island. They interpreted this as keeping the island the way it is, and so Niihau still has no running water, speaks an older form of Haiwaiian, and still live according to the rules of the Robinsons. Some of these rules are vague, such as not being able to have long hair or tattoos, or staying off the island for too long. They interview many people, some who cannot return to the island and some who run the island (Leiana, the matriach). These rules are vague and confusing, but at the same time, people who live on Niihau love their life, and in particular one guy moves back because he likes the simple day to day better. Pretty interesting stuff.

On the other side, part three looks at when laws are applied perhaps too consistently? Producer David goes into a courtroom to defend himself from a traffic ticket, and observes judge Clarence Barry-Austin exact the law in the courtroom. This is a super boring municipal court, the lowest law in the land, but the story telling is actually fascinating. The law applied this way seems kind of esoteric, and David ultimately gets a ticket because he says too much and dings himself on (what I think is) a technicality. 

609: It's Working Out Very Nicely
https://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/609/it%E2%80%99s-working-out-very-nicely
The title of this podcast is from Donald Trump's comment regarding the recent travel ban, "it's working out very nicely." This podcast is about the way the travel ban was implemented, and the chaotic results it had on people when it was put into effect.

The prologue begins by introducing Somali refugees who were supposed to come to America from their camps but were denied entrance because of the travel ban. These people have waited years to be able to enter America, and were told that America would happily accept them, and that America was a land of equality. They even gave up their jobs and lives and took on debt to buy winter clothes for America, and were ultimately told that they were not welcome. It is just an awful awful situation. 

Part 1 is equally awful, and moves to the people who were mid-air when the travel ban went into effect. In particular, this Iraqi guy flying from Canada to join his family was detained by immigration for several hours, and told he would be sent back to Iraq, where he would be executed because his wife had worked with an American contractor in Baghdad. This was so horrifying, to imagine being him thinking he was going to be sent back to be killed or to imagine being his wife, waiting in limbo to hear news about her husband. These policies and their implementation are not just bureaucratic details, but deeply affect many people.

Part 2 brings us to those responsible for vetting immigrants, showing their emphasis is on security, and that our vetting process is already extremely detailed.
Part 3 discusses the purpose of the travel ban. Nancy Updike, a producer of the show, looks to understand how the visa process was related to 9/11. I found most interesting that pre 9/11, there was a much smaller focus on immigration, and Saudi Arabians at the time weren't seen as security threats but rather as rich tourists. The real security system does not rely on visas and immigration checks, since the majority of terrorist attacks are done by citizens, either born in America or naturalized. Instead of alienating the Muslim community, "our borders and immigration system, including law enforcement, ought to send the message of welcome, tolerance, and justice to members of immigrant communities in the United States and in the countries of origin." 
Part 4 discusses the ban as a "Muslim ban." Benjamin Wittes, editor of a website devoted to national security law, sees the law's real purpose as keeping out Muslims. The law is poorly written, with plenty of vague points and loopholes, and was created and passed without consulting any of the nation's major agencies, such as Homeland Security, DoD, State Department, etc. Wittes argues that the goal is not real security objectives, but rather a symbolic bashing of Islam. 
Part 5 ends the show by talking to Abdi Nor, a Somali green card holder, who refuses to leave the country now out of fear of Trump's extreme vetting.

Ultimately, I think this podcast, along with Will I Know Anyone at This Party, brings an important human aspect to the problem. The people that are affected by these things are not abstract concepts, they are real people who are affected by these policies!!! It is important to always remember that those who are denied entry into the US or those who lose healthcare are not just numbers, but real people with real worries and real fears. 

I also love how each podcast looks at the topic from a ton of different perspectives.

Tina Rosenberg on the Kidney Market in Iran
http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2015/09/tina_rosenberg.html
So apparently in Iran kidneys are available to buy, and there is a market type thing going on matching kidney donors with kidney buyers. This is a big problem in the US (and actually in most countries) where the list of recipients for kidneys is super high, and many people are stuck on dialysis and die waiting for a kidney. 

The initial response to a market for organs is probably negative, since it evokes black market connotations of the poor being exploited by the rich to give away their kidneys for a cheap price. Actually, in Iran, the system works quite well. Only people of the same nationality can buy or sell kidneys from each other, so there is no risk of a wealthy foreigner coming to buy a kidney from a poor Iranian. There is extensive medical and psychological testing, as well as financial consulting, before a donor is allowed to give a kidney, and in fact the line for donating kidneys is longer than the line for receiving kidneys. The government pays the donor about $3500 for his kidney, with some regional differences. Generally the system is a success, but in some regions due to financial difficulty the program works much less well. 

I was annoyed by Russ's discussion of the motivation of doctors in the US, and how the system doesn't exist in the US possibly because doctors have a financial incentive to keep dialysis. I like the economic discussion on Econtalk, but sometimes I find Russ brings up stuff that isn't very supported. In particular I think (would hope, at least) and believe that doctors often have the best interest of the patient, and would be hesitant to put people on dialysis just to make money. 

Something unrelated I found interesting was that with bike helmets becoming more prevalent there are apparently fewer transplants in the US, since organs can be only be donated from the dead under specific circumstances (brain death w/o organ damage, something frequently caused by catastrophic traffic accidents).

I like the idea of market based solutions and would be interested in seeing how it would be implemented in a different society and a more robust economy. Any misgivings about this program I think would be offset by the benefits it would give (namely, save a bunch of lives)!

605: Kid Logic 2016
https://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/605/kid-logic-2016
This one is about kid logic being applying rationally in normal situations and arriving at completely wrong conclusions. It is really fun, and there was actually a really heartwarming story called "Werewolves in Their Youth." 

Also kids are mean. :-(

603: Once More, With Feeling
https://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/603/once-more-with-feeling
This is a podcast about people trying new approaches to things they've been doing. The first one is really interesting; it's about a woman who responds to cat calls trying to convince men to stop. She speaks to one dude who likes to slap one woman's ass in a group of women, referring to himself as a "one ass one group" man. This is interesting to me because none of these men think that the women don't like the attention, and it doesn't cross their minds that it might be scary or uncomfortable for these women. In particular, they think that because they would like the attention (mostly) other people should too. It takes Eleanor 2 hours to convince Zack to literally stop assaulting women on the street.

The second part is about a soldier finding ways to tell honest stories from his deployments in Iraq. He initially used a "veneer of chill" only telling funny stories, but eventually told his friend Isaac a real story about the war. My biggest takeaway was Isaac's response, when he just looked Michael (the vet) in the eye instead of looking away or being uncomfortable or changing the subject, making him feel like he wasn't a "monster." 

Podcasts of February 2017

In February I listened to:

Jim Epstein on Bitcoin, the Blockchain, and Freedom in Latin America
http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2017/02/jim_epstein_on.html
Probably one of my favorite econtalk podcasts so far. Talks about how bitcoin is popular in Venezuela because of lack of access to food (strict government controls), so instead of waiting in line for hours for essentials Venezuelans have turned to bitcoin mining to get revenue. Mining bitcoin generally is cost prohibitive, since the electricity to do is very expensive, but electricity in Venezuela is largely subsidized by the government so it is one of the countries where it economically makes sense to mine bitcoin. The bitcoins can be transferred to USD or coupons at a lot of popular exchanges. This kind of activity is also seen where there are big tariffs (e.g. Mexico with a ~60% tariff on buying iPhones).

Also interesting is the idea of blockchains, the tech behind bitcoin. Essentially a shared database where people can access records. Has uses in housing (keeping records of buys & sales & ownership). Really interesting thing to think about even in the US where government plays a big role in ensuring sales are legitimate (e.g. can't accidentally sell the driveway I share with my neighbor). Highly recommend this podcast, I enjoyed & understood almost all of it (the former comes often, the latter comes rarely).

George Borjas on Immigration and We Wanted Workers
http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2017/01/george_borjas_o.html
Also a really interesting one. Some main ideas include the comparison between immigration and trade. If we think of immigration as low skill workers threatening the jobs of some then trade will be largely the same, except immigrants are people & not widgets (paraphrased from Borjas) so there are some complicated differences. Brings up the great point that in immigration we often don't discuss the makeup of people, and what types of immigrants are coming into America and what types of jobs / workers they threaten.

Michael Munger on the Basic Income Guarantee
http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2017/01/michael_munger_3.html
I would love for someone to listen to this and explain it to me better. It was a really interesting intense debate about BIG (Basic Income Guarantee), essentially a basic income that is guaranteed to everyone (say, 15k for everyone a year). There are lots of arguments presented, but one of them (at least as far as I understood) was that we are already providing some kind of BIG via lots of government programs, and instead we should scrap them (save the overhead, save the trouble) and consolidate them into a BIG. Stuff like "cliff effect" where people will avoid working to lose basic guarantees are considered, and Russ suggests something like a progressive BIG. 

Dr. Munger makes a really interesting claim at the end- that the BIG will not go up, but will rather go down as we become more efficient. As our technology improves things will fall in price, and while wages will fall, prices will fall even harder & faster- so the BIG will go down not up. Similar argument to what Elon Musk made (about automation making BIG a necessity).

Michael O'Hare on Art Museums
http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2015/05/michael_ohare_o.html
Er, I've said so far I liked all of them. I guess it's because the ones I didn't like (Grit with Angela Ducksworth, Ego is the Enemy) I just didn't finish. But this one was also good, and it's a subject personally interesting to me. Michael O'Hare talks about how art museums currently don't well serve their audience, and they generally don't act towards what he thinks their goal should be: "The purpose of an art museum is more, better engagement with art." To this end, he discusses admission prices, museum layout (including getting more chairs), and the surprising amount of assets museums have.

Museums, big museums like the ones we have in NY, often only display single digit percentages of their assets (he cites 4~5%), most of which sits unviewed in a basement. Michael argues that we can take these art pieces and sell them, either to other museums or to private collectors. This would a) easily, easily take care of admission prices and b) allow new museums to come into existence. By allowing these assets to flow more freely the museum can generate revenue to better serve the public, but this is currently not allowed because amongst directors there is a rule to never sell art (except to acquire more art). I'm not sure how factual all these numbers are but I found the idea very interesting.

This was also the first econtalk podcast I listened to!

Cathy O'Neil on Weapons of Math Destruction
http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2016/10/cathy_oneil_on_1.html

The subject of this podcast is actually an answer I gave in a Palantir interview about problems in tech. I gave it really poorly and I didn't articulate it well, but Cathy brings up much better examples in a much more coherent way. She discusses Weapons of Math Destruction, algorithms that are secret, have big impact, and are destructive. Examples include recidivism rates, teacher ratings, college rankings, and advertising, and how these algorithms are destructive in very non transparent ways.

More than Terminator-esque sentient AI, I think this is the bigger concern with AI and ML and all these new algorithms. The developer isn't perfect and we should be careful of oracles.

Jonathan Skinner on Health Care Costs, Technology, and Rising Mortality
http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2016/07/jonathan_skinne.html
Health care is one of my favorite subjects so far, mostly because I have so little knowledge about it. Jonathan Skinner addresses how innovation is not always good in health care, and how there are many inefficiencies produced even with better technology. For example, a technology may be found to be effective for a small controlled group, but then is spread and used across the country in hospitals with much less certain effectiveness and much greater cost. An alternative is mentioned in British health care system where certain services are not provided by the government due to cost, but that sometimes results in lives lost and sicker people. Primary takeaway for me is that US health care is definitely innovative, but perhaps the innovation is not necessarily worth its cost.

In the last few minutes, he brings up a really interesting idea: a central institution that processes all insurance claims, reducing administrative costs, and providing central data for regional variations and where spending is going (and how effective it will be).

Richard Epstein on Cruises, First Class Travel, and Inequality
http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2016/06/richard_epstein_3.html
This was a confusing one. I didn't follow all the arguments or agree with all of them, but I wasn't sure if the latter was mostly due to the former. The podcast opens with a discussion of consumption inequality (e.g. first class seats) and how that benefits us all (the extra money is used in a way that helps us all, e.g. bigger planes, tvs, ambient lighting, all the new 777 stuff). They then move onto a general discussion about inequality, and this is where I kind of disagree. Russ & Richard make the point that a lot of billionaires are also philanthropists, and even though many people dislike the idea of billionaires having so much control, the money and aid they contribute is better than the government stepping in. Basically voluntary redistribution is much better than (i.e. more effective, efficient) a forced government transfer program.

They also discuss tax and regulation, and Richard makes the argument that they both produce incentive effects, such as curbing innovation. We are much better off by punishing those who cross the line than by intensely regulating them and affecting their growth.

I guess my problem with that argument is I mistrust some of these people in power and (maybe foolishly) think the government would better serve the people's needs.

Doug Lemov on Reading
http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2016/11/doug_lemov_on_r.html
This one was quite good, if not that insightful (for me personally). Doug discusses the importance of reading, and the importance of close reading. It's important for our education to emphasize reading difficult texts closely, and have the attention & grit & capability to get through difficult but rewarding texts. In particular, reading any book is not the same as reading difficult books, and one way we can incentivize reading is by teaching it in such a way that we combine difficulty with rewards.

I think one of the more valuable skills I got out of 4 years here at Columbia is how to skim texts, how to closely read texts, and how to read texts to distill the core arguments. 

Doug also makes a great case for reading books out loud. Made me think about how wealthy families tend to be more able to read out loud and provide resources for their kids.

John Cochrane on Economic Growth and Changing the Policy Debate
http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2016/09/john_cochrane_o.html
John was very interesting to listen to and had a good conversation with Russ. The takeaways I had from this podcast were: America is stagnating in economic growth, and that measure is one of the most important. Other issues we debate are often subsidiaries of that one problem. Innovation & growth is stagnated by taxes & regulation, and by removing these barriers we will have a better standard of living. 

There's currently a ton of inefficiency in how we operate (complicated tax codes, complicated loopholes, complicated laws) which in large part is due to a regulatory nightmare. This gets into an interesting discussion about policy debate, and how we can change the conversation to actually reform the system. We need, essentially, a leader/party/politician that can form this coalition and put together a "grand bargain."

I also found the point on corporate taxes interesting. Corporate taxes, according to John, never punish the company and instead punish the consumer through higher costs and thus higher prices. It would be better to remove corporate taxes and allow more freedom to invest. This also has the added benefit of removing the incentive companies have to hire smart people to find tax loopholes.

Josh Luber on Sneakers, Sneakerheads, and the Second-hand Market
http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2016/01/josh_luber_on_s.html
This one was half about the economics of sneakers and half about the data science. I think both were interesting, but I preferred the data science part of it. I've never been a sneakerhead but I've had friends who were really into sneakers. The economics were pretty clear; low supply (rarity) and high resale prices drive people to wait in line and generates a huge resale market (like concert tickets, some clothing brands, Supreme metro cards etc.). The data analysis part was really interesting. Cleaning up data from ebay auctions & pricing the shoes correctly is a really really difficult problem, and it was cool to listen to the various problems. I especially found interesting the problem of misjudging prices anecdotally. Since undervalued shoes are quickly bought on ebay, if you spend a lot of time looking at the data, you would tend to have a higher price point for the shoe, just because of sampling bias. 

I particularly liked the comparison between shoes and drugs, e.g. central supply chain, various distributors, lots of resellers...

Chris Blattman on Sweatshops
http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2016/12/chris_blattman_1.html
Not really sure what I learned from this one, although I still thought it was interesting. Chris explained his experiment in Ethiopia where he split a couple hundred people into 3 groups, factory, entrepreneur, and control, and found that after a few years, a high number of the factory group changed jobs or left factory jobs, and entrepreneurs tended to have pretty decent return on the initial capital and be happier. This suggests that factory jobs and industrialization may not be the only or optimal solution for poverty.

One particular point I found interesting was about lacking middle management. Middle level management was often most lacking in these sweatshop, people who can organize and run the factory themselves. Chris points to this as an attractive part of Ethiopia/ Kenya, with a fairly developed middle class and a stable economy. 

If nothing else, I appreciate the lack of a strong call to action. The experiment was localized and certainly had interesting results but may not apply to all of Ethiopia, let alone all of the countries where there are still sweatshops.

Abby Smith Rums on Remembering, Forgetting, and When We Are No More
http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2016/06/abby_smith_rums.html
Not that impressed with this one... agree that we should preserve the past and agree that it's important to engage stuff in its context, not really sure what I learned. To be fair though I also skipped a big chunk of it.

Jason Zweig on Finance and the Devil's Financial Dictionary
www.econtalk.org/archives/2016/06/jason_zweig_on.html
This one was good, and then ok, and then REALLY good. There were four things in particular I found interesting:

1) Jason describes how in 30 years of financial advising, most of what he does is just repeating himself several times a year, since good financial advice doesn't change very often. Instead, the newer stuff that comes out often turns out to be bad for the investor. 
2) The instantaneous access to information anytime we want is a very bad thing, and often prompts us to make hasty decisions out of fear or greed. I quote, "The greatest asset an investor can own is self-control."
3) Teaching finance to kids through competition is a horrible idea, because it teaches a) gambling b) trading on margin c) financial markets as a contest. Instead we should focus on teaching basic arithmetic, humility, and self-control (admittedly hard).
4) Sort of unrelated, but "No individual can assist or save the age. He can only express that it is lost." - Kierkegaard, and his father's response: "Well, he's right. But that's why you have to try to assist or save the age." I thought that was lovely. 

Tom Wainwright on Narconomics
http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2017/02/tom_wainwright.html
This podcast was about narconomics, i.e. the economics behind the drug industry. Tom explains how typical efforts in the War on Drugs involves destroying the supply of the drug through ways such as spraying pesticide from planes on poppy fields or burning supply that they find. This is an ineffective way to combat the use of drugs, because, and I found this super interesting, the cost of the raw material is not even close to the cost of the final product. To produce 1kg of cocaine requires 1 ton of poppy seed, which costs 500 dollars, but is marked up progressively until it reaches the United States, rising up to 20,000 and finally to 100,000+ before entering the hands of the actual consumer. Tom draws the analogy between trying to increase prices by hurting supply and trying to increase prices of art by increasing the cost of paint. The marginal increase in material cost is so much smaller that the effect will be miniscule.

Russ and Tom then discuss how hurting demand is a better strategy, and here is where I started to find the podcast less interesting. I didn't really hear any concrete ways to hurt demand, although they mentioned stuff like helping addicted people, educating younger people to not do hard drugs, etc. One thing I found interesting was Tom's discussion on marijuana and its legalization. By legalizing marijuana, we make it safer, since it becomes a legitimate business that doesn't have to be largely done in cash, and more importantly, we can rely on the FDA for federal regulation on marijuana instead of state by state. I am curious if his perspective on all drugs is to legalize, allowing for better regulation and completely killing the market of the drug cartels. Kind of interesting stuff. I find my favorite podcasts are the economics meets unexpected field, such as the sneakerheads one.

Michael Munger on Slavery and Racism
http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2016/08/munger_on_slave.html
Big fan of Mike Munger... I liked the BIG one as well, will probably watch some more of his. This one was about a paper he co-authored about the institutions of slavery. Munger defines racism in his paper as combination of bigotry and an institutionally privileged position (so it is difficult for minorities to be racist, although everyone can be a bigot). Munger argues that in order to justify slavery, slave owners of the South had to create an ideology to persuade themselves that slavery was good, leading to the creation of these institutes of racism to match these moral beliefs and logical conclusions.

They had economic and social incentives to do so, since there were many more slaves and a greater economic need for slaves. Munger discusses this from a Humean perspective, arguing that reasons are the slaves of passion, and passion ultimately comes from self interest. Because of this self interest & these incentives, slave owners self deceived themselves into thinking that slavery was good through racism. It is not a concerted planned central creation; it is more an emergent phenomenon from this shared set of ideal ideals. 

I found this point really interesting- Munger applies the veil of ignorance to racism. Suppose we all go into a room, and when we come out, some are going to be slaves, some are not, independent of who we are when we go into the room. If you still believe in slavery, then that could be your impartial spectator standard, but if you don't, then there's not much of a moral argument there.

Robert Frank on Dinner Table Economics
http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2016/01/robert_frank_on_3.html
This one is slightly different from most podcasts in that they discuss a variety of different cases of "dinner table economics." According to studies, a lot of students after taking their economics courses cannot answer/ apply basic economic principles to questions any better than students without any experience. To that end, Russ and Robert talk about some real world problems with interesting economic solutions.

Q1) Why old wine is more expensive than new wine?
A) Old wine is more expensive because of 1) demand shrinks as more and more people drink the limited old wine and 2) there is an additional cost to old wine (which is the return on investment if it was sold immediately and that money was put into a bank account). Similarly, and I thought this was more interesting, what happens to the price of pork when the price of corn goes up (assuming pigs eat corn)? The price of pork will go up in the long run to accommodate for the greater cost, but the price of pork will go down in the short run as pigs become more expensive to keep, so more pigs will be slaughtered and brought to market.

Q2) Why do men rent tuxedos, and women buy wedding dresses?
A) If we assume (and I think it's fair to do so) that women generally want unique wedding dresses, and the sizing of wedding dresses varies much more greatly than sizing of tuxedos, then there is a much greater cost to maintaining and keeping enough dresses for rent (something Robert calls money on the table assumption). As a result, renting dresses might end up being more expensive than just buying them.

Q3) Why is it more expensive to rent bikes than cars?
A) Similar to before, because of scale, cars are much easier to rent than bikes, and require less maintenance, and they are often cheaper to buy (because they have a special deal with the car company & they purchase in bulk). On the other hand, bikes require some custom tinkering, and the size just isn't there to support more efficient ways of renting bikes.

Pretty interesting, but nothing too difficult or profound (although those are maybe just my thoughts after listening to the answers).

Robert Aronowitz on Risky Medicine
http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2015/11/robert_aronowit.html
This podcast was about how the healthcare industry is increasingly focused on risk reduction instead of treatment, and highlights the high opportunity cost. I found this one specifically enlightening especially since I was born and raised in Taiwan, and in many Asian countries the norm is to take medicine, see a doctor, or get a checkup as a default response.

Because of over diagnosis and risk centered medicine, a lot of money is wasted on unnecessary checkups and false positives. These results and checkups are often invasive procedures that are physically taxing on the patient and also cause a lot of psychological stress and anxiety. One example Robert mentions is how mammograms are now a routine part of a woman's annual checkup when data suggests that these mammograms often do more harm than good (although, of course, data is complicated and not always black and white). Another closely related example is PSA tests for prostate cancer. A high PSA level often means recurring 6 month PSA exams to monitor changes, and Robert finds that many men get a prostatectomy to not only reduce the risk of cancer but also to get rid of the anxiety that comes with it. I am reminded of the Scrubs episode where Dr. Kelso introduces full body screenings at Sacred Heart, and Dr. Cox tries to persuade patients to not get one to prevent the test results from driving them crazy. 

I think the key to his argument is that a lot of data from clinical trials is incomplete or inconclusive, and it is dangerous to rely on partial data since we still know very little. A procedure with a slim and dubious statistically better chance at detecting an illness accompanied with a much greater opportunity cost just doesn't really make much sense.

I am a little torn though, because even if it's irrational, I doubt I will ever tell my parents to not get regular checkups...

Books of February 2017

In February I read:

The Simple Path to Wealth: Your Roadmap to Financial Independence and a Rich Free Life
- J L Collins

Pretty good book. This book comes from his blog, which comes from a series of letters he wrote to his daughter about investing advice. I like the way he presents the material, and it's written in a simple and engaging way (I read the book in an afternoon + an evening). I thought the chunks on what to invest specifically (VTSAX) and the bits on retirement funds, tax brackets, HSAs, and social securities were particularly helpful. I found afterwards I had a pretty good understanding of IRAs and corporate retirement plans (or at least for me personally), which is pretty useful info. It was already kind of a short read, but I think the beginning and the end could've been shortened a lot; he repeats himself quite often. Really the first and last parts of the book can be condensed into buy index funds, and buy Vanguard.

A good read if you're interested learning more about a simple and popular investing strategy, or if you just want to learn some useful stuff about managing your money. A lot of the material is also already on his great blog.

Godel Escher Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid - Douglas Hofstadter

This book is a gem written by a genius and everyone should read it. I share my thoughts on the book here.

Monster - Naoki Urasawa

Sooooo good. I read 20th Century Boys by the same author a year ago and it blew me away. I read the entire manga in 2-3 days, everyday until 5 am, and had vivid dreams of Friend. Monster was kind of a similar experience. Monster & 20th Century Boys are both really famous works, and they are both rightfully regarded as classics, sitting at the top of many people's best manga ever lists.

The art is decent but not amazing; the main strength lies in the exposition & the characters. The twists are actually surprising and the story is seriously gripping, one of the best psychological thrillers I've ever read (novel or manga or otherwise). The characters are also really really great. There are only two main protagonists, so most of the characters come and go, but all of them are important to the story and serve to further develop the plot. Despite their short appearances (so many people die...), in 1-2 chapters Urasawa can make you genuinely care about his side characters, and he does a great job of showing the good and the bad of people, and the nuances in between. Each character has a motivating back story, and very few characters are easily bucketed as good or bad. I liked the manga a lot; if you're in the mood for a darker read with a great story and great cast then definitely give it a read.

The Arabs, A History - Eugene Rogan

A few weeks ago I asked for recommendations on books on the Middle East, since I wanted to learn more about that region. All I knew before reading this book came from spotty MUN research and some random bits and pieces of information, so I was hoping to start with a comprehensive book on the history of the Middle East and the Arab world to build a good base to read other books. A lot of people suggested The Arabs by Rogan, also used in Khalidi's class.

I really really really enjoyed this book. Starting from the Ottoman control over the Arabs, Rogan explores modernization and reform, Arab bids for independence, colonialism and its challenges, the two world wars, Arab nationalism and its decline, oil, Islam, the Cold War, and the tumultuous early 2000s. The book was pretty dense, and had a lot of information (as can be expected by a compact volume of Arab history), but was always very easy to read. It was never boring, and I really liked the way he organized his book. Although mostly chronological, every chapter is organized by a theme, such as The Rise of Arab Nationalism or The Power of Oil, and Rogan discusses several Arab nations in relation to that theme. Every section is also closely related to its predecessor and its successor, showing how the Arab nations and the world at large changes and develops. I also particularly liked how he uses a broad range of primary sources to enrich his stories, giving them a personal element and giving us an insight into Arab thoughts and beliefs.

My only gripe with the book, and it is more a gripe with myself, is that it is difficult to trace the history of any particular nation. I found myself rereading chunks of the book and flipping back a lot to recall a name or previous events that happened in the country. It was only when I skimmed the book again after I finished it that I was better able to remember what happened in specific countries (I kept forgetting who Amir Faysal was and who invaded who in the Iran-Iraq War). I had to read parts of chapters over and over again to remember what happened in Lebanon.

This is a very thoughtful, educational book. Although at times it is very frustrating to read, and is not a particularly happy story, The Arabs is a wonderfully eloquent history of the Modern Arab world.

Godel Escher Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

This blog post is my review of Godel Escher Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter, although to be technical this is really more of a summary/ attempt to convince you to read this book. The only real review I have of this book is that it is brilliant and everyone should read it.

I picked up this book a year and a half ago thanks to Steve Yegge's blog post, and this is one of the smartest books I have ever read. When I say smart, I don't mean the subject material of the book is difficult (although it sure is), or reading the book makes you smart (although it probably will help). I mean that the author and the book, not the reader, are smart in the structure and content of the dialogues, the organization of the book, the braid he weaves connecting all these different topics, and just the various ways the book manages to refer to itself or talk about itself.

My first read through of this book was during my lunch breaks at OTC Markets, and after reading this book I started to read some reviews of it. One of the reviews that I read linked me to a retrospective by Hofstadter, who wrote 20 years after the book was published that most people misunderstood his book as a random collection of things he finds interesting, and about how "math, art, and music are totally the same thing at the core man!!!" I found this tremendously funny and a little self gratifying since I thought I was clearly not one of those people. Months later, when I was recommending this book to a friend, he asked me what the book was about.

Confidently, I answered- "Oh, this book is about how Godel, Escher, and Bach's ideas are connected and interwoven and how systems are limited and there's some stuff about Godel's incompleteness theorem and minds and each chapter is preceded by a dialogue between Achilles and a tortoise..."

And that was when I realized I needed to reread the book.

So this is my second attempt at reading through GEB, with the goal of really getting what this book is about. This time, while I was reading, every time I'd finish reading a chapter or two I would take notes on what I'd learned from the chapter (they are messy, but they are unedited here). I planned on writing this post from the very start of my read through, and many times I felt like I should give up. One of the reasons is because Hofstadter is much smarter than I am, and I have none of his wit, intelligence, or way with words, so what he says in a super dense book I am surely incapable of capturing in a short blog post. I also felt like I was doing the book a big injustice, and I wanted to avoid condensing the book in a crappy lossy way, losing a lot of its beauty and brilliance in the meanwhile.

I decided to keep going partly because I was already halfway, but mostly because I felt like it was helping me understand the book better. Perhaps that is why this blog post is a little messy still- I just couldn't make up my mind what I wanted this post to be or who I was writing this post for. But my original goal was threefold:

1. to better understand GEB
2. to convince you to give the book a shot
3. to be corrected if I get anything wrong

So what is GEB about?
GEB is, as Hofstadter describes it, a "very personal attempt to say how it is that animate beings can come out of inanimate matter." It is an attempt to describe, postulate, and perhaps understand how consciousness and intelligence and notions of beauty and truth emerge from inflexible, hardwired neurons. How does the concept of "self" emerge from things as selfless as stones or ants? This question is key to AI, because before we attempt to program "artificial" intelligence, we must first understand what "real" intelligence is, and where it comes from.

I hope to roadmap parts of his attempt here.

The first half of the book, dubbed GEB, lays down some of the groundwork of the book, and prepares us for understanding Godel's Incompleteness Theorems.

1. Any formal system able to do elementary arithmetic is either inconsistent or incomplete.
2. Any formal system able to express its own consistency can prove its own consistency if and only if it is inconsistent. 

This is explained in detail in the book, I am both unwilling and unable to explain it here.

Some precursors include the notion of formal systems, with a natural subgoal being establishing a formal system that can express all statements of number theory with rules that correspond to our reasoning. The idea of theorems & non theorems is linked to the idea of figure and ground in art (especially in Escher's work). He also looks at notions and origins of meaning, introducing propositional calculus and its extension, a formal system he calls Typographical Number Theory (TNT). TNT is created to be capable of expressing all number theoretic reasoning in a formal system via rigid symbol manipulation.

The next step is to "destroy" TNT as part of his proof of Godel's Incompleteness Theorem.

To do so, Hofstadter introduces the idea of "Godel numbering" of a system, of mapping symbols of a formal system onto numbers. This is a key part of the proof allowing us to recreate the Liar's Paradox ("This sentence is false", more detail here) in TNT by allowing strings of TNT to talk about TNT. More formally, we can make statements about formal systems expressible in numbers, so expressible in number theory, so expressible in TNT! In essence, with symbols in TNT, you can express statements about TNT by applying Godel numbering to itself!!! These ideas are a very distilled summary of Part 1 (GEB), the first 9 chapters of the book.

In Part 2 (EGB), Hofstadter shifts gears and focuses more closely on his ideas of consciousness and intelligence, as well as a more detailed proof of Godel's theorems. We start by looking at different levels of description in computer systems and in brains. Computers are divided into several different levels from bits to machine language to procedural to assembly, with each successive higher level making communication more natural. This raises the interesting question of whether or not the brain is built in a similar set of levels, since this question is deeply tied into the possibility of equivalent intelligence in computers. If computers are supported on the lowest level by hardware, by bits, how is thought supported by the brain, and what is the hardware of the mind? On the lowest level we have neurons, on the highest level we have thought, and Hofstadter suggests that in the middle layers lie symbols, complicated references that trigger and are triggered by other symbols.

We come back to Godel's Incompleteness Theorem when Hofstadter introduces Bloop, FlooP, and GlooP, three computer languages with increasing computation power. FlooP is a Turing Complete language (for those familiar with CS Theory), and GlooP is purely hypothetical  (since everything computable is computable by a Turing Machine according to the Church Turing Thesis). An interesting sidenote: some users on wikiwikiweb suggested that adding pimc, pifl, pire (purely theoretical) to FlooP would make GlooP. 

From FlooP and GlooP, Hofstadter does a detailed second passthrough Godel's theorem, introducing the Godel string G (the equivalent of the Liar Paradox for TNT), and shows how it is constructed and its undecidability in TNT.

We now have a proof of TNT's incompleteness (assuming consistency of TNT), so the next natural step is to show how this is applicable to ALL formal systems of sufficient power, not just TNT. Using something analogous to Cantor's diagonal method, Hofstadter shows how there is an "essential incompleteness" in all of these systems, and somehow as soon as a system has the basic conditions needed to be consistent or sufficiently powerful Godel's method can be applied.

What are some other examples through which Godel's theorem can be woven? Well, it turns out that there is an interesting analogy between self reference and self replication. Hofstadter compares self reference in Godel's theorem versus self replication in biology , particularly DNA and its self replication, relating sufficiently strong cellular support systems that permit self replication to sufficiently powerful arithmetical formal systems to permit self reference.

In both of these examples, it is the LEVEL mixing that is very important, the presence of self reference that results in the applicability of the Godelian method.

If all computer languages are equal in power to FlooP, and we are trying to simulate mental activity with computing power, how is computing power related to human thought, and can we simulate thought in machinery? If we view thinking as high level descriptions of a system governed by simple and strict rules on a lower level, can we replicate these high level descriptions on a lower level that doesn't consist of neurons? Hofstadter suggests because intelligence doesn't lie in the lower levels, but in higher levels of mixing, mental processes of any sort can be simulated by a computer program written in a Turing Complete language. He calls this the AI version of the Church-Turing Thesis since this belief is at the underpinning of all efforts in AI.

Hofstadter devotes the next two chapters of the book to retrospects and prospects of AI. Interesting retrospects include checkers, chess, translation, music composition, and language programs. I would be really interested in what Hofstadter has to say about current advances in AI, namely self driving cars, Alpha Go, and Google Translate, and how "intelligent" our artificial intelligence is nowadays. Interesting prospects include the AI idea of frames, similar to schemas or layers of context, which leads to a discussion on how different concepts interact and how symbols are created, manipulated, and compared. A question I had was: if we create a beautiful work of art or a piece of music from a computer program, and no listener can distinguish the piece as computer generated rather than human generated, can we still say that the work is not really music or art because the creator (computer) might not necessarily understand it?

The last chapter of the book, Strange Loops, or Tangled Hierarchies, is a wonderful summary of some of the core concepts of the book, looking at other examples of strange loops and how Godel, Escher, and Bach tie together in an Eternal Golden Braid.

A major theme explored in the book and repeated in chapter 20 is

“Underneath every tangled hierarchy is an inviolate level, whether we see it or not”

Another big point I think I understood better from the second reading is that consciousness, intelligence, sense of self, and all the things that make us confidently divide humans and machines are high level phenomenons. These epiphenomenons are based on interactions between levels, where the top level reaches down towards the bottom level and influences it, while at the same time determined by the bottom level. There is no specific place in the brain where we can point to and say "here is where consciousness is stored! Here is where the Philly cheesesteak symbol is stored!" On a low level, the hardware of our minds is strict, but on a high level, a fuzzy, informal level, epiphenomenon emerge. Therefore, to simulate intelligence in machines, Hofstadter proposes we must be able to simulate this same kind of fuzzy level mixing, this symbol manipulation that we do naturally in our minds in our programs.

This is the eponymous Eternal Golden Braid, and in my mind, this is what Godel Escher Bach is really about. The mathematician, the artist, and the musician are featured precisely because the strands of Godel's Incompleteness Theorem, Escher's art, and Bach's fugues share the integral core of level mixing and self reference, woven together in this book into an Eternal Golden Braid.

So that's my summary of GEB: EGB. There are many ways to view the book; I presented one that's roughly chunked along chapters. I think another interesting (but probably less fruitful) way to chunk the book is by fields. In his book, Hofstadter discusses formal systems, computer architecture, biology, neuroscience, computer languages, AI, mathematics, art, and music, and I probably missed a few more. Perhaps one of the reasons why the core of this book is so hard to grasp is because he touches on so many topics and addresses so many things in a variety of forms.

Like Steve Yegge said, the book is a bit like really good chocolate cake- really rich and yummy, but also really hard to eat more than 1 or 2 servings of. Some people suggest that the reader skip around, read a few pages here and there, and pick up whatever section is interesting to them. I personally think that is a bad strategy for GEB. The author has a goal, a roadmap of ideas connected in a way that was only made clear to me when I read the chapters sequentially and understood each chapter relative to each other.

That being said, I think there are many levels of enjoying the book. The dialogues are a delight to read; his examples are interesting; the connections are brilliant, and I think there's a lot to take away even if not read completely or read out of order.

This is probably one of the most difficult blog posts I've written, and maybe the one with least value, because this book really just defies description. You really just have to read it, or even just parts of it. I hope you find it as interesting and illuminating as I did.