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4 Book Reports from Penn: Stephen King, Steven Pinker, Steven Fry, Carl Dennis.
🕑 Added 2022-01-18 23:03:45 +0000 UTCHeroes: Mortals and Monsters, Quests and Adventures – Stephen Fry – Audio book read by Stephen Fry – 211025 – Oh my goodness. I don’t like these kinds of stories at all. I don’t even like when Shakespeare does the prophesies and witches shit. It’s just fantasy and means nothing to me. But Stephen gives it an angle and a feel that I can really latch onto. I really got so fully wrapped up the Minotaur’s story. Stephen doesn’t do any interpretation at all, he just lets it all just sit there. He tells the story so conversationally. The vocabulary is perfect, and it’s all this complicated stuff being laid out perfectly, but all that work makes it breezy. He’s such a great comedian that he never pushes. Just the exact right joke but never a joke when he doesn’t need it. I mention this every time, but it’s so important. The idea of needing a laugh really bugs me, just having a laugh is so much better. There’s one moment where he talks about a king “glued” to a chair and being pulled out and having his ass ripped off and going through the rest of his life without an ass, and Stephen just says, “Think Mick Jagger.” Just perfect. No other jokes around there, if feels like it just pops into his head. Beautiful.
I had one question about how a king could have looked back with grief on fulfilling a prophecy when he didn’t ever understand the prophecy (it’s Aegeus, never knowing that “bursting wineskin” referred to fucking and not drinking). I wrote to Stephen and, to my shock, he wrote back that he hadn’t noticed that mistake and it was a mistake, and he’ll find a way to fix it in future versions. Jesus, how did I find something he missed?
Anyway I loved this book and Mythos before it, and now I guess I’ll listen to Troy. And it’s nice because I know a little bit more about my culture.
Practical Gods (Penguin Poets) by Carl Dennis – 211107 – I read a little poetry every night and Kostya suggested this book. He said that you needed to know a lot of myths and literature but even on the surface, without knowing that it’s pretty great. I was very happy that Stephen Fry had prepared me for a lot of this, and Tim Jenison prepared me for other parts. This doesn’t have the form I look for in poetry (I just mean rhymes, I think) but it does have the depth. All these poems killed me. I loved them. And they all spoke to my heart. I did the highlighting things, but without the line breaks, it’s really hard to read. And a couple of them cut off because I was highlighting whole long poems and copyright doesn’t let you do that. But I really loved this book. So heavy and easy to read and clear with more depth every time you read it. One of the things poetry should do. The other thing is rhyme, and I’ll do that next.
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In search of something bright for the darker moments When the woman realizes her life with them Is the only life she’ll be allotted.
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NOT THE IDLE It’s not the idle who move us but the few Often confused with the idle, those who define Their project in life in terms so ample Nothing they ever do is a digression. Each episode contributes its own rare gift As a chapter in Moby-Dick on squid or hardtack Is just as important to Ishmael as a fight with a whale. The few who refuse to live for the plot’s sake, Major or minor, but for texture and tone and hue. For them weeding a garden all afternoon Can’t be construed as a detour from the road of life. The road narrows to a garden path that turns And circles to show that traveling goes only so far As a metaphor. The day rests on the grass. And at night the books of these few, Lined up on their desks, don’t look like drinks Lined up on a bar to help them evade their troubles. They look like an escort of mountain guides Come to conduct the climber to a lofty outlook Rising serene above the fog. For them the view Is no digression though it won’t last long And they won’t remember even the vivid details. The supper with friends back in the village In a dining room brightened with flowers and paintings No digression for them, though the talk leads To no breakthrough. The topic they happen to hit on Isn’t a ferry to carry them over the interval Between soup and salad. It’s a raft drifting downstream Where the banks widen to embrace a lake And birds rise from the reeds in many colors. Everyone tries to name them and fails For an hour no one considers idle.
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JESUS FREAKS The approval they get from above is all they need, So why should they care if they offend me Here in the parking lot of the Super Duper, my arms full, By stuffing a pamphlet or two in my pocket? No point in shouting at them to keep back When they’re looking for disapproval. No reason For them to obey the rules of one of the ignorant Who supposes the perpetual dusk he lives in Sunny noon. Their business is with my soul, However buried, with my unvoiced wish for the truth Too soft for me to catch over the street noise. Should I rest my packages on my car a minute And try to listen if I’m sure they really believe They’re vexing me in my own best interest? To them I’m the loser they used to be When they sweated daily to please themselves, Deaf to their real wishes. Why make it easy for me To load the trunk of my car with grocery bags When they offer a joy that none of my purchases, However free of impurities, can provide? Their calls to attention shouldn’t sound any more threatening Than the peal of a church bell. And if I call On the car phone to lodge a complaint, Jail will seem to them the perfect place to bear witness In this dark dominion where Herod rules. In jail, but also guests at a banquet, while I, They’re certain, stubbornly stand outside Shivering in the snow, too proud To enter a hall not of my own devising And warm myself at a fire I didn’t light And enjoy a meal strangers have taken pains with. Yes, the table’s crowded, but there’s room for me.
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A thousand sighs for an Eden that didn’t suit you And none for the Eden we might have made.
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VIEW OF DELFT In the view of Delft that Vermeer presents us The brick facades of the unremarkable buildings Lined up at the river’s edge manage to lift the spirits Though the sky is cloudy. A splash of sun That yellows some gables in the middle distance May be enough to explain it, or the loving detail Vermeer has given the texture of brick and stone As if he leveled each course with his own trowel. Doubtless stones in Cleveland or Buffalo May look like this on a day when the news arrives That a friend is coming to visit, but the stones in the painting Also put one in mind of the New Jerusalem, A city we’ve never seen and don’t believe in. Why eternal Jerusalem when the people of Delft Grow old and die as they do in other cities, In high-ceilinged airy rooms and in low-beamed Smoky basements, quickly, or after a stubborn illness, Alone, or surrounded by friends who will soon feel Delft To be a place of abandonment, not completion? Maybe to someone returning on a cloudy day After twenty years of banishment the everyday buildings Can look this way or to someone about to leave On a journey he isn’t ready to take. But these moods Won’t last long while the mood in the painting Seems undying, though the handful of citizens Strolling the other side of the river are too preoccupied To look across and admire their home. Vermeer has to know that the deathless city Isn’t the Delft where he’ll be walking to dinner In an hour or two. As for your dinner, isn’t it time To close the art book you’ve been caught up in, Fetch a bottle of wine from the basement, and stroll Three blocks to the house where your friend is waiting? Don’t be surprised if the painting lingers awhile in memory And the trees set back on a lawn you’re passing Seem to say that to master their language of gestures Is to learn all you need to know to enter your life And embrace it tightly, with a species of joy You’ve yet to imagine. But this joy, disguised, The painting declares, is yours already. You’ve been longing again for what you have.
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So fine are the threads that the moon Uses to tug at the ocean that Galileo himself Couldn’t imagine them. He tried to explain the tides By the earth’s momentum as yesterday I tried to explain my early waking Three hours before dawn by street noise.
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THE LACE MAKER Holding the bobbins taut as she moves the pins, She leans in close, inches away from the fabric Fretted and framed on the wooden work board. A young woman in a yellow dress Whose lighter hair, bound tight to her head But flowing about one shoulder, Suggests the self-forgetful beauty of service, Service to a discipline. Just so the painting Forgets the background to focus on her. Here she is, so close to the surface
The painter could touch her if he stretched his hand. Close work in sympathy with close work. The sewing cushion holding the colored threads Suggests a painter’s palette. So Vermeer Offers a silent tribute to another artist Who’s increasing the number of beautiful Useless things available in a world That would be darker and smaller without them. This is no time to ask if the woman Wishes she were rich enough to buy the likeness, If Vermeer can afford the lace she’s making; No time to consider them bandying compliments. They work in silence, and you may look on Only if you quiet your thoughts enough To hear the click of her needles as you lean in close (But not so close that you cast a shadow) And the light touch of his brush on canvas.
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PROGRESSIVE HEALTH We here at Progressive Health would like to thank you For being one of the generous few who’ve promised To bequeath your vital organs to whoever needs them. Now we’d like to give you the opportunity To step out far in front of the other donors By acting a little sooner than you expected, Tomorrow, to be precise, the day you’re scheduled To come in for your yearly physical. Six patients Are waiting this very minute in intensive care Who will likely die before another liver And spleen and pairs of lungs and kidneys Match theirs as closely as yours do. Twenty years, Maybe more, are left you, granted, but the gain Of these patients might total more than a century. To you, of course, one year of your life means more Than six of theirs, but to no one else, No one as concerned with the general welfare As you’ve claimed to be. As for your poems— The few you may have it in you to finish— Even if we don’t judge them by those you’ve written, Even if we assume you finally stage a breakthrough, It’s doubtful they’ll raise one Lazarus from a grave Metaphoric or literal. But your body is guaranteed To work six wonders. As for the gaps you’ll leave As an aging bachelor in the life of friends, They’ll close far sooner than the open wounds Soon to be left in the hearts of husbands and wives, Parents and children, by the death of the six Who now are failing. Just imagine how grateful They’ll all be when they hear of your grand gesture. Summer and winter they’ll visit your grave, in shifts, For as long as they live, and stoop to tend it, And leave it adorned with flowers or holly wreaths, While your friends, who are just as forgetful As you are, just as liable to be distracted, Will do no more than a makeshift job of upkeep. If the people you’ll see tomorrow pacing the halls Of our crowded facility don’t move you enough, They’ll make you at least uneasy. No happy future Is likely in store for a man like you whose conscience Will ask him to certify every hour from now on Six times as full as it was before, your work Six times as strenuous, your walks in the woods Six times as restorative as anyone else’s. Why be a drudge, staggering to the end of your life Under this crushing burden when, with a single word, You could be a god, one of the few gods Who, when called on, really listens?
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Witness the first haiku in the new translation I bought this morning at Niagara Books: “Even in Kyoto, hearing the cuckoo’s cry, I long for Kyoto.”
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IMPROBABLE STORY Far from here, in the probable world, The stable reign of the dinosaurs Hasn’t been brought to a sudden, unlooked-for end By a billion-to-one crash with an asteroid Ten miles across at impact, or a comet. No dust cloud there darkens the sky Till it snuffs out half the kingdom of vegetation, As it might in a B movie from Hollywood, And half the animal families, The heavy feeders and breathers among them. The dinosaurs rule the roost over there, And the mammals, forced to keep hidden, Only survive as pygmies. No time for the branching That leads to us. None of our lean-tos or igloos, Churches or silos, dot the landscape, No schools or prisons. Not a single porch Where you can sit as you’re sitting here Writing to Martha that your fog has lifted, That despite the odds against transformation You’ve left the age of ambivalence far behind you. Over there, in the probable world, your “yes” Means what it always has, “Who knows?” Your “maybe” means that your doubts are overwhelming. Martha doesn’t believe one sentence as she reads In the shade of a willow that could never survive The winter’s killer ice storms. No purple martins return In the probable world to the little house you made them, Ready to eat in a week their weight in mosquitoes While Martha completes a letter that over there She’ll never be foolish enough to begin
ETERNAL POETRY How to grow old with grace and firmness Is the kind of eternal problem that poetry Is best reserved for, unaging poetry That isn’t afraid of saying what time will do To our taste and talents, our angles of observation. As for a local problem mentioned in passing In this morning’s news, like the cut in food stamps, It’s handled more effectively in an essay With graphs and numbers. A poem’s no proper place To dwell on the prison reforms my friend proposes Based on his twenty-year stint inside the walls. In an essay there’s room to go into details So the State of New York can solve the problem Once and for all and turn to issues more lasting. Facing old age, the theme I’m developing here, Will still be an issue when the failure of prisons Interests only historians of our backward era. A poem’s the thing for grappling with the question Whether it’s best to disdain old age as a pest Or respect it as a mighty army or welcome it As a guest with a ton of baggage. Three options That health-care professionals might deem too harsh To appear in their journals. I wish they would help My friend publish his essay on prison reform, His practical plan to inspire the inmates By cutting their minimum sentences if they master a trade So they won’t return, as is likely now, in a year or two. The odds are long against getting the ear of the governor But not impossible if he’s only a year from retirement And old age prompts him to earn a paragraph In the history of reform. The bill might squeak through If the Assembly decides it hasn’t the wherewithal To keep the old prisons in decent repair Let alone build new ones. No money now To pay the prison inspector what he deserves As he makes his rounds in his battered pickup. An old man shaking his head in disgust At the roof leaks, peeling plaster, and rusty plumbing That might have been avoided with a little foresight And therefore don’t deserve a place in a poem. And to think he’s been at it for thirty years Despite his vow, after a month on the job, To be out of it at the latest by Christmas. Nobody’s eager to wear his shoes Unless we count the people inside the walls Whose envy of those growing old outside Is a constant always to be relied on, And so can enter a poem at any time.
THE GOD WHO LOVES YOU It must be troubling for the god who loves you To ponder how much happier you’d be today Had you been able to glimpse your many futures. It must be painful for him to watch you on Friday evenings Driving home from the office, content with your week— Three fine houses sold to deserving families— Knowing as he does exactly what would have happened Had you gone to your second choice for college, Knowing the roommate you’d have been allotted Whose ardent opinions on painting and music Would have kindled in you a lifelong passion. A life thirty points above the life you’re living On any scale of satisfaction. And every point A thorn in the side of the god who loves you. You don’t want that, a large-souled man like you Who tries to withhold from your wife the day’s disappointments So she can save her empathy for the children. And would you want this god to compare your wife With the woman you were destined to meet on the other campus? It hurts you to think of him ranking the conversation You’d have enjoyed over there higher in insight Than the conversation you’re used to. And think how this loving god would feel Knowing that the man next in line for your wife Would have pleased her more than you ever will Even on your best days, when you really try. Can you sleep at night believing a god like that Is pacing his cloudy bedroom, harassed by alternatives You’re spared by ignorance? The difference between what is And what could have been will remain alive for him Even after you cease existing, after you catch a chill Running out in the snow for the morning paper, Losing eleven years that the god who l.
Hearts In Atlantis by Stephen King – 211120 – My buddy, Rich Nathanson, gave me this book. I had never read any Stephen King. I just dismissed him. I didn’t care about pop-horror, supernatural shit. Just a hack, was what I figured. Nothing there for me. Just junk stories. Well, I couldn’t have been more wrong if my name were Wrongy W. Wronginstein. Wow. This is a great book. So deep and rich and smart and mysterious. Yup, it’s got some supernatural shit, but whose care? It’s all in the service of the emotion and the story. Not a crutch, just part of the story. I also love that I see “Atlantis” in the title and I think “Donovan” and know that’s not really what it’s about, and that’s really what it’s about. I always love when that happens in a title and it happens once in a while. This book was so rich and moving and really spoke to my heart about things I care about. And it’s Stephen King, who, I guess, I’m the last one to know is a wonderful, deep writer. So, yeah – I’m wrong. Talk about non-news.
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How old did you have to be to put one over on your mother, anyway? Twenty? Thirty? Or did you maybe have to wait until she got old and a little chicken-soupy in the head?
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He and Sully-John dared each other to go on the Wild Mouse and finally went together, howling deliriously as their car plunged into each dip, simultaneously sure they were going to live forever and die immediately.
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The room looked smaller now—not so much a place to come to as a place to leave. He realized he was growing into his orange library card,
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the definition of tragedy: events tending toward an unhappy outcome which cannot be avoided.”
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te-ka.
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And I hear Donovan Leitch singing his sweet and stupid song about the continent of Atlantis, lyrics that still seem profound to me in the watches of the night, when I can’t sleep. The older I get, the harder it is to let go of that song’s stupidity and hold onto its sweetness.
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We almost always see where our best interest lies, I think, but sometimes what we see means very little compared to what we feel.
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You could in theory flunk out of school, lose your deferment, get drafted, and wind up dodging bullets in Vietnam because you repeatedly forgot to empty the trash or sweep under the bed.
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Anything with the power to make you laugh over thirty years later isn’t a waste of time. I think something like that is very close to immortality.
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“The letters stand for nuclear disarmament. Bertrand Russell invented the symbol in the fifties.” He drew it on the back of his notebook: “He called it a peace sign.”
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I thought about Stoke Jones twirling on his crutch and felt like laughing; thought of him lying beached on the exam table in the infirmary and felt like crying. And you know what? It was, as far as I could tell, exactly the same feeling. “I just feel bad about it. I feel like shit.” “So do I,” Skip said.
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That was something else Vietnam had to teach him, back in the years before it became a political joke and a crutch for hack filmwriters.
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when the whole world seemed to smell of piss and his heart hurt like a headache.
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Dieffenbaker thought the world would probably be a better place without old men (this revelation coming just as he was getting ready to be one himself). Let the old women live, old women never hurt anyone as a rule, but old men were more dangerous than rabid dogs. Shoot all of them, then douse their bodies with gasoline, then light them on fire. Let the children join hands and dance around the blaze, singing corny old Crosby, Stills and Nash songs.
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It was how wars really ended, Dieffenbaker supposed—not at truce tables but in cancer wards and office cafeterias and traffic jams. Wars died one tiny piece at a time, each piece something that fell like a memory, each lost like an echo that fades in winding hills. In the end even war ran up the white flag. Or so he hoped. He hoped that in the end even war surrendered.
Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters by Steven Pinker – 211219 – I like to read everything Pinker writes. I like him so much. This book had almost nothing in it that I haven’t read before, I read this kind of book a lot, but I need to read the same things over and over in different words and different contexts to try to drill it in. I also love the way he writes and his optimism (with is dampened a little bit in here, in the short term). It’s the kind of book I really like.
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He that can carp in the most eloquent or acute manner at the weakness of the human mind is held by his fellows as almost divine. —Baruch Spinoza
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We have postponed our expected date with death from thirty years of age to more than seventy (eighty in developed countries), reduced extreme poverty from ninety percent of humanity to less than nine, slashed the rates of death from war twentyfold and from famine a hundredfold.3 Even when the ancient bane of pestilence rose up anew in the twenty-first century, we identified the cause within days, sequenced its genome within weeks, and administered vaccines within a year, keeping its death toll to a fraction of those of historic pandemics.
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A smartphone and a case cost $110 in total. The phone costs $100 more than the case. How much does the case cost? It takes 8 printers 8 minutes to print 8 brochures. How long would it take 24 printers to print 24 brochures? On a field there is a patch of weeds. Every day the patch doubles in size. It takes 30 days for the patch to cover the whole field. How long did it take for the patch to cover half the field?
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Francis Bacon (1561–1626), often credited with developing the scientific method, wrote of a man who was taken to a church and shown a painting of sailors who had escaped a shipwreck thanks to their holy vows. “Aye,” he remarked, “but where are they painted that were drowned after their vows?”
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Linda is 31 years old, single, outspoken and very bright. She majored in philosophy. As a student, she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice, and also participated in anti-nuclear demonstrations. Please indicate the probability of each of these statements: Linda is a teacher in elementary school. Linda is active in the feminist movement. Linda is a psychiatric social worker. Linda is a bank teller. Linda is an insurance salesperson. Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement.
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As Pooh-Bah says in The Mikado, it’s all “merely corroborative detail, intended to give artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative.”
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A rational agent must have a goal, whether it is to ascertain the truth of a noteworthy idea, called theoretical reason, or to bring about a noteworthy outcome in the world, called practical reason (“what is true” and “what to do”).
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With the filings the path is fixed; whether it reaches the end depends on accidents. With the lover it is the end which is fixed; the path may be modified indefinitely.
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When it comes to arguing against reason, as soon as you show up, you lose. Let’s say you argue that rationality is unnecessary. Is that statement rational? If you concede it isn’t, then there’s no reason for me to believe it— you just said so yourself. But if you insist I must believe it because the statement is rationally compelling, you’ve conceded that rationality is the measure by which we should accept beliefs, in which case that particular one must be false.
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Odyssean self-control,
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The winner is the one whose hands are tied.
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The problem with threatening to attack, strike, or punish is that the threat may be costly to carry out, rendering it a bluff that the target of the threat could call. To make it credible, the threatener must be committed to carrying it out, forfeiting the control that would give his target the leverage to threaten him right back by refusing to comply.
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Organs for donation are an example.35 No one needs both their kidneys, while a hundred thousand Americans desperately need one. That need is not filled either by posthumous donors (even when the state nudges them to consent by making donation the default) or by living altruists. If healthy donors were allowed to sell their kidneys (with the government providing vouchers to recipients who couldn’t afford to pay), many people would be spared financial stress, many others would be spared disability and death, and no one would be worse off. Yet most people are not just opposed to this plan but offended by the very idea. Rather than providing arguments against it, they are insulted even to be asked. Switching the payoff from filthy lucre to wholesome vouchers (say, for education, health care, or retirement) softens the offense, but doesn’t eliminate it. People are equally incensed when asked whether there should be subsidized markets for jury duty, military service, or children put up for adoption, ideas occasionally bruited by naughty libertarian economists.
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When it comes to paying for safety, a human life in the United States is currently worth around $7–10 million (though planners are happy for the price to be buried in dense technical documents).
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For how much money would you sell your child? Or your friendship, or citizenship, or sexual favors? The correct answer is to refuse to answer—better still, to be offended by the question. As with the rational handicaps in bargains, threats, and promises, a handicap in mental freedom can be an advantage. We trust those who are constitutionally incapable of betraying us or our values, not those who have merely chosen not to do so thus far.
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But Plato made short work of this argument 2,400 years ago in Euthyphro.42 Is something moral because God commands it, or does God command some things because they are moral? If the former is true, and God had no reason for his commandments, why should we take his whims seriously? If God commanded you to torture and kill a child, would that make it right? “He would never do that!” you might object. But that flicks us onto the second horn of the dilemma. If God does have good reasons for his commandments, why don’t we appeal to those reasons directly and skip the middleman?
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According to a story, the logician Sidney Morgenbesser and his girlfriend underwent couples counseling during which the bickering pair endlessly aired their grievances about each other. The exasperated counselor finally said to them, “Look, someone’s got to change.” Morgenbesser replied, “Well, I’m not going to change. And she’s not going to change. So you’re going to have to change.”
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Sometimes both sides pursue the fallacy, leading to the style of debate called burden tennis. (“The burden of proof is on you.” “No, the burden of proof is on you.”)
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To take a pointed example, lifesaving knowledge in public health, including the carcinogenicity of tobacco smoke, was originally discovered by Nazi scientists, and tobacco companies were all too happy to reject the smoking–cancer link because it was “Nazi science.”
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Brevity is the soul of pattern: we say that a dataset is nonrandom when its shortest possible description is shorter than the dataset itself.
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mistaking a nonrandom pattern for a nonrandom process is one of the thickest chapters in the annals of human folly, and knowing the difference between them is one of the greatest gifts of rationality that education can confer.
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Yet nuclear power has stalled for decades in the United States and is being pushed back in Europe, often replaced by dirty and dangerous coal. In large part the opposition is driven by memories of three accidents: Three Mile Island in 1979, which killed no one; Fukushima in 2011, which killed one worker years later (the other deaths were caused by the tsunami and from a panicked evacuation); and the Soviet-bungled Chernobyl in 1986, which killed 31 in the accident and perhaps several thousand from cancer, around the same number killed by coal emissions every day.
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To take another low-death/high-fear hazard, rampage killings in American schools claim around 35 victims a year, compared with about 16,000 routine police-blotter homicides.25 Yet American schools have implemented billions of dollars of dubious safety measures, like installing bulletproof whiteboards and arming teachers with pepperball guns, while traumatizing children with terrifying active-shooter drills.
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In 2020 the brutal murder of George Floyd, an unarmed African American man, by a white police officer led to massive protests and the sudden adoption of a radical academic doctrine, Critical Race Theory, by universities, newspapers, and corporations. These upheavals were driven by the impression that African Americans are at serious risk of being killed by the police. Yet as with terrorism and school shootings, the numbers are surprising. A total of 65 unarmed Americans of all races are killed by the police in an average year, of which 23 are African American, which is around three tenths of one percent of the 7,500 African American homicide victims.
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Since news is what happens, not what doesn’t happen, the denominator in the fraction corresponding to the true probability of an event—all the opportunities for the event to occur, including those in which it doesn’t—is invisible, leaving us in the dark about how prevalent something really is.
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As the economist Max Roser points out, news sites could have run the headline 137,000 People Escaped Extreme Poverty Yesterday every day for the past twenty-five years.33 But they never ran the headline, because there was never a Thursday in October in which it suddenly happened. So one of the greatest developments in human history—a billion and a quarter people escaping from squalor—has gone unnoticed.
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The psychoanalyst Carl Jung proposed a mystical force called synchronicity to explain the quintessential thing that needs no explanation, the prevalence of coincidence in the world.
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When a series of plagues is visited upon us, it does not mean there is a God who is punishing us for our sins or testing our faith. It means there is not a God who is spacing them apart.
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Tversky and Kahneman demonstrated base-rate neglect in the lab by telling people about a hit-and-run accident by a taxi late at night in a city with two cab companies: Green Taxi, which owns 85 percent of the cabs, and Blue Taxi, which owns 15 percent (those are the base rates, and hence the priors). An eyewitness identified the cab as Blue, and tests showed that he correctly identified colors at night 80 percent of the time (that is the likelihood of the data, namely his testimony given the cab’s actual color). What is the probability that the cab involved in the accident was Blue? The correct answer, according to Bayes’s rule, is .41. The median answer was .80, almost twice as high. Respondents took the likelihood too seriously, pretty much at face value, and downplayed the base rate.
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A blindness to base rates also leads to public demands for the impossible. Why can’t we predict who will attempt suicide? Why don’t we have an early-warning system for school shooters? Why can’t we profile terrorists or rampage shooters and detain them preventively? The answer comes out of Bayes’s rule: a less-than- perfect test for a rare trait will mainly turn out false positives. The heart of the problem is that only a tiny proportion of the population are thieves, suicides, terrorists, or rampage shooters (the base rate). Until the day that social scientists can predict misbehavior as accurately as astronomers predict eclipses, their best tests would mostly finger the innocent and harmless.
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No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous, than the fact, which it endeavors to establish.
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“The physics of undergraduate text-books is 90% true; the contents of the primary research journals of physics is 90% false.”18 It’s a reminder that Bayesian reasoning recommends against the common practice of using “textbook” as an insult and “scientific revolution” as a compliment.
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Tetlock had participants think about insurance executives who had to set premiums for different neighborhoods based on their history of fires. They had no problem with that. But when the participants learned that the neighborhoods also varied in their racial composition, they had second thoughts and condemned the executive for merely being a good actuary.
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Everyone complains about his memory, and no one complains about his judgment. —La Rochefoucauld
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According to legend, the logician Sidney Morgenbesser (whom we met in chapter 3) was seated at a restaurant and offered a choice of apple pie or blueberry pie. Shortly after he chose apple, the waitress returned and said they also had cherry pie on the menu that day. As if waiting for the moment all his life, Morgenbesser said, “In that case, I’ll have blueberry.”9 If you find this funny, then you appreciate why Independence is a criterion for rationality.
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The psychological meaning is obvious: an extra hundred dollars increases the happiness of a poor person more than the happiness of a rich person.11 (This is the moral argument for redistribution: transferring money from the rich to the poor increases the amount of happiness in the world, all things being equal.)
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For every thousand women who undergo annual ultrasound exams for ovarian cancer, 6 are correctly diagnosed with the disease, compared with 5 in a thousand unscreened women—and the number of deaths in the two groups is the same, 3. So much for the benefits. What about the costs? Out of the thousand who are screened, another 94 get terrifying false alarms, 31 of whom suffer unnecessary removal of their ovaries, of whom 5 have serious complications to boot. The number of false alarms and unnecessary surgeries among women who are not screened, of course, is zero. It doesn’t take a lot of math to show that the expected utility of ovarian cancer screening is negative.41 The same is true for men when it comes to screening for prostate cancer with the prostate-specific antigen test (I opt out)
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The cat that sits down on a hot stove-lid . . . will never sit down on a hot stove-lid again, and that is well; but also she will never sit down on a cold one any more.
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They may not convict based on a mere “preponderance of the evidence,” also known as “fifty percent plus a feather.”
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The only thing these tests show is that when some effect doesn’t exist, one of every twenty scientists looking for it will falsely claim it does. What makes you so sure it isn’t you?” The honest answer is: Nothing.
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Public Goods game. A pure example is easy to demonstrate in the lab. A group of participants are given a sum of money and offered the chance to chip in to a communal pot (the public good) which the experimenter then doubles and redistributes. The best strategy for everyone is to contribute the maximum, but the best strategy for each individual is to hoard his own sum and let everyone else contribute. Participants catch on to the grim game- theoretic logic and their contributions dwindle to zero—unless they are also given the opportunity to fine the free riders, in which case contributions stay high and everyone wins.
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The logic of Prisoner’s Dilemmas and Public Goods undermines anarchism and radical libertarianism, despite the eternal appeal of unfettered freedom.
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14 Hume, once again, set the terms for centuries of analysis by venturing that causation is merely an expectation that a correlation we experienced in the past will hold in the future.
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As the mantra goes: When A is correlated with B, it could mean that A causes B, B causes A, or some third factor, C, causes both A and B.
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“Random assignment is like charm. If you have it, you don’t need anything else; if you don’t have it, it doesn’t matter what else you have.”
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HiPPO (highest-paid person’s opinion).
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Sure enough, in a comparison across cable markets, the lower the channel number of Fox News relative to other news networks, the larger the Republican vote.
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Indeed, some of the predictors that human experts rely on the most, such as face-to-face interviews, are revealed by regression analyses to be perfectly useless.
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As Upton Sinclair pointed out, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”
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Kahan has found that most believers and deniers are equally clueless about the scientific facts (many believers in climate change, for example, think that it has something to do with toxic waste dumps and the ozone hole). What predicts their belief is their politics: the farther to the right, the more denial.
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But recent flip-flops in which side supports which cause, such as immigration, trade, and sympathy for Russia, suggests that the political sides have become sociocultural tribes rather than coherent ideologies.
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There is a different and more perverse rationality to the myside bias, coming not from Bayes’s rule but from game theory. Kahan calls it expressive rationality: reasoning that is driven by the goal of being valued by one’s peer group rather than attaining the most accurate understanding of the world. People express opinions that advertise where their heart lies.
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Though millions of people endorsed the rumor that Hillary Clinton ran a child sex trafficking ring out of the basement of the Comet Ping Pong pizzeria in Washington (the Pizzagate conspiracy theory, a predecessor of QAnon), virtually none took steps commensurate with such an atrocity, such as calling the police.
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Mercier also points out that impassioned believers in vast nefarious conspiracies, like the 9/11 Truthers and the chemtrail theorists (who hold that the water-vapor contrails left by jetliners are chemicals dispensed in a secret government program to drug the population), publish their manifestos and hold their meetings in the open, despite their belief in a brutally effective plot by an omnipotent regime to suppress brave truth-tellers like them. It’s not the strategy you see from dissidents in undeniably repressive regimes like North Korea or Saudi Arabia.
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The brazen lies and conspiracies of Trumpian post-truth can be seen as an attempt to claim political discourse for the land of mythology rather than the land of reality. Like the plots of legends, scripture, and drama, they are a kind of theater; whether they are provably true or false is beside the point.
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A meme, as Richard Dawkins defined it when he coined the word, is not a captioned photograph circulated on the internet but an idea that has been shaped by generations of sharing to become highly shareable.
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The arc of knowledge is a long one, and it bends toward rationality.
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“Wikipedia is not a soapbox, an advertising platform, a vanity press, [or] an experiment in anarchy or democracy.”
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Beginning to reason is like stepping onto an escalator that leads upward and out of sight. Once we take the first step, the distance to be traveled is independent of our will and we cannot know in advance where we shall end. —Peter Singer
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Like the humorist Fran Lebowitz, I don’t believe in anything you have to believe
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The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?
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We should care about people’s virtue when considering them as friends, but not when considering the ideas they voice. Ideas are true or false, consistent or contradictory, conducive to human welfare or not, regardless of who thinks them. The equality of sentient beings, grounded in the logical irrelevance of the distinction between “me” and “you,” is an idea that people through the ages rediscover, pass along, and extend to new living things, expanding the circle of sympathy like moral dark energy.
