What Intelligence Tests Miss, Keith Stanovich

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Chris Hibbert

Keith Stanovich's What Intelligence Tests Miss does a reasonable job of arguing that we have a couple of different things in mind when we talk about how "smart" a person is, and that some of the important aspects are very different from what IQ tests measure. His goal seems to be to convince us that the other parts are important and we would do better if we either found good ways to measure them (though there are caveats there) or reduce the societal importance of IQ tests and their ilk.

Most of the areas that Stanovich is interested in could loosely be called rationality skills. He starts out the book with the example of George Bush, whose apparent IQ (estimated from various of his tests results that are on the record) is about 120, but who is agreed to not have conventional smarts, or be a thorough, consistent, or deep thinker. The main point here is talking about how people are surprised, but shouldn't be, that IQ is separate from what we call smart. The book is mainly a riff on Kahneman and Tversky's work on human decision making, and all the kinds of rationality traps that we fall for.

Apparently, Stanovich's own research is in how the various layers of processing—the Autonomous mind, the Algorithmic mine, and the Reflective mind— interact and override one another in order to determine the kinds of processing we do. We spend most of our time in autonomous mode, with occasional incidents propelling us into slower Algorithmic thinking, and only rarely do we have a reason to actually think about what we're doing reflectively. Stanovich has a detailed model showing the interactions, and pointing to the Reflective mind as the director that gives the signal for when to invoke the Algorithmic level. His argument seems to be that people who don't "act smart" fail to engage their Reflective layer, and so end up on auto-pilot most of the time.

The rest of the book is mainly a rehash of the literature on rationality errors, and a plea for approaches like Thaler and Sunstein's Libertarian Paternalism, which are intended to provide support for people so they can get smarter results without having to reason more clearly.

In the end, I guess I'd say that there are some interesting ideas here, but not enough to make the book worthwhile.

No Justice, No Peace

Matt Welch's Editor's column in the June issue of Reason includes this paragraph on a budget fight in Montgomery County, Maryland:

The housing bubble, with its tax-generating wealth, was already bursting in 2007. Yet as recently as 2009, Montgomery County, Maryland, decided to make "phantom" cost-of-living increases to the pensions of government workers, linking contributions to salary increases that did not occur. This sweetheart deal, which added more than $7 million to the county's annual budget (according to The Washington Post), tasted rather bitter at a time when the county's revenue was falling short of projections by more than $24 million. Yet after one Montgomery County Council member proposed eliminating this sop to the public-sector unions, four of his colleagues joined a rally on the rooftop of the council's parking garage, leading a crowd of 400 government employees in chants of "We've had enough!" and "No justice, no peace."

I boggled at the audacity of re-using the "No justice, no peace" chant in a context like this. Normally, when the left uses this chant at a rally, it's in support of a group that isn't getting fair treatment on housing or employment rights. The unstated thinking behind the chant is that societies that don't protect people's rights will find that the underprivileged are more restive. But in the mouths of public safety workers threatening to strike because outrageous privileges might be taken away, it sounds more like a threat, which I would paraphrase as "If we don't get what we want, we'll make your life hell!"

A little digging assured me that Montgomery County did rescind the pension increases eventually. Some the county council members are running on their record for having imposed fiscal austerity measures, even though they were in place for the initial largesse as well.

A Different Universe: Robert B. Laughlin

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Chris Hibbert

Robert B. Laughlin's A Different Universe is full of interesting ideas without being a coherent narrative on a single theme. In the preface Laughlin explains that the book is an attempt to address the inherent tensions between reductionism and emergence. In particular, he (not very coherently) tries to argue that it's sometimes more useful to think of physical law as emerging from the interactions of particles rather than causing them. And he constantly interrupts his discussions of physics at various levels in order to tell anecdotes. Sometimes he seems to have chosen the topics in order to be able to either drop names (unusual for a Nobel laureate) or impugn the motives of people he's worked with.

Still, there are several fascinating examples of scientific phenomena that are well established, but for which there aren't good explanations that are integrated into the main texture of our understanding of physical law. I suspect that several good reputations could be made by physics grad students by latching onto one of Laughlin's stray thoughts and developing an explanation that fits the effect into the mainstream. One example is the phonon effect:

Suppose, for example, a sound transducer is attached to a solid and turned on, thus beaming sound into the solid, and then reduced in intensity to make the amount of sound small. A sound receiver on the other side of the solid detects not a faint tone but sharp pulses of energy arriving at random times. This quantized transmission of pulses evolves into the more familiar transmission of tone when the intensity is increased—an everyday example of the emergence of Newtonian reality out of quantum mechanics, But at low intensities this emergence does not occur, and the conclusion becomes inescapable that particles of sound exist, even though they do not exist when the solid is disassembled into atoms.

Laughlin calls this "The closest thing to real magic I know."

His discussion of symmetry (pp 124-5), and why it makes more sense to think of it as caused by the interactions between particles at various scales rather than as a set of rules that enforces their behavior is similarly tantalizing and brief.

He points out ways in which the physics mainstream is sweeping some problems under the rug, but doesn't truly resolve the issue. "If Einstein were alive today, he would be horrified at this state of affairs. He would upbraid the profession for allowing this mess to develop and fly into a blind rage over the transformation of his beautiful creations into ideologies and the resulting proliferation of logical inconsistencies. Einstein was an artist and a scholar but above all a revolutionary."

In chapter 13, "Principles of Life", near the end of the book, Laughlin spends several pages explaining that life is a mass phenomenon, and that collections of large numbers of parts act differently than you'd predict by analyzing the parts themselves. Rigidity, for example, is an important aspect of explaining how molecules get together to build living creatures, and it is only a coherent concept once you get into realms where the behavior of individual particles doesn't matter in detail. Similarly, proteins are enormous structures if you're trying to figure out how the behavior of atoms contribute to their effects, but if you deal with the atoms statistically, and as a mass, you can make more headway. Early in the book he had pointed out that "The only way one can start out from wrong principals and get the right answer is if the property one is calculating is robustly insensitive to details, i.e. is emergent. Thus the lesson from superconductivity is actually not that quantum field theory is a superior computational technology but that quantum fields can themselves emerge."

I'll end with Laughlin's summary of the (wine-fueled) conclusions of an interdisciplinary workshop on emergence:

Emergence means complex organizational structure growing out of simple rules. Emergence mans stable inevitability in the way certain things are. Emergence means unpredictability, in the sense of small events causing great and qualitative changes in larger ones. Emergence means the fundamental impossibility of control.

He manages to tie emergence in with some complex effects but leaves us with nothing more than a recognition that we don't understand what's going on yet.

A Mirror for Observers: Edgar Pangborn

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Chris Hibbert

I recently re-read Edgar Pangborn's A Mirror for Observers, and wanted to like it. (It's been nominated for a Prometheus Hall of Fame Award a couple of times.) The story is narrated by Elmis, a visitor from Mars, who has been living among humans for thousands of years as a passive observer. He believes that humans are managing their affairs and their progress quite nicely on their own. His main goal is to prevent Namir, a dissident Martian, from encouraging evil of various sorts from arising among the humans.

The good guy in this story is very good--Elmis values taste and style and life, and wants to ensure that they survive on this planet. But the people he's trying to protect do very little to help their cause. They spend most of their time ignorant of the battle that centers on them, and even spend some of their time collaborating with their apparent enemies. If it weren't for the assistance of the extraterrestrial agent, they wouldn't stand a chance. And in the end, they lose the most important battle, even with his help.

So the underlying message is that the good is worth working for, but it is incapable of defending itself, and even with powerful and intelligent allies on its side, those working to undermine it may come out ahead.

If you read the book, you'll admire the characters, and enjoy their taste and sophistication, but you'll be disappointed in the end by their impotence.

Impro, Keith Johnstone

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Chris Hibbert

Keith Johstone's Impro purports to explain how to teach people how to do theatrical improvisation. The author has apparently had a fairly significant effect on the way that actors think about improvisation, but while there's some loose theorizing here, Johnstone presents nothing but personal experience to back it up. It works for him, and that ought to be good enough for you.

Johnstone's main claim is that the appearance of versimilitude that theater needs is mostly a matter of controlling the appearance of status distinctions between characters. He teaches his students via a variety of games and exercises in which they learn to carefully control status both by verbal responses and minor postural tweaks. Part of the trick (he claims) to getting the aspiring thespians to understand what they're trying to achieve is to be able to appear either slightly above or slightly below (on command) another character. Getting the audience to believe that one character is significantly more highly placed than another is easy, but there's no tension in that. In order to get both the appearance of reality, and dynamic intensity, Johnstone wants status distinctions to be slight, and constantly varying.

The last section of the book covers exercises with the actors wearing masks. Johnstone seems to believe that hiding behind a mask has almost mystical properties. This section was very unconvincing to me. The rest was only moderately interesting.

Hiatus

My two month hiatus probably deserves an explanation, and enough has been going on in my life that it's worth bringing those of you who haven't heard about it up-to-date. For the last several years I've been primarily consulting on Zocalo, my open source prediction market software. In December, my two clients both let me know that their grants had run out, and they couldn't continue to pay me, so I started looking for a job. That occupied a lot of my time for the next few months, though I was able to keep writing reviews.

Then in early April, my father, Richard Tudor Hibbert, passed away. I spent a fair amount of time over the next week preparing to display some of his art that I had started organizing over the last year or so. At the service I ran a continuous loop of more than 100 of his paintings, watercolors, pastels, and sketches. I spoke briefly at the services (as did my brother Mike and my father's brother Robert).

Once I was back in California after the services, I continued interviewing, and got a job offer from Google shortly thereafter. I've been hard at work at Google since the beginning of May (when the hiatus began), and have been setting up a blog RTH-home.net for my father's art, (the name was his personalized license plate for many years, and is a play on his initials and his earth-covered home) and preparing posts for it every other day or so. That's what I've been up to. If you like the art I've posted there so far, I encourage you to keep tracking it, because there's much more coming. I'm hopeful that my time is more in control by now, and that my writing for pancrit.org will return to its normal (irregular) pace.

Microcosmos: Lynn Margulis and Dorian Sagan

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Chris Hibbert

Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan's Microcosmosis a recapitulation of the history of evolution of microbes and how it affects us. The work that Margulis & Sagan report on also led to an article at Edge.org that produced a quote I've been using as one of my email signatures.

All sensory cells [in all animals] have in common the presence of ... cilia [with a constant] structure. It provides a strong argument for common ancestry. The common ancestor ... was a spirochete bacterium.

The copyright date is 1986. A lot has been learned about evolution and microbes since then. Even so, this book is a good introduction to the subject; it's very readable and has lots of detail that is still accepted. The story starts with the very beginnings of life on earth, and is always connected to its affect on how our biology works now:

As we examine ourselves as products of symbiosis over billions of yeaaar, the supporting evidence of our multimicrobe ancestry becomes overwhelming. Our bodies contain a veritable history of life on Earth. Our cells maintain an environment that is carbon- and hydrogen-rich, like that of the Earth when life began. They live in a medium of water and salts like the composition of the early seas.

The presentation is ordered chronologically, starting with the formation of stars and planets, proceeding through the cooling of the earth and the formation of the first entities that could reproduce reliably, the invention of sex and the alternative means of exchanging genetic information, and the change in composition of Earth's atmosphere to something that supported oxygen breathers and was toxic to their precursors. That takes us through the first 3.5 Billion years of the history of the earth, and all of the evolution of macroscopic life occupies the most recent 500 Million years. The emergence of cells, multi-cellular life, and then plants and animals follows, but the microbes are still around and still affecting both metabolism and evolution.

Margulis & Sagan provide a very readable introduction to modern microbiology and modern thinking about evolution. There are certainly more recent books that cover the details of the modern understanding in more detail, but this is a good overview and doesn't miss much that's important.

The Prisoner, Carlos J. Cortes

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Chris Hibbert

Carlos J. Cortes's The Prisoner has a very dark mood (partly because a lot of it takes places in sewers and other underground places) but has a freedom-oriented atmosphere. The government has exploited the development of a technology that allows suspended animation to convert prisons to cost-effective body warehouses. Some of the highest officials in the prison bureaucracy have taken advantage of the system to get rid of enemies, or to make money hiding people for the world's crime syndicates.

Someone with inside information and an axe to grind with Odelle Marino, the chief bureaucrat, puts together a team and a plan to spirit out one particular prisoner with the best chance of embarassing Ms. Marino. The plan would be appropriate for a Mission Impossible script, and the sewers that the team escapes through would make great cinema. The novel describes the stench and the slime, while a movie would have to leave the odors to our imagination. This would be an improvement, as the book revels in the ick factor. It also portrays the bad guys (particularly Marino) as caricatures, but since they're not the center of the story, this isn't a huge problem.

The good guys come from all levels of society, from a powerful Senator (willing to abuse his power for the right ends) to homeless vets living in abandoned subway tunnels. They know why they fight against the entrenched bureaucracy, but the novel focuses more on the action and intrigue than on the politics. The climax has a bit too much deus ex machina for my tastes--it wouldn't have been too hard to convincingly portray a General who takes the side of the schemers as anti-establishment, or chafing at some of the abuses, but his motivation remains unstated.

The main weakness of the story, from a libertarian viewpoint, is that the characters are only concerned with obvious abuses of power, and not with the inherent abuse that come with vast centralized power. The government in this future has enormous power over network communication, travel, and employment, and the protagonists spend their time trying to reduce corruption and abuses of that power, without more than annoyance directed at the impositions it provides.

Overall, I'd say this was an fun near future adventure story with a weak message against abusive government. The Prisoner was nominated for the Prometheus award, but wasn't selected as a finalist.

Create Your Own Economy, Tyler Cowen

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Chris Hibbert

Tyler Cowen's Create Your Own Economy argues that Asperger's syndrome and Autism are more common than most people realize, and that part of the reason is that people like Cowen gain more advantages than disadvantages from their condition. The overall point of the book is that we should treat neuro-diversity as an asset, both to society, and (for the neuro-diverse) to themselves.

The advantages that come with aspergers are a greater ability to focus, and to creatively find order in data, while the concomitant weakness is a lower ability to see the big picture. The condition is sometimes referred to as the autism spectrum, because there is such a variety of symptoms, but Cowen points out that both the strengths and weaknesses have a large and largely independent range. One of his repeated refrains is that finding ways to see the strengths has two beneficial effects--it both enables us to take better advantage of our personality quirks once we recognize them, and it encourages others to find the strengths hidden within the ways they see the world and develop them. So overall society benefits from people who think of themselves as differently-enabled rather than differently-disabled, and find ways to contribute and earn, rather than ways to get support and assistance from others.

Makers, Cory Doctorow

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Chris Hibbert

I really enjoyed Cory Doctorow's Makers, which is a Prometheus award finalist for this year even though it doesn't reach very far into the science fiction realm. I think many of the other judges, not living in Silicon Valley, don't see the same kind of ongoing inventiveness as I do, and don't see makers as an unrelenting force in the world.

The story follows the activities of a pair of makers (the modern, more popular term for the good kind of hacker), who invent a continuing stream of disruptive technologies, start a couple of movements which grow and crash serially casting fame and angst in all directions though wealth is sparser. The characters are prototypical hackers, with varying social skills, but always with the ability to adapt to new circumstances. From time to time, they each need to take on more managerial or other non-technical roles, which they sometimes do well, and other times pass on to others more suited for the role, and are always pining to get back to being creative.

The characters were completely plausible, and their inventions were eminently reasonable. Many people might blanch at their universal constructors, but everything they build is macro-scale, no nanotech required. Their diet interventions were more fantastic, allowing people to eat unlimited quantities, while burning all the calories wastefully, and therefore losing weight. The drawbacks and work-arounds were also plausible.

The fun part of it is that you get to see hackers spinning out new ideas, and new businesses growing up in all directions. The two primary characters are followed around by a reporter who decides they're the most interesting thing going on, and blogs their activities non-stop. While this means they have few secrets, it's also a source of unending publicity for them. Many of their inventions help other people move up from the bottom rung of the economic ladder, and keep lawyers and business managers continuously busy.

The battles over ownership and control of the technology were priceless, as well as the corporate intrigue and underhanded shenanigans to keep them from destroying other company's (mostly Disney, a perennial bad guy in Doctorow's stories) plans.

As a Prometheus nominee, there must be a libertarian connection, right? Well, open source production, entrepreneurial drive, and undercutting the normal order of things will have to suffice, since the characters pretty much ignore the government except when someone is suing someone else.

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BTW, Locus Magazine had a great April Fools announcement that Ayn Rand's estate had picked Doctorow and Charlie Stross (both Prometheus winners, as Locus pointed out) to write a sequel to Atlas Shrugged. Meanwhile, Stross' own site announced that due to the sorry state of the SFF market, he'd be coming out with a line of sparkly unicorn-themed novels aimed at the teen market.

Liberating Atlantis, by Harry Turtledove

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Chris Hibbert

Harry Turtledove's Liberating Atlantis is the final book of the trilogy, which covers the successful rebellion that ends slavery slightly earlier than in our own timeline. The protagonist is Frederick Radcliff, a slave and descendent of Victor Radcliff, himself a major character in both the previous books. Frederick Radcliff is the grandson of a slave woman "lent" to Victor between the battles in United States of Atlantis. Victor suffers a fair amount of angst in that story over the existance of a slave-born son when he has no surviving children with his wife.

Frederick is a smart and competent house slave who trips over a loose floorboard at an inopportune time and is given "5 lashes, well laid on" as direct punishment, and demoted to be a field slave. It doesn't take him long to be fed up with his new circumstances and luck soon feeds him an opportunity which he grabs and takes advantage of. A squad of soldiers are ferrying weapons and ammunition when they are hit with yellow fever; they stop to recover at the plantation where Frederick lives and toils. After the fever takes a few soldiers and their sentries get a little lax, Frederick leads a small band of slaves to grab the munitions and kill the soldiers along with their owners.

From there, the rebellion spreads, and Frederick proves an able leader. They find enough supplies on the nearby plantations and intercept supplies intended for the army that comes to suppress the rebellion. The army underestimates their abilities often enough that they are successful, and eventually negotiate terms with the national government.

Turtledove does a good job of presenting freedom-oriented ideas but in this book, they're in extremely non-controversial areas (everyone has an equal right to be free, governing is hard). His characters are all mixes of good and bad aspects, with even the southerners getting good points in occasionally, and not being any more consistently stupid than their opponents.

One of the ideas Turtledove explored in the series is the workings of the Roman consul system in which the power of the federal executive is checked by electing pairs of chief executives who serve in alternating periods and can veto each others' actions. The system worked alright for Rome for a long time, but as Turtledove portrays it, it falls apart in contentious times. In particular, the system calls for the consuls to serve in times of war as field generals alternating duties daily. The two consuls in this novel eventually figure out how to work together to make some progress, even when they disagree about their aims. It is more entertaining and instructive to see wild ideas demonstrated in fiction to argue that they might work, rather than to show that they don't work any better than we'd expect.

On the whole, a good read. Worthy of being a Prometheus finalist, and the first time, I think, that an author has had two finalists the same year. A few authors, most recently Charles Stross, had two novels nominated the same year.

Hidden Empire by Orson Scott Card

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Chris Hibbert

Orson Scott Card's Hidden Empire picks up where his previous (prometheus nominated) Empire left off.

A new virus has just made the jump from monkeys to humans in Africa and Averell Torrent, the new U.S. President, knows how to take advantage of the situation in order to cement his power and make the world a better place. The story flows more smoothly than in the previous book; the action is intense, and the characters are engaging and sympathetic. There are very affective depictions of loyalty and heroism. Card knows how to propel the story through the characters' actions, and without needing editorial explanations to clarify his point.

But in the end, it's an apology for strong-man politics. The underlying message is if the right (visionary, ruthless) man can get control of the levers of power at the right time, and he has the right motives, he can make everything better. Card is careful (through the characters' actions) to warn us that it's crucial to a free society that the strong man be watched carefully to ensure he isn't pursuing nefarious ends, but in the end, Card says, if he is pure of heart and has the right goals, then he should be allowed to proceed.

If Hidden Empire becomes a finalist for the Prometheus this year, I would read it more as an indication of a weak year for well-written libertarian novels than an endorsement of the political principals displayed here. Of the eleven novels nominated so far (of which I've finished only 7), I can only recommend The Unincorporated Man as both libertarian and well-written. Makers by Cory Doctorow is a wonderful story (review coming shortly) but not libertarian enough to qualify. The United States of Atlantis is nearly as good, but also weak on libertarianism. The Iron Web is stridently libertarian, but with cardboard characters and weak writing.