| # | cover | title | author | isbn | isbn13 | asin | num pages | avg rating | num ratings | date pub | date pub (ed.) | rating | my rating | review | notes | recommender | comments | votes | read count | date started | date read | date added | date purchased | owned | purchase location | condition | format | ||
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0062228838
| 9780062228833
| 3.90
| 1,916
| May 14, 2013
| May 14, 2013
|
liked it
| A clearly written history of the decipherment of Linear B, structured as a 3-part autobiography with linguistic background interspersed chronologicall A clearly written history of the decipherment of Linear B, structured as a 3-part autobiography with linguistic background interspersed chronologically as understanding of Linear B & Crete developed. Fox’s mission, as she makes clear, is revisionism: drawing heavily on personal letters, she casts Alice Kober (incidentally, a graduate of Hunter High School & teacher there) as the Rosalind Franklin of Linear B, and castigating Michael Ventris. In this, she does not particularly succeed; she’s reduced to arguing that perhaps Kober could have and that despite her increasing age, strong hostility towards speculating about what language it was written in or trying to match up anything, and methodical approach, she might have succeeded where omnilingualist Ventris did a few years later. Which is not very persuasive since she doesn’t show such creative leaps in her earlier work, Ventris independently discovered some of the same things, and in any case, intellectual history does not typically assign credit based on what someone might’ve done if they had lived longer because that is unknowable and many people fail to live up to their initial promise as they regress to mediocrity or just go off on fatally unproductive tangents (eg Isaac Newton or Einstein). Fox’s hostile approach to Ventris left a bad taste in my mouth, as Ventris does not appear to have had an easy life whatever his ‘privilege’ and there’s an unpleasant emphasis on how he wasn’t credentialed like Kober (apparently it’s not cool to be the underdog outsider if you’re a white male). Actually, the impression I strongly got was that long duration from discovery to Linear B’s decipherment reflects not so much Linear B being extraordinarily difficult or bad luck by Kober, so much as as the severe damage done to research progress by the refusal to share data by almost all parties involved beginning with Arthur Evans (an academic sin which we remain all too familiar with), continuing with Blegen, and through to Kober - by my counting, once more than 200 inscriptions became even semi-publicly available in the mid-1940s, the solution followed in 1952 after not even a decade! As is not that surprising in retrospect, inasmuch as the language turned out to be the obvious one and lots of proper names survived into Greek sources and so were available for Rosetta Stone-style comparison. Kober’s exhaustive cross-classifications on 180000 index cards, which took so many years, would have been trivial with a full corpus and a 1950s-era computer, or even just an electromechanical IBM card machine (which could do sorting, cross-tabulation, and other summaries); it leaves one with a sense of pity and disgust to see so much effort expended on such a extraordinarily inefficient way of going about things when waiting a decade or two would have reduced a task from requiring multiple years of labor to weeks or months. While granted Kober didn’t have the budget for renting such equipment, that doesn’t necessarily justify such an approach. Sometimes the time is just not ripe for attacking a problem and one should have the good judgment to work on something else for a while instead of childishly insisting on working on that one thing, which often helps with the original thing as well (perhaps Kober would’ve gotten that tenured position if she had something, anything else to show published; I’ve noted in my other reviews that during the post-WWII hyper-expansion of America, getting tenure at a university was apparently as easy as falling off a log, even for women, so Kober’s failure with Penn is all the more striking). So a sobering double lesson for modern researchers: data hoarding can be extraordinarily harmful and is probably not stigmatized or penalized nearly enough, and stubbornness about a topic to research can be as much a fault as stubbornness about the details of a theory about that topic. One of the things I dread in a work like this is an author who is in a hurry to cover up and hide all the technical details and dreads that her audience is too dumb, ignorant, and impatient to reach any genuine understanding and settles for ‘lies to children’. She seems to avoid this trap and I felt, at least as a non-classicist and non-linguist, that I got an intelligible and reasonably accurate understanding of the intellectual puzzle and accomplishment of the decipherers. But was Linear B really worth reading about? The decipherment of hieroglyphics, of course, unlocked an extraordinary array of Egyptian riches from the baroque mythology, endless ancient Egyptian history, and many interesting magical, religious, and everyday letters and documents; there is no question as a layperson that you are interested in what hieroglyphics have to say even more than in how they say it and how they were unlocked. Mesopotamian clay documents are often boring, but so many survive and give us things like Gilgamesh that there too the results seem worth learning about, even the commercial ones which can build up a whole market economy before our eyes. With Linear B… the deciphering turns out to be the most interesting part. The documents are boring and the world depicted in the administrivia is about exactly what you would expect from reading about the palace, a totalitarian agricultural economy, and are a disappointment. A few enigmatic names and allusions are a poor catch. (It is just as well Nero didn’t see the true translation of the tablets discovered during his reign, because he would have been greatly disappointed to see nothing at all on the level of the memoirs of a participant in the Trojan War.) With Linear B, the journey is more interesting than the destination, which makes the account somewhat sterile. (In contrast, while I haven’t been able to finish reading Empires of the Plains, Henry Rawlinson had an extraordinarily interesting life and provided the gateway to the ancient Mesopotamian world.) ...more | Notes are private!
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1
| Oct 22, 2016
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Oct 23, 2016
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Oct 23, 2016
| Hardcover
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B01F7IQEHC
| 4.43
| 72
| unknown
| May 04, 2016
|
liked it
| 18 short stories typically with an ironic SF or fantasy tinge and heavy reliance on twist endings (more like Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives or C 18 short stories typically with an ironic SF or fantasy tinge and heavy reliance on twist endings (more like Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives or Chiang’s Stories of Your Life and Others than The Corpse Exhibition: And Other Stories of Iraq). As with most anthologies, the quality is uneven. Decent: “The Guests”: self-consistent time travel setting; no one will be surprised by the ending “Tap”: family drama/horror “Into That Good Night” “VASE”: SF thinkpiece; reminds me a great deal of Ted Chiang’s “Liking What You See” “My Brother, My Wife, and the Wheel”: Icelandic supernatural horror; probably too long, though “Sins: Various” “The First Living Exhibit”: overwritten but still amusing “Silicon Nights”: the best story in the collection, an homage to The Arabian Nights in a fast-forward Vingean-like setting (Arabian in the story structure, not the setting itself, so not like Rajaniemi's The Causal Angel if that's what you were thinking) where the twist really does work Poor: “A Dance”: cosmological allegory; done before and better (eg “The Goddess of Everything Else”, and of course Star Maker) “Godspeed and Goodnight”: time-dilation horror, overly long, not nearly as good as Watts’s time-dilation horror “The Flowers”. “Collision”: absolutely predictable “Empty Cups”, “The Bridge to Lucy Dunne”: failed attempts at regular literature “The Bait”: moderately interesting but I was unsure if I understood the twist ending or what it was supposed to be “A Haunting” “The Rite” “The Gift” ...more | Notes are private!
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1
| Sep 25, 2016
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Sep 25, 2016
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Sep 25, 2016
| Kindle Edition
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048645116X
| 9780486451169
| 3.90
| 29
| Jan 01, 1972
| Jul 21, 2006
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liked it
| None
| Notes are private!
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1
| Jan 2002
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Jan 2002
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Sep 14, 2016
| Paperback
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0740721135
| 9780740721137
| 4.67
| 5,268
| Sep 01, 2003
| Sep 01, 2003
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really liked it
| None
| Notes are private!
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1
| Jan 2005
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Jan 2005
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Sep 06, 2016
| Hardcover
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0809045990
| 9780809045990
| 4.15
| 1,912
| Sep 19, 2006
| Sep 19, 2006
|
really liked it
| An engaging multi-biography/history of the repeatedly-reinvented Kelly criterion, mixed in with overviews of Claude Shannon, John Larry Kelly, Jr., Ed An engaging multi-biography/history of the repeatedly-reinvented Kelly criterion, mixed in with overviews of Claude Shannon, John Larry Kelly, Jr., Ed Thorp, and their famous gambling adventures in beating blackjack and roulette and, as some of the first ‘quants’, the stock market. (Like Thompson sampling, the Kelly criterion has been reinvented many times; Poundstone lists at least 4 inventors: Kelly, Leo Breiman, Bernoulli, and Henry Latané.) Poundstone starts with the early mob and the ‘numbers racket’ and sports gambling, where Kelly’s metaphor of ‘the wire’ giving an edge on betting was quite literal: spotters at the race-tracks would race to communicate the results to bettors and bookies across the country, so they could take bets on already-won races, leading to mob wars over the lucrative monopoly over using telephones/telegraph services to communicate said results, which constituted a remarkable fraction of telecom profits. (Shades of HFT.) Thus, notorious characters like Bugsy Siegel enter into a book about statistics as gambling becomes a major revenue source replacing the loss of alcohol. (Poundstone speculates that Edgar Hoover’s famous denial of the existence of the Mafias was due to being paid off by betting on fixed horse races.) The mob part may seem like a colorful and interesting yet irrelevant diversion, but it sets the context for inveterate mob gambler Manny Kimmel (famous for betting on anything, and knowing clever tricks like betting people about whether anyone in the room shared birthdays - in other words, one of the only practical applications of the birthday paradox I’ve seen outside of cryptography), who, aside from being the founder of Time Warner (!) would eventually pop up as Thorp & Shannon’s bankroller. Thorp then enters the picture as a grad student deeply interested in making money using physics, starting with roulette wheels, which didn’t work out initially, and then publishing an instantly famous paper on beating blackjack with card counting, which brought him to Shannon (for mechanical & mathematical assistance) and Kelly (for deciding how much to bet) and Manny Kimmel (for the money to bet with). An interlude brings in Kelly and his Kelly criterion itself, and makes clear the connection to information theory and efficient markets: a few bits of information about outcomes (ie having probabilities which do not match the implicit probabilities in the prices of bets/investments) equates to excess returns, and the more information, the larger the returns with aggressive betting. The Kelly criterion optimizes the extraction of money, compared to other betting strategies like the martingale which don’t take into account the extra information. While excellent in theory, Thorp/Shannon/Kimmel’s (Kelly was uninvolved and busy chasing the still-elusive dream of voice synthesis) blackjack did not go well: the casinos shamelessly cheated any customer doing well, Thorp claims one even drugged him twice (although he was never beaten by casino thugs like other card counters), and new unpopular rules were announced to negate card counting. So Thorp moved onto roulette and the stock market. Thorp’s first big edge was in warrants: since warrants expire quickly, they need to go to 0 or 1 over a short time period, and if the market is efficient, they should follow a random walk of the sort familiar in physics from molecules, and their expected value easily calculated… and mispriced warrants spotted and purchased. Which sounds a bit paradoxical. And the risk of buying warrants can be offset just buy buying or selling short just some of the underlying stock. Thorp made money off warrants, and then published the strategy for increasing the credibility of his new hedge fund, and moved onto convertible bonds by applying similar reasoning: the bond should have a certain value which reflects the probability that the stock will spike high enough to make the built-in option worth exercising, and since stocks should follow a random walk, all you need to know is the variance… inventing Black-Scholes. With Kelly, he could bet heavily on the safest profitable investments, up to 150% of the fund, without blowing up. (In one amusing anecdote, Black-Scholes used their pricing model to spot a particularly mispriced warrant; then the company changed the terms of the warrants, wiping out the warrant holders and Black-Scholes, in a way that insiders had known was coming and sold all their warrants.) Thorp had a genius for regularly spotting these sorts of opportunities, and Poundstone says ‘“I’ve estimated for myself that if I had to pay no taxes, state or federal, I’d have about thirty-two times as much wealth as I actually do,” Thorp told me recently’ (Thorp’s net worth is estimated somewhere in the hundreds of millions) because his fund would have grown much faster if it could’ve reinvested all its earnings & profitability didn’t have to take into account taxation. This is plausible considering compound growth, the fund’s final 15.1% average annual return, and what ultimately killed Thorp’s fund: involvement in Michael Milken’s financial empire as their stock broker, which, as part of Rudy Giuliani’s crusade in applying RICO to anything possible to get himself elected, turned up some tax fraud on Thorp’s fund’s part (he blames his partner who was in charge of the implementation end of things). The timing was particularly bad for Thorp because investors would flock to hedge funds during that time period, as exemplified by LTCM, which Poundstone devotes a section to, arguing that LTCM also exemplified the perils of non-Kelly investment by putting too much at risk (which seems a little tendentious, since my understanding was that the real problem was they underestimated the correlations of many assets in an economic crisis; the underestimation led them to overbet and thus exposed them to huge losses, and some formalized Kelly-like proportional investment wouldn’t’ve saved them from the fundamental mistakes, any more than the KC saves you from an incorrect estimate of your edge or assuming that correlated bets are independent). Thorp returned to trading eventually, and in terms of his lifetime performance:
Thorp’s money may continue on:
Poundstone goes in more depth into the statistics than I expected, and although there’s not that much that can be said about the Kelly criterion (particularly in 2005, before the latest burst of interest in it due to evolutionary & biological interpretations of the Kelly criterion & probability matching/Thompson sampling), he benefits tremendously from extensive access to Shannon’s papers and Thorp’s reminiscences about his mob connections while trying to beat the casinos. Indeed, some of the reviews criticize the characterization of Thorp as almost forgettable and perhaps insufficiently critical due to Poundstone’s dependency. What is a little remarkable to me is how well Shannon did financially by 3 early venture capital investments, and how little Shannon contributed intellectually after his information theory paper; I had always somehow assumed that Claude Shannon, a genius who had offhandedly made a major contribution to genetics simply because his advisor forced him to work on genetics, and had created fully-formed information theory, had died in the 1950s or something, because how else would such a genius have not made further major contributions? But no! Shannon died in 2001! Ramsay died on the operating table; von Neumann had cancer; Kelly himself dropped dead of a stroke on a NYC sidewalk; Pitts was mentally ill and died of alcoholism; but Shannon was rich, tenured, sound as a bell in mind & body, and infinitely respected - what was his excuse? Poundstone explains that Shannon was simply too unambitious (and perfectionist) to work hard on any big topics or write up and publish properly any of his findings! (Instead, he worked on an endless succession of hobbies like juggling or Rubik’s cube or discovering that the smallest ride-able unicycle is >18 inches.) One of the more depressing demonstrations that raw genius is not enough. I did not notice any major errors (asides from perhaps a confusion of Euler and Gauss, and overstating the obscurity of Louis Bachelier's life). One downside is that despite the involvement of Jimmy Savage, Poundstone never mentions the connections to subjective Bayesianism, personal interpretations of probability, or Thompson sampling. (Which would, if nothing else, have partially explained why Savage's career was so peripatetic - it wasn't just his acerbic opinions as Poundstone claims.) ...more | Notes are private!
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1
| Aug 21, 2016
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Aug 21, 2016
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Aug 21, 2016
| Paperback
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0525953736
| 9780525953739
| 3.62
| 1,144
| Jan 01, 2013
| Sep 12, 2013
|
liked it
|
Followup to The Great Stagnation, AiO takes the same format awkwardly straddling the territory between overgrown Marginal Revolution blog posts and fu
Followup to The Great Stagnation, AiO takes the same format awkwardly straddling the territory between overgrown Marginal Revolution blog posts and full-length books (AiO can easily be read in an afternoon and could be edited down further without much loss). AiO rehearses some of the background of TGS like the stagnation in median incomes and wretched income growth for most educational brackets. Americans, in 2013 and 2016, feel tremendously insecure; the absolute standard of living may be higher than before, but an iPhone doesn't pay the bills, and YouTube doesn't replace having a sense of self-respect or a stable job. The Autor 'wage polarization' thesis argues this is due to the economy splitting between garbage jobs paying low-wage for unskilled but currently un-automatable jobs, and highly skilled and productive jobs, which benefit from globalization & technology. The unskilled and automatable jobs have been increasingly eaten by outsourcing to China or by technology (Cowen cites robotized factories, Netflix, dating sites, crime-predictive software for policing; he is skeptical in chapter 9 that outsourcing is the majority contributor to American trends). For the latter, technology & capital 'complement' the highly skilled, enabling them to produce ever more value (which is where their increasing salaries are coming from). This leads to some fairly dire forecasts: the banana republicization of America, with a self-regarding meritocratic class of wealthy white-collar workers continually concentrating into the metropoles and wealthy suburbs with their servants, leaving in the hinterlands the working poor, and the nonworking poor. What is this complementation that robots or AIs help with? Financial trading and investment, technology tasks like enabling a Google-scale titan to run without collapsing instantly, drone strikes and organizing interrogation & imagery to decide who to drone strike, or just in general management to efficiently organize and run all the highly-paid specialists and keep them on track towards goals. More ordinary people get shut out; they cause too many problems, there's too much overhead and inefficiency in trying to use them, they hold up deadlines or spit in the food & post the video to Facebook. Such zero-marginal product workers can't be usefully used by specialists. Cowen finds himself perplexed to how he would use a person to help him even at a wage of $0: As a professor, I am given a research assistant each year. Over the last twenty or so years, I have received some extraordinary assistance from some very good workers, students, and eventually, peers and coauthors. (As AiO is fairly light on citation and referencing for a book advancing such broad theses, I think maybe Cowen should try to figure out how to manage more than one research assistant.) Cowen's central case-study of this complementation is chess, and Advanced Chess in particular: a human playing chess with the assistance of grandmaster-level (and not long after its founding, super-grandmaster level) chess AIs, which began in 1998 at Kasparov's proposal. Cowen is an avid chess player, and these parts of the book are by far the best part of it. He describes the rapid progress of chess AIs after Deep Blue and the consequences for human chess playing of the availability of superhuman chess AIs. The chess AIs can see so far past the humans that Cowen, watching two play each other in a match and able to see each's evaluation of their winning chances by using his own chess AI to follow along, became certain that Stockfish would lose despite the evaluations insisting it would win, because Stockfish was in just too horrible a position; but as the inhuman moves pass, suddenly a Stockfish win started to look not so implausible, and by the end, Cowen could confirm with his own AI that the evaluations from almost 30 moves before were correct. Cowen notes that even grandmasters have difficulty understanding, after the fact, the moves that the chess AI play and why they work despite being apparently insanely risky and chaotic - paradoxically, though the best chess ever played is being played now in computer chess tournaments and chess AIs are arguably approaching perfection, humans have hardly any interest in playing, watching, commentating, or analyzing those games! Optimal chess moves, apparently, often strike benighted humans as ugly and risky, for all that they are the correct moves. (One thinks of what the Go players said about some of AlphaGo's moves during the Lee Sedol match.) What do 'AI moves' look like in life, or dating, or business negotiation, Cowen wonders? It might look like matching up people who are apparently antagonistic like conservative men and liberal women, but who might work out well anyway (Cowen cites one Match.com demonstration of a black/white couple where each violated the other's 'requirements' for a match but they married anyway, and his own marriage through a dating site to a liberal women.) However, as astoundingly excellent as chess AIs playing each other are, as of Cowen's experience before the 2013 publication, a few humans are able to provide some sort of edge, overriding the chess AI to make a better move, and win. Oddly, this does not apparently require one to be a grandmaster or even a master chess player, but some sort of instinctive mechanical sympathy based on having an idea of where the chess AI is 'weak' and watching the evaluations in realtime (along with better preparation like gathering large chess game databases); indeed, being a GM may be a liability, as at least two GMs, Nakamura & Naroditsky, appear to have harmed or at least not helped their chess AIs with their lack of deep humility. (As chess AIs show, GMs arguably make mistakes on almost half of their moves.) Cowen (as well as some other authors in 2013 like Clive Thompson) takes Advanced Chess as an optimistic paradigm for technological changes: it need not lead to unemployment if people can learn the skills which render them complements to new technology, instead of being substituted. One of his primary solutions is MOOCs and online education. I'm not sure MOOCs are so positively regarded in 2016 as they were in 2013. And like most authors who present education as a nostrum Cowen also doesn't explain why we would expect more education to solve anything when the existing steep education/income penalties/correlations have not managed to motivate the general population. Computerized education has been great for chess education, certainly, with grandmasters minted ever younger; but that didn't reverse Deep Blue's victory. I think Cowen knows that MOOCs and other band-aids aren't going to reverse these trends, and the Advanced Chess example is telling: very few people can contribute to Advanced Chess, and the very best Advanced Chess players are adding ~100 Elo points, or a few % towards victory. 100 Elo points is not much. It's about as much as chess AIs improve in 2 years. At what point will Advanced Chess stop 'being a thing' as the chess AIs will have become so good that Advanced Chess players can no longer make a discernible positive contribution? Oddly, I'm having a very hard time figuring that out. Advanced Chess is not mentioned much online after 2013. Some extrapolating suggests that Advanced Chess may already have become moot in 2013, and if not then, is probably finished by 2016; so at the most generous, Advanced Chess could be said to have only existed 1998-2016 (so 18 years, hardly enough time for a kid to grow up), and then only for the tiniest fraction of the population. So he finishes up pessimistically with forecasts of current trends: the American governments, federal/state/local, are going to face the anvil of healthcare inflation and unfunded Medicaid/Social Security promises. These programs are politically untouchable because old people know what side their bread is buttered on, so they will paid out, one way or another. Which will involve systematic rises in taxation and decreases in services. What does the lower half of the polarized economy do to cope with this? They will have to flee to jurisdictions with smaller governments and less taxation and less goldbrick regulation of housing jacking up rents, however unpleasant such places are, like Texas (but which nevertheless has constant inflow of migration, compared to California). American standards of living will decrease: beef burgers will be replaced with bean burritos, houses will downsize. Alternately, this inevitability of lower incomes could be embraced and deregulation and reductions done deliberately rather than implicitly: "In essence, we would be recreating a Mexico-like or Brazil-like environment in part of the United States, although with some technological add-ons and most likely with greater safety." This constriction won't be as bad as it may sound. Just as most healthcare expenditures in the USA are wasted so getting health insurance doesn't make much of a difference to health, many Americans (rich or poor) have extravagant spending habits (consider who buys all those lottery tickets and tobacco): "The bad news is that there is a lot of waste in American consumption-massive amounts of waste, in fact. Everyone has their favorite story about what the other guy spends his money on and could do without. But also the good news, oddly enough, is that there is a lot of waste in American consumption. Citizens faced with financial pressures will shift into cheaper consumption, and a lot of them will do so without losing very much happiness or value, precisely because there is already so much waste in what they buy." I could hardly disagree. If I had a buck for every boat or in-ground pool I've seen people pay a fortune for and then never use, or use once a year, I could buy a bundle of burritos; or not take even a few seconds to shop around online; and one can go to Walmart and simply watch people shop as they buy the smallest unit grocery (despite having a large family or it being something which never goes bad), or buy a brand-name food which tastes exactly the same as the generic but costs 50% more, or buy food they'll let rot before they can be bothered to eat it... (Nor do I exempt my relatives from this criticism.) In this section Tyler also says something that particularly amused me in this election season: "Most American voters are fairly moderate, disillusioned with both political parties, and looking for someone who can fill the proverbial niche of "getting something done," or "unifying the nation." Those are not the kind of attitudes that make for a revolutionary future." (A craving for strongmen like Mussolini is not revolutionary?) So what does that leave us? A weak diagnostic followup to TGS. One of the longest and most interesting writeups of Advanced Chess around. Some vague speculation about specifics of software/AI improvements to other sectors of the economy, badly handicapped by being written in 2013 (hopefully Cowen could do a much better job now). Some weak solutions or bandaids like MOOCs. And a reasonable but pessimistic extrapolation. Overall, not particularly worth reading unless you are interested in chess. ...more | Notes are private!
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1
| Jul 24, 2016
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Jul 24, 2016
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Jul 27, 2016
| Hardcover
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0891416005
| 9780891416005
| 4.04
| 275
| May 01, 1995
| Jun 01, 1996
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really liked it
| The Theory of Special Operations by William McRaven 1993 is a book-length thesis describing 8 case-studies of special ops missions and the degree to w The Theory of Special Operations by William McRaven 1993 is a book-length thesis describing 8 case-studies of special ops missions and the degree to which they adhere to a few principles for spec-ops success that McRaven extracts from their successes/failures. The case-studies are in chronological order and primarily WWII-oriented: Battle of Fort Eben-Emael Raid on Alexandria (1941) St Nazaire Raid Gran Sasso raid Operation Source Raid at Cabanatuan Operation Ivory Coast Operation Entebbe The principles themselves boil down to finding a chink in enemy defenses, concentrating force on it as fast as possible, achieving immediate relative superiority to those enemy forces in the way, and executing a well-trained & rehearsed minimal possible mission. Or as he puts it: “simplicity, security, repetition, surprise, speed, and purpose”. Arguably, all of these principles could be boiled down to a single principle of speed - complex unrehearsed operations with multiple objectives by uncommitted troops against a waiting enemy cannot be fast, while speed dictates all of the other requirements (except perhaps ‘security’). It’s surprising to read through his case-studies and realize that in many cases, the critical part of the operation lasts no more than 5 minutes, or even under a minute. For example, the successful part of the St Nazaire raid, from when the hellburner was first attacked by German artillery to when it rammed itself into the drydock gates (and the destruction of the drydock became guaranteed as the explosives/ship could not possibly be removed) was that short (the rest being, McRaven points out, an unnecessary debacle, and on a grand strategy level, destroying the drydock was probably not even helpful); the Gran Sasso raid, from when the Italian guards finally challenged the German commandos to securing Mussolini, was maybe a minute. The importance of speed strikes me as being, in some respects, due to the vulnerability of large organizations; McRaven notes that all of the the case-studies involved greatly out-numbered commandos, often by orders of magnitude with enemy units within relatively close range, often heavily out-gunned, often attacking positions heavily fortified against exactly the kind of attack done (eg Raid on Alexandria, St Nazaire, Operation Source), with objectives that can sometimes be defeated if the enemy reacts quickly enough (the Italian guards could’ve executed Mussolini, the Japanese guards the POWs, the Entebbe terrorists could’ve killed their hostages, the Tirpitz/Valiant/Queen Elizabeth captains could’ve dragged chains to dislodge limpets & moved their ships to avoid the mines planted underneath, etc). Why then are spec-ops not doomed to failure? Because the enemy is unable to collectively think, react, and execute a counter-plan as fast as the commandos can, who have executed the plan many times previously in practice, need only a few minutes to do so, and have a ‘distributed knowledge’ of the plan & objectives allowing independent-yet-coordinated action. The OODA loop is just inherently too slow for physically separated forces to recognize the threat, realize it’s local and not part of a broader attack, deduce the objectives, counter-attack, and execute the counter-attack; given enough time, the enemy forces can do all this and crush the commandos (St Nazaire) but by that point, they should be long gone. The commandos sting the elephant and flee before the tail can smash them into paste. The parallels with computer security and cyberattacks is clear: a hack can take months or years to research and craft, but when triggered, it can attack and finish within seconds or minutes, far outspeeding the merely human defenders. (A Silicon Valley startup analogy also makes itself; indeed “simplicity, security, repetition, surprise, speed, and purpose” would not be a bad set of founding principles for a startup!) The case-studies themselves are interesting. McRaven was able to interview a number of people involved in the case-studies as well as visit the locations to see them for himself. It’s interesting to note the presence of gliders in at least two of the WWII case-studies, because of their stealth advantage right up to the instant before landing, but never afterwards, and I can’t remember the last time I heard of gliders used by militaries; I wonder if that’s because parachute technology has evolved to the point that steerable parachutes obsoleted gliders? The Battle of Fort Eben-Emael case-study was particularly interesting because while most histories mention that it was a huge success for the invasion thanks to the gliders, McRaven emphasizes that the gliders were only a small part, and the reason the German commandos succeeded so thoroughly was because they deployed a new bomb technology, shaped charges, which literally shattered the Belgium defenders and their fortifications; otherwise, they would have successfully landed on the grassy field above the underground fortress but found themselves trapped in a deadly killing field between the various bunkers & cupolas. Deception plays surprisingly little role in most of the operations considering its outsized role in the public imagination (the St Nazaire raid ship briefly pretended to be German; Gran Sasso brought along an Italian general in the gliders to confuse the Italians; Operation Entebbe likewise involved the commandos pretending to be locals until they reached the building with the hostages, apparently successfully confusing the terrorists inside). McRaven himself, although I hadn’t realized it when I downloaded the book on a whim, may be a familiar-sounding name; turns out that he has since been putting his theory into practice as a major controller of American special operations during the War on Terror, in particular heading the Osama bin Laden raid. In retrospect, one can see how the OBL raid largely conforms to McRaven’s principles: a fast in and out raid in as few stealth helicopters as possible with little or no coordination with the locals, given that Pakistan/ISI had been sheltering OBL and would doubtless tip him off despite the danger of operating so near a Pakistani base, an operation rehearsed extensively with replica models. The thesis was apparently quite popular and was republished in 1995 as Spec Ops: Case Studies in Special Operations Warfare: Theory and Practice. Disadvantages to the online thesis version: big PDF, harder to search due to OCR errors, a lot of typos, and the photographs McRaven included of all the sites he could visit are unfortunately totally destroyed by the photocopier/scanner (although the diagrams are still legible). A skim of the Libgen EPUB version suggests that you might be better off with that edition (although it appears to drop the photos entirely). ...more | Notes are private!
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| Jul 16, 2016
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Jul 16, 2016
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Jul 18, 2016
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0140448063
| 9780140448061
| 4.03
| 3,950
| 1002
| Nov 30, 2006
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liked it
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While the descriptions of natural beauty are admirable, and some of the anecdotes of court life are interesting, much of the material is boring and Sh
While the descriptions of natural beauty are admirable, and some of the anecdotes of court life are interesting, much of the material is boring and Shonagon herself has ugly streaks of elitism in her outright contempt for anyone lower than herself (eg casually declaring that lower-class women should not even be allowed long or medium-length hair, an opinion which is certainly not 'delightful') and fawning admiration over anyone higher than her, particular the thoroughly unimpressive emperor/empress, and her endless fascination with the emblems of rank such as expensive clothing, which she apparently considers to be the full measure of a human and little else about them requires description. For a skilled poet and one with such recall of Chinese & Japanese classics, it's distressing to see how little insight she apparently has into anything and anyone, how much learning without wisdom; the court and its pretensions and hanger-ons surely invited sharp criticism, or at least some awareness of its faults, but Shonagon manages to conceal any such insight. No wonder Murasaki Shikibu thought little of her. The translator warns that "Similar opinions have continued to be expressed down the centuries, and modern scholars (men) have often been equally irritated by her. She has been dismissed by some as a mere chatterbox of a woman, and _The Pillow Book_ considered to be nothing more than a silly gentlewoman’s idle thoughts spilling themselves haphazardly on to the page. It is common in Japan to contrast her with Murasaki Shikibu, and those who side with Sei Shōnagon in this perceived rivalry are often characterized as vacuous and frivolous." Indeed. ...more | Notes are private!
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Jul 31, 2016
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Jul 13, 2016
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0486439593
| 9780486439594
| 4.04
| 159
| 759
| Mar 04, 2005
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liked it
| While not as read as the classic Heian-era waka poets, themselves vastly less read than the haiku poets, the Man’yoshu remains the first Japanese poet While not as read as the classic Heian-era waka poets, themselves vastly less read than the haiku poets, the Man’yoshu remains the first Japanese poetic collection of note and something I’ve always meant to read. Even if the MSY wasn’t important as a foundational text or one of the major scholarly projects of Japanese literature, it is still of note for the diversity of its verse forms, contributors (not just aristocrats or townmen), topics (eg genuine poverty), and documenting early Japanese culture/politics/life. Reading Keene’s Seeds in the Heart which devotes a large section to the MSY, I decided I had put it off long enough. There aren’t many translations of it online, and this was the largest I found. Keene, as it happens, wrote a preface to this 1965 edition. He notes that the anonymous committee authors & 1940 date of its composition means the original Introduction (a long and extensive description of MSY-era Japan and facts of life relevant to interpreting the poems, such as the sending of expeditions to China and the ill-fated political alliances with Korean kingdoms) will raise some eyebrows:
Keene is, if anything, far too kind to the Introduction. I had come across references to the Japanese literary world’s perversion during the imperial period and the phrase “spirit of the MSY”, but I admit I had never understood how exactly a poetry collection could be employed in imperial propaganda but the Introduction is quite blatant, to the point of comedy (it’s difficult to not roll my eyes when the authors rhapsodize over how Shintoism involves belief in “mysterious powers which moved and had their being in nature”, while Taoism is a “cult that was imported from China…compounded with all manner of folklore and superstition…a belief in fairies and genii” and Confucianism irrelevant pedanticism unnecessary to the Japanese as it was merely “a canonical basis for those social values that had already prevailed. Loyalty, filial piety, brotherly affection, conjugal devotion, faithfulness, etc, taught by Confucianism, were virtues that had naturally grown within, and been fostered by, the clan system of Japan”). As Keene notes, the mentions of poverty undercut the Edenic pretensions, to which I would add the disturbingly frequent regularity of dead bodies by the road side, drafting peasants for border guards, conquest expeditions, and vagueness and lack of mention of any genuine accomplishments in the frequent praise of the emperors. I suppose as a surviving example of imperial propaganda, the Introduction is of some interest on its own but I wonder if it can be trusted for background and if Keene was right in keeping it unedited from the original version. In any event, the poems are the main event, and Keene praises the translation as of high literary quality, so I should not be let down. Having read so much of the Heian-era poetry, I found the MSY ones interesting. They are clearly ancestors, showing both the early development of the waka and what would become stock themes, but also ‘roads not taken’, in particular the long verse forms like the choka. The waka could never express a vivid description of warfare like Hitomaro does in one choka, and it would be difficult indeed to think of a waka or several waka which could equate to his choka mourning his wife. One wonders what Japanese poetry lost by the possibility of the choka verse falling into obscurity and unreadability; I don’t think it would’ve choked off the waka’s growth, but allowed expression of weightier topics (a need which seems to’ve been only poorly satisfied by turning to Chinese kanshi). On the downside, while the choka are impressive, for the most part, I am left unimpressed by the MSY corpus. Almost all poems come across in the English as plain statements and restatements. Yes, I know the MSY style is to be straightforward and not as indirect or complicated as the later Heian poems like the Kokinshu - but still. A poem should not read like prose. And for the most part, they do. The selection is also weakened by the inclusion of many trivial pieces which praise the Emperor in ways which are either boring or bullshit (although I suppose I can’t blame the poets for their sycophancy, which they at least had excuses and good practical reasons for writing, but should blame the translators for their ideology in emphasizing those poems out of the enormous MSY corpus). Some of the ones I did like: Man’yoshu 1964, pg352: "To what shall I liken this life? Yamabe no Akahito, Man’yōshū VIII: 1426 "To my good friend Kuramochi Chitose; 326-7 VI: 913-4; pg198: "The beach is beautiful; and there grow Hitomaro, 103-5/ II: 199-201, pg127: "...Forthwith our prince buckled on a sword,...more | Notes are private!
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Jul 10, 2016
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Jun 19, 2016
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1567500056
| 9781567500059
| 3.00
| 2
| Jan 01, 1993
| Jan 01, 1993
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liked it
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Due to length I've split my review out to http://www.gwern.net/Statistical%20no...
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Jun 13, 2016
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Jun 19, 2016
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1591845114
| 9781591845119
| 4.16
| 5,450
| Aug 01, 2013
| Aug 01, 2013
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really liked it
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Jun 13, 2016
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Jun 11, 2016
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0192810944
| 9780192810946
| 4.32
| 1,328
| Jan 01, 1948
| Mar 18, 1976
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liked it
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(WP; Poetry Foundation biography). Hopkins is known as one of the most difficult English poets to read, and his poems bear out this reputation: they a
(WP; Poetry Foundation biography). Hopkins is known as one of the most difficult English poets to read, and his poems bear out this reputation: they are always challenging in syntax, the vocabulary occasionally fazes even me, and some border on the incomprehensible (I had to read “Carrion Comfort” at least 3 times before I could honestly say I started to understand any of it, and I don’t get the meaning of much of it). As important as his Catholicism was to him, the insertions of God into his poems often comes off as blunt, didactic, and unconvincing, especially compared to his ability to lyrically evoke nature, and I often felt that a poem would have been better off without it, quite aside from the apparently baleful effects of becoming a Jesuit on his life. (One author argues that Hopkins could not have been Hopkins without a devotion to God to drive his verse; but Nature has always served poets adequately in this regard…) His friend and editor, Robert Bridges, in the afterword quite accurately describes Hopkins’s faults: the grammar and syntax is unusually elliptical and out of order, exacerbated by the use of ambiguous words or simply obscure ones, often jammed together or rewritten to suit the rhythm (scrambling the sense even further), and the use of appallingly conventional rhymes. (One thinks of people who have mastered erudite vocabularies, but have not mastered when to use those words.) Hopkins, in other words, needed an editor. Bridges defends Hopkins as growing out of his excesses at his untimely death, and it is to be regretted that we’ll never know what poetry a mature Hopkins might have written; had he lived to a ripe old age, he might be as well remembered as Robert Frost is, instead of as an obscure and little-read experimentalist. In descending order, I particularly liked: This one, I feel, exemplifies Hopkins. The theme is classic, the integration of tragedy with nature is apt, and Hopkins’s complexities are reined in and instead of being nuisances, are beautiful - “Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie” is a striking line, and the final lines are fluent and perfect. “Pied Beauty” “Binsey Poplars” “That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the comfort of the Resurrection” ‘No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief.’ “The Wreck of the Deutschland” Overall, I felt Hopkins’s corpus exhibits more frustrated promise than reward. I read the Project Gutenberg edition. ...more | Notes are private!
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| May 19, 2016
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May 24, 2016
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May 19, 2016
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1400077303
| 9781400077304
| 4.16
| 7,781
| 1997
| Mar 30, 2004
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really liked it
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Fascinating account of a Gilded Age titan much worse known than Carnegie. His charming but scheming bigamist wandering con-artist father reminds me of Fascinating account of a Gilded Age titan much worse known than Carnegie. His charming but scheming bigamist wandering con-artist father reminds me of my old observation that a lot of very successful people seem to be high but not *too* high on the psychopathy continuum and have had difficult or abusive childhoods; while we tend to think of psychopathy as all negative, aspects of it, like its heritability, are consistent with it being a lifecycle strategy under balancing selection, indicating advantages to the social skills, fearlessness etc. The benign end of psychopathy may give us great leaders and businessmen and heroes like firefighters. Rockefeller's puritanism and obsession with accounting & ledgers renders his early life unpromising. I suspect Rockefeller may've been a bit influenced by Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography. Although the virtues of accounting no longer appeal quite as much - for example, one thing Rockefeller was famous for later on was giving children shiny new dimes and then lecturing them about the virtues of savings and how a dime was the annual interest on a dollar in a savings account, 10%. This is no longer quite as compelling today when your bank's annual CD pays 0.5% or less, which hardly even covers your time in filling out paperwork. This clerkish fixation on details and pennies makes his subsequent ability, after some modest success in trading & transporting goods, to risk his entire fortune and career going deeply into debt on visionary speculation in the nascent Pennsylvania oil fields all the more extraordinary and inexplicable to me. How did he do it? How did he know that oil wasn't some oddity but would be one of the defining resources of the 1800s-2000s? Rockefeller, in Chernow's telling, keeps his own counsel. I am left to wonder if it is another selection effect and what I've noted elsewhere, like my review of The Media Lab: we often assume millionaires and billionaires must have deep wisdom ("if you're so smart, why aren't you rich?"), when they may actually be deeply irrational, risk-seeking, and little more than lottery winners of timing and chance. (Several competitors to Rockefeller could easily have taken his place.) Having somehow seen the future and figured out that the refineries, sitting squarely in the middle between the raw oil of the Pennsylvania derricks and the end product of refined kerosene sitting in cans in customers' homes after being transported on railroad to their city, were the strategic point, he began buying up the Cleveland refineries to play off and balance the railroads (who otherwise would be propelled into ruinous competition) against his own cashflow needs and pipelines and the oil fields' smalltimers. (It all sounds like it would make a great board game in the German vein where players compete to control geographical routes of railroads/pipelines/refineries and cooperate until the exact right moment to stab another player in the back and take them over. I checked but while there are 2 or 3 existing oil-themed board games, they either are about off-shore drilling or take a much more abstracted macroeconomics point of view.) Rockefeller's second career as a philanthropist is equally interesting and Chernow gives it plenty of space. it's not much of an exaggeration to say that Rockefeller was one of the first Effective Altruists, in caring deeply that his money was spent as carefully and sustainably as possible. Indeed, some of his favored projects like the deworming of the American South have echoes in modern EA projects - deworming being a particular focus of GiveWell! Rockefeller was a complex man trying to be simple: he knew many of the criticisms of him were true but tried to delude himself to the end; he was a devout Baptist, who was intelligent and worldly enough to see the problems there and how the wicked flourished; he loved homeopathy, but his funding of medical research and the Flexner Report would kill the last shreds of legitimacy it had. The philanthropy transitions into an account of Rockefeller Junior, as he is entrusted with it, who emerges as diligent and effective, but not the man his father was. Senior attempted to replicate his own upbringing without the abusiveness, but as so often in dynasties, the founder's extreme qualities do not fully carry over to his offspring, who regress to the mean. The lesson I take away from Senior's disappointing offspring (variously mediocre, wastrel, neurotic, or gullible) is that if you want to build a family empire, you must have a lot of offspring so the maximum may be adequate, and also be willing to go outside direct descent or even adopt outsiders (eg the Romans or Japanese); this is the only way to keep a family business going for centuries. ...more | Notes are private!
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1
| Apr 29, 2016
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May 03, 2016
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Apr 29, 2016
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0814776019
| 9780814776018
| 3.97
| 76
| Mar 01, 2008
| Mar 01, 2008
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really liked it
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Apr 28, 2016
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Apr 23, 2016
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0195143655
| 9780195143652
| 3.73
| 15
| Jan 01, 2001
| Nov 01, 2001
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really liked it
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An engaging biography of Francis Galton, heavy with the many amusing Galton anecdotes we all know (a sober analysis of the inefficacy of prayer which
An engaging biography of Francis Galton, heavy with the many amusing Galton anecdotes we all know (a sober analysis of the inefficacy of prayer which drew furious attack; recording people fidgeting during lectures or average attractiveness of women on the street; constructing devices to keep himself awake). Gillham devotes much space to Galton's youthful travels and African expedition and to his fingerprinting work, less to the weather mapping, but that's reasonable inasmuch as those are the most exciting to read about and anyone can understand & appreciate that, even if I have to say that in the long run, Galton's work on the source of the Nile, as ancient a mystery as it may be, was infinitely less important than his other work like twin studies. What is much more interesting to me is the almost as lengthy discussion of Galton and other biologists' attempts to come up with a mechanistic model of how evolution & heredity could work which explained both simple Mendelian traits but also more complex breeding phenomenon like continuous traits, regression to the mean, and occasional throwbacks. This account of the dispute between the 'Mendelians' and 'biometricians' probably strikes most readers as deeply tedious and perplexing, but I found it interesting and enlightening as most histories of statistics tend to discuss briefly Galton's inventions of correlation & regression and then skip forwards 10-20 years to when Karl Pearson has made many contributions and the stage has been set for R.A. Fisher, ignoring the interregnum, so I didn't really understand what went between. Gillham helps in that respect, although in general his statistical explanations are poor enough and confused enough that I wondered if he understood the issues at all. (I assumed he was a historian, but looking up his biography, he apparently is even a geneticist, so he really ought to be able to do better. One is probably better off looking to Stigler for accounts of things like the Quincunx.) Aside from being obscure, he often leaves out critical details; for example, two or three times in the account of the debate, he quotes someone coming close to the insight that would resolve it, but Gillham doesn't explain what that insight was or how R.A. Fisher would push the insight through, so I suppose you simply have to already know that Fisher's insight was that the Mendelian view was correct but that with a large number of Mendelian genes, the Central Limit Theorem shows that they will manifest as a continuous phenotype, and the Mendelian traits were simply the extreme where there are only a handful or one relevant gene. This omission is unfortunate because it's a huge flaw in the Mendelian-affiliated eugenicists as it meant that their pedigrees of things like 'feeble-mindedness' were effectively useless since they were discretizing badly a continuous trait† they were often unable to measure accurately in the first place (no accurate IQ tests yet). Another example would be mentioning that Wissler's analysis ended Cattell's mental testing program without mentioning Wissler prompted Spearman to find the general factor (and indeed, some of the sensory testing like reaction time have shown a correlation with intelligence). Some of the criticisms that Gillham quotes approvingly are either ignorant or stupid - for example, that Shakespeare's parents were undistinguished and thus evidence against heritability, which ignores that his father was a wealthy trader & smuggler who had been elected mayor (even if one discounts the Shakespeare arms as due to the son) and his mother descended from the notable Arden family, and would be a poor counterargument even if it were true since base rates alone imply that a large fraction of great men will be of humble origins simply because there are so many humble people that it overcomes their far lower per capita chance of success (as implied by the precis of Hereditary Genius that Gillham gives). In addition to occasionally repeating ridiculous arguments, it's unfortunate Gillham doesn't survey any of the later Fisher & Wright development of behavioral genetics which bore out so many of Galton's inferences. Still, I think I have to give Gillham credit for being as fair as he was in 2001, and it overall is an excellent biography. † Yes, I know that many cases of severe mental retardation are due to single mutations and so might be Mendelian, but they would be irrelevant from an eugenic perspective since they tend to not reproduce in the first place, while the eugenicists were concerned about the poor in general. ...more | Notes are private!
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1
| Apr 09, 2016
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Apr 13, 2016
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Apr 09, 2016
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0375425020
| 9780375425028
| 3.87
| 2,311
| Jan 01, 2008
| Nov 11, 2008
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really liked it
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(~110k words; 2.5 hours) 2008 anthropology/linguistic memoir by Daniel Everett about studying the famous Pirahã people and particularly their language
(~110k words; 2.5 hours) 2008 anthropology/linguistic memoir by Daniel Everett about studying the famous Pirahã people and particularly their language. Some of the material is covered in the widely read New Yorker article or elsewhere: the Pirahã possess an astoundingly crude and simple language, the Blub of natural languages, without recursion. The 18 chapters are organized autobiographically with Everett's research conclusions interspersed mostly chronologically (Everett making no strong topical separations, which may annoy some readers despite being more realistic - one does not live and do science in discrete blocks of time, after all, and Everett neglects neither side of his life). Everett does go into some detail about the linguistic aspects, but not very much (which is good because I've always found linguistics excruciating) and it's very popularized and quick a read. And a bit formulaic: a naive anthropologist joins a tribe, full of ideology (in Everett's case, Christian missionary zeal), discovers the challenges of aboriginal life, nearly kills himself and his family several times, gradually comes to appreciate and understand the tribe and its ancient wisdom, and returns to tell the tale. Everett's challenges include denying his wife & child were dying of malaria rather than typhoid fevers even as everyone he met insisted it was obviously malaria and mocked him for being a stupid foreigner who brought his family to Brazil, and discovering the fatalistic cruelty & bigotry of poverty - a riverboat captain and his crew taking 2 hours off to play a soccer game, a nurse humiliating him in front of everyone simply because he was Protestant and she was Catholic (after several weeks in an ICU, both wind up surviving), and mistaking the lack of overt coercion in the staunchly egalitarian Pirahã and barely defusing a drunken plot by the Pirahã to massacre them all - as they years later do massacre a group of Apurina they see as interlopers, or Everett's offhanded mention of a village-wide gangrape of one woman. (I am reminded of things Graeber and Scott have written about tribal societies often being organized to suppress the existence of leaders or income inequality.) Pirahã can be ostracized, and when ostracized, may be shot at. Like many groups, they do not tolerate alcohol well at all (Everett describes fleeing the village when they get particularly large quantities of alcohol from traders, and returning to see blood all over; I would have liked some more specifics about those events). So what does he return with? A sketch of a society which is horribly fascinating. Unlike the controversial Ik, the Pirahã have been documented as existing for centuries in apparently identical to their current form; their language's only relation is extinct, and the Pirahã language is a language isolate, without counting or recursion or color words or comparisons or quantifiers or pluralization or disjunctions, minimal phatic elements, and so few sounds that it can be whistled, hummed, yelled, sung, or spoken, but also evidential grammar which indicates if the speaker is speaking of something from personal knowledge; all current Pirahã speak only small fragments and phrases of Portuguese or other major Brazilian languages (renaming foreigners in Pirahã in order to talk about them), and are despite 8 months of enthusiastic effort (to avoid being constantly cheated by river traders and understand money) are unable to learn to count to ten (making Everett's ability to predict when resupply airplanes come nigh magical to the Pirahã), add any numbers, draw straight lines, or write. No Pirahã is ever mentioned as learning well another language, converting to a religion, leaving the villages for the wider world, or mating with an outsider (nor outsiders ever accepted into the Pirahã). Everett recounts that the Pirahã lusted after fine river canoes, and he arranged for a skilled canoe builder to come and teach them and even bought the necessary tools as a gift to the Pirahã, and they enthusiastically made a canoe; 5 days later, they suddenly refused to make another one, saying "Pirahãs don't make canoes". They seem to need relatively little sleep, mature quickly, never plan ahead or make long-term investments (such as making wicker rather than palm leave baskets) or talk about the distant future/past (and will very rarely talk about anything they learned from someone now dead: "generally only the most experienced language teachers will do this, those who have developed an ability to abstract from the subjective use of their language and who are able to comment on it from an objective perspective"), and will casually throw away tools or things they will need soon. They know how to preserve meat, but never both unless intending to trade it; food is eaten whenever it's available, and since they fish at all hours, everyone might wake up at 3AM for fish. Growing and harvesting manioc is universal in the Amazon despite the need to process it to remove cyanide, but Everett says the Pirahã only grow & process manioc under the influence of an earlier missionary. They have no oral tradition but tell short repetitive stories of things that happened to them or someone they knew, no myths or origin stories (when asked: "Well, the Pirahãs say that these things were not made."), no relationships closer than grandparents (about the most distant directly observable given that Everett puts their life expectancy in the 40s, leading to minimal incest taboos, forbidding only full siblings or parents or grandparents). Burials are ad hoc, and bigger men will be buried sitting because, the Pirahã say, you need to dig less. They have difficulty understanding foreigners are like them, and can understand language, in a bizarre echo of the Chinese room: Then I noticed another bemusing fact. The Pirahãs would converse with me and then turn to one another, in my presence, to talk about me, as though I was not even there. "Say, Dan, could you give me some matches?" Xip06gi asked me one day with others present. "OK, sure." "OK, he is giving us two matches. Now I am going to ask for cloth." Why would they talk about me in front of my face like this, as though I could not understand them? I had just demonstrated that I could understand them by answering the question about the matches. What was I missing? All of this is part of Everett's case that the Pirahã are, like Luria's peasant, ruled by an "immediacy of experience principle" and this yields an extraordinarily conservative culture on which new ideas and concepts roll off like so much water off a duck's back. Their supernatural beliefs are particularly fascinating: dreams are simply interpreted literally and discussed as supernatural events that happened, and any random thing can be a 'spirit', with regular theatrical performances of 'spirits' who are obviously tribe men (but when asked, Pirahã deny that there is any connection between particular men and spirits, part of their weak grasp on personal identity (I was particularly amused by the Heraclitean tone of one anecdote: "Pirahãs occasionally talked about me, when I emerged from the river in the evenings after my bath. I heard them ask one another, 'Is this the same one who entered the river or is it kapioxiai [a dangerous spirit]?'"), where names change regularly and are considered new people). Some of the spirit appearances are group hallucinations or consensus, and Everett opens Don't Sleep with the anecdote of being part of a group of Pirahã staring at an empty sand bank where they see the spirit Xigagai saying he will kill anyone going into the forest that day. This example is a bit perplexing: what could possibly be the use of this and why would they either perceive it or go along with it? Similarly, it's hard to see how the spirit outside the village talking all night about how he wanted to have sex with specific women of the village is serving any role, and the tribesman reaction when Everett walks up and asks to record his ranting is hilariously deadpan: "'Sure, go ahead', he answered immediately in his normal voice". Other spirits make more sense: Pirahãs listen carefully and often follow the exhortations of the kaoaib6gi. A spirit might say something like "Don't want Jesus. He is not Pirahã", or "Don't hunt downriver tomorrow", or things that are commonly shared values, such as "Don't eat snakes." Through spirits, ostracism, food-sharing regulation, and so on, Pirahã society disciplines itself. The function and etiology of religion like this remains perplexing to me, but as a method of egalitarian coercion, it does at least explain incidents like the Pirahã ordering Everett to stop preaching about Jesus because the spirit of Jesus was causing trouble in another village and trying to rape their women with his three-foot long penis. Everett's deconversion from Christianity is probably the funniest I've read, but also very strange (some illiterate tribesmen should make no impact on your religious beliefs) and well exhibits the concrete and 'hard' tendencies: ...something that I thought would make them understand how important God can be in our lives. So I told the Pirahãs how my stepmother committed suicide and how this led me to Jesus and how my life got better after I stopped drinking and doing drugs and accepted Jesus. I told this as a very serious story. When I concluded, the Pirahãs burst into laughter. This was unexpected, to put it mildly. I was used to reactions like "Praise God!" with my audience genuinely impressed by the great hardships I had been through and how God had pulled me out of them. "Why are you laughing?" I asked. "She killed herself? Ha ha ha. How stupid. Pirahãs don't kill themselves" they answered. They were utterly unimpressed. It was clear to them that the fact that someone I had loved had committed suicide was no reason at all for the Pirahãs to believe in my God. Indeed, it had the opposite effect, highlighting our differences. Overall, the picture painted is astonishing. How is this possible? How can such people and societies exist? But Everett does not find them pitiful, and is seduced by the Pirahã. Living by the plentiful river, with no native technology more advanced than a bow, the Pirahã have lowered their expectations to the point where the jungle is paradise. If there is no food, then it is an opportunity to "harden" themselves and practice self-reliance. (This is deliberate, as it's unlikely that if it was just the random chance of hunting, they would be so uniformly 100-125 pounds & 5-5.3 feet tall). The climate means they don't need much clothing or shelter, and if it's raining, they can make a primitive hut. If they are hungry, they can go into the jungle and hunt. If there are foreigners, they can beg for food. They amuse themselves by talking and dancing and having sex and hunting and fishing and being self-reliant. They have no worries most of the time, have few duties - even child-rearing is easy, as women give birth with little ceremony and die by themselves, the Pirahã are willing to euthanize inconvenient infants, and much like the child-rearing practices described by Jared Diamond, children are expected to injure themselves and learn - and are happy. Reading about them, they come off as a cross between bonobos and Chimpanzees with wireheading thrown in to boot. So to ask again: how is this possible? Proximately, it's because Everett and FUNAI and others succeeded in getting a reservation created just for the Pirahã. With less pressure from more successful groups, they can continue to exist. But that doesn't answer how the Pirahã could ever come to exist. Everett does not speculate about this. A true anthropologist, everything is due to chance, environment, or culture, all of which ultimately spring from nothingness. (Where does culture come from? An anthropologist might give the Pirahã answer about where the world came from...) I might believe in culture as an explanation, with the Pirahã being just the most extremely conservative surviving culture, if the claims were not so extreme. But can that really be the case? Can we really appeal to culture as the explanation for why not a single Pirahã is literate, or can count, or has left the tribe to earn money, or brought a non-Pirahã woman in as wife, or total cultural stasis for at least 300 years, and all of the other singularities Everett claims? Is this the case for any other tribe ever, even the ones considered by their neighbors as the most primitive and least intelligent, like the Pygmies, or cases of cultural regression like the Tasmanians? Have the Amish ever succeeded in having an attrition rate <5%, and that with a relative level of wealth to the surrounding America far closer than the Pirahã relative to Brazilian? Why are all the other groups like the Warlpiri of Australia able to borrow numbers when numeral systems become useful, except the Pirahã? The Pirahã have been trading with Brazilians for at least two centuries, and have not taken any steps toward it. The endogamy and linguistic isolation is surprising; they seem more endogamous than the Bushmen, whose lineage may have diverged scores of thousands of years ago, or the castes of India. They have, for all anyone knows, been separate for thousands of years (the population history of the Americas is, likely in part because of well-founded fears that it will undermine rhetoric about being descendants of the first settlers rather than just the second-to-last wave, still obscure but the latest work is consistent with colonization/replacements yielding tribes with little genetic flow between groups & high geographic structure). This alone, along with their small population (both present and presumably founding), could yield major genetic drift on many traits. On the other hand, gene-environment co-evolution would make tremendous sense; over millennia of reproductive isolation and specialization to their ecological niche, Pirahã have reached a local optimum where abstraction and planning are unnecessary and only lead to trouble and the potential for inequality, and either punishment or simply lack of additional fitness for such cognitive traits, which was continuously reinforced by natural & sexual selection over hundreds of generations (evolution does not stop at the neck), leading to a population many SDs from surrounding populations. ("I would go so far as to suggest that the Pirahãs are happier, fitter, and better adjusted to their environment than any Christian or other religious person I have ever known." Indeed.) This would be similar to Harpending & Cochran 2015's model of the Amish. This parsimoniously explains the observations without the need for backflips in interpretation of many anecdotes. For example, if the Pirahã culture is so extraordinarily conservative, why did they eagerly learn to make canoes that they prize highly, saying that Pirahã canoes are bad, and only 5 days later decide it was a bad idea? But Everett gives us a valuable clue in a different anecdote: ...I was surprised that the Pirahãs did not seem tired at all, however. In the village the Pirahã men avoided carrying heavy things. When I asked them for help in carrying boxes or barrels and such, they were always reluctant to respond. When they did help, they could barely lift things that I could carry with ease. I had just assumed that they were weak and lacked endurance. But I was wrong. They didn't normally carry foreign objects and they didn't like to display their ignorance of how to handle them. Like anyone else, they are embarrassed by what they don't know - or have forgotten - and when asked, will make up excuses or dodge it some other way. Similarly, the failure to teach counting does not require some sort of subtle Pirahã ploy where they pretend to be interested and to learn how to count for very practical reasons and then sabotage it to comply with the dictates of Pirahã culture; it was simply that difficult, and any teacher will be familiar with students on whom instructions are writ on water. Supposedly a school was opened in 2012, so it would be interesting to hear whether a Potemkin school (recent events doubtless having reminded everyone that the Brazilian government has its fair share of problems with corruption & incompetence), what fraction ever enroll, how much attrition there is, and what performance levels any are able to reach. Doubtless Everett would vociferously object that such speculation is wrong, but he would in order to protect research access to the Pirahã (the Brazilian government being as much a villain as hero in these sorts of things, engaging in such senseless practices as outlawing two-way radios for foreigners) and to avoid becoming a second Napoleon Chagnon, and probably commits the same fallacy that Diamond memorably does at the beginning of Guns, Germs, and Steel in arguing that the Pirahã were so much better than him at using the jungle they must be at least as intelligent as anyone else (ignoring that they have had lifetimes to learn that, and underperform everywhere else). If nothing else, the genetics of the Pirahã would be fascinating for pinning down when they diverged from other groups and how much genetic drift & directional selection has happened since. Let us hope that future researchers will not bow to the local politics and continue studying only the safe, softball questions like the Pirahã syntax. ...more | Notes are private!
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1
| Mar 27, 2016
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Mar 27, 2016
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Mar 28, 2016
| Hardcover
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1493915614
| 9781493915613
| 3.50
| 2
| Oct 12, 2014
| Jan 14, 2015
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liked it
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28 paper anthology focused on non-human intelligence, the history of IQ, education, and a heavy emphasis on the CHC factorizations and how this is the
28 paper anthology focused on non-human intelligence, the history of IQ, education, and a heavy emphasis on the CHC factorizations and how this is the dawn of the age of Cattell-Hornquarius. For a book titled "Handbook of Intelligence" and published in 2015, it is bizarrely antiquated and could have been written in the 1980s - it is totally bereft of the past 6 years of behavioral genetics, from Rietveld et al 2013 to the UK Biobank to the phenome papers to Domingues to the continuity hypothesis work. You would think that these rich and exciting breakthroughs, showing intelligence to have a highly polygenic additive architecture with high intelligence being merely enrichment of common variants and genetic intelligence underlying education / SES / health / lower schizophrenia/bipolar/depression/behavioral-disorder risk (rather than confounding or reverse causation) with 9+ GWAS hits and 80+ upcoming, would be of some interest to the collected authors, but you will not find any of this discussed! You will not find several papers on the topics (nor on any broader behavioral genetics topics), you will not even find so much as a single citation to Rietveld et al 2013, the most important intelligence paper of the past 25 years, likely (I checked; there's one citation to a paper written by Rietveld, but an old and unimportant one). It is like reading a handbook of physics which does not mention the Higgs boson or gravity waves. You will instead find many dozens of pages devoted to things like eugenics or puzzling papers like "Intelligence as a Conceptual Construct: The Philosophy of Plato and Pascal". This is a huge missed opportunity and I had to raise my eyebrows at the closing comments: We applaud the work of our colleagues in zoology, evolutionary science, psychology, and education to appreciate the genetic and evolutionary roots of intelligence and to move forward to define intelligence. We are confident that the next 50 years of intelligence research will usher a new age in our understanding, evaluating, and enhancing intellectual development. Yes, I imagine the next 50 years will indeed be extraordinarily exciting for the field of intelligence; however, I suspect all of that excitement will have very little to do with debates over CHC, the career of Charcot, or how to use IQ tests to diagnose reading disabilities... Papers I found worth reading were: "Evolution of the Human Brain: From Matter to Mind"; "The Life and Evolution of Early Intelligence Theorists: Darwin, Galton, and Charcot"; "Alfred Binet and the Children of Paris"; "Creativity and Intelligence"; & "Intelligence and Success". ...more | Notes are private!
| none
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1
| Mar 25, 2016
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Mar 28, 2016
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Mar 25, 2016
| Hardcover
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1846274591
| 9781846274596
| 4.15
| 122
| Jan 01, 2013
| May 01, 2013
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really liked it
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Journalistic history of the development of "designer drugs"/"research chemicals", with focus on past two decades and Internet-based RC communities. Th
Journalistic history of the development of "designer drugs"/"research chemicals", with focus on past two decades and Internet-based RC communities. This is a topic you might think I'd know all about, but actually I don't, because my focus was always Silk Road & the dark net markets, where research chemicals often showed up after being banned, but I didn't know much about what went on before they became normal illicit drugs. So this filled in a lot of holes for me. Power starts with the Western discovery of psychedelics and LSD, giving an engaging potted history of the period to focus on the late Alexander Shulgin. Shulgin is the central figure in research chemicals for demonstrating that variants and twists on old drugs are almost as easy as falling off a log, one would think, coming up singlehandedly with dozens of stimulants and psychedelics and drugs with unclassifiable effects (the one which "makes everything sound 1 octave lower" always amuses me), all documented in his famous PIHKAL and TIHKAL. Shulgin's work and other chemists (including the still-mysterious discoverer of MDMA) lit a long fuse that finally detonated with Usenet (now there's a name you probably haven't heard in a while) showing that the Internet could document and spread knowledge about drug use through newsgroups and forums, and eventually, in a miracle of globalization, chemists with foreign chemical laboratories with customers online. Here Drugs 2.0 really gets moving, covering Erowid, the Hive, Chinese labs doing dodgy syntheses, discussion of what chemical analogues are and how these grey-market communities can come up with literally scores of new substances every year, faster than they could be banned, interviews in person or email with some of these amateur chemists and Chinese lab operators and the intermediary businessmen, and of course, Silk Road 1 (Power's chapter on it, while unavoidably obsolete in 2016, was one of the better writeups around when it was published). The focus tends to be on the UK, but that's fine by me, as the UK's more explicit drug policy makes changes easier to describe, and Power includes interesting material on fads in the UK drug consumer market and how it affected choices (the safrole oil shortage's effects on MDMA and finding substitutes is a good one). Where I'm left a little dissatisfied is in descriptions of effects of the various RCs which have been discovered. By the end, you don't know too much about how the various drugs differ, or how many could be considered to have found a niche of their own as more than just a formerly legal analogue of something like psilocybin. Like a biography of a scientist which doesn't go into much depth about what their ideas or discoveries were, it feels incomplete. Disclosure: Mike Power has interviewed or quoted me on several occasions about the dark net markets, and gave me a free PDF of Drugs 2.0 back in 2014 or something. (But it was so hard to read because of publisher watermarking, that I downloaded a better copy from Libgen and read that instead.) ...more | Notes are private!
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1
| Mar 08, 2016
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Mar 08, 2016
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Mar 17, 2016
| Paperback
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0201596075
| 9780201596076
| 3.50
| 8
| Nov 09, 2000
| Nov 13, 2000
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really liked it
| None
| Notes are private!
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1
| Jan 2008
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Jan 2008
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Mar 13, 2016
| Paperback
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1250054710
| 9781250054715
| 4.15
| 122
| Jan 01, 2013
| Oct 14, 2014
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really liked it
| None
| Notes are private!
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1
| Mar 08, 2016
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Mar 08, 2016
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Mar 08, 2016
| Hardcover
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076537708X
| 9780765377081
| 4.38
| 8,011
| May 2008
| Aug 11, 2015
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really liked it
| None
| Notes are private!
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1
| Jan 07, 2016
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Jan 07, 2016
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Jan 08, 2016
| Hardcover
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0824819918
| 9780824819910
| 3.44
| 9
| May 01, 1987
| Aug 01, 1997
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None
| Notes are private!
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1
| Dec 09, 2015
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Feb 24, 2016
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Nov 24, 2015
| Paperback
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B00OZ4NIXI
| 3.96
| 8,006
| -57
| Sep 01, 2001
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really liked it
| None
| Notes are private!
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1
| Nov 22, 2015
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Mar 2016
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Nov 22, 2015
| Kindle Edition
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141659907X
| 9781416599074
| 3.75
| 11,154
| 2012
| Apr 10, 2012
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liked it
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Another entry in the Jacobs formula: he'll breeze through a large number of activities, giving very superficial descriptions & background, making
Another entry in the Jacobs formula: he'll breeze through a large number of activities, giving very superficial descriptions & background, making wisecracks, and recording his wife's reaction to everything. The problem with this one is that ultimately, all his health interventions are lame. Tim Ferris may be a huckster, but at least in 4 Hour Body, he put himself out on the edge and wrote about interesting things which might make real differences if they panned out; while Jacobs recycles crunchy granola nonsense and works his way through a bunch of boring and tired interventions and foods, many of which could never make any large difference in his health or longevity even if true.† He has no ambition or bravery at all: I was disappointed that he was scared off by caloric restriction and wouldn't even give intermittent fasting a try (despite alternate-day fasting being probably the simplest diet ever), and when he finally does try something a little more drastic like Clomid for testosterone deficiency he seems to abandon it as fast as he possibly can despite admitting that it seemed to be more effective than pretty much anything else. This is a general trend with everything he reports back on: he drops them as fast as possible, without giving them a fair shake. I mean, I don't believe that, say, fruit juice fasts work but if Jacobs is going to try then, couldn't he at least stick it out more than 3 days? I felt he was wasting both his and my time. (That said, I am amused to find out just how many eccentric exercise classes apparently can be found in Central Park over the course of a year.) Chapter 19 was on sleep, a subject near and dear to my own self-experimenting heart, so I had great expectations, and was disappointed to see that it boiled down to 'get a CPAP for snoring' and apparently using his brand-new Zeo less than week. Or on the topic of driving and walking helmets, whose net benefit I found myself uncertain of after reviewing some of the research literature, he brings them up but dismisses as impossible, not because they don't seem worthwhile, but because they would be too embarrassing - Jacobs, seriously, are you a man or a mouse? (The only things he seems to really stick with is his treadmill desk - well, fair enough for a writer - and, weirdly given his terror of embarrassment, noise-canceling headphones. As if the photos of the headphones didn't make him look like he was autistic...?) Some gaps just struck me as odd: why would a germaphobe look into squat toilets and wash his hands excessively, but omit any consideration of bidets which could remove most of the reason one would need to wash hands? Perhaps unsurprisingly, I reached the final chapter and was distinctly unimpressed what his two years of effort had wrought: I went for my final exam at EHE and found out I’d lost another half pound, ending at 156.5 (total weight loss: 16 pounds). I’d gone down two belt sizes. Dr. Harry Fisch told me that my lipid panel numbers “are so good, they’ll give you a heart attack” (HDL: 48, LDL: 62). I more than halved my body fat percentage. I can now run a mile in less than seven minutes as opposed to not at all. I have a visible chest. One might think that such results, while laudable, did not require 2 years and probably were entirely due his eating less and spending some time weightlifting and running. The evaluation of research is also weak. Jacobs promises in the intro to draw as much on the Cochrane Collaboration as possible (fantastic!) but if he did so in the rest of the book, I must've missed it (boo, hiss). And while it's a tired, sometimes overused truism in my parts of the Internet that 'correlation is not causation', Jacobs is one of the people for whom that dictum was meant. Aside from the main storyline of the latest health fad, Jacobs counterpoints the slow death from old age & dementia of his grandfather and the unexpected death of his eccentric orthorexic aunt. These are good reminders of the horrors of aging but while well intentioned, Jacobs, superficial and middle-class humorously as ever, is unable to bring out the tragedy of the material anywhere near as well as, say, Still Alice, Do No Harm, or even blog posts like "Who By Very Slow Decay". So what's good? Well, Jacobs is intermittently funny. He does go through a wide range of interventions, which is mildly interesting, and if nothing else, makes the point that there are a lot of hucksters and idiots and people fooled by randomness out there, and that there is no nostrum that will not put someone on cloud nine nor silver bullet so silly that it will not sooth someone's sickness. For me, it functioned as reminders (the accident chapter reminded me that after a slip in my bathroom, I had meant to buy anti-slip pads, which I've put on my shopping list; his treadmill usage has inspired me to clean off my own treadmill desk and at least use it while watching movies or playing games; I had heard of the potential benefits of squat toilets but until reading the FAQ by the guy selling them I had not realized that it was possible to retrofit regular Western toilets to be squat toilets, so I may grab some cinder blocks & plywood and give it a try; and his own conspicuous failure to try out IF makes me feel more motivated to give it a try myself soon, especially now that I've got daily blood glucose measurements debugged). So it wasn't all bad. † To elaborate on this one point: we don't have hard precise evidence on most of the claims covered in the book, but for a lot of them we can give upper bounds on maximum possible benefits. For starters, lifespan is in humans, as it is in other species, partially heritable, so about a quarter of variability is off the table from the getgo. And no one has ever lived longer than Jeanne Calment's 122 years while life expectancy for Jacobs is ~80 (above-average since he's an employed well-educated white man with good family longevity), so he couldn't expect more than 40 years for anything that past humans have tried. Similarly, because of the exponential increase in death risk with age, the value of preventing any given disease in old age is not as high as it may seem, since if you prevent a heart attack, they may just die of a stroke or Alzheimer's instead, which sharply limits how valuable any particular intervention could be. So for example, if you could prevent cancer in its entirety, I've seen estimates that this might add a grand total of 10 years to average life expectancy, which is much less than one would expect; Jacobs quotes one person as noting there's something like 50k industrial chemicals out there; so if all cancers were caused by a modern industrial chemical, and you could eliminate each chemical completely for free at the cost of a day's research or work or income, then doing so would be... a huge net loss since 50,000 days >> 10 years (3,652 days). Not to mention that adult life expectancies have kept increasing hand in hand with the proliferation of industrial chemicals, suggesting that all of them together can explain only a fraction of variance. If you spend a day worrying about Bisphenol, you'd better have good reasons for thinking it's very likely to be harmful, because the prior probability is low, the harm is likely fairly minimal, you can't do much about it, and what you can do is expensive. ...more | Notes are private!
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1
| Nov 08, 2015
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Nov 09, 2015
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Nov 09, 2015
| Hardcover
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3.66
| 115
| Nov 01, 2015
| Nov 2015
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liked it
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Pop sci, which reads more like overgrown blog posts. Very weak overview of IQ's connection to income: poor overview of what IQ is, all its correlates,
Pop sci, which reads more like overgrown blog posts. Very weak overview of IQ's connection to income: poor overview of what IQ is, all its correlates, the evidence establishing its causal role like the iodization historical studies (which I think are extremely important yet there's not even allusions to their results), and surprisingly brief coverage of the cross-national correlational and longitudinal regressions (which you would think would be discussed at length). Jones pretty much doesn't discuss core issues like measurement error of IQ and income, and he is shockingly naively optimistic about the prospects of boosting global IQ - he takes the Flynn effect fully at face value, ignores education signaling (this, from a colleague of Caplan...?), and totally ignores the technical issues about IQ gains typically resulting from loss of validity of the test, publication bias, short-term gains fading out, and the almost total failure to find meaningful intelligence boosts from anything other than parasite eradication and iron & iodine supplementation - which have been largely done for most countries... I am not surprised that I learned little from the book, but I am disappointed that it is so superficial & scattershot and I cannot link it to other people as a good explanation of why IQs matter so much to people & countries and why we should put very high valuations on charitable projects like iodization. See also http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/12/08/... / http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/12/10/... ...more | Notes are private!
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1
| Feb 24, 2016
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Feb 24, 2016
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Nov 04, 2015
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0142437808
| 9780142437803
| 3.34
| 72,051
| 1911
| Sep 28, 2006
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really liked it
| None
| Notes are private!
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1
| not set
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Jan 2002
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Nov 01, 2015
| Paperback
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0465065708
| 9780465065707
| 3.78
| 777
| Sep 08, 2015
| Sep 22, 2015
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it was ok
|
Domingos wants to cover all of machine learning for the layman, but it winds up being a big mess. The level of explanation veers wildly from ridiculous Domingos wants to cover all of machine learning for the layman, but it winds up being a big mess. The level of explanation veers wildly from ridiculously oversimplified to technical minutiae. It is more confusing than enlightening as it goes through topics in an almost random order, scattering them all throughout the book. (You would think that Hume's problem of induction, the underdetermination of data, Occam's razor, the curse of dimensionality, and overfitting, would all be discussed in one and the same place in order to set the stage for how the various 'tribes' work, but you would be wrong.) The manic stream-of-consciousness writing style also drives me nuts, and the little medieval-fantasy passages come off as puerile. (I smiled. Once.) The explanations are almost uniformly terrible (another reviewer asks if this is the worst explanation of Bayesian inference one has ever read; I would have to say that at least for me, this is competitive for that distinction), and most are explained as briefly as decision trees are waxed endlessly upon. Major premises like there being any really universal algorithm are poorly presented; compare Domingo's argument for there being a neural algorithm with, say Jacob Cannell's "The Brain as a Universal Learning Machine" Content-wise, I have to seriously question the inclusion of evolutionary programming as a top-tier paradigm, and analogies hardly seem much more relevant a grouping either, and all that space comes at a huge cost of extreme superficiality about what deep learning is doing right now. Let me remark on how astounding it is to read a book whose self-proclaimed goal is to de-mystify machine learning for the layman, explain recent advances in deep learning that have created such media hype and sparked so much commercial & public & research interest, and which seems to only go from strength to strength to the point where sometimes it feels like one can hardly even skim a fascinating paper before yet another one has been uploaded to Arxiv, and which winds up doing little but explaining what backpropagation is and then passing grandiosely onto other topics and not, y'know, covering anything like solving Imagenet, caption generation, logical inference using reading of passages, etc. Or to read a decent capsule description of the general paradigm of reinforcement learning... and then see deep reinforcement learning described in a few sentences mostly to the effect that learning can be unstable - really? That is what laymen need to know about deep reinforcement learning, that - whatever it is - it can be unstable? Oh, and he offers us his thoughts on AI risk, the fruit of his decades of experience with machine learning: Relax. The chances that an AI equipped with the Master Algorithm will take over the world are zero. The reason is simple: unlike humans, computers don’t have a will of their own. They’re products of engineering, not evolution. Even an infinitely powerful computer would still be only an extension of our will and nothing to fear...The optimizer then does everything in its power to maximize the evaluation function—no more and no less—and the evaluation function is determined by us. A more powerful computer will just optimize it better. There’s no risk of it getting out of control, even if it’s a genetic algorithm. A learned system that didn’t do what we want would be severely unfit and soon die out. In fact, it’s the systems that have even a slight edge in serving us better that will, generation after generation, multiply and take over the gene pool. Of course, if we’re so foolish as to deliberately program a computer to put itself above us, then maybe we’ll get what we deserve. The same reasoning applies to all AI systems because they all—explicitly or implicitly—have the same three components. They can vary what they do, even come up with surprising plans, but only in service of the goals we set them. A robot whose programmed goal is “make a gooddinner” may decide to cook a steak, a bouillabaisse, or even a delicious new dish of its own creation, but it can’t decide to murder its owner any more than a car can decide to fly away. The purpose of AI systems is to solve NP-complete problems, which, as you may recall from Chapter 2, may take exponential time, but the solutions can always be checked efficiently. We should therefore welcome with open arms computers that are vastly more powerful than our brains, safe in the knowledge that our job is exponentially easier than theirs. How I wish I was making up these arguments. (Aside from the invocation of complexity theory which is not even wrong, this sort of naivete is sad coming from someone so enthusiastic about genetic algorithms, where researchers routinely discover that the evaluation function is quite difficult.) Overall, I would absolutely recommend against this book for any laymen interested in statistics or machine learning. You will be better off with Silver's The Signal and the Noise, reading random presentations on Schmidhuber's website, Bostrom's Superintelligence or even Hutter's Machine Super Intelligence or Domingos's own "A Few Useful Things to Know about Machine Learning" (which was really good) or anything really. (Suggestions are welcomed on things I can recommend for laymen instead of this...) ...more | Notes are private!
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1
| Oct 24, 2015
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Oct 24, 2015
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Oct 24, 2015
| Hardcover
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0029164303
| 9780029164303
| 4.11
| 9
| 1980
| Jan 01, 1980
|
it was amazing
|
(410k words / 840 pages; online edition; WP) One of the classics in the field, Jensen sets out to explain almost everything, it seems, in psychometric
(410k words / 840 pages; online edition; WP) One of the classics in the field, Jensen sets out to explain almost everything, it seems, in psychometrics, from the core concept of error-prone measurements and extracting factors to the various tests available, their correlates, concrete justifications for why the normal distribution is more than an assumption of convenience (a number of the points were new to me), exhaustive coverage of the core topic of various kinds of bias and evidence against them, to culture-fair tests, and finally how mental testing is best employed. (There is also some discussion of behavioral genetics and what the genetic architecture of intelligence might be, but that's a minor topic and he gives more attention to other things like reaction-time research.) Discussion of the topics straddles that fine line between too informal and too formal, as Jensen is careful to introduce and explain each concept as he goes and includes excellent summaries at the end of each chapter to the point where this would make a good textbook and it is so readable that I think even new tudents to statistics could understand almost everything in the book (at least, as long as they paid attention and occasionally checked back to the glossary to be reminded of which of the many formulas is relevant to a particular point; there is a ton of content and skimming will not work). Overall, my impression is extremely positive. I'm especially impressed that despite now being 35+ years old (and hence based on research from before then), there's hardly anything substantive I can object to. The statistical principles are largely the same, the black-white gap has hardly budged, the lack of bias remains accepted, etc. I saw no large mistakes or content that has been totally obsoleted, and in some areas one would have to say Jensen is being constantly vindicated by the latest research - in particular, in arguing for the genetics of people of non-retarded intelligence being largely uniform over the intelligence range and governed by a large number of additive alleles (yielding an objective normal distribution), none of it needs any correction. Afterwards I read a recent review, "Bias in mental testing since Bias in Mental Testing", Brown et al 1999, comes to the same conclusion. ...more | Notes are private!
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1
| Oct 08, 2015
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Oct 22, 2015
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Oct 08, 2015
| Hardcover
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142009176X
| 9781420091762
| 3.00
| 1
| Feb 01, 2010
| Feb 01, 2010
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liked it
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An inside view of how to run the War on Drugs for the boots on the ground. If you can manage to stand the unctuous & self-congratulatory tone and
An inside view of how to run the War on Drugs for the boots on the ground. If you can manage to stand the unctuous & self-congratulatory tone and its brazenness in pretending that civil asset seizure is anything but a travesty, you will find it's an informative overview of how cops approach drug busts and what limits are on them, and confirmation of much of the common wisdom (for example, that the private carriers like UPS or FedEx have zero interest in standing up for their customers); I don't think I'm spoiling anything when I reveal that the book's advice for each transportation modality can be boiled down to (1) cultivate informants among regular staff; and (2) trick or intimidate as many people as possible into agreeing to searches of themselves or their homes or possessions. Those interested in the DNMs should read Chapter 3: "Knock and Talk Technique" & Chapter 10: "Drug Parcel Systems". (The claims in ch3 may seem improbable, but if you read through my census of DNM arrests, particularly Australia or New Zealand arrests, you'll see many people do immediately confess.) ...more | Notes are private!
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1
| Oct 06, 2015
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Oct 08, 2015
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Oct 08, 2015
| Hardcover
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1597801577
| 9781597801577
| 3.74
| 46,121
| 2009
| Sep 01, 2009
|
really liked it
|
WG is Burdett's Bangkok 8 meets Chua's World on Fire: a Thailand crime thriller which goes from commercial espionage to national politics in which the
WG is Burdett's Bangkok 8 meets Chua's World on Fire: a Thailand crime thriller which goes from commercial espionage to national politics in which the Southeast Asian mixture of deep reverence for a decaying & incompetent monarchy combines with globalizing capitalism and ambitious military leaders plotting a coup and a population stewing with resentment towards a Chinese immigrant underclass (exemplified by the clever Hock Seng who tries to sense the winds of ethnic cleansing & escape in time) which bids fair to turn Thailand into another Malaysia, which combustible mixture explodes when lit off by a crusading cop & his two-faced sidekick and the accident of a trafficked Japanese prostitute. While not a genre I have any particular devotion to, it's a fun one to return too since I haven't read a thriller novel set in Thailand in a long time so it's fresh to me, and I particularly enjoyed the sections dealing with Hock Seng's planning. (To a lesser extent, I was interested in the treacherous subordinate.) I read it in two sittings because I wanted to see what happened. Oh, and apparently it's supposed to be a SF novel as well. That part doesn't need too much discussion since WG is not very good as a SF novel: while the worldbuilding is detailed, perhaps even excessive in terms of providing jargon and little tidbits for the reader to figure out (I can't quite decide whether to fault WG for data-dumps, since it does a good job early on avoiding explaining too much but I think the discipline wavers later on), the world thus built unfortunately lacks any intellectual coherence, and so it fails utterly as any kind of Gibsonian near-future extrapolation, or any kind of extrapolation at all for that matter - in its thoughtlessness and cliches, it comes off as just more Al-Gore-style liberal chic (to list two examples I couldn't stop thinking about: so the world economy is based on springs as an energy storage mechanism and coal & biofuel as the only apparent energy sources, with nothing about solar panels...? humanity is supposed to have engineered super-effective broad-spectrum plant viruses which Nature, despite billions of years/quadrillions of viral generations over quintillions of individual viruses, has not...? it's hard to know which of these two points is more wildly improbable.) Also, I can forgive the mad scientist cliche who we're supposed to have mixed feelings about (although to me as a transhumanist, the question is not 'why not have everyone be New People' but 'why hasn't that already happened when they're described as a brilliant success and improvements in every way upon baseline humanity?') but it seems a little dubious to name the book after one of the characters whose portrayal is the least convincing. ...more | Notes are private!
| none
|
1
| Oct 05, 2015
|
Oct 07, 2015
|
Oct 08, 2015
| Hardcover
|
| cover | title | author | avg rating | rating | my rating | date read | date added | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
3.90
|
liked it
|
Oct 23, 2016
|
Oct 23, 2016
| ||||||
4.43
|
liked it
|
Sep 25, 2016
|
Sep 25, 2016
| ||||||
3.90
|
liked it
|
Jan 2002
|
Sep 14, 2016
| ||||||
4.67
|
really liked it
|
Jan 2005
|
Sep 06, 2016
| ||||||
4.15
|
really liked it
|
Aug 21, 2016
|
Aug 21, 2016
| ||||||
3.62
|
liked it
|
Jul 24, 2016
|
Jul 27, 2016
| ||||||
4.04
|
really liked it
|
Jul 16, 2016
|
Jul 18, 2016
| ||||||
4.03
|
liked it
|
Jul 31, 2016
|
Jul 13, 2016
| ||||||
4.04
|
liked it
|
Jul 10, 2016
|
Jun 19, 2016
| ||||||
3.00
|
liked it
|
Jun 13, 2016
|
Jun 19, 2016
| ||||||
4.16
|
really liked it
|
Jun 13, 2016
|
Jun 11, 2016
| ||||||
4.32
|
liked it
|
May 24, 2016
|
May 19, 2016
| ||||||
4.16
|
really liked it
|
May 03, 2016
|
Apr 29, 2016
| ||||||
3.97
|
really liked it
|
Apr 28, 2016
|
Apr 23, 2016
| ||||||
3.73
|
really liked it
|
Apr 13, 2016
|
Apr 09, 2016
| ||||||
3.87
|
really liked it
|
Mar 27, 2016
|
Mar 28, 2016
| ||||||
3.50
|
liked it
|
Mar 28, 2016
|
Mar 25, 2016
| ||||||
4.15
|
really liked it
|
Mar 08, 2016
|
Mar 17, 2016
| ||||||
3.50
|
really liked it
|
Jan 2008
|
Mar 13, 2016
| ||||||
4.15
|
really liked it
|
Mar 08, 2016
|
Mar 08, 2016
| ||||||
4.38
|
really liked it
|
Jan 07, 2016
|
Jan 08, 2016
| ||||||
3.44
|
Feb 24, 2016
|
Nov 24, 2015
| |||||||
3.96
|
really liked it
|
Mar 2016
|
Nov 22, 2015
| ||||||
3.75
|
liked it
|
Nov 09, 2015
|
Nov 09, 2015
| ||||||
3.66
|
liked it
|
Feb 24, 2016
|
Nov 04, 2015
| ||||||
3.34
|
really liked it
|
Jan 2002
|
Nov 01, 2015
| ||||||
3.78
|
it was ok
|
Oct 24, 2015
|
Oct 24, 2015
| ||||||
4.11
|
it was amazing
|
Oct 22, 2015
|
Oct 08, 2015
| ||||||
3.00
|
liked it
|
Oct 08, 2015
|
Oct 08, 2015
| ||||||
3.74
|
really liked it
|
Oct 07, 2015
|
Oct 08, 2015
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