Gwern > Books: read‎ (2119)

"I owe to De Quincey (to whom my debt is so vast that to point out only one part of it may appear to repudiate or silence the others) my first notice

"I owe to De Quincey (to whom my debt is so vast that to point out only one part of it may appear to repudiate or silence the others) my first notice of …"

If at times I have appeared knowledgeable or worth reading to others, it is perhaps only because I have stood on the shoulders of Borges and Wikipedia. Borges the essayist is deeply underrated. (Borges’s poetry does not survive translation very well; and his fiction often, I feel, struggles to harmonize the divergence requirements of truth and falsity, while in his essays he needs not cloak his thoughts.)

Of the 161 items translated in this volume, I would suggest as starting points these 22:

Borges, I think, died happy.

The Apollo 15 commander spent two days drifting home from the Moon with a man who had (or felt he had) heard God calling to him there - Jim Irwin - and I want to know whether the crew discussed this at all?


The reply comes quickly. "No, there wasn't really time, we were too busy doing the science." And through the pause which follows, I'm thinking, "Oh well, I tried." But then Scott continues.


"That's an interesting question, though, because Jim was deeply affected. For instance, before the Moon, he was a good speaker, but afterwards he was a great one. He really believed. Something real happened to him." He then speaks about something which he called his "left seat-right seat" theory, referring to the fact that the commander stood to the left in the lander with the Lunar Module pilot on his right. He sounds reflective for the first time as he notes: "The six guys in the left seat went down paths you'd have expected, but the six in the right seats went off in all kinds of unexpected directions."


And I suddenly recall Ed Mitchell saying something similar. In fact he had a name for it. I'd asked whether he thought some of the Moonwalkers had been more open to the experience than others and he answered:


"Well, one thing to note is that most of the guys who were vocal about the depth of the experience were Lunar Module pilots. It's known phenomenon, from military studies, that the guy in the rear seat of a two-seater aircraft and the guy actually doing the flying have different experiences, because they're focussed on different things. It's the command phenomenon. The view of the guy who has to be alert and on top of things is different from the guy who's just along for the ride. So those of us coming back from the Moon who were LM pilots, we weren't just along for the ride - we had chores - but we didn't have major responsibilities, because the spacecraft was functioning well. We could take it in and contemplate what we were doing more thoroughly." He further added: "I think that was also true for people back home on Earth, though obviously in a different way. Those pictures of the Earth from the Moon are the most published pictures in the world. And so one has to ask the question: Why is that so? What is that? And to me, it's because they speak to that spirit of quest that humans have. And to the question 'Who are we? '"


Yes. Now Scott is talking about Ed and his noetic quest, and Buzz Aldrin with his postflight breakdown ... and Alan Bean with his Close Encounters Moon art ... and of course Charlie Duke and Jim Irwin, who were directly or indirectly led to their faiths by the Moon. Only Jack Schmitt followed a straight and normal path, and then only if you consider a desire to enter the Senate normal. And for the first time, I fall to reflecting on my own encounters with these men; on the LM pilots' eagerness to communicate what they'd felt up there and the way it seemed to still live inside them, as against the by-turns maddening and amusing imperviousness of the surviving mission commanders. Armstrong, Young, Cernan, Scott: I can admire them all in different ways, but wouldn't want them near me if I were a talk-show host or composer of sonnets. Afterwards, I go to find Scott, because I want to know whether he thinks this postflight divergence is attributable to the different experiences of the Moonwalkers - as he seemed to be implying - or whether Deke simply assigned them roles according to character type, with focus and singularity seen as the stuff of leadership.


..."No, character doesn't come into it," he says. Really? I ask, but he shakes his head firmly. "Character was never an issue." So he agrees with Ed Mitchell that there was something primal in the experience, at least for those who had the time and mental space to be affected by it? "I think so. Yes." He leaves a short gap, as though considering this for the first time. "It's interesting, isn't it?"


Yes, I agree, it is - even though by this stage of my travels I can no longer believe it to be true. I think Deke Slayton chose his commanders precisely for their rarefied focus and tightly reined imaginations; for their relative immunity to doubt, ambivalence and vacillation - states that arise from sensitivity to one's situation, but might also delay decisions by the split second that turned success to anguish. What Slayton wanted was impregnability. Many of the commanders appear to be fine men, but it seems to me unlikely that they were ever going to become painters or preachers or poets or gurus, or have much to say about the metaphysical resonance of their journey.


...We pass through money and families and end up at Schmitt the scientist’s different take on the divorces, with him pointing out: “Because it was obviously frowned on for a long time, there were no divorces at first. And then there was some pent-up demand, of course, that finally occurred. But remember, you’re dealing with a fairly specialized selection of Americans. Most of them were only sons or eldest sons in Apollo, and they almost all exhibited what psychiatrists, I think, would call ‘Type A’ personality traits. And so you have to evaluate everything that they’ve done since or during that time against that kind of a general personality background.”


And I say: My God! Why didn’t I notice this earlier? When I get home, I call some psychologists and they recommend a book called Born to Rebel by Frank Sulloway, who sees families as “ecosystems in which siblings compete for parental favour by occupying specialized niches.” In his view, the strategies required of these niches become major influences on personality formation. It’s a startling fact that every Moonwalker I’ve met has been either an eldest sibling or only son. More astonishingly still, this will turn out to hold true for them all. Is that what brought them here? Driven, work-obsessed, time-obsessed, fiercely competitive, prone to stress-induced heart disease … Type A. As the eldest of three sons, this produces a particular queasiness (bordering on panic) in me. At any rate, the Type A thesis would chime with the competitiveness Gene Cernan and others have described in the Astronaut Office – though Schmitt, another only son, takes a typically rational and somewhat different view of this, too, averring: “It wasn’t so vicious, because nobody quite knew how Deke Slayton picked his crews.”...I ask whether Schmitt thinks that going to the Moon changed him, repeating Alan Bean’s view that all the Moonwalkers came back “more like they already were,” and his face lights up. He says he didn’t know that Bean had said that, but it’s exactly what he, too, has felt for the last thirty years. The only one who went in a direction no one could have imagined, he suggests, was the Apollo 15 commander, David Scott, whose lustrous career was destroyed by the “stamp scandal” which overtook him a few months after his return: a storm which broke over NASA’s discovery that he and his crew (LM pilot Jim Irwin and CM pilot Alfred Worden) had smuggled 400 commemorative envelopes to the Moon, then sold them to a stamp dealer for a profit of around $6,000 per man. There was nothing illegal in this, but it was against regulations and the crew were canned, with the incident following Scott like a toxic cloud ever after, because he was the commander and thus forced to shoulder the responsibility. Over the three decades which followed he would become the most evasive of all the astronauts, including Armstrong. I find his story intriguing and a little scary.

(online letters) The famous annual letters of Buffett laying out the progress of Berkshire Hathaway and his & Munger’s investment beliefs. Apropos

(online letters) The famous annual letters of Buffett laying out the progress of Berkshire Hathaway and his & Munger’s investment beliefs. Apropos of an investigation into Long Bets as a charitable giving opportunity, I read through them. Perhaps the most interesting part about them is how skewed Buffett’s reputation is, given how often he is cited as a counter-example to EMH, despite him clearly explaining his strategy many times. What is most striking about Buffett’s returns is how, despite talking about how irrational “Mr. Market” is, Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway stay away from the general stock market. Reading through, I am stuck by the critical roles played by captive insurance companies and by buying private companies which are not on the stock markets; the methods are radically different from those of hedge funds like Thorp or RenTech, which focus on mispricings in the stock market and whose long-term successes might indeed show substantial weaknesses to the weak EMH. To summarize, the overall arc of Buffett/Hathaway appears to have been:

using float plus cashflow to maintain a large capital which can be deployed for brief once-in-a-decade opportunities like stock market crashes or companies in sudden distress or (in one particularly interesting example) resolving the Lloyd’s of London reinsurance spiral, reaping extraordinary returns (1960s-present). As Buffett puts it:

Occasionally, though, either because of company-specific problems or a worldwide shortage of credit, maturities must actually be met by payment. For that, only cash will do the job. Borrowers then learn that credit is like oxygen. When either is abundant, its presence goes unnoticed. When either is missing, that’s all that is noticed. Even a short absence of credit can bring a company to its knees. [We, at Berkshire] have pledged that we will hold at least $10 billion of cash. We customarily keep at least $20 billion. By being so cautious in respect to leverage, we penalize our returns by a minor amount. Having loads of liquidity, though, lets us sleep well. Moreover, during the episodes of financial chaos that occasionally erupt in our economy, we will be equipped both financially and emotionally to play offense while others scramble for survival. That’s what allowed us to invest $15.6 billion in 25 days of panic following the Lehman bankruptcy in 2008.

as capital expands & returns fall, with small private companies no longer worth the time it takes to investigate, move to purchasing/investing in mega-corporations with vast capital investments required (2000s-present)

Step #2 is interesting. Buffett praises the businesses he bought in step #2 like See’s Candy as all being solid businesses that an idiot could run, with little competition, long streams of earnings, requiring little or no capital investment and benefiting from no synergies with other BH companies, and which the existing managers (often family) could be left in place to run as before they sold out (all being highly capable managers Buffett praises in the most extravagant terms), and notes that cumulatively they earned billions of dollars which fueled his purchases of GEICO and General Re etc. Given all these facts, one has to ask: why did any of these companies’ owners ever sell to Buffett in the first place? And the answer is… I don’t know. Even by Buffett’s presumably favorable recounting, many of the reasons were downright idiotic, like the furniture store owner who sold to ‘stop her kids from fighting over it’ (which is one of the worst forms of estate planning I’ve ever heard of and doesn’t actually resolve the issue since presumably then they would simply fight over the estate’s cash). A better reason is that they don’t want to go public and corrupt their vision, so they sell to Buffett instead, but that’s not a great reason either as they forfeit a tremendous cashflow. Given his famously fast offers and handshake deals, I can only guess that either sometimes even highly experienced entrepreneurs go insane & decide to sell on the spur of the moment, or they develop bizarrely high discount rates and decide to sell lucrative income streams for a pittance up front. After finishing, I went looking for commentary and found Matt Levine and an investment banker noting the same thing (albeit in much more cynical terms), and I can’t really disagree: reading Buffett’s own descriptions, he drove extremely hard bargains and almost all of the business owners (except Dexter Shoes, who correctly insisted on BH stock instead of cash) would’ve made a lot more money selling to anyone but the kind avuncular Sage of Omaha. I don’t blame Buffett for doing this, as it is the owners’ faults for being so easily out-negotiated, and certainly Buffett is making far better use of his money in philanthropy than any of them would have, but still, this is not a model which can be emulated and such a method can hardly be considered a strike against the EMH.

Step #3 is interesting since float isn’t necessarily that profitable, but aside from some discussions of “supercat insurance” (a very interesting area of reinsurance I always enjoy reading about), Buffett doesn’t explain exactly why it worked so well; as far as I can tell, none of the supercat events wound up severely impacting BH and so BH got very lucky in those contracts. If he went into why BH insurance was so efficient and well-priced, I might have been more impressed by his skills.

Step #4 is something of an exception that proves the rule. If Buffett has to wait a decade for major vulture buying opportunities, that implies that such mispricings are actually quite rare, since he is not out routinely making such deals. Here he clearly benefits from the unique access to insurance floats to have lots of large but very cheap capital to throw around. One has to suspect that any returns from that are not that impressive after accounting for that, a pool of money simply not available to most investors.

And in step #5, returns have fallen drastically and are no longer anything much to explain.

So the critical steps are either forever vanished (there will never be inefficiencies in stocks and warrants as enormous as they were in the 1940s-1950s, and there will perhaps never again be an economic boom to compare with the US post-WWII return on all American equities) or irreproducible (there are only so many insurers), and Buffett appears to have benefited from a large helping of luck: luck that nuclear war didn’t break out, luck that he has lived so long and in such health that his persona could pay off in off-market purchases, luck that BH avoided all the supercatastrophes in the 1990s, luck that he cottoned onto GEICO early on, luck that BH never fell prey to legal action like some hedge fund competitors such as Thorp did etc. Looking at how he did it, I feel certain that if Buffett were reborn today and handed a copy of Graham, he would find it thoroughly useless and not die a billionaire.

And one wonders how much return Buffett’s mistakes cost him. For example, the initial foray into textiles he often mentions, but he repeated it with Dexter Shoes - I read the letter announcing the purchase and thought to myself, “buying another textile/clothing company in New England? Why on earth? It doesn’t sound like it has any monopoly or regulatory capture or other moat at all. This is not going to end well” and indeed it did not - and in early letters he focuses heavily on inflation long after it had been tamed (at what cost to investment decisions, one wonders), and then in the 2000s forecast doom for the US via the trade deficit (which thus far has not eventuated and he quietly dropped the topic altogether). I can’t say I feel like I learned all that much from reading his analyses.

So to sum up based on his letters: Buffett made his money largely off the efficient stock markets in irreproducible ways exploiting individual irrationality while benefiting from historical and personal luck and is a poor example for anyone trying to argue that the weak EMH is sufficiently false as to make stockpicking a good idea. His investment advice is not particularly impressive or actionable (does anyone need to be told to invest in indexes now?) while the more interesting technical areas like his actual securities trading and insurance pricing methods are deftly concealed under rustic bonhomie, and his writings, while clear, are increasingly repetitive and recycling of jokes toward the end (hopefully as a result of needing to reiterate basics to the growing legions of BH shareholders and not because of senility). All in all, I came out less impressed with Buffett’s investment acumen than I started. There are probably better materials to read on stock markets and investment (certainly, Fortune’s Formula was much more interesting).

I think of that old woman in the song

Who could not know herself without the skirt

They cut off while she slept beside a stile.

Her dog jumped at the unaccustomed legs

And barked till she turned slowly from her gate

And went - I never asked them where she went.



The child is hopeful and unhappy in a world

Whose future is his recourse: she kept walking

Until the skirt grew, cleared her head and dog -

Surely I thought so when I laughed. If skirts don't grow,

If things can happen so, and you not know

What you could do, why, what is there you could do?



I know now she went nowhere; went to wait

In the bare night of the fields, to whisper:

"I'll sit and wish that it was never so."

I see her sitting on the ground and wishing,

The wind jumps like a dog against her legs,

And she keeps thinking: "This is all a dream."



"Who would cut off a poor old woman's skirt?

So good too. No, it's not so:

No one could feel so, really." And yet one might.

A ghost must; and she was, perhaps, a ghost.

The first night I looked into the mirror

And saw the room empty, I could not believe



That it was possible to keep existing

In such pain: I have existed.



Was the old woman dead? What does it matter?

- Am I dead? A ghost, a real ghost

Has no need to die: what is he except

A being without access to the universe

That he has not yet managed to forget?

RAPHAEL:



The sun sings out, as of old

Against the spheres' unchanging sound;

Yet once more, with thunderous footsteps,

He works out his predestined round.

Though no angel fathoms him, his face

Gives strength to them upon their way;

The inconceivably exalted works

Are glorious as on the first day.



GABRIEL:



Swift, past all understanding swift

Is the splendor of earth's whirling flight:

The brilliance of Paradise is changed

For the awful darkness of the night.

The ocean foams up, overwhelming,

The great rocks tremble with the force,

And rocks and ocean are swept onward

In the spheres' swift, eternal course.



MICHAEL:



In rivalry the tempests roar

From sea to land, from land to sea,

And, raging, forge out for the earth

Fetters of wildest energy.

Before the path of the thunderbolt

The lightnings of desolation blaze.

And yet thine angels, Lord, adore

The tranquil footsteps of they days.



ALL THREE:



Since none can fathom thee, thy face

Gives strength to us upon our way,

And thine exalted works, O God,

Are glorious as on the first day.

I went to the cupboard, I opened the door,

I cried to my people, O it's not there!

"How long did you think it would last?" said the cook,

Said the butler, "Does anyone care?"

But where is it, where is it? O it's not there,

Not there to be saved, not there to be saved

If I'm saved it will not be there.



I ran to a plate, to a pig, to a dish,

An old china pig, a plate, to a pear,

Said, To find it, O, I will look anywhere,

Said, Anywhere, Anywhere... "Look anywhere,"

Said the plate as it laughed, "yes, look anywhere;

There's as good as here, there's as good as there -

For where shall you look to be saved?"



I said to my people, the plate, to the cupboard,

The pig on its platter, the pear, the pear:

O where is my salvation

"O it's not anywhere.

You break in my head like a dish", said the plate,

"A pig", said the pig, "a pear", said the pear -

Not there to be saved, go not there to be saved,

If you're saved it will not be there.

There was once upon a time a little owl.

He lived with his mother in a hollow tree.

On winter nights he'd hear the foxes howl,

He'd hear his mother call, and he would see

The moonlight glittering upon the snow:

How many times he wished for company

As he sat there alone! He'd stand on tiptoe,

Staring across the forest for his mother,

And hear her far away; he'd look below

And see the rabbits playing with each other

And see the ducks together on the lake

And wish that he'd a sister or a brother:

Sometimes it seemed to him his heart would break.

The hours went by, slow, dreary, wearisome,

And he would watch, and sleep a while, and wake -

"Come home! Come home!" he'd think; and she would come

At last, and bring him food, and they would sleep.

Outside the day glared, and the troublesome

Sounds of the light, the shouts and caws that keep

An owl awake, went on; and, dark in daylight,

The owl and owlet nestled there. But one day, deep

In his dark dream, warm, still, he saw a white

Bird flying to him over the white good.

The great owl's wings were wide, his beak was bright.

He whispered to the owlet: "You have been good

A long time now, and waited all alone

Night after long night. We have understood

And you shall have a sister of your own

A friend to play with, if, now, you will fly

From your warn nest into the harsh unknown

World the sun lights." Down from the bright sky

The light fell, when at last the owlet woke.

Far, far away he heard an owlet cry.

The sunlight blazed upon a broken oak

Over the lake, and as he saw the tree

It seemed to the owlet that the sunlight spoke.

He heard it whisper: "Come to me! O come to me!"

The world outside was cold and hard and bare;

But at last the owlet, flapping desperately,

Flung himself out upon the naked air

And lurched and staggered to the nearest limb

Of the next tree. How good it felt to him,

That solid branch! And, there in that green pine,

How calm it was, how shadowy and dim!

But once again he flapped into the sunshine -

Through all the tumult of the unfriendly day,

Tree by tree by tree, along the shoreline

Of the white lake, he made his clumsy way.

At the bottom of the oak he saw a dead

Owl in the snow. He flew to where it lay

All cold and still; he looked at it in dread.

Then something gave a miserable cry -

There in the oak's nest, far above his head,

An owlet sat. He thought: The nest's too high,

I'll never reach it. "Come here!" he called. "Come here!"

But the owlet hid. And so he had to try

To fly up - and at last, when he was near

And stopped, all panting, underneath the nest

And she gazed down at him, her face looked dear

As his own sister's, it was the happiest

Hour of his life. In a little, when the two

Had made friends, they started home. He did his best

To help her: lurching and staggering, she flew

From branch to branch, and he flapped at her side.

The sun shone, dogs barked, boys shouted - on they flew.

Sometimes they'd rest; sometimes they would glide

A long way, from a high tree to a low,

So smoothly - and they'd feel so satisfied,

So grown-up! Then, all black against the snow,

Some crows came cawing, ugly things! The wise

Owlets sat still as mice; when one big crow

Sailed by, a branch away, they shut their eyes

And looked like lumps of snow. And when the night,

The friend of owls, had come, they saw the moon rise

And there came flying to them through the moonlight

The mother owl. How strong, how good, how dear

She did look! "Mother!" they called in their delight.

Then the three sat there just as we sit here,

And nestled close, and talked - at last they flew

Home to the nest. All night the mother would appear

And disappear, with good things; and the two

Would eat and eat and eat, and then they'd play.

But when the mother came, the mother knew

How tired they were. "Soon it will be day

And time for every owl to be in his nest",

She said to them tenderly; and they

Felt they were tired, and went to her to rest.

She opened her wings, they nestled to her breast.

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.)

(I read the Project Gutenberg edition, which appears to be the first version which is shorter but generally said to be the better version. 36k words,

(I read the Project Gutenberg edition, which appears to be the first version which is shorter but generally said to be the better version. 36k words, 1-2 hours.)

One of the more famous drug memoirs, up there with Huxley’s The Doors of Perception in influence and how many people it has convinced to experiment. Most drugs that inspire prose tend to be psychedelics, and given the modern opiate epidemic, one is a little surprised to come across an opiate memoir, but de Quincey, when writing about opium, sounds remarkably like a modern drug writer, whose sentiments would fit right in at a 1960s California powwow, right down to his speculation that humans possess enormous powers of memory or thought which are suppressed in ordinary life but may reveal them under the proper (perhaps chemical) influence. I had heard the phrase ‘opium dream’ but somehow it had never dawned on me that this might be quite literal and smoking opium, like DMT, might cause dissociated states with engrossing hallucinations in addition to the euphoria and pain-killing aspects one expects from opiates.

The parts dealing with opium, however, are brief and could easily be excerpted in a review. The bulk of the work, which is hardly quoted, turns out to be a turgidly overwritten Romantic autobiography of de Quincey, where he professes to confess the troubles of his life and his innermost emotions; however, with de Quincey, author of “On Murder Considered as one of the Fine Arts”, the more he confesses about his life, the more puzzling it becomes why he is boring us with his melodramatic autobiography which ultimately has so little to do with the humdrum entirely ordinary circumstances of his opium addiction, the less one believes him, and the more suspicion builds up that de Quincey is doing the exact opposite of confessing, he is instead an octopus camouflaging his real gothic self under a cloud of ink. One senses that de Quincey is engaged more in playing a role: a jaded hedonist, he wants to see and feel and provoke the extremes, and if that is not possible, then at least inflict an intimation of happy horrors or paranoid pleasures beyond normal human ken (which yet survives in Lovecraft):

I trust that it will prove not merely an interesting record, but in a considerable degree useful and instructive. In that hope it is that I have drawn it up; and that must be my apology for breaking through that delicate and honourable reserve which, for the most part, restrains us from the public exposure of our own errors and infirmities. Nothing, indeed, is more revolting to English feelings than the spectacle of a human being obtruding on our notice his moral ulcers or scars, and tearing away that “decent drapery” which time or indulgence to human frailty may have drawn over them…Connected with this sleep was a little incident which served, as hundreds of others did at that time, to convince me how easily a man who has never been in any great distress may pass through life without knowing, in his own person at least, anything of the possible goodness of the human heart-or, as I must add with a sigh, of its possible vileness. So thick a curtain of manners is drawn over the features and expression of men’s natures, that to the ordinary observer the two extremities, and the infinite field of varieties which lie between them, are all confounded; the vast and multitudinous compass of their several harmonies reduced to the meagre outline of differences expressed in the gamut or alphabet of elementary sounds…Jeremy Taylor conjectures that it may be as painful to be born as to die. I think it probable

Or Matthew Bevis:

But De Quincey didn’t merely reveal dangerous appetites; he was one of the first to think through what such appetites might be concealing. He virtually invented the categories of modern psychology - the OED credits him with bringing the words “evadable,” “pathologically,” and “subconscious” into the language…In a style that is somehow both loquacious and surreptitious, De Quincey is frequently drawn to enclosed spaces.. His beloved sister Elizabeth died (probably from meningitis) when he was six years old. In Suspiria De Profundis (1845), the astonishing sequel to Confessions, he writes that, the day after she died, he crept into the room where her corpse was laid out. Struck by the contrast between her beautiful, stiffening figure and “the tropical redundancy of life in summer,” he fell into a kind of daze:

When I returned to myself, there was a foot (or I fancied so) on the stairs. I was alarmed; for I believed that, if any body should detect me, means would be taken to prevent my coming again. Hastily, therefore, I kissed the lips that I should kiss no more, and slunk like a guilty thing with stealthy steps from the room. Thus perished the vision, loveliest amongst all the shows which earth has revealed to me; thus mutilated was the parting which should have lasted for ever; thus tainted with fear was the farewell sacred to love and grief, to perfect love and perfect grief.

Coming back to the room a few hours later, he found the door locked and himself “shut out for ever.”…Wilson doesn’t neglect her protagonist’s addiction, but she’s more interested in what Thomas Carlyle referred to as his “diseased acuteness” than in the acuteness of his disease. De Quincey diagnosed one illness as his “intolerable procrastination”; delays, deferrals, missed appointments and deadlines, all served to put off the future, but they also helped to create a future that was full of promise…De Quincey’s life and his writing are fueled by a sense that he abhors what he adores - and vice versa. He recalls that, when he was younger, he had “a perfect craze for being despised. I doted on it, and considered contempt a sort of luxury that I was in continual fear of losing.” This thought shines as much light on those who feel contempt as on those who suffer it. Before the visions of his opium-induced dreams, he admits, “I stood loathing and fascinated.” Loathing, for him, is itself a kind of fascination; to be disgusted is to be implicated. (He writes of how disgust may “fasten on” things, rather than, say, “recoil from” them.)…And like his disciple, the poet knew about the strangeness of guilt; in his preface to The Borderers, Wordsworth notes that “every time we plan a fresh accumulation of our guilt” - that is, every time we plan to do something that we know will later cause us to feel guilt - we involve ourselves in a “perturbed pleasure.” This sense of perturbed pleasure is what made Confessions such a shocking, gripping book for contemporary readers. The baroque black comedy of De Quincey’s style - what Poe described as “the ludicrous heightened into the grotesque” - is founded on a portrait of the artist as someone who both colludes with and conspires against himself, someone who wears his predicament like an achievement. There’s a self-relishing archness hidden within De Quincey’s penchant for emergency, a sense that he knows his avoidances are the spur to his insights, as his opium dreams suggest…Early reviewers of the Confessions didn’t know whether to stare or grin. “It is not easy to say what the author intends by his book,” one remarked, sensing a subtle humor at work, provoking the reader to “laugh, without knowing, why or at what.”…Everywhere in the writing there lurks this sense of speculative arousal, the feeling that supping on horrors is a prelude to another kind of experiment. In a draft passage that didn’t make it into “The English Mail-Coach,” De Quincey explains that, along the journey, he fasted from everything but tea, “a trifle of opium,” and sin. And that sin is to be liberally interpreted; immediately after the near-fatal crash that he describes in such loving, lurid detail, he confesses that on reaching an inn, he had the baseness to talk only about cold beef and port wines. “There is not much to be said in defence of such conduct,” he admits, “but there is always something to be said in defence of any possible conduct.”

While unprepossessing, we should be charitable; as Borges says of Galland's Arabian Nights, "We, mere anachronistic readers of the twentieth century, perceive in these volumes the cloyingly sweet taste of the eighteenth century and not the evanescent oriental aroma that two hundred years ago was their innovation and their glory. No one is to blame for this missed encounter, least of all Galland."

Having gotten through the biography part, one finally gets the opium proper and since it is such a short book (really, an essay), the opium parts are surprisingly short for what is the first major description of opium and opium addiction in English. Some of the excerpts:

…Now Saturday night is the season for the chief, regular, and periodic return of rest of the poor; in this point the most hostile sects unite, and acknowledge a common link of brotherhood; almost all Christendom rests from its labours. It is a rest introductory to another rest, and divided by a whole day and two nights from the renewal of toil. On this account I feel always, on a Saturday night, as though I also were released from some yoke of labour, had some wages to receive, and some luxury of repose to enjoy. For the sake, therefore, of witnessing, upon as large a scale as possible, a spectacle with which my sympathy was so entire, I used often on Saturday nights, after I had taken opium, to wander forth, without much regarding the direction or the distance, to all the markets and other parts of London to which the poor resort of a Saturday night, for laying out their wages. Many a family party, consisting of a man, his wife, and sometimes one or two of his children, have I listened to, as they stood consulting on their ways and means, or the strength of their exchequer, or the price of household articles. Gradually I became familiar with their wishes, their difficulties, and their opinions. Sometimes there might be heard murmurs of discontent, but far oftener expressions on the countenance, or uttered in words, of patience, hope, and tranquillity. And taken generally, I must say that, in this point at least, the poor are more philosophic than the rich-that they show a more ready and cheerful submission to what they consider as irremediable evils or irreparable losses. Whenever I saw occasion, or could do it without appearing to be intrusive, I joined their parties, and gave my opinion upon the matter in discussion, which, if not always judicious, was always received indulgently. If wages were a little higher or expected to be so, or the quartern loaf a little lower, or it was reported that onions and butter were expected to fall, I was glad; yet, if the contrary were true, I drew from opium some means of consoling myself.

...The waters now changed their character-from translucent lakes shining like mirrors they now became seas and oceans. And now came a tremendous change, which, unfolding itself slowly like a scroll through many months, promised an abiding torment; and in fact it never left me until the winding up of my case. Hitherto the human face had mixed often in my dreams, but not despotically nor with any special power of tormenting. But now that which I have called the tyranny of the human face began to unfold itself. Perhaps some part of my London life might be answerable for this. Be that as it may, now it was that upon the rocking waters of the ocean the human face began to appear; the sea appeared paved with innumerable faces upturned to the heavens-faces imploring, wrathful, despairing, surged upwards by thousands, by myriads, by generations, by centuries: my agitation was infinite; my mind tossed and surged with the ocean.

…No man can pretend that the wild, barbarous, and capricious superstitions of Africa, or of savage tribes elsewhere, affect him in the way that he is affected by the ancient, monumental, cruel, and elaborate religions of Indostan, &c. The mere antiquity of Asiatic things, of their institutions, histories, modes of faith, &c., is so impressive, that to me the vast age of the race and name overpowers the sense of youth in the individual. A young Chinese seems to me an antediluvian man renewed. Even Englishmen, though not bred in any knowledge of such institutions, cannot but shudder at the mystic sublimity of castes that have flowed apart, and refused to mix, through such immemorial tracts of time; nor can any man fail to be awed by the names of the Ganges or the Euphrates. It contributes much to these feelings that southern Asia is, and has been for thousands of years, the part of the earth most swarming with human life, the great officina gentium. Man is a weed in those regions. The vast empires also in which the enormous population of Asia has always been cast, give a further sublimity to the feelings associated with all Oriental names or images. In China, over and above what it has in common with the rest of southern Asia, I am terrified by the modes of life, by the manners, and the barrier of utter abhorrence and want of sympathy placed between us by feelings deeper than I can analyse. I could sooner live with lunatics or brute animals. All this, and much more than I can say or have time to say, the reader must enter into before he can comprehend the unimaginable horror which these dreams of Oriental imagery and mythological tortures impressed upon me. Under the connecting feeling of tropical heat and vertical sunlights I brought together all creatures, birds, beasts, reptiles, all trees and plants, usages and appearances, that are found in all tropical regions, and assembled them together in China or Indostan. From kindred feelings, I soon brought Egypt and all her gods under the same law. I was stared at, hooted at, grinned at, chattered at, by monkeys, by parroquets, by cockatoos. I ran into pagodas, and was fixed for centuries at the summit or in secret rooms: I was the idol; I was the priest; I was worshipped; I was sacrificed. I fled from the wrath of Brama through all the forests of Asia: Vishnu hated me: Seeva laid wait for me. I came suddenly upon Isis and Osiris: I had done a deed, they said, which the ibis and the crocodile trembled at. I was buried for a thousand years in stone coffins, with mummies and sphynxes, in narrow chambers at the heart of eternal pyramids. I was kissed, with cancerous kisses, by crocodiles; and laid, confounded with all unutterable slimy things, amongst reeds and Nilotic mud.

I thus give the reader some slight abstraction of my Oriental dreams, which always filled me with such amazement at the monstrous scenery that horror seemed absorbed for a while in sheer astonishment. Sooner or later came a reflux of feeling that swallowed up the astonishment, and left me not so much in terror as in hatred and abomination of what I saw. Over every form, and threat, and punishment, and dim sightless incarceration, brooded a sense of eternity and infinity that drove me into an oppression as of madness. Into these dreams only it was, with one or two slight exceptions, that any circumstances of physical horror entered. All before had been moral and spiritual terrors. But here the main agents were ugly birds, or snakes, or crocodiles; especially the last. The cursed crocodile became to me the object of more horror than almost all the rest. I was compelled to live with him, and (as was always the case almost in my dreams) for centuries. I escaped sometimes, and found myself in Chinese houses, with cane tables, &c. All the feet of the tables, sofas, &c., soon became instinct with life: the abominable head of the crocodile, and his leering eyes, looked out at me, multiplied into a thousand repetitions; and I stood loathing and fascinated. And so often did this hideous reptile haunt my dreams that many times the very same dream was broken up in the very same way: I heard gentle voices speaking to me (I hear everything when I am sleeping), and instantly I awoke. It was broad noon, and my children were standing, hand in hand, at my bedside-come to show me their coloured shoes, or new frocks, or to let me see them dressed for going out. I protest that so awful was the transition from the damned crocodile, and the other unutterable monsters and abortions of my dreams, to the sight of innocent human natures and of infancy, that in the mighty and sudden revulsion of mind I wept, and could not forbear it, as I kissed their faces.

…As a final specimen, I cite one of a different character, from 1820.

The dream commenced with a music which now I often heard in dreams-a music of preparation and of awakening suspense, a music like the opening of the Coronation Anthem, and which, like that, gave the feeling of a vast march, of infinite cavalcades filing off, and the tread of innumerable armies. The morning was come of a mighty day-a day of crisis and of final hope for human nature, then suffering some mysterious eclipse, and labouring in some dread extremity. Somewhere, I knew not where-somehow, I knew not how-by some beings, I knew not whom-a battle, a strife, an agony, was conducting, was evolving like a great drama or piece of music, with which my sympathy was the more insupportable from my confusion as to its place, its cause, its nature, and its possible issue. I, as is usual in dreams (where of necessity we make ourselves central to every movement), had the power, and yet had not the power, to decide it. I had the power, if I could raise myself to will it, and yet again had not the power, for the weight of twenty Atlantics was upon me, or the oppression of inexpiable guilt. “Deeper than ever plummet sounded,” I lay inactive. Then like a chorus the passion deepened. Some greater interest was at stake, some mightier cause than ever yet the sword had pleaded, or trumpet had proclaimed. Then came sudden alarms, hurryings to and fro, trepidations of innumerable fugitives - I knew not whether from the good cause or the bad, darkness and lights, tempest and human faces, and at last, with the sense that all was lost, female forms, and the features that were worth all the world to me, and but a moment allowed-and clasped hands, and heart-breaking partings, and then - everlasting farewells! And with a sigh, such as the caves of Hell sighed when the incestuous mother uttered the abhorred name of death, the sound was reverberated - everlasting farewells! And again and yet again reverberated - everlasting farewells!

And I awoke in struggles, and cried aloud - “I will sleep no more.”

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:

Poor:

This road,

I have long been told,

Man travels in the end—

Yet I had not thought to go

Yesterday or today.

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:

In May 1998 Thorp reported that his investments had grown at an average 20 percent annual return (with 6 percent standard deviation) over 28.5 years. “To help persuade you that this may not be luck,” Thorp wrote, “I estimate that…I have made $80 billion worth of purchases and sales (‘action,’ in casino language) for my investors. This breaks down into something like one and a quarter million individual ‘bets’ averaging about $65,000 each, with on average hundreds of ‘positions’ in place at any one time. Over all, it would seem to be a moderately ‘long run’ with a high probability that the excess performance is more than chance.”

Thorp’s money may continue on:

The Thorps recently endowed a chair at the University of California at Irvine mathematics department. The gift consists of one million dollars to be invested entirely in stocks, with the university limited to withdrawing only 2 percent a year. The fund is expected to compound exponentially in inflation-adjusted dollars. Ultimately, Thorp hopes, it will fund the most richly endowed university chair in the world, and will help draw exceptional mathematical talent to UC Irvine.

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.)

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.
About once a year I receive an offer, usually by email, from someone who wants to work as my research assistant for free. Typically the offer is accompanied by a resume, and for the most part these resumes appear quite good. The emails sound reasonable and friendly.
I turn such offers down. I don't think the applicants are lemons, but still I find that one research assistant is for me the right number, at least if I have a good one, as is usually the case. Even when it comes to the assistant whom I have the time to manage, I am most of all concerned about having a conscientious person at my disposal.
The work with an RA is basically a team relationship, and the core problem is that I don't have the time to build another team, even if it doesn't cost me any money upfront. I don't have the time to work with and manage another person. To put this point in a broader business context, until another good manager is hired, there is no point in employing another assistant. It's the manager who is the scarce input, and that is one way to think about why managerial salaries have been going up so much. Managers play a role of growing importance in coordinating complex, large-scale production processes.
...To hire a risky and iffy worker, without a competent overseer, simply isn't worth it, no matter how low the wage. And so a lot of workers have a hard time being picked up and integrated into productive teams.
It is precisely that process that managers are paid to make work more efficiently. It is a process that is continuing its long, long trend toward increasing importance. And, finally, it is why managers are being paid more.

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:

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 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).

"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."

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:

we cannot help but be struck by the repeated allusions to a philosophy of the Japanese state which, though normal in 1940, has largely been discredited since. Not only is the imperial authorship of many poems stressed (though more recent scholars cast doubt on these attributions, aware that anonymous poems were often dignified by associations - however unlikely - with rulers of the distant past), but the glory of the Imperial House itself is proclaimed in a manner as foreign to the Japanese of today as to ourselves: “Turning to human relations, Japanese clan morality in its purified form - namely, that which is based upon the consciousness of the Imperial House as the supreme head of all clans - manifests itself in the NSY in spontaneous sentiments of the loveliest kind, giving the Anthology its chief distinction.” During the war years of 1941-45, the “spirit of the MSY” was constantly invoked by literary men. They meant by the phrase worship of the Emperor and an insistence on “pure Japanese” virtues untainted by foreign influence or by the over-refined, effeminate sentiments displayed in later poetry As a result of the defeat of Japan in 1945, the MSY acquired still another meaning: this time it was acclaimed as a “democratic” anthology that was given its chief distinction by the poetry of the common people (or of the humbler ranks of the nobility), unlike subsequent anthologies filled with jejune compositions by the decadent courtiers. The poetry of the MSY is sufficiently varied and abundant to afford corroborative evidence for all these theses, but though each is tenable as an interpretation of part of the work, it cannot be accepted as a judgment of the whole. The compilers of this edition, emphasizing the “cheerfulness” of an age when the Imperial family ruled without interference, declared that the “prevailing atmosphere is happy, bright and peaceful”. Yet surely the “Dialogue on Poverty” by Yamanoe Okura (pg 205) offers unmistakable evidence that, whatever conditions may have prevailed at the court, all was not joy and light in the villages…Again, such an assertion as “But filial piety, so sincere, intense and instinctive as shown in the Manyo poems is not likely to be duplicated by any other people and under any other social order” is certainly open to challenge, if not to being dismissed outright as absurd. But this nostalgic view of a distant golden age deserves our attention still, if only as a traditional, persistent Japanese interpretation of the MSY.

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?
It is like a boat,
Which, unmoored at morn,
Drops out of sight
And leaves no trace behind."

Yamabe no Akahito, Man’yōshū VIII: 1426

  "To my good friend
Would I show, I thought,
The plum blossoms,
Now lost to sight
Amid the falling snow."

Kuramochi Chitose; 326-7 VI: 913-4; pg198:

  "The beach is beautiful; and there grow
The sea-tangles swaying,
Lapped by a thousand waves
In the calm of morning,
And by five hundred waves
In the evening calm.
O Suminoe Beach,
Where white-crested waves are racing around!
Could I weary of watching, not only now,
But day in, day out, over and over again,
As those waves break on the shore?

[Envoy]
Let me go, with my clothes stained
For remembrance with the yellow clay
Of Suminoe's shore, which white-crested waves
Visit, ceaselessly lapping!"

Hitomaro, 103-5/ II: 199-201, pg127:

  "...Forthwith our prince buckled on a sword,
And in his august hand
Grasped a bow to lead the army.
The drums marshaling men in battle array
Sounded like the rumbling thunder,
The war-horns blew, as tigers roar,
Confronting an enemy,
Till all men were shaken with terror.
The banners, hoisted aloft, swayed
As sway in wind the flames that burn
On every moorland far and near
When spring comes after winter's prisonment.
Frightful to hear was the bow-strings' clang,
Like a whirlwind sweeping
Through a winter forest of snow.
And like snow-flakes tempest-driven
The arrows fell thick and fast.
The foemen confronting our prince
Fought, prepared to a man to perish,
If perish they must, like dew or frost;
And vying with one another like birds upon the wing,
They flew to the front of battle -
When lo, from Watarai's holy shrine
There rose the God's Wind confounding them,
By hiding the sun's eye with clouds
And shrouding the world in utter darkness...."