|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
my rating |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
1421419459
| 9781421419459
| 4.50
| 2
| unknown
| Apr 12, 2016
|
really liked it
|
Luttwak's controversial thesis on interpreting the pre-Byzantine Roman Empire's geopolitical strategies from roughly the early Empire to Constantine a
Luttwak's controversial thesis on interpreting the pre-Byzantine Roman Empire's geopolitical strategies from roughly the early Empire to Constantine as 3 broad systems of governance and frontier defense. (The Byzantine Empire's own long and intricate militarized history is dealt with by Luttwak in a separate later book, unsurprisingly titled, The Grand Strategy of the Byzantine Empire, which in general I found far more interesting as the Byzantine Empire is considerably underrated & ignored.) Not being a Roman historian or archaeologist, I can only say of the controversy it didn't strike me as obviously wrong or making major errors, although the thesis appears most strained when Luttwak tries to discuss the third system, the late empire after the third century crisis, as forming a coherent strategy of partial defense-in-depth. What most interesting about the discussion of the first two stages is the extent to which Luttwak takes what you might call a "Chinese" focus, by emphasizing the relative smallness of the Roman military compared to its vast territories, exploiting a "use the near barbarian against the far" strategy of neighboring (relatively) barbaric vassal states to defend its borders and provide strategic depth - states like King Herod. In most accounts, these vassal states are treated almost as comedies, literal side-shows to the real business of state and war in the Roman Republic/Empire itself. Luttwak sees the border function as critical to removing the need for a large military spread across many small far-flung border forts & detachments, allowing a concentration of soldiers into the handful of enormous Roman legions which could shatter any enemy in their way while being deployable without denuding any frontiers, giving them credibility as deterrents - and, "the paradox of strategy", by such deterrence, ensuring they were only occasionally needed and leaving the Empire's military deterrence flexibly deployable. Meanwhile, the neighboring vassals would gradually urbanize & Romanize thanks to constant influence from the Empire and the benefits for development of the Pax Romana, and eventually, their incorporation into the Empire would be a fait accompli and mere change of labels. Areas too impoverished, dried, or indefensible would not develop, and would be bypassed. The occasional revolts or invasions could be swiftly suppressed by the nearest legion marched or sailed into place. Thus, the Empire could enjoy a small cheap but invincible military and steady expansion into rich lands, with the borders eventually stabilizing at their outer limits of cost-benefit, and the golden age of the Empire. Far from being amusing anecdotes of ancient legalistic squabbling, the vassals were critical for freeing up legions and a necessary transition phase. The similarities with Chinese grand strategy are unmistakable: the same tactics reappear like the use of bribes, honorary titles and statuses, intermarriage with generals or aristocrats, use of neighboring vassal states to insulate & control further enemies, and the gradual expansion of the formal boundaries of the Empire with the expansion of the Han population-culture-plex, economic/agricultural development of once remote regions, and incorporation/suppression of indigenous populations. Whether this is really a "grand strategy" in the sense of a consciously enunciated strategy even to the degree of Chinese literati debating tactics & barbarian-quelling strategies in memorials to the emperor is largely unanswerable, as so much Roman material fails to survive & such strategic considerations might be expected to be considered key state secrets. Luttwak can't make much of a case one way or another, and it would be reasonable to suppose that the fact that the many decisions & battles & fortifications look fairly coherent reflects local decision-making and narrowed choices and trial-and-error reaching fairly optimal outcomes, an emergent order as in so many things. It might be better to take this book as a sort of "how I would do it", in the manner of a strategy game walkthrough like an account of a game of Europa Universalis; Luttwak's opinions are usually interesting and amusingly expressed, so it is certainly not a waste of time. ...more | Notes are private!
| none
|
1
|
Sep 04, 2017
|
Sep 04, 2017
|
Sep 04, 2017
| Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
1468301691
| 9781468301694
| 4.11
| 917
| Jul 12, 2016
| Jul 12, 2016
|
really liked it
| None
| Notes are private!
| none
|
2
|
not set
Aug 2017
|
not set
Aug 02, 2017
|
Aug 02, 2017
| Hardcover
| |||||||||||||||
4.11
| 53
| Jan 01, 2013
| Oct 2013
|
it was ok
|
TMOH is so short I am hesitant to call it a book or judge it by the standards of one (less than 90 pages excluding the wrappers), but considered as a
TMOH is so short I am hesitant to call it a book or judge it by the standards of one (less than 90 pages excluding the wrappers), but considered as a book about computer optimization, it is weak and idiosyncratic, and is much less worth reading that Google's SRE book (even though that is not primarily about optimization at all). TMOH is based primarily on Facebook/WWW programming topics, leading to odd focuses - for example, it's hard to imagine that very many people need be deeply concerned about the dynamics of global load balancing DNS systems bouncing users to nearby datacenters or might run into the pathologies of not getting the update time window just right (ch12), or that one of the most important things a programmer needs to know about optimizing is how to generate text logs with a specific format and field like script_path (ch5). I get the impression that this might have originally been intended for getting Facebook interns up to speed on datacenter tweaking and then Bueno tried to expand it into a more general book, which would explain the awkwardness and why it can't seem to decide whether it's explaining a few of the odder nooks & crannies of Facebook's hyperscale datacenters & PHP software stack or trying to describe how to debug & maintain a legacy system. I did enjoy some of the debugging war stories. ...more | Notes are private!
| none
|
1
|
Jul 27, 2017
|
Jul 28, 2017
|
Jul 28, 2017
| ebook
| |||||||||||||||||
1455586692
| 9781455586691
| 4.18
| 16,032
| Jan 05, 2016
| Jan 05, 2016
|
liked it
| None
| Notes are private!
| none
|
1
|
Jul 18, 2017
|
Jul 19, 2017
|
Jul 19, 2017
| Hardcover
| |||||||||||||||
0670849472
| 9780670849475
| 4.42
| 1,972
| 1999
| 1999
|
it was amazing
|
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: 1929: “The Duration of Hell” (pg47-51) 1932: “A Defense of the Kabbalah” (pg83-86) 1932: “The Homeric Versions” (pg71-74) 1933: "The Art of Verbal Abuse" (pg 87-91) 1936: “A History of Eternity” (pg123-139) 1936: “The Doctrine of Cycles” (pg115-122) 1936: “The Translators of The Thousand and One Nights” (pg92-109) 1937: “Ramon Llull’s Thinking Machine” (pg155-159) 1938: "Richard Hull, Excellent Intentions" (pg184) 1939: “The Total Library” (pg214-216) 1947: “A New Refutation of Time” (pg317-332) 1948: “Biathanatos” (pg333-336) 1951: “Coleridge’s Dream” (pg369-372) 1951: “Pascal’s Sphere” (pg351-353) 1951: “The Argentine Writer and Tradition” 1951: “The Enigma of Edward Fitzgerald” (pg366-368) 1953: “The Dialogues of Ascetic and King” (pg382-385) 1953: “The Scandinavian Destiny” (pg377-381) 1961: “Edward Gibbon, Pages of History and Autobiography” (pg438-444) 1962: “The Concept of an Academy and the Celts” (pg458-463) 1964: “The Enigma of Shakespeare” (pg463-473) 1975: “Emanuel Swedenborg, Mystical Works” (pg449-457) 1977: “Blindness” (pg473-483) Borges, I think, died happy. ...more | Notes are private!
| Kevin
|
1
|
May 15, 2017
|
Jul 07, 2017
|
Jul 01, 2017
| Hardcover
| |||||||||||||||
0764554190
| 9780764554193
| 4.06
| 756
| Feb 15, 2002
| Mar 01, 2002
|
liked it
| None
| Notes are private!
| none
|
1
|
Jun 23, 2017
|
Jun 26, 2017
|
Jun 30, 2017
| Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
9004153640
| 9789004153646
| 4.72
| 39
| Nov 01, 2003
| Aug 01, 2006
|
liked it
|
(I used the 2015 open-access e-book edition of de Rachewiltz's translation.) Something of a disappointment. One reads it looking for insight into the
(I used the 2015 open-access e-book edition of de Rachewiltz's translation.) Something of a disappointment. One reads it looking for insight into the people and into how and why Genghis Khan rose from the ragged slave Temujin to the unifier of the Mongolian horse-archers and greatest conqueror the world has seen, the Great Khan. SHM offers little insight into either, focusing on a bare-bones narration heavy on toponyms and genealogy, interrupted occasionally by speeches laced with alliterative verse. While the alliterative verse is better than one might expect from a country & people otherwise totally unknown for their poetry, and sometimes quite amusing, it is even less likely than the long speeches in Greco-Roman histories to faithfully represent what was said in either word or sense. There are a number of amusing or striking anecdotes recounted, but unfortunately they tend to involve minor characters and never Genghis or Ogedei. De Rachewiltz notes speculation that SHM was compiled not long after Genghis Khan's death at the orders of Genghis Khan's designated successor, his general Ogedei, for use at a great Mongolian political convention to confirm the succession; this speculation makes a great deal of sense because, while SHM offers little insight into Genghis's psychology or why he was able to unite the tribes ("it was Great Heaven's will" is not an answer), it does obsessively return again & again to the theme of loyalty to one's leader, the moral authority of leaders, and laying down & following rules (eg the extremely lengthy & almost verbatim repetition of the sections on rules for the 'day-guards' & 'night-guards') - this might reflect traditional nomadic societal norms or distant influence from Chinese Confucianism, but it would make especial sense if it were being prepared as political propaganda for the convention and trying to ensure Genghis Khan's will is followed. This theme leads to some of the more bizarre running storylines, Genghis's rivalry with his sworn blood-brother Jamuqa; naturally, Genghis kills him at the end, and one senses the narrator is deeply embarrassed by this blatant & undeniable breach of proper norms, and is forced to narrate an ending in which Jamuqa begs the Khan to kill him lest the Khan's mind be troubled & unable to focus on properly ruling. I know nothing about the Mongolian language or translation issues for SHM, so I will simply assume that de Rachewiltz did a good job on those aspects of SHM. ...more | Notes are private!
| none
|
1
|
Jun 29, 2017
|
Jul 10, 2017
|
Jun 29, 2017
| Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
4.37
| 278
| May 17, 2017
| May 17, 2017
|
really liked it
| None
| Notes are private!
| none
|
2
|
May 17, 2017
Dec 28, 2015
|
May 19, 2017
May 17, 2017
|
May 11, 2017
| ebook
| |||||||||||||||||
0817638660
| 9780817638665
| 4.20
| 64
| Dec 18, 1996
| 1998
|
liked it
|
Anthology; mixture of mathematician profiles, professional advice, odd phenomenology pieces, and ends. I suggest skipping this book and reading just t
Anthology; mixture of mathematician profiles, professional advice, odd phenomenology pieces, and ends. I suggest skipping this book and reading just the professional/intellectual advice essays "Ten Lessons I wish I had Been Taught"/"Ten rules for the survival of a mathematics department" and the controversial but interesting profile of Stanislaw Ulam, "The Lost Cafe". The rest was a dense mesh of punditry on mathematical fields I know nothing of, professional gossip, and opaque but mean-spirited comments on phenomenology & analytic philosophy, or profiles of mathematicians from the 1950s (which aside from emphasizing yet again what a rupture in intellectual history WWII was, are of no interest to non-mathematicians). A few asides struck me as interesting. Rota asks how Gibbs could become a world-famous physicist when he was not even a paid professor at an obscure university in the backwaters of physicists - the answer is a well-developed global mailing list whose archives he stumbled across in the library. Rota identifies as a key turning point in Ulam's life when he nearly died of encephalitis and required brain surgery, noting that the formerly hardworking Ulam appeared to almost have ADHD afterwards & relied abjectly on his collaborators to develop his ideas while becoming cruelly incisive about others & their work. (This is not the first time I've come across an obscure instance of brain injury apparently being linked to bad personality & intellectual changes; indeed, the population registry studies of traumatic brain injury suggest that even the mildest concussions can have terrifyingly large long-term effects on employment and education. If American parents were to ever read the full literature on TBIs, high school football would be gone the next day.) ...more | Notes are private!
| none
|
1
|
May 13, 2017
|
May 14, 2017
|
May 11, 2017
| Hardcover
| |||||||||||||||
0747563691
| 9780747563693
| 4.05
| 1,972
| 2005
| 2006
|
really liked it
|
Gonzo-light style book by a music journalist on trying to meet the surviving 9 astronauts who walked on the moon, discuss it and their post-moon lives
Gonzo-light style book by a music journalist on trying to meet the surviving 9 astronauts who walked on the moon, discuss it and their post-moon lives, and draw Deep Lessons. Prompted by the interesting review of it in the LRB ("What did you expect? The banality of moon-talk"). Smith strives very hard to contextualize the short interviews/encounters, often unsuccessfully, bouncing between a frustrating amount of padding, the history, and very short snippets from the actual interviews - he is particularly baffled by Armstrong, getting out of him only the interesting tidbit that Armstrong packed with him an album of theremin music (fittingly enough), concluding that Armstrong must have deep mysteries indeed (although the more parsimonious explanation would be that Armstrong is pretty much what he seemed). The straining continues with the other astronauts, with Smith ultimately more or less agreeing with "Alan Bean's view that all the Moonwalkers came back 'more like they already were'" - the New Age astronaut who tried to do ESP experiments from orbit* indeed continued to dabble in New Age and psi and other sorts of futility, the uncommunicative Armstrong remained uncommunicative, the hilariously and endearingly Aspergery John Young remained Aspergery, etc. The most interesting one is definitely Alan Bean, who feels he was kept so busy during his brief lunar sojourn that he failed to truly appreciate it and has since devoted his time to painting the Moon in pieces like "That's How It Felt to Walk On The Moon" in order to regrasp the experience. One possible regularity Smith notes in talking to them is that personality-wise, the disgraced David Scott might be onto something in identifying role and personality as moderators of the "overview effect":
Not being an Apollo buff, I learned many interesting little bits. For example, the first landing was nearly a disaster due to computer issues, excess lunar dust, and a pipe getting jammed & nearly exploding; going to the bathroom in space was so horrifying one astronaut simply didn't do it at all by taking Imodium to cause constipation; John Young fell down repeatedly while cavorting on the moon and immortalized himself by radioing back to Earth, "I got the farts agin. I got 'em agin, Charlie."; Buzz Aldrin, while suffering from a peculiar phobia in which he is unable to write things and still upset about Armstrong breaking Apollo tradition by insisting on being first out, still invented the lunar cycler; David Scott, cashiered for smuggling postal covers onto the moon to resell, was probably unjustly persecuted as other astronauts had brought things to the moon as well (in part because they were paid next to nothing (Aldrin keeps his travel expenses from Apollo framed: "PAYEE’S NAME: Col. Edwin E. Aldrin 00018 / FROM: Houston, Texas / TO: Cape Kennedy, Fla. / Moon / Pacific Ocean / AMOUNT CLAIMED: $33.311"), and couldn't even get life insurance); in Nepal, the astronauts would be asked constantly if they had seen peoples' dead relatives on the moon; selection of astronauts was capricious and done at the whims of a resentful former pilot with a heart condition (although given his mother "used to tie him to a tree at the age of four to stop him from running into the road", one suspects his grounding might've been a good thing); Armstrong only got the first moon landing due to the deaths of several astronauts ahead of him; Apollo 12 was hit by lightning while launching and NASA feared the parachute was permanently broken, but let them continue to the Moon because they might as well if they were doomed; most of the astronauts make little money but the orbiters in the command module make far less than the ones who actually walked on the moon, although the experience of orbiting the dark side of the moon helped make up for the resentment of coming so close but not landing; the ongoing problems of fake moon dust being peddled by con artists (fake because legally, only the US government is allowed to own/sell moon dust before 2014); a major finding in panspermia, that bacteria can survive a trip to the Moon, was caused by a worker sneezing into the Surveyor camera; Aldrin & Armstrong had great trouble planting a flag in the sharp hart lunar dust/soil and were terrified it would fall while being videotaped; early in NASA history, it was almost 20% British (50% of the engineers), scooped up from a bankrupt Canadian aircraft manufacturer; of a number of sad moments, the saddest may be one recording in an album of space program audio records, Flight to the Moon, where White is space-walking and Grissom orders him back in, White stalling, finally saying "This is the saddest moment of my life", both of them dying just months later in the Apollo 1 fire and never making it to the moon; Dennis Tito noting presciently that anyone wanting to go to the ISS in 2005 should do so as soon as possible as it would never be cheaper (proving to be right, in spades, as the price went up 10x in the years afterwards before Russia shut it down entirely in 2010); an astronomer getting excited over photos of ejected urine, asking what it was, and being told it was the "constellation Urion"; NASA seriously considered sending an astronaut on a one-way mission and then trying to pick him up years later when they figured that part out (which reminds me of some of the debates over how to do a manned Mars mission); and neither JFK nor Nixon really wanted Apollo, with JFK picking it up as a spur-of-the-moment desperate response to Russia and later backpedaling and proposing a joint program with the Russians; and in 1980, Americans spent more playing Space Invaders than they did on the space program. * Smith notes that due to a scheduling mishap, Edgar Mitchell's attempt to communicate in orbit using ESP with partners back on earth was incorrectly timed, but in Mitchell's defense, Daryl Bem has demonstrated that mere time is no barrier to ESP, so there's no reason to critique it on those grounds! ...more | Notes are private!
| none
|
1
|
Apr 25, 2017
|
Apr 25, 2017
|
May 03, 2017
| Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
1595910778
| 9781595910776
| 4.61
| 1,126
| Jan 01, 2016
| Apr 25, 2013
|
liked it
| (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: small-scale stock market trading in the 1940s, picking up minor inefficiencies in dead-end companies or warrants or whatnot. (All those opportunities have of course long since vanished.) parlaying that into a series of purchases of private, off-market purchases of small cap businesses with steady cashflow, by cultivating a folksy mystique & offering very fast deals in which the owners do not shop around for alternatives, then folding their future earnings into the conglomerate but otherwise not investing in them & leaving them entirely alone with the same CEOs etc (1950s-1980s) expanding holdings in insurers in order to benefit from their float (1970s-1990s) 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:
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). ...more | Notes are private!
| none
|
1
|
Mar 20, 2017
|
Mar 24, 2017
|
Apr 03, 2017
| Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
149192912X
| 9781491929124
| 4.24
| 548
| Apr 16, 2016
| Apr 16, 2016
|
really liked it
| None
| Notes are private!
| none
|
1
|
Jan 27, 2017
|
Jan 31, 2017
|
Jan 29, 2017
| Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
0805006540
| 9780805006544
| 4.04
| 606
| Oct 01, 1987
| Jul 01, 1988
|
really liked it
| None
| Notes are private!
| none
|
1
|
Jan 2008
|
Jan 2008
|
Jan 05, 2017
| Hardcover
| |||||||||||||||
0374513058
| 9780374513054
| 4.22
| 169
| Apr 01, 1981
| Apr 01, 1981
|
did not like it
|
491 pages, ~263 poems. Randall Jarrell followed a typically academic career for 20th century American poet, bouncing through various universities and
491 pages, ~263 poems. Randall Jarrell followed a typically academic career for 20th century American poet, bouncing through various universities and nonprofit/government positions until his early death; he is often cited & quoted for his critical opinions & 1 WWII poem (some of which are quite good & I fully agree with), but his actual poetry is rarely quoted & hardly available online. So when a quotation of the ending of his poem "A Ghost, A Real Ghost" intrigued me, I had to get a used copy to see the rest of it. It was overall a bust and I struggled to finish it. Jarrell turns out to be a far greater literary critic than poet. I usually consider a collection of poetry a success if I like even a few poems in it, but despite plowing through several hundred often very long poems of his, I have to consider it appallingly dreary at best. Jarrell's style is the worst of the 20th century academic style (doubtless he played a role in creating it), free verse in turgid ponderous descriptions, abounding with endless rhetorical questions and pathetic fallacies invoking abstractions. (Not for the first time I wonder why English 20th century is so systematically and totally appalling.) There is no music to his verse, and he is trapped in his own style - the only time his poems come anywhere near conveying anything is when the topic matter is so searing it overcomes his mannerisms (some of the WWII poems) or when formal considerations or imitation/parody force him out of his chosen shackles and into another voice. The last two categories are particularly sad because it's clear that Jarrell did have literary talent, from how easily & lightly he rhymes & mimicks, but had too much freedom and lapsed into mediocrity. No T.S. Eliot, the few good lines of "A Girl in a Library" are buried in a tedious mass of pages and overintellectualizing, and likewise "A Ghost, A Real Ghost" is in bad need of a rewrite to make the first half stand up to the second half. In a more dogmatic time, perhaps Jarrell would've been forced to be the poet he could've been. A few poems: "A Ghost, a Real Ghost": I think of that old woman in the song --pg262-263, The Complete Poems (originally The Woman at the Washington Zoo) "The Archangels' Song" (from Goethe's Faust) RAPHAEL: --pg251-252 "Song: Not There" I went to the cupboard, I opened the door, --pg105 "The Owl's Bedtime Story" There was once upon a time a little owl. --pg348-350 ...more | Notes are private!
| none
|
1
|
Nov 29, 2016
|
Jan 22, 2017
|
Nov 29, 2016
| Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
0470013915
| 9780470013915
| 4.33
| 3
| Jan 01, 1966
| Jan 01, 1976
|
None
| Notes are private!
| none
|
1
|
Aug 2016
|
Oct 30, 2016
|
Oct 30, 2016
| Unknown Binding
| ||||||||||||||||
B004TPFQH4
| 4.14
| 7
| Jul 2000
| Mar 24, 2011
|
liked it
|
Project Gutenberg edition: the definitive investigation into Clever Hans, the body-language-reading horse. Pfungst is fussy in his writing but I am ne
Project Gutenberg edition: the definitive investigation into Clever Hans, the body-language-reading horse. Pfungst is fussy in his writing but I am nevertheless impressed by how thorough and exacting his investigation of Hans was, down to Pfungst mastering and demonstrating the method himself and using little devices to trace the movement of individual body parts on graph paper like a seismoscope (!). There are a number of interesting aspects which don't come up in the usual summaries: for example, a few historical precedents of other animals and of dowsing; and that the owner van Osten turns out to exemplify confirmation bias in a version of the 3-2-1 game because in 'teaching', like a schoolteacher, he methodically concentrated on one topic such as numbers until Hans 'learned' it and only then would he move on; so as Pfungst remarks, he never bothered to test Hans on something impossible like understanding Chinese - which Hans might have 'succeeded' on, proving that he wasn't learning anything but reading body language. Thus by a series of constant tests, the owner convinced himself that Hans was gradually learning. each topic.
...more
| Notes are private!
| none
|
1
|
Oct 30, 2016
|
Jan 22, 2017
|
Oct 30, 2016
| Kindle Edition
| ||||||||||||||||
0062228838
| 9780062228833
| 3.90
| 2,117
| 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!
| none
|
1
|
Oct 22, 2016
|
Oct 23, 2016
|
Oct 23, 2016
| Hardcover
| |||||||||||||||
0140439013
| 9780140439014
| 3.30
| 5,483
| 1821
| Mar 27, 2003
|
liked it
| (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):
Or Matthew Bevis:
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." ...more | Notes are private!
| none
|
1
|
Oct 07, 2016
|
Oct 30, 2016
|
Oct 07, 2016
| Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
B01F7IQEHC
| 4.46
| 200
| 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!
| none
|
1
|
Sep 25, 2016
|
Sep 25, 2016
|
Sep 25, 2016
| Kindle Edition
| ||||||||||||||||
0394729641
| 9780394729640
| 3.98
| 1,235
| 1975
| Jul 12, 1979
|
really liked it
| None
| Notes are private!
| none
|
1
|
Sep 19, 2016
|
Oct 28, 2016
|
Sep 19, 2016
| Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
048645116X
| 9780486451169
| 3.80
| 30
| Jan 01, 1972
| Jul 21, 2006
|
liked it
| None
| Notes are private!
| none
|
1
|
Jan 2002
|
Jan 2002
|
Sep 14, 2016
| Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
0804706530
| 9780804706537
| 3.67
| 106
| Jan 01, 1900
| Jun 01, 1968
|
it was ok
|
Tales of Ise is one of the acknowledged classics of ancient & medieval Japanese literature, cited or alluded to nearly as much as the Kokinshu, Ta
Tales of Ise is one of the acknowledged classics of ancient & medieval Japanese literature, cited or alluded to nearly as much as the Kokinshu, Tale of Genji, or Man'yoshu; Keene praises it in almost extravagant terms in Seeds in the Heart. It is an anthology of poems with snippets of prose context relating the circumstances, expansions of the notes often attached to poems explaining the context or topic. The stories are threadbare, stereotypical, and lacking in any kind of charm or characterization, and it is clear that few of them can claim any defense from the truth as they are so obviously made up to explain the poem (similar to the 'just so' etymologies/histories one seems in many religious texts or myths to explain place names) or are so vague as to be meaningless or seem highly improbable & unattested elsewhere (like sleeping with the priestess of Ise). Reading it was a chore, and McCullough's translations manage to butcher poems I had loved in other translations; here, for example, is McCullough's translation of one of Narihira's most famous poems, on dying: This road, Yeah. The whole book is like that. I hope other translations are much better, but it is difficult for me to imagine that the substance of these stories, no matter how skilled the translator, could ever stand up to The Tale of Genji or even The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon (which as harsh as I was on some aspects of it, overall was far better than this and more worthy of its repute). ...more | Notes are private!
| none
|
1
|
Sep 08, 2016
|
Oct 30, 2016
|
Sep 08, 2016
| Hardcover
| |||||||||||||||
0740721135
| 9780740721137
| 4.67
| 5,490
| Sep 01, 2003
| Sep 01, 2003
|
really liked it
| None
| Notes are private!
| none
|
1
|
Jan 2005
|
Jan 2005
|
Sep 06, 2016
| Hardcover
| |||||||||||||||
0809045990
| 9780809045990
| 4.17
| 2,215
| 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!
| none
|
1
|
Aug 21, 2016
|
Aug 21, 2016
|
Aug 21, 2016
| Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
0525953736
| 9780525953739
| 3.64
| 1,420
| 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!
| none
|
1
|
Jul 24, 2016
|
Jul 24, 2016
|
Jul 27, 2016
| Hardcover
| |||||||||||||||
0891416005
| 9780891416005
| 4.07
| 338
| May 01, 1995
| Jun 01, 1996
|
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 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!
| none
|
1
|
Jul 16, 2016
|
Jul 16, 2016
|
Jul 18, 2016
| Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
0140448063
| 9780140448061
| 4.02
| 4,360
| 1002
| Nov 30, 2006
|
liked it
|
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!
| none
|
1
|
Jul 13, 2016
|
Jul 31, 2016
|
Jul 13, 2016
| Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
0486439593
| 9780486439594
| 3.99
| 176
| 759
| Mar 04, 2005
|
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!
| none
|
1
|
Jun 19, 2016
|
Jul 10, 2016
|
Jun 19, 2016
| Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
1567500056
| 9781567500059
| 3.00
| 3
| Jan 01, 1993
| Jan 01, 1993
|
liked it
|
Due to length I've split my review out to https://www.gwern.net/Statistical%20n...
| Notes are private!
| none
|
1
|
Jun 13, 2016
|
Jun 13, 2016
|
Jun 19, 2016
| Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
1591845114
| 9781591845119
| 4.15
| 6,650
| Aug 01, 2013
| Aug 01, 2013
|
really liked it
| None
| Notes are private!
| none
|
1
|
Jun 11, 2016
|
Jun 13, 2016
|
Jun 11, 2016
| Hardcover
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
my rating |
|
|
||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
4.50
|
really liked it
|
Sep 04, 2017
|
Sep 04, 2017
| ||||||
4.11
|
really liked it
|
not set
Aug 02, 2017
|
Aug 02, 2017
| ||||||
4.11
|
it was ok
|
Jul 28, 2017
|
Jul 28, 2017
| ||||||
4.18
|
liked it
|
Jul 19, 2017
|
Jul 19, 2017
| ||||||
4.42
|
it was amazing
|
Jul 07, 2017
|
Jul 01, 2017
| ||||||
4.06
|
liked it
|
Jun 26, 2017
|
Jun 30, 2017
| ||||||
4.72
|
liked it
|
Jul 10, 2017
|
Jun 29, 2017
| ||||||
4.37
|
really liked it
|
May 19, 2017
May 17, 2017
|
May 11, 2017
| ||||||
4.20
|
liked it
|
May 14, 2017
|
May 11, 2017
| ||||||
4.05
|
really liked it
|
Apr 25, 2017
|
May 03, 2017
| ||||||
4.61
|
liked it
|
Mar 24, 2017
|
Apr 03, 2017
| ||||||
4.24
|
really liked it
|
Jan 31, 2017
|
Jan 29, 2017
| ||||||
4.04
|
really liked it
|
Jan 2008
|
Jan 05, 2017
| ||||||
4.22
|
did not like it
|
Jan 22, 2017
|
Nov 29, 2016
| ||||||
4.33
|
Oct 30, 2016
|
Oct 30, 2016
| |||||||
4.14
|
liked it
|
Jan 22, 2017
|
Oct 30, 2016
| ||||||
3.90
|
liked it
|
Oct 23, 2016
|
Oct 23, 2016
| ||||||
3.30
|
liked it
|
Oct 30, 2016
|
Oct 07, 2016
| ||||||
4.46
|
liked it
|
Sep 25, 2016
|
Sep 25, 2016
| ||||||
3.98
|
really liked it
|
Oct 28, 2016
|
Sep 19, 2016
| ||||||
3.80
|
liked it
|
Jan 2002
|
Sep 14, 2016
| ||||||
3.67
|
it was ok
|
Oct 30, 2016
|
Sep 08, 2016
| ||||||
4.67
|
really liked it
|
Jan 2005
|
Sep 06, 2016
| ||||||
4.17
|
really liked it
|
Aug 21, 2016
|
Aug 21, 2016
| ||||||
3.64
|
liked it
|
Jul 24, 2016
|
Jul 27, 2016
| ||||||
4.07
|
really liked it
|
Jul 16, 2016
|
Jul 18, 2016
| ||||||
4.02
|
liked it
|
Jul 31, 2016
|
Jul 13, 2016
| ||||||
3.99
|
liked it
|
Jul 10, 2016
|
Jun 19, 2016
| ||||||
3.00
|
liked it
|
Jun 13, 2016
|
Jun 19, 2016
| ||||||
4.15
|
really liked it
|
Jun 13, 2016
|
Jun 11, 2016
|



































Loading...