Kevin > Recent Status Updates

Ch1: This book is a tale of two systems. 'System 1 operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control. System 2 allocates attention to the effortful mental activities that demand it, including complex calculations.'

We are mostly guided by System 1, but System 2 engages when difficulties arise and very frequently overcomes the bias-laden inclinations of System 1.

Part 4. Choices;
25. Bernoulli's Errors
26. Prospect Theory
27. The Endowment Effect
28. Bad Events
29. The Fourfold Pattern
30. Rare Events
31. Risk Policies
32. Keeping Score
33. Reversals
34. Frames and Reality

Part 5. Two Selves;
35. Two Selves
36. Life as a Story
37. Experienced Well-Being
38. Thinking About Life
Conclusions

Part 3. Overconfidence;
19. The Illusion of Understanding
20. The Illusion of Validity
21. Intuitions Vs. Formulas
22. Expert Intuition: When Can We Trust It?
23. The Outside View
24. The Engine of Capitalism

Part 2. Heuristics and Biases;
10. The Law of Small Numbers
11. Anchors
12. The Science of Availability
13. Availability, Emotion, and Risk
14. Tom W's Specialty
15. Linda: Less is More
16. Causes Trump Statistics
17. Regression to the Mean
18. Taming Intuitive Predictions

Re-reading Kahneman's great book on cognitive biases and heuristical thinking. This is an outline to save a few characters for future updates.

P1. Two Systems
1. The Characters of the Story
2. Attention and Effort
3. The Lazy Controller
4. The Associative Machine
5. Cognitive Ease
6. Norms, Surprises, and Causes
7. A Machine for Jumping to Conclusions
8. How Judgments Happen
9. Answering an Easy Question

Jennings tells an ofttimes cheeky story of his experiences leading up to his Jeopardy! appearance. Snippets of trivia are scattered throughout each chapter while he provides some history on quiz shows and college/high-school quiz bowls. I'm enjoying his wit and affection for alliterative wordplay.

Ep: The Future of Human History as a Science;
Answering Yali - Four sets of factors explain why New Guineans did not advance as quickly as Eurasians.
1. Continental differences in domesticable plants/animals
2. Varying rates of diffusion across continents
3. Diffusion rates within continents
4. Area and population size

Despite unavailable experiments, anthropologists are providing evidence for these factors.

Ch19: How Africa Became Black;
By AD 1000, Africa was home to all major human groups (blacks, whites, African Pygmies, Khoisan, and Asians) except Aboriginal Australians and relatives. The north-south axis and ecology provided a barrier to idea diffusion, preventing Eurasians from colonizing the entire continent. The settling of Europeans in sub-Saharan Africa was due to a geographic accident (domesticable plants)

Ch18: Hemisphere's Colliding;
The Old World (Eurasia) clashed with the New World (the Americas) resulting in conquest. The Americas were colonized by pre-Clovis settlers just 13000 years ago, so Europeans were far more advanced technologically and politically by the 15th century. Bands and tribes were easily conquered by force, while the Inca and Aztec empires were weakened by diseases prior to their downfall.

Ch17: Speedboat to Polynesia;
The pacific islands became largely influenced by Asians instead of European explorers because of indigenous germs preventing Europeans from colonizing in significant numbers. Food production spread throughout Polynesia and Micronesia from the north (China) rather than from the south (Australia). The indigenous New Guineans strangely resisted the influences of both.

Ch16: How China Became Chinese;
China has surprising little cultural diversity despite clear differences between northern and southern peoples. No significant geographical barriers divided the area so technology, language, and political structures were able to pervade the entire country very quickly at the start of human history. This allowed China to become an early center for plant and animal domestication.

Ch15: Yali's People;
New Guinea and Australia were populated by 40,000 BC. Yet, New Guineans remained non-literate hunter-gatherers up until a few hundred years ago due to the diversity of the land (food production was unnecessary) and isolation from other islands (who themselves were non-literate H-Gers). When colonists arrived in the late 18th century, they faced barriers that natives had dealt with for centuries.

Ch14: From Egalitarianism to Kleptocracy;
Government/religion, germs, writing, and technology were the four main routes to complex societies. Bands and tribes were the smallest and simplest egalitarian societies while chiefdoms and states were the largest kleptocracies (centralized gov't in which leaders pilfered the people's resources). Societies tend to coalesce into the latter with reversions occurring often.

Ch13: Necessity's Mother;
Instead of innovation being born out of necessity, the opposite tends to be the case; needs become salient post-invention. Technologies diffused and evolved at different rates on different continents with Eurasia growing fastest. Eurasia faced fewer obstacles while the Americas and Africa had to overcome the unfriendly deserts and rain-forests that effectively separated the landmasses.

Ch12: Blueprints and Borrowed Letters;
Hunter-gatherer societies were unable to develop the effective writing systems of food-producing peoples. Early writing was used mostly for debt accounting, and by the societal elite to oppress the lower-class members of the group. Writing spread via 'Blueprint' (an existing system) and idea diffusion (the general concept of scribing). Alphabets spread necessarily by blueprint.

Ch11: Lethal Gift of Livestock;
Europeans didn't just bring superior weaponry, technology, and farming methods with them to the New World. They also brought diseases that native peoples had not yet been exposed to. As a result, most of the conquest of the Americas was not due to the swords of conquistadors, but by the rapid spread of epidemics. Domesticated social animals were great breeding grounds for pathogens.

Ch10: Spacious Skies and Tilted Axes;
Latitude is a key indicator for the successful diffusion of food production to the east/west of the Fertile Crescent. It was much more difficult to grow the same crops in the varying climates as close as a thousand miles to the north and south. Eurasia is the biggest landmass and also stretches east-west while the Americas' and African axes stretch north-south.

Ch9: Zebras, Unhappy Marriages, and the Anna Karenina Principle;
'Domesticable animals are all alike; every undomesticable animal is undomesticable in its own way.'
Humans and wild animals form mostly unhappy marriages. Successful domestication requires the fulfillment of many criteria. Most domesticates live in packs, adhering to strict dominance hierarchies. This allowed humans to step in as leaders of the packs.

Ch8: Apples or Indians;
The answer to why the Fertile Crescent peoples were the first and predominate food producers is not that the area was more suitable for crop domestication. Many other mediterranean climates were existent in 8500 BC. It's because the wild flora were not suitable for domestication. The actual crops developed took a long time to cultivate. So, Diamond claims it wasn't the indians, it was apples.

Ch7: How to Make an Almond;
Domestication of wild plants by early farmers was almost certainly an unconscious process. H-Gers selected the biggest berries and the sweetest fruits to eat. Someone likely realized those plants popping up in the place they "did their business" and also the stores of unconsumed food left to rot. Then, animal power in farming led to monoagricultural gardens focusing on one specific crop.

Still not sure I understand what's going on in the Copycat program in chapter 13, but the cellular automata lead-up was a nice review. I understand that it's a genetic algorithm with the goal of analyzing patterns, mapping analogies and creating general rules for pattern recognition.

Ch6: To Farm or Not To Farm;
Five factors contributed to the gradual stepping-up towards food production.
1: Decreased wild food availability.
2: Increased domesticable wild plant availability.
3: Technological advances in food collection, processing and storage.
4: Increasing population densities
5: Displacement and extermination of lower-density hunter-gatherer peoples by higher-density food producers.

Ch5: History's Haves and Have-Nots;
The hunter-gathers essentially became the 'have-nots' while the food producers invaded to become the 'haves.' Ecological factors dictated which peoples would become food producers. 'The peoples of areas with a head start on food production thereby gained a head start on the path leading to guns, germs, and steel.'
Now the focus shifts to explaining the geographical variation.

Ch4: Farmer Power;
Land cultivation enabled groups of peoples to organize specialized societies, where vocations facilitated the rise of experts. Hunter-gatherers were the jacks-of-all-trades while the farming societies could devote resources to sustained conquest missions. This led to the domestication of large mammals, such as horses, which could be used for long distance travel. Advantage: Europeans

Ch3: Collision at Cajamarca;
Francisco Pizarro's capture of Atahaullpa spearheaded the conquest of the Inca Empire (which was weakened due to civil war and diseases introduced by Europeans). The Spaniards had far better armor, weaponry and communications resulting in atrocious slaughters of natives. So why weren't the roles of this scenario reversed? Why didn't the Incas develop guns and steel to conquer Europe?

Ch2: A Natural Experiment of History;
Polynesian colonists began to diverge due to the environments they found themselves in. Some went back to being hunter-gatherers while others were able to cultivate the land for farming. Consequently, the population densities varied greatly, from ~5-1100 ppl/sqmi. With so much variation between geographically-close peoples, divergence of distant peoples shouldn't be a surprise.