Category: Book reviews

Week 3, Gene Expression book club

Posted on by Razib Khan

Readers have been complaining about Not Born Yesterday: The Science of Who We Trust and What We Believe. The issue is that there’s no “there, there.” The author hasn’t really dug into the meat of his arguments, and everything was pretty thin and cursory in the first and second chapters. The third chapter is different.

He reviews the literature that people are gullible, that stupid people are gullible, that children are gullible. And he finds them all wanting. For example, he reviews and dismisses the literature on brainwashing and subliminal messaging. This is fine as far as it goes, from what I know these are not real things, but more public panics. I’m not sure that that is the strongest argument against gullibility.

In contrast, the idea of an evolutionary “arms race” between communicators and communicated speaks more to why we are not gullible. In evolutionary arms races, such as with disease, the two competitors tend to stay in place. Ultimately the equilibrium is maintained. This is obviously not the case for human communication. Rather, there’s a lot of evolutionary theory which suggests that there is a “ratchet” of increased complexity and richness of our cultural repertoire that emerges from social communication. If gullibility was so pervasive, it should have been selected against in this environment. Gullible people are marks.

The other angle that this chapter takes is to attack the relevance of “system 1” and “system 2” thinking that was popularized by Daniel Kahneman in books such as Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow (system 1 and 2 respectively). System 1 is fast, but subject to cognitive biases (it can be deceived), while system 2 is slow, but analysis takes time. One of the implications of this is that more analytical people, who rely on system 2, will be less gullible. I won’t go into the detail, but Not Born Yesterday presents an interpretation of this literature that suggests that gullibility again is not at play here. In fact, the authors suggest that system 2 itself can be easy to deceive or come to the wrong conclusion quite often. In fact, I kept thinking of the author’s previous book, The Enigma of Reason, which presents some arguments for why system 2 originally emerged.

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Week 2, Gene Expression book club

Posted on by Razib Khan

The second chapter of Not Born Yesterday: The Science of Who We Trust and What We Believe is short. Much of it is re-warmed evolutionary biology, with a focus on ethology. If you’ve read Amotz Zahavi’s The Handicap Principle: A Missing Piece of Darwin’s Puzzle or Dugatkin & Reeve’s Game Theory and Animal Behavior this will be a quick and easy chapter. Basically, the issue being explored here is that social cognition and conformity run up against the fact that there is an incentive to “cheat”, and communication is a two-way street.

Zahavi was the 20th century’s most eloquent expositor of the “handicap principle.” The idea that you need “hard-to-fake” signals to accurately convey information. So, for example, huge antlers are honest signals of robustness and genetic health, even though they are nonfunctional, and reduce individual fitness (it’s easier to find and catch animals with antlers). The idea that people are gullible and credulous in terms of communication and information processing runs afoul of the reality that communicators are incentivized to deceive you to optimize their own fitness (or, just “free rider” off communication altruism of conspecifics).

The strangest part of this chapter is that Mercier threw in a reference to Haig’s theories about mother-offspring genetic conflict due to different life-history incentives. The mother is optimized to not invest too much into the fetus so that resources are left for future offspring, while the fetus is incentivized to extract as much as possible (within reason; the offspring is related to future progeny, though in most mammals that might be 0.25 and not 0.50). All this is true, and it’s a robust area of science, but I thought this chapter would have benefited from more discussion of ethology and behavior, and less on evolutionary genetics.

Basically, the takehome here is that the gullible should be selected against…

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Week 1, Gene Expression book club

Posted on by Razib Khan

Not Born Yesterday: The Science of Who We Trust and What We Believe starts rather quickly and succinctly out of the gate. The author reviews the extant literature and folk wisdom that humans are gullible, and not suspicious of people trying to swindle them. To a great extent, this is the mainstream view now, with the emergence of the “heuristics and biases” literature, and the field of “cultural evolution” which is rooted in the idea of social cognition.

Social cognition basically means instead of thinking things through yourself you allow the community to decide. As a hadith states, the Ummah shall not agree upon an error. It’s cheap, easy, and good enough. But, this reliance on community means that irrational herds can erupt, and the opportunity arises for ‘cheaters’ to game these systems of information flow (think ‘affinity scams’).

The first chapter of Not Born Yesterday is a capsule of the view not taken in this book, so I assume the best is yet to come.

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Gene Expression Book Club – it’s off to the races!

Posted on by Razib Khan

So I’ve started reading the two books we selected:

– Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom: China, the West, and the Epic Story of the Taiping Civil War

– Not Born Yesterday: The Science of Who We Trust and What We Believe

Chapter 1 for both of them is very short, so I assume most of you will not flake out on this. I may go ahead, but as you know I will be posting every Friday night. If you have a blog, post your own  impressions and I will link that up. If you have a comment, put in a comment. If you are an “oral” expositor, I suppose I could link to a podcast.

The page for the book club will be updated over the next five months.

Hugo Mecier follows me on Twitter, so I’m going to try and see if he’s willing to do a livestream early in 2021 about Not Born Yesterday. I don’t know Stephen Platt, but am hoping to do the same thing with him if he’s open to it.

Remember, you only need to read one book. But really both are doable. I’m going to be reading some other things since one chapter a week is so leisurely.

As for why I’m doing the book club and just totally pessimistic about Western civilization:

There are barbarians all around us. Just look. These people are no different than censorious religious radicals in the past. Except for religious radicals at least had some notional broader vision of the world and the good. These people only care about their own individual feels. Power uber alles.

Let’s read!

Posted on by Razib Khan

Anyone who has read this weblog over the last few years has sensed my hopelessness and despair about the fallen world and in particular the American republic and Western civilization. I have told Rod Dreher many times privately that we irreligious also need our “Benedict option” in a “darkening world.” But while the Roman Empire fell due to the exogenous shocks of barbarian invasions, as well as internal decay, I feel the exogenous shock of coronavirus just exposed our societal ills, and we’re committing suicide all by ourselves.

My wife is reading The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. When I first heard the author, Nicholas Carr, talk about his book in 2010 on a podcast I was walking up Cedar street in Berkeley. I remember this moment so well because I laughed loudly. I scoffed. I almost dropped my iPod shuffle. Those were the days.

Unfortunately, though Carr’s book is dated, and some of the research seems tenuous, I am beginning to accept more and more of his conclusions. A few years ago I expressed some alarm at the rise of YouTube commentators. They are fine as far as it goes, but they are extremely popular and often informationally vapid.

Today, we have TikTok, where some of my younger friends admit to me that they spend hours and hours watching sequences of videos such as this.

But despair isn’t the point of this post. I’m almost done with The Birth of the West: Rome, Germany, France, and the Creation of Europe in the Tenth Century. The question then is, what do I read next? But then I thought, why just me? I haven’t done anything like a “book club” in many years. But why not? There isn’t a reason I have to march alone through the TikTok world.

So here’s the plan: I will pick a book, and read one chapter a week, and write a blog post about it. And those of you who also want to read the book can comment (if you have a blog or something you can post and I will link to that post; but who has blogs now?).

Here are some options, and I’ll let readers in the comments help choose:

The Economists’ Hour: False Prophets, Free Markets, and the Fracture of Society

Not Born Yesterday: The Science of Who We Trust and What We Believe

Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom: China, the West, and the Epic Story of the Taiping Civil War

The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge

The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success

Improbable Destinies: Fate, Chance, and the Future of Evolution

Greek Buddha: Pyrrho’s Encounter with Early Buddhism in Central Asia

Melting Pot or Civil War?: A Son of Immigrants Makes the Case Against Open Borders

The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century

The Invention of Science: A New History of the Scientific Revolution

Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-1962

Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

Pagans: The End of Traditional Religion and the Rise of Christianity

Champlain’s Dream

Against Fairness

I’m open to selections outside of this list…but I would prefer something on this list unless you have an awesome idea. These are books I already own and are in my “stack” of to-reads. Also, obviously remember that books written by academics are going to be much more dense than those written by journalists and commentators, which will be “quick reads.”