2024 By The Books, Q1

We are back with another truckload of reviews of works that left me wonder whether we can ever get into the mind of a chicken, why perfectly sane people would sell you a brand-new car in exchange for a stack of paper slips, and if we should all become a good deal more ignorant.

Daniel Issing
11 min readMay 20, 2024
Photo by @felipepelaquim on Unsplash

Are We Smart Enough To Know How Smart Other Animals Are?, Frans de Waal

A delightful read. Spoiler alert: I don’t think de Waal (who died earlier this year) ever answers the question posed in the title. His story is one of researchers displaying considerable narrow-mindedness, indeed carelessness, when interpreting the behavior of their animal subjects; but also a parallel strain that devised ingenious methods to get into the minds of creatures whose inner lives cannot be accessed through introspection.

It’s tempting to overlay his presentation with a Whiggish interpretation of science; a slow, torturous but inexorable march towards progress. My sense is that this is decidedly not de Waal’s position. He does not merely want to show us the follies of the past and assure his readers that science is on the right track after all. Instead, I take his writing to imply that there will be aspects of animal cognition that will forever be inaccessible to us, in the sense of being unable to understand “what it’s like to be a bat”. This is a perspective that is often missing from another discussion as well, revitalized by LLMs: How should we think about the concept of intelligence more broadly speaking? Is there such a thing as “general” intelligence, either in the superhuman or the universal Turing sense?

Austerlitz, W.G. Sebald

This is the first German novel I read in a long time, and this fact may have colored my perception of the book. It is beautifully told, no doubt, and I think it is rather remarkable that Sebald manages to tell a story in which WW2 features prominently without invoking the usual pictures — and yet not appear ignorant or disrespectful. Nevertheless, the style feels oddly antiquated for a novel that came out in 2001, but it’s hard to assess whether this is due to the language or something Sebald consciously set out to create. The architectural speculations, thickly woven into the plot, are perhaps the most interesting aspect of the novel, or at the very least a feature that makes it stand out.

The Bottom Billion, Paul Collier

This book concludes my reading of what I like to think of as the Big Important Books on Development, which includes works like Jeff Sachs’ The End of Poverty, Bill Easterly’s The White Man’s Burden, Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson’s Why Nations Fail, Dambisa Moyo’s Dead Aid and Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo’s Poor Economics. These are unlikely to be the very best books on the topic, but for better or worse, no one writing on development these days can avoid acknowledging their gravitational pull.

Collier, unlike Sachs (with whom he otherwise has a lot in common — he’s firmly in the Planner camp), doesn’t believe that a lot of aid will do much to lift poor nations out of poverty, and he’s equally skeptical that they’ll transform from within. He’s right on the mark when he pronounced that a guilt-ridden approach to development is unlikely to help us focus on the right things, and no doubt a lot of development thought suffers from this particular guilt complex. I just wish he’d kept his skeptical hat on when evaluating his own proposals, which do require a remarkable degree of confidence in international organizations and charters that their track record alone can’t possibly justify.

Other than that, am I the only one who finds Collier’s writing to be unabashedly condescending? A telling case is his insistence on informing his readers whether a particular part of his work has been peer-reviewed or not. Usually, this should count towards transparency, but the way he spells it out gives a very different vibe — that of an academic who believes the audience needs to be drip-fed the most basic facts about the scientific enterprise. (In fairness, this tendency is displayed somewhat less aggressively in Exodus, so maybe I’m reading too much into it.)

Company Of Strangers by Paul Seabright

“Trusting strangers is… a most unnatural thing for us to do. It is like a foreign language we have learned to speak with such assurance that we are all the more unnerved by our inevitable mistakes and the sometimes spectacular confusions to which these give rise.”

Indeed it is! And it’s quite remarkable that few of us are aware of, well, just how remarkable this state of affairs is. I would go as far as to claim that a huge part of the unprecedented economic growth we have witnessed during the last two centuries is, if not explained by our ability to trust strangers, then unexplainable without it. There is an unfortunate tendency to conceive of society too much in terms of formal rules enforceable by a central authority that has made us blind to the fact that such enforcement can only be effective if it is used but in the rarest of cases. Modern liberal society “works” because by and large, people play by its book without external pressure. As Seabright puts it, “the most effective mechanisms for ensuring trust rely not just on incentives but on people’s internalization of values through education and training.”

But every so often things blow up. The banking system is possibly the most prominent example — we are being told that we can always access the money deposited in our accounts, even though this clearly isn’t true. Two things can be true at once: It is desirable for everyone to withdraw money whenever they damn please, and it makes sense for banks not simply to hoard the money, but put it to profitable use, e.g. by offering loans. This is a feature, not a bug, and similar patterns show up in a thousand other places where supply is (quite reasonably) modeled in terms of expected demand, not to literally guarantee access to everyone at the same time — buses, phone calls and the electricity grid, to name but a few.

Seabright highlights an important aspect of such complex systems, namely that they couldn’t work if people were strictly rational, utility-maximizing machines. This isn’t just because such beings would regularly find it to their advantage to cheat and swindle, and, expecting everybody else to do the same, set the stage for an epic societal breakdown. It runs deeper than that: Even if these imaginary humans did, in their heart of hearts, desire to cooperate, it would be hard to convince others of their trustworthiness so long is this propensity to cooperate is merely the outcome of an elaborate mental calculation — calculations that could easily indicate that it was advantageous to defect.

My main criticism of the book is that the different chapters do feel a little disconnected. There are many interesting claims and arguments in the book, but they don’t necessarily feed into a coherent narrative, and so the above, rather than being a summary of the book, just analyzes the sections I found most clearly argued. That’s a shame, because I think it explains why the book remains little-known.

The Evolution Of God, Robert Wright

That our conception of the supernatural has changed rather dramatically from the prehistoric notion of spirits to the highly anthropomorphic polytheism of ancient Greece and Rome, and finally to a single all-powerful, all-knowing and fundamentally incomprehensible God (at least in the Abrahamic tradition) should not be news to anyone, and a book making this point would barely be worth reading. Wright, to his credit, goes a lot deeper when he maps out the evolution of the divine, and does not spare religious sensibilities in his strikingly naturalistic exposition. For example, he makes a very convincing case that Christianity itself (in particular the Old Testament) was heavily polytheistic, an observation obscured by the fact that the Bible isn’t chronologically ordered. At other times, he mercilessly dissects Jesus’ theology, which looks very unlike what we typically ascribe to him these days. The scripture is no longer the word of God, it is a political pamphlet at first that tries to offer metaphysical justifications for historical events that unfolded at the time it was written.

The interesting twist comes when he takes this whole evolutionary approach and turns it upside down. In his view, one can impute an almost teleological interpretation to our expanding notion of God: Starting from rather crude ideas of the supernatural, we are inching closer to an ever closer (and more enlightened) view of the divine, without ever being able to attain it. I don’t quite know if I get him right here — on the one hand, he is very clear that Man created God in His Image, but at the same time he seems to maintain that our theology doesn’t grow out of nowhere — we are merely getting better at articulating something that was “real” all along.

I don’t think I fully buy this, and this book could certainly have profited from a slightly broader perspective that gives other world religions their due. For example, I can’t see how not devoting even a single paragraph to Hinduism or Buddhism could be anything other than a glaring omission, and one that could easily sink his whole thesis. The same thing goes for more recently established religions — how does one escape the conclusion that, say, Mormonism provides a better approximation of the true nature of God than traditional Christianity? Indeed, how are we to decide which school of theology we are to follow — given the sheer variety of interpretations “out there”, surely it won’t suffice to argue that newer theories are better?

The Feast of the Goat , Mario Vargas Llosa

An excellent novel, probably Vargas Llosa’s best. In this fictionalized but chillingly realistic account of the assassination of the Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo, the author demonstrates that he is a master of gripping, intelligent narration — something that shines through in many of his other works but rarely as consistently as here. If I have any gripes with the novel, they’d probably be that certain characters feel rather flat (such as Johnny Abbes Garcia, head of the secret service, who is almost comically evil), and a climax that felt a little too predictable.

Fooled By Randomness, Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Ugh, Taleb again? I’ve persistently heard rumors that Fooled By Randomness suffers less from the delusional grandeur that drenches all of his subsequent writings, and in a sense that’s true: At least in the beginning, he presents a semblance of actual arguments that one may or may not agree with. But we soon get into stories (archetypes?) of made-up traders, aphorisms, and the usual insinuations of just what a damn smart guy this Levantine Orthodox Genius is. It can’t be denied that every so often, there are interesting nuggets sprinkled in here and there, and that depending on your degree of patience you may find it worthwhile to look for those — I, for my part, gave up about halfway through.

High Output Management, Andy Grove

Andy Grove is credited for almost single-handedly turning Intel from a flailing behemoth into the hottest company at the turn of the century. Born in Hungary and emigrated to the US after the failed 1956 revolution, he rose from poor immigrant with hardly any knowledge of the English language to one of the most highly respected CEOs in recent history. (As always, be wary of such “Great Men” theories of history.)

What I found most interesting about his preferred explanation for Intel’s rise from the ashes — a new management style that allowed the company to be more productive and responsive to changing circumstances — is how thoroughly these practices have permeated corporate practice. Performance reviews, dedicated weekly meetings between managers and subordinates (“1:1s”) and a focus on continuous professional development have all become part of the standard repertoire of many (most?) major businesses, and if High Output Management can indeed be credited with this, that would be an impressive achievement. (I have no idea if this is true.)

Ignorance, Stuart Firestein

People say science is about facts and accumulated knowledge, but instead the heart and soul of that whole enterprise really are the things we don’t know, the stuff we have no clue about. This sounds banal, but if there is more to this book, I must have missed it. I believe Firestein would say something to the effect of “no, but it’s not just that we don’t know certain things and we try to find out the truth about them, it’s really that science is fundamentally about ignorance”, I’m just not quite sure what practical implications that carries. Should students be taught more about epistemology or the history of scientific ideas, instead of just being served the polished textbook version? Maybe it makes for a good undergraduate reading, beyond that, not too sure.

Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula Le Guin

I seem to be incapable of warming up to science fiction. Even the most decorated works of the genre don’t seem to jibe with me, and at this point it would be fair to say that it’s me, not them. Left Hand of Darkness has been praised for its original take on gender identities, but instead the whole thing felt extremely stilted. Neither did the plot offer much of interest — solid, but not particularly enchanting. Welp.

The Myth Of The Rational Market, Justin Fox

My expectations for this book were that it would offer yet another riff on the tired old theme of “economics assumes that humans are fully rational actors, humans are in fact often irrational, hence all of economics is wrong”. Instead, I think Fox offered a balanced and informed account of the genesis and evolution of an underappreciated idea, the efficient market hypothesis. (Because people misunderstand it all the time, let me say once more that this hypothesis does not state that markets are always perfectly efficient.) Good stuff for anyone interested in the history of economic thought, but also the practical consequences of this idea for investing.

Pests, Bethany Brookshire

When we talk about pest control, we think of it as a response to an objective thread: Certain animals are undesirable because they’re invasive species, dirty our cities with their poop, or carry infectious diseases, and hence they must be combatted, tallied or, in certain cases, exterminated. But how objective are these categories, really? Sure, many people have an aversion to rats, pigeons and a varying number of other animals, but is it really possible to pin down plausible criteria why these creatures (and not others) are problematic?

Brookshire does a great job arguing that the idea of a pest is, yes, socially constructed (at least in part), and often merely a designation reserved for anything that interferes with our way of living. That’s why elephants that Western tourists love dearly are viewed as a plague by others who have to live and farm in their vicinity. As a matter of fact, I learned a great deal about the fascinating schemes that people have devised to keep elephants out of their immediate surroundings, with mixed success.

It could have been an even better book if she hadn’t tried quite as hard to please the prevailing orthodoxy. Part of it is just a personal preference; spelling out each time somebody opines on matters such as the Native perspective on rats, she feels an irresistible urge to spell out whether that person identifies as First Nation or whatnot (with the implication being that only people from a given culture can pronounce judgment on it, a terribly relativistic idea). But worse, “non-Western” perspectives get treated with a reverence that is reminiscent of religious dogma, when really, she should have presented them as alternative accounts that deserve critical examination. Read it for fascinating stories about trophy hunts for invasive snakes in the Everglades, jump over the politically correct ritualistic chants, and chances are you’ll like it.

The White Man’s Burden, William Easterly

Hayek on steroids, applied to the field of aid and development. I thought it was rather disappointing, although I do agree with the author’s assessment that a lot of actual development practice falls short of even the most generous interpretation of “doing good”, and yet remains impressively delusional about it. But there has got to be more to it than the simple “planners vs seekers” dichotomy that Easterly poses, with the former drafting grandiose plans and executing them regardless of how much their theories resemble reality. Maybe it historically served the purpose of a wake up call, but nowadays that kind of skepticism as so thoroughly invaded the bloodstream that the marginal learning value of the book is rather miniscule.

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Daniel Issing

Book reviews, trail running, physics, and whatever else I feel like writing about.