Review: The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business

I'm kind of tired of the Gladwellian psychology books that have hit the market. Oh, you have a journalism degree and an MBA? You're totally an a-ok source for a psychology book.

Why is it that psychology books are written by journalists and Kaku, Cox, Greene and Hawkings write actual physics books? I'll never understand.

Anyways, this book isn't bad. It starts with talking about habits that people have, habits that companies have, and habits that society has and questions the ethics of knowing about habits. The first two parts are good. Duhigg has an MBA and he writes about businesses well. But suddenly veers into talking about how habits created the civil rights movement-- by changing habits.... uhh, what? Like, Gladwell already talking about Dr. King and Birmingham. Dead subject. Let's stop exploring it from a weird psychological angle, please.

When discussing the ethics of habits, he talks about how gamblers have a habit. He tries to create this sympathetic story for a stay-at-home mom who gambled all her money away. We're supposed to feel sorry for her, and generally, question whether or not she is in the ethical wrong because she was driven by corporate manipulation. I don't know, Duhigg should really just say, "No, don't feel sorry for her. By doing a bad thing that could form a habit in the first place, she let it into her life. I've shown throughout this book that creating a habit is like allowing an angel or a demon into your life. She asked a demon into her life."

Perhaps the most important part of this entire book is the appendix, which actually brings it all together: it talks about how to kick or create habits and gives a self-guided way of doing so. That's pretty spectacular and it is written well. Now go eat a cookie.

Review: The Fault in Our Stars

This book is a combination of girl-porn and death-porn. Porn as in there is literally sex, and porn as in reddits' use of the term of describe "earthporn" or "cityporn". It is girl porn in the Notebook sense- two people who love each other because they meet each other and even though they're not perfectly, they're perfectly perfect. Blah blah blah love exists.

But that isn't where the book shines. The book is straight up death-porn. Remember when Harry Potter is contemplating his death in book 7? Or in Too Far From Home when the astronaut off-station is described as dying because he can't get back? Those are little half-a-dozen page long descriptions of somebody dying or preparing to die. They're both really fun reads. Death porn isn't gore or watching other people die, it is the Oculus-Rifting of death. You are the one dying.

And holy shit, is this book not from beginning to end, death porn. Now, it doesn't need to glorify death or cancer to do this. In fact, Green is extremely anti-romanticization. Death in the book is /never/ accepted. Death is bad. People who say "they're in a better place" are treated like the innocent, well-meant but wrong people that they are.

Dylan Thomas wrote his poem, Do not go gentle into that good night, ending with the lines,

"Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light."

The goodness of AFIOS is that it captures that mantra in a format that is edible for teenage girls.

Review: Why Him? Why Her?: Understanding Your Personality Type and Finding the Perfect Match

Why Him? Why Her? has two Why's in it because its alternative title is "Why 2: The Sequel to Why We Love?"

Helen Fisher's sequel to Why We Love has all the same characteristics of the original book: an extraordinary amount of cultural references combined with many academic references to psychological and anthropological studies. In my opinion, she is more careful to address issues with transexuals and homosexuals than she was in her first book. However, unlike her first book she is not laying out her case descriptive case for love, but a prescriptive case. "If ... Then ..." is sort of the underlying point of the entire book. If you're a director, to x y and z to get a good relationship with a negotiator. Or, lets say "if you're a explorer in a relationship with a builder, then you should focus on matching your zaniness to their sturdiness."

The one questionable thing about the book really is the premise of personality types. Like: "it can't be that simple and the exact hormone/neurotransmitter relationships aren't really explained!" Fisher uses historical references- to Greek and Native American personality types- to try to shore up these divisions. The appendix includes some of the data from her Chemistry.com data, which, I suppose, does mean /something/ is going on here. But obviously it isn't very set in stone, and Fisher thankfully makes that clear. Instead of saying, "If my quiz says this, then you must date this" she talks about how best to deal with those around you.

Review: Everything Bad is Good for You

Everything Bad is to Better Angels as Johnson is to Pinker as Pop Culture is to Violence. That is to say, Everything Bad is a sweeping and powerful attack on the "we're all idiots now" narrative. Games teach us- not just button skills or better eyesight (though they DO do that)- an entire set of cognitive skills that allow us to recognize patterns and make better sense of the world. TV shows are increasingly more complicated, and technology bolsters their complexity. This complexity is due to the fact that humans are generally smart. We're NOT all idiots. Likewise, the best movies of the 00's are complicated, twisting tales that turn our brain on. Even reality TV, the pseudogame shows that aren't really "reality" are much better than they were in the 90s or 80s.

Sure, elite culture isn't getting any better or more complex, but so what?

Interesting, Everything Bad stands the test of time (about another 8 years). The success of Breaking Bad, House of Cards, Netflix, and online streaming are all trends that Johnson pretty much guessed at in 2006. Stories are more complicated, require us to think more about them, and expand our horizons. Hell, even the sitcoms that the author had no access to- the Big Bang Theory and How I Met Your Mother- validate the claim that pop culture is more and more useful.

Johnson did not guess things like Twitter or Facebook or Reddit, which reward easily digestible content, would attempt to thwart the new pop culture. But his guess that we'd tend towards more complicated social systems? Surely those image macros that pave the surface of the internet have a technical complexity, one that relates to pop culture and gives it the "meme-like" power it was supposed to have

Either way, good book. A summary of it could be, "My Star Trek is more sophisticated than my mom's Star Trek because I'm smarter because I was raised in a more system-rich environment."

Review: The Selfish Gene

I read the Selfish Gene over the course of a single night in a single sitting, from 8pm to 12:30. What helps is that Dawkins is just a really good writer and that it isn't incredibly long. It is only ~200 pages, and so reading it is like watching a long documentary. Dawkins starts out basically saying he is going to war with group selection and other theories of evolution. He produces throughout the book a series of generalized models that work of the "Mendelian particle nature" of genes. But Mendel was wrong! You might say. Well, Dawkins knows that. He proposes that we consider a gene to be an /approximation/ of that particle nature by considering it to be essentially a strip of a chromosome that lasts over many generations, be it for a hundred thousand years or millions of them.

What I found really great was just the writing. Dawkins is fantastic. He has his asides, and apologizes for them. Perhaps the documentary metaphor is off. It might be considered almost conversational, with Dawkins' adversaries speaking up to either aid or be destroyed (assuming he isn't creating strawmen for them. I don't know).

Something interesting is that the models that Dawkins presents have been repeated in more recent literature. Professor Pinker in Better Angels might of well have copied Dawkins' chapter on aggression for parts of his book. Selfish Gene is an old book, almost 40 years old actually, and it shows its wear. It talks about computers that haven't beaten humans at chess yet and talks about only a few hundred transistors in the area of the human brain. Maybe reading the 30th Anniversary edition would've better suited me than the one I got at the university library.

Review: The Revenge Of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate

The Revenge of Geography is what George Friedmen's "The Next _____ Years" books were not. It is a geopolitical tour de force, a textbook introduction to the history of realpolitik and realism without focusing too much on the Greeks or the Machiavelli. Kaplan begins discussing the history of geopolitics, its rise from Bismark, Mahan, and Mackinder, to its fall and defense after World War 2. He is attempting to save it from the grips of war hawks and Nazis, and I believe that Kaplan does a good job at it.

In the next part of the book, Kaplan uses the theories he discusses to go on a tour around the world. The tour takes us from Central Europe in a great circle around the circumference of Eurasia, back to Turkey. He does not discuss Europe and but barely touches on South America. The novel ends with a discussion of the United States and its relationship with Mexico, and different realist interpretations of what will happen with the massive Mexican immigration population and whether or not it will be Americanized. Throughout this tour, Kaplan does a careful comparison of how geography may determine different things: hilly and harsh "Mediterranean" weather meant that South Europe was the land of highly landed elites, while Northern Europe had less formal relationships, and therefore more democracy, because their land was more productive. Russia exists in a constant state of fear. China deals with an eternal, internal conflict between its periphery and its core. India never developed its own centralized civilization because it was simply too productive and its regional powers balanced each other until they were forced together by an outside force.

Each time Kaplan uses one of these theories to explain the political, cultural and economic differences between nations, he is quick to point out contradictions. He does not want to seem like a geographic determinist, but instead a geographic possibilist (sp?). Sometimes these contrary points seem almost like pleading, "Take this set of theories seriously! please!"

All in all, the book is good and should convince the more liberal, the marxists or the libertarians among us to give more consideration to nature, geography and circumstance in the future.

Review: The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature

I will confess: i skipped about four chapters. The three in which Pinker responds to political objections and the one chapter about art. the chapter about art felt out of place, and is 10 years out of date. The other three I skipped because I need no convincing: The Blank Slate is namely about how evolutionary psychology is true and the idea of "humans being born with blank minds" being testably untrue. Note, Pinker has never started out as an evolutionary psychologist. He is a linguist, and his study of language has lead him to evolutionary psychology. He talks about, when discussing children, that it is a useful theory. The book has lots and lots of evidence, and about 30% of its pages are just notes and appendicies relating to these studies. I felt like Pinker was bringing his full on offensive game, and he pulls no punches. He trashes Margaret Mead and other "blank slatists" who he says deny human nature. It is a must read book for understanding human nature.