→ May 3, 2015
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The Victorian Internet.

I first encountered Tom Standage’s work when a friend gave me Standage’s A History of the World in Six Glasses, a brief history of a half-dozen fundamental drinks common to most global cuisines. At some point after I wrote about that book, Amazon put Standage’s 1996 book, The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph, on sale for the Kindle for just $1.99, so I picked it up because it seemed – as Paddington Brown might say – very good value, and I like to stash a few ebooks on my iPad in case I’m traveling and am caught without a book. Standage’s book was more than worth that price, as it’s a breezy, enlightening book on the invention, rise, and fall of the telegraph, with many parallels to the invention and rise of the modern Internet – although the latter’s fall has yet to come.

Standage covers a lot of ground in a short book, so he’s rarely bogged down in excessive detail; what detail there is he concentrates toward the front of the book as he describes attempts to invent the first telegrpah and then to improve it. The telegraph was preceded by what now seem comically inept attempts to transmit information over long distances using towers that would send signals using light by moving large panels that were visible from the next station. (Such towers live on in the many places around the world named Telegraph Hill.) It took a couple of crackpots who either didn’t know of the difficulties they faced or simply wished them away to come up with the first real devices that transmitted very simple signals over electrical wires – and then the inventors had to convince others that these things would actually work. Telegraphs first caught on thanks to some basic economic needs, not to actual foresight on anyone’s part: Railways and stock traders were among the leading early customers, and the rapid increase in the demand for immediate information via telegraphy led to attempts to increase what we’d now call the bandwidth of telegraph lines. These efforts eventually led to the fortunate accident, also described in Standage’s book, that led to Alexander Graham Bell and his assistant Watson (as all good assistants are named) discovering that they could transmit sounds over electrical wires, leading them to invent the telephone. Thomas Edison also makes a few appearances, as his first paying job was as a telegraph operator, a task at which he was so adept he quickly raised his pay and status and eventually used his work as leverage to fund his first laboratory.

Once that technical material is out of the way, Standage can focus on the social and economic aspects of the telegraph’s invention and rapid spread and adoption. News agencies were also early adopters, leading to the now-ubiquitous organizations Reuters and the Associated Press. Diplomats made heavy use of such cables for several decades, with the telegraph playing significant roles in the Dreyfuss Affair (which led Emile Zola to pen his “J’accuse!” column) and the Zimmermann Telegram fiasco during World War I. But there were also dreamers who thought the telegraph would lead to world peace and skeptics who thought the telegraph a parlor trick or feared its impact, similar to pronouncements on all sides of the earliest days of the World Wide Web (and the Segway, which didn’t work out quite so well). It’s an instructive look at how new technologies can disrupt entire economies, and how people and businesses react to such disruptive technologies in the first place, with massive investments made as if the telegraph was going to last forever, only to have it supplanted by the telephone within a few decades.

Standage wrote his book in 1997, so even in the short period since then we’ve seen substantial upheaval from the explosion of the Internet around the globe and through new access points unthought of when most people got online via a computer and a 28k modem. He adds an afterword, written in 2007, where he correctly foresees the rise of mobile phones as Internet access devices, and even draws a parallel between the economy of characters in text messaging and the various methods of shorthand used to send cheaper telegraphs. The afterword gives The Victorian Internet the finishing bow it needs to tie together its subject with the subtitle, and to allow Standage to emphasize the broader point about the creative destruction wrought by highly disruptive technologies. It’s a quick, educational read that, if it pops up for $2 again, would even make a bear from darkest Peru smile.

Next up: I finished Anthony Marra’s A Constellation of Vital Phenomena last night and started Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being.

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→ March 24, 2015
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Charlatan: America’s Most Dangerous Huckster.

Pope Brock’s Charlatan: America’s Most Dangerous Huckster, the Man Who Pursued Him, and the Age of Flimflam tells the story of con man J.R. Brinkley, the forerunner to today’s “FoodBabe” and “HealthRanger,” a man whose scams were so successful (at extracting money) and popular that he nearly won an election to become governor of Kansas. He helped create the modern radio industry, launched the first real “border blaster” from just over the border with Mexico, and spent about twenty years evading the pursuit of the American Medical Association’s lead investigator Morris Fishbein before finally coming to justice. It is so bizarre and so extreme that it defies belief, both that anyone could get away with a scam so brazen and that his name isn’t that well known today.

Brinkley’s main con was to pass himself off as a surgeon (despite a lack of any medical degree other than honorary ones he received later) who invented an operation where he would implant the glands from goat testicles into the scrotum of a human to give the latter added virility. In other words, he was selling penis pills before Al Gore invented the Internet. And it worked – the con, that is, not the operation, which was complete bullshit and left many patients maimed or worse. Brinkley built a huge practice in the backwater town of Milford, Kansas, in part by also constructing one of the country’s first radio stations and using it to promote his own business. He also filled much of the station’s airtime with country music, spreading the popularity of that genre and thus further building the audience for his promotion of his own business.

When the authorities in Kansas eventually forced him to stop killing people with scrotal operations, Brinkley first staged a write-in campaign for governor that, in just five weeks, may have garnered him enough votes to win, only to have a back-room deal invalidate thousands of those votes and hand the election to one of his rivals. Brinkley later decamped for Del Rio, Texas, opening a new surgery and setting up a half-million watt radio station just over the border that was so powerful there were days the signal could reportedly reach Canada. That station, XERA, introduced mexican and “tex-mex” music to the broader public and later gave us the outsized personality known as Wolfman Jack. Brinkley was a ruthless, sociopathic confidence man, but he was also quite brilliant and kept ahead of his enemies and adversaries for so long because he was a visionary. He saw potential in radio before anyone else did, and rewrote the rules of political campaigns, and also found a fine new way to part gullible people from their money, whether they had it to give him or not.

Fishbein enters frequently into the story as a secondary character, giving the story some narrative greed as he and Brinkley collide several times before the final denouement at a trial where Brinkley was actually the plaintiff, suing Fishbein for libel for calling the fake doctor a charlatan. Whether Brinkley actually believed his “operation” – which barely qualified as such – helped the patients is never clear, as he may simply have been convinced of his own invincibility regardless of the truth. He succeeded for nearly twenty years, running variations of the same scam, frequently upping the ante after he had to pull up stakes in one location, amassing enormous wealth and political power before his ultimate downfall.

That power in particular reminded me of the recent efforts by the soi-disant “FoodBabe” Vani Hari, a woman with no scientific or medical training (and no evident knowledge of either) who has used social media to run protests against specific ingredients in processed foods while encouraging people to do stupid things like take useless “natural herbs” or buy her book. Her post on staying healthy while flying is legendary for its ignorance (such as her beliefs on the chemical composition of air), and she fosters the same kind of anti-science sentiment that encourages vaccine deniers, climate change deniers, and 9/11 “truthers.” Her effort is hardly the only one of its kind; look at NaturalNews, another anti-science site run by a mountebank who peddles misinformation like claiming a raw food diet can cure cancer and fibromyalgia in what amounts to one giant appeal to nature. (Prepare to be shocked: Mike Adams, the self-styled “Health Ranger” who runs Natural News, is a vaccine denier and an all-around quack.) So while it’s easy to read Charlatan and convince yourself that such a sham could never happen today, in reality the fraudsters have just moved online.

Next up: I read S.S. Van Dine’s first Philo Vance mystery, The Benson Murder Case (just $1.99 for Kindle), on the flight yesterday, and will start Nobel Prize winner Mo Yan’s Red Sorghum later today.

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→ March 19, 2015
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Paleofantasy.

My list of breakout player picks for 2015 is up for Insiders. There’s no chat this week due to travel (I’m leaving Arizona this morning), but I’ve got several other posts up and two more coming this week:

* Javier Baez and Brandon Finnegan
* Taijuan Walker and some Dbacks
* Carlos Rodon, Tyler Danish, and Robbie Ray
* University of Arizona infielders Kevin Newman and Scott Kingery

Marlene Zuk’s Paleofantasy: What Evolution Really Tells Us about Sex, Diet, and How We Live takes no prisoners in its assault on that trendy diet fad, one that is based on both bad science and bad history in concluding that we should eat a diet of mostly meat and vegetables, without grains, dairy, or sugar. You can certainly eat whatever you want, but the charlatans pushing this diet and lifestyle are using a deft blend of myth and outright bullshit to convince people to give up huge swaths of their diet, perhaps with dangerous consequences.

Zuk’s emphasis in the book is more on human evolution than “paleo” idiocy; the latter is more of a hook to get readers into what could have been a dry history of the portions of our genes that determine what foods we can (and thus do) eat. Zuk organizes her narrative around the activity or food that paleo hucksters claim we should eschew, but within each section delves into the evolutionary history and evidence that tell us why, in essence, we eat what we eat and we do what we do. Along the way, she sneaks in some broader attacks on those who believe evolution isn’t true, or misunderstand it (deliberately or otherwise) to draw erroneous conclusions. Foremost among them is that evolution is not goal-directed, and does not have a conclusion or an apex. We are not the end, we are still evolving, and whatever you may believe about the meaning of our existence, we’re not the peak of some lengthy process.

Her greatest assaults, however, are on the codswallop tossed about by paleo authors and enthusiasts who claim, in short, that we have switched to a diet to which we are ill-suited from an evolutionary perspective. Zuk explains, with copious evidence, that humans have continued to evolve since the Paleolithic era, and thus have digestive and metabolic capabilities that we didn’t have during the so-called paleo era. Her leading example is a big one for me: lactase persistence, the genetic ability to continue to produce the lactase enzyme past childhood, most prominent in the Lapp populations of northern Scandinavia and in some sub-Saharan African groups. Such genes have only started to spread, but Zuk argues that if this is an evolutionary advantageous development (as it appears to be), it will likely spread through natural selection over a long enough period of time. She uses similar examples to discuss how we can get nutrition and energy from grains that may not have been as bio-available to us tens of thousands of years ago.

She also explains in a similarly comprehensive fashion that paleo peeps weren’t the good ol’ boys that they’re claimed to have been, and that the shift from hunting and gathering to agriculture didn’t therefore rob us of some essential dietary attributes or destroy our metabolisms. She puts the claim that cancer is a modern ailment to the test, and shows that the lack of evidence for cancer in, say, ancient Egyptians, is a case where we can’t conclude that there’s evidence of absence because cancer cells decay quickly and would rarely leave any sign in bones and other hard matter in the corpse. The idea that obesity, cancer, diabetes and other “modern” diseases are entirely the result of a sedentary, agriculture-based diet and lifestyle – and can be prevented or cured via a paleo diet – is just so much bunk. It’s not supported by the historical evidence, and it relies on the evolutionary myth that we were or will ever be perfectly adapted to our environment. Our environment changes, we change in response to it, but there’s no steady state at the end of the line. (Well, maybe after the sun swallows the earth, but that’s beyond the scope of this book.)

Zuk relies heavily on evidence, as any debunking tome should, but her writing is also very clear without oversimplifying, and she does an excellent job of presenting arguments that appeal to our logic or reason without relying on that alone to convince us. She explains why certain genes or blocks of genes might have first spread within human populations, based on certain advantages they conferred – even genes that simultaneously confer some disadvantage. Cystic fibrosis is an autosomal recessive genetic condition, meaning that you have to receive copies of the defective gene from both of your parents to get the disease; if you get just one copy, you’re a “carrier” but won’t get CF. You will, however, have some degree of immunity to cholera, one of the thousands or perhaps millions of tradeoffs and compromises that constitute our genetic makeup, a point to which Zuk returns frequently to hammer home her argument that there is no “perfect” in evolution, or even a clear positive direction. (Zuk never broaches religion, but it’s evident that she rejects the notion of evolution as a guided process, or as Francis Collins’ concept of evolution as the divine way of “delivering upgrades.”)

Paleofantasy may not be the book to convince your creationist friends that they’re out to lunch, although Zuk does present her fair share of evidence to support the theory of evolution; it is, however, the book to give that paleo friend of yours who won’t shut up about gluten and lactose. Eat what you want, of course, but wouldn’t you rather choose your diet based on facts rather than frauds?

Next up: A reader suggestion – Pope Brock’s Charlatan: America’s Most Dangerous Huckster, the Man Who Pursued Him, and the Age of Flimflam.

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→ March 13, 2015
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Two math anthologies.

My latest Insider post covered scouting notes on Danny Salazar, Kendall Graveman, and others from that same game. My weekly Klawchat transcript is up, and I have a new boardgame review over at Paste for the Kennerspiel des Jahres-nominated strategy game Rococo.

My friend Steve is quite familiar with my affinity for just about all things math – we first met in math class in seventh grade – and for Christmas this year bought me a pair of popular math texts, one new and one classic. (I bought him a lot of tea, as he consumes it even faster than I do.) Both were collections of short pieces, with the unevenness that comes with such an anthology, but with high points making both books well worth reading.

The new title was The Best Writing on Mathematics 2014, a book that opens with a sort of dry exhortation on the apparently declining interest in math among students, a theme revisited later in the book, although I think a large part of that is a function of how we teach math in the United States – something that is in and of itself the subject of a separate essay. The separation of abstract math from its practical uses will only sit well with students who are naturally able to deal with math’s abstractions, to hear the music in numbers and formulas, to understand topics like calculus on an intuitive level; modern American instruction tends to make the majority of students, those who don’t grasp this material as quickly, feel less able or competent in the subject. Math anxiety, the subject of so-and-so’s column, isn’t an innate medical condition like anxiety disorder; it is created by teachers and curricula that quickly tell students they’re just not good enough at this stuff.

I enjoy abstract math – one of the best books I’ve ever read was on the highly abstruse Riemann Hypothesis, called Prime Obsession, one of the great unsolved problems in mathematics and one without any apparent practical applications. Yet I also enjoy writing on the pervasive uses of math in other fields, from physics to probability. One of the best essays in the book, and unfortunately one of the shortest, is from game designer and engineer Soren Johnson, who discusses the uses of probability and controlled randomness in creating successful games, specifically citing the random component in Settlers of Catan that has diminished its standing among the most hardcore boardgaming segment that prefers the less random and more complex style of games like Puerto Rico or Agricola. (My issue with Settlers isn’t the randomness but the length of the games. It’s still a classic and one of the best light-strategy games ever created.)

There are several pieces built around randomness, including a high-level essay from Charles Seife (author of Zero, which I enjoyed, as well as Proofiness: How You’re Being Fooled by the Numbers, which is on my to-be-read shelf) on the nature of randomness and our inability to understand it, and another essay on the power of the random in musical compositions. The essay by Prakash Gorrochum titled “Errors of Probability in Historical Context” should be required reading for journalists everywhere, covering the gambler’s fallacy, reasoning on the mean, and misunderstanding statistical independence (Bayes’ theorem). One essay tackles the problem of the Jordan Curve – defined a simple closed curve in a plane or planar region, dividing it into exactly two parts, thus never crossing itself – and its applicability to some amazing works of art. I alluded to the closing essay on Twitter the other day; it discusses the proposed solution to the abc problem, for which the alleged solver had to invent a whole new kind of mathematics, which means that only a few dozen people in the world might be able to interpret his proof, let alone test or critique it.

The selection of titles seems idiosyncratic, as some have very little to do with math proper, such as the dreadful essay on various ancient tools and devices used for mathematical calculations, or the too-lengthy chapter disproving the contention that ancient Celts in modern-day Scotland knew and understood the features of the five regular polyhedra a millennium before anyone else seemed to catch on. The collection ends on several high notes, however, including Gorrochum’s essay (which you can read in its entirety online) and that abc problem/solution story, the latter of which is almost creepy because of how bizarre the whole backstory is. I’d never heard of this series before Steve bought me this book but the handful of strong essays in it made it a great read.

—

The other book Steve bought for me was Martin Gardner’s collection Hexaflexagons, Probability Paradoxes, and the Tower of Hanoi, which is the first in the series of books anthologizing Gardner’s many essays on popular math from his long-running column in Scientific American. Gardner’s writing exudes his sheer joy in math itself, yet most of these essays explore tangible questions even when they’re as useless as the hexaflexagons of the book’s title. Those peculiar shapes are formed by folding one or more strips of paper according to prescribed patterns to form regular polygons, in this specific case hexagons, that can be pushed and folded to reveal hidden sides and features, a chance discovery explored by some very famous names from math and science (Richard Feynman was among their earliest practicioners). A similar vein runs through his essays on the games Hex, invented independently by Nobel Prize-winning game theorist John Nash and Danish polymath Piet Hein, a totally nonrandom game of tile placement on a rhomboid board of hexagonal spaces where each player is trying to complete an unbroken chain from one of his sides to the side facing it. The game can’t end in a draw, and on smaller boards there are unbeatable strategies for whichever player goes first, inspiring much mathematical hand-wringing over the search for algorithms to predict perfect plays.

Other essays pose specific logic and math puzzles to the reader, many of which can be worked out in your head (and are much worse if you start putting pencil to paper). He explores the history of the “boss puzzle,” also known as the 15-14 puzzle, where the player is presented with a 4×4 grid with 15 numbered tiles on it, all in ordered rows but with the final row going 13-15-14. The player is told to use the single open space to move tiles around to get all fifteen tiles into the proper order. (The puzzle is unsolvable because it has a parity of one, meaning there’s a single tile displacement.) He also discusses several popular math and logic paradoxes, such as the division of a rectangle into several triangular pieces, then the reassembly that makes it appear that some surface area has disappeared. (It hasn’t.) They’re fun to puzzle over for their own sake, but the sleights of math used here or in the card tricks Gardner describes in another chapter expose holes in our critical thinking processes – ways we can miss obvious fallacies because something looks or sounds “right” on its face.

The chapter that might be most familiar to readers in subject matter discusses the Birthday Paradox. Given a group of 24 people selected at random, what are the odds that at least two members of the group have the same birthday? The answer is better than one half, which seems at first rather hard to believe as there are 365 days in the calendar. The odds that the first two people don’t have the same birthday are 364/365; the odds that the third person added to the group won’t have the same birthday as either of the first two are 363/365; and so on. The probability that n people won’t have the same birthday is thus a product of all of these individual probabilities (the formula is here); the 23rd person added to the group drops the probability that there is no birthday match under 0.5. It seems intuitively incorrect that just 23* people could suffice to raise the odds of a match over 50% when the number of dates is 365, and there are many methods of figuring these odds incorrectly, such as multiplying the apparent odds of a match (2/365 * 3/365 * 4/365…) or adding up the same fractions. Gardner’s explanations of such paradoxes were both clear and a pleasure to read, which is why so much of his work remains in print a half-century after he started writing. The chapter doesn’t discuss the Monty Hall problem, but describes a similar question around hands of cards that might illuminate that more famous question if you’ve struggled to understand its explanation.

* Gardner’s chapter uses 24 as the threshold, but I’m pretty sure it’s 23, using both methods to calculate the odds. If anyone can show the magic number is 24, please post it in the comments, because then I’ve got this wrong too.

Gardner also discusses magic squares, which seem to me to be the logical ancestors of the much simpler sudoku; the Tower of Hanoi problem; and some topological oddities that arise from manipulations of a Mobius strip (or two of them together). He gets a little ahead of himself, perhaps a function of the space limitations of the print world, in the chapter on fallacies by presenting two pure math fallacies without explaining exactly why they fail. Both revolve around attempts to prove that two unequal entities are equal; one fails through a disguised attempt to divide by zero, the other by treating i as a real (rather than imaginary) number, but I wouldn’t assume either fallacy was obvious by the way Gardner presents them.

I first encountered Gardner’s work in junior high school through his now out-of-print Aha! Gotcha! book, which took a similar approach to math tricks and paradoxes but was aimed at a younger audience; Hexaflexagons is the more grown-up version, aimed at math-loving kids like me who just refused to grow up.

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→ March 11, 2015
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Why Did the Chicken Cross the World?

Andrew Lawler’s brand-new book Why Did the Chicken Cross the World?: The Epic Saga of the Bird that Powers Civilization doesn’t quite measure up to the bravado of its subtitle – it’s neither epic nor is it a saga – but it is full of fascinating anecdotes on the history and near-future of the bird that is the most important source of animal protein in the world.

Lawler’s story repeatedly takes us back to the modern domesticated chicken’s (Gallus gallus domesticus) ancestral roots in south and southeast Asia, where its distant relative, the red jungle fowl, still lives in remote areas but is under threat from deforestation and human predation. The story of its evolution – yep, I said it – into the tame, flavorless, fast-growing and productive egg-laying creatures we consume today is the strongest narrative thread in the book, as Lawler traces the bird’s move across land and sea, through several crazes of breeding and development, into an industrial revolution that have made chicken popular and cheap. Along the way, however, it’s lost most of its taste and been bred into a bird that suffers greatly during its short life, often unable to stand under the weight of its enormous breasts (stop snickering), as its musculoskeletal system doesn’t grow fast enough to support it by the time it’s shipped off for slaughter.

While the history of the bird was interesting, it’s Lawler’s notes on the present state of the chicken and the issues in the near future of poultry farming that formed the book’s most compelling passages. In a chapter that reminded me of Vice’s tremendous mini-documentary on foie gras, Lawler visits a traditional French chicken farm where the birds are raised as they were a century and a half ago, resulting in meat that’s much more flavorful and tender, but at a much higher cost. That ties into interwoven discussions (little in the book is linear) about animal rights and what might constitute cruelty to birds that appear to be much more intelligent than we typically assume; Lawler writes, “Chickens are excluded from US laws regulating humane treatment of animals raised as food, and there are no international regulations,” although he mentions that the EU bans battery cages and refuses to import US-grown poultry for health and safety reasons.

These digressions lead to the most horrifying aspect of the book – Lawler’s descriptions of the conditions of factory-farmed chicken, and how recent changes may not even be as positive as they seem on the surface. Dr. Janice Siegford at the Michigan State University’s Department of Animal Science says that her preliminary research indicates that “cage-free” may not be that much better for the birds than the old-style battery cages that (rightly) earned the ire of animal-rights activists. Cage-free birds are typically reared indoors, in giant aviaries that still keep the birds out of direct sunlight and away from their natural diet, all in the name of encouraging them to lay as many eggs as possible before they wear out after a year or so. Research into hen behavior in various settings seems to point to enhanced cages that grant more room to each bird while still giving them some of the privacy they seem to want while avoiding the violent behavior often exhibited by chickens in close quarters, even in the open environment of the aviary. (Irony alert: Michigan banned homeowners from raising chickens or any livestock in their yards. Gotta protect Big Egg, I guess.)

Lawler’s focus on telling the story leads to some unfortunate choices and mistakes along the way. He gives physical descriptions of the various experts, farmers, and executives he meets – I can’t think of anything less relevant to this story than a description of a professor’s haircut – but then refers to an unnamed paper by “two academics.” He botches an amusing tangent on the myth of the basilisk, which was supposedly born from an egg laid by a rooster (not a biological impossibility, as he later explains), by placing the creature’s appearance in the wrong Harry Potter book, and later misplaces Mali in sub-Saharan Africa when more than half the country is within that desert. The details themselves are unimportant to the whole narrative, but it’s a distraction that, when I’m reading any non-fiction book, makes me worry there are other mistakes I won’t catch.

In all fairness to Lawler, I wonder to what extent a narrative was pushed on him by his editors, as these food-history books don’t typically lend themselves well to that kind of structure; Mark Kurlansky’s Cod and Salt were both very well-received by critics and food-industry folk, but neither has anything resembling a narrative. Dan Koeppel’s Banana: The Fate of the Fruit that Changed the World has an actual narrative – the fight between man and fungus – but he had the benefit of working with one of the few foodstuffs that has no genetic diversity whatsoever. Trevor Corson’s The Story of Sushi is one of the best food books I’ve ever read, but he wove a separate narrative of a session at a sushi-chef school around his story, allowing him to tie together chapters on different fish or sushi-making traditions that otherwise would have been separate essays connected only by theme. Lawler’s book stands up much better in that light, as a series of diverse commentaries and histories connected by a common subject without a unifying thread. It probably doesn’t need one, given how important the chicken and its eggs are to feeding the world, and if anything Lawler could probably write a Pollan-esque sequel expanding on the last few chapters on the future of poultry farming, explaining where that part of the industry needs to go to remain productive while improving the welfare of the birds themselves.

Next up: Marlene Zuk’s Paleofantasy: What Evolution Really Tells Us about Sex, Diet, and How We Live.

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→ March 4, 2015
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Think Twice

Michael Mauboussin’s short book on the psychology of bad decisions, Think Twice, features an endorsement on its cover from Billy Beane, saying he hopes his competitors don’t read the book. While it doesn’t go into anywhere near the depth on the psychology (and neurology) of decision-making as Daniel Kahnemann’s Thinking, Fast and Slow, Mauboussin’s book covers much of the same ground and does so in a quick, superficial way that might reach more people than Kahnemann’s more thorough but often dense treatise could.

Mauboussin’s book carries the subtitle “Harnessing the Power of Counterintuition,” but I would describe it more as a guide to avoiding decisions based on easily avoidable mental traps. Think Twice has eight chapters dealing with specific traps, most of which will be familiar to readers of Kahnemann’s book: base-rate neglect, tunnel vision, irrational optimism, overreliance on experts, ignoring context, phase transitions (black and grey swans), and conflating skill and luck. Where Kahnemann went into great depth with useful examples and sometimes less-useful descriptions of fMRI test results, Mauboussin writes like he can’t get to the point fast enough – an often desirable trait in the popular business non-fiction section of the bookstore, since the assumption is that business executives don’t have time to read (even if the book might save millions of dollars).

That lightweight approach still gives Mauboussin plenty of space to hammer home the critical lessons of the book. Some of his examples don’t need a lot of explanation, such as pointing out that playing French music or German music in a wine store aisle with wines from both countries skewed consumer choices – even though those consumers explicitly denied that the music affected their choices. (Context matters.) He targets sportswriters directly when discussing their (our) difficulty (or inability) in distinguishing skill from luck – and, in my experience, fans often don’t want to hear that something is luck, even when the sample size is so small that you couldn’t prove it was skill no matter how broad the confidence test. He mentions The Boss going off in the papers when the Yankees started 4-12 in 2005, and writers buying right into the narrative (or just enjoying the free content Steinbrenner was providing). But we see it every October, and during every season; are the Giants really the best team in baseball, or is there an element of luck (or, to use the more accurate term, randomness) in their three championship runs in five seasons? Yet we see articles that proclaim players to be clutch or “big game” every year; my colleague Skip Bayless loves to talk about the “clutch gene,” yet I see no evidence to support its existence. I think Mauboussin would take my side in the debate, and he’d argue that an executive making a decision on a player needs to set aside emotional characterizations like that and focus on the hard data where the sample sizes are sufficiently large.

His chapter on the world’s overreliance on experts also directly applies to the baseball industry, both within teams and within the media. It is simply impossible for any one person to be good enough at predictions or forecasting to beat a well-designed projection system. I could spend every night from February 10th until Thanksgiving scouting players, see every prospect every year, and still wouldn’t be better on a macro level at predicting, say, team won-lost records or individual player performances than ZiPS or Steamer or any other well-tested system. The same goes for every scout in the business, and it’s why the role of scouting has already started to change. Once data trackers (like Tracman) can provide accurate data on batted ball speeds/locations or spin rate on curveballs for most levels of the minors and even some major college programs, how much value will individual scouts’ opinions on player tools matter in the context of team-level decisions on draft picks or trades? The most analytically-inclined front offices already meld scouting reports with such data, using them all as inputs to build better expert systems that can provide more accurate forecasts – which is the goal, because whether you like projection systems or not, you want your team to make the best possible decisions, and you can’t make better decisions without better data and better analysis of those data. (Mauboussin does describe situations where experts can typically beat computer models, but those are typically more static situations where feedback is clear and cause/effect relationships are simple. That’s not baseball.)

Mauboussin’s first chapter describes the three central illusions that lead to irrational optimism, one we see all the time in baseball when teams are asked to evaluate or potentially trade their own prospects: the illusions of superiority, optimism, and control. Our prospects are better than everyone else’s because we scout better, we develop better, and we control their development paths. When you hear that teams are overrating prospects, sometimes that’s just another GM griping that he can’t get what he wants for his veteran starter, but it can also be this irrational optimism that leads many teams to overrate their own kids. There’s a strong element of base-rate neglect in all of these illusions; if you have a deep farm system with a dozen future grade-50 prospects, you know, based on all of the great, deep systems we’ve seen in the last few years (the Royals, Rangers, Padres, Red Sox, Astros) that some of those players simply won’t work out, due to injuries, undiscovered weaknesses, or just youneverknows. A general manager has to be willing to take the “outside view” of his own players, viewing them through objective lenses, rather than the biased “inside view,” which also requires that he be able to take that view because he has the tools available to him and the advisers who are willing to tell him “no.”

The passage on unintended consequences is short and buried within a chapter on complex adaptive systems, but if I could send just two pages of the book to new MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred, I’d send these. Mauboussin gives two examples, one of incompetent wildlife management in Yellowstone Park, one of the feds’ decision to let Lehman Brothers fail and thus start the 2008 credit crisis, both of which involve single actions to a complex system that the actors didn’t fully understand (or try to). So when MLB tries to tinker with the draft, or fold in the July 2nd international free agents into the rule 4 draft or a new one, or changes free agent compensation rules … whatever they do, this is a complex system with hundreds of actors who will react to any such rules changes in ways that can’t be foreseen without a look at the entire system.

The seven-page concluding chapter is a great checklist for anyone trying to bring this kind of “counterintuitive” thinking into an organization or just into his/her own decision-making. It’s preventative: here’s how you avoid rushing into major decisions with insufficient data or while under a destructive bias. I can see why Beane doesn’t want other GMs or executives reading this; competing against people who suffer from these illusions and prejudices is a lot easier than competing against people who think twice.

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→ September 10, 2014
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America Walks Into a Bar.

I have a post up for Insiders today on keeping faith in some players who had less-than-great years.

Christine Sismondo’s America Walks into a Bar: A Spirited History of Taverns and Saloons, Speakeasies and Grog Shops is a thoroughly academic look at the history of the watering hole, mostly in the United States but with a brief look at its origins in Europe and in the Near East. Like most histories, it lacks any real narrative thread, but Sismondo does present a clear thesis – that the bar or tavern has had an essential role in the cultural history of the U.S. – and does a great job of backing it up through interesting and often funny anecdotes.

The book is built around discrete chapters, each of which covers a specific movement that either got its start in the taverns or found faster growth through tavern culture, starting with the revolutionary spirit in the U.S. that led to the Stamp Act protests, the Tea Party (the real one, folks), and eventually the American Revolution and the nascent U.S. government. In that era, there were no real town halls or any kind of community center where anyone (meaning any adult man, although occasionally women were admitted) could gather to hear news, exchange information, or tip off the ragtag militia that the British were coming. Even churches would often have to close due to weather, moving their religious services to the local to take advantage of the latter facility’s heating. From there, Sismondo jumps ahead slightly to the abolitionist movement, then bounces through about 150 years of U.S. history, covering the temperance movement (and the Anti-Saloon League), the disaster of Prohibition, and the gay-rights movement that exploded, in literal and metaphorical terms, during a police raid on the Stonewall Inn in 1969.

The challenge for Sismondo isn’t making this interesting – she’s talking about booze and bars, with the frequent injections of sex and violence, so, really, I already have your attention by now – but making her arguments convincing. Some are easy, like the rise of the American revolutionary movement in taverns, because at the time, that’s all there was. If you wanted to associate, you had few options besides the town local. Others are more difficult, such as the speakeasy’s role in advancing women’s rights, because earlier proscriptions on women drinking alongside men or even sharing the same space in a tavern were dropped when all such establishments were banned. The political machines of the 1800s, notably the Tammany Hall regime in New York, certainly rose through the taverns of the age, especially because votes were procured in exchange for booze, but would they have risen without those places? Couldn’t votes be bought in other ways, as they are today here and in other countries? Sismondo makes a strong case, but it’s all anecdotal (as it has to be), so those chapters are more about reader interest than proving a hypothesis.

The interest level can be pretty high, depending on the chapter and subject. Sismondo gives brief portraits of some of the earliest celebrity bartenders, such as Jerry Thomas, and gives a lot of detail on some of the key figures in the Haymarket riot, where anarchists bombed a peaceful pro-labor rally, leading to four executions in a gross miscarriage of justice that further spurred the embryonic American labor movement. We get a sketch of Mary “Texas” Guinan, an actress who owned a speakeasy, the 300 Club, that became one of the most popular during Prohibition and launched careers of the likes of George Raft and Walter Winchell (the latter of whom made his name by printing the gossip Guinan fed him). And there’s a host of amusing stories of Prohibition evasion, much of it tolerated, enabled, or even run by the very folks who were supposed to be enforcing the silly, misguided Volstead Act. My main complaint with the book, though, is that we never seem to get enough of any of these things. The stories are all short, which keeps the book moving, but misses opportunities to add color to its pages with details on the eccentric characters or the devious/comical events that were planned at or took place in the American bar.

Next up: I just finished Steven Sherrill’s The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break, a book Alton Brown recommended twice on podcasts earlier this year, and have begun John Williams’ western novel Butcher’s Crossing.

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→ June 11, 2014
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The Checklist Manifesto.

I learned of Atul Gawande’s brief business book The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right through a positive mention of it in Daniel Kahneman’s fantastic book on cognitive psychology, Thinking, Fast and Slow. Gawande, a successful surgeon in Boston, wrote two books on improving medical care through optimizing processes (rather than throwing money at new equipment or drugs). His third book is aimed at a more general audience, extolling the virtues of the checklist as a simple, effective way to reduce the frequency of the most avoidable errors in any complex system, even eliminating them entirely, saving money and even lives at a near-zero upfront cost.

When Gawande discusses checklists, he’s using the term in the sense of a back-check, a list that ensures that all essential steps have been taken before the main event – a surgery, a plane’s takeoff, a large investment – occurs. This isn’t a to-do list to get you through the day, the type of checklist I make every morning or the night before to make sure I don’t forget any critical tasks, work or personal, from paying bills to making phone calls to writing a dish post. Gawande instead argues for better planning before that first incision, saying that key steps are often overlooked due to a lack of communication, excessive centralization in a single authority (the surgeon, the pilot, etc.), or focus on more urgent steps that detracts from routine ones.

Gawande illustrates his points about the design and use of checklists primarily through his own experiences in surgery and through his work with the WHO on a project to reduce complication rates from surgery in both developed and developing countries – a mandate that included the requirement that any recommendations involve little or no costs to the hospitals. That all but assured that Gawande’s group would only be able to recommend process changes rather than equipment or hiring requirements, which led to a focus on what steps were often skipped in the operating room, deliberately or inadvertently. Several common points emerged. For example, other medical personnel in the room saw surgeons as authoritarian figures and wouldn’t speak up to enforce key steps like ensuring antibiotics were being delivered prior to incision, or critical information wasn’t passed between team members before the operation began. To solve these issues, Gawande needed to devise a way to increase communication among team members despite superficial differences in rank.

The group took a cue from aviation, with Gawande walking the reader back to the creation of preflight checklists and visiting Boeing to understand the method of developing checklists that work. (There’s been some backlash to Gawande’s recommendations, such as the fact that surgeons can “game” a checklist in various ways, detailed in this NEJM subscriber-only piece.) A checklist must be concise and clear, and must grab the lowest-hanging fruit – the most commonly-missed steps and/or the steps with the greatest potential payoff. The checklist also has a secondary purpose – perhaps even more important than making sure the steps on the list have been followed – which is increasing communication. Gawande fills in the blanks with examples from medicine, aviation, and finance of how simple and perhaps “stupid” errors have helped avoid massive mistakes – or how skipping steps or hewing to old hierarchies of command have led to great tragedies, including the worst aviation disaster in history, the 1977 runway crash of two Boeing 747s at Tenerife North Airport in the Canary Islands, killing 583 people. (This isn’t a great book to read if you’re afraid of flying or of surgery.)

Gawande reports positive results from the implementation of pre-surgery checklists in both developed and developing countries, even in highly challenging conditions in Tanzania, Jordan, and India. Yet he also discusses difficulties with buy-in due to surgeons being unwilling to cede any authority in the operating room or to divert attention from what they see as more critical tasks. Acceptance of checklists appears to have been easier in aircraft cockpits, while in the investment world, Gawande presents a little evidence that checklists have made virtually no inroads despite a few investors finding great success in using them to override their emotional (“fast thinking”) instincts.

Even if you’re in an industry where checklists don’t have this kind of immediate value, it’s easy to see how they might apply to other fields with sufficiently positive ROIs to make their implementation worth considering. A major league team might have a checklist to use before acquiring any player in trade, for example – looking at recent reports and game logs to make sure he’s not injured, talking to a former coach or teammate to ensure there’s no character issues, etc. A well-designed blank scouting report is itself a checklist, a way of organizating information to also force the scout to answer the most important questions on each player. (Of course, having pro scouts write up all 25 players on each minor league team they scout runs counter to that purpose, because they’re devoting observation time to players who are completely irrelevant to the scout’s employers.) The checklist is more than just a set of tasks; it’s a mindset, a way of forcing communication on group tasks while also attempting to avoid high-cost mistakes with a tiny investment of time and attention. If the worst thing you can say about an idea is that people need to be convinced to use it, that’s probably a backhanded way of saying it’s worth implementing.

Next up: I’m about halfway through Ursula K. Le Guin’s utopian/dystopian novel The Dispossessed.

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→ May 28, 2014
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Aké: The Years of Childhood.

In case you missed it, my second go at projecting this year’s first round went up for Insiders on Tuesday. My next mock will go up on Tuesday, June 3rd, and I’ll have an updated ranking of the top 25 prospects in the minors this Friday. I’ll also be on Baseball Tonight tomorrow night, May 29th, at 10 pm ET.

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At the turn of the century, the rush to compile “best of the last 100 years” lists of books tended to leave a lot of postcolonial writers behind, something that the Zimbabwe International Book Fair attempted to address by assembling a list of Africa’s 100 best books of the 20th century. I saw the list not long after it was released in February of 2002, and had heard of exactly two books on the list: Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, which I’d already read once and subsequently re-read; and Nuruddin Farah’s Maps, the first book of his “Blood in the Sun” trilogy.

Within that broader list, the jury identified a dozen titles as the best of the best, without trying to rank any of the books, probably a thankless task given the effort required just to compile the nominations for the final hundred. The Nigerian-born author Wole Soyinka, the first native African to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, made the top 100 twice, with his play Death and the King’s Horsemen appearing on the main list and his first memoir, Aké: The Years of Childhood, earning special mention in the top twelve.

Aké is the name of the town where Soyinka grew up, on the grounds of a parsonage with his mother, whom he calls “Wild Christian,” and his father the teacher, whom he calls “Essay,” as well as a nearby collection of relatives, friends/workers, and spirits. The book takes magical realism and transplants it into the realm of the autobiography – Soyinka never pauses to consider whether these memories of ghosts, spectres, or other otherworldy entities are real; they simply are. Yet the stories he remembers revolve around more mundane matters, not least of which is what on earth a family was to do with a precocious, argumentative child in a country still ruled autocratically by the local puppets of a distant white government.

The memoir, however, is a joyous one, even around the crises and tragedies and the eventual buildup to the book’s concluding chapters, where the women of Ak&ecaute; agitate for more local rights, less corruption, and lower taxation. Soyinka renders even those scenes, which always threatened to devolve into violence, humorously, through the eyes of a mischievous child watching when he shouldn’t be watching or playing rebel by delivering message between various outposts of protesters. His memories of his time in school, where the lawyering he used to stymie his parents runs up against the wall of a headmaster who’s already seen that act before, and of the town’s market, with extensive descriptions of fresh fruits and African foods of which I’d never heard, show off Soyinka’s ability to evoke colorful scenes with precise descriptions and light prose that puts the reader right on the dirt road in the middle of all the market’s vendors.

Soyinka devotes another section to his childhood addiction … to powdered baby formula, which he sneaks from the family’s pantry now that their youngest child no longer needs it, only to end up playing cat-and-mouse with his parents to avoid detection. He also offers several anecdotes on the local blend of Christianity and native traditions, such as the fellow student who tries to counter “bad juju” by repeating “S.M.O.G.” – which stands for “Save Me Oh God” but he claims is faster to say in acronym form while running from your enemies.

The one weakness of Aké is its lack of structure; it’s a collection of stories and recollections, but there’s no single narrative because the book ends while Soyinka is still a child, so we haven’t driven towards a specific goal or endpoint. That doesn’t make the book less enjoyable or less vivid, although it means it more resembles a set of interconnected short stories than a non-fiction novel. It compares favorably to my favorite memoir, Gabriel García Marquez’ Living to Tell the Tale, although GGM’s prose flowed more easily, as Soyinka’s syntax and even punctuation often threw me off (e.g., he omits a lot of commas we’d consider essential in American English). For me, Aké ranks somewhere in the middle of the seven titles I’ve read from the top twelve on that African literature list, below Things Fall Apart, A Grain of Wheat, and Nervous Conditions but above Sleepwalking Land, Chaka, and L’amour, la fantasia.

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→ May 8, 2014
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A History of the World in 6 Glasses.

Klawchat at 1 pm ET today.

Tom Standage’s A History of the World in 6 Glasses gives a light, high-level history of six beverages that all had an impact on human history or development. I’m a big fan of four of them – beer, distilled spirits, coffee, and tea – and won’t turn down the fifth, wine. Only the last of the six Standage covers, Coca-Cola, seems out of place, both based on my personal tastes (I’ll only drink it if I have a headache and can’t have more coffee) and on its status as a thoroughly artifical beverage protected by trade secrets.

Standage has to stretch on occasion to make some of his historical connections, but in general he’s treading on safe ground, especially with beer and liquor, because their development or discovery had substantial economic impacts on the societies that consumed them. Beer was originally both a natural byproduct of grain storage and a safer alternative to water in an era when bacterial contamination was not understood; liquor, notably rum, drove international trade routes, agricultural production in the Caribbean and Latin America, and the slave trade with native kingdoms in western Africa. Wine was an essential part of the symposion, the Greek ancestor of the cocktail party, where great discussions took place in an atmosphere of convivial drinking … and probably excessive drinking, too, although Plato seems to have left that part out of his Dialogues.

Standage connects coffee to the academic cafe culture of western Europe, particularly London, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; the coffee was bad, prepared in large pots in advance and reheated to order, but these cafes, each of which was devoted to a specific subject or area, hosted conversations that led to great advances in areas from science to philosophy. Tea, like coffee, brought medical benefits, especially since water had to be boiled to make the beverage, and became the drink of choice in England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a shift that led to the British colonization and development of India (for their own purposes, of course, and only after they’d wiped out the subcontinent’s native textile industry) … as well as playing a role in our own revolution against the crown.

Where Standage lost the plot a little was with his shift to an overtly commercial product, Coca-Cola, which was the product of a handful of accidents and experiments and did, as the legend has it, once contain cocaine – the name comes from its onetime use of both the coca plant and the kola nut (a natural source of caffeine) as flavoring agents. The Coca-Cola company did play a role in the post-World War II trend of globalization, but its role was hardly as essential or as organic as those of the other five beverages in the book, and unlike the other drinks Standage covers, cola has no redeeming health qualities and is unhealthful even in small quantities.

A History of the World in 6 Glasses concludes with a prediction, in Standage’s epilogue, that the next beverage to direct human history will be the first one: water, with the need for clean, reliable water supplies directing political strategies and conflicts over the next century. That could have earned a larger chapter, similar to the discussion of the topic in Empires of Food, as it’s going to be a significant issue all over the world, including in the southern half of the United States. I also wish Standage had spent some time discussing the chemistry of each beverage, or more details of its production; he focuses far more on the history aspect of each drink than the scientific or culinary angles. The idea of “notes” in different beverages, widely used in discussions of wine but popping up more and more in reviews of beers, coffees, and even chocolates, derives from the differing chemical composition of the raw materials, which is usually a function of the soil and temperature where those materials grow. Those specific characteristics help drive the higher ends of the markets for each product, which in turn represents a path for coffee and cocoa farmers (and perhaps farmers of other crops) in developing countries to earn an actual living from their work, the kind of economic development that Standage discusses in a historical context in his six primary sections.

Next up: I’m about a quarter of the way through Charles Dickens’ Bleak House. I’m not sure this lawsuit is ever going to be settled.

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