→ September 10, 2021
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Noise.

Nobel Prize-winning economist Daniel Kahneman’s first book, Thinking Fast and Slow, has been hugely influential on the baseball industry and on my own career, inspiring me to write The Inside Game as a way to bring some of the same concepts to a broader audience. Kahneman is back with a sequel of sorts, co-authoring the book Noise: A Human Flaw in Human Judgment with Cass Sunstein and Oliver Sibony, that shifts the focus away from cognitive biases towards a different phenomenon, one that the authors call “noise.”

Noise, in their definition, involves “variability in judgments that should be identical.” They break this down into three different types of noise, all of which add up together to be “system noise.” (There’s a lot of jargon in the book, and that’s one of its major drawbacks.)

  • Level noise, where different individuals make different judgments across different sets of data. The authors cite “some judges are generally more severe than others, and others are more lenient” as an example.
  • Pattern noise, where different individuals make different judgments with the same data.
  • Occasion noise, where an individual makes different judgment depending on when they see the data (which can literally mean the time of day or day of the week). This is probably the hardest for people to accept, but there’s clear evidence that doctors prescribe more opioids near the end of a work day, and judges are more lenient when the local football team won on Sunday.

There’s a hierarchy of noise here, where level noise comprises pattern noise, and pattern noise comprises occasion noise (which they classify as transient pattern noise, as opposed to “stable” pattern noise, which would be, say, how I underrate hitting prospects with high contact rates but maybe Eric Longenhagen rates them consistently more highly). That’s the entire premise of Noise; the book devotes its time to exploring noise in different fields, notably the criminal justice system and medicine, where the stakes are so high and the benefit of a reduction in noise is likely to justify the costs, and to ways we can try to reduce noise in our fields of work.

As with Thinking Fast and Slow, Noise doesn’tmake many accommodations for the lay reader. There’s an expectation here that you are comfortable with the vernacular of behavioral economics and with some basic statistical arguments. It’s an arduous read with a strong payoff if you can get through it, but I concede that it was probably the hardest I’ve worked to read (and understand) anything I’ve read this year. It doesn’t help that noise is itself a more abstruse concept than bias, and the authors make constant references to the difference here.

Some of the examples here will be familiar if you’ve read any literature on behavioral economics before. The sentencing guidelines that resulted from Marvin Frankel, a well-known judge and human rights advocate, pointing out the gross inequities that resulted from giving judges wide latitude in sentencing – resulting in sentences that might range from a few months to 20 years for two defendants convicted the same crime. (The guidelines that resulted from Frankel’s work were later struck down by the Supreme Court, which not only reintroduced noise into the system, but restored old levels of racial bias in sentencing as well.) The authors also attempt to bring noise identification and noise reduction into the business world, with some examples where they brought evidence of noise to the attention of executives who sometimes didn’t believe them.

Nothing was more familiar to me than the discussion of the low value of performance evaluations in the workplace. For certain jobs, with measurable progress and objectives, they may make sense, but in my experience across a lot of jobs in several industries, they’re a big waste of time – and I do mean a big one, because if you add up the hours dedicated to filling out the forms required, writing them up, conducting the reviews, and so on, that’s a lot of lost productivity. One problem is that there’s a lack of consistency in ratings, because raters do not have a common frame of reference for their grades, making grades more noise than signal. Another is that raters tend not to think in relative terms, so you end up with oxymoronic results like 98% of employees grading out as above average. The authors estimate that 70-80% of the output from traditional performance evaluations is noise – meaning it’s useless for its intended purpose of allowing for objective evaluation of employee performance, and thus also useless for important decisions like pay raises, promotions, and other increases in responsibility. Two possible solutions: ditching performance evaluations altogether, using them solely for developmental purposes (particularly 360-degree systems, which are rather in vogue), or spend time and money to train raters and develop evaluation metrics that have objective measurements or “behaviorally anchored” rating scales.

It wouldn’t be a Daniel Kahneman product if Noise failed to take aim at one of his particular bêtes noires, the hiring interview. He explained why they’re next to worthless in Thinking Fast and Slow, and here he does it again, saying explicitly, “if your goal is to determine which candidates will succeed in a job and which will fail, standard interviews … are not very informative. To put it more starkly, they are often useless.” There’s almost no correlation between interview success and job performance, and that’s not surprising, because the skills that make someone good at interviewing would only make them a better employee if the job in question also requires those same skills, which is … not most jobs. Unstructured interviews, the kind most of us know, are little more than conversations, and they serve as ideal growth media for noise. Two interviewers will have vastly differing opinions of the same candidate, even if they interview the candidate together as part of a panel. This pattern noise is amplified by the occasion noise prompted by how well the first few minutes of an interview go. (They don’t mention something I’ve suspected: You’ll fare better in an interview if the person interviewing you isn’t too tired or hungry, so you don’t want to be the last interview before lunch or the last one of the day.) They cite one psychology experiment where researchers assigned students to role-play interviews, splitting them between interviewer and candidate, and then told half of the candidates to answer questions randomly … and none of the interviewers caught on.

There’s plenty of good material here in Noise, concepts and recommended solutions that would apply to a lot of industries and a lot of individuals, but you have to wade through a fair bit of jargon to get to it. It’s also less specific than Thinking Fast and Slow, and I suspect that reducing noise in any environment is going to be a lot harder than reducing bias (or specific biases) would be. But the thesis that noise is at least as significant a problem in decision-making as bias is should get wider attention, and it’s hard to read about the defenses of the “human element” in sentencing people convicted of crimes and not think of how equally specious defenses of the “human element” in sports can be.

Next up: Martha Wells’ Nebula & Locus Award-winning novel Network Effect, part of her MurderBot series.

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→ April 19, 2021
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A Promised Land.

I usually don’t read political autobiographies, because I feel reasonably sure that I’m going to get more self-serving renditions of history than true eludication or, dare we expect so much, real candor from the authors. I’m just not that interested in hearing the stories from people who have much to gain or lose from the way in which those stories are told.

So when my daughter bought me Barack Obama’s A Promised Land, the first part of his memoirs from his time as President, I was more than a little skeptical that I’d enjoy or appreciate it. I admire President Obama, and believe his tenure was more successful than his critics on the right or the far left want you to believe, and that Republican obstructionism was the major reason why he didn’t accomplish more – but I also see many missteps and lost opportunities, as well as policies that just defy reason (the use and frequency of drone strikes in the Middle East, especially Yemen) or that took too long for him to embrace (marriage equality). I was unsure in 2016 and 2017 how much blame to lay at the Obama Administration’s feet for failing to anticipate the rise of Trump and white nationalism, going back to his handling of the birther hoax. And I didn’t want to read 700-plus pages of rationalization or revisionism.

That’s not what A Promised Land is, though. I’m sure there is some inexactness in the retelling of certain stories – I find it hard to believe he’d have all of those quotes written down or memorized, especially with some going back twenty-odd years – and it’s impossible to know what details he chose to omit from the book. But it feels thorough, in detail and in intent, as Obama does acknowledge multiple mistakes in policy and in his management of the executive branch, and if the book has a major flaw it’s that thoroughness – he recounts so many conversations and trips in so much detail that the book drags, and I can’t believe this is only half of the intended volume.

A Promised Land takes us from Obama’s youth through the military operation that led to the killing of Osama bin Laden, so it’s more than a memoir of his time in the White House, or even in politics, and if you’re curious about the development of his character – or, as I was, how someone from a rather unlikely background rose so quickly from a state legislative position to the White House – that is the book’s true throughline. We learn far more about Barack Obama the person here than about, say, how certain decisions came to pass. That may seem a strange comment on a book of this length (and small font), but there’s a distinction between giving us every detail of a meeting, such as every word spoken or gesture made, and giving context and nuance to the scene. This book is a depiction rather than an explanation. So many of the compromises of Obama’s first term, large or small, are attributed to political expediency, often to the argument that it was “do this or the deal doesn’t get done.” Yes, that is how our unwieldy system of government works, but A Promised Land doesn’t connect enough of the dots here.

So much of the part of the book that covers his first two years in office is really a lengthy indictment of the existence of the United States Senate, which gives so much power to legislators who represent wildly unequal numbers of constituents. The camera needs to pan back and show the whole scene, and then Obama could, at least, argue that the system prevents those within it from enacting real, progressive change, even if a majority of Americans support it. The section on the fight over the Affordable Care Act, which is at least the most important event within the book and gets substantial coverage, shows how the sausage is made but never really concludes that the process means the sausage is hazardous to your health.

There is some self-serving messaging here, some rationalization that, as President, he had no choice but to do this or that, to leave troops in Iraq or Afghanistan longer than he’d promised, to check which way the wind was blowing before supporting marriage equality, and so on. A lot of the text around his first year in office amounts to “we inherited a colossal mess,” and that’s probably true, and more instructive now than it was a year ago, as President Biden appears to have inherited an even bigger mess. But doesn’t every President who replaces a predecessor of the other party feel, on some level, that he inherited a mess? Even though the transition of power from President George W. Bush to President Obama was smooth, and Bush deserves some plaudits for how open and cordial he and his staff were to their successors, in the end, you’re restaffing a giant monolith that moves at the pace of a glacier and trying to make quick course corrections that might run to 180 degrees. Did you succeed in spite of those limitations, and if not, what did you learn that you might tell the next guy (well, the guy after the next guy)?

Obama is witty, and he’s a gifted storyteller – his prose isn’t quick, but it’s evocative of image and place, and he captures many of the personalities around him well enough to help distinguish the many people around him in his office. He’s just wordy – his prose is, in fact, too prolix – although I imagine his editors might have been reluctant to ask him to cut back, because, hey, he’s Barack Obama. If there’s an abridged version, as much as I’m loath to recommend those, it might be better for readers who just want to know what happened and how. As for the why, and what we can learn from it, perhaps that’ll come in the second book.

Next up: I just finished Gilbert King’s Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America, winner of the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction.

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→ December 28, 2020
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Imbibe!

David Wondrich’s Imbibe! had been on my wishlist for several years, as it was recommended by several folks I follow on Twitter (including, I think, the great follow @creativedrunk), and he later appeared on the podcast Hugh Acheson Stirs the Pot. I finally picked it up a month or two ago when it was on sale for the Kindle, and while it’s a different book than I expected, it’s a great read if you’re a fan of cocktails, especially vintage ones, and how they took over the American drinking scene at least twice in history.

The inspiration for Imbibe! is “Professor” Jerry Thomas, a very successful if peripatetic bartender in the mid-1800s who mixed drinks at swanky bars and dives on both coasts and wrote what is believed to be the first book on drinks ever published in the United States, Bar-Tender’s Guide. He claimed that he invented the Tom and Jerry, an eggnog-like cocktail, and certainly did a lot to popularize the Tom Collins in the United States. He’s a towering figure in cocktail history … but he’s not really enough to support a whole book.

The real meat of the book is the drinks, and the way Wondrich presents the stories around each drink. Many of the classic cocktails we associate with the Roaring Twenties and the period before Prohibition have their origins in the late 19th century, as far back as the 1850s in some cases, a time of great experimentation with alcoholic spirits, which may simply have been a reaction to the inconsistent or low quality of the spirits available at the time. Thomas spent time tending bar in northern California during the Gold Rush, when he was mixing what I presume was god-knows-what sold as whiskey or brandy or whatever, and thus encouraged the introduction of various mixers and flavorings, notably sugar and other sweetening syrups, as well as peculiar combinations of liquors that would have produced cocktails so strong that you didn’t notice the taste.

I’m using the term cocktails loosely here to describe any sort of mixed drink, but Wondrich adheres to the strict historical definitions of cocktail, punch, sling, and more. A punch has four or five main ingredients – sour, sweet, strong (the booze), weak, and perhaps spice. A cocktail is a punch with the addition of some sort of bitters, potable or nonpotable. A sling is a punch without the sour element, and usually has nutmeg as its sprice. There are also sours (with lemon juice and sugar), collinses (a long sour, meaning it adds soda), juleps (with mint), smashes (with chunks of fruit), flips (with egg), and more. Wondrich walks through these categories and more with historical notes, pinpointing drink origins where possible and debunking the occasional myth.

Many of these drinks are best lost to history, with bizarre combinations of ingredients that result in drinks that sound like they’d have served no other purpose beyond getting the drinker as drunk as possible as quickly as possible. There are champagne cocktails that you’d never make with actual champagne, given the wine’s cost and how most people at least appreciate its flavor. Many drinks in the 1800s were topped with port, a fortified, often sweet wine that would have added color and alcohol but would have run through the flavor of the cocktail beneath like a rhinoceros on amphetamines. And all the eggs … there are some exceptions, to be sure, like a proper egg nog at the holidays, but I cannot see the appeal of mixed drinks with whole eggs in them, warm or cold.

Imbibe! is definitely not a book for every tippler, as it is, pun intended, rather dry in parts. Many of these drinks are antiquated, often lost to history, or only recently seeing a resurgence in interest because of the spread of artisan cocktail bars (which are, unfortunately, likely among the businesses most hurt by our government’s failed response to the pandemic). Some of the ingredients Wondrich identifies in original recipes are no longer available, or extremely difficult to find, and he has to recommend modern substitutes, which is fine but also would raise the question of whether we’re simply better off consuming cocktails and punches designed with those modern ingredients in mind. I’ve read enough about distilled spirits, especially rum, that I approached this book with more history of reading about this sort of thing – and perhaps a bit more specific interest in the makeup of some of the drinks. If you enjoy a good collins or sling, or are interested in the way flavors may or may not combine to create something novel in a glass, Imbibe! is as impeccably researched as you’ll find.

Next up: I’m playing catchup here on reviews but right now I’m reading the short story collection Addis Ababa Noir, edited by Booker Prize nominee Maaza Mengiste.

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→ December 8, 2020
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Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art.

Over the summer, I linked to an interesting longread in The Guardian, an excerpt from a new book by James Nestor called Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art. The excerpt and the title both promised an evidence-based approach to the rather fundamental act of respiration, one that comes up in areas from pulmonary and cardiovascular health to allergies to meditation and mindfulness. It was a huge disappointment: Breath is a lot of woo and anecdote, with a little bit of science hidden in the endnotes. It imparts very little useful information on how to improve your breathing, or address any problems with it.

Nestor starts Breath explaining an experiment he and a fellow “pulmonaut” underwent, where they agreed to block their nasal passages so they’d be forced to breath through their mouths for about three weeks , so they could see how much their health would deteriorate in the meantime. From there, he points out that humans are the only species with our wide range of dental problems, a product of evolution and our changing diet, and speculates that this has led to a constricted airway (which creates the conditions for sleep apnea) and says most of us are just breathing the wrong way.

One major way in which we do it wrong is breathing through our mouths, which bypasses the nose’s air-filtering, humidifying, and warming mechanisms, which came about via evolution and allow us to take less particulate matter into our lungs, while getting warmer, less dry air. Nasal breathing helps filter out some airborne pathogens, while the mouth has no such filtration. There’s even some evidence that breathing through the nose while exercising can improve performance, because “breathing through the nose releases nitric oxide, which is necessary to increase carbon dioxide (CO2) in the blood, which, in turn, is what releases oxygen.”

There’s at least some scientific evidence to back up the claims he presents in those parts of the book, and there’s copious evidence that sleep apnea is associated with serious health problems over the long term. As the book progresses, however, he veers farther and farther into pseudoscientific territory, discussing the Hindu concept of prana (the life force coursing through all living things in Hinduism) as if it were a scientific fact, which it’s not. He mentions how he breathes through his right nostril to improve his digestion, a belief from yoga that appears to have zero scientific evidence to support it. He also appears to advocate some extreme breathing hacks, such as the Buddhist method known as g Tum-mo meditation, that have little to no controlled research showing their efficacy or safety. There are even some internal contradictions here around hypoventilation and its effects, especially since there’s at least some literature showing a connection between hypoventilation and obesity.

I have some very mild breathing issues, mostly connected to sleeping, and thought I might get some useful tips from Breath to help with that, but all I really got out of the book was the advice to breathe more slowly, and remind myself to breathe through my nose when exercising. The former is something you’d get from any resource on mindful meditation, all of which start out with awareness-of-breath exercises. The latter is something I tried on Monday during a run … without success. It turns out that when it’s 40 degrees outside, breathing through your nose is not all that effective in delivering warm, moist air to your lungs, which is counterproductive when you’re trying to run at peak capacity. Apparently this is something you can build up to doing through practice, which I will continue to try to do over the next few weeks, but this isn’t advice for the larger audience.

There’s probably a decent book to write on this topic, but Breath isn’t it. With too much reliance on anecdote and the eventual devolution into woo, it’s not the kind of evidence-based argument I’d want to see for anything related to health or wellness.

Next up: I’ve got a few other books to review, but at the moment I’m reading Jude the Obscure.

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→ October 20, 2020
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Biased.

Dr. Jennifer Eberhardt is a social psychologist and professor at Stanford University who received a MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Grant in 2014 for her work on implicit bias and how stereotypic associations on race have substantial consequences when they intersect with crime. Her first book, Biased: Uncovering the Hidden Prejudice That Shapes What We See, Think, and Do, came out in 2019 and explains much of her work on the topic with concrete and often very moving examples of such bias occurring in the real world – often in Eberhardt’s own life – when Black Americans encounter the police.

The heart of Biased comes from Eberhardt’s work on racial bias and crime, and many of the stories that she uses to illustrate conclusions from broader research efforts involve the murders of unarmed Black men by police. One chapter starts with the shooting of Terence Crutcher, who was shot and killed by a panicked white police officer, Betty Shelby, who was, of course, acquitted of all charges in connection with her actions. (She later said that she was “sorry he lost his life,” as if she wasn’t involved in that somewhow.) Crutcher’s twin sister, Tiffany, has become a prominent activist focusing on criminal justice reform and raising awareness of the role white supremacy plays in endangering Black lives.

Eberhardt uses Crutcher’s story and her words to frame discussions of how implicit bias – the kind of bias that happens beneath our conscious thought process – leads to outcomes like Shelby killing Terence Crutcher. We can all recognize the kind of bias that uses racial slurs, or explicitly excludes some group, or traffics in open stereotypes, but implicit bias can have consequences every bit as significant, and is more insidious because even well-intentioned people can fall prey to it. Multiple studies have found, for example, that white subjects have subconscious associations between Black people and various negative character traits – and some Black subjects did as well, which indicates that these are societal messages that everyone receives, through the news, entertainment, even at school. When police officers have those implicit biases, they might be more likely to assume that a Black man holding a cell phone is actually holding a gun when they wouldn’t make the same assumption with a white man. This becomes a failure of officer training, not a matter of all cops who shoot Black men being overtly racist, while also drawing another line between those who say Black Lives Matter and those who counter that All or Blue or Fuchsia Lives Matter instead.

No other arena has the same stakes as policing and officer-involved shootings, but implicit bias also has enormous consequences in areas like education, hiring, and the housing market. Eberhardt runs through numerous studies showing implicit but unmistakable bias in the employment sphere, such as when test candidates with identical resumes but different names, one of whom bears a name that might imply the candidate is Black, receive calls back at vastly different rates. Implicit bias can explain why we still see evidence of redlining even when the explicit practice – denying the applications of nonwhite renters, or the offers of nonwhite home buyers, to keep white neighborhoods white – has been outlawed since the Fair Housing Act was passed in 1968.

Eberhardt also speaks to Bernice Donald, a Black woman who is now a federal judge but who experienced discrimination in education firsthand as one of the first Black students in DeSoto County, Mississippi, to attend her local whites-only high school, where she was ignored by some white teachers, singled out by faculty and students alike, and denied opportunities for advancement, including college scholarships she had earned through her academic performance. The implicit biases we see today affect not just students’ grades, but how students of different races are disciplined, and how severe such discipline is. Eberhardt doesn’t mention the school-to-prison pipeline, but the research she cites here shows how that pipeline can exist and the role that implicit bias plays in filling it with Black students.

Some of the studies Eberhardt describes in Biased will be familiar if you’ve read any similar books, such as Claude Steele’s Whistling Vivaldi or Banaji & Greenwald’s Blindspot, that cover this ground, but Eberhardt’s look is newer, more comprehensive, and punctuated by deeply personal anecdotes, including a few of her own. While she was a graduate student at Harvard, on the eve of commencement, she and her roommate were pulled over by a Boston police officer for a minor equipment violation, harassed, injured, and brought to the station, where a Dean from their department had to come vouch for their release. She eventually had to go to court, where she was acquitted of all charges – which included a claim that she had injured the officer, a claim the judge ridiculed, according to Eberhardt. Would that have happened if she were white? Would it surprise you to hear that the cop who hassled her and her friend was Black? And what, ultimately, does this, and research showing that Black motorists are far more likely to be stopped for the most trivial of causes and more likely to end up dead when stopped by police, tell us about solutions to the problem of implicit bias in policing? The answers are not easy, because implicit bias is so hard to root out and often isn’t evident until we have enough data to show it’s affecting outcomes. We won’t get to that point if we can’t agree that the problem exists in the first place.

Next up: I just finished Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo last night and am reading Graham Swift’s new novel Here We Are.

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→ August 1, 2020
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Educated.

In her memoir Educated, Dr. Tara Westover describes her upbringing off the grid by survivalist Mormon parents, including a father who she describes as suffering from undiagnosed bipolar disorder and a physically abusive older brother, and the price she paid for leaving that world by going to university and beyond. It’s a maddening read, and often grueling given the family’s refusal to seek medical treatment even when family members suffer gruesome accidents, but the ultimate message is that Westover did get out and establish herself as an independent adult in a way her parents would never have allowed had she stayed.

Westover’s father is indeed a Mormon, but is more completely described as an extremist, with a violent, anti-government, apocalyptic worldview that has far more in common with hardline Islamists than with mainstream LDS adherents. He refuses to send his children to school and doesn’t even get the younger ones proper birth certificates or social security numbers. He makes money running cash businesses like scrap collection and some construction work, risking grievous injury to his children, more than enough that a state authority should have stepped in at some point and removed the kids for their own protection. The state of Idaho appears to take no interest in the Westovers, however, even when he removes his older children, who did briefly attend public school, and doesn’t bother to home-school them. Meanwhile, as Tara gets older and especially when a local boy takes an interest in her, she finds herself increasingly targeted by Shawn, her violent, controlling older brother, whose behavior becomes even more erratic after multiple head injuries.

So much in this book is appalling, not the least of which is the willful ignorance of just about every adult who comes into contact with Tara and her siblings – and that includes her subservient mother, who does nothing to stop Shawn’s abuse, and who later becomes a successful charlatan purveying essential oils (and, from what I can see online, making all kinds of fraudulent medical claims about their powers) and “balancing” chakras. There are other adults in the town near where the Westovers live who have some idea of what’s amiss with the family, such as the total lack of home-schooling or the child labor occurring at their homestead, but appear to do nothing. Tara’s attempts to stand up for herself are nearly always undermined by the lack of support from anyone except, occasionally, one of her older siblings, although even her older sister Audrey – an earlier target of Shawn’s abuse – lets her down in this regard, leaving Tara no choice but to sever relations with her parents and most of her siblings if she wants to lead an independent life.

Westover takes pains in a one-paragraph introduction to say that she rejects any interpretation of her book as an indictment of Mormonism or organized religion, and there’s some merit to her implicit argument here that the real villain in the story is her father’s untreated mental illness. It is hard to read Educated, however, without seeing their church as complicit in the cycle of abuse and subjugation in the Westover family: Girls are raised to be wives and mothers, not to be educated, and certainly not to be independent in thought or deed of their husbands. There’s more than just familial pressure on Tara to stay in Idaho rather than pursue a formal education for the first time, starting at Cambridge and later continuing at Harvard – where her parents visit her to make one apparently last effort to bring her back into the fold from Satan’s clutches.

Her decision to pursue that education, after much soul-searching and a battle within herself to make a decision in her own best interests for what might have been the first time, results in some seriocomic moments that had to be excruciating for Tara to experience in the moment. She went to college having never heard of the Holocaust, with little to no sense of the existence of the civil rights movement, and ignorant of most aspects of modern Western culture. It’s a testament to her own natural intelligence that she was able to score highly enough on the ACTs to get into college at all, and that she was able to catch up on the equivalent of several years of material to be able to take age-appropriate classes once at Cambridge. It’s also incredibly aggravating to read this and think of all the Tara Westovers likely living out in the hinterlands who never get the opportunity to pursue their educations, or never even learn of the world beyond the borders of their homesteads or towns. She’s the lucky one, who got out, and realized that so much of what her parents and her church had taught her was false. She’s also probably the tip of a much larger iceberg of girls and women whose potential and agency are wasted by ignorance and superstition.

Tara is now Dr. Westover, and her story is still going, so Educated doesn’t conclude the tangible parts of the narrative; this is a memoir of personal growth, and of what Dr. Westover endured and ultimately sacrificed to become an independent woman who has rejected the core tenets that most of her immediate family hold. She seems torn in the last few chapters of the book between her choices and what she left behind, to the point that she seemed to be apologizing on behalf of the many family members, most importantly her parents, who will never apologize, and who seem to think she’s the one in the wrong. The catharsis here is not ours to demand, but I wanted one, a final break, an acknowledgement that her parents, with the help of their church, did her numerous wrongs, and with her brother have dealt her damage from which she will probably spend the rest of her life recovering.

Next up: I’m halfway through David Mitchell’s new novel Utopia Avenue.

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→ July 15, 2020
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Say Nothing.

Patrick Radden Keefe won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Non-Fiction this spring for his book Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland, a well-deserved honor for what is easily one of the best narrative non-fiction books I’ve ever read. The future of the NBCC is in doubt after mass resignations over the behavior of board member Carlin Romano in the wake of the board’s attempt to draft a strong statement on structural racism in the publishing world, but with this, Everything Inside (Fiction) and The Queen (Biography), they picked three tremendous books for their three big awards in this cycle.

Say Nothing is the story of the disappearance of Jean McConville, a widowed Protestant mother of eight, in Belfast in 1972, who was “disappeared” and whose body wasn’t even found for forty years. Keefe uses that as a framing device to provide an incredibly detailed, unsparing history of the Troubles, taking advantage of the trove of new information that has become available in the last decade on the conflict, including copious interviews with people actually involved in the violence who spoke to historians working at Boston College.

McConville was one of sixteen people who were considered Disappeared from the Troubles, and her case, and its ultimate resolution, work extremely well as a point of entry to discuss the conflict as a whole – particularly because some of the people involved in or with knowledge of her abduction were major figures in the Troubles. Keefe walks back to the origins of the strife between Catholics and Protestants in the six counties of Northern Ireland, focusing on the rise of the Irish Republican Army and its various splits (into the Official IRA and the Provisional IRA), and on the violent repression by the British authorities that created a war zone in Belfast for decades.

Keefe shifts the focus in the second chapter, after depicting McConville’s abduction, to Dolous and Marian Price, Catholic sisters who joined the Provisional IRA, the terrorist wing of the group that sought the unification of all of Ireland and expulsion of the British from Ulster at any cost. These two fanatical women were involved in numerous critical events of the Troubles, including the car bombing of the Old Bailey and other London sites in 1973, for which she went to prison; the first series of IRA hunger strikes in the 1970s; and several of the abductions of the Disappeared. Dolours eventually gave up her role in the violent struggle but remained politically active, opposing the Good Friday Agreement and eventually revealing that Gerry Adams was far more involved in IRA violence than he admitted, while Marian continued to engage in terrorist activity well into her 50s. The two make fascinating characters to study while conveniently bringing the narrative to several events critical in any retelling of the Troubles.

The Belfast Project provided Keefe with a wealth of material to fill in much of the historical record on the McConville case and many other Provisional IRA operations from the late 1960s until the Good Friday Agreement was signed in 1998, thanks to hours of in-person interviews the two historians behind the project conducted with former and even still current IRA members. The original intent was for the content of those interviews to remain confidential until after each subject’s death, and after the first few passed away, including Brendan Hughes, who ran multiple terror attacks for the IRA against British soldiers and also led the 1978 “dirty protest” and the 1980 Hunger Strike while in the prison known as Long Kesh, and who opposed the peace accord as too favorable to the United Kingdom. Hughes named many names, including the person he said ordered the abduction and murder of McConville, and these revelations – coming after Hughes’ death – led to prosecutions and an international court proceeding that eventually forced Boston College and the Project to turn over all of their interviews relating to specific crimes, even those that involved confessions by still-living persons. Without those materials, Keefe wouldn’t have much to add to the history of the Troubles beyond what had already been written by 2010, but the interviews with Hughes and Dolours Price both shed substantial light on multiple attacks and murders, also allowing Keefe to provide a conclusion to the Jean McConville story (albeit one that never led to a conviction). There’s also a tangent here about the nature of oral histories and whether the Belfast Project might have deserved some legal protection, although the school declined to fight the subpoena and subsequent efforts to invoke journalists’ privilege failed.

The detail is what carries the day here for Say Nothing; even if you’ve read about the Troubles before, as I had for a project while in college, you probably haven’t read anything this specific and well-structured. Keefe weaves multiple narratives together, giving nuance to so many of the people involved, even those who participated in multiple murders and carried out vicious campaigns of terror against their own neighbors and fellow citizens. You won’t leave with sympathy for Hughes or the Price sisters, but you will still get to see them as three-dimensional actors, and their revelations help give more texture to the portrayals of other major IRA figures all the way up to Gerry Adams, who had a whole second act as a politician and supporter of peace while denying that he was ever involved in the IRA – a lie that he was able to perpetuate for more than two decades because of the very code of silence that kept Jean McConville’s killers from ever facing justice.

Next up: Tony Collins’ The Oval World: A Global History of Rugby.

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→ July 6, 2020
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Mindware.

I appeared on the Inquiring Minds podcast this spring to promote my book The Inside Game, and co-host Adam Bristol recommended a book to me after the show, Dr. Richard Nisbett’s Mindware: Tools for Smart Thinking. Dr. Nisbett is a professor of social psychology at the University of Michigan and co-directs the school’s Culture and Cognition program, and a good portion of Mindware focuses on how our environment affects our cognitive processes, especially the unconscious mind, as he gives advice on how to improve our decision-making processes and better understand the various ways our minds work.

Nisbett starts out the book with an obvious but perhaps barely understood point: Our understanding of the world around us is a matter of construal, a combination of inferences and interpretations, because of the sheer volume of information and stimuli coming into our brains at all times, and how much of what we see or hear is indirect. (If you want to get particularly technical, even what we see directly is still a matter of interpretation; even something as seemingly concrete as color is actually a sensation created in the brain, an interpolation of different wavelengths of light that also renders colors more stable in our minds than they would be if we were just relying on levels of illumination.) So when we run into biases or illusions that affect our inferences and interpretations, we will proceed on the basis of unreliable information.

He then breaks down three major ways in which we can understand how our minds process all of these stimuli. One is that our environments affect how we think and how we behave far more than we realize they do. Another is that our unconscious minds do far more work than we acknowledge, including processing environmental inputs that we may not actively register. And the third is that we see and interpret the world through schemas, frameworks or sets of heuristics that we use to make sense of the world and simplify the torrent of information coming at us.

From that outline, Nisbett marches through a series of cognitive biases and errors, many of which overlap with those I covered in The Inside Game, but explains more of how cognition is affected by external stimuli, including geography (the subject of one of his previous books), culture, and “preperception” – how the subconscious mind gets you started before you actively begin to perceive things. This last point is one of the book’s most powerful observations: We don’t know why we know what we know, and we can’t always account for our motives and reasons, even if we’re asked to explain them directly. Subjects of experiments will deny that their choices or responses were influenced by stimuli that seem dead-obvious to outside observers. They can be biased by anchors that have nothing to do with the topic of the questions, and even show effects after the ostensible study itself – for example, that subjects exposed to more words related to aging will walk more slowly down the hall out of the study room than those exposed to words relate to youth or vitality. It seems absurd, but multiple studies have shown effects like these, as with the study I mentioned in my book about students’ guesses on quantities being biased by the mere act of writing down the last two digits of their social security numbers. We would like to think that our brains don’t work that way, but they do.

Nisbett is a psychologist but crosses comfortably into economics territory, including arguments in favor of using cost/benefit analyses any time a decision has significant costs and the process allows you the time to perform such an analysis. He even gets into the thorny question of how much a life is worth, which most people do not want to consider but which policymakers have to consider when making major decisions on, say, how much and for how long to shut down the economy in the face of a global pandemic. There is some death rate from COVID-19 that we would – and should – accept, and to figure that out, we have to consider what values to put on the lives that might be lost at each level of response, and then compare that to economic benefits of remaining open or additional costs of overloaded hospitals. “Zero deaths” is the compassionate answer, but it isn’t the rational one; if zero deaths in a pandemic were even possible, it would be prohibitively expensive in time and money, so much so that it would cause suffering (and possibly deaths) from other causes.

In the conclusion to Mindware, Dr. Nisbett says that humans are “profligate causal theorists,” and while that may not quite roll off the tongue, it’s a pithy summary of how our minds work. We are free and easy when it comes to finding patterns and ascribing causes to outcomes, but far less thorough when it comes to testing these hypotheses, or even trying to make these hypotheses verifiable or falsifiable. It’s the difference between science and pseudoscience, and between a good decision-making process and a dubious one. (You can still make a good decision with a bad process!) This really is a great book if you like the kind of books that led me to write The Inside Game, or just want to learn more about how your brain deals with the huge volume of information it gets each day so that you can make better decisions in your everyday life.

Next up: I just finished Ann Patchett’s The Dutch House this weekend and am about halfway through Patrick Keefe’s Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland.

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→ June 22, 2020
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Being Wrong.

Kathryn Schulz won a Pulitzer Prize in 2015 for her New Yorker story “The Really Big One,” about the earthquake that is likely to devastate the Pacific Northwest in the next half-century. It is one of the greatest longreads I’ve ever read, and one of the major reasons I’ve expanded my Saturday link roundups from what used to be a few links on most weekends to a dozen or more stories headlined by the best longreads of each week. It’s also why I wouldn’t move out to Seattle or Portland despite all of the benefits of living in that part of the country.

Her first book was 2010’s Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error, a meditation on and paean to the power of making mistakes, and an explanation of how our brains respond to the feeling of being wrong and how we use it, sometimes without realizing it, to learn and make better decisions in the future. It’s a book I wish I’d read a decade ago, and certainly before I wrote The Inside Game, but also helped affirm my longstanding commitment to owning my mistakes at work by detailing when and why my evaluations of certain players were wrong.

Schulz writes with a clarity and joy in the subject that is evident from the first lines. She asks “Why is it so fun to be right? As pleasures go, it is a second-order one at best,” and immediately has your attention: It is fun to be right, but why? And why does it feel so bad to be wrong, even if what you’re wrong about is ultimately something trivial?

Being Wrong breaks down the experience into three parts – where errors come from, what it’s like to be wrong, and what we can gain from being wrong and learning to embrace it. Part one dovetails well with other books I’ve read about the ways we think, but gets even further down into our mental processes than the sort of cognitive biases and errors I discussed in The Inside Game, such as describing how inaccurate our own memories can be (and why eyewitness testimony isn’t the unassailable truth our judicial system has long assumed it to be), how prior beliefs affect memory and observation (leading to cognitive dissonance), and how our thinking evolves as we mature and yet is still vulnerable to confirmation bias or forming conclusions based on insufficient evidence.

Part two goes into how we experience wrongness, while also continuing to explore the ways in which we are or become wrong. We can disbelieve things we know or strongly believe to be true simply because of the influence of others, which applies to spheres as different as religion or science. Schulz looks at some of the history of doomsday prophets who claimed that the Second Coming or a similarly cataclysmic event would occur on a certain date; when it didn’t happen, many of these prophets’ adherents didn’t give up on their faith in their soothsayers, but cooked up post hoc rationalizations why the prophets weren’t actually all that wrong in the first place. One such event, in 1844, spawned the Seventh Day Adventists, a sect that claims over 25 million followers even though it was founded by three followers of a prophet whose prophecy failed, leading them to concoct an explanation – utterly unverifiable, of course – that has hoodwinked people for over 150 years.

Schulz also delves into the persistence of memory – and how easily it can lead us astray, giving the story of Penny Beernsten, whose identification of the man who attacked and sexually assaulted her was overturned by DNA evidence that identified her actual attacker 18 years later. Beernsten has been extremely open about her experiences, including describing how she tried to remember details of her attacker’s face during the attack and how certain she was about her identification after the fact, as well as what happened to her when she learned that she was wrong and had sent the wrong man to prison for nearly two decades. This leads into a discussion of flawed prosecutions, where police officers and/or government attorneys will often cling to prior beliefs even when tangible evidence disproves them.

The third section, Embracing Error, looks at people and institutions that have made the active choice to accept errors as a part of life and build processes to trap them, minimizing their short-term impact and long-term frequency. This covers medical errors, which ended up the entire impetus for Atul Gawande’s excellent book The Checklist Manifesto, and how simple solutions like pre-operation (or pre-flight, or pre-anything) checklists can lead to significant reductions in errors, saving lives, injuries, or just cash. Schulz also explains how the awareness that we might be wrong makes us more apt to listen to the feedback or contrary opinions of others, avoiding the ‘yes men’ mentality of many leaders in government and industry. She wraps up the book with a detour into humor, asking why it’s so funny to us when other people are wrong (there’s quite a bit of research on this, which surprised me) but less so when the mistakes are ours, and uses that to launch into a philosophical discussion of fact versus art, certainty versus uncertainty, and how being wrong is essential to our survival and progress as a species. That assumes, of course, that we can admit we’re wrong, and then do something about it, which is certainly not the case in the United States today, where falsehoods are merely “alternative facts” and an entire party preaches science denial from wearing masks to stop a pandemic to denying evolution and climate change in its platform. Maybe they should read Being Wrong, but I have a feeling it wouldn’t get through.

Next up: About 2/3 of the way through Richard Nisbett’s Mindware: Tools for Smart Thinking.

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→ December 31, 2019
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Dark Money (book).

Jane Mayer’s Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right is the most horrifying book I read all year – but it’s not a horror novel, just a work of well-investigated, well-argued non-fiction that details how archconservative billionaires, usually mad over having to pay taxes, have spent hundreds of millions or more of their own money to buy control of our government. Their efforts helped catapult the retrograde right-wing of the Republican Party from the fringes to the party’s new core, gave them control of the legislative and executive branches, and have, for the last two years, allowed them to pack the federal judiciary with judges who agree with their reactionary views on taxation, environmental regulations, and women’s rights. If this book doesn’t horrify you, you must be one of them.

The main target of Dark Money is the Koch brothers, David (who just died this August) and Charles, who run the second-largest closely held company in the United States. Before David’s death, each was worth around $50 billion, each had longstanding individual efforts to avoid paying taxes, and their company had decades of violations of environmental regulations, including dumping benzene, a known human carcinogen that we absorb by breathing its vapors, into the air near their oil refinery in Corpus Christi. The Kochs’ response to these various federal actions against them has been to pump hundreds of millions of dollars into various front groups that donate to legislative and gubernatorial candidates who promise, in turn, to roll back environmental protections or to push tax cuts for the highest brackets; and to fund professorships at various universities where the positions will go to so-called “free-market advocates” and where the Koch brothers may have had say in hiring. Along with other anti-tax, anti-regulation billionaires, including the DeVos family, Wilbur Ross, John Olin, Art Pope, and more, the Kochs helped found the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation; spent hundreds of millions fighting climate reform; and helped fund massive gerrymanders in states from Ohio and Pennsylvania to North Carolina. They’ve packaged most of these policies, which help them directly or indirectly by helping the businesses they own, as issues of “freedom,” while tying some of them to issues that matter to social conservatives, so that they might convince enough voters to swing their way even when those policies (such as eliminating laws or regulations that fight pollution) would hurt those voters themselves.

Even if you agree with some of the positions that these billionaires are pushing, Mayer’s main thesis here is that our democracy has been bought by a tiny number of people, so that fewer than 20 of these billionaires are setting wide swaths of federal and state policies for a country of 300 million. It is improbable that this extreme minority, all of whom are white and quite old, nearly all of whom are male, and all of whom are in the top 1% of the top 1% of the top 1% of Americans by wealth, would all agree among themselves on policies that are also beneficial to the country as a whole … but even if, improbably, they did so, that’s not how our system of government is supposed to work, and not how most Americans think it works. But, as Mayer describes through her history of the Kochs and of the way money has metastasized throughout our political system, since Citizens United – a Supreme Court ruling that resulted from funding by the Koch brothers and their allies – this is exactly how our government works. Billionaires buying the policies they want is a feature, not a bug.

Mayer also goes into the Nazi roots of the Kochs’ fortune; it is unlikely that the brothers would have become this wealthy had their father not helped Adolf Hitler build a major oil refinery in Hamburg that let the Nazis refine high-octane fuel for their warplanes. Fred Koch, Charles’ and David’s father, also helped Joseph Stalin develop the Soviets’ then-moribund oil industry, helping ensure the dictator’s grip on power and setting the stage for the Cold War after the second World War. It’s estimated they spent nearly $900 million in the 2016 election to try to elect their favored, hard-right Republicans to state legislatures across the country and ensure control of both houses of Congress. Is that possible if Fred Koch doesn’t take Hitler’s money?

There isn’t a simple solution to the problems Mayer details in Dark Money, and she doesn’t pretend there are, instead pointing out every policy change and judicial decision that created this particular monster. Lax IRS regulations have allowed billionaires to funnel money into “non-profits” that don’t have to disclose their donors but manage to skirt rules against such groups funding candidates. Citizens United gave corporations the free speech rights previously reserved for individuals. A lack of federal rules on soft money, donated to groups (like Super PACs) but not directly to candidates, has further enabled the wholesale purchasing of legislators; corporations can’t contribute directly to candidates, but they can fund Super PACs, which can then campaign for or against candidates as long as they aren’t coordinating with the candidates they support. None of this will change soon; it certainly won’t change as long as this version of the Koch-funded Republican Party retains control of the Senate, the White House, and much of the federal judiciary. A huge part of the power of Dark Money is that Mayer channels her obvious indignation into providing more details on the shady (yet legal!) behavior of these billionaires, rather than just delivering a screed on the subject, even though the desire to deliver a screed would be easy to understand.

I don’t think boycotts accomplish a whole lot – they require such enormous coordination, and the presence of viable alternatives – but I am at least trying to avoid spending my money with companies owned by these reactionary billionaires and other companies that support their efforts (such as by funding the American Legislative Exchange Council, the conservative lobbying group that goes so far as to write bills for their member legislators to submit). I wouldn’t shop at Menard’s if I lived in the Midwest, not with its owner helping fund fights against unions and saying he “doesn’t believe in environmental regulations.” I won’t buy paper goods from Georgia Pacific, although I’m realistic – if I buy a new house, or do some renovations, I probably have no say over where any plywood or OSB comes from. And I don’t think I’m going to move the needle with any of these companies; I would just rather know my money isn’t going directly to help the subjugation of our democracy.

Next up: I’m reading a pair of Evelyn Waugh novels – first The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, and then Black Mischief.

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