Mead's Male and Female

[*****]

Margaret Mead's Male and Female is a masterpiece of anthropological writing, focusing on how different cultures approach gender, deal with naturally occurring biological differences in gender, and manufacture there own gender differences to go on top of the naturally occurring ones. This is already reason enough to take note of the book as something worth reading. Mead explains how most of what we think of as gender is a social construct (and proves it by giving examples of societies that treat it differently) without resorting to the normal post-modern failure mode of treating legitimately real things as though they were socially constructed. Gender does have a very strong biological basis which puts quite a few constraints on what additional constructs a society will manufacture on top of purely biological differences. Mead does a remarkable job of acknowledging the existence of both factors, keeping the two concepts isolated from each other, and talking about how they are related.

Male and Female is from 1949, so Mead is able to start with relatively simple definitions of gender. Females are people with the organs and glands required to gestate and nurse children, and males are people who lack the biological hardware for doing these things regardless of how functional their other relevant body parts are. Most of her descriptions of gender indicate that she would classify hermaphrodites as more-female-than-male for the purposes of her discussion, and classify transgender and transsexual people by their cis-gender for the purposes of her discussion. She does talk quite a bit about cultures which had a tradition of people taking up the opposite gender role as their cis-gender, and she doesn't treat a culture's inclusion of this culture as a deviance, though she does discuss the decision of people who behave in a manner that is not approved for their gender in a culture that does not tolerate that departure from gender roles as engaging in deviant behavior. Because she had lived among peoples who accepted some amount of transsexualism within their culture and studied cultures with these kinds of practices, she avoided discussing transsexualism in a way that insinuated that it was inherently offensive to nature or particularly deviant, even though she did discuss it in a way that suggested that it was incompatible with Western sensibilities (with which she did not appear to sympathize particularly strongly). In contrast, Mead does not appear to have lived among or extensively studied any group that was very accepting of homosexuality. The contrast of the book's willingness to accept transsexual practices with its treatment of homosexuality as something inherently degenerate is the only thing that really dates this book. Practically everything Mead discusses was informed, enlightened, and progressive by the standards of 1949. Most of it is still all of those things by today's standards, but a handful of comments mostly about preventing homosexuality will be off-putting to many modern readers, and odd-to-say-the-least to most others. (She doesn't say anything particularly negative about homosexualite. She simply writes with the assumption that her reader's will believe that it is something to be prevented whenever preventing it is possible.)

If I can't find anything worse to say about a book than that a few of the moral sensibilities with which it has written have since gone out of fashion, I'm going to call that book an excellent book. I'd prefer a book that somehow managed to steer clear of saying anything that reflected the moral sensibilities of the author, but on a topic as intensely steeped in moralistic discussion as gender and sex, the fact that most of the book could survive the past 66 years without seeming grossly obsolete on the basis of moralistic considerations alone is itself remarkable. It is all the more remarkable when you consider that most of the things she says would have likewise avoided being morally scandalous 66 years ago. Given how completely ideas about sexuality and gender have changed in the last half century threading the needle through the subject carefully enough to only have one or two snags is in itself worthy of commendation.

Mead divides her book into two parts, but the first three are similar to each other and the fourth is quite different, so I'll write about her book as if she had divided it into two parts (I-III as the first, and IV as the second). The first part describes eight cultures in which she has lived and which she has studied. They range from hunter-gatherer to third world semi-industrialized. She subdivides her discussion of these cultures into a topics, and talks about each culture when it suits the subject she has picked to discuss rather than giving a culture-by-culture account of each group of people. All of this was fascinating and informative. I occasionally wondered while I was reading it how much cherry-picking she was doing to support her points and how much of what she said was actually true. When I reached her discussion of American culture in the second part, I became pretty convinced she had a brutal devotion to accuracy that she would not compromise to suit her agenda.

Her account of modern American culture is breathtaking. It is the only description of a culture I understand that I have read that I think could have been plausibly written by an intelligent non-human observer. She makes no attempts to sympathize or even much of an attempt to understand. Simply to see and describe. She makes endlessly many observations that you and I ordinarily refuse to think. She describes a culture haphazardly strung together in such a way that keeps both males and females trapped in a double bind related to their gender roles setting members of both genders up for repeated failures in their pursuit of a meaningful life within the confines of the identity that their society hands them when they are children, forcing girls to choose between renouncing their dreams (and related parts of their identity) or unsexing themselves and psychologically emasculating boys, especially young boys.

I can't do the book justice in my attempts to describe it. If you can find a copy and read the part entitled "The Two Sexes in Contemporary American Culture," I'd strongly recommend doing so. I recommend the whole book, but if you only have time for a third of it, that section is good enough that I would almost consider it indespensible reading.

I'm updating this post a couple years after writing it originally. After writing it, I've seen criticism of this book that claim that Mead claims that the pain of childbirth is mostly socially constructed. I don't remember her saying that. I remember her saying that the amount of pain women in a particular culture say they experience during childbirth is strongly correlated with the amount of pain that men in their culture expect them to feel, and talking about socially-constructed sympathetic pain that men say they feel when their wife is in labor with their child in at least one culture. However, she also describes many reasons that one culture would have completely different ideas of pain from another, and does talk about ways that environment and culture shape the perception of pain in general. For instance, a culture where a coming of age ritual is stuffing nettles into a girl when she has her first period is going to have a very different relationship with the concept of pain than most other cultures do. I've read a lot of anthropological commentaries before I read this book, and it was the first one that I've read that talked about the existence of excruciating coming of age rituals for girls becoming women in some tribal cultures. Mead doesn't deny the existence of physical realities, but she does talk about the way that different societies approach the subject of pain and the subject of gender and how these things relate to how people perceive the physical realities of their bodies.

Ariely's The Upside of Irrationality

[***]

The Upside of Irrationality is a letdown after Ariely' Predictably Irrational. The experiments he describes tend to be pretty interesting, but I frequently don't buy the just-so stories he extracts from the descriptions, and I often get the sense that Ariely doesn't really understand the subjects he is talking about enough to make the sorts of comments he makes.

He studies the effect of large incentives on people's performance. I completely believe all of the results he has reported, but I think Ariely displays a complete lack of understanding of the subjects he applies them to, when he tries to explain the real-world relevance of his findings. He talks about basketball and bonuses as the application of his results. Ariely admits to not understanding basketball and then goes on to discredit the idea that clutch players exist in basketball. He found that the players who are known as "really clutch players" don't shoot any better under pressure, they just don't shoot any worse. Oh, and they also take more shots, if that matters at all. First of all, there's the matter of semantics. If most players break down under pressure, and a few play just as well under pressure as the rest of the time. The players who don't break down are clutch players. That's pretty much exactly what the phrase means. When it matters most, some players figure out how to win games consistently where others can't figure out how to do it. Since sports are entirely about your relative performs remaining exactly as good as your normal self in situations that cause practically everybody else to get worse is performing really well. The second thing is, keeping your normal accuracy while taking more shots and shooting sooner after you touch the ball is actually playing better basketball. Teams frequently use up most of the shot clock looking for an open shot. If you're able to make shots about as well when you are trying to shoot in the first ten seconds of the shot clock as you are when you are willing to use up the whole clock, you are playing better basketball than normal because your taking more heavily contested shots and still getting the same results. It's a lot harder to make the easiest shot you can find in ten seconds of searching for an open shot than it is to take the easiest shot you can find in twenty-four seconds of searching for an open shot.

But Ariely didn't really care about basketball. He was disputing the idea of clutch players existing in basketball, not because he had anything to say about basketball (he freely admitted that he knew next to nothing about the game), but because he was trying to demonstrate that nobody performs better when stakes are sufficiently elevated than they do under more ordinary circumstances. The main point he was trying to make was "Wall Street bonuses are egregious, and they aren't just egregious, they hurt the companies that pay them out because nobody performs better when the stakes are enormous than they do for smaller stakes." Okay, and here's where Ariely demonstrates that he really doesn't understand economics... or experiences that are more complicated than the ones that people might encounter in a lab. First of all the difference between real life experiences and lab experiments. Effort impacts your ability to improve over time a lot more than it does your ability to perform in the moment. Ariely designed experiments that are capable of measuring the impact of choking without having any ability to measure the impact of practicing more or putting in extra hours. In real life, extra hours can add a lot. And people are motivated by heavy stakes to put in a lot more effort and a lot more hours than they would be by lower rewards. If you tell your students that you've revised your grading policy, and the midterm exam that you've just handed out is now worth 100% of their grade instead of the 10% that they'd previously thought, a lot of them are going to choke and nobody's going to suddenly remember everything they didn't study because of the new incentive. But if you tell them the same thing the week before, you're going to have an awful lot of students who wouldn't have studied that much for an exam that was just worth 10% of their grade showing up having studied for this exam like they hadn't studied for any test in a long time. The real world is a place where, if you have advanced warning that something counts extra, you can put in a lot of extra effort to make sure that you're prepared and you've done everything possible to get the best possible results. The more damning critique of Ariely's comments is that it demonstrates a startling lack of understanding of how economics work. Wall Street companies don't pay huge bonuses because they think that paying people huge bonuses will motivate them to get better results. They pay key employees huge bonuses because they want to motivate those employees to stay with the company and keep producing the results they're already producing for them... instead of going to a competitor and producing those results for a competitor instead. You see, there's this thing called a job market, and a job market is a market. A market is a place where people come to exchange goods and services, and... *face palm*

Oh — kay.

Ariely goes on to talk about the joy of work, the IKEA effect, and the "not invented here" syndrome. He separates these into three separate chapters, but they are at least as closely related to each other as the topics he meanders through in most of his individual chapters. His discussion of the joy of work and the IKEA effect is pretty good, though it still seems rather simplistic. For instance, people attach extra value not just to things they've personally made but also to things that their friends and relatives have personally made or even personally possessed. As well as things that people they admire but have never met have personally made or personally possessed. I would guess that these things are somehow related, and the underlying phenomenon is about something a little bit different from the attachment to one's own labor that is part of Ariely's just so story. (And Ariely's just so story is suspiciously compatible with one particular ideological movement that talks a lot about the alienation of man from man's own labor. I am somewhat sympathetic to this ideology, much more so than the average American. Even so, when someone's findings map this well onto an ideology, I have to suspect that there's quite a bit of motivated cognition at play.)

Then there's "not invented here" syndrome. Like most people who describe it, Ariely fails to convincingly establish that NIHS is a real thing. Clayton Christensen has put forth a very convincing theory of how markets work that explain away the phenomena which NIHS was invented to explain. Christensen's theory does an excellent job of explaining a host of other market phenomena in the process without deteriorating into a host of ad hoc explanations or requiring the postulation of man's sinful nature to describe why things fail. Giving the choice between an explanation that describes the workings of impersonal market forces and one that asserts that people almost have a categorical tendency to some particular sin (or "bias" to use Ariely's preferred term for sin), I'm always going to opt for the explanation that has to do with impersonal market forces.

Ariely deals with plenty of other subject in The Upside of Irrationality, but that's all I have the patience to describe tonight.

Burg & Mann The Go-Giver

[**]

The Go-Giver is a lot better than most morality fables and self-help novels. The advice is mostly trite oversimplifications, the story is nauseatingly contrived, and most of the empirical claims in the book are false. However, none of these were quite as bad as I expected based on other books I've previously read in the genre. More importantly, all of the specific examples the book gives are good examples. If you treat all of the in abstract discussion as what people who don't really understand abstract reasoning but do understand signaling would say to hint in the general direction of what they actually mean, most of the problems with the book go away. The particular ways that Joe, the main character, applies the "secrets" he learns are all consistent with the behavior someone would take if they did understand how the iterated prisoner dilemma is supposed to work. If you understand game theory, you understand both why this book is kinda-sorta right and also why this book is entirely wrong.

Also hyperbole upon hyperbole... until all of the universe is consumed in nothing but platitudes! Such hyperbole, like you can't even imagine unless you've read any other books in this genre which somehow manage to be even worse (despite the impossibility).

This book is about the secrets of "stratospheric success." It basically reduces to be a nice person, impact a lot of people, and create more value than you retain. Oh, but do retain some of the value you create! This is all good advice, once you subtract out the hyperbole... and add in the other three rules of the iterated prisoner's dilemma. Punish defectors. Punish defectors. Punish defectors! (I've empirically tested what happens when you drop that rule from your strategy, and the results are double plus ungood to say the least. "Always defect" is a slightly better strategy than "always cooperate" both in theory and in practice.) That's one of the problems I have with morality tales. 

The rules morality tales give are almost always great rules for walled gardens, as long as you guard your walled garden. But these sorts of books always poo-poo the need to do that. You need to do that. Otherwise you get Fruitlands.

But then there is that whole phrase "stratospheric success."

This book isn't about stratospheric success, and doing what it recommends won't bring you stratospheric success, even if you do it in the right way. Which is different from the way that the book recommends.

The following is a seven step plan for stratospheric success:

1. Be born brilliant.
2. Start learning the skills you will eventually need long before you need them and long before a bunch of other people have started to learn the same exact skills.
3. Work really damn hard to revise those skills.
4. Meet the right people and make the write connection.
5. Be at the right place at the right time.
6. Seize the opportunities you have when you have them.
7. Work really damn hard to make sure that your attempt to seize those

Sometimes, if you get very, very lucky you can skip one or even two of these seven steps, but most extremely successful people do all of them.

Margulis Symbiotic Planet

[**]

Lynn Margulis' Symbiotic Planet was probably worth reading. It's not nearly as good as Microcosmos, which I would recommend to anyone looking for a good book on biology, especially anyone interested in reading Margulis. On the other hand, if you don't really want to read a book on biology, but you want to read a book by a prominent biologist, Symbiotic Planet might be a good choice. It's very short and easy to read. A lot of it isn't really about biology per se. It deals significantly with history of science and autobiography.

My main criticism of Symbiotic Planet is that it's too scattered and too brief to make much of a point. You pick up a little bit of biology that you might not have known (but probably did if you were someone who was inclined to read it to begin with). You read very brief descriptions of a few interesting experiments or a few interesting results that those experiments found. You learn quite a bit about how Margulis approached biology, which is arguably useful, given her influence on the field. She believed that the perspective of a student of the humanities is underrated in science. She might be right. She believed that when scientists dismiss material outside of their area of focus as unimportant before they bother to learn more about it, they're displaying hubris not the ability to prudently select priorities. Her career demonstrates that she was right about this.

Christensen's Innovator's Dilemma

[Non-fiction/business] [******]

The Innovator's Dilemma is one of two books that I've read more than once in the last three years, and I expect to read it several more times in the course of my life. It covers several interrelated topics including disruption, value networks, shadow prices, resource dependence, and commoditization. It covers each of these topics well enough that it would be well worth reading to see what Christensen has to say about any one of them, the combination, and there common connection that constitutes the innovator's dilemma makes it indispensable reading for anyone remotely interested in business, economics, investing, evolution, or even artificial intelligence. Rereading this book a couple months ago, I realized just how profoundly it has affected the way I think. No other book that I've read in the past ten years has come close to affecting me as much as this one has.

The Innovator's Dilemma is well-written and well-organized, with a good index. It has excellent graphs and illustrations and compelling data. More importantly, the book's claims and analysis clearly fit the data. When there are lines in a graph, they are transparently meaningful. Frequently, in soft disciplines like social sciences, business, and economics, you see regression analyses of weak correlations that are just not very convincing. Most lines just don't fit most of data very well. This is never the case in The Innovator's Dilemma. When there's a line fit to the data in a graph, it's because the line fits the data tightly, not because there's a weak correlation that someone has happened to discover.

The Innovator's Dilemma is a book about why successful companies sometimes succumb to competition created by newcomers to their industry. The basic thesis is that they're chasing a local maximum, and the entrant competitors are chasing a different local maximum which happens to be higher and the existing companies can't beat the competition by continuing to improve at what they do best because they're chasing the wrong peak (under the circumstances).

I typically advocate caution against making arguments based that rely on non-cyclical, non-monotonic trends. People are good at spotting cycles, and they are good at noticing monotonic progressions, they are good at rationalizing away information that they disagrees with what they want to believe, and they have a tendency to overfit data and see patterns even in noise. The general arguments that people usually give when they are claiming that some phenomenon is neither cyclical nor monotonic (apart from noise) leaves too much room for motivated cognition and is too likely to involve overfitting the data. It's too easy to say "sometimes one must take one step backwards in order to take two steps forward" and dismiss evidence that contradicts your stance when you really ought to acknowledge that it contradicts your stance. Christensen does an excellent job of describing an actual non-monotonic trend correctly, and further of explaining why the existence of these sorts of trends causes so many problems for business.

Non-monotonic, non-cyclical trends do exist. Most local maxima are not the global maximum. A theory that deals with these type of phenomena needs to do so explicitly. Hill-climbing algorithms only find local maxima, and people who want to find a higher maximum need to find a different hill which involves going away from that maximum. A good discussion of non-monotonic trends ought typically be a discussion of hill-climbing algorithms. The Innovator's Dilemma is an excellent example of how to discuss this sort of subject well. (Even though it deals extensively with the manufacture of computer components, it is not a book about computer science so it doesn't really on this sort of language to make its points, but nonetheless it does make them.) Christensen describes value networks and resource dependence as two phenomena that essentially convert any well-run company in a competitive industry into a hill-climbing algorithm for optimizing what it produces within in its context. Companies that are operated by other principals fail if they are operating in a competitive market. However, because most local maxima are not global maxima, companies that are well-run get destroyed whenever another company that starts off climbing a different hill with a higher maximum competes with them. Christensen makes the argument much better than any brief summary can, but that's the essential theme of the book.

Christensen is writing about companies, but most of what he discusses is applicable to a wide range of other fields including biology and artificial intelligence. Have you ever wandered why mammals and birds seem to be able to live in a much wider range of habitats than fish, amphibians, or reptiles? This book gives me a better framework for answering that question than any book I've read that deals only with biology. You would think that since their is an aquatic niche for species as big as whales that fish would have found it before mammals did since they've had many more generations of optimizing for various aquatic roles. But they couldn't find the niches that mammals could adapt to on land because evolution is a hill-climbing algorithm and hill-climbing algorithms only find local maxima. I'm sure that many books that are actually about biology make this point in passing, but I've never read a book of biology that makes the point as forcefully or as well as The Innovator's Dilemma.

The other thing that the Innovator's Dilemma does exceptionally well is that it actually gives you a framework for thinking about how big the hills are and whether an attempt to reach a higher maximum is actually climbing the same hill or not. The general idea is that you have to be optimizing for criteria that is useless to the major extant market if you want to be disrupting the major players there. Hard drive manufacturers didn't care about making smaller hard drives because the manufactures of the server/desktop/notebook/whatever they supplied had other components built to use a specific-sized hard drive and didn't need a smaller one, were willing to pay a premium for more data stored on a bigger hard drive for a while, and weren't willing to a pay a premium to have a smaller hard drive. Eventually, however, because everything is improving, the smaller hard drive become good enough at everything that the larger hard drives do better, that people do want to make the switch. The discussion of what it means for a feature to become "good enough" in this context is like everything else in this book, very solid.

I did have one small nitpick that might annoy biologists. The Innovator's Dilemma opens with incorrect information about the lifespan of the fruitfly. Christensen quotes a colleague as saying that they "are conceived, born, mature, and die all within a single day." (Which is technically also ungrammatical.) This is simply not true. Fruitflies (Drosophila melanogaster, the species studied as a model organism) have a lifespan of about a month and spend a full four days as a larva and another four as a pupa, so it takes about ten days to produce a generation. As a cautionary tale, if you're going to include incorrect information about a field unrelated to the book you are writing, please don't do it as the very first thing you say. If that mistake had been anywhere else in the book, it wouldn't be worth mentioning, but seeing as it is in the opening line, it does call into question a little bit how well the fact-checking in the book was conducted. That said, most of the rest of the book is original research, and as previously stated, the evidence it presents for its findings is pretty compelling.

The only other possible complaint I might have is that there may be a little bit of overfitting in the graph of the bucket size of the largest available hydraulic excavator. The graph fits the data with two lines when it should probably just use one. There really is no  evidence to suggest that fitting that data to two lines instead of one was justified. The point would be the same either way, and there would still be a good exponential fit with exactly one line. (It's a log scale plot so a line is an exponential fit.) It doesn't affect anything else in the book, but it does slightly contradict what I said about the solidness of the data analysis. But again, this is a tiny nitpick. I mention it only because it might annoy people who are interested in AI and sensitive to people overfitting data. Neither the mistake about the fruitfly nor this questionable fit have any impact on the subject matter. Both could be corrected and still support exactly the same message to approximately the same degree as the errant version.

All of this is to say that The Innovator's Dilemma is almost perfect. I wouldn't have commented on any minuscule details if I had weightier criticisms to levy. If you haven't read The Innovator's Dilemma you should read it; and if you have read it, I'd recommend that you read it again.

Schmidt & Rosenberg's How Google Works

[Non-fiction/business] [**++]

How Google Works is a book about how Google works! Since it is a work of non-fiction, it has a perfect title. The book tells you what to expect from it and delivers on its promise. Most equally accurate titles are far less specific, and the few titles that are as accurate and specific don't tend to be as pithy. How Google Works discusses some of the history of Google, some of the philosophy of Google, and some of Google's products, but it always does these things in the context of describing how Google works. It covers the basics of how Google hires people, how communication happens at Google, how workers are expected to behave, how people are managed, and how strategy is (and was) determined.

How Google Works is very well laid out. Apart from the introduction and conclusions, the book has six major sections called Culture, Strategy, Talent, Decisions, Communications, and Innovation. Each of them is about approximately what you would expect given the title. (These sections have sub-titles are pithy to a fault, sometimes slightly misleading and other times highly uninformative.) These sections also have sub-sections with titles that are meaningful later when you think about the book whether or not they are meaningful in advance. For example, "How was London?" is a sub-section that talks about Google's policy of breaking at the start of meetings with an informal question, such as a question about vacation. It goes on to tell the story of one person returning from vacation and giving a detailed report on what was happening in stores selling Android phones in London because the employee decided to visit those stores and talk to the sales people inside while he was on his vacation. Once you've read the book, the table of contents does a good job of reminding you what you read with considerable detail, even if many of them don't necessarily give you a good idea of what to expect. The book also has a good index.

Another great thing about How Google Works is that it is pretty fun to read. It has great illustrations. It has a lot of anecdotes, and many points of humor, most of which are on point, though a few are diversions. It also has the best brain-teaser I've ever read: one that gives you enough information to solve it without needing to know anything else (many brain teasers require you to know something like the fact that muscle strength scales sublinearly with volume). I solved it in twenty four hours, but I did have to sleep on it. I found it more challenging than any of the puzzles or exercises in Gödel, Escher, Bach which is one of the few other books with any comparable thought puzzles in it. It's also very satisfying since the solution doesn't depend on any tricks of semantics or anything like that.

Overall, How Google Works deserves several points for style. It gets pretty much everything related to style exactly right. The content, on the other hand, is a mixed bag.

I'll start by talking about innovation. The basic premise How Google Works is that Google knows what it's doing in all of the topics discussed, so you should follow Google's example. This is not an assumption I am making, the book actually switches back and forth between the descriptive and the imperative voice. The authors don't just tell you how Google works, they tell you while very clearly stating that you should go and do likewise. Schmidt and Rosenburg can get away with this because everyone knows that Google is a great company that really understands innovation, hiring, management, and all that. However, the fact that this is common knowledge doesn't make it correct.

Google is an incredibly successful company that has a many exceptionally successful services.

Before its IPO, Google created its search engine, Gmail, AdSense, and AdWords. These properties account for most of Google's profits. Though YouTube is an exceptionally profitable property that Google owns that I did not mention, and Android makes all of Google's other properties more valuable

Since its IPO, Google has created quite a few products and made many acquisitions.

YouTube was an acquisition. Android was an acquisition. Drive was an acquisition. Nest was an acquisition. Pretty much all of the things that Google has launched since its IPO that have done really well financially have been acquisitions. Google has launched a lot of cool products internally including Project Loon, Google Books, Google Fiber, Google Glass, and self-driving cars. But the evidence that these projects contribute much to Google's profitability is pretty lacking. Even more of Google's internal projects from this time period have been complete flops. Even Google Code which seemed like it was going to be a big deal when it launched is now defunct having been completely overtaken by GitHub (which is well on its way to becoming a wildly successful company).

Google Chrome (taken together with ChromeOS) is the only extremely successful Google project that I can think of that was created internally by Google since its IPO, and even that doesn't seem to have much profitability apart from adding value to Google's other products, most notably search, AdWords, and AdSense. Another internal project that is almost certainly profitable with good margins that Google has launched internally since its IPO is GAE, but that that is getting trounced by both Microsoft and Amazon's cloud offerings.

So the question of whether Google is a company other companies should be emulating (in terms of policy) if they seek to excel at innovation deserves to be answered before the suggestion is made, but Rosenberg and Schmidt don't acknowledge the question. The 800 employees that worked for Google in the six years before its IPO seem to have done a much better job of figuring out how to create extremely profitable transformative new technology than its 53,000 employees have in the past ten years. (That number is growing. 53,000 is how many Google had in 2004; not the average number of employees Google has had over the past 10 years, just like 800 is the number of employees Google had in 2004 rather than the average from the time it was founded in 1998 until its IPO in 2004.)

How Google Works does share a fact that seems to have a pretty strong explanatory power for why the employees hired post-IPO have been so much less innovative for Google than its pre-IPO employees. Google has a policy against rewarding its employees for the success of the projects that they start in their 20% time, and Google advocates this policy. All of the projects I've mentioned as having been extremely successful (including ChromeOS) were initiated by people who stood to gain a lot from the success of the project. The people who created projects that were acquired were compensated handsomely. Google's pre-IPO employees owned significant amounts of Google that stood to gain considerably. AdSense as a standalone product is not very valuable, but it adds a ton of value to search. Google's pre-IPO employees stood to gain a lot more by building these technologies for Google than they did in attempting to create their own start-up to run it. The same is emphatically not true of employees working in their 20% time, as a matter of Google policy.

This is the fundamental problem with How Google Works as a book. Google's original products are among the most profitable products in human history, and they give some fantastic self-perpetuating advantages to whoever dominates the market. Google's upper management also has a very good eye for the future of technology that has served them well in their acquisitions.

Google was well on it's way to becoming extremely successful in 2004, and it's hard tell whether its unconventional management practices have increased its successfulness or whether Google would have been more successful if it had a more conventional approach to management. How Google Works does go part of the way to answering that question when it talks about Google's culture and specifically the philosophy of Don't Be Evil. It tells us that Larry and Sergey knew they could afford to do things with Google that most managers at other companies couldn't afford to do. Google is Larry and Sergey's utopia, not an embodiment of what they think leads to financial success. That's what Don't Be Evil means. They know that most companies are forced to make decisions based on economics that Google can make based on principal.

So when Google tells you that it hires "smart creatives" (which is Google short-hand for highly intelligent extroverts who are not conscientious), they are not telling you that this kind of person makes for a good employee. They are telling you that these people are who Larry and Sergey consider ideal. As the linked Wikipedia article notes, extroversion does not correlate with success but conscientiousness does strongly, and it does so even more strongly after adjusting for intelligence. When Google tells you to tolerate divas (Google short-hand for people who have earned the right to be obnoxious), they aren't telling you that divas have a tendency to add more value than they destroy. They are telling you, that Larry and Sergey have a soft spot for divas. (Accounts of the two of them in their Stanford years suggest that both of them could be described by that term.)

This is not really a criticism of Google. Larry and Sergey have earned the right to build their own utopia. As I mentioned when discussing Google's acquisitions, they also them extremely well-suited to lead a tech company even if they don't seek to manage it optimally. An organization as profitable as Google needs to be run by extremely talented investors much more so than it needs to be run by profit-driven managers if it is going to maintain its profitability. Google's founders have were not only brilliant founders, they have continued to be visionary leaders of their company. Their management philosophy would drive most companies into the ground and they know it, but Google just simply doesn't have to worry about profitability the way that most companies do.

This brings me back to the high points of the book. How Google Works gives you a lot of vision into how Google made decisions its pre-IPO days, it tells you a lot about how Google's upper management still works (after all it was written by a couple guys who are much more familiar with how Google works at the top than they are familiar with how Google works at the ground level -- this is a necessary truth about upper management at large companies, not a criticism of Google, Schmidt, or Rosenberg), and it gives you a lot of insight into the general shape of the future that Google's leadership is looking for as they guide their company forward.

As is the case with anything a book does well, it covers the subjects much better than I can hope to summarize them in my review, but I'll quickly reference some of the highlights. Great leaders have a knack for soliciting criticism and responding to it well. This is especially true of people whose leadership relies extensively on their ability to make accurate judgments and predictions. How Google Works tells you how this is done at Google. Visionaries also tend to have very specific things they are looking for in ...

The first is simply a quibble with terminology. Pseudo-mathematical terminology appears to be in vogue, even when it is misleading. At Google (and more generally in the Silicon Valley -- Peter Thiel uses the same term), people refer to thinking about transformative changes as 10X thinking. Contrary to what the name implies, 10X changes refer to changes that are differences in kind rather than differences in degree. They refer to optimizing along  a different dimension than the competition (as Christensen explains so well in The Innovator's Dilemma -- without using the silly pseduo-mathematical misnomer). Back on the plus side of the same phenomenon, How Google Works explains the concept of using technical insights to inform innovation, and in the process gives the best articulation of how to think about these sorts of transformations that I have yet encountered. (Technical insights -- also a Google term -- is a much better term than 10X thinking, they are somewhat related to each other, but not identical.)

The second criticism is also a complaint about terminology, but it's more than just a nitpick. Apparently, at Google, they regard the word data as the plural of anecdote. (They point out that datum is the singular of data themselves. That is not my gripe.) The problem is, they completely overlook the part where you correlate data with the rest of reality to see if your predictions make sense!

They talk about data as objectively measurable qualities, but never once in the whole book do they mention ever having bother to check whether the objectively measurable qualities that they look for ever have any impact on the results that they hope to achieve.

So ultimately, as you come to know How Google Works, you learn a lesson that is not very applicable to places outside of Google. Google works because it has brilliant founders that happen to have a lot of accurate opinions, and it has processes in place to ensure that its founders' beliefs guide most of what happens inside of Google. People looking to learn how to make better judgments will find many interesting ideas in How Google Works but would ultimately be better served by reading Feynman, Judea Pearl, or Less Wrong.

My rating system

I expect books to be good. The scoring system I use is meant to hold books to a high standard. Any book that I give two or more stars in my reviews is a book that I would give four or five stars on Amazon (unless I think it is already severely-overrated by other people). For non-fiction, my ratings are as follows:

** (two stars) I would recommend this book in the sense that I don't think that reading it would be wasting your time at all, but I wouldn't recommend moving it to the top of your reading list. I think that the average reader would benefit more from reading this book than from reading most works of non-fiction. However, I would not be at all surprised if the content of this book received a much better treatment somewhere else.

**** (four stars) This book has fundamentally altered the way I think about its primary subject matter. Practically every thing it says about the subject with which the author claims expertise seems fundamentally sound to me, and I never expect to go back to thinking about this books central subject the way I did before I read this book.

**+ (two and one to three plus signs) The standards I set for four stars are too constraining to capture capture all forms of excellence. Nothing about this book truly revolutionized the way I think about the world so I can't give it four stars, but everything about this book is excellent.

*** (three stars) This book has content that deserves four stars, but it also has significant flaws that prevent me from considering it worthy of four stars. It is either poorly written, or the author demonstrates excessive ignorance of a topic that is highly relevant to the book, though it isn't necessarily particularly relevant to the author's field of expertise.

***** (five stars) The book exceeds the standards for requiring for stars. It is also extremely well written. Additionally, the author is presenting original research that he or she is uniquely well-qualified to comment upon. Moreover, when the author did that original research, he or she was producing ideas or results that contradicted the established views of his or her field.

****** (six stars) Five stars isn't enough. This book is one that I would nominate to be among the ten most important books ever written. (So far, the only two books I've read that deserve six stars are Darwin's Origin of Species and Pearl's Probabilistic Reasoning in Intelligent Systems.)

* (one star) I would not recommend this book, but it has some material and or ideas that I hope somebody else picks up and gives a better treatment in another work.

(0 stars) I would not recommend this book, and based on my evaluation, this book does not contain any material that would contribute to a book worth recommending if it were placed in a better context or given a better treatment.

+++ (three or four plus signs) A valiant effort. Something about the author's premise makes the book of limited use as a source of information and/or ideas, but the book itself is very well executed. The book itself gets enough right that I want to praise it as an example of how people should write non-fiction, but I cannot recommend its informational content.

Zero stars does not mean substantially worse than average. Most books deserve zero stars. For the most part, I try to avoid reading those sorts of books, and will seldom review them.

I have not yet figured out what I'm going to do with my rating system for fiction. In general, I think that devising an adequate rating system for fiction is much harder than devising an adequate rating system for non-fiction. For now, the basic rule is more stars is better than fewer stars.

Seidman's How

[Non-fiction/business] [0 stars]

Use virtue ethics to argue for childishly fanatical deontology as a solution to every business problem, disregard any evidence except hand-selected anecdotes, build your arguments on top of all sorts of cognitive distortions and logical fallacies, and do it all with a whole lot of hubris. What you'll get is Dov Seidman's How. It really is that bad.

How has received a lot of praise, probably because most people agree with its two main points: 1) Be ethical and 2) Take care of your customers. Like pretty much everyone else, I agree with both of these points. I think they are good advice. But supporting two good points that pretty much everyone already believes doesn't necessarily make a book a good book. How gets everything else wrong, including all of its arguments, all of its methods for making arguments, and all of its supporting points. It is one long indulgence in thinking poorly.

How is an Uncanny Valley story. Dov Seidman actually chooses the idea of the uncanny value (the idea in robotics and horror films that you make something creepy by making it seem almost human, and the closer to human it gets the creepier it becomes until finally it crosses some threshold after which becoming increasingly human also becomes increasingly empathetic) as his metaphor for "how" with respect to business.  With this remark, I have already told you three problems with the book each of which on its own would suffice to make the book not worthy of recommendation, but the combination of which is something awful. First of all, the whole book is about proof by metaphor. It's not the only book that it written like this. Proof by metaphor a popular strategy, but it's always wrong. Secondly, Seidman deliberately avoids talking about how to accomplish anything. The book really is about a naked "how" which is not a "how to." The resulting thesis is as ill-defined as this usage of the word how is unsemantic. Thirdly, the whole concept of an uncanny valley, as Seidman uses it, is a leap of faith concept. There is a valid way to go about making a similar argument, but that is not the way Seidman approaches his argument. (The valid approach would call for much more rigorous evidence than Seidman presents; whether the valid approach could support his particularly argument is undecidable given the amount of information the book presents, but I would predict that it cannot, because most of the evidence I am familiar with strongly contradicts Seidman's subpoints.) The way Seidman writes the book, he really is telling a Just So story that is no more compelling than any other Just So stories if you approach the book with any semblance of skepticism. But like most Just So stories, it is easy to believe if you start off already wanting to believe what the story tells you. Seidman picks points that guarantee him a sympathetic audience.

I won't cover what's wrong with proof by metaphor in any greater detail. I will, however, discuss the other two problems I just identified a little bit more, because both of them elucidate ways that human thinking can go terribly wrong.

First of all the unsemantic how: Dov Seidman's basic argument is that as the world becomes more open and progress accelerates, "outbehaving" the competition matters more than outperforming the competition. He believes performance can be copied, but behavior can't be. (He makes no attempt to explain why behavior would be harder to copy than performance, but one can hardly expect him to do so given the insipid quality of thought displayed throughout all of How.) He doesn't tell you how to improve anything in particular or anything measurable because if he did that would be performance. Instead he goes for a zen concept of how... claiming that focusing on behavior will ultimately produce better results, but only if you focus on behavior because you really care about behavior, trying to get the right behavior in order to optimize results doesn't work because how requires passion and passion requires caring about the right things and the right thing to care about is behavior not results. He gives examples of people doing How correctly and of people doing it wrong. He contrasts a factory which he tells us has the right behaviors for safety with two factories that he tells us have the wrong behavior. Is the better factory more productive? He doesn't tell us, because that's asking the wrong question. Okay. So is the better factory safer? Does it actually have fewer injuries? He doesn't tell us because that's still the wrong question. That's still the wrong-headed way of thinking about business. It's still about results. The point is that this processes follows the right behavior with respect to following the rules the right way because they care about following the rules because they care about believing in the rules. You don't get that when you focus on the results.  The correct thing to do is to Become More Virtuous! When you do that you will follow the rules because virtuous people follow the rules, and then good things will happen because Virtue! You can't measure your results to see if switching over to the virtue method of doing business is better because the virtue method of doing business involves doing things the virtuous way because doing things the virtuous way is virtuous. If you do things the way that seems like the virtuous way for any other reason, it's not actually doing things the virtuous way. So don't measure. Just be virtuous. Oh you of little faith.

Oh and by the way. Uncanny Valley! When you get most of the way to virtue but don't quite reach it, you enter the shadow of death where things go terribly wrong. If you start attempting to do the right things for the wrong reasons, Bad Things Will Happen. While you still persist in measuring results but start doing the same things that you would do if you actually, truly do Become More Virtuous, then you will get bad results, because that isn't really virtue. It's virtues creepy zombie cousin that lives in the uncanny valley.

So you can't test these ideas. You can't measure their improvements. (But if you just have faith they really are truly better... trust me.) Measuring them will cause them to malfunction because they imply that you're doing it for the results, not because they are more virtuous... for traditional forms of measurement at least. Since Seidman published this book, LRN (his consulting firm) has produced a report which collects data from 36,280 employees from an unspecified number of companies in 18 countries that supposedly supports Seidman's claims. The study shows that there is a correlation between how likely employees are to describe their company with terms that Seidman uses in How (most of which would be viewed positively by most people), and how well they evaluate other qualities about their company. In particular, the study demonstrates that the things Seidman advocates in How produce better results because, when surveyed, employees how said certain positive things about their company were also more likely to say that they believed their company had better costumer service than the competition and were also more likely to say that their company had better financial results than the competition! I'm not making this up! Seidman measured the financial performance of his ideas by asking employees "How would you gauge your company’s financial performance relative to its competitors?" and showing that employees who say management promotes strong values were more likely to call their company's performance "above average" than employees who do not say that corporate management at their company promotes strong values! You can get the report for free here.

It really is that bad, and I haven't even got to the worst of How, yet.

The cognitive distortion that How relies on most heavily is, unsurprisingly, the halo effect, and How takes the halo effect to ludicrous extremes. (One section is actually called "You can judge a book by its cover," which advocates trusting the first impressions you form about other people.) It gets worse. Seidman actually claims that Japanese persuading their pilots to be kamikazes during WWII were bad at persuasion! Not, mind you, that they were using their persuasive powers for evil, but that the techniques of persuasion they used are ineffective. One could never use radical, almost religious devotion to a cause to motivate people in the modern connected world where we have things like Facebook and Google. No, that kind of devotion, is a thing of the past that is doomed to fail today. Modern connectedness has made suicide bombing and everything else that relied on old-fashioned methods of persuasion a thing of the past. Persuasion can't really exist anymore. Carrot and stick motivation is likewise doomed to fail, as are all methods of persuasion. Persuasion doesn't work. To lead in the modern world, someone must inspire others through passion that comes from living out virtue by following all of the rules because you really, truly believe in them.

The particular example of the kamikazes is the worst example of the halo effect being taken way too far that I noticed in How, but that's not saying anything. It's the worst example that I've ever noticed of the halo effect being taken way too far in anything I've ever read. There are many bad things that you can say about the Japanese in WWII and have them be true, and many ways in which you can accurately criticize the kamikaze program. But one of them is not to say that they failed at persuasion, and another is certainly not to say that the methods of persuasion used by the Japanese to produce suicide bombers have become less effective in the modern world. Medieval heretics who proclaimed heretical beliefs knowing full way that such proclamations would likely lead to them being burned at the stake might have been fools, but they certainly weren't cowards. Similarly, the Japanese during WWII may have been cruel, murderous war criminals well on the way to loosing a war at far higher than reasonable cost to both themselves and their enemies, but the ones using Japanese culture to persuade their subordinates to deliberately die for their country weren't bad at persuasion.

Finally, I promised you hubris. So I'll give you some hubris. This is what Dov Seidman has to say about his own work and its relationship to Collins Porras' Good to Great, one of the most insightful and influential business books ever written:

While Built to Last remains a visionary work and its approach fundamentally sound, we can now see more deeply into what lives at the true core of successful enterprises. The new lens of HOW shows us that what Collins and Porras saw as "core ideologies" are not core enough for the road ahead. I don't think you can do, be guided by, or most importantly, be inspired by any of these things. They are results, things you get when you innovate in HOW... The problem with Collins and Porras' core ideologies is that they are about going at the benefit directly, aiming at just the "IP" (innovation and progress) in TRIP and neglecting what it takes to get there.

Indeed. The problem with one of the most influential and best-supported books in the history of business is that it disagrees with Dov Seidman's ideas. Again, I'm picking a particularly glaring example, but the theme of smugness and making self-aggrandizing remarks that this comment illustrates occurs consistently throughout the book.

This wouldn't be so horrible if How had any merits. Unfortunately, it doesn't.

Let me be clear. When I call How an example of human thinking gone utterly wrong in myriad unfortunate ways that lacks any redeeming qualities that could possibly make it worth reading, I'm not saying that I necessarily disagree with Seidman's values. I'm in favor of businesses behaving ethically (to the extent that I think "behaving ethically" is a well-defined phrase). I'm in favor of openness and transparency. I'm in favor of businesses being fanatically interested in serving their customers. I'm in favor of businesses deliberately building corporate cultures on shared values. I'm in favor of businesses empowering their employees and creating an environment where workers are trusted and expected to largely manage themselves. The probably with How is not Seidman's values. The problem is his complete incompetence at thinking and dealing with information. I'm not in favor of platitudes, shoddy research, fallacious reasoning, ignoring data, imprecise claims, and all of the other hand-wavy, heel-clapping naivety that makes How the intellectual-bankrupt pile of garbage that it is.

Ekman's Telling Lies

[Non-fiction/Psychology and emotion] [***]

I read Paul Ekman's Telling Lies hoping to be exposed to more Ekman's groundbreaking research on human expression of emotion and how that emotion gets expressed and concealed in what people say. The book covers this material well, but unfortunately it has many other deficiencies that detract from what it does well. In particular, Ekman dabbles in philosophy, politics, and ethics unnecessarily, and without any of the precision of thought that I would expect from a book on one of those subjects, and throughout Telling Lies makes arguments that display a basic lack of understanding in relevant statistics.

Though Telling Lies is a chapter book that was clearly intended to be read (and probably should be read once by anyone who wants to learn from it), the book makes for an excellent reference and probably serves in this capacity better than it serves as an informative read. The appendices at the end of the book provide a clear summary of the books most useful information, and a 15 page index makes navigating the 300 pages of the books primary content relatively easy. (Approximately 80 pages of the 120 pages of bonus content added to this edition are not indexed, but they don't contain as much useful information that would be worth referencing again later as the main part of the work that is thoroughly indexed.) For anyone to whom it's worth reading, it's almost certainly worth keeping on hand to periodically consult as well.

The book covers how people's emotions leak into their body language and facial expressions even when they are trying to prevent such leakages, and also how the level of mental agreement the speaker has with what she is saying impacts her use of gestures and other cues. It also covers the general practice of lie detecting and discusses how the average person, and even the average police officer and psychologist (who are in the business of detecting lies) do no better than chance, on average, at detecting whether or not a speaker is lying. Polygraphs do slightly better, and some people who by nature or training have learned to focus on the right cues do much better still. Interestingly, while most people consider themselves to be excellent lie detectors (and thus unlikely to consider others to be significantly better), people who interact with each other regularly naturally notice who among them are actually adept at catching lies, and when police officers are interviewed to determine who the best interrogators in their station, they successfully identify the few members of their force that do significantly outperform chance at detecting lies.

If there was ever a book that should have used Bayesian statistics significantly, Telling Lies was it. Practically every topic that Ekman covers involves Ekman struggling to convey in words intuitions he has learned from a lifetime of studying lie detecting that would be perfectly captured by statistics, if Ekman were more familiar with that formalism. I would love to see this book rewritten from a Bayesian perspective with a few other minor problems corrected. Its content could make for a fantastic book, but unfortunately Ekman struggles to present it well.

If you are familiar with Bayesian statistics and used to the idea of updating the probability you assign to each of your possible theories in accordance with how strongly each theory predicts each new observation, then you can safely read this book as long as you continuously make the appropriate mental substitutions for whatever it is that Ekman says about proof and evidence in any given place. All of his many statements of the form "if you see X, it is evidence in favor of B, but if you don't see X it is not evidence against B" are simply inaccurate from the point of view of statistics, and should be replaced with the appropriate Bayesian inferences. Interestingly, Ekman is aware of the inadequacy of his view of evidence, on some level or another. In the process of explaining his views on polygraph testing, he finds himself needing a more nuanced view of evidence than he uses throughout the rest of this book, and does eventually put forth his argument using accurate statistics. Readers unfamiliar with the basics of Bayesian statistics (and unenthusiastic about the prospect of learning) should start with chapter seven, and then return to the rest of the beginning bearing in mind that his illustrations and explanation about how the base rate of lying in the population affect the percentage of false positives and false negatives in the polygraphs results applies equally to everything he says about evidence because it is a general feature of statistics, not a particular feature of polygraph tests.

One more thing that I think deserves mention about this book is that Ekman draws many of his examples from fiction and most of his "real life" examples are drawn from historical events which he himself never witnessed. At first, I considered this a weakness of the book, but upon further reflection I think that it is simply a decision of presentation, and moreover, one that works well. Though he uses fictional evidence to support and illustrate his points, Ekman isn't generalizing from fictional evidence. He formed his beliefs through decades of research, most of it high quality research with strong results. Since he legitimately derived his opinions by studying actual human behavior, I don't see anything wrong with him using fictional evidence in presenting his beliefs and findings to a wider audience. Rigorous presentation of data *might* be more persuasive to the few people who have conditioned themselves to respond to it appropriately, but the average reader is more likely to be convinced by a story, even a fictitious one (especially since the average reader is unlikely to even read a book that relies on something more rigorous).

On the whole, I'd recommend Telling Lies, at least to some people some of the time. It's not perfect, but the positives outweigh the minuses for anyone who approaches it intelligently.

Chomsky's Language and Mind (Third Edition)

[Non-fiction/Linguistics *****]

Noam Chomsky's Language and Mind makes me wish I'd been a linguist in the '60s. When I was a child, I had a book of optical illusions that entranced me with its pictures (and its attempts to explain how the illusions worked). Language and Mind creates with pure language a richer, more complex experience that is in many ways similar to viewing optical illusions and having them explained, but this is only a side-effect resulting from the techniques Chomsky uses to make his argument rather than the whole point of the book. Reading this book was for me as much a fun and surreal experience of having my mind be surprised and tickled in ways I would never have anticipated that my mind could be surprised and tickled as it was an introduction to  the ideas that Chomsky presents.

The basic thesis of Chomsky's work in linguistics is that human children have an innate and genetic predisposition to learn human language, and that all human languages derive from some universal generative grammar. People learn through exposure which particular patterns (that the universal grammar permits) their particular language uses, but they couldn't grasp rules as nuanced as the ones that human languages actually use simply by extrapolating them from the available information unless they already had some innate predisposition to guess these rules. Throughout Language and Mind, Chomsky uses complexities of the English language as his source of examples, so he never asks the reader to trust him when he claims that some obscure tribal language exhibits a property that people would naively expect languages not to have. Instead, he constructs many ordinary English sentences that clearly demonstrate ways in which syntax is bafflingly complicated in seemingly arbitrary ways. He also briefly covers a few other topics such as the general characteristics of phonetic rules, the way vowels get reduced when suffixes are added, and the intricate pattern by which different amounts of stress are assigned to different nouns in English sentences that are stated in normal intonations.

To someone who is interested in how language works, many of the examples are actually jaw-dropping. The effect relies on context, so I won't do any of them the disservice of lifting them into my review. What makes this book so fantastic is that linguistics, at least the way Chomsky practices it, is an empirical discipline in which the forcefulness of the evidence can be fully preserved in writing and experienced by the reader. But Language and Mind is more than a book of evidence. It's a book in which Chomsky lays out a very clear argument for how people's internal representation of what they are saying relates to what they actually say. He articulates this argument in masterfully precise prose, and when he has occasion to answer his critics and detractors, he dismantles their counterarguments swiftly, precisely, and with a dry sense of humor. Every sentence in Language and Mind is the work of a genius who knows exactly what he is trying to say and successfully says it.

While Chomsky is a genius, he is not a god, and he doesn't write with perfect accuracy even if does write with perfect precision. I cannot criticize anything Chomsky says about language or philosophy in Language and Mind, but a few of his remarks reveal a rather naive view of evolutionary biology. I don't want to summarize his position uncharitably, but I winced as he used the term emergence to explain how language is too complicated to have evolved gradually and therefore must have occurred spontaneously with a single fortuitous mutation. Thankfully, Chomsky derives his understanding of linguistics from the evidence that language provides, and not from his understanding of biology. As such, his description of the way language works at present does not at all depend on how accurately he understands biology. Moreover, advances in biology in the time since Chomsky wrote Language and Mind have validated what was, in the field of linguistics at the time of his writing, Chomsky's most controversial claim: language has an inherited biological component and is not learned from environmental stimulus alone. In particular, as Kandel et all note in Principal's of Neural Science, modern neuroscience has strongly validated Chomsky's beliefs relating to the existence of a universal grammar. The human brain region known as Broca's area, which is not found in other mammals, responds only to natural languages and not to artificial ones. Thus Language and Mind is one of the few books ever to have accurately presented a theory that strongly contradicted the established beliefs of its field to have been shown to be essentially accurate in its boldest claims by subsequent advances in science. As such, Language and Mind is not just a brilliant exposition of fascinating ideas. It is also a landmark of human achievement that deserves to be read by anyone interested in understanding how language works.

Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors

[fiction/theater] [****]
I read Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors last night. Unless you count Measure for Measure as a comedy (as opposed to a problem play), this is the third of Shakespeare's comedies that I've read, and the first that I've liked. Midsummer Night's Dream and The Taming of the Shrew are the two that did not impress me at all. Like many plays from the time period, the Comedy of Errors has a plot based on people getting confused for one another and passing themselves off as people they are not.
 It works about as well as any play could within the confines of its plot. My appreciation for Shakespeare  increases when I keep in mind the limitations of the plot ideas he used; modern attempts to use similar plot ideas result in works like The Parent Trap which come nowhere close to warranting comparison with a play like the Comedy of Errors. What I think of as great modern literature and theater typically uses plots and techniques that were not available to Shakespeare. I don't think it's fair to criticize someone for failing to create new genres when that is something that very few authors or playwrights have ever managed to do. That said, I don't find Shakespeare as entertaining as many modern authors, and if I am going to respect Shakespeare as a literary genius, I have to do so in the context of remembering that he did not work with the same tool set available to modern authors and instead evaluate him on how well he used his tools.

If I am going to say an author of a comedy uses his tools well, one of the things that the author has to do is make me laugh more often than he makes me wince. The Comedy of Errors succeeds in this department. I don't laugh out loud nearly as often when reading alone as I do when watching a performance along with other people, but I still laughed verbally several times, and inwardly much more frequently. In the wince department, Shakespeare has a disadvantage because he writes so many of his lines in rhyme, and one of the things that makes me wince is when an author sacrifices any semblance of natural language usage in order to maintain a rhyme scheme. Some of Shakespeare's plays are damaged by their use of rhyme, but the rhyme and rhythm of The Comedy of Errors gives it a wonderful sense of pace that amplifies its humor. All of the jokes were either funny or inconsequential. The whole plot was written for the sake of the jokes, so I can't say that the play didn't go out of its way to tell them, but it never felt like it was going out of its way to tell them.

Another thing that The Comedy of Errors does particularly well is retelling what has happened. A play about confusion is necessarily repetitive, and most such plays are also redundant. You see something happen and then you hear about it four more times, and you get tired of it. The retellings in The Comedy of Error are actually the most interesting and humorous parts. The plot creates confusion, not so much so that the confusion can be resolved, but so that Dromio can comment on the confusion as it reappears, and Dromio (both Dromios) have been given an excellent voice for commentary that makes the play quite entertaining.

The Comedy of Errors is easily my favorite Shakespeare comedy that I've read. Hamlet is still my favorite of Shakespeare's plays, but I'd rank this one second, and I'm usually partial to tragedies or possibly dark comedies (in most literature and performance, not just Shakespeare). That said, it's still Shakespeare. The humor doesn't compare to Douglas Adams or Terry Pratchett; the use of language doesn't compare to Joyce or Nabokov; the plot doesn't compare to Dumas or du Maurier; the setting and characters are equally lackluster by more modern standards. But for a contrived story, written mostly in rhyme that doesn't do any particular thing exceptionally well, The Comedy of Errors is a damn good play.