EclecticLip

Over the months, one of the themes for book club selections has been self-knowledge; a tradition that goes back to the “Know Thyself” carved into the side of the Temple of the Oracle of Delphi (and surely earlier still).  As a side note, “Nothing in Excess” (the old golden mean of Aristotle) and somewhat more verbose “Make a Pledge and Mischief is Nigh” were also apparently engraved into the structure.

Given the interest in self-knowledge, Gerd Gigerenzer’s book Gut Feelings — a primary source for Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink — was a natural fit.  Gigerenzer’s data supports the idea that less is more, an idea with enormous implications when it comes to data analysis for the modern researcher / knowledge worker.

As always, if you enjoy the book review, please consider supporting the author by purchasing the book. 

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Gut Feelings - summary 

I recently had a chance to catch up on some podcasts.  (Much like my “not-yet-read books” bookshelf, I’ve got many a megabite of unheard podcasts on my hard drive.)  This one was a CBC Ideas episode called The Moral of the Story Is; it’s dated March 22 2010.  It starts off with Bertrand Russell’s remark that:

“Most of the greatest evil that man has inflicted upon man comes throuhg people feeling quite certain about something which, in fact, was false.”

Partway through, the narrator interviews one Dr. Robert Burton, a neurologist at Mount Zion University of California Hospital.  At about the twenty-minute mark, he suggests that the brain’s reward system activates, when one has the sense of being right — in the same way it activates when people smoke, drink, use drugs, or engage in other addictive behaviours.  Basically, feeling indignant gives you an upswell of (bio)chemical pleasure.

At about 22 minutes, there’s a wonderful exchange:

Narrator: are you suggesting Bill O’Reilly is some sort of junkie, in a way?

Burton:  I’m not suggesting.

This rings true for me.  I’ve experienced the intoxicating sense of indignant righteousness when arguing with people who were “clearly wrong”.  Nowadays, I try to maintain an unrippled calm; and temper any anger with humour.  My media habits reflect this: I used to enjoy listening to American progressive talk radio, but now tend to find it agitating, again on account of the subsurface exasperation.  Of course, that’s nothing compared to what relatively little I’ve experienced of its conservative cousin.  I prefer The Daily Show, Colbert Report and Bill Maher, as their jeremiads are leavened with humour.  Our modern jesters, I suppose.

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While Dawkins maintains his composure here, he carries a lot of anger — indignation — towards the shallower strands of various religion traditions.  If memory serves, he gives Buddhism a pass in The God Delusion; his real problem is with literalism in the Abrahamic faiths, and Christian fundamentalism in particular.  Brutish and backwards as they may be, they’re not worth tripping into addictive indignation over.  Surely other approaches are better.

Workplaces, like consumer products, involve the interplay of multiple systems: everything from accounting to manufacturing to research to… uh… the zeitgeist-tracking of a marketing department needs to work together reasonably smoothly.

The book was found on a pilgrimage to Powell’s Books in late 2009 and immediately targeted as a future book club read.  While most companies work together reasonably smoothly, those companies whose departments function with seamless ease, are likelier to enjoy greater success.  (Such is the Darwininan nature of business.)  As such, learning more about how complex systems function, was thought to be of high value.

As always, if you find the summary useful, please consider supporting the author by purchasing the book. 

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Thinking in Systems (summary)

Innumerable sources talk about how peer recognition matters for more people than money… though the latter itself has some importance too.   

I imagine that at most companies, pay is assigned at approximately market levels based on the responsibilities incurred.  As such, CEO pay tends to drift higher than junior engineer pay, because the market has been assigning a higher value to the former — despite the many examples where this has proven incorrect. 

For their part, markets are mechanisms for establishing the price of a good through transactions, based on perceived value of the participants.  If not enough buyers feel a banana is worth $3, they will tend not to buy until the price drifts to levels they’re willing to pay; if not enough sellers feel a banana is being properly valued at 3 cents, they will tend divert their productive elsewhere, until the price rises. 

If we call the grouping of people in a market “peers” we could easily say market prices are a peer phenomenon — a peer assessment of value of the service / good in question, such as a year’s worth of junior engineering time.  Market prices are a form of peer recognition-of-value, or to be more precise, peer perception-of-value.  Presumably , if Ahab makes more money than Baal, that means he’s perceived to be more valuable.

In which case pay serves as a proxy for peer recognition (how you’re recognized among your peers, and/or by your peers, depending how hierarchical one’s firm is).  Which would go a long way towards explaining why it can be such a sensitive subject…

In light of the company’s focus (energy) a decision was made to cover a few books about the energy sector.  Jeff Rubin’s wordily-titled book on the subject of peak oil — or at least, peak cheap oil — was chosen as the first volume of what has turned out to be (thus far) a trilogy.

Since few of us can relate handily to the volume of a barrel of oil (about 160 litres), and thus price-per-barrel numbers are somewhat abstract, the book review includes Litre-equivalent-prices to accompany the per-barrel figures.  While numbers like $80 / barrel sound expensive ($80 is a fair amount of cash after all), putting this in the perspective of it being 50 cents per Litre, provides valuable context.

As always, if you find the summary useful, please consider supporting the author by purchasing the book. 

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Why Your World (summary)

James Hoggan and Richard Littlemore’s public-relations handbook Do The Right Thing was the fifth volume covered in the book club.  The book’s selection was part of an effort to broaden the team’s exposure to ideas not generally covered in engineering education or their day-to-day work. 

The book was covered in late 2009.  Given that the Olympics would descend on Vancouver a few short months later, a book on public relations seemed topical.

In the interest of disclosure, I should note that I’ve had the pleasure of corresponding with both authors.  Given that I’m concerned about the framing of environmental issues, and not averse to sending emails to complete strangers, and given that Hoggan & Associates is a leading Vancouver PR firm with an interest in environmental issues, it was probably inevitable our paths would cross.

As usual, if you consider the review useful, please consider supporting the authors by purchasing the book.

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Do The Right Thing - summary

Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point was covered in October 2009.  A fascinating volume, its treatment of connectors, mavens, salesmen seem to have influenced ideas in subsequent book club text The Starfish and The Spider.  As of May 2010, none of Gladwell’s other books have been covered, though his second book, Blink, would use future book club selection Gut Feelings as a primary source.

As usual, if you find the review useful, please consider supporting the author by purchasing a copy of the book. 

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The Tipping Point - summary

The other week, I partook in a stock trading course I’d bid on as a lark, as part of the company United Way campaign.  I can blithely report that it amounted to a get-rich-quick scheme for people who are otherwise immune to get-rich-quick schemes. 

I doubt any of the professionals in the room would fall for chain letters, winning-lottery-ticket emails or advance fee fraud (the son of the brother of the President of Nigeria needs your help!) – but we indeed shared the collective gullibility that there was a way to rake in the dough at the Wall Street casino.

Come of think of it, apart from style of dress and dental health, we were probably no different from our tribal forebears in millenia past, who sought shamans’ advice to ensure their own prosperity.  (Contrary to popular belief, cavities seem to’ve been rare, way back in the day – most food simply wasn’t sugary enough to cause tooth decay.)  And I suppose our behaviour wasn’t so different, either, from Fortune 500 executives bringing in high-priced consultants to turn their companies around.  It all seems like a lot of dart-throwing, in the end. 

The course centred on “technical analysis”, the theory that a stock’s price follows near-immutable patterns – unless it doesn’t, which is why you arrange your bets such that you cash out with only a small loss the other 48% of the time; the stock market equivalent of a seat belt and air bags, I suppose.  Nor is it as nutty as some of the purportedly-professional investment advice I’ve read, some of which relied on planetary alignments.  (Hmm… maybe that was the Wall Street Journal’s astrologer?)

As for the brotherhood of technical analysts – there’s no handshake, but the password is “Fibonacci” – their investment numerology is based on the purported role of the Golden Mean (0.618) and various permutations thereof, in predicting future prices.  I’m not sure if Euclid would’ve been proud or horrified, but since he was smart, he’d’ve probably demanded a royalty.

By the logic of this arcane rubric, it should be possible to make money on a stock without knowing a thing about the company.  While I’ve proven the opposite true many a time, that prospect struck me as somehow inappropriate.  After all, even when it comes to making money in the stock market, shouldn’t you have to earn it by putting in hard work to research a company, and so forth?  Then the cognitive dissonance hit me: I had enrolled in a course to learn how to make easy money, and was now irritated that there could be a way of making easy money.  Naturally, I resolved this by deciding that maybe easy money wasn’t such a bad thing after all.  When it was in the right hands.  Specifically, mine.  Such is the clueless egotism of the modern male. 

All in all, the course reaffirmed my sense that the surest way to get rich quickly off of secret knowledge is to claim you have some, then meter it out for an exorbitant fee.  A recent motivational poster from despair.com does put it nicely. 

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Ah, Hamlet, were you only alive to read this…  or, given that you were a fictional character, were you only ever alive.  Hmm…  actually, given how horrific your end, maybe ’twere better you stayed fictive.

A recent Harvard Business School study (”Red Light States“) further confirmed the trend that conservatives buy more pornography than progressives.  Conservatives can take comfort that maybe, just maybe, the difference is that progressives steal more porn through file-sharing.

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Male humpback whales — like Sir Mix-A-Lot — like voluptuous females.  Or at least, what passes for voluptuousness in the cetacean world.

For their part, female humpbacks may prefer their males to be exotic foreigners — or again, what passes for foreign among creatures who migrate far enough each year to half-circumnavigate the globe.
There was a famous case in the mid-nineties (in nerd herds, at least) of some Indian Ocean male humpbacks getting lost and veering into the Pacific Ocean.  Their songs were different from those of the males in the local Pacific Ocean population — but within two years, almost all the Pacific Ocean-male humpbacks had changed their songs to be more like the Indian Ocean males’!

And to complete a humpback hat trick, here’s a link to a website about a wild albino humpback named Migaloo.