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Author: Jack London

The first e-book I have read, “The Call of the Wild” is one of those teenage-classics that everyone reads when they are in high school. I never read it so when I found that it was free in the iTunes book store I figured I might as well. It is a good read, with interesting plot and character development, and London is a great writer, but ultimately I did not get much out of it.

The novel follows Buck, a domestic dog who gets stolen and shipped to the Yukon to be a sled dog, and his transformation from domestic to wild animal. Buck gets set up as an omega dog in a team and quickly works his way to be the head dog, become more and more aggressive and authoritative as he gains experience in the Yukon. Towards the end of the novel he becomes more and more wolf-like, ultimately actually joining a wolf pack and completing his transformation from domestic to wild. Throughout his transformation the reader learns about the tough life in the Yukon, the strenuous role of being a sled dog and also meets some interesting human and dog characters.

But apart from poetic writing, interesting plot and character development, I don’t feel like “Call of the Wild” has much to offer. The book is certainly well written; London paints vivid images of the Yukon scenery and the stories events. Moreover, It is certainly interesting to follow Buck’s transformation and one could maybe draw insight from some of his interactions with other sled dogs (i.e. how he fights only when he has too, is great at manipulating them and earning their respect) as well as some of the seemingly unnecessarily aggressive behavior of the Yukon humans, but I personally didn’t gain much from the novel. Thus, while I was not disappointed with the novel, it really is a story and not much more.

Author: Yann Martel

Disclaimer: This review will ruin the book for you if you have not read it. Please read the book (it is fairly short) and then come back here. The book is amazing so I highly recommend it anyway.

“Life of Pi” is superficially a story about a boy lost at sea and his struggle to survive. Pi Patel and his family decide to move from India to Canada, and their ship crashes in the middle of the Pacific. Pi ends up on a life boat with a tiger, a zebra, a hyena, and an orangutan, and recounts his story of how him and the tiger (Richard Parker), miraculously survive. While this story is not lacking in violence (as is natural living with a tiger), and its fair share of sadness, it is ultimately a beautiful story about friendship (between Pi and Richard Parker), cooperation, and the serenity (almost to a spiritual level) of nature.

Pi’s story is truly incredible, so when he first recounts it to two Japanese officials, they somewhat naturally do not believe him. There is no evidence that almost any part of the story is true, as Richard Parker fled as soon as they landed, and the ship had no other survivors. The Japanese officials are looking for someone to hold responsible for the crash, and Pi’s story offers no helpful evidence for them. Pi at first firmly stands his ground, maintaining that his recounting is truthful, until he realizes that the officials cannot accept anything as true unless it fits into their limited understanding of the world. Pi tells another version of the story to appease the officials; this one is horribly gruesome, involving murder and cannibalism, and showcasing the worst aspects of human nature. Yet, this story is accepted by the Japanese as truth, despite still not providing any insight into the cause of the ships sinking. The reader is left asking which account is the truth.

But in some sense, why does it matter which was factually correct? Regardless of whichever version of Pi’s adventure is correct, there are no consequences to the future of really anyone, so who cares what the truth was? Given this premise, why not believe the first, beautiful, story, which leaves you hopeful and inspired, over the second, which leaves you feeling jaded and disillusioned? I think this at least one of the takeaways of the novel. The reader fully believes the first recount, up until Pi tells the second. Immediately the reader starts doubting himself. I asked myself two related but pretty different questions when I realized this: “Why do people believe certain things but not others?” and “Why do we incessantly search for the truth, or why can’t we (read: I) believe things without proof?”

We have some intuition for what make sense and what can occur in nature, but can’t it be wrong? For example, we rely very heavily on vision and group-think to confirm truth, but then it becomes much harder to believe things that we haven’t or can not see. In fact this is a large part of why the officials do not believe Pi’s first story; the carnivorous island Pi visits has never been seen nor reported by anyone else, so they cannot imagine that it is plausible.

So what happens when our intuitions are wrong? When we find something that we cannot believe, we search endlessly for either an explanation or an alternative. As a statistics/mathematics research, I’ve notice that this happens more often than I would have thought. An exploratory stage of our work is often to conduct simulated experiments, to get a better feeling for the problem. We usually go into this stage with some intuition about the results, but in some cases the experiments do not match our intuitions. We are left searching for an explanation as to why the experiments turned out the way they did, and worse, this often results in us looking for excuses rather than changing our initial intuition (e.g. data wasn’t generated correctly, the implementation was buggy, etc.). Only when we later develop proofs do we accept changes in our intuition, because they have been mathematically verified.

A Bayesian way of looking at this is that our intuition serves as a prior for what we believe. Without any data, we tend to believe that our intuition is correct, but as we collect more and more evidence, we may become more and more confident in our intuition, but the evidence may also shift the belief away from the intuition. Different kinds of evidence have different influences, so in my previous example, simulation experiments can not unhinge my intuition but they can confirm it. Mathematical proof can do both. I think a potential problem is that we place too much weight on our prior, so that we are looking for reasons to reject other contradictory evidence. This is what seemed to happen in “Life of Pi”, as the officials rejected Pi’s first story in favor of the latter, and also what happens when I conduct statistical simulations.

The other question is much more spiritual, “why can’t we believe things without proof?” I am fundamentally a scientist, so I do not accept something as true unless I have seen a certificate (usually in the form of a proof) of its validity. And once some doubt has been introduced into my mind, I have to get to the bottom of it and uncover the truth. For example, I accepted Pi’s first story as true up until I read his second story. I started questioning his first account, and I no longer believe it. I need another, more convincing certificate to believe in that story again. Of course I doubt I will ever get a more convincing certificate, so I will always be agnostic about Pi’s story. A consequence of this is that I cannot assertively stand for something that I am agnostic about, and I remain agnostic about things until I have convincing evidence. I don’t know how people can accept something as true without evidence, maybe it is just a different interpretation of “convincing”, but there are times when I want to be able to do that.

So for example, if someone were to ask me which of Pi’s stories is true, I would say that I think the first story is true but I am not sure. This is a really wishy-washy answer and it would be much nicer to truly believe the first story is true. It seems that some people have the ability to do this, but I certainly do not. I wonder how people develop that ability.

Author: Jared M. Diamond

In “Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies,” Diamond answers a fundamental question that shaped human history: What enabled some groups of people to colonize, obliterate, or otherwise exert substantial influence over other groups? One popular belief is that some groups of people are simply more intelligent, more aggressive, better humans than others. Diamond counters this racist argument by showing that in fact, a completely plausible explanation for cultural domination can be traced back to purely geographic origins, namely access to large, domestic-able mammals, high-nutrient, domestic-able crops, and ability to spread ideas, technologies, and information readily between local cultures. These ultimate factors can explain the proximate factors that enabled cultural dominance, which range from weapons, disease resistance, technologies, and several others which Diamond calls “Guns, Germs, and Steel.”

While also noticeable on smaller scales, a suitable candidate with which to clarify Diamond’s ultimate factors is the case of Eurasian cultures subjugating the native cultures of Africa, Australia, and the Americas for the most part (There are some exceptions). At at proximate level, this is because the European and Asian cultures were much more technologically advanced, endowing them with ability to cross seas and travel to the remaining continents, along with advanced weaponry and unfamiliar epidemic diseases that decimated native populations. A central question in “Guns, Germs, and Steel” is: Why didn’t the people of Africa, Australia and the Americas develop advanced technologies and subjugate the Eurasians? The answer lies in Diamond’s ultimate factors.

Eurasia had three key geographic advantages over the other continents that can explain the relative advancement of Eurasia with respect to the others. First, Eurasia was teeming with large mammals that could readily be domesticated whereas Australia and Africa were completely devoid of such mammals and the Americas enjoyed only the llama, which was much less useful as a domestic animal than the horse, sheep, cow, and pig. In my opinion this is the most prominent reason, as domestic animals, allowed for more efficient agriculture resulting in higher population densities, division of labor, and consequently advanced technology. The second factor is that of the major agricultural crops that humans currently farm, the majority of them, and the most nutritive ones, are native to Eurasia, so agricultural societies were much more successful in Eurasia, in comparison to the other continents. Lastly, the fact that Eurasia’s major axis is east-west versus north-south allows facilitates spread of ideas and technologies, while the Americas, Africa, and Australia are highly isolated by deserts and mountain ranges, and climatically very diverse. The fairly consistent climate of Eurasia, for example allowed the easy spread of farming knowledge, which lead to many self-sufficient farming populations that shared innovations and ideas, resulting in a highly advanced societies.

The “domesticable mammals” factor is one I had not considered before, but now I think that it is one of the most important. One must ask, “Why didn’t the other continents have domesticable mammals?” Interestingly, among the geographic factors (i.e. the Eurasian plains were more habitable for them), is the fact that when people first migrated to The Americas and Australia, they encountered several large animals that were unaccustomed to being hunted, because they evolved in safe habitats. The hunter-gatherers quickly found these animals as easy prey and exterminated them, obviously lacking the foresight that these animals could be crucial for later advancement. A causal factor here is that humans arrive in Eurasia much earlier than they arrived in Australia and the Americas so the wild animals in Eurasia had the chance to co-evolve with humans and develop defenses, making them much harder to exterminate. When humans arrived at the other two continents, they were already skilled hunters, but the animals were defenseless, leading to their rapid extermination. Once these continents had no domesticable mammals, they were destined to fall behind the Eurasians.

It is also interesting to think about how scientists, archaeologists, and historians have been able to piece together enough information to make these kinds of arguments. On one hand, a lot of it is very speculative. However, a lot of it is based on completely reasonable, well justified interpretations of archaeological evidence. One particularly interesting technique for studying population origins and migrations, which Diamond mentions and uses, relies on evolutionary linguistics. Essentially, people can trace cultural origins by studying the evolutionary history of languages. This has been used to characterize the migration of the Bantu people from West Africa into central and south Africa, as well as their interactions and for the most part their conquest over the Pygmies and Khoisan people of those areas. I think it is amazing that language undergoes the same evolutionary process as organisms and that it can be used for these sorts of studies.

To wrap up, Diamond makes clear, eloquent arguments against the racist view that cultural dominances is a product of human superiority, showing that instead, almost all conquests in history can be traced to geographic factors. “Guns, Germs, and Steel” is very multidisciplinary, combining elements of archaeology, history, and various subdisciplines of biology, into a pretty interesting read. I would definitely recommend this book to anyone interested in any of those subjects.

Author: Jonah Lehrer

In “How We Decide,” Lehrer recounts many of the scientific developments in neuroscience that contribute to our current understanding of how humans make choices and decisions. This discussion inevitably leads to philosophical topics like rationality, ethics, and morality so Lehrer also presents popular philosophical ideas that can be reconciled with modern scientific thought. And, of course, as a pop-sci book, “How We Decide” is riddled with cute, relatable anecdotes that help convey scientific and philosophical ideas. All of this come together in a fairly quick, interesting read with some nice takeaways about the way humans think and the trade offs between emotional and rational thinking.

Essentially, the thesis is that our brain is composed of a rational, calculating part and a more emotional part, and that these two are always competing to make decisions, but each is better at specific things. For example, the emotional brain is like a supercomputer; it is much better at making complex decisions, but it suffers from several historical drawbacks (risk and loss aversion among others) that make it worse than the rational brain at making simple decisions. On the other hand, the rational brain is great for making decisions where only a few factors come into play, but it has much less computational capacity so it struggles in the face of complexity. So, each is good for specific things, and we can improve our choices by thinking about how we make decisions and making efforts to use the “correct” part of the brain, depending on the situation.

The interplay between the two brains often leads to very interesting psychological phenomena, several that Lehrer mentions in his book. One example that I found particularly interesting is the ability to rationalize decisions/opinions/beliefs made by the emotional brain. This can come at the cost of ignoring glaring evidence in support of the contrary, and is something that we all need to be aware of. If one expresses certainty about something, one risks not being open to contradictory evidence, and this can be very dangerous. Lehrer talks about how it almost lead to the fall of Israel in the Yom Kippur War; the administration simply refused to believe that the Egyptians and Syrians would attack, despite the glaring evidence that they would.

It is also worth discussing how we can figure anything out about the neuroscience aspect. Lehrer mentions many experiments where people are placed in MRI machines and asked to make decisions. The activations measured in the MRI give insight to what brain regions are involved (often in combat with each other) in making decisions. However, these and other psychological experiments can only reveal so much, like what regions are involved in decision making, and cannot really reveal the function of each region. To gain insight here, neuroscientists and psychologists study patients with damaged brains, such as psychopaths. For example, people without properly functioning dopamine pathways have trouble learning from their mistakes. Others with damaged emotional brains have trouble making even the simplest decisions. And psychopaths specifically have trouble imagining how others would view their actions (called mirroring) so they lack any sense of ethics and can rationalize practically anything. Lehrer talks about all of these scientific developments and how they contributed to our still very incomplete understanding of the brain.

To summarize, “how we decide” is quintessential popular science. I personally learned quite a lot from the book, but I don’t know much about philosophy, psychology or neuroscience, and from my understanding, most of the knowledge is pretty basic. At the same time, the book is a quick read, so not much is lost if you don’t gain much from it.

Author: Orson Scott Card

One of the classic sci-fi novels, Ender’s Game is the first of novel in the Ender saga. The novel is probably more suitable for younger readers but it is a fun, quick read and there are certainly some interesting takeaways.

The novel follows Ender, a child prodigy as he is trained to command the human army against an alien species called the buggers. He is put through taxing trial after trial, either intentionally as part of his training or inadvertently by his peers (who are all older than him and prone to bullying). Throughout his supervisors watch him cope with stress and constant fatigue, but never intervene so that he learns he cannot count on anyone looking out for him. Ultimately, Ender flourishes, and potentially one can learn a lot from his experiences, i.e. how he deals with fatigue, antagonistic peers, and high-pressure situations.

I think there are a lot of useful leadership skills that can be learned from Ender. He quickly gets placed in charge of several cadets and has to deal with internal dissent, egotism and a general bad attitude toward him as a leader. He learns how to lead by example, and while many of his cadets despise him, it is clear that they all respect his abilities as a soldier. Later, when he is places in charge of a team of novices, he instills in them a strong drive to improve their fighting skills. In part this is because he is such a talented fighter (leading by example) but also because he uses psychological tactics to motivate his team. In this way, the novel was a interesting lesson in leadership, which I think carries over from fiction to reality.