Version 0.3

Review of Rise of the Robots (2016) by Martin Ford

Quite a good book, though I have a number of nits to pick. Overall the book is worth reading and I'm glad to give it the same strong recommendation that led me to read it, but there are places where his focus seems too shortsighted, especially in terms of the underlying severity of the problems. Onward to the nits:

In the introduction on page XIII I noticed that his math didn't seem to make sense. His projected acceleration was ultimately faster than the speed of light.

On page 6 he suggested that it was difficult to think of new applications to be implemented for smart phones or tablets, but I am constantly frustrated by the applications I want but which don't seem to exist.

On page 17, he talked about vending machines that's sell lousy instant coffee. I felt it was a bad and subjective observation, and some of the vending machines produce pretty good coffee (including fresh grinding of the beans), while others sell bad canned coffee or forms of instant coffee that do taste bad.

On page 34 he talks about Nixon descending into his death spiral, but it was only his administration that was collapsing. Of course Nixon was allowed to resign and live out his final years in relative peace and even with peaceful delusions.

More bad math on page 35. Or maybe it's just fuzzy talk about the meaning of the phrase "well in excess". I also disagree with his discussion here and on the next page about the divergence between wages and productivity. Yes, it's going on, but the starting time is not as clear as he says. I basically think he's casting too much blame on the relatively minor economic slump at the end of the 70s, when the real cause of the divergence was policy changes that took place in the 80s.

The graph on page 54 was not well laid out. The legend on the left side says thousands of persons divided by thousands of persons. It should've been called something like manufacturing employees as a percentage.

His presentation of Moore's Law on pages 64 and 65 was not very well done. I think he was especially mistaken as regards the advances of software.

Slightly annoying typo on page 107, where it says "believe" instead of "belief".

Another strange typo on page 164, where he talks about proton beams several times, but lets a "protein beam" slip in.

His discussion of healthcare systems around page 166 struck me is rather imbalanced, and he should have considered the Japanese example.

On page 240 he cited Dick Cheney's one-percent doctrine in a favorable way that mostly made me think he didn't understand the book. (I'm still wondering if Suskind has been diverted to prevent more books like that one.)

On page 266 he starts to realize that there's a need for new perspectives on economics, but he doesn't go as far as the kind of time-based approach that I advocate.

However he struck the jackpot on page 269, where he gave me a completely new idea on how to encourage people to spend their time on investment rather than recreation. I'm not sure if I got the idea here on page 273 where's talking about corporate taxes, but I realized that you could give people the basic annual income and then tax their spending, essentially discouraging recreational uses of time use by categorizing it in higher tax brackets for nonlinear sales taxes. It's a kind of consumption tax that would actually makes sense, where essential goods and services may have no consumption tax, investment time and services would be set at a higher rate, and the highest rate would be on the recreational time categories. The reality would actually be more complicated, but the principles would be clear. Several examples involving food: Excess food becomes a recreational good, but it might move to investment categories if someone is training for a physical test that requires more muscles--but that would then be influenced by the objective of the physical training, which might be recreational for a game or essential for a police officer.

All in all, a rather interesting and thought-provoking book, though I felt it isn't clear enough on the rationale for what he's trying to accomplish. He sees the problems of super-productivity making most work unnecessary, and that there is a need for some way to sustain demand keep the economy running, but he doesn't put the pieces together in a clear way that justifies his proposed solution. However I think by incorporating the progressive tax on corporate profits related to market share and by incentivizing more time in investment-related uses, then some of his objectives could be achieved.

As a footnote, I read his The Lights in the Tunnel near the end of 2016. My main memory is that the basic model of the lights in the tunnel was strained and even silly, but it was still a provocative book. In comparison with his new book, I think Lights was half-baked while this newer one is 3/4-baked. A discussion with the author would probably be mutually amusing.

Version 0.4

A few mental thorns in my side from The Gene by Siddhartha Mukherjee followed by an invasion from Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker

Great book, as expected based on his Emperor of All Maladies, but a couple of bits in the section "Truths and Reconciliations" did bother me. It started near the bottom of page 101, where he included "give wedding speeches" as a genetically transmitted entity. The other entities on the list were more plausible as capabilities directly related to genetic data, but I felt that particular capability needed to be abstracted more clearly, something like "a capability to create and deliver wedding speeches". Then on page 105 he says that without genetic diversity the entire species would either survive or go extinct, which struck me much harder as an actual overstatement. If the genes were identical, it would be a matter of random luck which individuals survived, but the species as a species might well continue to survive indefinitely. It would only be the appearance of some superior competitor that might tip the balance towards extinction.

I also had a notation about page 147, but on review, the only thing that strikes me is the especially intriguing reference to Schrodinger's What is Life? book. Not sure I'm going to read it, but I finally managed to locate a version in English in two nearby libraries. It's apparently embedded in a giant collection called Great Books of the Western World. About 750 pages in that volume 56? About a dozen books per volume? A whole lot of "greatness" going on... Back to the question of time.

On page 177 I was stuck by the word "blueprint", even though he modified it as "active blueprint", however later on he switched to the book-of-recipes metaphor. Upon later reflection I feel like his position is linked to his feelings as a physician who wants to do the best for every patient, no matter what the roll of the genes. This actually ties into my larger poke from the Part Five, where I felt he spent too much time on sexual topics without really reaching any conclusion. I feel like this is probably the part of the book where he should have discussed more deeply the motivation for sexual reproduction itself. Based on that physician perspective he has, I now feel like part of the reason he is shying away from those aspects is because of the random death, even including human deaths. Sexual reproduction has two aspects, one of which is stabilizing the breeding population by recombining gene's from different individuals to maintain some genetic consistency within a large population, but at the same time sexual reproduction is destabilizing, creating new mixes of genes at random. Mother Nature's goal is basically conservative and seeking equilibrium, but the conclusion is that there is only one natural approach: Each breeding pair should have roughly two survivors who reach reproductive age, and to keep things stable that means the less lucky combinations from the random destabilization aspect have to die before reproducing. Progress would actually suggest two or more shuffles, but the minimal equilibrium is an average of four children with the deaths of the two children who were least lucky in the genes they got. No parent and no physician likes that idea, but it's the reason I have come to my position in support of passive eugenics (based on genetic screening) so that parents have a tilted wager in favor of raising only two children who represent their better combinations. (He vaguely approaches some of these considerations in a note on page 360, but obviously not to my satisfaction.)

On page 293 I was reminded of Kuhn's paradigm shift, though Mukherjee never mentions the idea. This was just one of several areas that could have been analyzed from that perspective.

Page 313 has an extremely sharp thorn when he says "several million years ago" when it's more like 600 million years ago. Basically the same thorn on page 316 as "several million years of evolution", though the gap is more like 400 million years for insects.

Now for the intrusions from Walker's book. The genetic topic of interest was on page 145, where he writes about the BHLHE41 (AKA DEC2) gene as a factor allowing some people to do well with only 6 hours of sleep per night. I thought this was an excellent case for raising the distinction between passive and active genetics. I would argue that is would be okay to help parents with this gene try to tilt the scales in favor of their children having this gene. Not that it should be the primary factor in making their decisions, but over the long term they could increase the numbers of people who have the gene. That's a passive eugenics approach. In contrast, the active eugenics approach might involve attempting to deliberately insert the gene into the chromosomes of parents who don't have it. Based on that distinction, the recent work of He Jiankui is clearly an active genetics approach, and I would regard his approach as extreme to the point of insanity, apparently motivated by a desire for this 15 minutes of fame (per Andy Warhol).

Minor thorn from page 84 of Why We Sleep was the "breath rates" comment about babies just before birth (AKA "near-term fetus" in the citation in the note). There's something wrong with the passage "breath rates dropping from a normal rate of 381 per hour during natural sleep to just 4 per hour when the fetus was awash with alcohol." Hyperbolic wording, but the main question is "Before birth, there's no breathing going on here, so what is he talking about?"

On page 195 he's talking about MRI scans of sleeping people, but mostly I was wondering about the noise, or if they have a specially silenced MRI scanner.

On page 206 he assumes an incandescent bulb without saying so, though later in the book (on page 326) he talks about LED bulbs, so he knows about them (though he was apparently confused about how they work and even about the LED lights that can change their colors).

On page 209 he was talking about REM to remove negative emotions from memories for better learning, but mostly he reminded about the General Theory of Relatively Funny Stuff and how humor also supports learning. In some cases there's also some negative emotions, though usually not for humor-based learning.

Page 226 reminded me of my Zen collapse theory of extreme connectivity among ideas.

Page 234 is about lucid dreaming as an unusual skill, whereas I regard it as another aspect of our over-engineering.

Around page 326 he's talking about personalization, but doesn't really consider the problems of married couples with different sleeping patterns. Projecting too far (and revealing too much?) to say that I think that's my main sleeping problem?

Page 333 has an appeal to philanthropists for support, and I sort of considered pitching the ol' Charity Share Brokerage for small donors.

On page 340 he picks 3,400,000 years as the time for sleep to evolve, which seems like a really odd number.

So overall an interesting book, but too polemical and not as insightful as I'd hoped from the early sections. Mukherjee's book is much better and easier to recommend.

Search Inside Yourself

Version 0.1

Notes and email related to Search Inside Yourself (leftover as a draft review long ago)

Journaling communication exercise for Saturday September 6 today I'm going to talk about the book search inside yourself by Google employee number 107 I found it a very interesting book quickly car interested in it so I think that means my mind state is basically in a tune with the authors way of thinking. Yonkers with thinking. I don't quite by into the value a sinus to additional meditation practice, but a lot of his exercises and ideas seen very sound. He seemed crisis here, but it's hard to take am seriously in conjunction okay the context the way to google is your fault over the years. He's been teaching this course since about 2007 didn't even showing move from engineering work them, this looks pretty annoying. over to the personal section. Los several attempts to dictate more material. Anyway, the objective shirley appears to be to clarify my thinking in a b c a natural topic of journal activities would be the latest book 7 reading. My approach is going to be too dictated into Android, and then paste it into some kind of blog web page, editing. My feeling is I want to keep this kind of disassociated from my name, I'm not sure why. Perhaps a new blog over on WordPress rather than part of my existing blogs. Yes it's an estimate consciousness for now. Arapaho september 6

Since you closed Search Inside Yourself with a quotey thing, I feel I should open with a philosophic bauble whose origins are lost in the distant mists of time:

The past is fixed. The future does not begin tomorrow--it begins in the next instant. I stand in the cusp of now. Now I can make a thousand choices, each of which leads down a different path. Only one is the way to Tao. But regardless of my choice, the path of Tao is still before me. On my way, I met a man and asked him which was the path to Tao.

But the Master replied, "You can't get there from here."

I suspect the master was misquoted. He probably said "You can't get here from there" or, in accord with your book, "We can't get there from here." Or maybe that's just an allergic reaction to first awakening after finishing your book and sleeping on it?

Your book implied that your first language is not English, so you may not be familiar with the predecessor joke. I'm sure you can google it from the punchline, or I can explain it. Of course, if I tell you, then I have to kill the humor being. (Since my Zen collapse, it seems everything is also a joke.)

Anyway, my primary reaction was "So if he's sincere about training compassion, and since games are the most effective training mechanisms, and since games often induce quasi- or pseudo- or semi-meditative states of contemplation, where is Compassion, the training game?" The first person shooter of compassion? (Me? Can't stand FPSs, but Compassion is different, eh?)

Seems intuitively obvious enough for the most casual observer, but again, feel free to ask for clarification if required.

Having said that, I'm quite dubious about communicating with you. Your book certainly makes you seem like a nice guy, but the overwhelming evidence of the google is that you must be faking.

By the way (and way too far, too), I'm not really blaming the google. It's just that the rules of the business game in America worship cancer. Natural result of being legislated and regulated by the most cheaply bribed politicians working for the greediest and least ethical businessmen. The super-rich are different from you (I hope) and me. They love money much more, and that's how they became so stinking rich. Unfortunately, their problem is uninteresting because it is not solvable. The problems of a rich bastard who desperately needs more money cannot be solved by ANY amount of money. Meaningful problems should be viewed in terms of solutions.

Oh yeah, where did the bauble come from? Maybe you can google it? I found it in a little pocket notebook I used to carry, into which it had been copied from an earlier notebook, which had come from an earlier notebook, and back into the mists. I suspect it is my own thought, but if so, the prior question is what provoked me to think of it? If not, I wish I had noted the source.

P.S. You probably know Hal Varian (unless his title is just a sinecure). I was reminded of his contact invitation when my first search for you failed. You aren't using Google+, but he is, which is presumably the source of the fake LinkedIn account in his name. I'm pert' shure he isn't looking for me to discuss "Couch Potatoes of the World, Unite!" (Cf. Your page 135, which just missed the magic number of 137.) Pert' shure he isn't actually using Google+, either, since I used that link to let him know about the theft of his identity some months ago, and the fake LinkedIn account is still there and inviting me, for whatever nefarious purposes I know not.

P.P.S. Do you know Salikh in Japan?

P.P.P.S. I also hope this email bounces from a celebrity email system. Not to benefit the google, but for world peace and because it would help solve the spam problem. ROFLMAO.

--

Freedom = (Meaningful + Unconstrained) Choice ≠ Beer

Version 0.5

ECAL as the answer to Winners Take All by Anand Giridharadas

An interesting attempt to explain some philanthropy and certain aspects of Trumpism, but I have to reframe it in terms of ECAL, which is derived from my my old idea that most people don't want to be too free or to do too much hard work for the sake of creativity. Also elements of the problems of scale, whereas the book incorrectly assumes scaleable solutions are actually solutions rather than new problems and the sources of more failure. In my frameworks, the basic idea of this book is that "successful" people think the solution to the world's problem is sharing the opportunity to be successful with more people, and the reason their approach failed so spectacularly in 2016 with the rise of Trumpism and in such cases as Brexit is simply that most people do not want that form of success.

Upon reflection, I would describe it as the ECAL problem. Yes, it's a constructed mnemonic device, easy to remember as "lace" backwards, but I think it captures the key problems. It stands for Effort, Creativity, Ambition, and Luck, and the successful philanthropists don't understand ECAL as the source of their "success" and especially don't understand why other people wouldn't want that. In the worst cases, they will even admit that they regard the less successful people as "losers" even if they have "good excuses" for wallowing around at the bottom.

A few clarifications seem necessary. Effort is intended broadly, but mostly as sustained effort to stay in the competition. Though Creativity may require effort, some people (maybe even including yours truly) can spawn new ideas easily and the new ideas are crucial to finding new ways to succeed, but there needs to be effort to work out the bugs. (This is actually a link to the idea of programming as meta-thinking.) The Ambition should probably go first, in accord with my old joke about "Knowing what you want and wanting it badly are much important than knowing how to get it." It could also be reworded as avarice, greed, or lust, but I went with Ambition because the connotations are more neutral. Finally, Luck is the one the successful people usually don't like to acknowledge because it negates everything else, including intelligence and good timing. There are always other people who failed even with ECA because the L went to someone else.

Anyway, it was a good book and I can recommend it. Quite thought provoking, but rather difficult to obtain around here.

Let me repeat that I currently regard this blog as a collection of random notes that no one reads. If anyone actually showed any interest (most obviously manifested as questions in the comments), I could flesh them out.

Part 2:

Important aspect I should have mentioned involves the scale of [social] critics to thought leaders. [At least I don't remember "social" being used in that context in the book.] Similarities, but the difference in attitude results in acceptance of the thought leaders (at places like TED), but with the risk of their ideas (about solutions to the problems) being diluted, subverted, or even polluted, while the critics get "not so much". In the form of a sad little rhyme, the social critics are abhorred (or ignored or both or worse) while the thought leaders are adored.

Then as I was finishing the book I realized there was a different model that should have been mentioned in the book. It's the indulgences, stupid! What the rich philanthropists are doing is basically identical with the purchase of indulgences from the Catholic Church. The giant and cancerous corporations have committed huge crimes, even sins, but the main beneficiaries are the rich (if transient) owners of the cancers who are seeking to buy redemption with minor donations to "good" causes.

Extreme example in the news recently (as of 2019-3-26) involves the incredibly rich family that owns, among other companies, Krispy Kreme Donuts. It is being reported that some of their seed capital turns out to be slightly tainted. Nazi money. Whoops, more than a slight taint, eh? So their solution is a charitable donation of $11 million. Sounds pretty great, huh? Not exactly when the family's wealth is in the billions of dollars.

In terms of solutions, the book talks about B (as in beneficial) corporations as a solution, but I think that is a kind of bandage on the cancer. The underlying problem remains that the corporate cancers are focused on the single dimension of profit, and reality must not and cannot be reduced to a single dimension. (Interesting parallel arguments in The Gene, which I'm also reading just now. Evolution is intrinsically multidimensional.) I'm not clear if charity share brokerages would offer a better solution approach, but I'm definitely not convinced that B corporations are helping. Just another form of indulgence, they seem to me.

Part 3 is just noting some names, since I have to return the book now.

Mostly Lynn Nesbitt the agent who might refer me to a beginning agent suiting my own status? Key philanthropists and thought leaders might be Sean Hinton, Amy Cuddy, Sonal Sha, Andrew Kassoy, and Laurie Tisch.

Part 4 to follow is about the obvious comparisons with what indulgences led to.