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Did William Poundstone sell the answers in How Would You Move Mount Fuji? to Microsoft?

Not sure how else to explain things there... I'm not thinking that he allowed Microsoft to directly censor the book or anything, but more like an arrangement in which they would look over the book, ostensibly to check for mistakes and to protect him from liability, and Microsoft would offer a few suggestions and so forth. Perhaps even with a variable payment schedule that took into account the degree of his cooperation?

What's bothering me about the book is mostly the number of 'troubled' solutions. I hit the first one just after I started reading the book, as described in the slightly redacted email that appears below. However, the one that is bothering me most now is the puzzle about the village of philandering husbands. The supposed key to this analysis is that the wives suddenly knew that there was at least one philandering husband in the village--which directly conflicts with the premise that every wife already knew that there were 49 cheating husbands. There's also a contradiction between the 'friend' used in the presentation of the problem and the later description of the perfectly logical and utterly friendless pseudo-people used in these puzzles, but that doesn't bother me as much as the more obvious contradiction. Apparently the visit of the oracle resets the clock in some mysterious way, but if the chain of logic is actually valid then I can't see why THAT particular 50-day clock should be unique. The puzzle forbid certain kinds of knowledge sharing among the wives, but NOT obviously or specifically the knowledge that there is at least one philanderer in the village, and as soon as any wife realized that all the other women knew this simple existential claim, then the 50-day clock would start running for her. Or in other words, any of the wives could start the clock at any time with a statement similar to the oracles. There's something rotten in Denmark, or wherever this weird village is located, and at this point I'm just too suspicious of the logical flaws.

Microsoft's motivation for 'tampering' would seem to be obvious. They could plant seeds in the book to quickly spot the book-reading game-players among their interviewees. That could involve both seeded answers or bogus questions...

Not sure if it's related, but I recently concluded that Microsoft's essential interface design philosophy is fatally flawed, and this may be an inevitable result of the mental straightjackets created by this kind of interview process. Even if it works exactly as they intend, they can only wind up with the best configuration for the largest number of users--but no individual user is really the perfect fit for the resulting straightjacket.

Meanwhile, here's the earlier email messages:

On Wed, Aug 24, 2011 at 10:09 AM, Shannon Jacobs wrote:

Answer to the fourth question of Chapter 4 in "How Would You Move Mount Fuji", first need for errata. However, my main interest at this point is how many people have already [sent] you these [kinds of] comments--and remember you could probably short-circuit most of this kind of email with an errata page on your website... However, in the lack of any response, I probably won't say more. (The way my memory works these years, without highly specific prompting I'll barely remember the details in two weeks.) [Evidently an exaggeration?]

The part about the natural 180 degree rotation of the right hand was good, but called for some mention of the starting position of the key. Why assume it's vertical? However, my own thinking was more along the lines hinted at by your note at the end, that the passenger side door is reversed. Your analysis of the supposedly correct answer didn't say anything about the mechanism of the lock. A convenient and natural design for an outside door of a home is to open outwards with the hinge on the right side. If it opens inwards it wastes that space inside the house and if the hinge is on the left side the right-handed person has to shift the door to his left hand to avoid his own right arm as he enters the house. If the key mechanism is a rotating cylinder and the bolt it is rotating against is located above the lock, then the natural direction of rotation to retract the bolt is to rotate to the right which is clockwise. (No, I've never studied locks, but I heard that my grandfather knew a lot about them.) Therefore my guess would be that the clockwise direction became traditional to unlock doors, and the designers of the locks for car doors followed that convention for the driver's door. [However, rather than] design a completely different mechanism for the passenger's side, they just mirrored the design from the driver's side [causing it to turn in the other direction].

P.S. My own assessment is that the only position I could possibly qualify for at Microsoft would be CMO--but Microsoft wants a morality officer like a hole in the head. If by some misfortune I had wound up there, based on your book I'm pretty sure they would have classified me as a tester, but only briefly.

On Tue, Aug 23, 2011 at 10:24 AM, Shannon Jacobs <redacted email address> wrote:

Just stumbled across your "How Would You Move Mount Fuji?" book in the local library. Before actually starting to read it I ran a few tests, including with one of the top scientists of my acquaintance (since I work for a research lab at one of the so-called biggies). Upon starting in earnest, my initial thought was that I should check for errata on the Web, lest I go nuts over a typo.

Quickly found your website, but it didn't help much in my quest. These days we live and die by the search webform... Probing around, your quicktime poems killed my poor computer, which has been suffering pretty badly since the latest round of security software was installed. (The option of buying a more muscular machine out of my own pocket was eliminated by a previous change in corporate security policies...) No joy (so far as this particular book goes, and none of your others are conveniently available in English around here).

After poking around your website a bit more, I do have a reaction to your "Ann Coulter: Human Document". At first I wondered if it was some kind of endorsement. However, now I see it as related to knowledge dysfunctions, an area I've been thinking about a lot these years. It fits into the category of super-ignorance, where Coulter is one of the high priestesses. In brief, most people tend to believe what they want to believe, and the Internet now makes it not merely possible but convenient for people to completely saturate their input channels with whatever garbage they want to believe. You might call it search engine personalization, but I predicted it a couple of years ago as pandering.

Just in case you're curious about the topic or even interested in new ideas to worry about, I've concluded that the most serious category of knowledge dysfunction is abuse of personal information. I may have a twisted mind, but it isn't the corporate theft by collection of personal information that should belong to the real persons (of which corporations are NOT, my friend), but the potential for more subtle forms of abuse. From consideration of the recent Norwegian madman, for example. Imagine that there are terrorists who figure out how to spot such incipient or potential loonies by their writings on the Web. Then the real troublemakers send anonymous email to the police about the possible 'lone wolf attacker', and of course the police can't ignore it. With the other hand, they send anonymous email to the potential loony--and possibly even help push him over the edge. I still feel like knowledge is fundamentally a good thing, but the tools remain morally neutral, and it increasingly seems that the bad guys have more energy... (I see my tangential angel has run amok again.)

Anyway, if there is any errata for this book, I'd appreciate a pointer.

Happy for No Reason

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The American Love of Pseudo-science such as Happy for No Reason by Marci Shimoff

Justification is that Dubya would never admit he needed to be more happy, though he'd like the "no reason" part of it. Tie breaker is that the book is introspective and Dubya ain't, so he wouldn't read it.

The pseudo-science is supposed to be something like science of happiness.

The basic ideas are old, going back to The Power of Positive Thinking and similar books and similar motivational speakers.

Entire book is full of fake scientific veneer, though it was in Chapter 5, which is basically a plug for an obvious scam called the Institute of HeartMath. She tries to give them plausibility with a claim that it was verified by Stanford University and some other institute--but with no citation. Then you reread it more carefully and even the claim is meaningless. Maybe they rented a room in a building owned by Stanford? Nothing there. However, the kicker was the bogus graph, which is supposed to show pulse fluctuations over time as influenced by your mental state. It's easier to start with the supposedly good graph, which shows the pulse varying from 60 to 80 bpm--but within one minute. Wait a minute. Think about it. The pulse is about once a second, but from that data you are supposed to calculate smooth fluctuations in the average rate over the course of a few seconds? It's nonsense, which is exactly what the other graph shows. They are obviously playing some kind of game with the minor fluctuations, but the entire passage is just stuffed full of meaningless fake jargon and obviously false claims that are intended to sound scientific.

Other especially bogus and fraudulent claims involved the power of prayer and mental control over crystals (which was a Japanese scammer). Those are just some of the most glaring examples that came to mind now. Basically I just have to repeat it on a larger scale, the entire book is stuffed full of false claims that are intended to sound scientific.

I do think there is a tiny kernel of truth at the heart of the book. A positive attitude is a good thing and helps you in life. It's possible to be happier, though she never goes as far as saying that happiness is just a state of mind. It's one thing to be content and to adjust your expectations to be more content, but she's arguing for delusional states.

Another aspect that bothers me is the circular nature of the business. They basically endorse each other and help sell each other's books and classes and lectures.

The Essential Drucker

Thumb in the Eye Reactions to The Essential Drucker by Peter F. Drucker

Don't think I could do a rapid review of this one, but I wanted to record some of the things that stuck me in the eye as I read it. The problem with trying to summarize it for a more normal review is that his perspective is pretty unusual in a way that is hard to capture. The ridiculously short summary is that a lot of what he says here is valid, but some parts are dated, and there are pieces that don't pass my smell test. The last group is what struck me hardest as I read the book, and those are things I can quickly record.

Digesting the rest of this book is going to take a while, especially his sideways perspective on profit. He tried to argue for justified and necessary profits, but without directly addressing the question of losses. It seemed that his argument was sort of that you needed to have profits sufficient to cover your failures, and that was quite justified, but he didn't say what you were supposed to do when there were fewer failures than you planned for. The implication was that those profits would somehow become excess or unjustified, but I'm pretty sure that wouldn't be his intention.

Anyway, here's a linear presentation. I'm not sure why the frequency of 'clumsy thumbs' seemed to be increasing as I read. It might reflect the chronology of when the sections were written, since the book was compiled from many older sources. Alternatively, I may have been becoming more sensitized to things that didn't fit with my developing interpretation of his ideas...

On page 66 he claimed that income equality was improving in the US, but that trend had been reversed long before this book was compiled. The kindest resolution is that this section was originally written sometime before 1980 and the editors somehow overlooked it.

On page 89 he argued that there was an increasingly fair form of parity between a pharmaceutical company and professors at a university. I can't even remember a time when that perception could have seemed justified or even plausible as a projection into the future.

Page 183 includes one of his digs against Ralph Nader, who he clearly dislikes rather intensely. This dig was especially weak, since he was making a blanket claim about customers being intelligent while lumping Nader with the advertising agencies.

His treatment of corporations was inconsistent as regards biological metaphors, and I think that was related to confusion about the purpose of companies. On page 199 he is arguing that the organization is not like an animal and survival is not the goal, but elsewhere, as on page 210, he is argument that the organization is like a human body, based on a comparison of results to calories in a nutritious diet. On that same page he argues that the organization is "a means of overcoming the limitations mortality sets", which seems to be a strong defense of my own position, that a business is mostly in business to stay in business (though of course too many sustained losses will kill it).

On page 260 was an especially annoying incorrect citation confusing two of the Sherlock Holmes stories. The mystery that was solved by the dog that didn't bark was NOT "The Hound of the Baskervilles", and this quotation is clearly a fabrication. I'd already caught him in an earlier mistake, where he claimed that a confederate general had said "Hit them where they ain't." My research convinces me that this was a distortion of a famous baseball player's quote. Perhaps Drucker misled himself with his more accurate but nameless earlier citation of a confederate general for the "Get there fustest with the mostest", though there is some doubt that the general in question ever said it quite that way--but rather less doubt that the general became a leader of the Ku Klux Klan, which explains why the name got left out.

On page 288 he had a kind of diatribe that included "radical feminists", but the entire thing was pretty hard to follow and mostly convinced me that he didn't like the idea of liberal education because he didn't understand it very well. He actually seems to be arguing for a kind of education that I can only describe as liberal, but with a more pragmatic focus. This was actually related to a confusing and rather racist section from pages 306 to 309. He starts by saying knowledge work is accepted as a good thing "(except in the black community)" before he speculates whether Europe might follow "the American black" in what he implies is a negative and anti-intellectual course. Then he argues education must be the "center of the knowledge society", apparently ignoring the trends against public education in America over the last 25 years (before this book was assembled). On page 309 he had this sentence, that really hit my poor eyeball: "Thomas Jefferson's society of independent small farmers, each being the owner of his own family farm and farming it without any help except for that of his wife and his children, was never much more than fantasy." Of course the thing that strikes me is that there were slaves involved, too--and it struck me harder when he mentioned slaves and serfs later in the same paragraph... However, he came back to education near the end of the book, as on page 318 in an unclear but negative context, on page 330 when he talks about public schools "going downhill" and in a confusing paragraph on page 345, where says "every American college" is following the lead of a school in Vermont. Though it isn't fully clear what he means, it is clear enough that I'm sure it was never the case... On page 312, he claims the first pyramid built in Egypt is still standing, which is another exceedingly unlikely claim. On page 315 he has a kind of silly passage about government's failure to cure the ills of society, though the most obvious response seemed to conclude that things could be much worse if government wasn't trying to mitigate the problems... Perhaps that's because I felt he never adequately dealt with the roles of government as referee and provider of infrastructure? I guess this paragraph of my comments mostly shows the risks of getting outside of your own domain of expertise, which is actually a theme he mentions in several places.

Still, I want to reiterate that there were many places where he left an impression of wisdom. For example, on page 341 he has a very thoughtful paragraph that meshes with many of my feelings about size and specialization: "It would surely be counterproductive for the cockroach to be big, and equally counterproductive for the elephant to be small. As biologists are fond of saying, The [sic] rate knows everything it needs to be successful as a rat. Whether the rat is more intelligent than the human being is a stupid question; in what it takes to be successful as a rat, the rat is way ahead of any other animal, including the human being. In an information-based society, bigness becomes a 'function' and a dependent, rather than an independent, variable. In fact, the characteristics of information imply that the smallest effective size will be best. 'Bigger' will be 'better' only if the task cannot be done otherwise."

An interesting book, and thought-provoking, too, but right now I feel like the years were unkind to it and the editors should have been more careful. I'm pretty sure that the author was basically in a detached supervisory role that close to his death.

As an interesting coincidence, I should note that this week they just released a Japanese movie, called "Moshi" or "Moshi Dora" that is supposed to be based on Drucker's management philosophy. Those are actually short forms of the real title, which is ridiculously long. In translation the title talks about the manager of a girl's baseball team who reads one of Drucker's books.

What Eisenhower Thinks

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How What Eisenhower Thinks by Allan Taylor Makes President Eisenhower Look Like a Failure

This book was actually published in 1953 and somehow found its way into the public library of Kasawaski-shi in Japan. It's an interesting collection of excerpts of Eisenhower's speeches and writings. The editing was mostly done after Ike had declined the 1948 Republican nomination and before he decided to run for President in the election of 1952. It seems pretty clear that the editor was a supporter hoping to encourage him to run.

I don't know whether or not this book contributed anything to Ike's change of heart, but it did change my feelings about Ike. On the one hand, it gave me more appreciation for his understanding of the problems that America was facing at the time and in the future. However, at the same time it made me feel that he was a failure as president, whereas before I was pretty much neutral about his presidency.

Before reading this book, I regarded President Eisenhower's greatest mistake as the interstate highway system. This was a really crucial decision and policy that helped make America dependent on private automobiles instead of mass transit. I've always felt that the decision was made primarily for short-sided reasons of military exigencies. Mass transit is militarily vulnerable and positionally useless. The facilities of mass transit are sitting ducks and just can't delivery troops to arbitrary destinations where the generals want to attack or need to defend. I'd like to see the exact statistics, but I've often felt the interstate highways were the #1 deep cause of America's harmful dependence on foreign oil.

I felt that Ike's greatest positive legacy was actually the defense of individual rights by the Supreme Court. However Ike himself regarded his two progressive appointments to the supreme court as his greatest presidential mistakes. Kind of hard to give him credit in that situation, even if the results were good. Yes, there were some important events in such areas as civil rights for blacks, but Ike was NOT leading the way, but basically just passively going along for the ride.

However, from reading this book, I felt that President Eisenhower deserves more criticism for knowing better and failing to do anything about the problems he understood. There are many examples in the book, but I'm just going to pick on two that struck me as especially interesting and significant.

One was his advocacy of universal military service. Obviously he did not succeed in leading the country to the adoption of such a policy. I actually agree with the basic idea, though without restricting it to military service. His focus was purely on military preparedness, but I'd prefer including options for various other forms of public service. My own preference would be a weighting system where the least pleasant forms would also be the shortest. For example, one year of military service versus two years of medical support or foreign aid work versus three years of teaching. Yes, I could have missed it, but I've never seen any evidence that he even managed to start a dialog on the topic.

Another area that rather surprised me was Eisenhower's advocacy of a stronger United Nations and inspections-based nuclear disarmament. Again, it seems pretty clear that he failed to move the country in those directions. Some of his comments about America working compatibly with the United Nations now seem downright laughable considering our obstructionist history there.

Considering the era, it's hard to blame him for the anti-communist stuff. However, that part certainly looks kind of laughable now. However, even in that area his understanding of the importance of non-military economic development as the foundation for real national strength makes his leadership look misguided.

In conclusion, if I were a presidential historian being asked for my ranking, President Eisenhower would drop several places because of this book. Remember that this was a contemporary work, not colored by later revisionism and fishing for the best things to remember.

The New Jackals

Big Picture Conclusions Linked to The New Jackals by Simon Reeve

The detail that got me to look at this book about Ramzi Yousef and Osama bin Laden was the misleading publication date of 1999. Once I started looking at it, I found the book interesting enough to read, and light enough to read quickly, but it was NOT published in 1999, and this casts a large shadow over the entire thing. There was only one concrete proof of the later publication date: The back cover talks about the 9/11 attacks of 2001. Most likely, that means this was a later reprint to capitalize upon or even exploit the new infamy of UBL after 9/11--but if so, why doesn't the book mention anything about the publication history? Are they just hoping to mislead potential purchasers? Or were there other changes they don't want to talk about? One source (via Wikipedia) claims that the last and rather sensationalist section was added to the reprinted edition, but I suspect that there may have been other changes, too. The book would have been much more valuable and interesting to me if it were the original and unmodified edition reflecting what was known BEFORE 9/11 changed the world's view of the significance of terrorists. It seems to me that almost half of the book may have been added in the reprinting, since there is a lot of redundancy there and less substantiated stuff there.

Having said that, I'll try to assess the book briefly before moving to my conclusions. There is a lot of good information in the book, and some solid investigative journalism. There are also a lot of rumors and unfiltered stuff thrown in, and I strongly suspect that the relative significance of UBL was bulked up in this printing. Much of the material is downright speculative and could be used to feed conspiracy buffs, though the author's citation comes down to 'Someone told me he thinks so' or even 'Someone agreed with me it could have happened that way.' The most obvious fantasy is his attempts to link UBL to Saddam Hussein, which remains fundamentally implausible--but which was a leading propaganda angle of the neocons and neo-GOP politicians at the time when the book was probably being revised for republication. For support of conspiracies, he suggests the Oklahoma City bombers may have had more help than has been acknowledged, and he even tries to link that bombing to the first WTC bombing. The variability in the solidity goes beyond troubling, but basically forces you to go back to the primary materials.

My conclusion is fundamentally economic: We just can't afford to continue playing this game on the terms that the religious terrorists are defining. Essentially, they can make very small investments that induce us to make vastly larger counter-investments. UBL has said that he wants to bankrupt America, and he has described his strategic approaches to doing it, and this book greatly increased my feeling that America under Dubya was playing the game exactly by UBL's rules--and losing. If we are going to win against the terrorists, we need to change the game in our favor, which means we need to realign the bulk of the Islamic world against the terrorists. As shown by the recent kerfuffle about proposed Islamic cultural center near Ground Zero, it is clear that the majority of Americans do NOT understand this necessity. They are blindly walking into UBL's trap, even though there is nothing hidden or secretive about UBL's evil strategy.

Going rather beyond the scope of this book to consider the large historical view, but the degree of religious militancy in the Islamic world has fluctuated over the centuries. The actual peak was probably during the early transitional period when the cult became an established church. To survive the threats of those years, Islam became a highly militant religion, and even after its survival was assured, it continued aggressively expanding for a long time. Then it settled down and for a long time was quite peaceful, though UBL would surely call it a decadent period. Now it is moving back towards militancy--and most Americans are eagerly pushing to make it more militant by mindlessly attacking all things associated in any way with Islam. The most mild mannered and rational pacifist in the world would be regarded as anathema by most Americans--if that person was in any way tainted by Islam. In economic terms, we cannot afford this. Even if we only manage to grow the terrorist groups by a few percent, their RoI advantage is going to suck us dry.

Amusingly enough, that lunatic Rumsfeld was not crazy when he talked about the dangers of asymmetric warfare. He couldn't understand the solutions or he never would have supported the insane lost investment of billions of dollars in Iraq, but at least he noticed that such low-tech adversaries were getting much more bang from their limited bucks.

The Dignity of a Woman

A Clarifying Insight from The Dignity of a Woman (女性の品格) by Mariko Bando, translated by James Vardeman

The book itself is moderately interesting, though the original is clearly targeted at women and the translation is clearly targeted at Japanese people who are studying English at a high level. In spite of the targeting and a bit of redundancy, the book struck me as mostly quite reasonable, though not startling. It mostly confirmed my understanding of a lot of things about Japan, but I couldn't really get the full meaning from it, especially in the sections that were discussing the nuances of appropriate Japanese expressions. Not just the use of Romaji, but also that the translator mostly left the examples of undesirable usages untranslated, though the examples of good use were generally translated.

However, the thing that struck me about the book enough to motivate this comment was something I realized near the end of the book. Not quite sure what triggered the crystallization of the obvious insight, but this is a topic that has been bothering me and nagging at me for quite a while. As I've aged, I've become increasingly appreciative of the advantages of marriage, and even thought that a so-called 'good wife' might well have influenced my own career in a positive direction.

What I finally realized in a clear way is that "Two against one isn't fair." Not exactly a big insight, but it suddenly explained a lot of the conservatism of companies, especially established companies. Within such a company there is a constant competition for promotion, and other things being equal, the family teams are going to win out. Not just any family team, but especially the teams in which one partner is completely dedicated to the success of the other partner. So for which teams is this recipe for success most likely to work? Obviously in most cases it is a certain category of conservative team in which the wife essentially sacrifices her own life towards the success of her husband.

The obvious long-term result is that each company tends to be 'captured' by that kind of man who is helped upwards by his wife. With this very conservative mindset in place at the top, the entire company naturally becomes more and more conservative over time. The only thing that really upsets the apple cart is when the company is so calcified and stiff that it collapses and dies.

That is bad enough in itself and explains why change is so difficult within most companies. However, it also augers badly for the future, since the Supreme Court recently increased the 'personhood' status of corporations. No matter what SCOTUS says, corporations are NOT people, but now the actual people who actually control those corporations, people who are mostly very conservative, will have much more freedom in using the corporations' money to support their own highly conservative views. It seems inevitable that the entire American society will soon be calcified to death--though I've already long suspected it was too late to worry much about it...

Seven Million Years

Obviously the rationale of this blog has effectively mutated to reflect the post-Dubya reality. Who cares what Dubya does or does not read these days? Not much, I'm sure. However, I suppose it's worth the observation that Dubya must reject such a book as this, which already starts by assuming the jury has come in on evolution, and evolution works, even for us. So now:

Reactions to and a Quickie Assessment of Seven Million Years: The Story of Human Evolution by Douglas Palmer

It was my reaction to page 119 that encouraged me to write about this book. That's where he rather crudely touched on the nature versus nurture debate. His presentation was muddled, but it seems he's mostly trying to come down on the side of nature without sufficient understanding of what it means to be a Turing Machine. Of course we are constrained by our physical reality, and that may even include certain predispositions in the genetically-driven neural wiring, but one of the essential things about Turing Machines is that they are in a sense 'universal'. We may not run certain programs as effectively as other programs, but I think we have almost complete freedom as to the 'mental programs' we choose to run. It's not that we are unconstrained, but even then we have the freedom to fight against every form of constraint.

In the concrete context of the book at that point, it got me to thinking about the crucial importance of clothing. He very much downplays the topic, with a single reference in the index and at least two overlooked and unindexed references in the text (since I had become sensitized to the word), but my realization at that point was that the simple act of adding or removing a garment would vastly increase the effective range of humans in comparison with any other animals--and do it at a speed that evolution can't possibly match. It takes some large number of generations to adjust the skin's coloration or the amount of hair, but a simple cape can achieve better effects at a speed that can match today's weather.

Ergo, I was already predisposed to regard the book as a rather superficial introduction to the topic. The bulk of the book was just a kind of trivial low-level biography of anthropologists--a list of who found what, when, and some mentions of who disagreed with which categorizations. Then the author seriously annoyed me during his superficial presentation of genetic analysis, which was treated as a rather minor topic late in the book--but polluted by the use of presidential politics in a distinctly inappropriate context.

Overall, a kind of trivial book. I don't like to say a nonfiction book was a waste of my time, but that's mostly how I wound up feeling about this book. I can't recommend it, even after struggling to think of an appropriate scenario...