Coming War with Japan

Version 0.3

Can an Non-credible Book like The Coming War with Japan by George Friedman and Meredith LeBard Stimulate Ideas about Credible Threats?

Really, that's about the best I can do to justify reading this book. It's a crazy book, but that also makes it thought-provoking. The threat it proposes and the analysis is ridiculous, but I was able to devise a possible real threat chain--but not involving Japan. I actually conceived of that threat just as I started reading the book, but these authors aren't going anywhere near it. However, the book mainly fails because it makes lots of predictions that have already been invalidated by boring old reality.

The attraction to the book was obviously the title, but as soon as I read that George Friedman was associated with the ultraconservative Heritage Foundation, I knew where it had gone wrong. In brief, this book is just crazy money talking. I started by believing that I understood the Japanese pretty well after living in Japan for more than 20 years, but as a scientific sort of person, I was still willing to look at their evidence. Maybe he really meant an economic war or something plausible? No, they are arguing for military war. Maybe they have some compelling new evidence? No, not only are they using old and well known evidence, but they are using it in ways that are highly selective and even contradictory. (However, perhaps real scientists should be tested by how willing they are to believe things they don't like? In contrast, posers like these authors have already decided what they want to believe, and the key tactic is rejecting all of the problematic facts.)

It seems easiest to dismiss their military threat claim by pointing at their own evidence. The book spends a lot of pages explaining why America fundamentally can't afford to fight ground wars in Asia--but it works the same in reverse and is even less plausible for Japan, which has a much smaller pool of possible soldiers and almost no physical resources compared to America. (Too bad Dubya hadn't read the book before starting the war in Iraq, and perhaps Obama should have read it before ramping things up in Afghanistan...)

This fundamental problem of manpower and resources actually links to my idea for a plausible threat even though I was inclined to dismiss their thesis as soon as I knew they really did mean war in the military sense. This is actually an idea and analysis that came to me almost as soon as I opened the book and before I had read very far at all. It was obvious to me that Japan cannot and will not field a large number of troops, but is there some way they could plausibly fight a war anyway? My thought was that it could be conceivable with robots. The book was written long before that was plausible, but the science fiction authors have been there long ago. What I realized was that it might be conceivable for Japan to make a fleet of drones. Actually this is related to Rumsfeld's mumbling about asymmetric warfare. The cost of destroying an aircraft carrier with a swarm of drones would be extremely low compared to the cost of building the carrier. However, if Japan has the technology, the resources would still be a strain, but... What about the Chinese or the Russians or even the Iranians? Certainly the Chinese could do it using the students who earned masters and PhD degrees in America before they were kicked out of the country. Anyway, it's so obvious that nothing more needs to be said on that topic.

Therefore I'll loop back and point at a few of the glaring flaws in the book, just focusing on a few of the largest ones that caught my eye in the first 50 pages. On page 9 I noticed a citation of Yuddan, which was described as a Japanese bestseller that supports their position. They didn't provide an author, but if it's a bestseller then it should be easy to find, right? Maybe it's even been translated? No, they must have meant a book called 油断 (Yudan) from around 1975 by 堺屋 太一, but I'm pretty certain there was no bestseller called Yuddan, no matter how you spell it in Japanese. At that point I was expecting sloppy research, but they could have waited a bit longer, eh?

On page 29 they seemed to think the the Tokugawa Shogunate was a weak and divided government, which is basically ridiculous. Even the transition to the Meiji Restoration was relatively smooth and efficient, and the country never became fractured or seriously disrupted. Again, a book about Japan should start with a realistic understanding of Japan's history, eh?

On page 50 I saw an especially glaring example of the bias with the statement "The U.S., torn by internal dissension and bureaucratic infighting, ..." The thing that annoys me about this kind of thing is the projective aspects of it. THEY are the ones that are the masters of crippling the government based on the ideological perspective of destroying most of the functions of the government.

Getting out of the first 50 pages, but on page 198 they were arguing that America wasn't involved for the money with this gem, "...economic considerations playing an insignificant role." Again on page 200, with "... devoid of economic interests" just before twisting out "In any event, the reemergence of imperialism is intellectually challenging to a world that is essentially liberal democratic." However on the next page was the what struck me as the most plausible idea in the entire book: "Economics speaks to human greed, while politics speaks to fear." An example of a good idea from a bad source? Or more likely they borrowed it from somewhere and just forgot to mention the source?

Anyway, I mostly feel like I've written more than the book deserved. Lots of other flaws there. I forgot to say China got short shrift... Enough. Suffice it to say you should have a lot of leisure time before spend some of it with this book.

Even worse, I now confess that I wrote that much before finishing the book, and now that I've finished it, I feel I have to say more, even though I even more strongly feel the book was silly and not worth as much of a reaction as I've already written... Onward through the fog:

Some eye-catching, projective, self-contradictory, ridiculous, preposterous, other negative adjectives, or worse (including multiple adjective lists, of course) examples of rightwing bias and slant:

Page 256: "The power is there, but the thought of using it is quite alien to the American mind. Brute interference in free trade is anathema to American moral principles and the American psyche itself. But ideologies change, ...." In other words, American are deeply crazy, but we might change our minds, and history doesn't count, either.

Page 304 favorably cites Paul Wolfowitz, who writes books on crazy for a living.

Page 309 says "This [joint imperialism with the Koreans] would, of course, be a tremendous test of Japanese racism, for Japanese contempt for Korea runs as deep today as it ever did." This caught my eye mostly as a predictive statement that has been completely invalidated by current pro-Korean trends in Japan. It is possible that it was valid when they wrote it--but I did NOT see the evidence and I was living in Japan during the "today" of this book. In some ways I agree with the racism accusation, but "contempt" seems extreme unlikely and implausible as the substantive summary of the complex Japanese feelings towards Korea. I'm trying to make allowances for my having recently arrived in Japan at that time, but I can't buy it.

On page 310, "There is nothing more to conserve" with regards to energy. Absurd and extremely rightwing.

Pages 318-9 has a map predicting the state of the Pacific Ocean in 2000, and in comparison to reality it's completely incorrect, to put it politely. The funniest detail is probably the idea of North Korea being aligned with Japan.

On page 329 they say "How the [Japanese supreme] court could rule that Article 9 permits self-defense when it specifically bans the creation of an armed force is a matter best left to lawyers and theologians." Okay, so you could dismiss it as silly hyperbolic statement, except that it's part of a long section that is attempting to dismiss Japanese pacifism AND on page 328 their attempt to quote Article 9 is mangled. Poor editing is no excuse, eh?

On page 332 they argue that hundreds of bombers are cheaper than individual nuclear bombs. It would actually be possible to make the argument if they had gone into analysis of research funding, but they didn't bother.

In the next section there was a long and confusing passage where they first seemed to be arguing in favor of strategic bombing, though it eventually becomes clear that they are actually arguing against it. Or maybe the authors are on different sides of this topic and just got confused during the editing process?

Eventually that led to the hilariously naive comment on page 338 that "... Shinto Buddhism contains pacifist tendencies is beyond the scope of our discussion." Duh. They are separate religions. Is basic understanding of such fundamental knowledge supposed to be within the scope of authors claiming to write authoritatively about Japan? (No the book never mentioned the actual State Shinto and religious veneration of the emperor that was incorporated into the war effort.)

From page 390 there is a section of predictions, many of which are highly specific or even dated and therefore absolutely refuted, but all of which are completely ridiculous. My guess is that the draft of this section was the first thing the authors wrote, and then the rest of the book was an attempt to justify what they'd already decided they believed. There is a paragraph on page 401 about the 'trap of empire' that seems to doom America, but at this point the reader may be laughing to hard to notice.

As I already said, I spent too much time on this book. I do think it's a good idea to see how other people think, but it's even better to base my thinking on evidence from the real world.

Doing Nothing

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An Idealistic Economic Thought Experiment due to Doing Nothing: A History of Loafers, Loungers, Slackers, and Bums in America by Tom Lutz 

In terms of a review of the book, I mostly just want to say that it was an extremely thought-provoking book and generally quite interesting. If I had to try to reduce it to a capsule description, I would call it primarily a review of the literature—but what literature! I really hadn't thought about the breath of the topic of leisure, mostly in fiction according to the roughly 700 hundred citations in the bibliography. Or to frame it in a different way, I tend to read over 100 books/year, and I think this is one of the most thought-provoking books that I've ever read.

Hard to come up with a criticism, but I guess I could say that the scope was limited in some ways. For example, there was nothing about hunter-gatherers as slackers who naturally tend to multiply until they lose all of their slack. However, it was thinking about the book along those larger-box lines that led me to the thought experiment. I actually wonder if my ideas, which actually seem original to me, were somehow transmitted implicitly through the book. There was nothing explicit, but I wouldn't be greatly surprised to discover that Bertrand Russell or Paul Lafargue or someone else among the hundreds of authors he mentions had done an analysis along similar lines. (After I finish this description, I'm planning to attempt to contact the author to see if he did encounter anything along these lines... However, if you know of anything along these lines, your comments and pointers would be appreciated--as well as a bit of explanation how you wound up here in the first place. (Yes, Gertrude, I try to remember to look for similar blogs after I prepare one that seems unusually creative or innovative... Usually my searches come up rather dry.))

Today's thought experiment begins by dividing work into three broad categories:

1. Necessary work covers essential physical goods such as the production of food and crucial services such as garbage collection. The most important characteristic of this category is that the work needs to get done, but another important characteristic is that the demand for such goods and services is fundamentally limited. Food is a good example to work with. It's obvious that everyone need a certain amount of food to live, but you don't need two or three times that amount of food. (Actually, eating too much can even kill you.) From a historical perspective, it's crucial to note that amount of working hours required for this category of work has declined on the long term, though there are obviously major variations. Again using food as an example, hunter-gatherers in a fully loaded environment must spend all of their waking hours working to gather enough food just to survive. In earlier agricultural societies, most of the food-related work could be concentrated in certain seasons, and most of the time there was much less need for agricultural work. In modern industrial societies, only a small percentage of the population is able to produce a large surplus of food.
2. Entertainment work is for such tasks as writing books, making movies, or programming computer games, as well as non-essential but recreational services. Perhaps the most interesting characteristic of this type of work is that the consumption of the products is fundamentally limited only by the available leisure time of the consumers. We have long since passed the point where anyone could read all of the books that are published each year, let alone all of the books in a public library. The corresponding transitions for movies and computer games were more recent, but now we have the Internet, and we're completely saturated with potential uses of our leisure time. With such a surplus of available entertainment, one key factor is how to motivate the creators, but it's also important to consider the quality of the goods and how the consumers will search for the best content to occupy their limited amounts of available time.
3. Better-future work is such work as building new infrastructure and doing scientific research. There is some amount of infrastructure maintenance that really belongs in the necessary-work category, but most new infrastructure is intended to support improvements or higher economic efficiency. In the case of research, the most relevant for this category is the research into better ways to do work, so the key characteristic of this category is that what it produces then reduces the amount of time needed to perform the necessary work. If the total amount of working time remained unchanged, then that would mean more time could be directed into creating entertainment or doing more research.

This is just a rough framework for thinking, and in many cases it's hard to classify specific examples. For a complicated example, raising children seems to fit into all three categories. Before starting the actual thought experiment, it's worth noting that there is an obvious tradeoff between the last two categories. If more resources are invested in creating entertainment, then fewer resources are available for making things better and the rate of improvement will be reduced. However, we can't make such tradeoffs for the necessary-work category.

For my thought experiment, I'm deliberately ignoring a lot of complicating factors such as competition between countries and political insanity. In the specific case of international competition, I actually think you can argue the world is becoming more and more integrated across national borders, so it sort of makes sense. The situation as regards political insanity seems to be going in the opposite direction, but maybe part of the problem there is the lack of vision for a better future. (It certainly looks to me that most professional politicians are just in it for the money and thinking in the shortest time frame of the next election, whereas many (perhaps most) of the businessmen are even worse, only thinking of next quarter's profits.)

So for the thought experiment, imagine that you start with the assumption that everyone is entitled to life, and then leap to the conclusion that everyone is therefore entitled to the basic necessities of life such as food, clothing, and shelter. For the moment, don't worry about how it's paid for, but let's just assume that each human being should start out with enough to survive. Let's use food as the example because it's relatively easy to work with. You don't need an exact number, but you can calculate how much food is needed (plus a safety margin) and how many hours of work are needed to produce that amount of food, and you'll come up with a relatively small value, at least compared to the 40 hours/week that is regarded as a normal work schedule these days. (That value will come up a lot in this analysis, though it isn't a sacred number and could be changed. I'm using it mostly as a convenient reference point for a reasonable amount of work. I'm inclined to think that most people would prefer to work less but some would prefer to work more, especially if they liked their work or were especially motivated for any reason.) Of course you would need to total up all of the required work, but I'm confident that our current society has already progressed to a point where it's far fewer than 40 hours/week. For the advanced societies that I know best, I'd estimate the current value is somewhere around 5 hours/week, but that's because I think most service work is not going to qualify for the essential work category. If you simplify it by limiting it to farmers and pretend that each farmer works only 40 hours/week all year round, then the less than 1% of farmers in America would translate to less than 1% of 40 hours, which comes to less than 24 minutes per person per week, if the work of farming were actually distributed across the entire American population.

Since it would be difficult to figure out all of the essential work that belongs in the necessary work category, it would probably be better to do it from the other end, by dividing the GNP into essential and nonessential categories. In many cases it would be pretty obvious. A convenient example would be the music industry. No one would die if they couldn't listen to music, so that entire segment of the economy can be classified as nonessential. Maybe my guess of 5 hours/week for the truly essential work is too low, but certainly it's significantly less than 40 hours/week.

If the first objective is to make sure that the essential and necessary work is done, but the total amount is relatively small, how can we allocate it fairly? For the foundation of necessary work, I suggest we could try to equate it by difficulty to share the load in an equitable way, starting from the maximum load of 40 hours/week for the most pleasant kind of necessary work compared to the least pleasant kind of necessary work.

One way to do this might be by pairwise comparisons by large numbers of people. The key question would be "Would you prefer to do 40 hours/week of farming or 16 hours/week of garbage collection?" It would be especially useful to ask older people who had done several kinds of work during their careers, and their answers could be weighted more heavily. By comparing various kinds of work and various numbers of hours for large numbers of people, you would eventually have rough equivalences for the kinds of work on a average basis without having to worry about the actual preferences of individuals. From that data you could rationally design a basic economic system that would be designed to insure the essential work gets done based on a general metric of fairness.

Since the total amount of necessary work is much less than 40 hours/week, it should work out that the most pleasant kinds of necessary work would still come to less than 40 hours/week. The other kinds of necessary work would then be equated as smaller chunks. For example, there might be a broad consensus that 8 hours/week of garbage collection is equal to 24 hours/week of farming is equal to 40 hours/week of

 Different education for the different kinds. Total amount of time for first class quite limited, but must be filled, with better compensation as shorter hours. Guaranteed enough to live on, since everyone has a right to life, but working guaranteed to have more money to compensate for the lost time. People who choose to work more than needed might earn much more, but where do mega-managers fit in? Unneeded?

Free

Version 0.3

Reactions to Free by Chris Anderson

Overall the book struck me as quite thought provoking and worth a careful reading. He gets you to think about many things in new ways, often with a powerful phrase that he throws off in passing. For example he throws off a comment about the ultimate personal value of memorable experiences and made me think of an entire business model built around exploiting local climates for off-season vacations centered around live musical events.

One of the recurring themes that bothered me was advertising. He clearly regards it as a benign influence and neutral source of funding, but he never seems to consider that advertising itself has negative externalities and hidden costs. It's most revealing to consider advertising from the perspective of the people making the ads. Do you really want to deal with a highly educated and well informed audience that will carefully and accurately assess every claim in your commercials? Or would you prefer couch potatoes who simply obey the fairly obvious commands to "buy this to be happy"? Or from the perspective of the providers of the goods and services, do you really want to spend the money to have the best quality in the market? Those last increments near the top of the quality scales tend to be quite expensive. There's a much higher RoI if you have adequate quality and use a few ads to create a perception of higher quality, and perhaps nurture the imaginary needs, too, thus creating demand where none would exist. Obviously I regard advertising as a rather corrupt foundation for any economic system. A certain amount of advertising can be a lubricant, but the main point of his "free" is to exploit free goods and services as alternative forms of advertising. To me, it seems too much like treating one disease with a more dangerous disease...

However, my main conclusion was that his understanding of economics is distinctly uneven. The word "free" is powerful marketing-speak, but the value still has to go somewhere. His recurrent mentions of "time" are actually quite significant, since time is the ultimate in non-fungible and scarce resources, but I concluded that the main thrust of the book was on ways to say "free" as in beer without really meaning it.

As is often the case, here are some notes and reactions as I went through the book:

Chapter 2 was supposed to be a treatment of the misunderstood word "free", but it basically didn't say much, and not just because it was a short chapter. The basic assumption was that "free" means free as in beer, at least for the purposes of this book. The important sense of free is "meaningful and unconstrained choice", and he scarcely addresses that at all.

On page 65 he talks about Zappos free shipping policy for shoes. He does mention the higher prices this leads to, but he didn't mention the obvious and much larger problems with the Web-based business model for shoes. Certainly the first things that came to my mind were questions like: "Where have these shoes been? How many times have they been returned? Did the previous people just try them on briefly or perhaps wear them around for an hour? Were their feet clean?"

On page 76 he writes "as certain as the fact we'd once dwelled in caves." In reality only a tiny fraction of homo sapiens ever lived in caves, and even for them the caves were probably just seasonal housing. There were other places where his basic knowledge of historical or anthropological facts seemed questionable, though I didn't flag them.

Page 82 he attributes a quote to Gordon Moore: "Moore's law is a violation of Murphy's law." (sic) The citation notes are unclear, but it doesn't appear in the Wikipedia article cited for page 82 nor is there any citation for page 81. However, what really struck me was that it's nonsense and shouldn't have been used at all. Murphy's Law says that anything that can go wrong will, but there is no way to construe or interpret Murphy's Law so that Moore's Law somehow becomes a violation. Even if Moore was so confused about Murphy's Law (which I strongly doubt), the confusion shouldn't have been reproduced here. I think I managed to dig up the video of the interview that was probably supposed to be the source (based on reports in other articles). However, when I listened to the video I didn't hear this quote. (If I missed it, please let me know where it was via a comment. It's a long video and my attention might have wandered at some point...)

On page 142 he mentions "near-zero marginal cost", but that mostly got me to thinking about the spam problem, which is never mentioned in the book, though it is the ultimate example of free unto death. The closest he comes is a closing reference to "You can't compete with free" on page 230. I think it noteworthy that spam has not-quite-entirely succeeded in destroying email-based marketing by legitimate businesses.

Page 166 mentions OSS, but his numbers belie his own claims of economic significance. The potential has always been FAR greater than the reality. However, it mostly reminded me of RACS (Reverse Auction Charity Shares), which I should send to him as a suggestion... The same page mentioned the failure of a bike-loaning system in Brussels, apparently due to the competitive interference of Clear Channel. Is that an international investment of the ultraconservative company of the same name, the one that owns all those right-wing talk radio stations in America? If so, then perhaps Clear Channel deliberately prefers that such a "socialistic" business model fail even if they have to sabotage it? The American company could certainly afford to write off their minor losses in killing the idea.

Page 192 was like page 76 in the twisted interpretation of science, though evolutionary biology this time rather than anthropology. Mostly reminded me of the Chinese Granny Amazons as an alternative resolution... He should read Dawkin's Blind Watchmaker. However, my basic response is that humans aren't blind and we don't have to be wasteful with random search. He actually writes that "scattershot strategies are the best way [for search]", which shows a basic misunderstanding of heuristic approaches. The natural evolutionary scattershot approach is for the eyeless genes driving backwards to the results. (However, this thinking helps explain his own large family, as mentioned in the acknowledgements.)

On page 218 he writes in praise of the now-defunct Sun Microsystems. Even though he praises Sun's understanding of "free", it obviously didn't work out very well and no longer counts as evidence in his favor.

Page 222 is similar to Chapter two. Here he considers privacy in relation to freedom. He is arguing that some advertisers are more respectful of individual privacy than others, but he again ignores the competitive pressures. Remember that the success criteria are encoded into laws by professional politicians owned by the least ethical businessmen, whose three main criteria are "bigger is always better", "only profit counts", and "damn the externalities". Most businessmen are much better people than that, but they are NOT the ones who are buying the politicians who are writing the new laws about who owns our personal information and what can be done with it. In addition, I felt that he doesn't appreciate the deep threats imposed by the abuse of such personal information. It isn't just that our weaknesses and vulnerabilities or past mistakes might be exposed and used against us, but even our tastes and strengths can be turned against us and used to manipulate us and take away our freedoms.

On page 239 he mentions new business models, which again reminded me of RACS... He also introduced the BizSpark marketing campaign from Microsoft, which is exactly like the drug dealer giving out free samples. Start your new business with "free" Microsoft software, and Microsoft will OWN your data no matter how large you become.

The Israel Lobby

Reactions to the Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt

I suppose that anyone who writes a review about this book that is even vaguely favorable must start out by saying they're not an antisemite. Well, I'm not. However I am anti-religious, especially when it comes to governments influenced by extremely religious people, and anti-fanatic, especially when it comes to anything. The Palestinians are a Semitic people anyway, though the sources say that the word "antisemitic" is usually specific to Jews in its usage.

The metaphor that came to me a few days after I finished this book was of the balance of blind justice, but with the fulcrum off center. In other words, what the so-called Israel lobby has done is move the fulcrum so that the human rights of the Israelis have lots of leverage and influence and even power in the American political system, while the various other considerations such as the human rights of the Palestinians or even America's own foreign-policy interests are practically without weight. On a physical scale, that would be like moving the fulcrum away from the Israel side, but the political situation is different, especially in that it is more multidimensional.

Overall their description of the situation seems quite insightful and accurate to me, and I've read a lot about the American political system and world history. The situation around Israel is exceedingly unreasonable, and there must be reasons why they can't reach any political accommodations for stable peace with their neighbors. Before reading this book, I felt that the primary obstacle was just the religious fanaticism of a relatively small group of Jewish extremists, but now I feel that the Israel lobby is quite significant, too.

The rational view of the situation is that Israel is a small country that can't indefinitely maintain hostilities against vastly larger enemies. The rational solution would be to engage in reasoned discussions in search of peace--but the example of the Israel lobby in America is that all reasoned discussions can by avoided, apparently indefinitely.

Can You Win the iWoz Lottery?

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Can You Win the iWoz Lottery? A Review of iWoz by Steve Wozniak with Gina Smith

An interesting read, but mostly lacking in suasion from my perspective. The short critique is that it's like a book written by the winner of a lottery trying to encourage other people to play. His particular lottery was the innovation lottery, but the odds are about the same or lower compared to other lotteries, especially when you consider the cost of playing. Insofar as lotteries are just a special tax on people who are bad at math, and insofar as the Woz is claiming to be good at math, I feel that I have to expect better. In addition, when you consider how he struck out the second time he seriously played (with his universal remote control), even his own winning average drops to 50%.

The difference is that a regular lottery just takes a few bucks and a bit of patience to play, while the innovation lottery has much tougher requirements. First you need to have a good idea, but there are lots of great ones floating around, and his winning idea of personal computers was widely shared at the time. The second requirement is good timing as regards any technical and economic prerequisites. In the main example in the book back when Apple was founded, integrated circuits were just reaching the degree of sophistication needed for useful computers and the prices had fallen to the point where individuals could afford to buy the chips. Then there's the hard work aspect as all of the competitors race towards the big prizes. (In my interpretation, probably the most decisive moment in the story of Apple was when the campaign Steve Jobs had started succeeded in persuading the Woz to leave HP. After that the company had the key people with the time and the focus to succeed.) In his conclusion, the Woz talks about individual creativity, but his story makes it clear that the team is crucial. It was the combination of skills that made the difference, with his technical skills balancing the marketing and leadership skills that Jobs brought to the new company.

Not enough, however. There were plenty of competitors in that race, and even though the Woz felt the Apple II was technically superior, I'm convinced that there is also the element of luck. Even the Woz frequently refers to luck in the book. Too bad the book isn't currently searchable on the Web, or I'd get a word count for "luck"...

He talks a little bit about what I regard as the most important philosophic change of the period, but without much insight. He came out of the hobbyist days when it was almost expected that computers would be used by hackers who understood things in a deep way. That was the open box philosophy that was epitomized by the Apple II, and he gives many examples. However, he only nods vaguely at the Mac, which was the first major closed-box success. In my view, he even went over to the dark side in his praise of the iPod later on.

I was also troubled by some of the technical flaws of the book. Some of them probably reflect the technical limitations of his interviewer combined with his desire to make the book accessible to nontechnical readers. For example, the glossary includes EEPROM, which is essentially irrelevant to the book and collapses PROM programming to burning a singular fuse in contrast to the extremely plural reality. However, one that really bothered me as casting a doubt over the Woz's technical abilities was on page 113, where he talks about the search for a manual that listed the frequencies needed for the cross-tone generator. I feel like a real hacker would just throw the signals onto a oscilloscope and find them out observationally. He seems to regard this manual as a major technical secret? (Actually, it mostly reminded of the time I wired a cross-tone keypad into the bottom of a rotary phone so that I could pick up the phone and switch from pulse to tones, probably as part of the non-ATT long-distance phone service I was sharing with my co-residents at the Laurel House Coop back in the early '80s...)

In conclusion, I can't regard it as a great book, but a good read. The Woz comes off as a nice guy who deserved to win--but I feel the same way about many of the losers in those innovation lotteries, and there are far more losers than winners. I should try to read the new Steve Jobs biography for comparison...

Food Politics

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Discussion Questions derived from Food Politics by Marion Nestle

Quite a good book in many ways, but mostly it made me think about some extended questions and even paradoxes that were not addressed:

1. Isn't it a paradox that the food companies valued the reputation of the FDA and wanted to exploit it whenever it was possible to get approval from the FDA, but meanwhile the same companies were acting to destroy the effectiveness and ultimately the good reputation of the FDA that they were so eager to exploit?
2. Isn't it a winning situation for the food companies to make more obese people precisely because fat people need to eat more to sustain their fat?
3. Don't the food companies want inefficiency such as feeding 10 pounds of grain to cows to produce one pound of meat, even if the resulting meat is less healthy than the original grain?
4. Don't food companies prefer stupid consumers who can be more easily convinced by less expensive and less substantive advertising? Aren't naive and trusting children the best possible targets for such advertising?
5. If consumers vote with their wallets, won't the fat people win as regards food since they are the people who buy the most food? In other words, don't the economic votes of overweight people count more?
6. Isn't it a paradox for food companies to argue that food commercials pay for children's TV when there is wide agreement that less TV would be better for the children?
7. I have to ask, but what about her name? There is only one brief comment in the book that she isn't personally related to the giant food company of the same name, but I still wonder. It certainly isn't a common name and I don't think I've ever heard of anyone else named Nestle. I wonder if there was some interesting story there? Maybe she was kicked out of the family? Or maybe the coincidence inspired her to become a dietitian?

Overall, the book was extremely well prepared and meticulous. The only typo I noticed was on page 61, where it used "avalance" where it meant "avalanche". Perhaps that was a mistake in the original source that is being quoted, but in that case the error here is the lack of a "sic" notation.

Version 0.6

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.