Omne ignotum pro magnifico

Book Review: Gabriel Weinberg and Lauren McCann, "Super Thinking: Upgrade Your Reasoning and Make Better Decisions with Mental Models", Penguin Business, 2019. If you hang around the same corners of the internet as me, there is a chance you've encountered the Farnam Street blog's " latticework of mental models " or the site  Conceptually . Both promote the idea that so-called cognitive tools or mental models can enhance one's understanding of the world and help one make better decisions, by importing concepts from various fields and applying them more broadly. Economics, psychology, philosophy, physics, etc. all have their own sets of frameworks, shortcuts and models that help their practitioners explain things and cut through complexity. Yet by taking a multidisciplinary approach and analyzing a problem from different perspectives, we gain a more well-rounded understanding and reduce our blind spots. And with a "latticework of models" w...

Book Review: Adam Rutherford, "A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Stories in Our Genes", Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2017. In the epilogue to the latest edition of The Selfish Gene ( see my review here ), Richard Dawkins marvels at modern techniques in genomics, which can reveal the geographic and demographic traits of our ancestors. As an appropriate follow-up to that book, I decided to read Adam Rutherford's A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived , which Mr. Dawkins himself apparently considers "stimulating" and "right". The title of the book seems to be inspired by A Short History of Nearly Everything , but that's just my hunch. Needless to say, A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived is not literally about everyone who every lived. Rather, it is about the history of the human species viewed through the lens of genetics (in combination with some archaeology, anthropology and so on). But in a sense it is  about every per...

Book Review: Judea Pearl and Dana Mackenzie, "The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect", Penguin Books, 2019. If you have read the LessWrong Sequences , you know that Eliezer Yudkowsky is a big fan of Judea Pearl -- he references Pearl in this , this , and  this  article among others. Someone even made this picture of Eliezer, holding Judea Pearl's book Causality : If you're unfamiliar with what I'm talking about, let's just say that Pearl's work can be used to understand how people irrationally update their beliefs, and what they should do instead. His book on Probabilistic Reasoning in Intelligent Systems is referenced by folks like MIRI in the context of getting AI to learn from probabilistic models of the world. He has won the Turing Award, the most prestigious in computer science. Unfortunately, he is also known as the father of Daniel Pearl , a journalist who was killed by terrorists in Pakistan in 2002. Judea Pearl's la...

Book Review: Hans Rosling, Ola Rosling and Anna Rosling Rönnlund, "Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World -- and Why Things Are Better Than You Think", Flatiron Books, 2018. In recent months I've looked at rules of thumb for thinking more clearly about money and about rare yet impactful events . Today I'm expanding that toolkit of heuristics with Factfulness , a book by Hans Rosling, Ola Rosling and Anna Rosling Rönnlund. The book has received praise from the likes of Bill Gates and Barack Obama, but I was also keen to read it because I knew about Hans Rosling from his first TED Talk (which I watched years ago in Geography class). And yes, Factfulness  was a joy to read. You probably know that climate experts believe that the average global temperature will get warmer over the next century. But did you know that in the last 20 years, the proportion of the world population living in extreme poverty has almost halved? Or that 80% of the world...