Another pickup from Fresh Air and TED. Also, Dan Ariely sometimes does guest appearance on Marketplace.
This book has some similarities to Freakonomics, but it was more about the social experiments that he and his colleagues have done.
They are showing that we are irrational often times and the irrational behaviors are predictable (or statistically consistent). He doesn’t try to explain why that much, though.
I think this is another author that I prefer listening to that reading his/her book. Some parts were interesting, but often I couldn’t quite agree with the interpretation (or the explanation) of his experiments.
I get a lot of book references from Fresh Air and TED and I heard about Steven Pinker on both.
This book is about the recent developments in social science on human nature (”nature” vs. “nurture” is a very controversial subject). According to Mr. Pinker, the prevalent assumptions in the 20th century about human nature involved three ideas: “blank slate”, “noble savage”, and “ghost in the machine”. However, recent research and experiments show that they are not true.
“Blank slate” states that we can be anything we want to be. This idea helped greatly in the social changes in the 20th century, against many types of social oppression, discrimination, and inequality. However, this also creates unrealistic expectations from parents and well-intentioned but negatively-impacting public policies. “Noble savage” is a notion that in the natural state, we are all “good”, and that the evils in human nature is a product of modern culture. “Ghost in the machine” is an idea that the self (”ghost”) can be completely detached from the biology (”machine”).
I don’t want to go through the book literally, but the main idea of the book is that we can’t ignore our biological nature. One of the studies he included is about the affective-ness of parents (after birth) in forming children’s personalities. This type of studies are done by looking at identical/paternal twins and siblings that grew up together or separately. And it turns out the influence of parenting is almost insignificant.
It was very interesting and informative. I don’t think I agree with everything Mr. Pinker wrote, but still this is something to think about.
I heard it mentioned in The Totally Rad Show, one of many Podcasts that I follow. It was described as one of the classic American graphic novels and I have been interested in the basics of the American graphic novel histories, so I decided to give it a try.
Well, the problems for me were two folds. One is that I am not that into the more realistic painting styles of American graphic novels (I have grown up on the Japanese styles of comics). The other was that I had no previous knowledge of most of the Marvel characters (maybe just Spiderman). So, the story initially was a bit confusing and I don’t think I got all the connections and nuances that the Marvel fans would have picked up.
I guess, I am more into the “consumption” nature of comics/animation (than the “art”-y stuff).
After I started at a new company, I thought I might want to look at “project management” again. And I just searched through books on Amazon.com and decided on this book.
I thought it was very practical and had good procedural suggestions. It would have been really helpful if I was involved in a project that could have benefited from it, though.
I heard about Jill Bolte Taylor and her amazing personal account of stroke and recovery from TED and Fresh Air. I think her speech was much more entertaining. The book had more details, but after finish reading it, I think it does not have enough material for a book (despite however short it was).
I heard about this book on NPR and I thought it would be interesting. The subject was interesting, but the book read like a technical paper, not for a general public: mostly about numbers and repetitive themes and arguments.
I do hope for a better pension system, but I am not sure her book was able to convince me of her Guarantied Retirement Account plan.
I enjoyed reading it. I can see why some might say he and his book represent “bears”, but I think Robert Shiller is more about rationality and why the public’s perception of a possible infinite growth is just a dream.
I think this second edition came out in 2005, some time before all the talk about housing bubble bursting, but his analysis would correctly note the inevitable fall of the housing market.
I liked the fact that the historic prices used by him was adjusted to the consumer price index. I think this is really important for the true analysis of value growth (or shrinkage). You just can’t compare the face currency values in the historical senses.
Unfortunately I don’t think this book will change that much. We are, after all, irrational being (only being able to be rational for a short period of time).
This is the conclusion of the parallel stories of Peter Wiggin and Bean (a.k.a. Julian Delphiki) from Orson Scott Card, the author of Ender’s Game.
I didn’t think it was that good. As I said before, Mr. Card’s Hegemon series have this critical problem of making these kids to be so smart that his writings don’t have any real chance of coming close to it. I mean, his writings just fails those Ender’s Jeesh geniuses.
Anyway, I just wanted to finish the series so that I would have a closure to the series.
I wanted to try some short scifi short stories, and found this on Amazon.com. It had a pretty good user rating, so I decided to try it.
This is an anthology series from a magazine, “Fantasy and Sicence Fiction”. I never cared too much for the fantasy genre. And maybe that’s the reason, but I only found a few of the stories interesting. Maybe I should stick with someone I know…