New Books
[by Mark Safranski, a.k.a. “zen“]
Hit Half-Price Books recently….
Leadership by James MacGregor Burns
How to Create a Mind by Ray Kurzweil
Goebbels by Peter Longerich
I Will Bear Witness by Victor Klemperer
The Red Baron (Autobiography)
Memoir of a Revolutionary by Milovan Djilas
The Haunted Wood by Alexander Vassiliev and Allen Weinstein
The Coming Anarchy by Robert Kaplan
The Signal and the Noise: The Art and Science of Prediction by Nate Silver
The Haunted Wood was once groundbreaking and provocative and is now a classic of Cold War studies. Allen Weinstein, the former Archivist of the United States, died a month ago but he was better known as one of the historians who exposed that Alger Hiss was indeed the Soviet spy, traitor and secret Communist inside the Roosevelt administration State Department that Whittaker Chambers and Richard Nixon said he was, an achievement that did not endear Weinstein to the dwindling band of hardcore leftist Hiss apologists at The Nation magazine.
Milovan Djilas was a man who epitomized the same conflict as the Hiss-Chambers trial. The right hand to Tito in the Yugoslav Communist Party, Djilas was the highest ranking Communist official to become a dissident and critic, moving politically from convinced Stalinist to an advocate of free elections and liberal democracy. Djilas shrewdly analyzed the Communist nomenklatura as an oppressive and parasitic oligarchy in The New Class.
What are you reading?
July 13th, 2015 at 11:45 am
Ha! I’m partway through The Haunted Wood, but put it down a while ago. Still working through Stalin. I plan on When The Doves Disappeared after that.
July 13th, 2015 at 12:02 pm
Fred Kaplan’s John Quincy Adams (very uneven, more than a tad disjointed).
Sundown Towns (disorganized and messy, but the history is fascinating about how so many towns forcefully kept themselves all-white in the North and West especially after the Civil War).
The Conservatarian Manifesto (much gusto, great arguments)
The New Wild (Fred Pearce’s argument for invasive species as an environmental plus).
July 13th, 2015 at 3:21 pm
The Next Christendom – Philip Jenkins
Odyssey – Fagles Translation
Various JavaScript books
July 13th, 2015 at 4:25 pm
I read Signal and the Noise. What little details he shares about his methods were interesting when they relate to poker or baseball – domains with bounded variables where the odds and probabilities are known.
When he ventures into politics, is where he stumbles. In the book he criticizes old school pollsters and predictors who get fooled by their own bias instead of relying on robust statistics like he does. However, outside of games his math isn’t as iron-clad as he claims, and it caused him to ultimately fall victim to his own bias.
He did have a great string of good calls in US elections, made sweeter (for him) because they coincided with a surge in Democratic victories and Fox News defeats, but his luck ran out in May when he totally blew the UK elections. His model relied on establishing a correlation between past polls and election results to get the supposed odds. The polls were ambiguous, so he had to extrapolate and basically flip a coin between two questions. He picked the one that confirmed and reinforced his belief system and thus fell in line with all the other inferiors he looked down on in his book.
More here:
http://www.statisticsviews.com/details/news/7945151/So-what-can-we-learn-from-Nate-Silvers-mistakes.html
Even with that rookie error, all the polls were still off. The predictions didn’t take into account people lying or changing their minds or just being people with uncertainty. There’s just no good way to mathematically model fickleness.
The prediction markets were also stunningly bad. I remember being disappointed when Intrade was closed down, but after seeing how awful other prediction betting parlors performed on the UK elections, I think they should all be closed. We’re now so plugged in to information and so connected that biases get transmitted and propagated worldwide instantaneously. It now casts serious doubt on the concept of ‘wisdom of the crowds’
July 13th, 2015 at 8:28 pm
The Horse, the Wheel, and Language by David Anthony
July 14th, 2015 at 1:31 am
I’m reading Sapiens”. On deck are “Adios, America”, the new edition of “Getting Things DOne”, and “Data and Goliath”.
July 14th, 2015 at 5:34 am
Will McCants, The ISIS Apocalypse (advanced reading copy)
PW Singer & August Cole, Ghost Fleet: A novel of the next World War
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Just received, looks interesting:
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DR Worley, Orchestrating the Instruments of Power
July 15th, 2015 at 5:26 pm
Recent trip to Philadelphia
I am reading: Gordon S. Wood’s The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin
My wife is reading Jill Lepore’s Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin
July 16th, 2015 at 4:03 pm
BACH, by John Eliot Gardiner
Mao’s Way, Edward Rice
China, A Short Cultural History, by Fitzgerald
July 16th, 2015 at 4:53 pm
Bach envy, Scott!
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Did I ever tell you I went to the same “prep school” (private, ages ~9-12) as Gardiner, though I don’t particularly remember him? He hated, hated the place. I was sent there because I was being beaten too often at the first such school (ages 6-9), and at this one there were no beatings, but the headmaster frequently (and quite openly, and chastely as far as I knew) kissed all the students good night.