Not Even Wrong

String theory sceptic, Peter Woit discusses, among other subjects, his controversial book on the science of String Theory, Not Even Wrong

A Monkey Business

James Robertson reviews David Boyd Haycock's latest book A Monkey Business, about the history of man's quest for immortality

‘To philosophise,’ Montaigne once wrote, ‘is to learn to die.’ He was paraphrasing Cicero and making an ancient point — only by leading examined lives can we reconcile ourselves to the inevitability of our deaths. The legendary sanguinity of philosophers such as Socrates and Epicurus on their deathbeds seems to bear witness to the truth of the aphorism. In Mortal Coil, however, David Boyd Haycock has written a compelling history of man’s scientific search for longer life, one that reminds us of the many enlightened minds who wanted more than the consolations of philosophy...

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Kierkegaard's Either/Or

Nigel Warburton has resumed his podcasting of his book Philosophy: The Classics, with a chapter which featured in later editions only, on Kierkegaard's Either/Or.

The Forsaken

Sunday Times review of The Forsaken: From the Great Depression to the Gulags by Tim Tzouliadis

During the Great Depression of the 1930s, thousands of Americans left their homes and emigrated to the Soviet Union in search of a better life. They came from every walk of life (farmers, engineers, salesmen, cooks and clerks), but nearly all of them were from their country's 13m unemployed. Disillusioned with America, they placed their hopes in the “economic miracle” of Stalin's Five-Year Plan. At a time when the capitalist system appeared doomed, the USSR had growth and jobs. Perhaps they even thought that they would find a fairer, more humane society. People sold up everything to make the journey east. They believed they were departing for the “promised land”...

full review

The Physiology of Truth

From the latest New York Review of Books, a survey of the life work of Jean-Pierre Changeux, including his most recent, The Physiology of Truth, along with other neuroscience-related literature, such as V.S. Ramachandran's Phantoms in the Brain and Gerald Edelman's A Universe of Consciousness:

Jean-Pierre Changeux is France's most famous neuroscientist. Though less well known in the United States, he has directed a famous laboratory at the Pasteur Institute for more than thirty years, taught as a professor at the Collège de France, and written a number of works exploring "the neurobiology of meaning." Aside from his own books, Changeux has published two wide-ranging dialogues about mind and matter, one with the mathematician Alain Connes and the other with the late French philosopher Paul Ricoeur...

full review

Austrian Theory of the Trade Cycle

Free audiobook download of the Austrian Theory of the Trade Cycle, which was compiled in 1996 by Richard Ebeling, and includes essays by Roger Garrison, Ludwig von Mises, Gottfried Haberler, Murray Rothbard, and Friedrich Hayek.

Hayek's Challenge

Bruce Caldwell talks about his book Hayek's Challenge: An Intellectual Biography of F.A. Hayek in an excellent hour-long conversation with Will Wilkinson.

related: Jason Steorts's review in National Review. Excerpt:

As Hayek's ideas matured, he became increasingly critical of developments within mainstream economics; his works evolved in striking—and sometimes seemingly contradictory—ways. Caldwell is ideally suited to explain the complex evolution of Hayek's thought, and his analysis here is nothing short of brilliant, impressively situating Hayek in a broader intellectual context, unpacking the often difficult turns in his thinking, and showing how his economic ideas came to inform his ideas on the other social sciences. Hayek is fortunate in his biographer. Hayek's Challenge is a success, and Caldwell proves himself capable of presenting Hayek's ideas—in all fields—with both depth and clarity.

The Cult of the Presidency

Gene Healy essay adapted from his new book The Cult of the Presidency: America's Dangerous Devotion to Executive Power:

"I ain't running for preacher," Republican presidential candidate Phil Gramm snarled to religious right activists in 1995 when they urged him to run a campaign stressing moral themes. Several months later, despite Gramm's fund raising prowess, the Texas conservative finished a desultory fifth place in the Iowa caucuses and quickly dropped out of the race. Since then, few candidates have made Gramm's mistake. Serious contenders for the office recognize that the role and scope of the modern presidency cannot be so narrowly confined. Today's candidates are running enthusiastically for national preacher — and much else besides.

In the revival tent atmosphere of Barack Obama's campaign, the preferred hosanna of hope is "Yes we can!" We can, the Democratic front-runner promises, not only create "a new kind of politics" but "transform this country," "change the world," and even "create a Kingdom right here on earth." With the presidency, all things are possible..

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Wilful Blindness

In this hour-long TV interview, Andrew McCarthy discusses his book Wilful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad with radio host Hugh Hewitt.

Publishers Weekly:

Andrew McCarthy, the prosecutor responsible for leading the investigation of Blind Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman and others involved in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing dissects the miscues between federal agencies that led to that event while laying bare the challenges facing the war on terror today. The pre-1993 comedy of errors begins with the CIA's decision to funnel arms and money to Afghanistan during the Soviet-Afghan war and continues with inexplicable lapses of communication between the State Department and immigration officials (despite having been placed on a State Department terror watchlist, the sheikh travels freely to the United States). The most enduring oversight, however, at least from McCarthy's perspective, is the refusal among academics and political leaders to confront fundamentalist Islamic tenets, the 800-pound gorilla that is somehow always in the middle of the room when terror strikes. The jihadist philosophy that guided the Blind Sheikh is traced through generations of Islamic thinkers to the Prophet Mohammed himself.

Philosophy Interviews

Wonderful collection of Bryan Magee's highly regarded TV interviews with philosophers is freely available here, and includes:

A.J. Ayer on Logical Positivism
Geoffrey Warnock on Kant
Hilary Putnam on the Philosophy of Science
Hubert Dreyfus on Husserl and Heidegger
J.P. Stern on Nietzsche
John Passmore on Hume
John Searle on Wittgenstein
Michael Ayers on Locke and Berkeley
W.V. Quine on his own ideas, and
Sidney Morgenbesser on the Pragmatists

related: Transcripts of several of these interviews were later compiled in the book The Great Philosophers: An Introduction to Western Philosophy

The Legacy of Islamic Anti-Semitism

Review of Andrew Bostom's follow-up to The Legacy of Jihad:

Particularly since the late, lifelong Muslim Brother, Yasser Arafat, shifted anti-Israel jihad into fifth gear in September 2000, several Middle East and Islamic scholars have repeatedly asserted that 20th and 21st century Islamic anti-Semitism sprang solely from Nazi and European Christian influence.

Even now, Islamophiles like Bernard Lewis preach (as it were) that virulent Jew-hatred is not inherent to Islam--but rather, anti-Semitism migrated to the Middle East with European colonialism. The Quran uses "hard words ... about the Jews," even Lewis admits. Yet under Islamic rule, he claims they were "only rarely subject to persecution" and "their situation was never as bad as in Christendom at its worst ... "

Dr. Andrew G. Bostom's extensive, scientific and largely unprecedented new book, The Legacy of Islamic Anti-Semitism: From Sacred Texts to Solemn History, definitively disproves such claims...

The Charming Peasant Life of Pre-Industrial Europe

Don Boudreaux, at Cafe Hayek, quotes William Manchester's 1992 book A World Lit Only By Fire on the romantically rustic lifestyles of peasants in late-medieval and even Renaissance Europe, a world sadly lost after mankind opted for carbon-burning industrialisation instead:

Lying at the end of a narrow, muddy lane, his rambling edifice of thatch, wattles, mud, and dirty brown wood was almost obscured by a towering dung heap in what, without it, would have been the front yard. The building was large, for it was more than a dwelling. Beneath its sagging roof were a pigpen, a henhouse, cattle sheds, corncribs, straw and hay, and, last and least, the family's apartment, actually a single room whose walls and timbers were coated with soot. According to Erasmus, who examined such huts, "almost all the floors are of clay and rushes from the marshes, so carelessly renewed that the foundation sometimes remains for twenty years, harboring, there below, spittle and vomit and wine of dogs and men, beer...remnants of fishes, and other filth unnameable. Hence, with the change of weather, a vapor exhales which in my judgment is far from wholesome."

The centerpiece of the room was a gigantic bedstead, piled high with straw pallets, all seething with vermin. Everyone slept there, regardless of age or gender -- grandparents, parents, children, grandchildren, and hens and pigs -- and if a couple chose to enjoy intimacy, the others were aware of every movement. In summer they could even watch.....

If this familial situation seems primitive, it should be borne in mind that these were prosperous peasants. Not all of their neighbors were so lucky. Some lived in tiny cabins of crossed laths, stuffed with grass or straw, inadequately shielded from rain, snow, and wind. They lacked even a chimney; smoke from the cabin's fire left through a small hole in the thatched roof -- where, unsurprisingly, fires frequently broke out. These homes were without glass windows or shutters; in a storm, or in frigid weather, openings in the walls could only be stuffed with straw, rags -- whatever was handy....

Typically, three years of harvests could be expected for one year of famine. The years of hunger were terrible. The peasants might be forced to sell all they owned, including their pitifully inadequate clothing, and be reduced to nudity in all seasons. In the hardest times they devoured bark, roots, grass; even white clay. Cannibalism was not unknown. Strangers and travelers were waylaid and killed to be eaten, and there are tales of gallows being torn down -- as many as twenty bodies would hang from a single scaffold -- by men frantic to eat the warm flesh raw.

Beyond the Hoax

Michael Shermer on Alan Sokal's new book about his famous hoax:

Decades of careful and extensive research into cognition and the psychology of how beliefs are formed show that none of us simply gather facts and draw conclusions from them in an inductive process. Most of us, most of the time, arrive at our beliefs for a host of psychological and social reasons that have little or nothing to do with logic, reason, empiricism, or data. Most of our beliefs are shaped by our parents, our siblings, our peer groups, our teachers, our mentors, our professional colleagues, and by the culture at large. We form and hold those beliefs because they provide emotional comfort, because they fit well with our lifestyles or career choices, or because they work within the larger context of our family dynamics or social network. Then we build back into those beliefs reasons for why we hold them. This process is driven by two well-known cognitive biases: the hindsight bias, where once an event has happened or a belief is formed it is easy to look back and reconstruct not only how it happened or was formed, but also why it had to be that way and not some other way; and the confirmation bias, in which we seek and find confirmatory evidence in support of already existing beliefs and ignore or reinterpret disconfirmatory evidence...

full review

The Happiness Hypothesis

Jonathan Haidt discusses his 2006 'positive psychology' book The Happiness Hypothesis with Will Wilkinson on this recent episode of Bloggingheads TV.

related: Links to reviews

The Blind Watchmaker

Good old BBC2 Horizon documentary on Richard Dawkins's book The Blind Watchmaker (in 5 parts).

Understanding The Koran

Bill Warner:

Have you ever heard someone say: “What we need is a new translation of the Koran.” What they really mean is that we need a Koran we can read and understand. The difficulties of reading the Koran are notorious and common.

The Koran is repetitious and chaotic. Who do you know who has read the Koran and says that they understand it? The muddled chaos is passed off as profoundness. The confusion is proof of the Koran’s deep wisdom. Right. But, if the Koran were handed to an English teacher, it would receive an F as a grade. And as it turns out, the translation has almost nothing to do with the problem...

“An Introduction to Austrian Economics” by Thomas Taylor

New, free, audiobook version of Thomas C. Taylor's 1980 An Introduction to Austrian Economics.

Text version here

Libertarian Paternalism

Evan Goldstein:

"You see that?" Richard H. Thaler asks as we ride down picturesque Lake Shore Drive in Chicago. Thaler knows the route well. He travels it every day on his commute home from the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business, where he is a professor of behavioral science and economics. At the moment, he is excitedly jabbing his finger toward an approaching curve in the road, telling me that it is the scene of numerous accidents caused by drivers who fail to sufficiently reduce their speed. Then he directs my attention to a grid of lines that appear on the road ahead of us: Evenly spaced at first, as we near the apex of the curve, the lines begin to bunch closer together, which makes us feel like we are speeding up.

As Thaler taps the brakes and gently steers into the bend, he explains how the tightly spaced lines trigger an instinct that causes drivers to slow down. With evident glee, he notes that Chicago is effectively exploiting — to society's benefit — one of the many ways in which human perception is flawed. Or, as Thaler puts it, drivers are being "nudged" toward safety.

What does a peculiar pattern on the road have to do with fixing the nation's health-care woes, protecting the environment, resolving the thorny issue of gay marriage, and increasing donations to charity? Everything, according to Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein, a professor of law and political science at the University of Chicago. They are authors of a new book, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness (Yale University Press), in which they articulate an approach to designing social and economic policies that incorporates an understanding of people's cognitive limitations.

They call this governing philosophy "libertarian paternalism." That is not an oxymoron, they insist in their book. Rather it is a corrective to the longstanding assumption of policy makers that the average person is capable of thinking like Albert Einstein, storing as much memory as IBM's Big Blue, and exercising the willpower of Mahatma Gandhi. That is simply not how people are, they say. In reality human beings are lazy, busy, impulsive, inert, and irrational creatures highly susceptible to predictable biases and errors. That's why they can be nudged in socially desirable directions...

related: Richard Thaler discusses the concept of libertarian paternalism with Russ Roberts in this podcast

Ed Glaeser makes the case against 'soft paternalism' in
this one

Here Comes Everybody

Timothy Lee reviews Clay Shirky's new book on the Digital Age Here Comes Everybody. Sample:

One of the most talked-about consequences of the rise of digital communications technologies is the turmoil these have unleashed in the publishing industries. Newspapers and magazines, book and music publishers, and Hollywood studios are all feeling squeezed as the printing and distribution services they provide become less and less valuable.

Shirky points out that this turmoil is not new; indeed, the printing press itself unleashed similar turmoil when it was first introduced to Europe in the 15th century. For centuries, scribes had held an honored place in society, propagating society's written culture at a time when the vast majority of people were illiterate. But the printing press suddenly called the scribes' privileged position into question by drastically reducing the cost of creating books. Suddenly, the scribes' time-honored skills were a lot less valuable than they used to be.

Shirky tells the amusing story of an Abbot named Johannes Trithemius. In 1492—a half-century after Gutenberg's first printing press—he wrote a treatise on the superiority of the scrivener's life to the vulgarity of movable type. But Trithemius had a problem: he wanted his book to reach a broad audience, and that would have been impossible if he had relied on his fellow scribes to reproduce the book by hand. So he had the book printed...

related: In-depth discussion about the book between Shirky and interviewer Will Wilkinson here

Kluge

Gary Marcus discusses his latest book on the nature of the mind and the brain, Kluge, with Carl Zimmer in this Bloggingheads diavlog.

Amazon review:

In this lucid and revealing book, Marcus argues that the mind is not an elegantly designed organ but rather a "kluge," a clumsy, cobbled-together contraption. He unveils a fundamentally new way of looking at the human mind -- think duct tape, not supercomputer -- that sheds light on some of the most mysterious aspects of human nature.

related article:Total Recall:

How much would you pay to have a small memory chip implanted in your brain if that chip would double the capacity of your short-term memory? Or guarantee that you would never again forget a face or a name?

There’s good reason to consider such offers. Although our memories are sometimes spectacular — we are very good at recognizing photos, for example — our memory capacities are often disappointing. Faulty memories have been known to lead to erroneous eyewitness testimony (and false imprisonment), to marital friction (in the form of overlooked anniversaries) and even death (sky divers have been known to forget to pull their ripcords — accounting, by one estimate, for approximately 6 percent of sky-diving fatalities). The dubious dynamics of memory leave us vulnerable to the predations of spin doctors (because a phrase like “death tax” automatically brings to mind a different set of associations than “estate tax”), the pitfalls of stereotyping (in which easily accessible memories wash out less common counterexamples) and what the psychologist Timothy Wilson calls “mental contamination.” To the extent that we frequently can’t separate relevant information from irrelevant information, memory is often the culprit.

All this becomes even more poignant when you compare our memories to those of the average laptop. Whereas it takes the average human child weeks or even months or years to memorize something as simple as a multiplication table, any modern computer can memorize any table in an instant — and never forget it. Why can’t we do the same?...