You Scratch My Back … I’ll (maybe) …

Review: The Evolution of Cooperation by Robert Axelrod

Axelrod had a very nice idea for an experiment. Take a much-studied behavioural model – the (iterated) Prisoner’s Dilemma from game theory – and run a computer tournament between alternative strategies to try to understand the mechanisms driving cooperation.

Programs of various degrees of sophistication and complexity were submitted from experts in the field and the laurels were awarded to perhaps the least sophisticated and least complex among them. The entire strategy is clear from its name: TIT FOR TAT.

The book describes the experiment, shows how the Prisoner’s Dilemma is a reasonable model for many kinds of human interactions and explores the reasons why TIT FOR TAT was so successful.  It shows, for example, soldiers discovering the strategy for themselves during trench warfare in World War One without any face-to-face negotiation.

When run in populations, it was shown to be evolutionarily stable.  In other words, when discovered and entered even in small numbers into the population, it grows in influence, driving out more selfish strategies.

A second book delved deeper and an almost-as-simple program – TIT FOR TWO TATS – emerged as an interesting alternative strategy.

Inappropriate Behaviour

Review: Opening Skinner’s Box by Lauren Slater

The book describes 10 milestone experiments in psychology in a very quirky way.

The experiments addressed a wide range of topics including behaviour conditioning, blind obedience to authority, recovered memory, bystander response in an emergency and even one debunking psychology itself. The approaches taken very often went way outside what would be considered ethical norms today and the conclusions drawn were often counter-intuitive, showing the subjects in a very poor light and suggesting that that’s how we humans actually are.

The book is very readable, not least because the author is a perfect subject for psych-analysis herself. The book defies the norms of scientific investigation and needs to be read with a hefty dose of skepticism but I understand the facts are fairly reliable even if the conclusions can be described as colourful.

It’s a book for people-watchers.

Into Mothballs

Our May meeting convened this morning; our fourth, still enjoyable and well attended. We celebrated our continued existence with the launch (!?) of our bookmarks. (One can’t help wondering if champagne flutes would not have been more appropriate 🙂  ).

The format today was for each of us to ‘sell’ one book to the group.  Consistent with our headstrongedness (!!!) most insisted on selling at least two.  Subjects ranged from history to psychology, economics to travel and beyond. The choices seem to have struck a number of chords as the meeting concluded with a number of library transactions.

Brendan offered war and history:

• Afghan Guerilla Warfare: Mujahideen Tactics in the Soviet Afghan War by Ali Jalali and Lester Grau
• The Man Who Invented Hitler by David Lewis

Michael went for weight with about 2000 pages of history 🙂 :

• Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution by Simon Schama
• The Decisive Battles of the Western World (Volume 1) by J.F.C. Fuller

Don restrained his mathematical gene and tried psychology and behaviour with:

• Opening Skinner’s Box by Lauren Slater
• The Evolution of Cooperation by Robert Axelrod

Tony reminded us “we are all Keynesians now” by opting for:

• The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money by John Maynard Keynes
• On Keynesian Economics and the Economics of Keynes by Axel Leijonhufvud
• The Courage to Act: A Memoir of a Crisis and Its Aftermath by Ben Bernanke

Richard, just returned from Morocco, regaled us with the pleasure of dipping into familiar poetry around a campfire  (no specific title recommended) and counselled us to trust our parents by choosing a hand-me-down classic such as:

• The Path to Rome by Hilaire Belloc

Eugene offered optimistic (imho realistic) statistics and did a bit of member psych-analysis, concluding that we are a bunch of people with a deep “distrust of woo” who were in need of a title with God in it so he suggested:

• The Mind of God by Paul Davies
• Factfulness by Hans Rosling

Richard suggested a theme for a future meeting:

Books we’re tempted to read but really shouldn’t

… because deep down there’s something awful about them.

Brendan also introduced us to Document Number Nine, by the Chinese Communist Party, also known as a Briefing on the Current Situation in the Ideological Realm.

Summer is upon us and the club is being put in mothballs for a few months. Our next meeting is pencilled in for the third Thursday of September (20th). Get it in your diary.

Have a great summer. Stay in touch on WhatsApp.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier … Schoolboy

The George Smiley Trilogy by John le Carré

• Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
• The Honourable Schoolboy
• Smiley’s People

I’m gasping for breath.  I’ve just finished reading parts I and II and I’m giddy from the adrenaline rush.  I had to write this even before launching into the third instalment. If I could absorb it right away by osmosis, I’d be game.

Le Carré is always great and, of course, we all know parts I and III from the incredible BBC series of the late 70’s when George Smiley became forever Alec Guiness, but there is nothing quite like reading it.  And I didn’t know the Schoolboy, Jerry Westerby; what an incredible and inscrutable character!

I galloped through the book and I’ll have to read it again to understand everything that happened but my evaluation is:

I wish you all finish a book this year feeling like I feel finishing this one

Check out Ted Scheinman’s article for a more coherent but equally effusive review of the complete oeuvre of le Carré.

The Trouble with Physics

We accept that science (unlike religion, say) is a rational, objective search for verifiable truth. It is not subject to orthodoxy

In this 2006 book, physicist/cosmologist Lee Smolin argues that this is no longer so.  It has become virtually impossible for researchers to get funding for novel research.  A small number of approaches (e.g. string theory) are the established  orthodoxy of modern physics and to stray outside these is to invite ridicule and exclusion.  This, despite the fact that these approaches are still at the speculative stage and not yet verified (indeed some are unlikely to be verifiable). Smolin makes the point that physics has not had a significant breakthrough in 30 years (and that was 12 years ago).  The true scientific approach has been subverted by a new brand of dominant and dogmatic high priests.

The book created something of a storm across the wider scientific community in many other branches of science where the same limitations have come to apply.

Smolin writes well and accessibly,  an interesting and thought-provoking read which cautions against assumptions that science is objective and free from orthodoxy

 

50 Shades of Enlightenment

Napoleon the Great by Andrew Roberts
The Dream of Enlightenment by Anthony Gottlieb
Two Fine Men by Arturo Pérez-Reverte

We often imagine we live at the most exciting time in history where change is constant and succeeding generations have entirely different life experiences. In previous centuries, change was slow. However, that’s not what my reading of the last several months tells me. I’ve become obsessed with the Enlightenment, an amazing time when the modern world was invented, where human rights mounted on the stage and science replaced religion. I’ve been reading it as philosophy, as history, as biography and even as adventure novel.

Gottlieb’s book is a decent roundup of the enlightenment thinkers, indispensable for me as I knew so little about them.  Pérez-Reverte’s novel describes two gentlemen travelling from Madrid to Paris in 1780 to buy all 28 volumes of Diderot’s proscribed Encylopédie and the efforts of the establishment, whose social and cultural hegemony was threatened by new ideas, to thwart them.

However the most daunting (800 pages) but immensely satisfying of the three books is Roberts’ amazing biography. Where I expected to be affronted by wild ambition, cruelty and arrogance, I encountered Enlightenment Man.  Yes, he was a military genius, but that’s of little interest to me. He was that thing, a benevolent dictator, which probably cuts little ice among 21st century liberals.  The thing is: he lasted long enough (16 years) to establish the ideals of the French Revolution which had been subverted in the Reign of Terror so that even after the restitution of the monarchy, they couldn’t be undone. This book makes it clear it was the genius of Napoleon and his ability to be interested in the minutiae of his world that allowed him create a legacy that endured. The most amazing discovery for me was his charisma and generosity. I liked him, most of the time.

So when we plan our Christmas lunch and do that “who from history would you invite?” thing, I want Napoleon there.