Ancient Worlds 5: Republic of Virtue (TV Series Review)

 

 Ancient Worlds 5: Republic of Virtue (Rome) (2010) This episode clarified, corrected, organised, added to, and reminded me of the Roman history I learned in grade 6 or 7 in Austria. It also demonstrated why we should not rely on what we learned in grade school. I had a muddled recall, with events transposed, characters poorly understood or mistaken for each other, politics not grasped. Popular history, as conveyed by Shakespeare or Robert Graves, and as confirmed in middle school history texts, makes no sense if one doesn’t have at least a timeline of the events portrayed. Yet popular history is all that most of us have. No wonder we fall for demagogues that invoke tradition and pop-culture stereotypes of our glorious past.

      This series is worth watching more than once, preferably with a reference book at hand. Marie recently found a book about the great (i.e., history-changing) battles: it helped to have this to look at during or after the episodes.
      The previous episode described Alexander’s career, which belongs in the story only because he spread his ideas of Hellenic civilisation into North Africa and northwestern India. But it was clearer than ever that he was a psychopath: his extreme narcissism, his brutality, and his ability to mesmerise his followers are typical of a psychopath. One of the speakers in this episode said he’d concluded that Caesar was a psychopath. I’d go further: I think one has to be a psychopath to want and strive for absolute political and military power. In the short run, psychopathy is a survival trait, which no doubt explains why it has never disappeared from the human gene pool, even though it is in the long run lethal to to the psychopath, and to any civilisation that rewards psychopaths.
     Rating for the series: ***

Link: Botanicula (game)

Watch the trailer for this game. Neat little movie all by itself. ;-)

Link found on Drawn: http://blog.drawn.ca/, which I also like.

Thinking, Fast and Slow (Book Review)

     Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011) Kahneman is an economics Nobel winner for his work on the effects of psychology on economic behaviour. That is, he (with his friend Amos Tversky) answered what should have been an obvious question: How do emotions, cognitive biases, etc, affect economic decisions? The answer is of course, "A lot." Essentially, we can no more avoid cognitive illusions than we can avoid visual ones. Knowing that we are seeing a visual illusion does not prevent us from seeing it: we must deliberately use tricks and methods to avoid the effects of misinterpreting what we see. Just so, we suffer from cognitive illusions, and we must learn tricks and methods that enable us to avoid the mistakes that these illusions would otherwise ensure.
     Kahneman describes the experiments he’s done to tease out these effects. At first he was merely interested in how humans actually make decisions, judgments, estimates, choices, and so on; only later did he apply his discoveries to economics. But economics is after all just another area in which we do all these things. What he’s proved is again what should be obvious: that we are anything but the logical, rational creatures that Friedman and his kind assume we are. It will take a generation or so for economics to become what it really is: a social science. Which means that the application of economic theory is more art than science.
     The average person distrusts economists for many reasons. The joke is that if you as three economists for their opinions you’ll get six answers. But a more serious criticism of economics as it is currently practiced is that it focuses almost exclusively on money, and fails to take into account that for most people the purpose of economic activity is not the amassing of money but the creation, distribution, and enjoyment of wealth. That being said, there’s no question that most people also have only the haziest concepts of what money is, what the various indicator numbers mean, and so on. The worst effects of this confusion are the superstition that money is wealth; that the financiers have some kind of esoteric insight into the economy. There is also the touchingly naive belief that accounting captures not just the truth, but the whole truth, about economic activity. Neither of these proposition is true.
     Read Kahneman. The book goes far beyond economics, and has sage advice about how to compensate for the inevitable cognitive biases and illusions. It's also a good read. ****

No Kidding (Book Review)

Myrna Kostash No Kidding: Inside the World of Teenage Girls (1987) Kostash’s account rests on many interviews and many statistics. It’s a good, if often depressing, read. The anecdotes and stories give meaning to the statistics, which haven’t changed much in the last 25 years. She’s very good at giving us both sketches and portraits of the girls. She has the story-teller’s gifts of pacing, selecting the telling detail, and the illuminating quote. These gifts also, of course, mean she’s very good at shaping the narrative to suit her purposes. She’s a persuasive writer, and never more so than when she seems to be just telling a story.
     Kostash is a natural-born reporter, which means that she focusses on the unusual and the painful. I don’t doubt the truth of what she reports (insofar as a report is an honest account of the reporter’s perceptions and experience, it’s true). But I do doubt the impression that for most teenage girls, most of the time, life is more or less awful. My own observation is that teenagers are pretty resilient. Or maybe just short-term amnesic. Their time-horizon is short, their social perception ends a few inches outside their skin, they can empathise deeply and yet be blithely unable to imagine a  point of view different than their own.
     On the other hand, some of the people (groups) she identifies are in great need of help, support, and compassion. Far too many teenagers (not just girls) grow up dysfunctional in families whose members don’t or can’t treat each other as human beings. It’s not easy to figure out reforms that could ease the burden of abuse, but I think among them there must be changes in the environment within which teenagers try to navigate. That is, the environment must make some choices easier and other choices harder. A couple of small ones: make it more expensive to buy sugar drinks, and cheaper to buy fruit. Eliminate bells in schools (we did this for over ten years at the school I taught, and we had less tardiness than when we had bells).
     This book is often heart-breaking, occasionally funny, and sometimes hopeful. Recommended. ***
     Disclosure: Kostash was a student in a freshman English class I taught at the University of Alberta.

Links: Time-travel movie and music

Found this link to a movie in progress on Scientific American:
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cocktail-party-physics/2012/04/19/quantum-casimir-effect-inspires-indie-filmmakers/
And then looked for the band that provides the music for the trailer:
http://www.bluegillespie.co.uk/
Cool stuff.

Money and Politics (2)

Adam Smith is rarely read these days, but many (especially self-styled "libertarians") invoke his name as a justification for unfettered and unregulated competition.  Here's a salutary reminder of what he really said:



http://www.huffingtonpost.com/allan-brawley/adam-smith_b_1425751.html

You can download a copy of The Wealth of Nations here:
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3300

Libertarians often invoke Henry David Thoreau. Read his Civil Disobedience. Find it here:
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/71

What the Dog Saw (Book Review)

Malcolm Gladwell, What the Dog Saw (2009) Gladwell’s talent as a reporter is to find the significant anecdote that illustrates the statistical generalisation. He also has the story-teller’s sense of timing. But his greatest skill is to present you with the Aha! moments that reveal the underlying pattern, or link apparently random bits and pieces to the larger world in which we live. His essays are like transformer toys: shift your point of view, rearrange a few items, and the car becomes a robot. When it’s well done, you have to look twice to recognise the original fender in the gauntlet protecting the weapon-arm. I won’t summarise any of his pieces: finding out for yourself will give you great pleasure. But I will tell you that I think several of his investigations imply policy changes that we should urge our governments to adopt. ***