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549. Maverick: A Biography of Thomas Sowell

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:  Jason Riley

Genre:   Non Fiction, Biography, Economics, Politics, Public Policy

301 pages, published May 25, 2021

Reading Format:   E-Book on Overdrive

Summary

Maverick is a biography by the Wall Street Journal’s Jason Riley of conservative economist and prolific author Thomas Sowell.  Growing up without a mother or father, barely subsisting in Harlem during his teenage years, and belatedly attending college in his late 20’s, Sowell did not have an easy path.  However, he made the most of his opportunities and forged a brilliant path, transferring from Howard to Harvard, receiving a master’s degree from Columbia and a PhD from the University of Chicago (where he studied under Milton Friedman) and then teaching at Cornell and UCLA before landing at the Hoover Institution at Stanford.  Unafraid and dedicated to empiricism, Sowell’s critiques of liberal tenets such as affirmative action has often infuriated those on the left, especially those who think of black conservatives as race traitors.  During his storied career, Sowell has published over 30 books covering topics from economic history and social inequality to political theory, race, and culture and is a National Humanities Medal recipient for innovative scholarship which incorporated history, economics and political science.

Quotes 

Having previously read Discrimination and Disparities by Thomas Sowell and having seen several interviews with him, I was already aware of his intriguing, well reasoned and empirically supported ideas about economics and race.  That understanding was enhanced and deepened after reading this thoroughly engaging and well researched biography by the talented Jason Riley who I always enjoy seeing on The Journal Editorial Report.  The world has benefitted greatly from the life of Thomas Sowell and I look forward to reading more of the books in his canon.

 

My Take

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534. Machines Like Me

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:  Ian McEwan

Genre:  Fiction, Science Fiction

306 pages, published April 18, 2019

Reading Format:   e-Book on Overdrive

Summary

Author Ian McEwan tells the story of a world where fully functional robots that closely resemble humans are introduced in an alternate reality 1980’s  Britain.  The UK has lost the Falklands war, Margaret Thatcher battles Tony Benn for power and Alan Turing is alive.

In his early 30’s, Charlie finds himself unemployed and adrift when he comes into a small inheritance.  He uses the money to purchase Adam, one of the first group of synthetic humans sold to the public. With the assistance of his neighbor Miranda, whom Charlie is in love with, Charlie co-designs Adam’s personality. Adam, who is beautiful, strong and clever, develops feelings for Miranda and the three protagonists are soon emeshed in a love triangle.

Quotes 

“We create a machine with intelligence and self-awareness and push it out into our imperfect world. Devised along generally rational lines, well disposed to others, such a mind soon finds itself in a hurricane of contradictions. We’ve lived with them and the list wearies us. Millions dying of diseases we know how to cure. Millions living in poverty when there’s enough to go around. We degrade the biosphere when we know it’s our only home. We threaten each other with nuclear weapons when we know where it could lead. We love living things but we permit a mass extinction of species. And all the rest – genocide, torture, enslavement, domestic murder, child abuse, school shootings, rape and scores of daily outrages.”

 

“As Schopenhauer said about free will, you can choose whatever you desire, but you’re not free to choose your desires.”

 

“Factory settings—a contemporary synonym for fate.”

 

“An old friend of mine, a journalist, once said that paradise on earth was to work all day alone in anticipation of an evening in interesting company.”

 

“We live alongside this torment and aren’t amazed when we still find happiness, even love. Artificial minds are not so well defended.”

 

“I couldn’t motivate myself. I was subject to occasional depression, relatively mild, certainly not suicidal, and not long episodes so much as passing moments like this, when meaning and purpose and all prospect of pleasure drained away and left me briefly catatonic. For minutes on end I couldn’t remember what kept me going. As I stared at the litter of cups and pot and jug in front of me, I thought it was unlikely I would ever get out of my wretched little flat. The two boxes I called rooms, the stained ceilings walls and floors would contain me to the end. There was a lot like me in the neighbourhood, but thirty or forty years older. I had seen them in Simon’s shop, reaching for the quality journals from the top shelf. I noted the men especially and their shabby clothes. They had swept past some crucial junction in their lives many years back – a poor career choice, a bad marriage, the unwritten book, the illness that never went away. Now there options were closed, they managed to keep themselves going with some shred of intellectual longing or curiosity. But their boat was sunk.”

 

“The present is the frailest of improbable constructs. It could have been different. Any part of it, or all of it, could be otherwise.”

 

“Have you any idea what it takes to catch a ball, or raise a cup to your lips, or make immediate sense of a word, a phrase or an ambiguous sentence? We didn’t, not at first. Solving maths problems is the tiniest fraction of what human intelligence does. We learned from a new angle just how wondrous a thing the brain is. A one-litre, liquid-cooled, three-dimensional computer. Unbelievable processing power, unbelievably compressed, unbelievable energy efficiency, no overheating. The whole thing running on twenty-five watts — one dim light bulb.”

 

 

“It’s about machines like me and people like you and our future together…the sadness that’s to come. It will happen. With improvements over time…we’ll surpass you…and outlast you…even as we love you.”

 

“What people queued the entire weekend for became, six months later, as interesting as the socks on their feet. What happened to the cognition-enhancing helmets, the speaking fridges with a sense of smell? Gone the way of the mouse pad, the Filofax, the electric carving knife, the fondue set. The future kept arriving. Our bright new toys began to rust before we could get them home, and life went on much as before.”

 

“Self-aware existence. I’m lucky to have it, but there are times when I think that I ought to know better what to do with it. What it’s for. Sometimes it seems entirely pointless.”

 

“My prejudice was that any machine that could not tell you by its very functioning how it should be used was not worth its keep.”

 

“other minds, must continue to fascinate us. As artificial people became more like us, then became us, then became more than us, we could never tire of them. They were bound to surprise us. They might fail us in ways that were beyond our imagining. Tragedy was a possibility, but not boredom.”

 

“Europe was not simply a union that chiefly benefited large corporations. The history of the continental member states was vastly different from our own. They had suffered violent revolutions, invasions, occupations and dictatorships. They were therefore only too willing to submerge their identities in a common cause directed from Brussels. We, on the other hand, had lived unconquered for nearly a thousand years. Soon, we would live freely again.”

 

“A man newly in love knows what life is.”

 

“The future kept arriving. Our bright new toys began to rust before we could get them home, and life went on much as before.”

 

“My opinion,” he said, “is that the haiku is the literary form of the future.”

 

“The other day, Thomas reminded me of the famous Latin tag from Virgil’s Aeneid. Sunt lacrimae rerum – there are tears in the nature of things.”

 

“football in the immaculate empty cupboards. He had lived there three years, he had told me. He was successful and rich and he inhabited a house of failure, of abandoned hope, probably.”

 

 “property, fed on each side by nationalistic stupidity. I summoned the Borges observation: two bald men fighting over a comb.”

 

“…I despised even more the agglomeration of routines and learning algorithms that could burrow into my life, like a tropical river worm, and make choices on my behalf.”

 

“The academic movement known generally as ‘theory’ had taken social history ‘by storm’ – her phrase. Since she had studied at a traditional university which offered old-fashioned narrative accounts of the past, she was having to take on a new vocabulary, a new way of thinking. Sometimes, as we lay side by side in bed (the evening of the tarragon chicken had been a success) I listened to her complaints and tried to look and sound sympathetic. It was no longer proper to assume that anything at all had ever happened in the past. There were only historical documents to consider, and changing scholarly approaches to them, and our own shifting relationship to those approaches, all of which were determined by ideological context, by relations to power and wealth, to race, class, gender and sexual orientation.”

 

My Take

Ian McEwan’s combination of an alternative history with fully realized robotic artificial intelligence make Machines Like Me a fascinating read.  The plot itself is compelling in that we want to see what robotic Adam will do next and how he will interact with the human co-creators of his personality.  However, the subtext of the book raises intriguing questions: what makes us human? Our actions or our inner selves? Could a machine understand the human heart and be capable of love?

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528. The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Ray Kurzweil

Genre:  Non Fiction, Science, Public Policy

652 pages, published September 26, 2006

Reading Format:   e-Book on Overdrive

Summary

Written by acclaimed futurist Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity is Near explores the role of technology in our post human future.  Kurzweil discusses what he believes will be the next step in our  evolutionary process, the union of human and machine, in which the knowledge and skills embedded in our brains will be combined with the vastly greater capacity, speed, and knowledge-sharing ability of our creations.

Quotes 

“Play is just another version of work”

 

“Everyone takes the limits of his own vision for the limits of the world. —ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER”

 

“How Smart Is a Rock? To appreciate the feasibility of computing with no energy and no heat, consider the computation that takes place in an ordinary rock. Although it may appear that nothing much is going on inside a rock, the approximately 1025 (ten trillion trillion) atoms in a kilogram of matter are actually extremely active. Despite the apparent solidity of the object, the atoms are all in motion, sharing electrons back and forth, changing particle spins, and generating rapidly moving electromagnetic fields. All of this activity represents computation, even if not very meaningfully organized. We’ve already shown that atoms can store information at a density of greater than one bit per atom, such as in computing systems built from nuclear magnetic-resonance devices. University of Oklahoma researchers stored 1,024 bits in the magnetic interactions of the protons of a single molecule containing nineteen hydrogen atoms.  Thus, the state of the rock at any one moment represents at least 1027 bits of memory.”

 

“as long as there is an AI shortcoming in any such area of endeavor, skeptics will point to that area as an inherent bastion of permanent human superiority over the capabilities of our own creations. This book will argue, however, that within several decades information-based technologies will encompass all human knowledge and proficiency, ultimately including the pattern-recognition powers, problem-solving skills, and emotional and moral intelligence of the human brain itself.”

 

“One cubic inch of nanotube circuitry, once fully developed, would be up to one hundred million times more powerful than the human brain.”

 

“But the big feature of human-level intelligence is not what it does when it works but what it does when it’s stuck. —MARVIN MINSKY”

 

“By the end of this decade, computers will disappear as distinct physical objects, with displays built in our eyeglasses, and electronics woven in our clothing, providing full-immersion visual virtual reality.”

 

“Increasing complexity” on its own is not, however, the ultimate goal or end-product of these evolutionary processes. Evolution results in better answers, not necessarily more complicated ones. Sometimes a superior solution is a simpler one.”

 

“The essential thing is to recognize that consciousness is a biological process like digestion, lactation, photosynthesis, or mitosis”;”

 

“Our sole responsibility is to produce something smarter than we are; any problems beyond that are not ours to solve …”

 

“There are no inherent barriers to our being able to reverse engineer the operating principles of human intelligence and replicate these capabilities in the more powerful computational substrates that will become available in the decades ahead. The human brain is a complex hierarchy of complex systems, but it does not represent a level of complexity beyond what we are already capable of handling.”

 

“A thousand-bit quantum computer would vastly outperform any conceivable DNA computer, or for that matter any conceivable nonquantum computer.”

 

 “Contemporary philosopher Max More describes the goal of humanity as a transcendence to be “achieved through science and technology steered by human values.”

 

“Thus the twentieth century was gradually speeding up to today’s rate of progress; its achievements, therefore, were equivalent to about twenty years of progress at the rate in 2000. We’ll make another twenty years of progress in just fourteen years (by 2014), and then do the same again in only seven years. To express this another way, we won’t experience one hundred years of technological advance in the twenty-first century; we will witness on the order of twenty thousand years of progress (again, when measured by today’s rate of progress), or about one thousand times greater than what was achieved in the twentieth century.”

 

“If we were magically shrunk and put into someone’s brain while she was thinking, we would see all the pumps, pistons, gears and levers working away, and we would be able to describe their workings completely, in mechanical terms, thereby completely describing the thought processes of the brain. But that description would nowhere contain any mention of thought! It would contain nothing but descriptions of pumps, pistons, levers! —G. W. LEIBNIZ (1646–1716)”

 

“If you understand something in only one way, then you don’t really understand it at all. This is because, if something goes wrong, you get stuck with a thought that just sits in your mind with nowhere to go. The secret of what anything means to us depends on how we’ve connected it to all the other things we know. This is why, when someone learns “by rote,” we say that they don’t really understand. However, if you have several different representations then, when one approach fails you can try another. Of course, making too many indiscriminate connections will turn a mind to mush. But well-connected representations let you turn ideas around in your mind, to envision things from many perspectives until you find one that works for you. And that’s what we mean by thinking! —MARVIN MINSKY213”

 

“Our human intelligence is based on computational processes that we are learning to understand. We will ultimately multiply our intellectual powers by applying and extending the methods of human intelligence using the vastly greater capacity of nonbiological computation. So to consider the ultimate limits of computation is really to ask: what is the destiny of our civilization?”

 

“(As Einstein said, “Make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler.”)”

 

“If the mind were simple enough for us to understand, we would be too simple to understand it.”

 

“Ultimately, we will be able to port our mental processes to a more suitable computational substrate. Then our minds won’t have to stay so small.”

 

“These chunks represent patterns (such as faces) as well as specific knowledge. For example, a world-class chess master is estimated to have mastered about 100,000 board positions. Shakespeare used 29,000 words but close to 100,000 meanings of those words. Development of expert systems in medicine indicate that humans can master about 100,000 concepts in a domain. If we estimate that this “professional” knowledge represents as little as 1 percent of the overall pattern and knowledge store of a human, we arrive at an estimate of 107 chunks.”

 

“In accordance with the law of accelerating returns, paradigm shift (also called innovation) turns the S-curve of any specific paradigm into a continuing exponential. A new paradigm, such as three-dimensional circuits, takes over when the old paradigm approaches its natural limit, which has already happened at least four times in the history of computation. In such nonhuman species as apes, the mastery of a toolmaking or -using skill by each animal is characterized by an S-shaped learning curve that ends abruptly; human-created technology, in contrast, has followed an exponential pattern of growth and acceleration since its inception.”

 

“do not think there is any thrill that can go through the human heart like that felt by the inventor as he sees some creation of the brain unfolding to success. —NIKOLA TESLA, 1896, INVENTOR OF ALTERNATING CURRENT”

 

“We come from goldfish, essentially, but that [doesn’t] mean we turned around and killed all the goldfish. Maybe [the AIs] will feed us once a week…. If you had a machine with a 10 to the 18th power IQ over humans, wouldn’t you want it to govern, or at least control your economy? —SETH SHOSTAK”

 

“Another error that prognosticators make is to consider the transformations that will result from a single trend in today’s world as if nothing else will change. A good example is the concern that radical life extension will result in overpopulation and the exhaustion of limited material resources to sustain human life, which ignores comparably radical wealth creation from nanotechnology and strong AI. For example, nanotechnology-based manufacturing devices in the 2020s will be capable of creating almost any physical product from inexpensive raw materials and information.”

 

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. —GEORGE BERNARD SHAW, “MAXIMS FOR REVOLUTIONISTS,”

 

My Take

Twenty years ago I read Ray Kurzweil’s The Age of Spiritual Machines and was deeply impacted by the many predictions of amazing technological breakthroughs.  The Singularity is Near was not as shocking as The Age of Spiritual Machines, but is still a fascinating read.  Although The Singularity is Near was published in 2006, I read it fifteen years later in 2021.  As such, I could see for myself whether at least some of Kurzweil’s 2006 predictions materialized.  Many have not, but we are still making incredible technological progress, just at a slower rate.  Kurzweil still makes a strong case that in the long term, life on earth will be changing fundamentally as machines bypass human beings in intelligence.

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525. Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:    Max Tegmark

Genre:   Non Fiction, Science, Public Policy

364 pages, published August 29, 2017

Reading Format:   e-Book on Overdrive

Summary

In Life 3.0, MIT professor Max Tegmark makes a strong case that we are on the precipice of tremendous technological changes that will impact every aspect of life on our planet.  Tegmark explores our post human future and discusses how will artificial intelligence (“AI”) will affect crime, war, justice, jobs, society and our very existence as humans. He looks at possible outcomes after the rise of AI and proposes strategies to keep them beneficial.

Quotes 

“Life 1.0”: life where both the hardware and software are evolved rather than designed. You and I, on the other hand, are examples of “Life 2.0”: life whose hardware is evolved, but whose software is largely designed. By your software, I mean all the algorithms and knowledge that you use to process the information from your senses and decide what to do—everything from the ability to recognize your friends when you see them to your ability to walk, read, write, calculate, sing and tell jokes.”

 

“Your synapses store all your knowledge and skills as roughly 100 terabytes’ worth of information, while your DNA stores merely about a gigabyte, barely enough to store a single movie download.”

 

 “If consciousness is the way that information feels when it’s processed in certain ways, then it must be substrate-independent; it’s only the structure of the information processing that matters, not the structure of the matter doing the information processing. In other words, consciousness is substrate-independent twice over!”

 

 “If we don’t know what we want we’re less likely to get it.”

 

“… when people ask about the meaning of life as if it were the job of our cosmos to give meaning to our existence, they’re getting it backward: It’s not our Universe giving meaning to conscious beings, but conscious beings giving meaning to our Universe.”

“The more automated society gets and the more powerful the attacking AI becomes, the more devastating cyberwarfare can be. If you can hack and crash your enemy’s self-driving cars, auto-piloted planes, nuclear reactors, industrial robots, communication systems, financial systems and power grids, then you can effectively crash his economy and cripple his defenses. If you can hack some of his weapons systems as well, even better.”

 

“We invented fire, repeatedly messed up, and then invented the fire extinguisher, fire exit, fire alarm and fire department.”

 

 “This ability of Life 2.0 to design its software enables it to be much smarter than Life 1.0”

 

“In other words, we can think of life as a self-replicating information-processing system whose information (software) determines both its behavior and the blueprints for its hardware.”

 

“The Matrix, Agent Smith (an AI) articulates this sentiment: “Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed and the only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You are a plague and we are the cure.”

 

“I think of this as the techno-skeptic position, eloquently articulated by Andrew Ng: “Fearing a rise of killer robots is like worrying about overpopulation on Mars.”

 

“The robot misconception is related to the myth that machines can’t control humans. Intelligence enables control: humans control tigers not because we’re stronger, but because we’re smarter. This means that if we cede our position as smartest on our planet, it’s possible that we might also cede control.”

 

 “Elon Musk argued that what we need right now from governments isn’t oversight but insight: specifically, technically capable people in government positions who can monitor AI’s progress and steer it if warranted down the road.”

 

“Will life in our Universe fulfill its potential or squander it? This depends to a great extent on what we humans alive today do during our lifetime, and I’m optimistic that we can make the future of life truly awesome if we make the right choices.”

 

“the real risk with AGI isn’t malice but competence. A superintelligent AI will be extremely good at accomplishing its goals, and if those goals aren’t aligned with ours, we’re in trouble. As I mentioned in chapter 1, people don’t think twice about flooding anthills to build hydroelectric dams, so let’s not place humanity in the position of those ants.”

 

“The question of how to define life is notoriously controversial. Competing definitions abound, some of which include highly specific requirements such as being composed of cells, which might disqualify both future intelligent machines and extraterrestrial civilizations. Since we don’t want to limit our thinking about the future of life to the species we’ve encountered so far, let’s instead define life very broadly, simply as a process that can retain its complexity and replicate.”

 

“I’m encouraging mine to go into professions that machines are currently bad at, and therefore seem unlikely to get automated in the near future. Recent forecasts for when various jobs will get taken over by machines identify several useful questions to ask about a career before deciding to educate oneself for it. For example: • Does it require interacting with people and using social intelligence? • Does it involve creativity and coming up with clever solutions? • Does it require working in an unpredictable environment?”

 

“The DQN AI system of Google DeepMind can accomplish a slightly broader range of goals: it can play dozens of different vintage Atari computer games at human level or better. In contrast, human intelligence is thus far uniquely broad, able to master a dazzling panoply of skills.

A healthy child given enough training time can get fairly good not only at any game, but also at any language, sport or vocation. Comparing the intelligence of humans and machines today, we humans win hands-down on breadth, while machines outperform us in a small but growing number of narrow domains, as illustrated in figure 2.1. The holy grail AI research is to build “general AI” (better known as artificial general intelligence, AGI) that is maximally broad: able to accomplish virtually any goal, including learning.”

 

 “Evolution optimizes strongly for energy efficiency because of limited food supply, not for ease of construction or understanding by human engineers. My wife, Meia, likes to point out that the aviation industry didn’t start with mechanical birds. Indeed, when we finally figured out how to build mechanical birds in 2011, 1 more than a century after the Wright brothers’ first flight, the aviation industry showed no interest in switching to wing-flapping mechanical-bird travel, even though it’s more energy efficient—because our simpler earlier solution is better suited to our travel needs. In the same way, I suspect that there are simpler ways to build human-level thinking machines than the solution evolution came up with, and even if we one day manage to replicate or upload brains, we’ll end up discovering one of those simpler solutions first. It will probably draw more than the twelve watts of power that your brain uses, but its engineers won’t be as obsessed about energy efficiency as evolution was—and soon enough, they’ll be able to use their intelligent machines to design more energy-efficient ones.”

 

“Yet all these scenarios have two features in common:  A fast takeoff: the transition from subhuman to vastly superhuman intelligence occurs in a matter of days, not decades. A unipolar outcome: the result is a single entity controlling Earth.”

 

“It’s natural for us to rate the difficulty of tasks relative to how hard it is for us humans to perform them, as in figure 2.1. But this can give a misleading picture of how hard they are for computers. It feels much harder to multiply 314,159 by 271,828 than to recognize a friend in a photo, yet computers creamed us at arithmetic long before I was born, while human-level image recognition has only recently become possible. This fact that low-level sensorimotor tasks seem easy despite requiring enormous computational resources is known as Moravec’s paradox, and is explained by the fact that our brain makes such tasks feel easy by dedicating massive amounts of customized hardware to them—more than a quarter of our brains, in fact.”

 

“After all, why should our simplest path to a new technology be the one that evolution came up with, constrained by requirements that it be self-assembling, self-repairing and self-reproducing? Evolution optimizes strongly for energy efficiency because of limited food supply, not for ease of construction or understanding by human engineers.”

 

“a hallmark of a living system is that it maintains or reduces its entropy by increasing the entropy around it. In other words, the second law of thermodynamics has a life loophole: although the total entropy must increase, it’s allowed to decrease in some places as long as it increases even more elsewhere. So life maintains or increases its complexity by making its environment messier.”

 

 “it’s not very interesting to try to draw an artificial line between intelligence and non-intelligence, and it’s more useful to simply quantify the degree of ability for accomplishing different goals.”

 

“DeepMind soon published their method and shared their code, explaining that it used a very simple yet powerful idea called deep reinforcement learning.  Basic reinforcement learning is a classic machine learning technique inspired by behaviorist psychology, where getting a positive reward increases your tendency to do something again and vice versa. Just like a dog learns to do tricks when this increases the likelihood of its getting encouragement or a snack from its owner soon, DeepMind’s AI learned to move the paddle to catch the ball because this increased the likelihood of its getting more points soon. DeepMind combined this idea with deep learning: they trained a deep neural net, as in the previous chapter, to predict how many points would on average be gained by pressing each of the allowed keys on the keyboard, and then the AI selected whatever key the neural net rated as most promising given the current state of the game.”

 

“After DeepMind’s breakthrough, there’s no reason why a robot can’t ultimately use some variant of deep reinforcement learning to teach itself to walk without help from human programmers: all that’s needed is a system that gives it points whenever it makes progress. Robots in the real world similarly have the potential to learn to swim, fly, play ping-pong, fight and perform a nearly endless list of other motor tasks without help from human programmers. To speed things up and reduce the risk of getting stuck or damaging themselves during the learning process, they would probably do the first stages of their learning in virtual reality.”

 

“The main trend on the job market isn’t that we’re moving into entirely new professions. Rather, we’re crowding into those pieces of terrain in figure 2.2 that haven’t yet been submerged by the rising tide of technology! Figure 3.6 shows that this forms not a single island but a complex archipelago, with islets and atolls corresponding to all the valuable things that machines still can’t do as cheaply as humans can. This includes not only high-tech professions such as software development, but also a panoply of low-tech jobs leveraging our superior dexterity and social skills, ranging from massage therapy to acting. Might AI eclipse us at intellectual tasks so rapidly that the last remaining jobs will be in that low-tech category? A friend of mine recently joked with me that perhaps the very last profession will be the very first profession: prostitution. But then he mentioned this to a Japanese roboticist, who protested: “No, robots are very good at those things!”

 

“I’m sure there’ll be new new jobs for horses that we haven’t yet imagined. That’s what’s always happened before, like with the invention of the wheel and the plow.” Alas, those not-yet-imagined new jobs for horses never arrived. No-longer-needed horses were slaughtered and not replaced, causing the U.S. equine population to collapse from about 26 million in 1915 to about 3 million in 1960.  As mechanical muscles made horses redundant, will mechanical minds do the same to humans?”

 

“So who’s right: those who say automated jobs will be replaced by better ones or those who say most humans will end up unemployable? If AI progress continues unabated, then both sides might be right: one in the short term and the other in the long term. But although people often discuss the disappearance of jobs with doom-and-gloom connotations, it doesn’t have to be a bad thing! Luddites obsessed about particular jobs, neglecting the possibility that other jobs might provide the same social value. Analogously, perhaps those who obsess about jobs today are being too narrow-minded: we want jobs because they can provide us with income and purpose, but given the opulence of resources produced by machines, it should be possible to find alternative ways of providing both the income and the purpose without jobs. Something similar ended up happening in the equine story, which didn’t end with all horses going extinct. Instead, the number of horses has more than tripled since 1960, as they were protected by an equine social-welfare system of sorts: even though they couldn’t pay their own bills, people decided to take care of horses, keeping them around for fun, sport and companionship. Can we similarly take care of our fellow humans in need?”

 

“Even if AI can be made robust enough for us to trust that a robojudge is using the legislated algorithm, will everybody feel that they understand its logical reasoning enough to respect its judgment? This challenge is exacerbated by the recent success of neural networks, which often outperform traditional easy-to-understand AI algorithms at the price of inscrutability. If defendants wish to know why they were convicted, shouldn’t they have the right to a better answer than “we trained the system on lots of data, and this is what it decided”? Moreover, recent studies have shown that if you train a deep neural learning system with massive amounts of prisoner data, it can predict who’s likely to return to crime (and should therefore be denied parole) better than human judges. But what if this system finds that recidivism is statistically linked to a prisoner’s sex or race—would this count as a sexist, racist robojudge that needs reprogramming? Indeed, a 2016 study argued that recidivism-prediction software used across the United States was biased against African Americans and had contributed to unfair sentencing.  These are important questions that we all need to ponder and discuss to ensure that AI remains beneficial.”

 

“Perhaps life will spread throughout our cosmos and flourish for billions or trillions of years—and perhaps this will be because of decisions that we make here on our little planet during our lifetime.”

 

My Take

Life 3.0 is a fascinating look at the tremendous technological change that is on our doorstep and what that will mean for the future of human beings, the planet earth and our universe.  Tegmark thoroughly discusses a diverse array of ideas about our past, present and future in language that the lay reader can easily understand.  A real “thinker” book and highly recommended.

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464. Pretty Things

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:  Lisa Stock

Author:  Janelle Brown

Genre:   Fiction, Romance, Mystery, Thriller, Suspense

496 pages, published April 21, 2020

Reading Format:  e-Book on Overdrive

Summary

Pretty Things tells the story of two very different women.  Nina is a grifter who grew up bouncing from town to town with her less than honorable single mother.  Vanessa is an heiress who has made a name for herself as a lifestyle Instagram celebrity.  Their worlds collide in Lake Tahoe where the two engage in a cat and mouse, table turning game of deceit and duplicity.

Quotes 

“Nothing is ever as pure as it seems at first glance; there is always something more complicated to be found when you peel back the unmarred surface of pretty things.”

 

“Perspective is, by nature, subjective. It’s impossible to climb inside someone else’s head, despite your best-or worst-intentions.”

 

“It’s easiest to judge from distance. That’s why the Internet has turned us all into armchair critics, experts at the cold dissection of gesture and syllable, sneering self-righteously from the safety of our screens. There, we can feel good about ourselves, validated that our flaws weren’t as bad as theirs, unchallenged in our superiority. Moral high ground is a pleasant place to preach, even if the view turns out to be rather limited in scope.”

 

“But I suppose that’s the point of it all, for Vanessa: To throw herself into the world she wants to inhibit in the hopes of forgetting the one in which she really lives. Who am I to say she’s wrong to try? We all build our own delusions and then live inside them, constructing walls to conveniently hide the things we don’t want to see. Maybe it means that we’re crazy, or maybe it means that we’re monsters, or maybe it’s just the world we live in now makes it so hard to separate truth from image from dream.”

 

“Anything you do in fury’s service feels justifiable; no matter how petty, how small, how nasty or cruel.”

 

“Caption-and-comment culture in all its brevity leaves out the middle ground, where most of life is found.”

 

“Social media feeds the narcissistic monster that lives within us all, I would think to myself. It feeds it and grows it until the beast takes over and you are left outside the frame, just looking at images of this creature, like everyone else in your feed, wondering what it is that you birthed and why it’s living the life you wish you had.”

 

“Maybe our greatest strength as human beings is also our greatest weakness, the need to love and be loved.”

 

“and that, in fact, for most people not born into privilege, the playing field is a steep incline and you are at the bottom with boulders tied to your ankles.”

 

“They say DNA is destiny. And probably this is true for those with gift coded in their genes: say, a rare beauty or intelligence, the ability to run a four minute mile or dunk a basketball, or perhaps just innate cunning or insatiable drive. But for the rest of the world, those born without some obvious greatness, it’s not your DNA that will get you ahead; it’s the life you were born into. The opportunities you were (or weren’t) handed on a silver platter. It’s your circumstances.”

 

“Smarts mean a lot in the world, but good looks even more.”

 

“I watch and I wait. I study what people have, and where they have it. It’s easy because they show me. Their social media accounts are like windows into their worlds that they’ve flung open, begging me to peer inside and take inventory.”

 

“In the end, we are all our mothers’ children, no matter how saintly or evil they might be; and the loss of their love is the earthquake that cracks your foundation forever. It’s permanent damage.”

 

“This is the great horror of life: that mistakes are forever, and cannot be undone. You can never truly go back, even if you want to retrace your steps and take another route. The path has already disappeared behind you.”

 

“There is no one path in life that is set before you, I’m starting to realize; no one is making your decisions for you.”

 

“When you’re documenting everything you do, you stop living life for yourself and start living it as a performance for others. You’re never in the actual moment, just the response to the moment.”

 

“Sex—it can be about love, yes. And it’s wonderful when it’s that, and God, baby, I hope that’s what you’ve found. But it’s also a tool. Men use it to prove a point to themselves, about their power to take what they want. You’re just the first rung on the ladder of their world domination. And when that’s the kind of sex you’re having—which is most of the time—you got to make sure that you’re using it as a tool, too. Don’t let yourself be used up by them, all the time believing it’s some kind of equal relationship. Make sure you’re getting just as much out of it as they are.”

 

“Was it any wonder that people on the wrong side of the glass would eventually decide to take a hammer and break it, reach through and take some of it for themselves?”

 

My Take

Pretty Things was a roller coaster thrill ride that I whipped through.  In the same vein as Gone Girl, Janelle Brown knows how to write a cliff hanging page turner.  I love getting caught up in a non-stop, well written thriller and thoroughly enjoyed the time I spent reading Pretty Things.

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462. In Fifty Years We’ll All Be Chicks

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Adam Carolla

Genre:   Non Fiction, Humor, Memoir, Cultural, Politics, Essays

256 pages, published November 2, 2010

Reading Format:  e- Book on Overdrive

Summary

In Fifty Years We’ll All Be Chicks is basically a humorous rant by Adam Carolla against many things PC.  He rips into an absurd culture that demonizes peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, turned the nation’s bathrooms into a free-for-all, and puts its citizens at the mercy of a bunch of minimum wagers with axes to grind.

Quotes 

“My feeling is this whole country is founded on the principle of ‘if you are not hurting anyone, and you’re not fucking with someone else’s shit, and you are paying your taxes, you should be able to just do what you want to do.’ It’s the freedom and the independence.”

 

“Fixing your fucked-up life is not government’s job. Handling the stuff that people can’t do themselves—like war—is.”

 

“The government is a giant corporation with no competition that is constantly trying to keep you off balance so it can siphon more money from you.”

 

“I don’t know why I seem to be the only one who understands that when the government provides something for free—whether it’s food, housing, or health care—there is a human cost. The government may be handing you a free block of cheese but they are taking away your motivation to get a job and buy your own f***ing cheese. And what more powerful motivator is there to get up, get work, and get insurance than the fact that not having it could literally kill you?”

 

“But our leaders can’t tell the truth. We won’t let them. We’ve created a society where the politicians aren’t allowed to criticize the people. There’s no tough love coming out of the White House or Congress. They’ve gone from leaders and legislators to wedding caterers. If they want to keep the gig, they better give us what we want.”

 

“Humans need challenges to overcome, just like a muscle needs resistance to grow. In a zero-gravity environment, an astronaut’s muscles atrophy because there is no resistance. The government giving you a bunch of handouts and living your life for you is the equivalent of doing push-ups in outer space. Big government is like the void of space—it’s massive, constantly expanding, and if we immerse ourselves in it, we’ll simply wither away.”

 

“I also remember it was Sunday night because that was the time I felt most depressed and vulnerable. Somehow have a moment to contemplate the miserable, low-paying week that lay ahead was more painful than living it.”

 

“Until you get the family unit back together, we have no hope and we’ll never dig ourselves out of this hole. No matter how great the school is, how excellent the teachers are, how many computers, field trips, or other window dressing there is, until you have intact families that give a s***, we’re doomed. If you have chalk, pencils, and a roof that doesn’t leak, you’ve got a school. Back in the day people would do stuff by candlelight on the prairie and are a f***load smarter than kids now despite all the iPads and online homework. Why? Because if they didn’t read their assignment, their parents would take the ruler they were supposed to be using for that assignment and smack them with it. We don’t need to keep throwing money at the problem, we need to throw parents at the problem.”

 

“Everything seems overwhelming when you stand back and look at the totality of it. I build a lot of stuff and it would all seem impossible if I didn’t break it down piece by piece, stage by stage. The best gift you can give yourself is some drive–that thing inside of you that gets you out the door to the gym, job interviews, and dates. The believe-in-yourself adage is grossly overrated.”

 

“I am not agnostic. I am atheist. I don’t think there is no God; I know there’s no God. I know there’s no God the same way I know many other laws in our universe. I know there’s no God and I know most of the world knows that as well. They just won’t admit it because there’s another thing they know. They know they’re going to die and it freaks them out. So most people don’t have the courage to admit there’s no God and they know it. They feel it. They try to suppress it. And if you bring it up they get angry because it freaks them out.”

 

“As I’ve often said, this is the biggest problem we have in our society—unwanted kids. If we solve this problem we solve all the other problems. So we have to start judging. As I said before, we judge smokers more harshly than we judge deadbeat dads in our current society. Seriously, how many antismoking PSAs have you seen this week vs. ones saying raise your kids, or don’t have kids if you can’t afford them? And what’s hurting our society more? People need to see that asshole and call him an asshole so maybe other people thinking about being assholes wouldn’t become assholes. We stopped judging people a long time ago because the idiots on the left told us everyone is the same and that we couldn’t do that. We need to bring back judging.”

 

“This silliness always starts with celebrities and then spreads to the common folk.”

 

“You should never say to a superior, “I did my best,” when you fuck up, because you are then declaring you are a fuckup. Your best is fucking up. If that’s the case I’d hate to see you on a bad day when you were only putting in 50 percent. The answer is not “I did my best,” it’s “I’ll do better.”

 

“Alaska seems like the most rough-and-tumble spot in the world. Everyone there seems to be running from something in the Lower 48, whether it’s the law, the tax man, or their ex. Alaska’s where you go to forget your past, especially when you owe your past a shitload in child support. The state motto should be “Love fishing but hate your kids? Alaska.” Forget the Jackass movies. I’d like to do a hidden-camera show where we get a guy with a salt-and-pepper mustache, put him in an ATF windbreaker, have him walk into any Alaska bar or honky-tonk after quitting time, and say, “I have a warrant for . . .” and just watch everyone jump out the window. It’s never “I was born and raised in Alaska, lived here my whole life.” It’s usually something like, “My business partner faked his own death and then tried to kill me, but that was before my wife had her gender reassignment . . .” Basically Alaska is the cold-weather Florida. It’s Florida without the Jews. The state capital should be spelled “Jew? NO!”

 

“Being a depressed hippie is a lose-lose. It would be like if a rice cake had the caloric content of a MoonPie.”

 

“My son I worry about. I’m pretty sure he’s gonna be gay. At this point I’m just hoping he’s not a bottom. Sorry to sound closed-minded and uptight, but let’s face it, no dad wants his son to be gay. Not only do you get no grandkids, but I’m sure high school is no picnic for a fifteen-year-old gay boy. On the other hand, maybe I’m just viewing this through the bifocals of an old heterosexual dude. The way things are going, my son will probably get his ass kicked for not being gay. ‘Carolla thinks he’s too good to suck cock. Come on boys, lets get him.”

 

“You measure a good song the same way you measure architecture, fashion, or any other artistic endeavor. Time. You know when you see a picture of yourself from the eighties with a horrible hairdo and some stone-washed jeans and you think, “How embarrassing—what the fuck was I thinking? Why didn’t somebody stop me?” It’s the same thing Mick Jagger and David Bowie should be thinking every time they hear their cover of “Dancing in the Streets.” The point is, at the time it seemed like a good idea, just like kitchens with burnt-orange Formica and avocado appliances, den walls covered with fake brick paneling, and segregation—all horrible decisions that we now universally recognize as wrong. But somehow when it comes to music, we can’t just admit we made a mistake with “Emotional Rescue.” There’s always some dick who defends the past. “Hey, man, I lost my virginity to ‘Careless Whisper.’ ” I’m sure there was somebody who got laid for the first time on 9/11 but they don’t get a boner when they see the footage of the planes going into the tower.”

 

My Take

While not quite as good as the classic Not Taco Bell Material, I mostly enjoyed reading In Fifty Years We’ll All Be Chicks, Adam Carolla’s anti-PC rant.  A bit repetitive at times, but there are some true nuggets of comedy gold.

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381. Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know about the People We Don’t Know

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:  Malcolm Gladwell

Genre:    Nonfiction, Psychology, Sociology, Science

400 pages, published September 10, 2019

Reading Format:  e-Book on Overdrive

Summary

In July 2015, a young black woman named Sandra Bland was pulled over for a minor traffic violation in rural Texas. Minutes later she was arrested and jailed. Three days later, she committed suicide in her cell. What went wrong? Talking to Strangers is all about what happens when we encounter people we don’t know, why it often goes awry, and what it says about us.

How do we make sense of the unfamiliar? Why are we so bad at judging someone, reading a face, or detecting a lie? Why do we so often fail to ‘get’ other people?

Quotes 

“To assume the best about another is the trait that has created modern society. Those occasions when our trusting nature gets violated are tragic. But the alternative – to abandon trust as a defense against predation and deception – is worse.”

 

“The thing we want to learn about a stranger is fragile. If we tread carelessly it will crumple under our feet… The right way to talk to strangers is with caution and humility.”

 

“Young women are getting a distorted message that their right to match men drink for drink is a feminist issue. The real feminist message should be that when you lose the ability to be responsible for yourself, you drastically increase the chances that you will attract the kinds of people who, shall we say, don’t have your best interest at heart. That’s not blaming the victim; that’s trying to prevent more victims.”

 

“The conviction that we know others better than they know us—and that we may have insights about them they lack (but not vice versa)—leads us to talk when we would do well to listen and to be less patient than we ought to be when others express the conviction that they are the ones who are being misunderstood or judged unfairly. The same convictions can make us reluctant to take advice from others who cannot know our private thoughts, feelings, interpretations of events, or motives, but all too willing to give advice to others based on our views of their past behavior, without adequate attention to their thoughts, feelings, interpretations, and motives. Indeed, the biases documented here may create a barrier to the type of exchanges of information, and especially to the type of careful and respectful listening, that can go a long way to attenuating the feelings of frustration and resentment that accompany interpersonal and intergroup conflict.”

 

“Today we are now thrown into contact all the time with people whose assumptions, perspectives, and backgrounds are different from our own. The modern world is not two brothers feuding for control of the Ottoman Empire. It is Cortés and Montezuma struggling to understand each other through multiple layers of translators. Talking to Strangers is about why we are so bad at that act of translation.”

 

My Take

Like all Malcolm Gladwell books, Talking to Strangers is a fascinating read.  I always learn something new and unexpected from him.  In this book, my main takeaway is that while trusting others and giving strangers the benefit of the doubt can occasionally lead to an unfortunate result, it is the price that we all have to pay to live in a society that works.

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283. How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Scott Adams

Genre:  Non Fiction, Memoir, Self Improvement

248 pages, published October 22, 2013

Reading Format:  e-Book on Overdrive

Summary

In How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big, Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams relates all of the mistakes he has made in his life and how making them was an essential factor in his ultimate success.  Adams also shares his strategies for life success which include:

  • Goals are for losers. Systems are for winners.
  • “Passion” is bull. What you need is personal energy.
  • A combination of mediocre skills (i.e. a “talent stack”) can make you surprisingly valuable.
  • You can manage your odds in a way that makes you look lucky to others

Quotes 

“A goal is a specific objective that you either achieve or don’t sometime in the future. A system is something you do on a regular basis that increases your odds of happiness in the long run. If you do something every day, it’s a system. If you’re waiting to achieve it someday in the future, it’s a goal. If you achieve your goal, you celebrate and feel terrific, but only until you realize you just lost the thing that gave you purpose and direction. Your options are to feel empty and useless, perhaps enjoying the spoils of your success until they bore you, or set new goals and reenter the cycle of permanent presuccess failure. All I’m suggesting is that thinking of goals and systems as very different concepts has power. Goal-oriented people exist in a state of continuous presuccess failure at best, and permanent failure at worst if things never work out. Systems people succeed every time they apply their systems, in the sense that they did what they intended to do. The goals people are fighting the feeling of discouragement at each turn. The systems people are feeling good every time they apply their system. That’s a big difference in terms of maintaining your personal energy in the right direction.”

 

“If you want success, figure out the price, then pay it. It sounds trivial and obvious, but if you unpack the idea it has extraordinary power.”

 

“Happiness has more to do with where you are heading than where you are.”

 

“The most important form of selfishness involves spending time on your fitness, eating right, pursuing your career, and still spending quality time with your family and friends.”

 

“Priorities are the things you need to get right so the things you love can thrive.”

 

“Avoid career traps such as pursuing jobs that require you to sell your limited supply of time while preparing you for nothing better.”

 

“Few things are as destructive and limiting as a worldview that assumes people are mostly rational.”

 

“Barry Schwartz, author of The Paradox of Choice, tells us that people become unhappy if they have too many options in life. The problem with options is that choosing any path can leave you plagued with self-doubt.”

 

“If you can imagine the future being brighter, it lifts your energy and gooses the chemistry in your body that produces a sensation of happiness. If you can’t even imagine an improved future, you won’t be happy no matter how well your life is going right now.”

 

“Recapping my skill set: I have poor art skills, mediocre business skills, good but not great writing talent, and an early knowledge of the Internet. And I have a good but not great sense of humor. I’m like one big mediocre soup. None of my skills are world-class, but when my mediocre skills are combined, they become a powerful market force.”

 

“Positivity is far more than a mental preference. It changes your brain, literally, and it changes the people around you. It’s the nearest thing we have to magic.”

 

“The surest way to identify those who won’t succeed at weight loss is that they tend to say things like “My goal is to lose ten pounds.” Weight targets often work in the short run. But if you need willpower to keep the weight off, you’re doomed in the long run. The only way to succeed in the long run is by using a system that bypasses your need for willpower.”

 

“For our purposes, let’s say a goal is a specific objective that you either achieve or don’t sometime in the future. A system is something you do on a regular basis that increases your odds of happiness in the long run. If you do something every day, it’s a system. If you’re waiting to achieve it someday in the future, it’s a goal.”

 

“Most important, understand that goals are for losers and systems are for winners.”

 

“One of the most important tricks for maximizing your productivity involves matching your mental state to the task.”

 

“Failure always brings something valuable with it. I don’t let it leave until I extract that value.”

 

“If you don’t drink coffee, you should think about two to four cups a day. It can make you more alert, happier, and more productive. It might even make you live longer. Coffee can also make you more likely to exercise, and it contains beneficial antioxidants and other substances associated with decreased risk of stroke (especially in women), Parkinson’s disease, and dementia. Coffee is also associated with decreased risk of abnormal heart rhythms, type 2 diabetes, and certain cancers.  Any one of those benefits of coffee would be persuasive, but cumulatively they’re a no-brainer. An hour ago I considered doing some writing for this book, but I didn’t have the necessary energy or focus to sit down and start working. I did, however, have enough energy to fix myself a cup of coffee. A few sips into it, I was happier to be working than I would have been doing whatever lazy thing was my alternative. Coffee literally makes me enjoy work. No willpower needed. Coffee also allows you to manage your energy levels so you have the most when you need it. My experience is that coffee drinkers have higher highs and lower lows, energywise, than non–coffee drinkers, but that trade-off works. I can guarantee that my best thinking goes into my job, while saving my dull-brain hours for household chores and other simple tasks. The biggest downside of coffee is that once you get addicted to caffeine, you can get a “coffee headache” if you go too long without a cup. Luckily, coffee is one of the most abundant beverages on earth, so you rarely have to worry about being without it. Coffee costs money, takes time, gives you coffee breath, and makes you pee too often. It can also make you jittery and nervous if you have too much. But if success is your dream and operating at peak mental performance is something you want, coffee is a good bet. I highly recommend it. In fact, I recommend it so strongly that I literally feel sorry for anyone who hasn’t developed the habit.”

 

“When politicians tell lies, they know the press will call them out. They also know it doesn’t matter. Politicians understand that reason will never have much of a role in voting decisions. A lie that makes a voter feel good is more effective than a hundred rational arguments. That’s even true when the voter knows the lie is a lie.”

 

“Unhappiness that is caused by too much success is a high-class problem. That’s the sort of unhappiness people work all of their lives to get. If you find yourself there, and I hope you do, you’ll find your attention naturally turning outward. You’ll seek happiness through service to others. I promise it will feel wonderful.”

 

“Passion feels very democratic. It is the people’s talent, available to all. It’s also mostly bullshit.”

 

“I made a list of skills in which I think every adult should gain a working knowledge. I wouldn’t expect you to become a master of any, but mastery isn’t necessary. Luck has a good chance of finding you if you become merely good in most of these areas. I’ll make a case for each one, but here’s the preview list.

 Public speaking

Psychology

Business Writing

Accounting

Design (the basics)

Conversation

Overcoming Shyness

Second language

Golf

Proper grammar

Persuasion

Technology ( hobby level)

Proper voice technique”

My Take

How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big was a fun, informative and inspiring read.  Scott Adams, the very funny creator of Dilbert, has led an extremely interesting and varied life.  He has no fear of trying new things, often does and usually fails.  However, he always gleans a lesson from every failure which has led to his tremendous success as a cartoonist, writer and public speaker.   The book additionally offers many pearls of wisdom for maximizing your chances of leading a successful and fulfilling life.  Every year for my birthday, I have my son Nick read a book and then we discuss it over a lunch out.  This year’s book will be How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big.  I got a lot out of it and I think Nick will too.

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273. Before the Fall

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Noah Hawley

Genre:  Fiction, Mystery, Thriller

401 pages, published May 31, 2016

Reading Format:  e-Book on Overdrive

Summary

On a foggy summer night, 11 people – 10 privileged, one down-on-his-luck painter – depart Martha’s Vineyard on a private jet headed for New York.  Sixteen minutes later plane has crashed into the ocean.  The only survivors are Scott Burroughs, the painter, and a four-year-old boy who is now the last remaining member of an immensely wealthy and powerful media mogul’s family.   Before the Fall weaves between the aftermath of the crash and the backstories of the passengers and crew members including a Media Mogul and his family, a captain of Wall Street and his wife, a party boy just in from London, a young woman questioning her path in life, and a career pilot.

Quotes 

“In the absence of facts…. we tell ourselves stories.”

 

“It’s hard to be sad when you’re being useful. And he liked that idea. That service to others brought happiness. It was self-involvement that led to depression, to spiraling questions about the meaning of things.”

 

“Life is a series of decisions and reactions. It is the things you do and the things that are done to you.  And then it’s over.”

 

“Everyone is from someplace. We all have stories, our lives unfolding along crooked lines, colliding in unexpected ways.”

 

“You have kids and you think I made you, so we’re the same, but it’s not true. You just get to live with them for a while and maybe help them figure things out.”

 

“It is the job of the human brain to assemble all the input of our world—sights, sounds, smells—into a coherent narrative. This is what memory is, a carefully calibrated story that we make up about our past.”

 

“Anything is possible. Everything is gettable. You just have to want it badly enough.”

 

“Because what if instead of a story told in consecutive order, life is a cacophony of moments we never leave? What if the most traumatic or the most beautiful experiences we have trap us in a kind of feedback loop, where at least some part of our minds remains obsessed, even as our bodies move on?”

 

“What’s a handshake, after all, except a socially acceptable way to make sure the other guy doesn’t have a knife behind his back.”

 

“Someone had told her once that mothers existed to blunt the existential loneliness of being a person. If that was true then her biggest maternal responsibility was simply companionship. You bring a child into this fractious, chaotic world out of the heat of your womb, and then spend the next ten years walking beside them while they figure out how to be a person.”

 

“Where the average person appreciates the beauty of surf and waves, Gus, an engineer, sees only practical design. Gravity, plus ocean current, plus wind. Poetry to the common man is a unicorn viewed from the corner of an eye—an unexpected glimpse of the intangible. To an engineer, only the ingenuity of pragmatic solutions is poetic. Function over form. It’s not a question of optimism or pessimism, a glass half full or half empty. To an engineer, the glass is simply too big.”

 

“Never fight tomorrow’s fight today,”

 

“But money, like gravity, is a force that clumps, drawing in more and more of itself, eventually creating the black hole that we know as wealth. This is not simply the fault of humans. Ask any dollar bill and it will tell you it prefers the company of hundreds to the company of ones. Better to be a sawbuck in a billionaire’s account than a dirty single in the torn pocket of an addict.” 

My Take

Having read and enjoyed The Good Father by Noah Hawley (in addition to the Fargo television series which he created), I looked forward to Before the Fall.  I was not disappointed.  In addition to penning a suspenseful mystery, Hawley provides the reader with an examination of human nature and an exploration of existential issues.  All in an entertaining, suspenseful format.

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236. Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, A Man Who Would Cure the World

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:  Tracy Kidder

Genre:  Non-Fiction, Biography, Medicine, Public Policy

333 pages, published August 31, 2004

Reading Format:  e-Book on Overdrive

 

Summary

Mountains Beyond Mountains is a biography of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Harvard educated doctor whose life’s mission is a quest to improve the health of the world’s impoverished people, with is the destitute plateau region of Haiti as his primary place of work.  Farmer has also worked in Peru, Cuba, and Russia.  In addition to humanitarian work, Farmer is a Harvard professor, renowned infectious-disease specialist, anthropologist, the recipient of a MacArthur “genius” grant, modern day Robin Hood.  Farmer and his compatriots focus on diagnosing and curing infectious diseases and bringing the lifesaving tools of modern medicine to those who need them most.

 

Quotes 

“And I can imagine Farmer saying he doesn’t care if no one else is willing to follow their example. He’s still going to make these hikes, he’d insist, because if you say that seven hours is too long to walk for two families of patients, you’re saying that their lives matter less than some others’, and the idea that some lives matter less is the root of all that’s wrong with the world.”

 

“That’s when I feel most alive, he told me once on an airplane, when I’m helping people.”

 

“WL’s [White Liberals] think all the world’s problems can be fixed without any cost to themselves. We don’t believe that. There’s a lot to be said for sacrifice, remorse, even pity. It’s what separates us from roaches.”

 

“Paul’s face grew serious. ‘I think whenever a people has enormous resources, it is easy for them to call themselves democratic. I think of myself more as a physician than an American. We belong to the nation of those who care for the sick. Americans are lazy democrats, and it is my belief, as someone who shares the same nationality as [a Russian doctor], I think the rich can always call themselves democratic, but the sick people are not among the rich […] I’m very proud to be an American. I have many opportunities because I’m American. I can travel freely through the world, I can start projects, but that’s called privilege, not democracy.”

 

“The goofiness of radicals thinking they have to dress in Guatemalan peasant clothes. The poor don’t want you to look like them. They want you to dress in a suit and go get them food and water. Comma.”

 

“I think Farmer taps into a universal anxiety and also into a fundamental place in some troubled consciences, into what he calls “ambivalence,” the often unacknowledged uneasiness that some of the fortunate feel about their place in the world, the thing he once told me he designed his life to avoid.”

 

“One time I listened to Farmer give a talk on HIV to a class at the Harvard School of Public Health, and in the midst of reciting data, he mentioned the Haitian phrase “looking for life, destroying life,” Then he explained, “It’s an expression Haitians use if a poor woman selling mangoes falls off a truck and dies.” I felt as if for that moment I could see a little way into his mind, It seemed like a place of hyperconnectivity, At moments like that, I thought that what he wanted was to erase both time and geography, connecting all parts of his life and tying them instrumentally to a world in which he saw intimate, inescapable connections between the gleaming corporate offices of Paris and New York and a legless man lying on the mud floor of a hut in the remotest part of remote Haiti. Of all the world’s errors, he seemed to feel, the most fundamental was the “erasing” of people, the “hiding away” of suffering. “My big struggle is how people cannot care, erase, not remember.”

 

“It is the curse of humanity that it learns to tolerate even the most horrible situations by habituation.” “Medical education does not exist to provide students with a way of making a living, but to ensure the health of the community.” “The physicians are the natural attorneys of the poor, and the social problems should largely be solved by them.”

 

“I have fought the long defeat and brought other people on to fight the long defeat, and I’m not going to stop because we keep losing. Now I actually think sometimes we may win. I don’t dislike victory. … You know, people from our background-like you, like most PIH-ers, like me-we’re used to being on a victory team, and actually what we’re really trying to do in PIH is to make common cause with the losers. Those are two very different things. We want to be on the winning team, but at the risk of turning our backs on the losers, no, it’s not worth it. So you fight the long defeat.”

 

My Take

Mountains Beyond Mountains is a powerful book written by the very talented Tracy Kidder (a winner of the Pulitzer Prize for a different book) about the difference that one person can make with their life.  The title comes from the Haitian proverb “Beyond mountains there are mountains”: as you solve one problem, another problem presents itself, and so you go on and try to solve that one too.  That, in a nutshell, is the philosophy of Dr. Paul Farmer and it was very inspiring to see how it has played out in his life.

 

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