Hopefully Interesting

At Bill Gates's recommendation I recently read   The Grid  by Gretchen Bakke.  There's been a lot of talk recently about the US having an infrastructure problem but mostly it's in the context of our roads and bridges.  But really our electrical grid is also very important for modern life and impending changes to electricity generation look to increase the strain on the grid.  The cost of solar electricity on average has been plunging but the demand for electricity doesn't go down when a cloud passes over a solar farm.  We really want to be spreading out fluctuations generation between further flung power plants but to do that we need to build new, better, power lines.  There's also a good history of early electrical innovation though I was already familiar with much of it. Donald Trump's election finally prompted me to get around to reading The Revolt of the Public  by Martin Gurri.  He wrote about how social media has made the failu...

Of course, there are really plenty of reasons.  I don't expect that Trump's potential abandonment of the One China Policy to have more than a 1 in 10 chance of leading to war with China but, well, he isn't even in office yet and this is a thing. Still, as potentially painful and maybe even disastrous as the next four years are going to be I'm worried that a Trump presidency will be even worse (assuming no nuclear annihilation) in the long run. I've already plugged  The Myth of the Rational Voter  as my main model of thinking about elections and that makes me really worried about the lessons that people will draw from Trump's victory.  To summarize, politicians running for office have to compromise between promising things that sound nice to people who aren't really paying attention to policy and promising things that will actually make voters happy and thus vote for them again in the next election. I think that most politician, at some level, don'...

When people are looking at our two major parties they're often dissatisfied.  If you're a socialist or a libertarian or a Nazi then in most elections neither of the major candidates will represent your views.  Well, this election we have someone who at least appeals to Nazis  and we nearly had a candidate who called himself a socialist even if that wasn't totally accurate .  But this election is a bit weird and usually the people who complain about the major candidates being close to each other have a point. Thankfully political science has an explanation for this: the median voter theorem.   At this point I was going to give my own in depth explanation of it but I don't think I could possibly do a better job than Chris Hallquist does here .  Please read that link because otherwise the rest of this post might not make too much sense to you.  Or maybe you're already familiar with the theorem, in which case cool. The one thing I'd like to add to that...

Sorry for not posting much recently, I'll try to do more.  To ease myself back in here are some quick reviews of a few books I've read recently that don't deserve their own posts, plus some insights I got from them. Lost Enlightenment: Central Asia's Golden Age from the Arab Conquest to Tamerlane  by Starr, S. Frederick was just what the title leads you to expect.  It's about the flowering of philosophy and science in central Asia between 750 AD and 1000 AD.  The number of merchants involved in the silk road trade had always given the region a large educated class and after the Arab conquest in 750 AD better connected the area to the Mediteranian there was a large intellectual flowering involving greats like  Ibn-Sina  and  Biruni .  But as time went on anti-intellectual movements such as Sufism and books like  Al-Ghazali's   The Incoherence of the Philosophers  made science and philosophy less reputable and more dangerous. ...

Britain recently voted to leave the EU.  That's probably going to have a lot of long term consequences and I'm mostly writing this to try to work through what I think they might be, good as well as bad. In the short term there's probably going to be a fair amount of bad.  Germany and France are Britain's  #1 and #3 trading partners  and there's likely to be some disruption there.  Now that Britain has said it wants to leave it can negotiate a divorce from the EU there's some question about exactly what Britain's terms of trade are going to end up looking like.  The leave campaign promised that Britain would be able to trade with Europe the same way it always had but now without cumbersome EU rules.  I don't think it'll work that way.  The first reason for that is that managing trade is a big part of the complex EU rules Britain had to deal with.  If I sell you a ton of "Grade A Beef" it's important that we both have the same understan...

There's an old idea that all publicity is good publicity.  I seem to have have  written something about this  a few years ago but I should repeat the important bits.  If you're trying to sell something and you don't care about getting a majority of people to like you then your biggest foe is anonymity and the old chestnut is perfectly valid.  But if you're doing something that requires you to persuade a majority of people that you're correct then no, not all publicity is good publicity. I think this principle is very much applicable to the potential election of Donald Trump.  If you're looking at a 17 way contest and you only need a plurality, and besides only 13 of the 29 million people in the Republican primary voted for Trump compared to the 126 million  who voted in the 2012 presidential election.  So it's very much true that for Trump in the primary all publicity is good publicity.  But that won't hold for the general election. ...

Last Tuesday I faced a horrible dilemma as two books I'd been eagerly awaiting,  Too Like the Lightning  and The Age of the Em,  both came out the same day.  Luckily I was nearly done with the book I'd been reading, The Human Advantage  by Suzana Herculano-Houzel, so I could quickly finish that before moving on and I wasn't tortured by a third option of whether to just put it aside. In some ways this book was a good complement to  The Secret of Our Success  since it's another book about humanity's place in the world.  But this one is much more about where we fit in with other species in terms of our brains and less about the story of how we got there.  The real meat of the book is how the author figured out a good way to measure the number of neurons in a brain and was able to do the first real comparisons across species as to the number of neurons in their heads. The method was surprisingly simple as brilliant ideas sometimes are.  ...