{"id":2948,"date":"2015-10-19T18:16:04","date_gmt":"2015-10-20T01:16:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/?p=2948"},"modified":"2020-10-18T11:51:39","modified_gmt":"2020-10-18T18:51:39","slug":"links-and-comments-from-sundays-new-york-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/2015\/10\/19\/links-and-comments-from-sundays-new-york-times\/","title":{"rendered":"Links and Comments from Sunday’s New York Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

Front page article: Indian Writers Return Awards to Protest Government Silence on Violence<\/a><\/p>\n

File this under Conservative [religious] Resistance:<\/p>\n

\n…growing activism from conservative Hindu nationalists who seek to suppress forms of expression they view as offensive to their religion. They have pressured publishers to withdraw books, pushed universities to remove texts from syllabuses and filed criminal complaints against those they deem to have insulted Hinduism.<\/p>\n

Few writers have drawn more criticism than M.M. Kalburgi, a noted rationalist scholar who enraged far-right Hindu nationalists through his criticism of idol worship and superstition. Mr. Kalburgi said he received multiple death threats, and on Aug. 30 was shot dead at point-blank range in his home in Karnataka, a state in southern India. No arrests have been made.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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And in NYT’s Sunday Review, an essay by the venerable science writer Geroge Johnson: Gamblers, Scientists and the Mysterious Hot Hand<\/a>.<\/p>\n

This concerns new studies about the “gambler’s fallacy”, the idea that if you detect several coin toss heads in a row, a tail is somehow more likely than usual to come up on the next toss. Even scientists who study this can be tricked into detecting illusory patterns, as the essay explores. Bottom line, final lines:<\/p>\n

\nWe\u2019re all in the same boat. We evolved with this uncanny ability to find patterns. The difficulty lies in separating what really exists from what is only in our minds.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I have Johnson’s book Fire in the Mind: Science, Faith and the Search for Order<\/b>, still on my to-read shelf.<\/p>\n

\\\\<\/p>\n

And in the NYT Book Review, a “By the Book” Q&A with science writer Matt Ridley<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\nWhat are the best books ever written about science? <\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cThe Double Helix,\u201d by James Watson, and \u201cThe Selfish Gene,\u201d by Richard Dawkins. Both books gave me the important message \u2014 which my teachers had somehow mostly missed telling me \u2014 that science is not a catalog of facts, but the search for new and bigger mysteries.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And this (!):<\/p>\n

\nThe last book that made you furious?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Al Gore\u2019s \u201cAn Inconvenient Truth.\u201d It uses all the tricks of a fire-and-brimstone preacher to sell a message of despair and pessimism based on a really shaky, selective and biased understanding of the science of climate change.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And then this:<\/p>\n

\nDisappointing, overrated, just not good: What book did you feel you were supposed to like, and didn\u2019t? <\/strong><\/p>\n

Easy. The Bible. Not even the fine translations of William Tyndale, largely adopted by King James\u2019s committee without sufficient acknowledgment, can conceal the grim tedium of this messy compilation of second-rate tribal legends and outrageous bigotry.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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Among the reviews themselves, this by Leonard Mlodinow<\/a> of two books about “making sense of the world and trying to predict the future”: Richard E. Nisbett’s Mindware: Tools for Smart Thinking<\/b> and Philip E. Tetlock and Dan Gardner’s Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction<\/b>. Mlodinow reacts with a<\/p>\n

\nreinforced conviction that books on how to think should be required reading in high schools across the country.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(I agree: see The One Book I\u2019d Have Every College Student Read<\/a>.) He likes the former book, but says,<\/p>\n

\nMy verdict is mixed. If you are looking for a survey of the topics covered in the book\u2019s six sections, this is a good one. You\u2019ll learn about our overzealousness to see patterns, our hindsight bias, our loss aversion, the illusions of randomness and the importance of the scientific method, all in under 300 pages of text. But there isn\u2019t much in \u201cMindware\u201d that is new, and if you\u2019ve read some of the many recent books on the unconscious, randomness, decision making and pop economics, then the material covered here will be familiar to you.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

These are all topics of interest to me, as reflected in one of my Provisional Conclusions…<\/p>\n

The second book is somewhat different, but the themes are similar in that they involve drawing conclusions by trying to overcome the biases discussed in the first book. His summary:<\/p>\n

\nThe central lessons of \u201cSuperforecasting\u201d can be distilled into a handful of directives. Base predictions on data and logic, and try to eliminate personal bias. Keep track of records so that you know how accurate you (and others) are. Think in terms of probabilities and recognize that everything is uncertain. Unpack a question into its component parts, distinguishing between what is known and unknown, and scrutinizing your assumptions.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Of course, astoundingly few people have the discipline to do this, including most of the electorates in, I imagine, every country on earth.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Front page article: Indian Writers Return Awards to Protest Government Silence on Violence File this under Conservative [religious] Resistance: …growing activism from conservative Hindu nationalists who seek to suppress forms of expression they view as offensive to their religion. They … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48,30,51,12,2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2948","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-conservative-resistance","category-mind","category-provisional-conclusions","category-religion","category-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2948","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2948"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2948\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2950,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2948\/revisions\/2950"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2948"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2948"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2948"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}