150-159: Tech Support for Your Brain

158, Applied Psychology, is a very popular call number and includes many 'self-help' books. Best of all, it's heavily represented in the audio section of my library, so while I am driving I can get a cognitive tune-up!

I just finished David and Goliath by Malcolm Gladwell, which was really intense. He told story after story of folks who faced terrible adversity and from it acquired skills and strengths that enabled them to achieve great things. If I were writing an SAT essay about whether failure is part of success or some such uplifting thing, I could pretty much just summarize this book. Didn't I like it, you ask? Yes, if by "like" you mean "found interesting and thought-provoking." By "like" you probably don't mean "listened to while crying over the Irish Troubles and the London Blitz," though, so I can only recommend the book with reservations.

The most obvious question it makes one ask oneself is: "Do I have any weaknesses that are actually strengths?" One example in my case is my chronic low-grade depression. Before you rush to fix my brokenness, hear me out! Listening to this book reminded me that, although I would prefer not to have this condition and would never wish it on anyone else, it does give me a superpower: there are days where I just don't care. On some days, mind you, just some, I don't care what movie we see, because I'm not going to enjoy any of them. I don't care whether you hate me, because I hate myself. I don't care whether I live or die, because it's all the same to me. Therefore, I can be an unusually easy person to negotiate with, I can take all the blame for the problem at hand so we can move on to actually solving it, and I can take physical risks for causes I believe in. And I already know 3 or 4 pretty good ways to talk someone off the ledge, because I have that conversation with myself on a regular basis.

So, you see, I don't need to be repaired. I'd return this condition to sender in a flash if it were that easy, but I have figured out how to work around it. I appreciate the listening ears and encouraging words that have kept me going over the years, but ultimately my "desirable difficulty" has been like Paul's in the Bible. Gladwell quotes him as another David who defeated Goliaths: "Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ's power may rest on me." (2 Co 12:9)

Interlude: what I want

 I review because I care: I want you to read good books and avoid bad ones.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/08/books/review/is-book-reviewing-a-public-service-or-an-art.html?_r=0

I also want to record the flow of human knowledge as organized by a Dewey Decimal library, and, incidentally, I want to record the effect that being exposed to all these branches of inquiry is having on me personally.

I may not do all these jobs every time. I may not do any of them very well at any time. But I am determined to keep trying and to improve as I go. Thanks for coming with me.

Everyone's a Critic

Well, not everyone-- after all, most of the 130s was in praise of poltergeists and feng shui. But the critical book I chose, Exposed!: Ouija, Firewalking, and Other Gibberish, turned out to be unreadable. Literally indecipherable in that there were sentences that just didn't convey any meaning to my mind. Maybe something was lost in the translation from the original French, but so much for that.

The redundantly titled 50 Popular Beliefs That People Think Are True was slightly more readable, but it was in a different Dewey Decimal category for a reason. It really wasn't just about debunking specific beliefs, not just about the paranormal, but about various aspects of how people think the world works. It was really about exemplifying and promoting the philosophy of skepticism, which seems to me to be somewhat hollow. It's not so much a philosophy of life as an epistemology. All it has to offer is a certain way to approach knowledge, rather than a coherent body of thought, so I certainly wasn't going to read 50 essays, many of which boiled down to: "Here's a thing people think. I can't prove that it's true, so I won't believe it, which makes me smart!" The one where he pretended to be a psychic was pretty interesting, though. There he really did prove something: that it's not hard to convince someone that you are psychic even though you know you're not!

130-139: Everything Spooky! 140-149: All the Philosophies!

The paranormal in all its glory is the subject of the 130s. Ghosts, vampires, witches; feng shui, the I Ching, astrology, palm reading, and psychics; Nostradamus and 2012; it's all there. And I find it all pretty creepy. So this week I channelled my inner skeptic and only brought home Exposed! Ouija, Firewalking, and Other Gibberish, by Henri Broch, which Amazon, btw, markets under the category of "Controversial Knowledge." Seems to me that's an oxymoron. I mean, knowledge sounds to me like facts, and facts can't be controversial. They just are. You might not like gravity-- it sure annoys me sometimes-- but it's not just a good idea, as the saying goes, it's the law.

(Anyway, at least the title of the book leaves something to the imagination, unlike another offering in the 140s: Dogs Who Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home. For some reason, that title struck me as hilariously specific and uninviting to anyone (like myself) who doesn't have a dog or a particular interest in their admittedly admirable loyalty and affection.)

Speaking of unlikeable facts, or fictions, I also went into the 140s, where there is much less selection, and decided to stick with my theme of grumpy cynicism. I chose, mainly because of its absurd title, 50 Popular Beliefs that People Think Are True, by Guy P. Harrison. Is it just me, or is that sort of like 50 Philosophies that Are Ways of Looking at Things, or Cute Kitties that Are Felines? Well, I guess I am going to learn about popular beliefs that people think are true, as opposed to popular beliefs that people think are crap but still invite to parties, because I am in no frame of mind right now to read 500 pages on Romanticism or Humanism, which is what else I could do in the 140s.

Really I just want to get on with it and into the 150s, where 158 (applied psychology, or, unofficial tech support for your brain) is loaded with books I've been actually wanting to read, like Think Like a Freak (sequel to the very entertaining Freakonomics) and The 8th Habit (because 7 weren't enough and Stephen Covey does not come across like a flim-flam artist.) And they're available on audio, so I can get mental hacks in my car!

But first I have to debunk everything from dowsing to Area 51. I'll let you know if I turn up anything really interesting!

How to Be Human

I just finished The Most Human Human by Brian Christian, which is about computers simulating human conversation (one working definition of AI). You will get a detailed summary from this interview. Computer simulation of other supposedly exclusively human skills has been all over the news lately, too: moral and ethical improvisations in The New York Times, identification of emotions via facial expressions in the New Yorker.

AI is always all over the place. The IKEA chatbot, for example. It was programmed by a previous winner of the Loebner prize, but was completely unhelpful to me. I asked it if I could arrange for someone else to assemble my order, and it just referred me to generic web pages that did not contain the information I wanted. Then it asked whether its answer had been helpful. When I said No, it responded "Sorry. As an IKEA Online Assistant I don't know the meaning of 'no.' " Well, that's adorable, but shuts down the conversation, doesn't it? As I learned from the book, a good conversationalist offers plenty of holds with her responses, instead of just saying, "That's not what I wanted to hear."

My favorite robots are the ones that don't pretend not to be, like the CVS prescription reorder system.  "Press or say 1," "The first three letters of the patient's last name are..." Okay, that's a conversation we can have. If I have any actual questions, I can press 2 for a real person.

So the topic of conversation simulation is interesting in itself, but the description of Christian's experiences as a Loebner Prize confederate went beyond interesting to inspiring. I even emailed the organizers about the possibility of participating next year! If nothing else, what a great excuse to take a trip to Bletchley Park!

120-129: Matters of Life and Death

The 120's encompass both what it means to be human and what happens afterwards: the most popular number is 129, which includes both Heidegger and a Hippo Walk through Those Pearly Gates and, in the children's department, The Fall of Freddie the Leaf, by Leo Buscaglia, which is pretty much exactly as creepy as you might expect.  

Heidegger, of course, is the diametric opposite of creepy, but I just lost patience with it. One of their main points is that you are going to die and you probably are in denial about that, but not me! I am stunningly aware that my life is finite! That's why I'm only reading one book from each decade of the library, not every single book or even one from each number!

So I chose The Most Human Human, an engagingly-written combination stunt memoir and research paper about artificial intelligence and the Turing test, aka the Imitation Game. So far he has explained how he came to participate in the Loebner Prize as a human, and has gone on to discover that one essential element of human conversation is continuity, that it hangs together. Now he's talking about whether logic is overrated. I actually got this book because I thought my husband, who works in computing, would like it, but I think it's really interesting too.

Jim Holt Explains It All

Well, Holt found an answer that was satisfying to him, although I remain skeptical. He starts with Derek Parfit's construct: that anything could have happened, but only one thing did, and how was that one thing selected as the winning reality? He then assumes two principles:
1) For every truth, there is an explanation of why it is true.
2) No truth explains itself.
Based on these assumptions, he rules out all but two possible operational principles. One, the principle of Simplicity, doesn't work, because the simplest reality would be the empty set, the one where nothing at all happened, and that is clearly not the reality we are experiencing. The other organizing principle could be Fullness. So, under this principle, the Universe would be both full and empty, both simple and complicated, both good and bad, etcetera-- which is exactly how we experience Reality! It's not uniformly fantastic, but it's not completely awful either. Holt goes on to look at the probabilities of a cosmos that was on an extreme versus one that sits in the middle of the spectrum, and from a logical and mathematical perspective concludes that from the organizing principle of Fullness, this reality was generated.

I think this is a whole lot of unacceptable assumption and still doesn't answer the Ultimate Question. Holt never really explains where the principle of Fullness came from, or what it had to work with to generate Reality. He himself must not be completely satisfied, because he does continue his quest and speak with John Updike, who is a theist and envisions God (unsurprisingly) as an author, who, becoming bored with nothingness, made the world "as a bit of light verse." Holt also details some personal experiences that only underscore the fact that whatever our theories about Life, the Universe, and Everything, we have to function in the material world every day as if it made sense....

So that's what happens in Dewey section 110-119. The big questions will no doubt continue through the 100's...