"Surfing Uncertainty" by Andy Clark

This isn't a book for the general reader! Andy Clark is a professor of Logic and Metaphysics at Edinburgh University and a lot of this book deals with the latest ideas from Artificial Intelligence. So he is quite capable of writing "Computationally frugal solutions stressing embodiment, action, and the exploitation of bodily and environmental opportunities emerge quite naturally from a predictive processing (PP) framework involving cascading inference, internal generative models, and ongoing estimations of our own uncertainty." (p 112) and that is by no means the most difficult sentence you will encounter. On the other hand, there are moments when phrases such as "The profound cognitive entanglement of brain, body, and world" (p 83) make this book sound almost erotic.


But what really hit me was the brilliance of the ideas. And, geek that I am, ideas of this elegance which are capable of bearing as much fruit as these ideas can are ideas that I find mind-blowingly sexy.

For centuries, philosophers have alternated between the empiricist idea that all we know is what we learn from our senses, which pictures the brain as a fundamentally passive lump of jelly being bombarded by sensory data, and the solipsistic ideas that all we know is our thoughts and if there is a world out there is is one created by our fertile imaginations. It's, like, all in the mind, man.

The trouble is that there is powerful evidence for the latter point of view. For example, context dependent optical illusions where we interpret an ambiguous mark as, for example, a B or a 13 depending on whether the context has led us to expect a letter of a number. It seems clear that our expectations are shaping our perceptions. Seeing may be believing but, in cases like this, believing is seeing.One third of those told to listen to a degraded recording of White Christmas and to signal when the song started 'recognised' the onset of the song even though the tape contained nothing but white noise.

So Clark suggests that we do indeed think by sending a stream of predictions out into the world. These shape what we perceive and, indeed, direct our attention to seek evidence to confirm those predictions. But the sense data that then comes back in is (to some extent) different from our expectations so we generate an error message. We use this error message to refine our expectations.Clark suggests that generating predictions and then modifying them through error detection is a "computationally frugal" process which is used by at least one form of data compression. If we want to know what happens next when viewing a running man, rather than recompute every pixel we can simply move the entire image two pixels to the right, pick up the anomalies, and compute these few anomalous pixels. 

We know we do this. Our brains 'fill in' the blind spot in our visual field by making the assumption that the images around it are continued within it. Although our eyes move in lots of little jerks as we scan a scene, because our brain knows that our eyes are moving, and how they are moving, we make the appropriate adjustments and see the scene as stationary.We can use these expectations (which he calls hyperpriors when used globally) to fool ourselves. When we hear speech and see lips move we assume that the two are linked; this is how we are fooled by ventriloquists. "It is surprisingly easy ... to induce ... the illusion that a rubber hand, placed on the table in front of you, is your own. The illusion is created by ensuring the the subject can see someone tapping the realistic rubber hand, while (just out of sight) their own hand is being tapped in exact synchrony." (p 197)

Of course, the fact that we use expectations to shape and to select perceptions can lead to vicious circles. If Jill expects Jack to be angry she will selectively notice behaviours that reinforce her hypothesis, increasing her expectations. (p 73)But, excitingly, this model of the brain as being an active system, always interacting with the world, explains:

• why we notice things that aren't there: "if we hear a regular series of beats and then a beat is omitted, we are perceptually aware (quite vividly aware) of its absence. Moreover, there is a familiar sensation of 'almost experiencing' the onset of the omitted item." (p 89)

• imagination

• dreaming: "During sleep, precise prediction errors are not generated [because there is no sense data], so the balance shifts towards the reduction of model complexity. Sleep may thus allow the brain to engage in synaptic pruning so as to improve (make more powerful and generalizable) the knowledge enshrined in the generative model." (p 101)

• memory: "We are built to act in ways that are sensitive to the contingencies of the past, and that actively bring forth the futures that we need and desire." (p 111)

• why you can't tickle yourself: "the feeling of ticklishness requires a certain element of surprise" (p 113) and therefore the generation of expectation prior to the performance of the action prevent such "self-predicted sensations" (p 114)

• The role of 'mirror neurons' in empathising with other people: By deploying predictions "we may sometimes grasp the intentions of other agents" (p 139) by treating them as "context-nuanced versions of ourselves" (p 139). "Human infants, around the age of 4, possess not only a sense of themselves as individual agents with specific needs, wants, and beliefs but also a sense of others as distinct agents with their own needs, wants and beliefs. How might this be achieved? The discovery of 'mirror neurons' has seemed, to many, to deliver a substantial part of the answer." (p 151)

• Placebo-based pain reduction

• Schizophrenia: "Delusions and hallucinations ... might flow from ... falsely generated and highly weighted (high-precision) waves of prediction error ... it is the weighting (precision) assigned to these error signals that makes them so functionally potent, positioning them to drive the system into plasticity and learning, forming and recruiting increasingly bizarre hypotheses .. such as telepathy and alien control." (p 206) "Once such higher level stories take hold, now, low-level sensory stimulation may be interpreted falsely. When these new priors dominate, we may thus experience hallucinations that appear to confirm or consolidate them." (p 207) Schizophrenia may this stem from false error signals. This may in turn explain why they are less able to smoothly track with their eyes a moving object which is "one of the most widely replicated behavioral defects in schizophrenia" (pp 208 - 209 and why they are better able than neurotypical subjects to self-tickle (p 212).

• Autism: "Autistic subjects are less susceptible to illusions in which prior knowledge is used to interpret ambiguous sensory information" (p 224). If prior knowledge is attenuated ie weaker hyperpriors ie less influence of context, subjects are likely to "treat more incoming stuff as signal and less as noise" (p 225)  which in turn will mean that "huge amounts of incoming information are treated as salient and worthy of attention, thus increasing effortful processing" (p 225) which is likely to "contribute to the emergence of a variety of self-protective strategies involving repetition, insulation, and narrowing of focus" (p 225). "The social domain is highly complex ... in which context ... is everything and in which the meaning of small verbal and non-verbal signs must be interpreted against a rich backdrop of prior knowledge" (p 225) which might explain why autistic subjects often have poor social skills.

Wow! 

And, as Clark himself points out, it is a delightful description of human consciousness. "The image of the brain as a probabilistic prediction machine ... requires us to abandon the last vestiges of the 'input-output' model according to which environmental stimuli repeatedly impinge upon a richly organized but essentially passive system. In its place we find a system that is constantly active, moving restlessly from one state of expectation to another, matching sensory states with predictions that harvest new sensory states in a rolling cycle." (p 139)

Yes, it is sometimes hard wading through the prose, but when you hit nuggets such as these you know there is gold in these here hills!

August 2016, 300 pages

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Conflict, Arousal and Curiosity" by D. E. Berlyne

One of the classics of the last behavioral school, Berlyne focuses on the things that animals do when they are not directly trying to survive. As he puts it: "The higher mammals, at least, when temporarily freed from tasks connected with survival, will usually spend no more time on rest and inactivity than the minimum required for recuperation." (pp 4 - 5)

One of the joys about this book is that, while still addressing issues that are unresolved and are, indeed, of importance to psychology, you get the feeling that this is delightfully old fashioned (even his use of initials rather than a first name speaks to this, as well as the fact that he refers to humans of unspecified gender as 'he', he cites references from the nineteenth century as if they are still relevant, work on rats running through mazes form the mainstay of his evidence, and the Russians are major contributors to the field. He also ascribes drives to almost everything and gives wonderful names to things that have commoner names: play, for example, or recreation he calls "ludic behavior"!

This book felt very quaint at times.

But it is important. After all, as he points out, the leisure industry is vast and "ludic behavior ... may well affect prospects of survival ... animals will often not live long in captivity ... how long human beings survive after retirement is frequently thought to be influenced by whether they can keep themselves occupied." (p 6)

He suggests that play is a type of exploration and that "locomotor exploration appears to be universal among higher vertebrates." (p 104). What we want to do is to reduce uncertainty. We dislike uncertainty. People will watch election results all night even though they could go to sleep and "know the final outcome for certain almost at their next moment of consciousness" (p 206) He quotes Farber (1944): "prisoners who had hopes of a parole suffered much more than those who knew that they would never be released." (p 207) It made me think of the reactions of passengers whose flights have been delayed, seeking information as a priority, and the way bereaved relatives  are often desperate to know how and why their loved ones died. 

Animals are even prepared to take risks to satisfy their curiosity and learn information. He paints a beguiling image of young monkeys faced with a strange object in their cage who "will survey the object from a certain distance, apparently alert and delicately poised, perhaps even oscillating, between advance and withdrawal." (p 122). He tells us that "a fleeing animal will slow down or stop from time to time and look back at its pursuer" (p 114). He points out that we find fear fun and he cites fairground rides and horror films (p 198); this was written before bungee jumping took off (if you'll pardon the oxymoronic metaphor).

He is brilliant on art. "The art of all major civilizations shows fluctuations between the classical ideals of serenity, tranquillity, and discipline and the romantic taste for excitement, color, and drama. But the extreme cultivation of one extreme has been rare and usually followed by a violent swing in the opposite direction." (p 240) "The baroque work intentionally amazes with its continual deviations from the obvious, the straightforward, and the plain and by the very scale of its pretensions. As the eye runs along a line, the observer is left with a high uncertainty about what he will find around the corner, and his expectations come in for some jolts." (p 240) "Perplexity is resolved as the observer comes under the sway of the general texture and ceases to attach undue importance to its whimsical details." (p 241) "The fauve painters ... while foregoing the arousal value of ambiguity and complexity, they substituted the arousal value of gaudy coloring." (p 241)

Music, too, is analysed in terms of uncertainty and expectation. "The repetition of exactly the same sounds over and over again ... is, in fact, regularly used to build up excitement. This may be because of some primitive, physiological response to rhythmic reiteration, explaining its incantational use for the induction of mass irrational behavior or ecstatic states. But ... there is a mounting expectation that the repetition cannot go on for much longer, but it is not clear exactly when it will come to an end and what will replace it." (p 249) This made me think of Ravel's Bolero. But expectations also involve melody. "In modulating from one key to another: a chord which can belong to either key, and thus has an ambiguous status, is used to effect the transition" (p 250); modulation causes expectations not to be met creating "transient surprise and confusion" (p 250)

In literature "the curiosity of the reader or spectator is set astir and then satisfied." (p 253)

"The value of a joke ... depends on its formal structure, with the author alternately keeping in line with our learned anticipations and sharply diverging from them." (p 253) He points out that "the word 'funny' is also used to mean strange or perplexing." (p 259)

Despite its age, and 56 is ancient in social sciences, this book has many fascinating ideas and is deservedly a classic in its field.

August 2016; 303 pages

"The Eureka Effect" by David Perkins

This book, written for the general reader but tilted towards those who want to learn how to solve problems through greater creativity, describes what Perkins calls 'Breakthrough Thinking'.

Although Perkins describes the breakthroughs made by some great thinkers, such as Archimedes solving the problem of how to measure the volume of an irregular object such as a crown, Edison inventing the light bulb and Darwin discovering Evolution through Natural Selection, Perkins mainly concentrates on the sort of lateral thinking puzzles like solving the riddle of how the man died who was found dead in the desert with no marks around him and an unopened pack on his back. There are a lot of these sort of puzzles which are fun but seem to make the ideas Perkins is peddling seem slightly shallow and unimportant.

Perkins uses the metaphor of gold prospecting in the Klondike as an analogy to trying to find the solution to a puzzle. There is, he says, a vast wilderness of possibilities and sometimes the only way to find the treasure is to be "systematic about surveying all the possibilities". But often you are on a "clueless plateau" where there are  "no apparent clues to point in the direction of a solution" (p 47). The solution is to detect hidden clues by doing a search for "incongruities or other suspicious features" (p 54). (I suspect this might work better for the artificial puzzles that he sets up than in real life.) Part of the reason why searches may seem fruitless is that many people are trapped in a "narrow canyon of exploration" (p 47); their thoughts run in channels when they need to think outside the box. The solution is to reframe the problem, perhaps using perverse interpretations (I always want to obey signs saying wet paint). Finally people are lured towards an "oasis of false promise" (p 48) when you are nearly there but not quite so you hammer away at improvements without seeing that the solution lies, again, outside the box.

It is a delightful analogy but I am not sure that there was anything new here.

In a sense, the real meat can be found when he quotes the work of Davidson and Sternberg who suggested that there were three parts to insight:

• select what is relevant 
• compare new ideas with existing concepts
• combine ideas in original ways

It is an interesting and engaging book but I think there is a lot more that could be said on this subject.

August 2016; 269 pages

"Flow" by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

This influential book analyses what makes people happy. To do this he first divides pleasure (by which Csikszentmihalyi means the satisfaction of biological urges such as hunger, lust, fatigue etc) from enjoyment. Pleasure restores one to equilibrium but enjoyment, for Csikszentmihalyi, develops one. And the 'optimal experience' which gives enjoyment is 'flow'. Flow gives:

• " a sense of exhilaration, a deep sense of enjoyment" (p 3)
• "the best moments in our lives ... when a person's body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile." (p 3)

Most of us have solved "the basic problems of survival" and have moved up Maslow's hierarchy to try to make meaning of our lives and stifle our "ontological anxiety, or existential dread." (p 12) Flow gives us a purpose.

This is what flow is like:

• "You are totally involved" (p 53)
• "You aren't thinking of yourself as separate from the immediate activity." (p 53)
• "I sort of lose touch with the rest of the world, I'm totally absorbed in what I'm doing." (p 53)
• "one forgets oneself, one forgets everything" (p 63)

In flow "concentration is so intense that there is no attention left over to think about anything irrelevant, or to worry about problems. Self-consciousness disappears, and the sense of time becomes distorted." (p 71)

A flow activity needs to involve challenge and skill and these need to be matched. If we start off with low skills and a low challenge (in flow) and we work hard we soon arrive at a situation when we have higher skills. We will become bored unless we now raise the challenge. If we raise the challenge too much we will become anxious and will have to work hard to develop our skills to return ourselves to flow. So, by trying to maintain  the  flow state, we develop our skills and challenge ourselves more and more; in short we improve.

Csikszentmihalyi believes that we can all do this. He gives examples of workers in routine, boring jobs who, by turning what they have to do into a challenge and constantly seeking to improve, turn boredom into fun. He quotes paraplegics who see their accident as the thing that gave meaning to their lives ("accepting limitations is liberating" (p 179)) and helped them turn from bored ordinary people to become leaders. He examples blind people and vagrants. Some of these stories are inspirational.

But you have to be active. For example, "Everything the body can do is potentially enjoyable." (p 95) and this means sports and sex. "The body is like a probe full of sensitive devices that tries to obtain what information it can from the awesome reaches of space. It is through the body that we are related to one another and to the rest of the world. ... what we tend to forget is how enjoyable it can be." (pp 115 - 116) But "instead of doing it personally, most people are content to hear about it or watch a few experts perform it." [that seems to equate watching the Olympics on TV with watching porn!] (p 102) "Vicarious participation is able to mask ... the underlying emptiness of wasted time. But ... passive entertainment leads nowhere. Collectively we are wasting each year the equivalent of millions of years of human consciousness." (pp 162 - 163)

You can also just look and listen but again you have to be active: "occasionally people stop to 'feast their eyes' ... but they do not cultivate systematically the potential of their vision." (p 107) "Like a photographer looks at a sky and says, 'This is a Kodachrome sky. Way to go, God. You're almost as good as Kodak.'" (p 108).

Selected quotes:

• "it is very difficult for parents to compensate for the poverty of opportunities in the culture at large." (p 183)
• "What can a strong, vital, intelligent fifteen-year-old do in your typical suburb?" (p 183)
• "How can we expect people who are ill, impoverished, or stricken by adversity to control their consciousness?" (p 192)
• "'When I became paraplegic, it was like being born again ... I had to become part of the environment, and use it without trying to control it.'" (p 194)
• "'The lion, when he runs after a pack of gazelles, can only catch them one at a time." (p 197)

This is an easy to read and life-affirming book. 

August 2016; 240 pages

I came across a description of flow (in the mind of a murderer) in a 1930 novel by C S Forester called Plain Murder.

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Campfires in Cyberspace" by David Thornburg

Thornburg wrote about the three types of learning space which become four:

• Campfire: "informational spaces where we go to get information from experts" eg storytellers, lecturers, preachers (p 51)
• Watering hole: "where we go to share what we have learned with our peers." (p 51)
• Cave: "Caves are conceptual spaces where we go to reflect and elaborate in private what we have learned ... environments filled with the tools of creativity that we need to develop and extend our understanding of what we are learning." (p 51)
• Life: "Unless your learning is applied, it is sterile." (p 53)

This is a tremendously exciting concept. Schools and universities are organised around the Campfire with some element of Watering Hole but usually the Cavemen are left to fend for themselves. We hear a lot about cooperative learning, especially online, which ramps up the idea of the Watering Hole but mostly Cavemen are left to fend for themselves. As a fully paid up Neanderthal I find this challenging.

It was a shame that the rest of the book didn't really live up to the brilliance of the idea. Mostly, it read like propaganda. I hopes to see a much more carefully constructed argument for the three learning spaces but there was very little evidence offered. It didn't help that one of the few authorities cited was Marshall McLuhan and his pronouncements were treated as gospel and unchallenged.

The main part of the book was exploring how the CWCL model could be implemented in online learning. This must have been impressive in 1996 but things have moved on online in 20 years (Google has come to be!). Nevertheless, there are moments when Thornburg is astonishingly prescient.

A book that is very easy to read with some wonderful ideas but little in the way of evidence. 

May 2016; 155 pages

"Consciousness Explained" by Daniel Dennett

What is consciousness? Is it Gilbert Ryle's "Ghost in the Machine"? Is it our spirit or soul, entirely distinct from our body?

When we think it certainly seems that there is a Ghost watching a television inside our heads. Is mind entirely distinct from body?

Dennett seeks to debunk this mind-body duality that originated with Descartes and the Cartesian Theatre that goes with it. Mind cannot be separate from body and still be able to interact with it, yet I seem to be able to move my body by thinking. Instead, we are just evolved networks of neurons. Dennett disucsses psychological illusions that cannot be explained by the Cartesian Theatre; he uses the Multiple Drafts model to explain them in which a pandemonium of neural circuits is always responding to sensory inputs; the resulting conflict between different drafts is resolved by paying attention to whichever demon is presently shouting loudest. Even ourselves, suggest Dennett, are not single entities (our guts are ecosystems for bacteria, our boundaries are porous and multiple personality disorder suggests that our sense of self  is illusory).

This is a very important book. It is difficult to understand its arguments and compelling and logical. It is a work of philosophy that appeals to common sense (whilst demolishing a huge common illusion) and as such deserves a place on the bookshelf of every serious thinker.

He writes well too, so that this is an accessible text.

October 2015; 455 pages

Another brilliant philosophical work from a modern thinker is Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Redirect" by Timothy D Wilson

This is a book about the social sciences. It starts off by giving a number of examples where treatments for social and educational ills have been implemented, sometimes at the cost of billions of dollars, without being subjected to careful scientific testing. It shows which of these treatments are ineffective or, worse, counter-productive; the author compares these to the blistering and blood-letting treatments of quack doctors which were either unpleasant and useless or dangerous.

Some of the treatments are:

• Critical Incidence Stress Debriefing which results in a higher incidence of post-traumatic stress disorder
• Self Help books which suggest that positive thinking will get you want you want (implying that "if you are poor, or if, God forbid, you contract a serious illness - well, it's your own damn fault")
• Bribing kids to read which might work for kids that don't read but actually turns kids who do read off reading
• Just say no to drugs or underage sex; a better way of preventing these is to encourage kids to volunteer
• Getting convicts to scare kids off crime which increases the chance that they will commit crime
• Diversity training

The author's panacea (OK so I was getting a little cynical by this time) for all these is to encourage people to rewrite their inner monologues so that they saw themselves as empowered.

He also emphasises the need for randomised control tests for all such programmes before the politicians spend vast amounts of money on them.

A very readable book which demolishes a lot of shibboleths. Not sure if his message on rescripting lives was quite as clear.

March 2015; 240 pages

"Open" by David Price

This immensely readable book starts with the author having a heart attack!

In many ways it follows the 'industry standard'. Price has a vision of the future of education which he wants to share with us. It is an education transformed by the practices which have transformed (part of) the business world since the massive disruption to the ecosystem known as the internet revolution. He outlines this vision by giving examples (mostly from the business world because education hasn't really been transformed yet) in which visionaries have transformed their industries. Many of these examples have been mentioned in similar books: an example is the development of Post-It notes by 3M. Price then distils the lessons to be learned from these examples into general principles: Share, be Open, be Free, and Trust. The major difference between Price's book and others such as 'The World is Flat' is that Price then applies these rules to the world of education.

But this is a cracking good read which uses its evidence base to entertain whilst providing 'eureka moment' insights and making you think. Not bad!

Price begins with a compelling analysis of the post-internet world. The knowledge economy has rather blown up in our faces: more graduates means that the laws of supply and demand have driven the monetary value of knowledge down as evidenced by  freelance auction sites such as elance.com. He looks at 'open' systems such as the Philosophy in Pubs movement and ‘open source learning’.

He indicts formal learning in traditional education settings. He rehearses the dichotomy of transmissive learning versus constructive learning and suggests that apprenticeships and internships offer blends between the didactic and experiential. Bravely, he asserts that: "We should be in no doubt that businesses, schools and colleges that continue with ‘command and control’ as their dominant forms of leadership and intellectual property strategies are facing extinction, possibly within five to ten years." He wants to see collaborative learning as the dominant model in schools: "If collaboration is a headache for learning in the workplace, it’s hard to know where to start with schools. First, most schools don’t call it ‘sharing’ anyway – they call it ‘cheating’."

Price seeks a new model for education which he calls the Global Learning Commons whose characteristics are participation, passion, purpose.

The six imperatives of the Global Learning Commons are:

• "Do it yourself [eg Linux, wikipedia]
• Do it now [eg Just in time learning]
• Do it with friends 
• Do unto others
• Do it for fun [eg foldit, a video game which helps scientists work out protein folding in viruses]
• Do it for the world to see" [eg that food blog from the scottish kid]

He considers 'Just in time' learning: "learning is most powerful when the learner acquires a piece of
information to solve an immediate problem.... there’s a reason why you get the airline safety briefing when the engines are running, and you’re buckled-up, and not when you’re booking your ticket."

He has some great one-liners (some are above):

• Over-testing is like "a gardener pulling up a plant by its roots so that he could see how well it was growing. If a love of learning were a human right (and I contend that it should be) our courts would be overflowing with abuse of rights claims from our young." [OK, that was a two-liner.]
• "Learning doesn’t really work as a spectator sport, as any disengaged school kid will confirm."

I have one or two quibbles:

• I would contend that the anti-authority revolution started long before the world wide web, perhaps beginning with the growth of universal state education (even if it is too formal). As Steven Pinker has suggested in The Better Angels of Our Nature, literacy enables people to read and therefore to become exposed to ideas and, especially in novels, to start to see the world through the point of view of someone else. 
• Surely the example of the BRICs in Chapter One emphasise the need to develop a better knowledge economy even though an inevitable consequence is that the monetary value of knowledge will reduce as supply outstrips demand.
• The 'Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité' motto was coined before 1835.

I was a little disappointed that the evidence base was a little narrow and relied heavily on the old favourites such as wikipedia, Google and 3M.

But on the whole this is a brilliantly readable and thought-provoking book. September 2014; 152 pages

"Nudge" by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein

This 'hugely influential' book is really rather limited and boring.

These are the big ideas. None are original.

• Human beings are not as rational as the ideal consumer portrayed by Economists.
• Therefore, humans make choices based on rules of thumb such as 
• Anchoring (based on the latest information you have; they demonstrate this by asking you to add 200 to the last 3 digits of your telephone number and guess whether Attila the Hun sacked Europe before or after this date; strangely for me the right answer was exactly equal to the last three digits of my telephone number added to 200!); 
• Availability (we choose based on the evidence most readily available to us such as the horrendous aeroplane crash in the tabloids), 
• Conforming to others, 
• Overconfidence, 
• the fact that we would rather avoid Losses than make Gains, 
• seeking false patterns in random data, 
• and sticking to the Status Quo. 
• (All of these ideas are much better covered in Stuart Sutherland's Irrationality.)
• A choice architect designs the way we are presented with a choice. There is no such thing as a neutral choice.
• A choice architect can therefore influence our choice by manipulating the choice architecture in line with the rules of thumb. This is a nudge.
• This is morally acceptable within the framework of libertarian paternalism if the nudges influence us to make choices that are in our own best interests. Our best interests can be demonstrated: no one ever makes a New Year's resolution to start smoking or exercise less. 

They need to spend some time defending libertarian paternalism from the American right. They argue that it is better that government should nudge us to do what is in our own best interest rather than to force us to do this. They suggest that not all government officials are necessarily incompetent or corrupt. (I think they could go quite a way further here and suggest that it is more likely that a civil servant will try to influence your choice in a way that is good and positive than that a capitalist seeking to maximise the profit of himself or his shareholders will. They do say: "One the face of it, it is odd to say that the public [choice] architects are always more dangerous than the private ones. After all, managers in the public sector have to answer to voters, and managers in the private sector have as their mandate the job of maximizing profits and share prices, not consumer welfare. Indeed, some of those who are most suspicious of governments think that the only responsibility of private managers is to maximise share prices." (p238) )

So far the book has been interesting though not revolutionary. The test of the pudding as always is in the eating. Here they apply their theories to a variety of spheres (health care, pensions, sub-prime mortgages etc; mostly from a US perspective). What do they come up with in terms of practical advice?

• Default options are important but especially so when it becomes difficult to choose. Madly (because of fears of being sued) the default prescription option for seniors under the Bush health care legislation was to pick a plan at random even though in healthcare the past is a pretty good indicator of the future.
• Transparency is good. They recommend that for investment plans etc banks are required to send annual statements detailing all charges to prompt people to consider whether they really made a good choice before. Generally information is good although when the choice becomes complex it becomes critical as to what information you present and how your present it. This too is part of choice architecture.
• Escalators are good. People are more likely to save for their pensions if they are asked to set aside a small amount now with a commitment to an automatic increase every time they get a pay rise.

To keep choice architects on the side of the angels they suggest the slightly novel moral principle (they credit it to the moral philosopher John Rawls) that you should only do what you would not be embarrassed about. If you place mirrors into restaurants to nudge people into eating less you might be happy for this idea to be publicised; you might be less happy if you had used subliminal advertising to achieve the same end.

So overall this was an interesting book although I had encountered most of its ideas before and the practical applications do seem rather limited. I hope there is more potential for the essential idea.

March 2012; 260 pages

"Obliquity" by John Kay

"Why our goals are best achieved indirectly."

Kay cleverly starts with what he calls "Franklin's Gambit". This is the assertion that we do not base our decisions on good reasons but that whatever we decide, we will subsequently find good reasons for backing our decision. This makes it hard to criticise this book. I didn't like it. Here are my reasons. But are they post hoc justifications for my instinctive dislike or are they the reasons which genuinely led up to my disliking this book?

I didn't like this book because I am suspicious of his evidence base. Like many such popular treatises he bases his arguments on selected anecdotes. As an economist he starts with examples where great businesses decide to focus on 'maximising shareholder value' and, he claims as a consequence' lost their way. He includes Boeing, ICI, Marks and Spencer and Merck as well as less known companies such as Litton Industries. But many great organisations lose their way and decline, partly because they fail to adapt to changing circumstances and partly no doubt purely because of regression to the mean. He is no doubt correct to analyse the failure of lobster fishery Prelude Corporation as down to the attempt to impose management methods from other industries to their own. As he points out: "You don't make fish, you hunt it. Your success depends on the flair, skills and initiative of people who cannot be effectively supervised" (p27).

He then broadens his argument to include Lenin's direct approach to modernising Russia and Le Corbusier's architecture to suggest that the direct approach to solving problems is always worse than the oblique approach. He suggests that anyone who believes that they can control a society or a complex business is both arrogant and unimaginative. And it is true that the Soviet Union collapsed and that many modernist buildings have been demolished. But Lenin and Stalin did (albeit brutally) drag a bankrupt, defeated, peasant nation into the industrial age despite the appalling trauma of the second world war.

Kay accepts that people need goals and objectives. But he seems to suggest that the goals should always be slightly off-target. Thus in golf: "you can only swing well when you can swing without thinking  about it" (p43) which reminded me of Ian Botham's advice to partner Graham Dilley as they went out to bat with England following on and facing an innings defeat at Headingley in 1981: "Let's give it some humpty."

For Kay, the way to success is 'Muddling Through' and this does strike a chord with me. Kay equates muddling through with evolutionary adaptation which he sees as a slow, small step, incremental process. Darwinian Natural Selection, Kay points out, has no designer, no watchmaker (not even a blind one). And (going back to Frankiln's Gambit) teleological explanations for success are flawed: giraffes have long necks because they have long necks. "We find intentionality and design where there is only chance and improvisation; directness where there is obliquity." (p118)

Kay has a lot of good points but he over eggs the pudding. He quotes Lord Kelvin as saying that "when you cannot measure something ... 'your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind'" (p71); Kay damns this as leading "directly to the modern curse of bogus quantification." (p71) But while he is correct to mock indices for things such as happiness this should not mean that you should fail to measure that which can and should be measured.

He makes an interesting point about optimism which goes against the prevailing wisdom that optimists are always the great winners who live longer and succeed more. He quotes Admiral James Stockdale who survived lengthy captivity as a Vietnamese prisoner and who observed that "those who died were typically optimists" (p126) because the dashing of their hopes left them nothing left to live for. Optimists need resilience it seems.

He admires the "pragmatic improvisation" (p128) of F D Roosevelt and gives him the line: 'Try something. If it fails admit it frankly and try another'; I had always been told that it was Truman who said apropos his policies: 'We'll just try them and if they don't work we'll try something else.'

He rightly complains about consistency and precedent. How often have I longed for a politician to say 'I've changed my mind'; this would be a sign of strength rather than the weakness the political journalists suggest. And he points out that the fear of setting a precedent can sometimes make it harder to do the right thing.

The idea that Quality Assurance is simply a way of finding reasons post hoc for what we know a priori works is naively oversimplistic. My maxim would be: 'If it ain't broke don't QA it'. QA's principal concern is not with justifying what is quality but with improving what is not quality. And the clever use of data is to ask questions not to find solutions. So if I study the performance tables for British schools in a scientific and enquiring way I may find patterns that prompt me to ask what might be the causes for various perceived effects.

Kay himself suggests limits to obliquity. George Soros has noticed that his back aches when he subconsciously perceives that something dodgy is happening. Awareness of this intuition enables him to investigate a situation more carefully. But Kay points out that Soros does not base his investment decisions on intuition but on careful analysis; even the hunch is based on years of laboriously acquired expertise.

Statements such as "Paris grew by muddling through, Brasilia by design; Paris is a great city, Brasilia is not." (p175) confirm that Kay's arguments lack depth. A lot of what people love about Paris are the great boulevards designed by Baron Hausmann. But even if the element of design within Paris was insubstantial, Kay still ignores the time frame. Possibly Paris was not a great city in its first century; evolution takes ages.

February 2012; 179 pages