Life as we made it

Author: Beth Shapiro

Beth Shapiro takes us through the impact that humans have had on this planet over the last 50,000 years. With the recent advances in CRISPR and other gene editing technology, humans are on the precipice of creating living creatures with any traits that one desires. This is both profound and scary at the same time. The knee jerk reaction to this is to spread fear on the unintended consequences and put the brakes on progress.

In this book Dr. Shapiro asks us to take a step back and look at the picture over a larger timescale, say 50,000 years. Humans have had a big impact in many different ways. In some cases entire species were wiped out, in others we used selective breeding to produce offspring with certain (human) desirable qualities. What we don’t readily acknowledge is that many of these activities are also meddling with the gene pool with rather coarse tools.  The fact that we are now much more precise in how we can edit genes doesn’t necessarily make it worse. Clearly, we have to be careful and have some guard rails to prevent us from creating something that endangers us and our environment.

The book walks through many large projects like creating the perfect tomato or breeding Holstein cows without horns and highlights the complicated regulatory hurdles that scientists face along the way. I have a much better appreciation for some of their challenges after reading this book.

Numbers don't lie

Author: Vaclav Smil

While numbers don’t lie they also don’t tell good stories. Vaclav Smil probably knows this better than anyone else, so he make sure that each story is really short. Vaclav takes many of the standard  econometrics like GDP, happiness index, etc. and looks for contrasting numbers like suicide rate to see if these well-known quantities measure up to what they purport to be.

Vaclav has spent a lot of time studying innovation and its impact on humans and is clearly unimpressed with the recent fascination for social media. He is quick to point out that the 1880s witnessed some major advances in technology like antiperspirants, electric lights, elevators, etc. Not all the 71 stories are interesting, but I found several that grabbed my interest.

Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgement

Author: Daniel Kahneman

We have all been educated on the inherent flaws and inaccuracies of human judgement. However, the world we live in today, still makes use of this judgement to settle many important issues like judges handing out sentences, insurance adjusters deciding claims,  teachers grading students, etc.

The authors break down the errors in these decisions into two components: bias and noise.  There's plenty of books written on bias and this is not one of them. The authors spend a good amount of time defining noise and breaking it down into various components like

1. level noise

2. stable pattern noise

3. occasion noise

and then delve into each of these sub species. **Level noise** is a result of variability in the bar (level) that each judge inherently judges against. **Stable pattern noise**, on the other hand, is variability within the decisions of a single judge that arise as a result of some pattern that biases the judge away from his normal level. And **occasion noise** is introduced by the environment, mood and other factors that are specific to the instance in time when the judgement is rendered. The authors are very thorough in their treatment of the different facets of noise and provide many suggestions to reduce them.  I found the suggestions to improve hiring decisions and the protocol for conducting strategic discussions to be the most useful.

While the book is well written and highlights an area of judgement that hasn't received much attention, I felt the separation between bias and noise was somewhat arbitrary.  The way I understood it is as follows. 

• Human judgements are prone to errors. These errors are the result of several components ranging from our inherent bias, to our mood, to other environmental factors and so on.
• If we are able to conduct multiple independent judgements of the same underlying data, we are likely to get different answers.
• Even without knowing what the true answer is, the fact that there is variance highlights that most, if not all of these answers have an error component. The deviation of the errors from the average, is defined as the noise.
• Note that the average value is not the true value. The average value is really the "true value + bias".

A more mathematical and succinct definition is “The fixed offset (mean) of these answers from the true value is called bias, while the random component is called noise.”

While the above definition is technically sound, I don't know if the underlying processes that cause these errors can be so neatly separated. Bias itself can be a random process and if we allow for that, then the definition of noise is suspect. Additionally, a strategy to reduce bias, may result in reducing noise as well. Having well defined rules might be a good way to reduce noise, but the authors point out that it could have the undue side-effect of introducing bias.

Here are some thought provoking quotes from the book

• In general, we jump to conclusions, then stick to them.
• There is so much noise in judgment that a noise-free model of a judge achieves more accurate predictions than the actual judge does.
• Judgment is like a free-throw: however hard we try to repeat it precisely, it is never exactly identical
• Oddly, reducing bias and noise by the same amount has the same effect on accuracy.
• Humans can at most keep seven levels, plus or minus two, for quick evaluation.
• The institutions of justice should acknowledge the limitations of the people who administer it.
• Replacing absolute judgment with  relative ones, when feasible, is likely to reduce noise.
• Behaviors are a function of personalities and of situations.

Overall, it's a great book that definitely got me introduced to the concept of noise in our decisions.

The Key Man

Author: Simon Clark and Will Lark

I had heard of Arif Naqvi in the context of the unravelling of Abraaj, the private equity firm that was based in Dubai.  I was curious to learn about the events that led to the growth and demise of this endeavor. Having grown up in India, I do have an appreciation for how hard it is for someone from the Indian sub-continent to make it big in the Western World.

Arif didn't have anything handed to him on a platter and had to hustle every step of the way.  He was the captain of the debate team in high school and from the quotes in the book, I gather that he was quite articulate and quick witted.  Apparently he would say that there are two types of people in the world. Those who get up in the morning and say "Good God, it's morning" and others who wake up to say "Good morning, God".

One of his major contributions, was encouraging rich people to invest in emerging countries by convincing them that they could make money *and* do good in the world.  This is sometimes called "impact investing" and Arif was promising healthy (~17%) returns  to some of the wealthiest investors on the planet. His signature statement was  “emerging markets should really be called global growth markets”.

Unfortunately, he could not live up to the story he was selling investors.  He knew that coming clean with the losses in some of his investments, would result in drying up his sources of money.  So he fell for the temptation to "borrow" from future funds to plug holes in the investments that had gone bad. Ultimately, this spiraled out of control and the book will take you through the details of what transpired.

Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less

Author: Leidy Klotz

The premise of this book is intriguing. We are constantly making additions in our life. Whether it is remodeling our home or buying new clothes, we are inherently adding to something that we already have. Implicitly, we make the assumption that this adding, is somehow improving our lives. However, there are many -- albeit fewer -- examples where subtracting from what is already in place,  can improve the state of affairs. The book expounds on this approach.

The first thing the author sets out to do is define "subtraction".  He emphasizes that this is not the same as minimalism. The distinction here is that you are improving something by removing a part of the whole. The best example is the kids Strider cycle.  It turns out that kids find it hard to pedal and balance at the same time. Removing the pedals, makes kids focus only on the balancing part and they are able to enjoy riding a bicycle much earlier in their life.  Here the "pedals" were subtracted to create a new and innovative product. 

There are two main theses in this book. 

1. Humans are inherently biased towards addition. There are numerous experiments in the book highlighting the fact that our default behavior, when we are asked to improve something is to add to it.
2. The author reaches far and wide to convince you that some of the famous events and monuments can be cast in the light of subtraction. 

This second piece seemed like a stretch to me and the pages devoted to them could certainly have been subtracted from the book!

The Good Girls: An Ordinary Killing

Author: Sonia Faleiro

Back in 2014, two young girls in a rural village in Uttar Pradesh, India were killed in mysterious circumstances. By painstakingly putting the pieces together, Sonia Faleiro has brought her investigative journalism skills to bear, in telling the tale of not just murder and mystery, but also chronicling the shocking ineptitude of law enforcement in India. Along the way you will learn about Indian politics, social customs, prejudices and the poor-treatment of women in rural India. You will learn first hand

If I write anything more, I will be giving away some details that will spoil your enjoyment of the book.  Pick up a copy today. I was riveted from the start and finished the book in one sitting.

The Vanishing Half

Author: Brit Bennett

The novel starts its epic journey around 1940 in Mallard, a fictional town in Louisiana, whose residents happen to be mostly light skinned black people. Desiree and Stella are twin sisters who grow up in this town and for the next 300 pages you are treated to what the next half century has in store for them.  Ms Bennett brings the town Mallard to life with its obsession for light-skinned black people. I don't know if this obsession was for real back then, but it is interesting to see how society was stratified into the rich white people and then the lighter skinned blacks that serve them. Darker skinned field hands are considered to be at the bottom of the barrel and the residents of Mallard would have nothing to do with them.

Desiree and Stella are beautiful young girls with light skin, hazel colored eyes and could easily pass off as white girls. There's not too many options for the twins as they grow up and they are initially conscripted into cleaning houses like their mother. But eventually they  follow different paths and you are quickly transported to the different worlds that they inhabit. After a while the story is taken over by the next generation. The second half of the book is more predictable as the characters have already been cast and there's not much room for creativity. Nevertheless, the book moves quickly and I found myself eager to see how the story would end. 

Blockchain Chicken Farm: And Other Stories of Tech in China's Countryside

Author: Xiaowei Wang

Xiaowei Wang takes you on a journey to rural China where technology is being put to use in some rather creative ways to transform China's rural countryside. First up, there's the chicken farmer who uses a blockchain ledger to guarantee the authenticity that his chickens have been raised in a humane way. The chickens are outfitted with ankle bracelets that function as pedometers and serve as location tracking devices as well.  Buyers are able to see the vital statistics of their purchase right down to the details of the number of steps taken by the chicken in its lifetime. All of this is information is protected by a blockchain tag to ensure that there's no tampering with the supply chain from the farm to the table. 

From there you are transported to the use of Machine Learning algorithms to improve the Pig Farming. It turn's out that Pork is a serious national treasure and “China is the only  country in the world to have a pork reserve, consisting of millions of live pigs and uncountable pounds of frozen pork”.  Also, I was surprised to learn that  “an industrial pig farm is more like an iPhone factory than a bucolic countryside haven.” Today it's humans who watch over the pigs looking for early signs of infection or other anomalies that can wreak havoc through the population.  But these humans are too few relative to the millions of pigs in each of these farms. Alibaba is experimenting with Computer Vision and Artificial Intelligence techniques to provide an early warning system that can be used to rapidly react and reduce the spread of contagion through the herd.

I was blown away by the very thoughtful way in which Xaiowei approaches each of these vignettes.  They are careful to reserve judgement and list out the unanswered questions in each of these intersections of modern technology and rural life.  Xaiowei also sprinkles in comparisons to the United States and the times we live in. “If previous decades in the United States were defined by feelings of progress, ours is defined by a feeling of conspiracy, the last refuge of personal agency.” 

Xaiowei writes lucid prose and makes you feel like you are their companion on this journey through China's countryside. Grab the book and let them take you for a ride.