Read: Superfreakonomics

 The introduction had one of the most hilarious passages of all time. Talking about the difficulties of Indian women, it mentioned that Indian men’s condoms malfunction more than 15% of the time. Why? According to the Indian Council of Medical Research, some 60% of Indian men have penises too small for condoms manufactured to western specs. Direct quote: “The condom is not optimized for India.”

The feminist revolution has plummeted the demand for prostitution, causing prices to be lower now than 100ish years ago when it wasn’t illegal. Men can get sex for free relatively easy now. He didn’t mention it, but I bet the preponderance of pornography has also contributed to this. Escorts however, as opposed to the street prostitutes, make great money, with many charging $300 an hour.

Another loser of the feminist revolution has been schoolchildren. The average IQ of schoolteachers plummeted between between 1960 and 1980. They used to be significantly above average IQ, with 40% of teachers being in the top 20% of IQ, but no more.

On the wage gap, gender discrimination is at most a minor contributor. There is a difference in desire between men and women. Men love money, and women love children. Women take more career interruptions and even when they’re not they work fewer hours. Particularly the wives of men who make good money cash in on their privilege of being able to stay at home. 

A study using an SAT style math test to measure the difference in money motivation. When paid for each correct answer men did significantly more better than women, compared to when they were given a flat fee for doing the test. 

Pregnant Muslim women participating in Ramadan causes a significant increase learning and other disabilities in their children. 

Simple fixes are usually better. Seat belts cost about $30,000 per life saved in America. Airbags, by contrast, cost about 1.8 million per life saved.

This was an interesting book. Like the first one, it talked about lots of random topics, but the underlying idea is that incentives determine behavior on the aggregate. It’s section on global warming was interesting, mentioning lots of very cheap technological ideas that could solve the temperature issue, but many environmentalists hate them. Environmentalism is a religion, where technology is evil and the natural is good, so using technology to solve the problem is sacrilege. 

Read: How to Be a Dictator - The Cult of Personality in the Twentieth Century

 Mussolini:

His war atrocities in Ethiopia were hid from Italians by the state-backed media, instead presenting it as a war bringing liberation, freedom, & civilizations to victims of a feudal caste system.

He was probably pretty popular for awhile, but eventually the forced enthusiasm of Italy became more and more forced as people became fed up with food shortages imposed by sanctions from the international backlash to the annexation of Ethiopia. 

His army was woefully unprepared for WW2 and they never had any success in the war. They were always more like a vassal state of Germany.

Hitler and the Nazis tried to launch a coup against the republic in November 1923, but the army didn’t join them and they were easily crushed. His sentence for high treason was incredibly short, 5 years, shortened to 13 months. He has sympathetic judges and in his trial he appeared more as the accuser of the government than a defendant. He wrote most of Mein Kampf while in prison. 

Over and over again, bread lines are what cause people to really start expressing unhappiness with their dictator. It seems people are quite content with one as long as their material needs are met. I’d be interested if there were any capitalist dictatorships in history and how they performed, since they would have likely not had the food shortages. 

Another common thing was the “if only X knew...” line. Dictators would be thought of as good and kind, while all the cruelties of the regime would be blamed on the dictator’s subordinates. Their were examples in Soviet Russia of people writing direct pleas to intervene in their case after being arrested for no real reason, not knowing that Stalin had ordered the arrest himself. Reading that over and over again made me less sympathetic to the arguments some right wing nationalists have made blaming the White House’s lack of follow through on Trump’s nationalist campaigning on the nefarious influence of the establishment people in the administration. 

Another common thread was their feigned humility. When praised by party leaders they would act bashful saying that they didn’t deserve the praise, but beforehand they had checked and edited every word. Not to mention imprisoning/killing those who wouldn’t offer praise. 

Another common trait was the prizing of loyalty over competence. Anyone with any independent thought (which would inevitably entail critique) would be removed eventually. Ultimately this resulted in the despot being surrounded by midwit sycophants.

Read: Freakonomics

 People’s actions are a result of incentives. In areas with declining birth rates, obstetricians are more likely to perform expensive cesarean section surgeries. Real estate agents on average leave their homes on the market for 10 days longer and sell them for 3% more than their clients’ homes, because the extra work is not worth the tiny amount more they will make on client houses. That principle, that incentives are the cornerstone of life, is the fundamental idea of this book, and it applies that principle in various situations. Another principle is that “experts” use their informational advantage to serve their own agenda. This applies to everyone from real estate agents to criminologists. 

There are economic incentives, moral incentives, & social incentives.

In response to the high-stakes testing that started around the year 2000, teachers started illegitimately bringing their students scores up in droves. 

John Kenneth Galbraith coined the phrase “conventional wisdom” and meant by it that society associates truth with convenience. That which accords with our self-interest & personal well-being, avoids awkward effort or unwelcome dislocation of life, and that which contributes to self-esteem. Economic and social behaviors are complex, so we subscribe reasons that are convenient, comfortable, and comforting. 

People are terrible risk accessors. From mad cow disease vs dirt in the kitchen to swimming pools vs having a gun in the home to flying vs driving a car, people don’t feel the difference between a 1 in 10,000 risk and a 1 in 1,000,000 risk. Many “dangers” that cause outrage/panic are ridiculously unscary statistically. “The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do - Parents Matter Less than You Think and Peers Matter More” argued that the influence of parents on their children is overwhelmed by the brunt force applied everyday by their peers.

It had a section on names, where names go through a lifecycle, with names used by wealthier people being copied by poorer ones, and then being associated with the lower classes, and then falling out of favor entirely. Based on that idea it listed 24 names that might break into the mainstream over the next decade but were currently unheard of it. Quite a few were right. It included, Ava, Avery, Ella, Emma, Grace, Isabel, Kate, Sophie, Anderson, Carter, Cooper, Jackson, Liam, & Will.

Seth Roberts was the old self-experimenting guy I liked who died.

This book was interesting, but after “A People’s Trajedy” it felt very short. It’s lack of a central theme was also very obvious. It felt very random.

Read: A People’s Tragedy

 The last Tsar, Nicholas II, was determined to rule as an autocrat but did not possess the intelligence or temperament of a strong ruler. 

The emancipation of 1861 is a big turning point. It liberated the serfs, who previously were owned as part of the land they lived on, giving them the right to own property and businesses. It started the terminal decline of the old noble landowners, who were already heavily indebted and now deprived of their free serf labor and newly subject to the pressures of capitalism. Between 1861 and 1900 over 40% of the gentry’s land was sold to peasants. Prior to 1861 the gentry’s estates were not run like businesses at all.

Concept of the “Two Russias.” The educated urban elites and the peasants. The elites had very little knowledge the peasants’ lives. Russian populists romanticized peasant living, but would have dissolutionment when actually going to live with peasants and seeing they were no better people than the elites, being savagely violent and dumb. A example Russian peasant proverb: “Beat your wife like a fur coat, then there’ll be less noise.”

Rising literacy causes revolutions, English, French, and Russian revolutions all happened as literacy rates approached 50%. It disrupts traditional society, reducing the power/importance of patriarchal elders and spreading new ideas to the youth.

The literate young men would leave their farms, desiring to go work in the cities. City work was backbreaking, with no labor protections. He argues the Tsar’s refusal to enact labor laws improving workers’ conditions was a contributing factor to the revolution. Marxist/Socialist revolutionary factory workers would meet in secret. 

There was a huge suppression of dissent by the State. Secret police who could in imprison or exile on the just the suspicion of “political crimes.” State agents posed as revolutionaries to report on what was going on. 100s of bureaucrats were employed in reading people’s intercepted mail. In 1917, the average Bolshevik activist had spent 4 years in jail or exile. This suppression led to radicalization, resulting in the activists rejecting the more moderate liberal reform goals of the western European nations for a more violent and terrorism-filled ideology. 

At the top of the movement were guilt-ridden children of nobles, who felt they got their wealth and knowledge only because of the unjust exploitation of the peasants. They had the idea that they could be redeemed from their original sin of “privilege” by achieving the liberation of the peasants. They were newly minted atheists, and this was their substitute religion. 

What is to be Done? by Chernyshevsky was a book that pushed lots of people (including Lenin. Marx learned Russian just to read it) towards becoming a revolutionary. The protagonist is a force of nature who suffers no pleasures in life or any distraction from the single goal of the revolution. Another book’s character, Bazarov of the book Fathers and Sons by Turgenev was embraced as a model for the revolutionaries, despite being intended as a monstrous caricature of nihilists (evidence of the huge gulf between one generation and the next). 

Originally, during the early 1870s, revolutionaries were populist, but the failure of the “to the People” movement where many went and spent time in peasant villages trying to convert people to their cause, they realized the peasants weren’t having it, and gradually changed to a strategy of conspiracy to seize power using violence. They explained the failure of propaganda on the idea that the laws of social progress dictate that the richer peasants would always support the current regime.

The marxists succeeded the populists and kept the class struggle to overthrow the current system but changed the good guys from the peasants to the working class. Marx saw history as a inevitable sequence, where capitalism had to arise first before socialism.  

Lenin had no real compassion for people and would gladly increase their suffering if he could use it to agitate for his revolution. The split between the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks in 1903 was defined by Lenin. His personality, and his harsh methods and disregard for democracy in his sole aim of revolution.

End part 1

The great famine of 1891 was a big pusher towards political agitation, particularly marxism. 

Note, the term “liberal” or “political liberal” is used a lot and seems to be the those who wanted to keep the Tsarist state, but have it undergo liberal reforms for the benefit of the workers.

The author’s perhaps biggest point so far has been how the autocracy continually pushed people into radicalism by clamping down hard and viciously on any attempts at even moderate reform.

Bloody Sunday, on Jan 9 1905, where the state’s soldiers shot on an unarmed peaceful procession asking for reforms caused a lot of people to start hating the Tsar. Months of protests and violence ensued, with Russia teetering on the edge of collapse. Finally, after months, the Tsar accepted their demands and signed the October Manifesto, which among other things initiated forming a constitution and the duma. But after the Manifesto rioting if anything got worse, but eventually the Tsar was able to put it down, with vicious suppression, thanks to the continued loyalty of his military and the uncoordination of the various revolutionary sects. The Manifesto also mostly satisfied the liberals, leaving the socialists alone in rebellion.

From the 1905 Manifesto to 1917, discontent simmered. The well-to-do Liberals became conservatives, fearing future violence against them, and the peasants and working-class had had none of their economic demands met in the Manifesto.

During those years Stolypin tried to convert the peasants into land owners by getting them to private their communes, but resistance from the gentry, land captains, and older/wealthier peasants made this largely a failure. 

In WWI Russia was hopelessly incompetent. It’s military leaders had been promoted because of loyalty to the Tsar rather than military knowledge. They were still obsessed with using cavalry, which were mowed down by German artillery, they resisted digging trenches, which mowed down many more men. They had no ammunition and food supply for a long war, and were not quick to start working on making more. 

End part 2

Food shortages caused by WWI ultimately brought down the Tsar. It was a very sudden end, with no one predicting it even 2 weeks out. Protests and strikes about bread quickly turned political as people demanding the ousting of the Tsar. The soldiers, who already resented the government because of its incompetence in the war so far, started siding with the working class protesters and violence between protesters and police escalated quickly. The Tsar was very committed to his oath to uphold the principle of Autocracy and one could argue he preferred abdicating to becoming a constitutional monarch. 

The protests were very riot-like, with lots of excess violence as time went on, caused in part no doubt because they had emptied all the prisons. 

A provisional government was constructed and also the Soviet, which literally means council, the Soviet had the power because all the workers were behind it, but the government was officially in charge. At this time, the Bolsheviks were not really involved in the Soviet. It was largely Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionary members and Social Democrats. The government was mostly liberal bourgeois folks, not socialists, originally, but Mensheviks Soviet members joined later, which decreased their popularity as they became part of the government in a coalition with the liberals and helped the Bolsheviks.

Lenin returned to Russia April 3, 1917, a couple months after the February revolution had begun. Lenin lived like a spartan, exercising to build his muscles and didn’t live lavishly even after seizing power, author said Bolshevism had a “macho culture”: violence, power etc. He didn’t have lots of mistresses either, but he cultivated in himself coldness. Lenin quote: “I can’t listen to music too often, it makes me want to say kind, stupid things, and pat the heads of people. But now you have to beat them on the head, beat them without mercy.” He had no interests or hobbies outside of politics and his quest to seize power.

His April Theses were radically different that what current Bolsheviks, let alone Mensheviks or SRs were even considering. It was much more radical, arguing the proletarian revolution should try to seize power now, skipping the lengthy period of Bourgeoisie rule.

Gorky was one socialist who was disenchanted with revolution because of its violence and anti-civilization nature. Quote: “In my view the overwhelming majority of the population in Russia is both evil and as stupid as pigs.” He blame Lenin for taking a revolution that would’ve been Westernizing for Russia and “peasantizing it.”

The Bolsheviks seized power in October. And started rolling back freedoms and stepping up persecution of competing political parties. People really hated any form of privilege, peasants really believed everyone should get the exact same things, so the Bolshevik “eat the rich” policies struck a chord with people. They encouraged plundering bourgeois property as a form of social justice by revenge: “looting the looters.” Armed gangs robbed everywhere in the country as law and order completely vanished in early 1918. Mob violence killed people by the thousands, the Cheka courts had no legal principles and often primarily convicted people on the basis of their upbringing and former social class. Bourgeois people were forced to do menial labor like cleaning streets, primarily to humiliate them. Noble lands were split up and brought into the village communes.

As a result of their disastrous negotiating strategy, the Soviets’ peace with Germany involved giving up 34% of its population (55 million people), 32% of its agricultural land, 54% of its industrial enterprises and 89% of its coal mines. 

In 1918 Lenin created Committees of the Rural Poor which were supposed to consist of the poorer peasants in communes with the goal of inciting class conflict between the wealthier peasants and the poorer ones. It failed miserably and was abolished within a year. The peasants all thought of themselves as one group and the slightly wealthier peasants were looked up to and respected as the older and most success farmers. 

This book was very interesting, but very long, and I took far fewer notes in the second half of the book. (Still read the whole thing though.)

Read: The Happiness Hypothesis

It is estimated that 50-80% of the variance in happiness from person to person is a result of their genetics, and only the remainder is a function of how good or bad their environment is. I think I probably got dealt a not terrible but slightly below average hand on the baseline happiness level.

He talks about the brain with the analogy of a person riding and trying to steer an elephant. Where the person represents our logical rational mind and the elephant is our instincts and deep seated emotions. Contrary to how people feel, he says it’s actually closer to the elephant controlling the person, where no rational mind will do what it wants, and then the rider becomes the elephant’s lawyer, making justifications for what the elephant wants to do.

When faced with a decision, people usually have an inclination about it (take raising the minimum wage) and then they look for reasons to support that position. When they find something to support it, there minds turn off. People naturally have no inclination to seek out contradictory evidence.

People’s reasoning is even worse when it is motivated. People given different sides of a court case and then asked to negotiate an agreement were much less reasonable and more likely to be unable to come to an agreement than those who read the court case before being given their side.

Interestingly, people have more accurate perceptions of others than they do of themselves. People over estimate their own skills, moral qualities, and value, but are generally fairly accurate when asked to predict people as a whole. 

Studies show that people who do acts of abject evil, from spousal abuse to rape to genocide, rarely think that what they’re doing is evil. They see themselves as responding to provocations in a justified manner, often seeing themselves as the victim. This is one of the reasons the first goal of evangelism is to convince people they aren’t good. Unfortunately, his main conclusion from this topic was that “pure evil” is a myth.

Because of the biases that people have thinking what they do is fine, it is very difficult follow Jesus’ admonition to take the log out of our own eye first. In conflicts the author suggests trying to find one thing you did wrong, and ignoring the mind lawyer’s justifications for that action. 

After 4 chapters of analyzing the brain, chapter 5 finally begins a discussion on happiness. 

The adaption principle: Within a year lottery winners and paraplegics have mostly returned to their baseline happiness level.  We are sensitive to change in conditions in determining our happiness much more so than the absolute quality of our conditions. Buddhism sees this and tells me to stop striving for anything and just exist or whatever, Christianity warns of the love of money that is never satisfied. 

However, there are some environmental changes that do contribute to lasting happiness. Marriage does, being religious does, and having strong social ties does. A 65 year old with health problems and living off social security who is married and has strong ties to her church will be happier than a 35 year old guy making $100K but who is a single intellectual who reads all the time. 

Levels of power, status, freedom, health, and sunshine are all subject to the adaptive principle. More attractive people are not on average happier than uggos. People in good climates aren’t happier than those in bad, consistent chronic health conditions are adjusted to. Wealth does not really increase happiness after you get above the poverty line. 

Some environmental things can lastingly harm happiness without ever being adapted to. Noise, particularly intermittent noise. So avoid living near an interstate or traffic light. Bad commutes are lastingly negative. You can significant improvement your happiness long term by living nearer work even in a smaller house. Lack of a feeling of being in control can negatively impact (applicable to the elderly in particular). Bad relationships with coworkers or spouses are never adapted to. 

Pleasures like food and sex cause an increase in happiness that fades very quickly after the enjoyment is over. And they should not be overindulged in. Pleasures should be savored and varied to maximize enjoyment and avoid adaption. 

Participating in things that challenge you in areas you are good at or care about can improve mood for hours after the event. I think of playing sports for me personally here, or vigorous debate.

Joyously, the author described his change from expecting the Buddha to be the best psychologist, to realizing that there are actions and things we can do to improve happiness and just detachment doesn’t maximize our lives. 

Strong social bonds are beneficial for everyone. Introverts who are forced to be outgoing find their mood is boosted. Lack of social bonds is a great predictor for suicide likelihood.

Its chapter on morality was interesting. Secular of course, but it had some interesting data, such as that helping others, volunteering, etc, causes people to be happier, and even have health benefits like living longer.  It also had an interesting contrast between the way morality was taught of old, focusing on virtues: wisdom, courage, justice, temperance, etc, and the way morality is taught today, focusing on rationally analyzing individual decision to determine the “moral” course of action. Early America honored the virtues of producers: hard work, self-restraint, sacrifice for the future, but with the rise of consumerism a view of the self centered on personal fulfillment arose. Also, inclusiveness killed virtue. America has experienced a huge shrinking of moral ideas that everyone agrees with. Society needs homogeneity in moral values.

People who view their work as a calling enjoy it far more than those who view it as a job or career. They enter “flow” states more and don’t spend as much time looking at the clock. 

Read: The Charisma Myth - Olivia Fox Cabane

Hilariously, she says immediately that you can become charismatic “without changing your personality.” Not wanting to “change who they are” keeps a lot of people from working on self-improvement so her stance is one way to avoid those barriers.

She says charisma is a matter of 3 things: presence, power, and warmth.

On presence, she says you should always strive to be 100% present whenever talking to someone. Give them your full attention and do not let your mind wander. 

I ended up not finishing the last couple chapters. It just wasn’t really very useful to me. Too PC and more focused on a corporate setting, which i’m just not very interested in right now. 

I will take the presence idea though. I need to try to be more focused 100% when talking to people and not get distracted by other things or internally monologuing about what I’m gonna say next.

Read: The Art of Learning any Josh Waitzkin

Not terrible, but I didn’t get a lot out of it. Very buddhism influenced. More of a story about the Author’s competitive life than a systematic research of knowledge/skill acquisition. Still, there was some useful stuff, like spending lots of time on the bare basics, going over and over them slowly until they are perfect.