One Immigrant Who Made America Great (Books - Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow)

I'm not sure that Ron Chernow's Alexander Hamilton (Penguin Books, 2004) the bestselling biography and basis for Lin-Manuel Miranda's Broadway musical phenom needs any more hype, but here it goes. Chernow's book is a monument to one of America's most personally complex and influential founding figures.  It is lengthy not because Chernow, as is often the case in modern biographers, can't manage to make choices about which bits of his research to share -- a toenails-and-all approach -- but because he integrates his subject's story with necessary personal and historical context.  One cannot understand either the sheer amount of Hamilton's contribution to modern America: its constitution, party system, how voters are represented, how the state and federal governments relate, the system of checks and balances - nor the weight of these contributions, without understanding his role in the Revolutionary war, his relationship to George Washington (and by extension, who our first general and president was), and the opposition Hamilton faced from Thomas Jefferson (and who he was), James Madison (ditto), John Adams (ditto), and Aaron Burr (ditto), and having an overview of his most influential work The Federalist Papers.

Revolution in thought and practice (Books - The Lunar Men by Jenny Uglow)

Erasmus Darwin, 18th Century physician, writer, grandfather of the more famous Charles, and one of the eponymous lunar men of Jenny Uglow's book, wrote in the later years of his life:

Credulitas. Credulity.  Life is short, opportunities of knowing rare; our senses are fallacious, our reasonings uncertain; man therefore struggles with perpetual error from cradle to the coffin.  He is necessitated to correct experiment by analogy, and analogy by experiment...

If you live life with an ounce of curiosity in you, you likely recognize the longing Darwin so pithily expressed . If you, like Darwin, James Watt and Matthew Boulton inventors of the steam engine, Josiah Wedgwood potter and chemist, Joseph Priestley religious radical and the discoverer of oxygen, or any of the other principal characters in Uglow's The Lunar Men (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002), live to pursue your curiosities, then this is your creed.

Positive Deviant Alert

Two positive deviants attracted my attention lately:

Natalie Angier profiled physicist Dr. Mildred Spiewak Dresselhaus, a New Yorker who defied the odds for women in science thanks to the encouragement of the Nobel laureate and medical physicist Dr. Rosalyn Yalow.  She studied with Enrico Fermi at University of Chicago and then began her own research on carbon at MIT half a century ago.

Dr. Dresselhaus has also been a prominent advocate for women in physics and engineering, disciplines that are still short on high-ranking female faces and that were outright hostile to women when she began her career in the late 1950s. Even before entering science, she was well accustomed to hostility and hard times, having grown up impoverished in a rough part of the Bronx.

Our favorite design magazine The World of Interiors, an English publication, featured an essay in the latest issue by the blogger and author of the book Spitalfields Life. Check this excellent blog out.  It offers affectionate and energic appreciations of the history and contemporary culture of the hip and energetic Spitalfields neighborhood of London.  The author's mission:

Over the coming days, weeks, months and years, I am going to write every single day and tell you about life here in Spitalfields at the heart of London. How can I ever describe the exuberant richness and multiplicity of culture in this place to you?  This is both my task and my delight.

Let me disclose to you the hare-brained ambition I am pursuing, which is to write at least ten thousand stories about Spitalfields life. At the rate of one a day, this will take approximately twenty-seven years and four months. Who knows what kind of life we shall be living in 2037 when I write my ten thousandth post?

Orwell's inherently human contradictions embraced (Books - Why Orwell Matters by Christopher Hitchens)

I decided to read the late Christopher Hitchens's Why Orwell Matters less because I have a driving interest in political essayist and novelist George Orwell than because I had never read a book by Hitchens and many a sharp reading friend had praised his work. I was vaguely aware of Orwell being lauded and derided alternately by the left and the right. I knew he had become a hero of the neo-cons and I didn't know why. There's no reason to read at all if you're only going to stay in your ideological comfort zone, so I picked up Why Orwell Matters this weekend to see what they were all about.

This slim volume is not a biography. It is a corrective polemic of others opinions of Orwell - either critics of him, or those who idolized Orwell by appropriating

Parallel lives of determination and vigor (Books - A Saving Remnant by Martin Duberman)

Barbara Deming and David McReynolds are social and political radicals who worked during the tumultuous decades spanning the 1950s - 2000s. Their personal transformation through radical political action is the subject of Martin Duberman's dual biography A Saving Remnant. This sometimes messily organized narrative seemed almost suited to McReynolds and Demings's unusual lives of outward determination and vigor, and their parallel personal journeys which included much internal conflict, however, I was disappointed by the writing, which I found curiously flat and carelessly repetitive. Additionally, in a story whose central characters were active in many political organizations and who published in numerous journals, Duberman gave me too little background to help distinguish the Social Democratic Front from the Students for a Democratic

The relentless writer under the tyranny of physical paralysis (Books - The Memory Chalet by Tony Judt)

This is the second book I have read in as many weeks in which the writing was a sheer act of will, the other being Joan Didion's A Year of Magical Thinking. The esteemed historian Tony Judt wrote the essays that became The Memory Chateau by dictating them, having become quadrapeligic due to ALS, a degenerative disease of the motor neurons that eventually killed him in 2010. What impressed me nearly as much as his perseverance while looking death squarely in the face was the fact that the form he chose was a new kind of writing for him - memoir. Given that the form of one's writing becomes a signature of our work and could be said to be integrated with our very sense of self, I thought a change in form a courageous leap so late in the game. Although one could say, that the starkly new circumstances of his disease and the mental state accompanying it necessitated such a shift. In any event, it was a highly successful one.

The usefulness of lying, genetically speaking (The Folly of Fools by Robert Trivers)

Acerbic critique of Robert Trivers's new book on evolutionary biology Deceit and Self Deception, by Jenny Diski in The Guardian this week (hat tip: Book Slut).

...Now, decades on, he has arrived at a big, new universal theory, also essentially based on the arithmetic of gene selection. Deceit is useful where telling the (unpleasant) truth would hamper your progress. Progress towards what? Trivers would say your fitness, which is defined as raising the chances of replicating your genes into the next generation.
Your genes, apparently, would agree with him; but they would, wouldn't they? That is if they were capable of agreeing. I want to hang on to the fact that the building blocks of ourselves do not want or intend anything.

We're a work in progress...

Carl Zimmer has an excellent post today on George Williams, a little known evolutionary biologist who made some important additions to our understanding of the mechanisms of natural selection.

Many scientists believed, for example, that natural selection often produced adaptations that benefited entire groups.Why did animals get old and die, for example? Why didn’t animals just keep humming along until they were killed by a predator or a pathogen? Death had to be good for something, and one popular idea was that death benefited entire groups of animals. By dying, older individuals stepped out of the way for younger ones.

One day, Williams heard this idea for the umpteenth time,during a lecture by a renowned ecologist named A.E. Emerson. “My reaction was that if Emerson’s presentation was acceptable biology, I would prefer another calling,” he later wrote.

Check out the post for more.

Hurrah for positive deviance

Just a quickie today to say, if you haven't seen the piece in the Science Times on clinician and researcher Dr. Donald Redelmeier, take a look. I have a thing for people who can not just think out of the box (because that can be as hasty and end up as wrong as sticking with cherished notions - just because you think something or belive something doesn't make it true) but those who bother to question accepted wisdom and who put their hunches to the test. Here is one of those positive deviants that our belief-obsessed world so desperately needs in a nicely written profile by Katie Hafner.

Correcting our misinterpretations of the world (Books - Full House by Stephen Jay Gould)

As a working scientist, Stephen Jay Gould had a good deal of practice thinking about trends in the natural world in the language of statistics. Statistics get a bad rap as merely a fancy way to lie, but really they are a system of tools that allows us to infer the likelihood of something occurring in our world as a rule (and hence in the future) given what has already happened before in some subset of that world. For example, the likelihood that Drug X will cure a case of malaria can't be tested in the abstract, it must be tested by actually administering the drug to a group of people with malaria for, say, two weeks. At the end of that period, the number of people who survived or succumbed to the disease are counted. But we still don't know everything because a certain portion of any group would live or die anyway, those numbers will be estimated by comparing them to a group who does not receive the drug. This group should, if they are like most, have the same chance of living or dying as the other group. Then we can begin to infer how many people as a rule will survive because of the drug. Some math is applied to adapt the number from that small group and apply it to everyone, since it is impossible to give everyone the drug. The result is stated as a probability, the language of science, as it acknowledges the ubiquity of error and the inferential nature of estimates, as we can never know all the cases of anything.

Paleontologist, biologist, and science writer Gould was diagnosed with peritoneal mesothelioma at age 40, a disease with the median mortality rate of eight months. As most general readers of probablistic statements would, Gould first interpreted this statistic to mean he was likely to be dead in eight months however, his training as a scientist made him think twice about this interpretation of the median or the mid point of a group of numbers. This is one of three ways statistics describe the central tendency of any group of numbers - baseball scores, people who earn $30,000/year or more, people who will vote for Charlie Rangel in the next election, etc. Central tendencies are statistics way of summarizing what is usual in nature with one number. However, after thinking, Gould realized:

I am not a measure of central tendency, either mean or median. I am one single human being with mesothelioma, and I want a best assessment of my own chances - for I have personal decisions to make, and my business cannot be dictated by abstract averages. I need to place myself in the most probable region of the variation based upon particulars of my own case; I must not simply assume that my personal fate will correspond to some measure of central tendency.

Full House is a 190-page disquisition of what one might assume to be dry and obscure notions - means, modes and medians, spreads of scores, skewed averages - but because they spring from a personal confrontation with mortality as well as Gould's love of baseball, and because they are written in Gould's down-to-earth prose, this book is anything but dry. It is a lively, entertaining narrative on our tendency to misinterpret the world given our misunderstandings about what statistics are telling us. The writing is cogent, the format concise, and the references various as they are learned. Plato, Shakespeare, Huxley, Darwin, nameless drunks weaving down the sidewalk, Bill Gates, and the Brooklyn Dodgers all put in an appearance in Gould's attempt to make plain to the lay-reader concepts like measures of excellence, the likelihood of survival, or whether development - of skills or species - means a trend toward greater complexity or less. These phenomena are continually misrepresented in everyday conversation and reporting about our world, sometimes unintentionally and sometimes with malice aforethought. If you have ever wanted a better understanding the daily missives we receive in the language of probability through our senses or our news sources then read this book. The next time I teach a class which would benefit from an understanding of statistics, Full House is going to be required reading.

The use of deviating from "normal" (Books - Beautiful Shadow by Andrew Wilson)

One paper yet to write, but the exams are done. Meanwhile, I have gotten through close to half of Beautiful Shadow a biography of Patricia Highsmith. What a life of tumultous romance, and endless moving from place to place - Texas to New York to Paris to Mexico to Venice to Positano (where part of The Talented Mr. Ripley is set).

'The individual has manifold shadows, all of which resemble him, and from time to time have equal claim to be the man himself'

That is the apt quote of Kierkegaard from Highsmith's journal with which Andrew Wilson begins his first chapter. Highsmith was certainly well acquainted with her dark side and seemed driven to write from and of it. It makes me wonder what she would have written had she not had such a hard time creating satisfying, stable relationships. In some ways she was just a natural outsider to experience in general, a reflective, serious person. But another influential ingredient was the fact that she was gay and lived in both a time and a country that was unaccepting of her feelings. Who's to say which came first, being gay or being an outsider but I have my suspicions. Regardless, this is the point of view from which she experienced life and the source that flowed from her. In some ways, she was so interested in the conflict and in the darkness, one could posit that she was drawn to loving people she couldn't have or that perhaps not having them was a kind of satisfaction for her:

From the beginning of their friendship, Highsmith knew that Rosalind was attached - her partner was the artist and gallery owner Betty Parsons - and it seems her very unobtainability was one of her most attractive qualities. 'When we love unrequited we are very much conscious that we are in love. That is all we have to think about,' she wrote. 'When our love is returned there is, in me, at least, a holding back, almost a fear of perfection.'

Certainly longing makes for great art so we as readers should not complain.

Highsmith considered that as writer she was an entertainer, yet her natural seriousness drove her to write each book as:

...an argument with myself, and I would write it whether it is ever published or not.

Not finding predictability in life, she cultivated a preferenced for exploring the chaos:

'Admit that human life can be guided by reason and all possibility of life is annihilated,' she wrote, quoting Tolstoy, in one of her journals. She celebrated irrationality, chaos and emotional anarchy, and regarded the criminal as the perfect example of the twentieth-century existentialist hero, a man she believed was 'active, free in spirit'.

Or, a quote from Karl Menninger's book The Human Mind which Highsmith read and was influenced by in her youth.

'The adjuration to be "normal" seems shockingly repellent to me; I see neither hope nor comfort in sinking to that low level. I think it is ignorance that makes people think of abnormality only with horror and allows them to remain undismayed at the proximity of "normal" to average and mediocre. For surely anyone who achieves anything is, a priori, abnormal...'

Great quote. Without divergence from normal we would have no inventions, no great leaders, nothing new in music, in architecture... From a genetic point of view, without mutation we have no variability in the genome and would cease to evolve and eventually die because of the microbes that would continue to evolve while we didn't. This is one of my favorite topics, positive deviance as Atul Gawande calls it. And with no variability in our environment, face it, we'd be bored to death. Well I would anyway.

I love the fact the Highsmith read pulp novels in order to analyze their writing techniques. I'll leave you with Andrew Wilson's description of the writing points she gleaned from them:

She admired them for their clear cut narratives and simple style, but at the same time she also revelled in a sense of superiority, a knowledge that she, in fact, could do better. At working she should remember to set the scene quickly and get straight to the point; she should write quickly and with ease, as too much effort would result in a tired style; describe only the feelings and viewpoint of the main characters; make sure the end result was entertaining, as this was prime reason people picked up a novel; and always try to leave the reader begging for more.

Another defense of deviance and diversity

collective accuracy = average accuracy + diversity

In other words a diverse group will outperform a homogeneous one, knowledge or skill is not sufficient for excellent performance, diversity makes performance better. Congress, take note. Today's Science Times has an interview with Professor Scott Page from the University of Michigan and author of The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools and Societies.

Nature knows this well. Defending yourself against infection does not happen when you kill off bacteria, which is the downside of antibacterial soaps and overuse of antibiotics, you are better off with diverse flora and fauna in your gut or on your skin. Economist Lu Hong at Chicago Loyola builds mathematical models that demonstrate that:

diverse groups of problem solvers outperformed the grouops of the best individuals at solving problems. The reason: the diverse groups got stuck less often than the smart individuals, who tended to think similarly.

It makes me wonder if all models of diverse groups are more successful since I have been part of many a body whose diversity seemed to produce nothing but chaos! In the interview Peck discusses his views on interdisciplinary work, affirmative action, and standardized testing. I would be interested to read his book and learn more about his explanations for how and why this is true.

Changing minds - seismics shifts in thinking due to deviant minds (Books - The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson)

I've finished Steven Johnson's The Ghost Map. This post as well as this, this, and this one constitute my thoughts about it. While the putative subject of this excellent book is the London cholera epidemic of 1854, it is actually about something far less specialized and more far reaching - changing minds. Johnson tells us of the slow but seismic shift from the theory that diseases were caused by foul air to germ theory in general and, in the case of cholera, the notion that those germs infected our drinking water via its contamination by waste water.

The narrative relates this in a series of stages that move from - the original miasma theory, the counter-theory of waterborne infection, the logic or wisdom that supported the miasma theory, what made it compelling and why people held onto it for so long. Then, rather than any sort of eureka moment of discovery - such a popular way of characterizing scientific discovery - the eventual change, due to the dogged persistence of one man, Dr. John Snow, and his eventual winning over Henry Whitehead, the clergyman of the neighborhood most impacted by the outbreak.

The press and Board of Health were staunch defenders of the miasma theory but Johnson observes:

So often what is lacking in many of these explanations and prescriptions is some measure of humility, some sense that the theory being put forward is still unproven. It's not just that the authorities of the day were wrong about miasma; it's the tenacious, unquestioning way they went about being wrong. An investigator looking for holes in the theory could find them everywhere, even in the writings of the miasmatists themselves. The canary in the miasma coal mine should have been the sewer-hunters, who spent their waking hours exposed to the most noxious - sometimes even explosive - air imaginable. And yet, bizarrely, the canary seemed to be doing just fine...

As Snow observed many times in his writings during the period, there were countless cases of groups sharing the exact same living environment, breathing the exact same air, who seemed to have entirely opposing responses to the allegedly poisonous vapors. If the miasma was truly killing off Londoners, it seemed to choose its victims in an entirely arbitrary fashion...

Miasma had the support of the Chairman of the Board of health, Florence Nightingale - the nursing revolutionary, Charles Dickens, Engels - leading maverick minds of the day. It was an entrenched understanding that the noxious fumes produced when organic matter decomposed cause disease:

those telltale molecules - hydrogen sulfide, cadavrine - were clues pointing to a threat...methane and putrescine and cadavrine were the smoke. Microbes are the fire...

The committee begins with the assertion that cholera is transmitted via the atmosphere. When it discovers evidence that contradicts this initial assertion - a clear case that cholera has been transmitted by water - the counter-evidence is invoked as further proof of the original assertion: atmosphere must be so poisoned that it has infected the water as well. Psychologists call this type of faulty reasoning "confirmation bias":the tendency to force new information to fit one's preconceptions about the world.

John's Snows tireless interviews of residents lead a list of the address of each cholera victim and where they got their drinking water. He illustrated the connection by creating a map which won over Whitehead. Whitehead's insider-status and knowledge of the neighborhood residents lead to the discovery of the index case - the original case to which the infection can be traced. These two contributions together helped tip the balance and also pioneered our modern approach to epidemiology. But it took years longer for the general public to be swayed and John Snow died with little recognition for his work and without seeing that shift happen.

Johnson concludes the book by connecting this slow but important change in thinking to his favorite subject - the nature of cities and other networks. I think the value of this book in in this story of how a network of minds possessing an idea creates a different force than the possession of that idea by any one individual. Consequently, the force needed to change it is different too. It is tempting to ridicule those who held on to the false miasma based theory of infection given our knowledge today. Even the eventual discovery of the cholera bacteria could not convince Edwin Chadwick, one of the leading Victorian physicians. However, no age is free from popular ideas supported only with arrogance, circular reasoning, and cemented in place by confirmation bias.

I'll connect this story to two of my own favorite concepts: 1- the idea that what you see is not necessarily what you get - it is more true to say that "seeing is believing." Our sense of sight is thought of as a great window on objective truth but in actuality, perception is strongly guided by our knowledge so it is not surprising to me how difficult it is to see a "new truth," if the old one not only guides our thinking but how we take in information with our senses as well. I post in depth on that notion here. Favorite idea #2 - It is the function of what Atul Gawande terms positive deviants (people who are in some way different from the norm in a useful way) to see through the miasma of faulty reasoning and to persist in telling us how we may look at old things anew and see clearly, see my post on Gawande's book and that notion here. In other words, the world does not benefit from everyone being alike. Many people are most comfortable when they are in the company of like minds and like beliefs, but eternally doing nothing but confirming what we already know makes us less able to see challenging truths, even when they are true, and less able to change. It is a sure recipe for halting our individual or societal progress - that is why Johnson's book is valuable. It is not a book about cholera, it is a book about ideas - hanging on to them, changing them, and letting them go when they are found to longer be useful or true. It is a human tendency to think in shortcuts and rest comfortably on common wisdom. Sometimes a deviant thinker has to jolt us out of our stasis into a new awareness. Dr. John Snow's ability to see a new pattern in the face of ridicule has since saved millions of lives. Positive deviants may be our world's most useful assets.