Joseph Kelly's Blog

Re-Engineering Philosophy for Limited Beings, by William C Wimsatt

This was one of the deepest and most interesting books I read all year. Wimsatt is a philosopher, but early in his career he did tours through physics and biology. This helps to ground his material in real scientific contexts, especially in the history of genetic theory.

Some favorite quotes:

• “Why is it that academics who claim to seek the truth want to pretend that they have always had it?”
• “The history of scientific progress and the evolution of our conceptual categories is littered with one generation’s projects and category mistakes that have become the next generation’s impossibilities and conceptual truths.”
• “Cognitively speaking, we metabolize mistakes!”

Heuristics

Wimsatt is a big fan of Herbert Simon’s model of man as “satisficer,” and notes how suited heuristics are for the temporal and cognitive limitations we’re faced with. He even draws a parallel to evolutionary biology, claiming that biological adaptations also meet the definition of a heuristic.

The chapter “False Models as Means to Truer Theories” is a tour de force through the nature of models and why it’s still useful to construct them even when they may not be comprehensive or 100% true in all cases. He provides several examples from the history of genetics for how a theory that was not quite right was able to spur insights into a deeper understanding of how genes worked.

Wimsatt is very detailed and enumerates qualities and definitions for many abstract ideas that are above and beyond what I’ve typically seen. For instance, he gives a definition of a heuristic based on three qualities:

1. “The correct application of a heuristic procedure does not guarantee a solution and, if it produces a solution, does not guarantee that the solution is correct.”
2. Heuristics are “a cost-effective way, and often the only physically possible way, of producing a solution.”  “The application of a heuristic to a problem yields a transformation of the problem to a nonequivalent but intuitively related problem, [meaning] answers to the transformed problem may not be answers to the original problem.”
3. “The failures and errors produced when a heuristic is used are not random but systematic. …any heuristic, once we understand how it works, can be made to fail. … This property of systemic production of wrongs answers will be called the bias of the heuristic.”

Mental Models

Wimsatt introduces several valuable mental models:

• Robustness analysis: Something (an entity, concept, pattern or theory) is robust to the degree that it is accessible via multiple independent means. With this in mind, we might order the laws of nature by fundamentality: “the more fundamental laws will be those that are independently derivable in a larger number of ways.”
  • Wimsatt goes on to describe what’s elsewhere called thinking from First Principles: a reasoning process involving just a few short jumps from fundamental laws and principles will do much better than a long, serial chain of reasoning. “We feel more confident of objects, properties, relationships, and so forth that we can detect, derive, measure, or observe in a variety of independent ways because the chance that we could be simultaneously wrong in each of these ways declines with the number of independent checks we have.”
• Generative entrenchment: Wimsatt’s idea of generative entrenchment is deeply tied to evolutionary processes. As organisms or systems evolve, certain changes become more critical than others because they help generate other adaptations. An example would be the emergence of RNA and DNA, which have become generatively entrenched in so much of biological life due to their unlocking of many more adaptations. Other examples would be the joint-stock company or Bitcoin (kicked off Blockchain + ICO ‘revolutions’).
  • “A deeply generatively entrenched feature of a structure is one that has many other things depending on it because it has played a role in generating them. It is an inevitable characteristic of evolved systems of all kinds – biological, cognitive, or cultural – that different elements of the system show differential entrenchment.”  Generatively entrenched features engender and result in positive feedback loops: as more things build on a platform that platform becomes more entrenched, making it more stable and unlikely to change, therefore more things get built on it, etc.
• Perspectives and causal thickets:  These are close analogs to Charlie Munger’s latticework of mental models. When a phenomenon is complex enough that it requires multiple explanations that cross boundaries (both physical or theoretical), Wimsatt labels the multi-disciplinary view for that phenomenon a “perspective” (rather than just a single explanation from a theory of physics or biology). Wimsatt considers that there are aspects of reality that still don’t yield themselves to explanation by perspectives, these areas of reality he calls “causal thickets.”  I love this term as it calls to mind a shrub, where every branch is a theory or explanation that might be valid but is only a minor, intermingled part of the picture. Examples of causal thickets are abundant in the realms of psychology and sociology.

The Ontology of Complex Systems

I’ve always been fascinated by how nature seems to operate at levels. Why is it that we seem able to stack fields and theories on top of one another, such as Physics > Chemistry > Biology > Sociology?  Wimsatt explores why these occur in nature and complex systems. One answer has to do with the size of things in nature: because the size of something means it’s likely to interact with other things of equivalent size, our theories become robust at those levels (e.g. we have more means of proving and providing examples of a given theory at that level).

Wimsatt spends a good deal of the book outlining a subtle position on reductionism. It’s easy for us to read books about complexity and emergence then develop a distasteful attitude for simple reductive explanations. But Wimsatt shows that reality isn’t even simple enough to contain solely reductive OR emergent phenomena. Reductive explanations still have their place in describing nature accurately.

Wimsatt believes our world is like graphs (a) or (c) above. Below, he draws the progression from simple reductionist theories, through emergence, and then causal thickets.

Extreme Ownership, by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin

A quick read on leadership principles. Aside from the Iraqi war anecdotes, which were interesting in their own right, most of the ideas are things you’ve probably heard before. But that doesn’t mean it’s not worth it to be reminded of them.

Love and Math, by Edward Frenkel

I went on a big math kick these past few months. Frenkel’s book is a good introduction to modern mathematics that isn’t too tough for a layperson. The book is worth it for his explanation of symmetry alone, although there were a few parts where he gets carried away.

Princeton Companion to Mathematics

I’ve not read anything near all of this volume, but made a dent in the first few chapters and skipped around as various topics interested me. More of an encyclopedia than something you read cover-to-cover, it’s great to have around as you’re exploring math topics.

To Predict IS NOT to Explain, by Rene Thom

Thom was an influential mathematician from the last century who invented catastrophe theory and did lots of work in topology. I have a large personal fascination with the dichotomy between the continuous and the discrete. When and where is it helpful to treat a system as analog or digital, continuous or discrete? Is reality fundamentally one or the other? While no-one can really know, I have a soft-spot for people in the predominantly continuous/analog camp, such as Thom and CS Peirce.

Peirce’s Logic of Continuity, by Fernando Zalamea

Peirce is one of my favorite philosophers and this book is an exploration and expansion of his theories of continuity. Most discussions of continuity by mathematicians stop at Cantor’s real number line (or the related Zeno’s paradox), but as Zalamea shows, Peirce’s concept of continuity is a much more metaphysical idea that goes deeper. I loved the first half of the book but struggled through the latter half, when he dives into Peirce’s existential graphs. I’m still working up to see the real beauty and utility people ascribe to these tools developed by Peirce.

Philosophy of Gesture, by Giovanni Maddalena

More Peirce-inspired, continuity-related stuff, from a philosophy/semiotic point of view. Probably not worth it if you’re not into this sort of thing. I do find it interesting that Maddelanas’ models for synthetic judgment bear a lot of similarity to Wimsatt’s perspectives and causal thickets.

Maps of Meaning, by Jordan Peterson, plus 2 dozen of his podcast episodes

I’ve not read this cover-to-cover yet, but only because I’ve listened to so many of his podcast episodes which cover a lot of the same territory. I’ve come to love Peterson’s work. I grew up with a largely Catholic upbringing, surrounded by stories from the Bible that I struggled to take too literally. Peterson offers a synthetic perspective on some of our oldest stories that bring together evolution, psychology, and historical fact. Even if we find it hard to believe in the literal tale of Adam and Eve or the fratricide between their sons, Cain and Abel, Peterson shows how these stories are generic examples of humanity’s struggle with its own limitations. These stories play themselves out over and over again across time and different cultures, so even if they may not be true as historical fact they are very, robustly true as descriptions of human nature (see Wimsatt’s definition of robustness). I can’t help but point out the parallels between his framing of chaos and uncertainty and the same Peircean continuity described earlier.

Patterns of Strategy, by Patrick Hoverstadt and Lucy Loh

I bought this book after seeing it recommended on Chet Richards’ blog. It’s another great work of synthesis that brings together theories from John Boyd, Gregory Bateson and other systems-thinkers (but not many business gurus!). I really liked their use of landscapes to visualize strategic positioning:

A Sense of Urgency, by John Kotter

A quick-read business book about urgency. I’ve thought about this a lot as it relates to distinctions between real vs. manufactured urgency, and how to increase one over the other. This wasn’t mind-blowing but still had some good reminders.

The Great Endarkenment, Elijah Millgram

This is the follow-up to Millgram’s fantastic book, Hard Truths. It’s a collection of papers that were originally published elsewhere but have been edited to cohere into this one volume. While I didn’t find this book as useful to me as Hard Truths, it’s still good and is a natural extension of the topics he developed in that first volume. Millgram himself considers this to be the superior motivating frame for the ideas in Hard Truths.

Millgram’s core thesis throughout the book is that ever since the Enlightenment humankind has experienced a process of increasing fragmentation and specialization of knowledge. He characterizes humankind as “serial hyperspecializers,” a species that, in general, moves from specialized niche to specialized niche throughout a lifetime.

Specializations come and go (e.g. jobs like a switchboard operator) and within each specialization we develop unique context-specific vocabularies and frames of reference. This specialized vocabulary allows for greater accuracy and efficiency by those operating in a niche, yet represent a cost to new participants who must ramp up on a new language. Once an individual abandons a specialized niche for another they must learn yet another specialized language, but what often happens is that they instead port over pieces from the other niche. Their borrowed concepts will vary in their appropriateness for the new niche and so we will be left with partial truths via borrowed terms and frames of reference.

Throughout his work Millgram attempts to transform metaphysics into a more modern and practical tool for science and daily life. I love the path that Millgram is on and found myself nodding throughout the book. Why aren’t more practicing philosophers thinking along these same lines?

Think on These Things, Krishnamurti

I’ve been on a big ’60s guru kick lately, see Alan Watts, below. Krishnamurti is great at playing the guru who doesn’t provide direct answers but instead prompts you in an insightful way that helps you find your own answers.

My big takeaway from the book is to spend more time exploring the thorniness of a problem before jumping to solutions. For instance, if we have trouble with being late to meetings, we usually admonish ourselves and seek to find corrective behaviors rooted in self-discipline. Instead, Krishnamurti argues we should focus on why we tend to be late in the first place. If we can reach that understanding we’ll have solved our problem in mind already.

This is second-level thinking for your own self-development: instead of taking the first-level diagnosis (“I’m late because I don’t budget enough time for things”) and prescription (“let me pad meeting times by marking them 5 minutes earlier in my calendar than when they start”), spend more time taking your analysis further (“Why don’t I budget enough time for things?”). Krishnamurti’s message is that if we can get far enough along in such an analysis of why’s, down to the very bottom of it, we’ll have already solved our problem.

Very guru-y and somewhat woo, but I like it.

The Power of Gold, Peter Bernstein

This was a great account of this history of gold through the ages. Bernstein covers the basics of gold’s inherent properties that make it valuable (malleability, density, scarcity and lack of corrosion), its first use as a trading commodity and store of value, and its role in economies and state power. As an economic history it’s fantastic, but I love the qualitative stories about gold booms and busts. I’ve spent the last few years studying bitcoin and cryptocurrencies and there are a lot of parallels of investor/speculator psychology between the old and new commodities. It puts a lot of the short-termism around bitcoin’s scaling debate in perspective – gold has had plenty of multi-year crises throughout the centuries.

Shoe Dog, Phil Knight

This book has already been lauded by nearly every entrepreneur and executive I’ve talked to about it. And rightly so – it’s well-written and captures the spirit that drives me and similar people to creative pursuits like entrepreneurship. Even though it’s a recent book it should hold up for a long time.  Knight’s story of Nike’s origins and early days is the iconic entrepreneurial adventure.

Thrawn, Timothy Zahn

When Disney acquired Lucasfilm and announced they were scrapping the Extended Universe, the biggest loss was the saga of Grand Admiral Thrawn. It’s a damn shame we’ll likely never get to see this awesome character on the big screen.

Originally set in the years after Return of the Jedi, Zahn’s first Thrawn trilogy told of a brilliant Imperial strategist who attempted (and nearly succeeded) to bring the Empire back to glory after the death of the Emperor. Thrawn was a perfect blend of intelligence, strategy, and good intentions while still being the bad guy that you want to succeed. I loved his creative strategies and how he would glean insights about his enemies. Before a battle he’d draw up everything he could about an alien foe’s art and culture to glean how they might be culturally predisposed to bluff, feint, or play a conservative hand.

This book was released last month and is a prequel to Zahn’s original trilogy. It tells of how Thrawn rose through the ranks of the Empire. If none of the above sounds interesting to you I’d skip the book, but for fans of the original trilogy it’s a great dose of nostalgia.

Out of Your Mind, Alan Watts

This is a collection of lectures by Alan Watts in audio format (available on Audible if you have a subscription). I was blown away by the wisdom and modern views he was espousing back in the 1960’s and wondered why I haven’t heard more of his stuff before. All of his ideas – about anxiety, the struggle to know oneself, and the mysteries of the universe – still hold today. He’s not as cryptic as Krishnamurti and packages Eastern thought in a way that’s more easily digestible if you have a Western-educated background. You don’t have to take my word for it – Naval Ravikant mentioned reading Alan Watts in recent podcast interviews with Tim Ferriss and Farnam Street.

Stealing Fire, Jamie Wheal and Steven Kotler

Another audiobook I listened to. It’s all about how we perform under altered mind-states and how to produce them. An altered mind-state, something the authors call ecstasis, is something like a flow state or that which people experience under certain psychedelic drugs. Their message is worth heeding – that we should consider when and how we’ve seen these states in our own pasts and how to cultivate them for ourselves to better our creative work.

2017 has been off to a good start, books-wise.  Here are some of the books I read these last few weeks:

Hard Truths, Elijah Millgram

This was a wonderful book that hits at the core of one of my long-time pet theories.  Millgram gives us a very readable work of modern philosophy that dresses down much of the last century’s work by metaphysicists.  He points to their efforts to find concrete answers to “What is true?” as misguided and doomed to fail.  Instead, we are destined to always deal with Partial Truth, except for when we take on significant efforts to re-engineer the world or our conceptual apparatus in order to give us the ability to make True statements.  Even then, we’re still often left with having to decide what is “true enough” for any given problem or context.  Millgram points out that this is the problem area philosophers of metaphysics should instead focus on (what true enough means in different domains, etc), and they should redefine the field as one of “intellectual ergonomics.”  I’ll be borrowing from this book for a long time.

Algorithms to Live By, by Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths

I listened to this on audiobook but I’ve preordered the paperback to have a physical copy.  I love this kind of stuff.  The authors cover a lot of research from math and computer science over the last century around optimal decision making, a sexy topic for any engineering-minded person.  It turns out a good amount of the heuristics we all use naturally for situations are also the ideal mathematical choices – a win for natural evolution.

John von Neuman, Norman Macrae

I didn’t know much at all about John von Neumann before reading this book.  I’m so glad I do now, what an amazing man.  There’s probably too much fetishizing about his prodigious intellect out there, even if it’s deserved, but he was otherwise a very well balanced and likable man.  For over a decade he was like the unicorn CTO for the US Armed Forces – equally brilliant and practical.  Beyond his contributions to US weapons technology and strategy, he sparked research and progress in a lot of other areas, especially the modern computer.  His approach there is remarkably similar to the open source movement of our modern area: he made sure his teams’ discoveries in the process of building one of the first computers was always published in the public domain and available for borrowing and improvement.  I do wish the biography went into more technical detail, at least at par with Isaacson’s Einstein biography, but this seems to be the best biography of him we’ve got.

This book paired nicely with Dan Carlin’s most recent Hardcore History episode, Destroyers of Worlds.  It’s another excellent episode that’s about the world-wide race to posses nuclear weapons and how that changed geopolitics forever.  Macrae’s biography gives added color about how decisions were made behind the scenes, especially as so many of them were a result of Von Neumann’s recommendations.

The Art of Learning, Josh Waitzkin

Great book on skill development, inspired by Watizkin’s time as a young chess prodigy and his foray into Thai Chi.  Last year I began learning to play the piano and how to swim, and it’s been helpful to have read this book (and The Inner Game of Tennis) as guideposts on the learning process.  A lot of great reminders in here about what it means (and takes) to perform well in any domain.

“The key to pursuing excellence is to embrace an organic, long-term learning process, and not to live in a shell of static, safe mediocrity.  Usually, growth comes at the expense of previous comfort or safety.”

The Trauma of Everyday Life, Mark Epstein

A great book by a psychiatrist who traces Buddha’s life and draws parallels to typical dilemmas and traumas we are all faced with.  There is a lot of wisdom in here, and it pairs well with a bunch of other stuff I’ve read recently, like Waitzkin’s book and Harris’ 10% Happier.

The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams

A classic work of fiction that was a fun change of pace.  I bought the “ultimate” edition, with all the follow-on books, although I gave up halfway through – I could only take so many zany mishaps and adventures.

The Warded Man, Peter Brett

Fun work of fiction that helped fill my craving for good fantasy fiction after reading Patrick Rothfuss’ books last year.

The Dip, Seth Godin

Fast read about when it’s worth pushing through hard phases of any project.  If you find yourself asking questions about whether it’s worth quitting a project or not, you might pick this up to add some perspective.