Review of On Inhumanity: Dehumanization and How to Resist It

Link to review on Amazon

Review of On Inhumanity: Dehumanization and How to Resist It, by David Livingstone Smith, Oxford University Press, 2020.  Review by Todd Stark.  

This book is a valuable new entry in the literature trying to explain how ordinary people become complicit in the wholesale exploitation and murder of entire populations of human beings.  Smith has created his own synthetic framework for thinking about this which draws on a wide range of sources from psychology, sociology, history, and anthropology, as well as drawing on philosophical analysis to clarify many of the critical points which rely on terms that are commonly used in diverse ways.

The author's framework differs from the way we usually tend to think of these things in several important ways. This framework proposes a very specific way of thinking about racism, and then a very specific way of thinking about dehumanization, and offers a process relationship between the two which explains how oppression and atrocity seem be justified and sustained by ordinary people who are not necessarily callous or bigoted.  

Although his argument is very much about race, he doesn't start from the usual ways of thinking about racism.  Instead he adopts a very specific definition of racism for his argument which serves to distinguish the cultural construct of a folk race from any of the similar sounding ideas in population biology and anthropology.  He draws on the concept of essentialism and the psychology of essentialism for his definition.

This is very valuable for the purposes of his argument, although it takes a little getting used to.  We tend to think of racism already as either (1) individual prejudice or (2) institutional oppression or (3) disparity in outcomes.  These usual definitions are already a bit troublesome.  It isn't just that they are different, they can also be conflicting, and there is often an implicit relationship between them when people speak of racism. 

 

Some race theorists have tried to separate the concept of race entirely from prejudice, which is a big source of confusion when someone uses that concept in speaking with someone who has the concept of racism as individual or institutionalized bigotry.  Then the idea that racism means thinking one race is inferior to another in every way doesn't seem quite right.  People we call racists don't necessarily think some races are inferior in every way to others.  They might for example think certain races are superior in some ways and inferior in others, as in the case of the Nazi racists who thought Jews were diabolically intelligent but otherwise less than human.    The idea that racists hate the races they consider inferior isn't quite right either.  Slavers wouldn't necessarily hate their slaves, they more likely thought of them the way they thought of livestock.

  

Taking the sweep of troublesome examples and confusions into account leads Smith to back off from all of those meanings somewhat to focus on a fundamental mechanism ("racializing") that makes them all happen.  That is our tendency to see a population as having an inherited shared essence that applies to all of the individuals.  If this was all there was to racism, this would mean that merely adopting the concept of folk races is racist by definition.  But why should merely defining categories of people result in racism?  Smith proposes that the concept of a hierarchy of categories of human beings of different value is already there from the start.  Because we already think in terms of a hierarchy, defining human beings into races is then all that is needed to have racism.   

This means that racist thinking need not necessarily have anything to do with skin color or any other physical characteristic, those are historical artifacts. Since we already have a sense of hierarchy of humans based on relative value, all it takes is to find some way of placing people into different categories, and we have a formula for systematic bias.  

That idea of a hierarchy of human types, each with its own essential value is what constitutes racism in this argument.  So for example, racist thinking need not necessarily have anything to do with skin color or any other physical characteristic, those are historical artifacts. 

So the notion of psychologically and conceptually "racializing" a population is a fundamental idea here. This is not enough by itself to lead to unfair treatment, much less genocide or slavery, but becomes a powerful lever for other processes which do make it much easier to carry out all of those things.  

One of the lessons the author wants us to learn is that once we identify "racializing" a population as a lever that makes mass atrocities possible, we also have an important tool for fighting back against them if we catch them early enough. Categorizing people in this way combined with making the categories into a hierarchy is what racism is about here.    

From the start this approach distinguishes Smith's framework from the way many of us think about exploitation and hatred.  These days especially, with all of the polarizations we see between people, we often think of ourselves as fundamentally "tribal," as if identifying with a group in some way automatically disposes us toward other members of the group and also against members of other groups.  We often see arguments based on the theory that loyalty to our group leads to loathing of other groups.  This aligns somewhat with some of the thinking in social psychology that starts with the minimal group model and extends to all sorts of other kinds of out-group hostility models. 

Smith does not start with this "loyalty leads to loathing" idea.  He finds that humans seem to have a more fundamental disposition to see each other as human by default and to treat them as human beings even while identifying with different groups.  What he finds makes atrocity possible is not the "othering" mechanisms themselves but the way our cultural artifacts, especially our ideologies, trigger and maintain our aversive social psychological mechanisms while suppressing our natural and automatic ability to see each other as human.  

Importantly, in this framework, ideologies in this sense are not arbitrary, they are motivated ways of thinking that specifically preserve the conditions that let some people take advantage of others for their own benefit.  The classic example is how the Great Chain of Being divided the world up into a hierarchy of beings of different value, and was a natural fit for justifications of the enslavement of lesser beings.  

So if this framework is correct, we have some good news: we are not biologically doomed to exploit each other.  We do need to be vigilant of how we think of identity and how our sense of identity and the identity of others is being exploited by social and political messaging that draws on ideologies that support oppression and fuel resentment.

The way Smith's framework sees mass atrocity becoming possible is through a process with at least two steps.  

First we identify a population in terms of the inherited shared essence that applies to all the members.  This is simply the essentialist tendency, it doesn't imply any negative connotations about the population identified, it just attributes an essence to them all.  This first step is critical to the framework because it distinguishes the cultural construction of folk races from any scientific use of similar terms in population genetics or anthropology.  In this framework, the essentialist tendency is the bedrock foundation that lets additional mechanisms exploit or kill entire populations.

If we aren't being tricked into thinking of everyone in a population as having some sort of hidden shared essence, we could see people as individuals and populations as having diversity within them, which can greatly reduce the effect of propaganda meant to stir up hostility and fear.  Seeing a population as having a shared hidden essence lets us discount the individuals we see who are exceptions to the stereotypes because their hidden essence still means they have the potential in them to express it.  

Next, once a population is seen as having a shared hidden essence, the mechanisms of dehumanization come into play.  Smith defines dehumanization in a very specific way for the purpose of his framework.  Dehumanization for the author is a combination of psychological dispositions and social and political mechanisms that cultivate and trigger those dispositions.  We have an individual ability to bypass our instinct to see see each other as human and instead to see others as lesser humans or as non-human, and this is the psychological aspect of dehumanization.  Once we see a population as having a shared hidden essence that ability can be exploited in service of an ideology that treats the whole population as less human or non-human, and that is the social and political aspect of dehumanization.  

Importantly, dehumanization in this framework is a motivated process.  It is not used blindly but because it serves our advantage to view other people as a resource for us to use at our whim or as a threat in some sense and exploit resentment and fear of them.  This means that once dehumanization is part of a widespread ideology, it is very difficult to combat because people are relying on it and benefitting from it. 

Since the point of theorizing about human inhumanity is to fight against it, I want to summarize the points from the Resisting chapter at the end of the book.

1.  Dehumanization is both psychological and political.  We have to recognize how individuals are affected by social and political factors which push us in particular directions in our thinking.  When people and organizations say things that leverage essentialistic thinking about human beings we need to fight the temptation from the start.  When we see people's humanity being ignored or denied for some political or rhetorical purpose, we need to recognize it.  The political and the psychological are linked by such things.  

2.  Being both political and psychological, we need to fight dehumanization both by recognizing and opposing its political expression and by recognizing it in ourselves.  Our temptation to dehumanize people who are themselves dehumanizing others is very strong.  This promotes the very pattern of thinking that we are trying to fight.       

3. Dehumanization isn't the same as bias in general, there are many kinds of bias.  The sense of dehumanization where we attribute less human or inhuman qualities to a group with some attributed shared essence is particularly dangerous and associated with the worst atrocities of humankind.  We need to be on guard against that in particular.  

4.  We can study history to understand that everyone is subject to these temptations, even our in our own nation, religion, or ethnic group.  We can't let our loyalties blind us to the powerful forces that make ordinary people complicit with terrible things.

5.  This framework emphasizes that dehumanization is not a natural result of seeing people as different.  It is a result of ideology exploiting our natural psychological mechanisms.  

6.  One of the things that lets oppressive ideology take control is the failure of people to listen to each other, to allow dissenting viewpoints, and allow credibility to be destroyed through cynicism.  Tyrants typically destroy the credibility of the press as part of their strategy to make their own ideological message stronger.   

7.  Dehumanizing propaganda is usually not directly about hate.  Assuming that dehumanization is motivated by hate is a mistake because it makes it harder to recognize when people are doing it.  It is more often about desperation, fear, and longing for salvation.  Accusing people of being hateful and responding in kind is a big obstacle rather than a help because that tends to further lean into and draw on dehumanization.  Avoid accusing people of "hate speech" when you mean prejudice or dehumanizing speech. 

8.  The very concept of folk races leans us into the unfortunate uses of the term, and people use the term racism in very different and sometimes even conflicting ways, so an important counter-intuitive result of this framework is that we should not be fighting racism by accusing individuals of it.  We should instead be very specific and explicit about what sort of bias or bigotry we think is going on rather than calling people racists in general.

9.  Remember that folk race is about a hidden essence, not a biological reality.  So any population can be "racialized."  It needn't depend on folk race or appearance at all.  Ethnic groups, national groups, religious groups, and even political parties can be and have been "racialized" for the purpose or result of dehumanizing them.

10. Know the warning signs of dehumanizing speech and ideology: people claiming to be victims of a vulnerable racialized group, people saying that a group doesn't belong here, is not one of us, should go back to where they come from, comparing them to parasites or vermin, or other non-human creatures, accusing a group of sponging off of other groups, of having special privileges that the majority are denied, of breeding quickly and threatening to replace the majority.

A beacon of realistic hope for living better together

Review of Transcend: The New Science of Self-Actualization
Book by Scott Barry Kaufman
Review by Todd I. Stark
Review on Amazon

I was so excited to see this book come out at this particular changing and turbulent time of global crisis when the frailty of many of our systems and the political and social ideas that bolster them is being exposed.  This new review of Abraham Maslow's vision strikes me as a very welcome beacon out of the traps that we tend to make out of our fears and insecurities and aggressions.

The vision is bolstered here by many observations and experiments that help us make sense of it and recognize just how realistic it is.      Transcend assures us that even in dark times, when reminders of our mortality are all around us, those very reminders can help us grow if we pay the right kind of attention to them.

Transcend offers a way to do better, to be better, by building on the psychology behind human growth and development which we have just begun to understand.

This is a book about the realistic possibilities for human beings living better lives.  Can we do better, and what does better really mean?  Transcend suggests an answer to both of those questions in a way that can be tested and justified empirically.  This takes the book out of the realm of wishful thinking or idealistic philosophy and makes it more like a justification for projects that build on that vision.

There's a crucial message here; we don't have to give up on human nature as inescapably corrupt and selfish.  There is strong evidence that human beings are, for the most part, trying to meet their needs, and having developed past mere deficiency, will naturally aspire to growth in a way that reaches out to and supports other people.

In times of global crisis, we see a variety of ways people are trying to get their needs met in spite of enormous fear and uncertainty.  So it is particularly appropriate now that we think about what it means to be human and recognize our commonality and shared fate.

Is there a psychologically realistic vision of good people populating a better world, or is it just a utopian fantasy?  Scott Barry Kaufman takes it on as a serious and important project to find out whether we can really justify the claim that people are good and can become better.

The starting place is the early humanistic psychologists who went through a world of pain and violence and cruelty in the mid-20th century and saw in it some glimmers of hope from a psychological understanding of the causes.  They saw humans as fundamentally good, but sometimes twisted onto a darker developmental trajectory by having to meet their needs by treating other people as objects.  As we come to understand this twisting, we have the potential to mitigate it rather than accept it as unavoidable.  One of the things Kaufman finds is that we all seem to have elements of darker and lighter traits within us.  The distribution is very much affected by the experiences we have trying to meet our needs as we develop. 

There seem to be several challenges with this thinking.  Are there people who cannot help themselves from doing cruel and selfish things and are we forever stuck with that aspect of ourselves?  Does  trying to understand people who do bad things just give them a chance to take advantage of us?   Doesn't a focus on developing the best each of us can be lead to focusing on the selfish aspects of ourselves?  These are real and significant questions and I think Kaufman takes them as such and tries to address them in this book using empirical data wherever he can.  He doesn't ignore the dark elements about us, but I think he does help put those into perspective.   Unhealthy strategies for meeting our needs are widespread in some times and places but understanding them may at least give us a way to address them better if we have the will and a better vision of humanity. 

Maslow's concept of self-actualizing as a way of describing us at our healthiest functioning remains intact here.  However it is further clarified by pointing out its relationship with growth, purpose, love and a very specific notion of how the healthiest people manage to step out of their selfishness, fear, and defensiveness for periods of time.  That is, the healthier we are psychologically, the more we experience periods of that can be said to transcend our narrow typical experiences and offer in a sense a better vantage point for seeing life.

Among the most interesting and unique characteristics of self-actualizing involve the reconciliation of apparently opposed values. This includes reconciling agency and communion; reconciling in-group love with unconditional love; reconciling self-love with love of others; reconciling selfishness and selflessness; and reconciling the quiet ego with the strong self.  The self-actualizing person is distinctly able to draw from both sides of what appear to others to be opposites.  Transcend has many fascinating examples of research into just how self-actualizing people manage to do this by drawing on their own unique strengths and how it helps them function in a more healthy way in alignment with a sense of purpose.

Transcend doesn't stop at merely painting a picture of what healthy meaningful thriving looks like in human beings, it also offers specific strategies for facilitating our growth, from the distinctive properties of leadership that help pull us toward our best, the distinctive properties of culture that help us grow and explore and love, and the strategies for how we can recognize and make best use of our own unique strengths in our own development.

If we want to do better, Transcend stands as a new lighthouse drawing us toward that possibility.  I don't know whether we will make the world better.   I have seen glimpses of this vision of growth in myself at times, going beyond the petty and the fearful and the aggressive in myself and getting unstuck from apparent paradoxes.  And I've seen it in many other people as well, who learn to accept and embrace a wide variety of strengths and learn to use them to make things better for others as well as themselves.  So I know it is at least possible and I truly believe it would make a better world if we built more upon those qualities. 

Book Review

Action Versus Contemplation: Why An Ancient Debate Still Matters

Jennifer Summit and Blakely Vermeule
University of Chicago Press, 2018

I found this a very valuable discussion of the various forms this ancient dialectic has taken, from ancient Greece to the modern era of industry and knowledge work.

The authors use a touch of philosophy and history to some small degree but mostly selected literature to illustrate how we have come to see the active life and the life of contemplation.  Their conclusion is one I find myself agreeing strongly with, that the split between the life of action and the life of contemplation turns out to be artificial and historically contingent rather than something we can (as we typically seem to do) confidently take sides on.  Each of us has within us, "two contrary states of the soul" that each serve us in different ways.  Our need to make sense of these contrary motivational states pushes us ever toward telling moral stories that emphasize one or the other in different cultural environments. 

The argument mostly takes the form of examples where what seems to be reasons supporting one path or the other turn out to be better supporting some difficult balance of action and contemplation.  Herman Melville and George Eliot feature in particular.  The authors take pains to prepare the reader that they will not be comfortable with this conclusion, they will want to take sides, and it is opposing this deep temptation rather than defending a particular way of life that is the motivation for their book. 

Among the forms that the dialectic takes in this book are: the moral tale of the prudent industrious ant vs. the pleasure seeking grasshopper, skill vs. knowledge, theory vs. practice,  worldly engagement vs. otherworldly reflection, goal-oriented action vs. more broadly construed action, frenzied busyness vs. idleness, stress and relaxation, work and leisure, and ultimately they focus in on the modern University and its deeply entrenched division of sciences and humanities.  Taking the history and purposes of the modern college education into account, the authors make their final bid for reconciliation of the divided states of the soul.

At the very least the point is well taken here that we cannot afford to see our reflective nature as mere "idle navel gazing" nor can we afford to lose our goal orientation and love of efficiency.  We need to take the contrary motivational states that drive us to action and to reflection collectively as vital aspects of ourselves.  Though there are some intriguing and valuable examples such as trans-disciplinary studies and examples from art and fiction, just how to accomplish that reconciliation for ourselves is left mostly as an exercise for the reader.   

My related book list on Amazon

My review on Amazon

Todd's Review of Range by David Epstein

Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World
by David Epstein
New York, Riverhead Books, 2019

Review by Todd I. Stark

This is a beautifully written and well justified discussion of the various specific things that are not taken into account by the widespread cultural emphasis on early specialization for success and our popular model of performance in terms of domain-specific expertise.

This takes the form of a single conclusion which I would paraphrase as: "we need to be able to play and explore widely and to color outside the lines for a while in order to become very good at solving the difficult problems we later encounter.  But our cultural obsession with specialization pushes counter to that." 

There is a constant tension of the author's confidence in his conclusion that generalists are uniquely valuable and desperately needed and his recognition that he is fighting an almost Quixotic uphill battle against powerful cultural trends and incentives for specialization. 

What he means by specialization and the factors closely tied to it:

1. Head Start: Encouraging children from an early age to narrowly pursue things they seem talented at or have an interest in.
    
2. Domain-Specificity: Training with heavy emphasis on the specific narrow range skills we know we will need in the target environment and assuming far transfer of skills from other activities will be limited or non-existent.
    
3. Disciplinary Focus: Viewing learning as consisting of accumulating facts and theories specific to a particular field or subfield of study in order to become highly skilled at working in that narrow field.
    
4. Persistence:  The idea that we should identify a passion early and stick with it no matter what because it’s what we’re good at and enjoy and so can become successful at it if we manage to persist.
    
5. Fast and Efficient Short-Term Learning:  The assumption that we are learning better when we feel familiar with the material quickly and that we are then learning more efficiently. 
   
   
    
   Against those powerful and popular specialization factors, Epstein presents several compelling lines of evidence:
    

1. Domain-Specificity varies with Kind vs. Wicked Learning:  The argument for early specialization and domain-specificity is based on the observation that we need a long period of deliberate practice to accumulate the patterns and skills specific to performing in that specific activity and that practicing or exploring other activities is unlikely to do anything helpful for our performance in our specialty.  Epstein counters that on closer inspection we find a crucial distinction between different kinds of domains and learning environments, where in some of them deliberate practice reliably makes us better but in others deliberate practice either helps much less or can even make us perform more poorly under some conditions.  So not all domains or learning environments are equally specific and the head start is not equally helpful in all activities. 
2. Creative Performance comes from early exploration and interdisciplinary learning:  Given the domain-specific view of expertise we tend to assume that in order for someone to perform at a high level in any activity, since they need expertise, they need to specialize in that activity.  Epstein counters that when we focus specifically on creative performance, we find that deep expertise can be invaluable but is not enough.  In order to come up with truly novel solutions to problems we need to make use of analogies that cross different domains while sharing deep structural similarities.  That means being familiar with a wider range of ideas and ways of thinking than just those in our specialty, and so Epstein says creative performance is found more in people with broader backgrounds.  Epstein argues that outstanding creative performance also tends to be associated with early exploration of different activities more than with early specialization. 
3. The Efficiency We Perceive from Narrow Immersion is Very Often Illusory: We tend to assume that when we feel more familiar with the activity or material that we are learning it.  That’s part of the strong intuitive appeal for immersion in an activity comes from, it feels like we are learning more when we are more immersed.  Epstein argues that the evidence from learning research show quite often exactly the opposite, that the learning we think we are doing under conditions of immersion is either much less or much shorter lived than we assume.  Robert Bjork’s concept of “desirable difficulty” in learning and the evidence base behind it plays a central role in this argument.   This, Epstein argues, tells us that “slow learning” which helps us make new connections between a wider range of experiences is much more conducive to learning in the long run than fast, efficient learning from immersion in a narrow subject matter.
4. Match Quality is Not Necessarily the Same as Early Passion: Part of the argument for early specialization is based on the assumption that people have certain interests and talents from early on and if they can find something that matches them well and start early, they can align their passion with a successful career in that activity.   Epstein argues that what we know about lifespan development tells us that people’s passions are not so fixed or narrow and finds a number of cases of exceptionally successful people who spent their lives exploring and trying different things before finding a match that was truly satisfying and successful for them.   

Range is an appeal to encourage exploration in our lives from early on and for experimenting and experiencing broadly in our learning, even though it may seem to be inefficient or slow.  Epstein does not deny the immense value of long deliberate specialized practice in “kind” domains or the value of having deep specialized experience in some areas, but he has also made a passionate and well-argued case for making better use of a completely different dimension of performance.  A dimension rooted in longer term developmental outcomes, more exploratory or playful learning, and an ongoing search for ever better matches between our interests and abilities and our activities. 

Review on Amazon:
https://www.amazon.com/review/R3I57PTPZXSYU4/ref=cm_cr_srp_d_rdp_perm?ie=UTF8

Book Review: Secrets from the Eating Lab

Book Review: Secrets from the Eating Lab by Dr. Traci Mann

Review on Amazon

How our well-meant attempts to address the health implications of our increasing body fat are making the problem even worse.

This is a very well written and uniquely informative book in a field glutted with opinions and weak and conflicting advice. It is not a how-to book on losing weight, although it has a few solid behavioral suggestions for making modest healthy changes. This is primarily an interpretation of much of the available evidence regarding obesity and health by psychologist who runs an eating lab at the University of Minnesota and publishes a lot of scholarly peer reviewed work in the field.

Although she is a researcher, Dr. Mann takes pains to distinguish herself from obesity researchers with a public health focus who are motivated to warn people about the dangers of increasing body fat. Her interpretation of the data is often the opposite in some ways from theirs, she sees the growing incidence of body fat and she sees the growing incidence of adult onset diabetes, but she reports that the link between body fat and health problems is far weaker than is implied by the rhetoric of most obesity researchers and much weaker than the popular impression has become. In addition, our efforts to fight obesity have, she concludes, actually become counter-productive because of the manner in which we typically attempt to fight our own biology by restricting calories and exercising in ways that increase our stresses and increase our preoccupation with food, and that both of these things feed back into exacerbating the original problem.

The book starts off ripping into both the commercial diet industry and the focus of a lot of articles by doctors and obesity researchers by announcing that their "3 pillars" are all simply false:

1. That some diets work for losing weight

2. That some diets are healthy for losing weight

3. That obesity itself is deadly 

Among the central and most compelling aspects of this book is where Mann observes that our ideal body image often tends to be outside of the range that we can reasonably sustain. And this becomes confused with health concerns and fed by commercial interests. We could transform our bodies potentially through diet and exercise, but at the cost of altering or entire lives in the service of that goal and experiencing extended self-denial and obsession with food.

And the clincher for her argument is that all this self-denial and obsession would be mostly serving our aesthetic ideal rather than actually improving health. She finds that according to best available evidence upon close inspection mortality is not significantly improved by losing weight, unless you are already extremely obese and still have a long life ahead of you. The population in that category is far smaller than the one targeted by both the diet and fitness industries and most obesity researchers.

Mann finds that diets consistently fail in two ways: (1) only a tiny percentage of dieters retain their weight loss, regardless of which diet it is, and (2) even when people lose enough weight to satisfy the goals of improving their risk profile, they rarely lose enough to satisfy their aesthetic preference. This means that according to the person themselves, their diet failed even when for health purposes it succeeds. Our aesthetic goals trump our health goals for the purpose of satisfaction with the diet.

If we should want to attempt small changes that help us regulate our own eating so we can maintain a sustainably lower body weight, Mann offers several well-tested behavioral suggestions along the lines of "nudges" that help us avoid being triggered to eat excessively.

I think her principles seem sound and her use of evidence is compelling. I do have one criticism of her otherwise superb and unique exposition though. She argues for a set point model of body weight regulation that maintains our weight within a fairly narrow range but she doesn't really address the obvious question of why people are statistically getting fatter if we are so consistent at maintaining our weight in such a narrow range.

 

She puts most of her focus on obesity not being as deadly as it appears except at the extreme, and she explains why people can't simply diet away unwanted body fat, but she doesn't at all dive into the reasons for our growing bodies. That's a big topic and it isn't her area of research so I can understand leaving it to others to try to explain, but for me it left a logical hole in her argument that begs to be filled and should have been addressed with at least some general thoughts.

Book Review: "Are We All Scientific Experts Now?"

Highly recommended.  Brief book with a very high level argument relying a lot on his experience but I think it has some deep insights into how science is done, our shifting conception of how it is done, and the way it is communicated. 

Three big ideas are covered in this book.  First, a three wave conception of how science has been conceived since the mid-20th century:

(1) idealistic deference to science focusing selectively on fairy tale versions of its history and overly focusing on the heroic successes,

(2) cynical deconstruction of science as nothing special and decloaking of experts by adopting a symmetry of explanations regarding what is true and what is false, making science just another storytelling activity and focusing selectively on failures and controversies and social and political influences on science, and

(3) a more realistic wave that accepts the messy processes of doing scientific work and the requirements for doing it well along with the ethos that makes sincere inquiry into nature legitimately special. This is where we need to be now in his view, and I agree strongly with him.
The second wave Collins associates with the problem of "default expertise," the idea that since it is nothing special we can all directly understand scientific ideas and primary sources, learn from them, and make competent and useful evaluations of them, without any specialist knowledge or skills.  He ultimately finds the concept untenable and a notion drawn from significantly overreaching the real insights that were drawn from the second wave that revolted against the privileged scientific priesthood.

Second big idea, a model of different kinds of expertise and its relationship to tacit knowledge, recognizing especially the difference between things we pick up ourselves and things we pick up by interacting deeply and systematically with other people.

Third big idea, distance lends enchantment.  The farther we get from being researchers directly discussing their work with each other in a field day to day, the more the conversation changes and becomes more idealized regarding how it might be applied and the farther we get from actually understanding it.

My summary from the review:

"We are all ubiquitous experts but we are not all scientific experts in the sense that not only are we not all domain specialists in the fields we want to think about but we don't even widely share the ethos of inquiry that is common to scientists. Even specialist scientists vary in how highly they value aspects of that ethos.

The conclusion is that it is vital to both protect the scientific ethos and have a more realistic understanding of the kinds of expertise and the messy processes that make it work and cloud our communications about it when we go to make decisions from scientific work.

This kind of nuanced, important thinking about science and expertise is a wonderful gift from Collins that I truly hope we don't squander."

Full review on Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/review/R29W32NZEDCBIA/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm

Book Review:  Ungifted by Scott Barry Kaufman

Todd I. Stark  5/29/2013

Link to review on Amazon

Intelligence turns out to be a difficult topic, for reasons that aren’t at all obvious at first. Our understanding of mental ability has been captured in several independent threads of research that are surprisingly oblivious of each other for the most part.  Our stereotypes of the gifted and the ungifted often miss the details of what is going on.  The study of individual differences in general, while useful, doesn’t just de-emphasize, but actually systematically misses some of the most important things going on when people become exceptionally successful contributors.  

The author of Ungifted is well situated to make an important contribution to our understanding of intelligence.  He has made a deep academic study of a wide span of existing research programs, he has worked directly in collaboration with many of the leading researchers in several related fields and he has passionately engaged these ideas since childhood when he became  painfully aware of the academic sorting process for giftedness, and he himself is a wonderful example of many of the principles that emerge in his new book.  This is not another book that just starts out with a vague progressive vision of education and ability that everyone is a potential “genius” and then fills it in with wishful thinking.  No, this is a book that dives very deeply and realistically into the literature of psychometrics, heritability, cognitive neuroscience, and expertise.  It looks closely at patterns from the span of phenomena of human differences, including savantism, prodigy, autism, schizophrenia, personality, g factor, motivation, and creativity.

Ungifted is so compelling, rich, and significant a book for me that most of it was well worn by the end of the first day it arrived. What makes this book so rich is the unique combination of personal passion, strong but not intrusive scholarship, deep domain expertise, clear analysis, and all tied together with an original new and constructive perspective. Hard to ask for more than that from a non-fiction book. Every chapter is a stimulating lesson in an important topic that brings together a broad range of data, ever heading toward the book’s conclusion, nothing less than a complete rethinking of human intellectual ability, consistent with considerable evidence gathered along the way.

The most impressive and distinctive aspect of the author's thinking is his consistent and effective use of perspective-taking. In each case where a controversy is identified, each side is explored with great depth and sympathy to understand what its advocates understand that those on the other side seem to miss. It isn't difficult to do that for the side of an argument we agree with but it is an impressive achievement to do it for different sides and then to synthesize the perspectives into an overlapping understanding. This ability is particularly relevant to topics like IQ, giftedness, and learning disabilities, where sharp controversy shapes conversations at every turn.

Ungifted is about how we conceive of mental ability in general. Some people manage to accomplish much more with their mind than others do. There’s no escaping that basic observation, nor the fact that it has immense significance for political and educational thinking. What is the difference that makes a difference? The answers we get depend on the kinds of questions we ask.

Ungifted is in part the story of how the important questions have changed over time and why. There seem to be two tragic errors that we’ve fallen into historically. For one, we’ve often ignored the differences between us and tried to force everyone into cookie-cutter educational molds that well serve only a minority of the people they are intended to serve. Most of us appreciate this personal plight, as does the author in his "subjective" voice and personal experience throughout the book.

The other tragic error is ironically the reverse. In trying to appreciate the differences between people we’ve taken the opposite extreme of becoming obsessed with stable, predictive individual differences. We test ourselves and compare ourselves with each other and we look for the numbers that tell us who deserves what because we assume we are identifying potential. The author appreciates the motives and sometimes successes of this approach when done well, but the focus of Ungifted is on how we can do better.

It is the tragedy of our obsession with individual differences that Ungifted in the author's "objective" voice most eloquently addresses. We assume that testing people against each other will tell us how to best teach each person by identifying what makes people different. Ungifted describes in great detail and punctuated by the author’s own personal life story why that well-intended approach has failed us time and time again.

It isn’t simply as many politically motivated accounts would have it, that IQ has no meaning, or is too culture bound, or just measures test taking ability. IQ and similar kinds of tests when given and interpreted intelligently provide a useful and well-validated way of identifying the lion’s share of variation in human intellectual ability across a wide range of situations and this has some very real correlations with meaningful life outcomes. The problem is not that the tests are useless but that they have come to be misconstrued as if they measure a single stable ability that resides in each person and predicts what that person is capable of accomplishing. People who do well in IQ tests do tend to be smart people in general. But so are many people who do more poorly in IQ tests, and doing well in IQ tests doesn’t provide any guarantee that we also have persistence, motivation, or other qualities so important to making the best of our abilities.

A number of theorists have made useful additions to the body of well validated tests, but these are still tests of static abilities and they don't solve the most basic problem identified in Ungifted. The reasons the individual differences approach has failed us in the broad global sense that we have tried to apply it are that while effectively explaining variation between people in the same population, it has not taken broader environments into account, it has not taken the course of development into account, and it has not taken the dynamic differences into account that make the most difference in human lives over time.

A number of fundamental misunderstandings of heritability, genetics, development, and psychometric research have been exploited, often through politically motivated movements, to obscure the larger vision of intellectual ability. Ungifted makes a serious bid to help correct these fundamental misunderstandings.

Do some people have more of a critical trait or traits from the start, or do some people learn more from their experience, and in either case how much can we influence our abilities over the course of our life? The traditional dialectic of nature vs. nurture seems to have its own unavoidable groove in our thinking that we rarely manage to escape. Yet as long as we have been studying human ability scientifically, there has been evidence that the dichotomy is inadequate. 21st century research has given us some useful insights into the specifics. Ungifted summarizes the most important lessons from a wide range of data about human abilities, and the author is particularly careful to distinguish his subjective passion for the subject (which is often in evidence) from his more detached coverage of the data in the various fields.

Ungifted starts out with a concise summary of principles of the 21st century picture of development, setting the background for the rest of the book. The concept of traits is explored, and the patterns by which they develop.

Then we have a tour of the ways we have tried to measure human mental ability and our reasonable motivations for the various testing innovations over time. From the measurement of ability, we then see how measurement slides into the sorting of people into categories for practical purposes and the allocation of finite educational resources. We see the well-motivated practical reasons for labeling people, but we also get a sense of the often tragic real world limitations of that way of thinking.

We are introduced in an understandable but expert way to the real strengths and weaknesses of IQ testing, and to the best available model of how its scales map to specific cognitive abilities. This prepares us to begin to understand the different ways that "giftedness" has been defined and measured and why we are still so far behind where we need to be to cultivate the best in every individual. We also are given enough background to begin to appreciate the unique challenges of being different, whether perceived as higher or lower in ability than others around us. Ungifted artfully blends a sympathetic understanding of the needs of researchers and testers with those of teachers, and the diverse individuals just striving to do their best.

Then we are introduced to the core concept that distinguishes this developmental reframing of human mental ability, the concept of engagement. Engagement brings together the factors that distinguish the learnable, experiential aspects of intelligence from those that seem particularly stable. Engagement is the hinge that swings the big door to individual potential. Engagement is built on a number of factors that are particularly malleable and context-dependent, so it is of particular interest to the way education is done. Once we have a sense of what engagement is about, we take a fresh look at human abilities in terms of what is known about their development over time. The role of engagement over time in development begins to become clearer as we tour through the critical concepts of intelligence, creativity, talent, and expertise, and begin to see how they each relate to development over time. At the end, the key points learned along the way are summarized to give the outline of a new theory of intelligence.

For me the theory of intelligence introduced here is distinguished by two critical characteristics: (1) it emphasizes what happens in the individual over time rather than differences between people, and in so doing draws on different kinds of data, and (2) it is synthetic in spirit, emphasizing multiple ways of achieving the same outcomes by drawing on different resources, rather than looking for additional ways of distinguishing the abilities of different people. These two characteristics make this theory very different from most of the alternatives that are intended to address some of the same gaps in our intelligence models, alternatives such as “multiple intelligences,” “emotional intelligence,” and so on. Rather than just identifying more things that we think might be missed by IQ testing, and turning them into new sources of labeling and categorizing, the personal developmental theory of intelligence assumes that there are many different components to be identified, but places them into an overarching biological framework where ability is developed over time by identifying, selecting, modifying, and constructing niches suited to the thriving of the individual.

Several important shifts of emphasis emerge:

1.      Away from reliance on studying stable individual  differences and toward the details of person-centered development

We have focused primarily on measuring stable individual differences, whether “general intelligence” or other kinds of “intelligence” or personality in order to support research and allocate finite educational resources.  What this approach misses is the details of development within each individual over time.  It turns out that these two approaches, individual differences and person-centered, are not just different but produce incompatible results.  So this is a very important source of new information about how mental ability arises.  It is common for authors to point out that nature and nurture are an archaic dichotomy and that it is the interaction that matters, but the details are generally left vague.  There’s a need for specific research programs that focus on the development of ability over time.  The developmental approach is not just a detail, it is a separate source of crucial empirical data.

2.      Away from viewing the positive manifold of abilities on tests (“g”)  as a single ability in each person, and toward understanding its value in conveniently capturing most of the variation an array of mental abilities that collectively underlie many different kinds of tests.    

3.      Away from seeing intelligence as a number or even a trait, and toward seeing it as the adaptive fit between the individual and their environment by finding, selecting, shaping, and creating niches they can thrive in.

4.      Away from focusing on cognitive skills in isolation, and toward consideration of the motivations, strategies, and experience that turn those skills into practical abilities over time.

5.      Away from the focus on being able to measure abilities that represent potential in a brief test, and toward finding the best way to engage and cultivate each person.  Active engagement with the world and ability are inseparably intertwined in a mutual feedback process over time.

6.      Away from focus solely on controlled cognitive processes underlying reasoning, and toward better understanding of the role of both controlled and spontaneous processes in intelligence.  Being smart involves flexible use both controlled and spontaneous mental processes, and using the right resources when needed, rather than relying on one to the exclusion of the other.

7.      Away from fixed rules about how long it should take to become good at something or what special levels of ability provide thresholds, and toward seeing our “readiness for engagement” as a better indicator of potential.

8.  Away from seeing intelligence and expertise as independent (and one inborn and the other learned), and toward seeing the overlaps between them as cognitive abilities,personality, and motivation support the acquisition of expertise, and cognitive expertise is part of what shows up in testing for ability.  One of the most remarkable findings in the book that links intelligence and expertise is that chunking in memory, a key aspect of organizing knowledge in memory involved in expertise, activates the brain structures involved in fluid reasoning, a central component measured by tests.  

The resulting view of intelligence doesn’t see everyone as equal by any means, it seems unavoidable that some people will not be able to excel at some things relative to other people.  Stable individual differences do not somehow disappear because we shift emphasis to the person and their development.  However we do begin to see the real value of changing the nature of education to focus on the fit between people and niches rather than selecting people for special treatment via brief tests and subjective judgments of merit.  Several practical working examples of programs that successfully accomplish this change are described in the book.

I place this book alongside two others in a trilogy that for me represents a broad understanding of the nature of mental ability as it is best envisioned at the current time.

1. "Surpassing Ourselves" is about how outstanding performers learn differently.  It shows expertise as a distinctive way of learning rather than just an endpoint of domain specialization. By comparing the same person over time as they develop, rather than just comparing novices with experts, we get an understanding of the process by which people become smarter.  This is very similar to the shift made with intelligence in Ungifted, but applied specifically to expertise and shows again how the shift to a process perspective captures additional important information.  Surpassing ourselves also introduces  the reinvestment perspective, which looks at the growth of ability in terms of becoming more efficient over time and then reinvesting the saved time and energy in new learning, which seems to be a big part of how people who ultimately become exceptional learn differently from those who do not.
http://www.amazon.com/Surpassing-Ourselves-Inquiry-Implications-Expertise/dp/0812692055/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1369837497&sr=1-1&keywords=surpassing+ourselves

2. "Outsmarting IQ" is about learnable intelligence.  It shows how experience, stable cognitive abilities, and strategies work together to navigate realms of knowledge and let us apply our knowledge.  It gives a good account of the role of strategies, including learnable strategies and cognitive expertise, in trading off between cognitive abilities in order to make the best of our existing stable cognitive abilities. 
http://www.amazon.com/Outsmarting-IQ-Learnable-Intelligence-ebook/dp/B001D1Y8Z8/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1369837528&sr=1-1&keywords=outsmarting+iq

3. "Ungifted" combines the intrapersonal process perspective with a developmental model and an overall hierarchical model of cognitive abilities, consistent with the other two books in this list and yet going way beyond them to explain in much greater detail where “IQ” and other tests scores come from and what they tell us, and how stable cognitive abilities, expertise, creativity, and personality all interact to produce intelligence. 
http://www.amazon.com/Ungifted-Intelligence-Redefined-ebook/dp/B00B3M3UME/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1369837581&sr=1-1&keywords=ungifted+intelligence+redefined

Update 5/29/13 1PM:  Link to abbreviated GoodReads version of review:

Ungifted: Intelligence Redefined by Scott Barry Kaufman
My rating: 5 of 5 stars




View all my reviews

Review of "Surpassing Ourselves" - A profound vision of a problem solving culture

My recent review of Carl Berieter and Marlene Scardamalia's wonderful 1993 book "Surpassing Ourselves" on Amazon. 

It is about how the underlying concept of expertise needs to be rescued from our inaccurate commonsense epistemology and  from the negative connotations of speciallization and elitism and instead applied more broadly to processes and groups to make our education and culture in general become more supportive of better thinking and problem solving.  It builds from the individual psychology of ability, creativity, and wisdom to the application of the same principles to groups and culture.

http://www.amazon.com/review/R35GNAAFEFWRF1/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm

This is a remarkable book: deep in its insights, prophetic in its foresight, and profound in its implications. The most amazing thing is that this book was published in 1993, the same year the first commercial browser became available. That was long before science writers had popularized the research on expertise and long before most people had any idea what sort of thing a "social network" might be. Yet this book captures some of the most promising ideas of the modern information age, such as the use of technology to facilitate knowledge-building communities and the possibility of a wider problem solving culture. Having only the relatively limited technology examples of the time to draw from by today's standards, such as desktop computers with local databases, the authors express their vision in terms of concepts and processes rather than getting caught up in the details of technology. That turns out to be what makes this book most useful I think, because it makes the arguments very general.

A lot of my enjoyment of this book is admittedly because I had come to many of the same conclusions independently and felt reassured to see the same ideas expressed so eloquently. I do think they get a lot right here and that their core concepts have only become more plausible and more important over time since the book was written.

The driving themes of this book all revolve around a single idea: an expanded concept of expertise. I think this is a bigger leap of faith for most people than is at first obvious. Expertise has come to have very strong connotations in popular culture with specialization and elitism, which is exactly the opposite of the message in this book. The book is about how everyone can benefit from what we know about expertise, and how necessary it is to have schools and a broader culture suited to solving increasingly complex and difficult problems. It is not at all about specialization or elitism.

The disconnect between the expanded concept of expertise and the popular is not just about the politics and economics of specialization. It is also about how the research on expertise is interpreted. For practical reasons, most expertise research has focused on the difference between novices and high performers in a given domain and how much time and deliberate practice is required to make that journey. The authors recognize that body of work and draw from it, but they also recognize, critically, that there are other ways to look at expertise. We can also compare experienced high performers with experienced low performers. And we can compare novices who later become high performers with novices who later become experienced low performers.

The authors expand and elaborate on the concept of expertise in several ways:

1. Think of expertise not as an end state of ability but as an ongoing process of knowledge acquisition at increasingly high levels of performance rather than as an end state of high performing relative to other people.

2. Think of the expertise process as being a cycle of learning at one level until it requires less cognitive effort, and then reinvesting the surplus cognitive effort in reformulating the questions and addressing them at a higher level of difficulty and complexity, always working at the edge of our current ability.

3. Think of experts as people who actively engage in the process of expertise rather than as high performers, so we have expert (or "expert-like") learners even when they are novices.

4. Think of expertise as something that is done by groups as well as individuals.

5. Think of creativity as a particular kind of expertise, where we take greater leaps and risks in working at the edge of our competence and in building and drawing on our knowledge of what options are most promising.

6. Think of wisdom as another particular kind of expertise, drawing on our knowledge of human beings and what sorts of things are most promising in human lives.

The result is a vision of individual ability, education, and culture that is profoundly progressive in what it takes on, nothing less than creating the conditions for every student and citizen to either become or participate constructively with expert learners, to everyone's benefit, resulting in a broader culture of problem solving rather than one of stagnant political and philosophical stances. This is a 1993 vision for the challenges that beset us today, asking us to make better use of technology we already have available at this point, even though we did not at the time the book was written.

The authors recognize that even in 1993, most of these ideas were known and accepted by many educators, but they were very rarely put into practice effectively. The authors theorize that this is because of how self-sustaining the usual educational systems and in comparison how much constant vigilance and effort is required on the part of teachers and administrators to maintain a different sort of environment, what they call a "second order environment" that sustains the process of expertise for both individuals and groups.

One valuable prototype for second order environments is the research community, in which shared objectives and various intrinsic social rewards drive the team members to work together to increasingly more knowledge of their subject and tacking increasingly more difficult problems.

Compare this self-sustaining, actively learning expertise process with the simple use of technology to connect people to share knowledge. The difference is profound. Simply using technology to connect more people has some limited value, but it is a long way from the expertise process. The authors predicted this long before the "Personal Learning Network" became a promising but so often unimpressive reality. The gap between connecting people and knowledge bases, and people actually striving to make increasingly better use of available resources can be huge, and that is what the authors of "Surpassing Ourselves" identified in 1993, the way we use the technology and the way we communicate is critical as well, we can't just connect ourselves and our databases and expect to use all that potential effectively without facilitating and maintaining the process of expertise.

Does the term "expertise" itself limit our ability to make better use of these ideas because of its negative connotations? The authors point out how terms like "excellence" and "quality" have often been used for essentially the same idea, but those have their own misleading or easily abused connotations and limitations as well, and they lack the depth of individual psychological research found in the expertise literature. In the end, what we call it doesn't matter so much as whether we understand how it happens and how to create the conditions for supporting it.

Further Reading:

The books of David N. Perkins offer various proposals with a very similar and consistent vision to the one in "Surpassing Ourselves." "Outsmarting IQ" for example offers an expanded vision of individual expertise that in some ways builds on that of "Surpassing Ourselves" by providing a model of expertise as the process of navigating intersecting realms of knowledge, using the principles of far transfer to generalize expertise among domains and identifying some of the conditions for acquiring it. "Smart Schools" suggests a way to transform education along these lines. "Making Learning Whole" looks in more detail at the common process of expert learning at all levels of ability.
Outsmarting IQ: The Emerging Science of Learnable Intelligence
Smart Schools
Making Learning Whole: How Seven Principles of Teaching Can Transform Education

In "Rethinking Expertise," Harry Collins looks more specifically at the social dimension of knowledge underlying the group process of expertise.
Rethinking Expertise

In "Dialogue Gap," Peter Nixon elaborates on what is distinct about the sort of communication that brings out the different knowledge of each individual and in so doing facilitates what "Surpassing Ourselves" considers the group process of expertise, as opposed to simply arguing or conversing on a less constructive level.
Dialogue Gap: Why Communication Isnt Enough and What We Can Do About It, Fast

Maria Konnikova's "Mastermind" explores the role of a specific critical factor in individual process of expertise allowing us to work continually at the edge of our current ability. This is the ability to focus attention in a particular way in order to actively engage our thinking rather than just passively observe the same things in the same way. "Surpassing Ourselves" describes this only in the abstract as actively engaging higher levels of problems, but the concept of mindfulness offers a possible way of modeling the process in more detail.
Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes

Book Review:  You Are Your Own Gym

by Mark Lauren
Kindle edition available, review based on Kindle edition.
Text-to-Speech enabled on Kindle version.
165 pages.
Ballantyne Books (Random House)

Link to full review on Amazon

In a nutshell:  A lot of useful and clever exercise variations, good use of periodization for long term training goals, a number of good sample routines with progressions, very solid, practical advice for practical fitness through bodyweight exercise.  Straight to the point: exercises, protocols, and sample progressions.  A few tips of nutrition but mostly focuses on exercise.  Some of the protocols are tricky at first but the associated iPad app makes them a lot easier to learn if you can train with an iPad next to you.  A useful reference if you are interested in bodyweight training.  See the full version of the review on Amazon for more details.

Amazon review:  http://www.amazon.com/review/R2JDZTM4O5NCSH/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm

Book Review: The Blind Spot by William Byers

The Blind Spot: Science and the Crisis of Uncertainty

William Byers

Princeton University Press, 2011

Full review on Amazon.

Interesting food for thought, a reason for some humility, and an argument for perspectivism

I got some real value out of this book because it made me think more deeply about an important and fundamental philosophical problem, the problem of knowability.  How well do we directly know the universe we live in, and how well can even our best explanations really help us grasp it?  In the Western intellectual tradition, the question goes all the way back to the ancients, and we still frame it in much the same way they did.  The problem is fairly obvious to any reasonably reflective person I think, but I suspect most people tend to assume it is either an illusion or something of little consequence.
 
We have come to understand a massive number of details about our existence in various ways through science and we have discovered that with a bit of ingenuity, we can use mathematics to describe and predict the behavior of real things remarkably well.  This gives many of us the sense that we can grasp just about anything about our existence in the same way.  Afterall, from the modern humanistic point of view, what else is there besides our scientific causal explanations, our mathematical models, and our various superstitions? 

Byers seems to be playing something like the mischievous role of Ian Malcolm from Jurassic Park here in some ways. He is telling us that we shouldn't be so certain that we really understand everything the way we think we do.  Nature will always surprise us.  And he is not saying this because he thinks we should believe in miracles or because science doesn't work as well as we think.  He is saying it because science and mathematics cover the universe as we experience it rather like a lumpy carpet covers a smooth floor.  You can push down the lumps, but they always pop up again somewhere else. 

Our ability to explain our existence doesn't quite map to the totality of that existence in any uniform way.  We end up taking different perspectives on the same things in order to understand what we perceive.  This need to take different perspectives is "ambiguity." Our sense of certainty about what we understand, the perception of smooth areas of carpet, is not an illusion, but neither is it absolute, perfectly generallizable, not even entirely objective.  We tend to ignore ambiguity when we see it because it makes us feel uncomfortable.  Byers claims this discomfort creates a permanent blindspot in our perception of our own existence. 

The central theme of the book is that there are many different expressions of ambiguity in nature, and that they are all expressions of the same underlying limitation in our ability to grasp nature in terms of concepts and symbols.  It isn't just that there are some problems more difficult than others, it may be, according to Byers, that some difficulties are impossible to resolve permanently, they will always appear again in another form whenever we grasp them.  Blindspot tells us that something about the territory makes it fundamentally unmappable in any complete and consistent sense.  This, for Byers, drives us to keep trying to explain by grappling with the ambiguity in nature.

 
Byers makes some fascinating points and uses a lot of good examples from mathematics and science to make his points.  Most of the examples will be familiar to avid readers of science and math.  They include the usual suspects such as Godel's Incompleteness, Heisenberg's Uncertainty, wave/particle duality, the problem of the objective and subjective perspectives, intentionality, self-reference, and so on. Byers also draws on his own field of mathematics for some less well trodden examples such as real number theory and differential vs. integral calculus. 

While this book is definitely worthwhile in my opinion, I don't quite share the same excitement as some of the other reviewers because I also found it very repetitive and for me personally it sometimes seems to jump from point to point without really taking on important points in the detail they deserve.  I think this impression I get comes from Byers background in mathematics.  He will often start to talk about something I find really interesting, like the problem of intentionality or the problem of mental causation, but quickly turn it back into a logical question instead of exploring the scientific or philosophical questions in more detail.  I suppose my criticism is that Byers seems to be a "math" but not a "polymath" and the ambitious topic he has taken on may require someone with deep understanding of many different fields, since the thesis is that the blindspot is not just a quirk of mathematics but of our symbolic and conceptual abilities in general.

Ultimately I think the claim Byers is making is basically that the perception of clear understanding of nature is a local phenomenon not a global one because we can never get rid of the problem of incompatible but valid perspectives.  We can make the carpet perfectly smooth in an area, but we can never make the whole carpet completely smooth.  The "consilience" of nature's laws will never have a final expression in one scheme because we can't ever reconcile the different viewpoints that: (1) accurately describe situations, (2) are each self-consistent, and (3) are not only different but incompatible with each other. 

From my perspective, I think Byers has identified the problem in a legitimate way, but his logical arguments don't really convince me that the problem of perspectives is forever irreconcileable.  I agree with him that we should take the problem(s) more seriously than we do, since we usually wave this sort of problem away through various tactics.  I also agree that we should incorporate the challenge of multiple perspectives in our thinking.  It is not clear to me that the lumps are an intrinsic part of nature, or that they are all manifestations of the same blind spot, and Byers doesn't seem to me to exhibit the depth and breadth of scientific knowledge across the various relevant disciplines to make that point stick, but it does seem reasonable to think of them that way until we have actually smoothed them out and to take Byers' claim seriously as at least a sensible policy and a reason for humility.

Book Review: The Highly Hypnotizable Person

The Highly Hypnotizable Person,
Edited by David A. Oakley , Michael Heap , and Richard J. Brown

This is the most authoritative and comprehensive summary of hypnosis research compiled in over a decade, so anyone interested in the subject should take note. Noteworthy contrubutions include Helen Crawford on the genetics and neuropsychology, Steve Lynn on clinical correlates, Judith Rhue on the development of the underlying abilities, Donald Gorassini on enhancing hypnotizability, Graham Wagstaff on the sociocognitive view of high hypnotizability, and two superb chapters by Amanda Barnier and Kevin McConkey exploring what we now know about what it means when we say someone is highly hypnotizable. The book finishes up with a unique sort of perspective chapter, an invited independent viewpoint on the field from a psychologist previously unfamiliar with hypnosis research.

This information is too important and too interesting to leave buried in the hypnosis research specialty journals.

My review on Amazon is here.

Book Review: The GenoType Diet

The GenoType Diet: Change Your Genetic Destiny to live the longest, fullest and healthiest life possible

By Catherine Whitney (Author), Peter J. Dr D'Adamo (Author)

[Review based on Kindle version]

From my Amazon review:

"... is it plausible in general that metabolic traits cluster along with personality traits, and that these clusters imply different health regimens? Of course it's possible. I'm strongly disposed from my own experience to think there are personality traits that lead us to construct particular rough kinds of niches, and it makes sense that these might have distinct metabolic patterns. But does the author get it right that eating Turkey vs. Chicken or Beef vs. Pork for a particular type really is a difference that makes a difference? That part needs more research."

The question this book raises in my mind is whether the author's GeneTypes significantly improve the guesses we make about the best nutrition for us as individuals, compared to just knowing our medical risk factors and knowing our rough somatotype.

This book takes off from the author's previous writings about how blood type can predict a cluster of traits that include individual response to nutrients, and modifies it into a 6 part theory of types. The 6 part model is given an evolutionary rationale and the author links metabolic differences, personality traits, and speculation about ecological niches where those traits and metabolic differences might be especially adaptive. The resulting categories are so clean and tell such a compelling sort of story that they seem to invite accusations of similarity to fortune telling. But if they're right, then this would a pretty cool system, wouldn't it? At least in theory.

• The Hunter: Tall, thin, and intense, with an overabundance of adrenaline and a fierce, nervous energy that winds down with age, the Hunter was originally the success story of the human species. Vulnerable to systemic burnout when overstressed, the Hunter’s modern challenge is to conserve energy for the long haul.

• The Gatherer: Full-figured, even when not overweight, the Gatherer struggles with body image in a culture where thin is “in.” An unsuccessful crash dieter with a host of metabolic challenges, the Gatherer becomes a glowing example of health when properly nourished.

• The Teacher: Strong, sinewy, and stable, with great chemical synchronicity and stamina, the Teacher is built for longevity—given the right diet and lifestyle. This is the genotype of balance, blessed with a tremendous capacity for growth and fulfillment.

• The Explorer: Muscular and adventurous, the Explorer is a biological problem solver, with an impressive ability to adapt to environmental changes, and a better than average capacity for gene repair. The Explorer’s vulnerability to hormonal imbalances and chemical sensitivities can be overcome with a balanced diet and lifestyle.

• The Warrior: Long, lean, and healthy in youth, the Warrior is subject to a bodily rebellion in midlife.With the optimal diet and lifestyle, the Warrior can overcome the quick-aging metabolic genes and experience a second, “silver,” age of health.

• The Nomad: A GenoType of extremes, with a great sensitivity to environmental conditions—especially changes in altitude and barometric pressure, the Nomad is vulnerable to neuromuscular and immune problems. Yet a well-conditioned Nomad has the enviable gift of controlling caloric intake and aging gracefully.

If the model is right, it is a pretty remarkable and perhaps revolutionary approach to making better guesses at how to improve our own nutrition based on our biochemical individuality. The evidence for its plausibility seems reasonable, but there is still little evidence validating the particular categories here.

Full review on Amazon here.