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Paul Bloom shares six terrific books about decision-making by non-psychologists. These books offer unique perspectives on psychology and insightful approaches to understanding decision-making processes.

Book list:

• The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don't, By Julia Galef
• The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win. By Maria Konnikova
• Transformative Experience. By Laurie Paul
• WIld Problems: A Guide to the Decisions that Define Us, By Russ Roberts
• Trying Not to Try: The Art and Science of Spontaneity. By Edward Slingerland
• Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life. By Rory Sutherland

Check out the post for the bonus 7th book.

Highlights

America’s independent bookstores may look like the tattered, provincial shops of a bygone era—holding onto their existence by the slimmest thread. And booksellers may appear genial and absent-minded, like characters out of Dickens. But in reality, they’re the marketing geniuses of our time.

In August of last year Publishers Weekly reported, “Bookstore sales finished the first half of 2023 up 6.9% over the comparable period in 2022.” In fact, independent bookstore sales outpaced most other publishing industry metrics in 2023, growing faster than overall unit sales of print books. This is unprecedented.

Booksellers have bent the rules of the free market. For the first time in history, a significant chunk of the buying public are voluntarily paying almost double—and going out of their way—to buy exactly the same product they can get cheaper and often faster somewhere else. And it’s all due to that ABA message: “non-corporate, authentic, and socially responsible.”

What no one says is that the bargain works both ways. If book buyers must behave virtuously and tithe an additional $11 a book, then booksellers must uphold the community’s doctrines. They’re locked in the moral contract, too.

But books are different. They signal something about readers’ intelligence, identity, and closely held ideas. Books confer status—especially among the highly educated. The people who sell them know this and they used it to make their case.

“Most independent bookstores have succeeded because they’ve responded to the needs of their community,” says Jan Weissmiller, co-owner of Iowa City’s Prairie Lights since 2008. “If they’re in a part of the country where people are asking for a certain kind of book, that’s what they have on the shelf. Because they’re a business.”

But what I really want is a store where all the ideas are on display—the socialist, capitalist, monogamous, polyamorous, urban, rural, popular, and reviled—that also has the homely sacrosanct quality of one of Hemingway’s coffee-and-absinthe bars. With great music, please—and no puppets, or cheap pizza.

Where are you buying books?

A strong majority of Americans across the political spectrum sympathize more with Ukraine than Russia in the ongoing war: 62% of respondents express more sympathy with Ukraine than Russia, including 58% of Republicans and 76% of Democrats. At the same time, just 2% of respondents said they sympathized more with Russia in the conflict, including 4% of Republicans and 1% of Democrats. Republicans (20%) were more likely than Democrats (7%) to say they sympathized with neither side, while equal numbers of Republicans and Democrats (5%) said they sympathized with both sides equally.

The percentage of respondents who said they want the United States to stay the course in supporting Ukraine grew from our October 2023 poll, reaching the highest level in our tracking since the spring of 2023. In our latest survey, 48% of all respondents said that the United States should support Ukraine as long as the conflict lasts, including 37% of Republicans and 63% of Democrats. All these numbers are new highs in our four polls since March-April 2023.

Genes tend to be transmitted when they make us do things that transmit genes.

Notes of the book. Seems to be a fun one ;) Have you read it?

Top notch series

Highlights

“Now, there’s no question China has been trying to crack down on the internet.” (Chuckles.) “Good luck!” (Laughter.) “That’s sort of like trying to nail Jell-O to the wall.” (Laughter.)

While we were still rhapsodizing about the many ways in which the internet could spread democracy, the Chinese were designing what’s become known as the Great Firewall of China.

Even in a state where surveillance is almost total, the experience of tyranny and injustice can radicalize people. Anger at arbitrary power will always lead someone to start thinking about another system, a better way to run society. The strength of these demonstrations, and the broader anger they reflected, was enough to spook the Chinese Communist Party into lifting the quarantine and allowing the virus to spread. The deaths that resulted were preferable to public anger and protest.

If people are naturally drawn to the image of human rights, to the language of democracy, to the dream of freedom, then those concepts have to be poisoned. That requires more than surveillance, more than close observation of the population, more than a political system that defends against liberal ideas. It also requires an offensive plan: a narrative that damages both the idea of democracy everywhere in the world and the tools to deliver it.

This is the core problem for autocracies: The Russians, the Chinese, the Iranians, and others all know that the language of transparency, accountability, justice, and democracy appeals to some of their citizens, as it does to many people who live in dictatorships. Even the most sophisticated surveillance can’t wholly suppress it. The very ideas of democracy and freedom must be discredited—especially in the places where they have historically flourished.

Instead of portraying China as the perfect society, modern Chinese propaganda seeks to inculcate nationalist pride, based on China’s real experience of economic development, and to promote a Beijing model of progress through dictatorship and “order” that’s superior to the chaos and violence of democracy.

In September 2022, when Putin held a ceremony to mark his illegal annexation of southern and eastern Ukraine, he claimed that he was protecting Russia from the “satanic” West and “perversions that lead to degradation and extinction.” He did not speak of the people he had tortured or the Ukrainian children he had kidnapped.

Another strange actor in this field is RRN—the company’s name is an acronym, originally for Reliable Russian News, later changed to Reliable Recent News. Created in the aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, RRN, part of a bigger information-laundering operation known to investigators as Doppelganger, is primarily a “typosquatter”: a company that registers domain names that look similar to real media domain names—Reuters.cfd instead of Reuters.com, for example—as well as websites with names that sound authentic (like Notre Pays, or “Our Country”) but are created to deceive.

None of these efforts would succeed without local actors who share the autocratic world’s goals. Russia, China, and Venezuela did not invent anti-Americanism in Mexico. They did not invent Catalan separatism, to name another movement that both Russian and Venezuelan social-media accounts supported, or the German far right, or France’s Marine Le Pen. All they do is amplify existing people and movements—whether anti-LGBTQ, anti-Semitic, anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant, anti-Ukrainian, or, above all, antidemocratic.

Here is a difficult truth: A part of the American political spectrum is not merely a passive recipient of the combined authoritarian narratives that come from Russia, China, and their ilk, but an active participant in creating and spreading them. Like the leaders of those countries, the American MAGA right also wants Americans to believe that their democracy is degenerate, their elections illegitimate, their civilization dying.

Highlights

We may be close to rediscovering thousands of texts that had been lost for millennia. Their contents may reshape how we understand the Ancient World.

We don’t have original copies of anything, not of the Iliad, or the Aeneid, or Herodotus, or the Bible. Instead of originals, we find ourselves dealing with copies. These were first written on scrolls but later in books – the Romans called books codexes – starting in the first century AD. Did I say copies? That’s actually not correct either. We don’t have first copies of anything. What we do have is copies of copies, most of which date hundreds of years after the original was penned. Even many of our copies are not complete copies.

To most fully acclimate the reader to how tenuous this process is, this essay will focus on three different texts. The first will be a very well-known work that was never lost. Nevertheless, almost no one read it in earnest until the nineteenth century. I will then focus on a text that was lost to history, but that we were able to recover from the annals of time. Such examples are fortuitous. Our third example will be a text that we know existed, but of which we have no copies, and consider what important ramifications its discovery could hold. Finally, we’ll turn our attention again to the Villa of the Papyri and the gold mine of texts discovered there that new technologies are currently making available to classicists.

However, many of the scrolls from the Villa of the Papyri remain not only unread, but also unopened. This is because the eruption of Vesuvius left the scrolls carbonized, making it nearly impossible to open them. Despite this obstacle, Dr. Brent Seales pioneered a new technology in 2015 that allowed him and his team to read a scroll without opening it. The technique, using X-ray tomography and computer vision, is known as virtual unwrapping, and it was first used on one of the famous Dead Sea Scrolls, specifically the En-Gedi scroll, the earliest known copy of the Book of Leviticus (likely 210–390 CE). The X-rays allow scholars to create a virtual copy of the text that can then be read like any other ancient document by those with the proper language and paleography skills. Using Dr. Seales’s technique, scholars have been able to upload many of the texts online. A group of donors led by Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross have offered cash prizes to teams of classicists who can decipher the writings. The race to read the virtually unwrapped scrolls is known as the Vesuvius Challenge.

Highlights

When seawater gets cold, it gets viscous. This fact could explain how single-celled ocean creatures became multicellular when the planet was frozen during “Snowball Earth,” according to experiments.

A series of papers from the lab of Carl Simpson proposes an answer linked to a fundamental physical fact: As seawater gets colder, it gets more viscous, and therefore more difficult for very small organisms to navigate. Imagine swimming through honey rather than water. If microscopic organisms struggled to get enough food to survive under these conditions, as Simpson’s modeling work has implied, they would be placed under pressure to change — perhaps by developing ways to hang on to each other, form larger groups, and move through the water with greater force. Maybe some of these changes contributed to the beginning of multicellular animal life.

The experiment comes with a few caveats, and the paper has yet to be peer-reviewed; Simpson posted a preprint on biorxiv.org earlier this year. But it suggests that if Snowball Earth did act as a trigger for the evolution of complex life, it might be due to the physics of cold water.

It is difficult to precisely date when animals arose, but an estimate from molecular clocks — which use mutation rates to estimate the passage of time — suggests that the last common ancestor of multicellular animals emerged during the era known as the Sturtian Snowball Earth, sometime between 717 million and 660 million years ago. Large, unmistakably multicellular animals appear in the fossil record tens of millions of years after the Earth melted following another, shorter Snowball Earth period around 635 million years ago.

The paradox — a planet seemingly hostile to life giving evolution a major push — continued to perplex Simpson throughout his schooling and into his professional life. In 2018, as an assistant professor, he had an insight: As seawater gets colder, it grows thicker. It’s basic physics — the density and viscosity of water molecules rises as the temperature drops. Under the conditions of Snowball Earth, the ocean would have been twice or even four times as viscous as it was before the planet froze over.

As large creatures, we don’t think much about the thickness of the fluids around us. It’s not a part of our daily lived experience, and we are so big that viscosity doesn’t impinge on us very much. The ability to move easily — relatively speaking — is something we take for granted. From the time Simpson first realized that such limits on movement could be a monumental obstacle to microscopic life, he hasn’t been able to stop thinking about it. Viscosity may have mattered quite a lot in the origins of complex life, whenever that was.

“Putting this into our repertoire of thinking about why these things evolved — that is the value of the entire thing,” he said. “It doesn’t matter if it was Snowball Earth. It doesn’t matter if it happened before or after. Just the idea that it can happen, and happen quickly.”

Highlights

Amanda Randles wants to copy your body. If the computer scientist had her way, she’d have enough data — and processing power — to effectively clone you on her computer, run the clock forward, and see what your coronary arteries or red blood cells might do in a week. Fully personalized medical simulations, or “digital twins,” are still beyond our abilities, but Randles has pioneered computer models of blood flow over long durations that are already helping doctors noninvasively diagnose and treat diseases.

Her latest system takes 3D images of a patient’s blood vessels, then simulates and forecasts their expected fluid dynamics. Doctors who use the system can not only measure the usual stuff, like pulse and blood pressure, but also spy on the blood’s behavior inside the vessel. This lets them observe swirls in the bloodstream called vortices and the stresses felt by vessel walls — both of which are linked to heart disease. A decade ago, Randles’ team could simulate blood flow for only about 30 heartbeats, but today they can foresee over 700,000 heartbeats (about a week’s worth). And because their models are interactive, doctors can also predict what will happen if they take measures such as prescribing medicine or implanting a stent.

It’s a lot of data. We’re running simulations with up to 580 million red blood cells. There’s interactions with the fluid and red blood cells, the cells with each other, the cells with the walls — you’re trying to capture all of that. For each model, one time point might be half a terabyte, and there are millions of time steps in each heartbeat. It’s really computationally intense.

I am really happy that the younger generation is re-evaluating views on work.

From the article:

Yuki Watanabe used to spend 12 hours every day toiling away in the office. And that’s considered a short day.

Asking to leave work on time or taking some time off can be tricky enough. Even trickier is tendering a resignation, which can be seen as the ultimate form of disrespect in the world’s fourth-biggest economy, where workers traditionally stick with one employer for decades, if not for a lifetime.

In the most extreme cases, grumpy bosses rip up resignation letters and harass employees to force them to stay.

...She turned to Momuri, a resignation agency that helps timid employees leave their intimidating bosses.

For the price of a fancy dinner, many Japanese workers hire these proxy firms to help them resign stress-free.

At a cost of 22,000 yen (about $150) – or 12,000 yen for those who work part time – it pledges to help employees tender their resignations, negotiate with their companies and provide recommendations for lawyers if legal disputes arise.

“Some people come to us after having their resignation letter ripped three times and employers not letting them quit even when they kneel down to the ground to bow,” she said, in another illustration of the deferential workplace culture embedded in Japan.

Japan has long had an overwork culture. Employees across various sectors report punishing hours, high pressure from supervisors and deference to the company. These employers are widely known as “black firms.”

Human resources professor Hiroshi Ono, from Hitotsubashi University Business School in Tokyo, said the situation had become so pressing that the government had begun publishing a list of unethical employers to hamper their ability to hire, and warn job seekers of the dangers of working for them.

So why did these resignation agents only emerge in recent years? That, experts say, is down to young people’s changing approach to work.

Many of them no longer subscribe to older generations’ thinking that one should do whatever they are told regardless of the job’s nature, Ono said, adding that when there is a mismatch of expectation, they won’t hesitate to quit.

“We honestly think that our resignation agency service should disappear from society and we hope for that. We think it’s best if people can tell their bosses themselves, but hearing the horror stories of our clients, I don’t think that our business will disappear anytime soon,” she said.

For now, Momuri offers a 50% discount for those who seek their service to resign the second time.

Fascinating, I like this kind of Magick.

Highlights

Broadly speaking, the role of an establishment economist is to come up with new ways of saying, "actually, your boss is right."

Now, Lowe's has 285,000 employees, half of whom earn less than $33,000/year. Divide Ellison's $18m among those workers and each of them would net a paltry $126/year. But if you were to share out the $43 billion Ellison had to piss up against a wall on stock buybacks among those workers, you'd be able to give every worker a $30,000 bonus, every year:

The largest 20 companies in the Low-Wage 100 spent nine times more on stock buybacks than they spent on worker retirement plan contributions. Chipotle spent $2b on buybacks – that's 48 times what the company put into its workers' 401(k)s. That's because 92% of Chipotle employees can't afford to have a 401(k).

In incentivizing CEOs to keep share prices high above every other consideration, establishment economists set the stage for a corporate America where CEOs were punished for investing in a living wage, a dignified retirement, or even a non-lethal product. Instead, we have a business environment that boils down to a competition to see who can eat their seed-corn the fastest.