Science, Scientists, and Knowledge in General

October 29

General

1. Michael Strevens (2020). The Knowledge Machine: How Irrationality Created Modern Science.
   • Strevens: “The Knowledge Machine will plunge, searching for illumination among the tangle of competing visions of and skepticism about the scientific method. It will wrangle with philosophers such as Karl Popper, who believed that the method hinges on a certain kind of logic applied by thinkers with the right sort of temperament, and Thomas Kuhn, who thought that it is rather a special kind of social organization that is responsible for science’s power. It will confront sociologists such as Steven Shapin who hold that no method exists. And it will put forward its own proposal about the nature of the method” (p. 6).
   • By the end of the The Knowledge Machine, then, I will have answered two big questions, one philosophical and the other historical:
     1. How does science work, and why is it so effective?
     2. Why did science arrive so late?” (p. 9).
2. Karl Sigmund (2017). Exact Thinking in Demented Times: The Vienna Circle and the Epic Quest for the Foundations of Science.
   • We came across the name Karl Sigmund when reading Martin Nowak’s SuperCooperators: Altruism, Evolution, and Why We Need Each Other to Succeed. It is important to take a closer look at the Vienna Circle. As Douglas Hofstadter points out in the Preface: “There is no doubt that the Vienna Circle was an assemblage of some of the most impressive human beings who have ever walked the planet”.
   • 
3. Jonathan Marks (2009) Anthropology and Modern Knowledge
   • 
   • “All right, I admit it — I am a scientist. I can no more define myself out of that category than Bertrand Russell could define himself out of Christianity, in his 1927 essay to which the title of this book is an homage — “Why I am not a Christian.” Lord Russell tried to define himself out of Christianity on narrow grounds, maintaining his otherness on the basis of denying the existence of God and immortality and maintaining a fair degree of ambivalence about Jesus himself. On the other hand, he wasn’t thinking culturally. He was, after all, the product of Christian society, Christian history, Christian morality, Christian literature, and — Jesus Friggin’ Christ! — even Christian language. His national anthem was “God Save the King.” He matriculated at Trinity College. Bertrand Russell wasn’t a Muslim, a Jew, or a Hindu. He wasn’t a Trobriand Islander or a Khoe bushman. Whatever he found repugnant or offensive in aspects of Christianity, he was inescapably in a global sense a Christian, albeit one with some doctrinal issues. That is the sense in which I am a scientist. I treat the natural and supernatural realms as disconnected from one another. I don’t think much about God, and I certainly wouldn’t want to share those thoughts with you. However, I do capitalize His (or Her) occupation, by convention. On the other hand, I have some beefs with science — and I consider them significant enough to have some reservations about fully identifying with it — as Russell had with Christianity. These include the idea that all other knowledge, and all other forms of knowledge production, are illegitimate; that large classes of people perhaps ought to be political and social inferiors because they are natural inferiors; and that any critical analysis of any aspect of science reveals an anti-science agenda. The first is ethnocentrism, the second is racism or sexism, and the third is paranoia. They should be no more welcomed in science than they would be at a city council meeting or a family reunion. Why, after all these years, is there still scientific racism? Why do scientists raise the same classes of data today that they did decades ago, and which were illegitimate then? Why are they taken seriously when they do so? And if they can’t be taken seriously about this, then why should they be taken seriously about anything else? And that’s only the tip of the iceberg. Why is it still so threatening to learn that you can’t believe everything a scientist says? We knew that long ago. And yet to talk about it today is commonly perceived as producing not so much a deeper understanding of science as rather a threat to science — and that is a shame. The real question is, Given that there are circumstances under which proclamations of scientists are unreliable, what are those circumstances? In other words, if science is a system of thought and action, and the descriptive and comparative analysis of different systems of thought and action is anthropology’s stock in trade, then why shouldn’t the development of a relativizing anthropology of science be seen as an advancement for the science of anthropology, and indeed for our understanding of science in general? Science is widely accepted to be three different things: a method of understanding and of establishing facts about the universe; the facts themselves, the products of that method; and a voice of authority and science of anthropology, and indeed for our understanding of science consequently a locus of cultural power. This triple identity creates tensions within science and conflicting roles for it. This book explores science as a set of beliefs and practices about nature and knowledge that developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Europe — the most significant being that the subject of science, nature, can and ought to be approached independently of what we might now call supernature (i.e., the realm of spirit and miracle rather than of matter and law) and culture (i.e., the realm of human contrivance — law, beauty, morals, politics, and the like). The biggest obstacle to studying science anthropologically is the choice of whether to universalize it or to particularize it. Did the Classic Maya have science? Is science something that everybody has in their fashion but only certain peoples exercise strongly? Or is science something that only “we” have? In which case, what do “they” have? I think the most reasonable approach is to acknowledge that everyone has knowledge about the world, much of it accurate, which allows them to manipulate their environments in diverse and productive ways. Science, however, is a particular approach to knowledge that is more precisely localized in the cultural history of Europe. I don’t hold it against anybody that they don’t have “science”; it is simply that, if we extend the label beyond the traditions of thought that developed in early modern Europe, then we still have to come up with a word to encode the distinction between Western more or less modern science (on the one hand) and Inuit, Maya, medieval Islamic, or Nuer science (on the other). The distinction is real; the question then is, What do you call “our” system of knowledge production? I side with those who would call it “science,” in contrast to “other non-science systems of knowledge.” Laura Nader discusses the directions anthropology has taken in engaging with science, where British anthropologists were initially more active than their American counterparts. One direction (since the 1950s) lay in documenting the considerable knowledge about their environment possessed by indigenous peoples; the other (since the 1980s), in ethnographic studies of scientists as subjects. A third, more recent direction involves the engagement of local people specifically with science. She omits, however, that anthropology — or at least large segments of it — is self-consciously “science.” Somehow, unfortunately, those segments have rarely if ever connected with the “anthropology of science.” Genetics within anthropology, for example, tends to be represented as biological anthropologists aspiring to be “real” geneticists and as cultural anthropologists studying “real” geneticists. The biological anthropologists engaged in genetic research and yet also engaged with anthropological (as opposed to biological) issues are a small bunch. Paleoanthropology has contact with indigenous rights, alternative narratives of origins, and a history rich in colonialism and racism — but little engagement with them anthropologically. Primatology has had the greatest anthropological engagement with what it does. Yet within all of these anthropological sub-subfields, there also exists a contemporary reactionary literature that is so reductive and so unreflexive as to be almost embarrassing to have classified as anthropology — and yet still claims the authority of science. I have taught biological anthropology — the basic course on human evolution — at four universities, but students got science credit for the course at only two. That bothers me — not because I care about being formally labeled as a scientist, but because it has implications for understanding, and for communicating, what is constituted by science. How can you teach students about science if you’re not sure whether you actually do it? Imagine the creationists taking the line that they are not out to subvert science education after all, because at the local university the courses on human evolution don’t actually count as science! This book is not intended as a comprehensive review of all the work that has proceeded in the anthropology of science. It is, rather, intended as a necessarily somewhat idiosyncratic synthesis, drawing on themes I have been interested in as a biological anthropologist and as a general anthropologist. There isn’t a canon, and I am simply trying to draw a bit from the diverse literatures in science studies, sociology of science, history of science, cultural studies, and of course science (or whatever biological anthropology is). This book is most fundamentally about the relationship between anthropology and science. It tries in some measure to reconcile the two, by fitting anthropological science into an anthropological frame. If itsucceeds, the final product will tell us not only a bit more about anthropology but a bit more about science as well. Finally, an advocate of scientism—that is to say, the largely uncritical acceptance of everything said with the authority of science—might also be called a “scientist.” I’m definitely not one of those. What I want to know is, When can’t you believe everything a scientist says? (pp. ix – xiii).
4. Bertrand Russell (2016). The Impact of Science on Society.
   • This volume explores some important questions: “Science and Tradition”, “General Effects of Scientific Technique”, “Scientific Technique in an Oligarchy”, Democracy and Scientific Technique”, “Science and War”, “Science and Values”, “Can a Scientific Society be Stable”. Book overview: “Many of the revolutionary effects of science and technology are obvious enough. Bertrand Russell saw in the 1950s that there are also many negative aspects of scientific innovation. Insights and Controversial in equal means, Russell argues that science offers the world greater well-being than it has ever known, on the condition that prosperity is dispersed; power is diffused by means of a single, world government; birth rates do not become too high; and war is abolished. Russell acknowledges that is a tall order, but remains essentially optimistic. He imagines mankind in a ‘race between human skill as to means and human folly as to ends’, but believes human society will ultimately choose the path of reason”. Plenty of room for discussions!
   • 
5. Alfred North Whitehead (1925). Science and Modern World
   • Preface: “The present book embodies a study of some aspects of Western culture during the past three centuries, in so far as it has been influenced by the development of science. This study has been guided by the conviction that the mentality of an epoch springs from the view of the world which is, in fact, dominant in the educated sections of the communities in question. There may be more than one such scheme, corresponding to cultural divisions. The various human interests which suggest cosmologies, and also are influenced by them, are science, aesthetics, ethics, religion. In every age each of these topics suggests a view of the world. In so far as the same set of people are swayed by all, or more than one, of these interests, their effective outlook will be the joint production from these sources. But each age has its dominant preoccupation; and, during the three centuries in question, the cosmology derived from science has been asserting itself at the expense of older points of view with their origins elsewhere. Men can be provincial in time, as well as in place. We may ask ourselves whether the scientific mentality of the modern world in the immediate past is not a successful example of such provincial limitation. Philosophy, in one of its functions, is the critic of cosmologies. It is its function to harmonise, refashion, and justify divergent intuitions as to the nature of things. It has to insist on the scrutiny of the ultimate ideas, and on the retention of the whole of the evidence in shaping our cosmological scheme. Its business is to render explicit, and – so far as may be – efficient, a process which otherwise is unconsciously performed without rational tests”.
6. Richard P. Feynman (1998). The Meaning of It all: Thoughts of a Citizen-Scientist.
   • 
   • Editorial Note: “In April 1963, Richard P. Feynman was invited to give a three-night series of lectures at the University of Washington (Seattle) as part of the John Danz Lecture Series. Here is Feynman the man revealing, as only he could, his musing on society, on the conflict between science and religion, on peace and war, on our universal fascination with flying saucers, on faith healing and telepathy, on people’s distrust of politicians – indeed on all the concerns of the modern citizen-scientist. Pure gold, pure poetry, pure Feynman”.
7. Gianfranco Pacchioni (2018). The Overproduction of Truth: Passion, Competition, and Integrity in Modern Science.
   • “Today the world of scientific research dwells in a time that twists the sense of things, a continuing and spasmodic race to publication, to the production of results of little or no issue that are not necessarily aimed at increasing our knowledge; it is a projection always and exclusively to the future with a worrying tendency to dismiss the past as if it had never existed. In order to emerge, young people must accept to be involved in a tight and ruthless competition that leaves no room for mediation, originality, or risk, all factors that should be part of every proper research activity. There is not much time left to tackle unusually complex themes, or for the thrust of investing energy in projects with little chance of success. The pressure toward achieving new results is daily, and leaves little room, if any at all, to ponder the meaning of what one does. In this way, in a short time the world of research has changed from the passionate activity of a few selected people to a crowded universe of practitioners, often with few ideas and sharing little or no ethical values. It is too early to predict how and how much this will affect the development of scientific thinking and the relationship between science and society in the future. In my opinion there is little doubt that this will induce changes, but not necessarily good ones” (p. 4).
8. Howard Margolis (1993). Paradigms and Barriers: How Habits of Mind Govern Scientific Beliefs.
   • 
   • Philip Kitcher: “Howard Margolis is a truly original thinker who has a knack for breaking down disciplinary boundaries. Virtually no one combines cognitive psychology, philosophical argument, and historical work the way he does. This book is important for historians, philosophers, and sociologists of science”. Margolis: “The idea is that, when we talk about a Kuhnian paradigm shift, what we are essentially talking about is a special sort of shift of habits of mind. I try to show this leads to the far more counterintuitive claim that, ordinarily, a Kuhnian paradigm shift comes down to the breaking of some one particular habit of mind: the barrier of my title” (p. 2).
9. Peter Medawar (1984). The Limits of Science.
   • 
   • “The three essays which make up this book are in three different styles. For “An Essay on Scians” I followed the aphoristic style adopted by Francis Bacon and William Whewell in a number of their writings. It is the style of exposition most considerate of the reader’s interests, for the paragraph headings protect him very effectively from the discomfiture of learning what he does not wish to know, or of following discussions to the outcome of which he is completely indifferent. The second essay, “Can Scientific Discovery Be Premediated?” began as a lecture delivered on 5 June 1980 at a joint meeting of the American Philosophical Society of Philadelphia and the Royal Society of London, to which I am grateful for permission to reproduce it here. The principial essay, “The Limits of Science,” is written in the format of a short book. I am a professional scientist and a lover of science; there could be no greater misunderstanding of the purpose of this third essay than to suppose it to be in any sense antiscientific in mood. The purpose of “The Limits of Science” is simply to exculpate science from the reproach that science is quite unable to answer those ultimate questions. I refer to repeatedly in the text – questions I show to be beyond the explanatory competence of science. But in spite of this failing, science is a great and glorious enterprise – the most successful, I argue…, that human beings have ever engaged in” (pp. xii-xiii).
10. Abraham H. Maslow (1969). The Psychology of Science: A Renaissance.
    • His intuition and unconventional thinking are impressive and timeless. In this book he focuses on science as a product of the human nature of a scientist. Here some passages:
    • “[T]he style of “normal science” has been established not by the great eagles of science — the paradigm-makers, the discoverers, the revolutionizers — but on the contrary by the majority of “normal scientists”, who are rather like those tiny marine animals building up a common coral reef. And so it is that science has come to mean primarily patience, caution, care, slowness, the art of not making mistakes, rather than courage, daring, taking big chances, gambling everything on a single throw, and ‘going for broke’. Or to say this another way: our orthodox conception of science as mechanistic and ahuman seems to me one local part-manifestation or expression of the larger, more inclusive world view of mechanization and dehumanization” (p. 2).
    • “It does not help to start measuring, questioning, calculating, or testing out theories, categorizing, or classifying. If your brain is too busy, you won’t hear or see well. Freud’s term ‘free-floating attention’ describes well this noninterfering, global, receptive, waiting kind of cognizing another person” (p. 11).
    • “Slowly and painfully we psychologists have had to learn to become good clinical or naturalistic observers, to wait and watch and listen patiently, to keep our hands off, to refrain from being too active and brusque, too interfering and controlling, and — most important of all in trying to understand another person — to keep our mouths shut and our eyes and ears wide open. This is different from the model way in which we approach physical objects, i.e., manipulating them, poking at them, to see what happens, taking them apart, etc. If you do this to human beings, you won’t get to know them. They won’t want you to know them. They won’t let you know them. Our interfering makes knowledge less likely, at least at the beginning. Only when we already know a great deal can we become more active, more probing, more demanding — in a word, more experimental” (p. 13).
    • “I got into real trouble only when I started asking new questions for the researcher, questions which I couldn’t handle well, questions about imprecise, undefined, unmanageable problems. I discovered then that many scientists disdain what they cannot cope with, what they cannot do well. I remember counterattacking in my irritation with an aphorism I coined for the occasion: ‘What isn’t worth doing, isn’t worth doing well’. Now I think I could add: ‘What needs doing, is worth doing even though not very well’. Indeed, I am tempted to claim that the first effort to research a new problem is most likely to be inelegant, imprecise, and crude. What one mostly learns from such first efforts is how it should be done better the next time. But there is no way of bypassing this first time. I remember a child who, when told that most train accidents involved the last car, suggested that accidents could be reduced by eliminating last cars!” (p. 14).
    • “Neither can beginnings be eliminated. Even to think this, or to want it, is a denial of the very spirit of science. Cracking open new fields is certainly more exhilarating and rewarding and is also more socially useful. ‘You must love the questions themselves’, Rilke said. The assault troops of science are certainly more necessary to science than its military policemen. This is so even though they are apt to get much dirtier and to suffer higher casualties. Bill Mauldin’s cartoons during the war could serve as good illustrations of the clash in values between frontline fighting soldiers and rear echelon spit-and-polish officers. Somebody has to be the first one through the mine fields. (I wrote this first as ‘through the mind fields’!)” (p. 14).
    • “Some people dislike skating on thin ice. And why should they not do as they please? It would be a blow to science if all scientists preferred the same problem, the same method, the same philosophy, just as it would be a deathblow to the orchestra if everyone preferred to play the oboe. Clearly science is a collaboration, a division of labor59, and no single man is responsible for the whole of it, nor could he be. No, this is not the issue. Rather it is the tendency to get pious and metaphysical about these personal preferences and to exalt them into rules for everyone else. It is the insistence on generating sweeping and excluding philosophies of knowledge, of truth, and therefore of human nature that makes trouble” (p. 57).
    • “I consider to be a defining characteristic of the empirical or scientific attitude includes the ability to admit that you are ignorant and that mankind in general is ignorant about many things. Such an
      admission has the necessary consequence of making you in principle willing and eager to learn. It means that you are open rather than closed to new data. It means that you can be naive rather than all-knowing. And all of this means, of course, that your universe keeps on growing steadily in contrast to the static universe of the person who already knows everything” (p. 71). “A good empirical theory may be a sloppy abstract theory, self-contradictory, complicated, incoherent, with overlapping categories (rather than mutually exclusive ones), with unclear and equivocal definitions. Its first loyalty is to include all the facts somewhere within its jurisdiction, even if this makes for sloppiness” (p. 78).
    • “I quote from David L. Watson’s The Study of Human Nature: ‘When two men are arguing, I do not find that the truth of the matter always rests with the more dispassionate participant. Passion may enhance the disputants’ powers of expression and thus lead, in the long run, to deeper regions of truth’ (p. 187-188). ‘It is beyond question that certain kinds of emotion entirely distort our judgment. But I would ask the rationalist extremists: would we have any science, if truth did not inspire passionate devotion in the searcher?’ (p. 188). This is a characteristic expression of the rising discontent among psychologists with the old and widely held notion that emotions are only disrupting, that they are the enemy of true perception and good judgment, that they are the opposite of sagacity and are and must be mutually excluding of truth. A humanistic approach to science generates a different attitude, i.e., that emotion can be synergic with cognition, and a help in truth-finding” (p. 111-112).
    • “The term ‘scientific objectivity’ has, in effect, been pre-empted by the physics-centered theorists of science and bent to the use of their mechanomorphic Weltanschauung. It was certainly necessary for astronomers and physicists to assert their freedom to see what was before their eyes rather than having truth determined a priori by the church or the state. This is the kernel of sense in the concept of “value-free science”. But it is this generalization, uncritically accepted today by many, that has crippled so many human and social scientists” (p. 114).
    • “For one thing the whole scientific process is itself shot through with selectiveness, choice, and preference. We could even call it gambling if we wanted to, as well as good taste, judgment, and connoisseurship. No scientist is a mere camera eye or tape recorder. He is not indiscriminate in his activities. He doesn’t do just anything. He works at problems that he characterizes as ‘important’ or as ‘interesting’, and he comes up with ‘elegant’ or ‘beautiful’ solutions. He does ‘pretty’ experiments, and prefers ‘simpler’ and ‘cleaner’ results to confused or sloppy ones. All these are value words, evaluating, selecting, preferring, implying a more desirable and a less desirable, not only in the strategy and tactics of the scientist but also in his motivations and goals. Polanyi (60) has set forth most convincingly the thesis that a scientist is at all times a gambler, a connoisseur, a man of good taste or bad taste, a man who makes acts of faith and leaps of commitment, a man of will, a responsible person, an active agent, a chooser and therefore a rejector” (p. 122).
    • ‘There are some who will insist that ‘scientific’ knowledge is and must be clear, lucid, unequivocally defined, unmistakable, demonstrable, repeatable, communicable, logical, rational, verbalizable, conscious. If it is not these, then it is not ‘scientific’; it is something else. But what shall we say, then, about the first stages of knowledge, the precursors of these final forms, the beginnings that each of us can easily enough experience in himself. First comes the uneasiness, the restlessness, the unhappiness, the feeling that something is not quite right. This uneasiness can come before it finds its explanation. That is, we can feel something that, if put into words, would run, ‘I feel uneasy, but I don’t know why. There’s something not quite right here, but I don’t know what it is’. To make it even more confusing, this feeling can be totally unconscious or only half conscious, and it may be recognized only sometime later, retrospectively” (p. 129).
    • “It is easy for the laboratory scientist to criticize all this. But in the end these criticisms come down to an accusation that a final state of knowledge has not yet been achieved. This is why inchoate knowledge is apt to be sloppy and ambiguous. This is a stage through which knowledge must pass! There is no known alternative. There is no other way to do things. If this fact is fully understood, we are apt to turn back upon the critics with some irritation and even with some readiness to make psychoanalytic interpretations of the critic rather than to answer him with logical arguments. For at this point we realize that the critics often need neatness, exactness, or precision and cannot tolerate its absence, that they select only those problems to work with that already satisfy this criterion, and that in effect their criticisms may amount to a rejection of the problems themselves. They may be criticizing not your methodology but you yourself for asking that particular question. Scientists who need neatness and simplicity generally have sense enough to stay away from the humanistic and personal problems of human nature. Such a choice may indicate a preference for neatness over new knowledge of human nature, and this can be a way of avoiding the tough problems” (pp. 130-131).
    • “Polanyi rightly speaks of faith, connoisseurship, courage, self-confidence, and boldness in gambling as intrinsic to the nature of the trail-blazing theorist or researcher, as defining characteristics, not as accidental, fortuitous, or expendable” (p. 133).
    • “The originator is to some extent more attracted to the complex rather than to the simple or
      easy, to the mysterious and unknown rather than to the known. What challenges him is that which he does not know. What fun, he feels, is there in a puzzle whose solution he knows? A known puzzle is no puzzle. It is the not knowing that fascinates him and that sets him into motion. For him the mystery ‘calls for’ solving. It has ‘demand character’. It beckons, attracts, and seduces” (p. 134).
    • “One important one is the covert identification of a science with completed knowledge. It has been my experience to hear psychologists sneered at by physicists, for example, because they don’t know much and because what they do know is not highly abstracted and mathematized. “Do you call that a science?” they ask, with the implication that science is knowing rather than questioning. Thus the rear-echelon soldier sneers at the front-light fighter for being dirty, and the inheritor of wealth sneers at the sweaty one who is earning it. The psychologist knows that there are two hierarchies of esteem in science (not just one). One is the hierarchy of well organized knowledge; the other is the hierarchy of importance of the questions one chooses to work with. It is the ones that choose to work with the crucial, unsolved, human questions who have taken on their shoulders the fate of mankind” (pp. 147-148).
11. Edward O. Wilson (1998). Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge60.
    • Wilson: “When we have unified enough certain knowledge, we will understand who we are and why we are here. If those committed to the quest fail, they will be forgiven. When lost, they will find another way. The moral imperative of humanism is the endeavor alone, whether successful or not, provided the effort is honorable and failure memorable. The ancient Greeks expressed the idea in a myth of vaulting ambition. Daedalus escapes from Crete with his son Icarus on wings he has fashioned from feathers and wax. Ignoring the warnings of his father, Icarus flies toward the sun, whereupon his wings come apart and he falls into the sea. That is the end of lcarus in the myth. But we are left to wonder: Was he just a foolish boy? Did he pay the price for hubris, for pride in sight of the gods? I like to think that on the contrary his daring represents a saving human grace. And so the great astrophysicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar could pay Tribute to the spirit of his mentor, Sir Arthur Eddington, by saying: Let us see how high we can fly before the sun melts the wax in our wings” (p. 7).
12. Richard Foley (2018). The Geography of Insights: The Sciences, the Humanities, How they Differ, Why They Matter.
    • End of his Preface: “There are, however, two commitments that have been at the core of universities throughout their history and remain critical today for building and preserving robust research traditions. The first is a commitment to a long view and its attendant recognition that not every inquiry is to be assessed in terms of its short-term usefulness. Long gestation periods are often needed. The second is a commitment to a broad view, with an appreciation for the full breadth of issues of interest to humans. The two reinforce one another. Important insights in one area often have long-term, unforeseen implications in seemingly far removed fields. The history of computing is an object lesson in the potential synergies between the long and the broad, with work in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by mathematicians and philosophers on two-valued logics being utilized a century later by computer scientists to create electronic circuits of immense power. Neither long views nor broad views are in abundant supply in our time, which makes it all the more important for universities to cherish and support long-term intellectual endeavors across a range of fields. Sometimes the humanities and sciences are thought of as being in competition with one another, but with respect to this issue they are fellow travelers. A healthy culture for research for both is necessary for either to thrive in the long run. But if universities are to nourish both the sciences and the humanities, they need to understand them. My central claim in this work is that this involves appreciating that the intellectual aims of the two tend to be different, and this is not to be regretted. On the contrary, it is a good thing. A very good thing. Their differences complement one another” (pp. xiv-xv).
13. Arlindo Oliveira (2017). The Digital Mind: How Science is Redefining Humanity.
    • A detailed combination and collage of computer science, biology, and neuroscience with the quest of mapping how these fields meet and how they help our understanding of “brain, mind, and machine”.
14. Michel Serres with Bruno Latour (1990). Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time.
    • The published original has a more interesting title in French (Eclaircissements (clarifications/illuminations). This book is the outcome of Bruno Latour’s process of interviewing the unorthodox Michel Serres in 1991, and starts with “There is a Michel Serres mystery. You are very well known and yet very unknown. Your fellow philosophers scarcely read you”… The different conversations cover a lot of ground (Background and Training; Method; Demonstration and Interpretation; The End of Criticism; Wisdom).
15. Norman Lebrecht (2019). Genius & Anxiety: How Jews Changed the World, 1847-194762.
    • Start of the book: “Between the middle of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a handful of men and women changed the way we see the world. Some of their names are on our lips for all time: Marx, Freud, Proust, Einstein, Kafka. Others have vanished from our collective memory but their importance endures in our daily lives. Without Karl Landsteiner, for instance, there would be no blood transfusions or major surgery, without Paul Ehrlich no chemotherapy, without Siegfried Marcus no motor car, without Rosalind Franklin no model of DNA, without Fritz Haber not enough food to sustain life on earth, without Geneviève Halévy no Carmen, without Emanuel Deutsch no state of Israel. What these transformers have in common is being Jewish, some by having Jewish parents, others by practising the Jewish faith. All appear to think ‘outside the box’ and all of them think fast. Why, at this period, a handful of Jews managed to see what others could not is the subject of this book”.
    • 
16. Judea Pearl and Dana Mackenzie (2018). The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect.
    • Pearl won the Turing Award in 2011 for his fundamental contributions to artificial intelligence through the development of a calculus for probabilistic and causal reasoning. He created the representational and computational foundation for the processing of information under uncertainty, and Eric Horvitz called him an “Alan Turing of our time”. In this book he joins forces with Dana Mackenzie, a mathematics and science writer to discuss the Causal Revolution. Pearl’s mission in this book: 1) outline the intellectual content of the Causal Revolution in nonmathematical language, discussing how it affects current lives and the future; 2) to share both successful and failed attempts among scientists in exploring the journey of cause and effect; 3) to return the Causal Revolution to its womb in artificial intelligence. Here his attack on Big Data: “But I hope with this book to convince you that data are profoundly dumb. Data can tell you that the people who took a medicine recovered faster than those who did not take it, but they can’t tell you why. Maybe those who took the medicine did so because they could afford it and would have recovered just as fast without it”. He is also critical about his past achievements: “When I started working in artificial intelligence, in the early 1980s, I thought that uncertainty was the most important thing missing from AI. Moreover, I insisted that uncertainty be represented by probabilities… Though I am delighted with the ongoing success of Bayesian networks, they failed to bridge the gap between artificial and human intelligence. I’m sure you can figure out the missing ingredient causality” (p. 50). “At the time, I was so intoxicated with the power of probabilities… To my fellow computer scientists, my book [Probabilistic Reasoning in Intelligent System], my book became a bible of reasoning under uncertainty, but I was already feeling like an apostate… while probabilities encode our beliefs about a static world, causality tells us whether and how probabilities change when the world changes, be it by intervention or by act of imagination” (p. 51). “Human intuition is organized around causal, not statistical, relations” (p. 46).
17. Brian Epstein (2015). The Ant Trap: Rebuilding the Foundations of the Social Sciences.
    • 2016 Lakatos Award recognition: Professor Epstein’s book is rated as “an extremely serious and significant book, as good a treatment of the metaphysics of the social world as there is, by some way.” It provides “an outstandingly elegant illustration of why metaphysical foundations really matter to the practice of science,” and “opens the door to a more productive philosophy of social science than has hitherto been available.” The arguments are “careful and rigorous,” with “the right mixture of theories and examples,” arriving at “quite original conclusions.” The book is praised as “beautiful and engaging”, “original and ambitious”, “exemplary in its clarity”, and “extremely enjoyable to read.”
18. David Kaiser (2011). How the Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum Revival.
    • David Kaiser, a Professor of Physics and Germeshausen Professor of the History of Science focuses on an eccentric group of Berkeley, California physicists who dubbed themselves the “Fundamental Fysiks Group” in the 1970s. Kaiser explains “[T]he Fundamental Fysiks Group – an ensemble cast from the start – played what can only be considered an outsized role. The ratio of their ambitious participation to the humbleness of their professional situation was especially striking. They weren’t just chasing new gadgets, though they certainly had these in mind and even marched a few steps down the patent-filing road. Their goal remained far more grand: changing an entire worldview. I find this mismatch between their soaring intellectual aspirations and their modest professional platform especially captivating. That they have left any mark at all—attenuated to be sure, and largely unrecognized amid today’s breathtaking successes—should give current researchers, toiling in relative obscurity, some modicum of comfort. Members of the Fundamental Fysiks Group threw themselves into their investigations with gusto, keeping spirits high and enjoying every last minute of their quest. Surely there is a lesson in that.
    • 
19. Mie Augier and James G. March (2011). The Roots, Rituals, and Rhetorics of Change: North American Business Schools After the Second World War.
    • Introduction: “Some rather remarkable changes took place in North American business schools in the twenty-five years between 1945 and 1970. The changes altered the character of business schools, the possibilities for their future, and the terms of discourse about them. They transformed the position of business schools in the academic community. They changed the balance between experiential knowledge and academic knowledge in management education. They clarified and articulated several concerns about university education for business and the rhetoric surrounding it. In many respects, the changes constituted a minor “revolution” (…) The history of change in business schools is preeminently a history of words. The history was unquestionably political.
    • Power was involved. Money was involved. Interests were involved. However, power, money, and interests were all elaborately entangled in argument and ideas. As nearly as we can determine, the principal actors in the history often believed in the justifications they provided and believed that the arguments had persuasive force that was to some degree independent of the power, money, and interests associated with them” (pp. 1, 12). This book explores the rhetoric of the history around three major questions:
      1. “[H]ow managerial education connects its teaching to some version of virtual reality, some exposure to the realities of management within the confines of a university campus-based education” (p. 12).
         “[W]hether business schools should concern themselves primarily with experiential knowledge of known and immediate relevance to business problems or with academic knowledge with its unclear, uncertain, and distance relevance” (p. 13).
         “[W]hat kind of vision of managers and management should be reflected by business school. In particular, should they conceive managers as professionals analogous to physicians, engineers, teachers, or lawyers and themselves as professional schools?” (p. 13).
20. Michael Lewis (2017). The Undoing Project: A Friendship that Changed Our Minds.
    • 
    • We are all aware of the great work that Tversky and Kahneman accomplished together. But we are less aware of how individual characteristics not only shape an impressive collaboration but also contributed in destroying the collaboration. Who other than Lewis, the author of Moneyball, could tell such a story in a vivid manner? Here are some examples:
    • “In an ordinary society it is unlikely that anyone would ever have discovered the fantastic practical usefulness of Danny Kahneman. Israel wasn’t a normal society. Graduating from Hebrew University—which somehow bestowed upon him a degree in psychology—Danny was required to serve in the Israeli army. Gentle, detached, disorganized, conflict-avoiding, and physically inept: Danny wasn’t anyone’s idea of a soldier (…) They assigned him to the psychology unit. The chief feature of the Israeli army’s psychology unit in 1954 was that it had no psychologists. Upon joining it, Danny found that his new boss—the Israeli army’s chief of psychological research—was a chemist. So Danny, a twenty year-old refugee from Europe who had spent a meaningful amount of his life in hiding, found himself the Israel Defense Forces’ expert on psychological matters. ‘He was thin, ugly, and very clever,’ recalls Tammy Viz, who served with Danny in the psychology unit (…) What he did was teach the army interviewers—young women, mainly—how to put a list of questions to each recruit to minimize the halo effect. He told them to pose very specific questions, designed to determine not how a person thought of himself but how the person had actually behaved (…) “The scores on Danny’s personality test did predict something, however. They predicted the likelihood the recruit would succeed in any job. They gave the Israeli army a better idea than it had before of who would succeed as an officer, or as a member of some elite service (fighter pilot, paratrooper), and who would not. (They also turned out to predict who would end up in jail.) Maybe more surprisingly, the results were only loosely correlated with intelligence and education—which is to say they contained information that those simple measures did not. The effect of what became known informally as the “Kahneman score” was to make better military use of an entire nation and, in particular, to reduce, in the selection of its military leaders, the importance of raw, measurable intelligence and increase the importance of the qualities on Danny’s list” (pp. 74-81).
    • “Later, when he was a university professor, Danny would tell students, ‘When someone says something, don’t ask yourself if it is true. Ask what it might be true of.” That was his intellectual instinct, his natural first step to the mental hoop: to take whatever someone had just said to him and try not to tear it down but to make sense of it” (pp. 82-83).
    • “The difference between Danny and the next nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine psychologists is his ability to find the phenomenon and then explain it in a way that applies to other situations,’ said Dale Griffin, a psychologist at the University of British Columbia. ‘It looks like luck but he keeps doing it.’” (p. 83).
    • “Inside the classroom Danny was simply a bold genius. Outside the classroom—well, Avi was surprised by the volatility of Danny’s state of mind. One day on campus, he ran into Danny and found him in a seriously dark mood—unlike anything Avi had ever seen. A student had just given him a bad review, Danny explained, and he thought that maybe he was all washed up. “He even asked me, ‘I’m still the same man, right?’” It was obvious to Avi, and to everyone else but Danny, that the student was a fool. “Danny was the best teacher at Hebrew University,” said Avi, “but it was very hard to convince him that the review didn’t matter—that he was excellent.” This was just the first of many sources of complication for Danny Kahneman: He was unusually inclined to believe the worst anyone said about him. ‘He was very insecure,’ Avi said. ‘This is part of his character’ (p. 128)”.
    • “He’d married, and his wife had given birth to a son and a daughter, but Danny still seemed to others to live entirely through his work. ‘He was very much task-oriented,’ said Zur Shapira, a student of Danny’s who later became a professor at New York University. ‘You would not say he was a happy person.” His moods put distance between Danny and other people, a bit like the distance caused by intense grief. ‘Women felt the urge to care for him,’ says Yaffa Singer, who worked with Danny in the Israeli army’s psychology unit. ‘He was always in doubt,’ said Dalia Etzion, who served as Danny’s teaching assistant. ‘I remember coming to him and he was blue. He was teaching, and he said, ‘I’m sure the students don’t like me.’ I thought: What does it matter? And it was bizarre. Because the students love him.’ Another colleague said, ‘He was like Woody Allen, without the humor.’ (p. 129).
    • “That was another thing colleagues and students noticed about Danny: how quickly he moved on from his enthusiasms, how easily he accepted failure. It was as if he expected it. But he wasn’t afraid of it. He’d try anything. He thought of himself as someone who enjoyed, more than most, changing his mind. “I get a sense of movement and discovery whenever I find a flaw in my thinking,” he said. His theory of himself dovetailed neatly with his moodiness” (p. 132).
    • “To his fellow Israelis, Amos Tversky somehow was, at once, the most extraordinary person they had ever met and the quintessential Israeli” (p. 88).
    • “Amos had said, usually directed at people whom he found full of themselves. He had listened to an American economist talk about how so-and-so was stupid and so-and-so was a fool, then said, “All your economic models are premised on people being smart and rational, and yet all the people you know are idiots.” He’d heard Murray Gell-Mann
      66, a Nobel laureate in physics, hold forth on seemingly every subject under the sun. After Gell-Man[n] was done, Amos said, ‘You know, Murray, there is no one in the world who is as smart as you think you are’” (p. 95).
    • “The effect on others of whatever Amos said only led to even more stories about Amos. There was—to take just one example—the time that Tel Aviv University threw a party for a physicist who had just won the Wolf Prize. It was the discipline’s second-highest honor, and its winners more often than not went on to win the Nobel. Most of the leading physicists in the country came to the party, but somehow the prizewinner ended up in the corner with Amos—who had recently taken an interest in black holes. The next day the prizewinner called his hosts to ask, “Who was that physicist I was talking to? He never told me his name.” After some confusing back-and-forth, his hosts figured out that the man meant Amos, and they told him that Amos wasn’t a physicist but a psychologist. “It’s not possible,” the physicist said, ‘he was the smartest of all the physicists’” (pp. 95-96).
    • “The Princeton philosopher Avishai Margalit said, “No matter what the topic was, the first thing Amos thought was in the top 10 percent. This was such a striking ability. The clarity and depth of his first reaction to any problem—any intellectual problem—was something mind-boggling. It was as if he was right away in the middle of any discussion.” Irv Biederman, a psychologist at the University of Southern California, said, “Physically he was unremarkable. In a room full of thirty people he’d be the last one you’d notice. And then he’d start to talk. Everyone who ever met him thought he was the smartest person they had ever met.” The University of Michigan psychologist Dick Nisbett, after he’d met Amos, designed a one-line intelligence test: The sooner you figure out that Amos is smarter than you are, the smarter you are. “He would walk into a room,” recalled his close friend and collaborator Varda Liberman, a mathematician. “He didn’t look special. And the way he dressed said nothing. He’d sit there quietly. And then he would open his mouth and speak. And in no time he became the light that all the butterflies fly to; and in no time everyone would look up to him wanting to hear what he would say” (p. 96).
    • “A lot of things that most human beings would never think to do, to Amos simply made sense. For instance, when he wanted to go for a run he . . . went for a run. No stretching, no jogging outfit or, for that matter, jogging: He’d simply strip off his slacks and sprint out his front door in his underpants and run as fast as he could until he couldn’t run anymore. “Amos thought people paid an enormous price to avoid mild embarrassment,” said his friend Avishai Margalit, ‘and he himself decided very early on it was not worth it’” (p.97).
    • “Amos would have decided, in the first five minutes, whether the movie was worth seeing—and if it wasn’t he’d just come home and watch Hill Street Blues (his favorite TV drama) or Saturday Night Live (he never missed it) or an NBA game (he was obsessed with basketball). He’d then go back and fetch his wife after her movie ended” (p. 98).
    • “But Amos approached intellectual life strategically, as if it were an oil field to be drilled, and after two years of sitting through philosophy classes he announced that philosophy was a dry well. “I remember his words,” recalled Amnon. “He said, ‘There is nothing we can do in philosophy. Plato solved too many of the problems. We can’t have any impact in this area. There are too many smart guys and too few problems left, and the problems have no solutions’” (p. 100).
    • “To Amos’s closest Israeli friends, there was never anything mysterious about his interest in psychology. Questions of why people behaved as they behaved, and thought as they thought, were thick in the air they breathed. “You never discussed art,” recalls Avishai Margalit. ‘You discussed people. It was a constant thing, a constant puzzle: What makes others tick? It comes from the shtetl. Jews were petty merchants. They had to assess others, all the time. Who is dangerous? Who is not dangerous? Who will repay the debt, who won’t repay the debt? People were basically dependent on their psychological judgment’” (pp. 100-101).
    • “Danny invited Amos to come to his seminar to talk about whatever he wanted to talk about. He was a little surprised that Amos didn’t talk about his own work—but then Amos’s work was so abstract and theoretical that he probably decided it had no place in the seminar. Those who stopped to think about it found it odd that Amos’s work betrayed so little interest in the real world, when Amos was so intimately and endlessly engaged with that world, and how, conversely, Danny’s work was consumed by real-world problems, even as he kept other people at a distance” (p. 143).
    • “Amos was a psychologist and yet the experiment he had just described, with apparent approval, or at least not obvious skepticism, had in it no psychology at all. “It felt like a math exercise,” said Danny. And so Danny did what every decent citizen of Hebrew University did when he heard something that sounded idiotic: He let Amos have it. “The phrase ‘I pushed him into the wall’ was often used, even for conversations among friends,” explained Danny later. “The idea that everyone is entitled to his/her opinion was a California thing—that’s not how we did things in Jerusalem.” By the end of the seminar, Danny must have sensed that Amos didn’t particularly want to argue with him anymore. Danny went home and boasted to his wife, Irah, that he had won an argument with a brash younger colleague. Or anyway, that’s how Irah remembered it. “This is, or was, an important aspect of Israeli discussions,” Danny said. ‘They were competitive’” (p. 149).
    • “We were quicker in understanding each other than we were in understanding ourselves. The way the creative process works is that you first say something, and later, sometimes years later, you understand what you said. And in our case it was foreshortened. I would say something and Amos would understand it. When one of us would say something that was off the wall, the other would search for the virtue in it. We would finish each other’s sentences and frequently did. But we also kept surprising each other. It still gives me goose bumps” (p. 180).
    • “Work, for Amos, had always been play: If it wasn’t fun, he simply didn’t see the point in doing it. Work now became play for Danny, too. This was new” (p. 181).
    • 
    • “By the time they were finished with the paper, in early 1970, they had lost any clear sense of their individual contributions. It was nearly impossible to say, of any given passage, whether more of some idea had come from Danny or from Amos. Far more easily determined, at least for Danny, was responsibility for the paper’s confident, almost brazen, tone. Danny had always been a nervous scholar. “If I had written it alone, in addition to being tentative and having a hundred references, I would probably have confessed that I am only a recently reformed idiot,” he said. ‘I could have done the paper all by myself. Except that if I had done it alone people would not have paid it attention. It had a star quality. And I attributed that quality to Amos’” (p. 163).
    • “With Danny there was always a sense you were starting over, even if you had been with him just yesterday. Amos was tone-deaf but would nevertheless sing Hebrew folk songs with great gusto. Danny was the sort of person who might be in possession of a lovely singing voice that he would never discover. Amos was a one-man wrecking ball for illogical arguments; when Danny heard an illogical argument, he asked, What might that be true of? Danny was a pessimist. Amos was not merely an optimist; Amos willed himself to be optimistic, because he had decided pessimism was stupid. When you are a pessimist and the bad thing happens, you live it twice, Amos liked to say. Once when you worry about it, and the second time when it happens. “They were very different people,” said a fellow Hebrew University professor. “Danny was always eager to please. He was irritable and short-tempered, but he wanted to please. Amos couldn’t understand why anyone would be eager to please. He understood courtesy, but eager to please—why??” Danny took everything so seriously; Amos turned much of life into a joke. When Hebrew University put Amos on its committee to evaluate all PhD candidates, Amos was appalled at what passed for a dissertation in the humanities. Instead of raising a formal objection, he merely said, “If this dissertation is good enough for its field, it’s good enough for me. Provided the student can divide fractions!’ (p. 155).
    • “Beyond that, Amos was the most terrifying mind most people had ever encountered. “People were afraid to discuss ideas in front of him,” said a friend—because they were afraid he would put his finger on the flaw that they had only dimly sensed. One of Amos’s graduate students, Ruma Falk, said she was so afraid of what Amos would think of her driving that when she drove him home, in her car, she insisted that he drive. And now here he was spending all of his time with Danny, whose susceptibility to criticism was so extreme that a single remark from a misguided student sent him down a long, dark tunnel of self-doubt. It was as if you had dropped a white mouse into a cage with a python and come back later and found the mouse talking and the python curled in the corner, rapt” (pp. 155-156).
    • ““Amos and Danny realized, or seemed to realize, how much they needed each other. “There are geniuses who work on their own,” said Danny. “I am not a genius. Neither is Tversky. Together we are exceptional”” (pp. 293-294).
    • “With Amos in the room, Danny complained at length about how different the public perception of the collaboration was from its reality. “I am perceived as attending him, which is not the case,” he said, less to Shore than to Amos. “I clearly lose by the collaboration. There is a quality that is clearly contributed by you. Formal analysis is not my strength and it shows up very distinctly in our work. My contributions are less unique.” Amos spoke, at less length, about how the blame for their unequal status fell squarely on other people. “The credit business is very hard,” said Amos. ‘There is a lot of wear and tear, and the outside world isn’t helpful to collaborations. There is constant poking, and people decide that one person gets the short end of the stick. It’s one of the rules of balance, and joint collaboration is an unbalanced structure. It is just not a stable structure. People aren’t happy with it” (p. 294).
    • Alone with the Harvard psychiatrist, Danny said more. He hinted that he didn’t believe the outside world was entirely responsible for the problems in their relationship. “The spoils of academic success, such as they are—eventually one person gets all of it, or gets a lot of it,” he said. “That’s an unkindness built in. Tversky cannot control this, though I wonder whether he does as much to control it as he should.” Then he came straight out with his own feelings about Amos getting the lion’s share of the glory for work they had done together. “I am very much in his shadow in a way that is not representative of our interaction,” he said. ‘It induces a certain strain. There is envy! It’s just disturbing. I hate the feeling of envy. . . . I am maybe saying too much now’ (pp. 294-295).
    • “Amos was in Israel on a visit in 1984 when he received the phone call telling him that he’d been given a MacArthur “genius” grant. The award came with two hundred fifty thousand dollars, plus an extra fifty thousand dollars for research, a fancy health care plan, and a press release celebrating Amos as one of the thinkers who had exhibited “extraordinary originality and dedication in their creative pursuits and a marked capacity for self-direction.” The only work of Amos’s cited in the press release was the work he’d done with Danny. It didn’t mention Danny. Amos disliked prizes. He thought that they exaggerated the differences between people, did more harm than good, and created more misery than joy, as for every winner there were many others who deserved to win, or felt they did. The MacArthur became a case in point. “He wasn’t grateful for that prize,” said his friend Maya Bar-Hillel, who was with Amos in Jerusalem shortly after the prize was announced. “He was pissed. He said, ‘What are these people thinking? How can they give a prize to just one of a winning pair? Do they not realize they are dealing the collaboration a death blow?’” Amos didn’t like prizes but he kept on getting them anyway” (pp. 313-314).
    • “Danny couldn’t help but keep noticing the new attention Amos was receiving for the work they had done together. Economists now wanted Amos at their conferences, but then so did linguists and philosophers and sociologists and computer scientists—even though Amos hadn’t the faintest interest in the PC that came with his Stanford office. (“What could I do with computers?” he said, after he’d declined Apple’s offer to donate twenty new Macs to the Stanford Psychology Department.) “You get fed up with not being invited to the same conferences, even when you would not want to go,” Danny confessed to the Harvard psychiatrist Miles Shore. ‘My life would be better if he weren’t invited to so many’ (p. 316).
    • “By then their interactions had become fraught. It had taken Danny the longest time to understand his own value. Now he could see that the work Amos had done alone was not as good as the work they had done together. The joint work always attracted more interest and higher praise than anything Amos had done alone. It had apparently attracted this genius award. And yet the public perception of their relationship was now a Venn diagram, two circles, with Danny wholly contained by Amos. The rapid expansion of Amos’s circle pushed his borders further and further away from Danny’s. Danny felt himself sliding slowly but surely from the small group Amos loved to the large group whose ideas Amos viewed with contempt. “Amos changed,” said Danny. ‘When I gave him an idea he would look for what was good in it. For what was right with it. That, for me, was the happiness in the collaboration. He understood me better than I understood myself. He stopped doing that’ (pp. 329-330).”
    • “Danny needed something from Amos. He needed him to correct the perception that they were not equal partners. And he needed it because he suspected Amos shared that perception. “He was too willing to accept a situation that put me in his shadow,” said Danny. Amos may have been privately furious that the MacArthur Foundation recognized him and not Danny, but when Danny had called to congratulate him, he had only said offhandedly, “If I hadn’t gotten it for this I’d have gotten it for something else.” Amos might have written endless recommendations for Danny, and told people privately that he was the greatest living psychologist in the world, but after Danny told Amos that Harvard had asked him to join its faculty, Amos said, “It’s me they want.” He’d just blurted that out, and then probably regretted saying it—even if he wasn’t wrong to think it. Amos couldn’t help himself from wounding Danny, and Danny couldn’t help himself from feeling wounded. Barbara Tversky occupied the office beside Amos at Stanford. “I would hear their phone calls,” she said. ‘It was worse than a divorce” (p. 332).
    • “Danny didn’t need job offers from Harvard or genius awards from the MacArthur Foundation. Those might have helped, but only if they altered Amos’s view of him. What Danny needed was for Amos to continue to see him and his ideas uncritically, as he had when they were alone together in a room. If that involved some misperception on Amos’s part—some exaggeration of the earthly status of Danny’s ideas—well, then, Amos should continue to misperceive. After all, what is a marriage if not an agreement to distort one’s perception of another, in relation to everyone else? “I wanted something from him, not from the world,” said Danny” (pp. 333-334).
    • “Every conversation leaves me upset for a long time, which I cannot afford.” To which Amos replied, ‘I do not get your sensitivity metric. In general, you are the most open minded and least defensive person I know. At the same time, you can get really upset because I rewrote a paragraph you like, or because you chose to interpret a totally harmless comment in an unintended negative way’ (p. 337).
    • “One night in New York, while staying in an apartment with Amos, Danny had a dream. “And in this dream the doctor tells me I have six months to live,” he recalled. “And I said, ‘This is wonderful because no one would expect me to spend the last six months of my life working on this garbage.’ The next morning I told Amos.” Amos looked at Danny and said, “Other people might be impressed but I am not.” “Even if you had only six months to live I’d expect you to finish this with me”. Not long after that exchange, Danny read a list of the new members of the National Academy of Sciences, to which Amos had belonged for nearly a decade. Once again, Danny’s name wasn’t on the list. Once again, the differences between them were there for all to see. “I asked him, why haven’t you put me forward?” said Danny. “But I knew why.” Had their situations been reversed, Amos would never have wanted to be given anything on the strength of his friendship with Danny. At bottom, Amos saw Danny’s need as weakness. “I said, ‘That’s not how friends behave,’” said Danny. And with that Danny left. Walked out. Never mind Gerd Gigerenzer, or the collaboration. He told Amos that they were no longer even friends. “I sort of divorced him,” said Danny. Three days later Amos called Danny. He’d just received some news. A growth that doctors had discovered in his eye had just been diagnosed as malignant melanoma. The doctors had scanned his body and found it riddled with cancer. They were now giving him, at best, six months to live. Danny was the second person he’d called with the news. Hearing that, something inside Danny gave. ‘He was saying, ‘We’re friends, whatever you think we are” (pp. 337-338).
21. Ronald L. Numbers and Kostas Kampourakis (Eds.) (2015). Newton’s Apple and Other Myths About Science.
    • 
    • 
    • 
    • 

General Contributions in Various Fields

1. Chapter 1: The Remarkable Story:
   • “This is the story of a remarkable idea that has shaped humankind beyond the scope of any single historical event or clever invention. It recounts the astonishing and unexpected tale of how quantitative thinking was invented and rose to primacy in our lives in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, bringing us to an entirely new perspective on what we know about the world and how we know it—even on what we each think about ourselves: our very nature and identity. The widespread and lasting effect of thinking quantitatively is truly that profound” (p. 1).
   • 
2. Keith Oatley (2018). Our Minds, Our Selves: A Brief History of Psychology.
   • According to Michael Tomasello, this is possibly the best introduction to the history of psychology he knows. In his prologue, Oatley writes: “A revolution is taking place in our understanding how the mind works to know the physical and social world. We are beginning now to understand some principles of the mind, not just know which parts of the brain are active when we do this, or feel that, not just to know how behaviour is affected by events, by social processes such as conversation, and by learning, but to reach inner understanding of the minds of others and ourselves” (p. xii).
3. Morton Hunt (2007). The Story of Psychology.
   • This is a tour de force by Morton Hunt, who – as a freelance writer – specialized in the area of behavioural sciences since 1949. He died in 2016 at the age of 96. Throughout his career wrote at least 18 books and more than 450 articles.
4. Barbara Tversky (2019). Mind in Motion: How Action Shapes Thought.
   • A new view of looking at how we think. Are movement and our interactions in space the true foundation of thought rather than language? What enables and underlies spatial thinking? Dedication: “To Amos, whose mind was always in motion”.
   • 
   • 
5. Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1967). Robots, Men and Minds.
   • A contribution to the sociology of knowledge by emphasizing the study of interconnections and interactions between sociocultural situations, science, and the world outlook; all of which are based in an evaluation that science, and a science of and for man has become deeply problematic in our days. “What is the position of psychology in the modern world? By and large, an answer can be given: Science has conquered the universe but forgotten or even actively suppressed human nature. This is at least part of our trouble” (p. 6).
6. Jerome Kagan (2017). Five Constraints on Predicting Behavior.
   • Richard Aslin’s comments read: “Jerome Kagan’s coverage of constraints on behavior represents a remarkable summary that only one of psychology’s most distinguished scholars could provide. He captures much of modern brain science that bears on behavior and does so by spanning an incredibly diverse array of abilities across development and species, always paying homage to the field’s historical roots. With an emphasis on methodological rigor, Kagan warns of interpretative traps, yet offers an optimistic view that brain-behavior correlations, assessed by tasks in natural contexts, will lead to causal theories of our most complex cognitive achievements”
7. Daniel H. Hausman (2008). The Philosophy of Economics: An Anthology.
   • One of Dave Savage’s favourite scientific books on economics. A very strong collection of contributions by individuals such as John Stuart Mill, Max Weber, Lionel Robbins, Frank Knight, Karl Marx, Thorstein Veblen, Milton Friedman, Herbert Simon, Daniel M. Hausman, D. Wade Hands, Joseph Schumpeter, Nicholas Kaldor, Robert H. Frank, Amartya Sen, Kevin D. Hoover, Vernon Smith, Colin F. Camerer, James M. Buchanen, Viktor J. Vanberg, Geoffrey M. Hodgson, Deidre N. McCloskey, Uskali Mäki, Tony Lawson, Julie A. Nelson, and Robert Sugden.
   • Hausman explains: Unlike a textbook, this anthology also provides some historical perspective. Methodological questions concerning economics – questions about the goals of economics, the ways in which economic claims are established, the concepts of economics and their relation to concepts in the natural sciences and so forth – are all philosophical questions, and in philosophy it is generally a mistake to ignore the works of the past. Past wisdom cannot be encapsulated in a textbook, and original works cannot be consigned to intellectual historians (p. 4).
8. Agnar Sandmo (2011). Economics Evolving: A History of Economic Thought.
   • 
   • A tour de force by Sandmo (who died in 2019).
   • “The view of economics on which this book is based is that economics is one of the social sciences that study how society works.
   • Why study the history of economic thought?
   • Sandmo’s answer:
     1. “It is fun. Anyone with some familiarity with modern economics should find it interesting to read about the thinkers and theories of the past, and some will no doubt feel that time spent on the history of economic ideas does not need any further justification. The opinions of dead men may be fascinating to study even if one believes them to be wrong. Einstein’s discoveries did not turn Newton into an irrelevant character in history; in a similar vein, Paul Samuelson and other twentieth-century economists did not make the life and work of Adam Smith a subject of no relevance and interest.
     2. Some knowledge of the history of thought should form part of the liberal education of an economist. In books and articles – sometimes even the popular press – one comes across terms like “Adam Smith’s invisible hand,” “Walrasian equilibrium,” “Pareto optimality,” Pigouvian taxes,” and “Keynesian policies.” A well-educated economist clearly ought to know something about the persons that the terms refer to.
     3. Some familiarity with the history of thought contributes to a better understanding of the fact that the discipline of economics is in a permanent process of change and development, thereby leading to a better understanding of the nature of economic research. The common nonhistorical way of teaching economics may easily give a false impression of the subject as one that has found its final form. The history of thought makes one realize that economic science has always progressed through the efforts of people who have seen that it contains deficiencies and errors” (pp. 5-6).
9. Robert L. Heilbroner (1999). The Worldly Philosophers: The Lives, Times, and Ideas of the Great Economic Thinkers.
   • 
   • Samuelson states: Sinclair Lewis’s Arrowsmith inspired several readers to become Nobel laureates in biology. Robert Heilbroner’s new edition of The Worldly Philosophers will inspire a new generation of economists.
10. James Buchanan (1979). What Should Economists Do?
    • As time passes, fewer economists are familiar with Nobelist James Buchanan’s work. Is forgetting a good thing? Not really. The latest knowledge may not always be the best knowledge, particularly in the area of social sciences. Lost knowledge, the emergence and disappearance of fields, and fads are common elements in science. The evolution of knowledge is a tough beast. This book is a collection of essays by James Buchanan, collected by Geoffrey Brennan and Robert Tollison for two purposes: “First, and most importantly, it provides relatively easy access to a group of significant papers on methodology in economics, written by a man whose work has spawned a methodological revolution in the way economists and other scholars think about government and government activity. Second, it provides a means to honor a distinguished colleague at a stage in his career when such tributes are deemed appropriate” (p. 9).
11. Kenneth E. Boulding (1970). Economics As a Science.
    • Boulding is an another scholar that is disappearing from the minds of (young) scholars. In 2017, the American Economic Association Meeting organised a panel session entitled ‘Kenneth Boulding and Future Directions of Social Science’. The session raised questions about why Boulding is little known among economists, and why he had little influence on economics (or whether he had an influence, but economists are unaware of the source). You will find the abstract for that session here. The most interesting question posed at the event is whether there are other directions in Boulding’s work that can serve as indicators as to where economics and social science will head in future. Many Mammoth Reading Group lists have included Boulding’s work. Here you can find a collection of essays to introduce those already acquainted with economics to what Boulding might call the larger scientific background of the subject. Chapters: Economics as a Social Science; Economics as an Ecological Science; Economics as a Behavioral Science; Economics as a Political Science; Economics as a Mathematical Science; Economics as a Moral Science; Economics and the Future of Man.
12. Jean Tirole (2017). Economics for the Common Good.
    • Have we lost sight of the common good? If so, can economics help? Tirole: “Economics works toward the common good; its goal is to make the world a better place. To that end, its task is to identify the institutions and policies that will promote the common good. In its pursuit of the well-being of the community, it incorporates both individual and collective dimensions. It analyses situations in which individual interest is compatible with the quest for collective well-being, as well as those in which, by contrast, individual interest hinders that quest” (p. 5).
13. Albert O. Hirschman (1977). The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph.
    • A reconstruction of the intellectual climate of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, offering a new interpretation for the rise of capitalism. Hirschman: “This book was not written against anyone or against any intellectual tradition in particular. Neither espousing nor opposing any existing body of thought, it has the special quality of standing free and of evolving freely and independently”.
14. Paul Krugman (1997). Development, Geography, and Economic Theory.
    • A heavily revised version of Krugman’s Ohlin lecture delivered in 1992. Preface: “Invitations to give lectures of this kind are, of course, a great honor. They are also a special privilege for those of us who occasionally find that we have things to say that fit awkwardly into the usual media of professional communication – ideas that are too fuzzy for a journal article, too slight for a book, yet presume too much knowledge on the part of the audience to be published in more popular media. When you are prone to having fuzzy, slight ideas – as I am – a short lecture series published as a small book presents a wonderful opportunity to indulge your vice” (p. vii). Here are a couple of points he raised:
    • “Why do economists reject ideas? To laymen the unwillingness of academic economists to take seriously ideas that seem to them perfectly reasonable, whether they are John Kenneth Galbraith’s theory of the new industrial state or George Gilder’s views about wealth and poverty, is often infuriating. They can’t understand the criteria; why isn’t one forcefully written argument, backed by anecdotal evidence and an appeal to history, as good as another? And it is not at all uncommon for frustrated people with strong views about economics to attribute the unwillingness of the academic mainstream to listen to them or their friends to base motives to a guild mentality that refuses to consider ideas that are not from the right people or expressed in the right jargon or to political bias. But the truth is less simple. Economists, like everyone, have their political biases, but these are by no means as strong an influence on what they are willing to consider as you might think” (p. 4).
    • “So is it just guild mentality? Do you have to have a Ph.D. to be listened to? Well, having a Ph.D. even having an established professional reputation is no guarantee that your economic ideas will be treated with respect. Consider John Kenneth Galbraith or Lester Thurow, both leading economists in the view of the general public, both with all the formal qualifications, both totally ignored by the academic mainstream. Or consider Robert Mundell, who is still revered for his contributions to international monetary theory, yet whose later incarnation as the father of supply-side economics has similarly been ignored. And on the other hand, a nonacademic may under some conditions receive a respectful hearing in the last few years Jane Jacobs, the maverick urban observer, has become something of a patron saint of the new growth theory” (p. 5).
    • “So what is it that makes some ideas acceptable, while others are not? The answer which is obvious to anyone immersed in economic research yet mysterious to outsiders is that to be taken seriously an idea has to be something you can model. A properly modeled idea is, in modern economics, the moral equivalent of a properly surveyed region for eighteenth-century mapmakers” (p. 5).
    • “Economic theory is essentially a collection of models. Broad insights that are not expressed in model form may temporarily attract attention and even win converts, but they do not endure unless codified in a reproducible and teachable form. You may not like this tendency; certainly economists tend to be too quick to dismiss what has not been formalized (although I believe that the focus on models is basically right). Like it or not, however, the influence of ideas that have not been embalmed in models soon decays. And this was the fate of high development theory. Myrdal’s effective presentation of the idea of circular and cumulative causation, or Hirschman’s evocation of linkages, were stimulating and immensely influential in the 1950s and early 1960s. By the 1970s (when I was a student of economics), they had come to seem not so much wrong as meaningless. What were these guys talking about? Where were the models? And so high development theory was not so much rejected as simply bypassed” (p. 27).
    • “The history of economic geography of the study of the location of economic activity is more like the story of geological thought about the shapes and location of continents and mountain ranges. The location of production is an obvious feature of the economic world. Indeed, I began to get interested in economics as a schoolchild by looking at those old-fashioned maps of countries that used picturesque symbols to represent economic activity: sheaves of wheat to represent agriculture, little miners’ carts to represent resource extraction, little factories to represent industry, and so on. And yet there is almost no spatial analysis in mainstream economics. It is almost forty years since Walter Isard attacked economic analysis for taking place in a “wonderland of no spatial dimensions,” yet his plea for spatial economics has gone virtually unanswered. Consider, for example, the latest entrant in the field of economic principles textbooks: Joseph Stiglitz’s Economics. It’s a widely acclaimed book, faulted if at all for its excessive comprehensiveness, which accounts for its 1,100-plus page length. Yet the index contains no reference to the words “location” or “spatial economics,” and has precisely one reference to “cities” which occurs in the course of a discussion of rural-urban migration in less developed countries. Why this neglect? Mark Blaug, in his magisterial survey of economic thought, describes the neglect of spatial issues as a “major puzzle,” which in the end he explains by historical happenstance: because von Thünen was German, the tradition of spatial analysis failed to get established in the eventually dominant Anglo-Saxon school. But this is too easy an answer. On one side, it fails to appreciate the sociology of late twentieth-century economic research: in the world I inhabit, populated by hundreds if not thousands of technically able researchers desperate for interesting questions to study, any obviously available intellectual territory will always be exploited. Even though there is surely an excessive bias toward cultivating the internal margin, finding new theoretical wrinkles on familiar topics or using heavy econometric artillery to tease a bit more out of well-studied data, it is highly implausible that a huge extensive margin like the economics of location would be neglected simply because it failed to get into the curriculum a century ago (…) So why did spatial issues remain a blind spot for the economic profession? It was not a historical accident: there was something about spatial economics that made it inherently unfriendly terrain for the kind of modeling mainstream economists know how to do. That something was, as you might well guess, the problem of market structure in the face of increasing returns, a problem that is even more acute in economic geography than in development economics. In development the crucial role that high development theory assigned to increasing returns was a hypothesis crucial to that doctrine, but not necessarily crucial to understanding development in general. One could do meaningful theorizing about developing countries, albeit not in the grand tradition, without sacrificing the convenient assumptions of constant returns and perfect competition. In spatial economics, however, you really cannot get started at all without finding a way to deal with scale economies and oligopolistic firms” (pp. 33-35).
    • … “when you are working in a very new area, it is entirely forgivable to make outrageous simplifications in pursuit of insights, with the faith that the model can be brought closer to the facts on later passes. (This is a self-serving remark”… (p. 39).
    • “Economic geography never really got its foot inside the door to this day the silence of standard economics on such subjects as the location, size, or even existence of cities is startling. In each case, I have argued, the basic problem was one neither of ignorance nor of bias. Economists did not abandon the insights of development economics because they had forgotten about the subject; they did not ignore the ideas of the geographers because to acknowledge space would somehow conflict with free-market prejudices. No, these fields were left untilled because the terrain was seen as unsuitable for the tools at hand. Economists realized that they could not model Big Push development or almost anything interesting about economic geography with the kind of rigor that was increasingly expected of them, and so they simply left the subjects alone. This surely sounds like an indictment of the economics profession. Here were interesting, basically sensible ideas, ideas that made sense to anyone who did not have professional training in economics. And yet because they could not be modeled with the rigor required by the increasingly narrow standards of the journals, they were ignored. Doesn’t this say that we have made a fetish of formalism? Doesn’t it even seem to imply that the whole profession may have taken a wrong turning? No: while many economists are indeed too narrow-minded, the insistence on models is right, even when it sometimes leads us unfairly to overlook good ideas. To understand why, we need to stop for a little while and ask why we need formal economic models in the first place”.
    • “The response of some of the most brilliant high development theorists, above all Albert Hirschman, was simply to opt out of the mainstream. They would build a new development school on suggestive metaphors, institutional realism, interdisciplinary reasoning, and a relaxed attitude toward internal consistency. The result was some wonderful writing, some inspiring insights, and (in my view) an intellectual dead end. High development theory simply faded out. A constant-returns, perfect competition view of reality took over the development literature, and eventually via the World Bank and other institutions much of real-world development policy as well. And yet in the end it turned out that mainstream economics eventually did find a place for high development theory. Like the Norwegians who discovered that the shapes of clouds do mean something, mainstream economics discovered that as its modeling techniques became more sophisticated, some neglected insights could be brought back in. And it was not simply a matter of rediscovery: the restatement of high development theory, in terms of such models as the Murphy et al. version of the Big Push, is not only clearer but in some ways deeper than the original statement” (pp. 82-83).
    • “Economists tended to regard the Big Push story as essentially nonsensical if modern technology is better, then rational firms would simply adopt it! (They missed the interaction between economies of scale and market size.) Noneconomists tended to think that Big Push stories necessarily involved some rich interdisciplinary stew of effects, missing the simple core. In other words, economists were locked in their traditional models, non-economists were lost in the fog that results when you have no explicit models at all. How did Murphy et al. break through this wall of confusion? Not by trying to capture the richness of reality, either with a highly complex model or with the kind of lovely metaphors that seem to evade the need for a model. They did it instead by daring to be silly: by representing the world in a dishpan, to get at an essential point. In the end, the formalization of the Big Push was so easy that one finds oneself wondering whether the long slump in development theory was really necessary. The model is so simple: three pages, two equations, and one diagram. It could, it seems, have been written as easily in 1955 as in 1989. What would have happened to development economics, even to economics in general, if someone had. But it didn’t happen, and perhaps couldn’t. Those economists who were attracted to the idea of powerful simplifications were still absorbed in the possibilities of perfect competition and constant returns; those who were drawn to a richer view, like Hirschman, became impatient with the narrowness and seeming silliness of the economics enterprise. That the story may have been preordained does not keep it from being a sad one. Good ideas were left to gather dust in the economics attic for more than a generation; great minds retreated to the intellectual periphery. It is hard to know whether economic policy in the real world would have been much better if high development theory had not decayed so badly, since the relationship between good economic analysis and successful policy is far weaker than we like to imagine. Still, one wishes things had played out differently” (pp. 83-84).
    • And his Concluding Thoughts: “One would like to draw some morals from these stories of ideas lost and found. It is easy to give facile advice. For those who are impatient with modeling and prefer to strike out on their own into the richness that an uninhibited use of metaphor seems to open up, the advice is to stop and think71. Are you sure that you really have such deep insights that you are better off turning your back on the cumulative discourse among generally intelligent people that is modern economics? But of course you are. And for those, like me, who basically try to understand the world through the metaphors provided by models, the advice is not to let important ideas slip by just because they haven’t been formulated your way. Look for the folk wisdom on clouds ideas that come from people who do not write formal models but may have rich insights. There may be some very interesting things out there. Strangely, though, I can’t think of any. The truth is, I fear, that there’s not much that can be done about the kind of apparent intellectual waste that took place during the fall and rise of development economics or during the long intellectual exile of economic geography. A temporary evolution of ignorance, a period when our insistence on looking in certain directions leaves us unable to see what is right under our noses, may be the price of progress, an inevitable part of what happens when we try to make sense of the world’s complexity” (p. 88).
15. Dani Rodrick (2015). Economic Rules: The Rights and Wrong of the Dismal Science72.
    • From the Preface and Acknowledgments by Rodrick, who was the Albert O. Hirschman Professor in the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton between 2013-2015: “This book has its origins in a course I taught with Roberto Mangabeira Unger on political economy for several years at Harvard. In his inimitable fashion, Roberto pushed me to think hard about the strengths and weaknesses of economics and to articulate what I found useful in the economic method. The discipline had become sterile and stale, Roberto argued, because economics had given up on grand social theorizing in the style of Adam Smith and Karl Marx. I pointed out, in turn, that the strength of economics lay precisely in small-scale theorizing, the kind of contextual thinking that clarifies cause and effect and sheds light—even if partial—on social reality. A modest science practiced with humility, I argued, is more likely to be useful than a search for universal theories about how capitalist systems function or what determines wealth and poverty around the world. I don’t think I ever convinced him, but I hope he will find that his arguments did have some impact” (p. xi).
    • 
    • 
    • 
    • “In my interactions with many noneconomists and practitioners of other social sciences, I have often been baffled by outsider views on economics. Many of the complaints are well known: economics is simplistic and insular; it makes universal claims that ignore the role of culture, history, and other background conditions; it reifies the market; it is full of implicit value judgments; and besides, it fails to explain and predict developments in the economy. Each of these criticisms derives in large part from a failure to recognize that economics is, in fact, a collection of diverse models that do not have a particular ideological bent or lead to a unique conclusion. Of course, to the extent that economists themselves fail to reflect this diversity within their profession, the fault lies with them” (p. 6).
    • “In truth, simple models73 of the type that economists construct are absolutely essential to understanding the workings of society. Their simplicity, formalism, and neglect of many facets of the real world are precisely what make them valuable74. These are a feature, not a bug. What makes a model useful is that it captures an aspect of reality. What makes it indispensable, when used well, is that it captures the most relevant aspect of reality in a given context. Different contexts—different markets, social settings, countries, time periods, and so on—require different models. And this is where economists typically get into trouble. They often discard their profession’s most valuable contribution—the multiplicity of models tailored to a variety of settings—in favor of the search for the one and only universal model. When models are selected judiciously, they are a source of illumination. When used dogmatically, they lead to hubris and errors in policy” (p. 11).
    • As the distinguished economic theorist Ariel Rubinstein75 puts it, “The word ‘model’ sounds more scientific than ‘fable’ or ‘fairy tale’ [yet] I do not see much difference between them.” In the words of philosopher Allan Gibbard and economist Hal Varian, “[An economic] model always tells a story.” Nancy Cartwright, the philosopher of science, uses the term “fable” in relation to economic and physics models alike, though she thinks economic models are more like parables. Unlike fables, in which the moral is clear, Cartwright says that economic models require lots of care and interpretation in drawing out the policy implication. This complexity is related to the fact that each model captures only a contextual truth, a conclusion that applies to a specific setting” (p. 20).
    • “The reason economists use mathematics is typically misunderstood. It has little to do with sophistication, complexity, or a claim to higher truth. Math essentially plays two roles in economics, neither of which is cause for glory: clarity and consistency. First, math ensures that the elements of a model—the assumptions, behavioral mechanisms, and main results—are stated clearly and are transparent. Once a model is stated in mathematical form, what it says or does is obvious to all who can read it. This clarity is of great value and is not adequately appreciated. We still have endless debates today about what Karl Marx, John Maynard Keynes, or Joseph Schumpeter really meant. Even though all three are giants of the economics profession, they formulated their models largely (but not exclusively) in verbal form. By contrast, no ink has ever been spilled over what Paul Samuelson, Joe Stiglitz, or Ken Arrow had in mind when they developed the theories that won them their Nobel. Mathematical models require that all the t’s be crossed and the i’s be dotted” (p. 31).
    • “Models are never true; but there is truth in models” (p. 44).
    • “Finally, there are the big, timeless questions of economics and social science. What determines the distribution of income in a society? Is capitalism a stable or unstable economic system? What are the sources of social cooperation and trust, and why do they vary across societies? These questions are the domain of grand theories. A successful answer would explain the past and also provide a guide to the future. To that extent, these theories would form the social analogue of the physical laws of nature. Contemporary economics is often criticized for not taking on these big questions. Where is today’s Karl Marx or Adam Smith? Would they even get tenure at a half-decent university? These are fair criticisms. But a reasonable counterargument would be that universal theories are impossible to formulate in the social sciences, and that the best we can do is come up with a series of contingent explanations” (p. 116).
    • “When economists confuse a model for the model, two kinds of mischief may follow. First there are the errors of omission, in which a blind spot shows up in the inability to see troubles looming ahead. Most economists, for instance, failed to grasp the dangerous confluence of circumstances that produced the global financial crisis of 2007–8. Then there are the errors of commission, in which fixation on a particular view of the world makes economists complicit in policies whose failure might have been predicted ahead of time. Economists’ advocacy of the so-called Washington Consensus and of financial globalization are in this category” (p. 152).
    • “Beyond the general bias toward markets, economists are not always good about drawing the links between their models and the world. Because economists go through a similar training and share a common method of analysis, they act very much like a guild. The models themselves may be the product of analysis, reflection, and observation, but practitioners’ views about the real world develop much more heuristically, as a by-product of informal conversations and socialization among themselves. This kind of echo chamber easily produces overconfidence—in the received wisdom or the model of the day. Meanwhile, the guild mentality renders the profession insular and immune to outside criticism. The models may have problems, but only card-carrying members of the profession are allowed to say so. The objections of outsiders are discounted because they do not understand the models. The profession values smarts over judgment, being interesting over being right—so its fads and fashions do not always self-correct” (pp. 171-172).
    • “Economics needs fewer hedgehogs and more foxes engaged in public debates. Economists who are able to navigate from one explanatory framework to another as circumstances require are more likely to point us in the right direction” (p. 175).
    • “I have complained myself at length in this book about two weaknesses: the lack of attention to model selection and the excessive focus at times on some models at the expense of others. In plenty of instances economists have led the world astray”.
    • “Then there is the criticism that economists’ theories cannot be properly tested. Empirical analysis is never conclusive, and invalid theories are rarely rejected. The discipline hobbles from one set of preferred models to another, driven less by evidence than by fads and ideology. Insofar as economists present themselves as the physicists of the social world, this criticism is deserved. As I explained earlier, however, comparisons to natural sciences are misleading. Economics is a social science, which means that the search for universal theories and results is futile. A model (or theory) is at best contextually valid. Expecting general empirical validation or rejection makes little sense. Economics advances by expanding the collection of potentially applicable models, with newer ones capturing aspects of social reality that were overlooked or neglected by earlier ones. When an economist encounters a new pattern, his reaction is to think of a model that might explain it. Economics advances also by better methods of model selection— improving the match between model and real-world setting. As I explained in Chapter 3, this is more a craft than a science, and one that does not get the attention it deserves in economics. But the advantage of working with models is that the elements required for model selection—the critical assumptions, the causal channels, the direct and indirect implications—are all transparent and laid bare. These elements enable economists to check the correspondence between the model and the setting, informally and suggestively, even if not formally and conclusively” (pp. 183-184).
16. Robin Hanson (2016). The Age of EM: Work, Love, and Life when Robots Rule the Earth.
    • Preface: “Eleven years ago I was awarded tenure as an economics professor at George Mason University. I took advantage of tenure’s freedom to explore whatever topics piqued my interest each week. But eventually realized that, to have a lasting legacy, I needed to focus on a book. But what topic could draw me in enough to keep all the other fascinating topics at bay? I picked this one” (p. V).
    • 
    • 
    • 
    • 
    • Preface by the authors: “The seed of this book is an article that we wrote and published in an academic journal with the title “Parenting with Style: Altruism and Paternalism in Intergenerational Preference Transmission.” As we were thinking about parenting from an economic perspective, we realized how many disciplines (anthropology, education, history, psychology, sociology, and, of course, economics) discuss child- rearing practices, often without speaking much to each other. To foster a broader discussion, we published a column on the portal voxeu.org with the title “Tiger Moms and Helicopter Parents: The Economics of Parenting Style.” The response we received encouraged us to write a book that would communicate our ideas to a broader audience, one that included parents and general readers who are interested in learning more about parenting. This is how it all started” (p. ix).
    • 
    • Preface: “Ten years ago we wrote a book about the work we do. To our surprise, it found an audience. We were flattered, but it was clear to us that we were done. Economists do not really write books, least of all books human beings can read. We did it and somehow got away with it; it was time to go back to what we normally do, which is to write and publish research papers. Which is what we were doing while the dawn-light of the early Obama years gave way to the psychedelic madness of Brexit, the Yellow Vests, and the Wall—and strutting dictators (or their elected equivalents) replaced the confused optimism of the Arab Spring. Inequality is exploding, environmental catastrophes and global policy disasters loom, but we are left with little more than platitudes to confront them with. We wrote this book to hold on to hope. To tell ourselves a story of what went wrong and why, but also as a reminder of all that has gone right. A book as much about the problems as about how our world can be put back together, as long as we are honest with the diagnosis. A book about where economic policy has failed, where ideology has blinded us, where we have missed the obvious, but also a book about where and why good economics is useful, especially in today’s world. The fact that such a book needs to be written does not mean we are the right people to write it. Many of the issues plaguing the world right now are particularly salient in the rich North, whereas we have spent our lives studying poor people in poor countries. It was obvious that we would have to immerse ourselves in many new literatures, and there was always a chance we would miss something. It took us a while to convince ourselves it was even worth trying. We eventually decided to take the plunge, partly because we got tired of watching at a distance while the public conversation about core economic issues—immigration, trade, growth, inequality, or the environment—goes more and more off-kilter. But also because, as we thought about it, we realized the problems facing the rich countries in the world were actually often eerily familiar to those we are used to studying in the developing world—people left behind by development, ballooning inequality, lack of faith in government, fractured societies and polity, and so on. We learned a lot in the process, and it did give us faith in what we as economists have learned best to do, which is to be hard headed about the facts, skeptical of slick answers and magic bullets, modest and honest about what we know and understand, and perhaps most importantly, willing to try ideas and solutions and be wrong, as long as it takes us toward the ultimate goal of building a more humane world” (ix-x).
17. Peter L. Bernstein (1998). Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk.
    • We are constantly faced with risk, ambiguity, and uncertainty. As Bernstein states, “[r]isk touches on the most profound aspects of psychology, mathematics, statistics, and history”.
18. Richard Robb (2019). Willful: How We Choose What We Do76.
    • Edmund S. Phelps: “Willful is a breakthrough in economics. Richard Robb’s tremendously insightful book shows how much of our behavior is not explained by existing theories of human action and explains in sparkling prose why understanding decisions made seemingly without reason presents a fuller picture of our world”.
    • James Heckman: “Richard Robb has written a provocative and beautiful crafted challenge to conventional economics, introducing the concept of will as an important factor that must be reckoned with in explaining the choices people actually make. Drawing on his unique experience as a trained Chicago School economist and as a trader in financial markets, he engages the reader in the compelling personal odyssey of his evolution of thought”.
    • 
    • Tom McLeish starts his Preface with77: “This all began on a school visit—I believe in the North Yorkshire town of Harrogate. I was a visiting university speaker to a group of bright high-school pupils in support of their ‘General Studies’ activity. I can’t be sure now of the topic—it might have been the history of science, or the science of plastics, or even the fascinating story of religion and science—but the message for me came during the discussion. The UK school system, as many readers will know, is uniquely specialized after the age of 16, by any international comparison. This meant that some of the 17 and 18 year olds in the group were no longer studying any science or mathematics topics at all. From the level of their discussion many of them were clearly extremely bright and could have pursued any subject they had wished, so I asked them why they had not chosen to continue with any further studies in science. ‘Because I saw no room for any imagination, or my personal creativity, in science’, was the common response. I still remember feeling pain, and knew then that something had gone very awry in the way we talk about science in education and in the media. My own experience as a practicing scientist had been completely different. The school I attended a generation before had unusually allowed me to continue studies in French, alongside sciences and mathematics, before going to university, and there I had been helped to see that science cannot begin without the first creative step. I began to perceive that these two fortunate experiences were not unrelated. Scientists had failed somehow to communicate the creative core of science to the young people I was with, and clearly to many others besides”.
19. Neil J. Smelser (2014). Getting Sociology Right: A Half-Century of Reflections.
    • A collection of essays throughout his career on the nature, status, methodology, problems, current situation, and the future of sociology.
20. Neil J. Smelser and John S. Reed (2012). Usable Social Science.
    • The book is a collection of many ideas that populate the social science literature, as the authors point out, but is not an encyclopedia or a handbook. Chapters: Space and Time: Constraints and Opportunities; Some Dynamics of Cognition, Judgement, and Bias; Sanctions in Organizational and Social Life; Groups, Teams, Networks, Trust, and Social Capital; How Decisions Are Made; Organizations and Organizational Change; Economic Development and Social Change; Methods of Research and Their Usability; Social Change, Social Problems, and Demands for Knowledge; The Production of Knowledge in the Social Sciences.
21. Matthew Engelke (2018). How to Think Like an Anthropologist.
    • What is anthropology and what can it tell us about the world? Culture is becoming an important topic and we need to harness anthropologists’ understanding of culture and many other key concepts with which anthropology tries to make sense of the world. Content of the book:
      1. Chapter 1: Culture
      2. Chapter 2: Civilization
      3. Chapter 3: Values
      4. Chapter 4: Value
      5. Chapter 5: Blood
      6. Chapter 6: Identity
      7. Chapter 7: Authority
      8. Chapter 8: Reason
      9. Chapter 9: Nature
22. Jacob Burckhardt (1999). Judgments on History and Historians.
    • Foreword by Alberto R. Coll: “Readers should beware. This is a profoundly counter-cultural book, unabashedly and defiantly so. It takes on the prevailing truisms of our time across the entire political spectrum: the goodness of popular egalitarian democracy; the superiority of untrammelled capitalism and its consumerist, materialistic ethos; and the benefits of a welfare state that paternally provides for all. Jacob Burckhardt (1818-97) also strenuously challenged the notion, already widespread in his time and held even more tenaciously today, that the essence of history for the past four hundred years has been the march of progress and enlightenment” (p. xvii).
23. Marc Bloch (1953). The Historian’s Craft79.
    • “Tell me, Daddy. What is the use of history?” (p. 3). “What is it exactly, that constitutes the legitimacy of an intellectual endeavor?” (p. 9). “[H]istory is neither watchmaking nor cabinet construction. It is an endeavor toward better understanding and, consequently, a thing in movement. To limit oneself to describing a science just as it is will always be to betray it a little. It is still more important to tell how it expects to improve itself in the course of time” (p. 12).
24. Robert William Fogel and G. R. Elton (1983). Which Road to the Past? Two Views of History.
    • New and sophisticated methods are being used in the study of the past. For example, the field of cliometric history was born from a marriage between historical problems and advanced statistical analysis. The book presents a view of two different scholars and traditions discussing the validity of (their respective) methods: Robert William Fogel, Nobel laureate in economics collaborates here with the political and constitutional historian Geoffrey Elton.
25. Alex Pentland (2014). Social Physics: How Good Ideas Spread – The Lessons from A New Science. The Penguin Press.
    • “If the Big Data revolution has a presiding visionary, it is MIT’s Alex “Sandy” Pentland” (book cover). From his preface: “I don’t teach traditional classes; instead, I bring in visitors with new ideas and get people to interact with others who are on the same journey. When I was academic head of the Media Lab I pushed to get rid of traditional grading; instead, we have tried to grow a community of peers where respect and collaboration on real-world projects is the currency of success and further opportunity. We live in social networks, not in the classroom or laboratory”.
    • 
26. Krakauer, David C. (Ed.). [Worlds Hidden in Plain Sight]: The Evolving Idea of Complexity at the Santa Fe Institute
    80 1984-2019.
    • 
    • Krakauer in his introduction: “What explains our obsession with the hidden? Whence comes our enduring belief that truth is not to be found by means of immediate perception but through extreme efforts at augmenting what can be sensed with manufactured instruments? It is as if every scientific project were a crime scene, the perpetrators long since fled, leaving a few clumsy crumbs of evidence for researchers to puzzle over with magnifying lens and graphite powder. From classical antiquity and its obsession with geometric order beyond manifest reality, followed by the late Renaissance conviction that everything in nature expresses an unfathomable divine intention, on through to the modern age with its instruments required to reveal the elemental nature of reality (microscopes, telescopes, particle colliders, mass spectrometers), what is causally primary is always thought to be buried deep beneath the surface of the obvious. Traditionally things can be hidden in two fundamentally different ways. Things can be hidden in space, and they can be hidden in time. To hide in space means that phenomena lie beyond the scope of our everyday senses because they are either too small or too distant to be detected without amplification. Things can be hidden in time by being too fast for us to perceive or too slow for a single lifetime to encompass. And, given our extraordinarily bandwidth-limited cognition and the fleeting nature of an individual life, it comes as no surprise that by far the majority of natural phenomena would be hidden. It has been the great triumph of the sciences to find consistent means of studying natural phenomena hidden by both space and time—overcoming the limits of cognition and material culture. The scientific method is the portmanteau of instruments, formalisms, and experimental practices that succeed in discovering basic mechanisms despite the limitations of individual intelligence. There are, however, on this planet phenomena that are hidden in plain sight. These are the phenomena that we study as complex systems: the convoluted exhibitions of the adaptive world—from cells to societies. Paradoxically the complex world is one that we can in many senses perceive and measure directly. Unlike distant stars or nearby minerals that require a significant increase in optical capability to arrive at insights into their elementary properties, behavior—both individual and collective—seems to present itself in a way that can be investigated rather modestly, through observation, or through experiment. But the way in which complex phenomena are hidden, beyond masking by space and time, is through nonlinearity, randomness, collective dynamics, hierarchy, and emergence—a deck of attributes that have proved ill suited to our intuitive and augmented abilities to grasp and to comprehend. The subjects of this volume are those worlds hidden by these attributes of complex systems. These are worlds that will be revealed not by better instruments but by new models and frameworks that allow us to see the familiar world in unfamiliar ways—to transform domains described into domains rigorously quantified and observations informally sensed into those formally understood. Over the course of thirty years the Santa Fe Institute has been looking into this proximal, near-invisible reality. And looking not with multi million-dollar facilities built for investigating the divisibility of the atom, but with pencil, paper, microcomputer, and collaborative minds. Working in highly diverse, nondisciplinary teams to invent new concepts to render up complex reality to science. The last few decades represent a single-minded pursuit of tools and methods and frameworks that are adequate for exploring the adaptive world. We are not interested in the expedients of spherical cows and point masses and frictionless surfaces or convenient idealizations that throw the complex baby out with the merely complicated bathwater; the mission of the Santa Fe Institute is to search for order in the complexity of evolving worlds. Reading over the nearly forty short essays making up this volume, it is interesting to observe a shift from an emphasis on what makes for invisibility (Mavericks), to the creation of new methods for seeing into complexity (Unifiers), culminating with the most recent instrumental use of theory to intervene into complex reality (Terraformers). From fundamental science to application, we never lose sight of the need to make these two necessary features of research work together” (pp. xxvii-xxix).
    • Content:
      • 1984–1999
        Mavericks
        1. Complex Adaptive Systems: A Primer, John H. Holland
        2. Bounded Rationality and Other Departures, George Cowan and Kenneth Arrow
        3. Can Physics Contribute to Economics?, Richard Palmer
        4. Nature Conformable to Herself, Murray Gell-Mann
        5. The Simply Complex: Trendy Buzzword or Emerging New Science?, John Casti
        6. Learning How to Control Complex Systems, Seth Lloyd
        7. Beyond Extinction: Rethinking Biodiversity, Simon Levin
        8. What Can Emergence Tell Us About Today’s Eastern Europe?, Cosma Shalizi
      • 2000–2014
        Unifiers
        1. The Evolutionary Dynamics of Social Organization in Insect Societies: From Behavior to Genes and Back, Joachim Erber and Robert E. Page, Jr.
        2. Picasso and Perception: Attending to the Higher Order, Tom Kepler
        3. Four Complications in Understanding the Evolutionary Process, Richard C. Lewontin
        4. Searching for the Laws of Life: Separating Chance From Necessity, D. Eric Smith and Harold J. Morowitz
        5. Metaphors: Ladders of Innovation, David Gray and Michele Macready
        6. The Numbers of Our Nature: Is There a Math of Style?, Daniel Rockmore
        7. On Time and Risk, Ole Peters
        8. Transcience: Disciplines and the Advance of Plenary Knowledge, David C. Krakauer
        9. What Biology Can Teach Us About Banking, Lord Robert May
        10. Imagining Complex Societies, Scott G. Ortman
        11. Complexity: A Different Way to Look at the Economy, W. Brian Arthur
        12. Life’s Information Hierarchy, Jessica C. Flack
      • 2015 And Beyond
        Terraformers
        1. Complexity: Worlds hidden in plain sight, David C. Krakauer
        2. A Planet of Cities, Luís M.A. Bettencourt and Geoffrey B. West
        3. Predicting the Next Recession, Rob Axtell and J. Doyne Farmer
        4. Are Humans Truly Unique? How Do We Know?, Jennifer A. Dunne and Marcus J. Hamilton
        5. Engineered Societies, Jessica C. Flack and Manfred D. Laubichler
        6. Why People Become Terrorists, Mirta Galešić
        7. Beehives and Voting Booths, John H. Miller
        8. The Source Code of Political Power, Simon DeDeo
        9. The Complex Economics of Self-Interest, Samuel Bowles
        10. Water Management Is a Wicked Problem, But Not an Unsolvable One, Christa Brelsford
        11. What Can Mother Nature Teach Us About Managing Financial Systems?, Simon Levin and Andrew Lo
        12. What Happens When the Systems We Rely on Go Haywire?, John H. Miller
        13. When an Alliance Comes with Strings Attached, Paula L.W. Sabloff
        14. Thanksgiving 2050: To Feed the World We Have to Stop Destroying Our Soil, Molly Jahn
        15. How Complexity Science Can Help Keep the Lights On, Seth Blumsack
        16. Why Predicting the Future Is More Than Just Horseplay, Daniel B. Larremore and Aaron Clauset
        17. Emergent Engineering: Reframing the Grand Challenge for the 21st Century, David C. Krakauer
27. Martin Gilbert (2007). Churchill and the Jews: A Lifelong Friendship.
    • A book recommendation from Hannah Altman. Preface: “Individually, Churchill, Jews, and Zionism have long been subjects of interest. Combined, they form a study of the interaction of a remarkable man and a remarkable people, both surrounded by challenges and controversy (…) For more than half a century Churchill’s life intertwined with Jewish issues. As a young Member of Parliament from 1904 to 1908 with many Jews among his constituents; as a Cabinet minister in 1921 and 1922 responsible for determining the future status of the Jewish National Home in Palestine; as a war leader from 1940 to 1945 confronted by the military power and tyranny of Nazi Germany; and as peacetime Prime Minister from 1951 to 1956, in the early days of the State of Israel, he was aware of Jewish concerns, and sympathetic to them. Although such a sympathetic stance was unpopular with many colleagues, parliamentarians and contemporaries, Churchill rejected what he called ‘the anti-Semitic lines of prejudice’, and strove to support Jewish aspirations, both as citizens of Britain participating fully in national life, and as advocates and participants in the creation of Israel. For his support of Zionist enterprise in Palestine, Churchill was warned publicly by one Member of Parliament that as a result of his efforts he would find himself ‘up against the hereditary antipathy which exists all over the world to the Jewish race.’ Churchill was not deterred. While never an uncritical supporter of Zionism, he was one of its most persistent friends and advocates. In a world where Jews were often the objects of scorn, dislike, distrust and hostility, Churchill held them in high esteem, and wanted them to have their rightful place in the world. At a time when he was criticising Jewish terrorist acts against the British in Palestine, he told a Jewish friend who was uneasy about his criticisms: ‘The Jewish people know well enough that I am their friend.’ This was true: he was both a friend in their hours of need, and a friend in deed”.
28. Daniel Barenboim (2009). Everything is Connected.
    • A powerful and beautiful book even if you don’t like classical music (it was recommended to me by Uwe Dulleck). “Music is the common framework – an abstract language of harmony in contrast to the many other languages spoken in the orchestra – which makes it possible to express what is difficult or even forbidden to express with words. In music, nothing is independent. It requires a perfect balance between intellect, emotion and temperament. I would go so far as to argue that if this equilibrium were reached, human beings and even nations would be able to interact with each other with greater ease. Through music it is possible to imagine an alternative social model, where Utopia and practicality join forces, allowing us to express ourselves freely and hear each other’s preoccupations” (p. 68).
    • 
    • 
    • Barenboim: “In our discussions Edward Said81 and I had often come back to the fact that Muslims, Jews and Christians had lived in harmony only once in history: for seven centuries in Andalusia” (p. 70).
    • To get an idea of the power of this book, let’s take a glimpse at some quotes from the first chapter Sound and Thought.
    • “Today, music still often takes the last place in our own thoughts concerning education. Is music really more than something very agreeable or exciting to listen to – something that, through its sheer power and eloquence, gives us formidable tools with which we can forget our existence and the chores of daily life? Millions of people, of course, like to come home after a long day at work, put on a CD and forget all the problems of the day. I contend, however, that music also gives us another far more valuable tool, with which we can learn about ourselves, about our society, about politics – in short, about the human being. Aristotle, preceding John Locke by nearly two thousand years, held music in higher esteem, deeming it a valuable contribution to the education of the young: But music is pursued, not only as an alleviation of past toil, but also as providing recreation. And who can say whether, having this use, it may not also have a nobler one? … Rhythm and melody supply imitations of anger and gentleness, and also of courage and temperance, and of all the qualities contrary to these, and of the other qualities of character, which hardly fall short of the actual affections, as we know from our own experience, for in listening to such strains our souls undergo a change … Enough has been said to show that music has a power of forming the character, and should therefore be introduced into the education of the young” (p. 6)
    • “Let us examine the different possibilities presented by the beginning of sound. If there is total silence before the beginning, we start a piece of music that either interrupts the silence or evolves out of it. The sound that interrupts the silence represents an alteration of an existing situation, whereas the sound evolving out of the silence is a gradual alteration of the existing situation. In philosophical language, one could call this the difference between being and becoming. The opening of Beethoven’s Pathétique Sonata, Op. 13, is an obvious case of the interruption of silence. The very definite chord interrupts the silence and the music begins. The prelude to Tristan und Isolde82 is an obvious example of the sound evolving out of silence” (pp. 8-9).
    • “The last sound is not the end of the music. If the first note is related to the silence that precedes it, then the last note must be related to the silence that follows it. This is why it is so disruptive when an enthusiastic audience applauds before the final sound has died away, because there is one last moment of expressivity, which is precisely the relationship between the end of the sound and the beginning of the silence that follows it. In this respect music is a mirror of life, because both start and end in nothing” (p. 10).
    • “One way of preparing silence is to create a tremendous amount of tension preceding it, so that the silence arrives only after the absolute height of intensity and volume has been reached. Another way of approaching silence entails a gradual diminution of sound, letting the music become so soft that the next possible step can only be silence. Silence, in other words, can be louder than the maximum and softer than the minimum. Total silence exists, of course, also within a composition. It is temporary death, followed by the ability to revive, to begin life anew. In this way music is more than a mirror of life; it is enriched by the metaphysical dimension of sound, which gives it the possibility to transcend physical, human limitations. In the world of sound, even death is not necessarily final” (p. 10).
    • “Each note must be aware of itself but also of its own boundaries; the same rules that apply to individuals in society apply to notes in music as well” (p. 11).
    • “The conductor Sergiu Celibidache said that music does not become something, but that something may become music. He meant that the difference between sound – just pure sound or a collection of sounds – and music is that when one makes music, all the elements have to be integrated into an organic whole. There are no independent elements in music – rhythm is not independent of melody, melody is obviously not independent of harmony and not even tempo is an independent phenomenon. We tend to think that because some composers give us metronome markings, all we have to do is to try to squeeze all the notes and their expression into a certain speed, forgetting that one does not actually hear tempo, one only hears the music at a given speed. If the tempo is too fast, the content is incomprehensible because of the performer’s inability to play all the notes clearly or the listener’s inability to grasp them; if the tempo is too slow it is equally incomprehensible, because neither the performer nor the listener is able to perceive all the relationships between the notes” (p. 12)
    • “Only after observation of all the elements inherent in the content of the music can he determine the speed with which these can be expressed. Therefore, a decision taken too early makes one a slave of the tempo, whereas a decision taken at the end of the learning process takes all factors into consideration. Like so many things in life, the rightness of a decision is inevitably linked to the moment in which it is made” (p. 14)
    • “Nothing exists outside time: there is an indivisible connection in music, as well as in life, between speed and substance. The speed of a harmonic progression, just like the speed of a political process, can determine its effectiveness and ultimately alter the reality it seeks to influence. I am convinced that the Israel–Palestine Oslo peace process, for example, was fated to fail – regardless of whether it was right or wrong – precisely because the relationship between content and time was erroneous. The preparation for the Oslo discussions took place much too hastily. The process itself, once the discussions began, was very slow and frequently interrupted, which gave it little chance of success. The equivalent in music would be to play a slow introduction much too quickly and haphazardly, and then to perform the main fast movement much too slowly and with interruptions. In both politics and music, speed and timing are not external factors but ones that irrevocably change the shape of things to come. In music, everything must be constantly and permanently interconnected; the act of making music is a process of the integration of all its inherent elements. Unless the correct relationship between speed and volume is established, such integration is not complete and it therefore cannot be called music in the fullest sense of the term. All elements in music must relate to each other” (pp. 15-16).
    • “Making music inevitably requires a point of view: not a wilful, purely subjective point of view, but one based on total respect for the information received from the printed page, the understanding of the physical manifestations of sound and an understanding of the interdependence of all the elements in the music: harmony, melody, rhythm, volume and speed” (p. 18).
    • “The three permanent questions that a musician must ask himself are: why, how and for what purpose. The inability or unwillingness to ask these questions is symptomatic of a thoughtless faithfulness to the letter and an inevitable unfaithfulness to the spirit” (p. 18)
    • “In life outside music, ambiguity is not necessarily a positive attribute – it is often a sign of indecision and, in politics, a lack of firm direction – but in the world of sound, ambiguity becomes a virtue by offering many different possibilities from which to proceed” (p. 19).
    • “Music is not separated from the world; it can help us forget and understand ourselves simultaneously. In a spoken dialogue between two human beings, one waits until the other has finished what he has to say before replying or commenting on it. In music, two voices are in dialogue simultaneously, each one expressing itself to the fullest, while at the same time listening to the other” (p. 20).
    • And finally a last quote from Chapter 2 Listening and Hearing:
    • “Under close observation, the power of the ear becomes noticeable even when music is intentionally designed as background accompaniment, as in film. The famous shower scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho is driven by the music. We need only imagine it with another type of music – maybe the New Year’s Day concert of the Vienna Philharmonic – to realise that it would be far from frightening, even though the eye is telling us what to expect. In fact, Hitchcock had not planned to have music accompany the murder scene until he realised how much more powerful it was with the soundtrack Bernard Hermann had written. In this case, when the eye and the ear work together, we see that the ear is stronger than the eye”.
29. Colin McGinn (2017). Philosophical Provocation: 55 Short Essays.
    • Preface: “The essays collected here follow a particular pattern and style. They aim to be pithy, with no padding or extraneous citation. They each address a specific philosophical issue and try to make progress with it as efficiently as possible. There is little discussion of particular authors or “the literature”; my aim is to get down to the issues immediately and state a position. I avoid excessive qualification or self-protection, leaving it to the reader to fill in gaps. Thus: short, sharp, and breezy.
    • The style is intended to contrast with the way academic philosophy tends to be written these days: long, leaden, citation-heavy, and painful to read. This means that the book can be read by someone not expert in the fields covered, though I would not deny that some of the essays are quite demanding—but not I think unnecessarily so. There is room in academic writing for the style I avoid, but there is something to be gained by the direct and unencumbered style I adopt here (I have written my fair share of the other kind of stuff)” (p. vii).
    • 
    • 
30. Marvin Minsky (2019). Inventive Minds. Marvin Minsky on Education
    • Preface by Cynthia Solomon: “Marvin’s insights about the mind are relevant not only for creating intelligent machines, but also for providing new perspectives on children’s learning and thinking, as well as on the role of computers, both in education and in schools. These are the topics explored by the essays in this book” (p. xvi).
    • 
    • Marvin Minsky (left) with Seymour Paper (right). See also Seymour Papert’s book The Children’s Machine: Rethinking School in the Age of the Computer.
31. Luc Ferry (2010). A Brief History of Thought.
    • The author in his introduction: “I am increasingly aware that philosophy no longer counts as what is ordinarily thought of as ‘general knowledge’. An educated person is supposed to know his or her national history, a few standard literary and artistic references, even a few odds and ends of biology or physics, yet they most likely have no inkling of Epictetus, Spinoza or Kant. I am convinced that everyone should study just a little philosophy, if only for two simple reasons. First of all, without it we can make no sense of the world in which we live. Philosophy is the best training for living, better even than history and the human sciences. Why? Quite simply because virtually all of our thoughts, convictions and values exist and have meaning – whether or not we are conscious of it – within models of the world that have been developed over the course of intellectual history. We must understand these models in order to grasp their reach, their logic and their consequences. (…) Second, beyond coming to an understanding of oneself and others through acquaintance with the key texts of philosophy, we come to realise that these texts are able, quite simply, to help us live in a better and freer way. As several contemporary thinkers note: one does not philosophise to amuse oneself, nor even to better understand the world and one’s own place in it, but sometimes literally to ‘save one’s skin’. There is in philosophy the wherewithal to conquer the fears which can paralyse us in life, and it is an error to believe that modern psychology, for example, can substitute for this” (pp. xii-xiii).
32. Daniel Lord Smail (2008). On the Deep History and the Brain.
    • “What do we gain from a deep history centered on the neurophysiological legacy of our deep past. Well, one benefit is a new kind of interdisciplinarity that joins the humanities and social sciences with the physical and life sciences” (pp. 8-9).
33. Simon Blackburn (2009). The Big Questions.
    • Preface: “The twenty questions I have chosen here are among those that often occur to thoughtful men, women and children. They seem to arise naturally, without powers of reflection. We want to know the answers. Yet philosophy is unusual among academic disciplines in appearing to cherish the questions rather than provide the answers. The tradition contains few agreed and definitive solutions. This may be a matter of regret or embarrassment to those of us who work as academic philosophers, but I do not think it should be. This is partly because some questions which appear simple and straightforward at first glance fragment into many other little questions on reflection. We ask, “Why be moral?” or “What is the meaning of life?” as if one answer might be around the corner. But perhaps there are many different questions. Why be moral in this particular way on this particular occasion, faced with this, that or the other temptation? Which of the things that can interest and engage people deserve to do so? There will be many answers in different contexts, rather than one big answer, and it is progress to realize this. Other questions may have different concealed traps in them. “Why is there something rather than nothing?” is a good example. Although it is sometimes thought to be the fundamental question of philosophy, the deepest question anyone can ask, it may be that its depth, and the obsessive interest it can engender, are the artifact of a logical trick ensuring that it is unanswerable. Or perhaps not: these are matters on which we have to tread carefully, and not all thinkers will tread the same path. I do not think we should lament that or be embarrassed about that. We would not all tread the same path if we tried to write essays about almost any human affairs: just imagine the different lights in which a political decision or a family holiday (or family quarrel) may appear to different participants and observers. Shakespeare wrote wonderful plays about love, war, fear, ambition and many other things, but nobody believes that he gave definitive “answers” or that there is nothing left to add. So I have tried to acquaint the reader with the questions, with some of the things that get said, and with some of the pitfalls and perplexities surrounding them. The twenty questions I have chosen are here arranged in no particular order, except for the last one, which comes last for all of us. The discussions are intended to be self-contained, and therefore readers are welcome to dip in wherever they wish. Since there are occasional cross-references, they may find themselves drawn backward or forward as the case may be, and I hope that they are. The 21st century continues a trend also visible in the last century. This is a certain kind of scientific triumphalism. The euphoria that came with cracking the human genome, and the dazzling prospects of unlimited biological and medical progress that this encouraged, have contributed to an atmosphere in which humane studies like philosophy are put on the defensive. Insofar as we philosophers do things like interpreting human nature, then is philosophy itself due for retirement, overtaken and superseded by the juggernaut of advancing science? In a number of chapters I reflect on the actual achievements and promises of the new sciences of human nature, not always with quite the confidence that others seem to feel. I hope that the reasons in play at least raise some doubts, and enable others to approach the difficult problems of how we do think and feel, and then how we ought to think and feel, with proper respect” (pp. 6-7).
    • 
    • 
34. Violet Moller (2020). The Map of Knowledge: How Classical Ideas Were Lost and Found: A History of Seven Cities83.
    • Preface: “When I was twenty-one, a friend and I drove from England to Sicily in her old Volvo. We were researching Graeco-Roman temples for our third-year dissertations. It was a great adventure. We got lost in Naples, hot in Rome, we were pulled over by the police and asked out on a date, we gaped at Pompeii and ate milky balls of buffalo mozzarella in Paestum, and finally, after weeks on the road and a short ferry trip across the Straits of Messina, we arrived in Sicily. The island immediately felt different from the rest of Italy: exotic, complicated, compelling. Its layers of history enveloped us; the marks left by succeeding civilizations, like strata in a rock face, were striking. In Syracuse Cathedral, we saw the columns of the original Greek Temple of Athena, built in the fifth century BC, still standing 2,500 years after they were erected. We learned how the cathedral had been converted into a mosque in 878, when the city came under Muslim control, and how it became a Christian church again two centuries later, when the Normans took power. It was clear that Sicily had been a meeting point for cultures over hundreds of years, a place where ideas, traditions and words had been exchanged and transformed, where worlds had collided. The focus of our trip was the relationship between Greek and Roman religion and architecture, but the contribution of later cultures – Byzantine, Islamic, Norman – was remarkable. I began to wonder about other places that had played a similar role in the history of ideas, and how those places had developed (…) When I began to research in earnest, I was surprised how neatly the story unfolded in front of me. The year 500 was an obvious moment to begin – a time when the intellectual traditions of antiquity were evolving into those of the Middle Ages, when scholarship was entering a different era. Subsequent chapters each centre on a different city, first of all doubling back to Alexandria to see when and how the texts were written. From here, they were dispersed across the Eastern Mediterranean to Syria and Constantinople, where they remained until the ninth century, when scholars from the new city of Baghdad, capital of the vast Muslim Empire, began seeking them out to translate them into Arabic and use the ideas contained in them as the foundation for their own scientific discoveries. Baghdad was the first true centre of learning since antiquity, and over time it inspired cities across the Arab world to build libraries and fund science. The most important of these was Córdoba, in southern Spain, ruled over by the Umayyad dynasty, under whose patronage the works of Euclid, Ptolemy and Galen were studied and where their ideas were questioned and improved upon by generations of scholars. From Córdoba, they were taken to other cities in Spain and, when the Christians began to reconquer the peninsula, Toledo became an important centre of translation and the place where they entered the Latin, Christian world” (pp. 5-8).
    • 
    • 
    • 
35. Scott Soames (2019). The World Philosophy Made: From Plato to the Digital Age84.
    • What contributions have philosophers made to our knowledge and civilization?
    • 
36. Michael Ruse (2018). On Purpose.
    • “This project started nearly half a century ago when I was writing my first book, The Philosophy of Biology (1973). Framed very much in the school of “logical empiricism”—the leaders were two men whose names and memory I still revere, Ernest Nagel and Carl “Peter” Hempel—everything was going along swimmingly until I got to the chapter on function or purpose. Something went wrong, for I could not fit the discussion into the mold, especially the mold of science as a value-free inquiry, as an enterprise that drains itself of the human element—in Karl Popper’s felicitous phrase, “knowledge without a knower.” Eventually, I plowed on, or rather through, and the book was finished and published. But the problem of purpose kept nagging away—even back then I think I had insights into the way things had to go—and it has been a lifetime’s quest for understanding, frustrating at times but incredibly invigorating. Now I think I know the answer, and it is here in this book, the summing up of a fifty-year obsession with the problem. So, first, I want to thank Nagel and Hempel for setting me off on this quest. It was from them, as well as from others in the field, I learned that philosophy never stands still; there is always work to be done, criticizing and extending. An insight that never withers is that you learn most from those with whom you disagree most, and I very much hope that this book exemplifies this truth. I am very grateful to my fellow philosophers who have so stimulated me. In a rather different way, I want to thank Plato and Aristotle, Kant and Darwin. As you will see, my quest has taken me back to their writings. It has been a great privilege to spend time with minds such as these. If my huge respect for and sheer enjoyment and excitement at what they produced does not come across on every page, then I have failed myself, I have failed you the reader, and, most sadly, I have failed them. I want this book read in a positive manner. I shall have critical things to say but always in the sense of wanting to move the conversation forward” (pp. ix-x).
37. Ernst Mayr (1997). This is Biology: The Science of the Living World.
38. Ernst Mayr (2004). What Makes Biology Unique?
    • 
    • In his book Wild Life: Adventures of an Evolutionary Biologist, Robert Trivers notes that Ernst Mayr “was the greatest U.S. evolutionist I ever met, certainly Mr. Animal Species and possessing a very broad and deep knowledge of almost all of biology. He had also perhaps the strongest phenotype of any organism I have ever met. He lived to be a hundred and published more books after age ninety than most scientists do in a lifetime”. The Web of Stories has a wonderful interview with Ernst Mayr.
39. Kevin Laland and Gillian Brown (2011). Sense and Nonsense: Evolutionary Perspectives on Human Behaviour.
    • A well-crafted introduction to the ideas, methods, and findings of an evolutionary perspective on human behaviour. The authors: “Evolutionary theory is one of the most fertile, wide-ranging, and inspiring of all scientific ideas. It offers a battery of methods and hypotheses that can be used to interpret human behaviour… Most researchers within the social sciences and humanities remain extremely uncomfortable with evolutionary approaches. Consequently, disputes over evolutionary interpretations of humanity have fostered a polarization of thought” (p. 2).

Academic Biographies

1. Eric R. Kandel (2006). In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind.
   • Memory has always fascinated the Nobelist Kandel. The new biology of mind emerged gradually over the five decades of his career: “The first steps were taken in the 1960s, when the philosophy of mind, behaviourist psychology…, and cognitive psychology… merged, giving rise to modern cognitive psychology… In the 1970s cognitive psychology… merged with neuroscience… In the 1980s cognitive neuroscience received an enormous boost form brain imaging… In the early 1980s cognitive neuroscience incorporated molecular biology, resulting in a new science of mind – a molecular biology of cognition – that has allowed us to explore on the molecular level such mental processes as how we think, feel, and remember… Indeed, by unifying behaviourist and cognitive psychology, neural science and molecular biology, the new science of mind can address philosophical questions that serious thinkers have struggled with for millennia: How does mind acquire knowledge of the world? How much of mind is inherited? Do innate mental functions impose on us a fixed way of experiencing the world? What physical changes occur in the brain as we learn and remember? How is an experience lasting minutes converted to a lifelong memory? Such questions are no longer the province of speculative metaphysics; they are now fertile areas of experimental research” (pp. 7-9).
2. Herbert A. Simon (1996). Models of My Life
   • Herbert Simon is one of the most fascinating scholars in the history of science. How is it possible to be on top of so many different fields? He might be the first and perhaps even the last scholar who was (among other things) able to win the Nobel Prize in Economics and the Turing Award (“Nobel Prize in computing”). In his wonderful autobiography we will gather insights into his entire academic journey and his life in general.
3. S. M. Ulam (1976). Adventures of a Mathematician.
   • We cover a lot of ground with Ulam’s book (e.g., Princeton Days, Harvard Years, Los Alamos). Von Neumann once told Ulam’s wife that he had never met anyone with as much self-confidence, adding that perhaps it was somewhat justified. His book is fun to read and insightful: “Little has been written about the lives of the people responsible for so much in science and in the birth of the nuclear age and space age: von Neumann, Fermi, and numerous other mathematicians and physicists. But here I want to recount also the more abstract and philosophically decisive influences which came from mathematics itself. Names like Stefan Banach, G. D. Birkhoff, and David Hilbert are virtually unknown to the general public, and yet it is these men, along with Einstein, Fermi and a few others equally famous, who were indispensable to what twentieth-century science has accomplished”90.
4. Thomas Blass (2004). The Man Who Shocked the World: The Life and Legacy of Stanley Milgram.
   • Milgram’s research on obedience is among the most famous work in psychology’s history. We will take a look at his creative experimental mind covering wide-ranging topics and problems (e.g., six degrees of separation, lost-letter technique, or mental maps of cities). According to Blass, the book “is the product of my twenty-year immersion in Milgram’s eye-opening and sometimes troubling research”. Philip G. Zimbardo (see, e.g., Stanford Prison Experiment) calls the book “A tour de force”.
5. Robert Trivers (2015). Wild Life: Adventures of an Evolutionary Biologist.
   • A testament to individual intensity and passion by one of the most original evolutionary thinkers.
6. David N. Schwartz (2017). The Last Man Who Knew Everything: The Life and Times of Enrico Fermi, Father of the Nuclear Age.
   • Schwartz, son of Nobel Laureate Melvin Schwartz: “What you will find in this book, I hope, is a narrative that brings the whole person into focus. It is tempting to say, as did many of his colleagues, that he was “all physics, all the time,” and there is an element of truth to this. But he was also a husband, a father, a colleague, and a friend. He played a central role in some of the most important events of the twentieth century. The drama of his life can only be appreciated through an examination of all of these aspects”.
   • 
7. Eugene Wigner (1992). The Recollections of Eugene P. Wigner as told to Andrew Szanton.
   • A prolific reviewer on Amazon, Herbert Gintis gave the book five stars with the following comments: “There is zero science or mathematics in this charming memoir, but there is plenty of historical interpretation and a good deal of reflection on human nature. You will learn about the Manhattan Project, what happened to Jewish scientists who were persecuted by Hitler, and Wigner’s own personal political philosophy. I thoroughly enjoyed this book”. Here are some interesting passages:
   • “So in these first few weeks at Göttingen, I examined the course of my own life. I asked myself: What should I do? The answer to that question seemed quite clear. I should devote myself to physics. But that raised broader questions: Why is physics so important? What does present-day physics achieve? And what ought physics aim to achieve in the future? Every scientist must ask himself these questions at some time, in some way. Most of us answer them quietly, to the satisfaction of our own souls. Often the questions are only asked and answered implicitly, in the scientist’s work. But those first weeks at Göttingen were for me a time of deep and quite conscious reflection. I had already learned the value of a life of physics. I was proud to possess that distinctly human trait that seeks knowledge that is not clearly useful. Useful or not, I decided that physics had a duty to provide a living picture of our world, to uncover hidden relations between natural events, and to offer us the full unity, beauty, and natural grandeur of the physical world (…) I knew that man needs something to strive for. I kept returning to that notion. What should the higher purpose of physics be? I decided that it should be to elevate the material side of the world, to make daily life easier for all the world’s people. This was more than the great classical works of physics had ever done. lsaac Newton’s Principia, great as it was, had not immediately made human life easier. Newton’s work had lived, had attracted support by its intellectual brilliance alone. But now, in 1927, I felt that physics was just one part of science, and science apart of technology. All three embodied human curiosity, and all three were working together at great speed to change the material world (…) Science and technology were making room for far more people on our earth, making their lives longer and easier, even giving them some leisure. By applying scientific knowledge to technical problems, we had nearly found the means to satisfy the material needs of all the earth’s people.” (pp. 110-111).
   • “As a rule, the older and younger scientists at Göttingen did not mingle. At first, I rarely saw any of the big shots. I was still an unpromising young man whose ideas jumped ahead of his writing skill and whose papers were rather obscure. But after a few months, I began spending a good deal of time with some of the younger physicists. I enjoyed the company of a theoretical physicist named Walter Heitler” (p. 111).
   • “The first year that I truly contributed to physics was 1929. Quantum mechanics had been evolving quite well without my help. So I wondered: What could I do? Where could I concentrate my effort and perhaps produce something original? I realized how much I loved group theory. I had worked with Michael Polanyi on the symmetries of crystal, and these symmetries had suggested group theory. Group theory was a technique developed by mathematicians. It had been used by physicists years before I came along. But something kept occurring to me: that group theory had rarely been rigorously applied to quantum mechanics. Perhaps the dabbling I had done for Dr. Weissenberg might lead somewhere worthwhile. There was nothing brilliant in this insight-just a bit of good instinct and much good fortune (…) In 1929, many physicists, especially the older ones, felt a certain enmity toward modern currents in physics. Many of them found group theory a nuisance because it treated physics as something stationary; they were used to regarding physics as motion. In the group theory of quantum mechanics, electronic orbits were now presented not as orbits but as spheres. Most older physicists disliked all this. But I was young and the young are much freer of bias. The fact that group theory might be stationary and that its orbits seemed to be spheres did not irritate me at all. On the contrary, these facts rather appealed to me. Never having been trained otherwise, I readily digested the new formulations. I embraced group theory before most other physicists did, regarded it playfully, and wondered how it might advance physics. Do you recall my description of Wolfgang Pauli and his genius for lively derision? Well, I believe it was Pauli who put a label on the common distaste for modem group theory. He called it “die [G]ruppenpest”-in English, ‘the group pest’ or perhaps better, “that pesty group business.” “Die [G]ruppenpest” became a popular label for a while” (…) I relayed all these doubts to Jancsi von Neumann. We discussed the well-known [G]ruppenpesters. Jancsi reassured me: “Oh, these are old fogeys. In five years, every student will learn group theory as a matter of course.” And, as always, Jancsi was right. Soon all of them were learning “die [G]ruppenpest”-even Wolfgang Pauli (pp. 115-116).
   • “Once after a talk by Einstein on the Unified Field Theory, I visited a zoo with Teller and some others. I saw that Teller was feeling sad. Apparently, he had been unable to follow Einstein’s lecture. I asked him what was wrong. Teller said sadly, “I am stupid.” I considered that statement for a moment and then said, “Yes, that is a general human property.” Teller quite enjoyed my comment. Because, you see, everyone before had always told him how smart he was. But I agreed with him that he was stupid, as we all are stupid compared to our ideal: That man recalls everything, absorbs novel truths instantly, and regards them with perfect judgment. That is not a human standard. But even stupid people often make fine scientists. However wonderful a receptive mind may be, it is not central to science. Nor is mental speed. To persist in your inquiry and to engage it fruitfully-this is what makes a first-rate scientist. Curiosity, diligence, and ambition are traits far more essential than imagination. And stupid people are often remarkably well endowed with these traits” (pp. 125-126).
   • “If my work seemed trivial to some people, I did not care. Throughout my life, I have found it best to seek physics problems whose solutions seem initially simple. In complete form, their details revealed, such problems often become barely manageable. Solving physics problems that are exacting from the first often becomes a hopeless undertaking” (p. 124).
   • One morning in Berlin near the end of October 1930, I received a startling cable from the United States: “Princeton University offers you a one-term lectureship. Please cable reply.” It was nothing more than an offer to visit for six months. But I had never before received such an offer. And the salary they quoted was fantastically high. My salary in Berlin was then equal to about 80 American dollars per month, and I counted myself well off. I had just received the equivalent of 500 dollars for my book on group theory, and I thought that a handsome sum. Now Princeton University was offering me about 4000 dollars, almost 700 dollars per month. I had never seen so much money in one heap. It was more than seven times my old salary. I could not conceive of such an amount. I knew that American professors earned more than Germans, that it would take an expensive boat trip to reach Princeton, and that prices were higher there. But not seven times higher. The salary quoted in the cable was so high that I felt it was an error in transmission. I thought I knew why Princeton wanted me. The United States in those years was a bit like Russia: a large country without first-rate scientific training or research. Germany was then the greatest scientific nation on earth. I knew that many American universities wanted to improve in science. I thought at first that my physics work in Germany must have drawn the invitation. Then I learned that Jancsi von Neumann had received a similar cable, with an even greater ‘error in transmission.’ Now I could believe the salary figure. And suddenly I knew quite well why Princeton had offered me 4000 dollars to cross the ocean. When two physicists of the same age from the same clan are invited at the same time to the same distant university, it is hardly a coincidence. It was clearly Jancsi that Princeton really wanted. They had offered him about 1000 dollars a year more than me. And he fully deserved it. Though he was a year younger, Jancsi had already studied in Berlin and had taken both a chemical engineer’s degree in Zurich and a mathematics doctorate in Budapest. While teaching in Hamburg, Jancsi had written mathematical articles so advanced that they ventured into physics. Around 1929, Jancsi had married the former Marietta Kövesi. I had come to know Mrs. von Neumann well and regarded her with affection. Princeton did not want von Neumann and his wife to feel lonely in the United States. To be a stranger in a foreign country is a trying experience; far better to have an old friend around. And perhaps Jancsi would not have accepted a lone offer. So Princeton also invited Eugene Wigner. Promising as I might be as a physicist, it was clear to me that Princeton thought of me mainly as ‘the companion of Jancsi von Neumann.’ (…) Jancsi von Neumann and I had written three papers together in 1928 and two more in 1929. What a pleasure it was to work with von Neumann. I might be in Göttingen and he in Berlin. It did not matter. Each of us worked effectively alone. If I found a snag, I presented it to Jancsi. There was never a snag that he could not untangle. He explained the most complex mathematical questions in a light, casual tone. If I told him I failed to understand Warring’s Law, he might smile and ask:
     • “Do you know Hilbert’s Third Proposition?”
     • “No,” I would say.
     • “Then, do you know D’ Alembert’s Theorem?” he would continue, quite easily.
     • “Yes, I think so.”
   • After three or four more questions, he would finally begin to explain Warring’s Law, referring only to the theories that I knew and avoiding the others. By such circuitous paths, he quickly reached the core of the matter, which he explained easily. Von Neumann had the gift of making even the most complex concepts seem simple. Jancsi von Neumann taught me more mathematics than any other of my teachers, even Rátz of the Lutheran gimnázium. And von Neumann taught not only theorems, but the essence of creative mathematical thought: methods of work, tools of argument. Much of this von Neumann had learned himself from Rátz93, but most of it was his own. By 1930, Jancsi had well exceeded the mathematical reach of Mr. Rátz, as Rátz had foreseen he would 15 years before. Jancsi was not only a genius as a thinker and a teacher, but also a splendid man and a fine companion. He was never conceited. He was quite unable to act pompously. Though he could be blunt when necessary, his habitual mood was one of a leisurely and graceful good humor. He had grown more sociable since his days at the Lutheran gimnázium. No one knew more amusing anecdotes than von Neumann. His ability to coin a joke on any occasion delighted his fellows. Only intellectual dishonesty and misuse of scientific results could raise his ire. These did, whether he or another was the victim” (pp. 127-130).
8. Martin Seligman (2018). The Hope Circuit: A Psychologist’s Journey from Helplessness to Optimism.
   • “‘GET TO WORK, Nikki,’ I shouted irritably. It was three weeks after the Toronto convention, and I was low. We were supposed to be weeding. Nikki, however, was having a great time, throwing weeds in the air, dancing, and singing. She startled when I shouted at her, walked away, and slowly walked back.
   • ‘Daddy, can I talk to you?’
   • I nodded.
   • ‘Daddy, do you remember before my fifth birthday, I was a whiner, I whined every day?’
   • I nodded.
   • ‘Have you noticed that since my fifth birthday, I haven’t whined once?’
   • I nodded.
   • ‘Well, on my birthday, I decided that I was going to stop whining, and that was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. And if I can stop whining, you can stop being such a grouch.’
   • I was stunned. Nikki was exactly right.
   • First, I was a grouch and proud of it. But it occurred to me for the very first time that maybe any success I’d had was not because I could see every flaw-because of my ‘critical intelligence’ – but in spite of it. If Nikki could change, so could I. I decided to change.
   • Second, my ‘remedial’ view of raising my children was wrong. If I could correct all my kid’s errors – shouting at Nikki’s indolence – I would somehow end up with an exemplary child. What nonsense. Instead I had to identify what Nikki was really good at – and I’d just seen it: gleaning insight into other people – reward it, and help her to lead her life around her strengths, not waste her time thanklessly correcting her weaknesses. Most significantly, I got the idea that powered the rest of my life: psychology could be explicitly about building the good life. The current practice and science of psychology was half-baked. Psychology started with the premise that not getting it wrong equaled getting it right. If psychology could somehow eliminate all the ills of the world – mental illness, prejudice, ignorance, poverty, pessimism, loneliness, and the like – human life would be at its best. But the absence of ill-being does not equal the presence of well-being. Psychology could be about the presence of happiness not merely about the absence of unhappiness” (pp. 4-5).
9. Howard Gardner (2020). A Synthesizing Mind: A Memoir from the Creator of Multiple Intelligences Theory95.
   • 
   • How he has classified his own multiple intelligences:
     • Language ability: very strong
     • Mathematical and logical abilities: strong enough
     • Musical abilities: quite strong
     • (Visual) spatial abilities: weak, probably on the basis of biological/genetic factors
     • Bodily kinesthetic abilities: weak, because little opportunity in childhood to practice and improve (though drilling and piano playing are possible exceptions)
     • Understanding of other persons: not strong
     • Understanding of self: average
     • Discriminations in the natural world (plants, animals, etc.): adequate, at least for obtaining Boy Scout merit badges
     • Interest in big questions: very curious about the world, especially the world of human beings, past and present
   • He was educated around a fascinating interdisciplinary initiative at Harvard: “What was the field of Social Relations? This poorly named concentration reminds me of an academic camel—an academic department created by a committee of scholarly stars. In this case, immediately after World War II (in 1946), several then prominent Harvard researchers in the social sciences joined forces to create a new department. The chief luminaries and architects of this deliberately multidisciplinary department were Talcott Parsons in sociology, Gordon Allport in psychology, and Clyde Kluckhohn in anthropology; and the research and teaching that they envisioned consisted of an amalgam of those three disciplines. Despite the ill-chosen name and the chameleon origin, the Soc Rel idea and scholarly program was a good and important one. The lines between anthropology (the study of humans, from prehistory and across cultures, especially preliterate ones in remote corners of the globe), sociology (the study of groups, organizations, and societies), and psychology (the study of individual behavior, personality, motivation, and cognition) are very thin. Efforts to separate and compartmentalize them are artificial and unconvincing. In retrospect, I can see that this department was made-to-order for individuals with a synthesizing mind, especially individuals interested in what one might call, if somewhat pretentiously, the human condition or human nature. For one thing, it deliberately combined a number of academic disciplines—psychology, sociology, anthropology, shards of political science and economics—and invited practitioners to draw on insights and concepts from these several perspectives. For another, while it certainly drew on the current methods of statistics and experiments in the laboratory, Soc Rel gave plenty of room to those of us who were more drawn to thematic analyses and to portraits of major phenomena than to cumulative studies of single and deliberately simplified phenomena (for example, kinship structures in preliterate societies, a favorite of anthropologists, or the memorization of nonsense syllables, a staple of psychologists). It was as much a department of books and of book writers as it was a department of scholarly papers and multiple empirical studies of a single phenomenon. And it was also a department whose members often wrote for the intelligent general reader, though none wrote as elegantly as Edmund Wilson and few wrote as powerfully as Richard Hofstadter, my authorial heroes of the time (and thereafter). Soc Rel scholars were not scientists with large laboratories equipped with fancy equipment, but they were also not literary scholars, let alone artists. They believed that they were launching a new science or a new set of interlocking sciences. But two other, less grand motivations also underwrote the department. One was opportunistic: American foundations, and, increasingly, the federal government, were very interested in the possibility of a science of human nature. Events and creations in the recent World War such as propaganda, brainwashing, and communication theory were very much on their minds, and not far from their checkbooks. The leaders of Soc Rel discerned the chance to accumulate significant funding. Indeed, as poignantly described by Robert Nisbet, himself a sociologist, in his book The Degradation of the Academic Dogma, the opportunity for large-scale funding brought about a fundamental change in power and responsibilities in universities—a situation about which many, including me, still have highly ambivalent feelings. Are we, as educators of the carefully chosen young people, there primarily to teach and nurture students, with the professor on one end of a log, and the student on the other? Or is our primary task to carry out research and publication in scholarly venues? Or is it some awkward amalgam of these two activities, ones handled quite separately in many other countries? I’ve wrestled with this tension for decades. The other motivation for the founding (and the funding!) of Soc Rel was reactionary or antagonistic. Each of the constituent disciplines contained a division between those who were hard-nosed and quantitative—whom William James had dubbed the “tough minded”—and those who were qualitative, interpretive, far less committed to mathematical models and explanations—whom James had called “the tender minded.” Those attracted to Soc Rel wanted to distinguish themselves from mathematical sociologists, behaviorist psychologists, and physical anthropologists, and for a while they did so quite successfully. Soc Rel was to some extent a refuge for those who were interested in big questions and were not afraid to deal with messy phenomena, albeit imperfectly. Its fate could be analyzed retrospectively in terms of the key disciplines: future anthropologists would look at the tribal nature of academics, future sociologists at the organization of disciplines in the academy, future psychologists at the personal motivations of succeeding generations of academic “stars.” And those educated in Soc Rel might have sought to synthesize this trio of analyses. In 1972, a quarter of a century after Soc Rel was founded, the leadership of the university decided to close it down. Similar decisions were being made at other so-called peer institutions that had hitherto encouraged, or at least tolerated, interdisciplinary work in the human sciences. Such decisions are not made lightly, especially when large egos are involved. In this particular case, the founders had all retired, as had the initial funders; the pioneers had failed to groom sufficiently worthy or powerful successors; and the promise of an integrated new social science had not been fulfilled. In fact, in a sharp but fundamentally accurate postmortem, Charles Dollard, then president of the Carnegie Corporation, a major funder, declared: ‘A great deal of time is wasted on premature attempts to produce very large ‘syntheses’ or ‘integrations’ of social science fields’. There were also intrinsic reasons for the fading of Soc Rel. Each of the constituent disciplinarians had strong loyalty to the fields in which he (or occasionally she) was trained; and so ultimately Harvard and other schools, like Yale and Chicago, reverted to the status quo ante bellum: separate departments of psychology, sociology, and anthropology. As could have been predicted as well, each reborn department now contained within it, indeed recreated, the strains that had led in the first place to the formation of an amalgamated department in the aftermath of America’s triumphant military victories. Within each of the reborn disciplinary departments, one could readily locate those who leaned toward methodological impeccability in pursuing tractable issues, and those who in contrast aimed to illuminate far bigger and messier issues, using whatever methods could be entrained in whatever way seemed defensible. Why this potted academic history? To this day, I remain a staunch believer in the mission of the Department of Social Relations. So did a large number of individuals who were trained in the heyday of Soc Rel, though we are now distinctly senior—Rick Shweder, Claude Fischer, William Damon from Harvard, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, trained at University of Chicago—or alas, now deceased—Robert Bellah, Clifford Geertz, and Neil Smelser, just to name a few” (pp. 47-50).
   • Some further insightful reflections:
   • “Some years later, I observed that the students who landed the best initial jobs were ones who had been the best widgets as doctoral students, but in most cases not the ones who ultimately went on to change the field or the conversation. Being a widget does not easily translate into being a wizard” (p. 67).
   • “…Once having made the decision, it was not that hard to ignore people with whom I did not resonate, to avoid initiation rites in which I did not wish to participate, and, echoing a quite different figure, Frank Sinatra, to do it “my way””.
     “While Goodman and Jerry Bruner were friends and remained in contact with one another for many years, they could not have been more different in personality. In the late 1960s, Goodman ran the nascent research project on artistic knowledge quite differently from the way Bruner ran the curriculum development project a few years earlier. Goodman was far more hierarchical, far less expansive in personal contacts (Bruner was a prototypical extrovert, Goodman essentially an introvert), and a far more judgmental adviser. Bruner alighted upon what was exciting and moved on, often at breakneck speed, to the next point, whereas Goodman focused sharply on what was wrong or infelicitous and lingered there. In a comment that haunts me almost every day—especially as I am writing—Goodman said, “When I read something, as soon as I come to a line that does not make sense, I stop reading.” Whatever rigor may mark my thinking and writing should be credited largely to Nelson. But Goodman’s intellectual style nicely complemented Bruner’s. While Bruner moved—some would say, flitted—from one topic to another, Nelson stuck on something until he got it absolutely right. Without realizing at the time, I was getting for free a graduate course in strict philosophical argument. Renowned British intellectual historian Isaiah Berlin famously divided scholars into two types: the fox knows many little things, the hedgehog knows one big thing. Nelson once quipped ‘I know one little thing.’ Of course, he was a giant in what he knew. We might say that Goodman had a prototypical disciplinary mind—he was a philosophers’ philosopher—and that Bruner had a prototypical synthesizing mind—he was a synthesizer’s synthesizer. But with their stature as scholars and their status in life, they were both open to disciplinary (philosophy and psychology, respectively) and interdisciplinary synthesizing work, thus making them ideal teachers for me. And perhaps because neither was my doctoral adviser—I was fortunate that Roger Brown agreed to assume that role—Goodman and Bruner may have felt less of a need to discipline me in the way that they were presumably disciplining their own students. In a sense, I was more of an undergraduate mentee than an aspiring disciplinarian stuck somewhere in the pipeline. I also benefited from what I later termed ‘frag-mentoring’: the opportunity to emulate particular aspects of particular mentors” (pp. 73-74).
   • “A related thought: In later life the renowned economist John Kenneth Galbraith thought back to his first books, wrapped in scholarly jargon and addressed to the small field of scholars in the appropriate subdisciplines. The books sold poorly and were soon remaindered. Galbraith learned his lesson. He resolved that in future, everything he had to say, he would say in clear English so that his books would sell so well and be so widely known that his colleagues in the economics trade would have to read them in order to respond appropriately when queried about them at cocktail parties or on a train ride” (p. 80).
   • “And then I sit down and write . . . and write, and write. I am not one of those writers who obsesses about the first sentence, or who allots himself five hundred words a day, or who revises the first chapter until it is perfect before moving on. No, I just spit it out (or, if you prefer, crank it out). At least a chapter at a time, and, as far as possible, the whole book in one fell swoop—more precisely, in an uninterrupted week or two of several hours a day at the keyboard. I need to—I want to—get a feeling for the whole enterprise, what the whole book will feel like, even what it will look like in so many words. In this endeavor I like to think of myself as a composer of a symphony-in-words, who starts by drafting all four (or five or dozen) movements and then fills in the details and edits as necessary, including reconfiguring the main theme or revising the order of sections or chapters. Once a draft is done, I put it aside for a while and then redo, and redo, and redo. Most of my books go through at least four drafts, and several have gone through more. Often, I will show drafts to friends or colleagues and get their reactions, which I sometimes heed, especially when a particular bit of advice comes from more than one person (though sometimes I stubbornly stick to my guns—sometimes to my ultimate regret). And of course, at a certain point, the manuscript is seen by an editor and then an additional round of writing and rewriting often ensues. Claude Lévi-Strauss said that there are only three happy moments for a book writer: when the book is conceived, when it is ready to be sent out for publication, and when the published book arrives in the mail” (pp. 88-89).
   • “Of course, at the time there was no guarantee that I would get any fellowship. And so I also applied for one job, an assistant professorship in psychology at Yale University. My formal talk and my conversations with faculty went OK, so far as I could tell, but I was not surprised when I did not get the job. After all, as my efforts to publish in conventional journals had taught me, an interest in artistic development was not seen as a high priority by tenured psychology professors at an Ivy League school, let alone by prestigious editors of prestigious journals or, as irreverent Howie might have put it, editors and journals that believed themselves to be prestigious. And they were apparently not impressed by my efforts to carry out standard studies in experimental psychology, nor my efforts to synthesize the work of others in articles and drafts of books. As it happens, the job went to a Stanford graduate David Henry Feldman—soon to become a friend—but he too was becoming interested in “softer” topics (gifted children) and soon found himself leaving Yale for a more secure job in a child studies program at Tufts University” (pp. 95-96).
   • “My competitive advantage lay elsewhere. I was curious; I could read rapidly and widely; I enjoyed synthesizing and resynthesizing. I could also write quickly and clearly; and I could address various audiences, including the intelligent general reader. And so, while continuing for decades to contribute modestly to the peer-reviewed empirical literature, and training my students in that science and art, I became more of a writer, and strove (with limited but not negligible success) to be a public intellectual—a ‘poor man’s’ psychologically trained aspirant to the mantles of my one-time heroes Edmund Wilson and Richard Hofstadter” (p. 103).
   • “What’s ultimately important is not the longevity per se of an educational institution, but rather the number of individuals who were affected favorably while they were involved in the institution, as students, parents, teachers, visitors, or other personnel. Perhaps even more important is what happens to individuals who once spent time at the institution—a week for a visitor, or five years for a music or fifth grade teacher, or K–8 for a student—where they go and how they think and what they do thereafter. I suspect that, like a few other powerful institutions with which I’ve been fortunate to be associated (Jerry Bruner’s development of the social studies curriculum “Man: A Course of Study” leaps to mind), the spirit and practices of Key live on with many people in many places, spread far and wide. That rule of thumb may even apply to new concepts and constructs like multiple intelligences: they do their work, the relevant “memes” circulate, and then they are absorbed into the cognitive woodwork as their initial sources and explicit terminology fade into oblivion” (p. 146).
   • “I am like my teacher Jerry Bruner, who often did the first crucial experiment or demonstration, and then left others to follow—or, to phrase this less kindly, to pick up the pieces. Or like Albert O. Hirschman, the insightful economist who did not hesitate to cast his synthesizing powers widely, and described himself as a ‘trespasser.’ I have difficulty imagining what it must be like to be political historian Robert Caro, and to spend decades studying President Lyndon Johnson, or to be literary historian Leon Edel, who spent decades chronicling novelist Henry James. But perhaps these biographers would respond that Johnson or James are worlds unto themselves, much like “the mind” that I have been pursuing for at least half a century” (pp. 200-201).
10. Jeremy Adelman (2013). Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman.
    • A tour de force of Hirschman’s life journey (more than 700 pages). I recommend that you also take a look at two of his presentations (video 1; video 2)
11. Benoit B. Mandelbrot (2012). The Fractalist: Memoir of a Scientific Maverick
    • An honest and interesting biography of a creative mind who contributed to many disciplines and fields. Here an interesting experience that he had to go through: “Eugene F. Fama, a student at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business, often visited me. More important, I met his Chicago adviser, Merton Miller (1923–2000), who convinced his business school colleagues to hire me. First, he brought me to Chicago, with Aliette. Although there was heavy snow all around, my lecture was mobbed—and a big party followed, given by the dean, George Shultz. It was clear that an offer had already been arranged and Chicago simply wanted to see what they were purchasing. At some point in my visit, my total lack of experience with U.S. universities led me to take a characteristically costly and foolish step. A written offer could always be “traded” for advantage in some other place—at IBM, in the University of Chicago, or elsewhere—but I had no mentor. Talking with Shultz made me realize that all they knew about me was an IBM report. They had not even looked up my vita and so did not know that in addition to being a freshly anointed pioneer in finance, I had extensive other interests. Standing at this critical fork in the road, I unwisely enlightened them. Shultz was very warm and commented that it was wonderful that one salary was going to get them several different professors. Back in Boston, the telephone rang: George Shultz on the line. He thanked me for that beautiful lecture, et cetera, et cetera, then came to the point. The offer was withdrawn. Really? He had rushed to ask several other departments whether they would share my salary. The answer was always no—they did not even know me. This left him with a problem that was the bane of my life: my tendency to cross scientific disciplines. He feared that my interests might move out of economics as smoothly and unexpectedly as they had moved in. This represented a risk he would not take. He was disappointed that his diplomatic skills had not been sufficient. He also reassured me that my thinking in economics would be well represented, because Eugene Fama was going to join the faculty. There is irony in this. This was the same Fama who, in 1964, submitted a thesis subtitled “A Test of Mandelbrot’s Stable Paretian Hypothesis.” He believed that successive price changes were statistically independent. I had to convince him that I had never claimed independence and that he was in fact testing a much weaker hypothesis—the one that was first expounded in Bachelier’s 1900 Ph.D. thesis and had become known as the martingale hypothesis. Fama conceded, corrected his earlier assertions, replaced the mysterious label “martingale” with “efficient market,” and built his career on becoming its champion. This hypothesis is convenient indeed, and it is, on occasion, useful as a first approximation or illustration. But on more careful examination, it failed to be verified—and for being its herald, Fama should receive neither blame nor credit. Continuing to follow my lead, he supervised several excellent Ph.D. dissertations. Next he returned to the fold and had a brilliant career as one of the leaders of his profession’s backlash to the strictest Bachelier orthodoxy—suitably “nostrified” by a new vocabulary. Naturally, the University of Chicago soon stopped inviting me. Shultz’s path and mine crossed again once at a gathering of U.S. residents holding the Légion d’Honneur. He remembered the episode and thought it had ended well. Probably the diplomat was being diplomatic. Shultz went on to run Bechtel, a huge construction corporation in California, then became, successively, Nixon’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, secretary of labor, and secretary of the Treasury. Later, as President Reagan’s secretary of state, he brought his diplomatic skills to the world stage” (pp. 225-226).
    • 
12. George J. Stigler (1985). Memoirs of an Unregulated Economist. Basic Books97.
    • Nobel laureate Stigler, one of the original leaders of the Chicago School, was famous for his witty remarks, breadth of knowledge as an historian of economic thought, and for his honest statements. Here an example from George Loewenstein’s book Exotic Preferences: “Perhaps because he [Stigler] hated the paper so much that he didn’t know where to begin, or perhaps to preserve collegiality (U of C-ers tend to be nicer to their colleagues than they are to the outsiders they regularly demolish at seminars), Stigler did not tear the paper apart. However, in his brief and rather friendly commentary he did note that if William Stanley Jevons had written the words I attributed to him in 1932, it would have been “the event of the century” since at that point Jevons had been dead for almost fifty years. When I tracked down the problem I discovered that the statement I quoted was not from the great economist William Stanley Jevons, but his son, Herbert Stanley Jevons whose career provides unneeded support for the concept of regression to the mean. Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately from the perspective of forensic academics, my chapter was published by the time I discovered the error” (p. 386). Easy to digest, in Memoirs of an Unregulated Economist we get an idea of Stigler’s experiences and insights.
13. Peter Medawar (1986). Memoir of a Thinking Radish.
    • He starts the introduction with: “The title needs explaining. For reasons made clear by the book’s epigraphs, I was not anxious that it should appear explicitly as the writing of a scientist; it was indeed a special wish not to claim for myself as author any distinction more extravagant than membership of the human race. I thought, then, to devise a title out of one or other of the best-known literary similitudes of man. The first was Pascal’s roseau pensant—his thinking reed—and the second Falstaff’s forked radish (Henry IV Part 11, iii. z). Better still, I thought, would be a title that somehow combined the two, I put my problem to the representative of the Harvard University Press in England and her husband, the Provost of King’s College Cambridge. ‘Why not a thinking radish?’ said the Provost, with the grasp of essentials expected of a distinguished philosopher—and so it became. With most of my writings I have had at the very back of my mind a model of the kind of book I should like to write: with Aristotle to Zoos (which my wife and I wrote together!) it was Voltaire’s Dictionnaire philosophise and with Advice to a Young Scientist it was Lord Chesterfield’s Letters to his son; with this autobiographic memoir it has been S. T, Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria (‘Or, Biographical Sketches / of my / Literary Life and Opinions’; London, 1817), a work I enjoyed as much as I should like my Own readers to enjoy this (…) The pure narrative I have reduced to the very minimum, confining myself co those aspects of my life which seem to me to throw some light on the human comedy or the human predicament—very often the same thing. This, then, is a book of opinions which my life can be regarded as a pretext for holding. There is no message, therefore, but some themes do recur: one of them is the generally destructive effect upon English social life and our position in the world caused by the infirmity of manners I call ‘snobismus’—a syndrome that more aptly than any other deserves to be called the ‘English disease’. Snobismus is the irresistibly exigent impulsion to appear before the world as someone grander and more important in point of family, schooling, wealth, friends, and worldly distinction than one really is—and with this syndrome goes a somewhat debilitating conception of the manners and address that are or are not compatible with gentility. To snobismus, it will be shown in due course, may be attributed some part of the decay of the English theatre, whose renaissance was motivated by the belief that plays should be about something —and preferably something that matters. The maleficent effects of this disease of manners are a subject upon which I regard myself as especially well qualified to express an opinion, being ethnically speaking only half English. Now read on” (pp. 3-4).
14. Vlad Tarko (2017). Elinor Ostrom: An Intellectual Biography.
    • Finally, an intellectual biography of Elinor Ostrom’s achievements, published only a couple of years ago. Here an overview of the content of the book, indicating well-developed titles.
      1. Introduction: The Idea of Self-Governance as the Foundation of Institutional Analysis and Development
         • Overcoming Prejudice
         • Basic Principles of Institutional Economics
         • The Role of the Expert
      2. Against Gargantua: The Study of Local Public Economies
         • From UCLA to Indiana
         • The Complexity of Public Services
         • The Rise and Fall of Community Policing
         • The Impossibility of Efficient Hierarchical Public Economies
      3. Polycentricity: The Art and Science of Association
         • A Few Examples of Large-Scale Polycentric Systems
         • Polycentricity as a Framework for the Analysis of Emergent Orders
      4. Escaping the Tragedy of the Commons: The Concept of Property and the Varieties of Self-Governing Arrangements
         • Beyond Markets and Governments
         • What Are Property Rights?
         • Bottom-up Solutions to Social Dilemmas
      5. Resilience: Understanding the Institutional Capacity to Cope with Shocks and Other Challenges
         • Conceptualizing Resilience
         • Elinor Ostrom’s “Design Principles” for Resilient Systems
      6. Hamilton’s Dilemma: Can Societies Establish Good Governments by Reflection and Choice?
         • The Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) Framework
         • Example: Socioecological Resilience
         • Institutional Evolution and Public Entrepreneurship
         • Building a Science of Association
      7. Conclusion: Elinor Ostrom as a Role Model for Social Scientists
    • In his article Lin Ostrom’s Contribution to Economics: A Personal Evaluation (published in Public Choice in 2010), Bruno Frey writes: “Lin Ostrom’s ideas are so relevant because they are not simply theoretical propositions or the result of some laboratory experiment. Rather, they are based on an extensive collection of real life cases in many different countries and cultures, and for different types of commons. This type of research provides insights based on the empirically observed behavior of individuals under conditions they live in. In the more recent parlance, this approach can be called a “natural experiment” as the institutions addressing the commons problems are systematically compared with each other. This is extremely difficult and burdensome and therefore rarely undertaken in modern economics. The reason is not that scholars are lazier today than they were 20 or 30 years ago. Rather, the short-term publication pressure has become so intense that collecting such an enormous data base for many different countries and over so many different types of commons is generally regarded a bad investment for anyone’s present-day career purposes. Despite Lin Ostrom’s pathbreaking contributions (Ostrom 1990; Ostrom et al. 1993, 1994)100 that put institutions evolving from below, and the corresponding incentives provided, into the center, economics textbooks and many theoretical treatises still focus on the Samuelsonian conception of the necessity that public goods should be supplied by government, and private goods by the market. The type of institutional economics advanced by Ostrom is still largely disregarded, in particular in neoclassical orthodoxy. Her discussion of the particular way in which institutions are shaped to deal with the specific problems of various commons is totally different from the attempts of proponents of the “third way” in which a vague form of “democratic planning” is advocated. She is far from being an ideologue but rather a serious empirically orientated scholar with an open mind interested in seeing how the real world functions. Not surprisingly, the bestowal of the Nobel Prize came unexpected for many economists, and many seem not to have been familiar with her work, or even her name. The committee taking the decision can be considered to be more open than many academic economists who tend to be committed to standard theory. Unorthodox scholars have been awarded Nobel Prizes in Economics before, Kahneman, Sen, Simon, Hayek, Myrdal Fogel and North being examples. That Lin Ostrom was awarded the Nobel Prize is all the more noteworthy because economics over the recent years has developed in quite a different direction. In line with the explosion of experimental work based on game theory, human behavior has increasingly been attributed to particular human types such as “defectors”, “collaborators” or “conditional cooperators”—in many cases irrespective of institutional conditions (…) Lin Ostrom’s careful identification and analysis of a great number of institutional conditions helping to overcome free-riding in public goods and commons is of immediate relevance for economic policy. It draws the attention away from the still dominant discussion of government versus market. In policy this is reflected in the distinction between government intervention and regulation on the one hand, and tradable permits, auction markets and similar pricing instruments on the other hand. This antagonism is well visible today for instance in the discussion on the global environment (in particular climate change), or on water or noise pollution. Thinking along the lines suggested by Lin Ostrom’s work focuses attention on the adequate choice of institutions to deal with the problems posed by public goods and commons. The emphasis is not simply on the instruments such as particular government interventions or tradable permits, but rather on the many different ways people involved deal with a particular free-riding issues” (pp. 304-305).
    • In her 1997 Presidential Address of the American Political Science Association (Ostrom 1998, American Political Science Review) she said:
      • Any serious institutional analysis should include an effort to understand how institutions – including ways of organizing legislative procedures, formulas used to calculate electoral weights and minimal winning coalitions, and international agreements on global environmental problems – are vulnerable to manipulation by calculating, amoral participants. In addition to the individuals who have learned norms of reciprocity in any population, others exist who may try to subvert the process so as to obtain very substantial returns for themselves while ignoring the interests of others. One should always know the consequences of letting such individuals operate in any particular institutional setting (p. 16).
    • James Cox wrote In Honor of Elinor Ostrom (Southern Economic Journal), noting: “Increasingly, from the early 1970s onward, Lin and her husband and collaborator Vincent Ostrom devoted their energies to organizing research projects through the research center they created, which is now known as The Vincent and Elinor Ostrom Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis. This center of intellectual entrepreneurism (hereafter ‘‘the Workshop’’) has led local, national, and international research collaborations over extended periods to study questions centered on the commons and including other topics in governance and political economy. From the outset, the approach was interdisciplinary; the Ostroms were interested in, and encouraged participation by, researchers from any discipline that could contribute to understanding how real problems, such as the social dilemmas in appropriations from common pools, can sometimes be managed effectively. The research method is guided by theory from economics, political science, and other disciplines, but at its core the method is empirical—employing all methods of empirical research including laboratory experiments and applied econometrics—but its most distinctive component has been long-term, large-scale field studies implemented through international networks of researchers instructed, led, and coordinated by Lin Ostrom” (pp. 481-482).
    • In his book This View of Life, David Sloan Wilson offers a tribute to Ostrom (Lin’s Legacy): “A life-changing experience for me, after deciding to apply evolutionary theory to the solution of real-world problems, was working with Elinor Ostrom, who received the Nobel Prize in economics in 2009. Lin, as she insisted everyone should call her, was a political scientist by training and largely unknown to economists at the time she won their most coveted honor. Steve Levitt, the University of Chicago economist and co-author of the bestseller Freakonomics, confessed that he had to look her up on Wikipedia and predicted that his colleagues would hate the prize going to her because it signified that “their” prize was becoming one for all of the social sciences. Economics was falling off its pedestal. What did Lin do that was so important? She studied a problem called “the tragedy of the commons,” made famous by the ecologist Garrett Hardin in an article published in the journal Science in 1968. Hardin asked the reader to imagine a village with a common pasture that was available for all of the villagers to graze their cows. The pasture can support only so many cows, but each villager has an incentive to add more of his cows to the herd, resulting in the tragedy of an overgrazed pasture. Hardin’s example became a parable for the problem of managing common-pool resources of all sorts, such as pastures, forests, fisheries, irrigation systems, groundwater, and the atmosphere. Economists have difficulty seeing the tragedy of the commons because of their firm belief that the pursuit of individual self-interest robustly benefits the common good. When they do acknowledge the problem posed by Hardin’s parable, their two main solutions are to privatize the common resource (if possible) or to impose top-down regulations. Against this background, Lin’s work was indeed revolutionary. Unlike the orthodox economics establishment, which supports its ideas primarily with mathematical equations, Lin led an effort to compile and analyze a worldwide database of groups that attempt to manage common-pool resources. Some of these groups were capable of avoiding the tragedy of commons on their own, without privatization or top-down regulation. The economists were blind to something that was taking place in the real world. An outstanding example was a group of about a hundred fishermen operating out of Turkey’s coastal city of Alanya. Before the 1970s, this fishery was largely unregulated. About half of the fishermen belonged to a local producers’ cooperative, but the other half could do as they pleased. Competition for the best fishing spots led to uneven use of the whole area, more uncertainty about any fisher’s catch, increased production costs, and hostilities that at times escalated to violence. All of these dysfunctions can be regarded as tragedies of the commons writ large, including but also going beyond depleting the fish population. Then a system emerged from the cooperative, was perfected over a period of years, and largely solved these problems. All licensed fishers were eligible to join the system, not just members of the cooperative. The total area being fished was divided into a number of locations spaced far enough apart so that nets set in one area would not interfere with nets set in adjacent areas. Starting every September, eligible fishers drew lots and were assigned to the named fishing locations. At periodic intervals, they rotated their locations so that each fisher had equal access to the best areas over the long term. This arrangement was so fair that it was easy for all of the fishers to agree to it, regardless of whether they belonged to the cooperative. It saved everyone the effort of searching and fighting over sites. It was also easy to monitor, because anyone who fished where they weren’t supposed to was caught out by the ones who were playing by the rules. Not all of the groups in Lin’s database managed their resources so well. Some were failing, just as this particular group of Turkish fishers were failing prior to the 1970s. Lin’s great achievement was to derive eight core design principles (CDPs) that made the difference between success and failure. These were what all of the groups needed but only some of them had figured out for themselves. Without further ado, here are the eight CDPs. As I list them, think about whether they might be relevant to the groups in your life:
      • DP 1. STRONG GROUP IDENTITY AND UNDERSTANDING OF PURPOSE. The most successful groups knew the boundaries of their resource, who was entitled to use it, and the rights and obligations of being a group member. This was clearly the case for the Turkish fishers, who knew who was licensed and the area that they were authorized to fish.
      • CDP 2. PROPORTIONAL EQUIVALENCE BETWEEN BENEFITS AND COSTS. Having some members do all the work while others get the benefits is unsustainable over the long term. In the groups that functioned well, everyone did their fair share. When leaders were accorded special privileges, it was because they had special responsibilities for which they were held accountable. Unfair inequality poisons collective efforts. The system invented by the Turkish fishermen worked only because it was scrupulously fair.
      • CDP 3. FAIR AND INCLUSIVE DECISION-MAKING. In the groups that functioned well, everyone took part in the decision-making—if not by consensus, then by some other process recognized as fair. People hate being bossed around but will work hard to accomplish agreed-upon goals. In addition, the best decisions often require knowledge of local circumstances that group members possess and top-down regulators don’t. In the case of the Turkish fishers, everyone had to agree to the arrangement and only they were knowledgeable enough to divide the total area into its sectors. Also, years were required to perfect the system and only members of the group were in a position to know what needed adjusting.
      • CDP 4. MONITORING AGREED-UPON BEHAVIORS. Even when most members of a group are well meaning, the temptation to do less and take more than one’s share is always present and a few members might try to actively game the system. The most successful groups in Lin’s database were good at detecting lapses and transgressions, as we have seen for the Turkish fishers.
      • CDP 5. GRADUATED SANCTIONS. If someone isn’t doing their part, then a friendly reminder is usually sufficient to return them to solid citizen mode—but tougher measures such as punishment and exclusion must also be available when needed. One of Lin’s favorite examples of this and the other CDPs involved the lobster fishermen of Maine in the United States. Like the Turkish fishers, the lobstermen were organized into “gangs” that had exclusive use of sections of shoreline (CDP 1). Each lobsterman paints his buoys in a distinctive fashion so they can monitor each other’s trapping and detect the presence of outsiders (CDP 4). When an outsider sets traps in their area, the resident lobstermen begin the process of graduated sanctions by tying a bow around the buoys (CDP 5). Lin especially enjoyed telling this part of the story. “A bow!” She would laugh. “Can you imagine those big burly lobstermen tying bows around the interloper’s buoys!” Of course, tougher measures will follow if the interloper doesn’t take the hint and leave the area.
      • CDP 6. FAST AND FAIR CONFLICT RESOLUTION. Conflicts of interest are likely to arise in almost any group. The best groups in Lin’s database had ways to resolve them quickly in a manner that was regarded as fair by all parties. That is why an organization such as a cooperative is needed, although it need not rely on outside authority.
      • CDP 7. LOCAL AUTONOMY. When a group is nested within a larger society, then it must be given enough authority to create its own social organization and make its own decisions, as outlined by CDPs 1–6. This was clearly the case for the Turkish fishers. When other groups in Lin’s database failed to manage their common-pool resource, it was often because they weren’t provided the same kind of elbow room.
      • CDP 8. POLYCENTRIC GOVERNANCE. In large societies that consist of many groups, relationships among groups must embody the same principles as the relationships among individuals within groups. This means that the core design principles are scale-independent, a point that will become important when we turn our attention to large-scale societies in chapter 8. The Turkish fishers did rely on larger-scale governance (for example, the court system) for such things as licensing and extreme conflict resolution, but in a way that contributed to the implementation of the CDPs rather than disrupting them.
    • Unlike orthodox economics, which is math-rich and data-poor, the CDPs are based on the study of real-world groups such as Turkish fishers and the lobster gangs of Maine. They have been affirmed by subsequent research on common-pool resource groups that followed upon Lin’s pioneering studies. Hence, they are highly trustworthy. Let’s take a moment to reflect upon them. Notice how sensible they are. None of them are surprising, really. Another thing you might notice is how general they are likely to be. Why should they be restricted to common-pool resource groups? How about schools, neighborhoods, churches, volunteer organizations, businesses, nonprofits, and government agencies? In a sense, the very act of working together to achieve a common goal is a common-pool resource. Additional research will be required to confirm the generality of the CDPs, but intuitively it appears highly likely. A third thing you might notice is that even though the CDPs make great sense for almost any kind of group, sadly they are not implemented by many groups. That’s what Lin found for the groups in her database. Only some did a good job managing their common-pool resources. Others succumbed to the tragedy of overuse and other failures of cooperation. If the CDPs are so sensible, beneficial, and general, then why aren’t they universally adopted? Finally, even though the CDPs might seem obvious in retrospect, they weren’t at all obvious to the economics profession, which is why Lin merited their highest honor. Nothing is obvious all by itself. All policies “make sense” against the background of their assumptions, but the wrong assumptions can make people blind to the importance of the CDPs. Not only was this true for economic theory and policy, but it is true for other topic areas such as education, as we will see. I met Lin for the first time in 2009, a few months before she was awarded the Nobel Prize. That was the year of Darwin—the 200th anniversary of his birth and 150th anniversary of the publication of Origin of Species. Events were being held all over the world, including a workshop titled “Do Institutions Evolve?” that both Lin and I attended. It took place in a villa in the hills of Tuscany, a short distance from Florence, Italy. Although Lin was largely invisible to the economics world, her work was well known to me and my colleagues interested in human social evolution. The title of her most influential book, published in 1990, was Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. She told me that her use of the word “evolution” was mostly colloquial at the time, but that over the years she had increasingly adopted a more formal evolutionary perspective. As we talked in the idyllic setting, I began to realize how much Lin’s CDP approach dovetailed with multilevel selection theory and the saga of human genetic and cultural evolution that I have related in the last two chapters. In groups that strongly implement the CDPs, it is difficult for members to benefit themselves at the expense of each other, so that the only way to succeed is as a group. Those are the same conditions required for a major evolutionary transition, which converts a group of organisms into an organism in its own right. Lin’s work didn’t just follow from her school of thought within political science and her study of common-pool resource groups. It was far more general than that. It followed from the evolutionary dynamics of cooperation in all species and our own history as a highly cooperative species.
    • Multilevel selection theory helps to explain why the CDPs are not more widely adopted by groups. They probably would be if selection took place only at the group level, but there is always the temptation to benefit oneself at the expense of others or the group as a whole, which results in subversion of the CDPs. These efforts might be conscious or unconscious. They might even be well intentioned, as when someone feels certain that they know what’s best for the group and tries to override the opinions of others (a violation of CDP 3). Externally, the core design principles can be violated by other groups (violating CDPs 7 and 8). The CDPs must be implemented strongly enough to withstand these internal and external pressures, which doesn’t always happen. Lin and I worked together for the next three years, and with her postdoctoral associate Michael Cox (now a faculty member at Dartmouth University), we wrote an academic article titled “Generalizing the Core Design Principles for the Efficacy of Groups,” which placed her work on a more solid evolutionary foundation than ever before. The generalized version of the CDPs affirms the likelihood that they are needed by nearly any human group whose members are trying to work together to achieve common goals. However, this does not mean that they are sufficient. Almost all groups need the CDPs because they all need to cooperate in one way or another, but they might also need additional design principles to accomplish their particular objectives or to manage particular constraints. These can be called auxiliary design principles (ADPs), and they are as important for the groups that need them as the CDPs. For example, there are dozens of student groups at my university and all of them must be organized with a high turnover of their members in mind, since this is a fact of life for student groups. Not so for many common-pool resource groups, which can be designed with much lower turnover of their members. Another important point that Lin stressed in her own work is the difference between a functional design principle and its implementation. Take monitoring (CDP 4) as an example. Every group needs to monitor agreed-upon behavior, but there are many different ways to monitor and some might be easier to implement than others for a given group. The fact that each principle can be implemented in different ways is similar to the interplay between Tinbergen’s function and mechanism questions. In Lenski’s E. coli experiment, each population functionally achieved the same outcome by processing glucose more efficiently, but each population achieved this by means of a different mechanism. Similarly, nearly all human groups can benefit from the CDPs (and the appropriate ADPs), but each group must find the best implementations, which can depend critically on local knowledge. This means that the design principles cannot be implemented in a cookie-cutter fashion. Placing Lin’s work on a general evolutionary foundation has profound implications for public policy. It provides a functional blueprint for any group, anywhere in the world, whose members need to work together to achieve common goals. Think of the groups in your life—your neighborhood, your school, your workplace, your church, the informal groups that you form with your friends and associates to get things done. All of them can be expected to vary in how well they accomplish their objectives, and most of them can be improved by more strongly implementing the core (and auxiliary) design principles. It is not an exaggeration to say that widespread implementation of this approach can make the world a better place—although it is important to add that relationships among groups (CDPs 7–8) must be managed in the same way as relationships among individuals within groups (CDPs 1–6). Otherwise, we are faced with the specter of groups that function well for themselves but at the expense of other groups and the larger-scale society as a whole. Ever since my collaboration with Lin, I have been promoting the generalized core design principles approach in two ways: first, by analyzing existing information for different types of groups, similar to Lin’s analysis of common-pool resource groups; and second, by working with real-world groups to improve their efficacy” (pp. 114-123).
15. Charles Camic (2020). VEBLEN: The Making of an Economist Who Unmade Economics.
    • 
    • Introduction: “Preeminent British economist (and near-miss Nobelist) Joan Robinson once categorized Veblen as “the most original economist born and bred in the USA”; and her encomium—one of scores of similar tributes paid to Veblen over the past 125 years—invites a fundamental question about the relationship between new forms of economic knowledge and the life of the intellectual innovator. This book pursues that question through a historical study of the connection between Thorstein Veblen’s economic ideas—the distinctive type of economic knowledge he created—and how he was born and bred intellectually (…) In this book, I piece together Veblen’s educational career in order to bring Veblen-the-academic-economist into the foreground and to interpret his work in this context. By viewing Veblen in this way, I also aim to make a small contribution to adjusting the balance in current perceptions of late nineteenth-century American thought. During the past quarter century, major studies of this subject have focused attention primarily on American philosophical thought, reducing economic thought and, in particular, Veblen’s writings to ciphers. To take only the most influential of these studies published in the past twenty years, Louis Menand’s The Metaphysical Club tells “a story of ideas in America,” from the late nineteenth century to the early twentieth century, by presenting a collective biography of four professional philosophers—William James, John Dewey, Charles S. Peirce, Oliver Wendell Holmes—the group “more responsible than any other group for moving American thought into the modern world.” In this account and others like it, Veblen and most other academic economists of the era melt into the background, although “moving American thought into the modern world” – into “the Modern Industrial System,” as Veblen called it – called forth intense and far-ranging discussions about economic knowledge, discussions in which Veblen participated and interceded” (pp. 2-9).
16. Roger E. Backhouse (2017). Founder of Modern Economics: Paul A. Samuelson (Volume 1).
    • Young Samuelson was once challenged by Ulam to state one proposition in social science that is both true and nontrivial. Samuelson’s answer several years later was: comparative advantage. “That it is logically true need not be argued before a mathematician; that it is not trivial is attested by the thousands of important and intelligent men who have never been able to grasp the doctrine for themselves or to believe it after it was explained to them”. Samuelson’s witty remarks have a timely component which most mathematical economists fail to implement in their work: “I can claim that in talking about modern economics I am talking about me. My finger has been in every pie. I once claimed to be the last generalist in economics, writing about and teaching such diverse subjects as international trade and econometrics, economic theory and business cycles, demography and labor economics, finance and monopolistic competition, history of doctrines and locational economics. Kilroy, having been there, must share the guilt. Goethe wrote that there was no crime he ever heard of that he didn’t feel capable of committing. Bob Solow’s reaction was that Goethe flattered himself. And perhaps what I called “crime” is a mistranslation of what Goethe meant only as “error”” (p. 52). Roger Backhouse, an excellent scholar in the history and philosophy of economics101 takes up the challenge of providing a biography of Paul Samuelson.
17. Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman (2017). A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age.
    • 
    • See fascinating article here.
    • “The thin, white-haired man had spent hours wandering in and out of meetings at the International Information Theory Symposium in Brighton, England, before the rumors of his identity began to proliferate. At first the autograph seekers came in a trickle, and then they clogged hallways in long lines. At the evening banquet, the symposium’s chairman took the microphone to announce that “one of the greatest scientific minds of our time” was in attendance and would share a few words—but once he arrived onstage, the thin, white-haired man could not make himself heard over the peals of applause. And then finally, when the noise had died down: “This is—ridiculous!” Lacking more to say, he removed three balls from his pocket and began to juggle. After it was over, someone asked the chairman to put into perspective what had just happened. “It was,” he said, “as if Newton had showed up at a physics conference” (Introduction, p. xi).
18. Shing-Tung Yau and Steve Nadis (2019). The Shape of A Life: One Mathematician’s Search for the Universe’s Hidden Geometry.
    • 
    • Field Medalist Shing-Tung Yau writes in the Preface: “This is the story of my odyssey—between China, Hong Kong, and the United States. I have traveled the world in my pursuit of geometry—a field that is crucial to our attempts to map out the universe on both the largest and smallest scales. Conjectures have been made during these excursions, “open problems” raised, and various theorems proved. But work in mathematics is almost never done in isolation. We build upon history and are shaped by myriad interactions. These interactions can, on occasion, lead to misunderstandings and even fights, which I have, unfortunately, been caught up in from time to time. One of the things I’ve learned through these incidents is that the notion of “pure mathematics” can be hard to realize in practice. Personalities and politics can intrude in unexpected ways, sometimes obscuring the intrinsic beauty of this discipline” (p. XI). Mario Livio: “Yau and Nadis’s The Shape of a Life opens a window into the fascinating mind and world of today’s equivalent of Apollonius of Perga, ‘The Great Geometer’ of antiquity”.
    • 
    • “In March 2017, when this book was almost finished, my wife received a message from our twelve-year-old granddaughter: “We are all metaphors in this dark and lonely world.” Our daughter added her own comment, “The sentiment is tempered by the fact that she has a pink Afro.” The pink Afro displays a proud and joyful spirit, masking the melancholy thoughts of a teenager confronting an uncertain future. Our granddaughter is now emerging into a world strikingly similar to the world of 1936 into which I came as a twelve-year-old. Both our worlds were struggling with gross economic inequality, stubbornly persistent poverty, brutal dictators on the rise, and small wars presaging worse horrors to come. I too was a metaphor for a new generation of young people without illusions. Her declaration of independence is a pink Afro. Mine was a passionate pursuit of mathematics. I escaped from the barbaric world of Hitler and Stalin into the abstract world of Hardy. Hardy was the most famous mathematician in England when I came to him as a student in 1941. He taught me to be a maker of patterns. An even greater maker of patterns was the Indian genius Srinivasa Ramanujan, who had come to Hardy as a student in 1914 and died at age thirty-two in 1920. Through Hardy, I entered Ramanujan’s magical world. My first discoveries were concerned with the numbers 5 and 7 which play special roles in the weird arithmetical patterns of Ramanujan (…) The letters selected for this book cover only the period 1941–78, the first half of my adult life. The letters continue for thirty more years, but the second half of a life is usually less interesting than the first half. I believe it was Rudyard Kipling who said that a man should get half of his dying done before the age of forty. I decided to stop the selection at 1978, to keep the book short and readable while including the high points of my story” (pp. xi-xvi).
19. Mark Davidson (1983). Uncommon Sense: The Life and Thought of Ludwig von Bertalanffy, Father of General Systems Theory.
    • Foreword by Bucky Fuller: In 1972 I was asked by a committee of French scientists to write a paper on Ludwig von Bertalanffy’s nomination for the Nobel Prize. I did so… but the effort came too late. Ludwig died before their nomination of him could be considered by the Nobel authorities…Unique amongst the sciences, biochemistry and biophysics have long been aware of the synergetic character of ecological phenomena in general. As a perpetuator of natural philosophy from previous centuries and as a scientific pioneer of the present century, Ludwig von Bertalanffy was the first to undertake a mathematically rigorous approach to the understanding of biochemical synergies. He thus came to both evolve and name general system theory, which concept and schematic strategies first seek out the parameters or known behaviors of the hypothetically considered whole – hypothetical because what constitutes the whole of biological life has yet defied the clear-cut finiteness characterizing the Greek’s triangle. That Ludwig von Bertalanffy and other physiological pioneers have as yet to be rewarded with the finite system clarity attained by Euclid, Newton, and others, in no way diminishes the brilliance of von Bertalanffy’s conceptualizing nor the contribution that his general system theory has made to vast fields of scientific inquiry and the scientific organization of human efforts in general” (pp. 13-15).
20. James Lovelock (2000). Homage to Gaia: The Life of an Independent Scientist.
    • 
    • “As a scientist, I have been an explorer looking for new worlds, not a harvester from safe and productive fields, and life at the frontier has shown me that there are no certainties and that dogma is usually wrong. I now recognize that with each discovery the extent of the unknown grows larger, not smaller. The discoveries I have made came mostly from doubting conventional wisdom, and I would advise any young scientist looking for a new and fresh topic to research to seek the flaw in anything claimed by the orthodox to be certain. There are several examples of the use of this approach in this book. The most important was to challenge the biological dogma that organisms simply adapt to their environment. It turned out that just as we cannot observe an atom without changing its state, so neither can we, or any living thing, evolve without changing the state of the Earth. This the essence of Gaia. I hope that I can convince you that the independent scientist has a wonderfully interesting and rewarding life – every bit as good as that of the artist or composer, and may even be as worthwhile” (p. 5). Check out, for example, the following video at Oxford or the following videos two and three.
21. Nancy G. Slack (2010). G. Evelyn Hutchinson and the Invention of Modern Ecology.
    • 
    • Foreword by Edward O. Wilson: “G. Evelyn Hutchinson was the last great Victorian naturalist, a pioneer of modern ecology and justifiably called its founder, the one who brought the discipline into the Modern Synthesis of evolutionary theory. He was a polymath, master expositor, and teacher, and one of the few scientists who could unabashedly be called a genius. Because of Hutchinson’s extraordinary scholarship and breadth of his influence, historians of science and general readers will be grateful for Nancy Slack’s well-written, reliable, and insightful biography”.
    • 
22. Nicola Lacey (2004). A Life of H. L. A. Hart: The Nightmare and the Nobel Dream.
    • 
    • Biographer’s Note on Approach and Sources. “Biography is not a genre distinguished by any one methodology. But the reader of a biography is entitled to know not only the details of the biographer’s sources but also something of the biographer’s approach and relationship with her subject (…) As many of my interviewees observed, Herbert Hart was a hard person to know: an intensely private man whose primary emotional contacts were often explored through discussions of the literature, music, or landscapes (p.xviii) which he loved. I certainly could not claim to have known him in any deep sense. I was a young academic in a field which he dominated from Olympian heights, and although I plucked up the courage to have one or two informal discussions of jurisprudence with him, I was too much in awe of him to be able to relate to him directly in intellectual terms. And yet he had a mysterious capacity—again, this was noted by many people I interviewed—to communicate, indirectly, a sense of interest or concern. I felt the force of this strongly and, for this among other reasons, was very fond of him (…) When Jenifer Hart offered me the opportunity to write this biography, I had very little non-academic writing experience and no qualifications other than my knowledge of Herbert Hart and his work and a taste for biography. My approach to researching, planning, and writing was shaped by several factors. I re-read the intellectual biographies I most admired (notably Ray Monk’s Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius and Hermione Lee’s Virginia Woolf) and tried to think about what made them so compelling. I also read some books which might be described as cautionary tales about biography, notably Janet Malcolm’s The Silent Woman and—thanks to Joanna Ryan—Adam Phillips’ Darwin’s Worms. Malcolm’s story sharpened my sense of both the personal dilemmas of biography and the contingency of even one’s most confident interpretations. Phillips’ book made me think about the impulse to make a life story neater than life itself, and to pander to the reader’s desire for narrative closure and even a ‘happy ending’. As a result of reading these books, I have tried to write about Herbert Hart in a way which opens up the different levels of meaning which might be given—indeed which, at different moments, he gave—to his life, without in the process being irritatingly tentative. I have also tried to end on a note which does justice to his achievements without obscuring his complexities. In these terms, the writing was a journey of ‘interpretation’ rather than ‘discovery’: though in saying this, I do not mean to imply that biography raises no questions of truth and falsehood, fact and fiction (…) Since my ambition was to write a book which could be read as a complete narrative, and following Herbert Hart’s own example in The Concept of Law, I have chosen to avoid cluttering the text with endnote numbers (pp. xvii-xxii)”
23. Walter Isaacson’s most recent book which came out this year.
    • 
    • Into the Breach: “Her life story—as a researcher, Nobel Prize winner105, and public policy thinker—connects the CRISPR tale to some larger historical threads, including the role of women in science. Her work also illustrates, as Leonardo da Vinci’s did, that the key to innovation is connecting a curiosity about basic science to the practical work of devising tools that can be applied to our lives—moving discoveries from lab bench to bedside. By telling her story, I hope to give an up-close look at how science works. What actually happens in a lab? To what extent do discoveries depend on individual genius, and to what extent has teamwork become more critical? Has the competition for prizes and patents undermined collaboration? Most of all, I want to convey the importance of basic science, meaning quests that are curiosity-driven rather than application-oriented. Curiosity-driven research into the wonders of nature plants the seeds, sometimes in unpredictable ways, for later innovations. Research about surface-state physics eventually led to the transistor and microchip. Likewise, studies of an astonishing method that bacteria use to fight off viruses eventually led to a gene-editing tool and techniques that humans can use in their own struggle against viruses. It is a story filled with the biggest of questions, from the origins of life to the future of the human race. And it begins with a sixth-grade girl who loved searching for “sleeping grass” and other fascinating phenomena amid the lava rocks of Hawaii, coming home from school one day and finding on her bed a detective tale about the people who discovered what they proclaimed to be, with only a little exaggeration, ‘the secret of life.’ (p. xix).