Weekly reading/watching meme

[petronia]

I suddenly really did not feel like filling this out, for some reason. XD; Anyway, I spent the bulk of the week reading Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow, which is very famous for good reason. (It turned out Kahneman and his collaborators originated a great deal of the research that made it into my MBA negotiation class, unattributed.) I'll probably post a bit about this on Tumblr.

Bought another volume of Borges' essays -- On Writing, in English this time -- but it's not as good overall, being a subject-based survey that contains some relative juvenilia Borges himself tried to suppress, one might concur for good reason. XD

Read a few comics: Nova up to #3, Iron Man up to #9 (iirc?). I don't particularly want to be buying this but Gillen is writing it well, and this current nexus** of "cosmic" stuff is just really well executed in general. It feels a bit like watching a space opera anime with multiple storylines/protagonists that are clearly intended to slowly come together. It's also obviously intended for movieverse fans, though not in the OH HAI TUMBLR vein of Young Avengers/Hawkeye.

Anyway I'm probably going to stop reading so much for a while, I need to integrate. XD

Watched:

• Trance (cheap Tuesday with Anthony Easton), which was utterly ridiculous but had the merit of featuring Rosario Dawson as a full-fledged femme fatale who did not die and was not punished for her transgressions (real or imagined). I can't even remember another instance of that in noir. The fact that the movie is not at all about what/whom you think it's about is both its major strength and weakness, I guess.
• JoJo's Bizarre Adventure ep.1-4. It is what it is. XDDDD I should dig up the old stuff I wrote about Dio; some of it has remained "unpublished." He was really such a compelling villain -- I find him more compelling in parts 1 and 6 than in 3, actually.

** In my head Nova/Guardians/Gillen!IM is like one thing, and YA/Hawkeye is one thing (along with Secret Avengers/Winter Soldier, except I'm technically not reading those at the moment, and am actively ignoring Uncanny Avengers despite the presence of Wanda because I find it kind of depressing), and Captain Marvel/DeConnick!Avengers are one thing, and Hickman!Illuminati!Avengers is something else completely off to the side. I can't really convince myself that these four mental set-circles are meant to be one continuity, and tbh no one seems to be trying to convince me that they are, either. XD;

Comments

[sub_divided]

Funny, I also started Thinking, Fast and Slow (what a great title) but found it way too slow and "all people think this way". Maybe I was just in an impatient mood that day. The big bookstore near my house seems to have nothing but pop neuroscience, pop economics, and self-help books on the shelves and it's bothering me. I'd rather read blogs. I did like The Black Swan a lot, though.

Recently I'm reading Cloud Atlas. No wonder your sister liked it, not only is it funny but it's full of vintage Briticisms. Looking at the title page, it was published in 2004 lol no surprise there. I'm having fun reading something slightly difficult and whimsical, but all the picturesque racism is starting to get to me.

[petronia]

I found it very readable! Compulsively readable, actually. But then I'm pretty OK with the "gradually building on the argument by accretion of one data point/study after another after another after another" style of non-fiction -- Darwin and Adam Smith are both like this too (so is Borges, but Borges stops abruptly after 5 pages, inevitably startling me XD).

It's certainly not the case that "all people think this way," because even if in some studies you might have 75% or 80% of people falling prey to a specific mental bias, there will be one person out of four who sees through it. And Kahneman actually devotes quite a lot of the book to his intellectual opponents' arguments, since it's meant to be a survey of the field. This is one of the peripheral things I enjoyed about it -- there's a sense of narrative. He first introduces the guy who was his intellectual partner for most of this research, then halfway through, another guy who was his intellectual rival (and eventual shounen-style frenemy XD). But he also tells you explicitly that he's exploiting the various psychological effects he's identified in order to frame his arguments in the most palatable/comprehensible way for the reader, and storytelling is one of them. (Homunculus language is another.)

Anyway, I would appreciate this book just for the fact that dude manages to explain regression to the mean in such a way that I finally understand it, which five or six stats and research courses over two degrees haven't managed.

I haven't read Black Swan yet but it's definitely on the list. I get the impression the author is one of those really intelligent guys who doesn't truly have a sense of humour, though. XD

[petronia]

EDIT TO ADD -- as for the core "System 1" / "System 2" argument, I can't really say if all ppl think this way or not, since I'm neither telepathic nor a research psychologist XD (I'll probably bring this book up with my psychologist friend and see what he says, actually). I know the marketing research company Tom Ewing works for bases itself on behavioural economics, and some of the flaws it addresses in standard economics were apparent to me from day one. As for myself, I never needed Kahneman to tell me I have these two systems in operation. Most of the stuff in the book is stuff I'm aware is happening in my head on a daily basis (eg. that I've just used a word because I was primed by something else I read, or that I picked up an item in the supermarket because it featured popular Pantone colours). I think it's that I'm not disturbed by the fact that these minor daily issues run on intuition and not logic, so I'm not unconsciously resorting to making up logical explanations for them. XD;

[karalee]

(Also reading the book, independently XD)

He never says *everyone* - to my recollection, which is perhaps inaccurate, he has a good habit of saying X% of people or N out of M people noticed/didn't notice whatever. And even if he did, so long as the proportion of people is sufficiently large, I actually have no problem with him saying that people *tend* to think/behave in some way. 1) There's no value judgement being laid down on his part, and 2) it *is* the trendline that he's after -- it certainly is useful to know what the spread of the data is, but as long as what he finds isn't just random noise, then it does behoove a scientist to zero in on the mean and on the larger patterns in the data. Even if the mean isn't the message for individuals, it is when it comes to a large human population. [ETA: he could plausibly be wrong about the particulars of the biases or the systems of human thinking, but I have no issue with him trying to find said biases or systems, and announcing them if he believes he's found them; proving him wrong falls to other researchers XD.]

[karalee]

Oh, I think I have that Borges volume too -- I never did finish it XD. It strikes me as ... well, mostly it made me feel bad for dead writers whose writing publishers rifle through for anything they can possibly sell. I mean, I get why they do it, but I also get why other writers leave instructions to BURN EVERYTHING as soon as the body is cold. (No longer an option, I guess, in this day and age ... ? XD)

[petronia]

If you choose to front poetry movements at the age of 20 and write manifestos about revolutionizing technique and whatnot, I mean, it's a bit like getting a tattoo or something, isn't it? You can't really act like you're surprised when you're 50. XD

Some of the (even slightly) later stuff is actually quite good, but I'm middling on the translations. I kind of... forget this most of the time... but I think Borges was translated better into French, and in fact Borges thought he was translated better into French. XD;;

[ephemerides]

"Anyway, I would appreciate this book just for the fact that dude manages to explain regression to the mean in such a way that I finally understand it, which five or six stats and research courses over two degrees haven't managed."

Huh, if you have particular pages, I'm curious about that.

I took a stats for humanities (or rather, statistical methods for social history) class, and found that I couldn't understand regression to the mean without the proof. Which weirded me out a little, but perhaps I'm more math-minded then I like to think. (Central limit theorem too.)

[sub_divided]

I think I was also kind of annoyed that the author was taking 200 pages to explain System 1/System 2, when Blink was equally informal and only a hundred pages long and had anecdotes. XD;;

Nassim Taleb has an awesome sense of humor, all the way up to the point where he crosses the line into nothing-I-do-can-ever-be-wrong egomania. ^^ His problem is more paranoia and mistrust of the establishment which leads him to reject many perfectly sensible critiques of his work. The Black Swan is very funny though, and it also manages to stay grounded in reality, since the entire point of the book is to recognize how many things we can't know.

[petronia]

The chapter on regression to the mean is 17, starting page 175 in my paperback edition. The discussion really extends to the end of the next chapter, though: page 195.