Yesterday (a couple of days ago) when my wife was in the shower I was overcome with the urge to do something– something that didn’t involve using the computer, because I also wanted to go to bed afterwards. So I decided that I was going to read (or reread) a book, and review it if I had the time. I initially planned to do Predatory Thinking, and then thought I’d do Jack Canfield’s Success Principles, but finally settled on Stephen Landsburg’s More Sex Is Safer Sex.

It’s a book from the time where Freakonomics was very fashionable, and it talks about things like the Communal-Stream Principle (you can pollute your own pool and/or clean it up as you please, but if your pollution spills over into the communal stream everyone shares, things get more complicated). He also talks about other resource-allocation problems, like…

– how people’s decision on how much to spend on life insurance helps us infer how much we value human lives in $$ terms (it can get messy, complicated, relativistic and context specific, but if you ignore the numbers you are fundamentally unserious about policy and don’t care about the outcomes)
– The problem of akrasia, how people are irrational about doing what is best for themselves now versus themselves in the future– and he talks about how a taste for self-control might make sense in a social context rather than a personal context. Something to mull over, because I don’t think I think about that very often– the idea that the underlying reason why I want to ‘be better’ is really for the social utility. Which makes sense. I want to be friends with people I truly admire, and admirable people are typically hardworking, focused, disciplined, etc.

There are two things I want to do here. (Three– I also want to talk about how I’m realizing it’s not very good that I always seem to want to do more than one thing. I should train myself to do one thing at a time. That’s another topic for another time, and I should add it to my list.)

1- The book itself, and the ideas it discusses. I do think it’s a valuable book because it gives us a specific lens to view the world through, and as a specific lens it’s something different, something slightly uncomfortable at parts, and it concludes with several admissions of squirmy, awkward complications– which is good. I think that it’s a pretty good idea for every book to have a “things that make me squirm” chapter.

I found myself nodding vigorously at several points but also shaking my head. I think the general point might be this- he is very right when pointing out how other people is wrong, but when he argues how things should be, [A] I feel he falls a bit short– because a lot of it could be rendered invalid if people reacted to it differently. It seems to miss a lot of the perspective and marketing wisdom that Predatory Thinking and Rory Sutherland are so good at. It often doesn’t really matter how things actually are, but how they are perceived, and I feel like this book doesn’t cover that– which is totally fine, because that’s outside the scope of the book. But it makes me realize that reality is so much richer than any single book can ever convey.

2- The context of and around the book, of and around the author. (Great segue, huh!) This is where I think I am growing and learning as a writer. I have considered this before but it’s really coming into clarity now. Books and blogposts aren’t writen in vaccuums, they’re written in broader contexts. Reddit and Hacker News threads are posted in response to what had come before. I think what frustrates me a lot about a lot of conversations– or bores me, actually– is how little context people tend to have when debating an issue.

For example, when Neil Tyson talks about NASA funding, he has an amazing amount of context, for science– he knows about everything from Isaac Newton to the founding fathers of the USA and how the USA went to the moon because they were at war with the Soviet Union… he has a lot of sensitivity to the contexts. He also talks about the sensitivity that Richard Dawkin lacks– there’s a nice video of this. And yet the pedestal I put Neil on crumbled slightly when he once tweeted about “why not make X hack-proof?”, which seemed very ignorant. You could say that it’s ignorant of computer security, and not every astrophysicist is going to have a great understanding of computer security– but it seems to me that if something is a big problem that bothers a lot of experts in that field, and it seems obvious to me what the solution must be, there’s probably some complexity to it that I’m not aware of.

(I had stopped halfway here). I guess what I wanted to say is… it’s interesting to me how I’m starting to react differently to information as I encounter it. When I first read More Sex Is Safer Sex, it seemed to be written by somebody who was a lot more knowledgeable than me. I still think that Landsburg is really smart and has amazing context and all that stuff, but I also see how I see some things a little differently. I don’t contest his interpretations nearly as much as I see the value of them in one frame, and yet see how things can be different from another frame. To make any sort of case you have to make a bunch of assumptions, and those assumptions may not always hold true– and a criticism of those assumptions isn’t always appropriate or relevant.
[A] Which is valuable from a gadfly-ish perspective– Scott Adams, the author of Dilbert, does this pretty well. Extreme hypothetical scenarios that really force you to think harder about the arbitrary nature of the status quo. It’s a useful role that somebody ought to be playing.