Read Gleick first and then turn to this informative, ingenious book.
An exploration of the amorphous concept of uncertainty, “an essential part of the human condition.”
Uncertainty is another name for chaos, a fascinating concept largely unknown until the 1950s. Palmer, a professor of physics at Oxford, works hard to explain it to lay readers. He begins with Newton’s law of gravity, which can predict the Earth-sun orbit precisely into the distant future but only works with two gravitating bodies. After three centuries of searching for a formula to predict the positions of three or more, French physicist Henri Poincare proved that “no formula exists.” Planetary orbits are “chaotic.” Like weather or stock prices, “the system appears reasonably predictable until, out of the blue, it behaves unpredictably”—which means that it’s not impossible that the Earth will one day wander out of its orbit. One of Palmer’s main characters is meteorologist and mathematician Edward Lorenz (1917-2008). Before Lorenz, scientists believed that if you had enough accurate information about current conditions (temperature, wind speed, humidity), you could feed the details into a powerful computer and predict weather far into the future. Lorenz proved that this was impossible; tiny changes in initial conditions can blow up into huge errors. Chaos theory doesn’t make prediction impossible, only erratic over the short term. Weather forecasts have grown more accurate, but they’re now expressed in percentages. Palmer believes that embracing uncertainty might explain phenomena considered hopelessly complex, and he illustrates his points with densely argued chapters on financial crashes, war, climate change, pandemics, and brain function. The author is a fluid writer, but the sections on complicated areas such as fractal geometry and quantum uncertainty may overwhelm readers unfamiliar with college physics and calculus. They should prepare by reading James Gleick’s Chaos, still in print after 35 years—and which Palmer calls “masterful.”
Read Gleick first and then turn to this informative, ingenious book.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-5416-1970-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Aug. 22, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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