Books, Science

The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver

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Grey. Whenever my daughter asks me “What’s your favorite color?” my answer is always the same. Grey. My daughter asks me this often, maybe once a week, expecting my favorite color to change, maybe based on my mood, or the weather. But, no, my answer is always the same. Grey.

Why grey? First, grey is simply a cool color. Contrast is defined by shades of grey. Think of drawing with a pencil. All of the texture is conveyed by shades of grey. But, really, grey is my favorite color because of what it represents. Grey reminds me that the world is not black and white. It is nuance. It is not absolute. It is shades of grey. Our knowledge is not black and white. Science is not black and white. It adapts with new knowledge. It evolves. Science is, in some real sense, grey.

That’s, in some sense, the message of Nate Silver’s The Signal and the Noise. Nate Silver is most famous for running the FiveThirtyEight political forecasting website. He initially gained fame by contributing to the wave of analytics applied to baseball and his tools for forecasting baseball games and player performance. In The Signal and the Noise, he describes the inherent complexities involved in forecasting in a range of fields, from baseball and politics to the stock market, weather and hurricanes, earthquakes and, ultimately, national security issues such as terrorist attacks. He provides perspective into when we have proven successful in our ability of prediction, when we haven’t, and why some of these problems are so complex.

As a scientist, my job, in a real way, is about forecasting and prediction. I personally am not so involved in real forecasting, per se, but about understanding the phenomena that might be important to account for in forecasting. Others actually try to use that information to make real predictions. That said, the ultimate goal is to take knowledge we have today and make predictions about how materials would respond if the conditions were changed, either pushed further in time, or in slightly different environments, or for new applications. Thus, whether the results I uncover are useful is to be judged by if they help us understand and make predictions of materials that are better than they were yesterday. So, Silver’s treatment, while not delving into the my field per se, provides a nice overview of the idea of prediction more generally.

Silver takes the view that the world is inherently Bayesian. I’m certainly no expert on Bayes statistics, but, as far as I understand, the basic idea is that information doesn’t exist in isolation. Rather, there are certain biases or preconceptions or prior knowledge that we have and our experiments or experience modify those priors to give us new knowledge or allow us to make a better prediction. As one negative example of this, our intelligence agencies didn’t prepare for 9/11 not so much because they had no intelligence but because they had an implicit assumption that such an event could not happen. Their implicit probability that a group would hijack multiple planes and crash them into a building with no demands was effectively zero. So, all the intelligence of the world wouldn’t indicate an increased likelihood of such an event as it was simply beyond the realm of possibility for them.

Similarly, using what we do know to estimate probabilities and make predictions enhances our ability to make good predictions. As Wikipedia describes it, if we want to estimate the probability that someone might have cancer, it is important to account for the fact that cancer risk depends on age and that the probability is not uniform for all people. Knowing someone’s age lets us better predict if they might have cancer. Or, as Silver discusses, it allows us to better interpret test results.

Thus, the world isn’t black and white. It is a range of grey and the shade of grey depends on our experience and prior knowledge. Silver believes in an objective truth, but realizes that we will never fully be able to describe that truth. All of our models of reality are approximate, to varying degrees. None are fully faithful to reality itself. Realizing this, helps us make the best possible use of what we know and make the best possible prediction.

Silver delves into many examples and discussions of the state of prediction in several fields. Weather and hurricane prediction are success stories as we have improved our abilities significantly over the last several decades. In contrast, earthquake prediction has not advances at all. We are no better at predicting when an earthquake will happen than we were 20-30 years ago. Some of this is related to our ability to make relevant measurements — it is much easier to measure surface and atmospheric phenomena than the state of stress deep in the earth. We can’t directly measure the conditions that might allow us to make a good prediction.

Along the way, Silver makes a number of interesting points, a few of which I thought were worth noting:

  • “Human beings have an extraordinary capacity to ignore risks that threaten their livelihood, as though this will make them go away.”
  • “We forget — or we willfully ignore — that our models are simplifications of the world. We figure that if we make a mistake, it will be at the margin.”
  • “The key is in remembering that a model is a tool to help us understand the complexities of the universe, and never a substitute for the universe itself.”
  • A lot of pundits, such as the political talking heads on TV, are what might be termed “hedgehogs”: their predictions are not better than random and their views do not change with new evidence but rather remain entrenched, regardless of how bad their predictions have been in the past.
  • “If you have reason to think that yesterday’s forecast was wrong [about anything you might have forecast], there is no glory in sticking to it.”
  • A particularly difficult aspect of economic forecasting is that the prediction itself can influence the system. If a forecaster predicts that Facebook stock will tumble, that prediction itself may lead to a frenzy in trading Facebook stocks, impacting the price of those stocks and the market as a whole. So, while in weather and earthquake prediction, the forecast is outside of the system, that is not true of economics and other similar fields such as the prediction of epidemics. “The most effective flu prediction might be one that fails to come to fruition because it motivates people toward more healthful choices.”
  • In the era of Big Data, predictions might become worse rather than better, as much of the data might be noise that confounds our models rather than signal that leads to enhanced predictive capability.
  • “The need for prediction arises not necessarily because the world itself is uncertain, but because understanding it fully is beyond our capacity.”
  • “What I do know is that there isa  fundamental difference between science and politics. In fact, I’ve come to view them more and more as opposites… In science, one rarely sees all the data point toward one precise conclusion.”
  • “The dysfunctional state of the American political system is the best reason to be pessimistic about our country’s future. Our scientific and technological prowess is the best reason to be optimistic.”
  • “Whatever range of abilities we have acquired, there will always be tasks sitting right at the edge of them. If we judge ourselves by what is hardest for us, we make take for granted those things that we do easily and routinely.”

In the lead up to the Iraq War, Donald Rumsfeld gave a speech that was widely criticized. Not for the argument that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (though that was certainly a big criticism) but for this statement: “[T]here are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns — there are things we do not know we don’t know.” He was criticized for this phrase “unknown unknowns.” I certainly don’t agree with his politics, but I never understood the backlash he got for this. The view of the world he espoused in this simple statement is one we should all have. It is precisely the “unknown unknowns” that led to our intelligence agencies being unable to fathom a 9/11-like attack. There are always things we haven’t even thought of that will impact our day, our job, our health, our life. We can’t know what these are, by definition. But, we have to at least acknowledge that such things are out there and that they can severely disrupt what we predicted might have happened. “By knowing more about what we don’t know, we may get a few more predictions right.”

Overall, Silver advocates for a view of the world that is probabilistic, one in which we don’t make black and white assertions about the world, but one in which we acknowledge what we know, how uncertain that knowledge is, and what we don’t know, and use it to make estimates/predictions/forecasts about the world around us. Only by admitting that the world is grey — or better said, at least our understanding of the world is grey — can we hope to make better sense of it. Silver’s book is an initial step in arguing for this view of the world. The next step is trying to take that view to heart and use it in our every day lives. As Silver concludes: “Distinguishing the signal from the noise requires both scientific knowledge and self-knowledge: the serenity to accept the things we cannot predict, the courage to predict the things we can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

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The Improbable Patriot by Harlow Giles Unger

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How is it we don’t know who Beaumarchais is? He is most famous, these days anyways, for being the author of the plays The Barber of Seville and The Marriage of Figaro — he created that iconic character. Before that, as an apprentice to his dad in his clockmaker’s shop, he invented the wrist watch, the first watch that could be comfortably worn on the wrist, and made custom watches for the king and queen of France. He became an international businessman, amassing a fortune. He is the embodiment of the rags-to-riches story. But, perhaps most importantly, he, almost single-handedly, saved the American Revolution.

Beaumarchais was born Pierre-Augustin Caron in Paris, in the same year that George Washington was born (he would also die in the same year Washington died). He later gained the title Beaumarchais through his connections and his ability to buy a title. From the beginning, he displayed great and varied talents, from singing and music, to engineering. Being the only son in the family, it ultimately fell on him to take care of his sisters and parents. After a brief interlude as a teen when he was out carousing with friends too much for his father’s taste, and his father kicked him out of the house, he became a responsible head of household, ultimately taking care of the entire family.

Harlow Giles Unger’s portrayal of Beaumarchais, The Improbable Patriot, reads almost like a spy thriller. In the background, you have the world-shattering events of the American Revolution and the precarious state it was in. Washington had a relatively small number of raw recruits, little-to-no equipment, and a Congress that didn’t have the power to help. At the same time, France was ruled by despotic kings and similar-minded nobility, who could not stand that a commoner such as Beaumarchais could rise up in the world. More than once, Beaumarchais was imprisoned simply because he pissed of the wrong nobleman. This came with a loss of citizenship and the rights that went with it.

All the while, there is Beaumarchais himself, seemingly master of any task he put his mind to. By the time of the American Revolution, Beaumarchais was already a well known playwright, with The Barber of Seville already a smashing hit. His character, Figaro, embodied much of the revolutionary sentiment, and may have inspired, at least in part, the French Revolution (“A tiny gust that extinguishes a candle, Figaro reminds his audience, can ignite an inferno.”). He had also become a very successful businessman, tutored by the French magnate Paris-Duverney. But, Beaumarchais already had many enemies when he proposed to the French foreign minister that France absolutely had to help the Americans in their fight against the British, that they would lose without such help. He sold it as a way for France to regain the possessions she lost after the Seven Year’s War. Beaumarchais proposed an elaborate scheme to set up a shell company, giving it a Spanish origin, and using it to sell French arms and equipment to the Americans in exchange for goods. To do this, he got a massive loan from the French government, which would in principle be repaid by his selling American products on the European market. Unfortunately, because of American political backstabbing, he never really got his due from the American government. However, his shipments to America made a significant, perhaps pivotal, difference in the fight with Britain.

Though Beaumarchais didn’t play a significant role in the French Revolution — though he had humble beginnings, he was wealthy and conspicuous with that wealth at the time of the storming of the Bastille — he lived in an age of enlightened thought against the ways of despotic power. Voltaire, not exactly a contemporary, was still alive during Beaumarchais’ time and even asked the man to publish his complete works. Beaumarchais had been inspired by the works of Frenchmen such as Voltaire and Rousseau, who had strong views on the origin of power and the current state of the world — “The first man who, having enclosed a plot of land, took it into his head to say this is mine and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of class society.” In some sense, Frenchmen like Beaumarchais viewed America as the embodiment of the ideal society that French revolutionary thinkers discussed. He was ultimately disillusioned when political squabbling led to his debts being unsettled with the Americans.

At the same time, the French Revolution went further than the American Revolution, leading to mass riots and the Terror that saw large numbers of French put to death and the imposition of a new kind of dictatorship. While Beaumarchais certainly wanted change, he felt this had gone too far: “In trying to straighten our tree, we have made it bend in the opposite direction.” He came to see that people of all classes were similar. As Unger says, “The aristocracy had violated him early in his life for rising above his station to champion commoner rights; now the commoners whose rights he had championed had violated him, and he realized that commoners were as capable of injustice, cruelty, and arrogance as the aristocrats they despised — no better, no worse. Power rendered them all the same.”

Beaumarchais seemed to have an attitude toward life that was live it to its fullest. After being imprisoned in a miserable French prison, on the very day he was released he held a party, and chose not to dwell in his injustice: “Why should I lose the time I have with you, my friend, reliving things which only make us miserable.”

Beaumarchais was inspired by the social reform ideas of philosophers like Voltaire and Rousseau, but maybe had a bigger hand in diffusing their ideas. His character Figaro embodied that spirit and spread those ideas in a way that philosophical treatises could never do. Figaro railed against the nobility: “Nobility, wealth, rank, position — it all makes you so proud. And what did you do to earn so many rewards? You took the time to be born — nothing else. Apart from that, you’re quite an ordinary man! while I, by God, lost in the faceless crowd, had to apply more knowledge and skills merely to survive than it took to govern the entire Spanish Empire for the last one hundred years.” If this doesn’t encapsulate the idea of the American Dream, I don’t know what does. That we seem to have lost the admiration for the self-made man seems, to me, unfortunate.

The story of Beaumarchais is replete with spies and international espionage — more than once he is sent on behalf of the king to stop spies from harming the monarchy — the drama of a internationally-reknown playwright, and ups and downs of dealing with petty nobility, and his own family dramas — his father seems to have been a sex-starved old man who was always looking for companionship — all of this in the backdrop of two revolutions. That we don’t learn about Beaumarchais in history classes is truly a shame. History comes alive when you learn about the individuals and their stories, about how decisions that change the world rely on the capriciousness of people, and about how all of us have remarkable stories to tell.

Books

The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared by Jonas Jonasson

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Allan Karlsson is turning one hundred years old. The mayor is coming to help him celebrate in his retirement home. But, Allan doesn’t want a celebration. He wants to escape. And, so he does, by simply climbing out the window before the party starts.

Karlsson is a Swedish Forrest Gump, of sorts, but with more wits about him. His story, The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared by Jonas Jonasson, follows both Karlsson’s adventure after his escape from the retirement home as well as his past, when he rubbed shoulders with the most powerful people in the world and had a hand in changing world events. He even makes a fateful appearance at Los Alamos, making a suggestion to the most eminent physicists in the world that makes all the difference in their quest to beat the Germans to the bomb.

I won’t give away too much of the plot, as the joy of the novel is to discover who Karlsson is going to cross paths with next and what those interactions will lead to. Suffice it to say that Karlsson’s adventures take him all over the world and his wits and expertise with explosives save his butt on many occasions. While Karlsson is clearly a clever guy, he is as apolitical as they come, and doesn’t give a whit about the ideologies of those he comes across. As long as they have a stiff drink ready and can make some use of his explosives expertise, he is a happy man. Given that these two conditions are met most of the time, Karlsson is happy most of the time.

As with any grand adventure of this type, there are a lot of coincidences that move the plot along. Maybe these are deus ex machina type plot devices, but given the almost ridiculous nature of Karlsson’s adventures, they actually work well here. Karlsson’s story is bigger than life, and the events that propel it forward are as well. In lesser hands, this story could have easily derailed into the absurd but Jonasson juggles the events deftly and keeps things moving apace in a way that both keeps one engaged and is reasonably reasonable, given the absurd role Karlsson plays in the events of world history. A highly entertaining read with cameos from some of the 20th century’s most famous and infamous figures.

Books, Science

The Violinist’s Thumb by Sam Kean

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In The Violinist’s Thumb, Sam Kean takes us on a tour of how we have learned about the genes that define us and the implications of some of discoveries behind that science. I admit that biology is not my favorite branch of science, but Kean does an excellent job of telling an engaging story about the people, their world, and their discoveries that have led to our current understanding of how our genes impact everything from our behavior to our talents to our interactions with the rest of nature. For anyone with even a passing interest in our genes and DNA, what makes us tick biologically, and how we’ve learned what we learned, this is a great book.

Kean’s focus is on DNA, the science that, over many years, led to our discovery and subsequent understanding of what DNA does, and the people behind that discovery. As he guides us through the history of DNA science, he also takes us on interesting detours, introducing us to non-scientists whose lives demonstrate the point he is trying to make. These are people with either less common genes or mutations that gave them some benefit, such as more flexible hands for playing, for example, a violin, but often also made them rather sickly and not long for the world.

There are simply too many interesting tidbits in this book to really give them justice. But, I highlight a few that particularly piqued my interest:

  • Ultraviolet light can cause kinks in certain places in DNA. Nearly all animals and plants have enzymes that can fix these kinks. Mammals don’t. That is why mammals sunburn.
  • Women were typically not admitted into the science club. One exception were Catholic nuns, who were unmarried and had the financial support and independence from the church-run convents to pursue science.
  • Polar bears survive on eating seals. Seals have a high abundance of vitamin A, which allows them to survive in the cold, promoting growth of fat cells. Polar bears have adapted to this, and can tolerate high levels of vitamin A, which is stored in their liver. However, the concentrations of vitamin A in their liver is toxic to most all other animals, even other polar bears if they ate another polar bear liver: “As little as one ounce of polar bear liver can kill an adult human, and in a ghastly way.”
  • Our DNA isn’t entirely “human” – about 8 percent is ancient virus DNA, that was introduced as viruses attacked our ancient ancestors.
  • Toxoplasma gondil (Toxo) is a parasite that exists and thrives in the guts of cats. Rats who are infected with it are attracted to cat urine, making them easy prey for cats, and thus spreading the parasite to more cats. “Overall it infects one-third of people worldwide,” settling in our brains. There is evidence that it makes infected people less risk adverse: it can make dopamine and “Some emergency room doctors report that motorcycle crash victims often have unusually high numbers of Toxo cysts in their brains.“
  • “Viruses probably created the mammalian placenta, the interface between mother and child that allows us to give birth to live young and enables us to nuture our young.”
  • “Every known ethnic group worldwide has one of two genetic signatures that help our bodies fight off certain diseases that cannibals catch, especially mad-cow-like diseases that come from eating each other’s brains. This defensive DNA almost certainly wouldn’t have become fixed worldwide if it hadn’t once been all too necessary.”
  • Trauma we experience can be passed down to our children and, even more amazingly, to their children. Women with PTSD from the 9/11 attacks who had kids, particularly those who were in their third trimester at the time, have kids with higher levels of anxiety and acute distress than others in some situations.
  • Possibly the most amazing fact is that a child’s health is more directly related to the father’s diet during his so-called slow growth period, about 9-12 years old: “Even more strangely, the child got a health boost only if the father faced starvation. If the father gorged himself, his children lived shorter lives with more diseases.“
Books

Epitaph by Mary Doria Russell

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All those stories about cowboys, lawmen, and outlaws? Most of them occurred here, in the American Southwest. The people behind them have become legends, glamorized by Hollywood, stretched and exaggerated until they are hardly recognizable. Good guys never do no wrong and the bad guys are truly evil. Life is never so black and white and Mary Doria Russell tries to put some human perspective on one of the most famous events of the old West, the gunfight at the O.K. Corral.

Once the smoke had settled, three men had been killed. The Earp brothers, and their friend Doc Holliday, at most suffered relatively superficial wounds. However, the controversy over who drew first, whether the dead men had even been armed, and the bad blood between the Earps and the so-called Cow Boys that boiled over led to the shooting of two of the Earps, one who died, and a vendetta ride by Wyatt Earp that cemented his place in American history.

Epitaph is a novelization of the history of the gunfight. It begins in a seemingly unlikely place, with the childhood of Josie Marcus, who became Wyatt Earp’s wife and outlived them all. If there is a common thread that pulls the narrative together, it is Josie’s, but Russell does an excellent job of juggling a huge cast of characters and, more importantly, providing them with a voice. Even the most despicable of the so-called villains has his time on the page. Events are given view through the eyes of characters not directly involved in the gunfight, such as the wives of the various Earp brothers. Russell doesn’t lay blame for the gunfight at the foot of any one character. Rather, she tries to provide context for the events as they unfold and maybe some rationale for those events.

Being a novelization, Russell certainly takes liberties. There are quiet moments where she fills in the blanks. There are events where we don’t know enough to be certain what really happened — Russell adds her own details. And there are contradictory accounts, for example, how Josie originally left her family and found herself in Tombstone, Arizona. Russell chooses one of those stories, the one told by Josie herself, and uses it as if it were canon. One of the Earp brothers, Warren, never makes an appearance. I’m not enough of a historian to really judge the historical accuracy of the events as Russell conveys them. However, it seems she has a solid skeleton based on history and her details add the flesh that lead to a great story.

Maybe I learned something from this book about the history of the American Southwest. Certainly, names and places that dot our collective consciousness are given meaning: Doc Holliday, Albuquerque, Tombstone, Wyatt Earp. And new details arise that pique my interest, such as the fact that Earp spent some time in Idaho, in Eagle City. Other characters emerge as important players in the drama of Tombstone, including the other Earp brothers and John Behan, a would-be political mover and shaker whose life is very much intertwined with those of Wyatt and Josie.

Even though Russell may have taken liberties with some of the details, the story moves along and keeps you engaged. I’m keen to read more about the men and women of the American Southwest and that is as great a testament to a book like Epitaph as I can make.

Blah, blah, blah… I've got the blahs.