The Book Shopper

Backlog #2: Words to Live By

The most noticeable outlier of my Books Read in 2018 list, which is viewable on the blog’s home page, is Brian Christian and Tom Griffith’s Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions (2016). This book also caught my attention in the June/July Believer issue (see previous posting about Viet Thanh Nguyen’s 2106 novel The Sympathizer) in a dialogue between journalist Jessica Bruder and computer scientist David Blei. One of their main topics was how artificial intelligence and robots will affect the future of work. In the article Blei mentioned Algorithms to Live By as a book that is “very clear and it’s technically correct, but it’s not technical.” Relevant for me, especially since I am being asked more and more in my day job to assess auto tagging applications, which have a machine learning (artificial intelligence) component.

But what makes this book doubly appealing is that it uses computer science as a launching point to discuss how the logic of computing can assist our human thought processes as we try to manage daily problems.

Each chapter applies one of the fundamentals of computer science to day-to-day decision making. The chapters are: Optimal Stopping – When to Stop Looking; Explore/Exploit – The Latest vs the Greatest;  Sorting – Making Order; Caching – Forget about It; Scheduling – First Things First; Bayes’s Rule – Predicting the Future; Overfitting – When to Think Less; Relaxation – Let it Slide; Randomness – When to Leave it to Chance; Networking – How We Connect; and Game Theory – The Minds of Others.

Here are a few examples of relevant quotes gleaned from my notes that I keep on the backs of postcards stuffed in the book.

“Exploration in itself has value since trying new things increases our chances in finding the best…In the long run, optimism is the best prevention for regret…If you’re a baby, putting every object in the house in your mouth is like studiously pulling all the handles at the casino.” (Chapter 2: Explore/Exploit).  I know now that when my baby grandchildren put things in their mouth they are just doing some basic classification of the world placing all objects in two simple categories – Things I can fit in my mouth and the things I cannot fit in my mouth.

“Much as we bemoan the daily rat race, the fact that it’s a race than a fight is a key part of what sets us apart from the monkeys, the chickens--and for that matter the rats.” (Ch. 3: Sorting) Getting to and from work in Atlanta is pure rat race.

“It is really true that the company will build whatever the CEO decides to measure.” (Ch. 7 Overfitting) I thought of this when I am asked to produce Key Performance Indicators (metrics) at work.

“We use the idiom of ‘dropped balls’ almost exclusively in a derogatory sense implying that the person in question was lazy, complacent, or forgetful.  But the tactical dropping of balls is a critical part of getting things done under overload. “(Ch. 10 Networking) Hmmm. An excuse worth considering next time I miss a deadline --- such as catching up on my posting backlog.

 

Backlog #1: Notes on Viet Thanh Nguyen

The Book Shopper Backlog

The last couple months I have seen the backlog of my unpublished postings really pile up. But my alibis are in order:  1.) The Cubs were in the race for the NL pennant again. This was the fourth year that the team has been relevant in October. I have been watching way too much MLB network and reading daily briefs from The Chicago Tribune, but that all came to an abrupt halt. Rockies 2 Cubs 1 in 13 innings. 2.) I’ve suffered a nasty brush with poison ivy. Not as disfiguring as others have suffered from what I hear, but its constant itchiness has messed badly with my sleep and skin. Despite a couple of steroid treatments, I do have a couple of raw patches that on sight can clear a room. 3.) General malaise from being too busy at my day job (there is no compensation in blogging). Writing is more of a habit or a practice than anything else and once you fall out of it, it takes maximum effort to get “back to the gym.”

Backlog #1

Notes on Viet Thanh Nguyen’s – The Sympathizer (2016)

The book came on my radar via Believer magazine. I have been a subscriber reading this McSweeney’s publication for over a decade and I have all the issues dating back to 2008 even though sometimes the magazine has gone on hiatus and magazine subscription management has been questionable.  McSweeney’s has  introduced me to new writers and thinkers such as Rebecca Solnit.. 

 In the June/July 2018 issue, the editors included a pullout pamphlet featuring a conversation between Paul Beatty and Viet Thanh Nguyen. Beatty is the author of The Sellout, an important satirical novel about race which I thoroughly appreciated on several levels and Viet Thanh Nguyen wrote The Sympathizer, a novel where the main character is a Viet Cong sympathizer who is embedded into South Vietnamese/American regime. Nguyen's  narrator not only gives a vivid account of leaving Vietnam during the last days before the fall of Saigon, but he also offers biting commentary on America’s attempt to sweep its defeat and the hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese refugees under the rug. Both books are cutting, emotional, funny and relevant. It underscores that we have not come very far on attitudes towards immigration and assimilation in America.  Here are my indecipherable reading notes that I kept on the back of a retro Vietnamese political postcard.