Alexandra Petri Slept Here

And another excellent birthday book: Alexandra Petri's US History! I've been a fan of Petri's work for several years now. During my time as a Washington Post subscriber I consistently got kick out of her humor column, and she's been excellent whenever she flits across my social media feed.

 

While I hadn't thought about this before reading it, the conceit of the book reminds me strongly of Dave Barry Slept Here, a book my parents had that I devoured many times while growing up. Both are satirical looks back over the history of the United States, which are really funny on your own but become even more funny if you're already familiar with the subject matter, as there is usually a deeper layer to the jokes. Both books also bear covers with the classic scene of Washington crossing the Delaware but with the authors added to the boat - I imagine this is a deliberate homage.

The structure of the books turn out to be very different, though. I haven't read DBSH in years, but as I recall it's written in a sort of faux textbook style, with chapters covering discrete eras, occasional graphs and illustrations, and pop quizzes or discussion questions. Petri's book, in contrast, is a collection of faux "original" documents. Each one is basically a riff off an existing item, but presented as a first draft or alternate version or something. For example, there's an outline of The Federalist Papers using Hamilton's original idea to keep readers' attention throughout the serial by making "Publius" a three-dimensional character the audience would root for instead of an aloof narrator. There's a letter from Coronado in which he excitedly writes to the king describing what's very obviously a lie. There are transcripts of Nixon's tapes but only the parts involving Checkers the dog. And so on.

The other surprise was that, despite the title, it ended up being more about American literature than US history. I haven't counted, but I'd guess that about 2/3 of the sections are purely literary: riffs on Poe, Melville, Hawthorne, Twain, Hemingway, Sontag, Wolfe, Thompson, and tons more. That isn't a complaint! I love literature, and am probably even more familiar with these stories than I am with the history, which again adds to the delight as there are more in-jokes and subtle references to capture.

One advantage of this document-based approach is that the form and voice changes constantly throughout the book. There are letters, articles, Yelp-style reviews (of Ford's Theater!), screenplays, diaries, pitches, and more. It's all funny, but sometimes the wit is elevated, other times very blunt; sometimes it's mostly the concept that's funny, other times the concept is rote but the wordplay is hysterical.

There were multiple points where I had to stop and put the book down and ask myself, "How did she come up with this?!" The example I'm thinking of now is "Shirley Temple Jackson," which (why not!) mashes up the child actress Shirley Temple with the psychological horror author Shirley Jackson. It's deranged, a really bizarre idea and also a shockingly good imitation of Jackson's writing.

All in all, this is a perfect book for just about any occasion or setting. I enjoyed reading snatches from it while relaxing on vacation, but it would also be perfect for commuting, as a pick-me-up after a hard day, or really anywhere. Each "document" is nicely bite-sized, typically just a few pages, and stands on its own, so you can dip in and out at will. They're arranged chronologically and it makes sense to read that way, but there wouldn't be anything wrong with jumping around either. In any case - I had a blast with this book; I don't get to read Petri's columns as often these days, but I'm glad to see that she has published some other books as well, and I'll look forward to checking those out as well!

Mythmaker Mythmaker Make Me A Myth

For my birthday this year I received the wonderful book "The Mythmakers", which is a graphic novel about the friendship between J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis. It was a pretty quick and delightful read. Most of the content was stuff that I "knew" already from previous biographies and other readings, but I think this is the first book I've read that specifically focuses on the pair's relationship, and it draws out some strong resonance through this presentation.

 

The book is kind of a dual biography, but it's set in a framing story about myth. Two characters, a wizard and a lion, address the reader and talk about the history and importance of myth, along with related styles like epics and legends. They introduce you to Tolkien and Lewis, comment on their lives and react to their experiences. I was a little lukewarm on these characters at first - their dialogue can feel a bit cutesy, and I was eager to get back to the humans - but they strongly grew on me, and the last few pages with them were incredibly touching.

"The Mythmakers" is very interested in their faith, both separately and together, including Tolkien's influence on Lewis's religious searching and his later qualms with Lewis's religious writing. This book isn't only about faith, but it is a central theme, which I think is great since faith was so important to both of them. It goes into some depth on the conversations they had, how they saw myth as intersecting with religious belief, and other people in their circle who participated in this fellowship.

Any time I read about the Inklings I get a feeling of wistfulness. I think most of us have or will experience a friend group that vibes well together, but eventually falls apart: usually not through any big blow-up or acrimony, but the changes in life (people moving away, having a baby) or dynamics (new partner, new habits) that make it less fun and fulfilling, and ultimately just sort of stops. The Inklings seemed so incredibly vibrant, productive, and most of all fun during their strong early years. It's interesting to see the various perspectives on things like Charles Williams' addition to the group and how that changed the dynamics. In The Mythmakers, it's shown how Tolkien's feelings got hurt by another member's consistent complaints about elves.

Likewise, Tolkien and Lewis's own personal relationship, which was incredibly close and fruitful early on, eventually cooled. They remained cordial throughout their lives, but it is always sad to see how they lost something special they once had.

Which is all part of why I ended up appreciating the framing story in this book - while temporally the happier stuff happened early on and the sadder stuff came later, by breaking out of that chronology and into myth we can refocus the story, which lets things end on a really encouraging and sweet note.

One final thought - I was delighted to see that the author John Hendrix is a professor at my old school! I really want to check out some of his other work now; in particular, he has a graphic novel about Dietrich Bonhoeffer's struggle against Adolf Hitler that sounds right up my alley.

Accelerando

I rarely blog about short story collections, and haven't been consistently blogging all of my Charles Stross novels, but I do feel compelled to jot down some thoughts on Accelerando. This is, yes, a short story collection from Charles Stross; but it reads much more like a novel than I expected it too. It might be a bit closer to a classic serialized story, as the stories were originally published in various sci-fi periodicals, but they do tell a unified, fairly linear story.

 

MINI SPOILERS

The stories in Accelerando were written around 2000-ish, and are set in their near future, which is chronologically near our own present. That's one of the things that first caused me to fall in love with Stross through novels like Halting State, where it's science fiction but science that is extrapolated just a few years out from today, based on very firm research being done today.

The main character for most of the book is Manfred Macx, who in many ways is an archetypal cyberpunk protagonist - he even unironically dons mirrorshades at one point. He's very much a Free Software Foundation type of person, creating things and then releasing them for the world to use for the benefit of all mankind. He is pretty strategic in his directions, though. Depending on his idea and the situation, he may grant it to a particular person or entity who he thinks will accomplish the most good with it, and be willing to follow any guidelines he has in mind. Others are just copylefted to the net.

In this future, there is some form of "social credit" system, although I don't think Stross ever uses that specific term. Macx is broke in a traditional sense since he doesn't have any money, but thanks to the massive goodwill he's generated over the years, he doesn't want for anything - he can always find a place to stay, a computer to borrow, a seat on an airplane. This puts him at odds with Pamela, who at the start is his lover but becomes his nemesis: she is a freelance agent for the IRS, a kinky dominatrix who has very traditional values when it comes to raising a family and supporting the government. She is exasperated at Macx, who could easily have earned millions or billions of dollars that could be taxed by the United States, but instead has opted for non-pecuniary remuneration.

Macx reminds me a lot of William Gibson, specifically how he is always living just a little bit further in the future than anyone else. He accomplishes this by always being constantly online, monitoring all the gossip and announcements and speculation: he can draw the connections before anyone else because he has his eyes in every subculture. If Macx didn't exist, his ideas and inventions would still come into being, but some time later, most likely by some corporate group or avaricious entrepreneur. As the book continues, we learn more about the nuts and bolts of how Macx does what he does. There's a stunning sequence when Macx is mugged and has his glasses stolen; this results in the loss of his memory and even his personality. More startling, his mugger becomes Macx, carrying out his schemes and planning new ones. We come to realize that Macx has offloaded most of his memories to digital storage, which he can access on demand through his glasses - well, "access" implies a passive "pull" model, but what Stross depicts is more of an active "push" model. Macx has previously set up agents that take care of the grunt work and just notify him when he needs to take some specific meat-space action. But those "agents" really are, in some way, Macx too - he created them, and when people interact with Macx, they're interacting with the version of him as mediated by his programs.

I won't do a blow-by-blow of all the stories, but the thing I loved most was how it telescopes out into the future. Those early Macx chapters are all very believable and feel like they could be happening now - if Google Glasses had taken off and gotten multiple generations, if the FSF had acquired a truly wealthy benefactor. Macx is pointing the way to the future, but eventually the future arrives and overtakes him. Of course many other people, and eventually everyone, adopts the augmented intelligence he has championed. However, he draws the line at implants, which he sheepishly admits feel weird to him. But the younger generation doesn't have the same qualms, and so their augmentations are an order of magnitude faster and better than Macx's. He fades into a secondary supporting character, and eventually a revered but irrelevant elder as his biological daughter comes to the narrative foreground.

One major change is a sort of "fuzzing" of individuality and eventually reality. If you note someone else who seems interesting to you, you might offer to share some subroutines with them; if they reciprocate, those parts of your greater-self personalities may run a simulation of what your lives together would be like. Because they are just digital, they can run at much faster speeds than biological life, so they could run an experiment of many years of cohabitating in under a minute. You could then each check the results of the collaboration and use that to decide whether to explore greater intimacy together.

There's a recurring subplot about the question of personhood and rights. Early on, Macx is contacted by a colony of lobsters who had been uplifted by a revanchist Soviet Union. They have become self-aware and long for their freedom. Macx arranges for this; specifically, though, they want to leave their lobster bodies behind, and instead become a digital intelligence that is beamed into the depths of outer space. Meanwhile on Earth, people have become more comfortable with concepts of cloning: someone might choose to clone a beloved elder who has passed away, or create cloned versions of their own offspring in the event of some calamity, or the classic gambit of cloning yourself. Besides biological cloning, though, there is digital cloning too. Near the end of the book, technology has advanced to the point where people can upload their consciousness into, well, "the cloud"; once there, it's possible to "fork" your "self", creating two (or more!) copies that start off as identical but may be set on separate tasks. In one example that's great because it's so mundane, a person encounters a loquacious talker when entering a party. He has wanted to talk with this person for a while, but knows that doing so will eat up all his time at the party. So he creates one fork to stay and participate in this dull conversation while the other fork continues mingling with other guests. Ultimately those forks can reintegrate, at which point their memories will join together and synthesize.

So you end up with a variety of conscious entities: AI who have become sentient, non-human animal species that have grown intelligent, humans who have augmented their consciousness with digital agents, humans who have uploaded their consciousness and become purely digital, and, eventually, created beings who have always been digital. Macx can see where this is headed decades earlier, so one of his priorities is to ensure that "human rights" are carefully reconsidered and updated for the coming era of multiple intelligences.

Another thing I've always loved about Stross is how he thinks about the girders that underlie the worlds he creates. How does the economy work in a Berkeleian universe where people experience life through direct neural stimulation rather than through their biological sensors? Well, it ultimately comes down to bandwidth and compute power: these are the actual limited resources; within the digital world, actually experiencing, say, a stage coach or a steamboat or a jet plane are all equivalently "expensive". In the italicized sections fronting each short story, Stross describes how much computing power is held within biological brains versus computers, and notes the point where this crosses over. One of the most striking developments comes when the insatiable demand for additional computing power leads to the demolition of planets: Mercury, Venus, Mars, and eventually the gas giants will be taken apart, their raw material reworked into "computronium", the engineered matter that will expand the grid of digital power. This sounds shocking, but does make a lot of sense: a tiny ping-pong-sized ball of computing power can hold enough capacity for an entire world to experience full lives.

There is an early, brief discussion of the Mormon church in Accelerando, and by the time it reached the end I thought it was surprisingly aligned with some aspects of Mormon theology. Stross isn't Mormon, of course, but in some ways this felt like a Mormon book in the way that, say, Ender's Game never did. The idea of researching ancestry and praying for the salvation for the previously deceased sort of segues into a world where you can collect all known information about a person, and essentially take a crack at "re-souling" them. Of course, for a pre-digital-age person this will be less likely to match who they "really" were, but it still may satisfy the needs of their "summoner"; people who have lived more of their lives digitally can more accurately be studied and reborn. And the explosion in resources does give each person the capacity to essentially have their own universe to create and guide and even populate with new sentient life: the only limit is the amount of matter in the Solar System.

Much like with Halting State, I found myself thinking of Neal Stephenson novels while reading this, but Stross wrote his books earlier. Halting State's MMORPG reminded me of T-RAIN in REAMDE. Accelerando has a lot of overlap with Fall, particularly the idea of digitizing consciousness and living in a purely digital world. In Accelerando, though, this is just one step along a long process, and the veil between living and dead seems at most porous, at least irrelevant; in Fall, there's a much more severe chasm between the living and the dead, mostly due to the different speed at which Bitworld runs.

The few blurbs I've seen about Accelerando describe it as a collection of stories about the singularity, which it probably is, but I did like how the characters within kind of pooh-pooh that idea. There's an early discussion about the singularity, and everyone has a different idea about it. Some think it's just around the corner. Others think it's impossible. Others think it happened centuries ago. Others think it's meaningless. That variety of opinions felt very real to me, which leads to the surprising groundedness of this book.

END SPOILERS

I haven't gotten much into the actual plot of the book, especially the back half, so I'll just note that it's highly entertaining, surprising and rewarding, as I've come to expect from Stross. This book has been a great read, bursting at the seams with ideas. It's kind of shocking that it was written two decades ago; while we aren't living in this world, it did an amazing job at predicting many developments, and even better at anticipating the concerns we'd have today. Overall this is much more of a hard-sci-fi book than, say, the Merchant Princes or Laundry Files series, and I'd definitely recommend it to anyone interested in a nice meaty speculation about our digital future in the universe.

Profanity: Duplicate Virtue

This is probably the longest gap I've had on the blog between posts updating my progress through a game, but here we go: I've returned to Divinity Original Sin after more than a decade, and this time I intend to finish it!

 

My memory of events is slightly hazy after all these years, but I think what went down was: I was playing the game, really digging it, wrote a post and kept playing. I set it aside when Dragon Age: Inquisition came out. I loved DA:I, played it all the way through, then immediately replayed it in Nightmare Mode to unlock achievements. Somewhere in there, Larian announced and then released the Enhanced Edition to D:OS. This was a significant update, modifying the game engine as well as the contents (somewhat analogous to the changes between Shadowrun Dragonfall and Dragonfall: Director's Cut), and they released it as a separate entry on Steam (though giving it for free to all owners of the original "Classic" D:OS).

 

Of course, saved games were not compatible between the two versions. Everything I read said that the EE version of the game was a significant improvement over the (already highly-praised) Classic and there was no reason at all to stick with Classic. But by that point, I had sunk dozens of hours into the game and didn't relish the thought of starting over again from scratch. And on the other hand, I was still much less than halfway through the game, and didn't like the idea of spending so much time playing through an "inferior" version. Compounding all this, I loaded in my last save, and had that awkward moment where you come back to an RPG after several months' hiatus: I couldn't quite remember what I was doing, the big-picture story I'd been unfurling or my immediate quests. I decided to just permanently set it aside and focus on the other new games coming down the pike - and replaying DA:I yet again!

 

In the years since then, I've been repeatedly blown away by the developer Larian's work. I played all the way through Divinity: Original Sin 2, which has the best combat system of any RPG I've ever played. And Baldur's Gate 3 was a huge delight, with fantastic storytelling and an amazing world to explore. I've been feeling that itch since BG3, and wanting to go back and finish D:OS 1 EE. And now I am!

 

 

After all these years, my memory is a bit vague, but I think I've been recognizing some major improvements in the EE over Classic. Crafting is a huge one. If I recall correctly, originally you would read recipe books but the recipes wouldn't be recorded anywhere, so you'd need to hold on to the books and refer back to them (or copy them down on paper yourself or memorize them, but there are hundreds of possible recipes). And the recipe books are kind of jokily written, which is great for flavor but not for clarity. In EE, there's a full Crafting window that includes all the recipes you've read about in books, as well as the ones you've discovered yourself through experimentation. The actual crafting is much easier in the new interface, where you can either select from a list of results or free-form drag in potential items; it filters out your whole inventory so you only see craftable ingredients, which is a huge cognitive help.

All that said, crafting in general is still something I feel a bit ambivalent about. It is a very cool system, something I think I admire more than I enjoy. The sheer scope of it is impressive, much richer and wider than in most other RPGs, with lots of intermediate ingredients, items you can source from anywhere, the ability to craft food and potions and other consumables and equipment and upgrades. That said, only a small fraction of the items you can create are actually useful. I mean, everything does something, but (at least on normal difficulty) you're generally finding plenty of stuff just out in the world. In my game there are a couple of item gaps I was able to fill with crafting, particularly amulets; but I needed to look up those recipes online. Overall the D:OS crafting feels kind of midway between a "gamey" crafting system like in Dragon Age and a "realistic", non-game-y system like in Ultima that simulates an entire economic production chain.

Another difference I noticed from my original play-through was how the dual player character conversations played out. One of the signature features of D:OS is that you create two characters at the start of the game, not just one as in most RPGs. Any given conversation will initiate with one character, but the second PC will have an opportunity to chime in at key moments, particularly when making a decision. I recall role-playing both sides of the conversation in my initial playthrough. In the EE, I pick the response for my currently controlled PC, and the other auto-responds. I eventually realized that that's because I assigned each PC a "Personality" at character creation, which I think picks their response. You can change this partway through the game when you unlock an option to redo character appearance. I switched each to "No AI" and now it's back to the original behavior of you (the player) picking each PC's dialogue responses. So that's good. I have noticed that I'm still approaching the dialogues a little differently: I'm being a bit more min-max-y this time around and reloading after discussions if I don't like the Traits that get assigned, whereas I think in my initial playthrough I had a firmer role-playing mindset.

 

Last change I've noticed from Classic: I remember having major problems dealing with surfaces in the first game. I was constantly walking into poison or into electrified water and Having A Bad Experience. That seems to be happening way less in this EE game. They may have eased up on it, either redesigning combat encounters and the maps to have more forgiving surface layouts, or updating the underlying system to make it harder for your party to activate hazardous surfaces. But it's also possible that I'm just now better at recognizing and avoiding surfaces after the hundreds of hours I've played in D:OS2 and BG2. I do vaguely recall that... hm, I think in D:OS2 the movement cursor would turn red if you hovered over a surface, which definitely doesn't happen in D:OS1 EE, so there are still some times when I think I'm skirting the edge of a surface but I end up accidentally stepping into it and getting in trouble. And I keep forgetting that Bull Rush activates any surfaces you travel through, so if you charge through burning grass and/or a poison cloud you will end up burning and poisoned, even if your start and end positions were clear.

Okay, on to my experience in the new game:

I decided to create all-new PCs instead of redoing my abandoned ones from Classic. I consulted this guide, which I highly recommend to anyone who wants some help. It's spoiler-free, helpfully opinionated without being dogmatic, and written from the ground-up for EE, unlike other information floating around that was based on Classic and never fully updated. In my first playthrough, my cleric Tindali always felt weak; after reading through this guide, I now realize that's because she was splitting between STR for her weapon attacks and INT for her Water magic. You should either go all-in on INT and get multiple schools of magic, or focus on STR and just supplement with utility spells that don't depend on INT. My dagger rogue Sariya felt a lot more powerful, because she was just focusing on DEX, Scoundrel and Dagger, which all went well together.

 

This time I created Rion, who is mostly a pure ranged Archer/Ranger (DEX and Marksman, so far no points in weapons and alternating between Bows and Crossbows, but I plan to specialize in Bows), and has some small splashes in Pyrokinetic, Witchcraft and Scoundrel for utility. Rion is generally my face, although he doesn't have much Charisma that doesn't really seem to matter much; he does have decent Bartering so he handles all buying and selling, and he has Loremaster to identify items. My second PC Noor will be a generalist all-schools Mage, but for now she's mostly focusing on Pyrokinetic and Geomancy, since I've also recruited the NPC Jahan who starts with Aerothurge and Hydrosophist. I haven't put any points into Dirty Deeds, but Noor will swap into Lockpicking and Pickpocket gear in the rare occasions we need it. Jahan, in addition to his magical combat also handles crafting and repairs. Rounding out the party is Madora, a two-handed warrior. Currently she's laser-focused on Man-at-arms but I plan to give her some utility as well.

 

 

I also had Jahan and Madora in my first game, and briefly contemplated using different folks, but I like their personalities and builds so I'm mostly sticking with them. There are another two recruitable NPCs available: Wulfrum, an archer thief, and Bairdotr, a dagger rogue. I've recruited them and immediately dismissed them, as apparently they gain experience along with you whether they're in your party or not. I have no memory at all of either character; it's possible I didn't run into either one the first time, but it's more likely that I didn't realize that they were recruitable: if you have a full party, the game doesn't make clear that they are potential companions, and it's also possible to lose the recruitment opportunity through rock-paper-scissors dialogue. I'm planning to do their personal quests but haven't traveled with either NPC yet.

I'm taking the Pet Pal talent this time. I think I intentionally skipped it in my first game; I don't exactly remember why, but I may have read an article noting that the animal dialogue adds a more comedic element to the game, and I might have decided that I didn't want that. It does add more of a sense of humor, which I enjoy a lot: I've had more than enough Dark Fantasy in my life, I'll enjoy a few puns and silly voices, thank you very much. More importantly though, talking with animals can help you solve quests, and even more importantly, GET new quests you wouldn't otherwise be able to pick up. There's limited XP in this game, so that's a very precious commodity!

 

As with D:OS2, there's effectively a soft level cap from the limited amount of experience available in the game. You can earn exploration XP by entering a new area for the first time - this might be as minor as a hidden cellar or a locked shed. You earn combat XP by defeating enemies. From peeking at online games, a lot of people will intentionally attack otherwise friendly or neutral characters in order to get their precious XP; I'm more likely to take an optional fight in this game than I would otherwise do, but so far haven't felt comfortable fighting friendlies. Finally, you can get XP from completing quests. These can take a long time, as there is usually a decent story involved that unfolds after multiple hours of encounters, but it's a significant amount that can often lead to a new level. Overall all three sources feel well-balanced and worth pursuing.

 

 

Even a decade after release, this game is still ridiculously fun, almost dangerously so. No: definitely dangerously so! I'd play it all day long if I could. When I'm not playing it, I'm hearing the battle music in my head (any one of many catchy themes) and thinking about what I want to do next. It isn't QUITE as finely tuned as D:OS2, but is definitely scratching that itch, in ways that even BG3 didn't manage (as much as I love that game).

I think I'm bringing to this play-through the epiphany I received in D:OS2. In most RPGs, combat is the chore I need to get through in order to experience the story, which is the reward I actually want. In D:OS, combat is the addictive and fun reward that keeps me coming back, and I find myself clicking through story, eager to get back to fights. Not at all to say that there's anything wrong with the story - it's a fine fantasy tale, and I do appreciate the different tone it has from many other RPGs. It's more a testament to how darn good their combat is.

MINI SPOILERS

Plot-wise, I think I'm more or less caught up to where I stopped playing originally. I think I'm past the first big "Zone", having revealed the whole map around Cyseal and I think wrapped up all the quests I can in that area (though I may have missed a few small things). The big storyline here deals with the epidemic of undead who have besieged Cyseal for two years. You uncover a pretty complex conspiracy, with several mysteries and turns and identity revelations. Lots of people aren't what they seem like. You eventually learn that a cult has been trying to acquire some knowledge held by the long-dead sourcerer-king Braccus Rex. They recruited Thelyron, the medic in Cyseal, to locate Braccus and raise him from the dead. To accomplish this he created (or raised?) several other powerful beings, but those beings then began raising undead of their own, and the whole thing spiraled out of control. Nobody was happy, not even the cult since he couldn't find Braccus. You take down all the lieutenants and eventually the reborn Braccus himself.

 

 

I'm now early in the second section, around the smaller village of Silverglen. I do like how each town has its own economy - Cyseal is a harbor town built primarily around fishing, while Silverglen is a mining town deep in the woods by a mine. There's more cult business here, and some fun quest chains around a bunch of troll toll collectors (Larian really loves wordplay). I also need to find a witch who is the sister to a villain.  I'm at level 9, it sounds like the soft cap is around level 21-23 or so.

END SPOILERS

So far there really haven't been any major branching plot lines like you'd get in a BioWare or CD Projekt Red RPG. But it also doesn't feel like it's been running on rails. There is almost total freedom in where to go and what to do, feeling much more like an Ultima than a modern RPG. There's some soft gating in the form of difficult enemies blocking the path, but you don't need to pass story beats to access later parts of the game. You also have a ton of opportunities to advise other NPCs in how to act or to express your reactions to events, and can have your PCs speak with a unified voice or convey diverging views. All that to say that so far I'm not missing the lack of Virmire-style choices. This game is doing something else, and on its terms doing it well.

 

I'm looking forward to jumping back into it. I think that from here on out the content should be all-new to me, but set in a system I'm quickly coming to adore.

Far from the Madding Crowd

I recently finished reading "The Wisdom of Crowds" by James Surowiecki. I had to look up that name just now to spell it - I've been a fan of James' writing for two decades, mostly his excellent column "The Financial Page" in The New Yorker, and have been curious about this book for a while, but just finally got around to reading it. My immediate impetus for checking it out was noticing it on this list of best financial books as compiled by Larry Swedroe. A lot of those are books I've already read and loved, a few I know I'm not interested in, but a few ones like this jumped out at me and gave me a nudge to finally read them.

 

 

TWoC is a great read, the kind of book that's entertaining and makes you feel smart, like you've learned something both personally useful and true about the universe. It feels a bit Malcolm Gladwell-y, in the best positive sense. Like a lot of books in this genre, it's focused around a simple thesis: in this case, that groups of people tend to make better decisions than individuals. Groups are more than the sum of their parts, smarter than the smartest people in them, and can collectively arrive at solutions beyond any individual.

The first example he opens with is the classic example of a contest to guess the number of items in a large jar - how many gumballs or jelly beans or ping-pong balls or whatever. At a state fair people will write down their guess and submit it. At the end, if you add up everyone's guesses and divide by the number of entries, you'll end up with a really great approximation of the answer. In fact, that average answer will often be closer than any individual guesser. He gives a lot of other examples of groups collectively arriving at good solutions, both to complex problems (finding where a submarine landed deep on the ocean floor) and seemingly mundane ones (how to walk down a crowded sidewalk).

One thing that surprised me, though, is that after introducing the thesis, he spends more time exploring examples that seem to contradict the thesis: cases where crowds acted dumbly, where adding more people led to a worse solution, where something that worked well at a small level failed to scale up to a larger one. I think this really helps clarify the main point: by seeing what doesn't work, we can identify what does. The real world is, of course, complicated. We can't say "A always causes B!" We can say "A usually leads to B!" And then we can think about why that's the case, and what makes it more likely for A to lead to B, and what obstacles might prevent A from reaching B.

James classifies the types of problems crowds face into three main types, what he calls "cognition problems," "coordination problems" and "cooperation problems." (Again, this feels pretty Gladwell-y.) Cognition problems are the simplest type, and are cases where there is a specific right answer to find. You don't know at the outset what that answer is, but at some point in the future you will know whether you chose correctly or not. The gumballs-in-a-jar problem is one example, and so are "Where did the submarine crash to the ocean floor?" and even "How much money will this company earn over the next 20 years?" or "Who will be the next President of the United States"? There are multiple ways that groups can organize to tackle these problems, and he is a big fan of a "market" organization, where people bid on their best guesses: putting some skin in the game seems to drastically help the accuracy of predictions. (As a loyal Patreon subscriber to Election Profit Makers, I was intrigued by the description of the Iowa Electronic Market, a forerunner to PredictIt, Polymarket and other modern prediction markets.)

In a "coordination problem," there isn't some fact (past, present, or future) that you're trying to uncover. Instead, a group needs to decide how to accomplish some task, with everyone acting as individuals. Most of his examples here involve traffic, like busy New York City sidewalks or congested freeways. What's interesting about coordination problems is that, as a species, we are actually really good at coordinating, and we tend to do it without much thinking or direction. When scientists studied pedestrians, they discovered that pedestrians don't walk directly behind one another: each one walks slightly to the side of the person in front of them, so they can peer over their shoulder and see what's ahead. We do that for our own benefit, so we can be prepared if foot traffic is snarling ahead, but it also benefits everyone else in the group, since it keeps traffic moving smoothly.

Another example he looks at that I really liked is seating on a subway car. During rush hour, there are more riders than there are seats available. So we have a coordination problem to solve: who should get seats? The unspoken system we've landed with is simple: if you'd like to sit, and there's an open seat, you take it. (With of course caveats for handicapped seats.) Now, you can definitely argue that this isn't an optimal system, and it certainly isn't the only system you can imagine. Maybe we should prioritize giving seats to the people who have the longest to ride - that does seem fair. But if we were to implement that system, then you would need to have some Seating Czar on each subway car, who would quiz each rider as they boarded, compare their travel plans to others already on the car, and reassign seats as needed. Or each boarding rider would need to quiz every other rider to determine their seating order. The system we ended up with is good enough, much simpler and has way less overhead, and it actually does end up having an effect like that ideal system: people who are riding for longer will have more chances to claim seats, so while it won't necessarily be "fair" 100% of the time, it will be pretty fair most of the time. That's decent coordination.

Pretty much everything in the book is based on published scientific studies, not anecdotes, which I appreciated. In the coordination section, he notes that a lot of our behavior is strongly influenced by culture. People feel strongly about queues, for example, and will react strongly if someone asks to cut into a queue; on the other hand, people are much more willing to give up a subway seat if politely requested. The line is a more powerful force in our psyche than a subway car. Behavioral economists and sociologists have played "coordination games" in different countries around the world, and found differences in how players behave. Which is fine - again, for coordination there isn't necessarily a "right" or a "wrong" answer. We can all agree to drive on the left, or we can all agree to drive on the right, and as long as we're all doing it the same way we've successfully coordinated.

The last, and most challenging, class of problem he considers is the "cooperation problem." In this case, you are trying to solve a problem and make something happen: work as a construction crew to build a building, or as a party committee to put on a prom, or as NASA to bring a shuttle of astronauts safely back to Earth. One of the inherently hard things about this type of problem is that there isn't a clear black-or-white "right answer", but there definitely are good outcomes (everyone had a good time at Prom!) and bad outcomes (nobody had a good time at Prom!). With a cooperation problem, you need to decide what needs to be done, how to do it, and execute on it.

There are lots of different ways to organize things. You could have a pure committee, where each person gets one vote, and everyone does what the majority says. You could have a dictatorship, where one person (the boss) decides what to do, and makes everyone do it. And everything in between: pyramidal management structures, affinity groups, multiple classes of participants, etc.

In general, James likes broad-based groups, to tap into the wisdom of crowds. Adding more voices can bring in more ideas, help identify blind spots, and lead to better outcomes. He goes into a lot of detail on where this is and isn't effective. Diversity is very important - not sociological diversity, but people with different perspectives and background who bring unique thoughts to the table. Adding a bunch more Harvard MBAs likely won't improve decision-making, but adding a mix of MBAs, long-time employees, outsiders from other organizations, and customers will.

He writes about "private knowledge," which just means something unique that one person has which isn't shared by everyone. This could be some expertise, but also just having had a previous experience in the past, or knowing a random fact. The sum of all the private knowledge in a group will be greater than the private knowledge of even the most knowledgeable person. So an interesting quality of many group dynamics is that, if you add "dumber" people to a group, the decisions that group makes can actually become "smarter". The total knowledge of the group increases additively, it isn't reduced to the mean.

But, how the group is organized has a huge impact on realizing this potential. There's a long and kind of heart-breaking example of the Columbia explosion, and the days of internal NASA meetings that completely failed to handle the problem. (The underlying issue: there was a botched takeoff, which damaged the foam and protective heat tiles. When it re-entered the atmosphere at the end of the mission, the intense heat destroyed the shuttle.) One big aspect of this was management: the mission manager chair Linda Ham quickly settled on an interpretation of the facts that she liked, and downplayed and cut off other voices who suggested alternative (and, it turns out, better) explanations. This is a really wrenching section to read, I think especially because the dynamics shown here are often seen in workplaces throughout the country, but with the severest consequences.

James doesn't just blame the one person at top (even if the fact one person was driving everything contributed to the problem). He rhetorically asks, what was the difference between the Apollo 13 mission and the Columbia mission? One answer is that the Apollo 13 ground control was much more diverse. As he points out, that is a kind of shocking thing to say: when you see photos of the Apollo-era ground control, everyone has identical haircuts, identical classes and identical short-sleeved shirts. But because NASA was so new, everyone had worked somewhere else before joining. Some were ex-military, some were in manufacturing, some had worked in research labs, some managed retail stores. By contrast, by the time of the Columbia disaster, NASA was a much more insular and bureaucratic operation. Most people there had joined right out of college and spent their entire careers inside NASA. Because of that they all shared the same culture, similar mindsets and attitudes towards hierarchies. That made it far less likely for someone to speak up to challenge the decision of a leader, and even less likely to press on an issue once they had been shut down.

The book is filled with nifty examples like that. It is very much a relic of its time, having been written in 2004, and I felt a little sad reading James's praises of Google. I was reminded of just how magical Google was back then - you could type something into a search box and it did a really good job at finding you the information you needed. He explains how the PageRank algorithm works, which is essentially a voting mechanism, tapping into the "wisdom of crowds" to find the most useful information instead of relying on a single authoritative source (a la Yahoo at the time). Google's fall from grace has been well-documented, and I'm a bit more sympathetic to their decline: even before the disastrous decision to remove the wall between Search and Ads, Google had been dealing for over a decade with an entire SEO industry that had sprung up specifically to manipulate its algorithm into unduly weighting preferred sites. Voting worked well when the data was clean, but when you vote with dirty data you'll get dirty results.

It was also interesting to read about business in the window after the tech bubble crash of the late 90s-early 2000s and the Great Financial Crisis of 2008. I don't think the GFC invalidated anything he wrote here, but he certainly would have referenced it if it had already happened. In the context of this book, an asset bubble like tech stocks is probably a more applicable example than a systemic financial problem like the GFC.

I think of James primarily as a business writer, but TWoC as a whole is much less about business than I had expected. He draws mostly from science and sociology, with smatterings of history, pop culture and other fields. There are more business examples as the book continues, but he mostly pays attention to how things work inside individual businesses, especially at the level of small teams. This is much more micro than most of my business and econ reading these days, which are far more focused on macro. But the micro level is much more applicable to our lives, the level where we can recognize problems and systems and personally act to fix them.

I found myself thinking periodically of Nexus while reading this, and parts of this book seemed to be in conversation with that one, but that may be because I read them back-to-back. Both books are interested in information, and have examples where adding more information leads to a worse outcome. Returning to that gumball example, late in the book James recounts a study where a professor ran the classic experiment, and as usual got a pretty accurate result. He didn't share this result with his class, but instead asked them to submit new guesses, this time prompting them to note that the container was made out of plastic, and that the area under the cap could contain additional gumballs. All of this is information students could have, and maybe did, observe in the first round, and all of the information he shared was true. And yet in the second round of voting, guesses came in significantly over the actual answer. Having an authority figure inject additional information skewed the natural accuracy of the crowd and drew it astray. That's interesting!

Overall I think the Wisdom of Crowds is a more optimistic book than Nexus. It's hopeful that crowds can identify the truth that points to an underlying reality, collectively making discoveries. That isn't a guarantee, and there are definitely ways that crowds can be drawn astray or hijacked by bad actors, but in general we as a society do our best work when we're cooperating in groups. He has some thoughtful pages on the implications for democracy as well. It's pretty shocking how poorly informed voters are: most people (at least as of 2004, though I doubt it's much better now) believe that the US spends 20-40% of its tax dollars on foreign aid, when it's actually less than 1%. Collectively, we're shockingly ignorant about economics, foreign policy, and most big-picture topics. And yet, we (historically) have done a decent job at electing leaders who do a decent job at handling those things. Some of us daydream of a technocratic elite that knows stuff and can do things, but the dumb masses end up with a system that works just as well, and is (theoretically) more resistant to capture or authoritarianism.

So, yeah! I liked this book, it's one of those general topics that I think will be interesting and relevant to most people.