Seth's Blog

Sue Halpern has written the first interesting assessment of Steve Jobs I’ve seen, in the form of a book review of Isaacson’s biography. It happens to be very negative. She says little about his now-well-known bad treatment of coworkers, friends and family (“a bully, a dissembler, a cheapskate, a deadbeat dad, a manipulator”) and focusses on the effects of Apple Computer, which are obviously much greater.

She makes one very bad point. He should not call himself an artist, she argues:

There is no doubt that the products Steve Jobs brilliantly conceived of and oversaw at Apple were elegant and beautiful, but they were, in the end, products. Artists, typically, aim to put something of enduring beauty into the world; consumer electronics companies aim to sell a lot of gadgets, manufacturing desire for this year’s model in the hope that people will discard last year’s.

“In the end, products”? “Gadgets”? Are books gadgets? I cannot imagine a future without books. Nor one without cellphones and laptops. If they are lovely and work well, so much the better for all of us.  Moreover, cellphones and laptops, much more than other necessities (food, clothes, housing, transportation, medicine) help us express ourselves — our hidden inner selves — in so many ways. (Like art and books, but better.) Mark Fraunfelder made a similar point (obliquely).

“Products” and “gadgets” is Halpern’s conventional anti-consumerism. She goes on to make two equally conventional but much better points:

According to a study reported by Bloomberg News last January, Apple ranked at the very bottom of twenty-nine global tech firms “in terms of responsiveness and transparency to health and environmental concerns in China.” Yet walking into the Foxconn factory, where people routinely work six days a week, from early in the morning till late at night standing in enforced silence, Steve Jobs might have entered his biggest reality distortion field of all. “You go into this place and it’s a factory but, my gosh, they’ve got restaurants and movie theaters and hospitals and swimming pools,” he said after being queried by reporters about working conditions there shortly after a spate of suicides. “For a factory, it’s pretty nice.”

Apple had (and has) the power to improve working conditions at Foxconn. I completely agree: this was (and is) an enormous missed opportunity, for which Steve Jobs is completely responsible. No doubt he said that Apple products empower individuals (and they do) — well, how about empowering Foxconn workers?

Halpern’s final point is about recycling:

Next year will bring the iPhone 5, and a new MacBook, and more iPods and iMacs. What this means is that somewhere in the third world, poor people are picking through heaps of electronic waste in an effort to recover bits of gold and other metals and maybe make a dollar or two. Piled high and toxic, it is leaking poisons and carcinogens like lead, cadmium, and mercury that leach into their skin, the ground, the air, the water. Such may be the longest-lasting legacy of Steve Jobs’s art.

Yeah. Apple could (and can) lead the world in making their products easy to recycle. They haven’t. Entirely Steve Jobs’ fault. As Halpern says, this really matters.

Steve Jobs spent his working life (a) exploiting the commercial potential of new products (home computer, etc.) in large part by (b) caring obsessively, much more than others in his rarefied position, such as Bill Gates, about how they made him feel. Apple made products that Steve Jobs enjoyed. Fine. The problem is what Steve Jobs enjoyed. My take on him is a lot can be explained by (a) he cared little what others thought of him and (b) he lived in a tiny, uncomplicated intellectual world — as illustrated by his remarks about Foxconn and his Stanford graduation speech. Nabokov might say he had the emotional development of a child and the curiosity of an adult.

He left behind a company that reflects the shallowness of what he cared about. Those who take over Apple Computer are likely to be less shallow than he was — most people are. I predict the company will begin to care more about working conditions, ease of recycling, and other things beyond immediate user experience.

• The Shangri-La Diet: still too good to be true. It was my dream — and maybe every scientist’s dream — to discover something (a) useful and (b) counter-intuitive, the more surprising the better. It did not occur to me that (a) and (b) conflict. I think that more surprising discoveries are eventually more useful (as logic suggests), but it takes much longer.
• Marisa Tomei wants to play Jane Jacobs. “I love that she saved Greenwich Village.” When she does, perhaps Robert Caro will post the unpublished Jane Jacobs chapter of The Power Broker.
• Symposium on The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs.
• Did you know that Mindy Kaling’s amusing article in this week’s New Yorker is an excerpt from a forthcoming book? Neither did I. Likewise, the recent Murakami story Town of Cats was from a forthcoming book. The New Yorker, unlike other magazines, never identifies book excerpts. This  is unfortunate because doing so would help both writers (sell books) and readers (find books to read). For more criticism of  The New Yorker, see the great book Gone: The Last Days of The New Yorker by Renata Adler.

Thanks to Dave Lull.

Edward Jay Epstein‘s newest Kindle book is James Jesus Angleton: Was He Right?. Angleton worked at the CIA most of his career, which spanned the Cold War. He struck some of his colleagues as paranoid: He believed that the CIA could easily contain Russian spies. Colleagues said Oh, no, that couldn’t happen. After his death, it turned out he was right (e.g., Aldrich Ames). At one point he warned the CIA director, “an intelligence [agency] is most vulnerable to deception when it considers itself invulnerable to deception.”

What interests me is the asymmetry of the mistakes. When it really matters, we overestimate far more than underestimate our understanding. CIA employees’ overestimation of their ability to detect deception is a big example. There are innumerable small examples. When people are asked to guess everyday facts (e.g., height of the Empire State Building) and provide 95% confidence intervals for their guesses, their intervals are too short, usually much too short (e.g., the correct answer is outside the intervals 20% of the time). People arrive at destinations more often later than expected than earlier than expected. Projects large and small take longer than expected far more often than shorter than expected. For any one example, there are many possible explanations. But the diversity of examples suggests the common thread is true: We are too sure of what we know.

There are several plausible explanations. One is that it helps groups work together. If people work together toward a single goal, they are more likely to reach that goal and at least learn what happens than if they squabble. Another is the same idea at an individual level. Overconfidence in our beliefs helps us act on them. By acting on them, we learn. Doing nothing teaches less. A third is a mismatch idea: We are overconfident because modern life is more complicated than the Stone-Age world to which evolution adjusted our brains. No one asked Stone-Age people How tall is the Empire State Building? A fourth is that we assume what physicists assume: the distant world follows the same rules as the world close to us. This is a natural assumption, but it’s wrong.

Early in Angleton’s career, he had a very unpleasant shock: He realized he had been fooled by the Russians in a big way for a long time. This led him to try to understand why he’d been fooled. Early in my scientific career, I too was shocked: Rats in Skinner boxes did not act as expected far more often than I would have thought. I overestimated my understanding of them. In a heavily-controlled heavily-studied situation! I generalized from this. If I couldn’t predict the behavior of rats in a Skinner box, I couldn’t predict human behavior in ordinary life. My conclusion was data is more precious than we think. In other words, data is underpriced. If a stock is underpriced, you buy as much of it as possible. I tried to collect as much data as possible. Personal science — studying my sleep, my weight, and so on — was a way to gather data at essentially zero cost. And, indeed, the results surprised me far more than I expected. I could act based on the overconfidence effect but I could not remove it from my expectations.

Yesterday was the first day of one of my Tsinghua classes. It has about 25 students. I asked each of them to say their favorite book in English. Several were mentioned twice: Pride and Prejudice (mentioned three times), Harry Potter, Catcher in the Rye, The Little Prince, and — this surprised me — The Secret. The last student to answer this question said her favorite book was Lolita. The class oohed. Last year a student said his favorite book was Ulysses. I said my favorite book was Cities and the Wealth of Nations. (A close second is Totto-Chan.)

I said the class would have three underlying principles: (more…)

• The shame of college sports. Great article by Taylor Branch.
• Retraction watch
• protein folding problem solved by on-line gamers
• Edward Jay Epstein review of two books about the 2001 anthrax attacks

Thanks to Dave Lull and Justin Owings.