Category: Books

My Conversation with the excellent Tobi Lütke

by  Tyler Cowen in

Here is the audio, video, and transcript.  Here is the episode summary:

Tyler and Tobi hop from Germany to Canada to America to discuss a range of topics like how outsiders make good coders, learning in meetings by saying wrong things, having one-on-ones with your kids, the positives of venting, German craftsmanship vs. American agility, why German schooling made him miserable, why there aren’t more German tech giants, untranslatable words, the dividing line of between Northern and Southern Germany, why other countries shouldn’t compare themselves to the US, Canada’s lack of exports and brands, ice skating to work in Ottawa, how VR and AI will change retailing, why he expects to be “terribly embarrassed” when looking back at companies in the 2020s, why The Lean Startup is bad for retailers, how fantasy novels teach business principles, what he’s learning next, and more.

Excerpt:

COWEN: Are Canadians different in meetings than US Americans?

LÜTKE: Yes, as well. Yes, that’s true. It’s more on the side of American, definitely on a minimum quality bar. I think Canadians are often more about long term. I’ve seen Canadians more often think about what’s the next step after this step, but also just low ambition. That’s probably not the most popular thing to say around here, but Canada’s problem, often culturally, is a go-for-bronze mentality, which apparently is not uncommon for smaller countries attached to significantly more cultural or just bigger countries.

Actually, I found it’s very easy to work around. I think a lot of our success has been due to just me and my co-founder basically allowing everyone to go for world class. Everyone’s like, “Oh, well, if we are allowed to do this, then let’s go.” I think that makes a big difference. Ratcheting up ambition for a project is something that one has to do in a company in Canada.

COWEN: Is there something scarce that is needed to inject that into Canada and Canadians? Or is it simply a matter of someone showing up and doing it, and then it just all falls out and happens?

LÜTKE: I don’t know. Inasmuch as Shopify may be seen as something that succeeded, that alone didn’t do it. It would’ve been very, very nice if that would’ve happened. Now there’s another cohort of founders coming through. Some of them have been part of Shopify or come back from — I believe there are some great companies in Calgary, like NEO, that are more ambitious.

I think it’s a bit of a decision. The time it worked perfectly was when Canada was hosting the Winter Olympics, which is now a little bit of ancient history. There was actually a program Canada-wide that’s called Own the Podium. That makes sense. It’s home. We have more winter than most, so therefore let’s do well. And then we did. It’s just by far the best performance of Canada’s Olympic team of all times. I think to systematize it and make it stick — changing a culture is very, very difficult, but instances of just giving everyone permission to go for it have also been super successful.

And this:

COWEN: Say we compare Germany to the Netherlands, which is culturally pretty similar, very close to Koblenz. They have ASML, Adyen. Netherlands is a smaller country. Why have they done relatively better? Or you could cite Sweden, again, culturally not so distant from Germany.

LÜTKE: You’re asking very good questions that I much rather would ask you. [laughs] I don’t know. I wish I knew. I started at a small company in Germany; it didn’t do anything. So, it’s not like people didn’t do this. I came to Canada, again, this time it worked. Then I was head down for a very long time, building my thing because it was all-consuming, so I didn’t pay too much attention to — I wasn’t even very deliberate about where to start a company. I started in Ottawa because that’s where my wife and I were during the time she was studying there. We could find great talent there that was overlooked, it seemed, and gave everyone a project to be ambitious with, and it worked.

I think that if you create in geography a consensus that you’re a company really, really worth working for because it’s interesting work, great work, it might actually lead to something — then you can build it. I don’t quite understand why this is not possible to do in so many places in Germany because, again, Germany does have this wonderful appreciation of craftsmanship, which I think is actually underrepresented in software. I think it’s only recently — usually by Europeans — being brought up. Patrick Collison talks about it more and more, and certainly I do, too.

Making software is a craft. I think, in this way, Germany, Czech Republic, other places, Poland, are extremely enlightened in making this part of an apprenticeship system. I apprenticed as a computer programmer, and I thought it was exactly the right way to learn these things. Now, that means there’s, I believe, a lot of talent that then makes decisions other than putting it together to build ambitious startups. Something needs to be uncorked by the people who have more insight than I have.

COWEN: I think part of a hypothesis is that the Netherlands, and also Sweden, are somewhat happier countries than Germany. People smile more. At least superficially, they’re more optimistic. They’re more outgoing.

LÜTKE: I think it’s optimism.

COWEN: It’s striking to me that Germans, contrary to stereotype — I think they have a quite good sense of humor, but a lot of it is irony or somewhat black. Maybe that’s bad for tech. I wonder: people in the Bay Area — do they have a great sense of humor? I’m not sure they do. Maybe there’s some correlations across those variables.

Definitely recommended.  Can you guess which is the one question Tobi refused to answer, for fear of being cancelled?

Two missing markets

by  Tyler Cowen in

The London Times, in its Sunday on-line culture section, no longer has a weekly article listing what they think are the best books of the year.  Yet they continue to run similar weekly articles for music and film and television.

The books feature has, for me, been the single strongest reason to subscribe to the paper.

Dolcezza, the D:C.-based gelato maker, has replaced its “dark chocolate” with a corrupted and far inferior “dark chocolate fudge,” which I simply do not buy.

The people request their missing markets back!

What I’ve been reading

by  Tyler Cowen in

1. Bécquer Seguín, The Op-Ed Novel: A Literary History of Post-Franco Spain.  I liked this book very much, as it gave me extremely useful background on the Spanish fiction I enjoy.  It may make less sense to read if you don’t already know the relevant fiction, but in any case a fine work.  Imagine, by the way, if America had an equally strong correlation between novelists and Op-Ed columnists.

2. Ken McNab, Shake It Up, Baby! The Rise of Beatlemania and the Mayhem of 1963.  At the beginning of that year, John and Paul despaired of making it as a rock band, and expected to end up as songwriters for other people, much like Goffin-King at the time.  By the end of the year however…  This is the story of how that happened.  Very well done.

3. Ian Frazier, Paradise Bronx: The Life and Times of New York’s Greatest Borough.  An excellent, fun, and much-needed book.  I liked the parts about the 20th century best.  I am still longing for that cost-benefit analysis of the Cross-Bronx Expressway, though.  We know the Interstate Highway system passes the cost-benefit test massively, but do all of its constituent parts?

4. Simon Morrison, Tchaikovsky’s Empire: A New Life of Russia’s Greatest Composer.  My favorite book about Tchaikovsky, engaging but it also covers the music for the music’s sake as well.  I liked this sentence from the book jacket: “His life and art were framed by Russian national ambition, and his work was the emanation of an imperial subject: kaleidoscopic, capacious, cosmopolitan.”  The book does go relatively light on Tchaikovsky’s um…personal life.

There is Matt Grossman and David A. Hopkins, and their suitably titled and subtitled Polarized Degrees: How the Diploma Divide and the Culture War Transformed American Politics.

Pakistan is a drastically undercovered country, but now Lahore has some coverage, in Manan Ahmed Asif’s Disrupted City: Walking the Pathways of Memory and History in Lahore.

Marieke Brandt, Tribes and Politics in Yemen: A History of the Houthi Conflict had far more detailed than I was seeking.  But I read about one fifth of it, and learned a great deal from that.

J.C.D. Clark, The Enlightenment: An Idea and its History, sounds smart but somehow stays too much at the meta-level of commentary on the commentary?

Victor Davis Hanson has a new book The End of Everything: How Wars Descend into Annihilation.

*Self-Help is Like a Vaccine*, by Bryan Caplan

by  Tyler Cowen in

This is one of the best and most correct self-help books.  Bryan describes it as follows:

I’ve been writing economically-inspired self-help essays for almost two decades, Self-Help Is Like a Vaccine compiles the most helpful 5-7% of my advice.

Of Bryan’s recent string of books, this is the one I agree with the most.  Bryan offers some further description:

Like my other books of essays, Self-Help Is Like a Vaccine is divided into four parts.

  • The first, “Unilateral Action,” argues that despite popular nay-saying and “Can’t-Do” mentalities, you have a vast menu of unexplored choices. Where there’s a will, there’s a way. While most “minorities of one” are fools, cautious experimentation and appreciation of good track records, not conformism, is the wise response.
  • The next section, “Life Hacks,” offers a bunch of specific suggestions for improving your life. Only one hack has to work out to instantly justify your purchase of the book.
  • “Professor Homeschool” brings together all of my best pieces on teaching my own kids. I have over a decade’s experience: I taught the twins for grades 7-12, all four kids for Covid, and my 10th-grader is working one room away from me as I write. Except during Covid, homeschooling is a fair bit of extra work, but if you’re still curious, I’ve got a pile of time-tested advice.
  • I close the book with “How to Dale Carnegie.” As you may know, I’m a huge fan of his classic How to Win Friends and Influence People. Not because I’m naturally a people-pleaser; I’m not. But with Dale’s help, I have managed to make thousands of friends all over the planet. Few skills are more useful, both emotionally and materially.

You can buy the book here.

My excellent Conversation with Philip Ball

by  Tyler Cowen in

Here is the audio, video, and transcript.  Here is part of the episode summary:

Tyler and Philip discuss how well scientists have stood up to power historically, the problematic pressures scientists feel within academia today, artificial wombs and the fertility crisis, the price of invisibility, the terrifying nature of outer space and Gothic cathedrals, the role Christianity played in the Scientific Revolution, what current myths may stick around forever, whether cells can be thought of as doing computation, the limitations of The Selfish Gene, whether the free energy principle can be usefully applied, the problem of microplastics gathering in testicles and other places, progress in science, his favorite science fiction, how to follow in his footsteps, and more.

Here is one excerpt, namely the opening bit:

TYLER COWEN: Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Conversations with Tyler. Today I’ll be chatting with Philip Ball. I think of Philip this way. We’ve had over 200 guests on Conversations with Tyler, and I think three of them, so far, have shown they are able to answer any question I might plausibly throw their way. Philip, I believe, is number four. He’s a scientist with degrees in chemistry and physics. He’s written about 30 books on different sciences. Both he and I have lost count.

He was an editor at Nature for about 20 years. His books cover such diverse topics as chemistry, physics, the history of experiments, social science, color, the elements, water, water in China, Chartres Cathedral, music, and more. But most notably, he has a new book out this year, a major work called How Life Works: A User’s Guide to the New Biology. Philip, welcome.

PHILIP BALL: Thank you, Tyler. Lovely to be here.

COWEN: What is the situation in history where scientists have most effectively stood up to power, not counting Jewish scientists, say, leaving Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union?

BALL: Gosh, now there’s a question to start with. Where they have most effectively stood up to power — this is a question that I looked at in a book (it must be about 10 years old now) which looked at the response of German physicists during the Nazi era to that regime. I’m afraid my conclusion was, the response was really not very impressive at all.

On the whole, the scientists acquiesced to what the regime wanted them to do. Very few of them were actively sympathetic to the Nazi party, but they mounted no real effective opposition whatsoever. I’m afraid that looking at that as a case study, really, made me realize that it’s actually very hard to find any time in history where scientists have actively mounted an effective opposition to that kind of imposition of some kind of ideology, or political power, or whatever. History doesn’t give us a very encouraging view of that.

That said, I think it’s fair to say, science is doing better these days. I think there’s a recognition that at an institutional level, science needs to be able to mobilize its resources when it’s threatened in this way. I think we’re starting to see that, certainly, with climate change. Scientists have come under fire a huge amount in that arena. I think there’s more institutional understanding of what to do about that. Scientists aren’t being so much left to their own devices to cope as best they can individually.

But I think that there’s this attitude that is still somewhat prevalent within science, that’s a bit like, “We’re above that.” This is exactly what some of the German physicists, particularly Werner Heisenberg, said during the Nazi regime, that science is somehow operating in a purer sphere, and that it’s removed from all the nastiness and the dirtiness that goes on in the political arena.

I think that that attitude hasn’t gone completely, but I think it needs to go. I think scientists need to get real, really, about the fact that they are working within a social and political context that they have to be able to work with, and to be able to — when the occasion demands it — take some control of, and not simply be pushed around by.

That, I think, is something that can only happen when there are institutional structures to allow it to happen, so that scientists are not left to their own individual devices and their own individual sense of morality to do something about it. I’m hoping that science will do better in the future than it’s done in the past.

COWEN: Which do you think are the power structures today that current scientists, say in the Anglo world, are most in thrall to?

Recommended, there are numerous topics of interest.  I also asked GPT how much money it could earn if it had the powers of Wells’s Invisible Man.

The Daylight Computer

by  Tyler Cowen in

I am pleased and also honored to have been sent an advance copy of The Daylight Computer.

It performs functions similar to those of an iPad and a Kindle, but with improvements.

My first surprise is that I proved capable of operating the thing.  It requires no expertise above and beyond what you need to use your current devices, arguably less.

Here is the review of Dwarkesh, and here is the review of @patio11.  Both are consistent with my impressions, but Patrick McKenzie’s uses are closer to mine.  I’ve been looking for a Kindle improvement for a long time, and this is it.  Kindle Fire was not.

This seems to be the best general reading device humans ever have invented.  Compared to a Kindle, the page is much larger, the color choice is excellent, scrolling is easy, it is far better for showing maps, and it captures far more of “does this feel like reading a book?” impression than a Kindle ever did.  It also can handle all sorts of glare and sunlight issues.

It can connect to a wireless system more easily and effectively than a Kindle — ever have that problem in your hotel room?  The hotel makes you fill in extra fields, and the Kindle interface is not well suited for that.

The Daylight Computer just seems very generally well thought out.

I am also told that an AI function will make it possible to query reading passages at will, and easily, yet without leaving your reading window.  This is not yet up and running on my demo version, but it will be a major advance.

So I will continue to use this device and also will travel with it.

There is some other set of associated benefits, something about being able to use some iPad-like functions, but without the full distractions of the internet (see the Dwarkesh review).  That is not relevant for my own planned consumption habits, but it may be a significant benefit to many.

You can pre-order yours here.

Jon Haidt on causality (from my email)

by  Tyler Cowen in

“Hi Tyler,

i have big news about the debate over social media harming teens.
So much of it hangs on the claim that the evidence is just correlational, not causal.

Zach Rausch and I show that this is not true; the experiments DO show causation, very clearly and consistently.

Here are my 2 tweets about the post:

https://x.com/JonHaidt/status/1829163166066205168

https://x.com/JonHaidt/status/1829165292460859869

A lot of people heard our discussion, and enjoyed how spirited and yet civil it was.

Might you include the link to this post in your daily email:

https://www.afterbabel.com/p/the-case-for-causality-part-1

We have 3 more coming. We think we can prove causality using just the existing experiments.

thanks for considering it.
jon”

TC again: I received this email this morning, and told Jon I would post it on MR without response from me, so here it is.

Rawls Killed Marx

by  Alex Tabarrok in

I found this Joseph Heath post very informative. In essence, Marx was about exploitation but when no theory of exploitation without gaping holes could be developed, the analytical Marxists shifted to egalitarianism ala Rawls.

Back when I was an undergraduate, during the final years of the cold war, by far the most exciting thing going on in political philosophy was the powerful resurgence of Marxism in the English-speaking world. Most of this work was being done under the banner of “analytical Marxism” (aka “no-bullshit Marxism”), following the publication of Gerald Cohen’s Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence (and his subsequent elevation to the Chichele Professorship in Social and Political Philosophy at Oxford). Meanwhile in Germany, Jürgen Habermas’s incredibly compact Legitimationsprobleme im Spätkapitalismus promised to reinvigorate Marx’s analysis of capitalist crises in the language of contemporary systems theory. It was an exciting time to be a young radical. One could say, without exaggeration, that many of the smartest and most important people working in political philosophy were Marxists of some description.

So what happened to all this ferment and excitement, all of the high-powered theory being done under the banner of Western Marxism? It’s the damndest thing, but all of those smart, important Marxists and neo-Marxists, doing all that high-powered work, became liberals. Every single one of the theorists at the core of the analytic Marxism movement – not just Cohen, but Philippe van Parijs, John Roemer, Allen Buchanan, and Jon Elster – as well as inheritors of the Frankfurt School like Habermas, wound up embracing some variant of the view that came to be known as “liberal egalitarianism.” Of course, this was not a capitulation to the old-fashioned “classical liberalism” of the 19th century, it was rather a defection to the style of modern liberalism that found its canonical expression in the work of John Rawls.

If one felt like putting the point polemically, one might say that the “no-bullshit” Marxists, after having removed all of the bullshit from Marxism, discovered that there was nothing left but liberalism.

That’s the opening. Read the whole thing.

What should I ask Musa al-Gharbi?

by  Tyler Cowen in

Yes, I will be doing a Conversation with him.

Musa al-Gharbi is a sociologist and assistant professor in the School of Communication and Journalism at Stony Brook University. He is a columnist for The Guardian and his writing has also appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and The Atlantic, among other publications.

I am a big fan of his forthcoming book We Have Never Been Woke, which I have blurbed.  Here is Musa’s home page, do read his bio.  Here is Musa on Twitter.

So what should I ask?

What I’ve been reading

by  Tyler Cowen in

1. Anna Bogutskaya, Feeding the Monster: Why Horror Has a Hold on Us.  A fun read about the importance of horror movies in contemporary culture, and a lament that we underrate them.

2. Daniel Tammet, Nine Minds: Inner Lives on the Spectrum.  This is probably the best book of profiles of high-achieving autistics, with the chapter on Dan Ackroyd especially interesting.  Do note that the writing style is autistic, which you may consider either a plus or a minus.   And “Are we there yet?”

3. Michael Haas, Music of Exile: The Untold Story of the Composers Who Fled Hitler.  A detailed, well-organized and captivating look at this story.  My conclusion, though, is that the Germanic compositional scene already was starting to reach dead ends in terms of quality and innovation?

4. Oren Kessler, Palestine 1936: The Great Revolt and the Roots of the Middle East Conflict.  A good look at the festering problems in place before 1948.  Among other things, it shows how many of the current arguments and debates have very deep roots, and just how far back the lack of trust goes.

5. Luke Stegemann, Madrid: A New Biography.  Madrid is now one of the world’s very very best cities.  You can judge tomes like this by how many other books they induced you to read or buy, and in this case the number was eight.  I bought a whole catalog of color plates by the 18th century still life painter Melendez, for instance.  Recommended.

6. Michael H. Kater, After the Nazis: The Story of Culture in West Germany.  Another excellent work.  From this book I took away the (unintended?) conclusion that the German written and cinematic contributions have not aged well, due to excessive (but understandable) preoccupations with Naziism and the Second World War.  The greatest German postwar cultural contributions in fact are Richter, Beuys, Kiefer, Baselitz, Stockhausen, Kraftwerk, and Can.  The less literal artistic forms dealt with the war obsession in more effective and lasting ways, noting that some Kiefer works still have this problem.

Self-recommending is Dana Gioia, Poetry as Enchantment, and Other Essays.  The essays on Frost, Auden, and Bradbury are some of my favorites.

Jordan Ott’s Back to the Future: How to Reignite American Innovation is exactly that.

Speaking of Kraftwerk, I also enjoyed the new Simon Reynolds book Futuromania: Electronic Dreams, Desiring Machines, and Tomorrow’s Music Today  Reynolds is very good at covering parts of music history that other people ignore.

More to come!

The new Elizondo book

by  Tyler Cowen in

The title is Imminent: Inside the Pentagon’s Hunt for UFOs.  This is a difficult book to review.  For instance, it has passages like the following:

In one particular instance, a senior CIA official and his wife had a terrifying UAP experience in the backyard of their own home.  When they awoke lying on the ground in the yard, the CIA officer had a small hole punched in the back of his neck and his wife had a small metallic object recovered from her nose when she sneezed [TC: what percentage of younger American women have this?].  Making things even more interesting, CIA doctors were notified of the circumstances and examined the patients.

I would bet very heavily against what seems to be Elizondo’s interpretation of those events.  So if you read this book, do not trust any section that puts forward propositions about aliens.  And that is much of the book.

That said, no matter what your view on aliens, the bureaucratic history surrounding debates on aliens is a fascinating one, and one very much underexplored by serious scholars.  For instance, the more skeptical you are about aliens, the more you have to think our military and intelligence bureaucracies are just entirely, out of control insane.  Here you will get a first person account of how incidents such as Tic Toc and GIMBAL evolved.  I am not talking about interpretations concerning the aliens, I mean just the history of how these events were processed, recorded, and discussed.  Along that exceedingly scarce dimension, this is indeed a valuable memoir.

Can you trust Elizondo on such “ordinary” matters when you cannot trust him on the accounts of the aliens?  I am not sure, but my intuition says yes?  So in probabilistic terms, this is a historical document of import.  If used with care.

I cannot recommend a book which to me has so many apparent blatant falsehoods, but I would not try to talk you out of reading it either.  There is something here, and time will tell what exactly that is.