Flash Boys book review
Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt by Michael Lewis
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This is a quick-reading tale about trying to fight the High Frequency Trader (HFT) powers that be, which have succeeded in doing the seemingly impossible: made Wall Street more unfair. If you’ve seen Kevin Slavin’s TED talk on how algorithms literally shape our world (http://www.ted.com/talks/kevin_slavin…), then you know part of the story already. Where Michael Lewis takes it is a thorough play-by-play history of how IEX (Investory’s Exchange) set about creating a stock exchange that controlled for the speed advantage that HFT have to re-empower investors to make trades when and how they wanted to without being outrun and priced up by HFT. It’s a story of personalities, brusque Wall Street types and technologists, who are tried of people getting screwed by the new system.
It’s a pretty eye-opening read with regard to how Wall Street now works. I was thoroughly disillusioned as someone counting on the stock market to help finance my retirement. I couldn’t believe how many ways there were of extracting value from my money, without creating any actual value, that were built into the system. This form of capitalism as actually anti-capitalistic; it’s perverse. What was even more gobsmacking was the story of Serge Aleynikov. A programmer who ends up convicted of corporate espionage for saving open source code repositories that he worked with while at Goldman Sachs. For anyone connected to the open source software community, the story of how Goldman Sachs regularly strips off the open source licenses of code that they add to their own codebase and then refuse to let programmers contribute back to the OSS projects modifications or even save any of that code themselves is horrendous.
If you take away one thing, it’s that Wall Street might be the most paranoid and cutthroat corporate environment to work in. The money is attractive but the culture is hostile; it’s a miracle that IEX was created in the first place, let alone still exists! Michael Lewis does an amazing job of keeping the pages turning quickly with lots of dialogue from a cast of colorful characters. Definitely a fun and informative and depressing read.
Genius book review
Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman by James Gleick
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I could read biographies like this all day long, everyday. And I certainly tried to do that with James Gleick’s Genius. It’s not just that it’s written well and thoroughly researched with great details, anecdotes, and quotes. It’s that the character at the center—Richard Feynman—is so compelling. As Gleick shows, Feynman worked hard to make himself into the iconoclastically interesting person he was. He held on to his roots as a bit of a bumpkin, growing up just beyond the edges of New York City. He hated most music but loved rhythm and became an accomplished bongos player. And as a scientist, he refused to follow anything that looked “fashionable.” I loved the quotes from Feynman where he states his role as a scientist isn’t to explain how other physicists solved a problem, it was to go and actually solve problems. He claimed to only read contemporary journal articles in physics so far as he could understand the problem, then he would go off and try to solve it himself using his own methods.
Gleick attempts to draw out larger lessons in the book about the nature of genius and creativity. This was the only disjointed part of the book I thought. The sub-chapter on genius seems like a standalone essay dropped in to justify the title of the book or to reuse material to fill out the biography. That said, one of the key reflections on Feynman’s approach, supported by accounts from his peers, was his willful ignorance of scholarship in his field at multiple points in his career. He seemed to actively avoid it, and through that naiveté perhaps cultivate the opportunity for original thought. This is a pretty profound insight, especially to an academic like me who is expected to know the field as part of the job. But knowing too much can be a recipe for stagnation as everything appears to have been solved or understood already, or new problems simply require someone else’s method rather than a novel one. I’m going to be thinking about this idea for a long time.
This biography does a great job of offering context from the era of physics and especially the role of the Manhattan Project, which really changed the course of science and the careers of Feynman and his contemporaries. Gleick offers mini-biographies of many of these contemporaries who most closely worked and/or competed with Feynman on the central discoveries of quantum physics: notably Julian Schwinger and Murray Gell-Mann. And letters and interviews fill out how his peers saw him and how he engaged with his mentors, which I always find fascinating. With the end of this book, I’m hungry for more historical and biographical texts of this calibre, and will probably need to pick up Gleick’s earlier work: Chaos.
Challenges for Personal Behavior Change Research on Information Diversity
Link
Abstract
Researchers have tested a variety of personal informatics systems to encourage diversity in the political leaning, geography, and demographics of information sources, often with a belief in the normative value of exposure to diverse information sources. Methods attempted have included information labeling of media sources, personalized metrics of reading behavior, personalized visualization of social media behavior, recommendation systems, and social introductions. Although some of these systems demonstrate positive results for the metrics they define, substantial questions remain on the interpretation of these results and their implications for future design. We identify challenges in defining normative values of diversity, potential algorithmic exclusion for some groups, and the role of personal tracking as surveillance. Furthermore, we outline challenges for evaluating systems and defining the meaningful social impact for information diversity systems operating at scale.
The Death and Life of Great American Cities book review
The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
This classic holds up astonishingly well after 53 years. Jane Jacobs identifies or predicts problems that continue to affect cities like San Francisco, LA, Philadelphia, and most notably Detroit. The contributions here are historical, sociological, and theoretical. It’s great to see how much of her sentiment, spirit, and insight are now a part of city planning, but we miss larger lessons still about the level of complexity and the need for greater interdepartmental and interdisciplinary collaboration to handle the unique problems cities pose.
Smart Cities are meant to be one answer to this, but they quickly fall afoul of Jacobs’ concerns about the then new approaches to cities looking for averages from data on population, geography, income, etc. These are important for planning but don’t handle complexity around residents’ behavior, especially behaviors hard to quantify at all. Reading this in association with Jan Gehl’s How to Study Public Life, which was directly inspired by Jacobs’ insights, was really helpful and recommended to others.