Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur, May 2015

Attention conservation notice: I have no taste.

Cixin Liu, The Three-Body Problem (translated by Ken Liu [no relation])

A really remarkably engrossing novel of first contact. (I will refer you to James Nicoll for plot summary.) As a novel of first contact, I think it bears comparison to some of the classics, like War of the Worlds and His Master's Voice: it realizes that aliens will be alien, and that however transformative contact might be, people will continue to be human, and to react in human ways.

— It has a lot more affinities with Wolf Totem than I would have guessed --- both a recognizably similar mode of narration, and, oddly, some of the content — educated youths rusticated to Inner Mongolia during the Cultural Revolution, environmental degradation there, and nascent environmentalism. Three-Body Problem works these into something less immediately moving, but perhaps ultimately much grimmer, than Wolf Totem. I say "perhaps" because there are sequels, coming out in translations, which I very eagerly look forward to.

Elif Shafak, The Architect's Apprentice

Historical fiction, centered on the great Ottoman architect Sinan, but told from the viewpoint of one of his apprentices. I am sure that I missed a lot of subtleties, and I half-suspect that there are allusions to current Turkish concerns which are completely over my head. (E.g., the recurrence of squatters crowding into Istanbul from the country-side seems like it might mean something...) Nonetheless, I enjoyed it a lot as high-class mind candy, and will look for more from Shafak.

ROT-13'd for spoilers: Ohg jung ba Rnegu jnf hc jvgu gur fhqqra irre vagb snagnfl --- pbagntvbhf phefrf bs vzzbegnyvgl, ab yrff! --- ng gur raq?

Barry Eichengreen, Hall of Mirrors: The Great Depression, The Great Recession, and the Uses — and Misuses — of History [Author's book site]

What it says on the label: a parallel history of the Great Depression and the Great Recession, especially in the US, and of how historical memories (including historical memories recounted as economic theories) of the former shaped the response to the latter.

If anyone actually believed in conservatism, a conservative paraphrase of Eichengreen would run something as follows: back in the day, when our ancestors came face to face with the consequences of market economies run amok, our forefathers (and foremothers) created, through a process of pragmatic trial and error, a set of institutions which allowed for an unprecedented period of stable and shared prosperity. Eventually, however, there arose an improvident generation (mine, and my parents') with no respect for the wisdom of its ancestors, enthralled by abstract theories, a priori ideologies, and Utopian social engineering, which systematically dismantled or subverted those institutions. In the fullness of time, they reaped what they had sown, namely a crisis, and a series of self-inflicted economic would, which had no precedent for fully eighty years. Enough of the ancestors' works remained intact that the results were merely awful, however, rather than the sort of utter disaster which could lead to substantial reform, or reconsideration of ideas. And here we are.

(Thanks to IB and ZMS for a copy of this.)

David Danks, Unifying the Mind: Cognitive Representations as Graphical Models

This book may have the most Carnegie Mellon-ish title ever.

Danks's program in this book is to argue that large chunks of cognitive psychology might be unified not by employing a common mental process, or kind of process, but because they use the same representations, which take the form of (mostly) directed acyclic graphical models, a.k.a. graphical causal models. In particular, he suggests that representations of this form (i) give a natural solution to the "frame problem" and other problems of determining