The Magic of Reality by Richard Dawkins

A bit "dumbed down" from some of his earlier work, I guess in a bid to try and win a wider audience.  He draws on various magical and miraculous stories from various texts and explains why teh simple explanation is much more plausible, and in fact all the more 'magical' in the sense of wondrous.

All peoples around the world have origin myths, to account for where they came from. Many tribal origin myths talk only about that one particular tribe – as though other tribes don’t count! In the same way, many tribes have a rule that they mustn’t kill people – but ‘people’ turns out to mean only others of your own tribe. Killing members of other tribes is just fine!Read more at location 302 •
You were once a baby. Now you are not. When you are a lot older you’ll look quite different again. Yet every day of your life, when you wake up, you are the same person as when you went to bed the previous night. A baby changes into a toddler, then into a child, then into an adolescent; then a young adult, then a middle-aged adult, then an old person. And the change happens so gradually that there never is a day when you can say, ‘This person has suddenly stopped being a baby and become a toddler.’ And later on there never comes a day when you can say, ‘This person has stopped being a child and become an adolescent.’ There’s never a day when you can say, ‘Yesterday this man was middle-aged: today he is old.’Read more at location 385 •
So, the question of who was the first person, and when they lived, doesn’t have a precise answer. It’s kind of fuzzy, like the answer to the question: When did you stop being a baby and become a toddler? At some point, probably less than a million years ago but more than a hundred thousand years ago, our ancestors were sufficiently different from us that a modern person wouldn’t have been able to breed with them if they had met.Read more at location 408 •
Next time you see an animal – any animal – or any plant, look at it and say to yourself: what I am looking at is an elaborate machine for passing on the genes that made it. I’m looking at a survival machine for genes. Next time you look in the mirror, just think: that is what you are too.Read more at location 812 •
armed with science, we can at least ask sensible, meaningful questions about it and recognize credible answers when we find them. We don’t have to invent wildly implausible stories: we have the joy and excitement of real scientific investigation and discovery to keep our imaginations in line. And in the end that is more exciting than fantasy.Read more at location 2229 •
Bad things happen because things happen. Whether they are bad or good from our point of view doesn’t influence how likely it is that they will happen. Some people find it hard to accept this. They’d prefer to think that sinners get their come-uppance, that virtue is rewarded. Unfortunately the universe doesn’t care what people prefer.Read more at location 2562 •
There are things that not even the best scientists of today can explain. But that doesn’t mean we should block off all investigation by resorting to phoney ‘explanations’ invoking magic or the supernatural, which don’t actually explain at all.Read more at location 2909 •
The eminent science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke summed the point up as Clarke’s Third Law: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic

The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves by Matt Ridley

I have always been a fan of Matt Ridley's books and this one is no exception.
It covers damming evidence that both government R&D and international aid produce no overall benefit, in fact they actually cause harm by discouraging individuals from supporting themselves.
How arbitrage (trade) is the engine that drives civilisations to innovate and grow, how their governments eventually stifle them (and how the same thing happens to companies are they grow ever larger).

it is a book about the benefits of change. I find that my disagreement is mostly with reactionaries of all political colours: blue ones who dislike cultural change, red ones who dislike economic change and green ones who dislike technological change.Read more at location 159

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years. Today, a car emits less pollution travelling at fullRead more at location 255

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The spread of IQ scores has been shrinking steadily – because the low scores have been catching up with the high ones. This explains the steady, progressive and ubiquitous improvement in the average IQ scores people achieve at a given age – at a rate of 3 per cent per decade. In two Spanish studies, IQ proved to be 9.7 points higher after thirty years, most of it among the least intelligent half of the group.Read more at location 286

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Put it another way, an hour of work today earns you 300 days’ worth of reading light; an hour of work in 1800 earned you ten minutes of reading light.Read more at location 308

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Time: that is the key. Forget dollars, cowrie shells or gold. The true measure of something’s worth is the hours it takes to acquire it. If you have to acquire it for yourself, it usually takes longer than if you get it ready-made by other people. And if you can get it made efficiently by others, then you can afford more of it. As light became cheaper so people used more of it. The average Briton today consumes roughly 40,000 times as much artificial light as he did in 1750. He consumes fifty times as much power and 250 times as much transport (measured in passenger-miles travelled), too. This is what prosperity is: the increase in the amount of goods or services you can earn with the same amount of work.Read more at location 331

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Besides, a million years of natural selection shaped human nature to be ambitious to rear successful children, not to settle for contentment: people are programmed to desire, not to appreciate.Read more at location 412

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That is what, it is now clear, far too many people and businesses did in the 2000s – they borrowed more from posterity than their innovation rate would support. They misallocated the resources to unproductive ends. Most past bursts of human prosperity have come to naught because they allocated too little money to innovation and too much to asset price inflation or to war, corruption, luxury and theft.Read more at location 459

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after studying the issue, that the entire concept of food miles is ‘a profoundly flawed sustainability indicator’. Getting food from the farmer to the shop causes just 4 per cent of all its lifetime emissions. Ten times as much carbon is emitted in refrigerating British food as in air-freighting it from abroad, and fifty times as much is emitted by the customer travelling to the shops. A New Zealand lamb, shipped to England, requires one-quarter as much carbon to get on to a London plate as a Welsh lamb; aRead more at location 621

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There is no such thing as unproductive employment, so long as people are prepared to buy the service you are offering. Today, 1 per cent works in agriculture and 24 per cent in industry, leaving 75 per cent to offer movies, restaurant meals, insurance broking and aromatherapy.Read more at location 640

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allows us each to consume more and more different things by each producing fewer and fewer is, I submit, the central story of humanity. Innovation changes the world but only because it aids the elaboration of the division of labour and encourages the division of time.Read more at location 690

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once cooked, starch gelatinises and protein denatures, releasing far more calories for less input of energy. As a result, whereas other primates have guts weighing four times their brains, the human brain weighs more than the human intestine. Cooking enabled hominids to trade gut size for brain size.Read more at location 765

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A single, routine, minuscule Wal-Mart decision in the 1990s – not to sell deodorant in cardboard boxes – saved America $50 million a year, half of which was passed on to customers.Read more at location 1673

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In effect, Borlaug and his allies had unleashed the power of fertiliser, made with fossil fuels. Since 1900 the world has increased its population by 400 per cent; its cropland area by 30 per cent; its average yields by 400 per cent and its total crop harvest by 600 per cent. So per capita food production has risen by 50 per cent. Great news – thanks to fossil fuels.Read more at location 2093

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(chickens and fish convert grain into meat three times as efficiently as cattle; pigs are in between)Read more at location 2169

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The dirigiste mentality that dominated the second half of the twentieth century was always asking who is in charge, looking for who decided on a policy of trade. That is not how the world works. Trade emerged from the interactions of individuals. It evolved. Nobody was in charge.Read more at location 2412

Note: echoes of the intrnet, social networking, wikipedia Edit

It is common to find that two traders both think their counterparts are idiotically overpaying: that is the beauty of Ricardo’s magic trick.Read more at location 2477

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governments gradually employ more and more ambitious elites who capture a greater and greater share of the society’s income by interfering more and more in people’s lives as they give themselves more and more rules to enforce, until they kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. There is a lesson for today. Economists are quick to speak of ‘market failure’, and rightly so, but a greater threat comes from ‘government failure’. Because it is a monopoly, government brings inefficiency and stagnation to most things it runs; government agencies pursue the inflation of their budgets rather than the service of their customers; pressure groups form an unholy alliance with agencies to extract more money from taxpayers for their members.Read more at location 2670

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Rural self-sufficiency is a romantic mirage. Urban opportunity is what people want. In 2008 for the first time more than half the people in the world lived in cities. That is not a bad thing. It is a measure of economic progress that more than half the population can leave subsistence and seek the possibilities of a life based on the collective brain instead. Two-thirds of economic growth happens in cities.Read more at location 2783

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The economist Pietra Rivoli writes, ‘As generations of mill girls and seamstresses from Europe, America and Asia are bound together by this common sweatshop experience – controlled, exploited, overworked, and underpaid – they are bound together too by one absolute certainty, shared across both oceans and centuries: this beats the hell out of life on the farm.’Read more at location 3219

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Two billion people alive today have never turned on a light switch.Read more at location 3420

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Though they may start out full of entrepreneurial zeal, once firms or bureaucracies grow large, they become risk-averse to the point of Luddism.Read more at location 3818

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A large study by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development concluded that government spending on R&D has no observable effect on economic growth, despite what governments fondly believe. Indeed it ‘crowds out resources that could be alternatively used by the private sector, including private R&D’. This rather astonishing conclusion has been almost completely ignored by governments.Read more at location 3940

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As Bruce Ames famously demonstrated in the late 1990s, cabbage has forty-nine natural pesticides in it, more than half of which are carcinogens. In drinking a single cup of coffee you encounter far more carcinogenic chemicals than in a year’s exposure to pesticide residues in food.Read more at location 4357

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The history of the world is replete with examples of the extinction or near-exhaustion of resources: mammoths, whales, herrings, passenger pigeons, white pine forests, Lebanon cedars, guano. They are all, note, ‘renewable’. By striking contrast, there is not a single non-renewable resource that has run out yet: not coal, oil, gas, copper, iron, uranium, silicon, or stone.Read more at location 4410

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The aid that Zambia has received since 1960, if invested instead in assets giving a reasonable rate of return, would by now have given Zambians the income per head of the Portuguese – $20,000 instead of $500.Read more at location 4611

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They could find no evidence that aid resulted in growth in any countries. Ever.Read more at location 4615

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Botswana turns out to have secure, enforceable property rights that are fairly widely distributed and fairly well respected. When Daron Acemoglu and his colleagues compared property rights with economic growth throughout the world, they found that the first explained an astonishing three quarters of the variation in the second and that Botswana was no outlier: the reason it had flourished was because its people owned property without fear of confiscation by chiefs or thieves to a much greater extent than in the rest of Africa. This is much the same explanation for why England had a good eighteenth century while China did not.Read more at location 4667

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Whether considering fish off Iceland, kudu in Namibia, jaguars in Mexico, trees in Niger, bees in Bolivia or water in Colorado, the same lesson applies. Give local people the power to own, exploit and profit from natural resources in a sustainable way and they will usually preserve and cherish those resources. Give them no share in a wildlife resource that is controlled – nay ‘protected’ – by a distant government and they will generally neglect, ruin and waste it. That is the real lesson of the tragedy of the commons.)Read more at location 4719

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The twenty-first century will be a magnificent time to be alive. Dare to be an optimist.Read more at location 5226

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Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure by Tim Harford

The core message of the book is that if you are failing then you are not trying hard enough.  That you should try things out at a simple scale first and gamble on many small bets.
How professional experts are rarely worth listening to for their predictions about the future (expect in limited tightly controlled systems)
Along the way the book covers how disruptive technologies take hold and why large established business find it so hard to innovate.

Predictions about Russia from experts on Russia were no more accurate than predictions about Russia from experts on Canada.Read more at location 159

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Most accounts of Tetlock’s research savour the humbling of the professional pundits. And why not? One of Tetlock’s more delicious discoveries was that the more famous experts – those who spent a lot of time as talking heads on television – were especially incompetent.Read more at location 161

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The market has solved the problem of generating material wealth, but its secret has little to do with the profit motive or the superior savvy of the boardroom over the cabinet office. Few company bosses would care to admit it, but the market fumbles its way to success, as successful ideas take off and less successful ones die out. When we see the survivors of this process – such as Exxon, General Electric and Procter & Gamble – we shouldn’t merely see success. We should also see the long, tangled history of failure, of all of the companies and all of the ideas that didn’t make it.Read more at location 239

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Astounding complexity emerges in response to a simple process: try out a few variants on what you already have, weed out the failures,Read more at location 246

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In fact, Stuart Kauffmann and John Holland, both complexity theorists affiliated with the multidisciplinary Santa Fe Institute, have shown that the evolutionary approach is not just another way of solving complex problems. Given the likely shape of these ever-shifting landscapes, the evolutionary mix of small steps and occasional wild gambles is the best possible way to search for solutions.Read more at location 299

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We should not leap to conclusions based on an abstract mathematical model, but Ormerod’s discovery strongly implies that effective planning is rare in the modern economy. I wouldn’t go so far as to suggest that Apple might as well replace Steve Jobs with a dart-throwing chimpanzee – even though it would certainly liven up Apple product launches. But the evidence suggests that in a competitive environment, many corporate decisions are not successful, and corporations constantly have to cull bad ideas and search for something better.Read more at location 350

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We will have to make an uncomfortable number of mistakes, and learn from them, rather than cover them up or deny they happened, even to ourselves. This is not the way we are used to getting things done.Read more at location 369

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The Soviets failed at both: they found it impossible to tolerate a real variety of approaches to any problem; and they found it hard to decide what was working and what was not. TheRead more at location 415

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What Palchinsky realised was that most real-world problems are more complex than we think. They have a human dimension, a local dimension, and are likely to change as circumstances change. His method for dealing with this could be summarised as three ‘Palchinsky principles’: first, seek out new ideas and try new things; second, when trying something new, do it on a scale where failure is survivable; third, seek out feedback and learn from your mistakes as you go along. The first principle could simply be expressed as ‘variation’; the third as ‘selection’. The importance of the middle principle – survivability – is something which will become clear in chapter six, which explores the collapse of the banking system.Read more at location 442

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If we are to take the ‘variation’ part of ‘variation and selection’ seriously, uniformly high standards are not only impossible but undesirable. When a problem is unsolved or continually changing, the best way to tackle it is to experiment with many different approaches. If nobody tries anything different, we will struggle to figure out new and better ways to do anything. But if we are to accept variation, we must also accept that some of these new approaches will not work well. That is not a tempting proposition for a politician or chief executive to try to sell.Read more at location 494

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There is a limit to how much honest feedback most leaders really want to hear; and because we know this, most of us sugar-coat our opinions whenever we speak to a powerful person. In a deep hierarchy, that process is repeated many times, until the truth is utterly concealed inside a thick layer of sweet-talk.Read more at location 517

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All four examples – poker, Paris, Deal or No Deal and share portfolios – show a dogged determination to avoid crystallising a loss or drawing a line under a decision we regret. That dogged determination might occasionally be helpful, but it is counterproductive in all these cases and in many others. Faced with a mistake or a loss, the right response is to acknowledge the setback and change direction. Yet our instinctive reaction is denial. That is why ‘learn from your mistakes’ is wise advice that is painfully hard to take.Read more at location 590

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The three essential steps are: to try new things, in the expectation that some will fail; to make failure survivable, because it will be common; and to make sure that you know when you’ve failed.Read more at location 604

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‘In the absence of guidance or orders, figure out what they should have been … ’ – part of a sign on a command-post door in west Baghdad, commandeered by David PetraeusRead more at location 618

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Friedrich Hayek in an article published in 1945. What Hayek realised, and Allende and Beer did not seem to, was that a complex world is full of knowledge that is localised and fleeting. Crucially, the local information is often something that local agents would prefer to use for their own purposes.Read more at location 1157

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Return on investment is simply not a useful way of thinking about new ideas and new technologies. It is impossible to estimate a percentage return on blue-sky research, and it is delusional even to try. Most new technologies fail completely. Most original ideas turn out either to be not original after all, or original for the very good reason that they are useless. And when an original idea does work, the returns can be too high to be sensibly measured.Read more at location 1329

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Grants, unlike prizes, are a powerful tool of patronage. Prizes, in contrast, are open to anyone who produces results. That makes them intrinsically threatening to the establishment.Read more at location 1715

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‘Your first try will be wrong. Budget and design for it.’ – Aza Raskin, designer at FirefoxRead more at location 3464

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Disruptive innovations are disruptive precisely because the new technology doesn’t appeal to the traditional customers: it is different and for their purposes, it’s inferior. But for a small niche of new customers the new disruptive product is exactly what is needed. They want smaller, cheaper hard drives, or cameras that produce digital files, or email that you can access on any computer – and they are willing to tolerate the fact that the new product is inferior to the old one along all the traditional dimensions. That foothold in the niche market gives the new technology an opportunity to develop into a true threat to the old way of doing things.Read more at location 3778

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researchers find that self-employed people tend to be happier than the employed: they receive implicit approval of what they do every time somebody pays their invoice, whereas people with regular jobs tend to receive feedback that is both less frequent and less meaningful.Read more at location 4025

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in a complex world, we’re unlikely to get it right first time. To embrace the idea of adapting in everyday life seems to be to accept blundering into a process of unremitting failure. So it’s worth remembering once again why it is worth experimenting, even though so many experiments will, indeed, end in failure. It’s because the process of correcting the mistakes can be more liberating than the mistakes themselves are crushing, even though at the time we so often feel that the reverse is true.Read more at location 4081

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