KIND Book of the week
18/09/2024: What Tech Calls Thinking: An Inquiry into the Intellectual Bedrock of Silicon Valley
Adrian Daub. 2020. What Tech Calls Thinking: An Inquiry into the Intellectual Bedrock of Silicon Valley. ISBN 9780374538644, Worldcat link.
A possibly-controversial choice this week, with a coruscating look at the way the tech industry, and its leaders, choose to present their thinking. As you might gather from the ironic intellectual bedrock of the title, the book is largely about puncturing some of the more thoughtless presentation of old ideas as radical new ones that seems to infest tech talk. This recycling, which get memorably tagged with Daniel Dennett’s line about ‘bombastic redescriptions of orthodoxy’ include radical posturing about disruption, about Silicon Valley’s strange love of dropping out, and about the costs and consequences of failure. Particularly recommended if your work and interests take you anywhere where the tech talk runs more towards general promotion than towards details and substance.
11/09/2024: The 7 Deadly Sins of Psychology
Chris Chambers. 2019. The 7 Deadly Sins of Psychology. ISBN 9780691192277, Worldcat link.
Rosalyn Pearson, a Senior Information Analyst at Public Health Scotland, suggests this book of the week. `I highly recommend The 7 Deadly Sins of Psychology by Chris Chambers. It’s all about pitfalls in real-world scientific methodology and what we can do to combat them. The title says ‘psychology’ but it applies more broadly.
04/09/2024: Thinking, Fast and Slow
Daniel Kahneman. 2011. Thinking, Fast and Slow. ISBN 9780141033570, Worldcat link.
This week’s book of the week was suggested by Liz Elliott, a Senior Analyst at NHS Education for Scotland, who writes: ‘this very popular bestselling book discusses cognitive biases and why humans are generally bad at assessing risk and interpreting statistics. Some of the research cited in the book was found to be unsound and Kahneman himself said I placed too much faith in underpowered studies.’ Its an interesting read particularly with that in mind.
28/08/2024: Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship
Robert C. Martin. 2008. Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship. ISBN 9780136083238, Worldcat link.
This week’s book of the week was suggested by Zena Trendell, a Programme Manager at NHS Lothian. She writes: ‘I recently read The Clean Code by Robert Cecil Martin. I’m not a coder but thought it was very good. The book is about professionalism for developers (similar to accountants etc.) and give you some tools to help prevent feeling under pressure re: timescales. It’s not a recent book yet very relevant to some incidents that have happened lately.’
21/08/2024: How to Lie with Statistics
Darrell Huff. 1954. How to Lie with Statistics. ISBN 9780140136296, Worldcat link.
This week’s book of the week was suggested by Helen Alexander, an Evaluation & Change Team Manager from NHS Lanarkshire. She writes: ‘Everyone should read How to Lie with Statistics. It opens your eyes to the different ways we can present seemingly objective numbers to support hugely varying arguments/points of view. If you think statistics represent the absolute truth, this will make you think again.’
14/08/2024: The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy
David Graeber. 2015. The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy. ISBN 9781612195186, Worldcat link.
This is a fun and thought-provoking set of essays about bureacracy. It starts with a mystery: why, if people hate bureaucracy, is there so much of it?. A recurring theme in many KIND events that we spend lots of time managing forms and paperwork, rather than doing more important work. And so we might be reassured that it’s not just us, that ‘all of us end up finding increasing percentages of our day taken up in the filling out of forms.’ The most interesting parts of this book though are not about just moaning about the quantity of paperwork that we face, but instead point out exactly why all that paperwork might really be something to worry about. As the author notes, endless box ticking seems to prevent useful communication and other human interactions. Or, more cuttingly: ‘Bureaucratic procedures…make even the smartest people act like idiots’. That point then leads into a balancing act. As the title might suggest, some rules seem to constrain or prevent us doing useful things, while some rules seem to do the opposite (say, by insisting that we can’t discriminate based on appearance). So there’s a balancing act between different kinds of rules, that shows up as a long-running back and forth between different ways of ruling, that the author traces across times and places. That range of cases, and pleasure in talking about paperwork, is a substantial contributor to the great charm of the book.
07/08/2024: Disease Maps: Epidemics on the Ground
Tom Koch. 2011. Disease Maps: Epidemics on the Ground. ISBN 9780226449357, Worldcat link.
This is an excellent introduction to disease geographies. If you’ve ever wondered about how maps can be used to understand health and disease, this book gives a wide-ranging and engaging series of examples. It’s also (pretty unsurprisingly) packed with well-reproduced examples of unusual and historically-important maps that might provide some left-field food for thought if your work involves a geographical element. There are also lots of useful cross-connections made between disease mapping and other issues of health and care interest - tropical medicine, deprivation, and occupation especially.
31/07/2024: Weapons of Math Destruction
Cathy O’Neil. 2016. Weapons of Math Destruction. ISBN 9780241296813, Worldcat link.
If you’ve ever been stunned by an unexpectedly high insurance quote, you won’t need reminding that data-driven algorithms can have negative consequences in the real-world. This book looks across a series of ordinary activities to show how, a decade or so ago, algorithms were shaping our lives. While the tech may have moved on, the moral of the work remains: algorithms are capable of serious harms if they are designed and applied thoughtlessly. I’d make this compulsory reading for colleagues working with data if I could - not least because it’s a surprisingly engaging read given the serious subject-matter. The data that we work with can have all kinds of unpredictable destinations, and the potential scope of end-uses of that data should be considered when building tools that collect and combine powerful data. Again, it’s another reminder that data with enough power to effect positive change will often be usable to bring about harms.
17/07/2024: The Half-Life of Facts
Samuel Arbesman. 2012. The Half-Life of Facts. ISBN 9781591844723, Worldcat link.
This book suggestion comes from a conversation during one of the Evidence-based medicine training sessions last week. In the training session, we ended up in an interesting conversation about the rate of change of facts in health. That rate of change (or, to jump ahead a bit, the rate of decay) of the facts was a surprise to some of us. So I wanted to highlight this useful book, which gives a lot of examples of changing facts. That’s accompanied by a useful discussion of the causes and consequences of changing facts - how they spread, how we get tripped up by them, and what we might do to deal more elegantly with knowledge that’s always a bit unstable.
10/07/2024: Medical Statistics at a Glance
Aviva Petrie and Caroline Sabin. 2000. Medical Statistics at a Glance. ISBN 9780632050756, Worldcat link.
There are a lot of statistics textbooks out there. As it came up during a training session this week, I wanted to mention one that I thought was particularly useful for people in the KIND workforce. Although originally written for medical students, this book is an excellent quick source of reliable knowledge about core statistical pricinples and techniques. I’m recommending an older edition - and there are lots of newer editions available too - partly because this older edition is much more concise than the later versions, but also because this edition is one of the very few books that I’ve used every week or so since I was a student, particularly for the statistical tables and test selection flowcharts. Highly recommended, many copies available in various libraries across Scotland, and some pleasing shock-of-the-old about data entry techniques from the late 1990s.
03/07/2024: How Emotions are Made
Lisa Feldman Barrett. 2018. How Emotions are Made. ISBN 9781509837526, Worldcat link.
This week’s BotW suggestion comes from Anna Schneider (PHS). She writes:
‘The author discusses relatively new research that sees a strong interconnection between our interroception, our immune system, and emotions, showing how intertwined psychology and medicine are. She makes a strong case for the whole-system-approach, because isolated symptoms can easily be mislabelled by both practitioners and patients. The book also includes a critical perspective on the still prevalent methodology of studying emotions and mental illness.’
It’s an excellent book, and one that’s particularly refreshing in a field that’s dominated in the popular view by a series of works from the nineteenth century - the Bells, the Duchennes, and the Darwins especially.
26/06/2024: Dark remedy: the impact of thalidomide and its revival as a vital medicine
Trent D. Stephens and Rock Brynner. 2001. Dark remedy: the impact of thalidomide and its revival as a vital medicine. ISBN 9780738205908, Worldcat link.
We’re still on a mini-exploration of manufactured doubt in medicine. This week’s book of the week is about thalidomide. Initially sold as an entirely safe sedative, suitable for use in pregnancy, the drug turned out to cause serious harms in utero. A spectacular increase in a previously-rare limb abnormality called phocomelia, even though a cause of widespread alarm amongst paediatricians, did not prevent the continued marketing of the drug. This book, which takes a long and cold look at this ‘disaster’, with particular attention to the greatly-enhanced safety research that became required for new medicines as a consequence. This change was in large part due to one of the great heroes of obstinancy, Frances O. Kelsey, and her tenacious work in demanding higher standards for FDA drug approvals. Also highly recommended is the short review of this book in Nature from a lost era when high-quality book reviews were still a priority for academic publishers.
19/06/2024: Harvey’s Heart: The Discovery of Blood Circulation
Andrew Gregory. 2001. Harvey’s Heart: The Discovery of Blood Circulation. ISBN 9781840462487, Worldcat link.
Last week’s recommendation about agnotology sparked an interesting side-conversation: is this a new phenomenon, or something that’s been around for a long time. One of our members, Andrew Saul from PHS, suggested an interesting example concerning the discovery of blood circulation, where some researchers appeared to try and cloud the waters in order to defend their own pet theory. That brings me to a first, which is a BotW recommendation that comes with a competing interest as it was written by a former colleague of mine. This excellent short account of Harvey’s work in the mid-seventeenth century, culminating in the publication of De Motu Cordis in 1628, takes us through the story of blood circulation, with some thoughtful discussions about the reasons why some researchers appear to us now so keen to mislead. De Motu Cordis was also the oldest book that I know of whose publication was managed to co-incide with the Frankfurt book fair, so that’s another interesting first for the week.
12/06/2024: Merchants of Doubt
Naomi Oreskes and Eric M. Conway. 2012. Merchants of Doubt. ISBN 9781408824832, Worldcat link.
While the word agnotology might be unfamiliar to most people, the practice it describes - deliberately spreading doubt - unfortunately won’t be. This book describes several agnotologies - cases where doubt (about the likely environmental impacts of pollution, say) - and then uses those cases to set up a thoughtful discussion about uncertainty and understanding. For us, who often work with data and evidence which might be at least somewhat open to interpretation, it’s an excellent reminder to think carefully about the interpretations that might be placed on our work. It’s not enough, as these cases clearly show, to try and let the data speak for itself - particularly when (in some cases) there are parties who seek advantage by muffling and confusing that speech.
05/06/2024: In the beginning was the worm: finding the secrets of life in a tiny hermaphrodite
Andrew Brown. 2004. In the beginning was the worm: finding the secrets of life in a tiny hermaphrodite. ISBN 9780743415989, Worldcat link.
It’s now close to twenty years old, and deals with the research uses of a microscopic nematode worm, but this short and interesting book remains one of the most compelling introductions to health research out there. For analysts, the story here is one of wrangling. Not the usual wrangling and tidying data to permit analysis that we’re so used to, but a very similar process of wrangling the properties of an organism (C. elegans) to make it behave. Bonus points for the comments about the Worm Breeder’s Gazette which remains a favourite niche technical publication.
29/05/2024: Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact
Ludwig Fleck (Bradley and Trenn, trans.). 1979 (1935). Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact. ISBN 9780226253252, Worldcat link.
If last week’s book was a paean to the use of scientific facts, this week’s book tells a rather more subtle story about how facts. It starts by telling the story of the ‘discovery’ of the Wassermann reaction, and uses that history as the basis for an investigation of the ways in which people came to a) claim that the Wassermann reaction worked because of scientific facts and b) how those facts changes as the Wassermann reaction became used in practice.
From the KIND-ish stance much of the interest lies in the parts of this book that describe how medical research wasn’t the straightforwardly objective story about discovery that we often want to portray. Fleck’s claim, broadly, is that the Wassermann reaction was invented, rather than discovered, and that invention reflected (in part) the social organisation of researchers and others involved in its discovery. Of particular interest to people like us are a series of claims about how facts change as they travel out from the specialist communities that work on them. We’re all familiar with the changes that happen (and need to happen) as we pass the results of our work out to their eventual users: they often get simplified, or put in context, or whatever.
22/05/2024: Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup
John Carreyrou. 2018. Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup. ISBN 9781524731656, Worldcat link.
A love-letter to the power of domain knowledge. Theranos was big-business - a tech startup offering near-instant blood testing for nearly anything at the bedside (or clinic, or shop, or…) with remarkable precision. Investors, including the media tycoons, politicians, and other tech leaders, believed this would be tranformative - indeed, highest praise, disruptive. Yet laboratory medicine experts were absolutely convinced that the technology glibly described here as “near market” was an illusion. Want to guess who was right?
15/05/2024: Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error
Kathryn Schulz. 2010. Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error. ISBN 9781846270741, Worldcat link.
If I was posh enough to have a Latin motto, it would probably be “Fallor ergo sum” - I err, therefore I am. This phrase, which I’d like to pretend I read directly from the works of St Augustine, was instead stolen from Schulz’s book. This starts with a really simple question: why are we so bad - intellectually, socially, legally - at dealing with error, but then follows the threads of an answer to several unexpected destinations including criminal justice, health, and optical illusions.
08/05/2024: The Mismeasure of Man (2nd ed)
Stephen Jay Gould. 1996. The Mismeasure of Man (2nd ed). ISBN 9780140258240, Worldcat link.
After the discussion last week about the trouble that a default-male view of health might have caused, the title of this week’s book of the week might seem poorly chosen. Rest assured that the title of Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man is a pun: both on the idea that man is the measure of all things [https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/protagoras/], and on precisely the kind of not-thinking that we discussed last time.
This is a book about the history of measuring intelligence, and why we might worry about collapsing all possible measures of intelligence to a single number, like IQ. That story is told through a diverting series of detailed historical reconstructions about methods used to measure intelligence and related human features. Lots of this is about measuring skulls, and if you’re into that sort of history of science, seeing the kinds of dispute that switching between lead shot and mustard seed as measures of brain volume might cause is worth the investment - not least because it has surprisingly contemporary connections to the anthropometrical work that still powers much of modern ergonomics, human factors, etc. But the real value for most of us who do KIND-ish work isn’t this rich historical detail, fun though it is. It is instead about the abstractions about complicated human activities that lie close to the surface of our work. Every time we report a figure that collapses a complex activity into a single value we should be careful - particularly when that abstraction might well be influenced by our existing beliefs and practices. might shape that collapse.”
01/05/2024: Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men
Caroline Criado Perez. 2019. Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men. ISBN 9781784706289, Worldcat link.
Anyone who works with data knows that our data is often incomplete. Most of those gaps are mainly accidental - we just happen to have not collected some random bit of data. But that’s doesn’t explain every gap in the data. This book explores the gender data gap - which is where we often seem to lack the data that we need to understand how different e.g. health outcomes affect women. The author argues comes about by a kind of selective blindness, as a kind of collective failure to think about gender. That means that the gender data gap isn’t really a conscious omission - we didn’t all set out to ignore women, but something a bit more subtle about what we collectively assume is worth measuring, and what the sensible defaults might be for that. Nice quick examples abound - really great one about office temperates which I’m sure will chime with all of us, but great to see it explained as a consequence of assumptions about what a typical office worker would be (a mythical 70kg 40 year old man from some point in the 1960s, basically). So it’s a great introduction to understanding the view that much data work is male-unless-something, and how that functions as both a cause, and as a consequence of the gender data gap.
24/04/2024: Electronic Dreams: How 1980s Britain Learned to Love the Computer
Tom Lean. 2016. Electronic Dreams: How 1980s Britain Learned to Love the Computer. ISBN 9781472918338, Worldcat link.
We’re looking at regular expressions in the community meetup today. Regex, as the wikipedia page suggests, have been around for ages - positively archaeological in computing terms. So for the book of the week this week, I wanted to show off one of the most interesting bits of social history I’ve read: Tom Lean’s Electronic Dreams. Lots of the history of computing is either primarily about the technical details, or is a broadly nostalgic look at obsolete tech. This book doesn’t do either of those, instead spending its time giving a concise account of how personal computing worked as a social phenomenon. For example, how did people start getting paid to write computer games? What happened when the BBC got involved in personal computing? What happened to the various promises of digital revolutions as a replacement for manufacturing industries.
27/03/2024: Who Cooked Adam Smith’s Dinner
Katrine Marçal. 2016. Who Cooked Adam Smith’s Dinner. ISBN 9781846275661, Worldcat link.
NA
20/03/2024: The Arch of Knowledge
David Oldroyd. 1986. The Arch of Knowledge. ISBN 9780416013313, Worldcat link.
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13/03/2024: Ghost in the Wires
Kevin Mitnick. 2011. Ghost in the Wires. ISBN 9780316037723, Worldcat link.
Here’s a book of the week suggestion following on from the codes theme from last time. It’s the autobiography of Kevin Mitnick (2011 Ghost in the Wires) who was (briefly) the most wanted hacker in the world. Looking at the blurb of this ghosted book, you’d expect it be bepretty predictable - smarter than everyone else, playing pranks, evading capture until… That story is definitely there (there’s plenty of broad-but-exciting plot here), but for KIND purposes there’s something much more interesting, which is an insight into the kind of analytical thinking that lies at the heart of finding things out about complex systems. Kevin’s thoughts on that are highly transferable to the kinds of questions that we’re thinking about today - how to take a system apart, make sense of the bits, then recombine them into a more useful new system. Also, there are codes - really hard codes for emphasis - for the reader to break. That’s a lovely bonus - especially if you looked into Simon Singh’s The Code Book from last time.
06/03/2024: The Code Book
Simon Singh. 1999. The Code Book. ISBN 9781857028898, Worldcat link.
The Code Book: The Secret History of Codes and Code-Breaking a book by . (bookshop.org) (to buy online but support a local bookshop of your choice, for those not keen on more money to our Amazon Overlords…)