Customer Reviews

The Big Questions

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(10)

 

 

This book was a purchase based on an interview with the author on NPR, which, sadly, was terribly misleading. There are very few instances where I've felt the need to literally throw a book violently to one side, but this was one such time.

Though Landsburg does attempt to "tackle the problems of philosophy", he only succeeds in creating a patchwork chain of unreason as support of his views. This is immediately evident from the start in a discussion of physics, where the wonderful language of mathematics is mistakenly put in the role of being Prescriptive rather than Descriptive. Basic reasoning goes merrily along, until Landsburg suddenly and inexplicably makes a huge leap of causation where none exists. Worse, when even that won't do the trick, he simply redefines terms from their standard use to suit his conclusions.

"If your brain can conjure colors into existence, why can't it conjure physicality?"

"Indeed arithmetic must be more complex than life, because all the complexity of life derives from the complexity of arithmetic -- in particular, the combinatorial patterns that manifest themselves in DNA and protein synthesis."

The list goes on and on. Horribly flawed logic, redefining terms, and declarations by fiat is not valid reasoning and should not be used as "proof" for anything.

After reading this book, I am somewhat surprised by all of the five star reviews of it. It is one of the most incoherent books I have read in a long time. It is full of such tortured logic that I feel that some abstract equivalent of the Geneva Conventions has been breached. To add insult to injury, the prose is just as tortured as the logic.

Allow me to give a few examples to illustrate. First, his "demonstration" by "pure logic" alone that there is too much pollution in the world merely demonstrates that he can prove an allegation by assuming it to begin with. IF you assume particular curves for marginal cost (MC) and marginal benefit (MB) for an individual, AND you assume particular curves for MC and MB for society, then you can say something about the relationship of those curves you've already assumed. Wow, heavy, dude. If you assume 5 < 3, then you can "prove" that 5 < 3. BFD, er, I mean QED.

Then there is the "headache problem." People may or may not be willing to pay a dollar to insure that they won't die due to some unmentioned, random cause, particularly if the probability of it is only one in a billion. I have a feeling the reaction would be a little different if you told them you were going to randomly select one of those billion people and murder them. They might not give you your "protection" money, but they might call the cops. In his moral philosophizing, there is apparently no difference at all between an accidental death and a murder. After all, "we all agree to kill random people all the time." Of course! Society treats an accidental death of someone slipping in the tub while taking a shower in EXACTLY the same way it treats an intentional murder of someone by a sociopath/psychopath. Why did I not see that before? Clearly, engaging in risky activities like driving or taking a shower (because the perceived benefits outway the perceived
risks) indicates that we agree to murder people all the time. Right? Therefore, it follows logically that society should approve a completely avoidable murder to cure headaches. Yeah.... And what if that person you murder is the only person who has an idea about saving the Earth from an impending asteroid impact in the near future? You've just killed all life on the planet. Thank you so much. (This does actually bring out an issue with "consequentialist" moral theories, in a half-joking way. How far do you carry the consequences?) God, I'm getting a headache. NO, NO, NOT REALLY! Don't come knocking on my door!

Yet more sloppy prose: "People have died so that other people can drive to the opera." Really? I just knew there had to be something wrong with people who like opera! What kind of car do these people drive anyway, such that it's necessary for people to die in order for it to run? I assume he's talking about deaths from auto accidents, so are these accidents logically or physically necessary?

Even his jokes are cringe-inducing. But because I'm a physicist and not an economist, I am far more comically gifted.* As a matter of fact, amongst nuclear physicists, I'm known as the half-life of the party**. By way of example, I'm going to go out on a limb and hazard a guess that even economists take a shower or bath from time to time -- maybe as much as a couple of times a year. Clearly, they don't melt from this risky behavior, and neither do rubber ducks. Therefore, it follows logically that economists weigh the same as a rubber duck. And therefore....

*[Lest you take this sentence seriously, this is a joke! I'm paraphrasing his preposterously arrogant statement (or is it an attempt at a joke?), "But because I'm an economist and not a philosopher, I prefer to think about the argument a little more deeply."]

**[Okay, I stole that joke from an episode of Frasier....]

Next, His discussion of free will completely misses the point. His view of free will implies that ultimately we have free will to the exact extent that a thermostat does. But no matter, "You still have free will, and you know it." Most people would agree that they have free will, but the interesting question is not whether they have it, but how is free will even possible? Also, according to the author, "determinism is true" (apparently by fiat). How he reconciles that with quantum mechanics is left as an excercise for the reader, I suppose.

The list goes on and on. Affirmative action is a "nightmare," which is going to lead to the gumment telling you whom you can or can't marry, and you won't even be able to choose the gender of your spouse! Seriously, this guy's a raving lunatic. And kind of an idiot: after talking about how worthless college writing courses are, it turns out that he doesn't even know what the hell the word "metaphor" means. How does a grown man not know that? Honestly, why did none of his friends point out that his section called "Take Metaphors Seriously" doesn't contain a discussion of even one metaphor?

He is basically the equivalent of a wild-eyed religious fanatic on the street corner, handing out pamphlets full of twisted logic and incoherent gibberish. And here I thought Ben Stein was a moron ("Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed" -- his funniest movie yet!)

If you are interested in reading a grown-up book about some of these issues, I would highly recommend "The Blank Slate" by Steven Pinker for an insightful take on various moral issues. For an interesting look at free will, the mind-body problem, the problem of knowledge, etc., you might want to check out Colin McGinn's "Problems in Philosophy," though this isn't exactly a light read (short, but fairly dense). On the other hand, if you consider the logic of Rush Limbaugh or Bill O'Reilly to be impeccable, then perhaps "The Big Questions" is for you. In the end, however, I think you would do well to take seriously the author's own advice -- "Don't spend valuable time and energy in nonproductive ways" -- and skip this book.

I apologize if I've been overly vituperative here, but the combination of supreme arrogance and marked stupidity in one and the same person does get under my skin.

If you are reading The Big Questions merely for a playful romp you may be a little disappointed. Oh, it's a terrific romp, and well worth the price of admission. However, the book is a romp for the truly intellectually curious as it delves head on into theories of beliefs, epistemology, fairness, existence and more using the rigorous logic of physics, math and economics. Professor Landsburg's ability to cover all of these ideas so clearly, so enjoyably and so convincingly in less than 300 small pages is no less impressive than conceiving of the fabulously enormous schnoogol (see p. 102).

I only say "disappointing" because reading the book makes one wish they had the ability to learn more about each of its subjects. The paradoxes and puzzles are tantalizingly interesting, and the logic behind their resolutions so refreshingly solid, that reading it might lead one to believe that they have the capability to master the deepest insights into these fields. Have you ever wanted to grasp what the Uncertainty Principle really means? Well, you'll certainly be able to relay it to your friends after reading this book. But if you are like me, I am not sure you will be any closer to fully appreciating the weirdness that is quantum physics even after wrestling with this neat and short chapter.

The risk with explaining phenomena so clearly or with simple logic, is that one might be lured into believing that addressing the solution to the phenomenon is simple, or perhaps impossible. Take for example the discussion of activities that disturb your neighbors (pp. 113-121). The logic is airtight that, "when the cost of your activities spill over onto your neighbors, you engage in more of those activities than you ought to." Every economist worth their salt understands this. But it does not follow that pollution should be cleaned up or that it won't be cleaned up absent some grand plan to do so. Landsburg, of course, also recognizes this. But a quick or careless reading of that section or with only a casual understanding of the transactions costs which might prevent a convergence of marginal and social costs, or a casual understanding of the cooperative arrangements that might emerge in response to such problems, would have some readers thinking that the only solution to the "potbelly pig problem" is to tax them, regulate them or otherwise impose draconian governmental solutions.

This is what I mean when I say the Big Questions is a Big Boy Book. Some readers that are amateur philosophers or physicists or economists who find the logic behind the arguments so persuasive and impenetrable, nonetheless walk away feeling like there must be more to the story, or worried about using that logic in an open forum. I hope that this book is not the readers' first encounter with the ideas from math, physics and economics that are used to deal with the Big Questions - for this is not the place to begin your study of those fields. Rather, the point of the book is to use key insights from within those fields to inform the Big Questions. All too often, casual readers of books like this seem to misunderstand this application.

Of course the book was not written as a primer on physics, math and economics. It was written to demonstrate the power of logic, the virtues of consistency, how to craft a serious argument, the power of simple arithmetic and an exercise to invigorate the mind. It is a home run on all of these measures. The Big Questions is antiseptic against ad hominem arguments - see for example the discussion of the prejudice against those who accumulate great financial fortunes (p. 219), or the encouragement (really!) to delight in losing arguments. The Big Questions is an intellectual version of "putting your money where your mouth is" - see, for example the discussion of immigration and the logic required to argue that immigrants are "bad" for an economy. And it is much more. In short, the Big Questions is a terrific toolkit for anyone hoping to engage sincerely in intellectual debate and choc full of hammers to help you tamp down those nails that have been sticking out of your intellectual edifice.

In a world of myriad wonderful entertainment and educational choices, reading the Big Questions nonetheless is well worth the investment.

If you've read any of his earlier books, you're already aware that Steven Landsburg is a great economist with a writing flair that makes difficult concepts appear easy.

What you might not know if you've read only his other books (as opposed to some of his more abstruse journal articles) is that Landsburg is not only a whiz in economics, but in math, and can hold his own in physics and philosophy.

So what's an economist with insights into math, physics, and philosophy, who also has a writing flair gonna do for an encore? Write about THE BIG QUESTIONS, of course.

What are the big questions? You know...they're the one's we always ask as children without expecting, as adults, to get an answer. Questions like why is there anything rather than nothing, what constitutes knowledge, what is Heisenberg's uncertainty principle and what was Gödel talking about in distinguishing truth from provability. Questions of ethics and questions of education: telling right from wrong, what's best to study, how economists modify the golden rule. How to know if alleged believers really believe what they say.

In reading Landsburg's thoughts on these various topics, you feel like you're having a personal conversation--granted, he's doing all the talking, but it's in an inviting, conversational tone--with someone whose given these ideas great thought, saving you lots of time and providing you lots of enjoyment.

Does Landsburg ANSWER all of these Big Questions? Of course not. That's not the kind of questions they are, and not the point of the book. But thoughts about big questions, about what kind of answers might fit, about why some attempted answers are clearly wrong, aids in understanding. Easily within reach of the intelligent layperson without technical background in economics, math, physics, or philosophy, this book is highly recommended.

After hearing an interview with the author I immediately went out and bought this book, thinking the author might be the smartest man in the world. The book itself is a real mixed bag though. At the start it contains brilliant arguments about how people truely think about faith and religion. But then later on he makes positively goofy arguments like how affirmative action will eventually lead to government forced gay marriage (as in the government will make you marry someone of the same sex against your will).

Which ultimately made me wonder if I was stupid for being so impressed by the earlier arguments...

The title of Steven Landsburg's treatise, "The Big Questions: Tackling the Problems of Philosophy with Ideas from Mathematics, Economics, and Physics," does a good job of explaining the goal of this book. Landsburg addresses topics such as belief, knowledge, right versus wrong, and other philosophical problems through the lens (primarily) of mathematics.

This is an interesting (and ambitious) idea for a book. The execution, however, is rough and abrasive. Landsburg's points are consistently logical, cohesive, and coherent. The manner in which the points are made, however, is often dismissive to the point of making the arguments hard to separate from the harsh treatment of viewpoints that might not align with those of the author.

Given the title and focus of this book, there is a lot of ground to cover. Even with that perspective, I found the wide array of topics and examples used to support points and arguments to be disconnected. The story-driven nature of this book -- well-reasoned arguments followed by stories/parables -- suffers a bit from this disconnectedness.

If nothing else, this book offers a number of insights that stimulate thought. Moreover, Landsburg offers some interesting suggestions as to how to "think." The book does take patience and persistence to separate the harsh and strong viewpoints espoused throughout the book. For the ardent reader, though, the logical consistency of many points in this book make it a worthwhile (and quick) read.

This book asks "The Big Questions", but gets all the answers wrong.

I think Landsburg's problem is one that he himself points out - when you're a math guy, everything looks like math to you, and you try to solve everything using math (or economics, or whatever). I am no different - I'm personally a computer science guy, and so I try to solve problems in philosophy using concepts and applications from theoretical computer science. (I.e., what does the Halting Problem say about free will?) But it seems pretty clear that Landsburg didn't do his due diligence when dipping his toes into the philosophical waters.

For example, he cites Dan Dennett as providing the answer to the problem of consciousness, neglecting to inform the readers that not only does Dennett not have the slightest idea how to solve or even explain the problem (he tries to hide it under a rock and ignore it), nor that Dennett's ideas have no real basis in either neuroscience or philosophy (Searle has basically gutted Dennett's ideas), but Landsburg goes a step further and expands Dennett's idea to reduce all consciousness to "a mathematical pattern".

There's a large problem with this. Let's suppose you have a neural network in software that reproduces the chunk of a human brain of an art critic that judges art, ultimately giving a thumbs-up or thumbs-down verdict on the work. Landsburg/Dennett claim that this neural net has the same inner life and enjoyment of art that the art critic does. (We'll ignore the Chinese Room problem for now, which Landsburg ducks when he briefly references Searle.) The problem is this: Since, as Landsburg argues, "consciousness is just mathematical patterns", then the rules of math apply to consciousness. In other words, if two neurons add together, it doesn't matter in which order we add them - the result is the same. So for this giant neural net which maps an input (the art piece) to the output (thumbs up/down), which we'll call f(x)->y, we can reorder and simplify the operations. As long as the function mapping from x to y remains unchanged, we can play whatever mathematical games we want with it. (It's Functionalism, eh?)

Now, as it turns out, this art critic is actually very simplistic - he just likes the color red. If there's more red in the work than green or blue, he likes it (gives it a "thumbs up"), if not, he nixes it. We apply our mathematical simplifications and optimizations to this neural net, and find that all that really matter is the amount of red in the art. This is not as farfetched as it sounds - I've written neural nets before... it's actually quite amazing how a 40-dimensional input space can sometimes be collapsed into one or a few elements when you do a postmortem analysis to it. So we end up replacing this large and largely unnecessary neural net from an art critic with an Adder - it adds up the amount of red, green, and blue in an art, does a quick comparison, and returns a thumbs up or down verdict. Here's the problem: by Landsburg/Dennett's thesis, this adder has the same inner life and enjoyment of art (it is functionally identical, remember) that the original art critic had, which is quite obviously false, since it is essentially just adding up long lists of numbers, without even any knowledge of what art is, or even which of the numbers are red and green (we can withhold telling it, and interpret the result on our own based on which numbers we fed into it). So it's quite clear that he's completely wrong about it.

But he sort of breezes over the problems with it (and all the other arguments he sort of tosses out there), while insulting people by saying most of their beliefs are wrong, and that they haven't thought them through very well. Pot - meet Kettle Black.

I was going to write a longer list of problems with this book, since he makes in nearly every claim. His argument against ID could be used to prove that cars were not intelligently designed. His argument that math constitutes the universe could be equally replaced with the theory that sheep-sorting algorithms make up the universe. His argument about Pascal's Wager neglects to mention it was targeted at a fundamentally Christian audience, who thought that God was a real probability (a "live option" as William James would put it), not a marginally and equally low chance like the atheists that he quotes in the section. But it's not worth the time.

He just doesn't have enough background in the topics he's lecturing about. While the book is in some sense a stimulating read (it gets 2 stars just for that alone), it ultimately comes off as a collection of the author's essays from his Intro to Philosophy class, that he never took the time to run past his professor.

If you want to expand your mind, I'd recommend either the rather self-indulgent Freakonomics books, or the breezy Gladwell books like The Tipping Point, or Taleb's The Black Swan.

The culture I grew up in was mostly hostile to the rational, logical world-view. When I asked the 'big questions' growing up what I heard for the most part was silence. I've had to spend considerable effort and time trying to figure these sort of questions out on my own. I'm not complaining, just noting that the culture I found myself in was in an 'in-between' stage where the myths of the past were still taken far too strongly, and so it was very difficult to find good logical, rational discussion, much less well-thought-through ideas about the questions of 'life, the universe, and everything'.

In my mind this book is the perfect gift to that young rationalist human being, who is just starting to seriously ask those big questions of life. It has taken me decades of thinking, reading, and debating with friends to get to many of the points of view this book espouses. Note that I don't agree 100% with everything in this book. However I do agree with a good 90-95+ percent of it, and I have to give the author additional points for laying out his arguments clearly. So even the things I don't agree with I think he gets mostly right, and at the very least is a decent starting point if you've never been exposed to these ideas.

As to the criticisms I've read: Yes, he does go after Dawkins, however his argument is in my mind pretty solid. It just so happens that the Creationists are wrong from both angles of the complexity argument. It is really just a matter of taste which argument you want to use (Dawkins's evolutionary argument vs Landsburg's example of ab initio irreducible complexity), they are both very convincing depending exactly what point you are trying to argue. It's just humorous that the Creationists simply can't even win for loosing.

Bottom line: If you are a curious rationalist buy this book. Even if you don't agree with the author you will still exercise your current thinking. The worst that will happen is that you will agree with everything he says and will have found a kindred spirit. The best thing that can happen of course is that you will replace a weaker idea with a stronger one.

Also, if you are a parent and are blessed with a math/science inclined child, please, please, please buy them a copy!

I was expecting to be bowled over with irrefutable logic and powerful insights. I was not.

He used a great deal of logic, but some of the premises were dubious and some of the logical reasoning did not follow, even on critical strands of his major thesis.

On page 17, in order to prove his point that "math must be the fabric of the universe," everything not math is defined as "baggage." He explains that there is no natural division between heart particles and lung particles from an atomic or sub-atomic level, and that we, as humans, create the boundaries between heart and lungs for our own classification system, adding "even though it's not a fundamental aspect of reality."

That is a false statement. Because the atoms in lung tissue may be identical to the atoms in heart tissue, that does not prove that, in reality there is no fundamental difference. Those very real differences, which guide our decisions, are defined as baggage, and thus discarded, leaving, in the end, only math.

From this he derives the false dichotomy that "Either everything is baggage, in which case there is no external reality whatsoever beyond the subjective creations of human brains. Or something is real, completely independent of us humans," implying that it is either math or nothing. The argument defines away everything that does not support his contentions and uses logical juggling to arrive at nonsense. Similar lapses in reasoning pervade much of the first two thirds of the book.

I was glad I read it to the end. The economic reasoning in later chapters was, for the most part, very solid, as well as his insights on "how to think," partly redeeming the work.

Overall, I was disappointed. The meat of the book let me down.

This book is such a confused mismash it's hard to know where to begin.

I picked this book up because I had a long plane ride ahead of me. The premise seemed interesting. Unfortunately, I didn't have time to really check it out before I made my purchase.

I started reading, and right away I started noticing logical inconsistencies, incomplete presentations of arguments, and a deep intolorence for anything that didn't conform to his version of "rational thought" -- Even in the areas where this guy is supposed to be an expert.

He's a professor of economics at Rochester. His presentation of the subject is "Protectionism lowers wealth." That's it, end of story. He offers "proof." Nowhere is there any mention of the important Econ 101 instances of when protectionism is a an essential precondition to even economic efficiency. For example, there are many things that can be done to make a product more cheaply, child labor, externalizing pollution, etc. and protection against these things is essential. But none of this is mentioned.

As I read further, the arguments of philosophy were presented in the same one sided way. The author's intolerance for anything that didn't fit his definition of rational just got to be too much (religious believers don't really believe they just think they believe and here's the proof etc.). I had to put this book down.

To put it in terms even a bad economist can understand. The marginal pleasure I got out of yet again reading the same in flight magazine was greater than that I got from this book.

When I got home, I did a little internet research about the author. It turns out he's a self proclaimed "radical libertarian." Read in this context, the book makes complete sense. It isn't an honest search, it's a calculated political argument. The title shouldn't be The Big Questions, it should be Here Are the Answers You Idiot.

Just know what you are really buying here.