I push myself to write about the books I read for two reasons:
1. Being a very slow reader, I obsessively read, reread each sentence, understand and move to the next one all the while losing a lot of time. By the time I get to the end of the book, I may not remember very many things I read in the initial chapters of the book! So, writing a page or two about the whole book forces me to think through the contents of the entire book which in turn helps deposit the overall takeaways somewhere in my head. Without this process, I may not remember much of what I read after a week or two. Perhaps sad, but true! :-(
2. While most of my friends hit delete when they see my emails claiming TLDR :-), each book/topic tickles some subset of my friends, who then provide interesting additional pointers/follow ups. If I don't send out an email, I am sure I will never get those pointers. In a way sad, but that is the reality. :-)
This book called "What have you changed your mind about?" I just finished reading refuses to fold into any simple, easy takeaway making it interesting w.r.t. both of the points above. There is no simple summary for me to store & remember as it is a collection of short essays by several dozen experts in several different fields. Since it touches many different fields, this write up may not pique the curiosity of any one particular set of friends interested in a given field, obliterating the probability of receiving additional pointers. Hopefully I am wrong w.r.t. the second point and will get feedback related to such efforts online or in other books. :-)
You may know about Edge.org site that has been around since the mid-90's. In case, you didn't, you can read about it here. They had asked scientists, philosophers, academics, business people to write about ideas, opinions, concepts, notions they held earlier that they had changed later when new data or evidence proved them wrong. In this day and age, particularly in the arena of politics where being stubborn is considered a virtue and changing your mind on any issue gets you the sobriquet "flip-flopper", it is refreshing to read several respected experts writing about how they were wrong and were happy to change their long held views in their own field of expertise. Naturally you don't want to be fickle minded devoid of clear ideas in your field of interest, gullible enough to be swayed easily. But when new evidence/data that contradicts your ideas come to light, being able to switch your position is a mandatory requirement for scientists. It is certainly a characteristic that should be applauded and nurtured among the younger generation so that they don't feel ashamed to change views when warranted. So, I loved the premise of the book right away.
By design since each essay (not calling them chapters since each piece is just couple of pages long and there are more than 100 of them in a 400 page book) is written by a different person, it was a little difficult to read the book without settling into any one writing style and theme. Since there is no connection from one essay to the next, I did jump around initially to read the pieces written by people I knew. But later reverted to reading it from end-to-end so as not to miss any piece. While there were a few badly written pieces that didn't make much sense, there were a lot of good ones. Here are a few samples:
Freeman Dyson writes that based on the book Japan's Decision to Surrender by Robert Butow published in 1954, he believed that the two atomic bombs dropped on Japan brought world war II to the end. But based on new information summarized in a 2007 article, he has changed his mind since it is clear now that the surrender decision by the Japanese emperor didn't concern itself with the bombing but was based on other historical factors related to Soviet invasion of Manchuria! The Japanese military elite interviewed by Butow went with the "bomb brought an end to the war" narration since that saved face for them as the bomb is a result of a major scientific innovation where as the true reasons were related to lack of spiritual power and strategic errors.
Ray Kurzweil says that he has changed his mind about possible existence of other intelligent life forms in the universe and so rejects the SETI (Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence) attempts to find them.
Richard Dawkins discusses as to how The Handicap Principle proposed by zoologist Amotz Zahavi didn't make any sense to him for years and he was arguing against it. The principle basically says animals often carry serious handicaps as a way to display their superiority to the opposite sex. A good example is the plumage carried by peacock. It is unnecessary weight, and is inconvenient to carry around. So, peacocks without the plumage should have had an evolutionary advantage irrespective of the fact that the plumage may look pretty. But as per Zahavi, the underlying message is that the peacock is so strong and healthy that it can afford to carry the handicap and so should be preferred by the peahen in search of a mate. Verbal arguments discussing this notion can take you only so far. So, Dawkins looked for mathematical models that demonstrated Zahavi's idea is correct. Initial models & studies pushed the probability of Zahavi being right downwards. But eventually a scientist named Alan Grafen found an evolutionarily stable combination of male advertising and female credulity strategies that is indeed Zahavian. Having seen this proof, Dawkins had changed his mind.
While there are 130+ such changes that runs the gamut, what I found interesting was how years of analysis and additional evidence have moved researchers arguably in opposite directions as well! Just to give one example, Jesse Bering changed his mind to arrive at the notion that despite all the new understanding God still casts a long shadow on human beings for good reasons, while Clay Shirky has switched his belief coming to the conclusion that the Doctrine of Joint Belief (i.e. that science and religion can co-exist) is all nonsense and should be completely thrown out. :-)
Could be an interesting book to keep and pop open a random page to read a random article whenever you feel like it.
Please do me a favor. Send me a note or a short write up about how you have changed your mind about something over the years. It could be pertinent to anything in the world/our lives, not necessarily related to science & technology.
When you do, I will send you one notion that I used to hold that I no longer do due to contrary evidence.
-sundar.
