Simon Dobson (Posts about bonanza)

The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World from Scratch

Simon Dobson — Sat, 22 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Lewis Dartnell (2014)

I'm hard-put to classify this book. On the one hand it's an engaging and valiant attempt to illustrate the crafts that would need to be retained (or rediscovered) after a civilisational collapse – or at least after one kind of collapse such as a pandemic that leaves the infrastructure intact by decaying rather than pulverised. Dartnell seems to think a more fierce collapse would be unsurvivable, and so focuses on the more positive possibility.

He traverses a lot of technologies, including for agriculture, building, transportation, clothing, chemistry, and communications. He (correctly in my view) identifies the scientific method itself as the most valuable technology to retain, and explores some of the ways in which modern society is contingent on specific historical accidents that a re-booting society need not copy.

But it's also frustrating. As a scientist and engineer I wanted more detail: perhaps there's a need for another, "how to" manual alongside this book. And Dartnell seems to have a very cavalier attitude towards safety, mentioning and understating the dangers of (for example) lye once and then making use of it extensively, which is a recipe for disaster on the part of any practitioners. And the book is a little too broad, rather than focusing on the technologies of immediate relevance in the aftermath of disaster: should we really be thinking about building vacuum-tube electronics when even basic agriculture is such a challenge?

Despite the positivity on display, reading this confirmed my thinking that a recovery after a disaster would be protracted, with no way to avoid a return to feudalism and warring bands. In that sense technology would be the least of the survivors' worries.

3/5. Finished Saturday 22 November, 2025.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)

Darwin Comes to Town: How the Urban Jungle Drives Evolution

Simon Dobson — Wed, 27 Aug 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Menno Schilthuizen (2018)

A take on evolutionary biology that sees cities and human-created environments as a positive force on ecology, without in any way diminishing the effects of human-caused demage.

It's an interesting perspective. Ecologists and the popular press often only see the damage, not the opportunity, of human construction, and regard species being forced from their "natural" habitats as always bad. Schilthuizen argues quite persuasively that habitat destruction has been mitigated by habitat construction, by creating urban landscapes in which (often other) species can thrive possibly more than they did before. This is especially true when we also consider "invasive" species transported from elsewhere, which find niches in their destination cities (often around their ports of entry). In some cases we find species that no longer have or inhabit a "natural" habitat at all.

And habitat destruction often isn't as complete as it seems. Schilthuizen example is the mice of New York's smaller parks, which form islands of isolation that in turn cause identifiable genetic differences between the inhabitants of the different tiny patches of land. Singapore similarly has tiny trats of native forest surrounded by city and cut-off from each other. He uses this carefully to argue that evolution requires neither great distinctions in environment nor wide reaches of time in which to operate in.

This is a careful book that doesn't shy away from the difficult questions that evolution inevitably raises. Plenty of the cases discussed involve a complex mix of genetic evolution, epigenetic adaptation, individual learning, and group-based "culture" to change the animals' relationships with their environments. It's good to take on this complexity head-on, and that makes this stand out as a great introduction and illustration of the wider powers of natural selection.

4/5. Finished Wednesday 27 August, 2025.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)

Impossible Monsters: Dinosaurs, Darwin, and the Battle Between Science and Religion

Simon Dobson — Tue, 20 May 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Michael Taylor (2024)

How dinosaurs drove the development of the theory of evolution – and a lot more.

It's hard to credit that the first dinosaurs were only discovered at the end of the 18th century. They emerged into a world that had little doubt about the literal truth of biblical creation. They helped to shatter that certainty, although not alone and not at once.

This is a book that itself shatters several myths. It shows how Victorian scientists were as religious as their fellow citizens – and often more so – and how their faith coloured their interpretations of the evidence they themselves were discovering. It describes a Darwin too afraid of the possible social consequences ot publish his theories of natural selection as they are formed, and indeed he doesn't publish them until he's slowly built up his reputation as a naturalist through more traditional means: a level of patience that would be unthinkable today. And it shows that his interactions with Alfred Russel Wallace – often described as his rival – were marked by kindness and high regard on both sides, with Wallace modestly content in taking a supporting role (and later being a pallbearer at Darwin's interrment in Westminster Abbey).

Over the source of the 19th century the religious certainties are challenged successfully, but there was nothing inevitable about the triumph and the opponents absolutely did not go quietly. Atheism remained the last taboo: long after Catholics and non-confirmist Protestants had their civil and political rights restored, atheists still had to fight to be allowed to take seats in Parliament. Taylor presents this as part of the conflict driven by the dinosaurs and the scientific changes their discovery drove, and it's hard to argue with him.

There are some fascinating vignettes. My favourite is when Alfred Russel Wallace takes a bet to show the earth is not flat, and devises an ingenious method that of course doesn't rely on any modern technology or arguments, but which is self-evidently correct. That there are still many flat-earthers even today is testament to the abiding need to keep pressing for science and evidence in public life.

5/5. Finished Tuesday 20 May, 2025.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)

Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers

Simon Dobson — Sun, 23 Mar 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Mary Roach (2003)

An amusing and informative study of corpses. Not a sentence I ever expected to write.

This is a book that digs into both the biology and the sociology of how we treat the dead. This includes the various uses made of cadavers over the year, from modern medical education to potions and "cures" made from mummies. Along the way we also get a discussion of different funeral practices being proposed by generations of free-thinkers and how they do (and don't) get adopted by wider society. In many ways it's amazing the the taboo against dissection and associated practices was ever overcome: it seems to be an almost universal belief that the dead should be disposed of whole.

While the content is fascinating, the writing style grates on me. I understand the need for some levity in dealing with a topic that has the potential to be offensive or distressing in equal means – but I wish Roach could have resisted the temptation to quip every third paragraph (it feels like). It feels forced.

3/5. Finished Sunday 23 March, 2025.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)

Korea: A New History of South and North

Simon Dobson — Sun, 09 Mar 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Victor D. Cha (2023)

The modern history of a nation that's been to some extent marginalised by wider geopolitics. It begins with domination by Japan in the late 19th century, which continued until the end of the Second World War – only to be replaced by domination through "trusteeship" by the US and others, which itself was a direct precursor to the partition of the nation, a vicious war, and a long and convoluted evolution of two very different political and economic outcomes.

There are times when it feels a little superficial: the Korean War gets only a few pages. But that's a consequence of the breadth of coverage, and especially the time spent analysing the politics as they evolve through repression (in the North) and authoritarianism becoming dictatorship and finally vibrant and raucous democracy (in the South).

The fact that both authors are Korea specialists (and in one case ethnically Korean) certainly helps. They have seen close-up the evolution of both Koreas' places in the world, and their personal observations and anecdotes bring the story alive without being distracting.

The last chapter is a detailed analysis of when and whether any re-unification of the pennisula will happen. It's a balanced and well-informed view, albeit one that's too sanguine with respect to the expectation of continued US support and engagement: the recent (as I write) events in Ukraine don't give confidence in whether the US would act as an honest broker in any crisis. But it remains a clear and well-reasoned (if largely non-committal) analysis of where Krean history may go next.

4/5. Finished Sunday 9 March, 2025.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)

Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World

Simon Dobson — Sun, 02 Mar 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Naomi Klein (2023)

What does it mean for someone to have a double? That is the broad premise of this book, and its a lot broader than it first appears.

Klein's doppelganger is another author, Naomi Wolf. Both began as liberal and feminist darlings, before "Other Naomi" (Wolf) became a proponent of various consipracy theories and hanging out with right-wing influencers. The two Naomis starte being confused with each other within social media, to the estent that Klein almost starts to lose her own sense of identity and becomes increasingly obsessed with tracking the confusion. (I was darkly amused to check Wolf out on Wikipedia and find that the page starts "Not to be confused with Naomi Klein" – and vice versa for Klein's entry.)

There's a certain feeling of narcissism in the account. Maybe Klein is affected so much because she and Wolf both have such curated on-line personalities, so that when Klein's is intruded upon it feels like a personal attack. Would someone with less commitment to media be so affected? – well, I have to say I hope I never personally find out, because it comes across as a very destabilising experience.

Klein does take a broader view of the pheonomenon of "doubling", which at one level feels unnecessary ad extraneous to this book but that I found quite fascinating in its own right: the idea that doubles appear in lots of circumstances for those with (and even without) a life in the public eye. For an author it's natural to be worried about how the "double" that is one's written work is interpreted and re-interpreted after it's been published, without your control, and how this spills-back on to how people interpret everything you write from then on. Some of the examples feel a little contrived, others quite plausible.

So this book is both a personal memoir and a deeper exploration of a person's relationship to their own work and life. Both sides are valuable and well worth reading.

4/5. Finished Sunday 2 March, 2025.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)

Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control

Simon Dobson — Thu, 16 Jan 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Stuart Russell (2019)

A book that tries to address the emergence and implications of artificial intelligence.

(I should preface what I'm going to say by noting Brand's enormous contributions to AI research and teaching. He knows massively more about these systems than I do.)

Computer scientists often avoid the term "AI" because it's so broad and encompasses a huge range of approaches, from constraint-solving and pattern-matching to speech recognition and the sorts of "chatbot" technology that is the common face of modern AI – technically referred to as Large Language Models or LLMs, that have been trained on text scraped from the internet and can perform impressive feats of conversation.

There's a problem when discussing AI that you have to be very careful about, and that's the tendency to anthropomorphise. It's almost impossble not to use terms that imply agency: "think", "understand", "learn", "know", "decide", and so on. AI researchers use these words with very technical senses that are analogous to their usual meanings – but that aren't the same, and that's where things get misleading. When a person "summarises" some information, we mean that they pick out what they think is most important from the text; when an LLM does the same thing, it picks out the words that are statistically most clustered within the text and its training data. Are these two processes the same? They certainly don't sound the same, and they often produce radically different "summaries", because the human summariser is working from a far richer knowledge base and using different means to assess importance, often including what they know about the intended audience. It's doing this well that's usually taken as one of the hallmarks of intelligence. These are statistical techniques that cleave to the mean, which implies they will always by design produce middling answers. An amazingly insightful and creative answer is by definition unlikely, and so will be avoided by design.

There are other problems too. Machine learning, the science that underlies LLMs, is usually based on training from huge volumes of data. This permits impressive feats, such as being able to spot anomalies in cancer images better (in some cases) and more consistently than trained doctors. But that's a weakness too: the idea that the future will be like the past, meaning that anything not in the training set runs the risk of being ignored as noise. The LLMs' training data from the internet is text, not validated knowledge in any sense. And remember that repetition increases likelihood for an LLM, including repeatition of nonsense.

This lies at the heart of the problem of hallucination, where AIs confidently produce startlingly incorrect text. Why is this? Because text is all they have to work with: there is no model of the world as it is, and therefore no ability to correct. The most modern LLMs are now attempting to correct this, so far with little success.

So are we seeing intelligence from LLMs? We're seeing something that presents like some parts of such intelligence. From this the industry has extrapolated that we are, for example, about to see models demonstrating "PhD level" ability – "soon", but there never seems to be a demonstration. One characteristic of LLMs is that they don't spontaneously do anything: they wait until prompted, and then reply. Does that sound like intelligent behaviour? – no planning, no forethought, no imagination? I work with a lot of PhD-level people, and none of them behave this way.

Some will object that there's lots going on in industrial labs that we don't see. Quite possibly. Maybe the insiders are seeing things that we outsiders don't. But the common characteristic of the systems we outsiders do see is systems that can perform well on certain well-prescribed and -bounded tasks, but which then fail catastrophically when used in less constrained domains.

I am a materialist: I don't believe that there's anything supernatural about intelligence (however one defines it), or anything privileged about running an intelligent process on a biological (rather than a silicon) substrate. But this book strikes me as another over-hyped, somewhat confused and confusing contribution to our understanding of what AI is. It focuses on some entirely hypothetical potential harms (intelligent autonomous machines) while largely ignoring the very real current harms of bias, accuracy, and increasing economic and digital disparities.

2/5. Finished Thursday 16 January, 2025.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)

The World According to Colour

Simon Dobson — Sun, 11 Aug 2024 00:00:00 GMT

James Fox (2022)

A book using colour as a way to access a range of other topics, without ever losing focus.

Some of the choices will probably be controversial, such as the emergence of "whiteness" as a racial classification, even though supported plentifully by evidence. There are plenty of other less challenging anecdotes, though. Why do we usually consider there that there are seven colours? – at least in part because of Newton's religious and alchemical ideas that led him to want to tie colour to the notes on the musical scale

I most enjoyed the chapter on purple, mainly because it focused on the significant technological change that synthetic aniline dyes brought into culture, changing the relative abundances of various colours and changing the ways in which they were perceived as signifiers of wealth and status.

4/5. Finished Sunday 11 August, 2024.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)

Ultra-Processed People: The Science Behind Food That Isn't Food

Simon Dobson — Thu, 04 Jul 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Chris van Tulleken (2023)

Food versus food-shaped industrial products.

Ultra-processed food (UPF) is pervasive in modern diets, and with it comes a litany of actual, conjectured, and supposed harms. UPF itself is a strange beast, taking food crops and turning them into pure components that can then be re-mixed to construct new products. This has some perverse consequences, such as flavours being removed from purified and "modified" oils and starches in order to make them more broadly usable – and then having those same flavours re-introduced later in the process, again in "modified" form. That sounds insane – how can it be cheaper than using the original oil? – but in fact it makes perfet commercial sense for companies wanting fungible raw materials to produce unvarying, known-ahead-of-time tastes and textures.

The resulting products (I'm now reluctant to call them foods), being created in labs, can be re-worked in pursuit of particular commercial goals, for example by adding powdered soya when looking to create a "high-protein" snack. They can also be re-engineered to be far more pleasurable and addictive for consumers, for example by hacking the body's responses to food (which are themselves coming to be understood as far more subtle and complicated than we used to think).

van Tulleken has a science background, and it shows in the writing: most of the claims are carefully framed and evidenced. His background also saves him from falling for the industry's faux-refutations about there not being definitive causal links to specific harms: randomised controlled trials aren't the "scientific gold standard" in situations where they're impossible to conduct in the real world, and epidemiological evidence coupled with some knowledge of the possible harm pathways can provide sufficient evidence. Having said that, he does sometimes deviate from this careful path, and there are a few instances of words like "may" and "could" doing a lot of heavy lifting.

One of the most powerful elements of the book is that it simultaneously doesn't preach or prescribe, but does offer suggestions for ways forward. UPF is very difficult to precisely define, and is therefore difficult to legislate for or avoid. Does a single stabiliser in a product render it UPF? – because if so literally anything in a packet would be included. van Tulleken also takes aim at some of the wider social drivers of UPF, notably its cheapness and ease of preparation compared to "real" food, reinforcing poor diet as a consequence of poverty. He also suggests some interesting policy options, while also taking aim at a policy infrastructure that's heavily co-opted by the UPF industry. Regulators and the food industry are not partners and have goals that are mutually irreconcilable within the current framework of pre-eminent shareholder value.

5/5. Finished Thursday 4 July, 2024.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)

Beyond

Simon Dobson — Sun, 21 Apr 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Stephen Walker (2021)

The space race from the American perspective is well-known: this book presents the same race from the Soviet perspective.

The differences are profound, of course, mainly driven by the Soviet programme occurring in complete secrecy to duck the risks that failure would have on the programme's image. The American programme by contrast was conducted in the open at least as far as the actual "shots" were concerned – and their public failures did indeed endanger their ability to continue, at least in part because neither public nor politicians understood the process of engineering or just how hard each shot was. The deep irony is that the Soviet successes appeared so sudden and dramatic they led directly to the deepening of the American programme and commitment or more money and effort than the Soviets seemed able to maintain to capitalise on their early lead.

There are plenty of revelations even for those with a detailed interest in space history. I remember hearing all through the 1970s that the Soviet spacecraft landed on land, but it turns out that in many cases the cosmonauts were bailing-out and parachuting to earth instead, with this being intensively covered-up even to the extent of falsifying reports to the international organisation responsible for certifying "firsts" in space.

While the achievements of both programmes were profound, they were perhaps doomed in the long term by a lack of vision for what they were actually for. The benefits of space technology are now obvious; those of exploration perhaps less so, although it doesn't (in my opinion) require much suspension of disbelief to feel that science-driven activities lead almost inevitably to enormously valuable spin-offs. The fact that we can't quantify these a priori shouldn't (in my opinion, again) stop us keeping the faith in the value of experiments that advance our science and engineering in ways that wouldn't otherwise happen.

5/5. Finished Sunday 21 April, 2024.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)