Chris Woo — 胡仲平

Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny by Robert Wright, speaker of two of my favorite TEDTalks, is a book arguing that nonzero action is the driving force of History.  The tract, a limited game theory analysis of cultural evolution, is incredibly well researched and thought out.  There isn’t really a strong mathematical component; quite a lot of the logic is intuitive rather than formal — which is not to say you couldn’t formalize the logic it just is outside the purview of what is a journalistic polemic rather than a mathematical one.  In many ways this is like Robert Axelrod’s The Evolution of Cooperation.

One of the reasons I like this book is because Wright thinks quite a lot like I do.  For instance, while discussing possible distinctions between different social groups’ relative change in technological progress he discusses two functions of population density.  The first is a result of ease of trade and communication (it’s quicker to spread knowledge and to trade surplus goods if your market is closer rather than further from you).  While reading the first I had the thought, “Wouldn’t another function of pop. density be that the percent chance of inventions would increase?” and within the next two pages Wright is discussing that thought as part of his “Invisible Brain” hypothesis (to be compared to the “Invisible Hand” of Adam Smith).

My major problem with the book is a pedantic one; instead of using footnotes — which I prefer for non-fiction books — he uses an overly arcane endnote system that uses daggers (†) instead of actual superscript arabic numerals.

And when was the last time you invented something as clever as the boomerang?