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Saturday, July 28, 2018

Trump the Businessman?

I have never been a fan of Donald Trump -- which is not to say that I took no pleasure in the shocked looks on the faces of Hillary Clinton's overconfident supporters on election night.  Trump has spent his whole life in the spotlight, and no one with that kind of record can be called a "conservative", at least as that term was understood in the 1980's; he has more in common with Hugh Hefner than with Ronald Reagan.  I did however accept the claim that Trump was an experienced businessman.  Two observations now make me doubt that very much.

The first observation is of Trump's appointees, or at least the ones with whom he regularly works on important decisions.  A large business will require many specialized skills, and its CEO cannot be expected to master them all.  That is not his job.  He should, however, be able to assemble a team of capable subordinates who work together to achieve the corporation's goals and implement his vision.

For a good example, consider Walt Disney and the creation of Disneyland, or even any of its more important early rides, such as the Haunted Mansion or Pirates of the Caribbean.  The dream and the final say both belonged to Mr. Disney, but he managed to get a number of inspired imagineers to buy into that dream.  The difference between getting talented subordinates to buy in vs merely hiring yes-men cannot be overstated.  A yes-man will not creatively challenge his boss:
  • because he was selected for personal loyalty rather than ability, he may lack the necessary expertise to flesh out alternative possibilities;
  • it is not necessary even to understand the boss's vision to be a yes-man (though a boss who prefers yes-men may well lack anything coherent enough to be called a vision); and
  • the yes-man is motivated by his boss's praise (and by fear of his boss's criticism), not by the success of the project.
Walt Disney did this the right way, and the results speak for themselves.  Can anyone actually claim Donald Trump has chosen his subordinates wisely?  The resignations, the infighting, and the harsh language Trump has unleashed on people he personally selected indeed speak for themselves.  If Trump were a real captain of industry, how could he assemble such a poor staff, and why would he go to such lengths to undermine that staff?

The second observation crystallized a few days ago in the context of recent comments Trump has made about NAFTA negotiations:  he sees trade deals, and apparently most international affairs in general, as zero-sum games, in which one side wins only what the other loses.

Zero sum games can occur in business, of course, as well as in sports and electoral politics, but the particular characteristic of business is that it should produce wealth, making it possible for both sides to win.  In fact, it is not unusual for the success of one's "competition" to be extremely important for one's own success.  For example ...
  • It may be that the competition helps increase demand for one's product.  Take Busch Gardens for example.  They would be horrified if they were to hear that the Magic Kingdom were going out of business, even though Walt Disney World is a "competitor".  That's because many people come to central Florida just for Walt Disney World, but while in the area swing by Busch Gardens for a day or two.  Fewer people visiting the Magic Kingdom would mean fewer people visiting Busch Gardens.
  • Without competition, a business's suppliers might not be able to continue operations.  Let's say I'm a farmer.  Other farmers might be "competition", but John Deere would not be able to keep making tractors if I were their only customer.
Again, these things should be obvious to any businessman. 

"But," you might object, "international diplomacy is not business per se, and the examples you gave don't exactly apply to the United States."  Fair enough, then, so here are cases at the international level:


  • a prosperous Mexico would be better able to afford American goods, and 
  • there would be no need (nor desire) to "build a wall" to keep prosperous Mexicans out of the United States.

The case is even more dramatic with regards to Cuba.  The USA has spent decades trying to crush Cuba, even after the fall of Communism in Europe, but the only threat Cuba poses to America is another Mariel Boatlift should Cuba actually collapse politically or economically.  We would have a much better chance of transforming Cuba -- a small, nearby nation with much the same cultural background as ours -- through constructive engagement than we have with China, yet we treat Cuba as though it were the existential threat, not the nuclear-armed, incipient superpower.

It is worth repeating that not every interaction can be made into a win-win situation; it would be naive and dangerous to assume it could.  Yet it is even more naive and dangerous to assume that if our adversaries are losing, we must be winning.  Saddam Hussein definitely lost the "second Gulf war"; but did the United States really win?  A vacuum was created that allowed ISIS to form, and the whole area is still a mess with a very uncertain future.  Has this made America safer, or more respected, or more prosperous?  There is nothing particularly unusual about this example, either; punitive actions based on zero-sum reasoning seem to be counterproductive more often than not.

Sadly, Trump seems to base his whole foreign policy -- to the extent it has any consistent basis -- on the idea that for every loser there is a winner, and vice versa, so other countries must lose so that America can win.  This is not how a real businessman should think.

If Trump was not really the businessman he is portrayed as having been, what was he, exactly?  My guess is that he was like an NFL owner.  The players make the plays that fans come to see; the coaches call the plays; the general manager hires the coaches; the owner ... hires the GM, gives the team some of its general direction, but mostly just sits in his luxury booth and enjoys a feeling of power.  It is helpful if an owner knows the rules of the game, and even more helpful if he knows how to manage subordinates, but neither of these is really essential as long as he allows the GM to make the important decisions while he remains a kind of figurehead.  This leaves the owner with lots of free time to pursue other interests, like hosting a reality TV show or running for office.

Saturday, July 14, 2018

Book Review: Beyond the Ice Limit (Audio)

This is the second "Gideon Crew" book I have read, but I happened to start with The Lost Island, which falls in the middle of that series.  It is also the third book by Douglas Preston; he and Lincoln Child coauthored the Gideon Crew series.  Most of the general comments from The Lost Island thus apply to this book as well.  Fortunately, my review of Lost City of the Monkey God is not very relevant -- perhaps because this book is fiction, or perhaps because it does not treat a subject of serious academic interest, or perhaps because it is coauthored, the political posturing is not really present here.  Warning:  Spoilers ahead.

Genuinely original science fiction is hard to come by these days, and you won't really find it here.  Here are some echoes that I heard in this book.
  • Human choices can be modeled with great accuracy, from Isaac Asimov's "Foundation" series.
  • Luckiness is a real attribute of some people, from Larry Niven's Ringworld.
  • A plant/animal/?? from outer space eats people and threatens to take over the world, from a lot of places, but Little Shop of Horrors comes to mind.
  • An alien tries to communicate with whales, from Star Trek IV.
  • Snake-like aliens enter people's heads and control them, again from many possible sources, but most notably from Stargate SG-1.
The originality of the components is not so important as the way they are combined, though.  On that score, this is a decent story.

A few other flaws are worthy of note.
  • Everyone agrees that the ship Rolvaag (which occurred in an earlier book, The Ice Limit) was blown apart when the seed came in contact with salt water, resulting in the death of most of the crew.  Everyone also agrees that this is the fault of Eli Glinn, for refusing to drop the seed into the salt water in order to lighten the ship.  Despite the number of geniuses involved, no one notices the obvious conclusion that the explosion would have happened anyway, this time with no one having made it to the lifeboats.
  • Since everyone was convinced that the alien was very dangerous, there is no way the initial exploration would have been by manned submersibles a few dozen feet from it.  They come with 5 manned submersibles but only 1 remotely operated vehicle, which they intend to use only to deploy a bomb!  Reversing the numbers would make more sense.  The characters are supposed to be too smart to make this kind of mistake.
  • The alien is supposed to harvest brains on planets when it arrives; it enslaves them for "computing power". It is a safe assumption that brains evolved on different planets would have very different structures.  How is an organism that needs other brains intelligent enough to understand, preserve alive, and incorporate brains completely unrelated to it?
  • The alien seems to be rather flexible in the size of brains it uses.  Why did it not make use of whale and dolphin brains?
  • One of the characters was in the process of deciphering Blue Whale language by comparing whale vocalizations to their circumstances.  The alien is supposed to have done this without being able to sense their circumstances.  That should not be possible, no matter how intelligent the alien might be.
  • Conservation of energy seems not to be in play in this universe.
    • The shell of the seed is supposed to be made of a superheavy element (number 177) from the hypothetical "island of stability". Even if this element is truly stable (which is unlikely -- "stability" is a relative term for high-atomic-mass elements), it would be nowhere abundant. The creature would have to expend a huge amount of energy to make enough for millions or billions of seeds, each with a mass of thousands of tons. Where would this energy come from?
    • Contrary to what Eli Glinn suggests, throwing the bulk of a planet's crust into space is not more efficient than throwing only the seeds into space.  Nor is there enough energy available on a planet to disrupt it that way.
    • The "goa'uld" do not eat, but they move energetically.  Where do they get their energy?
  • Early in the book, a sex scene is described in more detail than some (myself included) may find comfortable.  The encounter does help drive the plot, but it need not be so explicitly described.
So again, this is not great literature to read.  It has just enough crazy ideas, though, and enough redundancy in exposition to make it a good book to listen to on a long drive.

Tuesday, July 10, 2018

Book Review: The Lost City of the Monkey God

A few months ago, I finished The Lost City of the Monkey God by Douglas Preston -- at least, I have reached the point where the main plot line has concluded, and I have no interest in finishing the last few chapters, for reasons I will get into shortly.  It is a mediocre book, which, given the material it had to work with, makes it immensely disappointing.

The book's main flaw is its lack of focus.  It starts off well, being the story of a mysterious, legendary lost city deep in the jungles of Honduras and of the adventurers who contributed to it finally being found.  This part could just as easily have been an Indiana Jones adventure, and when I first bought the CD's to keep my mind occupied during a long drive, I thought it was a fictional work in exactly that genre.

As the book progressed, though, it became all to clear that Preston was more interested in proving himself to be a liberal in good standing than to tell a good story.

Perhaps the least problematic part of Preston flaunting his liberal credential is when he is apologetic for the whole mission as not being sufficiently academic. It's not that academic credentials are unimportant; it's that they are more important in some parts of science than in others.  For example, skilled amateurs have made, and continue to make, many important contributions to astronomy, frequently being the first to spot a comet or nova and often recording the only record of a transient lunar phenomenon.  Amateurs are frequently the ones who find fossils, and indeed objects of archaeological interest; as long as they do not do irreparable harm to the finds, this is a help, not a hindrance, to science.  In all these cases, careful, knowledgeable amateurs give the professionals more "eyes" than they would otherwise have, and they allow the professionals to concentrate their efforts in places where their expertise is truly essential.  Really good scientists understand and acknowledge this.

Stepping up from that is Preston's "sensitivity" to cultural imperialism.  Yes, that is a real thing, but it doesn't really apply here.  In parts of the book, Preston is very "sensitive" to the claims that no, of course what they found was not the legendary "White City" (Ciudad Blanca); that is a myth told by the ignorant, and to claim to have found it is mere exploitative sensationalism, like claiming to have found Atlantis or Camelot.  At other points, Preston is "sensitive" to charges that the expedition really discovered nothing; the natives knew it was there all along, and the legend of Ciudad Blanca proves that.  

But these two extremes obviously contradict each other, and neither of them are exactly true.  Ciudad Blanca is real in the same way Troy is real (discovered by Heinrich Schliemann), the kraken is real (in the form of giant squids), the unicorn is real (it is a distorted description of a rhinoceros), and Santa Clause is real (St. Nicholas of Myra was a real man who lived from AD 270 to AD 343 in what is today Turkey); confusion and fiction do not remove the fact that each of these is "based on a true story."  The locals knew there was something out in the jungle, the works of a great native civilization, and some of them knew where at least parts of it could be found.  However, their story of the curse was at best a dim memory of the disease that arrived in the New World with Europeans (and traveled through it much faster than they did), and the animal behavior at the main archaeological site indicated that no human being of any kind had visited the spot for generations -- possibly since the location was abandoned centuries ago.  So there was a kernel of truth in the folktale, but only a kernel, and archaeology was necessary to learn the full truth.  That is not cultural imperialism; it is not an attempt to shoehorn another people's culture or history into a narrative to serve our own purposes, it is instead simply a matter of trying to learn as much as possible about their culture and history.  That a few self-serving individuals say otherwise is to be expected, but their claims need to be evaluated in the light of reason, not merely affirmed for ideological reasons.

Worse than even this, though, is Preston's shameful display of "white guilt".  

Now let me be quite clear on this.  Yes, the Europeans who came to the Americas did many cruel things to those who were already living here.  But don't be stupid about this:  choose any time and place at random, and you are almost certain to find that at that time and place those with the power to be cruel were in fact being cruel.  We are a species of stinkers.  If the conquistadors were more cruel to the natives of Central America than the other way around, it was only because circumstances gave them certain remarkable advantages, not that the New World was some hippy paradise of pacifists, like FernGully.  Now anyone is right to feel shame for his own misdeeds, and in diminishing proportions for the misdeeds of those with whom he identifies -- those of his family, those of his religion, those of his nation, those of his race.  Race really does come near the very end of any such list; our connections to those with very superficial resemblances to us is very tenuous indeed.  If Preston is Christian (his religion, if any, is unclear), he has better grounds to be ashamed of cruelty by Christians, both because he identifies with them, and because he could claim that Christians, with the benefits of the Gospel and the Sacraments, really should know better.  Naturally, there is no hint whatsoever of that argument.

But that only applies to deliberate cruelty, not to the diseases that were unwittingly spread from one location to another.  When the conquistadors came to the Americas, no one had a decent understanding of disease, as is clear from the fact that European populations would continue to suffer greatly from very preventable diseases.  In particular, the conquistadors had absolutely no reason to believe -- at least until it was too late -- that the natives of the New World would be much, much more vulnerable to diseases common among Europeans.  Nor did they have any reason to want to devastate the Americas; even the most selfish and worldly of them wanted to govern a prosperous territory, not a destitute one in a state of collapse.  Believe the stories about blankets intentionally exposed to smallpox centuries later if you like, but those stories had nothing to do with this first contact.

"No," you may say, "That's not good enough.  What matters is that a civilization was destroyed, not the intentions of those who carried the disease."  I disagree; blaming people, regardless of color, merely for being sick really is reprehensible. If that is still your position, though, you will have to blame Native Americans for the destruction of Ciudad Blanca's civilization.  No white man would penetrate that part of Honduras until long after the pandemic had done its worst; it was instead carried by Native American refugees.

In conclusion, this book is a wasted opportunity.  It could have been about adventure; it could have been about colorful personalities in an exotic location; it could have been about science and history.  It dabbles in each of these, but refuses to concentrate on any one of them; and it ruins even that weak mix with a heavy dose of off-putting virtue signaling.