A Few Good Men

Harper Lee: To Kill a Mocking Bird

A “great American novel”. Probably the best of the four US-American classics I have read this summer.

The story takes place over the course of three years in a small town, Maycomb, in 1930’s Alabama. It centers on lawyer Atticus Finch, his son Jem and daughter Jean Louise a.k.a. ”Scout”. A widower, Atticus has mostly been raising his children on his own. He is a soft-spoken man, but tries to set an example for his children through his morally righteous behavior. A coming off age story, there are numerous sub-plots which describe small town life in the American South:

•  In the beginning of the story, Scout is just starting school. Thanks to her family’s black cook, Calpurnia, she already knows how to read and write. This, and Scout's "smarty pants" attempt (I admittedly googled this expression...) to explain Maycomb’s peculiarities to her teacher from out of town creates significant conflict at school. 
• Dill Harris (1), a boy who spends his summers with his aunt in Maycomb, becomes Jem’s and Scout’s best friend and kind of Scout’s first boyfriend. Together, the children aim to lure reclusive Arthur “Boo” Railey, who essentially hasn’t been seen in public since his teenage days, out of his house. It does not become clear whether Boo is staying in his house voluntarily or whether he is being kept from going out by his brother Nathan. Boo seems to be reaching out to the children by leaving them little gifts in a hole in a tree, before Nathan puts an end to this.
• The children are good friends with Miss Maudie Atkinson, their neighbor from across the street who grew up together with Atticus. She feels kind of apart from the “foot-washing Baptists” of Maycomb who condemn the pride Miss Maudie takes in gardening. In the course of the story, Miss Maudie’s house burns down and she is forced to move in with a neighbor, an event to which she reacts stoically.
• In the latter parts of the story, Atticus' sister, Aunt Alexandra, moves in with the Finchens and attempts to turn the rather boyish Scout into more of a Southern lady, which leads the two to clash with each other repeatedly.

The book’s core, however, is the story of Atticus taking over the legal defense of a black man, Tom Robinson. Robinson has been accused of rape by Mayella Ewell. Mayella is one of eight children from a family that very much stems from the social fringe of Maycomb. After Atticus accepts the mandate, parts of Maycomb’s society and even their own extended family ostracize Jem and Scout for racist reasons. During the trial, Atticus succeeds to demonstrate that the injuries that Mayella sustained were likely inflicted by her drinking, violent father Bob. Moreover, Robinson also plausibly argues that Mayella had actually tried to seduce him. In spite of the strong case of the defense, the jury still finds Tom Robinson guilty of rape, a crime for which he is likely to end up on the electric chair. Atticus and his childrens' faith in the judicial system is badly shaken. Moreover, Bob Ewell sees that the trial has damaged his already low credibility in Maycomb. He is out for revenge against anybody involved in the trial. Events take a turn to the worse, but I won’t spoil the ending for anybody who hasn’t read the book, yet.

A fascinating combination: the book is written from a child’s perspective (or retrospective?), but deals with deeply adult topics such as racism and social boundaries. It also provides the perfect description of what I would imagine a childhood in the southern states to be like: porches, kids playing in the nature, families going back generations, Baptism, Southern ladies meeting for tea and cake etc. The court room drama of Atticus mounting a defense for Tom Robinson is gripping. At times, the description is so perfect that the novel almost conveys the feeling of watching a movie. Moreover, the main protagonist, Atticus Finch, is a morally righteous but at the same time three-dimensional figure, not the easiest combination for a writer to achieve. Overall, highly recommended. Comes out ahead of Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men” and Salinger’s “Catcher in the Rye”. Well, and I won’t be talking about Kerouac’s “On the Road”. Ever again.
Next on the list of American classics: John Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath".       

Random movie reference:

Boo Radley kind of reminded me of Bart’s Siamese twin brother, Hugo…

Favorite quotes:

“There are just some kind of men who are so busy worrying about the next world they’ve never learned to live in this one, and you can look down the street and see the results.”(Miss Maudie)

“People in their right minds never take pride in their talents.” (Miss Maudie, again, smart woman).

“The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience” (Atticus)

“Real courage … ‘s when you know you are licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what.” (Atticus)

“With him, life was routine; without him life was unbearable. I stayed miserable for two days.” (Scout)

“Serving on a jury forces a man to make up his mind and declare himself about something. Men don’t like to do that. Sometimes it’s unpleasant.” (Atticus)

“Atticus, he was really nice” … “Most people are, Scout, when you finally see them.”

Notes:

(1) Interestingly, Dill is based on Truman Capote, a childhood friend of Harper Lee. In this incarnation, Capote seems significantly less annoying than the Philipp Seymour Hoffmann version I had in mind.

Back to the Future

Philip Tetlock& Dan Gardner. Super-Forecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction

Tetlock and Gardner’s book is a popular account of the Good Judgement Project, a tournament on forecasting geopolitical events which ran from 2011 to 2015. Of interest to, well, anybody interested in making forecasts.

About 2800 forecasters were asked to provide predictions for more than 500 questions. The forecasters had to assign probabilities to whether specific outcomes (e.g. the number of Syrian refugees crossing a certain threshold) would occur within a defined time frame (e.g. the next three months). While it is impossible to evaluate a single probabilistic forecast, a series of forecasts can be evaluated according to two criteria: calibration- when forecasters assign 20%, 30%, or 40% probabilities, these events should happen 20%, 30%, or 40% of times, and resolution- forecasters should assign high probabilities to events that eventually do happen and low probabilities to events that don’t.

Superforecasting is a successor to Expert PoliticalJudgement (EPJ), a book based on a forecasting tournament Tetlock ran in the 1980s and 1990s. EPJ presented two major findings: the average forecaster did no better than randomly guessing outcomes would have done, and experts who based their judgment on many different analytical approaches (whom Tetlock labelled “foxes”) were more accurate than experts whose thinking was based on one big idea or ideology (“hedgehogs”).  Tetlock’s current book takes this investigation into the sources of variation in forecasting skill one step further. He and his co-author Gardner focus on “superforecasters”, the best participants in the tournament who did significantly better than chance or other forecasters. Superforecasters scored consistently well over the course of the tournament, with roughly 70% of forecasters in one year keeping this status in the next year as well.

Tetlock demonstrates that superforecasters have a couple of intellectual characteristics in common: higher scores on intelligence and knowledge tests, numerical literacy, and active open mindedness. What is most striking about superforecasters, however, is that they also share a certain approach to forecasting: 

• they first unpack every question into its components, separating between components that can be known and those that cannot (e.g. which scenarios are imaginable for the U.S. to intervene in Syria?);
• they then start by taking an outside view, i.e. establish a baseline probability for the event to be forecast as part of a larger class of events (e.g. what is the baseline probability for the U.S. to militarily intervene in a civil war in the Middle East?);
• they then take an inside view i.e. take into account the particularities of the case in question as well as the various causal factors at play (e.g. which specific attributes of the Syrian crisis might drive the U.S. to intervene?); 
• they make sure to compare their view to other views;
• and, finally, they synthesize all the information into a probability judgement.

Superforecasters also react to news in line with Bayes’ theorem, i.e. they neither under- nor over-react to new evidence, but instead update their assessments based on their prior beliefs as well as the diagnostic value of new information. Finally, superforecasters were even better when put together in teams. Teams of superforecasters were good at avoiding both extremes that may affect teamwork- internal wars and group think- and managed to outperform prediction markets.

Tetlock also compares his results with the black swan approach to forecasting popularized by Nassim Taleb. Black swans are extreme and improbable, but highly consequential events (e.g. World War I). According to Taleb, historical probabilities (possible ways in which history could unfold) have a fat-tailed, not a normal distribution, meaning that black swans are vastly more likely to occur than is often assumed. Against this objection, Tetlock puts forward that most of history proceeds incrementally rather than in the form of a constant stream of extreme events. Moreover, the consequences of black swan events take time to develop and can be broken down into distinct questions that can be forecast. While it would for instance have been impossible to predict the storming of the Bastille, some of the events that followed would at least have been partially predictable.

Overall, a great project and a fascinating read. Tetlock and Gardner do a good job creating an accessible account of what may easily be one of this decade’s most important social science projects. However, while the book has been compared to Daniel Kahneman’s “Thinking. Fast and Slowly”, it does not entirely live up to the comparison. First, there is of course a huge difference in terms of the scope and wealth of material covered. Kahneman covered multiple decades of research in cognitive psychology, while Tetlock focuses on one research project. Moreover, while Kahneman also aimed to reach a broader audience, he seemed to have more confidence in his readers grasping complex issues than Tetlock and Gardner. Some chapters, for instance on the book’s implications for executive leadership style, are nice to read, but remain quite superficial and do not add much to the book’s central message. In spite of these minor quibbles, this is still an important and informative book. Hoping that there will be a follow-up more geared towards an academic audience, though…
Next on my social science reading list is Fukuyama's "Political Order and Political Decay", possibly to be followed by McAdam, Tarrow and Tilly's "Dynamics of Contention" and Della Porta's "Clandestine Political Violence"....

Random movie association:

Back to the Future about 2015…