Author Archives: Richard Bowker

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About Richard Bowker

Author of the Portal series, the Last P.I. series, and other novels

Ayn Rand, Malcolm Gladwell, bad writing, and bad politics

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A few years ago I decided I should try to read Atlas Shrugged.  I felt as if I was missing out on a part of my political education.  The novel, and Rand’s philosophy, seemed to have changed the lives of a lot of important people–probably some who were a lot smarter than me.  It came in first in the readers’ poll of the top 100 English-language novels of the twentieth century.  Alan Greenspan was a Rand acolyte, and he was a Very Serious Person.  Maybe if I read the book my life would be changed, too!  So I gave it a shot.

I managed to get through about a hundred pages before I had to give up.  The book was just terrible.  I would have thrown it across the room if I’d had the strength to chuck the thing that far.  Rand can write a decent paragraph, but her characters bear no resemblance to any human beings I had ever met.  I couldn’t even get to the philosophy part, because the philosophy was clearly going to be based on the characters (or the characters were based on the philosophy), which meant the philosophy would be as bad as the characters, as far as I was concerned.  Because good writing matters to me.

I sometimes wonder if that’s a mistake, when it comes to judging philosophy or anything else.  I am willing to believe Dan Gilbert about anything after reading his delightful book Stumbling on Happiness; I’m pretty sure that’s a good judgment.  But what about Malcolm Gladwell? He is another delightful writer, but he’s come in for his share of criticism.  Here is Steven Pinker’s assessment of Gladwell’s What the Dog Saw from the New York Times a few years ago.

An eclectic essayist is necessarily a dilettante, which is not in itself a bad thing. But Gladwell frequently holds forth about statistics and psychology, and his lack of technical grounding in these subjects can be jarring. He provides misleading definitions of “homology,” “sagittal plane” and “power law” and quotes an expert speaking about an “igon value” (that’s eigenvalue, a basic concept in linear algebra). In the spirit of Gladwell, who likes to give portentous names to his aperçus, I will call this the Igon Value Problem: when a writer’s education on a topic consists in interviewing an expert, he is apt to offer generalizations that are banal, obtuse or flat wrong.

I loved What the Dog Saw!  Now what do I do? Good, clear writing is a reasonable marker for good, clear thinking.  But there obviously has to be more.  I have a feeling that Ayn Rand could have written a terrific novel, and I still wouldn’t have bought into her philosophy, as I understand it.

And the fact that the Republican vice presidential candidate is so enamored of Atlas Shrugged terrifies me.  Maybe this is another bad idea, but I think a candidate’s literary tastes say a lot about him.  If you enjoy novels with two-dimensional characters like the ones Rand created, you’re not going to be able to see the complexity of human existence, which seems to me to be critical to wise leadership.

So, anyone want to guess what Mitt Romney’s favorite novel is?  Click here to find out.  I dare you.

Great books, bad Amazon reviews

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Here‘s a delightful article that simply quotes one-star reviews of great books on Amazon.  (I read about it in the Boston Globe this morning and assumed it was recent–but it’s actually from way back in 2005.)

Some of the reviews just kinda miss the point, like this one of Slaughterhouse-Five:

“In the novel, they often speak of a planet called Tralfamadore, where he was displayed in a zoo with a former movie star by the name of Montana Wildhack. I thought that the very concept of a man who was kidnapped by aliens was truly unbelievable and a tad ludicrous. I did not find the idea of aliens kidnapping a human and putting them in a zoo very plausible. While some of the Tralfamadorians’ concept of death and living in a moment would be comforting for a war veteran, I found it relatively odd. I do not believe that an alien can kidnap someone and house them in a zoo for years at a time, while it is only a microsecond on earth. I also do not believe that a person has seven parents.”

Some of them simply employ different critical standards from the rest of us. Here’s a one-sentence pan of Lord of the Rings:

“The book is not readable because of the overuse of adverbs.”

And some of them do have a point.  Here’s a takedown of Gravity’s Rainbow:

“When one contrasts Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five with this book, it’s like comparing an Olympic sprinter with an obese man running for the bus with a hot dog in one hand and a soda in the other.”

And this one pretty well sums up The Sun Also Rises:

“Here’s the first half of the book: ‘We had dinner and a few drinks. We went to a cafe and talked and had some drinks. We ate dinner and had a few drinks. Dinner. Drinks. More dinner. More drinks. We took a cab here (or there) in Paris and had some drinks, and maybe we danced and flirted and talked sh*t about somebody. More dinner. More drinks. I love you, I hate you, maybe you should come up to my room, no you can’t’… I flipped through the second half of the book a day or two later and saw the words ‘dinner’ and ‘drinks’ on nearly every page and figured it wasn’t worth the risk.”

I just love that last sentence.

I wonder if you could chart a book’s reputation over time by the customer reviews.  The Sun Also Rises has 621 reviews; On the Road has 811; Slaughterhouse-Five has 911. That’s getting to be a reasonable sample size.  In any case, writers can take comfort that you can’t please everyone; some people are bound to hate even the best books.  Everybody likes To Kill a Mockingbird, right?  It now has 87 one-star reviews in Amazon.  Here’s one:

i had to read this book in 9th grade. i heard that it was supposed to be this wonderful american classic, and i actually looked forward to reading it. well, all i’m gonna say is that it sucked. it was just like any other book, nothing special. yes, the prejudice part was good, i think it could show people that we need to accept our differences, but it just wasn’t that deep. i got bored after 20 pages. all in all, i was very disappointed and to whoever gets an assignment to read this, good luck.

The ebook settlement with the states

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The three publishers (Simon & Schuster, Hachette, and HarperCollins) who settled with the Feds and the state AGs over collusion in ebook pricing have settled with the states.  Here‘s a good summary.  Recall the basics:

The feds’ lawsuit demands that publishers change their pricing model so that Amazon and others can set the price they want (even it the price is below cost). The lawsuit by the states is instead about money; the states want to collect refunds on behalf of ebook buyers.

The settlement with the states means people who bought ebooks from the publishers on Amazon or other ebook vendor will get smallish credits someday:

If you bought an e-book from one of the five big publishers between April 1, 2010 and May 23, 2012, you will get a 25-cent refund for each old title you bought and $1.32 if the title was a recent New York Times bestseller. The refund will come in the form of a credit to your Amazon, Barnes & Noble or iTunes account; you’ll get a check if you bought from Sony or Google. The retailers have your email address so it will not be hard to notify you.

That’s fine but, as the article notes, you’ll probably just take that credit and buy more ebooks, so it’s probably not that much of a hardship for the publishers.  Also, it will take years before you actually see the money.

In any case, this is small potatoes.  What really matters is getting Amazon to discount books from the publishers who have settled.  In an article in the Boston Globe, an expert says it’s happening.

“The price reductions are already happening,” said Michael Norris, a senior analyst in the Trade Books Group at Simba Information, a market research firm in Stamford, Conn. “Amazon is already starting to lower the prices of e-books.”

Hmm, I haven’t noticed this happening.  Have you?  A glance through some Simon & Schuster titles still shows most of them at the same old $12.99 price point.  Maybe I haven’t been paying sufficient attention.  I would think that Amazon would start aggressive discounting as soon as it can, to put pressure on its competition and to increase the value proposition for the Kindle.

Thoughts on the Harvard cheating scandal

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This blog seems to be turning into a real-time ethics course.  What are we to make of the Harvard cheating scandal?

When news of the scandal broke on Friday, there was much wringing of hands and clutching of pearls, along with a lot of schadenfreude. Here‘s one typical response. My initial thoughts were:

  • There’s got to be more to this story.
  • The professor was probably an idiot.

I can easily imagine Harvard pre-med students cheating on some important required course like Organic Chemistry (if Orgo gave them the opportunity, which I doubt it does). And they shouldn’t do that! But no Harvard student would have to cheat on a well-run intro Gov course, and there should be no incentive to.  And so today some of the complexities have started coming out.

Students said they were tripped up by a course whose tests were confusing, whose grading was inconsistent, and for which the professor and teaching assistants gave contradictory signals about what was expected.

Here are the rules for the exam:

But the instructions on the exam said students should consider it “completely open book, open note, open Internet, etc.” The professor had encouraged students to collaborate in their other course work.

A lawyer could drive a truck through that “etc.”.  Also:

Instructions on the final exam said, “students may not discuss the exam with others.” Students said that consulting with the fellows on exams was commonplace, that the [teaching] fellows generally did not turn students away, and that the fellows did not always understand the questions, either.

One student recalled going to a teaching fellow while working on the final exam and finding a crowd of others there, asking about a test question that hinged on an unfamiliar term. The student said the fellow defined the term for them.

The impression the articles give is that this had been an exceptionally easy course for years, the professor was trying to tighten it up, and he went about it the wrong way, by creating a confusing test with confusing rules.  And the result was chaos.

How does Harvard clean up a mess like this? They’ve got to say the right things about not tolerating cheating and upholding the ideals of the university and blah blah blah.  But if they really try to punish those students, they’re in for a fight, as well as for a ton of bad publicity.  I’ve got to imagine that a bunch of the students have parents who can afford high-powered lawyers, or who are high-powered lawyers themselves.

[Students] face the possibility of a one-year suspension from Harvard or revocation of their diplomas if they have already graduated, and some said that they will sue the university if any serious punishment is meted out.

Remind me never to become a university president; it’s not worth the hassle.  Drew Gilpin Faust will probably appoint a faculty commission to look at standards for take-home exams and what-not. But I’ll be very surprised if any of those students get anything more than a warning to go forth and sin no more.  And, based on what we know so far, that’s about all the punishment they deserve.  This isn’t a plagiarism scandal; it’s a bad teaching scandal.

The power of this blog cannot be underestimated

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On my endless commute I’ve been listening to a course on modern French history.  The professor knows his stuff, but he is not the most articulate lecturer I’ve ever heard.  Here’s an approximation of a sentence he uttered: “The importance of Charles de Gaulle, um, in post-war France, um, cannot, er, um, be underestimated.”  I swear that I knew this sentence was going to go awry even before he finished it.

Presumably the point he was trying to make was that de Gaulle was so important it would be impossible to overestimate that importance. No matter how high you made your estimate, you

This post isn’t about Charles de Gaulle

would always fall short of his real importance.  You could, I suppose, make the case that what he was trying to say that de Gaulle’s importance must not be underestimated–that is, his point was that you might be inclined to give a low estimate of his importance, but that would be a foolish mistake on your part.  In either case, the professor wasn’t saying what he wanted to say.

Here are some (of many) recent Google hits with the same problem:

“The complexity of bank reform cannot be underestimated”
“Iranian cyberthreat cannot be underestimated”
“The power of the English language cannot be underestimated” (hmm)

The great blog Language Log has more than one post about this construction (and similar ones). In this post, the author comes up with four potential explanations:

  1. Our poor monkey brains just can’t deal with complex combinations of certain logical operators;
  2. The connection between English and modal logic may involve some unexpected ambiguities;
  3. Negative concord is alive and well in English (or in UG);
  4. Odd things become idioms or at least verbal habits (“could care less”; “fail to miss”; “still unpacked”).

The author prefers the “poor monkey brains” explanation–as do I–but he feels obliged to work through the logical issues involved in explanation 2.  Here’s a taste:

Now, it’s a theorem of deontic logic that if it’s not permissible that A, then it’s obligatory that not A; or in symbols

¬PA  →  O¬A

This follows straightforwardly from the fact that PA (“A is permissible”) is defined as ¬O¬A (“not obligatory that not A”), and ¬¬O¬A becomes O¬A by cancellation of the double negative.

And since “cannot” can mean “not be permitted to”, while “must not” or “should not” can mean “be obliged not to”, it somewhat confusingly follows that “cannot” sometimes means the same thing as “must not” or “should not”.

If you say so.  Again, I think the likely explanation is that people can’t quite get the logic right when there are negatives involved, so they end up saying something that, if you work it through, means the opposite of what they intended. But as time goes by, the poor monkey brains explanation tends to give way to explanation 4–the phrase simply becomes an idiom that people don’t even try to understand.  Here’s the phrase’s Google Ngram, which shows that its use is very much a modern phenomenon:

Are we getting stupider?  Or is this just one of those things that happens in language?  I dunno, and I suppose I could care less.

Answering readers’ questions about fake ebook reviews

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Actually, more like the questions I imagine readers asking . . .

You titled your post yesterday “Fake ebook reviews: Worse than plagiarism?” But you never answered your own question.  What’s up with that?

I got sleepy.  Here’s a writing rule: Avoid blogging when you’re sleepy.  Bad things are bound to happen.

Are you sleepy now?  Will you answer your question?

No. Yes. Writing (or obtaining) fake reviews for your ebook is obviously not as bad as plagiarizing your ebook.  Don’t be an idiot.  But it has the potential to do much more harm.  I can’t imagine that many writers plagiarize to any great extent.  But faking ebook reviews is easy to do, could have a major upside for the individual writer, and has a huge downside for the whole ebook enterprise.  If readers start questioning the validity of those customer reviews, it will become a lot harder for good writers to get their attention.

What does the blog “Lawyers, Guns, & Money” have to say about this?

Oh, do you read Lawyers, Guns, & Money too? They ponder the larger issue of whether this is a part of the breakdown of our faith in the crowd, and may lead us back to a reliance on expertise:

For that matter, is there any reason to believe any kind of customer review online? This Times piece on professional “reviewers” being paid by self-published authors to give positive reviews, a process that seems to lead to increased sales for many, suggests to me that we, even the most supposedly savvy of us, are as manipulated now as ever. The crowd and the empowered individual does not protect us in any way, in fact, it may make us more vulnerable as our confidence lets our guard down.

On Twitter, Matt Zeitlin (@MattZeitlin) said about the Times article, “Possible future scenario: online customer reviews are ruined, publishers become more authoritative.” I thought that was interesting. Does the fact that anyone can say anything mean that all statements become equally worthless without some kind of expertise to back it up? For that matter, could we see a future where, as a broader society, we see the pendulum swing back toward expertise and institutionalized leadership in books, politics, or all the other ways in which we distrust expertise today?

Doesn’t xkcd have a funny strip about online ratings?

Yes, it does.  And here it is:

Are there any good fake ebook reviews?

Well, it depends on what you mean by good.  Have you seen the reviews for the pink “BIC for her” pen on Amazon UK?  I guess they’re not fake, but they aren’t exactly “real.”  And they’re awfully funny:

I bought this pen (in error, evidently) to write my reports of each day’s tree felling activities in my job as a lumberjack. It is no good. It slips from between my calloused, gnarly fingers like a gossamer thread gently descending to earth between two giant redwood trunks.

If I get (or think up) more questions, I’ll be happy to answer them.

Meanwhile, back on Mars

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Our latest header shows a high-resolution view of Mount Sharp on Mars.

Here’s more information. And here’s what’s most interesting about the mountain:

From earlier orbital imagery, the layers appear to contain clays and other hydrated minerals that form in the presence of water, Nasa has said.

Previous missions to Mars have uncovered strong evidence for vast amounts of water flowing over its surface in the past. Curiosity was dispatched to hunt for organic materials and other chemistry considered necessary for life to evolve.

In this picture, the layers above where scientists expect to find hydrated minerals show sharp tilts, offering a strong hint of dramatic changes in Gale Crater, which is located in the planet’s southern hemisphere near its equator.

Fake Ebook Reviews: Worse Than Plagiarism?

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For an ebook to be successful, it needs to get good customer reviews.  I now have half a dozen reviews of Senator on Amazon, all of them five stars.  Yay!  But three of them are from people I know.  Should I feel guilty about that?  Maybe.  But those people really liked the book!  I think.  (Of my other three ebooks, two have only one review on Amazon, and Pontiff has none.  C’mon, guys!)

Asking your friends for reviews is at most a venial sin, I think.  But faking reviews gets us into a bad place.  I suppose I always understood that some reviews might be fake, but a couple of recent articles suggest that this is actually a pretty pervasive problem.

This Times article describes a service that, for a while, provided authors with favorable reviews in bulk, for a price. The article quotes a data mining expert as estimating that . . .

. . . about one-third of all consumer reviews on the Internet are fake. Yet it is all but impossible to tell when reviews were written by the marketers or retailers (or by the authors themselves under pseudonyms), by customers (who might get a deal from a merchant for giving a good score) or by a hired third-party service.

The service that the article describes was run by a guy named Todd Rutherford, and for a while he was wildly successful.  And he made authors successful as well.

One of Mr. Rutherford’s clients, who confidently commissioned hundreds of reviews and didn’t even require them to be favorable, subsequently became a best seller. This is proof, Mr. Rutherford said, that his notion was correct. Attention, despite being contrived, draws more attention.

The second article, in Forbes, is titled “Fake Reviews: Amazon’s Rotten Core.” It focuses on an author with the odd name of Stephen Leather, who has “admitted to creating accounts on Amazon under assumed names in order to leave positive reviews of his own work. He also does the same on Twitter and other forums.” He says:

I’ll go onto several forums, from the well-known forums, and post there, under my own name and under various other names and various other characters. You build this whole network of characters who talk about your books and sometimes have conversations with yourself. And then I’ve got enough fans…

The article notes that there’s also a phenomenon of malicious negative reviews.  I noticed that with Matthew Yglesias’s The Rent is Too Damn High.  As I understand it, Yglesias offended the right-wing Breitbart crowd about something or other, and in return they carpet-bombed him with one-star reviews, with the result that the book’s average rating is a little over two stars.

What’s to be done about it?  The Forbes article points out that Amazon is complicit in the problem, which makes it harder to solve:

Unfortunately, there is also no motivation for Amazon, or other online booksellers, to clean up their own acts. Amazon exists to sell stuff. They will only begin to care about this if it starts to threaten sales, despite the fact that they could, if they wanted to, make it much harder for people to fake reviews.

And authors like Stephen Leather are unlikely to be harmed by the furor, even if they admit (or brag about) what they’ve done.  Average readers aren’t going to have any idea he’s gaming the system.  (I read the first chapter of one of Leather’s novels.  It seems like a standard-issue military thriller, with something of a comma deficiency.  It’s the sort of thing you’ll probably like, if you like that sort of thing. I also went to his web site; he seems fond of wearing leather jackets and striking a serious pose.)

All this leaves me feeling a bit like a moderately good baseball player in the 1980s who didn’t take steroids.  I’m not interested in gaming the system or doing anything unethical, but it’s annoying when you see other writers are becoming successful by doing so.  Where’s the World Anti-Doping Agency when you need it?

The solution, of course, is for all of you to read my books, love them, and write great reviews out of the goodness of your heart.  That will make me forget all about Stephen Leather.

In which Joe Biden tests the limits of my support

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Here is a report of Joe Biden speaking down in Provincetown:

Biden honed in on the LGBT issues during his campaign speech at the Pilgrim Monument and Museum, which is located in a prominent gay community in Cape Cod. “If I had to use one adjective to describe this community it’d be courage,” Biden said. “You have summoned the courage to speak out, to come out. We owe you.”

(First, note the Politico reporter testing the limits of my support by using the phrase “hone in on,” which I’ve considered previously. Also, who says “in Cape Cod”?  Any native would say “on Cape Cod.”  But I digress.)

I’m pretty sure that Biden knows that courage is not an adjective.  And his sentiments are admirable! But geez, every vote counts; let’s think harder about what we’re saying and avoid making the pedants grumpy.

Here is Biden speaking:

image Jamie Citron twitter

Like most vice presidents, Biden is the target of a lot of ridicule; it comes with the territory.  He actually has a compelling biography, especially the heartbreaking story of what happened to his family after he was first elected to the Senate:

On December 18, 1972, a few weeks after the election, Biden’s wife and one-year-old daughter were killed in an automobile accident while Christmas shopping in Hockessin, Delaware. Neilia Biden’s station wagon was hit by a tractor-trailer as she pulled out from an intersection; the truck driver was cleared of any wrongdoing.Biden’s two sons, Beau and Hunter, were critically injured in the accident, but both eventually made full recoveries.Biden considered resigning to care for them; he was persuaded not to by Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield and others and was sworn into office from one of their bedsides.The accident left Biden filled with both anger and religious doubt: “I liked to [walk around seedy neighborhoods] at night when I thought there was a better chance of finding a fight … I had not known I was capable of such rage … I felt God had played a horrible trick on me.”

On the other hand, we’ve been blogging about plagiarism lately, and Biden has more than one plagiarism story in his bio. Here is a nuanced (and lengthy) discussion of the topic.

Any twitterers out there?

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I have a Twitter account — rbobobo — that I use mainly for sending out notifications about new blog posts.  But that’s not enough to get me many followers.  If you’re interested, why not follow me?  I come across lots of stuff that interests me, but that isn’t quite worth blogging about.

I have to say that Twitter is a very odd medium that I haven’t got the hang of yet, and I’m not quite sure it’s worth the effort.  But with enough followers, I’ll give it a try!