At 64, Diana Nyad swam for 52 hours, 54 minutes and 18 seconds nonstop

A review of Find a Way: One Wild and Precious Life by Diana Nyad. This review was published in the Wall Street Journal on October 23. 2015.

I first met Diana Nyad in 1982 on the eve of the first 3,000-mile nonstop transcontinental bicycle Race Across America (RAAM). She was covering the race for ABC’s Wide World of Sports; I was riding in it. I knew of her 28-mile swim around Manhattan, her 102-mile open-ocean swim from North Bimini in the Bahamas to Juno Beach, Fla., and her unsuccessful attempt to swim from Cuba to Florida. So at a pre-race dinner in Los Angeles, with my nerves in my throat about undertaking my first transcontinental crossing, I asked her what it was like being a long-distance swimmer and what kept her going through both success and failure.

I don’t remember her exact words. But the single-minded intensity and strength of will that came through in her presence inspired me over the next 10 days to make it to New York.

Diana Nyad is a force of personality that anyone who meets her or hears her speak never forgets. This drive and dynamism is well captured in the title of her moving memoir Find a Way. She has—and her book shows us how we all can.
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A review of The Marshmallow Test by Walter Mischel. A a version of this review was published in the Wall Street Journal on September 19, 2014.

When video of Adm. William H. McRaven’s 2014 commencement address at the University of Texas at Austin was posted online, the speech went viral. Millions of viewers will remember the core message summed up in his memorable line: “If you want to change the world, start off by making your bed.”

The Navy SEAL veteran recalled that “if you make your bed every morning you will have accomplished the first task of the day. It will give you a small sense of pride and it will encourage you to do another task and another and another. By the end of the day, that one task completed will have turned into many tasks completed. Making your bed will also reinforce the fact that little things in life matter. If you can’t do the little things right, you will never do the big things right. And, if by chance you have a miserable day, you will come home to a bed that is made—that you made—and a made bed gives you encouragement that tomorrow will be better.”

Adm. McRaven’s “life lessons” in his speech are, in fact, variations on a theme examined by the legendary psychologist Walter Mischel in “The Marshmallow Test”; the key to being a successful Navy SEAL—or anything else in life—is summed up in the book’s subtitle, “Mastering Self-Control.” This fast-paced and engaging work is part memoir (Mr. Mischel recounts how he quit his three-pack-a-day smoking habit), part science book (the extensive research on self-control is artfully summarized) and part self-help tome (a chapter provides tips for increasing your willpower). (continue reading…)

Michael Shermer reviews Bicycle Design: An Illustrated History by Tony Hadland and Hans-Erhard Lessing. This review was originally published in the Wall Street Journal on July 5, 2014.

Path dependency is an economic concept to describe what happens when a technology becomes stuck in a market pathway out of historical momentum, especially when the transactions costs of changing course are too high. The QWERTY keyboard is the most popular example of the phenomenon. As the standard narrative has it, QWERTY got a head start in the late 19th century over other keyboard arrangements that were vastly superior and so now we are stuck with this clunky keyboard system because of historical lock in.

Baloney. The QWERTY keyboard may not be the best of all possible letter key arrangements, but it has consistently held up against all would-be competitors because it is good enough to get the job done compared to costs of changing technologies for minuscule margins of improvement. What happens in most technologies is that the earliest innovators make most of the significant design features, which later generations tinker with and modify for improvements, and change happens mostly for convenience or efficiency factors, and not because of initial serious design flaws.

The bicycle is a case study in how technologies evolve, evidence for which is in abundant supply in Tony Hadland’s and Hans-Erhard Lessing’s encyclopedic history of bicycle design. This marvelous book features over 300 illustrations culled from many sources, most intriguingly from patent records. Having lived through what I thought was a major revolution in cycling technology in the 1980s when I was competing in the 3000-mile nonstop transcontinental bicycle Race Across America, I discovered in Bicycle Design that most of that decade’s innovations (as well as those in the decades hence), were invented, designed, and in many cases patented by cycling innovators decades or even a century before. (continue reading…)

Reviews of Ten Billion by Stephen Emmott, and Countdown: Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth? by Alan Weisman. This review appeared in the Wall Street Journal on October 4, 2013.

Bad news books about the next looming catastrophe have a long literary pedigree that far surpasses those representing good news and progress. As John Stuart Mill noted in 1828: “I have observed that not the man who hopes when others despair, but the man who despairs when others hope, is admired by a large class of persons as a sage.” The two sage seekers under review here focus primarily on the coming calamities that they project will be the result of overpopulation and resource depletion when our planet reaches ten billion people.

Stephen Emmott is head of Computational Science at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, England, and by his computations when the world hits ten billion people we’re doomed. His conclusion is as colorful as it is misguided: “I think we’re fucked.” He despairs beyond even the most pessimistic of doomsayers. “We urgently need to do—and I mean actually do—something radical to avert a global catastrophe. But I don’t think we will.” This is an odd little book with one or two short sentences per page that if compressed would barely amount to a magazine article. It flows like a PowerPoint presentation, with text slides alternating with hockey-stick curves of population growth, CO₂ levels, global warming, and resource depletion and pictures of overcrowded cities and landfills. There are no references to support any of his claims, and his extrapolations from geometric growth curves are mired in 19th century Malthusian thinking, as if science and technology were stuck in the past and as if time stops in the year 2050.

In fact, the rate of population growth is slowing and in many Western countries there is a birth dearth. For example, the UN projects a 2050 population for Russia of 111 million, down from 147 million in 2000. Europe as a whole will shed 70 million people by 2050 as the current fertility rate of 1.59 children per woman is below the replacement rate of 2.1 (0.1 is added to account for childhood deaths and a small male-biased sex ratio). Half the world now has fertility rates below the replacement rate, with the high end fertility rates of nations such as Niger (7.19), Buinea-Bissau (7.07), Burundi (6.8), and Liberia (6.77) decreasing as they become developed nations, and the low end countries such as Japan (1.27), Singapore (1.26), South Korea (1.21) and Hong Kong (0.97) scrambling to deal with the economics of substantially smaller populations. Many scientists predict that the ten billion figure will drop back down to around where we are now—or lower—by 2100. At the very least, a responsible scientist would include the UN’s own projections of low (6 billion), medium (10 billion) and high (16 billion) world population figures for 2100; instead, Emmott simply presents his own unsubstantiated projection of 28 billion and spindoctors his doomsday scenarios from there.

Worse, environmental extremists like Emmott actually hurt the very movement they want to help by causing thoughtful people to discount more modest works that identify very real problems (such as water resources). When such extreme accounts are debunked—as this book has roundly been—many people tend to discount other books in the genre as more of the same apocalyptic hyperbole. As an antidote to Emmott’s self-proclaimed “rational pessimism” I recommend Matt Ridley’s The Rational Optimist and Peter Diamandis’s Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think.

At the more reasonable end of the genre’s spectrum is Alan Weisman’s Countdown. His 2007 book, The World Without Us, was a surprise bestseller in creatively imagining (and documenting) what would happen to the planet were all humans to suddenly disappear. Turns out nature would in short order erase pretty much everything we’ve done. Countdown imagines the opposite, and by Weisman’s account, at the rate we’re going nature may very well do what she did in the prequel, given the biological phenomenon of population collapses caused by famine, disease, ecological degradation and—in the case of our species—warfare, pollution and other byproducts of a big-brains. Countdown is a gripping read by a fair-minded investigative journalist who interviewed dozens of people in 21 countries as well as scoured the literature (all well documented) to deliver not so much a doomsday narrative but a warning followed by practical solutions employed by various countries to get control of their population, such as in Iran, where education and incentives for voluntary state-funded birth control stanched their looming overpopulation problem.

Of his interlocutors Weisman asks four basic questions: (1) How many people can our planet hold? (2) Is there an acceptable, nonviolent way to convince people to limit their family size at or below replacement level? (3) How much ecosystem is required to maintain human life (or what can’t we do without?) (4) Can we design an economy with a stable or shrinking population? As Weisman discovers, these are extremely difficult questions to answer and they admit many complications and qualifications. On the first question, for example, the answer very much depends on the standard of living—mud huts or massive mansions—along with a host of related factors, including available local resources or the opportunity to trade for them, political stability and the like, along with the ability to cope with Black Swan events (from extreme weather to economic bubbles).

Weisman defines an “optimum population” as “the number of humans who can enjoy a standard of living that the majority of us would find acceptable,” which he says is European: “far less energy-intensive than the United States or China, far more hospitable than much of Africa or Southeast Asia, and with the highest possible percentage of educated, enabled women—which may be the most effective contraceptive of all.” And that might be the most poignant observation in the entire book.

In the end we would all do well to respect the “Law of Prediction,” described by the population biologist Joel Cohen in his definitive 1995 book How Many People Can the Earth Support? (anywhere from 4–16 billion!): “The more confidence someone places in an unconditional prediction of what will happen in human affairs, the less confidence you should place in that prediction.” Nevertheless, Cohen predicts that by 2100 the world’s population could be back down to six billion with only an average decrease of half a child per woman, an effect that can be achieved by simply educating and enabling women everywhere on Earth.

In this year’s annual Edge.org question “What should we be worried about?” I answered that we should be worried about “ The Is-Ought Fallacy of Science and Morality.” I wrote: “We should be worried that scientists have given up the search for determining right and wrong and which values lead to human flourishing”. Evolutionary biologist and philosopher of science Massimo Pigliucci penned a thoughtful response, which I appreciate given his dual training in science and philosophy, including and especially evolutionary theory, a perspective that I share. But he felt that my scientific approach added nothing new to the philosophy of morality, so let me see if I can restate my argument for a scientific foundation of moral principles with new definitions and examples.

First, morality is derived from the Latin moralitas, or “manner, character, and proper behavior.” Morality has to do with how you act toward others. So I begin with a Principle of Moral Good:

Always act with someone else’s moral good in mind, and never act in a way that it leads to someone else’s moral loss (through force or fraud).

You can, of course, act in a way that has no effect on anyone else, and in this case morality isn’t involved. But given the choice between acting in a way that increases someone else’s moral good or not, it is more moral to do so than not. I added the parenthetical note “through force or fraud” to clarify intent instead of, say, neglect or acting out of ignorance. Morality involves conscious choice, and the choice to act in a manner that increases someone else’s moral good, then, is a moral act, and its opposite is an immoral act. (continue reading…)