Josh

Deep question with deep answers

Revisado: 05-25-22

This book summarizes the political science and economics literatures on violence and warfare, and distills the origins of violence to five mechanisms: unchecked interests, intangible incentives, uncertainty, commitment problems, and misperceptions. My understanding is that though these ideas have been floating around academia for a while, they haven't been succinctly organized and presented to general audiences until now. Unchecked interests refers to the fact that often the leaders of groups do not pay the price of violence. Intangible incentives refers concepts like honor, vengeance, and glory that tilt towards violence for violence's sake. Uncertainty refers to classic results in game theory in which asymmetric information leads to Pareto dominated outcomes (i.e. wasteful outcomes in which everyone is worse off). Specifically, in most confrontations, potential combatants know roughly their own strength but do not know the strength of the opposition. In the absence of asymmetric information, the two parties should decide how to divide the surplus immediately, as violence is pure waste. But with asymmetric information, violence is the only way to call the other party's bluff. Commitment problems refers to situations in which one party cannot credibly commit to restraining their growing power (stop research on a nuclear weapon, stop growing their army, stop positioning forces in threatening places, etc.) and so the value of first strike goes up relative to delay. Finally, misperceptions refers to behavioral biases, especially overconfidence.

This enumeration is highly enlightening and adds much on one of the other best books in this area, "Better Angels of Our Nature" by Pinker. I have two criticisms. (1) I have heard Blattman on several podcasts. He's a good speaker and I would have preferred that he read his own book. (2) I don't like the journalistic-style of this book in which many anecdotes are used to introduce new ideas. Anecdotes are great as examples to illustrate points, but I often wasn't connecting the anecdotes to the points.

As a whole, I highly recommend to anyone interested in understanding violence.

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Does this book have fake reviews?

Revisado: 03-08-21

I was looking for a good audiobook on world mythology and I was impressed that this had a nearly impossible average 5.0 rating! I have never seen such a good score on audible. Sure, there were only 102 ratings at the time, but that's still significant. After listening to about 2-3 hours of the book, I'm convinced that many of these reviews are shills.

When it comes to rating a mythology book you don't judge the book on the quality of the myths, as the writer didn't come up with those, but you can evaluate the book based on the quality of the storytelling, the context provided, the analysis, and the quality of narration. The storytelling is poor. The diction feels unprofessional; he uses the same words and phrases over and over, for example, he says, "a lot" a lot. This has never been an issue with any other books I've listened to on Audible (I've done over 600), but the prose is so clunky that the editor in me wants to get out my red pen. The stories themselves are short and poorly organized. Historical context is provided in the form of a list of dates of significant events, as if the author copy and pasted entries from Wikipedia.

I tried to find the author, Ron Carver, on the internet to see what his credentials are. Is he a journalist, writer, or scholar of myth? But I couldn't find any site for the author's bio. Super sketchy. In addition, the narrator is really bland and mispronounces many key terms.

After about 2.5 hours, I couldn't listen to this anymore. I almost never review books but I wanted to give a warning to others out there to not make the same mistake that I did. Don't waste your time. The absurdly high ratings are very likely fake.

I switched to the Great Courses: Great Mythologies. The improvement in quality in every way was palpable.

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esto le resultó útil a 55 personas

Weakest book of the series but John Lee is great

Revisado: 07-20-11

We all know that "A Feast for Crows" is the weakest of the series (but a good listen nonetheless). So herein I'd like to put my support for John Lee. I would have listened to this audiobook months sooner if it weren't for all the bad reviews of John Lee. After listening to the whole book, I really don't know what people are complaining about.

I read the first three books so I had not become accustomed to a particular voice actor when I reached Crows. John Lee speaks clearly, regally, and does great character differentiation.

I am now listening to Roy Dotrice for "A Dance with Dragons". Roy Dotrice does have an impressive ability to create dozens of characters. Nonetheless I find myself wishing to have John Lee back. Specifically, I find that Dotrice does a poor job with female characters, making them all sound croonish. Also, too many of his characters have high-pitched weak voices when I imagine them as being far stronger lower and more menacing. In any case, both are fine voice actors who do a great job. The hard part is switching voice actors.

At the end of the day, it all comes down to who you are accustomed to. For those who are not yet accustomed Roy Dotrice, ignore the negative reviews about John Lee because they are probably irrelevant to you. Although the book itself is weaker than the rest of the series, this will still be a very enjoyable listen.

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