Ask HN: What books changed the way you think about almost everything?
I was reflecting today about how often I think about Freakonomics. I don't study it religiously. I read it one time more than 10 years ago. I can only remember maybe a single specific anecdote from the book. And yet the simple idea that basically every action humans take can be traced back to an incentive has fundamentally changed the way I view the world. Can anyone recommend books that have had a similar impact on them?
1,210 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 565 ms ] threadIt’s a nice reminder on how to treat people.
This review is something I generally send out to people after they've read GG&S, and strongly recommend Eric Wolf as an author. He puts many of the points I would make significantly more eloquently:
https://www.livinganthropologically.com/eric-wolf-europe-peo...
If anything, the way it has been challenged and shown to be flawed is a lesson on and of itself - that complex systems have emergent properties, and that those starting conditions are not as deterministic as it might appear at first blush.
If GG&S changed the way you think, I'd highly recommend following it up with either the book from that review (Eric Wolf's "Europe and the People without History") or Ian Morris's "Why The West Rules, For Now".
Here is what I have figured out regarding this topic.
1) most times what really matters to you is impossible to measure. When you drill down to core motivation/drives.
E.g how does one measure “happiness”, relationship quality, friendship, quality of life, learning etc.
2) Due to 1. we measure a proxy for the outcome we seek.
3) if we get this proxy wrong, and we optimise/improve it we have no effect on the outcome. Maybe we even have the opposite effect.
4) We often import/take-on other peoples definitions/proxy metrics for the outcome. Not our own.
Think it was Russel Ackoff who said “rather do the right things wrong then the wrong things right”
In other words. Start with what you actually value/want and make sure the metric will get you there.
I wasn't doing this with my goals and a byproduct of that was that I wasn't able to measure to progress of my final goals.
It's really more about how you manage your goals, not what they might be, but even with something as broad as happiness I think this is still possible. If you set "being happier" as your final goal, you can start to set daily, monthly, yearly... goals that fold into happiness. Happiness may not be strictly measurably, but if you know that working out 3 times a week makes you happier you can set that as a weekly goal. You then can set monthly and yearly goals around what working out steadily will improve (lifting more weight, running further and faster) and those things will usually be easily measurable.
There's edge cases for sure, as with most things. I will say it works better in a work environment where most progress can be easily measured (Even though it often isn't), but I think a good goal system is something that can be beneficial for any goal you may set.
However I do agree with #3 & #4, if your final goals are not in the right direction any adjustments to the daily, weekly, monthly goals will not improve that and may have a negative overall effect, but I think that resolves to a much larger issue than your goal management system.
It was the first book I started reading I could not put down until the end. Gained a lot of appreciation for literature at that time.
The other book that I enjoyed and changed me was ‘The Wisdom of Insecurity’ by Alan Watts. I was a fan of Alan Watts works through his lectures already and it was wonderful to hear his ideas in writing for the first time.
The book is available to read for free online (https://antilogicalism.files.wordpress.com/2017/07/wisdom-of...).
I wish everyone read or watched Alan Watts lectures and books. The world would be a much nicer place if that was the case.
My favorite quote is by him:
‘We thought of life by analogy with a journey, a pilgrimage, which had a serious purpose at the end, and the thing was to get to that end, success or whatever it is, maybe heaven after you’re dead. But we missed the point the whole way along. It was a musical thing and you were supposed to sing or to dance while the music was being played.’
I mean, come on, the devil himself vs the communist party of Russia, sprinkled with loads of humour. What else do you need?
If anyone doesn't have the time or attention span to commit to a full-blown book, The Joyous Cosmology [0] and Become What You Are [1] present some of Watt's ideas in a more condensed format. The former is a ~30 page essay freely available online. The latter is a collection of ~15 very short essays (1-12pg each) - a perfect replacement for smartphone scrolling when confronted with 5-10 minutes of free time.
https://holybooks-lichtenbergpress.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content...
https://www.amazon.com/Become-What-You-Alan-Watts/dp/1570629...
[0] https://store.steampowered.com/app/582270/Everything/
Parties would become a lot more insufferable.
wonderful in comic form! :D
Another book similar in spirit and quality to M&M is "Danilov, the violist" by Vladimir Orlov.
But you can recover a lot of understanding even without speaking the language with a bit of work. By say trying to get a feel for what Moscow might be like in the 1920. Political persecution and censorship are major themes. Even things like psychiatric hospitals are important because they were often used as an alternative torture and imprisonment system. Writers are poets were also important. That was before TV, radio was just getting started so writers were sort of like the Youtube celebrities of the day. And controlling what they say, do, and act was critical. In other words things that might seems kind of "meh" or odd carry significance and knowing about it might make it for a richer interpretation and a more interesting read.
Everytime I read it I gain more insights. I absolutely recommend reading this book alongside a readers guide which gives more background and depth, there are many biblical, historical, and author-related references that won't be understood otherwise. The author's own life is massively relevent to the events of the novel. I recommend this guide:
https://www.amazon.com/Master-Margarita-Critical-Companion-A...
The latter argued that, contrary to a common notion, Woland is emphatically not the Devil. I did not get far in trying to understand it, but this and the similarly non-understandable commentary really took away some fun out of reading the book, because I constantly felt I was too stupid to get it.
Reading commentary is good, but maybe on a way lower level than literature professors trying to make a name.
No idea whether Fagott has some linguistic extravagance in the original, but it works really well on this Master of Ceremonies.
Another book that changed allot about how I look at the world is "The long tail" by Chris Anderson. Maybe too thin of a concept for a whole book, but definitely interesting.
I really liked the book, but mostly because I thought it was funny and had great plot. I fear I missed all the deep wisdom.
(This is Pontius Pilate's response to Yeshua.) To me this is about staying silent when you see evil being committed. But it doesn't even have to be 'Evil with a big E', it's just about speaking up when you see something that doesn't sit right with your morality.
The other big takeaway for me was about how Margarita threw away all the rules of society to save the Master (her beloved). But she did it for more than just his sake, I think; she certainly took her liberation from society's expectations of women.
I think the first example is just some innocent banter of a couple characters from long ago, who had a very naive understanding of the world because they couldn't begin to comprehend its true complexity.
I think the second example is something any cool person would have done, because witches are awesome.
IMHO envy, fanaticism, cruelty also cause more harm than cowardice.
Absence of cowardice (also known as self-preservation) will severely limit what people allow to do to them. This includes limiting all the things that you listed as worse than cowardice.
On the other hand, lack of fear will empower ideologies that employ suicide bombers.
Also it will make nuclear wars much less unthinkable.
In MoM the all 3 main characters have real prototypes. Master is Author (Bulgakov), Margarita is Author's wife Elena, Woland is Stalin. Bulgakov was under assault of Soviet regime, he wanted to emigrate, but Stalin kept him in country. He was in constant fear of being detained for anti-soviet propaganda. Her wife which he loved a lot was forced to became secret informer, she reported periodically to officials against him. Bulgakov knew that, and this theme also in book. This moment is so tragic and central, because her wife was editor of the book. MoM is about exceptional courage of Bulgakov, his personal response to Staling, his sole main reader. At that time, just comparing Stalin to Statan was enough to be executed.
I highly recommend this course to understand better MoM https://arzamas.academy/courses/39 unfortunately it's in Russian.
Edit: also Finite and Infinite Games by James Carse. It’s slim and user friendly to a fault, and would be easy to underestimate at first glance, but imho contains great wisdom and beauty.
More than any of those individual terms though, I took from the book a sort of gestalt of expansive, additive, richly intellectual ideation, one based not on truth values, but in thinking new thoughts. In my edition, the translator’s introduction portrays D&G’s notion of a concept as a brick that should not be used to build a courthouse, but to be thrown through a window. This whole way of being in the world was enormously refreshing to me when I read it.
Roots vs trees? If these ideas have any merit, surely it should be possible to express them clearly, and without (gratuitous?) invocation of pseudo-scientific terms.
You have a point with arborescent, but it is translated from French, and from what I know of French morphology, arborescent could probably sounds to a French person like "treeish" or "tree ADJ", and therefore not quite so formal/illegible.
The joke I tell about A Thousand Plateaus is that on one of the plateaus is good writing. Didn't make it into the book though
Your criticism is like telling a pharmacist not to use the terminology that distinguishes some kinds of drugs from others. It may be true that the blue pill makes your dick hard and the red pill cures your headache, but if you actually want to go into it and address why and how they do these things you need a more focused vocabulary that is clearly defined in its context of use (which G&D do).
Whenever I read about Deleuze and Guattari I get this feeling they are on to something - I just don't know what!
The First Immortal by James Halperin - introduced me as a sixth grader to things like cryonics, nanotech, etc. Got me thinking about a realistic ambitious nearer term future for humanity, rather than a more fantasy-like one in the other sci-fi I'd read at that point, like Asimov and Heinlein
As a Man Thinketh by James Allen - gave me much greater agency in life. Made me realize “You are today where your thoughts have brought you; you will be tomorrow where your thoughts take you.”
https://www.amazon.com/Illuminatus-Trilogy-Pyramid-Golden-Le...
There is no better book on the philosophy of UX, imho.
If you really hate someone, teach them about kerning
Would be really interesting to have Kahneman discuss the crisis in a new chapter.
HN discussion at the time https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15228712
[0] Archive link to the original comment by Kahneman https://web.archive.org/web/20190206160415/https://replicati...
Recently, Educated by Tara Westover, and in the past The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls, both have taught me to approach individuals with the true ignorance of their lives that I have. You don't know where people come from and what life led them to where they are when you meet them. Try not to make assumptions. Additionally, I have to remind myself that I grew up loved, cared for, and privileged compared to so many other people.. the fact that I could read their story and post here is a testament to that, helps me try to stay down to Earth and that I had some advantages growing up that others did not.
Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker... I used to be a chronic advocate for sleeping less until I read this and did my own scrappy post-research. I'm much more conscious of my health and my sleep now.
I could go on and on..
Your Deceptive Mind - A Scientific Guide to Critical Thinking
https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/your-deceptive-mind-...
This course helped me find places where i was allowing my own mind to run the show by default without thinking critically about my own motivations, thoughts, memories.
This helped me understand the duality of the logical/mechanical and the creative/artistic. Then merging the two.
"So the thing to do when working on a motorcycle, as in any other task, is to cultivate the peace of mind which does not separate one’s self from one's surroundings. When that is done successfully then everything else follows naturally. Peace of mind produces right values, right values produce right thoughts. Right thoughts produce right actions and right actions produce work which will be a material reflection for others to see of the serenity at the center of it all."
I never fully understood what Pirsig meant by Quality though. I could not understand what it really was, but I didn’t need to. I got so much good out of the book. But if someone could explain better I’d love to hear.
It's like Design Patterns for human conversations: the result of studying how people interact, common patterns that work, and how things break down. Really crystallised a lot of insights I'd perceived but never thought about systematically. I highly recommend it.
Word of warning - there are a few books with this title. Look for the one by Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton, Sheila Heen.
Also Thinking Fast and Slow, recommended elsewhere in this thread.
If you dispair at the way that conversations tend to devolve into personal attacks in national politics, office politics or your day-to-day interactions, this book is a very insightful handbook.
The book is the result of a big study at Harvard Business School of a large number of case studies. It spots the patterns that humans tend toward. In each case it identifies the pattern, why it happens, what the result can be (usually negative) and how to spot it coming and mitigate it. It also has snippets of conversation as case studies.
It's been a while, so I can't remember each item. But one example is that people tend to connect their identity to the point they are trying to argue. You challenge the point but to your conversation partner it feels like a direct personal attack. If you can find a way to acknowledge that connection, gently separate it from the identity, you have a much better chance of resolving the conflict.
I find a particularly strong parallel in the Gang of Four Design Patterns book. These are the broad problems that people try to solve with software, the structures that tend to emerge as people solve problems.
And, like design patterns, some things are deeply insightful and some things are obvious. E.g. of course 'iterators' are a thing. But development is so much better for having vocabulary to talk about them.
Always start with examples.
If I am trying to teach the fundamental ideas of complex analysis, I want to show folks how to take derivatives of complex functions with several worked examples and then show them how to do line-integrals on the complex plane -- I want them to have a big repertoire of things that they have worked out. I want them to have done for themselves several "closed loop" integrals that have come out to zero, and some that have come out to one, before I ever imagine putting the residue theorem underneath their noses. When I explain that analytic functions are these conformal maps which preserve angles, I want them to understand that how we defined analytic functions requires them to locally look like scaled rotations, and to understand that neither scaling nor rotation can change an angle.
Same thing in computing. I wouldn't dream about explaining what a monad is until I've explained what a functor is, and I wouldn't dream about explaining what a functor is without thinking through how lists and maybes and functions and eithers and pairs are all "outputtish" in a certain hard-to-describe way, maybe even discussing how a `forall z. (a -> z) -> z` is actually outputtish in `a` too, before I could finally define some bad definitions ("can get an output out of it" -- well no, I can't do that with the function!) and then alight on "okay so here's a good definition of outputtish as mappable, you can take a function and map it over the output" and then the fact that this has a specific jargon name at that point is no longer of any consequence, "we call this a functor" -- great, some name to memorize, but the concept is "not hard."
In other words, abstractions are patterns in concrete topics. The Dewey Decimal System organizes a library. It is incredibly difficult to convince someone to use the Dewey Decimal System to organize a pile of five books: "What's the point in having this big abstract unifying theory about book contents? I only have five of them!". But what you do if you want to teach someone the Dewey Decimal System is to make sure that first they have a whole library that is in some mess of a state, they can't find what they need to find and they can't see where to file new "books" (examples, pieces of information) and then you come over the hill with this Dewey Decimal System and you look like a righteous force for justice, "aha! everything can be well-organized!"
I have tried so many times to lead with the "Here's how you want to think about this sort of problem!" theory for all of my tutees, and it always leaves them looking at me with that "what abyss of hell did this crazy tutor crawl out of?" face. By contrast if I am just encouraging about "okay, what do you know about this system?" and am very careful to snip the premature theory of "Uh, F = m a?" that they have been exposed to, we can often work through a problem in words and then work through it in numbers and then I can suggest that here is a different way to think about it in terms of, say, momentum conservation.
Reading Rand’s essays both made me appreciate her views more and made me cautious to accept her epistemology as a whole. I don’t consider myself an Objectivist, but I still consider her work to be a strong influence on my life.
Likewise. In addition, The Fountainhead was, IMO, better written... and it has the additional perk of being shorter than Atlas Shrugged. If anyone was thinking of sampling Rand, I'd almost always suggest starting with The Fountainhead.
Warning: If you go over the fence, there is no returning back. Your thought process will change forever (for the good in my view).
The question of population-level selection (what you've called group selection) is more contentious, although it shouldn't be. The grandpa of our field, E.O. Wilson, whom we all adore and wish we could constantly hug, loves the idea. Sadly, evidence doesn't love it. Like, there's basically none. There's no real theoretical underpinnings that would make it possible, either, because there's just too much gene flow between demes (...partially isolated breeding populations) to allow selection to happen.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_dRXA1_e30o&list=PL150326949...
It has not. The "battle lines" between the "Dawkins school" and the "Gould school" were established in the 1970s and 1980s, and they are pretty much the same still. Each school probably thinks they refuted the other one decades ago already.
Also the majority of biologists don't give these much thought either way.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene-centered_view_of_evolutio...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene-centered_view_of_evolutio...
http://web.mit.edu/krugman/www/evolute.html
> What I encountered were quite a few references to Stephen Jay Gould, hardly any to other evolutionary theorists. Now it is not very hard to find out, if you spend a little while reading in evolution, that Gould is the John Kenneth Galbraith of his subject. That is, he is a wonderful writer who is bevolved by literary intellectuals and lionized by the media because he does not use algebra or difficult jargon. Unfortunately, it appears that he avoids these sins not because he has transcended his colleagues but because he does does not seem to understand what they have to say; and his own descriptions of what the field is about - not just the answers, but even the questions - are consistently misleading. His impressive literary and historical erudition makes his work seem profound to most readers, but informed readers eventually conclude that there's no there there.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/BahoNzY2pzSeM2Dtk/beware-of-...
> If you've read anything Stephen J. Gould has ever said about evolutionary biology, I have some bad news for you. In the field of evolutionary biology at large, Gould's reputation is mud. Not because he was wrong. Many honest scientists have made honest mistakes. What Gould did was much worse, involving deliberate misrepresentation of science.
What Prominent Biologists Think of Stephen Jay Gould Many nonspecialists believe that Stephen Jay Gould was the preeminent evolutionary theorist of the 20th century. His The Mismeasure of Man might be the most widely read book on biology/evolution among scholars in the humanities. But people specializing in the fields in which Gould pontificated generally had a poor opinion of his scholarship.
Bernard D. Davis (1983)
It is…not surprising that Gould’s history of the efforts to measure human intelligence, The Mismeasure of Man, received many glowing reviews in the popular and literary press, and even a National Book Critics Circle award. Yet the reviews that have appeared in scientific journals, focusing on content rather than on style or on political appeal, have been highly critical of both the book’s version of history and its scientific arguments. The paradox is striking. If a scholar wrote a tendentious history of medicine that began with phlebotomy and purges, moved on to the Tuskegee experiment on syphilitic Negroes, and ended with the thalidomide disaster, he would convince few people that medicine is all bad, and he would ruin his reputation. So we must ask: Why did Gould write a book that fits this model all too closely? Why were most reviewers so uncritical? And how can non-scientific journals improve their reviews of books on scientific aspects of controversial political issues?
John Maynard Smith (1995)
Gould occupies a rather curious position, particularly on his side of the Atlantic. Because of the excellence of his essays, he has come to be seen by non-biologists as the preeminent evolutionary theorist. In contrast, the evolutionary biologists with whom I have discussed his work tend to see him as a man whose ideas are so confused as to be hardly worth bothering with, but as one who should not be publically criticised because he is at least on our side against the creationists. All this would not matter, were it not that he is giving non-biologists a largely false picture of the state of evolutionary biology.
Ernst Mayr (2000)
Skeptic: You developed your theory of allopatric speciation in the 1940s and 1950s. In the 1970s Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould applied that to the fossil record and called it punctuated equilibrium. Was this just a spin-off from what you had already done? What was new in punctuated equilibrium?
Mayr: I published that theory in a 1954 paper (“Change of Genetic Environment and Evolution,” in Huxley, J., A.C. Hardy, and E.B. Ford, Eds., Evolution as a Process, London: Allen and Unwin), and I clearly related it to paleontology. Darwin argued that the fossil record is very incomplete because some species fossilize better than others. But what I derived from my research in the South Sea Islands is that in these isolated little populations it is much easier to make a genetic restructuring because when the numbers are small it takes rather few steps to become a new species. A small local population that changes very rapidly. I noted that you are never going to find evidence of a small local population that changed very rapidly in the fossil record. My essential point was that gradual populational shifts in founder populations appear in the fossil record as gaps.
Skeptic: Isn’t that what Eldredge and Gould argued in their 1972 paper, citing your 1963 book Animal Species and Evolution several times?
Mayr: Gould was my course assistant at Harvard where I presented this theory again and again for three years. So he knew it thoroughly. So did Eldredge. In fact, in his 1971 paper Eldredge credited me with it. But that was lost over time.
E. O. Wilson (2011)
I believe Gould was a charlatan….I believe that he was…seeking reputation and credibility as a scientist and writer, and he did it consistently by distorting what other scientists were say...
As an aside, I also think it's funny that you could easily* substitute the name Gould for Feynman in each of these criticisms, but somehow Feynman is considered a demi-god among physicists for having the same 'character flaws' and rhetorical flair.
Comparing Feynman to Gould is distasteful. They may both have been blowhards, self publicists and excellent writers but only one of them launched campaigns of harassment against other researchers. You could not easily substitute Feynman for Gould in these criticisms. Feynman never wrote anything as dishonest as Mismeasure of Man.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Jay_Gould
> Opposition to sociobiology and evolutionary psychology Gould also had a long-running public feud with E. O. Wilson and other evolutionary biologists concerning the disciplines of human sociobiology and evolutionary psychology, both of which Gould and Lewontin opposed, but which Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Steven Pinker advocated.[93] These debates reached their climax in the 1970s, and included strong opposition from groups such as the Sociobiology Study Group and Science for the People.[94] Pinker accuses Gould, Lewontin, and other opponents of evolutionary psychology of being "radical scientists", whose stance on human nature is influenced by politics rather than science.
If you would like to back up your claim that the same criticisms could be made of Feynman as of Gould here are the summaries. I’m sure the parallel statements will be easy to find if you’re right about Feynman.
Krugman: Gould was a good writer but vastly more respected outside his field than in it because he was a good writer more than a good scientist.
Yudkowsky: Gould wrote multiple books in which he acted as if other peoples’ life’s work was unknown to him, pawning off their intellectual work as his own, pretending that the field was in a state of confusion and that he, the towering genius, had brought closure and clarity.
Davis: Gould wrote a book of breathtaking intellectual dishonesty that was looked upon with favour in the popular press and panned by experts writing for other experts.
Smith: His ideas are so confused as to be unworthy of discussion but outsiders think he’s a genius of the field because he can write well.
Mayr: One of Gould’s only actual claims to originality was a trivial extension of work dating back either to the founder of the field or to a course taught to undergraduates in which he was a teaching assistant.
Wilson: Gould was a charlatan who dishonestly and repeatedly mischaracterised the work of other scientists.
Lewontin: Gould would take reasonable ideas and caricature them to the point they were plainly wrong.
Trivers: Gould was an intellectual fraud.
And they are guilty of the exact same non-arguments. Doesn't matter if they are scientists or non-scientists, the criticisms are exactly the same.
>> Opposition to sociobiology and evolutionary psychology Gould also had a long-running public feud with E. O. Wilson and other evolutionary biologists concerning the disciplines of human sociobiology and evolutionary psychology, both of which Gould and Lewontin opposed, but which Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Steven Pinker advocated.[93] These debates reached their climax in the 1970s, and included strong opposition from groups such as the Sociobiology Study Group and Science for the People.[94] Pinker accuses Gould, Lewontin, and other opponents of evolutionary psychology of being "radical scientists", whose stance on human nature is influenced by politics rather than science.
Again, where's the real critique of opposition to sociobiology? There are actually numerous flaws with sociobiology and evo-psych, which you seem to just dismiss out of hand as made up lies. The interdisciplinary fields of Science and Technology Studies and Sociology of Scientific Knowledge, which Gould was drawing from (though not necessarily in an optimal manner) provide sober critiques of the authority of science and of the political nature of knowledge and knowledge production. These fields look at how scientific practice is actually done and draw out mechanisms through which knowledge is produced through the interactions between people, prior knowledge and beliefs, objects of experimentation or evaluation, goals, pragmatic circumstances, 'grey' and information infrastructures, and community norms and expectations. Take a look at Epistemic Cultures (https://www.worldcat.org/title/epistemic-cultures-how-the-sc...) for a great example of such work, which compares scientific practice among high-energy physicists and molecular biologists, who follow very different trajectories in the formulation of new ideas, according to their circumstances and needs.
Gould's work is along similar lines.
One major critique of the Mismeasure of Man is that Gould dredges up long-dead hypotheses about race. However, these claims are in fact not dead, and have real impact on the world today. As an archaeologist, I can relate. Laypeople still think that archaeology does and believes things that have been debunked and shifted away from decades ago, things that 'prove' the inferiority of some races or that fuel nationalist and racist agendas. The thing is, people who are devising racist and nationalist policy are generally not intellectually honest, and don't care to actually read up on why or how these claims are wrong. They find an article from 1934 that supports their views and they go with it, and dismiss any criticism as coming from ""radical scientists", whose stance on human nature is influenced by politics rather than science.". Mismeasure of Man is clearly a popular non-fiction book geared towards educating laypeople about the flaws of race science, with the hope that people will recognize when policy is being enacted based on shitty science and oppose it when they do.
Below you or any other future readers may find a guide to the many faults in The Mismeasure of Man, all of which misunderstandings, distortions and deliberate omissions tended certain ways which supported Gould’s politics, though not the truth.
https://www.mdpi.com/2079-3200/7/1/6
Stephen Jay Gould’s Analysis of the Army Beta Test in The Mismeasure of Man: Distortions and Misconceptions Regarding a Pioneering Mental Test
> 5.1 Gould’s Judgments of the Army Beta Among the many topics of negative analysis in Stephen Jay Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man [1] is the Army Beta test. Although not the most prominent section of Gould’s text, his 23-page passage on the Army Beta is typical of his style in the book. Throughout the book, Gould criticized early scientists who studied individual and group differences of being misled by preconceived notions based on their social beliefs—instead of the data. Yet, Gould himself was motivated to write The Mismeasure of Man by his strong political and social beliefs, which guided him to present his text describing the early intelligence scientists as blinded by their prejudices [4,7,12,50]. Given Gould’s pervasively incorrect statements in The Mismeasure of Man about the Army Beta, factor analysis [3], the place of intelligence testing in the immigration debates of the 1920s [5,9,10], the biological basis for intelligence [4,8,9], and the questions regarding Gould’s analysis of Morton’s work [11–14], we wonder whether there is any section of The Mismeasure of Man that is factually accurate. Like other sections of The Mismeasure of Man, when Gould wrote about the Army Beta, he omitted relevant information that contradicted his preconceived beliefs and misinterpreted data in order to portray the study of individual human differences as ideological pseudoscience. Contrary to Gould’s claims, the Army Beta’s content, instructions, and time limits were all appropriate for a group-administered intelligence test a hundred years ago. We believe we have also demonstrated that the Army Beta very likely measured intelligence, given the results of multiple confirmatory factor analyses and the positive correlations with external criteria (both during World War I and in modern times).
I did not read the entire article you just posted, but it is worth noting that it misrepresents Mismeasure of Man as clinical research itself, rather than a historical and theoretical critique which it is, and holds improper standards against it (which is very funny because that's exactly what they claim Gould is guilty of!). Historical research is certainly biased, and that's okay. Historical research depends on omission as a crucial feature, otherwise how would you write a book about a focused topic? The two kinds of work have different kinds of data and follow different argumentation strategies, yet the authors of this paper expect otherwise. This is unreasonable and demonstrates a clear lack of understanding regarding what history is, and I have a hard time taking them seriously as a result.
“The Mating Mind” by Geoffrey Miller (another biologist who would do the world a favor by sticking to his domain of expertise) came to me more recently but has left a similar impression. It impeccably elaborates upon the power of sexual selection and how it intertwines with natural selection.
A philosopher has a look at what Dawkins actually says and realizes it is basically medieval demonology dressed up in pseudoscientific verbiage.
So, for now, my considered view is that Dawkins has many interesting insightful things to say, while his critics are often attacking straw men.
The search engine coughed up a PDF. I randomly opened it (p. 173) and read up to this author-provided "TL;DR" on p.176:
The main reason, however, for thinking that sociobiology is false, is the simple one I gave at the beginning: that it is obvious that human beings are the most intelligent and capable things on earth. But genes are not human. Therefore (etc.).
Uhhhm. Really?
tldr: Talk about how genes influence organism, is like reading animal planet