Hacker News Books

I can't recommend Talking to Strangers enough. We have a crippling inability of people to read strangers correctly. In addition to amazing testimony and evidence, great case studies, the production quality of the audiobook is like a good podcast.

Reminds me of the characterization of Harry Markopolos in Malcolm Gladwell’s book Talking to Strangers.

His takeaway is that society is a pretty bleak place when we all lose our “default to trust” mode of operation.

Malcom Gladwell addresses why proactive policing doesn't work at length in his book "Talking to Strangers". He refers to it as Kansas City style policing. Highly recommended.

Talking To Strangers was a choice for Zoom book club I was in during the shutdown. I was looking forward to it a little since I recognized but didn't know the name. I couldn't make my way through it and dropped out.

He has a New Yorker writing style but without having anything to say.

Malcolm Gladwell also talked about it in the book "Talking to Strangers." It revolved around a breakdown on communication between the two and assumptions that they each had for the other.

> How would you feel if an algorithm decided whether or not you should be charged with a crime? Whether an algorithm decided whether or not you had cancer? I think for many of these cases, it’s well known that the algorithms do much better than people. I was just reading Malcolm Gladwell’s new book, Talking to Strangers. He tells the story of a judge in Chicago who decided whether to keep detainees or release them on bail. He liked to look into the eyes of the detainee to decide whether he would skip bail. It turned out that information wasn’t nearly as valuable as other information that you can derive from machine learning, algorithms and so forth. Accuracy increased greatly with the algorithm.

I feel like this glosses over a lot of evidence that shows that using algorithms to determine guilt and innocence in the criminal justice system is incredibly fraught.

https://www.wired.com/2017/04/courts-using-ai-sentence-crimi...

https://www.propublica.org/article/how-we-analyzed-the-compa...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/11/19/algorithm...

Sure.

No. 1. "Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst" by Robert M. Sapolsky.

No. 2. "The Mosquito: A Human History of Our Deadliest Predator" by Timothy C. Winegard.

No. 3. "The Man Who Solved the Market: How Jim Simons Launched the Quant Revolution" by Gregory Zuckerman.

No. 4. "Hacking Darwin: Genetic Engineering and the Future of Humanity" by Jamie Metzl.

No. 5. "Biased: Uncovering the Hidden Prejudice That Shapes What We See, Think, and Do" by Jennifer L. Eberhardt.

No. 6. "Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World" by David Epstein.

No. 7. "The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War" by Ben Macintyre.

No. 8. "Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion" by Jia Tolentino.

No. 9. "Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know about the People We Don't Know" by Malcolm Gladwell.

No. 10. "Prediction Machines: The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence," by Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans and Avi Goldfarb.

That style of policing was popular before Gladwell. It was Giuliani who really doubled down on it in NYC as the exemplar.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory

It is also known as stop and frisk. This type of policing has also been adopted to traffic stops as well and arguably has lead to warrior cop policing.

Gladwell discusses the implications of this in Talking to Strangers.

So if you want a perspective on guns, gun violence, policing from the 1970s until today, I recommend it.

"Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst"
https://www.amazon.com/Behave-Biology-Humans-Best-Worst/dp/0...

"The Mosquito: A Human History of Our Deadliest Predator"
https://www.amazon.com/Mosquito-Human-History-Deadliest-Pred...

"The Man Who Solved the Market: How Jim Simons Launched the Quant Revolution"
https://www.amazon.com/Man-Who-Solved-Market-Revolution/dp/0...

"Hacking Darwin: Genetic Engineering and the Future of Humanity"
https://www.amazon.com/Hacking-Darwin-Genetic-Engineering-Hu...

"Biased: Uncovering the Hidden Prejudice That Shapes What We See, Think, and Do"
https://www.amazon.com/Biased-Uncovering-Hidden-Prejudice-Sh...

"Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World"
https://www.amazon.com/Range-Generalists-Triumph-Specialized...

"The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War"
https://www.amazon.com/Spy-Traitor-Greatest-Espionage-Story/...

"Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion"
https://www.amazon.com/Trick-Mirror-Self-Delusion-Jia-Tolent...

"Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know about the People We Don't Know"
https://www.amazon.com/Talking-Strangers-Should-about-People...

"Prediction Machines: The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence"
https://www.amazon.com/Prediction-Machines-Economics-Artific...

That doesn't explain being pulled over before they have checked her documents unless they are using a licence plate scanner to ID her beforehand. Doesn't sound likely due to the questions about whether it is her car - or those questions are therefore blatent harrassment.

I'd recommend Gladwell's last book 'Talking to Strangers' about how preconceptions and cognitive biases shape our interactions and how things can quickly derail as a result. You could put a spin on their motives that it is a prejudgement of her as a person of interest - but that then becomes an issue of individual training or a systemic failure in the whole force to not let that happen.

Just finished Talking to Strangers. That's an unfair ungenerous depiction, by omission. Specifically, the punch line.

Wide spread cargo cult adoption of Kansas City's policing strategy ignored the science, explaining why few reproduced KC's successes, with all sorts of terrible consequences, resulting many senseless deaths, and destroying trust and legitmacy of policing.

Just another tale of bad policy, unintended consequences, railing against entrenched dogma.

In this case, Gladwell's quixotic suggestion is to step back, reassess, try again. Daylighting the science during this cycle of turmoil seems reasonable. Might even help.

What more could he do? What would you do?