Dana Mackenzie http://danamackenzie.com Freelance mathematics and science writer Fri, 07 Dec 2018 22:47:29 +0000 en-US hourly 1 A Great List to Be On http://danamackenzie.com/a-great-list-to-be-on/ http://danamackenzie.com/a-great-list-to-be-on/#respond Fri, 07 Dec 2018 22:47:29 +0000 http://danamackenzie.com/?p=2402 This morning, my co-author Judea Pearl sent me an e-mail: “Did you know about this?” Well, no, I didn’t. Here’s what “this” means: http://s3.amazonaws.com/scifri-segments/scifri201812076.mp3 Science Friday, probably the nation’s most-listened-to radio show for science news, has named The Book of Why as one of its best science books of the year for 2018. It was […]

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This morning, my co-author Judea Pearl sent me an e-mail: “Did you know about this?” Well, no, I didn’t. Here’s what “this” means:

Science Friday, probably the nation’s most-listened-to radio show for science news, has named The Book of Why as one of its best science books of the year for 2018. It was one of eighteen books chosen. Here they are in alphabetical order. (That way, The Book of Why is near the top instead of at the bottom, the way it is on the Science Friday web page!) I’ll leave out the subtitles except when it’s necessary to understand what the book is about.

  • Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup, by John Carreyrou
  • The Book of Why, by Judea Pearl and Dana Mackenzie
  • Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet, by Claire Evans
  • Chesapeake Requiem, by Earl Swift
  • The Dialogues: Conversations about the Nature of the Universe, by Clifford Johnson
  • The Dinosaur Artist, by Paige Williams
  • Dispatches from Planet 3, by Marcia Bartusiak
  • Heart: A History, by Sandeep Jauhar
  • How to Change Your Mind, by Michael Pollan
  • In Search of the Canary Tree, by Lauren Oakes
  • Losing the Nobel Prize, by Brian Keating
  • The Mystery of the Exploding Teeth, by Thomas Morris
  • Nine Pints, by Rose George
  • The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs, by Steve Brusatte
  • Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore, by Elizabeth Rush
  • She Has Her Mother’s Laugh, by Carl Zimmer
  • Spying on Whales, by Nick Pyenson
  • What the Eyes Don’t See, by Mona Hanna-Attisha

Now I have to admit: I haven’t read any of these books, except for the one that I (co-)wrote. Shame on me! I do have In Search of the Canary Tree on my Amazon wish list, because I read a glowing review of it this week in Science. I am impressed that Science Friday says that She Has Her Mother’s Laugh is “clearly Zimmer’s best book,” because he has written a lot of books. Broad Band and Nine Pints (a book about blood) split my vote for the best title. In general, blood had a pretty good year (Nine Pints, Heart, and metaphorically speaking, Bad Blood). Of course, climate change had a good year; Chesapeake Requiem, Rising, and In Search of the Canary Tree all have to do with that topic. And dinosaurs are another evergreen topic (The Dinosaur Artist, The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs).

As for me, I’m just happy to be sitting at the same banquet table as these folks. It gives me the same spine-tingling, “Wow, is this happening?” feeling that I had the week our book came out. It’s possible that Judea and I will make it onto some other year-end best-of lists (I certainly hope so!), but this is the first one, so it’s special to me. And it’s a pretty great list to be on.

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The Real World Intrudes http://danamackenzie.com/the-real-world-intrudes/ http://danamackenzie.com/the-real-world-intrudes/#respond Thu, 08 Nov 2018 19:05:18 +0000 http://danamackenzie.com/?p=2396 If any of you have visited my book’s page on Amazon recently, you have seen a scary message like this one: “Available only through third-party vendors.” I don’t see that message today, but the page still does not say “In Stock,” nor does it give any hint of how long it will take you to […]

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If any of you have visited my book’s page on Amazon recently, you have seen a scary message like this one: “Available only through third-party vendors.” I don’t see that message today, but the page still does not say “In Stock,” nor does it give any hint of how long it will take you to get a copy. (Last week it said “Usually ships in 2 to 4 weeks.”)

What is the problem? The short answer: Amazon is sold out. Yes, that’s right, the company that has everything does not have a single copy of The Book of Why.

But there’s a more interesting answer behind that. The publishing industry has (in the words of my editor) been in a state of utter bedlam this fall because of two things. First, we are experiencing one of the worst paper shortages in years. (Bet you didn’t know that.) Second, there is an apparent undersupply of labor and printing press availability. According to this article in Publishers Weekly, the 5th largest printer in the U.S. unexpectedly went out of business this year, and the 3rd largest printer is in bankruptcy. (It’s expected to survive.)

Even for publishers who don’t use those printers, there is still a ripple effect as everybody scrambles to find a printer with available capacity. My editor tells me that they ordered the next printing of my book (the fifth, I think, or maybe the sixth), 4000 copies, back in early September. Ordinarily, he said, that order would take 15 days to fill. But they’re still waiting. A few days ago he told me that the books were expected in the warehouse on November 2, but now he’s telling me that they will come on November 16. Which means that Amazon will not have any copies of The Book of Why until then, unless they go looking under park benches and in dumpsters.

There are a couple of things to be thankful for, although only in a silver-lining-dark-cloud sense. First, The Book of Why is still available in bookstores and at Barnes and Noble online. Perhaps this printing shortage will weaken Amazon’s grip on the U.S. book market, which is not necessarily a bad thing. Second, as my editor points out, at least The Book of Why came out last spring, and so it had about five months of relative normalcy before the printing shortage began to affect sales. That means it reached a lot of people already, it developed good word-of-mouth, and I don’t think that the supply shortage will affect it in the long run. But for new books that came out in October, the shortage could be a kiss of death, preventing them from ever gaining momentum and generating word of mouth sales.

You can really see the effect of the printing shortage in my book’s latest Nielsen BookScan totals. Here is a graph of its weekly sales for the first 24 weeks of its existence:

For the first 23 weeks, it looks like a Poisson distribution with added noise, and perhaps a heavier tail. For non-mathie folks, here is what Poisson distributions look like. I think that the green one is the best match for the Book of Why sales graph.

But then in week 24, the sales dropped from 239 books to 81 — nearly a threefold drop! I expect that week 25 will be even worse, with no Amazon sales. Amazon is supposedly about two-thirds of the U.S. book market.

(By the way, you can see a few other interesting things about the Book of Why sales graph. Our peak, in week 2, was 1459 copies. As a rough estimate, you need to sell about 3000 copies a week to make it to the hardcover bestseller lists. So after I saw the downturn in week 3, I knew we were never going to be an official bestseller. The second peak, 1254 copies in week 4, came after the New York Times reviewed The Book of Why. The third peak, 567 copies in week 9, came for unknown reasons. Maybe Amazon just lowered its price that week. The fourth peak, 532 copies in week 14, came after our book was made an alternate selection for something called the Next Big Idea Club. I am still waiting for the fifth peak… maybe after the supply crisis abates.)

All this stuff about printers reminded me of something I almost never think about any more. When I was in college, I worked for four summers at a printing press. Although I was in the front office and didn’t go back into the production area too often, I always enjoyed it when I got the chance. It was a technological marvel. Those huge machines slap ink onto paper and fold it up and bind it faster than the eye can see.

That experience taught me that a book or a magazine is not just a collection of fine words and brilliant ideas. It is, first and foremost, a physical object that somebody has to produce. Those beautiful ideas would be worth nothing if we didn’t have the physical means to manufacture and distribute books in large quantities. The Internet has changed things a little bit, but not as much as you’d think. Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press (and all the improvements that have followed) is still king. You just don’t appreciate it until suddenly you don’t have it any more.

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The Book of Many Titles Returns http://danamackenzie.com/the-book-of-many-titles-returns/ http://danamackenzie.com/the-book-of-many-titles-returns/#respond Wed, 24 Oct 2018 19:27:10 +0000 http://danamackenzie.com/?p=2390 Once upon a time, I wrote a book. Interestingly, the idea for the book was not mine. A book packager named Elwin Street Productions, in London, came to me with a proposal for a history of the greatest equations in mathematics. The book came out in 2012 as The Universe in Zero Words, co-published by Elwin […]

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Once upon a time, I wrote a book. Interestingly, the idea for the book was not mine. A book packager named Elwin Street Productions, in London, came to me with a proposal for a history of the greatest equations in mathematics. The book came out in 2012 as The Universe in Zero Words, co-published by Elwin Street and by Princeton University Press.

To understand this story fully, you do need to understand a little bit about the book business. A “packager” is not a publisher per se. What they do is put together a book package — words by an author, images from various sources — that they shop around to traditional publishers. It’s a somewhat common procedure for image-intensive books. (Think Time-Life books, for example.) For me, it was fun to work on a book where the images would be such a big part of the finished product. This went along very well with a constant theme of the book, the idea that mathematical equations can be beautiful.

Over the years the book was translated into other languages, with other titles. The French edition was Fous d’Equations (Crazy about Equations), which I thought was a great title. The Italian edition was more or less a direct translation, L’Universo senza parole (The Universe without Words) but had a different subtitle (Mathematics Revealed in 24 Equations). 

Everything was fine until last winter, when I was informed, to my surprise and dismay, that Elwin Street was leaving the co-publishing agreement with Princeton University Press. In part, the reason is that they are converting their business so that they will be an actual publishing house. Therefore, they wanted to be able to publish my book themselves in the U.K. market. I do not know or understand why they wouldn’t let PUP continue to publish the book in the U.S. I definitely do not agree with their decision. However, because Elwin Street owns all the rights, it’s their decision to make. They are currently looking for a new U.S. publisher.

Anyway, for every dark cloud there is a silver lining. My book now has a new edition in England, and it has yet another new title! It’s now called The Story of Mathematics in 24 Equations, which I think is probably more appealing and less confusing than the original title. I now think that the original title, The Universe in Zero Words, even though it was my idea, was not a particularly good one. The only people who understand it right away are mathematicians; for everyone else, I have to explain it. 

For any readers in England who might come across it in a bookstore, the new edition is almost identical to the old one. The figures are the same. I made a few small corrections to the text, but there have been no major additions or deletions. The main differences are that it is a paperback and it has a beautifully re-designed cover, which goes better with the design scheme of the interior. It remains a gorgeous book to look at, thanks to all the color pictures. If you purchased the old edition, there really isn’t any need to buy the new one. However, I suspect that there is a large market out there of people who never heard of the first edition, and I am delighted that Elwin Street is giving my old book a second chance to reach them.

I hope that American readers will also get another chance (eventually) to buy The Book of Many Titles, but we’ll have to wait and see!

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Science Podcast Posted, plus Facing the Public http://danamackenzie.com/science-podcast-posted/ http://danamackenzie.com/science-podcast-posted/#respond Thu, 30 Aug 2018 20:58:19 +0000 http://danamackenzie.com/?p=2383 Today Jen Golbeck’s interview with Judea and me for the Science (magazine) Podcast went up, and you can listen to it here. (Alternatively, for the next 7 days, you can also go to the main Science magazine website at www.sciencemag.org and scroll down to the podcast.) The book review segment starts at 18:48 with a […]

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Today Jen Golbeck’s interview with Judea and me for the Science (magazine) Podcast went up, and you can listen to it here. (Alternatively, for the next 7 days, you can also go to the main Science magazine website at www.sciencemag.org and scroll down to the podcast.) The book review segment starts at 18:48 with a long-ish introduction by Golbeck, and the actual interview starts at 20:35 and lasts to 26:05.

Some thoughts: I do wish we had had more time. Basically Judea and I got to answer two questions each, and we got to discuss only about three topics out of a 400-page book. I have to blame myself for giving too rambling an answer to my first question. I kept saying “and this…” “and that…” If you wrote a transcript of the interview, you would probably find that I crammed about five sentences into one. A good thing to avoid in the future!

On the positive side, I thought Judea sounded very patient, reasonable, and persuasive. I think that between the two of us, we very clearly expressed one of our central ideas, which is that causal diagrams allow scientists to express their assumptions in such a way that they are visible and can be discussed by others. A point that was less apparent is that causal diagrams also guide you toward the right way to analyze your data.

One interesting point for very sharp-eared listeners: this may well be the first Science Podcast with a laugh track! My wife was listening to the interview as we recorded it, and at the 25:41 mark I said something that made her laugh. I think that Jen Golbeck tried to edit it out, but didn’t completely succeed. (It was when I talked about an “outbreak of common sense.”) 

Outtakes: What Didn’t Make it into the Podcast?

Golbeck asked each of us, “If you could put your book on the desk of one person, who would it be?” Judea said he would like the book to be read by economists. He feels that economics is one discipline that has resisted his graphical approach to causality.

My answer was “Ruth Bader Ginsburg.” In our book we discuss the long tradition of counterfactuals in the law. (A defendant is guilty if the victim would have been unharmed but for the defendant’s actions. “Would have” and “but for” express a counterfactual condition.) I would like lawyers to be aware that some scientists now are taking counterfactuals seriously, and that we have algorithms that can perhaps improve our ability to make such judgements. In particular, I know that some members of the Supreme Court are skeptical of gerrymandering measures that rest on counterfactual conditions, and I would like to alleviate some of their concern.

Another answer that was edited out: I told Golbeck about a question that Judea once asked me, about a month after the book came out: “Why was it necessary for me to go behind my colleagues’ back and address the public in order to get my colleagues’ attention?” My answer was: “First, I’m not sure you did go behind their backs. But if you did, it’s only because they themselves turned their back on the public.” I think that this experience has totally sold Judea on the fact that it’s not just good publicity to face the public — it’s good science, too.

P.S. It was a great day for Santa Cruz on the Science Podcast! The interview just before ours was with Emily Brodsky of UC Santa Cruz, who talked about human-induced earthquakes.

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Podcast Interview Coming Up! http://danamackenzie.com/podcast-interview-coming-up/ http://danamackenzie.com/podcast-interview-coming-up/#respond Fri, 17 Aug 2018 20:10:39 +0000 http://danamackenzie.com/?p=2380 The American Association for the Advancement of Science, publishers of Science magazine, also have a weekly podcast, called (of course) the Science Podcast. I’m pleased to announce that The Book of Why will be the featured book two weeks from now, in the last week of August. This makes up for my (mild) disappointment that Science […]

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The American Association for the Advancement of Science, publishers of Science magazine, also have a weekly podcast, called (of course) the Science Podcast. I’m pleased to announce that The Book of Why will be the featured book two weeks from now, in the last week of August.

This makes up for my (mild) disappointment that Science never published a review of The Book of Why in the print magazine. Of course, there are many science books published every week, and it’s not easy to write one that stands out enough to merit a review. The way I look at it, a review on the podcast is even more special than a review in print, because only one book a month gets chosen for the podcast, as opposed to three or four a week that get reviewed in the magazine.

Yesterday Jen Golbeck, the host of the book review segment, interviewed Judea and me by telephone (we had a conference call). I thought it went really well and she asked some great questions. The one I liked best was, “If you could put your book on the desk of one person, who would it be?” I hope you’ll get to hear my surprising answer. I can’t guarantee that it will make the episode, because the interview lasted 28 minutes but it will have to be edited down to 7 or 8 minutes.

My wife listened in on the interview, and laughed at a couple of the things Judea said. He really has a wonderful, understated comic wit. I imagine the chuckles will be edited out, but it would be funny if they said, “This episode was recorded in front of a live audience of one person.” 

Even without the laugh track, I’m sure that the interview will be interesting to listen to! After it goes live I’ll post a link to it here.

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Book Reading, Puppies and Bunnies Too! http://danamackenzie.com/book-reading-puppies-and-bunnies-too/ http://danamackenzie.com/book-reading-puppies-and-bunnies-too/#respond Sun, 22 Jul 2018 01:47:57 +0000 http://danamackenzie.com/?p=2375 Earlier this week I gave a presentation based on The Book of Why at the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing at UC Berkeley, where I have been a journalist in residence for the last eight weeks. It was very similar to my presentation at the Aptos Library in Santa Cruz, with one important […]

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Earlier this week I gave a presentation based on The Book of Why at the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing at UC Berkeley, where I have been a journalist in residence for the last eight weeks. It was very similar to my presentation at the Aptos Library in Santa Cruz, with one important difference: this one was video recorded! You can watch the whole talk at this link on YouTube, or you can watch it on the embedded viewer below. In two days, it has already gotten more than 400 views!

Just one word of warning: The first three minutes of the video is devoid of content; we were just chatting and waiting for latecomers to settle down. Beginning around the 3:00 mark, Shafi Goldwasser introduces me. If you want to skip the introduction and just listen to the actual lecture, it starts around 4:30.

Some good questions were asked during the lecture. I’d like to say a little bit more about two of them. Around the 39:30 mark, one listener asks whether an inference of causation might require a higher level of significance (such as p < 0.01) in the presence of a confounder. The answer I gave was correct but I could have explained it a bit better. I should have reminded him of the earlier example of the walking study (from about 23:00 to 23:20). The association between walking and reduced mortality was very strong and would probably have passed the test he suggested. Nevertheless, the association would be completely spurious if, say, the people in the intense-walking group were 10 years younger than the casual walkers. In that case the association would be completely explained by the age difference. So a low p-value, in the presence of a confounder, does not give us any guarantees about causality.

Secondly, one listener said something that I unfortunately talked over, and it’s hard to make out what he said. At 52:30, he suggested that one way a researcher could present a causal finding would be this: “Either you believe that smoking causes lung cancer, or there exists a confounding factor. Given our experience, we do not believe there is such a confounder.” I like this way of putting it because it puts the responsibility on a skeptic: if you don’t believe in this result, you have to say what specifically is wrong about our causal diagram. Perhaps we have omitted a confounder, or assumed two variables do not have a direct causal relation when in fact they do. In this way, we direct the discussion precisely where it should be directed: What do we know about the web of causes and effects, what is it reasonable to assume, and what do we not know yet? If we disagree about some aspect of the diagram, how sensitive are the results to our choice?

Not all of the lecture is quite this serious and academic! Keep an eye out for cute puppy pictures at 14:39 and a cute bunny picture at 50:13!

 

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Bestsellers and Goodsellers: A One-Month Retrospective http://danamackenzie.com/bestsellers-and-goodsellers-a-one-month-retrospective/ http://danamackenzie.com/bestsellers-and-goodsellers-a-one-month-retrospective/#respond Sat, 16 Jun 2018 17:00:26 +0000 http://danamackenzie.com/?p=2366 Some of my very well-meaning friends are saying that I “wrote a New York Times bestseller.” I’m very flattered, but er, um, that’s not quite true. Here’s a post from my chess blog that explains why “reviewed in the New York Times” is different from “New York Times bestseller.” But either way, I appreciate their […]

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Some of my very well-meaning friends are saying that I “wrote a New York Times bestseller.” I’m very flattered, but er, um, that’s not quite true. Here’s a post from my chess blog that explains why “reviewed in the New York Times” is different from “New York Times bestseller.” But either way, I appreciate their intentions, and it shows that perhaps the rest of the world doesn’t care as much about such distinctions as the publishing world.


I think it’s likely that every author who has ever published a book has wondered if it has what it takes to be a bestseller. There was even a day or two last month when I thought The Book of Why might have a serious chance to make a bestseller list. But it didn’t, and the experience has taught me something valuable about bestsellers versus goodsellers.

In chess terms, it’s like the difference between a player who is good enough to be invited to the U.S. Championship (i.e., one of the best 10 or 20 players in the country) and a National Master (which means roughly being in the top thousand in the country). Except that in book-land, the playing field is much less level than in chess. If you notice, the bestseller lists, especially in nonfiction, are crowded with books by celebrity authors, or people who are famous for something other than book writing. Also, in book-land, there is an incredible variety of outstanding books. You could write the best book ever about fungi, and it will have no hope of making the bestseller lists — but you can be sure that it will reach an audience who love that book.

In short, the landscape of book success is much more varied and nuanced than the landscape of chess success. And chess success, too, is more varied and nuanced than we sometimes think it is. Making grandmaster is hardly the only way to succeed. You can be a great organizer, or a great teacher, or run a great chess website. All of these are ways of making a mark upon the game.

Anyway, one month into its run, The Book of Why is looking like a really strong goodseller but not a bestseller. My editor just sent me sales figures today, and he was extremely happy with them. My book is in its 32nd consecutive day in Amazon’s top 1000, although it is just barely hanging on:

First Month

To put this into perspective, there are tons of great books that aren’t in the top 1000. My first book, The Big Splat, never came anywhere close; as far as I know, the highest it got was #5230 (although back then I did not pay as close attention to the Amazon rankings, so I don’t know for sure). So for me, it was an incredible thrill when The Book of Why reached #915 in its very first day on the market. Having a three-digit number for a ranking almost looked like a misprint, like seeing a six-digit phone number!

Another thing that’s cool about this graph is that you can see numerically how key events affected the book’s sales. We hit a trifecta of big publicity coups in the first month. Two of them hit on the same day: our Wall Street Journal article and the interview of Judea Pearl (my co-author) in The Atlantic. When you look at the graph, you can kind of see the book maybe starting to level off around #400 until those two articles hit, and then it shot up from #412 to #90 in one day. That was extremely exciting, because when you’re in the top hundred your book starts to appear on Amazon’s “Top 100” page.

I think that Amazon’s Top 100 is a rough line of demarcation between the goodsellers and the bestsellers. For a few hours, The Book of Why was rubbing elbows with some true bestsellers. The 17th Suspect by James Patterson (the bestselling writer in the English language after J.K. Rowling). War on Peace by Ronan Farrow (son of Woody Allen and Mia Farrow). But here’s the catch. Those books were in the top 100 for a whole week (or a lot longer). My book burst into the top 100 for less than 24 hours, and then it was gone. Judea and I would have made the bestseller lists only if we could have arranged to have publicity nonstop for an entire week. That was never realistic.

But we did have one more publicity coup, the extremely favorable review in the New York Times on June 1. Again the effect on the Amazon rankings was electric. Our book had been sagging down below #500, and suddenly it shot up again to #147. I think that this second surge was quite a bit more unexpected, in Amazon’s mathematical models, than the first one. They completely ran out of stock; the book went from “In Stock” to “Ships in 1-2 days” to “Ships in 2-3 days” to “Usually ships in 1 week” to “Usually ships in 2-5 weeks.” That last one worried me a bit, because if I were a book buyer, I might be turned off by the idea of having to wait for two weeks. Fortunately, that message was soon replaced by “Will be in stock on June 14,” and indeed The Book of Why is now back in stock.

Looking at the graph, I think you can predict with some confidence that The Book of Why will drop out of the top 1000 very soon — either today or tomorrow — unless and until another unexpected event occurs. But I’m not too upset at that prospect. As I said, there are many flavors of success, and being in the top 1000 is only one of them. And also, there is the delicious suspense of wondering whether there might be another surprise in the book’s future that might send its ranking back up again. Who knows? We’ll have to wait and see! Anyway, as long as the editor is happy, and the readers I’ve heard from are happy, then I’m happy too.


By the way, it’s now been a day since I wrote this, and we’re still hanging in the top 1000 on Amazon. Day 33 and counting! (Amazon raised the price on Day 30, which may be one reason the book dropped rather abruptly from the 600’s to the 900s. Yesterday Amazon lowered the price again.)

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Eavesdropping on Facebook http://danamackenzie.com/eavesdropping-on-facebook/ http://danamackenzie.com/eavesdropping-on-facebook/#respond Fri, 01 Jun 2018 03:33:02 +0000 http://danamackenzie.com/?p=2361 I have to pass along this wonderful conversation about The Book of Why that took place on Facebook. A friend of mine sent me a link to it; I do not know any of the commenters personally. More than any sales numbers or Amazon rankings, this conversation warmed my heart because it shows that our […]

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I have to pass along this wonderful conversation about The Book of Why that took place on Facebook. A friend of mine sent me a link to it; I do not know any of the commenters personally. More than any sales numbers or Amazon rankings, this conversation warmed my heart because it shows that our readers are “getting it.” I’ll copy the whole conversation below, using only first initials in case they would prefer to maintain their anonymity.


E: Judea Pearl’s new book is enormously impressive; it could end up being more important than his 1988 book. [Includes link to the book at Basicbooks.com.] (10 Likes, 8 Shares, 9 Comments.)

P: Cool! I have a long overseas trip coming up in a few weeks and was considering this for my kindle. Sold! Double sold because I’ve been working on causation and counterfactuals for so many years and he’s preaching to the choir.

A: Great! Have you read it E.?

F: I am reading it right now. Really good reading! I strongly recommend it!

H: Thanks for posting this. Can someone say in one or two concrete sentences, what they think is great about the book?

E: A: I’m about 2/3 of the way through. H: This has been the most dramatic experience I’ve had in many years where you read a really simple idea — essentially, rather than avoiding any mention of causality as if it were Sasquatch, statistics should use causal models systematically — and that simple idea makes all kinds of things enormously clearer. It’s not obvious immediately in the book, which starts a little slow, but by the time you get to the chapter on Confounders it’s dazzling. Pearl and others have been doing this for some years now, but (embarrassingly) I wasn’t aware of it, so this comes as a revelation.

H: Great, thanks, my mouth started watering and I will buy it now.

F: I really loved the historical perspective!

E: I’m curious to know what is the reaction in the mainstream statistics world — people like Andrew Gelman, for instance, or for that matter Nate Silver. If anyone sees a review or discussion, please post.

T: It’s SO good.


As it turns out, the original poster is somebody whom Judea, my co-author, is acquainted with. When I sent this conversation to Judea, he responded with his typically wry sense of humor: “Strange. To get your colleagues to understand what you do, you need to go behind their back and write to the general public.” I replied to him, “If you are going behind their back, it is only because they have turned their backs on the public.” 

In our culture, scientists (with a few notable exceptions) have perhaps lost the knack of addressing themselves directly to the public. Perhaps this book can help persuade them that it’s worth the trouble. If you state your case in terms that ordinary people can understand, you just might find that your colleagues understand you better, too!

Many thanks to A, E, F, H, P, and T for their enthusiastic and unsolicited praise. By the way, I loved E’s line about Sasquatch. I might use that line in the future myself!

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Number 2 Science Book in America http://danamackenzie.com/number-2-science-book-in-america/ http://danamackenzie.com/number-2-science-book-in-america/#respond Sun, 20 May 2018 16:20:56 +0000 http://danamackenzie.com/?p=2356 News flash: The Book of Why is now #86 among all hardcover books on Amazon #18 among all science and math books on Amazon #2 among all hardcover science and math books on Amazon (behind only The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli)!!!! Dreams don’t usually come true at 9:47 on a Saturday night. But […]

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News flash: The Book of Why is now

  • #86 among all hardcover books on Amazon
  • #18 among all science and math books on Amazon
  • #2 among all hardcover science and math books on Amazon (behind only The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli)!!!!

Dreams don’t usually come true at 9:47 on a Saturday night. But that’s when one of mine came true. That was when I checked the Amazon page for The Book of Why (co-authored by your truly along with Judea Pearl) and saw that we had cracked the top 100! Here’s a little bit of photographic documentation: the Amazon top-100 list in hardcover books, as of 9:47 pm Pacific time (12:47 am Eastern time).

 

There’s our book in the #93 position, right below Make Your Bed (an inspirational book by William McRaven, #92) and right above Baby Touch and Feel Animals (#94). Any time a hard science book can outsell a book with cute baby rabbits on the cover, that’s pretty amazing!

The Book of Why has even gone up a little bit more overnight; when I checked the ranking just now, it was up to #86. We have also cracked the top 20 among all science and math books, and we have the #2 hardcover science and math book in America, after The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli. Rovelli’s book is only two positions above us on the science & math list. We’re coming for you, Carlo!

Before I say how this happened, let me just say that my mind is completely, totally, 100 percent boggled. To have a success of this magnitude is more like a fantasy than reality. It ranks right up there with winning the lottery, or winning the U.S. chess championship (tip of the hat to you, Sam Shankland!), or with Wile E. Coyote finally catching the Roadrunner. You dream about it, but stuff like this doesn’t really happen.

How it happened was, I think, a perfect storm. Two articles about our book in major publications both came out yesterday. One of them, an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, we wrote ourselves. It was actually a month-long struggle to hammer this 800-word piece into shape, but we did it. Interestingly, the op-ed was originally scheduled to run on April 28, but the WSJ kept pushing it back because the editors didn’t think it was ready yet. I actually think that the timing could not have been better.

The other article actually came out earlier this week in Quanta, as I think I mentioned before, but yesterday it was picked up and published by a much bigger-name publication, The Atlantic. I have to say that Judea is a little bit unhappy with the headline of this one, because he is not really a critic of artificial intelligence; he is very much part of the AI research community. But he is saying that AI currently has a blind spot, which can be fixed. Anyway, aside from the headline, the article in The Atlantic is really excellently written, and I strongly recommend it.

Our book was off to a strong start before this, but was still a long way from top-100 and top-20 territory until these articles came out. My only hope is that it will keep selling this strongly even after Judea’s name drops out of the current news cycle. The next thing I will start waiting for is reviews in major publications, which have not happened yet, and which may decide whether our book has long-term staying power.

(Cross-posted from my chess blog.)

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On Co-Authorship http://danamackenzie.com/on-co-authorship/ http://danamackenzie.com/on-co-authorship/#respond Sat, 19 May 2018 03:26:30 +0000 http://danamackenzie.com/?p=2350 One of my readers (Dan) asked if I could write a little bit about the process of co-writing a book. I’m happy to oblige! First, how did Judea and I get in touch in the first place? A lot of people have asked this. The long version of the story is on my main web […]

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One of my readers (Dan) asked if I could write a little bit about the process of co-writing a book. I’m happy to oblige!

First, how did Judea and I get in touch in the first place? A lot of people have asked this. The long version of the story is on my main web page, and it’s worth reading, but I’ll just give you the short version here. I had done some work for the American Statistical Association and someone thought, “Hmm, this is interesting, a guy who makes a living writing about math and statistics.” So they interviewed me for a short profile in their magazine for members. Judea had already been hunting for someone to collaborate with him on a popular book, and he noticed this article. He e-mailed me to ask if I might be interested in this. I already knew very well who he was (see the long version for more details), so I instantly said, “Yes.” No question that his e-mail changed my life, or at least my career.

The next steps are getting an agent, writing a book proposal, and finding a publisher who is interested in your proposal. Again this part is a long story, with a lot of ups and downs. We both learned a lot through this process. Judea, who has spent his whole life in academia, was very much a naive innocent about the publishing business, and he was amazed by many things in the process. “You will auction the rights to the book?” he asked our agent. “Like selling fish?” Yes, like selling fish. Or he would ask me, “What do we need an editor for?”

I’ve been in the publishing business for a longer time, written two popular books, but there were still some things that were new to me. This was my first time working with an agent, and I finally got to see how “the other half” (i.e., authors who actually make some money writing books) live. Suffice to say, our agent was worth every penny that he earned. The Merriam-Webster definition of an agent should read as follows. “agent — 1. A person who makes problems go away.” That describes John Brockman to a tee.

Once you’ve got a contract, now the process of writing the book begins. I’m sure this is the main thing that Dan was asking about.

I’ll talk about co-writing a book like this one, where the two people bring very different skill sets to the book: one is the “expert,” we’ll say, and one is the “writer,” whose job it is to put the expert’s story into words. It’s a common arrangement, and there are three essential ingredients to make it work.

1. Both people must have complete respect for each other. Very often this is not the case; the expert looks at the writer as someone who is just hired to do a job. Maybe the expert hands the writer a bunch of papers and scribblings and says, “Here, turn this into a book.” I would hate to work with someone who had that attitude. I talked with a friend who co-wrote a book with someone who treated her that way, and she says that on the day the book came out, she and her friends got a pinata that looked like her co-author and started whaling away at it. “Very cathartic,” she said.

Suffice to say that Judea was as far from that as possible. No prima donna, he understood what I was there for and how I could help him. He insisted that I should be open and honest in saying what I liked or didn’t like. He wanted the book to have music and poetry to it — which was such a breath of fresh air compared to other scientists I’ve worked with, who only want the facts and don’t understand music or poetry.

2. As a writer, you need to know your co-author. I tried to learn Judea’s sense of humor (which is really sly) and what he was passionate about. I wanted to do my best to incorporate his voice in the book. As far as I’m concerned, more Judea is always better. I took notes on every phone conversation and would try to incorporate his phrases into the text, even if he didn’t ask me to.

I think that one big change that happened as we worked on this book was that I did not do as much research into other approaches to causation as I had planned to. Judea has some opponents, and for the most part I never interviewed them. If I were writing the book on my own, I would of course have interviewed all sides — that’s what a journalist does. But I gradually realized that my job here was to present Judea’s view of causality. Here’s an analogy: If you pick up a book by David Hume, you don’t expect him or want him to present John Stuart Mill’s point of view, or Immanuel Kant’s. You want Hume. I realized that readers of this book would want Judea’s words, not his opponents. This brings me to …

3. As a writer, you have to absolutely believe the expert’s message. This is tricky, because it’s not your own message, but you’ve got to believe it as much as if it were. I could never have done this project if I weren’t convinced, as a mathematician, that Judea’s approach is absolutely sound and better than his opponents. (Okay, I have to be careful here. In a mathematical sense, his approach is equivalent. But it’s better in practice because the language of causal diagrams makes the assumptions transparent and explicit. The other methods sweep the assumptions under the rug — you’re making them, but you don’t realize it.)

Not only that, I absolutely agree that causality has been absurdly ignored by “mainstream” science. I’ve personally taught a Statistics 101-type course, and taught students the “correlation is not causation” mantra, and I know for a fact that I never prepared students to think about what causation is or, more importantly, how it behaves.

Now, how did the writing actually work? Well, I’m not going to do the Lennon/McCartney thing and say, “This song was a Lennon song. That song was a McCartney song.” Every word in the book belongs jointly to both of us. However, here’s what I can say. Somewhat to my surprise, Judea allowed me to write every first draft of every chapter. In fact, that’s the way he wanted it. This means that the basic architecture of the book, and the basic architecture of every chapter, is more or less the way that I laid it out. This was an awesome responsibility! Of course, before getting started on a chapter I consulted his books, his articles, and talked with him personally. But he trusted me enough to let me shape the book. See point 1 above. I think that this is one reason the book reads way better than a traditional “as told to” book.

Within each chapter, we bounced the drafts back and forth many times. I have no idea how many thousands of e-mails we’ve written and how many hundreds of phone calls we’ve had. The “first draft” that we sent to our editor was really more like the tenth draft. In this way, every chapter became very deeply imbued with his knowledge, his outlook, and his voice. That is why it reads so seamlessly. For me as a writer, it was an amazing luxury to have Judea as a safety net. I could write stuff in the first draft that I wasn’t sure about, confident that he would correct me and steer me in the right direction.

When we first talked with our agent, he warned us about “collaborator’s disease.” I’m happy to say that this disease never hit us. Not that there weren’t some frustrating moments. But they were mostly the result of our interaction with others. The whole process of being edited was so foreign to him, because as an academic you are pretty much in control of your own words. There are editors, who accept or reject your article, but they have only a small say over what actually goes into your article. In academia, a much more important role is that of the referee. But here was another surprise for Judea — when you are writing a book for the public, there are no referees! In a way the editor is like a referee, but his role is completely different: instead of judging whether you’ve written is accurate, he is judging whether it’s written in a way that the ordinary reader can understand.

So working with an editor was challenging for Judea, but we got through it and I’m convinced that our editor did improve the book. Here my role was sometimes that of a sounding board or a counselor. Judea is sometimes combative — the result of a lifetime of battling with referees — and he had to see that the editor is there to help us tell the story better, not to get in our way.

The last part of writing a book is seemingly the easiest part. After you turn the final draft in, there are still about six months to go. It seems as if you’re just waiting, but actually there is a lot to do. This is when the publisher’s marketing and publicity effort starts ramping up, and you have to talk with the publicists about what the book is about, who should get free copies to review, etc. They asked us to compose a list of talking points. After I was done, I almost wished that we had written the talking points before writing the book! It would have been so much easier.

Another thing that seems routine, but really isn’t, is copy-editing and proofreading. It’s especially challenging in a book like this, which has tons of diagrams and even an equation or two. I don’t want to say anything bad about our publisher because in the end they did a beautiful job, but it was amazing to see how mistakes are just like weeds. You pull one up, and suddenly you notice another one. It’s exhausting.

And finally, one day, your book arrives in the mail. You look at it in wonder, just like a newborn baby, and you say, “But it’s so small!” Is this really what I’ve worked on for three years? But behind every word and every picture there is a story, so that really there is a whole journey stored up in that one little book. And hopefully, people read it and take a little bit of the journey with you.


I was going to stop there, but I realized that there was one more thing I wanted to mention. We had two illustrators working with us on this book: Maayan Harel and Dakota Harr. This was also Judea’s idea: he thought that illustrations would liven up the book and make it easier for readers to get through. I think it’s quite non-traditional for a “serious” non-fiction book like ours to have artist-drawn illustrations. I’ll be curious to see whether any of our reviewers will comment on this, and whether they will think they added to it or were just an embellishment.

Speaking personally, I really enjoyed Maayan’s and Dakota’s work, and it was exciting to see how they turned our rough ideas into actual drawings. I’ll show you one of my favorites, the frontispiece for Chapter 8, drawn by Maayan Harel.

This is the frontispiece for a chapter on counterfactuals. We wrote about ways that data and causal models can be used to answer questions like, “What would have happened if I had not taken that aspirin for my headache?” or “Would my grandfather have lived longer if he had not smoked?”

Implicit in the notion of counterfactual is that you have an action that you took, and a second action that you did not take, whose consequences you want to understand — and you are allowed the wisdom of hindsight. Suddenly I realized that this is exactly the situation that Robert Frost is talking about in “The Road Not Taken,” one of the most famous poems in the English language. For the first time I noticed how Frost spells out exactly what the issue is: “I could not travel both, and be one traveler.” But that is what we are doing with causality, and causal models! We are allowing the traveler to experience both roads, at least in his mind.

I asked Maayan if she could send me an illustration of “The Road Not Taken,” and she sent me this. I was absolutely swept away. It does what an illustration should do: it puts us right there, with the fork in the road before our eyes, and it evokes the wistfulness that the traveler feels. This is a feeling in the gut that every one of us has experienced, at one time or another. Her illustration tells us better than any words I could have written that counterfactuals are not just a word on the page, they are part of the meaning of being human. Counterfactuals are our lives. So yes, we’re talking about something pretty important in this chapter.

That is one of the joys of writing a book — being part of a team, and occasionally having a moment when everything falls into place better than you could have imagined.

(Cross-posted from my chess blog.)

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