Book Review: The 4-Hour Workweek

The 4-Hour Workweek immediately hit the media spotlight. It got raving reviews and has created countless debates on blogs around the web ever since. Its author, Timothy Ferriss, coined the term "the new rich". The new rich are not rich. They don't own oil companies or Manhattan nightclubs. They are not bestseller authors either. What they have is a regular flow of cash which they obtain without working much, and which they use to fund their dream lifestyle. Tim aims at showing anyone how to achieve just that: a luxury lifestyle without putting in the hours. And by 'anyone' he literally means 'anyone', from the Midwest academic on a 4-4 course load to the single mother working a 9-5 job as a coffee bitch. The book is smack-full of neat tips. Here are just a few of the "how-to" promises of the book. Tim promises to show you:

• How to outsource your life to overseas virtual assistants for $5 per hour and do whatever you want
• How to read 200% faster in 10 minutes
• How to eliminate 50% of your work in 48 hours using the principles of a forgotten Italian economist
• How to trade a long-haul career for short work bursts and frequent "mini-retirements"
• How to train your boss to value performance over presence, or kill your job (or company) if it's beyond repair
• How to cultivate selective ignorance—and create time—with a low-information diet
• How to get free housing worldwide and airfare at 50–80% off
• How to fill the void and create a meaningful life after removing work and the office

What the heck is the guy thinking? Well, there is a bit of history to it. After college Tim took a wearying sales job at a tech-y firm. When he left to start a successful business of his own, he went from 40 to 80 hours a week. Despite making good money, he felt like every little piece of his soul was slowly being sucked out of him.

Tim then decided to change. He streamlined, eliminated, automated, outsourced. Not exactly the geeky type, Tim took off to tropical paradise, and then decided to write a book about achieving the true American dream. He also created a blog devoted to experiments in life-style design.

So what to do if you want to be Tim? Well, first stop your 9 bad habits and then start outsourcing. It's that simple. Tim's 9 bad habits undone are plainly adorable:

1. Do not answer calls from unrecognized phone numbers
2. Do not e-mail first thing in the morning or last thing at night
3. Do not agree to meetings or calls with no clear agenda or end time
4. Do not let people ramble
5. Do not check e-mail constantly — “batch” and check at set times only
6. Do not over-communicate with low-profit, high-maintenance customers
7. Do not work more to fix overwhelm — prioritize
8. Do not carry a cellphone or Crackberry 24/7
9. Do not expect work to fill a void that non-work relationships and activities should

I must admit that I haven't been able to stop a single one of these killer habits (except the first one, but I never answer the phone anyway, unless I really like you). But the thought is a good one. What about outsourcing? The trick is to find a job that doesn't require your presence. Then, and only then, will outsourcing work. You then hire some poor Indian guy to do business for you and then you book a discount trip to Hawaii or Greenland. It sounds burlesque and irresponsible but, Tim argues, it really isn't. We are simply socially conditioned into thinking that we have to work our asses off to be successful. Get over your fears and hit the road, guys!

But outsourcing seems to rub people the wrong way. It feels a bit atrocious to hire some stone broke virtual guy from a third-world country to do an exhaustive search of the world's boutiques in order to find a talking or dancing Elmo for your spoiled child or to arrange for a team of tech nerds to set up a countless number of speed-dates with oblivious young women looking for true love. Tim has done all of that, and more. The most hilarious part of the book is the section where Tim describes how he is outsourcing his love letters to his wife! I am glad I am not married to him (though I do have to admit that he is quite a handsome young man). But back to outsourcing. Is it really that bad? We live in an outsourced world, don't we? We pay people to clean our houses, wash our cars, fill our SUVs with gas in Jersey, walk our dogs, house-sit our cats, baby-sit our kids, cook our party food, teach our classes, grade our quizzes, conduct our X-Phi quasi-experiments, add footnotes to our book manuscripts (yes, some people really do do that!), you name it. But it's not just paying people to work for you that fuels people's concerns about outsourcing. It's the fact that Tim pays $5/hour to have young starving men and women from India run his company and personal life while he tangos in Argentina and eats at 5-star restaurants. Ever thought of donating, Tim?

But if (and that's a big if) outsourcing really ain't that bad, then the question arises, is it really true that you can get away with working only four hours a week? Not really. By "a 4-hour workweek" Tim means four hours spent on work you really despise doing but which nonetheless brings in most of your income. Many of us (academics) are fortunate enough to have a 4-hour workweek in this sense. Not all academics are where they want to be, but a huge number of us are doing exactly what we want to do 90% of the time. So, the book is not really geared towards academics. But I think even academics can draw something useful from the book. If nothing else, you can get a good laugh out of it. Plus, it's all the rage, it's been on New York Time's bestseller list for years. Actually, this is the second expanded edition (100 pages of added material!), and it's still on the lists. Of course, the fact that it has been on the lists for years just shows that people buy it for whatever reason (a lot of marketing buzz and a catchy title?), not that it's a great book. But it really is quite a useful book, full of little nifty tips on how to use your time more efficiently and find more time to do what you really enjoy doing. One wonders, though, whether Tim actually wrote the book. Or did he follow his own religion? This could be a true Gödel-Schmidt story.

[Nota Bene: I appreciate the sudden flow of free books from trade publishers after I started posting book reviews to my blog but it is still my prerogative to pick and choose which of them I review. Yes, I do have a life! So, no follow-up emails please. Or maybe I should think about outsourcing my reviewer responsibilities!]

Book Review: The Hidden Brain: How Our Unconscious Minds Elect Presidents, Control Markets, Wage Wars, and Save Our Lives

In his recent book The Hidden Brain: How Our Unconscious Minds Elect Presidents, Control Markets, Wage Wars, and Save Our Lives science journalist Shankar Vedantam argues that our unconscious thoughts and emotions, for example our implicit sexism, racism and conformity to the behavior of others in a group, govern behavior we explicitly despise. Many Americans have a racial bias against Africans and African-Americans not because of biology but because of culture, says Vedantam. We grow up watching television and quickly learn who the most successful leaders in our country are. We are taught that the stereotype of a successful leader is a white male. We implicitly think that people of color and women are inferior to white males. In stressful situations our implicit biases quiet down our rational inner voices and take control of our decision making. Michael Richard’s racist rant during a 2006 stand-up appearance is an example of how our true temperament may suddenly rear its ugly head. Vedantam does not think that Michael Richard is significantly more racist in his beliefs than any one of us. The difference is a matter of degree, he says.

According to Vedantam, our unconscious mind fuels most of our decisions to act the way we do. Vedantam explains how the hidden impulses of a large crowd of onlookers fueled the horrible events that took place on the Belle Isle Bridge in Detroit on the morning of August 19, 1995, where Deletha Word, college student and mother of a 13-teen year old, was beaten up beyond belief by Martell Welch in front of crowd of onlookers who not only failed to intervene but also failed to notify the police. Some allegedly cheered him on as he beat up Deletha and tore off her clothes. Why didn’t the onlookers put an end to it? Because people unconsciously mirror the reactions of others in a crowd. Even though they understand at a rational level that they ought to notify the authorities or stop the incident, their hidden world of learned behavior prevents them from doing so.

One of the most fascinating sections of Vedantam's book is the discussion of how two transgendered biology professors at Stanford University underwent a complete change, not just sexually but also in how they were treated professionally, when they changed their appearance. One of the professors went from being a woman to being a man, and the other went from being a man to being a woman. The one who became a man suddenly was taken more seriously and was treated with a whole new kind of respect. The one who became a woman found that she was taken less seriously, and her pay fell significantly relative to her peers, all as a result of changing her sex.

As the book progresses Vedantam becomes increasingly more free in his interpretations of the scientific data. He moves from discussions of how our unconscious attitudes shape small-scale behavior to our unconscious resistance to famine relief and the hidden brain's seductive powers in suicide bombings and presidential elections. Despite the leap from solid evidence to more creative hypotheses about what drives our political and social decisions, the later sections of the book raise the important philosophical questions of whether we are responsible for behavior driven by our brain's hidden impulses and whether we can change our tendency to act on our predilections.

Though Vedantam remains optimistic about our capability of changing our inclinations by bringing our implicit biases to light and by using reason rather that gut feeling to guide our decisions, he doesn't really offer much by way of insight into how we should go about changing our ways. He also does not really answer the question of to what extent we should be held liable for behavior governed by our unconscious biases. But on a whole The Hidden Brain offers an insightful treatment of the delicate question of why we make the horrible decisions we do when they could have been avoided with a bit of confidence in the light of reason.

Heidegger And A Hippo Walk Through Those Pearly Gates

I just read Heidegger And A Hippo Walk Through Those Pearly Gates: Using Philosophy (and Jokes!) to Explore Life, Death, the Afterlife, and Everything in Between (Thanks to Brian Leiter for the link). It's available as an e-book through the Penguin group.

The authors Thomas Cathcart and Daniel Klein were once philosophy graduate students at Harvard University. After graduating they went on to do other things. Cathcart served as a probation officer and attended various divinity schools. Klein wrote a lighthearted book on jokes and a number of thrillers. After many years the two men re-united and wrote Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar . . .: Understanding Philosophy Through Jokes, a humorous and lighthearted introduction to key concepts in philosophy. It was rejected by 40 publishers before an editor finally showed interest. Initially the book was called An Existentialist and a Horse Walk into a Bar. But the editor didn't like the title. "I want it to be called Plato and ... something", he said. Cathcart quickly replied "A platypus". The book went on to become a bestseller. The two college friends followed up with Aristotle and an Aardvark Go to Washington, a humorous book about logic tied to political speech. The alliteration has become their logo. One wonders whether their next book is going to be called Frege and a Flamingo Walk into an APA Smoker.

Cathcart and Klein's latest effort explores the meaning of life and death through a dialogue between the two authors. The dialogue includes serious passages, jokes and clever little gags, such as the continual assignment of flippant nick names to philosophers. Some reviewers found the running gags annoying. For example, the authors refer to Heidegger as 'Heidi' and 'Marty', and Sigmund Freud as 'Siggy'. I found the style refreshing, and while most of the jokes didn't originate with the authors, they are well placed in the context of more serious philosophical discourse.

Incidentally, the authors' French publisher didn't want 'Heidegger' in the title of the translation because of Heidegger's Nazi associations. The French editor had once put out a book of letters from Heidegger to his wife. No one bought it. So, in France the book will be called Sartre et la Salamandre.

The authors' main aim in the book is to educate the reader about the immortality systems cultures go out of their way to design. Immortality systems are ways of denying death. Religions that promise eternal life are immortality systems. So is the urban tripe: the university club, the fraternity, the golfer club. Groups outlive individuals. Or you decide that you are going to live on in the hearts of your country men, or through your publications and international reputation. You decide that that's going to be your immortality system. But, the authors say, clinging to an immortality system is cheating yourself of a fulfilling life. It means that you are denying death. By not embracing death you are not living fully. And who wants eternal life through others anyway? As Woody Allen once wisely put it, "I don't want to live on in the hearts of my country men. I want to live on in my apartment".

The authors point out that immortality systems don't work very well. People are ultimately willing to kill each other to save their immortality systems. The reason: If I buy into one, and you buy into another, then yours could ultimately be seen as a threat to mine.

Historically, philosophers thought they were giving us a good message when they told us to get in touch with our mortality, Cathcart and Klein say. If you deny your own death, you also reject the chance of feeling fully alive. If we had eternal life, we could waste a couple of millennia making mistakes. It wouldn't matter. It is because of our mortality that we have to take responsibility for ourselves. Artifacts are stuck with the purpose they were designed to have, they cannot change their essence. Human beings, on the other hand, choose what they are going to become. However scary it may be, you have to take responsibility for your own life, Cathcart and Klein add. The message of the book: Face death head on and live intensely.

It's a fine little book. I highly recommend it to anyone who wants a lighthearted and humorous reality check on life and death.

Inconsistency Theories of Semantic Paradox

Here is a short review I just wrote of "Inconsistency Theories of Semantic Paradox".

A Couple of Links

1) Pictures from Russell V.

UPDATE: Alastair has uploaded some great pics. They can be found here.

2) And here is a short review which I just wrote of Nicholas Griffin and Dale Jacquette, ed., Russell vs. Meinong: The Legacy of "On Denoting".

Modes of Existence

I now have a draft of my review of Modes of Existence, which I am reviewing for Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. The first 12 pages are mostly summaries of the essays (Mulligan, Raspa, Kroon, van Inwagen, Varzi, Reicher, Barbero, Orillo, Spolaore). The last 6 pages are friendly criticisms of Achille Varzi, Giuseppe Spolaore, and others. The very last part is an (overly sketchy) extension of David Chalmers' 2Dism to fictional and perceptual reports. Comments welcome!

Freedom & Neurobiology

John R. Searle, Freedom & Neurobiology -- Reflections on Free Will, Language, and Political Power, Columbia University Press, 2007, 128pp., $24.50 (hbk), ISBN 0-231-13752-4.

Freedom and Neurobiology (FN) brings together two of the lectures John Searle gave at Sorbonne in the spring of 2001. One was a public lecture on political power. The other was a lecture on free will. The two lectures appeared in French in a book entitled Liberté et neurobiologie in 2004. The book was subsequently translated into Spanish, Italian, German and Chinese. FN comes with a 37 pages introduction which brings together the two themes. Both essays are written in the style that has characterized Searle's work for several years. Written with great clarity in expression, the essays begin with the fundamental issues (neurobiology and the Big Bang) and work their way up to such issues as freedom, collective intentionality and political power. Along the way the book makes several contributions to the free will debate and the dispute over the status of social reality.

In the first essay Searle formulates the problem of free will as a problem in neurobiology. According to Searle, the problem of free will boils down to the problem of answering the following questions: (1) 'What exactly are the neuronal processes that cause our conscious experiences', in particular, what are the processes that cause the 'active character of what we might call "volitional consciousness" '? (pp. 40-41), and (2) how do we explain the appearance of a gap between subsequent conscious states? Searle does not answer either question fully. Presuably only a neurobiologist/quantum theorist duo could do that. But he does give us reason to believe that these questions ought to be at the center of the debate concerning free will.

What makes the problem of free will a problem, says Searle, is that 'the conscious states are not experienced as sufficient to compel the next conscious state' (p. 43) There is an appearance of a gap in the causal chain. It is awareness of this gap that makes us think we have free will. As Searle puts it,

It is important to emphasize that the problem of free will, as I have stated it, is a problem about a certain kind of human consciousness. Without the conscious experience of the gap, that is, without the conscious experience of the distinctive features of free, voluntary, rational actions, there would be no problem of free will. We have the conviction of our own free will because of certain features of our consciousness.

This is a slight exaggeration, on Searle's part. For, as he subsequently points out, to say that there would be no problem of free will if we didn't experience the gap is not yet to say that the gap is not real. It could be that whatever precedes our actions is in every case sufficient to determine the action. But if it is not, then we are owed some account of how such gaps are possible in a largely deterministic world. Searle admits that there may be indeterminacy at the quantum level (p. 44). But the indeterminacy is often described as randomness, and randomness does not make for freedom in choice. Suppose I flip a coin before "deciding" whether to go to a bar in the Central West End or one in University City. I end up in University City. So do you. But unlike me, you weighed pros and cons -- your preference for walking home rather than driving settled the issue. Who is making a free decision in this case? Well, certainly not me.

What then is Searle's answer to the big question? After dismissing what he calls 'epiphenomenalism' -- the view that 'our experience of freedom plays no causal or explanatory role in our behavior' (p. 62) -- he argues that the brain 'causes and sustains' a conscious self which then engages in deliberations and reports its results to the brain. Finally, the brain moves the body. For Searle the self plays an important role in explaining our experience of the gap but the self is not something over and above the brain. As he puts it,

the self is not some extra entity; rather, in a very crude and oversimplified fashion, one can say that conscious agency plus conscious rationality equals selfhood. So if you had an account of brain processes that explained how the brain produced the unified field of consicousness, together with the experience of acting, and in addition how the brain produced consicous thought processes, in which the constraints of rationality are already built in as constitutive elements, you would ... get the self for free (p. 72).

So how does Searle's account differ from old-fashioned determinism? Is the account simply a form of compatibilism -- a theory that reconciles free will and determinism? It is not. While the self isn't some extra entity for Searle, the results of its deliberations are not caused by the brain. Searle thus assumes that there is a level of indeterminacy in decision-making. As quamtum indeterminacy is the only (known) kind of indeterminacy in nature, the indeterminacy in question can only be quantum indeterminacy. Searle points out that just because quantum indeterminacy is best described as randomness at the quantum level, this does not mean that the self's deliberation processes are also random. There can be radomness at the micro-level even if there is none at the macro-level. Searle concludes by noting that the hypothesis he has outlined is 'a mess' and that it seems to remove one mystery only to replace it with three others (free will, consciousness and quantum mechanics). Searle never says how quantum indeterminacy explains system indeterminacy. In spite of the inconclusiveness, the essay gives new structure to a very complicated debate without rehearsing all the tangents that have emerged in recent years. Moreover, it makes it absolutely clear where in the debate Searle stands: he is an old-fashioned indeterminist.

If you are already familiar with Searle's previously published books, in particular The Construction of Social Reality and Rationality in Action, the second essay will bring back old memories. The essay is about how political power supervenes on brute facts and collective intentionality. There is nothing mysterious about collective intentionality, according to Searle. If several organisms engage in an activity with consciously shared attitudes, there is collective intentionality. However, collective intentionality does not suffice for political reality. The institutional and political realms require what Searle calls 'status functions'. A status function is a function we impose upon an object by believing collectively that the object performs the function in question. Searle's favorite example is the one dollar bill. If we didn't believe that the one dollar bill had the value corresponding to the number printed on it, it would just be green paper. But the green paper is not just green paper, it functions as currency, and that function is a status function. Status functions are imposed on objects via constitutive rules of the form 'X counts as Y in context C'. According to Sarle, prominent or forceful individuals in a given social group initially impose the status functions. Then, slowly, the imposing becomes routine, and the practice then creates a constitutive rule. Searle thinks 'language is partly constitutive of all institutional reality' (p. 95). This makes institutional reality different from social reality (broadly construed). Within institutional reality, status functions exist only to the extent that we represent them as existing.

Now, as for political power, political power (and in particular governmental power), says Searle, is a system of status functions. It depends for its existence on collective acceptance (p. 97) When a system collapses, it is usually because the acceptance by a large number of people is withdrawn. One interesting feature of Searle's view is that he holds that political facts could not exist without language and armed violence. What makes it true that Bush is president is that enough people regard him as and accept him as president. And this they do by accepting the entire governmental system. But the governmental system would not remain in place if it were not 'backed by the threat of armed violence' (p. 108). It is only through the threat of armed violence that the government can be sustained as the ultimate system with ultimate power.

As noted at the outset, the essay on political power was intended as a public lecture. It does not deviate much from the theory Searle set out in the Construction of Social Reality and Rationality in Action. The essay raises important fundamental questions, such as 'what is a constitutive rule?', 'what makes social and political facts true?', 'how is a governmental system sustained?' A brief remark on the second question. On Searle's view, what makes it true that Bush is president is that we have imposed the president status function on Bush. He has the status function only insofar as we continue to believe that he has certain obligations and powers. But maybe this is overstating the role our alleged acceptance of Bush has in keeping him in place. Perhaps it is true that the continued acceptance of the governmental system is needed in order to sustain the government. And maybe it is also true that collectively we decided to impose a status function on Bush. But, it seems, the president status function is not sustained by our beliefs. Rather, it seems to be a role in a system that can be filled by different individuals. What characterizes the role is a collection of formal properties. What makes it true that Bush is president is that Bush fills the role. In this sense, the president status function is akin to numbers, it is a role in a larger system defined by its relations to other places in the order.

In sum: for those already familiar with Searle's philosophy, Freedom & Neurobiology introduces few new issues but it sheds light on old ones, and it clearly and concisely states Searle's views on a number of issues, including language, collective intentionality, free will, and the self.

Note: My colleague Gualtiero Piccinini was also asked to review the book for CUP. His review can be found here.


John Searle, the Free Speech Movement
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