Math-Frolic Interview #26
"Our inability to recognize or produce randomness is the most invisible of problems. Randomness is like air, all around us and never noticed until the gale hits. We are not prepared to connect our difficulty with randomness to the real world of missed tennis serves, bad passwords, and Ponzi schemes."
-- William Poundstone, from the Epilogue to "Rock Breaks Scissors"
William Poundstone is one of my favorite writers (twice nominated for a Pulitzer), and one of the more eclectic folks I've had the pleasure to interview here. He has explored an odd and wide range of topics in his writing, but is not a mathematician nor mathematical writer per se, so many readers here may be unfamiliar with him. Still, his topics often impinge on underlying mathematics, while having an uncanny way of also sliding between the boundaries of science, logic, psychology, philosophy, and finance/economics. I reviewed (and enjoyed) his latest work, "Rock Breaks Scissors," HERE. Another of his books, "Are You Smart Enough to Work at Google?" was dedicated to the memory of Martin Gardner.
His homepage is here:
http://home.williampoundstone.net/
and I found an interesting podcast interview from 2011 with him here:
http://www.smartpeoplepodcast.com/2011/07/11/episode-28-bill-poundstone/
If you're not already familiar with him I hope his responses below may entice you to check him out further (but if they don't, then maybe knowing that he is Paula Poundstone's cousin WILL! -- though I can't imagine what genes they could possibly share ;-)):
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1)
Information on your background has been surprisingly hard to come by!
(though I did learn that you studied physics at M.I.T. before becoming a
writer). Your book bios and Wikipedia page don't have much info on your
past, and even the quirky "about me" page at your personal website
doesn't divulge much. Is that because you're secretly a CIA-operative?
;-) Seriously, can you fill readers in a little on your background and
how you arrived at the interests/writing-life you have today?
Well, without saying too
much about my age, I have been a full-time author for longer than the
World Wide Web existed(!) I suppose that's why there's not much web
presence for my pre-author life. I did spend a year as an editor (with
Brentwood Publishing, now defunct, which produced trade journals). I
found that very useful as it taught me fine points of grammar and usage
that I never learned in my formal education ("that" v. "which," "vale of
tears" not "veil of tears," etc.) As to my interests, I was a big
reader from the time I could read, in science especially.
2)
My favorite work of yours is an older one, "Labyrinths of Reason." And
like it, many of your volumes touch upon human reasoning or logic to
some extent. How did you go from M.I.T. physics to such a
psychological/philosophical focus?
I'm glad to hear you mention Labyrinths.
It remains one of my favorites too. The book is about how we know what
we know, and that's always an issue in physics. Things like quarks
started out being a mental shorthand, a way of getting the right answer.
By pretending that quarks, which you can never see or isolate, exist,
you can make accurate predictions about the entities that you can see
and measure. So it started out as fiction and became "nonfiction"—at
least, we agree to call it that.
One of my favorite Stephen Hawking quotes: "Reality is not a quality you can test with litmus paper."
3) As a full-time writer what is your typical (if there is such a thing) workday like? Do you have a set routine?
I
get up about 6 AM, read the news, work out on a treadmill, and am
generally at work by 8. I work until about 5, but it's not all
writing/editing. I do a lot of reading, I do interviews (of people I'm
writing about, or giving interviews to promote my books).
4)
Your agent is John Brockman. I've long-enjoyed his books and Edge website. What can you tell us about the experience of working with John
and the Edge group? Is it forever-stimulating, fun, argumentative,
thought-provoking….?
John
is a great guy, and all those adjectives apply. BUT let me clarify that
I'm on the opposite coast and see or speak with him only infrequently.
(In movies, the writer-character sees his agent every day, and they live
down the street from each other. That's generally not the reality!)
5)
Many of your books hover around mathematics, but without being too
mathematical or technical. Can you say how math fits into your daily or
intellectual life… is it front-and-center to a lot of your thought, or
more lurking in the shadows of the things that most interest you?
Also,
do you still follow physics these days, and have any thoughts on the
controversies/debates surrounding modern cosmology -- especially in
terms of certain recent writers who argue that some high-level physics
is bordering on metaphysics or pseudoscience?
I
do take a quantitative approach to a lot of things — not to everything,
which would be nuts, but to things where many others might not.
Counting grams of saturated fat and carbohydrates comes to mind. And
definitely, as I say above, I think the (meta)physics debate over what
is real is interesting. How can one show that string theory, or the
many-worlds interpretation are worth pursuing? Everybody says they're
for Occam's razor, but that 14th-century implement doesn't cut it in
today's physics! For one thing, it's not always clear what it means to
minimize assumptions in physics far removed from direct human
experience. Also, as a practical and even careerist thing, you often
have to put an awful lot of work into a theory before you find out how
simple it is—or isn't.
6)
One curiosity note: Your latest work is entitled, "Rock Breaks
Scissors," but the chapter in the book on the betting game 'rock, paper,
scissors' is actually only a small portion of the book -- just wondering
if there's some story behind how that ended up as the title for the
volume?
"Rock,
paper, scissors" is a game that almost everyone has played in which
you're trying to predict someone else's "random" choice (which in fact
isn't all that random…) Though this element exists in many other
games and situations and conflicts, you encounter it in its purest form
in RPS.
I
had thought of using the title "The Outguessing Machine," but that
implies it's about machines predicting, when you can actually do a lot
of the predicting in your head.
7)
You've written over a dozen books, but only one biography… that of Carl
Sagan. Are there any other figures you've considered doing a biography
of?
I had thought of doing a standard Claude Shannon biography… but this evolved into Fortune's Formula, exploring just a tangent of his best-known achievements.
[hmmm... interesting, "Claude Shannon" another person with the initials "C.S." ...perhaps Cat Stevens next ;-)]
8) Are you currently working on a new book, and if so, what can you tell us about it?
I'm
doing a book addressing the question: How important is it to know facts
in the digital age, when it's easy to look up any fact? Part of the
research involves demographically balanced polling. I look at what
people know—about school subjects, current events, and pop culture—and
how that knowledge correlates (or doesn't) with things like income,
relationship status, self-reported happiness, and sources of news and
information (TV, newspapers, Internet, etc.)
...sounds interesting, as this is a debate currently going on within mathematics education: how much rote memorization is still necessary given the ease with which such information is digitally accessible; should children spend more time on working mathematically/algorithmically, and less time committing facts to memory?
9)
Who are some of your own favorite current authors (nonfiction) to read,
and what are some of your favorite books for learning or inspiration?
I read more fiction than nonfiction, and at least half of what I read isn't necessarily "current." I recently read Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi and (from this century) Persi Diaconis and Ron Graham's Magical Mathematics and Edward Tufte's Visual Explanations. In fiction I'm reading Don Delillo's Underworld.
I
suppose I should take the opportunity to plug Harry Stephen Keeler. He
was an eccentric American novelist that a group of friends and I
"rediscovered." Keeler would break all the rules of detective fiction,
in one case introducing the guilty party, for the first time, in the
last sentence of the book. One novel concerns the "Flying
Strangler-Baby," a little person who disguises himself as a baby and
stalks victims by helicopter. There is a Harry Stephen Keeler Society
with a newsletter at http://site.xavier.edu/polt/keeler/.
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Like I said, Bill is a bit of an eclectic fellow. Wikipedia describes him as "an American author, columnist, and skeptic," which hardly does him justice. You can check out all his books at Amazon here: http://tinyurl.com/lq87gko
Anyway, THANKS for taking some time with us here Bill, but I'm still gonna try to figure out either your age or a CIA connection...
