Tracy Flick Can't Win

Tracy Flick Can't Win by Tom Perrotta

Tracy Flick cannot catch a break. Her career has not been nearly what she thought it was. Now she is working as an assistant principal in suburban New Jersey. The principal has announced his retirement and it seems she may finally get a chance to lead the school. Then football gets in the way.

The book is fast paced as it jumps around first-person views of many characters. We delve in the minds of many characters associated with this suburban high school. It can be difficult to keep the characters straight as we bounce from one to another. But the rapid pace and internal thoughts help the novel to shiine. There are many different concerns going on at once. The super star athlete made to the NFL, but now has health issues and has hurt many people on the way. The principal has had an affair. Others have skeletons and concerns in their lives.

The school has decided to create a hall of fame. The star athlete is a no-brainer. They are excited to get him back in town. The other award goes to the front desk secretary. (Other nominees included a diverse range of characters including a boy that died in Vietnam, a social media influencer and a guy that ate a giant sandwich.) The ceremony does not go as expected. 

The Undoing Project

Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman were both born in Israel and later studied psychology there. Beyond that, they seemed to have little in common. Kahneman lived in France during World War II and had experiences running from Nazis. He tended to be more to himself, while Tversky seemed to know everything and be more social. Once they met, they found they had a great meeting of the minds and were able to achieve more together. They wrote a number of influential papers in their time together. They gradually drifted apart as Tversky received more public recognition. However, he died of cancer, and it was Kahneman that later received the Nobel prize.
Michael Lewis starts The Undoing Project by providing anecdotes of showing the fallacy of human judgement. In sports, picking the right players can have a serious impact on the success of a franchise. However, scouts are prone to use their gut, often missing out on great players. Using data can help avoid some of the human fallacies - but even the data requires some human judgement. The narrative then dives in to the biography of the psychologists.
Both Kahneman and Tversky had a rebellious streak. They didn't fully trust common theories - especially full rationality. People are prone to many biases that allow them to be fooled. When discussing a past event, people often engage in hindsight bias, exaggerating their perceived odds that the event would have occurred. When choosing among multiple items, it is not uncommon for people to prefer A to B, B to C and C to A, seemingly contradicting basic logic. Due to endowment and sunk costs, people are more likely to hold on to something they already have - even though they would never purchase it. The fear of loss is more powerful than the desire for gain. Even if two outcomes are the same, most people would much rather avoid the outcome with loss rather than one with a gain.
The title comes from one of their final works together. What does it take to mentally "undo" something. People experience much more grief if they appear close to gaining something than if they were nowhere near. Missing a winning lottery number by one digit would be traumatic, while missing it by 5 would barely be noticed. However, both cases have the identical outcome of no win. In one, it was just easier to visualize moving over. When undoing events, we often look at the most proximate, easy to visualize causes, even if they are not the most probable.
Knowledge of inbuilt human biases can be used to help improve decision making. However, these same biases can also be used to manipulate people.

Getting to Yes: Negotiating without Giving In

Getting to Yes presents "principled negotiation" as a negotiating strategy. Key to the strategy is a focus on interests and objective criteria rather than specific positions. Often "positional bargaining" can bring other sides to dig in and attempt to save face with their position. Instead, a principled negotiator will attempt to separate the person from the problem and acknowledge the common interests and let the solution suggest itself. Key to carrying out the negotiation is knowledge of "Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement". This differs from a "bottom line" in that it allows things to be adapted based on the result of negotiation. New ideas may be discovered during the process of negotiating that lead to solutions that were not intended earlier. Getting to Yes is filled with anecdotes of successful negotiating in action. Keeping your cool and resisting the urge to go into attack mode is an important part of the process. As the opposite party feels respected, they are less likely to come out with guns blazing. They can become more of a willing partner rather than an adversary. However, to succeed, they must also feel that the end result is valuable to them. If you come up with a result that is too beneficial towards you, then you may find yourself operating from a weaker standing in the future.

The Gene: An Intimate History

The history of the understanding of DNA and genetics is a fantastic tale of science marching forward and backwards in a quest for knowledge. There were plenty of detours and missed opportunities in the development of understanding of genetics. The Greeks had many ideas, most of which led scientists down the wrong paths. Mendel had a clear understanding of genetic crosses through his pea experiments. However, his work was ignored for decades due to his lack of "credentials". Darwin had some keen insights, but also had some guesses that turned out to be totally wrong. Eugenics appeared to be to the wave of the future and a way to help "improve" the human race. Then the Nazis adopted it, and it become verboten. (Today, however, it is carried out in a more "unofficial" format with genetic testing and elective abortions of "defective" fetuses.)

In "The Gene", the author uses his family's history of mental illness to weave together a history of knowledge of genetics and the human applications of this knowledge.

Today we have learned a great deal more about how DNA encodes "us". We also have the power to make changes to the genetic code. We have used this power to make extensive changes to plants. We can also make changes to animals and even humans. This gives us great power, but also poses a great risk. Many genes work together to produce a certain outcome. Research is primarily through a "guess and check" approach. We try to change certain genes in an animal model to see the impact. We may look at various people with a similar condition and try to find similarities. It may be tempting to "turn off" a certain gene that leads to a disease. But what will be the ramification? Will this also turn off immunity to a future unknown disease? Will that cause some unknown negative problem in the future?

The power to make genetic changes is perhaps one of the most scary abilities we have today. People are having fewer children and using more medical assistance and genetic screening. Will we accidentally screen out an unknown important mutation that is needed for our species' survival? Will we create a homogeneous society that differs only superficially? Or will we accidentally hit the self-destruct button? The state of the art in genetics lends itself towards a justification of an intelligent design. We have the ability to manipulate genes. Why not create entire species? Are we the first to do it?

I could envision a past world where dinosaurs wanted to be the best dino-league athletes. They engineered themselves to be larger and larger until they reached the gargantuan sizes of the day. This was wildly successful for a time. However, problems arose when the environment changed in unexpected ways. The cultural bias to bigness was so prevalent that they ended up having a dino-war rather than adapting to smaller sizes. Eventually they became mostly extinct. That is, all except a renegade group that decided they wanted to get smaller and smaller. They figured out how to change their DNA to shrink them to be smaller and smaller. They then used the genetic knowledge to create other organisms to house them. Other animals were merely biological "houses" were these beings could live and reproduce. They created their harems and started reproducing like crazy. They were able to get the last laugh in as they "dominate" the big species of today.

What will we humans do with our genetic knowledge? Will we try to do too much before we know enough? Will we cause irreparable before we know what we are doing? Or are we doing things at the proper pace now. We have power, but we are only beginning to understand. I hope we can make good decisions.