William X. Adams (Author of Reluctant Android)

William Adams rated a book liked it Waste Wars: The Wild Afterlife of Your Trash by Alexander Clapp	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
Garbage is a problem for every civilization and for every household. To extract the energy you need to sustain life, you must strip it from objects that have it, leaving a pile of detritus behind. That was true even for early hunter-gatherers, who le ...more
Jul 12, 2026 09:28AM · like · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of Waste Wars by Alexander Clapp. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — Waste Wars by Alexander Clapp <iframe sandbox id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
William Adams rated a book liked it Lost Worlds: How Humans Tried, Failed, Succeeded, and Built Our World by Patrick Wyman	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
This is a valuable update to the lay reader’s understanding of human history and prehistory of the last ten thousand years, from when “we were” cave-persons at the end of the last ice age, to when we became farmers at the end of the bronze age collap ...more
Jul 07, 2026 02:41PM · like · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of Lost Worlds by Patrick Wyman. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — Lost Worlds by Patrick Wyman <iframe sandbox id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
William Adams rated a book liked it Everything Is Predictable: How Bayesian Statistics Explain Our World by Tom Chivers (Goodreads Author)	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
The first three chapters are good, probably worth the price of the book. They give you a history of Bayes’s theorem and a good explanation of it. After that, the book rambles off into examples of decision theory applied to various problems, real and ...more
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William Adams and 73 other people liked Naeem's review of The Great Transformation: "I wouldn't think of reading this book without a guide. Because Polanyi is an impossible read -- more difficult than Marx (he doesn't have Marx's love of language or Marx's humor), more difficult than Hegel (he doesn't have Hegel's pointed sense of kn" Read more of this review »
May 26, 2026 02:08PM · see review
William Adams rated a book liked it Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism by Yanis Varoufakis	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
This engaging and provocative econo-political book by a former Greek finance minister sets up a parallel between feudalism and today’s wired economy. In Middle Ages Europe, nobility owned the land, and ordinary people worked it, paying a portion of t ...more
May 12, 2026 09:04AM · like · see review
William Adams rated a book liked it Invisible Doctrine: The Secret History of Neoliberalism by George Monbiot	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
Neoliberalism is a sloganeer’s term seldom defined. This book gives a good account of the term’s origins and development. For that alone, it is worth the read. However, much of it is uninformative ranting. The first 50 pages in particular can be skip ...more
May 12, 2026 08:57AM · like · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of Invisible Doctrine by George Monbiot. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — Invisible Doctrine by George Monbiot <iframe sandbox id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
William Adams rated a book liked it Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism by Yanis Varoufakis	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
This engaging and provocative econo-political book by a former Greek finance minister sets up a parallel between feudalism and today’s wired economy. In Middle Ages Europe, nobility owned the land, and ordinary people worked it, paying a portion of t ...more
May 03, 2026 04:20PM · like · see review
William Adams rated a book really liked it The Catalyst: RNA and the Quest to Unlock Life's Deepest Secrets by Thomas R. Cech	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
We all know that mRNA-based vaccines saved us from the worst of Covid. The miracle was that those vaccines appeared so fast. The pandemic hit the US in 2020 and we were utterly helpless, but by December the RNA-based vaccine appeared out of nowhere. ...more
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William Adams rated a book it was ok A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness by Michael Pollan (Goodreads Author)	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
Pollan attempts to report current thinking on consciousness: what it is, how it works, where it came from, who has it and who doesn’t. However there is a scholarly position for nearly every conceivable idea about consciousness, so this survey of curr ...more
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William Adams rated a book liked it Chain of Ideas: The Origins of Our Authoritarian Age by Ibram X. Kendi (Goodreads Author)	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
Internationally celebrated author Ibram X. Kendi is perhaps best known for his prize-winning book “How to be an Anti-Racist.” His newest, “Chain of Ideas,” Elaborates the thesis of the "Great Replacement Theory," that "they" are coming to take our jo ...more
Mar 23, 2026 12:53PM · 7 likes · like · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of Chain of Ideas by Ibram X. Kendi. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — Chain of Ideas by Ibram X. Kendi <iframe sandbox id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">

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Waste Wars: The Wild Afterlife of Your Trash
by Alexander Clapp

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Garbage is a problem for every civilization and for every household. To extract the energy you need to sustain life, you must strip it from objects that have it, leaving a pile of detritus behind. That was true even for early hunter-gatherers, who le Garbage is a problem for every civilization and for every household. To extract the energy you need to sustain life, you must strip it from objects that have it, leaving a pile of detritus behind. That was true even for early hunter-gatherers, who left piles of bones for archeologists to discover. Any village generates mountains of middens. The only way to avoid waste pits would be to get your energy from highly efficient sources that leave little waste, like a diet of glucose, protein powder, and vitamin pills? Yum. And houses made of mud bricks?
Most modern waste is not bones and chaff. The serious problem is not eggshells and coffee grounds. It’s plastic, used circuit boards and wrecked automobiles. Even someone who is aware of the global problem of waste will be shocked to learn of its scale. Literal mountain-sized mountains of trash are generated all around the world every year. Governments pay private entrepreneurs (often affiliated with criminal syndicates) to make the trash disappear from rich-world cities and countryside. Where does it go? Landfills (aka “dumps”) are full and nobody wants to dig another one near their town, but with a fat cash offer, many poor countries will take the garbage and pile it up right on the beaches near the ship docks, sometimes farther inland.
Often, impoverished trash-pickers can make a deathly living digging through our garbage for items and commodities of value. It’s dangerous, life-shortening work. Some trash, especially metals, can be resold. Old electronics can be taken apart to recover trace amounts of metals from circuit boards. Some appliances can be repaired and resold. Plastic? Not so much. While some high-grade plastic really is recyclable, in the trash it is so dirty and contaminated that it’s not worthwhile to extract.
Garbage is a very sad tale of corruption, greed, poverty, and reverse-colonialism, where the rich-world adds waste products instead of extracting natural resources as they once did. The author does a good job of documenting all this, making the book an interesting and informative experience, although with some big caveats.
One is mind-numbing repetition. You have the story of trash dumps in Malaysia, then the same story of trash in Greece, and then trash in the Philippines, and trash in India, trash in the South Pacific. The details vary, but it’s the same story. It’s not necessary to repeat it in every detail for every geographical location. Worse, these chapters were obviously written separately as standalone essays, so the repetition extends right down to sentences and paragraphs. The book as a whole lacks integration. Some essays are way off base, such as the story of phone scammers in central Europe who seduce lonely rich-world people to send money. I guess they use recycled phones for that, but it hardly contributes to the story of waste pileup.
The most important shortcoming however is that the whole problem of rich world trash can be solved easily in only a few months, and everyone but the author knows it. Simply make the producers of the waste materials responsible for its disposition. Currently, because of lobbying, political contributions and government corruption, plastic producers and retailers pass responsibility for disposal to the consumer. We are responsible for recycling, a giant hoax—it all ends up on some poor-country beach. I challenge anyone in the U.S. to do a week’s shopping without buying any plastic. I’ve tried. It can’t be done, but it could be done if the producers of packaging were held responsible for their product. Yes, prices would go up, but that’s a separate problem. The roadblock to waste reduction is political will corrupted by money.
One bright spot in this sad tale is steel. Most new steel comes from recycled scrap such as automobiles, train tracks, retired ships, and old bridge girders. Steel is expensive to make from scratch and recycling is economic. The author mentions that in the context of stories about desparate untrained workers cutting apart old ships at risk of life and health. A whole book could be written on steel recycling and why it makes economic sense.
This book presents well-researched data on the volumes and amounts of waste, alongside pages and pages of fluffy prose about people who get rich handling trash and poor people who get sick handling trash, and virtually nothing about the greed and corruption that allows the problem to flourish. The book is thus a compromise but has value.

Clapp, A. (2025). Waste Wars. New York: Little Brown, 390 pp. ...more

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Lost Worlds: How Humans Tried, Failed, Succeeded, and Built Our World
by Patrick Wyman

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This is a valuable update to the lay reader’s understanding of human history and prehistory of the last ten thousand years, from when “we were” cave-persons at the end of the last ice age, to when we became farmers at the end of the bronze age collap This is a valuable update to the lay reader’s understanding of human history and prehistory of the last ten thousand years, from when “we were” cave-persons at the end of the last ice age, to when we became farmers at the end of the bronze age collapse around 1000 BCE. So just what were we doing all that time? It’s so hard to remember…
Wyman is at pains to argue that we were not on a steady march from caves to farms to cities. There is no such predetermined pathway, and nothing about how people lived was foreordained. For every human community, making a living was an exercise in creative problem-solving, as it still is. People had to figure the best way to feed themselves and find shelter in all kinds of environmental niches, micro-climates, and social contexts. Some groups prospered, some perished. There never was, and still isn’t any invisible hand of progress that moves civilization along.
The book is organized along that very dominant argument. But who does believe in a superordinate arc of the progress of civilization? G.F. Hegel might have. No modern archeologist does, few historians do. Hardly any educated person believes in the outdated concept of historical determinism. But the repetition of the author's weak straw-man thesis grates on the reader’s nerves.
Nevertheless, the archeological evidence is fascinating, if presented a bit repetitively and with overwrought imaginary scenarios. I skimmed over the author’s flowery scene-setting at the start of chapters to get right to the findings. Not only are the discoveries interesting in their own right, but it’s fascinating the way inferences can be made now from physical evidence like graves and ruins to human behavior, values and intentionality. Climage change records give background context to the findings. Analysis of teeth reveal details of diet, disease, and health. Linking DNA patterns across times and cultures adds information about migrations and intermarriage. Linking it all to linguistic research into Proto-Indo-European language adds yet more layers of meaning. One can get a feel for what features of the world stood out in the minds of our long-ago ancestors.
A writerly tic grates the reader crosswise from the repetition, and that is the author’s fondness for expressions of the type “These neolithic hunters could not have imagined that a great city would someday stand on the site of their humble camp.” Well, of course they couldn’t. Such sentences are patently absurd but the author lays one down every couple of chapters.
A reader comes away convinced that inflated abstraction about the development of “civilization” (never defined in the book) has apparently led some people (not identified) to believe in historical determinism, which is not supported by the evidence or by rational analysis.
Or is it? Despite the author’s demonstration that changes in settlement patterns, agriculture, herding, and economics were varied and ever-experimental, the plain fact is that we no longer live in caves. We don’t forage for berries much anymore, and most of us don’t grow any food at all. We don’t need to invoke teleological explanation to see trends of increasing social complexity, urbanization, and agriculture, improvements in economics, health, and longevity, exponential population growth, and ever-widening patterns of trade, migration, and communications. Just because each tribal group does not recapitulate the overall trendlines does not negate them. The big picture is buried by the author’s jeremiad against historical determinism. Even so, the book is redeemed by good archeological descriptions with thoughtful inference, making it a worthy read overall. ...more

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Everything Is Predictable by Tom Chivers

Everything Is Predictable: How Bayesian Statistics Explain Our World
by Tom Chivers (Goodreads Author)

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The first three chapters are good, probably worth the price of the book. They give you a history of Bayes’s theorem and a good explanation of it. After that, the book rambles off into examples of decision theory applied to various problems, real and The first three chapters are good, probably worth the price of the book. They give you a history of Bayes’s theorem and a good explanation of it. After that, the book rambles off into examples of decision theory applied to various problems, real and imagined. An example of an imagined problem is how “the brain decides” things. It seems to use a Bayesian approach! That conclusion presupposes that a brain, a bodily organ like a liver or a lung, is capable of cognition. Meat cannot decide anything. Only a person can decide. That’s an example of the nonsense that populates the last half of the book.

In the first part, the historical derivation of Bayes’s theorem from anomalies in calculating odds for gamblers, is quite interesting. Also fascinating is the briefer history of traditional inferential statistics derived in part from having to find the “average” size of a French soldier in the mid-1800s to mass-produce army uniforms. A frequency distribution of heights takes a normal curve, with the true value of the average assumed to be in the center. That assumes there is such a truth. There’s no evidential or rational reason to believe it, but that’s what’s taught even today.

Making a probability estimate of “truth” by inference from a normal curve is called the “frequentist” method of deriving probabilities. That’s how it’s almost universally done in the behavioral sciences. The logic is that you have a set of measurements, and you ask the question “How likely would these data be if my hypothesis is true?” The entire edifice of Popperian philosophy of science is based on answering that question.

By contrast, a Bayesian approach asks, “How likely is it that my hypothesis is true, given these data?” That’s intuitively the question every scientist really seeks to answer. However, the frequentist approach (plus Popperian reasoning) does not let you ask it.

Instead, “frequentists” (most scientists) nominally assume that the hypothesis being tested is “the null,” meaning the data are purely random and demonstrate nothing. The frequentist statistical exercises might show that “these data would be extremely rare if they were really drawn from a random source.” So the logical conclusion is that the data are not random. Does that prove there was some interesting scientific phenomenon affecting the measurements? No. It only proves that whatever is going on, it is most likely not random. Is that all? Yes, that’s all you can say. Anything more is pure speculation. It’s no wonder most students hate statistics courses.

How much more direct it is to ask the Bayesian question that you really want to ask, what’s the probability that an interesting scientific phenomenon is reflected in my data? I tortured students for years with the traditional frequentist approach because that was the required curriculum. I should have slipped the Bayes approach in there anyway.

One serious problem with the book’s explanations is that Chivers never asks or addresses the fundamental question of where probabilities come from. They come from three sources. 1. Logical reasoning, such as the conclusion that a fair coin turns up heads 50% of the time. 2. Counting how often things actually occur, as in measuring the heights of French soldiers. 3. Subjective estimate based on general experience, such as when you see smoke, there’s nearly always fire. By failing to clearly discriminate these sources of probability, the author’s discussion of “Bayesian priors” is often confusing.

There are several other logical problems in the text, such as confusing correlation with causality, but overall, the first three chapters are clear and illuminating. Too bad he didn’t stop there.

Chivers, T. (2024). Everything is Predictable. New York: One Signal, 371 pp. ...more

William Adams and 73 other people liked Naeem's review of The Great Transformation:

The Great Transformation by Karl Polanyi

"I wouldn't think of reading this book without a guide. Because Polanyi is an impossible read -- more difficult than Marx (he doesn't have Marx's love of language or Marx's humor), more difficult than Hegel (he doesn't have Hegel's pointed sense of kn" Read more of this review »

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Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism
by Yanis Varoufakis

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This engaging and provocative econo-political book by a former Greek finance minister sets up a parallel between feudalism and today’s wired economy. In Middle Ages Europe, nobility owned the land, and ordinary people worked it, paying a portion of t ...more

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Invisible Doctrine: The Secret History of Neoliberalism
by George Monbiot

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Neoliberalism is a sloganeer’s term seldom defined. This book gives a good account of the term’s origins and development. For that alone, it is worth the read. However, much of it is uninformative ranting. The first 50 pages in particular can be skip Neoliberalism is a sloganeer’s term seldom defined. This book gives a good account of the term’s origins and development. For that alone, it is worth the read. However, much of it is uninformative ranting. The first 50 pages in particular can be skipped. The rest of it, intermittently informative, is helpful in documenting the money interests behind furtherance of the doctrine, which is currently seldom named.

It's a good essay for a political beginner who is not aware of the plutocratic stranglehold on American democracy and on most other political systems. But for anyone who has been paying attention, there is not much new here. The author’s definition of “capitalism” is narrow and leans Marxist so the text is designed more to convince rather than to inform.

The most disappointing flaw is the text’s failure to make its main point: the fact that predatory capitalism is essentially hidden in plain sight. Most people are by now so accommodated to it that they won’t believe this account. Tales of capitalist conspiracies will seem fantastical to them. Even (just-plain) “liberal” politicians may not even realize they are part of a kleptocracy.

As for the plutocrats themselves, I do not think they are evil conspirators. They actually believe their own propaganda. The book fails to pull back the psychological veil that makes neoliberalism so invisible. As that was the goal implied by its title, the project does not succeed.

The authors’ main suggestion for overcoming the grip of neoliberalism is to form parallel communities and economic processes where people self-govern and opt-out of mass media and mass consumerism. Sounds great but I couldn’t visualize it. We should live like the Amish? I don’t see a practical remedy for neoliberalism other than apocalyptic crisis such as war, disease, or food, water, and climate catastrophe. Even then, what would the rebuild look like?

Monbiot, G., & Hutchison, P. (2024). Invisible Doctrine: The secret history of neoliberalism. New York: Crown, 213 pp. ...more

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Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism
by Yanis Varoufakis

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This engaging and provocative econo-political book by a former Greek finance minister sets up a parallel between feudalism and today’s wired economy. In Middle Ages Europe, nobility owned the land, and ordinary people worked it, paying a portion of t ...more

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The Catalyst: RNA and the Quest to Unlock Life's Deepest Secrets
by Thomas R. Cech

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We all know that mRNA-based vaccines saved us from the worst of Covid. The miracle was that those vaccines appeared so fast. The pandemic hit the US in 2020 and we were utterly helpless, but by December the RNA-based vaccine appeared out of nowhere. We all know that mRNA-based vaccines saved us from the worst of Covid. The miracle was that those vaccines appeared so fast. The pandemic hit the US in 2020 and we were utterly helpless, but by December the RNA-based vaccine appeared out of nowhere. How was is possible to develop a whole new biomedical technology in twelve months?

We know now it didn’t happen like that. The foundations of mRNA (“messenger” RNA) technology had been laid years ago but most of us were unaware. The genius was in the engineering that got the treatment into a deliverable vaccine so fast. Cech tells this story with gusto in the context of a general history of RNA research. It’s fascinating stuff.

There are many other medical breakthroughs arising from RNA research, not just the Covid vaccine, and Cech gets into them. He started out as a DNA researcher but was not making much progress until he switched to RNA. If you split the double-helix of a DNA molecule down the middle, you’d have two single strands of RNA (“nuclear” RNA or nRNA). Cech describes that, and the many other variants of RNA, so many varieties in fact, that you’d be wise to make use of the extensive glossary in the back of the book.

And that’s both the strength and the weakness of the book. It is scientifically impeccable, written about as clearly as possible for a pop-sci text, and with enough detail to satisfy all but actual working biochemists. It is a terrific science read that does not dumb down (as long as you ignore most of the author’s strained metaphors). I feel that I now have a basic working idea of RNA and how it works. It’s not a domain I was much aware of, and now I am. I hate popular science that gets caught up in the scientist’s personalities, hair styles, and what they had for lunch. I read for the science and this book delivers science.

On the other hand, I also sometimes like a little help connecting the scientific facts to the meaningful context of human life. This book offers very little of that. It’s long on facts, short on connections to the human condition. The Covid vaccine is a mild exception. Most of us understood the danger posed by the pandemic. Millions of people died and we remember the helpless feeling. It made me think of the 14th century plague (which was far, far worse, but still, the idea of that helpless feeling as an unseen predator ravaged civilization).

Covid aside, it’s hard to grasp the larger meaning of most of the information in Cech’s book. It’s fascinating to learn about the incredibly complex and intricate world of RNA, but that’s like learning about quantum mechanics or ultraviolet circuit-etching. Amazing, yes, but what does it mean?

With just a little reflection, a reader can address such questions. Learning about the dynamic mocro-world of RNA made me wonder about scale—how big monkeys like us could be made out of such tiny mechanisms, and how little it takes for something to go wrong in that microscopic world that takes us down. So the food for thought is there but sometimes it’s nice to have some help extracting the larger meaning. But this is not that kind of science book. This is the science. Add your own meaning.

Cech, Thomas R. (2024). The Catalyst: RNA and the Quest to Unlock Life’s Deepest Secrets. New York: W.W. Norton, 292 pp. ...more

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A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness
by Michael Pollan (Goodreads Author)

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Pollan attempts to report current thinking on consciousness: what it is, how it works, where it came from, who has it and who doesn’t. However there is a scholarly position for nearly every conceivable idea about consciousness, so this survey of curr Pollan attempts to report current thinking on consciousness: what it is, how it works, where it came from, who has it and who doesn’t. However there is a scholarly position for nearly every conceivable idea about consciousness, so this survey of current thinking is no different from idle speculation. Pollan is unable or unwilling to search for fundamental principles or common denominators. It appears that the topic defeated him. The result is a superficial survey of thinking about consciousness since about 1994 (the date of the first Tucson conference).

Essentially all the ideas about consciousness covered are either physicalist or computational-informational. Pollan does a decent job in such a short book in summarizing those. He tries to critique them but has no foundational tools to do so. Instead, he seems to equate mind and brain, consciousness and sentience. He, like his interviewees, hopelessly confuse subjective and objective description, observer with observed, mind and brain, ontology and epistemology, self and world, functional and phenomenological terminology.

Pollan very briefly takes up idealism, the idea that all the world is made of consciousness, but declares without analysis that it is “implausible” (a verdict that confuses subjective and objective points of view). He briefly discusses panpsychism, the idea that consciousness is “in” everything, or at least everything alive, without realizing that it does not solve any problem. Spreading consciousness very thinly over everything does not address what it is.

Beyond his offhand dismissal of idealism, Pollan does not seriously consider non-physical, non-functional theories such as Advaita, phenomenology, religion, or any of the philosophical idealists beyond Kastrup. He reports briefly on drug-induced experiences of physical transcendence but without interpretation or integration into any theory of consciousness.

In the end, he opts for an anti-intellectual Buddhist practice, chopping wood and carrying water, failing to realize that as soon as you open your mouth that solution becomes invalid. For someone who has not been paying attention to recent thinking on consciousness, the book might be a useful catch-up, but for anyone else it is an exercise in frustration.

Pollan, Michael (2026). A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness. New York:
Penguin ...more

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Chain of Ideas: The Origins of Our Authoritarian Age
by Ibram X. Kendi (Goodreads Author)

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Internationally celebrated author Ibram X. Kendi is perhaps best known for his prize-winning book “How to be an Anti-Racist.” His newest, “Chain of Ideas,” Elaborates the thesis of the "Great Replacement Theory," that "they" are coming to take our jo ...more

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