Explaining Humans: Winner of the Royal Society Science Book Prize 2020

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I came to this book already knowing about refraction and harmonic motion so I didn’t need to read about them. Box-like thinking is deductive and constrained whereas tree-like thinking is inductive and expansive. Early in the chapter, the metaphor works on simple level to give a sense of how inductive and deductive reasoning differ, but there’s no reason why the box needs to be flimsy or the tree sturdy. I think this is a bit of a stretch to be enjoyable, it's just someone with some arbitrary views that seems to think they're special and I couldn't really find value. However, I did enjoy reading about how such metaphors have helped the author to understand the world around her more clearly.

I will say we do have very different personalities, I'm sure partly innate and partly due to the difference in our ages, resulting diagnosis being more available and likely than when I was eight years old. The most useful chapters for me were the last three, which dealt with the challenges of relationships, learning from mistakes and navigating the confusing world of social rules using game theory and machine learning.By drawing the connection between machine learning and decision-making, Millie concludes that machine learning teaches us that ‘mistakes’ are normal and inherent in real data, therefore we should embrace instead of run away from the mistakes and setbacks in our own lives. But of course, anyone that has looked into machine learning and AI concepts she uses for these claims would see that computer are absolute failures when it comes to domain-general thinking: They can't think outside of the domain “box” that they have been designed to address (think self-driving cars which have excellent visual perspicacity but no way of adapting to new ways of driving like drifting or stunt car driving, let alone how to play chess or create an artwork). Millie uses covalent (stability through sharing) and ionic (attraction of differences) to define human relationships — our desire for connection is similar to the exchange of electrons essential for chemical bonding, where one can both be too distant and too close to form an effective, stable relationship. From her point of view seems to mean mainly comparing human interactions to phenomena in biochemistry, which may be insightful for people who know more than I do about biochemistry, but since I don't, it was a matter of explaining something I already more or less understand - human behaviour - in terms of something I don't.

But this one was SO cringy, SO “I’m super special and so different than everyone else and so misunderstood”, that I just couldn’t. Pang erklärt, was den Menschen steuert, zieht Vergleiche und erklärt Hilfestellungen, die ihr im Umgang mit Familie, Kollegen und Fremden geholfen haben (z. As a painter this has inspired me to explore in images the mystery of the people, objects and landscapes of foreign lands, people speaking a different language which I have slowly had to learn.Pang, in her mid-twenties, wrote this fascinating book that looks at life from the perspective of an autistic person and science nerd. For a book written by someone whose career is in an intellectually rigorous discipline, it lacks both rigour and discipline. Indeed, inductive and deductive reasoning both have their place depending on the domain; and more often than not, the most useful mode of thinking combines the two.

Feedback loops, both positive and negative, are ways to use your neural networks to create desired outcomes or get rid of bad ones. Thinking of people as analagous to chemicals in a reaction does neither people nor chemicals worthwhile service. The world of science is full of theories, algorithms, and logical explanations, while the world of people is chaotic, full of unwritten rules, and always changing. At the core of this memoir is an exposition of human nature written from the perspective of an individual who always felt like she was on the outside looking in. The application of science to the problems of human relationships is refreshing, Millie doesn’t use scientific jargon — instead, she explains scientific concepts in layman terms to link to the perils of perfectionism and the pitfalls of social etiquette.

She landed an agent quickly, and a book deal with Penguin, with Explaining Humans released at the start of the first lockdown.