Undeterred: A Critique of a Book About Life Without Free Will

Introduction

Is it responsible to review a book you haven’t even fully read? Well, here’s a thought experiment: suppose somebody came out with a new book about UFOs and in the introduction mentioned casually, “I never go UFO hunting without dropping acid first.” You’d have a pretty good justification to dismiss the book without even going out and buying it, right? Of course, bothering to review it would seem beside the point … but what if it were an “instant New York Times bestseller”? And what if you had reason to believe that thousands of otherwise appropriately skeptical people might somehow embrace the book? What if your family members decided that the denial of UFOs was a NASA conspiracy, and resolved to start dropping acid regularly? Wouldn’t you want to weigh in?

Something kind of like this happened a dozen years ago with Amy Chua’s irresponsible and stupid book, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. I wrote a blog post criticizing her book without having read it—but I did read the excerpt of it in the New York Times which I felt was enough. If Chua’s own distillation has enough wrong with it to fundamentally undermine her argument, do we need to read the full book? (To make an analogy, if you’re at a restaurant and your appetizer has a cockroach in it, do you need to stay through the entrée and dessert to conclude the restaurant has a problem?) Bestselling books in this vein have a way of smearing their overall message across the zeitgeist, whether or not people engage with the source material. For example, my wife, who also didn’t read Chua’s book, was somewhat swept up in the chatter around it and started wondering aloud if we needed to start getting all tiger mother on our kids’ asses. At that point I felt the need to stand up and say something.

I’m feeling that again now about Robert Sapolsky’s new “instant bestseller,” Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will. I read two profiles of Sapolsky, which struck a nerve, and then I waded through enough of his book to take its measure. The book is total drivel, and yet it’s clearly making a splash … almost as though people are taking Sapolsky seriously.

In this post, I will delve into my issues with the book: not just that it’s poorly written and reasoned, but why I disagree with its very ambition. This examination will involve a lot of logic (something Sapolsky occasionally dabbles in between bouts of self indulgent blathering). But first, just as a warm-up and for your amusement, I’ll start with an irresponsible ad hominem attack against him, since this blog prioritizes entertainment over utility.

Irresponsible ad hominem attack

Just look at that picture above, a drawing my daughter did of the photo accompanying the Sapolsky profile in the New York Times. Can’t you just imagine this guy cornering you at a cocktail party and holding forth? I wonder how that beard came to be. It could be he just has a weak chin, which would make his beard a better idea than his new book, but probably the superabundant facial hair is more about the intellectual air he hopes to achieve. I can picture him looking in the mirror thinking, “Would I look more like a guru if I had a big, fluffy grey beard? Or would I just look like Santa? How can I look more like Karl Marx?” Maybe that’s why he also has the really long hair. Now, let me be clear, I think long hair on a dude is totally fine, when he’s young. But an ageing adult needs to have a little decorum. I mean, he’s got fricking ringlets! Doe he use product in his hair? And check out the odd difference in coloration between his beard and his hair … makes me wonder if he actually dyes it. If so, how vain!

Also note his wise, world-weary expression … does he always look like that, or only when he’s posing for a photo that will appear in the New York Times? Of course, it could be the photographer saying, “Okay, that’s good, but could you try to look more contemplative, maybe a little world-weary? Could we get, you know, a little more guru going here?” In that case Sapolsky shouldn’t have gone along with it. He should have just smiled naturally, because he gets to be in the Times and that’s a pretty big deal. But of course he needs to present this persona, so he stares gloomily and intellectually off into the distance, little realizing that he does not, cannot convey an air of gravitas when he’s wearing plastic clogs. With white socks. Sure, I have flip-flops I wear around the house, but for the Times I would dress up a bit, show a little respect. Look, Sapolsky, you might hang around college kids but that doesn’t make you hip or cool. You’re trying to shape widespread public perception of deep philosophical matters … try to be a grown-up, would you please?

One more heads-up

Full disclosure: I hold free will to be a capacity people should cherish, and to deny or even doubt its existence is to threaten our ability to seize it. That is to say, anybody’s effort to discredit the existence of free will invokes my ire on principle. (As I describe here, I frequently bring unnecessary physical suffering upon myself simply to prove, to myself, that I have free will.) So to be perfectly candid, Sapolsky’s very intent (combined with his douche-y beard, vainglorious long hair, and Stanford pedigree) made we want to hate him right off. Nevertheless, as somebody truly interested in this topic (having read a number of books on existential philosophy), I was willing to read what Sapolsky has to say, even after reading the profile of him in the New York Times and a critique of his book in the New Yorker, both of which only deepened my sense that he’s a tool.

Alas, his book is really popular around here so I couldn’t get it from the library. (There are 35 holds ahead of me.) I don’t like to buy a book unless I’m pretty convinced it’ll be good. Sometimes all this takes is a paragraph ... if the opening to a book is good enough, I will take a gamble on that alone. If a book doesn’t start off great, but I still think it may have promise, I’ll read a few of the free sample pages Amazon serves up. In the case of Determined, Amazon was unusually generous, and for the first time ever I found myself longing for the end of the free pages. The excerpt of this poorly written, poorly reasoned tract just went on and on, until—32 excruciating pages in—Amazon finally cut me off. Now, based on the two profiles and the pages I’ve read, I’m prepared to say I’ve revised my initial opinion (that Sarposky is a tool) to more precisely and accurately state that I find him a self-indulgent, glib, preening old fool whose brazen dismissal of a vast body of thought going back hundreds of years is the height of arrogance. There’s no point trying to pretend this blog post is an exploration … it’s a take-down.

(Note that I’m not being ageist here. I wrote “preening old fool” because it’s sad how foolish Sapolsky still is despite the many years he’s had available to him to have gained wisdom … years that he has apparently squandered.)

Thirty-two excruciating pages

Right off the bat, I have an issue with the title: Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will. What’s with “a science”? Science isn’t supposed to be a realm where everybody gets to have his own version, his own private belief system. It’s about building consensus, and improving our understanding in this way. A scientist investigates, builds a hypothesis, proves it in the lab, and then other scientists attempt to recreate the experiment and either confirm or deny the findings. That’s why the normal phrase is “the science of,” not “a science of.” Contrast this to Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values. “An inquiry” makes more sense: you would never have “the inquiry” since the number of inquiries into a realm as general and squishy as “values” is infinite. But science is supposed to be the leading edge of the best effort of scientists to build a common, tangible understanding of how the world works, based on experiments that produce data, which describe and predict behaviors and other demonstrable phenomena. The phrase “a science” suggests that Sapolsky doesn’t fully support the collaborative mission that science is supposed to have.

Rather than illustrating any specific line of scientific examination, Sapolsky seems to use his reputation and authority as a biologist and neuroscientist as a flag that he waves. His grand assertions really beg the question. For example: “Once you work with the notion that every aspect of behavior has deterministic, prior causes, you observe a behavior and can answer why it occurred: as just noted, because of the action of neurons in this or that part of your brain in the preceding second.” Here he includes a footnote directing the reader to an introduction to neuroscience that he includes as an appendix (which presumably we’ll ignore other than as a rubber stamp of his authority, or else it wouldn’t be an appendix) and to another book he wrote on neuroscience that he warns us is “agonizingly long.” It’s as though he’s saying, “Yeah, there’s all this science behind understanding behavior but it’s really complicated, so just take my word for it.”

But even beyond how complex this science might be, let’s back up a second: he’s asserting that we can explain any behavior in terms of deterministic, prior causes having to do with brain neurons in the preceding second. Seriously? We could actually catalog and describe all these neural events leading to the behavior? How could we possibly chase them all down? But it gets worse: he goes on to say that those neurons were activated in the minutes before the behavior, and that the behavior was also influenced by hormones from hours to days before that, and that the function of those neurons was influenced by experience and environment in the preceding months to years, and by the person’s development in the womb and what his or her pregnant mother was going through, and further by culture that has evolved over decades, even centuries. So really, there’s no way we’re actually “answering why the behavior occurred,” because who has data going back that far? It’s only a theoretical explanation.

In terms of tying a behavior to past events, neurological and circumstantial, I can suggest a simple scenario that defies the idea. Have you ever been on the fence about an action you had to take, and decided to flip a coin in order to decide? I think plenty of people do this, from time to time. Our willingness to base an action on the outcome of a flipped coin flies in the face of determinism. We have decided in advance to act based on the random outcome of this coin-flip, thus the behavior that follows this flip cannot be predetermined because until that coin is flipped, there is/are no predictive, deterministic preceding event(s). Since the result of the coin flip is random, one can’t go back and trace the resulting behavior to anything except the decision of the coin-flipper to base his or her next decision on heads vs. tails. How is that not freedom?

Sapolksy doesn’t seem to begin with data and use it to lead us towards a conclusion; rather, he starts with an attractive notion to get our buy-in, so that perhaps so we’ll go easy on him when he builds his case. At the end of his first chapter he asks us to imagine a college graduation ceremony with all the happy students and their proud families milling about, and then draws our attention to a (hypothetical) garbage collector in the back. He asks us to consider the background of this garbage collector compared to that of the graduates. He declares, “Trade every factor over which they had no control, and you will switch who would be in the graduation robe and who would be hauling garbage cans. This is what I mean by determinism.”

What a smarmy, smurfy load of shit. Yeah, being born to college graduates in a wholesome community surely helps a person’s educational prospects, but it doesn’t determine how far they get. It just changes the odds a bit. Both my parents went to Berkeley; my dad earned a Ph.D.; one of my brothers—though lucky enough to grow up in one of the best school districts in the nation—dropped out of high school. Meanwhile, the rapper Lil Wayne (as he describes in this interview) was raised in a school district so dangerous that his mom, upon seeing him packing a gun in his backpack before heading to class, implored him to drop out, which he then did. And yet, Lil Wayne (despite the distraction of a platinum-selling music career) earned his GED and later enrolled at the University of Houston. So there are two counterexamples, right off the top of my head. Sapolsky’s little anecdote doesn’t effectively convey the gist of determinism. It’s sentimental, simplistic, and twee.

This backwards-looking attempt at establishing causality breaks down so easily upon close inspection. How is it not free will that my brother Geoff moved to the Netherlands? Is it fair to say that, having been born to the parents that he was, with the genes that he had, developing as a fetus in the natal environment that he did, growing up in the community that he did, and attending the college that he did, there was no other possible outcome than relocating to Europe? What about his identical twin brother, who—despite having the same parents, the same genes, the same fetal environment, the same community, the same friends, and the same (initial) college—stayed on this continent? Shouldn’t these two have been deterministically pushed into the same inevitable decision about where to put down roots?

But let’s assume that a person’s behavior could be tied to a pattern of neuron activity and historical factors. How would the scientist determine, much less prove, causality that is so airtight as to deny the possibility of free will? The perfect test would be if the scientist could then use his understanding of the precise mechanism of that behavior to make predictions about future behaviors as well. If we’re confident we understand exactly why that man pulled that trigger, shouldn’t we know his next move?

The last time I checked, biologists haven’t proven to be great prognosticators of human behavior. (Business people have done okay here, in terms of understanding basic principles such as are used in advertising, but they don’t pretend to be scientists.) Doesn’t it seem like Sapolsky is overestimating what science can do for his thesis? To put it another way, if Sapolsky really thinks there is a solid scientific basis to his refutation of free will, why shouldn’t his scientific findings be subject to peer review instead of just published to a lay audience as a general interest book?

Actually, from what I can tell, Sapolsky didn’t even do much of his own research for this book; it’s more of a survey of the existing stuff. Well … some of it. Which brings us to an overarching failure of logic in Sapolsky’s approach. He declares in his first chapter that to accomplish his goal of convincing the reader there is no free will, he’ll “look at the way smart, nuanced thinkers argue for free will, from the perspectives of philosophy, legal thought, psychology, and neuroscience. I’ll be trying to present their views to the best of my ability, and to then explain why I think they are all mistaken.” Um ... what? He’s going to discredit everyone who disagrees with him? Sure, his book is 528 pages long, but how is he going to evaluate even a moderately representative sample of the existing literature across these four gigantic fields? To be more honest he’d have to write, “I’m going to look at the way a VANISHINGLY SMALL PROPORTION of smart, nuanced (BUT NOT TOO SMART OR NUANCED SINCE I’VE CHOSEN TO INCLUDE ONLY THE ONES I THINK ARE WRONG) thinkers to explain why I think THIS TINY SAMPLING of them are all mistaken.” His approach only makes sense if he could refute all the great thinkers who’ve studied this question, which is of course impossible: it’s like proving a negative.

So, he digs himself in pretty deep with his stated intention to base his argument on a glancing review of these four realms while pretending that’s sufficient. Then, although he acknowledges that individual scientific studies can’t disprove free will, he goes on to say, “But—and this is the incredibly important point—put all the scientific results together, from all the relevant scientific disciplines, and there’s no room for free will” (italics his). Is he really purporting to have done this? He sure hasn’t presented the findings of such a comprehensive effort, which is no surprise because it would be simply impossible. ALL? ALL SCIENTIFIC RESULTS? There’s no way. Again, what he’s really asserting is more hypothetical; it’s like he’s saying, “I’ll bet if you looked at all the scientific results you’d find they’d collectively deny free will. In fact I’m sure of it. Just take my word for it.”

If it seems like I’m accusing Sapolsky of essentially cherry-picking his evidence: yes, I am. Consider that, as he willingly admits (in both profiles I’ve read of him), he has denied the existence of free will since he was thirteen years old: that is, since before he was educated and before his brain had even fully formed. So although he’s using biology and neurology to bolster his decades-old belief, he’s not doing so in the responsible manner of a scientist exploring the matter—he began his research with his mind already made up. It looks to me like a classic example of confirmation bias.

After his first chapter, which defines a lot of terms and explains his approach, Sapolsky’s book gets increasingly boring and pointless. He starts his second chapter with an exposition of one of the methodological approaches scientists have taken, through various studies, to evaluate the existence of free will. After a brief outline of this approach, Sapolsky concludes, “I think that at the end of the day, these studies are irrelevant.” Why, then, does he spend the next ten pages (well, at least ten—at this point the Amazon sample mercifully ran out) describing one such study in excruciating detail? How does simply knocking down other people’s work support his own improbable conclusion? (It’s like two economists discrediting a typewriter keyboard layout by basing their findings on a single previous study conducted about it, as I describe here.) I’m aghast at what passes for scholarship, and that this book is popular. Perhaps it’s just like the Tiger Mother book … it’ll be something to talk about at cocktail parties for a while because it’s timely, and then it will sink out of sight forever.

Beyond his poor execution

As described above, one of Sapolsky’s stated goals is “to convince you that there is no free will.” His second stated goal is “to take seriously all the implications of there being no free will.” With this second goal he seems to focus on whether or not we can hold people morally responsible for their behavior in the absence of free will. He says free-will skeptics (like himself) are “less punitive and more forgiving.” This seems to be at the heart of why, and perhaps how, he was able to publish this book: he’s positioning himself and his mission as a way to be a kinder and more liberal person, and as readers we can (choose to!) join him. Don’t hate the guy who broke into your car, he implies, because it wasn’t really him, he didn’t mean to do it, it was just the desperate position society put him in. So we’re sort of coaxed (or bullied) into accepting Sapolsky’s position so we don’t come off like the heartless old-school moralists who would throw a homeless man in prison for stealing loaf of bread.

The trouble is, such sentimental appeals cannot and should not stand in place of actual intellectual rigor. The New Yorker writer Nikhil Krishnan, in his review of Determined, questions Sapolsky’s assertion that free-will skeptics are less punitive and more forgiving:

But he can’t really have meant that... If free-will skepticism means never having to say you’re sorry, then it also means never being forgiven. Forgiveness is, as much as vengeance, a concept that can be applied only from within the first-person point of view. Sapolsky’s ethic of forgiveness demands that we retain something of our old-fashioned belief in holding one another responsible.

Ah, but I’m delving again into the failure of Sapolsky’s argument (because it’s just so easy!) when I’ve been trying to get into something else: the ramifications of accepting his ideas and putting them into practice.

My biggest issue with Sapolsky’s book is that if we truly embrace his goals of 1) agreeing there is no free will, and 2) living according to this belief, we are denying the possibility of making better choices. And yet isn’t making better choices the noble purpose of some of our most important human behaviors? Think of education, counseling, coaching, even self-reflection. If our every move has already been decided, what’s the point in trying to be better, by trying to choose better?

If we want to advance the argument that humans are slaves to our brain chemistry, it seems like nicotine addiction would be the ideal poster child. This NIH report, describing how nicotine activates reward centers, and how it rewires the brain of the addict, should be right up any neuroscientist’s alley:

Nicotine causes the release of dopamine in the mesolimbic area, the corpus striatum, and the frontal cortex. Of particular importance are the dopaminergic neurons in the ventral tegmental area of the midbrain, and the release of dopamine in the shell of the nucleus accumbens, as this pathway appears to be critical in drug-induced reward… Likewise, nicotine withdrawal is associated with significant increases in intracranial self-stimulation reward threshold, consistent with deficient dopamine release and reduced reward. The decrease in brain reward function experienced during nicotine withdrawal is an essential component of nicotine addiction and a key barrier to abstinence.

The nicotine addict, then, would seem to be a classic case of somebody with no free will. As the same NIH report states, “Approximately 80% of smokers who attempt to quit on their own relapse within the first month of abstinence, and only approximately 3% remain abstinent at six months.” And yet, my brother—who had smoked for over forty years—decided exactly a year ago that he had to quit, and he did. For this to happen, he had to believe that he could … that he could fly in the face of statistics and his own fraught history with tobacco. But in Sapolsky’s view, my brother doesn’t get any credit for his resolve and tenacity—that is, for deciding enough was enough. Are we to believe Sapolsky that for my brother to quit smoking was predetermined somehow, just like taking up the nasty habit in the first place (even though he had the same parents I did, and grew up in the same health-crazed community)? So my brother’s behavior was all preordained, from the forty-year chemical addiction to the bold refusal to put up with even one more day of it? Seriously?

What if Sapolsky’s book had come out a year ago and my brother read it, decided he had no free will, decided to be more compassionate with himself because it wasn’t his fault he was a smoker, that he had no say in the matter, and that his lungs were already doomed based on neurons, environment, and history? Would he have taken that huge step of deciding (or, fine, pretending to decide) to quit?

Sapolsky seems to be trying to couch his worldview in being fairer: in not holding criminals responsible for their crime, and in not praising this or that lucky guy for his achievement. But we don’t need to deny the existence of free will to be more fair. We can acknowledge that a person choosing between hunger and theft was dealt, by society and history, a worse hand than the guy choosing between a savings account and a mutual fund. The world isn’t fair … we get it. But why not focus more on what all of us humans can choose (or seem to choose) to do, like taking better care of our bodies, our minds, our families? Why not behave as though we can improve, even if—worst case and unbeknownst to us—our free will is just a placebo? I mean, who cares … besides the preening, self-aggrandizing academic who needs to publish?

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From the Archives - Book Review: Bill Bryson’s “Lost Continent”

Introduction

Did I really write a book review, for practically no audience, all the way back in 1994? Yes, I just now stumbled across it. This review was within a letter to my brother, who’d recommended Bill Bryson’s The Lost Continent: Travels in Small Town America. You might as well read my review; it’s really more about dining out in small towns than it is about helping you decide whether to read Lost Continent.

Book Review: The Lost Continent – January 10, 1994

I must say, that Bryson fellow has a sharp sense of humor and a keen eye for detail. I especially like his made-up town names: Draino, Indiana; Tapwater, Missouri. And his mockery of American products: Hunk o’ Meat Beef Stew ‘n’ Gravy; Sniffa-Snax; Country Sunshine Honey-Toasted Wheat Nut ‘n’ Sugar Bits Breakfast Cereal. It’s an easy book to get in and out of, since it rambles along playfully without any complicated structure. I read it eagerly during my recent trip to Oregon, and then at the Amtrak station while waiting for my train, and then while the train was delayed.

Well, I’m almost done with the book now, and upon careful consideration I must conclude that as far as I can tell, Bryson has not given America a fair shake. After a while his clever critiques became tiresome, cranky complaints that I didn’t need to hear. My moment of epiphany came when I read his description of Wells, Nevada: 

              I spent the night in Wells, Nevada, the sorriest, seediest, most raggedy-assed town I’ve ever seen. Most of the streets were unpaved and lined with battered-looking trailer homes … Such economic life as Wells could muster came from the passing traffic of I-80 … I turned up my collar and trudged the half-mile from the town proper to the interstate junction with US 93, where the most prosperous-looking truck stops were gathered, forming an oasis of brightness in the pinkish dusk.

              I went into what I looked to be the best of them, the 4-Way Café, which I gather took its name from the fact that it consisted of a gift shop, restaurant, casino and bar … It was absolutely, in my opinion, the worst food I have ever had in America, at any time, under any circumstances, and that includes hospital food, gas station food and airport coffee shop food … I pushed the plate away and wished that I still smoked. The waitress, seeing how much I had left, asked me if I wanted a doggy bag.

              “No thank you,” I said through a thin smile, “I don’t believe I could find a dog that would eat it.”

I did get a chuckle out of that, but then realized, wait, I’ve been to Wells, Nevada, recently, and had a totally different experience.

It was the summer of 1991, when I was driving out to Boulder with a friend of a friend. We stopped for the night, got rooms at the Motel 6, and relaxed for a while before setting out to find a worthy restaurant. The motel was about like all Motel 6’s everywhere: clean, perhaps a bit too air conditioned for its own good, but generally a fair bit nicer than many of the apartments I’ve lived in. Scoping out the town didn’t take too long. We even went to the 4-Way Café, which as Bryson reported was a conglomerate of gift shop, restaurant, casino, and bar. But we never even considered eating there; it was clearly not even an option. Nothing obvious about it tipped us off as a lousy place; it just seemed lacking in whatever local flavor a café in Wells, Nevada could have. Wouldn’t anyone rather go to a place that’s only a restaurant? Have you ever encountered a gift shop or casino that appealed in any way?

We found a more promising little café not far away, right next to the visitor’s center. Now here’s something interesting: this so-called “raggedy-ass town” actually had a visitor’s center. It wasn’t a commercial operation, but more like a tiny museum of whatever heritage Wells happened to have. Free coffee, a cheerful docent, etc. Would the sorriest, raggedy-assed town in America have a visitor’s center?

The café we went to also seemed to try harder than it really needed to. It wasn’t overbearing or self-important, mind you; not like Zachary’s Pizza, which has all its awards framed and on display. But the mop-topped glasses-faced kid behind the counter was friendly, and looked at us intently, maybe trying to figure out where we came from and what brought us to Wells.

My philosophy about eating in strange towns, or even at strange restaurants in general, has just two basic tenets:

• Stick with simple stuff. It’s hard to ruin a big steak or hamburger. Grilled ahi tuna 800 miles from the nearest ocean, cooked by someone who’s never had a chance to try the genuine article, is not a good bet.
• Ask the restaurant staff what they recommend. If there’s a loss-leader on the menu, they’ll usually steer you away from it. And if you can spot actual enthusiasm about a dish, you know you can’t go wrong.
• [For my more modern guide to spotting bad restaurants, click here.]

My rules for dining out are not nearly as humorous as Bill Bryson’s [which include prohibitions against photographs of the food, flocked wallpaper, live entertainers, bloodstains on the walls, or staff you can overhear talking in the kitchen]. My rules, though, may be a bit more practical. I asked the teenager behind the counter what he thought was the best thing on the menu. He broke into this wide Ritchie Cunningham grin, and with a little gleam in his eye, declared without a hint of hesitation, “The Super-Deluxe burger. With fries. Oh yeah.” It was just like when a customer at the bike shop asks me to tell him about my bike.

The kid did not steer me wrong. I love a good burger anyway, but the whole time I was eating it I was envisioning this guy back in the kitchen, inspired by my order to make a Super Deluxe for himself. He’s smashing down the patty with his little steel spatula, almost in tears, murmuring to it, “Oh, yeah, that’s it, boy, that’s my half-pound of grade-A American beef, oh, and let’s grill those onions!” He does a little spin, maybe, then flips that patty over with the skilled flick of the wrist that has become his trademark, and he can just envision the delectable grease slowly soaking into the sesame-seed bun.

This is my memory of Wells, Nevada. I remember it was late in the afternoon, but still sunny, and nothing struck me as unpleasant in the slightest. Granted, I wasn’t expecting the earth to move for me; I was just glad to get out of the car and have some food and get some rest. When I read Bryson’s account of Wells, an unsettling question crept up on me: what would that teenager at the café think, reading about the “sorriest, seediest, most raggedy-assed town” our critic had ever seen? Would this guy go on thinking it’s even worth bothering trying to do right by snooty tourists? Does Bryson assume the citizens of Wells are all illiterate?

Reading this book, I am frequently reminded of Peter Jenkins’ travel book, A Walk Across America. Jenkins isn’t as funny as Bryson, to be sure. In fact, he admits in the first chapter that prior to writing the book, he had no idea how to construct a sentence. But it was enjoyable reading, anyway, and the author wasn’t so cynical. And yet, didn’t these guys tour the same country? How much of what they reported was based on what they’d hoped to find? Jenkins said his whole purpose in walking was to find out, as he hoped, that he was wrong to be ashamed of America. Bryson, on the other hand, seemed intent on proving beyond reasonable doubt that this country is going to hell in a handbasket (whatever that means).

The two writers’ methods are quite different. I saw Jenkins give a lecture once, and found him really charismatic. As you can read about in his books, he talks to people wherever he goes; lived with various folks here and there along the way; and even did his best to fit in at the cult-like commune called “The Farm.” He’s a real people-person.

Bryson seems like the opposite. He’s seems like kind of a loner, who doesn’t recall much dialogue other than brief exchanges with service-sector people whom he seems to always conclude are incompetent. His modus operandi is to drive from one tourist trap to another, silently build his case against the stupid tourists there, get back in his car, and drive on. The only distinguishing feature that separates him from his fellow tourists is that he takes mental notes and contrives clever ways to deride them later, while the tourists just putter around, buy souvenirs, and quite possibly enjoy themselves.

I also have to wonder if Bryson doesn’t actually look for trouble, in the service of his art. Maybe he chose the 4-Way Café because he predicted it’d be lame, which would give him a cleverer story than my admittedly sentimental, cloying one. I also suspect Bryson exaggerates a bit, and possibly even fabricates details. Consider this passage, about another place he ate at:

I was the only customer in the restaurant. I was quite clearly the only thing standing between the waitresses and their going home … The waitresses stood against the wall and watched me chew my food. After a while they started whispering and tittering, still watching me as they did so, which frankly I found a trifle unsettling. I may only have imagined it, but I also had the distinct impression that someone was little by little turning a dimmer switch so that the light in the room was gradually disappearing. By the end of my meal I was finding my food more or less by touch and occasionally by lowering my head to the plate and sniffing. Before I was quite finished, when I just paused for a moment to grope for my glass of iced water somewhere in the gloom beyond the flickering candle, my waitress whipped the plate away and put down my bill.

That’s definitely some funny shit, but I’m not sure I believe it. Consider Bryson’s qualifier, “I may have only imagined it,” about the dimmer switch. If what follows had actually happened, he would have no doubt that a dimmer switch was involved. If not, what could possibly account for the room getting so dark? I think he introduced this idea of a gradually darkening room on a lark, and developed it for maximum comedic effect without worrying too much about veracity. I could be wrong about this, of course, but at least my theory would help explain why nothing like this ever happened to Peter Jenkins, or to me.

When you really stop and think, in fact, the whole premise of this man’s book is absurd. What we have here is an expatriate, coming back for a visit in order to write a book about the place he has forsaken. When he describes towns like Wells, it’s like he’s run his experience through a filter of disgust and complaint. I almost wonder if he’s being careful not to enjoy himself too much here, so he won’t have any regret when he returns to England. If that’s true, perhaps we might conclude he’s more of an anti-travel writer than anything.

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1-Star Reviews: The Fun & The Folly

Introduction

I’ve blogged before about Amateur Product Reviews:  those reviews that your average joe can post on sites like Amazon, Best Buy, Yelp, etc.  These serve a valuable purpose because we can’t always count on magazine reviews, etc. to be unbiased.  Moreover, it’s nice to see people’s opinions in aggregate; if a dozen or two reviewers complain that the lid doesn’t fit right, chances are it doesn’t.

Being a very reluctant consumer in general, I like to go straight to the 1-star reviews.  I want to know what’s wrong with this thing I’m considering, so that maybe I can talk myself out of it.  I also find that 1-star reviews are the most entertaining.  When consumers feel wronged, their talons come out.

Of course, amateur reviews are as flawed as humanity, and the overall level of discourse is less like your college English class and more like traffic school.  It has recently dawned on me that websites could do a lot better to help consumers separate the wheat from the chaff.  In this post I’ll explain how, and just for fun I’ll throw in a contest.  You might win!

How the review-o-sphere governs itself

The amateur review system has evolved, and some mechanisms are now in place to validate user testimonials.  Supposedly, there are safeguards to detect fake reviews from manufacturers.  Some sites validate that the product reviewed was actually purchased.  And now many sites allow readers to comment on a review, which in many cases means crying foul.

Here’s an example.  A reviewer gave a 1-star review, titled “Symplicity,” to a digital camera.  The review (in its entirety) reads as follows:  “Needed something for my wife to use without too many buttons and knobs. All she has to do is aim and push a button.”  A couple of people commented that this guy probably meant to give this camera the highest rating based on its ease of use.  They’re probably right, and I also liked the comment, “So, you’re looking for a camera that’s like you?”

Amazon keeps tabs on the usefulness of reviews by asking the reader, “Was this review helpful to you?”  It uses this feedback to rank its reviews, so readers can sort by the most helpful ones.  This is a good start, but it doesn’t stop useless reviews from cluttering up the page and distorting the weighted average of a product’s rating.

Yelp offers sophisticated feedback widgets.  A reader can flag a review as useful and/or funny and/or cool.  (I’m pleased to say that one of my Yelp reviews got 4 “useful” ratings, 5 “funny” ratings, and 1 “cool.”  I’m less pleased to report that this review, for Cozmic Café,  doesn’t actually show up in Yelp’s review listing for the place, which fills me with lots of sour-grapes-based conspiracy theories.)

These feedback widgets are somewhat helpful, but still don’t prevent pointless 1-star reviews from tarnishing the average rating of a product or business.  But there is a way to fix this.  After careful analysis I’ve determined that most useless 1-star reviews fit within one of just four basic categories.  By giving readers four more simple buttons to click as needed, a website could easily gain valuable insight into improving rating metrics.  If some threshold of readers flagged a review according to one of these categories, the website could exclude that review when calculating the average rating. 

Category #1 – the Hapless review

This category covers one of the biggest problems with these reviews, which is a person giving one star when he meant to give five, and vice-versa.  The “Symplicity” review above probably fits this category.  Consider also this 1-star review for the iPhone 6S:  “Great item i had recent.”  Considering that whoever posted this is barely able to operate an Internet-connected device, his calling the iPhone “great” really does attest to its ease of use.  It’s a shame that this would-be 5-star review, masquerading as a 1-star review, is bringing down the iPhone’s average.  Imagine if you could flag this review as “Hapless” to alert Amazon’s star-crunching engine.  (Of course one vote of “Hapless” shouldn’t change anything, but if 20 out of 21 respondents click Hapless, and 0 out of 21 click “Useful,” that’s a solid basis for ignoring the 1-star rating.)

There’s a subcategory of Hapless I’ve observed:  consumers who are the real problem.  A 1-star reviewer may not realize, for example, that the product he purchased needs its battery charged from time to time, or that dropping a smartphone and breaking it doesn’t indicate a manufacturing defect.  I recently bought a bike light despite a reviewer complaining, “The act of taking it off to charge it caused the strap to snap on one side.”  I suspect that something specific about that act—such as manhandling the light—broke the strap, because this review also says, “barely fit my handlebars.”  The directions for this light clearly state it’s not designed for oversized handlebars.  I’d flag this review(er) as Hapless.

Category #2 – the Irrelevant review

Amazon in particular is plagued by this one.  A reviewer has a bad experience with his shipping, or the partner seller, or  the means by which an entertainment product is delivered, and gives the innocent product a 1-star review.  Consider this iPhone review:  “I ordered an i phone 6s 64 GB unlocked. When I got the box I found out that the I phone 6s box contained brown colored clay and no phone or accessories. Very shocking.”

There’s a mechanism for dealing with this—the reader comment feature—but these comments are not always helpful.  Consider these comments on the “clay and no phone” review:   “Liar go ask for refund liar thief,” and, “Not true, probably a Microsoft fan.”

Another example:  a reviewer of Eminem’s latest album wrote, “I spent $16 on this album and it wont play. I wrote customer service and they never responded. Guess I’m just out the money and worst of all still no eminent!”  (I take this as an Amazon problem, as their new Cloud Player has received lots of complaints.)  This review elicited the comment, “Fools like this should lose all internet privileges.”  Love it.

Another reviewer of this album wrote, “this CD does skip very bad.”  Look, pal, you’re supposed to be reviewing the quality of Eminem’s music.  I don’t think he gets involved in pressing the discs.

It’s sad to see products dragged through the mud by reviewers who haven’t actually gotten to use them.  Again, a simple response button could tell the website to exclude these reviews from the average rating.

Category #3 – the Nonsensical review

Sometimes a reviewer receives his product intact, and understands that one star means worst, not best, and yet posts such an inane review that his basic brain function is highly suspect.  Consider this 1-star review of the Eminem album:  “Water for someone else.”  That’s the entire review.  What the hell happened here?  Was this guy typing on a smartphone and was so sloppy it replaced every word of his review?  Or was he starting to say something complicated and just ran out of steam?  Or does he think people will actually understand what he’s getting at?  I can’t see how this review could possibly contribute to a constructive dialogue.

Then you get the reviews from people who are obviously bat-shit crazy, like this review for the Apple Watch:  “Causes cancer. Radiation on wrist can bring rumors to your body. DO NOT BUY!”  Obviously this isn’t a person who would ever purchase this watch … so what gives him the right to review it?

Needless to say these reviews shouldn’t dilute the average rating.  On top of that, as a consumer I’d like to be able to filter out all nonsensical reviews before I even start skimming.

Category #4 – the Weirdly Autobiographical review

I want to be careful with this one because some of my favorite reviews are weirdly autobiographical.  Excess detail isn’t automatically a problem, but some reviews say more about the reviewer than the product or service being reviewed.  Consider this excerpt from a laptop computer review:  “My Dad is an Engineer in both Computer Sciences and Electronics/Electrical with many years of experience, and as such Toshiba could fair well to take some custructive criticism.”  Wow.  This guy seems to have some Daddy issues.  Were both father and son ignored by Toshiba’s product marketing department, or does the reviewer assume technical acumen is genetic?  And what does any of this have to do with this specific laptop?

I was researching old-fashioned razors (i.e., that use the double-edged “safety” blades) and one review reported, “I would say 1 out of ten hairs would just fold down and go under the blade. So I started using my wifes cheap razor to finish the job. Finally she got after me and I went looking for my old razor. I then found a stainless 43c. Although I liked the wood better this one cut just like my old razor.”  I have no idea what a 43c is, or how old this guy’s wood-handled razor must have been, or why his wife and her razor have entered into the discussion.  Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed this review, but there are 127 other 1-star reviews of this razor and only so much time in the day.

An Apple Watch reviewer wrote, “If you wanna dictate something naughty you can’t do it unless you are alone, in that case use your phone.”  Wow.  Some kind of perv, and I wonder what he thought this watch was supposed to do.

Here’s another jewel:  in a review of the Cozmic Café, one guy wrote, “I was told they don’t have beer to which I said it’s on the menu and can someone go upstairs and get me one and they said they were understaffed.  As I was walking upstairs with the guy to go get my beer he says...see you later.”  WTF?!  I mean, sure it’s lame to run out of beer, but I’d be pretty scared if I worked at this café and some beer-crazed guy tried to follow me upstairs.  I think “See you later” is a pretty reasonable response, especially at a place where (as another 1-star reviewer mentioned) “lately I have heard of multiple fights breaking out there, including ones where thirty year old men beat up teenagers.”

I don’t think reviews flagged as Weirdly Autobiographical should necessarily be removed from the average rating calculation, but it’d be nice to be able to filter them out, or (for bored readers) filter the results to show only these reviews.

And now … the albertnet Fake Review challenge!

What follows is a collection of product reviews.  For each product, there are three reviews:  two real ones plus a fake one I made up.  I challenge you to identify the fictitious review for each product.  Send your submissions to feedback@albertnet.us.  The first person to guess correctly on every review, or the person with the best score when I arbitrarily decide I have enough responses, will get a prize.  I don’t know what it will be, but it will be similar in value to the First Endurance EFS Liquid Shot given to John Lynch, the winner of the last Fake Review challenge.  Win this contest and you’ll be just as famous as he, when I publish your name and photo (along with the correct answers) in a future post.

Review #1:  The Turn of the Screw (novel)

a)   The Turn of the Screw is quite possibly the stupidest and most pointless story I have ever wasted my time on. Purportedly a ghost story, the “ghosts” are nothing more than occasional appearances by the former governess and valet, both of whom are now dead.

b)   A friend told me “I couldn’t put it down.” Couldn’t put it down? I couldn’t pick it up! So hard to read...took me weeks to get through. If Henry James wrote this today, he would NOT get laid.

c)   The story is lousy, the characters are unbelievable, the protagonist is annoying, the plot development is glacial, and the ending is absurd. But what makes this book really bad is the writing.

Review #2:  Apple Watch 

a)   I had a hard time charging the watch.. The instructions read that that the charger attached magnetically to the back of the watch. When I placed the charger to the phone it seems to repel the watch instead of attaching to it. I tried resetting the watch twice but that did not help. I was finally able to get a charge by physically holding the charger to the phone and strapping it down, but this took 8 hours and I only got a charge 62%. It is our assumption that the magnet was placed backwards in either the watch or the charge.

b)   this is poop

c)   i thought this watch would replace my iphone (or actually I wouldnt have to buy one and watch is actually reasonable compared to phone cost) but it turns out WITHOUT THE PHONE THE WATCH DOES ALMOST NOTHING also battery life sux

Review #3:  toaster

a)    Mostly works well except something is catching on the bread and tears bits off that get “stuck” down in the toaster and hard to get out. So I tried to fish it out with a knife (with the toaster off, by the way) and got this big electric shock! My wide actually laughed at me and said next time just turn it upside down and shake it. So I tried that and burned the crap out of my hand! Toaster is going back for sure.

b)   I was so excited to buy a four slot toaster, morning arguments solved. However, this toaster was highly disappointing. The level that lowers the slots down is thin plastic and wobbly. The right side of the toaster quickly stopped lowing. The left side often burns part of the bread, while the rest of it is still cold. Overall, a shotty machine. Do not buy.

c)   I looked on line and read reviews and decided to get this one, HA! This does not even pop the toast up high enough to grab! It says that you get even toasting on both sides, not! It worked for about a week and after that half the side of toast would cook and then only half of a half, When I use the Bagle button the Bagle is cooked on both sides, not one like it should have been.

Review #4: Tom Danielson’s Core Advantage: Core Strength for Cycling’s Winning Edge (book)

a)   I would buy this book but not from somebody who was suspended for doping-specifically for using Testosteron-as a Physiciian I know that Testosteron is useful in the recovery and healing of tissues, especially muscles.If his training was as beneficial as he describes why did he need Testosteron-also being as long in the Pro Peleoton as he ,he must must be pretty stupid not to know how easy it is these days to discover Testosteron.Therefore with me he has no credibility and I will not buy the book

b)   It’s a shame how these books get published. The so-called co-author, Allison Westfahl, actually knows a lot about core strength training and theres lots of useful info here. Problem is she’s a nobody and couldn’t publish a book without tying it to a celebrity name so she let TD (aka Total Douche) pretend to co-write this. Almost worked but she should have hitched her wagon to a clean rider, if there are any left.

c)   I noticed the chapter on doping was missing. Can’t trust a doper. Maybe I will wait for the B sample of this book before buying again.

Review #5: cordless drill

a)   never should have bought cordless drill, remember when drills had a cord and you could just go whip it out and use it, now i always have to plan ahead and charge the batteries, this one particularly bad won’t hold a charge and tajkes forever to charge up do not buy!

b)   Only lasted two years and stopped working while my son was assembling soccer goals. Thought it was the battery and installed fresh one from the charger. My son came running to me yelling the drill was on fire. When I got to the drill smoke was pouring from the battery.

c)   came with black marks along handle, tip and back of drill. case had interior scratches, battery had a charge, and scratches, second battery had scratches. im not talking about scratches you could blame on rough shipping, this thing was dropped a few times outside of its case. nobody wants somebody elses tool. *cough* 

Okay, get those contest entries in! Remember, feedback@albertnet.us. 

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For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.

Book Review - "The Secret Race"

NOTE: This post is rated R for mild strong language.

Introduction

In this post I review The Secret Race —  Inside the Hidden World of the Tour de France:  Doping, Cover-ups, and Winning at All Costs, by Tyler Hamilton and Daniel Coyle.  I describe why I didn’t like the idea of buying this book; why this book is important and admirable; a general assessment of its readability and what it has to offer besides sordid doping tales; and the importance of the footnotes Coyle provides.  At the end I’ll address the obvious question of whether or not you should read this book.

Why I didn’t buy this book

I got this book at the library.  Of course I’ll pay good money for good writing, but I didn’t want to further enrich somebody who has made enough money already by cheating at sport.  If Tyler hadn’t doped, his career would have likely been short and/or mediocre and he’d have made tens of thousands instead of many hundreds of thousands of dollars, and wouldn’t have a book to his credit.  (As Coyle described in his forward, Tyler had approached him in 2004 about writing a book, similar to Lance Armstrong’s War, but about Tyler.  Coyle wasn’t interested:  “I liked Hamilton, and his feats on the bike were amazing and inspiring, but when it came to being the subject of a book, he was fatally flawed:  he was simply too boring.”)

If Tyler had pledged to donate all the profits from this book to, say, a junior development program for cyclists, I’d have bought a dozen copies and given them as gifts.  (I have no problem with a solid co-author like Coyle keeping his profits; after all, he never cheated.)  By donating his profits Tyler could have given back to sport he stole from, while also defusing the predictable argument that Lance’s legal team made—that Tyler was making up all kinds of lies just to make money selling books.

Why this book is important and admirable

We shouldn’t be too hard on Tyler for doping—obviously he wasn’t alone.  Indeed, one of the main points of the book is that practically nobody in that era could have made good money riding clean.  Whether or not that position is entirely true, it must be said that prior to this book, only one of the positive tests and rider suspensions of the last dozen years had yet led to a satisfying confession (and if Floyd Landis wrote a book, I might check it out too).  This sport has long lacked a complete picture not only of the shame and repercussions of getting caught doping, but of the trials and terrors of doping successfully.  Because of this lack, a rider of Tyler’s era could be forgiven for having taken the wrong message from rider suspensions—that you just better not get caught.

As mentioned a couple years ago in a blog post comparing Lance Armstrong to Eminem, I’ve long wished a rider found guilty of doping would come all the way clean, as Eminem has about his own drug problems.  Where are the tales, I wondered, of how scary it is getting a blood transfusion in a motel room; where’s the lurid life story, equivalent to Eminem’s, to scare our junior cyclists away from doping?  Where Eminem is brutally honest, doping cyclists—even convicted ones—have so often continued being as secretive as possible.

Well, I got my wish—this book gives plenty of gory details.  For example, Tyler describes a routine visit he made to Dr. Eufemiano Fuentes to have blood taken out of his body, to be transfused later:  “When the bag was full, I hopped to my feet.  I usually held my arm over my head for a few minutes, applying pressure with a cotton ball—but I had no time for protocol.  I taped on a cotton ball … and headed for the exit.  Then I was outside, on the streets of Madrid, racing down the street toward a cab, dragging my roller bag across the cobblestones, hoping I wouldn’t be late [for my flight home].  I was maybe two blocks from his office when I felt a strange wetness in my hand.  I looked down.  My hand was dripping with blood.  My sleeve was soaked.  I looked like I’d just murdered someone.”

Even more disturbingly, Tyler describes a botched transfusion of previously frozen blood he received in a hotel room during the 2004 Tour:  “[Fuentes] wasn’t there, so the Phonak doctors handled the transfusion; it went smoothly.  I went back to my hotel room to wait for Haven and Tugs to show up.  But a few minutes after I got there, I started feeling bad.  I got a headache, and felt my forehead:  I was burning up.  I had to piss, badly.  I looked down, expecting to see the usual slight discoloration from the [blood bag].  But when I looked down, I was pissing blood.  Dark, dark red, almost black.  It kept coming and coming, filling the toilet like a horror movie….  My fever kept rising.  My headache got worse.  Then I got up to piss again.  I didn’t want to look down.  Then I did.  Pure red.  Then I knew I was in trouble.  The bag was bad….  My body felt toxic.”

Beyond the service he performs in scaring the crap out of anybody who might think about blood doping, I admire Tyler for having the cojones to be so frank about Lance.  Obviously a vast amount has been written about Lance’s doping, but not as much about him being a bully, being insecure, and being a leader—probably the leader—in the doping culture of the last decade.  There is some very damning stuff in this book about Lance’s character, including something truly illuminating:  the notion that Lance was actually proud of his doping—of how clever he was at it.  For example, he came up with a plan to have EPO brought to his Postal team by motorcycle during the ’99 Tour de France.  One of his assistants, whom they called Motoman, would carry the EPO in a thermos and use his motorcycle to zip through the traffic and crowds.  Tyler writes, “Lance practically glowed when he told me about the plan—he loved this kind of MacGyver secret-agent stuff.”

Sure, the USADA testimonies of many other riders also portray Lance as a bully, but not in such detail, and it must be remembered that this book came before there was so much momentum to the story.  And of all the people in this world whom Lance hates—there must be many hundreds by this point—I can’t imagine a greater target for his wrath than Tyler has made himself by writing such a detailed account.

(It’s hard to imagine being literally afraid of any bike racer, but Lance is different.  He is the only athlete I’ve personally ever felt scared of.  I encountered him at the 2003 T-Mobile Classic in San Francisco, after he’d dropped out of the race, changed into street clothes, and given an interview.  He walked right by me, and I noticed his expensive leather jacket had a big pile of bird shit on it.  I almost tapped him on the shoulder and said, “Lance, man, some bird crapped on your jacket!”  But suddenly I had this feeling that if I laid a finger on him I’d be clobbered by his bodyguards.  (What kind of bike racer has bodyguards?)  Years later, because of Lance’s legendary vindictiveness, I was almost afraid to post, to this blog, an unkind spoof I wrote about his defense team.  Instead, I sent it as an e-mail to friends, claiming I came across the story in “Ladies’ Home Journal.”  A friend convinced me that a garage door wouldn’t fall on my head if I put it on albertnet, and so far he’s been right.  In contrast, I wrote a similarly brazen humor piece for dailypeloton about Floyd Landis, without ever worrying that he’d sic anybody on me.  I think if Floyd read that he’d probably just shrug, or maybe even laugh.)

Above all, Tyler’s book has helped the public understand how widespread doping was in that era, and he has brought to light the corruption above the riders’ heads that allowed doping to go on for so long.  I’m tired of reading about younger riders complaining that they’re bearing the brunt of all these confessions by the previous generation.  That’s a really narrow view.  All the Lance-era Americans who have recently confessed are helping to create a sport in which the younger dudes can be competitive without doping.  That’s a lot better career prospect than the “dope or quit” choice Tyler’s cohort was faced with.  Sure, many of the USADA witnesses have gotten a pretty sweet deal—only a six-month suspension, and they get to keep the big money they made during their dark past—but we can’t hold that good deal against them.  (What are they going to do—ask for a longer suspension?)  And in coming clean they still have to suffer the shame of confessing, and the hit to their reputation.  If the sport is actually cleaning up, the next generation will never have to go through all that.

How’s the read?

The Secret Race is a good read—depressing, but certainly engaging and well-written.  In this review I won’t dwell on the combination of fascination and depression I felt when reading about the doping itself.  Anybody who has read the rider affidavits on the USADA website already knows what I’m talking about.  Suffice to say, these guys did a tremendous amount of doping—more than I ever would have expected.

The prose in this book isn’t as razor-sharp as Coyle’s in Lance Armstrong’s War.  In a sense, I think that’s a testament to how well Coyle has allowed Tyler’s own voice to come through.  I get the sense that these really are Tyler’s words, and that Coyle’s main contributions are asking the right questions, drawing Tyler out effectively, and organizing vast amounts of anecdotes into a coherent narrative.  The book rings a lot more true than Lance’s autobiography, It’s Not About the Bike, which had a strong whiff of ghost-writer embellishment about it.  (Not that I didn’t enjoy that book, in my naïve rubber-bracelet days.)

Beyond the doping, there’s a lot of interesting day-in-the-life bike racer stuff in this book.  For example, there are anecdotes about diet.  Tyler describes having a meal in the presence of Doctor Ferrari, who was obsessed with the weight and body fat of the riders he coached.  “Eating meals with Ferrari was a nightmare,” Tyler writes.  “He’d eagle-eye each bite that went into your mouth; a cookie or piece of cake would bring a raise of the eyebrow, and a disappointed look.”  He also describes how Lance’s own discipline once let him down and he ate three pieces of cake:  “The other Postal riders watched him eat with a sinking feeling:  they know what was going to happen.  The next day in training was supposed to be an easy day.  But the cake changed that.  Instead, Lance had the team do a brutal five-hour ride, to burn off the cake only he had eaten.”  After Tyler left Postal, he continued to run up against the weight/diet obsession; his team manager Bjarne Riis advised him to “come home from a training ride, chug a big bottle of fizzy water, and take two or three sleeping pills.  By the time you woke up, it would be dinner, or, if you were lucky, breakfast.”

There are also some funny tales in the book.  Tyler describes the boredom of being at a training camp in Tenerife with new teammates who didn’t speak much English.  “We stayed in a big empty hotel on the top of a volcano; I roomed with Roberto Heras, and for almost two weeks we did nothing but ride, sleep, and eat….  We ate in the empty dining room.  We wandered the halls.  Roberto would try to say, ‘I am so fucking bored’ but since his English wasn’t great, he would say, ‘I am so fucking boring.’  That became our motto for the trip.  I am so fucking boring.”  

Another funny anecdote concerns the crappy camper that Postal had during the ’99 Tour, before they made it big.  It belonged to the team’s head mechanic, Julien deVriese.  “We called it Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, because everything shook when you drove; the cabinet doors tended to fly open on the gentlest curve; every hinge squeaked frantically; it was so loud that, when under way, you could barely talk over the din.  Julien had one rule:  No shitting in the camper.  He was very clear on this rule.  We could tell because every time we saw him, he would point his big finger at us and say, ‘No shitting in the campa!’ in a husky voice.  We informed Julien that shitting in the camper was likely to improve it.”

Of course Lance looms large throughout the book.  Tyler describes how, during the 2000 Dauphiné Libéré, Lance had an off-day on Mount Ventoux, and Tyler—with Johan Bruyneel’s blessing—soloed to victory.  After the race, Bruyneel went straight to the team bus, thinking only of Lance.  “’This was no big deal, man,’ Johan told Lance.  ‘It was probably the altitude.  Perhaps you have been training too hard, no?  We will talk to Michele [Ferrari]….’  After a few minutes of this, Johan asked, ‘Who won?’  Without looking up, Lance pointed at me…  That night at dinner, when everybody was toasting my victory, [Lance] would barely make eye contact.  It was like he was having an uncontrollable reaction, like an allergy:  my success in the race—which was good for Postal and therefore good for him—drove him bananas.”

Tyler describes how his ongoing improvement, and particularly a stress test he did with Ferrari in which he beat Lance’s record for a certain climb, began to make Lance feel threatened.  As a result, in the 2001 Tour, Tyler wasn’t given any EPO or blood transfusions, and thus struggled just to keep up, eventually finishing 94th.  In one stage, he struggled to make pace on the front:  “I felt a hand grab my jersey by the neck and pull me back, hard.  Lance’s voice, yelling in my ear at the top of my lungs.  ‘What the FUCK are you doing, Tyler?’ …  After that stage, Johan asked me to apologize to the entire team for my poor performance.”

Perhaps most illuminating of all is the very clear depiction of how the doping culture at Postal worked.  Nobody pushed the drugs on the riders.  Quite the opposite:  a rider wasn’t even offered them unless he made it into Lance’s inner circle.  Tyler describes the white lunch bags that these riders were given by soigneurs after a race:  “They were given only to the stronger riders on the team—Hincapie, Ekimov, Baffi, Robin.  The guys I thought of as the A team.  That’s when I felt a sinking realization:  I was on the B team.”

So when Pedro, the team doctor, finally offered Tyler a capsule of synthetic testosterone—a “red egg”—Tyler didn’t hesitate to accept it, and (at the time) felt no shame.  Quite the opposite, actually:   “The red egg was a badge of honor, a sign that Pedro and the team saw my potential.  I felt like this was a small step toward making the A team.”

Coyle’s footnotes

The Secret Race is a memoir, not an exhaustive journalistic exposé, but Coyle provides copious footnotes in which he elaborates on certain points, often citing other sources to validate Tyler’s claims. A good example is how Coyle describes the Catenay-Malabry doping-detection lab study that found EPO in six of Lance’s fifteen urine samples from the ’99 Tour.  The study itself isn’t news, but Coyle lines it up with Hamilton’s claim that that Motoman, the guy who delivered EPO to the Postal team, became exhausted and went home after stage 14.  “All samples taken after stage 14 tested negative,”  Coyle points out. 

While he’s at it, Coyle completely torpedoes the tired old “level playing field” argument that enables many diehard Lance supporters to ignore the importance of his doping:  “Perhaps more interestingly, it looks as though Lance was in the minority [of Tour de France EPO users] in 1999.  Of the eighty-one urine samples taken during the 1999 Tour that were not Armstrong’s, only seven tested positive for EPO, or 8.6 percent.”  Probably at least one or two of those positives were from Lance’s teammates.  In other words, Postal won the ’99 Tour largely because they were using EPO and most of the others weren’t.  Perhaps the others had been scared straight by the Festina scandal in 1998.  After the ’99 edition, noting what EPO could do for a former Tour also-ran (Lance had one 36th-place plus three DNFs), the other riders may well have decided it was “game on,” and went right back to doping.

(The notion that Postal’s EPO use in ’99 was the exception rather than the rule, and the notion that Lance pressured his teammates by claiming everybody else was doing it, is corroborated outside of this book by an instant-messaging transcript cited by cyclingnews between Jonathan Vaughters and Frankie Andreu.  The transcript—available on USADA’s website—was evidence in the SCA lawsuit of that year.  In the chat, Vaughters tells Andreu that Credit Agricole, the team he rode for after Postal, didn’t dope:  “So that’s when I realized Lance was full of shit when he’d say everyone was doing it.  As crazy as it sounds - [team leader] Moreau was on nothing.  His Hct [hematocrit] was 39.”)

Coyle’s notes are helpful when it comes to the matter of Tyler’s own impression of the risks he took, which may not be the same as Coyle’s impression.  To my mind, Tyler doesn’t always seem to grasp just how dangerous his doping truly was.  He lists cycling injuries he’s had—“elbow, shoulder, collarbone (twice), back, hip, fingers (multiple), ribs, wrist, nose”—and concludes, “When it comes to the risks of EPO, they tend to feel pretty small.”  He doesn’t seem to acknowledge the categorical difference between a relatively simple bone injury and the very complicated matter of blood chemistry.  I find it odd that he would compare the risk of crashing to the risk of doping even after the botched blood transfusion he describes, where he was pissing blood and running a high fever and had nobody to turn to for medical help. 

Coyle writes more frankly about the danger of blood doping than Tyler does when it comes to Tyler’s positive test.  Tyler doesn’t seem to have thought too hard about how he managed to have somebody else’s blood in his body.  He describes his defense, which was based on the test equipment or protocol being faulty, and seems to still doubt the veracity of the test. 

While Tyler doesn’t dwell on the question, Coyle does, in an extensive footnote:  “Presuming the blood test was accurate, how did someone else’s blood get inside Hamilton’s body?”  He cites Dr. Michael Ashenden’s analysis of the situation:  “Freezing blood is a multi-step procedure that includes several transfers and mixings with progressively stronger concentrations of glycol…  Because the cells are alive, you have to babysit this machine for hours at a time, and keep everything straight.  In a situation where Fuentes and his assistant, Jose Maria Batres (aka Nick), were handling the blood of dozens of riders, it would be possible to envision a scenario where Hamilton’s and another racer’s blood were accidentally mislabeled and/or mixed.  In addition, according to Spanish newspaper reports in 2010, Batres was suffering from dementia.”  I am struck by how lucky Tyler really was:  if the foreign blood he got hadn’t happened to be compatible with his, he’d be dead.

Should you read this book?

If you haven’t been glutted by all the rider testimonies against Lance; if you have been glutted but just can’t get enough of this guilty pleasure; if you’d like to get the perspective of a doping cyclist and an answer to the question “Why would you ever do that in the first place?”; if you’re looking for a way to find compassion for an entire generation of doping cyclists; if you’d like to get a feel for what it’s like, day-to-day, to be a world class pro rider; if you don’t mind reading something as depressing as it is gripping—then I think you should read this book.  But I’m not saying you should buy it.

Amateur Product Reviews

I’ve had some bad luck with cameras. I got a nice, compact new camera last spring, and when it was still new it suffered a little accident. I was riding on a gravelly road, of seriously steep grade, on a snowy day in Boulder, and decided to take a little “Self Portrait With Brother” while still pedaling. Max and I, crowding in to get into the photo, bumped into each other and the next thing I knew my front wheel had come off the ground and I was doing what amounted to a backward somersault on (and off) my bike. (I told you, it was a really steep grade.) In the process, my finger happened to press the camera shutter button, and I ended up with one of the most remarkable photos I’ve ever snapped:

With the hand not holding the camera, I maintained my grip on the bars, evidently never giving up hope that I’d somehow get the bike upright again. Alas, I could not, and in the fall I broke my camera. I sent it back to the manufacturer with a repair request form, writing in the “Description of Problem” area, “I fell with this camera and it broke.” I made no claim that it was defective. Remarkably, the manufacturer repaired it for free.

A Repeat Customer

When I got tired of loaning this camera to my daughter Alexa, I decided to get her a camera of her own for her seventh birthday. I started to research cheaper cameras (she’s only seven, after all), but my heart wasn’t in it. There’s just too much information out there to sift through, much of it contradictory and most of it highly complicated. I’d chosen my camera because a friend had one and it looked cool, and it was, and I ultimately decided to get Alexa the same camera, but in blue. I questioned the wisdom of buying such a fragile and (relatively) expensive camera for a young person, but Alexa never lost, broke, or misused her camera. Instead, I broke it.

I sent it in, and on the repair request form I wrote, “This broke. I don’t know how.” This time, they sent me a whole new camera. The new one looked a bit fancier—it sports more megapixels, anyway—but suddenly I needed to research it online. That may seem silly, and it is—after all, it makes no sense to research something you already own, and I wouldn’t have much recourse to return it to the manufacturer if I did decide it was lame. (I was starting to feel like the Fisherman’s Wife, to tell you the truth.) But feeling like this replacement was too good to be true, I had to know if this replacement camera was a loss leader, a terrible misstep by the manufacturer resulting in a glut of an unpopular model.

A Puzzling Review

I went to amazon.com and started reading the one-star reviews. It always surprises me how easy it is to find one-star reviews on consumer websites. It’s especially surprising with hi-tech products like digital cameras that are improving in leaps and bounds while their prices plummet. Consumers can really be fickle. One guy blasted my camera model based its requiring you to remove the battery to charge it. “Of course I got my money back!” he boasted. And to think I’ve been cheerfully taking my battery out to charge it, for over a year, blithely unaware at how irritated I should be about it.

Here is the first one-star review I found of my new camera:

“Too bad I couldn't give 1 star. I had an older Lumix that lasted two years. When that camera was stolen, I purchased this model from my local B & M. The first time I took it out, I used it 8 times. I put it back in the case and when I checked the camera the next morning, the LCD display was cracked in the back of it. This happened when it was in the padded camera bag I had in my pocket. I emailed panasonic, they emailed me back 5 days later and told me to send the camera with a check for $52.50 and they will tell me whether the warranty will be honored. 1/3 the cost of the camera, just to tell me if they will fix it. Unbelievable.”

This review is kind of a classic of the genre. First of all, it gets your attention with a blatant error: “Too bad I couldn’t give 1 star.” Um, actually, dude, you can give one star. In fact, you did. Then, he proceeds to give information that is completely unnecessary. If I’m trying to decide if a camera is good, what do I care his older camera was stolen? Does it reflect well on the product that a thief would want it? And was it really stolen? Throughout my childhood, “stolen” was a euphemism for “lost.” And does it matter where he bought the replacement?

Then, the guy’s description of how he broke the camera is laid out like a court case, like he’s been deposed. Make no mistake: he used the camera not, say, a handful of times, but exactly eight. (Who counts their camera usages? Or did he go back and reconstruct his precise usage based on JPG metadata?) And what does he mean, he “checked the camera the next morning?” The morning after what? And what did he check it for? Did he have a sneaking feeling it had spontaneously broken? And would a camera in its case really fit in his pocket? Just how big was this pocket? Could it be that putting a camera in a case in his pocket wasn’t such a good idea?

I suppose I wouldn’t nitpick so much were it not for the punch line of the review: the arrogant manufacturer wouldn’t stand behind its product. I have to agree with one thing the reviewer says: his story is unbelievable. In fact, I don’t believe it. If I’d had a great warranty experience only one time with this manufacturer, I could attribute my good fortune to a mistake. But twice these guys took care of me, even though I never claimed either camera was defective. How did this other guy have such a bad experience? Did his e-mail just tick them off? Or are we not getting the whole story?

Why Trust Amateurs?

You might ask why, with so many professional reviewers out there, I would seek out the amateur reviews to begin with. It’s a fair question. I think there are several good reasons.

First of all, I’m tired of professional reviewers who aren’t impartial. Pick up any buying guide magazine—Gear, Stuff, Complex—and (once you’ve gotten past all the babes) you may notice that the products “reviewed” are really just described, invariably in glowing terms. There’s never any bad news. Consider this: when’s the last time Bicycling magazine gave a bike a bad review in a road test? Believe it or not, in the magazine’s early history there actually were negative reviews: two, to be precise. The first was in 1981, and the bike was the San Tropez 710. It is a testament to the rarity of the bad review that I remember this so many years later. I can’t remember the specific complaints, only that the magazine completely trashed it. I don’t think anybody cared, though, because nobody had ever heard of this bike, nor has anyone since.

The next bad review in Bicycling was in 1982, and it was a review of the Motobecane Prolite. It was a glorious review, citing readings from Bicycling’s frame flex testing machine (which they called the Tarantula) describing massive frame flex. There were also subjective impressions; one staffer came back from a road test “laughing at the rubber bike.” I was thrilled at the magazine’s candor, and thus crestfallen a month or two later when they retracted the review, saying the Prolite was actually a very good bike. The magazine mysteriously carried its first full-page Motobecane ad in that same issue. I was young but not stupid, and recognized how this whole thing works. To this day, I’ve never seen another negative review of any bike in any bike magazine. And yet, I’ve spent enough time working in bike shops to know how many truly crappy bikes there are out there.

Another reason I’m not fond of professional reviews is that they’re just too complicated. Especially in the case of electronic items, the language is way too technical for me. Looking at camera reviews, I find pages and pages of stuff about ISO, lens faults, sensitivity, noise and noise reduction, recycling time, and so forth. I’m not a professional and I don’t know much about cameras and I really just want to know if a camera is easy for the average joe to use. Granted, I often come across amateur reviews that fail the “sanity test,” but if lots of reviewers have the same complaint, I can start to put some stock in it. For example, when I looked at amateur reviews of a laptop computer, tons of people had complained about the labels on the keyboard being too hard to read. I bought that very laptop, figuring it’d be a bargain based on all the bad reviews. (I have no use for key labels, as I use the totally nonstandard Dvorak keyboard layout, about which I’ll likely blog one day.)

But really one of the best reasons to read amateur reviews is simply because they’re amusing. For me they’re a guilty pleasure, like Parade magazine. For once, I don’t have to suffer a sense of inferiority while reading something. It’s bad enough that professional product reviewers far outpace my ability to understand them, but when I’m reading for pleasure it’s usually either a classic work of literature or an article in the New Yorker, either of which can be a humbling read. (I often commiserate with an M.D. friend of mine about the doctor/writer Atul Gawande’s obvious superiority to us. Not only is he a bestselling writer, but he’s an esteemed surgeon and an Associate Professor at Harvard, has degrees from Stanford, Oxford, and Harvard, and is more handsome than either of us. We like to joke that his kids probably love him more than ours love us, and that either of our wives would leave us for him at the first opportunity.) So yes, I’ll admit it, I enjoy the occasional foray into off-the-cuff—yet often impassioned—product reviews from mere mortals, especially the frustrated ones.

A Couple of Gems

Here’s a fun one-star camera review:

“I don't know. But I have a problem with the colors and noise sometimes when taking shots with this camera. The colors are not that shinny. When taking the photos without flash - even in day light - the photos still seems dark when displayed on my computer screen. It looks fine in the camera screen but not on the computer.”

I just love the opening: “I don’t know.” So humble, so honest. I could learn something from this approach, I know. About those non-shiny colors, though … I suspect this problem isn’t related to the camera, if the pictures look fine on the camera screen. This person probably has a bad computer monitor. I wish I could help him.

Don’t misunderstand me—finding fault with people’s reviews isn’t the point. Really, the best part is the little glimpse into people’s lives and worlds that the extraneous information can provide. Check out this one:

“My husband bought this camera in order to replace my 2 year-old Sony Cybershot that I have been using with a broken LCD screen for the past 8 months. However, I was so dissapointed because it has no video shooting option, as my old cybershot had..... I have an hyperactive crazy little dog that I love to catch on photos and videos and I cant do it with my new camera...”

This review has it all: the thoughtful husband, the stoic camera owner gamely making do with a broken camera for eight months, and best of all that hyperactive crazy little dog that she not only wants to make movies of, but wants to tell the camera-buying public about. (Never mind that this model of camera does have a video shooting mode that she must not have discovered yet. I actually get some added pleasure from the knowledge that one day she’ll figure out the video mode, and will delightedly run right over to her little dog to make her first movie.)

My Amateur Review Challenge

For no good reason other than to alert my readership, if any, to the e-mail feedback feature of this blog, and to train to you all in the use of said feature, I hereby issue my Amateur Review Challenge. What follows is a collection of reviews of a variety of products. For each product, there are three reviews: two real ones plus a fake one I made up. I challenge you to identify the fictitious review for each product. Send your submissions to feedback@albertnet.us. The first person to guess correctly on every review will get a prize. I don’t know what it will be, but it will be similar in value to the brand-new Bike Tires Direct patch kit that was won by the first person to sign up as a Follower of this blog.

Review #1: PC printer

a) The thing I didnt know about this printer or I would have not bought it was that it takes special photo paper that has this tear-off tab on it that you have to tear off and it doesnt always evenv work. HP is not the company it used to be, how can they make you do that. Bogus. I had a Canon Bubblejet before and it had no tab and the ink didn’t smear either. I took this one back and its a good thing I had my reciept.

b) I have purchased 3 of these for family members and all 3 came without the usb cable to plug them into the computer. which makes the printer useless. I contacted your company and they sent me another printer,and that one didnt have one either. I had to buy the cables myself. I dont understand how you can sell this printer without the means to use it.

c) Realmente no puedo dar ninguna opinion de sastifaccion por que el producto no llego a su destino. [Babelfish translation: "I really cannot give any opinion of satisfaction so that the product I do not arrive at its destiny."]

Review #2: The Alchemist (a novel)

a) The most mysterious part of this book is its popularity. I understand that it’s a simple fable and I'll even grant the “follow your heart” message may be a virtuous pursuit. But the manner in which this message is delivered is tortuous…. Instead of having to resolve significant conflicts himself, Santiago floats through the story guided by a sequence of serendipitously fortuitous events. Coelho attributes this to the “universe conspiring” to help him attain his Personal Legend. I attribute this to weak writing.

b) This incredibly over-rated book is a mixture of pure fantasy and mushy sentimentalism. It is more suited to children or to an American audience.

c) I read this book alongside What Is the What by Dave Eggers, about the “Lost Boys” in Sudan. The characters in Eggers’ book were realistic, and had real problems, and it was hard, in reading The Alchemist, to get excited about some schmuck searching for buried treasure. The Alchemist is a shallow, contrived, fourth-grade-reading level novel. Its millions of devoted fans should feel embarrassed.

Review #3: Anna Karenina (a novel)

a) The book is a great book even though it has fallen apart piece by piece during my read.

b) I can’t see how a book that was made into such a tight, well-paced movie that only lasted less than two hours. I thought I’d never get through it and was so boring, get to the point already.

c) Nabokov, you are a jerk

Review #4: Food Processor

a) OK, I really like this little mini-prep processor at the very beginning. The motor is strong, very easy to clean. However, this little guy only last for 10 time of use within 5 months. I handwash the bowl and found out there were cracks between the blade and the joint plastic. I emailed their customer service thru their website. It's been 10 days, no one even reply with a sorry!

b) I have had this thing for eight months and I never use it. I don’t see much use except greating cheese and then it’s a hassle to clean anyway. But the thing I can’t get is it was supposed to come with an instructive video and it but it’s VHS! Wake up people it’s 2009. I don’t even have a VHS anymore.

c) great chopper until you try to clean it. to screw the blade on tight, you are safe, to take the blade out of it's compartment to clean it, you must twist in the same direction as the sharp blades. this is the reason i am typing with one hand without the time to use caps b/c i am bleeding!

Review #5: Men’s Jacket

a) Shabby packing, was delivered rolled as a ball! The quality is poor, almost light as a fleece, and is a dirt magnet. I ordered thinking this brand is typically good, but not in this case.

b) Won't buy again! The lining got mold all over, the buttons were together, very hard to get apart and when I pulled them, the lining almost came off and so did the rusty buttons, is made in china that's why, if I knew it was made there will never buy it.

c) Loved the jacket at first, has that “lived-in” look I wanted, which my old jacket had but I think it was broken in by a real person wearing it around, it smelled like boiled cabbage and I couldn’t get rid of the smell. So this jacket I’m like “yes, it’s all worn in and doesn’t stink!” But then I read this little disclaimer tag that comes with and here’s what it says, I’m not making this up: “THIS GARMENT IS PREWASHED. We've put this J. Crew product through a washing process to create a softer, “lived-in” feel and look. This prewashing replicates natural aging without repeated wearings and washings. So this garment is a bit faded, a bit shrunk, and its seams are looser and less uniform (as shrinking is never completely even in all dimensions). There will also be some variations of shading and texture. In fact, some garments will have large bleached patches. Invariably, one sleeve will be longer than the other, and the collar may choke you, or else gape wide open and let cold air in. You may find that there are more buttonholes than buttons, and that the fabric may have large runs or tears in it. Some garments will give you years of service, but you shouldn't be surprised if your garment completely falls apart after just a few short weeks. These factors combine to give this garment its individual look and comfort. Please keep this in mind as you examine your new J. Crew garment: because we don't want to hear any complaints. Such variations are assets that contribute to the uniqueness and personality of all our prewashed apparel.” I was like, WHOAH! So I’ll probably return it, my god, but right now I’m actually enjoying it.

Okay, get those contest entries in! Remember, feedback@albertnet.us. Tell your friends! Tell your family! Good luck!

Postscript

If you would like to see the results of the fake amateur review quiz, click here: We Have a Winner!