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hammo's review against another edition
3.0
Very interesting book. Trivers is so far outside of what you expect a successful academic to be like that it made me reconsider the whole category of "academics".
The blurb on the back describes this book as being in the tradition of You're Surely Joking Mr Feynman, and this is an apt comparison. Feynman too was a very unconventional academic (or at least, he didn't conform to my idea of a conventional academic), and in those memoirs he discussed all kinds of wacky adventures from reforming the Brazilian education system to getting into a bar fight to partying for several days straight with prostitutes in Las Vegas. But with Feynman, there was always a sense of that at the end of the day he had his priorities right and nothing would get too out of hand. Like when he starts getting concerned he might be heading towards alcoholism so becomes a teetotaller.
Not so with Trivers, who, were it not for the fact that he's a very smart guy, would no doubt have spent large chunks of his life in prison. He's a big drug user. There's one story where he gets pulled over by the police for drink driving like a maniac, and narrowly avoided being done in for possession of cocaine by virtue of the fact that he hadn't been able to find any. And he was a big marajuana user his whole life. Here's a nice photo of him in a marajuana plantation:
There's another story where he gets arrested for being drunk and acting dangerously around a moving vehicle. The following day, his jailers are acting extremely wary around him and he can't figure out why. His cell mate eventually explains to him:
Almost immediately after this, comes the most incongruous paragraph transition I've ever seen:
As well as drugs, sex and violence also played pretty major parts in Trivers' narratives. Most of his field work was done in Jamaica - which he tolerated despite it being one of the most violent countries in the world in no small part because of its sexually promiscuous norms. At one point Trivers laments his younger self's naivety because he didn't pursue a threesome when one might have been within reach. At another point Trivers stabs a big Jamaican guy (with arguably commensurate provocation) and then lacerates himself to make it look like damage was evenly done to either side (and thus avoid Jamaican's ineffectual justice system). He was also a member of the Black Panthers and didn't have any issue with affiliating with what sounded like a bunch of reprehensible thugs.
Aside from Feynman, the other person who Trivers really reminded me of was Hunter S. Thompson. Here's a bit which sounded particularly HST-y:
And here's a photo of Trivers is looking very much like a Gonzo journalist next to W.D. Hamilton:
Sometimes I wonder how brilliant people end up in cul-de-sac disciplines like zoology. If you're really smart you go into physics or maths because 1) those are the highest prestige disciplines, 2) it's where the problems are that are most tractable to throwing a bunch of brain power at them (ie, no legwork required), 3) they become Schelling points for smart people to congregate to (and smart people will want to be with their own kind). If you can't cut it as a mathematician or physicist, then you try out computer science or statistics. Then maybe psychology or philosophy. Eventually you get to the lowest rungs of sociology and dance studies. But every now and then a genius ends up at one of the lower rungs and revolutionises the field. Why? Why didn't they follow the natural flow of things to end up at maths/physics where they belong? Trivers' story sheds some light on how this can happen. He started out doing a maths degree at Harvard (so far so good), but soon suffered a mental breakdown and subsequently went so far off the rails in terms of antisocial behaviours that there's no way he would've fitted in with the conventional bourgeois lifestyle of high-prestige academia.
That's all very cynical. Here's a more inspiring take away message from this book: You don't have to choose between living a low-risk, unadventurous, conformist lifestyle and achieving social prestige and intellectual fulfilment. If you play your cards right, you can have it both ways.
The blurb on the back describes this book as being in the tradition of You're Surely Joking Mr Feynman, and this is an apt comparison. Feynman too was a very unconventional academic (or at least, he didn't conform to my idea of a conventional academic), and in those memoirs he discussed all kinds of wacky adventures from reforming the Brazilian education system to getting into a bar fight to partying for several days straight with prostitutes in Las Vegas. But with Feynman, there was always a sense of that at the end of the day he had his priorities right and nothing would get too out of hand. Like when he starts getting concerned he might be heading towards alcoholism so becomes a teetotaller.
Not so with Trivers, who, were it not for the fact that he's a very smart guy, would no doubt have spent large chunks of his life in prison. He's a big drug user. There's one story where he gets pulled over by the police for drink driving like a maniac, and narrowly avoided being done in for possession of cocaine by virtue of the fact that he hadn't been able to find any. And he was a big marajuana user his whole life. Here's a nice photo of him in a marajuana plantation:
There's another story where he gets arrested for being drunk and acting dangerously around a moving vehicle. The following day, his jailers are acting extremely wary around him and he can't figure out why. His cell mate eventually explains to him:
"You don't remember what you were yelling when they brought you here last night?" I did not. "You were cursing them left and right, calling them mother-fuckers for holding you for the night."
Almost immediately after this, comes the most incongruous paragraph transition I've ever seen:
In 1980 I had a prestigious fellowship from the Smithsonian and space provided to do a year of tropical research in Panama.
As well as drugs, sex and violence also played pretty major parts in Trivers' narratives. Most of his field work was done in Jamaica - which he tolerated despite it being one of the most violent countries in the world in no small part because of its sexually promiscuous norms. At one point Trivers laments his younger self's naivety because he didn't pursue a threesome when one might have been within reach. At another point Trivers stabs a big Jamaican guy (with arguably commensurate provocation) and then lacerates himself to make it look like damage was evenly done to either side (and thus avoid Jamaican's ineffectual justice system). He was also a member of the Black Panthers and didn't have any issue with affiliating with what sounded like a bunch of reprehensible thugs.
Aside from Feynman, the other person who Trivers really reminded me of was Hunter S. Thompson. Here's a bit which sounded particularly HST-y:
It was these actual details [of a murder] that soon came to trouble me and, in fact, set me off on a ten-day tear in which I ended up "investigating" the crime, sleeping two to four hours night, smoking ganja [marajuana] continuously, and so polarizing the community that by the end of my stay some men were carrying guns against me, and I had to seek refuge in my lawyer's home By then I had also had several physcial fights, both in Southfield and elsewhere, inccluding one in a Kingston night club that resulted in an icepick being shoved almost completely though my left hand.
And here's a photo of Trivers is looking very much like a Gonzo journalist next to W.D. Hamilton:
Sometimes I wonder how brilliant people end up in cul-de-sac disciplines like zoology. If you're really smart you go into physics or maths because 1) those are the highest prestige disciplines, 2) it's where the problems are that are most tractable to throwing a bunch of brain power at them (ie, no legwork required), 3) they become Schelling points for smart people to congregate to (and smart people will want to be with their own kind). If you can't cut it as a mathematician or physicist, then you try out computer science or statistics. Then maybe psychology or philosophy. Eventually you get to the lowest rungs of sociology and dance studies. But every now and then a genius ends up at one of the lower rungs and revolutionises the field. Why? Why didn't they follow the natural flow of things to end up at maths/physics where they belong? Trivers' story sheds some light on how this can happen. He started out doing a maths degree at Harvard (so far so good), but soon suffered a mental breakdown and subsequently went so far off the rails in terms of antisocial behaviours that there's no way he would've fitted in with the conventional bourgeois lifestyle of high-prestige academia.
That's all very cynical. Here's a more inspiring take away message from this book: You don't have to choose between living a low-risk, unadventurous, conformist lifestyle and achieving social prestige and intellectual fulfilment. If you play your cards right, you can have it both ways.
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