Thinking Complete

This post discusses two books by Michael Strevens: The Knowledge Machine: How Irrationality Created Modern Science and Thinking Off Your Feet: How Empirical Psychology Vindicates Armchair Philosophy . I loved the former, which tries to answer the core question in philosophy of science: why does science work so well? It’s a masterful synthesis of previous ideas and important new arguments, and it’ll be my go-to recommendation from now on for people interested in the field. The latter was… slightly less persuasive. But let’s start with the good stuff. The Knowledge Machine begins with a review of two of the key figures in philosophy of science: Popper and Quine. Historically, philosophers of science focused on identifying a “scientific method”: a specific way of generating theories, designing experiments, and evaluating evidence which, when followed, led scientists to the truth. Popper’s influential account of the scientific method focused on scientists trying to refute their hypothese...

I recently finished Shoshana Zuboff’s book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism . It’s received glowing reviews, but left me disappointed. Zuboff spends much of the book outraged at the behaviour of big tech corporations, but often neglects to explain what’s actually bad about either the behaviour itself or the outcomes she warns it’ll lead to. The result is far more polemical than persuasive. I do believe that there are significant problems with the technology industry - but mostly different problems from the ones she focuses on. And she neglects to account for the benefits of technology, or explain how we should weigh them against the harms. Her argument proceeds in three stages, which I’ll address in turn: Companies like Google and Facebook have an “extraction imperative” to continually “expropriate” more personal data about their users. They use this for “the instrumentation and instrumentalisation of behaviour for the purposes of modification, prediction, monetisation, and control.”...

I recently finished reading The Technology Trap , by Carl Frey. The book attempts to do two things: chronicle the role of technology in economic progress throughout history, and argue that automation in our own era parallels the first seven decades of the industrial revolution, during which the wealth from mechanisation failed to reach most citizens, leading to a populist backlash. I particularly enjoyed the first component, because until now I’ve read much less about the industrial revolution than I should have. That also means that I’m not qualified to evaluate the book’s accuracy. However, it had interesting discussions of: The technological prowess of the Romans, and why they were held back from industrialising both because of their slave-based economy, and also because of an implicit dismissal of the private economy. The development of some surprisingly important technologies during the Middle Ages, such as wind- and water-mills, better ways of accessing horsepower (via im...

Note: Alexey Guzey has identified a number of flaws in this book, casting doubt on its veracity. Pending further investigation, the information in this summary shouldn't be considered reliable. I read this book because I knew that it would tell me to sleep more, and I hoped it would cite enough scary statistics that I'd be likely to actually follow through. Well, it worked - I'm keeping a copy on my bedside table for the foreseeable future, just as a reminder. In addition to the exhortations to get more sleep, it contains a variety of other interesting and important facts about sleep. What is sleep? Human sleep consists of cycles lasting about 1.5 hours, each of which contains first a period of NREM (Non-Rapid Eye Movement) sleep, then a period of REM sleep. In brain scans, the former consists of slow, deep brain waves, while the latter shows the same frenetic activity as an awake brain. As the night goes on, cycles feature a higher proportion of REM sleep. This m...

"The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity."                                                    W. B. Yeats The idea that things aren't going great these days is pretty widespread; there's a glut of books pointing out various problems. Cowen's achievement in this one is in weaving together disparate strands of evidence to identify the zeitgeist which summarises the overall trend - in a word, complacency. There are at least two ways in which people can be complacent. Either they're living pretty good lives, and want to solidify their positions as much as possible. Or they're unsatisfied with their lives, but unwilling to mobilise or take the risks which could improve their situations. (People in the middle of the economic spectrum showcase aspects of both). What's the opposite of complacency? Dynamism and risk-taking ...

It’s difficult to write an accurate review of The Female Eunuch . It was an enormously influential book, but even immediately after reading it, I remembered the tone and mood Greer created much better than the content. Partly that’s due to her style: her prose is energetic and impassioned, though at times verging on bombastic. Greer's arguments are stories - first a sweeping claim, followed by a more detailed and vitriolic assessment of the psychology of her chosen targets, and swelling to some iconoclastic conclusion, phrased in a deliberately outré manner. Between these she weaves personal anecdotes, quotations, literary references and enough obscure words to have me continually reaching for a dictionary. The book is far from a modern sociological study, teeming with facts and statistics. Rather, it is equal parts continental-style philosophy and call to arms. To what purpose, exactly? It’s very easy to tell what Greer stands against - most things, it seems - but more dif...