Joshua Stein > Recent Status Updates

Haven't read anything from Patternmaster in probably 15 years, and I'm honestly unsure if I've ever read this one (or just parts). Really looking forward to it.

The major mcguffin of the book and longtermist approach is that we should treat possible de re future persons as individuals deserving impartial assessment of interests; the "apocalypse scenarios" discussion just sort of abandons that to talk about the de dicto class of civilizations, which is a pretty serious inconsistency and raises problems.

There's some interesting philosophy here, but it's buried in some really weak (to the point of being distracting) pop social science, including both history and sociology. The discussion of slavery and contingency is useful conceptual background on contingency, but it's a mess re: the actual historical issues.

It's going to look like I finished this book abruptly, but this is actually the end of the substance of the book in the kindle edition that I'm reading.

A Republican Senator lecturing on the importance of a new Glass-Steagall (but for tech) is sort of like a professional boxer warning you about the dangers of getting repeated concussions.

So, the last chapter is just a regurgitation of the comments by Dina Srinivasan on anti-trust suits against Google. Which is entirely reasonable; Srinivasan's work is good, but readers should maybe just look at that instead.

Perhaps the most interesting point of incoherence is the sheer volume of time that Hawley spends railing against what is essentially a libertarian conception of freedom (where freedom is individual and consists in non-interference) to advocating basically entirely for weak "personal responsibility" solutions.

I support reforms to CDA Sec 230, but Hawley's discussion of the issue is plainly ridiculous and quickly descends into conspiracy theories. This is not surprising. Hawley shows throughout the book that he's an intellectual lightweight regurgitating partisan lines on these issues, without consideration for their internal incoherence.

Actually laughed out loud when Hawley cited Marco Rubio as an authoritative source on tech companies' business practices.

I genuinely wonder if Hawley has ever thought about the actual problems of traditional media monopolies, since everything he says about information pushing is equally true of the Murdoch papers, Sinclair, Fox, Comcast, etc. He just kind of ignores that to focus on social media, very narrowly.

Now Hawley is touting the various Robert Epstein white papers as gospel, despite their infamous lack of peer review and their widespread criticism by actual computer scientists (which Epstein is not; he's a psychologist). It's really bad, but it supports Hawley's conspiracy theories, so he'll run it out anyway.

This book is a painful slog. In addition to not knowing the basics of the technology that he's trying to regular, Hawley wants to paint himself as a sort of grand hero. It's normal for political books written in anticipation of a presidential run (which this is), but it's tedious and silly.

We've now entered the "Josh Hawley is a mental health and social psychology expert" portion of the book, which is basically just a parade of basic correlations, asserting causation when it supports the argument and ignoring the findings when it doesn't.

Two increasingly weird features. (1) Hawley doesn't understand the basic mechanics of the technologies he's writing about, which the median milennial could likely explain to him. (2) His discussion of labor dynamics gets into pretty hilariously Marxist territory, given his right-wing political orientation.

Hawley writing dramatically about the Facebook IPO is pretty silly. Hawley seems to think that talking about a product as "revolutionary" is somehow a big deal and surprising, rather than just the standard approach to excite investors. (He also seems to think Zuckerberg wrote the S-1... which is very unlikely.)

It's still not clear from Hawley's discussion what either "corporate liberalism" (his ideological adversary) or "Big Tech" (his boogeyman) are. He's ennumerated some people and corporations, but it's all broad gestures coupled with boilerplate ideological claims and weakly cited "history." Is "Big Tech" just Apple, Google, Twitter, and Facebook? ISPs like Comcast and Charter are not mentioned at all.

Through the first three chapters, we get a wierd combination of Hawley superimposing his ideological positions on a very narrow set of historical events, focusing his discussion of corporate power on Morgan (rather than, say, the southern plantation owners or Hearst) and the dynamic with Roosevelt. It's all self-serving as "successor to Teddy" narrative.

After rambling about Roosevelt v Morgan, we finally get to the acknowledgement that the first major labor-exploiting force in America was the southern plantation, but Hawley shrugs this off as not part of his anti-corporate argument and immediately pivots to the railroad construction projects.

There's a curious gulf between Hawley's ideological boogeyman ("corporate liberalism") and his targets (Apple, Google, Twitter, and Facebook). I wonder whether Hawley sees that his arguments about corporate power apply to, say, DowDuPont just as easily as Facebook.

Unsurprisingly, the book is basically just an ideological screed that collapses into self-parody. "I'm like Teddy Roosevelt" pivots to "super-secret codes called algorithms," which pivots on his target audience not even understanding the basics. Because that's who'll buy the "arguments."

So, this got very sketchy in chapter 3. I’m not sure what’s going on, but the metaphors are really weak and carries much further than is appropriate.

Not sure how much of what Raz says here is intended as primer or genuine discussion of conceptual analysis. Feels like the former; maybe it is the latter and just feels very old hat in the contemporary context where we’ve done this a lot.

If this view is Kant’s politics, then no thank you.

Kant scholarship is very good. I’m becoming a bit more skeptical of the readings of Rawls and Habermas, though.

Kant scholarship feels terrific, but made skeptical by the pretty bad and uncharitable account of rational autonomy.

Almost done. Great read; funny and accessible, making for a very solid primer on some core concepts in applied epistemology and it’s relation to politics, social epistemology, etc. My major frustration is that I want more... which is a sign of how good the book is.

Continues to be an excellent and succinct read.

So far: astute, well-argued, and funny.

I’m enjoying the book, but it bounces around a lot without tying the threads together as clearly as I’d hoped. Some of the messages are clear, but I do worry some is getting lost.

Actually doing this as a review, so won’t really be posting comments here or on a blog or anything.