What I've been reading (September 2022)

Book Haul

  • Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony, and Cass R. Sunstein, Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment (2021)

  • Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo, Good Economics for Hard Times (2019). Banerjee and Duflo are really, really good popular writers. While this is not *unheard of *among economists, it is really quite rare. Whatever you think of the policy positions, you’ll enjoy reading the book.

  • Rukmini S., Whole Numbers and Half Truths: What Data Can and Cannot Tell Us About Modern India (2020)

  • Stuart Russell, Human Compatible (2019). I want to thank Impact Books and Effective Altruism.org for shipping me a free copy of Russell’s Human Compatible. AI alignment research is an area I’ve neglected completely and it should be fun to dig in!

It’s been a long time since I went shopping in a physical bookstore - highly recommended. If nothing else, I got a sense of what’s being published, what’s new, and what the space in various genres looks like. They’re going to be a hassle to transport, but it’s the kind of hassle that’s easy to romanticise.

HPMOR

I’ve also been reading a lot of fiction. Howeve, instead of rereading my sparse collection of literary fiction or picking up a new Murakami, I regret to inform you that I have uncharacteristically plunged headfirst into Elizer Yudkowsky’s Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (link for mobile users). It’s a fanfiction where Harry Potter is a very, very annoying but *funny *hyper rationalist eleven year old with ambitions of remaking the world. I don’t know what the general standards for writing in fanfiction are, but this is not impressive. Part of me regrets this - part of me is enjoying the guilty pleasure. I feel like I will give up midway, but I’d recommend you at least try it - though you need a *lot *of tolerance for pretentious characters.

New Labour

I *really *enjoyed getting into British political documentaries. Particularly, I love reading about New Labour. I got through sets of memoirs — Tony Blair’s My Journey; Gordon Brown’s My Life, Our Times; David Cameron’s For the Record — over the last month. I also enjoyed watching documentaries. Particularly, a series with footage from inside Gordon Brown’s team when he was Shadow Chancellor and when he became Chancellor. The New Labour Revolution series from the BBC is also worth watching if you want a couple of perspectives.

Academic Reading

  • I’ve been curious about the research on social mobility for a long time — and the weekend gave me some time to get started with Raj Chetty’s very famous Where is the land of Opportunity? The Geography of Intergenerational Mobility in the United States (Chetty et. al., 2014). (“We use administrative records on the incomes of more than 40 million children and their parents to describe three features of intergenerational mobility in the United States.”)

  • I enjoyed reading Joseph Freer’s If I was the minister of health: democratising healthcare (Freer, 2021). Freer is opposed to the pro-market, privatising impulse in UK Health Policy. If he were health minister, he would change the constitution, establishing a separately elected legislature, along with a separate and expanded executive for health. Well, not just for health; under Freer's constitutional structure, the Ministry of Health would subsume three or four portfolios in the modern cabinet, with ministers under it having separate responsibilities for housing, welfare, social care, the NHS, public health, and patients.  Each of these seven "health" ministers would now have a seat in cabinet. 

    Now, I am somewhat suspicious of those who tell me that their policy goals require a permanent constitutional revolution. Since Freer does not want to go to the trouble of securing the health budget and ensuring more collaboration between ministries, he has decided that he will turn over the table instead. Freer would be running in an election in which the sole purpose was the promotion of health, instead of a budget that balances investment, growth, or defence with social spending.

    One must appreciate Freer's candor; unlike many other first-time ministers, he is open about his desire to tell the Prime Minister to sod off and to consolidate all available power under his portfolio. I am only surprised that he did not bother to annex the Ministry of Defence; what with cruise missiles and landmines being somewhat deleterious to a healthy and balanced lifestyle. 

    But this is expected. Freer is, of course, being modest when he suggests that he would consolidate in the Ministry of Health every aspect of human life from conception to death. He has small, incremental ambitions, like creating a legislative assembly separate from Parliament. I sometimes suspect that if they made a lepidopterist the minister for endangered species, he would quickly abolish the Magna Carta to preserve some speckled blue wing-flapper of unknown origin. 

    "Now, come, soyons raisonnables," you say? Alright. Let us be reasonable. 

Math

I’ve slowly begun to realise that my math skills are atrocious. I thought I could proceed straight into enough statistics for the social sciences. Naturally, I put out a call on Twitter.

@annihalated: Are any of you good with discrete math or stats? please do DM - would love to talk.

Various people were kind enough to reply, but talking to them quickly made me realise that I needed to revise starting all the way back to algebra. If anyone wants to teach me math, send me their favourite textbooks, or tell me about how they started relearning math in their twenties, do let me know! For now, I’m starting with AP Statistics and Youtube videos. Also, while this may not be particularly useful to me, I’m really enjoying reading about set theory!

Other Links

This analytical approach to style is so common that it can almost feel natural. On menswear message boards such as StyleForum, nearly every discussion feels like it’s part of The Dialectic, where members argue like Athenian philosophers or Tibetan monks over whether blue pairs with black, or if a shoulder seam is sitting in its “correct place.” If you look below the surface, however, you’ll find this approach has some important underpinnings that date back to the Enlightenment. Immanuel Kant, at first glance, seems like an unusual figure to reference in menswear. He was not particularly interested in clothes and had a generally negative view of fashion. Among his three critiques, he’s most famous for his first book, The Critique of Pure Reason. The Critique of Judgement, sometimes called the “third critique” because it came last, is the one that concerns itself with aesthetics. It seems like a diversion for a German idealist who primarily wrote about epistemology and ethics. However, Kant’s contemporaries Schelling and Hegel considered it one of his most important works (Schelling once advised students to read the three critiques in reverse order). Widely regarded as a seminal work on modern aesthetics, The Critique of Judgement has influenced how we view everything from paintings to pinstripes.