Adrian Buck > Recent Status Updates

"...you should not read a commentary by someone else until after YOU have read the book." - this applies to the Critique of Pure Reason apparently.

"Common experience is most relevant to the reading of fiction, on one hand, and to the reading of philosophy on the other." - well, a certain sort of fiction, and a certain sort of philosophy...

"[The complexity of comtemporary technologies] concentrates power into the hands of an ever-smaller number of people..." - Yes, that power comes from the demand for goods and services. Oppressing employees is also oppressing consumers. It's the self- limiting nature of economic power, again think 1930s.

"...any belief that technological progress will lead to 'the triumph of human capital over financial capital...is largely illusory" - history comes in waves, and at the moment we're back in the 1930s. Things looked bleak for human capital then too, a countervailing force is needed, I think it can't emerge until the boomer generation has crashed upon the shore.

"As the experiments progressed, the researchers realised that the benefits of combining human and machine intelligence worked both ways..." - this points to the more likely prognosis, that AI becomes part of the human phenotype, rather than an alien inteligent 'species'.

"All science is becoming the science of big data" - all new science, perhaps, because small data science was all done when data was expensive.

"Gate's law...as a result of wasteful and inefficient code and redundant features, the speed of software halves every eighteen months."

"It is also dependent upon the desires of its consumers, who have come to prize the shiny things that become smaller and faster every year. Moore's law is not merely technical or economic; it is libidinal." - The libido of managers of consumer technology companies may have more impact than the libido of consumers; a lot of technological advance seems redundant to me as a consumer.

"Few people have ever read any book in this ideal manner" - probably because there are few reasons for doing so. The only one I can think of is that you intend to write a scholarly response to the author's thesis.

"[The reader] must not render a critical judgement until he understands," - I often a critical judgement provokes understand, without it my reading is complacent.

"...teachability is an extremely active virtue. No one is really teachable who does not freely exercise his power independent judgement. He can be trained, perhaps, but not taught. The most teachable reader is therefore, the most critical" - I prefer Bacon on this.

"The vice of "verbalism" can be defined without regard for the thoughts they should convey and without awareness of the experiences to which they should refer." - he doesn't seem to appreciate that language is experienced, and they refer to cotext as well as context.

"State in your words" - what if your words are not nearly as precise and concise as the authors'? Recognising that you can't actually capture the thought as well as the author has probably the fullest appreciation of the thought. Some writers though are easy to precis; I'm beginning to think this book could be a lot shorter.

"But philosophers often find it necessary...or to take word from common speech and MAKE IT A TECHNICAL WORD." - I think what philosophers are doing here is defining their terms. In general, the more common a word, the more multiple its meanings.

"If every word had only one meaning, if words could not be used ambiguously, if, in short, each word was an ideal term, language would be a diaphanous medium. The reader would see straight through the writer's words to the content of his mind." - somewhat Platonic conception of mind, cf Sassure's conception of language.

"In fact, whatever your failures as a reader, the fault is usually in the book, for most books...are badly made books in the sense that their authors did not write them according to these rules." - this insistance on rules - rules for reading, rules for writing - is beginning to irritate. I agree that writing and reading are reciprocal, but the reciprocity lies in discovery not in the applications of rules.

"The best books are those that have the most intelligible structure. Though they usually more complex than poorer books, their greater complexity is also a greater simplicity, because their parts are better organized, more unified." - how close is this to my own notion that the best books have no waste, that every part of the book is of some relevance to the whole?

"Science is not concerned with the past as such. It treats of matters that can happen at ANY time or place." - true for experimental sciences, but what of historical sciences like geology, or paleontology? Science is concerned with explanations that exclude human agency.

"Theoretical books teach you THAT something is the case. Practical books teach you HOW to do something you want to do or think you do." - this distinction is only one of degree, as their classification of The Critique of Practical Reason suggests, I don't think Kant intended it as an instruction manual.

"Wi-fi, in short, will get worse" - this highlights the problems with this kind of forecast: global warming predates wi-fi and its technologies continue to evolve more rapidly than the fossil fuel technologies that drive global warming. My guess is that wi-fi will continue to get better while global warming will continue to get worse.

"Weather that is nice is often weather that is wrong. The nice is occuring in the immediate and individual, the wrong is occuring systemwide" - perhaps climate change gets so little political traction because the majority is experiencing better weather whereas the victims of climate change remain a minority.

Goodreads doesn't actually support inspectional reading - table of contents, index, blurb, examples of the text. But Amazon's 'Look Inside' does. Why doesn't Amazon add this feature to Goodreads?

"Given the option of relinquishing decision making, the brain takes the of least cognitive effort" - so says Thinking, Fast and Slow but only the majority of brains, engaged brains are more cautious. Humanity could be headed for another evolutionary bottle-neck.

"At the last survey, bots counted for seventeen of the top twenty most prolific editors and collectively make 16 per cent of all edits to [Wikipedia]"

'the agency of non-human actors' - oxymoron?

"Technology is not mere tool making: it is the making of metaphors" - wary of flacid thinking about metaphor (see Metaphors We Live By but like this idea, especially when he links it to 'to one who has a hammer, everything looks like a nail'.

"A college degree ought to represent general competence in reading such that a graduate could read any kind of material for general readers and be able to undertake independent research on almost any subject" - the first half of this shoots too low, the second too high.

"Because of widespread faith in the law...resorting to long-lived feuds and family vendettas, while extremely frequent in the middle ages, is unknown in Roman Society" - this is despite the one rule for the rich, another for the poor situation?

"The Greeks had managed to convince the Roman Authorities to impose discriminatory measures against the Jews...' - Racism in Europe it all starts here.

"Whether it was in the frozen north of Scotland or the torrid desert of the Sahara, Virgil had to be learned without errors." - some evidence for a comnon curriculum, but what percentage of the population participated?