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Time of the Magicians: Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Cassirer, Heidegger, and the Decade That Reivneted Philosophy

By Wolfram Eilenberger

Meh, don't have a ton to add besides the title pretty well captures the contents. The bigraphical details of these guys’ life are interesting but I still find 20th century philopsophy, especially in the style of Heidegger and Wittgenstein, to be impenetrable nonesense.

The Polymath: A Cultural History from Leonardo da Vinci to Susan Sontag

Peter Burke

Again, very accurate title. I gave up after about 75 pages since it was exremely tedious.

The Misinformation Age: How False Beliefs Spread

Cilin O'Conner and James Owen Weatherall

I have a meta-gripe about this norm where we expect every book that talks about some sub-optimal feature of our world to include the author's proposed solution. Sometimes it's okay to just point out a problem and say “I dunno, not sure how we fix this….” More to the point, the “solution” in a number of cases seems really poorly considered and bolted on to the end of the book because someone's editor told them they had to have it.

Anyway, this is a book about how disinformation spreads. The authors do a nice job of explaining the specific dynamics by which false beliefs can take hold in a community either through the unintentional malfunction of human social networks or the intentional manipulation of bad actors who have an alterior motive. The examples are the ones you would probably expect: Semmelweiss and the hand washing (there must be some law where you have to include this anecdote in any book that dicusses epistomology), the tabacco industry from the 1950s to the 1990s and the fossil fuel industry from the 1980s until the present. And of course, there is a discussion of the current “fake news” environment since the 2016 Presidental Election.

Overall it is interesting and the authors do a great job explaining the dynamics underlying some of our common inuitions but I think they probably take the argument a bit too far. A lot of the basis for their explanations are stylized agent-based models which try and model the dissemination of knowledge through connected networks of Bayesian reasoners. And it is a useful model for sure but I think they fall prey to the Ludic fallacy and mistake their stylized model for the vastly more complex world of actual human social networks, which are much less stable and subject to vastly more feeback. One obvious point would be that all of the examples of bad actors spreading disinformation failed. We have all long since accepted the consensus that smoking is bad for our health (and is a huge risk factor for developing lung cancer) and the consensus on climate change is fairly strong now (to the point where outright denialism isn't the preferred strategy of those tryinng to prevent meaningul action).

I make this point because the authors propose some rather extreme measures at the end of the book that I think are wildly unwarranted. The market place of ideas does work, it is just not as fast to converge to the truth as we would like and it is possible for bad actors to slow that convergence by muddying the waters on important issues. And if that is the case then I think you need to make a strong case that your preferred alternative is actuallly better in some tangible way.