What I've Been Reading

It's been over six months since my last post, so it seems like a good time to try to push something out. I usually read for ten minutes or so in bed before going to sleep. Although it does take a while to get through longer books this way (I'm almost always reading non-fiction), over the course of a year I do manage to finish a few. That said, I'm usually nodding off as I'm doing this, so I don't have the best retention of the material. To that end, I thought it might be good for my future self to jot down what I've read recently and what the general gist was. (No guarantees on the accuracy of these recollections.)

The Death of an American Jewish Community: A Tragedy of Good Intentions, Hillel Levine and Lawrence Harmon

The World of Patience Gromes: Making and Unmaking a Black Community, Scott C. Davis

Though these two books deal with different geographical locations, they both discuss (among other things) the impact of urban renewal programs in the communities that they were supposed to help. One thing that stands out in both accounts is that, at the end of the day, lots of factors (internal and external) and personalities are involved in any kind of social / political process. Good intentions do not always lead to good outcomes, and what constitutes an acceptable rate of change is very dependent on personal experience and expectations. 

The Dawn of a Mindful Universe, Marcelo Gleiser

I don't remember much about this book, truth be told. One of the themes was that the universe has evolved to create beings like us who are now able to contemplate their own place in it. At the same time, for the average person, the sense of wonder, as well as the understanding that we are not apart from nature but rather a part of nature, has been lost. We need to get back to seeing the Earth that sustains us as a "sacred" entity if we want to remain in the picture. 

Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me), Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson

This book talked mainly about how hypocritical humans tend to be. We do everything in our power to maintain the fiction that we are as moral, kind, altruistic, reason-driven, etc. as we see ourselves to be. This can lead to problematic outcomes, such as prosecutors refusing to believe that the new discovered DNA evidence is actually proof of the defendant's innocence -- how could a prosecutor who prides themselves on being truth-seeking and moral, have made such an egregious mistake as helping to send an innocent person to jail?

Revolutionary Mathematics: Artificial Intelligence, Statistics, and the Logic of Capitalism, Justin Joque

This book likely deserves a more detailed reading in a less sleepy state than I gave it. The author is essentially making a Marxist critique of the commodification of knowledge in the service of capital that is possible given the explosion of machine learning and big data. For example, Uber is a transportation company that owns no cars, extracting value from the labor of the driver and the data collected from the passenger.