Books I Wish Existed

For a while I’ve been collecting a list of interesting book-length projects. Since I’m never going to write the bloody things, I figured it’d be better to throw them into the light of day and see what daylight makes of them. Here is a preliminary, first stab at a list of books I wish existed: books that haven’t been written yet, but could be.

A collection of short books on the history and interpretation of U.S. constitutional amendments

One under-explored feature of the US constitution is its deep cultural, as well as judicial, role in modern American politics. Each amendment has its own motivations, historical context, and judicial precedent; but each amendment also serves as the starting point for contemporary arguments for or against certain policies: even, today, the policies of private companies.

I’d like to see a series of short, concise, focussed books – think roughly the length and depth of the OUP Very Short Introductions series – with each volume focussed around an amendment to the U.S. constitution. Each book could discuss the amendment’s historical context, important cases in its subsequent judicial precedent, and the moral and legal and institutional justifications for the amendment and how they have changed.

Most amendments would have their own volume, while some of the more arcane amendments might be bundled together, where appropriate. The 18th & 21st are a natural pairing; the 13th, 14th and 15th sit snugly together in terms of their shared historical context, but are perhaps each significant enough, with their own rich set of continuing precedent and relevance, for their own volumes; perhaps the 3rd, 4th and 5th. It might also be interesting to conclude the series with a volume on the amendments that didn’t get passed: amongst many others, the ERA, balanced budget amendments, the We the People amendment.

Seeing Like A Startup

Scott’s Seeing Like A State is an excellent piece of political epistemology, not because he makes a powerful moral argument to curtail the absolute power of the state – which he does – nor because of the trenchant analysis he applies to the material and sociopolitical conditions under which the tools of statecraft are likely to be abused – which he gives – but because it grounds the analysis in a Weltanschauung, an all-encompassing frame of reference, a set of spectacles that underpin the identity of those who wear them. To see like a state is not just to see the world a certain way, to plan with a specific framework, to write with a specific dictionary, but also to be somebody.

Isn’t the same true of startup-land? Isn’t working in a startup with its techno-optimism and its studied disregard of conventional wisdom and Disruption with a Capital D a form of world-view? Weren’t we decades ahead on remote work and Agile / Lean Startup approaches to product development? Don’t startups, especially tech startups, have a distinctive set of incentives and respond to a distinctive set of internal and external cues? Isn’t this weird (physical or virtual) Bay Area we inhabit a conduit for a specific mode of thought, a Weltanschauung, a pair of spectacles?

A full-length biography of Évariste Galois

Évariste Galois died aged 20, after being shot in the stomach with a pistol. He died a gregarious yet unlikable, angry young man, but he bequeathed us a small elliptic body of mathematical work that has proven to be incredibly fertile.

The short biographies that accompany discussions of his work are useful and evocative, but focus almost exclusively on either his precociousness, or the Potemkin-romanticism of his death. His life was short but full of activity, sadness, anger, intense adolescence, mental illness and revolutionary politics.

The best biography of him so far (fr) focusses on Galois-as-mathematical-figure (‘personne’ vs ‘personnage’). I’d like to see a full-length biography of Galois-as-boy and Galois-as-man, as well as Galois-as-mathematician: something that draws out the dynamics of a Republican and Bonapartite household in restoration Paris, the stability of his mother and bipolarity of his father (who himself committed suicide when Évariste was 15), the friends and foes, real and imagined, that shaped this troubled young boy.

I’ve been trying to write this book for a while, but have put the project on hold. Perhaps I’ll resurrect it one day.

Uses and abuses of popular science

The effective communication of science is incredibly important. What the electorate understands and values about scientific output can translate meaningfully into policy outcomes, on the one hand, and our continued ability to discover more about the world on the other. (At its limit, it can cause deadly incentives failures when the scientific bureaucracy needs to reengage a science-saturated public).  Simplifying without talking down is a tough job, and the very best writers do it with elegance and wit and humanity. But so much of it is reductionist, factually incorrect, statistically ignorant, sensationalist drivel.

Writing about science poorly harms us all. Being excessively confident about scientists’ predictions – “toast causes cancer!” – shifts our focus onto the wrong things, or erodes trust in the output of science when it turns out that, you know, the world might be a little more complicated. Being excessively cynical about science’s output is so often a tiresome postmodern ploy to import political solutions to yet-understood social issues.

I’d like to see a book on popular science and the popularisation of science: what good it can do when it’s good, what harm it can do when it’s bad, and how we can get more of the former and less of the latter. I’d also like to learn more about how science fiction fits into all this. We will never get to a stage where science is not weaponised in one direction or another – discovery is, as the physicists of the Manhattan Project discovered, the beginning of the moral story, not the end of it – but with a better understanding of how science is reported, we might be able to give people the tools to at least discount the views of the most egregious of offenders.

What could science look like?

The way that modern science is structured – the categories and classifications of physics, biology, chemistry, computer science, mathematics, philosophy, the social sciences – forms a reasonably arbitrary and path-dependent structure. A few changes in how humans organised themselves at various stages, how projects got funded, and which questions happened to be salient (for cultural or contingent material reasons), and we have a very different body of knowledge, structured along different lines, today. What, for instance, would modern AI look like if the centre of gravity in computer science hadn’t drifted away from cybernetics and the HCI-focussed research tradition during the ARPA golden years, and toward applied mathematics and algorithm design? What could biology look like if our best mathematicians were more interested in biological systems rather than physical systems? What would Newton have done if he hadn’t spent so much time pursuing alchemy?

A good moral, economic and psychological investigation into paternalism.

I have a set of libertarian-ish (which is to say, mostly negative) aesthetic reactions to paternalism, and, in a trivial sense, ‘paternalism is bad’ seems true by definition – at least on a normative reading of ‘paternalism’. Naturally, these intuitions have come into much sharper focus throughout the pandemic. But state interventions in private lives are nothing new, in many cases they are basically uncontroversial (e.g. seat belts) and there are a whole host of moral and economic arguments in favour as well as against.

Perhaps paternalistic reasoning is our default mode of thought and respect for individual freedom only gets bolted on in certain contexts? If you really believe that such-and-such a lifestyle is immoral, harmful materially and spiritually to he who practices it, why wouldn’t you want to intervene? Liberalism is a position most have to contort themselves into. I’d like to see a modern book-length treatment of this subject, exploring the changing relationship between individual and society, ideally within a framework that make sense of big data, the long death of privacy, and crypto- or techno-libertarianism.

Aesthetics in politics.

Hume never got to finish his ‘examination of morals, politics, and criticism’, but if he had, I imagine much of the project would be spent grounding political discourse in terms of human sentiments like approval and disgust. Jonathan Haidt offers a modern-day version of this story, arguing for the centrality of psychological states in understanding politics and religious discourse.

But one thing that often gets ignored, I think, is how much aesthetics play a part. People find views they dislike not just disagreeable but ugly, and often detached logical reasoning takes a backseat to matters of taste. I’d wager that a lot of opposition to virtue signalling, for instance, is simply that it seems distasteful, or uncouth, or something like that.

To what extent do we elevate matters of taste to matters of shared social importance? (There’s an interesting Twitter thread here on conservatism and aesthetic sense, which might begin to address these issues.)

The House of Uncommons: the rise and fall of excellence in politics

Why has politics lost its cultural cachet? Why do we pay our governors so little relative to other, arguably better run, countries – and certainly less than a lot of private-sector high-status jobs? Are our politicians getting more incompetent and panderous, as they do indeed seem to be? When was the golden era of the politician? What characteristics should we try to select for? Given the unpredictability of democracy and the epistemic credentials of the average voter, how can we reshape our institutions to better encourage the selection of these characteristics?

The Aesthetics of Programming Languages

One thing that often gets lost amongst the computer science jargon and expediencies of writing functional software is that there’s an important aesthetic dimension to programming, a concern with the beauty of the code and algorithms we write. We throw around words like ‘beautiful’ when we talk about code, but we’re usually just gesturing toward some muddy intuitive notion, something like ‘clean’. There’s been little attempt to define these words more rigorously, or explore other aesthetic or aesthetic-adjacent virtues, such as simplicity, or parsimony.

It’s not merely syntactic, either. Much of what a programmer does is invent abstractions, extract out pieces of a system into reusable and more generic chunks. Some abstractions are intuitively better than others. But on what grounds? It’s not just “how widely applicable is this thing”, or “how performant is this thing”, or “how few lines of code does this thing take to implement or call”. There’s a notion of expressivity, the capacity for the abstraction to open and close the right set of logical doors, that is crucially important, and, crucially, misunderstood.

It runs deeper than just the code that actually gets written. Different language design decisions force us to think about our code in different ways, and to structure our programmes along different fault lines. Type systems force us to think about our domain before we think about the processes we apply in that domain. Pure functional languages force us to think about the flow and transformation of data. Different languages, sometimes, though by no means always, designed for different tasks, start with different mental primitives which change both how we write code now, and how the norms of the broader language ecosystem evolve.

The great irony of programming: instructing computers can be a deeply human thing. It would be fun to see a thoughtful little book exploring these questions in more detail.