"In his book Direct Democracy Worldwide, David Altman moves beyond the classic narratives of Greek city-states and New England town halls to demonstrate that this form of government is pertinent today despite its still relatively modest use at the national level. However, although some forms of direct democracy, particularly citizen initiatives, may enhance a larger representational context, others offer little opportunity for authentic popular voice. Direct democracy here is a tool, rather than a system, a tool that has the potential to be harnessed to refine the limitations of representation. Thus, Altman provides a rich evaluation of the possibilities for such input—a much needed addition to this literature—while initiating a longer term agenda for scholars of democracy.
"More historic understandings of direct democracy have offered a simplistic understanding of its use: Citizens gather in a common place, or through a ballot, and themselves determine the policy that will govern their polity. Yet Altman provokes the reader to consider a much more complex constellation of possibilities in his first chapter. Rather than consider direct democracy as a Weberian ideal type of political order, he effectively offers a vision of this process as a function within a larger representational system."

(etc., etc.)

This is one of the most beautifully annihilating book reviews I have ever seen, and I say that with deep jealousy.

Have I really never bookmarked this before?

"To understand what Murray does in Coming Apart, imagine this analogy: A social scientist visits a Gulf Coast town. He notices that the houses near the water have all been smashed and shattered. The former occupants now live in tents and FEMA trailers. The social scientist writes a report: 'The evidence strongly shows that living in houses is better for children and families than living in tents and trailers. The people on the waterfront are irresponsibly subjecting their children to unacceptable conditions.'
"When he publishes his report, somebody points out: "You know, there was a hurricane here last week." The social scientist shrugs off the criticism with the reply, "I'm writing about housing, not weather." "

---All parts of Frum's review are worth reading.

Very nice

"Steven Pinker has read the reports on civilian deaths in the Afghan war, mass rapes in the Congo, “going postal” shootings in the United States, and our youths’ seeming addiction to Call of Duty video games. Yet the Harvard cognitive scientist and wildly effective popularizer of evolutionary psychology brings you the Good News: humans are now far less violent than they have ever been. In roughly 700 pages of text and many dozens of graphs, Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature takes us on a long trip through millennia of brutality and sadism to arrive at a time, our time, when we ain’t going to study war—nor, for that matter, wife-beating, animal torture, or burning at the stake—no more.
Professional historians have known this news for decades; in their field, it is conventional wisdom that violence has declined over the centuries in both rate and savagery. Now Pinker brings his considerable analytical powers and rhetorical skills to tell this story to the wider public. He can be heard on NPR, seen on The Colbert Report, and read about in New York Times features. The Times’s Nicholas Kristof is ready to award The Better Angels of Our Nature a Pulitzer. Unlike the historians, many lay readers and listeners are surprised. “Really?!” Stephen Colbert asked in one of his less parodic moments. Really.
Pinker also means to deliver on the book’s subtitle, “Why Violence Has Declined.” But while his chronicle is powerfully and convincingly straightforward—rates of violence have indeed decreased—his explanations are less so. They may even undermine his campaign for a biological view of the human condition."

"Curiosity plays a key explanatory role in this book, but, curiously, Huff makes no attempt to explore what early modern Europeans thought about the subject. Historians Hans Blumenberg and Lorraine Daston have traced how, in the late Middle Ages, Europeans took a new view of curiosity: By transforming it from the vice of inquisitiveness into a cognitive virtue, they legitimated scientific inquiry. Unfortunately, Huff does not draw on the work of Blumenberg and Daston. Instead of tracing changes in what curiosity has meant, he assumes it has always been the same thing, and that Europeans just happened to have a surfeit of it, whereas others had a deficit. His attempt to establish this point, though, is flawed: Huff identifies things about which Europeans were curious, and then shows that Chinese and Muslim scholars were not equally curious about the same things. Because India had astronomers, Huff writes, “we can assume” that they would find the telescope “of intrinsic interest”—but he does not explain why that would be the case. Because of this methodological asymmetry, he misses areas in which non-Europeans demonstrated that they were quite capable of curious investigation—natural history, for example.

But Huff is not interested in what non-Europeans were curious about, because it was not modern science. In his account, the “breakthrough” or “march to the modern scientific revolution” appears inevitable. Despite occasional wrong turns onto “garden paths,” European scientists by and large made “progress” toward goals that they could not “resist.” Because Huff sees modern science as the inevitable result of curiosity, he assumes that other sophisticated cultures must have lacked it. The “discovery machine” was like a lighted match tossed into a powder keg; if it fizzled out for Chinese and Islamic scholars, that must have been because their intellectual powder was damp."

Review of _Pattern Theory: The Stochastic Analysis of Real-World Signals_. Leaves me quite uncertain as to whether there is anything new here. But then I was never quite able to get the _point_ of Grenander's school, unless it was something like "base your learning algorithms on generative models with nice algebraic structure", which could be rather more simply expressed.

"(I'm not sure I'd want to be one of Beckwith's doctoral students: they may be expected to bury themselves with him.)"  --- I have this book, and it is everything Danny's review makes it out to be, for good and ill.

The two counter-moves Blackburn makes here (facts don't give us reasons to do anything without desires; and the "so what?" response to "because the Inherent Moral Order says so") are ones I like.  But they are also ancient, and it is hard for me to imagine that Parfit doesn't at least _try_ to counter them.

Sounds like it's more useful as source material than for any conclusions.

"This sentence shows another failure of the book: a blurring of the line between experimentation (trial-and-error) and decentralization. Throughout most of the book he uses experimentation as a synonym for decentralization (tacit knowledge and all that) and is in favour of both, but sometimes - as here - he separates the two to make his argument fit."

To put it a bit more kindly than Tom does, the _cognitive_ value of traditions like Turkle's is "heuristic" in the older sense: they _make up_ speculations and conjectures, but do not combine them with data in a way that has any real force as evidence.  In the case of psychoanalysis, the track record even as heuristic is not exactly encouraging...

Henry on _The City and the City_, which I still haven't gotten to.

Anderson reviews vol. II of Runciman's _Treatise on Social Theory_ (the key part).

I have no idea at all whether this is fair, but it's a glorious rant.

Obviously, I need to read this book.

Jordan Ellenberg on math in the age of Romanticism.

This is indeed one of the pleasures of reading about travel: "I used to subscribe to Outside magazine. Not that I needed the tips on hiking boots or information on cutting edge mountain bike technology — what I really liked were the tales of either horrible death or I-survived-but-I-am-now-missing-a-few-toes. There was always someone getting trapped on the side of a mountain, or having to walk 50 miles out of the Amazon after their homemade lightweight aircraft crashed. I’m sure there are people who read these stories of bravery and adventure and thought, “I am totally hiking in Brazil for my next vacation,” but I always read the stories curled up on the couch, under a blanket, eating a stack of Saltine crackers, and thinking cozily to myself, “This is something I will never, ever have to deal with.”"

"In that sense, this time really is different: while the first great global financial crisis was followed by major reforms, it’s not clear that anything comparable will happen after the second. And history tells us what will happen if those reforms don’t take place. There will be a resurgence of financial folly, which always flourishes given a chance. And the consequence of that folly will be more and quite possibly worse crises in the years to come." --- I wonder, does Krugman read Ken MacLeod? If not, someone should send him a copy of The Fall Revolution.

In which Jo Walton writes about Plato in exactly the same way she writes about fantasy novels, and it works.

review of a possibly-interesting book.

Reviewed by Jo Walton, with her customary acuity.

Sam Jordison reads his way back through the Hugo winners. Fun.

Well, that's one book I won't have to bother with.

Review of Fodor & Piatelli-Palmarini.

"Reinventing cars means reinventing cities". This does sound interesting...

Actually, this kind of makes me want to read _The American Evasion of Philosophy_; which I guess shows that McLemee isn't being _simply_ malicious.

This leaves me unsure of whether or not I want to read it.

Warning: I'm serious about the time-sink tag.

"To be skeptical of climate models and credulous about things like carbon-eating trees and cloudmaking machinery and hoses that shoot sulfur into the sky is to replace a faith in science with a belief in science fiction. This is the turn that “SuperFreakonomics” takes, even as its authors repeatedly extoll their hard-headedness. All of which goes to show that, while some forms of horseshit are no longer a problem, others will always be with us." --- I would like to say that this is unfair to science fiction, but that would involve some special pleading...

Mo Tkacik on Malcolm Gladwell. Massive, to be read later.

On Crawford's _Shop Class as Soulcraft_.

The end of an era: d^2 finishes his review of _Freakonomics_ which began back when the book came out. " I swear that my notes for this review (begun in 2003!) contain the draft passage: When future generations ask the economics profession 'What were you doing while the great bubble built up ahead of the Second Great Depression?', and we have to reply 'Lots and lots of quirky little working papers about sumo wrestling and speed-dating', it is going to be really, really, fucking embarrassing"."

Hear, hear: "Oh, another terrific masterpiece that’s not at all like the last book."

Shorter review: Q: Was Darwin motivated by anti-slavery views in formulating the theory of natural selection? A: Not as far as any evidence presented suggests, no. Nice book, though. --- I wish my harsh reviews could be as polite-yet-devastating. (Actually, I don't, but I wish that I wished that.)

Review of Tett's _Fool's Gold_. But this scene is NOT in my copy - what gives? "Fool’s Gold begins in a conference room in Nice in spring 2005. Tett admits that at that point she was baffled by the technical language – ‘Gaussian copula’, ‘attachment point’, ‘delta hedging’ – used by the participants. However, before joining the FT she had conducted fieldwork in Soviet Tajikistan for a PhD in social anthropology, and the ethnographer in her was now reawakened. The conference reminded her of a Tajik wedding. Those attending it were forging social links and celebrating a tacit world-view – in this case, one in which ‘it was perfectly valid to discuss money in abstract, mathematical, ultra-complex terms, without any reference to tangible human beings.’"

Scott McLemee reviews an ethnography of Wall St.

Wow does Caldwell sound like a thoroughly unpleasant idiot.

Despite the niceness of Steve's review, I wrote my own: http://bactra.org/reviews/fox-rational-market/

Review of Hendry's _Econometrics: Alchemy or Science?_

The great Jo Walton appreciates Dan Simmons's great _Hyperion_. I have one quibble: one should also read _The Fall of Hyperion_, and _then_ stop.