Digifesto

I have been reading and writing for a long time. Every once in a while I have thought, “I should write a book”. I starting thinking about the scope of the book, get overwhelmed, realize that I don’t have the time, and give up.

Not too long ago, some PhD students I know suggested that I should write a book, which is very encouraging — somebody might actually read the book!

I thought about it again recently and settled on some fundamentals:

• I will write multiple books, and two books I’ve tried to write before (about ethics and metaphysics) are going to come later, after the first book.
• I am nowhere near where I want to be to write a book about politics and economics; that’s my next research agenda with the computational economics and multi-agent systems tools.
• What I have written about quite a bit already is epistemology and scientific method. That’s a real passion of mine, and it’s one where I feel my views have solidified.
• This is probably also a topic where I’ve got a somewhat original and deep perspective, given my interdisciplinary romping, relative to what others have done.
• Because this isn’t what I’m interested in researching next, and because it’s a topic that I think everybody should know about, I’m free to write this as a (aspirationally) popular book, trying to walk the reader persuasively through interesting arguments and history, rather than trying to establish my expertise among a crowded field of other experts.
• Since this problem is never going away, and indeed only gets more confusing with, e.g., AI and other technical infrastructure, I’m not in a rush to finish it.
• This is a good setup for my future research, since in many ways it’s a public-facing account of why my (now much more narrow and difficult to get into) research makes sense to do.

So, there we go!

A few surprising things about getting started. First, GenAI tools are useful, or at least seem useful, when outlining a book. Rather than force somebody else to listen to me rattle off ideas for what to include, I can rattle off my ideas to a CLI tool, and it slots those ideas into the outline and draft materials for me. Cool!

Second, I feel, philosophically, in good shape. There are good reasons for believing in things, good tests for things. There’s no need to be ‘post-truth’ about anything. The anti-science side of the science wars, and various skeptical positions along the way, have robustly lost their argument and I can explain why. Critical counter-epistemologies can be incorporated back into a robust constructivist epistemology without sacrificing objectivity. I’m bullish about objective human knowledge and its continued accumulation.

Third, it’s very comforting looking at historical epistemology, because it never changes. I’m going to start with Socrates. But there’s also a surprising amount of material to add based on developments in the last 20 years, and a lot of this has to do with technology and statistical methods. I think what might be useful is explicitly connecting the problem of epistemology to the mathematizations of knowledge that are at the heart of knowledge infrastructure. This is useful to do, but not located in any discipline that I know of.

Fourth, I think this work can be helpful as “AI for science” as well as “AI-powered misinformation” take off. A lot of the book will be about technology and institutions and their recursive impact on knowledge. The book will have implications for how to navigate the world that could otherwise be confusing for the next generation of people who have to live in it. I have my children in mind when I work on this — I want to be able to efficiently convey a lot of stuff I’ve learned to them. That’s motivating.

Fifth, I’m actually qualified to write this book. My official degrees are related to this field. I’m working on adjacent areas. No imposter syndrome!

Now, it’s only been a few days and the book outline already spans 2500 years of history and a bunch of fields of study. It is quite probably “too ambitous” and maybe it will never get written or read. But… the project feels compelling, and it’s a fine “first book” attempt.

So, onward!