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juliangerez 's review for:
What's Our Problem?: A Self-Help Book for Societies
by Tim Urban
There are plenty of interesting ideas here, and I like the vertical distinction of high-rung and low-rung thinking—the drawings are also great.
That said, I take issue with the overall framing of the book. I expected something quite different from the title—this isn't a "self-help book for societies", it's a dissection of a very specific issue. Further, I expected something quite different after reading the chapter that said "these next two chapters are going to annoy both the right and left!" when suddenly the entire rest of the book (like 2/3rds of it!) felt like a screed against what Urban calls the "social justice fundamentalism" of the left with just a few final pages of ideas/solutions... While I would have enjoyed reading his analysis/dissection of "SJF", and even agree with him at a variety of points, it felt insidious to setup the book in the way he does toward the beginning. To this point, I generally agree with the notion that "SJF" is a "small-l" liberal threat, I do not agree at all with the proportion of attention given to it nor the embeddedness of its proponents in actual positions of power (most obvious by looking at who are the two major party candidates for president today in the USA… the Supreme Court cases that are being argued as I write this, etc.)
I also find his views about social media, especially at the end to be naive. Algorithmic content curation != the last bastion of free speech, since algorithms that maximize engagement prioritize inflammatory content.
Finally, because everything about immutable characteristics like race is "post-treatment", there's no way to know what proportion of observed differences stem from discrimination versus inherent traits, and so I think it's reasonable to be overtly cautious, and after all a key liberal tenet is that all men are created equal, so we shouldn't be focusing on any differences that *are* inherently biological anyways. The small section on the GWG (even as he acknowledges that controlling for, for example, occupation doesn't rule out the fact that women may self-select into certain occupations for discriminatory reasons!) is odd, as is the section about how we underestimate the proportion of victims of police violence who are non-white while ignoring normalizing by population.
That said, I take issue with the overall framing of the book. I expected something quite different from the title—this isn't a "self-help book for societies", it's a dissection of a very specific issue. Further, I expected something quite different after reading the chapter that said "these next two chapters are going to annoy both the right and left!" when suddenly the entire rest of the book (like 2/3rds of it!) felt like a screed against what Urban calls the "social justice fundamentalism" of the left with just a few final pages of ideas/solutions... While I would have enjoyed reading his analysis/dissection of "SJF", and even agree with him at a variety of points, it felt insidious to setup the book in the way he does toward the beginning. To this point, I generally agree with the notion that "SJF" is a "small-l" liberal threat, I do not agree at all with the proportion of attention given to it nor the embeddedness of its proponents in actual positions of power (most obvious by looking at who are the two major party candidates for president today in the USA… the Supreme Court cases that are being argued as I write this, etc.)
I also find his views about social media, especially at the end to be naive. Algorithmic content curation != the last bastion of free speech, since algorithms that maximize engagement prioritize inflammatory content.
Finally, because everything about immutable characteristics like race is "post-treatment", there's no way to know what proportion of observed differences stem from discrimination versus inherent traits, and so I think it's reasonable to be overtly cautious, and after all a key liberal tenet is that all men are created equal, so we shouldn't be focusing on any differences that *are* inherently biological anyways. The small section on the GWG (even as he acknowledges that controlling for, for example, occupation doesn't rule out the fact that women may self-select into certain occupations for discriminatory reasons!) is odd, as is the section about how we underestimate the proportion of victims of police violence who are non-white while ignoring normalizing by population.