Three-Toed Sloth

The Books I Am Not Going to Write

Attention conservation notice: Middle-aged dad contemplating "aut liberi, aut libri" on April 1st.

... and why I am not going to write them.

Re-Design for a Brain

W. Ross Ashby's Design for a Brain: The Origins of Adaptive Behavior is a deservedly-classic and influential book. It also contains a lot of sloppy mathematics, in some cases in important places. (For instance, there are several crucial points where he implicitly assumes that deterministic dynamical systems cannot be reversible or volume-preserving.) This project would simply be re-writing the book so as to give correct proofs, with assumptions clearly spelled out, and seeing how strong those assumptions need to be, and so how much more limited the final conclusions end up being.

Why I am not going to write it: It would be of interest to about five other people.

The Genealogy of Complexity

Why I am not going to write it: It no longer seems as important to me as it did in 2003.

The Formation of the Statistical Machine Learning Paradigm, 1985--2000

Why I am not going to write it: It'd involve a lot of work I don't know how to do --- content analysis of CS conference proceedings and interviews with the crucial figures while they're still around. I feel like I could fake my way through get up to speed on content analysis, but oral history?!?

Almost None of the Theory of Stochastic Processes

Why I am not going to write it: I haven't taught the class since 2007.

Statistical Analysis of Complex Systems

Why I am not going to write it: I haven't taught the class since 2008.

A Child's Garden of Statistical Learning Theory

Why I am not going to write it: Reading Ben Recht has made me doubt whether the stuff I understand and teach is actually worth anything at all.

The Statistics of Inequality and Discrimination

I'll just quote the course description:

Many social questions about inequality, injustice and unfairness are, in part, questions about evidence, data, and statistics. This class lays out the statistical methods which let us answer questions like "Does this employer discriminate against members of that group?", "Is this standardized test biased against that group?", "Is this decision-making algorithm biased, and what does that even mean?" and "Did this policy which was supposed to reduce this inequality actually help?" We will also look at inequality within groups, and at different ideas about how to explain inequalities between and within groups.

The idea is to write a book which could be used for a course on inequality, especially in the American context where we're obsessed by between-group inequalities, for quantitatively-oriented students and teachers, without either pandering, or pretending that being STEM-os lets us clear everything up easily. (I have heard too many engineers and computer scientists badly re-inventing basic sociology and economics in this context...)

Why I am not going to write it: Nobody wants to hear that these are real social issues; that understanding these issues requires numeracy and not just moralizing; that social scientists have painfully acquired important knowledge about these issues (though not enough); that social phenomena are emergent so they do not just reflect the motives of the people involved (in particular: bad things don't happen just because the people you already loathe are so evil; bad things don't stop happening just because nobody wants them); or that no amount of knowledge about how society is and could be will tell us how it should be. So writing the book I want will basically get me grief from every direction, if anyone pays any attention at all.

Huns and Bolsheviks

To quote an old notebook: "the Leninists were like the Chinggisids and the Timurids, and similar Eurasian powers: explosive rise to dominance over a wide area of conquest, remarkable horrors, widespread emulation of them abroad, elaborate patronage of sciences and arts, profound cultural transformations and importations, collapse and fragmentation leaving many successor states struggling to sustain the same style. But Stalin wasn't Timur; he was worse. (Likewise, Gorbachev was better than Ulugh Beg.)"

Why I am not going to write it: To do it even half-right, relying entirely on secondary sources, I'd have to learn at least four languages. Done well or ill, I'd worry about someone taking it seriously.

The Heuristic Essentials of Asymptotic Statistics

What my students get sick of hearing me refer to as "the usual asymptotics". A first-and-last course in statistical theory, for people who need some understanding of it, but are not going to pursue it professionally, done with the same level of mathematical rigor (or, rather, floppiness) as a good physics textbook. --- Ideally of course it would also be useful for those who are going to pursue theoretical statistics professionally, perhaps through a set of appendices, or after-notes to each chapter, highlighting the lies-told-to-children in the main text. (How to give those parts the acronym "HFN", I don't know.)

Why I am not going to write it: We don't teach a course like that, and it'd need to be tried out on real students.

Actually, "Dr. Internet" Is the Name of the Monsters' Creator

Why I am not going to write it: Henry will finally have had enough of my nonsense as a supposed collaborator and write it on his own.

Logic Is a Pretty Flower That Smells Bad

Seven-ish pairs of chapters. The first chapter in each pair highlights a compelling idea that is supported by a logically sound deduction from plausible-sounding premises. The second half of the pair then lays out the empirical evidence that the logic doesn't describe the actual world at all. Thus the book would pair Malthus on population with the demographic revolution and Boserup, Hardin's tragedy of the commons with Ostrom, the Schelling model with the facts of American segregation, etc. (That last is somewhat unfair to Schelling, who clearly said his model wasn't an explanation of how we got into this mess, but not at all unfair to many subsequent economists. Also, I think it'd be an important part of the exercise that at least one of the "logics" be one I find compelling.) A final chapter would reflect on the role of good arguments in keeping bad ideas alive, the importance of scope conditions, Boudon's "hyperbolic" account of ideology, etc.

Why I am not going to write it: I probably should write it.

Beyond the Orbit of Saturn

Historical cosmic horror mind candy: in 1018, Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni receives reports that the wall which (as the Sultan understands things) Alexander built high in the Hindu Kush to contain Gog and Magog is decaying. Naturally, he summons his patronized and captive scholars to figure out what to do about this. Naturally, the rivalry between al-Biruni and ibn Sina flares up. But there is something up there, trying to get out, something not even the best human minds of the age can really comprehend...

Why I am not going to write it: I am very shameless about writing badly, but I find my attempts at fiction more painful than embarrassing.

Self-Centered; Modest Proposals