By Any Other Nerd

Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes Filterworld is one of those books that I appreciated as much for the questions it reinforced as for the arguments it made. Kyle Chayka offers a rich account of how algorithms shape the culture we consume and, in turn, the culture that gets made as a result of that process. I found myself nodding along with much of his analysis, though less engaged with some of his biggest conclusions. One of the book's greatest strengths is that it doesn't pretend algorithms emerged from nowhere. Chayka traces a longer history of recommendation and filtering before arriving at today's digital platforms, and that historical context gives the book a depth that many critiques of social media and algorithmic culture lack when they frame it as entirely new (that is the concerns that a media-ecosystem create). At the same time, I wanted him to push that history even further. Where I most disagreed with the book was its framing of what feels genuinely new. Chayka...

Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes Stories, Dice, and Rocks That Think is at its strongest when Byron Reese is showing that the ways we think about the world came from somewhere. Storytelling, mathematics, probability, and (less so) artificial intelligence can feel so normal to us that it is difficult to imagine a world without them. Reese’s book helped make those habits of thought feel strange again. The book traces a progression from humans using language and telling stories, to using abstract concepts like mathematics, to developing ways of predicting the future, and eventually to creating “rocks that think” (computers). I found that movement through the history of thought a useful means of sensemaking, albeit one that still feels a bit arrived at in hindsight. Regardless, it's still compelling. It offers an accessible way to consider thinking devices (conceptual or physical) as most distinctly human: our ability to communicate, externalize ideas, imagine what has not happened, ...