AlGra reviewed Revolutionary Mathematics by Justin Joque
Review of 'Revolutionary Mathematics' on 'Goodreads'
3 stars
Philosophy books are usually like the mass sermon on Sunday: You can start from a point which will kind of makes sense, and extrapolate it to whate extreme in any direction you want. This book is more or less that. The author makes a series of claims where statistics and machine learning have been coopted and aligned with capitalist initiatives.
While I can believe that, there is a lot of claims that are really hard to digest, such as
Thus, objectification is not a rationalization, as the term is normally understood, but the process by which concrete domination (e.g., racism, sexism, imperialism and class exploitation) is translated into an abstract form whose origination and social elements appear to recede behind its objective mask.
My problem with this book is that it is describing a lot of valid problems in the hardest, most convoluted way possible, which make it suck. While …
Philosophy books are usually like the mass sermon on Sunday: You can start from a point which will kind of makes sense, and extrapolate it to whate extreme in any direction you want. This book is more or less that. The author makes a series of claims where statistics and machine learning have been coopted and aligned with capitalist initiatives.
While I can believe that, there is a lot of claims that are really hard to digest, such as
Thus, objectification is not a rationalization, as the term is normally understood, but the process by which concrete domination (e.g., racism, sexism, imperialism and class exploitation) is translated into an abstract form whose origination and social elements appear to recede behind its objective mask.
My problem with this book is that it is describing a lot of valid problems in the hardest, most convoluted way possible, which make it suck. While there is valid criticism on the course that statistics and ML have taken, especially in the last decades, a simpler way could be better to explain.
Maybe the worst part is that the author offers no solution. There is a call to work on the metaphysics of mathematics (???), but I have absolutely no idea what it means.
This, then, is the ultimate task of a revolutionary mathematics today: to work toward the future of mathematics and science, redefining their underlying metaphysics, with a full understanding of the political and economic stakes that both determine and are determined by the possibility of this future.
I don't know what to do with this quote. In summary, there are problems, but there is no solution. The Revolutionary Mathematics is a vacuous term that reflect more wishful thinking than anything remotely concrete, which is disappointing.