Thanks for your reply!
1. I don’t think this is the right standard (or a fair standard) for a few reasons.
1a. I don’t recall Cummings claiming that this was a _comprehensive_ description of the “most important economic and political priorities.” But it’s been a while since I read the essay, perhaps you can correct me.
1b. Even if this essay was presented as a description of the top economic and political priorities, it’s always trivially easy to think of _some_ potentially highly important issue that wasn’t discussed. I think it’s a bad idea to dismiss an article on that basis. One could easily think of multiple potentially huge global issues that aren’t discussed at any length in _Doing Good Better_ for example. As such this seems like an unrealistic standard.
1c. This strikes me as an asymmetric demand for rigor. If someone wrote an article or blog post discussing their personal thoughts on how climate change, poverty, various forms of discrimination are all inter-linked as top priorities, I think it would be churlish and inappropriate to respond that this didn’t discuss (at sufficient length for your liking) technological risks or democratic reform or whatever.
2. Maybe he does, perhaps especially in one of the various digressions he goes into where he just starts talking about Quantum Computing or Set Theory or whatever. But I didn’t see anything particular in the review to suggest that he does. Per my original comment, it seems to me that you mostly just observe that he hasn’t discussed certain topics.
3. I think you presenting an argument for this would be worthwhile. Notably, he _does_ discuss democratic and democratic institutions at numerous points throughout the essay, so I think this would require engaging in more detail with the substance of his arguments.
I didn’t find this review very helpful. Hopefully I’ll be able to explain why and hopefully people will read Cummings’s essay for themselves.
As you note, this is not (straightforwardly) an essay about education. It’s a wide-ranging discussion of his views on a handful of core themes, and a series of disconnected thoughts on many topics. You might think these are vices in an essay, but I think it’s only fair to evaluate the essay in terms of what it’s actually trying to do.
As far as I can tell, it’s not trying to be a comprehensive political manifesto, but most of your criticisms seem to simply be objecting that he’s not talking about things you’d like him to talk about (or just not talking about them as much as you’d like):
- “One of the great failings of the piece is his failure to engage with climate change (while space exploration gets three full pages).”
- “Yet carbon emissions get very little airtime in his discussion of energy systems, and the impacts of climate change (heatwaves, floods, food shortages, and others) are not discussed at any point in the 235-page essay.”
- “There’s no discussion of the societal impact of advancing technologies… There’s nothing on how algorithms are interacting with our social structures, locking in biases, and systematically discriminating against women. Cumming’s essay has no real discussion of people, or reflection on lived experiences.”
- “Notably vacant from Cummings’ essay is any discussion of political representation, democracy, or even voting systems, which are in desperate need of reform.”
You also complain that “Often the text moves on to another topic without linking to the previous one, and without having developed the ideas much further.” But this is inevitable given that the essay ranges across an enormous variety of different topics of discussion. It might be frustrating to you as a reader if you didn’t want to read a loose collection of Dominic Cummings’s personal thoughts about multiple topics, but that’s what you signed up for in reading the essay. There’s nothing wrong with writing a personal essay which alludes to a wide range of topics without going into depth on most of them.
Notably, practically the only specific concrete criticism of anything in Cummings’s essay that I found in your review was concerning one of these many digressions on technical issues of interest to him that he goes into: “he draws false equivalences between the count of neurons in a brain and the processing power of computers, when this field still has many deep uncertainties” which, for one, is a fairly mild objection but also seems only tangential to the main themes (to the extent there are any) of the essay.
I think it would have been more useful if you engaged substantively with some of the arguments Cummings makes and explained specifically where you think he goes wrong. For example, you grant that “[Cummings] agrees that markets can fail, need to be regulated, and that the government plays an important role in fostering innovation.” But then you write “even advocates of market approaches, like Harvard academics Iversen and Soskice (2019) argue that successful capitalism has to always be embedded in the institutional features of democratic states” as though this you are pointing out a flaw in Cummings’s position. As it stands, if I hadn’t read Cummings’s essay, I would have virtually no idea from reading your review what his distinctive views are and I barely know what you actually disagree with him about.