Old Notes

Slides and notes aren’t always identical to what was taught in class, and may be too elaborate/terse or contain my own original errors.

Lecture Notes on Others’ Research

These notes were created during seminars at the Weizmann Institute and Hebrew University (2017-2018), where I presented papers by other researchers.

2017

• Garland’s Estimate Revisited—Laplacians of Simplicial Complexes [GW16]
  June 11 — High-dimensional Expanders seminar, Hebrew University of Jerusalem

• Liquid Democracy [BBCV11, KMP18]
  December 5 — Foundations of Internet-enabled Democracy seminar, Weizmann Institute of Science

2018

• MAXCUT Is UGC-hard to Approximate [KKMO07]
  January 3 — Student-led Computational Complexity seminar, Weizmann Institute of Science

• Pseudorandom Permutations of a Prescribed Type [NR02]
  February 1 — Introduction to Cryptography course, Weizmann Institute of Science

• Liquid Democracy [KMP18, GKMP18]
  June 4 — Fair, Accountable, and Transparent Algorithms seminar, Weizmann Institute of Science

• The Margulis-Gabber-Galil Expanders [M73, GG81, T14]
  July 24 — A Theorist’s Toolkit course, Weizmann Institute of Science

Science, Technology and Society (STS) Reading Journal

In Fall 2020 I took the introductory course STS C200 at UC Berkeley’s Center for Science, Technology, Medicine & Society. The course made use of three learning techniques: reading, journaling, and discussing.

With some hesitation, I’m sharing my reading journal. Some excuses/disclaimers: we were reading fairly quickly (each entry marks one week), and entries were limited to 2-3 pages. I may have missed some key points and messed up the ones I haven’t, but I know I’ve learned a whole lot in the process.

Warm thanks to my fellow students who were wonderful partners in discussion, and to Massimo Mazzotti for patiently guiding us through it all. It was a great experience.

1. Politics and Historiography
   • The German Ideology, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (1845-46).
   • The Social and Economic Roots of Newton’s Principia, Boris Hessen (1931).
   • From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe, Alexandre Koyré (1957).
2. Early Sociology of Science
   • The Spirit of Capitalism, Max Weber (1935).
   • The Sociology of Science: Theoretical and Empirical Investigations, Robert Merton (1973).
   • The Specificity of the Scientific Field and the Social Conditions of the Progress of Reason, Pierre Bourdieu (1975).
3. Early Sociology of Science (cont.)
   • Conservative Thought, Karl Mannheim (1925).
   • Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact, Ludwig Fleck (1935).
4. Revolutions and Negotiations
   • The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn (1962).
   • Proofs and Refutations, Imre Lakatos (1976).
5. The Sociology of Scientific Knowledge (SSK)
   • What is a Social Fact?, Emile Durkheim (1895).
   • Wittgenstein and Mannheim on the Sociology of Mathematics, David Bloor (1973).
   • Relativism, Rationalism and the Sociology of Knowledge, Barry Barnes and David Bloor (1982).
   • Sociology of Scientific Knowledge, David Bloor (2004).
6. History of Science and Social Constructivism
   • Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle and the Scientific Life, Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer (1985).
   • Galileo the Emblem Maker, Mario Biagioli (1990).
7. The Social Construction of Technology
   • Do Artifacts have Politics?, Langdon Winner (1980).
   • The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology, Wiebe Bijker, Thomas Hughes, Trevor Pinch (1987).
   • An Equation and Its Worlds: Bricolage, Exemplars, Disunity and Performativity in Financial Economics, Donald MacKenzie (2003).
8. Laboratory Studies
   • Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts, Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar (1979).
   • The House of Experiment in Seventeenth Century England, Steven Shapin (1988).
9. Actor-Network Theory
   • Science in Action, Bruno Latour (1987).
   • Institutional ecology, ‘Translations’, and Boundary Objects, Susan Leigh Star and James Griesemer (1989).
10. Decentering STS
    • Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective, Donna Haraway (1988).
    • The Zimbabwe Bush Pump, Marianne de Laet and Annemarie Mol (2000).
    • Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code, Ruha Benjamin (2019).
11. Algorithmic Life
    • Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest, Zeynep Tufekci (2017).
    • Algorithms of Oppression, Safiya U. Noble (2018).
12. STS, Expertise, Public Discourse
    • Impure Science: AIDS, Activism, and the Politics of Knowledge, Steven Epstein (1996).
    • Merchants of Doubt: How A Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming, Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway (2010).