Wow, I'm glad the winner won; that's the one I'd have voted for.
But I must have been asleep at the switch; I never saw a notice that it was time to vote, or even a notice that the last one -- Kora in Hell? -- was indeed the last one. I haven't even found time to read the last two yet.
I don't need to read the comments to quickly open the OT and see if there's anything new. I'm glad I don't get extra announcements in addition to everything that's already out there.
Don't know about most readers ... for me, those are exactly the place I would look for announcements.
I guess in this case you'd have preferred an extra post for 'please vote now'?
I didn't need one, but talking about nitpick ... I'd usually prefer to have a time frame for doing x. Like 'voting will be open until'. In this specific case, voting was quick for me, but eg. I might have wanted to have a second look at certain reviews and needed more time. Also, there are weeks, when I only read on my smartphone while travelling but mostly don't have time at the PC, and having a clear timeframe helps to schedule stuff.
I mean, the fact that the contest exists is its own post. The "meetups everywhere" are two posts, one calling for organizers and one listing times and places, for the *explicitly acknowledged* reason that putting them in an open thread doesn't get a lot of eyeballs. And "please vote" was its own post last time, so I don't think I was alone in not realizing I had to actively look for it in a post with an unrelated title.
I'm not arguing with your point of having a special announcement for sth. important. At the same time I also find the combination of 'news & announcements' & 'OT' very convenient. I certainly prefer having those in one post than in two seperate ones in many cases (exceptions confirming the rule).
"There are ACX-affiliated meetup groups all over the world. Lots of people are vaguely interested, but don't try them out until I make a big deal about it on the blog. Since learning that, I've tried to make a big deal about it on the blog at least once annually, and it's that time of year again."
(Note that a mention in an open thread isn't what is meant by "making a big deal about it.")
One of the most interesting things I learned from this project was the gap between "good writer", "excellent writer" and "I make money with writing". All of them were at least good, but to me there was a sharp distinction between the median book review and some of Scott's reviews.
I mean, they are mostly user-chosen, right? "Median score above 8 given out entirely to very long reviews" is pretty strong evidence they *can't* go shorter and still get seen, unless there just weren't any short reviews of any quality in the initial phase.
Same note: not that a better writer couldn't have done it, but my experiment this year was to see if I could force a fiction book into the running. I sort of failed at that, then got a reprieve that sort of muddied the results. But I think there's good evidence that "non-fiction book, pretty heady subject, long" is sort of the format to shoot for if you want to win the old-fashioned focus-on-quality way.
I'm not sure this gives us that much data though, right? Like if there were short reviews to choose (I have not checked this) then there's nothing keeping the short-review-lovers from using their text-intolerance to pick the short ones.
I'm saying, the part where this *doesn't* happen is either a function of short reviews not existing at all, or people not voting for them if they do. There might be another explanation beyond "people don't like them and thus don't vote for them, and thus it's a bad idea to write them if you are optimizing for winning", but if you are a writer choosing between tactics you sort of want to know what that explanation is before you bet on it.
Or people who really like book reviews. But having a ton of time isn't really necessarily the same thing as preferring long texts - you could just as easily eat 100 nuggets as an entire chicken, so to speak.
People who tolerate text well can vote both for long and short reviews. People who don't tolerate text well can only vote for short reviews. They can't vote for the long reviews and give them bad grades because they don't read them in the first place.
Or, to put it from another angle: If someone reads through a long text, that is that is most likely because someone finds that text good. If the long text is not good, people will not finish it. And then they can't vote. That way there will be a positive bias for long texts.
This is kind of plausible, but it also means that (if true) there's a ideal length of review - one that's so impossibly long that only one person finishes it, and votes it a ten. For some reason this concept is hilarious to me.
Hmm. I would find it acceptable for someone to start reading a review, get bored with it before the end, and give it a bad grade. More than acceptable: keeping the reader engaged for the full piece is part of what the review should accomplish.
I think there was a discussion whether this was good behavior or not. Personally I was scared away from the whole exercise by the vast amounts of text.
I thought the rule was you needed to read everything to vote. So by definition thst will leave you with only people who are willing to read the long ones
I don't know if there was such a rule ... but I would favour one like this. Or at least sth. like you must read a significant part or give it a decent try for each of the finalists or sth.
But overall, I agree with the consequences ... if I had read only 3 shorter ones and nothing else, I'd certainly not vote.
There was no requirement that you absolutely had to read everything in order to vote. I'm sure many people skimmed all/most reviews, but read only a couple that caught their interest, and then voted for one that they had read.
Which means that shorter reviews would have had an advantage, since it was more likely that someone would read them in their entirety, and if that didn't happen then it's evidence that longer reviews were preferred.
I read four randomly chosen reviews from the Google doc, rated 3 poorly and 1 well, and the one I rated well, I also voted for in the final round of voting, and it got 2nd place. I feel like I contributed to the initial round successfully without having done a huge amount of reading.
So it seems you're less 'text tolerant'. Do you enjoy Scott's writing then? Or what are/aren't you reading here? I'm not sure how not being text tolerant and reading Scott's blog fit together.
Scott's texts are the big exception to my text intolerance. He simply is a very gifted writer, I assume: Somehow he knows how to write a lot of text that is easy to read even for me. I can't say I read everything Scott writes, but I often enjoy his posts regardless of their length.
True that. And it's not sour grapes - like that's entirely fine; people can have preferences. I was knowingly working high-payoff longshot odds stuff in terms of what I was up to.
>is pretty strong evidence they *can't* go shorter
I kind of disagree. I agree though, that it's not about writing a really short review. Overall, non-fiction, heady subject, long, seems spot on. But I think this doesn't say that several of the finalists wouldn't have profited from being 1/3rd or 1/5th shorter.
They arent book reviews in the sense of a NYT book review of a recent novel, which is about whether the books are good enough to buy. They are book explanations, discussions, and are necessarily long form essays.
Yeah a lot of them could have used a pass through from an editor. I didn't vote in the end because the prospect of reading them all was exhausting
Maybe have them labelled by length? Or have subcategories for different lengths. It's hard to compare a short punchy review to a long discussion of the topic that could be it's own book
Err, could the reviews be longer, please? Next time maybe only those long enough to come in installments? - Hoel's winning text is super-long (the longest?) - and I would have loved to read even more of it. I am here for the reading. Not for saving time. I hurry at other things (job, food, family, sleep - to have more time for substack ACX/Hoel/Caplan/Zvi - and blogs as ACOUP, putanumonit, mru) . Amazon has short reviews, I noticed. ;)
Thanks for releasing the preliminary voting data! The sample sizes are small but even at 10 people, the 95% confidence interval for most of these would only be ± 1 (and 68% interval would be ± 0.5), so I think it's fine to give the scores some thought.
I just went to read the one about Trans on the strength of its almost getting promoted to finalist, and yeah, it was a good review. Thanks, mystery author.
>Why are two people with similar gender identities more alike than say, two people that both have wombs?
Went in quite skeptical, but yes, this is literary alchemy: review gold transmuted out of book lead. And it's quite tiresome, unoriginal lead, at that. (But apparently good enough to sucker former intellectual Richard Dawkins? How embarrassing...score one for Scott's "Will Nonbelievers Believe Anything?"[1]) It's a solid beatdown of a bad book begging for bruising, by a reviewer who has proper Skin In The Game. That matters so much - indifferent neophyte reviewers make for poorer reviews. Many Such Examples this year, sadly. This review would have made my Top 3, easily. Well worth the read. (Bias note: oddly similar life story to my own, closing sections will likely hit differently for cis readers. Prediction: YMWV. It's still pretty good without those parts though.)
Also, boggling at that familiarity graph - boy would I like to know where they pulled the N=1000 from. 5% trans is, what...at least an OOM above standard population estimates? Some very fine data on both sides, indeed.
(The __comments__ would have been ass though - an uncontroversial point of consensus about a contentious topic. Like a Pentagruel of the worst Open Thread comments, dug up and stitched together, unwittingly given life by Scott's blessing. I can live without seeing that...)
"Like a Pentagruel of the worst Open Thread comments"
Is there a part of Rabelais where Pantagruel gets cut to pieces, buried, dug up and put back together? I'd believe it, but I don't remember that at all.
Ah, I seem to have misunderstood a joke from the animated series __Archer__. Quite right: that should more appropriately be Deucalion or Adam, if named at all. Learn something new every day. Thanks for the edification opportunity.
(I genuinely don't like The Monster being colloquially known as Frankenstein, since that's just confusing, and Shelley's original book is pretty clear + worth the read...)
Oh, you *did* mean the monster! I thought that likely, but I didn't want to presume.
And yes, I think Adam is pretty much the best name candidate, although I take less exception to calling the monster Frankenstein than many others do (it seems to have become one of those I Am Smart And Educated memes). After all, Victor Frankenstein is pretty much his father and we have pretty well established norms for surnames in such cases.
I misread the first word of the "When ideology meets reality" book as "trains" and got really excited to find out about a new book on trains until I clicked through and realized it was about gender stuff :(
Congratulations to all the winners and finalists! I enjoyed all of the reviews I had the chance to read. And as someone else said, it would be great for the voting interval to be a little longer next year.
No, I’m claiming that if 90% of readers are male then we should expect 90% of submitters to be male, and getting 100% out of about ten isn’t significantly different from that. This is the unbiased hypothesis.
My guess is, the readership here is more female than the group of really active participants.
In most larger groups, men are much more active in expressing their views than women, even if it's almost a 50 : 50 balance in the audiance. I'm not sure, why this should be any different here. And this group in addition has a much higher percentage in male readership, which should emphasise this even more. (Here, I'm talking more about comments than book reviews).
Well, anonymity removes/reduces the potential for explicit gender bias, but you could have situations where the book reviewers (male) submit books that are most likely to resonate with the reviewers (who I believe are mostly male), leading to more or all males being chosen. You could have a situation where a reviewer submits a review about say, menopause, which may not resonate with a mostly male audience and not get chosen. It’s just odd that there are no identifiable females on this list but I’m assuming at least some female readers. That would warrant more examination, if it were my own research.
that belief is more or less biologically or culturally essentialist. There are books for women, and books for men. Indeed the writers were possibly all men and the reviewers mostly men. If this was the kind of blog to have book reviews on the menopause it would be the kind of blog to have blog posts on the menopause, and if it were that kind of blog it would attract a different audience and vote differently on the book reviews.
Several of the books reviewed by finalists were written or co-written by women, including the one I reviewed (Making Nature), two of the winners (Castrato and Internationalists), and a few others (Viral, Exhaustion).
Are you suggesting that the mere fact of the audience being largely male is a kind of implicit gender bias? This seems like an obvious absurdity; does Archive of Our Own have gender bias that it needs to address just because it's a clam fest?
As a long time member of the commentariat and female (in the classic sense) I find that the SSC/ACX 'group' is just fine the way it is. It is more left, more atheist, more urban, more male, younger, more mathy and a bit smarter than the usual run of people that I hang with. I find it occasionally off-putting for any of those reasons. I would resist strongly any deliberate attempts to change any of those things, as I feel the possibility of catastrophic damage to the community is more likely than positive change.
And if we were to 'improve' it, I wouldn't start by focusing on 'male'.
"You could have a situation where a reviewer submits a review about say, menopause, which may not resonate with a mostly male audience and not get chosen"
I hate this kind of argument, and you want to know why? Because the corollary of that is "A reviewer who submits a review about menopause (1) *must* resonate with a female audience (2) *must* be voted Top Number One by the female audience because this is a Lady Review on a Lady Topic for Ladies".
If the menopause book is crappily written, or the review is crappily written, I will be a heck of lot less interested in it than a well-written review about mathematics, even though I am post-menopausal and non-mathematical.
I object to having my preferences dictated to me by what is in my knickers. "People didn't vote for it because of gender bias" is a catch-all excuse; if we don't vote for Obviously Female Reviewer, it's because this site is all boys, so gender bias; if all reviews are anonymous, and the revelation after voting is that the winner is a guy, well that's gender bias in action again, because the guy wrote Guy Review on Guy Topic for Guy Audience.
Is history, the brain, economics, how well-intentioned do-gooders screw up, and other topics of reviews Guy Stuff? I would not like that to be the diktat, since it would mean I could no longer have opinions on those things, given that I am Not A Guy.
>>>That would warrant more examination, if it were my own research.
Why? What is it about the ratios of participation by men and women that you find interesting? Why, in the context of reading and commenting at ACX/SCC, does that matter?
If I took the time to anonymize the responses so as not to bias the results (which is what I think was done here), I would also want to check if in fact my results were unbiased (by comparing the sample to the larger population).
Just curious, which review did you write? I really enjoy your comments here, but I don't think I've read your review - none of the ones I read had your style :)
I don't think any made it through to the finals, but at least one of us did submit a review. The fact of the matter being that this is a a majority male space, it's always going to have way more guys than gals submitting reviews, posts, comments, or what have you.
Speaking as somebody in possession (so far as I know) of two X chromosomes, the *last* thing I want is Token Representation. "Oh gosh, there are no women reviewer finalists, quick, find two women reviewers!" I don't want people picked because they tick off one of the Diversity Bingo Card squares, I want them selected because it's good work. And I don't feel 'seen', 'represented' or whatever the current buzz-word is, when it's perfectly clear that the only reason Philippa Space was picked to be a finalist is because she is a she. That does not make me go "Yes, finally at long last, we ladies are being treated equally!"
Did the instance of plagiarism not merit a mention? I can't remember which book review this was, but there was one in the finalists in which a commenter noted that the review plagiarized a substantial chunk of their writing.
Thanks for organizing the contest Scott! Really happy to have ended up among the finalists. Congrats to Erik and everyone else, too.
I had actually decided to review Making Nature for reasons completely unrelated to the contest, i.e. my independent research on scientific writing and publishing, but the theme fit ACX too well not to participate. I sort of gave up on my plans to improve science writing (Roger's Bacon does it better than me); however, I'm always down to talk about it with anyone who's interested. (I'm also, incidentally, looking for work at the moment. You know, just in case you know something.)
That's so cool Etienne, the Making Nature review was one of my favorites, just super interesting. My guesses at the time was that The Castrato review was SlimeMoldTimeMold, so I thought Making Nature was Roger's Bacon - should have thought of you
Thanks Erik, and congrats! It didn't even occur to me to try to guess who wrote what, though in retrospect it makes perfect sense that several of us in this weird blogging niche would participate. (Though I knew SMTM deliberately sat out from this contest!)
#1 seemed pretty fairly obvious, so I guess I voted with the "normies"; I'm somewhat surprised by the rest of the results though. A good reminder that commentariat tenor isn't necessarily reflective of actual voting behaviour, and reading interests don't actually quite conform to the expected ACX stereotypes. (If there'd been a review directly about AI and x-risk, I wonder how it'd have done...)
>Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality, reviewed by AS.
Oh God. Even if it was a pretty well-ranked review, I personally am glad that wasn't included. You just know it would have been murder in the comments...at this point it's the one single topic with the distinction that I don't think I wanna read about it ever again, anywhere. Rehashing the same tired fights over and over, where otherwise-sane people lose their epistemic minds by default.
Sure; it's not fun to read about anymore though, and rarely insightful. One must carefully budget Slack, especially on true voluntary commitments like entertainment.
I do miss the days not very long ago - well within my lifetime - when trans was just this obscure little thing barely anyone knew about, even inside lefty academia and whatever. There *wasn't* a debate, outside the maybe like once a week during random years when some former celebrity came out or whatever. Then the public rightfully lost interest over salacious nothingburgers of no statistical relevance whatsoever, and moved on. That's the environment I grew up in, the veil of opacity that made it seem like a worthwhile life intervention to rally some form of identity around. If I'd instead grown up during These Modern Pathologies, hearing the sorts of absurd Obvious Nonsense spouted by the loudest activists...I'd very likely have ended up "just" a gay man instead (or dead). No way would I touch this madness with an 11-foot pole. That makes for me having an awkward, "traitorous" stance on this particular aspect of CW. Talk about misaligned incentives.
I might read the review anyway; it's useful to at least have a working knowledge of the Major Works which get thrown around as citations constantly. Couldn't possibly be worse than Abigail Shrier's epistemically bankrupt works...
The approved narrative is that this is a statistical nothingburger no longer, to the extent which requires restructuring the society from the ground up. Of course, like you say, no internet debate is likely to shed much light on this, and maybe no other process which civilization is capable of can either. As usual, the only hope left is for the robot overlords.
I'm of the mind that robust data collection could put many such questions to bed, or at least move policy in saner directions. But no one seems to want to spend the money, perhaps precisely because object-level results would be...inconvenient. (Though, of course, empiricism such as conducting surveys is now considered discriminatory oppressive white supremacy, so maybe that's the real reason. One must never study Schrodinger's [Heisenberg's?] Marginalized Person, lest they disappear in a puff of statistical artifacts. Self-ID episteme 1, metis 0.)
What pronouns will AI use?
That's enough heat out of me, though. To extend a joke elsewhere in threads, I'll stop derailing book-review related discussion. ("Trains Ideology" would be a good title for a book on Italian fascism...)
>I'm of the mind that robust data collection could put many such questions to bed, or at least move policy in saner directions.
I'm not so optimistic. Data by itself says next to nothing, it's all about how one interprets it, all sides in every debate claim that theirs is amply supported, and to some extent they are right. The most intractable thing about this particular brouhaha is that it's a giant motte and bailey, where sex reassignment surgery and fluid gender identity are often included under a single heading, and it's obvious to me that no data can possibly disprove underlying assumptions of that ideology.
There's remarkably little data (given how much attention and resources are otherwise spent on this sub-battle), quite a lot of it old, quite a lot of it of questionable quality/perverse incentives. I'm reminded back during the "bathroom bills" saga how ~every single left outlet reused the exact same infographic over and over and over, citing the same handful of blue states (or were they just big cities?) that swore, Never Have I Ever had issues with inclusive facilities policies passed variable amounts of time ago. And maybe that was even completely honest! But it was telling. I get suspicious whenever "checkmate, outgroup!" dunks become homogenized boilerplate.
That's the rub, really. It largely comes down to narratives and stories, anecdata and counterfactuals, which possibly-accurate statistics get emphasized and which don't. With such a small "intervention arm" compared to "control group", sample sizes are necessarily iffy, and I worry a lot about Lizardman's Constant-type artefacts + selection effects. And as you note, even just the first step of Define Terms, Please is quite fraught. It's a minefield for sure...but I still think it'd be one with a slightly more navigable map if there were, like, Kinsey-grade megastudies to draw from. Not this unholy amalgam of revisionist anthropology and John Money's successors that passes for academic canon. The time I spent in Department of Women and Gender Studies college classes...eye-opening, but not in the way they intended. :(
(Penance for replying despite saying I wouldn't anymore: gonna make myself read that review now. Sigh.)
Wow, I don't think I've ever been so shocked by the voting. Neither of my favorites made it into the top 5, and I was pretty disappointed with most of the winners. It's a huge difference from last year, when I was happy about all the winners, even if I would have ranked them slightly differently. It's especially embarrassing that the Fusion piece made it anywhere near the top since it a) isn't even a book review and b) is wrong about everything important.
I'm not especially surprised by the result, but do agree that there seemed less exceptional posts than last time. Maybe there was a built up buffer of people with interesting things to say that has been depleted
Agree that the fusion review shouldn't have ended up anywhere near the final reckoning. But - and this is pretty important - the ACX community isn't likely to be much dumber than it was before it made that decision, and therefore (it being vastly larger than us two) we should maybe ask why we're at such odds with it..
Well I think the audience here is full of people who are more exited about tech and futurism than real actual experts in say fusion who understood all the critiques in the comments before encountering them.
Myself included. I think the fusion research community has been very good about bamboozling even the educated public about its progress.
Really glad 1587 made it on the winners list. My first instinct was to vote for it, but I didn't because I was afraid that I was being polluted by recency bias. My alternative vote (Castrato) made it to 3rd though, so I'm happy.
Really surprised to see Fusion Energy on the finalists list. As many others said, it was a solid overview of the state of the field, but it barely qualified as a "book review".
Yeah, these aren't topics I'd normally go near, so the fact that I found them engaging enough to tell others about it really speaks to the quality of the book reviews.
IMO, Fusion Energy was misleading to the point of being negligently deceptive. When you say "get fusion", a normal reader would think of plants selling cheap power to the grid, not minor improvements on an arbitrary benchmark. This is like saying "90% chance of getting GAI* by 2028" and then the footnote defines "getting GAI" as "a dense language model with at least 10T parameters".
The most charitable take I can think of is that plasma scientists have their own jargon where "getting fusion" is shorthand for "Q_plasma >= 5", and the author just typical-minded themselves to death. But really, if you're writing for a general audience, you need to use words with their generally understood meanings!
I think the author is also overly optimistic even on the narrow question of when "Q_plasma >= 5" will happen due to not fully taking the correlation between the success of different experiments into account, but that's a comparatively minor matter.
If anything, the author *actively encourages* misunderstanding by saying "I'll also count it if anyone is selling fusion power to the grid, even if they don't get Q_plasma >= 5", which is a bit like saying "I'll also count Skynet taking over the world as getting GAI, even if it has less than 10T parameters".
I wonder if Scott would contemplate a system like the Australian voting system, the single transferable vote, for next year. Also, would using it have changed the results this year? We can't know now.
Thanks so much for running the contest and for being so transparent about the decision process!
I wrote the Trans review and totally understand why you would be hesitant to publish it. It's still a huge honor to see it linked on my favorite blog. I hope you run the contest again next year. If you do, I definitely plan on submitting again.
I didn't hear back from you about giving me a blurb, let me know if there's anything about you (blog, etc) you want me to advertise next to your name on here.
Friendly advice: the part where you altered your quotes from the book to "correct" names almost certainly lowered many people's opinion of your review while making it substantially more inflammatory.
Thanks, but I think you might have misunderstood. I didn't change the genders of the names. I changed the names altogether (from real names to fake names), because I thought the descriptions were often cruelly unflattering, and I thought I could make my point without risking further embarassment to the subjects.
As long as we do it by the rules! The new international rules about war.
I voted for "The Internationalists". I thought it would win, given that its topic is very near to the values espoused by Effective Altruists and it describes an amazing case study in how the world was made better for ordinary people.
That's not why _I_ voted for it, though. I'm a sucker for huge, invisible changes to culture that make the past into a foreign country, so much so that even people as smart as Zvi can make bad assumptions / silly assertions (unless the quote in the review was taken very much out of context). Currently I'm stuck on demographics. We are entering unknown territory this century.
(The Dawn of Everything I thought was just to weak a book, and too sensationalist, to appeal to readers here. Recalibration required. The "social media trap" is a very shiny idea for magpie minds...)
Wow, thanks for the alt good reviews! Unsettled (the 2nd) was my fav. review, such that I bought the book and then leant it out. The book reviews is one of my fav things here. Having a diversity of opinion, is important. I think I found all the book reviews to signal a political slant. It would be better to write a review (I think) that didn't indicate your political slant.... And yet here I am liking those reviews that favor my slant... It would be better if it wasn't that way... but how?
Oh I'm going to go read the trans one... thanks again.
Truly honored! This was an absolute blast, from beginning to end.
A huge thanks to Scott, not just for organizing, and not just for putting up money, but also for sharing his community with us finalists. There are not many places out there where a 9,000 word book review can find an audience, let alone generate hundreds of comments - Scott has built something truly special. Knowing there was a possibility that the community might get to see it was incredibly motivating when working on the piece, and I think it's some of my best writing because of it. When reading your comments, not just for my piece, but for all of them, it became very clear to me why Scott does "Comments" roundups for posts, given the quality, some of which were as detailed and engaging as the reviews themselves. And of course, thanks to those who decided to vote for me, I'm so glad you enjoyed the piece.
Additionally, I want to highlight, as Scott did, that I am a fan of several of the writers who entered this contest, including Roger’s Bacon, Étienne F.D, and Resident Contrarian - I highly recommend them, they are all excellent writers who put out great stuff regularly. Additionally, some of my favorite reviews were the ones Scott added at the last minute, including "1587, A Year Of No Significance" - I'd love to see more from that anonymous author.
Finally, here's to the gossip trap not eating all of us alive one by one - maybe we can beat the Garrulous Gorgon With a Thousand Heads one day. Cheers!
Man, I didn't know you read my shit. Thanks - I've read some of your stuff lately (only lately because, honestly, I don't read as much as I should) and enjoyed it a lot.
Amen to all of that; couldn’t agree more! I’m the anonymous 1587 author - genuinely surprised I got the ‘silver medal’ and honored to be in such illustrious company.
Thanks for hosting Scott. It was my first time publishing anything, so I'm pleased to be an honourable mention. No harm in losing to some of those excellent finalists.
Rereading my review, I was maybe a little strong in some of the claims of Deutsch dismantling rationalism. In truth, I'm agnostic to how it all shakes out: Reconciling the worldviews remains an interesting puzzle to me (along with the puzzle as why people seem to underrate Deutsch).
I enjoyed your writing - especially the funny bits like “Our significance is not due to our size or bovinity,” the Pickle Rick reference, and the Minnie Mouse gag 😄 But I burned out on philosophy a while back, so it’s hard for me to get excited about the topic. Pretty much any review of a philosophy book would need to be some kind of hilarious stand-up routine with pyrotechnics for me to give it a top rating.
I liked the review! I hadn't previously read about Deutsch's philosophy, and I found this to be a good introduction.
For what it's worth, I believe (epistemic status for all of the below: 70% certain) many of the philosophical differences between Deutsch and the rationalist community seem to boil down to a difference in intellectual background: physics for Deutsch vs. statistics, game theory, etc. for rationalists.
For instance, physicists notoriously hate most philosophy but love Popper and falsificationism. My (perhaps uncharitable) take on this is that it is not because Popper's philosophy is necessarily better aligned with how to make scientific discoveries, but rather because physicists enjoy their discipline and Popper gives them an excuse to continue working the same way they always have. More precisely, physicists believe they are on track to understanding how the world *really* works at a fundamental level, not that they are just creating useful models. The sensation of true understanding feels deep and incredibly special, but it is not an acceptable justification when e.g. requesting funding. Popper's philosophy gives physicists an out-- the effort in making good models is fine as long as, in the end, the models are falsifiable. Physicists can say a theory is useful in good faith if it continues to hold up in the face of rigorous testing. The reason why I think this is an excuse (at least for some physicists) is because over the past few decades, many physicists have turned to studying theories which are very likely non-falsifiable for at least several centuries (string theory, quantum gravity) or not at all falsifiable (some interpretations of quantum mechanics). They do this because they really think these theories are true and worthwhile to study even if they won't ever make predictions observably different from those of current theories. The same kind of conflict between falsificationism and a desire to find really good and insightful theories seems to show up in Deutsch's beliefs, as well, from what you've written.
Compare this to rationalists, who I understand as optimizing not for understanding, but for prediction. To the rationalist, it's totally understandable to have beliefs based on a prediction market. Why do the prices have the values they do? It's sometimes hard to say, but in a sense it doesn't matter-- all you need to know is that if you know enough to say that the market is likely mispriced, you can make money. It's thus a win-win situation-- either you get better probabilistic knowledge of the future or you make money in expectation off of your superior knowledge. Similarly, Bayesianism is about trying to be more correct about things on the average, not about knowing the true nature of things. You can sometimes get evidence for the true nature of things if the true model is in the support of your prior. But this isn't the case for things like theories of physics -- what would a prior over theories of gravity even look like?
I think the idea that anything that is not forbidden by physical law is possible is also very common among physicists. As is the philosophy of technooptimism. I think for people in the field that created the nuclear bomb, the laser, and the transistor it's hard to deny that theoretical descriptions of possibility translate very concretely into practical devices. Deutsch continued in this line by coinventing quantum computing. On the theme of technooptimism, Von Neumann proposed machines that would control the weather (prior to the discovery of chaos in atmospheric fluid dynamics); Freeman Dyson led Project Orion, a project to create spacecraft powered by nuclear bombs. I suppose the creation of the nuclear bomb could theoretically also have lead to technopessimism, but I think many physicists are inspired even here by the fact that we have mitigated the risk of nuclear armageddon with robust international norms prohibiting the military use of WMDs. Some might even claim they have made the world safer by increasing the potential negative consequences of warfare.
In contrast, there is a much larger gap between theory and practice in the fields rationalists are acquainted with. E.g. theoretical economists make a number of predictions, not all of which are borne out in practice-- one needs empirical studies to make sure that one has not neglected any relevant factors, because of how complex society is. I think the greater complexity of the real world also causes social scientists to be very skeptical about whether effects of actions will always be as positive as we think they are. E.g. the internet was originally conceived as an instrument to break down barriers between cultures, but over the past few years, it seems to have done the opposite, instead.
There are also some Deutsch beliefs that you mention that don't seem to fit neatly into the physicist paradigm, such as his beliefs about animal welfare. I also feel like his beliefs on intelligence are shared by many smart people who cannot imagine what it might feel like to have less intelligence, and so err on the side of assuming every individual has equal intellectual capabilities in principle (this could turn out to be correct, but it's not a priori guaranteed imo).
In sum, I feel like both rationalism and Deutsch have interesting ideas to offer. It's probably the case that there are some domains where one set of tools is more useful than the other, but neither has a strict advantage overall. However, it strikes me that maybe this calls for more physicists in the rationalist community (of whom there are undoubtedly many) to share their insights about science/life with the community at large, which could lead Deutschian ideas to naturally be absorbed into the rationalist canon.
I had two book reviews prepared for this competition. The other one is Leviathan and the Air Pump by Stephen Shapin and Simon Schaffer (1985), about some of the earliest debates about what science should be between Thomas Hobbes and Robert Boyle, in the first decade of the Royal Society. I decided to go with Fusion because I know the subject much better. If you want to read the other one, you can find it here: http://thechaostician.com/book-review-of-leviathan-and-the-air-pump-by-stephen-shapin-and-simon-schaffer-1985/
I enjoyed that review - interesting to know that Boyle was discussing topics like “public access, replication, and publication bias” back in the 1660s! Also liked your comparison of air pumps back then to supercolliders now.
You should have submitted this rather than the fusion one; I like this a lot better, and it's not as open to the arguments about "author is being way too optimistic and it's not gonna happen like this"as the fusion one was.
I think part of why I like this better is that you are more impartial; you don't really have a dog in the fight (apart from thinking Boyle was right, which is the mainstream opinion) whereas with the fusion book it was evident that you were hyping it up because you agreed with it. That left the review open to "the reviewer wants this to be true so they can't see the obvious flaws".
It's not a bad review at all. I thought it was interesting and brought out the essence of the book well. I'm not as sanguine as you about the likelihood of space colonization, but that's a quibble and not a criticism of your review.
To be honest I do not think it is a bad review either. Had it been I would not have published it. But it is quite different from the finalists and I understand now that my definition of a book review is rather different from the ACX crowd's definition of a book review. Had I done some research beforehand I would probably have written differently. Now its worth lies mostly in what it says about different cultural "bubbles" (for lack of a better word).
I wouldn't say that the style is particularly out of place here. The bigger point is probably that this crowd doesn't take uncritical space exploration optimisim seriously, the likes of Musk and Bezos notwithstanding.
That is of course a possibility. But I find it rather more depressing since it implies that the jury makes its judgement more on the book reviewed than the book review.
I think that depends on the approach that the reviewer takes. For example, the trans review which got snubbed to avoid the WW3 in comments was mostly critical of the book, and the winner this time around was somewhat critical too. Since in your case the style is more that of a precis/extrapolation, then affinity to the subject matter is more important, like with the Georgism winner of the last year, or the Fusion finalist this time.
Point taken. Like most reviewers I did choose a book that I myself liked. Despite that I still think that a book review should always strive to find the positive in the reviewed book. No one consciously writes a bad book and if the reviewer can not find anything good in the book, chances are the reviewer has missed something important.
Yeah, it's not bad at all - I'd just chalk it up to the fact that there were a lot of strong contenders this year, and it seems like longer reviews are often more popular with the ACX crowd. I mean, one has to be a bit of a bookworm to even care about such things as book review contests in the first place, so it's bound to attract people who read a lot more (and possibly a lot faster) than average. I enjoyed reading your review - although it made me a little nostalgic and sad, honestly. I was a little kid in the 70s, and I remember feeling a lot more hopeful about actually traveling into outer space back then!
I was actually relieved when I found out the abysmal score I had received from the ACX voters. I am a professional writer (admittedly in a non-English language) and had I received an average score that would most likely have meant that I am an average writer. Something which is not very good for someone trying to make a living out of writing. From that perspective, being in the bottom 5% is better since it probably only indicates that I was at the wrong place, at the wrong time. I mean, I could still be a very average writer, but at least this contest will not pop my bubble.
Interesting - your English is great: if you claimed to be a native speaker, I'd believe you. Of course, the written word erases most accents. But there are usually some oddly phrased bits - idiosyncratic grammatical construction, characteristic errors involving definite articles, or something like that which read as "non-native speaker." Didn't notice anything like that in your writing.
Well, I have been reading in English for 30 years and by now I have probably read more English-language books than the average Anglosaxon will do in their entire life (not a high bar considering the low interest in literature these days). Language skill should in my case be a rather weak excuse for bad writing.
A big thank you to all contributors, and congratulations to the winners!
I have read all the reviews. Even those who didn't make it to the final were often pretty good, and I enjoyed many of them. It gave me a cheap way (relatively speaking) to learn about ~140 books, through high-quality and thorough reviews. Thanks for that! And of course: thanks to Scott for making the contest happen!
Congratulations to the winners! I really enjoyed 1587. It was interesting to hear that Tocqueville was supposedly totally unfamiliar with the work of the great missionary to China Fr. Matteo Ricci SJ. who was working in China in 1587. I think he arrived in China in 1582. His story is beautifully told in Vincent Cronins book
The Wise Man from the West: Matteo Ricci and His Mission to China https://a.co/d/2siU8AC
Yes: that was a pretty great (and lengthy) comment! One of the things I love about ACX is the generally high quality of the comments, and that one really stood out 🙂
Not sure if you'll see this, but @Froolow, I just read the Surface Detail review and thought it was excellent. Easily my favourite of the reviews I read. :)
I just realized you're the very same Froolow who wrote the astonishing series of cost-effectiveness posts over on the EAF. I'm a data analyst who does demand forecasting for my company, and close-reading your essays made me viscerally feel like I was leveling up; I also sound like a genius just parroting bits and pieces from them. Good stuff, thank you!
I guess maybe I'm more out of step with most ACX readers than I realised - I really expected The Anti-Poilitics Machine to place. It didn't have the most 'added value' on top of summarising the book but I thought the subject matter was fascinating, and very much up the alley of rationalists and particularly EA-types.
I found the Anti-Politics Machine review fascinating, but I think characterising it as 'anti-EA' is unfair to both EA and the book. It talks about how charity can miss the mark completely when it doesn't consider the viewpoints of the locals; my understanding is that this has been known to charity organisations for a long time, and current major EA orgs all involve teams that are from, or at least live in, the parts of the world they're trying to help. Please correct me if I'm wrong about that.
I really wanted to vote for the God Emperor of Dune review. I know some people were opposed to including works of fiction in the contest, but that was exactly what I liked about it. After all the academic and political books, it was refreshing to see a novel getting reviewed!
Unfortunately, the review just had too many problems. The biggest issue was that it tried to use the novel as a metaphor for the use of Friendly AI to counter the dangers of Unfriendly AI, which felt sort of like using a smartphone to hammer a nail into a wall: Sure, it can *kinda* work, but it looks awkward, it won't be that effective (it doesn't say anything particularly novel or insightful about FAI or UFAI), and you're likely to break the smartphone in the process (it "breaks" the book by interpreting it in a way that clearly wasn't intended by the author, isn't supported by the text, and to some extent contradicts the narrative's actual plot and themes). There were also places where the review seemed to presume that the reader already knew the book, e.g. mentioning certain characters without explaining who they were.
I wish it had touched on the real world context of the series a little more too. For instance, a lot of people in the comments section were talking about how military combat in Dune was so heavily focused around melee combat, and regardless of the in-universe reasons for the lack of ranged weapons, the out-of-universe reason was simply because Dune was both a revival and a deconstruction of the old planetary romance/sword-and-planet genre, which even in the 60s was considered outdated and had fallen out of favor in sci-fi circles. It's similar to what Game of Thrones has done with medieval fantasy.
I still enjoyed reading the review, and it definitely had some good insights about the book and the overall Dune franchise, but I ended up voting for The Righteous Mind instead. (The Dawn of Everything was a close second, but I had a different problem with that one: I thought the review itself was great, but I strongly dislike the book it was reviewing. I think David Graeber's work is historically and anthropologically dubious at best, and completely and almost hilariously wrong on everything involving political science and economics. Worse, his ideas have unfortunately led a very large chunk of the American left down a losing path.)
I vaguely remembered reading the book and thinking it was terrible, then reading the review reinforced me in "Ah yes, this book is indeed terrible".
So I don't know if that makes it a good review or not, because I think the review did take the Big Message seriously so perhaps it was trying to go "No, this book is great and here's why by making it relevant to *checks list of current today bees in bonnet* AI threat!"
Unfortunately, when Herbert wrote it, the current yesterday bee in bonnet he was going on about was environmentalism.
It's interesting you should say that. I've read plenty of Golden Age sf, and I would've said the reverse, that the 60s was a renaissance for sword-and-sorcery, after the much "harder" Campbell-era stuff, perhaps influenced by the significant surge in popularity of Tolkien in the mid 60s. Are you thinking much further back, to ERB and Barsoom, in the early 1900s? That would make sense, although I confess it would never occur to me to juxtapose those two series (Barsoom and Dune) and ask about the similarities and differences. They feel very different, if for no other reason than that Burroughs just seems interested in making a buck from some easily constructed pulp fiction with a broad revue-audience appeal, while Herbert seems to want to blow minds (assuming the psychedelic nature of Dune isn't just the result of the drugs he took while writing it).
Also now I think of it, aren't ranged weapons generally disliked in fiction? You want your hero to win or lose by virtue of his strength of arm, wits in the moment, decision and energy. It's dispiriting -- well, less inspiring -- if he wins merely because he's flying an F-22 and the other schmo is stuck in a Sopwith Camel, or because his logistical tail is superior and he's well supplied with ammo/charges for his blaster/magical potions, while the other guy doesn't even have good shoes.
New Wave SF started in the 60s and had its heyday in the 70s, and that strain still lingers on. So Herbert's "Dune" was very much in the New Wave mould. Ray Bradbury's "Martian Chronicles" would be 'soft' SF but they're very much not New Wave, even allowing for the chronological distance.
Anything by M. John Harrison, a lot of Michael Moorcock, J.G. Ballard (before he started losing the run of himself and claiming he was writing "speculative fiction" (that kind of SF) not "science fiction" - a bit like Margaret Atwood when she was in the running for Serious Literature Literary Prizes and got fed-up with interviewers asking her why she had written SF novel). There was a sort of stylistic throwback to the 'planetary romances'/science fantasy settings of previous decades, but updated to be post-apocalyptic (e.g. the Viriconium stories of M. John Harrison which I liked https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viriconium):
"The New Wave was a science fiction (SF) movement in the 1960s and 1970s characterized by a high degree of experimentation in form and content, a "literary" or artistic sensibility, and a focus on "soft" as opposed to hard science. New Wave writers often saw themselves as part of the modernist tradition in fiction, and the New Wave was conceived as a deliberate break from the traditions of pulp science fiction, which many of the writers involved considered irrelevant and unambitious. They thus emphasized stylistic experimentation and literary merit over the scientific accuracy or prediction of hard science fiction writers."
You had writers experimenting with prose styles like "cut-up prose" and other techniques of the time. According to Wikipedia, "Although the New Wave was critiqued for the self-absorption of some of its writers, it was influential in shaping the development of subsequent genres, primarily cyberpunk and slipstream." Anyone remember slipstream? Very big in the 00s, though you don't hear so much about it anymore; I'd say a lot of recent Hugo winners could best be described as slipstream rather than conventional SF, but for some reason they don't seem to have adapted that label.
> Trans got exactly 8.0 and I was forced to decide whether by “above 8” I meant “including 8” or “literally above 8” and how much I wanted to start World War III in the comments section; I apologize to the author for chickening out.
Somehow I misread this as "trains" twice, thinking "yeah, I could imagine SSC commenters getting mad about whether or not a bubble-bursting of their preferred transit mode is accurate," and then clicked thru.
At first I was a bit sad because my review (the book of why) got a low-end score. Then I noticed that, at standard deviation 3.4, it has the highest variance of them all! What rejoicing! Then I got a bit sad again because I felt dumb at being happy due to topping an irrelevant metric. Then I noticed that, actually, in statistical optimization variance is a resource as important as the mean! Then...
Yeah I gave your review "The Book of Why", a high review. I tried reading the book, before reading your review and got totally bogged down. So I really appreciated your review, but it was a lot of work.. and I can imagine people giving it a bad review. So here is a hearty thanks from at least one person.
Tangential, but anyone who, like me, found the story and 'lost media' aspect of the Castrati fascinating, should listen to the song 'Boy 1904'. It's the best example I've found of one of the extant Castrato recordings being remixed and used to a modern composition, in this case by the front man of Icelandic post-rock band Sigur Ros. Incidentally, I think this front man own voice might serve as a fair facsimile of the 'otherworldliness' of the best Castrati voices.
Regarding Erik Hoel, he's obviously a superb writer, but there's something about his style that I find off-putting. He completely lacks irony, humor and plain conversational ease (contrast with Scott!). Instead, he comes across as aloof, projecting a persona of a Serious Writer Covering Deep Topics, in defense of refined taste and high art etc. It's very clear he desires recognition as The Writer. Treats himself way too seriously.
I haven't looked at his review since it first came out, so maybe I might see what you are talking about if I reread it. But there was definitely a lot of humor and irony in his writing. The ridiculous Victorian titles were hilarious and had me chuckling the whole time, and The Gossip Trap theory is the total opposite of Serious Writer Persona. So, without examples, I'd have to say I disagree pretty strongly.
I don't find the titles especially hilarious - yes, they're amusing, but it's a dry, reserved, academic kind of humor. More importantly - he never directs the humor and irony at himself (something that Scott does quite often). He's dead serious about himself. The way he writes feels very "carefully, cautiously measured" in a way that e.g. Scott's writing is definitely not.
That's the vibe I feel, anyway, it's subjective. I could comb his essays for specific examples, but it's more of a holistic impression than anything in particular.
He's a different writer than Scott, but I loved his review. Not as funny, true, but he does a fantastic job of taking a very big-picture book and zooming out to write an even-bigger-picture review.
That Golem review is mindblowing, I only read the fake foreword for it from "Imaginary Magnitude", I didn't know there's an actual book. Lem never ceases to amaze me.
Francesca has brought up the topic of "books that are most likely to resonate with the reviewers (who I believe are mostly male)" on here, and I think part of her questioning is to do with styles of writing or how a topic is presented (e.g. if it is presented in a fashion associated with masculine thinking rather than feminine feeling attributions). A majority male readership will unconsciously gravitate towards something written in a 'masculine' style, so reviewers will select books that enable them to write in that style, and in turn the readership votes preferentially for the 'masculine' rather than 'feminine' writing style.
In that regard, I think the exchange between myself and Mark is instructive. I am going to assume Mark's gender (apologies in advance!) that Mark is a man. I am a woman.
Mark thinks this is an affecting, moving, well-written article and likes it. I think it's at least in part fictionalised, and is heavy on the kind of heartstrings-tugging I most dislike.
Were I to go by Francesca's metrics, had this been submitted for a contest or just a post, I should like it (woman, likes feeling-writing style, likes personalisation of subject to relate more easily to it, likes the human interest touch and so forth) and Mark should dislike it. The reality is the other way round.
So I don't necessarily think that there is that kind of bias going on, but yes, if we got figures for readership it would be a fun little exercise to match "how many female-identified" against "how many female-identified reviewers", with the caveat that it is nothing more than a fun little exercise and says nothing about "this is the He-Man Woman-Haters Club".
My relevant demographic labels according to the current fashion would be, I believe: "XY, cis-het, He/Him".
Got through the first few paragraphs of "Part I" and clicked back here to note that I'm not going to finish reading it because it's depressing and sad and gross. Not into that sort of thing. Dunno if that is a useful data point or not, but there you go *shrug*
Unhappily, a lot of real-life situations amongst the less well-off/less got it all together are sad and gross and depressing.
And there are a lot of times when, as I said, I would cheerfully have napalmed the adults involved for being such self-involved, up their own arses, fuckwits who were wrecking their kids.
But there's a style of misery porn writing that this woman invokes which makes me bristle. Theodore Dalrymple writes about his similar experiences with the English poor and underclass, and while he has more of a judgemental approach, he is much more readable and palatable to me, because he does not make it about HIMSELF and HIS sensibilities and how he gasped, hiccoughed, staggered, and reeled in a mental sea of static through his day-to-day duties.
What did this woman do, in the end? Nothing. Did she even attend the cremation of this young woman that she had been crying crocodile tears over all through this article? No mention of it, and had she done so, she certainly would have tried to wring our withers with a blow-by-blow account of how she gasped, reeled, etc. through the ceremony.
Did she make any formal complaints or reports? Get on to anyone in authority? Try upsetting the apple-cart? No, no and no.
All that she did do was use this tragedy to write a (really badly written by prose style) piece making herself out to be Susannah Sensibility, Super Sensitive M.E. who will weep and wail online about the drama, the drama! so as to present herself in the best possible light and every other person as the uncaring, callous, indifferent or pure evil.
While, let me remind you, doing exactly *nothing* about any of this, except exhorting an online mob to hate the CPS, hate the local authorities, hate hate hate and so on. But not hate her, even though she is part of all this apparatus, because she is one of the Good Ones.
A Good One who, if you die in circumstances that warrant having an M.E. write it up, will gleefully rifle through your belongings to ferret out bits and pieces about your personal life which are none of her goddamn business, as she kicks this entire sob-fest off by admitting is why she gave up being a paramedic - not enough juicy secrets being resolved that she could find out about.
"Sob sister was an American term in the early 20th century for reporters (usually women) who specialized in newspaper articles (often called "sob stories") with emphasis on the human interest angle using language of sentimentality. The derogatory label was coined in 1907 during coverage of a murder trial. The term "sob sister" dates to 1907, when Irvin S. Cobb derided the women reporters who were covering the trial of Harry K. Thaw for murder.
...The spectacle of the newswomen's presence in court and the publicity marketing of the "woman's view" was more responsible for the derogatory label of "sob sister" than the melodramatic style of the women reporters, which was not notably different from the writings of their male colleagues. The reporting of the Thaw trial was equally "overwrought" by both men and women reporters. An excerpt from one of Dix's articles on the Thaw trial demonstrates the sob sister approach:
'In good truth, a more piteous figure than the little chorus girl and artists' model could scarcely be imagined. Gone was even the bravado of cheerfulness and nonchalance she had been trying to vainly to keep up for the past two days. She came into court looking like a flower that has been beaten down into the ground and despoiled of its beauty by a storm. Her face was sodden with weeping. Her eyes red rimmed and swollen. Her face showed white and wan under the black veil in which she had tried to shroud it. She had seemed sad and miserable before. She appeared absolutely crushed, and as if there was no spirit left in her.'
From the same trial, a male reporter, William Hoster, wrote in similar sob-sister style:
'Throwing aside all modesty and pride, sinking every feeling to woman dear, baring her bleeding heart to the world—Evelyn Nesbit Thaw flung wide open the book of her tragic life, that all might read. A tremendous sacrifice, and a soul-crushing story. But in the hour of deepest woe, the girl wife of Harry Kendall Thaw has this consolation, which will be all sufficient balm to her broken heart,—she has probably saved the life of her husband.'"
Compare the similes used back in 1907 and our 2022 heroine:
"She came into court looking like a flower that has been beaten down into the ground and despoiled of its beauty by a storm."
"This poor, defeated foster-kid looked like a flower with a broken stem."
Same "can I make a buck out of this story by piling on the treacle" attitude at work, but at least the journalists have the excuse that this is their job. Our Heroine has no excuse but wanting to be head-patted for her exquisite empathy.
>with the caveat that it is nothing more than a fun little exercise and says nothing about "this is the He-Man Woman-Haters Club".
I totally agree it says nothing about "this is the He-Man Woman-Haters Club". At the same time, the space between 'nothing more than a fun little exercise and says nothing' and 'this is the He-Man Woman-Haters Club' is vast. And, to me, the more interesting place to explore.
I think if people find it an interesting exercise, then go ahead and do it. But I would be very chary of attributing Great Significance to any findings, one way or the other.
I am still smiling at the suggestion that we Lady Readers on here are such delicate, timid, shy, shrinking wood-violets that it takes too much courage to submit a review to the book contest because, well, we are ladies and don't write in a style/on a topic that the Manly Men of ACX would be interested in reading or voting for.
I'm not brave in ordinary life, but it didn't take any great burst of courage (Dutch or otherwise) for me to proffer my opinions on here, even if you are all Big Strong Intelligent Scholarly Manly Men Readers 😀
I'm not very interested in comparing finalists to readership (or book review submissions to readership). Personally, I find the question interesting of why are there (if it's still the case) 90% guys reading this blog and 10% girls. I find it interesting, because I think the answer goes beyond 'it's just interest' and has something to do with how this community developed in the first place and how such trends spread and multiply.
> I am still smiling at the suggestion that we Lady Readers on here are such delicate, timid, shy, shrinking wood-violets that it takes too much courage to submit a review to the book contest because, well, we are ladies and don't write in a style/on a topic that the Manly Men of ACX would be interested in reading or voting for.
That brings you into the question of why the wider Rationalist community is majority guys. Is it because yah boo bad old sexism patriarchy no outreach to divergently abled trans BIPOC femmes? Quick, let's get the DEI Committee up and running and on the case!
Or is it 'men tend to be interested in this kind of thing more than women are?' which can go down the rabbit hole of 'is it genes, is it environment, is it differences in the brain, is it socialisation' and so on and on and on.
There are Rationalist blogs by women. Why am I not reading them? Well, I'm not a Rationalist, as such, I stumbled across Scott's stuff by accident, and I keep reading for the wide range of topics covered. You couldn't pay me to read any of the Less Wrong stuff, old or new, and that might be a question of "is it appealing to ordinary women?" but frankly, I'm not interested.
I'm mainly not interested in questions of "why not more women?" about anything, because too often it devolves into "patriarchy! sexism! hire me on as DEI consultant to get more differently able trans femmes of colour in here!" and it turns into a grift. Even if the real reason is *not* sexism, it's because of bell curve distributions in mathematical ability or summat.
EDIT: Now, in the Not-So-Old-Days, yes it really was a case of "men-only clubs" and "jobs for the boys" and "the old school tie" which kept women out of spaces. But we've been doing a lot of work on that, so it's hard to claim that it's still the same old reason. If it is, then the work being done is practically useless, so what do you do instead? I think it is a combination of this is a small bubble of like-minded people in pretty much one country who happen to talk to each other, and it shakes out that they're mostly guys, because it's STEM-heavy topics.
Getting into the topic of "why not more women in STEM" is covering the same old ground and as I said, I'm not interested in that. I think the simplest answer is most likely to be correct: mostly guys on here because the Rationalist movement is mostly guys because there's a lot of STEM talk, plus it's within a geographic/social bubble so nearly everyone knows everyone else.
Okay, I understood you're not interested in those questions, and fine.
I guess most people here are not interested in one or the other question that comes up in the comments. Also perfectly fine. Same for me btw. In most cases, most of us (including you?) ignore most of those questions ... also fine.
The thing is, why does there seem so much (negative) excitement around sb. asking a rather simple question around gender here? I imagine what this comment section would look like, if for any question that came up, most of who were *not* interested in a certain question would question why on heaven and earth it was asked in the first place. So why does there seem to be so much effort to respond with 'this question is irrelevant'?
You partly gave the answer, and if I understood it right, it's because you're expecting certain generalized criticism of what's going on (sexism!) or political demands for change (to get more differently able ... in here!) or something similar.
Well, if that's the case, my responses are: first, it's a pity if you have had such bad experiences with overly exaggerated demands & debates in the gender context. Second, is this not of all places the one place where we can focus on what somebody is actually saying, instead of all the negative (and real-life) parodies of their argument?
"The thing is, why does there seem so much (negative) excitement around sb. asking a rather simple question around gender here?"
Because it is *never* a simple case of "I'm just asking questions". Maybe you don't have any ulterior motive, but when someone pops up to go "You say you have a female readership, but all your finalists were male. Interesting!", the next thing is the witch-hunt starts.
Look at TheMotte right now, which was a spin-off of a sub-reddit spun off from the old SSC. It has decided to leave Reddit before it is pushed, because the Eye of Sauron is turning upon it. There may or may not have been malicious reporting to the admins, but Anti-Evil Operations are taking an interest.
I don't want that here. I don't want "Hmmmm - why so male?" brought up as a topic of investigation and then flagellation. 'I think the answer goes beyond 'it's just interest' and has something to do with how this community developed in the first place and how such trends spread and multiply' - well, are you also investigating how trends spread and multiply in how knitting sites are majority female?
See, that is the larger point I am making. If there isn't "I am also looking into how some spaces end up majority female", then this begins to sound like one of those isolated demands. "How such trends spread and multiply" - how does anyone find out anything? You hear about it from a friend, or a friend of a friend; you go looking for something specific; you are reading one thing and stumble over a mention of another which leads you down the rabbit-hole; you can't really remember, was it back in '06 or '11 you saw this place mentioned somewhere?
There are clear and plain investigations of "why is X all guys and Y all girls?", to be sure. But in the current climate, any raising of "so why all X on here?" does raise alarm bells because of how such questions have become politicised and weaponised.
And besides, haven't we done reader surveys before about "how did you find this place?" What exactly is it you are hoping to uncover? "Less Wrong to Rationalist Blog A to Rationalist Blog B to Unrelated Substack C run by a friend of B who mentions them to Podcast D"? Reading the New York Times and wondering "who the heck are these people, and this Scott guy?" and looking it up?
What in the end would be the suggestion to "get more women"? 'Oh you must move outside your cosy little bubble, try advertising on cake-icing websites and is Jezebel or something like it still running? make this place more appealing to a feminine audience by - "
And THAT is the pitfall right there. How do you make this site "more appealing to a feminine audience"? I may be being unfair to Francesca, but she seemed to suggest "more topics appealing to women in particular on feminine interests, written in a manner appealing to women by going for the soft-soap, sob sister style".
No, thank you. This woman would depart by the nearest window if I saw a post on "What is this autumn's fashion trend colour? Do you know which Season you come under? Read on and find out!" done in that glurge style. Though if anybody could do something interesting in a quasi-scientific style on "What colour season are you?", it would be here! I would read an article on skin tones, I would not read one "slanted to appeal to the ladies, because we need to increase our female readership to the level required by the mandatory diversity quota".
The well of public discussion about sex and demographics, in jobs or avocations, has been thoroughly poisoned by this time. It should come as no surprise that a forum should react negatively to the introduction of such topics.
I read it, just to add to the data. I didn't like it. It was bombastic, maudlin, and worst of all deeply hypocritical: it complains about narcissism and a lack of empathy while demonstrating those qualities itself in spades. I now know a great deal about how the author feels about all the people involved in this story, her feelings are described at length at each point, but I know very little about the people themselves. They are described briefly, superficially, without any apparent attempt to observe and understand what they were actually like, or actually feeling. They appear to be just playing a stock role in the drama of which the author gets star billing.
Like you, I noticed that the author's rage leads to no concrete or useful action at all, indeed she congratulates herself on her "daring" of putting a flower from the funeral dispaly in the hand of the dead teenager. Such boldness! But that's it. No attempt to get to know anyone, or do anything, just a rage at everyone else for not doing something. I would say the author ironicallyh shares with the guy who shot himself a similarly narcissistic focus on herself.
I use "her" in this comment somewhat cautiously, too. I'm not fully convinced this actually was written by a woman, it feels strangely masculine, although of a sort of keyboard warrior living in mom's basement masculine.
Why not - she has no y-chromosome, feelings differ (and no, I would've never told that lady in the story to take off her clothes - wanna look at corpses? fine with me).
I try not to judge people's feelings - and consider it near impossible to convey any emotion fully in mere words. - If you feel she fakes, well, she has as yet few comments, she may read yours. - Anyway, thanks A LOT for mentioning Anthony Malcolm Daniels aka Theodore Dalrymple; I will get at least one of his book(s) asap. Sounds very interesting.
Oh goodness gracious me, I would recommend that lady get her blood pressure and balance checked out. She is always being giddy, dizzy, staggering and the like, I do fear for her health!
"You’ll notice I referred to them as “my dead folks.” They are. They’re mine. Their stories are in my hands. It’s up to me to see that their truth is told. I know these people. I know them more than their own families sometimes, more than the pathologist who will literally pry their brains out of their skulls."
And this is exactly the level of narcissism I am complaining about. The dead people are *not* hers. It's *not* up to her. They belong to themselves, first and foremost, and their families next. Some stranger who sees them as fodder for misery porn, the more tragic their stories the better for her ghoulish fictionalisation, does not speak for them or for anything more than her own lack of sympathy, compassion, or tact.
I wanted to thank Scott and all the reviewers. This is wonderful, I'm slowly working my way through the rest of the reviews. Good stuff, a few new books added to my read pile. And, Iain Banks, where have you been all my life? ("Surface Detail")
I pressed the link to see the book review on Galton, ended up reading a very eye-opening review on "Making Sense of Tantric Buddhism". Sadly, I failed to find the name/email address of the reviewer- I wanted to thank them for the enlightening read.
If anyone could help me find it, it would be greatly appreciated.
I lived reading the reviews, but I was pretty disappointed when I realized I'd run out of time to vote. I wish there was more time between the last review and the deadline. I had read 14 of 16 reviews when the winners were chosen, and I also hadn't gotten to the open thread yet that announced the voting deadline.
You might sponsor a Comment Contest too. It would be interesting if well-known writers won that too, since comments are a different, dash-it-off, form.
Presumably the winner will use the same e-mail that they used to submit the actual book review.
Congrats everyone !! Great reviews, I'll go back and read those that I missed.
I didn't know the votes had even opened though, but that's life.
Wow, I'm glad the winner won; that's the one I'd have voted for.
But I must have been asleep at the switch; I never saw a notice that it was time to vote, or even a notice that the last one -- Kora in Hell? -- was indeed the last one. I haven't even found time to read the last two yet.
It was in the last Open Thread: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-239 .
Ah, I *really* don't jump on those. I've been trying to be diligent about the reviews, but there's only so much time. Ah well.
Those are not a place most of your readers look for major announcements.
Source?
Agreed, I skip the open threads sometimes and completely missed this. other than us, I'm not the only one I know of that experienced the same thing.
If there was an explicit post for voting I definitely would have voted.
Same here. Was trying to keep up with the reviews but totally missed the announcement.
(Also, wondering why Scott chose plurality voting this year...)
agreed, I don't really come here to read the comments that often.
I don't need to read the comments to quickly open the OT and see if there's anything new. I'm glad I don't get extra announcements in addition to everything that's already out there.
Don't know about most readers ... for me, those are exactly the place I would look for announcements.
I guess in this case you'd have preferred an extra post for 'please vote now'?
I didn't need one, but talking about nitpick ... I'd usually prefer to have a time frame for doing x. Like 'voting will be open until'. In this specific case, voting was quick for me, but eg. I might have wanted to have a second look at certain reviews and needed more time. Also, there are weeks, when I only read on my smartphone while travelling but mostly don't have time at the PC, and having a clear timeframe helps to schedule stuff.
I mean, the fact that the contest exists is its own post. The "meetups everywhere" are two posts, one calling for organizers and one listing times and places, for the *explicitly acknowledged* reason that putting them in an open thread doesn't get a lot of eyeballs. And "please vote" was its own post last time, so I don't think I was alone in not realizing I had to actively look for it in a post with an unrelated title.
>for the *explicitly acknowledged* reason
Where was that?
I'm not arguing with your point of having a special announcement for sth. important. At the same time I also find the combination of 'news & announcements' & 'OT' very convenient. I certainly prefer having those in one post than in two seperate ones in many cases (exceptions confirming the rule).
From the call for organizers:
"There are ACX-affiliated meetup groups all over the world. Lots of people are vaguely interested, but don't try them out until I make a big deal about it on the blog. Since learning that, I've tried to make a big deal about it on the blog at least once annually, and it's that time of year again."
(Note that a mention in an open thread isn't what is meant by "making a big deal about it.")
While I did notice the voting announcement, I think it would make sense to create a separate post about stuff like that.
One of the most interesting things I learned from this project was the gap between "good writer", "excellent writer" and "I make money with writing". All of them were at least good, but to me there was a sharp distinction between the median book review and some of Scott's reviews.
Same.
Request for next time: Can these reviews be a bit shorter? I'd have enjoyed reading them more if they had been half the length or less.
I agree; they were really long so I didn't read most of them.
I mean, they are mostly user-chosen, right? "Median score above 8 given out entirely to very long reviews" is pretty strong evidence they *can't* go shorter and still get seen, unless there just weren't any short reviews of any quality in the initial phase.
Same note: not that a better writer couldn't have done it, but my experiment this year was to see if I could force a fiction book into the running. I sort of failed at that, then got a reprieve that sort of muddied the results. But I think there's good evidence that "non-fiction book, pretty heady subject, long" is sort of the format to shoot for if you want to win the old-fashioned focus-on-quality way.
The reviews in question were probably chosen by the most text-tolerant of the users. Those of us who didn't get through the reviews also did not vote.
I'm not sure this gives us that much data though, right? Like if there were short reviews to choose (I have not checked this) then there's nothing keeping the short-review-lovers from using their text-intolerance to pick the short ones.
I'm saying, the part where this *doesn't* happen is either a function of short reviews not existing at all, or people not voting for them if they do. There might be another explanation beyond "people don't like them and thus don't vote for them, and thus it's a bad idea to write them if you are optimizing for winning", but if you are a writer choosing between tactics you sort of want to know what that explanation is before you bet on it.
Aren’t people doing prelim voting for something like this by definition people with tons of time on their hands?
Or people who really like book reviews. But having a ton of time isn't really necessarily the same thing as preferring long texts - you could just as easily eat 100 nuggets as an entire chicken, so to speak.
Meh I think the voters on a prelim book review contest almost certainly prefer longer reviews compared to the gen pop.
I started doing some preliminary voting but quickly realised I didn't have time for reading all these darn 15K-word reviews.
People who tolerate text well can vote both for long and short reviews. People who don't tolerate text well can only vote for short reviews. They can't vote for the long reviews and give them bad grades because they don't read them in the first place.
Or, to put it from another angle: If someone reads through a long text, that is that is most likely because someone finds that text good. If the long text is not good, people will not finish it. And then they can't vote. That way there will be a positive bias for long texts.
This is kind of plausible, but it also means that (if true) there's a ideal length of review - one that's so impossibly long that only one person finishes it, and votes it a ten. For some reason this concept is hilarious to me.
Ha ha, yes, that idea illustrates the feeling I got when I saw the collection of the 141 (?) book reviews pretty well.
If someone was motivated, they could probably look at the relationship between length, sd, and average rating to see if there is likely an effect.
That sounds like you-work. I have all the motivation of the director of the mario brothers movie.
Hmm. I would find it acceptable for someone to start reading a review, get bored with it before the end, and give it a bad grade. More than acceptable: keeping the reader engaged for the full piece is part of what the review should accomplish.
I think there was a discussion whether this was good behavior or not. Personally I was scared away from the whole exercise by the vast amounts of text.
I thought the rule was you needed to read everything to vote. So by definition thst will leave you with only people who are willing to read the long ones
I don't know if there was such a rule ... but I would favour one like this. Or at least sth. like you must read a significant part or give it a decent try for each of the finalists or sth.
But overall, I agree with the consequences ... if I had read only 3 shorter ones and nothing else, I'd certainly not vote.
There was no requirement that you absolutely had to read everything in order to vote. I'm sure many people skimmed all/most reviews, but read only a couple that caught their interest, and then voted for one that they had read.
Which means that shorter reviews would have had an advantage, since it was more likely that someone would read them in their entirety, and if that didn't happen then it's evidence that longer reviews were preferred.
I read four randomly chosen reviews from the Google doc, rated 3 poorly and 1 well, and the one I rated well, I also voted for in the final round of voting, and it got 2nd place. I feel like I contributed to the initial round successfully without having done a huge amount of reading.
(I read all the finalists, too, of course, or I wouldn’t have voted in the final.)
As the 2nd place winner, thank you! Glad you enjoyed the review 🙂
Seems you're text tolerant. Like most people here, apparently. I thought most of the finalists were too much text so I only read a minority of them.
So it seems you're less 'text tolerant'. Do you enjoy Scott's writing then? Or what are/aren't you reading here? I'm not sure how not being text tolerant and reading Scott's blog fit together.
Scott's texts are the big exception to my text intolerance. He simply is a very gifted writer, I assume: Somehow he knows how to write a lot of text that is easy to read even for me. I can't say I read everything Scott writes, but I often enjoy his posts regardless of their length.
Were the contest reviews longer than the reviews Scott writes?
If not, it might be a case for your different type of criticism argument. Anyway, congrats!!
“Non-fiction, pretty heady subject, long” is pretty much what this Substack is about.
True that. And it's not sour grapes - like that's entirely fine; people can have preferences. I was knowingly working high-payoff longshot odds stuff in terms of what I was up to.
I was glad there was some fiction review in the contest, I think it's more difficult, and I think both pieces did really well.
Disagreed. Most (impressionistically, haven't actually sat and calculated) ACT texts are medium-length by my standards, but reviews are longer.
>is pretty strong evidence they *can't* go shorter
I kind of disagree. I agree though, that it's not about writing a really short review. Overall, non-fiction, heady subject, long, seems spot on. But I think this doesn't say that several of the finalists wouldn't have profited from being 1/3rd or 1/5th shorter.
They arent book reviews in the sense of a NYT book review of a recent novel, which is about whether the books are good enough to buy. They are book explanations, discussions, and are necessarily long form essays.
Yeah a lot of them could have used a pass through from an editor. I didn't vote in the end because the prospect of reading them all was exhausting
Maybe have them labelled by length? Or have subcategories for different lengths. It's hard to compare a short punchy review to a long discussion of the topic that could be it's own book
Err, could the reviews be longer, please? Next time maybe only those long enough to come in installments? - Hoel's winning text is super-long (the longest?) - and I would have loved to read even more of it. I am here for the reading. Not for saving time. I hurry at other things (job, food, family, sleep - to have more time for substack ACX/Hoel/Caplan/Zvi - and blogs as ACOUP, putanumonit, mru) . Amazon has short reviews, I noticed. ;)
Thanks for releasing the preliminary voting data! The sample sizes are small but even at 10 people, the 95% confidence interval for most of these would only be ± 1 (and 68% interval would be ± 0.5), so I think it's fine to give the scores some thought.
Standard deviations are pretty different
Thanks, Scott! I had a good time.
I just went to read the one about Trans on the strength of its almost getting promoted to finalist, and yeah, it was a good review. Thanks, mystery author.
Me too. It was very thought provoking and threw up some interesting juxtapositions in my mind.
>Why are two people with similar gender identities more alike than say, two people that both have wombs?
Went in quite skeptical, but yes, this is literary alchemy: review gold transmuted out of book lead. And it's quite tiresome, unoriginal lead, at that. (But apparently good enough to sucker former intellectual Richard Dawkins? How embarrassing...score one for Scott's "Will Nonbelievers Believe Anything?"[1]) It's a solid beatdown of a bad book begging for bruising, by a reviewer who has proper Skin In The Game. That matters so much - indifferent neophyte reviewers make for poorer reviews. Many Such Examples this year, sadly. This review would have made my Top 3, easily. Well worth the read. (Bias note: oddly similar life story to my own, closing sections will likely hit differently for cis readers. Prediction: YMWV. It's still pretty good without those parts though.)
Also, boggling at that familiarity graph - boy would I like to know where they pulled the N=1000 from. 5% trans is, what...at least an OOM above standard population estimates? Some very fine data on both sides, indeed.
(The __comments__ would have been ass though - an uncontroversial point of consensus about a contentious topic. Like a Pentagruel of the worst Open Thread comments, dug up and stitched together, unwittingly given life by Scott's blessing. I can live without seeing that...)
[1] https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/will-nonbelievers-really-believe
"Like a Pentagruel of the worst Open Thread comments"
Is there a part of Rabelais where Pantagruel gets cut to pieces, buried, dug up and put back together? I'd believe it, but I don't remember that at all.
Ah, I seem to have misunderstood a joke from the animated series __Archer__. Quite right: that should more appropriately be Deucalion or Adam, if named at all. Learn something new every day. Thanks for the edification opportunity.
(I genuinely don't like The Monster being colloquially known as Frankenstein, since that's just confusing, and Shelley's original book is pretty clear + worth the read...)
Oh, you *did* mean the monster! I thought that likely, but I didn't want to presume.
And yes, I think Adam is pretty much the best name candidate, although I take less exception to calling the monster Frankenstein than many others do (it seems to have become one of those I Am Smart And Educated memes). After all, Victor Frankenstein is pretty much his father and we have pretty well established norms for surnames in such cases.
Dawn of Everything was great. I thought the part about the "gossip trap" at the end was pretty insightful and troubling.
I misread the first word of the "When ideology meets reality" book as "trains" and got really excited to find out about a new book on trains until I clicked through and realized it was about gender stuff :(
Tender-normative
Gauge non-conforming.
The narrow/standard gauge dichotomy is a social construct.
I feel that you're derailing this conversation.
I was mildly annoyed by one of your other comments on this post, but this gets you right back on track.
The only solution to this is for you to write a polemical history of the Sodor and Man Railway and title it "Trains: When Ideology Meets Reality".
Or a critical examination of Atlas Shrugged. (Trains [x] ideology [x].)
lol same
The link for https:/www.awanderingmind.blog/ is broken
Thanks for noticing, I've also added a comment :D
Turns out the voting system worked.
Congratulations to all the winners and finalists! I enjoyed all of the reviews I had the chance to read. And as someone else said, it would be great for the voting interval to be a little longer next year.
So *no* (identifiably) women reviewers!??
I seem to recall from past reader surveys that this blog has a skew enough gender distribution that this isn’t statistically surprising here.
If you are claiming bias then thats odd, given the anonymity.
No, I’m claiming that if 90% of readers are male then we should expect 90% of submitters to be male, and getting 100% out of about ten isn’t significantly different from that. This is the unbiased hypothesis.
My guess is, the readership here is more female than the group of really active participants.
In most larger groups, men are much more active in expressing their views than women, even if it's almost a 50 : 50 balance in the audiance. I'm not sure, why this should be any different here. And this group in addition has a much higher percentage in male readership, which should emphasise this even more. (Here, I'm talking more about comments than book reviews).
But, like, really, none?
Theres no identifiable any kind of writer in anonymous contests.
Well, anonymity removes/reduces the potential for explicit gender bias, but you could have situations where the book reviewers (male) submit books that are most likely to resonate with the reviewers (who I believe are mostly male), leading to more or all males being chosen. You could have a situation where a reviewer submits a review about say, menopause, which may not resonate with a mostly male audience and not get chosen. It’s just odd that there are no identifiable females on this list but I’m assuming at least some female readers. That would warrant more examination, if it were my own research.
There were no books about menopause; you can check the documents for the full list.
I know, and I did. I was using that as a hypothetical example in response to the point someone made about anonymity.
that belief is more or less biologically or culturally essentialist. There are books for women, and books for men. Indeed the writers were possibly all men and the reviewers mostly men. If this was the kind of blog to have book reviews on the menopause it would be the kind of blog to have blog posts on the menopause, and if it were that kind of blog it would attract a different audience and vote differently on the book reviews.
I would argue that books are for everyone, but ok.
Essentialism isn’t wrong though in its sane form? Men and women really do like different things in general.
Several of the books reviewed by finalists were written or co-written by women, including the one I reviewed (Making Nature), two of the winners (Castrato and Internationalists), and a few others (Viral, Exhaustion).
Are you suggesting that the mere fact of the audience being largely male is a kind of implicit gender bias? This seems like an obvious absurdity; does Archive of Our Own have gender bias that it needs to address just because it's a clam fest?
Not what I’m suggesting.
As a long time member of the commentariat and female (in the classic sense) I find that the SSC/ACX 'group' is just fine the way it is. It is more left, more atheist, more urban, more male, younger, more mathy and a bit smarter than the usual run of people that I hang with. I find it occasionally off-putting for any of those reasons. I would resist strongly any deliberate attempts to change any of those things, as I feel the possibility of catastrophic damage to the community is more likely than positive change.
And if we were to 'improve' it, I wouldn't start by focusing on 'male'.
I’m not trying to change or improve anything - I’m just trying to understand a simple data point.
"You could have a situation where a reviewer submits a review about say, menopause, which may not resonate with a mostly male audience and not get chosen"
I hate this kind of argument, and you want to know why? Because the corollary of that is "A reviewer who submits a review about menopause (1) *must* resonate with a female audience (2) *must* be voted Top Number One by the female audience because this is a Lady Review on a Lady Topic for Ladies".
If the menopause book is crappily written, or the review is crappily written, I will be a heck of lot less interested in it than a well-written review about mathematics, even though I am post-menopausal and non-mathematical.
I object to having my preferences dictated to me by what is in my knickers. "People didn't vote for it because of gender bias" is a catch-all excuse; if we don't vote for Obviously Female Reviewer, it's because this site is all boys, so gender bias; if all reviews are anonymous, and the revelation after voting is that the winner is a guy, well that's gender bias in action again, because the guy wrote Guy Review on Guy Topic for Guy Audience.
Is history, the brain, economics, how well-intentioned do-gooders screw up, and other topics of reviews Guy Stuff? I would not like that to be the diktat, since it would mean I could no longer have opinions on those things, given that I am Not A Guy.
>>>That would warrant more examination, if it were my own research.
Why? What is it about the ratios of participation by men and women that you find interesting? Why, in the context of reading and commenting at ACX/SCC, does that matter?
If I took the time to anonymize the responses so as not to bias the results (which is what I think was done here), I would also want to check if in fact my results were unbiased (by comparing the sample to the larger population).
I'm a woman, and I wrote a review that didn't become a finalist. N=1
I'm not a woman and I didn't write a review, which partially confirms the hypothesis that all unknown reviewers are women.
Oooh, that makes a whole two of us, so! 😁
Just curious, which review did you write? I really enjoy your comments here, but I don't think I've read your review - none of the ones I read had your style :)
I reviewed "The Knowledge."
Which did you write?
"The Mirror and the Light" which, I imagine, will become clear that it was me as it has some of my hobby-horses pastured therein 😀
I did love that book though!
The personal anecdote at the start of the Trans review was presumably not written by somebody who identifies as a man.
(The demographics round here being what Ozy delicately described as more of an assigned at birth gap than a gender one)
I don't think any made it through to the finals, but at least one of us did submit a review. The fact of the matter being that this is a a majority male space, it's always going to have way more guys than gals submitting reviews, posts, comments, or what have you.
Speaking as somebody in possession (so far as I know) of two X chromosomes, the *last* thing I want is Token Representation. "Oh gosh, there are no women reviewer finalists, quick, find two women reviewers!" I don't want people picked because they tick off one of the Diversity Bingo Card squares, I want them selected because it's good work. And I don't feel 'seen', 'represented' or whatever the current buzz-word is, when it's perfectly clear that the only reason Philippa Space was picked to be a finalist is because she is a she. That does not make me go "Yes, finally at long last, we ladies are being treated equally!"
+1 on the "I want to be chosen because I'm good, not to check a diversity/representation box."
very important people was mine! so that one at least lol
Did the instance of plagiarism not merit a mention? I can't remember which book review this was, but there was one in the finalists in which a commenter noted that the review plagiarized a substantial chunk of their writing.
That one was disqualified. Thread on the topic here: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-230/comment/7375551
Thanks for organizing the contest Scott! Really happy to have ended up among the finalists. Congrats to Erik and everyone else, too.
I had actually decided to review Making Nature for reasons completely unrelated to the contest, i.e. my independent research on scientific writing and publishing, but the theme fit ACX too well not to participate. I sort of gave up on my plans to improve science writing (Roger's Bacon does it better than me); however, I'm always down to talk about it with anyone who's interested. (I'm also, incidentally, looking for work at the moment. You know, just in case you know something.)
That's so cool Etienne, the Making Nature review was one of my favorites, just super interesting. My guesses at the time was that The Castrato review was SlimeMoldTimeMold, so I thought Making Nature was Roger's Bacon - should have thought of you
Thanks Erik, and congrats! It didn't even occur to me to try to guess who wrote what, though in retrospect it makes perfect sense that several of us in this weird blogging niche would participate. (Though I knew SMTM deliberately sat out from this contest!)
#1 seemed pretty fairly obvious, so I guess I voted with the "normies"; I'm somewhat surprised by the rest of the results though. A good reminder that commentariat tenor isn't necessarily reflective of actual voting behaviour, and reading interests don't actually quite conform to the expected ACX stereotypes. (If there'd been a review directly about AI and x-risk, I wonder how it'd have done...)
>Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality, reviewed by AS.
Oh God. Even if it was a pretty well-ranked review, I personally am glad that wasn't included. You just know it would have been murder in the comments...at this point it's the one single topic with the distinction that I don't think I wanna read about it ever again, anywhere. Rehashing the same tired fights over and over, where otherwise-sane people lose their epistemic minds by default.
Maybe. On the other hand the debate hasnt gone away you know. This particular battle in the culture war will endure for a lifetime.
Did you intend the double-entendre of "lifetime"?
("~70 years" vs. "this will end in lethal violence")
Sure; it's not fun to read about anymore though, and rarely insightful. One must carefully budget Slack, especially on true voluntary commitments like entertainment.
I do miss the days not very long ago - well within my lifetime - when trans was just this obscure little thing barely anyone knew about, even inside lefty academia and whatever. There *wasn't* a debate, outside the maybe like once a week during random years when some former celebrity came out or whatever. Then the public rightfully lost interest over salacious nothingburgers of no statistical relevance whatsoever, and moved on. That's the environment I grew up in, the veil of opacity that made it seem like a worthwhile life intervention to rally some form of identity around. If I'd instead grown up during These Modern Pathologies, hearing the sorts of absurd Obvious Nonsense spouted by the loudest activists...I'd very likely have ended up "just" a gay man instead (or dead). No way would I touch this madness with an 11-foot pole. That makes for me having an awkward, "traitorous" stance on this particular aspect of CW. Talk about misaligned incentives.
I might read the review anyway; it's useful to at least have a working knowledge of the Major Works which get thrown around as citations constantly. Couldn't possibly be worse than Abigail Shrier's epistemically bankrupt works...
The approved narrative is that this is a statistical nothingburger no longer, to the extent which requires restructuring the society from the ground up. Of course, like you say, no internet debate is likely to shed much light on this, and maybe no other process which civilization is capable of can either. As usual, the only hope left is for the robot overlords.
I'm of the mind that robust data collection could put many such questions to bed, or at least move policy in saner directions. But no one seems to want to spend the money, perhaps precisely because object-level results would be...inconvenient. (Though, of course, empiricism such as conducting surveys is now considered discriminatory oppressive white supremacy, so maybe that's the real reason. One must never study Schrodinger's [Heisenberg's?] Marginalized Person, lest they disappear in a puff of statistical artifacts. Self-ID episteme 1, metis 0.)
What pronouns will AI use?
That's enough heat out of me, though. To extend a joke elsewhere in threads, I'll stop derailing book-review related discussion. ("Trains Ideology" would be a good title for a book on Italian fascism...)
>I'm of the mind that robust data collection could put many such questions to bed, or at least move policy in saner directions.
I'm not so optimistic. Data by itself says next to nothing, it's all about how one interprets it, all sides in every debate claim that theirs is amply supported, and to some extent they are right. The most intractable thing about this particular brouhaha is that it's a giant motte and bailey, where sex reassignment surgery and fluid gender identity are often included under a single heading, and it's obvious to me that no data can possibly disprove underlying assumptions of that ideology.
There's remarkably little data (given how much attention and resources are otherwise spent on this sub-battle), quite a lot of it old, quite a lot of it of questionable quality/perverse incentives. I'm reminded back during the "bathroom bills" saga how ~every single left outlet reused the exact same infographic over and over and over, citing the same handful of blue states (or were they just big cities?) that swore, Never Have I Ever had issues with inclusive facilities policies passed variable amounts of time ago. And maybe that was even completely honest! But it was telling. I get suspicious whenever "checkmate, outgroup!" dunks become homogenized boilerplate.
That's the rub, really. It largely comes down to narratives and stories, anecdata and counterfactuals, which possibly-accurate statistics get emphasized and which don't. With such a small "intervention arm" compared to "control group", sample sizes are necessarily iffy, and I worry a lot about Lizardman's Constant-type artefacts + selection effects. And as you note, even just the first step of Define Terms, Please is quite fraught. It's a minefield for sure...but I still think it'd be one with a slightly more navigable map if there were, like, Kinsey-grade megastudies to draw from. Not this unholy amalgam of revisionist anthropology and John Money's successors that passes for academic canon. The time I spent in Department of Women and Gender Studies college classes...eye-opening, but not in the way they intended. :(
(Penance for replying despite saying I wouldn't anymore: gonna make myself read that review now. Sigh.)
Wow, I don't think I've ever been so shocked by the voting. Neither of my favorites made it into the top 5, and I was pretty disappointed with most of the winners. It's a huge difference from last year, when I was happy about all the winners, even if I would have ranked them slightly differently. It's especially embarrassing that the Fusion piece made it anywhere near the top since it a) isn't even a book review and b) is wrong about everything important.
What were your favorites?
Consciousness and the Brain was my favorite, followed by Making Nature.
I was surprised Consciousness and the Brain didn't place. I agree that was one of the best.
I'm not especially surprised by the result, but do agree that there seemed less exceptional posts than last time. Maybe there was a built up buffer of people with interesting things to say that has been depleted
I think with this many “finalists”, the earliest ones would have a natural disadvantage.
Agree that the fusion review shouldn't have ended up anywhere near the final reckoning. But - and this is pretty important - the ACX community isn't likely to be much dumber than it was before it made that decision, and therefore (it being vastly larger than us two) we should maybe ask why we're at such odds with it..
Well I think the audience here is full of people who are more exited about tech and futurism than real actual experts in say fusion who understood all the critiques in the comments before encountering them.
Myself included. I think the fusion research community has been very good about bamboozling even the educated public about its progress.
The thorium PR people have managed to inculcate some obvious lies too.
That's so cool! Congrats to everybody!!
Really glad 1587 made it on the winners list. My first instinct was to vote for it, but I didn't because I was afraid that I was being polluted by recency bias. My alternative vote (Castrato) made it to 3rd though, so I'm happy.
Really surprised to see Fusion Energy on the finalists list. As many others said, it was a solid overview of the state of the field, but it barely qualified as a "book review".
I do like the weirdly specific histor(y|ical) book reviews. Like last year's Galen.
Yeah, these aren't topics I'd normally go near, so the fact that I found them engaging enough to tell others about it really speaks to the quality of the book reviews.
IMO, Fusion Energy was misleading to the point of being negligently deceptive. When you say "get fusion", a normal reader would think of plants selling cheap power to the grid, not minor improvements on an arbitrary benchmark. This is like saying "90% chance of getting GAI* by 2028" and then the footnote defines "getting GAI" as "a dense language model with at least 10T parameters".
The most charitable take I can think of is that plasma scientists have their own jargon where "getting fusion" is shorthand for "Q_plasma >= 5", and the author just typical-minded themselves to death. But really, if you're writing for a general audience, you need to use words with their generally understood meanings!
I think the author is also overly optimistic even on the narrow question of when "Q_plasma >= 5" will happen due to not fully taking the correlation between the success of different experiments into account, but that's a comparatively minor matter.
If anything, the author *actively encourages* misunderstanding by saying "I'll also count it if anyone is selling fusion power to the grid, even if they don't get Q_plasma >= 5", which is a bit like saying "I'll also count Skynet taking over the world as getting GAI, even if it has less than 10T parameters".
I also picked Castrato and was very pleased and surprised to see it made it to bronze.
I also really enjoyed and would have submitted additional votes for most of the other medal winners, fwiw
Yes, 1587 was my second choice.
I wonder if Scott would contemplate a system like the Australian voting system, the single transferable vote, for next year. Also, would using it have changed the results this year? We can't know now.
Thanks so much for running the contest and for being so transparent about the decision process!
I wrote the Trans review and totally understand why you would be hesitant to publish it. It's still a huge honor to see it linked on my favorite blog. I hope you run the contest again next year. If you do, I definitely plan on submitting again.
I didn't hear back from you about giving me a blurb, let me know if there's anything about you (blog, etc) you want me to advertise next to your name on here.
Nope. It's fine as-is, thanks.
I just finished reading your review. I liked it. Thanks so much for sharing that with us.
Friendly advice: the part where you altered your quotes from the book to "correct" names almost certainly lowered many people's opinion of your review while making it substantially more inflammatory.
Thanks, but I think you might have misunderstood. I didn't change the genders of the names. I changed the names altogether (from real names to fake names), because I thought the descriptions were often cruelly unflattering, and I thought I could make my point without risking further embarassment to the subjects.
I see. My mistake.
Thank you for the review. Very nuanced, well-written, and structured.
Have you read other books in this genre? Any that you would recommend? I am often surprised by how uniformly polarized the reviews are (unlike yours).
So, can we start World War III in *this* comment section?
As long as we do it by the rules! The new international rules about war.
I voted for "The Internationalists". I thought it would win, given that its topic is very near to the values espoused by Effective Altruists and it describes an amazing case study in how the world was made better for ordinary people.
That's not why _I_ voted for it, though. I'm a sucker for huge, invisible changes to culture that make the past into a foreign country, so much so that even people as smart as Zvi can make bad assumptions / silly assertions (unless the quote in the review was taken very much out of context). Currently I'm stuck on demographics. We are entering unknown territory this century.
(The Dawn of Everything I thought was just to weak a book, and too sensationalist, to appeal to readers here. Recalibration required. The "social media trap" is a very shiny idea for magpie minds...)
Wow, thanks for the alt good reviews! Unsettled (the 2nd) was my fav. review, such that I bought the book and then leant it out. The book reviews is one of my fav things here. Having a diversity of opinion, is important. I think I found all the book reviews to signal a political slant. It would be better to write a review (I think) that didn't indicate your political slant.... And yet here I am liking those reviews that favor my slant... It would be better if it wasn't that way... but how?
Oh I'm going to go read the trans one... thanks again.
Truly honored! This was an absolute blast, from beginning to end.
A huge thanks to Scott, not just for organizing, and not just for putting up money, but also for sharing his community with us finalists. There are not many places out there where a 9,000 word book review can find an audience, let alone generate hundreds of comments - Scott has built something truly special. Knowing there was a possibility that the community might get to see it was incredibly motivating when working on the piece, and I think it's some of my best writing because of it. When reading your comments, not just for my piece, but for all of them, it became very clear to me why Scott does "Comments" roundups for posts, given the quality, some of which were as detailed and engaging as the reviews themselves. And of course, thanks to those who decided to vote for me, I'm so glad you enjoyed the piece.
Additionally, I want to highlight, as Scott did, that I am a fan of several of the writers who entered this contest, including Roger’s Bacon, Étienne F.D, and Resident Contrarian - I highly recommend them, they are all excellent writers who put out great stuff regularly. Additionally, some of my favorite reviews were the ones Scott added at the last minute, including "1587, A Year Of No Significance" - I'd love to see more from that anonymous author.
Finally, here's to the gossip trap not eating all of us alive one by one - maybe we can beat the Garrulous Gorgon With a Thousand Heads one day. Cheers!
congrats man! extremely well deserved
Man, I didn't know you read my shit. Thanks - I've read some of your stuff lately (only lately because, honestly, I don't read as much as I should) and enjoyed it a lot.
Well done. And I agree that your review was some of your best writing. A deserved winner.
Amen to all of that; couldn’t agree more! I’m the anonymous 1587 author - genuinely surprised I got the ‘silver medal’ and honored to be in such illustrious company.
Thanks for hosting Scott. It was my first time publishing anything, so I'm pleased to be an honourable mention. No harm in losing to some of those excellent finalists.
Rereading my review, I was maybe a little strong in some of the claims of Deutsch dismantling rationalism. In truth, I'm agnostic to how it all shakes out: Reconciling the worldviews remains an interesting puzzle to me (along with the puzzle as why people seem to underrate Deutsch).
Any advice from Scott's readers is appreciated:
https://falliblepieces.substack.com/p/david-deutsch-eats-rationalism
Namely, where I'm mischaracterising rationalism or where Deutsch's arguments fall down.
I enjoyed your writing - especially the funny bits like “Our significance is not due to our size or bovinity,” the Pickle Rick reference, and the Minnie Mouse gag 😄 But I burned out on philosophy a while back, so it’s hard for me to get excited about the topic. Pretty much any review of a philosophy book would need to be some kind of hilarious stand-up routine with pyrotechnics for me to give it a top rating.
I liked the review! I hadn't previously read about Deutsch's philosophy, and I found this to be a good introduction.
For what it's worth, I believe (epistemic status for all of the below: 70% certain) many of the philosophical differences between Deutsch and the rationalist community seem to boil down to a difference in intellectual background: physics for Deutsch vs. statistics, game theory, etc. for rationalists.
For instance, physicists notoriously hate most philosophy but love Popper and falsificationism. My (perhaps uncharitable) take on this is that it is not because Popper's philosophy is necessarily better aligned with how to make scientific discoveries, but rather because physicists enjoy their discipline and Popper gives them an excuse to continue working the same way they always have. More precisely, physicists believe they are on track to understanding how the world *really* works at a fundamental level, not that they are just creating useful models. The sensation of true understanding feels deep and incredibly special, but it is not an acceptable justification when e.g. requesting funding. Popper's philosophy gives physicists an out-- the effort in making good models is fine as long as, in the end, the models are falsifiable. Physicists can say a theory is useful in good faith if it continues to hold up in the face of rigorous testing. The reason why I think this is an excuse (at least for some physicists) is because over the past few decades, many physicists have turned to studying theories which are very likely non-falsifiable for at least several centuries (string theory, quantum gravity) or not at all falsifiable (some interpretations of quantum mechanics). They do this because they really think these theories are true and worthwhile to study even if they won't ever make predictions observably different from those of current theories. The same kind of conflict between falsificationism and a desire to find really good and insightful theories seems to show up in Deutsch's beliefs, as well, from what you've written.
Compare this to rationalists, who I understand as optimizing not for understanding, but for prediction. To the rationalist, it's totally understandable to have beliefs based on a prediction market. Why do the prices have the values they do? It's sometimes hard to say, but in a sense it doesn't matter-- all you need to know is that if you know enough to say that the market is likely mispriced, you can make money. It's thus a win-win situation-- either you get better probabilistic knowledge of the future or you make money in expectation off of your superior knowledge. Similarly, Bayesianism is about trying to be more correct about things on the average, not about knowing the true nature of things. You can sometimes get evidence for the true nature of things if the true model is in the support of your prior. But this isn't the case for things like theories of physics -- what would a prior over theories of gravity even look like?
I think the idea that anything that is not forbidden by physical law is possible is also very common among physicists. As is the philosophy of technooptimism. I think for people in the field that created the nuclear bomb, the laser, and the transistor it's hard to deny that theoretical descriptions of possibility translate very concretely into practical devices. Deutsch continued in this line by coinventing quantum computing. On the theme of technooptimism, Von Neumann proposed machines that would control the weather (prior to the discovery of chaos in atmospheric fluid dynamics); Freeman Dyson led Project Orion, a project to create spacecraft powered by nuclear bombs. I suppose the creation of the nuclear bomb could theoretically also have lead to technopessimism, but I think many physicists are inspired even here by the fact that we have mitigated the risk of nuclear armageddon with robust international norms prohibiting the military use of WMDs. Some might even claim they have made the world safer by increasing the potential negative consequences of warfare.
In contrast, there is a much larger gap between theory and practice in the fields rationalists are acquainted with. E.g. theoretical economists make a number of predictions, not all of which are borne out in practice-- one needs empirical studies to make sure that one has not neglected any relevant factors, because of how complex society is. I think the greater complexity of the real world also causes social scientists to be very skeptical about whether effects of actions will always be as positive as we think they are. E.g. the internet was originally conceived as an instrument to break down barriers between cultures, but over the past few years, it seems to have done the opposite, instead.
There are also some Deutsch beliefs that you mention that don't seem to fit neatly into the physicist paradigm, such as his beliefs about animal welfare. I also feel like his beliefs on intelligence are shared by many smart people who cannot imagine what it might feel like to have less intelligence, and so err on the side of assuming every individual has equal intellectual capabilities in principle (this could turn out to be correct, but it's not a priori guaranteed imo).
In sum, I feel like both rationalism and Deutsch have interesting ideas to offer. It's probably the case that there are some domains where one set of tools is more useful than the other, but neither has a strict advantage overall. However, it strikes me that maybe this calls for more physicists in the rationalist community (of whom there are undoubtedly many) to share their insights about science/life with the community at large, which could lead Deutschian ideas to naturally be absorbed into the rationalist canon.
Trans review was quite good.
Thank you to Scott for hosting this competition !
Can you add a link to my blog at thechaostician.com ?
I had two book reviews prepared for this competition. The other one is Leviathan and the Air Pump by Stephen Shapin and Simon Schaffer (1985), about some of the earliest debates about what science should be between Thomas Hobbes and Robert Boyle, in the first decade of the Royal Society. I decided to go with Fusion because I know the subject much better. If you want to read the other one, you can find it here: http://thechaostician.com/book-review-of-leviathan-and-the-air-pump-by-stephen-shapin-and-simon-schaffer-1985/
I enjoyed that review - interesting to know that Boyle was discussing topics like “public access, replication, and publication bias” back in the 1660s! Also liked your comparison of air pumps back then to supercolliders now.
You should have submitted this rather than the fusion one; I like this a lot better, and it's not as open to the arguments about "author is being way too optimistic and it's not gonna happen like this"as the fusion one was.
I think part of why I like this better is that you are more impartial; you don't really have a dog in the fight (apart from thinking Boyle was right, which is the mainstream opinion) whereas with the fusion book it was evident that you were hyping it up because you agreed with it. That left the review open to "the reviewer wants this to be true so they can't see the obvious flaws".
Link to Now It Can Be Told actually goes to Surface Detail.
If someone wants to read a really bad review (134th in the preliminary voting) I have published my own cotribution to the contest here:
https://woodfromeden.substack.com/p/up-where-we-belong
At least it is short.
I think you're wrong.
It's not a bad review at all. I thought it was interesting and brought out the essence of the book well. I'm not as sanguine as you about the likelihood of space colonization, but that's a quibble and not a criticism of your review.
To be honest I do not think it is a bad review either. Had it been I would not have published it. But it is quite different from the finalists and I understand now that my definition of a book review is rather different from the ACX crowd's definition of a book review. Had I done some research beforehand I would probably have written differently. Now its worth lies mostly in what it says about different cultural "bubbles" (for lack of a better word).
I wouldn't say that the style is particularly out of place here. The bigger point is probably that this crowd doesn't take uncritical space exploration optimisim seriously, the likes of Musk and Bezos notwithstanding.
That is of course a possibility. But I find it rather more depressing since it implies that the jury makes its judgement more on the book reviewed than the book review.
I think that depends on the approach that the reviewer takes. For example, the trans review which got snubbed to avoid the WW3 in comments was mostly critical of the book, and the winner this time around was somewhat critical too. Since in your case the style is more that of a precis/extrapolation, then affinity to the subject matter is more important, like with the Georgism winner of the last year, or the Fusion finalist this time.
Point taken. Like most reviewers I did choose a book that I myself liked. Despite that I still think that a book review should always strive to find the positive in the reviewed book. No one consciously writes a bad book and if the reviewer can not find anything good in the book, chances are the reviewer has missed something important.
Yeah, it's not bad at all - I'd just chalk it up to the fact that there were a lot of strong contenders this year, and it seems like longer reviews are often more popular with the ACX crowd. I mean, one has to be a bit of a bookworm to even care about such things as book review contests in the first place, so it's bound to attract people who read a lot more (and possibly a lot faster) than average. I enjoyed reading your review - although it made me a little nostalgic and sad, honestly. I was a little kid in the 70s, and I remember feeling a lot more hopeful about actually traveling into outer space back then!
I was actually relieved when I found out the abysmal score I had received from the ACX voters. I am a professional writer (admittedly in a non-English language) and had I received an average score that would most likely have meant that I am an average writer. Something which is not very good for someone trying to make a living out of writing. From that perspective, being in the bottom 5% is better since it probably only indicates that I was at the wrong place, at the wrong time. I mean, I could still be a very average writer, but at least this contest will not pop my bubble.
Interesting - your English is great: if you claimed to be a native speaker, I'd believe you. Of course, the written word erases most accents. But there are usually some oddly phrased bits - idiosyncratic grammatical construction, characteristic errors involving definite articles, or something like that which read as "non-native speaker." Didn't notice anything like that in your writing.
Well, I have been reading in English for 30 years and by now I have probably read more English-language books than the average Anglosaxon will do in their entire life (not a high bar considering the low interest in literature these days). Language skill should in my case be a rather weak excuse for bad writing.
A big thank you to all contributors, and congratulations to the winners!
I have read all the reviews. Even those who didn't make it to the final were often pretty good, and I enjoyed many of them. It gave me a cheap way (relatively speaking) to learn about ~140 books, through high-quality and thorough reviews. Thanks for that! And of course: thanks to Scott for making the contest happen!
The link for the review of "Now It Can Be Told" links to the review of "Surface Detail" instead.
Thanks for this! The link to https:/www.awanderingmind.blog/ is broken... you can find the book review at https://www.awanderingmind.blog/posts/2022-05-22-book-review-civilization-and-its-discontents.html.
Congratulations to the winners! I really enjoyed 1587. It was interesting to hear that Tocqueville was supposedly totally unfamiliar with the work of the great missionary to China Fr. Matteo Ricci SJ. who was working in China in 1587. I think he arrived in China in 1582. His story is beautifully told in Vincent Cronins book
The Wise Man from the West: Matteo Ricci and His Mission to China https://a.co/d/2siU8AC
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matteo_Ricci
Thank you (I’m the 1587 reviewer) and that’s interesting info about Matteo Ricci!
Have you read this comment? https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-1587-a-year-of-no/comment/8504990 Like some replies noted, it basically a book review-worthy essay in itself.
Yes: that was a pretty great (and lengthy) comment! One of the things I love about ACX is the generally high quality of the comments, and that one really stood out 🙂
Thank you, Sir! I am happy to have so much great stuff available.
Not sure if you'll see this, but @Froolow, I just read the Surface Detail review and thought it was excellent. Easily my favourite of the reviews I read. :)
Thank you so much! I'm really pleased you enjoyed it and genuinely delighted that anybody bothered to read it at all!
I enjoyed it as well - ranked it equal to six of the finalists, and above four of them
I just realized you're the very same Froolow who wrote the astonishing series of cost-effectiveness posts over on the EAF. I'm a data analyst who does demand forecasting for my company, and close-reading your essays made me viscerally feel like I was leveling up; I also sound like a genius just parroting bits and pieces from them. Good stuff, thank you!
Oh I'm really glad you enjoyed them! Drop me a DM on the EAF if you ever want to talk cost-effectiveness modelling :)
I guess maybe I'm more out of step with most ACX readers than I realised - I really expected The Anti-Poilitics Machine to place. It didn't have the most 'added value' on top of summarising the book but I thought the subject matter was fascinating, and very much up the alley of rationalists and particularly EA-types.
Except, as Scott alluded to in his introduction to the review, it's critical of EA.
I have to admit that it being anti-EA was one of the reasons I liked it.
But as Scott has pointed out yet elsewhere, there's little EAs like more than to engage with criticism of EA!
Except, as many critics of EA retorted, EAs will accept any criticism of EA as long as it leaves EA intact and shiny.
I found the Anti-Politics Machine review fascinating, but I think characterising it as 'anti-EA' is unfair to both EA and the book. It talks about how charity can miss the mark completely when it doesn't consider the viewpoints of the locals; my understanding is that this has been known to charity organisations for a long time, and current major EA orgs all involve teams that are from, or at least live in, the parts of the world they're trying to help. Please correct me if I'm wrong about that.
I liked it and I also like EA. I'm genuinely confused as to how it's anti-EA, I didn't get that vibe at all.
That and The Righteous Mind were my two picks for winner, and I went with The Righteous Mind just by a short head.
I really wanted to vote for the God Emperor of Dune review. I know some people were opposed to including works of fiction in the contest, but that was exactly what I liked about it. After all the academic and political books, it was refreshing to see a novel getting reviewed!
Unfortunately, the review just had too many problems. The biggest issue was that it tried to use the novel as a metaphor for the use of Friendly AI to counter the dangers of Unfriendly AI, which felt sort of like using a smartphone to hammer a nail into a wall: Sure, it can *kinda* work, but it looks awkward, it won't be that effective (it doesn't say anything particularly novel or insightful about FAI or UFAI), and you're likely to break the smartphone in the process (it "breaks" the book by interpreting it in a way that clearly wasn't intended by the author, isn't supported by the text, and to some extent contradicts the narrative's actual plot and themes). There were also places where the review seemed to presume that the reader already knew the book, e.g. mentioning certain characters without explaining who they were.
I wish it had touched on the real world context of the series a little more too. For instance, a lot of people in the comments section were talking about how military combat in Dune was so heavily focused around melee combat, and regardless of the in-universe reasons for the lack of ranged weapons, the out-of-universe reason was simply because Dune was both a revival and a deconstruction of the old planetary romance/sword-and-planet genre, which even in the 60s was considered outdated and had fallen out of favor in sci-fi circles. It's similar to what Game of Thrones has done with medieval fantasy.
I still enjoyed reading the review, and it definitely had some good insights about the book and the overall Dune franchise, but I ended up voting for The Righteous Mind instead. (The Dawn of Everything was a close second, but I had a different problem with that one: I thought the review itself was great, but I strongly dislike the book it was reviewing. I think David Graeber's work is historically and anthropologically dubious at best, and completely and almost hilariously wrong on everything involving political science and economics. Worse, his ideas have unfortunately led a very large chunk of the American left down a losing path.)
I vaguely remembered reading the book and thinking it was terrible, then reading the review reinforced me in "Ah yes, this book is indeed terrible".
So I don't know if that makes it a good review or not, because I think the review did take the Big Message seriously so perhaps it was trying to go "No, this book is great and here's why by making it relevant to *checks list of current today bees in bonnet* AI threat!"
Unfortunately, when Herbert wrote it, the current yesterday bee in bonnet he was going on about was environmentalism.
It's interesting you should say that. I've read plenty of Golden Age sf, and I would've said the reverse, that the 60s was a renaissance for sword-and-sorcery, after the much "harder" Campbell-era stuff, perhaps influenced by the significant surge in popularity of Tolkien in the mid 60s. Are you thinking much further back, to ERB and Barsoom, in the early 1900s? That would make sense, although I confess it would never occur to me to juxtapose those two series (Barsoom and Dune) and ask about the similarities and differences. They feel very different, if for no other reason than that Burroughs just seems interested in making a buck from some easily constructed pulp fiction with a broad revue-audience appeal, while Herbert seems to want to blow minds (assuming the psychedelic nature of Dune isn't just the result of the drugs he took while writing it).
Also now I think of it, aren't ranged weapons generally disliked in fiction? You want your hero to win or lose by virtue of his strength of arm, wits in the moment, decision and energy. It's dispiriting -- well, less inspiring -- if he wins merely because he's flying an F-22 and the other schmo is stuck in a Sopwith Camel, or because his logistical tail is superior and he's well supplied with ammo/charges for his blaster/magical potions, while the other guy doesn't even have good shoes.
New Wave SF started in the 60s and had its heyday in the 70s, and that strain still lingers on. So Herbert's "Dune" was very much in the New Wave mould. Ray Bradbury's "Martian Chronicles" would be 'soft' SF but they're very much not New Wave, even allowing for the chronological distance.
Anything by M. John Harrison, a lot of Michael Moorcock, J.G. Ballard (before he started losing the run of himself and claiming he was writing "speculative fiction" (that kind of SF) not "science fiction" - a bit like Margaret Atwood when she was in the running for Serious Literature Literary Prizes and got fed-up with interviewers asking her why she had written SF novel). There was a sort of stylistic throwback to the 'planetary romances'/science fantasy settings of previous decades, but updated to be post-apocalyptic (e.g. the Viriconium stories of M. John Harrison which I liked https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viriconium):
"The New Wave was a science fiction (SF) movement in the 1960s and 1970s characterized by a high degree of experimentation in form and content, a "literary" or artistic sensibility, and a focus on "soft" as opposed to hard science. New Wave writers often saw themselves as part of the modernist tradition in fiction, and the New Wave was conceived as a deliberate break from the traditions of pulp science fiction, which many of the writers involved considered irrelevant and unambitious. They thus emphasized stylistic experimentation and literary merit over the scientific accuracy or prediction of hard science fiction writers."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Wave_science_fiction
You had writers experimenting with prose styles like "cut-up prose" and other techniques of the time. According to Wikipedia, "Although the New Wave was critiqued for the self-absorption of some of its writers, it was influential in shaping the development of subsequent genres, primarily cyberpunk and slipstream." Anyone remember slipstream? Very big in the 00s, though you don't hear so much about it anymore; I'd say a lot of recent Hugo winners could best be described as slipstream rather than conventional SF, but for some reason they don't seem to have adapted that label.
> Trans got exactly 8.0 and I was forced to decide whether by “above 8” I meant “including 8” or “literally above 8” and how much I wanted to start World War III in the comments section; I apologize to the author for chickening out.
Somehow I misread this as "trains" twice, thinking "yeah, I could imagine SSC commenters getting mad about whether or not a bubble-bursting of their preferred transit mode is accurate," and then clicked thru.
Any evidence of recency bias in the outcome?
How did the final ranking compare to the initial scores?
At first I was a bit sad because my review (the book of why) got a low-end score. Then I noticed that, at standard deviation 3.4, it has the highest variance of them all! What rejoicing! Then I got a bit sad again because I felt dumb at being happy due to topping an irrelevant metric. Then I noticed that, actually, in statistical optimization variance is a resource as important as the mean! Then...
Yeah I gave your review "The Book of Why", a high review. I tried reading the book, before reading your review and got totally bogged down. So I really appreciated your review, but it was a lot of work.. and I can imagine people giving it a bad review. So here is a hearty thanks from at least one person.
Thanks!!!
I think I liked the field of finalists better last year when they were chosen more by Scott and less by voting.
Tangential, but anyone who, like me, found the story and 'lost media' aspect of the Castrati fascinating, should listen to the song 'Boy 1904'. It's the best example I've found of one of the extant Castrato recordings being remixed and used to a modern composition, in this case by the front man of Icelandic post-rock band Sigur Ros. Incidentally, I think this front man own voice might serve as a fair facsimile of the 'otherworldliness' of the best Castrati voices.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TVL5y3s9Yks
Congrats to all the winners!
Regarding Erik Hoel, he's obviously a superb writer, but there's something about his style that I find off-putting. He completely lacks irony, humor and plain conversational ease (contrast with Scott!). Instead, he comes across as aloof, projecting a persona of a Serious Writer Covering Deep Topics, in defense of refined taste and high art etc. It's very clear he desires recognition as The Writer. Treats himself way too seriously.
I haven't looked at his review since it first came out, so maybe I might see what you are talking about if I reread it. But there was definitely a lot of humor and irony in his writing. The ridiculous Victorian titles were hilarious and had me chuckling the whole time, and The Gossip Trap theory is the total opposite of Serious Writer Persona. So, without examples, I'd have to say I disagree pretty strongly.
I don't find the titles especially hilarious - yes, they're amusing, but it's a dry, reserved, academic kind of humor. More importantly - he never directs the humor and irony at himself (something that Scott does quite often). He's dead serious about himself. The way he writes feels very "carefully, cautiously measured" in a way that e.g. Scott's writing is definitely not.
That's the vibe I feel, anyway, it's subjective. I could comb his essays for specific examples, but it's more of a holistic impression than anything in particular.
He's a different writer than Scott, but I loved his review. Not as funny, true, but he does a fantastic job of taking a very big-picture book and zooming out to write an even-bigger-picture review.
That Golem review is mindblowing, I only read the fake foreword for it from "Imaginary Magnitude", I didn't know there's an actual book. Lem never ceases to amaze me.
Francesca has brought up the topic of "books that are most likely to resonate with the reviewers (who I believe are mostly male)" on here, and I think part of her questioning is to do with styles of writing or how a topic is presented (e.g. if it is presented in a fashion associated with masculine thinking rather than feminine feeling attributions). A majority male readership will unconsciously gravitate towards something written in a 'masculine' style, so reviewers will select books that enable them to write in that style, and in turn the readership votes preferentially for the 'masculine' rather than 'feminine' writing style.
In that regard, I think the exchange between myself and Mark is instructive. I am going to assume Mark's gender (apologies in advance!) that Mark is a man. I am a woman.
Mark thinks this is an affecting, moving, well-written article and likes it. I think it's at least in part fictionalised, and is heavy on the kind of heartstrings-tugging I most dislike.
https://deadmensdonuts.com/2022/07/30/the-truth-of-the-matter-the-purple-rose-and-the-apple-cart/
Were I to go by Francesca's metrics, had this been submitted for a contest or just a post, I should like it (woman, likes feeling-writing style, likes personalisation of subject to relate more easily to it, likes the human interest touch and so forth) and Mark should dislike it. The reality is the other way round.
So I don't necessarily think that there is that kind of bias going on, but yes, if we got figures for readership it would be a fun little exercise to match "how many female-identified" against "how many female-identified reviewers", with the caveat that it is nothing more than a fun little exercise and says nothing about "this is the He-Man Woman-Haters Club".
As a data point of one, I disliked it.
My relevant demographic labels according to the current fashion would be, I believe: "XY, cis-het, He/Him".
Got through the first few paragraphs of "Part I" and clicked back here to note that I'm not going to finish reading it because it's depressing and sad and gross. Not into that sort of thing. Dunno if that is a useful data point or not, but there you go *shrug*
Unhappily, a lot of real-life situations amongst the less well-off/less got it all together are sad and gross and depressing.
And there are a lot of times when, as I said, I would cheerfully have napalmed the adults involved for being such self-involved, up their own arses, fuckwits who were wrecking their kids.
But there's a style of misery porn writing that this woman invokes which makes me bristle. Theodore Dalrymple writes about his similar experiences with the English poor and underclass, and while he has more of a judgemental approach, he is much more readable and palatable to me, because he does not make it about HIMSELF and HIS sensibilities and how he gasped, hiccoughed, staggered, and reeled in a mental sea of static through his day-to-day duties.
What did this woman do, in the end? Nothing. Did she even attend the cremation of this young woman that she had been crying crocodile tears over all through this article? No mention of it, and had she done so, she certainly would have tried to wring our withers with a blow-by-blow account of how she gasped, reeled, etc. through the ceremony.
Did she make any formal complaints or reports? Get on to anyone in authority? Try upsetting the apple-cart? No, no and no.
All that she did do was use this tragedy to write a (really badly written by prose style) piece making herself out to be Susannah Sensibility, Super Sensitive M.E. who will weep and wail online about the drama, the drama! so as to present herself in the best possible light and every other person as the uncaring, callous, indifferent or pure evil.
While, let me remind you, doing exactly *nothing* about any of this, except exhorting an online mob to hate the CPS, hate the local authorities, hate hate hate and so on. But not hate her, even though she is part of all this apparatus, because she is one of the Good Ones.
A Good One who, if you die in circumstances that warrant having an M.E. write it up, will gleefully rifle through your belongings to ferret out bits and pieces about your personal life which are none of her goddamn business, as she kicks this entire sob-fest off by admitting is why she gave up being a paramedic - not enough juicy secrets being resolved that she could find out about.
She's the modern equivalent of a sob sister:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sob_sister
"Sob sister was an American term in the early 20th century for reporters (usually women) who specialized in newspaper articles (often called "sob stories") with emphasis on the human interest angle using language of sentimentality. The derogatory label was coined in 1907 during coverage of a murder trial. The term "sob sister" dates to 1907, when Irvin S. Cobb derided the women reporters who were covering the trial of Harry K. Thaw for murder.
...The spectacle of the newswomen's presence in court and the publicity marketing of the "woman's view" was more responsible for the derogatory label of "sob sister" than the melodramatic style of the women reporters, which was not notably different from the writings of their male colleagues. The reporting of the Thaw trial was equally "overwrought" by both men and women reporters. An excerpt from one of Dix's articles on the Thaw trial demonstrates the sob sister approach:
'In good truth, a more piteous figure than the little chorus girl and artists' model could scarcely be imagined. Gone was even the bravado of cheerfulness and nonchalance she had been trying to vainly to keep up for the past two days. She came into court looking like a flower that has been beaten down into the ground and despoiled of its beauty by a storm. Her face was sodden with weeping. Her eyes red rimmed and swollen. Her face showed white and wan under the black veil in which she had tried to shroud it. She had seemed sad and miserable before. She appeared absolutely crushed, and as if there was no spirit left in her.'
From the same trial, a male reporter, William Hoster, wrote in similar sob-sister style:
'Throwing aside all modesty and pride, sinking every feeling to woman dear, baring her bleeding heart to the world—Evelyn Nesbit Thaw flung wide open the book of her tragic life, that all might read. A tremendous sacrifice, and a soul-crushing story. But in the hour of deepest woe, the girl wife of Harry Kendall Thaw has this consolation, which will be all sufficient balm to her broken heart,—she has probably saved the life of her husband.'"
Compare the similes used back in 1907 and our 2022 heroine:
"She came into court looking like a flower that has been beaten down into the ground and despoiled of its beauty by a storm."
"This poor, defeated foster-kid looked like a flower with a broken stem."
Same "can I make a buck out of this story by piling on the treacle" attitude at work, but at least the journalists have the excuse that this is their job. Our Heroine has no excuse but wanting to be head-patted for her exquisite empathy.
>with the caveat that it is nothing more than a fun little exercise and says nothing about "this is the He-Man Woman-Haters Club".
I totally agree it says nothing about "this is the He-Man Woman-Haters Club". At the same time, the space between 'nothing more than a fun little exercise and says nothing' and 'this is the He-Man Woman-Haters Club' is vast. And, to me, the more interesting place to explore.
I think if people find it an interesting exercise, then go ahead and do it. But I would be very chary of attributing Great Significance to any findings, one way or the other.
I am still smiling at the suggestion that we Lady Readers on here are such delicate, timid, shy, shrinking wood-violets that it takes too much courage to submit a review to the book contest because, well, we are ladies and don't write in a style/on a topic that the Manly Men of ACX would be interested in reading or voting for.
I'm not brave in ordinary life, but it didn't take any great burst of courage (Dutch or otherwise) for me to proffer my opinions on here, even if you are all Big Strong Intelligent Scholarly Manly Men Readers 😀
I'm not very interested in comparing finalists to readership (or book review submissions to readership). Personally, I find the question interesting of why are there (if it's still the case) 90% guys reading this blog and 10% girls. I find it interesting, because I think the answer goes beyond 'it's just interest' and has something to do with how this community developed in the first place and how such trends spread and multiply.
> I am still smiling at the suggestion that we Lady Readers on here are such delicate, timid, shy, shrinking wood-violets that it takes too much courage to submit a review to the book contest because, well, we are ladies and don't write in a style/on a topic that the Manly Men of ACX would be interested in reading or voting for.
I didn't say so, and I didn't think so.
That brings you into the question of why the wider Rationalist community is majority guys. Is it because yah boo bad old sexism patriarchy no outreach to divergently abled trans BIPOC femmes? Quick, let's get the DEI Committee up and running and on the case!
Or is it 'men tend to be interested in this kind of thing more than women are?' which can go down the rabbit hole of 'is it genes, is it environment, is it differences in the brain, is it socialisation' and so on and on and on.
There are Rationalist blogs by women. Why am I not reading them? Well, I'm not a Rationalist, as such, I stumbled across Scott's stuff by accident, and I keep reading for the wide range of topics covered. You couldn't pay me to read any of the Less Wrong stuff, old or new, and that might be a question of "is it appealing to ordinary women?" but frankly, I'm not interested.
I'm mainly not interested in questions of "why not more women?" about anything, because too often it devolves into "patriarchy! sexism! hire me on as DEI consultant to get more differently able trans femmes of colour in here!" and it turns into a grift. Even if the real reason is *not* sexism, it's because of bell curve distributions in mathematical ability or summat.
EDIT: Now, in the Not-So-Old-Days, yes it really was a case of "men-only clubs" and "jobs for the boys" and "the old school tie" which kept women out of spaces. But we've been doing a lot of work on that, so it's hard to claim that it's still the same old reason. If it is, then the work being done is practically useless, so what do you do instead? I think it is a combination of this is a small bubble of like-minded people in pretty much one country who happen to talk to each other, and it shakes out that they're mostly guys, because it's STEM-heavy topics.
Getting into the topic of "why not more women in STEM" is covering the same old ground and as I said, I'm not interested in that. I think the simplest answer is most likely to be correct: mostly guys on here because the Rationalist movement is mostly guys because there's a lot of STEM talk, plus it's within a geographic/social bubble so nearly everyone knows everyone else.
Okay, I understood you're not interested in those questions, and fine.
I guess most people here are not interested in one or the other question that comes up in the comments. Also perfectly fine. Same for me btw. In most cases, most of us (including you?) ignore most of those questions ... also fine.
The thing is, why does there seem so much (negative) excitement around sb. asking a rather simple question around gender here? I imagine what this comment section would look like, if for any question that came up, most of who were *not* interested in a certain question would question why on heaven and earth it was asked in the first place. So why does there seem to be so much effort to respond with 'this question is irrelevant'?
You partly gave the answer, and if I understood it right, it's because you're expecting certain generalized criticism of what's going on (sexism!) or political demands for change (to get more differently able ... in here!) or something similar.
Well, if that's the case, my responses are: first, it's a pity if you have had such bad experiences with overly exaggerated demands & debates in the gender context. Second, is this not of all places the one place where we can focus on what somebody is actually saying, instead of all the negative (and real-life) parodies of their argument?
"The thing is, why does there seem so much (negative) excitement around sb. asking a rather simple question around gender here?"
Because it is *never* a simple case of "I'm just asking questions". Maybe you don't have any ulterior motive, but when someone pops up to go "You say you have a female readership, but all your finalists were male. Interesting!", the next thing is the witch-hunt starts.
Look at TheMotte right now, which was a spin-off of a sub-reddit spun off from the old SSC. It has decided to leave Reddit before it is pushed, because the Eye of Sauron is turning upon it. There may or may not have been malicious reporting to the admins, but Anti-Evil Operations are taking an interest.
I don't want that here. I don't want "Hmmmm - why so male?" brought up as a topic of investigation and then flagellation. 'I think the answer goes beyond 'it's just interest' and has something to do with how this community developed in the first place and how such trends spread and multiply' - well, are you also investigating how trends spread and multiply in how knitting sites are majority female?
See, that is the larger point I am making. If there isn't "I am also looking into how some spaces end up majority female", then this begins to sound like one of those isolated demands. "How such trends spread and multiply" - how does anyone find out anything? You hear about it from a friend, or a friend of a friend; you go looking for something specific; you are reading one thing and stumble over a mention of another which leads you down the rabbit-hole; you can't really remember, was it back in '06 or '11 you saw this place mentioned somewhere?
There are clear and plain investigations of "why is X all guys and Y all girls?", to be sure. But in the current climate, any raising of "so why all X on here?" does raise alarm bells because of how such questions have become politicised and weaponised.
And besides, haven't we done reader surveys before about "how did you find this place?" What exactly is it you are hoping to uncover? "Less Wrong to Rationalist Blog A to Rationalist Blog B to Unrelated Substack C run by a friend of B who mentions them to Podcast D"? Reading the New York Times and wondering "who the heck are these people, and this Scott guy?" and looking it up?
What in the end would be the suggestion to "get more women"? 'Oh you must move outside your cosy little bubble, try advertising on cake-icing websites and is Jezebel or something like it still running? make this place more appealing to a feminine audience by - "
And THAT is the pitfall right there. How do you make this site "more appealing to a feminine audience"? I may be being unfair to Francesca, but she seemed to suggest "more topics appealing to women in particular on feminine interests, written in a manner appealing to women by going for the soft-soap, sob sister style".
No, thank you. This woman would depart by the nearest window if I saw a post on "What is this autumn's fashion trend colour? Do you know which Season you come under? Read on and find out!" done in that glurge style. Though if anybody could do something interesting in a quasi-scientific style on "What colour season are you?", it would be here! I would read an article on skin tones, I would not read one "slanted to appeal to the ladies, because we need to increase our female readership to the level required by the mandatory diversity quota".
The well of public discussion about sex and demographics, in jobs or avocations, has been thoroughly poisoned by this time. It should come as no surprise that a forum should react negatively to the introduction of such topics.
I read it, just to add to the data. I didn't like it. It was bombastic, maudlin, and worst of all deeply hypocritical: it complains about narcissism and a lack of empathy while demonstrating those qualities itself in spades. I now know a great deal about how the author feels about all the people involved in this story, her feelings are described at length at each point, but I know very little about the people themselves. They are described briefly, superficially, without any apparent attempt to observe and understand what they were actually like, or actually feeling. They appear to be just playing a stock role in the drama of which the author gets star billing.
Like you, I noticed that the author's rage leads to no concrete or useful action at all, indeed she congratulates herself on her "daring" of putting a flower from the funeral dispaly in the hand of the dead teenager. Such boldness! But that's it. No attempt to get to know anyone, or do anything, just a rage at everyone else for not doing something. I would say the author ironicallyh shares with the guy who shot himself a similarly narcissistic focus on herself.
I use "her" in this comment somewhat cautiously, too. I'm not fully convinced this actually was written by a woman, it feels strangely masculine, although of a sort of keyboard warrior living in mom's basement masculine.
T.D.: "simplistic and addicted to cliches" to some, "journalistic gold" to others. fine. Deiseach has feelings as wanting to "cheerfully napalming". Excellent, even if not highly original. The author of Dead men's donut writes - when she "first started as a medicolegal death investigator: I was giddy with amazement". https://deadmensdonuts.com/2022/02/10/a-terrible-horrible-no-good-very-bad-job-part-2-if-the-dead-could-speak-theyd-say-fk-you-so-ill-just-say-it-for-them/
Why not - she has no y-chromosome, feelings differ (and no, I would've never told that lady in the story to take off her clothes - wanna look at corpses? fine with me).
I try not to judge people's feelings - and consider it near impossible to convey any emotion fully in mere words. - If you feel she fakes, well, she has as yet few comments, she may read yours. - Anyway, thanks A LOT for mentioning Anthony Malcolm Daniels aka Theodore Dalrymple; I will get at least one of his book(s) asap. Sounds very interesting.
Oh goodness gracious me, I would recommend that lady get her blood pressure and balance checked out. She is always being giddy, dizzy, staggering and the like, I do fear for her health!
"You’ll notice I referred to them as “my dead folks.” They are. They’re mine. Their stories are in my hands. It’s up to me to see that their truth is told. I know these people. I know them more than their own families sometimes, more than the pathologist who will literally pry their brains out of their skulls."
And this is exactly the level of narcissism I am complaining about. The dead people are *not* hers. It's *not* up to her. They belong to themselves, first and foremost, and their families next. Some stranger who sees them as fodder for misery porn, the more tragic their stories the better for her ghoulish fictionalisation, does not speak for them or for anything more than her own lack of sympathy, compassion, or tact.
Thanks for running this contest, Scott! Love reading these book reviews. They do a lot to increase our collective knowledge.
I wanted to thank Scott and all the reviewers. This is wonderful, I'm slowly working my way through the rest of the reviews. Good stuff, a few new books added to my read pile. And, Iain Banks, where have you been all my life? ("Surface Detail")
I pressed the link to see the book review on Galton, ended up reading a very eye-opening review on "Making Sense of Tantric Buddhism". Sadly, I failed to find the name/email address of the reviewer- I wanted to thank them for the enlightening read.
If anyone could help me find it, it would be greatly appreciated.
I lived reading the reviews, but I was pretty disappointed when I realized I'd run out of time to vote. I wish there was more time between the last review and the deadline. I had read 14 of 16 reviews when the winners were chosen, and I also hadn't gotten to the open thread yet that announced the voting deadline.
You might sponsor a Comment Contest too. It would be interesting if well-known writers won that too, since comments are a different, dash-it-off, form.