> Njal’s Saga, reviewed by Scott Alexander. This one got the most votes, but I’m disqualifying it because it seems in poor taste for me to win my own contest.
There was a prediction market about which book review would win "resolv[ing] to contest winner". An excellent lesson in how precise wording matters!
I just want to say that I really enjoyed the Book Review Contest—I didn't finish (or even start) every entry, but I found the book selections wide ranging and in some cases utterly captivating. (On Marble Cliffs and Njal's Saga being the most unexpected). Kudos to all the reviewers and to you for running such an interesting contest.
Thanks for hosting the contest once again Scott! I'm pretty happy I upgraded from finalist to podium this year. Congrats to Brandon and everyone else too! And thanks for those who believed in my review enough to place it first on the prediction market :D
For those who might be interested in Jane Jacobs further, I'll be writing about some of her other books in the near future.
(Also for the record I really liked The Alexander Romance and it was my only 10/10 on the preliminary round and I'm glad I publicly predicted on Twitter that Scott had written it)
I had the impression that the response to "Cities And The Wealth Of Nations" was pretty negative from what I remember of the comments but it did really well
For people who voted for that book review, do you agree with the core idea there?
For everyone who read the book review, I'm curious what you thought about it (either about the book or about the review). Do you think the replication crisis reveals that something is deeply wrong about science, or is fraud, hype, bias, and negligence just part of the human condition and an inescapable part of the scientific process? Has the replication crisis changed your worldview? Do you agree with Stuart Ritchie's ideas for reforming science? And finally, what did you like or not like about my review (as distinct from the book)?
WOW! Thanks all around for the reads (especially everyone who read through to the long, bitter end), thanks for the feedback, and thanks for the votes! I’ll be posting a “Highlights from the Comments on the Review” on my substack. (Never fear, it’ll be shorter. Slightly.)
I feel like I should have an evening dress or something for this grand occasion, but oh well.
First, I must apologise and not alone eat crow but humble pie and my hat. To everyone who said "Scott has a book review in this contest and it's Njal's Saga", I was wrong and you were right. The deceit, the duplicity, the deception! I am shocked, shocked I tell you!
Now excuse me while I choke down this mouthful of feathers.
I am disappointed Zuozhan review didn't do better, so good luck to T! It was an excellent review and educated me on the subject.
"I’m planning another contest next year. I haven’t decided if it will be book review or generic essay"
I would really love to see a reader submitted generic essay contest, although I suspect there would be 100s of entries since the barrier to entry is so small.
The LRB and other publications that have book reviews as long form essays, allow the writers to review more than one book on the same topic (for instance if there are two books on Stalin, or whatever) - is that possible in this competition, next year?
I was surprised to see Njal's Saga not in the top 3, based on the overwhelmingly positive response to it elsewhere. Then I scrolled down, and everything made sense again.
Thanks for posting all the scores, I was very curious how well I did.
Getting 54th out of 145 is just good enough to encourage me to try again next year. I probably won't be a finalist, but I think I can beat my high score! Though I wish there was a way to get feedback from those low scoring reviewers so I can figure out how to improve.
I’m thrilled to hear The Educated Mind won. I enjoyed most of the book reviews in the contest but that one genuinely changed how I think about education and motivated me to dig deeper into idifferent learning and teaching theories.
Welp! I was surprised not to see Njal's Saga in top 3, and low on the prediction market, but this explains a lot. I had no idea it would have been Scott's, I just really enjoyed it.
Shocked that “The Educated Mind” won, it was a chore to get through and it seemed aware of that and felt a need to constantly reassure the reader of the reward at the end (at long last reaching the thesis). Pleased with the other two though, “Cities” was my favorite and “Njal’s Saga” and “On the Marble Cliffs” were near contenders.
I somehow missed the opportunity to vote, despite being a regular reader of ACX. It looks like it was only posted on Monday, and then voting closed on Wednesday. There really needs to be more than two days of voting, especially after the contest itself took place over many weeks.
I'm not sure if this is a symptom or our societies polarization, or if it's the fact that this kind of thing being true that is causing it, but what I'm taking away from the comments here is that the most polarizing review was also the most popular.
What's slightly interesting to me is that, given that it was a ranked choice voting system, that _mostly_ shouldn't have been true (or at least, in general on average that shouldn't be true).
He even posted the Video on his own YouTube Channel he has used for SSC videos in the past. He wasn't trying his hardest to hide it. In general, it was the funniest review by far, though I only ranked it 3rd because two others were more informative.
Scott: Now that it's been established that it was you, can you explain your thought process behind *why* you didn't comment even in passing on almost any of the parts of Njál's Saga for which it has been famous and beloved for centuries? I get that the point for the review was essentially to crack a joke about legal systems very different from ours, but surely the concept of a review would normally oblige someone to engage at least cursorily with the substance of a book? I guess most of your readers haven't read Brennu-Njál and couldn't tell, but reading the review as someone who *is* familiar with the book, seeing not one word about e.g. the attack on Hlídarendi in favor of the ridiculous legal quibble parts nobody cares about is almost surreal.
After looking at The Educated Mind, I agree with the other commenters here that it was terrible, quite possibly the worst review of the contest. I'm amazed it got any votes, let alone first place, and that's saying something since I thought that nearly every entry deserved to win this year.
> Njal’s Saga, reviewed by Scott Alexander. This one got the most votes, but I’m disqualifying it because it seems in poor taste for me to win my own contest.
Now I can't decide if intentionally not voting for Njal's Saga cause I was pretty confident that was the True Scottsman actually made sense. I guess it at least ensured none of my votes got discarded? But it was the most entertaining, well-written (even by Scott standards - felt like "classic" SSC-era), and breaking the nonfiction monopoly is a big plus in and of itself. Not expressing those preferences feels...inconsistent.
The Educated Mind...would have expected it to top5, given the demographics, but not actually win. The length and imprecision were real bummers, even though I overall enjoyed and "liked" it. I think I'd have given up if not for priors being adjusted by FdB and Caplan - that is, having the expectation that ponderous ed theory critiques can actually be enlightening and moderately entertaining, so it's probably worth slogging through. The juice was worth the squeeze, at least in strict marginal idea-profit terms, if not best-uses-of-my-time utility.
Main bucked expectation for me was Why Machines Will Never Rule The World finalizing at all. I guess there's a lot more community (or voter anyway) split on AI fundamentals than I thought.
First of all, I loved the Njal's Saga review and I agree with other commenters who said that it was by Scott Alexander. I also really liked the Romance of Alexander review, and I said to myself, that one also looks like a Scott Alexander review! I couldn't tell which, if either, was by our illustrious host, or whether there were contestants who were just really good at imitating Scott's voice. (What is the kabbalistic significance of Scott Alexander reviewing the Romance of Alexander?)
Second, The Educated Mind winning first place was... well, it was a choice.
I can't say I *disliked* the review, because it had some excellent parts and made very good and important points, especially about how success in public education is difficult/impossible, because we're asking the education system to do different/conflicting/incompatible things: socialization, academics, and individual development.
But it was a flawed review for several reasons, and not just because it's so fricken LONG. I'm not going to reread it now, but Brandon Hendrickson seems to claim that True Education is about taking a child through five developmental stages, and then he gives examples of what to teach at each stage.
Which, ok, sure, but what is the evidence for the five stages and their correspondence to the child's age? I don't recall real evidence, mostly lots of anecdotes along the lines of "seven-year-olds like puns and jokes, which correspond to the XYZ stage." Also, I don't recall Mr. Hendrickson attempting to reconcile these five developmental stages with the socialization/academics/development (SAD) model - which sides of the SAD triangle are we aiming for with the five-stage model, and why? Next, the five-stage model seems to ask a LOT of teachers. They're supposed to not just know a very broad range of material, but also be gifted comedians, storytellers, entertainers, etc. Sure, this works if you're paying lots of money to recruit the best teachers possible to a small school attended by the children of the PMC, but how well will it scale across the whole society?
Finally, as other commenters on that review already pointed out, the review, for all its length, has some very important gaps. Mr. Hendrickson spends a lot of time on the proposed curriculum, and very little on things like testing, classroom discipline/behavior standards, tracking (do we group by age or ability?), etc. What to do if, despite our best efforts, some children just can't/don't want to progress through the "five stages"? And if the reviewer did write about these things, then I apologize for not remembering, but again, if you wanted me to remember more, you would have made your review shorter.
Again, I don't mean to sound harsh, you obviously put a *ton* of work into your review and it has a lot of very good things about it. Congratulations on your win!
I’ve noticed that Jaynes’ Probability Theory has been reviewed each year for three years in a row, but never does well. Given that it’s a core text for the rationality community, I’m curious if many ACX readers have read the textbook? My sense is that it seems a bit like a book that people talk about without having actually read it, and maybe for good reason, since the author died before completing it and a lot of it is half done.
Bit of a meta-comment: In terms of sheer quantity of text, these 15 reviews must be the most I have read from a single source (/collator) in a long, long time. I used to read this quantity of text from The Economist when I cared more about the news; occasionally from the FT, NYT, or New Yorker.
What I mean to say is that Scott is now, for me, as good a source of interesting writing as *the best* journal publishing houses in the world. That's an extraordinary state of affairs, and I hope someone studies it one day. But not Scott, because I just want him to carry on with whatever he's doing.
Congratulations to all the reviewers, I thought they were all world-class pieces of writing.
I'm surprised at the amount of negativity directed at the Educated Minds review in the comments here. I found the book's outlook on education both exciting and sensible, enjoyed reading the review, placed it as my first choice, and am happy to see it win!
In general, I liked the contest a lot, thank you to all the reviewers for your efforts!
I see a lot of comments that say that the review was written terribly, rambling, teasing and generally confused how it won.
As someone that voted for it as a second preference, (Njal's Saga as first), I figured I'll say why I liked it enough to vote for it.
For me, I enjoy a book review when it introduces me to new ideas, and does so in an enticing and interesting way. I felt that TEM book review took me on an interesting journey, introducing a new way to consider education and adding a new lense to view interacting with children and teenagers.
This was especially interesting to me as it fit in with what I have actually experienced myself, and can see with my children: my grade school child is fascinated with stories, and she can spend 40 minutes reenacting all the parts of the stories she heard at school, but can barely recall other lessons. Meanwhile, her older brother is really getting interested in extremes: highest mountain, lowest place on earth, etc. What I'm trying to say is that as I was reading, the ideas resonated, and seemed to fit my observations and place them in the context of a theory.
I also enjoyed his explanation of the problems with current education, with different types of schools satisfying two out of three "ideals" and leaving out a third, important one, and found it to make sense. Especially given how drastically schools can vary (from personal experience). The review left me with hope that an education institution that isn't completely broken is possible.
As for the rambling and teasing, etc., I didn't mind that so much; other overly-verbose reviews gave me more trouble, and a couple just lost my interest halfway. This one did not. A book review that delivers so much of the book's content makes me happy with it. I also felt that the review addressed many of the objections, concerns and questions that popped into my mind as I was reading it. I spoke about the review with friends and recommended it often enough that it felt to me that it makes the cut as a solid second choice.
As a last note, while I liked "Cities and the Wealth of Nations", I didn't want to vote for it, as I felt economics reviews were overly represented in this competition (likely due to last year's winner), at five out of sixteen finalists. But I do agree that CATWON was the best economics review.
I wonder if people with children / significantly younger siblings were more likely to vote for it. Did anyone also have this experience?
I mostly based my voting on the ones that I could clearly remember - this may well have biased me towards later ones, but I think moreso just being unusual. I felt like I had to vote for On The Marble Cliffs because it made me actually download the book, I plan to read that some time when I'm in the mood for Literature.
I'm surprised more people aren't declaring their votes. Well, here are mine:
1. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.
This was terrific and hugely underrated. Very much what I'd like to see more of here (in comments and even in some posts by Scott) and elsewhere: clear, logical grounding of relevant facts, and then detail-focused, logically justified conclusions from those facts. And especially, solid grounding of claims about the present and predictions about the future in the parallels and principles from actual history.
It's amazing to me how little of this there is, and how much people rely on Sprawling Theories of Everything, attempted grand explanations of the past and the future and the nature of society and life itself, justified by little more than "this just seems like something that might be true". Even in purportedly "empirical" communities like this. JJ's review instead does the radical thing of answering the question of what might happen, or what we should fear happening, by looking at what has, you know, *actually* happened, in the past. And getting a grounding in that, picking out the important details, and drawing out general principles that we can apply to other contexts.
I'm not surprised it didn't do well in the contest, though. The fact that so many people love their Sprawling Theories of Everything, and their gut reactions that "*clearly* candidate X is the new Hitler, that's just obvious, I don't need any logical argument or actual knowedge of Hitler to make that claim!" means they won't be very amenable to tightly-focused and clearly-argued pieces that pay attention to details and distinctions. Please write more pieces like this, JJ. Even though the people you describe in your first paragraph are most of the internet and a large portion of the voters in this contest, there are definitely those of us who see its compelling explanatory insight.
2. Man's Search for Meaning.
A very courageous, sweeping essay, complete with narrative twists, integration of multiple historical contexts with one another and with the present, and of course a focus on the *truly* important questions. As admitted in the essay, it's a bit of a mess in terms of focus and structure. But polish it up a bit, and it could be a total masterpiece.
3. Njal's Saga.
Incredibly entertaining and well-written. I bumped it down slightly for being gimmicky: the multimedia youtube aspect and trying to copy Scott's style. But I then bumped it up for *succeeding* at the latter. In light of the truth...the last two points are invalidated I guess, leaving "entertaining but a bit gimmicky". Please, no one copy the second part next year, thinking that's what made it "win". It's not.
If I'd been allowed a fourth vote, it would have gone to ZuoZhuan. This one had, in fact, the good aspects of each of the above three respectively: clear and solid, sweeping scope, and entertaining style. It just had each of them to a lesser extent, making this a hard choice for me. In the end, I decided it was probably written by an academic or other expert professional, and that I wanted to give my votes to less credentialed contestants. In light of the biograohical information, it seems I was wrong about this, and maybe this deserved an even higher place.
The complaints against the winner need some perspective - even with ranked choice voting most people will have voted against the winner. This would be true of most winners given the number of candidates.
If there is an official list of haters of The Educated Mind, add me there.
At first, it makes some good criticism of the existing educational system. But, as is the usual problem with populism, the actual challenge is not telling people how the existing system sucks (most people know already), but designing a system that sucks *less*.
The proposal, in a nutshell, is to tell stories at the elementary school, interesting trivia at high school, and leave the boring stuff (such as addition and subtraction, I suppose) for university. Yeah, that would definitely improve education a lot!
Seriously, if you think this is a strawman, then I challenge you to show me a mathematical curriculum designed to comply with The Educated Mind, and put it side by side with the existing one.
The nearest thing that exists in reality is probably Waldorf schools. If you look at the lists of their famous alumni, you will find approximately zero scientists, which is not a coincidence.
Absolutely wonderful as always, these book reviews always manage to concentrate so much good stuff on so many topics. I wonder, are there links to the Google Docs containing the rest of them? I see one in this post, but only for the A-G section.
In anticipation of maybe taking part in next year's contest, does a review have to be of a very recently published book, or would one published in say 2016 be OK, or 1916 for that matter?
So it WAS you!
Damn Scott writing anonymously won his own Book Review Contest. That deserves respect.
Thanks, that was really fun!
> Njal’s Saga, reviewed by Scott Alexander. This one got the most votes, but I’m disqualifying it because it seems in poor taste for me to win my own contest.
There was a prediction market about which book review would win "resolv[ing] to contest winner". An excellent lesson in how precise wording matters!
So pleased to see The Educated Mind review win! Certainly the most mind-opening of any review I’ve read on the last two years of ACX for me.
I just want to say that I really enjoyed the Book Review Contest—I didn't finish (or even start) every entry, but I found the book selections wide ranging and in some cases utterly captivating. (On Marble Cliffs and Njal's Saga being the most unexpected). Kudos to all the reviewers and to you for running such an interesting contest.
Thanks for hosting the contest once again Scott! I'm pretty happy I upgraded from finalist to podium this year. Congrats to Brandon and everyone else too! And thanks for those who believed in my review enough to place it first on the prediction market :D
For those who might be interested in Jane Jacobs further, I'll be writing about some of her other books in the near future.
(Also for the record I really liked The Alexander Romance and it was my only 10/10 on the preliminary round and I'm glad I publicly predicted on Twitter that Scott had written it)
I had the impression that the response to "Cities And The Wealth Of Nations" was pretty negative from what I remember of the comments but it did really well
For people who voted for that book review, do you agree with the core idea there?
Hello! I'm Michael Zhang, the author of the "Science Fictions" book review (https://michael-zhang.medium.com/trust-scientists-less-trust-humanity-more-9eb1f5af98d4). I'm an astronomer studying exoplanet atmospheres. I was honored and pleasantly surprised to get an honorable mention, so thank you!
For everyone who read the book review, I'm curious what you thought about it (either about the book or about the review). Do you think the replication crisis reveals that something is deeply wrong about science, or is fraud, hype, bias, and negligence just part of the human condition and an inescapable part of the scientific process? Has the replication crisis changed your worldview? Do you agree with Stuart Ritchie's ideas for reforming science? And finally, what did you like or not like about my review (as distinct from the book)?
WOW! Thanks all around for the reads (especially everyone who read through to the long, bitter end), thanks for the feedback, and thanks for the votes! I’ll be posting a “Highlights from the Comments on the Review” on my substack. (Never fear, it’ll be shorter. Slightly.)
I was *outraged* that Njal's Saga didn't win until I read on.
Where can we read all entries?
I feel like I should have an evening dress or something for this grand occasion, but oh well.
First, I must apologise and not alone eat crow but humble pie and my hat. To everyone who said "Scott has a book review in this contest and it's Njal's Saga", I was wrong and you were right. The deceit, the duplicity, the deception! I am shocked, shocked I tell you!
Now excuse me while I choke down this mouthful of feathers.
I am disappointed Zuozhan review didn't do better, so good luck to T! It was an excellent review and educated me on the subject.
"I’m planning another contest next year. I haven’t decided if it will be book review or generic essay"
I would really love to see a reader submitted generic essay contest, although I suspect there would be 100s of entries since the barrier to entry is so small.
> Seth is a chemistry
Typo
So do we have to wait until next year for an AI-written book review to place among the finalists?
Or am I still too optimistic there?
“Njal’s Saga, reviewed by Scott Alexander”
Yeh, it was the best out of a great list. You should think about making a living out of writing.
The LRB and other publications that have book reviews as long form essays, allow the writers to review more than one book on the same topic (for instance if there are two books on Stalin, or whatever) - is that possible in this competition, next year?
I was surprised to see Njal's Saga not in the top 3, based on the overwhelmingly positive response to it elsewhere. Then I scrolled down, and everything made sense again.
Congrats to the winners, and thankyou for the honorable mention!
I finally got around to posting my review here if anyone would like to give it a read: https://open.substack.com/pub/ninedimensions/p/book-review-the-design-of-everyday
If anyone else has published their non-finalist reviews, please share!
Thanks for posting all the scores, I was very curious how well I did.
Getting 54th out of 145 is just good enough to encourage me to try again next year. I probably won't be a finalist, but I think I can beat my high score! Though I wish there was a way to get feedback from those low scoring reviewers so I can figure out how to improve.
I was very salty Njals saga lost til I saw the explanation. Bravo
I’m thrilled to hear The Educated Mind won. I enjoyed most of the book reviews in the contest but that one genuinely changed how I think about education and motivated me to dig deeper into idifferent learning and teaching theories.
Welp! I was surprised not to see Njal's Saga in top 3, and low on the prediction market, but this explains a lot. I had no idea it would have been Scott's, I just really enjoyed it.
I traded down on you having written the Njal's Saga review, because you linked to your own channel and I thought that's too obvious
Shocked that “The Educated Mind” won, it was a chore to get through and it seemed aware of that and felt a need to constantly reassure the reader of the reward at the end (at long last reaching the thesis). Pleased with the other two though, “Cities” was my favorite and “Njal’s Saga” and “On the Marble Cliffs” were near contenders.
I somehow missed the opportunity to vote, despite being a regular reader of ACX. It looks like it was only posted on Monday, and then voting closed on Wednesday. There really needs to be more than two days of voting, especially after the contest itself took place over many weeks.
I'm not sure if this is a symptom or our societies polarization, or if it's the fact that this kind of thing being true that is causing it, but what I'm taking away from the comments here is that the most polarizing review was also the most popular.
What's slightly interesting to me is that, given that it was a ranked choice voting system, that _mostly_ shouldn't have been true (or at least, in general on average that shouldn't be true).
He even posted the Video on his own YouTube Channel he has used for SSC videos in the past. He wasn't trying his hardest to hide it. In general, it was the funniest review by far, though I only ranked it 3rd because two others were more informative.
Scott: Now that it's been established that it was you, can you explain your thought process behind *why* you didn't comment even in passing on almost any of the parts of Njál's Saga for which it has been famous and beloved for centuries? I get that the point for the review was essentially to crack a joke about legal systems very different from ours, but surely the concept of a review would normally oblige someone to engage at least cursorily with the substance of a book? I guess most of your readers haven't read Brennu-Njál and couldn't tell, but reading the review as someone who *is* familiar with the book, seeing not one word about e.g. the attack on Hlídarendi in favor of the ridiculous legal quibble parts nobody cares about is almost surreal.
After looking at The Educated Mind, I agree with the other commenters here that it was terrible, quite possibly the worst review of the contest. I'm amazed it got any votes, let alone first place, and that's saying something since I thought that nearly every entry deserved to win this year.
Huh, I didn't realize Scott had reviews in the contest. That sorta distorts the betting market.
> Njal’s Saga, reviewed by Scott Alexander. This one got the most votes, but I’m disqualifying it because it seems in poor taste for me to win my own contest.
What a chad move.
I am SO happy Njal's Saga won. Had no idea it was you, and I loved it so much.
Now I can't decide if intentionally not voting for Njal's Saga cause I was pretty confident that was the True Scottsman actually made sense. I guess it at least ensured none of my votes got discarded? But it was the most entertaining, well-written (even by Scott standards - felt like "classic" SSC-era), and breaking the nonfiction monopoly is a big plus in and of itself. Not expressing those preferences feels...inconsistent.
The Educated Mind...would have expected it to top5, given the demographics, but not actually win. The length and imprecision were real bummers, even though I overall enjoyed and "liked" it. I think I'd have given up if not for priors being adjusted by FdB and Caplan - that is, having the expectation that ponderous ed theory critiques can actually be enlightening and moderately entertaining, so it's probably worth slogging through. The juice was worth the squeeze, at least in strict marginal idea-profit terms, if not best-uses-of-my-time utility.
Main bucked expectation for me was Why Machines Will Never Rule The World finalizing at all. I guess there's a lot more community (or voter anyway) split on AI fundamentals than I thought.
First of all, I loved the Njal's Saga review and I agree with other commenters who said that it was by Scott Alexander. I also really liked the Romance of Alexander review, and I said to myself, that one also looks like a Scott Alexander review! I couldn't tell which, if either, was by our illustrious host, or whether there were contestants who were just really good at imitating Scott's voice. (What is the kabbalistic significance of Scott Alexander reviewing the Romance of Alexander?)
Second, The Educated Mind winning first place was... well, it was a choice.
I can't say I *disliked* the review, because it had some excellent parts and made very good and important points, especially about how success in public education is difficult/impossible, because we're asking the education system to do different/conflicting/incompatible things: socialization, academics, and individual development.
But it was a flawed review for several reasons, and not just because it's so fricken LONG. I'm not going to reread it now, but Brandon Hendrickson seems to claim that True Education is about taking a child through five developmental stages, and then he gives examples of what to teach at each stage.
Which, ok, sure, but what is the evidence for the five stages and their correspondence to the child's age? I don't recall real evidence, mostly lots of anecdotes along the lines of "seven-year-olds like puns and jokes, which correspond to the XYZ stage." Also, I don't recall Mr. Hendrickson attempting to reconcile these five developmental stages with the socialization/academics/development (SAD) model - which sides of the SAD triangle are we aiming for with the five-stage model, and why? Next, the five-stage model seems to ask a LOT of teachers. They're supposed to not just know a very broad range of material, but also be gifted comedians, storytellers, entertainers, etc. Sure, this works if you're paying lots of money to recruit the best teachers possible to a small school attended by the children of the PMC, but how well will it scale across the whole society?
Finally, as other commenters on that review already pointed out, the review, for all its length, has some very important gaps. Mr. Hendrickson spends a lot of time on the proposed curriculum, and very little on things like testing, classroom discipline/behavior standards, tracking (do we group by age or ability?), etc. What to do if, despite our best efforts, some children just can't/don't want to progress through the "five stages"? And if the reviewer did write about these things, then I apologize for not remembering, but again, if you wanted me to remember more, you would have made your review shorter.
Again, I don't mean to sound harsh, you obviously put a *ton* of work into your review and it has a lot of very good things about it. Congratulations on your win!
I’ve noticed that Jaynes’ Probability Theory has been reviewed each year for three years in a row, but never does well. Given that it’s a core text for the rationality community, I’m curious if many ACX readers have read the textbook? My sense is that it seems a bit like a book that people talk about without having actually read it, and maybe for good reason, since the author died before completing it and a lot of it is half done.
Congrats to the winners! I'd also like to commend T. for her Zuozhuan review, which was my favorite.
Thanks to Scott for putting this on, and to everyone who read.
1. I really approve of both using ranked choice voting and limiting it to three choices.
2. I gave my first choice to Cities and the Wealth of Nations and I'm glad to see it place.
3. Of all the book review finalists the only one that would annoy me by winning was the one that did just that.
I posted my review here:
https://tapwatersommelier.substack.com/p/book-review-mans-search-for-meaning
In a week or so, I will write a post answering to the comments from the original posting in June.
Bit of a meta-comment: In terms of sheer quantity of text, these 15 reviews must be the most I have read from a single source (/collator) in a long, long time. I used to read this quantity of text from The Economist when I cared more about the news; occasionally from the FT, NYT, or New Yorker.
What I mean to say is that Scott is now, for me, as good a source of interesting writing as *the best* journal publishing houses in the world. That's an extraordinary state of affairs, and I hope someone studies it one day. But not Scott, because I just want him to carry on with whatever he's doing.
Congratulations to all the reviewers, I thought they were all world-class pieces of writing.
I'm surprised at the amount of negativity directed at the Educated Minds review in the comments here. I found the book's outlook on education both exciting and sensible, enjoyed reading the review, placed it as my first choice, and am happy to see it win!
In general, I liked the contest a lot, thank you to all the reviewers for your efforts!
What an excellent way to leverage skill at edutaining children.
In defense of "The Educated Mind" book review:
I see a lot of comments that say that the review was written terribly, rambling, teasing and generally confused how it won.
As someone that voted for it as a second preference, (Njal's Saga as first), I figured I'll say why I liked it enough to vote for it.
For me, I enjoy a book review when it introduces me to new ideas, and does so in an enticing and interesting way. I felt that TEM book review took me on an interesting journey, introducing a new way to consider education and adding a new lense to view interacting with children and teenagers.
This was especially interesting to me as it fit in with what I have actually experienced myself, and can see with my children: my grade school child is fascinated with stories, and she can spend 40 minutes reenacting all the parts of the stories she heard at school, but can barely recall other lessons. Meanwhile, her older brother is really getting interested in extremes: highest mountain, lowest place on earth, etc. What I'm trying to say is that as I was reading, the ideas resonated, and seemed to fit my observations and place them in the context of a theory.
I also enjoyed his explanation of the problems with current education, with different types of schools satisfying two out of three "ideals" and leaving out a third, important one, and found it to make sense. Especially given how drastically schools can vary (from personal experience). The review left me with hope that an education institution that isn't completely broken is possible.
As for the rambling and teasing, etc., I didn't mind that so much; other overly-verbose reviews gave me more trouble, and a couple just lost my interest halfway. This one did not. A book review that delivers so much of the book's content makes me happy with it. I also felt that the review addressed many of the objections, concerns and questions that popped into my mind as I was reading it. I spoke about the review with friends and recommended it often enough that it felt to me that it makes the cut as a solid second choice.
As a last note, while I liked "Cities and the Wealth of Nations", I didn't want to vote for it, as I felt economics reviews were overly represented in this competition (likely due to last year's winner), at five out of sixteen finalists. But I do agree that CATWON was the best economics review.
I wonder if people with children / significantly younger siblings were more likely to vote for it. Did anyone also have this experience?
I mostly based my voting on the ones that I could clearly remember - this may well have biased me towards later ones, but I think moreso just being unusual. I felt like I had to vote for On The Marble Cliffs because it made me actually download the book, I plan to read that some time when I'm in the mood for Literature.
I'm surprised more people aren't declaring their votes. Well, here are mine:
1. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.
This was terrific and hugely underrated. Very much what I'd like to see more of here (in comments and even in some posts by Scott) and elsewhere: clear, logical grounding of relevant facts, and then detail-focused, logically justified conclusions from those facts. And especially, solid grounding of claims about the present and predictions about the future in the parallels and principles from actual history.
It's amazing to me how little of this there is, and how much people rely on Sprawling Theories of Everything, attempted grand explanations of the past and the future and the nature of society and life itself, justified by little more than "this just seems like something that might be true". Even in purportedly "empirical" communities like this. JJ's review instead does the radical thing of answering the question of what might happen, or what we should fear happening, by looking at what has, you know, *actually* happened, in the past. And getting a grounding in that, picking out the important details, and drawing out general principles that we can apply to other contexts.
I'm not surprised it didn't do well in the contest, though. The fact that so many people love their Sprawling Theories of Everything, and their gut reactions that "*clearly* candidate X is the new Hitler, that's just obvious, I don't need any logical argument or actual knowedge of Hitler to make that claim!" means they won't be very amenable to tightly-focused and clearly-argued pieces that pay attention to details and distinctions. Please write more pieces like this, JJ. Even though the people you describe in your first paragraph are most of the internet and a large portion of the voters in this contest, there are definitely those of us who see its compelling explanatory insight.
2. Man's Search for Meaning.
A very courageous, sweeping essay, complete with narrative twists, integration of multiple historical contexts with one another and with the present, and of course a focus on the *truly* important questions. As admitted in the essay, it's a bit of a mess in terms of focus and structure. But polish it up a bit, and it could be a total masterpiece.
3. Njal's Saga.
Incredibly entertaining and well-written. I bumped it down slightly for being gimmicky: the multimedia youtube aspect and trying to copy Scott's style. But I then bumped it up for *succeeding* at the latter. In light of the truth...the last two points are invalidated I guess, leaving "entertaining but a bit gimmicky". Please, no one copy the second part next year, thinking that's what made it "win". It's not.
If I'd been allowed a fourth vote, it would have gone to ZuoZhuan. This one had, in fact, the good aspects of each of the above three respectively: clear and solid, sweeping scope, and entertaining style. It just had each of them to a lesser extent, making this a hard choice for me. In the end, I decided it was probably written by an academic or other expert professional, and that I wanted to give my votes to less credentialed contestants. In light of the biograohical information, it seems I was wrong about this, and maybe this deserved an even higher place.
The complaints against the winner need some perspective - even with ranked choice voting most people will have voted against the winner. This would be true of most winners given the number of candidates.
I am delighted by two of the honorable mentions: Prince of Persia and the Design of everyday things.
I am bit sorry for Lying for Money, which was very good, and Zuozhuan, which was excellent.
I wanted to mention that I thought the Zuozhuan review was excellent - my personal choice for the best among the offerings.
If there is an official list of haters of The Educated Mind, add me there.
At first, it makes some good criticism of the existing educational system. But, as is the usual problem with populism, the actual challenge is not telling people how the existing system sucks (most people know already), but designing a system that sucks *less*.
The proposal, in a nutshell, is to tell stories at the elementary school, interesting trivia at high school, and leave the boring stuff (such as addition and subtraction, I suppose) for university. Yeah, that would definitely improve education a lot!
Seriously, if you think this is a strawman, then I challenge you to show me a mathematical curriculum designed to comply with The Educated Mind, and put it side by side with the existing one.
The nearest thing that exists in reality is probably Waldorf schools. If you look at the lists of their famous alumni, you will find approximately zero scientists, which is not a coincidence.
Absolutely wonderful as always, these book reviews always manage to concentrate so much good stuff on so many topics. I wonder, are there links to the Google Docs containing the rest of them? I see one in this post, but only for the A-G section.
In anticipation of maybe taking part in next year's contest, does a review have to be of a very recently published book, or would one published in say 2016 be OK, or 1916 for that matter?