Book Review Contest 2024 Winners
...
Thanks to everyone who entered or voted in the book review contest. The winners are:
1st: Two Arms And A Head, reviewed by AmandaFromBethlehem. Amanda is active in the Philadelphia ACX community. This is her first year entering the Book Review Contest, and she is currently working on a silly novel about an alien who likes thermodynamics. When she's not writing existential horror, she practices Tengwar calligraphy and does home improvement projects.
2nd: Nine Lives, reviewed by David Matolcsi. David is an AI safety researcher from Hungary, currently living in Berkeley. He doesn't have much publicly available writing yet, but plans to publish some new blog posts on LessWrong in the coming months
3rd: How The War Was Won, reviewed by Jack Thorlin. Jack previously worked as an attorney at the Central Intelligence Agency, and is now an assistant professor at the University of Arkansas School of Law.
First place gets $2,500, second place $1,000, third place gets $500. Email me at scott@slatestarcodex.com to tell me how to send you money; your choices are Paypal, Bitcoin, Ethereum, check in the mail, or donation to your favorite charity. Please contact me by October 21 or you lose your prize.
The other Finalists were:
Autobiography Of Yukichi Fukuzawa, reviewed by Jason Rhys Parry. Jason is a researcher at Sapienship. He has a new tech and culture-themed Substack called Blueprint Canopy. You can read his debut post "The Sci-fi Career Guide" for a taste of things to come. He also tweets at @JRhysParry.
Dominion, reviewed by Drew Housman. Drew writes about animal welfare on his Substack and about all kinds of stuff on his personal blog. He also wrote a book about his college days and early career. He’s interested in working with animal welfare orgs and can be reached at drewhous@gmail.com.
Don Juan, reviewed by Amedeo Rothson. Amedeo has been called “the greatest writer who has ever lived,” namely by himself. He writes occasional essays and still-more-occasional verse at The Titan’s Breakfast.
The Family That Couldn’t Sleep, reviewed by Vat, a neuropsychology/genetics student who writes at Vates Rising.
How Language Began, reviewed by John V, a neuroscientist who lives in Boston.
Real Raw News, reviewed by Blake Neff. Blake is a producer for an American conservative podcast and radio show, and previously wrote the scripts for Tucker Carlson's Fox show, so feel free to blame him for the present state of American politics. He doesn't have a Substack as of yet, but does take commissions and he'll respond to your email if you send one.
Silver Age Marvel Comics, reviewed by Edward Nevraumont. Edward has a day job in private equity but has three side projects that may interest ACX readers: he co-hosted "What if Marvel was Real" — a podcast that pretends to be part of the 1960s Marvel Universe and discusses the real world implications of living with superheroes. He writes business-stuff at the largest marketing Substack: Marketing BS. And most recently he has started a project to coach his nine-year old daughter to (hopefully) the History Bee National Championship (using some technique from last year's contest winner): The Everest Era.
The Complete Rhyming Dictionary And Poet’s Craft Book, reviewed by David. David is a materials science PhD and programmer who blogs with co-author Felipe at The Hall of Impossible Dreams about fanfiction, poetry, video game machine learning, and fanfiction poetry about video game machine learning. He is currently looking for work, and can be reached at david@hallofdreams.org.
The History Of Rationalism, reviewed by Louis Morgan, a curmudgeon and cunctator who lives in a swamp in south Louisiana
The Pale King, reviewed by Arielle Friedman. Arielle likes fiction, light technopessimism, and the occasional political screed. She writes at analogfutures.substack.com and runs a co-writing group every weekday morning that you can join here.
The Ballad of the White Horse, reviewed by FLWAB. FLWAB works in mental healthcare administration, and is in the process of earning a PhD in clinical psychology. He writes the Substack Flying Lion With A Book, and is often found leaving C. S. Lewis quotes in the comments of other people's Substacks.
I’m also giving out six Honorable Mentions. These either came very close to making the finals, or had an interesting balance of very high and very low votes in the first round, or I just personally liked them. They are:
Catkin, by ctrlcreep. They write microfiction as translucent as the finest yellow plastic. ctrlcreep.net. Otherwise prefers illegibility.
Road of The King, reviewed by UnlimitedOranges. He is a rationality and fiction enthusiast as well as 1L law student at Rutgers Law School. If anyone is looking for a Summer 2025 law intern, email him at elvisqwalsh@gmail.com.
World Empire Lost, reviewed by Iain. Iain is a former civil servant and government adviser based in England. He blogs on politics, government, society, books and miscellany at www.edrith.co.uk, where he also hosts an annual UK-focused forecasting competition.
The Meme Machine, reviewed by Arvid Häggqvist. Arvid is currently doing a Master's degree in philosophy at Uppsala University, Sweden, and works as a software engineer. He asks you to consider donating to his friend's fundraiser for helping displaced people in Beirut.
Determined, reviewed by Slippin Fall, who invites you to join him at Nobels in the Street where he will try to win himself, using zero math, a Nobel Prize every Monday for the next six Mondays. First up, on 10/14, the Nobel Prize in Physics. He sh*ts you not, and hopes to see you there.
The author of the final honorable mention, Piranesi, asks to remain anonymous.
I enjoyed watching you speculate on which reviews you thought were secretly mine, but I didn’t submit one this year.
All winners and finalists get a free ACX subscription at the email I have on record for them. I haven’t done this yet but I will next week. If you want it at a different email and haven’t already told me, send me an email saying so.
All winners and finalists also get the right to pitch me essays they want me to put up on ACX. Warning that I am terrible to pitch to, reject most things without giving good reasons, and am generally described as awful to work with - but you can do it if you want! I used to say I would pay you if I used your article, but I found that other people already wanted to pitch me more than I wanted to accept, so I’m suspending this offer for now.
All winners and finalists get the opportunity to be named and honored publicly here; if I didn’t include your details, it’s because I didn’t get your response to my email asking me what details to include, and if you want to change that you should send me an email so I can name you in an open thread or something.
Many people said the Book Review Contest seems to be declining. I may skip next year in favor of an Everything-Except-Book-Reviews contest, give you time to read some more good books, then return to book reviews in 2026. Let me know if you have opinions on this plan.
I still really enjoyed the book review contest - so I hope it does continue next year. Even the reviews I don’t love, still tend to be interesting and informative.
Winners weren’t what I was expecting - but I did vote for the top 2 places.
Congratulations to all the finalists/winners
I found most of the reviews this year quite good but I'm also plenty interested in the "Everything-Except-Book-Reviews contest" so I figure we win either way.
> I still really enjoyed the book review contest - so I hope it does continue next year. Even the reviews I don’t love, still tend to be interesting and informative.
Hear hear !
Congratulations to the winners. Can we see where our reviews placed in the rankings?
http://slatestarcodex.com/Stuff/bookreviews_all_scores.png
Ratings may not 100% agree with the list of finalists because of affirmative action, adjustment for number of votes, disqualifications, and me exercising personal judgment around the edges.
Affirmative action? Can we hear more about your methodology and reasoning there? This is the first I’ve heard (though I easily might have been oblivious) that affirmative action was involved in the contest or finalist selection.
This being a rationalist, or rationalist-heavy, site, the reviews tended to be very much non-fiction, especially technical, subjects. Scott exercised his prerogative as the Rightful Caliph to include fiction, poetry and other neglected areas to be amongst the finalists (if I'm getting that right).
And he even assumed the identity of a materials science PhD/programmer named "David", who has a friend named "Felipe", which 2 names conveniently don't anagram to anything - who share a blog (he just couldn't self-deflect without a little self-regarding tell there) - so that he could enter a review of a book about the fundamentals of verse, and be the recipient of his own affirmative action.
Real Raw Comment, right there.
ETA: oh wow, he even dummied up the "blog"!
Are any of us on here real, if it comes to that? Maybe we're all sockpuppets of Scott!
He contains multitudes! (To coin a phrase.)
I would think that if I were a sock puppet of Scott's, I would have better writing and communication skills.
Of course you'd say that, "Victor" 😀
I can only dream of being a Scott sockpuppet. So much writing to do, so little skill in plain speaking and not getting lost in convoluted digressions and, what was I talking about again?
I'm Scott Alexander, and so's my wife!
That would explain things; I've been feeling like socks for months.
CTRL+F "affirmative action" at https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-contest-rules-2024
Ah, *that* affirmative action. I had read that, chuckled at the use of the term for something I actually approved of, then completely forgot about it. I couldn’t imagine that it was actual affirmative action, but I couldn’t imagine what else you could mean either.
...what's up with The Sixth Day and Other Tales? Highest score, second highest number of votes, low SD— not even an honorable mention. Cheating?
Disqualified for voting irregularities.
I will note that a standing policy of disqualifying the recipient of fraudulent votes will indeed discourage attempts to boost the outcome of a favored candidate, but instead open the avenue of getting unfavorable candidates disqualified through them.
Yes, but somehow that doesn't seem likely to happen to me. For one thing, I don't think many people on here know each other well. And who's going to go to a semi-stranger and say, "hey, want to get X disqualified by making it look like X got his buddies to all give him a 10?" And of the pairs and groups of people on here who do know each other well enough to feel safe broaching an idea like this to each other, how many of them function at such a middle-school shenanigans level?
I figure the way to actually stop this would be to make the votes more clearly tied to identities. I don't think it would be difficult for a *single person* to submit a whole bunch of fraudulent votes for a single candidate (either in order to boost their standing or, conversely, to get them disqualified for suspected cheating). I mean heck, I submitted a large number of legitimate votes (I forget how many but I think I voted for about half of the entries) and it wasn't hard to do at all. I imagine it would be a lot easier if you don't read the review, spam 10s, and use dummy email addresses.
That said, in instances of suspected cheating, I think a fairer solution would be to simply delete the suspect votes. If someone gets a hundred 10/10 votes in an hour, those votes should be deleted. (For that matter, if someone gets a hundred 1/10 votes in an hour, same thing.) If the review author themselves were obviously involved, maybe then they should be disqualified. I dunno, a lot of the voting is being undertaken on the honor system anyways.
Did voting irregularities happen a lot?
Can I get some data on the contest? How many reviews were enetered? How many votes alltogether? (How many for each winner?)
Thank you.
Any chance we could see the vote totals on the second round?
One of the adjustments Scott mentions he makes is an adjustment for number of votes. I had an exchange with him about that, and as I understand it, here’s how things work: By the time most reviews have 10 or more votes, which is the standard Scott uses for enough (which seems reasonable), there are some with considerably fewer votes — like maybe 4 or 5. What he does is then add enough dummy scores to bring the total votes for teach of those reviews up to at least 9. For dummy scores, he uses whatever the average is for all scores for all reviews. Scott, if I’ve got this wrong, please correct me.
The voting system is messy and imperfect anyway — for one thing, each review is read by a different panel of voters — but that’s unfixable. But the present system for handling votes for people who got way less than 10 votes is simply inaccurate and unfair. Those reviews just don’t get enough of a hearing. If someone goes to the effort of writing a review, I think they deserve to get 10 real votes. Using the average scores as dummy votes is not an accurate substitute for real scores, and it’s particularly inaccurate for people whose scores up to that point are far above or below the mean. Think about what would happen if there were no dummy scores, but we waited for more real votes to come in up to a total of 10 votes. For some reviews whose average scores after 5 votes is 9, late votes will bring their average down to, say, 7.5. But for a few, the average score will stay high, and they will finish with a high average score, and become finalists. There is no way to know, based on the first 5 votes, which reviews are the ones whose average score will stay high, rather than regressing to the mean. Throwing a bunch of dead-center-average votes into the pot for each review that’s short on votes doesn’t compensate for the extra 5 pieces of data we don’t have, it just sprays polystyrene spray foam over everything for that the reviews in questions are shapeless blob, at least shapeless are regards their real overall appeal to voters.
They only reasonably fair solution I can think of is to make sure every review gets 10 real votes. To make this happen, options I can think of are these:
(1) Once a review has 10 votes, remove it from the pool of reviews to vote on. That should free up some reviewer time that otherwise would be going to the 15th or 20th rreading of a review that already has more enough votes. (2) Insist that every review get 10 votes, and don’t tally the results until all do. Tell people which reviews need more votes. (3) agree in advance on a size
limit for reciews, so there is less total time required of the group to get them all read. At present, the long reviews get more than their fair share of reviewer time.
A lack of reviews during the review period suggests a lack of interest in the subject, which should itself be given weight. An average dummy review is more generous than necessary, serving only to give something with a handful of pure 10's an outside chance.
Yes, a lack of reviews suggests something discouraged voters, but I don't see any justification for treating getting a smaller number of reviews as informative in the way an actual numerical score is. When I did reviews the thing that most often made me skip one was that it was unusually long. Before starting I'd skim and see how long it was, Review scoring season was during a period when I was pressed for time, and I wanted to do my fair share of reviewing, but could not help having my choices be influenced by how long it was going to take me to give one a good read.
If failure to draw as many reviewers was as valid a measure as scores, we could greatly speed up the review process. Instead of reading them people could just eyeball them and then give a 1-10 rating for how much enthusiasm they would have for reading and rating them, if in fact they were called upon to do that.
We do have that, but it's a 1-0 rating; you rate it or you don't. If it survives that bothered-to-read-it round, then we start caring about how people rated it.
Then we need to make that explicit. At present people electing not to read things do not think
of themselves as voting on whether the review merits real consideration and real scores. As I said, when I rated reviews last year my criterion for deciding whether to read and rate something was length, not what it was a review of or how well written it was. I would certainly not have done that if I thought of my decision to rate or not to rate as a first round vote. We can ask people here if they’d like to have that 2 round system. I don’t think your model would be popular, but maybe I’m wrong.
a couple of review scores got cropped out, can you zoom out?
Thanks for the update, and congratulations to the winners and finalists! Can you share the vote results from the longlist?
See response to Penrose's comment above.
Thanks!
I thought most of the entries this year were quite good and hope there will be another one next year.
(I also hope to finally actually finish writing a review in time for next year's contest, so conflict of interest I guess)
Do you have a spreadsheet of the ratings from Round 1, or the vote totals from Round 2? I’d be interested in seeing them.
See response to Penrose's comment above.
Were there any other true "guest posts" besides the two from Daniel Bottger this year? It must've been awhile, or I just don't remember any others...
I still got net positive utility from the Book Review Contest this year, despite the troubles. Plus side of even the ones I disliked is that they were shorter, so much less of a heroic lift to wade through; I'm sympathetic to Scott's "free blog posts I don't have to do ~any work for" rationale. From the reader end, even a bad book review here tends to be much more interesting than guest content from others I subscribe to. The bar is very low! So it'd be a little sad to see it cancelled for 2025.
I think The Georgism guy had a three-part series at some point?
By George, I'd forgotten that Lars Doucet's book was mostly made from the material of that three-part series...after winning that year's Book Review Contest with Progress and Poverty. Good catch.
I suppose that the implication I got was that there were various pitches that he rejected, and cutting down on those is his reason for removing the payment.
I say that Book Review of 2026 shouldnt be skipped.
Seconded, or Nth-ed given how many others have posted similar. There seems ample scope given the number of great books published each year. As the good book says (Ecclesiastes 12, 12) "of making many books there is no end", although it adds "in much study is weariness of the flesh", a view many a bookworm would share!
I do wonder how much the topic of a book review influences peoples' judgement, with maybe harrowing or momentous topics having some advantage independent of the merits of the review.
Also congratulations do the winners!
> Everything-Except-Book-Reviews contest
Finally, a platform where my review of a tube of braunschweiger I got on Amazon Fresh can have the reach it deserves.
I meant this as (Everything Except)(Book Reviews), but you're right that (Everything Except Book)(Reviews) is a better idea, and this is probably how I'll do it!
Maybe that would be a bit too broad.
https://xkcd.com/1803/
Is it bad I have some certainty about which xkcd that is without clicking?
Edited to add: yup, I knew it!
No worse than my thinking of this particular one when the topic of (Everything Except Book) (Reviews) is brought up.
I would have also accepted xkcd 37
I thought it was going to be the one about Biden sandwich photos.
Then there are the reviews on Google Maps of the Taylor Swift Bench in Nashville. A few excerpts:
"It’s a great little tribute and a fun spot for any Swiftie to visit."
"I've sat on a lot of benches, but this was by far the benchiest of the bunch."
"Fits numerous people and amazingly shaded."
"It’s a bench."
The Taylor Swift Bench in Nashville gets 4.4 stars, compared to just 3.7 stars for the Forrest Gump bench in Savannah.
From delving into the reviews, the Forrest Gump bench is heavily marked down for not being there any more, which seems fair.
I once got on a Google reviewing spree, and reviewed a bathroom at the local mall. "Gets the job done."
I am always ultimately reviewing the parking lot.
I remember SomethingAwful.com featuring reviews of water fountains. "lame-ass backwoods bubbler...."
I remember once hearing that someone left an angry review of the Google HQ on Google Maps, complaining that there was no place to buy coffee. I wonder if that's why Meta included a public coffee shop in their new office complex...
Too broad? ((Everything (Except Book)) Reviews) is much less broad than (Everything (Except (Book Reviews)))
**3x3 alignment chart for book reviews**
Horizontal: bookness
1. Books are books
2. Books are long collections of prose (e.g. Real Raw News)
3. Books are anything coherent (e.g. a codebase)
Vertical: reviewness
1. Reviews are reviews
2. Reviews are about the source material, including relevant background
3. Reviews are anythinginspired by the source material
Ensuing predictions for book reviews:
* The screenplay for Citizen Kane, to examine whether scripts predict movie success
* The Linux kernel, to give a history of open source
* The notes from the reviewer's therapist about them
Top comment right here ^^
For the record, I agree about the decline, but assign low probability this will address it.
💯💯
I once got a review of my colon from the doc who did the colonoscopy. It had a little glamor shot of one little pink colon grotto up at the top.
Great comment.
And "The screenplay for Citizen Kane, to examine whether scripts predict movie success" would be a fantastic review. I would have thought most people here would agree, and yet I'm not sure we've ever had anything like that.
Just when I think I know this community, it turns out I don't.
I - for real - started wtiting a review of the libretto from the Bellini's opera Norma, but was too lazy to actually finish it.
Oh too bad, I was going to bypass the review altogether and submit, in the interests of man over machine, one of those Amazon Q&A answers, which it has now ditched in favor of its AI assistant?: "Is this braunschweiger smooth and spreadable? I don't know. I didn't buy this product."
I like the idea of everything-except-book reviews.
I'm going to write a review of everything except The Birds of Australia by John Gould.
I concur on the interest in anything-but-books reviews. Especially if it's reviews of things that are absolutely un-experiencable by the audience.
Do tacos count as books?
Only if you also count hotdogs.
If you must change the format, please restrict the field more. Maybe "if not a book, then justify why you think it deserves to have an essay written reviewing it"?
Can we review hookups? home electronics? latte art?
> Can we review hookups?
Oh god i hope so
I like the book reviews. You don't have to read them if you don't like them. Maybe just remove the incentive to write more "novel" reviews, so it can stay focussed on what the rationalist audience wants to read about.
I'm agnostic as to whether quality has declined, but I am in favour of a year off, to try something different and give me a chance to miss it. It takes up such a big chunk of time, and I can't say I really look forward to a bunch of non-Scott posts in my inbox (even though I do enjoy many of the reviews once I get into them)
We can have both contests, I'd say. (Yes, the reviews were on average just A, not A+; there even was one, I didn't finish. Still looking forward to the next.) Oh, my 2 manifold bets came first and 2nd. Kinda obvious, this year.
An Everything-Except-Book-Reviews contest sounds amazing.
It sounds amazingly boring, yes. Great art needs constraints. "Not a book review" can barely be described as a constraint. Strong disagree.
Yeah, I have no idea where one would even start there.
Alternative stuff to review:
Charities
Governments
Cities
Companies
Laws
Scientific papers
Substacks
Previous book review contest winners
World religions
Dogs
Hell Yeah
How about reviews of
My artificial knees
My tennis serve
The wad of gum I stepped in earlier
My first marriage
My second marriage
That New Yorker cartoon I saw on Facebook
Facebook
My unfinished novel
Listicles as a medium of expression
All reviews that do not review themselves
Paradoxes
Cleverness
Self-reference
Irony
Self-loathing
On those remote pages [of the Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge] it is written that animals are divided into:
(a) those that belong to the Emperor,
(b) embalmed ones,
(c) those that are trained,
(d) suckling pigs,
(e) mermaids,
(f) fabulous ones,
(g) stray dogs,
(h) those that are included in this classification,
(i) those that tremble as if they were mad,
(j) innumerable ones,
(k) those drawn with a very fine camel's hair brush,
(l) others,
(m) those that have just broken a flower vase,
(n) those that resemble flies from a distance.
Plus:
Reviews of the list itself
Reviews of the list if "This list is bogus" had appeared on it.
Different ground covers on a barefoot walk
Book-jacket blurbs
Cranberry mustards
The 40s radio shows our parents liked as children
Colors of pansies at Home Depot
Comets
Strong yes to reviewing world religions (another area of knowledge seriously lacking in this community).
I'd also like to see reviews of previous book review contest winners.
Clearly we should have a Visual Novel Review Contest.
I can't wait to see the rationalist hot takes on classics like Class Zenin Maji de Yuri?! Watashi-tachi no Les Oppai wa Anata no Mono, or Motto! Haramase! Honoo no Oppai Isekai Ero Mahou Gakuen!, or the monstrosity that is Albatross Log, a literary siren that draws you in with its innocent-sounding name before you realize you're reading maritime Finnegans Wake with porn.
I seem to have already done one with my review of Rings of Power episode by episode, so I will conclude the series by saying that after reading a recent interview with the showrunners in the Hollywood Reporter, I now want to go buy an elephant gun and hunt them down for trophy heads to mount on my wall.
Don't worry, they're plainly not *using* those heads because there are no brains inside, not an original thought rattling around, lonesome and forlorn for lack of company.
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/the-rings-of-power-season-2-finale-1236018870/
"You mentioned their relationship might remind people of their own relationships, including romantic. There were times watching Celebrimbor and Annatar that I wondered if there was some romantic, or even sexual, underpinning to what was going on there?
MCKAY I would say the nature of this relationship and its closeness, and the even the sexual tension in it, has been a source of speculation by may fans of the source material for many years. Anytime you’re dealing with such powerful emotions as seduction and deception, I think it’s easy for your imagination to go there.
PAYNE I think you can see it from the beginning of their interactions together in the second episode. Sauron is pulling Celebrimbor in by saying, “There are things I can only tell to you,” and, “You always saw me the way no one else could” and “You’re safe with me.” You’re seeing this intimate dance that Sauron is doing. So certainly we could see how people could take that a step further and ship them."
My dudes. I've been around online Tolkien fandom of all descriptions since the movies came out and kicked off mass interest. To quote your own show, "You have not seen what I have seen"* Yeah, people have been shipping Annatar/Celebrimbor**. I've seen the art. I've (not) read the stories. But those people are not watching your crappy show, because I've seen Sweet Fanny Adams about the show being produced by them. So I don't know what the [expletive deleted in the best tradition of the Rightful Caliph asterisking bullsh*t] you think you are doing here, apart from copying anything and everything others better than you have produced.
*Mature content, and I ain't kidding, but they also manage to be philosophically interesting in their take on this and how they fit it in with Tolkien's world: https://www.ansereg.com/
**Also Elfcest (not selfcest, that's a different trope). Oh, the Elfcest. I could tell tales, but I've tried to blank it all out.
EDIT: I feel like that scene from the original movie of "The Producers", where the baffled and enraged playwright is threatening to shoot the cast and everyone associated with the production, and Zero Mostel's character thrusts money at him and tells him "Go, buy bullets!"
https://nerdist.com/article/the-rings-of-powers-director-charlotte-brandstrom-interview-finale-galadriel-halbrand-sauron/
"In celebration of the final episodes of The Rings of Power season two, Nerdist sat down with the director of the season’s final episodes, Charlotte Brändström. Brändström spoke to us about what it’s like to direct epic battles, how to inject character into long fight sequences, and the motivations and fates of some of our favorite Middle-earth figures. She also mentioned that Galadriel was in love with Halbrand. That might make some of you very happy.
Seeing Halbrand really affected Galadriel—what were her feelings for him?
Yeah. Galadriel obviously was in love with Halbrand. She was very attracted to him. So when Sauron changes shape… Sauron knows this because he gets into her head, so he knows what she’s thinking, what she’s feeling. So when he immediately takes Halbrand’s shape, he completely destabilizes her because that was her weakness. She had very strong feelings for the King, for Halbrand, obviously in the first season."
I would like to shoot you, and also you, and you over there, and that one in the background trying to skulk away, and by the way, where's Jeff at these days?
For what it's worth, your various commentaries have greatly enhanced my experience of viewing the Rings of Power. (And I am not remotely a Tolkien fan.) Many thanks for your interest and opinions.
Weirdly enough, I'm interested to see if they do get a season three. Apparently it hasn't been greenlit yet, but they are still making noises about how they're committed to five seasons. Amazon have been fudging viewing figures for this season (e.g. they released a number for 'streaming minutes' but of course that equally counts if I watched each episode in full and then re-watched, or if I and a thousand others watched one minute then turned it off) but the general consensus is that the audience is greatly reduced since the first season.
The problem is that it's not *totally* rubbish, there were some good parts (the Dwarven storyline,though mostly totally invented, was the strongest in both seasons). When they let the actors have a chance, they can be good. But the problem remains that Payne and McKay don't know how to do TV (or streaming shows), so the pacing is *terrible*, on top of ignoring the lore, altering the characters, ignoring the Aristotelian unities in favour of fast travel, teleportation, and the character did A last episode and does B this episode in flat contradiction with no explanation, as well as being hampered by "will this look cool?" for scenes instead of "does this make sense?" (they get that from being movie writers, where you need the Big Action Scene or whatever).
The quality of writing is also wildly variable, and their attempts at profundity and expressiveness fall very short of the mark. The writers' room is being changed for the third season, but Payne and McKay are still around, so we'll see what happens there.
What will keep me (and other critics) watching is to see how they resolve the tangles they've created by ignoring the canon plotline in favour of their own thing. How do the Dwarf kings get the seven rings now, once prince Durin knows they are evil? Why would he just hand them out? Who will Sauron give the nine rings to? And since he hasn't yet forged the One Ring, where is that going to happen? What about Númenor, the storyline there is just running in place and not really advancing?
It's not "so bad it's good", so it's not fun that way. Honestly, the best part is the post-mortems online after each episode, which are often much funnier than the show and often much better put together.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mNyNyqgkgh8
Again - speaking as something of an outsider to Tolkien - I agree that the Dwarven storyline seems to be the strongest (followed by Gandalf and the Harfoots - which although a little lightweight is an interesting origin story to watch).
The content focusing on the actual rings is a little bit garbled considering it's the central story, and the fight scenes? - oh dear god, the fight scenes are awful. They add very little, and go on and on forever...
Personally I am also mystified by Galadriel, who is apparently pivotal and yet is in point of fact insipid and tiresome, although it's hard to tell if this is due to poor casting or poor direction.
This stands out more than it might ordinarily do because many of the other actors do a solid job and inhabit their characters in satisfying ways.
Tastes obviously differ, I found the Harfoot storyline very bad. There is, of course, the whole "dirty little psychopaths" thing ('nobody goes off trail and nobody walks alone', they sing, while they put the weak, sick or outcast at the end of the line and abandon them to be left behind and perish, and if that isn't happening fast enough, it's suggested to take the wheels off their cart so they can't follow the main group. Also the annual 'this is everyone who died during the year or before, let's laugh at them' ritual). The fake Oirish accents were... special. I wasn't horribly offended, but some did take it as yet more of the same.
The main problem was "is the Stranger Gandalf?" mystery box nonsense. "Yes, he is" everyone said after he falls from the sky in a meteor, and those of us who said "No" based it on "they can't be that stupid, can they?"
Apparently they can. When I said the showrunners were idiots, I was estimating their intelligence too highly. Allegedly they had no idea who the Stranger was going to be, until they got too far in and decided it would have to be Gandalf:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1QzGIAoBW0s
From the transcript:
"Host:
2:53 Very cool now in the season two
2:57 finale we find out that the stranger is
2:59 in indeed Gandalf I'm curious when was
3:02 the decision uh made to make him Gandalf
3:06 and what was that process and the
3:08 conversations like around that decision
Payne:
3:10 so uh we could this answer could take up
3:13 all of our time so we will endeavor to
3:15 be quick uh uh uh uh we like the idea of
3:19 a wizard who didn't know who he was and
3:22 who didn't know where his allegiances
3:23 should lie and was forging a friendship
3:26 with some halflings that's as far as our
3:28 thinking got um until until the end of
3:31 season one um where we you know have a
3:34 Gandalfy some Gandalfy exchanges and we
3:37 started being like oh wow are we going
3:38 down this road and then we had a long
3:40 conversation between Seasons gosh we're
3:42 gonna have to name this guy right the
3:43 story of you know he's a good guy was
3:45 season one he's a good wizard bad wizard
3:47 that's all what season two's got to be
3:49 about okay now what is his mission and
3:50 who is he um and and as we looked at all
3:53 the available
3:55 possibilities it became very difficult
3:57 to imagine a a a true Lord of the Rings
3:59 epic without its most beloved character
4:02 and then we found some very deep
4:03 Tolkien cuts that suggested that maybe
4:06 he was around earlier than most people
4:08 assume and maybe he interacted with
4:10 different peoples in another form in
4:11 some earlier time those are very deep
4:14 Cuts but they were encouraging at least"
Forget an elephant gun, I want a mortar to use on these guys. It was bad enough when I thought they were just teasing with the "who is the Stranger?" bit, but now they admit they had no idea what they were doing, just going along pulling stuff out of their backsides then rationalising it away afterwards.
That comment about the Stranger potentially being not-Gandalf can't possibly be true. I mean it stretches even my credulity to breaking point, there is literally no way it could have been anyone else. I took it that they were playing a little game with viewers, an arch "YOU know who he is and WE know who he is but let's all just pretend for the sake of the story" kind of thing. I flatly refuse to believe that they didn't plan that character to be Gandalf from the beginning.
This background that you are providing is absolutely fascinating and a little bit disturbing - and I don't even have any particular alliance to the original Tolkien cannon.
More invested folks must really be suffering at the hands of some quite weird decision-making.
The more I read/hear from these two, the more I ask myself "How? How were these two bozos put in charge of a billion dollar five season show? What kompromat does J.J. Abrams have on people in Amazon Prime TV/streaming that he was able to swing it to get them hired?"
Because I don't believe for a hot minute their claims about "We love Tolkien so much! We read the books!" yeah, and one of you couldn't name a favourite place in Middle-earth.
So either they're lying about "we never planned from the start for it to be Gandalf", because everyone is going "the 'mystery' about the Stranger's identity was no damn mystery at all" and they're trying to save face, or they're telling the truth that they were just wandering along pulling stuff out of their backsides and making it up on the fly with no idea about plot or characters or continuity or what the hell they were doing.
One case where the truth is worse than the lie could be.
You're also correct about Galadriel. I have no idea what they've done with the character, their take seemingly was that this is younger Galadriel than in the movies, so she's not the mature wise lady of those. She's rebellious etc.
Which is okay, except even Second Age Galadriel is not a teenager/young twenties (even in Elven years), she's married with a grown daughter by the time of the fall of Eregion, for instance. Much fun has been had at the idea that everything that happened in the Third Age is Galadriel's fault; she encouraged Sauron (in his 'Halbrand' form) to forget what wrongs he had done in the past, dragged him away from Númenor where he just wanted to settle down and be a smith, and forced him into the role of 'King of the Southlands'; it was her idea to make Three Rings; even after she knew that 'Halbrand' was Sauron, she didn't tell anyone, etc.
Season two has tried to move her along from "I'm always right and I don't have to listen to any of you idiots" but too often she was still "I'm always right and I don't have to listen to any of you idiots". We'll see what happens in season three (only two years to go!)
A lot of the problems are the bad writing. Some of the casting doesn't seem right, but that's hard to say; I didn't like Charles Edwards as Celebrimbor, but in his final two episodes he really gave a strong performance. So was that a case of "wrong actor for the role" or "wrong characterisation and poor writing"? I think the latter. I do think Morfydd Clark was miscast, though.
Clark has a faintly uncanny look about her which is why they cast her, I think. But I don't think she has an actually Elfen vibe, which makes it difficult for her to inhabit the character.
Either way, Galadriel seems to have almost total control over the storyline (as much or more than Sauron!) , but makes very little use of it, which impacts on the credibility of the whole thing.
I would never have guessed that Galadriel was actually a grown woman based on this series.
Contrariwise, I found Edwards quite good as Celebrimbor - he nailed the 'talented but weak' trope and played this off against Halbrand's deceptions pretty well. But I don't know how true that is the the original Celebrimbor character.
And again, your commentary has greatly increased my enjoyment of the series. Thank you!
"But I don't know how true that is the original Celebrimbor character."
Well, like any First Age elf, my take on Celebrimbor is "John Rambo with pointy ears". While Legolas famously cries "oh shit, a Balrog is come" and swoons upon seeing one, his kind fought them face-to-face, and in some (admittedly rare) cases killed them solo.
He's not as crazy as his grandfather Feanor (an elf so mad that he chased Satan out of Heaven like an angry goose, his hobbies include kinslaying and swearing blood oaths, made three jewels so precious that the One Ring is rhinestone trinket compared to them, literally exploded out of rage on death, and while elves resurrect after dying he's specifically banned because the gods decided one time is enough), but he's no wimp. Rings of Power missed an opportunity in not bringing muscle elves into reality.
So... what you're saying is that they've really fully realised the Celebrimbor character in this series then??
Good grief. Exactly how much can they get wrong/how many opportunities can they squander in one production?
I'm starting to understand why they don't have the whole-hearted support of their potential fan-base.
To be fair, Celebrimbor doesn't feature prominently in the Legendarium either. But yeah, for people in the know the show is a triple-whammy of sub-par writing, canon contradictions and wasted potential.
In a better world, Amazon would begin this endeavor with full rights to the Silmarillion, the first season would end with the words "On the holy mountain hear in witness, and our vow remember, Manwe and Varda!" instead of the physics-defying volcano of idiocy, and Feanor and his sprogs would become the new Dean Winchester/Kylo Ren/Edward Cullen-style morally dubious brooding pretty boys for women across the world.
Oh, don't get me started on the potential for mucking up the First Age!
I thought, due to some shots in the first season trailers, we were going to get the scene of the Oath of Feanor, but no, that was misleading.
There already are staunch Feanorian stans out there, brother/sister/sibling of undetermined gender, you haven't seen them yet 😁
The way these knuckleheads do things? Manwe *would* be a tyrant, Melkor and Mairon *would* be in the right, Feanor would have stolen the secret of making the Silmarils from Melkor, and the Kin-slaying never happens (I did chuckle at that in the first episode of the first season prologue, where we get the CGI fleet of ships sailing to Middle-earth and no mention of certain Unfortunate Events by Galadriel as to *how*, exactly, they acquired the ships to follow Morgoth).
"Feanor and his sprogs would become the new Dean Winchester/Kylo Ren/Edward Cullen-style morally dubious brooding pretty boys for women across the world."
I got one word for you: Thangorodrim. The rescue of Maedhros by Fingon. Oh yeah, baby: hurt/comfort all the way!
What takes the cake is another interview where the showrunners are talking about Celebrimbor being a minor character in the first season.
In the gol-durned show called "The Rings of Power", where the guy who forged said rings should be the front-and-centre focus of attention, not Girlboss Galadriel.
"Exactly how much can they get wrong/how many opportunities can they squander in one production?"
That's what we want to see in season three! They've effed up Celebrimbor and the sequence of forging the rings, they've effed up Galadriel, they've effed up Númenor *hard* (I want Isildur to be eaten by the bog-monster), they're even starting to eff up Pharazon who was a strong character in season one but is just wibbling around in season two, they've effed up Gandalf, they've effed up the Hobbits (dirty little psychopaths and/or lizard-eating airheads) and they've nearly effed up the Dwarves but by some miracle (maybe the two Durins as portrayed by the actors) that managed to be a strong storyline.
So with much anticipation we await: how are they going to eff up the Dwarven storyline, how are they going to eff up the Downfall of Númenor, and how are they going to continue to eff up Galadriel and Sauron (he just wants her to return his love, he just wants to be loved, and she still has the hots for Halbrand)? What new and interesting ways can they find to torture canon?
Don't forget "also likes burning at least one of his sons to death due to committing arson of the ships he stole during the First Kin-slaying, but that's okay because he has six others and if any of them are not 200% committed to him, there's the fiery pyre for them" 😁
Feanor tops the scale of "how batshit insane can any one person be?" and breaks the meter because the needle flies so far and so hard to the upper limit.
To be fair, Celebrimbor *is* a softie by Feanorian standards: he hasn't even murdered or attempted to murder, not even inadvertently or by the actions of his servants, one family member or other Elf.
Legolas faints before the Balrog because he's one of those wussy Silvan/Sindarin losers, every fule kno only *tru* kickass Elves are Noldor like Glorfindel and Ecthelion, Balrog-slayers of Gondolin 😃
Well, I guess the Feanorlings should've realized they're disposable when their father named them Finwe One, Finwe Two, Finwe Red, Finwe Blue, Finwe Fast, Finwe Furious and Finwe This Is The Last One I Swear To Eru Aren't Elves Supposed to Have Like Two Kids At Most Do I Have To Forge Myself Aman's First Condom.
And Gandalf is lucky that, when he said, "even if you sent an elf-lord like Glorfindel, it's not like he can ride into Mordor and stab Sauron in the face", Glorfindel was humble enough to accept his plan instead of saying "haha, bet" and doing just that.
Feanor is/was hyper-competitive. If Dad was going to have more kids by his second marriage to that blonde Vanyar trollop, then by jingo Feanor was going to have the mostest kids of anyone ever!
What I like is that in "Laws and Customs", it's said that Elf men do the cooking, so I like thinking that after a hard day in the forge being a genius, he has to come home and cook the dinner for himself, Nerdanel, the seven kids, and Dad 😀
Though being Feanor, he probably competed himself into being a five star Michelin chef!
It will never not be funny for me about the Shibboleth:
"So it came about that to Feanor the rejection of þ became a symbol of the rejection of Miriel, and of himself, her son, as the chief of the Noldor next to Finwe. This, as his pride grew and his mood darkened, he thought was a “plot” of the Valar, inspired by fear of his powers, to oust him and give the leadership of the Noldor to those more servile. So Feanor would call himself Son of the Þerinde, and when his sons in their childhood asked why their kin in the house of Finwe used s for þ he answered: “Take no heed! We speak as is right, and as King Finwe himself did before he was led astray. We are his heirs by right and the elder house. Let them sa-sí, if they can speak no better.”
Whatta guy. How Nerdanel put up with him - it must have been True Love 😀
I have to admit, I disliked Edwards for all of season one and the majority of season two, then his performance when it all came crashing down and he realised who Annatar was had me going "Oh, okay, *this* is why he was hired".
And that *has* to be on the writers, i.e. showrunners, because *they* are the ones who decided "Celebrimbor is a doddering old fool who doesn't even know what alloys are". He's a generation younger than Galadriel in canon (the son of her first cousin) but the show cast him as older and stuck him in a granny bathrobe (I swear, I had a version of that green robe years back, only in blue).
Canon Celebrimbor is young, ambitious, very conscious of his family history and trying to make up for it, with all the flaws and the virtues of the Noldor. He moves to Eregion because he learns about the Dwarves mining mithril in Khazad-dum, he and the Jewel-Smiths are on good terms with the Dwarves, and he's insanely talented (second only to his grandfather Feanor). So he's willing to be persuaded that Annatar is who he says he is (in part, I think, because the idea that the Valar sent an emissary to Middle-earth means for him some degree of forgiveness for his family, and he wants that) and he really wants to learn what Annatar can genuinely teach. They spend centuries working together, not the severely compressed timeline of the show where we don't even know if it's a month (it must be several months at least, but the show never gives any indication for any of the storylines about how much time has passed).
Nobody has solid evidence that Annatar is a liar, by the way; Gil-galad and Galadriel distrust him and don't entertain his message, but that's just "I don't think he's on the level" intuition and nothing that Celebrimbor can't refute with "But do you have proof he's lying?"
So Celebrimbor is at fault because he wants, in a way, to be deceived, but Sauron really is that good at deception and manipulation, he really does have knowledge as a Maia of Aule to impart, and he still retained some lingering faint trace of his original good intentions. He can assume the fair form of a Maia because that is still what he is, just about, before he makes the irrevocable decision to defy the Valar and take over as lord of all Middle-earth.
I'm trying to figure out what % of this is total fiction. The name "Charlotte Brändström" is clearly fake, and there cannot be a site called "the Nerdist" that might review JRRT material. (*)
But, if I grant maximal reality, I need to ask, how/when did the word, "ship" start to mean "become sexually intimate"? Or am I not even understanding basic lexical tokens?
* - I know you are not lying, I just can't believe all this sillyness is real ; - }
Unhappily, it's all true. What I couldn't get over in the Nerdist article was how they were praising the battle scenes, since those were either clunky, pointless, or 'that's not how catapults, or mountains, or rivers, work'.
"Ship" and "shipping" comes from fandom, and is cut-down from "relationship". Started off with people discussed the actual relationships in the show/movie/book, then it evolved into "I think characters X and Y are interested in each other/should be in a relationship" and from there we got ships (e.g canon pairings, non-canon pairings, and all the rest of it), and shipping.
Other terms are "I ship it" which means "I can see, even if it is not explicit, that X and Y could be lovers" or "I want X and Y to be lovers". You had things like ship wars in, for instance, the Harry Potter fandom where the canon pairing of Ron/Hermione was often dismissed in favour of 'it *should* be Harry/Hermione' (since that was how people took the interactions of all the characters throughout the books to be moving towards).
And of course for slash fiction, the male characters are paired up, such as Annatar/Celebrimbor here. Though the show seems to also be going for Sauron/Galadriel (the first season started with Halbrand/Galadriel which picked up the pairing name 'Haladriel') and (via the kiss) Elrond/Galadriel.
Lots of us have poked fun at 'it's really Elrond/Durin' since the dialogue lends itself very easily to innuendo (really, show? "Give me the meat and give it to me raw"? what did you think would happen?), and the starry-eyed interactions between the pair of them look more like romance than 'just friends'. But that's not meant seriously.
More seriously, the show seems to be trying to set up romances that are invented out of whole cloth: Elendil/Miriel, for one. And Isildur/Estrid (the female character there comes off really badly, as her betrothed's worst fault is apparently that he's *too nice to her* and she is ready to dump him in a heartbeat to head off to Numenor with Isildur, so she may be intended to be sympathetic but instead just seems to be a stupid, greedy little 'rhymes with witch'). And made-up Earien/made-up Kemen, though the show did nothing with that since. And Arondir/Bronwyn, intended to be the Aragorn/Arwen gender-flipped analogue, though now She Ded since the actress left the show. Oh yeah, and Poppy/Merimac, the Harfoot/Stoor pairing.
We've seen no sign (as yet) of Celeborn/Galadriel (except for a line in one first season episode about how Galadriel thinks he's dead) or Pharazon/Miriel. Remains to be seen if the show will include that in later seasons or ignore it. They do love trying to set up love triangles, so doubtless this is why they're trying for the Elendil/Miriel to then set up 'oh no but she has to make a political marriage with Pharazon, oh no' later.
The only interesting thing I can offer here is that the best coy description of "hooking up" or whatever, comes from a very unlikely source: Robert Jordan (et al) "Wheel of Time" series used the charming phrase "pillow friends" to describe two chars who were snogging.
All this projection is hilarious considering JRRT's entire corpus is just about the most asexual legendaria possible for characters that are basically human(oid).
Oh, they very definitely have not read "Laws and Customs among the Eldar". But it's a modern show for modern audiences, so they need romance (while at the same time avoiding any overt nudity or sex, as they're chasing overseas audiences for family-friendly material; I see a lot of Hindi language trailers for Rings of Power on Youtube, for instance), and any Western-style DECADENCE is going to have that shot down immediately.
Because, as has been pointed out, Bezos and Amazon are not in the business of making shows and movies, they're in the business of selling Prime subscriptions. Persuade people to take out a subscription to watch HOT NEW SHOW BASED ON FAMOUS AND SUCCESSFUL FRANCHISE! and a lot of them won't cancel and will continue to use it to shop, even if they stop watching the show.
The worst of it is not so much inventing romances, as claiming to be totally huge fans of the books and completely faithful to what Tolkien wrote, then ignoring that Galadriel is married with a daughter at this time, and hooking her up with Sauron (Sauron????) and Elrond. If I face-palm any harder, my hand will come out the back of my head.
Even more hilarious/desperate are the actors' interviews trying to play off "well the kiss wasn't romantic, anyways Elves have a different culture and it doesn't mean the same to them". You bet Elves have a different culture, and we know *exactly* what Tolkien would have thought about it, because one of the very major plot points in the entire work is the fate of Miriel and Finwe; Miriel did not desire to be reborn and Finwe wanted to take another wife, and this was a problem that even the Valar found difficult to solve because Elves are not meant to 'die'. And the subsequent second marriage and eternal separation of Miriel produced bad effects on Feanor, and we get the whole story of the Silmarils from then on.
Even on the show's terms, if Celeborn is dead, Galadriel knows he can be reborn, and by the nature of Elvish spirits and marriage, they will reunite as spouses again. So Elrond would never even dream of kissing her, not even as a distraction tactic, and she wouldn't be falling in love with random scruffy mortals aboard rafts.
"Hooking [Galadriel] up with... Elrond."
Wait, what? Celeborn aside, was there nobody on set to say "they'll be mother-and-son-in-law later, isn't this more than a little creepy?"
"We don't know how to write compelling characters, so we're going to reuse the work of people who did, and in doing so ruin it" syndrome strikes again. Celebrian didn't get tortured by orcs for this.
Everything that's "why the heck did they do that?" with this show can be explained once you remember that the showrunners are idiots.
There was backlash to the kiss from the lore nerds who went "hang on, she's his mother-in-law", so the show then backpedalled on "oh no no it wasn't romantic, it was a ploy". However they simultaneously shot themselves in the foot with "in some cultures kissing is not romantic" and "Elves are different", because if it's just a ploy, why do you have to explain it as "yeah it was a kiss but ---"?
On its own it's ambiguous enough (but given that, as I said, this show has tried coupling up everybody, Elrond and Galadriel from the start have been presented as friends and close to each other, it was supposedly a 'last time we will ever see one another' scene, and worst of all they've made Sauron into an incel who only went bad when Galadriel cruelly rejected him, plus she definitely had and still has the hots for Halbrand - Celeborn? Never heard of him), but then there is a scene where Elrond gives her back her ring, and even I have to say, it does look like "putting a wedding ring on her finger" scene.
They're dumb. They do dumb stuff, then are all shocked Pikachu face when objections arise, and they have to go "no maybe it looked like that but it wasn't".
See this article where I go "Ho ho ho, NO" about the claims that 'well Elves are different':
https://www.slashfilm.com/1677530/elrond-galadriel-rings-of-power-season-2-kiss-not-romantic/
"When asked if the act was free of all romantic overtones, he emphatically said, "Oh, a hundred percent. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah," adding that in the fantastic elven world, a kiss may not be taken quite as strongly as how we humans view them in the real one. While my own research can't find a spot where Tolkien specifically addresses this sort of thing in his writing, it would fall in line with the Oxford Professor's love of old stories and cultural behaviors (where lip-to-lip kisses often weren't romantic)."
Yeah, no, Galadriel is married and Elrond is not going to kiss a married woman, even as a ploy to distract notice. As several people have pointed out, it' s unnecessary, he can pass her the brooch by other means. One does have to wonder were it Gil-galad in Galadriel's place, would the show have had Elrond kiss him to disguise handing over the brooch, and would they be afterwards going "Nah, it wasn't like that"?
https://screenrant.com/rings-of-power-elrond-galadriel-kiss-scene-explained-love/
"Elrond and Galadriel's kiss in Rings of Power season 2, episode 7 isn't the first time that the Prime Video series seemed to imply that there was something between the pair. Their moments together in season 1 were also full of chemistry, though it was easier to shrug these scenes off as only being part of audiences' own imaginations. This idea itself was controversial since any relationship here would be another big change to canon—something Rings of Power is already heavily criticized for. Now, the season 2 kiss scene seems to hint that Prime Video is sticking to its guns.
Backlash as a result of Elrond and Galadriel's kiss isn't unfounded. These two never having been romantic in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings is enough reason for some to be upset, while others are frustrated that Galadriel is seemingly in another controversial relationship after her chemistry-charged moments with Sauron in season 1. Still, Galadriel being generally desirable by the beings of Middle-earth is nothing new, so riffing off this might not be so out of pocket. For now, the jury may need to hold out until Rings of Power reveals how far it plans to go with Elrond and Galadriel's romance."
They're idiots. All we can do is shrug and go with it (and then mock them afterwards).
I'm going to throw out a very CW Hot Take here.
JRRT's writings are *SO* utterly chaste and non-sexual, that millions of kids reading LotR etc as a child is a major reason we have a FERTILITY CRISIS.
Hobbits have large families, and over and over again Tolkien says that it is the obsession with immortality and the envy about the deathlessness of the Elves that leads to falling birth rates and general decline:
"In the second stage, the days of Pride and Glory and grudging of the Ban, they begin to seek wealth rather than bliss. The desire to escape death produced a cult of the dead, and they lavished wealth and art on tombs and memorials. They now made settlements on the west-shores, but these became rather strongholds and 'factories' of lords seeking wealth, and the Númenóreans became tax-gatherers carrying off over the sea evermore and more goods in their great ships. The Númenóreans began the forging of arms and engines."
Also their major problem is that their couples have no chemistry at all (except *perhaps* Galadriel and Halbrand for a bit). The Big Forbidden Love between Elf and Human - Arondir and Bronwyn? Nothing there. No spark. No "yeah I can see it". Same for Isildur and Astrid (and in fact Isildur comes out of tht looking like a complete fool, which is not what you want for 'one day he will be king of men' character) or Elendil and Miriel. As for Earien and Kemen, that is so ludicrously *not* happening that it's funny in a twisted way. He simps over her, she cosies up to 'childhood friend', he ends up killing childhood friend out of jealousy and spite, she still doesn't know him from a hole in the ground romantically. That's why the joke is that Elrond and Durin have more chemistry than the "love couples" shown. Seriously, their reunion scene where Elrond comes to beg the Dwarves for aid to save Eregion, he says his heart sings to see Durin once more and Durin is paying him all kinds of lovey-dovey compliments with stars in his eyes 😁
The main problem is pacing: no time to develop any character or relationship. A meets B last episode and they interact for ten minutes tops, this episode they're mashing faces together and planning to run off to Numenor. Huh?
No idea what the double posting there is, seemingly Substack also has strong feelings about the lack of romantic compatibility.
For the first time in my life, I regret knowing how to read Japanese.
Oh, come on. These are just regular everyday plots compared to the stuff like Gore Screaming Show or Chiba Tetsutarou's work.
Even respectable, big-name companies like Alicesoft and Nitroplus go off the rails once in a while. Galzoo Island, for example, is about an island of monster girls (called "Gal Monsters" here, Alicesoft is so old that their game predates the post-Kenkou Cross terminology) who are oppressed by an evil squid man and put under a curse to die if they ever have sex with our hero Leo (a "Gal Monster Tamer", i.e. Pokémon trainer but your 'mons are people). But they find a workaround by laying an egg that contains their reincarnation as a child before they kick it, which Leo raises until they can fight again. Do you have sex with the kid versions, you ask? No, actually! Good man, that Leo. I mean, other than the slavery thing.
(Big spoilers from here on)
Meanwhile, Kikokugai's plot is about a woman trying to undergo an experimental brain-upload procedure to combine her mind with her brother's (whom she's in love with) and live forever in a near-indestructible robot she secured, as one does. But her shady back-alley doctor/disgraced world-class cybernetics expert tells her the upload is only possible if she's exposed to massive trauma, enough to fracture her psyche. Like any normal person, she concludes that a ton of rape ought to do it. Faced with the problem of getting raped consensually, she enlists the help of her fiance, who knows that she's in love with her brother and is very supportive. He gathers the worst psychopaths in his cyberpunk martial arts clan, runs a train on her, and the doctor gets to work putting parts of her brain into five different sisterbots, who are each given to one of her assailants.
Her brother does not know any of this, and from the outside it looks a lot like his best friend just betrayed him and murdered his sister. He goes on a quest for revenge, fighting lots of cyborg wuxia masters and collecting his sister's brain robots in the process. He fights the fiance while the sisterbots Voltron themselves back into the original sister, now successfully a cool immortal robot. How do they do this? They link data by scissoring, naturally. Anyway, the big kung-fu fight ends and the brother is dying (as is the fiance, a man too good for this world), but then the sister reveals the whole gig to him, and would you look at that, now he's got enough trauma to fracture his brain! She uploads him too, and they live happily ever after. I mean, at least she does.
(And now you regret knowing English as well. Mission accomplished!)
I don't actually think the review contest has been declining at all, and greatly enjoyed lots of reviews this year.
As one of the Honourable Mentions, I've published my review - World Empire Lost - on my own substack, here, if anyone wants to read it.
https://www.edrith.co.uk/p/book-review-world-empire-lost
I very much enjoyed the contest and reading the finalists - and was particularly glad Two Arms and a Head (one of the three I voted for) won!
Thank you! And yes, entirely fair on length. :-)
I think the Holocaust was very much driven by hatred, but that others who enabled it went along through indifference or will to power - apologies if that wasn't clear enough.
I would have described it as "educated sociopathy." This can be emulated by mob thinking--we are one, and anyone else is unimportant at best (and an immoral enemy of all decent people at the worst). But in an individual who displays it as a persistent character trait is almost certainly some flavor of high functioning sociopath.
I'm enjoying this so far (I'm up to the section on Roosevelt).
I reviewed Wages of Destruction which covers a lot of the same topics.
https://claycubeomnibus.substack.com/p/book-review-wages-of-destruction and also tries to give an insight into the Nazi perspective.
It might be of interest. I found Roon's nihilistic/Nietzschian attitudes from your review fascinating, but like you said they're not persuasive to a 21st century liberal audience, Tooze's economic arguments are much less alien which makes them more challenging imo.
"Germany didn’t need to go to war to get resources, because the USSR was selling them all the resources they needed"
I'd say that was true if Germany could have been confident war wouldn't break out anyway, it wouldn't have been unreasonable to expect a another war since WW1 was only 20 years earlier. Since trade gets cut off during war you can only rely on trade if there's no existing threat of war, and you might want to start a war if you can't rely on trade. It's a catch 22.
"They were also able to peacefully catch up to the UK (if not the US) post-war." My understanding is no-one really anticipated the strong post-war growth, it was a big departure from the inter-war trend and would have been hard to predict, particularly since that path would have meant US vassalage for Germany.
"The key lesson here is to maintain open global trade so countries don’t feel like they have to forcefully seize resources." Yes and also to ensure rising powers feel the system is fair as well as open, and that there's widespread trust and a sense of fairness in the international system. It's mostly incumbent on the stronger established powers to promote that trust imo, that's what I took away from WoD.
Well, that depends on one's goals, of course. Authoritarian personalities do not desire parity with anyone--the whole point is to dominate others, or die trying.
> it wouldn't have been unreasonable to expect a another war since WW1 was only 20 years earlier
They didn't call it "World War One" at the time. It was seen as something unique.
This was excellent, TBH I probably would have voted for it if it had been a finalist.
OTOH, I think the twist at the end importantly subtracts from the book. It's really interesting to see the internal view of von Roon, but given the end I sort of have to discard it all as extrapolating from fictional evidence.
That's a fair point - though I do think it is heavily based on real source material reprocessed (it was researched for years, not just a quick pot boiler). But I can definitely understand your perspective.
If you found it persuasive up to that point, then there had to have been a reason for that. Likely because it seemed consistent with other sources of information and lines of thought you have encountered in other places. That doesn't make it correct, of course, but it does make it plausible and worthy of further exploration, in my opinion.
Warning for anyone who decides to read this very long text -
contrary to the reviewer's claim, the reviewed book is a work of fiction, not an actual memoir of a German officer.
Any thoughts about how much a winning book review needs to be about a promising book?
I'm a little disappointed that Real Raw News didn't win, so I don't think it needs must be about a book at all. I suspect some people didn't vote for it because it wasn't actually a book.
Congrats to everyone - some interesting entries!
I wrote the review for "A Thousand Ways to Please a Husband." My thanks to those who said kind things about it. Someday I'll probably put it on my Substack.
Ah, i read that review and liked it! I thought it deserved to be a finalist.
Also, interesting that it got almost the highest number of people rating it. Maybe shows the power of a clickbait title....
Thank you! I'll be honest, I enjoyed reading the book but I chose to write about it in large part because of the unusual title (and the fact that it was a cookbook, in a cynical ploy to secure some affirmative action for my entry). Ah well, next year!
*A Thousand Ways to Please a Husband* was absolutely delightful! Well done.
You should definitely post it.
You are very kind! Vox populi, vox dei. https://lettersfromtrekronor.substack.com/p/book-review-a-thousand-ways-to-please
Just read it and loved it. I would have voted for it, this is confirming my feeling that I oughtn't participate since I don't have time or more accurately speed of reading/absorbing to read them all.
I actually didn't notice it among the initial entries so may have misconstrued the title.
The rice-drying is still recommended for when you drop your phone in water.
I would like to see the contest return, and I'm also ok with non-traditional subject matters such as websites or poetry. Whatever their respective flaws, few of the reviews were guilty of that greatest writerly sin: being a bore. The reviews at the very bottom of my personal list were guilty, rather, of overly mimicking their subject matter's style to the point that it interfered with my understanding them, namely Don Juan and Pale King. That gimmick I would like to see much less of.
Can someone help me parse "everything-except-book-reviews"? Scott said in the comments that he did *not* mean reviews of anything except for books. So I don't know what this means.
I interpret it to mean "any piece of writing that isn't a book review". As opposed to "reviews about anything that isn't a book".
Thanks! That's actually obvious in retrospect, but that there'd be a contest for that was so outside of my imagination that I couldn't parse the phrase. Definitely my bad.
I only had an answer ready because I'd just spent five minutes trying to figure it out myself!
He mentions in a comment above that he meant (everything except) (book reviews), but that he prefers the idea of (everything except book) (reviews) now that it has been pointed out
I greatly enjoyed reading this year’s reviews. I hope it returns next year.
I didn't like the winner. This is nothing to do with the quality of the review, but rather the subject of the book. Nothing to take away from it except perhaps "legalise euthanasia now and never mind any qualms about slippery slopes, in fact put oil, butter and soap on the slopes if you have to!" as any kind of 'positive' feeling, and my own personal view is that "legalise suicide now" isn't that much of a positive.
Congratulations to all the finalists! Looking forward to doing it all again next year!
It makes the point that suicide has a legitimate case to be made for it in some circumstances, like most things. For example, killing people is always wrong (except in self-defense, defending someone else, etc.).
And I cannot help but notice that putting soap on an oil-and-butter-covered slope ought to make it less slippery.
Honestly, same. Its a fascinating book and a well-written review. But its just such a heavy, depressing read that it makes me sad that it won. And i think most people here would already favor legal euthanasia so its not like we really learned anything, just pure visceral horror.
Still, congrats to the winner for a well written essay. Maybe other people like religious conservatives will see it and change a few minds.
Unlikely. A religious conservative reaction would be: "How sad. If only people wouldn't consider suicide as a legitimate option, they might finally be able to accept their condition and move on. The book's discussion of those disabled from birth shows that this is possible."
As a religious person my reaction was, of course, that Clayton was in a horrible situation; but it was frustrating to see him write that he realizes he could rewire himself to accept his situation but that he refuses to do so, considering that it would be delusion and a refusal to accept the truth. As a Kierkegaardian I can’t help but shout, no! There is no objective truth to your existential situation, only subjective truth! On this point he seemed willfully obstinate to become better-adjusted to his circumstances. Not that I fault him for his suicide—a horrible situation he was in with only two very difficult roads in front of him. His attitude that it would be better to die “””himself””” than live “””as a new person””” is frustrating, though.
He didn't actually have the choice to live as a completely new person. He also had his past, which wasn't forgotten, and which he didn't want to forget. He addressed the point of being worse off than someone who had been born a paraplegic. He also had no problem with other para- and quadriplegics who decided to live with their circumstances.
I think it's self-centered and selfish for people to "know" what is better for someone else in such circumstances. That person is the BEST person to evaluate their position, usually. Everyone must draw their own lines somewhere, and where someone else would draw the line should have little impact in where a specific individual would draw it.
Agreed - it was frustrating to see the book in the finalists list back in May and instantly know it was going to appeal to the blog's pro-suicide voting bloc and win, and that the other reviews (many of which were excellent, like Ballad of the White Horse) were at best competing for second place. I checked Manifold out of curiosity, and am genuinely baffled that Manifold only had it at a 9% chance.
Thoroughly enjoyed most of the rest, though, so in utilitarian terms the contest was still a net positive. The Everything-Except-Book Review contest next year ought to be fun.
I also called it as the winner, but don't believe it was just the pro suicide bias. It's a powerful book and highly memorable, sticky even (to make a revolting pun).
It was the sort of thing that I would usually eat up, but having recently suffered a (relatively) minor back injury, it hit a little too close to home.
I'm opposed to assisted suicide but voted for the winner. I felt the fact that I found it so powerful and well written despite me disagreeing on the subject matter was a real mark of quality.
I also really didn't like the subject matter, as a fellow person with a disability who might arguably be even more dependent on care than the book's author. I was born with it as opposed to having acquired it and I guess he also touches on the point that it's probably quite a bit easier to come to terms with it then.
Nevertheless, I just felt like he was a big wuss, not accepting help in any way without considering that there might be other ways to achieve his goals and live a fulfilled and self-determined life. Sure, it won't be easy at the start and I don't have a concept of how hard or easy it is in his country (which I assume would be the States) to acquire all the care that he needs, but it also seemed like he has friends and family that he could ask to support him even if it comes with a bit of shame at the start.
To me, I almost got the impression from the review that the book is written by a mentally ill person and we are all agreeing "actually, what he says is right. We are all doomed, nothing is worth living for anymore as soon as you can't walk anymore." and that felt like a lot of bullshit and very voyeuristic.
Regarding that slippery slope, both Switzerland and the Netherlands have had legal euthanasia for a few years and so far, neither of these countries has killed mentally disabled kids with carbon monoxide by the truckload. We should consider the possibility that legalized consensual euthanasia will not invariably result in society adopting Nazi values.
The alternative to legal euthanasia is not people staying alive, but unregulated suicide. There are myriad ways to kill a human, and a human of median health who wants to die will find a way to kill themself.
These unregulated suicides impose additional externalities on society, though. Sometimes the person killing themself will drag other people to death, such as when they drive their car the wrong way on the highway. Sometimes they will traumatize random bystanders or train conductors. Some people require more than one attempt, imposing emotional and financial costs on themselves and society.
But there are more indirect costs still. With a society and medical apparatus which will cheerfully lock you up for talking about suicidal ideation, only a fool would talk to their therapist or loved ones about suicide. "I think about applying for euthanasia" would be a safe way to discuss the topic of ending one's life without getting locked up. Crucially, this would enable therapists and friends to argue against that decision. Even if they can't convince the patient, knowing the reasons and being there when the lethal cocktail is applied is much better than going for breakfast one morning and seeing your loved one hanging in the living room out of the blue.
As an intuition pump, consider a hypothetical state which has decided that the state should never shoot its citizens and thus has abolished the police. The end result will not be that nobody gets shot. Instead, more people will get shot. A lot of the victims will be random bystanders. Perhaps some thugs who really need to be taken down will terrorize a neighborhood for decades because nobody dares shoot them. Thus, a state which embraces "sometimes, the best way to resolve a situation is to shoot the aggressor, sad as it is" will get a much better outcome.
Congrats to the winners!
I enjoyed the contest and I thought the reviews this year were as good as ever. I'm open to something different next year too, but I would miss the reviews.
Did Scott write any of the reviews?
> I enjoyed watching you speculate on which reviews you thought were secretly mine, but I didn’t submit one this year.
Oh, I missed that. Thank you.
I have a suggestion for Jack Thorlin (author of the 3rd-place book), if he wants to write anything else for us. What do you think LW and ACX readers tend to misunderstand about US government agencies & the legal system?
Same question for honorarily mentioned Iain, on UK government agencies.
We know they are both good writers, and I think this is a topic a lot of people here would like reading a long essay or even just a long listicle on.
I really look forward to my summer of book reviews and I hope the contest continues. Maybe make it an 'Anything Review'? Regardless I hope it continues, and thanks so much to all of you who took the time to write a review. Even when I don't like the review I still appreciate the effort. Read more books.
Congrats to everyone who participated! I was one of the Honorable Mentions and I'm honestly surprised I even made it that far. I intentionally wrote my review to have nothing to do with the subject matter of the blog and just went for "ACX member reviews unrelated book through the lens of a guy who has read all of SSC/ACX."
If anyone is interested in trading card game tournaments or just wants to read more book reviews of questionable quality, check out my review of Road of The King.
https://substack.com/home/post/p-149810390
This year was so much fun!
To anyone reading this who isn't involved in the Philly group, I was convinced (for weeks) that Zvi wrote the review for Road of the King. This review was awesome, and everyone should check it out!
I can see that (it shares his interests), but it's not quite Zvi's writing style. Plus I can't imagine a singular-minded MTG player like Zvi reviewing a yugioh player like this.
That said, I wonder what Zvi's review of this book would look like.
I would definitely read Zvi's review of the book. (Then again I read everything Zvi puts up on Substack already.)
Oddly, I was so certain that your review was written by Daniel Böttger (last year's "On the Marble Cliffs") that I avoided reading this post until I had sent him an e-mail saying "I bet "TAaaH" was YOU!", and that I loved both.
I also told him that when I tried to talk up both reviews to friends, I found little interest in "OtMC", but most of my friends who were motorcycle riders were interested and several really appreciated your work.
Congratulations and thanks for a very interesting essay.
______
PS -- After working on this, do you think that men and women have different attitudes to the issues of assisted suicide and/or terminal care? I'm a man and can completely understand the author's thoughts and decisions; I wonder if most women would feel differently. Curious whether you discovered any kind of split. BRetty
> do you think that men and women have different attitudes to the issues of assisted suicide and/or terminal care?
My impression is that women are high variance in their opinions about MAiD. Support for MAiD is heavily correlated with the rest of their opinions about the "family and life planning" spectrum (contraceptives - IVF - embryo selection - embryonic stem cell research - genetic engineering - abortion - MAiD). My devout Catholic in-laws are against the entire collection, but my nerdy friends who like medical science support all of it.
> Oddly, I was so certain that your review was written by Daniel Böttger (last year's "On the Marble Cliffs") that I avoided reading this post until I had sent him an e-mail saying "I bet "TAaaH" was YOU!"
Omg that's hilarious. What did Daniel say in response?
Well, I finally sent the e-mail just yesterday, (and right after that I read Daniel's guest post and learned of his severe health problems) so his replies to fan mail may be delayed. I am hoping fervently for his recovery.
Yes, same. I wish him a swift recovery.
I loved your review. It was a great look into the nature of power through ruthlessness, though the lens of a children's card game. After reading your review it stuck in my head for a while. I was fascinated by Patrick Hoban, and his willingness to sell his soul in exchange for winning Yu-Gi-Oh tournaments. Like Esau giving up his birthright for a bowl of soup.
Hey I really liked your review - I didn’t know it was yours but I voted for it. That and Nine Lives were my favourites out of the finalists
Thanks! I'm glad people enjoyed it.
Ignore the haters. Keep the book reviews. They’re excellent content and we enjoy discussing them at the meetup. Personally I think the reviews have gotten better over time.
Holy cow. I was not expecting this. Woah.
Shout out to Vat! The Family That Couldn't Sleep was my favorite review this year. Together, we made 2024 into the Year of Poetry and Medical Horror. I wasn't expecting to compete with the *prions* [shudder] for Most Existentially Horrifying Book Review, but here we are. You're amazing. (And prions are terrifying.)
Also shout out to UnlimitedOranges, my fellow Philadelphia ACXer! I genuinely thought Zvi wrote the review for Road of the King. Well done.
Most of all, I want to thank Clayton. Thank you for telling the world your story. Rest in peace.
Next time, I swear I'll review something more cheerful.
More cheerful than Teo Arms And A Head? That won't narrow it down much. =)
Congratulations again on your review!
Thanks for your review; I immediately read the book after seeing it.
These reviews are a true highlight for me, and I hope we don't lose them next year.
Since it seems like a lot of people feel oppositely, I wanted to express that I really like the weird and novel reviews and want next time's reviews to be even more weird and novel.
Upvote
John V, if you're reading this, I'm also a Boston local. Do you ever go to meetups? I'd be delighted to have you for a local ACX meetup about your book review. If you're interested you can reach me at skyler@[at]rationalitymeetups[dot]org
I do not think the Review Contest is declining. I didn't vote because I didn't manage to read all of them but I liked the effort to foreground less-contemporary writing, and I read many, enjoyed them mightily, had secret favorites, & now plan to read several of the actual works. If numbers of voters overall are slipping, that might be a sign that the contest is declining, but I hope it continues. Having said this, I would *also* be interested in an everything-else contest, mainly just to see what is meant by this.
the incel: "I didn't vote because I didn't manage to read all of them"
vs the chad: "I read this one review and it seemed good so i rated it 10"
Well, that was exactly the review I voted for. Two Arms and A Head got my attention in a way very few book reviews do. Though It's more about the book than the review. But I'm really grateful that someone thought to do a review of it.
Please keep the book review contest.
In the guest post by Daniel Böttger, whose umlautted name I shamelessly copy-pasted, I noticed that ACX readers were divided on whether they wanted to see guest posts or not.
In this announcement, I notice that Scott rejects a lot of guest posts for unclear reasons and presumably gets too many pitches to sift through without losing a lot of time.
In Asterisk Mag, I noticed that the serious big picture topics were covered well. However, neither the questionably-sound but engrossing theories, nor the terrible jokes, nor the interesting factoids are covered.
It feels like there's some kind of brewing need for a volunteer-run magazine, or supplementary blog, or bespoke aggregator, or something.
The book review contest one of best things on the internet! Thx ACX!!!
Please do the book review contest again next year.
I guess I have a clear favorite type, bc last year my fav was Njal's Saga and this year it was the Autobiography of Yukichi Fukuzawa. I'm not quite sure if "accounts of one awesome guy explaining his strangely rigid foreign culture" is a genre, but it's something. I don't think I would enjoy reading these works, but I do like reading the reviews of them and learn a lot from them.
I certainly hope you keep doing this contest, I enjoy reading about 80-90% of the ones that are posted.
I would have voted for Autobiography of Yukichi Fukuzawa if it weren't for the ill-conceived political rant at the end.
I look forward to the book review contest every year, and I hope you don't suspend it! I suspect what might be flawed is the mechanism by which a book advances from "submission" to "finalist." I always want to help with this, but walk away intimidated.
I think you should consider randomizing this a bit more, so we don't have to sift through a huge pile of undifferentiated reviews. I would find this much more approachable if, say, you divided them arbitrarily into 12 piles and said, "if you were born in June, please look through this pile." It could be more or less than 12. You get the idea.
Though it might be too difficult on a technical level for Scott to do, the ideal would be to have a button that brings you to a random review: or even to a random review that's in the bottom quintile for number of scores it has received already.
Let's go back to the good old traditional ways: sortes Vergilianae:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortes_Vergilianae
We all take up the nearest book to hand, open it at random, and take the first word our glance falls upon. Then we look for a review with that word in its title, or sounding like it, or sounding like the subject is related to it.
Let me go first and try it. And the word is "Fascists". There must be some book that can relate to it (e.g. the reviews of books about the Second World War).
Repeat as many times as desired until you have your fill of reading the reviews.
It sounds like you will be the only person doing this which defeats the purpose of designing a mechanism to change the way book reviews are sorted for voters
Does anyone mind sharing some links to comments on the apparent decline of the contest? I don’t visit the comments section often and this post is just full of people saying it was great or that they enjoyed it, I’d like to have a little more context
I wouldn't want there to not be a book review contest next year, but the alternative everything-except-book-reviews contest sounds even more exciting
I'd prefer the book review contest to continue next year.
As voiced several times here already, I really enjoyed reading these reviews and was looking forward to them being posted every Friday. So please have this competition next year as well 🙏
I would be devastated to not have a book review contest next year, I purchased several of the books reviewed including one that didn't even make the finals but whose entry I pre-read. Don't listen to the whiners, please keep doing these!
+1 the book reviews are probably my favorite part of this blog. I wish there were ACX quality book reviews for every book out there.
I've written a review of Slippin Fall's review of Determined. NGL, it's critical.
https://open.substack.com/pub/theancientgeek/p/a-review-of-a-review-of-robert-sapolskys?r=1fn82&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true
I thought it was a very good review. It told me about the book and what the thesis of it was (I forgave the fanboying/fangirling over Sapolsky) and was very informative and entertaining.
And it had me going "Merciful God, Chesterton was right yet again" at two important parts.
(1) No such thing as free will or any semblance of it, we're hard-coded and hard-wired since the literal creation of the universe to do the things we do. No blame for being a rape torture murderer, you couldn't possibly have turned out any other way and there is no vice. No praise for being St Maximilian Kolbe, you couldn't have acted other than you did and there is no virtue.
(2) Okay, so even if criminals gotta crim, we can still lock them up in prison for the sake of protecting society (not for rehabilitation, because they can't be rehabbed, remember?) Of course we will treat them nicely and only let them out once they can be trusted enough not to go out and do the same crimes again.
That last bit puzzled me rather; how can we reform them if there is no undoing the hard-wiring? But then it hit me: ah yes, operant conditioning. Which then brings me on to "and why the devil *would* we treat them nicely, if we want them to stop offending? condition them by punishment so they will be too afraid to do the crimes again since they cannot do the time".
Quoting Chesterton: "boiling oil is an environment"
Orthodoxy, Chapter II, 'The Maniac':
"In passing from this subject I may note that there is a queer fallacy to the effect that materialistic fatalism is in some way favourable to mercy, to the abolition of cruel punishments or punishments of any kind. This is startlingly the reverse of the truth. It is quite tenable that the doctrine of necessity makes no difference at all; that it leaves the flogger flogging and the kind friend exhorting as before. But obviously if it stops either of them it stops the kind exhortation. That the sins are inevitable does not prevent punishment; if it prevents anything it prevents persuasion. Determinism is quite as likely to lead to cruelty as it is certain to lead to cowardice. Determinism is not inconsistent with the cruel treatment of criminals. What it is (perhaps) inconsistent with is the generous treatment of criminals; with any appeal to their better feelings or encouragement in their moral struggle. The determinist does not believe in appealing to the will, but he does believe in changing the environment. He must not say to the sinner, "Go and sin no more," because the sinner cannot help it. But he can put him in boiling oil; for boiling oil is an environment. Considered as a figure, therefore, the materialist has the fantastic outline of the figure of the madman. Both take up a position at once unanswerable and intolerable."
"we're hard-coded and hard-wired since the literal creation of the universe to do the things we do."
Determinism doesn't mean nothing changes; it means change, where it occurs, was determined. Specific laws of physics may even require changes, such as ever increasing entropy Psychological changes, such as changes of mind, new innovations, etc, therefore don't disprove determinism.
"not for rehabilitation, because they can't be rehabbed, remember"
And criminal rehabilitation is compatible with determinism -- the man-machine can be mended as much as any other machine. No one would think that fixing a car disproves determinism.
Which itself means people are still "to blame" in a practical sense,.that you still want to do something about crimes instead of ignoring them ...even if they are not To Blame in a.metaphyscal sense.. Sapolsky tries to argue that abandoning belief in free will would make.a black and white difference ... but he wouldnt actually empty the jails if he were president, because thats crazy.
"And criminal rehabilitation is compatible with determinism -- the man-machine can be mended as much as any other machine."
So how do we fix them? Ask them to stop being bad? That's like asking the car engine to stop running on petrol.
Bert the Burglar can't help being a burglar. So we have to lock Bert up to stop him taking other people's stuff. We want to turn Bert into Bert the Non-Burglar. I'm asking you seriously: how do we do that? A broken machine has an identifiable fault or broken part that can be taken out and replaced. But how do we replace Bert's brain, or the parts of it, that are "go burgling"? Where's the switch we flip from "crime" to "non-crime"?
Yes, we treat Bert nicely while he's in jail and we give him rehabilitation, but we're not changing Bert in any meaningful sense, any more than getting Bert to study to be a chef and have a different trade to practice once he gets out of jail would change his blood type or eye colour.
I believe Sapolsky would not empty the jails, but how does Bert ever get out of jail, having been locked up as an incorrigible on the basis of "his behaviour is pre-determined"?
I'd be delighted if there were wiggle-room acknowledged along the lines of "Psychological changes, such as changes of mind, new innovations, etc, therefore don't disprove determinism", but I'm not seeing it. At best, it says "if you have the capacity to change, you can be released from jail as rehabilitated, but that all depends if you have the capacity to change and maybe you don't".
Our rehabilitate techniques aren't well developed, but they are not nonexistent. Sapolsky's , black-and-white idea that you should have 100% rehabilitation and 0% punishment doesn't work, but a shades-of-gray version could.
>, we treat Bert nicely while he's in jail and we give him rehabilitation, but we're not changing Bert in any meaningful sense, any more than getting Bert to study to be a chef and have a different trade to practice once he gets out of jail would change his blood type or eye colour.
What? We are aiming to reform his behaviour, not his eye colour. So succeeding in reforming his behaviour is meaningful, and changing his eye colour is meaningless.
>I believe Sapolsky would not empty the jails, but how does Bert ever get out of jail, having been locked up as an incorrigible on the basis of "his behaviour is pre-determined"?
I've already explained why determinism doesn't mean nothing changes or can be changed.
>I'd be delighted if there were wiggle-room acknowledged along the lines of "Psychological changes, such as changes of mind, new innovations, etc, therefore don't disprove determinism",
Acknowledged by whom? I said it so I acknowledge it.
>At best, it says "if you have the capacity to change, you can be released from jail as rehabilitated, but that all depends if you have the capacity to change and maybe you don't".
I don't know who you are arguing with. When I say "rehabilitation good" I don't mean "everyone not rehabiltable must stay in jail forever".
You acknowledge. Sapolsky according to Slippin, doesn't, and neither does Slippin. They want hard determinism: we're robots running on pre-determined rails and can't change even if we (think we) want to.
I don't believe in that, I do believe in free will. I think we can rehabilitate people. I think even Bert the Burglar can make a conscious decision and effort of will to change his behaviour. But taking the logic of hard determinism to its end, and adding in Slippin's "humans are not special, this is a noble lie that we were all taught but human life is not sacred and we have to understand that", there's no reason we 'should' treat Bert humanely (other than 'it makes me feel icky to do otherwise') and no reason to think that exhorting Bert to change his ways will work. Bert would not be a burglar were it not his nature, the same way it is the nature of a fish to live in water and a bird to fly. Nature is unchangeable (until and unless we can get in there with surgery or whatever to burn out the 'burglary nodes' in Bert's brain). Thus, the best we can hope for is to condition Bert to not burgle via fear of punishment, because we can't appeal to his 'better nature' since such does not exist. And the way to scare Bert onto the straight and narrow *is* treat him harshly, not treat him nicely, while he's in jail. Behaviour can be conditioned to that extent, if we use "animals want to avoid pain" as the metric.
And Bert is just another animal, like the rest of us.
Free will is a loosely connected constellation of ideas, not a single idea, and determinists, even hard deteminists , aren't obliged to knock them all down.
Having said that , Sapolsky seems to reject rehabilitation. Having said *that* he doesn't reject change, because no one does.
Predetrmined rails can include pre defined changes.
"why the devil *would* we treat them nicely, if we want them to stop offending?"
Because we want to be nice as well as wanting to prevent crime...well, some of us do .
The thing is that our values are pretty independent of our metaphysics. As I pointed out, there are harsh atheist/materialist/determinist countries , and there are liberal religious countries. Liberalism predicts niceness much more than (ir)religion.
I don't believe in Sapolsky's optimism., because determinism per se doesn't force you to be nice. Specific deteministic rules could force you to be anything -- determinism only tells you you are forced.
I also don't believe in Chesterton's pessimism, for similar reasons.
"What it is (perhaps) inconsistent with is the generous treatment of criminals; with any appeal to their better feelings or encouragement in their moral struggle"
Determinism is quite compatible with the idea that people have wills, better natures and moral struggles. It only insists that the outcome is inevitable.
Chesterton seems to have a background assumption that moral responsibility, moral worth, will, free will, etc, are all rigidly connected, so that if you lack one, you lack all.
That sort of assumption is often connected with a corresponding idea that atheism, materialism, determinism, pessimism , etc, are all rigidly connected.
Marvin Minsky calls it a dumbell theory -- two big blobs with a loose connection to each other
Modern thinkers dont see it the same way...inderminisric materialism is conceivable , deteministic angels are conceivable, and so on.
"Determinism is quite compatible with the idea that people have wills, better natures and moral struggles. It only insists that the outcome is inevitable."
And that is the problem in a nutshell: we probably will have to keep Bert the Burglar locked up for life, or at least until he's too old and feeble to go burgling, because "the outcome is inevitable". Bert struggled with his impulses to steal and lost, and he's going to lose again the next time he struggles, just like he did the last ninety-nine times, so we have to say that the result of Bert's moral struggles is pre-determined: he will fail and he will steal.
I'm going off what Slippin's review was, which is pretty darn grim if you ask me:
"So, here’s the high-level logic of Sapolsky’s case.
• Since there’s no place for free will to reside, inside or outside the human, we should try to proceed as if it’s not there, despite what it feels like.
• If it’s not there, then people are not acting intentionally.
• If people are not acting intentionally, then praise and blame make no sense—we simply do what we do.
• Therefore, we should try, even though it’s very hard, to praise and blame less. Misbehavior is not a choice, nor is good behavior. So, let’s do our best to reason our way through the counter-intuitiveness to a more humane world."
Okay, but why more humane? Earlier, Slippin says they have swallowed the lie that human life is sacred, even though we're only smart animals and there's no basis to believe this, due to being taught it since they were a child. *Why* do we bother being more humane, if there's no reason to be, since humans are nothing special? Wanting to punish criminals and make them suffer is as valid an impulse as wanting to treat them humanely - remember, "misbehaviour is not a choice nor is good behaviour" and "praise and blame make no sense". Blaming society for treating prisoners badly is senseless, therefore, and so is praising society for treating prisoners well, and there's nothing on one side or the other to say we should choose niceness.
"There’s an important clarification that goes with that final bullet point. Preventing bad behavior and blaming someone for it are separate things. So, for the safety of the group, it’s perfectly ok to confine someone (in a jail, say) but we shouldn’t be beating them up or berating them as a bad person who intentionally chose not to follow the rules. Chances are that in the future things will change, and we’ll appear as heartless ignoramuses to those looking back at us. So let’s at least be kind in our stupidity.
The hardest thing to swallow about hard determinism is that it must apply to everyone, all the way to Hitler. Reality is just unfolding. Humans are not agents, they’re automatons. They’re like robots running on computer code, always following the next instruction, which may be a reaction to the environment they’re experiencing, but they still don’t ever have the power to jump the logic. They’re completely locked in."
Okay, so we shouldn't beat up Bert (because that won't change his behaviour). But what if the beating up is about making us feel better? That's part of "Humans are not agents, they're automatons... they still don't ever have the power to jump the logic. They're completely locked in". So if I get positive feedback from beating up Bert for his crimes, that's not me choosing anything, that's my programming at work and I can't change my pleasure in inflicting pain any more than Bert can change his impulse to steal.
This is the worst of it, though: the inescapable panopticon which will boost co-operation (though why I would react like that instead of hating and resenting those around me, I have no idea):
"As technology advances and surveillance increases, less and less of our behavior is going to require the false premise. Because if more and more of our behavior is recorded, and filtered by a (community-trained) artificial intelligence for violations, we won’t need the false premise. We’ll have a real realtime omniscience to use for that purpose.
That might sound like an Orwellian dystopia, but it won’t be one if we make the surveillance data public, and we will. We’ll create safe spaces (much like we create college campuses today) that are fully monitored by AI gods. As long as any of us can check and challenge the work of the AIs, we’ll be perfectly fine with the monitoring. It’s when only the government has (or only the corporations have) the surveillance data (and we don’t) that it’s dangerous.
These safe spaces will be required, in the survival sense, for all societies, just like colleges are today. Without them a society’s military and economy will fall far behind. Because inside the safe spaces, where all behavior is publicly transparent and duly and timely punished, misbehavior will diminish, cooperation will surge, and better weapons will be produced."
And who does the punishing? Well, I suppose that is what our AI overlords will be for, as well as monitoring us 24/7. Why anyone is supposed to feel relieved and cheerful at the thought of every single tiny act of theirs being available for public view, I have no idea. Blowing your nose at your desk? Slurping your coffee? Maybe you scratched an inconvenient itch, or didn't wash your hair last night, or you just look goofy on camera. Now the entire world can laugh at you.
Maybe we'll all be wearing shock collars along with the 24/7 surveillance, so the "due and timely punishment" can be administered by our AI watchers. That's how we'll rehabilitate Bert - and all the rest of us - if he even looks like he's going to do something naughty, zap! Just the way you condition rats in a Skinner experiment.
See what I mean about boiling oil being an environment? It'd be nice to think that they'd use sweet words of encouragement, but for that pesky "humans are completely locked in" and that Slippin thinks Big Brother constantly watching for violations is what it takes to keep us as a functional society.
>And that is the problem in a nutshell: we probably will have to keep Bert the Burglar locked up for life, or at least until he's too old and feeble to go burgling, because "the outcome is inevitable". Bert struggled with his impulses to steal and lost
"The outcome is inevitable" doesn't mean "a bad outcome is inevitable".
I'm quite baffled about how you are getting from "punishment should be behaviour correction, not retribution" to "all criminals should have a life-means-life sentence".
Well, in some cases I think "life-means-life" e.g. this charmer here who strangled his one year old stepchild to death, and seems to have a record of vexatious demands while in jail:
https://www.wsaz.com/2024/09/27/judge-rules-favor-gender-affirming-surgery-transgender-inmate-who-strangled-infant/
But apart from vicious murderers who are possibly deranged, I do think the likes of Bert can be rehabbed. But the logic of hard determinism, qua Sapolsky (or Slippin's characterisation of him via the book review) calls for "life means life" if we are not confident the offender is indeed changed.
And it's hard to be confident, since the offender only offended because of their innate nature, laid down since the Big Bang, and changing that nature is hard. Maybe we can do that in future via brainwashing. Or the appealing prospect of "AI is watching every single thing you do, every moment of the day, every day of the year; this surveillance is public, for anyone to see; punishment for violations is immediate" that Slippin thinks will make us all co-operate and pull together for the good of society.
I do like the prospect of "community training" on what constitutes violations and punishment; that's from us, the community, and as history shows, lynch mobs and witch-hunts are part of the nature of humans. A boot stamping on a face forever, indeed.
>But the logic of hard determinism, qua Sapolsky (or Slippin's characterisation of him via the book review) calls for "life means life" if we are not confident the offender is indeed changed.
You keep saying so , but I don't see why. If you want to reduce the possibility of crime to exactly zero , you would need to imprison everybody forever. But why would
reducing the possibility of crime to exactly zero be an implication of deteminism.
>Okay, but why more humane?
Because you value humanity? Even if it isn't logically forced on you by deteminism? But I said that before.
Deteminism doesnt mean you only have to value strict implications of deteminism.
Under the typical scientcism framing, where values are arbitrary and not derivable from facts , your not being forced to adopt certain values isnt a problem.
Under a Scott style utilitarian framework ,you want strike a balance between minimising Berts suffering and his potential victims', so you also don't conclude that Bert necessary gets life.
But again, Slippin says (in their view) the idea that "human life is sacred" or that humans are special is a deceit; it comes from Religion 2.0, Humanism, which took it over from Religion 1.0, Religion, in order to solve the problem of "when a group goes over Dunbar's Number, we treat the 151st person as a stranger, and this is a problem when society grows to the extent that we vastly exceed Dunbar's Number".
But it's still a lie for all that, and Religion 3.0 (Sapolsky's Determinism) will solve it by perpetual surveillance instead: we won't co-operate because we can't, because Dunbar's Number, so we must be *made* to co-operate, and that can only be done by transparency (i.e. every person's every action, word and deed is immediately available for public inspection because it is public record, and violations are punished in a 'due and timely' manner - we won't need to fear anyone is 'getting away' with bad behaviour because the AI sees all, knows all, and punishes all).
I think this is abhorrent, so you see why I'm *not* a determinist? But if you want soft determinism, then you have to argue with Slippin/Sapolsky about why this is more feasible than their version of hard determinism, I think Slippin addresses this in the review, let me check.
"But the infinitely precious part was a stroke of genius. I myself was taught as a child that human life is sacred, and I believe it, deep, deep down. Even though I know there’s absolutely no evidence for it (we’re just smart animals), I couldn’t purge that belief in a million years. I am a humanist, you are a humanist, and we will die humanists. Religion works.
Morality is Implanted, Not Awakened
The morality that extends beyond the inborn morality for the 150, the morality that reaches all the way to the very last human, is not awakened in the individual, it’s implanted there. We are told that the love-of-the-150 (only) is a stunted, insufficient thing that was always meant to be extended to all humans. But there’s no evidence for that claim—and can’t be. However, does convincing ourselves of its “truth” help us survive? (Yes.)
We were brainwashed, pure and simple. We were bombarded with morality tales from the moment we could speak. And the moral instruction continues throughout our lives via story based entertainment. All our stories are just morality tales dressed up in action, comedy, mystery, romance and sex. We are desperate to be reminded that human life is sacred, that being kind to strangers is good behavior—because the brainwashing atrophies over time, and without it, group cohesion erodes. We start seeing ourselves as the dangerous animals we truly are. Even today, all humans are still being born with a deeply instinctual fear of strangers that must be suppressed. When it can’t be, we fight wars.
...Sapolsky is not trying to convince the reader that the world is deterministic. He’s assuming it. To most scientists and philosophers today, the world is so obviously deterministic that he doesn’t need to do that work. Instead, he’s addressing those people who agree that the world is deterministic but also insist that there’s a secret back door that allows free will to slip in. These are the compatibilists; they believe free will is compatible with determinism. According to Sapolsky’s estimate, their numbers make up about 90% of philosophers and legal scholars. Sapolsky himself is in the small minority of (hard) incompatibilists: for him, determinism unequivocally rules out free will.
...The book is organized into two halves. The first half is Sapolsky saying, OK, let’s have a good hard look at those secret back doors where free will is supposedly slipping in. He starts off by setting the table, much as I just have, and then, after dismissing the central, roiling debate in the free will space (Libet) as inconclusive and irrelevant, he walks us through a quick review of what’s in Behave (minus the replication crisis problems). That brings us to the heart of the first half: the in-depth takedowns of the three main (remaining) compatibilist back doors. All three, as you might guess, are places where the science is currently stymied or misunderstood. Sapolsky proceeds to explain away each of the back doors.
...Can wars be won in the 21st century without women in the workforce? Probably not. Can a slave society defeat a mechanized society? Definitely not. And it’s not because slave owners are bad people and the universe is rigged to let the good people win. It’s because societies with slaves are inefficient. They waste human minds. It’s not about good and evil, it’s about winning wars. In fact, our definitions of what is good and evil are constantly being reworked to suit that purpose.
Consider this. Slave societies are gone now because they couldn’t survive against mechanized societies, but if things change and we find ourselves once again in a world where slavery is required for winning wars, it will surely come back in force. And we’ll have a lock-solid moral justification for it, which will be just what it was back then: get slaves or be slaves.
...There’s an important clarification that goes with that final bullet point. Preventing bad behavior and blaming someone for it are separate things. So, for the safety of the group, it’s perfectly ok to confine someone (in a jail, say) but we shouldn’t be beating them up or berating them as a bad person who intentionally chose not to follow the rules. Chances are that in the future things will change, and we’ll appear as heartless ignoramuses to those looking back at us. So let’s at least be kind in our stupidity.
And the same goes for praise. No one is deserving of anything in a world without free will."
So we can't blame Bert for being a burglar, he's not to blame (since blame is meaningless). But neither are we obligated to treat Bert nicely, since Bert does not deserve nice treatment: no-one does, and our lingering squeamishness is a hangover from the past religious rules over "human sacredness". 'Being nice to strangers is good behaviour' (and Bert is a stranger to most of us affected by his burgling behaviour) is a fairy tale that has to be constantly propped up and reinforced because it's not true. There's no objective reason in the material universe why we should be nice to Bert, so the religions of the past brainwashed us into the notion "all humans are special and equal, so treat Bert as you would wish to be treated" in order to reinforce group cohesion.
But Bert is breaking group cohesion by his actions, so why does he get the fruits of cohesion? He doesn't. Boiling oil is also an environment.
> this is abhorrent, so you see why I'm *not* a determinist?
Well, it's not forced on you by determinism, and it's not the only objection to determinism. Minimally, determinism just means the future is inevitable..it's one bit of information , compared to "the
future is open". So it doesn't imply much.
> can't blame Bert for being a burglar, he's not to blame (since blame is meaningless). But neither are we obligated to treat Bert nicely, since Bert does not deserve nice treatment: no-one does, and our lingering squeamishness is a hangover from the past religious rules over "human sacredness".
Who are you taking issue with? Sapolsky would say that Bert doesn't deserve harsh treatment, like being jailed forever, either.
Maybe you are taking issue with the kind of determinist-materialist-atheist GKC was arguing against. There probably were people who though you had to reject the sentimental ideas of the past, not that you merely didn't have to accept them.
But there's another kind of determinist-materialist-atheist , who think values are subjective preferences, and you can have any you like.
My immediate reaction was "Why do they think religions for just-over-150 groups look remotely like that? Much later religions don't!" At least it doesn't seem to be Sapolsky's idea, but the reviewer's own.
I keep on hoping to submit to the contest so I hope it doesn't go away! Haha
As someone who criticized a lot of the reviews for various things, I want to say that my issue is not with the quality of the reviews per se but the finalist selection. I wrote a review and it was scored below average; and that's fine, it didn't show up in the finalist section. I want a lot of different people with different views to submit the book reviews, even if they aren't of the highest quality. But the highest quality reviews should be finalists. The Emperor of All Maladies was fantastic and it didn't make the cut somehow. I thought all three of the winners were at least good, and Nine Lives was my number 1 pick. So I hope the book reviews continue.
And now I end on a somewhat lame note of "make the review grading better" without specifics of how to do that.
The Emperor of All Maladies failing to place surprised me, too! I remember rating it highly, whomever wrote it did a good job. That being said, I was already familiar with the book -- could have been other people just didn't find the title interesting enough to read, especially since alphabetically it was down in the Ts. (I note that only 31 people appear to have voted on it, which is a middling number.)
Thank you! I wrote this, largely for the sake of Jake and Bess Seliger who are friends of the blog.
I know there was a thread about this under the last article, but seriously, what's the point of writing stuff like "He sh*ts you not"? Why censor swear words in an article aimed at adults? Why censor only a single letter and leave the rest? Why use swear words at all, unless you're directly quoting someone, if you're just going to censor them out? Biff Wiss and I can't be the only ACX readers who find this incredibly irritating.
I mostly agree, but thinking contrarian, maybe it is so that it is SEEN by a wider audience, and not pulled for actual profanity? Like, if a store is afraid children might see it, they wouldn't display it, even if children aren't the target audience.
Another possible reason could be shock value, if you DON'T use swear words in the actual book. Click-bait, as it were. For lazy title writers who don't know how to write GOOD titles that grab attention.
There seems to be a misunderstanding. I'm complaining about Scott's use of partially asterisked-out swear words in the middle of ACX articles like this one, not their use in book titles.
The use of asterisks to fake-obscure words kind of irritates me, too. On the other hand, in my time here I have used every single forbidden word, including the Worst Words in the History of Speech, “cunt” and “nigger.” These 2 I have used when discussing harassment of women and woke’fear of being racist, respectively. All the other Horrible Words, most of which just denote things people do and parts of people, I’ve also used, sometimes literally and sometimes as swears for emphasis. I’ve never heard a word of complaint from Scott (or anybody else). Given that, I can forgive him his asterisks.
I wrote one of the honorable mentions (The Meme Machine), would love to get feedback from anyone who read it!
Yesterday I was on the fence when I saw that a review of this book got a honorable mention, today I saw your comment and decided to read it. I think the review is very competent, clearly written, very good, it would have made my top three as a minimum. So thank you.
I have a weakness for grand theories such as Blackmore‘s but suspected already that her „panmemetics“ (as „Parasites of the mind“, Boudry & Hofhuis 2018, another very good paper on memetics, calls it) goes *too* far, and found that confirmed by your review (which, to be clear, is mostly sympathetic to Blackmore). Another thing I finally learned is how Dennett‘s memetics and multiple-drafts theories connect to each other (and how that relates to animal consciousness). And then there is the relevance for AI impacts, of course, which may be of particular interest to many here.
What would I criticise? But basically I can‘t find things to disagree with, which is unusual. The closest might be that I think psychopaths usually make bad meme stewards (but then this may just come down to definition: when I personally think of „psychopath“ I think more of opportunistic types like perhaps Gavin Newsom, see the previous post here, than of idealistic-fanatic types that would be great for their memes). And if the review was close to the final in terms of voting average, then perhaps a bit of „ACX micro-humour“ might have put it over the line.
Finally, to note perhaps another AI connection: you quote Dawkins‘s „we, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators“, and I can’t get rid of this intuition that our ability to *understand* could be a pathway to such rebellion that has little to do with memetics. That relates to the orthogonality thesis, although I first thought it when reading something by Dennett (probably Consciousness Explained, a book that I didn‘t manage to finish). It seemed to me like something Dennett overlooked as a possibility.
Thank you for taking the time to read it and for the thoughtful response! I will have to check out the Boudry & Hofhuis paper as well, hadn't come across that one!
I really thought my favourite review, The Pale King, might win, but I guess I was just typical-mind-ing again. Its commitment to an on-theme ending was brilliant but maybe a little too
Maybe an adversarial collaboration contest again? I enjoyed the outcomes of the ones you ran and I think the results stand the test of time.
By the way, I would like to honorably mention the non-finalist review for The Language Puzzle. Especially paired with the finalist review, How Language Began. I bought both books and am so excited to journey through the origins of language from an anthropological perspective and then a linguistic perspective!
Over the last year the book review finalists were the ACX posts I was most looking forward to reading. However, this year I found the task of sifting through the slush pile more difficult (some previous contests I've read every review).
I'm not sure (not-book) reviews would be something I would look forward to as much. Even Lem's Imaginary Magnitude and A Perfect Vacuum, although I am a fan of Lem's work, seem less vital in my memory than his non-reviews. Maybe I am just jaded from having read the collected McSweeney's reviews of new food, which I used to think were hilarious but now make me yawn. Or maybe I secretly want book reviews so I can avoid the time-consuming task of reading the books reviewed while experiencing the vicarious pleasure of experiencing the works. There isn't as strong a reason to read about something I can just consume and assess in less time than reading a review.
I don't think the book review contest is declining. What happened is that last year had several very good (even by the standards of finalists) reviews submitted, and this year was a regression to the mean which looks like a decline compared to last year. I think the reviews this year were about the same quality as the ones 2 years ago.
Agreed; I've been reading these for a while, and last year was exceptional, but I still very much enjoyed this year.
Curiously, this comment on the 1st place winner manages to specifically call out the 2nd and 3rd place winners as well: https://open.substack.com/pub/astralcodexten/p/your-book-review-two-arms-and-a-head?r=32mxn6&utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true&commentId=64164820
Fun background info for why the book reviews were posted in semi-alphabetical (but not quite) order.
After I wrote and submitted the review for Two Arms and a Head in April, I'd been loosely following the court case about the autistic Canadian woman whose father sued to try and stop her MAiD. The news about the father withdrawing his appeal came out a few months later.
I knew that I would need to provide the update to Scott before he posted my review, but I'd been procrastinating. But then when he posted the Real Raw News review, I was like "Oh no. He's already in the Rs. I need to email him."
So, I emailed him the update. I also provided the image files I used, and asked that he use the nerve diagram as the thumbnail.
He responded with, "Sure, done. Good luck!"
...And then he posted it. 😅
I imagine it was similar with the others. I think Scott was copying the reviews from Google docs into Substack once a week, one at a time, going down the list. But if a reviewer emailed him to make a minor change, or ensure that an image was formatted right, then Scott would dutifully prepare it in the Substack editor and be like, "Awesome, I have one ready for this week. Publish."
I think the book review should still occur next year. I agree the finalists felt weaker this year. But I think that just means we should reduce the number of finalists.
I would hate to lose the book review contest. I always check out the finalist reviews, as well as several of the non finalist reviews that catch my interest. Just getting to see that big google doc of competing reviews makes me very happy.
Winners, please feel free to pitch a post titled "Hidden Open Thread 342.5"
I've just read Catkin, and would strongly recommend it to anyone else with children / currently immersed in children's literature. It would have won my vote for winner had it made it to the finalist!
I don't think the contest is declining. There were several good entries in the finalists this year.
I would prefer to skip the book review contest next year (but the contest is easy to ignore if you are not interested, so no strong opinion)
I only just finished reading all of them, so missed my opportunity to vote. While I applaud the winners, I just wanted to say I was super impressed with the quality and content of How Language Began.
Kudos to the winners - please don't stop doing this contest though, was very much hoping to participate next year!
I still enjoy the book reviews. I like how varied and out of my bubble the topics are (I would never think to read anything about, eg, Real Raw News, but I really enjoyed the review). But also not opposed to something new either.
Can we have an AMA with Blake Neff? That he reads this blog is somewhere between extremely flattering and conspiratorially concerning that even right wing journalists hang out together at the same elite places.
This is he; I'd be happy to do it if that interested people. That said, I'm also on the Discord (PhilipOfMacedon) so if you have something you specifically would like to ask go ahead and @ me there.
Sorry, I've been ill for a few days now. I'll reach out in a few more days.
Thanks!
I read more submissions this year than in all years combined. I actually thought this year was the best yet.
So the review of Real Raw News, which was inexplicably excited about a site made of pure fake news, written for the lulz; turns out to be a guy who professionally wrote fake news, because he found them funny.
I don't understand why that guy and people like him aren't actually considered evil. He actively helped make society worse, surely? This isn't a partisan thing, Carlson is a well-documented cynical liar.
I was intrigued by Slippin Fall's Nobels in the Street thing, and waited for the first one to come out, not particularly expecting it to be correct, but hoping for at least interesting crackpottery. It wasn't even that though. It felt like the things they were trying to explain were their own misunderstandings rather than actual issues with modern physics, and they were moving backwards from the state of the art, not forwards.
As someone too squeamish to finish reading the winning review—congratulations to Amanda! I wish we lived in a world where this review and book didn’t have to exist.
As someone who didn’t participate in the first round, but enjoyed getting the finalists as blog entries, I really appreciate the honorable mentions. I look forward to reading them.
I also wouldn’t say the quality of the winners or finalists has gotten any worse. It does feel like there are more of them, so perhaps next year’s contest needs to be narrower rather than broader?
Thoroughly enjoyed the reviews this year. Ended up getting Something to Do with Paying Attention by DFW and the Rhyming Dictionary. Enjoyed the first one very much and planning to dig into the second one soon!
I am surprised to hear that people say the book reviews are declining. I enjoy them and my personal desires would be to do them again next year.
I think the book reviews were an absolute highlight and I felt pretty sad when I read there wasn’t going to be anything like this next year. I got several books that were mentioned only because of the book reviews and I guess I am far from the only one like that. They have a different flavor here that is unlike that of anywhere else. Declining? I can’t agree with that at all.
Of course I understand that running an Everything-Except-Book-Reviews contest as well as running the book review contest might be asking a bit much, but it would still be nice to have the book review contest back next year. At least know that some of us are very much in favor of a book review contest in 2025.
The book reviews are what brought me to this Substack, and something I eagerly anticipate. Please continue this year!!