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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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...
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.
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."
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"?
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.
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.
"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!"
"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.
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:
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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?
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!)
This was a great review, just maybe a little too long?
It was pretty convincing and relatable. You see a lot of people make the line of argument beginning “Country X had ethical failings” all the time, like about Ukraine or even more so Palestinians, and even groups like Aztecs in history. Maybe that’s the essence of “tanky-ism.” The point that the Holocaust was probably driven more by will-to-power plus indifference towards weaker peoples rather than outright hate is also an important one; that was a much deadlier attitude throughout history than hate, and yet a lot of people today tend to blame everything on hate and think doing bad things is okay as long as they don’t feel hate in their heart.
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.
Hitler and a lot of Germans did have genuine hate, but this attitude from the general quoted from your review seems to be more common and what enabled an entire country to go along:
“He did not particularly wish to kill the Jews - but nor did he care if they were killed. What mattered to him was that “the Nazi policy toward the Jews must be called a costly military blunder.” Whether the Jews lived or died was of relevance only so far as their life or death contributed to Germany’s success.”
I wish there were a word for this attitude. It goes beyond “indifference.” Maybe it is “callous indifference plus nationalism plus will to power.” Anyway, I see versions of this unnamed attitude a lot and find it scarier than hate because it can actually motivate entire countries to do and excuse horrible things, whereas hate generally only motivates people at the margins of society who don’t have the power to commit organized, large-scale atrocities.
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.
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.
These economic arguments are less alien, especially today when powerful countries seem to distrust the global trading system again, but as an actual matter, Germany didn’t need to go to war to get resources, because the USSR was selling them all the resources they needed in exchange for technology imports. They were also able to peacefully catch up to the UK (if not the US) post-war. The key lesson here is to maintain open global trade so countries don’t feel like they have to forcefully seize resources.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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
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!
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.
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'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.
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!
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.
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.
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!
This was a great review, just maybe a little too long?
It was pretty convincing and relatable. You see a lot of people make the line of argument beginning “Country X had ethical failings” all the time, like about Ukraine or even more so Palestinians, and even groups like Aztecs in history. Maybe that’s the essence of “tanky-ism.” The point that the Holocaust was probably driven more by will-to-power plus indifference towards weaker peoples rather than outright hate is also an important one; that was a much deadlier attitude throughout history than hate, and yet a lot of people today tend to blame everything on hate and think doing bad things is okay as long as they don’t feel hate in their heart.
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.
Hitler and a lot of Germans did have genuine hate, but this attitude from the general quoted from your review seems to be more common and what enabled an entire country to go along:
“He did not particularly wish to kill the Jews - but nor did he care if they were killed. What mattered to him was that “the Nazi policy toward the Jews must be called a costly military blunder.” Whether the Jews lived or died was of relevance only so far as their life or death contributed to Germany’s success.”
I wish there were a word for this attitude. It goes beyond “indifference.” Maybe it is “callous indifference plus nationalism plus will to power.” Anyway, I see versions of this unnamed attitude a lot and find it scarier than hate because it can actually motivate entire countries to do and excuse horrible things, whereas hate generally only motivates people at the margins of society who don’t have the power to commit organized, large-scale atrocities.
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.
These economic arguments are less alien, especially today when powerful countries seem to distrust the global trading system again, but as an actual matter, Germany didn’t need to go to war to get resources, because the USSR was selling them all the resources they needed in exchange for technology imports. They were also able to peacefully catch up to the UK (if not the US) post-war. The key lesson here is to maintain open global trade so countries don’t feel like they have to forcefully seize resources.
"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.