In addition to the random reviewer picker link being wrong, it seems the actual random review picker (and also just like, the list of reviews) needs to be altered to account for the two different reviews of "Determined". Currently it's doing it by book, not by review, even when the same book has multiple reviews.
This comes up every year. Last year's winner was 22k words long, which implies voters actively select for long reviews (nothing else was nearly that long). In general, there seems to be a constant loop of "The reviews are too long, make them shorter" > "the winning reviews are consistently the longest of the nominees, so people seem to prefer long ones".
I prefer long reviews if they are good, short if they are poor. Good (as in good to read) reviews are more likely to win. I don’t know if this preference structure is solvable.
I think its fine for the finalists to be long. But its awkward at this initial stage, when there's so many and we just dont have time to read them all. It's also hard for the reviewers, knowing that to have a serious chance at winning they need to write what is basically a thesis on the book, but first itll just go to a slush pile with random anonymous reviewers.
But whatever length they are, some reviews are going to be skipped. I don't care if it's only eighty words long, if I'm not interested in "How A Concrete Block Is Made", I'm not going to read that (well, in fact, I would read that).
Okay, maybe something about economics or politics or whatever that doesn't grab my attention. There is certainly the flaw of "This is a good review but it would be even better reduced by one-third", but nobody is holding our noses to the grindstone here; if it's too long and now I'm bored, I stop reading and pick something else.
I think the solution is that if you notice that you are reading a bad review, then stop reading, rate it low, then start reading a different one. That way a bad long review doesn't take much more time than a bad short review.
If there are too many good reviews to read, that's I problem I'd like to have!
Very happy someone reviewed APGTE, since it's a great serial and deserves more exposure. Somewhat disappointed that they went with an AI-box theme instead of the even-more-visible and just as ACX-friendly theme of how institutions and incentives shape a society.
Also, the middle of the review seems to be cut out:
>There are also a couple plot points and world-building ideas which were clearly meant to have significance laid out in this first book, which never get re-examined or have any resolution. But these, 6635
same, I would really like to vote for A Practical Guide to Evil to give it more exposure yet the review was weak and I would not have voted for that review.
I have to say, I never heard of that and the review made me go "Isn't this just an updated version of The Overlord's List?" Also, "bisexual teenager" made me groan and go "I don't need to read something that is going to be lecturing me every five minutes about REPRESENTATION SMASHING THE GENDER BINARY SMASH THE PATRIARCHY".
Maybe it's not like that at all, but if you make a point of mentioning your protagonist is a peppy, zeppy, scrappy fighter against the existing order who is a girl (of course 'cos the lead has to be a girlboss) and bisexual (of course because plain old vanilla cis het is not alone boring, it's evil and wicked), then I'm going to 'nope' right out of there.
"How could I try to sell ACX subscribers on reading A Practical Guide to Evil (PGtE) by ErraticErrata (EE)?
Well, it’s got a plucky teenage bisexual protagonist making morally dubious choices"
You can stop right there, I'm sold - on I wouldn't read this thing if you held my eyes open with sporks.
Yep, entirely fair, what I would say is that the best recommendation I can give for the series is to read the prologue and first chapter. And I would give the elevator pitch that: This is a world that runs on stories, the first step of the villain's plan will always work, when you fight your nemesis the nemesis will win the first time, come to a draw the second time, and you will win the third time, etc, except that these rules are knowable by characters in world, and can be manipulated thus. So it is both an homage to fantasy tropes and also turns them on their head and gets meta in a wonderful way. Also the worldbuilding is really good, and there's fantastic banter
Seems like today is my day to be a wet-blanket, because "meta" makes me groan. I think my brain is just tired, it wants plain and simple stories that are stories and not breaking the fourth wall 6-D chess plotlines nodding and winking at the audience.
I think Pratchett got away with it and can't really be improved upon: if you're in a desperate situation and say it's a million to one chance, everyone knows that those are the ones that work. So if you ever find yourself in a desperate situation, just say "This is a million to one chance" and then by the narrative laws of the universe, whatever you are going to do will work.
Hmm, very fair. It may not be for you, although I'd say it is that it's my favorite series of all time and I liked it better than Pratchett, although it's not quite the same in winking at the audience.
Yeah, you're not missing much IMO — I gave it a shot and it's real basic stuff, nothing really surprising or new... to my mind, anyway. The sort of pseudo-insightful stuff that's been floated a thousand times already, treated as if it's something nEw aNd ShOcKiNg.
I think the meta stuff isn't really as exciting as everything else. Everyone and their dog has pointed out that the heroes always win and pondered what it would be like if the villains got a fair shake. Where it gets *interesting* is when it ties the narratives to the cultures they're embedded in - the leaders of the Dread Empire don't win simply by saying "Let's not be over-the-top cartoon villains, that's dumb," they win by saying "what are the sociopolitical forces that incentivize Dread Emperors to launch foolhardy schemes to conquer the world, and how do we change them?"
(For all the big drama about "subverting patterns", Black's master plan basically boils down to "what if instead of brutally repressing our conquests, we instead found a local faction that we could convince to maintain the status quo because they hated the old system?" It's a very mundane strategy, the sort of thing that IRL colonial empires did all the time.)
Do they/does he or she end up "You know and I know and the dogs in the street know that Dread Lords and Evil Empires come crashing down because they're just begging to be overthrown by the first backwoods orphan with a scruffy old beggarman or witchy woods crone as an advisor, so how about if we skip all that part and jump right ahead to being an efficient Benevolent Dictatorship republic/'democracy' where we perfect the act of ballot-stuffing in order to always win every free election and the people get their say, so long as what they say is what we tell them to say?
Healthcare and a job for life for all, down the salt mines?"
Haven't read the thing and don't intend to read it, so it would be too dismissive of me to say that it sounds like it would indeed involve a lot of stupidity 😀
(1) I've been that teenager (and older) making 'morally dubious choices' and I don't need to read no more about that kind of thing
(2) I don't care who the b-word is banging, that's her/xer/whatever pronoun in use's affair. Romance sub-plots don't interest me that much and I fear that the bi-ness would only really come into play for said stupid decisions.
I'm too old for that kind of story, in short, because plucky 15-19 year old making decisions I can see are gonna blow up in her face isn't interesting any more, it just has me yelling "that's a really stupid decision, why are you doing this?"
The story could be really good, the review honestly doesn't sell it, but neither does the achingly hip title. I sort of like "how to be good" stories, or even "well we tried to be good but turns out that's hard", not "oh yah gonna say we're evil but not, like, y'know, really evil like racist or transphobe or something like that, we're just evil 'cos The Man says we're evil so it's, like, *ironic*".
I'm not fourteen anymore, this doesn't impress me.
It's had the opposite effect these people want on me. I've always enjoyed fantasy novels and used to read anything that sounded interesting not caring who wrote it. I only ever used to look up who the writer was *after* I liked the book and wanted to find more by that writer. It meant I would read a good number of stuff by someone with a name like A. B. Jones and Jones ended up being a woman or a black person or whatever and it made 0 difference and I'd go read more books. Now, given how insufferable most speculative fiction has become it's actively become a good sign in the book's favor if it's written by some species of boring looking nerd white man. 25 years ago the 3 black people in the audience at the midnight release of the Fellowship of the Rings movie probably had interesting out of the box things to say. Today, in mainline fantasy the room is full of weird twenty something girlchildren who won't grow up and any of the 3 old white prototypical male nerds still hanging around are probably the ones with weird interesting out of the box things to say.
Word. I have seen so many mediocre by-the-(new-patriarchy-smashing-)numbers fantasy novels by Queer Black Nonbinary Genius DESTROYS White Heterosexual Masculine Fantasy!!!™ pushed so hard that I actively avoid anything highlighting the author's VictimCred®.
If I want Queer Black Genius SF, I'll go to Samuel Delany who's a better writer than the current crop of "Did I mention all my neuroses and illnesses mental and physical and also that you OWE it to me to read all my stuff and donate to my several begging-bowl apps and plus I work for a literary magazine that does land acknowledgements" treasures.
This is why I don't like the review, the point of the work is not about bisexual girl boss at all, it was more about deep character interacting with incentive and narrative trope, competently written. Some characters had different sexual orientation because some people had different sexual orientation.
for example below you mentioned Terry Pratchett
>>> So if you ever find yourself in a desperate situation, just say "This is a million to one chance" and then by the narrative laws of the universe, whatever you are going to do will work.
- Books I really like and want to promote, but with a poorly written review on simple technical measures...
- Reviews with a captivating and accurate summary, with a throwaway takeaway at the end where the "so what" is weak or uninteresting...
- Reviews that are all "so what" and I'm not sure I learned much about the underlying book...
- Reviews where I totally disagree with the premise, but concede it raises a really interesting point and want to promote it for discussion...
- Reviews I suspect may have been written anonymously by Scott... and while unsure how that would specifically bias my review, I try to then anti-bias my review to account for it, then worry I'm over-calibrating and proceed to anti-anti-bias it, and so on ad infinitum to the point where I've forgotten the content of the original review completely anyway.
Maybe I should try to hold tighter to the sum of:
(a) Is this good prose? (5 possible points)
- Do I enjoy reading it?
- Does it include a good description without too many details, nor too few?
(b) Does this deal with interesting ideas? (5 possible points)
- Is the book vaguely relevant to any interesting topic?
- Does it deal with it in a novel way?
- Does the review land on an interesting and compelling takeaway?"
Also the aspect of "New Evil" being (mostly) Consequentialist compared to Good's (mostly) Deontology, and those spots where Good crosses over into quite horrifying consequentialism, fits right in with Scott's old (pre-SSC) writings.
A Farewell to Alms was a book that had a big impact on my thinking, and I cite it frequently. This book review seems unfinished though, having sections saying to insert things later. It could also use a spellchecker, and not just that review.
Those are things you fix upon re-read. If they're still there then the author didn't re-read it. If even the author isn't willing to read the thing, why should anyone else?
It's more likely that the author is bad at time management, was still writing the review at the last minute, and failed to find the time to fix these issues.
In a situation like this, leaving in the intended-subheadings may provide useful information to readers who are interested in deciding whether they want to read the book themself.
Also, removing structure from ones writing because there are only 10 minutes left to the deadline wouldn't necessarily make it look more "smoothed over," except to a casual, skimming eye; edits leave "scuffs and scratches" in the writing unless you're able to take your time re-doing transitions and surrounding grammar.
Because Scott is asking us to read and rate each and every review.
So the question is not whether you should read a review, but how you should rate a review that you have read.
I mean, come on. Let's say that there is a review that is really fun and informative and interesting and stimulating, but it has typos and "missing parts". Does it stop being fun and informative and interesting and stimulating because of it?
It sounds like you're bargaining with whether or not something has to be finished to have high value.
This is a familiar line of argument. I know this one so well.
And I would imagine many of the other perpetually-online rationalist -adjacent members of this community might find a glimmer of recognition in it too. Like an old friend we all share.
Sometimes we struggle to get things done. Perfectly normal! So we just ship. We hope people will recognize the underlying bits of brilliance and help carry our baby over the finish line on our behalf.
I have no judgment on a person for that. The whole time I'm honestly thinking "one of us! one of us!" I'm literally looking across my desktop at my own half-finished review. So much nonjudgment.
But the author should know that this is, at best, a high variance strategy.
If this one doesn't make it into the finals circle, that's ok, there was still high potential in terms of ideas and writing quality. I'm really hoping the author blocks off some time next year to take another shot, I think there's a ton of potential here.
I just read the abstract, and it strikes me that it seems horribly dated. This would be one of the degenerate branches of anthropology that Graeber is strawmanning in The Dawn of Everything. I couldn't imagine why anyone would bother with it? It's so firmly well established that it's bad science...Innit? Or is that just the view from my little branch in the academic web?
Greg Clark is an economic historian, not an anthropologist. And I doubt it's "firmly well established that it's bad science", so it is indeed likely just the view from your little branch. Graeber, on the other hand, frequently produced easily demonstrated falsehoods
Thank you for the correction, and for the recommendations. I've got the patience for all of them, and no, that stuff is not too old to be interesting. I am interested in old stuff when it's not been too thoroughly debunked (and sometimes even then...) It's pretty recent that I've begun to take interest in history, but so far I've gathered this much: Graeber got a whole lotta popular praise taking advantage of people not being familiar with the basics of anthropology. I was one of them :p So I'm trying to set my misconceptions straight now. I'll be enjoying the reading material, thank you.
Yes, it is unfinished, and I'll downvote it. But if the reviewer decides to finish the review eventually, perhaps they can give us a link in some Open Thread or Classified Thread. The bits that were in the review have hooked me up enough that I would enjoy reading the full review.
That one seems to end only part way into a review with the last three sections being only a quote or some bullets, and does not seem to conclude in anyway. The early bit of the review was quite strong, but it seems like it was abandoned.
For those of you who don't trust your internal random number generator, here's an extremely simple website I made that just displays a random title from the list Scott posted. Hopefully that biases the reviews away from the A's.
Probably we should wait a couple of days at least; there's a few reviews I'd like to talk about, and one review at least where I want to engage with something from the book, but it's better to wait until everyone gets a chance to read their choices.
Well, I seem to have broken my own self-imposed moratorium on comments on reviews with the Practical Guide to Evil, so let me get stuck in to the one I really wanted to get stuck in to.
The review of Sam Harris' "Letter to a Christian Nation", which is an excellent review, and it's not the review I have a beef with. It's the dang attitude in the books by Harris, thanks to gems like the following:
"Harris ends his book Waking Up with this vivid anecdote:
Sometime around her third birthday, my daughter asked, “Where does gravity come from?” … We could have told her, “Gravity might be God’s way of dragging people to hell, where they burn in fire, and you will burn there forever if you doubt that God exists.” No Christian or Muslim can offer a compelling reason why we shouldn’t have said such a thing—or the moral equivalent—and yet that would have been nothing less than the emotional and intellectual abuse of a child."
Well, I can't speak for Muslims, but this Christian has no problem saying "The reason you shouldn't have said such a thing, Sammy boy, is because it's bloody stupid. You want a pre-scientific, Christian explanation for gravity? Turns out we got one right here!
Gravity is Desire."
I've mentioned this before on here in another long comment chain but let me repeat it, more seriously this time. The idea of the "attractive" force in Nature, which moderns call "gravity", was also a topic in Mediaeval times and indeed before. All things move according to their nature, and have a natural place to be, and want to be in that place. Some things move downward because of natural heaviness, some things move upward. Fire is the lightest, in that sense, and 'wants' to move 'upward' to its natural place in the heavens, hence the stars.
And thus the motion of the heavens is explained, due to that desire or love. Take it away, C.S. Lewis, in "The Discarded Image", which I will quote at length in a foot-note to all this.
Very briefly, Gravity is the motion of all things in the Universe driven by Desire, as they wish to move closer to that which they Love, which is God, the Beloved as the most perfect and desirable in existence. As I said, I can't speak for the Muslims since I have no idea of their conception of Hell, but no Christian would have said that gravity is God dragging the sinful to eternal perdition. Hell might be at the very lowest part of creation (the centre, in other words, at the middle of the Earth) but that was because it was *furthest* away from God, the most *repulsed* instead of *attracted*. And Earth is at the centre not because it's evil or that God is dragging sinners to Hell, but because it is made up of the mixture of elements and the heaviest elements sink to the bottom and settle there, like the classical soil separation experiment we've all done in secondary school science:
And this is what passes for a public intellectual today? Sammy the Harry can't even do the basic reading; no, he has his mind already made up that religion (especially the Abrahamic religions) are the worstest most evilest things ever, and hence those who hold to them must be awful horrible wicked monsters.
So he makes up what he imagines awful horrible wicked monsters would say, attributes that to them, and then piously folds his hands and mims up his mouth and goes "Why would you abuse a little sweet innocent baby child like that?" What's even weaker than a strawman - a tissue man?
Ironically, according to the review of Harris' works, he takes a position on lying and the need for honesty slap-bang in accord with that of St. Augustine. You know, one of the awful horrible wicked monsters.
How, I ask you, am I supposed to take Sammy The Whammy seriously after all this?
Here are those excerpts from Lewis' "The Discarded Image" about Mediaeval Christian conceptions of the structure of the universe, including gravity:
"The fundamental concept of modern science is, or was till very recently, that of natural ‘laws’, and every event was described as happening in ‘obedience’ to them. In medieval science the fundamental concept was that of certain sympathies, antipathies, and strivings inherent in matter itself. Everything has its right place, its home, the region that suits it, and, if not forcibly restrained, moves thither by a sort of homing instinct.
…Thus, while every falling body for us illustrates the ‘law’ of gravitation, for them it illustrated the ‘kindly enclyning’ of terrestrial bodies to their ‘kindly stede’ the Earth, the centre of the Mundus.
…In the Mundus which God built out of that raw material we find them only in combination. They combine to form the four elements. The union of hot and dry becomes fire; that of hot and moist, air; of cold and moist, water; of cold and dry, earth. (In the human body they combine with a different result, as we shall see later.) There is also a Fifth Element or Quintessence, the aether; but that is found only above the Moon and we mortals have no experience of it. In the sublunary world—Nature in the strict sense—the four elements have all sorted themselves out into their ‘kindly stedes’. Earth, the heaviest, has gathered itself together at the centre. On it lies the lighter water; above that, the still lighter air. Fire, the lightest of all, whenever it was free, has flown up to the circumference of Nature and forms a sphere just below the orbit of the Moon.
The architecture of the Ptolemaic universe is now so generally known that I will deal with it as briefly as possible. The central (and spherical) Earth is surrounded by a series of hollow and transparent globes, one above the other, and each of course larger than the one below. These are the ‘spheres’, ‘heavens’, or (sometimes) ‘elements’. Fixed in each of the first seven spheres is one luminous body. Starting from Earth, the order is the Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn; the ‘seven planets’. Beyond the sphere of Saturn is the Stellatum, to which belong all those stars that we still call ‘fixed’ because their positions relative to one another are, unlike those of the planets, invariable. Beyond the Stellatum there is a sphere called the First Movable or Primum Mobile. This, since it carries no luminous body, gives no evidence of itself to our senses; its existence was inferred to account for the motions of all the others. And beyond the Primum Mobile what? The answer to this unavoidable question had been given, in its first form, by Aristotle. ‘Outside the heaven there is neither place nor void nor time. Hence whatever is there is of such a kind as not to occupy space, nor does time affect it.’
…All power, movement, and efficacy descend from God to the Primum Mobile and cause it to rotate; the exact kind of causality involved will be considered later. The rotation of the Primum Mobile causes that of the Stellatum, which causes that of the sphere of Saturn, and so on, down to the last moving sphere, that of the Moon.
…God, we have said, causes the Primum Mobile to rotate. A modern Theist would hardly raise the question ‘How?’ But the question had been both raised and answered long before the Middle Ages, and the answer was incorporated in the Medieval Model. It was obvious to Aristotle that most things which move do so because some other moving object impels them. A hand, itself in motion, moves a sword; a wind, itself in motion, moves a ship. But it was also fundamental to his thought that no infinite series can be actual. We cannot therefore go on explaining one movement by another ad infinitum. There must in the last resort be something which, motionless itself, initiates the motion of all other things. Such a Prime Mover he finds in the wholly transcendent and immaterial God who ‘occupies no place and is not affected by time’. But we must not imagine Him moving things by any positive action, for that would be to attribute some kind of motion to Himself and we should then not have reached an utterly unmoving Mover. How then does He move things? Aristotle answers, κινεῖ ὡς ἐρώμενον, ‘He moves as beloved’. He moves other things, that is, as an object of desire moves those who desire it. The Primum Mobile is moved by its love for God, and, being moved, communicates motion to the rest of the universe."
I've seen people talk about being screwed up by being taught about Hell. In particular, R A Wilson was told that demons would drop glass in his eyes (probably in Hell) and it resulted in sinus problems that didn't clear up without some serious work.
However, that's no excuse for Harris to make up something so nasty and random.
From memory: Lewis said something to the effect that medieval physics talked about things moving by affection, which is shared with pigeons, while modern talk about objects obeying laws of motion presents them as citizens.
Hell is a very contentious subject, and people have indeed been exposed to over-lurid and over-eager descriptions of it, and harmed by the same. I have no problem with anyone pointing that out.
What I do have a problem with is a guy boasting of his smarts and intelligence and how he's too cool to be caught by dumb religion, inventing [expletive deleted] horseshit where, if he could bother his arse to spend ten minutes on goddamn Google, he would find that there is already in existence an answer to the question which is *not* the one he thinks there is.
If I went around saying the Four Atheist Horsemen of whom Harris was one, were claiming that it's okay to have sex with six year old kids, I don't think I could weasel out of it with "No freethinker or agnostic can offer a compelling reason why I shouldn’t have said such a thing (because that's what my view of what those godless Hell-bound sinners tells me they'd probably endorse)".
I mean, my religion binds me to say that I *can't* even say Harris is going to Hell, nobody will know for sure until he dies and faces the particular judgement.
I wouldn't expect the average Catholic to know about medieval natural science. The decent answer would probably be to admit not knowing how gravity works.
Yes, there's no excuse for Harris just making things up.
That's why I'm pissed-off. Yes, I wouldn't expect the average idiot in the street to know the finer points of gravity, they might have some vague recollections of that rubber sheet and weights thing:
But Sammy The Whammy is mean to to be The Smart Guy. He's so dweamy (if I go by all the fawning over him):
"Samuel Benjamin Harris (born April 9, 1967) is an American philosopher, neuroscientist, author, and podcast host. His work touches on a range of topics, including rationality, religion, ethics, free will, neuroscience, meditation, psychedelics, philosophy of mind, politics, terrorism, and artificial intelligence."
So Big Brain Smart I Know My Onions You Can't Tell Me Nuttin' Whammy comes out with his cute little anecdote about his three year old kid asking where does gravity come from?
And what does Mr. Just The Facts Lying Is Bad Honesty Is The Best Policy come out with? Goes into a swinging attack on Christians and Muslims, with no apparent self-consciousness about looking like a giant idiot, and certainly no attempt at all at finding out "Huh, what did those stupid mouth-breathers think back before we had SCIENCE!!!!?"
Just pulled it out of his ass and thinks *that* makes him look like the winner here.
Not what I'd expect from the expert on everything from spirituality to how to make beans on toast the right way. Yeah, I'm miffed.
I believe without evidence that the same impulse is behind both horror fiction and lurid descriptions of Hell. I'm not sure what that impulse is, possibly love of intensity, though Hell is also useful for social control, or at least can feel that way.
It's a good question - why do we like reading crime novels and the kind of crime novels that involve serial killers and gruesome crimes, and horror novels? It's the old notion of catharsis, but how does that work? Why do we enjoy reading about monsters and ghouls? Or going to see movies about them, and the gorier the better (for some at least)?
There's something in our psyche that responds to it, be it an evolutionary adaptation to living in a world of uncertainty and danger.
I can't believe Harris has no conception of hell or doesn't find it useful in life if only as a rhetorical shorthand. Where I live, people reference it pretty constantly. I'm not sure the dread remains, but it's a useful and satisfying concept, surely. At least in our culture.
I mean, just the other day, someone died, someone whose life work had been sort of the antithesis of our own values, and I announced this, and my husband said, "Well, you know what they say, hell ain't half full".
Now, he is not a Christian and wasn't really consigning anyone to hell, though he’d not object to it on principle, but I am picturing Sam Harris popping up to lecture us, about fueling his child's nightmares.
I sometimes remember, Bailey White's contention that the way to teach children to read is a Titanic-based curriculum.
> "I've seen people talk about being screwed up by being taught about Hell."
This is a side-topic from the original one, but it feels custom-made for me: Yeah! I would say that, coming into Christianity from a non-Christian background... I definitely picked up the sense "that people in the West will get really distressed about the topic of hell." I even sort of FEEL like "talking about hell is an instant-lose button* in any discussion where you are trying to help others love Jesus, except perhaps if you're talking to very very close friends who know you well and are already Christian." Now I said I FEEL that way; my reflexive reaction... I look at intellectually and thing "this is at the point where I tend to be less willing to talk about (or think about) hell ...than what I think would be helpful/truth-oriented."
That said, I think that the impression that an adult talking about hell leaves on a child has much to do with what's on the other end of the conversation: the tone, and what sort of personal pressure is being exerted, and does the adult have his or her own fears or anger leaking in to the background when speaking?
On the other hand, occasionally, the way conversations in my life actually PLAY OUT is glorious: One time I needed to teach a passage in which I would very unavoidably have to talk about heaven and hell (the parable of the rich man and Lazarus). That Sunday morning, I MIGHT have decided to, for my own need for humor and loosening-up, go search up a transcript of a Simpson's episode where they're in Sunday School. I hadn't remembered, but the kids in the episode repeatedly react to the Sunday School teacher like she's swearing each time she says the word "hell." Then I went and taught kids at church later that day, and no joke--a dear (not very churchgoing) student was sincerely and genuinely worried that I was swearing each time I used the word "hell." It was, for all the world, like I was inside a PARODY, not a parable. When one of these things happens to over-serious super-neurotic ole me, it is sheer gift.
* Makes my choice of username seem kind of unfortunate, but there you go.
Children are a lot tougher than Sam Harris is. He may feel the concept of literal hell is too scary for his own sensitive ears but billions of children have handled the concept with aplomb. I don't personally believe in literal hell but it's Fine.
If he wants to say the concept of Hell is horrific, he's free to do so and it's an understandable stance to have. Hell *should* be horrific; this trend with shows like "Lucifer" and "Hazbin Hotel" to tidy it up and make it somehow appealing because it's fun or at least the Devil has his heart in the right place is terrible to me.
But to invent some crappy just-so story about "and this is how Christians, who are all hardcore Calvinists and don't let their pretences otherwise fool you, oh and they are also idiots and too stupid to understand science either, would explain gravity" - yeah, that's when I want to start hitting him over the head with a feather pillow.
He's staking his claim, to any convincing he can do regarding his views, on being smart and accurate, yet he can't even bother with ten minutes of looking up about "what did Christians ascribe gravity to?" but instead makes up this nonsense out of his own little id.
No editor at the publishers seems to have mentioned any of this to him either, but that is less surprising. Editing seems to be a lost art in the modern world, and besides I'm assuming the publisher assumed the audience for such books would be anti-religious so would just lap up all "yeah the dumb violent Christians are exactly like that!" anecdotes.
In the list on main page, "What Came Next" and "My Thoughts," which seem to be subheaddings of the "Righteous Victims" review appear on their own lines.
I would say: if it bothers you, then adjust your vote accordingly, either now or in the finals if it makes it there. It's a grey zone, so I doubt that Scott would like to start disqualifying contestants, especially because people will feel differently about such a case. Last year there were also some edge cases, like a comparing review of two books, and a review of some technical report or so.
Was wondering that, but it's got a stronger claim in that they all get printed in one physical book. Same with The Lord of the Rings, which is either one, three, or six books but has been published as one complete compilation in the past. I don't think anyone's ever consolidated The Wheel of Time into one physical book, because if you did it would take three men to lift it.
If the OT were published as individual books, which ones would be surprising in sales volume, do you think?
I think Psalms, Genesis, and Exodus would clearly be up there in volume. Numbers would almost certainly have the lowest sales volume from the Torah, but still high just because it's Torah and some people feel obligated to complete the set. Maybe Deuteronomy is the 'bargain/paperback' version for those who don't want to shell out the cash for all five books in the set?
Kings 1-2 would almost certainly outsell Chronicles 1-2. Meanwhile, who's buying first Kings and not the sequel?
I feel like the minor prophets would almost certainly have low sales volumes.
Isaiah would be purchased as the kind of leatherbound volume people keep on their bookshelf to impress people without ever cracking it open.
Song of Solomon ... ? IDK, honestly.
What about the parts of the Bible protestants consider apocryphal? Would people buy the shorter version of Daniel, or would they pick up the one with Bel and the Dragon because they'd cost the same and who's going to buy the shorter version for the same price?
I'm realizing it's been so long since I've read these I don't even remember what's in most of them. Samson's in Judges, right? Judges would do okay.
I'm still holding out hope for a "Black Swan"-style movie adaptation of Ezekiel; bring the Son of Mad to the big screen and you'll get a solid boost. You might be able to do the same with Jeremiah, but, like, aimed at the teen girl demographic; give him a suave haircut and really play up how emotionally vulnerable he is all the time. Esthar's already been made into children's entertainment as a Veggie Tales episode, ride that success into the Y7 bank.
I feel like Job's success might fluctuate with the times, he'll sell worse in good times and better in bad. His love of salt and hatred of eggwhites will turn the dietary crowds against him.
I like the idea of Jeremiah as a heartthrob character. Crank it up a notch by making it one of those tragic Korean dramas, and tie it together with Lamentations as he gets dragged along into Babylon in the end and you'd have something unintentionally hilarious.
Isaiah - Favorite of the true intellectual and spiritual elite
Jeremiah - For those who can handle BOTH Isaiah & Kings
Ezekiel - Necessary for Latter Prophets Completionists
The 12 - See "Ezekiel", except for the very popular Jonah
Psalms - Already a separate book to people of many religions, including Islam and Lubavitch
Proverbs - Not too popular except during tough periods when the Gods of the Copybook Headings Return
Job - Not good for the internet age as the entire point of it is to spend a long long time engaged with Job's "everyman" justifications, otherwise the ending is meaningless
Song of Songs - Popular with the poetic
Ruth - Popular with Christian feminists
Lamentations - Same as today (for tough times and rememberances of such)
Ecclesiastes - Would be banned
Esther - Very popular
Daniel - Popular with apocalyptics
Ezra+Nehemiah - Popular with reformers and historians
Chronicles - Reference Text
P S. The Reviewer went all-in on Maccabees despite their non-canonical status among actual Hebrews. He also oversold his mockery of the Exilic Alphabet (in footnote), a theory less mocked by modern historians. Otherwise, nice review, if quite selective.
Is "Food of the Gods" meant to be H.G. Wells's "The Food of the Gods" (or "The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth," which Wikipedia gives as the full title)? Or is there some other book with that title?
I too thought it would be Wells, but it appears to be a different book:
"Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge. A Radical History of Plants, Drugs, and Human Evolution, by Terence McKenna"
Stopped reading right about there, it looks to be one of those fringe pop evolutionary psychology works like "The Aquatic Ape" that nobody takes seriously but still manage to hang around, this one seems to be based on "we got smart/big brains/developed consciousness because we were all high on magic mushrooms and other plants".
Every so often, somebody feels the need to do a scientific version of Graves' "The White Goddess".
It maybe random chance, but all of the 4 reviews I've randomly sampled with AlexanderTheGrand's randomizer (which BTW is not linked up top - that link sends to one of the review documents) seem to suffer from the same problem - they are all erudite, witty and clever - but all jump in medias res, and none do the bread and butter journalistic Who What Where When Why How of giving me a framework of the book, such that I am at a loss as to what the book is about, and whether I am reading a facsimile of the author's thoughts or of the reviewer's thoughts. "Context is the thing with feathers etc."
I think it's a common problem for any book reviewer. I never really know how much of basic book summary to put in. If there's too much, I feel like you might as well just read the book itself, or at least the wikipedia summary instead. If there's too little, anyone who hasn't read the book will be confused. OTOH a lot of these are famous books that a lot of people here *have* read, so it's just a waste of time to do repeat what the book was already saying.
If we're doing "high school book report" style, then it's mostly rehash to prove that you actually read and understood the book. If we're doing "academic paper" style, then you're expected to produce something new and original, and you can assume anyone reading it is already familiar with the book. I'm not sure there's a good middle ground.
I've thought about this before, and I think the best way (not that I've done it yet in a publishable form) is nested TL;DRs - start with an executive summary, then an abstract, then a meatier pass through and finally the long rambling et cetera. In any case a summary of the content is essential for the reader - either to know what it's about, or having read it yourself, to see whether you agree with the reviewer as to what is even in the book.
Scott mentioned that he was reserving a few finalist slots for fiction, since most of the winners in the past were overwhelmingly nonfiction technical reviews.
I think there's a Substack setting to turn emails off. I don't get emails and I can't remember making an email rule, so that seemed the most likely explanation.
Previously when I tried turning off emails it also unsubscribed me from anything I turned emails off for. I reached out to Substack support about it and they confirmed there was no way to subscribe without receiving emails -- so I just made a rule to delete any email recieved from Substack, as recommended above.
Click on your user icon in the top right to show the drop-down options. Choose Manage Subscription. Turn off the option to receive emails for new posts.
Reading these book reviews reminds me that I've got a bunch of books that I acquired cheaply secondhand (mostly from library book sales and the like, 50 cents apiece) that I really ought to read.
Presumably, Caba means voting for your own review a bunch of times, giving yourself the highest score, and asking all your friends/family to do the same.
What if you don't specifically tell them who to vote for, but you have a big social media following who are all interested in the specific sort of book you reviewed (eg ww2 history, manga, russian literary novels, whatever)? Linking that sort of niche obvious in big numbers is obviously going to skew the vote.
I'm not sure if there's IP logs or anything like that, but I figure if Scott sees a bunch of 10/10 reviews for the same book in a matter of minutes, that'd be something suspicious enough to be noticed.
Is there a way to cast different votes for different reviews of the same book? For example, "Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will" has two reviews. One is by S.F., and the other is by G.H.T.
As a temporary kludge, perhaps one could include in the "email" field a note saying "I'm voting for this review not that one" followed by one's actual email. It doesn't look like there's a character limit in the text box.
I'm glad there is a lot of variety in this batch. I feel like the last few were 75% "Here's a review of some nonfiction book about a metaprocess of some kind that explains everything or one neat trick/hack that can solve man's problems." I'm fond enough of big, bold ideas but sometimes people can't see the trees for the forest.
I'm attempting to read this on my phone with sporadic internet (underground), and Google Docs with giant documents is really janky – jumps about, loads slowly and is way too easy to accidentally close. Enough work goes into these that I think it would warrant a mini-site where each review has a stable HTML page, if anyone felt like creating it. That could easily also host the randomiser, review form, archive etc.
I suspect a copy-paste issue - there are other reviews with the same problem. It's a shame, I thought it was a cracking review but I would really have liked to have seen the images. If anyone's wondering whether or not to read it based on this, do read it - the images aren't required to understand it. But I would like to see them.
Can anyone enlighten me as to the sense of the word double (adjective, then verb) in this passage from the review of Chesterton's epic poem of Alfred (which I am enjoying):
Wild stared the Danes at the double ways
Where they loitered, all at large,
As that dark line for the last time
Doubled the knee to charge—
The Danes were celebrating, no longer in battle rank. The remnants of Wessex men turn to charge once more. But "double the knee"? What are the "double ways"?
"One of the most common phrases said in athletics is Bend Your Knees. It is an important phrase with good reason. When an athlete bends their knees correctly they are in a better position to move quicker in any direction."
Worth knowing, and related to the British "on the back foot" which is also about movement.
I've seen a claim in _The Sports Gene_ that an excellent test of athletic potential is having a person run a short distance, turn around, and run back. If they can do it quickly, they have athletic potential. I wonder if the test is checking for intuitive understanding of legs and momentum.
I've seen discussion, in the context of soccer, of the distinction between being quick and being fast, and I think that's it: you can be fast running in a straight line or when you know what is happening, but to be quick means being able to react faster and to make those kind of changes in direction without losing momentum.
The "double ways" refers to a crossroads (place where two roads come together) that the battle is occurring on, which is context that may have been in part of the poem that the review did not quote.
Now I'm on to the review of "The Beauties: Essential Stories" by Checkhov.
I read out to my companion the reviewer's footnote, after explaining his deep antipathy to the short story form:
"1. When I’m sitting in a dentist waiting room and there’s an outdated issue of The Atlantic lying on the table, I’ll skim through it. “Ah Trump. He’s not a good man,” I might mutter to myself, stroking my chin as I read their latest coverage. “Ah Artificial Intelligence. Going to lead to profound and unpredictable change, that’s for sure.” But, when I get to the Fiction section, I will skip it. I would genuinely rather watch paint dry than read ten more half-baked pages of realist fiction about a young New York City liberal arts grad’s dating issues or a child of immigrants’ struggle with being “caught between two worlds.”
He replied that as the contemporary novels will also be about those same things, it is inescapably logical that there necessarily being less of it, argues in favor of the short story.
I totally agree that fiction seems cringe-y especially surrounded by interesting nonfiction pieces, as in the New Yorker of old. I too look away. But then "The Fiction Issue" is if anything worse. But I knew a woman who remarked my habit of reading the New Yorker on my lunch break - this was in a library - and said she only ever looked at it "for the story". So this may be something that divides the world in two.
I (or rather my partner, who is an AI wizard) gave some of my rating for the 2023 contest to Gemini Pro, together with the text of the book reviews. Then I gave it the text of some other book reviews and asked it to predict my ratings for those. The correlation with my true ratings was +0.34. That's positive, but it seems that I should still read the 2024 entries myself.
I genuinely appreciated someone not me doing a review of this 😁
I get what you mean about the Paradiso being the most boring part of the work, but I think as you get older and read it over again and again, it has more depth to it. There are funny little touches in it. But Purgatorio is wonderful, no disagreement there. When they meet Sordello, and he's fanboy raving over Virgil, and Virgil is looking at Dante like "Don't tell him" but Dante is so glad to meet another Virgil fanboy he can't help making some kind of smiling face and Sordello is "What? What's going on?" and then of course the truth comes out - oh, that's funny and beautiful all together.
Yes, I mixed up the two "poets who love Virgil and whose names begin with S". Statius is great, these little encounters along the way are just so pleasant and happy.
There's a bit in Paradiso I like. A woman in the heaven of Venus is asked whether she envies the people in higher heavens. She says that she is feeling as much bliss as she can hold, and she'd have to be a different person to hold more. (From memory.)
He sets up the traditional Ptolemaic heavenly spheres and then does away with the concept; Beatrice explains to him that the souls appearing to him are not *really* in the Moon, etc. but just doing this as a concession to his mortal understanding. In reality, everyone is in Heaven, in the Empyrean, but it will take time for Dante to get there as his capacity for understanding has to grow, in order to be able to take it all in.
It's in the Moon, where he asks that soul if she's not disturbed or envious by not being in a 'higher' place, and yes - it's a wonderful contrast to Hell, where everyone is jealous of their reputation on Earth and want to grab as much a they can. In Heaven, there isn't any "more", you have as much as you can have, so it makes no sense to apply earthly standards of "a bigger slice of the pie".
In Venus, it's the soul of what was a great sinner on Earth (again, it's hard to know if modern standards would consider it sinful to have many lovers) and he asks if she is disturbed by memories of her past life, and she just laughs. Having gone through Lethe, there is no longer any power in memory to cause distress. Heaven *is* joy, and indeed the only thing the memories of past sins do is make the joy even greater by contrast.
It's a much, much different take to the later one by Milton in "Paradise Lost" where he (wisely) doesn't try grappling with the question of mortals in Heaven. I think Milton succeeds best in depicting Eden, because he really isn't up to the task of depicting Heavenly joy; his angels and counsels of war and the conversation between the first Two Persons of the Trinity are very static and boring - lots of standing around reciting monologues.
Oh no, I understand that. And it's very different from the rest of the work, there's much less action and much more talking - and lecturing. It can be very skippable! It takes time to appreciate what is going on.
Even Botticelli had problems grappling with how to illustrate the text - it's hard to draw devils and not have them looking comic, somehow, which immediately works against the tone of the text:
Ik I'm super late to this thread, but I'm genuinely super curious as to why you say that, and what your specific meaning of random gibberish is. Honestly, I hope the review makes it, just for the comment section.
I found the first maybe 45 pages to be a summary of the standard post-rationalist fare (I mean seriously, another run through of Seeing Like a State). Competent, but not mind blowing.
I found the second 45 pages to be cultural criticism(?) Which occasionally took on an unjustified mystical tone.
Despite this generally dismissive response, I still didn't find much that was gibberish (i.e. it largely made sense), and despite it all, I really do feel that I was affected by it in a very real way. Ik that might seem like a non-sequitur from my 2nd and 3rd paragraphs, but as far as this type of (Lacanian, maybe) writing goes, I found it a (literally) effective example, if nothing else. I'm rambling about my experience, but I really am super curious about yours. Gibberish is just not the term I would use.
I suppose I am being a bit harsh. I'm bummed that it did not engage with the text because I am still waiting for somebody to actually talk about Sadly Porn was actually doing (Scott missed the point entirely, I believe).
But anyway, I think that there is a delicate art to writing these sorts of rambling musings. They have to either directly build up their cathedral of ideas in explicit language, or, if they are going to ramble and circle around it and try to show the reader how to build it up themselves, then they have to do a decently good job of it, so that you can get something useful out of it.
This review, like Sadly Porn itself, does the rambling and circling approach, but it did not, IMO, construct deep or useful ideas out of it. Actually the beginning, analyzing the contextual meaning of Narcissus, is very much an interesting thing to do, and it's exactly the sort of thing Sadly Porn does (with e.g. Oedipus and Freud and a bunch of other stuff, I can't remember). And the whole part about narcissism starts to get pretty interesting as a result---I'd read that essay, separately. And as I was I was reading it I was looking forward to how it would tie back into Teach's project (the blog TLP is very much about narcissism, after all).
But then it just... wanders away from that idea and never comes back? (It is mentioned again and again but not coherently, not building further on the opening ideas.) Instead it just wanders to other ACX/SSC-adjacent concepts. We get some James Scott, we get some Ribbonfarm/Gervais Principle, we get some Yudkowsky-style rationalism (I'm just skimming sections and mentioning what they're about), we get some takes on capitalism and liberalism, and then just twenty sections of apparently wherever the author's mind jumped to.
So if it had started with the narcissism bit and turned it into an interesting point about Sadly: Porn, TLP, or just society, then maybe it'd be a great review. Instead it starts strong, but not about the book at all, then wanders through the author's unstructured thoughts for like 50 pages, and then ends and says lol it never read the book. Well! Fine, that's why your review isn't very interesting. I think the author is very smart and glimpsed a really interesting narrative about narcissism (and maybe about TLP, I dunno), and started writing, but then when the ideas got less crisp they just descended into free-associating for a long time and hoping people would find it interesting. I did not.
Part one, if we want to call it that, the part that you liked, is a shockingly accurate description of the lived experience of being a narcissist, pardon me, a person with narcissistic tendencies, I should probably say. I agree that this would work standalone and that the whole thing is too long. I don't think this part is strong on original ideas but I have not seen these ideas summarised like this.
Part two, I read as an analysis - "psychoanalysis" would be a cheap but ultimately inaccurate pun here - of this community. The author is retreading some ideas that are fundamental to this community, to then gesture at what they might be missing. The criticism that we all already know these ideas is missing the point.
So here, I think, we have the paradox of the piece. If this were the kind of community that would vote such a pice as the winner of their contest, there would be no reason to write it in the first place. It is only interesting _because_ it is bound to fail in the contest. I started this thread to hopefully get some eyeballs on it before its inevitable(?) failure.
Well you can say the criticism is missing the point and that it's some higher work of clever art, sure, go for it. I think it's just not worth reading.
I enjoyed some of the review, but gave up after about twenty minutes. It seems to me that whenever someone gestures to “the community” or “the average ACX” reader, someone trots out the stats on Scott’s number of subscribers and readers vs number of commenters and engaged folk, and we all conclude that the readership or the blog is much more diverse than is represented in the comments, at the meet-ups, or any other thing. I think most people who read the blog don’t fall into whatever “community” you are referring to and thus find any analysis or criticism of it to be less interesting or meaningful than it seems that you do.
Point of clarification: when I said "this community" I was, in the terms of our host, referring to the ideology, as preached by our host, as opposed to the movement. You are correct that I do not have direct insight into the movement other.
The review of Real Raw News caused me some trouble. It's a prolix, unpolished review, but at the end it raises an issue worth thinking about ... and then just leaves it.
I'm sorry to put this here but I might forget another time.
But I'd anyone is reading "one thousand ways to please a husband", and notes the comment on getting fresh milk, they might be interested in a book called "Care and Feeding of the Southern Infant", published in 1920, which also discourses in detail how to get fresh milk for feeding their baby, and other considerations on baby food in 1920.
I am totally going to read that review--I've skimmed it, read a bit, and the "atmosphere" that book / review looks fairly delightful!
(Though the "meme-generation" part of my brain told me I wanted to make a meme containing a Rod-Serling-esque "It's a Cookbook!" moment* ironically "warning" readers of its contents!)
The Remains of the Day review was excellent and completely convinced me to read the book, but is so short as to be difficult to review highly. Great work to the author if they see this though!
The review of "the Old Testament" began to annoy me after about 5 lines, when the author wrote "I was using the version with 39 chapters (or “books”) that is
deemed superior by most fans and experts."
Catholics by themselves are 51% of all Christians, and Orthodoxes are an other 11%. Most fans and expert don't agree with the Protestant canon. Like, try imagining that there are people outside of the US maybe ?
Holy hell, that review is a fantastic troll. I was pretty solidly debating whether to give it a low score because it's not really a book review, or a high score because it's something I wish I could write.
Then I realized I was only a third of the way through the thing. Low score it is.
I ignored that because my priors are that someone who is going to write a review of the Bible, unless they're the Pope, is going to be a Protestant with their "trimmed down due to Luther's neuroses" version 😁
The reviewer wrote somewhere at the start that religious people probably shouldn't read the review. There are way more outrageous claims after the one that annoyed you (so it's good that you quit early).
Personally, I found the review utterly brilliant, huge kudos to the author!
I enjoyed the 4 hour work week review and thought it had a great thesis. I thought the question of moral universality (not everyone can do a 4 hour work week because society wouldn't function, so a 4 hour work week is bad or a problem in some way) was interesting but I'm not sure it applies. Wouldn't that approach apply to many seemingly positive things e.g. not everyone can become a nurse, because we need farmers, but obviously it's not bad if someone wants to become a nurse.
I read the Atlas Shrugged review and it wasn't bad, but not enough new in it. It's true that Ayn Rand didn't like the real world-- she preferred the simplifications of art-- but there wasn't enough new in the review for my taste.
It's funny-- I read a Rand biographer (sorry, name forgotten) who had a great revelation after digging through a lot of Rand's writing that Rand didn't like the real world. It's right there in Atlas Shrugged.
I've reached the level of sophistication where I believe Rand is neither entirely right nor entirely wrong. There really are organizations that advocate self-sacrifice (these days, sometimes disguised as human potential). It's in some governments, businesses, religions, political movements, cults, families, and marriages. I wish Rand were still around. I'd like to see what she would say about our scammy world.
At the same time, humanity needs some generosity to function, and a *little* too much generosity may be better than drastically too little generosity. Any thoughts about good fiction handling these issues?
Sufi saying: If you make yourself a donkey, there will be someone to ride you.
I've reached the point where I regret the invention of language. People can make *anything* sound good.
I think that's an oversimplification of Rand's view, though one that people commonly make. When Rand talks about "altruism," she means what Auguste Comte, who at least popularized the word and perhaps invented it, meant by it: total dedication to the welfare of others and total indifference to one's own good (seriously, Comte criticized Jesus for saying "love your neighbor as yourself" because a good person would not love themself). The word has taken on a range of less drastic meanings over time, starting with Comte's buddy John Stuart Mill, who wanted it to include acts of concern for others generally; these days biologists talk about "reciprocal altruism" as meaning "I'll make you better off if you make me better off," which economists call "trade." Rand makes a point of saying that she is not objecting to generosity or benevolence. There are scenes in AS that illustrate this---notably Dagny Taggart's meeting with the tramp, Jeff Allen, at the end of part two (she stops the conductor from throwing him off the train and invites him to dinner).
There are basically three things that different people could mean by altruism:
1) helping other people, regardless of how and why
2) helping other people, because doing so makes me feel happy, but there is no reciprocation or strategic advantage from doing so
3) helping other people, with no reward whatsoever, not even a good feeling
If I understand it correctly, only 3 is truly altruistic according to Comte. If helping other people makes you happy, you are just another selfish asshole who cares about their own feelings. From that perspective, even most effective altruist would not qualify as real altruists.
From Rand's perspective, I think 1 and 2 are okay; it's 3 she argues against. Her use of the word "selfishness" is a bit unusual, but I think we can literally translate it as "increasing one's own utility function". Should you help others? If doing so makes you happy / is the right thing to do according to your values, yes. If you achieve a greater value in return, also yes. Otherwise, no. From this perspective, effective altruists are "selfish" -- and that makes them the good guys.
(The evil thing would be e.g. to convince people to donate their money to some bureaucratic organization that spends 100% of the money on its own overhead, or to a political organization that actively makes the world a worse place, simply because of some emotional blackmail like: "this is what you should do to signal being good". Giving for the sake of giving, not because it actually does anything that you would consider good.)
It seems like no one sane should advocate for Comte's definition, but... First, you can use this definition to devalue good deeds of your opponents. (Yes, he did X, but he *only* did it because he wanted Y; even when Y = feeling good.) Second, it could be used to defend failed projects. (You should support X because it achieves Y. Oops, actually X does not achieve Y. Anyway, you should support X because you should support X, and you are a bad person if you don't.)
>but I think we can literally translate it as "increasing one's own utility function".
This is complicated by Rand's philosophy only considers "rational" preferences to be valid, and her definition of rational has a lot of stuff packed into it. Internally-contradictory preferences aren't rational, of course. Nor are preferences that are contrary to your "nature", such as self-destructive desires. She explicitly cites Aristotelian virtue ethics as part of her understanding of what constitutes a valid preference, and the idea of morality extending from being true to your own nature sounds familiar to me from both classical Stoicism and from Thomas Aquinas's writings.
As someone who agrees with a lot of Rand's ideas (though not all), I think much of what you say is on the right track. In particular, yes, as far as I can tell, Comte defined altruism as 3). What that says about Comte's sanity you are welcome to judge for yourself. I think Rand's take was that people often praised Comte, and praised altruism, and then guilt tripped people who pursued their own interests (a big dramatic point in AS, where she shows Hank Rearden suffering that from his family)—but didn't want to think about how inhuman Comte's actual ethics was, so they diluted it, rather than saying that it was fundamentally wrong in principle.
I think it's questionable whether Rand would accept 2). To borrow a distinction from Plato's Euthyphro, we can ask "Is X in your interest because it makes you happy, or does X make you happy because it's in your interest?" Rand says explicitly that "happiness is the purpose of ethics, but not the standard." That is, she's an egoist, but not a SUBJECTIVE egoist; she rejects the argument "this is in my interest because I want it" (which I think is perfectly sound; people want all sorts of things that are not in their own interest, from heroin to love affairs such as the one that damaged Rand's own marriage to centrally planned economies)—and she rejects hedonism for similar reasons. Her idea is that what is truly in your interest ultimately comes down to what enables your survival as the kind of living organisms you are; that living for your rightly understood interests will make you happy (which is what I think Erica Rall is pointing to, rightly); and if helping other people fits within that, then it's a good thing, and one that she wouldn't call "altruistic."
And all that makes talking about utility functions problematic, because utility functions are subjective, and people can have messed up utility functions.
> I've reached the point where I regret the invention of language. People can make anything sound good.
Deception is everywhere, but to me the tragedy is that it parasitizes on hope. Lies wouldn't be as much of a problem, if we didn't want so much to believe. And it leaves behind husks with all their hope devoured, or zombies who cling tightly to the lies that are puppeting their brain, staring resolutely forward in fear of what they would see if they looked inside or behind.
I found it annoying that the reviewer obviously assumed that the reader has read the book, or is at least very familiar with the content. I haven't and ain't, and it was barely possible to follow some parts. It became very unconvincing because the reviewer just formulated theses without giving support from the book. Or only in the form of "as shown by the great monologue of XYZ", without even mentioning the topic of this monologue.
Cheers to everyone who submitted. A lot of these are suffering from “this is just a summary”. I give low score for that, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t enjoy the read!
Agreed, thanks to all the authors. If any criticisms of your reviews get you down, just remember the great quote from Teddy Roosevelt:
"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better.
The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds..."
Against Democracy: I've read the book and thought this review summarised it well and added some good commentary, but it didn't really expanded much beyond the book. That's what I call an 8/10, calibrating from the reviews from last year. Brenan's proposal for 10% less democracy seemed weird to me because it's not that different from 100% democracy but losses the symbolic benefits like universal equality, I'm guessing it's just meant as a transitional step. I'd have also liked more discussion, in the book and review, about how many issues have "correct" answers. Rationalists can tend a bit contrarian, if Brenan's definition of "correct" == the academic consensus, how sceptical should we be?
Piranesi: loved the book and have read a fair amount of online discussion on it and the review still had a fresh perspective on it and articulated what I like about it.
Politics on the Edge: Difficult to rate, it meandered quite a long way from the book itself, and even as a Brit who's fairly into politics/economics I wasn't really sure what to make of the analysis it made. 7/10, but that might be unfairly low.
It was lovely to see a nice review of the favorite book of a five year old of my acquaintance. I didn't expect to read a review of Winnie ther Pooh which was fun to read as an adult (without wearing my parenting hat). Kudos
Have you ever encountered The Pooh Perplex, which contains essays on the Pooh books written in parodies of the style of psychoanalytic, Marxist, Roman Catholic, and other schools of literary criticism?
In the list at the end of the post "Road of The King" is listed as "My Thoughts Road of The King". The title is correct in the documents and survey , but means someone looking for It under M won't see it.
Impressed by those who decided to review the Illiad, the Old Testament and the Hebrew Bible ; as well as the Divine Comedy, perhaps the most difficult of all...
Whoever wrote The Divine Comedy review... is a genius! I've never read anything so distinct about Dante's masterpiece. What I've loved the most is the author's effort to explain the power of single key words, like hell or abandon or "buio", and the original phonetic evocations. It's a privilege for anyone who's as fascinated by the Italian language as I am.
I think the "L - P" doc is missing; it links to "A - D" again.
Can confirm.
yes,
Thanks, fixed.
The random reviewer picker link seems to be broken; it's consistently linking to the start of the L-P review document.
Yea, it is linking over and over to the same review in the L-P document
Yes, still doing it for me too as of 11 PM Central.
Is it fixed now?
Yes! Took me to four different books with a wide alphabetical spread this time instead of the same one over and over.
In addition to the random reviewer picker link being wrong, it seems the actual random review picker (and also just like, the list of reviews) needs to be altered to account for the two different reviews of "Determined". Currently it's doing it by book, not by review, even when the same book has multiple reviews.
It's not fixed for me. Can we get another link?
Instead of using that link, I've been using the random review selector that was linked further down and which can be found here: http://justforrandomstaticfiles.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/random_list_element.html
So excited!!! Thank you for doing this!
I think next year you should put a character limit on those reviews to keep it manageable.
This comes up every year. Last year's winner was 22k words long, which implies voters actively select for long reviews (nothing else was nearly that long). In general, there seems to be a constant loop of "The reviews are too long, make them shorter" > "the winning reviews are consistently the longest of the nominees, so people seem to prefer long ones".
I prefer long reviews if they are good, short if they are poor. Good (as in good to read) reviews are more likely to win. I don’t know if this preference structure is solvable.
I think its fine for the finalists to be long. But its awkward at this initial stage, when there's so many and we just dont have time to read them all. It's also hard for the reviewers, knowing that to have a serious chance at winning they need to write what is basically a thesis on the book, but first itll just go to a slush pile with random anonymous reviewers.
But whatever length they are, some reviews are going to be skipped. I don't care if it's only eighty words long, if I'm not interested in "How A Concrete Block Is Made", I'm not going to read that (well, in fact, I would read that).
Okay, maybe something about economics or politics or whatever that doesn't grab my attention. There is certainly the flaw of "This is a good review but it would be even better reduced by one-third", but nobody is holding our noses to the grindstone here; if it's too long and now I'm bored, I stop reading and pick something else.
I think the solution is that if you notice that you are reading a bad review, then stop reading, rate it low, then start reading a different one. That way a bad long review doesn't take much more time than a bad short review.
If there are too many good reviews to read, that's I problem I'd like to have!
Very happy someone reviewed APGTE, since it's a great serial and deserves more exposure. Somewhat disappointed that they went with an AI-box theme instead of the even-more-visible and just as ACX-friendly theme of how institutions and incentives shape a society.
Also, the middle of the review seems to be cut out:
>There are also a couple plot points and world-building ideas which were clearly meant to have significance laid out in this first book, which never get re-examined or have any resolution. But these, 6635
same, I would really like to vote for A Practical Guide to Evil to give it more exposure yet the review was weak and I would not have voted for that review.
I have to say, I never heard of that and the review made me go "Isn't this just an updated version of The Overlord's List?" Also, "bisexual teenager" made me groan and go "I don't need to read something that is going to be lecturing me every five minutes about REPRESENTATION SMASHING THE GENDER BINARY SMASH THE PATRIARCHY".
Maybe it's not like that at all, but if you make a point of mentioning your protagonist is a peppy, zeppy, scrappy fighter against the existing order who is a girl (of course 'cos the lead has to be a girlboss) and bisexual (of course because plain old vanilla cis het is not alone boring, it's evil and wicked), then I'm going to 'nope' right out of there.
"How could I try to sell ACX subscribers on reading A Practical Guide to Evil (PGtE) by ErraticErrata (EE)?
Well, it’s got a plucky teenage bisexual protagonist making morally dubious choices"
You can stop right there, I'm sold - on I wouldn't read this thing if you held my eyes open with sporks.
Yep, entirely fair, what I would say is that the best recommendation I can give for the series is to read the prologue and first chapter. And I would give the elevator pitch that: This is a world that runs on stories, the first step of the villain's plan will always work, when you fight your nemesis the nemesis will win the first time, come to a draw the second time, and you will win the third time, etc, except that these rules are knowable by characters in world, and can be manipulated thus. So it is both an homage to fantasy tropes and also turns them on their head and gets meta in a wonderful way. Also the worldbuilding is really good, and there's fantastic banter
Seems like today is my day to be a wet-blanket, because "meta" makes me groan. I think my brain is just tired, it wants plain and simple stories that are stories and not breaking the fourth wall 6-D chess plotlines nodding and winking at the audience.
I think Pratchett got away with it and can't really be improved upon: if you're in a desperate situation and say it's a million to one chance, everyone knows that those are the ones that work. So if you ever find yourself in a desperate situation, just say "This is a million to one chance" and then by the narrative laws of the universe, whatever you are going to do will work.
Hmm, very fair. It may not be for you, although I'd say it is that it's my favorite series of all time and I liked it better than Pratchett, although it's not quite the same in winking at the audience.
Yeah, you're not missing much IMO — I gave it a shot and it's real basic stuff, nothing really surprising or new... to my mind, anyway. The sort of pseudo-insightful stuff that's been floated a thousand times already, treated as if it's something nEw aNd ShOcKiNg.
I think the meta stuff isn't really as exciting as everything else. Everyone and their dog has pointed out that the heroes always win and pondered what it would be like if the villains got a fair shake. Where it gets *interesting* is when it ties the narratives to the cultures they're embedded in - the leaders of the Dread Empire don't win simply by saying "Let's not be over-the-top cartoon villains, that's dumb," they win by saying "what are the sociopolitical forces that incentivize Dread Emperors to launch foolhardy schemes to conquer the world, and how do we change them?"
(For all the big drama about "subverting patterns", Black's master plan basically boils down to "what if instead of brutally repressing our conquests, we instead found a local faction that we could convince to maintain the status quo because they hated the old system?" It's a very mundane strategy, the sort of thing that IRL colonial empires did all the time.)
Do they/does he or she end up "You know and I know and the dogs in the street know that Dread Lords and Evil Empires come crashing down because they're just begging to be overthrown by the first backwoods orphan with a scruffy old beggarman or witchy woods crone as an advisor, so how about if we skip all that part and jump right ahead to being an efficient Benevolent Dictatorship republic/'democracy' where we perfect the act of ballot-stuffing in order to always win every free election and the people get their say, so long as what they say is what we tell them to say?
Healthcare and a job for life for all, down the salt mines?"
The gimmick is bad, though. It's worth reading as a work of military fantasy, but you'd never know it!
>Well, it’s got a plucky teenage bisexual protagonist making morally dubious choices"<
Ooh, "Mass Effect: The Teenage Years" sounds intriguingly stupid, actually.
Haven't read the thing and don't intend to read it, so it would be too dismissive of me to say that it sounds like it would indeed involve a lot of stupidity 😀
(1) I've been that teenager (and older) making 'morally dubious choices' and I don't need to read no more about that kind of thing
(2) I don't care who the b-word is banging, that's her/xer/whatever pronoun in use's affair. Romance sub-plots don't interest me that much and I fear that the bi-ness would only really come into play for said stupid decisions.
I'm too old for that kind of story, in short, because plucky 15-19 year old making decisions I can see are gonna blow up in her face isn't interesting any more, it just has me yelling "that's a really stupid decision, why are you doing this?"
The story could be really good, the review honestly doesn't sell it, but neither does the achingly hip title. I sort of like "how to be good" stories, or even "well we tried to be good but turns out that's hard", not "oh yah gonna say we're evil but not, like, y'know, really evil like racist or transphobe or something like that, we're just evil 'cos The Man says we're evil so it's, like, *ironic*".
I'm not fourteen anymore, this doesn't impress me.
It's had the opposite effect these people want on me. I've always enjoyed fantasy novels and used to read anything that sounded interesting not caring who wrote it. I only ever used to look up who the writer was *after* I liked the book and wanted to find more by that writer. It meant I would read a good number of stuff by someone with a name like A. B. Jones and Jones ended up being a woman or a black person or whatever and it made 0 difference and I'd go read more books. Now, given how insufferable most speculative fiction has become it's actively become a good sign in the book's favor if it's written by some species of boring looking nerd white man. 25 years ago the 3 black people in the audience at the midnight release of the Fellowship of the Rings movie probably had interesting out of the box things to say. Today, in mainline fantasy the room is full of weird twenty something girlchildren who won't grow up and any of the 3 old white prototypical male nerds still hanging around are probably the ones with weird interesting out of the box things to say.
Word. I have seen so many mediocre by-the-(new-patriarchy-smashing-)numbers fantasy novels by Queer Black Nonbinary Genius DESTROYS White Heterosexual Masculine Fantasy!!!™ pushed so hard that I actively avoid anything highlighting the author's VictimCred®.
If I want Queer Black Genius SF, I'll go to Samuel Delany who's a better writer than the current crop of "Did I mention all my neuroses and illnesses mental and physical and also that you OWE it to me to read all my stuff and donate to my several begging-bowl apps and plus I work for a literary magazine that does land acknowledgements" treasures.
Well said.
This is why I don't like the review, the point of the work is not about bisexual girl boss at all, it was more about deep character interacting with incentive and narrative trope, competently written. Some characters had different sexual orientation because some people had different sexual orientation.
for example below you mentioned Terry Pratchett
>>> So if you ever find yourself in a desperate situation, just say "This is a million to one chance" and then by the narrative laws of the universe, whatever you are going to do will work.
actually happened multiples times in the work.
So many hard ones.
- Books I really like and want to promote, but with a poorly written review on simple technical measures...
- Reviews with a captivating and accurate summary, with a throwaway takeaway at the end where the "so what" is weak or uninteresting...
- Reviews that are all "so what" and I'm not sure I learned much about the underlying book...
- Reviews where I totally disagree with the premise, but concede it raises a really interesting point and want to promote it for discussion...
- Reviews I suspect may have been written anonymously by Scott... and while unsure how that would specifically bias my review, I try to then anti-bias my review to account for it, then worry I'm over-calibrating and proceed to anti-anti-bias it, and so on ad infinitum to the point where I've forgotten the content of the original review completely anyway.
Maybe I should try to hold tighter to the sum of:
(a) Is this good prose? (5 possible points)
- Do I enjoy reading it?
- Does it include a good description without too many details, nor too few?
(b) Does this deal with interesting ideas? (5 possible points)
- Is the book vaguely relevant to any interesting topic?
- Does it deal with it in a novel way?
- Does the review land on an interesting and compelling takeaway?"
What other rubrics are people considering?
Also the aspect of "New Evil" being (mostly) Consequentialist compared to Good's (mostly) Deontology, and those spots where Good crosses over into quite horrifying consequentialism, fits right in with Scott's old (pre-SSC) writings.
A Farewell to Alms was a book that had a big impact on my thinking, and I cite it frequently. This book review seems unfinished though, having sections saying to insert things later. It could also use a spellchecker, and not just that review.
Is it such big of a deal if there are typos, or "missing" parts that aren't absolutely necessary?
I think it's very forgivable.
Those are things you fix upon re-read. If they're still there then the author didn't re-read it. If even the author isn't willing to read the thing, why should anyone else?
It's more likely that the author is bad at time management, was still writing the review at the last minute, and failed to find the time to fix these issues.
Yes, this is what I was thinking.
In a situation like this, leaving in the intended-subheadings may provide useful information to readers who are interested in deciding whether they want to read the book themself.
Also, removing structure from ones writing because there are only 10 minutes left to the deadline wouldn't necessarily make it look more "smoothed over," except to a casual, skimming eye; edits leave "scuffs and scratches" in the writing unless you're able to take your time re-doing transitions and surrounding grammar.
Why do I want to read an unfinished review when there are lots of finished ones...?
Because Scott is asking us to read and rate each and every review.
So the question is not whether you should read a review, but how you should rate a review that you have read.
I mean, come on. Let's say that there is a review that is really fun and informative and interesting and stimulating, but it has typos and "missing parts". Does it stop being fun and informative and interesting and stimulating because of it?
well
...fine, fine, I GUESS not!
I'll read the damn unfinished ones too then >:(
Scott didn't ask us to read all of them.
"Please pick as many as you have time for, read them, and rate them using this form."
It sounds like you're bargaining with whether or not something has to be finished to have high value.
This is a familiar line of argument. I know this one so well.
And I would imagine many of the other perpetually-online rationalist -adjacent members of this community might find a glimmer of recognition in it too. Like an old friend we all share.
Sometimes we struggle to get things done. Perfectly normal! So we just ship. We hope people will recognize the underlying bits of brilliance and help carry our baby over the finish line on our behalf.
I have no judgment on a person for that. The whole time I'm honestly thinking "one of us! one of us!" I'm literally looking across my desktop at my own half-finished review. So much nonjudgment.
But the author should know that this is, at best, a high variance strategy.
If this one doesn't make it into the finals circle, that's ok, there was still high potential in terms of ideas and writing quality. I'm really hoping the author blocks off some time next year to take another shot, I think there's a ton of potential here.
I just read the abstract, and it strikes me that it seems horribly dated. This would be one of the degenerate branches of anthropology that Graeber is strawmanning in The Dawn of Everything. I couldn't imagine why anyone would bother with it? It's so firmly well established that it's bad science...Innit? Or is that just the view from my little branch in the academic web?
Greg Clark is an economic historian, not an anthropologist. And I doubt it's "firmly well established that it's bad science", so it is indeed likely just the view from your little branch. Graeber, on the other hand, frequently produced easily demonstrated falsehoods
https://www.bradford-delong.com/2014/11/monday-smackdown-in-the-absence-of-high-quality-delong-smackdowns-back-to-david-graeber.html
If you've got the patience for it, there's a symposium where specialists from many fields point out things wrong with that book:
https://crookedtimber.org/2012/02/28/seminar-on-david-graebers-debt-admin-notice/
Or if you are less interested stuff that old, this is on the ideas of the last book published in his lifetime:
https://peterturchin.com/an-anarchist-view-of-human-social-evolution/
Thank you for the correction, and for the recommendations. I've got the patience for all of them, and no, that stuff is not too old to be interesting. I am interested in old stuff when it's not been too thoroughly debunked (and sometimes even then...) It's pretty recent that I've begun to take interest in history, but so far I've gathered this much: Graeber got a whole lotta popular praise taking advantage of people not being familiar with the basics of anthropology. I was one of them :p So I'm trying to set my misconceptions straight now. I'll be enjoying the reading material, thank you.
Yes, it is unfinished, and I'll downvote it. But if the reviewer decides to finish the review eventually, perhaps they can give us a link in some Open Thread or Classified Thread. The bits that were in the review have hooked me up enough that I would enjoy reading the full review.
That one seems to end only part way into a review with the last three sections being only a quote or some bullets, and does not seem to conclude in anyway. The early bit of the review was quite strong, but it seems like it was abandoned.
Can I vote on as many as I have time for, or should I stick to 2–3?
As many as you have time for. The more votes, the better the decision.
As many as you can!
For those of you who don't trust your internal random number generator, here's an extremely simple website I made that just displays a random title from the list Scott posted. Hopefully that biases the reviews away from the A's.
http://justforrandomstaticfiles.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/random_list_element.html
As a fun aside, it's the first site I've ever made with ChatGPT, with the prompt
`Write the html and javascript for an extremely basic website that shows you one of the following three words randomly: "First," "Second," "Third."`
One could also paste the list into random.org's list randomizer: https://www.random.org/lists/
Hm, this should probably be updated to go by *review* rather than by *book*, since at least one book has multiple reviews.
And here's a Python program to do the same:
https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1q1dWtOS_dVlhy_H_5wOeVy2E996sFXSz?usp=sharing
Is it alright to put comments on reviews here, or should that wait for later?
Probably we should wait a couple of days at least; there's a few reviews I'd like to talk about, and one review at least where I want to engage with something from the book, but it's better to wait until everyone gets a chance to read their choices.
I'd say here - most of these won't make it to the finals, so there won't be a later!
Well, I seem to have broken my own self-imposed moratorium on comments on reviews with the Practical Guide to Evil, so let me get stuck in to the one I really wanted to get stuck in to.
The review of Sam Harris' "Letter to a Christian Nation", which is an excellent review, and it's not the review I have a beef with. It's the dang attitude in the books by Harris, thanks to gems like the following:
"Harris ends his book Waking Up with this vivid anecdote:
Sometime around her third birthday, my daughter asked, “Where does gravity come from?” … We could have told her, “Gravity might be God’s way of dragging people to hell, where they burn in fire, and you will burn there forever if you doubt that God exists.” No Christian or Muslim can offer a compelling reason why we shouldn’t have said such a thing—or the moral equivalent—and yet that would have been nothing less than the emotional and intellectual abuse of a child."
Well, I can't speak for Muslims, but this Christian has no problem saying "The reason you shouldn't have said such a thing, Sammy boy, is because it's bloody stupid. You want a pre-scientific, Christian explanation for gravity? Turns out we got one right here!
Gravity is Desire."
I've mentioned this before on here in another long comment chain but let me repeat it, more seriously this time. The idea of the "attractive" force in Nature, which moderns call "gravity", was also a topic in Mediaeval times and indeed before. All things move according to their nature, and have a natural place to be, and want to be in that place. Some things move downward because of natural heaviness, some things move upward. Fire is the lightest, in that sense, and 'wants' to move 'upward' to its natural place in the heavens, hence the stars.
And thus the motion of the heavens is explained, due to that desire or love. Take it away, C.S. Lewis, in "The Discarded Image", which I will quote at length in a foot-note to all this.
Very briefly, Gravity is the motion of all things in the Universe driven by Desire, as they wish to move closer to that which they Love, which is God, the Beloved as the most perfect and desirable in existence. As I said, I can't speak for the Muslims since I have no idea of their conception of Hell, but no Christian would have said that gravity is God dragging the sinful to eternal perdition. Hell might be at the very lowest part of creation (the centre, in other words, at the middle of the Earth) but that was because it was *furthest* away from God, the most *repulsed* instead of *attracted*. And Earth is at the centre not because it's evil or that God is dragging sinners to Hell, but because it is made up of the mixture of elements and the heaviest elements sink to the bottom and settle there, like the classical soil separation experiment we've all done in secondary school science:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=fhG7B0jF460
And this is what passes for a public intellectual today? Sammy the Harry can't even do the basic reading; no, he has his mind already made up that religion (especially the Abrahamic religions) are the worstest most evilest things ever, and hence those who hold to them must be awful horrible wicked monsters.
So he makes up what he imagines awful horrible wicked monsters would say, attributes that to them, and then piously folds his hands and mims up his mouth and goes "Why would you abuse a little sweet innocent baby child like that?" What's even weaker than a strawman - a tissue man?
Ironically, according to the review of Harris' works, he takes a position on lying and the need for honesty slap-bang in accord with that of St. Augustine. You know, one of the awful horrible wicked monsters.
How, I ask you, am I supposed to take Sammy The Whammy seriously after all this?
Here are those excerpts from Lewis' "The Discarded Image" about Mediaeval Christian conceptions of the structure of the universe, including gravity:
"The fundamental concept of modern science is, or was till very recently, that of natural ‘laws’, and every event was described as happening in ‘obedience’ to them. In medieval science the fundamental concept was that of certain sympathies, antipathies, and strivings inherent in matter itself. Everything has its right place, its home, the region that suits it, and, if not forcibly restrained, moves thither by a sort of homing instinct.
…Thus, while every falling body for us illustrates the ‘law’ of gravitation, for them it illustrated the ‘kindly enclyning’ of terrestrial bodies to their ‘kindly stede’ the Earth, the centre of the Mundus.
…In the Mundus which God built out of that raw material we find them only in combination. They combine to form the four elements. The union of hot and dry becomes fire; that of hot and moist, air; of cold and moist, water; of cold and dry, earth. (In the human body they combine with a different result, as we shall see later.) There is also a Fifth Element or Quintessence, the aether; but that is found only above the Moon and we mortals have no experience of it. In the sublunary world—Nature in the strict sense—the four elements have all sorted themselves out into their ‘kindly stedes’. Earth, the heaviest, has gathered itself together at the centre. On it lies the lighter water; above that, the still lighter air. Fire, the lightest of all, whenever it was free, has flown up to the circumference of Nature and forms a sphere just below the orbit of the Moon.
The architecture of the Ptolemaic universe is now so generally known that I will deal with it as briefly as possible. The central (and spherical) Earth is surrounded by a series of hollow and transparent globes, one above the other, and each of course larger than the one below. These are the ‘spheres’, ‘heavens’, or (sometimes) ‘elements’. Fixed in each of the first seven spheres is one luminous body. Starting from Earth, the order is the Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn; the ‘seven planets’. Beyond the sphere of Saturn is the Stellatum, to which belong all those stars that we still call ‘fixed’ because their positions relative to one another are, unlike those of the planets, invariable. Beyond the Stellatum there is a sphere called the First Movable or Primum Mobile. This, since it carries no luminous body, gives no evidence of itself to our senses; its existence was inferred to account for the motions of all the others. And beyond the Primum Mobile what? The answer to this unavoidable question had been given, in its first form, by Aristotle. ‘Outside the heaven there is neither place nor void nor time. Hence whatever is there is of such a kind as not to occupy space, nor does time affect it.’
…All power, movement, and efficacy descend from God to the Primum Mobile and cause it to rotate; the exact kind of causality involved will be considered later. The rotation of the Primum Mobile causes that of the Stellatum, which causes that of the sphere of Saturn, and so on, down to the last moving sphere, that of the Moon.
…God, we have said, causes the Primum Mobile to rotate. A modern Theist would hardly raise the question ‘How?’ But the question had been both raised and answered long before the Middle Ages, and the answer was incorporated in the Medieval Model. It was obvious to Aristotle that most things which move do so because some other moving object impels them. A hand, itself in motion, moves a sword; a wind, itself in motion, moves a ship. But it was also fundamental to his thought that no infinite series can be actual. We cannot therefore go on explaining one movement by another ad infinitum. There must in the last resort be something which, motionless itself, initiates the motion of all other things. Such a Prime Mover he finds in the wholly transcendent and immaterial God who ‘occupies no place and is not affected by time’. But we must not imagine Him moving things by any positive action, for that would be to attribute some kind of motion to Himself and we should then not have reached an utterly unmoving Mover. How then does He move things? Aristotle answers, κινεῖ ὡς ἐρώμενον, ‘He moves as beloved’. He moves other things, that is, as an object of desire moves those who desire it. The Primum Mobile is moved by its love for God, and, being moved, communicates motion to the rest of the universe."
And people wonder why I like the 13th century better?
13th century guy: Gravity is Love
ma già volgeva il mio disio e ’l velle
sì come rota ch’igualmente è mossa,
l’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle. (Par. 33.143-45)
but my desire and will were moved already —
like a wheel revolving uniformly — by
the Love that moves the sun and the other stars.
21st century guy: Gravity is God dragging you to Hell to burn for all eternity, trust me, I'm a scientist (well, I Freakin' ❤ Science, anyway)
I've seen people talk about being screwed up by being taught about Hell. In particular, R A Wilson was told that demons would drop glass in his eyes (probably in Hell) and it resulted in sinus problems that didn't clear up without some serious work.
However, that's no excuse for Harris to make up something so nasty and random.
From memory: Lewis said something to the effect that medieval physics talked about things moving by affection, which is shared with pigeons, while modern talk about objects obeying laws of motion presents them as citizens.
Hell is a very contentious subject, and people have indeed been exposed to over-lurid and over-eager descriptions of it, and harmed by the same. I have no problem with anyone pointing that out.
What I do have a problem with is a guy boasting of his smarts and intelligence and how he's too cool to be caught by dumb religion, inventing [expletive deleted] horseshit where, if he could bother his arse to spend ten minutes on goddamn Google, he would find that there is already in existence an answer to the question which is *not* the one he thinks there is.
If I went around saying the Four Atheist Horsemen of whom Harris was one, were claiming that it's okay to have sex with six year old kids, I don't think I could weasel out of it with "No freethinker or agnostic can offer a compelling reason why I shouldn’t have said such a thing (because that's what my view of what those godless Hell-bound sinners tells me they'd probably endorse)".
I mean, my religion binds me to say that I *can't* even say Harris is going to Hell, nobody will know for sure until he dies and faces the particular judgement.
I wouldn't expect the average Catholic to know about medieval natural science. The decent answer would probably be to admit not knowing how gravity works.
Yes, there's no excuse for Harris just making things up.
That's why I'm pissed-off. Yes, I wouldn't expect the average idiot in the street to know the finer points of gravity, they might have some vague recollections of that rubber sheet and weights thing:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTY1Kje0yLg
But Sammy The Whammy is mean to to be The Smart Guy. He's so dweamy (if I go by all the fawning over him):
"Samuel Benjamin Harris (born April 9, 1967) is an American philosopher, neuroscientist, author, and podcast host. His work touches on a range of topics, including rationality, religion, ethics, free will, neuroscience, meditation, psychedelics, philosophy of mind, politics, terrorism, and artificial intelligence."
So Big Brain Smart I Know My Onions You Can't Tell Me Nuttin' Whammy comes out with his cute little anecdote about his three year old kid asking where does gravity come from?
And what does Mr. Just The Facts Lying Is Bad Honesty Is The Best Policy come out with? Goes into a swinging attack on Christians and Muslims, with no apparent self-consciousness about looking like a giant idiot, and certainly no attempt at all at finding out "Huh, what did those stupid mouth-breathers think back before we had SCIENCE!!!!?"
Just pulled it out of his ass and thinks *that* makes him look like the winner here.
Not what I'd expect from the expert on everything from spirituality to how to make beans on toast the right way. Yeah, I'm miffed.
He's reminding me of Sartre's description of anti-Semites-- for them, the impudent lack of logic is part of the pleasure.
I believe without evidence that the same impulse is behind both horror fiction and lurid descriptions of Hell. I'm not sure what that impulse is, possibly love of intensity, though Hell is also useful for social control, or at least can feel that way.
It's a good question - why do we like reading crime novels and the kind of crime novels that involve serial killers and gruesome crimes, and horror novels? It's the old notion of catharsis, but how does that work? Why do we enjoy reading about monsters and ghouls? Or going to see movies about them, and the gorier the better (for some at least)?
There's something in our psyche that responds to it, be it an evolutionary adaptation to living in a world of uncertainty and danger.
I can't believe Harris has no conception of hell or doesn't find it useful in life if only as a rhetorical shorthand. Where I live, people reference it pretty constantly. I'm not sure the dread remains, but it's a useful and satisfying concept, surely. At least in our culture.
I mean, just the other day, someone died, someone whose life work had been sort of the antithesis of our own values, and I announced this, and my husband said, "Well, you know what they say, hell ain't half full".
Now, he is not a Christian and wasn't really consigning anyone to hell, though he’d not object to it on principle, but I am picturing Sam Harris popping up to lecture us, about fueling his child's nightmares.
I sometimes remember, Bailey White's contention that the way to teach children to read is a Titanic-based curriculum.
R.A Wilson is an outlier.
> "I've seen people talk about being screwed up by being taught about Hell."
This is a side-topic from the original one, but it feels custom-made for me: Yeah! I would say that, coming into Christianity from a non-Christian background... I definitely picked up the sense "that people in the West will get really distressed about the topic of hell." I even sort of FEEL like "talking about hell is an instant-lose button* in any discussion where you are trying to help others love Jesus, except perhaps if you're talking to very very close friends who know you well and are already Christian." Now I said I FEEL that way; my reflexive reaction... I look at intellectually and thing "this is at the point where I tend to be less willing to talk about (or think about) hell ...than what I think would be helpful/truth-oriented."
That said, I think that the impression that an adult talking about hell leaves on a child has much to do with what's on the other end of the conversation: the tone, and what sort of personal pressure is being exerted, and does the adult have his or her own fears or anger leaking in to the background when speaking?
On the other hand, occasionally, the way conversations in my life actually PLAY OUT is glorious: One time I needed to teach a passage in which I would very unavoidably have to talk about heaven and hell (the parable of the rich man and Lazarus). That Sunday morning, I MIGHT have decided to, for my own need for humor and loosening-up, go search up a transcript of a Simpson's episode where they're in Sunday School. I hadn't remembered, but the kids in the episode repeatedly react to the Sunday School teacher like she's swearing each time she says the word "hell." Then I went and taught kids at church later that day, and no joke--a dear (not very churchgoing) student was sincerely and genuinely worried that I was swearing each time I used the word "hell." It was, for all the world, like I was inside a PARODY, not a parable. When one of these things happens to over-serious super-neurotic ole me, it is sheer gift.
* Makes my choice of username seem kind of unfortunate, but there you go.
[EDIT: little details for phrasing.]
Rules against using certain words and the effects of those rules is another large topic in itself.
Children are a lot tougher than Sam Harris is. He may feel the concept of literal hell is too scary for his own sensitive ears but billions of children have handled the concept with aplomb. I don't personally believe in literal hell but it's Fine.
If he wants to say the concept of Hell is horrific, he's free to do so and it's an understandable stance to have. Hell *should* be horrific; this trend with shows like "Lucifer" and "Hazbin Hotel" to tidy it up and make it somehow appealing because it's fun or at least the Devil has his heart in the right place is terrible to me.
But to invent some crappy just-so story about "and this is how Christians, who are all hardcore Calvinists and don't let their pretences otherwise fool you, oh and they are also idiots and too stupid to understand science either, would explain gravity" - yeah, that's when I want to start hitting him over the head with a feather pillow.
He's staking his claim, to any convincing he can do regarding his views, on being smart and accurate, yet he can't even bother with ten minutes of looking up about "what did Christians ascribe gravity to?" but instead makes up this nonsense out of his own little id.
No editor at the publishers seems to have mentioned any of this to him either, but that is less surprising. Editing seems to be a lost art in the modern world, and besides I'm assuming the publisher assumed the audience for such books would be anti-religious so would just lap up all "yeah the dumb violent Christians are exactly like that!" anecdotes.
In the list on main page, "What Came Next" and "My Thoughts," which seem to be subheaddings of the "Righteous Victims" review appear on their own lines.
Does "The Wheel of Time" count as a book? It's a series of fifteen books, each of which are capable of consuming three and a half regular-sized books.
I would say: if it bothers you, then adjust your vote accordingly, either now or in the finals if it makes it there. It's a grey zone, so I doubt that Scott would like to start disqualifying contestants, especially because people will feel differently about such a case. Last year there were also some edge cases, like a comparing review of two books, and a review of some technical report or so.
Does "The Old Testament" count as a book? It's a series of thirty-nine books...
Was wondering that, but it's got a stronger claim in that they all get printed in one physical book. Same with The Lord of the Rings, which is either one, three, or six books but has been published as one complete compilation in the past. I don't think anyone's ever consolidated The Wheel of Time into one physical book, because if you did it would take three men to lift it.
If the OT were published as individual books, which ones would be surprising in sales volume, do you think?
I think Psalms, Genesis, and Exodus would clearly be up there in volume. Numbers would almost certainly have the lowest sales volume from the Torah, but still high just because it's Torah and some people feel obligated to complete the set. Maybe Deuteronomy is the 'bargain/paperback' version for those who don't want to shell out the cash for all five books in the set?
Kings 1-2 would almost certainly outsell Chronicles 1-2. Meanwhile, who's buying first Kings and not the sequel?
I feel like the minor prophets would almost certainly have low sales volumes.
Isaiah would be purchased as the kind of leatherbound volume people keep on their bookshelf to impress people without ever cracking it open.
Song of Solomon ... ? IDK, honestly.
What about the parts of the Bible protestants consider apocryphal? Would people buy the shorter version of Daniel, or would they pick up the one with Bel and the Dragon because they'd cost the same and who's going to buy the shorter version for the same price?
I'm realizing it's been so long since I've read these I don't even remember what's in most of them. Samson's in Judges, right? Judges would do okay.
I'm still holding out hope for a "Black Swan"-style movie adaptation of Ezekiel; bring the Son of Mad to the big screen and you'll get a solid boost. You might be able to do the same with Jeremiah, but, like, aimed at the teen girl demographic; give him a suave haircut and really play up how emotionally vulnerable he is all the time. Esthar's already been made into children's entertainment as a Veggie Tales episode, ride that success into the Y7 bank.
I feel like Job's success might fluctuate with the times, he'll sell worse in good times and better in bad. His love of salt and hatred of eggwhites will turn the dietary crowds against him.
I like the idea of Jeremiah as a heartthrob character. Crank it up a notch by making it one of those tragic Korean dramas, and tie it together with Lamentations as he gets dragged along into Babylon in the end and you'd have something unintentionally hilarious.
Job has possibilities as a short book with a lot of illustrations.
I have an edition of Job as its own book, which I bought for the beautiful A. Szyk illustrations.
Jonah seems like it'd outsell the other minor prophets. Although I'm amused thinking of, I dunno, Obadiah fanboys.
G - Popular
E - Half read
L - Unread
N - Cult favorite
D - Schoolfare
J - Popular in Israel
J - Popular Everywhere
S - College Necessity
K - Historian Favorite
Isaiah - Favorite of the true intellectual and spiritual elite
Jeremiah - For those who can handle BOTH Isaiah & Kings
Ezekiel - Necessary for Latter Prophets Completionists
The 12 - See "Ezekiel", except for the very popular Jonah
Psalms - Already a separate book to people of many religions, including Islam and Lubavitch
Proverbs - Not too popular except during tough periods when the Gods of the Copybook Headings Return
Job - Not good for the internet age as the entire point of it is to spend a long long time engaged with Job's "everyman" justifications, otherwise the ending is meaningless
Song of Songs - Popular with the poetic
Ruth - Popular with Christian feminists
Lamentations - Same as today (for tough times and rememberances of such)
Ecclesiastes - Would be banned
Esther - Very popular
Daniel - Popular with apocalyptics
Ezra+Nehemiah - Popular with reformers and historians
Chronicles - Reference Text
P S. The Reviewer went all-in on Maccabees despite their non-canonical status among actual Hebrews. He also oversold his mockery of the Exilic Alphabet (in footnote), a theory less mocked by modern historians. Otherwise, nice review, if quite selective.
Nerdforge actually did bind all 14 WoT books in a single 12k page volume.
It turned out great though admittedly less convenient than a kindle.
Is "Food of the Gods" meant to be H.G. Wells's "The Food of the Gods" (or "The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth," which Wikipedia gives as the full title)? Or is there some other book with that title?
I too thought it would be Wells, but it appears to be a different book:
"Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge. A Radical History of Plants, Drugs, and Human Evolution, by Terence McKenna"
Stopped reading right about there, it looks to be one of those fringe pop evolutionary psychology works like "The Aquatic Ape" that nobody takes seriously but still manage to hang around, this one seems to be based on "we got smart/big brains/developed consciousness because we were all high on magic mushrooms and other plants".
Every so often, somebody feels the need to do a scientific version of Graves' "The White Goddess".
I have Julian Jaynes on my shelves; I don't think any other wildly speculative hypothesis is likely to be as interesting as his.
It maybe random chance, but all of the 4 reviews I've randomly sampled with AlexanderTheGrand's randomizer (which BTW is not linked up top - that link sends to one of the review documents) seem to suffer from the same problem - they are all erudite, witty and clever - but all jump in medias res, and none do the bread and butter journalistic Who What Where When Why How of giving me a framework of the book, such that I am at a loss as to what the book is about, and whether I am reading a facsimile of the author's thoughts or of the reviewer's thoughts. "Context is the thing with feathers etc."
I think it's a common problem for any book reviewer. I never really know how much of basic book summary to put in. If there's too much, I feel like you might as well just read the book itself, or at least the wikipedia summary instead. If there's too little, anyone who hasn't read the book will be confused. OTOH a lot of these are famous books that a lot of people here *have* read, so it's just a waste of time to do repeat what the book was already saying.
If we're doing "high school book report" style, then it's mostly rehash to prove that you actually read and understood the book. If we're doing "academic paper" style, then you're expected to produce something new and original, and you can assume anyone reading it is already familiar with the book. I'm not sure there's a good middle ground.
I've thought about this before, and I think the best way (not that I've done it yet in a publishable form) is nested TL;DRs - start with an executive summary, then an abstract, then a meatier pass through and finally the long rambling et cetera. In any case a summary of the content is essential for the reader - either to know what it's about, or having read it yourself, to see whether you agree with the reviewer as to what is even in the book.
that sounds like a good strategy! I haven't seen any book reviews so far that use a form like that though.
I commend the reviewer of Practical Ethics for doing just that!
Great. I'll bet as a whole these 150 reviews are higher quality than your average online book review.
I'm aching for the fiction reviewers. Maybe I'm misremembering but it seems like fiction reviews don't do well in the book review contest.
Scott mentioned that he was reserving a few finalist slots for fiction, since most of the winners in the past were overwhelmingly nonfiction technical reviews.
I just wanna say I love this time of year. And is there a way to support (subscribe) and not get any emails? I'd be happy to pay ~$50/yr. ?
Can't you just subscribe then set an email rule to delete the email from Substack? That's how I'd accomplish it.
I think there's a Substack setting to turn emails off. I don't get emails and I can't remember making an email rule, so that seemed the most likely explanation.
Glad to hear this was changed at some point.
Previously when I tried turning off emails it also unsubscribed me from anything I turned emails off for. I reached out to Substack support about it and they confirmed there was no way to subscribe without receiving emails -- so I just made a rule to delete any email recieved from Substack, as recommended above.
Log into your user account on substack/astralcodexten.com.
Click on your user icon in the top right to show the drop-down options. Choose Manage Subscription. Turn off the option to receive emails for new posts.
Eve seems to be missing some diagrams that I really want to see!
Reading these book reviews reminds me that I've got a bunch of books that I acquired cheaply secondhand (mostly from library book sales and the like, 50 cents apiece) that I really ought to read.
What stops people from cheating?
What kind of cheating?
Presumably, Caba means voting for your own review a bunch of times, giving yourself the highest score, and asking all your friends/family to do the same.
What if you don't specifically tell them who to vote for, but you have a big social media following who are all interested in the specific sort of book you reviewed (eg ww2 history, manga, russian literary novels, whatever)? Linking that sort of niche obvious in big numbers is obviously going to skew the vote.
I'm not sure if there's IP logs or anything like that, but I figure if Scott sees a bunch of 10/10 reviews for the same book in a matter of minutes, that'd be something suspicious enough to be noticed.
Personal honour, which I realise is a concept dead as the dodo in our brave new world.
Is there a way to cast different votes for different reviews of the same book? For example, "Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will" has two reviews. One is by S.F., and the other is by G.H.T.
As a temporary kludge, perhaps one could include in the "email" field a note saying "I'm voting for this review not that one" followed by one's actual email. It doesn't look like there's a character limit in the text box.
I'm glad there is a lot of variety in this batch. I feel like the last few were 75% "Here's a review of some nonfiction book about a metaprocess of some kind that explains everything or one neat trick/hack that can solve man's problems." I'm fond enough of big, bold ideas but sometimes people can't see the trees for the forest.
A "randomize the order of these" button would be nice. Or even better, some javascript to auto-randomize for every page load.
You can link to headings in google docs, so you could even have the randomized titles link directly to the essays.
You can paste the list into random.org's list randomizer: https://www.random.org/lists/
Wait it turns out there is actually a script link in the article that we both, somehow, missed.
I'm so excited to read these, I'm salivating
I'm attempting to read this on my phone with sporadic internet (underground), and Google Docs with giant documents is really janky – jumps about, loads slowly and is way too easy to accidentally close. Enough work goes into these that I think it would warrant a mini-site where each review has a stable HTML page, if anyone felt like creating it. That could easily also host the randomiser, review form, archive etc.
On the iPhone, you can export the reader mode version as a pdf. I’m going to read a bunch on my flight tomorrow!
Second that.
The illustrations are missing from the "Silver Age Marvel" review. Is that a copyright issue or a copy-paste issue?
I suspect a copy-paste issue - there are other reviews with the same problem. It's a shame, I thought it was a cracking review but I would really have liked to have seen the images. If anyone's wondering whether or not to read it based on this, do read it - the images aren't required to understand it. But I would like to see them.
I also noticed missing pictures in some of the reviews, but this was the one where I felt it really impacted my ability to give it a rating.
Can anyone enlighten me as to the sense of the word double (adjective, then verb) in this passage from the review of Chesterton's epic poem of Alfred (which I am enjoying):
Wild stared the Danes at the double ways
Where they loitered, all at large,
As that dark line for the last time
Doubled the knee to charge—
The Danes were celebrating, no longer in battle rank. The remnants of Wessex men turn to charge once more. But "double the knee"? What are the "double ways"?
"Double the knee" is bending the knee, preparatory to rushing forward:
https://leetaft.com/bend-your-knees/
"One of the most common phrases said in athletics is Bend Your Knees. It is an important phrase with good reason. When an athlete bends their knees correctly they are in a better position to move quicker in any direction."
Thank you!
Worth knowing, and related to the British "on the back foot" which is also about movement.
I've seen a claim in _The Sports Gene_ that an excellent test of athletic potential is having a person run a short distance, turn around, and run back. If they can do it quickly, they have athletic potential. I wonder if the test is checking for intuitive understanding of legs and momentum.
I've seen discussion, in the context of soccer, of the distinction between being quick and being fast, and I think that's it: you can be fast running in a straight line or when you know what is happening, but to be quick means being able to react faster and to make those kind of changes in direction without losing momentum.
The "double ways" refers to a crossroads (place where two roads come together) that the battle is occurring on, which is context that may have been in part of the poem that the review did not quote.
Good point: it is mentioned earlier - “the cloven way, the meeting of the ways”.
Now I'm on to the review of "The Beauties: Essential Stories" by Checkhov.
I read out to my companion the reviewer's footnote, after explaining his deep antipathy to the short story form:
"1. When I’m sitting in a dentist waiting room and there’s an outdated issue of The Atlantic lying on the table, I’ll skim through it. “Ah Trump. He’s not a good man,” I might mutter to myself, stroking my chin as I read their latest coverage. “Ah Artificial Intelligence. Going to lead to profound and unpredictable change, that’s for sure.” But, when I get to the Fiction section, I will skip it. I would genuinely rather watch paint dry than read ten more half-baked pages of realist fiction about a young New York City liberal arts grad’s dating issues or a child of immigrants’ struggle with being “caught between two worlds.”
He replied that as the contemporary novels will also be about those same things, it is inescapably logical that there necessarily being less of it, argues in favor of the short story.
I totally agree that fiction seems cringe-y especially surrounded by interesting nonfiction pieces, as in the New Yorker of old. I too look away. But then "The Fiction Issue" is if anything worse. But I knew a woman who remarked my habit of reading the New Yorker on my lunch break - this was in a library - and said she only ever looked at it "for the story". So this may be something that divides the world in two.
I (or rather my partner, who is an AI wizard) gave some of my rating for the 2023 contest to Gemini Pro, together with the text of the book reviews. Then I gave it the text of some other book reviews and asked it to predict my ratings for those. The correlation with my true ratings was +0.34. That's positive, but it seems that I should still read the 2024 entries myself.
This is where all the translated lines of poetry in my review are from:
Hell 1 1-9 61-66 79-90 112-136, Hell 2 1-9 52-63 133-141, Hell 3 1-9 14-30 34-42, Hell 4 10-24, Hell 5 25-27 100-107 112-142, Paradise 3 31-33, Hell 20 27-30, Hell 32 1-9 25-30, Hell 33 109-117 148-150, Hell 34 1-3 10-15 25-27 88-111 139, Purgatory 1 7-27 46-48 91-93 115-129, Pur 3 121,, Pur 8 53-59, Pur 11 25-30, Pur 27 17-18 49-51 142, Pur 30 22-57 76-78 136-138, Paradise 1 1-9 103-120, Par 2 1-6 31-36, Orlando Furioso 34 72 (obviously W. S. Rose is the translator not the author), Paradise 3 58-87, Par 4 61-63, Par 15 34-36, Par 17 58-60, Par 19 1-12, Par 22 134-135 151-154, Par 33 1-27 58-75 115-145
I genuinely appreciated someone not me doing a review of this 😁
I get what you mean about the Paradiso being the most boring part of the work, but I think as you get older and read it over again and again, it has more depth to it. There are funny little touches in it. But Purgatorio is wonderful, no disagreement there. When they meet Sordello, and he's fanboy raving over Virgil, and Virgil is looking at Dante like "Don't tell him" but Dante is so glad to meet another Virgil fanboy he can't help making some kind of smiling face and Sordello is "What? What's going on?" and then of course the truth comes out - oh, that's funny and beautiful all together.
You mean Statius.
I love that bit too! I wanted to put it in the review!
Yes, I mixed up the two "poets who love Virgil and whose names begin with S". Statius is great, these little encounters along the way are just so pleasant and happy.
I really would love to chat with you about Dante.
Unfortunately I don't think I'm allowed to do so under this name.
There's a bit in Paradiso I like. A woman in the heaven of Venus is asked whether she envies the people in higher heavens. She says that she is feeling as much bliss as she can hold, and she'd have to be a different person to hold more. (From memory.)
He sets up the traditional Ptolemaic heavenly spheres and then does away with the concept; Beatrice explains to him that the souls appearing to him are not *really* in the Moon, etc. but just doing this as a concession to his mortal understanding. In reality, everyone is in Heaven, in the Empyrean, but it will take time for Dante to get there as his capacity for understanding has to grow, in order to be able to take it all in.
It's in the Moon, where he asks that soul if she's not disturbed or envious by not being in a 'higher' place, and yes - it's a wonderful contrast to Hell, where everyone is jealous of their reputation on Earth and want to grab as much a they can. In Heaven, there isn't any "more", you have as much as you can have, so it makes no sense to apply earthly standards of "a bigger slice of the pie".
In Venus, it's the soul of what was a great sinner on Earth (again, it's hard to know if modern standards would consider it sinful to have many lovers) and he asks if she is disturbed by memories of her past life, and she just laughs. Having gone through Lethe, there is no longer any power in memory to cause distress. Heaven *is* joy, and indeed the only thing the memories of past sins do is make the joy even greater by contrast.
It's a much, much different take to the later one by Milton in "Paradise Lost" where he (wisely) doesn't try grappling with the question of mortals in Heaven. I think Milton succeeds best in depicting Eden, because he really isn't up to the task of depicting Heavenly joy; his angels and counsels of war and the conversation between the first Two Persons of the Trinity are very static and boring - lots of standing around reciting monologues.
I didn't mean that Paradise is boring, just that many people say it is.
Oh no, I understand that. And it's very different from the rest of the work, there's much less action and much more talking - and lecturing. It can be very skippable! It takes time to appreciate what is going on.
Even Botticelli had problems grappling with how to illustrate the text - it's hard to draw devils and not have them looking comic, somehow, which immediately works against the tone of the text:
https://artsandculture.google.com/story/botticelli-featuring-dante-kupferstichkabinett-staatliche-museen-zu-berlin/6gWBKADf-6d1JA?hl=en
We can talk about Dante, I think, in other open threads when the opportunity comes up.
The problem is not *where*, but whether I'm allowed to talk about Dante while saying I'm the one who wrote that review.
I think outside the book reviews is no problem, doing in here brings in everyone then wanting to talk about their own review.
I must have read about 20 handed to me by the RNG someone posted below. The "Sadly, Porn" review blows them all out of the water. Highly recommended!
It's a troll review and should be removed.
If you do read it, make sure to read the conclusion first.
Don't listen to this guy.
Definitely don't do it.
It was like... random gibberish for fifty pages? but unlike the actual Sadly, Porn book's gibberish it was not interesting.
Ik I'm super late to this thread, but I'm genuinely super curious as to why you say that, and what your specific meaning of random gibberish is. Honestly, I hope the review makes it, just for the comment section.
I found the first maybe 45 pages to be a summary of the standard post-rationalist fare (I mean seriously, another run through of Seeing Like a State). Competent, but not mind blowing.
I found the second 45 pages to be cultural criticism(?) Which occasionally took on an unjustified mystical tone.
Despite this generally dismissive response, I still didn't find much that was gibberish (i.e. it largely made sense), and despite it all, I really do feel that I was affected by it in a very real way. Ik that might seem like a non-sequitur from my 2nd and 3rd paragraphs, but as far as this type of (Lacanian, maybe) writing goes, I found it a (literally) effective example, if nothing else. I'm rambling about my experience, but I really am super curious about yours. Gibberish is just not the term I would use.
I suppose I am being a bit harsh. I'm bummed that it did not engage with the text because I am still waiting for somebody to actually talk about Sadly Porn was actually doing (Scott missed the point entirely, I believe).
But anyway, I think that there is a delicate art to writing these sorts of rambling musings. They have to either directly build up their cathedral of ideas in explicit language, or, if they are going to ramble and circle around it and try to show the reader how to build it up themselves, then they have to do a decently good job of it, so that you can get something useful out of it.
This review, like Sadly Porn itself, does the rambling and circling approach, but it did not, IMO, construct deep or useful ideas out of it. Actually the beginning, analyzing the contextual meaning of Narcissus, is very much an interesting thing to do, and it's exactly the sort of thing Sadly Porn does (with e.g. Oedipus and Freud and a bunch of other stuff, I can't remember). And the whole part about narcissism starts to get pretty interesting as a result---I'd read that essay, separately. And as I was I was reading it I was looking forward to how it would tie back into Teach's project (the blog TLP is very much about narcissism, after all).
But then it just... wanders away from that idea and never comes back? (It is mentioned again and again but not coherently, not building further on the opening ideas.) Instead it just wanders to other ACX/SSC-adjacent concepts. We get some James Scott, we get some Ribbonfarm/Gervais Principle, we get some Yudkowsky-style rationalism (I'm just skimming sections and mentioning what they're about), we get some takes on capitalism and liberalism, and then just twenty sections of apparently wherever the author's mind jumped to.
So if it had started with the narcissism bit and turned it into an interesting point about Sadly: Porn, TLP, or just society, then maybe it'd be a great review. Instead it starts strong, but not about the book at all, then wanders through the author's unstructured thoughts for like 50 pages, and then ends and says lol it never read the book. Well! Fine, that's why your review isn't very interesting. I think the author is very smart and glimpsed a really interesting narrative about narcissism (and maybe about TLP, I dunno), and started writing, but then when the ideas got less crisp they just descended into free-associating for a long time and hoping people would find it interesting. I did not.
Thank you.
Part one, if we want to call it that, the part that you liked, is a shockingly accurate description of the lived experience of being a narcissist, pardon me, a person with narcissistic tendencies, I should probably say. I agree that this would work standalone and that the whole thing is too long. I don't think this part is strong on original ideas but I have not seen these ideas summarised like this.
Part two, I read as an analysis - "psychoanalysis" would be a cheap but ultimately inaccurate pun here - of this community. The author is retreading some ideas that are fundamental to this community, to then gesture at what they might be missing. The criticism that we all already know these ideas is missing the point.
So here, I think, we have the paradox of the piece. If this were the kind of community that would vote such a pice as the winner of their contest, there would be no reason to write it in the first place. It is only interesting _because_ it is bound to fail in the contest. I started this thread to hopefully get some eyeballs on it before its inevitable(?) failure.
Well you can say the criticism is missing the point and that it's some higher work of clever art, sure, go for it. I think it's just not worth reading.
I enjoyed some of the review, but gave up after about twenty minutes. It seems to me that whenever someone gestures to “the community” or “the average ACX” reader, someone trots out the stats on Scott’s number of subscribers and readers vs number of commenters and engaged folk, and we all conclude that the readership or the blog is much more diverse than is represented in the comments, at the meet-ups, or any other thing. I think most people who read the blog don’t fall into whatever “community” you are referring to and thus find any analysis or criticism of it to be less interesting or meaningful than it seems that you do.
Fair enough.
Point of clarification: when I said "this community" I was, in the terms of our host, referring to the ideology, as preached by our host, as opposed to the movement. You are correct that I do not have direct insight into the movement other.
Sadly, Porn entry is a clear winner in my eyes, but I wouldn't be surprised if many, or even most, other voters disagreed.
Looking forward to finding out who the author is, I have a guess at who it might be
My favorite so far as well. I would still be surprised if it won.
It's the kind of review I'd like to see more of here, that's for sure.
The review of Real Raw News caused me some trouble. It's a prolix, unpolished review, but at the end it raises an issue worth thinking about ... and then just leaves it.
I'd guess the boring answer for many cases of this was "they procrastinated on finishing and ran out of time."
I'm sorry to put this here but I might forget another time.
But I'd anyone is reading "one thousand ways to please a husband", and notes the comment on getting fresh milk, they might be interested in a book called "Care and Feeding of the Southern Infant", published in 1920, which also discourses in detail how to get fresh milk for feeding their baby, and other considerations on baby food in 1920.
I am totally going to read that review--I've skimmed it, read a bit, and the "atmosphere" that book / review looks fairly delightful!
(Though the "meme-generation" part of my brain told me I wanted to make a meme containing a Rod-Serling-esque "It's a Cookbook!" moment* ironically "warning" readers of its contents!)
* from "To Serve Man," 1962.
I remembered seeing this comment ages ago and came back to say - thank you!
Belated thank you for reading my review and the lovely suggestion!
I don't think that if you are reviewing a book of Chekov's short stories you should literally write, "short stories are bad." Very poor.
The Remains of the Day review was excellent and completely convinced me to read the book, but is so short as to be difficult to review highly. Great work to the author if they see this though!
Who else feels a burst of joy from this post, knowing a months-long feed of finalist reviews will soon be published?
Yeah, getting to the finalists will be really fun because of all the "I voted for this/I hated this" commentary!
The review of "the Old Testament" began to annoy me after about 5 lines, when the author wrote "I was using the version with 39 chapters (or “books”) that is
deemed superior by most fans and experts."
Catholics by themselves are 51% of all Christians, and Orthodoxes are an other 11%. Most fans and expert don't agree with the Protestant canon. Like, try imagining that there are people outside of the US maybe ?
Holy hell, that review is a fantastic troll. I was pretty solidly debating whether to give it a low score because it's not really a book review, or a high score because it's something I wish I could write.
Then I realized I was only a third of the way through the thing. Low score it is.
I ignored that because my priors are that someone who is going to write a review of the Bible, unless they're the Pope, is going to be a Protestant with their "trimmed down due to Luther's neuroses" version 😁
You might want to check it out. It's complete trolling, treating it like a newly-released 2024 high fantasy novel.
"This book features an 'Ahab' and an 'Ishmael': clearly the author was a fan of Moby Dick. And the pop-culture references don't stop there."
The reviewer wrote somewhere at the start that religious people probably shouldn't read the review. There are way more outrageous claims after the one that annoyed you (so it's good that you quit early).
Personally, I found the review utterly brilliant, huge kudos to the author!
I enjoyed the 4 hour work week review and thought it had a great thesis. I thought the question of moral universality (not everyone can do a 4 hour work week because society wouldn't function, so a 4 hour work week is bad or a problem in some way) was interesting but I'm not sure it applies. Wouldn't that approach apply to many seemingly positive things e.g. not everyone can become a nurse, because we need farmers, but obviously it's not bad if someone wants to become a nurse.
I read the Atlas Shrugged review and it wasn't bad, but not enough new in it. It's true that Ayn Rand didn't like the real world-- she preferred the simplifications of art-- but there wasn't enough new in the review for my taste.
It's funny-- I read a Rand biographer (sorry, name forgotten) who had a great revelation after digging through a lot of Rand's writing that Rand didn't like the real world. It's right there in Atlas Shrugged.
I've reached the level of sophistication where I believe Rand is neither entirely right nor entirely wrong. There really are organizations that advocate self-sacrifice (these days, sometimes disguised as human potential). It's in some governments, businesses, religions, political movements, cults, families, and marriages. I wish Rand were still around. I'd like to see what she would say about our scammy world.
At the same time, humanity needs some generosity to function, and a *little* too much generosity may be better than drastically too little generosity. Any thoughts about good fiction handling these issues?
Sufi saying: If you make yourself a donkey, there will be someone to ride you.
I've reached the point where I regret the invention of language. People can make *anything* sound good.
I think that's an oversimplification of Rand's view, though one that people commonly make. When Rand talks about "altruism," she means what Auguste Comte, who at least popularized the word and perhaps invented it, meant by it: total dedication to the welfare of others and total indifference to one's own good (seriously, Comte criticized Jesus for saying "love your neighbor as yourself" because a good person would not love themself). The word has taken on a range of less drastic meanings over time, starting with Comte's buddy John Stuart Mill, who wanted it to include acts of concern for others generally; these days biologists talk about "reciprocal altruism" as meaning "I'll make you better off if you make me better off," which economists call "trade." Rand makes a point of saying that she is not objecting to generosity or benevolence. There are scenes in AS that illustrate this---notably Dagny Taggart's meeting with the tramp, Jeff Allen, at the end of part two (she stops the conductor from throwing him off the train and invites him to dinner).
There are basically three things that different people could mean by altruism:
1) helping other people, regardless of how and why
2) helping other people, because doing so makes me feel happy, but there is no reciprocation or strategic advantage from doing so
3) helping other people, with no reward whatsoever, not even a good feeling
If I understand it correctly, only 3 is truly altruistic according to Comte. If helping other people makes you happy, you are just another selfish asshole who cares about their own feelings. From that perspective, even most effective altruist would not qualify as real altruists.
From Rand's perspective, I think 1 and 2 are okay; it's 3 she argues against. Her use of the word "selfishness" is a bit unusual, but I think we can literally translate it as "increasing one's own utility function". Should you help others? If doing so makes you happy / is the right thing to do according to your values, yes. If you achieve a greater value in return, also yes. Otherwise, no. From this perspective, effective altruists are "selfish" -- and that makes them the good guys.
(The evil thing would be e.g. to convince people to donate their money to some bureaucratic organization that spends 100% of the money on its own overhead, or to a political organization that actively makes the world a worse place, simply because of some emotional blackmail like: "this is what you should do to signal being good". Giving for the sake of giving, not because it actually does anything that you would consider good.)
It seems like no one sane should advocate for Comte's definition, but... First, you can use this definition to devalue good deeds of your opponents. (Yes, he did X, but he *only* did it because he wanted Y; even when Y = feeling good.) Second, it could be used to defend failed projects. (You should support X because it achieves Y. Oops, actually X does not achieve Y. Anyway, you should support X because you should support X, and you are a bad person if you don't.)
>but I think we can literally translate it as "increasing one's own utility function".
This is complicated by Rand's philosophy only considers "rational" preferences to be valid, and her definition of rational has a lot of stuff packed into it. Internally-contradictory preferences aren't rational, of course. Nor are preferences that are contrary to your "nature", such as self-destructive desires. She explicitly cites Aristotelian virtue ethics as part of her understanding of what constitutes a valid preference, and the idea of morality extending from being true to your own nature sounds familiar to me from both classical Stoicism and from Thomas Aquinas's writings.
As someone who agrees with a lot of Rand's ideas (though not all), I think much of what you say is on the right track. In particular, yes, as far as I can tell, Comte defined altruism as 3). What that says about Comte's sanity you are welcome to judge for yourself. I think Rand's take was that people often praised Comte, and praised altruism, and then guilt tripped people who pursued their own interests (a big dramatic point in AS, where she shows Hank Rearden suffering that from his family)—but didn't want to think about how inhuman Comte's actual ethics was, so they diluted it, rather than saying that it was fundamentally wrong in principle.
I think it's questionable whether Rand would accept 2). To borrow a distinction from Plato's Euthyphro, we can ask "Is X in your interest because it makes you happy, or does X make you happy because it's in your interest?" Rand says explicitly that "happiness is the purpose of ethics, but not the standard." That is, she's an egoist, but not a SUBJECTIVE egoist; she rejects the argument "this is in my interest because I want it" (which I think is perfectly sound; people want all sorts of things that are not in their own interest, from heroin to love affairs such as the one that damaged Rand's own marriage to centrally planned economies)—and she rejects hedonism for similar reasons. Her idea is that what is truly in your interest ultimately comes down to what enables your survival as the kind of living organisms you are; that living for your rightly understood interests will make you happy (which is what I think Erica Rall is pointing to, rightly); and if helping other people fits within that, then it's a good thing, and one that she wouldn't call "altruistic."
And all that makes talking about utility functions problematic, because utility functions are subjective, and people can have messed up utility functions.
> I've reached the point where I regret the invention of language. People can make anything sound good.
Deception is everywhere, but to me the tragedy is that it parasitizes on hope. Lies wouldn't be as much of a problem, if we didn't want so much to believe. And it leaves behind husks with all their hope devoured, or zombies who cling tightly to the lies that are puppeting their brain, staring resolutely forward in fear of what they would see if they looked inside or behind.
I found it annoying that the reviewer obviously assumed that the reader has read the book, or is at least very familiar with the content. I haven't and ain't, and it was barely possible to follow some parts. It became very unconvincing because the reviewer just formulated theses without giving support from the book. Or only in the form of "as shown by the great monologue of XYZ", without even mentioning the topic of this monologue.
Cheers to everyone who submitted. A lot of these are suffering from “this is just a summary”. I give low score for that, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t enjoy the read!
Agreed, thanks to all the authors. If any criticisms of your reviews get you down, just remember the great quote from Teddy Roosevelt:
"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better.
The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds..."
Did Scott enter his own contest again? There are one or two reviews that make me suspicious.
Which ones?
Don't tell us which ones! :-) I hope we hold off on speculation as to author identity, until more people have read the reviews, to avoid groupthink.
Plot twist: one is actually Scott, and one is an AI trained specifically to match Scott's writing style.
(This is wild speculation, not based on any hard evidence)
Some feedback on the reviews I read:
Against Democracy: I've read the book and thought this review summarised it well and added some good commentary, but it didn't really expanded much beyond the book. That's what I call an 8/10, calibrating from the reviews from last year. Brenan's proposal for 10% less democracy seemed weird to me because it's not that different from 100% democracy but losses the symbolic benefits like universal equality, I'm guessing it's just meant as a transitional step. I'd have also liked more discussion, in the book and review, about how many issues have "correct" answers. Rationalists can tend a bit contrarian, if Brenan's definition of "correct" == the academic consensus, how sceptical should we be?
Piranesi: loved the book and have read a fair amount of online discussion on it and the review still had a fresh perspective on it and articulated what I like about it.
Politics on the Edge: Difficult to rate, it meandered quite a long way from the book itself, and even as a Brit who's fairly into politics/economics I wasn't really sure what to make of the analysis it made. 7/10, but that might be unfairly low.
Against Democracy: I came to the same grade for exactly the same reasons. Nice to find someone else with the same calibration.
It was lovely to see a nice review of the favorite book of a five year old of my acquaintance. I didn't expect to read a review of Winnie ther Pooh which was fun to read as an adult (without wearing my parenting hat). Kudos
Have you ever encountered The Pooh Perplex, which contains essays on the Pooh books written in parodies of the style of psychoanalytic, Marxist, Roman Catholic, and other schools of literary criticism?
Or these reviews of Mr Men books!
https://www.thepoke.com/2016/03/01/literary-criticism-mr-men-reviews-made-us-laugh-lot-updated/
If I could see a current list of the least reviewed entries I'd focus on those. Nonrandom but would help even out the evaluations if that's the goal.
There are two reviews for "Determined" but only one on the voting form. Please fix!
In the list at the end of the post "Road of The King" is listed as "My Thoughts Road of The King". The title is correct in the documents and survey , but means someone looking for It under M won't see it.
Impressed by those who decided to review the Illiad, the Old Testament and the Hebrew Bible ; as well as the Divine Comedy, perhaps the most difficult of all...
I completely agree! the Divine Comedy review must have been quite the head-scratcher
Question for whoever wrote the review of The Complete Rhyming Dictionary... - did Clement Wood say anything about Emily Dickinson?
Whoever wrote The Divine Comedy review... is a genius! I've never read anything so distinct about Dante's masterpiece. What I've loved the most is the author's effort to explain the power of single key words, like hell or abandon or "buio", and the original phonetic evocations. It's a privilege for anyone who's as fascinated by the Italian language as I am.
Here's a random title generator from the above to help you choose what to read:
https://kss5991.github.io/ACX_Book_Competition/
Whatever happened to announcing the finalists??
How can I find all the book reviews for past years, including the ones that weren't winners?