Hmm, my review isn't there, I definitely submitted it and screenshotted my submission form confirmation because I'm paranoid. Anything I can do about that? Worked hard on it...
Email me which one is yours. scott@slatestarcodex.com . Same request to anyone else in this situation. Don't worry, I'll get it on once I hear from you and make sure that it gets a reasonable number of votes.
Hi Scott, there are a few that look interesting to me, but I don't want to start reviewing ones that might end up over-reviewed; would you consider doing a reminder post in a week's time or whatever with a list of the under-reviewed submissions so people can try and even things out?
Same event. Though I liked that review, well done! Could not stand the video for long.
My issue is The sermon on the mountain - that pops up EVERY time I go for "T" - NOt using the random report - and neither do I want to read that review nor do I particularly like the first page (well written, but hey there is a speech on the field in Luke, you cheat if you only do Matthew).
Looked into 3 reviews - and I agree, there should be a follow up with the seldom-rated reviews, seems they are all very well done.
Oh, interesting - will try to look at the 2nd; but I really wanted to read another text starting with "The" ;) UPDATE: a) the 2nd sermon-review seems same content (surprise), slightly less well written. Same ignorance of the sermon in Luke. b) more important: Oh, I can scroll to the other reviews, but I still get force-started at the first sermon-review. :/ c) As I wanted to read the Ukraine-war text, I was lucky: just the one before the sermons. At the end of that war-review was a comment "10/10, would recommend. " By Scott?!? Some early assistant? - anyways, I agree.
To be clear, the two reviews are counted separately in the randomizer; if you click the link, you're equally likely to be redirected to either of them.
To be clear, I did not get to the first Sermon by clicking on the randomizer (that I did only once, first, brought me to Skibidi toilet). I just opened the "Other T-Z" section, a few second later I was catapulted to the first Sermon. Happened several times. - No idea, got that fixed or do I do something different now, but I am happy reading.
I'm experiencing the same issue as you, and I think this is entirely due to an extra argument in the link to the "Other T-Z" document. It has an extra "heading" argument that's absent from the other links. (Though weirdly the "Other (A-I)" link has a "heading" argument but doesn't redirect.) That argument basically makes the Google Docs page to scroll down to the Sermon review. If Scott sees this, he can fix it by editing the link urls in this post and removing everything starting from the hashtag onwards.
Got that thought on getting up. At 4am: too dumb. ;). A few other reviews do so, too - reminds of John Green. "Rating" that war as a 10/10 - not my view. Rating the "review" thus: fine. Though it shows survivorship-bias, literally.
I have to say I wish there was a bit more time. I tend to read long essays slowly, unless I wait until I'm in the right mood to read them fast. I also prefer to think over them a bit before I decide what I think of them. With barely two weeks, I'll be lucky to end up rating more than two or three.
EDIT: Actually, it'll probably be a lot more than that. I've looked at a few and they're so far much easier to read than the dense and rather pompous and self-important essays that I remember dominating one year of the book review finalists.
I'm excited to find out if some of these ("Love", "Marriage", "The Spreadsheet") are about, like, *the concept*, or a piece of media named after the concept, or...
Agreed - I would not mind this repeating next year, in parallel with the book contest. Or maybe one in the summer and one in the winter, like with Comiket? It all depends on whether Scott finds it too much of a hassle, though.
(I've done a skim of the gachage review, and man, do I have things to say about that. Plenty of personal experience, you see. But I wish it had gone deeper into the field, from Kancolle and the infamous Fall 2013 event, through the Airship Era and the rise of DMM Games, to the streamlined modern series that are mostly reviewed there. Maybe I should try writing a historical perspective myself...)
Wow! The creativity in some of the things people chose to review has already made this *much* more fun than the book reviews. Hope this concept makes a return!
Nearly 2,000 pages of reviews. Wowza! Looks like I won't be bored for a little while.
Anybody have an idea how this compares to previous years submission volume? I generally avoid book reviews for books I haven't read, but non-book reviews seem more accessible. I've already given out one ten star rating from the handful I've read.
Before having read any of them, to whoever wrote the Pathologic review: I want you to know I appreciate you and, if your review is half as good as your choice of game, I'm sure you'll do very well.
(Also, TWO Disco Elysium reviews??? What if both of them are good??? What then???)
I had the same thought. I suppose strictly speaking it's a speech which was transcribed in a book. If a book contains a transcription of MLK Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech, the speech itself is still a distinct entity from the book that contains it.
I don't necessarily think the sermon should DQ'ed, but it does not sound like a good comparison. That speech was recorded, and there are plausibly people alive who attended it. You can experience it without the mediation of a book.
As a comparison point, I think it's fair to review a theater play you attended for this contest, even if the text was published as is often the case. Now, reviewing an old theater play that has not been staged in living memory, by reading its text? Heeeeeh...
Thus begins my favorite time of the year. For a while now there will be endless ACX-like content to read and procrastinate to, hooray!
I think Im going to random 5-10 reviews in order to get a good sample of the quality before going for the ones I am interested in (lots of those!). I recommend everyone try to balance like this so we dont get a bias for acx-bait in the finals
(would there be a bias towards common interests if everyone votes only for their interests? Perhaps its a high risk high reward strategy for the writer: you would get a lot of voters who are not going to vote to other reviews but if they are unusually negative you are tanking yourself)
I can't speak for anyone else, but my scale is normed according to the benchmark that a typical review by Scott, on typically representative review material, constitutes a 9, and his best and most interesting reviews constitute a 10. I can't guarantee in advance that a 5 will represent the average among actual submissions (I'm rating a lot, but have no intention to rate all of them.) But a 5 represents roughly how good I *expect* the average submission to be. A 1 would represent a review where I feel deeply aggrieved and insulted with the reviewer for their use of my time.
My highest rating so far is an 8, and my lowest are 3s, but I hope I'll expand that upwards with time, and suspect I'll likely expand it downwards as well.
My personal rating scale has two benchmarks, and is otherwise just querying my vibes:
7: I don't regret spending the time reading this. (This is a relatively high bar for me)
9: This has noticeably shifted the probability distribution of either my actions or my beliefs in some way.
It's a pretty American scale, where most works will be 5+ instead of using the precision evenly. But as long as I review a bunch of things (I think I'm at 20+ completely random rates, plus 3 interest-driven ones so far), consistency is all that matters.
Surprised to see Bishop's Castle here. Thought it was a pretty good article til they got to the conclusion and summed up the man's entire life work "munchkinry".
What makes you think this? It's included in the Google form, this post, and the randomizer. And at least the latter two weren't late corrections (I don't have a way to check the history of the Google form).
I think Yair meant that the second to last section title of Human Sexuality was accidentally formatted as a top-level title instead of a second-level title. This meant that in the table of contents at the beginning of the document as well as in the outline tab, "Limitations and objections" appears as a separate review when it's not. This happens
Although unlike the case with "The Delusion" and "The Disease", this didn't affect the Google form or this post, so this is mostly cosmetic and not so urgent.
Whoever wrote the "Adolescence" review - if you're unsold on continuous takes as a gimmick, I must STRONGLY recommend the 2015 film "Victoria" (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4226388/), which unlike "1917" isn't cheated: they really filmed the entire two-and-a-half-hour film in a continuous take. And it isn't just impressive from a technical perspective, but is also a fantastically gripping film as well.
I'd like to note the existence of Timecode (2000) here - four simultaneous continuous takes. Technically impressive, maybe not artistically brilliant, but a decent cast including Stellan Skarsgard and Salma Hayek and a very interesting experiment.
I used the random review script and landed on one called The Disease, which is not a separate review, but the last section of the above one, Dating Apps - The Misery Engine. The heading should be indented one further.
Whoops, this is my fault. I did a manual pass looking for these kinds of errors, but since the extraneous title was almost in the right place alphabetically, I missed it. I have fixed it in the randomizer; Scott would need to fix it in the post and Google form.
I was playing Hot Seat at Lighthaven last night. The question I was asked was, "what spicy opinion do you have that would be controversial with the Rationalist crowd?" (As in, not "controversial" in general, but controversial in our community.)
I answered that I didn't actually think my review was "the best" last year. I'm glad I won, and I think my review was "good enough" to be finalist, but I think I only won due to shock value. I usually have multiple reviews every year that I love during initial voting that don't make it to Finalist. I met Brandon Hendrickson (the 2023 winner with his review of "The Educated Mind") in person this past weekend at LessOnline. He's awesome, I liked his review, but I admitted to him that I voted for his review for #1 at the time... because it was my favorite out of the finalists. But only a couple of my favorites from 2023 made it to Finalist. There were so many awesome submissions in 2023!
Etienne Fornier-Dubois has talked about this. From 2021-23, he chose topics specifically tailored to make finalist (WW2, grand theories of neuro/evolutionary/civilizational development), and then in 2024 he just had fun. He reviewed "Egypt's Golden Couple", a book about the reign of Pharaoh Akhenaten. I loved his review in 2024, and I'm not particularly interested in the topics he reviewed in past years.
So go read the initial submissions!!!! You will almost certainly find some favorites!
Curious which ones were your favorites in 2024? My favorite finalist last year was "Real Raw News" (though yours was also very good); I only read a smallish sample of the nonfinalists, but the one that I still remember, and think should have made the finals, was "Don't Make No Waves, Don't Back No Losers".
(I didn't actually vote in last year's preliminaries because I'd read so few of the reviews and didn't feel calibrated about them. I'm going to try to vote this year, though.)
Out of the ones that didn't make finalist in 2024, I really liked:
- Egypt's Golden Couple
- Don't Make No Waves, Don't Back No Losers
- Cat's Cradle (by Kurt Vonnegut)
I'm actually really glad that my favorites (The Family That Couldn't Sleep, The Autobiography of Yukichi Fukuzawa) made finalist this past year.
I unfortunately can't think of any others off the top of my head right now. I tried to search for Scott's announcement post for the initial round of 2024 voting, but my search was drowned in a sea of regular finalist posts. I think Substack changed their search algorithm. :-/
I'm reading a whole batch, making some notes as I finish, before I start rating them. I feel that's only fair... the point of the rating system is to establish which reviews Scott should elevate and analyze. Therefore to me it makes sense to grade on a curve, to give the ones I think are average the average grade rather than against some absolute scale.
Just scanned the titles. Goddam, I am impressed with this group, and that’s really saying something because I am picky, quirky, and used to smart people. Jeez, Scott, I hope you feel some pleasure and gratitude about having gathered this group.
And if you do, I wish you’d say so once in a while. You don’t have to *gush.*. A single sentence a couple times a year would suffice.
I agree. I've been looking forward to see the silly meta topics that people chose, and the submissions did not disappoint! (Including the review about the ACX Commentariat lol.)
Even the people who reviewed perfectly normal things like popular movies and video games found interesting things to say about them. Really good stuff.
What are the guidelines for grading reviews if you are a contestant? Last year, I refrained from participating in the finalist-choosing process on the theory that it was a conflict of interest, but it occurs to me in hindsight that I was perhaps overly scrupulous there and it might be fine as long as I'm grading in good faith.
I don't read the whole of the blog or the comments, but I find yours unusually evenhanded, searching, and dispassionate - so *I think* you ought not to concern yourself about this.
There is a review called "Joanna Newsom: The Lyric" in Music which starts with the sentence: "We will complete our series on Joanna Newsom’s music with the analysis of a single sentence from the last track of her last album.". Is this intended or some parts are accidentally missing?
Comment on the testosterone review: As someone considering what testosterone level would be optimal for me, I found it supremely unhelpful. My understanding is that some women (cis and post-op trans) benefit significantly from low-dose supplemental testosterone, but this doesn't discuss that. Furthermore, there's no comment on rumors that it affects autoimmune conditions.
I suppose I also care about this in particular because the testosterone review talks like testosterone makes you a better person, the kind we need more of in the world, the kind that is just cooler and superior and such, and given that, throwing in a flat "but women shouldn't take it" given all this promotion seems not great.
A cursory glance at this population pyramid (https://www.populationpyramid.net/world/2024/) suggests that somewhere in the region of 17% of the population are women aged 45 or older i.e. the demographic you'd expect to be menopausal. Even assuming that fully half of these women would stand to benefit from taking testosterone, that's still only 8.5% of the population. Unlike "male people who have undergone medical transition", 8.5% isn't a *negligibly* small demographic, but I still think it's fair to say it's vastly smaller than the primary demographics of people who could stand to benefit from testosterone.
I wonder what happens if I vote for the same review more than once. I realize the form records the email to check for repeats and deter cheating, but if I accidentally (or maybe intentionally) vote for a review twice, how would the votes be dealt with? Is only the latest vote counted? Are all the repeat votes averaged and then counted as one? Are all the repeat votes disqualified? Are all the votes from the same email address disqualified?
I'm going to keep track of which ones I voted for so I don't accidentally vote twice, but say if I want to change my mind later, is it possible to "overwrite" my vote, or should I avoid doing that because that would invalidate my votes? (I'm assuming that even if an update like that is possible, I should avoid doing that because it makes data-processing more annoying.)
Is there a good place to discuss these articles as we read them, perhaps accessible for [anonymized?] discussion with the authors? I'm not tech-savvy but there's a buttload of discussion material here and it would be nice to have some sort of article-specific comment sections to discuss submissions before they get winnowed down to finalists. (Maybe next year?)
"The Russo-Ukrainian war" review had evoked in me emotions I would have preferred not to have. I had often felt the same way as the author, but quieted this feelings thinking "no, you read WWI and WWII memoirs, it never goes like that". Reading about how the author did exactly what I dreamed of and liked it makes me again want to do it so hard.
I’d like to make the case for a different system for handling reviews that get few ratings. The present system, as described by Scott 2 years ago, is to add to the person’s real ratings enough “artificial ratings” to bring the person’s total ratings up to some minimum — I believe it’s 8. For artificial votes, I believe Scott uses the average (or median? or mode?) of all scores given to all reviews. I understand the statistical logic of using that number, though I just had a long exchange with GPT4 about that system, and the upshot was that whether that system yields the fairest estimate of what the review’s score would have been if the review had gotten 8 real scores depends on a lot of things. But it would not be practical to take all of them into account, unless Scott is assisted by someone who really wants to nerd out with the numbers.
I take a personal interest in this matter because 2 years ago my review was one of the ones that had few votes as we neared time for wrapping up the group-votes-on-all-of-them phase. I know that because Scott posted a list of reviews with few votes, asking the group to make a point of reading more of those reviews, and it gave me a shiver to see that mine was on the list. I have no idea whether my review ended up getting more real votes or whether Scott had to supplement mine with several bottles of Ensure, but I suspect it was the latter. I later saw all the votes for my reivew, and I believe there were 3 7s in a row at the end, which did make me wonder.
I am here to tell you that it was startlingly painful to take in the information that my review was one that few people chose to read. While it would have been delightful to have my review in the finals, and ever more to have it win, I was not counting on either of those, and was quite prepared to do without them. But the idea that hardly anybody even read this thing I had put so much of myself into — that was unexpected, and brought back memories of other times I never got a chance with something because I wasn’t just weird, I was weird in a weird way. Lots of people here have had that experience, and in fact I think the ones I had were probably on the mild end of the spectrum of what people here have been through. But even my own relatively mild experiences of exclusion were bad enough that decades later they are painful to remember, and I just wasn’t prepared to experience a version of them here.
So I am advocating for a system where we keep going with the initial reads until every single review gets whatever Scott has been counting as the acceptable minimum number of scores — around 8 I think. Let’s not give anyone artificial, statisically-derived scores to bulk up their total. If people are tired of reading reviews, or if some reviews just don’t look appetizing on a first glance, some members of the group just have to keep reading anyway. Jeez, it’s not that terrible. Everybody has logged some time reading stuff they don’t feel like reading — it’s just a bit more of that. And after all, if the review is really terrible — if it’s long, incoherent, insanely droning and tedious, full of inaccuracies — the reader can probably give thing the a fair shake without spending 40 mins. reading every single godawful paragraph.
Have you noticed people piping up here and there exclaiming about how they couldn’t stop worrying that when they sent in the link to the review it somehow didn’t register? And I’ll bet for everyone who actually posted about that there were quite a few with the same worry who kept it to themselves. People really care about having their reviews read. My reasonl for speaking up in favor of guaranteeing that people who enter get a reasonable share of readers is that it is the kind thing to do. It makes a lot of difference to individuals who wrote essays, and doesn’t cost the group much effort, especially when there are so many of us to share the effort.
I understand where you're coming from, but I think that the solution is to have more contests with fewer articles per contest, or rather just round up the existing articles in groups.
Just looking at the categories here, there can be three contests a year:
- Book Reviews.
- Media Reviews (Games, TV, Music, etc...)
- Other.
If people feel compelled to rate the less-reviewed essays, they'll just rate them worst.
As I recall there were 15 or so reviews in the year I’m talking about that had too few ratings. If each of them had only 4 ratings, and so needed 4 more to reach the acceptable total of 8, that means 60 more reviews in total were needed. Lots of people here read and rated reviews, but let’s just consider the 150 or so who had entered reviews in the contest. It seems to me that these people have a bit of extra responsibility for reading reviews, since their own are being read. So if 60 of those entering the contest, fewer than half of the total entrants, read one more review the problem would be solved. And of course there are far more potential reviewers than the 150 context participants. Seems like the added burden on ACX would be very small.
And if I did not feel like reading and rating somebody’s review but did it out of obligation I would not give them a low rating just because I was not in the mood to read, because I am not a mean-spirited unfair piece of shit. How about you?
> And if I did not feel like reading and rating somebody’s review but did it out of obligation I would not give them a low rating just because I was not in the mood to read, because I am not a mean-spirited unfair piece of shit.
I don't think it takes mean-spiritedness to vote unfavorably when people are compelled to read an initially less-voted review. Suppose people are generally charitable and act according to the "say nothing if you have nothing nice to say" principle, which is probably pretty prevalent. In their initial voting, they would probably avoid voting on reviews whose subject they found uninteresting, or reviews that they skimmed but didn't find high quality enough to bother reading carefully. If you compel people to read those all the way through and vote on them, unless people are systematically mistaken with their judgment in their initial screening, which I find unlikely, this will result in the less-read reviews getting lower scores overall.
I don't know if this scenario is more likely than people being mean-spirited and acting in a biased way, but either way it doesn't bode well for the outcome that you were hoping for with your proposal. That is, boosting the vote count of less-read reviews by compelling people to read them might tank their score more than just adding artificial votes at global average.
Of course, this is assuming that there is some not-too-weak correlation between the number of votes and the quality/interest of the review. It could be that the correlation is weak enough and the variance in vote count is mostly due to random fluctuation in the selection process and people's tastes. In that case, your proposed system or some form of obligatory assignment could improve voting efficiency.
Ah, I hadn't thought about tactical voting! Yes, if every entrant has to read all the reviews, then sabotaging the competition comes into play (just like getting all your friends to vote for your review). The Hillary Clinton campaign strategy of voting for a weak entry so that it will displace a stronger contestant that is rival to you, though it might blow up in your face the way her campaign's support of Trump over the other Republican candidates did:
"So to take Bush down, Clinton’s team drew up a plan to pump Trump up. Shortly after her kickoff, top aides organized a strategy call, whose agenda included a memo to the Democratic National Committee: “This memo is intended to outline the strategy and goals a potential Hillary Clinton presidential campaign would have regarding the 2016 Republican presidential field,” it read.
“The variety of candidates is a positive here, and many of the lesser known can serve as a cudgel to move the more established candidates further to the right. In this scenario, we don’t want to marginalize the more extreme candidates, but make them more ‘Pied Piper’ candidates who actually represent the mainstream of the Republican Party,” read the memo.
“Pied Piper candidates include, but aren’t limited to:
• Ted Cruz
• Donald Trump
• Ben Carson
We need to be elevating the Pied Piper candidates so that they are leaders of the pack and tell the press to [take] them seriously."
While the campaign also kept a close eye on Rubio, monitoring his announcement speech and tightly designing the tweeted responses to his moves, Clinton’s team in Brooklyn was delightedly puzzled by Trump’s shift into the pole position that July after attacking John McCain by declaring, “I like people who weren’t captured.”
Eleven days after those comments about McCain, Clinton aides sought to push the plan even further: An agenda item for top aides’ message planning meeting read, “How do we prevent Bush from bettering himself/how do we maximize Trump and others?"
They wouldn’t have to work very hard at it though; the debates were the beginning of the end for the candidate Clinton’s team always thought she would face on Election Day. The day after the first debate in August, Clinton confidante Neera Tanden emailed Podesta her analysis: “Bush sucked. I’m glad Hillary is obsessed with the one candidate who would be easiest to beat :) Besides Trump, of course.”
"And if I did not feel like reading and rating somebody’s review but did it out of obligation I would not give them a low rating just because I was not in the mood to read, because I am not a mean-spirited unfair piece of shit. How about you?"
You *greatly* underestimate my capacity for spitefulness and malice. Also, I *hate* being compelled to do things - Irish saying "I'll be led but I won't be drove". I might try to be fair to a poor entry if it came up when I spun the randomiser, but if it was a poor entry and I was *made* to read it, the vitriol would flow in rivers.
-You hate being told what to do. Yeah, I often do too, but not usually in circumstances where doing something is just an expectation in some group I’m in because I like the group. And that’s the situation here. We are already being told to do various things: Submit a review of a certain kind in a certain way. Rate them on a certain scale. Read reviews. As a matter of fact, I had some discontent with the first of these expectations. When we were discussing, a while ago, whether to have the usual book reviews or change it up somehow. I suggested a change more radical than the one we finally went with, and I was disappointed. So I am being “made” to participate in a contest of a kind that is not the one I advocated for. However, I’m OK with all that. I don’t hate the constraints, and the pleasure of participating outweighs the disappointment and annoyance I have about not getting exactly what I want.
-The idea that somebody is going to make you read a review you have zero desire to read: You’re picturing what would happen in an unrealistic way that makes it particularly infuriating. Nobody is going to say, “Deiseach, read and rate this long, long badly-written review of a new approach to weight loss based on the idea that overweight is caused by laziness and self-pity. If you don’t read it and review it, you are banned for ACX.” What would really happen would be that Scott would put up a post listing 15 or so reviews that have had few readers, and say that we can’t move to the finals until each had a total of 8. My estimate is that those would each need on average 4 more ratings, so a total of 60 more read-and-rates in all. There are literally thousands of possible raters. Out of those, I’m confident 60 would step forward and do the job, either just to be a sport, or because they enjoy reading reviews even of things they’re not interested in. There were people other years who read every single review, and were surprised that others were surprised to hear that. So when Scott called for readers for the wallflowers, you would simply not step forward and read any of them, and the people who minded it less would pick up the slack.
-Am I asking for the wallflowers to get read, or for people to be extra-nice and give them a few pity points. Definitely the former! The thing that I think is unfair and unkind is for reviews just not to get read. If the wallflowers all get rated a 2 or 3, so be it. Scott also posted that his problem with few reviews is that some reviews only have, say, 3 or 4 ratings but those few are high, and in that situation he has read them himself and often thought they were not very good. He doesn’t like the idea of somebody making it to the finals without having their high score be one that is unlikely to be luck. (The fewer votes there are, the less you can count on its being a valid reflection of the consensus view, rather than, say, a 10 the writer gave himself and then a coupla 8’s by people who read the review and just happened to be the kind of people who loved the review’s topic — or the reviewer’s jokes — of who just gave high scores to everybody, rating almost all reviews 7, 8, 9, or 10.)
-Reading reviews one is not interested in: Yeah, that’s tedious. My own inexperience of reading reviews is that about half the time I end up having to draw on my willpower to give a review a fair shake. I do pick reviews on subjects I’m interested in, but about half the time I just don’t enjoy the review itself. It turns out to be about an aspect of the subject I don’t care about, or it’s disorganized and hard to follow, or it’s superficial, or it’s sort of a tedious summary of the subject with few interesting insights. And for those I just push myself to read the thing all the way through, and keep in mind my rating criteria, and give it a fair score based on those. Some that really bore me I end up giving decent ratings, because they are clear and well-organized and cover the bases, just bore to me. So some boredom when rating reviews seems inevitable to me. Doing one extra read-and-review of a wallflower is just more of the same. Don’t you ever end up bored halfway through a review you thought you’d enjoy?
>If people feel compelled to rate the less-reviewed essays, they'll just rate them worst.
I don't think that's necessarily the case. Personally, my highest-rated review so far has been one I was directed to by the random review picker which I expected to be a self-indulgent throwaway.
A review whose subject doesn't immediately grab people isn't necessarily going to be less interesting on reading.
>we keep going with the initial reads until every single review gets whatever Scott has been counting as the acceptable minimum number of scores
If you do that, then people will jump in to the "stalling" reviews and throw up a 5 without even reading it. Exactly the same result, just less principled.
Also fuck any system that forces people to read Skibidi Toilet.
Seems to me that just throwing in a 5 is piece-of-shit behavior. Reminds me of the time the reservoir used for water in my area was contaminated and I saw a few people coming out of stores carrying 100 or so bottles of spring water. And actually there weren’t that many people doing it. Most must have just done what I did — boil water for the recommended period than use that. Would you just give each of the 15 or so stalling reviews a 5 without even reading it, or do you just think most other people are that stingy and self centered?
And if you are in fact that mean-spirited, there’s a nice alternative for you. Just *claim* in a coupla posts that you’ve
read and rated half a dozen of the wallflowers, and urge other people to do their share. There are enough scrupulous, prosocial people on here to take up the slack and do the small bit of extra review-reading required, especially if prodded by someone they like whom they believe has done more than his share. Think how great
that works out for somebody who cares way more about getting what the want ASAP than about fairness: You avoid tedious review-reading you don’t want to do, improve your reputation, and get other people to do the labor that will give you speedy access to the next phase of the contest. You can drink some bottled water while waiting. Toss the empties into the park next time you pass.
I'm reminded of a Youtube lawyer talking about prosecutorial discretion, and how it's impossible to eliminate because the alternative is they show up and just don't present any evidence, and lose that way, and it's impossible for a judge to force the prosecution to present a winning case. You can lead a horse to water, you can flick it in their eyes and laugh, but you can't actually make them drink.
Trying to halt other people's conversation to make them have a different conversation only you are interested in, is also piece-of-shit behavior; "somebody who cares way more about getting what they want ASAP than about fairness."
<Trying to halt other people's conversation to make them have a different conversation only you are interested in, is also piece-of-shit behavior;
Wait, you think it is piece of shit behavior to say things that make the strongest possible case for what I want and believe, to people who want and believe other things? You’re a lawyer, right? Isn’t that what you do for a living? Isn’t that a lot of what goes in here, when Scott writes essays about what he thinks, and people put up posts making cogent arguments for what they think?
I agree forcing people to stop the conversation they are having and forcing them to have the conversation only I want to have is bad behavior. But in the present situation I have no power at all to force people to stop saying or doing what they want and instead say and do what I want. How can you not see that distinction? I am just arguing the case for doing something in a way I think is better, not compelling anyone to anything.
No. I'm a guy who reads stuff on the Internet, and then has opinions on it.
>Isn’t that a lot of what goes in here,
Some of them try, and those people are pieces of shit, but I have the tools to just go around them; the page doesn't stall on their comments until I give it a thumbs-up or thumbs-down, I can just scroll past them, or hide their thread, or block them entirely, and engage with everything else.
>But in the present situation I have no power at all to force people to stop saying or doing what they want
Yes. In the present situation. But you're calling for a situation where the Book Review Final can't begin until people read and respond to your entry.
>No. I'm a guy who reads stuff on the Internet, and then has opinions on it.
So are you saying here that you’re not a lawyer, or that you don’t like my making the point I just did about lawyers because it’s a great point?
<< Isn’t trying to convince people who disagree that your take on things is right a lot of what goes on here?
<Some of them try, and those people are pieces of shit,
Well using that criterion Scott is a major piece of shit, because he spends a lot of time trying to change people’s ideas about various things. And lots of commenters, not just yours truly, are also pieces of shit. But wait, maybe you agree pretty often with Scott and the commenters. Is it only people who disagree with you that are pieces of shit?
< you're calling for a situation where the Book Review Final can't begin until people read and respond to your entry.
Are you joking? Of course I’m not saying the Final can’t begin until peoplerespond to my entry. I’m making the case that we should not begin the Final until all entries have had a minimum of 8 reviews (The 8 comes from Scott, not me, but seems like a reasonable number to me.)
Wait, are you maybe saying that the Final should not begin until everyone has read and responded to your admirable and enviously well-written lines about pieces of shit on ACX?
According to the spreadsheet report Scott screenshotted and linked in the comments at the end of last year's contest, the average rating was 6.74. Looking at the scores of finalists, it appears that the cutoff for consideration as a finalist was probably around 7.6, with most finalists being comfortably above 8.0. I think the lowest number of scores among the finalists was 18, with most of them having something like 30-50. A few reviews with considerably above 8.0 ratings but less than ten reviews were apparently kept out of the finalists by the low sample size correction.
Scott's algorithm, as he explained it, was to pad 3-4 average ratings to every review's actual ratings to regress everything towards the mean, not just padding the overlooked reviews. This shouldn't produce as sharp an effect as padding to a fixed minimum, but still affects scores quite a bit more if the review only has a handful of ratings.
Maybe I misremembered what Scott said. Are you sure that he said he pads all scores? But in any case, my main point isn’t that score padding is undesirable, it’s that I’d like us to guarantee those who enter at least 8 readers. The year I entered there were not many reviews with so few ratings that Scott asked the group to read reviews from the list. The total number of extra reviews that would have to be read is probably pretty small. My estimate was 15 review wallflowers, with a total of maybe 60 reads needed to give each of those reviews a
total of 8 ratings. That’s quite a small amount of reading compared to the total amount done. If the other 130 reviews got an average of 8 ratings, the minimum, that would mean 1040 review-readings had already been done. Another 60 is an additional 5% or so.
I don't agree with your criticism, because I think the possibility that no one will care what you have to say is simply a risk that you have to take when writing anything for the public, and there's not really any way around this, for the reasons that other commenters have tried to explain.
I also suspect that this isn't a real problem for accurately determining which reviews are good enough to make the finals, because if most people aren't moved enough by a review to rate it, then it's probably not in the top 10%.
That being said, if this were somehow a real signal quality problem that needed to be fixed, my first idea would be to make the randomizer more heavily weight reviews that have gotten fewer ratings. This'd require closer coordination between Scott and me than the current process does, and while I'd find this interesting enough to want to do the extra work, I'm not sure whether Scott would.
I like the idea of using the randomizer for this purpose, and I doubt it would be much trouble for Scott to implement. And it has the advantage of not making public which reviews have not had many readers.
I can't remember my thought process the past few years. I do direct people to undervoted reviews (as you know), and I'll try to be more aggressive about it this year and see if I can get everyone to have enough.
It does bother me when a review makes the finals because it has the bare minimum number of votes, they're all high, but when I read it it doesn't seem very good, and this encourages me to set a high (maybe unachievably high) minimum.
I don't know. I sent in a review one year and it ended up in decent mid-table obscurity, maybe more towards the lower end. I was a little disappointed, yes, but realistically I couldn't expect it to do better, and that it got any votes at all was a bonus.
So asking people to read reviews they are not interested in, or find dull or poorly written - I don't know. This year I skimmed, I read the first few bits of every review and if it didn't appeal to me, sorry, moving on. If I'd been told "here are six random reviews and you *have* to read them even if five of them bore you senseless", I think I would probably have been a lot crueller in how I voted for the compulsory ones because yes I am that vengeful ("oh you think you're a ten, do you? maybe a seven at least? ha ha, take this two and like it!")
I think perhaps social media has conditioned people to judge themselves by their status online - am I getting enough likes or followers or retweets? I have to curate my life, my Instagram images, my TikTok, my blog to appeal to the most! If I don't monetise this content, I am a failure! (yes, I was This Old Today when I found out "hang on, people get *paid* for tweets?" https://create.twitter.com/en/goals/monetization) and this naturally causes people to feel badly if they don't get the level of engagement they expect for the work they did.
I just slop up whatever oozes out of the brain crevices and if people read it, hurrah, and if they don't, well they don't. I did have a Dreamwidth account way back but I've never done anything to grow or foster engagement or whatever the term is.
I'm not trying to boast about my better way, but I do think we have become a lot more sensitive about "do people like me?" over the content we create, and that's all due to the ecosystem that has evolved.
Review of Schoenberg's 3 Klavierstücke was ok. Nothing new to someone wo has read lots of classical music though.
It made me slightly upset as a giant Schoenberg fanboy. But the reviewer came around in the end and acknowledged one could like the avant-garde music so he shall be forgiven.
Some disagreements I had with the article
- Beethoven certainly didn’t have to publish an “artist statement” each time a work of his was premiered.
Neither did the avant-garde composers of the 20th century. You can listen to Messiaen, Schoenberg, Stockhausen without reading anything hey have ever written.
Yes nowadays not that many people listen to classical music anymore but:
- There is still a very active community, especially on YouTube around the people making "score-videos" and lots of people there also really like modern music.
I remember listening to Gruppen by Stockhausen again and again during every break we got one day in high school. And I have absolutely no musical talent, I can't even sing a basic melody. I guess you just randomly like that sort of music, the way some people spicy food.
Stockhausen wrote *ten volumes* of prose. Thousands upon thousands of pages. Do you seriously think this played no role in validating the narrative of his genius? That there was no incentive structure fostering this? Why didn’t Mozart have to write entire books about his craft?
"Yes nowadays not that many people listen to classical music anymore"
Is this a fact? Let alone a fact with unambiguous evidence? It sounds like the sort of truism that people would just say because it "sounds like the sort of thing that would be true" without checking if it's actually true, but I could be wrong.
I think Timothy is referring to new classical music. Lots of people still listen to e.g. Mozart, but it’s uncontroversial that something happened in the 20th century where most people stopped caring about anything new. In previous eras, the popularity of contemporary high art music ebbed and flowed - Mozart would mostly have been known only to elites in his time, whereas Liszt was huge - but at no point was it anything like the current situation, where basically nobody knows any contemporary composers. If you include film composers the situation is a bit less bleak, but probably still constitutes a general decline.
I’m a big fan of Person of Interest and I keep an eye on rationalist circles, but I cannot believe I never put the two together. The reviewer is blameless for feeling insane, this show should’ve blown up here by now, especially since it already has somewhat of a cult following among mainstream audiences. Very often when I come across AGI scenarios I play them in the context of the show in my head, like how you always imagine a certain actor’s character from the adaptation when you read the book.
Another thing to note is that Jonathan Nolan (yes, brother of the very same director) is also the creator of Westworld which also deals with AGIs. In some ways it feels like PoI was practice for WW, except that the practice run turned out much better — well, credit where due, the first season was solid.
Person of Interest was such a good show. I loved the way the story tried to address one of the primary concerns of mass, intensive surveillance - what if the government spies on you for its own gain even if you did nothing wrong?
How does us entering our email address prevent cheating? Someone can just enter fake emails and you'll have no way to know since you've committed to not emailing anybody.
There are prob lots of ways to cheat. Easiest is to have your friends give your review high marks. They don't have to be paid subscribers to vote -- I'm not even sure they have to be unpaid subscribers. Or yeah, you could just get yourself 10 email addresses and vote 10x Just -- jeez, people, please don't do it. It's unfair.
1. Last year I disqualified a review because all of the email addresses were French names and the author was French - they had asked their IRL friends to vote for them.
2. Because ACX is now a "newsletter", I know the emails of most ACX readers. If one review has a disproportionate number of non-subscribers to subscribers, that raises my index of suspicion.
3. People are bad at creating lots of fake email names that follow real email name patterns.
4. When I said I wouldn't email you, I just meant I'm not going to add everyone to a spam list. I'm willing to email a few people from a seemingly-fake review to check whether they really exist (although I've never had to do this).
> they had asked their IRL friends to vote for them.
So what's the policy here? Are contestants strictly forbidden from sharing the contest and their reviews even with a couple of close friends who would be interested in this kind of thing, to prevent any conflict of interest? Or is it more about a case where you/someone else specifically organise dozens of people to vote for your review in particular?
And what about fandoms? Some of the things reviewed have a huge fan base among people from all around the world. Wouldn't sharing your review there be a more significant contamination? Or is it considered fair game as fans of the work can be even more critical? Or nevermind sharing, what about casual readers of the blog who may not even be subscribed, who are fans of some work and therefore will read and rate its review in particular? Is it on the reader to vote at least for several entries?
I think it would be nice if all those rules were explicit to begin with.
Keeping your review anonymous is an explicit rule. Pointing your friends at your review and asking them to vote for it seems contrary to it being anonymous to the judges.
Hmm. I got the reading that it was meant to be anonymous in a sense of not to publicly declare that its yours, instead of not to tell about it to anybody whatsoever.
But also it doesn't really solve the fandom issue. One can attract fandom votes without explicitly revealing whose review it is.
When an entry is about something I like or am a fan of, I do try to be careful to judge it on "yes but is this a good review?" rather than "yay, thing I like, I'm gonna vote for this!"
I'm not perfect on this, but I do try at least not to vote solely on "yay, thing I like!".
I'm part of a specific community where a reviewer shared their review (with a topic connected to the community) under their pseudonym used in the community. Is that allowed?
I think the idea is (a) the reviews are anonymous so we're not voting for "this is my best pal!" over "this is a good review" and (b) the voting should come from among the readers here, so asking people who aren't involved even as lurkers to vote specifically for your review is gaming the system.
Getting all your friends, family, colleagues and random people off the street to vote for only one review in the contest means that if this review wins or places highly, this is not really an accurate representation of its quality or of how the readership here judged it.
You know what, sure, I already did most of the work in figuring out the right section headers anyway. Warning: This was produced by a hacky script and so certain things (like screenshotted tweets) might not be counted correctly.
The Spreadsheet: Humanity's Most Misunderstood Programming Language (636 words)
11 Poetic Forms, Reviewed in Verse (815 words)
Marriage (1006 words)
Baldur's Gate Three (1015 words)
The Beginning After the End of Humanity Circus (1017 words)
My Childhood Television Set (1043 words)
Tenga Arte Drape (1073 words)
An American football game (1123 words)
The Zone of Interest (1216 words)
Grave of the Fireflies (1231 words)
A New Theodicy for High School Math (1356 words)
The Three Stigmata of Noel Scott Engel (1375 words)
Time’s Arrow (spirals) (1390 words)
Sheldon Brown's Bicycle Technical Info (1398 words)
Pythia (1425 words)
Nicotine as a Nootropic (1478 words)
My Neighbour Totoro Stage Show (1486 words)
“Earth” in Review: A Beautiful, Frustrating, Waste of Time (1662 words)
Have read about half a dozen of the video game and film reviews so far, and have found them to be pretty poor quality and not close to as good as the book review contest. Could just be to do with an inferior medium.
A lot of sloppy recounting the plot to things as if it's a sixth grade book report. Very little underlying analysis, and nothing you couldn't get from a cursory google search. Hopefully the other categories prove more fruitful.
The doc shows a page-number. :) When scrolling/hovering the mouse. Taymon did a much better job - yep, that looong one I liked is among the "10k+ words". Only Joan of Arc at 23949 words is slightly longer than last-year's winner. Is that good or bad news? :D
FYI, the random script is broken on mobile (if you don't desktop-mode it). Instead of going to a random article, it just stays at the top of a random docs.
Thanks for reporting this; I've partially fixed it. The next time you use it on mobile, if it leaves you at the top of the page, tap the URL bar and then the navigate button, and it should scroll you to the right place. (At least this works for me in Chrome on Android; I don't have a good way to test on other browsers.)
The underlying bug is unfortunately in Google Docs (specifically the "mobile basic" view which I think gets less attention from the dev team), and so there isn't really anything I can do about it.
I'm a little surprised by how many Ghibli films have been reviewed. Of the 23 TV/movie/theater entries (excluding Toby, which was probably misclassified), 4 are Ghibli films and another is a stage adaptation of a Ghibli film. I don't quite know what to make of this.
Tentative hypothesis: Anime is very (and increasingly) popular, but if you're a snob (who are probably overrepresented among reviewers), you can basically only watch Ghibli, almost any other anime is low-sophistication-coded, hence the large number of Ghibli reviews.
I mean, snobs have a point. Ghibli is consistently good, and often excellent, whereas anime in general is largely worthless slop, exactly in accordance with Sturgeon's law. That's not to say excellent stuff can't occasionally be found, but your chances are much better with Ghibli, so why would not-committed-weebs venture elsewhere?
Well, I didn't say that they were doing anything wrong, merely posited a possible explanation. (Though I do admit I was probably a bit influenced by my annoyance resulting from reading some very pompous (non-Ghibli) reviews when I was writing my comment.)
However, if you ask me, choosing to review Ghibli does make me think it's more likely that the review author has less knowledge in the medium of anime (there are excellent anime that are not Ghibli!) and that they are more motivated/driven by signaling status than I would like a reviewer to be. These factors decreased my expectation of those reviews enough to delay reading them. (But to be clear, they might actually be amazing reviews and I hope they are and I get to read them in the finals even if I don't get around to reading them in this phase.)
Well, the interplay between anime and snobbery is a complex issue, and it has fascinated me for a long time. No other part of pop culture is at the same time so universally low-status and has such a large fanbase incensed at this injustice. This frustration often leads to excesses in the other direction, with "weeb" becoming the entire identity, often with gushing praises for obvious slop, which further weirds out and repels normies (looking at you Sword Art Online). I'd say that even Ghibli suffers from this, where only the more adventurous kind of snob dares to touch it, so that even the highest-status anime masterpieces are probably underappreciated by the mainstream.
"No other part of pop culture is at the same time so universally low-status and has such a large fanbase incensed at this injustice."
I would have thought romance novels, the Star Wars expanded universe, and professional wrestling are all things with large fanbases that are considered near-universally low-status, but I have no familiarity with any of them so maybe I'm completely wrong.
I'm also not familiar, but my (snobbish) impression is that "trashiness" is part of their charm that is generally embraced, with fans not thinking that their stuff is unfairly denied induction into High Art (whereas deserving exceptions, e.g. Pride and Prejudice, aren't tainted by that).
> However, if you ask me, choosing to review Ghibli does make me think it's more likely that the review author has less knowledge in the medium of anime (there are excellent anime that are not Ghibli!) and that they are more motivated/driven by signaling status than I would like a reviewer to be.
I'm actually not too convinced by this reasoning. This observation, "the review author has less knowledge in the medium of anime" might be true, but I'm not sure about the motivation. There are other animes that have achieved non-weeb recognition that would probably be high-status enough for a status-seeking reviewer. For example Ghost in the Shell got a live-action adaptation starring Scarlett Johansson. Netflix did the same to Cowboy Bebop and made a bit of a splash. Neither adaptation was especially successful, but at least they indicate that the source material aren't just weird shit that only weebs watch.
I still don't have a good theory as to why so much Ghibli, but I'll venture a guess that the AI Ghiblification trend is a contributing factor.
I didn't really give a reasoning, just my opinion, so of course, you might be right. If you are curious about why I hold that opinion, it's because of my personal experience: The friends of mine who are a bit on the snob spectrum all like Miyazaki (and haven't ever watched any other anime). When the Ghost in the Shell adaption came out, I could convince some of my (less snobby) friends to watch it, but none of them had heard about it before, so my impression is that it is a lot less famous (and Cowboy Bebop is even less famous than that).
Of course as it's merely my n=1 personal experience I'm not sure it would convince anyone of anything, I'm just giving my reasons.
I think the AI Ghiblification trend was pretty short-lived and Google Trends seems to agree with that, but it did probably introduce some people to Ghibli.
> If you are curious about why I hold that opinion, it's because of my personal experience: The friends of mine who are a bit on the snob spectrum all like Miyazaki (and haven't ever watched any other anime).
Okay, I see that. I don't have the same experiences but I think my circles are a bit weird in that respect, and I can imagine your experience being more generalizable. I remain a bit surprised nobody thought to review Ghost in the Shell though, because while it's sort of reviewed to death (in anime/cyberpunk circles), it has at least some salience to ACX readers concerned with AI/singularity.
> I think the AI Ghiblification trend was pretty short-lived and Google Trends seems to agree with that, but it did probably introduce some people to Ghibli.
To clarify my brief guess, I wasn't trying to say that the reviewers that wrote about Ghibli did so because they were introduced to Ghibli by the AI Ghiblification trend. Rather, the trend could have been an impetus for them to revisit their favorite Ghibli films. The AI Ghiblification trend kicked off about a month after the announcement of this year's review contest, so if people were still noodling over what to write about, the trend could have simply planted a seed in their heads. Scott's post about it could have also given them something to think about and respond to: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-colors-of-her-coat
Human Sexuality seems to have a broken link (to taskmster). It just opens up the same page for me. EDIT: Actually, it appears to de-anonymize the author in the preview.
I think "Toby: A Review Of My Entry To ACX 'Everything-Except-a-Book Review Contest'" is in the wrong category (TV/Movies) and should instead be in Other.
The average length might not be the most useful metric here. The distribution of document lengths is asymmetric (you can’t have less than zero, but there is no upper limit), so the median will be below the average.
JFK Assassination Conspiracies was a good read, but fails to mention my favourite one (there are so many! You couldn’t possibly include everyone who was a suspect!) But anyway, Kerry Thornley, co-founder of Discordianism, was writing a book about Oswald. The sane version of the conspiracy: Oswald joins what was basically a cult, loses his mind, and shoots JFK.
That doesn't sound terribly dissimilar to the conclusions the Warren Commission arrived at, if you consider communism a cult. Certainly it's a matter of public record that Oswald was mentally unstable and had attempted suicide on at least one occasion.
I think to make it work, Oswald’s mental state has to be deteriorating before he gets involved with Kerry Thornley. Oswald defects to the Soviet Union, then comes back and tries Discordianism, and in general tries to get involved with every cult he can contact. Then he kills JFK, and every weird cult he was previously involved with gets the blame.
Toby is quite the paradox. I think it is accurate in that it is a bad review, and that accuracy implies, to me at least, that it is a good review, which implies that it is incorrect and that it is a bad review. I would say the best way to read it is to get halfway through, get exhausted and skip to the conclusion, and then not think about it too much after that.
If you’re into visiting show caves, Mammoth is probably not one to drive across country for.
It is a big and important cave system - *possibly* even connected to Wind Cave; the story of the exploration of the latter may appeal to obsessive types on the forum.
But Mammoth’s significance is largely its place in the history of American tourism. It was one of the earliest destinations, when the nation first took auto trips for pleasure. Foreigners absolutely can skip it.
The story of the slaves at Mammoth is a bit more nuanced than presented in the contest entry.
These were very good jobs, for the time, and a cause of pride to this day to the families that were particularly involved.
Two of the people who ran the tourist operation as best I recall were the sons (slaves) of a businessman I think out of Nashville, who bought the cave at some point and really opened it up? It was a little unusual for the time in that he recognized his sons and seems to have deliberately sent them off to the cave as a family business to work in.
Somebody who’s probably been a Google doodle was one of the tour guides; slave or not I don't remember but I think he learned to read and write so that he could read geology, and mapped and produced the first paper on the cave. Maybe studied in Europe. Or maybe he knew how to read, but learned Latin for the purpose.
The unhappiness of black families in the area (according to an old park ranger, a descendant, I met who is there as an interpreter for early cave days and the local black community that was tied up with it) lay not with their work in the cave prior to Emancipation (not sure how long this even was) but with the fact that when the National Park Service gained control of the attraction in the 20th century, they lost their jobs as guides. His family moved away and he described visiting as a child and going to the back door of the place they had had the run of.
I could tell that this gentleman seized on somebody after each tour, and I was that person. He showed me a book about his people in the gift shop and so I bought it and he signed it for me.
He told me a sad story about an ancestress who cried when her children were taken from her, and ran down the road and never regained her senses. He told me that enslaved women loved and sorrowed over their children the same as anyone else, as if I had doubted that. It sort of seemed like he had read some Frantz Fanon, or some 19th century nutjob, which I was sorry about.
However he was equally proud of his white ancestor for whom there’s a prominent street named in Nashville, and how the whole lot of them black and white get together for reunions.
He talked to me more than an hour, and while my husband would never have had patience for it, it rather gave my trip to Mammoth Cave a memory to peg onto it.
The historical tour is pretty short and probably the best one to take for a casual visitor. It was light on geology, as well, dealing more with munitions as I recall.
I had my hand up a lot - I’m that person, which is why I usually am left to take tours alone. But I gave it up.
You can stay in the old cabins that housed workers and they’re kind of cool.
Yeah, to be clear I meant nothing against the original essay (which is clearly trying to be funny and succeeds.) I just wanted to emphasize I appreciated this comment.
I have run across a couple of reviews that I think are not reviews but essays, and am curious how other people rating reviews are handling reviews of that kind. I think a review of something describes the thing well enough that the reader has a decent idea of what the thing is, then identifies its good and bad features. And there’s a better class of review where the reviewer goes on to place their description and their judgments in a larger context. So for instance if someone wrote a review of Devon Rex cats, they would describe the distinctive features of the breed, and lay out what they saw as good and bad Devon characteristics, and maybe end with a recommendation — are they good cats? If only some would enjoy them, who are the people for whom they’d be a good fit? And then if the writer took the review to the next level they might write about the ethics of developing breeds, or about what draws human beings to animals, or about whether it makes sense to think of cat’s purring and cuddling as affectionate behaviors. And the person could build all that around the story of their adopting a Devon, and that would not interfere with what they wrote being a review, so long as they included the other stuff I named.
But let’s say someone’s entry in this review contest was just the story of their adopting a Devon. It’s well written, clear, has charm and humor, but it simply is not a review In this situation, would you just rate the personal memoir itself, ignoring the fact that it’s not a review, or deduct points because it’s not a review, or just not rate it at all?
The case in favor of deducting: My guess is that “reviews” of this kind are often essays or memoirs somebody wrote in some other context, used here in the hope that people would think of them as reviews in some extended sense of the word and give them a pass. But it’s kind of unfair give a pass to somebody who skipped the labor of actually writing a review and just threw in something they had handy. Or maybe somebody was not clear what a review is, and actually wrote a personal memoir for this contest and entered it. Also seems kind of unfair not to deduct for such a big mistake.
The case against deducting: Memoirs and essays are fun to read too. Life is hard, don’t be picky.
Later edit: I looked back at how Scott described the contest. He said "Submit an ACX-length post reviewing something, anything, except a book. You can review a movie, song, or video game. You can review a product, restaurant, or tourist attraction. But don’t let the usual categories limit you. Review comic books or blog posts.. . ." Having thought more about this, I think I am going to deduct some for something not being a review. I say some more about that later in this thread.
I would rate based on how much I like it; not deduct. I'd be more torn if it were the book review contest, but with this one, I'm going in with the expectation that things are weird, so if someone just uses a thing to inspire an essay, I don't feel like I'm having an important expectation violated.
Yup, I second primrose's comment. This feels like more of a loosey-goosey, bend the rules sort of contest anyway, so it seems appropriate to judge based on how good the piece is, not how well it adheres to the prompt. Up to you though.
My rating system is pretty much a slapdash gut-check of how well I think it reads. But, how well it reads includes how well it informs me about its topic. So if it says it's a review of Devon Rex cats, but just describes how the author felt adopting one without making comparisons to other animals, I'm going to say "that didn't review cats at all" and mark it accordingly.
On the other hand, if it says it's a review of their experience adopting a Devon Rex cat, and then just describes how they felt adopting their cat without comparing it to other animals, I'm going to say "yeah, that's a cat adoption all right" and judge it based on how interesting I found the story. (Which I'm guessing would be "not very". Humor and charm is one thing, but I've seen SO many cats in my life. So many, many cats.)
> I have run across a couple of reviews that I think are not reviews but essays, and am curious how other people rating reviews are handling reviews of that kind
I assumed that it would be all essays. A non book review is ambiguous but I read it as anything that isn’t a book review.
No, "non book review" is ambiguous, but Scott's description of the contest is not: "So this year, let’s do something different. Submit an ACX-length post reviewing something, anything, except a book.
I think I am going to treat something's failure to be a review as a flaw, and deduct some for that. What I'll count as a review is an essay that describes a thing and critiques it.
Unless, Scott, you want to give your views on this matter. I kind of wish you would.
The "report comment" feature in substack hangs for me, but there's a bunch of LLM spam in the comments with identical messages from different user accounts pretending to be a commenter and shilling a link (ctrl+f 'castletv').
Askwho is creating AI readings of a smattering of these to help those who read more with their ears. Last year the AI readings got me to read several I wouldn't have otherwise and it really eases some of the reading load. So far he's done Jacobitism, Men Aren't Alright, Mad Investor Chaos, and one of the Disco Elysiums.
The getting over it review is very, very good. I'm not a review afficianado so I'm not speaking in that sense, but as a piece of writing it has a certain sense of control I'm not very good at, and am envious of.
Lots of reviews this year strike me as really gloomy and despairing, and not in the cozy and familiar "AI will soon kill us all" kind of way, but in ways that are new and innovative.
So far I really liked:
* 11 Poetic Forms (obviously written by Scott), lots of fun with rigid poetic forms. Villanelle seems so rigid and weird, it was jarring to realize that yes, I have actually read one very famous villanelle before, everyone has.
* Islamic geometric patterns in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (obviously also by Scott, his love for neat patterns is well-known). Every bit as autistic as it sounds. Surprisingly useful, I might actually save this one for when I need to cook up mock-islamic patterns again.
* The Tale Of The Princess Kaguya (obviously by Scott, his knowledge of several Japanese words is well known) - give it a try even if you have zero interest in the actual cartoon (which is good, to make clear). There's a long plot summary, but it makes its way to a despairing point about human condition I thought was insightful.
* The World As A Whole - very despairing review, spoilers: the entire world gets 3 out of 10. Usually when people say that the world sucks it's some kind of pose, or a passing mood, or depression, but here it feels like the author actually saw a thing or two about what the world is like and 3 out of 10, horrifyingly, may just be a pretty objective evaluation. (Author mentions teaching Japanese kids, obvious Scott is obvious.)
* My Father's Instant Mashed Potatoes - I learned things about mashed potatoes! It was better than expected. Do you think the author uses Mashed Potatoes to spin a metaphor about the AI? Yeah.
* I'm not even going to type that - yes, revolting subject, but it actually served as an interesting window into something I had no idea about and made me understand why someone might enjoy it. (I didn't even know it was a series!)
There were some other good ones that other people already mentioned, and I won't, so as not too add to the popularity feedback loop.
Unfortunately a couple of reviews reeked of ChatGPT prose style. Sorry people, I gave you bad marks. Using LLM in a way that sneaks under my radar is cool. Sounding recognizably like an LLM (whether you actually used it or not) is not cool.
The last one is Skibidi Toilet, right? If yes, then I think it's useful to mention it, because there is a highly-liked joke comment that might bias people into giving it lower ratings/reviewing it less, so sth balancing that would be fair, I think.
Even if some of the reviews were indeed written by Scott, I wouldn't have guessed that he wrote as many as four of them. He did say that one of the benefits of the review contest is that he can take it easy during the summer since he doesn't have to write as many posts during the weeks when the finalists are posted. Entering so many entries to the contest defeats at least that part of that purpose.
Also, if there was any other goal to the experiment of entering his own review, it was probably already achieved when he entered two book reviews in 2023 and won the popular vote with one of them. I don't see why he would enter again.
I'm both impressed and frustrated by the "The Men Are Not Alright" essay. Clearly it's written by an unusually perceptive woman, who thoroughly catalogued destructive failures of both feminism-infused "polite society" and the "manosphere" that opposes it. But whereas she understands that misogyny is core to the manosphere (which she's correct in entirely rejecting), she somehow still doesn't get that misandry is core to the mainstream feminism as it's practiced (not the insulting cardboard cutout of "women are people, actually", which is still always trotted out). If even she isn't wise enough to understand that feminism does far more harm than good these days, can't be reformed or reclaimed from bad faith actors, then hopes for substantial improvements any time soon are few and faint indeed.
When it acknowledged that housewife is no longer a viable role for most women in the modern society. To the extent that conservatives still deny this, they are just as clueless.
If it was really that objectively nonviable, we wouldn't need feminism to point it out. It would just organically stop occurring. Also, just as clueless as who?
There is clear value in recognizing a serious problem and bringing it to societal attention, particularly when powers that be would rather that knowledge about it stays suppressed. Sure, if not "feminists", then somebody else would've done it eventually, and then credit for that contribution would've been his. If somebody wiser than feminists had done both that and also carried through better solutions, his credit would've been much greater, but alas, and here we are.
Okay, well, in that case I don't think I agree with any part of your premise.
Society changes all the time without any particular political-ideological impetus, so I don't agree that it's necessary for someone to point out an issue actively for society to adapt around it; by the time feminism arose in the late '60s/early '70s housewifery had, on the contrary, only just begun to become available as an option outside a comparatively small, privileged section of society, a great advance in human prosperity which feminism if anything ruined; and finally, even if this was a serious social problem and they deserved credit for drawing attention to it, I don't think that's nearly sufficient for feminists to have done more good than harm in this period.
Hello! Writer of the review here. (I hope it's okay for me to post here? Scott, please delete if necessary!)
I deliberately chose not to dive into a critique of fourth-wave feminism (which I think is what you mean when you refer to “mainstream feminism”), because it would take at least 20,000 words for me to express my frustrations on the topic, and my review is already too long.
However, I do see the blatant misandry present in fourth-wave (and many third-wave) feminist circles, especially the terminally online ones. It’s actually one of the main reasons I chose to write this essay. Talking about the well-being of men has somehow become taboo in modern feminist circles, which I think is heartless, foolish, and needs to change. That change will only happen if more feminists speak up about these issues, hence the essay.
That all being said, I do believe the average person who describes themselves as feminist is *not* fourth-wave. Fourth-wavers get the most attention, because they dominate discourse in elite circles and on social media. But when you actually look at feminist non-profits, most funding remains focused on first/second wave topics: ensuring women can safely leave their husbands, providing shelters for abused women, protecting and expanding reproductive rights, providing girls with education, etc.
This is great news, because it means the majority of people who care enough about feminism to throw money at it are still focused on the core values of “equality between genders.” And this is why I disagree with your statement that feminism “can't be reformed or reclaimed from bad faith actors.” The money and support is there; it’s just a matter of shifting the narrative. Which won't be easy, but I'm stubborn and contrarian as hell, so I figure I may as well help kick-start the change. :)
In addition, I think the argument “feminism does far more harm than good these days” might be somewhat true when looking specifically at “fourth-wave feminist impact on middle- and upper-class Westerners.” A bunch of disorganized people shrieking misandrist comments on Twitter, and doing very little practical activism to help women, doesn’t seem to have accomplished much besides driving young men to the manosphere.
However, I feel the argument does not hold when looking at broader society. Many girls are still born into highly sexist communities/cultures/countries that restrict their rights, education, and safety. The populations of these communities/cultures/countries are currently growing faster than middle- and upper-class Western populations. At its core, feminism is a creed of equality between genders, and I believe it’s short-sighted to claim this creed is no longer needed.
Personally, I hope for a fifth-wave of feminism to appear soon: one that re-focuses on the core goal of equality between genders, gracefully acknowledges biological differences, disavows misandry, and seeks mutual support and trust between the genders.
Anyway—thanks for taking the time to read my absurdly long essay and this absurdly long follow-up comment.
…and now I feel the need to actually write that 20,000 word critique of fourth-wave feminism. Sigh. :')
You know, regardless of the okayness of this comment with respect to the norm of maintaining anonymity, and I'm not criticizing your decision to respond, I do wonder how entrants, especially finalists later on when they get a full post, feel about the comments. Assuming most of them refrain from responding to comments due to concerns with breaking anonymity, instead of indifference or reluctance to get into a debate, it must be kind of hard holding back when you can't clarify a misunderstanding or settle a debate in case something you wrote happened to be ambiguous.
I would actually really appreciate Scott posting some guidelines about this. Several people chose fairly controversial topics to write about, and I'm expecting some finalist comment sections to get a wee bit heated. It would be nice if the writers had some solid guidelines to follow regarding whether they can engage, and if so, what that engagement should look like.
My current understanding of the rules is "engagement is okay as long as you maintain the anonymity of your IRL identity." But would definitely appreciate clarification. :)
Wanted to give you a gold star for your patience and honest engagement to the rather nasty initial comment. It's darkly amusing to me that that comment is not even cynical/blackpilled enough to go unchallenged here.
Thanks, friend, I appreciate the kind words. My guess is that the comment would have been challenged, had it been posted yesterday when there was more activity on this post and more eyes on the comments. I don't think it accurately reflects the mindset of most ACX readers.
Ii wish people were not commenting here on reviews they’ve read.
Comments like Xpym’s leave the writer in a difficult position with no good solution, and in my opinion just gum up the works. Anyhow, for the record, I only read a few sentences of Xpym’s comment, out of curiosity. And in any case I don’t give a shit what Xpym thinks about feminism and your review, and will read your review with a. open mind. I am sure there are many others who will do the same .
Thanks, I greatly appreciate you offering to read it with an open-mind. I also heartedly second your opinion on not commenting critique/praise of reviews until finalists are chosen. It puts us writers in a weird spot.
Yes, and as far as I can tell, "fourth wave" entirely controls the steering wheel here, and I have no idea why you expect this to change any time soon. Sure, "reasonable" feminists may sometimes grumble, but when push comes to shove, they toe the line, and certainly don't denounce or ostracize the worst offenders.
>Many girls are still born into highly sexist communities/cultures/countries that restrict their rights
Well, either those cultures will westernize, or they won't. I don't think that feminist ideas are attractive outside of that package, so pushing them alone isn't productive, while pushing the whole package is probably still net positive.
>I hope for a fifth-wave of feminism to appear soon: one that re-focuses on the core goal of equality between genders, gracefully acknowledges biological differences, disavows misandry, and seeks mutual support and trust between the genders.
But why "feminism" though, if the goal is equality? Names are powerful, you know.
>thanks for taking the time to read my absurdly long essay and this absurdly long follow-up comment.
I judged an entry unfairly low, because I got distracted and missed a curcial part of the text. My actual mark should have been about 3 points higher. I'm assuming I can't just submit a new rating from the same email, because it'd be exploitable, but ugh.
I can emphasize; I feel so guilty when something like this happens to me, pretty much regardless of the scope of damage. Probably because it violates, idk, my sense of fairness or something.
It explicitly states that the email address you provide is used to prevent duplicate ratings, so it's not really exploitable to submit a second rating with the same address; Scott is specifically not going to count both. However, we don't know whether he will pick the first, the last or some average.
Scott has a post on here saying that if there’s a contest-related problem you can email him. Maybe just do that? — tell him which review it was and what your revised rating is.
A quote: “Among the 3,700 tiles Lu and Steinhardt mapped in the Darb-i-Imam shrine, there were only 11 tiny flaws. A simple change in orientation of the tiles fixes the flaw... these accidents were possibly introduced by workers.”
Quasicrystals are 3D solids with quasiperiodic atomic structures and symmetries forbidden to ordinary periodic crystals, such as 5-fold symmetry. A Penrose tiling is the 2D equivalent: an algorithmic tiling which can be expanded to infinity, but which (if I understand correctly) can't be constructed by a tiling of just one basic pattern. Johannes Kepler examined them in Harmonices Mundi (1619); Roger Penrose studied them more-closely in the 1970s.
I doubt that the Universe is big enough and old enough for anyone to have made a 3700-tile quasicrystal by accident.
See p. 48-59, "Formal to Realistic?", of an incomplete draft of my theory of art history ( https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/oeef5qowpjb846rt2lrhz/Theory-of-Art-20240906-1617.pptx?rlkey=r1tqgjg225cp0samib9s55qg6&st=46lb2oja&dl=0 ), on why that's interesting and important. Basically, we have no longitudinal evidence of any artistic tradition that transitioned directly between formal art (geometric patterns) and naturalistic art without going thru the intermediate realm of symbolic or iconic art (think cartoons), except as the result of iconoclasm or civilizational collapse, or with the aid of powerful mathematics.
Understanding fractals reveals that quasiperiodic patterns and fractals chart a path from formal to naturalistic art, usually without producing intermediate symbolic art; and that the realm of symbolic art probably has zero measure within the space of art between formal and naturalistic art (just guessing, tho). Comparing the philosophies of the societies which choose each kind of art, supports my thesis that a society's choice between these 3 types of art is driven by whether it wants to eliminate, tolerate, or exploit complexity and disorder. Reactionaries who want centralized government hate complexity and diversity; liberals who want distributed governance (liberty, individual rights, democracy, free markets) require it.
The kinds of "errors" that the author of "Islamic geometric patterns in the Metropolitan Museum of Art" points out are not found in Penrose tilings. But they may have the same intent.
We don't know the motives of the Islamic mosaic makers. It could be that making quasiperiodic patterns was the only way they could create something with organic beauty without violating the iconoclastic rules of mosques. Or it could be part of the tradition of "Persian flaws", deliberate flaws made to prove that the artist was not hubristically aspiring to perfection.
I think that the Islamic mosaic artists, and the fin de siècle and modern artists, were following the same path, but in opposite directions, and for very different reasons. The absurd notion of "exhausting" an artistic form was a trope of modern artists, which they did not respond to by introducing new complexity, but by demanding the old forms be burned to the ground. They wanted a complex form destroyed, where I think the mosaic artists wanted a simple form to grow.
The mosaic artists started from a space of, as our author notes, "miniscule complexity", and may have wanted to make it more organic, more complex. Whereas we have a great deal of written evidence, in the form of manifestos, magazine articles, diary entries, and letters, that most of the French artists after (but not including) the Impressionists were trying to destroy all of the complexity in art, which they regarded as bankrupt, because their only conception of representational art was as religious symbols. They wrote about burning down, sweeping away, destroying, all previous art, as a necessary cleansing, which they had hoped WW1 would accomplish. See, for instance, BLAST! (1914), and the Dada Manifesto (a call for /more-thorough/ destruction, written in 1916 and expanded in 1918!!!).
They did not have the concept of generative creativity, which is to say, the creation of new art from a pre-existing set of symbols, whether that be letters and words, or objects in paintings. When Ezra Pound said "Make it new!", he was NOT talking about making anything new, but only about re-making old art from a new perspective--as proved by the poems he wrote after saying "Make it new!" Most modernist painters did not believe humans could make new things; they believed that artists were prophets who could perceive the Platonic Forms of things which existed in Eternity, but which had never before been revealed to humans. (You can see this in the writings of Gaugin, Cézanne, Matisse, Malevich, Gleizes, Metzinger, Kandinsky, Mondrian, & many others.) They were actually iconoclasts, but iconoclasts who believed that they COULD paint the actual spiritual essences that representational painting distracted people from.
New to the site and new to this "Nonbook Review", though it seems clear enough - people submit (?) reviews of anything that isn't a book. So far I have enjoyed the first-hand account of volunteering for combat in the Ukraine amongst others, but was baffled by "Orgy Review - Red Means No". Do erotic fantasies qualify?
Ahhhhh - given the origins of this site, if someone is reviewing "sex parties I have attended", it's most likely not a fantasy but a genuine "sex parties I have attended" account 😀
Can the writer of the Astral Codex Ten Commentariat review send me a link to his file containing all of the comments from the entire ACX blog history? He said he scraped them all—I want to make a RAG tool for them so we can search it in natural language.
On one hand, that would be a helpful tool for me, supposing they're grouped by blog post, or at least linked to the blog post they were on and the comment they responded to. On the other hand, it would make it easy for, say, an employer, or the "vetters" of Worldcon, to check whether someone has ever commented on ACX. Perhaps people should be allowed to opt out.
"Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the SSC and/or ACX and/or associated and spin-off sites commentariat?"
*defiantly yells "I know my rights! you can't ask me that!" as security drags me away to cast me into the outer darkness while this plays in the background*
Lots of people are posting their opinions of reviews. I wish people who disliked reviews would refrain from posting that info. Seems to me that is going to lead to fewer people reading those reviews, and so your rating, presumably a low one, is going to weigh more heavily in the review’s average rating than it would have if you had kept silent — because there are going to be fewer other readers to balance out your score.
I don't agree at all. This is the only place anyone will ever be able to actually discuss the non-finalist reviews. It would be different if, as some people have been suggesting for several years now, there were some dedicated discussion threads made for discussing the non-finalist reviews (which could happen after the finalists are chosen), but it seems like Scott has no intention of doing that.
So for the sake of both readers with things to say, and moreso review writers who want some actual engagement with their review to occur sometime ever, I 100% oppose this.
Actually, year before last I and about 7 other ACX readers who had not made the finals set up a Substack blog called Book Review Group so that each person could get a critique of their review and also a discussion of the book’s topic and the review author’s take on it. That worked out well. Every one of us got detailed responses from about 7 readers. That is much more than any review on this thread is likely to get via spontaneous opinion posts, and our discussion did not do anything to change the voting dynamics on ACX, since it took place after the finalists were chosen. Setting up that Substack was quite easy. It’s still up. Go have a look at it if you like. It’s called Book Review Group, and is findable by googling that title plus the word “Substack.” (I later used it to publish a few things of my own. but it should be easy to tell which posts are from the original group.)
And what about the problem I mentioned with putting up a post here saying a certain review is lousy? My point was that a post like that reduced the number of readers a review was likely to get. Consequently, the low rating presumably given by the person posting that the review sucked was likely not to get get balanced out by a
good number of other ratings, possibly better ones, which ywould make the review’s final score more of a reflection of the group consensus. Giving a review a low rating and then posting that the review is lousy probably doubles or triples the effect of the denigrator’s vote. Instead of giving the review a score of 3, he is doing the equivalent of giving it 2 or 3 3 ratings. Calling a review lousy in this thread is like trampling the snow in front of it and then taking a shit on the middle
of the mess.
Is that nothing? How would you like it if somebody posted a paragraph about how lousy and boring your review is?
I would vastly, vastly prefer it to not getting any acknowledgement or discussion of my review whatsoever. I guess we have very different intuitions on this.
I find it enormously frustrating to see a single post made where discussion of reviews that don't end up finalists is remotely possible, then lots of people not bothering to do so even there (this post has a fraction of the comments of most ACX posts, despite there being such an unbelievable amount to discuss, plus apparently hardly anyone's still checking the thread a mere few days after it was posted, despite an unimaginable amount to discuss and the fact that commenters need time to read through the discussable material), then requests to create more discussion spaces being repeatedly ignored (with all respect, Scott, is it so hard to give a one setence reply saying you don't want to do that and why?), and *then* further comments saying that even the extremely limited discussion taking place should not be happening!
I'm sorry, maybe I just have very different expectations to most people here. But I find myself disappointed in this community. And I understand the point you're making. I personally think it's very much outweighed by the other considerations mentioned, but again I accept we may just have different intuitions.
Believe me I hate the idea of never hearing any reactions to a piece of writing I put a lot of myself into. I was extremely distressed when I entered 2 years ago and my review was on the list of 15 or. so with few votes that Scott put up, with a request that people read and rate those reviews. I get what’s bothering you. But why not consider the solution I found? I get 7 long thoughtful responses to my review, as well as discussion of its topic among members of the group we set up.
And anyhow, it’s pretty clear that Scott’s not going to take any action on this matter. If he were going to post asking people not to comment on reviews on this thread he would have done it by now. But even with no rule against commenting on reviews in this thread, what are the chances someone’s going to put up a comment about yours? There are 150 reviews, for fuck’s sake, and most people are busy reading them. Even if you got a comment there’s at least a 50% chance it will be negative, and will reduce your chance of being a finalist. And it may be inaccurate and unfair.
And then what about the problem that. a negative comment here about somebody else’s review will probably reduce the number of readers they have, and therefore how fair an evaluation they get? Don’t you give a shit about their situation? The person whose review got somebody’s long complaint about her review of — I forget what, something having to do with feminism — is clearly distressed. Doesn’t it matter that getting a reader’s reaction to her review was clearly a net negative for her? How many people are you prepared to watch being upset the way that reviewer is in order to increase the chance that somebody puts up a comment about *your* review?
"I was extremely distressed when I entered 2 years ago and my review was on the list of 15 or. so with few votes that Scott put up"
My question here is *why* were you extremely distressed? I get being disappointed or feeling like your hard work was not recognised, but upset and put out by being a low scorer? Extreme distress sounds like an over-reaction, at least to me, since I operate on "you didn't appreciate my genius? well fluff you too and the horse you rode in on".
This is not a performance review for work, or someone judging you on a dating site. This is voluntary participation in a competition that doesn't in fact mean anything outside of the readers of this site.
Please believe me I'm not intending to be condemnatory or victim-blaming here. I'm not good at sensitive interpersonal interactions so I will come across as blunt, but I would ask you to think a little about why that meant so much to you. Why did it hurt you? How much of your self-worth was pinned to 'doing well on the ACX book review contest' and why? Is it because you were raised that "if you don't do well and score in the top on exams/school grades/university/work then you are worthless and bad and we won't love you anymore"? EDIT: I've failed and been mediocre enough in all aspects of life that I don't expect to do better than a low minimum, but I can see how someone who is used to doing well and being successful and getting what they want from working hard and turning in the piece of work would be upset by not getting the place they thought they merited.
Not making into the top ten or twenty for the book review contest means nothing more or deeper than "the idiosyncratic tastes of avowed contrarians on this here Substack didn't match up with what I wrote".
I was planning to give opinions on reviews I'd read in, like, a week or two, after the majority of voting had taken place. There will probably be another post later that says, the votes are in, we're tallying now, and that's the best time to discuss random reviews. We're only three days in right now, it's too early. We haven't even hit a weekend yet.
"How would you like it if somebody posted a paragraph about how lousy and boring your review is?"
I'd be pissed-off but it would also help me understand where I failed (if I failed) in the review. EDIT: For example, in a reply to a comment on here I got called out for my "faux cynicism". Hey, all my cynicism is 100% organic free-range grass-fed GMO-free no artificial colourings or flavourings sincere!
Early on I had to learn not to take it personally when people either didn't read what I thought were fantastic comments/pieces, or didn't like them. My first natural reaction was "why doesn't this person like me? why are they being mean?" until I slapped some sense into myself. This person doesn't know me, they're only going by what I wrote. And if they didn't like it, then they didn't like it. God knows, there's plenty of comment online I don't like or vehemently disagree with. It's not personal. It's not even me they're calling "boring and lousy" because 'Deiseach' or whatever the name I used for that work is not real world me. It's an online construct that shares, to greater or lesser extent, parts of my personality and experiences, but it's not the me that gets up in the morning and goes out the door to work.
So getting thicker skinned helped. And of course, that does not mean I can't reply in the comfort of my own mind "you freakin' idiot, you know nothing, you tasteless brainless shameless spineless heap of compost!"
There is indeed no accounting for taste. I've gotten (from the same site) compliments on things that were just thrown together immediate reactions and condemnation for what I had worked hard on putting together as a reasonable argument or at least sincerely expressed emotion.
Hey, I agree that to get the benefit of online forums like this you have find a way to tolerate being criticized, misunderstood and insulted. and yes you’re right that none of us fully know each other — we’re sort of seeing each other through a keyhole. But the point of my “how would you like it” question to Ascent was different. I wasn’t reminding them that harsh criticism from online strangers is unpleasant. My complaint about posting criticism of a review *at this point* was that it probably is going to reduce that number of readers a review gets. Fewer readers means their that review’s score won’t be as good an approximation of the consensus — the score they would have gotten if everyone had rated their review. So the point of my question to Ascend was how would they like it if somebody posted here that their review was
tedious and lousy, given that that post was likely to mean Ascend’s
review got fewer readers.
Also, most reviewers care about having their review read. Everybody knows the chance of winning or being a finalist is low, but I think it hasn’t occurred to lots of people that maybe only 2 or 3 people will read the thing they wrote. I was startled when it happened to me. When Scott posted the links to all reviews I had quite a strong shivery feeling of, “ooh, it’s up. Wow, people are reading it. They are actually looking at my thoughts about that book I was fascinated by. I wonder what that they think?” I doubt that that’s rare.
About the question in your other post — what’s up with caring about having one’s review read? I don’t think that’s rare for people who write poetry or fiction, or essays where they are representing their personal take on something. I certainly have a different feeling about the stuff I write than I do about other products of my labor — the work I do for a living, my rock climbing back in the day when I did a lot of that, the various crafts I do. I experience the things I write as being much more a chunk of me. I’ve read biographies of quite a few writers, and while not all of them seem to feel that way about what they write, it’s very common. Beyond that, all I can say is that I am not a rock of confidence. I am thin-skinned. I have learned how to manage in situations where people are being blunt and tough and sometimes mean. I do not expect some great playground monitor in the sky to swoop down and make them stop. But a lot of my coping is simply feeling bad but knowing to shut the fuck up about it. I doubt that being thin-skinned the way I am is rare here.
I actually do not think there it is likely that the review I entered in this contest will have fewer readers than the average one. The review that few people read 2 years ago had an illustration under the title that I later learned that many people kind of recoiled from. And the first few paragraphs were about something unrelated to the book I was reviewing. I thought they were a good way to lead into the subject of the book, but at least a dozen people by now have told me they are confusing and annoying. So I think I lot of people bailed early on. I made sure my present review started in a user-friendly way. I’m not feeling particularly confident that most people will like it, just reasonably safe from its having no readers. So all the speaking up I’ve been doing during the present review season has been in the service of reducing the chance that other people’s reviews don’t go unread.
Thank you for your response. I'm glad that you did find something helpful in why people didn't respond well to your last review, and I do hope this one gets the response you would like.
I think I approach this from a very different angle. I don't think of myself as a writer, I've never shared a lot of writing with anyone, and I write mostly for myself. So my expectations around putting a piece out in public - be it a post or a comment - are very different. I don't feel so much like "this is chunk of myself", it's more "this is my view right now on this thing or my response to this thing". I've never had the expectation of an audience because before I got online, I never had anyone to share writing with.
So it's more participating in a conversation between a lot of people, and sometimes not everyone hears you or responds to you, because there's umpteen people talking to/at/over each other. If that happens, well I shrug and continue on.
I feel the same way about a lot of writing in fanfiction spaces, where now the expectation seems to be "you should/must engage with me, review, leave comments (but always praise never constructive criticism) because I am providing all this content and doing all this work for free and I deserve to have that acknowledged".
My reaction there is - and I have to say it's precisely because I've always written for myself and not an audience - "yeah, you're doing this for free, it's voluntary, nobody is compelled to read you or respond if they do, if it's published work that is bought and paid for that's different".
Let’s see, how many other ways are there to put a thumb on the scale? So far we’ve got putting up positive comments about certain reviews, putting up negative comments about certain reviews, and posting AI summaries of some but not others. How about favor trading or favor peddling? Hey guys, fuck fairness, right? If you give me a 9 or a 10, I’ll give you one — DM me if interested. Or something more straightforward? Good old cash? A really really long wet blowjob?
To anyone who has a temptation to cheat, maybe consider:
there a lot of ACT readers. It's unlikely that your cheating will have an outsized impact. This means that if your review is good enough to even be in contention for top 3/winning a prize, then it will already make the cut to be a finalist. So you don't really get much of a benefit from cheating. To me this helps reduce the temptation.
(I realize this argument doesn't apply if you consider just being a finalist as a terminal goal in itself.)
I agree with the others pointing out that selectively summarizing the reviews doesn't feel fair. If you don't want to produce summaries for all 141 articles, which I know is a lot of work, would you consider removing your post for now, and directing your attention towards less-read reviews later on?
In the past years, at later stages of the finalist selection process, Scott has called for more votes on some reviews that received less attention. Creating AI summaries for those post might be a useful way to entice people to read those posts and balance out the vote counts, whereas selectively summarizing reviews now could exacerbate the imbalance.
Re: the review of countries and British people being rude and emotional.
America's view of Britain is basically middle.class.britain...David Attenborough and Stephen Fry. That's partly because anglophiles are.more interested in highbrow things. Partly because middle class britons speak BBC english, even when they don't work for the BBC, whereas lower class Britons speak a variety of colourful dialects Usians can't understand. And partly because the US isn't a major soccer playing nation: if the Barmy Army descends on you at regular intervals, you quickly stop believing all Brits are quiet and polite.
Scott I think you should foreground the random picker script above the linear links.
Fine.
Judging by the titles this looks all good!
Well. I’ll save money on my kindle habit.
Hmm, my review isn't there, I definitely submitted it and screenshotted my submission form confirmation because I'm paranoid. Anything I can do about that? Worked hard on it...
Correction: it is one of the reviews, but it's not available to vote for, and is missing in the list on this post.
Email me which one is yours. scott@slatestarcodex.com . Same request to anyone else in this situation. Don't worry, I'll get it on once I hear from you and make sure that it gets a reasonable number of votes.
Thank you, sent an email.
Have you clicked 'Share' & select 'Anyone with the link'?
Yes, it is actually available in the doc to be read, just not in voting or in the long list here.
Similar situation, except mine is missing entirely. I have emailed scott@slatestarcodex.com
Hi Scott, there are a few that look interesting to me, but I don't want to start reviewing ones that might end up over-reviewed; would you consider doing a reminder post in a week's time or whatever with a list of the under-reviewed submissions so people can try and even things out?
Yes, please do list under-reviewed submissions - I'm happy to take a look at them once I know what they are!
The Random Report script gave me a review on Skibidi Toilet. I feel this result is not just an error, but a sin.
Same event. Though I liked that review, well done! Could not stand the video for long.
My issue is The sermon on the mountain - that pops up EVERY time I go for "T" - NOt using the random report - and neither do I want to read that review nor do I particularly like the first page (well written, but hey there is a speech on the field in Luke, you cheat if you only do Matthew).
Looked into 3 reviews - and I agree, there should be a follow up with the seldom-rated reviews, seems they are all very well done.
FYI, there are two different reviews of the Sermon on the Mount, by different authors.
Oh, interesting - will try to look at the 2nd; but I really wanted to read another text starting with "The" ;) UPDATE: a) the 2nd sermon-review seems same content (surprise), slightly less well written. Same ignorance of the sermon in Luke. b) more important: Oh, I can scroll to the other reviews, but I still get force-started at the first sermon-review. :/ c) As I wanted to read the Ukraine-war text, I was lucky: just the one before the sermons. At the end of that war-review was a comment "10/10, would recommend. " By Scott?!? Some early assistant? - anyways, I agree.
To be clear, the two reviews are counted separately in the randomizer; if you click the link, you're equally likely to be redirected to either of them.
To be clear, I did not get to the first Sermon by clicking on the randomizer (that I did only once, first, brought me to Skibidi toilet). I just opened the "Other T-Z" section, a few second later I was catapulted to the first Sermon. Happened several times. - No idea, got that fixed or do I do something different now, but I am happy reading.
I'm experiencing the same issue as you, and I think this is entirely due to an extra argument in the link to the "Other T-Z" document. It has an extra "heading" argument that's absent from the other links. (Though weirdly the "Other (A-I)" link has a "heading" argument but doesn't redirect.) That argument basically makes the Google Docs page to scroll down to the Sermon review. If Scott sees this, he can fix it by editing the link urls in this post and removing everything starting from the hashtag onwards.
I read that "10/10 would recommend" as the author restating that he didn't regret doing it.
Got that thought on getting up. At 4am: too dumb. ;). A few other reviews do so, too - reminds of John Green. "Rating" that war as a 10/10 - not my view. Rating the "review" thus: fine. Though it shows survivorship-bias, literally.
Well... more rating his choice to participate in the war, than the war per se.
I have to say I wish there was a bit more time. I tend to read long essays slowly, unless I wait until I'm in the right mood to read them fast. I also prefer to think over them a bit before I decide what I think of them. With barely two weeks, I'll be lucky to end up rating more than two or three.
EDIT: Actually, it'll probably be a lot more than that. I've looked at a few and they're so far much easier to read than the dense and rather pompous and self-important essays that I remember dominating one year of the book review finalists.
This finally relieved my anxiety about accidentally not submitting a review
Oh, yeah. I wish there was a confirmation email. It were agonizing three weeks.
I suffered with that too!
Can you make it so the docs aren't broken into pages? It messes up the pictures.
Not enough positivity on this one, so I'll say it: YAY! Thank you reviewers and Scott! Lots of spicy topics - I'm excited to read them!
I'm excited to find out if some of these ("Love", "Marriage", "The Spreadsheet") are about, like, *the concept*, or a piece of media named after the concept, or...
Agreed - I would not mind this repeating next year, in parallel with the book contest. Or maybe one in the summer and one in the winter, like with Comiket? It all depends on whether Scott finds it too much of a hassle, though.
(I've done a skim of the gachage review, and man, do I have things to say about that. Plenty of personal experience, you see. But I wish it had gone deeper into the field, from Kancolle and the infamous Fall 2013 event, through the Airship Era and the rise of DMM Games, to the streamlined modern series that are mostly reviewed there. Maybe I should try writing a historical perspective myself...)
Sorry, but is justifying the text too much to ask? (text formatting, ok?)
Why would they be? If they make it to the finals they won't be justified when posted on the blog itself.
edited for clarification
I understood what you meant. If they make the finals, the text formatting won't be justified when posted on the blog itself.
lol, what made you think you had been misunderstood?
Wow! The creativity in some of the things people chose to review has already made this *much* more fun than the book reviews. Hope this concept makes a return!
+1. Just taking a quick glance at the titles, there are at least 5-10 I'm looking forward to read, and probably a bunch of hidden gems too.
Nearly 2,000 pages of reviews. Wowza! Looks like I won't be bored for a little while.
Anybody have an idea how this compares to previous years submission volume? I generally avoid book reviews for books I haven't read, but non-book reviews seem more accessible. I've already given out one ten star rating from the handful I've read.
Submission volume appears to be pretty steady. There were 150 submissions in 2024, 156 in 2023, and 141 in 2022.
There are some intriguing titles for sure.
Before having read any of them, to whoever wrote the Pathologic review: I want you to know I appreciate you and, if your review is half as good as your choice of game, I'm sure you'll do very well.
(Also, TWO Disco Elysium reviews??? What if both of them are good??? What then???)
I was fearing way more repeated reviews, however it seems that the only repeated are:
- Schools
- Call of Duty
- Disco Elysium
Maybe this is just Scott's way of outsourcing marketing research on his readers, to his own readers!
ACX game review YT/Twitch channel when?
Also The Sermon on the Mount.
It strikes me that The Sermon on the Mount is really stretching the "not a book" part of the Not-A-Book review, considering it is from a book.
I had the same thought. I suppose strictly speaking it's a speech which was transcribed in a book. If a book contains a transcription of MLK Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech, the speech itself is still a distinct entity from the book that contains it.
I don't necessarily think the sermon should DQ'ed, but it does not sound like a good comparison. That speech was recorded, and there are plausibly people alive who attended it. You can experience it without the mediation of a book.
As a comparison point, I think it's fair to review a theater play you attended for this contest, even if the text was published as is often the case. Now, reviewing an old theater play that has not been staged in living memory, by reading its text? Heeeeeh...
I think reviewing a section of a book is fair game if it can be done without just having it be a microcosm review of the whole book.
For example, I think a review of "Susan not going to Narnia at the end of the Last Battle" would be an interesting read.
I was also exited by the Pathologic review. I'm sure it can't be as good as hbomberguy's, but that is an extremely high bar.
holy shit the random chooser script gave me pathologic on the first go
Thus begins my favorite time of the year. For a while now there will be endless ACX-like content to read and procrastinate to, hooray!
I think Im going to random 5-10 reviews in order to get a good sample of the quality before going for the ones I am interested in (lots of those!). I recommend everyone try to balance like this so we dont get a bias for acx-bait in the finals
(would there be a bias towards common interests if everyone votes only for their interests? Perhaps its a high risk high reward strategy for the writer: you would get a lot of voters who are not going to vote to other reviews but if they are unusually negative you are tanking yourself)
Will you rate the average 5 and the best 10 (and linearly between) or assume normality and eg rate a review with +1sd quality as 6 or sth else?
I can't speak for anyone else, but my scale is normed according to the benchmark that a typical review by Scott, on typically representative review material, constitutes a 9, and his best and most interesting reviews constitute a 10. I can't guarantee in advance that a 5 will represent the average among actual submissions (I'm rating a lot, but have no intention to rate all of them.) But a 5 represents roughly how good I *expect* the average submission to be. A 1 would represent a review where I feel deeply aggrieved and insulted with the reviewer for their use of my time.
My highest rating so far is an 8, and my lowest are 3s, but I hope I'll expand that upwards with time, and suspect I'll likely expand it downwards as well.
My personal rating scale has two benchmarks, and is otherwise just querying my vibes:
7: I don't regret spending the time reading this. (This is a relatively high bar for me)
9: This has noticeably shifted the probability distribution of either my actions or my beliefs in some way.
It's a pretty American scale, where most works will be 5+ instead of using the precision evenly. But as long as I review a bunch of things (I think I'm at 20+ completely random rates, plus 3 interest-driven ones so far), consistency is all that matters.
Surprised to see Bishop's Castle here. Thought it was a pretty good article til they got to the conclusion and summed up the man's entire life work "munchkinry".
Some titles don't seem to appear in the tables of contents. Maybe these are formatted as "Title" and not as "Heading"?
An example is "The Delusion of Infinite Economic Growth" in the Other T-Z document.
This article also does not appear in the review form.
Delusion should be corrected now (let me know if it isn't), if you spot more of these please tell me the names.
Also Human Sexuality, reviewed
What makes you think this? It's included in the Google form, this post, and the randomizer. And at least the latter two weren't late corrections (I don't have a way to check the history of the Google form).
I think Yair meant that the second to last section title of Human Sexuality was accidentally formatted as a top-level title instead of a second-level title. This meant that in the table of contents at the beginning of the document as well as in the outline tab, "Limitations and objections" appears as a separate review when it's not. This happens
Although unlike the case with "The Delusion" and "The Disease", this didn't affect the Google form or this post, so this is mostly cosmetic and not so urgent.
Some of these are ridiculous, and simply reading through the titles is an experience itself. Love it!
Whoever wrote the "Adolescence" review - if you're unsold on continuous takes as a gimmick, I must STRONGLY recommend the 2015 film "Victoria" (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4226388/), which unlike "1917" isn't cheated: they really filmed the entire two-and-a-half-hour film in a continuous take. And it isn't just impressive from a technical perspective, but is also a fantastically gripping film as well.
Russian Ark didn't cheat either, but that's also a less conventional film.
I'd like to note the existence of Timecode (2000) here - four simultaneous continuous takes. Technically impressive, maybe not artistically brilliant, but a decent cast including Stellan Skarsgard and Salma Hayek and a very interesting experiment.
There's a formatting error in document A-I.
I used the random review script and landed on one called The Disease, which is not a separate review, but the last section of the above one, Dating Apps - The Misery Engine. The heading should be indented one further.
Whoops, this is my fault. I did a manual pass looking for these kinds of errors, but since the extraneous title was almost in the right place alphabetically, I missed it. I have fixed it in the randomizer; Scott would need to fix it in the post and Google form.
Shouldn't the field "Email" be mandatory in the submission form? I added some ratings without it by mistake, hope they will be deleted.
Yay!!!!! Finally!
I was playing Hot Seat at Lighthaven last night. The question I was asked was, "what spicy opinion do you have that would be controversial with the Rationalist crowd?" (As in, not "controversial" in general, but controversial in our community.)
I answered that I didn't actually think my review was "the best" last year. I'm glad I won, and I think my review was "good enough" to be finalist, but I think I only won due to shock value. I usually have multiple reviews every year that I love during initial voting that don't make it to Finalist. I met Brandon Hendrickson (the 2023 winner with his review of "The Educated Mind") in person this past weekend at LessOnline. He's awesome, I liked his review, but I admitted to him that I voted for his review for #1 at the time... because it was my favorite out of the finalists. But only a couple of my favorites from 2023 made it to Finalist. There were so many awesome submissions in 2023!
Etienne Fornier-Dubois has talked about this. From 2021-23, he chose topics specifically tailored to make finalist (WW2, grand theories of neuro/evolutionary/civilizational development), and then in 2024 he just had fun. He reviewed "Egypt's Golden Couple", a book about the reign of Pharaoh Akhenaten. I loved his review in 2024, and I'm not particularly interested in the topics he reviewed in past years.
So go read the initial submissions!!!! You will almost certainly find some favorites!
Curious which ones were your favorites in 2024? My favorite finalist last year was "Real Raw News" (though yours was also very good); I only read a smallish sample of the nonfinalists, but the one that I still remember, and think should have made the finals, was "Don't Make No Waves, Don't Back No Losers".
(I didn't actually vote in last year's preliminaries because I'd read so few of the reviews and didn't feel calibrated about them. I'm going to try to vote this year, though.)
Out of the ones that didn't make finalist in 2024, I really liked:
- Egypt's Golden Couple
- Don't Make No Waves, Don't Back No Losers
- Cat's Cradle (by Kurt Vonnegut)
I'm actually really glad that my favorites (The Family That Couldn't Sleep, The Autobiography of Yukichi Fukuzawa) made finalist this past year.
I unfortunately can't think of any others off the top of my head right now. I tried to search for Scott's announcement post for the initial round of 2024 voting, but my search was drowned in a sea of regular finalist posts. I think Substack changed their search algorithm. :-/
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/choose-book-review-finalists-2024
I feel slightly stupid for asking, but which of the documents contains Repairing a Father/Daughter Relationship?
Other (J-S)
Huh, I swear I looked in their and somehow missed it. Thanks!
I'm reading a whole batch, making some notes as I finish, before I start rating them. I feel that's only fair... the point of the rating system is to establish which reviews Scott should elevate and analyze. Therefore to me it makes sense to grade on a curve, to give the ones I think are average the average grade rather than against some absolute scale.
Just scanned the titles. Goddam, I am impressed with this group, and that’s really saying something because I am picky, quirky, and used to smart people. Jeez, Scott, I hope you feel some pleasure and gratitude about having gathered this group.
And if you do, I wish you’d say so once in a while. You don’t have to *gush.*. A single sentence a couple times a year would suffice.
I agree. I've been looking forward to see the silly meta topics that people chose, and the submissions did not disappoint! (Including the review about the ACX Commentariat lol.)
Even the people who reviewed perfectly normal things like popular movies and video games found interesting things to say about them. Really good stuff.
Have you considered making the google docs links end in /preview instead of /edit? This can improve load times for users.
I've gone ahead and made this change in the randomizer (though I'll revert it if Scott says he prefers the /edit view for some reason).
What are the guidelines for grading reviews if you are a contestant? Last year, I refrained from participating in the finalist-choosing process on the theory that it was a conflict of interest, but it occurs to me in hindsight that I was perhaps overly scrupulous there and it might be fine as long as I'm grading in good faith.
I don't read the whole of the blog or the comments, but I find yours unusually evenhanded, searching, and dispassionate - so *I think* you ought not to concern yourself about this.
It is kind of you to say so.
There is a review called "Joanna Newsom: The Lyric" in Music which starts with the sentence: "We will complete our series on Joanna Newsom’s music with the analysis of a single sentence from the last track of her last album.". Is this intended or some parts are accidentally missing?
Comment on the testosterone review: As someone considering what testosterone level would be optimal for me, I found it supremely unhelpful. My understanding is that some women (cis and post-op trans) benefit significantly from low-dose supplemental testosterone, but this doesn't discuss that. Furthermore, there's no comment on rumors that it affects autoimmune conditions.
I think it's fair to say that female people and males who have medically transitioned are at best periphery demographics for testosterone.
I'm not sure that's true! https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7098532/ suggests it may be fairly valuable for menopausal women, who are a significant part of the population. https://usefulfictions.substack.com/p/testosterone-gave-me-my-life-back has some anecdotes, if you'd like.
I suppose I also care about this in particular because the testosterone review talks like testosterone makes you a better person, the kind we need more of in the world, the kind that is just cooler and superior and such, and given that, throwing in a flat "but women shouldn't take it" given all this promotion seems not great.
A cursory glance at this population pyramid (https://www.populationpyramid.net/world/2024/) suggests that somewhere in the region of 17% of the population are women aged 45 or older i.e. the demographic you'd expect to be menopausal. Even assuming that fully half of these women would stand to benefit from taking testosterone, that's still only 8.5% of the population. Unlike "male people who have undergone medical transition", 8.5% isn't a *negligibly* small demographic, but I still think it's fair to say it's vastly smaller than the primary demographics of people who could stand to benefit from testosterone.
Comment on the Museum of Science review: How can you review the Museum of Science and then NOT MENTION THE LIGHTNING SHOW?
Wild. What else even is there at the Museum of Science since they got rid of Virtual Volleyball (like 20 years ago but I'm still mad about it).
I wonder what happens if I vote for the same review more than once. I realize the form records the email to check for repeats and deter cheating, but if I accidentally (or maybe intentionally) vote for a review twice, how would the votes be dealt with? Is only the latest vote counted? Are all the repeat votes averaged and then counted as one? Are all the repeat votes disqualified? Are all the votes from the same email address disqualified?
I'm going to keep track of which ones I voted for so I don't accidentally vote twice, but say if I want to change my mind later, is it possible to "overwrite" my vote, or should I avoid doing that because that would invalidate my votes? (I'm assuming that even if an update like that is possible, I should avoid doing that because it makes data-processing more annoying.)
Use AI to read all & pick for ya
Wel, all perspective is best though
Is there a good place to discuss these articles as we read them, perhaps accessible for [anonymized?] discussion with the authors? I'm not tech-savvy but there's a buttload of discussion material here and it would be nice to have some sort of article-specific comment sections to discuss submissions before they get winnowed down to finalists. (Maybe next year?)
I'd also appreciate some kind of comment section if that's at all possible.
My ADHD is "neuron activating" at this list :O
Wait, why did Toby end up in TV / movies?
Seems like it's mis-categorized. It's a review of itself.
Scott is anticipating the day when this is made into a TV series (though I predict it will not get renewed for a 2nd season.)
"The Russo-Ukrainian war" review had evoked in me emotions I would have preferred not to have. I had often felt the same way as the author, but quieted this feelings thinking "no, you read WWI and WWII memoirs, it never goes like that". Reading about how the author did exactly what I dreamed of and liked it makes me again want to do it so hard.
I’d like to make the case for a different system for handling reviews that get few ratings. The present system, as described by Scott 2 years ago, is to add to the person’s real ratings enough “artificial ratings” to bring the person’s total ratings up to some minimum — I believe it’s 8. For artificial votes, I believe Scott uses the average (or median? or mode?) of all scores given to all reviews. I understand the statistical logic of using that number, though I just had a long exchange with GPT4 about that system, and the upshot was that whether that system yields the fairest estimate of what the review’s score would have been if the review had gotten 8 real scores depends on a lot of things. But it would not be practical to take all of them into account, unless Scott is assisted by someone who really wants to nerd out with the numbers.
I take a personal interest in this matter because 2 years ago my review was one of the ones that had few votes as we neared time for wrapping up the group-votes-on-all-of-them phase. I know that because Scott posted a list of reviews with few votes, asking the group to make a point of reading more of those reviews, and it gave me a shiver to see that mine was on the list. I have no idea whether my review ended up getting more real votes or whether Scott had to supplement mine with several bottles of Ensure, but I suspect it was the latter. I later saw all the votes for my reivew, and I believe there were 3 7s in a row at the end, which did make me wonder.
I am here to tell you that it was startlingly painful to take in the information that my review was one that few people chose to read. While it would have been delightful to have my review in the finals, and ever more to have it win, I was not counting on either of those, and was quite prepared to do without them. But the idea that hardly anybody even read this thing I had put so much of myself into — that was unexpected, and brought back memories of other times I never got a chance with something because I wasn’t just weird, I was weird in a weird way. Lots of people here have had that experience, and in fact I think the ones I had were probably on the mild end of the spectrum of what people here have been through. But even my own relatively mild experiences of exclusion were bad enough that decades later they are painful to remember, and I just wasn’t prepared to experience a version of them here.
So I am advocating for a system where we keep going with the initial reads until every single review gets whatever Scott has been counting as the acceptable minimum number of scores — around 8 I think. Let’s not give anyone artificial, statisically-derived scores to bulk up their total. If people are tired of reading reviews, or if some reviews just don’t look appetizing on a first glance, some members of the group just have to keep reading anyway. Jeez, it’s not that terrible. Everybody has logged some time reading stuff they don’t feel like reading — it’s just a bit more of that. And after all, if the review is really terrible — if it’s long, incoherent, insanely droning and tedious, full of inaccuracies — the reader can probably give thing the a fair shake without spending 40 mins. reading every single godawful paragraph.
Have you noticed people piping up here and there exclaiming about how they couldn’t stop worrying that when they sent in the link to the review it somehow didn’t register? And I’ll bet for everyone who actually posted about that there were quite a few with the same worry who kept it to themselves. People really care about having their reviews read. My reasonl for speaking up in favor of guaranteeing that people who enter get a reasonable share of readers is that it is the kind thing to do. It makes a lot of difference to individuals who wrote essays, and doesn’t cost the group much effort, especially when there are so many of us to share the effort.
I understand where you're coming from, but I think that the solution is to have more contests with fewer articles per contest, or rather just round up the existing articles in groups.
Just looking at the categories here, there can be three contests a year:
- Book Reviews.
- Media Reviews (Games, TV, Music, etc...)
- Other.
If people feel compelled to rate the less-reviewed essays, they'll just rate them worst.
As I recall there were 15 or so reviews in the year I’m talking about that had too few ratings. If each of them had only 4 ratings, and so needed 4 more to reach the acceptable total of 8, that means 60 more reviews in total were needed. Lots of people here read and rated reviews, but let’s just consider the 150 or so who had entered reviews in the contest. It seems to me that these people have a bit of extra responsibility for reading reviews, since their own are being read. So if 60 of those entering the contest, fewer than half of the total entrants, read one more review the problem would be solved. And of course there are far more potential reviewers than the 150 context participants. Seems like the added burden on ACX would be very small.
And if I did not feel like reading and rating somebody’s review but did it out of obligation I would not give them a low rating just because I was not in the mood to read, because I am not a mean-spirited unfair piece of shit. How about you?
> And if I did not feel like reading and rating somebody’s review but did it out of obligation I would not give them a low rating just because I was not in the mood to read, because I am not a mean-spirited unfair piece of shit.
I don't think it takes mean-spiritedness to vote unfavorably when people are compelled to read an initially less-voted review. Suppose people are generally charitable and act according to the "say nothing if you have nothing nice to say" principle, which is probably pretty prevalent. In their initial voting, they would probably avoid voting on reviews whose subject they found uninteresting, or reviews that they skimmed but didn't find high quality enough to bother reading carefully. If you compel people to read those all the way through and vote on them, unless people are systematically mistaken with their judgment in their initial screening, which I find unlikely, this will result in the less-read reviews getting lower scores overall.
I don't know if this scenario is more likely than people being mean-spirited and acting in a biased way, but either way it doesn't bode well for the outcome that you were hoping for with your proposal. That is, boosting the vote count of less-read reviews by compelling people to read them might tank their score more than just adding artificial votes at global average.
Of course, this is assuming that there is some not-too-weak correlation between the number of votes and the quality/interest of the review. It could be that the correlation is weak enough and the variance in vote count is mostly due to random fluctuation in the selection process and people's tastes. In that case, your proposed system or some form of obligatory assignment could improve voting efficiency.
I agree with the idea of putting the burden of "making sure all essays get reviewed" on the contestants, provided that we can have a system which:
- Preserves anonimity or pseudonimity.
- Prevents the contestants from "tactical" voting (i.e. giving low ratings to reviews just above their own, so that they get pushed up).
Ah, I hadn't thought about tactical voting! Yes, if every entrant has to read all the reviews, then sabotaging the competition comes into play (just like getting all your friends to vote for your review). The Hillary Clinton campaign strategy of voting for a weak entry so that it will displace a stronger contestant that is rival to you, though it might blow up in your face the way her campaign's support of Trump over the other Republican candidates did:
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/11/hillary-clinton-2016-donald-trump-214428/
"So to take Bush down, Clinton’s team drew up a plan to pump Trump up. Shortly after her kickoff, top aides organized a strategy call, whose agenda included a memo to the Democratic National Committee: “This memo is intended to outline the strategy and goals a potential Hillary Clinton presidential campaign would have regarding the 2016 Republican presidential field,” it read.
“The variety of candidates is a positive here, and many of the lesser known can serve as a cudgel to move the more established candidates further to the right. In this scenario, we don’t want to marginalize the more extreme candidates, but make them more ‘Pied Piper’ candidates who actually represent the mainstream of the Republican Party,” read the memo.
“Pied Piper candidates include, but aren’t limited to:
• Ted Cruz
• Donald Trump
• Ben Carson
We need to be elevating the Pied Piper candidates so that they are leaders of the pack and tell the press to [take] them seriously."
While the campaign also kept a close eye on Rubio, monitoring his announcement speech and tightly designing the tweeted responses to his moves, Clinton’s team in Brooklyn was delightedly puzzled by Trump’s shift into the pole position that July after attacking John McCain by declaring, “I like people who weren’t captured.”
Eleven days after those comments about McCain, Clinton aides sought to push the plan even further: An agenda item for top aides’ message planning meeting read, “How do we prevent Bush from bettering himself/how do we maximize Trump and others?"
They wouldn’t have to work very hard at it though; the debates were the beginning of the end for the candidate Clinton’s team always thought she would face on Election Day. The day after the first debate in August, Clinton confidante Neera Tanden emailed Podesta her analysis: “Bush sucked. I’m glad Hillary is obsessed with the one candidate who would be easiest to beat :) Besides Trump, of course.”
"And if I did not feel like reading and rating somebody’s review but did it out of obligation I would not give them a low rating just because I was not in the mood to read, because I am not a mean-spirited unfair piece of shit. How about you?"
You *greatly* underestimate my capacity for spitefulness and malice. Also, I *hate* being compelled to do things - Irish saying "I'll be led but I won't be drove". I might try to be fair to a poor entry if it came up when I spun the randomiser, but if it was a poor entry and I was *made* to read it, the vitriol would flow in rivers.
-You hate being told what to do. Yeah, I often do too, but not usually in circumstances where doing something is just an expectation in some group I’m in because I like the group. And that’s the situation here. We are already being told to do various things: Submit a review of a certain kind in a certain way. Rate them on a certain scale. Read reviews. As a matter of fact, I had some discontent with the first of these expectations. When we were discussing, a while ago, whether to have the usual book reviews or change it up somehow. I suggested a change more radical than the one we finally went with, and I was disappointed. So I am being “made” to participate in a contest of a kind that is not the one I advocated for. However, I’m OK with all that. I don’t hate the constraints, and the pleasure of participating outweighs the disappointment and annoyance I have about not getting exactly what I want.
-The idea that somebody is going to make you read a review you have zero desire to read: You’re picturing what would happen in an unrealistic way that makes it particularly infuriating. Nobody is going to say, “Deiseach, read and rate this long, long badly-written review of a new approach to weight loss based on the idea that overweight is caused by laziness and self-pity. If you don’t read it and review it, you are banned for ACX.” What would really happen would be that Scott would put up a post listing 15 or so reviews that have had few readers, and say that we can’t move to the finals until each had a total of 8. My estimate is that those would each need on average 4 more ratings, so a total of 60 more read-and-rates in all. There are literally thousands of possible raters. Out of those, I’m confident 60 would step forward and do the job, either just to be a sport, or because they enjoy reading reviews even of things they’re not interested in. There were people other years who read every single review, and were surprised that others were surprised to hear that. So when Scott called for readers for the wallflowers, you would simply not step forward and read any of them, and the people who minded it less would pick up the slack.
-Am I asking for the wallflowers to get read, or for people to be extra-nice and give them a few pity points. Definitely the former! The thing that I think is unfair and unkind is for reviews just not to get read. If the wallflowers all get rated a 2 or 3, so be it. Scott also posted that his problem with few reviews is that some reviews only have, say, 3 or 4 ratings but those few are high, and in that situation he has read them himself and often thought they were not very good. He doesn’t like the idea of somebody making it to the finals without having their high score be one that is unlikely to be luck. (The fewer votes there are, the less you can count on its being a valid reflection of the consensus view, rather than, say, a 10 the writer gave himself and then a coupla 8’s by people who read the review and just happened to be the kind of people who loved the review’s topic — or the reviewer’s jokes — of who just gave high scores to everybody, rating almost all reviews 7, 8, 9, or 10.)
-Reading reviews one is not interested in: Yeah, that’s tedious. My own inexperience of reading reviews is that about half the time I end up having to draw on my willpower to give a review a fair shake. I do pick reviews on subjects I’m interested in, but about half the time I just don’t enjoy the review itself. It turns out to be about an aspect of the subject I don’t care about, or it’s disorganized and hard to follow, or it’s superficial, or it’s sort of a tedious summary of the subject with few interesting insights. And for those I just push myself to read the thing all the way through, and keep in mind my rating criteria, and give it a fair score based on those. Some that really bore me I end up giving decent ratings, because they are clear and well-organized and cover the bases, just bore to me. So some boredom when rating reviews seems inevitable to me. Doing one extra read-and-review of a wallflower is just more of the same. Don’t you ever end up bored halfway through a review you thought you’d enjoy?
>If people feel compelled to rate the less-reviewed essays, they'll just rate them worst.
I don't think that's necessarily the case. Personally, my highest-rated review so far has been one I was directed to by the random review picker which I expected to be a self-indulgent throwaway.
A review whose subject doesn't immediately grab people isn't necessarily going to be less interesting on reading.
>we keep going with the initial reads until every single review gets whatever Scott has been counting as the acceptable minimum number of scores
If you do that, then people will jump in to the "stalling" reviews and throw up a 5 without even reading it. Exactly the same result, just less principled.
Also fuck any system that forces people to read Skibidi Toilet.
Seems to me that just throwing in a 5 is piece-of-shit behavior. Reminds me of the time the reservoir used for water in my area was contaminated and I saw a few people coming out of stores carrying 100 or so bottles of spring water. And actually there weren’t that many people doing it. Most must have just done what I did — boil water for the recommended period than use that. Would you just give each of the 15 or so stalling reviews a 5 without even reading it, or do you just think most other people are that stingy and self centered?
And if you are in fact that mean-spirited, there’s a nice alternative for you. Just *claim* in a coupla posts that you’ve
read and rated half a dozen of the wallflowers, and urge other people to do their share. There are enough scrupulous, prosocial people on here to take up the slack and do the small bit of extra review-reading required, especially if prodded by someone they like whom they believe has done more than his share. Think how great
that works out for somebody who cares way more about getting what the want ASAP than about fairness: You avoid tedious review-reading you don’t want to do, improve your reputation, and get other people to do the labor that will give you speedy access to the next phase of the contest. You can drink some bottled water while waiting. Toss the empties into the park next time you pass.
Both.
I'm reminded of a Youtube lawyer talking about prosecutorial discretion, and how it's impossible to eliminate because the alternative is they show up and just don't present any evidence, and lose that way, and it's impossible for a judge to force the prosecution to present a winning case. You can lead a horse to water, you can flick it in their eyes and laugh, but you can't actually make them drink.
Trying to halt other people's conversation to make them have a different conversation only you are interested in, is also piece-of-shit behavior; "somebody who cares way more about getting what they want ASAP than about fairness."
<Trying to halt other people's conversation to make them have a different conversation only you are interested in, is also piece-of-shit behavior;
Wait, you think it is piece of shit behavior to say things that make the strongest possible case for what I want and believe, to people who want and believe other things? You’re a lawyer, right? Isn’t that what you do for a living? Isn’t that a lot of what goes in here, when Scott writes essays about what he thinks, and people put up posts making cogent arguments for what they think?
I agree forcing people to stop the conversation they are having and forcing them to have the conversation only I want to have is bad behavior. But in the present situation I have no power at all to force people to stop saying or doing what they want and instead say and do what I want. How can you not see that distinction? I am just arguing the case for doing something in a way I think is better, not compelling anyone to anything.
>You’re a lawyer, right?
No. I'm a guy who reads stuff on the Internet, and then has opinions on it.
>Isn’t that a lot of what goes in here,
Some of them try, and those people are pieces of shit, but I have the tools to just go around them; the page doesn't stall on their comments until I give it a thumbs-up or thumbs-down, I can just scroll past them, or hide their thread, or block them entirely, and engage with everything else.
>But in the present situation I have no power at all to force people to stop saying or doing what they want
Yes. In the present situation. But you're calling for a situation where the Book Review Final can't begin until people read and respond to your entry.
>>You’re a lawyer, right?
>No. I'm a guy who reads stuff on the Internet, and then has opinions on it.
So are you saying here that you’re not a lawyer, or that you don’t like my making the point I just did about lawyers because it’s a great point?
<< Isn’t trying to convince people who disagree that your take on things is right a lot of what goes on here?
<Some of them try, and those people are pieces of shit,
Well using that criterion Scott is a major piece of shit, because he spends a lot of time trying to change people’s ideas about various things. And lots of commenters, not just yours truly, are also pieces of shit. But wait, maybe you agree pretty often with Scott and the commenters. Is it only people who disagree with you that are pieces of shit?
< you're calling for a situation where the Book Review Final can't begin until people read and respond to your entry.
Are you joking? Of course I’m not saying the Final can’t begin until peoplerespond to my entry. I’m making the case that we should not begin the Final until all entries have had a minimum of 8 reviews (The 8 comes from Scott, not me, but seems like a reasonable number to me.)
Wait, are you maybe saying that the Final should not begin until everyone has read and responded to your admirable and enviously well-written lines about pieces of shit on ACX?
"Also fuck any system that forces people to read Skibidi Toilet."
I have been trying very, very hard to avoid even finding out what all that is about, so you can bet that is not one of the reviews I read 😀
According to the spreadsheet report Scott screenshotted and linked in the comments at the end of last year's contest, the average rating was 6.74. Looking at the scores of finalists, it appears that the cutoff for consideration as a finalist was probably around 7.6, with most finalists being comfortably above 8.0. I think the lowest number of scores among the finalists was 18, with most of them having something like 30-50. A few reviews with considerably above 8.0 ratings but less than ten reviews were apparently kept out of the finalists by the low sample size correction.
Scott's algorithm, as he explained it, was to pad 3-4 average ratings to every review's actual ratings to regress everything towards the mean, not just padding the overlooked reviews. This shouldn't produce as sharp an effect as padding to a fixed minimum, but still affects scores quite a bit more if the review only has a handful of ratings.
The average review overall got about 32 ratings.
Maybe I misremembered what Scott said. Are you sure that he said he pads all scores? But in any case, my main point isn’t that score padding is undesirable, it’s that I’d like us to guarantee those who enter at least 8 readers. The year I entered there were not many reviews with so few ratings that Scott asked the group to read reviews from the list. The total number of extra reviews that would have to be read is probably pretty small. My estimate was 15 review wallflowers, with a total of maybe 60 reads needed to give each of those reviews a
total of 8 ratings. That’s quite a small amount of reading compared to the total amount done. If the other 130 reviews got an average of 8 ratings, the minimum, that would mean 1040 review-readings had already been done. Another 60 is an additional 5% or so.
This is his comment:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/vote-in-the-2024-book-review-contest/comment/70606466
It sounds like he tweaks the procedure each year and this comment was specific to how he did it in last year's contest.
I don't agree with your criticism, because I think the possibility that no one will care what you have to say is simply a risk that you have to take when writing anything for the public, and there's not really any way around this, for the reasons that other commenters have tried to explain.
I also suspect that this isn't a real problem for accurately determining which reviews are good enough to make the finals, because if most people aren't moved enough by a review to rate it, then it's probably not in the top 10%.
That being said, if this were somehow a real signal quality problem that needed to be fixed, my first idea would be to make the randomizer more heavily weight reviews that have gotten fewer ratings. This'd require closer coordination between Scott and me than the current process does, and while I'd find this interesting enough to want to do the extra work, I'm not sure whether Scott would.
I like the idea of using the randomizer for this purpose, and I doubt it would be much trouble for Scott to implement. And it has the advantage of not making public which reviews have not had many readers.
I can't remember my thought process the past few years. I do direct people to undervoted reviews (as you know), and I'll try to be more aggressive about it this year and see if I can get everyone to have enough.
It does bother me when a review makes the finals because it has the bare minimum number of votes, they're all high, but when I read it it doesn't seem very good, and this encourages me to set a high (maybe unachievably high) minimum.
I don't know. I sent in a review one year and it ended up in decent mid-table obscurity, maybe more towards the lower end. I was a little disappointed, yes, but realistically I couldn't expect it to do better, and that it got any votes at all was a bonus.
So asking people to read reviews they are not interested in, or find dull or poorly written - I don't know. This year I skimmed, I read the first few bits of every review and if it didn't appeal to me, sorry, moving on. If I'd been told "here are six random reviews and you *have* to read them even if five of them bore you senseless", I think I would probably have been a lot crueller in how I voted for the compulsory ones because yes I am that vengeful ("oh you think you're a ten, do you? maybe a seven at least? ha ha, take this two and like it!")
I think perhaps social media has conditioned people to judge themselves by their status online - am I getting enough likes or followers or retweets? I have to curate my life, my Instagram images, my TikTok, my blog to appeal to the most! If I don't monetise this content, I am a failure! (yes, I was This Old Today when I found out "hang on, people get *paid* for tweets?" https://create.twitter.com/en/goals/monetization) and this naturally causes people to feel badly if they don't get the level of engagement they expect for the work they did.
I just slop up whatever oozes out of the brain crevices and if people read it, hurrah, and if they don't, well they don't. I did have a Dreamwidth account way back but I've never done anything to grow or foster engagement or whatever the term is.
I'm not trying to boast about my better way, but I do think we have become a lot more sensitive about "do people like me?" over the content we create, and that's all due to the ecosystem that has evolved.
Review of Schoenberg's 3 Klavierstücke was ok. Nothing new to someone wo has read lots of classical music though.
It made me slightly upset as a giant Schoenberg fanboy. But the reviewer came around in the end and acknowledged one could like the avant-garde music so he shall be forgiven.
Some disagreements I had with the article
- Beethoven certainly didn’t have to publish an “artist statement” each time a work of his was premiered.
Neither did the avant-garde composers of the 20th century. You can listen to Messiaen, Schoenberg, Stockhausen without reading anything hey have ever written.
Yes nowadays not that many people listen to classical music anymore but:
- There is still a very active community, especially on YouTube around the people making "score-videos" and lots of people there also really like modern music.
I remember listening to Gruppen by Stockhausen again and again during every break we got one day in high school. And I have absolutely no musical talent, I can't even sing a basic melody. I guess you just randomly like that sort of music, the way some people spicy food.
Stockhausen wrote *ten volumes* of prose. Thousands upon thousands of pages. Do you seriously think this played no role in validating the narrative of his genius? That there was no incentive structure fostering this? Why didn’t Mozart have to write entire books about his craft?
"Yes nowadays not that many people listen to classical music anymore"
Is this a fact? Let alone a fact with unambiguous evidence? It sounds like the sort of truism that people would just say because it "sounds like the sort of thing that would be true" without checking if it's actually true, but I could be wrong.
I think Timothy is referring to new classical music. Lots of people still listen to e.g. Mozart, but it’s uncontroversial that something happened in the 20th century where most people stopped caring about anything new. In previous eras, the popularity of contemporary high art music ebbed and flowed - Mozart would mostly have been known only to elites in his time, whereas Liszt was huge - but at no point was it anything like the current situation, where basically nobody knows any contemporary composers. If you include film composers the situation is a bit less bleak, but probably still constitutes a general decline.
I’m a big fan of Person of Interest and I keep an eye on rationalist circles, but I cannot believe I never put the two together. The reviewer is blameless for feeling insane, this show should’ve blown up here by now, especially since it already has somewhat of a cult following among mainstream audiences. Very often when I come across AGI scenarios I play them in the context of the show in my head, like how you always imagine a certain actor’s character from the adaptation when you read the book.
Another thing to note is that Jonathan Nolan (yes, brother of the very same director) is also the creator of Westworld which also deals with AGIs. In some ways it feels like PoI was practice for WW, except that the practice run turned out much better — well, credit where due, the first season was solid.
Person of Interest was such a good show. I loved the way the story tried to address one of the primary concerns of mass, intensive surveillance - what if the government spies on you for its own gain even if you did nothing wrong?
How does us entering our email address prevent cheating? Someone can just enter fake emails and you'll have no way to know since you've committed to not emailing anybody.
There are prob lots of ways to cheat. Easiest is to have your friends give your review high marks. They don't have to be paid subscribers to vote -- I'm not even sure they have to be unpaid subscribers. Or yeah, you could just get yourself 10 email addresses and vote 10x Just -- jeez, people, please don't do it. It's unfair.
1. Last year I disqualified a review because all of the email addresses were French names and the author was French - they had asked their IRL friends to vote for them.
2. Because ACX is now a "newsletter", I know the emails of most ACX readers. If one review has a disproportionate number of non-subscribers to subscribers, that raises my index of suspicion.
3. People are bad at creating lots of fake email names that follow real email name patterns.
4. When I said I wouldn't email you, I just meant I'm not going to add everyone to a spam list. I'm willing to email a few people from a seemingly-fake review to check whether they really exist (although I've never had to do this).
> they had asked their IRL friends to vote for them.
So what's the policy here? Are contestants strictly forbidden from sharing the contest and their reviews even with a couple of close friends who would be interested in this kind of thing, to prevent any conflict of interest? Or is it more about a case where you/someone else specifically organise dozens of people to vote for your review in particular?
And what about fandoms? Some of the things reviewed have a huge fan base among people from all around the world. Wouldn't sharing your review there be a more significant contamination? Or is it considered fair game as fans of the work can be even more critical? Or nevermind sharing, what about casual readers of the blog who may not even be subscribed, who are fans of some work and therefore will read and rate its review in particular? Is it on the reader to vote at least for several entries?
I think it would be nice if all those rules were explicit to begin with.
Keeping your review anonymous is an explicit rule. Pointing your friends at your review and asking them to vote for it seems contrary to it being anonymous to the judges.
Hmm. I got the reading that it was meant to be anonymous in a sense of not to publicly declare that its yours, instead of not to tell about it to anybody whatsoever.
But also it doesn't really solve the fandom issue. One can attract fandom votes without explicitly revealing whose review it is.
When an entry is about something I like or am a fan of, I do try to be careful to judge it on "yes but is this a good review?" rather than "yay, thing I like, I'm gonna vote for this!"
I'm not perfect on this, but I do try at least not to vote solely on "yay, thing I like!".
I'm part of a specific community where a reviewer shared their review (with a topic connected to the community) under their pseudonym used in the community. Is that allowed?
I think the idea is (a) the reviews are anonymous so we're not voting for "this is my best pal!" over "this is a good review" and (b) the voting should come from among the readers here, so asking people who aren't involved even as lurkers to vote specifically for your review is gaming the system.
Getting all your friends, family, colleagues and random people off the street to vote for only one review in the contest means that if this review wins or places highly, this is not really an accurate representation of its quality or of how the readership here judged it.
Anybody fancy making a list in order of review length for me?
You know what, sure, I already did most of the work in figuring out the right section headers anyway. Warning: This was produced by a hacky script and so certain things (like screenshotted tweets) might not be counted correctly.
The Spreadsheet: Humanity's Most Misunderstood Programming Language (636 words)
11 Poetic Forms, Reviewed in Verse (815 words)
Marriage (1006 words)
Baldur's Gate Three (1015 words)
The Beginning After the End of Humanity Circus (1017 words)
My Childhood Television Set (1043 words)
Tenga Arte Drape (1073 words)
An American football game (1123 words)
The Zone of Interest (1216 words)
Grave of the Fireflies (1231 words)
A New Theodicy for High School Math (1356 words)
The Three Stigmata of Noel Scott Engel (1375 words)
Time’s Arrow (spirals) (1390 words)
Sheldon Brown's Bicycle Technical Info (1398 words)
Pythia (1425 words)
Nicotine as a Nootropic (1478 words)
My Neighbour Totoro Stage Show (1486 words)
“Earth” in Review: A Beautiful, Frustrating, Waste of Time (1662 words)
Silo, Seasons 1 & 2: Tiananmen Square (1804 words)
The Delusion of Infinite Economic Growth (1955 words)
Shrinking: Men (1979 words)
Museum Of Science, Boston (2000 words)
Synanthropes - Love thy infestation (2060 words)
Which Sports? Why Sports? (2139 words)
US Census Review: A Biblical Perspective (2223 words)
Airships: A Tech‑Tree Branch We Let Wither (2261 words)
Kiki’s Delivery Service (2306 words)
Beating Balatro. Learning mathematics through infinite games. (2345 words)
Permaculture: Rationality’s Long Lost Twin (2377 words)
Pure Mathematics (2396 words)
Love Island (2403 words)
She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (2424 words)
DEJA VU (2471 words)
Bite Me: A Review of Teeth as Evolution’s Leftovers and Modern Shame (2503 words)
Sound Bathing (2520 words)
Disco Elysium (2521 words)
Adult Gymnastics: How Falling On Your Butt Repeatedly Makes Everything Else in Life Easier (2527 words)
Princess Mononoke (2605 words)
Simple Twist of Fate (2628 words)
Two Years of Parenthood: A Review (2675 words)
The Pebble, Jewel of the 1960 World Series (2688 words)
Love (2707 words)
Google's Hiring Process: A Review (2776 words)
Identity (2824 words)
The aphorism "Music is the universal language of mankind" - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (2845 words)
Arnold Schoenberg - Drei Klavierstücke ("Three Piano Pieces"), Op. 11 (2969 words)
Schools - A Review (3103 words)
Pregnancy: A British Husband’s Review (3132 words)
Toki Pona - The Language of Good (3253 words)
Phoenix Theatre at Great Northern Mall (3295 words)
Jacobitism: The First Four Thousand Years (3361 words)
Scientific Peer Review - Umbilical Cord or Corduroy Umbrella? (3363 words)
Call of Duty's campaigns (3394 words)
The Future of Legal AI: A Revue Review of the 2025 Stanford Law School Musical (3634 words)
“Civil War” (3786 words)
Einstein’s World-View Review (3836 words)
Joanna Newsom: The Lyric (3860 words)
Judaism (3977 words)
State of competitive debating (unions) address (3986 words)
Lublin Castle (3991 words)
/vt/txt- convergence : A Failed Social Experiment (4032 words)
Lesbian Fanfiction (4082 words)
Dall-e 2 and 3 as Depicters of Human Life (4130 words)
Effective Altruism & Rationalism (4170 words)
0th Dimension - Infinite Theory (4187 words)
Orgy Review - Red Means No (4211 words)
Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (4211 words)
Sign-tracking Sucks (4329 words)
My Father’s Instant Mashed Potatoes (4374 words)
North Korea (4438 words)
The Drum Major Instinct (4514 words)
The Last of Us, Part II: Remastered (4557 words)
unORDINARY (WEBTOON comic series) (4577 words)
Elon Musk’s Engineering Algorithm (4578 words)
Meditations on Moloch (4593 words)
Participation in Phase I clinical pharmaceutical research (4603 words)
The Witness (4652 words)
Arbitraging Several Dozen Online Casinos (4707 words)
Knives Out (4733 words)
Detective Pikachu (4747 words)
A Review of the Proposition: The Goat is Humanity's Best Tutor (4752 words)
Toby: A review of my entry to the ACX “Everything-Except-a-Book Review Contest 2025” (4956 words)
From the Control Problem to RLHF – Some Dangers of Misaligned Alignment Research (4989 words)
Rubbermaid products (4990 words)
Gacha Games (5074 words)
GETTING OVER IT WITH BENNETT FODDY: a perfect review in which I fail (5111 words)
Repairing a Father/Daughter Relationship as an Adult. (5122 words)
We Should Never Have Gone to Mammoth Caves (5210 words)
Islamic geometric patterns in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (5305 words)
Testosterone (5322 words)
Zermelo-Fraenkel Set Theory: A Review (5465 words)
The soul of an anti-woke intellectual: Jamie Q. Roberts (5499 words)
Disco Elysium (5557 words)
“The Origins of Wokeness” by Paul Graham (5624 words)
Ollantay (5627 words)
"The Metaethics of Joy, Suffering, and Artificial Intelligence" with Brian Tomasik and David Pearce (5679 words)
L'Ambroisie, by Bernard Pacaud (5748 words)
Martial Arts Review: Muay Thai and Brazilian Jiu Jitsu (5767 words)
Mad Investors Chaos and The Woman of Asmodeus (5824 words)
The Soul of Karl Friston [1] (5860 words)
The Emperor of All Maladies (5898 words)
Gender (5923 words)
The Sermon on the Mount (5953 words)
Inside (6037 words)
Skibidi Toilet (6127 words)
Face the Fear, Worldbuild the Future: The Games and World of Project Moon (6181 words)
Bukele The World’s Coolest Dictator. (6311 words)
The Life’s Work of Banerjee, Duflo, and Kremer (6329 words)
Person of Interest (6409 words)
How many Super Mario games are there NOW? (6504 words)
Dating Apps - The Misery Engine (6522 words)
Human Sexuality, reviewed. (6558 words)
Bishop’s Castle, a Roadside Attraction (6573 words)
Miniatur Wunderland: The Model Train that Dreams It's a World (6754 words)
Freedom of Speech (6924 words)
Of Mice, Mechanisms, and Dementia (6930 words)
The Brutalist (6981 words)
A dance remix of Chappell Roan's "Pink Pony Club" (7138 words)
The Russo-Ukrainian War: A Firsthand Review (7346 words)
The Internet That Might Have Been (7349 words)
Feminism (7447 words)
My Imagination (7541 words)
School (7902 words)
JFK Assassination Conspiracy Theories (8007 words)
“As Little as Possible”: Slave Morality in Chinatown and Spec Ops: The Line (8094 words)
The Watergate Affair (8437 words)
Contrasting Reviews of Nine Countries (8466 words)
On Taste (8470 words)
Summer Camp For Sluts: Young Swingers Week at Hedonism II in Negril, Jamaica (8503 words)
Adolescence (2025 TV mini series) (8835 words)
The Tale of the Princess Kaguya (9117 words)
Death Review - The Lives, Deaths, & Legacies of Mata Hari, Princess Diana, & Joan of Arc (9337 words)
The Virality Project: A Misinformation Tragedy (9797 words)
The Astral Codex Ten Commentariat: “Why Do We Suck?” (9971 words)
The Sermon on the Mount (9977 words)
The Synaptic Plasticity and Memory Hypothesis (10483 words)
Pathologic Classic HD (10621 words)
The World As a Whole (11161 words)
Deathbed Ballads (14077 words)
The Men Are Not Alright (15218 words)
Alpha School and "2-hour Learning" powered by AI (17750 words)
Joan of Arc (23949 words)
Great work! Useful.
Thank you!
Have read about half a dozen of the video game and film reviews so far, and have found them to be pretty poor quality and not close to as good as the book review contest. Could just be to do with an inferior medium.
A lot of sloppy recounting the plot to things as if it's a sixth grade book report. Very little underlying analysis, and nothing you couldn't get from a cursory google search. Hopefully the other categories prove more fruitful.
I thought the Adolescence review was pretty good. The review of Call of Duty 4 was nothing to write home about though.
I’m similarly distressed so far, but will push on. At least you kind of know early into a review if they got the idea or not.
Which ones have you read?
I think the longer ones have more promise. You can't recount the plot for thousands of words.
The 60+ page review of Joan of Arc has really grabbed me.
Finally, I found sth. worth 10 points. And it was just 50 pages long. ;)
Where do you look to see how long one is?
Someone else asked for word counts, so I calculated some: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/choose-nonbook-review-finalists-2025/comment/122686238
The doc shows a page-number. :) When scrolling/hovering the mouse. Taymon did a much better job - yep, that looong one I liked is among the "10k+ words". Only Joan of Arc at 23949 words is slightly longer than last-year's winner. Is that good or bad news? :D
FYI, the random script is broken on mobile (if you don't desktop-mode it). Instead of going to a random article, it just stays at the top of a random docs.
Thanks for reporting this; I've partially fixed it. The next time you use it on mobile, if it leaves you at the top of the page, tap the URL bar and then the navigate button, and it should scroll you to the right place. (At least this works for me in Chrome on Android; I don't have a good way to test on other browsers.)
The underlying bug is unfortunately in Google Docs (specifically the "mobile basic" view which I think gets less attention from the dev team), and so there isn't really anything I can do about it.
I'm a little surprised by how many Ghibli films have been reviewed. Of the 23 TV/movie/theater entries (excluding Toby, which was probably misclassified), 4 are Ghibli films and another is a stage adaptation of a Ghibli film. I don't quite know what to make of this.
Tentative hypothesis: Anime is very (and increasingly) popular, but if you're a snob (who are probably overrepresented among reviewers), you can basically only watch Ghibli, almost any other anime is low-sophistication-coded, hence the large number of Ghibli reviews.
I mean, snobs have a point. Ghibli is consistently good, and often excellent, whereas anime in general is largely worthless slop, exactly in accordance with Sturgeon's law. That's not to say excellent stuff can't occasionally be found, but your chances are much better with Ghibli, so why would not-committed-weebs venture elsewhere?
Well, I didn't say that they were doing anything wrong, merely posited a possible explanation. (Though I do admit I was probably a bit influenced by my annoyance resulting from reading some very pompous (non-Ghibli) reviews when I was writing my comment.)
However, if you ask me, choosing to review Ghibli does make me think it's more likely that the review author has less knowledge in the medium of anime (there are excellent anime that are not Ghibli!) and that they are more motivated/driven by signaling status than I would like a reviewer to be. These factors decreased my expectation of those reviews enough to delay reading them. (But to be clear, they might actually be amazing reviews and I hope they are and I get to read them in the finals even if I don't get around to reading them in this phase.)
Well, the interplay between anime and snobbery is a complex issue, and it has fascinated me for a long time. No other part of pop culture is at the same time so universally low-status and has such a large fanbase incensed at this injustice. This frustration often leads to excesses in the other direction, with "weeb" becoming the entire identity, often with gushing praises for obvious slop, which further weirds out and repels normies (looking at you Sword Art Online). I'd say that even Ghibli suffers from this, where only the more adventurous kind of snob dares to touch it, so that even the highest-status anime masterpieces are probably underappreciated by the mainstream.
"No other part of pop culture is at the same time so universally low-status and has such a large fanbase incensed at this injustice."
I would have thought romance novels, the Star Wars expanded universe, and professional wrestling are all things with large fanbases that are considered near-universally low-status, but I have no familiarity with any of them so maybe I'm completely wrong.
I'm also not familiar, but my (snobbish) impression is that "trashiness" is part of their charm that is generally embraced, with fans not thinking that their stuff is unfairly denied induction into High Art (whereas deserving exceptions, e.g. Pride and Prejudice, aren't tainted by that).
I really liked the essay "On Taste" in this contest. If you like topics related snobbery, you might enjoy it as well!
> However, if you ask me, choosing to review Ghibli does make me think it's more likely that the review author has less knowledge in the medium of anime (there are excellent anime that are not Ghibli!) and that they are more motivated/driven by signaling status than I would like a reviewer to be.
I'm actually not too convinced by this reasoning. This observation, "the review author has less knowledge in the medium of anime" might be true, but I'm not sure about the motivation. There are other animes that have achieved non-weeb recognition that would probably be high-status enough for a status-seeking reviewer. For example Ghost in the Shell got a live-action adaptation starring Scarlett Johansson. Netflix did the same to Cowboy Bebop and made a bit of a splash. Neither adaptation was especially successful, but at least they indicate that the source material aren't just weird shit that only weebs watch.
I still don't have a good theory as to why so much Ghibli, but I'll venture a guess that the AI Ghiblification trend is a contributing factor.
I didn't really give a reasoning, just my opinion, so of course, you might be right. If you are curious about why I hold that opinion, it's because of my personal experience: The friends of mine who are a bit on the snob spectrum all like Miyazaki (and haven't ever watched any other anime). When the Ghost in the Shell adaption came out, I could convince some of my (less snobby) friends to watch it, but none of them had heard about it before, so my impression is that it is a lot less famous (and Cowboy Bebop is even less famous than that).
Of course as it's merely my n=1 personal experience I'm not sure it would convince anyone of anything, I'm just giving my reasons.
I think the AI Ghiblification trend was pretty short-lived and Google Trends seems to agree with that, but it did probably introduce some people to Ghibli.
> If you are curious about why I hold that opinion, it's because of my personal experience: The friends of mine who are a bit on the snob spectrum all like Miyazaki (and haven't ever watched any other anime).
Okay, I see that. I don't have the same experiences but I think my circles are a bit weird in that respect, and I can imagine your experience being more generalizable. I remain a bit surprised nobody thought to review Ghost in the Shell though, because while it's sort of reviewed to death (in anime/cyberpunk circles), it has at least some salience to ACX readers concerned with AI/singularity.
> I think the AI Ghiblification trend was pretty short-lived and Google Trends seems to agree with that, but it did probably introduce some people to Ghibli.
To clarify my brief guess, I wasn't trying to say that the reviewers that wrote about Ghibli did so because they were introduced to Ghibli by the AI Ghiblification trend. Rather, the trend could have been an impetus for them to revisit their favorite Ghibli films. The AI Ghiblification trend kicked off about a month after the announcement of this year's review contest, so if people were still noodling over what to write about, the trend could have simply planted a seed in their heads. Scott's post about it could have also given them something to think about and respond to: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-colors-of-her-coat
Human Sexuality seems to have a broken link (to taskmster). It just opens up the same page for me. EDIT: Actually, it appears to de-anonymize the author in the preview.
This is the correct link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=auFi3RzlzPU
Sent some messages, hopefully can get that fixed; thanks for bringing that up.
Rude Tales appears in the body of the text of the "Games" section, but doesn't seem to be a voting option?
I think "Toby: A Review Of My Entry To ACX 'Everything-Except-a-Book Review Contest'" is in the wrong category (TV/Movies) and should instead be in Other.
706k words, an average of 5,000 words an entry. Reading at 300 wpm without a break, it'd take you the better part of two days to read the whole lot.
The average length might not be the most useful metric here. The distribution of document lengths is asymmetric (you can’t have less than zero, but there is no upper limit), so the median will be below the average.
JFK Assassination Conspiracies was a good read, but fails to mention my favourite one (there are so many! You couldn’t possibly include everyone who was a suspect!) But anyway, Kerry Thornley, co-founder of Discordianism, was writing a book about Oswald. The sane version of the conspiracy: Oswald joins what was basically a cult, loses his mind, and shoots JFK.
That doesn't sound terribly dissimilar to the conclusions the Warren Commission arrived at, if you consider communism a cult. Certainly it's a matter of public record that Oswald was mentally unstable and had attempted suicide on at least one occasion.
I think to make it work, Oswald’s mental state has to be deteriorating before he gets involved with Kerry Thornley. Oswald defects to the Soviet Union, then comes back and tries Discordianism, and in general tries to get involved with every cult he can contact. Then he kills JFK, and every weird cult he was previously involved with gets the blame.
Phoenix Theatre at Great Northern Mall is tremendous.
Seems like the footnotes in the Deja Vu review aren't showing up properly? Unless that's a bit I'm not getting.
Ah okay they're blank at the bottom of each page but they also appear correctly as endnotes.
Toby is quite the paradox. I think it is accurate in that it is a bad review, and that accuracy implies, to me at least, that it is a good review, which implies that it is incorrect and that it is a bad review. I would say the best way to read it is to get halfway through, get exhausted and skip to the conclusion, and then not think about it too much after that.
Some Notes on Mammoth Cave:
(From memory.)
If you’re into visiting show caves, Mammoth is probably not one to drive across country for.
It is a big and important cave system - *possibly* even connected to Wind Cave; the story of the exploration of the latter may appeal to obsessive types on the forum.
But Mammoth’s significance is largely its place in the history of American tourism. It was one of the earliest destinations, when the nation first took auto trips for pleasure. Foreigners absolutely can skip it.
The story of the slaves at Mammoth is a bit more nuanced than presented in the contest entry.
These were very good jobs, for the time, and a cause of pride to this day to the families that were particularly involved.
Two of the people who ran the tourist operation as best I recall were the sons (slaves) of a businessman I think out of Nashville, who bought the cave at some point and really opened it up? It was a little unusual for the time in that he recognized his sons and seems to have deliberately sent them off to the cave as a family business to work in.
Somebody who’s probably been a Google doodle was one of the tour guides; slave or not I don't remember but I think he learned to read and write so that he could read geology, and mapped and produced the first paper on the cave. Maybe studied in Europe. Or maybe he knew how to read, but learned Latin for the purpose.
The unhappiness of black families in the area (according to an old park ranger, a descendant, I met who is there as an interpreter for early cave days and the local black community that was tied up with it) lay not with their work in the cave prior to Emancipation (not sure how long this even was) but with the fact that when the National Park Service gained control of the attraction in the 20th century, they lost their jobs as guides. His family moved away and he described visiting as a child and going to the back door of the place they had had the run of.
I could tell that this gentleman seized on somebody after each tour, and I was that person. He showed me a book about his people in the gift shop and so I bought it and he signed it for me.
He told me a sad story about an ancestress who cried when her children were taken from her, and ran down the road and never regained her senses. He told me that enslaved women loved and sorrowed over their children the same as anyone else, as if I had doubted that. It sort of seemed like he had read some Frantz Fanon, or some 19th century nutjob, which I was sorry about.
However he was equally proud of his white ancestor for whom there’s a prominent street named in Nashville, and how the whole lot of them black and white get together for reunions.
He talked to me more than an hour, and while my husband would never have had patience for it, it rather gave my trip to Mammoth Cave a memory to peg onto it.
The historical tour is pretty short and probably the best one to take for a casual visitor. It was light on geology, as well, dealing more with munitions as I recall.
I had my hand up a lot - I’m that person, which is why I usually am left to take tours alone. But I gave it up.
You can stay in the old cabins that housed workers and they’re kind of cool.
I learned more from this comment than the original review.
Well, I enjoyed the original review because I too am a road tripper.
Yeah, to be clear I meant nothing against the original essay (which is clearly trying to be funny and succeeds.) I just wanted to emphasize I appreciated this comment.
I have run across a couple of reviews that I think are not reviews but essays, and am curious how other people rating reviews are handling reviews of that kind. I think a review of something describes the thing well enough that the reader has a decent idea of what the thing is, then identifies its good and bad features. And there’s a better class of review where the reviewer goes on to place their description and their judgments in a larger context. So for instance if someone wrote a review of Devon Rex cats, they would describe the distinctive features of the breed, and lay out what they saw as good and bad Devon characteristics, and maybe end with a recommendation — are they good cats? If only some would enjoy them, who are the people for whom they’d be a good fit? And then if the writer took the review to the next level they might write about the ethics of developing breeds, or about what draws human beings to animals, or about whether it makes sense to think of cat’s purring and cuddling as affectionate behaviors. And the person could build all that around the story of their adopting a Devon, and that would not interfere with what they wrote being a review, so long as they included the other stuff I named.
But let’s say someone’s entry in this review contest was just the story of their adopting a Devon. It’s well written, clear, has charm and humor, but it simply is not a review In this situation, would you just rate the personal memoir itself, ignoring the fact that it’s not a review, or deduct points because it’s not a review, or just not rate it at all?
The case in favor of deducting: My guess is that “reviews” of this kind are often essays or memoirs somebody wrote in some other context, used here in the hope that people would think of them as reviews in some extended sense of the word and give them a pass. But it’s kind of unfair give a pass to somebody who skipped the labor of actually writing a review and just threw in something they had handy. Or maybe somebody was not clear what a review is, and actually wrote a personal memoir for this contest and entered it. Also seems kind of unfair not to deduct for such a big mistake.
The case against deducting: Memoirs and essays are fun to read too. Life is hard, don’t be picky.
Later edit: I looked back at how Scott described the contest. He said "Submit an ACX-length post reviewing something, anything, except a book. You can review a movie, song, or video game. You can review a product, restaurant, or tourist attraction. But don’t let the usual categories limit you. Review comic books or blog posts.. . ." Having thought more about this, I think I am going to deduct some for something not being a review. I say some more about that later in this thread.
I would rate based on how much I like it; not deduct. I'd be more torn if it were the book review contest, but with this one, I'm going in with the expectation that things are weird, so if someone just uses a thing to inspire an essay, I don't feel like I'm having an important expectation violated.
Yup, I second primrose's comment. This feels like more of a loosey-goosey, bend the rules sort of contest anyway, so it seems appropriate to judge based on how good the piece is, not how well it adheres to the prompt. Up to you though.
My rating system is pretty much a slapdash gut-check of how well I think it reads. But, how well it reads includes how well it informs me about its topic. So if it says it's a review of Devon Rex cats, but just describes how the author felt adopting one without making comparisons to other animals, I'm going to say "that didn't review cats at all" and mark it accordingly.
On the other hand, if it says it's a review of their experience adopting a Devon Rex cat, and then just describes how they felt adopting their cat without comparing it to other animals, I'm going to say "yeah, that's a cat adoption all right" and judge it based on how interesting I found the story. (Which I'm guessing would be "not very". Humor and charm is one thing, but I've seen SO many cats in my life. So many, many cats.)
> I have run across a couple of reviews that I think are not reviews but essays, and am curious how other people rating reviews are handling reviews of that kind
I assumed that it would be all essays. A non book review is ambiguous but I read it as anything that isn’t a book review.
No, "non book review" is ambiguous, but Scott's description of the contest is not: "So this year, let’s do something different. Submit an ACX-length post reviewing something, anything, except a book.
You can review a movie, song, or video game. You can review a product, restaurant, or tourist attraction. But don’t let the usual categories limit you. Review comic books or blog posts . . ." (That's from https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/everything-except-book-review-contest)
I think I am going to treat something's failure to be a review as a flaw, and deduct some for that. What I'll count as a review is an essay that describes a thing and critiques it.
Unless, Scott, you want to give your views on this matter. I kind of wish you would.
The "report comment" feature in substack hangs for me, but there's a bunch of LLM spam in the comments with identical messages from different user accounts pretending to be a commenter and shilling a link (ctrl+f 'castletv').
I think this has been fixed.
Is there an anonymous form for reporting contest-related issues anywhere?
No. If it's not private, you can comment here. If it's private and important, email me.
Correction: Disco Elysium was reviewed by "A.H." not "E.H."
...of course it got reviewed by Aldous Huxley. It makes so much sense.
Askwho is creating AI readings of a smattering of these to help those who read more with their ears. Last year the AI readings got me to read several I wouldn't have otherwise and it really eases some of the reading load. So far he's done Jacobitism, Men Aren't Alright, Mad Investor Chaos, and one of the Disco Elysiums.
https://askwhocastsai.substack.com/
probably not a good idea to only read them this way tho, will really mess up the reading distribution if so
The getting over it review is very, very good. I'm not a review afficianado so I'm not speaking in that sense, but as a piece of writing it has a certain sense of control I'm not very good at, and am envious of.
A lot of the non book reviews moved to movies, or songs. I was hoping for no reviews in general. I’ve read some and they weren’t my favourites.
iiuc it was "everything-except-book review contest", so all entries should be reviews-of-[not-books], rather than something-other-than-book-review.
Yep. missed that. Anyway i just found a great music review so I’m now ok with it.
Lots of reviews this year strike me as really gloomy and despairing, and not in the cozy and familiar "AI will soon kill us all" kind of way, but in ways that are new and innovative.
So far I really liked:
* 11 Poetic Forms (obviously written by Scott), lots of fun with rigid poetic forms. Villanelle seems so rigid and weird, it was jarring to realize that yes, I have actually read one very famous villanelle before, everyone has.
* Islamic geometric patterns in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (obviously also by Scott, his love for neat patterns is well-known). Every bit as autistic as it sounds. Surprisingly useful, I might actually save this one for when I need to cook up mock-islamic patterns again.
* The Tale Of The Princess Kaguya (obviously by Scott, his knowledge of several Japanese words is well known) - give it a try even if you have zero interest in the actual cartoon (which is good, to make clear). There's a long plot summary, but it makes its way to a despairing point about human condition I thought was insightful.
* The World As A Whole - very despairing review, spoilers: the entire world gets 3 out of 10. Usually when people say that the world sucks it's some kind of pose, or a passing mood, or depression, but here it feels like the author actually saw a thing or two about what the world is like and 3 out of 10, horrifyingly, may just be a pretty objective evaluation. (Author mentions teaching Japanese kids, obvious Scott is obvious.)
* My Father's Instant Mashed Potatoes - I learned things about mashed potatoes! It was better than expected. Do you think the author uses Mashed Potatoes to spin a metaphor about the AI? Yeah.
* I'm not even going to type that - yes, revolting subject, but it actually served as an interesting window into something I had no idea about and made me understand why someone might enjoy it. (I didn't even know it was a series!)
There were some other good ones that other people already mentioned, and I won't, so as not too add to the popularity feedback loop.
Unfortunately a couple of reviews reeked of ChatGPT prose style. Sorry people, I gave you bad marks. Using LLM in a way that sneaks under my radar is cool. Sounding recognizably like an LLM (whether you actually used it or not) is not cool.
The last one is Skibidi Toilet, right? If yes, then I think it's useful to mention it, because there is a highly-liked joke comment that might bias people into giving it lower ratings/reviewing it less, so sth balancing that would be fair, I think.
True, and fair enough.
Even if some of the reviews were indeed written by Scott, I wouldn't have guessed that he wrote as many as four of them. He did say that one of the benefits of the review contest is that he can take it easy during the summer since he doesn't have to write as many posts during the weeks when the finalists are posted. Entering so many entries to the contest defeats at least that part of that purpose.
Also, if there was any other goal to the experiment of entering his own review, it was probably already achieved when he entered two book reviews in 2023 and won the popular vote with one of them. I don't see why he would enter again.
Comment obviously written by Scott trying to hide his shenanigans.
I'm both impressed and frustrated by the "The Men Are Not Alright" essay. Clearly it's written by an unusually perceptive woman, who thoroughly catalogued destructive failures of both feminism-infused "polite society" and the "manosphere" that opposes it. But whereas she understands that misogyny is core to the manosphere (which she's correct in entirely rejecting), she somehow still doesn't get that misandry is core to the mainstream feminism as it's practiced (not the insulting cardboard cutout of "women are people, actually", which is still always trotted out). If even she isn't wise enough to understand that feminism does far more harm than good these days, can't be reformed or reclaimed from bad faith actors, then hopes for substantial improvements any time soon are few and faint indeed.
These days? In what days did feminism do more good than harm?
When it acknowledged that housewife is no longer a viable role for most women in the modern society. To the extent that conservatives still deny this, they are just as clueless.
If it was really that objectively nonviable, we wouldn't need feminism to point it out. It would just organically stop occurring. Also, just as clueless as who?
>we wouldn't need feminism to point it out
There is clear value in recognizing a serious problem and bringing it to societal attention, particularly when powers that be would rather that knowledge about it stays suppressed. Sure, if not "feminists", then somebody else would've done it eventually, and then credit for that contribution would've been his. If somebody wiser than feminists had done both that and also carried through better solutions, his credit would've been much greater, but alas, and here we are.
>just as clueless as who
As the average feminist.
Okay, well, in that case I don't think I agree with any part of your premise.
Society changes all the time without any particular political-ideological impetus, so I don't agree that it's necessary for someone to point out an issue actively for society to adapt around it; by the time feminism arose in the late '60s/early '70s housewifery had, on the contrary, only just begun to become available as an option outside a comparatively small, privileged section of society, a great advance in human prosperity which feminism if anything ruined; and finally, even if this was a serious social problem and they deserved credit for drawing attention to it, I don't think that's nearly sufficient for feminists to have done more good than harm in this period.
That depends on whether "we" run on pure pragmarism.. Saudi Arabia blocked it over ideology.
Hello! Writer of the review here. (I hope it's okay for me to post here? Scott, please delete if necessary!)
I deliberately chose not to dive into a critique of fourth-wave feminism (which I think is what you mean when you refer to “mainstream feminism”), because it would take at least 20,000 words for me to express my frustrations on the topic, and my review is already too long.
However, I do see the blatant misandry present in fourth-wave (and many third-wave) feminist circles, especially the terminally online ones. It’s actually one of the main reasons I chose to write this essay. Talking about the well-being of men has somehow become taboo in modern feminist circles, which I think is heartless, foolish, and needs to change. That change will only happen if more feminists speak up about these issues, hence the essay.
That all being said, I do believe the average person who describes themselves as feminist is *not* fourth-wave. Fourth-wavers get the most attention, because they dominate discourse in elite circles and on social media. But when you actually look at feminist non-profits, most funding remains focused on first/second wave topics: ensuring women can safely leave their husbands, providing shelters for abused women, protecting and expanding reproductive rights, providing girls with education, etc.
This is great news, because it means the majority of people who care enough about feminism to throw money at it are still focused on the core values of “equality between genders.” And this is why I disagree with your statement that feminism “can't be reformed or reclaimed from bad faith actors.” The money and support is there; it’s just a matter of shifting the narrative. Which won't be easy, but I'm stubborn and contrarian as hell, so I figure I may as well help kick-start the change. :)
In addition, I think the argument “feminism does far more harm than good these days” might be somewhat true when looking specifically at “fourth-wave feminist impact on middle- and upper-class Westerners.” A bunch of disorganized people shrieking misandrist comments on Twitter, and doing very little practical activism to help women, doesn’t seem to have accomplished much besides driving young men to the manosphere.
However, I feel the argument does not hold when looking at broader society. Many girls are still born into highly sexist communities/cultures/countries that restrict their rights, education, and safety. The populations of these communities/cultures/countries are currently growing faster than middle- and upper-class Western populations. At its core, feminism is a creed of equality between genders, and I believe it’s short-sighted to claim this creed is no longer needed.
Personally, I hope for a fifth-wave of feminism to appear soon: one that re-focuses on the core goal of equality between genders, gracefully acknowledges biological differences, disavows misandry, and seeks mutual support and trust between the genders.
Anyway—thanks for taking the time to read my absurdly long essay and this absurdly long follow-up comment.
…and now I feel the need to actually write that 20,000 word critique of fourth-wave feminism. Sigh. :')
You know, regardless of the okayness of this comment with respect to the norm of maintaining anonymity, and I'm not criticizing your decision to respond, I do wonder how entrants, especially finalists later on when they get a full post, feel about the comments. Assuming most of them refrain from responding to comments due to concerns with breaking anonymity, instead of indifference or reluctance to get into a debate, it must be kind of hard holding back when you can't clarify a misunderstanding or settle a debate in case something you wrote happened to be ambiguous.
I would actually really appreciate Scott posting some guidelines about this. Several people chose fairly controversial topics to write about, and I'm expecting some finalist comment sections to get a wee bit heated. It would be nice if the writers had some solid guidelines to follow regarding whether they can engage, and if so, what that engagement should look like.
My current understanding of the rules is "engagement is okay as long as you maintain the anonymity of your IRL identity." But would definitely appreciate clarification. :)
Wanted to give you a gold star for your patience and honest engagement to the rather nasty initial comment. It's darkly amusing to me that that comment is not even cynical/blackpilled enough to go unchallenged here.
Thanks, friend, I appreciate the kind words. My guess is that the comment would have been challenged, had it been posted yesterday when there was more activity on this post and more eyes on the comments. I don't think it accurately reflects the mindset of most ACX readers.
Ii wish people were not commenting here on reviews they’ve read.
Comments like Xpym’s leave the writer in a difficult position with no good solution, and in my opinion just gum up the works. Anyhow, for the record, I only read a few sentences of Xpym’s comment, out of curiosity. And in any case I don’t give a shit what Xpym thinks about feminism and your review, and will read your review with a. open mind. I am sure there are many others who will do the same .
Thanks, I greatly appreciate you offering to read it with an open-mind. I also heartedly second your opinion on not commenting critique/praise of reviews until finalists are chosen. It puts us writers in a weird spot.
Completely disagree. See my later reply to Eremolalos.
>it’s just a matter of shifting the narrative
Yes, and as far as I can tell, "fourth wave" entirely controls the steering wheel here, and I have no idea why you expect this to change any time soon. Sure, "reasonable" feminists may sometimes grumble, but when push comes to shove, they toe the line, and certainly don't denounce or ostracize the worst offenders.
>Many girls are still born into highly sexist communities/cultures/countries that restrict their rights
Well, either those cultures will westernize, or they won't. I don't think that feminist ideas are attractive outside of that package, so pushing them alone isn't productive, while pushing the whole package is probably still net positive.
>I hope for a fifth-wave of feminism to appear soon: one that re-focuses on the core goal of equality between genders, gracefully acknowledges biological differences, disavows misandry, and seeks mutual support and trust between the genders.
But why "feminism" though, if the goal is equality? Names are powerful, you know.
>thanks for taking the time to read my absurdly long essay and this absurdly long follow-up comment.
Thank you for writing them.
I judged an entry unfairly low, because I got distracted and missed a curcial part of the text. My actual mark should have been about 3 points higher. I'm assuming I can't just submit a new rating from the same email, because it'd be exploitable, but ugh.
I can emphasize; I feel so guilty when something like this happens to me, pretty much regardless of the scope of damage. Probably because it violates, idk, my sense of fairness or something.
I think it's called integrity
It explicitly states that the email address you provide is used to prevent duplicate ratings, so it's not really exploitable to submit a second rating with the same address; Scott is specifically not going to count both. However, we don't know whether he will pick the first, the last or some average.
Scott has a post on here saying that if there’s a contest-related problem you can email him. Maybe just do that? — tell him which review it was and what your revised rating is.
Re. "Islamic geometric patterns in the Metropolitan Museum of Art", that essay is a great work of careful observation, thought, and extrapolation. I also don't think the "errors" were mistakes. There's VERY strong evidence that in at least one 15th-century mosque, the irregularities were deliberate: https://spacetimefactor.wordpress.com/2014/03/04/quasicrystals-islamic-architecture-and-a-nobel-prize
A quote: “Among the 3,700 tiles Lu and Steinhardt mapped in the Darb-i-Imam shrine, there were only 11 tiny flaws. A simple change in orientation of the tiles fixes the flaw... these accidents were possibly introduced by workers.”
Quasicrystals are 3D solids with quasiperiodic atomic structures and symmetries forbidden to ordinary periodic crystals, such as 5-fold symmetry. A Penrose tiling is the 2D equivalent: an algorithmic tiling which can be expanded to infinity, but which (if I understand correctly) can't be constructed by a tiling of just one basic pattern. Johannes Kepler examined them in Harmonices Mundi (1619); Roger Penrose studied them more-closely in the 1970s.
I doubt that the Universe is big enough and old enough for anyone to have made a 3700-tile quasicrystal by accident.
See p. 48-59, "Formal to Realistic?", of an incomplete draft of my theory of art history ( https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/oeef5qowpjb846rt2lrhz/Theory-of-Art-20240906-1617.pptx?rlkey=r1tqgjg225cp0samib9s55qg6&st=46lb2oja&dl=0 ), on why that's interesting and important. Basically, we have no longitudinal evidence of any artistic tradition that transitioned directly between formal art (geometric patterns) and naturalistic art without going thru the intermediate realm of symbolic or iconic art (think cartoons), except as the result of iconoclasm or civilizational collapse, or with the aid of powerful mathematics.
Understanding fractals reveals that quasiperiodic patterns and fractals chart a path from formal to naturalistic art, usually without producing intermediate symbolic art; and that the realm of symbolic art probably has zero measure within the space of art between formal and naturalistic art (just guessing, tho). Comparing the philosophies of the societies which choose each kind of art, supports my thesis that a society's choice between these 3 types of art is driven by whether it wants to eliminate, tolerate, or exploit complexity and disorder. Reactionaries who want centralized government hate complexity and diversity; liberals who want distributed governance (liberty, individual rights, democracy, free markets) require it.
The kinds of "errors" that the author of "Islamic geometric patterns in the Metropolitan Museum of Art" points out are not found in Penrose tilings. But they may have the same intent.
We don't know the motives of the Islamic mosaic makers. It could be that making quasiperiodic patterns was the only way they could create something with organic beauty without violating the iconoclastic rules of mosques. Or it could be part of the tradition of "Persian flaws", deliberate flaws made to prove that the artist was not hubristically aspiring to perfection.
I think that the Islamic mosaic artists, and the fin de siècle and modern artists, were following the same path, but in opposite directions, and for very different reasons. The absurd notion of "exhausting" an artistic form was a trope of modern artists, which they did not respond to by introducing new complexity, but by demanding the old forms be burned to the ground. They wanted a complex form destroyed, where I think the mosaic artists wanted a simple form to grow.
The mosaic artists started from a space of, as our author notes, "miniscule complexity", and may have wanted to make it more organic, more complex. Whereas we have a great deal of written evidence, in the form of manifestos, magazine articles, diary entries, and letters, that most of the French artists after (but not including) the Impressionists were trying to destroy all of the complexity in art, which they regarded as bankrupt, because their only conception of representational art was as religious symbols. They wrote about burning down, sweeping away, destroying, all previous art, as a necessary cleansing, which they had hoped WW1 would accomplish. See, for instance, BLAST! (1914), and the Dada Manifesto (a call for /more-thorough/ destruction, written in 1916 and expanded in 1918!!!).
They did not have the concept of generative creativity, which is to say, the creation of new art from a pre-existing set of symbols, whether that be letters and words, or objects in paintings. When Ezra Pound said "Make it new!", he was NOT talking about making anything new, but only about re-making old art from a new perspective--as proved by the poems he wrote after saying "Make it new!" Most modernist painters did not believe humans could make new things; they believed that artists were prophets who could perceive the Platonic Forms of things which existed in Eternity, but which had never before been revealed to humans. (You can see this in the writings of Gaugin, Cézanne, Matisse, Malevich, Gleizes, Metzinger, Kandinsky, Mondrian, & many others.) They were actually iconoclasts, but iconoclasts who believed that they COULD paint the actual spiritual essences that representational painting distracted people from.
New to the site and new to this "Nonbook Review", though it seems clear enough - people submit (?) reviews of anything that isn't a book. So far I have enjoyed the first-hand account of volunteering for combat in the Ukraine amongst others, but was baffled by "Orgy Review - Red Means No". Do erotic fantasies qualify?
"Red Means No" is an orgy which actually takes place (or more precisely a group which actually puts on orgies); see https://www.redmeansno.com/ .
Thank you for that clarification! So different, indeed, from the home life of our own dear (and now sadly departed) Queen...
Sure. Scott said people could review absolutely anything, even pebbles
"Do erotic fantasies qualify?"
Ahhhhh - given the origins of this site, if someone is reviewing "sex parties I have attended", it's most likely not a fantasy but a genuine "sex parties I have attended" account 😀
Very unimportant, but am I the only one who finds it strange to put "other" above the specific categories?
Can the writer of the Astral Codex Ten Commentariat review send me a link to his file containing all of the comments from the entire ACX blog history? He said he scraped them all—I want to make a RAG tool for them so we can search it in natural language.
On one hand, that would be a helpful tool for me, supposing they're grouped by blog post, or at least linked to the blog post they were on and the comment they responded to. On the other hand, it would make it easy for, say, an employer, or the "vetters" of Worldcon, to check whether someone has ever commented on ACX. Perhaps people should be allowed to opt out.
"Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the SSC and/or ACX and/or associated and spin-off sites commentariat?"
*defiantly yells "I know my rights! you can't ask me that!" as security drags me away to cast me into the outer darkness while this plays in the background*
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eGnLv6snknM
Lots of people are posting their opinions of reviews. I wish people who disliked reviews would refrain from posting that info. Seems to me that is going to lead to fewer people reading those reviews, and so your rating, presumably a low one, is going to weigh more heavily in the review’s average rating than it would have if you had kept silent — because there are going to be fewer other readers to balance out your score.
I agree.
I don't agree at all. This is the only place anyone will ever be able to actually discuss the non-finalist reviews. It would be different if, as some people have been suggesting for several years now, there were some dedicated discussion threads made for discussing the non-finalist reviews (which could happen after the finalists are chosen), but it seems like Scott has no intention of doing that.
So for the sake of both readers with things to say, and moreso review writers who want some actual engagement with their review to occur sometime ever, I 100% oppose this.
Actually, year before last I and about 7 other ACX readers who had not made the finals set up a Substack blog called Book Review Group so that each person could get a critique of their review and also a discussion of the book’s topic and the review author’s take on it. That worked out well. Every one of us got detailed responses from about 7 readers. That is much more than any review on this thread is likely to get via spontaneous opinion posts, and our discussion did not do anything to change the voting dynamics on ACX, since it took place after the finalists were chosen. Setting up that Substack was quite easy. It’s still up. Go have a look at it if you like. It’s called Book Review Group, and is findable by googling that title plus the word “Substack.” (I later used it to publish a few things of my own. but it should be easy to tell which posts are from the original group.)
And what about the problem I mentioned with putting up a post here saying a certain review is lousy? My point was that a post like that reduced the number of readers a review was likely to get. Consequently, the low rating presumably given by the person posting that the review sucked was likely not to get get balanced out by a
good number of other ratings, possibly better ones, which ywould make the review’s final score more of a reflection of the group consensus. Giving a review a low rating and then posting that the review is lousy probably doubles or triples the effect of the denigrator’s vote. Instead of giving the review a score of 3, he is doing the equivalent of giving it 2 or 3 3 ratings. Calling a review lousy in this thread is like trampling the snow in front of it and then taking a shit on the middle
of the mess.
Is that nothing? How would you like it if somebody posted a paragraph about how lousy and boring your review is?
I would vastly, vastly prefer it to not getting any acknowledgement or discussion of my review whatsoever. I guess we have very different intuitions on this.
I find it enormously frustrating to see a single post made where discussion of reviews that don't end up finalists is remotely possible, then lots of people not bothering to do so even there (this post has a fraction of the comments of most ACX posts, despite there being such an unbelievable amount to discuss, plus apparently hardly anyone's still checking the thread a mere few days after it was posted, despite an unimaginable amount to discuss and the fact that commenters need time to read through the discussable material), then requests to create more discussion spaces being repeatedly ignored (with all respect, Scott, is it so hard to give a one setence reply saying you don't want to do that and why?), and *then* further comments saying that even the extremely limited discussion taking place should not be happening!
I'm sorry, maybe I just have very different expectations to most people here. But I find myself disappointed in this community. And I understand the point you're making. I personally think it's very much outweighed by the other considerations mentioned, but again I accept we may just have different intuitions.
Believe me I hate the idea of never hearing any reactions to a piece of writing I put a lot of myself into. I was extremely distressed when I entered 2 years ago and my review was on the list of 15 or. so with few votes that Scott put up, with a request that people read and rate those reviews. I get what’s bothering you. But why not consider the solution I found? I get 7 long thoughtful responses to my review, as well as discussion of its topic among members of the group we set up.
And anyhow, it’s pretty clear that Scott’s not going to take any action on this matter. If he were going to post asking people not to comment on reviews on this thread he would have done it by now. But even with no rule against commenting on reviews in this thread, what are the chances someone’s going to put up a comment about yours? There are 150 reviews, for fuck’s sake, and most people are busy reading them. Even if you got a comment there’s at least a 50% chance it will be negative, and will reduce your chance of being a finalist. And it may be inaccurate and unfair.
And then what about the problem that. a negative comment here about somebody else’s review will probably reduce the number of readers they have, and therefore how fair an evaluation they get? Don’t you give a shit about their situation? The person whose review got somebody’s long complaint about her review of — I forget what, something having to do with feminism — is clearly distressed. Doesn’t it matter that getting a reader’s reaction to her review was clearly a net negative for her? How many people are you prepared to watch being upset the way that reviewer is in order to increase the chance that somebody puts up a comment about *your* review?
"I was extremely distressed when I entered 2 years ago and my review was on the list of 15 or. so with few votes that Scott put up"
My question here is *why* were you extremely distressed? I get being disappointed or feeling like your hard work was not recognised, but upset and put out by being a low scorer? Extreme distress sounds like an over-reaction, at least to me, since I operate on "you didn't appreciate my genius? well fluff you too and the horse you rode in on".
This is not a performance review for work, or someone judging you on a dating site. This is voluntary participation in a competition that doesn't in fact mean anything outside of the readers of this site.
Please believe me I'm not intending to be condemnatory or victim-blaming here. I'm not good at sensitive interpersonal interactions so I will come across as blunt, but I would ask you to think a little about why that meant so much to you. Why did it hurt you? How much of your self-worth was pinned to 'doing well on the ACX book review contest' and why? Is it because you were raised that "if you don't do well and score in the top on exams/school grades/university/work then you are worthless and bad and we won't love you anymore"? EDIT: I've failed and been mediocre enough in all aspects of life that I don't expect to do better than a low minimum, but I can see how someone who is used to doing well and being successful and getting what they want from working hard and turning in the piece of work would be upset by not getting the place they thought they merited.
Not making into the top ten or twenty for the book review contest means nothing more or deeper than "the idiosyncratic tastes of avowed contrarians on this here Substack didn't match up with what I wrote".
I was planning to give opinions on reviews I'd read in, like, a week or two, after the majority of voting had taken place. There will probably be another post later that says, the votes are in, we're tallying now, and that's the best time to discuss random reviews. We're only three days in right now, it's too early. We haven't even hit a weekend yet.
"How would you like it if somebody posted a paragraph about how lousy and boring your review is?"
I'd be pissed-off but it would also help me understand where I failed (if I failed) in the review. EDIT: For example, in a reply to a comment on here I got called out for my "faux cynicism". Hey, all my cynicism is 100% organic free-range grass-fed GMO-free no artificial colourings or flavourings sincere!
Early on I had to learn not to take it personally when people either didn't read what I thought were fantastic comments/pieces, or didn't like them. My first natural reaction was "why doesn't this person like me? why are they being mean?" until I slapped some sense into myself. This person doesn't know me, they're only going by what I wrote. And if they didn't like it, then they didn't like it. God knows, there's plenty of comment online I don't like or vehemently disagree with. It's not personal. It's not even me they're calling "boring and lousy" because 'Deiseach' or whatever the name I used for that work is not real world me. It's an online construct that shares, to greater or lesser extent, parts of my personality and experiences, but it's not the me that gets up in the morning and goes out the door to work.
So getting thicker skinned helped. And of course, that does not mean I can't reply in the comfort of my own mind "you freakin' idiot, you know nothing, you tasteless brainless shameless spineless heap of compost!"
There is indeed no accounting for taste. I've gotten (from the same site) compliments on things that were just thrown together immediate reactions and condemnation for what I had worked hard on putting together as a reasonable argument or at least sincerely expressed emotion.
Hey, I agree that to get the benefit of online forums like this you have find a way to tolerate being criticized, misunderstood and insulted. and yes you’re right that none of us fully know each other — we’re sort of seeing each other through a keyhole. But the point of my “how would you like it” question to Ascent was different. I wasn’t reminding them that harsh criticism from online strangers is unpleasant. My complaint about posting criticism of a review *at this point* was that it probably is going to reduce that number of readers a review gets. Fewer readers means their that review’s score won’t be as good an approximation of the consensus — the score they would have gotten if everyone had rated their review. So the point of my question to Ascend was how would they like it if somebody posted here that their review was
tedious and lousy, given that that post was likely to mean Ascend’s
review got fewer readers.
Also, most reviewers care about having their review read. Everybody knows the chance of winning or being a finalist is low, but I think it hasn’t occurred to lots of people that maybe only 2 or 3 people will read the thing they wrote. I was startled when it happened to me. When Scott posted the links to all reviews I had quite a strong shivery feeling of, “ooh, it’s up. Wow, people are reading it. They are actually looking at my thoughts about that book I was fascinated by. I wonder what that they think?” I doubt that that’s rare.
About the question in your other post — what’s up with caring about having one’s review read? I don’t think that’s rare for people who write poetry or fiction, or essays where they are representing their personal take on something. I certainly have a different feeling about the stuff I write than I do about other products of my labor — the work I do for a living, my rock climbing back in the day when I did a lot of that, the various crafts I do. I experience the things I write as being much more a chunk of me. I’ve read biographies of quite a few writers, and while not all of them seem to feel that way about what they write, it’s very common. Beyond that, all I can say is that I am not a rock of confidence. I am thin-skinned. I have learned how to manage in situations where people are being blunt and tough and sometimes mean. I do not expect some great playground monitor in the sky to swoop down and make them stop. But a lot of my coping is simply feeling bad but knowing to shut the fuck up about it. I doubt that being thin-skinned the way I am is rare here.
I actually do not think there it is likely that the review I entered in this contest will have fewer readers than the average one. The review that few people read 2 years ago had an illustration under the title that I later learned that many people kind of recoiled from. And the first few paragraphs were about something unrelated to the book I was reviewing. I thought they were a good way to lead into the subject of the book, but at least a dozen people by now have told me they are confusing and annoying. So I think I lot of people bailed early on. I made sure my present review started in a user-friendly way. I’m not feeling particularly confident that most people will like it, just reasonably safe from its having no readers. So all the speaking up I’ve been doing during the present review season has been in the service of reducing the chance that other people’s reviews don’t go unread.
Thank you for your response. I'm glad that you did find something helpful in why people didn't respond well to your last review, and I do hope this one gets the response you would like.
I think I approach this from a very different angle. I don't think of myself as a writer, I've never shared a lot of writing with anyone, and I write mostly for myself. So my expectations around putting a piece out in public - be it a post or a comment - are very different. I don't feel so much like "this is chunk of myself", it's more "this is my view right now on this thing or my response to this thing". I've never had the expectation of an audience because before I got online, I never had anyone to share writing with.
So it's more participating in a conversation between a lot of people, and sometimes not everyone hears you or responds to you, because there's umpteen people talking to/at/over each other. If that happens, well I shrug and continue on.
I feel the same way about a lot of writing in fanfiction spaces, where now the expectation seems to be "you should/must engage with me, review, leave comments (but always praise never constructive criticism) because I am providing all this content and doing all this work for free and I deserve to have that acknowledged".
My reaction there is - and I have to say it's precisely because I've always written for myself and not an audience - "yeah, you're doing this for free, it's voluntary, nobody is compelled to read you or respond if they do, if it's published work that is bought and paid for that's different".
So, different perspectives at play here!
This was a great idea! I think almost every review I've read so far has been interesting (J through M in "other").
In case anyone is interested, I asked NotebookLM to summarize most of the "lettered" reviews:
https://www.zappable.com/p/acx-nonbook-review-contest
Thanks but, why are some reviews left out???
Let’s see, how many other ways are there to put a thumb on the scale? So far we’ve got putting up positive comments about certain reviews, putting up negative comments about certain reviews, and posting AI summaries of some but not others. How about favor trading or favor peddling? Hey guys, fuck fairness, right? If you give me a 9 or a 10, I’ll give you one — DM me if interested. Or something more straightforward? Good old cash? A really really long wet blowjob?
To anyone who has a temptation to cheat, maybe consider:
there a lot of ACT readers. It's unlikely that your cheating will have an outsized impact. This means that if your review is good enough to even be in contention for top 3/winning a prize, then it will already make the cut to be a finalist. So you don't really get much of a benefit from cheating. To me this helps reduce the temptation.
(I realize this argument doesn't apply if you consider just being a finalist as a terminal goal in itself.)
Why are so many left out?
Why would this be interesting?
I agree with the others pointing out that selectively summarizing the reviews doesn't feel fair. If you don't want to produce summaries for all 141 articles, which I know is a lot of work, would you consider removing your post for now, and directing your attention towards less-read reviews later on?
In the past years, at later stages of the finalist selection process, Scott has called for more votes on some reviews that received less attention. Creating AI summaries for those post might be a useful way to entice people to read those posts and balance out the vote counts, whereas selectively summarizing reviews now could exacerbate the imbalance.
Why is "Toby" in the TV/Movies category?
Re: the review of countries and British people being rude and emotional.
America's view of Britain is basically middle.class.britain...David Attenborough and Stephen Fry. That's partly because anglophiles are.more interested in highbrow things. Partly because middle class britons speak BBC english, even when they don't work for the BBC, whereas lower class Britons speak a variety of colourful dialects Usians can't understand. And partly because the US isn't a major soccer playing nation: if the Barmy Army descends on you at regular intervals, you quickly stop believing all Brits are quiet and polite.