Can we see the ratings for our non-finalist submissions? I'm wondering if my Einstein's' world view review is worth putting up on substack so wondered what score it got.
I feel more comfortable giving rankings in the top half than those in the bottom half, so here are the top 50 runners up: https://slatestarcodex.com/Stuff/50runnersup.xlsx . If you're not in the post above, or on this spreadsheet, yours was in the bottom ~half.
What is less encouraging is that I did Sermon on the Mount Review #2, and it looks like people preferred Review #1 significantly. I preferred my review, but I am extremely biased in this case.
I suspect most raters agreed with something like Billy Hamilton's critique of your review. I actually rated your review more highly than the other one, because I suspect the other one of outright misrepresenting its historical sources and that's a far graver sin, but I do think the other one was more interesting.
I'm surprised Alpha School placed 2nd. I suppose unlike many of the other finalists, it actually delivered on being a *review* rather than a jumping off point for a personal essay, but the flip side is that it didn't possess much of interest if you aren't directly interested in sending your children to Alpha School
I think what happened is that a specific subset of ACX readers *really really* liked the Joan of Arc review and rallied behind it, while people who liked the Alpha School review put it 2nd or 3rd during voting.
That certainly includes me, it was among the better things I'd read all year. Maybe this was a "Shakespeare in Love versus two war movies" voting pattern. The community darlings that were leading on polymarket when I first checked were Alpha School and the thing about dating different categories of young metropolitan stereotypes, and I didn't rank either of those. (To clarify, I didn't look until after voting, and was actually surprised.) My vague sense is that those two appeal to a subset of the ACX readership with specific life circumstances that probably make them more "in the scene" of EA, but it also just isn't relevant to readers outside certain demos or cities.
I might not have bothered to vote had it not been for Joan of Arc, as I didn't feel very strongly about any of the others. My 2nd-3rd were Ollantay and the war journal. There's a throughline on the Joan and Ollantay articles, obviously, and the war journal was just the most remarkable of the remainder due to uniqueness.
I'm sorry to hear that, because the point of Ranked Choice Voting is that it allows participants to vote honestly without worrying about that sort of strategy. Putting Joan of Arc as your first choice, you could've ranked as many others as you'd have liked and still gotten the same result.
Well, it would have taken you less than one minute to see on wikipedia that IRV does not satisfy the Condorcet criterion and therefore cannot avoid the spoiler effect. Do you want me to be more impressed by your brazenness or your stupidity?
Consider a population of 1200 voters who prefer candidate B to candidate A 610-590.
When candidate C enters the race, the precise preferences are as follows:
A > B > C (260)
A > C > B (160)
B > A > C (190)
B > C > A (160)
C > A > B (170)
C > B > A (260)
After one round of IRV, candidate B receives 350 votes and is eliminated.
The remaining votes (all 1200!) divide 260 + 160 + 190 = 610 in favor of candidate A and 160 + 170 + 260 = 590 in favor of candidate C, making A the winner. In the absence of candidate C's doomed campaign, candidate B would have won.
Or did you intend "the spoiler effect" to have a very different meaning from what it means in every other discussion of voting methods?
> This is not a statement with any connection to reality.
> Wow.
I really really hate drive by comments like this. You might be right - I know nothing about the systems at play - what you aren’t is convincing, in the abscence of an argument.
He's correct about everything except the part where he says I was lying.
I wasn't lying. I was just wrong. IRV is less susceptible to the spoiler effect than FPTP and is still a superior method, but it is not immune, despite what I'd been told by several sources before today.
I'm not currently planning on sending children to school but, having been to a school in the past, loved reading about a school system that sounds like it actually tries getting things right.
Why do you not think the question of what actually works in education is of broader intellectual interest? It seems obvious to me that it's one of the most important questions out there.
Absent personal feedback from every reviewer a la Victor, we won't know exactly why readers did or did not like it.
There's also a possibility that this was a satisficing review. I personally did not dislike the review as I said, it just surprised me to see it take top 2. A small core of super fans, and a large mass of readers with nothing against it, would be sufficient to take a high placement
Obviously I can't speak for everyone but I didn't vote for it for being satisficing, I thought it would be a runaway first after reading it (despite not having seen any of the others yet) and stood by it despite several later strong contenders.
I am obsessed with education. I was a teacher for a few years. I currently have 2 kids at school. Some of my friends do various educational projects. Every year my family spends one week of summer vacations at a conference about improving education. And... I feel triggered by this reaction.
School sucks. It's almost the worst possible environment for learning. It teaches children to hate learning. Do you know how 5 years old kids keep asking "why?" about everything all day long? School kills this curiosity in them; trains them to associate learning with stress and boredom. Nerds are a rare minority that remains curious despite school. Many of them are bullied at school.
Most teachers are depressingly conservative. Not politically, but in the sense of: "if we did this for the last 100 years, we will keep doing that for the next 100 years, too; technological progress and educational research be damned". We are lucky that books were invented before general education, otherwise teachers would still consider them suspicious. I think there was a psychological research comparing various professions, and teachers were the third most closed-minded profession, after bureaucrats and professional soldiers.
The "Alpha School" review shows how to do it much better: mostly by doing the obvious. Maybe we could involve computers in education. (Not in the sense of letting kids browse social network, but doing spaced repetition etc. Also, while some kids are training with the computers, the rest can get more individual attention from the teachers.) Maybe we could let children learn also something interesting, in addition to the mandatory. Maybe we could reward them for learning. (Instead of giving them constant stress and fear of punishment.) Maybe we could let them learn at individual speed. Maybe we could just do all of that together, and thereby create something that most current teachers and students wouldn't even consider possible.
My only worry is that this all sounds too good to be true.
The "School" review on the other hand insists that everything I consider a bug is secretly a feature. You know, some kids are lazy morons... but if we invent a system tailored specifically for their personality, it will make school slightly better for them (and much worse for everyone else), and that's apparently a good thing! The children learn little and suffer a lot, but they learn nonzero! Maybe kids ultimately remember almost nothing, but at least the school increased their IQ (that seems to contradict most studies on IQ but who cares) and that's what matters. Different children need different amounts of help, therefore we have to inflict maximum micromanagement on everyone, because apparently the only options are all or nothing. All this suffering and inefficiency is done in the name of motivating the dumbest... without care about how demotivating it is for everyone else.
The author keeps repeating the word "motivation", but in my opinion, school is the opposite of motivation, it is the thing that kills motivation. Some kids love reading books... until you tell them that they will be graded by how many unimportant details from the book they remember; also they need to read the books selected by the teacher, not the ones they like. (My daughter recently got a bad grade for failing to correctly answer who are the best story writers in Slovakia. Who the fuck cares? She has read all seven Harry Potter books and now she is halfway through Narnia, but apparently what matters more is guessing the two names that in teacher's subjective opinion are the most important. If the goal is to make children love reading books, the teacher's strategy tragically goes in the opposite direction.) Maybe if half of the school wasn't optimized for killing motivation, we wouldn't have to optimize the other half to keep it nonzero. Or maybe we could group the morons in a separate classroom and feed them bananas; they might even enjoy it.
tl;dr -- in my opinion, the "School" review represents the worst in the school system, the profoundly anti-fun and anti-learning mentality of the worst teachers
Well said. If "School" accurately portrayed the best we can get, I for one would be prepared to bite the bullet and advocate abolishing public education entirely. The minimal gains we got out of it clearly wouldn't be anywhere near sufficient to offset the suffering it creates.
It would be if it mattered, but it doesn't seem to. It's like working on perpetual motion machines, it's foolish, it can't work, but you occasionally see something that looks like a miracle if you don't know what's been hidden from you. But there is always something hidden from you, and it comes out eventually, every time. Not commenting on the merits, just to say that people who've read about these over the years may see "new educational method" as roughly equivalent to your friend trying to sell you on how his MLM scheme works without drawing a pyramid.
There's a big difference between a hard problem and an impossible problem. I've never seen a convincing argument that getting good effects from education is impossible rather than hard. The right attitude towards a hard problem is to maintain skepticism towards proposed solutions, especially if they claim to work very broadly, but watch with interest when someone gets impressive results, since they might have something that could be a form of incremental progress even if it's not a miracle cure.
It's also worth noting this school got good results in part by making compromises most schools wouldn't be willing to try (e.g. decentering teachers, charging more, being oriented on results over status, only trying to help a narrow segment of the population). It's acting under fewer constraints than most education systems.
Yeah. But that's also the danger in generalizing--the one truth I've ever found in education research is "it works in lab schools only." Everything (within a long stone's throw of vaguely rational) works in lab schools. None of it, to first approximation, works anywhere else.
I think there is a good chunk of the readership of this blog who think they are geniuses, but couldn’t flourish due to the structure of school. It’s the easiest genre to pander with. Combine that with the review being very well written and you’ve got a contender.
In fairness to these people, most of us aren't eighteen and did successfully flourish after leaving school. It's "I wasted my time there", not "I could've succeeded if only it hadn't stopped me".
Actual geniuses realize very quickly that Teachers Have Power and They are Smarter than the Teachers, and Letting the Teachers Know This will lead to Ego Damage for the teacher, and Bad Consequences for the Student.
Then they learn how to not act smart anymore, to conceal their agendas, and to always look like they're willing to take advice from teachers.
If you didn't get all that in school, you probably weren't smarter than your teachers. And that's a low bar for most schools (teachers ain't bright).
My teachers were bright enough though it was a private school. You seem to have been dragged through the American state school system. It’s also possible that the school teachers who didn’t think certain kids were smart are actually right.
What exactly do you mean by "bright enough"? My guess would mean you mean talented midwits. Teaching critical thinking is HARD WORK (and even the people good at it largely give up on most people.)
Totally in character, Joan of Arc snatches a miracle win from the jaws of defeat, pulling ahead of top contenders Alpha School and Dating Men in the Bay Area.
Thanks for everyone who participated in the Manifold market! It was fun trading with you. Accepting suggestions on how to give back to the community after this.
Congratulations to the winners! Those that won were all easily in my top five. All the finalists were interesting and informative.
I remember reading some comments last year from non-finalists who wished they'd received more feedback. Therefore, here are my notes on the 38 submissions that I reviewed in the first stage of the contest. They were all randomly chosen using the random review button. I also wrote a few paragraphs on my overall thoughts on what makes a good review.
Thank you so much for taking notes and posting them! I did the (F) Sermon on the Mount review, and every year I wonder what I could have done to do better. I imagine most everyone who didn't make the finalist cut wonders the same thing. So thanks for telling us!
I am delighted (and frankly surprised) this won, I voted for it but didn't expect it to do as well as it did (I expected the miraculous element to be the sticking point for this readership).
Stealth Catholic vote ensures victory? Much more broad-minded and generous commentariat than I gave them credit for? You decide! 😁
Eh, a "miracle" is just what interested parties call their favored interpretation of a mystery. And everybody likes a good mystery, even us irreligious irredeemables.
I think that *religious apologism* is, rightly, a sticking point for the ACX readership, and a fair amount of popular historical writing on questions of whether miracles occurred is in fact thinly disguised religious apologism, unless it's instead positioned as debunking. Aevylmar gave a convincing account of why he was interested in this question that did not require a bottom-line position on Christianity to be written first, which allowed us to accept what he was doing as good-faith historical inquiry.
From the perpective of a Catholic, I was surprised that while it seemed at the start like another "well miracles can't be real obviously so let's stretch our imagination to think of a way this could have been made up" it ended with the conclusion that there's possibly something to it because the purely skeptical explanation is deeply flawed.
I don't think you have to be a Catholic or any other sort of Christian to believe that Joan of Arc performed miracles, or had other supernatural powers. You just have to believe that the supernatural, you know, exists.
First, I'm not entirely sure that's true in the relevant sense; even if you believe that there's some kind of real supernatural, you'd need an explanation for why it would be in play in any particular case (given that we so rarely encounter it in daily life), or else it's just a god-of-the-gaps argument. You could argue that Joan's miracles were faked with Harry Potter magic or whatever else, but you have to actually make that argument.
Second, in practice, the genre of post I'm complaining about usually ends with something like "so as you can see, we've proven conclusively that something supernatural happened here; therefore, my particular denomination of Christianity is true and you should all convert right now."
<i>Second, in practice, the genre of post I'm complaining about usually ends with something like "so as you can see, we've proven conclusively that something supernatural happened here; therefore, my particular denomination of Christianity is true and you should all convert right now."</i>
Oh, I completely agree with you that Christian apologists do this all the time, especially on the internet, and I always find it annoying. Many of them really do seem to conflate "demonstrating this one miracle happened" (most commonly the resurrection of Jesus) with "demonstrating that Christianity is true." They aren't the same thing at all (and more generally, believing that a miracle happened, as an event in history, doesn't equate to buying into Christian theology as a whole, with all of its problems).
As I'd said in my own comment on the article, the "miraculous" element is in fact what sold me on the article. It really drove home the point for me that Medieval Frenchmen (and perhaps Englishmen) were not like us; they did not engage in realpolitik to the extent that we do; and to them, Joan's powerful conviction and leadership skills (as we'd call them today) would've felt like a miracle. It's obvious that our modern machine technology (cellphones, computers, airplanes, mass-produced corn dogs) would have felt miraculous to them; but I never appreciated that our *social* technology is likewise tremendously advanced !
As a formerly-offensively-atheist now-agnostic - both in the Bayesian sense of "0% and 100% aren't real probabilities" and also in the religious sense - I mostly found the Miracle Question of secondary concern to the mere fact of it simply being a fun and engaging read. Life's weird, lucky things happen more often than mere coincidence, who needs fiction when you have history. Cf. Scott's Fatima post. The object-level question of God's existence is not something that I expect to be argued into/out of by a mere blog post (feels perpetually unknowable with certainty, honestly), yet the stakes are high enough that it makes for a strong topic anyway, especially with a frame that isn't mired in exhausting old New Atheist baggage. Still ended up ranking it 3rd, since I felt it strayed somewhat from the nominal review rules of not being about books, and was more of a quality aggregation of existing well-known sources vs showing new perspectives I wouldn't hear otherwise.
Joan of Arc was on the top of my list, initially; but upon a subsequent read, I discovered a historical error. The error wasn't a critical one—wrong French king, wrong date for a minor piece of the backstory—but, since I'm not especicially knowledgeable about the Hundred Years War, I had to wonder how many other errors there were that I didn't know enough to spot.
Poor Scott, now he's *never* going to shake off the rumours that he's converting to Catholicism 😁 (something I do not believe is ever going to happen, but now what do I know about what St. Joan and Our Lady of Fatima have in mind?)
Congratulations to all the winners and honorable mentions, and thanks to everyone who entered.
I very much enjoyed the "non-book" aspect of this; I feel like the book reviews for the contests are never really book reviews anyway, so it was nice to have a broader jumping-off point for the submissions to the contest.
Congrats to the winners! All extremely in-depth and interesting. Joan was my personal favorite so I'm glad to see it get its flowers.
Thank you to everyone who wrote kind comments about my silly Mashed Potatoes essay. I had a lot of fun writing it and it was gratifying to make the finals! I don't have time to go back through all the comments from the original post but I will cop to being, as many pointed out, philosophically inept, spinning out a vast and flawed Baudrillard-recapitulating metaphor before walking it back to a relatively minor point about semantics. I identified the pattern I wanted to write about first and then struggled to tie it all up with a bow in the final section with any kind of consistency or rigor. I do feel it's gesturing at a real dynamic, even if it's imperfectly explicated, and I'm glad some of you found merit in it anyway (except for the guy who thought I was GPT-5? Not cool bro).
I loved your review! It was my favorite. Thank you for identifying this pattern/phenomena and putting it into words. There's definitely a "there" there, even if you "struggled to tie it all up with a bow" at the end.
>except for the guy who thought I was GPT-5? Not cool bro
I legitimately find it less insulting to be called ugly than to be accused of having used generative AI to compose a piece of text I slaved over with my bare hands.
For what it's worth, I have the reverse criticism; I thought your writing was good but remain skeptical that the dynamic you're talking about is actually a real thing.
I passed a happy car journey listening to it! I think it worked on several levels, both concrete and abstract:
- It has straightforwardly interesting facts about the origin of potatoes etc
- It weaves them into a more general and interest narrative about mashed potato, which I'd never really thought of (I grew some potatoes this year so it oddly did interweave with my concrete problem of how to preserve them!)
- It makes a broader abstract point which I think adds something to the mental toolbox (although I think whenever I apply IMPishness I need to think a lot about the context of each individual case)
All the other reviews had their own flaws by the lights of other commenters, too, and I don't think you need to be so apologetic.
I think you're being too modest. I voted for it to win, it was my favourite of the reviews. I learned some new things about potatoes and the simulacra comparison was very apt. Give yourself a pat on the back.
I voted for yours despite having minor criticism of it at the time. I appreciated it being a review of an actual thing and also not being way too long.
I liked your essay and would have voted for it with a more satisfying wrap-up. If you have the time it might be worth trying to resolve the dangling threads and to post a revised version. Thanks for sharing!
I guess Brandon Hendrickson's anti-precedent (where reviewers tried to limit reviews to <10k words in 2024 after his 2023 review of The Educated Mind got meme'd for being way too long) only lasted one year.
Congrats to all the winners! I wish Edward's kids (along with the rest of the Alpha School students) all the best!
This is just my personal opinion (and so I'm prone to the pundit's fallacy in thinking it's more broadly shared), but this year's winning and second-place reviews were the two longest submissions because they both genuinely had a huge amount of ground to cover, whereas the review of The Educated Mind seemed to be drawing out its argument as long as possible in order to wear down readers' prior inclination to dismiss its bottom-line conclusion.
The HYW stuff was more interesting than the JoA stuff, though. To be honest I think the review benefitted massively from the historical context vs ignoring that to focus more narrowly on JoA.
Before I put them in it was kind of incomprehensible. With longer editing I could probably have gotten it down significantly, but I actually wrote the essay in a desperate rush the week or two before the deadline and so I didn't have time for all the editing I wanted.
I can relate. We've all been there. Editing is hard. Your review was still very well-written and I'm glad you won. I'm looking forward to what you're going to write in the future!
The length was such a sticking point for me personally because it's not good for the overall health of the contest. It's fine if one person submits a super long review; it's not fine if everyone does. Initial voting becomes a slog.
Back in 2023, when Brandon won, I said at the time that I voted for it despite its length, not because of it. Commenters were worried that his review would set a bad example, and subsequent entries would all be super long.
Then 2024 rolled around, and Scott instituted a soft 10k word limit. And... people abided by it! I read (and rated) a significant chunk of the initial submissions that year, and I enjoyed all of them. When the entries are a manageable length, it's really fun to read review after review. All the finalists were under 15k words, with most of them being under the soft 10k word limit.
I don't know why people stopped doing that this year. Scott gave the same (soft) 10k word limit, but a lot more submissions blew right past it. This was a bigger problem than just you, specifically.
I barely read any initial submissions this year, simply because of math. In the time it takes me to read one 30k word post, I could have read and rated three or four <10k word reviews. That adds up when there are over 150 submissions.
I think part of the reason why the ACX commentariat was disappointed in this year's initial submissions was because they had the same constraints I did, and people simply couldn't read as many during initial voting. They didn't have an opportunity to read a ton of them and find their favorites; they probably only read a handful and then stopped. A huge part of the enjoyment I get out of this contest every year is from digging through the initial pile and finding the awesome ones that appeal to me, but not necessarily the rest of the ACX readership (and so never make finalist). I can't do that if all the submissions are long.
All that to say: your review was great! Congrats again!!!
I don't read all the reviews. I pick out ones that seem interesting (based on title and/or subject matter), start to read, and if it bores me, I don't bother with the rest of it but move on to something else.
I can imagine very conscientious people dutifully slogging through the whole of every entry, but I don't think we *have* to do that (barring the voice of conscience compels you).
Why do you think the ACX commentariat was disappointed in this year's initial submissions? Sentiment in the first-round voting thread was largely positive, and where negative was largely about minor-ish process issues (rather than content of submissions), plus some arguing about what's a "review" and some performative complaining about Skibidi Toilet.
In any event, if you're against long reviews, then your complaint is with the voters, not the submitters. There weren't in fact any submissions that came close to 30,000 words. The three longest were Joan of Arc (~24,000 words, first place); Alpha School (~18,000 words, second place); and Dating Men in the Bay Area (~15,000 words, probably fourth place according to Manifold). Besides those three, only four others were over the 10,000 word limit (one of which, The Synaptic Plasticity and Memory Hypothesis, was also a finalist), and only one (Deathbed Ballads, ~14,000 words) was clearly over the limit if it's interpreted as a "soft limit". This is out of 144 submissions in all. (Complete list of word counts here: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/choose-nonbook-review-finalists-2025/comment/122686238)
So there wasn't in fact a huge wave of super-long reviews. Rather, there were a small number of super-long reviews, and they were the ones that did best in the voting. This makes me think that the pattern of finalist lengths from 2023 to 2024 to 2025 was probably just a fluke.
Maybe your threshold for noping out was actually lower than 10,000 words?
Could it be that my taste is the exact opposite to ACX readers in general? In my ranking Joan of Arc and Alpha School were 12th and 13th, while School and Mashed Potato were 1st and 2nd. Any chance of publishing the full ordered list?
Alpha school was definitely low for me. Joan of Arc was middling. Although I admire the work put in. The mashed potato was an excellent essay, one of my favourite essays in a long time. Maybe people didn’t think it was a review.
Is there any possible explanation for one submission getting an outlier number of ratings, other than that someone elsewhere on the internet linked it and drew attention to it? I don't think a submission can achieve that by its merits, since we all started off with just the giant Google Docs full of reviews that we hadn't yet read, and so couldn't know in advance which ones were any good.
Speaking as someone who doesn’t ever bother voting in these things, and mostly doesn’t bother even reading honorable mentions because the Google doc is too awkward to deal with on my phone… I had heard of Red Means No, and probably others had too, since Aella is somewhat famous around here. I have not heard of young swingers week. So if I were the going to read stuff, I’d be more likely to read about the thing I’d heard of
Huge congrats to William on the Joan of Arc Review! The other two I voted for (Dating Men in the Bay Area and Instant Mashed Potatoes--both excellent) covered ground that I'm interested in and made arguments I think are important. Joan of Arc had me rivetted to the screen in spite of its length and my lack of prior interest. Very well done!
Great minds! Honestly, I'm surprised that Instant Mashed Potatoes made it to the finals at all--I loved it, but it so cuts against what I stereotype as the ACX view of things. Glad to hear you voted for it!
Not everyone has been following Scott that long. In which case I recommended this old post (don’t worry about the size of the scroll bar, that post had a few hundred comments; the post itself is pretty short)
"No paid consulting. No discounted tuition (or more accurately no discounted tuition that was not provided to every other family in the school)
I did have a couple calls with their marketing team at one point - but it was purely volunteer to help them out. I do the same thing for lots of organizations."
So while the author received no compensation, I think it is fair to call the review "undisclosed infomercial". It was written by a marketer who volunteers to help Alpha School convert customers and apparently employs psychological conversion tactics (analysis here: https://pastebin.com/fJfvQFQ2). The recent posts in the author's new linked blog can be seen in the same light.
ORIGINAL COMMENT: Hi, regarding the "Alpha School" review, the author is a growth marketing expert by profession according to his linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/edwardn/, the review reads in part like ChatGPT-assisted viral marketing copy (the ChatGPT feel has been noted by other commenters), and Gemini or a similar LLM flag some stylistic devices in the storyline and rhetorics that are evidence in favour of this, see e.g. https://pastebin.com/fJfvQFQ2 here^1. I think it would be appropriate to get a statement about whether he received any form of compensation from Alpha School or other ESW/Joe Liemandt-affiliated entities, including e.g. discounted tuition, either explicitly for writing this review or in some other consulting-like role? I do realize that the truth may be "I really love to help them grow even without taking money, because I am convinced of the product" - I am more convinced of what the Alpha school product tries to do than I am of public high school too - but I'd like to know.
In particular, part of the Alpha/GT marketing seems to be explicitly directed at the rationalist community - look e.g. at the https://x.com/gtdad account, which follows rationalist/adjacents like Kelsey Piper or orthonormalist and is part of the Alpha School marketing system. I also think there is a pattern of entities receiving money from Alpha School or other Joe Liemandt-affiliated companies and writing positively about the Alpha school system (e.g. tracingwoodgrains,^2 whose Center for Educational Progress to my understanding has been mostly funded by an Alpha School grant as of a few months ago, or Austen Allred ^3). Once again, I find it absolutely plausible that the enthusiasm would be genuine (like the review author, Allred has his own kids in the thing, which he wouldn't do if he didn't like it), but I think it should be made clear whether any money or other advantages flowed to the people voicing it.
In fact, the connection is now quite direct - Alpha School founder Liemandt himself has made this very ACX review the pinned tweet on his X profile, calling it the start of "The Alpha School virus" and explicitly encouraging people to vote in the contest: https://x.com/jliemandt/status/1974984216027738467
^1 I got this response when pasting the prompt "Is this text likely some sort of hidden advertising? Can you tell me evidence in favour and against?" together with the review text into Gemini 2.5 Pro on Google AI studio.
^3 Austen Allred's writes positively about Alpha as well: https://x.com/search?q=alpha%20from%3Aausten and his current venture, Gauntlet AI, was to my understanding bootstrapped mostly by hiring demand from Joe Liemandt's education and other ventures.
"No paid consulting. No discounted tuition (or more accurately no discounted tuition that was not provided to every other family in the school)
I did have a couple calls with their marketing team at one point - but it was purely volunteer to help them out. I do the same thing for lots of organizations."
So while the Alpha School review was written by a marketer who is enthusiastic about helping Alpha School convert, there was no compensation.
I'm glad you'll be alternating book and non-book review contests: I liked the latter enough to want to see more of them, but of course love book reviews and wouldn't want to simply subsume them into a larger "review anything" project.
Congratulations to all the winners.
I'm bummed that "11 Poetic Forms, Reviewed in Verse" didn't even make the honorable mentions list. I really liked it.
I really liked the concept of "11 Poetic Forms, Reviewed in Verse" but didn't feel that the author was quite a skilled enough wordsmith to pull it off. If Scott had written it, I bet it would have been great. (I feel bad about saying this because it's good for people to try ambitious things, but ultimately I gave high ratings to ones that I felt were successes.)
Ditto on "11 Poetic Forms". A damn shame. Well done, whoever you are!
(Also, I am getting deja vu from this comment. I swear I've read Taymon's response before, maybe word for word, and maybe Stephen's and mine, too. Did we do this when the finalists/HMs were first announced?)
In case the authors or anyone else is interested, here are the short notes I wrote to myself after reading each review, to refer to later when voting:
Alpha School: pretty good, little on the long side
School: really good core insight, writing kinda dull
Mice Alzheimer’s: pretty hard to get through.
Islamic Geometry: fine I guess? Not very exciting.
Commentariat: fun, but dragged a bit in the second half.
Joan of Arc: Quite good, easily my favorite so far.
Instant Potatoes: Fun and interesting, not too long, but point is suspect and also mashed potatoes aren’t actually good.
Dating Men: Pretty good but feels a bit pandery.
Ollantay: Another top contender
Phase 1 Research: Interesting and a good read.
Synapse Memory: Interesting but dubious and kinda long for the value.
Xanadu: Okay I guess.
Russia-Ukraine War: Pretty good but not sure it’s a winner
IIRC I ended up voting for Joan, Ollantay, and Phase 1 Research. Phase 1 might have been confounded in either direction since it was the only finalist that I read and voted on in the preliminary round.
Are we gonna start the Great Potato War of 2025 on here? Because I feel the Irish and Germans would line up on one side, you heretic 🤣
It depends on the type of potato (waxy versus floury), how they're cooked (boiled into mush?), and how they're mashed (drain off the water and allow steam dry a little or mash them into a gruel in the water, then leave them coarsely mashed or put them through a ricer, then lots of liquid such as milk to make them soupy versus no, you want a solid potato not something you can drink with a straw).
One thing I like is to do all the prep up to the point of boiling, but instead of putting the pot onto the stove, letting the potatoes sit in the salted water at room temperature overnight. That's usually enough to get a bit of fermentation going, to break down some of the tough stuff and add a bit of tang.
Of course, slicing them then and then fermenting in Mason jars for a few days before *baking* results into the chips Sea Salt and Vinegar chips want to be when they grow up.
Thanks for running an excellent contest, Scott. I'm always curious to see how alternative voting systems work in practice, is there any way you could share how the RCV method actually determined the results in this case?
why post the contents of footnote 3 about getting past the spam filter, as opposed to send it in an email to finalists? LLMs are good at scraping and finding these sorts of things
I am thrilled "Alpha School" placed, and just want to take a moment to highlight an aspect of the review that I don’t think has gotten enough praise: this man uprooted his entire life to ensure his kids got the highest quality, healthiest education possible. And, unlike some parents who obsess over their kids’ education, he graciously and lovingly admits that both of his kids have unique personalities, and is eager to find individualized motivations that work best for them.
Edward, you're an incredible father. I want to hug you and clone you.
I help with mentorship programs, and my experience with the parents who are obsessed with their kids' education is that they tend to want their children to fit a very cookie-cutter mold of success. They get fixated on their kid getting into Stanford, MIT, etc, and then force their child toward whatever interests/activities/achievements will get them into those schools. They essentially create a personality for their child and then force them to wear it.
I instinctively cringed a bit when I saw a very long post about someone trying to optimize their kids' education. But I was very pleasantly surprised by how in-tune Edward is to his kids' mental well-being, unique interests, strengths, weaknesses, etc.
I think he's a rare balance of someone who is both hyper-fixated on his childrens' success and also deeply respects their children as individuals and cares for their mental health. And I think it's worth applauding. Frankly, I'm baffled by why you'd want to mock it, but so be it.
I wasn't mocking your points, I was critiquing them. But I did not get that you were not comparing him to parents in general, but saying that within the population of parents hyper-fixated on their kids' achieving certain markers of success, he's much better than average. That I do not find absurd, though I'm still inclined to think of it more as being the best of a bad lot than as a precious and remarkable achievement.
Critique is an art form of its own, and I would suggest you learn how to give it in a way that does not sound like mockery. Your point very easily could have been made without sounding snide.
And to each their own. I never got the chance to go to high school, so my mind is absolutely blown when I come across individuals who put so much effort into their children's education. When done in a compassionate and humanizing manner, I absolutely believe it's worth applauding.
You are right that I could have made my point in a pleasanter way. You could lay my snideness to spillover anger from other, related things I object to. First of all, I do not like the sound of Alpha School. The thread where the review was posted for comments has something like 10 long, detailed posts of mine articulating what I think is wrong with its objectives and methods. Second of all, I am very angry about information that has come out about Alpha School and the review's success iin the present thread: The founder of Alpha School had a pinned tweet on X asking his 45,000 followers to vote for the review: https://x.com/jliemandt/status/1974984216027738467. And the request was retweeted 32 times. That's ballot stuffing.
On the other hand, calling my anger spillover suggests that it's irrelevant to my present complaints about the writer and dad in question. It's not. Seems to me that both he as a contestant and the school he's promoting in his infomercial are overconcerned with winning competitions and underconcerned with being trustworthy and real.
I guess if everyone he asked to vote did come over here and vote, then yeah, that's ballot stuffing.
Good job St. Joan thwarted his plans just like she did the English, then!
"When done in a compassionate and humanizing manner, I absolutely believe it's worth applauding."
That's the rub, isn't it? Alpha School sounds like rearing turkeys for Christmas. I enjoy my Christmas fowl but I wouldn't raise another animal, let alone a child, like that: plump 'em up fast for the slaughter and the profit of the owner (of the brand which he seems, if Eremolalos is recounting correctly, to be marketing as hard and perhaps as deceitfully* as his little spindly legs will run on the treadmill).
I agree with Eremolalos that I don't like being used for free advertising.
*There seems to be some little blurring about who founded what and who owns what; one source (Wikipedia) says the founders of Alpha School are MacKenzie Price and her husband Andrew Price; another source (Wall Street Journal) says some guy called Bill Ackman is acting as the public face/ambassador for Alpha School, and finally Wikipedia again says the owner of the magic software that the school operates off is this Joe Liemandt, who also owns the companies that Andrew Price works for.
I often feel sort of at home here, which is a rare experience for me, but the present “review” contest has had me wandering deep in familiar alienation. I hope some of that reaction is accounted for by how many outsiders participated as contestants and "judges." One post here today (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/non-book-review-contest-2025-winners/comment/167323863) says that the founder of Alpha School, Joe Liemandt, had a pinned tweet on his X profile asking readers to vote for Edward Nevraumont's review of Alpha School. Seems to me there's virtually no chance that Nevraumont was not aware of the pinned tweet or that he asked Liemandt to take it down and Liemandt refused. Also seems highly unlikely that any who arrived here via that route actually read any of the other reviews. So they weren't really judges or voters, just unpaid ballot box stuffers.
GPT's assessment of amount of AI-generated content in the essay:
>The piece reads overwhelmingly as human-written with some AI-style scaffolding or heavy-AI paraphrase in certain middle sections. The dominant voice is cohesive, witty, and self-aware—traits that large-language-model prose still rarely sustains across 25 000 words. But there are several passages whose sentence rhythm and connective phrasing match AI composition patterns strongly enough to suggest the author may have used an AI draft or rewrite tool, then edited heavily. . . . Overall, the essay’s conceptual architecture and narrative sensibility are human, but perhaps 15–25 percent of the phrasing bears AI fingerprints—primarily in data-dense or connective prose.
The soul of an anti-woke intellectual: Jamie Q. Roberts
*SINGLE MOST INTERESTING PARAGRAPH*
Japanese social interactions exist at a much higher resolution than American ones, and at times I felt that living in Japan as an allistic person gave me a reasonable understanding of what it might be like to be autistic in America. At all times there were subtle games being played, and things being communicated by other people to which I was not privy at all. This created a background radiation of stress that made social interaction much more stressful than fun. Japanese people get around this by leaning into role assignment; basically, your boss is just your boss, and must play the role of boss rather than ‘being himself’ because if everyone was particularly ‘himself’ at this high resolution of social interaction, everyone’s minds would collapse under the information overload, and life would be impossible, even for those born into the culture. (From The World as a Whole)
*MOST ACUTE AND ENTERTAINING SINGLE SENTENCES*
“Less powerful than Cantor’s [wings], but still airworthy enough to reveal the vistas that Cantor saw; and robust enough not to melt and send us plummeting into the sea of mathematical paradox.”
“One sees crystalline souls that have polished all their facets into a perfect refracting jewel of self-awareness, and often a performance of self-contempt, so no one can ever accuse them of being cringe.”
“. . . young people who are by default edgelords, unserious Christians, iPad kids, psych med-takers, or bog-standard faces in the halls to mine the social media algorithms for what is most in opposition to the listlessness and malaise they feel.”
“Plastiform glee that intensifies into a sort of pop-eyed, carnivorous ecstasy. “
“This speaks to its visual literalism.”
“The villanelle so strangles sense that one can't tell the meaning from the structure.
“ . . . something done in the physical world in an intangible age. An age of circling back, checking in, lit reviews that go nowhere, and innovative best practices in marketing.”
“He appears to have an almost fanatical devotion to parsimonious explanations.”
“The concept of bad faith- akin to mauvaise foi but with a sunk-cost ratchet.”
“It is immortal precisely because it is flawed. Like human language, its ambiguity delivers the creative freedom that closed systems cannot.”
“Past the veil of shame is where the dark, gross, raw workings of the heart lie. Meet me there.”
To be clear, the person encouraging to vote in the contest (together with promotion of the review) is not the author of the review, but the founder of Alpha, Joe Liemandt himself (he used to be quite secretive, letting Mackenzie Price present as the public face, but has become less so in the last months): https://x.com/jliemandt/status/1974984216027738467
Before education, this person got (in)famous for acquiring struggling companies and operating them with remote contractors (https://archive.is/ar0Cr), using his remote working platform Crossover that pioneered bossware/mouseclick "productivity" surveillance (https://archive.is/PpoLs). A big part of the philosophy of Alpha School seems to be adopting this metrics and surveillance-driven approach to schoolchildren.
According to the linked blog post, Liemandt started presenting more publicly in part because the review author accidentally outed him, not realizing that his involvement was supposed to be kept quiet.
And do you have any doubt that the author of the review could have kept him from soliciting votes on X? In my opinion anyone who solicits votes on social media or accepts having someone else do it for their own gain or the author’s should be disqualified
Thanks for singling out my paragraph. I agree that promotion of reviews on other platforms sets a dangerous precedent. It would take very little for the contest to lose all meaning because of tactical social media campaigns.
You're in the Single Sentence category too, with your riff about Macedonian teens. You seem very gifted to me in your takes on people and settings, and your ability to put nuanced takes and odd unsettling truths into words. I hope you'll keep writing, so long as it gives you pleasure. There are way fewer settings than there used to be where talent like yours is appreciated, but there are still some. My own talents are in the same realm as yours, and I've had to come to terms with the fact that ACX is just not a setting where gifts in that realm are much valued. If you hang out here, it has to be for the other great things about this group. You might be amused by my own entry, which is about AI text-to-image art, but can be read as an extended angry riff about the triumph of plastic analogs over the real deal. It's Dall-2 & 3 as Depictors of Human Life. But fer crissakes don't feel like you owe it to me to give it a read! Anyhow, DM me if you'd ever like to chat.
I enjoyed your thoughts about the superiority of Dall-E 2 over 3, from an artistic perspective. What do you think about the newest image generation models?
Having been a reader since the early SSC days, I too have felt vaguely threatened and alienated by the massive influx of normies. This wasn't helped by Scott generally being busy for other reasons and not quite as on top of moderating as usual.
I agree that outside promotion is icky. I suspect the LLM slop will only become a bigger problem, too.
In addition to everything else (especially Joan of Arc, the only review that earned a 10 from me), I want to congratulate Max Nussenbaum on having now written *three* banger ACX contest reviews that I keep coming back to for a good read. It's disappointing that this one didn't make the finals, but I'm glad to see it recognized anyway.
I'll be frank and say I'm crushed my review didn't bubble up to the top of the honorable mentions. I put my heart and ten years into it though, so I suppose I'll try to be content with having let out many things that I've long believed and left unsaid.
Congratulations to all the winners. Here's a link to my review if you didn't read it. Shout out to the commenters who singled it out, and seemed to understand what I was getting at.
Originally, I haven't noticed it among the submissions. I've got to reading it only now. And holy moly, that's a seriously good piece of writing. It's almost Steinbeckian in its depth and insightful in that particular human-centered way that's almost fully missing from the rationalist-adjacent blogosphere. I still have to fully digest it. And then maybe write a review of it.
Next time, I suggest writing something that doesn't make people want to kill themselves after they finish reading it. Pander to your audience! Reinforce their prejudices!
Good idea! I plan to write a sequel that casts the review in a less pessimistic. It's intended more as a picture of things as they are, then as they must be.
I understand that, to a degree. To those that already know, it's only a depressing reminder, and to those that don't know, it may seem like nothing but an argument that they should feel bad. But I don't believe in collective guilt, and that isn't the point of the essay at all.
Happily surprised by Alpha School - not being a winner, that was kind of a given, but by author. I remember doing my part to dunk on the previous comics review. It's unusual to dislike something so strongly that it becomes a recurring synecdoche for bad things of a type! Big tsuyoku naritai energy for learning based on gradient descent and putting out a much, much stronger review this time. "As long as you learn something, it's not a mistake," says Archer.
Befuddled by not recognizing any of the finalists as commenters whose writing feels very familiar, like as if they're a big-name regular that I've been reading for years. At least two entries this year gave that strong sense of readerly deja vu. More evidence of convergent evolution, I guess...spend time on ACX, start to write like/complementary to Scott.
Most of the finalist and honorable mention reviewers aren't people I know, but in two cases (Joan of Arc and JFK Assassination Conspiracy Theories) I found specific tells that allowed me to, with fairly high confidence, figure out who the author was before today's reveal. (In the former case, there was actually a Manifold market on it, not created by me, and I made a decent profit.)
More congrats...winners, finalists , HMs, and top 50s. Well done!
And thank you Scott, and all those who helped Scott bring us the contest again this year. Thanks also for providing links for the HMs this year!
Finally, special shoutout to Laura González Salmerón. Your Miniature Wunderland caught me just right. Such an interesting place, and so nicely presented by you. I find myself thinking of it often.
Thank you so much! I'm glad it resonated with you. That's the best compliment a writer can hope for, that something you've written stays with someone and keeps coming back to them :)
I didn't make the top 50 this year. (HM last year)
If anyone who read my submission on Bob Dylan's song Simple Twist of Fate would like to share what they didn't like about it, I would love to hear it. Please, don't hold back. I can take it. I knew I was taking a risk by going with a song, but I wanted to reach for it. You can DM me if you don't want to put it here. Thanks!
Here it is in Substack (not Google Docs), if you need a reminder. Not asking others to read.
I don't remember what rating I gave it, but it wasn't too generous. Reviewing the song lyrics seems like a perfectly good idea, but the thing is - I didn't like the song itself much, didn't think the lyrics were all that amazing, and it was hard for me to really get into the review praising those lyrics and analyzing them in great detail. A review that says: "read this poem, it's genius!" is going to fall a bit flat if I read the poem and think it's kind of meh. This is not a disparagement of your actual writing skill.
I'm old enough to be burned out on people writing Deep Articles analysing song lyrics (way too much of this for Dylan among others in the past) and also reflexively kicking back against song lyric posts in general (way, *way* too many of songfic in fanfiction, though thankfully that seems to have died down again until a fresh crop of kiddiewinkies come along who think their favourite band are, like, sooooo deep and meaningful).
As others have pointed out, the song is not particularly deep'n'meaningful: guy meets gal, they have a fling, they break up, guy broods about it. That's about a good sixty percent of most songs past and present. And this wasn't even a fling but a one night stand.
Overall take; there's a rush through the intro to get to the review, contradictory goals stated, one particular interpretation offered for the lyrics when other interpretations are equally supported, and a general overselling of the song's lyrical tightness.
I have a longer version if you want it. It's a couple of pages, too long to post here.
Just commenting to say that I really really liked "The Life's Work Of Banerjee, Duflo, and Kremer", I'm sad that it didn't make it to a finalist but I'm glad that it made it to the top half
Well, most people here sound sort of like people at the end of a fine Thanksgiving dinner. This was great — thanks, Scott, for hosting it, and for all the fine people who participated by writing or judging — great bunch of essays, guys — congrats to all . . . So I feel sort of like the skunk who slipped in through the dog door and shows up in the dining room doorway, all scary and stinky, saying this:
Edward Nevraumon, author of the Alpha School review, cheated. He should be disqualified. There are a number of posts about this matter scattered on the thread, but here’sthe brief version. During the competition, Joe Liemandt, founder of Alpha School, had a pinned tweet on X asking followers to go to ACX and vote for Nevraumon’s review. (https://x.com/jliemandt/status/1974984216027738467). It has 45.5 K views, and was retweeted 32 times. It went up on October 5, 3 days after voting started.
Nevraumon has not denied knowing that tweet was up, and it would be quite implausible if he did deny it. The fully honest thing for him to do would have been to tell Liemandt to take down the tweet as soon as he knew it was there, then inform Scott of what had happened. But I’d settle for his just having quietly asked to have the tweet removed. But nope, the thing’s still up, and presumably was up from 10/5 til voting ended on 10/13. Nevraumon, who’s a growth marketing expert, has denied receiving any direct or indirect compensation for writing his piece about Alpha School, and I don’t know anything that makes me doubt that, but it’s clear there was communication and coordination going on between Nevraumon and Liemandt about the review. How otherwise would Liemandt even know that Nevramon was entering a review in the ACX contest, much less know when voting began?
Last year one entrant was disqualified during the voting, because of “irregularities.” Seems likely irregularities were suspicious patterns in the votes the review received, though I supposed there could instead have been reason to suspect plagiarism. In any case, it seems to me that the case for disqualifying Nevaumon cannot possibly be weaker than the one against last year’s disqualified reviewer. In fact I’m having a hard time imagining a stronger case. He told someone who’s deeply invested in the success of Alpha School about his review, and informed him when voting began. He said not a word to anyone here about the tweet soliciting votes. Some fraction of the 44.5K people who saw the tweet (plus of course those who saw retweets) very likely came here and gave him a 10. That’s ballot stuffing. Even if in fact not a single X rando showed up and voted, Nevaumon is still just as guilty, because he went along with an attempt to send an army of ballot stuffers here to up his score.
I’m amazed that nobody but me has spoken up loudly about this. It seems like a clearcut, especially egregious case of cheating to me. But of course the tone here today nudges everyone in the direction of being mellow and positive.
I’ve been reading since the SSC days and AlphaSchool was a favorite of mine and I also judge it likely to interest the typical reader of this blog, at least any that have or are thinking of having children. It also gets bonus points for being basically the only actionable reviewed item. I don’t find its performance surprising and I don’t consider someone else tweeting something to be a form of the author cheating nor do I expect a review author to be aware of tweets about his review, even from people the author knows.
Of course there is an alternative to disqualifying Nevraumon.. We could agree to just not treat vote solicitation in the review contest as a problem. I don’t believe Scott stated anywhere that vote soliciting is not allowed, or even said that it’s sleazy and please don’t do it. And of course there is no way to fully enforce a rule of this nature. Only pretty flagrant violations will come to anyone’s attention. Any anyhoo, that’s how the world works, right?
In that case, I would like to be the first to take advantage of the situation by making an offer to the group. Next year I will enter the best, most crowd-pleasing review I can, and pay up to 4 people to give my review, and only mine, a 10. I will give each person who does that 10% of my cash winnings, or $500, whichever is greater. For those squeamish about accepting cash for their votes, I am also open to an arrangement in which the individual gives me, and only me, a 10. I in return will give their review, and only theirs, a 10 *and* guarantee that 2 close acqaintances of mine also give them a 10.
You scratch my ass, I scratch yours. That’s how things work in most of the world, and it’s time we got with the times, right?
Just in case your comment about people giving the Alpha School review a 10 reflects genuine confusion on your part: Voters were asked to list their top three choices from among the finalists. The rating process was done earlier, before the tweet was posted.
Since Scott has not (as far as I know) posted any specific rules about this kind of cheating, I don’t think that this incident should be treated as an automatic disqualification. I think that ballots cast by people who don’t have a history at ACX (voting in previous contests or posting comments here prior to the tweet), and which list the Alpha School review as the only choice, should be considered suspicious. If there are enough votes in that category to change the outcome, I think that would be reasonable grounds for disqualification because it would mean that the purpose of the contest had been subverted.
Of course this is really up to Scott, and I don’t know whether he is reading this or is even aware of the controversy.
This incident has changed my view of the school more than my view of the essay. I might have followed the progress of the school; now I no longer consider it worth my time.
Personally I thought Joan of Arc review glossed over key points and left me unsatisfied. Was she really an artillery genius? Was she really outwitting them at the trial? I’m skeptical of both on priors and nothing presented moved me either way. I also wasn’t too interested in the meta take at the end of the review, which I guess is what people liked the most about it?
The Russia-Ukraine war review deserves to win the “first ACX review that managed to be too short” award.
Overall, I thought this year has the highest quality reviews so far and I'm not surprised that my some of my favorites didn’t place. Shout out to the geometric designs review in particular.
It definitely could have been longer, but then it was already quite long to begin with and several people commented to say they didn't finish reading it. It sort of felt like 3 separate essays- one about the 100 years war in general, one about Joan's specific role in the war, and one about theology and the case for why she might have performed genuine miracles. I would like to see the author pick these three threads apart and publish them as 3 separate essays, if he wants to spend more time on this.
A lot of good ones in the honorable mentions! I wish there was a place to discuss those. I know we can discuss them all there, but its just feels cramped and limited here having one comment section for all of them combined.
Yeah congrats to all the winners, I really enjoyed reading your pieces.
(or I stopped 1/2 way through :)
And to all those in the lower half. Many thanks for your effort too. And last but not least, thank you Scott for hosting this. It's a highlight of my spring/summer. (I'm a shitty writer, but I dream of some day posting a book review.)
I think it is important that people reading the Alpha school review are aware that
- it was written by a professional marketer - and while the author's enthusiasm is surely genuine, it employs psychological devices made to convert. See again the Gemini review pointing them out: https://pastebin.com/fJfvQFQ2.
- a very substantial fraction of the positive attention that Alpha gets on social media is fanned by people who somehow received or receive money from Liemandt's ventures, and this is not obvious to spot because of the mirror maze of companies, entities and social media accounts that appear to be independent endorsers of each other, but all trace back to him.
For an extreme "pure bot" case, see https://twitter.com/insideaustinedu for an apparent bot account that pretends to be a neutral resource but posts nothing but slop+engagement bait promoting Alpha. It seems to be part of the strategy laid out in https://contently.com/content-marketing-case-studies/case-study-alpha-school/, which is to manipulate LLMs into endorsing Alpha when they find such slop in web searches.^1 My understanding is that such a bot, if it was indeed operated by someone working for Liemandt, is a violation of FCC rules on deceptive advertising.
This whole picture leaves me with a somewhat bad taste regarding the integrity and honesty of the whole Alpha operation, and makes me doubt their marketing claims.
^1 Contently is Liemandt-owned too - so the case study is an example of the "fake independent endorser" pattern - and this "case study" was reposted by https://x.com/bpizzacalla , who works for ESW Capital and is the only human follower of the bot account.
This is interesting but I’d like to officially declare myself neutral about the issues you raise. The reason is that I feel very strongly that Nevraumon, the author of the Alpha School review, should be disqualified for cheating, and that’s really a separate issue from whether the Nevraumon uses “psychological devices,” whether the Alpha School is sleazy, whether it violates FTC rules etc.
I do not want the issue of whether the review should be disqualified to be tangled up with the issues you raise here. If the review had been about homemade quilts, and the Nevraumon’s mother had solicited votes for him from her many followers on X my opinion would be exactly the same as it is now. It would be the same even if the quilts and their makers and their business model were all above reproach. The dishonesty I am pointing to has nothing to do with Alpha School itself. It is the soliciting of votes on social media.
The vote-soliciting tweet was not on Nevraumon’s X account , but pinned von the account of Joe Liemandt, the founder of Alpha School., who has 45K followers. It was put up on the 3rd day of our voting period, and last I checked was still there. But Nevraumon has not denied knowing about the pinned tweet and It would be very hard to believe if he had. Seems clearly there was some coordination and collaboration going on between Liemandt and Nevraumon — otherwise, how would Liemandt have even known Nevruamon was entering the ACX contest, what his review was about, and, of course, what day the voting began?
Sorry to peel away at this juncture, T T, but the points you’re making are hard to prove, and open to debate, and they will probably be discussed at great length and there may never be agreement. The cheating, though, seems to me unambiguously bad and unfair. And it’s probably a larger scale version of what got somebody disqualified last year. Seems to me we and/or Scott should act promptly if we are going to. (And if we are not — why on earth not? )
To be honest, I think that the tweet situation is, on its own, iffy but ambiguous. The review went viral long before that tweet appeared (though that may well have had to do with Liemandt employees promoting it), and it's hard to hold the author responsible for the actions of a billionaire.
In the particular case of this product review, I find that the Alpha/Crossover/ESW universe as a whole is filled with indifference to honesty and iffy behavior. The bot account is clear-cut astroturfing, and its existence should make anyone less confident that every vote for the Alpha review was an honest vote by a disinterested human. I wrote my comments to help people see the whole picture around this matter - but I don't want to tar Nevraumont, who did not get compensated and apparently wrote a review using his professional content marketing writing style out of genuine enthusiasm.
Zooming out from this particular case, I think that reviews of things with a large financial stake in their image in the tech community are likely to generate ambiguous situations of this sort.
For future contests, one solution may be a rule like "you should abstain from voting when you were encouraged to do so by someone else than Scott, or did not reach the review contest by being a preexisting ACX subscriber". For this contest, this rule unfortunately didn't exist, which would make it unfair to tar and feather this particular author in my opinion.
<To be honest, I think that the tweet situation is, on its own, ambiguous. The review went viral long before that tweet appeared, and it's hard to hold the author responsible for the actions of a billionaire.
It went viral on the internet before the tweet? Did it go viral in the form of a link to here, the ACX version, where it was nestled in among a bunch of other reviews? If not, where was the other version, and by what route did it become viral? If it somehow went viral via some route Nevruamon knew nothing about then no, I don't see Nevraumon as having done anything wrong there. But if it got posted somewhere other than here, I don't see how that would have led to its getting votes here.
As for not holding people responsible for the actions of a billionaire? Huh? No, you can't hold someone responsible if they don't know the billionaire -- they'd quite likely never be able to get word to him about their complaint. And you can't hold them responsible if they tell the billionaire their complaint and he says "if you don't like it, sue me." But these 2 guys very likely at least knew of each other, had probably had had at least some contact prior to the review. Nevraumon says he talked to the public relations office a couple times and gave some advice. He had 2 kids in the school Liemandt founded. And he's a marketing specialist with a big online presence. He would not have found it impossible to ask Liemandt about the tweet. And note that he is not saying either than he had no idea the tweet was there, or that he tried and failed to get Liemandt to take it down.
I first became aware of it in google doc version, IIRC when it was linked in a reply during an X discussion on Alpha School and the future of education/learning apps more generally. The school has plenty of organic buzz by now, and this review was the most in-depth public explainer of the Alpha School approach.
Yes, maybe if he had known that it would be perceived badly, he may have asked Liemandt to take down the tweet. I would guess that the norms in the business sales world are just so different from the norms in the rationalist community that it wouldn't have crossed either of their minds that such a tweet could be seen negatively. Just important to point out the difference in mindset and the more instrumental approach to making assertions of fact in the former.
Congratulations to the winners.
Can we see the ratings for our non-finalist submissions? I'm wondering if my Einstein's' world view review is worth putting up on substack so wondered what score it got.
I feel more comfortable giving rankings in the top half than those in the bottom half, so here are the top 50 runners up: https://slatestarcodex.com/Stuff/50runnersup.xlsx . If you're not in the post above, or on this spreadsheet, yours was in the bottom ~half.
Nice to see that Person of Interest was the first runner up outside the HM range - it was my favorite of the "traditional media" reviews that I read.
Hey, I was in the top 50! That's encouraging.
What is less encouraging is that I did Sermon on the Mount Review #2, and it looks like people preferred Review #1 significantly. I preferred my review, but I am extremely biased in this case.
I suspect most raters agreed with something like Billy Hamilton's critique of your review. I actually rated your review more highly than the other one, because I suspect the other one of outright misrepresenting its historical sources and that's a far graver sin, but I do think the other one was more interesting.
Blessed are the less popular reviewers...
Awesome. I hope this becomes a tradition.
Glad to see the Russo-Ukraine War one get in the top three. I ended up sharing it quite widely to good reception. Really thought provoking.
I'm surprised Alpha School placed 2nd. I suppose unlike many of the other finalists, it actually delivered on being a *review* rather than a jumping off point for a personal essay, but the flip side is that it didn't possess much of interest if you aren't directly interested in sending your children to Alpha School
I think what happened is that a specific subset of ACX readers *really really* liked the Joan of Arc review and rallied behind it, while people who liked the Alpha School review put it 2nd or 3rd during voting.
That certainly includes me, it was among the better things I'd read all year. Maybe this was a "Shakespeare in Love versus two war movies" voting pattern. The community darlings that were leading on polymarket when I first checked were Alpha School and the thing about dating different categories of young metropolitan stereotypes, and I didn't rank either of those. (To clarify, I didn't look until after voting, and was actually surprised.) My vague sense is that those two appeal to a subset of the ACX readership with specific life circumstances that probably make them more "in the scene" of EA, but it also just isn't relevant to readers outside certain demos or cities.
I might not have bothered to vote had it not been for Joan of Arc, as I didn't feel very strongly about any of the others. My 2nd-3rd were Ollantay and the war journal. There's a throughline on the Joan and Ollantay articles, obviously, and the war journal was just the most remarkable of the remainder due to uniqueness.
This is true. I wasn’t exactly sure how the ballots would be counted, but I strategically listed only Joan of Arc (and left rest of ranking blank).
I'm sorry to hear that, because the point of Ranked Choice Voting is that it allows participants to vote honestly without worrying about that sort of strategy. Putting Joan of Arc as your first choice, you could've ranked as many others as you'd have liked and still gotten the same result.
Not necessarily. For example if it’s using the Borda count, then ranking any other review would only harm “Joan of Arc”.
I've never heard of that voting system until today. I've never seen anybody use unqualified RCV to mean anything but IRV.
> the point of Ranked Choice Voting is that it allows participants to vote honestly without worrying about that sort of strategy
This is not a statement with any connection to reality.
Wow.
You don't think it's significant that RCV (a phrase which, unqualified, I've only ever seen used to refer to IRV) avoids the spoiler effect?
Well, it would have taken you less than one minute to see on wikipedia that IRV does not satisfy the Condorcet criterion and therefore cannot avoid the spoiler effect. Do you want me to be more impressed by your brazenness or your stupidity?
Consider a population of 1200 voters who prefer candidate B to candidate A 610-590.
When candidate C enters the race, the precise preferences are as follows:
A > B > C (260)
A > C > B (160)
B > A > C (190)
B > C > A (160)
C > A > B (170)
C > B > A (260)
After one round of IRV, candidate B receives 350 votes and is eliminated.
The remaining votes (all 1200!) divide 260 + 160 + 190 = 610 in favor of candidate A and 160 + 170 + 260 = 590 in favor of candidate C, making A the winner. In the absence of candidate C's doomed campaign, candidate B would have won.
Or did you intend "the spoiler effect" to have a very different meaning from what it means in every other discussion of voting methods?
> This is not a statement with any connection to reality.
> Wow.
I really really hate drive by comments like this. You might be right - I know nothing about the systems at play - what you aren’t is convincing, in the abscence of an argument.
You think I should provide more of an argument than Brenton Baker did? Why?
I've given you just as much argument, with the added bonus that I was telling the truth and he was lying. You got more value from me.
He's correct about everything except the part where he says I was lying.
I wasn't lying. I was just wrong. IRV is less susceptible to the spoiler effect than FPTP and is still a superior method, but it is not immune, despite what I'd been told by several sources before today.
I'm not currently planning on sending children to school but, having been to a school in the past, loved reading about a school system that sounds like it actually tries getting things right.
I have no children, am past childbearing age, and I found it fascinating. I expected it to win or place.
Why do you not think the question of what actually works in education is of broader intellectual interest? It seems obvious to me that it's one of the most important questions out there.
I don't think it was very good at that; the "School" post answered that question more effectively, for example
Leaving aside my personal opinion, I think most readers didn't agree.
I agree (with sohois).
Absent personal feedback from every reviewer a la Victor, we won't know exactly why readers did or did not like it.
There's also a possibility that this was a satisficing review. I personally did not dislike the review as I said, it just surprised me to see it take top 2. A small core of super fans, and a large mass of readers with nothing against it, would be sufficient to take a high placement
Obviously I can't speak for everyone but I didn't vote for it for being satisficing, I thought it would be a runaway first after reading it (despite not having seen any of the others yet) and stood by it despite several later strong contenders.
Whaaaaat?
I am obsessed with education. I was a teacher for a few years. I currently have 2 kids at school. Some of my friends do various educational projects. Every year my family spends one week of summer vacations at a conference about improving education. And... I feel triggered by this reaction.
School sucks. It's almost the worst possible environment for learning. It teaches children to hate learning. Do you know how 5 years old kids keep asking "why?" about everything all day long? School kills this curiosity in them; trains them to associate learning with stress and boredom. Nerds are a rare minority that remains curious despite school. Many of them are bullied at school.
Most teachers are depressingly conservative. Not politically, but in the sense of: "if we did this for the last 100 years, we will keep doing that for the next 100 years, too; technological progress and educational research be damned". We are lucky that books were invented before general education, otherwise teachers would still consider them suspicious. I think there was a psychological research comparing various professions, and teachers were the third most closed-minded profession, after bureaucrats and professional soldiers.
The "Alpha School" review shows how to do it much better: mostly by doing the obvious. Maybe we could involve computers in education. (Not in the sense of letting kids browse social network, but doing spaced repetition etc. Also, while some kids are training with the computers, the rest can get more individual attention from the teachers.) Maybe we could let children learn also something interesting, in addition to the mandatory. Maybe we could reward them for learning. (Instead of giving them constant stress and fear of punishment.) Maybe we could let them learn at individual speed. Maybe we could just do all of that together, and thereby create something that most current teachers and students wouldn't even consider possible.
My only worry is that this all sounds too good to be true.
The "School" review on the other hand insists that everything I consider a bug is secretly a feature. You know, some kids are lazy morons... but if we invent a system tailored specifically for their personality, it will make school slightly better for them (and much worse for everyone else), and that's apparently a good thing! The children learn little and suffer a lot, but they learn nonzero! Maybe kids ultimately remember almost nothing, but at least the school increased their IQ (that seems to contradict most studies on IQ but who cares) and that's what matters. Different children need different amounts of help, therefore we have to inflict maximum micromanagement on everyone, because apparently the only options are all or nothing. All this suffering and inefficiency is done in the name of motivating the dumbest... without care about how demotivating it is for everyone else.
The author keeps repeating the word "motivation", but in my opinion, school is the opposite of motivation, it is the thing that kills motivation. Some kids love reading books... until you tell them that they will be graded by how many unimportant details from the book they remember; also they need to read the books selected by the teacher, not the ones they like. (My daughter recently got a bad grade for failing to correctly answer who are the best story writers in Slovakia. Who the fuck cares? She has read all seven Harry Potter books and now she is halfway through Narnia, but apparently what matters more is guessing the two names that in teacher's subjective opinion are the most important. If the goal is to make children love reading books, the teacher's strategy tragically goes in the opposite direction.) Maybe if half of the school wasn't optimized for killing motivation, we wouldn't have to optimize the other half to keep it nonzero. Or maybe we could group the morons in a separate classroom and feed them bananas; they might even enjoy it.
I already wrote a long comment about it here: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-review-school/comment/132187510
tl;dr -- in my opinion, the "School" review represents the worst in the school system, the profoundly anti-fun and anti-learning mentality of the worst teachers
Well said. If "School" accurately portrayed the best we can get, I for one would be prepared to bite the bullet and advocate abolishing public education entirely. The minimal gains we got out of it clearly wouldn't be anywhere near sufficient to offset the suffering it creates.
It would be if it mattered, but it doesn't seem to. It's like working on perpetual motion machines, it's foolish, it can't work, but you occasionally see something that looks like a miracle if you don't know what's been hidden from you. But there is always something hidden from you, and it comes out eventually, every time. Not commenting on the merits, just to say that people who've read about these over the years may see "new educational method" as roughly equivalent to your friend trying to sell you on how his MLM scheme works without drawing a pyramid.
There's a big difference between a hard problem and an impossible problem. I've never seen a convincing argument that getting good effects from education is impossible rather than hard. The right attitude towards a hard problem is to maintain skepticism towards proposed solutions, especially if they claim to work very broadly, but watch with interest when someone gets impressive results, since they might have something that could be a form of incremental progress even if it's not a miracle cure.
It's also worth noting this school got good results in part by making compromises most schools wouldn't be willing to try (e.g. decentering teachers, charging more, being oriented on results over status, only trying to help a narrow segment of the population). It's acting under fewer constraints than most education systems.
Yeah. But that's also the danger in generalizing--the one truth I've ever found in education research is "it works in lab schools only." Everything (within a long stone's throw of vaguely rational) works in lab schools. None of it, to first approximation, works anywhere else.
So the answer is to go to lab schools?
I think there is a good chunk of the readership of this blog who think they are geniuses, but couldn’t flourish due to the structure of school. It’s the easiest genre to pander with. Combine that with the review being very well written and you’ve got a contender.
"The enemy's gate is down."
In fairness to these people, most of us aren't eighteen and did successfully flourish after leaving school. It's "I wasted my time there", not "I could've succeeded if only it hadn't stopped me".
Actual geniuses realize very quickly that Teachers Have Power and They are Smarter than the Teachers, and Letting the Teachers Know This will lead to Ego Damage for the teacher, and Bad Consequences for the Student.
Then they learn how to not act smart anymore, to conceal their agendas, and to always look like they're willing to take advice from teachers.
If you didn't get all that in school, you probably weren't smarter than your teachers. And that's a low bar for most schools (teachers ain't bright).
My teachers were bright enough though it was a private school. You seem to have been dragged through the American state school system. It’s also possible that the school teachers who didn’t think certain kids were smart are actually right.
What exactly do you mean by "bright enough"? My guess would mean you mean talented midwits. Teaching critical thinking is HARD WORK (and even the people good at it largely give up on most people.)
Spiky intelligence is a thing. Einstein had this problem and I'm pretty sure he was in fact a genius/smarter than his teachers.
Totally in character, Joan of Arc snatches a miracle win from the jaws of defeat, pulling ahead of top contenders Alpha School and Dating Men in the Bay Area.
Thanks for everyone who participated in the Manifold market! It was fun trading with you. Accepting suggestions on how to give back to the community after this.
Congratulations to the winners! Those that won were all easily in my top five. All the finalists were interesting and informative.
I remember reading some comments last year from non-finalists who wished they'd received more feedback. Therefore, here are my notes on the 38 submissions that I reviewed in the first stage of the contest. They were all randomly chosen using the random review button. I also wrote a few paragraphs on my overall thoughts on what makes a good review.
Link: https://docs.google.com/document/d/105iO7NveSS_-g89arfNMiyJeqdKTTO6K/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=101255285208990633185&rtpof=true&sd=true
Thank you so much for taking notes and posting them! I did the (F) Sermon on the Mount review, and every year I wonder what I could have done to do better. I imagine most everyone who didn't make the finalist cut wonders the same thing. So thanks for telling us!
Nice! I should do this.
"1st: Joan of Arc, by William Friedman"
"Do we all holy rites;
Let there be sung 'Non nobis' and 'Te Deum;'"
https://shakespeare.mit.edu/henryv/henryv.4.8.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xghzOS3tQ6w&list=RDxghzOS3tQ6w&start_radio=1
I am delighted (and frankly surprised) this won, I voted for it but didn't expect it to do as well as it did (I expected the miraculous element to be the sticking point for this readership).
Stealth Catholic vote ensures victory? Much more broad-minded and generous commentariat than I gave them credit for? You decide! 😁
Eh, a "miracle" is just what interested parties call their favored interpretation of a mystery. And everybody likes a good mystery, even us irreligious irredeemables.
I think that *religious apologism* is, rightly, a sticking point for the ACX readership, and a fair amount of popular historical writing on questions of whether miracles occurred is in fact thinly disguised religious apologism, unless it's instead positioned as debunking. Aevylmar gave a convincing account of why he was interested in this question that did not require a bottom-line position on Christianity to be written first, which allowed us to accept what he was doing as good-faith historical inquiry.
From the perpective of a Catholic, I was surprised that while it seemed at the start like another "well miracles can't be real obviously so let's stretch our imagination to think of a way this could have been made up" it ended with the conclusion that there's possibly something to it because the purely skeptical explanation is deeply flawed.
I don't think you have to be a Catholic or any other sort of Christian to believe that Joan of Arc performed miracles, or had other supernatural powers. You just have to believe that the supernatural, you know, exists.
First, I'm not entirely sure that's true in the relevant sense; even if you believe that there's some kind of real supernatural, you'd need an explanation for why it would be in play in any particular case (given that we so rarely encounter it in daily life), or else it's just a god-of-the-gaps argument. You could argue that Joan's miracles were faked with Harry Potter magic or whatever else, but you have to actually make that argument.
Second, in practice, the genre of post I'm complaining about usually ends with something like "so as you can see, we've proven conclusively that something supernatural happened here; therefore, my particular denomination of Christianity is true and you should all convert right now."
<i>Second, in practice, the genre of post I'm complaining about usually ends with something like "so as you can see, we've proven conclusively that something supernatural happened here; therefore, my particular denomination of Christianity is true and you should all convert right now."</i>
Oh, I completely agree with you that Christian apologists do this all the time, especially on the internet, and I always find it annoying. Many of them really do seem to conflate "demonstrating this one miracle happened" (most commonly the resurrection of Jesus) with "demonstrating that Christianity is true." They aren't the same thing at all (and more generally, believing that a miracle happened, as an event in history, doesn't equate to buying into Christian theology as a whole, with all of its problems).
I thought the essay was great overall, and while the pro-miracle angle towards the end annoyed me i was able to look past it in my appraisal
As I'd said in my own comment on the article, the "miraculous" element is in fact what sold me on the article. It really drove home the point for me that Medieval Frenchmen (and perhaps Englishmen) were not like us; they did not engage in realpolitik to the extent that we do; and to them, Joan's powerful conviction and leadership skills (as we'd call them today) would've felt like a miracle. It's obvious that our modern machine technology (cellphones, computers, airplanes, mass-produced corn dogs) would have felt miraculous to them; but I never appreciated that our *social* technology is likewise tremendously advanced !
As a formerly-offensively-atheist now-agnostic - both in the Bayesian sense of "0% and 100% aren't real probabilities" and also in the religious sense - I mostly found the Miracle Question of secondary concern to the mere fact of it simply being a fun and engaging read. Life's weird, lucky things happen more often than mere coincidence, who needs fiction when you have history. Cf. Scott's Fatima post. The object-level question of God's existence is not something that I expect to be argued into/out of by a mere blog post (feels perpetually unknowable with certainty, honestly), yet the stakes are high enough that it makes for a strong topic anyway, especially with a frame that isn't mired in exhausting old New Atheist baggage. Still ended up ranking it 3rd, since I felt it strayed somewhat from the nominal review rules of not being about books, and was more of a quality aggregation of existing well-known sources vs showing new perspectives I wouldn't hear otherwise.
I gave myself fifteen percent odds! I'm as surprised as you are!
Congratulations on the win, and don't forget to light a candle to St. Joan!
Thank you! I continue not to be a Catholic or even know where you get votary candles.
Joan of Arc was on the top of my list, initially; but upon a subsequent read, I discovered a historical error. The error wasn't a critical one—wrong French king, wrong date for a minor piece of the backstory—but, since I'm not especicially knowledgeable about the Hundred Years War, I had to wonder how many other errors there were that I didn't know enough to spot.
Now I can officially declare you manipulating your post (Fatima) schedule to push Joan of Arc specifically. Tbf I did vote for the top 2.
Btw, isn't usually the scoring of every post gets published or am I misremembering?
Poor Scott, now he's *never* going to shake off the rumours that he's converting to Catholicism 😁 (something I do not believe is ever going to happen, but now what do I know about what St. Joan and Our Lady of Fatima have in mind?)
Be careful what you wish for. Imagine Catholic EA or the Catholic Rationalism in general.
Wacky hijinks ensue.
Well, we have the grant winner for the Christian EA website and project so who knows what Sinister Jesuit Plots will mature in the future?
My head hurts.
There's a saint for that.
> Catholic EA
You mean something like https://www.bible.com/bible/111/MAT.19.21.NIV ?
Imagine a universe of shrimp trying to fit through an eye of a needle.
Congratulations to all the winners and honorable mentions, and thanks to everyone who entered.
I very much enjoyed the "non-book" aspect of this; I feel like the book reviews for the contests are never really book reviews anyway, so it was nice to have a broader jumping-off point for the submissions to the contest.
Congrats to the winners! All extremely in-depth and interesting. Joan was my personal favorite so I'm glad to see it get its flowers.
Thank you to everyone who wrote kind comments about my silly Mashed Potatoes essay. I had a lot of fun writing it and it was gratifying to make the finals! I don't have time to go back through all the comments from the original post but I will cop to being, as many pointed out, philosophically inept, spinning out a vast and flawed Baudrillard-recapitulating metaphor before walking it back to a relatively minor point about semantics. I identified the pattern I wanted to write about first and then struggled to tie it all up with a bow in the final section with any kind of consistency or rigor. I do feel it's gesturing at a real dynamic, even if it's imperfectly explicated, and I'm glad some of you found merit in it anyway (except for the guy who thought I was GPT-5? Not cool bro).
I loved your review! It was my favorite. Thank you for identifying this pattern/phenomena and putting it into words. There's definitely a "there" there, even if you "struggled to tie it all up with a bow" at the end.
>except for the guy who thought I was GPT-5? Not cool bro
I legitimately find it less insulting to be called ugly than to be accused of having used generative AI to compose a piece of text I slaved over with my bare hands.
For what it's worth, I have the reverse criticism; I thought your writing was good but remain skeptical that the dynamic you're talking about is actually a real thing.
I passed a happy car journey listening to it! I think it worked on several levels, both concrete and abstract:
- It has straightforwardly interesting facts about the origin of potatoes etc
- It weaves them into a more general and interest narrative about mashed potato, which I'd never really thought of (I grew some potatoes this year so it oddly did interweave with my concrete problem of how to preserve them!)
- It makes a broader abstract point which I think adds something to the mental toolbox (although I think whenever I apply IMPishness I need to think a lot about the context of each individual case)
All the other reviews had their own flaws by the lights of other commenters, too, and I don't think you need to be so apologetic.
I think you're being too modest. I voted for it to win, it was my favourite of the reviews. I learned some new things about potatoes and the simulacra comparison was very apt. Give yourself a pat on the back.
Fantastic Chris. Loved it.
I voted for yours despite having minor criticism of it at the time. I appreciated it being a review of an actual thing and also not being way too long.
I liked your essay and would have voted for it with a more satisfying wrap-up. If you have the time it might be worth trying to resolve the dangling threads and to post a revised version. Thanks for sharing!
God rewards the faithful.
I guess Brandon Hendrickson's anti-precedent (where reviewers tried to limit reviews to <10k words in 2024 after his 2023 review of The Educated Mind got meme'd for being way too long) only lasted one year.
Congrats to all the winners! I wish Edward's kids (along with the rest of the Alpha School students) all the best!
This is just my personal opinion (and so I'm prone to the pundit's fallacy in thinking it's more broadly shared), but this year's winning and second-place reviews were the two longest submissions because they both genuinely had a huge amount of ground to cover, whereas the review of The Educated Mind seemed to be drawing out its argument as long as possible in order to wear down readers' prior inclination to dismiss its bottom-line conclusion.
No, the Joan of Arc review did not need an entire socratic dialogue in order to cover the ground it had to.
It definitely did not need several thousand words just to go over all the minutia of the Hundred Years' War.
What can I say, some of us like those minutiae!
Yes I never got bored reading it. I didn’t even notice it was particularly long.
The HYW stuff was more interesting than the JoA stuff, though. To be honest I think the review benefitted massively from the historical context vs ignoring that to focus more narrowly on JoA.
Before I put them in it was kind of incomprehensible. With longer editing I could probably have gotten it down significantly, but I actually wrote the essay in a desperate rush the week or two before the deadline and so I didn't have time for all the editing I wanted.
I can relate. We've all been there. Editing is hard. Your review was still very well-written and I'm glad you won. I'm looking forward to what you're going to write in the future!
The length was such a sticking point for me personally because it's not good for the overall health of the contest. It's fine if one person submits a super long review; it's not fine if everyone does. Initial voting becomes a slog.
Back in 2023, when Brandon won, I said at the time that I voted for it despite its length, not because of it. Commenters were worried that his review would set a bad example, and subsequent entries would all be super long.
Then 2024 rolled around, and Scott instituted a soft 10k word limit. And... people abided by it! I read (and rated) a significant chunk of the initial submissions that year, and I enjoyed all of them. When the entries are a manageable length, it's really fun to read review after review. All the finalists were under 15k words, with most of them being under the soft 10k word limit.
I don't know why people stopped doing that this year. Scott gave the same (soft) 10k word limit, but a lot more submissions blew right past it. This was a bigger problem than just you, specifically.
I barely read any initial submissions this year, simply because of math. In the time it takes me to read one 30k word post, I could have read and rated three or four <10k word reviews. That adds up when there are over 150 submissions.
I think part of the reason why the ACX commentariat was disappointed in this year's initial submissions was because they had the same constraints I did, and people simply couldn't read as many during initial voting. They didn't have an opportunity to read a ton of them and find their favorites; they probably only read a handful and then stopped. A huge part of the enjoyment I get out of this contest every year is from digging through the initial pile and finding the awesome ones that appeal to me, but not necessarily the rest of the ACX readership (and so never make finalist). I can't do that if all the submissions are long.
All that to say: your review was great! Congrats again!!!
I don't read all the reviews. I pick out ones that seem interesting (based on title and/or subject matter), start to read, and if it bores me, I don't bother with the rest of it but move on to something else.
I can imagine very conscientious people dutifully slogging through the whole of every entry, but I don't think we *have* to do that (barring the voice of conscience compels you).
Why do you think the ACX commentariat was disappointed in this year's initial submissions? Sentiment in the first-round voting thread was largely positive, and where negative was largely about minor-ish process issues (rather than content of submissions), plus some arguing about what's a "review" and some performative complaining about Skibidi Toilet.
In any event, if you're against long reviews, then your complaint is with the voters, not the submitters. There weren't in fact any submissions that came close to 30,000 words. The three longest were Joan of Arc (~24,000 words, first place); Alpha School (~18,000 words, second place); and Dating Men in the Bay Area (~15,000 words, probably fourth place according to Manifold). Besides those three, only four others were over the 10,000 word limit (one of which, The Synaptic Plasticity and Memory Hypothesis, was also a finalist), and only one (Deathbed Ballads, ~14,000 words) was clearly over the limit if it's interpreted as a "soft limit". This is out of 144 submissions in all. (Complete list of word counts here: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/choose-nonbook-review-finalists-2025/comment/122686238)
So there wasn't in fact a huge wave of super-long reviews. Rather, there were a small number of super-long reviews, and they were the ones that did best in the voting. This makes me think that the pattern of finalist lengths from 2023 to 2024 to 2025 was probably just a fluke.
Maybe your threshold for noping out was actually lower than 10,000 words?
Several thousand words for the Hundred Years War is, what, twenty words a year? Sounds way too fast, actually.
Could it be that my taste is the exact opposite to ACX readers in general? In my ranking Joan of Arc and Alpha School were 12th and 13th, while School and Mashed Potato were 1st and 2nd. Any chance of publishing the full ordered list?
Scott linked (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/non-book-review-contest-2025-winners/comment/167278351) to the top 50 entries outside of the winners, finalists and honorable mentions.
Alpha school was definitely low for me. Joan of Arc was middling. Although I admire the work put in. The mashed potato was an excellent essay, one of my favourite essays in a long time. Maybe people didn’t think it was a review.
Being an Irish Catholic, of course I voted for Joan and mashed spuds 😁 Some things just go perfectly together.
Is there any possible explanation for one submission getting an outlier number of ratings, other than that someone elsewhere on the internet linked it and drew attention to it? I don't think a submission can achieve that by its merits, since we all started off with just the giant Google Docs full of reviews that we hadn't yet read, and so couldn't know in advance which ones were any good.
I think it was because it was titled "Orgies", and people were naturally interested in that topic.
Would this not also apply to Young Swingers' Week?
Speaking as someone who doesn’t ever bother voting in these things, and mostly doesn’t bother even reading honorable mentions because the Google doc is too awkward to deal with on my phone… I had heard of Red Means No, and probably others had too, since Aella is somewhat famous around here. I have not heard of young swingers week. So if I were the going to read stuff, I’d be more likely to read about the thing I’d heard of
Huge congrats to William on the Joan of Arc Review! The other two I voted for (Dating Men in the Bay Area and Instant Mashed Potatoes--both excellent) covered ground that I'm interested in and made arguments I think are important. Joan of Arc had me rivetted to the screen in spite of its length and my lack of prior interest. Very well done!
Thank you!
We voted for the same three!
Great minds! Honestly, I'm surprised that Instant Mashed Potatoes made it to the finals at all--I loved it, but it so cuts against what I stereotype as the ACX view of things. Glad to hear you voted for it!
Disgusting to date someone while married.
Seems pretty weird to bring that up all of a sudden. Scott has been open about being polyamorous for well over a decade.
Not everyone has been following Scott that long. In which case I recommended this old post (don’t worry about the size of the scroll bar, that post had a few hundred comments; the post itself is pretty short)
https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/06/polyamory-is-boring/
That post was amazing. I've missed quite a lot of ancient SSC content, especially from 2013. Thanks for sharing!
Welcome :)
UPDATE: Edward Nevraumont reassured me that he didn't receive any direct compensation for the Alpha School review, and while he did consult them on marketing, this was pro-bono. I quote from https://everestera.substack.com/p/welcome-acx-readers/comment/167347729:
"No paid consulting. No discounted tuition (or more accurately no discounted tuition that was not provided to every other family in the school)
I did have a couple calls with their marketing team at one point - but it was purely volunteer to help them out. I do the same thing for lots of organizations."
So while the author received no compensation, I think it is fair to call the review "undisclosed infomercial". It was written by a marketer who volunteers to help Alpha School convert customers and apparently employs psychological conversion tactics (analysis here: https://pastebin.com/fJfvQFQ2). The recent posts in the author's new linked blog can be seen in the same light.
ORIGINAL COMMENT: Hi, regarding the "Alpha School" review, the author is a growth marketing expert by profession according to his linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/edwardn/, the review reads in part like ChatGPT-assisted viral marketing copy (the ChatGPT feel has been noted by other commenters), and Gemini or a similar LLM flag some stylistic devices in the storyline and rhetorics that are evidence in favour of this, see e.g. https://pastebin.com/fJfvQFQ2 here^1. I think it would be appropriate to get a statement about whether he received any form of compensation from Alpha School or other ESW/Joe Liemandt-affiliated entities, including e.g. discounted tuition, either explicitly for writing this review or in some other consulting-like role? I do realize that the truth may be "I really love to help them grow even without taking money, because I am convinced of the product" - I am more convinced of what the Alpha school product tries to do than I am of public high school too - but I'd like to know.
In particular, part of the Alpha/GT marketing seems to be explicitly directed at the rationalist community - look e.g. at the https://x.com/gtdad account, which follows rationalist/adjacents like Kelsey Piper or orthonormalist and is part of the Alpha School marketing system. I also think there is a pattern of entities receiving money from Alpha School or other Joe Liemandt-affiliated companies and writing positively about the Alpha school system (e.g. tracingwoodgrains,^2 whose Center for Educational Progress to my understanding has been mostly funded by an Alpha School grant as of a few months ago, or Austen Allred ^3). Once again, I find it absolutely plausible that the enthusiasm would be genuine (like the review author, Allred has his own kids in the thing, which he wouldn't do if he didn't like it), but I think it should be made clear whether any money or other advantages flowed to the people voicing it.
In fact, the connection is now quite direct - Alpha School founder Liemandt himself has made this very ACX review the pinned tweet on his X profile, calling it the start of "The Alpha School virus" and explicitly encouraging people to vote in the contest: https://x.com/jliemandt/status/1974984216027738467
^1 I got this response when pasting the prompt "Is this text likely some sort of hidden advertising? Can you tell me evidence in favour and against?" together with the review text into Gemini 2.5 Pro on Google AI studio.
^2 https://x.com/search?q=alpha%20from%3Atracewoodgrains&src=typed_query&f=top grant announcement: https://www.educationprogress.org/p/june-updates-gt-school-grant-and
^3 Austen Allred's writes positively about Alpha as well: https://x.com/search?q=alpha%20from%3Aausten and his current venture, Gauntlet AI, was to my understanding bootstrapped mostly by hiring demand from Joe Liemandt's education and other ventures.
^4 https://everestera.substack.com/p/welcome-acx-readers/comment/167332671
You could ask him about this on his own blog? There's a link in the post.
Thanks for the suggestion, I asked him on his blog - I will post a reply here
UPDATE: Edward Nevraumont reassured me that he didn't receive any direct compensation for the review, and while he did consult them on marketing, this was pro-bono. I quote from https://everestera.substack.com/p/welcome-acx-readers/comment/167347729:
"No paid consulting. No discounted tuition (or more accurately no discounted tuition that was not provided to every other family in the school)
I did have a couple calls with their marketing team at one point - but it was purely volunteer to help them out. I do the same thing for lots of organizations."
So while the Alpha School review was written by a marketer who is enthusiastic about helping Alpha School convert, there was no compensation.
Ewww. Hey, ACX, send your kids to Alpha Dog School and with luck they, too, will grow up to be rich and successful growth marketing experts.
Hey Scott, I'm the author of Bishop's Castle. I sent you an email with my bio. See you at Inkhaven!
Woot woot! See you at Inkhaven, too! Did you fill out your entry in the bio doc?
Yup! You can find it by Ctrl+F searching "collisteru".
See you at Inkhaven!
I'm glad you'll be alternating book and non-book review contests: I liked the latter enough to want to see more of them, but of course love book reviews and wouldn't want to simply subsume them into a larger "review anything" project.
Congratulations to all the winners.
I'm bummed that "11 Poetic Forms, Reviewed in Verse" didn't even make the honorable mentions list. I really liked it.
I really liked the concept of "11 Poetic Forms, Reviewed in Verse" but didn't feel that the author was quite a skilled enough wordsmith to pull it off. If Scott had written it, I bet it would have been great. (I feel bad about saying this because it's good for people to try ambitious things, but ultimately I gave high ratings to ones that I felt were successes.)
Ditto on "11 Poetic Forms". A damn shame. Well done, whoever you are!
(Also, I am getting deja vu from this comment. I swear I've read Taymon's response before, maybe word for word, and maybe Stephen's and mine, too. Did we do this when the finalists/HMs were first announced?)
Found it in an open thread: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-387/comment/128562595
Ok, that's funny.
So. Much. To. Read.
Brain. Dying.
Feels. Good. Must. Keep. Going...
In case the authors or anyone else is interested, here are the short notes I wrote to myself after reading each review, to refer to later when voting:
Alpha School: pretty good, little on the long side
School: really good core insight, writing kinda dull
Mice Alzheimer’s: pretty hard to get through.
Islamic Geometry: fine I guess? Not very exciting.
Commentariat: fun, but dragged a bit in the second half.
Joan of Arc: Quite good, easily my favorite so far.
Instant Potatoes: Fun and interesting, not too long, but point is suspect and also mashed potatoes aren’t actually good.
Dating Men: Pretty good but feels a bit pandery.
Ollantay: Another top contender
Phase 1 Research: Interesting and a good read.
Synapse Memory: Interesting but dubious and kinda long for the value.
Xanadu: Okay I guess.
Russia-Ukraine War: Pretty good but not sure it’s a winner
IIRC I ended up voting for Joan, Ollantay, and Phase 1 Research. Phase 1 might have been confounded in either direction since it was the only finalist that I read and voted on in the preliminary round.
"also mashed potatoes aren’t actually good."
Are we gonna start the Great Potato War of 2025 on here? Because I feel the Irish and Germans would line up on one side, you heretic 🤣
It depends on the type of potato (waxy versus floury), how they're cooked (boiled into mush?), and how they're mashed (drain off the water and allow steam dry a little or mash them into a gruel in the water, then leave them coarsely mashed or put them through a ricer, then lots of liquid such as milk to make them soupy versus no, you want a solid potato not something you can drink with a straw).
One thing I like is to do all the prep up to the point of boiling, but instead of putting the pot onto the stove, letting the potatoes sit in the salted water at room temperature overnight. That's usually enough to get a bit of fermentation going, to break down some of the tough stuff and add a bit of tang.
Of course, slicing them then and then fermenting in Mason jars for a few days before *baking* results into the chips Sea Salt and Vinegar chips want to be when they grow up.
You should have saved this to enter in the 2027 review contest
Thanks for running an excellent contest, Scott. I'm always curious to see how alternative voting systems work in practice, is there any way you could share how the RCV method actually determined the results in this case?
why post the contents of footnote 3 about getting past the spam filter, as opposed to send it in an email to finalists? LLMs are good at scraping and finding these sorts of things
I am thrilled "Alpha School" placed, and just want to take a moment to highlight an aspect of the review that I don’t think has gotten enough praise: this man uprooted his entire life to ensure his kids got the highest quality, healthiest education possible. And, unlike some parents who obsess over their kids’ education, he graciously and lovingly admits that both of his kids have unique personalities, and is eager to find individualized motivations that work best for them.
Edward, you're an incredible father. I want to hug you and clone you.
>he graciously and lovingly admits that both of his kids have unique personalities . . .
Jeez, that's not exactly a high bar to clear. In fact I'd say any parent who fails to recognize this fact is 15th percentile or below.
> . . . and is eager to find individualized motivations that work best for them.
Now he's up to 40th percentile.
I help with mentorship programs, and my experience with the parents who are obsessed with their kids' education is that they tend to want their children to fit a very cookie-cutter mold of success. They get fixated on their kid getting into Stanford, MIT, etc, and then force their child toward whatever interests/activities/achievements will get them into those schools. They essentially create a personality for their child and then force them to wear it.
I instinctively cringed a bit when I saw a very long post about someone trying to optimize their kids' education. But I was very pleasantly surprised by how in-tune Edward is to his kids' mental well-being, unique interests, strengths, weaknesses, etc.
I think he's a rare balance of someone who is both hyper-fixated on his childrens' success and also deeply respects their children as individuals and cares for their mental health. And I think it's worth applauding. Frankly, I'm baffled by why you'd want to mock it, but so be it.
I wasn't mocking your points, I was critiquing them. But I did not get that you were not comparing him to parents in general, but saying that within the population of parents hyper-fixated on their kids' achieving certain markers of success, he's much better than average. That I do not find absurd, though I'm still inclined to think of it more as being the best of a bad lot than as a precious and remarkable achievement.
Critique is an art form of its own, and I would suggest you learn how to give it in a way that does not sound like mockery. Your point very easily could have been made without sounding snide.
And to each their own. I never got the chance to go to high school, so my mind is absolutely blown when I come across individuals who put so much effort into their children's education. When done in a compassionate and humanizing manner, I absolutely believe it's worth applauding.
You are right that I could have made my point in a pleasanter way. You could lay my snideness to spillover anger from other, related things I object to. First of all, I do not like the sound of Alpha School. The thread where the review was posted for comments has something like 10 long, detailed posts of mine articulating what I think is wrong with its objectives and methods. Second of all, I am very angry about information that has come out about Alpha School and the review's success iin the present thread: The founder of Alpha School had a pinned tweet on X asking his 45,000 followers to vote for the review: https://x.com/jliemandt/status/1974984216027738467. And the request was retweeted 32 times. That's ballot stuffing.
On the other hand, calling my anger spillover suggests that it's irrelevant to my present complaints about the writer and dad in question. It's not. Seems to me that both he as a contestant and the school he's promoting in his infomercial are overconcerned with winning competitions and underconcerned with being trustworthy and real.
I guess if everyone he asked to vote did come over here and vote, then yeah, that's ballot stuffing.
Good job St. Joan thwarted his plans just like she did the English, then!
"When done in a compassionate and humanizing manner, I absolutely believe it's worth applauding."
That's the rub, isn't it? Alpha School sounds like rearing turkeys for Christmas. I enjoy my Christmas fowl but I wouldn't raise another animal, let alone a child, like that: plump 'em up fast for the slaughter and the profit of the owner (of the brand which he seems, if Eremolalos is recounting correctly, to be marketing as hard and perhaps as deceitfully* as his little spindly legs will run on the treadmill).
I agree with Eremolalos that I don't like being used for free advertising.
*There seems to be some little blurring about who founded what and who owns what; one source (Wikipedia) says the founders of Alpha School are MacKenzie Price and her husband Andrew Price; another source (Wall Street Journal) says some guy called Bill Ackman is acting as the public face/ambassador for Alpha School, and finally Wikipedia again says the owner of the magic software that the school operates off is this Joe Liemandt, who also owns the companies that Andrew Price works for.
I often feel sort of at home here, which is a rare experience for me, but the present “review” contest has had me wandering deep in familiar alienation. I hope some of that reaction is accounted for by how many outsiders participated as contestants and "judges." One post here today (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/non-book-review-contest-2025-winners/comment/167323863) says that the founder of Alpha School, Joe Liemandt, had a pinned tweet on his X profile asking readers to vote for Edward Nevraumont's review of Alpha School. Seems to me there's virtually no chance that Nevraumont was not aware of the pinned tweet or that he asked Liemandt to take it down and Liemandt refused. Also seems highly unlikely that any who arrived here via that route actually read any of the other reviews. So they weren't really judges or voters, just unpaid ballot box stuffers.
GPT's assessment of amount of AI-generated content in the essay:
>The piece reads overwhelmingly as human-written with some AI-style scaffolding or heavy-AI paraphrase in certain middle sections. The dominant voice is cohesive, witty, and self-aware—traits that large-language-model prose still rarely sustains across 25 000 words. But there are several passages whose sentence rhythm and connective phrasing match AI composition patterns strongly enough to suggest the author may have used an AI draft or rewrite tool, then edited heavily. . . . Overall, the essay’s conceptual architecture and narrative sensibility are human, but perhaps 15–25 percent of the phrasing bears AI fingerprints—primarily in data-dense or connective prose.
Full GPT response is here: https://chatgpt.com/s/t_68f2bab449a081919ac5ba3e85cab785
Ewww to the whole thing.
**********************
So I am posting here my personal awards:
*BIGGEST HAUL OF NEW AND INTERESTING INFORMATION*
The ACX Commentariat
*BEST NUANCE PARSING REGARDING SUBJECTIVE MATTERS*
The soul of an anti-woke intellectual: Jamie Q. Roberts
*SINGLE MOST INTERESTING PARAGRAPH*
Japanese social interactions exist at a much higher resolution than American ones, and at times I felt that living in Japan as an allistic person gave me a reasonable understanding of what it might be like to be autistic in America. At all times there were subtle games being played, and things being communicated by other people to which I was not privy at all. This created a background radiation of stress that made social interaction much more stressful than fun. Japanese people get around this by leaning into role assignment; basically, your boss is just your boss, and must play the role of boss rather than ‘being himself’ because if everyone was particularly ‘himself’ at this high resolution of social interaction, everyone’s minds would collapse under the information overload, and life would be impossible, even for those born into the culture. (From The World as a Whole)
*MOST ACUTE AND ENTERTAINING SINGLE SENTENCES*
“Less powerful than Cantor’s [wings], but still airworthy enough to reveal the vistas that Cantor saw; and robust enough not to melt and send us plummeting into the sea of mathematical paradox.”
“One sees crystalline souls that have polished all their facets into a perfect refracting jewel of self-awareness, and often a performance of self-contempt, so no one can ever accuse them of being cringe.”
“. . . young people who are by default edgelords, unserious Christians, iPad kids, psych med-takers, or bog-standard faces in the halls to mine the social media algorithms for what is most in opposition to the listlessness and malaise they feel.”
“Plastiform glee that intensifies into a sort of pop-eyed, carnivorous ecstasy. “
“This speaks to its visual literalism.”
“The villanelle so strangles sense that one can't tell the meaning from the structure.
“ . . . something done in the physical world in an intangible age. An age of circling back, checking in, lit reviews that go nowhere, and innovative best practices in marketing.”
“He appears to have an almost fanatical devotion to parsimonious explanations.”
“The concept of bad faith- akin to mauvaise foi but with a sunk-cost ratchet.”
“It is immortal precisely because it is flawed. Like human language, its ambiguity delivers the creative freedom that closed systems cannot.”
“Past the veil of shame is where the dark, gross, raw workings of the heart lie. Meet me there.”
To be clear, the person encouraging to vote in the contest (together with promotion of the review) is not the author of the review, but the founder of Alpha, Joe Liemandt himself (he used to be quite secretive, letting Mackenzie Price present as the public face, but has become less so in the last months): https://x.com/jliemandt/status/1974984216027738467
Before education, this person got (in)famous for acquiring struggling companies and operating them with remote contractors (https://archive.is/ar0Cr), using his remote working platform Crossover that pioneered bossware/mouseclick "productivity" surveillance (https://archive.is/PpoLs). A big part of the philosophy of Alpha School seems to be adopting this metrics and surveillance-driven approach to schoolchildren.
According to the linked blog post, Liemandt started presenting more publicly in part because the review author accidentally outed him, not realizing that his involvement was supposed to be kept quiet.
And do you have any doubt that the author of the review could have kept him from soliciting votes on X? In my opinion anyone who solicits votes on social media or accepts having someone else do it for their own gain or the author’s should be disqualified
Fuck this shit, every stinking aspect of it.
OK T T. I have changed my post to reflect all your corrections and clarifications.
Thanks for singling out my paragraph. I agree that promotion of reviews on other platforms sets a dangerous precedent. It would take very little for the contest to lose all meaning because of tactical social media campaigns.
You're in the Single Sentence category too, with your riff about Macedonian teens. You seem very gifted to me in your takes on people and settings, and your ability to put nuanced takes and odd unsettling truths into words. I hope you'll keep writing, so long as it gives you pleasure. There are way fewer settings than there used to be where talent like yours is appreciated, but there are still some. My own talents are in the same realm as yours, and I've had to come to terms with the fact that ACX is just not a setting where gifts in that realm are much valued. If you hang out here, it has to be for the other great things about this group. You might be amused by my own entry, which is about AI text-to-image art, but can be read as an extended angry riff about the triumph of plastic analogs over the real deal. It's Dall-2 & 3 as Depictors of Human Life. But fer crissakes don't feel like you owe it to me to give it a read! Anyhow, DM me if you'd ever like to chat.
I enjoyed your thoughts about the superiority of Dall-E 2 over 3, from an artistic perspective. What do you think about the newest image generation models?
Having been a reader since the early SSC days, I too have felt vaguely threatened and alienated by the massive influx of normies. This wasn't helped by Scott generally being busy for other reasons and not quite as on top of moderating as usual.
I agree that outside promotion is icky. I suspect the LLM slop will only become a bigger problem, too.
Sorry, the broken link to Liemandt's pinned tweet was my fault, corrected now.
Thanks for these gems. I've now read Whimsi's piece, definitely agree with your recommendation.
yeah, outside manipulation feels gross to me, too.
In addition to everything else (especially Joan of Arc, the only review that earned a 10 from me), I want to congratulate Max Nussenbaum on having now written *three* banger ACX contest reviews that I keep coming back to for a good read. It's disappointing that this one didn't make the finals, but I'm glad to see it recognized anyway.
I'll be frank and say I'm crushed my review didn't bubble up to the top of the honorable mentions. I put my heart and ten years into it though, so I suppose I'll try to be content with having let out many things that I've long believed and left unsaid.
Congratulations to all the winners. Here's a link to my review if you didn't read it. Shout out to the commenters who singled it out, and seemed to understand what I was getting at.
https://whimsi.substack.com/p/my-review-of-the-world-as-a-whole
Originally, I haven't noticed it among the submissions. I've got to reading it only now. And holy moly, that's a seriously good piece of writing. It's almost Steinbeckian in its depth and insightful in that particular human-centered way that's almost fully missing from the rationalist-adjacent blogosphere. I still have to fully digest it. And then maybe write a review of it.
Thank you!
Next time, I suggest writing something that doesn't make people want to kill themselves after they finish reading it. Pander to your audience! Reinforce their prejudices!
Good idea! I plan to write a sequel that casts the review in a less pessimistic. It's intended more as a picture of things as they are, then as they must be.
Sequel idea: FOREIGN PANTIES: GETTING LAID EVERYWHERE IN THE WHOLE WORLD
Very well written. A bit too far in the you are so privileged direction for my taste but well done for sure.
I understand that, to a degree. To those that already know, it's only a depressing reminder, and to those that don't know, it may seem like nothing but an argument that they should feel bad. But I don't believe in collective guilt, and that isn't the point of the essay at all.
Happily surprised by Alpha School - not being a winner, that was kind of a given, but by author. I remember doing my part to dunk on the previous comics review. It's unusual to dislike something so strongly that it becomes a recurring synecdoche for bad things of a type! Big tsuyoku naritai energy for learning based on gradient descent and putting out a much, much stronger review this time. "As long as you learn something, it's not a mistake," says Archer.
Befuddled by not recognizing any of the finalists as commenters whose writing feels very familiar, like as if they're a big-name regular that I've been reading for years. At least two entries this year gave that strong sense of readerly deja vu. More evidence of convergent evolution, I guess...spend time on ACX, start to write like/complementary to Scott.
Most of the finalist and honorable mention reviewers aren't people I know, but in two cases (Joan of Arc and JFK Assassination Conspiracy Theories) I found specific tells that allowed me to, with fairly high confidence, figure out who the author was before today's reveal. (In the former case, there was actually a Manifold market on it, not created by me, and I made a decent profit.)
More congrats...winners, finalists , HMs, and top 50s. Well done!
And thank you Scott, and all those who helped Scott bring us the contest again this year. Thanks also for providing links for the HMs this year!
Finally, special shoutout to Laura González Salmerón. Your Miniature Wunderland caught me just right. Such an interesting place, and so nicely presented by you. I find myself thinking of it often.
https://substack.com/redirect/5fad29f9-d99a-409f-8e36-f0ee0c9cf52d?j=eyJ1IjoiMm14cXVyIn0.1k93KASnFCAfrXgM8PhPPtgerysZkblg0X6qAL_sWOw
Thank you so much! I'm glad it resonated with you. That's the best compliment a writer can hope for, that something you've written stays with someone and keeps coming back to them :)
I didn't make the top 50 this year. (HM last year)
If anyone who read my submission on Bob Dylan's song Simple Twist of Fate would like to share what they didn't like about it, I would love to hear it. Please, don't hold back. I can take it. I knew I was taking a risk by going with a song, but I wanted to reach for it. You can DM me if you don't want to put it here. Thanks!
Here it is in Substack (not Google Docs), if you need a reminder. Not asking others to read.
https://thepullingandhauling.substack.com/p/simple-twist-of-fate
I gave it a 6 ("replacement level") during the first round. There was nothing wrong with it, it just didn't stand out.
I don't remember what rating I gave it, but it wasn't too generous. Reviewing the song lyrics seems like a perfectly good idea, but the thing is - I didn't like the song itself much, didn't think the lyrics were all that amazing, and it was hard for me to really get into the review praising those lyrics and analyzing them in great detail. A review that says: "read this poem, it's genius!" is going to fall a bit flat if I read the poem and think it's kind of meh. This is not a disparagement of your actual writing skill.
I'm old enough to be burned out on people writing Deep Articles analysing song lyrics (way too much of this for Dylan among others in the past) and also reflexively kicking back against song lyric posts in general (way, *way* too many of songfic in fanfiction, though thankfully that seems to have died down again until a fresh crop of kiddiewinkies come along who think their favourite band are, like, sooooo deep and meaningful).
As others have pointed out, the song is not particularly deep'n'meaningful: guy meets gal, they have a fling, they break up, guy broods about it. That's about a good sixty percent of most songs past and present. And this wasn't even a fling but a one night stand.
> He sings it like this: like a FREEEEEEEEEEIGHT train. The Doppler effect. You feel the train, the rhyme, and the orgasm all blow by.
This was beautiful.
Gave the not a book review a 10 myself.
So kind of you to say.
Overall take; there's a rush through the intro to get to the review, contradictory goals stated, one particular interpretation offered for the lyrics when other interpretations are equally supported, and a general overselling of the song's lyrical tightness.
I have a longer version if you want it. It's a couple of pages, too long to post here.
Yes, I very much do want it. Can you post it somewhere and place the link here? Thanks.
Glad Gallow did so well, the military theme was really unusual and refreshing to me.
Elons musk engineering algorithm and Bukele are too interesting reviews, thanks for bubbling them up.
Funny story: Sabaton released a bunch of new music videos today... including 1 about Joan of Arc! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTqB-kWVnBA
Thank you, I needed some music recommendations and this will go nicely with their Swiss Guard and Winged Hussars songs! 😁
Someone did a great video for the Winged Hussars:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CxlRJsQ7p2k&list=RDCxlRJsQ7p2k&start_radio=1
Congrats to the winners!
Just commenting to say that I really really liked "The Life's Work Of Banerjee, Duflo, and Kremer", I'm sad that it didn't make it to a finalist but I'm glad that it made it to the top half
Well, most people here sound sort of like people at the end of a fine Thanksgiving dinner. This was great — thanks, Scott, for hosting it, and for all the fine people who participated by writing or judging — great bunch of essays, guys — congrats to all . . . So I feel sort of like the skunk who slipped in through the dog door and shows up in the dining room doorway, all scary and stinky, saying this:
Edward Nevraumon, author of the Alpha School review, cheated. He should be disqualified. There are a number of posts about this matter scattered on the thread, but here’sthe brief version. During the competition, Joe Liemandt, founder of Alpha School, had a pinned tweet on X asking followers to go to ACX and vote for Nevraumon’s review. (https://x.com/jliemandt/status/1974984216027738467). It has 45.5 K views, and was retweeted 32 times. It went up on October 5, 3 days after voting started.
Nevraumon has not denied knowing that tweet was up, and it would be quite implausible if he did deny it. The fully honest thing for him to do would have been to tell Liemandt to take down the tweet as soon as he knew it was there, then inform Scott of what had happened. But I’d settle for his just having quietly asked to have the tweet removed. But nope, the thing’s still up, and presumably was up from 10/5 til voting ended on 10/13. Nevraumon, who’s a growth marketing expert, has denied receiving any direct or indirect compensation for writing his piece about Alpha School, and I don’t know anything that makes me doubt that, but it’s clear there was communication and coordination going on between Nevraumon and Liemandt about the review. How otherwise would Liemandt even know that Nevramon was entering a review in the ACX contest, much less know when voting began?
Last year one entrant was disqualified during the voting, because of “irregularities.” Seems likely irregularities were suspicious patterns in the votes the review received, though I supposed there could instead have been reason to suspect plagiarism. In any case, it seems to me that the case for disqualifying Nevaumon cannot possibly be weaker than the one against last year’s disqualified reviewer. In fact I’m having a hard time imagining a stronger case. He told someone who’s deeply invested in the success of Alpha School about his review, and informed him when voting began. He said not a word to anyone here about the tweet soliciting votes. Some fraction of the 44.5K people who saw the tweet (plus of course those who saw retweets) very likely came here and gave him a 10. That’s ballot stuffing. Even if in fact not a single X rando showed up and voted, Nevaumon is still just as guilty, because he went along with an attempt to send an army of ballot stuffers here to up his score.
I’m amazed that nobody but me has spoken up loudly about this. It seems like a clearcut, especially egregious case of cheating to me. But of course the tone here today nudges everyone in the direction of being mellow and positive.
I’ve been reading since the SSC days and AlphaSchool was a favorite of mine and I also judge it likely to interest the typical reader of this blog, at least any that have or are thinking of having children. It also gets bonus points for being basically the only actionable reviewed item. I don’t find its performance surprising and I don’t consider someone else tweeting something to be a form of the author cheating nor do I expect a review author to be aware of tweets about his review, even from people the author knows.
Of course there is an alternative to disqualifying Nevraumon.. We could agree to just not treat vote solicitation in the review contest as a problem. I don’t believe Scott stated anywhere that vote soliciting is not allowed, or even said that it’s sleazy and please don’t do it. And of course there is no way to fully enforce a rule of this nature. Only pretty flagrant violations will come to anyone’s attention. Any anyhoo, that’s how the world works, right?
In that case, I would like to be the first to take advantage of the situation by making an offer to the group. Next year I will enter the best, most crowd-pleasing review I can, and pay up to 4 people to give my review, and only mine, a 10. I will give each person who does that 10% of my cash winnings, or $500, whichever is greater. For those squeamish about accepting cash for their votes, I am also open to an arrangement in which the individual gives me, and only me, a 10. I in return will give their review, and only theirs, a 10 *and* guarantee that 2 close acqaintances of mine also give them a 10.
You scratch my ass, I scratch yours. That’s how things work in most of the world, and it’s time we got with the times, right?
Whadda say, guys? ?
Just in case your comment about people giving the Alpha School review a 10 reflects genuine confusion on your part: Voters were asked to list their top three choices from among the finalists. The rating process was done earlier, before the tweet was posted.
Since Scott has not (as far as I know) posted any specific rules about this kind of cheating, I don’t think that this incident should be treated as an automatic disqualification. I think that ballots cast by people who don’t have a history at ACX (voting in previous contests or posting comments here prior to the tweet), and which list the Alpha School review as the only choice, should be considered suspicious. If there are enough votes in that category to change the outcome, I think that would be reasonable grounds for disqualification because it would mean that the purpose of the contest had been subverted.
Of course this is really up to Scott, and I don’t know whether he is reading this or is even aware of the controversy.
This incident has changed my view of the school more than my view of the essay. I might have followed the progress of the school; now I no longer consider it worth my time.
Personally I thought Joan of Arc review glossed over key points and left me unsatisfied. Was she really an artillery genius? Was she really outwitting them at the trial? I’m skeptical of both on priors and nothing presented moved me either way. I also wasn’t too interested in the meta take at the end of the review, which I guess is what people liked the most about it?
The Russia-Ukraine war review deserves to win the “first ACX review that managed to be too short” award.
Overall, I thought this year has the highest quality reviews so far and I'm not surprised that my some of my favorites didn’t place. Shout out to the geometric designs review in particular.
It definitely could have been longer, but then it was already quite long to begin with and several people commented to say they didn't finish reading it. It sort of felt like 3 separate essays- one about the 100 years war in general, one about Joan's specific role in the war, and one about theology and the case for why she might have performed genuine miracles. I would like to see the author pick these three threads apart and publish them as 3 separate essays, if he wants to spend more time on this.
A lot of good ones in the honorable mentions! I wish there was a place to discuss those. I know we can discuss them all there, but its just feels cramped and limited here having one comment section for all of them combined.
Wow I only just saw that someone reviewed the Miniatur Wunderland. I really liked the review.
Thank you! Glad you enjoyed it.
> can be found at his nascent Substack : https://substack.com/@gallowglassglen
This link does not work
Sooo can we now ask for Alex's dating doc? Her description of the whole man made me smile
Yeah congrats to all the winners, I really enjoyed reading your pieces.
(or I stopped 1/2 way through :)
And to all those in the lower half. Many thanks for your effort too. And last but not least, thank you Scott for hosting this. It's a highlight of my spring/summer. (I'm a shitty writer, but I dream of some day posting a book review.)
I think it is important that people reading the Alpha school review are aware that
- it was written by a professional marketer - and while the author's enthusiasm is surely genuine, it employs psychological devices made to convert. See again the Gemini review pointing them out: https://pastebin.com/fJfvQFQ2.
- a very substantial fraction of the positive attention that Alpha gets on social media is fanned by people who somehow received or receive money from Liemandt's ventures, and this is not obvious to spot because of the mirror maze of companies, entities and social media accounts that appear to be independent endorsers of each other, but all trace back to him.
For an extreme "pure bot" case, see https://twitter.com/insideaustinedu for an apparent bot account that pretends to be a neutral resource but posts nothing but slop+engagement bait promoting Alpha. It seems to be part of the strategy laid out in https://contently.com/content-marketing-case-studies/case-study-alpha-school/, which is to manipulate LLMs into endorsing Alpha when they find such slop in web searches.^1 My understanding is that such a bot, if it was indeed operated by someone working for Liemandt, is a violation of FCC rules on deceptive advertising.
This whole picture leaves me with a somewhat bad taste regarding the integrity and honesty of the whole Alpha operation, and makes me doubt their marketing claims.
^1 Contently is Liemandt-owned too - so the case study is an example of the "fake independent endorser" pattern - and this "case study" was reposted by https://x.com/bpizzacalla , who works for ESW Capital and is the only human follower of the bot account.
This is interesting but I’d like to officially declare myself neutral about the issues you raise. The reason is that I feel very strongly that Nevraumon, the author of the Alpha School review, should be disqualified for cheating, and that’s really a separate issue from whether the Nevraumon uses “psychological devices,” whether the Alpha School is sleazy, whether it violates FTC rules etc.
I do not want the issue of whether the review should be disqualified to be tangled up with the issues you raise here. If the review had been about homemade quilts, and the Nevraumon’s mother had solicited votes for him from her many followers on X my opinion would be exactly the same as it is now. It would be the same even if the quilts and their makers and their business model were all above reproach. The dishonesty I am pointing to has nothing to do with Alpha School itself. It is the soliciting of votes on social media.
The vote-soliciting tweet was not on Nevraumon’s X account , but pinned von the account of Joe Liemandt, the founder of Alpha School., who has 45K followers. It was put up on the 3rd day of our voting period, and last I checked was still there. But Nevraumon has not denied knowing about the pinned tweet and It would be very hard to believe if he had. Seems clearly there was some coordination and collaboration going on between Liemandt and Nevraumon — otherwise, how would Liemandt have even known Nevruamon was entering the ACX contest, what his review was about, and, of course, what day the voting began?
Sorry to peel away at this juncture, T T, but the points you’re making are hard to prove, and open to debate, and they will probably be discussed at great length and there may never be agreement. The cheating, though, seems to me unambiguously bad and unfair. And it’s probably a larger scale version of what got somebody disqualified last year. Seems to me we and/or Scott should act promptly if we are going to. (And if we are not — why on earth not? )
To be honest, I think that the tweet situation is, on its own, iffy but ambiguous. The review went viral long before that tweet appeared (though that may well have had to do with Liemandt employees promoting it), and it's hard to hold the author responsible for the actions of a billionaire.
In the particular case of this product review, I find that the Alpha/Crossover/ESW universe as a whole is filled with indifference to honesty and iffy behavior. The bot account is clear-cut astroturfing, and its existence should make anyone less confident that every vote for the Alpha review was an honest vote by a disinterested human. I wrote my comments to help people see the whole picture around this matter - but I don't want to tar Nevraumont, who did not get compensated and apparently wrote a review using his professional content marketing writing style out of genuine enthusiasm.
Zooming out from this particular case, I think that reviews of things with a large financial stake in their image in the tech community are likely to generate ambiguous situations of this sort.
For future contests, one solution may be a rule like "you should abstain from voting when you were encouraged to do so by someone else than Scott, or did not reach the review contest by being a preexisting ACX subscriber". For this contest, this rule unfortunately didn't exist, which would make it unfair to tar and feather this particular author in my opinion.
<To be honest, I think that the tweet situation is, on its own, ambiguous. The review went viral long before that tweet appeared, and it's hard to hold the author responsible for the actions of a billionaire.
It went viral on the internet before the tweet? Did it go viral in the form of a link to here, the ACX version, where it was nestled in among a bunch of other reviews? If not, where was the other version, and by what route did it become viral? If it somehow went viral via some route Nevruamon knew nothing about then no, I don't see Nevraumon as having done anything wrong there. But if it got posted somewhere other than here, I don't see how that would have led to its getting votes here.
As for not holding people responsible for the actions of a billionaire? Huh? No, you can't hold someone responsible if they don't know the billionaire -- they'd quite likely never be able to get word to him about their complaint. And you can't hold them responsible if they tell the billionaire their complaint and he says "if you don't like it, sue me." But these 2 guys very likely at least knew of each other, had probably had had at least some contact prior to the review. Nevraumon says he talked to the public relations office a couple times and gave some advice. He had 2 kids in the school Liemandt founded. And he's a marketing specialist with a big online presence. He would not have found it impossible to ask Liemandt about the tweet. And note that he is not saying either than he had no idea the tweet was there, or that he tried and failed to get Liemandt to take it down.
I first became aware of it in google doc version, IIRC when it was linked in a reply during an X discussion on Alpha School and the future of education/learning apps more generally. The school has plenty of organic buzz by now, and this review was the most in-depth public explainer of the Alpha School approach.
Yes, maybe if he had known that it would be perceived badly, he may have asked Liemandt to take down the tweet. I would guess that the norms in the business sales world are just so different from the norms in the rationalist community that it wouldn't have crossed either of their minds that such a tweet could be seen negatively. Just important to point out the difference in mindset and the more instrumental approach to making assertions of fact in the former.
Are you / have you published the names / substacks of the other review writers?