I really loved this year's concept, but I find it funny that few of them I would call reviews -as in they mostly didn't rank their subjects on a 1-10 scale-
A lot of commenters have been saying that a bunch of the submissions weren't reviews, but there doesn't seem to be much agreement on which ones were or weren't.
I definitely wouldn't consider a 1-10 ranking as a requirement to constitute a review. As far as I remember, none of the book review submissions have included one, either previous contest entrants or Scott's own.
I think the relevant takeaway isn't which essays were or weren't reviews, it's that almost all of them might as well not have been, and would probably have been about as good as just essays
No, but they do usually provide some kind of bottom-line conclusion on whether/why/how the book was good or bad. I guess most of the finalists also did that at least a little, but sometimes only a little.
The book review contest was already basically an essay contest, and this one was one even moreso, considering that one of the basic purposes of a review was obviously in most cases unachievable or very hard to achieve (some *might* try out, say, the Russo-Ukrainian War on the basis of the review, but it's rather expected that the clear majority will not).
I agree that the basic purpose of a review is to let people know whether they should try out a thing (read a book, watch a film, etc...) and this was unworkable with the most interesting topics (I.e. Joan of Arc).
But, what I really liked about the concept of a contest for reviewing *everything* was giving a chance to normal people to really nerd out with their knowledge about very niche topics. This is contrary to a normal "book review" (or any other form of media), where what we really value is the expertise and "taste" of the reviewer.
However, I'm really glad with what we ended up getting, which is a sort of general essay contest, more or less in the style of Scott's writing.
I don't know if you read any of the non-finalists, but there were quite a lot of "really nerd out with their knowledge about very niche topics" submissions. They just mostly didn't make the finals.
Note that, while my opinions differed pretty substantially from those of the first-round voters, this was mostly not in a pro-"really nerd out with their knowledge about very niche topics" direction. I know there are some readers for whom that's automatically interesting if done competently, but I mostly favored reviews that were somehow tied to something I had reason to care about, or that successfully made the case that I should care about something. First-round voters seemed to think the same way.
"The Life's Work of Banerjee, Duflo, and Kremer" was my second-favorite entry, behind only "Joan of Arc", but that's because the subject matter is objectively really important, not just because the reviewer cares about it.
I wish Scott would go ahead and just call it an essay contest so we stop getting the usual complaints about them not actually being "reviews" every year.
I don't think that a numerical scale is necessarily needed for a review. This seems like a modern artefact of rating services online, where one is urged to leave five stars or whatever maximum score.
I think it's possible to review something, to say where it worked and where it failed, and to give a final subjective opinion on it without needing to rank it "6/10, good but not up there with Sockovski's best works such as "Dripping Wool".
This is a digression, but I hate the norms of this whole rating system where you're expected to constantly hand out five star ratings for services or justify what went wrong. Or worse. My old bank would send me surveys after any online banking, asking me to rate on a ten-point scale how much I agreed that they'd offered an exceptional customer service experience. This is a travesty. A good customer service experience should make itself unobtrusive.
I think that our whole ratings norm should be overhauled and replaced with a presumptive three point system. The ratings are "bad," "normal," and "good." If you pick "normal," you do not have to justify yourself or explain anything. Nobody should need to explain why a banking experience was normal. If it's better or worse than normal, then you can explain yourself.
Others are saying that reviews don't need a monotonic scoring system, but I want to go further and challenge the idea that "review" even entails a good/bad evaluation. That's just one thing they can do, which entered the popular consciousness through daily/weekly journalism long before the Internet.
And really, I don't see that much of a reason not to do that. It's the internet era, if you want to find out what's worth reading there are easier ways than waiting for Scott to review stuff.
Way harder to choose my top 3 this time than in years past. So much so that despite voting a mere minute ago I've already forgotten the order I placed 2, 7 & 10 and have regrets on not substituting for 4,5, 8, 11 or 13 for any of the ones I chose.
Your ballot will work like a single-choice ballot so there is no harm.
More specifically, if your first choice is eliminated, then your vote will be transferred to your second choice who was already eliminated. So nothing happens.
I've been watching the market for a while, and both of them have been really strong contenders throughout and usually the top two, but weren't previously quite this dominant. The currently-next-highest one, not counting "The Russo-Ukrainian War"*, also did well for a long time but fell fairly far fairly fast when this post went up.
* "The Russo-Ukrainian War" doesn't count because it has also consistently been the case that the most recently posted review scores disproportionately highly, and so we can't easily disentangle that from the question of whether people otherwise liked it best.
The Dating in the Bay Area one isn't that surprising. A lot of ACX readers are men who fit one of the profiles mentioned in the review and people like feeling seen and affirmed. That's the only explanation for why that one's doing so well. In terms of content, it was one of the lower-tier ones.
To the extent that I imagine myself as any of those types, I do not think I would feel very affirmed by the treatment in that review. This isn't a commentary on the merits of the review, just that that explanation seems odd.
Someone doesn't have to think it's a good account of the situation to be interested in that review, they just have to be a man in the Bay Area dating women in the Bay Area. To take an example from another context, clicks and views are clicks and views, even if the people are clicking to disagree vehemently with the piece as published.
There's a large overlap between people who use prediction markets and the ACX readers, but not all of us are men dating in the Bay Area, and I think the market doesn't take that into account in its estimation of chances of winning. Though they could be basing their forecasts on views formed after reading another contender "The Astral Codex Ten Commentariat" 😁
Maybe I’m part of the problem of the declining intellectualism of the ACX commentariat (as a relative newcomer who didn’t come from lesswrong, probably), but as a young man, who’s not in the Bay Area, but who is struggling with his identity, that piece was really affirming and valuable to me. It let me know other people also face personal struggles similar to mine. When you’re going through it, it seems like everybody else is navigating fine and you’re the only stunted exception.
I don't think this overlaps much with what you'd find on LessWrong, but it does overlap a lot with what you'd find on other Substacks that trade in political and cultural commentary.
I agree. Both the thinking and the writing were meh. Even if I were a hurting male who felt like the author really got me I would not vote for it. It’s a contest! I’d vote for the smartest and best written one. If what you like is the writer’s attitude towards people like you, show it by trying to get to know her, or, jeez, even asking her out, not by voting for her essay.
The Dating in the Bay Area one being so high is probably a smart bet, but it's a bet that you make because you don't have an overly high opinion of the electorate.
I don't know. I didn't put it on my top three but I thought it was mostly quite well written. It wasn't on my list of things I don't see what anyone sees in them.
Here's my review of the "Dating Men in the Bay Area" review. (This was originally part of a chat conversation among friends shortly after it was posted; I've cleaned it up a little to be more self-contained.)
I gave this review a 4/10. Here's why I didn't like it:
There is a *whole lot* of armchair philosophizing about Modern Gender Roles, and it just didn't feel all that insightful or convincing. I think some amount of it is just, like, I've read more nuanced and more persuasive and better-cited versions of all these points elsewhere, by better writers.
Other readers have praised this post as a good ethnography of the Bay Area dating pool. I do not get the sense that that's what I'm reading. First of all, a lot of the post isn't even about that, see above. But even in the parts that are, she has so thoroughly suffused the entire piece with her own voice as to give the sense that I'm reading her extrapolations and judgments, rather than her observations. A good ethnographer needs to get out of the way and allow their subjects to present themselves, or rather, to create the impression of same.
While the author has identified a number of real and undesirable trends in society that are worth commenting on, her core problem is that she demands a 99th-percentile emotionally healthy and self-actualized partner and won't accept anything less, which makes it totally unsurprising that she's usually disappointed. (She gives lip service to the idea that becoming a Man Who Is Whole is a messy process that involves failures along the way, but makes clear that he'd better have already gotten all of those failures out of the way before he tries to date—and I'm not clear on how that's supposed to happen given that lack of relationship experience is *also* supposedly a red flag.) To be clear, unlike some of the commenters, I don't at all judge her for being picky! I'm probably pickier than that (though not along that specific axis, and also I'm defective in a bunch of other ways she isn't). But I think that we picky people ought to own our pickiness, and be clear to ourselves and others that the problem is with us, not our dating pools. Instead she pretty strongly implies that she views these men as Fundamentally Defective, and their prevalence in her dating pool as a symptom of a sick society. (The "it's not their fault they grew up in a sick society" shtick is trying to treat this compassionately but instead mostly comes across as condescending. This is double-extra true for the manosphere section.)
The "Man Who Opts Out" section feels like it can go a bunch of different ways and the review only acknowledges one of them; see https://thingofthings.substack.com/i/171420890/in-defense-of-the-men-who-opt-out, but also the point about how dating over 25 without a prior relationship is a market for lemons but the way to overcome it is to have had non-romantic close relationships. Like, do we have specific reasons to believe that this in particular is a decisive factor?
Her prescriptions for society don't really have anything to do with the problem that she says she's trying to solve. They are basically just the same anti-man-hating-feminist talking points from above. There are a couple places where she sort of gestures at a Thing Society Could Do Differently that's a *small* step towards actionability for the specific problems of the specific men she's talking about (promote subcultures and more aggressive therapist filtering), but she doesn't elaborate on them at all.
I mostly agree with these being its weaknesses. I think I differ in finding her not quite as bad along them as you do (and, having been a man who dates women in the bay area, it helped that I found her to be better along them than most women in the bay area, if not as good as the women I most liked dating after moving away). But broadly directionally in alignment with this meta review.
Hey, writer of "Dating Men in the Bay Area" here. Just wanted to give a very sincere thank you for taking the time to write up such a detailed and helpful critique. :)
You make some excellent points about the weaker spots, and some of your takeaways don't match my opinions/intents, which shows me areas where I probably should have been clearer. Your comment gives me lots of helpful ideas for revisions, thank you!
Full disclosure: I've never written a long-form essay before this one, and this was written in a 10-hour marathon session of writing with no time for revising before the deadline. In all honesty, I am low-key mortified it made it as a finalist, because I cringe at so many people reading my un-revised writing. (I never dreamed it would make it as a finalist, so I just submitted to keep my personal goal of participating this year. Jokes on me, lmao.) The amount of feedback I've gotten has been overwhelming, but your critique is hands down the most helpful comment I've gotten in regards to actually learning how to be a good essayist.
Also really appreciate you linking to Ozy's piece! I wasn't aware of it until now, and I really enjoyed reading her perspective and feel she's changed my mind about some elements of dating "Men Who Opt Out."
Wow, I'm honestly shocked that you found my comment helpful; I'd have been nicer and more careful if I thought you were likely to read it! Thanks for your kind words.
I should disclose that the review also induced a certain amount of anxiety/feeling-judged in me personally, which I don't think should count against its merit but might have caused me to judge it a bit more harshly than was really fair. (The original version of my comment, posted privately for friends, had a final paragraph about this that I cut for being too personal for the public internet, but it's relevant context so I'm mentioning it.)
I'm really heartened to hear that a top finalist (one of only four to get substantial share in the prediction market) is from someone who isn't already a professional blogger or similar; this inspires me to try and put more of my own writing out there too, and I really hope you keep at it and we get to read more from you.
I think one thing that may help you understand the positive response to that review is knowledge of just how low the bar is for some of us men.
As trans people figured out long ago, gender is a performance. It is a role we act out to fulfill the expectations of society. The problem is, a lot of women (Hell! Even some men!) believe the performance is the real thing and don't look beyond it. When they see a man following the stage directions and nailing his lines, they believe that this is all he is, because that is what they were taught to believe. When they see a man who does something different though, they are immediately biased to view it in terms of how it relates to the script, and judgment soon follows:
Examples:
event: "He saves a kitten?"
gendered: "He's a hero!"
neutral: "He cares about animals."
..
event: "He likes video games?"
gendered: "He must be lazy"
neutral: "He must find them fun"
..
event: "Crying at mom's funeral"
gendered: "He can't control his emotions in front of a crowd"
neutral: "His mom just f-ing died!"
..
Not all of those comments are negative, but none of them align with how the man actually feels about the thing. The term for that is alienation. Even if you don't bother to perform the script yourself, the effects of it are still noticed and felt. The message becomes clear: we want the script, not the man who acts it out.
So imagine how it must feel to meet a person who actually does care about the person, and not the mask? Do you know how rare that is?
Probably not because the script has a way of hiding itself. Contrary to popular caricature, there is room in it for things like emotional vulnerability and crying. But the problem is that those things are only allowed at certain times and in a certain shape. There is a constraint. Since this is a comment and not a blog post, I will leave the details as an exercise to the reader. All I will say is that it's generally ok to talk to your wife about problems, but you can't tell her what REALLY keeps you up at night...
She thinks you're being open and honest with her, but it's just another script!
...
Out of all the women I've seen both in real life and online, I would say I've only met 3 who knew how to consistently get past men's barriers to see the real person underneath. One of them was a girl I knew in high school, another was a random girl I stumbled upon on reddit who couldn't understand why most guys she talked to ended up devoting themselves to her, and finally there is this author.
Three sightings in almost 30 years! That's all I ever got to see. And there was only ever one I ever got to talk to (though our time was meaningful). These women are so rare that they may as well be supernatural creatures.
I'm sure there are people who could write a more thorough and academic analysis on this subject if they put their mind to it, but I argue that the odds of a person having the awareness to even attempt to cover a topic like this is astronomically low.
So for me, it doesn't matter if it isn't perfect. It's a miracle that it's even here.
-----
epilogue: I am aware of the fact that I may just be an incredibly unlucky man who struggles to have authentic relationships with women, but I have reasons to believe the distribution is bimodal in that case. I suspect that people who are fortunate enough to have good relationships with women will hold the article to a higher standard that it doesn't meet, while those that are unlucky are just surprised it exists at all. There are a lot of us these days.
So my understanding, and a big part of why I wasn't impressed with that part of the review, is that over the past couple years there's been quite a lot of online discourse saying things like that. The trigger was possibly Richard Reeves's 2022 book Of Boys and Men (though Reeves is actually saying something slightly different, with more of a focus on the problems of lower-class men and boys in particular), but a lot of opinion columnists and Substackers have picked it up and run with it in a more emotional-expression-norms-centered direction. https://www.ggd.world/p/automation-ageing-and-mens-loss-of is a representative example.
The performance and alienation thing is also a mainstay of feminist writing. Granted, until a few years ago it was really hard to say anything about men's problems as a feminist without a lot of "of course women still have it worse" disclaimers that tended to undermine the sympathy signal, because your fellow feminists would skin you alive. But I really think that has become a lot less true lately.
Maybe a lot of ACX readers don't otherwise read much of the kind of political or cultural commentary where this kind of thing is prevalent. Or maybe it matters that it's coming from someone who has a personal stake in men's psychic success, because she wants to find a psychically successful male partner.
I've had a similar experience, although I have put it down to my being a generally weird and manipulative person.
I have had about half a dozen real romantic relationships in my life, with three of them being very long-term & significant; I have found that it is nearly pointless to even *try* taking off the mask—it is generally pretty clear what a woman (or man, for that matter) wants & expects, and giving it to her is just... easier... than violating those wants & expectations. Mostly, they don't like Real Kveldred nearly as much as Silver-Tongue Kveldred... so to speak, heh. When you want to end the dalliance, then you can stop saying & doing All the Right Things, and the problem solves itself.
...except in one case. In one single case, she liked & loved me *more* as my Real Self(™). In one single case, she really truly did mean it when she said she loved me for who I am. In one single case, my real thoughts & feelings truly *were* of interest to her, and—apparently, somehow—appealing besides.
.
Of course, I decided to break her heart & destroy everything, that time. Took me twelve years, but I eventually found a way.
I have "Opted Out" ever since. I won't find her like again, I think.
Sort of a tangent, but what kind of psychopath would want to shame you for crying at your mother's funeral? Is that an opinion that you have actually encountered?
Alphaschool was definitely a runaway first for me, but I found Joan of Arc offputting. Maybe because I have a general antipathy to taking supernatural claims seriously, so I found the focus on that side of her story (instead of the history) to be a turnoff.
Not to the same degree - I think Scott's a better writer and does better job of being skeptical at the places I would be (and unlike Joan of Arc, that's not a story where he could've chosen to focus on the interesting history instead) - but yeah, definitely at least somewhat turned off by the subject.
Looking at it now, my top 3 Russo-Ukrainian, Alpha School, and Joan of Arc are in the top 3. I wonder if Joan will get a bit of a boost from the voting opening the same day as the sun miracle post; while reading about the documentation of the sun miracle I kept thinking of the equally well documented Joan of Arc miracles
Just voted 50 M - and the numbers changed a lot, must be very early times and/or a tiny market. Not much of a surprise there: ACX readers do like to read about school (see earlier winners), and the "men of bay area" made it in into the top-liked posts on acx (see archive "TOP") . And all were good reads. Not to forget: one should bet on the piece one believes most others will vote for.
I wonder if the betting markets are simply being set around which one has the most comments. This might make sense if you think the most commented ones were the most read ones, and that people wouldn't vote for a review they didn't read.
Yeah, none of the reviews I loved made the finals. The only finalist I really liked is getting almost no mentions here. And that stoopit thing about dating busted men, which irritates me even to *think* about, is probably going to win.
I agree, the 'Dating Men' article was terrible. It was just a regurgitation of truisms about the ennui of modern life that have been circulating for decades ('Bowling Alone' is based on an essay written in 1995!), with a few Forer statements sprinkled in to give the illusion of profound insight into the human condition. It's the quality I'd expect from a below-average think piece in The Atlantic.
Conversely, 'The ACX Commentariat' was excellent. Genuinely original analysis.
I think I do recall you saying that, but it's my number one too! My favourites tend to be the ones that rely on skills I lack, and data-crunching is well outside my wheelhouse.
Ha, I was starting to feel bad for having voted for 'Dating Men' which is getting so much hate here. You have just found a good justification for my choice.
This didn't reflect my personal ranking, but it does reflect how I guess other people will vote.
(perhaps some will detect an implied admission that I am distinct from the crowd in my preferences and thoughts. If so, please include that I also feel a touch of smugness.)
Good luck to all the finalists! This year was great!!!
> This year is back to ranked choice voting
As someone who directly benefited from approval voting last year, I feel obligated to complain about the switch back to ranked choice voting. (Jk, it's fine.)
that is a nonsense statement. regret just expresses the loss from the optimum of whatever social preference function you use. you can argue about what is the correct social welfare function, but you can't argue that whatever function you use, its output is what you want to optimize. That's not even a coherent statement. of course, none of this is obvious to you because it's a super esoteric subject and you clearly aren't familiar with it.
I suppose that makes sense. I remain sad that "JFK Assassination Conspiracy Theories" did not get promoted to finalist, it was brilliant and I think I'd have bet on it making the top three.
I didn't read that one during initial voting. I'll have to check it out!
My favorite of the initial submissions was the review for The Witness (the line puzzle video game). It set up a great narrative about practicing rationality skills in a legible video game overworld.
I was very disappointed that there weren't more finalist reviews of ordinary non-book media. I don't think the Ollantay review really counts, since the review centered on the historical events surrounding the play more than the play itself.
I didn't like the review of The Witness; I didn't feel that it successfully made the case that there was anything there that I should care about. It is possible that my feelings here may have been indirectly influenced by my annoyance at Jonathan Blow's bad opinions/behavior about programming language design.
I read and rated about half of the submitted reviews, mostly chosen at random. I think of the ones that I gave 9/10 or higher as the "top tier", of which there were six, and of these only one was of a work of traditional media: Kiki's Delivery Service.
For fun, here's all my ratings; this is a total rank order of how much I liked all the reviews I read, though I don't claim perfect calibration or consistency.
★★★★★ ("the best one, I hope it wins and the author leverages this to cultivate an audience and get published more"): Joan of Arc*
★★★★⯪ ("actively interesting"): The Life's Work Of Banerjee, Duflo, and Kremer; JFK Assassination Conspiracy Theories**; Alpha School***; Ollantay*; State Of Competitive Debating (Unions) Address; Kiki's Delivery Service
★★★★☆ ("contains something unusually worth thinking about"): Participation in Phase I Clinical Pharmaceutical Research***; The Astral Codex Ten Commentariat ("Why Do We Suck?")***; We Should Never Have Gone To Mammoth Caves; My Imagination; Person of Interest; The Last Of Us, Part II; Pregnancy; The Drum Major Instinct; Adult Gymnastics
★★★⯪☆ ("thought-provoking"): Earth; Judaism; Arbitraging Several Dozen Online Casinos; She-Ra and the Princesses Of Power; Of Mice, Mechanisms, and Dementia***; Museum of Science; Summer Camp For Sluts / Young Swingers' Week; Skibidi Toilet; Deathbed Ballads; My Father's Instant Mashed Potatoes***; Lesbian Fanfiction; Arnold Schoenberg - Drei Klavierstucke; The Aphorism "Music Is The Universal Language Of Mankind"
★★★☆☆ ("replacement-level"): On Taste; DALL-E; L'Ambroisie; Rubbermaid Products; North Korea; Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare; The Soul Of Karl Friston; Pure Mathematics; 11 Poetic Forms; A New Theodicy; Disco Elysium (1, by EH); Simple Twist Of Fate; Time's Arrow; Google's Hiring Process; Gacha Games; Mountaintop; The Beginning After The End Of Humanity Circus; Phoenix Theatre at Great Northern Mall
★★⯪☆☆ ("I didn't personally like it but can acknowledge its value"): Pythia; Mad Investor Chaos; School***; Zermelo-Fraenkel Set Theory; The Russo-Ukrainian War***; Getting Over It With Bennett Foddy; Pathologic Classic HD; Disco Elysium (2, by DC); A Dance Remix Of Chappell Roan's "Pink Pony Club"; An American Football Game
★★☆☆☆ ("failed to make the case for itself"): The Men Are Not Alright; Identity; Einstein's World-View; The Soul Of An Anti-Woke Intellectual; The Witness; The Spreadsheet; Scientific Peer Review; Dating Men In The Bay Area***; Gender; Islamic Geometric Patterns In The Metropolitan Museum Of Art*; How Many Super Mario Games Are There; Nicotine As A Nootropic; Which Sports? Why Sports?; The Pebble, Jewel of the 1960 World Series
★⯪☆☆☆ ("fundamentally flawed"): Death (Mata Hari, Princess Di, Joan of Arc); Marriage; Project Xanadu - The Internet That Might Have Been***; Feminism; The Sermon On The Mount, Review 2; Love; Meditations on Moloch
★☆☆☆☆ ("provoked active annoyance"): The Synaptic Plasticity and Memory Hypothesis***; Lublin Castle; The Sermon On The Mount; Civil War; Effective Altruism / Rationalism
⯪☆☆☆☆ ("I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul"): 0th Dimension
* Eventual finalist that I read and rated during the initial phase of voting.
** Eventual honorable mention.
*** Finalist that I read only after it was posted on ACX proper.
Honorable mentions I enjoyed, maybe you'll give them a try (although your taste is not like mine). Bishop's Castle is about a mildly crazy American man constructing a more or less real castle on his own, and Miniatur Wunderland is about a German model city so huge and intricate that quantitative hugeness gives it some mindblowing quality.
I had a different distribution of rankings (I read and voted on nearly all the submissions,) but I was pleased to finish having awarded a full stretch across the point scale, from ten to one, in a distribution clustered around five, without calibrating my scoring after the fact, and I can confirm that the 0th Dimension review received my coveted 1 point rating.
I was inspired to do this partly because I didn't vote in last year's first round due to not having bothered to read enough reviews, and then one of the few that I did read (Don't Make No Waves, Don't Back No Losers) didn't make the finals despite being in my opinion better than most of the finalists, and I wished I'd voted for it.
...I wrote that one. Thank you!!! I think you just made my day.
I unfortunately got a concussion on the Friday before reviews were due back in May, so I ended it kind of suddenly, and (reading it later to edit and publish myself) realized my submission was full of typos.
A few weeks later was LessOnline, where I apologized to Scott about the quality in person. He chuckled, smiled, and said, "A concussion? Oh, that's no excuse. Daniel Böttger wrote his review with a brain tumor! 😀" (He reviewed On The Marble Cliffs back in 2023.) Which... I mean... can't argue with that.
>I was very disappointed that there weren't more finalist reviews of ordinary non-book media.
I read a few of the reviews of films and video games, and on the whole they seemed to be exceptionally poor. Far, far below the standard that I would expect for this competition. I'm not surprised that basically none of them made it in.
In general, I found the reviews of ordinary non-book media on average much less appealing than other reviews. There were a few laudable exceptions, and to me The Witness was one of them, together with Pathologic Classic and The Tale of Princess Kaguya. But none of them reached my top 5, and probably not even top 10. And after that, there were a few good ones (Face The Fear, Worldbuild The Future; Disco Elysium by DC; Person of Interest; The Zone Of Interest), but most others I didn't find appealing.
It might be me. It's easier to get me interested about some aspect of the real world than about some work of fiction. It's one more level of detachment of the real world. But apparently other people also didn't like the reviews very much, for whatever reasons they had.
Eh... not as good as I'd hoped, I'd have to say. It's basically just a quick, Wiki-level summary of all the usual suspects, with all of the usual conclusions ("was it THIS party? no. but was it THIS OTHER party? also no. but was it...")—nothing surprising or enlightening. I learned nothing! (...except that there is a fellow by the name of "Bonar"!)
It *is* entertainingly written, though, I'll give it that. (And thanks for posting the link—I was dreading having to go find it myself–) Joan of Arc remains the best, if you ask me.
It'd be interesting to review all the prior review contests and see how well likes and/or comments correlate to eventual contest placement. I'm not sure in which direction a strong correlation would make me update, or on what. One wants to believe there's such a thing as silent majorities, hidden gems, underdog upsets, etc., I suppose...more narratively satisfying. But reality doesn't grade on a story arc. Either way, it's clear that despite some commentariat drift, we (or at least, voters) largely continue to like what we like, year after year. This is heartening, I guess.
Replicating my feedback here: While this year did have entries I found valuable for myself, I would prefer a little more traditional review next time, such as books, movies, websites; basically, things I can go out and experience for myself with relatively little effort or manipulation of spacetime.
I didn’t like any of the entrants this year. The finalists were clearly better than most of the entrants in the first round, but I wasn’t enthused by them.
I didn't like it very much, mostly because I felt I couldn't _trust_ it; it seemed to overstate, rather badly, the strength of connection between the play and the real-world events allegedly connected to it.
[EDITED to add:] ... And that connection was the real subject of the review, much more than e.g. the actual play itself.
Exactly. The review itself seemed interesting, but then I learned from the comments that it wasn't actually *true*, which completely defeated the purpose.
In terms of sheer effort and quality it has to be "The Astral Codex Tex Commentariat". That one was a Scott level of analytical work. And it wasn't just data for it's own sake, it really cut to the heart of - what does it mean for a comment section to be good? Why do we keep coming back and what are we trying to accomplish?
I really hope the mice and dementia and synaptic plasticity reviews don't win. Both authors pretty badly misrepresent the field that they are writing about, and make pretty serious mistakes.
I found the Commentariat stopped short at precisely the point where it would have been interesting. The author scraped the entire commentariat history, did some half-baked analysis, ignored the anomalies and outliers, and called it a day. Big anticlimax after the amount of preparation done.
My suggestion for next year's contest, which I forgot to put in my voting form so I'll put it here, is to have divisions based on word count. It feels wrong that a short, pithy essay might have to compete head to head with an exhaustively researched review of historiography or scientific literature. I might like the two pieces equally as much but it will be hard for me as a voter not to vote for the one that was obviously 10x more work to write.
Oh and I almost forgot -- thank you to Scott for running this contest and for all the writers who contributed! There's so much excellent, thought-provoking writing that gets surfaced here that probably would never have gotten an audience otherwise.
dear god, why use IRV instead of something good like score voting or approval voting? if you really MUST use a ranked voting method, there are myriad forms of condorcet that are decent, or even borda or bucklin. IRV is just the worst.
It's funny because you're making exactly the same point as the character in this xkcd making fun of people who take voting systems too seriously: https://xkcd.com/1844/
I'm literally one of the world's top experts on this subject. Yes I take it seriously. I have put 20 years of my life into it. I co-founded arguably the only serious non-profit working in the space. and it is hands down the most important subject for humanity to be focusing on.
there is no such thing as "least offensive". it is not even an objective quantifiable concept. there is just total utility. it is mathematically proven that that's the thing you want to maximize. any other social preference formula leads to absurdities or self-contradictions.
Can you outline the argument you want to use here for score voting, *specifically using the essay contest as a concrete example*? Otherwise it's hard to assess whether the relevant assumptions are applicable here.
it has the highest voter satisfaction efficiency, with essentially any reasonable modeling assumptions about voter behavior. honest voting, strategic voting, various proportional mixtures, etc.
How interesting - those were my three favorites too! I didn't think that hard about it. They're the three that stuck with me in the most positive way.
Weirdly, I found the others in Manifold's current top (Alpha School, Dating Men in the Bay Area, and The Russo-Ukrainian War) personally much lower on my list. I'm struggling to elucidate why beyond "vibes," though. I felt judgmental about the authors, which may well just be a reflection on me. Perhaps the personal nature makes them more popular to readers, though.
I don't mean this in an impolite way to the writers or enjoyers of those reviews, but the first two you mentioned both rubbed me the wrong way with a vague sense of "this flatters the interests and concerns of the (primary) ACX reader-base; I'm not actually that impressed by the writing or insights here."
Lol. I voted Dating Men in the Bay Area, Alpha School and Russio-Ukrainian War. I was considering swapping Alpha School with Joan of Arc. Then I check the manifold market.
Voting for the non-book review contest is open until end of day Monday, October 13, using ranked choice—select your 1st, 2nd, and 3rd favorites from the seven finalists listed below.
If you’ve read this year’s finalists, cast your ballot for your favorites. Voting closes Monday, October 13 (end of day). We’re back to ranked choice voting this year, so please select your first, second, and third favorite reviews. https://www.ezpass-ri.com
I really loved this year's concept, but I find it funny that few of them I would call reviews -as in they mostly didn't rank their subjects on a 1-10 scale-
A lot of commenters have been saying that a bunch of the submissions weren't reviews, but there doesn't seem to be much agreement on which ones were or weren't.
I definitely wouldn't consider a 1-10 ranking as a requirement to constitute a review. As far as I remember, none of the book review submissions have included one, either previous contest entrants or Scott's own.
I think the relevant takeaway isn't which essays were or weren't reviews, it's that almost all of them might as well not have been, and would probably have been about as good as just essays
i think you mean rating (cardinal), not ranking (ordinal).
Do Scott's book (and etc) reviews ever give a number rating?
No, but they do usually provide some kind of bottom-line conclusion on whether/why/how the book was good or bad. I guess most of the finalists also did that at least a little, but sometimes only a little.
(Also, there were a bunch of other "reviews" that didn't make the finals that made no pretense of being a review of anything at all.)
The book review contest was already basically an essay contest, and this one was one even moreso, considering that one of the basic purposes of a review was obviously in most cases unachievable or very hard to achieve (some *might* try out, say, the Russo-Ukrainian War on the basis of the review, but it's rather expected that the clear majority will not).
I agree that the basic purpose of a review is to let people know whether they should try out a thing (read a book, watch a film, etc...) and this was unworkable with the most interesting topics (I.e. Joan of Arc).
But, what I really liked about the concept of a contest for reviewing *everything* was giving a chance to normal people to really nerd out with their knowledge about very niche topics. This is contrary to a normal "book review" (or any other form of media), where what we really value is the expertise and "taste" of the reviewer.
However, I'm really glad with what we ended up getting, which is a sort of general essay contest, more or less in the style of Scott's writing.
I don't know if you read any of the non-finalists, but there were quite a lot of "really nerd out with their knowledge about very niche topics" submissions. They just mostly didn't make the finals.
I haven't read them all, but some such as "The life work of Banerjee, Duflo & Kremer" were really good, and I was sad to not see it as a finalist.
Any other that you recommend?
You can see all my ratings here: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/vote-in-the-2025-non-book-review/comment/162426002
Note that, while my opinions differed pretty substantially from those of the first-round voters, this was mostly not in a pro-"really nerd out with their knowledge about very niche topics" direction. I know there are some readers for whom that's automatically interesting if done competently, but I mostly favored reviews that were somehow tied to something I had reason to care about, or that successfully made the case that I should care about something. First-round voters seemed to think the same way.
"The Life's Work of Banerjee, Duflo, and Kremer" was my second-favorite entry, behind only "Joan of Arc", but that's because the subject matter is objectively really important, not just because the reviewer cares about it.
I wish Scott would go ahead and just call it an essay contest so we stop getting the usual complaints about them not actually being "reviews" every year.
I don't think that a numerical scale is necessarily needed for a review. This seems like a modern artefact of rating services online, where one is urged to leave five stars or whatever maximum score.
I think it's possible to review something, to say where it worked and where it failed, and to give a final subjective opinion on it without needing to rank it "6/10, good but not up there with Sockovski's best works such as "Dripping Wool".
This is a digression, but I hate the norms of this whole rating system where you're expected to constantly hand out five star ratings for services or justify what went wrong. Or worse. My old bank would send me surveys after any online banking, asking me to rate on a ten-point scale how much I agreed that they'd offered an exceptional customer service experience. This is a travesty. A good customer service experience should make itself unobtrusive.
I think that our whole ratings norm should be overhauled and replaced with a presumptive three point system. The ratings are "bad," "normal," and "good." If you pick "normal," you do not have to justify yourself or explain anything. Nobody should need to explain why a banking experience was normal. If it's better or worse than normal, then you can explain yourself.
Others are saying that reviews don't need a monotonic scoring system, but I want to go further and challenge the idea that "review" even entails a good/bad evaluation. That's just one thing they can do, which entered the popular consciousness through daily/weekly journalism long before the Internet.
sounds like you mean rate not rank.
I think that's Scott's fault, really. A lot of his "reviews" have been more like extended digressions on some subject, prompted by some work or other.
And really, I don't see that much of a reason not to do that. It's the internet era, if you want to find out what's worth reading there are easier ways than waiting for Scott to review stuff.
Way harder to choose my top 3 this time than in years past. So much so that despite voting a mere minute ago I've already forgotten the order I placed 2, 7 & 10 and have regrets on not substituting for 4,5, 8, 11 or 13 for any of the ones I chose.
Is it intended for us to be able to vote the same thing for the 3 places or we should just not do that?
I seriously doubt it
Your ballot will work like a single-choice ballot so there is no harm.
More specifically, if your first choice is eliminated, then your vote will be transferred to your second choice who was already eliminated. So nothing happens.
Genuinely shocked by the prediction market! None of my top 3 are even slightly in contention if the wisdom of gamblers is to be believed, lol.
Agreed- it seems odd that those two at the top are such strong favorites according to the market.
I've been watching the market for a while, and both of them have been really strong contenders throughout and usually the top two, but weren't previously quite this dominant. The currently-next-highest one, not counting "The Russo-Ukrainian War"*, also did well for a long time but fell fairly far fairly fast when this post went up.
* "The Russo-Ukrainian War" doesn't count because it has also consistently been the case that the most recently posted review scores disproportionately highly, and so we can't easily disentangle that from the question of whether people otherwise liked it best.
The Dating in the Bay Area one isn't that surprising. A lot of ACX readers are men who fit one of the profiles mentioned in the review and people like feeling seen and affirmed. That's the only explanation for why that one's doing so well. In terms of content, it was one of the lower-tier ones.
To the extent that I imagine myself as any of those types, I do not think I would feel very affirmed by the treatment in that review. This isn't a commentary on the merits of the review, just that that explanation seems odd.
Someone doesn't have to think it's a good account of the situation to be interested in that review, they just have to be a man in the Bay Area dating women in the Bay Area. To take an example from another context, clicks and views are clicks and views, even if the people are clicking to disagree vehemently with the piece as published.
There's a large overlap between people who use prediction markets and the ACX readers, but not all of us are men dating in the Bay Area, and I think the market doesn't take that into account in its estimation of chances of winning. Though they could be basing their forecasts on views formed after reading another contender "The Astral Codex Ten Commentariat" 😁
Maybe I’m part of the problem of the declining intellectualism of the ACX commentariat (as a relative newcomer who didn’t come from lesswrong, probably), but as a young man, who’s not in the Bay Area, but who is struggling with his identity, that piece was really affirming and valuable to me. It let me know other people also face personal struggles similar to mine. When you’re going through it, it seems like everybody else is navigating fine and you’re the only stunted exception.
I don't think this overlaps much with what you'd find on LessWrong, but it does overlap a lot with what you'd find on other Substacks that trade in political and cultural commentary.
I've been betting the market, and that one is easily the most volatile. My theory is that a few really like it and a few really don't.
That much is quite clear to anyone who read the comments or other discussion surrounding that review.
I agree. Both the thinking and the writing were meh. Even if I were a hurting male who felt like the author really got me I would not vote for it. It’s a contest! I’d vote for the smartest and best written one. If what you like is the writer’s attitude towards people like you, show it by trying to get to know her, or, jeez, even asking her out, not by voting for her essay.
It has the most Likes.
The Dating in the Bay Area one being so high is probably a smart bet, but it's a bet that you make because you don't have an overly high opinion of the electorate.
I don't know. I didn't put it on my top three but I thought it was mostly quite well written. It wasn't on my list of things I don't see what anyone sees in them.
Here's my review of the "Dating Men in the Bay Area" review. (This was originally part of a chat conversation among friends shortly after it was posted; I've cleaned it up a little to be more self-contained.)
I gave this review a 4/10. Here's why I didn't like it:
There is a *whole lot* of armchair philosophizing about Modern Gender Roles, and it just didn't feel all that insightful or convincing. I think some amount of it is just, like, I've read more nuanced and more persuasive and better-cited versions of all these points elsewhere, by better writers.
Other readers have praised this post as a good ethnography of the Bay Area dating pool. I do not get the sense that that's what I'm reading. First of all, a lot of the post isn't even about that, see above. But even in the parts that are, she has so thoroughly suffused the entire piece with her own voice as to give the sense that I'm reading her extrapolations and judgments, rather than her observations. A good ethnographer needs to get out of the way and allow their subjects to present themselves, or rather, to create the impression of same.
While the author has identified a number of real and undesirable trends in society that are worth commenting on, her core problem is that she demands a 99th-percentile emotionally healthy and self-actualized partner and won't accept anything less, which makes it totally unsurprising that she's usually disappointed. (She gives lip service to the idea that becoming a Man Who Is Whole is a messy process that involves failures along the way, but makes clear that he'd better have already gotten all of those failures out of the way before he tries to date—and I'm not clear on how that's supposed to happen given that lack of relationship experience is *also* supposedly a red flag.) To be clear, unlike some of the commenters, I don't at all judge her for being picky! I'm probably pickier than that (though not along that specific axis, and also I'm defective in a bunch of other ways she isn't). But I think that we picky people ought to own our pickiness, and be clear to ourselves and others that the problem is with us, not our dating pools. Instead she pretty strongly implies that she views these men as Fundamentally Defective, and their prevalence in her dating pool as a symptom of a sick society. (The "it's not their fault they grew up in a sick society" shtick is trying to treat this compassionately but instead mostly comes across as condescending. This is double-extra true for the manosphere section.)
The "Man Who Opts Out" section feels like it can go a bunch of different ways and the review only acknowledges one of them; see https://thingofthings.substack.com/i/171420890/in-defense-of-the-men-who-opt-out, but also the point about how dating over 25 without a prior relationship is a market for lemons but the way to overcome it is to have had non-romantic close relationships. Like, do we have specific reasons to believe that this in particular is a decisive factor?
Her prescriptions for society don't really have anything to do with the problem that she says she's trying to solve. They are basically just the same anti-man-hating-feminist talking points from above. There are a couple places where she sort of gestures at a Thing Society Could Do Differently that's a *small* step towards actionability for the specific problems of the specific men she's talking about (promote subcultures and more aggressive therapist filtering), but she doesn't elaborate on them at all.
I mostly agree with these being its weaknesses. I think I differ in finding her not quite as bad along them as you do (and, having been a man who dates women in the bay area, it helped that I found her to be better along them than most women in the bay area, if not as good as the women I most liked dating after moving away). But broadly directionally in alignment with this meta review.
Hey, writer of "Dating Men in the Bay Area" here. Just wanted to give a very sincere thank you for taking the time to write up such a detailed and helpful critique. :)
You make some excellent points about the weaker spots, and some of your takeaways don't match my opinions/intents, which shows me areas where I probably should have been clearer. Your comment gives me lots of helpful ideas for revisions, thank you!
Full disclosure: I've never written a long-form essay before this one, and this was written in a 10-hour marathon session of writing with no time for revising before the deadline. In all honesty, I am low-key mortified it made it as a finalist, because I cringe at so many people reading my un-revised writing. (I never dreamed it would make it as a finalist, so I just submitted to keep my personal goal of participating this year. Jokes on me, lmao.) The amount of feedback I've gotten has been overwhelming, but your critique is hands down the most helpful comment I've gotten in regards to actually learning how to be a good essayist.
Also really appreciate you linking to Ozy's piece! I wasn't aware of it until now, and I really enjoyed reading her perspective and feel she's changed my mind about some elements of dating "Men Who Opt Out."
Wow, I'm honestly shocked that you found my comment helpful; I'd have been nicer and more careful if I thought you were likely to read it! Thanks for your kind words.
I should disclose that the review also induced a certain amount of anxiety/feeling-judged in me personally, which I don't think should count against its merit but might have caused me to judge it a bit more harshly than was really fair. (The original version of my comment, posted privately for friends, had a final paragraph about this that I cut for being too personal for the public internet, but it's relevant context so I'm mentioning it.)
I'm really heartened to hear that a top finalist (one of only four to get substantial share in the prediction market) is from someone who isn't already a professional blogger or similar; this inspires me to try and put more of my own writing out there too, and I really hope you keep at it and we get to read more from you.
I think one thing that may help you understand the positive response to that review is knowledge of just how low the bar is for some of us men.
As trans people figured out long ago, gender is a performance. It is a role we act out to fulfill the expectations of society. The problem is, a lot of women (Hell! Even some men!) believe the performance is the real thing and don't look beyond it. When they see a man following the stage directions and nailing his lines, they believe that this is all he is, because that is what they were taught to believe. When they see a man who does something different though, they are immediately biased to view it in terms of how it relates to the script, and judgment soon follows:
Examples:
event: "He saves a kitten?"
gendered: "He's a hero!"
neutral: "He cares about animals."
..
event: "He likes video games?"
gendered: "He must be lazy"
neutral: "He must find them fun"
..
event: "Crying at mom's funeral"
gendered: "He can't control his emotions in front of a crowd"
neutral: "His mom just f-ing died!"
..
Not all of those comments are negative, but none of them align with how the man actually feels about the thing. The term for that is alienation. Even if you don't bother to perform the script yourself, the effects of it are still noticed and felt. The message becomes clear: we want the script, not the man who acts it out.
So imagine how it must feel to meet a person who actually does care about the person, and not the mask? Do you know how rare that is?
Probably not because the script has a way of hiding itself. Contrary to popular caricature, there is room in it for things like emotional vulnerability and crying. But the problem is that those things are only allowed at certain times and in a certain shape. There is a constraint. Since this is a comment and not a blog post, I will leave the details as an exercise to the reader. All I will say is that it's generally ok to talk to your wife about problems, but you can't tell her what REALLY keeps you up at night...
She thinks you're being open and honest with her, but it's just another script!
...
Out of all the women I've seen both in real life and online, I would say I've only met 3 who knew how to consistently get past men's barriers to see the real person underneath. One of them was a girl I knew in high school, another was a random girl I stumbled upon on reddit who couldn't understand why most guys she talked to ended up devoting themselves to her, and finally there is this author.
Three sightings in almost 30 years! That's all I ever got to see. And there was only ever one I ever got to talk to (though our time was meaningful). These women are so rare that they may as well be supernatural creatures.
I'm sure there are people who could write a more thorough and academic analysis on this subject if they put their mind to it, but I argue that the odds of a person having the awareness to even attempt to cover a topic like this is astronomically low.
So for me, it doesn't matter if it isn't perfect. It's a miracle that it's even here.
-----
epilogue: I am aware of the fact that I may just be an incredibly unlucky man who struggles to have authentic relationships with women, but I have reasons to believe the distribution is bimodal in that case. I suspect that people who are fortunate enough to have good relationships with women will hold the article to a higher standard that it doesn't meet, while those that are unlucky are just surprised it exists at all. There are a lot of us these days.
So my understanding, and a big part of why I wasn't impressed with that part of the review, is that over the past couple years there's been quite a lot of online discourse saying things like that. The trigger was possibly Richard Reeves's 2022 book Of Boys and Men (though Reeves is actually saying something slightly different, with more of a focus on the problems of lower-class men and boys in particular), but a lot of opinion columnists and Substackers have picked it up and run with it in a more emotional-expression-norms-centered direction. https://www.ggd.world/p/automation-ageing-and-mens-loss-of is a representative example.
The performance and alienation thing is also a mainstay of feminist writing. Granted, until a few years ago it was really hard to say anything about men's problems as a feminist without a lot of "of course women still have it worse" disclaimers that tended to undermine the sympathy signal, because your fellow feminists would skin you alive. But I really think that has become a lot less true lately.
Maybe a lot of ACX readers don't otherwise read much of the kind of political or cultural commentary where this kind of thing is prevalent. Or maybe it matters that it's coming from someone who has a personal stake in men's psychic success, because she wants to find a psychically successful male partner.
I've had a similar experience, although I have put it down to my being a generally weird and manipulative person.
I have had about half a dozen real romantic relationships in my life, with three of them being very long-term & significant; I have found that it is nearly pointless to even *try* taking off the mask—it is generally pretty clear what a woman (or man, for that matter) wants & expects, and giving it to her is just... easier... than violating those wants & expectations. Mostly, they don't like Real Kveldred nearly as much as Silver-Tongue Kveldred... so to speak, heh. When you want to end the dalliance, then you can stop saying & doing All the Right Things, and the problem solves itself.
...except in one case. In one single case, she liked & loved me *more* as my Real Self(™). In one single case, she really truly did mean it when she said she loved me for who I am. In one single case, my real thoughts & feelings truly *were* of interest to her, and—apparently, somehow—appealing besides.
.
Of course, I decided to break her heart & destroy everything, that time. Took me twelve years, but I eventually found a way.
I have "Opted Out" ever since. I won't find her like again, I think.
Sort of a tangent, but what kind of psychopath would want to shame you for crying at your mother's funeral? Is that an opinion that you have actually encountered?
Looking at the top one, I think the market is very skewed by the people betting on it, who probably all are the subjects of that review 😁
Alphaschool was definitely a runaway first for me, but I found Joan of Arc offputting. Maybe because I have a general antipathy to taking supernatural claims seriously, so I found the focus on that side of her story (instead of the history) to be a turnoff.
Did you also dislike the Miracle of the Sun lit review that Scott posted yesterday?
Not to the same degree - I think Scott's a better writer and does better job of being skeptical at the places I would be (and unlike Joan of Arc, that's not a story where he could've chosen to focus on the interesting history instead) - but yeah, definitely at least somewhat turned off by the subject.
nooo Joan of Arc was the best :(
Looking at it now, my top 3 Russo-Ukrainian, Alpha School, and Joan of Arc are in the top 3. I wonder if Joan will get a bit of a boost from the voting opening the same day as the sun miracle post; while reading about the documentation of the sun miracle I kept thinking of the equally well documented Joan of Arc miracles
I put 1. Joan 2. Clincial Trials 3. Russia-Ukraine. I haven't even read the Sun post yet, so that didn't influence me.
I'm really surprised that the Clinical Trials post wasn't more popular.
Just voted 50 M - and the numbers changed a lot, must be very early times and/or a tiny market. Not much of a surprise there: ACX readers do like to read about school (see earlier winners), and the "men of bay area" made it in into the top-liked posts on acx (see archive "TOP") . And all were good reads. Not to forget: one should bet on the piece one believes most others will vote for.
I wonder if the betting markets are simply being set around which one has the most comments. This might make sense if you think the most commented ones were the most read ones, and that people wouldn't vote for a review they didn't read.
Yeah, none of the reviews I loved made the finals. The only finalist I really liked is getting almost no mentions here. And that stoopit thing about dating busted men, which irritates me even to *think* about, is probably going to win.
I agree, the 'Dating Men' article was terrible. It was just a regurgitation of truisms about the ennui of modern life that have been circulating for decades ('Bowling Alone' is based on an essay written in 1995!), with a few Forer statements sprinkled in to give the illusion of profound insight into the human condition. It's the quality I'd expect from a below-average think piece in The Atlantic.
Conversely, 'The ACX Commentariat' was excellent. Genuinely original analysis.
Oh, that’s my number one! Did I say that, or do we just think alike?
I think I do recall you saying that, but it's my number one too! My favourites tend to be the ones that rely on skills I lack, and data-crunching is well outside my wheelhouse.
Ha, I was starting to feel bad for having voted for 'Dating Men' which is getting so much hate here. You have just found a good justification for my choice.
This didn't reflect my personal ranking, but it does reflect how I guess other people will vote.
(perhaps some will detect an implied admission that I am distinct from the crowd in my preferences and thoughts. If so, please include that I also feel a touch of smugness.)
Two of my top 3 choices are in the top 3 on Manifold, but one is way down there. There's a pretty big disconnect there.
Good luck to all the finalists! This year was great!!!
> This year is back to ranked choice voting
As someone who directly benefited from approval voting last year, I feel obligated to complain about the switch back to ranked choice voting. (Jk, it's fine.)
ugh, approval voting is so vastly superior to IRV.
https://www.rangevoting.org/BayRegsFig
I'm not sure regret minimization is what we actually want for the use case of picking an essay contest winner.
that is a nonsense statement. regret just expresses the loss from the optimum of whatever social preference function you use. you can argue about what is the correct social welfare function, but you can't argue that whatever function you use, its output is what you want to optimize. That's not even a coherent statement. of course, none of this is obvious to you because it's a super esoteric subject and you clearly aren't familiar with it.
What was the rationale for promoting exactly one honorable mention to finalist status?
in the intro to "school" acx said it was because it was a good counterpoint to the other finalist about alpha school
I suppose that makes sense. I remain sad that "JFK Assassination Conspiracy Theories" did not get promoted to finalist, it was brilliant and I think I'd have bet on it making the top three.
I didn't read that one during initial voting. I'll have to check it out!
My favorite of the initial submissions was the review for The Witness (the line puzzle video game). It set up a great narrative about practicing rationality skills in a legible video game overworld.
I was very disappointed that there weren't more finalist reviews of ordinary non-book media. I don't think the Ollantay review really counts, since the review centered on the historical events surrounding the play more than the play itself.
I didn't like the review of The Witness; I didn't feel that it successfully made the case that there was anything there that I should care about. It is possible that my feelings here may have been indirectly influenced by my annoyance at Jonathan Blow's bad opinions/behavior about programming language design.
I read and rated about half of the submitted reviews, mostly chosen at random. I think of the ones that I gave 9/10 or higher as the "top tier", of which there were six, and of these only one was of a work of traditional media: Kiki's Delivery Service.
For fun, here's all my ratings; this is a total rank order of how much I liked all the reviews I read, though I don't claim perfect calibration or consistency.
★★★★★ ("the best one, I hope it wins and the author leverages this to cultivate an audience and get published more"): Joan of Arc*
★★★★⯪ ("actively interesting"): The Life's Work Of Banerjee, Duflo, and Kremer; JFK Assassination Conspiracy Theories**; Alpha School***; Ollantay*; State Of Competitive Debating (Unions) Address; Kiki's Delivery Service
★★★★☆ ("contains something unusually worth thinking about"): Participation in Phase I Clinical Pharmaceutical Research***; The Astral Codex Ten Commentariat ("Why Do We Suck?")***; We Should Never Have Gone To Mammoth Caves; My Imagination; Person of Interest; The Last Of Us, Part II; Pregnancy; The Drum Major Instinct; Adult Gymnastics
★★★⯪☆ ("thought-provoking"): Earth; Judaism; Arbitraging Several Dozen Online Casinos; She-Ra and the Princesses Of Power; Of Mice, Mechanisms, and Dementia***; Museum of Science; Summer Camp For Sluts / Young Swingers' Week; Skibidi Toilet; Deathbed Ballads; My Father's Instant Mashed Potatoes***; Lesbian Fanfiction; Arnold Schoenberg - Drei Klavierstucke; The Aphorism "Music Is The Universal Language Of Mankind"
★★★☆☆ ("replacement-level"): On Taste; DALL-E; L'Ambroisie; Rubbermaid Products; North Korea; Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare; The Soul Of Karl Friston; Pure Mathematics; 11 Poetic Forms; A New Theodicy; Disco Elysium (1, by EH); Simple Twist Of Fate; Time's Arrow; Google's Hiring Process; Gacha Games; Mountaintop; The Beginning After The End Of Humanity Circus; Phoenix Theatre at Great Northern Mall
★★⯪☆☆ ("I didn't personally like it but can acknowledge its value"): Pythia; Mad Investor Chaos; School***; Zermelo-Fraenkel Set Theory; The Russo-Ukrainian War***; Getting Over It With Bennett Foddy; Pathologic Classic HD; Disco Elysium (2, by DC); A Dance Remix Of Chappell Roan's "Pink Pony Club"; An American Football Game
★★☆☆☆ ("failed to make the case for itself"): The Men Are Not Alright; Identity; Einstein's World-View; The Soul Of An Anti-Woke Intellectual; The Witness; The Spreadsheet; Scientific Peer Review; Dating Men In The Bay Area***; Gender; Islamic Geometric Patterns In The Metropolitan Museum Of Art*; How Many Super Mario Games Are There; Nicotine As A Nootropic; Which Sports? Why Sports?; The Pebble, Jewel of the 1960 World Series
★⯪☆☆☆ ("fundamentally flawed"): Death (Mata Hari, Princess Di, Joan of Arc); Marriage; Project Xanadu - The Internet That Might Have Been***; Feminism; The Sermon On The Mount, Review 2; Love; Meditations on Moloch
★☆☆☆☆ ("provoked active annoyance"): The Synaptic Plasticity and Memory Hypothesis***; Lublin Castle; The Sermon On The Mount; Civil War; Effective Altruism / Rationalism
⯪☆☆☆☆ ("I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul"): 0th Dimension
* Eventual finalist that I read and rated during the initial phase of voting.
** Eventual honorable mention.
*** Finalist that I read only after it was posted on ACX proper.
It seems like you never read:
Bishop's Castle https://docs.google.com/document/d/1d0vRSj1E93joWWvbUen2XGuDjN_mM94ybMIAADzM2fo/edit?tab=t.0#heading=h.a1yucj1u3lx5
Miniatur Wunderland
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1a3q0Z2tuPLLbDeg5-pfEffkajGjrfPDwE7ZMs7uaWQs/edit?tab=t.0#heading=h.ya1rt12znfg4
Honorable mentions I enjoyed, maybe you'll give them a try (although your taste is not like mine). Bishop's Castle is about a mildly crazy American man constructing a more or less real castle on his own, and Miniatur Wunderland is about a German model city so huge and intricate that quantitative hugeness gives it some mindblowing quality.
Have read them now, giving Bishop's Castle 7/10 and Miniatur Wunderland 6/10.
I had a different distribution of rankings (I read and voted on nearly all the submissions,) but I was pleased to finish having awarded a full stretch across the point scale, from ten to one, in a distribution clustered around five, without calibrating my scoring after the fact, and I can confirm that the 0th Dimension review received my coveted 1 point rating.
Having not ready any not posted to ACX, now I feel like I really should have seeing this list. I strongly agree with you about Joan and its author.
I was inspired to do this partly because I didn't vote in last year's first round due to not having bothered to read enough reviews, and then one of the few that I did read (Don't Make No Waves, Don't Back No Losers) didn't make the finals despite being in my opinion better than most of the finalists, and I wished I'd voted for it.
> Kiki's Delivery Service
...I wrote that one. Thank you!!! I think you just made my day.
I unfortunately got a concussion on the Friday before reviews were due back in May, so I ended it kind of suddenly, and (reading it later to edit and publish myself) realized my submission was full of typos.
A few weeks later was LessOnline, where I apologized to Scott about the quality in person. He chuckled, smiled, and said, "A concussion? Oh, that's no excuse. Daniel Böttger wrote his review with a brain tumor! 😀" (He reviewed On The Marble Cliffs back in 2023.) Which... I mean... can't argue with that.
I do think there's something to be said for brevity.
>I was very disappointed that there weren't more finalist reviews of ordinary non-book media.
I read a few of the reviews of films and video games, and on the whole they seemed to be exceptionally poor. Far, far below the standard that I would expect for this competition. I'm not surprised that basically none of them made it in.
In general, I found the reviews of ordinary non-book media on average much less appealing than other reviews. There were a few laudable exceptions, and to me The Witness was one of them, together with Pathologic Classic and The Tale of Princess Kaguya. But none of them reached my top 5, and probably not even top 10. And after that, there were a few good ones (Face The Fear, Worldbuild The Future; Disco Elysium by DC; Person of Interest; The Zone Of Interest), but most others I didn't find appealing.
It might be me. It's easier to get me interested about some aspect of the real world than about some work of fiction. It's one more level of detachment of the real world. But apparently other people also didn't like the reviews very much, for whatever reasons they had.
I also found it brilliant.
Is there a link to this one?
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1a3q0Z2tuPLLbDeg5-pfEffkajGjrfPDwE7ZMs7uaWQs/preview?tab=t.0#heading=h.8aqayzf6n8vk
Eh... not as good as I'd hoped, I'd have to say. It's basically just a quick, Wiki-level summary of all the usual suspects, with all of the usual conclusions ("was it THIS party? no. but was it THIS OTHER party? also no. but was it...")—nothing surprising or enlightening. I learned nothing! (...except that there is a fellow by the name of "Bonar"!)
It *is* entertainingly written, though, I'll give it that. (And thanks for posting the link—I was dreading having to go find it myself–) Joan of Arc remains the best, if you ask me.
Did you already have a high prior on the official story?
For convenience:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/everything-except-book-review-contest Announcement
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/choose-nonbook-review-finalists-2025 Semifinals (all entries)
Immediately before Yom Kippur: random article on the Fatima Sun Miracle
Immediately ater Yom Kippur: get to voting
Truly the goat
Yes that's good to know. https://www.aessuccess.com.co
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It'd be interesting to review all the prior review contests and see how well likes and/or comments correlate to eventual contest placement. I'm not sure in which direction a strong correlation would make me update, or on what. One wants to believe there's such a thing as silent majorities, hidden gems, underdog upsets, etc., I suppose...more narratively satisfying. But reality doesn't grade on a story arc. Either way, it's clear that despite some commentariat drift, we (or at least, voters) largely continue to like what we like, year after year. This is heartening, I guess.
I hope he holds this contest again. I was in the middle of a big move and so couldn't get the time to write what I wanted.
Alpha School is my bet.
Mine too
Replicating my feedback here: While this year did have entries I found valuable for myself, I would prefer a little more traditional review next time, such as books, movies, websites; basically, things I can go out and experience for myself with relatively little effort or manipulation of spacetime.
Agreed!
So I can say I called it, I think Scott wrote Joan of Arc. It reminds me too much of the Fatima article.
In that case, go pick up some free mana. https://manifold.markets/Wott/who-reviewed-joan-of-arc-in-acxs-ev
I didn’t like any of the entrants this year. The finalists were clearly better than most of the entrants in the first round, but I wasn’t enthused by them.
In contrast, I think many of Scott’s own articles are great. This kind of writing turns out to be surprisingly hard to do well.
I thought "My father's instant mashed potatoes" was one of the best essays I've ever read, full stop.
Same, excepting the Joan of Arc piece.
In very surprised to see how badly ollantay is doing
I didn't like it very much, mostly because I felt I couldn't _trust_ it; it seemed to overstate, rather badly, the strength of connection between the play and the real-world events allegedly connected to it.
[EDITED to add:] ... And that connection was the real subject of the review, much more than e.g. the actual play itself.
Exactly. The review itself seemed interesting, but then I learned from the comments that it wasn't actually *true*, which completely defeated the purpose.
Agreed with gjm -- my opinion of Ollantay went down quite a bit after reading the comments that accused it of misrepresenting the historical facts.
Mine went up: I reframed it as a Sam Kriss style pseudohistory instead of the flawed historical narrative I initially thought it was.
The discussion of those historical facts was left frustratingly unconcluded. The reviewer responded to the claim of misrepresentation (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-396/comment/148891307) and then there was never a counter-response.
In terms of sheer effort and quality it has to be "The Astral Codex Tex Commentariat". That one was a Scott level of analytical work. And it wasn't just data for it's own sake, it really cut to the heart of - what does it mean for a comment section to be good? Why do we keep coming back and what are we trying to accomplish?
I really hope the mice and dementia and synaptic plasticity reviews don't win. Both authors pretty badly misrepresent the field that they are writing about, and make pretty serious mistakes.
I absolutely agree. That is the only one of the finalists that made a deep impression on me.
I found the Commentariat stopped short at precisely the point where it would have been interesting. The author scraped the entire commentariat history, did some half-baked analysis, ignored the anomalies and outliers, and called it a day. Big anticlimax after the amount of preparation done.
My suggestion for next year's contest, which I forgot to put in my voting form so I'll put it here, is to have divisions based on word count. It feels wrong that a short, pithy essay might have to compete head to head with an exhaustively researched review of historiography or scientific literature. I might like the two pieces equally as much but it will be hard for me as a voter not to vote for the one that was obviously 10x more work to write.
Oh and I almost forgot -- thank you to Scott for running this contest and for all the writers who contributed! There's so much excellent, thought-provoking writing that gets surfaced here that probably would never have gotten an audience otherwise.
Please please please let it be the Bay Area men woman or the Ukraine war bro. Alpha school is too on brand
dear god, why use IRV instead of something good like score voting or approval voting? if you really MUST use a ranked voting method, there are myriad forms of condorcet that are decent, or even borda or bucklin. IRV is just the worst.
It's funny because you're making exactly the same point as the character in this xkcd making fun of people who take voting systems too seriously: https://xkcd.com/1844/
(I do agree though)
I'm literally one of the world's top experts on this subject. Yes I take it seriously. I have put 20 years of my life into it. I co-founded arguably the only serious non-profit working in the space. and it is hands down the most important subject for humanity to be focusing on.
https://www.rangevoting.org/RelImport
Score and approval voting promote the least offensive candidates, which I'm not sure is what we want for an essay contest.
there is no such thing as "least offensive". it is not even an objective quantifiable concept. there is just total utility. it is mathematically proven that that's the thing you want to maximize. any other social preference formula leads to absurdities or self-contradictions.
ScoreCoting.net/UtilFoundns
Can you outline the argument you want to use here for score voting, *specifically using the essay contest as a concrete example*? Otherwise it's hard to assess whether the relevant assumptions are applicable here.
it has the highest voter satisfaction efficiency, with essentially any reasonable modeling assumptions about voter behavior. honest voting, strategic voting, various proportional mixtures, etc.
https://www.rangevoting.org/BayRegsFig
My basic criteria for these is
1. Was it enjoyable to read?
2. Was the take distinct, i.e. not something I've seen in other perspectives covering similar subject matter?
3. Did it educate or inform me in a way I couldn't have gotten by Googling the thing it's reviewing?
4. Did the author make the subject interesting (even if I'm not already in a subcultural niche predisposed to find it interesting)?
My favorites were Joan of Arc, Ollantay, and My Father's Mashed Potatoes, by a pretty wide margin.
How interesting - those were my three favorites too! I didn't think that hard about it. They're the three that stuck with me in the most positive way.
Weirdly, I found the others in Manifold's current top (Alpha School, Dating Men in the Bay Area, and The Russo-Ukrainian War) personally much lower on my list. I'm struggling to elucidate why beyond "vibes," though. I felt judgmental about the authors, which may well just be a reflection on me. Perhaps the personal nature makes them more popular to readers, though.
I don't mean this in an impolite way to the writers or enjoyers of those reviews, but the first two you mentioned both rubbed me the wrong way with a vague sense of "this flatters the interests and concerns of the (primary) ACX reader-base; I'm not actually that impressed by the writing or insights here."
> this flatters the interests and concerns of the (primary) ACX reader-base
Yes, I also felt exactly this way, even though I liked both of them.
Interesting. Joan was my favorite as well, but I thought the Ollantay and IMP ones were terrible - I'd put them near the bottom.
2,6,7
Lol. I voted Dating Men in the Bay Area, Alpha School and Russio-Ukrainian War. I was considering swapping Alpha School with Joan of Arc. Then I check the manifold market.
a 1-10 ranking as a requirement to constitute a review. As far as https://www.my-wisely.org I remember, none of the book review submissions
Voting for the non-book review contest is open until end of day Monday, October 13, using ranked choice—select your 1st, 2nd, and 3rd favorites from the seven finalists listed below.
Here’s a quick refresher on the finalists, in order of appearance: https://www.myfordbenefits.com.co
- Alpha School – A sharp, possibly satirical take on educational institutions and their branding.
- School – A minimalist title that may belie a deeper reflection on learning environments.
Remarkable work it’s rare to find input this clear, thoughtful, and effective. https://www.ez-passde.com
If you’ve read this year’s finalists, cast your ballot for your favorites. Voting closes Monday, October 13 (end of day). We’re back to ranked choice voting this year, so please select your first, second, and third favorite reviews. https://www.ezpass-ri.com