1. There were some amazing submissions that were IMO at least as good as the best finalists. Maybe the readers should be able to choose half the finalists in the next edition?
2. I'd honestly read more reviews by Scott. Hopefully this review contest didn't dis-incentivize him to post more book reviews.
3. Reviewers should somehow be incentivized to cite papers and other sources to back their opinions on the books. Some reviews were flippantly dismissive of the books' opinions, and I didn't know how seriously to take them as they were unsubstantiated.
Thanks for organizing, would love to see this again. Strongly recommend a word/character cap next year to encourage more concise writing - in my opinion it's more skillful to write a 1000 word review than a 5000 word one.
Heads-up: Your form presently allows people to vote multiple times. (I grant this is true regardless what setting you use (e.g. if you limit it to one by Google account, people could just make several Google accounts), but there's not even an attempt to prevent it at the moment.)
It's hard to untangle liking the content of the book vs the content of the review. And without reading all the books it's hard to tell if the review is accurate. Any advice for voting more rationally?
Thumbs up for the book review! As others are saying, it was great and thanks for all the effort - from scott and all the contributors! If this ever gets repeated, here are couple of books that a budding reviewer might enjoy reviewing (I'd do it myself, but my writing style is bland. I also dont have the guts to compete so openly...)
* Ted Chiang's short story collection. it is very much sci-fi for 'clever people', for lack of better term. there are some stories where i notice things that a layman couldnt possibly notice (e.g. one story is just one big analogy to entropy); makes me wonder how much I am not noticing in other stories!
* Nothing is True and Everything is Possible, by Peter Pomerantsev. I have not read it yet, but his podcast interview on 'Subject to Change' podcast is packed with some fun and intriging stories of life in Russia.
So, how do I vote tactically with approval voting? Assuming it's _very important_ to me that my favourite review wins, and, if it doesn't, it's _very important_ that my second-favourite wins and so on. How many should I vote for?
(I'm mostly joking; I know it doesn't matter that much. But I am interested in the theory here...)
Bwah-hah-hah! Cast my votes, so now waiting with evil glee the final results and the resulting "what? no way!" disagreements.
This was great fun, I'd love to do it again. Thanks so much for giving us all this chance to read and vote on a "selected by personal interest of the reviewer, not a pre-selected slate of reviews" assortment, and thanks to the entrants for their time, effort, and willingness to put these before us for criticism and assessment.
I approve of approval voting, but it would be nice if there was a way to participate in the voting even if we haven't read all of the reviews—like a Yes / No / Didn't Read, where the latter would not affect the score of that review relative to the others.
I want to use this as an opportunity to kindly request you host more user generated content contests in the future.
I believe there are many great writers in this community with fascinating things to say. Unfortunately, many of these people don't write (or share their content) because they don't have an audience. I can attest to how discouraging this can feel. By offering the possibility of an audience (even in the form of the non-successful entries linked to in the Google Doc), it will help promote lots of great writing.
To be specific - I think you could very easily run a "best SSC-like essay competition" amongst the userbase and generate absolute gold and help people discover lots of wonderful new writiers. To make your life easier, you could get a team of volunteers to read the initial submissions and run the process similar to the book review one.
Personally, I was a bit disappointed by the theme of the reviews, as I was voting I honestly had to remember "wait, which one of the 5 books that make analogies between the decline of the Roman empire and the decadence of the US is this one?"
It does feel like the selection could have used more books that are just fun factual rides (e.g. the one about Galen, or the one about the digitalization of books) or at least fun investigation/science/life-experience, etc. Politics is such a silly subject and it kills the mind. Pundit predicting the fall of America because:
1. Berton Woods
2. Waves at China and Roman Empire
3. I'm not a racist/evangelist/anti-equalitarian <BUT>
I'm going to list off word counts, in case anyone wants to take them into account when voting.
Order Without Law review: 14,595 + 5,191 on another site
On the Natural Faculties review: 7,319
Progress and Poverty review: 18,343
Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are review: 5,330
Why Buddhism Is True review: 4,341
Double Fold review: 6,817
The Wizard and the Prophet review: 5,669
Through the Eye of a Needle review: 5,412
The Years of Lyndon Johnson review: 2,138
Addiction by Design review: 5,064
The Accidental Superpower review: 9,017
Humankind review: 7,256
The Collapse of Complex Societies review: 5,554
Where's My Flying Car review: 2,811
Down and Out in Paris and London review: 13,445
How Children Fail review: 4,509
Plagues and Peoples review: 4,200
Quotes of the source are included because you have to read them and they were included by the reviewer; Scott's notes at the top (and in one case bottom) are not.
It was amazing! A big thanks to all reviewers and to Scott!
One thing that was not working properly: in the runners-up file, links were generally broken. I know this is hard to fix in hindsight. But if you host a contest again, Scott, (I so much hope you do!), you could ask for a format that allows you to keep the links working without much effort.
Is it possible to see what the votes for the non finalists looked like? I voted for a few and would be interested in seeing how my thoughts match the consensus. Additionally the non finalists were hit or miss enough that I don't want to read all of them but would probably be interested in ones that just missed the cut.
I voted for Progress And Poverty (interesting topic), Double Fold (the librarians flooding the comments to explain how it was "all wrong" was rather revealing) and Addiction By Design (important topic).
Dear Scott, would it be possible to extend the voting time by, say, two weeks? It seems hard to match reading the final entries with a busy schedule. Also, thanks a lot for organizing this, I think it was a great endeavour!
On the Natural Faculties was probably my favorite because it 1) changed my views about ancient medical science, 2) concerned a text we all weren't already reading, 3) and most importantly was written fairly well.
I can't imagine why you decided to gather less information in the main contest (Approval Voting) than you did in the auxiliary book review contest (Score Voting).
Also, Score Voting is something that ought to work well with a separate "ballot" on the bottom of each review (it's always easier for people to rate the thing they just read).
Funny story. I thought my favorite review of the contest, by a longshot, was the Arabian Nights one. I was just waiting to vote for it. I also figured it was the one Scott was pretty sure would win in those predictions he posted a while back. Only after I reviewed and quantified all 17 in order to vote did I wonder where it was and go find it, only to find out it was his review and not in the contest at all! Doh! No wonder if was so fitting with the themes of the blog.
Was on the fence a bit about recommending the Down and Out review, as it mostly summarises highlights from the book in a digestible format and praises Orwell, rather than being especially strong as criticism per se. However I pondered on this and realised that "summarise highlights of a book into a format digestible over about 20-30 mins" is actually also a good thing which I in fact come to SSC/ACX for, so I don't feel bad about voting for it.
Also voted for the review of The Wizard and the Prophet, but felt it might have done without the bit about the tattoos, however neat a framing device it is.
Scott: I emailed you several times from a couple of email addresses saying that I sent a book review in, never heard back from you.
Putting my suggestions as a comment here:
1. There were some amazing submissions that were IMO at least as good as the best finalists. Maybe the readers should be able to choose half the finalists in the next edition?
2. I'd honestly read more reviews by Scott. Hopefully this review contest didn't dis-incentivize him to post more book reviews.
3. Reviewers should somehow be incentivized to cite papers and other sources to back their opinions on the books. Some reviews were flippantly dismissive of the books' opinions, and I didn't know how seriously to take them as they were unsubstantiated.
Thanks for organizing, would love to see this again. Strongly recommend a word/character cap next year to encourage more concise writing - in my opinion it's more skillful to write a 1000 word review than a 5000 word one.
Heads-up: Your form presently allows people to vote multiple times. (I grant this is true regardless what setting you use (e.g. if you limit it to one by Google account, people could just make several Google accounts), but there's not even an attempt to prevent it at the moment.)
Thanks for running the contest!
It's hard to untangle liking the content of the book vs the content of the review. And without reading all the books it's hard to tell if the review is accurate. Any advice for voting more rationally?
Thumbs up for the book review! As others are saying, it was great and thanks for all the effort - from scott and all the contributors! If this ever gets repeated, here are couple of books that a budding reviewer might enjoy reviewing (I'd do it myself, but my writing style is bland. I also dont have the guts to compete so openly...)
* Ted Chiang's short story collection. it is very much sci-fi for 'clever people', for lack of better term. there are some stories where i notice things that a layman couldnt possibly notice (e.g. one story is just one big analogy to entropy); makes me wonder how much I am not noticing in other stories!
* Nothing is True and Everything is Possible, by Peter Pomerantsev. I have not read it yet, but his podcast interview on 'Subject to Change' podcast is packed with some fun and intriging stories of life in Russia.
So, how do I vote tactically with approval voting? Assuming it's _very important_ to me that my favourite review wins, and, if it doesn't, it's _very important_ that my second-favourite wins and so on. How many should I vote for?
(I'm mostly joking; I know it doesn't matter that much. But I am interested in the theory here...)
Bwah-hah-hah! Cast my votes, so now waiting with evil glee the final results and the resulting "what? no way!" disagreements.
This was great fun, I'd love to do it again. Thanks so much for giving us all this chance to read and vote on a "selected by personal interest of the reviewer, not a pre-selected slate of reviews" assortment, and thanks to the entrants for their time, effort, and willingness to put these before us for criticism and assessment.
I approve of approval voting, but it would be nice if there was a way to participate in the voting even if we haven't read all of the reviews—like a Yes / No / Didn't Read, where the latter would not affect the score of that review relative to the others.
I didn't like any of the book reviews, but I voted to approve 2, 4, 6, and 15.
Thank you Scott for organizing this.
I want to use this as an opportunity to kindly request you host more user generated content contests in the future.
I believe there are many great writers in this community with fascinating things to say. Unfortunately, many of these people don't write (or share their content) because they don't have an audience. I can attest to how discouraging this can feel. By offering the possibility of an audience (even in the form of the non-successful entries linked to in the Google Doc), it will help promote lots of great writing.
To be specific - I think you could very easily run a "best SSC-like essay competition" amongst the userbase and generate absolute gold and help people discover lots of wonderful new writiers. To make your life easier, you could get a team of volunteers to read the initial submissions and run the process similar to the book review one.
Is there a difference between voting No and not voting on an entry? (Is the winner just going to be the one with the most Yes votes?)
Finally!
Somehow I got the impression that all 80 were finalists XD Will the remainder be put up on ACX at some point?
Did the reviewers pick the book they wanted to review?
Thanks for running this, tons of enjoyable content. So many, it's hard to remember all of them!
These reviews were all so good and so interesting! I was really impressed by the quality of all the finalists. Many thanks to everyone involved.
Am I allowed to vote if I have a gestalt impression of the reviews?
I did enjoy the reviews quite a lot, and I hate to say it, but... I think 17 is just too many. They kind of tend to blur together after a while :-(
The 1001 nights review is still the best one by far, lol
Personally, I was a bit disappointed by the theme of the reviews, as I was voting I honestly had to remember "wait, which one of the 5 books that make analogies between the decline of the Roman empire and the decadence of the US is this one?"
It does feel like the selection could have used more books that are just fun factual rides (e.g. the one about Galen, or the one about the digitalization of books) or at least fun investigation/science/life-experience, etc. Politics is such a silly subject and it kills the mind. Pundit predicting the fall of America because:
1. Berton Woods
2. Waves at China and Roman Empire
3. I'm not a racist/evangelist/anti-equalitarian <BUT>
are a dime a dozen.
I'm going to list off word counts, in case anyone wants to take them into account when voting.
Order Without Law review: 14,595 + 5,191 on another site
On the Natural Faculties review: 7,319
Progress and Poverty review: 18,343
Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are review: 5,330
Why Buddhism Is True review: 4,341
Double Fold review: 6,817
The Wizard and the Prophet review: 5,669
Through the Eye of a Needle review: 5,412
The Years of Lyndon Johnson review: 2,138
Addiction by Design review: 5,064
The Accidental Superpower review: 9,017
Humankind review: 7,256
The Collapse of Complex Societies review: 5,554
Where's My Flying Car review: 2,811
Down and Out in Paris and London review: 13,445
How Children Fail review: 4,509
Plagues and Peoples review: 4,200
Quotes of the source are included because you have to read them and they were included by the reviewer; Scott's notes at the top (and in one case bottom) are not.
It was amazing! A big thanks to all reviewers and to Scott!
One thing that was not working properly: in the runners-up file, links were generally broken. I know this is hard to fix in hindsight. But if you host a contest again, Scott, (I so much hope you do!), you could ask for a format that allows you to keep the links working without much effort.
Is it possible to see what the votes for the non finalists looked like? I voted for a few and would be interested in seeing how my thoughts match the consensus. Additionally the non finalists were hit or miss enough that I don't want to read all of them but would probably be interested in ones that just missed the cut.
I voted for Progress And Poverty (interesting topic), Double Fold (the librarians flooding the comments to explain how it was "all wrong" was rather revealing) and Addiction By Design (important topic).
I was about to comment about why Arabian Nights wasn't here. I definitely hadn't realized that one was written by Scott!
I was conflicted between voting "more reviews" because more is better, and "same as now" because so many reviews are hard to remember and evaluate.
My actual preference is "same number of reviews, but more often".
Reading the entries was incredibly time consuming. I strongly suggest that you filter down the finalists better next time.
They are all so good...
Dear Scott, would it be possible to extend the voting time by, say, two weeks? It seems hard to match reading the final entries with a busy schedule. Also, thanks a lot for organizing this, I think it was a great endeavour!
On the Natural Faculties was probably my favorite because it 1) changed my views about ancient medical science, 2) concerned a text we all weren't already reading, 3) and most importantly was written fairly well.
Note to self: Stop reading Open Threads.
I can't imagine why you decided to gather less information in the main contest (Approval Voting) than you did in the auxiliary book review contest (Score Voting).
Also, Score Voting is something that ought to work well with a separate "ballot" on the bottom of each review (it's always easier for people to rate the thing they just read).
Funny story. I thought my favorite review of the contest, by a longshot, was the Arabian Nights one. I was just waiting to vote for it. I also figured it was the one Scott was pretty sure would win in those predictions he posted a while back. Only after I reviewed and quantified all 17 in order to vote did I wonder where it was and go find it, only to find out it was his review and not in the contest at all! Doh! No wonder if was so fitting with the themes of the blog.
If you want to keep exploring alternate voting methods for these, I suggest using this website next time for quadratic voting: https://qv.geek.sg/
Was on the fence a bit about recommending the Down and Out review, as it mostly summarises highlights from the book in a digestible format and praises Orwell, rather than being especially strong as criticism per se. However I pondered on this and realised that "summarise highlights of a book into a format digestible over about 20-30 mins" is actually also a good thing which I in fact come to SSC/ACX for, so I don't feel bad about voting for it.
Also voted for the review of The Wizard and the Prophet, but felt it might have done without the bit about the tattoos, however neat a framing device it is.