Promoted to curated: Many posts that we’ve curated have been literature and book reviews, with the general reasoning being that it’s much easier to learn from others who have already thought about a topic than to rederive everything from scratch, and that there is a lot of value in importing other people’s models into the broad rationalist ontology in a way that furthers understanding.
This post feels to me like it’s roughly doing the same, but instead of it reviewing a book or a scientific field, I would classify it as a “culture review”, which I think is valuable for many of the same reasons. In the same way it seems valuable to learn facts and models from established scientific fields, it’s also valuable to learn norms and social coordination mechanisms from established cultures.
Even a month later I am still thinking about this post when trying to understand how to build functional institutions, and it has given me a pointer towards a perspective on coordination that I didn’t have before.
I think a better version of this post would have expanded more on the cultural review aspects, and possible summarized some more insights into what the Amish actually practice, possibly with some more concrete examples.
This post feels to me like it’s roughly doing the same, but instead of it reviewing a book or a scientific field...
Well, to be fair, it is also a book review. :P
I think a better version of this post would have expanded more on the cultural review aspects, and possible summarized some more insights into what the Amish actually practice, possibly with some more concrete examples.
Fair, although worth noting that such an expanded version of the post would simply be the entire chapter from Legal Systems Different From Ours (available here, although I think this looks slightly different than the version I got on kindle).
I always have mixed feelings when I read book reviews that largely are quotes from the book.
I think that’s a useful service when the book is long (especially if it’s overly long) and there is some actual intellectual labor in figuring out how to abridge it down to the essentials.
In this case I think the original chapter was pretty close to maximally compact, and if I were to have done lots of quotes it’d have essentially just been a link-post, and I’d feel uncomfortable copying the chapter whole cloth.
I do encourage people who were interested in this post to read the whole thing if they’re interested in more details.
(Legal Systems as a whole is quite long and I think individual posts that highlight particular chapters are quite valuable. My reading of the book was directly downstream of this previous, recent LessWrong post about legal systems created by prison inmates, was another chapter that illuminated key group rationality concepts for me)
Promoted to curated: Many posts that we’ve curated have been literature and book reviews, with the general reasoning being that it’s much easier to learn from others who have already thought about a topic than to rederive everything from scratch, and that there is a lot of value in importing other people’s models into the broad rationalist ontology in a way that furthers understanding.
This post feels to me like it’s roughly doing the same, but instead of it reviewing a book or a scientific field, I would classify it as a “culture review”, which I think is valuable for many of the same reasons. In the same way it seems valuable to learn facts and models from established scientific fields, it’s also valuable to learn norms and social coordination mechanisms from established cultures.
Even a month later I am still thinking about this post when trying to understand how to build functional institutions, and it has given me a pointer towards a perspective on coordination that I didn’t have before.
I think a better version of this post would have expanded more on the cultural review aspects, and possible summarized some more insights into what the Amish actually practice, possibly with some more concrete examples.
Well, to be fair, it is also a book review. :P
Fair, although worth noting that such an expanded version of the post would simply be the entire chapter from Legal Systems Different From Ours (available here, although I think this looks slightly different than the version I got on kindle).
*nods* I do wonder whether the post would have been better had you used a lot of quotes from the chapter in the book.
I always have mixed feelings when I read book reviews that largely are quotes from the book.
I think that’s a useful service when the book is long (especially if it’s overly long) and there is some actual intellectual labor in figuring out how to abridge it down to the essentials.
In this case I think the original chapter was pretty close to maximally compact, and if I were to have done lots of quotes it’d have essentially just been a link-post, and I’d feel uncomfortable copying the chapter whole cloth.
I do encourage people who were interested in this post to read the whole thing if they’re interested in more details.
(Legal Systems as a whole is quite long and I think individual posts that highlight particular chapters are quite valuable. My reading of the book was directly downstream of this previous, recent LessWrong post about legal systems created by prison inmates, was another chapter that illuminated key group rationality concepts for me)