Reading Project Lawful (so far, which is the majority of Book 1) has given me a strong mental pointer to the question of “how to model a civilization that you find yourself in” and “what questions to ask when trying to improve it and fix it”, from a baseline of not really having a pointer to this at all (I have only lived in one civilization and I’ve not been dropped into a new one before). I would do many things differently to Keltham (I suspect I’d build prediction markets before trying to scale up building roads) but it’s nonetheless extremely valuable to read someone’s attempt at this.
The thing I dislike most about it is that every interaction is suffused with highly adversarial deceptive analysis. I find this pretty hard to do in real life and kind of distasteful and is not a skill I aspire to have. I understand Keltham finds himself in a highly adversarial environment, but I still don’t like it.
I really wish it had chapters or similar units of chunking. I bounced off like 4 times before being able to read this book, having to learn the practice of “this is about enough reading for now / this is probably a good place to stop” which most books help me with themselves.
Overall +9 as an assessment of the quality of the contribution, though I agree that I’m not quite sure how this would fit in the review. Perhaps we could just include a select few pages of it for flavor then link to the website.
Reading Project Lawful (so far, which is the majority of Book 1) has given me a strong mental pointer to the question of “how to model a civilization that you find yourself in” and “what questions to ask when trying to improve it and fix it”, from a baseline of not really having a pointer to this at all (I have only lived in one civilization and I’ve not been dropped into a new one before). I would do many things differently to Keltham (I suspect I’d build prediction markets before trying to scale up building roads) but it’s nonetheless extremely valuable to read someone’s attempt at this.
The thing I dislike most about it is that every interaction is suffused with highly adversarial deceptive analysis. I find this pretty hard to do in real life and kind of distasteful and is not a skill I aspire to have. I understand Keltham finds himself in a highly adversarial environment, but I still don’t like it.
I really wish it had chapters or similar units of chunking. I bounced off like 4 times before being able to read this book, having to learn the practice of “this is about enough reading for now / this is probably a good place to stop” which most books help me with themselves.
Overall +9 as an assessment of the quality of the contribution, though I agree that I’m not quite sure how this would fit in the review. Perhaps we could just include a select few pages of it for flavor then link to the website.