Reviewing works can be tricky, because I’d focus on very different aspects when targeting different people. When describing books to potential readers, I’d focus on very different aspects than when trying to comment on how good of a job the author did to advance the topic.
In this case the main issue is that I wasn’t sure what kind of book to expect, so wanted to make that clear to other potential readers. It’s like when a movie has really scary trailers but winds up being being a nice romantic drama.
Some natural comparison books in this category are Superforecasting and Thinking Fast and Slow, where the authors basically took information from decades of their own original research. Of course, this is an insanely high bar and really demands an entire career. I’m curious how you would categorize The Scout Mindset. (“Journalistic?” Sorry if the examples I pointed to seemed negative)
I think you specifically did a really good job given the time you wanted to allocate to it (you probably didn’t want to wait another 30 years to publish), but that specific question isn’t particularly relevant to potential readers, so it’s tricky to talk about all things at once.
I’d also note that I think there’s also a lot of non-experimental work that could be done in the area, similar to The Elephant in the Brain, or many Philosophical works (I imagine habryka thinks similarly). This sort of work would probably sell much worse, but is another avenue I’m interested in for future research.
(About The Village, I just bring this up because it was particularly noted for people having different expectations from what the movie really was. I think many critics really like it at this point.)
Fwiw I basically expected the book to be more in the Malcolm Gladwell genre (and I don’t say that pejoratively – it’s generally seemed to me that Julia’s strength and area of focus is in communicating concepts to a wider audience).
Thanks so much, that makes a lot of sense.
Reviewing works can be tricky, because I’d focus on very different aspects when targeting different people. When describing books to potential readers, I’d focus on very different aspects than when trying to comment on how good of a job the author did to advance the topic.
In this case the main issue is that I wasn’t sure what kind of book to expect, so wanted to make that clear to other potential readers. It’s like when a movie has really scary trailers but winds up being being a nice romantic drama.
Some natural comparison books in this category are Superforecasting and Thinking Fast and Slow, where the authors basically took information from decades of their own original research. Of course, this is an insanely high bar and really demands an entire career. I’m curious how you would categorize The Scout Mindset. (“Journalistic?” Sorry if the examples I pointed to seemed negative)
I think you specifically did a really good job given the time you wanted to allocate to it (you probably didn’t want to wait another 30 years to publish), but that specific question isn’t particularly relevant to potential readers, so it’s tricky to talk about all things at once.
I’d also note that I think there’s also a lot of non-experimental work that could be done in the area, similar to The Elephant in the Brain, or many Philosophical works (I imagine habryka thinks similarly). This sort of work would probably sell much worse, but is another avenue I’m interested in for future research.
(About The Village, I just bring this up because it was particularly noted for people having different expectations from what the movie really was. I think many critics really like it at this point.)
Fwiw I basically expected the book to be more in the Malcolm Gladwell genre (and I don’t say that pejoratively – it’s generally seemed to me that Julia’s strength and area of focus is in communicating concepts to a wider audience).