Haha, would love to see more book reviews in this genre. Reading this reminded me of a passage about children’s books in one of Eliezer’s recent stories about dath ilan:
If something that strange was written in dath ilan, it would be inside a children’s-book; and you would realize that the real answer was meant to be sought out by young adults, when you were old enough to notice Problems with what had been claimed by the children’s-book in your bedroom.
(The children’s-books of dath ilan are not visibly author-signed, and never attested-to by any specific grownup, nor gifted to you by specific adults; they’re just there in your bedroom, when you grow up. And if you ask your parents they’ll truthfully tell you that they didn’t put the books there. And your parents never speak to you of anything that you read in a children’s-book; for those are children’s books, and only children speak of them to each other.
As the saying goes in dath ilan, trying to raise a child on only true books is like trying to train a statistical classifier on only positive examples!
And furthermore—as is so obvious as to hardly need stating after the original proverb—having all the true books be written in a nonfiction voice, while all the untrue books are written in a fiction voice, would be introducing an oversimplified hyperplanar separator that would prevent a simple statistical algorithm from learning subtler features.)
Maybe your children will be the ones writing these reviews in the future?
Haha, would love to see more book reviews in this genre. Reading this reminded me of a passage about children’s books in one of Eliezer’s recent stories about dath ilan:
Maybe your children will be the ones writing these reviews in the future?