Promoted to curated: I generally think book reviews and summaries, in particular of books that are relevant to ideas that are currently being explored and people are thinking about, are one of the most robust and reliable ways to produce a lot of value with a post.
I think this book review in particular stands out with its thoroughness, as well as tying the concepts into other discussion of similar topics on LW. I also very much appreciate you going beyond a normal book review, and asking about the reproducibility of the general insights in the book.
Overall, I found this review to be quite useful, well written and to generally be a great example of how I would want a LessWrong book review to be like, and I am looking forward to the rest of your sequence.
Some things that I think could be done better (I expect these will be addressed in future posts of the sequence, but it still seems good to point them out now):
I think you could refer more to existing discussion on the topic, and I would greatly appreciate a list of links to existing LessWrong discussion in this space, of which there is plenty.
A lot of the post is a relatively straightforward summary of what the author said in the book. I’ve historically found reviews that contrast the opinion of the book, with your own opinion, to be more useful. Scott Alexander usually does this in his book reviews, and I’ve found that this makes it easier for the post to point out problems or inconsistencies in the book, which I think overall improves the understanding of the audience when reading the review.
Promoted to curated: I generally think book reviews and summaries, in particular of books that are relevant to ideas that are currently being explored and people are thinking about, are one of the most robust and reliable ways to produce a lot of value with a post.
I think this book review in particular stands out with its thoroughness, as well as tying the concepts into other discussion of similar topics on LW. I also very much appreciate you going beyond a normal book review, and asking about the reproducibility of the general insights in the book.
Overall, I found this review to be quite useful, well written and to generally be a great example of how I would want a LessWrong book review to be like, and I am looking forward to the rest of your sequence.
Some things that I think could be done better (I expect these will be addressed in future posts of the sequence, but it still seems good to point them out now):
I think you could refer more to existing discussion on the topic, and I would greatly appreciate a list of links to existing LessWrong discussion in this space, of which there is plenty.
A lot of the post is a relatively straightforward summary of what the author said in the book. I’ve historically found reviews that contrast the opinion of the book, with your own opinion, to be more useful. Scott Alexander usually does this in his book reviews, and I’ve found that this makes it easier for the post to point out problems or inconsistencies in the book, which I think overall improves the understanding of the audience when reading the review.