I was leafing through a copy of Marc Hauser’s Moral Minds off a friend’s bookshelf at the weekend, and it made me realise why I’d gone off reading books lately: the original content is too hard to find amongst the material I’m already familiar with.
I don’t want to read another introduction to Chomsky’s theory of universal grammar. I don’t need another primer on ev-psych. I’m not interested in having the Trolley Problem explained to me again. What I would like is a concise breakdown of the core arguments, linking to other sources to explain things I might not already be familiar with.
This would end up looking a little like a Wikipedia article, or more to the point, a Less Wrong post. We have our fair share of book reviews, but they tend to select for books in which there’s value in reading the whole thing, rather than those which have some novel content amongst mostly familiar territory, (what I took away from the recent chapter-by-chapter review of Causality was that I should totally read the book).
Is anyone else in this boat? Could it be worth organising some sort of book review/summarisation group?
Aye. I’d be keen to join some sort of book club for smart people, where you could see others’ bookshelves a la LibraryThing, but on top of that also have very short reviews letting you know what to expect from each book.
Most books tend to fall into two broad categories: things you already mostly know, and things you care little about. The rare high-value book is one that has just enough connection to what you already know, and makes you care about a whole new domain. (An exceptional book, like GEB, will make you care about many new domains at once.)
One recently read book that was very high value because it covered ground that was totally new to me: Abbott’s System of Professions. Typically books in the sociology of professions had focused on the “trappings”, professional societies, regulation and so on. Abbott pointed out that professions were the emergent result of a complex system of jurisdictional disputes, and the only way you can understand a profession is by looking at the others that compete with it for dominion over its topics. Abbot’s analysis is so wide-ranging that it connects in several places with topics I care about; for instance when he analyzes “the construction of the ‘personal problems’ jurisdiction”, a tug-of-war between the clergy, the (early) “neurologists”, and psychiatry; or when he sketches the early history of the information professions—I hadn’t realized that librarians were among the first such.
I have the exact same problem. You forgot about Phineus Gage and getting a pole stuck through your head.
I think one way of solving this would be to use something like workflowy to make the entire book a zoomable/compressible bullet list. That way, the book would have a section heading like “explanation of Chomsky’s theory of Universal grammer” you could literally just skip that entire branch of the book (and if any part of it were referenced, you could jump back to it (because it’s digital) ) .
Also, a lot of LWers (myself included) are looking to build better argument mapping software for a wikipedia of arguments type resource (though that’s a bit simplified).
EDIT:
Also, you could compile all the different 1 sentence, 1 page, 5 page, 1 chapter, explanations from several different authors. for any particular bullet point.
That’s the benefit of online linkable texts as opposed to books.
On the net, if you want to mention a Sequence post or a Wikipedia article, you just link to it and the reader either knows or can quickly check whether they’ve read it before.
In a book, if you just name-drop something like “evo-psych”, the reader might have a very different, limited, or wrong conception of the subject. If you refer to another book or article that explains the subject, the reader isn’t likely to have read it unless it’s a very famous textbook or popular exposition (like The Selfish Gene), because there are many equally good books on any subject. So for the reader to make sure they’re on the same page as the author, the book must include a long explanation of the subject referred to—even if it’s not the actual topic and author would rather leave it out.
The only reason that I still read most books is that it is very low cost for me.
I think I get some benefit from reading through things I already know, though. It’s going to help me remember it and the explanations are going to be somewhat different and so I’m going to get a better understanding of it overall.
I would join the group. We could do it through goodreads or a similar, better designed, site if you know of one.
I was leafing through a copy of Marc Hauser’s Moral Minds off a friend’s bookshelf at the weekend, and it made me realise why I’d gone off reading books lately: the original content is too hard to find amongst the material I’m already familiar with.
I don’t want to read another introduction to Chomsky’s theory of universal grammar. I don’t need another primer on ev-psych. I’m not interested in having the Trolley Problem explained to me again. What I would like is a concise breakdown of the core arguments, linking to other sources to explain things I might not already be familiar with.
This would end up looking a little like a Wikipedia article, or more to the point, a Less Wrong post. We have our fair share of book reviews, but they tend to select for books in which there’s value in reading the whole thing, rather than those which have some novel content amongst mostly familiar territory, (what I took away from the recent chapter-by-chapter review of Causality was that I should totally read the book).
Is anyone else in this boat? Could it be worth organising some sort of book review/summarisation group?
Aye. I’d be keen to join some sort of book club for smart people, where you could see others’ bookshelves a la LibraryThing, but on top of that also have very short reviews letting you know what to expect from each book.
Most books tend to fall into two broad categories: things you already mostly know, and things you care little about. The rare high-value book is one that has just enough connection to what you already know, and makes you care about a whole new domain. (An exceptional book, like GEB, will make you care about many new domains at once.)
One recently read book that was very high value because it covered ground that was totally new to me: Abbott’s System of Professions. Typically books in the sociology of professions had focused on the “trappings”, professional societies, regulation and so on. Abbott pointed out that professions were the emergent result of a complex system of jurisdictional disputes, and the only way you can understand a profession is by looking at the others that compete with it for dominion over its topics. Abbot’s analysis is so wide-ranging that it connects in several places with topics I care about; for instance when he analyzes “the construction of the ‘personal problems’ jurisdiction”, a tug-of-war between the clergy, the (early) “neurologists”, and psychiatry; or when he sketches the early history of the information professions—I hadn’t realized that librarians were among the first such.
I have the exact same problem. You forgot about Phineus Gage and getting a pole stuck through your head.
I think one way of solving this would be to use something like workflowy to make the entire book a zoomable/compressible bullet list. That way, the book would have a section heading like “explanation of Chomsky’s theory of Universal grammer” you could literally just skip that entire branch of the book (and if any part of it were referenced, you could jump back to it (because it’s digital) ) .
Also, a lot of LWers (myself included) are looking to build better argument mapping software for a wikipedia of arguments type resource (though that’s a bit simplified).
EDIT:
Also, you could compile all the different 1 sentence, 1 page, 5 page, 1 chapter, explanations from several different authors. for any particular bullet point.
That’s the benefit of online linkable texts as opposed to books.
On the net, if you want to mention a Sequence post or a Wikipedia article, you just link to it and the reader either knows or can quickly check whether they’ve read it before.
In a book, if you just name-drop something like “evo-psych”, the reader might have a very different, limited, or wrong conception of the subject. If you refer to another book or article that explains the subject, the reader isn’t likely to have read it unless it’s a very famous textbook or popular exposition (like The Selfish Gene), because there are many equally good books on any subject. So for the reader to make sure they’re on the same page as the author, the book must include a long explanation of the subject referred to—even if it’s not the actual topic and author would rather leave it out.
The only reason that I still read most books is that it is very low cost for me.
I think I get some benefit from reading through things I already know, though. It’s going to help me remember it and the explanations are going to be somewhat different and so I’m going to get a better understanding of it overall.
I would join the group. We could do it through goodreads or a similar, better designed, site if you know of one.