Would people be interested in a place on LW for collecting book recommendations?
I’m reading The Logic of Failure and enjoying it quite a bit. I wasn’t sure whether I’d heard of it here, and I found Great Books of Failure, an article which hadn’t crossed my path before.
There’s a recent thread about books for a gifted young tween which might or might not get found by someone looking for good books..… and so on.
Would it make more sense to have a top level article for book recommendations or put it in the wiki? Or both?
Considering most of my favorite books are the result of mentions in comment threads here, I’d say a book recommendation thread is in order.
Tangental, but I remember “Logic of Failure” to be mostly being mental phenomena I was already familiar with, and generalizations from computer experiments that I didn’t find particularly compelling. I’ll have to give it another look.
I liked the section near the beginning about the various ways of being bad at optimizing complex computer scenarios. It was a tidy description of the ways people think too little about what they’re doing and/or overfocus on the wrong things.
Part of my enjoyment was seeing those matters described so compactly, and part of it was the emotional tone which combined a realization that this is a serious problem with a total lack of gloating over other people’s idiocy. That last may indicate that I’ve been spending too much time online.
If you didn’t notice anything new to you in the book the first time, there may not be a good reason for you to reread it.
Would people be interested in a place on LW for collecting book recommendations?
I’m reading The Logic of Failure and enjoying it quite a bit. I wasn’t sure whether I’d heard of it here, and I found Great Books of Failure, an article which hadn’t crossed my path before.
There’s a recent thread about books for a gifted young tween which might or might not get found by someone looking for good books..… and so on.
Would it make more sense to have a top level article for book recommendations or put it in the wiki? Or both?
Considering most of my favorite books are the result of mentions in comment threads here, I’d say a book recommendation thread is in order.
Tangental, but I remember “Logic of Failure” to be mostly being mental phenomena I was already familiar with, and generalizations from computer experiments that I didn’t find particularly compelling. I’ll have to give it another look.
I liked the section near the beginning about the various ways of being bad at optimizing complex computer scenarios. It was a tidy description of the ways people think too little about what they’re doing and/or overfocus on the wrong things.
Part of my enjoyment was seeing those matters described so compactly, and part of it was the emotional tone which combined a realization that this is a serious problem with a total lack of gloating over other people’s idiocy. That last may indicate that I’ve been spending too much time online.
If you didn’t notice anything new to you in the book the first time, there may not be a good reason for you to reread it.
I’d say new top-level thread. The wiki can get a curated version of that.