Not to pick on you specifically, but just as a general comment, I’m getting a bit worried about the rationalist book review pipeline. It seems it usually goes like this: someone writes a book with an interesting idea → a rationalist (like Scott) writes a review of it, maybe not knowing much about the topic but being intrigued by the idea → lots of other rationalists get the idea cached in their minds. So maybe it’d be better if book reviews were written by people who know a lot about the topic, and can evaluate the book in context.
Like, a while ago someone on LW asked people to recommend textbooks on various topics, but you couldn’t recommend a textbook if it was the only one you’d read on the topic, you had to read at least two and then recommend one. That seems on the right track to me, and requiring more knowledge of the topic would be better still.
Not to pick on you specifically, but just as a general comment, I’m getting a bit worried about the rationalist decontextualized content policing. It seems it usually goes like this: someone cultivates an epistemological practice (say how to extract conceptual insights from diverse practices) → they decide to cross-post their thoughts on a community blog interested in epistemology → somebody else unfamiliar with the former’s body of work comes across it → interprets it into a pattern they might rightfully have identified as critique-worthy → dump the criticism there. So maybe it’d be better if comments were written by people who can click through the author’s profile to interpret the post in the right context.
[Epistemic status of this comment: Performative, but not without substance.]
We have downvotes if a review is inane, and we have comments if an expert wants to correct something… And we could have a tag like “Expert Review” for reviews by people who know the topic.
I did not particularly intend to do a book review per say, and I don’t claim to be an expert on the topic. So completely fine with tagging this in some way as “non-expert” if you wish.
Not planning to change how I wrote my posts based on this feedback, as I have no interest in following some arbitrary standard of epistemic expertise for a fun little blog post that will be read by 10 people max.
Not to pick on you specifically, but just as a general comment, I’m getting a bit worried about the rationalist book review pipeline. It seems it usually goes like this: someone writes a book with an interesting idea → a rationalist (like Scott) writes a review of it, maybe not knowing much about the topic but being intrigued by the idea → lots of other rationalists get the idea cached in their minds. So maybe it’d be better if book reviews were written by people who know a lot about the topic, and can evaluate the book in context.
Like, a while ago someone on LW asked people to recommend textbooks on various topics, but you couldn’t recommend a textbook if it was the only one you’d read on the topic, you had to read at least two and then recommend one. That seems on the right track to me, and requiring more knowledge of the topic would be better still.
Not to pick on you specifically, but just as a general comment, I’m getting a bit worried about the rationalist decontextualized content policing. It seems it usually goes like this: someone cultivates an epistemological practice (say how to extract conceptual insights from diverse practices) → they decide to cross-post their thoughts on a community blog interested in epistemology → somebody else unfamiliar with the former’s body of work comes across it → interprets it into a pattern they might rightfully have identified as critique-worthy → dump the criticism there. So maybe it’d be better if comments were written by people who can click through the author’s profile to interpret the post in the right context.
[Epistemic status of this comment: Performative, but not without substance.]
We have downvotes if a review is inane, and we have comments if an expert wants to correct something… And we could have a tag like “Expert Review” for reviews by people who know the topic.
I did not particularly intend to do a book review per say, and I don’t claim to be an expert on the topic. So completely fine with tagging this in some way as “non-expert” if you wish.
Not planning to change how I wrote my posts based on this feedback, as I have no interest in following some arbitrary standard of epistemic expertise for a fun little blog post that will be read by 10 people max.