I've been thinking about finally starting a Study Group thread, primarily with a focus on Jaynes and Pearl both of which I'm studying at the moment. It would probably make sense to expand it to other books including non-math books - though the set of active books should remain small.
Two things have been holding me back - for one, the IMO excessively blog-like nature of LW with the result that once a conversation has rolled off the front page it often tends to die off, and for another a fear of not having enough time and energy to devote to actually facilitating discussion.
Facilitation of some sort seems required: as I understand it a book club or study group entails asking a few participants to make a firm commitment to go through a chapter or a section at a time and report back, help each other out and so on.
Well those are actually exactly the two books I had in mind (though I think we should probably just start with one of them).
the IMO excessively blog-like nature of LW with the result that once a conversation has rolled off the front page it often tends to die off
Agreed. Two options
A new top level post for every chapter (or perhaps every two chapters, whatever division is convenient). This was a little annoying when it was one person covering every chapter in Dennett's Consciousness explained but if a decent number of people were participating the bo
The title says it all.