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Jack comments on Open Thread June 2010, Part 2 - Less Wrong
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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).
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 book club (and if each new post was put up by the facilitator, explaining hard to understand concepts) they'd probably justify themselves.
We start a dedicated wordpress or blogspot blog and give the facilitators posting powers.
I wouldn't at all mind posting to start discussion on some sections but I'm not the best person to be explaining the math if it gets confusing-- if that was part of your expectation of facilitation.
I was thinking a reading group for Jaynes would be have a better chance of success than Pearl-- the issues are more general, the math looks easier and the entire thing is online. But it sounds like you've looked at them more than I have, what are your thoughts? I guess what really matters is what people are interested in.
For those interested the Jaynes book can be found here and much of Pearl's book can be found here.