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erratio comments on Intellectual insularity and productivity - Less Wrong
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Comments (169)
Upvoted. I think that refactoring LW is a strong move, but it's also one which has been discussed for a while and hasn't happened. I think that's because there's never been a well-presented case for new sections, but the site admins are the ones to talk to about that.
I like this idea but it seems like it's on the wrong side of the 80/20 value/effort split. badger's summary of EPHJ is one twentieth of the length of the book it summarizes, but contains at least half of the value one gets from reading that book.
Kaufman's Personal MBA comes to mind as another thing to model off of. He's read hundreds of business books, and has distilled them down to create a mostly complete business education in 400 pages. The book reads like the blog- an explanation of a part in a few pages, and then on to the next part, with the parts fitting together to make a lean system.
Perhaps a summary contest? Identify some book as a valuable addition to LW, and announce a contest with a prize and deadline for posts that summarize the book or possibly posts that turn the book into a sequence. (The candidate posts might get their own section, with the best one or a hybrid of the best ones being pushed to main, so that people don't have to see three or four of the same thing if they don't want to.)
Why not post a list of such valuable or potentially valuable books and see if anyone has already read them and is willing to do a quick skim and summarise?
I should probably add that I'm opposed to the idea of a summary contest because it will cost a relatively large number of people a lot of time and gain them very little.
Summaries aren't too useful. On the other hand, commentaries and in-depth discussion might be useful. For example, I've occasionally thought of doing a chapter by chapter discussion of Good and Real, with additional material like a Haskell implementation of his Quantish universe (since I don't really understand it).
Please do this. I'm finding it impenetrable.
Mmm. Active reading of quality books is its own reward- the prize is for sharing the notes, and to raise the option to attention. It seems fine compared to a book club, but I agree that it's generally an economic model that favors the buyer over the producers.