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Curiouskid comments on Open Thread, October 16-31, 2012 - Less Wrong
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I was leafing through a copy of Marc Hauser's Moral Minds off a friend's bookshelf at the weekend, and it made me realise why I'd gone off reading books lately: the original content is too hard to find amongst the material I'm already familiar with.
I don't want to read another introduction to Chomsky's theory of universal grammar. I don't need another primer on ev-psych. I'm not interested in having the Trolley Problem explained to me again. What I would like is a concise breakdown of the core arguments, linking to other sources to explain things I might not already be familiar with.
This would end up looking a little like a Wikipedia article, or more to the point, a Less Wrong post. We have our fair share of book reviews, but they tend to select for books in which there's value in reading the whole thing, rather than those which have some novel content amongst mostly familiar territory, (what I took away from the recent chapter-by-chapter review of Causality was that I should totally read the book).
Is anyone else in this boat? Could it be worth organising some sort of book review/summarisation group?
I have the exact same problem. You forgot about Phineus Gage and getting a pole stuck through your head.
I think one way of solving this would be to use something like workflowy to make the entire book a zoomable/compressible bullet list. That way, the book would have a section heading like "explanation of Chomsky's theory of Universal grammer" you could literally just skip that entire branch of the book (and if any part of it were referenced, you could jump back to it (because it's digital) ) .
Also, a lot of LWers (myself included) are looking to build better argument mapping software for a wikipedia of arguments type resource (though that's a bit simplified).
EDIT:
Also, you could compile all the different 1 sentence, 1 page, 5 page, 1 chapter, explanations from several different authors. for any particular bullet point.