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DanArmak 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?
That's the benefit of online linkable texts as opposed to books.
On the net, if you want to mention a Sequence post or a Wikipedia article, you just link to it and the reader either knows or can quickly check whether they've read it before.
In a book, if you just name-drop something like "evo-psych", the reader might have a very different, limited, or wrong conception of the subject. If you refer to another book or article that explains the subject, the reader isn't likely to have read it unless it's a very famous textbook or popular exposition (like The Selfish Gene), because there are many equally good books on any subject. So for the reader to make sure they're on the same page as the author, the book must include a long explanation of the subject referred to - even if it's not the actual topic and author would rather leave it out.