Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: LessWrong is paying $500 for Book Reviews , published by Ruby on the AI Alignment Forum. Kudos to Kelsey Piper and Buck for this idea. See Buck’s shortform post for another formulation. LessWrong is trialing a new pilot program: paying USD500 for high-quality book reviews that are of general interest to LessWrong readers, subject to our judgment and discretion. How it Works Pick a book that you want to review. [Optional] Contact LessWrong (Intercom in the bottom right or team@lesswrong.com) to check in on whether the book is on-topic (to reduce the probability of not getting the bounty). Write the review and post it on LessWrong. Contact LessWrong to let us know you’re submitting your review for payment. Optionally, send us your book review before posting to get free feedback. (In fact, feel free to send us your draft at any stage for feedback.) If we like your book review and it’s the kind of post we had in mind, we pay out the $500. The program will by default run for one month (until October 13). At the end of the month, a bonus $750 will be split evenly between the top three book reviews received, as judged by us. Desired Reviews Most non-fiction topics related to science, history, and rationality will merit payment if the book review is of sufficient quality. By “quality” I’m referring to both content and form. Do the inferences seem correct? Does the reviewer seem to be asking the right questions? Does the summary feel informative or lacking? Do I feel confused or enlightened? Is it riveting or a slog to get through? On the writing side, relevant aspects are sentence construction, word choice, pacing, structure, imagery, etc. I don’t want to be too prescriptive about form since I expect that being of sufficiently high quality (nebulously defined) is enough to make for exceptions, but generally, I’m interested in book reviews that: Convinces the reader that the topic is interesting, usually by explaining how the topic is relevant to the user’s life or other interests. Summarize the core claims and arguments in the book so that others can benefit without having to read it. Perform an epistemic review of the book–which, if any, of its claims seem correct? Book reviews that involve a degree of fact-checking/epistemic spot checking will be considered favorably. Describe what the reviewer has come to believe and why. (An extra great format is to compare and contrast two or more books on the same topic.) Examples of Desired and Undesired Book Reviews Since it’s hard to give an explicit definition of “quality”, I’m going to fall back on examples and hope that these are better than nothing. Generally, the book reviews tag is a good guide to the kinds of book reviews that are popular on LessWrong and that we want to incentivize. Below I’ve listed specific book reviews that were either particularly great or kind of poor. Again, most of these came down to quality rather than topic. Positive Examples Book summary: Unlocking the Emotional Brain Book Review: Working With Contracts Notes on "The Anthropology of Childhood" Outline of Galef's "Scout Mindset" Book Review: Design Principles of Biological Circuits These book reviews all present engagingly on a topic of interest. They’re not difficult to read, and having read them, I know something more about the world than I did before. Negative Examples I am reluctant to name and shame particular essays on LessWrong, and instead, direct people to view the book reviews tag sorted by karma and look at the lowest scoring posts (you’ll have to click load more to get the entire list). Karma is a strong correlate of quality (whether or not the bounty is paid out is not strictly contingent on the karma it gets, but is influenced by it). Importantly, quality is not the automatic result of effort. Someone could expend a lot of effort writi...