Solomon's Cairn

[Edit: The Book Review Contest has ended, and I particularly recommend you read the gold medalist, Lars Doucet’s review of Progress and Poverty, which I take a look at here ] This was the book review I submitted for Scott Alexander's book review contest. Sadly, it was not a finalist, and now that the runners-up have been released, I reproduce it here. If you enjoy the review, do give it the rating you think it deserves on the Runner-Up Votes , and check out some of the other non-finalists ( Runners-Up A-R , Runners-Up S-W ). Also worth noting, I submitted my own review before Scott published his , and I preregistered this book for review last year when the contest was announced.  I. Prologue Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder , by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, seems to have anticipated my project of reviewing it, and took pains to make it difficult for me. Writing on the book’s structure: Someone in the business of “summarizing” books would have to write four or five separate des...

I wrote 'An Open Letter on Love' during the height of rioting and violence in the United States. At the time, I didn't want to risk ire (online or from family) by writing explicitly about those events, and settled instead on exhorting people to love one another. I later posted it on LessWrong, where it got much less attention than I wanted, and I subsequently slunk away from the site. Now that I am working on returning there, I've decided to repost it here, and follow it with a look at the comment it got. It is reproduced below as it appeared on LessWrong in October.  ----------- This post originated as an open letter to my own family this past June, later republished on a political community blog. It was born out of a dissatisfaction with how Love is popularly conceived of, as a vague positive force one pays lip service to, rather than a concrete and potent phenomenon. Religious texts are cited, but are not in conflict with secular wisdom on the matter. Not especially ...