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Comment by throw4847285 | Hacker News Reader

This review is just a plot synopsis. There are no quotes from the book to give me a sense of the quality of the writing. The review feels targeted at somebody who is already bought into the premise, not somebody from the outside who wants to know if "There Is No Antimemetics Division" is a good book or not. In that sense, it totally fails as a book review.

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I have never read a review and got a true notion of whether the prose is good or not. Is that really why you read reviews? I thought this was a great review because it very concisely described what is an unorthodox book. If you want to see if the prose is any good, read the book. It is a good book by the way.

Yes, I read reviews to learn if a book is good or not. Quotes from the book that are carefully selected often help to showcase what the author is capable of, on top of a clear description of their writing style. I want the reviewer to sell me on what moved them.

That is different than whether or not the reviewer was compelled by the ideas in the book. If the reviewer is a good writer, then I've learned something. Then, I know that somebody who is a good writer thought the ideas in a book were interesting, which by the transitive property, implies the author being reviewed is also a good writer. In this case, I don't think the reviewer is a very interesting writer, so I'm not convinced that they are a good judge of interesting writing.

That's interesting, here's a perspective from a different type of reader. I tend to read very old books, usually non-fiction, so 'reviews' are usually wikipedia articles, or references by other authors (the more references the more a classic it is).

usually it's the context around the book what people write about, where it was written, who wrote it, what was going on in their life. But if it's older perhaps not much is known, so the older it is increasingly it becomes at when it was read, where it was conserved, what it means to those who read it. If it's sufficiently old, there's several phases of 'rediscoveries' of the book, and the actual contents itself start losing importance as the book becomes more about past readers and how they influenced subsequent writing.

It would never occur to you to decide whether to read Luca Pacioli's accounting treatise based on some passages describing how you should keep your daily book, or whether to read Deuteronomy based on the headcount of some obscure tribe from old middle east, like there's no banger it's more about inmersion, and there isn't one way to absorb and interpret the content, because we are so far away from its writing, that the connection between the writer and reader is very faint.

So this feels normal to me, and the comparision felt funny, so I once again I found myself writing a hacker news comment

I say this with no malice, but you are weird. Being weird is cool! Reading nothing but historical manuscripts is rad! But the historical lens and the literary lens, as you yourself stated, are totally different.

Though, honestly, it would be fun to read reviews of ancient texts that are written like modern literary reviews. I guess we do get that, but only for new translations of the Odyssey or Beowulf or whatever. Those essays often dive into both the translation and the text in its original language (if the reviewer is fluent enough).

I bet you would love the Cairo Genizah.

> If you want to see if the prose is any good, read the book.

I don't read complete plot summaries of books that I ever plan to read. That's why I look for "reviews." The only reason it's hard to write a review is because you can't give away the plot, but you have to give a sense of the appeal and the quality of the book. Otherwise, it's just a summary.

I can't know what books are available on the market through introspection. The only way I can know about them is through being informed. I don't want to read a complete plot summary of a book I have yet to read. If the only way I can find out about the existence of books is by having the plot spoiled, that's not optimal.

edit: Also, tbh, if a book's plot is good, I don't need you to tell it to me. The person who came up with the plot already carefully came up with the way they wanted to tell it to me. Not sure why you think you can do better if you think the book is good. If the book is awful to read but the plot is interesting, feel free.

> It is a good book by the way.

The reason this doesn't work as a review is because I don't know you, and I don't know what you like. If you can say this in a way in which it doesn't matter whether I know you or what you like, and give away the least plot possible to accomplish this, you've written what most people are looking for in a review.

Agreed, and plot itself doesn't make a good book either. Some have very interesting plots but terrible prose and pacing while others are vice versa. Therefore a "review" that is merely a plot summary actually says nothing of the quality of the work.

It sounds like you're describing a summary (which does not deal with quality) rather than a review (which necessarily deals with quality). The posted writing seems to fall somewhere in between.

I liked it! Qntm's prose is what hooked me.

If you'd like a representative sample, check out the previous version which remains available on the SCP wiki: https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/antimemetics-division-hub

As part of qntm's book deal, the prose in the book was gently revised to change names etc. Some chapters were reordered for improved flow.

If you say to just read the book then what's even the point of writing a review? I could say the same about any book which renders the advice meaningless.

To me, the point of a review is to tell me – without spoilers – whether it manages to deliver a compelling ending, presents interesting ideas etc.

If I really just want to know whether I like the prose, I can indeed read the first few pages before buying/lending it.

Yes that would be a good review but the linked article seems to still only be a plot summary.

The review is also heavily LLM-inflected, to the point of being distracting.

GPTZero gives it a 100% chance of being AI generated, and I've found that these tools may give false negatives from a well-prompted model, but false positives are rare.

If you are looking to tune your intuition for AI-written text, here's an interesting list of their quirks (ironically provided as a Claude skill for removing those quirks from emitted text):

https://github.com/stephenturner/skill-deslop/blob/main/refe...

I'm not so sure about false positives being rare.. ZeroGPT flags the Gettysburg Address as 96% AI generated:

https://www.reddit.com/r/ArtificialInteligence/comments/1s0y...

(I tried it just now and got the same result as in that post)

According to that site, Robert Kennedy's speech on the night Martin Luther King was killed[1] was almost entirely the product of GenAI, as were both of Obama's inaugural addresses[1][2].

By this logic, I'd venture a guess that "AI" was also responsible for some of Shakespeare's most famous lines.

[1] https://www.jfklibrary.org/learn/about-jfk/the-kennedy-famil...

[2] https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/realitycheck/the_press_...

[3] https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2013/0...

Fair enough, I accept "the blog post was written by someone from the 1800s" as an alternative hypothesis.

edit: For what it's worth, I also just tested the Gettysburg Address (using the "Bliss Copy" from [1]), and got a "100% Human" score.

[1] https://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/gettys...

I've noticed this too online and on YouTube, where "reviewers" conflate a plot summary with an actual review of the pros and cons and often deeper analysis of a work. These days I need to go to specific subreddits to get true reviews beyond surface level details, such as at r/TrueFilm.

It's not a well-written book. It's an interesting book (more like a story).

Oh no, a book that tells a story.

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