I’m planning to write a book, a book I want to both be engaging to a wide audience, and to adequately defend some complex non-obvious intellectual claims. It feels quite daunting to write with both of these goals in mind at once. So I’m thinking of achieving these two goals in two steps. First I’d write a pre-book, which states my main claims and arguments directly and clearly, using expert language, for an expert audience. I’d then circulate that pre-book privately among experts and useful thinkers of various sorts, seeking criticism of my arguments. Then using their feedback, I’d revise my claims and arguments, and write an engaging accessible book that can be circulated widely.
I've asked other mathematicians about a very similar issue and they were quite upfront that the main impetues for publishing a book was the prestige and that the prestige came from the publisher's endorsement of this as a genuine draft of something that would be printed (I wanted to know why they didn't just post their graduate level textbooks online).
I suspect this is at work here. If you show people your idea before it has a publisher's full endorsement you might be dismissed as a crank and when your book finally comes out, even if your intellectual contributions were recognized, it would be old hat and you would miss out on a fair bit of prestige.
Why do you claim that people don't already do this? Read the acknowledgements of different books. How did all those names get in there if the author didn't circulate a draft?
Gary Taubes did this when he published the very important book "Good Calories, Bad Calories", 500 pages of heavily annotated evidence that eruditely shows how wrong American physicians and nutritionists have been. He followed with the more reader-friendly "Why We Are Fat", with essentially the same info for non-experts. Interestingly (in my opinion) the bias of the "experts" has prevented the former tome from having the effect it should, while the indoctrination of the masses has prevented the latter tome from generating a populist paradigm shift. OTOH, perhaps he made some money.
"Then using their feedback, I’d revise my claims and arguments, and write an engaging accessible book that can be circulated widely."
A confidence building process. It is interesting to hear what Leslie Robertson, a head structural engineer of the World Trade Center, says about confidence @3:53 in http://www.youtube.com/watc... He points out that much of the innovation of the WTC design was in large part due to his age at the commencement of the project (34), and that an older engineer would have had confidence in the work he had done previously (and thus likely to repeat it), whereas he was "charging down a different highway".
Confidence is about repeatability. Confidence is about predictability - which increases demand. Interesting that confidence, or at least over-confidence, also increases risk-seeking behavior. However, confidence may have negative impacts on innovation levels.
The bottom line is; a choice is there to be made - get the feedback loop happening and maximize confidence as a result, or, forget all that and charge down a different highway instead.
Why not write two books? Edward O. Wilson, Peter Turchin, Steven Pinker, and others switch back and forth between writing books for an academic audience and writing for a popular audience.
Sorry for the essentially repeated posts. I don't understand what's happening in the "queque." Posts don't appear, I conjecture (per Schulman) about what might trigger it. The last post appears and some time later the earlier posts appear. Anybody know what's going on?
Too inefficient. Use your time, instead, to perfect the style of the general-audience book. That, in itself, won't be easy: the style in economics journals is known to be the worst in all the social sciences and humanities—not good enough for a successful book. (For a rational revision cycle based on construal-level theory, see my "Avoiding irrelevance and dilution: Construal-level theory, the endowment effect, and the art of omission." [ http://tinyurl.com/9sw54v8 ].)
Your book is part of an intellectual process. After it's published, you can defend and refine the arguments in response to criticism in the journals.
I've asked other mathematicians about a very similar issue and they were quite upfront that the main impetues for publishing a book was the prestige and that the prestige came from the publisher's endorsement of this as a genuine draft of something that would be printed (I wanted to know why they didn't just post their graduate level textbooks online).
I suspect this is at work here. If you show people your idea before it has a publisher's full endorsement you might be dismissed as a crank and when your book finally comes out, even if your intellectual contributions were recognized, it would be old hat and you would miss out on a fair bit of prestige.
You missed the point. He's talking about writing two different books, not an earlier draft of the same book.
Why do you claim that people don't already do this? Read the acknowledgements of different books. How did all those names get in there if the author didn't circulate a draft?
Gary Taubes did this when he published the very important book "Good Calories, Bad Calories", 500 pages of heavily annotated evidence that eruditely shows how wrong American physicians and nutritionists have been. He followed with the more reader-friendly "Why We Are Fat", with essentially the same info for non-experts. Interestingly (in my opinion) the bias of the "experts" has prevented the former tome from having the effect it should, while the indoctrination of the masses has prevented the latter tome from generating a populist paradigm shift. OTOH, perhaps he made some money.
"Then using their feedback, I’d revise my claims and arguments, and write an engaging accessible book that can be circulated widely."
A confidence building process. It is interesting to hear what Leslie Robertson, a head structural engineer of the World Trade Center, says about confidence @3:53 in http://www.youtube.com/watc... He points out that much of the innovation of the WTC design was in large part due to his age at the commencement of the project (34), and that an older engineer would have had confidence in the work he had done previously (and thus likely to repeat it), whereas he was "charging down a different highway".
Confidence is about repeatability. Confidence is about predictability - which increases demand. Interesting that confidence, or at least over-confidence, also increases risk-seeking behavior. However, confidence may have negative impacts on innovation levels.
The bottom line is; a choice is there to be made - get the feedback loop happening and maximize confidence as a result, or, forget all that and charge down a different highway instead.
Exactly. I use my blog to throw out ideas and test them.
2, 3, 4 all sound most plausible to me.
Why not write two books? Edward O. Wilson, Peter Turchin, Steven Pinker, and others switch back and forth between writing books for an academic audience and writing for a popular audience.
How common is it, really, for popular-level books to make arguments that are genuinely novel to experts in the field?
Yes, I read this article thinking it sounds a bit like what Kevin Kelly did w/ the book "What Technology Wants" and his blog "The Technium."
Who, gwern or gwern0?
Maybe your use of a URL shortener is triggering a spam filter?
Sorry for the essentially repeated posts. I don't understand what's happening in the "queque." Posts don't appear, I conjecture (per Schulman) about what might trigger it. The last post appears and some time later the earlier posts appear. Anybody know what's going on?
I suggest you start a blog and publish your pre-book in parts there.
books are longer than articles
Too inefficient. Use your time, instead, to perfect the style of the general-audience book. That, in itself, won't be easy: the style in economics journals is known to be the worst in all the social sciences and humanities—not good enough for a successful book. (For a rational revision cycle based on construal-level theory, see my "Avoiding irrelevance and dilution: Construal-level theory, the endowment effect, and the art of omission." [ http://tinyurl.com/9sw54v8 ].)
Your book is part of an intellectual process. After it's published, you can defend and refine the arguments in response to criticism in the journals.