The book review
In 2023, I entered the annual Astral Codex Ten book review contest.
For the uninitiated: though, yes, this might be among the only book review contests that exists, it’s also almost certainly the only book review contest that matters.
The first year, the winner was the game designer Lars Doucet, who popularized the theories of the nearly-forgotten economist Henry “the rent is too damn high!” George, and put Georgist economics back on the map.1
The second year, the winner was Erik Hoel, who has since gone on to fame, fortune, and being a public intellectual.2
The third year, I won it.
The review itself
The book review can be found online, on ACX. If reading on paper is your thing, a PDF of it can be found here — there’s some color-coding and such that makes it better than just printing the ACX page. And Ross Richey (online handle: Jeremiah) was kind enough to spend three hours recording it as an episode of the Astral Codex podcast.3 You can listen to that episode on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, on the web, or, y’know, wherever you listen to podcasts (look up “Astral Codex Ten”, and then “The Educated Mind”).
The stuff behind the review
Egan’s ideas are famously hard to distill; if I was going to have a chance of success, I knew that I’d need to re-read his 1997 magnum opus The Educated Mind THOROUGHLY.
I started in, and began to underline one sentence — the key idea — from each and every paragraph.
Then I went back through and summarized each of those sentences in my own words, in pen, in the margin.
Then I went back through and typed those up so they’d flow together. Each paragraph was turned into a sentence, each section became a paragraph, and each chapter become a document.4
Imaginary Interlocutor: Pics or it didn’t happen!
They’re all yours! Here are the distillations of the first five chapters:
THEN I realized that this wouldn’t be enough — I had to Eganize Egan. I had to find a way to express his paradigm through the elements of story. So I reached out to some trusted homeschooling parents, and did a draft 1-hour workshop, in which I presented his ideas.
It… didn’t go well. It was stillborn, a trainwreck, a dumpster fire behind an oily rag factory. Its failure was complete.
It made me realize that I wasn’t yet ready to squeeze Egan’s paradigm into an hour. So I scheduled five hour-long workshops, in each of which I’d express one of the load-bearing chapters of his book.5
They each went about two hours.
Sigh.
But it was in those workshops — which I’ve now put on YouTube — that I first beat out my new way of expressing Egan’s paradigm. If “listening to, and maybe occasionally glancing at, really long YouTube videos” is your thing, have at it!
You can find much of his writing on Substack; he’s also been on like one-third of your favorite podcasts.
If you know the term “aristocratic tutoring”, that’s Hoel. Also on most of your favorite podcasts. Also wrote a killer novel, and my second-favorite book on consciousness. I’m a paid subscriber to his Substack; I recommend starting with his essay “Exit the Supersensorium”.
Actually, he told me it took longer, because he had to practice looking up how to pronounce the agglutinations of historical names I had smooshed into a couple key paragraphs. Man, was he ticked at me…
I call this “book distillation”, and I used to have high schoolers do it on particularly hard philosophy books. Thanks to Mortimer Adler’s How to Read a Book for the inspiration.
There are some other chapters in Educated Mind: an imaginative Q-and-A, a chapter on what this means for the curriculum, and a chapter on what this means for classroom teaching. I brought insights from those — especially the curriculum chapter — into the workshops.