If indeed this part is excellent, then which general advice is given for determining and assessing the weak points in corner positions?

Perhaps buy the book and find out ?

To possibly find out that there might not be such a generalized advice at all? This is a review thread, so the reviewer should explain why he calls something excellent.

With the clear definition difference you and John have on the word "excellent", do you really believe his justification will satisfy you, or are you looking for a way to shoot down the usage of the word as inappropriate?

If the word has been used appropriately, then we might learn something useful or be convinced to purchase the book. Else I suggest to use the word with its standard meaning.

Zzzzz. Huh, what?? Oh... "Excellent" does not mean or infer "general advice is given." Can I go back to sleep?

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Patience, grasshopper.

There's might also be a difference about principles. If I'm remembering past disagreements properly, and I might not be, Robert believes that we should try and find principles for playing Go well, John believes that any such principles are likely to be very high level (focus on "time", "make your stones efficient"), relying on developed judgment.

So perhaps John just thinks this book is just fine without general principles, while Robert will try and bully someone for calling something excellent when it doesn't contain general principles.

John will probably correct me about the subtleties of his own views, but I wanted to make a general point. We can disagree about the role of principles in learning Go, and we'll probably have periodic debates about it on the boards. But coming in to someone's book review and saying "you can only call this book excellent if it has principles, of the kind that I want" is unseemly.

If you want a genuine discussion of the issue, start one, ideally in a new thread. Don't just tell people they've reviewed books wrong based on your idiosyncratic standards.

Debate is good, but this seems more like policing people's comments.

References: I'm thinking of comments from John like this one: viewtopic.php?f=17&t=2458&p=40926&hilit=principles#p40926. Here, John talks about principles, but high-level ones: viewtopic.php?f=12&t=1578&p=29876&hilit=principles#p29876.

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Occupy Babel!

Without general advice like, e.g., principles, teaching remains on a level of teaching by examples and giving specific comments per example only. Since extremely many shapes / positions exist, the reader is left with these choices:

a) read very many examples so that he knows those or very similar examples occurring in his games by heart

b) develop general advice (e.g., in the form of principles or as subconscious knowledge, depending on his preferred thinking style) by himself, i.e., complete the teaching work, which the book author failed to provide, by means of auto-didactic teaching.

Explaining most positions is better than explaining only a couple of example positions. Providing general advice is better than leaving the work of developing general advice to the readers.

Therefore it is essential for each book and each review whether or not the book does teach also the general or only the specific.

Teaching only specific examples might be excellent for itself but misses the other half of what good teaching should do, i.e., is also extremely poor concerning the generalization part.

However, so far we do not know yet IF the book does give generalized advice. Maybe it does?

If there were no need for discussing review standards, such could be omitted. Use clear and uniform polls like

excellent
very good
good
neutral
bad
very bad
extremely bad,

use quality identifiers in their standard meanings (excellent meaning "excellent in every respect" and not "excellent in one respect but arbitrary in other respects") and explain reasons for something having a quality (like being excellent) instead of just expressing an opinion. If everybody does that, then this book review forum can become valuable.

Robert, this is beginning to get quite silly. You are taking people's reviews and comments and turning threads into a meta-discussion about language definition - it's thread derailment on a surprising scale. You also did this to the "Move 8 is bad" thread I created. If it carries on, I will start moving posts that aren't directly relevant to the thread title into threads with titles such as "The definition of the word Excellent" in Off Topic.

If you prefer, someone can move all meta-discussion about review quality into a separate thread. However, don't paint it as if only I were participating in this meta-discussion! This entire thread is a meta-discussion reaction to earlier "excellent" definition discussion. Since you mention the White 8 is Bad thread, also you could consider whether your starting with an inappropriate "excellent" comment and then complaining about my reply on your start was reasonable.

BTW, the "excellent" review comment is an already over a decade old problem. Now such usage is becoming excessive though.

robert: can you not see that nobody agree with you?
then you should think "maybe i am wrong on this issue"

edited -- topazg

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"The more we think we know about
The greater the unknown"
Words by neil peart, music by geddy lee and alex lifeson

Magicwand, since you disagree with me,
- can you explain why you like it when a reviewer (here: John) qualifies part of a book as, e.g., excellent without convincingly explaining why it is excellent,
- can you advise us how to learn well generalized application from books that do not generalize, and
- why would you expect meaningful results from a poll using prejudiced and non-uniform qualifiers in the voting options?

then why didnt you explain what difficult mean when you use that word? dont answer this. it is silly question to redicule you if you didnt get it.


you need to elaborate your sentence because it is far mor vague than "excellent"


it is like thumbs up down, 5 star rating, rate the 1~10. they didnt write whole book on what it mean to be 5.
if you didnt get it i will explain in dummy proof example:
5 being excellent. 4 being good 3 being fair etc.

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"The more we think we know about
The greater the unknown"
Words by neil peart, music by geddy lee and alex lifeson

Why would anyone ever expect meaningful results from a poll on the internet?

because robert is not just anyone. he is almost equal to chuck norris.

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"The more we think we know about
The greater the unknown"
Words by neil peart, music by geddy lee and alex lifeson

Oooh, I think we should make Robert a moderator! At least the forum shall then be purged from all of these glaring semantical errors

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My name is Gijs, from Utrecht, NL.

When in doubt, play the most aggressive move

How antisemantic of you!

Now that this has become a sandbox thread without proper context, let me at least repeat the intersection of Oxford and Cambridge dictionaries to give some sense to the thread title:

excellent = extremely good

Personally, I think that, in a review thread, two things are (most) important:
1. The quality the reviewer experienced, eg excellent.
2. The level of the reviewer, eg 4 dan.
There are of course sub-levels of this. Are only parts of the book excellent, or is the reviewer from a country with overranked players?
Also the level of the book makes some difference - if many 5 dan thinks a book stinks, but many 10 kyu thinks it helped them, if I was 20 kyu I'd buy it rather than a book where the reviews were the other way around.

Another thing: excellent does not mean complete, a book can be excellent in what it wants to teach, that can be a subset of eg Go, or Haengma, so stating that a book on Haengma that only deals with a subset of Haengma cannot be excellent is IMHO just bull.

/Mats

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mohsart - games & books
http://spel.mohsart.se/