Positional Judgement 2 / Dynamics - Review by the Author

[sparky314]

"What the book is not" section is not a negative aspect. It sets expectations for the audience, which is great, but don't confuse that for a 'negative aspect.'

You can call it whatever you like, but they're not reviews. They're promotional descriptions or blurbs. You might say gimmick, using words like 'review' to trick the audience into thinking its a unbiased opinion of the book. Any 'self-review' will be highly biased, and immediately throws up red flags. If it could stand on its own, then it would.

I would recommend giving someone who is known for their reviews a copy, in exchange for an unbiased review. That validation for the reader is critical in determining whether a book is worth the time and monetary investment.

[daal]

I would recommend giving someone who is known for their reviews a copy, in exchange for an unbiased review. That validation for the reader is critical in determining whether a book is worth the time and monetary investment.

Robert does do this from time to time - in fact he sent me a copy of Fighting Fundamentals which I reviewed here. This is however not a substitute for the type of thorough description Robert gives of his own book above. Here he is presenting his own work as he sees fit, and it is indeed quite an informative post. Since I've already had one nasty altercation (not with the author) over my well-meant suggestion, and since Robert seems unlikely to come around and call his description something else, I suggest we resist our impulse to correct this source of irritation and focus instead on what appears to be quite the gap-filler in English go literature.

Let me start with a question for the author. You say that in the theory sections, there are 86 principles. Are these principles prioritized in some way?

[belikewater]

I suggest we resist our impulse to correct this source of irritation and focus instead on what appears to be quite the gap-filler in English go literature.

While sparky314 sums up my thoughts on why calling it a review is problematic, I think daal's suggestion above is helpful. I didn't want my original post to be seen as an attack on Robert or to initiate one. Robert, from a promotional standpoint, I think it would be interesting if you provided glimpses into your books in game reviews here on L19 or even Malkovich games.

[DrStraw]

These discussions will continue until either you stop defending your decision, or people get tired of responding...

Story of Robert's life

I blocked his posts a long time ago for this very reason.

[RobertJasiek]

belikewater, I have understood your good intention in your first post and not confused it with attack:) Just my opinion on your suggestion differs:) Concerning game reviews / Malkovich games by me here, consider this: I needed 5 months to write the book. This is already ca. 2 months more than reasonable. (But I write books also for improving my own knowledge and, in the case of such books, as preparation for knowing how to approach the new contents of books to be written in the future.) When I give detailed game commentaries (especially on a forum where editing diagrams consumes thrice as much time as for editing them for a book) or writing Malkovich commentaries, I can in principle invest arbitrarily great amounts of additional time on that. So what already is 5 months would become, say, 7 months, and then you can watch me starving from doing too much for free.

daal, concerning priority of principles: In http://www.lifein19x19.com/forum/viewto ... ls#p194277 saxmaam has asked the same question for another book. My overall study of principles is not sufficiently advanced yet to order all of them by priority (or achieving something similar by stating enough presuppositions for every principle). The principles in my books are clearly better than 55% proverbs; I'd say the range of correctness varies between 67% and 100%. Without having checked every principle in this book, my guess is that they are in the ca. 80% to 95% range. For principles in any go books, this is a good range. (100% can be achieved only for specialised topics with almost mathematical foundation, such as for capturing races.)

The below 100% values of correct application are related to a) ambiguity (e.g., when "important" in "important group" is undefined) or b) a principle possibility of conflicting principles. While the researcher of low level terms or rules might be scared of (a), ambiguity of reasonably clear words is hardly a problem for the experienced player (who, e.g., perceives immediately which the important groups are). (b) is a potentially greater problem, and, since my research has not proceeded far enough yet, is not dissolved.

However, in my books (and in particular this book), I restrict the scope of harm of (b) by specifying for which kinds of purposes a principle is supposed to be applied. E.g., I specify that certain principles apply only to the purpose of reducing a big moyo (or a big sphere of dominating influence). This results in a few principles designed specifically for a particular purpose. The remaining conflict potential affects conflicts among these few particular principles. When designing them, I invest a lot of thought to which extent such conflicts remain and try to minimise the conflicts as well as possible. The result is not perfect, but at least very good.

When the judgement of a position can be attacked by different concepts of analysis, every concept brings with it its own set of principles and techniques. Sometimes one of the concepts is inapplicable - fine, we simply use the other concept. When two concepts agree, it also is fine because they confirm each other. If two concepts disagree, then, as I explained somewhere (but not in this book, IIRC), one must instead resort to higher order principles (such as dissolving a conflict by reading, if this is possible).

When writing the book, constantly I try to consider if principles elsewhere in the book might also apply or create a conflict. I infrequently notice such a conflict and usually dissolve it by fine-tuning a principle.

Hence, although I cannot offer the final conflict-free theory yet, I reduce the potential for conflicts as well as I can. The IMO much greater problem for the learner is to reach the tactical reading level encouraged by the book. A principle encouraging, under certain circumstances, an invasion if the invading group lives is all fine and well, but must be supported by the appropriate reading.

[wineandgolover]

I suggest we resist our impulse to correct this source of irritation and focus instead on what appears to be quite the gap-filler in English go literature.

daal, you know I love you man. But...

I think your attempt to deflect the conversation is heavy-handed and inappropriate.

You are effectively encouraging the outrageous practice of Robert writing his own reviews by saying, "Let Robert be Robert."

<Content deleted. Merry Christmas!>

Again, I think it's great that you like his books, and I look forward to your review. But any thread that starts as an outrageous publicity stunt deserves all the scorn it gets.

[longshanks]

You are effectively encouraging the outrageous practice of Robert writing his own reviews by saying, "Let Robert be Robert." It is the equivalent of excusing misogyny or racism as just part of somebody's character.

Outrageous practice? Perhaps only you feel that way? I feel Robert writing his own reviews to be perfectly acceptible. You might question his objectivity, but then even third-person reviews are subject to subjectivity and bias. People are free to buy this book and write their own reviews in an effort to mitigate this. It is NOT the equivalent of excusing misogyny or racism. I'm not sure how you arrived at this conclusion.

Does anyone have anything to say about the book itself ?

[wineandgolover]

You are effectively encouraging the outrageous practice of Robert writing his own reviews by saying, "Let Robert be Robert." It is the equivalent of excusing misogyny or racism as just part of somebody's character.

Outrageous practice? Perhaps only you feel that way? I feel Robert writing his own reviews to be perfectly acceptible. You might question his objectivity, but then even third-person reviews are subject to subjectivity and bias. People are free to buy this book and write their own reviews in an effort to mitigate this. It is NOT the equivalent of excusing misogyny or racism. I'm not sure how you arrived at this conclusion.

Does anyone have anything to say about the book itself?

I really hope the book is great, and sells tons of copies. That is not the issue.

What other author have you ever seen write a self-review? It is pretty much unprecedented, and for a good reason. I think the choice of the word "outrageous" is pretty defensible.

Finally, I was not equating Robert's behavior to misogyny or racism, I was equating daal's "just let it pass" to those who excuse their embarrassing uncle. I deleted that portion of the post, because I don't want to risk offense.

Merry Christmas, all!

[RobertJasiek]

A few have mentioned objectivity of book reviews by third persons. Which objectivity? Every reviewer makes a decision about what to write or not to write at all. Reviewers often are weaker players than the authors so that reviewers do not often fully appreciate all the contents or properly relate the go theory in a book to all the go theory available in the (English speaking) world. Instead of objectivity, this results in subjective evaluation driven by the limited overall knowledge and invested time of the reviewer. Reviews by third persons are important, but hardly for their degree of objectivity. Instead call it independence from the author's own view. - Reviews by the authors (or other kinds of descriptions) also are important because they (should) have a great knowledge so that they can relate contents to overall knowledge well.

wineandgolover, you can do a web search for non-go books to find self-reviews. Among writers of go books in English, unfortunately self-reviews are the exception. Instead, there often are too short descriptions, and often with a greater level of subjectivity. It is inconsistent to criticise a self-review for its title but not to criticise much more dubious contents in some blurbs. For example, http://www.kiseido.com/master.htm#K79 K79: An Encyclopedia of Go Principles, the author describes "The purpose of this book is to bring together all the strategic and tactical principles of go. The 100 principles [...]". This is extraordinarily false because there are many times more than 100 principles. I wish the author had written a self-review so as to motivate himself to describe his own book more correctly.

[wineandgolover]

wineandgolover, you can do a web search for non-go books to find self-reviews.

Hi Robert,

Okay, I tried a few variations on "self-reviewed book" without luck. I found reviews of books by Will Self, self-help book reviews, and several suggestions on how to get third-party reviews of self-published books.

When I tried searching "review by author" I got several hits on "review and author interview" but none suggesting that self-reviews are common.

I'm open minded if you have a search suggestion that makes the case that self-reviews are kosher.

Merry Christmas!

[Knotwilg]

Robert, if you'd just change your practice of self reviewing semantically to a practice of announcing and clarifying your books, you'd get comments about the book, its contents and your rationale of what's included and what's not, instead of these unfortunate meta discussions about whether or not it is acceptable for someone to review his own books.

Any author would quickly adapt and get the irritation out of the way, but you seem to find it more important to be right about your choice of words and ways of communicating, than to pass your message to the widest possible audience by removing the noise.

We have a perfect example here of the difference between being intelligent and being smart. Be smart, call your self reviews "announcements and clarifications" instead, and don't waste any more energy in convincing people that reviewing your own books is a just cause, even if it's just a semantic meta discussion.

[daal]

I suggest we resist our impulse to correct this source of irritation and focus instead on what appears to be quite the gap-filler in English go literature.

daal, you know I love you man. But...

I think your attempt to deflect the conversation is heavy-handed and inappropriate.

You are effectively encouraging the outrageous practice of Robert writing his own reviews by saying, "Let Robert be Robert."

<Content deleted. Merry Christmas!>

Again, I think it's great that you like his books, and I look forward to your review. But any thread that starts as an outrageous publicity stunt deserves all the scorn it gets.

I don't see it as a publicity stunt, unless you think Robert is purposefully utilizing the the old adage that there is no such thing as bad publicity. On the contrary, I think it is legitimate that he wants as many people as possible to know about his book and to buy it. The fact that he insists on such a groan-worthy title does make him seem akin to the embarrassing uncle you allude to, but aside from rankling otherwise sympathetic readers, he is not doing anyone other than himself any harm, so it does seem fitting on Christmas to let it slide.

BTW, I am not going to review it. Although it looks interesting, based on Robert's description, I think the contents are too difficult for me. Perhaps you would be a better candidate?

[RobertJasiek]

Knotwilg, the second closest title is "Description". For many years, many go players have explained that good English style relies on accurate choice of words. "Review by the author" is more accurate that "Description" because I use the same method for my reviews of other go books and my own books. So if I change the title to "Description", my use of this less accurate choice of words is the responsibility of everybody insisting that "Review by the author" would be inappropriate.

Does everybody who complains about "Review by the author" as the title want only a change of the title? Or do a few want to also restrict my freedom of speech by changing the contents of such descriptive texts? If so, I rather prefer to hold up the basic human right of freedom of speech than bow to intolerance, which must not rule the world.

Regardless of the title, the contents is a self-review. Therefore, I think such texts carrying the title "Description" still belong to the Go Book Reviews forum. I do not mind, it might as well be in the Go Book forum. I just want to place threads in the forum considered appropriate by the administrators.

BTW, I have spent almost 2 days on writing this particular self-review to be sure that every statement is correct. Who else spends that much time when writing reviews of go books?

Why do I feel a need to write self-reviews? Because there are by far too few reviews of go books, and often delayed by too many years. Please everybody do write reviews!

***

daal, if your real world rank (German?) is 5k, you won't be able to solve most problems, you can learn from more than half of the theory and examples but you might prefer to wait reading this book until you will be a bit stronger and gain more confidence.

[Cassandra]

Dear Robert,

I am afraid that you are unaware of a very decisive aspect.

In YOUR understanding, the text that YOU have supertitled with "review by the author" explains what YOU think (or are absolutely sure about) the book IS.

But please note that YOU are the book's AUTHOR.

However, in the understanding of the (potential) READERS that YOU want to get interested in YOUR book (and finally to buy it), the text that YOU (as the AUTHOR) have written explains what YOU think the book SHOULD BE. I.e. this text clarifies YOUR motivation, and YOUR intentions, for writing YOUR book.

As Knotwilg already tried to explain: Just change the supertitle (so that it matches the potential READERS expectations), and everything is fine. Not writing in the third person is a marginal side-effect only (but it would be better to do without).

+ + + + + + + + + +

Just to give you another hint:

I learned Go at a time when the English books were full of Japanese terms, so I am very familiar with these.

During several years of my engagement with writing a few books for the SmartGo library, I had to painfully learn, and finally to accept that
-- capitalisation of Go terms looks extremly ugly in native eyes,
-- the readers of today are not sooo familiar with Japanese terms,
-- the readers of today accept only a few Japanese terms that have become an integral part of their language.

Over a few decades, I was used to capitalise Japanese terms (no problem at all in German), so I hope that you can understand how difficult it is for me now DURING the ENTIRE period of writing a new book not to use the Shift-key.

In tsume-go, sagari (= descent) very often plays a decisive role. I thought that it would make sense to use this Japanese term to highlight the importance of this type of move. But I was asked to use "descent", instead, for the reasoning mentioned above.

You are in a far better position than mine:
Editing the title of your texts will take only seconds. And will be no burden over months.

[longshanks]

I really don't get what all the fuss is about.

The implication is that the author's view is non-objective. Well, so is a third person's.

What I WOULD think is a problem, is the author posting a review to their own book under a pseudonym or not stating clearly it's a review by the author in the title. Neither of these apply.

Any reasonable person is able to adjust their opinion based on these facts.

Are we arguing over semantics here?