I’m going to be reading Bill Gates’ “How to prevent the next pandemic” in the next 5 days, would anyone else be interested in reading it and working on a “shared thoughts”/collective review/takeaways type post for the forum? Book reviews are cool, but I was thinking about doing something slightly different where a bunch of people write something much shorter and give a bullet pointed list of pros, cons, and main takeaways from the book. Thoughts?
Update: I read the book and didn’t think it had much information that was particularly insightful or novel. As a public health professional, it was very boring, but I’d be happy for as many people to read it and take it seriously as possible because the information is sensible and likely to be unharmful and helpful in the case of future pandemics. As an EA working on GCBRs, it was very underwhelming and failed to mention many of the things that biosecurity people in the EA space seem to think are vitally important, like next-gen PPE, the NAO, the BWC etc.
We basically agreed to read 1 chapter a week (not always successfully) and write main notes from it, while reading and responding to each other. It was fun and gave us plenty of room to engage with it more deeply. (In the end we had a zoom call for the first time, which was pretty cool).
Roam is definitely not needed, and gdoc would work as well, but it was a nice meta gimmick ;)
I’m going to be reading Bill Gates’ “How to prevent the next pandemic” in the next 5 days, would anyone else be interested in reading it and working on a “shared thoughts”/collective review/takeaways type post for the forum? Book reviews are cool, but I was thinking about doing something slightly different where a bunch of people write something much shorter and give a bullet pointed list of pros, cons, and main takeaways from the book. Thoughts?
Update: I read the book and didn’t think it had much information that was particularly insightful or novel. As a public health professional, it was very boring, but I’d be happy for as many people to read it and take it seriously as possible because the information is sensible and likely to be unharmful and helpful in the case of future pandemics. As an EA working on GCBRs, it was very underwhelming and failed to mention many of the things that biosecurity people in the EA space seem to think are vitally important, like next-gen PPE, the NAO, the BWC etc.
I think this is a great idea! Not for me at this time, but I’d be interested in reading such a post.
Also, if you could use some inspiration for the format, I’ve done a collaborative note-taking group with a random person on the internet on the book “How to Take Smart Notes”: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/roamexample4muli/page/u1M-bz2nZ
We basically agreed to read 1 chapter a week (not always successfully) and write main notes from it, while reading and responding to each other. It was fun and gave us plenty of room to engage with it more deeply. (In the end we had a zoom call for the first time, which was pretty cool).
Roam is definitely not needed, and gdoc would work as well, but it was a nice meta gimmick ;)