The Wisdom of Indexes
I seem to remember that there was an interesting anecdote in James Surowiecki's "The Wisdom of Crowds" about the development of the threaded bolt. Unfortunately, however, the book doesn't have an index and I can't find it. Luckily, the book itself provides a solution to my problem - could all my readers please have a guess which page number I need, then I'll average them all together.
73!
ReplyDeleteWould we not need to know what the range is here for this to work? With the sweets in the jar you can look at them, which changes things.
ReplyDeletepp. 55-56
ReplyDeletegood point Justin. Unfortunately I don't have the book to hand right now, so perhaps you could just ask half a dozen people how many pages they think it has, and then make your guess?
ReplyDelete3651
ReplyDeleteNaadir demonstrates why you'd better use the Malatesta Estimator.
ReplyDeleteI've just been reading "The Wisdom of using's Amazon's Look Inside feature" and so my guess is 109 onwards, and it's a screw not a bolt.
ReplyDeleteThat's the US hardback large print edition, which is what the average person I just asked said you would have.
ReplyDeletematthew's guess is disqualified as I don't trust "expert" testimony.
ReplyDeleteOh, ok then. 712.
ReplyDeleteVery good. There's clearly a seam of comedy to be mined here. "I flicked through Blink but it looked rubbish"; "I'm only reading The Tipping Point because everyone else has", "I paid someone else to read Freakonomics for me", &c.
ReplyDelete"I couldn't afford a copy of The Affluent Society"
ReplyDeleteI asked a crowd and they all said that "its not about crowds no more man, but like choice architecture". Roughly translated from "street", this seems to mean that you need to get some top notch psychologists to design an environment that will "nudge" you into picking the right page.
ReplyDeleteI let Wikipedia do my crowd-sourcing for me and it came up with an informative article on the history of standardization of the screw thread that I'm sure is better than anything in that Surowiecki book.
ReplyDelete"I don't have time to read Dsquared Digest"
ReplyDeleteWhat economists will never be able to explain is why the hell I bought (and read to the end) 'The Undercover Economist'.
ReplyDeleteI would also note that having read "Fooled By Randomness", I predicted that Nicholas Taleb would repeat more or less all of exactly the same arguments in "The Black Swan", and he did.
ReplyDeleteNo doubt at increasing volume....
ReplyDeleteI put a card in my wallet that says "Nudge is a book by Cass Sunstein", in case I find myself about to buy it.
ReplyDeleteI started reading "The Black Swan" but my copy spontaneously combusted!
ReplyDeleteI didn't read "The Art of War" because that's exactly what everyone else would expect me to read.
I didn't read "Il Principe", but I'll lie and say I did so people will respect me.
Taleb must be a really irritating man in the flesh.
ReplyDeleteHenry Farrell reckons that he's actually really interesting and nice, which is the only first person report I have.
ReplyDeleteI didn't read the complete works of Leo Strauss, and anyone who says I did is WITH THE TERRORISTS.
ReplyDelete3d100+1d20
ReplyDeleteAny roll higher than 300 and rather than getting an answer you are attacked by 1d8 kobolds.
I left it to someone else to read "Principles of Political Economy and Taxation".
ReplyDeleteI did not follow your recommendation to read "Beyond Good and Evil", because reading lists are merely attempts by the weak to shackle the strong.
ReplyDeleteLo.
In considering whether or not to read Mr. Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, it is necessary to weigh several factors against each other; firstly its inordinate length; secondly the age of its scholarship, both in the temporal range it covers and the effluxion of time since it was written[1]; while thirdly one must consider against these the occasional delights; and also the details veiled in the decent obscurity of a learnéd language [2].
ReplyDelete[1] albeit most engagingly.
[2] "Drauci Natta sui vorat pipinnam,
collatus cui gallus est Priapus. " Martial 11.71
I didn't read The Long Tail because I was too busy reading niche blogs that make fun of it.
ReplyDeleteI didn't read Free because it was too expensive.
I impress women by telling them that I wasted four of the best years of my life studying under Amotz Zahavi.
ReplyDeleteOh, go and look it up.
I couldn't think of anything to say about the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, so I just skimmed it. [Pears-McGuinness translation only]
ReplyDeleteI bought 'Steal This Book'
ReplyDelete[that joke is older than me, btw]
"I had to buy The Affluent Society because my library doesn't have it, but while I was in Borders I got the current Lucky."
ReplyDeleteDon't you need a prediction market to get the right page?
ReplyDeleteBy the way, this thread approaches the humor of a 'Chase Me Ladies' thread, but not quite.
MaxSpeak
Wow. I had no idea the seam was so rich. For my part, I failed to read Globalization and Its Discontents and somehow, in some way, this was the IMF's fault.
ReplyDeleteI thought I had bought a copy of "The Threatening Storm" for $15,000, but when I actually had a look on my bookshelves, it wasn't there.
ReplyDeleteI've never got beyond the second sentence of Cordwainer Smith's story _The Crime and Glory of Commander Suzdal_.
ReplyDeleteChris Williams
I remember the time in college that I took a load of E's and read "La disparition".
ReplyDeleteI started reading _The Lexus and the Olive Tree_ in a Starbuck's in Singapore, but then the guy who was clearing tables told me how it ended. In Finnish.
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteI started reading "The Mystery of Edwin Drood", but a passing choirmaster told me who dunnit.
ReplyDeleteI started to read Kublai Khan, but some git from the West Country called about two verses in, and I never could quite find it again.
ReplyDeleteA young man in Bangladesh read the World is Flat for me, and then told me how happy it made him to get that sort of work.
ReplyDelete100^100. No wait, 1000^1000?
ReplyDeleteengels