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September 16, 2007
Richard Dawkins Confirms Duane's Inverse Bookshelf Length Law
In announcing the tax exempt status of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science, Dawkins also linked to a somewhat revised mission statement. In his extended preface to that statement, Dawkins reports on the following observation.
I have just visited my local branch of Britain's biggest bookshop chain, and this is what I found: six books on astronomy and nineteen books on astrology. The real science is outnumbered three to one by the pseudoscience. There were twenty books on angels, which means that angels and astrology together outnumber the totality of books on all the sciences (33). When you add in books on fairies, crystal healing, fortune telling, faith healing, Nostradamus, psychics and dream interpretations, it is no contest. Pseudoscience out numbers science by at least three to one, and I don't even begin to count the far larger number of books on religion.
Now, whatever Dawkin's book count is, it isn't exactly science. But I do find it further support for what I have called, in all humility, "Duane's inverse bookshelf length law." Formally stated, this law says, "The amount of actual knowledge on any specific subject is inversely proportional to number of books on that subject in a general-purpose bookstore." If you go to a popular general-purpose bookstore, say, Barnes and Noble or Borders here in the US, and look at the "stacks," as opposed to the special displays, for almost any subject, you will find that the more books there are on that specific subject, the less there is actually anything to know or known about it. If there are a great many books on a given subject, it is likely that nothing is even knowable on that subject or that it isn't even a subject. There are several corollaries to this law, but I will not trouble you with them now. Suffice to say, like all pseudoscience, I have an explanation for every seeming violation of my law. And while Duane's inverse bookshelf length law may be pseudoscience, it does provide a first order approximation for those who want to know the amount of actual knowledge on a given subject.
While you're contemplating my law of inverse of bookshelf length, take a look at the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science mission statement. I find it appealing.
Posted by Duane Smith at September 16, 2007 1:42 PM | Read more on Odds and Ends |
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Comments
Sadly, I think you're inverse law is spot-on.
Posted by: Charles Halton at September 18, 2007 5:08 AM
Duane,
You definition of the inverse law reminds me of the definition of a scholar that I read somewhere. A scholar is the one who known more and more about less and less.
Claude Mariottini
Posted by: Claude Mariottini at September 27, 2007 7:12 PM
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