12 Rules For Life: $0
50 Shades of Grey: $26
A Theory of Justice: $0
Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone: $0
Principia: $0
The Bible: $0
The Cat in the Hat: $0
The Origin Of Species: $0
The Wealth of Nations: $7
War and Peace: $12
In order to participate in the donating poll* you first need to make a donation to NationStates. Reply to this thread and use your donation to communicate the relative size of your love for each book. Please round your donation up (ie $2.99 -> $3) and use whole dollar amounts (ie Principia: $2 The Bible: $1).
Making a donation to NS helps to raise its ranking (relative importance) in the race for resources. The more money that Max Barry receives, the more resources that he can compete away from other uses. Would it be better if ranking by donating was replaced with ranking by voting (ie participatory budgeting)?
As far as I know, there’s never been any formal attempt to compare voting and donating. No real scientist has tried to determine whether a crowd of voters is wiser than a crowd of donors. I’ve e-mailed dozens of scientists asking them to investigate this... but so far no luck.
Perhaps I’ll continue to pester the professionals, but in the meantime, it’s up to us amateur sleuths to try and solve this mystery. This thread is actually the second NS voting vs donating experiment. The results of the first experiment were… debatable. So far 39 people have participated in the voting poll but only one person participated in the donating poll. Galloism argued that this proves that voting is far more informative than donating, but he didn’t argue that voting ranking should replace donating ranking. My interpretation of the results is that many people are happy to share worthless opinions. It’s quite clear that a donating poll is highly effective at separating the wheat from the chaff. Therefore, the dominance of the chaff in social media is caused by the absence of donating polls.
Just remember that when someone touts their number of followers on YouTube (or Twitter, or a blog). Those numbers are mostly meaningless and only tell you that someone has hit a sweet spot in the medium’s artificial algorithm, which inflates noise into a mysterious cultural significance. - PZ Myers, Pewdiepie Is Up To His Old Tricks Again
This noise, which is primarily produced by voting, is the real root of society’s problems. But I could be wrong. In any case we can all agree that voting and donating produced very different results in the first experiment. In order to correctly interpret these results, we need more evidence.
How differently will voting and donating rank these 10 books? Will one ranking be noticeably better than the other? How, exactly, do we define “better”? Are intellectual books inherently better? Here are 12 books that made Taylor Pearson think (sorted by when he read them)...
Compare Pearson’s list to Amazon's list of the Top 20 bestselling books of all time...
There’s absolutely no overlap between the two lists. Is this a problem? How different would Amazon’s Top 20 list be if all its books were ranked by donating instead of buying? What if the books were ranked by voting?
Voting, buying and donating are very different ranking systems. Naturally they aren’t going to create the same hierarchy of books. Each ranking system is going to arrange the books, and their knowledge, very differently, which will create very unequally beneficial social orders. So it’s incredibly important to determine which ranking system is the best. My belief, which might be wrong, is that donating is the best way to rank books. What’s your belief?
To help facilitate book ranking comparisons, here are the preferred rankings that a few members shared in the previous thread....
What’s your preferred ranking? Is it closer to the voting ranking or the donating ranking?
If you are craving additional food for thought and discussion, then here's a feast for your enjoyment…
[The donation poll last updated to include American test's input]
*Rules
1. Previous donations cannot be applied to current donating polls
2. Screenshots aren't acceptable proof of donations