Journalists, authors, publishers: all dying (?) industries whose introspection should be eminently readable. Most fail on this account: they are mostly unreadable because they lack sound logic.

One of the best things I've read this week breaks that mold, and excellently so. Richard Nash's VQR piece on the business of publishing is, as my authoritative tweet said, surprisingly readable.

https://twitter.com/inathanael/status/318022523470094337

What makes it readable is its clear thinking, its logic. To cut apart most analysis of the publishing industry, NAsh cites the availability heuristic. Wonderful.

The story of the book as technology—the book as revolutionary, disruptive technology—must be told honestly, without triumphalism or defeatism, without hope, without despair, just as Isak Dinesen admonished us to write. A great challenge in producing such an account, however, is the “availability heuristic.” This is a model of cognitive psychology first proposed in 1973 by Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman and his colleague Amos Tversky, which describes how humans make decisions based on information that is relatively easy to recall. The things that we easily recall are things that happen frequently, and so making decisions based on the samples we have at hand would seem to make sense. The sun rises every day; we infer from this that the sun rises every day. A turkey is fed every day; it infers that it will be fed every day—until, suddenly, it isn’t. Heuristics are great until they aren’t. A person sees several news stories of cats leaping out of tall trees and surviving, so he believes that cats must be robust to long falls. These kinds of news reports are far more prevalent than ones where a cat falls to its death, which is the more common event. But since it is less reported on, it is not readily available to a person for him to make judgments.

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