Book Data Me

The Book

I started my search by reading about all the different kinds of problems I could find. I went through tens of thousands of pages of sociology, education, political science, psychology, math bio history and literature. What I found was a pattern. In an enormous number of situations, things weren't working because people didn't know what they were doing, and they didn't have the opportunity to learn. The information they needed might have been about statistics, manufacturing, or feelings, but in an important way, it was an information problem. And suddenly those thousands of pages just looked like: how do you get the information you need?

Of course, if this is one way to describe every problem, that makes it one massive problem. What kept it from seeming hopeless was that all of the books I read had really been solving a piece of the larger puzzle. Most people would never have thought that these pieces had anything to do with one another. I certainly hadn't. But when you put them together, they became an incredibly exciting picture, that none of them could have shown on their own.

(The download link has the first three chapters.)

Exciting as it was, the book is just the beginning of the story. I went looking for a problem. Now that I've found one I'm satisfied with, the next step is the solution. And the shape of the solution flows out of the book, just as nicely as all the problems I read about flowed into it.