The Data Delusion

One unlikely day during the empty-belly years of the Great Depression, an advertisement appeared in the smeared, smashed-ant font of the New York Times' classifieds: Five hundred college graduates, male, to perform secretarial work of a pleasing nature. Thousands of desperate, out-of-work bachelors of arts applied; five hundred were hired ("they were mainly plodders, good men, but not brilliant"). They went to work for a mysterious Elon Musk-like millionaire who was devising "a new plan of universal knowledge." In a remote manor in Pennsylvania, each man read three hundred books a year, after which the books were burned to heat the manor. At the end of five years, the men, having collectively read three-quarters of a million books, were each to receive fifty thousand dollars.