Comment by sixhobbits | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sixhobbits | Hacker News Reader

- If you want to find the most influential book, you should probably ask more than a dozen people the question "what is the most influential book". And you should probably look at how frequently certain titles get chosen. Otherwise you just have a list of favourite books from some unrelated academics I've never heard of.

- You should also try and include some academics and/or authors outside of America if you want to be taken seriously.

- Perhaps also consider, if you insist on doing this through a survey, asking people for some kind of evidence that supports the influential reach of their chosen book.

- Finally if you have a list of 20 books arranged vertically so people can can scroll down them, don't have the back button attempt and fail to scroll to each visited location on the page if you expect return visitors.

Overall, I see no value in this list beyond any other "hey I like these books I happened to read" type blog and I'll think twice before clicking on a chronicle link in future.

Is there a way to completely blacklist web sites such as this one? Such as a Firefox extension than would, in my browser, remove results from search engines, entries from hackernews, and so on? There are tons of them where articles are meaningless, and a waste of time.

> Overall, I see no value in this list beyond any other "hey I like these books I happened to read"

But... that’s valuable.

Only if the opinion of the people you ask is considered valuable.

Not really. Unless made by Nazis or people under the age of 7 I’m pretty much always interested in skimming a thoughtful list of nonfiction book recommendations.

...and then hitting back 40 times to return to HN.

That part I was less pleased by. Though as any savvy HN reader knows just holding down the back button on an iPhone, or the equivalent elsewhere, solves that problem neatly.

Or just open in a new tab. When done, close the tab.

I thought article would be about the sorts of books read by the sort of people who read the Chronicle, and sure enough it was. And that was fine with me. If I wanted the sort of list a different sort of group would produce, I would go somewhere else.

As to evidence these are the most influential books in their fields, I assume they spend a lot of time reading what other people in their field say they were influence by, and so I trust they know what they are talking about.

Or is it perhaps your belief that social science and humanities professors should not be allowed to talk about such things?

How else would you do it other than a survey?

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