WiReD magazine Editor-in-Chief Chris Anderson has copped to lifting chunks of material for his second book Free from Wikipedia and other sources without credit. But it could be about to get a lot worse.

In addition to the Wikipedia cut’n'pastes, Anderson appears to have lifted passages from several other texts too. And in a quite surreal twist, we discover that the Long Tail author had left a hard drive backup wide open and unsecured for Google to index, then accused one of his accusers of “hacking”.

Does the WiReD editor and New Economy guru need basic lessons in how to use a computer?

Waldo Jaquith of Virginia Quarterly Review unearthed a dozen suspect passages after what he called “a cursory investigation”, and posted his findings here on Tuesday. Wikipedia entries for ‘There Ain’t No Such Thing as a Free Lunch’, ‘Learning Curve’ and ‘Usury’ had been pasted into Anderson’s book.

In addition to Wikipedia citations, which Anderson reproduced with the errors intact (oops), Jacquith suggests he also lifted from an essay and a recent book. Presented with the evidence, Anderson blamed haste and (curiously) not being able to decide on a presentation format for citations, for his decision to omit the citations altogether. Other examples were “writethroughs”, he said.

Then lit blogger Edward Champion documented several more examples which he says show

“a troubling habit of mentioning a book or an author and using this as an excuse to reproduce the content with very few changes — in some cases, nearly verbatim.”

Champion’s examples of churnalism include blog posts, a corporate websites and (again) Wikipedia.

Handbags at dawn

In a memorable exchange with the humourless [*] Anderson, Champion responded:

“Even accounting for the fool’s weight that Wikipedia has in even the most generalized research situation, surely an ‘according to Wikipedia’ would have solved the problem. Except that if you actually copped to the fact that you cadged from Wikipedia, you’d be a laughing stock, wouldn’t you? Your ‘expertise’ — that country bumpkin approach to slinging conceptual generalizations around — would be called into question, wouldn’t it?”.

The bit in [our] italics is an early candidate for Quote of the Year.

Champion also discovered that Anderson had shared a backup of his personal hard drive with the entire universe. Anderson said he’d accidentally left the password off the backup, and then accused Champion of depositing files on the hard drive. Paging tech support for Mr Anderson…

And the rest of the iceberg has yet to be measured. One correspondent noted yesterday that in The Long Fail, Anderson’s first hit, Anderson describes a walk he supposedly took around a Wal-Mart in Oakland, where

“There are no copies of the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main Street or Nirvana’s Nevermind”

This bears a remarkable resemblance to a 2004 article in Rolling Stone magazine by Warren Cohen, who wrote:

“At a Wal-Mart Supercenter in Thorton, Colorado, for example, there were no copies of the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main Street or Nirvana’s Nevermind.”

The papers have been having great fun with the story, which has gained legs because of Anderson’s dog-ate-my-footnotes defence. But maybe they shouldn’t cast the first stone.

Pranking the newspapers by planting phoney material into the Hive Mind’s favourite reference source is an artform, and the papers oblige only too easily. When they’re not cutting and pasting from each other, they’re cutting and pasting from Wikipedia.

As we first reported, almost all the British obituary pages fell for the odd fact that Ronnie Hazlehurst had come out of retirement with S Club 7. Tabloid factoids spill from the web straight into print.

And last month an Irish prankster made up quotes for robo-repeaters at the BBC, the Graun, and the Independent (amongst others) to recycle. Newspapers blame the web for their demise, while churning out a crappy version of it in print.

And Anderson’s lame thesis (The Long Tail is now thoroughly shot to pieces, while Free is hedged with qualifications) wouldn’t have got out of the door if the papers had treated them with critical thinking, rather than slack-jawed wonder.

Actually – I made the last bit up. There was no Thunderbird. But you’ll need something similar – or maybe stronger – to anaesthetise your synapses after trying to read WiReD. After a 12 year absence, the magazine that purports to tell us the future returns to the country that invented the bouncing bomb, the hovercraft, television and the computer.

So, er … is it any good?

I can think of three or four reasons why it should be.

Well I can think of three or four great reasons why it really should be. The media doesn’t do science, and is terrified of technical subjects. The nearest a Hampstead or Islington-based newspaper features editor will get to an engineer is meeting the gas repair man. They consider the vacuous Malcolm Gladwell to be a mysterious, fascinating and wise figure from over the water. Nor do we have, in Britain, a magazine of ideas – just dull collections of position papers written by wonks, for wonks. In Britain we’ve never had the equivalent of a Harper’s or a New Yorker – something with a cracking 15,000 word article that you can read in the bath.

Secondly, this is a time when almost everything is up for grabs. Big ideas in science are furiously contested, and established ideological adversaries are finding strange things in common.

And finally, WiReD has always done optimism quite well – which for all its flippancy and nuttiness, is its redeeming feature. Take Global Warming, for example. Let’s suppose it’s true, said WiReD; there’ll be no Thermageddon, just a set of technical challenges that don’t involve drastic lifestyle or behaviour modification.

In other words – the world is far more interesting than we’re told, and there’s a gap in the market.

What WiReD gives us instead is 177 pages of relentless infonuggets. The techno trivia submerges both the features and the ads. It starts with the specially commissioned cover, which imagines a futuristic London, with WiReD-sponsored blimps hovering over the city. It predicts “buildings are routinely fitted with turbines and solar panels” and “local trips are taken on an elevated transport network”. No, really? The bloke who invented Twitter predicts “I think we’ll be bigger than Blogger” in a 150 word interview. Pages are filled with bite-sized futurology predictions which are just as bland – the prediction that we’ll find ET in less than twenty years comes from a marketing consultant called Faith Popcorn. (I’m not making this up).

Alain de Botton writes about a day spent driving diggers at the Diggerland theme park. He files just 250 words, and I hope I’m not spoiling it for you when I report the philosopher’s key discovery: “It’s fascinating to sit at the controls of a digger such as the JCB 3CX… The strength of the digger’s arm is awesome”.

Who knew?

On to the features, where there’s an good idea done well – quant pioneer David X Li, whose mathematical formula powered the last financial bubble. That should have been twice or three times as long. There’s a good idea done badly – how Anthony Rose rescued the BBC iPlayer. This should be a cracking tale of a techie who tamed a bureaucracy, but it isn’t done justice – you’ll learn a lot more from Rose his own words [PDF, 840kb]. And there’s a completely wacky feature about “Lifecasting”- in which people record every calorie and particle of food eaten, and every minute of activity in their lives, before posting it on the web. Do you know anyone who does this?

Then there’s the four page photo feature of close-ups of a supercomputer’s circuitry – and everything’s alright again. You wonder – was this published because the pictures are interesting art? (They’re not – one page would do).

The choice of experts reflects a media person’s idea of cutting edge science – if they’d been cyrogenically frozen in about 1993. You’ve got neuroscience, represented by Susan Greenfield, and sociobiology, thanks to former Northern Crock chairman Matt Ridley, nephew of former cabinet minister Lord Nicholas and a Dawkins fanatic. Neither is best-placed to explain why neuroscience and sociobiology have been flops.

(Place bets on Stephen Fry “guest editing” in the near future).

“The end came quickly,” as authors of morbid weepies like to say. On Monday WiReD magazine editor Chris Anderson effectively admitted game over for his “Long Tail”, the idea he’s been dragging so lucratively around the conference circuit for the past four years. In as many words, he downgraded it from “the future of business” to something that’s, er, not very helpful for your business at all.

“I’ll end by conceding a point: It’s hard to make money in the Tail,” Anderson wrote. “The revenues are disproportionately in the Head. Perhaps that will never change.”

As befits a quasi-religious cult, the straw that broke the Long Tail’s back wasn’t empirical evidence, but the Word of God. The Google God, to be precise – Eric Schmidt. Will Page’s exhaustive analysis of tens of millions of music transactions from a giant digital music store had already prompted a last ditch stand. But it was remarks by Schmidt, however, interviewed by McKinsey, that prompted the downgrade. Schmidt said they make most of the money in the top 10 per cent of advertising inventory.

Anderson also agreed that things were less fair – the “Head” was bigger – thereby destroying the message of salvation implicit in the original theory: that things would get fairer on the Interwebs. (And we’d all ascend to Heaven.)

“So much for ‘democratization’,” comments Tom Slee – who wrote about the post-Page fall-out for us here.

Connoisseurs of Cobblers and (future historians of Web 2.0) may be entertained by the titanic struggle Long Tail disciples now have: it’s men locked in mortal combat with their metaphors.

“If the old economy was a ‘regular body’ that grew a ‘long tail’ then this is the ‘beautiful face’,” pips in one commenter, while another adds:

“I’m tempted to do a comparison between FatHead/LongTail markets and oscillators,” writes one ‘Panayotis’. “I’d love to hear from someone with a more solid background in physics who could take the idea a bit further,” he adds hopefully.

Yeah, oscillators. Why didn’t we think of that?

So for Anderson, it’s on to the next instalment of trying to make the internet’s turds smell like perfume. The Long Tail was a response to a 2003 essay by Clay Shirky which pointed out that Pareto Law distributions (“Power Curves” – with big “heads” and long but insignificant “tails”) abounded on the net. This broke the utopian hearts, hence Anderson’s propaganda offensive.

His forthcoming book begs profitable companies to cross-subsidise Web 2.0 Fails.

It’s called Freetardonomics, apparently

Anderson bet that the orange portion – the “Tail” – has more value than the red portion – the “Head”. But it doesn’t.

Examining tens of millions of transactions from a large digital music provider, economist Will Page with Mblox founder Andrew Bud and Page’s colleague Gary Eggleton, looked to see how large and valuable the “Tail” of digital music may be. They produced a spreadsheet with 1.5 million rows – so large, in fact, that it required a special upgrade to their Excel software (and more RAM) – and the three revealed their work at the Telco 2.0 conference this week.

They discovered that instead of following a Pareto or “power law” curve, as Anderson suggested, digital song sales follow a classic Log Normal distribution. 80 per cent of the digital inventory sold no copies at all – and the ‘head’ was far more concentrated than the economists expected.

“Is the ‘future of business’ really selling more of less?” asks Page. “Absolutely not. If you had Top of the Pops now, you’d feature the Top 14, not Top 40.”

As Andrew Bud explains:

“The Long Tail’s argument is that the pattern of consumption for media is bent out of shape by the limits of the shops selling them. Digital media lets the nature of people’s demand flow free. Well, we now know what the shape of that demand curve looks like.”

Bud told the conference that the basic shape of consumer demand for digital music clearly fits the Log Normal distribution, “with eye-watering accuracy”. That’s no surprise, he says, because so many sales curves he’s seen over the past ten years follow this distribution.

“Now we’ve seen what happens when tens of millions of choices are thrown in the air and people can go pick them up. What was astounding was the degree of inequality between the head and the tail – by a factor of three. It’s specifically the Log Normal shape that leads to a rather poverty stricken Tail.

“There are Tails where the Tail lives as a kind of welfare state. Not this one. You starve in this Tail.”

Brown’s 1956 lognormal curve fits digital sales data much better than “The Long Tail”

This really isn’t the upbeat fairy tale message Anderson has spent four years selling on the conference circuit.

However, as he took his “message” to Davos and beyond, the Long Tail has gradually developed into a ‘Policy Based Evidence Making’. Having convinced himself of the truth of his hypothesis by looking at one US music service, Anderson widened his search for facts that might fit his theory. But he didn’t examine the numbers closely or critically enough, say the economists.

“You need to consider much more than just some flimsy volume-based Rhapsody data if you’re going to say the world’s changed,” says Page. “For instance, understanding value both in terms of retail spend and then marginal profitability to the artist and songwriter would have been a logical extension”

In another surprise, 80 per cent of the revenue came from 52,000 songs. What’s eye-catching about the number? Well, the typical inventory of a conventional high street record store was around 4,000 CDs. Or … around 52,000 songs.

Old Rules rediscovered

Page says the breakthrough had come via Andrew’s father Martin Bud, a businessman and researcher whose work had informed a now obscure tome with a distinctly unsexy name. John Goodell Brown’s Statistical Forecasting for Inventory Control was published in 1957, and is now out of print. But it forecast the digital world far closer than anything in WiReD.

“In many ways, we’ve been in the Long Tail business since 1914″, says Page, referring to the UK copyright collection society the MCPS-PRS Alliance, where he is chief economist. “That’s what collective rights licensing is. It doesn’t matter if a song is a hit or niche, once it’s been licensed under a blanket agreement so there are no barriers to using it.”

And neither lead economist agrees that the Tail will be any more prevalent when P2P file sharing is taken into account. If anything, it’s more pronounced, Page suggests:

“Look at Radiohead’s experiment. Even when they reduced the price of copyright to free, there were 2.3 million downloads in the first three weeks – and 400,000 in a day. This was perhaps the most pirated piece of music of all time – and yet every fan could get it legally without paying. So the black market could potentially be even more concentrated.”

New World, Old Rules

For Page, the grain of truth in the digital music revolution is buried beneath a mountain of nonsense.

With cheap production tools and the internet as a new distribution channel, some costs of production are indeed lowered, and some artists can indeed cut out (or “disintermediate”) the middle man. But those old rules still make a significant difference to your business strategy.

“In particular, the division of labour and economies of scale still have tremendous relevance to understanding today’s market”, Page notes.

The division of labour means it can benefit you to employ a specialist intermediary, while economies of scale mean the bigger you are, the better terms you can negotiate.

“What’s interesting, from a collecting society’s perspective, is that when you have a dramatic increase in both rights holders on one side – more artists and songwriters – and rights users on the other side – an explosion of more digital music start ups – then, regardless of what the Long Tail is or isn’t, the case for a common platform grows. This common platform pools rights, reduces transaction costs and prevents fragmentation – and everyone sees benefits.

“Otherwise those start ups won’t get started – and those performers and songwriters won’t get paid”.

WiReD‘s faith-based economics

Bud is surprisingly generous about Anderson’s book.

“It’s an excellent book and thoughtfully written. But The Long Tail receives very little numerical examination. Saying the Tail has great value is not borne out by the evidence in this case.”

Anderson’s inspiration was the desire to put a positive spin on a depressing observation. An essay by Clay Shirky suggested that weblog readership followed a Pareto Curve (or “Power Law”) – which dismayed many early Web 2.0 evangelists. Early bloggers began to lose faith. The Long Tail helped bolster morale – although its success owed much to sloppy thinking – and in particular, metaphorical logic.

This supposes that because one thing is like another, it exhibits the same characteristics. For example:

• Oranges are nutritious
• Billiard balls are like oranges
• We should eat billiard balls

To see how far this can travel, once borne on the heady vapors of Web 2.0, take this passage by Jack Schofield in The Guardian from 2006:

“The Long Tail is making an impact because it is a powerful idea that provides us with a new(ish) way of looking at the world. Copernicus did the same thing for many people when he pointed out that the earth went round the sun, not vice versa, though no planetary bodies were physically moved in the process.”

The propensity of journalists – even highly experienced journalists – to fantasize about the world rather than examine it critically is one of the defining features of modern technology coverage.

As Andrew Bud puts it -

“The Long Tail created a Movement, and it’s the Long Tail ‘Movement’ that’s in trouble.”

Page is making a habit of debunking the WiReD clique that is the source of so much bad business advice. We published his response to Kevin Kelly (WiReD‘s founding editor) – Can 1,000 fans replace the music business? – here earlier this year. More of his work can be found online here. ®

[Disclosure: your reporter's explanation of Californian technology utopians was credited in this presentation]

WiReD magazine is coming back to the UK. I set Reg readers the task of Photoshopping some covers here. You can see the results in a gallery here.

Wonderful stuff.

WiReD magazine’s editor-in-chief Chris Anderson has just seen the end for scientific theories. And it is called Google.

Read more at The Register

Scientists have been able to identify human DNA for over 40 years. And here at The Register, we have access to our own stock of Martian DNA – courtesy, of course, of cult commentator and philosopher amanfromMars.

The startling discovery that DNA may have leaped across planetary boundaries comes courtesy of literary agent John Brockman.

Brockman runs an online groupthink “salon”, called Edge.org, where his indentured science authors and a select band of ideologically-correct journalists are invited to congratulate each other on their insight. (Don’t worry if you’ve never heard of Edge before – it’s only ever mentioned by Blokes who are already in it, or Blokes who would sell their mothers to get in.)

But it’s here, at Edge, that Brockman may have unearthed the greatest scoop of his lifetime; for here at least, one Martian-human hybrid walks amongst us.

New Year’s Day found a curious declaration credited to one “Kevin Kelly” – editor in chief of WiReD magazine.

“The success of the Wikipedia (sic) keeps surpassing my expectations. Despite the flaws of human nature, it keeps getting better,” he writes.

Of course, that’s an easy mistake to make… if you’ve just arrived from another planet. Here’s a more accurate measure of success, from earth-bound observers SomethingAwful.

Yet the alien visitor must be impressed by the high ethical standards exhibited by the project, its fair-mindedness, tolerance and generosity, and of course, its uniquely bottom-up democratic nature, for he is mightily impressed. So much so, that he sees in it a new way of organising society:

“The reality of a working Wikipedia has made a type of communitarian socialism not only thinkable, but desirable… I hate to say it but there is a new type of communism or socialism loose in the world.”

Alarm bells really ought to be clanging by this point. The Martian-Martian hybrid is using terms he has apparently heard, but doesn’t really understand – and can’t relate to the world around him.

The next statement can be construed as a promise that the hybrid DNA is here to stay:

“It may take several decades for this shifting world perspective to show its full colours …

Finally, here’s the clincher:

“I am convinced that the full impact of the Wikipedia is still subterranean, and that its mind-changing power is working subconsciously on the global millennial generation, providing them with an existence proof of a beneficial hive mind, and an appreciation for believing in the impossible.”

Pure Martian.

“The name of this new game is RADICAL TRANSPARENCY, and it’s sweeping boardrooms across the nation,” burbled the mag.

But the perils of allowing employees to “blab and blog!” were splendidly illustrated over the weekend by Google.

“Does negative press make you Sicko?” asked Google health account planner Lauren Turner. She was referring to the new documentary by left wing demagogue Michael Moore about the US health provision.

Turner used the corporate blog to condemn his use of “isolated and emotional stories of the system at its worst”. Why couldn’t the media concentrate on the positive aspects of the system such as 44m uninsured Americans er, “the industry’s numerous prescription programs, charity services, and philanthropy efforts.”

This segues neatly into a plug for Google’s core business, as she goes on to explain:

Many of our clients face these issues; companies come to us hoping we can help them better manage their reputations through “Get the Facts” or issue management campaigns. Your brand or corporate site may already have these informational assets, but can users easily find them?

We can place text ads, video ads, and rich media ads in paid search results or in relevant websites within our ever-expanding content network. Whatever the problem, Google can act as a platform for educating the public and promoting your message. We help you connect your company’s assets while helping users find the information they seek.

Not surprisingly, Google’s intervention on behalf of the healthcare giants caused an uproar.

“Google might want to consider changing their motto to ‘We pander to anyone that can pay’”, wrote one Slashdot poster.

Yesterday, Turner followed up with an explanation, but seemed to ignore the unwritten rule of old-school PR disaster management: When you’re in a hole, stop blabbing.

Her opinion of Mr Moore’s jolly unfair movie was entirely personal, she said, and Google “probably” doesn’t have a position.

But nevertheless: “Advertising is a very democratic and effective way to participate in a public dialogue,” she urged.

Now advertising may be many things – but “democratic” isn’t a word that readily comes to mind.

This piece of “radical transparency” has served two purposes, neither of which particularly helps Google. Firstly, it reminds everyone that Google is an advertising company. It is, but it goes to extraordinary lengths to persuade us it isn’t. Secondly, it again shows a rather weird relationship with “democracy” (you’ll recall how it marketed its PageRank™ as harnessing the “uniquely democratic nature of the web” – too bad if you’re not on it).

Only among the simple minded, or truly brainwashed, can Google’s highest-bidder-wins advertising auction be uttered in the same breath as one person, one vote democracy.

Perhaps it’s time to re-hire that publicist.

Just as the young polemicist Dawkins paved the way for the social darwinism of the Reagan and Thatcher years, Surowecki’s discussion of futures markets and “collective intelligence” provides the flimsy premise for a spending splurge on junk technology. It’s the common thread that unites several of the disparate “Web 2.0″ start-ups we wrote about yesterday, in our must-read roundup.

Both authors were the catalyst for entire schools of junk science – yet both can justifiably claim to have been misrepresented to some degree. While Surowecki is clearly as bewitched by “collective intelligence” as Dawkins was by a gene-eyed view of evolution, he also warns that the crowd only picks winners in very specific circumstances, where the collective guess work acts as a kind of risk hedging. If these factors aren’t present, then the market falls victim to the inevitable: gaming.

But even when this appears to work, so what? Seth Finkelstein notes that in some situations, throwing darts at a dartboard produces excellent results. Citing the Wall Street Journal Dartboard Contest, he writes,

“People are fascinated by ways in which data-mining seems to represent some sort of over-mind. But sometimes there’s no deep meaning at all. Dartboards are competitive with individual money managers – but nobody talks about the ‘wisdom of darts’”

And today, Canadian hockey fans are rejoicing in the return of Maggie the Macaque. The simian (on the right) out-performed the experts in predicting the results of key games during the 2003 season. Could it be Maggie’s diet of crabs, or could it be – “The Wisdom of Monkeys”?

One need only look at the composition of the internet to understand why the “Wisdom of Crowds” will never apply: the internet isn’t representative of society, and even amongst this whiter-than-white sample, only a self-selecting few have any interest in participating in a given pseudo-market.

While Wisdom of Crowds was self-consciously written with the purpose of restoring the public’s faith in the market, after the dot.com bubble burst – it was titled after Charles Mackay’s Extraordinary Popular Decisions and The Madness of Crowds – it’s had the opposite effect.

The self-selecting nature of participation in computer networks simply amplifies groupthink. Facts that don’t fit the belief are discarded. The consequences abound, wherever you look.

The great Wikipedia experiment is already over, says Nick Carr, the inevitable result of an open editing policy.

He cites what may prove to be the 21st Century’s equivalent of the 1948 newspaper headline, “DEWEY WON”, Time magazine’s declaration that,

“everyone predicted that [Wikipedia's] mob rule would lead to chaos. Instead it has led to what may prove to be the most powerful industrial model of the 21st century: peer production. Wikipedia is proof that it works, and Jimmy Wales is its prophet.”

Praise be!

But to buy into this world view, one must disregard all evidence to the contrary. Veteran Wikipedia administrator ‘Skippy’ of Wikitruth.info – a site strangely absent from Wikipedia’s “sum of all human knowledge” – mailed us his summary yesterday:

“Wikipedia is proof that an encyclopedia that ‘anyone can edit’ doesn’t mesh with the reality of human nature.”

A harsher summary from the Village Voice recently declared:

“No true believer in the democratic promise of the Web can fail to gladden at the very mention of this grand experiment – the universal encyclopedia ‘anyone can edit’!—or fail to have noticed, by now, what a fucked-up little mockery of that promise it can sometimes be.”

It’s no surprise to discover that Time magazine’s puff piece was written by WiReD magazine editor Chris “Long Tail” Anderson. Three years ago, Anderson bet your reporter that by today Wi-Fi chipsets would outsell GSM or CDMA chipsets. This was on the occasion of an Intel-sponsored edition of his publication, and Anderson was in the grip of the religious mania about Wi-Fi. His prediction has fallen short by around a billion units.

(If you want faith-based economic theory, Anderson’s your man.)

We’ve written about groupthink on so many occasions – particularly after the collapse of the Howard Dean presidential run – we won’t bore you with repetition. But a golden rule of internet companies is that the more faith they place on the “new wisdom of the web”, the more inevitable their demise.

For Google, which buys into the junk science more than any other Silicon Valley company, this is very bad news indeed. The “democracy of the web” was short-lived, and the company devotes most of its brainpower resources not to developing new products, but trying to rescue its search engine from “Grey Goo”. Faith-based junk science can be a real handicap.

Where does all this affect us? Wherever their advocated bad ideas waste money and resources. For those of us who want better technology, the mini splurge of capital investment in fatuous companies is more than troubling. A dollar spent on a doomed web site is a dollar that could have been spent on solving some real, overdue infrastructural problems.

Seth Finkelstein points out an immediate consequence which is already taking place. Wisdom… gained such traction on the net, because of its cultural distrust of expertise. This stops where the net stops, however – it’s hard to envisage even the most militant Wikipedia fan choosing to be operated upon by amateur heart surgeon. But it’s accelerated the process of deskilling, and the new flood of cheap (but wise!) amateur labor promises to depress wages even further.

The media, and Time is a great example, espouses the rosy view that our public networks are in rude health. I’m confident that this utopian view carries little weight with a public frustrated with pop-ups, viruses and spam.

So to return to our original question. If the public so wilfully buys into sloppy thinking, are the authors themselves responsible? In the case of both Dawkins and Surowecki, who mistitled their books, they may protest too much