CobWeb

Neal Stephenson book ISBN:0553383442

Excerpt on filtering Reading: ...dozens of advanced baby-management books... Then he picked up another one and discovered that it contradicted the first one directly... So he went directly to the content. It seemed like a good bet that if the writer of such a book was a fool, this fact would be bound to come out somewhere in its several hundred pages... Clyde read the books with the relentless penetrating scrutiny of a detective, not looking for information so much as evidence... finding an internal contradiction or even a badly written sentence, he would snap it shut, with a popping noise like the bang of a gavel, and Frisbee it across the carpet into the reject pile... he was able to narrow the field of baby-sleep experts down to one guy.

• cf Gell-Mann Amnesia, Bozo Bit