More on Free

Today I ran across another entry in the grow­ing list of refu­ta­tions of Chris Anderson’s Free: The Future of a Radical Price. This time it’s an arti­cle from The Chronicle of Higher Education fea­tur­ing the story of Berkley Physics pro­fes­sor Richard A. Muller. In a nut­shell, Anderson uses Muller as an exam­ple in Free of a case where web expo­sure (in this case YouTube videos of pro­fes­sor Muller’s lec­tures) has trans­lated into com­mer­cial suc­cess (in this case a book deal).

The prob­lem is, Muller doesn’t agree with Anderson’s con­clu­sions. Muller is quoted in The Chronicle:

“That is wish­ful think­ing from some­one who is try­ing to con­clude that Webcasts lead to money,” said Mr. Muller. “But cor­re­la­tion is not cau­sa­tion. What Anderson says may be ‘easy to see,’ but it just ain’t so. He is let­ting his hoped-for con­clu­sion drive his analy­sis of events.”

The Journal then goes on to detail how Muller per­formed a quasi – sci­en­tific exper­i­ment to attempt to con­firm Anderson’s hypothesis:

“I have been per­son­ally con­tacted by about 1,000 peo­ple who saw my Webcasts,” said the pro­fes­sor. “When the book came out, I arranged to e-mail all of them (using Norton’s account) to let them know that a book was now avail­able. I then watched the sales very care­fully. (I actu­ally have a com­puter that down­loads the rank­ing every hour from Google.) Although I had seen huge jumps in my sales when I was inter­viewed on NPR (3 times) or had a book review inThe Boston Globe, and a few other things, the mas­sive e-mailing to my Web fans pro­duced no dis­cernible increase in sales. My con­clu­sion: Web view­ers don’t buy many hard­cover books.”

Anderson, of course will have none of this. The Chronicle quotes him as responding:

“To sug­gest that all Web view­ers don’t buy books seems pre­ma­ture,” said Mr. Anderson in an inter­view with The Chronicle. He argued that the professor’s expo­sure on YouTube most likely helped the sales of his book, even if indi­rectly. For instance, the pop­u­lar­ity of the videos may have made review­ers more inter­ested in writ­ing about the book. “If he believes there’s no cor­re­la­tion, that’s inter­est­ing,” said Mr. Anderson. “We have done the same type of exper­i­ments and we con­clude otherwise.”

Here is the hight of  cyber­topian douchebag­gery. “I will ignore your evi­dence because it doesn’t fit my pre – con­ceived notions.” Sorry, Chris, this isn’t how sci­ence works. Of course, if Chris Anderson had an under­stand­ing of the Scientific Method we wouldn’t have twad­dle like The Long Tail and Free to tear apart. Anderson makes two fun­da­men­tal mis­takes in his attempts to push his cyber­topian crap. The first, Richard Muller points out above. Correlation does not cau­sa­tion. Chris Anderson seems inca­pable of grasp­ing this fact. The sec­ond mis­take that Anderson makes is think­ing that the plural of “anec­dote” is “data.” Anderson’s writ­ing is chock – full of just – so – sto­ries that, while they do an admirable job of mak­ing the reader feel good about what­ever techno – utopia Chris is push­ing this week, do not serve as actual evi­dence of a trend. Really, it’s no bet­ter than a weight loss pill ad. Results may vary, meant for use with diet and exer­cise, con­sult your doc­tor before using Free.

The thing is, the above issues aren’t the most annoy­ing part of the cyber­topian men­ace, and here I will switch from the spe­cific annoy­ance of Chris Anderson to the gen­eral mass of cyber­topian dip­shits. If the worst thing about the cyber­topi­ans was their sketchy grasp of sci­ence and their insis­tence on a woo – laden world­view that would make Depak Chopra blush then we could just dis­miss them. What truly ran­kles about the cyber­topian free­tards is their com­plete and utter inabil­ity to con­sider the fact that they may be wrong.

See, I couldn’t care less if some­one wants to try to fol­low Anderson’s model and become a cyber – hip­pie. That just leaves more filthy lucre for me. What infu­ri­ates me, and many peo­ple that I’ve dis­cussed this issue with is Anderson and his dis­ci­ples abil­ity to blithely ignore actual con­tent cre­ators like Muller and just declare them wrong. To assume that, in a com­pli­cated eco­nomic sys­tem, a sin­gle model is the only valid one is sheer lunacy. To then declare the very peo­ple mak­ing money by refut­ing your model to be wrong bor­ders on psychotic.