Utility function

I recently volunteered to proof-read articles for the journal of a library association that I belong to. My first article was a wonderful exemplar of the axiom that no good deed goes unpunished. The paper concerned ways of getting people to make certain research products available to the general public, and was written from an economist perspective. (The journal in question is emphatically not aimed at economists.) I have some economics background, but...

This paper talked about things like the Pareto-optimal allocation of resources, non-cooperative game theory and incentive inefficiency. It contained several utility functions to be maximized and two and a half pages that consisted mostly of equations. I spent about a week, off and on, editing it, and there were individual sentences that I spent as much as fifteen minutes trying to decode with the help of a colleague with an economics degree.

I'm pretty sure I now understand the paper, and I'm also pretty sure that I can sum the whole thing up as follows: to get people to do X (X being the action of concern here), you need either a reward that is higher than the cost of doing X or a punishment that is more costly than the cost of doing X. Otherwise, it makes more sense for them to not do it.

I can think of no way in which either the writing or the reading of this paper can possibly maximize any sort of utility function. Unless the original author just really enjoys doing that sort of thing, I guess.

Weeding

It's occurring to me now that people who love books really shouldn't try to do certain library tasks. I discovered back in Library School that I probably couldn't be a cataloguer. I remember that day when a professor handed each of us aspiring cataloguers a stack of books to practice our subject-heading skills on. At the end of the class, very few subject headings had been applied to my books, and I was sitting there reading.

Or, take weeding, the process of selecting books for deselection, as we euphemistically call it. I'm currently going through some antiquated technology books, and I can't help but pity the poor things, even or perhaps especially the ones that have sat unused for over 20 years. It brings me back to those laws of library science we learned, every reader his or her book, every book its reader. And no matter how dated or seemingly useless the book I'm considering, I find myself picturing the reader that this one would be exactly right for.

Take the dated programming guides to defunct languages. (Take them off my mind, if you would.) Someone maintaining legacy software, or a historian of the evolution of programming, might find them invaluable. Software manual? A hobbyist, or someone trying to decode an old file. And many of the old texts have insights still as relevant as Ranganathan's are, if only the ones who need them would look...

But I'm afraid they wouldn't, and won't be able to in any case.