Sadly there's a lot of truth there. Generally it's a bad idea to lend tools to people that don't know how to use them. I don't lend my tools to friends,
although I make exceptions when I 100% trust the guy. This is based on experience.
But I'm happy to help, either by me going there or the friend bringing his stuff to my workshop.
I'm confident you could build one of these in an IF engine like Inform, but the offering is fundamentally different. These books are essentially compressed TRPG experiences where the gamemaster's actions are encoded into the "go-to page n" directives.
>It's about logic, methodology, significance, and citations
To quote kazinator in this thread.
"The typo is not the problem; it's that the typo is evidence of academic dishonesty.
When you make a citation, it means you cracked open the original work, understood what it says and located a relevant passage to reference in your work.
The authors are propagating the same typo because they are not copying the original correct text; they are just copying ready-made citations of that text which they plant into their papers to manufacture the impression that they are surveying other work in their area and taking it into account when doing their work."
>It's not some gold standard of perfection or truth.
"Gold standard" is a term used within the scientific community to describe the high rigor expected within the scientific community when doing research. One of the processes they hold up in this standard is Peer Review. I wasn't making some general public statement about perfection.
Google "Gold Peer Review Gold Standard".
I used to watch her show a few years back. I enjoyed her willingness to point out the failings of the scientific community. Things like lying by omission around the cold fusion energy levels being generated. Certain cosmological areas ignoring the need for empirical validation of their mathematical models etc. This was during that post-covid window where science was the institutions not the the method, skepticism was anti-science. Scientists were being portrayed as angels not humans, that don't suffer from the same failings as the rest of humanity... Anyway it was refreshing.
It was her video on the Stanford Internet Observatory. That made me realise she doesn't always put a lot of research into areas outside her expertise.
You can actually estimate this pretty well with only your brain and basic math.
Example 1 in Guesstimation by Lawrence Weinstein and John Adams, would work for this problem. The problem is about estimating the height of all lottery tickets in a lottery. Another book called The art of Insight in Science and Engineering by Sanjoy Mahajan has this problem (1.3) but its with a suitcase filled with $100 bills.
