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Corruption in textbook-adoption proceedings: ‘Judging Books by Their Covers’
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This is why we continue to see, in state after state, the same absurdities that Feynman saw thirty-five years ago. In state after state, the legitimate reviewing of books is shunned. In state after state, incompetent committees engage in group-grope “evaluation” shams which embody the emperor’s-nose fallacy — the nonsensical notion that a question can be answered by averaging a bunch of guesses proffered by people who don’t know what they are talking about. In state after state, corrupt proceedings are corrupted further by publishers’ “presentations”: The publishers send salesmen to describe, explain and promote their books to the evaluation committees, to other state functionaries, and even to members of state boards of education. Feynman refused to hear such pitches, because he held that a book should be able to speak for itself. He was right, of course — but in many states, evaluation committees are routinely subjected to “presentations” by publishers’ pitchmen.
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