In contrast, only about 7 percent made it through Nobel Prize economist Daniel Kahneman’s magnum opus, Thinking, Fast and Slow. By his measure, more than 90 percent of readers finished Donna Tartt’s novel The Goldfinch. This would give a rough guide to readers’ propensity to make it to the end. Ellenberg realized he could compare how frequently quotes were highlighted at the beginning of the book versus the end of the book. Amazon reports how many people quote various lines in books. He thought of an ingenious way to test it using Big Data. Ellenberg, a mathematician at the University of Wisconsin, was curious about how many people actually finish books. “Then, one day, a friend of mine emailed me a study by Jordan Ellenberg. Towards the end of the book, the author tells us how a clever researcher figured this out: Earlier today, I was scrolling through my Twitter feed when I saw something striking, though maybe not surprising.Īccording to the tweet, only 7% of people that start Daniel Kahneman’s “ Thinking Fast and Slow” end up finishing the book.Ĭurious of how this was determined, I picked up a copy of the book that stat was plucked from: “ Everbody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are”.
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