The Cost of Casual Research, Then and Now

A week or so ago, I came across the following account:

One cool thing that came with the [Encyclopædia] Britannica was a sheet of stamps. If there was something you wanted to know that didn't have an entry you could send them a letter, including one of the stamps, and they would respond with a custom entry. We used all of the stamps.

This was news to me: Either I didn't know about it or the World Book Encyclopedia I grew up using didn't come with anything like that.

Naturally, I bookmarked the story and decided to find out if it was true some time later.

Having just remembered it now, I did, but it was interesting that it was slightly harder to verify this claim than many others.

In other words, since Wikipedia didn't have an entry for answer girl, I'd get to experience the modern equivalent to the above!

The first things I found were images of the stamps (at eBay, for example) and a mention of them on a stamp collecting forum.

I was indeed mildly peeved: As Tyler Cowen has put it, There is a literature on everything, but I seemingly didn't know what terms I needed to find this.

But then a news story about Britannica's 250th year had enough of what I wanted:

She is her own 'Answer Girl' ... (Image by Windows, via Unsplash, license.)

[T]here were also challenging times for the company: the Great Depression of the 1930s, for example.

"Folks did not have disposable income, a lot of it, to spend on encyclopedias," Pappas told correspondent Luke Burbank. "Britannica had to find a way to stay relevant."

Their answer? The Answer Girls, an elite corps of women who would research and answer any question a Britannica owner might have.

Readers would ask a question of Britannica on a postcard, attach a stamp, mail it to them, and their library research service would research and type up a detailed report -- up to 10,000 words!

Neat! And you could probably be pretty sure that you got good information, given it came from a company with a reputation to uphold.

But look at the time! You paid for that information not just with part of the cost of a set of encyclopedias, but in time. If you needed that information in a hurry, you'd have to figure out another way to get it, or deal with being ignorant.

Now? Sure, people complain about all the bad information on the internet, but past a certain point, that's a failure to take responsibility for evaluating knowledge claims against logic, the sum of what one already knows, and the advice of relevant experts.

On balance, while the idea of asking an "Answer Girl" makes me smile, I'm much happier with the speed and low cost of being able to find information myself. Focusing too much on the All The Bad Information Out There is a mistake that blinds one to the many upsides, such as not being limited by: a number of stamps, or the speed of the post office, or the skill level or personal biases of any one other person.

-- CAV