About

This site has been created to promote the communication between the writer of this book with his potential Readers during the process of creation.

This book is about ranking, everybody with whom I talked in the last six months seemed to agree with me that the topic is in the air. I am writing this book, since I feel if I don’t do it and not now, somebody else would publish a bestseller with a very similar title and I would be envious of the author as she had happened to be more rapid, cleverer and more successful than I was. Enviousness comes from comparison. We like to compare ourselves to others and see who is stronger, richer, better, cleverer. Our love to comparison led to our fad to make rankings. Ranking is about becoming more organized and we like the idea of being more organized!

Ranking procedure is a triple edge sowrd.  It reflects objectivity. First, runners ranked based on the time they achieve a distance, a competition going back to the ancient Olympic Games in Greece, reflects the reality of objectivity. Second,  many Top Ten (twenty one, thirty three etc) lists based on subjective categorization and give the illusion of objectivity only. Third,  we don’t necessarily like always objectivity, since we don’t mind to have a better image and rank as we (or our website, business, organization etc.) deserves. More precisely, occasionally we cats are the victims of biased self-perception, and we are ready to believe we are lions, other times while we know well we are not, but would not mind to be perceived by others that we are, and maybe just we are the only king of the animals. In the latter case we need reputation management. Reputation management manipulates objectivity by suppressing negative aspects, and amplifying positive ones. The result of this ethical dubious procedure is a higher-than-well deserved rank.

About the author:

The author, a Henry Luce Professor of Complex Systems Studies  teaches interdisciplinary classes and is cross-appointed with a physics and psychology departments. He has an extensive experience to explain thoughts to students even without having preliminary knowledge. Péter Érdi, who grew up in Budapest, combines the perspectives of a Central European intellectual and a professor of complex systems studies in a descent small Midwestern liberal art college at Kalamazoo, Michigan.