Inflation is a growing problem in modern lists. When I was a kid, we used to get articles in papers and magazines saying things like three great books to read or two ways to treat an owie. But nowadays, the lists show 100 great books to read before Christmas and 33 foods to avoid for the health of your liver. There is a book "1000 places to visit before you die". C'mon! A thousand places? I don't have time nor energy for 1000 places. How about 10? Or 4?
The problem may be partly due to search engines, like Google or Bing or, yes, DuckDuckGo. Those searchers are so efficient that a little investigation will turn up hundreds, maybe thousands of links and references. It is easy to get caught up in more and more information, deeper and deeper possibilities. Google lets you know how many hits it has found and when that number is in the hundred millions, how can you face using just 5 or 10?
It shows more thought and more courage to pare down a list, say of books that have mattered, to five or ten. Anyone can plunk down every title they remember and not exercise any editorial brains or courage to focus on what matters. If I am afraid of being wrong, I will list every possible vacation destination but I may step up and promote Nice and Avignon in France, knowing that I have omitted Yellowstone and Arches National Park.
I learned a long time ago, from a Bell Labs speaker and from the statistician W.E. Deming to be suspicious of any official number. You have probably heard of the seven wonders of the world. Why seven? How about the seven deadly sins? Again, with research and thought, we might be able to pare the sins down to the two or three that lie behind most of our problems. When students are studying ways to run a classroom, they are sometimes asked to write the rules their future students should follow. Ten is quite a few but many more and we have too many. Wonders of the world, sins, rules of behavior: we are going to do better if we concentrate on a few important ones. We don't want to be the victims of inflation.
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