A Benelovent Autocracy interested in your Philosophical Wellfare: or How We Choose Books

The Harrogate Philosophical Society is still in its first century of existence and hence all information or guidance that follows should be taken with a grain of salt.

In these early days of exploring the presence of HPS on the web, I wanted to include a bit of an explanation of how we come to select books for the group to read. This Society (a super fancy term for people interested in what speculative fiction, and speculative non-fiction, can add to our lives) was started with the simple goal of reading a new book by a favourite author and the desire to read it at the same time, with other humans, and then meet in person, multiple times, and discuss the book. Enough with the passive voice, I also wanted the experience of ordering a whole box of the same Neal Stephenson book because this is the closest I will ever get to the experience that an author has when opening their box of freshly printed books. It was quite fun by the way. I also wanted to read with people, and discuss interesting science based world building with people.

That was how it started, shared interest, a box of books, and a couple of meetings (the book was >700 pages long) at the pub to discuss it. I (we) had so much fun, and it was a new group of people talking about interesting ideas, that we wanted to continue and I offered that we would randomly select book suggestions from a hat and allow the proposer to lead the next book club iteration. The book that was suggested and subsequently selected was the second book of a trilogy (I won’t name names, you know who you are, and besides it was a good turn of events overall because of the mythology and founding story that it lent us, so thank you). As fellow leaders of book clubs or readers in general might suspect, this resulted in the near complete destruction of the club. There was mass confusion; “Do I read the whole trilogy?” “Do I read just the second book?” “What are you reading?” This confusion combined with the timing of post-global-pandemic opening up of the world of options for your free time resulted in us not meeting or reading together or going to the pub (just joking on that one) for the better part of a year.

Fast forward to the days getting shorter and the nights getting longer, and the stories being told in the halls of “hey what happened to book club?” And we were ready to start to piece it back together like the shards of an aging government after a failed revolution. And like any other good aging government, we (I) put in place legislation, legal interpretation, and unratified amendments to ensure that 1) this near destruction of the club would never happen again during the 1000 year reign and 2) people would think that they get a say in the books that we read, but in fact each would be carefully curated by a benevolent dictator in such a way to weave a thread of story and knowledge through the literature of our time into the minds of our members. But you can’t just come out and say that so we have landed on the following method for selecting books:

1. At the conclusion of the meeting for the previous book, everyone present is invited to suggest books that they would like to read for the next month. It used to be that only people in physical attendance would get to suggest, however even people that have other obligations, commitments, or interests and can’t make that month like to participate in pseudo democratic process too so now we let anyone suggest books via chat.

2. Because we routinely have 15-20 suggestions, and this is far too many choices for the average human mind to decide from, through a closely guarded process, shrouded in mystery and brimming with anticipation, these suggestions are down selected to four for the month.

3. These books are then associated with emojis and posted on the chat, and people are again invited to vote from these books to read. Because it is more fun, and more subjective, and more opaque, the voting mechanism is rank choice rather than majority. I am confident that the way we vote is considered rank choice however I am not sure if how we select from those votes is rank choice (again ambiguity) but here is a crystal clear description of how I tally the votes for anyone to replicate themselves or try to refute.

4. Put all choices for books on the columns and rows of a matrix, for each cell in the matrix put the number of votes where the row was preferred to the column. Find the row that was preferred to all other columns, this is your Condorcet winner. If there is a cycle, or a tie, use the votes of people who aren't on the chat to break the tie (this can be the First Lady of the Benevolent Dictator for example), then you have your next book.

As you can plainly see, this process involves both the suggestion AND voting upon of books by the people, for the people and hence is a slightly erudite, but entirely democratic selection process. Except for when it’s not, many people don’t care and hence don’t vote or suggest, they just like to show up and talk about interesting philosophy. These people can, and often do suggest books that we have been talking about, discussing, or thinking about outside of the strictures of the club. I also intentionally left out that only 3 of the suggestions come from the people and one comes from me. My suggestion doesn’t always get selected, but it does sometimes, and that is alright as there are many paths to enlightenment, and part of the reason we do this is to engage in tangents, diversions, distractions, and rabbit holes in our literature consumption and discussion.

Finally, this process is fun, we all know about it, and we all acknowledge its shortcomings and the potential for corruption, but it seems to be a good way to figure out what we will read and what we will talk about, and what we will think about next. I hope this serves as a record of how we arrived at this process, as well as some suggestions for any present or would be BDOBC…..Benevolent Dictators Of Book Clubs.