When you propose to do something new people ask you whether it hasn’t already been done. Are you on a fool’s errand, about to put effort into something already done? And if it hasn’t been done, why not? Won’t you encounter the same impediments which blocked others?

During the three years Book of Odds was in development I was asked this question very often by friends and advisors.

This led me on an extended search for prior attempts to collect and organize Odds Statements. I found nothing on the Web on the scale I envisioned. I found quite a few books, all fun to read but all out of print today.

The books have titles such as What the Odds Are, by Les Krantz, The Odds Almanac, by James A. Fix and David Daughton, and my personal favorite, What Are the Odds? This was penned by “The Wizard of Odds,” Leo Guild, and has a foreword by Bob Hope. This sort of title recurs regularly and aims for the general reader.

They have good intentions. Krantz offers to help with “major decisions, goals and fears too–founded and unfounded.” Fix and Daughton propose that “in your daily life, the word probably may take on an entirely new aspect.” Leo Guild suggests his pages “are meant to be your guide to just how much luck, dead or alive, you need to beat the odds.” Baer promises that his book would help readers learn “the odds of all manners of events that concern, interest or amuse us.” It also adds candidly, “Kids, Daddy wrote the book for the money.” Alas, kids, Daddy’s book wasn’t reprinted and neither were all but one of the others. Not one is in print today.

If the regularity with which these books were produced suggested a need for information about the probabilities of everyday life, why didn’t any of these attempts become standard sources or even be reprinted?

Here are four possible reasons:

1. They were formatted the wrong way. Every single book of this sort was organized alphabetically by subject, as children’s nature books run from Aardvark to Zebra. Krantz’s book’s subtitle is “A-to-Z Odds on Everything You Hoped or Feared Could Happen.” This made it easy to search but in effect made each alphabetical entry an information island unconnected to any other. A dozen probabilistic statements about nutrition shed no light on probabilistic statements about shoplifting. The only meaningful comparisons were within the subject heading. This made calibration by comparing similar odds in unrelated subjects too hard.
2. They were out of date. By the time a book about last year’s probabilities was published next year and read the year after the information was three years out of date. Without a process to keep current and a means to disseminate the latest available information the game was lost before begun.
3. They were too limited. It is hard to cover enough of the subjects of interest to people in a book. To comment on each subject reduced the space left for many Odds Statements and limited the number of probabilistic statements per subject. Unable to cover enough, they could not really claim to be much more than an introduction to the subject.
4. They were a bit too tongue-in-cheek. To create a reference work of Odds Statements means to simplify, standardize, and be useful to the largest number of people. It means looking down on no one, but joining with all who care to join in “raising the floor” of understanding. To those who have studied probability or statistics, or worked on problems of inference, this task may have seemed a bit like slumming. A good defense is self-deprecation. Take this paragraph from a light-hearted book called Life: The Odds (And How to Improve Them).

“…the muse for Life: The Odds will be Michael, the People magazine writer portrayed by Jeff Goldblum in the big-screen classic The Big Chill. Asked about his job, he explains to his fellow dysfunctional baby boomers, ‘Any article for People can be no longer than the average person can read while taking a crap.’ Wise words indeed.”

Book of Odds assumes people have longer attention spans than a tweet. It also assumes that they are capable of understanding the odds of everyday life. If we must choose a muse it would be a lexicographer such as Dr. Johnson, whose form of self-deprecation was to define the job as that of “a harmless drudge.”

A dictionary-maker should be humble. His job is not to write poetry but provide the raw materials for poetry. Just as a poet must use materials not his own, someone hoping to make sense of the world must begin with humble and even approximate facts. These are embodied in Book of Odds as hundreds of thousands of Odds Statements. From these anyone may come and test his or her wild surmise.