The 2010 Phantasy Philosophy League
You've immersed yourself in bracketology. You've fielded your fantasy baseball team. Why not take the logical next step, and enter a team in the phantasy philosophy league?
How it works:
Up to eight participants select their draft picks from a pool of 100 philosophers, ancient and modern.
Philosophers are assigned by lottery, nine to a team.
Every month from May to November, each team goes up against one other team. Philosophers score points by having their names mentioned in any of nine fora: the websites of Time magazine, The New York Times, the Guardian, the New Yorker, Harper's, Atlantic Monthly, Slate, Salon, and the BBC. If your philosophers score more mentions in these nine fora than your opponent's do over the course of the month, your team wins two points. If there's a tie, each team wins a point.
At the end of November, whichever team has accumulated the largest number of points wins. If there's a tie, December (and other months as needed) will be used as a tiebreaker.
FAQ:
How do you determine how many mentions a philosopher has had on a given website each month? By means of a Google search, limited by domain name, at the beginning and end of the month.
That sounds like a lot of searches. Are you really going to stick with it? Each month I'll have to search at most seventy-two philosophers' names at nine websites, for a total of 648 searches. Once I've got my technique down, I doubt it will take over a couple of hours per month. I'm willing to make that commitment.
What about philosophers whose names can be spelled in multiple ways? Each philosopher will be listed under one form of their name for the purposes of competition, and that name will have to appear in its entirety in order for the philosopher to score a point. This is a somewhat arbitrary rule, but necessary in order to limit the amount of searching required. Most modern philosophers will be listed under their first name and last name (John Locke) or first, middle, and last name (Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz).
Wait a second! John Locke is also a character in Lost. Isn't that unfair? No. For purposes of competition, people with names identical to the philosophers are considered to be extensions of those philosophers. In other words, Aristotle Onassis is the same person as Aristotle the tutor of Alexander the Great. Since all of us have a chance to assess the pool of philosophers before the draft, you're welcome to make your picks with name overlap in mind.
Many of the Google hits on these websites include readers' comments. What's vvto stop me from intentionally commenting on articles at these sites and dropping the name of some of my players, thus generating extra points for my team? You're on the honor system. By agreeing to take part in the league, you agree not to try to game the protocols.
What do I win? Bragging rights.
Who's in?
- P.Chippy
