Another Meaningless Internet Top Five List as heard on The Big Papa Show and Shore to Shore to Shore News. Awesome!
The Top 5 Reasons Lists Are Stupid
An ironically unironic look at the mania over random rankings.
By: David Merline
Grabbed from
http://www.web2carz.com/lifestyle/everything-else/2594/the-top-5-reasons-lists-are-stupid
E
verybody loves lists. At least, that’s how it seems, judging by the predominance of lists in our culture. Take a look at the magazines on your local newsstand (if in fact, there is a newsstand in your locale) and you’ll soon notice there are nearly as many numbers as letters on all the covers (Top 10 this, 5 Ways to that, Hot 100, 25 Best, 50 Worst, 3 Quick Steps). Meanwhile, websites are quickly becoming little more than list delivery systems.
Very soon, end-of-the-year lists will begin springing up everywhere, informing us what the 10 best and 10 worst of everything was, what 5 great things we might have missed, and the 5 things to expect in 2014 (more lists -- that’s my new year’s dream).
With that in mind, we present, as a public service to our dear, loyal headline skimmers, our top 5 reasons why lists are stupid.
 Casey Kasem, the patron saint of lists. 5. Lists are arbitrary.
Have you ever wondered why lists are often broken down into sets divisible by five? 5, 10, 20, 50, and 100 are the most popular list lengths. But why? There’s absolutely no reason whatsoever, other than those numbers are convenient and familiar numbers in our base ten numeral system.
Lists could be absolutely any length at all, and if lists were truly representative of reality, they would simply end when the objects or ideas being enumerated have run out. Five is a more relatable number than four, for instance, which is why even though I only had four good reasons to make up this list, I added this one to stretch it to five.
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 When ships lean too far to one side, they are said to be "listing." 4. Lists make us lazy.
The proliferation of lists panders to the short attention spans humans have developed in the last century. Blame television, the internet, smart phones, or MTV -- they all contributed. But lists lure us in with the promise of easily digestible bits of data, and ultimately only offer us the barest of information, like an outline based on Cliff’s Notes.
But by pandering to our laziness, lists reinforce that laziness. They make us feel that we can learn something of substance in less time than it takes to put our shoes on. The average web surfer spends less than a minute on a page, which means that most of the people clicking on this page will only read the five bolded, numbered items and will skip the accompanying text, which is why we can safely say that all of those people are liars and cheaters who don’t love their mothers.
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 Oskar Schindler wasn't the only person during WWII to have a list. Guess who else was fond of lists? 3. Lists are manipulative.
The most popular lists tend to be those that relate to sales figures. The Billboard Hot 100, The New York Times best seller list, and Amazon.com’s Best Sellers lists all are borne from the mistaken notion that popularity equals quality.
We want to know what the number one movie at the box office is because if it’s the movie the most people went to see, it must be the best movie, right? Best seller lists are instruction manuals for blind conformists -- people incapable of forming an opinion without first knowing what the general consensus is.
These lists manipulate our insecurities and our desire to fit in. In order to seem “with it” we obey these lists, not wanting to be the only person who hasn’t heard, seen, or watched the latest hit song, movie, or television program.
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 Surprisingly, 19th Century composer Franz Liszt had no opinion one way or another about lists. 2. By attempting to quantify the unquantifiable, lists represent mankind’s attempt to deny the chaotic nature of reality.
The Italian novelist and semiotician Umberto Eco once said, in an interview in a German newspaper, “The list is the origin of culture. It's part of the history of art and literature. What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible. It also wants to create order. And how, as a human being, does one face infinity? How does one attempt to grasp the incomprehensible? Through lists, through catalogs, through collections in museums and through encyclopedias and dictionaries.”
Eco may be right that lists are the origin of culture, but one might as easily say that guttural grunts and laryngeal fricatives are the origins of language -- that doesn’t mean we haven’t evolved beyond them.
Attempting to make the universe conform to our limited understanding is what led people to believe in a flat Earth, alchemy, and witchcraft.
As the film director Werner Herzog once said, “The common denominator of the Universe is not harmony, but chaos, hostility, and murder.” But even though things like chaos, uncertainty, and randomness may be the principles that govern reality, they don’t make for very good copy.
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 Where will it end? 1. Lists are made up.
The earliest, and most influential list of all time has got to be the Ten Commandments. This is God’s list of what constitutes proper human behavior -- and who better to create a list than the Creator Himself?
Well, not to be blasphemous, but I’m not so sure He was the best one to make that list. If you notice, the top four commandments are all about Him, which seems to indicate that He may have been motivated as much by narcissism as by any “love of mankind.”
But anyone with less authority than the Almighty who makes a Best or Worst or Top type of list, has no more authority to make such a list than you do.
Are the members of the American Film Institute (AFI) better judges of what the Top 100 Movies of All Time are than anyone else who presumably hasn’t seen every single movie ever made?
Critics' lists are perhaps the most egregious lists, as they not only assume that any one person’s taste is more “correct” than anyone elses, but they force us to compare things that have virtually nothing in common.
If we accept the AFI’s authority, for example, then we’re supposed to believe that The Wizard of Oz is to be compared unfavorably to Schindler’s List, but just barely. The Wizard of Oz is #10 on AFI’s 100 Years 100 Movies list, but Schindler’s List is #8. How could anyone compare these two, diametrically different films? On what criteria? Based on whose subjective judgement?
Eh, who cares. It’s just a stupid list.
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