"big-idea books" are not intended by the authors to be the secret to the universe. Books like "Guns, Germs and Steel" and "The Black Swan" and "The Tipping Point" are not about somehow unravelling the mysteries of life, they're about framing the discussion in order to present a perspective that hasn't been presented before. They invariably have their detractors, and they invariably lead to discussion.

This, really, is the whole reason to write a book such as this: provide an insight as to how a large and disparate grouping of data can be regarded as a whole so that others may springboard off of (or against) one's ideas. Hell, that's the reason we were forced to write book reports as a kid: "what did you get out of 'Treasure Island,' Junior?" It's the "executive summary" of a research report or scholarly paper.

What the author is confessing to here is that he spent six months researching Wikipedia and didn't learn enough about it to be able to elucidate his findings in any digestible way to an audience. And apparently, he's the only one:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/search/ref=sr_nr_n_0?rh=n%3A283155%...

This is not some sort of "cultural honesty" as to the way the world works. Any fool can point out that ours is a universe of irreducible complexity. This is couching failure as purity, a hipsterish "I was into complexity before it was cool" apologia in which the failure of one to live up to the standards of ones publisher is somehow worn as a badge of courage.

I'm not buying it. If you can't look at Wikipedia and see broad cultural implications, you're blind. And if you can't illuminate those broad cultural implications for a larger audience, you're a bad writer.