Indexing Indexers Quotes

Well, I've never met an indexer any more than I've met a real writer. I'm impressed." Miss Finch's tone had changed, and she was suddenly leaning toward me, almost half over the counter. "Tell me, do you make any real money at this job, writing indexes for books? ~ Larry D. Sweazy

I'm thinking of a presidential bid; currently indexing and cross-referencing everyone I've tweeted my junk to. 8x10s available. ~ Christopher Titus

We know that we can do it, but cannot describe in so many words how we do it, nor can we reduce it to a set of rules. At most, the observable facts of the indexing operation can be described. ~ Hans H Wellisch

It uses the greatest random-access indexing system ever invented - one that computer scientists haven't come even close to replicating. Whereas an index in the back of a book provides a single address - a page number - for each important subject, each subject in the brain has hundreds if not thousands of addresses. Our internal memories are associational, nonlinear. You don't need to know where a particular memory is stored in order to find it. It simply turns up - or doesn't - when you need it. Because of the dense network that interconnects our memories, we can skip around from memory to memory and idea to idea very rapidly. ~ Joshua Foer

The mind's cross indexing puts the best librarian to shame. ~ Sharon Begley

Socialist countries throughout the world love to lower retirement ages to make people prematurely dependent on the government. But we should move in the opposite direction. In the long run, indexing retirement to life expectancy will yield enormous revenues to the system, far more than a one-shot increase in the age in the current legislative cycle. ~ Dick Morris

The simple index fund solution has been adopted as a cornerstone of investment strategy for many of the nation's pension plans operated by our giant corporations and state and local governments. Indexing is also the predominant strategy for the largest of them all, the retirement plan for federal government employees, the Federal Thrift Savings Plan (TSP). The plan has been a remarkable success, and now holds some $173 billion of assets for the benefit of our public servants and members of armed services. ~ David F. Swensen

If the data do not prove that indexing wins, well, the data are wrong. ~ John C. Bogle

One could imagine a period like Japan13 years ago, however, in which indexing over time wouldn't work. ~ Charlie Munger

Everything is 'smart' now. The library cataloging system is smart, classification and indexing information entered into a uniform online database. People wept and lamented the loss of the old cards, then forgot them. They pretty much forget everything they weep over and lament. Clop-clop of hooves on the street. The humble art of carrying a block of ice up the stairs, pincered by a pair of tongs. Rotary phones and 33 rpm records. Stamp-pad ink and poster paint. ~ Christopher Sorrentino

Market-cap based indexing will never be driven from its deserved perch as core and deserved king of the investment world. It is what we should all own in theory and it has delivered low-cost equity returns to a great mass of investors ... the now and forever king-of-the-hill. ~ Cliff Asness

The spectacles of zoos, circuses, and world's fairs and expositions are important sites that predate the Internet by more than a century, but it can be argued and is in fact argued here that these traditions of displaying native bodies extend to the information age and are replicated in a host of problematic ways in the indexing, organization, and classification of information about Black and Brown bodies--especially on the commercial web. ~ Safiya Umoja Noble

[With] closet indexing ... you're paying a manager a fortune and he has 85% of his assets invested parallel to the indexes. If you have such a system, you're being played for a sucker. ~ Charlie Munger

The indexing problem changes with each new book undertaken. To meet the needs of different classes of seekers and to suit various types of books, rules entirely satisfactory in one case must be varied in the next and perhaps ignored or even reversed for a third ... Indexing is a highly complex intellectual process involving the use of language in a specific and somewhat artificial way, and that it is also to a considerable extent a matter of intuition, the workings of which cannot be reduced to fixed rules. It is 'knowing what but not knowing how'. ~ Hans H Wellisch

The ocean flows of online information are all streaming together, and the access tools are becoming absolutely critical. If you don't index it, it doesn't exist. It's out there but you can't find it, so it might as well not be there. ~ Barbara Quint

The word passive does a disservice to investors considering their options. Indexing provides an effective means of owning the market and allows investors to participate in the returns of a basket of stocks. The basket of stocks changes over time as stocks are added or removed based on its rules. ~ Charles R. Schwab

Nobody wants to be passive; indexing is not passive - much more goes into indexing than watching a stock become the next buggy whip. ~ Charles R. Schwab

Arnold Harberger, Milton Friedman & Co. Inc., your modest proposal of partial equilibrium for the general good is not without its own internal contradictions. Moreover, you cannot take complete credit for this program of equilibriation. Although you and your colleagues and disciples at the Department of Economics of the University of Chicago may have dedicated two decades to the design of the program and the technical training of its executors, it took the approach of another major economic and political crisis of capitalism, analogous to that of the 1930's, to mobilize the political support and the military force to instal a government prepared to put your program of equilibration and your equilibrating experts to work in Chile - and you, Milton Friedman, are still waiting to put your part of the same program, complete with Brazilian style indexing, into practice at home for the glory and benefit of the bourgeoisie in the USA, whom you so faithfully serve as paid executors and executioners. ~ Andre Gunder Frank

Indexing is a successful approach to investing not because it's simple, but because it has performed so much better than the average active manager (the opposite of indexing), and the simplicity is just an added bonus. ~ Patrick Geddes

She remembered the conversation in the Library, as forgetting was the last thing a fully-trained Librarian should do. Memories were as important as books, and almost as important as proper indexing. ~ Genevieve Cogman