Book of Answers

What is the Book of Answers?

You think of a yes-or-no question, hold it clearly in your mind, and open the book. Whatever page you land on is your answer. It will not be a plain yes or no. It will be a short phrase, something like "not yet" or "you already know" or "ask again tomorrow", and the work of interpreting it is yours.

The format goes back to Carol Bolt's book of the same name, and much further back than that to the bibliomancy tradition, where people opened a religious text at random and read the passage they landed on as guidance. Turning to a book for an answer to a question it cannot possibly know about is a very old human habit.

How to consult it

1. Phrase your question as a yes or no. Vague questions get vague answers.
2. Hold it in your mind for a few seconds. This part matters more than it sounds.
3. Open the book.
4. Read the phrase and notice your first reaction before you start reasoning.

Why an oracle works even if you do not believe in it

The phrases are deliberately ambiguous, and that is the mechanism rather than a flaw. An ambiguous answer forces you to supply the meaning, and what you supply comes from what you already think. If you get "not yet" and feel relief, you did not want to do it. If you get the same phrase and immediately start arguing with the book, you did.

Psychologists call the general tendency to read specific personal meaning into vague statements the Barnum effect, after the showman, and it is the reason horoscopes feel accurate. Here it is being used deliberately and in the open rather than to convince you of anything. The book is a mirror with a delay built in.

Getting a useful answer

• Ask about one thing. Compound questions produce answers you can bend to fit either half.
• Do not ask what will happen. Ask whether to do something. The book is bad at prophecy and decent at prompting.
• Take the first reading. Repeatedly opening it until you get the answer you like is a well-known move, and if you catch yourself doing it, you have your answer already.
• Write down your reaction, not the phrase. A week later the reaction is the part that turns out to have been informative.

Other ways to be told what to do

Decide For Me spins a wheel through your actual options, Flip a Coin handles a straight two-way split, and Roll Dice gives you a number. All of them are free, run in your browser and store nothing.