Omne ignotum pro magnifico

Book Review: Chip Heath & Dan Heath, "Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work", Crown Business, 2013. This book by the Heath brothers is about the decision-making process, and as such is not about good outcomes per se . As the authors write in chapter 12, "We can't know when we make a choice whether it will be successful. Success emerges from the quality of the decisions we make and the quantity of luck we receive. We can't control luck. But we can control the way we make choices." This quote reminds one of a similar point made by Stuart Sutherland in his book "Irrationality", which I have previously reviewed : rational thought and action does not guarantee that you will always achieve the best possible outcome, but in the long run, rationality maximizes your chance of success. So Decisive  is really about using a process for decision-making in order to make better decisions, which cannot be evaluated merely by their out...

Book Review: Stuart Sutherland, "Irrationality", Pinter & Martin, 2007. Back in 1992, the British writer and professor of psychology Stuart Sutherland (now deceased) published a book simply titled Irrationality , which foreshadowed Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow by nearly two decades. Recently, I finished reading the second (2007) edition, although a newer edition (2013) is also available. In the preface, Sutherland states his mission: to demonstrate, using research from psychology, that irrational behavior is the norm (not the exception) in our everyday lives. And this book covers a wide range of irrational phenomena, many of which will be familiar to those who've read Kahneman or who follow rationalist blogs like Less Wrong . And if you're not familiar with the literature, this book will convince you that indeed, humans are probably not rational creatures (in case you needed to be convinced of that). Since I believe this topic is so im...

Previously on this blog I have shared two lists of assorted quotes to ponder. Out of sheer curiosity, I took these twenty quotes and asked 65 anonymous people on the internet (via SurveyCircle) to fill in a Google Forms survey, where they were asked to rate each quote on a scale from 1 to 5 (with 1 being "hate it" and 5 being "love it"). The order of the quotes was shuffled for each respondent so that there were no position/contrast effects. I computed the descriptive statistics using SPSS. The top five most popular quotes were: Mean score 3.83 -- George Bernard Shaw: "The fact that we can become accustomed to anything, however disgusting at first, makes it necessary to examine carefully everything we have become accustomed to." Mean score 3.75 -- Vaksel: "People want to think there is some huge conspiracy run by evil geniuses. The reality is actually much more horrifying. The people running the show aren't evil geniuses. They are just as...

Book Review: Maria Konnikova, "The Confidence Game: The Psychology of the Con and Why We Fall for It Every Time", Canongate, 2016. When you find a book with an epigraph like this: How cheerfully he seems to grin, How neatly spreads his claws, And welcomes little fishes in With gently smiling jaws! -- Lewis Carroll, "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" ...then you know it's going to be a cynical one. Over the past week-and-a-half, I've been reading this book by Maria Konnikova about con artists, scams, fraud and other forms of deception. And indeed, the author does seem cynical: she writes in the introduction that "Given the right cues, we're willing to go along with just about anything and put our confidence in just about anyone." The confidence game is at its core a game of storytelling; one in which we find ourselves complicit because we want to believe -- to believe in justice, fairness, meaning and certainty, and to believe ...

Book Review: Brian Tracy, "Eat That Frog! 21 Great Ways to Stop Procrastinating and Get More Done in Less Time", Berrett-Koehler, 2007. In line with the self-improvement theme , I decided to check out "Eat That Frog!" by Brian Tracy, a popular audience book about productivity. It was a quick read (at 117 pages), and delivers exactly what you'd expect based on the subtitle -- twenty-one "principles" for managing time, each with its own chapter. But why the title "eat that frog"? Well, as Brian Tracy explains in the introduction: "Mark Twain once said that if the first thing you do each morning is to eat a live frog, you can go through the day with the satisfaction of knowing that that is probably the worst thing that is going to happen to you all day long." So, a metaphorical "frog" is a big and important task that can have a great impact on your life but is also something that you are likely to procrastinate on (...