Omne ignotum pro magnifico

Book Review: Charles Duhigg, "The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business", Random House, 2014. Previously I've written about the shopper research of Siemon Scamell-Katz, which paints an unflattering picture of humans in their modern habitat. For example, it seems that people don't look into the window before they enter a store, don't recall the name of the store they are in, don't find the products they are looking for even though those products are in the store, don't read signs, and remember almost none of the brand messages they are exposed to. Some people will say that a store is fantastic and that they've shopped through the whole store, while film footage shows them actually covering half the store and experiencing inconvenience. These post-hoc rationalizations occur because much of the time, people shop on "autopilot" -- and they tend to buy the same brands in the same stores. Scamell-Katz talks about behaviora

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: 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 (

Book Review Wayne Weiten, Dana Dunn & Elizabeth Hammer, "Psychology Applied to Modern Life: Adjustment in the 21st Century", Cengage Learning, 2015 (11th edition). Today I am reviewing an academic textbook, firstly because it was recommended by Kaj Sotala and Luke Muehlhauser in their booklet "How to Run a Successful Less Wrong Meetup Group", and secondly because I have previously reviewed Dale Carnegie's "How to Win Friends and Influence People" -- a self-help book, which makes this textbook apropos as it also relates to self-improvement. Psychology Applied to Modern Life has beautiful cover art for the eleventh edition: The authors write in the preface that the pop psychology represented by self-help books is often "oversimplified, intellectually dishonest, and opportunistic". Nevertheless, the authors maintain the philosophy that an empirical and critical approach to understanding behavior can offer useful insights, espec