Skeptics will be sure of even less after reading Blastland’s book—and that’s a step in the right direction.
We know a fraction of what we think we know—and, writes journalist Blastland, even that is likely to be wrong.
This is a book-length exercise in what philosophers call epistemic humility, which the author, co-author of The Norm Chronicles, a study of risk, glosses as “intellectual humble pie to the rest of us.” If clones are supposed to be identical copies of some master unit, how is it that marmorkrebs, or cloned crayfish, vary markedly in size and other qualities when they’re “identical batch-mates in the same conditions”? If economists are so smart, why couldn’t we avoid the worldwide 2008 financial collapse? Why is it that a gaggle of juvenile delinquents, studied over a long period, deep into adulthood, diverged into repeat offenders and model citizens, given the same backgrounds and disadvantages, and that identical twins can be so downright different? Blastland’s answers are considered and developed at leisure, but in the end, they boil down to the proposition that although we are wedded to ideas of order and regular patterns, the world is chaotic. Acknowledging this, he continues, allows us to see chance, noise, and like things that rationalists detest as instead “a positive force for disruption.” That positivity doesn’t help us avert what Nassim Nicholas Taleb calls a black-swan event, but it does go a long way toward explaining oddities of human behavior. In one experiment, Blastland elicited political opinions from a group of volunteers, then wrote down the opposite of what the respondents said, only to have them passionately and rationally defend the viewpoint exactly counter to their own. We believe what we want to, it seems. Chaos and contingency also help explain the rise of Donald Trump and the success of the Brexit movement, neither of which should ever have happened. The author closes with a dozen useful pointers for navigating uncertainty, including the mandate, “Don’t use probability to disguise ignorance.”
Skeptics will be sure of even less after reading Blastland’s book—and that’s a step in the right direction.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-78649-639-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Atlantic Books
Review Posted Online: July 15, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.
A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.
To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781982181284
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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