An unnerving but convincing anti-number polemic.
Two professors of marketing and economics launch a well-informed attack on the infallibility of numbers and data.
Popular mathematics books tend to belong to the math-is-fun or how-to-lie-with-statistics genres. Dahlen and Thorbjørnsen, however, offer an ingenious warning that numbers are messing up the world. They are “flirtatious, manipulative, distracting little devils. [They] mislead us and lie. They distort and entice.” The authors deliver a steady stream of anecdotes, studies, and historical events that will unsettle even the most skeptical. Readers who roll their eyes when the authors claim that we perceive odd numbers as masculine and even numbers as feminine must explain why so many professional athletes (mostly men) prefer odd numbers on their jerseys. Even though numbers influence our feelings, identities, and interests, “numbers contain not more information than words but less.” For example, the authors describe an experiment in which subjects read lengthy, information-rich, flattering reviews of a hotel that received an overall rating of 2. Then they read lukewarm reviews of a hotel that was given a high 5 rating. When asked, they preferred the hotel with the higher number, “clearly influenced more by the number than thewritten praise.” To make matters worse, the 21st century has seen an explosion of smartphones, smartwatches, and other logging apps that allow opportunities for self-quantification that Benjamin Franklin could only dream of. Do they work? Studies show that obsessive health monitoring with a Fitbit or Apple Watch improves performance in some users but only slightly. Besides filling the text with suggestions for fending off number mania (“number vaccine advice”), the authors explain that numbers are there to help. That’s why they were invented. However, they are only helpful if we remember that they’re the product of the human mind and therefore almost always subjective, selective, changeable, different in different cultures, swayed by prejudice and emotion, and often simply wrong.
An unnerving but convincing anti-number polemic.Pub Date: March 14, 2023
ISBN: 9780306830846
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Hachette
Review Posted Online: Jan. 10, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2023
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
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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
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