Basically, we worry a lot. A LOT. We live in dark times (with a scary president), etc. Pinker points out why we worry so much: the news. The news cycle is designed to play on our fears, and thus it is largely negative, focusing on all the bad things that are happening in the world. And we are consuming more news than ever in human history! And if the news focused on all the good things, the ratings would plummet, after all. But one of my favorite lines in the book points out that we would be hard pressed to find negative news if we were covering the last 100 years, instead of the last day.
And that was the eye opening thing about the book - if you take a long term view, every metric you can find has gotten better. Life expectancy, health, extreme poverty, prosperity, peace, freedom, safety, literacy, leisure, and even happiness - he has chapters and graphs for each of them, showing them vastly improving over the past centuries and usually with most gains in the past century. An interesting point is that most graphs show third world countries only being ~20-30 years behind first world countries, but the shape of the graphs looks the same in terms of the rate of progress. I won't recap all the graphs and numbers, but here is a small example of how life has gotten better.
This is not to say that there aren't still large problems in all of those areas left to solve. Nor that we haven't created other problems - the book has chapters on some of those, notably climate change and nuclear war - but again there we have actually made progress. For some reason I haven't quite fully fathomed, Pinker and this book have gotten a lot of criticism. I think some of this is from people who object to him saying "the world is great" because there is so much progress left to be made - yet Pinker often admits that in the book. Or from people who think he is measuring progress along the wrong metrics, and we are all headed for an apocalypse. Certainly, there are lots of books about apocalypse, but it's much more pleasant to be an optimist, and believe that as long as we keep applying reason and science and making progress, the world will keep getting better....more
A fascinating book, great for investing and entrepreneurs. I like how he really focuses on contrarian thinking, and his mental models for it. But onlyA fascinating book, great for investing and entrepreneurs. I like how he really focuses on contrarian thinking, and his mental models for it. But only giving it 4 stars because I wish he went deeper there, with more examples. But this quote is gold:
Jeff Bezos says this often - to really create something new and innovate, copying others doesn't typically work. What works is Customer Obsession - focusing obsessively on solving problems people have. If you do that, you have a chance to create something truly innovative. If you are focused on competition - the "hot space", the "hot technology", the "hot market" - you likely will create something marginal. Goodreads was born and evolved this way - by maniacally focusing on solving problems for book lovers.
One of the more interesting points in the book, is that we live in a competitive society, and that causes us to over-optimize on the wrong things. We instead focus on beating the next guy or company instead of truly innovating, or focusing on what really matters to humans. In each company our goals and career growth define our pay, and thus we have to beat our coworkers, and our competitors to be judged successful. But even worse, competitive thinking is not creative thinking, and so it tends to be very incremental and built on past ideas, rather than creative and innovative. It also tends to be short term vs long term. Two quotes around this:
Another point I liked that sounds obvious but is actually fairly contrarian in practice is that startups are most successful when focused on small markets, but ones that have high concentration, so the product can grow quickly in it. Most MBA’s will ignore these markets because they are so small. In Goodreads’s case, our initial set of reviewers were not a huge number of people, but they were very concentrated in the 2007 era blogging platforms - they had all their friends on their "blog rolls", and thus when they discovered us we grew rather quickly in those communities.
But I liked this quote perhaps best - it really summarizes what I took from the book. Doing something different *is* likely whats going to truly help society the most, AND create value. That is an interesting thing to ponder!
Absolutely loved this book and all the examples it gives of how we think we are making rational decisions, when in fact we aren't. The book concludes Absolutely loved this book and all the examples it gives of how we think we are making rational decisions, when in fact we aren't. The book concludes by saying many of these irrational decisions we make are entirely predictable (thus the title of the book), and thus we should as a society do better to factor them in. I would have loved more suggestions of how this could be done, but that was beyond the scope of the book.
This book seems to be a must for anyone studying or dealing with pricing. Which is all of us given we all buy things. For instance, the advice that "given three choices, most people will take the middle choice" is simultaneously obvious and also very useful.
I loved the chapter on social norms vs market norms. Also stuff that seems obvious, but I hadn't ever put it into that mental model, and seeing it that way is very interesting. Good reminder that money isn't the best motivator, but if you go with social norms, you have to keep it entirely that way (eg Burning Man barter economy).
Another gem was the study that showed that how when we are in an emotionally charged state, we make consistently worse decisions. It would be great if my smart devices (Garmon, Oura, Fitbit, Apple Watch, etc) could detect this and give me a warning somehow.
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