Relevant augury for technology’s future during a tech-dependent, dysfunctional historical moment.
The state of Silicon Valley captured in uneasy conversations with technology workers.
Logic magazine co-founders Tarnoff and Weigel use crisp, knowing interviews to address the labor and class ferment percolating beneath the tech industry’s sleek exterior. They argue that industry secretiveness contributes to internal stress and public misunderstandings. “To obscure the human work involved in training an algorithm or moderating a social media feed,” they write, “is both a sales pitch and an evasion.” The interviews capture seven archetypes, including “The Founder,” “The Engineer,” and “The Massage Therapist.” The editors begin with a developer whose floundering startup earned a lucrative buyout, apparently to quash competition: “the inherent value in a talent acquisition comes from acknowledging that most projects in software fail.” This pervasive sense of high-stakes absurdity provides a tense, neurotic undertone throughout the book. A technical writer addresses the industry’s notorious “gendered exclusions,” showing “what it’s like to be a woman in tech perceived to be less technical.” A chef whose union activism has since aided a more equitable workplace remembers his first posting at a wealthy startup: “I ain’t gonna be mad at them, but they were snobby as hell. You saw the Benzes, the Lamborghinis, the Porsches, the Ferraris, the Bentleys popping all up in the parking lot.” The editors also acknowledge the importance of the contributions of “tech’s blue-collar workers”—e.g., security guards, custodians, cafeteria staff: “Their labor is often invisible but completely indispensable. If they don’t do their job, nobody else can do theirs.” Viewing Google as an industry bellwether, Tarnoff and Weigel also interviewed an engineer who noted, “I have a friend whose opinion is that Google strongly believes in doing the right thing—so long as it doesn’t cost Google money.” While indicting a business culture of privilege and profit-minded willful blindness, the interviews also showcase thoughtful and socially engaged—if wonky—personalities.
Relevant augury for technology’s future during a tech-dependent, dysfunctional historical moment.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-374-53867-5
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
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
IN THE NEWS
IN THE NEWS
Highly instructive for would-be tycoons, with plenty of entertaining interludes.
Well-crafted memoir by the noted media mogul.
Diller’s home life as a youngster was anything but happy; as he writes early on, “The household I grew up in was perfectly dysfunctional.” His mother lived in her own world, his father was knee-deep in business deals, his brother was a heroin addict, and he tried to play by all the rules in order to allay “my fear of the consequences from my incipient homosexuality.” Somehow he fell into the orbit of show business figures like Lew Wasserman (“I was once arrested for joy-riding in Mrs. Wasserman’s Bentley”) and decided that Hollywood offered the right kind of escape. Starting in the proverbial mailroom, he worked his way up to be a junior talent agent, then scrambled up the ladder to become a high-up executive at ABC, head of Paramount and Fox, and an internet pioneer who invested in Match.com and took over a revitalized Ticketmaster. None of that ascent was easy, and Diller documents several key failures along the way, including boardroom betrayals (“What a monumental dope I’d been. They’d taken over the company—in a merger I’d created—with venality and duplicity”) and strategic missteps. It’s no news that the corporate world is rife with misbehavior, but the better part of Diller’s book is his dish on the players: He meets Jack Nicholson at the William Morris Agency, “wandering through the halls, looking for anyone who’d pay attention to him”; hangs out with Warren Beatty, ever on the make; mispronounces Barbra Streisand’s name (“her glare at me as she walked out would have fried a fish”); learns a remedy for prostatitis from Katharine Hepburn (“My father was an expert urological surgeon, and I know what I’m doing”); and much more in one of the better show-biz memoirs to appear in recent years.
Highly instructive for would-be tycoons, with plenty of entertaining interludes.Pub Date: May 20, 2025
ISBN: 9780593317877
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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