Lots of anecdotes, many of them really cool, but not enough practical guidance.
The author of Sensemaking explores what it really means to pay attention.
The premise of this book is that contemporary people have lost the capacity for mindful observation of the world around them. As an entrepreneur, corporate consultant, and instructor at the New School, Madsbjerg teaches people how to take note of phenomena that we often fail to recognize as important—if we even see them at all. Using Wittgenstein as his guide, the author argues that it’s only through paying attention to what happens in the background that we fully understand what’s happening in the foreground. “Most people don’t even take the time to acknowledge that the background is there,” he writes, promising to provide “brief thought pieces accompanied by prompts, provocations, and inspirations designed to guide you in your practice.” While Madsbjerg does offer numerous illustrations of what he calls “hyper-reflection” drawn from the realms of science, art, and business, readers who really want to learn how to put hyper-reflection into practice may come away feeling a bit unsatisfied. This book began as a college course (developed with his colleague Simon Critchley) called Human Observation, and it shows. Much of the content makes more sense as a weekly reading assignment for students than as a self-help book. All of the figures considered here—from Paul Cézanne to Margaret Mead—are fascinating, but Madsbjerg discusses each of them at considerable length and in great detail for no clear purpose. Philosophy majors might need to know that the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty calls the human body a “perceptual apparatus,” but this factoid won’t help many other readers. One gets the sense that Madsbjerg keeps trying to sell readers on his idea long past the point they’ve either bought in or dropped out.
Lots of anecdotes, many of them really cool, but not enough practical guidance.Pub Date: July 18, 2023
ISBN: 9780593542217
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2023
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
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The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.
A follow-on to the author’s garbled but popular 48 Laws of Power, promising that readers will learn how to win friends and influence people, to say nothing of outfoxing all those “toxic types” out in the world.
Greene (Mastery, 2012, etc.) begins with a big sell, averring that his book “is designed to immerse you in all aspects of human behavior and illuminate its root causes.” To gauge by this fat compendium, human behavior is mostly rotten, a presumption that fits with the author’s neo-Machiavellian program of self-validation and eventual strategic supremacy. The author works to formula: First, state a “law,” such as “confront your dark side” or “know your limits,” the latter of which seems pale compared to the Delphic oracle’s “nothing in excess.” Next, elaborate on that law with what might seem to be as plain as day: “Losing contact with reality, we make irrational decisions. That is why our success often does not last.” One imagines there might be other reasons for the evanescence of glory, but there you go. Finally, spin out a long tutelary yarn, seemingly the longer the better, to shore up the truism—in this case, the cometary rise and fall of one-time Disney CEO Michael Eisner, with the warning, “his fate could easily be yours, albeit most likely on a smaller scale,” which ranks right up there with the fortuneteller’s “I sense that someone you know has died" in orders of probability. It’s enough to inspire a new law: Beware of those who spend too much time telling you what you already know, even when it’s dressed up in fresh-sounding terms. “Continually mix the visceral with the analytic” is the language of a consultant’s report, more important-sounding than “go with your gut but use your head, too.”
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-42814-5
Page Count: 580
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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