An iffy prescription for how big tech might enable psychiatrists to provide better patient care.
A psychiatrist offers a blue-sky vision of how smartphone and other data might help with treating mental health concerns from depression to schizophrenia.
In Mind Fixers (2019), Anne Harrington cast the history of psychiatry as a series of overzealous efforts to show that if the profession was troubled, “the field’s best days lay just over the horizon,” whether in the form of 19th-century mental hospitals or the 20th century’s surgical treatments, Freudian psychoanalysis, and “biological revolution.” Given that unpromising track record, readers may be skeptical of Barron’s thesis that digital tools might ease the profession’s current ills if only psychiatrists had access to tech like patients’ Fitbit stats, social media profiles, and Google search histories (“with their permission of course”). The author, a Scientific American contributor, offers slim, if sometimes-intriguing evidence of the potential uses of such “digital exhaust”—e.g., “Google searches for explicitly suicidal terms were better able to predict completed suicides than conventional self-report measures of suicide risk.” Barron also lays out the formidable barriers to tapping such benefits, ranging from patients’ fears about how their health data might be exploited to the difficulty of reproducing scientific studies when tech companies are reluctant to share their proprietary codes. Because of the obstacles to much of the research he describes, the author lacks sufficient data to make a convincing case that the “Big Data revolution” in psychiatry will be more successful than the failed “revolutions” described in Mind Fixers and other trenchant critiques. The most interesting parts of this book are Barron’s memorable anecdotes, some especially relevant to public health. “During the COVID-19 Pandemic, Google searches for symptoms like ‘I can’t smell’ were almost perfectly correlated with state-level reports of the disease prevalence,” he writes. “By pooling one symptom with other common searches,” public health officials could follow the emergence of outbreaks.
An iffy prescription for how big tech might enable psychiatrists to provide better patient care.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-73442-078-4
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Columbia Global Reports
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2021
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
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
