An eye-opening account of an irrational mistake with broad ramifications.
A panoramic study focuses on survivor bias, a pervasive failure of reason that deeply distorts people’s views of the world.
According to Lockwood, survivor bias—a “cognitive failure” that involves a myopic overemphasis on success to the relative exclusion of failure—encourages all kinds of inferential missteps. “We are misled because we focus on the winners, the successes, and the living and lose sight of those who have lost, the failures, and the dead. By failing to adjust for survivor bias, we reach the wrong conclusions,” the author asserts. Psychologically, the tendency toward survivor bias results from an excess of optimism, the inclination to “attribute success to skill rather than luck,” to believe in the power of expert effort over the vagaries of chance. Lockwood supplies a sweeping account of the expressions and effects of the bias, ranging from the pharmaceutical and financial industries to war. For example, drug companies routinely oversell the efficacy of their products by excluding contradictory data, just as hedge funds overstate their performances by neglecting to mention their numerous failures. Moreover, survivor bias “warps our view of the past”—this explains why the horrors committed by Hitler’s Germany are so well documented in comparison to those by Mao’s China. The author’s account is impressively comprehensive, though the wide-ranging scope of the study doubles as a vice since he’s committed to assessing an array of topics beyond his expertise. For example, his discussion of President Harry S. Truman’s decision to drop two atomic bombs on Japan is historically superficial and unconvincing. Nevertheless, Lockwood sets out to provide an accessible introduction to survivor bias, one shorn of academic jargon and instead reliant on “concrete, real-world examples,” and in this he roundly succeeds. Further, he makes a compelling case for the ubiquity of the error, one that has far-reaching consequences, causing both sloppy reasoning and the opportunistic exploitation of individuals and groups.
An eye-opening account of an irrational mistake with broad ramifications.Pub Date: Oct. 19, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-62634-880-6
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Greenleaf Book Group Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 9, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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