Solid, definitely-not-dumbed-down popular science.
A serious exploration of the neuroscience and psychology of bias.
According to Agarwal, bias is simply a neutral term for prejudice, which is usually but not invariably a bad thing. Reaching back into prehistory, she identifies tribalism as a precursor. Early man had no doubt that his tribe was superior to all others, and this had a Darwinian survival value because it was undoubtedly safer to assume a stranger was dangerous than not. The author divides biases into conscious and unconscious but emphasizes the second, which seems innate and is thus often called “instinct.” However, writes Agarwal, “when it comes to making important decisions about people or situations, we cannot always rely on instinct. Darwin defined instinct as independent of experience, but more recent research…has shown that it is continually being honed. It is fluid and malleable.” Indeed, many biases are formed throughout life. By age 6 or 7, humans begin stereotyping according to race and gender. The author turns up a genetic disorder, Williams Syndrome, that produces children who are extremely friendly because they lack a fear of strangers; a study showed that they were also much less biased about racial issues. In the first half of the book, Agarwal reviews studies on bias and the debates over their findings; these sections will be a tough slog for general readers. Matters improve when the author, a British citizen born in India and no stranger to gender and racial bias, describes her own experiences as well as the specific biases of gender, race, beauty and age, and speech, along with many dismal statistics—e.g., 14% of whites have been wrongly accused of shoplifting compared with 38% of ethnic minorities. Although Agarwal has been a TED speaker, her writing lacks a similar charismatic appeal, but 400 pages of academic prose, dense with footnotes, reveal important insights.
Solid, definitely-not-dumbed-down popular science.Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-4729-7135-7
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Bloomsbury Sigma
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
A deeply learned dive into the frightening visions of technocrats past and present.
The noted historian and New Yorker staffer looks into a future ruled by machines.
Thirty-odd years ago, writes Lepore, liberal democracies of old were being transformed into both authoritarian or autocratic regimes and by “automatocracy, rule by automation, government by machine-driven computation, prediction, and persuasion.” In this pointed rejoinder to Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), which foresaw a world in which humans were essentially superfluous, Lepore charts a long history that extends deep into the “machine age,” beginning in the 17th century, which saw “the artificial as existing not only outside the natural but above it, an improvement upon it.” In this conception, humans were fallible, while machines faithfully and unfailingly obeyed the rules set for them. A logical progression followed in the 1920s with the rise of the Technocracy movement, a variety of fascism widely accepted in the U.S. that held that far from being free and equal, humans should be governed by scientists and engineers who alone “have the intelligence and education to understand the industrial operations that lie at the heart of twentieth-century life.” It’s a short hop from there to the present, with tech billionaires pushing AI and, in the case of the influential “self-described ‘neo-monarchist’” Curtis Yarvin, a dictatorship aided by it. In all this, Lepore writes, it is not just the human animal that suffers but all animals and all habitats, which can only worsen with the incessant demands for energy, rare earths, and water that AI requires. And what “humans crave, in that artificial world, is nature,” a nature that is increasingly silenced. This undemocratic world, benefiting only the wealthy at the expense of all else, is a prison of screens and keyboards from which, she writes memorably, “What is required is to imagine an escape, and then to conduct it.”
A deeply learned dive into the frightening visions of technocrats past and present.Pub Date: Aug. 25, 2026
ISBN: 9781324098423
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2026
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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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