Reviews and Comments

This book is excellent. Much like Kahneman’s definitive book on bias, Thinking Fast and Slow, Noise provides an excellent, fairly comprehensive treatment of another source of error in human judgement, which the authors define as noise. Noise is, as a term in this book, used to describe inconsistency in human judgment, as opposed to bias, which is a systematic departure from “correct” results. There is some overlap in terms here, as, for example, hungry judges systematically make harsher decisions, which is referred to as bias in Thinking Fast and Slow, but because we’re looking at error across the entire range of outcomes in a different way here, is called occasion noise. I do not believe this detracts from what the book brings to the table, but it’s worth noting that in this book, bias is used to refer to the difference between the average outcome and the “correct” outcome, or other errors across the range of outcomes such as minorities being treated differently in cases where there isn’t a “correct” outcome to measure.

What this book does not do is claim that all noise should be completely eliminated. Eliminating noise has costs. However, a wide disparity of outcomes in similar cases can be extremely unfair. Should two people with similar histories and mitigating/aggravating factors have several years of difference in sentencing for the same crime? Should the luck of who evaluates your insurance policy or what mood they’re in when they do make hundreds of dollars in difference to your premiums or policy payouts? Certain types of judgements are judgements where inconsistency is inherently unfair.

Noise looks at these judgements. It looks at hiring decisions where projection is inherently difficult and outcomes are hard to evaluate. It looks at expert judgement in fields like forensics where experts are asked to make evaluations of objective facts and whether there is noise in those outcomes as well.


I feel like I should be writing many more paragraphs about this book, but for now I’ll leave it here. This book is held to a high standard of rigor and is evidence backed throughout, again in line with Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow. The two books combine to provide an extreme amount of information on how to improve your judgement as an individual or an organization. I highly recommend this book and it will be very close to the top of my list of “must read” books on intelligence and the human brain.



There are three authors here and I don’t wish to downplay any role of Cass Sunstein or Oliver Sibony, which I am obviously not in position to evaluate. This book has led me to investigate their other work and likely will result in me reading at least one from each. However, Kahneman is the most well known partly because he’s one of the most influential figures in the field of human judgement, widely cited by psychologists and behavioral economists, and Thinking Fast and Slow is in my opinion is probably the best book on the brain everyone should read.

This book is 45 years old at this point, but it ages well. If you could ignore the handful of references to computers and floppy disks of the era, you could believe it was written relatively recently. We have, of course, learned since it was initially written, and the 30th anniversary edition I read did include some helpful interjections in addition to the extra chapters added to the second edition in 1989.

The Selfish Gene is and continues to be wildly popular for a reason. It provides an extremely accessible explanation of the mechanism of evolution, popularizing the concept that the gene is the fundamental building block that the whole process revolves around. What’s a gene? The definition he uses is approximately “any sequence of any length of DNA”, with the understanding that shorter sequences are more likely to survive longer unaltered than longer sequences, but allows him to ignore quibbling over terminology of specific lengths when it’s largely not meaningful to the concepts being presented.

The core idea is that genes that are successful are genes that increase the number of copies of themselves in existence. It explains the concept that there is a mechanism for even extreme “altruism”, such as an organism sacrificing itself for others to be selected for, if you recognize that multiple close kin relations each have many of their genes in common with that individual, and that dying saving several siblings increases the number of copies of your genes propagated to future generations than failing to do so.

It goes further into many other elements of how to view evolution from the perspective of individual genes, in specific environments, and how natural selection does and doesn’t work to change species over time.

One thing I’m not sure I was aware of, going into this reading of the book, is that Dawkins also coined the term “meme” and gave the first(?) presentation of ideas as replicators subject to very similar selection pressures as genes. This explanation is relatively simple and there are entire books on the concept now, but I did enjoy his short treatment here.

The signal and the noise is all about prediction. It starts with the subprime mortgage financial crisis and discusses the combination of perverse incentives and overconfidence that caused the rating services to fail to accurately portray the risks of those securities (primarily the assumption that even with housing prices astronomically high, the risk of default of each individual mortgage was completely independent rather than affected by the economy). Next he looks at television pundits and the fact that more television appearances is negatively correlated to forecast accuracy. Here he gives a solid introduction to Philip Tetlock’s work on forecasting, which can be found in more depth in his book Superforecasting. He touches on baseball, an information-rich environment, before moving on to irreducibly complex problems like the weather, seismic activity, and the economy where you fundamentally can’t get anywhere near enough raw data or information on interactions between data points to paint a complete picture.

The second half moves towards giving you an idea how to approach problems probabilistically and how to improve and refine your process over time. He starts with simple problems like sports and poker before moving onto more complex problems like terrorism and global warming.


I wouldn’t consider this book a complete guide to rational, evidence based decision making (ignoring that it doesn’t give you the math), but it’s a pretty accessible introduction to the topic and is largely technically sound. It’s a solid place to start.

Brethren is fascinating as a demonstration that even at the level of the highest court in the US, that was created and is intended for the purpose of objectively interpreting laws, human nature reigns supreme. It’s centered around Chief Justice Warren E Burger’s court from 1969-1975, and paints a particularly uncomfortable picture of and both his leadership ability and his legal mind, but it goes beyond any one individual.

There are several interesting cases decided during this span. To me the most notable would be a couple desegregation cases, primarily involving bussing, the Pentagon papers, Roe v Wade, and the Nixon tapes. The story this book tells involves multiple justices conspiring to rework Burger’s opinions sentences at a time, others threatening to dissent over single phrases, Burger repeatedly changing his votes just to be able to assign the majority opinion, justices telling each other, “I don’t agree with this ruling but I’m going to be the fifth vote anyways to make Justice X happy”, and all sorts of other manipulation and gamesmanship.

Ultimately you’re relying on the word of the authors, and I believe they’re fairly credible, but I can’t speak to veracity. But man, the story it tells is terrifying and this is well worth a read.

This is second on my all time list behind Kahneman. This thing is huge, it's as close to a comprehensive multi-field discussion of human behavior I've seen, and it manages to stay coherent, well structured, and compelling throughout.

This book goes from the basic structure and biology of neurons, the brain, neurotransmitters and hormones, genetic elements of behavior, epigenetics, development of the brain and behavior from early in pregnancy through adolescence and how negative events (malnutrition, abuse, neglect) alter that development, a pretty damn in depth discussion of evolution and the various selection processes in play from survival of the individual to close family to the species as a whole, and how social structures and culture influence behavior just to lay the groundwork for how much goes into any single decision.

The second part starts to look into behavior closer to directly through the lens of research by psychology. It starts with in-group bias, with solid coverage of how researchers have manipulated whether people feel someone is an us or a them. Next is peer pressure. Excellent coverage of Milgram's electric shock work and the Stanford Prison Experiment. Really there's a lot here and touching on every subject in depth. What I will say is that the psychology, which is the material I'm most familiar with, is presented masterfully, engaging, does a good job of being clear on what the research does and doesn't say, and consistently refers back to the groundwork in the first part of the book.

There is a third part where he discusses what we should take away from all of this, and he loses me a bit at points in the discussion of the justice system. I'm not entirely sure what he's trying to say. But he comes back strong with discussions of how to work past large scale conflict including war and even genocide, then the overall message that we can use our understanding of context to frame things in ways that allow us to be better to the people around us and drive positive change. Overall with some very minor hiccups, he manages to keep a consistent thread throughout this absolutely insanely broad work. He doesn't just skim through topics. There's a solid level of depth throughout. The organization is excellent. To the best of my ability to determine, it's one of the best sourced books I've read. He does all this while keeping a light, not too serious tone and throwing in mild wit and wordplay in a way that adds to the level of engagement.


If that's not enough, the appendices are great too.

Edit: I have followed this up with Behave by Robert M Sapolsky and it completely puts this book to shame. I still don't think this book is awful, but the fact that there's a book that basically covers everything this book does, is better structured and written, gives a better idea of what's well backed vs speculation, and does it in more depth knocks a star off here for me. Maybe it's unfair because it's a couple years newer and didn't exist when this book was written, but there's really no reason to read this book over behave. Even at significantly longer length, it manages to be an easier, more coherent read.

**
This one is interesting. There’s a lot here backed by evidence, and overall the book takes an interesting look at how various changes to brain structure/development (from early malnutrition or abuse to genetics to physical trauma) tend to result in a higher rates of criminal behavior, with the focus on violent and sexual crimes. But it’s intermixed with bits here and there of jankiness that’s less supported. When he gets to the final subject discussing the ethics and future steps, he goes off the rails a bit for me. “Your brain made you read this book” is a weird argument that free will is nonsense even if he comes around a little later, and his argument that we should treat the person with a clear tumor basis for wildly out of character behavior the same as someone with a slightly smaller brain region is really uncomfortable. Then I’m not entirely sure he’s not advocating a Minority Report style precrime intervention system when he uses it to raise questions.


Overall, though, I am convinced by the case that we should be focusing on proper nutrition and mental health access and that the better we take care of our kids, as a society, the less likely they are to turn to violence. I think even with its flaws, it does encourage you to think about things that we should probably think about.

“Still, nothing is as wildly age-inappropriate as a toy that Tesco, the UK retailer, released in 2006: the Peekaboo Pole Dancing Kit, a pole-dancing play set marketed to females under ten—as something that will help them “unleash the sex kitten inside.”

This is the most disturbing example of marketing gone to a gross extreme in this book, but it’s far from the only one. Lindstrom tells the story of how marketing takes advantage of understanding the brain to push your buttons and sell products. He starts with research indicating that you can start to form brand attachments by babies in utero and continues with efforts grooming kids into perfect little customers, and influencers of parent purchases, before getting into how they target adults.

Then, while this book is about a decade old at this point, he starts to discuss all the ways big companies are tracking you with technology. Many more people are aware of some of the ways big data is used for advertising now, but it’s likely you’ll learn things about how deep those tentacles go reading this book as well, even though it’s starting to slow its age a little.


Finally, he discusses an experiment where he set up a family in a new neighborhood to test the efficacy of guerrilla word of mouth marketing to friends and neighbors. This also serves to demonstrate why astroturfing is such big business in the tech driven world of today.

As it’s partly driven by his personal involvement in the industry, not every claim is sourced to academic research, but a decent bit is. For additional science backed information on the subject, Influence or Presuasion by Robert Cialdini are the way to go, but Lindstrom’s insider perspective is worth reading as well.

Very good book. You’ll find it disturbing, but knowing is the only way to protect yourself from manipulation.

Did you know men and women are physically different? Why don’t doctors get taught that? Why don’t vehicle safety tests take that into account? Why is medical and drug research heavily biased towards male subjects with minimal effort to evaluate the physiological differences that do show up?

The Invisible Woman takes a look at all the small (and big) things that get overlooked when women’s input isn’t considered. It discusses UI, personal protective equipment, company policies, city design, medicine, and more, with much of the discussion supported by some academic tier research.

I don’t universally agree with all her positions on political/policy changes to address the issue, but she does make a compelling case that this is something people need to be aware of and make deliberate effort to mitigate.

The introduction is a bit rough, barraging you with numbers that in my opinion don’t work particularly well to introduce you to the topic, but it’s worth powering through.

I also, as someone broadly interested in intelligence on the individual, collective, and artificial levels, took it more broadly as a cautionary tale of making decisions without making effort to understand a variety of positions, and the dangers of treating groups of people as one homogenous entity. In some ways, while the subject matter is different, there are a lot of parallels to David Epstein’s Range. You can’t make effective decisions without some understanding of several distinct perspectives on a problem.

So, from multiple angles, this book is worth reading. It does get a little dense at times and makes some points strongly, but if you let yourself you should learn a lot.