And I had already noticed that the bookshelves are being increasingly
swamped by books by psychologists divulging in numbing detail their various
experiments and how they might help us improve our personal decision-making.
I blame populiser Malcolm Gladwell - for the success of his 2005 "Blink – the power of thinking without thinking" about which a contemporary reviewer wrote -
Malcolm Gladwell’s fevered new book, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking is evangelical in a got-religion kind of way, with Gladwell praising a stratagem he calls “thin-slicing” — using the smallest amount of information possible to make decisions. In fact he’s wandering through territory staked out by Herbert Simon fifty years ago when he wrote about “bounded rationality,” as well as by practitioners of a branch of psychology called “heuristics and biases,” and by evolutionary biologists and economists and neuroscientists and philosophers and those ancient taxonomists who classified cognition as either intuition or reason. It’s a long literature, and hey! who has time for it?
The result, ironically, of this embarrassment of riches is to make it
increasingly difficult to find the book on the subject which might best fit a
particular person at a particular point. Of course, you can find lots of
reviews of such books – but they are of a single book and give no overall assessment of the field.. And those most capable of doing such comparative assessments would never attempt it...for fear of the damage it would do their
professional or academic reputations….”did you hear that old so and so
actually reviewed a clutch of self-help books??? What is the world coming to…??”
I can’t say I am all that decisive myself – things panned out well for me...so I tend to a more fatalistic philosophy….Que sera sera. But the
reference to Herbert Simon in the review above reminds me that I do have form in this field of decision-making…..Back
in the 1980s I took a part-time MSc in the country’s first degree course in
Policy Analysis in which Simon and others such as Etzioni loomed large….I even,
in 2002, wrote a Manual on the subject – for Slovak senior civil servants!
The New Labour government of 1997 made the subject a sexy one – although the
manuals its policy unit spawned were still rationalistic…..it was not until the mid 2000s that I got a copy of what remains for me far and away the most
satisfactory (less rationalistic) treatment - Policy
Paradox -the art of political decision-making by Deborah Stone
A post last autumn noted the explosion of interest the last decade has seen in efforts to change people’s behavior – initially it seemed by governments although subsequent revelations demonstrated the extent to which big business had been successfully using algorithms to influence our social behavior…
My plea
So my plea to editors of book sections and of Literary journals is –
please don’t look down on these popular books on decision-making….there are a
lot of readers out there who would value some guidance to the literature!
Background Reading
Decisive - how to make better decisions in life and Work; C and D Heath (2013)
Blink
– the power of thinking without thinking - the full read
The
Art of Decision Making; Helen Drummond (2001)
https://readingraphics.com/book-summary-decisive/
The sculptures which heads the post were found in Cernavoda on the border between Romania and Bulgaria and date from 6,000 BC ie the oldest of their sort....
The sculptures which heads the post were found in Cernavoda on the border between Romania and Bulgaria and date from 6,000 BC ie the oldest of their sort....
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