Patrick
An interesting tale - cautionary, of letting your imagination always get the best of you.
The characters in our story are constantly, almost instinctively, driven by expectations that do not mirror reality, even when presented with cold facts and their situations, they routinely dream up new fanciful scenarios.
This is not just Emma, Leon does this, Charles does this. Emma is certainly the main culprit, but there are other examples. Often, almost assuredly, these failed flights of imagination come crashing down and our characters are placed in situations where they are far worse off than where they started.
I admit to skimming a fair amount here. I read relevant chapters that were more generalized instead of the ones that focused on Leon Black's ascendance. Even with research, some of the financial mechanisms were over my head. Still, great book, paints a fairly grim picture though of financial exploitation. I think my biggest complaint was as a layperson, I didn't feel significantly prepared to understand the PE playbook and how a lot of these transactions work. I would have appreciated some more background there, general discussion and overview of specific events that occurred.
Note: I read "The Final Edition" version, which is an update and revised edition that was published 12 years after the original. I would argue that this is probably the best version to read, as it encompasses feedback from the original and talks about recent events and trends.
I recommend it, though with caveats. Overall it's an interesting idea around how to structure choices made in society, by organizations, and by government, but I think it suffers from some missteps in talking about how those choices can interact and apply in a variety of complex situations.
I will concede that Part V: Complaints Department does seem to provide some reasonable explanation into the brevity and choices the authors made writing this book. That has tempered some of my opinion on the reasoning behind claims, but the citation issue still remains. Ultimately I agree with a lot of the arguments explained in Part V, and it may be possible that I'm being too harsh in my review (for example, the authors call out in Part V the nature of companies preying on consumers [paraphrasing here], which was a discrete complaint of mine below). Maybe my opinion could really be summed up in a way that I just wanted a longer and more in-depth book.
Citation Issues
There are some statements that rely on external research in this book that are cited, and no evidence is provided besides the words of the authors. Frustratingly, not only does this erode confidence in the authors credentials, but it makes it difficult to self-educate on the topic using the same sources.
In some cases, there's enough background information given that one could Google the study and study author, and probably find similar information, but there's no guarantee that its the same report being cited, that it's the same conclusion that the study author and book authors come to, and in some cases, not enough background information is given.
It is difficult to reconcile because these authors probably are a level of expertise, but only in the field of which they're writing. The main problem here is that the specific references they make are from fields where they are not experts, and I would ask that those be properly cited.
Is this an overreaction on my part? I doubt the authors are peddling intentional misinformation but it still sparks concern. Perhaps I am over scrutinizing how references in a book like this should be handled?
Here are some examples:
- "There are about twice as many gun-inflicted suicides as homicides" - p.30 - not cited
- Hotel Guests Influence in towel reuse - p.85 - not cited
- Tire Safety Rating - p. 120 - "This example comes from actual deliberations within the U.S. government, on how best to convey the safety ratings of tires" - not cited and something I really wanted to read more about.
- Voting Intention changes from 2008+ - p. 93 - not cited (see below)
This list is not comprehensive, and there are plenty of times where they -do- provide references.
Logicality of Claims
Some claims follow to conclusions that don't necessarily make sense:
'voter perception of candidate shifting helped account for the election of Barack Obama in 2008, for that of Donald Trump in 2016, and for his defeat at the hands of Joe Biden in 2020'
Not only is this information not cited, the context is important, because the authors are making the claim that social influence (social pressure) of voter perception helped influence election outcomes. It's a conclusion they're coming to based on a previous examples given that showed that social influence played a part in the Salganik, Dodds, Watts study of music downloads, and the 'mass panic' of the Seattle Windshield Pitting Epidemic. I personally believe that social influence for music downloads, mass panic, and voter perception are all separately distinct contexts, and that tying this to the outcome of a Presidential election is a questionable-cause fallacy.
Further Notes:
- Chapter: Choice Architecture was really where I felt like the meat of the book started. This chapter gives a lot of examples of sensible defaults and nudges in our everyday lives.
- Part: #Sludge resonated strongly with me, though some of the problem statements seem reductionist (yes, college application entry is a convoluted process, but the authors' solution is "just don't be" which glosses over the many different backgrounds and scenarios that applicants are in)
- Government Sludge is not always intentionally tedious - and some regulations that doctors, truckers, and nurses have to complete is to protect the end-recipient of healthcare, or impose restrictions on trucking loads that create danger on the road. The failure of individual companies to police these things without regulation is what led to sludge to begin with, the idea that the government must make a doctor fill out a form because otherwise a hospital would cut corners to save money (as a real-life example of this - see Private Equity firms taking over ManorCare and reducing patient care in 2015, something that the Justice Department intervened in.)
- Important to point out: this is a balancing act. As the authors mention, I'm not trying to say that every single thing should be regulated, nor that regulations are all created equal, just more-so that I've found in my lifetime that the government seems to be the only entity with the power to keep companies from hurting, deceiving, or swindling customers (outcomes that don't just result in financial harm, but physical, mental, and emotional harm as well, sometimes even death.)
- p. 170 - The authors mistakenly attribute failure to adhere to GDPR compliance regarding cookies as a failure of the EU legislation, when they actually highlight the reality that sludge-based tactics and patterns that encourage users to blatantly accept all cookies are a result of companies trying to subvert the EU law, not a factor of the law itself.
- There is a push-pull mechanism here: The EU says you have to inform users when you're going to use cookie data (especially for tracking and advertisements) and companies respond by designing patterns that encourage users to consent (highlighting the 'accept' button green, making the 'reject' button smaller.) These patterns are not a failure of the EU, they are a failure to continually regulate those companies that would do their best to subvert user privacy in the name of selling user data that they collect. When the EU forces them to allow users to have a choice in how their data is used, the company responds with psychological tricks to nudge the user in the direction that is beneficial to the company, not the user.
- From a complete review, I think Part V may be the most impactful section of the book in aligning to what I think about the concepts presented in the rest of it. Most of my complaints above in terms of reasoning are echoed (even if the authors misunderstood GDPR, they still understand the downstream impact of allowing users the right to privacy)
In some cases, I distinctly felt that there was a reductionist element at play here, where behavioral economics was supposed to reveal this "one neat trick to solve X" mindset - Examples of these can be found in the book as a whole, but one of the most recent ones was on page 282:
Concerning climate change, the authors put forward the following ideas:
Building sea walls can reduce the risk of flooding from higher sea levels, and if we can shift home building toward places where flooding is less likely, we can do even better.
It is possible to develop hybrid corps that are more resilient to heat drought, but farmers might need to be nudged to switch to those crops, having grown something else for generations.
Now, I am neither in home construction, nor a farmer, but I understand these are absolutely massive changes, that can't just be nudged, and are significantly more complex than the authors are implying. Farmers "just grow heat resistant crops" hand-waves away all the logistical, societal, regulatory, and industrial change that would need to take place first. "Just build sea walls" glosses over the construction effort (and money) required for these projects, and "just build homes where flooding is less likely" ignores the fact that we can't even get home inventory/home buying to a healthy constant even in places where flooding is not an issue. I'm not saying that nudges aren't valuable here, but the authors are approaching topics that could have entire books written about them and how to influence change as "this is very simple, we just need nudges" and I simply don't agree with that.
I have a lot of personal investment here; the ideas presented in this book are ones that I've been in agreement with for years, namely, that noise pollution (especially at night) is on the rise, and that preventing hearing loss suffers from a societal lack of awareness, regulation, and incentive. I think there's a general idea that this falls into common sense, but I'd argue that awareness of noise pollution and hearing damage is scant.
I assert that:
- People don't take hearing loss seriously - and thus do not take hearing protection seriously either. The lack of earplugs or even consideration of them at concerts, mowing the lawn, industrial environments, etc. I have personally experienced the following mindsets in my personal life:
Friends who don't think you need hearing protection shooting outdoors as long as "it's just a .22."
Friends who don't wear earplugs at concerts because "Well my hearing's already shot."
Friends who don't wear hearing protection while mowing because "it's not that loud."
- The general sentiment of hearing loss is the idea of flat volume reduction, akin to aging, instead of more complex damage (that this book illustrates).
- The general misunderstanding of decibel volume as a linear scale, as opposed to logarithmic, and the reduction/halving of safe exposure time when volume increases.
- Reactive changes versus proactive changes in establishing standards that relate to noise (and enforcement and regulation.) Fundamental cultural shifts are needed to express that noise is not just a decibel reading, and that types of noise are just as important. The book refers to this as "cultivating better soundscapes" (L. 1887 ) and it's a major point in later chapters that noise control is not just about creating absolute quiet but crafting what sounds people do and don't want to hear and the appropriate situation to engage with them. The idea of "high sonic quality" as a more important factor for noise in human perception than flat volume is brought up many times in this book, based on survey data from a variety of populaces, environments, and situations.
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It's very confusing to me that the general populace seems so unaware of noise, as the author describes, maybe they have better or worse filtering than I do (and I hope I have protected my hearing as much as possible), but the number of times I've had conversations with people explaining that night is simply "quieter" and them not understanding makes me think that there's some level of noise pollution that people other than me are better at blocking out on a regular basis.
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There's also the elephant in the room, in my mind, for our United States readers: Automobiles.
The extreme noise of automobiles, and the consistency of its presence, is an ever-growing problem in our environment, especially as it relates to the lack of discrete noise regulation for neighborhoods that border busy streets, highways and roads. As outlined in Chapter 4, residents who live in neighborhoods that are disproportionately affected by industrial automobile traffic typically have very little recourse to solving that problem once it exists. There was a key takeaway point in this chapter that highlights that road effects are far harder to combat once they are established, especially if said road is primarily used for traffic supporting industry (because then you're fighting commercial interests to maintain that roadway and sunk cost of continuing to do business). Furthermore, this seems to be a common major disruption regardless of environment or income status, as outlined in Chapter 9 when the author highlights survey results showing vehicular noise being detrimental 55% of the time on surveys in various urban environments.
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Other Interesting Parts:
- Medical - Very interesting: How noise interference creates slow reaction times to fatal mistakes and incidents in surgery, often leading to fatal or preventable outcomes. The sections on alarm fatigue and how to better design alarm sounds for hospitals was great.
- Open Office Plans: Shocking no one - open office plans harbor worse scores towards privacy and noise pollution for workers, and all scores from studies conclude that this harms collaboration much more than cubicles ever did. Once again, shocking absolutely no one that this concept conceived by cushy executives in their private offices unfettered by the noise of an open plan failed to provide the perceived collaborative benefits. The persistent problem of halfalogues noted in these relevant chapters are also a personal annoyance that I experienced working in an open-office environment, ultimately leading to everyone wearing noise-cancelling headphones throughout the work day.
Chapter 4: The Noise Gap - Sound Pollution and Environmental Justice
Really good chapter. The author is making a casual link between industry pollution, racism, city planning, automotive pollution, and invasive noise. It's a weak link, only in that the assertion that one follows the other is a given. The author has the right message, but any one of these is worth a deep dive into. The exposition around neighborhood redlining is informative and necessary, and the author does a great job of explaining how a 1930's decision continues to have lasting downstream effects.
Chapter 5: Sensory Smog - Nature is Listening
Probably my favorite chapter -- especially the parts about the work the NPS is doing to preserve soundscapes and measure noise pollution by humans on nature. I found the comparison to wildfire when evaluating seedling drop rate in forests from noise to be very interesting.
Chapter 6: Beyond Noise - A World of Unbounded Sound
Specifically, the section titled "Beeps, Bleeps, and Bubbles", which investigated the evaluation process for creating idling and movement noises for London's electric bus system (you can hear these noises and get a deeper dive from this video: https://youtu.be/xINOfbdY8-g?si=Gtgc_xoCY6FHxdqK)
Re-read. I do revisit this one every now and again because I like the ideas presented.
I appreciate the *ideas* and *concepts* presented in this book, but the evidence supporting them is outright missing. The book is only 140 pages, which is already a red flag for the "well-researched" and "properly cited" discussion.
To be clear, this book does not cite a single source to back up its claims. It provides a "Resource List" in the back of the book that acts as a "if you'd like to read more" section. There are no footnotes, there is no bibliography, there is no secondary or primary source attribution anywhere in this book. This alone, in my opinion, is reason alone you should avoid this book and seek better researched opinions about similar topics in other books.
There are also just some wildly oversimplified ideas presented here (part of the problem with its length).
It's good to think critically about how communities can support one another, but these ideas would go so much farther if they were cited correctly and this book was able to present its argument with evidence that could refute skepticism.
I'm the biggest hater.
If you're the kind of person who rolled their eyes in the Martian movie trailer when Matt Damon said "I'm gonna have to science the shit out of this", you're in a for a bad time with this book.
It gets even more cringey, with choices like:
Yay! More oxygen!
[...] designed to work against technical faults, not deliberate sabotage (bwa ha ha!)
Fear my botany powers!
Yeah, that's right Mars, I'm gonna piss and shit on you. That's what you get for trying to kill me all the time.
"Kilowatt-hours per sol" is a pain in the ass to say. I'm going to invent a new scientific unit name. One kilowatt-hour per sol is... it can be anything...um... I suck at this... I'll call it a "pirate-ninja"
Mark Watney is absolutely insufferable as a character, and only described through execution of snark, not the heavy mental load of an astronaut stranded on a foreign planet. They should have left this guy on Mars.
There are maybe... three or four times where the actual emotional state of Mark is discussed. There's a tantrum, a couple mentions of "fear" and "uncertainty" and ... that's it. The rest is numerical facts (not calculations, just numbers and units) for "scientific credibility", I guess.
Fortunately, the supporting cast of characters, that is, everyone not on Mars, are more reasonable and don't seek to fill every moment with jokes.
Reading this after reading the real-life log entries of Arctic and Antarctic exploration in the form of Endurance or Empire of Ice and Stone was such a shock to the system - those log entries show the hardened consummate professional sailor, much like The Martian, trapped in a hostile, uncaring alien land, facing starvation, and the tone could not be more different. I know they are intended for different audiences but The Martian loses that element of immersion from having an unbelievable character contrasted to the logs of similar non-fiction counterparts.
I think this is exactly what people think of when they criticize self-help books - small concepts that anyone could reach with the most minimal of research, and, in some cases, outright fabrication of fact. Rather than do the research, those same individuals turn to the SparkNotes of Psychology - it's a shame this one is so highly rated.
There are nuggets of inspiration, sure, but you could probably get the same effect from reading about Stephen King's work ethic or watching an art reel on YouTube.
The basis of tying everything to human procrastination and willpower isn't a new idea, and the format that this is written in makes me think I'm reading a message board where someone suddenly thought they found out that the secret to hustling is just to work harder. No kidding.
A very well-done ending ultimately hampered by too much build-up during the main plot, fairly disjointed names, geography, and history, and plotlines that I was excited about being concluded in a poor way (Danica's grandfather)
I kept feeling like I should be enjoying the book more than I was. The characters (especially the Khalif) were great, but their motivations were lacking for me Because of the lack of enjoyment I was getting from reading it, it took me months to actually finish it. Ultimately I found it to be boring until the end.
Gave up. Cool body horror tropes aren't a great excuse for Stephen King-esque crudeness, nor for the amount of animal cruelty in here.