How We Decide

This book nearly ended up on my did-not-finish-shelf after I started with reading the back and thought "Wasn't he the quy who was caught making up quotes?" I did a bit of research and discovered that I remembered right. The publishers have pulled the book because Lehrer used a lot of quotes that weren't quite what he said they were. Not making them up out of whole cloth mind you, but even if you can be confident of the opinions or knowledge of someone, based on sources, you can't make up something they may very well have said and present it as quotes.

So I started out biased against it, and as the style of the book was a poor fit for me as well, I had halfway decided not to finish it, and started skimming passages. Lehrer annoys me both by overusing that cursed feature of modern information transmission, the personal story as a means to frame a point, and by delving too deep into the science of his topics. All the personal information about the people in his examples is superfluous to me, and so is the science I can't understand and that seems oversimplified. So I did a lot of skimming to get to the meat of each chapter.

But the book isn't actually bad. I finished it, even if I did so in less than half the time I should have, by skimming a lot. Some of the information and knowledge would have interested me more if I hadn't heard it before, and a lot I hadn't read about before. So if you like to read pop-sci books like this, you'll learn a lot about the growing knowledge about the non-intuitive features of the different ways the human brain makes decisions.