Reviews and Comments

Professor Clayton Christensen applies a pedagogical method that I enjoy: explain some theory, exemplify the theory to solidify the insights, then use this theory to analyze a new situation and discuss the predictions/guidance that the theory yields.

It's strange to attempt to design a life based on business administration theory, and it's somewhat bleak that so often the book invites the reader to think of themselves, their careers and their families as a business to grow and manage. But I have to confess that the lessons are convincing, mostly because those management principles are crystals of common sense.

The advantage of this approach is that business cases are more well documented and more convincing than examining the life of "successful" people, exactly because the success of a business is easier to measure than a human life. I recommend not taking the theories too seriously (there's a lot of literature on motivation theory elsewhere, for instance) but to focus on a few key aspects: some investments need to happen early; certain things should not be outsourced; priorities are defined by resource allocation; culture is defined by decision making;

Overall a good book to re-read once in a while to remind myself to re-balance my life's portfolio.

Steven Pinker absolutely demolishes his imaginary adversaries in a series of long and repetitive discourses against the most inane straw man arguments - obviously preaching to the choir because creationists, ecoterrorists and whatever else radicals he takes for enemies will not be reading this book anyway.

I'm impressed by how despite we agree on most viewpoints the experience of reading this book is completely overshadowed by the confrontational style. Even more surprising that I liked his book on writing (The Sense of Style)! The problem is not dry or repetitive prose, but the absurd positions he's making out of the other side of the debate. It feels like being stuck on a nerd's shower monologue the day after some bully roasted him for being too optimistic.

Very disappointing because there are long sections dedicated to irrelevant positions like people defending that we should go back to living in forests; while important and possibly fruitful discussions about inequality are completed glossed over. "An increase in inequality is not necessarily a bad thing, if the average poor is less poor" is enough to summarize pages upon pages of defending the hill that inequality isn't a big deal. This is so superficial that it's hard to take anything else he writes seriously.

I celebrate any a book focusing on scientific literacy and I congratulate the authors on trying to reach an important audience: people who already (try to) think critically but could use some guidance on methods and pitfalls.

The book style is not for me, though. Like other generic best sellers on the 10's and 20's, it uses a random swear word to refer to things that have proper descriptors used by specialists who are serious about this field. It abuses the elasticity of slang to lump together things that are tangential and makes the book longer than it should. Sometimes I started getting semantic satiation from all the bullshit jokes and metaphors going around.

The very end of the book reminds the reader: the book is about calling out "bullshit", not just identifying it. But the majority of the book feels like a textbook that defines exhaustively all the modern types of "bullshit" through examples. This was a bit disappointing because like any anecdotal exposition, the majority of it is bound to be forgotten very quickly and the reader is left with very little in terms of long term behavioral changes.

If the book is about preparing readers to engage on questionable information, I think the book betrays the promise by investing so much on categorizing and exemplifying and so little in coaching the readers to do that by themselves. But of course if the point was to tell people to rely on fact checking agencies and reverse search images, there would be no book to write.

I do highly recommend the companion website (www.callingbullshit.org/) as an evergreen resource, specially the Tools and Case Studies sections.

We need a more fact-based world view. You can probably find the 10 instincts and their respective solutions out there on the web and that greatly summarizes the good parts of the book. In a sense, this is the extrapolation of Thinking Fast and Slow applied to humanitarian progress. The bonus of reading the book instead of just looking up the list is getting showered with positive statistics about our progress in all kinds of important metrics regarding poverty, health, education and equality around the world. That was a healthy outcome and I appreciate the effects it had on me.

Still, for a book about resisting cognitive baits, every chapter will include a dozen. The author poses ill defined questions like "how many people have some access to electricity?", and of course the provided answers are set up in a way that you're blown away by the biggest number being the answer. Isn't this a fault of the size instinct, and taking advantage of multiple-choice biases? How about designing the answers so there's an overly optimistic option as well? And how about defining precisely what "some access" means?

And the chapter on gaps, that was borderline disingenuous. We can't talk about pay gaps because the salary distributions overlap a lot? What kind of argument is that of "we can't think too much about the averages"? Almost every woman has a "salary twin" that makes just as much, but every woman has a "salary twin" that makes more as well. There are many ways to biject two distributions, so was the choice of the author based on factfulness?

After that argument about gaps the book would have to avoid discussing any aggregate statistic, but of course that "lesson" is forgotten as soon as it's convenient. The usage of CO2 per capita is highly praised to compare countries instead of total emissions, but shouldn't we look at histograms and continuous distributions only to avoid thinking of gaps? If two countries CO2 distributions have any overlap at all, we can't argue any meaningful comparisons!

And of course, the reason we discuss total emissions per country instead of per capita is because when global conferences occur, we have country representatives. That's the level of decision making and political power on the table, so that's the granularity of the metric most useful. Of course this skews the conversation towards populous countries, but that's intended because those are the countries where policies and incentives are more likely impactful due to scale. It's not because world leaders are ignorant or lack "factfulness", neither because they can't get some trivia questions right.

And the whole story about "us vs them" is very convincing, but only to the point where it's suddenly "us vs 3 of them". Separating the world in 4 slices instead of 2 is supposed to make us more united somehow?

Right out of the gate the author took the joy out of my reading experience, as this book was written in a way that leaks Freakonomics superiority complex. The author makes it very clear that they take pleasure in "gotcha"-ing people at best, publicly roasting students at worst if we take some anecdotes seriously. And there's this whole stereotype of being a rational person, not an optimist but a realist, facts over feelings and so on. Just stop it.