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It's hard for me to evaluate this book. As a biography of Einstein and Schrödinger and their interactions of the years, it's interesting. As a look at how politics and life events can affect the ability of scientists to do their best science, it's enlightening.


In terms of the actual science, I still mostly don't get it. I think the coverage of Schrödinger's cat and Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle is presented well, but I was already comfortable with those subjects. A lot of the other science is hard to follow. Now, that's not the prime purpose of this book, and it's a hard subject, so to some extent that's reasonable, but it seems weird to me to carry the science well past their deaths when I don't think it's covered with sufficient depth to be truly educational to most.

That said, it's not a bad book. The primary subject of Einstein and Schrodinger is presented in an interesting way with enough of the big picture timeline of the science to follow. But I wouldn't expect to learn that much of the science even if it's presented through the book in a way implying you can.

Wow. I'm not going to go into detail, but what a ride.

The main spoiler bit is that I was expecting more arcs to conclude, but he pivoted the whole thing into feeling like a true beginning of the war for the Cosmos. I do hope the choice of timescale for the next half doesn't cut too hard on the threads he left open.It's pretty clear there will be some passage of time, but most of the characters don't feel like their stories are finished.

Is this the single definitive Karen Rose book? Nah. If you haven't read her work, I recommend starting at the start of a city. That's Quarter to Midnight here, or Say You're Sorry, or Closer than You Think, among others. (Warning that most of them have children victimized somewhere, though not directly depicted. The real world is dark and she doesn't shy away from that).

But even a less standout Karen Rose book is really well crafted, with believably broken characters who heal over the course of the book. She's a master of her craft, and my personal favorite author. Minus a little main character plot armor, every lengthy mystery is incredibly believable and full of characters it's hard not to like (or hate). As an avid reader of nonfiction psychology, all of her motivations of all of her characters hold up really well to me.

This book specifically is fine standalone, but Phin's history with his family as a result of his PTSD is something you see start in Alone in the Dark, and there's been a level of suspense seeing him as a side character in the New Orleans series, waiting for his turn. The resolution of his relationships are emotional and reasonably well done.

“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.

I don't know how I got suckered into buying this book, but it's one of the worst things I ever read. This is cult tier stuff masquerading as science.

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.

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.

This is the Bias Bible. If you want to get a brief overview of how your brain works, and lots of information on how you aren't the rational actor you see yourself as, this is the book.Kahneman won the Nobel Prize in Economics for his work on human judgement covered in this book, and played a key role in the development of the field of behavioral economics. If you read one book on the brain, this is the one.

(If this is overwhelming and you want an accurate, but less in depth alternative, I also highly recommend Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke.)