Rock breaks scissors

Poundstone is someone who's gone in for deep dives on Von Neumann, game theory, Carl Sagan ... and more recently, “Are You Smart Enough to Work At Google?” There's no doubt he's taken on a pop-sci flair of late, and while it's understandable from a marketing/positioning standpoint, a book that promises to be full of ways to “outguess” and “outwit” almost everyone turns out to be a lot of largely common-sense suggestions with some actual science behind them, and one or two genuinely counter-intuitive strategies that (unfortunately) sound like they're straight out of freakonomics.

It's interesting, actually - I loved the first Freakonomics book, perhaps because it forced me to think about things in new ways, but also because it genuinely offered insights into things I wouldn't have otherwise given any thought to. But that type of discovery really only works once, and by the time Superfreakonomics came along (to say nothing of the blog, podcast, etc.), it felt like retreading old ground. Not unnecessary or useless, mind you, but more incremental advances rather than breakthroughs. And frankly, if we're talking about how to win the office NCAA pool and your advice is “use the algorithms you can find on websites but tweak them slightly in case someone else is” seems aimed more at the desperate gambler than your general reader.

So I guess, if you haven't read Freakonomics (or haven't thought about it since it came out), this is a good relatively up-to-date replacement. Everyone else can feel free to take a pass.

Poundstone tries a Malcolm Gladwell-like attempt to start off each chapter with a clever anecdote and then go into the science, but it doesn't work.