This book is one of the most well-organized nonfiction books that I have read. The authors took great care in organizing all of their research results and anecdotal evidence into logical structures. It was a pleasure to read.
I was first made aware of this book through David Epstein's Range
Widely Substack feed: How to Get Better At Learning From Experience (https://davidepstein.substack.com/p/how-to-get-better-at-learning-from-experience)
He had interviewed one of the authors:
Emre Soyer, about the book’s idea regarding experiences and how experiences can
mislead. This is an important topic as our decision-making mechanism is almost
completely based on our memories of our experiences. The good of that mechanism is that once we
have had an experience, the memory stays with us, guides us, and helps us make
critical decisions. The bad of the mechanism is that these experiences may be misleading.
This book dives down the same rabbit hole as Daniel
Kahneman's: Thinking: Fast and Slow
As the authors make clear in the introductory chapter, we all
have unmitigated faith in our experiences; partly because they are our
experiences, partly because they are two separate things: a process which is a
constant memory dump and a practice which is a product of our cumulative storage
of memories. It is because our experience is personal that we feel so confident
in making our experiences our fundamental source of information for our
cogitations.
Soyer and Hogarth do yeoman’s work, laying out all of the arguments against
an unfiltered trust in the veracity of our experiences as a resource for our
decision making. This book is laid out beautifully and it was a pleasure to
read as the authors placed the two critical questions that were asked at the
very beginning of the book at the end of every chapter to remind us of those traps
and shortfalls that we inevitably fall into when we consider the information
available to us. The two major questions are: What is missing and what is
irrelevant?
What is missing is
usually other data: mitigating circumstances, contextual facts that affect the
decision, the fact that the experiences we have are likely to be incomplete.
Which is not all that surprising, but we as humans live in an egocentric world,
thus we believe that everything that has ever happened to us is all that there
is to reality. We regard the viewpoint that anything that we did not experience
is either not true or never happened.
The question of what is irrelevant goes into our very human
nature. We humans need to create a narrative, a story, from our accumulated experiences
to make it all make sense, to make it all fit into a believable format. We
blend all the experiences that we have in front of us into a digestible chunk,
this is the magical wand that we deploy to make sense of our cumulative experiences.
But that narrative, that story, may not be true because of context and circumstances.
But mostly it's because maybe there isn't a narrative, a story to be believed.
We never consider that maybe we are dealing with noises in the machine, we are
good at creating fairy tales from nothing. The term “correlation is not
causation” applies in our experiences as it does in statistics. We don't consider
whether we have enough data which will show us whether there is enough
correlation for a narrative. The exact opposite is true in the human mind, any
kind of correlation is considered to be causal. We, as humans, prefer the
overly simplistic, overly ostentatious, and overly convenient narratives and
stories. They give us the impetus to believe the stories and narratives over
facts staring us in the face.
In the seven chapters that make up the book, the authors
dives into seven different traps which impacts the way our experiences deplys
our decision-making abilities. Many of these traps are well-known, but we
continually fall for the lures: we focus on the result rather than the process,
we fall into the habit of relying on our experiences that are compromised by
dodgy premises rather than believing accurate information, we fall for what the
purveyor of information wants us to believe, we believe in what ever gives us
the least pain or alleviates the most pain, and we discount our ability to put
distance between us and painful memories as time moves forward.
The most interesting chapter involves our belief in the
lessons brought to us by the success and failures of ourselves and of successful
people. The authors analyze the reasons studying successes or failures without
context limits the utility of the gathered lessons. I recently saw a video clip
of Jack Ma of Alibaba ranting about people needing to learn from the failures
of people who are successful, he only got it partly right. In Soyer and Hogarth’s
reckoning, JUST learning from successes or failures can be very misleading
because in just focusing on the success or failure, we are discounting context
once again. Learning lessons from successes or failure also looks back upon
what had already happened, the changes wrought over time and the evolving
nature of the decision gets filtered out by time and incomplete information or
memory. They emphasize that it is important to carefully scrutinize the “lessons”
from others to take into account the missing context, the overabundance of easy
and pithy truisms, as well as the missing stories that contradicts the reality.
This is not, however, a book of complaints. Soyer and
Hogarth conclude the book, and with every chapter, with ways that we can
ameliorate our blind spots when it comes to our experiences. They don’t give us
a formulaic recitation of how-to-do check boxes, they do give us the list of
what is missing and what is irrelevant so that we can apply those best
practices to our own decision-making process. The last chapter is particular good, it
encapsulates and summarizes the book, and it gives the reader a good spot to perform
a check the two questions as they apply to our experiences.
It would be easy to discount the book as being dismissive of
the importance of our experiences as they apply to our decision-making lives,
it is not dismissive. It is, however, cogent
and careful in helping this reader to becoming factually oriented, all the
while learning to be aware of my own blind spots, all in service of making
better decisions and keeping the truth the truth.
1. References
Kahneman, Daniel. Thinking Fast and Slow. New
York City: Farrar, Strau, and Giroux, 2013.
