Followers

Search This Blog

Showing posts with label Soyer. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Soyer. Show all posts

Monday, May 22, 2023

Book Review-The Myth of Experience By Emre Soyer and Robin M. Hogarth

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 (Kahneman 2013), it questions the way we make decisions, what we use as reference for those decisions and whether those references are reliable. Many others have written books about the other parts of the decision-making process, but this book hits right at the heart of it.

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.