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.

 

Book Review-Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals By Oliver Burkeman

I happened onto this book after watching YouTube videos made by Vashik Armenikus (https://www.youtube.com/c/VashikArmenikus/videos). This book by Oliver Burkeman was one of the many books recommended in one of the videos.

The title refers to the duration of human life in weeks if we lived to the ripe old age of 80 years old. 4000 weeks is all we get. I am not unfamiliar with Mr. Burkeman's work. I thoroughly enjoyed his earlier book:  The Antidote (https://polymathtobe.blogspot.com/2018/08/book-review-antidote-by-oliver-burkeman.html). It was a revelatory read on the subject of happiness: why we chase the elusive goal of being happy and why we have a hard time defining that very happiness that we are chasing. How we are fooled by our own biases and how society has sold us on how to become happy, which of course assumes that we are all unhappy to start, at least in the way that the happiness industry defines happiness. It was both entertaining and enlightening. I am naturally biased towards Mr. Burkeman’s writing, and I expected the same incisive observational scalpel taken to the topic of time management.

This book is about our obsession with managing our time.  The author points out that this culture wide obsession came as a result of the industrial revolution. When we were agrarians, we had all the time in the world. We did not need to manage our time because we had time to do what we wanted after we planted the crops. We sat and waited, did our work when needed, the timing was dependent on nature, and we were along for the ride. It wasn't until after we industrialized, and the factory owners needed workers to work together and at the same time. Which, interestingly, he also addresses in the book, the synchrony effect. This is when time becomes a commodity in everyone’s minds. The industrial revolution made most of the population surrender the choice of how we spend our time to the employers; and anything that was left over would be euphemistically called leisure time. The price we pay in exchange for higher wages and perhaps more economic security.  

Burkeman is a fantastic writer. He is droll in how he presents his case, and he has a writing style that is pleasing to read. I don't know if anyone else reads him as I do, but knowing that he's British, I read the book in my own pseudo-British accent and I try to emulate the dry sense of humor that I have come to associate with Monty Python. I am more than sure that Mr. Burkeman possesses that uniquely British sense of irony. It works well with this book as a matter of fact, with me at least.

The book is structured into two parts and fourteen chapters, each chapter has associated with it a mixture of questions and answers: Why we treat time the way we treat time; why we are so impatient with time; why our society is such a large part of why we are what we are when it comes to the way we view and treat time.

There is a lot to digest.

There is quite a bit of information that is presented, much of the material, as is the case with most of these kinds of books, comes with a significant amount of research, copious amount of anecdotal evidence, and cites numerous studies. The differentiator is Burkeman's particular take on all the information which draws the reader in and keeps us interested, the same perspective that kept me in his thrall when I read The Antidote..

Burkeman is blunt in his assessment of our foibles when it comes to the subject time and how we struggle to “control” time.  He points out the brutal truth that we flatter ourselves in believing that we can harness and use time as a commodity. He exposes our egocentric bias that we can own, control,  and manipulate time in service to our needs and requirements. In chapter after chapter, he bursts conceptual bubble after bubble.

The most brutal takedown is that our most human problems are that we are fear driven, ego dominated, control chasing, care more about how others feel about us than how we feel about ourselves, and we fear disappointing others. These traits all thwart us from seeing through our impossible relationship with time.

One critical factor that Burkeman points out is our steadfast belief that we can save time, to save and preserve time when we speak of time. This implicit belief pre-supposes that the continuous concatenation of preserved time can continue ad infinitum, that this time storage can last into infinite time. We are, assuming that infinitude, rather than admitting to the finitude of our existence; we are denying the reality of our existence.

Burkeman examines the reason why we have the relationship that we have with time. Our impatience, our belief that time can be lengthened and shortened according to our whims. He dives into the idea that time is communal, and the idea of synchrony is critical to our satisfaction in life. This was one of the most exciting chapters in the book.

He proposes solutions in each of the chapters, dealing with each of the topics individually, quite unlike the time management solutions proffered in the business press pap that the typical time management experts spews forth. He poses solutions that are quite difficult to accept, it would take a complete change in outlook, beliefs, and preferences to understand the why, which would lead to the how. But once the perspective is turned around, it was a head slapping moment for me, as in: why didn’t I think of that?

The last chapter, the Afterward, is where  Burkeman pulls it all together. He does not try to tie it up into a nice pretty box tied with a pretty bow. What does is encapsulates the key points he made while addressing the foibles in our modern-day thinking, and here are the acts that we must take on  to overcome this crippling mental crutch that we all believe implicitly: that we must all be impatient with ourselves, that we can postpone the present to the future so that we can be better prepared to enjoy all that preserved time.  The last chapter is a gut check. It is difficult to aggregate into our minds because it is so contrary to the way our society has evolved and how we, as members of society, have created this particular ethos.

Burkeman has also helpfully added an appendix with ten hints that help us realize the finitude of our existence. Foremost amongst his advice is to realize that time is finite, to live in the moment, to stop putting faith on the impossible, to embrace life’s limits, to give up on overcoming the unknown, to realize that this life is not a dress rehearsal, and to just do.

Unfortunately, I don’t think most people hot on the trail of the next time management elixir would stop long enough to even consider the subtlety and nuance that populates Burkeman’s book, let alone accede to his proposed remedies. Even though the book is interesting to read, and the ideas are refreshing. People would rather chase after the snake oil salesmen who are paddling the miracle cure for all our time management problems. If only we had more sense of urgency, discipline, and an ability to multitask. People would rather let their biases and foibles guide them to the open arms of the time management charlatans, even though the emperor has no clothes.